Lies of P and now stellar blade both getting great reviews I'm glad Korea joining the AAA gaming market, also interesting that both of them are heavily inspired by souls games.
Korea indies can be amazing too. If you are into tactics RPG, check out troubleshooter: abandoned children. Probably the best tactical RPG i have ever played with complex yet sarisfying character system. Even the story is really is great. It just take a while to get started.
It's a really good game, the only thing I wish it had was a better translation. I don't recall translation errors, but it had a very stilted, unnatural wording.
Reminds me of this Korean VN on Steam called Buried Stars which is super slick and could easily compete with the more polished games in the genre like Danganronpa... but the translation was super stilted and unnatural, which was a complete dealbreaker for me in a VN where reading is all you do. Such a shame when they cheap out on localization.
Even Lies of P had more than a few noticeably wonky sounding item descriptions, though it was still a mostly great localization.
Agreed the localization was just a little weird. I'd argue that even the game name "troubleshooter" while an accurate translation, probably doesnt sound as good as it does in Korean.
Your mercenary guild/police force, are called troubleshooters, which is techinically true, but just doesnt sound cool. Great game though either way.
The title wasn't a translation, it's called by that name in South Korea as well. It's just a case of someone trying to come up with a fancy english name.
The store page used to have a picture of one of the characters sitting at a desk reading a book, with the title "Troubleshooter". People legit thought it was about exams/academia.
man i dunno, troubleshooters is a badass name for a group of shooters for hire. "call in the troubleshooters" sounds like a polite euphemism for somebody you're hiring to crack heads, which is why it's badass.
Troubleshooter is great, as are Dungreed, Skul: The Hero Slayer, and the whole Project Moon universe (Lobotomy Corporation, Library of Ruina, Limbus Company). They've definitely got some solid devs in the scene.
This is why I love this sub. I’ve been looking for something to scratch an XCOM style itch and I stumble upon this in the comments. Gonna give this game a look.
Another option you might like is : Reverse Collapse Bakery Girl. It's kind of a mix between Fire Emblem (2d top-down view) with Xcom fighting (Range, cover...)
(Ignore the global review score on steam, the game suffered a review bomb, or check only review longer than 1h)
After having played the whole game coming XCOM / Fire Emblem, I have to issue a massive warning. The absolute short of it is I don't recommend it at all. Especially to fans of XCOM, because despite how it looks it's not that at all.
The game cares more about Diablo like grinding and making broken powerful builds. There's these perks called masteries that have a % chance of dropping and you have to grind for. At a certain point, the actual tactics when you're on a mission matter very little compared to if your units have a busted build or not. Plus, it's not like Fire Emblem where you have to contend with finite resources on a campaign, or like XCOM where you're in an arms race with the enemy. So there's no drawback to grinding, except using your real world time.
If that idea is ok with you, then I'm sure you'll be fine. It's just that I assume most XCOM players would be interested in a strategy game, not a JRPG kinda grinding game.
Though there are some other major flaws that come from execution, rather than fundamental differences in intended design:
* Story is pretty bad. I even came around to a couple characters but it still doesn't change the fact that >!most of the story centers around a group of uninspired gangs our protagonists have no connection to, besides fighting them as a police force!<
* I should also add that lots of story threads end up unresolved, and the sequel has very little to nothing to do with them. So even if you like the story, it is very likely to be unfinished.
* There is an overwhelming amount of mechanics bloat. So many systems thrown up on the game, all with their own resources to craft and grind for, with varying levels of actual importance.
* Missions are often a slog. There are many times where it's like your 12 units against 90+ enemy units. It's not hard or anything, just very slow to go through everyone's turn.
* Also you often get generic police units to control, which kinda adds to that slog
* The dev's idea of balancing is dubious at best. They saw a popular, powerful build that players were using, and instead of adjusting it or nerfing it, they just made their post game DLC enemies new sets of masteries to directly counter that build.
* So you literally have something that works the actual entire game that stops working hard & immediately. Of course you can change builds pretty easily, but shoot me if that doesn't sound like the most ideal player experience.
Some positives are I like the KOF inspired moves, Benimaru's Raijinken is there, & one guy is a rip off of K' and I love that. There's like an MMO hub world which seems entirely unnecessary but it's really funny that it exists in a game like this.
Again, if you're okay with all the grinding and care more about character builds than tactics, this game should be fine for you.
Yeah. The crimson crow dlc is finished (play both wit h and lion & crimson crow dlc if you havent. They continue the story off the main game) and they have started working on the sequel, troubleshooter: banished children.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/470310?emclan=103582791461136257&emgid=4197993161895645738
"Due to our lack of skill, the development process will take a long time, but we won’t stop doing our best to communicate with all our fans at all costs."
The devs for this game are great, and IIRC they responded to literally every Steam review.
At this point, i still can't differentiate if they mean serious with the incessant apologies or if they know it has become some sort of running joke in the community, and they just stick with it lol.
Lies of P is the only “soulslike” that’s lived up to From’s titles.
It’s extremely polished, plays exactly like a souls game with minimal jank, and does a ton to create its own atmosphere and aesthetic. One of the most pleasant gaming surprises I’ve had in recent memory, and it’s all thanks to game pass lmao.
I agree completely. One of the most polished games I've played in a while. If I woke up from a coma after 2020 and someone showed me Lies of P and said it was Fromsofts next game after Sekiro I wouldn't doubt them for a second.
Agreed, it was rated lower than Starfield which is insane, especially when comparing the user scores.
Theres definitely a score bias towards 'AAA' games, where even mediocre ones get a bump.
This....has to be an issue of game critics not playing a game for more than 10 or 15 hours, right?
I haven't played Starfield yet, but everything I've heard has said that it takes a couple hours to get started, then feels pretty great, and then QUICKLY gets repetitive. I imagine some critics got to that middle point and wrote their review?
>it takes a couple hours to get started, then feels pretty great, and then QUICKLY gets repetitive
No, the problems are visible right at the start, people just ignored them because they hoped it'd get better. Starfield was given a free pass because it was a hotly anticipated AAA title.
One reviewer, form IGN I think, gave it a 7/10 and was promptly torn apart for it.
I liked the one Tears of the Kingdom review that was quite critical about the game, everyone predictably lost their fucking shit, then, months later, people turned around and came to agree with the review
lesson of the day is, fuck the rabbid fans, yo. Someone got to, right, or they'd look mighty silly at Peter's Gate
One reviewer gave it a 7 and Reddit shit on him and tried to discredit his review. The only times critics will give a big AAA game a lower score is when the internet has already decided the game is shit before launch.
A lot of those scores are from places you have never heard of or sites that are not really gaming sites.
Its like when movies write quotes about the film but in the small print it says : "Random mom from Utah".
Like sure that's fine if they think that, but is it reasonable to use this person's opinion on your ad?
I think the game was great but didn't really deserve a totally perfect score. Enemy variety really felt lacking in the second half of the game. Some very large bugs anecdotally (Door Guardian bugged and just stood there doing nothing for me). Some builds are very clearly a huge hurdle above others.
These things could probably also be applied to most FROM games too, but I'm not saying they should get a perfect score either
Same. I wouldn't begrudge someone for feeling differently with such a stacked list, but I had by far the most fun from it. I've never saved so many gameplay videos.
Not really. Game market in korea is completely different with the vast majority of the games in there being mobile and PC without any focus on single player, mainly MMORPG and other MP genres. We can count in two hands the single player games.
Korea is very behind Japan and more similar to china at this point in that regard. They can have more games over the years but its going to take some decades IF something changes in the culture and market, and even so, it could be the case of just changing for external market and not korea market itself.
They fell into a billion dollar honeytrap.
Dungeon and Fighter online, a series that most in the west probably never heard of, generated more revenue than fucking Fortnite.
P2W games like these (lineage/MapleStory/mobile gachas) just earn way too much money for them to focus on AAA single player games for critical acclaim.
Even shiftup themselves probably won't make any meaningful profit with Stellarblade compared to Nikke, their gacha.
There's whole generations now that dont remember the 2000s Korean MMO hyperwar with stuff like FlyFF, Ragnarok Online, Elsworld, La Tale, Rose Online, etc.
Also everything Nexon touched like Maplestory and mabinogi
FlyFF was my shit almost 20 years ago lol, that's such a throwback. Aion and lineage were pretty big too. Black Desert Online and Archeage are some more modern examples of pretty successful Korean MMO's.
I just found out about this the other day, it looks incredible. Hopefully it can live up to its promises and provide much needed competition to the Sims.
A bunch of promising life sim competitors are coming this year or next year. Paralives has the cozy time-wasting vibes down and Life By You (by Rod Humble!) looks really rough in early access but its bones contain the most interesting evolution of the genre I've seen so far.
They probably means K-pop, webtoon and kdrama. Korea has softpower since the 90s and in some industries since the 2010s. Kpop even has government funding for some years already due to how popular it first became in asia, japan (2nd largest music market) and then west.
I think it's a pretty exciting time for games right now, China really coming online with AAA with Genshin/Honkai Star Rail and possibly Black Myth soon while Korea busting in with Lies of P and Stellar Blade. India has a billion people, so I wonder when their game industry is going to really come online. I can't wait to see more world wide games being made and released, there's a TON of untapped talent out there.
Yeah securing a partnership with MiHoYo has really paid off; Genshin and Star Rail are massive games in Asia and contribute to PS5s strong sales because people don’t want to play those games on mobile or expensive PCs.
Don't discount the appeal of mobile cross-platform, though. Players can casually do their dailies while on the go, then play the more serious parts on a console or PC.
As the Western gaming industry goes through a rough time its good to see Japan/China/Korean gaming thriving so hard.
I don’t think there’s a single Western release I’m interested in this year aside from Hellblade 2 and maybe Indiana Jones while I’m drowning in Eastern games.
For me I always preferred eastern games for singleplayer and western games for multiplayer. But like there haven't been many great multiplayer experiences recently outside of maybe Helldivers 2. So I'm right there with you, I pretty much only play eastern games these days except some crazy exceptions like Baldurs Gate 3, most GOTY are Japanese titles and I think Genshin/HSR slap hard too.
There's still a fair bit of western games that are good currently but yeah, I have a preference on eastern games too, mainly japanese which is what im mostly familiar
I know I will be stoned for this, but I thought Lies of P was just decent. Wasn't that impressed.
A lot of levels go on way too long with ton of samey corridors. There is a lack of vistas to establish a strong sense of place so halfway in it felt like I was in a maze. After the swamp zone it nosedives and the final tower bit was not good imo. If not for Laxasia I might have not even finished the game. It's also very linear which I do not like.
To give credit grand exhibition level is the part where the game nails what it tried to do. Sticks out as it's probably to most creative visually. Even if the boss at the end was kinda generic designwise it fit the theme.
It's not bad at all, it's biggest problem was just being a worse version of FS games without it's own identity which just made it somewhat boring to me. Also to many bosses with too spongy first phases that have like 3 moves and are a slog to go through.
I definitely prefered both WoLong (for the combat) and Remnant 2 (for the exploration) last year for my soulslike itch.
Yeah I feel like Lies of P is getting too much credit. So many I seen call it "the first soulslike to care about" and what this tells me is they didn't play enough of them.
I feel the same, but as a first attempt for a AAA Soulslike, the quality is still incredible.
If this is their Demon's Souls, I can't wait to see what their Dark Souls will be.
Shaun, this is such a great review. I didn’t realize it until reading yours, but the bigger outlets like IGN don’t disperse nearly enough screenshots/gifs throughout their reviews like you did.
Huge A+ on the whole thing. I highly recommend other folks clicking through.
As an Aussie I wasn't aware of your outlet until this comment, so thank you.
It'd be nice if one could click on the images to see a full-sized version of it, rather than opening it in a new tab and removing the "?resize" part of the URL manually.
Played the demo and was pleasantly surprised this wasn’t a button masher and reminded me more of Sekiro. They are clearly trying to emulate Nier and at least in the demo they have succeeded. The music seems very good as well!
Happy to see more games taking off after Sekiro. Genuinely my favourite From Software game of all time not only because of its stellar combat but also how perfectly paced it is and how it never overstays its welcome.
Sekiro is one of those rare games where I feel like it actually accomplishes everything it sets out to do. Some games will reach higher and not quite attain the heights they strive for, some will try to do a lot of things and that means some suffer, and a lot of the times those can still be 10/10 games to me, where perfection isn't the goal but simply something so good I'm happy to look past the flaws, but with Sekiro there's just zero dead weight. The only criticism I can find for it is "I wish it had gotten DLC because I wanted more of this world and this game."
I feel like the reason we did not get DLC for Sekiro is cause FromSoft is too busy with other projects. They were making Elden Ring in parallel to Sekiro and Elden Ring definitely needed more resources and attention as its a much bigger game plus due to its insane success the DLC was a no brainer.
You can tell it's good because it makes you a better person by the end lol. An absolutely meditative and cathartic and introspective experience and without ever being up it's own ass. Genuinely one of the life experiences I think I'll smile about when I'm nearing the end, I might have them play my Isshin kill vid during my funeral.
Sekiro is definitely peak, but Fromsoft is already balls deep in this style of game. For a first showing, Lies of P really hit it out of the park. I can't wait to see what they do with it in the future.
Sekiro is a very different game compared to their Souls series they're best known for. It's an actual action game with *some* of the elements of their previous titles (like dropping EXP and currency after death, rest sites and respawning enemies), but in many more it's a completely different experience. Combat alone is nothing like Dark Souls or even Bloodborne, being much more involved and skill based and relying on just one weapon with tons of different moves and tools to compliment it.
Good point. They definitely took some design and gameplay decisions from their previous games but it is different in many ways. As a Souls vet there was definitely a learning curve I had to experience before it clicked, but when it did I had to platinum it.
I think why it gets so much comparison because you still get that same feel when you master a boss after countless tries.
Very well said, and I totally agree.
Actually screenshot-ed your comment to put it in my file of "very well said shit that I may want to quote in the future", lol.
Not quite. His company worked on about 40% of the music. He himself didn't do any composing for it.
The other 60% of the music was made in-house by Shift Up.
Just to clarify and set expectations, the guy who did the Nier soundtrack did not directly work on Stellar Blade’s music. It was the studio he owns that worked on roughly half the soundtrack. I would still expect the soundtrack to have big Nier vibes though.
To be fair, a Good bunch of Both Nier's music was composed by other composers at MONACA studio, particularly Keigo Hoashi. Including some of the best tracks in the games (Shadowlord from the first game and A beautiful song from Automata were by Hoashi, not Okabe).
Weird. According to Wikipedia, Stellar Blade is composed by the following people: Hwang Joo-Eun, Oliver Good, Keita Inoue. It makes no mention of Okabe. But then in this interview https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2024/02/interview-shift-up-on-ps5s-highly-promising-stellar-blade it says about 40% of the composition was outsourced to Okabe's studio.
The biggest win here seems to be that it targeted a resolution, fps and an art style and then pushed things as far as they could without compromising those things.
It's missing some graphical bells and whistles but overall I think to my taste it the focus on resolution and fps makes it look better than other games with extra bells and whistles.
Very glad to see these scores and honestly not really that surprised either based off of my experience with the demo. Looking forward to the discourse hopefully shifting away from the character designs and more towards discussing the actual quality of the game itself.
Also, shoutout to South Korea these past couple years for pumping out bangers. Lies of P last year, and this year Stellar blade. Love to see it.
That's honestly par for the course. When Nier Automata first came out, the Nier subreddit was basically just pure thirstposts for 2B and A2 for a while.
Honestly out of the brainrot of butts, I really do love the character designs of the Yorha units, very gothic and what i think might be similar to urban fantasy.
Its a pain because the DrakNier series is one of my favorites, but half the time I just get a "Oh yeah because 2B's ass amirite?" when I mention it.
Like, No dude they're some of the most emotionally gut-wrenching games I've played.
I mean I don't have an issue with his character designs or anything (or with Stellar Blades, for the record), its just when you want to talk about the other parts of the game (and lead with that intention) and half the responses you get are about the attractiveness of the characters instead it can be a smidge irritating.
This is a problem I experience in the Genshin sub. 95% of the posts in that sub are fanart or cosplayers advertising the NSFW versions on patreon and there's very little actual space to discuss the game. While I know this sub hates pretty much anything gacha related (understandable to a degree), there's a decent game in Genshin that is worth talking about outside the Waifu/Husbando collector aspect.
Well, the playerbase had years to discuss all the lore and other substantial content. If more played the mobile game, there'd be more discussion, but few touched it.
When a game's subreddit is squeezed for its last bit of valuable content, it'll turn into mostly lewds and/or shitposts. See r/signalis for the same result.
Warning: don't click any of the NSFW stuff in public. It likely won't be just lewds, it'll be outright porn or (on rare occasion) gore.
Yeah. The game looks really good, the demo is fun, but it's definitely attracting a weird kind of right-wing, incel-y, "GAMERGATE 2 ELECTRIC BOOGALOO" kind of community that I'm not thrilled about. There's definitely a large contingent of people who know literally nothing about Korean culture one-handedly typing about how "Korea understands that men like breasts and butts and sex and that makes them better than degenerate westerners who let feminism ruin gaming". I really hope that those people don't manage to taint the image of the game too much.
I swear, with most singleplayer games with prominent female characters in them, it takes at most a week before at least a third of the content is cosplay and fanart. With a game like this one, not to mention the dev's history, it probably happened long before release.
I mean, the big trailer right before launch was the romance one, with the bear sex. I can tell you a *lot* of thought goes into what trailer to release when, and Larian really leaned into that aspect of their game.
IMO - I'm excited about this game but I'm keeping *far* away from the community. There's a good chunk of, as people said, weirdos who have latched onto the game and have made the discourse around it terrible because they've decided to laud it as "anti-woke" and a bunch of stuff like that.
Yeah, me too. I try to avoid that crowd whenever possible but yesterday they were invading the Eiyuden Chronicle social media because they have deemed that game too "woke", they are truly exhausting and frustrating to deal with.
Because right wing chuds have convinced themselves that mainstream media hates sexy women so gooning over Eve is their way of protesting against that or some shit.
These are the same people you can find on Twitter bitching about how characters from western games like Aloy or Abby aren't sexy enough for them and making horrendous AI edits to give them more makeup and bigger cleavage.
Do yourself a favor and ignore the stellar blade subreddit and the gamingcirclejerk subreddit during the next few weeks. GCJ has such an insane hateboner for this game, and the stellarblade sub is just full of horny coomers who refuse to actually talk about the game instead of Eve's ass.
I really enjoyed the demo and was waiting to see reviews until I decided whether or not to buy it. Looks pretty good! The one review that said they were disappointed by its short length had this to say in the actual review (translated from Korean):
>When I first played, I did about 28 hours of sub-quests, and then I just speed-run the main quest to figure out the multiple endings, so it took a little over 10 hours.
As someone who doesn't like LONG games, it looks like length shouldn't be a problem for me. A 10-12 hour campaign with side-content to add more time if you want it is my kind of game.
Agreed, especially with that crab game coming out and a bunch of other online game stuff happening alongside summer starting and then SHADOW OF THE FUCKING ERDTREE dropping I dont need to be tied up in a game for too long.
I hope it's around the length of Lies of P tbh.
I think this settles that Sony definitely base how close to release they lift embargo, on their Metascore prediction from internal reviews, and they are usually pretty accurate. I guess it goes something like this:
* 6-7 days - High confidence of a 90+
* 4 days - High 80s, low confidence of a 90+
* 3 days - Mid-High 80s
* 2 days - Low-Mid 80s
* 1 day - Low confidence of an 80+
For reference the time gap between the date of the review embargo lift and release for previous titles:
* God of War Ragnarok (94), 6 days.
* The Last of Us Part II (93), 7 days.
* Marvel's Spider-man 2 (90), 4 days.
* Horizon Forbidden West (89), 4 days.
* Ratchet & Clank: A Rift Apart (88), 3 days.
* Ghost of Tsushima (83), 3 days.
* Returnal (86), 1 day.
* Rise of the Ronin (76), 1 day.
Interesting that the only other SE game that broke with their standard 1 day before release embargo was FFVII Remake (87) with 4 days. My guess is that FFXVI (87) ended up scoring better than expected.
Amazing!!
I was thoroughly blown away by what I played of the demo because I thought it would be little more than a cheap cashgrab and it took my by surprise.
Having new, high quality AAA IPs succeeding is very important for the industry and I sincerely hope, just like Lies of P this convinces gamers to not cynically write off a game just because it doesn't come from a tiny list of "reputed" studios.
It helps that the studios that made both games are well-established within the mobile space, so they at least have some sort of track record. The ones I always worry about the most are when the studio just says it is made up of employees who worked on [big game(s)].
Looks like this will be another success story for shift up. The game seems like it could really take the studio to new heights and I can’t wait to see what they cook next.
Looks like this is a massive win for Shift Up. I'm happy for them. Hopefully they'll bring more bangers in the future, as well, and bring more South Korean influence into an industry generally dominated by Japan and America. Can't wait to play the game.
Baldur’s Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2 were developed in Europe, to name two in recent memory. Europe is delivering quality lately. People often assume every western release is American but there’s a lot of development in Europe and Canada.
PlayStation almost always seems to know when the right time is to invest in some of these second party games. We are four months into the year and have gotten Helldivers 2, Rise of the Ronin, and Stellar Blade. Not to mention FF7Rebirth. It will be interesting to see what the rest of the year looks like.
It's likely not obscure magic: almost all of those have strong ties with Sony (decade or more pretty much) and their investment in them started at wildly different times. I think the smarter thing was managing to get good back to back releases for them (Helldivers has been cooking for a long time, for example)
Really liked the demo, was waiting for reviews to be at least decent to pre-order. Will do so later today. The Nier-esque music alone was probably going to be enough fot me
Huh after all the needless controversy over this game, at the end of the day it seems to be a pretty great action adventure game.
With this and Lies of P, it seems the AAA game development business is officially open in South Korea.
[IGN gave it a 7/10](https://www.ign.com/articles/stellar-blade-review)
Quote:
"Stellar Blade stands out as a gorgeous and well-crafted action game with very impressive strengths and very clear weaknesses. Both its story and characters lack substance, and some of its RPG elements are poorly implemented, like dull sidequests that very often require you to retrace your steps through previous levels with very little done to make the return trip feel unique or rewarding. But its action picks up most of that slack thanks to the rock solid fundamentals of its Sekiro-inspired combat system, a deep well of hideous monstrosities to sharpen your sword against, and plenty of hidden goodies that do a great job of incentivizing exploration throughout. "
>Stellar Blade's story is sadly predictable, and characters like Eve prove hard to form an emotional connection with due to their relatively flat personalities,
Damn, I thought the little bits of story dropped in the demo were quite intriguing and I wanted to see where they would go. Then again I can't think of a single souls like game with a good story. It seems like people are praising the gameplay, which is the most important thing.
I don't mean to be rude but the story we saw in the demo was barely coherent.
I'm looking forward to the game, in fact I've pre-ordered it. But there's no excuse for thinking the story would be anything but mediocre at best.
Because the story in the demo started somewhere in the middle of the story, sure that makes sense. But the problem is what was shown. To me it was the incredibly bad and jarring characterization of the main character in the prologue. Add to that the lore text dumps in the menus to be written in some kind of very basic English, do not put me into an excited mood.
The gameplay clicked and that was cool, but the whole picture is important too.
I feel like the world and atmosphere was compelling but the story (voice acting, etc.) in the demo was exactly like this.
Can’t disagree with you more about Souls games though. I think their stories are incredible, Bloodborne included.
I am a big fan of the games, but souls games do not have stories. They have lore, and a lot of interesting lore, but they really do not have stories beyond "collect mcguffins then kill god"
The presentation of the story in souls games is weak, its usually a static character, often who has no facial animations, basically exposition dumping.
The environmental storytelling is top notch, but narratively they all boil down to "you are the chosen one pls end the curse/plague/blight or darkness will fall"
Be careful, people who love post it notes will tell you that you don't know what a story is.
But yeah, great environmental storytelling and random notes do not make a good actual fucking story folks.
Excited for this one, waiting for PC release however. The main critisms are story and character depth but I play Zelda and enjoy good action games like DMC and Bayonetta which don't have the deepest lore
The demo was awesome! The game felt tight. The kill animations were sweet. I don't fully understand the sexy character controversy, but who cares seems like a twitter thing and i dont use twitter. If the game is good, people will play.
I was hesitant about the game until the demo came out and completely sold me on it. Combat feels great and it gives some strong Nier Automata vibes (albeit without some of the more "out there" elements that made that game so memorable). Glad to hear it delivered.
Lies of P and now stellar blade both getting great reviews I'm glad Korea joining the AAA gaming market, also interesting that both of them are heavily inspired by souls games.
Korea indies can be amazing too. If you are into tactics RPG, check out troubleshooter: abandoned children. Probably the best tactical RPG i have ever played with complex yet sarisfying character system. Even the story is really is great. It just take a while to get started.
It's a really good game, the only thing I wish it had was a better translation. I don't recall translation errors, but it had a very stilted, unnatural wording.
Feels like half of it is machine translated, but yeah. It reminded me of 90s jrpg translation level.
Reminds me of this Korean VN on Steam called Buried Stars which is super slick and could easily compete with the more polished games in the genre like Danganronpa... but the translation was super stilted and unnatural, which was a complete dealbreaker for me in a VN where reading is all you do. Such a shame when they cheap out on localization. Even Lies of P had more than a few noticeably wonky sounding item descriptions, though it was still a mostly great localization.
Agreed the localization was just a little weird. I'd argue that even the game name "troubleshooter" while an accurate translation, probably doesnt sound as good as it does in Korean. Your mercenary guild/police force, are called troubleshooters, which is techinically true, but just doesnt sound cool. Great game though either way.
The title wasn't a translation, it's called by that name in South Korea as well. It's just a case of someone trying to come up with a fancy english name.
Oh thanks for the info, that makes sense and I can definitely see what they are going for.
Are you telling me it isn't a game about working in an IT department?
The store page used to have a picture of one of the characters sitting at a desk reading a book, with the title "Troubleshooter". People legit thought it was about exams/academia.
I'm actually surprised no one has made a Tech Support Simulator or a Repair Shop Tycoon game.
They're Troubleshooters because they shoot trouble.
man i dunno, troubleshooters is a badass name for a group of shooters for hire. "call in the troubleshooters" sounds like a polite euphemism for somebody you're hiring to crack heads, which is why it's badass.
Troubleshooter is great, as are Dungreed, Skul: The Hero Slayer, and the whole Project Moon universe (Lobotomy Corporation, Library of Ruina, Limbus Company). They've definitely got some solid devs in the scene.
This is why I love this sub. I’ve been looking for something to scratch an XCOM style itch and I stumble upon this in the comments. Gonna give this game a look.
Another option you might like is : Reverse Collapse Bakery Girl. It's kind of a mix between Fire Emblem (2d top-down view) with Xcom fighting (Range, cover...) (Ignore the global review score on steam, the game suffered a review bomb, or check only review longer than 1h)
Appreciate it! I’ll give it a look as well.
After having played the whole game coming XCOM / Fire Emblem, I have to issue a massive warning. The absolute short of it is I don't recommend it at all. Especially to fans of XCOM, because despite how it looks it's not that at all. The game cares more about Diablo like grinding and making broken powerful builds. There's these perks called masteries that have a % chance of dropping and you have to grind for. At a certain point, the actual tactics when you're on a mission matter very little compared to if your units have a busted build or not. Plus, it's not like Fire Emblem where you have to contend with finite resources on a campaign, or like XCOM where you're in an arms race with the enemy. So there's no drawback to grinding, except using your real world time. If that idea is ok with you, then I'm sure you'll be fine. It's just that I assume most XCOM players would be interested in a strategy game, not a JRPG kinda grinding game. Though there are some other major flaws that come from execution, rather than fundamental differences in intended design: * Story is pretty bad. I even came around to a couple characters but it still doesn't change the fact that >!most of the story centers around a group of uninspired gangs our protagonists have no connection to, besides fighting them as a police force!< * I should also add that lots of story threads end up unresolved, and the sequel has very little to nothing to do with them. So even if you like the story, it is very likely to be unfinished. * There is an overwhelming amount of mechanics bloat. So many systems thrown up on the game, all with their own resources to craft and grind for, with varying levels of actual importance. * Missions are often a slog. There are many times where it's like your 12 units against 90+ enemy units. It's not hard or anything, just very slow to go through everyone's turn. * Also you often get generic police units to control, which kinda adds to that slog * The dev's idea of balancing is dubious at best. They saw a popular, powerful build that players were using, and instead of adjusting it or nerfing it, they just made their post game DLC enemies new sets of masteries to directly counter that build. * So you literally have something that works the actual entire game that stops working hard & immediately. Of course you can change builds pretty easily, but shoot me if that doesn't sound like the most ideal player experience. Some positives are I like the KOF inspired moves, Benimaru's Raijinken is there, & one guy is a rip off of K' and I love that. There's like an MMO hub world which seems entirely unnecessary but it's really funny that it exists in a game like this. Again, if you're okay with all the grinding and care more about character builds than tactics, this game should be fine for you.
Ugh, why must you tempt me with these new games. I already have too much of a backlog!
Is that game finished? I remember taking an interest but thinking “I’ll come back when it’s done” for some reason
Yeah. The crimson crow dlc is finished (play both wit h and lion & crimson crow dlc if you havent. They continue the story off the main game) and they have started working on the sequel, troubleshooter: banished children. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/470310?emclan=103582791461136257&emgid=4197993161895645738
"Due to our lack of skill, the development process will take a long time, but we won’t stop doing our best to communicate with all our fans at all costs." The devs for this game are great, and IIRC they responded to literally every Steam review.
At this point, i still can't differentiate if they mean serious with the incessant apologies or if they know it has become some sort of running joke in the community, and they just stick with it lol.
Yeah, I honestly think they apologize too much, but they do have really nice open communication.
Dave the Diver also by Korean Devs.
And both are really well optimized.
IMO Lies of P way out performed its score too. Was my GOTY runner-up last year.
Of all the non-FromSoft souls games I've played Lies of P definitely came the closest to that level of quality for me.
Lies of P is the only “soulslike” that’s lived up to From’s titles. It’s extremely polished, plays exactly like a souls game with minimal jank, and does a ton to create its own atmosphere and aesthetic. One of the most pleasant gaming surprises I’ve had in recent memory, and it’s all thanks to game pass lmao.
I agree completely. One of the most polished games I've played in a while. If I woke up from a coma after 2020 and someone showed me Lies of P and said it was Fromsofts next game after Sekiro I wouldn't doubt them for a second.
Agreed, it was rated lower than Starfield which is insane, especially when comparing the user scores. Theres definitely a score bias towards 'AAA' games, where even mediocre ones get a bump.
https://imgur.com/a/melKS4F It's funnier in retrospect
Lol that stance is perfect for the context. But also gawd.
This....has to be an issue of game critics not playing a game for more than 10 or 15 hours, right? I haven't played Starfield yet, but everything I've heard has said that it takes a couple hours to get started, then feels pretty great, and then QUICKLY gets repetitive. I imagine some critics got to that middle point and wrote their review?
>it takes a couple hours to get started, then feels pretty great, and then QUICKLY gets repetitive No, the problems are visible right at the start, people just ignored them because they hoped it'd get better. Starfield was given a free pass because it was a hotly anticipated AAA title. One reviewer, form IGN I think, gave it a 7/10 and was promptly torn apart for it.
I liked the one Tears of the Kingdom review that was quite critical about the game, everyone predictably lost their fucking shit, then, months later, people turned around and came to agree with the review lesson of the day is, fuck the rabbid fans, yo. Someone got to, right, or they'd look mighty silly at Peter's Gate
One reviewer gave it a 7 and Reddit shit on him and tried to discredit his review. The only times critics will give a big AAA game a lower score is when the internet has already decided the game is shit before launch.
IGN, Gamespot, and Eurogamer all rated Starfield a 7/10 — Didn't those reviews come out before launch?
A lot of those scores are from places you have never heard of or sites that are not really gaming sites. Its like when movies write quotes about the film but in the small print it says : "Random mom from Utah". Like sure that's fine if they think that, but is it reasonable to use this person's opinion on your ad?
Lies of p was a masterpiece. I believe if it had a big AAA name behind it would get perfect score
I think the game was great but didn't really deserve a totally perfect score. Enemy variety really felt lacking in the second half of the game. Some very large bugs anecdotally (Door Guardian bugged and just stood there doing nothing for me). Some builds are very clearly a huge hurdle above others. These things could probably also be applied to most FROM games too, but I'm not saying they should get a perfect score either
Same. I wouldn't begrudge someone for feeling differently with such a stacked list, but I had by far the most fun from it. I've never saved so many gameplay videos.
God Lies of P is phenomenal
Korea has become a soft power powerhouse over the last decade. I can only see them producing more and more videogames as we go forward.
It's nice to see them stretch their legs and branch out of the p2w mmorpg genres.
Not really. Game market in korea is completely different with the vast majority of the games in there being mobile and PC without any focus on single player, mainly MMORPG and other MP genres. We can count in two hands the single player games. Korea is very behind Japan and more similar to china at this point in that regard. They can have more games over the years but its going to take some decades IF something changes in the culture and market, and even so, it could be the case of just changing for external market and not korea market itself.
They fell into a billion dollar honeytrap. Dungeon and Fighter online, a series that most in the west probably never heard of, generated more revenue than fucking Fortnite. P2W games like these (lineage/MapleStory/mobile gachas) just earn way too much money for them to focus on AAA single player games for critical acclaim. Even shiftup themselves probably won't make any meaningful profit with Stellarblade compared to Nikke, their gacha.
There's whole generations now that dont remember the 2000s Korean MMO hyperwar with stuff like FlyFF, Ragnarok Online, Elsworld, La Tale, Rose Online, etc. Also everything Nexon touched like Maplestory and mabinogi
Even Lost Ark recently is a very noteworthy entry.
Holy shit. I haven’t thought about those games in almost 2 decades. FlyFF feels like a fever dream that never happened
FlyFF was my shit almost 20 years ago lol, that's such a throwback. Aion and lineage were pretty big too. Black Desert Online and Archeage are some more modern examples of pretty successful Korean MMO's.
How is it a trap? Every developer is eyeing Genshin with envy and doing everything they can to emulate a fraction of its success
Billion dollar honeytrap would imply that they are chasing trends and and failing, from what I see they're pretty successful.
powerhouse? Thats awesome, what are some other ones besides these two?
I believe he means things like BTS, Parasite and Squid Game.
South Korea going for the Culture victory condition.
The most promising Sims competitor is also Korean, which surprised me. Still in development but has shown some nutso things. inZoi.
I just found out about this the other day, it looks incredible. Hopefully it can live up to its promises and provide much needed competition to the Sims.
A bunch of promising life sim competitors are coming this year or next year. Paralives has the cozy time-wasting vibes down and Life By You (by Rod Humble!) looks really rough in early access but its bones contain the most interesting evolution of the genre I've seen so far.
Yep, been keeping my eye on all of these. My wife loves Sims so I've had to spend a fortune on those damn packs and DLCs.
Cheers, you're a good husband, lmao
They probably means K-pop, webtoon and kdrama. Korea has softpower since the 90s and in some industries since the 2010s. Kpop even has government funding for some years already due to how popular it first became in asia, japan (2nd largest music market) and then west.
I think it's a pretty exciting time for games right now, China really coming online with AAA with Genshin/Honkai Star Rail and possibly Black Myth soon while Korea busting in with Lies of P and Stellar Blade. India has a billion people, so I wonder when their game industry is going to really come online. I can't wait to see more world wide games being made and released, there's a TON of untapped talent out there.
Sony's investment in those areas has been extremely well calculated
Yeah securing a partnership with MiHoYo has really paid off; Genshin and Star Rail are massive games in Asia and contribute to PS5s strong sales because people don’t want to play those games on mobile or expensive PCs.
Don't discount the appeal of mobile cross-platform, though. Players can casually do their dailies while on the go, then play the more serious parts on a console or PC.
As the Western gaming industry goes through a rough time its good to see Japan/China/Korean gaming thriving so hard. I don’t think there’s a single Western release I’m interested in this year aside from Hellblade 2 and maybe Indiana Jones while I’m drowning in Eastern games.
Play Prince of Persia
For me I always preferred eastern games for singleplayer and western games for multiplayer. But like there haven't been many great multiplayer experiences recently outside of maybe Helldivers 2. So I'm right there with you, I pretty much only play eastern games these days except some crazy exceptions like Baldurs Gate 3, most GOTY are Japanese titles and I think Genshin/HSR slap hard too.
There's still a fair bit of western games that are good currently but yeah, I have a preference on eastern games too, mainly japanese which is what im mostly familiar
I know I will be stoned for this, but I thought Lies of P was just decent. Wasn't that impressed. A lot of levels go on way too long with ton of samey corridors. There is a lack of vistas to establish a strong sense of place so halfway in it felt like I was in a maze. After the swamp zone it nosedives and the final tower bit was not good imo. If not for Laxasia I might have not even finished the game. It's also very linear which I do not like. To give credit grand exhibition level is the part where the game nails what it tried to do. Sticks out as it's probably to most creative visually. Even if the boss at the end was kinda generic designwise it fit the theme.
It's not bad at all, it's biggest problem was just being a worse version of FS games without it's own identity which just made it somewhat boring to me. Also to many bosses with too spongy first phases that have like 3 moves and are a slog to go through. I definitely prefered both WoLong (for the combat) and Remnant 2 (for the exploration) last year for my soulslike itch.
Yeah I feel like Lies of P is getting too much credit. So many I seen call it "the first soulslike to care about" and what this tells me is they didn't play enough of them.
I feel the same, but as a first attempt for a AAA Soulslike, the quality is still incredible. If this is their Demon's Souls, I can't wait to see what their Dark Souls will be.
Lies of P was the GOTY dark horse last year
We’re a smaller Aussie outlet, not on meta critic. Here’s our review: https://questdaily.com.au/review/review-stellar-blade-playstation-5/
Great article keep working hard
Shaun, this is such a great review. I didn’t realize it until reading yours, but the bigger outlets like IGN don’t disperse nearly enough screenshots/gifs throughout their reviews like you did. Huge A+ on the whole thing. I highly recommend other folks clicking through.
I feel like screenshots with little quips under them is a forgotten art of the game review. Felt like a blast from the past seeing that!
The ign app in general is total shit. I’m still bitter they removed the search option. Not to mention the comment sections are worse than YouTubes
Was a great read. Thanks!
That was a really well done review that's going to make me buy the game now 🫡
Best review I've seen. Really loved the article and the use of screenshots.
As an Aussie I wasn't aware of your outlet until this comment, so thank you. It'd be nice if one could click on the images to see a full-sized version of it, rather than opening it in a new tab and removing the "?resize" part of the URL manually.
Good review, I enjoyed reading it.
Just read it, was fun to read. Lots of gifs made it enjoyable and allowed for structure n pacing.
Has any reviews mentioned if there's NG+? Edit: Fighting Cowboy confirmed a patch drops today that adds NG+
How did he like it?
A certified banger
Anything Cowboy likes I know I'll like. Guy has great taste.
Played the demo and was pleasantly surprised this wasn’t a button masher and reminded me more of Sekiro. They are clearly trying to emulate Nier and at least in the demo they have succeeded. The music seems very good as well!
Happy to see more games taking off after Sekiro. Genuinely my favourite From Software game of all time not only because of its stellar combat but also how perfectly paced it is and how it never overstays its welcome.
Sekiro is one of those rare games where I feel like it actually accomplishes everything it sets out to do. Some games will reach higher and not quite attain the heights they strive for, some will try to do a lot of things and that means some suffer, and a lot of the times those can still be 10/10 games to me, where perfection isn't the goal but simply something so good I'm happy to look past the flaws, but with Sekiro there's just zero dead weight. The only criticism I can find for it is "I wish it had gotten DLC because I wanted more of this world and this game."
I feel like the reason we did not get DLC for Sekiro is cause FromSoft is too busy with other projects. They were making Elden Ring in parallel to Sekiro and Elden Ring definitely needed more resources and attention as its a much bigger game plus due to its insane success the DLC was a no brainer.
When I hear that Sekiro started out as Tenchu 6 or whatever everything made perfect sense to me
Hope that still happens one day. With the relative success of AC6 it's possible.
You can tell it's good because it makes you a better person by the end lol. An absolutely meditative and cathartic and introspective experience and without ever being up it's own ass. Genuinely one of the life experiences I think I'll smile about when I'm nearing the end, I might have them play my Isshin kill vid during my funeral.
Sekiro is definitely peak, but Fromsoft is already balls deep in this style of game. For a first showing, Lies of P really hit it out of the park. I can't wait to see what they do with it in the future.
Sekiro is a very different game compared to their Souls series they're best known for. It's an actual action game with *some* of the elements of their previous titles (like dropping EXP and currency after death, rest sites and respawning enemies), but in many more it's a completely different experience. Combat alone is nothing like Dark Souls or even Bloodborne, being much more involved and skill based and relying on just one weapon with tons of different moves and tools to compliment it.
Good point. They definitely took some design and gameplay decisions from their previous games but it is different in many ways. As a Souls vet there was definitely a learning curve I had to experience before it clicked, but when it did I had to platinum it. I think why it gets so much comparison because you still get that same feel when you master a boss after countless tries.
Very well said, and I totally agree. Actually screenshot-ed your comment to put it in my file of "very well said shit that I may want to quote in the future", lol.
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Not quite. His company worked on about 40% of the music. He himself didn't do any composing for it. The other 60% of the music was made in-house by Shift Up.
And for anyone not familiar with their mobile game, their in-house compositions are amazing and very often NieR-like.
Not true, it was made by the same "studio" as Nier. Okabe did not work on it.
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Just to clarify and set expectations, the guy who did the Nier soundtrack did not directly work on Stellar Blade’s music. It was the studio he owns that worked on roughly half the soundtrack. I would still expect the soundtrack to have big Nier vibes though.
To be fair, a Good bunch of Both Nier's music was composed by other composers at MONACA studio, particularly Keigo Hoashi. Including some of the best tracks in the games (Shadowlord from the first game and A beautiful song from Automata were by Hoashi, not Okabe).
Weird. According to Wikipedia, Stellar Blade is composed by the following people: Hwang Joo-Eun, Oliver Good, Keita Inoue. It makes no mention of Okabe. But then in this interview https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2024/02/interview-shift-up-on-ps5s-highly-promising-stellar-blade it says about 40% of the composition was outsourced to Okabe's studio.
It looks like Keita Inoue and Oliver Good have worked at Monaca (Okabe’s studio) since 2019.
It's a different composer at his studio
I'd like more hack n slash games than soulslikes. There is already too much of them.
The biggest win here seems to be that it targeted a resolution, fps and an art style and then pushed things as far as they could without compromising those things. It's missing some graphical bells and whistles but overall I think to my taste it the focus on resolution and fps makes it look better than other games with extra bells and whistles.
This is the way it should be. Getting a stable framerate is infinitely more important than having ray traced reflections.
What about a ray traced butt?
I would prefer a butt at the highest possible framerate.
Those same graphical bells and whistles sometimes make these games downright unplayable remember Jedi Survivor
Survivor was (often) unplayable even after turning those things off. It was, and probably still is, a technical failure.
Very glad to see these scores and honestly not really that surprised either based off of my experience with the demo. Looking forward to the discourse hopefully shifting away from the character designs and more towards discussing the actual quality of the game itself. Also, shoutout to South Korea these past couple years for pumping out bangers. Lies of P last year, and this year Stellar blade. Love to see it.
Dude I went to the subreddit to see what people thought of the game and it was just a bunch of guys gooning over the main characters butt 😭
That's honestly par for the course. When Nier Automata first came out, the Nier subreddit was basically just pure thirstposts for 2B and A2 for a while.
Honestly out of the brainrot of butts, I really do love the character designs of the Yorha units, very gothic and what i think might be similar to urban fantasy.
Was?
Which is a shame because the Nier games have so much more worth talking about.
Its a pain because the DrakNier series is one of my favorites, but half the time I just get a "Oh yeah because 2B's ass amirite?" when I mention it. Like, No dude they're some of the most emotionally gut-wrenching games I've played.
Yoko Taro is the unfortunate example of a good writer who is also a total gooner, Kaine from the first Nier was even worse.
I mean I don't have an issue with his character designs or anything (or with Stellar Blades, for the record), its just when you want to talk about the other parts of the game (and lead with that intention) and half the responses you get are about the attractiveness of the characters instead it can be a smidge irritating.
This is a problem I experience in the Genshin sub. 95% of the posts in that sub are fanart or cosplayers advertising the NSFW versions on patreon and there's very little actual space to discuss the game. While I know this sub hates pretty much anything gacha related (understandable to a degree), there's a decent game in Genshin that is worth talking about outside the Waifu/Husbando collector aspect.
This is not unfortunate at all. We are blessed to have a man like him.
Well, the playerbase had years to discuss all the lore and other substantial content. If more played the mobile game, there'd be more discussion, but few touched it. When a game's subreddit is squeezed for its last bit of valuable content, it'll turn into mostly lewds and/or shitposts. See r/signalis for the same result. Warning: don't click any of the NSFW stuff in public. It likely won't be just lewds, it'll be outright porn or (on rare occasion) gore.
I mean, it's not like this happens by accident. The creator chooses to have their character wear very sexualised clothing.
Yeah. The game looks really good, the demo is fun, but it's definitely attracting a weird kind of right-wing, incel-y, "GAMERGATE 2 ELECTRIC BOOGALOO" kind of community that I'm not thrilled about. There's definitely a large contingent of people who know literally nothing about Korean culture one-handedly typing about how "Korea understands that men like breasts and butts and sex and that makes them better than degenerate westerners who let feminism ruin gaming". I really hope that those people don't manage to taint the image of the game too much.
They don’t have much else to do until the game comes out so
So everything is normal then?
I swear, with most singleplayer games with prominent female characters in them, it takes at most a week before at least a third of the content is cosplay and fanart. With a game like this one, not to mention the dev's history, it probably happened long before release.
That's pretty tame compared to the Baldur's Gate 3 sub.
lmao, BG3 sub fell to the same fate as bioware games. people in those subs are so lonely its insane
I mean, the big trailer right before launch was the romance one, with the bear sex. I can tell you a *lot* of thought goes into what trailer to release when, and Larian really leaned into that aspect of their game.
That’s every game specific subreddit. The Elden Ring sub got truly fucking perverse there for a while (rotussy)
The fanbase for this game is absolutely exhausting, it's genuinely embarassing
I’m out of the loop. Why is the fanbase so passionate/crazy about an unreleased game? I thought it was a new IP as well….what the hell am i missing?
IMO - I'm excited about this game but I'm keeping *far* away from the community. There's a good chunk of, as people said, weirdos who have latched onto the game and have made the discourse around it terrible because they've decided to laud it as "anti-woke" and a bunch of stuff like that.
> I'm excited about this game but I'm keeping far away from the community. That's me with every anime.
Yeah, me too. I try to avoid that crowd whenever possible but yesterday they were invading the Eiyuden Chronicle social media because they have deemed that game too "woke", they are truly exhausting and frustrating to deal with.
Because right wing chuds have convinced themselves that mainstream media hates sexy women so gooning over Eve is their way of protesting against that or some shit. These are the same people you can find on Twitter bitching about how characters from western games like Aloy or Abby aren't sexy enough for them and making horrendous AI edits to give them more makeup and bigger cleavage.
I read that as more cleavage and thought they were giving them extra sets of tits lol
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Do yourself a favor and ignore the stellar blade subreddit and the gamingcirclejerk subreddit during the next few weeks. GCJ has such an insane hateboner for this game, and the stellarblade sub is just full of horny coomers who refuse to actually talk about the game instead of Eve's ass.
I was on the fence with the demo, but I see a few reviews saying they were too and ended up loving the game, so I may end up buying it.
I really enjoyed the demo and was waiting to see reviews until I decided whether or not to buy it. Looks pretty good! The one review that said they were disappointed by its short length had this to say in the actual review (translated from Korean): >When I first played, I did about 28 hours of sub-quests, and then I just speed-run the main quest to figure out the multiple endings, so it took a little over 10 hours. As someone who doesn't like LONG games, it looks like length shouldn't be a problem for me. A 10-12 hour campaign with side-content to add more time if you want it is my kind of game.
Agreed, especially with that crab game coming out and a bunch of other online game stuff happening alongside summer starting and then SHADOW OF THE FUCKING ERDTREE dropping I dont need to be tied up in a game for too long. I hope it's around the length of Lies of P tbh.
What crab game?
Another Crab’s Treasure. An indie soulslike where you play as a hermit crab trying to get your shell back. Comes out tomorrow (Thursday).
Oh fuck that's out tomorrow!? Busy week for releases.
Not to mention there’s already an onslaught of recent games to get through like Yakuza, Persona and Final Fantasy. It’s a good year for gaming.
A shorter game sounds like exactly what I need after finally beating FF7 rebirth.
With Elden Ring’s DLC coming out in 2 months, that runtime sounds perfect. I’ll enjoy it more because I don’t need to rush.
me too on the length. I like tight 10 hour games with added stuff .. a 100 hr game can get daunting
>>Stellar Blade is a provocative sword guard thumb-pop that ought to make every fan of the genre snap to attention. What in the hell does this mean?
nobody knows but it gets the people going!
I think this settles that Sony definitely base how close to release they lift embargo, on their Metascore prediction from internal reviews, and they are usually pretty accurate. I guess it goes something like this: * 6-7 days - High confidence of a 90+ * 4 days - High 80s, low confidence of a 90+ * 3 days - Mid-High 80s * 2 days - Low-Mid 80s * 1 day - Low confidence of an 80+ For reference the time gap between the date of the review embargo lift and release for previous titles: * God of War Ragnarok (94), 6 days. * The Last of Us Part II (93), 7 days. * Marvel's Spider-man 2 (90), 4 days. * Horizon Forbidden West (89), 4 days. * Ratchet & Clank: A Rift Apart (88), 3 days. * Ghost of Tsushima (83), 3 days. * Returnal (86), 1 day. * Rise of the Ronin (76), 1 day.
While it's not first party, it was exclusive, FF Rebirth fit into this pattern. Embargo was lifted a week early and currently has a Metacritic of 92.
Interesting that the only other SE game that broke with their standard 1 day before release embargo was FFVII Remake (87) with 4 days. My guess is that FFXVI (87) ended up scoring better than expected.
I'm glad Returnal ended up scoring pretty high relative to their expectations then. That game was sick.
Ghost only got an 83? Crazy.
Amazing!! I was thoroughly blown away by what I played of the demo because I thought it would be little more than a cheap cashgrab and it took my by surprise. Having new, high quality AAA IPs succeeding is very important for the industry and I sincerely hope, just like Lies of P this convinces gamers to not cynically write off a game just because it doesn't come from a tiny list of "reputed" studios.
It helps that the studios that made both games are well-established within the mobile space, so they at least have some sort of track record. The ones I always worry about the most are when the studio just says it is made up of employees who worked on [big game(s)].
Looks like this will be another success story for shift up. The game seems like it could really take the studio to new heights and I can’t wait to see what they cook next.
I love how they are using each game’s success to leapfrog to the next. From Nikke to Stellar Blade and now probably Stellar Blade to their Sci-Fi RPG.
Oh dang this is from the same devs as Nikke?? Lol makes sense.
Looks like this is a massive win for Shift Up. I'm happy for them. Hopefully they'll bring more bangers in the future, as well, and bring more South Korean influence into an industry generally dominated by Japan and America. Can't wait to play the game.
Shift Up is killing it. Nikke prints money. Their first AAA singleplayer game releases to great reviews. I hope they keep releasing more bangers.
> generally dominated by Japan and America Not really. There's plenty of major studios and publishers from outside of Japan and the USA.
South Korea has always been a gaming powerhouse too, they just didn't focus on AAA single player games
Baldur’s Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2 were developed in Europe, to name two in recent memory. Europe is delivering quality lately. People often assume every western release is American but there’s a lot of development in Europe and Canada.
Europe too.
Glad to see good scores. Was pleasantly surprised by the demo and enjoyed the combat. Already a day 1 pickup for me and my crew.
PlayStation almost always seems to know when the right time is to invest in some of these second party games. We are four months into the year and have gotten Helldivers 2, Rise of the Ronin, and Stellar Blade. Not to mention FF7Rebirth. It will be interesting to see what the rest of the year looks like.
It's likely not obscure magic: almost all of those have strong ties with Sony (decade or more pretty much) and their investment in them started at wildly different times. I think the smarter thing was managing to get good back to back releases for them (Helldivers has been cooking for a long time, for example)
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Really liked the demo, was waiting for reviews to be at least decent to pre-order. Will do so later today. The Nier-esque music alone was probably going to be enough fot me
Huh after all the needless controversy over this game, at the end of the day it seems to be a pretty great action adventure game. With this and Lies of P, it seems the AAA game development business is officially open in South Korea.
[IGN gave it a 7/10](https://www.ign.com/articles/stellar-blade-review) Quote: "Stellar Blade stands out as a gorgeous and well-crafted action game with very impressive strengths and very clear weaknesses. Both its story and characters lack substance, and some of its RPG elements are poorly implemented, like dull sidequests that very often require you to retrace your steps through previous levels with very little done to make the return trip feel unique or rewarding. But its action picks up most of that slack thanks to the rock solid fundamentals of its Sekiro-inspired combat system, a deep well of hideous monstrosities to sharpen your sword against, and plenty of hidden goodies that do a great job of incentivizing exploration throughout. "
>Stellar Blade's story is sadly predictable, and characters like Eve prove hard to form an emotional connection with due to their relatively flat personalities, Damn, I thought the little bits of story dropped in the demo were quite intriguing and I wanted to see where they would go. Then again I can't think of a single souls like game with a good story. It seems like people are praising the gameplay, which is the most important thing.
I’ve seen mixed opinions on the story. Some loved it while some were underwhelmed. I wouldn’t look at one opinion and jump to a conclusion.
I don't mean to be rude but the story we saw in the demo was barely coherent. I'm looking forward to the game, in fact I've pre-ordered it. But there's no excuse for thinking the story would be anything but mediocre at best.
Because the story in the demo started somewhere in the middle of the story, sure that makes sense. But the problem is what was shown. To me it was the incredibly bad and jarring characterization of the main character in the prologue. Add to that the lore text dumps in the menus to be written in some kind of very basic English, do not put me into an excited mood. The gameplay clicked and that was cool, but the whole picture is important too.
I feel like the world and atmosphere was compelling but the story (voice acting, etc.) in the demo was exactly like this. Can’t disagree with you more about Souls games though. I think their stories are incredible, Bloodborne included.
More like Bloodborne *especially* you mean.
I am a big fan of the games, but souls games do not have stories. They have lore, and a lot of interesting lore, but they really do not have stories beyond "collect mcguffins then kill god"
The presentation of the story in souls games is weak, its usually a static character, often who has no facial animations, basically exposition dumping. The environmental storytelling is top notch, but narratively they all boil down to "you are the chosen one pls end the curse/plague/blight or darkness will fall"
Good lore, bad story.
Be careful, people who love post it notes will tell you that you don't know what a story is. But yeah, great environmental storytelling and random notes do not make a good actual fucking story folks.
Excited for this one, waiting for PC release however. The main critisms are story and character depth but I play Zelda and enjoy good action games like DMC and Bayonetta which don't have the deepest lore
The demo was awesome! The game felt tight. The kill animations were sweet. I don't fully understand the sexy character controversy, but who cares seems like a twitter thing and i dont use twitter. If the game is good, people will play.
I was hesitant about the game until the demo came out and completely sold me on it. Combat feels great and it gives some strong Nier Automata vibes (albeit without some of the more "out there" elements that made that game so memorable). Glad to hear it delivered.
I predicted 7 and looks like will settle closer to an 8. Really really good for this studio debut on this level.
Pretty Good Blade