Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

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@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Making up for lost time, I see.

That's a whole lot of "meh" and "eh" reactions in one compilation, though. I actually really like writing scathing reviews, but I rarely get the chance because, typically, if I dislike a game that much I stop playing it, so my critical energy gets expended on games that probably don't deserve to be picked apart, like The Witcher 3.

RE - NieR: Automata
Kudos on playing, replaying, and then replaying again a game you clearly couldn't stand. I wouldn't have it in me to do that with a game I disliked as much as you clearly dislike this one.

RE - Resident Evil Revelations 2
I think it's easy to grow tolerant to the faults of series we otherwise have a soft spot for. Have you ever played Revelations 1? While I think it's an amazing technical showpiece for the 3DS and probably the best RE game released after 4 up until that point (2013? something like that), I didn't think the chapter-based format did much for that game either (I won't say episodic, since that game released as a complete package from day one).

RE - Saints Row IV: Re-Elected
Interesting review. I'll confess I'm a fan of Saints Row 2. It was defo a GTA clone, but it filled an important function at that time: it was a GTA-style game that remembered these games are supposed to be fun. GTA games have long had a goofy, tongue-in-cheek aspect to them, but that side of the series was almost completely abandoned with the dour GTA IV, which features a depressing story and irritating social sim elements. But SR2 kept itself reigned in enough that the goofiness didn't overwhelm the experience.

SR3 "drank the goofy juice," as you so aptly put it, and turned into a parody of itself, so I COMPLETELY lost interest in the series from there (it reminded me of 'bad movies' that deliberately try to be stupid and just end up being obnoxious, like Sharknado; a genuinely fun bad game, like a bad movie, must be made with love and passion). It sounds like SR4 dials it down a bit, so I might actually try playing the series again (although, based on how you describe it, it sounds more like an InFamous clone than a GTA one at this point?).

Also

😂😂😂
The upside to having a gamer mom: Being able to bond over a shared hobby
The downside to having a gamer mom: You ain't fooling anybody.

RE - The Last of Us
So, at the time, I had a really poor reaction to this game. I still don't really like it. Looking back, though, I can sort of see its strengths. But I think people talked me up on it too much. It was this amazing, cinematic, emotional post-apocalyptic father/daughter epic, and I end up with... well, what I thought was a decent but somewhat tropey zombie movie. Well, it would have been decent if it didn't feel like half the game was moving ladders/boxes/planks and sneaking around tediously dispatching post-apocalyptic raiders/mooks. And, like almost all of ND's pre-Uncharted 4 games, the entire game feels like you're being funneled through a tunnel of sorts.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who wasn't really wowed by it.

RE - Shining Resonance Refrain
Yeah, I've not heard great things about this game all-around. I guess I can sort of see why it wasn't originally localized. Granted, in the JRPG desert that was last gen (on home consoles, at least; the NDS was still getting great JRPG support), it would have been welcome. But in the modern landscape with Persona 5, Dragon Quest XI, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Octopath Traveler, Ys VIII, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, etc.? Nothing special.

I think it could be fun, though, once I've played all of the hype JRPGs I'm actually excited for. The demo was reasonably fun, if nothing else.

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Fun read overall, Foxy! Especially the SRR section, which was conversational, but still discussed game mechanics and whatnot. Glad you're back on the review horse.

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Shantae and the Seven Sirens

Platform: Nintendo Switch (also on: PS4, Xbox One, Windows PC, iOS)

Playtime: 10 hours

Shantae and the Seven Sirens is the fifth Shantae game to release in the series since the Game Boy Color original in 2002. As in other games in the series, you play as the titular half-genie Shantae, who, this time, is invited out to the tropical Paradise Island as a guest of honor for a Half-Genie Festival. When her fellow half-genies are kidnapped before festivities can kick off, however, Shantae takes it upon herself to find the missing girls and inadvertently stumbles upon a larger mystery involving the history and nature of the island itself, encountering old rivals and new enemies along the way.

As a brief bit of background: the first three Shantae games connected narratively and formed a trilogy of sorts. The fourth game, Shantae: Half Genie Hero, functioned as both a soft reboot of the narrative as well as a pretty dramatic shift in game design, abandoning the free exploration of previous entries for a mostly linear adventure. This shift in design didn't sit well with a number of fans (including yours truly), so I was happy to see Seven Sirens not only return to a more exploratory form of gameplay, but actually draw primarily from the very first Shantae game as its primary source of inspiration. While the first three games all focus on exploring environments and using transformations or tools to access new areas (heck, even Half-Genie Hero features this, to a limited extent), the series drifted away from the connected world of the GBC original, which featured multiple towns and themed dungeons, over time. The second game, Risky's Revenge, was a smaller-in-scale DSiWare title that didn't feature multiple towns or elaborate dungeons, and the third game, Shantae and the Pirate's Curse, featured a more contained hub world design, where the player would venture out from one town to multiple, elaborate themed islands. Seven Sirens marks a reversal of this trend toward increased linearity, and features a fully inter-connected world map in the style of the original Shantae, along with the return of multiple towns and more elaborate, themed dungeons.

The most immediate change from previous Shantae titles is in the setting. This is the first title in the series to not take place at least partially in Sequin Land, and the iconic Scuttle Town is abandoned as well in favor of fully focusing on Paradise Island. This gives the game a chance to focus on crafting an entirely unique new environment, which it mostly does. It was interesting to see an entire Shantae game with a tropical/aquatic theme to it.

In addition, this entry has seen a complete revamp of the animal transformation system that has featured in almost every Shantae game (except for Pirate's Curse, where she temporarily loses her half-genie powers and is forced to rely on pirate gear from her long-time pirate arch-rival, Risky Boots) to date. In previous games, Shantae would have to stop and perform transformation dances to assume different animal forms in order to progress through environments. While fans often tend to love this aspect of the series, many felt like it slowed down the pace of exploration overall and were spoiled by the comparatively lightning fast gameplay of Pirate's Curse, where pirate gear can be instantly used without needing to interrupt the flow of gameplay. WayForward clearly took this feedback to heart and crafted a clever have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too solution to the problem of transformations in this game. Via the use of "fusion coins" that you gain for rescuing and completing a task for each of the other kidnapped half-genies you rescue, you can now initiate animal transformations at will, temporarily, based on the use of context-sensitive button presses. For example, the newt transformation can be instantly achieved by air dashing toward a wall, when you hit the wall, you'll be in your animal form, but when you feet touch the floor, you turn back into half-genie form. While this sacrifices the ability to wander around in your transformed state (which there is usually no real reason to do), it allows this new game to preserve the iconic animal transformations that are part of the series' core identity while also allowing for the more fluid and dynamic gameplay introduced in Pirate's Curse. Shantae still has her dances, but they're reserved for separate magical ability now, such as revealing hidden platforms or filling the screen with electricity.

I'd briefly like to mention that I love how, in another aspect that's similar to the original, WF brought back a sort of dancing minigame to earn money.

(this video completely destroys the aspect ratio of the GBC original, but it serves its purpose)

The distinguishing gimmick introduced in Seven Sirens. though, comes in the form of monster cards. When you kill an enemy, there's a random chance that it will drop a collectible card. Depending on the requirements (some cards are usable when you collect only one; others require the player to find several duplicates before they can be used), you'll be able to equip these cards to Shantae and boost one of her stats or abilities. These can vary from increasing climbing speed when transformed, to boosting the power of certain types of magic, to allowing Shantae to auto-smash pots she runs across on her journey. A handful of monster cards are more powerful and are only obtainable by trading items to obtain them. While I liked this extra wrinkle that was added to the gameplay, the game is easy enough that it never mattered too much, and the monster cards don't really drastically change things up enough to make different card load-outs feel like they deeply impacted the gameplay.

And, to segue quickly into my biggest complaint about the game, Seven Sirens is too easy. Partially because of the way the game throws food at you constantly when you're killing enemies. In previous games, if you ran out of potions, you'd have to tediously farm enemies for heart drops. In this game, though, you're always stacked with various sort of food that heal a TON of the player's health, which means there's never really reason for the player to die. New Game Plus mode (no idea why it's called this, considering nothing seems to carry over; really, it's just magic mode from previous games) tries to balance this by making Shantae take more damage from enemies, which definitely leads to more deaths early on, but it doesn't really address the underlying balance issue with food drops.

Additionally, the boss encounters in this game, while not mind-numbingly easy, don't really feel particularly threatening, either. Partially because you'll always be stacked with healing items, and partially because there's nothing particularly brutal about them in terms of their patterns and attacks. I will say, though, and this is leading into a broader discussion, I LOVE how bosses are introduced in this game. Seven Sirens, in a series first, makes use of fully-animated video clips throughout the game (akin to ones seen in JRPGs like Persona 4 or Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete), and it does a lot to make the game feel more... premium? A lot of care has gone into the presentation of this game, and that extends to this element as well. Before encountering a boss, you'll be treated, each time, to a short video clip showing off Shantae's first interaction with her enemy. They're both fun to watch and do a great job of building a sense of anticipation for the coming fight.

The character models and backdrops in this game all look quite sharp, and, especially in handheld mode, Seven Sirens is a stunning little indie. The game also seems to run at a perfect 60fps all the time. Musically, the game is a bit less impressive, thanks to the departure of the series composer Jake Kaufman for this entry. His work is iconic, and it's really noticeable when that particular brand of Shantae music fans have been used to hearing from game to game is missing. The compositions in Seven Sirens are not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but I can't help but notice the lack of his peppy, middle-eastern inspired tracks, which fit well with a series that had a half-genie as its main character. There were also a number of tracks that were nearly identical from game to game, which helped to give the series its sense of identity. What we get here is... different, although definitely still trying to sound like Shantae music. It's pretty good, actually, but I do hope Kaufman returns for the next entry.

What particularly took getting used to was the new boss theme, which had been the same or extremely similar from the GBC original on.

Compare:

7.5/10 (outdated score; see edit)

edit:

I don't usually adjust years-old reviews, but I wanted to adjust my review and score of Shantae and the Seven Sirens in light of the "Spectacular Superstar" update that released for it, which prompted me to actually replay the game and judge the effect of the improvements first-hand.

The meat of this update, arguably, and what I'll primarily be discussing, is the way this updated version of the game (now dubbed the "Definitive" version, although the older, unbalanced version of the game is still preserved in a Legacy Mode) rebalances certain aspects of the game. The biggest improvement address my biggest complaint about the game: the food drops. Food drops WAY less often now, and heals significantly less damage than it did previously. This seems like it should be a small thing, but it really is transformative to the experience, as the player can no longer casually tank endless amounts of damage because they have piles of food in their inventory to rely on. Additionally, the player seems to take more damage from small enemies, and bosses have been made more aggressive in their attack patterns. All this adds up to a more satisfyingly challenging dungeon-crawler, as the player will actually need to deliberately stock up on restoration items if they want to make it through a dungeon without seeing a Game Over. And the player will see this a lot more, frankly.

Now, the game can still easily be trivialized, as the player seems to be able to still buy endless amounts of health and mana restoration potions, auto-potions, upgrades that reduce damage taken and dealt, etc. I'm not a huge fan of being able to easily buy enough materials to tank damage endlessly. But, see, here's the thing: before this update, I never even bothered buying health portions, because I always had tons of food drops to lean on. The vastly more balanced food item drops now make it where I actually had to stock up on materials from time to time, and could even talk about this aspect of the game as a result.

If the player is swimming through this game by tanking damage now, they're making the deliberate choice to stock up on tons of items to do so. It's extremely accessible, but also easily makes it where more skilled players can still experience a challenge without feeling like they're gimping themselves or not engaging with the game's mechanics (like, the game would be difficult in any mode if you never increased your health, for example, but at that point it just feels like you're handcuffing yourself in order to be able to enjoy the experience).

And, frankly, that's not always even a guarantee. I stocked up materials as needed (not a crazy amount, but far more than I did in the rest of the game) before the final boss, but the increased difficulty meant I'd burned through the majority of my resources and was actually at risk of dying by the time I made it through the final dungeon and confronted the last boss. That's... nice. Shantae games aren't the Dark Souls of Platformers or whatever, but they have traditionally demanded a modicum of skill from the player. This update brings Shantae that much more in line with the best games in the series.

It's probably worth mentioning that bosses have a bit of dialogue and actual character portraits now. These don't add a lot to the game (you get, maybe, 10 lines of new dialogue overall per boss encounter), but it does add that tiny little extra bit of polish to the experience. It's appreciated.

On top of this, three new modes have been added, although they... don't do much for me. Full Deck mode allows the player to start the game with a full deck of monster cards. As I mentioned in my review, those don't tend to dramatically alter the balance of the game, so I'm not fussed about this. Rule Breaker mode allows the player to equip as many monster cards as possible at once (up to 50). This seems like it might be fun to experiment with if you're into experimenting with different set-ups, but it primarily just makes the player character vastly unbalanced again, which isn't really appealing to me. Finally, an easy mode was added, which seems... unnecessary to me, but I guess it might be good for small children. Legacy Mode is already easy enough, though.

I'm bumping the score for this game up to an 8.5/10. There are certain design issues that mean it'll never be my favorite game in the series, but developer WayForward has done a good job of fixing the core issues I had with this game. It was already a very decent Metroidvania, and now it's an extremely decent one. Really enjoyed my time with this update.