Recent reviews by Noctah

Moving is fun. Game is about moving.

Game is fun.

Loads fast, runs fast, writing's funny as ♥♥♥♥, voice acting is top notch, plays well, actually challenging on normal, and the minute you think you're getting the hang of it, there's new types of units / maps that will challenge you once more.

Of course, there's some jank here and there, some animations that are a little bit slow, but overall it's just a lot of fun. Not many games can say that.

Also, mods. That's a good sign for the future.

Way too grindy to be enjoyable. Making it twice as fast would still be too slow.

Played the closed Alpha, and didn't touch it until 1.0. The game was good back then, and is even better now.

It's deeper than you'd expect, gameplay-wise. Meaty hits, satisfying Dodge/Parry system, and overall high skill ceiling that makes you feel real good about yourself when you get the hang of things. Once you git gud, you end up chaining kills, dodges and parries like it's Devil May Cry with Dark Souls' rolls.
Every weapon type has a specific quirk (interrupt on charged attack, dodge on combo hit, garanteed critical on tipper hits...) which gives a vastly different gameplay experience depending on your build.

I still haven't seen all that the game has to offer (how's the endgame replayability? any extra challenge modes?) but considering I've seen the entire design process of the game, I'm pretty confident on betting on future updates.

The game feels extremely unfinished and unsatisfying.

The game balance is completely off: you get killed in 2-3 hits by a lot of mobs, and the mobs themselves don't telegraph their attacks much. The combat lacks depth and melee classes feel like they're impossible to play. And whenever you die (which is a lot at the beginning) you have to hold W to walk for minutes on end to find anything of interest for you (no autorun button). And the transportation methods you unlock later are region-dependent, meaning you lose them whenever you go and explore (defeating the entire purpose of them).

Lots I haven't covered, but I'll let all the other disgruntled people take care of it.

Also, stop censoring your forums.

First off, kudos to Xseed for their anti-censorship policies, and the hard work they put into their ports/translations.

I'll try and make it short: the game runs well on PC, plays well even with mouse and keyboard, has a polished world packed with useless but charming details, comfy atmosphere, great soundtrack, good writing and likeable characters, but unfortunately goes nowhere as a game and as a story.

It doesn't "get better 20 hours in" as you could expect from other long JRPGs.

The combat is unfortunately simplistic and very easy, unless you go on "Hard" mode, in which is more akin to "Impossible" mode if you start off your first playthrough with it on (you can get killed in a single hit in the first "tutorial" fight). I'm not sure, but I think Hard mode is meant for New Game+, but why would you?
It feels like the "Normal" mode was balanced with a casual, unaware player in mind, as it is terribly forgiving. Trying to do all the sidequests, and not running away from common battles, both of which the game encourages via various systems, will make you naturally overpowered in almost every single fights in the game, bare the last few bosses which could require a bit more thought and strategy, but by then you'll probably still beat them without much difficulty (and worst of all, you can lose to one of them without any repercussions!).
The customization system with Orbs is pretty fun and original, but you reach its limits very, very fast. There's are almost no magic abilities with any surprising effects, it's just full of "damage+status effect", "damage in a medium zone", "damage in a large zone", "damage in a line"; and honestly, you'll probably won't want to spend time watching the magic spell animations when you can just hold A and auto-attack the nearest enemy, nearly one-shotting them while they do single digits of damage to you. This is 90% of the game's combat, without exaggeration. Unless you're some kind of masochists that likes to reverse the roles, dealing single digits of damage while being one-shot yourself?

The story is, as I've said, well written, and the little details in the various NPCs' conversations are fun to check on, but in the end it's all a big meaningless whole.
You're left in the dark for 90% of the story, and that's dozens of hours of playtime, and the remaining 10% are giving you tidbits of answers, that are all meant to tease you, or perhaps "coerce" you into buying the sequel to know the full answer (sequel which apparently repeats the same pattern of bait&switch so that you buy the third game after that [EDIT: "apparently", it doesn't bait&switch like the first one. I wouldn't recommend trying and find out either way.]).
The characters are likeable, and I'm immersed in the world, but I have to endure dozens of hours of meaningless filler if I wish to actually see any story progression, not just "we stopped the bad guy this time, but we don't know who they are" repeated x10 until the game finally gives up and gives you a bit of info, but not too much! "I don't care if the player already spent 30 hours on the game! We can't have him know anything yet! Just drop him a name or something and let him play 10 more hours before telling him anything else."
There's not even any meaningful foreshadowing that a smart player can guess. The only thing the game trusts you to guess is that "There's a connection between X and Y". What connection? Impossible to guess. You'd think a game with this much detail in its world would put hints here and there, but nope. You gotta play 50 hours and beat the final boss to get an answer to this, and it's left thoroughly unexplored, telling you to piss off and go buy the sequel already.

That being said, if you're in the mood for a more casual experience; light-hearted dialogue (and genuinely funny at times), mindless escapism just to chill out an hour or two every evening after work, then you've got a gem right here. Others, check out the soundtrack and look elsewhere for an actual game.

Final edit : It's still not a good deal to buy the game full price. GTA Online is a mess, with tons of loading screens, desynch issues and general issues. The singleplayer game runs fine, looks good, and is interesting story-wise, but is it worth 60 bucks ? I'm not convinced. The modding community is finally getting "official support", but I'm skeptic as to how long it will take before Rockstar actually does something to actually support modders, other than "not banning them". Wait for a GOOD discount, and for killer mods to come out. Rest of the review is older, but left here for convenience.

Crashes, freezes, stuttering, memory leaks...

The port isn't horrible. Far from it. But waiting two years, two delays, and seeing four versions for consoles come out, anything that is worse than a "great port" is unnacceptable. We only have so much patience for one game. If you still have any, wait for a patch.

Edit 1 : the Nvidia drivers that came through fixed most of the stuttering issues, but the memory leaks and the random crashes still happen, even though the game runs fine. Waiting is still the name of the game.

Edit 2 : 23/04, still waiting for loadings improvements on GTA Online, and still has random crashes associated to random actions. Game runs well and smooth though.

Edit 3 : 7/05, there's been some improvements for some users, and bug fixing for GTA Online. But there's been a lot of issues with modding, with the latest patch basically killing mods altogether and forcing users to downgrade their game to keep enjoying custom content. There's been bans from the game altogether (Singleplayer and Multiplayer) because of FOV mods, which is necessary to enjoy 1st person camera and not have a headache for some people.
The whole affair is a mess, and it's not a good incentive to spend money on the game.

Less cheesy voiceovers and extra voiced dialogs. And you can switch back to English at anytime in the ingame menu.

I found myself finally being able to stand some of the characters that had a really annoying voice, and most of the repeating dialogs ( "I didn't expect you to be so strong !" ) are a bit more bearable.

Download it if you can afford the 3 gigs of space it requires, just to try it out !