Patient Gamers

Chrono Ark

I'm decently deep into it now, and I keep enjoying it immensely. The only unfortunate thing about it (depending on how you look at it) is that it's really rather long. I had for some reason thought this could be a medium-length game I could get through in a reasonable time frame and feel good about finishing. Instead it's probably something of a 100-hour affair if you want the true ending - which is on par for the JRPG influences I suppose. I am also in finding that each run being around 3 hours in total is maybe a tad long: if you ever fail against the end boss it's easy to get frustrated as you need to beat it every time in order to progress the story. And the story is quite important to the game, while the meta progression (which happens even on failed runs) is rather limited. So it can sometimes feel like you wasted 3 hours if you experimented with a new team and didn't get there.

In the end though, this is more telling of the fact that the story is actually quite interesting, since the frustration is more stemming from the fact that I want to progress further in it and get impatient at a failed run. Otherwise not much to say about gameplay, it's a really solid and fun roguelike deckbuilder. Every character is very well designed and unique, there are many combos and synergies and there is a lot of variety in every run with various unlocks, card upgrades and so on. If you like the genre, you would love this. Really can't recommend it enough.

Ninja Gaiden 4

Played a couple of chapters so far, still on the Hard difficulty. Really liking the bosses so far, this has previously been a weak point in the series but have delivered here so far. I am pushing myself a bit playing on Hard, but I have been able to manage it thus far. I wasn't thrilled about the idea of adding parrying and deflecting to a Ninja Gaiden game, but it really does make the bosses a lot more fun.

The general combat (outside of bosses) feels really good, but it's still somewhat weird to not have fighting game style specific strings to work with, and I don't know how to feel about that. On the one hand it's much more dynamic and free flowing than ever, but I still miss memorising specific strings like "okay, XX->XY with the dual katanas is a guaranteed decapitation against humanoids, I'll use it here" etc.

Overall though it's the best Character Action Game in years and if you like the genre you should definitely play it.