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.

Time has not been kind to Mirror's Edge. I've seen so much praise for this game over the years and in retrospect, I'm assuming most people have not replayed it since release. Most of the praise I've heard has been for the general aesthetic, the world, and the core traversal system. What was rarely talked about were the mountains of issues the game has -
The controls were incredibly unresponsive. I can't count the amount of times I'd jump to a ledge or wall run and the game would eat my input and I'd have to try again.
The gunplay felt like an addition specifically so EA could call this an FPS. Guns feel bad to use with terrible spread, no scoping, the movement speed penalty, and lackluster sound design. I know they're optional to use for most of/if not all of the game but it felt like several segments railroaded you into using them instead of bashing your head against a wall to get around enemies.
The hand-to-hand combat system felt completely worthless due to enemies blocking your attacks near constantly. The only useful move is the disarm which is incredibly inconsistent and would not work despite the enemy guns flashing red or refusing to flash at all. The combat issue is expounded upon when you're introduced to the parkour trained enemies since they have nothing to disarm (again I know they're optional but at least one segment feels like it's
the recommended method of progressing).
Soooo many boring hallways and maintenance rooms are repeated constantly through the campaign and they don't add anything to the game. Hell, I found most of the interior segments to be frustrating or bland and they never really got better especially when you combine it with the unresponsive controls.
The story does very little to give you any drive to progress. The plot doesn't take advantage of its setting and I think the familial connection isn't strong enough for it to give enough motivation for the player to care.
I think the game's strengths are still noteworthy. The overall aesthetic is great and for a 2008 game it still looks phenomenal (if you can get past the awful bloom or the grey filter as you're being hit). The movement system feels fantastic when you're on open rooftops with lots of options to get to your objective. I haven't heard the music talked about much but it's used well in the appropriate situations. One of these days I need to replay Catalyst since it's been ages but I definitely remember enjoying it much more than I liked the original. I'd say Mirror's Edge is worth playing as a time capsule as Mirror's Edge was definitely novel and fresh when it came out but you can't expect much out of it as a modern experience.

What a wild ride, to think they did very little to improve on the original and the vast majority of changes make the game much worse. The biggest bad change is the whole crafting system, which I spent ages figuring out and working on a video explaining it all because it's total nonsense https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e82M7zj12g&t=22s&ab_channel=AllstarBrose

On its own, Ishin is a middling Yakuza game. Middle of the road story that's really slow but has a few decent highs, a weak selection of minigames, a bad selection of substories, some of the grindiest side content in the series, and combat that loses the refinement of 5 without the energy or synergy of 0's styles. If you look at it on its own, Ishin's probably a solid 6/10. Once you compare the changes between the original release and this one, you'll question what the hell RGG Studio was doing.

First off, why on earth is brawler so weak? It deals no damage compared to the rest of your styles and the combo speed boost does not help. Why is sword so slow? Why does wild dance do so little? Why is gun... well gun's mostly the same once you put a pierce seal on one since armor takes no damage from guns. The combat does not feel good, especially when compared to the original release. Ryoma falls over if an enemy so much as looks at him wrong and you gotta sit through a two second animation. There is no herculean spirit in this game (and stability is locked to brawler) so unless you wanna be on the ground for 1/5 of the time you're fighting, get good at those blocks and dodges (of which they locked komaki dharma tumbler to unarmed instead of it being for all styles for some reason).

Ishin was already known as one of the grindiest games in the series, but they did very little to fix it initially. A lot of the diligence records were made less grindy, but some of the worst ones (like Gion reputation) weren't changed at all. The seal system was completely ruined, but the video linked above covers that. At release material gathering was just as tedious as it was in the original, but a patch has been put out to remedy this at least. This game is still insanely grindy and frustrating for that purpose, don't say "that's just for 100% completion!!!" The game encourages you to use the blacksmith. If you're playing a casual playthrough, you won't be able to craft much of anything since so much requires dungeon grinding, plus none of the systems are explained to you. It's complete bullhonkey.

The casting changes are also a big misstep, one of the cool things about the original release was that because almost every character was similar to their mainline personality, you got to see interactions that never happened before. Seeing Mine as an ally to Kiryu or interacting with Saejima or seeing Baba showing off his deceptive personality from the start created interesting dynamics. Now? Oh cool there's Kuze, sounding more bored than ever and being an underhanded, dishonest bastard for some reason. Oh wow there's Han, who's a spy and torturer but sticks out like a sore thumb and acts completely different than he did in 7 (and in 6 he has one scene where he's ruthless). Oh cool there's Zhao, being shifty and shady when he's never been like that before. The only one that really fits is Awano, but that character was barely present anyway. All of this casting just screams fanservice for people who played only 0, K1, K2, and 7 instead of having a wide variety of characters from your whole legacy.

The original release of Ishin was in my bottom 3 for Yakuza games, but this one easily takes the cake for worst game in the series to me. I can't ever see myself replaying either iteration of the game, nor could I ever recommend them. If you want a gripping story with good emotional beats, play Y3. If you want a more serious, clinical, but tightly written story, play Judgment. If you want great side content, play 5. If you want great combat, play Lost Judgment. There's nothing Ishin does better, or even close to as good, as any other game in the series. Do not bother with this one.

Like everybody else’s review, this is gonna be a wall of text

With every Suda game I play, I question more and more why I continue playing them. Before playing TSC, I had played Killer7, the three main No More Heroes games, and Killer is Dead with it being the only game I came out of with a fully positive feeling. I find Suda’s writing style to be obtuse, esoteric, and obnoxious for the sake of being obnoxious. I don’t feel like he writes compelling characters as most just have a single gimmick they stick to for the entire story or their characterization feels like a mishmash of other characters from media he likes (he’s stated he’s inspired by everything he likes). I feel the worlds he writes tend to not live up to their potential, feeling like he either wasn’t able to finish all the background writing or he thought he did but there’s a lot missing. His newer works also feel masturbatory, he never stops referencing his old works and how freaking awesome! they are, which is funny to me because I think almost all of them aren’t very good

I was really hesitant to play The Silver Case. My friend @Kungfugloves spent weeks shouting about how insane and amazing it is, how “it doesn’t feel like a human wrote it” and how everything feels super unique and interesting. The thing is I hate visual novels. I do not find them engaging, I put gameplay and story on an equal pedestal and visual novels tend to be stripped of the former. As stated, I also do not like Suda’s writing and this is nothing but that. He tried to ease me in by saying one of the campaigns was written by someone else so I’d at least like that one. He bought it for me despite me telling him not to and so I bit the bullet and tried my hardest to go into it with an open mind

I remember watching my friend play this a few months prior to my playthrough and genuinely getting a headache from the UI and backgrounds. I didn't have as much of an issue with it this time around but I do think they're waaaay too busy and a lot of them seem like they're trying to be cryptic and weird for the sake of it. I also found the music to be largely uninteresting, very little of it being downright bad but there isn't a single song that ever stuck out to me and I couldn't even hum a single tune from the game if you stuck a gun to my head

But how did I feel by the end? I think “underwhelmed and frustrated” is probably the best descriptor. The story wasn’t nearly as complex or interesting as I was led to believe. I did have the context that the original release was 1999, but at the same time none of the concepts or story beats felt original to that time period. I’d definitely seen police procedurals of a similar nature as a child with my grandparents that followed a lot of the same beats. Mental clones had been done before in comics and manga well before this. Manic obsessions with serial killers had been a phenomenon for ages.

This game also plays like complete and utter shit. I go into further detail about it in Placebo later in this review but I cannot understate how little I enjoyed the simple act of playing this game. The little exploration you do isn't interesting and takes ages. The puzzles aren't interesting, fun, or engaging, searching every nook and cranny for what you can interact with is actively shit. I cannot and straight up refuse to understand anyone who says that playing this is a good time

The chapter I was most disappointed by was Parade, which my friend described as being “actually crazy, there’s explosions and kidnappings, it’s insane”. Those were present, sure, but the presentation of the game didn’t do the former any good and the latter felt like any other political kidnapping in any other media, topped off with Suda’s esoteric writing that I hate (I know the conclusion is very much easy to understand but the way it’s presented prior to the reveal really rubbed me the wrong way). Runner up goes to Spectrum which felt like an insane waste of time from beginning to end and Lunatics which doesn’t add anything except a miserable conclusion for the five fans of Moonlight Syndrome

I enjoyed Placebo more than Transmitter for the sole reason that the mundane life Tokio lived was more compelling to me than the police procedural of Transmitter. Seeing Tokio’s life descend and him slowly lose his mind as it becomes less clear what’s real and what isn’t was interesting and despite how much more fantastical parts of it were than Transmitter, the grounded tone felt less miserable than Transmitter. I did feel the gameplay was more frustrating though due to the constant back and forth of the three interactables in the room, not telling you which you should do first so you have to constantly trial and error which leads to reading the same lines over and over. I’m told this is a holdover from the original PS1 version but I feel they could have just cut out that spot in the room by the bed if they wanted to

The only other character I ended up liking by the end was Kusabi. I say this because he was easily my least favorite character for a lot of the game. Most of his dialogue early on felt like it was written around the profanity instead of the profanity being written in after, it felt like Suda just discovered the words “fuck”, “shit,” and “goddamn”. I do think he gets some nice development as the game goes on and he effectively becomes the protagonist due to how intertwined he is in everything, but I feel the way he’s more or less dropped at the very end (and how he’s used in the future games now that I’ve played them) is a major misstep

I understand TSC. I get what it’s trying to say. I don’t think it’s an interesting story, I don’t think anything it does is new, I feel it expects the player to never have even considered anything it says throughout its runtime which feels like an insult to the player’s intelligence. I do think the world of the 24 wards is really interesting and had me intrigued the whole time. This game’s world seems downright miserable to live in and the things they hint toward really had me itching for more, but unfortunately instead of any interesting developments I spent the final chapter going up and down ten buildings for some lore that easily could have been consolidated to a drastic degree. Maybe if I liked visual novels more I might have given this a higher score but I don't think that's the case

Most of the criticism I’m writing comes from during and after the playthrough but now that I’ve gone through Flower, Sun, and Rain (terrible) and MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY The 25th Ward (amazing), this game’s flaws mean much more to me because I can see what was possible in this world that has been created and how the establishing framework placed down in this game could have been so much better. I do think it’s interesting how prescient the writing is when it comes to the way government corruption and terrorism are presented, but I don’t think this game is very good in any way honestly

At least it got me to play The 25th Ward

An unnecessary prequel with a worthless story, frustrating combat encounters, and very little to give praise toward. When I played through all the God of War games in 2020, I specifically bought a PS3 so I could play this game and while I don't regret it due to homebrew being fantastic, I hated the game for the same reasons I do now except I played it on normal. Playing it on hard for the platinum trophy was like throwing myself at a wall over and over to see if I could break through it. Every combat encounter was frustrating, every puzzle wasn't fun, every platforming section was boring. The only thing I can give this game credit for is its visuals - it's absolutely gorgeous for a PS3 game. Much like Ratchet and Clank: Into the Nexus, you could have easily fooled me into believing this game was released on the PS4 due to the overall visual fidelity. Besides that, I don't think I'll ever have any reason to replay this game again and I'd even go so far as to tell people to steer clear of it.

Finished a replay of the trilogy today and it's crazy to me how good these games are as remakes. They still fundamentally feel like the original trilogy in their gameplay but the refreshing of the visuals and character designs are stellar (especially Spyro 1). Spyro 1 is my favorite game of all time so when this was announced I was both extremely excited and hesitant. When it finally came out, I was shocked at how well Toys for Bob managed to keep the spirit of the original games while keeping their identity completely intact. Spyro 2 and 3 are pretty obviously rushed compared to Spyro 1 but all three games are still fantastic and this is still a great way to play the games (I still prefer the originals but that's solely due to personal taste).

I never had the "pleasure" of playing GTAV in its prime back in 2013/2014. I eventually got to play it a bit on my Xbox 360 for a bit but the loading times and the torture mission completely put me off of it as a 13/14 year old. Years later after it was given away for free on Epic, I finally started a new playthrough without having played any other Rockstar game except Max Payne 3, so my judgment on the game isn't clouded by its predecessors.

The 2013 cynicism that fills this game is one of the most poorly aged facets of the overall experience. Nearly every single character in the game hates the world and everyone in it which makes meeting new characters completely uninteresting. On the other hand this makes the few positive or opportunistic characters a breath of fresh air, like the old couple Trevor meets, the daredevil Franklin hangs out with, Solomon the movie director, and Franklin himself. Other than when those characters are present, it feels like most dialog exchanges are simply characters espousing how much the world sucks and how everyone in it should die, them included. The trope is so played out at this point that it makes the main plot nearly unbearable to me. Characters in the side content are overall more bearable due to their eccentricities but they have another issue going for them.

Most of the content in this game just involves you driving for several minutes to sit and watch a cutscene for a few more minutes, to then drive for a few more minutes until something might happen, or maybe you'll just end up seeing another cutscene and driving some more. This is the one reservation I have towards the side content, as the lengthy drives combined with lack of rewards don't make going out of your way to do them fulfilling. I didn't find any of the minigames particularly enjoyable either which I feel is mildly inexcusable due to other contemporaries such as the Yakuza series having such engaging side content despite their tiny budget when compared to GTAV. There is one thing this game does quite well though.

The sandbox that is the open world has some of the highest potential for chaos and comedy. This is where the 1.5 stars for my rating comes from. I have had such a good time just causing chaos while driving around, my personal favorite thing to do being hitting motorcyclists as fast as I can. Just being able to cause mayhem at a moment's notice is one of GTAV's biggest strengths. Honestly I don't really have anything to say about this facet other than it's just fun compared to everything else in the game.

It feels odd to not have enjoyed the second highest selling game of all time. You'd think it'd be near flawless with the fact it's still making as much profit for Rockstar as it is, but when it comes to the singleplayer content there's very little I can give praise toward. Maybe there's something about the multiplayer that makes up for the missing 3.5 stars in my rating but I feel I'm about eight years too late to play it and I'm not willing to drop the real world money required to get fully invested into the game. I'm glad I played this game though, as an adult it's interesting to me since it's a time capsule of 2013 culture in terms of how vapid and worthless celebrity culture and media could be. I can't recommend it if you're looking for an interesting story or fun characters due to both being simplistic and cynical, but if you just wanna smack a car going 110MPH into an innocent person on a moped, I can't think of many better options.