Recent reviews by Marionette

I JUST PLAYED 2 GAMES IN 1 HOUR AND WHAT THE ♥♥♥♥ THIS IS SUCH AN UPGRADE???

- Better art style and animations
- LORE???? OH MY GOD???? EPOCHS ARE SO NICE (the WIPs are so cute!!!)
- WHAT THE ♥♥♥♥?!?!?!?!?! WHAT IS THIS REGENT CHARACTER????

Unironically would highly recommend this game over the first one, although clearly it has more content to add. But the first game was an absolute classic and it's safe to say I can see this game also becoming a great refresh and continuation to it.

i'm so sorry mom

deep ♥♥♥♥ galactic good game

I refunded this game because I expected a 2019 release to be supported for at least a little longer than 2 years; the clear and transparent neglect compared to the cashcow that is Warhammer is really disappointing.

This was my first game in the 'Tales of' series.

I'll start off with the bad first; for the base price of the game, even after 3 years of release, it's incredibly expensive. Visuals aren't anything impressive IMO but for an anime game they look more than just fine, and finally, the gameplay isn't particularly for everyone. Best way for me to describe it is think of Final Fantasy 13's mission layout, or Drakengard 3's; you go from zone to zone, in dungeon to dungeon, to where you can encounter enemies which will put you in a battle screen. The experience overall IMO is fairly linear, yet the game's exploration is wonderful. For newcomers, the combat may be somewhat overwhelming; it was fairly difficult for me to grasp most factors into my head, though I think it was more of a personal thing since I tend to not have the best attention span cx It's really in-depth for what it is, and personally I really liked it, but it might depend on you.

Now, before I get into the good, I just wanna start with a bit of a tale;

I had this game for the longest time in my wishlist; I hadn't really wanted to buy it because I was much more focused on other games at the time, and many events in my life had occurred that ultimately landed me in a spot where I was diagnosed with clinical depression. I had barely any motivation to play games for the longest time, especially Single-Player games at that, until my boyfriend then bought this game just over a year ago, last March.

When I first started out playing the game, it personally hit real hard. I won't spoil one bit about its narrative, but it caught my interest rather quickly, though for the longest time I always put it off because said lack of motivation; I never really had a reason for why I never really stopped and gave it a run, since I had an overwhelming amount of free time and who knows how good the narrative would've worked for back then. I grew a bit of an attachment since every so often I would launch the game, and play it really briefly, only really garnering up about 13 hours in the timespan of a year until the recent Covid 19 outbreak finally gave me a reason to sit down and play it, and... oh boy.

It was absolutely blissful. The narrative itself was presented in a way that at first, I found to be somewhat boring but as I played more, more and more I quickly grew to look forward to listening more of each character's dialogue; let it be about the main story, about their own insecurities, or just random trivia about the game's world, Desolation (which fun fact, is the same world 'Tales of Zestiria' is set in. I won't spoil into how its related to its sequel, but it shouldn't be really hard to find; both games are really distant from one another). I quickly grew to love each and every character almost equally, I felt genuinely happy whenever I would read all of their dialogue, and discover more and more about all the characters' weaknesses and pasts, all along while discovering genuinely beautiful scenery; for what this games' graphics are, the game looks nothing short of beautiful. You can easily get stranded and lose yourself in the game to just look at the scenery, or to appreciate the game's wonderful OST.

You might find the story to be rather 'edgy' at first, but ultimately it's real hard for me to come across games that so wonderfully portrays human emotion into such a thrilling, and ultimately, emotional and relatable journey.

I highly recommend this game if you love wonderful narratives, a wonderful world to explore and an OST that's nothing short of amazing. I might be a total baby when saying this, but I genuinely cried when this game finished. After putting it off for so long and then bursting it for so long during this recent week, it kind of struck me that I would no longer get to see any of the characters again in the same way; I wouldn't listen to any more random, heartwarming trivia, I wouldn't get to see them laugh and have fun, I wouldn't get to experience the same hardships each and everyone of them went through their journey. It's nothing short of beautiful. Get it on sale, as it happens frequently, but it's nothing short of a wonderful investment, even if the price may be a little steep at $50.

You probably know why at this point.

why?

You know this game is doing something right when it's having a much better fan reception compared to the thing it's actually inspired/based off of, Day Z.

Changing my review because of Paradox's increasingly disgusting amount of DLC, plus the x2 price count for the base game. THIS GAME IS FROM 2013, AND IS BEING CHARGED MUCH MORE THAN GAMES THAT HAVE BEEN RELEASED JUST RECENTLY/LAST YEAR! No one should be paying $40 for a 2013 game that has nearly $300 for all expansion, and requires around $200 for you to play with all features. So, in total, if you want the complete EU4 Experience... it'd be around $300?

Edit:

Ever since Paradox's super sale and subscription service, while not fully mending the problem that every game requires an unbelievable amount of money to be fun, has made this game FAR more accessible to newcomers and that I can wholeheartedly appreciate.

I keep playing it every now and then, it's kind of my comfort game. Think of it as a History sandbox kind of experience where you can pick any nation-state that's traced on a map (by Paradox's rendition of it which is continuously being updated), and play through roughly 400 years of history in a time where the world itself shifted away from an Asia-dominated sphere into a more European one. While the game pretties up a lot of European atrocities, it very much does it under an obviously Euro-centric lens to fit in with the overall theme of the game, which I can appreciate. Colonization, vassalizations/subjugations, rivalries, alliances, political and situational awareness, grand campaign and battles, and an overall sense of you truly leading a nation-state through the ages really begins to show a remarkably different view of the history we know of today, or even a similar one, while you witness the AI controlling the other countries through this game practically butchering what you know of history.

I'd LOVE to go on and on about this game's systems because even nearing at 900 hours it goes by quite a mile... so I'll do exactly that.

- The game itself is centered around a 2.5D rendition of a map, and that's essentially what it is that you'll be looking at for the rest of the game, save for the occasional event that's going to be popping up, to which gives you the main appeal of the game: immersion, roleplaying, that you're truly the leader of the nation-state thing (you aren't the actual king, per se, you're just the entity of x country acting as a sort of invisible, more or less allknowing ruler).

With this in mind, there's many different kinds of map modes; the game defaults to the terrain map mode, but realistically you're probably always going to have the Political map mode which will display each nation's classic paradox color scheme.

Alongside the terrain/political map mode, there's many other kinds of map modes which show you worldwide views of pretty much everything; from religious borders and beliefs from each and every individual province, to cultures and various culture groups all around the world, to even historical trade routes, hubs/centers, your diplomatic status, each and every country's ruling dynasty, an Imperial Holy Roman Empire map mode which shows the current "borders"of that de-centralized mess, an Institution map mode which more or less shows just how "advanced" an overall society is in a general sense, a map mode that displays just how large or truly developed a specific province/city is, among many, many, MANY other map modes to help facilitate your gameplay and help make it easier to have that overall global image of not just your country, but have strong context to those other countries that you otherwise would not think much of. As France, you can see who England is allied to not just by right clicking and reading for example, but you can look for yourself what countries they hate/are hated by, and vice versa.

There is no real end-game to this game, which is why the game itself provides you with a set of mission lists for each and every single nation you can see. Whether or not they'll be a UNIQUE set of mission trees depends on the nation-state you're going to be playing as, as for example England would have many missions focused around its historical aim at obtaining a personal union, and eventually control of that part of continental Europe, to subjugating Ireland, the Americas, Australia, India, etc. By completing each of these missions, you will either be granted temporary or permanent benefits to your nations (which every single one can and will stack), and/or claims to use for your upcoming wars.

The war game in this game is fairly simple, but much like every single mechanic in this game, what makes it complicated are all the tiny little details surrounding it that make it genuinely difficult to have an initial grasp of that you need to keep in mind.
I would suggest for the beginning all you need to know is, a 24-thousand strong army will probably always beat a 12-thousand strong army. What makes it more complicated, though? You can skin this next section if you want, but:

- There's two positions in a battlefield you will always have to keep in mind, to which the terrain mapmode will be beneficial for that purpose to help make it easier.
a.) Attacking and Defending are the two primary battlefield positions that you'll have to keep in mind when starting a battle.
b.) Defending will receive environmental bonuses to which will affect the Attacking player's ability to inflict damage/receive damage from you.
c.) Crossing a river, entering a mountain range/forest/jungle/hills will give the Attacking army a -1, or -2 depending on which one of these it is (and yes, sometimes you can cross a river towards a mountain range, and yes, these penalties will stack.
d.) Forts are an important system in the game which do not allow the Attacking army to go wherever they please throughout your country, but all you need to worry about what they do right now is that by an Attacking army landing still in a fort, they will be put in a 'Sieging' state automatically which means if the nation-state's corresponding fort is being Attacked, the following army corresponding to the nation-state's fort will immediately be put in a defensive position while the sieging army will always be in an attacking position.

With that in mind, how is it that damage is dealt? You can skip this section if you don't want to read this, but: there are two primary ways of damage being dealt, them being "Fire", represented by a gun, and "Shock" represented by lightning. There's also "Morale" which acts as the HP of said armies, to which is also one of the most universally important stats any nation-state's army will ever have/want.

a.) Much like its board game, there is a 'dice roll' system that determines how much damage an army will be doing to another army. Say, you start a battle with two different armies, both the same 25-thousand size. The battle will then automatically be shifted into a 'fire' state: this means units that correspond to Fire damage will be dealing their main damage, while 'Shock' corresponds to your 'shock' units dealing more damage in that stage.

b.) What you'll be doing throughout the game, is improving your odds at winning battles like that, to which there's MANY tools that assist you in doing that: generals (which outright give you free points corresponding to fire/shock/morale) , discipline (how coordinated your units will be to deal more direct damage to the enemy), environmental/positional benefits (such as listed above in attack vs defense), how far in military technology you are, and the sheer amount of units presented in the battle. Naturally, a 25-thousand strong army will deal more damage period than a 10-thousand strong army, as such they will also receive less damage, unless the smaller army's absolutely STACKED in beneficial battle modifiers.

I'd love to keep going, but the word limit is approaching. In short, great game! Very deep! Nice to take a break and turn your brain off with. Have fun!

You might be wondering to yourself, why is this review not recommended despite my enormous playtime? I'll get into that later.

The game itself is absolutely amazing. Flight mechanics and controls are top-notch, hands down the easiest game to fly a plane with. Tank controls are also very easy. Rather simple and do give you quite a bit of control over the tank (Unless it's a gigantic beast with an 80 foot gun). Flight models are a bit wonky, and matchmaking is... Bad. Let's leave it at that.

The graphics are absolutely gorgeous in this game, and surprisingly the game itself is VERY easy to run! I have around 40 FPS on a GT 640 around medium settings. Some of the more newly-added maps DO impact performance, but Gaijin usually fixes that rather fast.

The game itself is situated around late 30s up until the korean war. Most vehicles are from early until late world war two, and USUALLY some korean war or post-war vehicles all remain in Tier 5 (there are exceptions of course)

The GAME itself is very well made. It's quite a marvel, really. I'll most likely be playing this game from time to time simply because of that.

Now... Here's the issue. Marketing and... "bug fixing" is usually just adding more and more planes or tanks, and lately most of them have been premium. Now, I get it that this game is free, and that they need SOME type of money, but...

Any complaints you have heard most likely has "Russian Bias" around in one of their sentences. This is... True, to a certain extent. In War Thunder, you can play as 5 nations all rounded up to "big" nations, per se. United States of America, Germany, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and Japan. Some vehicles from other nations ARE included in these nations, such as the italian M.C. 202 being in Germany, and the D. 520 being in Great Britain.

Usually how the premium vehicles work is they either take an obscure vehicle or a complete carbon copy of another nation with a different camouflage, and puts it in a nation. Let's say... the british Churchill tank, in the German technology tree. It's a bit of a negative, unless you think it's a good idea, but as I said... Gaijin DOES need some source of income for a free game.

Anyways, the "russian bias" claim is... to be blunt, yes. It's true. How the game's matchmaking works is, vehicles are organized in a "battle rating" sort. Battle Rating is given to a vehicle so that it can face off against other vehicles of the same "rating", you could say. Such as a pershing against a tiger, perhaps.

One of the most advertised features of this game is how it has "historical accuracy", but I can very much tell you that you won't find any of that, at least in Arcade. Your best bet would be simulator, and currently they've removed that option from matchmaking. Only way you can play it is by going to "Events", and even then the aerial battles are not available (Only with tanks you can play it)

The "russian bias" is supported by claims such as the plane "Yak-9T". If you've done your homework, you would know this is a Russian world war 2 plane designed to destroy tanks with its huge 37mm gun, but what's wrong with that? Well, the game itself essentially makes it a fighter, very much a one-shotter. Originally situated around Battle Rating 3.7, now it's situated around 4.3 because of how good everyone was with it, and of course, complaints. You could easily say "oh, that's just one vehicle... What's so bad about it?" Well, MiG-17 is also an absolute game-breaking vehicle. The MiG-15bis was already a formidable opponent like the F-2 sabre or the Hunter british fighter jet, but they've added it for... god knows what reason, really. Planes isn't exactly the most DOMINATED, but there are quite a few Russian planes with extremely good qualities... I-185 has 3 20mm cannons and is situated around Battle Rating 4.0, where it faces off against planes such as the early Japanese zero, the American P-47, or the british Spitfire Mk. 9. In ground forces, it's very much... expressed, in an extremely frustrating way. the medium tank T-34 faces off against vehicles such as the American M4 Sherman tank. You could say that's pretty fair, but... with the T-34s ridiculous armor and gun, it's really not an opponent at all. The higher the tier, the higher the problem you could say. There's been an incredible amount of complainst against vehicles such as the IS-2 penetrating a King Tiger's turret ring and insta-killing it, or issues such as the T-34-85(D-5T) being in Battle Rating 5.0 (this means it rarely faces off against tanks such as a tiger, which was meant to take it. Usually it takes on lower-rated vehicles such as the Panzer 4 G/J, or the Sherman M4 with the M1 cannon. Since the Soviet Union used extremely ginormous, godly Death Star-sized cannons, such as the 122mm SPG (SU-122), its high explosive round WILL instantaneously kill anything among its battle rating (perhaps not an M4A3 pershing, but my point still stands). It gets worse at around Battle Rating 5.0, where the KV-2 arrives. The KV-2... was designed to destroy bunkers. It's really not meant to be in the game with it's absolutely ludicrous 152mm gun, but... yet... somehow... it's in the game. Killing everything in its tier. The only bane is the reload time and armor combined with slow speed. That's it. You could counter this by saying that the SU-152 also has a huge cannon, so what's so bad about the KV-2? The KV-2 has a rotating turret. Not to mention, why is it okay for Russia to have 152mm cannons and not let any other nation use that type of calibre? (cough cough German E-100). The T-10M is... let's just leave it at this. It has the best penetration, it uses extremely explosive rounds (meaning if you penetrate, it fragmentates other tanks with ease), it faces off against paper-thin armor such as the Leopard 1, and its armor is virtually impenetrable. Not to mention that thanks to the big edit in the battle rating, it faces off against 6.7 tanks. Oh boy.

The game itself has a Battle Rating cap of 9.0, where mostly post-tier planes and tanks dominate the battlefield. Tanks originally had a cap of 8.0 for some reason, but lately they've reduced it to 7.7 because they thought it'd be a "good idea" for top tier tanks to face off against 6.7, or extremely high tiered tanks. Gaijin has blocked all criticism and complaints throughout their forum, and they keep charging EXTREME amounts of money for their premium vehicles.

Oh, premium vehicles you say? About that... Apart from their absurd pricing at Tier 4, the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ vehicles are so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ overpowered in ground forces for the soviet union, it's unreal. T-44-122 (T-44 with a 122mm cannon. Yeah.), it faces off at 6.3. Six. Point. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Three. Compared to its heavier brother, the IS-2 (around 6.7, or its actual realistic copy with a worse gun: the T-44 at a battle rating of 6.7.) it's absolutely ridiculous. Not to mention they have the T-34-100 (T-34 with a 100mm gun. Hooray.) facing off against tanks at 6.3 battle rating as well. Both of these tanks should be removed from the game completely. They're a nuisance to deal with.

The grind is real. The grind is very much real.

... Finally, it all comes down to this. The game itself is extremely good. What's really lacking is its way of... handling, you could say. Gaijin isn't the best at listening, but I encourage them to at least TRY open up for criticism, and at least try to not give advantages to nations simply for the sake of nationality. I don't see Armored Warfare with a superpowered M1 Abrams. So why should you, Gaijin?

The game itself is fun to play with, and it's especially fun to play with friends. Early-game tiers are rather fun, and high-tiered can be fun if you play Soviet (and have enough patience to actually reach it)... but apart from that, it'll be pretty frustrating.

/end review