To put it simply, Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 is a sequel to the original in every sense of the word. From the obsessive emphasis on visual and audio quality (which are still incredible, by the way), to the combat that chooses being visceral over functional. Luckily for me, I loved the original Hellblade and while the story in Senua's Saga has a different focus from that game, it resonates because of those differences as well.

The events of the first game can still be felt on Senua, and that growth helps her on this journey where she has to open up to others and be more vulnerable. Each chapter effectively emphasizes a certain aspect of growth that Senua must come to terms with. From the past, she must both remember the happy times of her life, and become in control of her trauma and use that pain for good. For the future, her ability to maintain a healthy relationship with those she comes to trust comes into question. Additionally, I am kind of a sucker for stories where empathy is a key part of dealing with antagonistic forces, and this game has that in droves and I loved that aspect of the narrative.

The elephant in the room for both Hellblade games is the combat. Combat in the first game was entirely serviceable; it got the job done. Hellblade 2 doubles down in a way I did not expect when the game was first announced. Rather than make the combat more satisfying on a moment-to-moment basis, they went in the opposite direction. When Senua pulls off a perfect parry, it feels incredibly satisfying, but miss the timing, and she can be knocked back and fall to the ground from the weight of the enemy's swing. Animation plays a much larger role in Hellblade 2's combat, and while the spectacle surrounding each encounter is unmatched in terms of the visuals, music, and even the way Senua transitions from enemy to enemy, that level of base satisfaction is not truly there. The game's emphasis on visuals and realism is already divisive, and Ninja Theory doubling down on weighty, animation-lead combat won't be an effective sell for people who just want a good action game.

Puzzles also have more variety than they did in the first game, which is appreciated, but they still aren't hard enough that I had to stop and think about the solutions too much. They made my brain work just enough to not be bored by them, but never so much that I felt an "aha" moment after solving one. Some of them are clear improvements over the original, but having to match signs in the environment could easily be replaced by a The Last of Us pushing a dumpster to climb a ledge scenario and not much would be lost.

Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, despite being a game published by Xbox, is still very much Hellblade, and that surprised me quite a bit. With the first game being relatively niche compared to games from any first-party publisher, it would have been easy to spin the sequel into something more mass-market like the evolution God of War underwent to great success. But it's not. People will hate this game, and from the outside looking in, Ninja Theory was given free reign to simply make a more expensive Hellblade and double down on aspects of the original that were already contentious. Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 worked for me, however, and I'm happy it exists in the way it does.

For years I had seen people say the Mystery Dungeon games had good stories but I never believed it honestly, but I was proven wrong playing this game finally. I was shocked how much I actually cared about the characters, and the game has quite a fun mystery and concept. There is one part in particular toward the middle of the game where I went from just intrigued to totally enamored with the game.

The gameplay is pretty fun after I got used to it, scouring the dungeons and battling is fun even if sometimes the randomness got on my nerves a bit. It isn't too hard overall but there are definitely some difficulty spikes I had to overcome. The game does do a good job giving you lots of different tools to work with so I may have not been playing very optimally which may have contributed to that. The music and art style were very appealing to me as well, it has a very charming cute vibe all around that kept the game fun even when I was just grinding out rescue requests.

Still playing this with friends but feel like i know most of what i want to say about it. While the gameplay loop turns out to be extremely repetitive with the same objectives repeating constantly, the game turns out to be incredibly fun due to the shenanigans and funny situations that happen due to Friendly Fire and general lethality of the weapons and enemies.

However, it's clear that this game was not ready for the popularity it got as two months later we are still having connectivity issues, crossplay not working and some general bugs. With a bit more polish I would love this even more.

This game is peak in so many regards but also fumbles in so many ways when it comes to combat, quest design and level design. This is probably the highest I’ve rated a game that i have so many complaints with that’s how good the peaks of this game are.

Combat is restrictive, barebones and often plain unfun. 4 hit combo and that’s it? Really? Launcher tied to another character? 6 ability slots while having 30+ abilities and they have cooldowns? Large enemies that don’t reach to you, can’t be juggled and are just wet noodle sponges slap fests to fight? Why would you make an action game like this?

Any time your abilities are on cooldown vs a larger enemy with a stamina bar you can only mash square and do the same 4 attacks over and over. Or weave in some bad feeling magic follow ups to increase it to an samey 8 hit combo. Enemies have too much HP for how boring they are to fight and how little variety they have.

I understand the game can’t be at an 11 of hype at all times or else it would lose its impact but the rise actions of its structure are so BORING. Gotta get margret her 7 shit potatoes for 3 hours before we can actually move the plot forward. There are these little arcs when you get to a new town that has a roadblock preventing you from getting to a bosses’ palace that you must get around and they get so fucking old after the 2nd time they do this. The game could have easily 15 hours shorter with all these boring repetitive shit cut out

85% of the side quest are the shit quests from FF14 you ignore and walk past unless you are an absolute fiend that should be locked in a cage and need something left to do after playing it for 7000 hours. They sprinkle you with some good ones every once in a while and it isn’t until the literal final hour do you get all the good side quests with your friends.

The open world is barren and has zero reason to traverse. The game is an assortment of hallways they tried to obfuscate by putting them in empty warehouses. I’d rather it just have Stranger of Paradise’s level structure because that was too the point.

The music to this game is incredible. People finally getting a taste of some of the best FF music now that it isn’t locked behind 300+ hours into an mmo. The performances are great and the sound design for the main villain is really cool. I wished they stuck speaking gibberish like they did at the start.

I was really engaged with the story even if it blue balls you a bit too much in areas and there is one character that may as well be a talking map because all they do is show up to give the game of thrones opening styled map cutscenes of the world.

The scale of boss fights and set pieces are insane. Normies got baited thinking they were buying game of thrones only to find out square secretly made the sequel to asura’s wrath and the hypest kaiju/toku game on the market. Holy fuck those behomet and titan fights. I’ll be thinking about those for a while

This one is so tough for me, and honestly, there is no way I can ever be 100% unbiased. Let's start from the top. OG FF7 is one of my favorite video games of all time. Between that and MGS it is what got me into gaming in the first place, and I can still remember sneaking up late at night to play more of these games on the PS1.

So when a remake of this was announced, I was obviously nervous, and oddly enough, the first Remake game did almost nothing to squash that even though I really did like it. It was clear they were going with a bold, new, different direction, and despite my squabbles, I couldn't help be just beyond in awe with what they were trying to accomplish, but it really felt like something I'd need to wait and see the whole way through before I could give a full opinion on.

Another game later, I still feel kinda the same way? I really do like this game, along with remake, I think they're both spectacular. I also think, they will NEVER live up or surpass the OG game to me, and that's okay too.

I do think this game is too bloated. It's also way too story light until the last chunk of the game. Really we don't get major story stuff until chapter 12 (though it starts getting better in eight).

I think the side quests are improved from Remake, but still not great here.

Also for the love of god, I like the mini games, but not EVERYTHING needs to be a mini game. Some sections were an actual slog cause of that.

The open world while solid and fun, does nothing that hasn't been done before, and can't match some of the top tier open worlds to me (RDR2, Horizon FW).

What this game excels at is the world, and character building. It's tremendous. It makes you really fall in love with every one of these characters, and shines a light one more time on Aerith, one of the greatest female characters in video game history.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time with this game, even more than Remake (even though I think Remake does somethings better). I think this one will grow on me over time, and maybe even increase in score, and who knows, maybe after the third game, I'll learn to love them all even more.

Oh Suicide Squad. Where do I even begin with this fucking one.

Let's start at the top. I genuinely think this game got did dirty by gaming journalists, and just gamers in general. I think 99% of the hate from gamers come from people who have never, and have no intention of playing this game.

My background. I'm a primarily SP gamer, who does not like live service, does not play online, and really never been into loot score games. That being said, as a GIANT batman fan, and a rocksteady fan, I had to go into this one and give it a fair shot. And to be honest, most of what was here I dug.

The story is genuinely great. It's hilarious from start to finish, the suicide squad themselves are written great (Boomerang and King Shark are easily the highlights here). Getting to go around and fight each justice league member as the bad guy, as a young Addi's dream come true, and was so awesome to experience.

All the boss fights were really fun (and just the gameplay in general, it was really fast, responsive and felt slick to traverse.) I mained as Harley, and I love how you could have a totally different experience depending on who you played as.

Now some negatives:

First of all, I had to drop the game for a period because of a "loading metroplis" bug. Un acceptable, no reason this game should be always online. The side quests, are really bad. I love them introducing Penguin, and a really cool new version of Ivy, but then doing jack all with the character development. It was clear this game was tugged in SO many different directions, and really didn't know what it wanted to be at the end of the day.

Honestly I was at a very solid 7/10 for this, but I had to drop half a point for the ending. Just totally anti climactic, and clearly content was cut for future live service stuff, which I have no interest in taking a part in.

This game is a giant mixed bag, and it's such a shame because there's stuff here I genuinely love, but stuff that also frustrates me that could have been easily avoided. Overall though, I still enjoyed my time with it, and it's no where NEAR as bad as people are making out it to be.

Give it a chance yourself sometime, I certainly, won't root for Rocksteady to fail, the sauce is still here, they just need to be more focused, and commit to more of a sp vision next time.

This just felt like a game that should have come out a long time ago. The original 2016 Detective Pikachu on 3DS was a flawed but charming mystery/adventure game with a clever premise, and if this game came out a year or two afterwards it probably would have gotten a similar reception. Instead the gameplay feels dated and the presentation is just not up to snuff. The plot isn’t bad per say but it also has the problem of the Detective Pikachu movie coming out in 2019 despite the movie adapting material that would be eventually used in this game, so the release timeline for this franchise is all out of whack. The last case in the game makes up for a lot of the slowness in the rest of the game but I just wish the game was more dynamic in structure, it would be nice to feel like you are solving something instead of being dragged along with no agency. I did like how it all wrapped up at least and it did retain some of the charm of the original, I just sadly think this missed its window by multiple years… if it had come out right before the movie it would have felt much more at home.

Playing through FES in 2022 was one of my favorite gaming experiences I've had in quite some time. I guess I didn't realize quite how much until hearing about this remake. No hesitation in wanting to replay a long game like this, and in fact, genuine excitement for what was to come. If this version in 2009 was already one of my favorite games of all time, what would this end up being?

The answer is a truly unforgettable experience, that cements itself as one of my favorite games of all time, and Persona as one of my favorite series of all time.

Everything here is improved, from the improved music, to the combat, to the visuals, to the links, to the voice acting. Almost nothing feels off here. The story remains excellent and in my humble opinion, the best of the big three persona games, with some of the best side links in the series, and some of the best female characters. Makoto is the best protagonist in the series, and, while this game can't quite hit the monumental high and achievement of Persona 5 Royal (including the best OST soundtrack in any game) this game comes damn close to me.

The final boss fight is one of my favorite in all of gaming, and is done total justice here, the game is accessibile and easy if you want it to be (a huge improvement from FES in that way without modding it).

Overall, this game is a dream come true, is probably going to be my GOTY, and quite frankly, one of the crowning achievements for video games in general.

Can't wait to see what Atlus does dipping its toes into the Old Timey Mystical genre next!!!