Two updates in a month!? Is... is there hope for me yet?
12.2h. Normal difficulty.
As a born and raised Spaniard I really, really wanted to like this one. Unfortunately, after a strong early game, the hype peters out pretty fast. The environments are samey and you probably won't get the full appeal if you're not Spanish, and even if you are, it feels a bit too... on the nose sometimes. Also, there are like three types of enemies that repeat eternally, so everything becomes tedious fast. And the game stutters even on my 5090.
Gameplay wise, mixed bag. The HP = ammo system is interesting, but it's not paired with an appropriate amount of healing items and the enemies are bullet sponges... so as you can imagine most of the gameplay after a while can be summarized as "run until you can heal, heal, waste most of your bullets, rinse and repeat". Interestingly the bosses are surprisingly easy compared to the levels themselves.
The puzzles are good fun, but they're almost all rebakes of classic videogame puzzles like Towers of Hanoi and Othello. They feel kinda uninspired, like they were put as an afterthought.
Oh and after dying, and you will die because the parry system is bollocks and enemies take half your hp when they hit you, instead of a quick respawn you get to suffer through an unskippable game over screen and then load your game. Because we never really outgrew the Spectrum era I guess.
Chapter 2 is unfettered ass. Most of the time is spent running away from Dolores, who has peerless sight and hearing so you cannot run past her. Fortunately chapter 3 and the final chapter go back to being much better.
I'm giving it 3 stars because like 60% of the game is 4 stars worthy and 40% is like 2 stars worthy.
My Score: ★★★☆☆
***
12.5h. Non-completionist (achievements) run.
Another fine addition to my collection of "Games I paid 5€ or less for and beat in two days". Scritchy Scratchy is a cool incremental game where you start dishes until you get enough money to buy lottery scratchies and then start accumulating ridiculous wealth. As it often happens with incremental games, the stakes soon become stupidly high. Short, cheap
divertimento.
My Score: ★★★★☆
***
50:08h. Normal difficulty. Bracer rank 1.
So the (IMO) best JRPG ever gets a remake and it's STILL the best JRPG ever, just better looking. WHAT A FUCKING SURPRISE HUH
No, really. This is what a remake should be. The game is exactly the same - hell, you can easily follow through the game using a walkthrough for the original. All improvements are technical and QoL (Like the fact that it's now extremely hard to miss bracer tasks because they appear in the minimap).
Also, the new translation is more faithful to the original, with Estelle now being her original airheaded tomboy instead of Alex DeLarge with a stick.
So here you have it, my current title holder for Best JRPG
for the next two months, at least, until 2nd Chapter dethrones it.
My Score: 
***
3:50-ish. My Armor is Contempt difficulty.
4h more Boltgun! What else can a man ask for?
Its an old style expansion pack, really. Not much more to say. Like new five awesome new levels, action-packed and a little challenging, and one or two new weapons (not sure if there's anything else that's new apart from the grav gun)
Be warned, if you thought the original game final fight was some bullshit, you're in for a treat.
My Score: ★★★★★
