I have a love/hate relationship with this game.

This game throws every bullshit you can imagine at you, forget about most of the rules. You'll start with a shitty deck and getting good cards takes forever, you need to grind a lot. The enemies don't give a fuck, they straight up cheat and mock you after. At the beginning it's easy to get by but the more you play, the more bullshit it gets, the last section of the game can be pure insanity and you'll need to be on point with your deck and knowledge.

Growing up playing this was a pretty amusing experience, trying to figure out card combinations and how to get the best cards was really fun, which is why I look at it now with affection. I also enjoyed the eerie atmosphere a lot and the music is quite memorable. Nowadays the game is seen as a speedrun game and there's a lot of guides and tricks to help you out.

As my first entry into Suda's works, I found it to be utterly enthralling from an atmospheric perspective. It was weird and strange but not in a lolsorandom way that somehow when a man in a gimp suit started giving me tutorial advice and hints, I didnt even bat an eye. The game is utterly hilarious at times, using its cutscenes to deliver utterly insane dialogue and over the top actions.

The game play itself is pretty simple, and engaging (at first). Its effectively a mix of a Rail Shooter and Resident Evil. You wander around the mission, shooting explosive enemies that walk towards you and shoot their weak point to kill them instantly. Enemies change up as the game progresses adding more variables and caveats to the simple bread and butter, but overall I found it getting rather dull by the end.

The puzzle elements in each level are'nt anything too deep either, its either use the right Smith or have the right item equipped to complete the solution. Which I found to get a bit grating at times because I honestly just wanted to get to the next cut scene more than anything.

I think the two primary flaws with the game are tiny nitpicks in the grand scheme. Other than the game play being a little bland, I found the blood system to be rather strange. As you kill enemies, you get blood, as you get blood, you get vials that can be used to heal your characters, which each have individual health values. I found in some sections, particularly where I felt the game did not explain how to fight the enemies properly, I was very low on blood and would die rather repeatedly, which I wouldn't mind as much if I didn't have to pilot Garcian back to the corpse, and then get teleport-ed back to the save room where I then had to retrace my progress again. There were a few points in the game where I felt this frustration, especially, in the Cloudman Mission, at the final boss, where you have to take a long trek back to the boss each time. I also felt gating off the usage of the Smiths' abilities to having a bit of blood to be kind of superfluous. I get that its supposed to be a simplified version of Resident Evil's resource management, but it still felt a bit too awkward for me. I usually never used charge shots because the healing was too valuable when the precision of the shooting was poor enough that sometimes I'd get hit no matter how hard I tried.

Overall though, a fantastic game with marvelous twists and turns, and an ending that absolutely blew me away. I have a feeling that I will be thinking about this game for a long while.

make no mistake when i say I Am A Mario Party Expert And Yes I Have A Mental Illness. this is the closest the series ever got to having a perfect party game before feeling the need to bog down every sequel with sometimes good and sometimes incomprehensible changes.

if i knew how to program and could change a few things about this game (item mini-games, no repeating mini-games, quality of life changes, etc.) that i have been thinking about for twenty years of my life (oh god why am i like this), i would have the Definitive Mario Party that would still be played at EVO to this day

i feel like this game is almost universally misunderstood due to its comparisons to its predecessor. it's a game that strips a lot of the most frustrating parts of The Dark Descent and boils them down to a more narratively interesting game, but most people left disappointed because it had less jumpscares and felt more like a "walking simulator" to them.

let me tell you something, the best horror games are, in fact, mostly walking simulators! fear of the unknown that is allowed to fester and build dread over time as the rich plot themes bubble over is much more interesting than having to wait for an enemy's patrol route to go in the specific way you need to sneak by over and over and over. having an unreliable narrator who is much more of a character than a near-blank slate everyman is wholly more powerful. also, the music of this game owns. back off haters!!!!

perfect example of a "7/10 game"

a game of memorable highs, uninteresting lows, but ultimately a lot of forgettable middles. this game feels a lot like someone's first game and the fact that it is shows. it's about 10 hours too long (it took me about 20 hours to beat with avoiding a lot of the random encounters, not doing much side-content), the stuff happening in the dreamworld doesn't really have any bearing on the story 95% of the time, and most of the characters feel very ignorable, superfluous, and slightly annoying due to their constant presence.

that being said, the game is VERY ambitious in its scope, which i appreciate. it feels like a few interesting ideas and discussions that are weighted down by the game's need to feel "gamey" and long due to typical RPG bloat. can't wait until people fully abandon the RPG genre as the de-facto means to tell a story in a narrative game!