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Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes Review: I Was Hoping For More

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Story: Three Hopes is a re-telling of the story from Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It diverges from the main timeline by introducing a new player character, Shez, as a student at the academy and having Jeritza fill in as a professor instead of the previous protagonist, Byleth. Solon is outed early and Monica is saved from Kronya. There are three routes depending on which house you side with after the prologue: A rivalry between Byleth and Shez is set up but awkwardly incorporated and has very little impact on the story. Blue Lions (Kingdom): In this timeline Dimitri never goes insane because the Remire Village Massacre, Flame Emperor, and his exile never occur. With Dimitri cognizant, he assumes more of a leadership role and the responsibilities that go along with it. Most of this route's focus is on protecting the Church and the Kingdom lands from the Empire's incursion, which requires a bit of backtracking across the same areas multiple times. This version felt t...
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Music to Level Up Your Day: Cyberpunk 2077 (Part 1)

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I don't know much about musical theory, nor am I a musically inclined person. However, I do love to listen to video game soundtracks. They can be a powerful listening experiences in their own right, or be as evocative as the scores composed for film. Each of these posts will feature a sampling of music tracks from a single game title, or series/franchise in some rare cases. A complete list of these can be found on the Video Game Music page. Composers: P. T. Adamczyk, Marcin Przybyłowicz, and Paul Leonard-Morgan Singers: Aligns & Rubicones, REL & Artemis Delta,  Jason Charles Miller, Alexei Brayko, Release Date: February 15, 2022 A freelance mercenary known as "V" (Vincent / Valerie) operates within the independent megacity and city-state known as "Night City". They are reluctantly imbued with a cybernetic "bio-chip" during a job that contains a digital version of the legendary rockstar and terrorist, Johnny Silverhand. The t...
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Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator Review: There Is Room For Growth

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Review based on patch 1.8.0.0 It is refreshing to get a gardening simulator that isn't about growing and selling vegetable crops. Instead the player cultivates a community garden full of decorative plants and lawn ornaments. The locals will provide a few seeds and tools to get the player started, but to earn money you will need to create flower bouquets from clipped flowers to sell in the marketplace via an honor system display. There are four seasons, but these are mostly cosmetic and only impact the availability of certain items in the shop. Flower sculptures are a goal for the player to work towards. In town there are pre-made wooden frames over which flowers are placed. Each one requires a set amount of a specific plant variety. Each species of plant is available for purchase in the marketplace right away, but only as the 'base' variety. Special color variants are obtained randomly from seeds produced by mature plants in the garden. There is also an assortm...
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The Mighty Nein: Season 1 - Bigger And Darker

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The Mighty Nein is an adult animated series based on campaign 2 of the Dungeons & Dragons web series Critical Role. Critical Role is a group of professional voice actors that get together to play D&D 5th edition. The cast own the intellectual property and have already produced a number of licensed works based on the show. A single Critical Role campaign will consist of a series of story arcs, played over multiple sessions. Between or sometimes within the major story arcs, the characters rest, resupply, or go on side quests. While each campaign centers on a different party of adventurers, the campaigns are all set on the various continents of Exandria, a world of Matt Mercer's creation. Campaign 2 ran from January 2018 to June 2021; totaling 141 episodes with an average runtime of 3 to 4 hours per episode. It follows the adventures of the Mighty Nein party and is set primarily on the continent of Wildemount roughly 20 years after the Legend of Vox Machina. The Critical ...
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Unicorn Overlord Review: Classical Fantasy

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The story is a simple black-and-white tale of a righteous prince using his magical ring to defeat an evil overlord. The exiled prince Alain will lead his Liberation Army in a campaign across the the five realms of Fevrith, freeing captured towns to gain access to shops, taverns, and unit upgrades. The massive cast of characters all have distinct personalities and managed to stand apart visually from one another. There are a number of slice-of-life support conversations that open up by having units fight together on the battlefield or dine together at a tavern. These character stories were compelling enough, but none stood out as particularly surprising or unexpected. The ones I remember the best are Amalia's (demonic?) possession and Auch's desire for approval from his late mother. At various points you can choose to execute or recruit a former enemy, but as far as I can tell there is no reason not to recruit every single time, as there are no negative consequences for it an...
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Monster Hunter Rise Review: Now For Dog Lovers

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The Monster Hunter franchise alternates between mainline releases with big budgets and more experimental spin-off titles such as Rise. And a lot has changed. Farming has been meshed with the Argosy (trading ship), Tailraider Safaris are now the Mewcenaries, and the lizard mounts have been replaced by a palamute (dog) that the player can customize and ride. This makes getting around Rise's surprisingly vertical maps a breeze. The downside is that there isn't much of a reason to move vertically because most of the fights happen at ground level. A new 'wirebug' mechanic can be used to zip through the air and to take direct control of weakened monsters in order to puppet them into fights with other monsters. For some reason players now start every mission with a chunk of their health and stamina bar locked out. The only way to access this missing section is to collect glowing spirit-birds in the environment, which isn't so bad at first but becomes tedious over time, e...
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The DioField Chronicle Review: Triple Agents

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Review based on patch 1.02. Gameplay: The gameplay is real-time strategy with pause (RTwP), although you only really 'pause' when selecting unit paths or rolling back an action. The deployable unit size is abnormally small at just four main units, each with its own backup member that can be swapped out a set number of times per battle. This limits what you can do strategically, and besides deciding what order to target enemies in and sometimes what direction to approach them from, there isn't any real tactical depth. There are no terrain hindrances or elevation to consider, no shortcuts to open up. Every mission has optional goals that are almost always to keep every unit alive and to finish in 6 or 8 minutes. The actual main mission goals are equally static, being to kill all enemies or on rare occasions to guard a barricade or protect a wagon. On the battlefield units auto-attack and will do additional 'ambush' damage when positioned behind an enemy, but...
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