It's really important for a tactics game to give you as much information as you need to be able to make informed decisions. If you don't have enough information then you're just guessing and it becomes hard to do anything tactically. Unfortunately, Ragnarok: Tactics hides or obfuscates too much information to be much fun to play. Too much of the combat felt like I was hoping for the best and finding out that, no, what I was hoping for wasn't going to happen because of information the game just didn't feel like giving to me. It makes combat very frustrating and when the first few hours of story weren't doing anything for me, it made me ask: Why bother playing this when there's so much else available. I could sit and play this (multiple times, as the game seems to suggest doing) but there are so many better things out there to try instead.

On a technical level, this game is an improvement over Yakuza 1 in pretty much every way. It is genuinely incredible that they were able to make such a huge jump in quality in only a year between the two games.

The main plot of the game is kind of a mess all throughout but especially falls apart in the finale. The good bits of the story can be very good and it is compelling all the way through but I dislike the bad parts of it too much to come away from the game feeling positive about the story.

It's interesting seeing this game after having played the remake a year ago. There's an entire minigame (with its own subplot) about working as a host, the hostess management minigame is completely different, and there's even an entire third city (although it's tiny compared to Sotenbori and Kamurocho). Between the differences and how well the game holds up, I think this is genuinely still worth playing.

Watch_Dogs 2 is a pretty clear step up over the first game in every possible way. It feels better to play, the world is more interesting, much of the excessive fluff got trimmed out, and (most importantly) the characters are actually likable now! Marcus, Sitara, Wrench, Josh, and Horatio are all great characters that were a ton of fun every time they got to have some dialogue together.

The main story did have some issues in that it felt like disjointed series of short stories with little to no impact on one another. In addition to that, the antagonist feels like he only matters in a conceptual way rather than any him be any actual threat. This all made the story a little tough to feel motivated to complete and resulted in the ending feeling a bit flat.

My final issue is that the politics of this game are in a weird place. The game paints itself as very rebellious and anti-establishment and while it mostly is that, it doesn't seem to want to go all the way with it. For example, there's a mission where you find out that some cops are using data they get from ctOS to do illegal stuff with a gang. It'd be a great time for the game to go on about police abolition or about the ways in which police don't actually serve the people but instead it goes into a bland "we need to get rid of the Bad Cops so that the Good Cops can be in power instead" and it makes it fall flat. The whole game ends up feeling like it wants to be perceived as progressive and very far left when it really isn't.

But overall, it is an enjoyable thirty-ish hours. Not my favorite of Ubisoft's open world games but a very solid one.

I don't usually play mobile games but I've been having to see doctors pretty often lately but this has helped keep my anxiety in check while I'm in waiting rooms trying not to be stressed about the disaster that is the American healthcare system.

Although since I have an older/smaller phone, it makes the bigger puzzles hard/almost impossible to do. But there's enough of the smaller size ones that I still have plenty to work through.

Pleasant lil game.

I wish I liked this game as much as everyone else does, I really really do. It's got some of the best feeling turn-based combat in the franchise (and probably in the whole genre) but so much of the rest of the game just didn't click for me. I liked a few of the characters, but my favs were all left with rather short and unsatisfying storylines whereas the characters I didn't care about very much all the focus. On top of that, the voice acting is.... well it's historically significant and it's important that it's there but it's really rough. It was genuinely hard for me to sit through all those cutscenes.

This game is massively important to Final Fantasy and to JRPGs and maybe to gaming as a whole but to revisit it in the modern day is tough, especially for someone like me with no nostalgia for it.

ReCore has a lot of cool ideas and sometimes those come together into a really fun game but just as often they fall apart leave you with a frustrating mess.

The combat is the biggest weakness. It's easy to feel very overwhelmed by enemies due to sheer number of things they throw out at once, the very hard-to-see indicators for things outside of your view, and the lock-on not functioning very well in general. When only faced with two or three enemies it's fine but when it locks you into a small arena with seven or eight enemies, it's a massive pain to get anything done. Then, when you're out in the overworld, having enemies constantly pop up out of the sand feels like a nuisance after the first handful of hours.

The platforming usually feels quite nice. The combo of double jumping and boost dashing feels great. Then, throw in the spider climb and glider robot for some extra spice here and there and it's actually pretty good. But when I got into the dungeons that offer 'challenges' it starts to get messy. It's not always clear what they're asking you to do and so I ended up having to trial-and-error my way through it, occasionally feeling like I accomplished it in some unintended method that ultimately leaves it feeling very unsatisfying.

The story and writing isn't really anything special. It's not particularly good but it's not particularly bad. It gets the job done and nothing more.

I got the game on sale for five dollars and it's hard to recommend for getting if you'd have to spend more than that. It's a bundle of cool ideas that are interesting to see but it's too often veers into un-fun frustration to really be recommendable.

Fun lil toy of a game. You're a lil guy in a ball and you roll around, collecting other balls (but not other lil guys) and sometimes you put those balls in or near something to activate it and open up a path to let you go somewhere else (where there are more balls and more things). Everything makes pleasant little beeps and boops and honks while some pleasant music plays.

My only issue is that for how chill this is, some of the platforming felt too finicky. I don't want to re-try a jump five or six times, I just want to vibe!!

I had initially heard this game pitched as "Left 4 Dead but with a Warhammer fantasy coat of paint" and it is extremely that. I never played much Left 4 Dead because I never had a consistent group to play with but it was generally fun and, hey, guess what, this is also generally fun.

My one major issue with this is that there seems to be more of a hurdle to getting started and actually understanding everything than there really needs to be? I played as Sienna (the fire mage) and there's some mechanics about her that the game just simply doesn't explain. Intricacies for how particular skills or interactions work, whole mechanics and systems, things just go unexplained and it's left up to you to learn them via trial and error or to look them up outside of the game. I dunno, I think that, at the very least, a game should explain how the character I'm playing as works.

Also, this is a bit more of a pet peeve for me, but the first thing that happened when I completed the tutorial is that the real money shop guy beckoned me over to advertise expensive cosmetics to me and, like, at least wait until I play the game a bit. I know this is just sort of a 'modern video game monetization' thing but come on.

Might return to this in the future but have to shelve it for now because my computer is too old to keep the framerate at a playable state when there's a big horde of things attacking.

A game that bravely asks the question "what if Vampire Survivors had an aesthetic that was more appealing to Alexa, specifically, and also all the characters were like cool women and witches and stuff". And, well, it turns out the answer to that question is that it'd hold my attention about as long as Vampire Survivors did. I dunno, it's just kinda boring to play! I'm just not really feeling any strong draw to do more runs. I did a couple and it was whatever. If I needed something to play while listening to a podcast there's about dozen other games I'd go back to before this one (or another entry in whatever this genre is called). It seems Fine if you're into this genre, I guess.

I made the mistake of going into this game immediately after finishing 7th Dragon 2020. I thought "Okay, I was a little tired of the relatively basic mechanics by the end of the first game but I'm sure the sequel will mix things up enough to make it feel fresh!" Unfortunately, 7th Dragon 2020-II is functionally identical. There's one new class that I didn't particularly care for and a bunch of balance changes that, as far as I could tell, only made my characters weaker. That second part is important because it made the game feel like it was pushing me to grind a bunch of extra levels right at the start because no one could survive more than two or three hits and all the costs of skills went way up so I couldn't get much stronger without committing to lots of extra fights.

On top of all that, the story sets itself up to be an exact repeat of the previous game. Oh, you killed the True Dragon who is a god that created all other dragons? Well, there's six more attacking Tokyo, please go kill them. Maybe there's something interesting later on but getting what appears to be largely the same story isn't worth the investment right now. Maybe someday I'll return to this and enjoy it, but not right now.