Recent reviews by Frate

Beyond the Dawn feels like they wanted to make a proper sequel to the game but weren’t allowed to do so and turned it into a small scaled DLC instead.

The only thing it basically does is to expand the lore and the story of the main game:
What happened to the main characters after the main story? How are the Danans and Renans doing after the fusion of both planets?

Gameplay-wise, there are no new enemy types, weapons or Arts.

I can understand the frustration that they reset your level to 65 and take your equipment away, but for me personally it wasn’t that big of a deal since, I hadn’t played this game in 2/3 years.

It’s basically just an Epilogue: What if the game had one more chapter after the end of the game?

If you loved the game and want to see more, go for it, if you are looking for a new and fresh experience, skip the DLC or get it on Sale. It’s just more of what the main game had to offer.

The Steam Reviews are way to harsh. It’s not as bad as people make it out to be.

This game was revolutionary for it's time, being the first loot shooter, but looking at it now, Borderlands 1 aged terribly, not even including the aspects of the broken remaster, which they ironicaly called "Enhanced".

• The campaing can be played in coop online with up to 4 players
  
• The Gunplay in general doesn't feel that bad, at least for some of the weapon types
  
• Some of the characters were interesting, but at the same times there were also a lot of bland characters.

• Almost non existent Story
  What you hear at the start of the game in the first cutscene is literally all it has to offer.
  You search the vault, you find the vault, you kill what comes out of the vault, that's it.
  
  
• Some of the weapon types are just terrible to use:
  Pistols are useless, since they shoot too slow and giving headshots is easier with an AR.
  Sniper Rifles miss despite being perfectly on the target.
  The range of shotguns are too low to be useful.
  Rocket Launcher do too little damage to be useful.
  
  
• Getting good weapons rellies to much on RNG.
  I was stuck with my lvl 17 weapon up to lvl 32, since everything I got was worse then what I already was using and the shop did not have anything useful.
  
  
• Level design is boring
  Eerything is brown and designed as corridor or a way too big open field with nothing to see. Also fast traveling is too finicy to be useful.
  
  
• The sound was bugged out
  The sound sometimes cut out, when too much was happening on the screen, additionally the sound options in the menu didn't work.
  My friend didn't have this issue, so I don't know what causes it.
  
  
• Memory leak
  The game started to stutter after a while. Seems to be an issue with the Enhanced Edition off the game.

All in all it was an experience which was mediocre at best, but was still fun in at some points thanks the game being playable in coop.

I wouldn't recommend to play the game in singleplayer, but if you have a friend or two play with it's a decent game to spend a few hours with.

But if you look at it as a game released in 2009, it's good for it's time, but looking at it today, it has too many issues to recommended it fully.

That was the crucual reason, why I decided to give the game a negative review.

Aeternoblade 2 is a suprisingly polished and fun game, considering that this game only has 37 Steam reviews.

But if I'd known it would have taken me 45 hours to beat it and I am probably like 1 of 10 people, who actually finished the game, I'm not sure, if I would have bothered to play it. The length is also probably why so little people have actually beaten the game in the first place.

Appart from the length, the biggest problem of the game is the difficulty which is just evil. I started with the 2nd highest difficutly and went down over time to the lowest one. Even on the easiest difficulty this game is not easy, with the biggest problem being the HP regeneration of enemies, which is not turned off even on very easy. An option to turn that off would have been nice, considering that this wasn't even in the original version of the game. This "feature" made the game unnecessarily hard and had no real purpose.

Furthermore the best part of the game is definitely the music, which is suprisingly decent. The guy, who made the ost is really talented.

The story was fine, but the inclusion of 2 additional playable characters was kind of pointless, since you only get the opportunity to play as them once for like 4 hours in a 50 hour game.

What is also suprising is, that this game has voice acting. You wouldn't expect it from such a unkown game. The voice acting itself was fine in general, although it started of pretty badly in the first few chapters but improved over the course of the game.

Would I recommend this game?
Yes, but with some compromises. You have to be willing the spend over 40 hours on this game and also like to torture yourself with the difficulty. If you are fine with that, I can recommend this game, which was an suprisingly decent Metroidvania.

As a reminder:
Do not play this before completing Yakuza 0-7
This game is a conclusion of all the Yakuza games released to this day. Playing this first would be the same as watching the final Season of Attack on Titan or any other good series before Season 1-4. You would ruin your experience.

Now for the review:
Kazuma Kiryu is back, for better or worse, depending on how you see it, but on a technical level, this game takes everything that made Yakuza 6 and Kiwami 2 amazing and improves it quite a bit:

Kiryu keeps his Dragon of Dojima style, which is now called the Yakuza style, but it’s slightly nerved in comparison to Y6 and K2. They made it slightly slower and took away two of the side-steps, you can only do one now (and you get a roll upgrade later) otherwise the moveset is mostly unchanged.

The star of the show is the new Agent style. It’s mixture of Yagamis Crane and Kiryus old rush style with some new gadgets, which are really fun to use.

Gameplay wise Agent style is superior, especially on harder difficulties, due the nerving of Yakuza style and it generally being faster.

One of the biggest changes in terms of combat is the number of enemies you can fight at once. Some battles (mostly in the Colliseum) makes you fight up to 20 enemies at once.
After this game, One Man Army Kiryu definitely deserves his title.

The main story might be shorter but in terms of minigames and side content, Gaiden has almost as much content as a normal Yakuza game:

• Improved Pocket Circuit Racing
  
• Improved Colliseum with it’s own Subplot including Team Battles and the opportunity to control and fight with different characters other than Kiryu.
  
• A mixture of Judgment side cases and and the classic Substories. It’s presented in a similar way as in Judgment but play out like the classic funny substories we know from Yakuza.
  
• New and old Karaoke songs, including Bakamitai
  
• Billiard for the first time in the Dragon Engine
  
• Hostess Club (They made it worse and more creepy by using real actresses, but it’s there for the people who like it).

Additionally, something, that doesn’t really fit into any of the Subcategories:
You change the appearance of Kiryu now.
Some outfits from older games return or you can just dress him up as a clown, and it will affect almost every cutscene!


Now for the most important part of the game:
In terms of story writing, it's kind of amazing to think that the entire situation of Kiryu, where everything started to go downhill for him, begun in Yakuza 5 or more specifically it's ending.
Before that, all Yakuza games had it's of own concluded stories without any big impact for it's successors, but with Yakuza 5 and successor Yakuza 6, everything changed:

1. Kiryu ends up in prison due the aftermaths of Yakuza 5 (2012)
   
2. Haruka leaves Morning Glory Orphanage due unwanted attention by media (sometime between 2012-2014)
   
3. Haruka meets Yuta (2014)
   
4. Haruka gets hospitalized due her involvement with Yuta (2016)
   
5. Kiryu fakes his death to protects his family (2016)
   
6. Which leads to Gaiden (2019-2020)
   
7. Which then leads to Infinite Wealth, due the affairs in Gaiden and Yakuza 7. (2023)

The entirety of Yakuza 6 and Gaiden could have been prevented, if Kiryu would have been there to protect Haruka. The decision Kiryu made at the end of Yakuza 5 to go into prison were the trigger for everything that took place afterwards. You could even go further back and say that Kiryus decision to let Haruka pursue her dream of becoming an Idol let to all of this, which is impressive to think about.

You could say, that this is all an one big arc and it's still ongoing for 11/12 years now.

If the writers of Yakuza, or Like a Dragon, how it’s called now, planned this from the start, it’s actually really good story writing. Now we will have to see how it continues in Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth

The sum it up, without spoiling the game, this game has definitely the most emotional scene in the entire franchise with one of the best voice acting pieces I’ve ever heard, which would even make the toughest Yakuza cry.


Please RGG give this man a happy ending, he has suffered enough.

After spending over 120h in Alicization Lycoris and completing it, this is still the best Sword Art Online game to date.

To sum it up:

• Story is more interesting
  
• Combat is more complex and fluid
  
• The Game doesn't take a year to load a new area
  
• The world is more diverse and interesting
  
• The DLC's which continue the main story are better in this game aswell. They are even Free in the Steam Version, while they cost a fortune in Alicization Lycoris.

Let's just hope they learned their lesson and Last Recollection won't be a failure.

It's not the best game in the world, but as you can see of my high playtime, it is a fun one.

Highly recommend if you are a fan of the Anime or Light Novel.

This is not a bad game and as a remake this game is great, but in some places (Story, characters, level-design), you notice that in it's core it's a 28 year old game.

I used to own Castlevania on my DS, which is where my love for Metroidvania comes from. The question is how good is this game and would I recommend it?

Ender Lilies is definitely one of best games released in this genre in recent memory, it features a lot of things I want of a Metroidvania:

• Great Music
  
• Great Atmosphere
  
• Beautiful Artstyle
  
• Smooth Animations
  
• Lot's of different environments
  
• Decent amount of exploring with secrets hidden in in the environment
  
• Lot's of abilities to improve the movement, like double-jumps, dashing, climbing, wall- and ground-smashes
  
• Generous amounts of checkpoints with no death penalty
  
• There is insane amount of lore and backround information hidden over the entire map. It was really fun figuring out what happend in this world peace by peace.

The unique part of this games combat is that you don't actually attack with the character you control. Instead of weapons, you have guardians, which attack for you and all of them have unique movesets, which range from heavy to fast or from ranged to melee. I actually really like it, as it actually makes sense, why some attacks are slow or fast and it is kind of cool to see how they are protecting Lily from the monsters.

Now for the reason, why I called this game a "flawed Masterpiece":

• The Movement is not perfect, I wouldn't call it stiff, but the best way to describe it is that the game sometimes "swallows" your inputs. Lily does not move how I actually wanted her to move which caused me to die more times then it should have been necessary. Some Boss fight really suffered from this issue, which brings me to the next point:
  
• Balancing Issues
  In this game you take insane amount of damage. The problem is not only the bossfights, but also the normal enemies. At the end of the game the HP-bar almost takes up the entirety of the screen, but you will still die from 2-3 hits depending on the enemy. So why does the HP-bar gets so huge, while it has almost no inpact on the gameplay?
  I don't know
  
• Boss Fights
  Some bosses have so much HP, to the point, where it starts to get annoying instead of being fun. With the issue mentioned above, bosses in this game, with some exceptions, are really hard. Not the good kind of hard (Sekiro) but the annoying kind of hard. If you are not careful, the boss can sometimes even one-shot you and them being HP-tanks doesn't help with that fact. Some people enjoy the difficulty, while I enjoy the exploration aspect of Metroidvanias. Making bosses difficult is okay, but at least give us a difficulty-slider, so the rest of the game doesn't suffer from it.
  
• Parry
  This game has one but unfortunately it is not very useful.
  
  It might sound like I was not enjoying the game, as I've mentioned a lot of negative points, but that is not really the case. I just want them to improve those issues for their next game, so that we might actually get a real Masterpiece.
  
  My overall rating would be 8.5/10, big recommendation, if you enjoy Metroidvanias

I have to write a review for a game I nominated so here you go

The game is great, but how did we go from "Let's escape the Island!" to killing an immortal god who is otherwise going to destroy humanity?

Also if you ever played any of the older Ys-games you know that it isn't the first time Adol is supposed to beat an immortal god, who already managed to destroyed ancient civilizations which existed before humanity.
And one red boi is supposed to stop them.

What I always asked myself is, how can all of those ancient gods, who are supposed to affect the entire planet, coexist?

And why do they always wait for a certain red haired swordman to appear, before they try to realize their almighty evil plan?

That was my rant about the Ys-Franchise, now about the review:
This game is one of the best JRPG's I've ever played. Ys 8 offers everything what I love about JRPG's:

• Interesting Characters (especially Dana)
  
• Great Story
  
• Exploration
  
• Beautiful and interesting world with a lot of diversity
  
• Great and smooth Combat

Do you have to play any other Ys-game to enjoy Ys 8?
I would recommend it, but you don't have to play any of the other Ys-games to enjoy or understand the story of this game. They only reference some of his older adventures and appart from Dogi, there are no important characters in Ys 8 from older titles.

So in concusion: I love this game and the entire franchise. You should definitely play it.