Recent reviews by Issa

It's just a bizarre sandbox where you can just mess around with. The wide variety of community assets for it also adds to the experience. And you don't even need to know what you're doing to enjoy it. There really isn't much to add more to it other than it's fun.

RPG Maker VX Ace Lite gives a good perspective on what to expect on the series of RPG Makers, specifically for RPG Maker VX Ace. While there are limits (especially the 10 events per map thing), so you cannot make anything vast and extensive, it's something worth trying out if you do plan to buy one of the engines eventually and see if you like it enough or not without spending a high amount of money at first.

Despite being the third game in the series, Last Heroes 3 lacks polish and has several novice mistakes. I didn't come in this game expecting a masterpiece whatsoever, but honestly, it was worse than I expected.

• It was nothing memorable except that finishing this game really just felt like a chore. There is even a point where. bosses run out of MP. Once that happens, the game becomes an enter button-mashing fest (because the last four bosses including the final boss don't attack anymore if they run out).
  
• Battles are mostly either Amelia attacking all the enemies while the others can target only one (or two/three random enemies in the case of Darwin, and thankfully they all do eventually get skills at attack all enemies) and in some cases, Clair using the heck out of Recover, or mass attacking and mass healing, while Roland is Weapon, Armor, and Spirit Cursing, making the boss' stats a joke while exhausting their MP.
  
• Some events don't even occur even if you reach the area of the event itself (includes the final dungeon), which can be fixed with an event copy and paste in the game's engine, RPG Maker VX.
  
• Enemies can corner you tightly and at some cases, makes running away impossible even if you did so in-battle. The enemy sprites are still even trying to approach and attack you during major cut scenes, another sign of a lack of polish.
  
• The environments feel generic and feel like they're pretty much identical, except with different tile sets, the dungeons just feel like they've been made by the random generator, and the story and characters were bland, with the former also being pointless because Amelia's mother wasn't even in the continent.. It was mostly going to point A to point B with not much interesting with characters who have uninteresting dialogue. The story is literally just doing random quests just to know the prison's location, and then one of the quest givers becomes a villain just comes in the end because... he wanted them to die while doing the quests?
  
• However, the music was nice (even if there was quite a bit of reusing which while makes it repetitive, I don't really mind), and at least it was a decent time waster when I needed a break, but those don't really mend a bit of this game's fatal flaws.

I know that this game is a budget title, so quality like this might be expected. I wouldn't care much about the bland world if at least felt a bit fun and polished, which it wasn't. With all the flaws piling up, even with the game's price dropping so low during a sale (bought it during the Autumn 2017 Sale), I still can't recommend it.

RPG Maker can really make something worthwhile if a lot of heart is put into it, but this just feels very lazy and rushed.

Just going to start off with this because it only being released in Japanese might set some people off from the game, there should be guides around the internet to make your playing experience more enjoyable, and also an English patch.

I'm also going to say that this probably not the best review to go off from because this is from the perspective from someone who, while plays the game quite often, hasn't mastered or even beat it yet. I am not a Touhou fanatic in any shape or form, but I do love the gameplay. What I mostly played is EoSD, a bit of LoLK (of course I reset over 100 times in Pointdevice Mode…), and this. I am also quite a newcomer to the franchise, only really starting to play this year. This is also the first real review I've ever done, so that keep that in mind.

While my current time tracked on Steam is rather... low, I actually started playing this game ever since the game got posted online (of course I was a pirate too), so my time in this game is probably past eight to ten hours or so. I even played this game in the computer lab during school hours with my now broken USB, and well, the ICT teacher didn't care much. This is also the first Touhou game I was really hooked into, my first one was EoSD, but HSiFS was the one that made me love the franchise even more.

But back to the main point, Hidden Star in Four Seasons is the 16th (technically not really the 16th due to the other games that are numbered in-between) official Touhou game, and the first one to be put on Steam. While I'd talk about the series here, I'm not a Touhou historian and there are a million other people who can explain it better than be in the internet. But by the screenshots, it's a game where you dodge bullets while shooting your enemies. There are four difficulties, but I usually stay in the lower half because I'm not the best player in this.

There are four characters, each representing a different season. Their type and range of attacks and speed are different per character, and while it can be fun to use different characters, I personally like using Marisa (representing Winter) the most due to her speed. There are also sub-seasons, which also represent the four seasons (obviously), and can be used to complement a season's strength or add a bit more variety into your play, all with different sub-shots that in a way, represent the respective character for that season's abilities.

If you feel like you're close to being absolutely cornered, you can use a bomb, but you will lose your bonus during a boss' spell card. You can also press C to release the season you collected, effects of course, depending on the sub-season chosen. This will also remove a varying amount of bullets from the screen.

There are four different difficulties, and in my opinion, while some people may think otherwise, choose the one that you are most comfortable with at first. While frustrating at first, once you start getting the hang of it, it's a lot of fun and well, addicting. Sometimes you may end up realizing that you spent more time than you thought playing the game. There are many enemies with different patterns and tricks up their sleeve, and being able to overcome them also, well, brings that good feeling of success.

While sure, not everyone is really a person who wants to try again and again to win, and to be honest, even I am a sore loser. But playing again and again (I'm not really a person to use continues, bombs, or season releases because I guess my mind is just not used to doing so.) and being able to succeed is just so satisfying. I'm more of a person who plays Touhou on and off, so I'm not really a person who plays in the higher difficulties, but I still get that good feeling even in the smallest successes in the game.

And while the character art can be... off putting to some, I personally don't really have a problem with it, and in fact, I kind of like it. The real art here anyway is the art of bullets, and still as gorgeous as ever from what I've seen throughout the series. The music is a charm to listen to, and it really adds more to the fight itself in my opinion, and is really a part what made me love the game even if I really suck at it. Sometimes it just doesn't feel the same at all without hearing the music while playing in the school's computer lab.

To be honest, aside from the frustration of losing and losing and losing all over again, there's nothing I really even dislike about HSiFS. Maybe it's different for those who played more games in the franchise, but coming from someone like me who doesn't play that often, I don't really have anything negative to say about it. Apparently there are bugs left over from the original release, but I have yet to encounter them myself.

Major props to ZUN for the everything, really shows he did so much for the franchise and still is, despite it being since what, the mid-1990's since he started working on Touhou. Many people had to pirate Touhou in the past, and with the public's reaction to HSiFS' Steam release now, hopefully in the future we continue to get more Touhou titles via Steam (maybe even some titles of the past too) in the future, maybe with even more Steam-related features.

So in a nutshell: Hard, yet fun, addicting with great music, will suck away so many hours of your life without even realizing it, but will feel so satisfying to get the hang of it. I definitely recommend you to get it, and while this might not be a game for everyone, it could be one for you… especially when the addiction gets to you. Seriously. Only not recommended for those who aren’t really into it or can’t handle the sheer difficulty.