Recent reviews by SotiCoto

6/10 sort of game. Bought it for Aggressive Retsuko. Stayed because it is an ascended South Park meme.

... No, actually stayed because of the flowers.
I mean it is a cosy sort of game, but once you burn through all the quests there is little left to do. The ONLY part of the game that persists is the everlasting quest for rare flowers. Also the fact that I have ONE ACHIEVEMENT LEFT TO GET... and I won't be able to get it for about half a year....
That Milk achievement is so bad....
When I finally get Milk and have finished the game I'll probably be wondering why the hell I dedicated so much of my life to this insanity... but hey... it still is kinda cosy.

Just stay away from the Official Discord. It is a crapsaccharine tyranny. They banned me without warning for posting, and I quote: "👉 👉 👉 📬 ❗" ... Yeah. Officially THE stupidest reason I've ever been banned from anything ever.

Nope. I don't recommend this game.

Don't get me wrong. The basic gameplay is great fun. I love the combat. I love the deliveries. I love razzing about on bikes and ziplines. Great fun...

BUT... and this is a big but. Like some major booty here...

The setting, the story, the worldbuilding.... it is nonsense. Complete and utter nonsense. It varies between just "what the hell" and outright pseudoscientific horsesh!t that is frankly insulting. Plus they kill the ONLY character worth a damn while all the other disposable bellends survive (which is the reason I never played Dead Rising, funnily enough)... and disrespect her corpse into the bargain.

The music is intrusive and awfully mismatched to the game. You do NOT put background music with vocals playing during gameplay... let alone have it cut out the sound effects. It INTERFERES with the gameplay, and the tone of the music is all wrong. It is an abomination.

BUT.... it gets worse.

The ending. The freaking ending.
The real proper ending to the game comes when you beat Higgs. If that had been the end, it would have been great...
The game COULD have ended when you fight Clifford Unger in the vietnam war scene. That would have been fine...
BUT NO...
After travelling all the way back across the central region you then have to travel all the way back across the eastern region.... where the game has deleted EVERYTHING YOU EVER BUILT THERE.... and populated a whole section of the map with duplicating enemies that take FOREVER to clear out. Just a huge huge waste of time.
There are a few repeated fights on the way back, and one new boss whale fight which is the honest last decent part of the game, if rather simplistic.
But then you go to hell. You get dumped on the beach, made to "choose" except it is a fake choice and you can only do one thing... then you run about and get teleported back to your starting point for ages while the credits roll and more disgustingly obnoxious music plays...
Then when you escape there are MORE infodump cutscenes...
Then just when that is over you have to go back to where you went at the beginning of the game.... except it doesn't let you have any gear and forces you to listen to EVEN MORE AWFUL MUSIC.... which eventually leads into more asinine cutscenes showing you things you've already seen.... and Sam behaving like a complete pillock and destroying the precious gift Mama left him before she died.
AND THEN THERE IS A SECOND UNSKIPPABLE CREDIT SEQUENCE...
...and a brief fake-out...
AND EVEN MORE CREDITS...

And just when you finally get back to the room magically back in time.... THEY KEEP TALKING AT YOU.

I could scream. The ending was agony. Everything after the whale fight and a fair bit of what came before it was AWFUL. TERRIBLE. EXECRABLE. And the whole time it was bombarding me with awfully sh!tty music I couldn't do anything to avoid.
It utterly ruined the game for me.

So... basically... if you do play the game, play until you've beaten Higgs, or Cliff... or the whale.... definitely stop at the whale. Close the game. Uninstall it. You've completed everything worth completing in the game.

I want to like this Remaster... but I really can't recommend it as it is.
What kind of insane idiots would make a non-strategy game of any sort in 2025 and NOT give it proper controller support? It was weird enough that the PC version of the original Oblivion didn't have proper controller support given the Xbox 360 version worked perfectly. But even without official support, it was easy enough to play Oblivion with a controller even on PC.
The Remaster though is debilitatingly awful with a controller. Sometimes the movement or camera rotation get stuck for no reason and other times they suddenly drift way off point even without any input. It isn't my controller's fault. I actually opened up a brand new controller just to be sure and it had the same problems as my previous one right from the start. Other games play fine. Even original Oblivion plays fine. But this remaster is a nightmare where I have to move exceedingly slowly to even fight without spinning uncontrollably around or suddenly dashing off to one side unprompted.
I don't know how any company can get this so horribly wrong. Not everybody wants to lower themselves to the utter dreck of WASD. Controller Support has been standard since before Steam even existed, yet here this "Virtuos" have somehow managed to take a game without proper support and actually make it WORSE rather than better.

ANYWAY...
As for the rest of the game...

~ They've kept most of the old Oblivion stuff, for better or worse. No bugs patched. Still crashes as much as Oldblivion. Apparently the Jyggalag fight now crashes almost everyone's game.
~ The old scroll duplication glitch no longer works, but there is another duplication glitch involving containers instead.
~ Speaking of containers, if you put too many items in a container, it starts hiding them. Especially 125 health equipment upgraded by the Armorer skill. Apparently this bug was in Oldblivion but I never encountered it there. It has to be a lot more sensitive now. I've had to stop hoarding because of this. Major downer.
~ They've utterly ruined the levelling system so it is complete garbage now. Very disappointed by that. Levelling is no longer the fun experience it used to be, but simply a mindless slog.
~ They've also mucked up the character creator, not only with the pointless "Type 1" / "Type 2" political bullsh!t .... but also by preventing the sliders influencing each other, so it is now impossible to make some of the truly obscene monstrosities that made the original Oblivion so hilarious.
~ The game actually looks graphically decent now, and some of the faces a little less potato...
~ The "Deluxe Edition" is apparently steaming garbage, so I've not bothered with it.
~ All the old DLC content is included, but the player isn't spammed notifications about it at the start, so that is a step in the right direction, I guess.

So anyway... I think I'll have to give it a 4/10. Might be upgraded to a 6 if they could fix ALL the Controller issues. Would even get as high as a 7 if they brought back the old levelling system. But as it stands you're better off playing Oldblivion.

Yeah, its alright.

# Pros
+ : The art is decent for an RPGMaker game.
+ : Wholesome. No rape.

# Cons
- : The combat scaling is an absolute mess.
- : The weapon skill achievements are a grindy nightmare.
- : Sakura is a filthy little heretic who cooks karaage and there is no option to reject it once you know what is happening.


I'll just leave it at that.

Should be renamed "Growing up IN MURICA" complete with an M-16 in one hand and a McDonalds happy meal in the other, stars & stripes all over the place, and exuberant yank-noises. The game presents a thoroughly bizarre and alien experience of childhood for anyone European.

I HATE the fact that it autosaves constantly and there are no do-overs. Some parts of it are massively unintuitive, and trying to find the same character a second time to fix what went wrong the first time is nigh on impossible. Like who the hell thought that was a good idea?

Also that scene where the father recommends to his teenage daughter that she should try to be more attractive made me recoil inside myself in disgust. What the hell is with those parents?

Ah... this one.
Let me tell you a little anecdote...

I hadn't even had Steam for very long when I started playing this game.
I wanted to do everything I could in it, but it was very daunting. Tales games can get pretty complicated and non-linear sometimes if you want to do all the side-content. I'd come to this from Tales of Vesperia, so it was several steps back in terms of combat style ad all that.... so it felt kinda uncomfortable.
I reached a point where I wasn't entirely sure whether I'd screwed up sidequests or not. I was trying to follow a guide and accidentally went the wrong way because the instructions were terrible... and I got completely lost. Well... I ended up parking it. I parked it for AGES... years even.

Then at some point I decided I couldn't tolerate there being so many incomplete games on my account, so I went through them all one by one. And this one was the last. The one I'd parked the longest. The most insanely daunting 100% of all the things I'd left unfinished.

Well... in the end it wasn't too bad. I did start the game over from scratch, but the second time I followed everything through perfectly. didn't miss a step... and got to experience a pretty fun story. Not as good as Tales of Vesperia, but still pretty good. And I felt satisfied when I finally got the 100% for it.

Still.... the sheer amount of time and effort it took has put me off committing to any other Tales games since then. Take that as you will.

I still haven't got around to playing the later South Park games...
But no matter. This game was awesome. Very true to the spirit of South Park. And a pretty decent RPG besides.

Play it for the memes.
Stay because it is genuinely a fun game.
Probably the last good Sonic game. I mean I quit playing Sonic games after this. The franchise died for me after this... but I had fun while it lasted.

I like this one too... though I remember it being a tad more difficult than the first Overlord game. A few stages towards the end were particularly troublesome.
Still.... same basic feel. Fun times. Good humour, colourful, cartoony graphics... all good stuff.

The reasons my Overlord playthrough had so few hours on it was because I installed this updated version halfway through without realising it was just going to take over the same files or somesuch...
It basically is just Overlord. Just with a bit more or something.
And Overlord is awesome... ergo this is awesome. Same comments about light-and-soft villains vs actually bad villains applies.