Análises recentes de Ark Tolei

I've been following this project for many years, and it has gotten continuously better with time. The Last Sovereign is probably the best RPG I've ever played, with meaningful decision making, and well thought out construction of the consequences of those decisions.

The game begins at a small scale, with your decisions mostly impacting your immediate surroundings, and grows in scale to encompass decisions impacting entire civilizations. The creator has made an effort to design variable systems to track both the small and large scale consequences of your actions, which allows consequences to always feel like they belong. Random strangers will not walk up to you and say "wow, you sure killed X baddies with a pistol in that last mission, good job!", instead areas will shift over time as the political environment changes, and you will only occasionally run into NPC's who directly reference the specific details of singular decisions.

The result is one of the best narrative experiences in gaming. Some choices are objectively better than others, but often how good or bad a choice is will depend on the other choices you've made. As a random example, in certain scenarios playing defensively helps you if you're behind, but actively hurts you if you're already ahead, because it allows the opponent to regroup. You also generally have multiple objectives you're trying to accomplish, so in the most "decision heavy" sections, a good portion of what you're doing is prioritizing what objectives you're going to focus on.

The combat is also fairly difficult for large portions of the game. There's some degree of RNG to some fights, particularly some very early optional fights where status effects like blind are important, but not 100% reliable, and the specific details of how 5 enemies choose to target their attacks matters, but broadly RNG seems fairly minimal.

Since I've been fairly completionist in my approach to the game, it obviously gets easier as I have progressed further into the game, because the distance between my party and the "worst possible" party grows larger and larger.

There's a lot of sex in The Last Sovereign. It's built into the world and setting. It's built into the magic system. It's built into cultures. But unlike most games that feature a lot of sex, I don't think you need to be titillated by it to enjoy it.

You do need to have an open mind, obviously. If you can't appreciate the humor of a horny JRPG protagonist trying to figure out how to have sex with a plant monster the early game will be fairly difficult to comprehend. If the game seems like it's ridiculous to the point of parody at times, it's likely doing so deliberately.

The further you get into the game the less relevant the genre conventions that surround it become, however. I think TLS largely speaks for itself, and what it has to say is very interesting.

The first Class specific dialogue you encounter for a paladin in Icewind Dale 2 is likely to be them turning down a reward for helping someone. It's annoying, but it's good characterization.

The first class specific dialogue you encounter for a paladin in BG3 is lying to a stranger about helping them kill a monster. It's a slightly reworded variant on a default dialogue option, and has no functional difference.

The best way I can explain Baldur's gate 3's writing is that it is written in the style of Mass effect, if you removed all characterization from shepard themself. The protagonist navigates conversations as a vaguely incompetent amorphous blob, molding their personality from conversation to conversation as necessary to navigate the player to the next line for the actual characters to speak.

The combat is largely fine when it adheres to the rules of D&D, because the rules of D&D are fine. The other mechanics, like stealth, tend to fully break the game. Going into turn based combat mode is not treated as a global setting, it's character specific, so if you're stealthing around and someone other than your lead character is detected the game will not go into turn based mode, and you can observe in real time as the enemies fully ignore combat initiative to murder whoever they detected in real time. It's delightfully incoherent game design and I'm shocked it made it into the final product.

Most of my time played as of this writing was in the demo that was inaccurately flagged as early access 2 years ago, but the first hour or so of gameplay has demonstrated to me that in that time none of the fundamental problems that existed then have been addressed, and some new ones have been added.

If you're looking to role play, look elsewhere, there is naught for you here. If you want to prompt a cast of characters to monologue at a vacant void where a character should be, then maybe this is for you. I intend to at least attempt to finish this at some point, maybe using a warlock of a great old one to excuse the complete lack of characterization by having them just be possessed by a random entity with random motivations for each dialogue option chosen. We'll see.

This game pairs mechanics from metroidvanias and creature collectors in very interesting ways, and it does a far better job at both than it has any right to. As a pure metroidvania it benefits from tying the exploration abilities to creatures, because thorough exploration and collecting can get you access to new areas very rapidly, with quite a lot of postgame content being unlockable well before you actually reach the end of the game.

The levels of enemies are tied to map exploration when you first arrive in the room, so while there is some degree of "intended progression" attached to areas, and some areas have relatively high minimum levels, the level progression is likely to be reasonably smooth for most of your run, and you'll never enter a new area and find that the enemies are hopelessly weak because you missed a low level area 10 hours earlire.

The creatures have pretty robust skill trees, with quite a lot of differentiation. The combat system seems specifically designed to allow you to use synergies in ways that seem extremely overpowered, and mastering different combat styles feels quite fun.

I created a bird of doom that stacked basically every possible debuff in the game onto enemies in a single round, using a mixture of their skills, auras from their allies, and accessories. This was paired with abilities that reduce enemy damage dealt to my party for each debuff on them to take a party that seemed quite squishy, and make them remarkably sturdy.

Having the doom bird be the lynchpin of my combat strategy, that everything else revolved around, was not because the bird itself is that out of control. I found an aesthetic I liked early, and leaning hard into that aesthetic was extremely mechanically rewarding.

Overall the combat system, collection mechanics, and metroidvania elements worked together in an extremely satisfying way. Certainly the best creature collector game I've ever played, and one of the best turn based combat systems I've seen in general.

The concept behind this game is excellent. Think honey I shrunk the kids, but the kids have no idea how they ended up there. The gameplay is action survival, with a pretty solid combat system, a large variety in gear types, and a really fun base building dynamic.

The creatures are generally far cuter than they have any right to be, and I sometimes find myself going out of my way to avoid hurting the less dangerous bugs. This can cause problems when you need body parts from them, but hey, most people don't arbitrarily decide to not kill things in a survival crafting game.

Building bases on the ground is something I have no experience with, but finding the highest, most secure place you can, and then building up from there allows the creation of massive sky structures that can span the length of the yard if you get too many engineers in one game.

In terms of equipment, armor has 2 separate effects attached. The first is a per piece bonus that's usually a minor bonus to a stat like endurance, hp, block power, or hauling load. The second is a set bonus that only applies when all 3 pieces of the set are equipped. The set bonus tends to be a unique effect that can be quite powerful. Some examples would be hp regen or making certain arthropods that are usually hostile, no longer hostile.

Weapons also have interesting effects attached, but I do think that they're less interesting than armor because the base damage of the weapon is so important in combat. You're much less likely to use old low tier weapons for a special effect than you are to use old armor.

The game also allows you to customize your character in various ways using mutations, but I won't go into detail about that mechanic other than to say doing things in the game can unlock mutations that can help you do (generally related) things better. You can only have a limited number equipped at a time, but a mechanic was just released to allow you to increase the number available at one over the course of your playthrough.

When I first saw the game I was very hesitant to pick it up because these kinds of early release titles often have extremely slow patch cycles, and there wasn't that much content available at the time. When I did end up getting it I was surprised by how much more content was in the game, and in the time I've had the game there have been several major content releases that dramatically alter the map and add a ton of new everything (buildable structures, equipment, consumables, creatures, terrain types, etc.). There's a rather huge amount of content now, and I've been very pleased with it.