Recent reviews by Rinku

Working hard or hardly working?

The only thing harder than this game was me during the rage-induced goon session I had after playing.

Ore wa Gundam da.

Also:
Lin would get pregnant.
Lilin would get pregnant.
Sheena would get pregnant.
Reco would get pregnant.
Chaos would get pregnant (in a homie way).
DUBARRU-EKKUSU would get pregnant.

Before I start off, I'm aware of the scam Atlus/Sega pulled with the Premium Edition. That's not why I'm giving this a negative, although what they did was totally scummy and inexcusable and warrants a negative review in itself (although I never purchased that version). Anyway, this negative is because of the overall gameplay.

So first things first, I've played the PS2 version of The Answer twice before although the most recent playthrough was around 3-4 years ago. Episode Aigis is exactly what it advertises itself as, it's just a remaster of The Answer with minimal changes (most being QoL like access to the Compendium from your main story profile).

In terms of story, I've always been one of The Answer's defenders. Aigis is my favourite character and seeing her in the protagonist role is still amazing to me. Back in FES when she first awakened to Orpheus I got goosebumps, it was so freaking cool! Anyway, the gameplay is essentially just Tartarus again but this time all the social aspects that you got between Tartarus runs are completely gone aside from the hangout sessions you can have with certain SEES members whenever you get an item in the Abyss of Time.

The entire gameplay for this is just nonstop battling which is exactly what the original The Answer was, however somehow they managed to make it more boring than before! I don't know what they were thinking, but it feels like every single boss fight (including the ones behind the Monad Doors) just have SOOOO MUCH HP. I was playing on Normal difficulty and I didn't really have any issues in terms of my team getting beaten, I died a few times but that was a mere skill issue. Most fights had me surviving with no effort but it was taking FOREVER to kill the bosses. It got so bad that by the time I got to the 4th or 5th set of doors in the Abyss of Time, I just started ignoring the Monad Doors entirely because it felt like I was wasting my time fighting all these beefy bosses (most of them repeats of previous ones I fought already). I got tired of being in these absurdly long fights that I eventually decreased the difficulty from Normal to Easy, not because of it being hard, I just wanted the fights to end quicker so I can get on with the limited amounts of story they give you.

The objective here is to make your way down the Abyss of Time until you get to these golden doors, most areas have 2 floor bosses similar to Tartarus that you fight, that you guessed it, HAVE A ♥♥♥♥ TON OF HEALTH. It felt like my brain was switching off as I was playing. I couldn't even get properly invested in anything going on because each fight would take like 10-20+ minutes, much longer than any boss in the main game.


When you finally get to the door, you get a short cutscene of a character's past. Very cool. Except after the 5 minutes of dialogue, it's back to the grind once again. I beat Episode Aigis with 12:30~ as my playtime. I can tell you that was the longest 12 hours and 30 minutes of my life. I don't remember The Answer feeling this sluggish back on the PS2, I remember it being pretty slow at the start but picks up in terms of progression. However this felt slow from start to finish. When you finally beat all the doors, you have to do the funny Blackoto boss fight which honestly wasn't too bad, that one didn't feel too long which gave me reassurance that I wasn't underlevelled. BUT OH MAN, RIGHT AFTER THAT FIGHT WAS WHERE TRUE HELL BEGAN!

The 2v2 fights against the other SEES members are nothing short of torturous. From a story perspective, absolute cinema. From a gameplay perspective, I'd rather tie my testicles with barbed wire and poke a sickle through them than replay any of that. Akihiko and Ken was such a fun boss fight (NOT!), after getting them down to low enough HP where I'm ready to deliver the finishing blow, ONE OF THEM CASTS DIARAHAN AND HEALS ALL THE WAY BACK TO FULL HEALTH! It took me nearly 30 full minutes to beat both of them. Junpei and Koromaru didn't have any healing thankfully, BUT THAT STILL TOOK FOREVER TO BEAT! They were doing little damage to Aigis or Metis, but they were tanking every hit while having lowered defence and my attack raised and charged like it was nothing! But oh man, the Yukari and Mitsuru fight... did Atlus even program their AI correctly for these fights? I'm not sure if the previous 2 fights do this because I never tried it, but if you cast a magic barrier on one of your characters, the AI freak the ♥♥♥♥ out and forget every move in their arsenal except Megidolaon. They both spam casted that ♥♥♥♥ every turn and didn't even ATTEMPT to break the barrier. I remember this being an issue in the base Persona 5 back on the PS3 with the Reaper, HOW IS THIS STILL HAPPENING AFTER 8 YEARS?! Once again, battle took forever.

NOW HERE'S THE EVEN FUNNIER PART. I gave the game the benefit of the doubt and thought "man... maybe for those fights I was underlevelled..." NAH I WENT INTO THE EREBUS FIGHT WITHOUT TRAINING UP ANYTHING, TEAMMATES WERE STILL THE SAME LEVEL AS BEFORE THE COLOSSEUM STUFF, AND GUESS WHAT?! EREBUS WAS A TOTAL PUSHOVER! WHATTTTTTT?! I kid you not, Erebus gave me 0 trouble, no one even came close to dying! HOW DOES THAT WORK ATLUS?

Anyway that's it for gameplay. So let's look at the time it took for me to beat it: 12 hours 30 minutes. I want to say that 70-80% of that time was used fighting and the rest being story. Now let's look at the price of the DLC: £28.99! So you're telling me I paid £30 for an add-on to a game that already existed as part of the base game on the PS2 for a game that is £60 (that also has a version that costs £85 and was meant to "include all DLC" until they sneakily changed it after purchase). You know what can be bought for cheaper than that? THE DIGITAL DELUXE EDITION OF PERSONA 4 GOLDEN WHICH IS A WHOLE GAME WITH SO MUCH CONTENT!

Anyway, the story is still great. I love how they chose not to retcon the potential of Makoto coming back to life which they teased in Persona 4 Arena. Makes me wonder what direction the series might go in after Persona 6 if we'll get any spin-offs or mainline stuff that will go into it.

tl;dr boss fights have way too much health and take 20+ minutes to beat. Story is good so either play on Peaceful or Easy or be every other Persona fan and watch everything on youtube and claim you've played the game.

Every time I play this game, I feel like I need to be rehabilitated for violent behaviour.

This game feels like what happens when you try to make a game based around the "Lethal Company funny clips" you'd find on tiktok or on Discord. The whole game is meant to be recording funny clips of your friends getting terrorised by monsters to meet a quota of views with no other real main objective, which makes most of the gameplay feel completely forced. You spend maybe a good amount of time looking for the monsters, which means most of the time you're just like "wow look at these spinning gears and emotes we have guys" until you eventually come across a monster. And even then, some of the monsters are just boring as hell to run into or are too overpowered to where it's essentially game over if you encounter them. The snail monster seems to only exist to record your friend getting grabbed for a few seconds, the whisker seems to only exist to record it tweaking on the ground like some Vancouver citizen OD'ing in broad daylight while other people surround it recording it, and then you have stupid monsters like the barnacle that are a total waste of time. If you get caught by this thing, you may as well just go AFK because it's game over for you as you'll just slowly die no matter how hard you button mash to get out, and if your friends revive you you'll just be stuck again. You can't even free people using the taser so what's the point??? Monsters like the grenade throwing dude and the boston dynamics dog are fun encounters since they actually create panic without being like the giant or throwing monster where if you don't have a full bar of stamina you're completely screwed.

For the first few hours, it's hilarious when you and your friends die. But the more you play, the more the laughter just turns into an "ugh looks like we're pressing F3 to save the footage again". There's like 3 maps total so there's barely anything to change up the gameplay loop other than the occasional "we added lasers in the hallway" or "this trapdoor is now open instead of closed". The thing that made Lethal Company fun was the fact the game had an objective and fun upgrades for your ship that made going above the quota feel worth it, while the scares you get from the monsters was secondary and not the only focus of the game.

Lethal Company was still fun once you got bored of the vanilla game because of the amount of mods it had that actually improved the game by adding more player slots, letting monsters go outside, actual upgrades for you and your friends, and other mods that would make the monsters even more terrifying to deal with (like the maskless doppelgangers).
Meanwhile this game's modding potential isn't all that great because the vanilla game itself barely has anything to offer. You can't even add more player slots since Photon has a hard cap of 4 players. And most other mods just make the game easier like making items free or giving you infinite health/stamina.

Anyway, the tl;dr: boring flavour of the week, go play Lethal Company instead.

Thank you for letting me check Discord messages in VR without using the awful SteamVR interface. <3

This game gaslit me into finding mentally unstable women attractive again.

This was definitely a "flavour of the week/month" type of game where you play it non-stop with friends for a month before you all move on to the next game.

Despite that though, for the month we did play the game (with mods installed), it was incredibly fun.

Game was fun for maybe 1-2 weeks, but once the initial excitement wears off, the game just becomes really boring and repetitive. Maybe after a few more months of updates it might get become fun again.