บทวิจารณ์ล่าสุดโดย Quitch

One of the great video game stories, but also one of the worst paced games I have ever played through. You are much better off watching the anime and will lose almost nothing of the experience. The few touching moments it doesn't cover aren't worth the slog.

Persona 4 Golden is a game of melancholic longing for a time that might never really have existed. Your life is still one of endless possibilities, you’re surrounded by friends with whom you have deep personal connections, and everything is a grand adventure.

In other words, it’s an idealised take on school life and the bonds formed there.

The gameplay is a mix of social elements and dungeon crawling, with a big focus on the characters within the narrative and your relationship to them, going so far as to tie numerous gameplay mechanics into these social links.

The game is heavily split between its social, almost visual novel elements with your friends, and what look to my eye to be more traditional turn-based battles in the dungeons. Yet at the same time there are numerous systems employed to try and tie the two together.

So, let’s start with the bad: the dungeon crawling. It’s dire.

Persona 4 Golden suffers from a problem seen in numerous RPGs before it which is that it loves numbers seemingly for the sake of numbers. You will be presented with vast swathes of information without the context necessary to make meaningful choices. This isn’t helped by the PC version not coming with the manual that console owners would have but having read that too it does little to alleviate the issue. Do you want to increase “Luck” by one? It will boost certain effects. By how much? Who knows? What enemy elements impact its effectiveness? Who knows? When I use items and abilities which affect the same thing, how does that tie into this stat? Who knows?

It seems all the more pointless because your companions follow fixed levelling paths, so have set abilities. And abilities are all you’re going to worry about, and these abilities have their own levels which in turn determine their effectiveness. So really, why have the stats at all? As I say though, this is far from a problem specific to this game and I really wish RPG designers would settle on stats or skills instead of trying to cram the two together which leads to this amorphous blob of nothing. This is without getting into the mess that is weapons and armour, or how the word “Attack” is used in multiple contexts and the game never tells you which one it’s using. This mess leads you to just pumping the numbers high and buying the most expensive gear. Don’t think, feel. And pump up the numbers.

But the real failing of the dungeon crawling is that the combat is mind-numbingly boring. Of my 84 hours, I’d guess about 30 hours were spent in dungeons, yet the systems just aren’t there to support this. Don’t get me wrong, the game has a lot of systems, and I mean a lot of systems, but it’s a mile wide and an inch deep. The game is about hitting enemy weaknesses to specific elements, and it never evolves beyond that. In 99% of combats the enemy would be dead before they could attack, existing only to add an unnecessary level grind.

You will constantly see the same enemies, often in the same groups, and once you’ve beaten a particular group combination you’ve beaten all of them, and it’s just going through the numbers of firing the same abilities in the same order. If I had a second monitor I’d have watched shows while I did this, that’s how little involvement the game needed from me. At times I felt like I was entering a trance as muscle memory took me through fights, with no requirement for my brain to engage at all. And every dungeon has eight to nine levels of this, with six to ten monster groups per level, and they even have the nerve to respawn sometimes. That’s a lot of menial combat.

The game then compounds its combat sins with bosses that don’t leverage anything the dungeon taught you about fighting. Instead they’re sponges which you wear down, and all those support skills that were irrelevant up until now suddenly become important. This doesn’t add depth, it just means you have one rotation for mobs and one rotation for bosses. And in the early boss fights sometimes they’ll do two area attacks in a row and everyone dies and there was nothing you could do about it.

I could write an essay on the many failings of the game’s combat. Let me just round this section out by saying that the combat serves to undermine the game’s own headline feature: the personas. As per the reset of the game this is an over-engineered mess of opaque merges, unforeseeable bonuses, and unplannable ability trees. Again, almost all irrelevant because you just find one with abilities you need then merge or skill card in a couple of additions to shore up the gaps and that’s you done for the game, especially as stat boosts not carrying over means you’re actively discouraged from engaging in the fusing of personas, something that you’d think would be a major element of the game.

I finished the game around level 84, going to dungeons when the story required it or when companions asked to. I used three personas across the course of the game, relying almost exclusively on my High Pixie from level 30 onwards. I used the first three companions for the entire game because companions not in the party don’t gain XP. There’s catch-up XP, which naturally the game doesn’t tell you about, but that smells like grind and grind is anti-fun. You also can’t rotate companions mid-dungeon without using an item, so again the game is discouraging me from changing my party and so I obliged it.

But it’s the other half of the game which Persona is truly known for, and this is where the game shines. It has an incredibly strong cast of likable characters and achieves what any good character driven RPG should: a feeling of emptiness once the game ends and they’re no longer in your life. In a way this is what drove me to write this post, it’s part of me letting go of the cast and moving on.

You will spend your time in the game world either going through scripted events, with low to no consequence dialogue choices, or in choosing who to spend time with to improve your social links. There are gameplay benefits tied to social link improvement, but in the main you should spend time together with the people who interest you.

Some backstories are more interesting than others, but all of them were surprisingly well done, and all of them feel true to the character they’re about. You really do learn more about these people, get a view into their insecurities and help them overcome some emotional baggage. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but it’s well executed and done on a huge scale. Across the cast there is must be somewhere between 100-120 different scenes, and that doesn’t include the scenes specific to each romance. There are so many social links that I forgot about a couple completely and didn’t even find one of them until after I’d finished the main quest!

There’s some true ending ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ towards the end of the game, which isn’t a true ending at all so much as it is the ending. My game ended after 63 hours because in a dialogue tree I chose option A and not B. The game skips to the end and there’s absolutely no emotional climax, no feeling of closure, it just stops. So then I looked it up because that can’t be right, and sure enough, you need to make a series of specific choices in a final dialogue and then the game carries on for another twenty hours. The ♥♥♥♥?! The game even repeats this in the true ending but asking if you want to go home at one point, something it has done before, but foolish you if you say yes. Apparently, you need to say no, then visit some specific places, and then boom there’s another dungeon, another ending and a real epilogue.

I really enjoyed my time with the game despite the combat, and I hear that Persona 5 has much improved gameplay systems. I’m hoping it will some day make its way to the PC because this feels like a franchise I could be a fan of.

A fantastic open world romp, which focuses more on the detection aspect than the deduction and trial. It treads a fine line between guiding you and requiring you to figure out where to go and what to look for all by yourself, and I think it succeeds.

For fans of Danganronpa, be warned that the final trial is more a summation of your findings, rather than an intense battle of wits. This is the one area I would like to have seen the game do more, but it does mean you come to trial with a firm grasp of the facts if you’ve done your job properly. It also allows an interesting approach where you have firm control over the verdicts, and have many options of who to throw under the bus regardless of what you know to be true. You don't fail, you "find your truth" as the game would say.

I highly recommend this game; I haven’t played anything quite like it and would gladly welcome more. The soundtrack is a banger as well.

Mankind Divided is a game with better gameplay than Human Revolution, but worse story and characterisation.

It’s not that the story and characters are bad, it’s that they’re flat. The story never really builds into much of anything, you believe there’s a frame job, you investigate the frame job, and then the person who looked like a bad guy turns out to be a bad guy. And it’s implied there’s more going on and the story ends. Bleh.

Characters are distinct and well-written, but they never evolve. Your relationship to everyone by the end isn’t that different to them at the start. Worse is that a lot of them are only present around the periphery, leading to a wide cast without much depth. In HR you had Sarif, Megan, and Pritchard all playing major roles and changing with the story. Here you have characters ranging from Aria, who you wonder why she’s even in the game, to Miller, whose back story you can uncover but which doesn’t change anything or reframe anything that he does. It’s depth of content without depth of development.

Far more interesting are characters in the side-missions, and indeed the side missions are where the game shines, with little vignettes where it tries out new things and people have actual arcs.

Where Mankind Divided really delivers is in the promise Human Revolution had in Detroit. That city spoke to possibility, and through Prague that possibility is delivered upon. 80% of your time will be spent in the city, exploring, doing mission, and just learning about the world through the situation unfolding before your eyes.

Level design is also much better than before, with less dependency on vents in plain view, and a feeling of interconnectedness, and multiple real possibilities for every situation. I’d go so far as to call the level design within the city and its connected elements masterful.

It’s just a shame that ultimately the whole thing doesn’t add up to much of anything. No questions are answers, no relationships are developed, you don’t really feel like you shaped much of anything. It is here that the sequel underperforms. Yet the pleasure of the gameplay experience was more than enough that I would recommend this game.

This is a very serviceable story-driven FPS which doesn't do anything particularly well. It has a story, but it’s not great. It has characters, but they’re not very well executed. It has romance, but it’s incredibly shallow. It has shooting, but you’ve experienced better. It has stealth, but it’s very half-hearted. It has exploration, but there’s little to find.

Yet, in a market where there isn’t a lot of competition in the space, if story-driven FPS is your jam then this is a game worth checking out. It certainly shows some promise, and I’m excited to see what the team does next. It always feels like it’s on the cusp of being better than it is, despite lack lustre writing and abysmal AI. When it drops you in a map with some objectives and lets you figure out how you want to tackle things, it’s fun. Ironically, it becomes less fun once the terminators get involved and you obtain plasma weapons.

I would say you should play Metro Exodus before this game, a rather similar style of game that does most everything better, but this certainly isn’t a waste of your time.

A superb ending to the long running series, which provides suitable closure to everything. The fifth game also manages to bring some slightly meatier puzzles to bear than the fourth game, which was appreciated.

What seems like a standard harem visual novel turns into something much more meta, akin to Bioshock, or actually closer to the level of meta found in The Stanley Parable.

While this does make for something fun, and relatively unique, I feel it undercuts the far more powerful presentation that proceeds it. I enjoy a good Bioware romance as much as anyone, but they're very surface level. The first act of the game goes deeper and shows you that perhaps you don't really know the people around you, and has a pretty strong message about mental illness. By moving to a meta story it feels like the game avoids tackling a much more interesting and far less explored subject, which was also far more emotionally impactful.

Oh, and the game has a warning about not being for people suffering from depression or of a sensitive nature. I advise taking the warning seriously.

The Council starts strong, but ultimately it disappoints.

At first you are greeted by something that feels like a Telltale game with a heavier focus on gameplay outside the dialogue elements. It teases you with an array of classes, skills, talents and various systems in which to employ them. All of this is well used in a strong opening episode that gets you excited to play the rest.

Unfortunately, it's pretty much downhill from there, both in terms of gameplay and narrative. You can feel the time and budget limitations setting in as dialogues move from carefully directed scenes, to player controlled over-the-shoulder camera work. The opportunity system mostly disappears, and rarely presents anything of interest or challenge. Skills feel relevant only in whether you hold them or not, as consumables make levels mostly irrelevant. Talents never deliver reward worth the effort. Only the confrontation system remains strong.

The game does have some good puzzles, but there's far too much pointless wandering around. There are even fetch quests. In a game which teases political intrigue, what you get is surprisingly shallow and it's rare anyone has anything of value to say. The game in fact pivots away from this to some very videogame style storytelling, which was a real disappointment after the great setup. I think the writers simply weren't able to deliver the quality necessary to carry a court intrigue style game.

Inconsistent voice acting undermines the game as well, with key characters, including your character, having some of the weakest performances in the game. Combined with dodgy animations and an increasing number of pauses and facial desyncs as the episodes progress, really serves to undermine the cinematic experience.

It's a game whose reach just exceeds its grasp, but if the developers tried something similar again I'd certainly check it out.

I've been playing The Walking Dead since 2012, the longest running game series I've ever played. By this point you're likely incredibly invested, emotionally, in the series and its central character: Clementine.

This is a bittersweet season. It sees both the end of this series and the studio that made it. So it makes me happy that they went out with probably their strongest offering to date. The engine looks better than ever, they've mixed up the gaming mechanics a little more to the point where you may actually die, and they've perfected the balance of dialogue, gameplay, alone time and the group. Where season 2 struggled to find its footing for some time, season 4 is firing on all cylinders from episode one.

It's a shorter season, and the last episode is in many ways an epilogue. But that's what it needed, because when you've seven years of history behind you, you shouldn't rush the emotional release. The game brings things to a close perfectly, and brought me to tears at least once.

It has been a pleasure to play this series, and one day when I have enough distance, I'll play it again. Until then, it has been a joy to watch my Clementine grow up and guide her on her journey.

Good, but not as good as you've heard. It tries to do a lot, and is very reminiscent of Deus Ex, yet it doesn't do any one thing particularly well.

For an RPG I was left feeling that the experience was ultimately hollow. I didn’t really get to know anyone or grow attached to them. None of the factions ever become more than skin-deep. None of the choices you make about them carry any real weight because you don’t care about anyone in any of them.

You are given a raft of social and stealth skills, yet thrown into mandatory combat on multiple occasions. This mandates a combat build to some degree, meaning that replayability is highly limited because most clans will feel very similar in playstyle. There is some flexibility here, with the Malkavians having lots of great dialogue, and the Nosferatu mandating a unique approach to world navigation (though one that may simply be irritating more than fun). Social skills are mainly wasted though, with both seduction and intimidation being mostly useless, and persuasion predictably powerful.

What ended up killing replay for me though is the endings are weak. It’s as well that none of the factions or characters are particularly developed, because there is no emotional payoff at the end. A brief cutscene and we’re done. It’s an ending that leaves you empty.

There’s a reasonable flexibility to approaching missions. It’s not at the level of its four-year younger cousin, Deus Ex, but it’s there.

So why do I still recommend it? Because the pool of this type of game is very small. There just aren’t many FPS RPGs, and it does have some fun ideas, even if the implementation isn’t great. The last chapter of the game has all the classic signs of rushed development, and the poor ending made me feel I’d ultimately wasted my time pushing through that last chapter, but I can’t deny that I had fun in the run-up to it.

Would I play it again? Probably not, I felt like my build was broad enough that I saw everything the game had to offer outside some unique clan elements. Yet it’s worth at least one romp.