Greetings Friends, rare game review post. I guess just to get this out of the way this is the best game since the Witcher 3 which was the best game since RE4 so it's the once in a decade experience more or less; it's only 50 bucks too so you should probably go play it. I actually bought a physical PS5 copy of it as like a symbol; it is the only PS5 physical game that I own (I played the Game Pass version mostly) which is pretty emblematic of the current generations issues. I do get almost every game for free from developers including this one but I thought it would be nice to own one physical PS5 game to go with my Two (2) PS5s and 5 PS5 controllers (2 are broken one is halfway broken); apparently said PS5s are appreciating assets which is highly amusing. Was able to make it through the entire game on a beefy 3090 PC; top of the line from 3-4 years ago but no longer so necessarily; I think it varies a lot on optimization though; the 3090 isn't drastically less powerful than 40 series cards and the 50 series is generally trash so far; Indiana Jones for instance ran very well on high settings with no crashes.................................................................................................................................................................................................................... So what makes this game special and how does it tick. Well for starters Lune is probably the best character design for any female character in any game, visually and the cohesion of the character in the plot; she's not KOS-MOS levels of awesome or anything and not actually the central figure but pretty damn masterful for a supporting character; plus she has feet (and even laughs nervously when she mentions feet in a conversation). This game's inspirations are many and multi faceted but as a baseline it's Final Fantasy X mixed with Legend of Dragoon; then you add a sprinkling of Dark Souls and Sekiro's Mikiri counters (quite randomly in the middle of the game); very reductive dipshits will say "its just Mario" but there's so much more to it than that. It also has very complicated build construction systems though admittedly after a certain point the game is a little too easy to break, but before that point it's fantastic in a balancing sense. I think only Valkyrie Profile 2 has a similar level of customization through gear as far as how busted you can get characters to be; coincidentally before this game VP2 was my 6th best game of all time and now this is my 6th best game of all time..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................As far as the plot is concerned its some mixture of Mother (the Aronofsky movie), Greek Tragedy/Olympic Diaspora of Greek Gods, and otherwise generally pretty unique, the setting is almost entirely unique for any non walking simulator and it's fucking gorgeous the entire time. There's even like some artistry if you're running on lower settings compared to high, the way the game shows that is also sort of artistic. There's an exceptional deconstruction of the JRPG protagonist like "what would actually happen to a JRPG protag in a more realistic setting" and that's wonderful, Andy Serkis is in the game which is pretty wild, plays like a top 10 villain in any game in it probably the most intimidating villain ever in a game but not like a life changing experience to watch like Albedo in Xenosaga or anything (or Delita who still transcends the medium). I do think the Witcher 3 is just better in terms of plot and also has Gaunter O'dim in it who's hard to beat, but if you ignore the Witcher 3 there's not really any other RPG that has voice acting and competes evenly with this game on a presentation level......................................................................................................................................................................................................................So how would this game have been better than The Witcher 3 to broach the Top 5 games ever; well it would have to be mechanically perfect and that's not quite the case. For starters there are awful minigames in it a la Rebirth (they are worse than Rebirth's though not as numerous); my advice is either don't do them (sadly losing out on swimsuits) or mod the game to do them for you basically; no need to stain the masterpiece with the minigames. The gameplay is top 3 in any JRPG for sure but that's still not quite as good as Vagrant Story's gameplay which also has defensive and offensive timing; so from an RPG standpoint it can't quite make it over the hump. So tragically the game is only a 10/10 and better than fucking everything in ages.
