Review of BALDR SKY Dive1 "Lost Memory"
| Subject | BALDR SKY Dive1 "Lost Memory" |
| By | Helpfulness: 5 Vote: 4succhunter on 2022-06-11 last updated on 2022-07-27 |
| Review | I really wanted to like Baldr Sky. I really did. It is classic cyberpunk. It is heavily inspired by Neuromancer. It even directly references it at one point with the quote "the sky is dyed the color of a tv tuned to a dead channel." However, the pacing is fucked. It was torture to read at times. It's really long but moves really slow. Stop and start is the best way to describe it. Like how I'm writing these sentences. The "good" parts, the meat of the experience that actually has some kind of meaning or message, are buried underneath a mountain of bullshit. The story constantly goes back to this annoying high school romcom phase of the protagonist's life that is the bane of my fucking existence. Everytime this happens I lose all motivation to keep reading. These flashbacks are fucking trite, banal, limp-dicked, milquetoast, mind-numbing, soul-crushing, torturously, infuriatingly, disgustingly bad. No words can express my hatred for the flashbacks in this game. The most interesting stuff is in the present - the cyberpunk stuff. However, even that is bogged down by the game's atrocious approach to storytelling - by using 1000 words where 10 would do, while inserting at least 5 flashbacks in between every other sentence. The story beats really are not that complicated, but the writer tap-dances around every plot point, determined to waste your time for hours and hours with dialogue that never gets the point before finally giving you what you came for. Whenever my attention is grabbed by some interesting plot point, the story takes so long to explore it that I have already lost my interest by the time it has done so. Dive1 is over 50 hours long when it could have easily been 20 hours tops. Did I mention that Baldr Sky also has gameplay? Not only is it not good enough to justify how much it pads out and blueballs you on key story beats, you cannot skip them at all when you read through the game again to get a different ending. Yes, you heard me right. You cannot skip the combat even when you've done the exact same fight dozens of times already as you play through the routes again and again and again. The devs were REALLY proud of their combat system and by god, you WILL play it. The fights were somewhat fun at first, but they become unbearably tedious after the 2nd route, and there are 6 routes in total in Dive1 and 2 combined. Fuck this game. |
| 5 points |