When all is said and done, the negative headwinds are too strong for Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire to navigate successfully. The earnest story and varied, if simple, setting assets can’t make up for the obtuse systems and vapid, repetitive combat. The raft of graphical glitches and plotting bugs only adds to the terminal altitude loss. For the very committed, there may be enough content and exploration for a week or so. But with many better retro RPGs available, from indie to triple-A, the turbulence on deck is too great to warrant a recommendation to hire Glenn and his crew this time.

If you have shunned Idea Factory RPGs in the past and/or found the previous Agarest War titles a chore to play, this one's marked improvement may sway you slightly. I recommend at least giving Record of Agarest War 2 a rental because it shows that Idea Factory has the potential to create good stuff.

If you enjoy grinding to unlock classes, and the experience of playing as different classes is more important to you than random loot drops, you could very well have a lot of fun with this game.

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.

It's an action RPG from Spiders: awkward, sloppy, and too small for its own good, but entertaining enough for what it is.

It's fun, but incredibly flawed. As long as it's taken as such, fans of the adventure genre will probably have fun playing it like I did.

With companies like XSEED offering higher quality localizations at the exact same price point, there is absolutely no excuse for the abominable work done here by UFO.

All in all, Half Past Fate: Romantic Distancing is a title that doesn’t do anything wrong in its gameplay or story presentation. Truth be told, it is really only hampered by its brief duration. If you’re looking for a shorter diversionary title with an emphasis on romance development that doesn’t ignore the pandemic experience we’ve all been going through, you might want to look into this cute episodic adventure. Like most rom-coms though, don’t expect it to be insanely memorable afterward.

I did not enjoy playing Hoshigami: Remix. I did not find it fun. I found it irritating, monotonous, and cruel.

Creeping Terror feels like your typical horror movie that one would watch to get a cheap, quick scare but proceed to forget about once it's over.

There are plenty of superior RPGs available, and if you want to see sexy Japanese cartoons, the internet is always there for you.

It's a good game, but not an amazing one, mostly because it's more complicated than it needs to be.

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

The people at Muteki Corp. made a game they and their fans would enjoy and there is definitely an audience for it. Unfortunately for anyone else, Dragon Fantasy Book II is often broken, and when it does work, it never transcends being derivative.

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.

If you like a straightforward plot and don't mind Lovecraftian-like animations.

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.

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

Rise of the Argonauts is not unplayable. It's just mediocre and marred by countless careless mistakes born out of a lack of inspiration and passion for the product.

I can’t say I was compelled to explore the board with every single character, nor was I enamoured with the story or the writing. If anything, I felt a bit weird playing this after V3. And while the main games are rarely longer than 30 hours, I can see people grinding forever just to get something satisfying out of Danganronpa S. Unless you’re a hardcore fan, I don’t think it’s worth it. But if you’re picking up Danganronpa Decadence, it might be worth a peek.

Xuan-Yuan Sword: Mists Beyond the Mountains is a rather interesting game to review. On the one hand, I am perhaps too lenient towards the English translation by rating it as I have, but there’s still a solid RPG experience at the game’s core. I admit to being entertained by the English script for all the wrong reasons, but I became engrossed by it. The clues of “something better” within the plot proved both frustrating and enough to keep me speculating. It’s a shame the game couldn’t have been translated more adequately because I can see where the title could have appealed to those wanting a thoughtful, solidly set-up traditional RPG. Despite this game’s flaws, I still want to see more Xuan-Yuan Sword titles released in the West. But, of the ones that have gotten localized thus far, Xuan Yuan Sword 7 is the more substantial title despite its action RPG leanings. Unfortunately, some things are lost in translation in this remaster, making the journey to the East a conflict at best.

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.

Valhalla Knights lacks soul.

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.

What's frustrating about Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 is that it's a game with a good concept and a battle system that has the potential to be fantastic if refined. What it ends up being, though, is a game with the smallest bit of quality at its core, surrounded by a suite of atrociously subpar elements.

A noble attempt to do something unique in the strategy RPG space that won't appeal to most players.

I can sum up Ragnarok DS in one word: mediocre.

Unfortunately, its few shining points are obscured by a massive dark cloud of flaws. I loved the visual design and the gameplay elements that required me to think a little differently. An RPG I can’t just play on autopilot is certainly intriguing. Sadly, the game’s faults are just too numerous for me to wave off. Try before you buy is the order of the day with The Revenant Prince, so I urge anyone interested in the game to take the available demo for a thorough test drive before committing.