Play the originals.

The visual upgrades arguably make the games look worse, especially for Budokai 1 where everything looks like shiny plastic. Budokai 3 isn't nearly as bad but still suffers from oversaturated colors & too much bloom.

And as for the elepahnt in the room: the replaced soundtrack. I don't care about "plagarism", the original soundtrack was a home run chock full of bangers and it's a damn shame they aren't in this collection. Idk how licensing works in Japan, but people sample beats from different songs all the time in their music, it's really not a copy/paste like everyone makes it out to be.

As someone who has played this game for 10+ years throughout their childhood into adulthood, I cannot recommend newcomers play this game. Developers refuse to double down & improve their bread & butter games in a timley manner, and instead put their time & money into countless side projects that don't go anywhere. The core gameplay experience is centered around farming for aestherics or spending real life money on aesthetics. Most players resort to botting software to automate the monotnous gameplay loops that offer no real challenge outside of testing your sanity.

Many of us who still play do so for nostalgic reasons, and have been aronnd since the first year or two when things were still fresh. Best part of the game is the community of passionate fans & talented artists; if you want to at least appreciate the artwork of the cosmetics you can just follow the twitter pages & AQW Reddit. I always find myself coming back to check in just becasue it's the MMO I grew up with, but it's undeniably in a sorry state.

One of the all time great RPGS. Won't get into graphics too much since games in general from this time period don't have the best models/textures & so on. Starts off strong & keeps the momentum going pretty much all the way to the end. Only really takes 10-15 min to get into the action with the first dungeon, and from there you jump right into the world of Hyrule. The variety of dungeons & available weapons to use keeps things interesting, no place really feels like a retread or chore to get through. Compared to future Zelda titles with ambitious overworlds & narratives, this feels much tighter. Great story, music, gameplay, & just a well rounded experience.

One of my all time favorite childhood games, love the music and characters. Unfortunatley this game has aged badly like many early 3D games from the late 90's & early 2000's. Momentum during many of the speed & mech levels is constantly killed by the archaic camera system & janky collision detection with environments, and they somehow made the treasure hunt levels even worse with a gimped radar compared to the first game. The best levels are still a lot of fun to play in stage select but the story mode overall is a one & done for me. Battle mode & chao garden are also great additons that made for a lot of memories growing up with family & friends. Overall still a very fun game but that story mode can be very rough at many points.