The Mighty Nein is an adult animated series based on campaign 2 of the Dungeons & Dragons web series Critical Role. Critical Role is a group of professional voice actors that get together to play D&D 5th edition. The cast own the intellectual property and have already produced a number of licensed works based on the show. A single Critical Role campaign will consist of a series of story arcs, played over multiple sessions. Between or sometimes within the major story arcs, the characters rest, resupply, or go on side quests. While each campaign centers on a different party of adventurers, the campaigns are all set on the various continents of Exandria, a world of Matt Mercer's creation.
Campaign 2 ran from January 2018 to June 2021; totaling 141 episodes with an average runtime of 3 to 4 hours per episode. It follows the adventures of the Mighty Nein party and is set primarily on the continent of Wildemount roughly 20 years after the Legend of Vox Machina. The Critical Role cast reprise their characters for the show, which consists of 8 (50 minute long) episodes.
Spoiler Warning: I am going to give a synopsis of each episode and my opinions at the very end.
The story is a simple black-and-white tale of a righteous prince using his magical ring to defeat an evil overlord. The exiled prince Alain will lead his Liberation Army in a campaign across the the five realms of Fevrith, freeing captured towns to gain access to shops, taverns, and unit upgrades. The massive cast of characters all have distinct personalities and managed to stand apart visually from one another. There are a number of slice-of-life support conversations that open up by having units fight together on the battlefield or dine together at a tavern. These character stories were compelling enough, but none stood out as particularly surprising or unexpected. The ones I remember the best are Amalia's (demonic?) possession and Auch's desire for approval from his late mother. At various points you can choose to execute or recruit a former enemy, but as far as I can tell there is no reason not to recruit every single time, as there are no negative consequences for it and execution will lock-out side quests. I did like that every member of the Liberation Army felt like they had a good reason for being there, be it ties to the royal family or for personal gain.
There is a great diversity of races, consisting of humans, elves, winged celestials, and various beast races.
Units move in real-time across an overworld map, capturing command posts and dealing with concealed enemy units and choke points. Siege weapons and traps may also be employed. When two units meet it will initiate a battle that plays out automatically in real-time without input from the player. The skirmish lasts until one side is depleted of people or until points used to perform actions are exhausted on both sides. Before deployment, teams (units) of up to five characters are arranged in a 2x3 grid. The order they will attack in is determined by their 'initiative' value. Arrangement also matters. Some classes are better at guarding (themselves and other units) and are best positioned in front of or next to long range classes. Items that increase speed, damage, and defense can also be used in advance.
Unicorn Overlord is a decent strategy game that almost anyone of any skill level can get into. Its gameplay mechanics are easy to grasp and just complex enough to keep them engaging.
The Monster Hunter franchise alternates between mainline releases with big budgets and more experimental spin-off titles such as Rise. And a lot has changed. Farming has been meshed with the Argosy (trading ship), Tailraider Safaris are now the Mewcenaries, and the lizard mounts have been replaced by a palamute (dog) that the player can customize and ride. This makes getting around Rise's surprisingly vertical maps a breeze. The downside is that there isn't much of a reason to move vertically because most of the fights happen at ground level. A new 'wirebug' mechanic can be used to zip through the air and to take direct control of weakened monsters in order to puppet them into fights with other monsters. For some reason players now start every mission with a chunk of their health and stamina bar locked out. The only way to access this missing section is to collect glowing spirit-birds in the environment, which isn't so bad at first but becomes tedious over time, especially as the monsters get tougher.
Rise made me miss the boisterous energy around meals big enough to feed a family of eight. The Hunter and their dog now only eat dango; a sweet, usually vegetarian food. I hope they don't get diabetes.
In many ways Rise feels like a regression from World due to the large number of cut features: the sling, mantles, stealth bushes, destructible environments, scoutflies, and investigations are gone. Different aggro ranges, idle animations, and turf wars for the monsters have either been reduced or are gone completely. Breaking monster parts no longer seems to impact their movement or ability to inflict status ailments, and a lot of returning monsters have been given their old move-sets back. Players that got their start with World are sure to be shocked by how aggressive the original barroth was. The hit boxes are also some of the worst I have encountered yet in a Monster Hunter title. It doesn't matter how far out of reach I am or even if I am up high on a cliff, an invisible force field is sure to find me and I am not alone in this: video 1 and video 2.
The Switch's hardware limitations restrict how luxuriant the maps can be, so none of them are as vivid or alive as World. Two maps from the third game (Tri) - the Sandy Plains and the Flooded Forest - were recreated in Rise's style with their battle-zones intact and the loading screens removed. The results are quite good and didn't feel gimmicky at all. Players still engage with the staple gameplay loop of hunting massive monsters to craft better gear in order to take down even more powerful animals, but it's easier than before. Part breaks and shiny drops are more plentiful, and gear requires fewer resources to craft. It's very friendly to new players and the lower part costs allow for more experimentation with different weapons, unlike in the mainline games where you kinda needed to pick your 'main' early and stick with it because the cost of switching later was detrimentally high.
The weapon designs in general are much better than Worlds which used a "slap-on" design - the same bone or metal weapon base would have skin or feathers tacked on. Rise by comparison has fewer weapon upgrades but greater stat increases and visual variety. There is also better animal variety than World; wyverns still dominate in numbers, but there is an almost equal number of leviathans and fanged beasts, and at least one invertebrate. I also finally got the chance to fight a chameleos (an old monster that hasn't had many appearances) and learned to use the hunting horn - one of the series least played weapons - thanks to Rise re-working the weapon to be more user friendly. I had been curious about this weapon since my first Monster Hunter game, but never got into it due to the learning curve.
The Monster Hunter series has always had a tradition of setting the flagship monster up as a rival to the Hunter by having them make a surprise appearance in quests or disrupting the ecosystem and village life in some tangible way, but magnamalo just kinda appears without much fanfare. I mistakenly completed the 'hub quests' (multiplayer) first, instead of the 'village quests' (single player / low rank), so my first time even hearing about magnamalo was in the quest to defeat him. Had I completed the village quests first there still wouldn't have been any build-up, rivalry, or special gameplay interactions for this monster. At most he gets mentioned twice by NPCs and appears once in a cut-scene, so the mystery behind the hordes of monsters rampaging through the village ends up overshadowing him.
I also miss when the flagship monster could just be a regular animal that fit ecologically into the game, like lagiacrus and nargacuga. I can tell you what habitats they prefer, what their roles in the environment are, what their daily habits are, and how they function on a physiological level, but I can't do that with magnamalo. From in-game text I know that his "digestive gases" are expelled through vents on his arms, back, face, and rear. But I don't get how he manages to throw this fart gas like a projectile, or why it is explosive in nature and purple in color (the same as poison). Visually magnamalo has the presence of an Elder Dragon - essentially a force of nature with special powers. In battle he can leap straight across the arena 2 or 3 times in a row, moves in erratic ways, has gigantic hit boxes, and uses multiple area of effect attacks in addition to having a special ailment (hellfire; aka blastblight) unique only to him. But he somehow isn't classified as an elder dragon. Someone just as confused as me actually made a silly cartoon that summarizes my feelings on magnamalo pretty well.
They left out mythology-based monsters like kirin but included rajang, which is powered up by kirin. Odogaron was also left out (presumably for the lack of suitable environments) in favor of izuchi, an entirely new monster based on the same yōkai (Kamaitachi) as Odogaron. One of the NPCs is also sitting on a young (stunted?) tetsucabra, but the Hunter never actually gets to fight one in-game. The opening cutscene of a 'wind serpent' in the clouds I thought for sure was going to be an amatsu, but nope. The monster selection isn't bad by any means, just a bit odd.
The main story is also a bit weird. For some reason the end-game boss monster can "resonate" with two twins in the village - essentially possessing them to use as mouthpieces. The story never actually does anything with this or bothers to explain it properly, so it is hard to quantify exactly what "resonance" can do and what its limits are. The twins only really talk to each other when in their possessed state and not to anyone else, so the telepathy could be accidental. By the end of the game I still had no idea why "resonance" effected the twins and no one else, or what its purpose was. Is it unique to wyverians or can it effect humans as well? Why were none of the other Wyverians in the village effected? Why were the twins only possessed and not enraged like the monster hordes? In the context of the Monster Hunter universe it is highly unusual to include something so supernatural. It's the sort of thing that wouldn't be out of place in a more anime type game like God Eater 3, which actually featured monster resonance quite heavily in its plot.
Bishaten was my favorite new monster. I enjoyed the uniqueness of his fruit mechanic and the idea that a simian-type monster would be smart enough to use basic tools/items (such as flashpods) against the Hunter.
Rise is ultimately fine for what it is, especially as a side entry and I am glad the development team has a place where they can experiment with new stuff that may or may not make its way into the mainline games. Rampages, which are essentially tower defense, were a flop and likley won't return. Likewise the telepathy, vegetarian diets, and faster pace of fights just didn't feel like a Monster Hunter game to me. I have heard that the Sunbreak expansion corrects many of the base game's shortcomings, but I don't own it and I have no desire to. I have gotten my fill of Rise and am looking forward to what the next entry - Wilds, has to offer.
The gameplay is real-time strategy with pause (RTwP), although you only really 'pause' when selecting unit paths or rolling back an action. The deployable unit size is abnormally small at just four main units, each with its own backup member that can be swapped out a set number of times per battle. This limits what you can do strategically, and besides deciding what order to target enemies in and sometimes what direction to approach them from, there isn't any real tactical depth. There are no terrain hindrances or elevation to consider, no shortcuts to open up. Every mission has optional goals that are almost always to keep every unit alive and to finish in 6 or 8 minutes. The actual main mission goals are equally static, being to kill all enemies or on rare occasions to guard a barricade or protect a wagon.
On the battlefield units auto-attack and will do additional 'ambush' damage when positioned behind an enemy, but this can be hard to control as the game may think that you are at the 'side' of an enemy rather than the 'rear'. Your units move around and clump together as well, making it hard to select the one you want. Their auto-attacks are supplemented by powerful weapon skills that can heal units, inflict status ailments on enemies, hit multiple targets, and disrupt heavy attacks. Each skill uses a set amount of EP (mana) and if you run out of it that's it. You can drink a potion to recover EP but you are limited to carrying only 3. EP management is further complicated by the fact that new enemies regularly spawn on maps, so you never know exactly how many enemies you will face. You also have no way of knowing what those enemies will be: human, animal, mini-boss. This makes it easy to burn through all your EP and potentially end up in an unwinnable situation.
From what I have heard this game was extremely easy until an update over-corrected by nerfing a lot of the stats and so much of this game relies on raw stats over strategy. I started out by playing on normal and found it decently challenging until around chapter 3 and the "Reclaim Teggaria" mission which had a massive spike in difficulty that forced me to turn the difficulty down from normal to casual. Even then I still got slaughtered despite being over-leveled with the best gear available. From then onwards certain missions would be relatively easy while others in the same chapter would wreck me despite being above the minimum recommended level. At some point I just gave up on trying to keep all of my units relevant and benched everyone except for my main four, which I stuck with until the very end. This greatly over-leveled them to where the game felt balanced by chapters 6 and 7.
Whenever a mission is replayed you have to watch the cutscenes and dialogue again.
Story:
The story is centered around the Blue Fox mercenary group and their involvement with various employers on the island of DioField, which is ruled over by the Kingdom of Alletain. The Kingdom is currently at war with the invading Trovelt-Schoevian Empire and maintains an uneasy peace with the Rowetale Alliance. The Blue Fox base acts as the player's hub area in-between missions where Andrias (the protagonist) can shop, upgrade, and replay old missions for experience and cash. It is also where Andrias can talk to members of the team who are all varied in personalty but don't have much going on beyond that. They do not interact with each other outside of missions and they do not have any Fire Emblem type supports. Naturally, this made it hard to get attached to any of them, and their deaths were likewise inconsequential on a personal-level but important in terms of how they impacted the power balance of the nations and their conflicts.
Whenever internal conflicts between party members with opposing views did arise, those themes were never explored or resolved in any meaningful way. Major story events were equally vague or hand-waved away as all the important events are told through a narrated summary rather than being shown. For example: alliance talks break down, invaders seize land, pro-democracy advocates upset the ruling class, and the church is caught harming orphans. All this happens off-screen with few details given. It is a type of storytelling that left me feeling detached from the conflict, possibly by design. You see, the story isn't quite as shallow as it initially appears; there is actually a lot of interesting stuff going on behind the scenes, but you never get to see the setup to most of it. To really understand what is going on you need to beat the game and then read the library codex entries. Considering less than half of the people who purchase a game are likely to beat it (according to trophy / achievement statistics), how many of those gamers will then choose to read optional text after the credits have rolled? It is a really odd design choice, and I wish these story elements had been incorporated into the actual gameplay instead of being relegated to text.
For those curious, here are the details you only get by reading the character profiles after beating the game (highlight to reveal):
Andrias, Umarida, and Duke Hende are Empire spies.
Andrias was likley neutral on the war because he wants people who are altruistic and capable in power - no matter the nation. Neither 'rightful heir' to the Alletain Kingdom was ideal, so Andrias had Fredret, who seemed virtuous, pose as the deceased fourth-child Levantia Shaytham. And regardless of the outcome, Andrias was likley going to slay the Empire's ruthless general Zevatian no matter what.
How Fredret faked the divine mark is never explained, but Princess Hezeliah knew he was a fraud from the start. She went along with the scheme anyway in order to be freed from her captivity.
When the power went to Fredret's head, Andrias had to put him down in order to hand the Kingdom over to the Empire or allow the remaining heir Hezeliah to take over; likley as someone's puppet given how easily she is pushed around and manipulated.
After leaving the Blue Foxes, Iscarion is killed by a thief or possibly an assassin sent by Andrias. Yulzim's killer in chapter 2 is also never identified, but could possibly have been Umarida acting on Duke Hende or Andrias' orders as they were all working together by that point in time and had the most to gain from his death.
Conclusion:
While the balancing is an ongoing issue for DioField Chronicle, the foundation for a better sequel is here. The gameplay is easy to grasp, there is great artistic direction and some interesting ideas. It just needs fine adjustments. I really like where they went with the ending and would be curious to see where a sequel goes with it.
This is an annual list of my personal disappointing games of the year. To clarify, these are not the "worst" games of the year. They are titles I was let-down by based on my own preferences and expectations. Most of the titles on this list are not even what I would consider to be bad games. They just weren't for me, or were not what I was expecting.
All the games on this list are the launch version or later, and I have either played them to completion or abandoned them. The list is ordered based on my overall enjoyment (one being the best) of games I played in 2025. Most of the games listed here will not be brand new 2025 releases. They are games I played in 2025 that were new to me.
