Completed Soul Reaver.
Had to look at the guide to figure out how to beat Dumah boss. All other bosses are fought in an enclosed arena, and you need to use environment against them. Here, you can leave the throne room, and he’ll chase you, barely. At first I thought it’s just a bug. Then I thought that maybe you need to lead him to his statue, but he wouldn’t follow. And if he disappears from your sight, he teleports back to the throne room, which reinforced the idea that’s where you need to beat him. But no, turns out you need to lead him through the entire level.
When people say that Soul Reaver story is great, they either mean that the dramatic voice acting is entertaining or that the overall story of the series is great. Because the story of the original Soul Reaver is bare bones.
The last temple was designed by someone who played Mario 64 too much. You need to rotate switches by running around them, over and over. I’m glad I’m playing with an analog stick.
We are also shown some glimpses from the future, where Raziel kills Ariel to get Sun Reaver and then stands with the red Kain Reaver.
The final boss is one of the easiest in the game: you just need to hit Kain three times, and then he escapes to the past through the time machine portal. So it’s not even a complete story, just half of it.
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Category: PS4
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Soul Reaver
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Soul Reaver
After obtaining Soul Reaver, Raziel can finally stop lugging a spear around to dispose of vampires, as while in full health, Soul Reaver can do the same. Doesn’t remind of any other game series at all 🤡
Cathedral is the worst of 90s design. You solve a puzzle, and somewhere else a switch opens. And those puzzles aren’t difficult, but they have endless enemies to distract you as well.
The boss of this dungeon confused me, as I thought that you need to aim with the eggs when he attacks. Turns out, you just need to set the eggs on fire before throwing them.
What’s even more confusing is the entire magic system, which I found about only because I was very confused were to go after the Cathedral. So I ended up finding two spells tucked away in secrets, one of them behind a 6-crate puzzle I was sure I was solving in order to progress the plot.
The Big Reveal is that Raziel and other vampire princes were once human Sarafan, paladin vampire hunters.
The “water temple” is not as bad as the spider temple, but it has a lot of platforming, which is surprising, you’d expect there will be a lot of swimming, but you get the swimming skill only after you beat the boss by jumping on tiny platforms, falling from which means you need to jump 8 platforms back, over and over.
I also found the fire upgrade for Soul Reaver, which is nice, because it allows to dispose of vampires from a safe diatance. Less clunky combat is a good thing. -
Soul Reaver
Soul Reaver wasn’t supposed to be set in Legacy of Kain universe at all. It just so happened that Amy Hennig, best known for Uncharted series, was helping with Blood Omen, and then decided that the best way for her idea to get approved is to shoehorn it into existing universe.
Another fact I didn’t know is that there are two versions of the game: PC and PSX have the same models, while Dreamcast had them reworked. Then there’s the remastered version from 2024.
At first I tried the original. I can see how this game is the precursor of the entire action adventure genre on PS2, with its acrobatics, almost mandatory finishing moves and gathering of souls out of dead enemies to replenish your health. Nowadays, though, it’s mostly unplayable, since it was designed before twin sticks became the norm. So camera is an issue.
And since the only way to permanently dispatch of enemies is to throw them at hazards such as water or sunlight, without second stick it becomes a pain.
And you can’t even look up or down. So Remaster it is.
I quickly discovered that the easiest way to dispose of vampires is to always carry a spear with you. Once you impale one, you can always reuse it.
Box puzzles are a genre staple. But it’s actually rare to see you are allowed to get boxes over obstacles and stack them to solve puzzles.The game shows its age: the locations are pretty small to fit PSX memory, and the view distance, albeit better than in the original, is still quite limited. The blood effects are on PSX level as well. When you traverse corridors, camera follows Raziel closely, so you wouldn’t feel discomfort when you couldn’t control it.
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Callisto Protocol Final Transmission
I decided to go back on my words and actually complete the only DLC for Callisto Protocol. I highly doubt I would have returned to it later, and if I did, I would have forgotten how to play the game anyway.
I decided to play it on PS4, because I didn’t want to buy it on PC.
I was complaining about unnecessary transitions on PC. On PS4 the loading times are so bad that sometimes the lift doors won’t open, because the level behind them is still loading, something that never happened to me on PC.
Because I can’t transfer my saves, I started with a default loadout. Which is, to be honest, fair. You get mostly upgraded shotgun, glove, and pistol, and you can pick up other weapons as you go. Worse off than if I could continue from my save, but it is what it is.
Jacob starts with light amnesia, for some reason. He also hallucinates Elias, the now dead cellmate, which didn’t happen to him in the original. There’s a “new” enemy: same robot with a flashlight, but this time covered it fungi.
Also, I guess because people complained about boring vent crawling, now they added traps inside the vents. Which only make them more annoying, as they do not save you before the vent. At least I was prepared the second time.
At some point you break your button and given a hamme, because developers couldn’t implement two melee weapons at once. In addition to being incredibly powerful in melee, it can also break crates.
Credit given where credit is due, they actually added an almost original boss. It’s obviously based on two-headed ogre, but it has also a ranged attack and a stomp, and transitions between melee and ranged forms. It’s actually better than the final boss from the original, in a sense. -
Playstation 4
Half a year ago I sold my “unhackable” Playstation 4 Pro 11.52 for 110GBP. And did I miscalculate.
Two things happened. First, now those are hackable up to 12.52. And second, the RAM price hike drove all the console prices up, even the older ones. Go figure.
In any case, if I wanted to get Playstation 4 Pro now, I would pay at least 150GBP.
Not that I need it. Or not that I can’t afford the price difference. But it is still quite wild. -
Ravenswatch
Ravenswatch and No Rest for the Wicked are two games I confuse a lot. Ravenswatch is sometimes presented as an ARPG, but it’s more like Hades: generated dungeons, clear weapon telegraphs and danger zones, low character health, cooldown on dodge, direct and AoE attack, you name it. Oh, and three perks with rarities to pick from every level. The only significant difference is that instead of picking different weapons, we pick different fairytale characters.
Also, Hades had an optional timed mode. Here, it’s one of the main features. You have just 15 minutes to clear the map before unavoidable boss fight occurs. You also have limited number of revives. Yeah, just like in Hades.
One interesting mechanic is related to Scarlet, or in other words Red Riding Hood. Every night she turns into a wolf, and every day turns back, repeating this cicle 3 times over a run. I bet that’s the first mechanic they came up with, and then they build the rest of the game around it.
After playing with other characters, though, I feel like it’s a disservice to the players that she’s made the default character, as she’s probably the most difficult to start with. Pied Piper is more of a necromancer, with ranged attacks and swarms of rats that are summoned automatically.
And Beowulf is a two-handed “barbarian”, with some nice fire AoE damage.
In the meantime, I unlocked two additional characters, Guipetto and Mnemosyne. Guipetto is also a summoner, but his summons are slower and hit harder. Kind of like skeletons Vs golems in Diablo 2, or maybe the Engineer from Torchlight 2. I would be all for it, if not for the fact that the runs are time bound.
In fact, and it took me some time to realize, there is a way to turn the time limit off. But I’m not sure if there are any implications except score penalty.
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Persona 4
Completed Persona 4. For good, this time.
Getting True Ending is not as much pain-in-the-ass, as it’s not obvious at all. On the last day you need to visit a few locations without any good reason or hints in a particular order.
The final plot twists is good, though, I admit. Speaking of “playing the long game”. The real villain is the guy at the fuel station, the one you meet on your first minute of the game and shake hands with. By shaking hands he grants you the power to enter TVs. Only that’s not a “he”, but a “she”, death goddess Izumi. Yeah, the same death goddess you’ve been told about somewhere mid-game during a school trip to the school from Persona 3.
The final fight resembles Persona 3 a lot. Same grotesque female shape, same theme of unbeatable foe that falls to the Power of Friendship. I liked how the music themes are mixed to sound more epic.
I don’t like the Fusion mechanics much, but I still fused Belzebub for the final battle, one of the Personas that require 6 personas to fuse, and it’s epic:
As a visual novel, the plot has to many holes. As a dating sim, the sudden time skips are annoying and prevent enjoying it without a guide. And as a dungeon crawler, the fights are too tedious, with some enemies having no weaknesses or constantly healing, and the boss battles too unpredictable, and beatable only if you died multiple times and have memorized the phases.
But with all those flaws, it’s still a great game. Kind of what it tries to teach you: that you need to bridge the gaps to build something great.
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Playstation 4
A year later, and Playstation 4 can be jailbroken up to version 11. If I sat on my PS4 Pro for a year, I could jailbreak it now, but I didn’t, opting to play Diablo 4 on it instead. I regret nothing.
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Persona 4
The Magatsu dungeon is just tiring. Full of enemies that have no weaknesses and tons of HP.
You can never clear a floor in Persona 4, new Shadows will continue to spawn. But this is where it gets ugly.
It’s also annoying how the game skips a couple of weeks after Ameno-sagiri fight. Because half of the game is basically a dating sim, and you have two actions each day, you miss a lot of interactions that way without being warned.
I also missed Marie dungeon, because my social link was 9 out of 10 😬
But I’ve read that it’s annoying as hell anyway. -
Persona 4
By December things get dramatic. Nanako, the protagonist 7 years old niece, gets kidnapped. Her father and protagonist’s uncle gets badly injured chasing the suspect. Fog descends on the town. After being rescued, Nanako dies in the hospital.
Unfortunately, that’s where the game starts to get annoying too. In order to get the true ending, you need to pick not obvious dialogue lines, such as “I don’t know about that”, while the gang discusses if they should lynch Nanako’s kidnapper by throwing him into the TV World.
Teddy disappears, but Nanako recovers. Turns out that the first two victims where kidnapped by someone else. And Nanatame, the suspect, was throwing people into the TV World because he believed they’d be safe there from the real killer.
The problem with those investigation mechanics is that there are long dialogs preceding them. And if you fail, you get one of the bad endings, and endless credits, so I just end up restarting the game every time that happens. And I don’t remember 20 characters by their Japanese names, so that did happen. -
Persona 4 Golden
I don’t mind school kids fighting demons inside the TV. But a schoolkid detective helping the police is a bit too much for me. Although that’s as a staple as a TV idol coming to a small town and falling for the protagonist. Detective Conan and all that. Although people tend to forget that Detective Conan was an adult trapped in kid’s body.
But I must admit, the plot twist that Naoto is actually a girl dressing like a boy because otherwise people wouldn’t take her seriously is a good one. And they even managed to tell that story convincingly, instead of going for “you just need gender surgery!” -
Persona 3 Reload
Discovered that unlike Persona 4, which is a port with a few enhancements, Persona 3 was completely remade on PS4, apparently using Persona 5 engine.
It’s unlikely that will ever play this version, though, despite not remember much about the original game. I do remember that the choice of companions annoyed me immensely: a kid, a dog and a robot, to name a few. -
Diablo 4
Getting a triple boss in a dungeon for the first time is fun. Getting the same triplets for the third time… not so much.
Speaking of fun, the story bosses drop junk, but the Treasure Goblin dropped an actually useful bow that randomly creates a pool of poison, and while you’re standing in that pool, your poison attacks are free. Finally a mechanic that is not just about shooting monsters in their faces.
Elias is supposed to be some kind of a villain, and he certainly gets a lot of people killed, but for a good reason, it seems? He’s cullying humanity, because invasion is inevitable. So only the strong will survive to fight the demons. Makes sense to me.
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Persona 4 Golden
By September maximized my relationship with Yosuke, which has double benefits: the character gets their ultimate persona to use in battle, and you get one of the ultimate personas to fuse.
The best storyline so far is by Yumi, a girl that tries to reconcile with her dying father whomlwft her family for another woman:
On a schooltrip we meet Chihiro from Persona 3, who’s now in her final year. Which means that the game is set a year or two after the events of Persona 3. I haven’t thought before that those games even happen in the same universe.
I was completely blown by the fact that they have special portraits for when the party gets drunk in a nightclub. -
Persona 4 Golden
A third body is discovered: sleazy homeroom teacher of the protagonist. This is surprising, since he never appeared on TV, unlike all the other victims, and apparently wasn’t even thrown into the TV-world. But then as the characters point out, since they managed to rescue the last three potential victims, the killer has decided that simply throwing them into the TV-world is not efficient anymore.
Another twist is that Teddie is not only able to come out of the TV-world, but also acquires a human shape in the human world.
The game tries to convince us that the killer is Mitsuo, a creepy teenager that approached Yukiko at the very start of the game.
His dungeon is literally a 80s JRPG dungeon, with pixelated walls, and the endboss is that cubic hero character. This boss is much harder that previous ones, attacking twice each turn.
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Persona 4 Golden
Second big dungeon is a men-only public bathhouse. Kanji is a though guy that is struggling with his homo/bi sexuality. A bold theme for a JRPG for teenagers.
After the rescue, Yosuke keeps making jokes about his uncertain sexuality throughout the game:
The next victim is Rise, a local teenage popstar. Her dungeon is a strip-club, because she gets to expose too much of her working as a model. And the boss is literally a huge pole-dancer.
The fight while not difficult in itself, turns out to be a double-boss battle, as Teddie discovers he also has a persona. This is interesting. Aegis from Persona 3, a cyborg, was given personality in order to acquire a Persona.
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Persona 4 Golden
That’s my second or even third time trying to play Persona 4. It’s not bad or anything, just long.
The only bit that annoys me is the fact that character mouths are not moving.
The premise is that people start to get sucked into their TVs at night, where they have to face their Shadow, the dark self. And if they die, they die in the real world too.
The problem with the game is same as Persona 3. And honestly, with most shin Megami Tensei games. When your entire combat system is built around exploiting enemy weakness with magic, once you run out of mana, it becomes boring. And since characters are designed to compliment each other, once one character runs out of SP, you may as well end the run. Although SP recovery items seem a little less of a problem than in PS4 version than in the original PS2 release.
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Nier Replicant
Completed Nier Replicant.
As I already mentioned, OST of Nier is something else:
Being grown up means mostly you revisit same locations again, and with the Junkyard, I think even twice.
Some of those are better, like the Octopus Girl boss.
https://youtu.be/0dZfR-LhLO0Some of them are meh, like the Wolf boss.
Devola and Popola, the town major and her twin sister, turn out to be evil witches. And everyone turns out to be android, while the Shades are the real humans. This is all explained in a sneaky burst of images at the very end of the game. Not a real surprise, as the subtitle of the remake is “Replicant”. Akin to “The Island”, the plan was for people souls to return into the android “shells” after the pandemic is over, but souls turned into monsters, while shells developed conscience and rejected their owners.
There are 4 more endings, achieved by playing the second half of the game 3 more times, and then the entire game again from the start. But I think I’ll stop there. It’s great the Nier has a sane difficulty: unlike Bayonetta or Revengeance, nor like Souls games, not once I wanted to break my gamepad while playing it for 20 hours. But I played it for 20 hours, and I think that’s quite enough. No amount of post-irony and self-humor about boring dungeons and quest can hide the fact that those are indeed boring.
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Nier Replicant
A game makes a timejump 5 years. Timejumps aren’t new: Ocarina of Time pulled it, Breath of Fire 2 pulled it too. But I still respect every game that manages to do it properly. This one does.
Now our hero isn’t a teenager anymore, although that makes him resemble Dante now much more. I was also wondering why the game mentiones that the sword you find are “one-handed”, since they all were one-handed. This is why. As an adult, the protagonist can also weild two-handed swords. Nice.
Emil, the kid that is able to petrify with his stare, discovers that his mansion has a laboratory underneath (another Resident Evil reference), and there his sister, turned into a huge monster, is kept. And he was given his capabilities to stop her. The game perspective switches to 2.5D isometric ARPG-like for a while.
The siblings merge, Emil receives magic abilities, but now looks like a skeleton, a miniature version of his sister. I always thought that the skeleton on the cover is Grimoir Weiss personified.
With that, Kaine is un-petrified, and the monster she held sealed finally beaten. -
Nier Replicant
The music in this game is something else, I must admit. Having vocals is not something many games try to pull out.
Bad mouthed Kaine is sure a good comic relief.
With her, we travel to a Sand City that has thousands of rules. Obviously the dungeon / temple puzzles are also based around following bizarre rules: no jumping in one room, no running or using magic in another.
And suddenly the game turns into a text adventure.
And then it mocks Resident Evil with its mansion and keys.
There we meet and kill Red Book, that doesn’t speak, though, and a boy, Emil, that can petrify with his gaze.
Then the village gets attacked. This episode is seriously technically impressive, with that huge boss chasing the hero:
We try to fend it off, but Kaine has to be sacrificed, turned into stone, to seal one of the Shades, and a dark twin of a protagonist appears alongside Grimoire Noir, which we were about to start chasing. Noir explains that it must unite with Weiss to bring Shades upon the world, but Weiss refuses. Still, protagonist gets stabbed, and Yona stolen by the Shadowlord.
