Recent reviews by Oku

Krita is an incredibly diverse illustration suite that's every bit as good as subscription-walled piracy bait that billion dollar tech corporations put out except it's Free (or $9.99 if you want to get the Steam release, have auto-updates, and support the devs behind it). Krita is also extremely stable, I've never run in to an issue with stuttering, freezing, or crashing, and it has excellent support for a wide variety of drawing tablets, and includes support for scripting and user-made addons and plugins.

If you're a professional artist that makes a living off commission work or just a hobbyist looking to get in to digital art, Krita is exactly what you need.

Exactly as good as it was when it was originally shut down.

Gigantic is a Hero Shooter/MOBA in the same vein as Paladins or Battleborn - semi-symmetrical maps with objectives that you fight over with the ultimate goal of punching the other team's Thing to death, all while controlling one from a roster of characters all with their own unique flair and kits, you've seen it all before.

What sets Gigantic apart is its immense style - the art direction in this game is absolutely gorgeous, the characters all are utterly unique from one another with some of the coolest designs I've seen in a game like this, and minute to minute gameplay has so much personality and a sense of wholesomeness to it all that I just adore.

Admittedly it's not the most refined game, the skill curve is quite high not because of the competitive nature of the game but because some characters just feel off to play and you really need to know how to micro game in order to be successful, all the while there are some characters who's entire thing is "boom, team wipe lmao". It's not unbalanced mind you, some characters are just way harder to do well with, and a lot of the game's finer details aren't really explained. If this was a game as giant as League of Legends, you'd have tons and tons of community resources helping you learn everything down to the pixel, but alas.

In spite of it's roughness, Gigantic remains an incredibly fun experience with matches lasting around 15 minutes each so it's great to sit down, play a few, and be done for the day., just like it always was.

Never should have been shut down in the first place, but I'm glad it's back.

I love Democracy.

I think something might be broken with steam because I bought a rock album and it came with a fighting game?????

The ability to spend $20 and be elevated socially, economically, politically, and psychologically is the ultimate demonstration of the Superiority of our Free and Democratic society, and any disagreement to this will be reported to the Ministry of Unity.

I'm doing my part.

Knowing that a bunch of goofballs are having existential crises over girls in this game wearing booty shorts instead of generic panties if you go out of your way to clip the camera to look up their skirts just makes me enjoy this game so, so much more.

This is a solid, refreshingly wholesome Action-Combat JRPG with a good chunk of Monster Hunter and Xenoblade thrown in for good measure. Combat is impactful and fluid, though can be a bit sticky at times, with boss fights being expansive, visually stunning, and lots of fun to go up against. The story is pretty standard, if you've played any Final Fantasy you get the gist and the tropes, but it's presented in such a beautiful world with tons of really light hearted dialogue and fun. This game was very clearly made both in Japanese and in the Localized english version to be targeted at younger teens, and honestly I'm all for it. It knows when to be serious but everybody is just having fun going on a big adventure and it's really relaxing to just get lost in and enjoy for what it is.

There's an expansive post-game multiplayer akin to Monster Hunter fights and long term grinds for every character, character builds are a lot of fun to screw around with, and there's more content planned for the future, so it'll be around for some time to come.

Between Rising and now ReLink I'm definitely a fan of the Granblue Fantasy franchise at this point.

Granblue FVS Rising is an updated and improved version of the original Granblue FVS in the same line as Guilty Gear Xrd Rev2 was the improved version of Guilty Gear Xrd SIGN.

It's an incredibly fun and satisfying fighting game to play, fairly easy to pick up as a newcomer but with tons of room for mastery as most fighting games tend to have. A much easier to learn combo chaining system and extremely powerful anti-air on every character keep the game focused on grounded gameplay with an emphasis on fast close-combat, with lots of dodge mechanics and guard breaks to give you plenty of options to deal with your opponent. The art style is gorgeous, the animations and effects are flashy as hell, great sound design gives everything much more impact and presence, the music is stellar as expected from ASW, character levelling and reward tracks that include colors, costumes, weapon skins, and profile customizations mean even a loss still gets you stuff and the more you play no matter the outcome the more you get, the ranking system won't de-rank you until you get to the highest tiers meaning that the game focuses much more heavily on rewarding you for your wins and lessens the impact of a loss, and rollback + crossplay will keep the game populated for a long time to come.

This is one of the better fighting games I've played and the way everything is laid out has me motivated to learn and see how far I can go more so than almost any other fighting game has at this point. Highly recommend to people new to fighting games or people who just want something a bit faster paced.

EVE is one of THOSE games.

A monument to creative vision so utterly unique in what it offers that it stands as a pillar of gaming and an example of what interactive software can achieve with enough passion and resources from the developers. Whether your love it or hate it, EVE is an extremely important game.

I'd be inclined to say I only recommend it with a million caveats but no, I actually do recommend it to everybody with an even passing interest in the Space Sim genre. Even if it's just a weekend or two, enough to do the tutorial and starter career missions and a bit of aimless exploring and dabbling with the game's features. I still think everybody should experience the game at least once.

EVE is a completely player-driven universe. The framework for PvE content exists, and indeed you can spend thousands of hours just sticking to High-Security space doing missions and PvE content, but the players and communities that have sprung up over the years are the REAL content. 20 years of stories, power shifts, massive player groups rising and falling, espionage, territory gains and losses, heroes, villains, massive conflicts involving thousands of players costing hundreds of thousands of real dollars in lost assets, interpersonal and intergroup tensions so extreme they bled out in to the real world, economic booms and crashes, entire mythologies, enough drama and intrigue to fill an entire library with individual and large scale experiences within this game -- all of it completely driven by players. The romanticized version of the Anarcho-Capitalist mindset condensed down in to an on-going Space Opera where millions of players and all of their interactions drive the history forward.

Everything you would expect from a space sim MMO - hundreds of ships, thousands of modules and equipments, Trillions of potential individual builds to do countless playstyles for combat, mining, exploration, playing markets, missions, piracy, player-hunting, industrial farming and manufacturing, construction, you name it. Whatever you decide to do, it can be as short or long term as you like, as basic skills to try out an activity can take minutes to a few hours to train, while deciding to invest heavily in a specialization can take you on a multi-year long investment of skill training and gaining applied experience in doing what it is you want, with the more you invest the more you get out of it. All of that combined with the player-driven nature of the game means that whatever it is you do, you will be making an actual material impact on the simulation, no matter how small it may seem, and if you choose to join and operate with a large player corporation/alliance then you will be joining in writing the history of the game, and you never know when you might log on one day, and end up thrust in to the middle of something truly historic -- people have accidentally triggered massive years-long feuds between player groups that explode out in to titanic scale fleet battles and attempts to obliterate eachother's sovereignty over a region of space by simply auto-piloting and AFKing at the wrong time in the wrong place.

Give EVE a try, all the weird stigma around it is mostly undeserved. You don't need a spreadsheet to get in to the game, you aren't going to be killed by other players every time you leave a station unless youre not paying attention and are doing something very, very wrong, and the idea that there's no point in starting because of how Skill training works and everybody else is already ahead of you is just dumb - EVE isn't a competitive game unless you try to make it in to one or are operating a corporation trying to maintain sovereignty. You aren't competing for a high score - you are joining an entire sci-fi world as just one more random schmuck like all the others, and whether or not you go on to be remembered in the lore of the game forever is up to you.

07

Bridget is an incredibly fun character and she is both fairly easy to pick up and learn even though she has a really high skill ceiling like most Strive characters. She fills a really fun mid-point between rushdown and zoning with her yo-yo combos and set ups and she can mix up in to some close range beatdowns. She fits really well in to the various character niches of Strive and with season 3 and the addition of Wild Assault to her kit she ends up being a really fast-paced character to play.

Highly recommend picking her up even if you aren't particularly interested in the DLC content just because she is really that fun.

(Have about 60-70 hours on the Switch version, liked it enough to want it on my main steam library for use on my Steam Deck - and yes it absolutely DOES run great on Deck, I don't know why it's listed as not-supported. It launches in windowed mode which you can change in the first-launch settings to full screen and then it runs perfect)

This game is a must-play for two kinds of people - anybody who has ever felt bad for going "IT'S THE BEST BOY!!!" during a regular Monster Hunter game after their favorite monster shows up and then proceeding to beat it to death and carve its body apart, and people who like Pokemon alternatives.

The story is like a family-friendly saturday morning adventure that does a great job at pace setting and moving the player around the world and has enough intrigue and emotional beats to leave you wanting to see more, the turn-based combat has a surprising amount of depth to it and a TON of character with beautifully animated moves and abilities unique to weapon types and different monsters, and the monster taming system, while not over-the-top, has a lot of nuance to it that's fun to engage with.

My one and only gripe with the game is the fact that in spite of having a beautiful 10/10 experience, they decided at some point that the game was too good and had to be worse, so they added Navirou - the single worst character I have ever encountered in any video game I have ever played. He's meant to be the comic relief helper but he serves functionally no purpose. He's not funny, he's not charming, he does nothing besides make annoying quips during battles, act as your character's voice in cutscenes, make utterly meaningless additions to conversations, and ruins emotional tension with his mere presence. I want you to imagine for a moment your most beloved family member - a partner, a parent, a sibling, whoever you hold closest to your hear - was just shot. You hear the sirens from the ambulence approaching and your desperately trying to get them to not close their eyes, to just hold on a little bit longer because help is so close...and then you hear in a squeaky out-of-place voice: "MEOW-ZA!!!! THIS SURE IS A REAL PAW-DICAMENT, HUH BUDDY????"

And for that reason, I think you should buy this game even more. As much as I despise Navirou, he is so unfathomably bad that he is an experience all on his own. I mean that sincerely, you have GOT to see this ♥♥♥♥. The sheer audacity of putting him in to a game that he just makes worse for no reason is to be respected and feared. They want to make a Monster Hunter Stories 3. The WILL do it again.