 |
|
Jan 2nd, 2026 at 14:49:02 - Ninja Gaiden 4 (PC) |
Never played a Ninja Gaiden game before (maybe did when I was a kid), but I knew this was developed by Platinum Games, so I figured it would feel like Bayonetta and their other fast action games that I've played. Indeed, Ninja Gaiden 4 feels like a mix between Bayonetta and Devil May Cry. I don't know what previous Ninja Gaiden games are like!
In this one, you play as a guy whose name I already forgot even though I beat it 2 hours ago. None of the characters have much personality. Anyway, you're a badass ninja and you have to save Tokyo by reviving and then killing a giant dragon. You do this by following a linear path to break four seals, killing the guardian of each seal, and then killing said dragon. Story and missions are extremely straightforward. Oh yeah, and when you're almost at the end of the game, you take control of a different character in the past and retrace the main character's steps backwards. You go through an abbreviated version of every area again and have to kill all the bosses again. Yay, backtracking...
What you will play this for is the combat, which is very fast and brutal. I haven't played anything this gory in a long time. The learning curve is steep. You can button mash your way through like the first hour, and then you will start getting your ass kicked. Instead of learning the deep combat system, which ends up with four weapons, two stances, various special abilities, a shuriken, and like 50 moves (including what you can do in the air and jumping up and down from things in the environment), I set the game to easy mode after a couple hours and button mashed my way through. My rationale? I am on a Game Pass timer and still have to go back to Hollow Knight: Silksong, and maybe Blue Prince. I am least interested in Ninja Gaiden and would prefer to spend my time attempting to beat Silksong.
Button-mashing your way through the game on easy ("hero") mode is still satisfying. The game mostly plays for you, auto-blocking all enemy attacks, but that let me pay attention to the environments and the enemies. Ninja Gaiden 4 is a visual treat! Somehow my computer ran it just fine on my TV. The environments are detailed, especially the neon-lit underground Tokyo part. Enemy animations are meticulously done, and bosses are huge, fast, and scary. There is also souls-like difficulty here on the bosses. They all have two phases, lots of different attacks, and are just plain cool. Granted, I was playing on easy, so I never lost enough to get frustrated at them!
And that's Ninja Gaiden 4. Played on easy, ended up just trying to speed my way through, it was pretty to look at with some good metal soundtrack, but it felt pretty much like 10 other games I've played before. I wouldn't bother playing it unless you really love these types of combo-combat action games.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Jan 3rd, 2026 at 02:47:29.
add a comment  - read this GameLog  |
|
Dec 31st, 2025 at 09:41:06 - Blue Prince (PC) |
I LOVED Blue Prince...until I didn't. Fasten your seatbelt because you're on the complain train. Wait, trains don't have seatbelts...do they?
Blue Prince has a great concept. I went in blind and quickly realized that I was not playing a regular puzzle game. I was playing a roguelite puzzle game with (mostly hidden) deckbuilding elements. Cool.
So let that be a spoiler warning of sorts. If you want to be completely surprised by how it works, then don't read this.
In Blue Prince, the first goal that you have is to reach "room 46" in a mansion. The mansion is laid out in a 9x5 grid of rooms (that's 45 rooms; the 46th is a mystery!). The gimmick is that the rooms reset every day. You have x number of steps you can take in a day before you have to "call it a day," resetting the mansion and starting from the beginning.
Imagine you are an architect. You begin your day in the entryway, which has doors facing west, north, and east (and south to outside). You choose a door and "draft" a room. What that means is that you are presented with three rooms from your deck (you can never see your deck, so you don't know exactly what's in there; I assume one copy of most rooms to start, though later on you get slightly more info about what is in your deck and are able to manipulate it a little bit). You can choose one of those three rooms to build. Rooms:
- have different configurations. Some are dead ends, some have 2 doors, or even 4.
- cost different resources. Some rooms cost gems, some require keys to open, some are electronically locked, etc.
- are of different types. Some are bedrooms, hallways, green rooms, red rooms, shops, etc.
- have different effects. For example, bedrooms tend to give you steps (e.g., +10 steps for drafting this room; +2 steps every time you enter; +5 steps every time you draft a bedroom), hallways tend to have lots of doors, red rooms tend to have even more doors but often come with negative effects (e.g., for the rest of the day one of your draft choices will be hidden [dangerous!]; lose 1 gold every time you enter; lose 1/2 of your steps).
- may have items (e.g., gold, gems, keys, or utility items like shovels [dig up dirt], a magnifying glass [scrutinize papers and pictures], or a metal detector [makes noise near metal and makes finding coins and keys more likely).
Those are the basics, then. You build the mansion each day as you walk through it, attempting to strategically map your way to the antechamber, a room opposite the entryway on the far side of the mansion, through whose locked doors room 46 may sit. I say "may" because I never actually got through the antechamber. I got inside it once, but there is another locked door to get out of it that I never figured out how to open. Your main hazards are running out of keys, gems, and steps, such that you will be confounded by a locked door (no key, womp womp), unable to draft what you need (some rooms cost gems and you might be forced to draft a dead end, for example, womp womp), or you tire out and have to call it a day. These were problems for me early on, but I ended up rarely running out of these resources. More often, later on, I would paint myself into a corner, come up against electronically locked doors when I didn't have a keycard or hadn't shut off the power, or, most commonly, I would just not get any useful combination of rooms/items and couldn't solve whatever puzzles I needed to solve, or just couldn't make it into the antechamber.
Those latter problems are what kill this game for me. I really, really, really want to keep loving it, but unfortunately it gets really tedious because, however much strategy you employ, you need a lot of luck on your side. I stopped on day 21 and had played about 16 hours. It was day 14ish, and around 11-12 hours, that I started to get the "uh oh" feeling that I wasn't going to finish, chin resting in my hand as yet another day was ended through no fault of my own. I stopped seeing much new (though ironically on my last "just one more day" run, I saw a bunch of new rooms, solved two new puzzles, discovered a big new puzzle, and felt slightly compelled to continue). Here's the thing. You will figure out what you need to do, but you will be unable to do it unless you are able to find the correct items and draft the correct rooms, often in a correct order (and avoid all the pitfalls I mentioned above, like running out of keys). For example, I know that to get into the antechamber, I need to find one of several rooms with levers that open doors to the antechamber. One lever is found after solving a puzzle in the secret garden, a room that I drafted one time by dumb luck. It requires that you use the secret garden key, which I have also seen exactly one time in 21 days, in a specific area of the mansion to draft the room. This means, by the way, not only that you have to find the secret garden key (again, I am 1 for 21 with that), but that you have to find it before drafting rooms in the specific spots in which you CAN draft the secret garden and/or that you haven’t already blocked off those spaces. Another lever is behind a locked door in the great hall (a room with 7 locked doors). I have double the success rate of this, having found that lever 2 times in 21 days. Again, you first need to get lucky and draft the great hall (I saw it maybe 4 or 5 times), but then, because the great hall has 7 locked doors, you then also need to have tons of keys or the lockpick kit (which lets you sometimes pick locks in normal doors). So, there are three times that I found levers to open a way into the antechamber. The very first time I opened an antechamber door, I made it in, but not the other two, because even if you do open the antechamber door, you need to draft rooms leading to that side of the antechamber in such a way that you can actually get inside. It very well may be that you get to the space next to the antechamber door that you have opened, and then your three options to draft don’t include a room with a door on the correct side. Day over and an hour of your life gone.
Here are some other examples of not getting what you need or things taking a long time:
- I found the chess puzzle after 20 days. I assume that solving this requires finding a bunch of chess pieces scattered throughout the mansion, which will take who knows how long. On my last two days, I found three unique chess pieces. I have no idea how long finding the rest will take. I will basically have to draft every single room until I find all the pieces, and they could be hidden in super rare rooms! I said I found like 4 new rooms in my last (21st) run. These are rooms I'd never seen before. If you need those rooms for something, good luck!
- Apparently there is an item, a wrench, that is super useful. Never seen it. Not in the toolshed, not in any item closets, not in a shop, not for trade, never. I am sure there are other items I also never saw.
- One very useful item is the shovel, which lets you dig up things when you see dirt mounds (common in green rooms and underground areas). If you draft a particular room outside in the west wing, it increases the number of dirt mounds found throughout the estate that day. I was never able to draft that room and get the shovel in the same run.
- Another shovel one…if you draft a laboratory, you can set up “experiments”, which are cause-and-effect actions like “every time you eat an apple, gain 5 additional steps” or whatever. You are given three causes and three effects to mix and match. One of the causes is “dig up junk” and one of the effects is “permanently increase your allowance (starting gold) by 1.” Permanently increasing your allowance is awesome. Anyway, I found “dig up junk” twice and of course never got a shovel. One of those times I had more dirt piles too! And I found “permanently increase your allowance” twice and was never able to do the cause that resulted in the benefit. You just have to get lucky.
- There is a room, the boiler room, from which you can send steam power to other rooms. Some rooms have piping for steam, but most don’t. There are like 5 rooms that are affected by the boiler room, that can be powered. The catch is, you have to actually draft them in such a way that you pipe the steam physically through them. I NEVER was able to pipe steam anywhere. I would route the steam, draft rooms from the boiler room, and get a bunch of bedrooms or something that don’t need power or don’t even have piping to chance drafting something useful after that. Solving the various boiler room power puzzles would require getting multiple specific drafts in a row. That is crazy.
- And so on and so forth x 100.
It’s not just the randomness that is bothering me, but the over-reliance on it. Yes, there is some strategizing. For example, you can boost your chances of getting a shovel by drafting a room that lets you request items that will appear the next day, gunning for rooms with items like closets, or building a commissary and hoping there is one for sale. And there are permanent upgrades for meta-progression that are helpful. For example, I was up to starting each day with 2 gems, 11 coins, and 20 extra steps. You can also permanently upgrade some rooms, manipulating water in the pump room persists, etc. But you just cannot get around drafting the “wrong” rooms, not getting items you need when you need them, etc. If you aren’t getting what you need, there isn’t really anything you can do. I mean, it’s not engaging. Like, you just draft rooms until you decide to call it a day. It’s slow, and it gets repetitive. The meta puzzles are cool as hell, but the per-day puzzles are a slog, figuring out the box riddles or (and this is actually a puzzle) solving increasingly complicated arithmetic problems on the dartboard. If I have demonstrated that I can solve arithmetic puzzles 10 times, can you please not make me do it anymore?!
In most roguelites, there is combat that keeps you engaged, even if you fail a run. I’m not faulting Blue Prince for no combat, but it is missing something to keep you engaged for run after run after run when you are not finding anything new or advancing any of the puzzles. Too slow, too repetitive, too reliant on luck. I still like it…it’s something different…but I’m not going to finish it. It could take me just a few more hours to get lucky and for things to click, or I could see this taking 40 hours, and I have no idea which it will be!
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Dec 6th, 2025 at 11:47:01 - Persona 5 Royal (PS5) |
This game was SO friggin long. 135 hours. I have been playing it since February (it is now December). And I didn’t even do the third semester and final palace in the Royal edition, which I read add another 10-20 hours. I don’t have the motivation to do any more. I finished the main game, saw the story build-up for the third semester after New Year’s (which I didn’t know I had fulfilled the conditions to unlock), and called it done. I clocked about 80 hours in Persona 4, so 5 is over 50% longer. I loved the game overall, but it kept going and going and going; there was no need for the extreme length. There are a lot of palaces (main dungeons), a huge dungeon called Mementos (full of side quests and the end of the game; like HUGE, literally at least 55 floors [I remember a character commenting on that number]), tons of confidants (characters with whom you forge social bonds), creating and fusing personas, five social characteristics to level up, tons of dialogue (often through long text chains), and just a really long, involved story with a lot of side activities to do. It’s enormous. It reminds me of the rebooted Assassin’s Creed games that were so much longer beginning with the PS4 games compared to those before. I really liked those first two PS4 Assassin’s Creed games, but I wanted something shorter and more streamlined. If there is a Persona 6, I will be skipping it unless it is significantly shorter and changes up the formula.
There really isn’t too much to say about this that I didn’t say about Persona 3 and 4. I made an entry for Persona 4 over 10 years ago! Re-reading it sounded like I was basically describing Persona 5 back then. You’re a displaced troubled youth. Weird stuff is happening, mysterious deaths and people going insane. You meet people at school, meet a talking cat, and get a mysterious phone app that transports you to strange places. You become the Phantom Thieves, who identify rotten adults and change their hearts by going into their “palaces” (minds), stealing their treasures (desires) and forcing them to confess to their misdeeds. In so doing, the Phantom Thieves become social media famous, until the public turns against them. You survive an interrogation (a cool narrative device that lasts about half the game), meet new people, recruit them to the team, go up against bigger and badder adults as you work your way toward the true culprit behind the mysterious deaths and insanities. (That’s when I thought the game was over, but surprise, there is more plot and a true boss after what you think is the last boss, and that’s like another 10 hours of gameplay!!). Along the way, you help all sorts of people with their problems and potentially date a girl.
Combat operates pretty much the same as I remember. There are all the standard Shin Megami Tensei personas and magics. You play a game of strengths and weaknesses in combat, exploiting enemy vulnerabilities for advantage in battle. When you hit an enemy's weakness (e.g., use a fire spell on an enemy weak to fire), you knock them down and get an extra turn. If you knock all enemies down, you perform a powerful group attack. You can recruit different personas to enhance your own arsenal and can fuse personas to create stronger ones to mix-and-match skills to suit your purposes. For example, for most of the game, I created personas with a high magic stat that could use most elements. Whatever I didn’t have at the ready, I would choose party members who had what I was missing. By the end of the game, I was fusing personas focusing on buffs and debuffs because, as “exploit the weakness” combat systems always go, the toughest enemies have no weaknesses, and so you end up being better off going for pure damage, buffing your party, and debuffing the enemies. All the later bosses basically faced me at an attack power and defense deficit because I constantly debuffed them. Every time a boss raised its attack, I nullified it, and I had a few party members always ready to raise my own attack and defense and remove status ailments. Combat could be challenging at times (some particularly nasty enemies or combinations of enemies, some tough bosses), but usually it was a cakewalk, with me by the end of the game using auto-attack most of the time to win regular battles.
Outside of palaces, you are living the daily life of a teenager in Japan, going to school, playing sports, eating ramen, etc. You choose how to spend your time after school, in the evenings, and on weekends, strategically hanging out with people and engaging in activities to raise stats and strengthen social bonds. Or, you’re just really interested in all these characters’ side stories! I enjoyed all of them. One girl is an expert shogi player, but her mother wants to use her shogi fame to make her an idol. Another girl is trying to help a friend who is dating a bad guy who is attempting to exploit her for sex work. You help your best guy friend mediate conflict between his old track teammates. You meet a fortune teller who is caught up in a grift. There is a gamer kid who you train with and a former yakuza arms dealer who you go to work for. And like 15 more. There is a TON of story in this game. I really, really enjoyed the narratives, dialogue-heavy though the game is.
I guess in the end, that’s really what I was playing for was to see what would happen with all these characters and in the main story. The dungeons ended up getting pretty grindy and same-y with puzzles that just padded them out. Plus, I was way over-leveled. I got some accessories at the beginning of the game that increased experience gain by 15%. Any item that increases experience gain is an awesome long-term investment. I mean, 15% bonus XP in every battle for 135 hours, what could be more overpowered? I equipped that accessory on every character, ignoring all other accessories, such that by the end of the game, I was in the high 70s, with personas in the low 80s. The internet says you should be tackling the final boss around level 70. I completely dominated the final boss, but see how he could have been trickier if I was 10 levels lower (by the high 70s, all your party members' personas' skills are maxed out and, of course, everyone has higher stats, more HP, and more SP).
It was a fun, long ride, with great characters and interesting themes. I am teaching an Introduction to Psychology course for the first time right now, so it was cool to see how the game plays with concepts like the collective unconscious and, well, personas. Very Jungian. There is excellent story payoff at the end. You finally figure out what’s up with Mona/Morgana. However, if I knew before playing that it would be so long and so similar to previous Persona games, I would not have picked it up. Extremely glad to be done and start the next (also long, but nowhere near this long) Playstation game on my list, Red Dead Redemption 2 (also I believe the final PS4 game in my backlog and wishlist!).
PS, I forgot to mention how stylish the game is. It looks and sounds super slick. And the music is AWESOME!
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Dec 6th, 2025 at 11:50:31.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Dec 1st, 2025 at 21:06:47 - Divinity: Original Sin II (PC) |
The “toolbox” feel of Divinity: Original Sin 2 is incredible. I am barely through the second act, haven’t even left Reaper’s Eye, and have clocked nearly 30 hours. I’ve explored every bit of every area I can and have been flummoxed by locked chests, complex puzzles, and difficult encounters. Often, I have been stuck on something only to have an “a-ha!” moment. For example, I remember when I realized the value of the teleport spell. This spell is amazing. Cast it on an object and then select where to move the object. It works on most anything—chests, items, even enemies. Chest stuck behind a locked gate? Teleport it to your side. Enemy too close to you in combat? Drop it off a cliff. One of your characters needs to be on the other side of the battlefield, but is slowed and would take three turns to get there? Boom. Teleport him. There are so many abilities like this that have numerous uses that aren’t obvious at first glance. At some point, I realized that if I kept spare junk weapons in my inventory, I could use them to bust down doors. Since they’re junk, it doesn’t matter if they break. At some point, I realized that I could make great use of my undead character being healed by poison. So, I always keep a poison wand on him, all poison items go to him, etc., and he can always heal himself by attacking himself. At some point, I realized that it might be cool to put one point of Necromancer on each of my mages. Necromancer heals the caster by 10% of damage dealt (20% at level 2, etc.). So now all my mages heal for 10% of damage dealt. I am sure there are dozens more such discoveries to be had.
This makes combat fascinating and extremely dynamic. It is based on elements—fire, electricity, oil, ice, poison, blood, steam, etc.—being manipulated on the battlefield. I mean, you can choose to ignore elements, but that would be stupid. You can use them to your great advantage, and accidentally to your great detriment, and enemies will use them too. For example, have a character hurl an oily rock that coats characters and surfaces in oil, then have another character launch a fireball at the oil. BOOM! Explosion. Have a character cast raining blood, which causes enemies to bleed if they don’t have physical armor. Then have another character use a lightning attack, which electrifies the blood. A character on fire? Cast rain to extinguish all the fire. But watch out for an enemy to blast the water surfaces with lightning and zap your previously immolated character. The number of interlocking effects and systems in this game is nuts.
My party is magic-heavy. I have a summoner (my main character, the Red Prince), a fire/geo mage (Fane, the undead), an aero/water mage (Lohse), and a dual-wielding rogue (the woman who is possessed by a demon). The magic variety is awesome because I often have elemental control of the battlefield. But, if there are a lot of enemies with high magic armor, or a lot of physically strong enemies who can get up close, then I can have some trouble. Usually, my rogue can lock down any mages or archers who are around. The trick there is getting her to them quickly (hello teleport) so she can kill one and move on to the next. And my magic users obliterate melee enemies who tend to have low magic armor. The summoner is especially badass because his familiar acts as an extra character, and a strong one at that. Plus, he can summon totems that take a free shot per round at an enemy. The familiar and the totems also act as damage sponges; sometimes enemies will attack them instead of my main party members. I’ll often just summon the familiar out in front of the party to serve as a tank, then bombard enemies with spells from the mages, while the rogue runs around the edges of the battlefield disposing of mages or archers who might be sniping from above. The setup works pretty well! One drawback is equipment though; I keep getting all these badass two-handed swords, heavy armor, strength equipment, crossbows, etc., with no one to use them, and I only get so much equipment that is great for mages, with three mages to share it.
Story-wise, I am loving the world and the characters in it. It’s dark, funny, deep, creative—extremely well written. It was just revealed to me that each of the main playable characters (there are six or seven playable characters, but you can only have four in your party; no idea what happens to the others right now) is chosen by a different god to become The One. It introduced conflict between me and my party in what was previously a collaborative venture! Now The Red Prince (me) is supposed to distrust everyone else because they’ve all been summoned by different gods, and my god told me outright to kill one of my party members (my aero/water mage, who is the healer!). I don’t want to kill any of my party members! I’m so curious about how these intertwining playable character narratives flow together, because any one of them can be you, the main character. That means that the game is a bit different every time, aside from the race/class/background stuff, because each character essentially has their own hero arc.
I started off playing this co-op with a friend, which had its own cool features, though we only played through the tutorial together before I got busy, put the game down for a long time, and then just continued on alone. It was fun fighting together, as you can play off each other in terms of battlefield elements and coordinate in interesting ways. I would like to play some more co-op; however, given the narrative heavy nature of the game and all the inventory management slowing me down (probably the only downside), I don’t think I would enjoy playing co-op except for the combat.
Anyway, I am almost off of Reaper’s Eye, and then on to the next act! Excited to see where this one goes.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
