Recent reviews by Happy

I very much bought the game on another platform and just had the demo up at the same time to farm an equal amount of hours, that is very much what I did.

Refantazio is the closest ATLUS has been to bringing a persona like game to be more in line with an SMT game, in all the right ways. I will be bringing up slight spoilers so be aware.

It took 80 hours and one single playthrough for me to manage to pretty much 100% the entire game (only missing the culinary quest line and maybe doing all the party members archetype tree to 100% outside of just the MC.
Its very easy for me to say that i think Refantazio is one of ATLUS best games ever developed, and while I dont usually like ranking games I would most definitely put it as my personal favourite.

From the story being captivating the whole way through, with it being an extreme social commentary on systematic racism in society, social gaps, class differences and the fundamental societal gaps due to belief structures, ot making every single bond character and major character wildly interesting, sparking the question of whether you the player is right in your quest for the throne, ATLUS has managed to sew together their most compelling world yet when they can break off from the demons of SMT and the school life of persona games.

Your party of characters are diverse and likable, they have their own quirks that dont overpower their character in important story moments. Strohl, who is for all intents and purposes the stand in for the MCs best friend in the party, is an intelligent and kind young man, he takes charge when needed and usually has a plan for most of the situations the party ends up with, and he STAYS this way throughout the game, he has the quirk of getting movement sickness which is not a good thing seeing as alot of the traversal in the game is done on the landrunner.

Hulkenberg, one of the other party members is a strong and proud royal knight, she stands by her oath as a knight and always upholds it throughout the game, her one quirk is being a foodie, she devours food of every culture constantly throughout the game and loves every single bit of it, but it has never been over used and or used in a bad framing in the story.

Every bond tells a fantastic story that always brings up societal issues in a fantastic way, from empoverished slums to slavery and bereavement, from isolationist cultures due to societal friction to fanaticism, there isnt a wasted story.
This all is further enhanced by ATLUS deciding to cut the bonds/social links from 10 stages to 8, cutting down on the levels that felt more like fluff than anything.

They also decided to cut romance entirely from the game, which further helps with enhancing the story, ATLUS has in the past written great social links for their characters, but if you chose to romance that character their social link changes drastically in the end, nearly shoving the story of the link to the wayside so that you can see the MC hug the girl you chose for a split second, while the real social link when you friendzone the girl almost always is 10x better. Refantazio DOES have romantic moments in their story, 2 or 3 of the characters in the game pretty often get flustered when the MC says certain things and one pretty blatantly has you promising yourself into marriage to them, but its not shoved down your throat and fits into the story of the game and the story of the bond itself so well that it doesnt feel out of place at all.

The main antagonist of the game, Louis, might be ATLUS best written antagonist yet, throwing maruki down to second place. Louis has everything down to perfection, from a fantastic design to high charisma, to a fantastic voice casting with Joseph Tweedale. He has motivations that match your own, he makes you think for a second, drawing your gaze away from the fact that the way he is looks at the motivations are in a polar opposite direction, with skewed morality. There wasnt a single moment where Louis didnt steal the scene, where him talking didnt silence the rest of the cast, where he faltered, questioned himself or anything of the sort, and thats what made him a masterclass of an antagonist.

Gameplay wise the archetype system is great, its far less diverse than the persona system of demons, where there are hundreds of personas, but like 70% of them are unusable fusion fodder meant to fuse into stronger ones through the game.
Archetypes are a part of every party member in the game, and you can change the archetypes of every character in your party, I myself decided to stay in the same tree most of the time for my party, and made the MC himself more flexible.
So for Hulkenberg she followed the archetype tree of the knight, taking hits for the team and drawing aggression, I never really switched her off this path, for Strohl I kept him on the warrior path as the main damage dealer for physical weakness for 80% of the game (until you get your last party member who is just downright unfairly broken when slightly well built) And for 90% of the game, until a certain point I ran the MC as the mage archetype, dumping all my stats into the magic stat to be the main elemental damage dealer until you got any other magic user on your team.

spoilers for the late game archetype system that also contains pretty large story spoilers at around the end of the game, the last month or so, you gain access to the MC's pinnacle archetype, the prince, which in turn unlocks the royal classes for all the party members in the game as long as you have maxed their bonds out fully, these royal archetypes only fit on those party members but are broken beyond belief, the prince has a passive that makes him resist all damage, so he can never be hit for weakness outside of the slight chances that the enemy manages to crit you. another royal archetype on the party member that has a high chance to dodge gains the passive where whenever that character dodges an attack, all of the enemys turn icons are used up instantly, so on bosses that gain 8 attacks a turn, if that party member dodges the first attack, the other 7 actions will be skipped, which is utterly broken and balanced accordingly due to the investment you need to actually unlock their royal archetype

There is far more I could speak about the game, the overhauls of the turn based system, giving us front and back formations, action points showing us how many actions we can do in a single turn, the difficulty not being piss easy like the persona games but being just under the difficulty of an SMT title to where you get washed out by random enemies but dont contemplate ending it all on a tutorial boss.

Ignoring the abyssmal day 1 server issues, which were kind of to be expected seeing as on steam alone there were 280k players at the peak of what i saw, not accounting for however many were on other platforms unaccounted for.

The final shape is an incredible (so far) finale for the first "saga" of destiny, the character interactions and voice acting were all on point (Keith David did a phenomenal job with Zavala, making sure to actually do a Zavala voice and not an impression of Lance Reddick) and not a single character feels "wasted" being there and talking. The post campaign content has felt more overwhelming than even forsaken, with us most likely not even having unlocked every single piece of content available until after the campaign finale coming after the raid.

Prismatic doesnt feel hamfisted into your mouth as a big story point, at most its used as a way to just say that us, the guardian has become too powerful for the witness to overlook, and as for the gameplay of it, it has been a blast.

All in all i would say that the bulk of this expansion, which isnt even finished yet, has blown me away far more than the witch queen (except for the Savathun supplicant cutscene) and far and away better than anything that forsaken had to offer story and location wise.

Yeah

One of the best shooter campaign storiesi have ever played with an excellent story and extremely well crafted levels for each mission, there are literally 0 complaints with the witch queen from me, they nailed every single piece of this expansion.

I want to prefice this by saying that Destiny 2 has brought me a majority of my favourite moments in gaming, and words would not do justice as to how much I adore the game.

However, as of writing this review Bungie has announced that they are laying off another 220 members of their own team to bring them more in with Sony, which contradicts their promise of being an independant subsidiary of SIE.
This however was kind of throwaway line, nobody in their right mind would think that Sony would shell out 3.7 billion for Bungie and let them keep their independence. But this kind of treatment would be understandable if it was during the year of lightfall, which was one of the arguably worst periods for the company, and that round of layoffs only cut about 100 of the 1200 employees working at bungie. To fire another 220 employees after your biggest and most successfull expansion is an abbhorent move of corporate mismanagement, especially when the CEO Pete Parsons is seemingly getting away unscathed for the majority of the time of his management, which thankfully ( or unthankfully depending on how good he is) has a new upper management headed by Hermen Hulst, who is also the current co CEO of SIE.

The majority of the 220 employees were stated to be employees not directly involved with Destiny 2 itself, but several talents have come forward that worked on several seasons and or expansions did get laid off, these layoffs are scathing reminders of how in the red the company is after lightfall, but we do not see the executives or Pete Parsons doing the bare minimum of even slightly cutting their own overinflated salaries which are unearned to keep their talent.

Changing out the employees and talents of bungie 2 years straight will bring nothing but bad product when the team has worse chemistry now that a good 1/4th of the team that has worked on the game has just vanished. I would love for Sony and Bungie to prove me wrong, but that would still not excuse the blatant mismanagement and treatment of the employees, the industry is showing time and time again why unions in the space has to start happening.

This review is in no way a negative one concerning the actual employees and developers of the game, but more so pointed towards the higher ups.
I am hoping that whatever Hermen Hulst does, it reels in the horrible job that Pete Parson has done.

Is Destiny 2 one of my favourite games of all time? Yes
Would i recommend playing it and supporting a company that has shown nothing but blatant corporate mismanagement due to their CEO for years on end? No

Easily the best game I have ever played, its one of those games where I actually want to just forget about it and experience it all over again.

Developers ran off with the money while they could, glad i got the captain founders pack on ♥♥♥ for like 9 euro then instead of funding this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ company

I just don't find it fun tbh, and the prices for the dlcs are a joke.

Before any fan boy of this game comes here and says "ooooo you only have 60 hours in it so you couldn't have reached the fun parts, i myself have spent several thousands of hours into it and it is really fun" if a game takes over 1k hours to get to the fun stuff, it isn't a good game.

People who actually play this should consider taking a lethal dose of potassium cyanide before going to bed.

I could not do anything but recommend this game.

The story is amazing being a big jump from Shadow of Mordor

The graphics are amazing giving real immersion, though some kind of update glitched out some lighting with the undead Uruks making me nearly get seizures, this was something that kept me from the game for a long while until I decided to play it again and to my big surprise it was fixed.

The nemesis system was also a big jump up from Shadow of Mordor giving both new and old Uruk variants into the fray.
I myself had several interesting stories with these, seeing them grow through the ranks because my own stupidity, seeing them losing their minds either growing weak, being a shadow of their former selves, or seeing them grow further beyond their old selves making me regret my decision of ever shaming them. The only question I have is, later into the game I never got these interesing stories as much, it was mainly during the first hours in the starting area all the way through the middle of the game that I got these, then poof, if I killed an Uruk it was gone, they never returned, which made the game quite bland during the later parts, though those rare moments when one of those Uruks you found interesting returned was something to remember.¨

I have seen several people complaining about the idea of a lootbox system in a single player game, and I just feel that it isn't something you should bother with if you really don't like it, no one is forcing you, I never bought them and still got the enjoyment that everyone else has gotten, with or without lootboxes, you could just spend the ingame free currency for lootboxes, completly free instead of buying the real expensive ones.

After writing this I have just remembered the news of the removal of lootboxes, so the above argument, while still in my mind valid, is pretty much useless right about now, and since i spent alot of time writing that, i'm not removing it.

Summing it up, it is, in my mind one of the better games out there, not perfect, but I myself can say that I spent my money wisely