i would say it's the best rpg ever made. blows disco elysium and yandare simulator out of the water
played the demo on win95, finally got around to buying it. Holds up really well. Huge QoL improvements when paired with CorsixTH.
most game of all time
Not exaggerating to say this is one of the funniest games in the last decade. It's very low brow pastiche but intentionally so, and clearly made by some very funny people. I would borderline line German just to get the most out of it. I've never played a twin stick game beyond maybe metal slug on a pub arcade machine, but it's worth playing for the narrative. I don't go fully to bat for the europa stuff but it's very, very heartening to see that digital platforms will still publish games like this.
excellent game, as close to perfect as you could hope for from such a small team. A true iteration of the classic genre, maintaining its mouse-only simplicity while adding enough art-direction to feel modern. The cutscenes are clearly done on a budget, but are very well executed and add dimensionality to the story. The pre-rendered backgrounds are masterfully done and I wish more games were still made with this level of love and care. Looking at earlier game footage, I appreciate that they went through the effort of imprioving a lot of the graphical assets after release. The story took a while to catch my interest, and it while the writing and characterisation could have been a little more interesting (the husband/wife relationship is a little flat and uninteresting), I was invested by the end. It's an accessible story. They did a great job with Moses' character. The audio is good and compliments the environments well. I just wish they had someone do some more foley/sound work, as there are several cutscenes that have silence when something VERY LOUD is happening in the scene, and quite a few of the little environmental descriptors that mention big environmental sounds that aren't present. IMO this is something that could be realistically improved without a lot of expense. Gameplay is enjoyable, puzzles are mostly great and the difficulty is about right. I would have loved to have some more branching choices in the game, even if it's something like one or two alternate endings, lore dumps behind missable item interactions etc. These are really minor criticisms of a brilliant game, and the overall formula is GREAT and doesn't need to be changed!
As an old fan of the original PSX titles, I was and am very excited to see Murayama making a successor The localisation is competent, and the drama over it was overblown. However, it is one of the worst aspects of the game- particularly because it feels like a lot of unnecessary liberties were taken by someone outside the studio, and which are in stark contrast to the intended tone of the world and characters. The rest of the game was a good nostalgic experience, but unfortunately it feels like this is the extent of the game. Despite its runtime, the story feels like it manages to fit far fewer beats than its predecessors (like i'm somehow experiencing 30 hours of game despite 60 hours of gameplay), and a lot of the key plot development and twists feel a bit flat. The brilliant military strategist pulling aces does not feel convincing, and neither does the rivalry/friendship between the two male protagonists. Much of the rest of the plot feels heavily cribbed from S1 & 2, with many tropes and scvenarios just being copied. I can understand that this is going to be inevitable to an extent, with a scenario being premised on so many minor characters; and being from the same writer- and who is trading on his own work from several decades ago. it feels like the project is a victim of crowdfunding dynamics- promising many stretch goals which become weak features in the game that feel like under other circumstances should be cut. namely mini-games. And they are bad. I spend hours autistically grinding all the janky suikoden II minigames to completion, for fun no less, but despite being half baked (forgivable), these are absolute SLOGS. Several end-game characters are locked behind completing them. I'm generally a completionist, but an ageing one; and it wasn't worth suffering through them to get the true ending, sadly. I wouldn't let this discourage you from playing, and i'd rather play this than a modern final fantasy title. i commend the studio on a solid game
