Recent reviews by Cordy

A great remake in everything but combat.

Good:
- Story is just as amazing, new endings are great, and the additions to angela and maria's characters were great
- Map design is really cool, the puzzles inside are also great
- Effectively lengthened a 4-ish hour game into a 12-ish hour one without feeling artificially stretched
- Every boss fight is better in someway, especially the final boss.

Bad:
- Combat is really bad, not to say its worse than the original but its still pretty bad. Enemy health pools are ridiculous
- On top of huge health pools, they throw alot of enemies at you and unlike classic survival horror games, its really hard to ignore a lot of them to conserve resources, which forces you to engage in the awful melee combat.
- The labyrinth was extended too much and felt so forced to be "scary" that it just feels like a bad Bloober game
- Stealth section at the end of the hotel was also terrible, it was already a bad section in the og and it feels bad here too.
- I like the remade soundtrack, but certain songs like Fermata in Mistic Air and Blank/Black Fairy were just thrown in where they were in the original, like just the og track playing and it sounds really out of place
- The Otherworld Hotel lost alot of the "drowned / water" aesthetic to it that really honed in on what James's Otherworld is, and I dont understand why because the other locations definitely leaned more into that water aesthetic, especially the Otherworld town

All in all a 9/10, a great game narratively and from a puzzle standpoint, terrible combat. Just like the original

a good, not great modern survival horror game.

the entire outdoor section of the game is just. really bland, and the game is definitely at its best during the indoor sections.
this is mostly because the enemies are not nearly aggressive enough to make fighting them ever worth it in the open outdoor sections, which on paper isn't bad (silent hill's city sections for example didnt exactly make you fight either) but considering i would say a good 30-40% of the game is spent outside definitely makes it a little bit of a disappointment.

speaking of enemies, i feel like the enemies are creepy but thats kind of it, and combat is very much just "shoot the monster until it dies" and because the only boss fight is at the end of the game, and is more of a puzzle / chase sequence where ammo doesn't matter it just doesn't make the resource conservation aspect of survival horror exactly shine through

the story is... good? its not really explained very well especially the finale but not in an artsy way like how signalis is, moreso in a just a rushed ending kind of way. there are little hints as to whats going on in the dialogue from the stranger, but overall it just feels half-baked.

mica is a great protagonist, i wish they leaned a little bit more into her funny / snarky side because there are a couple interactions with the environment that show she has that side to her.

however the world-building imo is the best part of the game, especially through the use of the radio letting you hear echoes of the people that lived in the city you're exploring.

tl;dr: its good, not great. a solid 6/10 for me personally, and while it may not be my favorite of the modern indie survival horror games, it certainly isn't bad and i think supporting indie devs who are keeping this genre alive while AAA devs modernize it to fit wider audiences is always going to be important, and for the price point the game is absolutely worth it.

is it the scariest survival horror game i've ever played? not really, but the atmosphere is top notch.
story can be a little confusing / vague but overall is very good, especially because of how fantastic mara is as a protagonist, and how great her cast of supporting characters is too.
puzzles are top notch, they're challenging but nothing crazy difficult like other modern survival horror games like to make them (love alisa and tormented souls to death but some of those puzzles were psychotic)
ost is god tier

overall pls support this game if you love retro survival horror everything about it is just so enjoyable

took the best persona game and made it even better by removing literally all the obnoxious jank, letting the protagonist spend time with the male party members in meaningful ways, removing forced harem route


edit: 35$ "expansion" pass aka 1 story dlc (that was cut last second to be dlc bc greed) and boring costume / ost replacements, refusal to add femc despite consistent fan support for it, and worst of all the "expansion" pass doesnt come for free for ppl that bought the expensive upgraded versions of a 70$ game, including ppl that bought the 200$ version

just nasty practices and you should 100% find "other" ways to access the game online instead of giving atlus / sega your money

maybe one of the best written games ive ever played (barring the final act) but you *really* need to download the vtmb unofficial patch and be willing to use god mode at times (especially towards the end where there is a massive difficulty spike)

its like if borderlands was a good series still

it's fine
its pretty, music is good, story is mostly good until the like final act which is just.... underdeveloped and weird
characters are all likable, and are well written, their dialogue also is well written and voiced which is always great
combat is fluid, i can't fully comment bc i played rinwell for a good 90% of the game, but from what i played of dohalim the melee combat felt nice, but i love playing casters and this is the most fun game for that since vesperia for me personally
they made the correct choice in having dungeons not be super long, bc zesteria and berseria's dungeons were god awful, but the final dungeon in this game just sucks BAD, and recycles a bunch of non-important bosses as normal battles. which for a jrpg in the 90s or even early 2000s thats fine, but as a triple a 60$ game i cannot stand by that choice at all lol.

countering the incel review bombing
very in depth fun fighting game that i suck at but apparently removing panty shots of 16 year old girls and references to nazis is a bad thing to neckbearded pedo incels lol

its not bad by any means, but no ada + wesker, only 3 maps, no real unlockables from the gamemode (unless im mistaken) its just all in all not spectacular but a very fun minigame regardless especially because its free

took everything great about the original, and fixed all the awful segments and modernized them very wellwait till denuvo is gone though if that matters to you it definitely does affect performance