HIGH Fantastic combat system that is both modern and an homage to classic RPGs.

LOW Sluggish pacing in the middle chapters.

WTF “How about a hundred smacks on the ass?”

About a month ago I started seeing buzz online for Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter.

The Trails/Legend of Heroes series, despite its vast library, is one I knew very little about, but this remake of the first in the series seemed to check a lot of personal boxes — realtime combat that transitions into turn-based, a captivating art style, and a high fantasy setting harkening back to classic JRPGs. So, I booted up the free demo, and by the end of its generous eight-hour playtime, I was completely hooked and thirsty for more. Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter is a beautiful RPG with top-notch combat, memorable characters, and also serves as a perfect entry point into the long-running Trails series.

1st Chapter follows the story of sixteen-year-old Estelle and her adopted brother Joshua as they aim to become top notch Bracers — people who help protect the citizens of Liberl from monsters, thieves, and any threats to the kingdom. Over the course of their journey, they will travel across the kingdom to aid as many people as possible while balancing each other out perfectly — Estelle is captivatingly optimistic and reactionary, while Joshua is more reserved and calculated. As they blossom into powerful bracers, so do their feelings for one and other.

The story Falcom weaves is a complex one commencing with Estelle and Joshua’s hunt for their missing father, which eventually matures into a struggle for military power, treason from within the government, and other powerful forces at work behind the scenes. When firing on all cylinders, Trails is captivating and engrossing, simultaneously balancing the intimate and personal story of two kids trying to find their dad, and the larger, more sophisticated political drama. However, I found myself disengaged in the middle chapters because the focus shifted off both these potent storylines, and more into side characters that are ultimately important to the overall plot, though they feel gratuitous during their runtimes. 

Besides the sluggish middle section, another issue is that each chapter tends to focus on two characters that will join in battle with Estelle and Joshua, but their residence in the party is short-lived as they always depart at the end of each chapter, leaving Estelle and Joshua effectively starting from scratch. Each of these side characters are memorable — from over-the-top traveling musician Olivier, to the mysteriously powerful swordsman Agate, the cast is top notch. However, it felt like just as soon as I got to know the characters on a deeper level, they would set off on their own journey.

That said, all of the intermittent party members reappear in an epically-bombastic final act that ties everyone’s stories together quite well, but the thickness of the middle chapters does lessen the overall experience. Also puzzling was that some of these itinerant characters have voice acting while Estelle and Joshua do not, which did occasionally pull me out of the immersion. 

What does remain engaging throughout 1st Chapter’s runtime is the phenomenal combat system. When approaching wandering enemies, players can enter into a basic, but effective real-time battle complete with normal attacks, dodges, and a special meter that charges over time. Once the enemy’s stun meter is full, the player will have a huge advantage when they enter into turn-based combat, which they can slickly switch into with the press of a button.

In the turn-based combat, characters will have a range of options at their disposal, with different resources for each. The key to successful battles is knowing how to balance spells and abilities, and also knowing how to correctly position party members. For example, some buffs and healing spells are only effective when party members are positioned near each other, but certain enemies might abuse this proximity with powerful AOE attacks. Understanding both party strengths and enemy attack patterns is crucial. 

In addition to a traditional level-up system and equipment management, Trails adds a deeper level of preparation to combat with the orbment system. Each playable character has the ability to equip an elemental quart into a total of six slots. Depending on the element of the quartz and its proximity to other quartz, the character can obtain varying spells to use in battle. For example, equipping a water-based HP quartz will give the character healing spells, while a water-based mind quartz will give the character an offensive aqua attack. As the adventure progresses, players will obtain more powerful quartz to create incredibly powerful offensive and defensive spells. The level of customization here is high, and finding the correct quartz for each character is enticing. (There’s is also an auto-equip for those who want to enjoy battles without too much experimentation.) 

The world of Liberl is one brimming with history — it’s filled with collectable books that outline how the kingdom came to be, and mysterious towers hint at the many wars and struggles the country has endured. Trails does a great job at making the land feel lived-in and real, though I do wish the environments were a little more varied when exploring. The sun is always shining brightly over the samey-looking rolling meadows, with the occasional cave or forest thrown in.

Overall, I truly enjoyed my time with Estelle, Joshua, and their many companions in their quest to become senior bracers. Falcom does a commendable job creating a world and story that feels real for the majority of its runtime, despite a few occasional stumbles. As a newcomer to the series, the combat system captivated me from the first battle and never let me go. Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter feels like a classic JRPG I might have grown up playing, yet produced in a modern and nuanced way at the same time. Thanks to the obvious pride and care put into this remake, consider me the newest fan of the Trails series. 

Rating: 8 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Nihon Falcom & Nihon Falcom Corporation and published by GungHo Online Entertainment America, Inc. It is currently available on Switch/Switch 2, XBX/S, PS5 and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 39 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There is no multiplayer mode.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood, Fantasy Violence, Language, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco. The official description reads: Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter is rated T for Teen by the ESRB with Blood, Fantasy Violence, Language, Suggestive Themes, and Use of Alcohol and Tobacco. This is an action role-playing game in which players assume the roles of adopted siblings searching for their missing father. From a third-person perspective, players explore a kingdom, interact with characters, complete missions, and engage in battle with human and fantastical enemies (e.g., plants, robots, soldiers). Players use swords, staffs, guns, and magic spells to attack enemies. Players can use special moves that depict brief cutscenes of the attacks. Combat is highlighted by colorful light effects and impact sounds. Still-images sometimes depict bloodstains near bodies and on characters’ faces/clothing. One female character is designed with a somewhat revealing outfit (e.g., deep cleavage) and breast-jiggling effects; some camera angles focus on her chest. Story elements also allude to a romantic relationship between adopted siblings (e.g., struggling with their feelings, kissing). One scene depicts two characters under the influence of alcohol (e.g., flushed faces, slurred speech), with accompanying dialogue (e.g., “Come and drink with your big sister. You drink or I bring the whole place down”; “Wow, I really drank. Feels like it’s been forever since I last got to cut loose.”) One character is seen smoking a cigarette, and a side mission involves finding stolen cigarettes. The words “sh*t” and “a*sholes” appear in the game.

Colorblind Modes: There is no colorblind mode.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles, though they are not resizable. Audio cues are not needed for progression, making the game fully accessible. 

Remappable Controls: Yes, the game’s controls are remappable.

The post Trails In The Sky 1st Chapter Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Hee hee hee! Look at Rikku’s chubby little face! Ha ha!

LOW So… many… random… encounters.

WTF What the honk? Really?

The setup for World of Final Fantasy is a weird one.

After hopping off a building for some reason or another, super amnesiac wonder twins Lann and Reynn wake up to find that their hometown is completely deserted. Following a quick visit from a mysterious stranger at a nearby coffee shop, it turns out that they’re both supremely powerful Mirage Keepers with the ability to trap wandering monsters.

Of course they’re still amnesiacs, so before long it’s off to the world of Grymoire to recover their missing faculties and find out just who they really are. Unfortunately, Grymoire also happens to be under attack by an oppressive empire intent on world domination and, coincidentally, home to the Lillikin — super-deformed cutesy humans, including tiny versions of the Final Fantasy series’ most recognizable heroes all living together on the same planet. Ever wanted to see a micro version of Squall and Lightning team up to murder their enemies? Who hasn’t? Well, it’s a thing now.

It should be noted that World of Final Fantasy is clearly aiming for a younger audience with its cutesy characters, slapstick writing and cartoonish portrayals of even the most vicious FF enemies, so it’s also added some weird personality quirks to its leads. There’s a pretty good chance that anyone over the age of two will want to drown Lann in a bucket due to his ceaseless outbursts, terrible jokes and puns. Reynn’s generally okay, other than loudly and repeatedly treating Lann like an unwanted, bumbling incompetent throughout. Another character has a bizarre propensity for sticking the word ‘the’ onto random words — it wasn’t the-long before I wanted her to the-die gruesomely in a the-horrific accident.

These slightly annoying quibbles aside, our protagonists aren’t terrible — just slightly bland, everyday JRPG heroes bumbling through an unexpected adventure in a foreign world. Their storyline doesn’t really matter until the back end of the game, and before that it’s all about bumping into familiar faces from times gone by and helping them out for fun and profit.

The gameplay is, appropriately enough, a turn-based affair based on the classic Final Fantasy Active Time Battle system. A timer ticks away during each encounter before each character gets their turn. When the timer’s up, they’re allowed to smack the enemy in the teeth, whip out a healing item or cast some magic. The twist here is that many of the enemies can be captured after meeting certain requirements — dropping their health, afflicting status ailments upon them and the like — and once caught, they’re added to the player’s arsenal and literally stacked atop one another to bolster their abilities in towers which grant bonuses to hit points, action speed and other attributes.

These captured enemies can also be powered up with new abilities and passive strengths via experience that they’ve accumulated, but when screwing around with dozens of minions coming and going in and out of the party, it gets tiresome quickly. Thankfully, many of these captured monsters are basically interchangeable, so it’s easy to just bag them and file them away without ever bothering to delve into their peculiarities or spend time leveling up ones that don’t fit the party.

It must be mentioned that battles generally dance on the precipice of taking way too long for their own good given how often they crop up. Sometimes it feels like every three steps leads to another inevitable battle, and waiting for the ATB gauge to do its thing sometimes feels like forever. Thankfully, most of the game can be fast-forwarded by holding down the R1 button. This allows fights to speed along, and many fights can be won using little more than standard attacks and some occasional healing.

While I’m personally familiar with Final Fantasy as a franchise, it’s tough to tell how much World would appeal to newcomers. A lot of the early highlights come from recognizing characters that are coming and going — without prior knowledge of who they are, their appearances won’t mean much when they show up and randomly do something awesome. Given that World seems especialy inviting towards younger players and that many of these characters are decades old at this point, it’s a curiously conflicting approach.

All told, World of Final Fantasy is a great-looking game with charm to spare and quite a few cool ideas under its belt, but it never quite nails the pacing and the excellent localization can’t save it from a pedestrian storyline jaunt through linear dungeons. It’s a reasonable option for anyone hankering for some Final Fantasy nostalgia or anyone who wants to overdose on cute and the colorful, but for everyone else it’s merely a decent JRPG with a few too many irritating lows. Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Tose/SquareEnix and published by SquareEnix. It is currently available on Playstation 4 and Playstation Vita. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS4. Approximately 35 hours of play were devoted to the singleplayer mode, and the game was completed. 1 hour of play was spent in multiplayer modes, a strange online battle thing that’s easily ignored.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated Everyone E10+ and contains alcohol reference, fantasy violence, mild language and mild suggestive themes. Kids will undoubtedly do fine with this, it’s clearly aimed at them – though when Lann screams ‘what the honking honk’, I have to admit that my brain automatically overwrote it with something else.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: No problems here, the game is fully subtitled and doesn’t rely on audio cues for success.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. I had a pretty good look, and couldn’t find any such option.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

The post World Of Final Fantasy Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The cast is charming and the combat is pleasantly unconventional

LOW The leveling-up minigames. All of them.

WTF The “slime fling” is basically bukkake.

Criminal Girls 2: Party Favors is a perfect example of a great game that’s brought down by its gimmick. In this case, it’s a pleasantly breezy, dungeon-crawling, turn-based JRPG that’s perfectly suited for the Vita, but the ‘hook’ — S&M-themed minigames — is both questionable and annoying.

The premise of Party Favors is that the player is a man in hell (with amnesia, of course!) in charge of seven girls who were about to commit heinous acts in life. Thanks to pre-emptive happenstance, they were sent to hell before committing wrongdoings and are in the player’s charge so that he can ‘reform’ them before they’re doomed for eternity.

This spiritual cleansing is done not by prayer or ethics lessons, but via brief minigames in which the girls are posed in compromising positions. The player will then rub, tap, stroke, or otherwise interface with them via the touchscreen to get them back on the right path.

At this point in my writeup, it should be obvious that the content in Criminal Girls 2 is Not For Everybody — and in general, that’s totally okay. I’m a firm believer that not all content is right for all people whether it be games, movies, books, or anything else. That said, Criminal Girls 2 went a little further than I was personally comfortable with, and the ‘discipline’ was both tedious and annoying.

The problem with this aspect of Criminal Girls 2 is that rather than simply putting EXP points into a stat or making choices on a menu, it gets incredibly tiresome to perform inane touchscreen tasks to level the girls up. Any potential titillation wears off almost immediately, and then it’s just repeating the same tap-tap or swipe-swipe motions over and over again. It’s possible to map the functions to the Vita’s sticks, but they don’t work as well and are clearly meant to be done via touch.

There are different types of discipline methods ranging from “scrubbing” the girls with soap (don’t forget those dirty nipples!) to one where the player is throwing globs of goo onto them. I’m not sure how getting pelted bukkake-style would reform anybody, but it sure is embarrassing to explain when someone walks by and catches a look at the screen.

So I found the ‘sexy’ aspect of Criminal Girls 2 to be problematic on a few levels, but as for the rest of it? Surprisingly, it’s actually quite good.

Players walk around simple dungeons collecting treasure and looking for the next exit, and random battles occur long the way. Fairly boilerplate so far, but when a fight breaks out the player goes to a different screen where their team of four girls (three stay back in reserve) take positions, one in each corner of the Vita’s display. Then, rather than the player assigning actions from a menu, each girl will ‘suggest’ what she wants to do. One girl might want to attack, one might want to defend, one may ask to heal, and so on.

I found this system fascinatingly novel. At the beginning the girls are low-level and want to hide or give up, but after a stretch of killing monsters and leveling up with discipline, they’re soon offering to do triple attacks and magically-charged combos. This system vaguely ties into the S&M theme (in reverse!) by making the player submit to the demands of the girls, but it also adds an unusual strategic layer — it’s impossible to spam the most powerful attacks or keep the party at full health when the characters capable of doing so don’t want to execute. However, it ends up as a pleasant challenge rather than being a problem.

I also want to give credit to the script. Despite being so preloaded with innuendo, the writing was well-done (if a bit verbose) and each of the seven girls had a distinct personality. They spend a satisfactory amount of time talking about their situation and what it means to be in the underworld rehab program, and I appreciated that. There’s also a bit of intrigue since it’s later revealed that one of the seven is actually an imposter. Paranoia ensues! Despite seeming like cheap exploitation software on the surface, the developers didn’t take shortcuts on the game design or narrative. It was a cut above what I expected, for sure.

Apart from the discipline minigames, my only criticism is that it gets a little grindy at times. It’s not egregious, but the best design is when characters are an appropriate level to fight the next boss by the time they get there. In Criminal Girls 2, I usually had to farm EXP for a while before a big fight. Not a dealbreaker, but a minor downer. Otherwise, there are brief delays when selecting actions during combat, and I wanted the fights to run more quickly. Although a one or two second delay after choosing an action doesn’t seem like much at first, it adds up.

There’s a lot going for Criminal Girls 2: Party Favors. The characters are likable, the writing is solid, the combat is fresh, and it feels like a great fit for the Vita. However, it’s embarrassing to level up when others are around, and the ‘sexy’ minigames wore out their welcome in a hurry. It’s a thumbs up when all is said and done, but I’d love to see a sequel that dials back on the touchscreen S&M — despite being the ostensible hook, it was the weakest part of the experience. Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Nippon Ichi. It is currently available on Vita. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the Vita. Approximately 22 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Fantasy Violence, Language, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes. The violence consists of harmless-looking sword swipes and magic fireballs, and the language is super tame. However, this one is 100% not for the kiddies… During the level-up process, the girls are in all sorts of kinky positions and the player needs to touch/spank/slime them in the minigames. It’s pretty over-the-top, so steer little ones clear!

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All dialogue is subtitled and there are no audio cues needed for gameplay. It’s fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

The post Criminal Girls 2: Party Favors Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.