This isn’t the greatest game I’ve ever played. There’s a lot that’s objectively wrong with it: its translation is kinda shoddy, its battle system is overly simple and doesn’t do much different from its contemporaries, it’s a short RPG, its graphics and effects are somewhat lackluster, its story is fun but not especially chock full of deep layered characters, and it can be pretty clunky at times.

Yet despite this, I think Okage: Shadow King is a fantastic experience bursting with passion, humor and creativity.

Its art style and character designs burst with a nightmare flavor to them, and with the fairy tale way the story is framed, it makes sense to model them as such. They’re charming and unique. The characters themselves are fun too, while not deep, they’re hilarious(something shared with the game as a whole), and the story is surprisingly layered and intriguing.

Even the gameplay I enjoy. I like it for its relative simplicity, even without diversity in character builds, min/maxing or anything like that, it’s still fun in its simplicity I feel.

Okage is a definitely a game without a place to belong, made too soon for many to appreciate its humor and soul, and too late to be considered a classic in its own merit.

I think it’s a definitive cult classic, a strange, surreal, but heartfelt RPG journey that you wouldn’t be remiss in trying out if any of that sounds fun to you.

Episode 1: A Knight to Remember: 4 out of 5
-A lovely opening chapter to the adventure of Kings Quest. It's colorful, funny, filled with great characters and obtuse but satisfying puzzles, a great story and just is lovely to experience. The lack of a skip function does make certain bits tedious however.

Episode 2: Rubble Without a Cause: 3/5
-This episode features a largely self-contained setting that just isn't as interesting as the previous episode, and the puzzles can be frustratingly obfuscated and obscure. Still a fun time, but not as good as the previous episode.

Episode 3: Once Upon a Climb: 4.5/5
-A lovely episode that takes the self contained setting of Episode 2 but makes it better through a lovely romance story and genuinely fun moments, one of the best so far.

Episode 4: Snow Place Like Home: 4/5
-I like this one more than most it seems, but it's really an subjective opinion. It's very puzzle focused rather than on exploration. Still very fun though and very heartfelt.

Episode 5: The Good Knight: 4.5/5
-Comes full circle and takes the most after the first episode, and endcaps the story in a very bittersweet way. More focused on the world and exploring rather than a self-contained setting, and this is done for the better.

People played this game for money.

Can you believe that?

People played this game for large sums of cash in professional tournaments.

Baffling. This unbalanced clusterfuck was played professionally for YEARS and people got PAID to play it.

And I love it. It's such a genuinely fun fighting experience with a solid roster, tons of variety, and an impressive visual style with a comic book flair that just pops and makes everything look so good. It's unbalanced as all hell and there's tons of broken nonsense in it, but it's still a great time.

Great fighting game. Can't believe it was played for money.

Before growing up and having to embrace adulthood, and all the reality that came with it, there was a time where you could turn on your television and be whisked away into a world of colorful heroes, giant robots, cheesy fights and enough transformation poses to guarantee that you accidentally break at least something in your house when you mimicked them. But, just for that half an hour, you could imagine yourself as a hero, a stalwart defender of justice and peace, fighting monsters, aliens, mutated creatures and really anything that seems evil. It's a wonderful feeling, and the Wonderful 101 wants you to relive the days of doing silly poses to the rainbow adorned heroes taking on the bad of the week.

Here, alien invaders, the GEATHJERK, have launched their assault on our great planet Earth. And here, you take control of not one, not two, but an legion of 100 heroes united to take them on.

Essentially, imagine Pikmin, Super Sentai, and Kamen Rider were blended together into a wonderful, over the top, challenging, but obtuse action game. Don't let it's appearance fool you: this is a Platinum Games game, and as such, it's all about the frenetic, stylish, and challenging action gameplay.

The main attraction here is the system known as the Wonder Liner. By drawing a shape(in the case of this remaster, using the right stick), you can form a specific weapon called a Unite Morph such as a fist, a sword, a gun, and much more. The bigger the shape, the bigger the damage and the bigger the morph. But this comes at a cost: the 100 heroes in your group are essentially your resources, and by drawing a circle around helpless civilians on each level, you can recruit more and more to your ranks, including unique heroes. The Liner also uses the Unite Gauge, your battery level, as the size of the morph is also determined as such.

The Wonderful 101 is a hard game to get into at times. Something that likely precedes it's own reputation as an underlooked gem, and something indicative of Platinum's brand of game. However, W101 can be obtuse for the wrong reasons. The game at times simply does not clue the player into enough information to make judgments on what they encounter. While this allows players to discover new techniques and ways to play on their own, certain info feels it should be divulged. For example, the block ability of the game, Unite Guts, is only effective against specific types of attacks. Guts is shaped like a pudding, so it gives you a clue as to what it can block, but it still feels as if the game's logic is overriding what the player expects. The Guts, since the game doesn't say this outright, can be bigger or smaller depending on how big the current Unite Morph is, and as such can deflect bigger attacks. There's certain illogical aspects throughout the game that can make it frustrating at times. The game's learning curve is also notoriously high, but, when this game clicks, it becomes an wonderful classic.

More than just the satisfying and intricate gameplay, is the pure spectacle, passion and heroic spirit emanating from every piece of W101. From results screens for each fight taking the form of a newspaper congratulating our great heroes for their valiance, to the insane presentation of boss fights through(a rare sight) fun quick time events that endow the heroic action unfolding before you.

The characters are also fun and surprisingly likable despite being essentially parodies. The game is also really, really funny with Platinum's goofy and earnest sense of humor that shines even beyond character interactions and to the gameplay itself in many surprising ways.

Passion is in it's purest form in this game. It's a passion project from Platinum, and it feels as such that you can't help but love it. If you can surpass the game's learning curve and ride with the game instead of fighting it, there's a truly unforgettable experience here.

Most of all, the game whisks you back to that innocent time, where you with all your heart cheered on the great heroes to defeat the cartoon bad guy. Wonderful indeed, and a wonderful game of pure heroic passion. Give it a try, you may just be surprised.

I don't get the critical acclaim, I really don't. This must be how people feel when they just don't gel with a popular game.

I still had a lot of fun with this game. The visuals are absolutely stunning, the music is amazing, and the characters are endlessly charming. But, this game fails as an RPG. The combat while having some depth just isn't that good and your tools end up being very limited. The game is incredibly linear, and honestly I'm not sure how on board I am with the fact this only equates to the first ten hours of the original. No overworld, bland, formulaic side quests, I couldn't experiment with the combat system because the game would not let me, it wanted to keep moving to each linear story beat without letting me just take in it's world. How great would this be if you could actually explore? The level cap is 50 but you really only need to be at about 30 for the "final boss". I'm even on board with the weird changes to the central narrative from the original! It's different! I think a lot of my gripes come from the fact this is a "Part 1" kind of game. I'll probably go into the next parts, but still, this installment just didn't land for me.

Style over substance, but not in the fun way.

I was really excited for this game for a long time. I had hailed this as the return of Obsidian with a game in the critical vein of New Vegas. They hype was real, and while I did have fun with this game, it felt way too short, too surface level, and just smacked of a game that was cut way, way too short. The story is fine, the moral complexities of dialogue and characters just aren't there. The characters are fine. Some stand out more than others like Parvati and Max, but they don't bring enough to the table to make them worth exploring. Gameplay is fine enough but nothing really stands out. And the game's length is an issue, because while a shorter RPG experience is fine and all, but the world of the game feels so sprawling, and you feel so excited to explore it, only for it to slam the doors on you when you start to hit it's stride. I hope the sequel is better and actually delivers on the sprawling world filled with satirical hyper corporate stories because that is interesting.

It's very middling, but it's a good foundation for the sequel, but doesn't stand on it's own.

“The wounds you dealt my soul will never heal.”

This game is astounding. For a long time, many wanted a game where you can be immersed as a samurai and shinobi, something a series like Assassins Creed seemed to fill that hole, but could never reach the artistic heights. Ghost does. It’s like an playable artistic masterpiece, a game that utilizes its setting to the utter fullest in so many beautiful ways. The story follows ideas set by classic samurai films, but with so much emotional heart, excellent acting, incredible characters and a gameplay system that makes this the ultimate feudal Japan immersion experience. Absolutely one of my favorite games of all time, and something you should experience if you haven’t already.

This game is so goddamn fun, if you put me into a empty room with this game and a bucket, I'd eat the bucket, and play this game for days. It's short, on a take your time playthrough, it's about 6 hours. But in this case, it's by design. It's meant to be replayed so you can get better and better. The gameplay is like a third person bullet hell, and has tons of hidden mechanics and strategies for shooting and punching the shit out of robots and looking stylish as hell while doing it. The story is there. It's more of a reason to give you the game to play, though I do like our main character, think there's a lot of charm there. If you love action games, you owe it to yourself to play Vanquish.

L.A. Noire I feel had a ton of untapped potential that could have been realized had the director of the game(total ass, look him up.), not sunk his own project. I think the game looks and feels great, the facial capture looks pretty good by the standards of the time(in certain cases it looks pretty odd), the investigation style play is intricate and fun, and the central story is pretty solid noir stuff. The open world is empty though, there's not much else to do besides drive around, which is funny cause the game as an option where an AI partner can drive for the player. The main interrogation gameplay though is pretty hit or miss. It's a neat idea, but the vagueness of the facial expressions don't really clue the player into the right choice to make. One day, a better crime noir game like this will come around and I will love it.

I think Borderlands 3 has the best, most smoothest gameplay in the series thus far. It's traversal is responsive and smooth, it just feels good to play. Otherwise, it's still more or less the same. The story...man I can't lie. It's bad. It feels like the writers of 3 saw the success of Tales from the Borderlands' narrative(which is excellent btw), and was so spited that they retconned and made characters shadows of what made them so interesting. It's unfortunate that the gameplay is JUST SO FUN, cause being here for the story is a bit of a waste.