Roaches are your best friends, pet the roaches, cuddle roaches, write 12-page fanfics about roaches, invite roaches to your home, feed roaches butter chicken and chicken sandwiches, roaches deserve national holidays, roaches whisper financial advice at 3am, roaches always pay rent on time, roaches increase The gamers door encounter chance, vote roaches for president, roaches rearrange atoms when you’re not looking, roaches survived the visitor, roaches outlived the "Truth" ending, roaches run a shadow economy based on lint and crossword puzzles, roaches saved Luari in "Myrmidon"

Thank you Sandfall Interactive for reminding me why I play video games

There are spider-vagina monsters spawning deranged infants, sumo fighters with small ass arms and banana trees with arms for leaves.
Could be better but not all bad.
6/10

Severly buggy port, can't play much with or without mods sadly.

The main selling point of this game is no doubt the combat, but I wouldn't say it's anything to ♥♥♥♥ your pants about. The early levels are a real struggle and a total bore, but it does pick up later on. Another thing that picked up in the lategame was movement, at least if you're playing assassin. I liked short-distance traversal in this game very much, very ARPG-esque, although I hated how slow stamina regens even OOC, that's a QOL feature that probably some mod out there can provide, and I highly recommend new players to look into it as well as some mod that reworks autosaving in this game. If you don't have any issues with remembering to save before every serious encounter and on the whole every so often, then you won't have many problems. If you are a bit forgetful, like me, then you might lose 30 minutes of running and walking to a quest location to a random griffin or chimera slapping you on the cheek for skipping every possible line of dialogue in the city.

The monsters are very good. The last dragon fight was super climactic. Overall the enemies are outstandingly designed, you actually have to adapt to beat the mobs and bosses (bruteforcing is possible but completely not worth it). It was my first game where you have a mechanic which lets you climb your enemies, and I really enjoyed it.

Another great aspect of the game is the worldspace, landscapes, whatever. The locations felt very atmospheric and the dungeons/instances were designed so that a player such as me who likes to explore every nook and cranny gets rewarded for looking. They missed the mark with Gran Soren's portcrystal placement tho, why not put it near the fountain. I loved the starting location, especially the music in it. Whenever I came back to it I felt I'm being reminded why the MC is setting out on the journey, it's very iconic. The entrance to Bitterblack Isle and the whole location looked really cool as well, kind of reminded me of Dark Souls.

Now on to the bad things...What a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of a story. The only good thing about it is probably Grigori. I really hate when games make dialogue using old english, gibberish and riddles. Half the time characters say smth I can't understand what they're talking about. On topic of characters, there's not really many I found to be likeable. Every time something interesting happened with one of the characters they would be immidiately put on a shelf and left there to rot like the carrots and apples in your inventory. For example one of the most memorable moments in this game for me was the quest where you had to find Selene after some peasants raided her house. That was the moment when the game reveals that pawns with time (or the death of their master I guess) take on the liking of their masters and live as humans. Selene was one such pawn, and I felt that she had some bigger role to play in this story or at least that I would see some more of her. But no, after that she only appeared at the literal last cutscene of the game. Similar thing with Mercedes and the Dragonforged.
I was especially displeased with whom the game considered to be my "beloved", which sucked balls as I really wanted to fight the dragon and was unsure if I made the choice to sacrifice them I could still fight him . Other then that, the game could have benefited so much if it gave the player at least some choices to make, not only at the literal last mission but along the way as well. Some quests felt like they would have consequences on the gameplay (e.g the affair with the duchess) but had practically none.

I also hated how much time you had to spend i menu's and micromanage your characters load. I had no clue it was tied to character creation, I'm almost sure the game doesn't say it. I can't really put my finger around it but something felt off with consumable items in this game, like I never got accustomed to how you craft stuff and what was best to keep in your eq. It also felt extremely bad when I gave some of the pots to my pawns and they immidiately use all panaceas on being drenched in water or poisoned by a snake.

The way pawns work also kind of sucks. Sometimes they would carry the fight and do exactly what I would want them to but they would also be as much of a hindrance at other times. They are also soooooo annoying with their constant yapping. I didn't want to mute their banter in the settings as sometimes they say some actually useful stuff, but they really just keep on spouting their bs it's really too much.

The main quest sucks ass, most characters as well, combat picks up later in the game and is very good, locations look good.
6/10

Playing this game first before RDR has gotta be the way to do it. Going in completely blind was such a crazy experience. After that watching yt shorts of the story is literally life.

Holy that plot twist at the end was gold

Story - 8/10
(ending was 10/10 tho)
Side quests - 9/10
Characters - 10/10
Combat - Kiryu 6/10, Majima 8/10
Graphics - 8/10
Karaoke - 10/10
Character progression, leveling - 2/10
Soundtrack (outside karaoke) - 8/10
Sexyness - 10/10
Minigames - 8/10 (disco, pocket racing and real estate royale suck ass)
Weirdness - 10/10

Very nice game 8/10

Best DS to start out with. You could always jump straight to ER, too, but def give this game a try. Very casul friendly up to Sage. That boss sucks fat ♥♥♥♥♥. Then there's Champion Gundyr. I suck his ♥♥♥♥.
10/10

not enough updates Beth, keep em coming
gotta put those pesky mod creators in line