Recent reviews by bp

* Five?? different upgrade-purchasing currencies
* Lots and lots of physics glitches. Whether in buildings, under corpses or around tiny bugs, you can always get stuck
* Had to restart the game to fix the strategem menu several times
* Death feels often cheap and undeserved
* Invasive DRM in a PvE game
* Baffling balancing decisions that seem mostly based on selling the new weapons in the next warbond

The one thing this game does indubitably better than Deep Rock Galactic is that death in DRG is way too punishing for my taste. Respawning with full ammo, grenades, stims and health is almost a little too nice, but I'd rather have that than spectating your friends while you chain-die.

I don't regret the time I've spent playing this game, but if you need to read a review to figure out if you should play this game: don't.

This game grabbed me and didn't let go. I had to finish it in one sitting (luckily, it was short enough.) The visuals are great, the voice actor work is stunning, the mystery is good, and I almost didn't get stuck finding the last thing I needed to click on to cascade the plot to its conclusion. Some puzzles are a little annoying and there's maybe a plot hole or two but I recommend.

A really special game for a really rainy day. You should find space for it in your heart.

Momodora 4 sports what I consider at the moment the golden standard of difficulty curves. The game is engaging without never turning frustrating. The shortage of RPG-ey stat ups means enemy design relies on more than just numbers to ramp up the challenge, while still keeping the numbers in check for most playthroughs.

I want to like this game, but I can't. The setting is lovely. The mechanics are lovely. The exploration is lovely. The levels are lovely. The controls are lovely. The first ten hours are also lovely. Wonderful stuff, very well made, please let's have more of that.

Unfortunately, it's what in between that's rotten.

After the first six or so hours, the game starts slowing down until it feels like a glorified boss rush: really long boss fights, one right after the other, each boss getting harder much faster than you can improve as a player. Worse, they're not necessarily hard because they are HARD, they are hard because every boss has eleventy bajillion hitpoints, and each subsequent boss has that much more. The difficulty curve seems to be out of control.

This is not the kind of hard that is fun -- not for me, anyway. Fun hard is nailing a really hard 10 second long level in Super Meat Boy. Tough as nails, but it's 10 seconds. "Can you execute flawlessly for even just 10 seconds? How hard can it be?", SMB taunts you. Fifty tries later, you finally deliver.

Rabi Ribi is more like "final boss on hard is 15 minutes long," quoting another commenter who no doubt knows everything about reverse wall jump ground smashed zero range double charged rainbow attacks of doom. Fifty times ten seconds later, you're probably still in your second try.

So each boss takes a bunch of tries to nail, and maybe you didn't work twelve hours today and you have the mental fortitude to go do just that. But as you go through this necessary learning process, the game grows increasingly desperate with you. "Go buy items," it suggests. "Use your invincibility orbs," it begs. "Oh my god please forgive me and take those free buffs," it cries, knowing full well what it has done.

In a way, it reminds me favourably of One Way Heroics, which also tried to cheer you on and give you helpful advice after every run, while celebrating every single thing you did right. On the other hand, it also misses the point spectacularly.

I don't know about you, but to me, personally, a fifteen minute endurance test is not fun. You can accept the buffs on your third death in a row, but that's not fun. You can drop to the lowest difficulty level, but that's not fun. You can backtrack to buy health recovery items and some timed buffs before every boss fight, but that's not fun. There are a few good spots to grind EN to afford all that, but that's not fun. It's just doesn't feel right, and it is just not fun.

You could give me a mode where I can one-shot all bosses, and guess what? It would just not be fun.

No amount of aids dispels the nagging feeling in the back of your head that there will be a time when you'll have taken all of those aids, and you still won't be able to make it, because the developer put one zero too many in a file somewhere, and that'll probably be it.

While I should be careful about what I wish for, I'd much rather be playing much harder bosses with one tenth or less of the health each.

Momodora 4 takes many of the same elements as Rabi Ribi does and makes a much better game out of them IMVHO - metroidvania explore-a-thon with lots of enemies and bullets and dodging and bosses and stamina bars et caetera. Maybe not as charmy and definitely a lot edgier. And yet, its difficulty curve worked out really well for me: I always felt challenged, but never overwhelmed. That game only has half the difficulty levels, and you don't get to have a lot of the optional hand holding Rabi Ribi desperately offers, and it might not have any Secret Techniques, but that's because you just don't need them.

That said, while I endeavour to still finish the game (and I reserve the right to change my mind as I go along), I must now prepare myself to face the least fun part of all: dealing with high and mighty people going all "git gut" on others. I wonder if Rabi Ribi will offer to delete this review for me?

_______

Some other reviewers made negative remarks about the cutscenes, but that's just factually incorrect. Hold Y to fast forward or hit Back to skip the entire scene; that's explained to you in the very first piece of tutorial, right after "hit A to jump".

Full screen or not, the first boss is unbeatable.

Watch the SwanOS perfects on YouTube instead.

Nepgear Goes To School: The Visual Novel.

Make sure you've played through Cherry Tree High Comedy Club first. This non-interactive piece picks up from that game's true ending.

If:

* You loved Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;birth 1
* You bought Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;birth 2 immediately afterwards, and loved that one too
* You failed to sign up for the Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;birth 3 closed beta by mere minutes
* You watched the first few episodes of the anime to make up for it, but you can't go any further because of spoilers
* You watched the full longplay of the PS3 Hyperdimension Neptunia game (and you were glad that you didn't play that version)
* You still want more of the same, and you want it now
* You are okay with the fact that every single time you activate HD--- I mean, "fairize," whatever encounter music is playing is replaced by the same cheesy engrish song
* You are okay with the stares oblique stares about becoming THAT kind of person who plays THAT kind of games
* You are okay with your favourite Steam tags cementing forever to "RPG", "Anime", "JRPG" and "Cute" (but not with "Female Lead")
* You hated hunting for hidden items in the Neptunia games, especially Re;birth 2
* You are okay with a somewhat more clunky interface
* You are okay with giving up on all the strategy involving guard points and hurtboxes
* You are okay with giving up on the HDD Drive meter carrying over between battles, so there's not really a reason not to rush straight for the end of each level
* You are okay with having to unlock each tier of combo attacks with a hard-to-come-by resource (you need 1,000 "weapon points" to unlock the fourth normal attacks in a turn; the final boss is worth 6 WP).
* You were annoyed by the forced losses in Rebirth 1 and instead prefer being yanked out of a perfectly winnable fight only to be treated to a cutscene where your party immediately gives up
* You are okay with bosses announcing their final super-special ultra awesome attack... only to see they usually do two-digit damage.

...then congratulations: Fairy Fencer F is more of the same stuff you liked, and you can stand its most glaring issues. I did, however, appreciate seeing chirprers being replaced by actual short cutscenes: the more character interaction the merrier.

All in all I really didn't care too much for the changes in actual gameplay and the way plans work in this game is somehow even more infuriating than Hyp-Dim-Nep-Reb (you can't see plans if you don't have any ingredients for it).

Here's a weak "no" from me.

Better than the original in basically every way (although the soundtrack is somewhat of a mixed bag; some of it is much better, some of it is... meh).

The game has had a few tweaks on launch from the previous web-based incarnation: the option to spawn with two weapons of your choice ("loadouts"), which means everybody is now using the rocket launcher all the time.

Also, weapon-specific ammo boxes have been replaced with generic ammo boxes that replenish everything, which means everybody gets to keep using the rocket launcher all the time.

So really we could call this Rocket Launcher Derpy Battles Live.

But that's not even what tilts me towards a No review. What does it for me is the fact that, in order to make their premium tiers more palatable, Bethesda has not only not added one single map to its free maps, it actually has REMOVED them.

Incomplete and possibly inaccurate list of maps that were made premium-only ($9/mo, $36/y): Almost Lost, Beyond Reality (!), Blood Run, Brimstone Abbey, Campgrounds (!!), Chemical Reaction (!), Longest Yard, Retribution (!!), Space Chamber (!), Vertical Vengeance (!).

And yet, and yet, there is so little like this that's being actually played out there. It's hard to say "No." I don't honestly know how many people are still playing Quake 3.

Ultimately, given that 86% have said "yes", I think that percentage is a little too high and visible right now, so that's a "no" from me.