I'm rarely disgusted after beating a game. Risen 2 left me aghast, and I'm not even a pirate fanatic. I can't imagine the disappointment of those expecting to finally lay their hands on a quality pirate RPG. What could have been a heavily nuanced action RPG is instead a waste of potential and a cheap product. Risen 2 doesn't just leave the niche as empty as it found it. Risen 2: Dark Waters gives pirates a bad name.

For all the Valkyrie Profile fans out there who are wondering about Anatomia: let me put your anxiety to rest! Valkyrie Anatomia is a game absolutely worth skipping. You need not lose bandwidth or storage space over this one. If you must know what is going on, follow the wikis out there and read story summaries from time to time.

This 10-15 hour journey at $30 on release is riddled with bugs and housed in boring game design and even worse execution. Nothing excites me about playing The Ascent. If only this were an adventure game.

There was nothing fun, enjoyable, or remotely redeeming about this game at all. The experience was akin to having a root canal.

The game is obviously not Harvest Moon as we know it or even a "real" Harvest Moon game, but even when taken on its own merits and values, it's simply a throwaway game.

My immediate thought after playing Fighting Fantasy Legends is that I'd rather reread/replay my old, if dusty, Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. The books had haunting text and astonishing artwork that were captured beautifully in inkle's Sorcery! video games, but were sorely lacking in Fighting Fantasy Legends. This is largely because Fighting Fantasy Legends' repetitive and luck-dependent board game format made me feel completely disconnected from the adventure and did not engross me the way that Sorcery!'s "visual novel with RPG elements" format did. Fighting Fantasy Legends' menu option to increase font sizes pleased me and leveling up my dice was nifty, but I still found the game a disappointing waste of my time.

Kitaria Fables is an action RPG with a failed farming component. Hell, even the action RPG aspect is failed. The dialogue, while cute and child-like, goes on and on with more telling and less showing. On its surface, this looks like a fun kids game, but the punishing enemies and excessive text tell otherwise. I’m not sure who this is for. Actually, I’d say it’s for no one. In no way is this any fun. It felt like work from beginning to end, and I can’t even say that’s because I was doing any farming.

Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness is a hot mess of a game. I respect that rules from Made in Abyss’s world and mythos translated into the game mechanics, but that made for a wholly unappealing play experience. While I wouldn’t recommend playing Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness, I would definitely recommend checking out the Made in Abyss anime or manga to see why it’s highly regarded.

Fans of this archaic throwback to Wizardry dungeon crawling of old may enjoy the nostalgia captured here, but those craving story and more engaging gameplay best look elsewhere.

Robotherapy not only falls short of even the most basic of my expectations, it’s completely unremarkable in almost every regard. It fails to capitalize on its premise in any meaningful way, and the story that it does choose to develop struggles with the prohibitively short overall runtime. If you’re looking for a simple pick-me-up, Robotherapy might provide an hour of decent entertainment. But anyone looking for a more substantial experience, this is not it.

If you're itching for a dungeon-crawler, go for Etrian Odyssey or Unchained Blades instead.

If you've already beaten every DS RPG to date and you have plenty of money, then buy this one. If you're into repetitive dungeon-crawling and repetitive fighting to level monsters who are much less interesting than their franchise-based rivals (Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh), then give this title a play.

Re: Hollow Fragment is an appropriate title for yet another shallow licensed game.

At this point, it should be obvious that if you're considering purchasing this game, I'd advise you not to. There are so many other, better games you could be playing.

A visually appealing but ultimately trite series of references to much better games.

All in all, this is just a disappointing game, and the Mana series doesn’t deserve to be brought down like that since it already has so many hit-or-miss games. Wright Flier Studios needs to rethink and retool this one and fast before the player base is gone and won’t come back. They only need to look at other Square Enix gacha games to see how to do it right, like Romancing SaGa Re;univerSe, or even their own Another Eden. I can not recommend Echoes of Mana in its current form, but hopefully it can be fixed before it joins the graveyard of other dead gacha games.

The isometric grid muddies the waters instead of providing meaningful depth, the companion and charm systems feel several iterations short of being finished, and the core deck mechanics lack the consistency and design work that make its inspirations so enduring. Shuffle Tactics is brimming with things to unlock but starved for meaningful ways to enjoy them, leaving it less a cohesive “greatest hits album” of roguelite elements and more of a confused compilation of good ideas played out of tune.

Those who couldn't get enough of Tokyo Xanadu's combat will no doubt be pleased with the extra content here, especially a robust post-game that takes place during Halloween. Everyone else, however, is better off passing this one up. eX+'s additions are so flimsy and superfluous as to actively detract from the original game, dragging out an already thin premise to another 25 hours.

As a freeware title, Sylia may be worth playing if you're bored and are in the later stages of Mercury poisoning, but buying Sylia at $20 is, well, silly.

Zoids Assault is a bland, uninspiring game that will keep the interest of very few gamers after the first battle or two.

InuYasha: Secret of the Divine Jewel is a dud.

Needless to say, Eredia wasn't my cup of tea in the end. The few bright spots it has are completely overshadowed by its tasteless protagonist and its subpar execution. This is supposedly the first of three installments. While I can't say what the future holds for the series, I can say that where it stands right now, I can’t recommend it to anyone.

Katana Kami is the worst game I've ever reviewed at RPGFan. While it works from a technical standpoint, the design is as flat and disgusting as a glass of soda that's been sitting out on the dining room table all night and into the morning. The ideas are there. I can almost hear the exciting discussions during the beginning stages of development. On paper, this game sounds tenacious and engrossing, but everything done after those initial meetings was clearly a disaster. I never got a sense of import or consequence. Katana Kami is a black hole that sucks in time and gives nothing back.

So many things don't fit, so many things work against each other, and everything just reeks of half finished game ideas.

Aura: Fate of the Ages promises many things, yet fails to deliver on almost all of them.

I keep a list of RPGs I want to play, or think I should play, or have to play for the sake of writing a review. Cross Edge was right on the bottom "edge" of the list. Now, I happily "cross" it off the list.

Despite all my complaints, I initially had fun with Dying Light 2. The first quarter of the game was engaging. I think if the rest of the game played like this, I would have way more positive things to say, but the fact is that it’s just not done. This is clearly an unfinished game mired in mismanagement. I don’t blame the developers at all; the leaders and executives behind this work are responsible. What works here is clean and well done, albeit with some boring AAA niceties. After the first quarter or so, though, the game absolutely falls apart in almost every respect. I’m sad for what was produced here, but if I’m being honest, I’m more sad that I invested nearly thirty hours of my own time into this. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

Death by Scrolling is a functional game. It controls well, is feature complete, and is mostly bug-free, but it lacks the spark needed to make it truly compelling. Recent updates have added new content and breathed some life into the experience, but the core remaining so bare still makes it a difficult game to recommend, unless you’re specifically looking for a stripped-down, low-commitment take on the genre.

In a word: yuck.

The new virtual world of Ainground is just a regular VR game. And this is Hollow Realization's core problem: there is absolutely no motivation to push forward in the game. Kirito and his harem of stereotypes adventure far and wide, but often with no discernable purpose.

At the end of the day, Freedom Cry is a terrible game.

So in the final analysis, Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom takes a bunch of decently designed aspects and mangles them into an unfun experience.

I guess if I had to summarize my experience with Izuna 2: The Unemployed Ninja Returns, it would be this: do not buy this game. Do not rent this game. Do not borrow this game from a friend.

The Princess Guide could have been so much more if there had been more effort put into it. Instead, we have a mess of a game that needed more time in the oven. My instincts as an Instructor are telling me to ride off into the sunset, leaving this game to its own problems.

Often, even if a game is flawed, there will still be an audience who can appreciate what it has to offer and look past its flaws. I would be hard-pressed to identify any such audience for Agarest: Generations of War.

We Are The Caretakers is a reminder of just how much work it takes to properly bring something from a cool concept to an actual functioning game. I have no doubt that Heart Shaped Game’s intentions were noble, and their courage to venture into relatively unexplored territory in gaming deserves its due credit. But when looking at the bigger picture and judging the game for what it is, not what it is supposed to be, We Are The Caretakers is simply beyond the pale.

Nights of Azure 2 was the chance to improve on its predecessors potential, but it completely drops the ball.

Between its endless backtracking, lengthy, unskippable cutscenes and space battles in which nothing happens, this feels like a five hour game that was padded out to five-times its length, with some ridiculous cleavage grafted onto it in an attempt to distract. Integrity and Faithlessness is not a game that respects or deserves your time, and perhaps Star Ocean is a series that's ready to be jettisoned from the airlock.

This is a disturbingly conservative action RPG that functions as a museum of bad game design.

There are a few promising things about Crystar, but they are overshadowed by its terrible combat and a story that thinks it's much more interesting and important than it actually is.

A finale built for fans that will be hard for newcomers to enjoy.

A dense and impenetrable creature-management simulation that relishes in gut-punching the player every time they make progress.

As it stands, Artis Impact is an audiovisual masterpiece that fails to convey a cohesive narrative or engage the player beyond its spectacular presentation.

Did I enjoy being scared? Yeah, I did. I don’t understand people who watch a horror movie, laugh at it the whole time, and then talk about how the movie just wasn’t scary. If you allow yourself to be scared, this game creates some reliable tension. Unfortunately, the entire premise is essentially the theft of what Hideo Kojima’s team created, and nothing is built on top of that. As if the mind-shatteringly awful ending wasn’t bad enough, the final achievement is titled “See the names of Gods.” This is awarded for seeing the credits. I’m just going to leave that there and let you finish my final thoughts on your own.

Capcom deserves credit for preserving these games in a complete package. All versions are here, faithfully presented. For longtime fans, that preservation alone may justify the collection. But I cannot, in good conscience, recommend it to newcomers. The games are intact, and with them come all of their limitations. Once, it felt like an ambitious handheld experiment; now it plays like a trilogy stuck between ideas. Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection is an honest time capsule, capturing a series that never found its footing.

I came away from Adore extremely disappointed. While I still believe that combining monster-collecting mechanics in an action roguelike framework could be effective, this title has too many missteps that prevent it from being enjoyable after a couple hours. Furthermore, the control and presentation issues on Nintendo Switch exacerbate these core design flaws, making for an overall frustrating gameplay experience.

Much like vanilla ice cream, MidBoss suffers from a severe case of creative bankruptcy. From its aesthetics that seem like straight asset rips, to its extremely shallow gameplay that tries to impress with numbers only, the final product is a meager roguelike that desperately clings onto a single gimmick to stand out from the rest of the crowd. While that might make for a passable game that you can kill time with every now and then, it doesn't make for a very memorable one that you'll think about playing again just for old time's sake. With this in mind, unless you're a diehard fan of roguelikes, you can safely keep MidBoss out of your Steam library.

There's potential for a fine adventure clutched within ICY's frosty embrace, and a little more time and care could've made this memorable. As it stands, it just feels broken.

Mon-Yu sets out to make the first-person dungeon-crawling genre more approachable and friendly for new players. It does achieve this at some level , but in doing so it removes a lot of what makes the genre appealing in the first place. I can’t recommend this game to someone who wants to get into DRPGs, simply because there isn’t anything noteworthy here that will get its hooks into you. For fans of the genre, stick to Experience, Inc.’s other titles and stay far away from the land of Tir Na Balc.

Faith in Destiny is not a good game, and I could not recommend it to anyone.

Deep Labyrinth is every generic action-RPG you've ever played overlaid with what is quite possibly one of the worst control schemes in any DS game.

There's not much I can say about Arc of Alchemist given its short runtime; there's just not a lot for me to work with. It's a very mediocre game with few redeeming qualities. Compile Heart is toying with my feelings once again.

Let this game serve as a warning to Square Enix: we don't want an RTS for the Mana series. And even if we did, we would only want it if the game wasn't broken from start to finish.

A broken 3D graphic adventure.

The 25th Ward has a few cool ideas, yet they're almost always held back by outdated ignorance and rampant misogyny, turning what could have been a powerful avant-garde adventure game into a frustratingly juvenile monument to phallocentrism.

You better be a hardcore fan of the series, or you won't find much to like in Sword Art Online Fatal Bullet.

Stay very far away from this port. Virtually any other port will do, but not this one.

Ultimately, to say that I didn't enjoy The Caligula Effect would be an understatement. I actively disliked this game the longer I played it. Its uninteresting cast, repetitive music, poor dungeon design, and tedious battle system created an experience that I sincerely detested. There's no doubt that some will enjoy the game, but I doubt most will. The Caligula Effect may not be unplayable, but that doesn't mean that it should be played. The dozens and dozens of hours that I sunk into the game weren't enjoyable at all. After reading this review, you may fall victim to the titular Caligula Effect and want to see just how bad it is for yourself—just don't say that I didn't warn you.

There's very little to love here, and I'd struggle to recommend the game even to fans of the original. Nippon Ichi is capable of much better than what they've cooked up here.

Even the most hardcore visual novel fan is going to be hard pressed to find enjoyment with this unsatisfying mystery adventure.

Overall, SolSeraph is a huge letdown. It's the lack of variety, the terrible platforming levels, and the forgettable building sections and music that makes the game so frustrating and dull. Given the promise of an ActRaiser successor, I was really excited to see what new stuff ACE Team would bring to the table, but the answer is absolutely nothing. In the process, they've managed to strip away the magic of what made the SNES classic so fun, while doing nothing to evolve or develop the formula. Despite this huge misstep, I really hope we do get a solid ActRaiser-inspired game in the near future.

Crimson Tactics wants to be a sweeping epic but is instead a cumbersome slog. Even the most patient and forgiving gamers who can look past slow pacing, terribly written dialogue, and myriad other issues will not see much potential. Crimson Tactics is an unbearably dull, poorly designed, and unfinished game that fails to deliver on any of its promises. I’m glad to be done with this game and have no intention of looking at its sequels, DLC, or any subsequent content.

Do yourself a favor, pass on the PSP port of this game and go find a copy of the PS2 version. Mana Khemia is a cute, enjoyable game - just not on the PSP.

One of the worst RPG experiences on the PSP, and one of the worst RPGs of the past few years. The terrible story, bland battle system, and the atrocious load times and slow down makes this Strategy RPG unbearable. And because of this, Spectral Souls is like eating your grandmother's fruitcake. It looks appetizing on the outside, but as you put it into your mouth, it's stale and hard to swallow.

The sad thing is, there are glimmers of something better. The four main characters have the potential to be appealing, with interesting backstories and some good interaction between them. This is aided by some competent performances by their respective voice actors, although undercut by the messy translation. There is a grandeur hiding behind the failure, like finding the gilt edges on some faded theatrical scenery. For all my displeasure, I would like to see this studio approach similar subject matter again, but this time with more respect for the audience. It would take some serious persuasion to bring me back into the fold. I cannot see that happening for a very, very long time.

Even putting the awful rhetoric aside, Shattered Space is a tone-deaf, regressive, poorly blueprinted, and poorly executed sorry excuse for a story expansion, favoring looks over substance and regression over progression.

Metal Max Xeno lacks just about all of the characteristics that made the series interesting to begin with.

Flower, Sun, and Rain is barely a video game at all. Calling it such is almost too high of praise for a blemish such as this. FSR manages to fail in almost every way, and so completely does it fail that I could scarcely finish half of the adventure.

World of Kungfu is the kind of bad game that wastes your time and makes even its best qualities hurt you in the end. As it stands, the only audience I can imagine for it consists of those actively seeking out janky messes. I thought I could occasionally find enjoyment in overcoming the broken parts, but doesn’t make the game good. Plenty of other great RPGs, new and old, will give you so much more back than this one. This is one fight that just isn’t worth it.

Time & Eternity is by far one of the worst RPGs I have ever played, and even when accounting for different tastes, I cannot recommend it to anyone. At best, a select few may enjoy the game's sense of humor, but I'm convinced that the gameplay is so broken that almost anyone will regret purchasing this game.

I can see no reason why anyone would want to play this game to completion. In its present form, the game is terrible.

Aethereus isn't about the story, the graphics, or the music; it's about gameplay. I won't fault Aethereus for not being something other than what it tries to be, but with questing this anonymous and combat this dysfunctional, I can't recommend it to anyone.

Hate is a strong word and not one I use lightly at all, but I hated The Pale City with every fiber of my being. The ten hours I spent with this game were some of the most deplorable hours of my gaming career and finally deleting it from my computer was incredibly satisfying. Considering my morbid fascination with bad gaming and the sheer magnitude of things I've endured for the site, my expression of hatred is not hyperbole. I've played throwaway games like InuYasha: Secret of the Divine Jewel to completion, so I have a monstrous tolerance; The Pale City roasted, toasted, and burnt my Jedi-level fortitude to a crisp.

Only an absolute die hard of the genre or the series will enjoy this.

Pretty much everything in Loop8 boils down to building up your stats past an arbitrary barrier by looping and repeating the same dull, boring conversations and tasks ad nauseum. The characters are tropey and uninteresting, the unique premise is squandered by disjointed storytelling, and the combat is devoid of strategy or depth. The only positive thing I can commend the game for is the visuals, which feature a nice mix of detailed 3D models and lovingly crafted 2D background elements. They really nailed the look of an 80’s Japanese island town, but the actual game is such a chore to play that I can’t recommend it to anyone. Spend your summer somewhere other than Ashihara.

Qora just isn't fun to play.

Hack, Slash, Loot is not a good game, and I couldn't even recommend it to the most hardcore roguelike enthusiasts. It's dull, it's frustrating, it's entirely dependent on luck and, most significantly, it's not even remotely fun to play. The graphics and sound are appalling, and a little variation in dungeon types isn't enough to save this horrid title. Go spend your money elsewhere.