Recent reviews by Jaffa Calling

I tried so hard to like it. I really did. They got the music really right. They got assets, and lighting right. That's it though. The praise ends there. I had heard the characters don't really interact (Which is still a baffling design choice nonetheless) but that the individual stories were, most of them I was told, good on their own. I was willing to take that since I was pre-warned. What I wasn't prepared for is for each individual story to be terrible.

All of them. They weren't even mediocre, they were awful. It is one of the most generic, unrelatable, bland, totally emotionally uninvolved plots I have encountered in any form of media or entertainment in a long time. That description, but 8 seperate times. It feels like they did not actually make a sincere effort to write a quality compelling story or characters, they didn't bother to try.

Even the world building is awful, every person inside every location is utterly generic and obligatory. Each town either has the most generic predictable problem possible to deal with or none at all and is a utopia where nothing matters or happens. Most buildings are bafflingly empty, totally devoid of the things of life. Literally empty, not hyperbole. You go into someone's house and it is all floor and wall. They sleep against the wall apparently, prepare food using the floor, it is a stove, knife, spoon, oven, whatever. It can do it all. They eat that food on that floor too apparently. The plates and table are all one thing. This is a very versatile choice of interior decor, these empty sometimes 2 story studio apartments with no stairs.

I keep having to say "generic". But that's what describes it. It's a diluted thing, the JRPG, a niche, twisted into something it's not. God never counted on something like this happening. It's a non-niche now. Whatever it is is not for the serious JRPG snob like me. This is an undercooked mystery meat. It is for the consumption of normies, apparently blind to it's overt insulting of the player's maturity and intelligence. The dialogue is horrendous and juvenile, like it was written by a twelve year old. It just kept sucking, never improving. I kept telling myself something will happen that will make me care about what is going on. Surely, there is a reason people apparently like this. It never did, all 8 times.

It did have a really good OST, I have no problem acknowledging that. Especially Flamesgrace, Guiding Light.

Unforgettable. That was something really special.

If you are someone who is quite beyond lay knowledge of firearms as I am, this is an exceptional piece of software that you can use to answer a lot of your own questions. Progressiing through the different gun models is actually a very interesting way to do this, you will become better familiarized with weapons you never really had interest in and discovered, now you do have an interest in them. At some point there was a sale for full access brought down to like 10-20 bucks, and I snatched that up immediatly. There was a hell of a lot less models at that time, probably half as much. Some of the very early ones are noticeably disappointing with regard to polygons and texture resolution, but that is long since past.