Baldr Sky Reviews

This game is good, however beware: Windows 11 breaks this game hard. I played it before on my Windows 10 laptop, and everything works great there, but on Windows 11 you have to screw around with compatibility settings and it loves to crash randomly despite all the screwery. Maybe its better on Linux, I dont know.

One of the best stories I've ever read. Baldr Sky is a sci-fi visual novel that has some top down mech combat action. To be completely honest, I thought the combat gameplay was terrible. It felt like an afterthought, wasn't responsive, wasn't fun, and I would have preferred if it was just a pure visual novel. BUT the story was so good I pushed through. If you're like me, I'd recommend switching the difficulty to "very easy" from the get-go so you can quickly facetank your way through the combat. Harder difficulties mostly just add more enemies and increase their health pools anyways. Luckily the combat is only like 5-10% of the actual game. There's a good bit in the final route, but it's mostly sprinkled here and there. The genius in Baldr Sky's story is that each route takes you through the same few days, but you uncover more lore about everyone's history, and who was doing what at key times depending on which route you take. I beat route 1 and felt like I had more questions raised than answers answered. But that's what's so good about the game. You get to see how everything falls into place, and learn why certain unexplained events in past routes happened when you play the newer routes. The story really is amazing and I'd recommend it to anyone who might be interested. However, there is a LOT going on. I knew I'd forget details, so I took notes as things happened, and my "Baldr Sky route notes" Google doc ended at 65 pages long... So just know you're getting yourself into a 100+ hour mega-story. I have to warn that I did experience a lot of crashing near the end of the final route. Saving is very fast, and you can set skip mode to also go really fast, so it isn't the end of the world, but still annoying. Just be ready for it and save a lot!

A very long game, ~100 hours if only going for the good endings (theres 2-3 endings per girl/route), its 90% conversation and 10% battles, sometimes you will go 2 chapters straight without battles. The story is about a tragedy event and how each of the characters cope with the pain while pursuing the shrouded truth. These are very sad histories [spoiler] Chinatsu route is particularly hurtful [/spoiler] and a emotional roller coaster, so don't go for it if you have deep emotional troubles. There's some questionable cruel scenes about sexual assault, for the ones with triggers be careful. There's are no explicit sex, but some scenes are very erotic. The characters are very well written with unique persona and strong convictions [spoiler] except your "rival" that is very a one dimensional "haters gonna hate" jerk[/spoiler] . The normal and hard difficulties are ok, avoid the "very hard" in your first play or the game will become very time consuming and probably lock you out of the best endings since in general it requires to beat time attack battles. The graphics are average for a 2009 game, typical of an "A" PS2 game. The background sounds are well made and the timings are very well done, the characters voice combine with their persona. The battle systems take some time to get used, the attacks needs to be customized and there's no pre-made builds. So you have to explore a lot of the weapons and practice your timing. Don't keep using the same weapons, latter in the game the enemies health and numbers goes through the roof and initial weapons don't keep up the pace. About 70% in the game there's a very time consuming obligatory event called "Reminiscence", it takes 8-10 unskippable hours and basically you see again all the flashbacks of the first half of the game in some more detail. Probably was made because this game were 2 different games originally, but its very frustrating to be made to see the same things again in the first gameplay. I'm not a fan of visual novels, but this game indeed is one of the best in the genre.

Coming from playing the Muv-Luv trilogy just before playing this game, I honestly didn't expect that I'd play anything better than it, but this game surely delivers. Amazing gameplay, great story, lovable characters - 100 hours of pure fun. To prevent any crashes, make sure you play this game on Fullscreen mode. Otherwise, you risk your game crashing randomly and losing minutes of progress and having to redo fights.