Recent reviews by mimizukari

Hidden gem of a game.

It's a classic dungeon crawler that's a mix of roguelike strategy & mystery dungeon with a lot of interesting depth added with the fact that it is a realtime fusion of the two game genres. There's a lot of fast action like sliding under tripwires, jumping over traps/fire/hazards and mixing in all the different things that monsters in the game can do make for an interesting learning experience with each run.

The difficulty scaling is pretty good, it starts off with tutorial level easy then ramps up explaining mechanics over time before throwing you in, by the time you get to the third set of dungeons it's already pretty difficult and the puzzles/fights that come later are no slouch either. It doesn't just drop off in difficulty, but instead gives you even more variety in how to build out your characters, tackle encounters and so on, none of which feels wasted or meaningless even later into the game's main story dungeon paths or even the randomized mapgeons.

Gave it a shot because NIS + trailer showed making Etna and I was going to copy that but... holy hell the customization you can do on characters & music is far beyond what I expected. It's almost like the old BYOND sprite sharing maps, you can explore other people's worlds and download characters from any anime/popular JP franchise you can think of practically. So not only is the game good with huge layers of depth but you can play as any character you want with any song you want all built with the in-game systems, no modding required.

I used to think Steam had a lack of mystery dungeon style games, clearly I wasn't looking hard enough, especially considering this is the fourth entry to this franchise apparently. Do not skip if you are a fan of mystery dungeon/roguelikes or even just NIS style menu management where you spend a bunch of time after grinding reworking your entire inventory and bonus effects for your characters.

The Best VR Game Ever Made... With a HUGE Asterisk

Let's get this out of the way immediately. Vanilla Skyrim VR is not what this review is about. If you buy this game, you are buying it with the expectation that you are going to spend a few hours (or more... let's be real) modding it. If you're not willing to do that, you can probably pass.

If you are willing to put in the work, you are in for what is, without any exaggeration, the single greatest and most immersive VR experience available today. Forget short tech demos or wave shooters. This is the only truly longform, open-world VR RPG that delivers hundreds of hours of content. Half-Life: Alyx was a fantastic, polished experience, but it's a short story. Skyrim VR is a whole second life.

The magic happens with a holy trinity of mods: HIGGS, VRIK, and PLANCK. These aren't just recommended; they are absolutely essential.

• VRIK gives you a full virtual body. You look down, you see your chest, your arms, your legs. It tracks your movements. This alone cranks the immersion up to eleven.
  
• HIGGS lets you physically interact with the world. You can pick up objects with your hands, grab loot directly, and even physically collide with items. Your hands aren't just floating controllers anymore.
  
• PLANCK builds on this by adding full player and NPC physics. You can physically push enemies, block their attacks with your weapon, and get shoved around yourself. Combat becomes a visceral, physical dance instead of a floaty waggle-fest.

When you combine these, you get something truly special. You're not just playing Skyrim; you are in Skyrim. Peeking around corners, physically drawing your bow, and seeing a dragon blot out the sun above you is an experience no other game has managed to replicate on this scale.

So, what's the catch? The big, ugly con?

This version of the game is stuck in time. It was never updated to the Anniversary Edition. This is a massive headache for the modding scene. A huge number of amazing mods created in the past few years are designed for the Special/Anniversary Edition of the game and are simply incompatible with the VR version. You will constantly run into amazing mods on Nexus that you just can't use. It requires a lot of careful reading and frequently using older versions of mods to get a stable load order. It's a significant limitation that holds the game back from its true, ultimate potential.

Even with that massive flaw, modded Skyrim VR is a masterpiece. It's a testament to the modding community that they have taken this game and elevated it to a god-tier VR title. It takes work, patience, and a willingness to troubleshoot, but the payoff is the most engrossing virtual world you can possibly lose yourself in.

Absolutely recommended, but only for the dedicated.

Persona 5 but mobile... Long setup phase but the story/cutscenes are interesting and the gameplay is pretty much just p5 but slightly watered down and you unlock more of the stuff as you play. You don't get full control for a while but if you're a fan of Persona 5 it's definitely worth checking out.

Mix of Kill La Kill's insanity/visuals with a bite-sized parody style like Boku to Roboko. Lots of fun moments & decent comedy, more of a plot than other bite-sized (8 min per ep) anime typically offer. ED song is great too.

more card game. specifically if they keep up with this schedule the game will always be on a 6 month delay for as long as they continue to support it, far better than dd1 release cycle.

Buggy launch with some card effects & especially translations but overall a straight upgrade from Dear Days 1 in nearly every way. Massively more content with roughly 9 expansions further than DD1 (kind of counting Clash of Heroes since it wasn't complete in DD1) PLUS 5 vintage boosters & 2 extra boosters for vintage play. So in terms of pricing given how the first game was priced you're easily paying for what is effectively like 3 card expansions worth of content on top of what was available in DD1 + all DLC for the singular $69.99 price that the game's currently offered at.

There's also more npcs to free fight, also you can free fight npcs in vintage, online is smooth, more cosmetics to earn and the only real "downgrades" I think is that when you expand a special card such as FFR or even the new mermaid text cards you get a high quality like 75% art picture instead of seeing the special border & other effects on the card, also we lost the button that lets you easily go back to your hand in a duel, I believe in DD1 it was pressing the "a" button. That said, the art when expanded does seem to be higher quality than we had in DD1 and I've noticed a lot of little things about some card arts that I hadn't noticed before so kind of neutral on this specific point.

Deck building is massively improved, even if there's one thing that's a little odd, text search doesn't allow you to immediately change your query or filters whilst in text search, but the UI itself is so much more usable and it's so much easier to grab the cards you want for a deck, one little tip is that if you mouse over a card and press "2" it will go into ride deck instead of main deck so you don't have to switch from ride deck/main deck mode when adding cards to your deck, especially useful if you have an MMO mouse.

Shop interface is also a lot more manageable divided by series & packs in a vertical scrolling format vs the old horizontal scroll that made you go one by one. Really just overall the UI of the game has seen a massive upgrade in many areas which make it a lot easier to find what you need without wasting much time. Also, currently there's a secret in the shop if you press "Q" and search the text "APPLEJUICE9590", it will unlock a deck & character.

The card pool this time is only roughly 6 months behind and it looks like they'll continue with updates to keep it roughly 6 months behind, at least for now so it's in a much better place than DD1 was and hopefully they can continue to support it for longer than DD1 to keep interest high in this game being the "definitive" standard/DivineZ format game.

Overall, return to best card game again, only problem with the simulator aspect is decks that have a lot of effects since they still have to go one by one with animation and pause time between each one which was a problem with a certain DD1 deck, but haven't seen anyone play that deck yet in DD2, doesn't seem like anything's changed on that front, though. Still far better value and a better gameplay experience than similar titles like Master Duel... On that note, unlike Master Duel you can actually play Vanguard and it's far more interactive/engaging with the back and forths, you could win with any of the 90+ ridelines in the game even if you have to struggle a bit giving a much better experience overall.

Free weekend sold me on it. Few interesting things this year like the sleeper agent mechanic which reminds me of moles in the counter-strike 1.6 WC3mod, the changes to zombies since I last played and a few other things...

Largely it's just a new Call of Duty entry so you should pretty much know what to expect if you've played the previous games, the new movement systems added in this are probably the most game changing new change; and it feels good such as being able to sprint/dive backwards and move all around while prone and so on.

Only real gripes: 1. Gunfight isn't selectable outside of when it's an ongoing special playlist thing. 2. Performance... But performance has always been kind of weird for COD on PC. I'm not necessarily lagging/glitching out during gunfights, yet it's not flawless. Whenever i pick up a weapon off the ground that my PC has never seen before there's a noticeable hiccup, and other small things like that but nothing as gamebreaking as the countless crashes & abyssmal performance I heard of from MW 3.

The king of arena fighters returns with Budokai Tenkaichi 4.

It is a straight upgrade from not only Budokai Tenkaichi 3 but also the combat mechanics of Xenoverse 2, taking everything good from both series and turning it into this singular ultimate arena fighter. Aside from things like beam struggles being back amongst other things the combat is fast, fluid, feels intuitive and has more depth than any previous Dragon Ball game.

The story(episode mode) is very interesting, as if you take certain actions you can branch off into entire what-if routes until they're completed. For instance, if you're able to defeat Raditz quickly you'll be able to completely change the trajectory of the saiyan/namek arc, causing Goku to never meet with King Kai and need to turn Super Saiyan to defeat Vegeta. So it's not just your stock standard play through the story like you have 20 times before in every other game, there's some actual depth to it and tons of branching paths to explore across the 8 playable characters. Do keep in mind though that the game absolutely prioritizes its combat/gameplay elements over the story, you aren't getting a Dragon Ball Z Kakarot or Tenkaichi 2 level storytelling experience here, but it's enough, especially with how it covers all the major story beats of Z/Super and multiple what-if routes.

Then there's the Custom Battle mode, if you've played Super Dragon Ball Heroes before you effectively know what it is, but you're able to completely set up custom scenarios, with even more control, being able to set triggers that occur when conditions are met, special win/lose conditions, add in dialog and make your completely own what-if scenarios, or perhaps recreate scenes that don't yet exist in the game like iconic movie battles customized nearly down to the last detail.

From the custom battles I've played that other people have made I have been very surprised at the amount of controllable things you have access to and in the future I wouldn't be surprised if every missing battle in the game was recreated, as well as very good custom what-if scenarios. The only downside to this is that it's very hard to search for specific dialog/speakers/etc, if you're going all in on making a custom scenario a lot of time could be spent just looking for what you need as you don't have the ability to freely manipulate dialog outside of character names/locations, and even then only existing ones on a list.

This game doesn't have the absolute plethora of game modes you might expect from a BT title, but they did go all-in on the World Tournament, allowing extreme customization of various tournament modes, some of which even make use of new mechanics to this title, such as switching in a fighter FighterZ style during the Tournament of Power. And to emphasize the previous point of how customizable the custom battles are I have no doubt that people will be able to make games within games or extremely unique matches with special conditions that fill the void of the missing content like Sim Dragon (RIP).

There's a few bugs here and there like enemies staying down instead of getting up or AI getting slightly bugged and ignoring you for a bit but those things can likely be fixed in upcoming patches, I don't even think we've had the day 1 patch yet so lots will likely be fixed as time goes on.

All in all this is a superb arena fighter experience and a game I'll probably find myself playing even more than TEKKEN 8, other things like the music and visuals are also at the very top of their game, at one point in a fight I got immersed enough that it felt like a scene straight out of the anime. 10/10 would go super sand with kakacarrot cake again.

The second collection is where things get spicy. Patch cards, dark chips, even turn-based strategy/tactics gameplay(BN5), the culmination of everything that made the earlier games good amplified with new things to do and see. Though some of the games may get a little repetitive (such as 4) the quality of the combat and overall gameplay is perfected throughout the 3 titles present in the second half of the collection.

Mega Man Battle Network 3 may still be many people's favorite, but you're definitely missing out if you don't play through at least 5&6. Arguably some people might advise you skip 4 but I'm pretty sure that at least I've played 4 more than 2 at the very least.

If you can only get one of the collections, this is the one I'd recommend due to having a lot more stuff to do, chips to collect, the most refined combat of the series as well as the inclusion of the Patch cards which allow you to alter Mega Man in ways not seen prior to the 4th title, as well as offering some additional bonus content/missions. The first collection is full of grind and while not bad doesn't really live up to today's standards (except for 3), in this package you get 2 great titles, and one mid-tier title with playtimes far exceeding 1&2 which makes it more than worth it over Vol 1.

Good adaptation of the card/board game; though with some bugs. Often in multiplayer matches I find I have to exit/reopen the game or someone else has to in order to continue the game due to the options not appearing for us; but the core of the game works fine & it's better than playing it on Tabletop Simulator at least.

Some of the animations are slow but it's not too big of a deal if playing with others since there'll be chat & banter going on usually.

Currently contains the first two expansions (unnatural axe & clerical errrors), looking forward to future expansions and the future of the digital game in general if it keeps getting updates.