Recent reviews by CS1

Octopath 0 is a console port of the gacha they've had running for a while, covering about the first 2 years worth of content made for that game. In general, it's really cool to see them do this for a mobile title, and I kind of hope we see more of this sort of thing in the future.

That being said, Zero is a rough play. Almost all of that comes from the above mention of this porting *2 years* of content updates into a single experience, with the main story asking 100 hours from you beginning to end. There's some optional side stuff scattered around, but that pales in comparison to what's on the critical path. This could be a selling point for people looking for that kind of experience, but for that amount of time, there's so many other games you could be playing that would just be a better time.

Zero's combat now lets you run 8 characters at once, swapping back and forth between rows to change character at any given moment. This is actually pretty neat and something I'd be happy to see return if they do an OT3. On the flip side, since they know you can swap between two sets of skills at any point, most individual characters have pretty gutted sets. Outside of the lategame characters, most characters feel a little underbaked, and will be missing some kind of coverage you'd have expected from someone in OT1/2. To make up for this, they've added "masteries", where in lieu of secondary classes you can instead "master" skills with JP to put them on someone else, with everyone having 3 attack slots and 2 passive slots. In a similar trend to the above, this system is ridiculously bloated, with hundreds of masteries across the entire game obfuscating the handful that are actually worth using. The sweet spot is about 30-40 hours in where you finally have the levels to start using masteries, but not so many that trying to sort who has what on your roster becomes a hassle. I have to assume that the game gives us so many characters because it wants us to swap them around and have different people for different scenarios, but juggling equipment and masteries (which you have limited numbers of) make this exhausting. The distribution of characters is also a little weird, with quite a few of them being unlocked in the final hours, giving you little time to actually play with them. There's a lot of cool things you get at hour 95 of 100 if not hour 99, which is really frustrating, since I'd have liked being able to actually use those things rather than seeing credits and full completion after the next fight.

It's worth noting that, despite being comparable to the length of OT1 and 2 combined, it actually has less areas than either individually. Of the 8 regions, you only get 2 towns rather than the typical 3 you'd expect in an OT game. There's some extra places you find in the lategame, but you definitely feel how restricted they are with the map this time, spending the most amount of time on the least amount of exploration.

I'd be willing to forgive that if we had a good enough story carrying us through it, and lots of people do say that the story being ported here is one of the best OT has ever done. I really wish I could see what they're seeing. Zero's story is certainly darker than what we've had before, but otherwise this feels like a typical JRPG plot from the 90s (which is to say, very barebones). Of the 4 arcs adapted here, almost all of them feature over the top villains who are evil for the sake of being evil and all they ever do is talk about how evil they are. The second arc in particular is atrocious for this. Octopath has a weird problem where it will let you meet the villains in an early chapter, but you have to retreat in awe of them or for whatever other reason it gives, and then in the final chapter you finally fight them without anything really happening in the narrative to suggest you're better equipped than you were when you first encountered them. You're just kind of strung along by the plot until the devs are ready for you to beat them. We're also playing a silent protagonist this time which certainly doesn't help matters. Things just happen around us and we have no input outside of the occasional "yes/no" prompt where selecting the wrong thing just gives us the prompt again. Why is this still a thing games are doing.

If you are REALLY pressed for things to play, then by all means, this game is a great return on investment. If you just want to play a competent JRPG and don't care beyond that, then I certainly can't knock how much is here for you to sink your teeth into. But if you have any sort of game backlog, or there are other JRPGs you've been eyeing, your time would be better spent there. If this came out in the mid 2000s, this would easily have been a great game worth recommending, but in a world that now has so many 9/10s or 10/10s for you to play, do you really want to put 100 hours into a 6.5/10?

This is one of those cases where I wish reviews had a "nuance" option, but alas.

Silksong is very competently made. A lot of love and care went into the development of it over the last 7 years and it shows. Through and through, this is definitely the game Team Cherry wanted to make, and it's good to see them make it through the other side and finally release it.

That said, there are a series of baffling design decisions that completely torpedo the feel of the game. I wanted to wait until I hit 100% completion to see if my feelings changed as the game progressed, but generally the vibe I had by hour 5 is what I carried through to hour 60.

Silksong's difficulty isn't a bad thing in theory, but they stack so many antagonistic mechanics on top of each other that it just ends up feeling frustrating.

Bosses being hard is fine.
Bosses being punishing is fine.
Bosses having a long runback is fine.
Runbacks having non-trivial enemies or platforming is fine.
Bosses having no to minimal rewards is fine.

Putting them all together, though, makes the experience really unsatisfying. It basically kills any sense of accomplishment for overcoming the obstacle, it just leaves you going "thank god that's over". Of the 40+ bosses that the game prides itself on, I can think of maybe 5 that I beat and went "that was actually fun". There were at least twice as many which were miserable from start to finish.

The game size also works against it - Pharloom is somewhere in the region of 2-3x the size of Hallownest, but nowhere near 2-3x the amount of stuff to find and discover. Upgrades are sparse and many feel inconsequential - and the early game in particular suffers greatly from this. You get wall jump around 5 hours in and then you're waiting around 15-20 hours before you get the next movement ability. Hornet's full kit feels great, but there's a giant lull where you're just waiting to become more mobile and throwing your head against things with basically the same kit you started the game with. Similar to the combat, discovering new areas didn't feel exciting and full of possibility, it felt like an additional chore to add to the pile. The large enemy variety in Silksong means you're always encountering new things and having to learn their patterns, but compared to Hollow Knight most of them aren't simple so you kind of always need to stay on guard. You never really reach that flow state where you can just turn on autopilot and relax while running around, you generally need to keep some level of focus so that you don't end up in a situation that takes you from full health to no health in a couple seconds. It's exhausting, and there's a lot of valid comparisons to Dark Souls 2 in the encounter design. Also, gauntlets. They've gone from an occasional challenge in Hollow Knight to keep you on your toes to a mainstay that show up several times per area (and sometimes even as part of boss runbacks). It's another thing that adds to the pile that breaks you out of the flow state since the game just keeps throwing mandatory challenges at you without easing up and giving you an equal reward or break to balance it out.

The shard mechanic is also very weirdly designed. I suppose they wanted to add something as drops to weaker enemies (since money drops are rationed and saved for harder foes), but the tools you get to use are already limited between rest points, so it's limited resources stacked on limited resources. It kind of disincentivises their use when out and about unless you want to have to go and grind, and for bosses it effectively puts a cap on how many times you can have a full-out try before you either have to go without them or go to a different zone and grind. Team Cherry clearly know it's an issue because they give you infinite uses for some of the harder bosses in the lategame, but notably not the true final boss, which is one of (if not the) hardest in the game, and has no good way to replenish shards without running halfway across the map and then coming back later. It effectively encourages just saving all your tools until the last/enrage phase of a boss, and then throwing them all out at once in hopes that you can just out-DPS it and ignore all the mechanics, which feels... really unsatisfying.

Of course, all the above gripes are to do with learning the game. If you pick things up quickly or are already particularly proficient, you get to enjoy all the good parts of the game and ignore most of the pain points. But for the average consumer, the pain points are front and centre.

Ultimately, I'd say Silksong is kinda like dark chocolate. It's more bitter and has a lot more depth than the usual milk, so while some people might not like the taste of it at all, those who do will definitely like it a lot. If you're in the crowd who takes great pride in their ability to beat hard games or are just a student with lots of free time (or my buddy soup who keeps bringing up this review and saying he's not in either of those groups) then you'll probably get a lot out of Silksong (especially at the insanely cheap pricepoint); but if you're not, you won't.

Woah, you hit your head pretty hard there. Huh? Microtransactions? Live service games? Balance patches? What are you talking about? It's Summer 2004 and we just found out how to completely break this new wizard game. It's awesome! Come on, let's go have some fun!

Generally when people recommend Ace Attorney or Danganronpa there'll be an asterisk attached to warn you about some of the more questionable parts of the game; whether that's the plot getting too silly, the logic leaps being too strange, or the game crawling to a pace as you have to spend 5 segments walking through a line of reasoning you already figured out an hour ago. There's plenty to like in those games, but even the most die-hard fans will have parts that they wish were different.

of the Devil is the game you get when those parts are different. The worldbuilding is extremely tight and intricate while still feeling natural. The characters all feel suitably fleshed out and act like real people rather than surface level tropes. The plot respects your intelligence and the logic sessions never start wasting time so that it can hold people's hands.

This game isn't just on par with its AAA counterparts; it's completely exceeding them. On both style and substance, there's nothing here to fault.

Grab a drink. Go in blind. You'll struggle to find anything else of this quality at this price point.

Fun game which scratches the activity itch (both solo and with friends). The dev seems committed to weekly updates, which helps a lot, since there's always a reason to come back every few days.

The good:
-All around improvement over the original. If you enjoyed the first, everything you liked is back and better
-Main cast has a little more spice to them (for the most part). They're still very clearly pure-of-heart-good-guys, but Temenos and Osvald have way more going for them than the fairly plain characterisation Ophelia and Cyrus had in the original, for example.
-Not that you'll need it for the main game, but grinding has been improved a lot. 100% here is a lot less demanding than the original, and even if you do want to go the extra mile, it's easier to do so.

The bad:
-Villain writing is very classic JRPG. There's a significant amount of bad guys who are evil and want power with no nuance to it. I'd argue that things are even more black and white in this game than in the original, which is saying something.
-Crossed paths are good but there's still not an awful lot of interaction between the cast. For the most part you're still playing 8 individual stories that are tangentially related. If that was your biggest gripe with the first game, that's not really fixed here.
-Difficulty balancing is pretty haywire. I'm honestly not sure what the "intended" path is, since it's really easy to overlevel if you explore everything, and easy to underlevel if you flee from everything. It's still fun, but I'd say it's even less challenging than the original, which many people already thought was too easy.

Overall it's still arguably one of the best JRPGs released in recent years, so if you like the genre, you'll get your money's worth here.

Look man, I love Yugioh, but the modern game revolves around using one of several specific meta gimmick decks to basically win in turn 1 before your opponent can even do anything. You have to be a special kind of person to enjoy this.

This game scratches the same itch that the original Binding of Isaac did in terms of "you get a broken good build, steamroll the game, have a ton of fun doing it, and then start another run to do it again"

solitaire but more stress!

i lov master cheif