Through Deviant Eyes: June 2023

Jobless reincarnation (Overrated AF, the go-to example)

Extremely cliché and lewd enough to pass as a porn comic, the story is difficult to believe even if we ignore the propostous pretense that getting run over by a truck throws you into a fantasy world.

"The story is so great" some had said, "he grows in character throughout the story". Ha! He has a personality change so big, that there's no point in showing his previous life. Think about it. You have this NEET guy, thirty-something years doing nothing but playing eroges, and suddenly he not only awakes some kind of conscience and sacrifices himself for some rando, but once in the fantasy world he works his ass off both intellectually and physically from the minute he's born? Yeah, right!

He couldn't get a job or even lift his fat ass off the chair, but now he'll endure the pains and dangers of life as a mercenary. Note that the guy is born into a rich family and both his parents are skilled heroes, so leaving aside the fact than that's cheating, if a lazy guy has the opportunity not to work a single day of his life you think he'll just say "Nah, more work for me, please"? Precisely.

I'm going to tell you what this overrated piece of garbage is. A power fantasy from some pedo loser who put himself into a fantasy setting and made his character do all the heavy lifting so he could enjoy the fruits of hard labor without actually doing anything. Thus he constantly ogled little girls, cousins, and even his mother. Do you think that someone who has changed would objectify someone so much as to fabricate some BS rape story for the maid accusing his innocent father without even considering what the consequences could be? I'll leave you at that.

17/7/24 Revisiting "Jobless Reincarnation" (Isekai slice of life manga, three volumes)

If you're wondering why I'm fact-checking my prior review it's because I've realized that objectivity hasn't always been my greatest forte. So, facts check. I even went above and beyond and read until mid-volume 3 just in case I'm missing some key information or some drastic change occurs to shift the plot from an uninteresting, dull slice of life to something more thrilling. It saddens me to say, no it doesn't. In fact, it's an insult to slices of life to call this... thing, a "slice of life". I have no clue as to what this is. "Power fantasy" is also somewhat inaccurate, since the main character has little importance. It's like "Imagine if all those secondary, no, tertiary characters who none ever gave a damn about because of how bland they were had ALL the screen time".

I've read other reviews in case I was missing something else, but other that, apparently, the Light novel and the Anime are even better (worse?), none said anything useful outside trying to justify how sluggish the plot is by saying "Yeah, man. I swear it gets better, right after chapter ten, or uhh twenty. Maybe right before the end? It's coming of age, so it's supposed to be like that" and we, the educated, cultured readers look at them as Volturi look upon puny, sad little mortals.

Imagine reading "slice of life"

PS: The art desing would be half decent if not for the accursed blinding effect they put in every page. 1/10

Power of Ten (Planetary defense roguelite)

Mixing the planet defense and roguelite genres is difficult, but by adding multiple planets to defend at the same time and a choice-based path to the end boss, Power of Ten (what a terrible name...), manages to give the player a new experience. It's entertaining and well-balanced, but there's still room for improvement.

The challenge of the game is to protect the planets and yourself while collecting resources to restore the shield generator of each planet. However, once you figure out the enemy patterns - their timing, types, and priorities (which happens quickly) - this challenge is significantly reduced, impacting replayability. An idea would be varying the patterns. Instead of having the same five ships teleport next to a targeted planet, introduce different types of fleets: larger and slower, faster but brittle, or hunters that chase after your ship instead of just the planets. Better AI would also enhance gameplay, allowing enemy ships to maneuver and avoid hits.

Although there are ten ship models, none are particularly unique. Excluding their abilities, which have minimal impact on gameplay, they're essentially the same, contradicting the purpose of having multiple ships. Consider incorporating unique upgrades for each ship or, at least, mutations for their abilities.

There's no strong incentive to save citizens beyond avoiding loss after a certain number are reached, making it hard to believe you're truly saving people. By the end of my run, I found myself using millions of people as bait to kill enemies or letting entire planets burn to ashes just to get an extra loot box. One rare upgrade provides extra hull for saving citizens, but it's insufficient

Re-Monster (Re: Power Fantasy. Re: Gary Stu gets sexslaves

The introduction was absolutely terrible. It felt like all the information in that prologue was both unnecessary and unjustified. The stalker who mysteriously murders the main character might have an obscure justification that will be revealed in twenty volumes, but for now, it's just beyond reasonable. If the author was going to handle it that way, it would have been better to skip it altogether. There's a lot of unnecessary information, and the information that is, in fact, necessary is sometimes omitted, as it is in several instances of difficult battles that are skipped and then told in retrospect, like the Red Bear one and the Old Generation Goblins raid.

About that last one... There were twenty-six armored and armed guys; you people outnumbered and outgunned the enemy, and yet, with a super basic and defective ambush during broad daylight, you not only lost but failed so miserably at your task of guarding the carriage that the goblins had enough time to kill all the men and capture all the women practically unharmed. Not a single one escaped. I get it that you're "fledgling adventurers" "the sword of the weak" (because they're weak themselves), and all that, but you lack the most elementary planning! Where were the scouts? Where was the coach, ready to flee at the first sign of danger? The crossbow man at the top of the carriage? The mounted units, anything at all? The goblins' BS ambush was so primitive that I'm having trouble thinking of what animal could be so stupid as to not notice a dozen guys poorly hidden in the bushes. They didn't place any traps; there were no blazing fires nor falling trees, no chains or tripping wires, not to mention that the best-equipped goblin had a rusty sword and a broken breastplate, while the rest had clubs. I don't care if there were Hobgoblins! You people struggled to fight a normal goblin that's the size of an infant. An infant wielding a heavy stick managed to almost disarm your most skilled "warrior". You people disgust me; you should feel shame, and eternal shame. Nothing but shame!

But even if that wasn't a problem, if we justify it by saying "hey, it's written like a diary," we still have to deal with the problem of the main character... I have never seen someone so hypocritical, so scumbag, as the protagonist. I get that your reign is based on terror, but six hours of public torture and execution for attempted rape? That's just over the top. Isn't it enough punishment to kill them? Or just impale them, half an hour, and the same result, but no. He kept all the citizens of his small tyrannical reign awake the whole night watching him torture and kill his political adversaries, the real reason for such brutality. He tortures, brutalizes his subjects, kidnaps people, robs and pillages everything he comes across with, hunts down people and eats them, cannibalizes his own kind, commits genocide, unlawful withholding of war prisoners, and God knows how many war crimes... but sexual assault disgusts him. Sure, he locks them up in a cage and drugs them until they agree to have sex with him, but that's not rape; that's not abusem, your honor. That's perfectly consensual sex. Apparently, he plans to do this on a large scale too. Male and female sex slaves, open to the market. Horrible! As the protagonist keeps committing these crimes against life, me, as a reader, felt like an accomplice, which wasn't nice. The worst part of it all is that the guy doesn't even seem to notice, unlike other villainous characters like FFF-class trashero, the guy from Arifureta, or even Momonga from Overlord. Their anti-hero character was a fundamental part of the story, but in this case, it feels more like reading Pogo's sexual/power fantasy. Each time something goes right for the MC, it feels wrong; he's getting away with all his terrible acts!

Other minor issues I had were the following:

⦁ Terrible names for everything. All the initial characters had names starting with "Gobu"-something or "Hobu"-something, and since there were like twenty characters like that, it turns into a confusing mess. All locations lack names. Several relevant characters lack names as well and are referred to with a short description.

⦁ Way too many skills. I lost count, but by the end of the volume, the MC had at least seventy skills, out of which a lot (not obvious) lack description or is told a lot after being acquired, which leads to confusion and removes the usual satisfaction of victory.

⦁ Confusing leveling system. Since there's experience, but it's not measured progressively, it's hard to tell when or even how closely the character is to leveling up or how much experience they get from defeating foes, which takes away the meaning of using EXP instead of other systems.

⦁ Preoccupying chapters that hint that this might be another of those "it was all evil God's plan" stories.

The plus sides would be... Hmm.

⦁ Promising paragraphs that hint that there will likely be epic battles with gods.

⦁ Possible large-scale, full-on war. That's difficult to write.

⦁ Many characters increase their strength, and not just the MC.

⦁ Varied action scenes. While there aren't many, they do seem... well, not "unique" but something on those lines.

Even still, the book is so terribly written that the most optimistic couldn't salvage a single part that's either original or remotely interesting. 1/10.

Re-Monster volume I (Power fantasy of someone with zero moral and zero taste)

Other minor issues I had were the following:

⦁ Preoccupying chapters that hint that this might be another of those "it was all evil God's plan" stories.

The plus sides would be... Hmm.

⦁ Promising paragraphs that hint that there will likely be epic battles with gods.

⦁ Possible large-scale, full-on war. That's difficult to write.

⦁ Many characters increase their strength, and not just the MC.

⦁ Varied action scenes. While there aren't many, they do seem... well, not "unique" but something on those lines.

Even still, the book is so terribly written that the most optimistic couldn't salvage a single part that's either original or remotely interesting.

Log horizon (No more "genius" characters in LNs, please?)

I'll be sincere. I didn't get that far into the reading, about 30% of the first volume (about 150 pages) so what I'm about to say is partial information.

The reading was practically unbearable. It has a lot of meaningless and unoriginal details about the game they're in, a lot of obvious information like "after walking around, they noticed that they got hungry. And after that, they realized that they had to sleep, too." Wow. I wonder how they got that far in life without knowing that.

Or "the guy with the full plate armor and the tower shield is specialized in defense, and the one in the robe casting spells with the generic magic staff is a wizard." No, you don't say! And he repeats everything at least twice, in case you didn't read it.

There are other mind-boggling aspects of the "game rules" that seem to apply only when it's convenient, such as food turning into mush if the cook doesn't have the "cook" subclass. Imagine that. You're frying some eggs and the moment the yolk touches the pan, bam! Black mush.

Or the fact that low-level monsters don't deal damage at all. You've got this giant ogre, three times your size, and his axe falls in the middle of your skull, but instead of cracking it's like an "elementary kid punch". I'd be very frustrated if I was the ogre, and very tranquil if I was any of the players that are super on edge. "Oh, no, no. Battle spells lots of trouble; what if we get surrounded, or if we don't have enough teamwork? Or what if we encounter a monster we haven't seen before?" He says it like three times, then the partner another two and the omnicient Superman, one more time. Dude. Chill out. You're invincible, like Superman. You can't even die, just bulldoze through everything and you'll be fine.

But he doesn't, he rallies his allies one more stupid and annoying that the one before, and from what I can surmise this will continue ad infinitum.

PS: I've heard online that the protagonist "Shiroe" it's a master strategist. That's a big fat lie. For starters he commands a very small group of three people including himself, not an army, so strategies are already a weird way to phrase it. Then it just consists of putting the most vulnerable unit in the rear (mistake, it goes in the middle of the convoy) and the most armored one in the front. Again, there's no rear or front it's just three people. Apply debuffs ASP on the enemy, which is a given, and then attack. Wow. What a strategist. Mehmed II would cower in fear should he face such a brilliant adversary.

FFF-class Trashero (Practicity is wickedness)

The best thing, and the only good thing really, it's the protagonist Han Shoo, Achoo, or whatever his name is. The character does think outside the box and manage to turn around deeds that are morally disgusting, and legally questionable but that personally... I like them.

Such as becoming the Demon lord of a satanic cult to manipulate the Kingdom from the shadows and build a reputation for himself. It is hinted that perhaps the MC doesn't comprehend the meaning of "morals", and the author doesn't, which leads me to the worst part that ultimately made the series become mecha BS to avoid further repetition: the main character is the only character.

Not literally of course, but it's the only one that gets some (already insufficient) development, and all the rest are cardboard figurines. The most pathetic example is when a character (Zieg) shows to make a balance with Achoo and turns out to be a priestess-lusting goody two shoes boarding Down syndrome.

Somewhere around half the story the MC gets a super-power start seasonally means he can bulldoze through everything and the joke is recycled episodes starts getting old without at least one co-protagonist. 4/10

Wall World (Like watching paint dry)

I don't know the exact details behind the game's creation, but with the current information I have, one thing is crystal clear. This game has violently ripped off Dome Keeper. It features the exact same mechanics, graphics, and overall design, but with a different developer/publisher. Alawar Premium hasn't just borrowed inspiration; they've plagiarized every single pixel. Moreover, they've poorly integrated 'roguelite elements,' including an instakilling end boss that's unbeatable (like running your head against the wall, heh) unless you've had enough runs.

I suspect this is a hook to prevent players from refunding the game, but by the second run, I realized the so-called 'procedurally generated adventure' was actually the same map every single time. Yeah, it's terrible.

if your game's boss looks like some giant's buttocks barely reaching the restroom after eating too much calamari sashimi... maybe it's time to get another proffesion.

Ratopolis (deck/city building tower defense)

Being original in a subgenre crowded with cliché "traditional roguelikes" is a challenge, one that Metropolis, while not masterfully, has managed to surpass. In the game, you control a group of rats defined by their leader, which can be picked from a pool of six major factions and be male or female, and the objective is to survive several enemy waves in a chosen environment. The level of difficulty varies a lot more depending on those choices than on the actual resource management, since half of the leaders have rather useless abilities, a pair of leaders have backfiring skills and only two or three are good, and the enemies in the "shore" scenario are notoriously harder to beat since they come with skills to bypass your soldiers, your walls, instantly destroy your buildings, and even temporarily disable your warriors. It's definitively entertaining for a couple of days, but since the cards are very limited, you'll end up seeing the same ones over and over, and other than playing new cards, the game doesn't offer much more. The cards have only two levels, and there's no exploration. The runs can range from 20 minutes to 1 hour, but after doing a couple of runs with each faction, that's it. 8/10

Rimworld (sci-fi colony sim survival, cannibalism included)

Very interesting game with lots of potential, right now it's on it 1.4 version and I can't wait to see what they'll do with it. Let's break it down: Rimworld is a colony simulator setted in another world, thousands of years in the future. Three survivors of a crash land on the planet, and now have to develop technology and weaponry utilizing their traits and skills while fending off raiders, insectoid monsters and robotic contractions. There's a lot to praise, the huge map divided in grids, the wide arrange of items and mechanics blended in a well-balanced gameplay, the different sources of threats but the most important and the reason why this game scores higher than others is that Rimworld has a lot of plasticity. A huge modding community is proof of that, lots of mods are out there, but as far as I could see and specially Vainilla expanded and Alpha mods broke the game. They are either unbalanced or irrelevant, changing the sprite of a certain object or buffing the stats of another.

Moreover, mods tend to pile up, and even using little more than VE and Alpha, over a hundred mods were active, and the computer resources burned up forcing the game to play without speedup, which made me realize that even if you can't get distracted the gameplay can be slow. Still, modding the game made me see that there's a lot to improve. First and foremost: the enemies. Rimworld procedurally generated enemy bases all look squarish and non-functional, the second you got a feet too close or chop a tree, the whole base swarms on your force- around 15 pawns fully armed and armored, all guns blazing. Barely any time for traps or tactics of any kind except scattering some chunks for coverage. Once you manage to kill half the base the rest run off, and give you three days until reinforcement to tend your wounds and explore the long awaited spoils of war, you open the chest and... Nothing.

Some pemmican, not even enough to sustain the trip back home, cheap clothes and that's it. You made a huge investment in time, in weapons, in risks, you took damage and the only thing you have to show for are more useless weapons. You cannot settle in a destroyed enemy base either, so you can't even use the bricks. The raiders you fight off normally don't need to fight your entire base and if victorious they'd get crops, freezers, high tech and all sorts of resources. In fact, the whole battling system needs to be reviewed. It feels static, dull. You put yor pawns behind cover and wait for the action to play out. 8/10

Grim Night (Strategy base-building game)

It's funny to think that the real difficulty of this game is not the game itself but ignoring the mechanics like how much IRL time is one in-game hour, how much food is produced and how often (or much) it's consumed, and lacking convenience tools, such as fast forward or effective group commands.

After you figure out these things and get around the slow pace of the game, it turns out to be quite easy. I just spammed the enemies with musketeers and even if the final boss made some trouble he was dead in less than three minutes.

Other than the initial difficulty that forces you to take several cracks at the game (four, in my case) there's no replayability since the enemies are the same and follow the same patterns, and the developer heavily favors ranged units over melee ones.

Sure, there are two types of enemies that are difficult to deal with if you only have ranged units, but if you have forty ranged and two melee the problem is solved. Conversely, if you have 40 spearmen and two crossbows your squad is going to get squashed by the other ten types of enemies that obliterate CQC units.

But few types of enemies and only three bosses are a problem if we're thinking of replayability. Take that out and you have a minimalist yet beautifully crafted pixel-art indie game, less is more in Grim Nights.

I'm expectant to see the second part, where I'm hoping to see new content. 7/10

Caveblazers

Very good game, almost perfect for my taste if it wasn't for the hectic gameplay. I like to take my time, and cave-blazers' action occurs too fast. Other than that, it's a blast. The gameplay is fire, if you know how to exploit your resources, it goes like a bomb... OK, enough. Speaking seriously, like everything cave-blazers has its faults. The most notorious is the RNG dependency, not only is hard to get a proper weapon: it's incredibly hard to find it twice to upgrade it and get to the ending, which makes the trader (that gets a free upgrade) a broken perk. The bosses are almost unbeatable if you don't have a good ranged weapon, and if you do the melee weapon becomes accesory, which limits the gameplay. The end boss is disappointingly easy to beat, and there's no proper end cutscene, which made me feel like "Is that all? After twenty runs to get the proper RNG this is all you give me?". 7/10