This is easily one of my favorite Metroidvania games I’ve played, I was hopeful seeing the original trailers and it blew my expectations away. The movement in this game is amazing and just gets better as it goes, chaining together your usual double jumps, dashes, wall jumps with tons of other abilities you unlock as you go make the game feel incredibly fluid and allows for some great platforming sections. The collectibles are often in spots that require you to use all these skills so they feel super satisfying to get each time, as well as using a lot of them for leveling up weapons or buying perks/more potions/etc. The game does a great job balancing all these light RPG systems where you feel like you could beat the game without doing them all if you are skilled, but really making it feel rewarding if you take the time to find things in the map.

The combat is also quite fine despite not being overly complex, you have a few different combos you can do with your blades as well as a bow but really the skill comes from dodging or parrying at the right times. The boss battles all felt fair even some of the tougher ones later one and led to some really awesome moments. The way the map flows is also quite good, you pretty frequently find golden trees where you can restore your health and save, as well as finding fast travel points around the map which are super useful but also not game breaking. This allows you to jump around a bit but by limiting where you can initiate to only those spots it doesn’t take away the feeling of exploring. The areas themselves vary from pretty standard settings to a few that really stand out that I won’t spoil. The map also lets you place icons as well as a collectible you have that let’s you save screenshots on the map so you can easily remember a spot you want to return to later which is a great feature.

If you are a fan of the genre this is definitely a game I would recommend, it plays super well and the story, while not the most in depth hooking narrative ever, has a pretty neat concept that kept me entertained and led to cool gameplay moments.

Where to begin? First and foremost, I want to preface this by saying I enjoyed this game so much that I’m going to review a piece of media for the first time.

75 hours into Persona 3 Reload, I wasn’t sure what I was going to rate it. Tartarus was fantastic; it felt refreshing every time a new section opened up, and the combat was so fluid and fun to play, even as a turn-based game. I split the Social Links into two categories: the side characters and the main characters (including the linked episodes). I have to be honest; most of them ended up being a miss for me. With 20 total, only about 5 were really memorable. The rest weren’t bad by any means but somewhat forgettable.

What really makes this game special for me is the story. It’s full of twists and turns, as well as emotional beats that really hit home for me. The villains were a treat; the mystery surrounding them at first was enough to make them interesting until their motivation was revealed. Last but not least, the ending was truly beautiful. If you haven’t played this game, do yourself a favor and buy it. I promise you won’t regret it, and by the end, you’ll feel like A Most Remarkable Guest.

P.S. - Every music track in this game is straight flames.

After sitting on this game for over a month now, my opinion on this game has only lessened as I ruminate over and over about the 60+ hours I spent with the game.

Of those 60-ish hours, I would say around 10-15 of those hours were moments where narrative was actually occurring, and it was fucking good. When plot was happening, when it was channelling the game it's meant to be a retelling of, the game is fantastic. Cutscene direction is really strong, voice acting is great and it has some of the best lip-sync i've seen in a Japanese developed title.

It's the other 40-50 hours where the game fumbles, and where my mind wanders to the most when thinking about this game. Starting off the game, I quite enjoyed the first area, it was nicely designed and it looked great and it had good environment diversity. I felt compelled to complete everything in the area's activity checklist. However, the more areas that were introduced - the more burned I became completing the same mindless activities, and the areas became more and more tedious to traverse. I was fully ready to stop doing the open world activities by the time I was hit with the 1-2 Punch of Gongaga and Cosmo Canyon. Two areas that had the most tedious and annoying traversal mechanics and really made getting around the map feel like a chore. When I had got to the final area I completely mainlined, feeling further emboldened by the game vomiting 15 more side quests on you.

In terms of the side activities, I do find the reception to them to be fascinating. It's very clear the game is apeing the design of other open-world titles, but it's not like it's doing this content any better. As much as the gaming public lambasts "radio tower" map clearing activities, or "lazy Ubisoft-esque" side content, this game is doing all of that? So why is it not a problem here? It's never actually been a problem, but that's a tale for another day.

What the side-content does the best is give the party more areas to shine, for every quest theres 1 party member that is actively invested in the completion of your side quest objective. It gives you a snippet of their character, a much welcomed addition. While there are moments within the side content that I found enjoyable (Queen's Blood is fantastic), I found that alot of the minigames and stuff to not be as high of a quality as I'd hoped. Alot of the minigames felt like maybe 4 people in the studio worked on them, theres not like an equal level of development time and care between them all, so alot just come off as randomly thrown together so that they can hit some kind of internal metric of having X amount of minigames. I couldn't help but think of Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth when playing through the minigames. RGG are the masters of minigames in my opinion, and 90% of the time those minigames are there for you to be distracted with. You're able to go off on your own and on your own volition interact with the minigames. But in Rebirth, minigames are shoved down your throat left right and center to mask the fact that there isn't really a lot happening in this section of Final Fantasy 7's narrative. I fully believe that a lot of the minigames should not be integrated within the story, even for areas where it's intentionally lax and they want you to "have fun". That was a problem I actually had with Infinite Wealth, it constantly dragged you away from the story in order to interact with the big minigames it had implemented. They should have all been relegated to the Golden Saucer.

Now, the narrative. When there was actually stuff happening I was pogging and soying. The first couple hours were great, and then there were sparce moments here and there where I had fun and then the game ended. The ending left ALOT to be desired, and I was ultimately left with more questions than answers - which was quite disappointing as I had bought the game to get those answers. I wanted to see what they were laying the groundwork for in Remake, and I still have yet to see where they are going. There are flashes where the game is showing it's hand, but it's presented so ambiguously it just made me frustrated. The final chapter of the game had it's ups and downs, and then I was presented with yet another boss fight against Sephiroth and then it was done.

I don't know what they are going to do with the third game. They can't get away with "nothing happening" in the final act clearly, so I wonder if they're going to focus on the inclusion of inane minigames that completely destroy the pacing of the narrative. I'm at the point where I believe that's probably whats going to happen. I really hope the final game knocks it out of the park, but like are we really going to end on the 5th fight with Sephiroth with One Winged Angel playing for the 14th time? I don't mind games where the primary focus is just vibing out and hanging around the characters, I just don't feel like that was marketed appropriately. Had I known this game was going to be a bit more primarily slice-of-life I would've set my expectations as such - but I understand that adapting this section of the original game was going to be a bit difficult.

Random points I never really mentioned:
- Combat is good, love it
- Pre-rendered scenes are gorgeous
- Queen's Blood is amazing
- Golden Saucer and Costa Del Sol are fucking beautiful, GS in particular I really loved just being in
- Party member AI is fucking stupid, I don't like the overreliance on Materia in order to get them to do certain actions.
- AP economy is wayyyyy too small, I finished the game and still had HP Up materia I got at the beginning of the game that still hadn't levelled up to the max
- Folio menu was ass
- Potions became useless within the first hour of play. What the fuck? I can't believe that, genuinely, probably the weirdest thing in the game. I became outleveled for a base potion within the first HOUR OF THE GAME.
- Random shit not being implemented, like why can't my chocobo jump? Would get annoyed being on a cliff and having to run allll the way down a hill path instead of just being able to jump and glide so they can have area-specific chocobo gimicks


Thats all, rant over. Very polarizing game for me.

What an absolute masterpiece. All versions of Persona 3 before had some flaws. It was either you couldn't control party members or the visuals were turned into a VN style game.

This game first of all is just gorgeous and they added some much needed things from Persona 5. The biggest thing for me is they made the social links a lot better you don't have to date all the girls now and the boys have events you can do too. While the side characters are mostly lacking compared to P5, the full voice acting for every social link more then makes up for it.

The combat is improved vastly thanks again to P5 and it's baton pass now called shifting. Tartarus was good before but it's even better now with lots more to do do and visual differences for each sector.

The story is of course amazing. The big thing to take away is this game is dark and the story isn't afraid to get super dark with consequences that make every moment hit. I won't spoil the ending but it still really shocks me and Persona has replicated this type of ending to this day.

Go play this amazing masterpiece right now if you haven't. This is the version you have been waiting for

I always find it particularly interesting when I find a piece of media that doesn't do anything novel, but is wholly unique all the same. Momodora: Moonlit Farewell is that. It has made a clean, inviting home in its niche, and it is inviting you to come visit for a nice chat.

Momodora as a series does not bring any wild ideas to the metroidvania genre, but you do play as a priestess with a maple leaf for a weapon, and I'm fairly confident in saying it's the only metroidvania like that. These are games whose strengths are in how they tailored a set of existing gameplay ideas to the developers particular tastes. The appeal is less in discovering some new place to explore, but in exploring a familiar place in a different way. It's something fresh, but not something that requires you to learn a whole new way of living.

Moonlit Farewell is a what you'd expect from the genre, but it's not everything you'd expect from the genre. It's a carefully chosen subset of elements that are a result of the developer's limits and experience—having already released several games of this style and learning what they do and don't like to do.

This is a long-winded way of saying the game is a lightweight, streamlined, and polished metroidvania, and I quite like it for those qualities. Compared to Reverie Under the Moonlight, the previous in the series, it feels better to play, is more satisfying to play, sits at a perfect length, and maintained a pleasant experience for almost the entire runtime—though I'm sure my familiarities with the quirks of Reverie may have biased me a bit in that aspect.

Oh, and above all of that, this game is gorgeous and I adore the art style. I played it on a Steam Deck OLED and made sure to show it off to all my friends and family and they all quite agreed. The scenery, the effects, Momo's animations. It is all very pretty. The artist(s) should be proud.

From a gameplay side, I will say that I did find some of the boss fight balancing a bit uneven. Mostly dipping into a bit too easy on several of them. But one counter to that is that I seem to have become a bit of a power gamer over the last three years, and I found a particularly lethal combination of the traits available which the average player may not. The other counter is that easy is fine if it means it's staying smooth and relaxing.

Maybe it's the FromSoft brainrot that causes me to even feel the need to justify that, but there it is.

Whereas I would have only really suggested Reverie Under the Moonlight to people plumbing the depths of this genre niche, Moonlit Farewell has reached a point of polish and artistic appeal where I will happily recommend it to anyone. It is the type of game that—to me—justifies delving into a niche and which can introduce the curious to that kind of spelunking. It is a very nice little game and I would love to see more people appreciate it.

One of the most unique RPG's I've ever played with incredible story and characters. The game has a nice contrast of being very whimsical but also very dark. The OST is awesome and the combat, although very simple, is enjoyable and has a unique spin on status effects with emotions. In an unexpected way, it's also one of the creepiest games I've ever played (even more than many horror games I've experienced).

Easy recommendation especially for anyone looking for a unique/different experience from a JRPG.

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.

While there may never be a definitive version of Persona 3, I think Persona 3 Reload is, at the very least, the best version of Persona 3 hands down. This is an incredible remake by Atlus that far surpasses the original. The music, art style, UI, and combat got a big improvement while still keeping the story and characters of P3 nearly 1:1 with the original.

My major issues with the game are stuff that I had issues with the original:
- The structure of the game can still get repetitive. I still prefer the palaces/dungeons of later entries
- The villains are still a little meh but they are slightly improved in Reload
- Some of the social links are not very good. They're not awful but later entries are just much better in quality. The fully voiced VA in each rank was great though

I wouldn't have minded if Atlus did rewrites and redesigns for these issues but I can also respect that they stuck to their guns and kept these things 1:1 to preserve the good and bad of Persona 3 similar to how Bluepoint Games did a near 1:1 remake of Demon's Souls to preserve its original design in a modern version.

While I still prefer P4G and P5R more as games, I think Persona 3 Reload has my new favorite final boss and ending in the Persona series. The music and scenes popped off in the end and had more impact than when I played the original. This is a must play for JRPG fans