Recent reviews by Dragonforce Changed My Life

EDIT: My opinion of the game has changed slightly. I think the writing is fine, the issue is story structure. The devs bit off more than they could chew financially. I think it's abundantly clear that they intended to have three campaigns, or at least significant time spent as Marisa/Seign doing their own recruiting and showing their perspectives, but in the finished product, you only get a chapter of each really. Ultimately, this hurts the flow of the story and there's a real rushed feeling to the back half of the game. Things just sort of happen and it feels like the bones of a story with missing connective tissue. I still think its worth playing, but it definitely doesn't rise to the level of Suikoden 2, so expectations should be tempered.

Translation/localization is fine. It's not Persona 4 quality -- few games are -- but its better than a lot of other JRPGs. I was expecting a trainwreck, but I've come to the conclusion that the people yelling about it in the comments are weird chud gamers angry about political stuff in a game that unavoidably has to be about politics. The Suikoden series is about wars, refugees, various cultures and ideologies mixing -- like an entire subplot in Suikoden 2 revolves around Twin River's racist reaction to Winger refugees and how they're not inherently bad, but driven to criminality and ♥♥♥♥ due to living in poverty. I'm sure they would have called that "woke" twenty years ago.

The actual writing is better than the old Suikoden games, but the tone is definitely the same. There's occasional zany ♥♥♥♥ happening, but that also happened in the old games, just occasional adies into hijinks and goofball characters.

Some of the complaints feel disingenuous, almost like they're arguing for a more literal translation, but very literal translations are awful. Like the reason Persona 5's translation is noticeably worse than Persona 4's is because 5's is frequently way too literal instead of a proper localization, which often robs the characters of a voice or makes everything feel very dry. Or think of Legend of Dragoon: cool game, technically a good story, but the writing is stilted and lifeless because its a slavishly literal, snore inducing translation.

If you like the Suikoden series, especially 1 and 2, or just classic RPGs, then the game is worth a buy. Voice acting so far is a little hit or miss, but with such a large cast that's to be expected -- though nothing has been outright terrible, a couple characters are a bit meh.

Game seems great, but dropping a negative review until the add an option to hide cloaks since they frequently bug out, warp inside the characters' bodies, stiff-pose outward as physics break, or just look like glitchy dogwater. Frequently takes me out of the game as I watch the physics freak out on capes. Truly baffling decision to not have a "hide cape" option separate from backpacks.

Honestly, if you like 40k or CRPGs, its absolutely worth a buy. Probably Owlcat's best work yet. That said, this is the third game with buggy capes + a weird refusal to allow hiding them.

They've fixed most of the issues.

game good

Jagged Alliance is back.

And it's great.

This game is poorly optimized. Where Warhammer 2 runs smooth with most settings on Ultra, this game will crap its pants. The campaign map is absurdly demanding, tanking 20-30 FPS just moving about, even on settings that remain a steady 60 in battle.

And to get that steady 60 in battle, the game ends up looking worse than WH2.

I guess the solution is to manually change graphics setting every time you hop between battle and campaign? Good luck! The game's load times are abysmal even on a SSD, often taking well over a minute to load back into the campaign map from battle.

These issues used to exist in WH2: absurd load times, poor optimization, but were eventually solved. So I guess SEGA/CA just kicked a poorly optimized game out the door again, and you'll have to wait another year or two for reasonable load times, optimized graphics, etc.

As of right now a simple campaign map is the most hardware intensive gaming experience I've had in the last few years, stuttering and turning my card into a jet engine in ways that Elden Ring or the RE4 Remake wouldn't dream of.

This game owns.

Want a character rich, dialogue heavy RPG with a great party and solid writing? And your party just happens to be a bunch of solid interpretations of Marvel mainstays along with some underappreciated occult weirdos?

Want an XCOM pedigree, skin of your teeth strategy game? How about coupling that with a quality bit of deckbuilding?

Want to enjoy the skinner box dopamine rush of constantly opening loot boxes, but its completely free instead of predatory BS?

What if we tied all those systems together so they fed into and reinforced one another?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, Midnight Suns has you covered.

Also has you covered if you want like a weird pseudo-dating sim where you become best bros with Blade by taking him fishing. Or give Deadpool a child's music box as a gift, while on a date picking mushrooms in a graveyard, because Dr. Strange took you aside and asked you to make him feel welcome on the team, then while doing so Deadpool tells you he's made action figures of the rest of the team and is making them kiss. Then as a reward for your bromance you get like an epic purple card that makes Deadpool shove a grenade up someone's ass or something. I dunno, this game is alright.

No ranked matchmaking. Ugly, gigantic UI with no options for scaling. Camera distance feels claustrophobic. Feedback, both audio and visual, in general feels worse than previous games. Apparently the campaign is completely busted, but I refunded after encountering multiple bugs where my settings and UI changes would revert every match in multiplayer.

The game feels like a beta. Maybe try back in 6 months to a year.

Maybe Chivalry 2 will have functional shields. Mordhau does not, and was fun when a variety of playstyles were viable, but the devs made shields incredibly clunky to use (you can no longer just hold up a shield like normal humans have been doing for millennia) so now everyone just runs around spinning in circles with two handers.

Mordhau mostly has performance problems and packet loss.

People complain about this being scummy. And it is.

But the real issue as that this is a poorly optimized pile of ♥♥♥♥ that will bring a 2080 to its knees and have you running at 20-30 fps by the middle of a battle.