Recent reviews by Babypuncher

I mean, if you like Star Trek, this'll basically be your best way to just go ahead and disappear into Star Trek's universe.

If you don't like Star Trek...first off, you're an idiot, but secondly, this game is still surprisingly decent. The space combat's pretty fun. Ground combat is...functional. Mostly bad, but not so bad that it's not functional. Skip ground combat whenever you can and you'll be golden here.

The free to play seems pretty generous, but I'm a lifetime subscriber so I don't really know if it is exactly as it seems or if there's some glaring issue with it I'm oblivious to. For what I know and see, it seems pretty easy to play and enjoy the whole game even if you don't want to pay anything at all.

STO also gets frequent content, QoL and main series tie-in events, and the seasonal events are both rewarding and usually a pretty good time for all.

Just skip that ground combat as often as you can. Everything is made better in STO life that way. It's pretty bad.

SO: TLH is a generally poor follow-up to the spectacular Star Oceans 1, 2 and 3. It's not a new game anymore, certainly not by the time I got around to writing this review, but it is indeed a game, and it does the Star Ocean thing.

So apparently it's a Star Ocean game.

Just don't go looking for strong characterization (there really isn't any; they're all weird and unrealistic in often over the top ways that smack of bad writing and general shallowness); it isn't here.

It's not terrible though. The gameplay's fine. The characters are boring weird AF JRPG third-rate manga tropes that add exactly nothing memorable but also don't really deviate from their tropes either.

Ever heard the saying 'C's get degrees'?

This game got its 'I'm A Real Game' degree with straight C's.

It excels nowhere and leaves a lot of potential on the table, but doesn't really strike out hard anywhere either.

It might be a more interesting game if it did.

Getting this to run on Windows 10 is a study in futility, because even when you manage it, it will be in windowed mode and will still crash out on you entirely too often. The game seems alright, especially if you're an oldschool Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale fan, but a game I can't play is a game I can't recommend.

I've tried so very hard to like this game. I love most of the single player Final Fantasy games, but what I love most about them is that they have a gripping story that feels, to me, like I'm playing a great novel, or series of novels.

FF14:ARR didn't feel like that in vanilla at all. The vanilla game was very boring and an abysmal slog to me by comparison, chiefly because it dawdled so long on things that I felt weren't useful or necessary to moving the story forward. It spends A LOT of time on fed-ex and collect-bear-asses quests that I find to be nothing more than filler, and it tries super hard to stretch a single plot point out into twenty go-here-fetch-this-go-there-talk-to-so-and-such quests.

That changes a bit in Heavesnward. Heavensward felt to me like it almost became a proper Final Fantasy game, and I very much enjoyed my whole playthrough of the Heavensward content. It's an excellent expansion with a story that starts strong and keeps punching clear through to its magnificent conclusion.

And then you hit Stormblood, which feels to me like an abandonment of everything good about Heavensward in favor of returning to what made vanilla ARR suck - excruciating filler, stretching a single plot point out into 10-20+ meaningless fetch, fed-ex or collect-bear-asses quests and not nearly enough gripping story. It gets much more interesting at the very back end when you're ramping up to the conclusions, but Stormblood felt so boring to me that I quit the game twice, for several months each time, because I just couldn't stay interested in it.

I'd log in, spend sometimes upward of 8-10 hours playing and hammering out main story quests and be left feeling like I basically did nothing, got nowhere and couldn't for the life of me remember a single genuinely interesting thing that happened the whole time. Was it all technically germane to the story unfolding? Sure.

And yet, I feel that if Stormblood were a movie, it would be one of those artsy movies that's 12 hours long and makes you watch the protagonist sleep, in realtime, for 8 of those hours. Just...lay there, sometimes toss and turn, sometimes move around a little bit, maybe get up once in the middle of the night and seem almost like they might maybe possibly do something interesting but they actually just needed to pee, and then went back to sleep for three hours.

And when they finally get up and get moving, you have to watch every...single...thing they do in their morning ritual. You have to watch them brush their teeth, from beginning to end. You have to watch them pick out a shirt and trousers. If it takes them 14 minutes to make and eat breakfast, you're watching them make and eat breakfast for 14 minutes. And you're getting a completely unnecessary close-up of the floral print on their coffee cup for four of those minutes.

Stormblood takes everything I felt was wrong about vanilla ARR and makes it somehow worse. Whether you agree or not is entirely your own, but me...I think I'm pretty much permanently done with FF14 because of it.

Whether or not this particular MMO is for you, I've been left feeling too often like it's a game that tries far too hard to waste my time on meaningless drivel while scraping too little good story out over too many bedamned fetch, fed-ex and collect-bear-asses quests.

It's a bloody good time. If you like single player RPG's, and final fantasy in particular, this is a must play.

Pretty good game. If you like reasonably open worldish RPG gaming, the Risen series in general puts up some respectable offerings, with Risen 3 being the prettiest, most polished and most colorfully diverse of the lot.

Its pretty fun to play, altogether solo friendly if you prefer that, but forget endgame if you're not willing to spend hundreds to thousands of $, or even more hours on arcane farming and grinding strategies to get endgame gear.

It isn't pay to win by the thinnest of technicalities in this respect, but if you're not terribly concerned with having best in slot gear at enchants for your gear, you can have a lot of fun.

But you'd best believe that if you let yourself get bit by the competetive itch, be it for PVP or progression in PvE, you're going to pay dearly for it in time, dollars or both. You will not get around that. The grind will impress you, even if you think you're accustomed to grinding.

I liked this one a lot better than Zestiria, to which it is a prequel. In terms of exploration, its a lot like Tales of Xilia, which is middle of the road for my interests - I prefer a more open world exploration experience, but this type is acceptable to me.

Pros
- best combat since Tales of Graces, though Graces is still better IMO.
- You're the villains (kind've) for once rather than the sappy, over-the-top SuperGood protagonists common to Tales games
- Excellent system and settings options. This isn't a crappy port, yo!

Cons
-It feels like there's just less to do in the game than in older Tales offerings. I'm not sure if this is objectively true, but by the time I cleared it @ about 34 hours, I was left feeling very much like...'That's it, huh? Something's missing'. I'm just not entirely sure what. But something is definitely missing.

-The DLC is junk. Don't buy it unless you like spending money on cosmetic frippery in a single player game.

Overall: Well recommended

Its a solid, non-standard entry in the venerable Tales series. Storywise, its a fair bit grittier and darker than is common for a Tales game, but it does it just nice.

Couldn't even get through the tutorial without dying a bajillion times. Accidentally removed a power from the hotkey bar and had nowhere to retrieve it from. I gave it about an hour, and that's all its getting from me.

An excellent port with all the right upgrades for new and old fans of FF9 or the entire franchise to pick up.

If you like FInal Fantasy or oldschool JRPG's in general, you really can't go wrong here.

Cons (Such as they are): Character sprites and numerous models have been updated, but there is not (as of the time of this writing) any high definition backgrounds. That said, this should prove to be no issue at all if you already love the game.

Additionally, if you want to use the cheats built into this version of FF9, you have to use the Function keys to toggle them. As of this writing, the port developers haven't made that overly clear or self explanatory and it can be a bit unobvious if you don't know what to push to toggle them and don't know exactly what you're looking for to tell if they're on or off.

Pros: Excellent PC port with some graphical and gameplay updates from the original version. Squaresoft was at the top of their game in the FF7/FF8/FF9 years, and FF9 is a worthy culmination of that era with a memorable cast of characters, an engaging and often heartwarming storyline as well as a great deal of potential challenge, secrets and an expansion on one of the most addictive collectible card based mini games I've ever encountered in an RPG.