Recent reviews by Aristile

Shaw!

Great Vidya Game.

First and foremost, it feels like a finished product. Everything is good-to-go out of the box. While it's unfortunate that the industry has come to this point, a finished product gets major bonus points from me these days.

The narrative is great from start to finish. The main-focus cast is kept relatively small for the genre allowing you to properly attach to everyone. While the back-of-the-box synopsis will get you interested along with the prologue, it's the narrative twists and revelations that are the bread and butter of keeping you playing. The TLDR here is that you REALLY should try to go in unspoiled or parts of the story simply won't hit right.

The dungeons all feel like they're the perfect length. No dungeon overstays its welcome, and no dungeon feels too short. The overworld steadily opening up more and more as you unlock new traversal upgrades throughout the game feels very ps1 era JRPG and I love it.

Combat is a great spin on the JRPG turn-based formula, with a little bit of classic Final Fantasy, some Paper Mario/Mario RPG timed hit and badge slot mechanics, a bit of the "Tales of" title system sprinkled in there, and someone on the combat team must've just come off their first playthrough of Sekiro with the dodge/parry system. This may sound like a hodge-podge of random signature elements from various games of the genre, but they managed to nail a mixture that feels very good and rewarding the entire way through the game.

The game also won't stop you from trying to punch WAY above your weight class. There are plenty of mini-boss enemies with the title of "Chroma" in their name sprinkled in most dungeons and throughout the overworld. If you try to fight them as soon as you see them, you'll probably get waffle-bopped, but there's nothing stopping you from beating your head into them over and over again until they finally fall over from you perfecting their parry timings. I had a ton of fun doing this and managed to take down about 70% of the ones I found on my way through the main game as soon as I saw them through raw bullheaded memorization.

I STRONGLY recommend you play on the hardest difficulty setting to best engage with the dodge/parry system. Playing on the hardest difficulty forces you to really engage with a boss and learn it's moveset like you're playing a from-soft inspired game. I found the feeling of slowly working towards being able to parry every attack a boss did over several attempts to be incredibly satisfying, but if you're mostly here for the story, don't worry, you can switch difficulty at any time at no penalty.

The music also goes hard for the entire duration of the game. I've even bookmarked some of the boss themes on Youtube to listen to them out of game.

My only warning to new players is that when you get to the very clearly telegraphed 3rd Act of the game, if you care anything about preserving the challenge of combat, do NOT go exploring and book it to the final dungeon. Don't worry about missing the optional and post-game content. After you beat the game you can reload your save right at the final rest flag and teleport out of the dungeon. Everything aside from the area marked as the main quest objective is 100% optional content that will radically over-scale you for the final dungeon and bosses of the main game if you do even 1-2 of them. You can ease this somewhat by un-equipping your ability to break the damage cap, resetting the stat points on all characters and re-allocating them to be around level 45 to 60, unequipping any picto over level 16, unequipping any post-game lumias, and switching to a weapon around level 18-20 for your characters. This is a huge slog though and involves personal judgement calls that are very muddy. I managed to get some of the challenge back by doing this, but still couldn't quite hit it right.

This game fell right in my wheelhouse. I've been a fan of old-school JRPGs since the SNES came out, but have slowly fallen out of love with the gameplay of the genre. Adding action and timing based mechanics without compromising the genre's turn-based nature was a welcome breath of fresh air. The story is also worth the asking price by itself.

If you're still on the fence, just go ahead and scoop it. ~35-80 hours of quality content is worth the 50 buckarooskies.

We Jongin'

A finished product in 2025? What is the madness. Good vidya.
Dunno a thing about DFO, but I don't care because the game is so fun and polished.

Good vidya, solid story, & fun action combat.
The game earns bonus points for letting you open the settings menu to tweak graphic settings, rebind keys/buttons, and invert the control stick as soon as you press the start button.

Despite the FF name this is an action game through and through. If you're a fan of Devil May Cry, you'll easily be able to see where they drew inspiration for a lot of the moves and abilities.

However, as usual with Squenix ports, this one could use a lot of optimization. You will almost certainly need to turn the grass and shadows to low if your GPU is has 8 or less gigs or is older than a Nvidia 30XX series. If you don't, parts of the game can easily suddenly become a stuttery mess at best or a completely slideshow at worst.
I was planning to upgrade my GPU for Monster Hunter Wilds early next year anyway, but went ahead and upgraded now from a 3070TI 8GB to a 4070TI Super 16GB. This game was approaching unplayable at some parts. Went from barely getting 20 fps at Martha's Rest on 1080p low settings to full 60fps at 1440p everywhere no problem.

The 60fps cutscene mod is also a must, but because cutscenes hammer the GPU harder than anything in this game, so you'll need a decent card to run it without issues.

Overall, it's a solid vidya, just know you need a chunky card for the best experience and that you are playing an action game with long cutscenes, not a JRPG.

Good vidya

Good Mon-Hun Lite Vidya.

Sheepa Sheepa Yeah! Sheepa Yo! Let's Go!

Good Vidya

one of the better vr games out there