Dusk Diver 酉閃町

Really awesome time of a game if you're a fan of action games or beat 'em ups. This is virtually nothing like Yakuza nor Persona and I don't know why so many comments would suggest as much. This is very much in the vein of a standard action RPG or Beat 'em Up with more focus directed at combo systems and strings as opposed to just outside resources and tools like Double Dragon for example. The combat system gets very in-depth and can feel rewarding, but once you reach a certain point, you start to optimize a lot and cut down on the excess moves. It does reward mastery for flashy combos but since this game features the stagger system as opposed to allowing pseudo-infinite juggling, you start to note which strings are the safest and yield the most returns rather than the one that converts the coolest and makes use of all your tools.
The campaign is super short and concise and the story is fine for what it is. It really just plays second fiddle to the combat system and the core gameplay loop is very much akin to that of a KR MMORPG (so much so that it reminds me a lot of Closers, Dungeon and Fighter, and Elsword when it comes to the late game grinding for mats, rewards, and whatnot). There are some sidequests but they aren't very long and while the characters aren't very deep or anything, they're all pretty solid for what they are, NPC storylines included.
The worst part of the games mostly appear with respect to the grind to 100% completing it in the forms of the lottery RNG filling out and/or the insane spongey-ness of the enemy health pools so much that you'll find yourself repeating the most effective tactics you know rather than the ones you might've been learning along the way there.
There's a lot of variety when it comes to level design and you can honestly tell the devs had fun exploring some aspects of things. The color-coded barriers is a bit of a miss in terms of mechanics that enhance things but it's honestly whatever as it does actually pose trade-offs early game.
All-in-all a hidden gem. Easy recommend to anyone.

In a city where humans blink 20x slower, you'll alternate between questing in the real world and beating up monsters in the "otherworld", a dark version of the place.
Very similar to Tokio Xanadu, and... I Persona-ly don't know any other.
Cleared the story in 18 hours with some grinding (didn't fully listen to voiceovers), so definitely pretty short.
Pros
• Runs very well on low-specs. Also good optimisation like NPCs models being heavily simplified.
• Accessible 100% clear. The story is short enough so most will stay hungry for more fighting.
All "non-marked event locations" can be either revealed or rather easily found.
The worst (or best depending on players) will be to clear hard missions. The game is rather vague about the moveset, so requires some personal theorycrafting.
• Getting best rank on a stage only requires to clear it fast. This is very achievable compared to other games in the genre.
Devil May Cry 3 stage rank is based on time / money / "combos" / damage taken / items used.
Tokyo Xanadu rank is about time / damage taken / % enemies killed / treasures found / elemental kills / broken objects / max combo.
• Combat is a mix of monster swarms and armored enemies, but the game provides good tools to deal with these.
Special gauge easy to refill, encouraging abusing it and keep the brain active (Do I need combo count? Armor break? Crowd control? Long range?)
• Combat becomes interesting on hard mode, although the AoE / combo character might make it a bit too easy.
• Characters have intricate personnalities and mostly talk to say useful stuff. The story respects players' time.
Quests are series of tasks involving specific NPCs, making them actually memorable.
• Story missions require D-stones, obtained from both battling and questing. Forces the player to do various activities rather than rushing the story, I love it.
There are 153, but only ~50 are needed for the last mission. Finding more will still yield skill points.
• The hub city is beautiful, with fully-decorated buildings. Sadly, I'm used to keeping the camera 45° down, and rarely got to enjoy the heights.
Fails
• Keyboard controls are just bearable ; transposed emulation of a triple-joystick gamepad.
• Money is very easy to get. Gacha machines and food sources can be cleared for super cheap.
Buing 5 meals at the same place (~400$) yields a D-stone. Since I didn't know, I instead grinded the stones I missed in previous story stages and hard mode, which made me filthy rich in no time.
I then proceeded to buy the whole stock of everything I passed by, making it very anticlimactic.
• Gacha poetry is the rotten cherry on top :
- 62 poems to collect that stay in the pool after being obtained.
- Unskippable 13-seconds animation, neither gives the time to read.
- The temple is far from HQ, so better clear it all at once.
- Even sadder to see that people worked on all of these, plus the art, animations and translation. I'll never take the time to read all 62 in the gallery.
- Thankfully, a good reward : That's right, a freakin steam achievement. Nothing else.
At least, it's spammable. Just put on some music, podcast, asmr or whatever and put the game on mute. Steam notification will tell when you got them all.
Took me ~40 minutes (~= 185 pulls) total, and 18 minutes for the last 6.
• Food is barely better : There are many shops unlocked through character events, mostly completed by the time story is cleared, which is too easy to even require food.
I reached the penultimate story mission, realized I should try food shops, went through the whole city and maxed 'em all at once - 20, some have animations - (including gacha machines - 5 -).
There are 46 different foods with their translated description, pictures and effect, but pretty sure Yumo dmg+ is the only one I'll ever eat.
There're maybe 2 quests requiring to go shopping for X food, but it overall feels like even more wasted potential than poetry.
• Some dragon stones can require unintuitive processes to be reached.
Shootout to the mission 11 where you have to get to a place from a specific path before the first part starts. If you take the wrong path, a "wrong" event happens, locking the stone away. Watch playthroughs for this one.
• The fighting mechanics could've been cleaned up. Some can be tedious to learn/relearn, but this might as well be a pro since it keeps the player improving even after clearing the story.
Check end of review for a quick guide.
• Bosses are quite easy. Their attacks are very telegraphed and there's always the time to dash away.
• Short story. Might be a pro as well, since it ends before the player has the time to get bored, and leaves them hungry for grinding the 100%.
• Lacks endgame "play for fun" content after the 100% (I guess?). I'd sure spend 5-10$ for a DLC including Devil May Cry's Bloody Palace, basically a mode where you face increasingly difficult waves of monsters, and all bosses as well, just to have fun mastering the combat mechanics and styling around.
• No punching bag / training mode. At best, pick a hard stage, reach some big monster and compare damage.
"Basics" of fighting (very simple)
Don't be afraid, the following is a dense summary, the game teaches these gradually
• Each ally starts with 5 special attacks, depending on the amount of hits previously input in a combo string (0-1-2-3-4). These have no description, so players will need to test them by themselves and remember which one is good on which situation.
• Then come aerial specials, which are in fact one of the 5 basic ones, depending on the character. Leo's air spec. is his special 3, Bahet's is his 4 and Viada's is her 2. Would've been easier to remember if it was, like, spec. 3 for everyone.
• Next up are extra specials. These are new ones that can be cast after spec. 0, but also have an alt input. Thing is, you rarely want to spend meter for spec. 0, so you'll mostly use this alt input.
• Finally, "tag team" specials are basically extra specs, but stronger, no alt input, and chain from different basic specs.
Thing is, this also unlocks an alt input for that basic spec. Leo's is 3, Bahet's is 4 (just like airspec), but Viada's is 5, not 2.
By the time I unlocked "tag team" specs, I was already used to casting these basic specials from combos, and had to relearn that new way for them, which is more efficient.
• Was it all? I almost forgot that a few 1000s of skill points can unlock -> input, which, followed by a cast spec. 5.
Got that from a Fanatical bundle (8$ for 3 games). If you love that kind of thing, grab it right now.
Even though it respects players' time, original price might be too much for a ~15 hours story.

This game would need a neutral option.
Similar game to Akiba Strip but with some bugs (mostly crashes solved by not using costumes/playing in windowed mode)
It was a good experience to me and with a good sale (or bundle) it might be interesting to buy Dusk Diver

Had a good time with it, and i liked the characters

My complaint would be that it is annoying that there is no restart option when trying to S Rank, it can get annoying having to exit a level and if it is a story level having to go all the way back to the rift to access it

A fun, simple and somewhat easy combo based action game. The setting is very unique and the story is interesting. The story feels like the first season before something very important happens though, the kind where all the team comes together, beat an enemy, then life goes on kind of ending that set up for endless new episodes and threats.

Pretty solid DMC Action game with a light Persona city sim on the side. Combat has solid foundations. I appreciate the setting. Though I've never been to Taiwan, I've eaten a lot of the food so I like how the culture is being showcased front and center here!

A great musou/hacknslash made by Taiwanese devs!
I definitely think this is a game worth trying out if you like this genre of games and are familiar with the DMCs and Bayonettas, although I would compare it more to a musou (dynasty warriors) style game with how you are fighting most of the time big waves of mobs. It's got a lot of the DNA of games like Senran Kagura and also the attention to detail of replicating a believable real world location, mainly the Ximen district of Taipei. I can count on my fingers games that translate real world locations to an anime art style so well, and those mainly include the Yakuza, Persona and Akiba's Trip games.
You noticed I mentioned and referenced a lot of games Duskdivers reminds me of, but I do believe a lot of this dev team's inspiration is very intentional. They are fans of games and have most likely played a lot of these other games and decided to produce a labor of love to this very niche style of games.
I think that the combat is the weakest aspect of this game and I am soon going to startup Duskdivers 2 to find out how they have improved on it there, but I also don't believe the combat is terrible. It just suffers from a lot of the typical bloat musou games struggle from, where the closer you reach the endgame, the more the game just throws at you obnoxiously spoungey enemies that don't really do much but you have to spam the hell out of your stamina depletion skills to get them into a vulnerable state. This is a problem a lot of games have regardless if AAA or indie, so I am not going to slam on the game too much for it, though it definitely gets annoying by the end and although I want to 100% every achievement, I am starting to really burn out and feel the repetitiveness of it all by the 11th hour I am currently on.
My advice is take the game in slowly, enjoy the setting, theme and story, visit some food stalls and gachapon machines, beat it and just look back at it as a cozy experience you had at some point throughout the year between major releases or other main games you are going ham on.
Peace out ;)