Ratchet & Clank (PS2)

The first Playstation was known for its two Western-developed platformers: Crash and Spyro, by Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games, fittingly both teams working in the same building. Both those series were later left in the hands of other developers, as for the next generation the duo was joined by Sucker Punch and three iconic lines were born for the PS2 - Jak & Daxter, Ratchet & Clank and Sly Cooper. Of those, only the middle one is still going strong, and surprisingly, the duo is still all in Insomaniac’s hands, despite them also being knee-deep in developing Marvel stuff for Sony. Surely there must be something special in these games. I played the first game remastered on the PS3.

You’re playing an acrobatic and very selfish (obnoxiously so - seriously, Ratchet is an unbearable asshole in this game) cat-like creature and his companion, a failed but very matter-of-fact robot named Clank, which doubles as a double jump mechanism. The game takes you through over 15 different planets for a mix of shooting and platforming. You are to find the galaxy’s superhero to enlist him to defeat an evil businessman and his nefarious housing scheme, at least until circumstances make you take matters into your own hands.

The gameplay, for its time, was a unique take on an objective system - you have to get to a specific point on the map to get a new gadget or access to a new planet. Some routes are gated off until you get some new ability. While this sounds interesting on paper, in essence, it means having two or three “levels” on each planet, starting in the same place, but then branching off to an entirely separate section - each being some sort of a skill gauntlet. It’s similar in approach to games like Super Mario Galaxy in this way, but somehow a bit more boxed-in. There’s also a bigger issue at play here. The platforming is mostly really basic, largely uninteresting and often just boring. There are some shining exceptions to this, mostly leading to some secret areas, but they are few and far between. The camera will also be hindering your style as it always seems to be interested more in pointing to the scenery instead of what's under your feet.

The second side of the coin is combat. You get a cool choice of over a dozen guns in the arsenal, ranging from mines to heat-seeking missiles. For the most part though, combat will be done with your trusty wrench, which has a simple 3-hit combo and a short-range throwing attack. And the wrench is always the best choice since not only do you need a lot of ammo to play with the other stuff, the shooting in this game is pretty undercooked in my opinion. A lot of the weapons are pretty situational, those which are all-purpose mainly suck or are a victim of the broken targeting system. Whenever you’re moving towards an enemy, a reticle appears, which in theory is where you’ll shoot your weapon. In practice any move or jump will change or disable the reticle, making you shoot at nothing. Of course, you could stand still, but the enemies will not waste a second and will gun you down instead. It’s like fighting against a broken system rather than the enemies. It’s a nightmare.

This is sad, because there’s a lot of cool stuff there, from a flamethrower to a suck gun and even a rocket you can steer yourself. But because you’re fighting the game, everything needs to be fired from a distance and carefully, making the latter half of the game feel like a chore. Whenever you fail, it doesn’t feel like your fault and to infuriate you more, you’re being brought back to a very, very distant checkpoint, so you need to go through the same boring stuff again. What’s interesting is that some stuff is maintained through the attempts, some is not. One of the things that’s kept is your ammo spent, so to get a second chance you’ll have to rebuy it from a nearby vendor. But the money does not reset, so if you take particularly long, you’re better off restarting the save and trying again from the start of the stage.

You’ll be collecting a lot of money throughout the game, but never enough to get everything - the game encourages withstanding it over again multiple times to get more and more. Thankfully, the late-game bolt magnet stays between the playthroughs, so if you’re into that, collecting is a bit faster. Money is also used for plot gating and a lot of other stuff with multiple jabs at capitalism thrown in. The funniest part is saving up money and ordering more missiles during the battle works as the best strategy for the final boss.

There are also some utility gadgets for light and/or tedious puzzles, along with a Spider-Man swinging prototype from Insomniac, but due to a clunky system of choosing all your gadgets, it takes a while to use them. There’s some other stuff, like racing, rail-grinding, dogfights, artillery shooters and Clank’s lemmings-style puzzle levels, but nothing truly interesting. It’s great that the variety is there, though.

There’s some diversity in the levels, yet the theme is “futuristic alien structures”, so in the end, it all starts feeling pretty the same, with “space city but fire”, “space city but water” and “space city but swamp”. The cutscenes are great and work together with the great humour the game has, but there’s something strange with the jarring cut from gameplay to movie (like in the PS1 Spyro games). The music, on the other hand, is pure 90s electronica goodness with some espionage-sounding tracks thrown in. Nothing’s really an earworm in itself, but if you ever hear those songs again, you will be able to tell it’s Ratchet and Clank.

It’s not a bad game, but thanks to a lot of missteps, it’s not a good, or even enjoyable game either. Towards the end, I felt like I was just forcing through to the end with no pleasure. I hear the next games deemphasize platforming and focus on real combat. I’m looking forward to those for sure.

Some distinctly “Ratchet & Clank” music, all from David Bergeaud
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti-jrTI0tpM Veldin - Kyzil Plateau
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-kxKay1WiY Novalis - Tobruk Crater
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGyP1dWj4OY Kerwan - Metropolis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGP3eS5Y0LE Aridia Outpost X11
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jvFKBSHgUI Nebula G34 - Clank In Space
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypCQ_e2XgLM Rilgar - Sewer Escape
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGXcddME7Kg Pokitaru - Jowai Resort
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HusUf80usOs Pokitaru - The 'Scenic' Sewers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c906eLzscLM Oltanis Orbit - Gemlik Base

Astalon: Tears of the Earth (NSW)

Search Action as a type of game, has had a huge number of flavours throughout the years. From the strict skill-based early titles, to adding RPG mechanics, souls-like mechanics, and now, apparently roguelike. Or roguelite. But is it really fair to describe Asalon as such? In my opinion, it’s not as clean-cut as it sounds.

You play as a trio of adventurers, in a post-apocalyptic world, trying to find the cause of the water in their home village being poisoned. All clues lead to the ominous Gorgon Tower, where monsters of all sizes roam and a dark knight with seemingly genocidal ambitions resides. There’s not much beyond that, though there is some character growth and some bits and pieces to show the state of the world itself. It uses the old Star Wars trick of being a second part of a larger story, though the game itself teases more of a potential sequel, so the first part may be deliberately left to our imaginations. The hook is that the mage of the group made a mysterious pact with the world’s death god, and until the mission is finished, both himself and his friends will be rewinded to the start of the game.

The game in itself is an exploration platformer with a slightly different playstyle for each character. The warrior packs more punch and can take a bit more punishment, but his range is laughably short. The archer on the other hand attacks the full length of the screen, and can scale short walls, but is frail and the attacks come out very slow (at least at the beginning). The mage has a short-range projectile and is the most balanced at the start, but through upgrades, he can become one of the most broken player characters in the whole game. If you’ve seen how Crissaegrim works in Symphony of the Night, it’s that, but our Algus here also has a satellite later on, able to double this firepower. That’s tied to the hook of the game. Each time you die, you get reborn and can use any money accumulated to upgrade not only individual statistics of your characters but some shared abilities too. Nothing else, progress-wise is restarted. Doors stay open, map remains revealed.

Traversal itself is pretty unusual for the type of game it’s in. Instead of gauntlets of enemies or vast platforming challenges, it’s mostly a mix of the two in the form of Megaman-like challenge rooms. You need to get to the other side, there are enemies strategically placed in your way, and you need to find a way through while dealing with the opposition. Those are great. They are fun, small and often quite puzzly. I definitely liked them. Every few rooms you unlock a shortcut - since you’ll be running through the same corridors multiple times, those save time and enable you to conserve life points for the next run. Progress is not only gated through traversal skills but mostly colour-coded doors and keys you can find along the way. There are only three kinds of those, so the game opens pretty fast and gives you a lot of paths to choose from, having a more open world than most other search-action games.

The aforementioned similarities to Megaman are the start of one of my knocks against the game. The fact it has an 8-bit style is no coincidence. Astalon pays homage to multiple NES-era classics. There’s a segment that plays like Metroid 2, with you having to get rid of a given number of boss monsters to proceed. There’s a bonafide Metroid section with slime hanging off the walls and floating jellyfish. There are additional characters if you can find them. One is more of a joke character who plays like Toad from Mario 2 and another is just a Belmont. Speaking of which, a lot of enemies are pretty Castlevania in their design. This reliance on homages feels a bit unfocused and the game seems much less confident in itself for it.

So what about the other mechanic, the roguelike nature? A lot of people felt it was very unnecessary, making you go through the same rooms over and over. From a design perspective, this is not an issue, but more of a nudge - because of how open the world is, starting from the beginning gives you a chance to explore some other corner of the tower, find an easier spot or just explore in a different direction. The areas are connected with an elevator, and an elevator node is literally one screen from the start, so those are more or less like save points. The second thing is the death god shop, which is only accessible between runs. This, for me, is the unnecessary part. To progress, you will have to die either way. To get stronger, you need to fail. And backtrack. It doesn’t help that the stat raising is separate for each character, which means in the end, to have a balanced team, you need to boost Strength to all five characters, which requires grinding, and a lot of it.

Not that you need to do it. The game nudges you to play as the mage. He doesn’t have the disadvantages others have, so you’ll at least start investing in him. And then it turns out that he gets so overpowered so fast, that you essentially don’t need to invest in anyone else, as they are mostly relegated to switching to them just to solve a puzzle or two. Seriously, at about 33% of the game you start to spam multiple fireballs a second and every obstacle melts in a moment. No boss in the game stands a chance anymore and you're only railroading through everything without a problem. Search action games are famous for sometimes giving you a Screw Attack at the end, feeling very powerful while backtracking, but this is just for going through the game. It breaks it in half. The only obstacle may be spending all your keys to get to an impassable section and needing to scour the tower for some more or trying to find the critical path with the functional, but limited map.

Otherwise, the environments are very pretty, full of background details, and each screen is memorable if you want to go back to it to find secrets. That is, if you commit to memory where on the map it is. The music’s great too, with some atmospheric pieces and some more lively, actiony songs. One of the areas’ themes struck me as very Undertale-like. Is it another inspiration? I don’t know, but it added to the game and was great. Character design was made by Ryuusuke Mita of Dragon Half fame and boy, I wasn’t expecting to see his art in a million years in an indie game, being very much a 90s style, but here we go. Some people say it doesn’t fit, but I think it’s great.

Despite my reservations, it is a very good game, the moment-to-moment gameplay, at least to some point, is engaging and fun, and the exploration is done without the usual trappings. You don’t get a double jump, a Gryphon Wing, or a crawl. You get multiple kicks from a wall, slow falling and a dash, plus some more. Sadly, the lack of confidence in itself, and the general lack of challenge in the latter half knock some points from it in my eyes, but I hope the next game from these devs will fix those shortcomings.



Some tracks I liked, all by Matt Kap:
https://youtu.be/I3QAymB4lA8 Dark Serenity
https://youtu.be/Yj_j_rbhgOA Arteries
https://youtu.be/-w1Wb3hKr0A Puppetmasters
https://youtu.be/_78yYZZnYGQ Blight of Mankind
https://youtu.be/6Kqkb68OFw0 Bloodstained Glass
https://youtu.be/rYksvrJQmZs The Serpent's Path

Turok: Dinosaur Hunter Remastered (NSW)

A pleasant surprise for sure, the first Turok game is something that is hard to believe was made for the Nintendo 64. You're playing as an indigenous American, armed at the start with a knife and a bow going around and scouring the enormous and labyrinthine levels for keys to open more levels. It's a proto-Metroid Prime since many people from Iguana Entertainment working on this were poached to form Retro Studios, under the management of the same sleazeball, Jeff Spangenberg. While I knew about the devs, I kinda did not connect the dots until some ways through the game, where it evidently started to remind me of MP, and since that is my favourite game ever, I got even more intrigued.

You play through 8 stages, one of which serves as the hub world, and the other seven are accessible from a stone circle at the end of the first one. Your initial run through them could take you 1-2 hours each, depending on your style. Those stages are huge. You can enter levels only after collecting all the corresponding keys scattered throughout the game. To get to those you need to explore, search every nook and cranny, and platform your way through multiple strange locales. Places that are alien to you in which you feel like you're very unwelcome there and every living thing wants to murder you. It's standard Metroid stuff when you look at it this way. The hostile atmosphere is magnified by the giant, expansive environments and haunting, tribal music. Some keys or other trinkets are hidden very well, and the path to them can be obscured, so you need to be alert all the time or go back and replay some stages, but the exploration is so rewarding, there's not ever that much of an issue there. Mastered levels don't respawn most enemies, so they're pretty fast to traverse through them anew. One very nice feature is that the biomes somehow fade into one another - before getting to the Ancient City, the stage starts in the jungle you've been in before and so on. There's even, to my delight, a Dark Souls moment in the Catacombs, where you loop back multiple times to previously visited rooms to ceremoniously get back to the start in the final pass and use the room in a completely different way than before. My jaw was on the floor when I saw that and it is not the only impressive trick the game has up its sleeve.

The game is lightning fast, as a boomer shooter from that time should be, but the centre stage is taken by momentum-based platforming. Though the camera does not shift downwards during jumps on its own, like in MP, the remaster alleviates this greatly with dual stick and gyro control. That's not to say that the weapons are an afterthought - the arsenal is fun and varied, from the aforementioned bow and arrows, through automatic shotguns, to even some fantastic alien guns, like a plasma rifle, a BFG replacement which shoots more or less micro nukes to the super secret Chronoscepter, which you can and should use only in the final bout with the main villain. I wish that changing ammo types would be a thing since you'll always have to use thunder arrows and explosive shells before the regular stuff and cannot strategise with that.

The playthrough is in no way difficult, but it is very tense. The level design and the ammo placement lend themselves to constant weapon switching, but the issue is that the standard bullet capacity is laughable, which makes you always scramble and backtrack to get more. This is wholly amended with the backpack pickup, which doubles your totals. The tension with this in mind comes from the fact that losing a life makes you lose your backpack. So you're doing everything to get to the next save point without losing a life or facing the choice to either reload or live with a reduced ability, at least until you get your pack back. It's a good balance, and the spread-out, sweat-inducing save points is another feature that was revisited in Prime a few years later. You'll also be naturally urged to sometimes go for a more melee option to conserve resources. The difficulty is punctuated with admittedly sparse, but eventful menagerie of boss encounters. And while the first one is nothing to write home about, the rest are original, blood-pumping and memorable.

Of course, there are some failings with the game, some frustrating ones too. While the structure is more DOOM II than the first one with the exploration and interconnected rooms, the secret design smacks of DOOM I. To get everything, you will have to hug every wall, investigate every crevice and press every button. Thankfully, the most important secret series, the Chonoscepter parts, are hidden much more sanely and are far more visible during a normal playthrough. The graphics, lifted from N64 have their issues and the cone-like design of the fog, which was previously used to hide parts of the level is distracting. You can spot enemies from the corner of your field of view, but you won't be able to properly aim at them, since when looking straight, the fog will obscure your view.

The enemies can be a real pain too. There is no directional hurt indicator, and because you're often molested by a lot of hidden enemies at once, you may not be sure about which way to shoot. There are also respawning enemies. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but they exist. Now, in 2025, everyone knows that respawning enemies are the worst. Though I know why they are there (to force the player to get the hell on with it and explore further), they limit the natural exploration a player might want to do. The worst offender of this is not even a make haste device like previously described, but a literal dick move trap in one of the early stages, showing you a ruined city packed to the brim with ammo and other goodies, but then bombarding you with dozens of constantly reappearing hitscan enemies that make you lose more resources and health that you could, in turn, get in this section, while the devs laugh at your misgivings straight in your face.

Despite all of this, the first Turok is a stellar game, thanks to its atmosphere, rewarding exploration and frenetic boss battles.

I didn't expect to have Turok of all things be an early contender for my game of the year, but here we go. I give it a well-earned 9/10 and urge everyone to give the remaster on Switch a chance.



Memorable music from my playthrough:
https://youtu.be/bBJn8xZZ6s4
https://youtu.be/XL6wMdxWa-0
https://youtu.be/AOxxjA1_9m8
https://youtu.be/SdfRGj4NtQw
https://youtu.be/r-94RwFVKAM
https://youtu.be/vSPTqDajIxE

Drakengard (PS2)

First things first, while I “like” the game and give it a good score, I DO NOT recommend it to anyone. Don’t seek it out, don’t watch playthroughs (they don’t give out what the game’s about). It’s a mix of a part of a very bad game and a part of a subpar kind of another game, with a truncated story that reads like ramblings of a madman, awful graphics with ugly textures and pop-in, peculiar music (more on that later). It’s not a good game, but if you look at it as a statement or work of art, it qualifies. It’s absolutely shitty and probably mostly accidental art, but at least it was interesting enough for me to power through.

You play as Grinning Murderman Caim in a fantasy upside-down medieval Europe, fighting against an Empire, which seemingly built its capital on remnants of an advanced civilization. You make a pact with a humanity-despising dragon and set out to kill hundreds of thousands of enemy soldiers. And there’s no coyness about this. You’re not defeating them, or neutralizing them. The main character takes immeasurable joy in killing and is supposed to be a reflection of the player.

Supposed, because you can never take anything as given with Yoko Taro. This game is touted as being a solitary vision of a genius, but in reality, all of it may have been a happy accident. The game was devised as a Panzer Dragoon clone, before Square came in and mandated the use of musou elements, because they were gaining in popularity at the time. As a result, you got one-half of a flying game with wonky, imprecise controls (dual shock was never made for precision aiming) against abstract flying shapes and one-half slow, meandering, dull and boring musou game. The glue that’s holding it all together is a story about a doomed kingdom, which gets more and more deranged as you get through the endings. Yet the story also takes a hit. Not only the translation is very truncated and weak, cutting off some important character traits (best to play the original version, or an undub, with the original script on hand), the whole script is very esoteric, speaking in riddles and warranting further research into novelizations and side stories. I don’t know Yoko Taro that much, but the game is obviously very themed on the role of children in society and how are they received by different groups of people, but the schizophrenic pace makes it a bit blurry.

The story serves the gameplay and vice versa of sorts. Time to talk about real crazy. As mentioned before, the gist of the game is murdering soldiers. And children. And babies. And everything that comes in your path. You’re collecting various weapons throughout the game, 65 in total, and the only way to level them up, by adding more combos and special attacks is by killing more and more. You want better weapons, so you are in sync with the MC's motivations and the plot seems more and more of a distraction. In fact, most of the weapons are worthless and dull, and each new one somehow is more disappointing than the last one, but for some reason you keep powering through. There’s a rambling companion which both you and the MC just want to shut up, the looming end of the world or the danger impending to your sister are obstacles to the goal of killing more and more. The musou element is awful and very monotone, but you get strangely in sync with it and kinda get hypnotized by the prospect, helped with the music.

Now the music is the most bizarre ingredient in this whole mix. They took recordings of an orchestra performing classic pieces, like Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Debussy and Wagner, chopped it all up into second long samples, looped and mashed up together with a pulsing bassline, glitches and unconventional beats. All of this sounds surreal. It’s violent. It somehow sounds like liquid violence and rage straight to your ear. It sounds like something otherworldly, something that someone crazy is hearing, and you shouldn’t be part of it. It sounds like a mix of a washing machine tumbler and being under an MRI machine. It’s crazy, but in turn, it makes you crazy, squeezing in that square button to rhythmically kill kill kill kill kill. It needs not only to be heard but to be experienced with the game itself. And as all the rest of the characters in the story descend into madness, you’re already there, greeting them with open arms.

DO NOT play this game. It’s evil. It’s incompetent and boring. It draws you in and tries to make you a part of its madness. It’s incomprehensible. But boy is it unique. That’s why it’s a 7/10 for me. Because it’s like a trainwreck that you cannot take your eyes off of.



Some deranged music for your delight(?):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRkAjlsec90
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_82yA-keV8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLCUX4fpvro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_XkirkMJhU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9kkzsALWAU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S13UdF_7oCc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPfGhV_8Kgs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkYejDiG9xg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNXixWo3coY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZQCqhS_4F8

I beat Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and have some words to say.

The XC and Xeno series as a whole are games that I very much respect, and like, but there’s always something that keeps them from being absolute favourites for me. For Gears it is the drawn-out and boring combat and the pacing of the second disc do to it being a “VN”. For Sagas it’s the sheer length of cutscenes forced down my throat, bugs and once again, slow combat. The game that turned this around for me was the first Xenoblade, and on the third try (DE), when it really clicked. Besides the staggeringly awful and boring side quest design, almost everything else was simply exquisite, the maps, music, gameplay… Almost everything. The big constant between the xeno games is that while Takahashi is great at worldbuilding and overall plot, all of the games’ stories shit the bed in the final act, with a Shyamalayan “twist” and exposition dump before the final array of bosses. Even besides that I rather liked XC1 and while I didn’t play X, I hoped for XC2 to be an evolution of everything in XC1.



What I got was… not entirely successful - while I cheered for it on each step, it found a way to stumble and break each of its limbs. A spectacular view for sure, breaking all limbs at once, but you’re left with something that struggles to function.Bear with the bitterness, though the things I point out are mostly negative, there is still fun to be had here.

Let’s start with the maps. The environment was a defining part of the first game, so with the promise of a lot more titans, I was very hyped for the prospect. In actuality, the number of distinct biomes is more or less the same between the games, so what about their contents? The areas got much more verticality. With places like Gotmott, Tantal or Uraya you can explore layered landscapes walking higher on hills, pillars or trees. In some way sadly, this verticality made the maps themselves really close on themselves and made them constricted, feeling smaller than they are, especially with the two general types - a roughly oval playground with a set goal or a set of corridors, the exploration is kinda cut down. The verticality also made the maps much harder to read and confusing, especially since you don’t get to reveal the map by exploring, you don’t get to know those places that well. What really hurts is that the environments are often rehashes of maps of XC1 but in some way more generic. Gormott is Bionis Leg, but without the vistas. Tantal is Valak Mountains but boring. The second to last area is just the Mechonis Core, but with much less sheen and “just futury”. They try so hard to replicate XC1 that even the Upper Right Gormott reveal is the same as getting from Tephra Cave to the Gaur Plains - you climb up, music changes, it's getting lighter and you see an open space. The last thing that really hurts is how secret areas are handled. Those should be sufficiently secret, hidden, with wonderful vistas, rewards in themselves. Here, you often get to see them as parts of quests or even walk through them when playing through the story normally. They are not that special because of that anymore.



The characters are a main gripe for most. The biggest problem is that most of the side characters, or even the main characters besides the central three are much more interesting than Pyra-Mythra-Rex, but they are not given much to do, especially in the final chapters, than to look in awe at the feats of their companions. Companions, mind you, who do everything thanks to the Power of Friendship ™, which is so tiring. There is no drive to do what we’re supposed to do. Our character did a promise, everything around is kinda incidental and happens around and is never the main goal. The overarching threat almost always feels like second fiddle to the GET HER TO ELYSIUM mission, which makes me disconnect from the main story more and more. The blades are all shonen anime caricatures, a clumsy girl, a genki girl, a helpful cook, a cutesy glutton, etc. They are fleshed out and characterised well during the awesome blade quests, but they are still the same characters. You may feel more for the oblivious possessed girl, but at the end of the day it’s still the same oblivious possessed girl. The lack of direction in voice acting hurts the game even more.



Story then. The foundation is very good, with the politics between the regions, the predicament of running out of living space etc. As said before, it’s often squandered by the characters and their seemingly different goals. There is foreshadowing here, but more cryptic than in XC1 - there you figured out the story a step before the party. Here you get the hints only on the second playthrough. There’s also less environmental storytelling here. It’s a real big pity that Torna had to be cut out of the main story, a lot of the twists lose a lot of impact due to that. I really like the side quests. In comparison to XC1, all of them are interesting, are not fetch quests and flesh out the characters a lot. Same with Heart to Hearts, which hold more meaning than those of the first game. There are attempts at humanising the villains throughout the story but I feel they fall flat on their face, except one tragic figure. Again, having Torna in the main game would do wonders to understand some of their pledges and seeing the state of Mythra in the prequel would naturally explain the behaviour of the last villain. The connections and reveals in the last few chapters are great in a “I know what it is'' sense, but the info dump at the end ruins it kinda. The biggest blow is the resolution itself. It is abrupt, awful and feels fruitless, robbing the moments before of their power.



There’s a lot of content, which is a double edged sword. Systems in systems in systems are a great thing and I like them a lot, but the sheer amount multiplied by the amount of characters means that you won’t be grinding EXP in this game, you’ll be grinding achievements to fill those charts. Merc missions are a kind of a time sink you get in subpart mobages, I don’t get why they are even here. Gacha is absolutely awful and does not add anything. Most interesting blades from a story perspective are not gotten from a random chance but quest based - Praxis, Theory, Vess, Herald you get while playing normally and you get attached to their stories. Maintaining all of this content, planning item, trust and affinity grinding routes is very exhausting. There's also an issue of showering the player with thousands of useless trinkets, items they won’t ever use, which detract from those they would use, which results in most people not even bothering with Aux Cores in their playthrough. This also feeds to the shops, which have a lot of useless guff in them, making you use them as an obligation for something I describe later.



Quick tech digression before the gameplay. The visuals are okay. As mentioned, nothing really eye-catching other than the world with environments feeling strangely much more anime. I didn’t like the UI. Seems like something from a bygone era. It’s clunky and unintuitive to navigate through. Music on the whole is not as memorable for me as the first one. As compositions it’s much better, the leitmotifs are very noticeable and it is very good when listening as a whole, but there are not as many individual “hits” I would like. There are a few though. The one I liked the most is the VS Driver battle theme, which sounds like a Falcom game for some reason.



Gameplay is something I have the most nice things to say about and is something which saved the game for me. Combat is complex, devilishly intricate and satisfying. The gradual learning curve is a reward in itself, and I feel the comments about tutorials are overblown here. The game invites you to figure out much of the systems on your own, as part of the game itself. The combat system is a perpetual Dunning–Kruger effect - you feel that you know everything, but then you discover more and more. The driver combos, orb bursting stuff is great, much better than the phlegmatic in comparison system from XC1. There’s downsides though. Amount of customisation is great, almost overwhelming, but in the end it can make everyone samey, generic and not fit their niche. Arts and accessories make healers worthless, going quickly to boring evade/damage based setups. There is nothing truly distinct, like Sharla, Melia or Riki with distinct playstyles (art moderation, damage over time turning to immediate damage etc. Minmaxing in this game puts the whole team into 2-3 standard kits with mindless gameplay. There are also bugs in the combat, pertaining to the behaviour of some characters, making the team even more tunnelled to what everyone’s using. The aforementioned obligation to buy stuff from shops results in shop deeds, great additive small gameplay and QOL features. I’d like for it to be implemented better (Torna), I really like the idea. Field skills is an interesting concept, but the implementation and constant character switching make it the most infuriating thing in the game. As progression/reward blockers akin to Zelda/Search Action games it’s great but needs to be done better (Torna). There’s once again the gacha and sadly a bulk of the game boils down to the tedium of grinding cores, bonding, releasing, ad nauseam. I was really disappointed with the bosses, in particular the last few bosses. There is no fanfare here, nothing like the Bionis Slash X threat, nothing like multiple forms or needing to resort to any tactics. Just a stationary target. I was only a few levels higher than him and it was a sad show, a cakewalk without any problem. In my opinion, the last boss should be somehow scaling to the player’s level. Since in my opinion, a lot of the side content is much more interesting than the main story, the team is likely to be overpowered. There’s a big Gerolf-type unique monster on the way to the last bosses and it was a much more interesting and challenging fight.



Like I said, there’s a lot of negatives here, but combat is the glue that holds it all together. The combat is one of the most inventive, while simple systems I’ve seen, and kept me in front of the screen for the 150+ hours it did. It tries considerably to lift everything on its shoulders, but can’t do wonders. The story and nitpicks ruined it for me and kept me off from NG+ for now.

I started by saying that the Xeno games I very much respect, and like. This is the first one that I really wanted to like, but did really not. I respect it for the scope, but that’s it. I could say that it overstays its welcome, but it also starts slow and miserable, so you warm up to it and then start slowly despising it. It feels like testing the waters of hardware and a stepping stone on the road to the third game. Throwing everything at the wall and checking if it sticks. Hopefully, in the end that’s for the best.

I got almost everything possible on the first playthrough, save for 3 blades. All possible quests and merc missions, I’ve done. I did not max all of the blades’ affinity charts, but I finished Ursula’s, so that’s something at least. It took me almost 170hrs and I would keep at it longer, but the story and ending scared me from it for a while now. The final score may be a bit inflated from the respect and general affinity with the series, but I give it 7/10. I’m playing Torna now, halfway through and I like it a lot more. It seems to fix a lot of the problems, offers a condensed and more cohesive story and adds even more tactics than the main game. I’ll be sure to write about it when I finish.

Some tracks I liked the most:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aFqSU8Zqv4 - Alba Cavanich (Night)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx3AbguQZHU - Mor Ardain - Roaming the Wastes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y31fTxvloTU - Driver VS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIn82wCRrHY - Cliffs of Morytha
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pSxFohBmis - Elysium, in the Blue Sky

Hiya.

I try to experience as many games as possible and while I started logging my experiences not so long ago, I want to post some more in-depth reviews, mostly of RPGs, since the review character limit on the main site is 5000. Hopefully, this will also be a sort of a chronicle for myself to get back to the experiences I went through down the line. This post will be a table of contents then, though I won't get back to the games I played a while ago. I hope to have a review, even brief, for all the things I finish from now on though.

Without further ado...

Edit 2.5 years later: I'm getting back to this if anyone's interested at all. I'm playing 100+ games a year and this is a way for me to document those experiences. Have a read if you like.

0001. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (NSW) - 7/10
0002. Drakengard (PS2) - 7/10
0003. Turok: Dinosaur Hunter Remastered (NSW) - 9/10
0004. Astalon: Tears of the Earth (NSW) - 7/10
0005. Ratchet & Clank (PS2) - 5/10

https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=77133
https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=6034

These are the same, even listing the same platforms

For the last few weeks I've been dumping every game in my backloged collection and encountered some were missing, so I added tens of new ones (mainly japanese only titles), but I also marked them as 'to edit' in my spreadsheet. Just posting here so I can add more info on them when I have more time. Thanks in advance.