Recent reviews by Nerdevar

killer7 more like gaming heaven ahahaha 10/10 (or should i say 9/11?)

it's peak

Updating my review; it's great. The bugs I listed have been fixed and the game is much more stable. All in all, definitely a great experience.

summoned an adult baby to help defeat a monkey operating construction equipment 10/10

finished this game like 8 months ago but i still think about it every day

One of the best JRPGs ever made, really, and the best entry in the Persona series to boot (in my opinion), Persona 4 Golden is required playing if you're even slightly interested in the genre. It manages to make turn-based combat addicting and satisfying thanks to stellar sound and visual design and a phenomenal soundtrack (if you like the music in The World Ends With You, you'll like this), and the day-to-day events are always kept fresh and interesting, even as the game spans an entire year. The 20 dollar price tag is unbeatable, too. All in all, if you choose to pass up Persona 4, that's your call, but you're missing out on one of the highest points of the sixth generation of console gaming.

Simply put, it feels like Valve themselves put this out. Can't recommend it enough.

This is my favorite game of all time. I've played this game probably about 20 times all the way through since I first played it back in 2011, and this version is excellent after all the updates that got pushed out. It's a masterpiece through and through, with perfect pacing, memorable characters, beautiful music, gorgeous spritework, and the introduction of the now common New Game+ help keep replay value extremely high. A first playthrough will take about 25 hours or so, and there are 13 endings to discover (with almost all of them relegated to New Game+).

Anyway, please give Chrono Trigger a shot. If you're even slightly interested in RPGs, you won't regret it.

Absolutely my game of the year, possibly the best character action game I've played.

If I could give this a "mixed", I would, because while there's a lot to love, there's also a lot to really hate here.

I've been a longtime Final Fantasy fan since middle school (which I entered around the time FFXIII came out). My progression with the (main) series went: 1 -> 7 -> 2 -> 4 -> 3 -> 12 -> 8 -> 9 -> 6 -> 10 -> 5 -> 13 -> 15. I dabbled a bit in FFXIV as well, so I've seen many different directions the series has taken and have strong opinions on them, and this new spin on the series is great on the surface, but digging even an inch deep into the gameplay reveals a lot of problems.

At first glance, FFXV looks like standard open-world RPG fare: visit "towns" (most of which are rest spots and gas stations), take quests, fight monsters, gather materials, etc. And that's because it is[/] standard open-world RPG fare in those regards. Sidequests are frustratingly shallow and monotonous. One quest will have you drive a mile and a half (not too far in this game's scale) to a farm to get some produce for a shopkeeper. You'll turn it in, get your gil and EXP, then see the shopkeeper is offering another quest. What could it be? Why, it's a quest to drive a mile and a half to a farm to get some produce for the shopkeeper. This cycle is prevalent in the majority of FFXV's sidequests, turning them from something you want to do (e.g. The Witcher 3) into something that feels like a chore. Fetch quests aren't fun.

There's a surprising amount of backstory and lore across the world of FFXV, and I occasionally felt as if I was missing something.

I was.

There's a movie (Kingsglaive FFXV) and an anime series that fill in some background information and deepen the atmosphere of the game, and I've watched neither. It didn't impede my enjoyment of the atmosphere the game had, though it felt strange that there were only a couple densely populated areas that you can visit over the course of the game.

Regarding atmosphere, FFXV feels like a road trip: camping out, cooking meals, fishing, filling up on gas, sightseeing the (pretty gorgeous) environments... the (second) strongest aspect of XV is here. Prompto (a party member) will take photos throughout the (in-game) day and allow you to sort through them when you rest and save ones you like. It creates a lot of memories of places you've been and things you've done, and saving them pays off in a very cool way at the end of the story.

The strongest part of Final Fantasy XV lies in its voice acting and party chatter. Every performance is incredible and delivers immense energy and emotion almost non-stop. There's hundreds of little bits of dialogue the party will spit back and forth depending on where you are and what you're doing, and it helps solidify each character's personality and cement them emotionally with the player.

Elephant in the room here is the actual combat gameplay. It's fine at best, and at worst, it's paradoxical in its execution. I can best describe it as a hybrid of Kingdom Hearts II's combat and traditional character-action gameplay (such as Devil May Cry or many PlatinumGames titles). It excels at mimicking neither of their strengths, as the reaction-based, combo-oriented battling seen in Bayonetta gives way to auto-piloted dodges and combos done by holding a single button. It looks stylish and fluid but lacks any real depth and boils down to switching to whatever weapon type/element an enemy is weak to and holding a button until a character is in danger, healing them, then returning to holding a button. There are a lot of abilities for Noctis (the main character) that offer bonuses for dodging attacks with good timing, but... there's just no reason to use them, because the standard dodge is incredibly effective and the bonuses offered by the abilities are things like "less MP consumption when dodging with proper timing" and other minor boosts. What should be making the gameplay feel more skill-based and involved is pointless, whereas a game like Bayonetta gives massive incentive for performing a perfect dodge (time slows down for a few seconds, allowing massive damage to be racked up on an enemy).

Somehow, though, Final Fantasy XV kept me engaged and entertained enough to do plenty of side objectives and I intend to return to it eventually to play more. Be warned, the install size is massive (over 80 gigabytes) and there are some performance issues, even with higher-end systems. Pick this up on sale and give it a try; there's a lot here I didn't cover because it had no real bearing on my review to me. I just wanted to go over the biggest factors that might affect your experience.