Lordhippos
Pokémon Master
In the last couple of weeks I've been on a mission to complete two games ahead of Dragons Dogma 2 and Rise of the Ronin both arriving on the same day.
Unicorn Overlord
This game was awesome and I highly recommend it for people who enjoy tactical RPG games. Vanillaware animations are top tier and the story and action have a good pace of delivery to ensure you're never bored. The game introduced some new systems and mechanics slowly and this allows even novice players of this genre to grasp how the game works without needing to read lots of instructions.
There is like a 6-7 hour demo you can try as well before buying it, they are that confident in the demo that they are willing to give you plenty of time to try it out.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
I've not played the OG FF7 games so hard to get nostalgic about things here, but I have played FF7 Remake part 1, the Intergrade DLC, and the Crisis Core one so I did enjoy seeing some throwbacks to events/places out of those.
With that said, I think that for the most part the story elements here were very good, I'll add some comments/issues I had in spoilers here as I don't want to spoil anything for people who haven't reached the end yet. I have a fair bit to add here so this will be quite long.
Unicorn Overlord
This game was awesome and I highly recommend it for people who enjoy tactical RPG games. Vanillaware animations are top tier and the story and action have a good pace of delivery to ensure you're never bored. The game introduced some new systems and mechanics slowly and this allows even novice players of this genre to grasp how the game works without needing to read lots of instructions.
There is like a 6-7 hour demo you can try as well before buying it, they are that confident in the demo that they are willing to give you plenty of time to try it out.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
I've not played the OG FF7 games so hard to get nostalgic about things here, but I have played FF7 Remake part 1, the Intergrade DLC, and the Crisis Core one so I did enjoy seeing some throwbacks to events/places out of those.
With that said, I think that for the most part the story elements here were very good, I'll add some comments/issues I had in spoilers here as I don't want to spoil anything for people who haven't reached the end yet. I have a fair bit to add here so this will be quite long.
There are quite a few issues I had which stop this game being as good as it really should be. I could probably write more, but you guys may get the idea.
In no particular order:
Open World
Open world traversal was largely a pain and the open world locations were copy/paste objectives. Poor map design meant that there was usually only one route to get to something, and it could be that you need to traverse from elsewhere, or find a cave, or a hidden path or similar. I wish they made the map traversal a bit more open, more than one route to places to discover.
Gongaga jungle was the worst zone of them all. Nibelheim was the most fun to traverse as your chocobo could practically fly.
Chocobo bouncing off the smallest thing you bump into was meh as well, and the car driving into anything instantly stopped it dead as well. Physics engine not really at work here.
I hated how involved Chadley was as I don't like his character really, and every time you did something he'd give you a little video message and a chat. I did joke with him at the start and said I didn't remember him
Side Quests
A lot of side quests were kind of boring and simple. Side quests such as find ingredients for dinner, or go rescue some chickens, are simply lazy quest design. I wish they took a leaf out of Witcher 3's book and made each side quest interesting so they were always worth doing. I started skipping the later ones.
I feel like this game doesn't necessarily really respect your time, so it's happy to add filler to slow you down.
Example of a quest which just wasn't fun was the one where you had to rescue to bird in Corel. You have to visit 3 different bird cages and lay bait, and then re-visit all 3 locations again to complete the quest.
Mini Games
There are far, far too many mini games, and some of them were really not fun at all. It was almost a game of "what can become a mini game?". Highlights for worst mini games include:
Enemies
There were a lot of annoying enemies to fight to be honest, the combat in this game isn't that amazing to me to begin with, but when you throw in:
I wish they transplanted the combat from Granblue Fantasy Relink into this because that had way more fun combat (to me).
Levelling Systems
They've turned everything into a levelling system, there is:
As a general note, the lack of continuation of your character from the 1st game kind of makes all of this levelling pointless as well, I suspect we'll get a brand new character set in the 3rd instalment as well.
Main Story
The main story was the best of the game really, but was probably 25% of my actual playtime, the rest was spent on sort of filler open world and quests. I completed this with an 82 hour save file, and with some stuff left not done still such as Gilgamesh island, because the thought of fighting two bosses at once instead of one was enough to put me off.
I tried to do basically everything I could though, some of the mini games I liked so I went for higher scores, some of the open world bits were OK so I didn't mind them, though it got a little zzz after the first 2-3 zones.
My least favourite main story bit was probably the Cait Sith section. I liked the boat section and the bit leading up to it where you get your own little squad of Shinra troops from the seventh.
The ending sequence was a little too long winded for it's own good I thought, with multiple phase/character Sephiroth battles, and the final move he does (the end is nigh) was a totally out of the blue thing which is a DPS check, if you fail, you have to start that bit of the fight again. I wouldn't mind but you also get no opportunity to swap gear or materia etc after this like 2 hour long battle starts, so if you get here and you can't finish it, you have to accept going quite far back or retrying this fight at least a few times.
As for the actual ending itself, honestly mostly just confusing, Aerith died, but she didn't, and then she is there helping you, but she's not there at the end, and only you can see her. As a general rule I dislike multiverse stories unless they can make it coherent enough to follow what is going on, here the "is this real?" vs "is this imaginary" played a little too often for me, this takes away impact of things as you're second guessing yourself as to whether it's a real event or not.
In no particular order:
Open World
Open world traversal was largely a pain and the open world locations were copy/paste objectives. Poor map design meant that there was usually only one route to get to something, and it could be that you need to traverse from elsewhere, or find a cave, or a hidden path or similar. I wish they made the map traversal a bit more open, more than one route to places to discover.
Gongaga jungle was the worst zone of them all. Nibelheim was the most fun to traverse as your chocobo could practically fly.
Chocobo bouncing off the smallest thing you bump into was meh as well, and the car driving into anything instantly stopped it dead as well. Physics engine not really at work here.
I hated how involved Chadley was as I don't like his character really, and every time you did something he'd give you a little video message and a chat. I did joke with him at the start and said I didn't remember him
Side Quests
A lot of side quests were kind of boring and simple. Side quests such as find ingredients for dinner, or go rescue some chickens, are simply lazy quest design. I wish they took a leaf out of Witcher 3's book and made each side quest interesting so they were always worth doing. I started skipping the later ones.
I feel like this game doesn't necessarily really respect your time, so it's happy to add filler to slow you down.
Example of a quest which just wasn't fun was the one where you had to rescue to bird in Corel. You have to visit 3 different bird cages and lay bait, and then re-visit all 3 locations again to complete the quest.
Mini Games
There are far, far too many mini games, and some of them were really not fun at all. It was almost a game of "what can become a mini game?". Highlights for worst mini games include:
- Moogle babysitting
- Cactuar protorelic (esp as Aerith)
- Glide de Chocobo (which for some reason had no inverse ascend/descend control - every single flight based game I've ever played you pull down on the stick to go up!).
Enemies
There were a lot of annoying enemies to fight to be honest, the combat in this game isn't that amazing to me to begin with, but when you throw in:
- Flying enemies in general
- Enemies that turn you into a frog
- Enemies that petrify you
- Enemies that become invincible (jellyfish)
- Enemies that are hard to hit (cactuar)
- Enemies that one shot kill you (or your whole party)
I wish they transplanted the combat from Granblue Fantasy Relink into this because that had way more fun combat (to me).
Levelling Systems
They've turned everything into a levelling system, there is:
- Your level
- Your party level
- Your crafting level
- Your weapon level
- Your relationship level with characters
- Your Queens Blood level
- Your Moogle vendor level
- Materia levels
As a general note, the lack of continuation of your character from the 1st game kind of makes all of this levelling pointless as well, I suspect we'll get a brand new character set in the 3rd instalment as well.
Main Story
The main story was the best of the game really, but was probably 25% of my actual playtime, the rest was spent on sort of filler open world and quests. I completed this with an 82 hour save file, and with some stuff left not done still such as Gilgamesh island, because the thought of fighting two bosses at once instead of one was enough to put me off.
I tried to do basically everything I could though, some of the mini games I liked so I went for higher scores, some of the open world bits were OK so I didn't mind them, though it got a little zzz after the first 2-3 zones.
My least favourite main story bit was probably the Cait Sith section. I liked the boat section and the bit leading up to it where you get your own little squad of Shinra troops from the seventh.
The ending sequence was a little too long winded for it's own good I thought, with multiple phase/character Sephiroth battles, and the final move he does (the end is nigh) was a totally out of the blue thing which is a DPS check, if you fail, you have to start that bit of the fight again. I wouldn't mind but you also get no opportunity to swap gear or materia etc after this like 2 hour long battle starts, so if you get here and you can't finish it, you have to accept going quite far back or retrying this fight at least a few times.
As for the actual ending itself, honestly mostly just confusing, Aerith died, but she didn't, and then she is there helping you, but she's not there at the end, and only you can see her. As a general rule I dislike multiverse stories unless they can make it coherent enough to follow what is going on, here the "is this real?" vs "is this imaginary" played a little too often for me, this takes away impact of things as you're second guessing yourself as to whether it's a real event or not.
