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It may not be as flashy and cinematic as other Playstation era RPGs, but Breath of Fire III has a unique charm to it that I haven't found in any other game to date.
It's now been more than 10 years after I played this for the first time when it just came out in europe and my opinion on Persona 3 has barely changed. The japanese school-life sim aspect was truely novel at the time, and it was only that novelty that allowed me to look past the game's glaring pacing issues. Ironically Atlus remedied these somewhat in the original release of Persona 4 a couple years later, only to backtrack and make them even worse in the most recent Persona 5. I honestly don't know what the developers at Atlus are thinking here.
You can tell this one came out only a year after its predecessor, as Breath of Fire II is very similar to the series originator from 1993. This game improves on the first one in many ways: Better visuals, better music, better story and writing. And yet it doesn't quite reach for the top of its genre. A horrid encounter rate unfortunately drags this one down to another exercise in patience.
It's april 2019 and a Sega Saturn controller fresh from the manufacture line makes it onto the market. Not an april fools joke. Disregarding that I may be wasting my money on a subpar junk controller I actually preordered this one. Just in case it's good, making sure I don't miss out. Now having tested this piece of modern retro hardware for a good hour there's nothing in the way of the me giving this a seal of approval.
For a 1993 release on the Super Nintendo the original Breath of Fire plays surprisingly archaic. The plot is simple to the point - the game's silent protagonist embarks on a journey to rescue his sister and save the world from evil emperor Zorgon. The journey itself consists mostly of sub plots. To be honest I forgot about Ryu's sister halfway through the game because it never mentions her again until the last act. Dialogue and character developments are kept to a minimum, and while the game's story elements have some neat moments it's hard to stay interested in the shallow story as a whole.
Finally released roughly 4 years after the project got funded on Kickstarter Koji Igarashi's latest gothic action RPG is now on sale. I expected a classic Metroidvania game, hoped for a very good one and feared a terrible mess. The result has something of all these.
Although you can call me a fan of Atlus games, having played a good number of their games, this one went right past my radar. I only learned of this games' existance through accident while browsing an online import game store in 2016. The title and cover immediately appealed to me, and realizing it was a game produced by Atlus I bought it without thinking twice (the condition was great and it was only 20 bucks). When I got the game I shelved it, expecting it to be extraordinarily text heavy - and at the time I felt I should come back to this when I had improved my japanese - in the end it took me until 2019 to find the time to actually play it because I kept prioritizing fresh releases over my backlog. It turned out there was no reason to worry about the amount of text in Stella Deus, the game has comparatively few lines of text for an RPG.
Not many new announcements this year. Might just feel that way because nearly everything gets leaked these days of course. Microsoft showed lots of games, but none of them would convince me to purchase an X-Box. I doubt the new console can really display native 4K-HD 120FPS, and even if it could the "wow-effect" would be lost after a couple of hours anyways and games would play much like they did on 7th and 8th gen consoles. So I'm all "whatever" on all things Microsoft this time (but that's my usual reaction there).
Alright I went into this one with low expectations because of how mediocre Final Fantasy XIII and XV were. Some of these concerns turned out meaningless because at its core Kingdom Hearts III is still a proper Kingdom Hearts game. It's got the action RPG gameplay fans are used to, no overly focus on an open world and fetch quest shenanigans. Props for that. However the game feels really rushed towards the end, so much that I'd argue they had to finish the game earlier than planned to assign resources to the Final Fantasy VII remake. More on that later.
If the Dancing games weren't enough, here's another fanservice Persona game. New Cinema Labyrinth plays a lot like its predecessor, people who've played the 2014 release of Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth will feel quite at home. However there's still some notable changes and differences between the two games. For one, there is now only a story route from the perspective of the Persona 5 protagonist. The teams and characters from P4 and 5 are back as well, but the protagonists from those games aren't voiceless. Their names can still be chosen by the player, though. The combat has been adjusted to play more like a Persona game. Hitting an enemy's weak spot now inflicts the down status, and downing all enemies allows for an all out attack which is now easier to execute. On the downside just hitting all weakspots and executing said all out attack is rarely enough to wipe out a monster party. New Cinema Labyrinth retains the strong point of coming with a battle system that requires some strategy to competently make it through the dungeons. Aside from no longer triggering all out attacks the game keeps the boost status unchanged. Downing enemies may trigger support from characters outside of the party to help downing enemies that remain standing, and later on can trigger a new feature called Unison Attack. Unison attacks are special attacks in which multiple characters pitch in to deal large damage to enemies. One might think of them as light variants of all out attacks that have a unique animation each.