Recent reviews by Shogun

Talk about a comeback for a game that was mostly doom and gloom for the era. Phenomal work you rarely see games do when off to a bad start.

Gorgeous game, painstaking compositions and a ton of them in every scene. Also fun gameplay.

Bascially unplayable with this new engine. The blur from their forced temporal anti aliasing is impossible to stomach and leaves me literally nauseated. Steam needs to add a label for games like this that don't offer a TAA off option. Just awful.

Pretty fun game overall. Like most games that are of middling or good quality, they get swept under the rug especially when they have a marketing failure like this game did. Early reviews are all copy-paste complaints about some of the writing, when the writing itself is fine. Actually refreshing having a character act somewhat real instead of games where characters act like cliche's when they have a supernatural setting.

Also the story was going somewhere pretty decent.

The gameplay is also pretty good, and keeps getting better the more you progress. There are obviously portions where you feel the dev team could have used more time to make a better game, but it's just a case of high ambition ruined by some corporate meddling (the deathblow to any AAA game as once you sink the cost, pulling the plug early is a disaster almost certainly).

DLC also was pretty refreshing, and the combat was more engaging and had you more engaged in constant action.

The music was the only real downside I perceived constantly. The ambient music is alright I guess, but the combay and higher tempo stuff is just the typical uninspired garbage dreamed up by a classical orchestra. Very one-note linear and trumpets and horns.

Graphics are pretty good too (not something you can say a lot about most games these days), but the overall world design itself isn't that great due to the desolation. Particle effects are great. Though this game (like literally every other, other than Red Dead Redemption 2), has had their shadows severely downgraded compared to reveal footage of the game.

This is an overall fun game due to the movement and power fantasy genre it wants to live in. This genre doesn't have too many games worth of note, and the last one I can recall other than things like Spider-Man 2, would be the older Prototype games in the PS360 era. We need more games like this that are fun with movement, and combat.

6/10 (Patch also included in this review), with around ~20 hours of gameplay after launch. (I have no beaten the entirety of the game but I'm working on it, despite the eye rollingly bad decisions made in terms of gameplay - I have beaten Messmer and the Lord of Flame for future frame of reference whenever people get around to doing them and comprehending the scope of the things I'm about to say)

So typical things like the artists (as seemingly with most games) have pogged up, along with the music composers and arrangers. Everything else, is just the same old. There's nothing new to the formula, and we're basically getting a very safe DLC. You still have utterly ignorable NPCs in terms of caring about who lives and dies (typical for their form of "story telling"). There is still zero exposition about this word, and thus will remain undecipherable in terms of how it universally functions. Shame all the work GG Martin did seems to have been for nothing (more of a base game complaint really than the continuation in this DLC). This game also has pacing problems. I suppose because it's a DLC they didn't want to spend too much time, and the way you just stumble upon Messmer willy nilly was somewhat poor given his prominence in pre release material.

But enough about all this, why isn't this DLC a 10/10? For the same reason the base game isn't, and it has to do with gameplay, balancing and neglect. Firstly the gameplay is the same, so no points there, but also no subtractions. Second the balancing, this is basically something either untested, or tested and then they just said after the testers were finished "Now double the damage and double the enemy HP at the very least for the launch day version". This is fine, but not with what they've chosen to do with the enemies. Aside from fodder, enemies have less stagger, more poise, their combos are longer and if you get clipped by the first part of most combos, chances are you will get hit by a following sequence if you're not extremely careful. The aggression has been tuned to heights never seen before. Now you're playing a game of "either I take so many HP pots, and use them all, while never getting the bosses HP down because I'm wasting time trying to heal" (which you can't do a lot of the times because enemy aggression doesn't allow for HP recovery as before). Or you bring so many potions that have no use because you need to get the enemies killed as fast as possible before they get into a routine where you're toast. Anyone complaining about this, has no idea what they're in for until they get to the two bosses I just suffered through. I hope for the next game, there is no more HP, and the Souls die hard get the game they seemingly want. A 1 hit only souls-game.

Basically this game now needs to be played like a speedrun/no hit run. Doing so otherwise is just you trying to learn enemy patterns (with defensive talismans which are basically bait since these bosses require you to do a ton of damage to stand a chance if you want to get them done within 15 minutes to an hour).

The second problem is, the overall balancing that came with this patch. They opened a youtube video, and decided to nerf any "top build" weapons, and buff whips/axes (which were outclassed by hammers every time). A year of letting this game go without a balance patch is a joke, and this developer (but more their fans) should really take a look at what their praising so much. There is still a base game content that is utterly useless, and none of that is as we know now - ever going to get fixed. Really the biggest W of this patch was much love to some cancerous PvP cheese now being nerfed (the fact this took a year is a testament to just the level of feces fans of this game will accept, quite pathetic really).

We also have other problems with perplexing color correction (contrast so high in some instances that light source graphical issues occur where the light doesnt project as much from torches/lantern especially), jarring whole color pallete shifts (buggy thematic programming issue), and no fixes to core engine issues. This engine needs to be put in a dumpster, especially evident now in the starting area where they pathetically tried to increase vegetation, and instead did nothing other than demonstrate glaring object culling, shadow and asset cascading issues of asset and light-maps pop-in. I can't believe the concept artists are content with this seeing what their final work ends up looking like when it's rendered by the 3D modelers. This is just something straight out the of PS3 era, not PS4, straight up PS3. We also get no official ultra-wide support, which is just a slap to the face for that minority.

Final words:

The DLC is fine if you liked the base game, it doesn't really do much aside from give you new weapons to play with (I've tested only a handful, and they seem alright, while most are just pure garbage that shows how tone-deaf their balancing team is, with quad or triple scaling that caps out at like B scaling at times, thus utterly ignorable). These weapons should be benchmarked in the DLC and in the base game to see if their new Tree shards mechanic is to blame or to praise for viability issues. That along with being able to ride our horse at Elden Beast (shame on you FromSoft, and shame on anyone that excuses not having this in after all this time).

The enemies are many reskins, and just a bit too many re-used all over the map. The map itself is also plagued with desolation, utterly unrewarding in terms of exploration in the first game. For those that say they like exploring for explortations' sake, you'll get it with this game, because you sure as heck won't be getting many cool things as a reward.

And finally the balancing once more. The enemies are just unfun due to being overtuned. It's obviously the most overtuned they've ever made their game, and is mostly a DLC for fans of the OG, so they get more difficulty than they ever bargained for. But this is just really bad. It's so bad, and obviously done to maintain their difficulty reputation without doing anything actually interesting (this Souls formula is capped out at this point, there's only so much you can do with a light attack, heavy attack, and special attack for melee). I was hoping something interesting with armors would happen in this patch + DLC, but nope, still mostly useless outside of armors with special effects.

This new patch is just more corporate driven moronic nonsense.

First off, if you played any of the prior entires, or just like stealth games in general, this is basically a top tier distillation.

Finished the game, and now currently playing for badges. This game unlike the prior entries has far more replay value if you're going to be hunting for 100%. Generally speaking, you have more of everything the prior entries tried to do, better abilities, more abilities, more characters, more inventive levels, longer story and personalities. Just more of everything.

This is the developer's last game and they've done it justice. A final DLC with two more characters was added which is just wonderful, and level editor modding tools added as a parting gift for a proper send off.

Basically a 10/10 game in my book.

Souls series could learn or thing or two about combat animations from this game.

The short of it is, it feels like an incomplete game in some respects (it tragically was according to developers), yet it still became legendary enough to start an MMO. But the problem with Japanese development of the era (like in this era seemingly still) is, nothing they do when making games makes sense holistically. They'll put out an incomplete gem like this, yet here we are almost ten years later still waiting for the true sequel...

Nevertheless, definately worth a playthrough, the game feels like a bridge between old and new RPG's with a perplexingly high emphasis on systems (things likes weight, and size of character yields interesting differences for example). The combat is obviously the best I've seen in an RPG, certainly of this era (basically the only combat system that's better, is Ninja Gaiden Sigma/Black, but that's not really an RPG game). The abilities are fun and really get into their role playing aspect quite well. What really sells the combat as I alluded to in the opening, is the animations, and many types of attacks. Gone is the moronic Souls-like stiffness, instead you get fluid and detailed animations that still leave you with speed and control.

Other aspects of the game can be read up in the punchline of most reviews. Get it if you don't mind slight jank here and there. Stay with it, and you'll see why it's a gem.

This is just the best Tetris game ever basically. Fun all around, and finally come to PC in this complete edition.

It's Ninja Gaiden on PC, works great in game, but obviously could have done more for a slight remaster, though it wasn't advertised as such. Lots of content here, and its nice to see the original Sigma games at least in their full glory. Get it if you really want a challenge that relies on you organically getting better, and not playing Dance Dance Revolution like Seikiro for example (there's really not much close to it in terms of modern games).