Recent reviews by Kylano

I'm just here to simp for Boss idk why everyone's talking about some serial killer or something

I couldn't be more mixed about this game. What it tries to do, it does incredibly, but along the way it has a lot of frustrating design flaws.

To start with what's good:
1. The environment design. Every place you explore is gorgeous in a unique way and full of character. You've got cold and metallic planets, bustling market planets, calm farming planets, etc. And getting between them has you travelling on rivers so beautiful and serene that I usually choose to sail instead of using the quick travel.
2. They do a great job of making everything feel ancient and mysterious. Even the run-down slums feel like they hold secrets just lost to time. Why is there a teleporter that speaks an ancient language? Who knows, all people know is that it works if you say some words that you have no idea the meaning of.
3. The language puzzles are also really fun. You could brute-force it all, but it gets interesting once you start paying attention to the meanings of each glyph and how they're combined. All of a sudden this long line of simple glyphs work together to create complex ideas that all make sense.
4. The branching narrative looks very carefully planned out. I accidentally deleted my save and went through trying to make all the same decisions, but it started going a completely different way from small choices. I haven't played anywhere near enough to see just how branching it is, but, as far as I can tell, it does a great job.

Now, for the flaws:
1. For one, for a game about exploring every corner of the places you find, you move painfully slow. I spend a third of the game wondering why there's no run button.
2. While it is interactive fiction, the consequences sometimes make 0 sense or seem artificially forced. Prime example is that, once you leave most planets, you can never come back. Ever. Did you go to that planet before you had the tools or knowledge you needed to explore it? Too bad, you're never going to be able to fully explore it, I guess. It had this secret that was begging to be found but you'll have to finish the story never knowing what was there. And almost none of the have a lore reason why you can't go back.
3. For as calming as it is sailing the rivers, the navigation is.... beyond clunky. For one, there's no minimap, so you keep having to check the map to see which way you need to go. But that's pretty minor compared to the main issue. For a game that lets you explore all these uncharted rivers, you have to fight the game to explore them. You can't start sailing without choosing a destination first, and oftentimes the only available destinations are very far from where you want to explore. Want to explore those routes in the Withering Ways? Too bad, you can only select Iox as your destination, have fun finding your way to the Withering Ways while we keep telling you you missed the turn-off to Iox. I feel like this could've been avoided if you could set custom waypoints, but you can't for whatever reason.
4. The dialogue system can be a bit annoying. For one, most of the dialogue bits take a while to play out, and they can't be hurried. Second, while you're talking, you can't interact with anything or even see what's interactable. Which means that if you spend the dialogue time exploring, you're going to miss a lot of stuff.... for no reason. Third, you trigger dialogue with the same buttons you use to make decisions.... and these sometimes pop up at the same time, meaning you could want to trigger some dialogue and instead you make some stupid decision that you can't reverse. And given how long this game is, that means you're going to have to live with that decision for the next 20 hours of the game...

Welcome to Dead or Alive 5, where none of your combos are true, you have to know your opponent better than your fast food order, and its useless to get on your hands and knees to beg Team Ninja for a good PC port, a good sequel, or the chance to even buy the Mai Shiranui DLC. It's unfortunately incredibly fun...

I desperately need Ángel to use her super on me

the rollbackussy has returned to bless another arcsys game

Made me aware of how much more sex my ancestors had than me

Is the online as good as dead? Yeah. But god it's such fun to play. Gameplay-wise, it plays like a mix of King of Fighters and anime air-dashers like Guilty Gear/BlazBlue, while also adding some of its own mechanics.

It uses King of Fighters' 4 button model, with light and heavy punches and kicks and it uses their general combo structure. It then spices that up with airdasher-esque canceling, like dash cancels and jump cancels. It also borrows double-jumps and air-dashes from the air-dasher genre, making the movement nice and mobile. The characters also feel very unique in a way that I've only found in Guilty Gear or BlazBlue. Characters are given abilities that make them fundamentally different from all other fighters, rather than different only by minute differences in frame data or hitboxes.

It then tosses in its own mechanics, that being the character skill customizations. In addition to your standard moveset, you are allowed to choose 2 of 4 additional moves and to choose between either having a run or a hop as your "double-tap forward". I suppose you could draw parallels to the V-Skill in SFV, but the selectable moves in Chaos Code feel far more integral to the characters' playstyles.

Overall, very fun. Worth every penny, and, if you wait for a sale, you can find it absurdly cheap. If you can get some friends to play with, all the better.

It's dumb fun, but great dumb fun at that. It's also unironically a really enjoyable superpower simulator if you wanna feel like a god for a few hours a day. The upgrade tree often feels very rewarding.

Only downside is that the difficulty feels a bit lacking sometimes, even on the hardest setting. Once you know how each enemy type works, you can usually take them down without much of a struggle. Melee combat is also pretty lackluster, as most enemies die in one or two punches, even without upgrades.

enlightened me on the struggles of having a huge ♥♥♥♥

I want to like it, but god this is one of the buggiest messes I've seen. My computer runs perfectly fine playing games made years after this one, even with browsers open, but this game has issues even when its the only program running. Biggest of all is the random lag spikes, which can last several minutes. I'm talking 1-2 FPS, and controls that respond 3 seconds after I input them. And then there's frequent crashes. Every time I finish a mission, which can take 15 minutes, I have to pray that it doesn't crash. And, if it does, I'm screwed, because the last save goes to before the start of the mission, even if I saved in the middle of the mission. So I guess you can also chalk missing saves up to the bug tally.

Also quite a few miscellaneous bugs, like mission targets not spawning, which makes you have to restart it and hope it works properly next time.

I'll probably play it anyways, but god it makes playing it so frustrating.

EDIT: After 24 hours more play, I can say that the bugs only get worse. I'm talking game-breaking bugs, coupled with very questionable mission designs. There are missions I've had to play 30 (not an exaggeration) times over because a bug or AI interference at any of the 10 steps had me restart from the very beginning. Which brings me to the atrociously-designed AIs for both allies and enemies. Allies get in the way more times than not, and make you wonder what price you're willing to pay for a few extra bullets working for you. Enemies are inconsistently competent. Sometimes you can walk up to one that's aggressive to you and they can't see you, sometimes they have nigh aimbot accuracy with SMGs. AIs for neutrals often ♥♥♥♥ you over for no reason. There's so many times in chase missions where civilians would, without provocation, swerve into my lane from across the street and ram me as if they're targeting me, outright ending the mission or making it almost impossible to complete it. There's so many missions I've had to restart because cars would pile up outside the only door to a building, preventing me from progressing. In missions where I shoot while an NPC drives, I have to pray he follows the right path. I've failed missions almost a dozen times because the NPC would drive the opposite way as the target so I never even had a chance to shoot the target down, Genuinely the most god-awful and frustrating open-world game I've played. Everyone talks about the remaster of the third being the downfall of the series, but I can't imagine anything being worse than this. Even more disappointing considering how big of an expectation I was given for it.