Recent reviews by Hybrid

Alright, here we go again raining on the wet, but it's gotta be said.
First of all, this game is AMAZING, it's everything that we could expect, it feels like a beautiful and natural evolution from World. The game now is full open world, the history is much more present and fluid that almost feels like a RPG, the weapons are in their best forms with new moves and some reworks, all this with all the delicious gameplay loop tied up the MH essence we love so much.
But....of course. It is 2025, a pc port, by Capcom... so yeah, the technical aspect is terrible, like very, very bad. It's not Cyberpunk level, and it's actually playable. But playable is not enough when you are paying so much of your hard earned money for it. Another disrespectful, disgusting pc port that will once again stain the video game history. Frame generation and upscaling used as mandatory tools for acceptable frame rates, massive and frequent stutterings for no reason, textures that takes a lot of time to load and of course, let's not forget the random crashes, all ties up with a decent graphics at best that by any means justifies this amount of technical demand much less the issues. And just for the record, all my setup is ABOVE what Capcom itself said to be the "recommended" so there's no excuses here.
Sad, but I can't give a recommendation like this. Making very clear again, the game itself is perfect. I'm only down voting because of the technical issues. I'll change the review to a 100% positive if they patch the game in the future.

I will start getting the main question out of the way: yes, this game is an ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE. It is a direct improvement from Ender Lilies in almost every way. Inevitably, I'll be making some comparisons to Ender Lilies. ( without spoilers )

-- Story/Characters - A story of rancor, war, forgiveness and of people that fight to their last breaths for a brighter future. The plot unfolds in the same universe from Ender Lilies a couple of decades after its events but it the feels much more expositive and dynamic than the first one, the characters have much more lines and participation. All of them have a clear reason to there and a pretty godd amount of character development. Now sometimes you get an option to talk with them in the respites, where Lilac ( the main character ) talk to the homunculi ( the equivalent of the spirits from EL ) about what's happening at that moment. This gives much more depth to the relationship between Lilac and the homunculi.

-- Presentation/Soundtrack - It is exactly what you could expect from an Ender Lilies sequel. The visuals are beyond gorgeous and the soundtrack is SPECTACULAR, created by the same people that made the Ender Lilies OST. You have that same aesthetic contrast between innocence and tragedy, athough I would say that Ender Lilies is more dramatic, melancholic and carry more sadness. Lily felt more innocent and weak compared to Lilac which behaves more confident and plays more a lead role in the story than Lily. The game also have several different enviroments and it feels less repetitive than EL. All of this will make the game touch your heart.

-- Level design/Exploration - Another big improvment. By any means EL has a bad level design, but here they made even better. The maps are bigger and more complex and each one feels unique. I fell in love with some of them for being challenging with complex pathings that will demand your attention and focus.
The exploration is very well made and it is what you can expect from a good metroidvania. The overall map is bigger this time and the game rewards you a lot the more you explore, with many important collectables and currencies used to upgrade your equipments, making exploration directly attatched to your overall combat experience

--Enemies/Bosses - This is for me the bigger improvement from Lilies. In the first game some of the bosses felt like enldess hit sponges that created long and frustrating fights. They completely evolved here, where every single boss feels fair and fun, without any of the frustrating EL bosses mechanics. And don't get the wrong ideia, they're still very hard and challenging, but here you feel you have more creative ways to play against them, since the game has several different builds, attacks and equips for you to customize your experience. Many of the bosses made me change my biuld to adapt, which made the game feels more dynamic and rewarding. The commom enemies are pretty good as well, and will also make you consider change your build to adapt to each area emeny type.

-- Progression/Mechanics - You still have the same relic system from EL but now with the addition of a proper equipment system that allows you equip acessories to improve your atributes and grant some bonus effects like more healing charges, a regen effect and more. Also the collectables that increases your HP and your relic slot size are back, pretty much the same way it was done in EL. Another new addition are two currencies, one used to upgrade the relics and another one to buy equipments and itens from a permanent shop.

-- Combat - Similar to EL, you equip specific spirits/homunculi in four button slots that will attack in your stead, each one corresponding to a different move. Here the combat feels more fluid and fast paced than the first game and everything works perfectly good. You will find different homunculi more effective in some especific combat situations, stimulating you to change your build often, although not 100% necessary. There's melee combat, ranged attacks, automatic attacks, coordenated moves and even two different parry systems that works very well. One very cool addtion to Ender Magnolia is the new status effects, burn, shock and freeze, each one giving you or the enemy different debuffs that both you and the enemies can infflict, creating even more depth to the combat possibilites

In a more personal note, I love video games and together with Ender Lilies, Ender Magnolia is one of the games that changed my life, it has everything I ever expect from a game and a metroidvania. In an age that video games became products, with generic formulas just to make profits, seeing a pure and sublime work of art like Ender Magnolia is revigorating.


--- From the bottom of my heart, Thank you Binary Haze ---

Beautiful art and fun gameplay, but it feels like the devs don't know how to balance the game. Finish a single run in the lowest difficulty ( the only one available at the beggining ) feels harder than an Elden Ring deathless run. Enemies are very tanky, you die in a few hits and every boss feels like an endless bullet hell. I know that a rouguelike game is suppose to have a learning curve as you repeat every run and get slowly better results, but when the lowest difficulty is as coward as it is, it feels unrewarding and doesn't bring any will to keep playing.

Good, fluid and fast gameplay, pretty aesthetics and musics, but unfortunatelly what completely kills the game experience is its ridiculously bad balanced bosses. Every boss's combat design is terrible and frustrating, hp sponges with zero room for any mistake that only makes you frustrated and annoyed. Dificulty is not a problem when the game has a good design, which clearly is not the case here. I think it's easier and less frustrating to finish Elden Ring no death run than go through some of this game bosses, awful experience. Which is sad cause the basic gameplay mechanics are pretty good and the combat itself is fun, but these bosses completely ruins the experience.

It's a copy of Overwatch? No, it stands on its own legs, and actually it's fun, but doesn't mean it's good. It's a sloppy, broken mess with same problems from Overwatch and other competitive games. Elo hell, INSANELY broken habilities, ahd characters,(seriously, everything is REALLY broken), everything feel either low risk and high reward or high risk low reward, creating a horrible unbalanced experience, The monetization is very bad, full of tech bugs, no fair matchmaking and so on. And good luck tring to climb on ranked with terrble teammates and a non existent matchmaking which btw don't separate solo queue players from pre made teams.
The game is fun and has potencial, but this broken mess can't be called a game, I'll consider change the review if they decide someday to actually create a fair game experience instead of this psychotic break we have now.

As expected for a 2024 game at launch, it is a complete mess. Server issues, performance on PC is horrendous with random frame drops, stutterings and crashes, terrible optimization, twitch drops not only not connecting to your account but delaying the prizes as well, micro transactions not being delivered to people who already paid for it and so on. I'll not be playing it while this game has at least a funcional experience.
We day one players are once again being treated as beta testers working for free. If these issues are resolved in the future I'll consider change this review.

One of the most unbalanced games I've ever played. The game is full of AoE hit kills, hit scans, tanks and supports that do more damage than dps and so on. Never going to complain about balancing in other games after playing this

Edit: never though I would say that but this is WAY worse than League of Legends. The matchmaking is horrible and basically doens`t exist just like in LoL, but there at least the game isn`t completely broken and 100% unbalanced like this crap here

The focus here is the gameplay. It is indeed fluid, responsive and extremely fun and satisfying with several different characters with their specific gameplay gimmicks to try. What can possibly go wrong? So...
Dispite the fact that the gamplay is amazing the game is HEAVILY content lacking. The main story has around 10 to 15 hours depending of your pace and the so called "endgame" that was suppose to be the focus here is repetitive and shallow, having you fighting the same bosses and enemies that you did during the campaign but tankier, a terrible matchmaking system that seems to be region locked, meaning you won't have many people to play with and a brutal grind behind all these repetitive quests with the same bosses to fight. And in my opinion the worst of all: the game does not have any kind of balancing system when matching you with other people to play, meaning that 99.99% of all your co-op experiences is going to be with full build lv100 players practically one shotting all the bosses for you, taking away all the challenge or fun you could have.
And by the way the story is very, VERY bad. Like, it is unbearable. Boring characters with childish and cringe lines, constant predictable plots and heavy clichés that makes the worst shonen in the world look like a Hollywood masterpiece.
I feel it could get much better with some tweaks like crossplay with PlayStation, a global matchmaking setting and mainly a balancing system to stop this frustrating experience of people killing bosses for you. I say this cause the gameplay is tons of fun and makes you want you play more, but the way it is right now it is a complete waste of time, especially when there's better games out there similar to this one, like Monster Hunter or Final Fantasy XIV.
Sadly, a big disappointment...

Yes, it is still as good as you and I remember. After all theses years Skyrim it's is still one of the best games ever made and extremely enjoyable to this day, an immortal gaming experience

Pretty cool concept, fun and satisfying gameplay. Graphics are beautiful and the lore is pretty cool. Unfortunately for me the game suffers from heavly bad boss designs. I managed to defeat several bosses, some of them are very good, but ones that are bad are very, very bad as well. Constant spam of 2 fase bosses and the acutal worst part is that most of these 2 fase bosses have like "sub fases" on each fase, meaning that you are basically fighting 4 bosses in a row. There's a diference between hard and coward, and it lies on the enemies design, and this game doesn't know how to deal with this.
I feel like they tried to be harder from the other soulslike games just for the sake of "being better" but they clearly lack the game design experience that fromsoftware has to achieve this.