I downloaded this game back when it was released on Game Pass and completely forgot about it until they announced it was leaving the service, so I decided to knock through it really quick since it looked interesting on a cursory glance. After beating it, I think I'd say I'm content with the experience I got and I wanna give it a full review because I haven't seen any discussion on it anywhere.

To start off, the visuals are fantastic and I'd say it's one of the most visually pleasing games on Unity. Normally I'm not a fan of voxel-based art styles since most games that use them tend to look a bit samey but Vanessa Chia and her team did a great job at creating their own style with the tools they used. On top of that, the lighting is fantastic and used very well in conveying tone and atmosphere. I feel it shines best in bigger, open areas where they use 2D pixel art to create distance detail, like sunsets, distant cities or neighborhoods, and plains. In terms of the world you're interacting with though, every area is full of lots of clutter and detail that all feels intentional and makes the world feel lived in which makes taking in your surroundings a joy. The music and sound design are also great, with the soundtrack matching very well with the lighting and coloring of every scene and the ambient audio creating good tension when needed. Props to Pusher for making an overall fantastic soundtrack.

When it comes to gameplay, Echo Generation has you going between two main methods - Paper Mario-style combat and point-and-click-style exploration. Every combat encounter is turn-based with you, your sister, and one of several pets you can find each having unique skills with different purposes. When you level up, you have the choice of choosing between upgrading each characters' health, strength, or skill points. I WOULD HIGHLY RECOMMEND upgrading health evenly with all characters, while having the humans focus on strength past that and your pet upgrade skill points. Your humans will be the main damage dealer and the pet will be mostly focused on healing them both. Unfortunately, early on the combat isn't particularly fun since most enemies can take you out really quickly unless you get a feel for the timed actions for blocking their attacks and landing yours. Thankfully the enemies are physically in the world except for two areas so you can pick and choose your fights, but there aren't that many and they respawn on a timer so if you need to grind, it can be a hassle. As your journey progresses, you can find comic books which expand a specific characters' moveset while adding more utility to their kit, like making the enemies bleed or poisoned or stunned. Unfortunately, these status effects aren’t that important as they all last for less than three rounds and deal only one damage per enemy turn while nearly every enemy has over 50 health past the 1/3 point.

My biggest gripe is that you don't have much of a reason to use anything except the first pet since it has a cheap healing move and every pet you get starts at level 1 in a game where grinding is time consuming. Once you hit about the 1/3 point in the game, every fight ends up going the same way with you spamming the same moves over and over just because they're more efficient than anything else. This slightly changes when you hit the 2/3 point and you swap to some new moves, but most of the encounters go the same way and take a while because enemies are extremely tanky and combat is a bit on the slow side. They are very well designed in a visual sense however. There aren't many enemies in the game overall, but all of them have incredibly good designs and the animation work done by Edgar Abrego and Ian Mendoza make them all stand out. I just wish fighting them was more fun.

Past the combat, the exploration and story progression were some of the few things I didn’t like from the start. Like I stated earlier, exploration is like a point-and-click adventure game where you search every nook and cranny for items to pick up and for where they might need to be used. The highly detailed environments you explore through are very nice like said earlier but some areas have so much clutter that it’s hard to tell what you can and can’t interact with. On top of that, there are a lot of items your character will just decide they need for an arbitrary reason so it makes the discovery process not very satisfying overall. At a certain point I needed to use a guide for several things because I missed small items or couldn’t find the single interactable object that I needed to progress. I feel it was an interesting choice since it encourages full exploration of each area, but some things felt really obscure and didn’t make sense to me. If you’re a more patient person than I am, this might be something about the game you’d enjoy but I personally didn’t like this aspect. The world is also a little annoying to navigate since there isn’t any form of fast travel, unless you can consider a bus to an area that’s disconnected to the rest of the map to be that. There are two points where the end of an area would connect with a previously closed off part of the map, but the movement speed of your character when sprinting is just slow enough to make it not feel convenient.

I don’t really have much to say about the story honestly. It’s fine, it’s not particularly interesting and felt like most of the plot just kind of happened without much cause or effect. I’m probably misremembering, but the initial drive for the story was also completely unrelated to what ends up happening, other than the inclusion of aliens. Early on, people around you are talking about you and your friends are going to make a movie about aliens the next day, but you’re not driven to go to the first plot beat of the game which involves the player heading to the right and entering a repair shop. Everything felt really disconnected and lacked any sort of stakes so I was hard pressed to care about what could happen next.

In the end, I would recommend this game to someone wanting a more puzzle focused game who is fine with the combat shoving you around a little bit. The story doesn’t do enough to keep you engrossed in it and the lack of variety is a little disappointing, but the art, music, and world are solid enough to make the experience enjoyable. If they were to make a follow-up, I would want them to make the combat have more variety in terms of enemies, useful skills, and options in the early game and I would love to see a quest log or character thoughts page or something to make the direction a bit less vague.

Mechanically, this game is a perfect evolution of the PS2 quadrilogy. Nearly every weapon feels really fun to use, movement is solid, shooting is the best it's ever been. However, this game falls flat for me when it comes to the story. The overarching plot never really grabbed me since Ratchet's family wasn't something that was ever really relevant to Ratchet ever before so it felt jarring for every game going on to focus on it. On top of that the robo-pirates, while silly, got a bit tiring by the end of their stay within the game and I was glad to have them gone. The interactions between Ratchet and Clank are still really solid but I miss other non-Qwark characters being present (which I understand why, whole new system and all). Overall I really enjoyed the game but it never hit the highs of the PS2 games for me.

An insanely weak ending to a six (seven) game saga, Yakuza 6 ignores damn near everything from the games that came before it and has one of the most anti-climactic endings I've seen. Add some of the worst side content in the series, boring substories (28 of the 51 either introduce you to or are the stories for minigames), and the worst combat in the series, and you have quite the worst mainline entry in the series. At least the story is good for a Yakuza game and it's by far the prettiest one in the series

Simple, short, and sweet. Fallout is one of those games I've kept in the back of my mind for years. I've been a fan of the series since I played 3 and New Vegas as a child, but up until yesterday I had only given 1 and 2 a few chances, with me giving up on 2 for being confusing and 1 for getting screwed over by bad random encounters. A friend of mine played through the game recently and he wanted to watch me play so I decided to pop it on and I had a fantastic time. I really like how brief the game is, I was under the impression I would be spending 30+ hours just lost but the game felt a lot more intuitive than I expected (on top of my friend giving me pointers here and there as well).
The combat is really satisfying as the progression of gear felt nearly perfectly balanced with my crit build, plus getting access to the Alien Blaster made most of the late game fights comically quick. This gear progression was tied in very well with area progression as well as each of the locations had a nice gradual increase in enemy difficulty and quest rewards. I liked the quests a lot as well, they're all simple in an enjoyable way where you don't have to deal with any convoluted solutions (hell, by the end of the game I just shot or exploded my way through any problems). The stories surrounding these quests were nice and simple too and they did a good job at developing the people and the world around them.
My only gripes come from the game's age. Pixel hunting for items is obnoxious and eye-straining, some of the skills, while potentially nice from a roleplaying perspective, were completely useless, the companion AI was borderline disabled at times, and a lot of the UI was either not intuitive or not convenient to use. None of those issues really took me out of the game so I can't hold them against it that much.
Overall, I'm shocked at how much fun I had with Fallout. I'm FAR from an "old game bad" kind of person but I was expecting the game's age to really damper my experience. All in all, I'm happy I spent time playing this game and I'm excited to play Fallout 2.

Despite the linear nature of the game, I had a ton of fun with DS3, especially after slogging through the misery of DS2:SotFS. DS3 feels much more modern than the games prior, for better and worse. Level design doesn't feel as inspired as DS1, but combat is insanely fun and the gauntlet of bosses in this game is by far my favorite of any From game. One specific boss in this game took me more tries than it took to fight every boss in DS1 combined, but despite that normally pissing me off I felt like I could do it every single time and the amount of joy I felt after beating him hasn't been matched in this series

So far, Melos Han-Tani is 0 for 2 in terms of making an experience enjoyable to me. Between All Our Asias and this, I'm questioning if I'm missing something with their work or if it just isn't for me. Unlike All Our Asias, however, Anodyne does have some actual merit and points of quality to it. The music is sublime, varying from extremely cozy to having the ability to instill some strong discomfort. If there's one thing to take from this game, it's that you should listen to the OST. The artwork is also fantastic, with most of the areas being really pretty, some of the more thematic areas working really well visually, and the enemies being well designed on a visual sense. Past that, there really isn't anything I found enjoyable or worth caring about.

Most of the game is just spent meandering around, trying to find where to go next. An adventure game with a more free progression system isn't a bad thing, but when you need exactly one card left and the one card missing is in an area that's disconnected from the main map, it's really frustrating to deal with. On top of that, you really need to get the wide and extend upgrades for your weapons early just to make the game easier, but there's no way to know they even exist in the first place nor where they could be. Combat was frustrating, never hard but it feels terrible to fight anything and it almost always just ends up being a matter of spamming your attack until they die, taking hits in the process (which doesn't matter since save points that heal you are all over the place). In between the meandering exploration and floundering combat is one of the worst platforming I've played in a little while. I can't think of a single area where I enjoyed the platforming puzzles. I don't understand how developers can make something like this and think it's fun or rewarding.

I'm gonna try Anodyne 2. Nitro Rad sold me on this game and while it unfortunately didn't end up hitting the mark for me, I'm praying 2 will. If it doesn't, I guess that just means I should avoid Han-Tani's games from now on since they aren't for me. I would just recommend listening to the music and watching a video going over what this game's about, it's more engaging and entertaining than actually playing it.