Valkyrie Saga

yay

I loved how it felt to play, but lack of Playstation glyphs, makes me not want to recommend if you use a Playstation 5 controller. Otherwise it's fantastic.

Sure, I expected some nice sfx but I wasn't ready for the soundtrack to be so warm, vibey, and truly beautiful. Honestly, I just left the game running while I was making tea just to have this music playing in the background. The game is just a pleasure for both eyes and ears. Even though I am not a big fan of platformer games, I found this game really engaging and fun to play. As usual, the Dev clearly gets the whole PSX era vibe which resulted in an exceptionally well-made niche project. Very warm and cozy.

Open world 3d platformer where you get rewarded heavily for exploring. Movement starts off slow but it quickly picks up and you can zoom across the map. Ended 100%'ing it and was a blast to play. :) My only critique is the textures. They could def use work. Other than that, excited to see what other games this dev makes.

This feels like a retro PS1 era game. I absolutely love it, and it probably would've been my favorite game at the time if it had been on PS1

Loved this game to bits. Its a short 10 hour or so game if you explore and the whole time I was having fun. I like the story and how as you talk to NPCs you discover more about the island, the goddess, and Roll. The NPCs were probably my favorite part of the game as they had funny and interesting dialogue and I was always excited to find new ones to get more of it. I liked the Island itself as it felt huge and like there was always a secret around every corner, while at the same time as you get upgrades you are able to traverse around the Island very quickly so it never felt annoying to have to travel to and from areas or going back to previous areas and the areas are also important to the story and background of the island. There are a lot of upgrades and you can get them if you want, but you don't really need that many to beat the game as past a certain point the platforming get pretty easy with the amount of upgrades you can get, until the final area where the difficulty picks up again and makes you work for the win. Overall a very fun game that I am glad to have played and I will probably replay it at some point.

Maybe a little premature to leave a review as I only have four crystals but I think the majority of the game is going to be the loop I'm in now. At the beginning of the game it feels incredibly unwieldy to the point of being offputting, from the control scheme to the distortion of the camera when looking upward, but as you use the systems more it feels better and better as time goes on, with a few exceptions that I can't tell are features or bugs. The moveset is also fairly unique as far as platformers go, and the level design is also very odd in a good way. If I had to make a shot in the dark comparison it feels like when you're specifically trying to make jumps to unintended ledges in the 3D marios, except instead of just being the odd diversion it's the entire game. The majority of the game is purely platforming, but the open nature of the game means you have a pretty wide array of approaches to the platforming. You can do the intended mix of high jumps, wall climbs, floats and magic, but the development of the character means if you're truly stuck on a tricky jump, you can always come back later with a much wider range of movement, or you can glide back from a much higher layer of the island and ignore the intended platforming entirely. When you get in the groove the movement is pretty good feeling with a few exceptions. Some of the magic takes a couple inputs to actually happen, and with something like the gale where it's mixed into the platforming, a few milliseconds difference can mean a whiffed jump. Also if you're holding R1 to glide, it will cancel your previous action to do so, even if you're in the middle of gaining height. You can also hold jump to glide but if you're switching from gale to the jump glide it will cause you to do a small midair hop and waste a crystal, so you have to hold r1, then hold a, let go of r1 and then perform the magic, it's all unnecessarily complex and I don't think it's intentional. one fix for this might be to give upward movement priority and only trigger the r1 glide when vertical movement has stopped, but I don't know how easy that is to implement. Also when doing the glide on the ground I got stuck in level seams like 5 or 6 times which led to a forced checkpoint restore, sometimes losing several minutes of progress. The game visually is fairly unique, I don't really care for the texturing work personally but I like the character designs and models. The game is mostly made up of simple polygons and primitives, which was probably to make the scope doable. One benefit to this method is it lets you set the draw distance pretty far without needing a super beefy computer. Some of the problems I have with the texture work can potentially be hidden by the default toggles, but I'm not a fan of the default resolution scale or color crunch and I don't really want to look at aliased polygons all day. The texture shimmer seems unmodifiable and part of the rendering. I listen to a playlist when I play games like this so I can't comment on the music but the little I heard was uninvasive. The story is interesting enough but I feel like it's going to require me talking to a lot of npcs to get the big picture. Some of the framing for explanations are a little unnatural and awkward but I appreciate the insistence on worldbuilding in a genre where that's not really standard, and if you want to ignore it entirely you can because learning about the world isn't your goal. Over all a pretty cool game with pretty good feeling movement minus some genuine bugs and a weird learning curve.

i can't say much because i haven't played a lot of games like this, but the platforming is fun and exploration is wonderful

Un juegazo que tiene movimiento tan satisfactorio y un mapa grandote donde poder probar todos los movimientos. AME este quasiregalia y disfrute caleta haciendo todo lo q se podia hacer. Sacar el ultimo ending fue una mierda solo pq nunca se me habria ocurrido que en el area mas minijuego opcional del mundo hubieran metido un prerequisito para el final "verdadero".

This feels like Psuedoregalia but just worse. Idk, that's all I can say about it.