Recent reviews by Crouton

Listen, as someone who staunchly and stubbornly advises all people new to this series to start with Trails in the Sky FC, the very first game in a very long, interconnected story, I have this to say:

It's okay if you start here. This game is a perfectly fine jumping on point.

HOWEVER, you've gotta promise to go back and play the games that came before it. Even if you have to set the difficulty to easy to just get through the dated gameplay. You can read summaries and synopses all day long, but for this series, there is NO substitute for having that emotional attachment to the characters and the world on a personal level, especially when those characters show up again, multiple times.

This game is great, by the way. I think it should leave a strong first impression of what this series has to offer.

I'm just saying, if Naamah wanted my magatsuhi, I'd gladly provide.

I have no problems buying this early because I know, without a doubt, by the time I actually make any decent progress, there will already be way more content.

Everything, from the gameplay itself to the dialogue, is fun. If you don't hate fun, you'll love this. If you skip the dialogue, maybe you're the one who's cringe.

This game is proof to me that, even if you generally don't like a genre, there's almost certainly something out there within that genre that will still manage to appeal to you. Don't much care for deck building or roguelikes/lites. The lack of tangible progression always puts me off. Makes things feel pointless. But this game, man. I don't know what it is, but it just has such an undeniable appeal. It's incredibly addicting. Just gotta keep doing those runs.

Gotta keep doing the runs. Gotta keep unlocking the decks. Gotta keep unlocking jokers. So that you can do more runs, to unlock more decks, to unlock more jokers. Make the numbers go up. The house always wins? You can take down bosses with a single high card. This game is crack.

This game is pretty fun. I really like the movement, especially once you start finding some of the movement upgrades. It's fun trying to get places you probably aren't supposed to be yet even if you ultimately can't get much further. The aesthetics of the game are also quite nice. Really like some of the locations you go to. And the soundtrack does a good job of selling that dreamy feeling it's going for. My biggest complaint was the lack of any kind of map because it was incredibly easy to get lost and a platforming game isn't really the right genre for me to want to make a map as I go.

But the game was literally just updated to add exactly that. It still doesn't show you what direction you're facing relative to the map, but that's easy enough to adjust to. Other than that, I think this game is swell, especially considering its origins as a game jam project. I'm quite looking forward to what this dev has in store next.

And most important of all: Sybil is a REALLY COOL character design. Yes sir, very cool indeed.

The game might have a few weird collision bugs, but people are literally acting like the game is unplayable in some of these negative reviews and I can't help but feel that's kinda disingenuous. It might need some polish, but it's 100% worth the asking price if you're even remotely into the idea of what it is. There is a pretty steep learning curve for playing the game well, so you might feel like it's not "clicking" with you, but give it a chance. Once your brain starts putting together the mechanics and how things work, it feels legitimately amazing.

I can't possibly recommend this enough. This remake is an improvement over past iterations in pretty much every way possible. The game is beautiful, the new voice actors do a fantastic job, and every rank of every social link is voiced. Running through Tartarus is less of a slog now on account of not just the sprint button but also the fact that the game introduces small new mechanics with each block. Nothing major, just slight things to wake you up if you were getting a bit bored. And the presentation and handling of certain major moments in the story is incredible. I can't imagine going back at this point. Does the game lack The Answer? For the time being, though it sounds like it's all but confirmed to be coming at some point. If you've already played Persona 3 in the past and feel that $70 is a bit too steep an asking price, then that's fair. But if you've never experienced this game before in your life, you could certainly use $70 for worse things.

Even after all these years, this game still captures the very essence of why Persona ultimately got so popular. It's a bit slow to start, but once the ball gets rolling, it rolls.

I'm not gonna leave a negative review over a publisher's greedy business practices. They're not going to see any of this. The complaints are valid, but all anyone is doing is lowering the reputation of what it set to be one of the best games in the entire series. This game is going to be amazing, I can already tell. To those of you who want the DLC, look up "pointfeev" and click the first result on github. The rest is up to you.

Angel Rain is such a good song it's a shame most levels don't last long enough for it to start banging.