Recent reviews by Knightly Knave

This is a little half baked. You just control so strangely. Your jumps are terrible and floaty and imprecise and the game requires you to be very specific in where you're landing and aiming in order to hit the enemies. The bosses take off so much of your health in one hit too. Was it like this back in the day as well? Maybe it was but I don't enjoy it anymore.

This game looks beautiful. It's pretty smooth action experience too. It's always hard to dodge things in third person over the shoulder but it does an okay job at it anyway. The voice acting is fantastic. The overall atmosphere and levels are very interesting. The story is dolled out slowly but also very good.
However, it's just too difficult. It's punishing. The rogue-like nature of it makes it far less fun and more frustrating than it needs to be. Even Dark Souls lets you just keep trying again and again at a boss without having to play the whole game over again from almost scratch every time. It's just too easy to die and too discouraging when you do.

I feel like it's only partially a game. You just walk around and click on enemies but the plot is so sparse and the only progress you can find is just moving on to the next area. The movement feels clunky and the sound effects and music are pretty bland. There's just something missing.

Just as good as the original but with the bugs quashed and a new orchestrated soundtrack and a better translation. It's a shame there's no GBA expansion content but otherwise it's the best version!

It apes the old Castlevania games pretty well. But, it doesn't add enough to that formula. After playing The Messenger and Infernax, I just need more than this to keep my interest. Also, it is punishingly difficult and I think that's on purpose but I would prefer a more gradual difficulty curve.

The problem is that it tries to do a fair number of things and does not excel at any of them. It might have been better with some of the elements removed and the others refined.
The premise is interesting, but the execution in getting there doesn't really work for me. The couple don't appear to have much chemistry especially when alive but even afterwards as well. They seem more of a mentor and apprentice relationship.
The individual investigations are structured in much too linear of a way. You can't miss anything, you have to get once piece of evidence after another and then you get to make your decision. But, you shouldn't just make any decision you want based on the scenario because the ending requires you to commit to doing the same accuse or ascend for every group. It would have been so much more interesting if the game encouraged you to be more invested and spend as much time investigating as you want so you could fail or make a rash decision and that your decision was based on the individual scenario not what you need to do for the meta progression.
The combat is very clunky. The camera feels terrible, especially since enemies spawn behind you all the time. Transitioning between the two people in combat never feels good. The special abilities don't feel good. And the level up tree requires you to remember a lot of mechanics (this only triggers after four week attacks, this one only triggers if you swap characters at a certain time) that just make it even more cumbersome. The enemies are also repeated over and over.
The dungeon exploration is boring and not always intuitive. There's a lot of chatter and sometimes it points out where to go in a way that's too obvious and sometimes it distracts from trying to navigate instead and gets you lost or stuck.
The actual voice acting is pretty solid overall. But, it doesn't ever really hit emotional peaks. The world building is okay, they make good use of the time frame to tell stories about being on the frontier.
So overall, this would have been better with the combat stripped out and the relationship dynamics between the characters reworked. Make the investigations more dynamic and the outcomes more meaningful.

A "Triple A" studio would never make this game. It's about something. It deconstructs the genre. I'd even say it's deep. It's got a beautiful but simple art style. It takes on dark subject matter. It's very queer. It's the perfect indie title and you should play it.

I played Mercenaries Blaze and Mercenaries Rebirth and liked them well enough. The writing and graphics hit their stride at that point, whereas this game and the first three are just too rough. The plots are not involved enough, the characters are flat and the animations are rough. The art style of the character portraits is nice and some of the music is good. I think I'll skip the rest of this one and try Mercenaries Lament instead.

Fantastic game! The pacing is rock solid, it kept me engaged the entire time. I've always wanted a game where "choices matter" and I think this game has done that better than any other. The crafting the cards is the icing on the cake. The characters are all really interesting and likeable as well. It really does make you think and feel.

It's just not a very good version of this series. It's focused on kingdoms instead of characters, it has very poor control support. The rock paper scissors mechanic for which weapons enemies are weak against is dull and annoying. Not a good evolution, the older games were better.