I use Spirit City: Lofi Sessions and it has companions (pets) as well but much prefer this one because having small dialogues from Satone from time to time helps keeps my head-scape feeling lonely when I'm working on projects. Plus it works quite well with my 1080x1920 portrait mode second monitor - you can scale to fullscreen and while it cuts out a chunk of the room, Satone is mostly visible and a bit of her desk, or you can have 720p screen in the middle with large black bars top and bottom which shows more of the room which is what I'm doing. Highly recommend if you want a straight forward lofi utility game.

Needing frame gen to hit above a stable 60 FPS at 1440p on a 4070 and 5800x3D is diabolical, how did they learn nothing from Dragons Dogma 2?

Save corruption with no obvious fix despite the patch saying they fixed it and unless you religiously backed up your saves like I did you are out of luck. PS2 era textures and object load in, black mesh flickering across the screen. Constant disconnects and crashes.

Terrible endgame where you mainly hunt two tempered monsters with a less roster than base Worlds and Rise for a Kulve Taroth weapon equivalent rendering almost all crafted weapons useless, which by the way no layered weapon so you get stuck with the Artian weapon model for everything. No gathering hub. No personal room.

6/10 MonHun game, only thing saving it is the combat, and even that has issues with balancing.

Gallica best girl.

Hidden gem, if you love Hollow Knight and Sekiro this is the game for you. It may not boast the scale of those two games but what it has certainly isn't lacking. Nine Sols deserves an easy try.

Story and characters are wonderful especially the development between Yi (protagonist) and those around him. Obviously I'm not gonna spoil it but I find the relationship Yi builds and grows from to be really beautiful. His self-reflection and the growth from it is well executed.

The gameplay is great, execution of the parry and talisman mechanic feels incredibly rewarding. Almost all the fights and boss fights feels fair with the exception of one I would say. It's also pretty hard - do what the game is made in mind with - parrying.

The music is good. Easy winner goes to the ending song, it's a banger. The second title screen song also gave me the chills.

The artstyle is hit or miss to be honest, I think the character the designs and main boss designs are great, but the enemy designs are pretty lackluster and the animations of enemies while doesn't personally bother me, I can see it being an issue for some. Background art is great, definitely pay attention to the background there's a lot of stuff like lore and story you can glean from it.

Not a single bug or issue at the time of me making this review, I played on the Steam Deck and it ran perfectly at 60 FPS (capped) with zero dips throughout my 30 hour playtime.

Give it a shot and support the devs!

Played mostly on the Steam Deck, almost zero issues aside from some dips to 40 FPS, especially the last two zones where it's more prevalent, otherwise solid 60 FPS. No FPS issues on my PC (it's a 4070 after all).

Do Canon of Vengeance first. It's significantly better than Canon of Creation in terms of character development and pacing. Atlus should've never released the original Switch version that the state it was in. No more 20~ fps with dips to the singles.

The greatest JRPG of all time. Absolute kino. The review below was edited in after a year since I played, it's a game I think about everyday and it's something I want to fully express in the shortest way possible, maybe one day, perhaps another year like today I'll write a full essay on Astlibra but this will do.

This has been the only game aside from Chrono Ark that has in recent years has me looking forward to playing when I immediately get home from work. I think it's better than any single JRPG I've played in my life - not necessarily on the specific aspects of it like gameplay or story, just better in enjoyment and the nostalgia it provides - and I've played many, almost every single Square Enix games (FF, DQ, KH, Nier, Star Ocean, Bravely, Chrono Trigger etc), I've played every single Trails games up until Kuro no Kiseki - also working on YS, Fire Emblem. Phantasy Star, Tales of series, Persona, and more.

I know I'm putting Astlibra on a pedestal but what it gave me - the experience, the gameplay, the story, and the fact that it was built by a single salaryman for 16 years of passionate solo dev work, someone who became a father during them working on this that not only blew me away but it felt like I got dragged back to a bygone era that now remains of something past that will never be again.

It's a game that while may not be superior to the other games I've listed above when it comes to specific aspects like how the gameplay plays, or how well the writing of the characters or story is, how good the music is, how good the artstyle is, the nostalgia from a bygone era that will never come back - it's how Astlibra has everything coming together that I doubt no other game can come together to make again.

I think it's a beautiful unforgettable and immensely enjoyable nostalgic experience that feels like a happy childhood home and life that remains in memory that I got to experience again.

tl;dr Game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ kino or nowadays expressed, CINEMA

I played 60 hours of this game within a week, every moment I could when I came home from work, it was immediately onto Chrono Ark. This is because this game has not only a great gameplay loop but also a really captivating story that hooks you right in all the way until the end. The best game I played thus far in 2024.

It's hard to really talk about what makes Chrono Ark's story great without spoilers, so I won't go into that. It's obvious it deals with "time travel" stuff as per the name of the game, but I won't say more.

The characters were endearing, I loved how each and every one of them were different from each other, yes some may fall into a tropey category, but really what isn't at this point? They're great, I just wished we had a lot more interactions and story for each and every one of them. I would also love voice acting as well for these characters and the story in general as an addition, not a necessity but maybe a future update for at least the combat and field dialogue.

The music is great, what a banger ost for the bosses. Even the credits scene + music is amazing. I sit through it every time I get to it. AI Fine should add the whole soundtrack somewhere, I would love to buy it to support them.

I really can't get enough of Chrono Ark, I think it'll be one of those games that gets stuck in my mind that I would just think back on a lot. Not many games do that for me, and Chrono Ark has achieved that, well done AI Fine. I hope there is more to come.

I don't know if I even have the will to give this game a full review as I'm writing this after being met with disappointment after disappointment, but I guess I'll try.

I know Itsuno's capable, but was this game capable? Absolutely not. It's one step forward (graphics and world design) and two steps back (everything else) in the worst ways possible. I've had a far much more enjoyable time in Dragons Dogma: Dark Arisen, a game that came out in 2012 than I did with DD2 and that game was apparently was not Itsuno's full realized vision come to life. And yet here we are with Dragons Dogma 2. It's depressing, even the Grigori of DD2 is depressed, he doesn't even look like he wants to be there in the game.

So you may ask, what is the vision he envisioned for DD2? Well we'll explore the new features DD2 introduced:

1. Dragon Plague, it's supposed to be something really interesting and yet it all happens off screen. You get a small cutscene and everyone in the city is dead. Wow must be terrifying right? Not really given most NPC death isn't permanent, you can even cycle through two weeks of ingame time and all the NPC's will be alive again if you don't want to use wakestones. Half-baked.

2. Beastren Race, cool a new race and one of the boxart characters is a beastren who seems like she's going to be heavily important. Annnnnnnd.... Nope, she has like a total screen runtime of like 3 minutes tops. And the other important beastren character? He has even less! You spend like a grand total of 10 minutes in their nation before you screw off to another area.

3. Talos, all the news and videos went heavily featuring this guy. And yet he's a one time encounter fight. There's no other Shadow of the Colossus type of fights other than him. Why? Dragons Dogma is made to have more of these type of fights with it's core climbing mechanic.

4. Warfarer, why? Whose bright idea was it to give you a limit of ONLY 3 slots to customize, why does it cost a chunk of stamina to swap when it feels already so jank to use??? I want what that person who designed this is smoking.

5. Trickster, why is our only CC aggro management. For a vocation that uses mists as there weapon why do we not have more combat capabilities like poisoning foes with poison mists? Something (miasma in DD1) you gutted from Sorcerer?

6. The unmoored world. This felt rushed, all they did was just remove water from the map and sprinkle enemies we already fought all around. You can do everything in less than 2 hours.

All of these feel half-baked and or rushed. Features we already had in DD1 getting gutted or removed completely. I don't even want to start with the localization issues. Why the FLYING ♥♥♥♥ did the English script remove all mentions of the Seneschal (a massively important ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lore piece, you know something ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Dragons Dogma is centered around!?), when the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ JP dub outright says it and has it in their script. What the actual ♥♥♥♥ man. You know what I give up writing anymore I'm sad and pissed.

Don't waste your time and $70. I can't give this any higher than a 6/10 and this is without my emotions and bias for DD1 coming into play.