the absolutely INCREDIBLE Live A Live remake is 50% off. If you want to experience one of the most influential and ambitious jrpgs of the 90s with some really excellent redone art I cannot recommend it enough. Go play that shit

Josh Tolentino | weeaboomer, Gamist
| work: RPG Site, Game Rant, Gamecritics | ex: Siliconera, Destructoid
Contacts in Carrd
the absolutely INCREDIBLE Live A Live remake is 50% off. If you want to experience one of the most influential and ambitious jrpgs of the 90s with some really excellent redone art I cannot recommend it enough. Go play that shit
It took a little while to get it online, but my review of Stellar Blade is now live on RPG Site!
Check it out: https://www.rpgsite.net/review/15760-stellar-blade-review
Most of my thoughts on it are in the review, but I'll add a fee stray ones below:
The endings justifying the story and characters being boring do not retroactively make the story and characters interesting (at least, not interesting enough). This is the "aha, but I was conducting a social experiment" of narrative approaches
This is kind of a shame coming from the same company that makes Nikke, which is imo the paragon ideal of a game that's so sexy-focused it's kind of ridiculous having a decent story and genuinely interesting characters. Maybe y'all should've talked to the gacha game team before writing all this out for the "we're not just a gacha game company, we make real true games that are good, too" debut splash idk
The loc is really stilted! Nikke has a pretty good English localization team, so it's wild that they opted not to tap that resource to make the dialog not read like TTS. It comes across like a first or second draft from the translator that wasn't passed through a native English-speaking editor (or perhaps a better editor) before being added to the game. I don't know Korean so I can't judge it on accuracy or whatever, though, but, like, I've watched Space Sweepers, I know Korean genre media is capable of properly cartoonish dramatics as befits an RPG, so Korean games should be capable of this in their native language, but I dunno what happened, here.
Anyway, that's kinda nitpicking when the combat is good and flashy, because people aren't really playing character action games for the story alone, so I think that, culture war shit aside and the fact that absolute chodes have made this game their rallying point, it's got strong fundamentals and low points that are easy to ignore. Strong 7, easy 8 if you're not super focused on wanting the story to be as good as it could be.
Addendum: forgot to contribute to the discourse on here and...well, she's sexy in that doll-faced lineage MMO/guild wars/graphics card box art way, and that works for some, though i found myself more interested in the 2D promo art they made in the Nikke art style commemorate the release lol.
some fears about how...expressionless she seemed are kind of borne out in the game proper. The outfits are there purely for you the player to gawp at rather than she the (fictional) person to express herself with, in part because she barely has a self to express for 90% of the story. About the only time she seems to display that kind of awareness of her own appearance is when she picks up a hidden soda can and does a cute pose with it.
Shift Up was very open about wanting to make a game that starred an unrealistically pretty lady, and they kinda went and did it. The contrast where she's wearing this insane bodysuit with so many skin cutouts it probably needs to be painted on and the one guy in the game is dressed like he's going to star in a Fallout sequel. When I showed one of the attached screens to a coworker she commented that she dresses like an instagram erocosplayer and he dresses like the boyfriend carrying all her camera equipment.
I mean, it's fine, i guess? I lack standing to comment with any authority but imo there are way worse things in video game industry misogyny to spend energy on (like KR game devs allegedly caving to/being Ilbe reactionaries and firing women accused of feminism)
I don’t know who needs to hear this:
You can add a bookmark with a keyword and replace part of the URL with %s to add it as a makeshift search engine.
fgo, bluaca, and honk rail livestreams all basically at the same time. that’s the gacha eclipse