Recent reviews by Neko-san

-----{ TL;DR Review Section }-----

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☑ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☑ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Moderate
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☑ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☑ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☑ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

---{ Template Author }---
☑ https://vojtastruhar.github.io/steam-review-template

-----{ DETAILED Review Section }-----

If you read the first section of this review, you're probably wondering why I said buy "if on sale."
The reason why is because, despite the game's design merits, the latter half of the game:
1) somewhat escalates/paces itself uncomfortably fast given the events
2) ends in a way that honestly the could have been executed a bit better (slightly opinionated but I'm trying to be objective)

For point 2: I can't go over it without disclosing spoilers (so I'll spoiler tag it further below), but for point 1 I'll say that it's hard to tell if the reason why is because of development time or if it really was somewhat rushed intentionally. As a result, solving cases in Kanai Ward (the game's city setting) comes across as strangely short in a heavy-handed sort of way.

You can literally count the number of city cases solved on one hand and the plot does very little to string events in between to make the player feel like they were there longer than they really were. The game tries to distract you from this by offering optional side-quest errands for you to run but it doesn't provide the effect properly in that, instead of trying to "extend" your perception of how long you've lived in Kanai Ward, it only uses additional background characters to make the city feel like its frequently a place with people in need. If I were able to able to give advice to Spike Chunsoft on this: it would be to add more to the main characters' lives instead of speed-running the plot. The main cases subtly impact the long-term plot, and what I feel like what have made more of an impact on the player is providing similar "sub-cases" (similar to Halara's sub-case DLC) to spread out the game's chapters but still give the player real senses of accomplishment instead of handing them chores. This would have been more effective at making the player feel like a real detective rather than someone forced to be because the plot says so (think of how the Witcher 3 gives players monster contracts to complete; this even would have been a decent opportunity to flesh out the game by giving players an opportunity to earn money)! They don't have to be hugely complicated cases (though that is welcome), but having some people on the dev team whose focus is providing players conundrums outside of the main plot cases is exactly what this game is missing the most for a city like Kanai Ward. Which is (ironically) funny, because the player is actually told near the beginning of the game that there is "no end" to Kanai Ward's mysteries and crimes and then doesn't leverage that. Instead, Kanai Ward ends up feeling like a somewhat dangerous city but with guardrails. Spike, you guys could have even exploited the city's reputation by taking a page out of Yakuza and have citizens take advantage of the protagonist as he's exploring... but you didn't. Painful missed opportunities... There's much more potential here.

That said I still have to be fair and say that I don't know the circumstances surrounding the game's development and how difficult these would have been to juggle with getting the game done, but there's still missed elements that definitely would have at least made the game better off than it is. As-is, this game left me painfully unsatisfied and rabidly thirsty for a sequel. I don't know if that's intentional, but I can never forgive you guys if you don't. It's like getting into a romantic relationship, then they leave a month later because your partner got a new job in another country; it's brutal.

That leads us to the details about the ending. If you have not played/finished the game be careful with not hovering your mouse! I will make slight references to Danganronpa here, so be careful with that as well.

-----{ BEWARE SPOILERS }-----

How the game handles the endgame drama by "splitting up" characters is less aggressive than Danganronpa, so it feels somewhat lighthearted, but only in retrospect. Makoto falsifying deaths makes no plot-sense and unfortunately doesn't provide any utility beyond shock value to the player... which is disappointing.

I'm glad that the game doesn't discard these characters but this makes the endgame feel underdeveloped somehow. This one aspect aside, this was the only case in the game where I actually completely solved it before I even got to the Mystery Labyrinth: and this tells me something is very wrong. I'll admit it was cool, but that's not enough for being the final chapter in a mystery game; there was hardly a mystery to be solved. The only thing that surprised me in the Mystery Labyrinth was the background identity of Yuma and this is basically spoon-fed to us. It gets even worse when this chapter saves big relationship development between Yuma and Shinigami at basically the last minute then effectively drives both you (the player, emotionally) and her apart soon after and leaves a sour taste in your mouth that instead outweighs the positives of everyone not being dead. I suspect the reasoning is was to give us a bittersweet ending akin to how Danganronpa does, but is instead just a frustrating and heartbreaking ending despite how it gets swept under the rug so quickly.

And that's not even going over how some of the ending doesn't even make sense! #1 Yuma resigning from the WDO makes precious little sense when his goal is to (unrealistically) solve every case/mystery in the world. It makes FAR more sense to leverage the WDO and adapt its motto in that pursuit instead because at least then there would be a chance of his dream being achievable. Epilogue Yuma not going back on that decision and just throwing himself into the world without at least the excuse of coming back to the WDO makes him look silly and lacking common sense: which is "hilarious" because he's a detective. He would never realistically keep his promise to see Shinigami again in his lifetime. Kurumi would be far more likely to actually do so, and I don't know if that's why this bizarre ending forced her with the Book of Death for the sake of a possible sequel with her as a next protagonist, but there must've been a better way.

Didn't realize this was a PSP remaster until after I bought it.
After playing for 2 hours, I felt it really showed because I was actually telling myself it felt like an old portable game. I stopped playing to double check and I was right; and for the price it is, being an old PSP game, I don't care how good it looks if it's just a re-skin because this felt like a strong letdown coming from FF7R.

Decent gameplay, under-delivered however given its ludicrous pricing.
Would I buy this game for $60+? Hell no; DOA5 feels more polished to me, similar pricing aside.
Only reason why I bought the game was because the deluxe edition was $20 on sale during Golden Week.

1) Stupid that the deluxe edition doesn't have all the characters
2) Disgusting that there's at least 3 season passes (almost if not) exclusively and expensively priced, even on sale, for HUNDREDS of individual costumes
3) It almost looks as though there were meant to be 3 more characters? Not sure if they just gave up because monetization might have not been working the way they expected
4) Defending the pricing is for the brain-dead
5) Honestly, I'm not "bashing" them for this, but if you KNOW you want jiggle physics in the game and they're pretty rigorous as-is, why are you seemingly afraid to both call it what it is and provide the same options available in DOA5? Call me whatever you like, but with this pricing (for both DOA5 and DOA6: every line of menu dialogue has no excuse not to be voiced in this game, there's no excuse not to have more stages, and no excuse to not have the same settings as DOA5 for that (honestly, I don't know anyone who wouldn't buy DOA for that alone; never personally met anyone who bought it just for the gameplay - not that the gameplay is bad, it is good, but honestly could use some innovation)
6) DOA6 feels like a **worse** copy & paste of DOA5

Full of bugs that are never going to get fixed due to abandonment.
Additionally, the game falls short of its potential and could use substantial content updates to make up for it but, again, won't due to abandonment.

Free Halo-like game, cross-platform, and supports Linux
I have no reason to dislike this game; in fact, support for this game is great

I have mixed feelings about this game because the combat feels great and mostly right compared to past entries but also does things I don't like, mostly in regards to character creation where it copy-pasted the same system and assets from PS2, Xbox 360/PS3, and Vita games instead of innovating beyond their ancient assets and methods

Overall, however, definitely worth playing but it's very hard for me to defend the price point

This game, while somewhat small and quite difficult, I must say is quite enjoyable and does what it set out to do decently well.

I love games like this and it reminds me of Fable 3; I hope this developer makes more games like this one in the future

This game has many upsides and many downsides; more downsides than upsides.
It clearly lives in the shadow of Resident Evil 2 Remake, and makes many downgrades to design along the way.

While I do think the story, cinematics, and encounters are fantastic: the level design lacking in comparison to the game before it. Part of RE2R's charm was that it didn't take control from you in what you needed to do or needed to go, and while RE3R tries not to do that, it does it far too often by limiting where you need to go to OVERLY limited and narrow paths that pale to the RPD Station from RE2R.

I'm more often thinking: "Am I about to be in extreme danger by turning this corner?"
and not even because of Nemesis, but because of the terrible back-steps in common enemy and level design.

Warning: Heated Rant About Enemy Combat
The zombies in RE2R are predictable but not in a bad way; I guess Capcom thought they were?
Their solution: Make zombies EVEN MORE resiliant to bullets than they were before.
If you haven't played RE2R, I'll make it short: zombies often ATE bullets for lunch. I've literally had to RELOAD on them to keep them down and they still don't die most of the time. Making any worse than it already was effectively makes them bullet sponges. The worst part of it is: it doesn't even stop there. Zombies ALSO don't react to being shot, so thanks to the almost always tiny areas that you find yourself in (which says a lot considering that RE2R took this into consideration), you're incredibly likely to get cornered and then bit because there is no defense mechanism in place to prevent it after RE2R already takes under consideration that this is a very possibly scenario. I get that RE3R probably didn't have the disposable knives that RE2R had but this is a remake for a reason. If you're going to to buff the zombies beyond what even makes sense for a zombie game, at least have the decency to give the player a fair way to combat it. Mashing A with next to no perceivable benefit just because it was decided to give the player the ability to dodge or punch in select scenarios does not make up for it. You're far more likely to get chain-grabbed than effectively get out of it when everything is taken into account.

Rant Over
That said, the open nature of RE2R's level design is what puts the world into the player's hands rather than forcing them to what can feel like: "push W or up left-stick to beat game."

I can't even remember a single puzzle in the entirity of the game, which is strange, considering the age of RE games we're talking about. It honestly felt more like a frustrating interactive movie than a zombie-horror survival, which RE2R somewhat leaves the impression of. RE2R doesn't try to be difficult by putting bullet sponges in your path, it's difficult because there are enemies on the way to actual difficulties. Thus, RE3R's difficulties are artificial rather than natural.

CONCLUSION:
It's a good game to play once, but I honestly can't see myself ever playing it again, because it just took everything I loved about RE2R and threw it out the window.
Definitely not worth $60.

And don't even get me started on this game's pistols compared to the last one's: they're trash.

If you love the history of video games, this game is for you.

If you like the tingle in the back of your head when you get money, this game is for you.

If you are a game developer, this game is for you.

If you like mashing on your keyboard, this game is for you.

If you like the idea of porting every game to everything, including your toaster, this game is for you.

If you like making your own toaster to make for or port games to, this game is for you.





If you're still reading this, this game is probably for you.

One of my favorite stealth games; many ways to complete objectives on fairly large maps, but this game and the previous one have an absurd pricing model