Torment:Tides of Numenera - BILLIONS OF YEARS!

I have not played Planescape Torment. I just need to get that out there and anyone that played or is planning on playing this game should probably stop comparing these two games. Its a spiritual successor, its not the same game, and its never going to live up to its predecessor. The biggest problem people have with this game is its not Planescape Torment. The game is based off the Numenera tabletop game universe, which takes place BILLIONS OF YEARS into the future. Instead of Planescape Torment's "What can change a nature of a man?" its instead "How much does one life matter?" This theme unfortunately makes zero sense and we'll get into that later. Its a narrative driven game where you can talk your way out of any battle if you are good enough at it. This also means combat is the biggest shit stain on this game and anytime you fail a skill check you want to restart because sitting through combat makes you want to jump in front of a truck. Yes its one of these type of games.

Lets look at the universe of Numenera for a second. This game takes place "a billion" years into the future. We need to stop and think about this for a second. A billion may sound like a small number when you say it out loud. But this is an astronomical number in life and evolution. The earth itself is only about 5 billions years old and life started only 3.5 billions years ago. Life evolved from single celled organisms to land life in 3 billions years. Within 200 million years they evolved from amphibians on land into dinosaurs. These lived for several hundred millions of years before going extinct. It took 66 million years from the time of dinosaurs to the time of humans. Humans only evolved 200 thousand years ago. Human civilization only begun 10 thousand years ago. You're telling me billions of years into the future, everyone is still human and look exactly like the people today? People still live in mud houses on the side of a cliff and everyone has the same moral standards as people today? That architecture and design still look the same as today? They tried to explain it all by saying its currently the ninth world as in 8 great civilizations before the one in the current game have come and gone and currently everyone is living in a medieval like civilization. What the fuck? This basically is a medival fantasy game that uses "technology" instead of magic. It uses Authur Clarke's famous third law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Instead of shooting fireballs you're shooting esoteric bolts. Instead of casting heal you use innervate which channels esotery into their bodies and cleans them of wounds.

Now we have the billions of years rant out of the system we can start looking at the world of Numenera. The world of built on the ruins of ancient civilizations. Every now and then you can click on an object and shit will happen. Sometimes nothing will happen and most often than not, it is completely useless. Why have all this cool stuff around when they do absolutely nothing. In fact the main storyline has almost nothing to do with any of the technology around. The main story is short and garbage but there are plenty of side quests that are somewhat interesting. There are some pretty interesting ideas in the game like the house of empty time where homeless children, though the keeper is able to be adopted by another family in another time frame. You could be adopted 600 years into the future or into the past. Or something like the Anchorage and the lore behind it. There is a lot of interesting stuff if you look for it, unfortunately none of that is in the generic main quest.

With technology and future shit out of the way we can focus on the main storyline. Some time ago someone discovered a way to to transfer his consciousness from one being to an artificial body and was called the changing god. Whenever the conscious is transferred out of the previous body, a new consciousness appears and takes its place. These people are known as the castoffs. You are the newest castoff of the changing god and you basically travel the world trying to figure out what to do. And by world I mean three maps. The first area you are at is the biggest, then it gets smaller as the game goes on. If you just follow the main quest you can probably finish the game in a couple hours. Doing every side quest took me about twenty hours to complete the game. Most of the time was wasted running around doing nothing trying to find quests. The other half is talking. This game has a lot of text. Do not play this game if you don't like reading. Its a whole lot of text with a whole lot of nothing. They can drag a description on for paragraphs yet you learn nothing about the character. If fact you rarely learn much of the people in the world. They are sort of just there and you sort of just walk away before stuff happens.

Not expanding on things really hurt the game. Like you meet a group of Nanos in a bar who fight the the Adversaries, a group of beings that traveled through the bloom, a multidimensional living creature that opens maws across dimensions, composed of pure thought and are in constant combat with the Nanos in an invisible psychic war. You show up you do a few quests and you leave, you never really learn that much about them and they never show up again. It was interesting but it was over much too fast. This also includes the Bloom, its a huge living creature that has maws extending to different dimensions and the living beings in the world of Numenera use it as a way of travel as well as a home. However the maws are not permanent and many groups of people get lost in different worlds. New maws are also always constantly being made which require different foods to open. Slaves are sold to feed the maws who will only eat certain things. For example, one maw will only eat guilt and after the feeding, the person will sometimes stay alive, but lose their ability to feel guilt. Upon eating something, the maw will open leading to a whole new world. Like this thing is fucking awesome why isn't the game expanding on this. Am I the only one who thinks this multi dimensional creature the size of cities just biding its time at our doorstep is a threat? Its such a powerful entity that the sorrow can't even reach you inside the bloom. Except when suddenly plot holes appear and it could reach you.

The main story is shitty. You are chased by the sorrow, a monster that chases the changing god and all its castoffs to kill them. Really? You're going to call it THE SORROW!? What kind of shitty name is that. The sad part was the original name was called The Angel of Entropy. Basically its a creature that ignores space time and is angry at you and your siblings. Why? Because of the tides. Its wiped out civilizations because of the tides and its after you because you, the changing god, and all your fellow castoff siblings are tied to the tides. What is the tides exactly? Well its the currents of urge and emotions that flow through humanity's collective psyche. Its never really expanded on other than its a power thats shared among you all. It has the ability to affect people around you based on the colours of your tide. Its basically a reputation system. The tides are as followed:

Blue Tide: Represents wisdom, enlightenment, and mysticism. It is the Tide of people whose goal is to expand the mind and the spirit.
Red Tide: Represents passion, emotion, action, and zeal. It is the Tide of people whose goal is to live in the moment, to experience life to its fullest, or to follow their heart wherever it leads them.
Indigo Tide: Represents justice, compromise, and the greater good. It is the Tide of people who view life's difficulties from a broad, global perspective rather than an individual one.
Gold Tide: Represents charity, sacrifice, and empathy. It is the Tide of people whose primary goal is to help others, especially at the cost to themselves.
Silver Tide: Represents admiration of power and seekers of fame. It is the Tide of people who seek to influence the lives of others or who actively seek to be remembered.

Almost every choice you make in the game will shift your tides, and it shifts very quickly. You can even have two dominant tides if there are two high ones instead of one very high tide. For example I started the game with the blue tide because I kept asking questions about the world, but as I started doing quests I gained gold and turned into blue/gold tide. Eventually I did a bunch of quests that jumped me so far ahead that I turned into full gold tide. By the end of the game I was back down to blue/gold and ended at that. However, from what I've read theres only like a couple of NPCS who will mention anything because of your tides. That and the ending which is similar to Mass Effect 3's notorious ending. It looked like they wanted to do something with the tides but never got around to it. This holds true to almost everything in the game.

Onto the worst part of the game, the combat. I have never seen combat in a game this terrible before in my life. It is turn based with the most horrible UI I've ever seen. Combat design in this game is to put as many enemies as humanly possible on the map and each one takes forever to move. The next is to add consistently respawning enemies or enemies that will keep joining in the fight. A single turn of combat can take minutes, a entire fight could take ten to twenty. Like what the fuck? The good news is you can skip most of it by cheat scumming. Usually I'm too lazy to bother with that but when the alternative is the equivalent of sitting through an Adam Sandler movie I would rather retry over and over until I got it right. No matter what you do, there are several fights where you cannot avoid. Most of them involve the Sorrow and the Sorrow are the worst fights. It takes forever to appear and walk, and then it will spawn Sorrow fragments every turn which is another enemy that takes up time during combat and the entire time is spent running away so enemies eventually fill up so much of the screen you can take a shit and come back before your turn is up. When your turn is up though, you usually can't tell where the fuck you are going. Sometimes the circle for how far you can move disappears entirely. So combat becomes a game of clicking as far away as possible then clicking closer and closer and closer until you can move then hoping the enemies don't spawn new ones and waste five minutes of shuffling around before its your turn to run away.

There is a lot of potential in the game and it was obviously unfinished. A lot of the things promised on kickstarter never made it into the game, although they have said they are working on a new patch to add in one of the removed companions. I wish they expanded on more of the lore and side quests instead of the dumb main story quest that is over way too quickly. More areas to explore would be nice too instead of the three maps we gotten. Combat would have to be completely remade because what it is now is a piece of shit. Is this game good? I would say its passable if you ignore the combat. Its not the greatest, but some of the side quests, characters, and lore are interesting but they just sort of end abruptly. The ending also ends abruptly and completely shits over the theme of "How much does one life matter?" by giving you the power to choose the fate of the world. All of them involve the death of many so there really isn't much of a choice.

Kathy Rain - Unsatisfying

Kathy Rain is a old school style adventure game where you play as Kathy Rain, a rebellious college student who found out that her grandfather recently passed away. Going back home to the family that she hasn't seen in over a decade revealed a old family mystery. What this game really reminds me of is The Blackwell Legacy. The graphic style is similar, they both feature a whiny young woman as a protagonist, they both have a sidekick of sorts, they both get dragged into the occult and solve mysteries that others cannot. The biggest issue is, Kathy Rain was also set up as an episodic game like The Blackwell Legacy so you basically learn nothing from playing the game. It just ends out of the blue and it leaves you pissed at the whole thing. The Blackwell Legacy did the same, but it at least ended at a better place than Kathy Rain. It did take 8 years to finally complete the entire series but each game in the series left you satisfied.

Enough comparisons and lets get on with explaining this game. You start off waking up in your dorm as Kathy Rain and your hyper religious roommate tells you that your grandfather died so you take your motorbike down to your hometown and find out your grandfather suffered some kind of shock one day 30 years ago exploring the woods and became a vegetable. So you spend the rest of the game digging up clues of your family's past. This part is fun there are interesting puzzles to solve, a few characters to meet a few areas to explore. One issue with the game though is that its incredibly tiny in areas to explore. You get one or two areas at first which only has a few objects of interest. Near the end of the game you start getting into the supernatural. The story is really similar to The Blackwell Legacy. Instead of being a spirit medium to help dead spirits move on in the afterlife, you are the chosen one by whatever magical force of the other world. If I knew more of the story I would explain it but there really isn't. Apparently people meet the will-o-wisp of the woods and then get visions of the future and then the "red man" shows up and tells them to do shit and they end up dying or disappearing or going vegetable. You go to the other world save your sidekick and then the game ends with nothing being explained.

Thats it. After the game ended you know about as much of the game as you first started. Absolutely fucking nothing. The characters are all boring, the places you explore are boring, the story is complete trash and the whole entire game left you unsatisfied. If you want a good point and click adventure game with supernatural elements then pick The Blackwell Legacy.

Owlboy - Too fucking long

Fuck this game. I wanted to enjoy this game, I wanted to like it but every time I do something fucking stupid shows up and drags on way too long to be remotely enjoyable. I commend them for trying different things in the game but when it fucking sucks, it really fucking sucks. Alright what is Owlboy? Its an indie sidescrolling platformer that spent the last decade in development. Literally a decade to develop. The graphics are great, the characters are likable and the gameplay is decent in some parts. However, underneath its pretty exterior is a frustrating mess. I have never wanted to throw my controller at the screen harder than playing this game. Not even Persona 3 or Dark Souls or anything challenging. This game is frustrating because it feels like I'm either fighting with the controls or something boring just drags on way too long like the fucking stealth sections.

The unique part of Owlboy as a platformer is you have the ability to fly. Flying hides the terrible controls somewhat until you get to sections where you cannot fly. Most of the game is spent navigating through dungeons/ruins solving puzzles and killing monsters along the way. Pick up a rock, drop the rock here, grab a cloud and have it pour water here, then kill monster and use it as a bomb blah blah blah. This is fun, its a great game if it was just that. Then suddenly you'll get to a part where the screen goes dark and you "cannot fly because they have poor vision but can hear the sound of your wings flapping." Yet I can run around jumping on rocks or slamming onto the floor as hard as possible. You have to sneak past them and since the jump and fly button are both A, you will constantly accidentally fly and instant game over. Getting to close is a game over. This goes on and on and on. Luckily that part was short. Then you get to other parts where you accidentally set off a swarm of gnats in the darkness and you have to survive by lighting up torches and grabbing lantern monsters. As soon as you touch the darkness you instantly die. Then theres the pirate base where you have to stealth past pirates. If you get seen the door locks and they shoot bombs and you die. Then later in the game theres another pirate base where you have to stealth, then even later you have to stealth through a pirate ship. And so on and so on. LIKE IS THERE ENOUGH OF STEALTHING? Its not fun, its clunky and with the shitty controls makes it a huge core than anything challenging.

Then there are the gladiator rooms. I don't know what they're called but you will constantly enter a room both doors will close then waves upon waves of enemies will spawn and you have to survive. Getting hit in this game will send you flying across the room and stick onto a wall. If you get hit, its fairly easy to get chain hit and you can do nothing but die. So you're fighting swarms and swarms of enemies and then eventually you'll get hit somehow and then get swarmed and die. You need to be flying to summon your allies to shoot at them. Yes you don't actually get to fight you need the power of your allies to do it for you. That is interesting in a way but when you do get hit you are separated from your ally and have to grab him again. Imagine a game where you are hit and you drop your sword or gun and have to pick it up before you can fight again. Sometimes in regular exploration mode I get too lazy to fight monsters and just fly past them but they will keep following you to the next screen and soon I find myself being chased by 50 bees and then swarmed to death. You don't have that much health in the game and getting hit a couple of times usually means a game over so gladiator rooms are just a room of pure luck. Are you standing in the right spot when the monster spawns? Did it spawn on you? Well too bad try again.

Bosses are underwhelming. Theres usually a chase scene before or after bosses where you have to constantly run from a big bad thing or lava or water or whatever thats coming. Messing up once is death. I surprisingly haven't died once in these sections. Its hectic but it doesn't feel too annoying to do. Bosses all have a set pattern and once you learn it it is fairly easy to do. The thing is, for all the bosses, they are immune to all damage so you just have to sit there and take it until it suddenly stops shooting. Use the cannon from an enemy ship to shoot a rock to have it land on them, dodge swords until the guy charges a wall and gets stunned then shoot him, have the guy punch a wall to get his arm stuck then shoot him. Its unrewarding to spend 90% of the time just running until you can run up close to hit him once and after like 3 hits the boss is dead. Whats the point of giving me a gun and upgrades and all that shit if I'm not going to be using it? Look at something like Axiom Verge, you're running around with guns blazing shooting giant bosses. Those felt rewarding to fight when you finally win. This feels like you're a punching bag. You don't even get to kill the bosses as most of them end up being used by the pirates and are actually good people underneath it all. You never kill anyone because murder is wrong! Except the part where you go around murdering all those monsters, and monkeys and the monkey king probably died too after you flood the room with lava. You might be going, yeah but monsters and monkeys and prinnys aren't human. Neither are you, you're a fucking owl.

Then the worst part reveals itself near the end where you go into space and cannot fly anymore. This whole section has no monsters, no puzzles, just hours of platforming fun. OH JOY. This part you'll realize how bad the controls are. You are trying to do a jump when you'll accidentally flap and end up crashing to your death. Want to jump from the chandelier to the door? Oh we've made sure you have to stand at the very edge and leap and click fly at your highest point then glide towards the door. Any less will have you crashing into the ground below. Oh its an autoscroller now? We'll make the rocks spawn as slow as possible so you have to click fly and stay in the air as long as possible and one fuck up will end up costing you the entire thing. Even if it looks like you made it if you jump too early you'll eventually die a slow agonizing death. Which fucking masochist came up with this shit. This isn't fucking remotely enjoyable to do. I love sidescrolling platformers. Its my favorite genre of game but this is fucking infuriating to play. I cannot stress how bad the flying and jumping are in this game. You will constantly fuck up and randomly start flying when you are doing a long jump and crash to your death. If its just a few sections thats alright but this drags on too fucking long. In fact most of the game drags on for too fucking long. Too much instant death, too much stealth, too much platforming with bad controls, too much of shitty stuff.

The really sad part of this game was that its fun to play. Its an enjoyable game ridden with frustrating parts. The puzzle solving is fun, the exploration is enjoyable, and some of the bosses even put up a challenge and the storytelling is great. The characters are likable, they have their flaws, and they have growth to them. One thing I can't help but notice though is that everyone is male. Everyone you talk to, everyone you meet and fight are male. The only women you meet in this game are the two captured soldiers in the pirate base and the mad scientist. And those show up for a total of like 5 seconds. The game is very story driven and its really quite interesting to learn about the world. Its honestly a fun game. However all of that is just completely overshadowed by the horrible experiences in certain sections of the game. Was the game enjoyable for me? After that last platforming section, no. I can hardly remember the fun I was having with the game after that section. I would play it once for the story but I'll never in a million years want to touch it again. If I want a good platformer that I can go back and play over and over again then I'll just play something like Castlevania SOTN, Axiom Verge or even Valdis Story. I'll even reply Shantae: Half-Genie Hero over this.

Shantae: Half Genie Hero - Hip Shaking Transformations

I've never heard of the Shantae series, and I'm sure most people haven't. It started off as an indie game by a husband and wife team on the Gameboy Color but releasing it when the Gameboy Advance was already out hurt its sales. Nevertheless it had great reviews and gained a small following. The next game came out on the DS and once again received great reviews. By the time the third game came out on 3DS and WiiU it already reached cult classic status. It wasn't the most popular but enough people wanted a sequel and the fourth one was funded through kickstarter and they passed it by a huge margin. I recently learned of it from AGDQ as people were talking about speed running the game. I saw that people on my steam list has been playing it but never bothered to look into it because it seemed pretty anime. Its anime, but it has charm.

Half genie hero is the forth of the series and is probably the one most people will start with since its the only one to come to PC. Because of this, half genie hero is a soft reboot of the series and does not follow the plot of the first three games. What is the plot you say? Is there even a plot? Well, you start off as Shantae, a half-genie hero. Genies used to live in the world and protected it and eventually fell in love with humans. However bad stuff happened and they all left the world to return to the genie realm so they can focus their powers on protecting the world. They left behind their children, the half-genies and each one becomes a guardian of a town. Thats where you come in, the guardian of Scuttle Town. You must go around beating up bad guys and saving the world with the power of love and friendship. Before you groan and puke, it's a light hearted game with a lot of charm. The characters are likable and the humor is passable. But the greatest strength of the game would be the graphics and the music. The graphics are bright and colourful and the enemies and NPCs you meet are charming. From small pirate grunts and starfish to giant worm monsters and mermaid girls. Everything looks cheerful and cute. The music is catchy and I sometimes end up humming along with the level. I especially enjoy the music in Mermaid Falls. The main theme of Shantae has actual singing too.

The game plays like a side scroller, although not a very complex one. You start off with 2 hearts, each one represents 4 health. It may seem challenging at first, but later on you'll find so many extra hearts that everything does trivial damage. Your attacks consist of hair whipping enemies and it can be upgraded to deal more damage and whip faster. As well as learning magic like shooting fireballs or spinning swords. Thats not all though, the best part of the game is the dances. Early on it will tell you to shake those hips and when you do you can get up to 12 different dances at once. Using a monkey dance will transform Shantae into a monkey that can hop high and climb walls. Crab dance will transform her into a crab that can swim in the water. Elephant dance will transform into an elephant that can break weak walls and floors. There are many forms and each one will allow Shantae into previously blocked off areas in earlier stages for secrets. There is one issue though, if secrets are required are they still considered secrets? For example every time you finish a chapter you will get a new dance, then your uncle will tell you to collect an item for his invention which requires you to help several people by trading item to item and each of the items needed will be from a secret area. I can't help but feel its made as padding for the game.

The game itself is very short, consisting of 5 stages and one extra final stage with no secrets. Like really? This is it? Even when I searched though everything and collected every secret I still managed to beat the game in 5 hours of playtime. The game length really hurt. Luckily, on kickstarter some of the stretch goals included extra characters. Unfortunately, most of the stretch goals were set way too high. It was originally supposed to come with 3 chapters but two were added in as stretch goals. Only 3 chapters? Are they serious? Either way, the extra character's chapter isn't out yet so I can't comment on it. The stages are quite varied with each stage having its own gimmick. However, some stages contains parts which are much too frustrating. There is are too many pitfalls or instant death on stages with no or far apart checkpoints. Its not very bad that you die, however its very bad that whenever you die you have to fade to black into a loading screen then start again. Bosses have pretty predictable patterns and each stage contains one or two bosses. They do have a lot of health so its just poke poke poke until it gets defeated eventually. Defeated, not killed because this is a game of love and friendship. They aren't really that much of bad guys and they come back later, reformed in a way, and you help them out. Except the real villain, the evil pirate Risky Boots, and even she can turn around and become reformed.

Is the game fun? Very. I would recommend this to anyone who likes platformers and isn't turned away by this style of game. It has the old school feel to the game and really makes you feel like a kid all over again. The game is a little easy however and quite short so if 5 hour of gameplay isn't for you, I would wait on a sale. If anything, wait for the other character to be added in first to see if you want to jump into the game.

This War of Mine - Eating raw rats

Alright, when I first heard of this game I automatically assumed it would be another one of those war games where you play as the hero and go around shooting everything and glorifying war. Then I found out it was some kind of survival game where you actually play as the civilians during war time. I completely overlooked this game until now and wow was I wrong about how much fun it was. This is a survival game where you need to build a shelter, find food/materials/weapons, barter, help others, rob others, murder others, and a whole lot more to do. I went into the game blind and this is pretty much how my first game went.

I installed the game, then the DLC, the little ones, which included children. Clicking play put me into the shoes of the father Christo and his daughter Iskra. The first day Christo and Iskra found an abandoned house and Christo went around digging through rubble with his hands and looting through everything he could find. Iskra being the child that she is, was unable to help and spent the entire day playing hopscotch. Occasionally she'll try and get the attention of Christo but he was too busy digging. Using the materials he found he started building a workshop, then a metal workshop then eventually from those ended up making a crowbar and shovel. This helped break through the rest of the rubble and locked doors of the house. They found food and had enough materials for beds. At night Christo had the option to scavenge and leave poor little Iskra all alone. They were low on food, if he didn't scavenge then they would surely starve. He picked the abandoned shopping mall where he ended up seeing a group of looters. They were open to share what they find but being nervous around armed men Christo looted whatever he could find and bolted home only to find that raiders had come and ransacked the shelter stealing all their food.

Iskra ran over crying when Christo came home in the morning asking why he wasn't there to help her. He had no choice was what he wanted to say but he could do nothing but apologize. They needed more protection. Christo spent the morning sleeping only to be awoken by a friendly neighbor. He wanted to give the two wood since he saw them move in recently and we should all help and rely on each other. Christo accepted it and spent the wood on boarding up the open walls of the house. Surely raiders wouldn't attack right? Even though they were out of food, Christo spent the night standing guard but no raiders showed up. They were desperate, Iskra has been complaining about being hungry. Just then two neighbors showed up bringing a batch of vegetables. They were a gift and Christo graciously accepted it. The two of them will dine like kings tonight. However, Christo still needed to scavenge but he can't possibly leave Iskra alone. That night Christo went scavenging again, this time at an abandoned house. He managed to loot everything from the fridge which contained many cans of food. Great, they can survive for a few days with these. He quickly headed home to find the night was quiet and Iskra was safe.

That next morning a knock came at the door and a girl calling herself Arica begged to join the group. She was a girl from the hood, a cat burglar at the age of 14 and her abusive alcoholic father died during the war and she survived up to now all alone. Christo gladly invited her in. They needed someone to scavenge the night and Arica would be perfect. Iskra ran up and introduced herself. She asked if Arica would stay forever and she only replied with a generic response. She doesn't know how long she would stay. Each night could be her last and if the group was out of food, then she had no reason to stay with a sinking ship. That night Arica went scavenging and came back with the most food they had. She proudly proclaimed her loot as she walked in the door only to find a sad Iskra. That night raiders had attacked again, they stole the food and injured Christo who was guarding the house, as well as Iskra who was sleeping in the bed. This calls for war. Christo spent the rest of the day making knives. The next few days would be the same routine with Arica scavenging and Christo guarding the house. Only problem now is Arica scavenged most of the abandoned areas and they are out of food again. Raiders have attacked again, stealing the rest of their food and injuring Christo again. This leaves them only one reasonable choice. They would have to steal from others. Arica armed with a knife went to the home of an old couple as soon as she entered the two ran in fear. Arica walked calmly up to them and pluged her knife deep into the old man. His wife ran and screamed begging for mercy but there would have to be no witnesses. With a second plunge of the knife, Arica killed the old woman too. She looted everything in the house and returned home broken.

Arica was depressed, Christo came to comfort her saying she had no choice, she did what had to be done and he wasn't going to judge her. Iskra sensed something wrong but no one would tell her what happened that night. She ended up becoming sad. Luckily for them, that morning a sick man calling himself Marin showed up. He was a handyman and needed a place to stay. The party agreed to help him and let him inside. The group gave him some of his medicine and he spent the rest of the day sleeping. The next few days would have neighbors come over and beg for medicine for their sick mother. They had extra so they gave them some. However there was an outbreak of violence, raids became a nightly occurrence and they were losing their food. Arica decided to steal again, but this time a group of thugs. She had quiet sneaking so she could make it in and out without much trouble. But when she fell down from a open floor making a loud thud, she knew she was done for. The thugs ganged up on her and shot her twice killing her instantly. She was gunned down like a dog. Marin was sad but it was up to him to do what Arica couldn't. They crafted some guns for defense and Marin went back for revenge. He gunned them down but his mood was awful. The raids didn't stop and winter was coming. They were out of food, out heating, and Marin needed to go out again. He didn't come back that night as he was gunned down at the next house. The two remaining survivors didn't live through the winter. The End.

This was how I died? Really? I fucked up pretty hard there. I went to start a new game and I realized, It randomly picked one for me since I had the little ones DLC. Kids were useless, they can't defend, they can't scavenge, they can't use tools to help around the house. All they did was eat your food and get sick. I could start another story with other premade group of characters, or start my own custom story with custom characters. But what about Iskra? She was depending on us, she needed us to protect her and we failed as adults. Not wanting to give up I picked the same story but this time I have a better understanding on what to do. Obviously I would board up the house early this time with weapons. Raids caused a snowball effect and I couldn't get myself back on track after the first couple of raids. Next I built a rain catcher and a rat catcher. These two will give me food. This time woman called Zlata joined the group and I had her scavenge. I chose not to rob, not to kill but early on found a soldier coming onto a girl a little too hard. I hid behind a door and watched as he beat her and started dragging her away to rape her. Well I'm not going to stand here and do nothing. Snuck up killed him and stole his assault rifle. This will stop anyone from attacking our shelter. Soon a man named Roman showed up, he was an ex gang member and would gladly go on missions to murder thugs and rescue others. The group applauded for what he was doing. He was saving lives and psychopathic killer thugs brought nothing but harm for the war torn neighborhood. Eventually winter came and I had to set up two heaters just to keep warm and was nowhere close to dying. My food storage was always full, no one managed to raid us with our guns and Roman would dispatch all the thugs and have Zlata come in to scavenge with her bigger inventory. Arica ended up joning us 3 days before the war was over and the war ended with the good ending and everyone going their merry ways.

Iskra ended up going to school again and being normal, Christo was reunited with his wife, Zlata went back to Canada and continued music school, Roman ended up becoming good, and a leader of his community, Arica decided to give her father a funeral and ended up starting her own family. The End. That ended much nicer than the first try but it almost felt too easy once I knew what to do the second time around. People, events, locations are all randomized each run but I don't know how much replayability there is for something like this. If survival or stealth is your thing I would at least check this out.

Conception 2 - Persona meets child making simulator

This game sucks. When I first heard of the title I thought it was some kind of porn game but after hearing people talk about how its a persona clone and is actually pretty good I went and looked it up. This thing looks like a giant ripoff of persona from the social links, to the ui, to the combat, to the dungeon crawling, and even the music. Only difference here is instead of making friends with others to strengthen your persona and summon stronger ones, you make friends so you can "classmate" with them and make children.Yes you're probably going what the fuck and I don't blame you. I said the same thing out loud when 5 minutes into the game you meet someone and the priest tells you to start classmating. Yes I hate that term too. Other than this the entire game is basically a bad ripoff of persona.

I started this review with this game sucks and I'll repeat it again. This game sucks. They tried very hard to copy persona but didn't realize what they are actually copying. Each "day" you get 3 hearts where you can talk to the 7 heroines each represented by one of the 7 virtues. Talking to one of them will raise their affection slightly and there are 7 bars. Each bar is locked behind one dungeon each represented by the 7 deadly sins. Here is the issue, there is no time limit like persona where a big bad monster is coming every full moon nor is there someone trapped in the shadow realm waiting to die. There are no days where you cannot enter the dungeon because of a school event or there is no fog. No in fact there are no time at all. So why the fuck can you only talk to 3 people a day and then have to go back to rest in your bed for the next day is beyond me. So the majority of the time is spent navigating the menu going to sleep talking to a girl then going back to sleep. There are random events you get and you answer a question and their affection and mood goes up. Only problem here, unlike persona mood doesn't really matter because your not limited by time. It doesn't even matter what the mood of the heroines are because its almost impossible to fuck it up. So both mood and limited hearts is a completely worthless mechanic added in for almost no reason.

The point of raising affection is because when you have higher affection, you'll get stronger children when you classmate. And by classmating its not exactly sex as its just the male shooting his star power into the woman's star womb and a starchild gets born right away. There's also the sailormoon silhouette thing where they do sex poses and moans but its totally not sex! They are affected by the level of you and the mother with higher level parents giving the child better stats and higher maximum levels. They can also be different classes, some are gender locked, some are hidden classes, some require items. Which brings me to another point. This game is fucked up. I wanted to get a mercenary class and kept classmating but kept getting girls. Mercenary is a male only class so I ended up having to toss away tons of children. Same thing happened when I wanted a diva class and kept getting boys. Even more annoying when you have a full bar of affection, you have to classmate to advance the story but I don't want children right now. I'm still leveling these children and the new ones being born can't be saved for later because their stats will be shit once I finished leveling the ones I am using and the mothers level increases as I grind in the dungeon. So toss them away again. If only they let us advance the heroine bars without forced classmating. There's also this part later in the game where you have to perform classmanting with two other guys and the scientists create some artificial womb for you guys to get children and you have a gay orgy and some children were actually born. They ended up dying within 24 hours and everyone is all sad and like what the fuck. Why is that in the game.

Before we get further with all the children and classmating and all that shit we need to first introduce the people in the game and the story. Basically dusk nests appeared in the world and monsters are being spawned and children from the age of 16-18 are blessed with magical ether energy from the star god so they can fight back. The higher the ether count the higher your rank and two S rank disciples can classmate for a 1% chance of conceiving a child. They gathered everyone with the star god brand and put them in a school for them to fuck and fight all day long.

God's Gift - G.G. for short. You are called god's gift because you are filled with a monstrous amount of ether energy that lets you enter labyrinths without danger. With your super ether it also means you have a 100% conception rate with any S rank girls so you get a harem of them there to make children for you. What the fuck.

Fuuko - The first girl you meet she's the normal girl who is so normal she's kinda boring but not really. After meeting the other heroines you wish for normal. Basically all she does is swim and eat croquettes nothing special.

Narika - Another girl in your class she is the super shy student council vice president or something. Soft spoken, super shy, and blushes every other sentence. Warning though, later on you realize shes a yandere and tries to stab you with a knife. "Why do you talk to Fuuko when you have me? I will gouge out your eyes so you can't see another girl. I will cut off your tongue so you can't speak to another girl. I will cut off your ears so you can't hear another girl. You are mine, all mine." I'm not fucking kidding.

Ellie - The little sister childhood friend you almost forgotten who died when you were kids and got resurrected by the church and became a zombie assassin. I wish I was joking. That's her entire character she is a super happy cheerful little sister but have a darker side to her where she goes around murdering people for the church. I don't know about you but I really can't stand little sister characters. Even less if shes a zombie and an assassin.

Ms. Chloe - Your teacher who is actually only 1 year older than you because shes a genius and skipped grades. Yeah what the fuck right? At least give us someone older but no the game has to keep everyone within 16-18 years because only they can handle ether energy. Anyways blah blah blah she becomes an idol and you become her manager somehow and her singing can cure diseases and mend broken bones blah blah. Boring ass shit.

Serina - Haughty senior who is slightly tsundere. She has a huge complex about her short height and how successful her sister was when she was a disciple at the school. She's pretty likable and not very annoying. Kind of on the tame side after seeing all the other heroines though. Constantly having fights with her sister then later on gets a magic spell that lets her transform into a "tall busty beauty" from a kiss from you so you end up having to kiss her all the time to help her transform and enter a beauty pageant. Its not as bad as it sounds.

Torri - Eccentric super genius who talks in monotone with no emotion. She's odd but not in a bad way. Nothing too special about her shes just normal outside of her eccentricities. She does build planes from scratch and golems and send them flying and shit. Loves birds, tries to be a cicada, stands in the pouring rain all day because of a promise, walks around naked without being embarassed, tries to fight monsters alone because you said you wanted world peace and almost dies, and a bunch more shit. Although you do have the same feeling with her as you have with Ellie. She feels more like a little sister than a heroine. And you know how I feel about little sisters.

Feene - Foreign girl with blond hair blue eyes and talks in really weird formal speech. She's ok but they try to hard to hammer in the fact that she's foreign and shit. Shes all about justice this justice that justice everything blah blah blah.

Clotz - Fuuko's childhood friend. You classmanted with him and he helps you guys out when you're in the dungeon as the radio guy. Similar to the characters in persona who never actually fight but is always giving hints and talking through the radio.

So yeah these are the people who are going to help you fight in the dungeons. What is annoying is you can only bring 1 heroine with you and 9 children. So you will be forced to grind each heroine individually until they are high enough levels to have good children to power up your team. This is fucking annoying and grindy. Luckily if you are playing the steam version it comes with all the DLCs so you get a rare mob called Saggita on the final floor of dungeons. If you pick up the quest to kill them but never turn them in then the mobs remain golden so you can easily scout them out and kill them. These guys give like 3000 exp each and comes in a pack of 3 while normal enemies give like 30 exp each. What the fuck? Basically strategy is skip every pack of mob you see in a dungeon and go down to the bottom floor then hunt for these. Kill them and tp out and come back in to the same floor and repeat until you are leveled up. This is fucking boring. Near the end I pretty much gave up because the dungeons get so fucking large. 15 floors of 30 rooms each is way too much to explore for a game with shitty combat. Well combat isn't bad but its all just spamming your strongest skills since there is no time limit so you can always leave the dungeon and come back at the same floor when you need mana anyways. And its not like mana potions are in low supply. There's even an autocombat button you press and it does all of this for you. They know the game wasn't about the combat. That said bosses are stupidly easy and boring. Unlike persona's giant health sink hour long boss fights, the ones here ends in one turn. All bosses use the same skill, dusk release which is a full party aoe attack that does moderate damage. That's it. From the first boss to the last they only use one attack and you can blow them up in 1 turn if you're decently leveled.

So if combat sucks, if the social links suck, then what about the story it has to be good right? Nope! Not even close. It the most generic and mediocre bullshit save the world story that every shitty mindless developer makes. Monsters suddenly spawn 20 years ago and all the kids start fighting. Why? who gives a fuck. Then there's an evil corporation who wants to harvest the power or some shit and people start turning into monsters and what the fuck. So you use your powers to make children with all the girls and then you and your army of kids go into the dungeon and fight them.There are basically two short cutscenes before a dungeon opens up and you go in there and spend the rest of the time farming. After you beat it, two more short cutscenes, talk to all the heroines to raise another bar of affection, classmate, do two cutscenes with each of them, then do 2 story cutscenes and enter the next dungeon. Repeat until its over.

The classes in the game are interesting but the problem with having a lot of classes is most of them end up sucking. But they did a good thing in that when you bring children with you they travel in a pack of 3. 3 groups of 3 will make up your team of children and you with a heroine makes up the 4th group. Different classes in the groups will unlock hidden group skills so even if Bulleteer is the strongest gun class in the game, you're not going to get full potential unless you mix it up with a say Gambler or Ether Sniper. The stats of the child is determined by the mother. For example, Feene has a lot of attack and defense but low speed and technique. Torri has a ton of speed and Serina has a ton of technique but no attack. If you are making an Archer class you should pick Serina since Archers use technique for their damage while a Paladin class should be on Feene since they are tanks. That means to get the most of all the classes you'll need to level up the mothers so their stats will be better. What if you want a shitty Archer could you just go Feene since she's the highest level? Nope! You must reach certain stat thresholds before you can create a class so since Feene's children's growth is mostly into defense they will never be able to make an Archer no matter how much you level her. The mother will also pass her element down to the child. For example, Torri's children will all have the wind element, Serina's children will have fire, and Feene will have dusk. So having all your children be one element may be good when you're fighting against one you are strong against, but as soon as you meet water enemies with a team of 9 fire element children you'll start crying. Some weapons can change the element of your attack, but your defense will always remain. Casters will always learn spells based on their element. So Narika's children will always have earth element spells.

Now comes the more complex stuff. Later on you are able to perform trimating when you get heroine affection high enough. Any heroine with 5 bars or more are able to trimate with each other. Trimating lets you pick two heroines and create a child with bother their stats and one of their elements. You're probably thinking you can just mix Feene with Torri for a child with both great defense and great speed but it doesn't really work that way. Those two are probably the worst mix because it averages out both mothers and they grow into some weird shitty average child with no specialization. Trimating is a trap that people fall into because they think they can get away with a low level mother and a high level mother to make children not easily available to one mother. Lets use the Archer example again. Say your highest level mother is Feene and Serina is at level 1. When you trimate the max level of the child will be low and the growth of the archer will have weak technique, lower defense and attack and even lower speed than normal. Archers want technique for their damage and since their growth is so low once you leveled up they will be doing shit damage. Sure you'll be able to hit the threshold for an Archer but its going to be a giant burden character not able to do shit because you handicapped yourself. Archers don't care about attack, or defense really since they're not going to be tanking like paladins are. These stats are completely wasted. Mixing say Torri with Serina might be better because Torri is all about speed by sacrificing some attack you get to move at incredible speeds. What trimating is good for is unlocking thresholds of special classes early on. For example you might get an Astromancer or Dungeoneer unlocked but no one is able to pick it because no one can hit the threshold, trimate and you can make one. These two classes aren't as specialized in stats so you can make an average child as one of those classes. Trimating also lets you get different elements on classes that are usually focused heavily on one element. For example Serina's Archers will always be fire, but if you trimate with Serina and Torri you'll now have wind element archers. Since Serina also has earth element defense you could have wind element attack, earth element defense archers or fire element attack, non elemental defense. Its surprisingly complex and probably the best part of the game.

Classes are good, choice is good, but it all ends up being more grind. After basically finishing one dungeon and unlocking the next bar of affection for the heroines, its time to get rid of all your children and get a new batch of powered up children! Your child hit their level cap of 13 and now you make a new batch which are level capped at 28. After clearing the next dungeon they most likely hit their cap again so you make a new batch with a cap of 51. But I unlocked a new class I want to make it but oh no I only leveled Ellie but I want to make a Warlock. If you try to make it with Narika you'll get a child with like a max level of 17 or whatever level Narika was. Now you have to go back to level the mother, then you make the child then level again! So once again its back to grinding level 1 children. This shit is boring. Every once in awhile you will get a genius child, marked by a star on their stat screen and a giant star aura around them in dungeons. Genius children get better stats and have a max level of 99. You might be thinking, I have a genius child I'll just keep him forever! NOPE. If only it was that easy. The stats of your child is based on the level of the mother. A level 4 mother with a genius child will not be as strong as a normal child with a level 40 mother for example. Sure you can grind to 99 but so can a genius child from a higher level mother. The game is also limiting you to 3 genius children at a time so you'll need to get rid of them before new genius children can be born. By getting rid of them I don't mean killing them off because that's just cruel. You send them away to become independent by helping out the city. Each child will contribute exp to raise the level of the city which opens up new shops or upgrade shops with new stock so you'll always want to send them away when they don't need them. Higher level children contribute more exp but since there isn't a time limit in the game you can just make thousands of level 1 children in one sitting and send them all away to max the city level anyways. Once again they didn't think shit through.

Is this game good? No its not. If you want to play a good game try Persona. Persona 3 isn't the greatest but Persona 4 is pretty good. One thing that this game does well is that it gives me a new appreciation for Persona. Thanks Conception 2, at least you have that going for you. It has potential but it doesn't know why exactly they copied such and such from Persona.

Firewatch - A Midlife Crisis

When I heard of this game being good I sort of just brushed it off going its probably like Gone Home or Dear Esther and didn't really bother with it. While I liked those two games I found this one to be much superior and believable. In Gone Home you learn of life through notes hidden in the house and in Dear Esther its from a unknown narrator. In Firewatch however, you are basically alone, isolated in the woods and the only form of companionship is a friendly voice on the radio, your boss Delilah. You learn of the world, yourself, your fellow coworkers, and Delilah though conversations with her.

What is the game about? There really isn't much you can say without spoiling the game too much so I'll just say its about a game about a man named Henry going through a midlife crisis. When you first start the game you get a little text narration of your life going from how you met your wife Julia, to how you ended up at Firewatch. The narration will constantly give you multiple choices on how you want to react in certain situations. It doesn't change the story at all, but it changes little things and affect your conversations with Delilah. Basically it starts with how you met your wife and then the years you spent with her and her eventually suffering from dementia at the age of 40 and how your life spiraled into drinking and petty arguments with your estranged wife and her family. Eventually you decided to run away from it all and take a summer job in Firewatch as a park ranger away from civilization. You will then spend the next few months there with your boss talking about anything and everything from her failed attempts to marriage and running away here for a decade to random conversations about trees. You start from being annoyed by her constant prodding into your personal life and sarcastic remarks but eventually both you and Henry will get along with her. Shes very realistic in the way friends egg each other on and is quite entertaining since she will be your only human interaction for the entire summer. Then shit starts happening.

The first half of the game is sort of calm and in a way boring. Delilah gives you instructions to pick up a supply drop, someone setting of fireworks in the forest go warn them, check out that smoke pillar in the distance, blah blah blah. Its relaxing walking in the trees with no one around and soaking in the image and sounds of nature then Delilah pops up on the radio to give you a friendly jab to remind yourself that you are not quite alone. At the second half, you start noticing shit happening. Someone breaks into your tower while you're away throwing your shit out the window stealing your stuff. Someone cut the phone lines so you cannot call for help. Getting attacked from behind and finding stuff about a Wapiti station that shouldn't exist. A giant conspiracy happens and the game starts getting interesting but the formula doesn't really change. Delilah sends you somewhere and you go do it. You find clues and you report back to her. You spent the entire game constantly chatting with her and the time you found out how someone has been listening in on your conversation and then Delilah saying the two of you should stop talking for awhile really puts it in perspective how lonely it is out here without her. Its really quite unnerving to hear silence on the radio. The ending is pretty great too. It doesn't try too hard to give you a bad ending or a good ending, but a realistic ending. While some people were disappointed about it, I enjoyed how it ended. This summer was your escape from reality, and eventually you have to face it and return. What you choose to do is up to you.

While I found this game to be interesting, it is quite short. It can be finished in a couple of hours and most people will find that isn't worth the cost for the game especially since there is little to no replayability. If you're a fan of Gone Home or another narrative story game then you will enjoy this and probably worth the cost. Otherwise wait for a steam sale or something before grabbing it. However if you hate walking around doing nothing or listening to random conversations then this game obviously isn't for you. You don't get to do any fighting. There is nothing out here in the forest but you and your radio.

Song of the Deep - Adventures of a child prodigy

When I first saw this game, the first thing that came to my mind was, this is Aquaria, Its both set in an underwater world with the ruins of ancient sea dwelling civilizations with great music and visuals. They are also both metroidvanias. However if you're expecting the game to be equal or better than Aquaria then you'll be disappointed. That doesn't mean the game is bad, its just not as complex as the game it was based on. This game was made by the creators of Ratchet & Clank, and Spyro the Dragon. They were inspired by Aquaria to make a game with a heroine that the developer's daughter could relate to and what came out of it was this game.

Lets start with the story. The game begins with you, Merryn, a 12 year old girl whose fisherman father has gone missing one day and you had a vision where he was trapped under the sea. Using your skills, you build a submarine from scratch and then dive under the sea to find ancient civilizations with mechanical cities and constructs that surpasses the ones on land. First of all, they wanted a character little girls can relate to but what the fuck is this. I don't know about you, but when I was 12 years old I wasn't able to build submarines. Nor do I know what Tyne reactors do and how they will shoot a torpedo of pure energy at enemy fish and how if I trade shiny coins with a giant blushing hermit crab he will give me parts where I can install helix rockets to my submarine or electrical grappling hooks. Ok fine maybe the game is a little unrealistic but that doesn't hurt the game in any way. The story has a narrator and she narrates everything that happens, as well as give clues on what to do next and she does it in the style of a children's book along with colourful drawings. However, the story is short and has many plot holes. Like how does Merryn know what the name of the areas are? How does she know who the Merrow or Fomori are? And how does she know a giant sonar tower under the sea was used by the Fomori to hunt Merrows? We are going to just accept the fact the Merryn magically knows everything? Outside of that the story is enjoyable enough but its short and purposely left vague and unanswered with hints of a potential sequel if enough demand.

The game is played as a 2d sidescroller with full exploration of the world with blocked off areas that require upgrades. These usually contain optional upgrades and if you follow the story will end up skipping these. However, I find them to be the best parts of the game because they usually involve puzzles of some kind. To explore the world, you have a grappling hook you can grab onto things with on your submarine. It can also be used as a weapon along with 3 different torpedos and a sonar explosion. Combat compared to Aquaria is more fun but at the same time, more boring because the game only has five different enemies and two bosses. Jellyfish, angler fish, urchins, crabs, nautilus are the five enemies you'll meet. There's also the red reaper squids but we don't get to fight them. Instead they are immortal, move stupidly fast, and one kill you when they get near. You don't even get to dodge they just gravitational pull you towards them, freeze your controls, then you watch them kill you in one hit. The worst part is an area where you have to escape a hoard of them by dodging wood spikes, opening a gate by pulling it with your grappling hook, sea anemones, shoot down two lava walls and a ice wall, navigate through two circles of water currents, and lastly a short burst before you reach the exit. The time they give you is so specific that one mistake, one bump, one error will get you instant killed. Worst part is they spawn magically through the walls so even if you outrun the previous ones, the new ones will spawn infront of you and kill you instantly with no way to dodge because of its gravitational pull and control freezing. Bosses however are super easy and you don't even attack them with your weapons.

In conclusion, the game isn't terrible but its definitely not very good. Its passable at best and frustrating at worst. If you've played Aquaria and likes metroidvanias and enjoy the ocean setting, then go ahead and try it. If you haven't played Aquaria, play it instead. If you don't like metroidvanias why are you even considering this game. I would wait for a sale to get the game otherwise just pick up Aquaria for a superior game for a cheaper price.

Tree of Savior - Tree of shit

Tree of Savior is the spiritual successor to the very loved game Ragnarok Online. Ragnarok Online was a good game right? Well, lets take a look at it without our rose tinted goggles. Ragnarok Online is a grinding game where you spend hours and days of your life to get a few precious % of your exp bar while trying to kill mobs while being surrounded or KSed by million of bots. Drop rate for items were so low you have a better chance of getting hit by lightning than actually getting them unless you bot. Bosses are tuned to one shot you so the strategy of fighting bosses is to use a big hit and then run or teleport away until it dies. They also have a long respawn timer, sometimes as long as half a day and you will be competing with a million other people on it. PvP is a mess where everyone either one shots or spam potions and never dies. Does this game sound fun to you? Looking back, no it doesn't. I do know why I spent years on that game though, it was because we didn't have anything better. Now our standards for games are higher we can forget about that such a shitty game existed.

Now, what about Tree of Savior, is it the same shit? Yes, and no. For starters, it is an incredibly grindy game but there are now quests thrown about where you can avoid a small bit of the tedium of grinding. However, the quests will eventually stop and you'll be forced to spend days killing the same 5 monsters in a spot contested by hundreds of people. The maps in Tree of Savior are small and the number of enemies are even smaller. Party exp is also heavily penalized so grouping up to kill mobs at the same speed you are soloing is a waste so everyone is a greedy asshole purposely stealing mobs whenever they can. You are pulling mobs into a pack to use an AoE? NOPE! Not if Archer Mcfuckface here shoots his arrow skill and pulls them away and kills them. Its not like you are able to spam your skills to kill monsters either. Most skills have a long delay and your basic attack does barely any damage unless you're lucky and picked a swordsman or archer class so you have to AoE to get the most out of them.

For the quests you get, it comes in a few varieties. Most of them are simple, kill 5 mobs finish a quest, collect 5 bear asses finish a quest, talk to asshole finish a quest. Some are the most idiotic ideas for a quest I've ever seen. Go and collect a plant. Well that seems simple enough right? Nope. Every time you pick one up you have a lets say 5% chance of it not failing. Now there are a few that spawn on a long cooldown and you see hundreds of people running around trying to pick up flowers but keep pricking themselves and bleeding all over the fucking place. Why was it designed that way? Then you get to the stupidest quests, the bosses. This game is lazy, it uses the same 10 bosses in the game with the same name over and over again. The level changes, their damage and health went up but nothing else. They all use the same attacks, they all share the same name, and they definitely didn't get more threatening than the time you met it at level 5. All they are is nothing more than a giant punching bag. You can't kill them very fast since their health is so high, but they don't really hit you either so its just a big waste of time.

Outside of those things its good right? There are a lot of classes right? Right there are a lot of classes but it doesn't really mean much when each class only comes with 4 skills. Going up a circle adds two more for circle 2 and another for circle 3. Each class has a rank and as you rank up you open up different classes depending on rank, or you can upgrade a previous class by increasing its circle level, up to a level of 3. However most of the classes, and most of the skills are pure shit. Instead of having a single class with many useful skills, you have many classes with many worthless skills. It looks complex and amazing at first, but once you realize how shitty the majority of the classes are you basically are forced into one path because none of the other classes or skills are worth picking up.

What if you just want to make a guild and play with friends? Nope! Not here! You'll have to level up a templar class, which is a rank 7 class that requires a base level of about 220. This would take months to get to just to make a guild. Whats worse is you need to waste a class change to turn into a templar whose skills consist entirely of guild stuff. A guild can also kidnap people. Inviting someone into a guild and if they join they are unable to leave. Spam invite in an area where people are commonly asking for grind parties will have a few people accidentally accept eventually. When other guilds declare war on you they will get killed and become unable to play. The Korean servers basically broke down because one guild invited a mass of people and got them killed every time they logged in and with no way to leave they spent the rest of the time logged out and on the forums complaining only to have IMC/Nexon reply with "its intended."

Tree of Savior is a free to play game, which means its a game designed to make you spend as much money as possible while giving the player as little gameplay as possible. They even released the game while its still incomplete and in beta. Its officially launched, but its completely full of bugs and unfinished shit all because if its launched they can start charging people money. You can buy costumes, hair dyes, and other shit for like 20 bucks each. You can even buy resurrection tokens so you can instantly revive where you died at. Then they added tokens, which is premium. It gives you a bonus 30% increased exp, along with a lot of extra stuff like bonus movement speed and increased dungeon runs by 1, and loot reroll chances. Also they removed the ability to trade between players without premium subscription. Yes you cannot trade in this game. Why? Because its designed to make you playing as long as possible, spending as much as possible, while giving you as little as possible.

Dungeons have a lockout timer of 24 hours. You can run these dungeons 1-2 times a day. A bonus run for premium subscription users. This makes sure people aren't spending too much time on the game and progressing too quickly. They need the premium to tick down while they make more content. World bosses have a 8 hour cooldown after killing one where it prevents you from getting any more loot. Oh so we can just run a dungeon kill a boss log out and come back tomorrow right? NOPE. It only ticks down when you are online. Yes you have to leave your character AFK for the timer to tick while eating away at your premium or whatever time based stuff you have. The no trading seems like a natural thing to do too. Low drop rate of good loot means they'll be doing dungeons/bosses a lot, and with a long lockout means they'll be running stuff for months, so make it so they can't trade so it makes it take even longer to get something. This makes sure they have plenty of time to make content while they are still milking players of money if they are premium subbed.

What do you expect from a game published by Nexon anyways? Something that isn't designed to drain all your time and money while giving you nothing? The sad part is the game has potential. The art design is beautiful, the music is amazing, the gameplay with a controller is great but everything else about this game is a giant mess. They were desperate in trying to get this game out as soon as possible to collect money. The only reason people even looked at this game was because it was carrying the name of Ragnarok Online. The developers worked on that game and kept calling this a spiritual successor. These type of grindy shit doesn't work in today's market anymore. You may have a group of hardcore Ragnarok Online fans but that isn't going to sustain a game especially when the free to play players all start to leave and leave the game littered with tons of bots from gold farmers. In conclusion, the game sucks, Nexon sucks, IMC sucks, Ragnarok Online sucked, free to play games suck, and the playerbase for these games suck.

Stardew Valley - You got dungeon crawling in my farming game

If you know what Harvest Moon is, you'll know what Stardew Valley is. This game doesn't even try to pretend its not a clone but rather embraces it. The game was developed by one guy, ConcernedApe for 3 years. The reason he started the game was he felt that Harvest Moon was moving too far from its roots and wanted a game that felt like the old SNES, n64, Playstation version of the game. What this game is, is a farming simulator. Not like the actual farming simulator game but a simplified, romanticized version of farming, along with gifting villagers, dungeon crawling, fishing, and other things. Like all Harvest Moon games, you inherited a farm from your grandfather and must change it from a desolate broken down heap of trash into a thriving farm filled with rows upon rows of crops. How you get there, is up to whatever path you choose.

Of all the different things you can do in the game, lets start with the most obvious, farming. When you first start the game you basically get dropped off on a huge plot of land. And when I say huge I meant huge. This massive and majestic beast of a farmland can fit five of the most recent handheld Harvest Moon games on the plot and still have room leftover. One thing the more recent games of the Harvest Moon series have been doing wrong was moving away from the farming roots. You get to open shops, fight monsters, tame animals, etc. But what happened to the farming? Isn't that the main reason the game was made? To simulate life as a farmer? Anyways back to your plot of land, you get a couple tools to start off, a watering can, a hoe, a scythe, a pickaxe, and an axe. You chop down some annoying trees, pickaxe away some rocks, scythe down some grass, hoe the land, plant the seeds you conveniently received from the mayor as a housewarming gift, and then water the seeds. This will be your daily routine for the rest of the game as you slowly expand the farmable area on your land. The tools can be upgraded to improve the cutting speed, or the area you can water and will help speed things up as you get better.

After repeating the steps above for a few days you'll notice that the crops are ready. The game is divided into 4 seasons, each 28 days long. Some crops take 5 days to grow, some others take 14, and some even take 24 days. Knowing what seeds to buy is an important thing to know. Do you buy seeds that take 14 days to grow because it gives the best return of cost per profit, or do you buy fast growing crops to start getting some income so you don't end up being poor and unable to do anything. Crops will grow in every season except winter unless you have a greenhouse. Each season has their own crops and most will not carry over to the other season. So don't plant a crop that takes 24 days to grow near the end of Spring or it'll wither and die as soon as Summer begins. Unless that crop is a multi season one like corn. Once the crops have grown, you can harvest them and throw them into the shipping bin where the mayor will come every night and pay you a sum of money the next morning for whatever you shipped. But what about winter? Will I starve to death?

The game also allows the raising of livestock. You can build a coop, which can house chickens and ducks who will lay eggs every day or every two days for ducks. They will need to eat hay every day, either from cutting down grass or buying them from the ranch in town. Eventually you will be able to house rabbits in the coop as well letting you collect wool from them. The barn can also be built and house cows, goats, sheep and pigs. Cows and goats can be milked, sheep can be sheared for wool, and pigs can be used to dig for truffles. These too need to be fed everyday, as well as petted. If you don't pet your livestock they will get mad and refuse to lay eggs or produce milk. One thing however, unlike something like Shepherds Crossing,  you aren't able to slaughter them and harvest their meat. This is a romanticized version of farming, these animals are your friends and you must give your utmost love and affection. You could however, sell them. The ones which likes you more with more hearts, will sell for more. I don't know why but I guess pets who are raised with love taste better when you ship them off to the butcher. You could focus more on ranching, focusing more on creating artisan products from milk to make cheese or mayonnaise from eggs over farming crops if you want.

Another alternative to farming is fishing. Once you have acquired a fishing rod, you are able to start fishing in any body of water in the game. Starting off fishing may seem like a chore, and not much profit for the effort spent but as you get better, the easier it becomes to fish rarer fish which sells for ludicrous amounts of money. Fish are affected by seasons as well, but unlike crops you don't need to worry about when to plant them or what to do during winter. After you're done the daily chores of watering all your crops and feeding your livestock, you can spend the rest of the time fishing if you need that extra money. Another thing about fishing are crab pots. You can drop them in the ocean with bait and come back the next day to find stuff caught inside. Sometimes is garbage people threw in the ocean, sometimes its lobsters. Some fish will only show up in certain weathers, different time of days, or certain locations. Fishing is like a game within a game, and to catch them all require a lot of patience.

Last but not least, there is mining. You may enter the mines at any time and start digging your way down. There are monsters inside the mine and the game sort of turns into a dungeon crawl. You need to mine rocks and beneath them you may find ores, or ladders. The ladder lets you descend to the next floor and the ores are used to upgrade your tools. If you find gemstones they can be sold for money or gifted to people for big friendship points. Monsters also drop loot which can be sold for money. Mining can be quite profitable as you start digging deeper into the mine. Every 5 levels is an elevator that acts as a shortcut for the next time you go down. However, if you die inside the mine you will get knocked out, sent to the hospital or woken up at the entrance of the mine and the jerk monsters will steal your gold, 5 items you are carrying and also you will suffer a concussion that makes you forget the last 10 levels you dug and have to find the elevators all over again. Do not get knocked out as its a huge setback. But the greater the risk the greater the rewards.

This is not everything in the game either, there is an actual story. You basically left city life working at the Joja offices to become a farmer. However, at the countryside, an aggressive Joja Mart has set up shop and is driving local mom and pop stores out of business. There are two ways to tackle this problem, the common sense route is to fight the problem by showing this town is worth saving by starting with the town center. Inside there, little spirits have made it its home and you can do bundle quests to restore it to how it was before. These bundles are made from all sorts of things ranging from crops, to fish, to ores, to cooked food. Basically it makes you do everything in the game and rewards you with small items and unlocks new areas and things to do in the game. The other way is to become a Joja Mart member and buy the town hall and have it demolished into a storage facility and then buy the rest of the upgrades directly instead of doing bundles. This goes against everything harvest moon but its for people who don't like to collect items and doing little quests and just want to shove money so they can unlock the same things. These unlocks range from accessing the mine carts in town for fast travel, to fixing the bus stop so you can ride to the desert, a second area/town with more villagers, crops, a harder more difficult mine, and even a difficult dungeon to dungeon crawl in.

The game alone without the story and unlocked new areas would be amazing but adding these little extra things push it far above the Harvest Moon series. Its everything Harvest Moon was and is, but done better and expanded upon. Dungeon crawling adds a new element to the farming game and is comparable to something like the Rune Factory spinoffs for Harvest Moon. If you like anything from the Harvest Moon series you'll love this game. If you don't know and never tried, this game will be a good one to get started with as its simple to pick up and filled to the brim with complexity if you wished it to be. You can skip all the combat if you wished and just go the Joja Mart route if you wished. The best thing? This game is a quarter of the price of Harvest Moon at only $15 so its cheap to pick up and try compared to the Harvest Moon series. A quarter of the price and tenfold in content, its no wonder this game is getting so much praise and became one of the top games on steam after only a week of its release.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot7uXNQskhs