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This game is like a mosquito bite that keeps on itching the more you scratch it and it never gets more satisfying or relieving but you just have to keep on scratching it because it won't go away
Also the developer is a real piece of work so that doesn't work toward this game's favor

Suda fans will play an actually fun game that isn't esoteric, boring, or full or dogshit and say "wow this sucks ass!"

Played this game back when it launched initially on PS4 and loved it, but over the years I've come to develop some retroactive opinions on it that soured it in my mind. A friend recently gifted me the game for PC however so I decided to take the time to re-assess how I feel about it and I came out of it pleasantly surprised. Here's a hodgepodge of my feelings towards the game split into positive, neutral, and negative sections.
+ Still arguably the best story RGG has ever written, everything's so well thought out and the mystery that's built and slowly unraveled is intensely interesting at all times. Nothing that is mentioned is forgotten and everything ties up really neatly by the end.
+ The final long battle and final boss segment is one of the best in the series, the stakes feel incredibly high for Yagami and the stormy setting fits the tone perfectly. I'm also a fan of the little story bit in the middle since it brings the plot back around from Yagami's start, but I know that part's a bit divisive.
+ The English voice cast is amazing and I struggle to think of any particularly bad line reads. The main characters have great chemistry and the VAs definitely seemed like they enjoyed themselves while recording. Yagami, Kaito, and Sugiura are standout performances but I also loved Ayabe and Saori too. All of the antagonists also do an incredible job at being conniving and downright evil at times.
+ The theme of the importance of friends and allies really shines, even with 7 directly following it and using a similar theme. Building up your reputation through both the story and side content really makes Kamurocho feel like it's important to Yagami and vice versa. Scenes like the one after the amour fight or the Golden Mouse side case are great examples of that.
+ The SP and money grind weren't nearly as bad as I remembered, if you're using growth extracts during the story you'll get tons of SP and only need to chug a dozen or so of the expensive hug bombs to top off the required SP.
+ The OST is insanely good from beginning to end, better than most games in the series. Standouts include Destination, Alpha, and It's Showtime, but I'd say every track is really good at worst.

= The combat isn't as frustrating as I remembered but your options are more limited than I remembered, there aren't a lot of heat actions and comboing is limited due to the lack of any useful juggle setups without the use of EX mode and style switching being incredibly slow. Wall grabs are also incredibly overpowered and it feels like you're meant to rely on them waaaaay too much.
= Extracts are cool but their use is still pretty limited, I wish there was more variety and the materials for making them were both less rare and less frustrating to get while also letting you hold more.
= The story pacing is very inconsistent, the first half of the game is glacial in pace (most notably chapters 1, 2, and 3) while the second half is in constant "go-mode", which is when it's at its best.

- Street fights are fucking incessant and never end and the extract to get rid of them is too costly to craft constantly. To add to that, the Keihin Gang system is awful and doesn't add to the game at all. It needed a toggle once you completed a certain side case so you aren't forced to engage in it.
- Damage output is incredibly inconsistent and unbalanced. Having no damage ups in the early game was fine but midgame I needed at least one for a few notable battles. This lead to a certain mid-late game boss getting decimated while the buildup to him was an actual challenge. Late game I decided to max out my damage for Amon and proceeded to crush the final boss. Most Dragon Engine games have this issue, having damage ups as an upgrade is never good.
- Side content sucks in general, the selection of minigames is incredibly weak, uninteresting, and unrewarding. The side cases don't fare much better, I'd argue 3/4 of the side cases are forgettable at best and downright boring at worst. There are a handful of standouts but I'd say they don't outweight the bad ones.
- Yagami's characterization in the side content is incredibly inconsistent. They sometimes just decide he's a perverted creep for no reason and act like it's a funny joke, then you play the story or do another activity and he's nothing like that. The girlfriend system also sucks and none of the women are written in an interesting way, plus it feels creepy for 39 year old Yagami to be dating a 19 year old.
- Some incredibly important skills are unlocked waaaaaay too late, with chapter 5 and 6 being the main point for a lot of them with the requirement of Quickstarter. I shouldn't need to go through almost half the game to be able to increase my Heat Gain or get Re-Guard, and I can't imagine how frustrated I'd be if I missed getting Double Quickstep since if you miss it in chapter 1, you can't get it until chapter 5.
- Tailing is downright miserable and used far too much. I don't think a single tailing mission is fun despite the fact you do more or less at least one per chapter in the story alone. The one you do in chapter 12 is a desperately miserable example of the mechanic at its worst, with the tailing mission lasting nearly ten whole minutes.
- The Amon fight is terrible due to inconsistency. His gimmicks are neat but he's either a brick wall that's a frustrating ordeal to even get to phase two or he decides to be incredibly docile and you can nuke his ass from orbit in seconds. The reward for beating him also isn't worth it since you can easily get ¥1,000,000 from a single good King Koro-Nyan in VR.
- Too many enemies have too many stun attacks. Some bosses can decide to stunlock you by repeating them over and over and you can't even block them with Re-Guard once you've been hit by the first one. Some of the Keihin Gang members and the final boss are notable examples of this.
- The completion process is downright terrible. KamuroGO formats store completion TERRIBLY and makes it annoying to keep track of every location. I desperately wish it was an alphabetized list instead of a grid, but it's at least separated between restaurant and minigames. City completion is even worse, with garbage requirements like "Defeat 1000 enemies with each style", "Play 300 minigames", "Destroy 1000 objects in battle", and "Use EX Actions 300 times". I love 100%ing this series but I genuinely did not enjoy 100%ing this game both times I've done it.

All-in-all, Judgment is really damn good. I think the game's a must play for the sake of the story alone and it stands as a really solid entry in the series, but the side content isn't something worth bothering with aside from a handful of decent side cases. Definitely a solid entry in the series but I'd struggle to find where I'd place it in order from best to worst.

I've put almost 500 hours into Fallout 4. I've played Fallout 3 dozens of times. I've explored every inch of Skyrim. I've grinded out all skills to the max level in Oblivion. I like Bethesda games. Starfield though? Starfield will never get me back. Some people are harsh critics of most of Bethesda's post-Morrowind content, saying they're bland and sanded down to the point of blandness. Starfield has less of an edge than a perfect sphere.

I think in my 100 or so hours, there was exactly one interesting quest called Operation Starseed; an extremely distant planet had a colony of clones of historical figures from Earth's history and several factions had been made between them based on wanting to leave or not. This quest had some interesting moral choices based on the concept of if a clone would act the same as their genetic base; more or less the moral argument on if behavior is genetic or learned. On top of that, the dungeon you had to crawl through was incredibly unique, it wasn't possible to have an "everyone wins" ending to the quest, and you got Amelia Earheart as a companion in your ship.

Meanwhile every questline and every other quest was boring at best, total shit at worst. None of them were well written nor did any have interesting plot beats. Several ended before they could even build up any momentum leading to an incredibly flat, wet fart of an ending without any worthwhile reward. When you can land on a planet and kill a single enemy and get more experience than a 20 minute long quest, what's the point of questing? On top of that, most quests are simply a matter of entering loading zones repeatedly with little to no content to make it enjoyable. Where's the Oasis? Where's the Whodunit? Where's the Lost to the Ages? Where's the Brain Dead? Even though I praised Operation Starseed, I don't even think it compares to any of the listed missions.

On top of all this, despite what Bethesda has said I found Starfield to be the buggiest game of theirs by a country mile, even more than launch Skyrim. Major NPCs not spawning, enemies refusing to function properly, entire planets not spawning in when landing, constant crashes, terrible performance, the list goes on. I feel they were straight up lying when they said this was the least buggy release yet.

I bought a GPU for this game and I regret it. The specific Amazon listing I bought to get the game bundled in was a scam, on top of the game genuinely sucking ass. If the launch version of this game sucked ass, I cannot imagine how bad the game would have been if it had released a year prior as initially planned. I wish this game's tone was closer to that of the animated three-piece series they put out before the game came out. I wish the combat was better than their game from 2008. I wish there was a reason to care about this game, but there isn't.

At least it functions properly.

Eastward made me sad. Not because the game wanted it to but because it's missing so much of its potential. I had been excited for this game for years, I remember seeing it pop up on my Twitter feed several years before it came out. Every new image and video, every new character, every piece of music had me increasingly excited. As time went on I forgot about it and it came to my attention again when it was added to Game Pass. It was finally time to satisfy this urge and play one of my most anticipated games in a long time.

And it was boring. Almost everything in this game is boring. The combat, the exploration, the writing, the side content. Almost nothing about this game is engaging. The art is downright gorgeous and straight up alive at times and the music is phenomenal and fitting at just about every single moment, but other than that this game just doesn't work. There is very little about this game that I will remember fondly but godDAMN this game is so good artistically. I want this team to make more games but I want them to learn how to make it fun first.

An insane man would consider these machines to be normal, quite pleasant even

On one hand, I love Star Wars and FPS games. On the other hand, I don't love getting nauseous by simply turning while moving

Crazy that all Flying Wild Hog had to do to make a good Shadow Warrior game was get good voice actors, remove the previous shitty leveling systems, and make a shorter game

Signalis is a perfect game in the presentation aspect - every single bit of this game gels thematically and hits a spot I've wanted for ages. The art style is gorgeous, the visuals are flawless, the sound design is amazing, the worldbuilding is impeccable. I'm normally not a fan of games where the plot is obtuse and requires the player to piece it together but Signalis creates such an intriguing world that it's impossible to resist it. I can't get over how much I love everything about this game - except the gameplay.
I love survival horror games. Signalis made me incredibly frustrated for numerous reasons. The six item inventory limit doesn't add to the game (as of the 25th the devs made it so the flashlight and eidetic modules don't take up a slot by default which is a great change but I didn't get to experience that since the Game Pass version didn't update). Most of my experience was running with nothing but a pistol and flashlight (sometimes not even those), filling up my inventory in two rooms, then run back through enemies to empty my inventory. I never felt like I should kill enemies either because they'd get up like RE1R crimsonheads (I wasn't aware that they had a limited amount of times they could get back up). I can't say it was challenging because I finished the game with a fuckton of ammo and heals in my item box so it felt like the inventory limit was entirely artificial.
On top of that, the key hunting got incredibly tedious a few areas in which, combined with the incredibly limited inventory, lead to endless backtracking that wasn't fun, difficult, or beneficial. I will say the fact you can enter your inventory, notes, and radio while interacting with a puzzle is incredibly convenient and makes for a lot of saved time. The puzzles for the most part were solid and made sense but a few left me stumped in a way that I couldn't intuit or the answer wasn't clear (namely the tarot card puzzle and dials near the end, don't use the words "sun-like" and have both the sun and the star as a tarot card since the sun is literally a star). Out of my complaints for this game, this is near the bottom but compared to other survival horror games I was mildly disappointed by this aspect.
At the very end, I came out of this game wanting more from the developers. I fail to think of any other games that nail the PS1 aesthetic as good as this and the music, visuals, and gameplay are so cohesive that I need something else like this. I don't care if it's another survival horror, if it's something closer to Parasite Eve, if it's an RPG in the same world. Despite my dislike for the gameplay, I'm desperate for more.

I remember having a rough go of it with this game as a child and I was shocked to come back to it and have a similar experience. Pokemon XD is rough in the best way possible, as once you hit the halfway point the difficulty ramps up and the game does not hold your hand. You've got a limited roster of Pokemon (both shadow and normal), generation 3's bad movesets and limited TM selection, a complete lack of an easy way to grind money, and an exponential difficulty curve that does not let up. The only other game in the series I've played where you have to strategize for your boss fights was near the end of Legends: Arceus, but this knocks those fights out of the park. I'm praying either TPC or Genius Sonority manages to either port this and Colosseum to modern hardware or that they get another shot to make a similar experience because there aren't any other games in the series like these two.

2021

One of the realest games out there, the character performances are so fucking fantastic and the dialogue exchanges feel so natural that it's a shame it's stuck in what's effectively a walking sim/visual novel. I would have enjoyed this much more if it was done in a non-interactive environment as I feel playing as the protagonist doesn't add anything to the experience. At an hour of playtime I feel Adios is worth experiencing just for the core performances of the actors, as I struggle to think of a game that hits the same kind of realism this small cast does.

There were two moments throughout Borderlands 3 where the game gave me any form of positive emotions. The first was a side mission called "Life of the Party" where you attend a celebration of life for someone who recently passed away. You play several little games and you're given the opportunity to one-up the score of the recently deceased, but if you don't you're rewarded with a very genuine and very solemn response from the game. For once in the 50 hours I had played up to that point, the game didn't feel like it wasn't trying to peddle its new stand-up routine and it gave me a moment to think about what it could have done more.

The other moment was the Bounty of Blood DLC. After trudging through the other three expansions and the Designer's/Director's DLCs, I was praying this last one would at the very least end quickly. Instead I got a genuine homage and adaptation of classic western themes that, while occasionally quippy, managed to hold my interest the entire time. The narration was charming and the characters were much more realized than anything in the base game. It felt closer to the roots of the series with generally deadpan plot beats and darker humor and it made me miss the days of playing Borderlands 1.

Past that, it's astounding to me that this game has any positive reception. Everyone's heard the take "the story sucks but the gunplay is good" followed by "Borderlands never had a good story so who cares". Both of these points deserve a large amount of scrutiny as the issues lie much deeper to the core of this game.

The gunplay, while improved from Borderlands 2 to 3, relies on improving your loadout through picking up gear from enemies or chests (no shit, I know). The issue is that if you aren't using one of a couple dozen legendary weapons, most of which come from the latter half of the game, you're putting yourself at a severe handicap. Anything worse than a legendary deals pitiful damage while also not having any unique gimmicks to potentially make them stand out in your arsenal. I get that BL2's standards of regearing every few levels suck major ass but when you get a weapon at level 12 and you're using it until nearly level 28, there's something wrong with your base weapons (BL1 had the excuse of being effectively the first game in the genre which gives it a pass in my mind).

When it comes to early progression, you have no reason not to grind out the legendary sniper rifle from the first map and the legendary pistol from the second because nothing else comes close in damage potential and nothing will for a long time. This leads to very little in build variety since even if you use differing characters and skills, you'll be using the same weapons every single time. Doing side missions doesn't alleviate the issue either as nearly every single mission reward is near worthless from my experience. Contrary to BL2 where many mission rewards throughout the entire game were incredibly useful for pushing you forward through the game. It all circles back around to farming the same enemies over and over to get the best legendary drop out of the massive piles they explode into, which makes the name legendary oxymoronic.

Every single criticism to the plot is 100% deserved. There are very few, if any, good moments as you progress through the story. This applies to the side missions and DLCs as well, as they're trying so hard to be funny at nearly every single moment (again, Life of the Party and Bounty of Blood withstanding). The very few moments the game shows restraint tend to consist of some of the most baffling and jarring choices the writing team could come up with. None of what I'm saying here is new, but there's nothing wrong with restating the lack of core quality.

Borderlands has had good writing before. BL2 has some great moments, from the twist and betrayal of using Wilhem's power core, to the death of Angel and Handsome Jack's response to it, to the Tiny Tina DLC and its solid campaign direction and heartfelt emotional conclusion. The core team at Gearbox is capable of making good writing choices on their own. If you extend it to other Borderlands properties, Tales from the Borderlands is consistently touted as one of the best Telltale games to be released and there was a lot Gearbox could have learned from it (I swear I remember some articles from before BL3's release saying they took lessons from the game but I can't find them and it's very obviously not the case). The Pre-Sequel also had a solid core plot from beginning to end and it did a great job showing Jack's character progression, letting serious moments settle, and best of all the Claptastic Voyage DLC which is one of the best pieces of Borderlands media in my opinion. The point is, the world of Borderlands is capable of having good stories to tell and nobody should settle for the trash Gearbox has decided to continue pursuing.

Borderlands as a series isn't in a good place in a critical sense. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is so devoid of content that even the most diehard of Borderlands fans won't touch it. New Tales from the Borderlands is a miserable experience from beginning to end. The movie has been in development hell for years and takes the plots of the first two games and puts them in a trash compactor. I don't see this series going on much longer and in my humble opinion this game was the first domino to fall.

No matter the monster, big or small, I'll hit it with my big fucking sword til it falls.

I have not seen a game with such inventive mechanics like this used to such a little degree. Beautiful art style, absolutely insane music, novel game mechanics, silly but fitting plot; every little bit of this game is so neat, interesting, and unique and the fact it's only 90 minutes is criminal. It feels like the first chapter in a game that doesn't exist that really needs to.