i got banned trying to beat this game 3 times, so i won't lie and tell you i finished it or even got super far in it, but i played enough to come away with an opinion and i did really enjoy my time with it, brief though it might have been. the game itself had a long and troubled development, it took so long to come out and even longer to be localised that by the time they made any real progress on the localisation, the game was already a flop in Japan and was announced for shutdown, knowing this i downloaded the game and tried to give it a real shot and i did get a decent chunk of time in here, though obviously not enough, this is just a first impressions moreso than anything else. pic unrelated

the process of getting in the game is kind of complicated, first you'll need to get it from a PSN store, i got mine from Japan but i think it might have been on other Asian stores too, though not any euro or American ones, it would have been eventually after it had been localised but that never actually happened. once you manage to get this downloaded you have to make an account, but you can't do this from ingame, you needed to use a QR code to make it on your phone, something that i feel a little weird about, like why should i need a phone to play a video game? what if i don't have a smartphone? i do but i plan to get rid of it soon for a flip phone and i don't think i should be locked out of games for this, but that's a minor issue i guess. once you get in, and don't immediately get banned you do get pushed right into the character creator and for some basic combat. the character creator was solid, i was able to make a character that looked a decent amount like me and the classes are very varied and fun, plus you can even pick them up on the fly and changing them via the weapon wheel, and in a very nice move from the developers they even gave you near max level weapons as a gift near closure! so you could try all the skills and combos. after you get in the game you do a few story bits and combat and then you get thrown into the world. the story the game sets up is pretty interesting, you have this greedy fairy helping you get by and recover your memory, helping you get a job and driving the story, it's very recettear honestly, at least this one character, the writing is overall very solid from what little i played, there are also archived versions of it that are fully translated online if some of you at least want to see what that part of the game had going for it.

the structure of the game starts to get introduced about here, you go do a short dungeon with a boss fight, get introduced to mounts and things like gathering and crafting, plus the guild that you'll go to for all your quests, you pick them up here and slowly gain nodes in this grid thing that gets you ranks and unlocks new story stuff, it's like a mix of a mission mode and the sphere grid from FFX, with each unlocking and giving you stuff for performing feats and missions, it's neat but kind of confusing. here you also get the games pokemon like monster system, you get these monsters and they all have different effects, some can be used as buffs while others give you support in fights or are summonable for a move, it's such a cool system but sadly i wasn't able to get much use out of it during my time with the game, and that's because after a few more dungeon runs and a day of exploring the open world i got hit by my first ban, i was discouraged but i decided to try again on another PSN and made another account, i made it to just before where i got to before..... then i got banned. i decided to try one more time and i got just a little bit farther than that before i logged off the the day.... and got banned. this game has the worst IP ban system i'd ever seen and it was especially weird that it was still in effect this close to the games death, it's a dying game so who cares if foreigners play? so strange. guys in the general chat can spam about porn and gooning in Japanese and English but i quietly sit there just doing quests and i get a ban? it's so strange.

there's some other areas like a desert to explore, a huge town full of players, crafting places, stores and even a cool beach and pier you an hang out in, it's a really nice town all things told, it feels very like something you would see in a PS2 rpg, medieval fantasy but with things like air conditioners and screens thrown in, super anachronistic, but it's cozy, you can sit on most surfaces and just gaze out at the people doing their thing or at the sea in the distance, that beach and pier especially are a delight to look at and the games actual zones can be really nice too, the big open plains full of enemies to fight and crafting mats to farm or the big desert, plus more i didn't even get to, it's all super well made and nice to look at. the music is very good (it was composed by multiple composers and is super varied, people ranging from Rio Hamamoto of the MotoGP games, soulcalibur 2, urban reign, multiple ridge racers and tekken games, idolmaster and pokken. Eriko Sakurai of house of the dead 3 and 4, pokken, scarlet nexus, touch my katamari, altered beast ps2 and tales of arise. Mitsuhiro Kitadani of mario kart arcade, tekken 7, pokken and daemon x machina. Yoshinori Hirai of tales of the world: radiant mythology, smash bros wiiu, idolmaster, pokken and new pokemon snap. KYO, a composer on multiple idolmaster games. Syuri Misaki of scarlet nexus, soulcalibur 6 and daemon x machina. Kanaya Oki and Shogo Nomura who also worked on tekken 8. kohta yamamoto who has mostly prior worked on mobile games and anime. lastly there is Hideki Sakamoto who has worked on juggernaut, tales of the abyss, devil children, shinobido, shining exa, yakuza 2, spectrobes, bleach blade battlers second, one of the best games ever made in 428: Shibuya scramble, castlevania judgment, resi umbrella chronicles, aquanauts holiday for ps3, Valkyrie profile: covenant of the plume, the toukiden games and Naruto to boruto, guy has a legendary resume.



the combat is pretty good, it's a mix of normal hack and slashaction and MMO cooldowns similar to something like granblue relink or god of war or that one platinum games TMNT game, you have duel axes that are your most standard hack and slash DPS with big throws and swings (my first main), a sword and shield that are very tanky and a guitar that works like a ranged buffing weapon that shoots out energy projectiles (my second main), there's magic that i think is your support class and bows, a cool fast spear with a bit more mobility than the other classes (third) and even a massive hammer that has a built in cannon for ranged attacks, there's a good amount of variety and each plays super differently, there's also that pokemon system that seems to tie pretty heavily into the combat later on, but i never got far enough for it to really factor too much in. you can explore the world or do dungeons and i think later on there's even raids? but i never got anywhere close to that, i just had fun in some of the dungeons and overworld killing enemies with all the different classes and trying out the fun cooldowns, i do think i'd have had even more fun though had i gotten far enough to really test out the pokemon type systems, maybe if the game's upcoming amazon produced retooling comes to consoles i may put the time into this game it deserves, though that version, while in english and localised, seems to be PC and mobile only, but considering so much of the work on porting to console is effectively done for them, we can only hope something comes of it. at the time i was pretty negative and angry about this game, maybe even rightfully so, i hated how stressful trying to play it was because of the account bans and i hated having to constantly make new accounts, it started to sour the whole experiance on me, but then i took a step back and thought about it, this wasn't the way the game was meant to be played, this wasn't its fault and i shouldn't hold any of that against it and when i did this it put the game much more into perspective for me, i think it was a healthy experiance to have, annoyance and all, because it let me take that step back and think about my negative perceptions on certain games, something that became very relevant with two other games i played shortly after this one.

i also want to go from a dead game to talk about a dying game, that being ubisofts XDefiant, long time readers will know that this is not my first time talking about XDefiant, i talked about it before in a short review compilation and enjoyed my time with it well enough, even if i didn't stick with it and thought the game was too difficult to really get into for me because of the skill gap between me and other players, this all changed a few months ago when the game had announced its shutdown far before i ever expected it would have, far, far long before that, see i expected this to last at least a few years, right, like its an ubisoft game and its one that seemed to be doing well for itself that first week, but it didn't, and what success it did have did not last, eventually they just decided it wasn't worth the effort and announced a shutdown, leaving tons of potential unfinished and lots of content lost to time with none of it to ever be acknowledged or seen again....except that didn't happen, what did happen was that the devs stopped giving a fuck what ubisoft wanted and threw all the content, finished or not in the game, characters, maps, weapons, weather they were finished or balanced or not, maps without sound effects and weapons without template pics, all broken and unfinished and all up there to use for the few people lucky enough to still have the game in their libraries after delisting, this is very impressive and downright inspirational and i'd like to talk about it just to give them credit for their work here, what they did was brave and it deserves to be given recognition.

so what all was added, for a start a few new groups of playable characters. the wolves from ghost recon breakpoint (literally who?) the assassins from assassins creed who have some of the games coolest looking outfits and an ult that lets you disintegrate people and some guy from far cry blood dragon (NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO), thankfully he's not as overtly racist as you've probably come to expect from anything to do with that subseries, they're not super unique characters but the assassins are great fun to use and the blood dragon guy seems downright broken but in a fun way. you also have maps from series like rayman, which is complete with a lum collecting mode!! prince of Persia and more tom Clancy whatever's, but the main draw here is the rayman and POP maps, they're cool as hell and worth checking this out for alone, there was so much care put into both that it's honestly a little inspiring, they even have unique mechanics like jump pads in raymans stage or teleporters in the prince one. there's new modes like a bot mode that sadly still requires you to que up for a match and can't be done in a private match but like, still, bots. there's a tactical valoranty mode and i think more but i'm not totally sure, there's new weapons and cosmetics, all of which are just given to you for free since the game is dying which was super nice and i'm very grateful for that. serious work was put in here and it's such a shame that so few people will even get to experience it. the team stuck their neck out to put this stuff out there even in an unfinished state, they really went for it and i think that deserves some serious recognition, so often things like this are just lost to time, never to be seen by anyone other than a page on the cutting room floor, but here it's all there, you can go and try it and see how fun this stuff was and that's just not an experience you get often, it's a digital museum for a cancelled game and i think that's really beautiful and it really shows that any game can have passionate, caring people working on it that really care, too often are games like this written off as being slop with no value, disregarding the work of the staff and with people all but laughing when they eventually become lost media and i think that's a real shame, this game clearly had a lot of passion from the people working on it on the ground, sure maybe the idea behind it from the higher ups might have been a little cynical, but care and love was put into the final product and i think it's a shame to write it off like that, it's those kinds of attitudes that always end with genuine ,caring artists continuing to be unknown and uncared about by this industry, eventually being pushed out of it, we need to do better especially now in an age of *real* slop, generated by machines without a human touch, you may not care about this as a game, but it deserves credit for what humanity it has, because soon games like this won't even have that much.

the last game i want to talk about in this catchup page is a game called nour, a cute little physics tech demo that somehow gets sold 10 dollars digitally which i think is a good bit overpriced for what this is, though i played it by mooching off of someone elses ps plus so am i really one to complain about that? its a physics demo where you get thrown into a food scene and can add and play around with it using a set of super basic tools to spawn and manipulate food, it's very reminiscent of an older trend on ps3 for short games similar to this, thing .detuned or linger in shadows, tech demo games made to show off something cool the developers managed to do with the console's tech, with some added artistry thrown in, this is that but for people who watch lofi mukbangs on youtube..... this is not me and i kind of really did not enjoy this at all, it's a game seemingly made just for terminally online twitch viewers to gawk at and no one else and something about that just skeeves me out a little, it's streamerbait, a game made to be seen in funny youtube letsplays and tiktok compilations and not actually played and that is a real shame.....all of this is what i wanted to say when i first wrote this in a bad mood but i don't think any of it is really fair, much like XDefiant before it it might seem like slop on the surface but someone making this probably had a lot of passion and care, it's so singularly focused on what it is and it does accomplish some of those things so well like the genuinely impressive looking food and physics, that even if it's not for me, that doesn't mean it doesn't have value at least to the people making it or the people who do get it, this game isn't bad and it never could be, it's just not for me, and that's okay, things can be made for people other than me, i think that's something that a lot of people forget as they give into the internet negativity spiral and rage against something they probably otherwise wouldn't even feel any real emotions for, because that's what we've been conditioned into, and that's fucking weird right, that's not normal and we shouldn't be like that., i wasn't fair on this game and i think it is a good example of the very thing i talked about earlier with XDefiant and it's proof that even i am not immune from that feeling and that this spiral really can be that pervasive and poisonous a feeling, that for as much as i would like to be it's just that easy to fall into that trap and it just goes to show that sometimes you do need to re-examine your feelings on things, even things you might dislike, because they're not for you, but they might be for someone else, anyone else, and i think thinking about the game this way did help me appreciate and enjoy what was there a little more in retrospect.

the throughline with these games, as you might have noticed, is negativity, these are games that it's very easy to get mad about, with the bad experiances with the banning, with the corporate greed, cynical ideas and unjust endings or with just plain not understanding the appeal of something, it's a spiral that's easy to fall into and with my initial writing about these games in this page, i did, the initial draft of this was much more negative than it turned out and you can probably feel that in it, but i didn't want that, i stepped back and realized that this was a very unhealthy way to look at these things that i didn't even feel all that badly towards, i enjoyed two of these games a lot and the other one i felt at most a little irritated at, it's just that easy to let negativity poison you and your life, i don't want to be like that and i don't want my writing to be like that, it's easy to be negative because that's what makes it on the net, just admitting something isn't for you isn't cool, you have to rage and rail against it because that's what gets clicks and views but that's lame, why would you subject yourself to that instead of taking what you don't get and trying to learn about why it can have appeal, what makes it special and about the work and care that might have went into it, yeah it might be easier to call something souless or slop or make fun of the people enjoying it, but you don't learn or grow from that, you just pidgeonhole yourself into a spiral of misery and you poison the well for others. we should all work to be better than that, to learn when to step back and just admit something isn't for us rather than making it the next laughing stock or punching bag, the world has enough of those and we need to move on from that, focus on what good these experiances can bring and if we can't at least do that, then focus instead on what makes you passionate, and what brings you joy, you'll live a better life that way.