Another year, another list. I might see if I can put in games where I play them a lot but not necessarily complete them - it seems weird not to put in something like Beatmania IIDX when for part of the year it's pretty much the only game I play.
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PS4/Vita - 3/5 37 hours for the main story. Got sick of the instant kill bullshit in the end and just cheesed the final boss in Easy. It's got a lot of good ideas for a dungeon crawler - the way that skills are learned in battle like Saga, the way that enemy hate is handled (it's one of the few RPGs I've seen which makes defending really matter) and the whole modern day occult setting is pretty good. There's a section in the middle which is really well done and properly brings the game together with El Shaddai that I really enjoyed. It just has too many niggling issues though; the Vita version runs so badly (and doesn't support Vita TV, infuriatingly), the game has separate trophy lists for each version which don't share, and the whole interface is about half a second too slow in every action. It takes about 30 seconds on the PS4 to revive and return a summon to your team from the menus because they're so slow and unresponsive. You have to quit and restart the entire game, which takes a full minute on Vita, if you want to upload a network shared save, because you can only do it from the title screen. My biggest fault in the end ended up being something which happens in other games but is particularly egregious here - if the main character dies it's instantly game over. The worst part is that there doesn't seem to be any kind of defence against instant kills, and so you can just be told to do the fight again because the random number generator rolled a 1. The last few bosses just ended up with the two main characters just kind of cowering in defence, hoping not to die from a stray attack/group hit, while my summoned "astrals", 20+ levels above them, just pounded away on the enemy. They clearly know it's an issue as well as there is a system where you can retry from just before the fight you died in for a fee, and that fee is tiny. All it does is waste your time and I can't help that that (plus the too-slow XP gain for the main characters compared to the Karma points you use to level up your astrals) is in service of getting that first clear time closer to 40 hours. In the end, frustrating and ordinarily I'd say that they'll get it right next time but I don't think there will be one. If you're interested, definitely pick it up for PS4 and don't worry about turning down the difficulty at the end, or enjoy the grinding. It's fairly well set up for that.
PC - 5/5 Does what Toukiden did and made a game that I'd repeatedly bounced off - in this case Demon's Souls - and made it fun. The mission structure and the faster/higher damage combat is what made it for me. A friend explained the appeal as them making it so just pressing buttons is fun, and I think that's it. I really appreciated the stances and some of the movesets really clicked. Seeing all those Sengoku characters with new designs and voices was great too.
Switch - 3/5 Definitely an improvement on the previous game but still a long way from the heights of the Dusk series, which are some of my favourite JRPGs ever. Not a great start with some initially hard-to-like characters but it's pretty good once it picks up, only to have all the wind sucked out of it by a massive, gigantic difficulty spike right at the end.
Switch - 5/5 Fantastic action game, running better than ever on Switch. the decreased loading times felt like a big upgrade, almost as big as the generally smoother framerate. In portable mode it's simultaneously the most and least appropriate game to play on a commute. Classic!
Switch - 3/5 Decent enough, with a great soundtrack, but really short. 4:36 with 100% of the map isn't quite enough for nearly 20 quid. Also dropped quite a lot of frames on Switch, even after the performance patch.
Switch - 5/5 Good version of a great game. A better game in most ways than The Mummy was, with a lot of little bits of map cleverness I'd forgotten about since 2015. Little bit of stutter on the Switch but no slowdown, even when there's loads of stuff disintegrating with that cool effect. Only real issue is the way they make B the confirm button as they didn't think to decouple Confirm and Jump.
PS4 - 4/5 A great JRPG, excellent writing with some great characters (too many of whom are kind of forgotten by the end of the story, unfortunately) and a really good battle system. It's great to play semi automatically because of one of the intelligent auto battle systems I've seen (it's very good at hitting weak points and making sure not to overkill stuff), but when the bosses come along there's still plenty for you to do in terms of buffs, debuffs and other special skills. The final battle in particular has a couple of fun little gimmicks and genuinely gave me some trouble. My first big issue is the sound, specifically two areas: music and voice. First, the music. Obviously the big issue is that it's composed by noted shitbag and war crime denier Koichi Sugiyama. Aside from that, due to said shitbag the music is entirely in a low quality recorded MIDI format which sounds like it's being played through some default orchestral synth from 20 years ago. This is not good enough for a game which cost nearly 10,000 yen new. The issue on the voice side is - there isn't any. Again, a 70 quid game. Finally, there's a little bonus you can get when completing the game with the true ending if you have sharp eyes. I won't go into detail as it's a bit of a spoiler in general but it's introduced in a clever way. I carry out the little bonus thing and... it was taken down from PSN at the end of January. What the fuck, guys?! Again, 70 quid game and you can afford a fancy little intro but not the ability to keep an item you own online for more than six months? Talk about ruining the moment. The payoff for 75 hours is "fuck you, too slow"?
PS4 - 3/5 Tough one to rate this; I had a lot of fun playing it and the voice artists seemed to be in competition to see who could be the most over-the-top, but it's way to short; three hours for the campaign. It's a short single character campaign for a normal Basara but those games have campaigns for more than one character! If I'd bought it at full price I'd have been really mad but playing it on PS Plus for free seemed fair enough. I'd say 4/5 on free play but 1/5 at full price. There's no reason why the individual levels at least couldn't have been as long as normal SB stages. If they'd had that size story for the four main characters it'd have been fair, I think. As it is though, I don't think it makes for a product you can sell for any more than a very small price.
Switch - 5/5 Great port and a great game when it's on - but so many rough edges. Hammering buttons, instant death QTEs and some overlong minigames are usually overcome by some great fighting. When you get into the rhythm and it becomes a self-fulfilling machine of carnage it's completely brilliant, and that's why this is the fourth time I've bought it.
PS4 - 4/5 I think this was about as good as it could have been. The combat is fun in that slightly irritating way that RGG often is, it doesn't take itself too seriously and there's plenty to do - though it does get a bit fetch quest-y at points. I don't think the ending quite gets there, though, and it's been clearly made to a budget/timeline. I'm no FOTNS fan but it's definitely the best game made with that licence I've played.