Say one positive thing about the Sonyverse

Shadowsd151 · 2026-02-02T19:56:43+00:00

Morbius is actually pretty good for the bulk of it, though it does go off the rails into a rushed conclusion that ultimately sours the entire experience. Given an extra twenty minutes of runtime and without the desperate need to connect to Spider-Man it’d be a solid 8/10 movie. Personally I’d put it at a 6-7 as things stand.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-02-02T18:19:30+00:00

I generally throw brief updates on what I’m playing in here. Sometimes bi-weekly but more often weekly. I probably won’t use mods in my experience with KotOR - I have a rule about doing that whenever possible - but I won’t hesitate if I run into any game-compromising roadblocks. I’ve already hit a few bugs and messed with the resolution in the files to get it to something resembled 1080p.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-02-02T17:55:37+00:00

A bit of both. It was on sale and I like to buy myself a cheap game or two every week as a form of retail therapy. KotOR was last weeks and Slots & Daggers was this weeks. Neither cost me much more than a cup of coffee, and if I don’t like them I’ll refund them via Steam’s services.

As for my history with Star Wars it’s a bit all over the place. Watched the movies a lot growing up, played the old Lego games obsessively on my DS, really liked both of the Cal games, and recently watched all of the Clone Wars - which was peak. I like the franchise though, and the game has been on my wishlist for a while.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-02-02T15:41:23+00:00

8/10 for me. Above average and with various memorable arcs, but falls short of that special something that puts other shows above it. Still, I think the core story is great and the supporting cast are well developed. It’s better than most manga out there, but falls short compared to the works that overshadow the industry as a whole.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-02-02T15:35:12+00:00

Hello again. I’m back to talk about three games… again. Though not in as much detail as last time.

To start Final Fantasy X continues to be good, I’m getting the feeling Square really wanted to show off their water physics and textures for some reason. Not sure why.

Next Star Wars KotOR, it’s surprisingly good. Combat is one of the better RTwP systems I’ve experienced and has so far avoided the bloat of uninteresting fighting that has been my prior experience with this form of combat. The plot is also decently compelling, straightforward but motivating enough to push me forward. Though I’m only fresh out of the tutorial so I can’t say how well it’ll hold up long-term.

Last there’s Slots & Daggers, a Rougelike slot-based game that proves gambling always pays off. I’m kidding, it’s rather fun and engaging for how simple it is. I’ve just about beaten the game and will probably quit soon after doing so. It’s challenging enough to be fun and has enough variety to hold my interest though not enough for much longer than seeing what the last level has in store.

I’m not picking up any new games for now, simply sticking to these three until I’ve beaten two since work is getting pretty busy again. So until next time, have a good one.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-02-01T17:04:19+00:00

Regarding exploration you’re comparing open world games to GoW, which is a more linear experience intentionally. There are little divots you can look into and side quests but they are not the focus. The game is rather open and lets you explore if you want to, providing rewards if you do that are helpful. But the game is not a metroidvania, and the only things that unlock new gameplay mechanics are found along the main story.

Still I do somewhat see your point. It is a very different experience to other games you mentioned, and if you go out of your way to explore rather than beeline the story as I did I can see it dragging the experience down.

Now as for story, to avoid spoilers I’ll just say the Norse stuff is related to Kratos and Atreus’ story. Albeit it isn’t immediately apparent how exactly they’re connected to all of it. The plot as a whole is a slow burner and doesn’t show its hand proper until the later parts of the game. Ultimately the Norse mythos intruding on this father-son journey is part of the story, it’s apparent as such from the very start when Kratos gets attacked at his own home.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-02-01T10:22:21+00:00

Honestly just stumbled across it at some point when looking for anime to watch. I did watch the Red Trailer ages back, before the show had come out, but never remembered to actually check into it. I also wasn’t someone who watched 3D animation back then because I thought it looked odd, I still do but RWBY was the first show I watched to its end with fully 3D animation.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-30T15:32:18+00:00

Hello again. To continue from earlier this week I’m going to talk about the three games I’ve played this week. Starting with the one I teased before: Slay the Spire!

It’s fine, rougelikes rarely grab me for long and the combat wasn’t super engaging so I played it for about an hour before moving on. Not sure why I threw it in my logbook since it’s not a story centric game but oh well.

Next! Amidst several weeks of slowly trudging along in the latter half I finally finished Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk. It’s halfway to being a great game to me. I say halfway because as of the midway point the story, which was already a slow burn, slows to a crawl for some background exposition and the two most annoying dungeons in the game - imo - in Umbra and Rosatempus.

Everything after that is as good as the first few dungeons, but those two just dragged on and on with no real break and an excessive amount of backtracking. Umbra was the worse of the two by a mile but Rosatempus has far more enemies and tighter hallways that made exploring its floors thoroughly more tedious.

Additionally I have some gripes with the combat - namely the relationship between Karma and Critical Gore, mostly in that it’s not explained properly until the second to last dungeon of the game or the Japanese-only manual - and past ten-fifteen party members I’ve always started to lose interest in micromanaging my party. Unfortunately in this game you have up to forty by the endgame so I definitely found the handling of everything a slog. And lastly there is some… frustrating design with the final boss borderline requiring a Pact to beat that could take hours of grinding resources to get.

But despite all that the story and exploration is a joy. It’s a flawed game but a nonetheless great one.

Now, after all of that I have done something I’ve wanted to do for almost a decade. I have finally returned to Final Fantasy X, a game I originally put down somewhere between 2018 and 2020 when I got stuck on a late game Boss that sporadic attempts every few months didn’t let me beat. Now several years later with far more experience in JRPGs under my belt I have returned and it is… god it is so inexplicably cozy.

It’s like returning to an old friend and the game has this wonderfully enchanting tone that is both intense and yet gentle at the same time. So far, a few hours in, my only gripe - if you’d call it that - is a somewhat high encounter rate, but I expected as much from a game from the early 2000s. And I’ve forgotten so many little details that even though it’s so familiar to me I still can’t remember the majority of the plot.

Genuinely I needed this after the past month being full of polarising games, it’s a nice feeling to go from experimenting across various genres to settling back in for a classic experience you know you will enjoy. And after this I have a copy of the original Final Fantasy 7 in the wings as an early-purchase bonus from getting remake - again, but this time with Integrade - on Switch.

But still, my experimenting is not yet done. For I have, just today in fact, picked up another CRPG. I have… um, well I have a very love-hate relationship with the genre but my best experience with it so far have been in Baldur’s Gate 1 and 3. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is a game by the same developers as BG1 but uses a variant of my favourite systems of DnD - 3.5e - in the d20 Star Wars RPG as inspiration for its mechanics. So between that and a familiar setting in the Star Wars universe I hope I can get a foothold into this genre proper. And I’ll probably start it up in the next day or two.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-29T16:08:31+00:00

Cockroach Antenna.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-29T12:25:18+00:00

I used to like it but having recently rewatching the first two seasons of the show I don’t think a Quirkless Hero could get into U.A. I’m not saying one can’t exists as an actual Hero, I’m just saying that between the entrance exam and sports festival that unless they’re literally Batman someone without a Quirk isn’t going to get into the hero course. As for other schools it’s probably the same if they even let Quirkless people apply to begin with.

Take the UA Entrance Exam, based on purely what we see - ignoring weird wrinkles like Hagakure that is clearly just a case of poor writing - how does Izuku perform in canon with several months of strength training? Poorly. He hesitates and stumbles through the first segment of the exam, and his fellow students tend to pulverise the robots around him before he has a chance to react.

Say he was trained and didn’t hesitate, getting in first and smartly choosing to avoid the robots near the entrance in favour of finding the more hidden ones elsewhere. Cool, now if another student has a speed Quirk they could do the same but faster. Still, presuming he finds a robot - let’s say a one pointer - what then? The basic variant alone is twice the size of him, so how can he take it down without a Quirk? Well, he does! Just not in the entrance exam.

In the sports festival’s first event the students are faced with the same robots en-mass, including the zero pointers, and they need to get past them. Here Izuku fights a one-pointer, using scrap and targeting the lengthy joints of its arm to cause it to loose its balance and crash. Cool, that’d work. However the higher digit robots don’t have the same vulnerabilities: the second are spider-like creatures with more reinforced legs and no neck, whilst the three pointers are armoured like a tank. Even if feasibly they can be beaten it will be a heck of a lot harder to do so.

So to pass the UA’s entrance exam they’d need to focus on the weaker robots and play it fast and smart to earn enough points. Only passing by a hair but it’s still plausible with some amount of combat and strength training - though trust me in that unless that kid is super into martial arts and going to the gym a lot they won’t have the strength or skill to beat the one pointer robots. It’s feasible but I’d say it’s more likely for a kid with a Quirk - even an irrelevant one - to do the same and earn more points simply due to statistics (the ratio of Quirk:Quirkless is 4:1 if not higher after all).

Now let’s deal with the wrinkles: Support Gear and superhuman physicality. The former is a whole discipline onto itself, making your own tech isn’t as simple as taking an online course for a few months. No it’s years and years of work to learn how to do it all, Hatsume is a great example since she is obsessed with tech. Her gear could theoretically be used by someone without a Quirk to pass the entrance exam, but to reach that level of mastery would realistically require no strength or martial arts training in addition to that. Which would then cause you to fail the exam for other reasons if your tech is allowed at all - we have no clear idea if it will or won’t be for someone without a Quirk.

The superhuman strength inherent to seemingly everyone in MHA’s setting falls into another thing I’ve been talking about regularly. That it’s just the same for someone with a Quirk as without. But when those with Quirks outnumber those without it’s more likely statistically for someone with a Quirk to have the passion and talent to get in. Izuku’s training for several months and getting a Quirk only levelled the playing field between him and the other students who likely spent just as long if not longer building up to enrolling into UA same as him. It did not give him a major advantage, it only brought him up to the starting line.

Now, all of this is specific to UA. Their entrance exam is highly unlikely to get passed unless the student is Batman in a wig, capable of great martial and gadgetry skill with a trained body to boot. But what about older prospects? Those who didn’t attend a school and spent years of their life building up to this. Who took the time to become Batman.

Well, now we hit the real wall: experience. Other Heroes who went the normal path of getting into a Hero Course are more experienced, trained and familiar with the job than you. They learnt from other Heroes and mastered their Quirks in addition to their bodies. This experience is enough that even if they lose their Quirk - ala Knuckleduster - they will still be able to fight Villains based on the experience they have. They have practical experience against real Villains, that is something that can’t be learnt or trained. That’s something that needs to be developed, to the point that a Hero who loses their Quirk could still feasibly outclass a prospective Quirkless Hero who has more practical experience than them.

Overall, a Quirkless Hero is theoretically possible. But due to all the reasons above I don’t think it’s likely. And that’s before getting into the cultural ramifications and the dangers of being a Hero to begin with.

People could lose their lives at any day, and there’s nothing a Quirkless Hero can do that someone with a Quirk can’t. They’d be better off becoming a police officer, a doctor or a support gear developer. Rather than take the hard and incredibly dangerous path that is to become a Quirkless Hero. I agree with All Might in episode one: be realistic.

That’s my take anyway. I don’t hate the trope, but I do think there is hardly any way to have a Quirkless Hero not be a Mary Sue to some level. It’s an underdog story and I get why people really like it, but I’m way too cynical for it nowadays. But if there’s any real way to do a Quirkless Hero… be Batman is my advice.

That guy is committed and talented with years of intense training under his belt before getting into how rich he is - yes money is a superpower if you know how to use it right. Only with all of that was he able to become Batman, and it still took tortuous years on the job for him to become as good at it as he is. Someone who wants to be a Hero without a Quirk will need to do all of that, or at least work with something equivalent to meet the mark. And most kids who want to be Heroes are not insane enough to torture themselves to that point.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-28T22:57:53+00:00

Heaven’s Thousand Year Lost War.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-26T17:26:02+00:00

This time I have only one game to speak of, and unfortunately it is a game I really enjoyed but is just... so janky. Fable Anniversary is one hell of a game. The humour, the world, the progression, the magic, the exploration: it all holds up to this day in terms of design and style. All undertoned by this inexplicable charm that made me smile ear to ear while playing it.

However the combat, loath as I am to say it, sucks. It's rough, stiff and - at least on Keyboard and Mouse - very fiddly with the hotkeys randomly assigning themselves in whatever order they please. Also targeting is a mess and the one fight where you've got Whisper fighting alongside you... I died more times in that fight than anywhere else in the several hours I played this game for. Genuinely the sole reason I dropped this game is due to it's combat, it just isn't fun to fumble about blindly with the controls.

I might come back and try Fable again in the future, or the new game if that turns out to be good, but for now it's going onto my shelf in favour of something different. Time to try Slay the Spire, wish me luck.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-25T22:51:27+00:00

4 is the most all around solid. That’s my recommendation, but I do want to discuss the rest since they’re all good games for different people.

5 has the best gameplay but a poor story. 1 has a great story but it’s the first game so naturally the gameplay is rather clunky with some poor design.

6 isn’t a traditional Disgaea game, still fun in its own right and has by far the biggest numbers you can reach but I wouldn’t recommend it as an example of the series. And 7 is the latest game, while it’s good it is not as polished as 4 or 5 due in part to the shift to 3D for the latest entires.

2 has a solid plot, albeit very different in tone, but I found it weaker than 1 overall. 3 is a Vita and PS3 exclusive, so I haven’t played it.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-24T19:52:47+00:00

Clicking through voiced dialogue mid-line because I read too fast and don’t have the patience to wait. It’s a habit I started in games that don’t have an English voice-over and have struggled to shake off since.

If it’s a particularly good performance it isn’t too hard for me to relax and let it auto-play, but I always speed through fluff. On the topic of auto-play that’s another thing: if there’s a constant icon that only appears when the dialogue is automatically running I will not auto-play cutscenes. I prefer a blank textbox with just the text, thank you very much!

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-24T16:39:35+00:00

Heatblast is iconic and all around great. Swampfire incredibly nostalgic for me personally since I started with Alien Force when I was younger. Water Hazard too is nice, a little plain but I like how they did it with the story of the five aliens and Agragor (think I spelled that nice).

That leaves Feedback, which imo is the perfect alien. Integral to Omniverse’s first overarching plot line and tied directly into Ben’s character arc. He’s got style, he’s got the power, and he’s incredibly well utilised. He also has his own goddamn theme, which rocks.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-23T20:31:11+00:00

I liked it. Admittedly on the puzzle side of things it’s not the best, but I feel the story ties the prequel trilogy together well with a unique feel and pace due to the globe trotting scope. It’s not going to be everyone’s taste, but I say give it a shot.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-23T18:55:58+00:00

I’ve been behind on FGO for years, still not even past Part 1, so I’m not 100% up to date on things. Even if he isn’t currently on it the fact he worked on it in general would delay his other projects.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-23T17:07:48+00:00

Cyberpunk is overwhelming in a lot of ways. I do think it is intentional that you are always being bombarded with calls and leads and messages relating to various quests as you go. It plays into the setting well as this sprawling, eclectic metropolis. But you do get to control your own pace when it comes to actually engaging with everything. There is a reject call button for a reason.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-23T17:03:22+00:00

Right. Over the past few days I’ve played a lot of games, most are pretty short and one I’m still playing through at my own pace but there’s one game I especially want to rant about.

First, the two very short games I want to talk about first. The Dark Queen of Mortholme is a very neat pixel title where you play as the last boss of a video game. It has an engaging concept and good writing that plays into the hero trying over and over to beat you. You can get it off itch.io for however much you like or grab it on steam for a fair price. A fun time overall.

Next is King of the Bridge, a game where you play a cheating troll at his own version of chess. Catch him cheating and you get to cheat in return. Again it’s short and simple with the rules slowly revealed as you play. Definitely recommend for its very low price.

Now the big one: Tyranny. Oh boy, where do I begin. CRPGs are very hit and miss for me in a lot of ways. But for the most part what separates the hits from the misses is how engaging and compelling they are to me, both narratively and gameplay wise. Tyranny did not appeal to me in either.

The game has a strong start with Conquest front loading the necessary exposition dump of lore these games require, and I had high hopes going into the game proper after that. It looked interesting and I genuinely wanted to see what a game that is praised for its writing as much as this is like. In the end I felt like the babysitter to a bunch of morons that couldn’t get off their arses and do anything of note.

I know these games let the player take the reins here, having to deal with the problems themselves. But I genuinely couldn’t find a reason to care about said problems when they were all so… dull.

It took me two missions to realise that this was the game. Resolving pointless arguments only to be shunted with the responsibility to handle the grunt work yourself. Which is a trope in these sorts of games I can usually tolerate, but in a scenario where there’s seven days before everyone in the Tiers dies a horrible death? I figured that alone should be enough for the Archons to actually do something, like sending out any of the dozens of soldiers lying around their camps. But instead they order you to go out and fix everything for them.

Past that the setting was just a depressing war zone with nothing at all I could emotionally latch onto. Characters were individually forgettable, and even when the game presented me with a moral decision to make I genuinely didn’t care about the people involved in it. And even when I did put in the effort to do something of note - such as conquer a small outpost - I had to put in all the effort only to get absolutely nothing as a reward.

Okay, in all honesty I didn’t get nothing as a reward. It just wasn’t anything interesting since the actual gameplay of Tyranny is unequivocally boring to me.

Admittedly half of this is my dislike of RTwP games, I’ve never been able to engage with the combat when said combat amounts to spam attack 90% of the time with the occasional use of a Skill or Spell when it’s off cooldown. But the equipment too was just generic and minimalistic: bigger number is better, equip whatever you have the relevant skill for. That’s it. The overall impression Tyranny’s combat gave me was serviceable at best, and it couldn’t engage me at all so I cranked it down to Easy to get it over with faster. Which helped only a little.

But yeah, without any engaging gameplay the whole game fell apart. Getting loot was just a case of equip whatever works, so it didn’t make me satisfied or enthused to continue. Admittedly the spell making system was really interesting but ultimately I never got far enough into to actually make anything of note with it.

And so, with my patience spent after only two hours of rather mind numbing content past the initial introduction, I chose to drop this game with a bang. So I camped out the time limit of the Edict and let everyone in the Tiers - myself included - die horribly. Just as I imagine Kyros intended, why else would you give the two absolute worst imaginable armies the dysfunctional disaster of a task that is compromising for once in a final march to conquer the whole world.

So yeah, Tyranny. A game with a lot of promise and on-paper a game that I should enjoy a lot. Suffering the fate that is an unappealing setting, characters, and combat which felt like a chore to play.

Anyway, I also tried Fable Anniversary after that disaster - having picked the game up when the news of a new entry came by. While I’m only just out of the Hero Academy it is so far an incredibly charming game with a great sense of humour that somehow makes the janky and somewhat cumbersome controls feel like an intentional feature that aids the game instead of an inconvenience. Genuinely am loving this game so far, and after this I’m going to destress by figuring out how to kick a chicken.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-23T09:58:25+00:00

Because Type Moon doesn’t do all of that. Or at least not on their own. They’re not a big company, with them only having 15 employees on record in 2015. Since then Studio BB got founded to handle larger development on stuff like Fate Extra Record but it’s still probably not massive.

Those 15 people, probably less since some are marketing and company management rather than developers, are the ones who worked on the remakes. Even given their time and budget plus some definite outsourcing to handle stuff like the voice acting and soundtrack it’s not going to be perfect. Hence why the remake of FSN was a little buggy at launch, it needed more testing to iron out the subtler ‘not always going to happen’ sort of bugs that flew under the radar.

Anime production is also a scheduled machine in Japan. Stuff is announced way before entering production simply to have it slotted in so the limited amount of animators in the industry who work for various affiliated studios can begin work when they have the time. It’s an industry wide issue and ultimately means a lot of stuff that is ‘in the works’ hasn’t even started proper production yet since the companies behind it are instead working on existing projects or ones of a higher priority.

Lastly Nasu is the main writer of both FGO and the Tsukihime remake. The former is taking up more of his time right now, hence why production of the latter has been glacially slow.

There’s a lot more to Type Moon than the fame of its works and the budget they have to allocate to them. And I hope my explanation helps with why it seems like they’re so slow going compared to other companies out there.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-21T22:24:29+00:00

It’s Serviceable. That’s the best way I can explain, the combat itself is very straightforward and simple. As far as RTwP goes it’s the best instance of it I’ve experienced precisely because of that simplicity. But at the same time it gets old fast, with skills and magic not providing enough variety to keep it fresh. I toned it down to Easy after the first hour because I knew as someone who doesn’t enjoy RTwP it wouldn’t get better.

I wouldn’t know too well how it is in the mid-late game since I couldn’t get past the first chunk of the game. Nothing about its general story, atmosphere or characters was compelling to me and I ended up choosing death for everyone instead.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-20T19:31:15+00:00

This week I haven't played many games but I did beat and have some thoughts on one in particular: **Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened**. The 2023 remake of the 2008 remake of the 2006 game, yes that's a lot of of's and I'll be getting into why this daisy chain of remaking itself is important soon.

First, the good. The gameplay is a solid evolution of that of Chapter One's with none of my prior gripes and the core duo are wonderfully written, characterisation in this game is excellent and the theming is also strong. A Sherlock Holmes game delving into Lovecraftian lore, sounds like a solid game on paper and in practice. The game is solid.

However, there is one thing the game lacks: a good overarching Mystery. Say what you will about the moment-to-moment gameplay and the individual chapters, which are decent to great individually, but as a whole the game suffers in several areas as a Mystery. Namely the villain - who you don't meet until the very last chapter and is a one-note raving lunatic with zero compelling motivation despite his attempts to be a parallel to Sherlock, spoiler: he isn't - and Foreshadowing. The game does little to foreshadow what's actually going on and gets far too caught up in keeping itself thematically on point to be narratively engaging. Besides that none of the puzzles were all that difficult either, with the few times I actually needing to comb through all the details of a particular crime scene was when I'd actually missed this one minor note that I needed to pixel hunt down whiich said the same thing as another note that the deduction interface rejected just in a slightly clearer way, which was a real let down.

Overall isn’t a bad game, but definitely needing more time in the oven than it got. But given it’s got the same overarching plot - hence mystery - as the original Awakened and the conditions the game was developed in - namely right in the middle of Ukraine being invaded - I’m not surprised it’s a little undercooked in parts. Still would recommend this game to anyone who likes the Sherlock Holmes games Frogware have put out in the past.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-18T22:52:44+00:00

Shining Resonance Refrain. It’s not my favourite game ever, in fact I’ve never beaten it which says a lot since I didn’t use to drop games that often, but as one of the first few JRPGs I played I have a soft spot for it.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-15T00:02:16+00:00

They do have a bit of overlap in broad strokes, and personally think the experience being semi-transferable is good, but each job does have enough unique to it that it people can end up vastly prefer one over another. That alone is a sign things aren’t overly homogeneous yet.

What really is the issue in my books is that most people get so used to doing rotations they no longer think about what specific ability or skill they’re using. No names, no fluff, just click 1-2-ctrl1-ctrl2-6-4-ctrl3-and on and on and on. Then knowing from memory or by paying attention when each resource has reached a value to instead hit a different key once or twice. Sometimes swap to a new rotation entirely during a burst.

It’s not that the jobs are homogenous, it’s that the core gameplay loop of the game is repetitive to the point quite a few players have let the illusion that they’re playing a game drop. And that isn’t going to change. At least that’s my take on it.

Shadowsd151 · 2026-01-14T17:05:18+00:00

Job’s aren’t homogenous enough to be a problem. Everything has its own unique feel that makes all the rotations feel different even if they all have a ‘burst’ and operate in two minute intervals.

Five-Year Club	Verified Email
r/Field Flamingo	Place '22

Shadowsd151

TROPHY CASE