Recent reviews by ldragonlong

A charming RPG with some quality of life improvements for PC.

You take control of Estelle and Joshua, two junior bracers, who travel across the country of Liberl as they work towards their senior bracer licence. It follows the standard formula of going to a new town, getting side-quests, main story quests, and dungeons. However, your performance and choices can affect your rewards. Some choices are not as obvious as others, but you aren't expected to be perfect your first time through. The script is charming and the additional lines in the empty chests are funny. The NPCs also get new lines as the story progresses, which gives life to the town. Most of the NPCs you'll come across in towns even have names. Turbo mode makes grinding and back-tracking a breeze.

Combat is straight forward. Players move around on a grid and use physical skills (crafts) and magic (arts). Enemies occasionally require skill and planning. Bosses usually require buff/debuffs and strategy. The orbament system is fairly easier to understand, although it takes math or a guide for optimal setups. For example, on your caster, your would have Mind 3. You may want to slot in some wind and earth quatz to get the AoE diamond dust, but you use up 2 additional slots. You could slot in Scent and save a slot, but you also attract monsters on the field. Do you want to add more water and get a more efficient heal, or put in an Attack 3 quartz (which wouldn't help a caster), but give access to fire spells? It can be fun balancing stats and spell versatility.

Music is great. It's mostly instrumental tracks, but the songs do a great job of setting the mood.

There's a lot of missable things if you want to go for 100% completion. It includes side-quests, recipes, empty chest dialog, the in-game newspaper, and the book series, Carnelia, that you can actually read.

My main complaint (which isn't much of a complaint) is that the story ends on a cliffhanger that made me want to jump into the second game right away.

Recommended for fans of JRPGs and people willing to jump into the beginning of a long-running series.

As much as I love this game, I can only recommend it to a small audience. I have gotten to at least chapter 13 on the Xbox360 version, although it has been a while.

I love the character interactions the most and I believe them to be the highlight of the game. Vashyron is the mentor figure that guides the other two through the world, but is still goofy and likes to prod the others. Leanne is kind of a naive character. And Zephyr is the brooding protagonist. But the in-battle banter is where you get choice quotes, like
Leanne: Do you want me on offense or defense?
Vashyron: So Leanne goes both ways, huh?

The gameplay is hard to describe. Starting from attack mechanics, your SMGs will deal scratch damage. It's always non-lethal, but charging it multiplies damage. Pistols deal direct damage and increases chances of breaking the HP gauge with more charges (think literally breaking the HP gauge Deadpool style). Grenades can deal knockback and increases its chance of occuring with more charges. Scratch damage can be healed off, but it can be turned into permanent HP damage with direct damage. Tools you get are an ammo case which can alter the effectiveness of your firearms and a first-aid kit to heal. You can equip two weapons/tools in your hands, although I found SMGs and pistols to be the most effective. It could be that I'm a hoarder and did not like to use grenades and ammo.
The battles are tactical as you take your time to plan your move. The enemies won't charge their attacks until you start moving or charge your attacks.
You could take aim and shoot, but it's usually better to do a hero run (and cooler). You start off with 3 charges in your hero gauge and once you collect 4 piece, you gain a new piece (a la Legend of Zelda). When you do a hero run, you're invincible to all damage during that run and can move to a more strategic position. If you run between your teammates (think quarter hockey), you gain a resonance point. With resonance points, you can trigger a tri attack. Your team will do a hero run in a triangle and can run one line per resonance point.

Your team plays with a different set of rules. As long as your hero gauge is up, all damage taken by your characters is scratch damage. When a character takes full scratch damage, that character will consume charges of the hero gauge, using 1 point per 1000 points of scratch damage until they reach full health. The hero gauge will then break and fall to the battlefield. If you run out of hero gauge, then you enter critical condition where your attack speed and accuracy greatly fall.

There's a lot more to the mechanics, such as status effects, customizing crazy attachments onto your guns, knockdown and smackdown, skills, Hp breakage, and armor parts. The game doesn't give a great tutorial on these mechanics and expects you to go to the arena to practice them. It also doesn't really evolve beyond what is introduced, instead opening new customization options such as dual wielding and new parts. All in all, it is a fun game, although poorly explained and reveals all of its mechanics out of the box. I can only recommend it to the most devout JRPG fans.

If you can get past the initial payment as well as monthly fees, this game offers as much as you're willing to put in.

Compared to F2P MMO's, this game offers many quality of life improvements, such as being able to level all jobs on one character, no stamina capping playtime, or intentionally long loading times. This game does have DLC in cosmetics and level boosters per jobs, but it never felt like that grind was unfairly steep.

I definitely suggest trying the trial if you have interests in MMOs. If you do decide to jump in, save on the dlc until you reach the end of A Realm Reborn (2.0 quests).

One Piece meets Musuo/Dynasty series. How well do these two mesh?

Although simple and possible to button mash on normal difficulty, it can be considered a guilty pleasure. On hard difficulty, there may be a little more thought put into it.

Combos are fairly simple. You can start a melee or ranged combo, and switch off (once) to the other style. EX. M-M-R, R-M, etc. You can dash mid-combo for a decent number of I-frames and be able to continue your combo (super broken, but hey, you're like a god among men). Each character also has a special move, such as Franky's fresh fire, Nami's shocking enemies with the thundercloud status, or Luffy's Gum-Gum pistol.

At first, it feels like you're getting bombarded with info. Someone is in danger. A keep is about to fall. My best suggestion is, ignore the NPC units unless specified to protect. If someone is in danger, they have close to half their health and cannot be rescued for another minute. You'll have to get used to which messages are urgent and which is filler.

Basically, the major arcs of One Piece, but just the Sparknotes version. The Dressrosa arc is an original story and may not follow the anime/manga closely (I'm just finishing Thriller's Bark ;w;) You'll have to play through some missions twice or more for secrets/hidden objectives.

As mentioned earlier, you may have to play through some missions over again to farm for medals or complete secret objectives. After that, there is a free mode. There are islands with a scenario on each location. It may be a battle of the beauties, or battle of the devil fruit types, and etc. WIthin the scenario, there may be 1-3 randomized events from a pool of events (shared between all free mode islands). On average, the missions take up to 10 minutes. I tend to do 2-3 missions per session without burning myself out.

• AMD FX-8320 3.5GHz
  
• MSI 970 Gaming
  
• GTX 960 2-way SLI
  
• 16GB DDr3 Ram

Just by the description, you'll probably know whether or not you'll like this. If you hate the Dynasty series, you won't like this. If you don't like One Piece, blah blah blah. If you don't mind either, it's a Dynasty/Musuo game that stays true to the characters of One Piece. Except for Nami getting the clima-tact in Alabastia

Battleborn is a new title in a emergeant genre of games, tentitivly called "hero shooters" (@)totalbiscuit. This game has been compared to Overwatch, but the similarities are skin deep. Still, how does this game fair?

• Incusion: like a MoBA, but with one lane. (Well, more like Monday Night Combat) You try to escort minions to an enemy sentry to lower its shield, than take down the sentry. Rinse and repeat.
  
• Capture: standard capture the point.
  
• Meltdown: escort minions to the enemy base.

Out of each, I have had the most fun with Incursion just due to it's more complex main/side objective balance.

• Run over small shard crystals or hit large shard crystals for resources.
  
• Use shards to activate gear in game (from a set of 3) -OR-
  
• Build/upgrade sentries
  
• Unable to switch hero mid-game.
  
• Game might throw you into a story mission alone after a long queue time.
  
• Helix skill tree gives 2 or 3 choices per (in-match) level up. For many points, I can see either branch being versatile. However, I do have certain skills that I prefer over others.
  
• Induvidual exp. per character. Can unlock a third choice at some helix points.

• AMD FX-8320 3.5GHz
  
• MSI 970 Gaming
  
• GTX 960 2-way SLI
  
• 16GB DDr3 Ram

It is, with a heavy heart, that I do not recommend this game. I have certainly gotten my money's worth out of it, expecially with the Humble Bundle Sale. However, at this time, with concurrent players as low as it is, you will have a hard time finding a teaa. WHen you do, it could be against a team of maxed out characters. I feel, as others have, that this might go down the road of Evolve. Unleass you can find a group of friends to play with, prepare for long queue times.

IMHO, improves over the original. All missions (main and sidequest) are non-generic. More background information is given for each party character, including a personal quest. Less of an RPG element, but flows more smoothly. Especially fun to see how decisions from the original affects the news and characters in this sequel.

A fun sandbox game with humorous dialogue.

Extremely difficult, masochistic platformer, but so satisfying when you complete a level.

Nice 2d comic book graphics, along with a fast paced combo-centered battle system.

I really like this game but I couldn't find the stupid cake.

Valve, Valve Coperation. 2011 Dec 27.