Recent reviews by goob

I bought this game month 1 - 2 and fell in love instantly. As I continued to play I gradually felt a stagnant flow of progress and dropped it afterwards once reaching the Margott boss in Lyndell. I recently picked it up again and with some advice from online sources and friends, this game has easily become one of my favorites. I highly recommend this game, more so if you enjoy exploring large maps or metroidvanias!

Before I begin I will say this: If you like Yoko Taro’s writing, enjoy convoluted plots or philosophy, you will enjoy this game. I went in as a Hack n’ Slash fan looking for one of the most renowned Hack n’ Slash games of the modern era, and I was severely disappointed

From the lackluster hack n’ slash combat this game has made part of it’s reputation from, to it’s unnecessarily convoluted and messy storyline, I think this is one of the worst experiences I’ve had playing a video game ever. The combat is so unbelievably brain dead and boring it makes No More Heroes look complex, yet despite this is somehow still more frustrating thanks to the bullet hell aspects Yoko Taro thought would be a good idea to flood the screen with. 90% of the time the only thing you’re gonna see is a bullet hell. The hacking mini-game only becomes an annoyance once you reach Route C in which you play as 9S or A2. The mini-games become unbearably frustrating and feel like Yoko Taro is f**cking with me like The Last Song. Speaking of which, for a hack n slash about 50-60% of your time will be with this damn hacking mini-game so I hope you enjoy bullet hells and shoot em’ ups


The story is a nightmare; Coming off of DOD3, the story of Nier feels like it’s trying to improve upon DOD3 timeline structure, yet maintains one single timeline with multiple branching paths. This leads to a story that's 50-60% cohesive and the rest feeling like a bunch of evangelion level pointless and pretentious symbolism. The only positives I can give are for the bare minimum things a game should get right: Graphics and Music. Outside if this I did end up enjoying the characters, but only after spending HOURS forcing myself to listen to the same garbage dialogue: “Hey 2B, why do you think *insert philosophical question” “Doesn't matter, focus on the mission”. The VAs also did a fantastic job on this regardless of the nonsensical writing and direction of the story.

To put it bluntly, this whole game feels like one line 9S repeats in Route C “It doesn't matter what they do” and boy does it sure feel like it cause the more I play this game, the more I want to play literally any other game but this.

For the conclusion to an epic tale about a nerd trying to get into a chick’s pants, this game feels both great and disappointing as a finale. For what there is, it’s fantastic! The combat is as simple as nier, but way more fun and unique! Outside of story, you have the death missions for more combat, the collectathons for completionist, and really fun and engaging boss fights that the series is known for. My main gripes are with the way the death chips and item drops were handled and how the game definitely feels unfinished. You can tell Suda had so much more planned but due to restrictions outside of his control, we have this. I highly recommend this entry to hardcore fans and people looking for a hack n slash!

peak mid 2000's gaming

I have put 1000+ hours into World, Hundreds into Generations and Stories, and almost 400 hours into Rise so this is coming from a fan os the series who is hoping WILDS learns from this game. This game is not a good Monster Hunter Game. The combat has cool mechanics, but leans too far away from the formula imo and ruins the perfect balance of power the games are known for, and Sunbreak made this worse. Every update post-Sunbreak launch was mid and felt like attempts to prolong an already dying game. And the main reason to writing this review, ENIGMA. Enigma is Capcom's way of saying "you don't own anything"; You can't play without internet connection, you can't have this game installed on multiple systems, and apparently this has prevented people from even starting the game. I was thinking about coming back to it on my steam deck, but enigma can brick decks according to reports. I just hope Capcom learns from this and DoD2 and does not screw up WILDS.

Garbage patch after garbage patch; controversy after controversy; I can't keep doing it with this game anymore. Stay far away from this game and it's un-bearbly annoying community if you can.

Went into this game with the expectation of it being bad, most arena fighters are mid at best and I play to play as my favorite characters, not to win. For a fighter, this is some of the worst balancing I've seen. I know it just released but some characters feel terrible to play and some are lore accurately balanced making fights feel one sided and the difference in performance between characters ridiculous. I'm hoping as this game receives updates and more dlc it will have a comeback, but I would wait until then or they finally collab with Arc Sys

Rock and STONE!!

(This is an edit of a previous review, the original review was written around 24 hours in around chapter 3 of the game, halfway through the story. I am now on chapter 5, 55 hours in.)

This is the second out of two reviews that I have ever made on Steam and I do this hoping Koei Techmo actually starts listening to feedback and continues to patch this game for the better. For the preface, I started with MH:World, Finished Rise and Sunbreak, on anomaly level 200, and played through some of MHGX. I love Dissidia NT and have played as few of Koei’s other projects like the AOT game and FE Warriors. I am by no means a MH Veteran but as a fan of the series and a fan of Koei I want to leave my honest opinions so that my feedback could be taken into consideration.

Let’s address the elephant in the room, this is a Monster Hunter game influenced by the Souls series. Unlike Monster Hunter where you’re constantly glued to the monster and trying to reach your weapon goals, you have to play patiently and wait for openings or make your own with the kakuri tools at your disposal. This is a great idea considering how similar the two genres are and the challenge it provides, but this often leads to spikes in difficulty and a feeling of imbalance that isn't helped by your skills as it is in Monster Hunter. The point of the genre is to overcome the monster with your weapons and win back the balance by the various tools you have that help you reach your weapon goals. In Wild Hearts it often feels like the Kemono is always winning the power struggle and rarely topples; Often when you finally get that topple it typically lasts for seconds, barely letting you go all out with this game’s form of weapon goals. On top of this Kemono constantly enrage themselves after their first time, often leading to entire encounters where the beast is enraged, leading to a stagnation in topples and a favorable match-up for the beast. This progressively gets better as you unlock more kakuri fusions and stronger armor and weapon options, but it never fades away and can make the game feel unfair, janky, or stale at times because there’s no sense of that tug of war Monster Hunter thrives off of. I think the main point I am trying to get at is that the fights here are more souls-like in a genre that’s about a power struggle, not a complete power imbalance. I do think the challenge this provides can be fun and push players to become better hunters, but most of the time it feels as if we the hunters are just hitting a brick wall that hits like a truck for small mistakes.

Aside from this more generalized take, here’s a list of things I’ve noticed that I think could be improved for the better:

Main Issue - GRINDING: Monster Hunter and the hunting genre is known for its grind and rpg elements that have earned its reputation of their players sinking hundreds of hours into their games, but the way Wild Hearts goes about it brings out the mediocre and worst of the grinding in the genre. Kemono parts are already hard to break and it’s almost mandatory you run this game’s version of Part Breaker. Wild Hearts implements RNG in it’s worst possible form for the genre; Normally your chances of getting a particular part increase or are guaranteed if you focus and break the part on the Kemono, but some schmuck decided to include items that are completely RNG with the lowest of low rates. You cannot focus on parts to get these, you cannot equip skills to increase your chances, there are no armor and weapon equipment requirements, it is pure RNG if you get these items or not and the rates for them are LOW. What’s worse is that some of the parts are incredibly hard to reach for some weapons as this was designed for multiplayer, but I’ll delve into that later; Climbing to also reach these parts is an absolute nightmare as your movement while grappling is dependant on the wildly swinging camera.

Once you complete the story and start participating in the post game, you unlock cladding (this game’s layered armor). Another thing Monster Hunter is known for is the ability to transmog, earning it the name Fashion Hunter. Again I don't know who at Koei or Omega decided that this would be a great idea, but in order to get the items you need, you have to hunt a slightly powered up version of the monster and successfully finish the hunt. This is not the issue, this issue is that the item that drops, as previously stated, is up to complete RNG and can drop from 1 - 10 pieces of it. So you have to get the low rng to get the item and then get the rng to get multiple copies of it. On top of all that, the quests rotate and so after you hunt it, you have to hunt other monsters until it comes back. My last gripe about this is that you need multiple of this type of item from multiple kemono to make one set for one individual kemono’s set, and even before all of this you have to make the armor set normally to unlock the option to make it as a layered piece. This is how you take one of the most beloved features of a game and absolutely bury it in monotony and aggravation.

Weapons: I completed the main story using the Kakuri Katana, the flagship weapon. I branched out and tried Maul for some quests while I was grinding. I am now in the post game experimenting with all the different weapons and I think this is where Wild Hearts begins to crack. None of the weapons are complex enough to stand alone as a main weapon for a player. It can quickly get stale and some weapons are not as rewarding as the skill level required to play them is. They lack the complexity that Monster Hunter weapons provide which give hunters many options and combos to experiment with on the fly, but many options to deal with the monster. The best description I can give is that the weapons feel artificially complex and not engaging enough to warrant hours of investment.

Combat: Combat can quickly become stale as the monster variety is nowhere near as large as Capcom’s selection. I know I am talking about a franchise vs 1 new property, but World had 90+ Monsters to fight. Wild Hearts has 21, half of them being variants. My guess is due to the souls' influence, they were banking on the complexity of each fight, however this fails due to how many moves each kemono has. This leads to a quick understanding of movesets and how to properly counter attack. Kakuri Fusions also play a huge role as they can make a break or hunt as they do not function consistently. Aside from all this, I would say it's common knowledge that the hitboxes can be absolutely absurd and outright broken in Kemono's favor. I think a major thing that the formula is missing in terms of combat is the complexity of the weapons combining with the complexity of the monster to create unique hunts every time you engage with that monster, but due to the souls-like nature they’re aiming for, the ability needed of memorizing the kemono’s moveset ruins all chances of this as you’re gonna be responding with the same options every time. There is also no magical moment where after spending the entire hunt you can finally reach your weapon goals because you overcame the monster. They just fall over for literal seconds giving you little to no time to have fun with your weapon.

Kakuri Tree: I won’t go too long on this one but throughout the game you have moments of inspiration where you unlock a new kakuri fusion to use in battle. The issue is that if you do too well on a hunt or don’t bring the right kakuri to the hunt, it’ll never unlock until you do bring them, or you just have a really bad run. The real issue of this is that they never tell you and some of these are extremely helpful fusions and optimal for end game. You could go through the rest of the game never unlocking these important options to use against kemono because the game for no discerning reason refuses to tell you, or is actively punishing you for playing too well.

knives are better for close encounters