Review of BALDR SKY Dive2 "RECORDARE"
| Subject | BALDR SKY Dive2 "RECORDARE" |
| By | Helpfulness: 3 Vote: 8.5r-2 on 2020-09-04 |
| Review | To be honest, I have a lot of issues with Baldr Sky. However in an effort to make this review a little more useful, instead of a traditional review where I focus on what I liked and didn't like about the game, I'm going to go over a few things to try to make the experience more fun for other people, especially those that aren't particularly feeling the gameplay. First of all, there are a few misconceptions that I want to get out of the way: The difficulty. Before I picked the game up, I'd assumed that the last route would be the hardest. During my playthrough however, the hardest part about the game was the switch from Hard in Dive1 to Very Hard in Dive2 and having to adjust my playstyle to the enemies who were now much better at interrupting combos. For this reason, the hardest battles in the game usually weren't the boss battles, but rather the ones where you have to fight hordes of mobs. Also, by the last route you should have access to better weapons and plugins that can make battles go by more easily than in previous routes where you didn't have them. All that said, the game is still pretty hard. Recommended playstyle. People have said that you shouldn't rely on ranged attacks, but this is only partially true. While it's true that you do need to focus on building a combo to get decent damage (which is easier with melee attacks since they link together more intuitively), ranged weapons still play an important role as approach tools and can be used to deal with the enemies' own ranged attacks. Not to mention that some melee weapons are locked behind ranged weapons in the development tree so you have to use them anyway. Now for my own comments and suggestions: Baldr Sky is primarily a gameplay VN, rather than a VN that has gameplay. It's all well and fine to only want to play for the story, and that's what the easier difficulties were made for if you're so inclined. However if you can bring yourself to learn the gameplay despite how much of a struggle it can be, then you'll get more enjoyment out of the game as a whole. By the last routes you'll really feel like you've gone through as much of a journey as Kou has. Play the game with friends. The social aspect of being able to stream my gameplay whenever fights got difficult (or similarly being able to watch other people's streams) made the struggle less frustrating. You can learn from each other's playstyles too. Streaming the last chapter is always fun. Use a good controller/input setup. Make sure that you can actually press your buttons at the same time. I played Dive1 with a non-gaming keyboard, which put me at a severe disadvantage and limited my options since it could only register 2-3 buttons at once depending on which direction I was moving. Once I switched over to a fight stick/hitbox controller, the gameplay suddenly clicked. Which brings me to my next point... Use your dashes. I can't believe I made it through Dive1 without using them. I think a lot of new players tend to underutilize these. Focus on developing weapons early. At the beginning, the game tells you to focus on getting plugins first since you have limited Force, but by Dive2 you'll have more Force than you know what to do with, and at that point it might be too difficult to develop so many weapons at once. The 18+ patch is actually optional for those playing the English version. Though Makoto's H-scenes were pretty funny. That's about it. I wish someone had told me this stuff before I started playing, since I think I would have enjoyed the game more if I'd heard it. But fortunately I came to like the game anyway, and I hope other people do too. Good luck hotdoggers (Route order: Rain -> Nanoha -> Chinatsu -> Aki -> [Reminiscence] -> Makoto -> Sora) (Dive1 on Hard, Dive2 on Very Hard) |
| 3 points |