Recent reviews by : D

Simple? Yes.
Touching? Yep.

Well-executed? 100% Yes.

Fuga: Melodies of Steel has a simple, pretty cliche war story: You're these children who suddenly find their village attacked, need to escape, and somehow find a way to rescue your parents and friends back.

But it's the execution of the story that shines: It's never too complicated, gets told at a steady pace, and keeps you engaged and wanting to "turn the page" next chapter to know what happens next.

The combat is much like the story: Simple enough to understand, but its complexity lies in mixing and matching your kids to get the most out of them in each battle.

Simple pros and cons:

Pros
-Very engaging story that keeps you reading/playing on
-Easy to play combat that ends up harder to master
-Beautiful music. Just excellent.
-XCOM/Fire Emblem-esque base segments that are enjoyable to build up
-Character interactions are well done
-Fairly balanced paths for all levels of players.
-Lots of cats n dogs. Who doesn't love 'em?

Cons:
-Combat is fairly difficult in the beginning due to lack of options, as is the woe of many RPGs.
-Hard to know sometimes what materials you lack for base upgrades due to how the game works.
-Music makes it hard to focus in battle sometimes.
-Slow, steady gameplay that can't be rushed.
-Pretty cliche story. It's well done, but doesn't really reinvent the RPG wheel much.
-Not enough cats n dogs. Never enough.

Will you enjoy it? That's up to you to decide. But if you love strategic planning coupled with a good story, you'll pick Fuga up. It's worth your money and time to at least try it.

Good game. Absolutely CRAP forum moderators. Banned for complaining about a trophy LMAO. I'm sure many people will agree that grinding for 100million zombie kills is dumb.

Pros:

-GREAT premise, mostly runs smooth unless there is a high zombie population

-Base management is crisp, every building has its purpose, some more useful than others

-Every unit can be either a game-changer or a game-ender, depending on how you use them.

Cons:

-This is basically the Souls of RTS games, 1 mistake leads to another, potentially game-ending if you aren't prepared (And believe me, you WON'T be prepared many, many times)

-NO CHECKPOINTS, not even an OPTION for them. Yes, you just lost that base you spent 5 hours building from scratch. No, you cannot get it back.

-No real tutorial explaining anything, you learn everything through trial by fire. What does a building/resource do? Find out yourself, The Game.

-The campaign is so imbalanced towards the hardcore, and the fact there aren't any checkpoints in a map is just silly. Oh look, you died to that last Harpy in a map. Square one here we come <3


Game devs who can't handle criticism tend not to last long, and from what many have seen in the forums, these particular devs are fragile snowflakes. Careful, they might ban you for telling them there's a *gasp* bug in their game!!! Oh noes! /s

Buy it for the custom games and survival, but don't expect much from the campaign.

Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is a stealth game in the purest sense. There is no flashy sword attacks, no super-move to instantly wipe out enemies with. Moving, planning, and initiating with care is the name of the game.

And ST: BOS delivers this in spades. All the maps were very well thought-out and constructed, with enemy placements, the environment and every character's skillsets in mind. What may seem like an impassable area can easily be solved with enough thought and careful planning/execution.

TLDR version of pros and cons:

Pros
-Excellent, excellent stealth gameplay
-Each character has their own uses, and no one is truly better than all others
-Well-crafted maps, enemy behaviour. never truly unfair
-Many ways to complete a map; choose your own methods
-Limited maps and yet all have their own unique modifiiers (night, day, rain etc)
-Good enough story to make it all work
-You can use a tanuki as bait

Cons
-Quite the hard game. If you're looking for fast-paced action, this is not it.
-Requires some hard thinking at times.
-Some objects and walls overlap with each other, making for sometimes unintended orders to be carried out
-Maps take some time to load up
-You can't use the tanuki as a weapon

If you are on the fence on buying this, I suggest trying out the demo to further aid in your decision-making: you may end up enjoying it far more than you thought you would.....like the reviewer.

Alone, for a while
I've been searching through the dark
For traces of the love you left inside my lonely heart....

Final Fantasy IX, 2000

Now allow me to go a bit into detail about the game:

+The visuals are as stunning as ever, now even better with the upgraded models and cutscenes. Backgrounds remain rather blurry, though they still look good.

+Boosters provide newcomers with all the tools you could want to play through the game your way

+Some parts have been made more lenient to relieve people of frustration (Hint: Swordfight)

+Screen/Disc transitions are now nearly seamless: No more waiting 10 seconds to enter a town from the World Map.

-The menus appear to be a bit laggy, especially from the World Map.

-Battle menu sometimes blocks some animations (Damage numbers, spell visuals etc)

-Apparently the sound of defeated enemies were left out, or there is an error that causes no sound to be played when you defeat an enemy (For example, the sound when you defeat a Skeleton does not play).

-Some minigames, should you choose to go the full length, are still *slightly* hard (Hint: Jumprope)

All in all, Final Fantasy IX is a love letter to its predecessors, while remaining a very solid game in its own right. While some aspects of the remastered version are a bit annoying, such as the laggy menus, the core game is still as good now as when it was originally released.

A recommended Buy for all Final Fantasy fans and newcomers alike.