Recent reviews by Ammokkx

I come to write this after getting the true ending and ruminating on my exact thoughts about this game. And they ain't very good, lemme tell you.

That's not to say Crystar has nothing good about it, though. There's things that can and will draw people like me into wanting to try out the game: The voice acting is good both in JP and EN, the character art is lovely, the setting for the story is interesting enough to want to play through it all, and... well, that's about as much as I can give you up-front on the good aspects.

I'll give you the biggest problem, though not the only problem, straight away: The gameplay. It's the gameplay. Tons of reviews mention it for a reason, and I'm damn well going to double down on it myself. The issue mainly stems from how overly stiff it is: The game is a hack n'd slash where you're meant to fight hordes of enemies and mow them down as you advance through a series of stages each with a few "floors" to them. The only issue with that being, the enemies themselves have very little variety (There is about 10 enemy types in the game, total, if that) and when you land an attack on them it often feels like said attack isn't doing much of anything. Sure, you can stunlock most enemies into submission, but every hit you land feels like you're smacking air more than the object in front of you. The animations are very rigid and have no fluidity to them. Once you press a button you're animation locked until the attack finishes through all the way; which isn't bad inherently per-say, but couple that with how bad they actually look and you've got a recipe for "This feels unrewarding and unengaging."

And the issues don't even stop with just the combat in a vacuum, as it's bad on a macro-scale too. The game is packed with far too many enemies, close to a hundred every single floor, and they all only have one, MAYBE two attacks at most. They barely even group up so you can hit them all at once, they're scattered in their own individual corner every room. It makes cutting through them a chore and the sheer amount you'll be facing makes you want to turn the difficulty down and start running past everything, since the game isn't giving you enough incentive to fight everything. The only enemies that are worth fighting are the very clearly marked ones that drop items you can purify to upgrade your gear with, and even THEY stop being worth it after a certain point where the items dropping are barely any better than what you already were working with!

And if all THAT wasn't bad enough, the level design itself is just completely atrocious. Every zone in the game is just a retexture of the same basic floating island idea as the very first level in the game, at best looking like a color swap and at worst virtually indistinguishable from an earlier stage. If they weren't visually bland enough on their own, each stage is just a set of branching hallways leading to a ton of dead ends which contain nothing useful. They just lead to another gank squad of enemies most of the time, and it's not even hard to figure out where you're going as you can just keep the full map open at any time and roughly guess where you have to go to get to the highlighted exit point that's always visible. The hallways themselves also feel like they're randomly generated, and in a sense I'd have preferred they were, because instead every level has a set map. This means someone designed what feels like a persona 4 randomly generated dungeon crawling with enemies, by hand, deliberately.

And all of this being awful just sucks, really! Because if the game wasn't a complete slog to play through, there'd be things to like. The characters can start off being VERY generic and tripe, and some of their individual plots feel incredibly derivative at times, but if you stick with it and watch them develop they actually become a really loveable core cast of characters. It's easy to get invested in their stories past a certain point and really feel for their motivations and personalities, even if you need to chug down the bitter "these are walking anime tropes a lot of the time" pill. The setting is genuinely really cool even if they fluffed its execution, and the best character in the game is mr. "WAGA ARUJI" himself: Heraclitus. He's your 'guardian', basically a Stand, which the main character uses to fight. He doesn't talk a whole lot throughout the game, but during certain key plot beats he comes in clutch and single-handedly can make one go "Hell yeah, this character RULES."

This game has a lot of potential to be better than it is. I can only praise the characters up to a certain point, even, because the overall plot ends up falling apart pretty badly by the end game due to how shallow the final villains actually end up being, and the plot devices you've been collecting through the whole game are explained pretty terribly. I *cannot* reccommend this, even at a discounted price. At best you'd want to experience this game's story reading about it online or looking up a playthrough, as it's just far too miserable to play through on your own.

This game is very, very short. It took me only 7,5 hours of playtime on the hardest setting to 100% complete it, and that's counting about 1 hour of complete messing about in the first hour.

If length is not an issue for you, however, ICEY is definitely a game worth checking out. It has satisfying 2D combat, looks good and has an excellent story for you to explore. The only problem you might experience is that the bosses may end up being a bit of trial-and-error. Telegraphs aren't always clear and sometimes the boss can and will stunlock you for half your health in one go, only to get immediately hit when getting up and die on the spot, as well as the dodge being inconsistent. They all have a unique identity and playstyle, though, and look really good across the board.

The game's worth playing, even despite its short length and 50/50 boss design. I can't say its one of my favorites ever made, but it's definitely one of the better ones and just a good game outright.

An incredibly fun game if it works, but the constant crashing makes it really hard to recommend. Only purchase if you're up for trying a fight 3 times because the game locks up at the final blow.