Recent reviews by LennaLeFay

This is a LARGE REVIEW that will explain some of the game's systems so you can see if this is gonna be for you or not. If you're coming in and wondering about how everything is shaping up right now given that the game (currently) has a loooot of negative reviews, I am gonna try and be as concise and metered to as far as why you might be seeing those so you can tell if the game is for you. As of now I think the game is definitely for me, but I'll definitely keep this updated as the first few months go and I think your own mileage may vary. So let's dig into some of the main pain points:

[[[ TL;DR ]]]
If you want to play a lot of high-end Mashmak, you might want to see if the cash shop is something that will not put you off of playing this game. If you play very casually, the player marketplace might even be useful! The anticheat is there, but it's really no worse than just about anything else you'd see - you probably already know how you feel about this. The genAI is seemingly gone, as they mentioned it would be.

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[[[ The cash shop is P2W/a ripoff/has $50 items/etc. ]]]
So yes, there IS truth to some of this, but there's a lot of nuance missing from reviews - whether or not these things will affect you are going to *hugely* vary. Yes, you can pay for early extraction beacons, high end weapons, specific mods, etc in the player-run marketplace. If you plan to play Mashmak a lot and at a high level, this is something you are going to want to consider whether it's going to piss you off enough that you wouldn't wanna play. Weapons and mods do not matter for Verge/Ace Arena, so if you just want team shooter fun, you will likely be completely unbothered by that part. The player marketplace is definitely interesting, we'll see what solidifies as far as a market over time, but for a comparison it's WAY better than, say, the PSO2 market if you've played that - at least you can fully make entries/buy things without having to be a premium pass holder or anything!

Here's some bullet points on how the MTX works:
* All but three BREAK Strikers are available from the beginning of the game immediately as of now. You can spend 15,000 tokens (non-paid) to get each of the new BREAKs, and it seems you keep them forever. After about 9 games I have 4,387 tokens, so this does not seem too bad of a goal to hit so far, and you can test-pilot these for a week individually before purchasing them too. You do not need to spend any tokens to unlock any of the other BREAKs - just click on them the first time and they will be permanently ready for you.

* Basic colors are extremely cheap. You do have to buy them per BREAK Striker, but at a *very* cheap 100 tokens (the non-paid currency), you will just about always have the ability to experiment as long as you're playing games. You only have to buy them once per BREAK Striker, at least - they are not consumed on use and can be re-used for every part. This also counts for your pilot outfit too.

* More flashy colors can be gained by extracting with them in Mashmak, getting them in the player marketplace (with Corite - the "real money" currency - but you *can* get some of this by playing!) or presumably through some other ways as well. They don't feel massively different than the base colors, but sometimes can have a good extra metallic sheen or damaged feeling or just brighter matte effect, etc. If you get one, you can choose which BREAK (or pilot) you want to use it on and it's unlocked forever - not consumed.

* Yes, there is a nearly $50 USD pilot/skin combo that does not have separate customization. If the sheer thought of that pisses you off, you probably already know how you're going to feel about this game, which is totally fair. They are gonna put stuff in here for whales - there's no way they won't, and I'm sure this won't be the last of it that we see.

* Advantageous items (beacons, weapons etc) for Mashmak *can* be bought for low amounts of tokens (non-paid) with a weekly limit of a few a week, so you can still get your leg up (or sell them in the marketplace for Corite!! Big tip!!) without spending money. I have been able to extract from Mashmak twice out of five games without *any* extra items or weapons besides what I have procured on-site, so this will probably only matter to you if you want to go very hardcore with it.

As hinted at in the last bullet point, you can sell things you find in Mashmak or buy in the season drops to convert your in-game money to real money! (Ofc you can't cash out your money, but still.) I was able to get some epic mod packs and sell them pretty quickly, getting enough to get a few small pilot cosmetics here and there, and honestly for me this is a pretty nice trade-off!

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[[[ They changed the character creation a lot! ]]]
Yeah, this one's kind of weird! I wouldn't call it a deal-breaker for me but they vastly simplified the basic creator tools and made the onboarding for that process weird. You'll create your character immediately but won't be able to change most of their actual look until you're through/skipped tutorial and you're in the game proper. Once you're there you have better access to customization, but it's definitely not as good as the beta was! They have relegated certain cosmetics to cash shop stuff - this is probably not surprising - but at least basics like face piercings etc. aren't too bad to Corite grind and buy on the player marketplace!

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[[[ This game has anticheat that will sell your data to China! ]]]
As briefly mentioned earlier: Yes, there's anticheat. You're going to probably know how you feel about this already as far as tolerating it. What I assume is the matchmaking + anticheat stack runs with about 7 instances in Task Manager, totaling a combined approx. 65MB of RAM. I have no reason to see so far what the concerns of 'selling your data to China' would be any more than a normal metadata collector would do, so I'm guessing some of this is just sinophobia, though I'll keep an eye out on reviews/tech breakdowns and adjust accordingly.

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[[[ Does the game still use generative AI from Beta 2? ]]]
Amazing Seasun told the pressers that the AI placeholders in Beta 2 were not going to persist into the final game, and it looks like this is true! There's no NVIDIA ACE presence and the voice acting does seem to be human and not as stuttery/broken as Beta 2 as far as I am able to tell. The English VA work is reeeal stiff, but the Chinese and Japanese VA work is pretty solid at least imo.

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So there you go! I hope some of this helped you make some decisions in either direction. Tried to be as unbiased as I could since a lot of these reviews REALLY aren't covering anything well in either direction, but for me, I'm enjoying myself so far! If I missed something big feel free to lmk about it and I'll update as I go. Have fun!

I am now trying to speedrun just the demo if that gives you any semblance of how I feel about it. Incredible GB Zelda feel, classic Yacht Club production value, fun and varied weapons. If I had to nitpick the demo I'd say I wish I could try at least a tiny bit of the trinkets and weapon customizations, but that's not really any massive concern.

Will be updating this review as I play and over the course of early access.

2025.04.15 -- First patch already fixes nearly all of my issues in my first review!!

2025.04.11 -- So far I am VERY surprised with this one! Decent little VSRG with a ton of UI polish. Be sure you know this is Early Access because a lot of things like customization just straight-up don't exist yet, but honestly what's already here is quite good. Charts are generally pretty high quality - a welcome surprise! - and pretty low on the overall over-charting, I think having the FX lanes as separate difficulties instead of just four modes feels really nice, and the songs are fun with a good bit of genre variety. The charts may not have the overall cohesiveness as you scale up difficulty vs. something like DJMAX, but they are still quite well-curated.

My main cons right now are that song unlocks feel a bit vestigial/unnecessary with an early access songlist, and difficulty rating consistency (just the number, not the actual difficulty, if that makes sense) feels *extremely* off, at least for 6-key, and seem to go much more on just pure speed/density than voltage/technicality. My only other big con is, PLEASE allow more fine adjustments of input latency - intervals of 10ms will not cut it for high-end players who are looking to fine-tune their High Perfects. But none of these move the needle outside of recommending it, especially if you like to get in at the start of new VSRGs.

Still playing through the game, will update if needed.
An absolute love letter to a lot of Japanese PC classics, with some amazing story beats and music so far. The sheer variety of items and equipment feels really nice, too. Snappy controls and good customization are the cherry on top; I can't wait to beat this one and replay it on some harder difficulties too.

My love of Void Stranger has turned into mild obsession. On one hand I can understand why the (seemingly) higher skill barrier for entry can be a turnoff, but I cannot recommend enough seeing what lies past that. It's some of the smartest, most deliberate game design I have EVER seen, no hyperbole. It is an absolute lesson in teaching people how to play a game in an abstract but sensible way, and then taking those lessons you've learned very literally and using them to sort of frame the rest of the game around you as you go. And it KEEPS DOING THIS. The sheer amount of "oh ♥♥♥♥" moments in this game are really impressive.

My recommendation would be: Look up as little about this game as you can if you plan to get it and just dive in with as little information as possible.

Early review which I'll change over time as needed.

Visions of Mana is a game that, to me, *fully understood the assignment.* While it doesn't take any massive leaps, it's an incredibly comfortable and visually stunning game. It feels like they took what they learned about the Trials of Mana remaster and just pushed it forward to make a really sharp game. I already find myself really hooked into the feelings of these characters, who despite how you feel about the voice acting (I like it, but people are complaining about it) I feel are pretty neatly written.

There are a few cons, though. I thought Square learned some of their lessons on this, but the graphics options are just not enough for a modern-day full price PC release. Framerate locks, jitter, and *very* sparse customization abound. This is not enough to kill the enjoyment of the game for me, but hopefully they definitely put some patches through down the line.

If you already like Mana or the Super Famicom RPG heyday, get this and I really think you won't be disappointed. And if you're not sure how you feel yet, I feel like the demo will give you a decent idea right away.

A very good VSRG with a nice amount of updates, solid QoL, and some (not all, but many) extremely well-designed Lunatic charts if you like challenging yourself. Difficulty for most high-end stuff is on par with mid to mid-high level SC tracks in current DJMAX (with the exception of one song which is absolutely brutal.) Story mode is visual novel-like and simple, but the Danmaku levels mix things up a bit and get you using quite a bit of brain power to manage both things at once. Overall very worth it, especially if you can pick it up on sale like right now.

Favorite tracks/charts: Spider's Blood, 患部で止まってすぐ溶ける ～ 狂気の優曇華院, Bad Apple!! feat.nomico (Tetsuya Komuro Remix), SAMURAI GHOST GIRL, KILL! KILL!, U.N. Owen Was Hero?, Re:Unknown X

The "value for a couple of bucks" level of this game is Terraria levels of absolutely off the charts. I cannot recommend this game enough, and with a solid roadmap and a big expansion on the way in a while, you will have plenty to do for not a lot of money, especially if you like checking off completion boxes and making wacky builds.

If the fact that the game is bullet hell-ish turns you off, I *still* encourage you to try it, 'cause you can simply make a build with a staff that shoots lightning that shoots ice and that ice throws magic hammers across the room killing the final boss in 2 seconds, or a build where you have 8 life but every time you get hit you do 200,000 damage and have 16 seconds of invincibility frames, and just skip all that bullet hell mess.

Short and sweet; I really enjoyed it and will definitely be checking out more works from this writer. Has a couple writing and mechanical quirks that I don't see in VMs often that I really appreciated here, though I am being a bit vague so as not to spoil. If the subject matter is intriguing, definitely give it a shot.

Incredible game both solo and co-op, has that super strong "just one more game" energy to it. Tons of polish and the dev pays attention. MMO raiding distilled without all the grind is a great choice.