Recent reviews by LostQuelana

I actually really like this. It's mostly as it advertises itself as a user friendly zero-skill necessary avatar creator. Includes way more free options than I expected. Feels like it also allows for higher customization if I was willing to put in the time to actually remodel or make new parts entirely. Overall pretty neat.

Yeah when I bought this, I actually didn't know they locked both difficulty select and new game+ behind a $20 paywall. I think if I had a better understanding of what I was buying I would've not purchased this as it's both anti-consumer and also not a game good enough to warrant looking past that. It's about of similar quality to Yakuza: Like A Dragon (mainline entry 7). I liked 7. I feel Infinite Wealth gets a lot of smaller things right, while the main story in 7 is more compelling. Here certain aspects of the game are improved such as performance, gameplay balance, quality of life tweaks to game flow, and substory writing. Flip side is that this game does character assassinate who Ichiban was in 7 in service of getting the ball rolling on a new plot. I'm still not really over that. Beyond that, the plot following that is mostly lackluster, and is in essence a fanservice Hawaiian beach episode with mostly flat and predictable dramatic moments. Of course, most playtime is actually spent on mini-games and substories, and to the game's credit, for the most part, they're fun. It's just that comparative to other Yakuza entries, what's on offer isn't any more special than substories in other games so it doesn't really make up for anything.

In writing this it feels like I'm completely glossing over the turn base combat, which would seem to be a core part of an rpg and this game in particular, but it's just not particularly engaging beyond spamming everyone's strongest single target or aoe moves. There are guard and guard breaks mechanics as well as elemental weakness and resistance mechanics, but they don't show up that often or meaningfully enough to make me switch party build or skills around. Base classes usually have tools necessary to work around stuff, so class changing is more for flavor. 7 was kind of the same way, but then I was playing it more for the story.

I will comment on two of the bigger substory lines I think may have been shown in media, which is Sujimon and Dondoko island. Sujimon is pokemon but with the game's enemy mobs and inch deep stat and mechanical depth. It's kinda boring once you understand it. Dondoko island is actually more fun and depthful than I initially thought it would be as it's basically a set of smaller minigames and systems within a separate island game mode. For better or worse, it's a casualized progression treadmill in the vein of animal crossing or some city builder. I think love went into it considering it's length, but I was often at odds with wanting to engage with island customization and just placing down whatever new unlocks I was getting that increased island satisfaction more than what I had a minute ago. By the time I beat the Dondoko storyline, I kinda felt like half my unlocks were preset buildings I didn't really care for. Smaller stuff was nice, but by the time I beat it and was free of my pseudo-obligatory need to go for the much larger satisfaction objects, I didn't have a reason to do anymore building. It's a weird feeling of "I think this could've been done better" to walk away with, since I never really got that from pocket racers or any of the cabaret mini-games ever.

Obviously this is an easy "don't buy" to anyone that didn't like 7 or the new turn based series direction. If you like the way this looks and haven't played 7, consider 7 or any of the other Yakuza games. To people that wanted more 7, this is technically more, but I'm leaning against saying this is a deserving improved sequel. I recommend saving your money and/ or finding a different game.

Edit after completing mostly everything in the base game and tripling my playtime from ~50 hours to ~150ish: I definitely left this game on overnight sometimes so I don't know what my actual playtime is, but it's probably still 120+ hours. I also spent a lot of that in the first two deep dungeons leveling the different classes for the whole cast, which I really didn't super benefit from other than raw levels. I'd still consider that playing the game. Anyway, I think I was mostly right about everything I wrote in my initial review here. I would like to emphasize further that the main story here is terrible. Most of the time your driving motivation is solving mystery intrigue that does not pay off. The main story has a buckshot approach with connecting smaller plot-lines and nothing has a strong showing because most things don't have screen-time to develop, and the things that do have little consequence. This feels like a fanservice entry a lot of the time, but if you consider the main story in isolation it seems uninspired, by the books and like it's scrambling for things to pad that story with. Final thoughts: forget this entry like RGG forgot how to write a plot and like how they'll also probably forget this game as a whole.

To keep this short, the 999 remaster is fantastic, and the VLR port is a subpar sequel but a passable game that you would also receive with buying The Nonary Games. I’m mixed on VLR and might even be wrong on being so critical of it as I did enjoy parts of it, but the padding and weaker characters drag the whole game down low enough that I’m even hesitant to say 999 fans should play it.

Setting aside ZLR for the moment, I'm mostly sure for most people this pc re-release is the ideal way to play 999. I do think there's significant value added with the voice acting, remastered 999 graphics (maximum possible 1080p versus the DS' 192 pixel resolution), and as small as it can sound, yes, the new addition of a route flow chart. I do want to address the DS release did make unique use of the DS' dual screens, but I can’t really imagine preserving that nuance on pc where most people only have one. In all my time playing there were only two times where I even thought there might be a difference in adaption, and I wasn’t really impacted by them. So, I acknowledge something small might be lost there. That said, again, I do enjoy the voice acting performance and the graphical overhaul so this would be my preferred way to play and my platform to recommend to others regardless.

I don’t have a ton of criticism to give regarding 999 because it gets so much right. To begin with it was already a well-constructed narrative with wonderful presentation and characters. With the benefits of the remaster, it’s monstrous. I can’t overstate how much better the game looks being brought up from DS graphics to 1080p. The store page doesn’t even mention this, but the musical tracks themselves have been remastered in terms of bitrate. If I reach, I can maybe say the failing is maybe the puzzle difficulty, which I generally enjoyed but seemed a bit scattered. Also, I think average all ending completion time might be 20 hours which might be short for the $30 price point if you just wanted to buy it for this alone.

Conversely, I'm a lot less positive on VLR after revisiting it. VLR does have more content and ideas floating around than 999. It's just that the nature of the narrative and the gameplay has you seeking out a bunch of different endings with route variations that don’t feel super satisfying to play through. The different endings mostly act as a carrot on a stick to continue replaying. The game ends up being not just padded out by extra game over routes, but also and mainly by swathes of unchanged dialogue and events shared between routes. There is a skip text feature I made gratuitous use of because there was so much I had seen already re-occurring between routes, but there's no option in the menus for “don’t skip unseen text.” Skipping around in this fashion didn’t feel like the right thing to do, even though I must assume this is the intended fix with its inclusion. I’m then unsure if this is fair criticism because these re-occurring events do allow the writing to setup character moments and seemingly integral plot beats, and narratively it makes sense why the same events often happen in different routes if plots are already in motion in the background. The thing is it repeats often enough it’s still aggravating to the point that it feels like a legitimate flaw and worth talking about.

This is a weird frustration to express. I mentioned weaker characters at the beginning of this. It hurts to say this as I wish the inanimate product VLR well, but it’s overwhelmingly true. People are caricatures for most of this game. Sensibly, you get a bit more insight as to who a person is supposed to be and what their motivations are at the end of their routes, but before that everyone might as well be a closely guarded blank face. Most don’t really get into character conflict or development outside of the structure of the main plot. This is just a weird thing to get wrong where in 999 they didn’t have hours between opening doors where they could just stand around and chat. Early on in VLR you might have some downtime moments before a new set of doors unlocks, but even that little bit soon gets traded out for completely on rails and automatic investigation sections where you’re often looking for other items of interest or other people to talk to over more matters of practicality. Outside of their end routes most only really talk casually as teammates in puzzle rooms, and that usually only totals a few lines not explicitly about the puzzle. To end me droning on, let me just say what little characterization that’s squeezed in the whole game just isn’t enough to get me to like seeing most of these characters for the playtime I’m expected to spend with them. I don’t need persona-esque dates, but seeing people act as people and try to hold any conversation about nothing in their life-or-death situation or something like that might go a long way to sell them as being alive in the first place.

While I don’t think I recommend VLR, I will commend it for being narratively interesting with a billion twists, even if it does so with a stilted roster. The twists do act as highs that reinvigorate interest, which when there’s enough of them even let someone let me want to finish the game. Going for the different endings hoping for interesting twists and conclusions was a bit like gambling, which was fun in a sense. Still not worth your time.

I would recommend this game to anyone looking for a good horror game. Considering this is the 2011 remaster, the only thing I would say is particularly dated are some of the graphics in regards to the 3d models and fmvs. The character models are still good for their time and even now the pre-rendered backgrounds are a beautiful selling point.

If the thought of fixed camera angles and tank controls puts you off, you can think of it as part of the fundamental challenge. I didn't even use tank, as there was a 2d fixed camera control scheme I used for the entirety of my playthrough that worked relatively well. Moreover, game had what I felt were extremely generous aim assist and hurtboxes for weapon spread. So for as infamously bad or janky this style of gameplay can be where in the sudden moments of combat you might presumably take cheap damage, it does its best to give you a reasonably winning chance. Also, once I had the shotgun most times I'd come out unscathed in those situations. Most of the core gameplay then comes down to strategy in exploration and resource management. Planning and running routes to carry necessary items around was fun. Then once I had a grasp of the area and wasn't doing blind exploration, routing just functioned as a form of stress relief, as puzzle solving tends to be.

That relief becomes sweeter in context when you factor in this game's best feature is its atmosphere. Again, the pre-rendered backgrounds are still gorgeous and the sound design matches its quality. Being a bad (or in an ironic sense great) B movie in video game form, I wouldn't describe the game as immersive but instead as a playable scary movie. It just wants to show you something well-crafted that is tonally scary. This has a few traditional jump scares, but it's the buildup and suspense the playable characters endure that even allows you to faithfully buy in to the idea of that's there is anything worth being fearful over. Later in the game when this scare-factor does wane as you actually start to feel unthreatened with your cleared hallways and powerful with your new resources and confidence in skill, the atmosphere itself is still deeply appreciable as flavor for running through the game.

I have no idea how to cap this off. I went in not sure if I actually was going to like it or not, and I ended up liking it. If it sounds like something that interests you, give it a shot because it definitely went past my expectations.

I would recommend this game. I do think the predecessor's story was a bit more tight and cohesive, but this game's plot juggles a lot more and finds its mark for 99% of it. That aside, characters here are so strong in both with characterization and voice acting that I'd recommend picking the game up just for that. Most characters are over the top in their own unique ways, but they're generally grounded in the world as they find it. Usually at any given time, especially given each protagonist has a partner they can talk to with their thoughts alone, someone is reacting and recognizing what someone said or how the situations they find themselves are, offering both narration and personalized insight. Between that nuance in writing and the full voice acting, everyone feels alive and like a real character and it just makes all of the story more fun. I know VNs are known for having strong writing and characterization, but I want to emphasize I think it's been executed extremely well here. I would also describe the puzzles and somniums as generally more pleasant and challenging, and the graphics and animations as improved over the original. This game is markedly more trippy in the new somniums, which I enjoyed. Overall its better, and ultimately the original having what I think is the tighter story just means I'll recommend you play both.

Well written enough to stand up on its own without much of any traditional gameplay mechanics. If you look at it and think you'll like it, you probably will. Ignore my playtime, it's probably about 3 hours in length with lines read aloud or shorter if you're just reading to yourself

Yeah no it's great.

I should preface this by saying I played on hard and it seems like the game might have already been tuned to be challenging regardless of that. That said, the runs of this I played weren't particularly fun in any aspect. Most of what's there stands out as exceptionally uninspired. The store page's trailer looks flashy and interesting enough, but beyond the colorful ui, weapon and environmental lighting I still got saddled with a basic 3 hit combo and rolling to dodge. The player plays as literal unnamed protagonist, fighting crazed slaver robots so enslaved cyberpunk humanity can escape the semi-cyberpunk underground. For a framework it all sounds serviceable enough, and if the gameplay was good I wouldn't care. There is no great compelling gameplay to get away with that, at least that early on. I was left past the tutorial with no good story hooks other than I should free leaders of a human rebellion, a vague sense I should play the rogue-like dungeon available to me to do so, and weak 2d platforming combat. There was a leveling system with both run-specific and permanent upgrades, but for me the basics of what was there was so mediocre that I didn't care to see what else the game had in store.

Easy recommend. Even after finishing it, eventually uninstalling, I still think about this game for how much fun it was. Yes it's a walking sim, but it's also a physics and routing based walking sim wrapped around an insane story and post-post apocalyptic world that you can shape and restore. It's weird and wonderful to experience. The only people I can imagine not wanting to play this would be diehard fans of metal gear's stealth action gameplay that only want more of that. There's still light elements of stealth and gunplay in this, but it's only briefly there in the game's more tense moments. If that's only what you want, I can't really say that this does that in droves. I can say it not being a metal gear-esque action ride certainly helps with the game's pacing and theme of anti-destruction/ building up. The simple deliver stuff from point A to B gameplay ends up serving the story so well in that regard I can't help but say it's all foundational to telling it.

It's exactly as it appears, but it's not really fun. The pitch for this game is a kind of jokey rpg mocking some alleged trope of a healer always being the most hated party member that receives the brunt of the blame when stuff goes wrong. That element is in the writing, but between that and all the other jokes it still seems pretty dry. Beyond that, the gameplay isn't great either. You mouse click over allies to heal or buff them, and quickly switch between various spells to mitigate damage while keeping everyone alive. I played on hard, so I feel confident saying it does has some depth and does push the player to switch between their spells and worry about mana management. It is functional. It's just not very clever, and so the game more or less rewards twitch usage of spells as necessary and then switching to mana recovery between doing that. Many of my deaths in this game were to fast chunky hits though, so between the game basically trying to tell me heal as necessary and also be ready for conditions or tankbusters on anyone it just feels unintuitive and frustrating.