One of my favorite pieces of childhood nostalgia sits between the cozy aesthetic and vibey music within this game. I used to go to my grandpa's house and play this with him and we could never get the trophies on some of the levels. We never got to the last set of levels nor did we beat any of the bosses, but we had fun nonetheless. 11 years have passed since I played it with him last and his health is steadily waning. I've beat this game a handful of times in my adult life and every time I see him, he asks about it as if he didn't ask the last time. I laugh it off inside and tell him about the last time I beat it and you can see a little spark of joy go through him.

On its own, Toy Commander is a simple, but fun game that relies on the player's urge to beat its missions as fast as possible. With a variety of different vehicles and challenges to play through, the gameplay rarely gets stale. The music is also amazing, as the jungle/EDM beats perfectly suit the energy of the game. I highly recommend listening to the OST, it's easily the best thing about the entire game. The gameplay is simple and the vehicles don't control as well as racing games from the era, but the missions rarely require a level of precision you'd need from those.

This is one of those games I wish would get a re-release, even though the audience for it is really niche. It's probably the nostalgia talking but this small, arcadey game is really fun when you're in the mood for a short session where you play through one room at a time. The time-based trophies make your knowledge of the levels rewarding and it's fun to see how fast you can sprint through a level.

One of these days I should see about finishing it with him before he's gone.

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.

I've always been told that to really get into Sekiro, you need to find that "click" where the game finally makes sense. Most of the time I've seen people say if you don't find it by the boss at the top of the Ashina Castle, you might as well give up on playing. I've tried this game several times, the first three or four I dropped it at the Chained Ogre. This time around I decided to persist, and I found that click. Unfortunately that click doesn't inherently make the game fun, just doable. I kept hoping I could find some enjoyment after each boss I took down just filled me with that sense of apathy or angry relief instead of satisfaction. Every boss took me less than 20 tries, the vast majority of which took less than a handful and by NG+, most went down first try. But on this initial playthrough, by the time I got to the final boss I thought maybe the satisfaction would come with me being more powerful in NG+. By the time I got to Genichiro in NG+ I thought it'd come as I got stronger with all the memories I got (without realizing that giving back the charm to Kuro makes the game noticeably harder).

This continuous cycle of "maybe I'll like it more" continued until I got to the final boss of the first NG+ run, where I realized that this game isn't for me. I toiled through and finished the Shura ending to get the plat and in the end all I learned is that I don't get satisfaction out of intrinsic rewards. The way most people get joy from Sekiro (this is a generalization but I feel it's true) is from the satisfaction of your skills outplaying what's in front of you with minimal reward in defeating your foe (sure you get damage increases but those effectively just keep you at the pace the game is ramping up at). The clang of your sword as you perfect deflect, the gushy sound of deathblows, the swift defeat of a boss you've got down to a science. And none of this felt good to me. I never felt like I learned or earned anything from beating a boss. I guess the whole point I'm saying is Sekiro just isn't for me and if you want to play something that gives you a reward that's more than satisfaction, this probably won't be for you.

Charming art style, great music, very silly writing. The only problem is that a roguelike/roguelite is mostly carried by its gameplay, and Going Under doesn't have those legs to stand on.
The combat never really evolves as you're frantically spamming the attack button every single run while scrounging for whatever has the highest damage. You don't get any invulnerability frames when dodging, nor can you use it to cancel animations so you're mostly committed to your attacks. Later on, combat gets so frantic and hectic that it's hard to tell what's happening and damage more or less becomes unavoidable.
You can pick a skill to start your run with but there's no reason not to choose the one that gives you five whole seconds of invulnerability. There are so many skills that completely dilute the item pool and unlike something like The Binding of Isaac, you don't have multiple pools to separate the skills from. Unfortunately, the skills you unlock earlier on tend to be much more helpful than the ones in the middle of the game, so you're just making it harder on yourself when you buy them.
When you hit the second part of the game, everything gets much harder without warning. All of the dungeons you were running before get enemies that are tankier and have attacks that are much harder to dodge. Thankfully you can hit a lever now to go back to the old dungeons but they don't properly prepare you for the end game.
I think this game is worth a shot on sale, but you shouldn't go in expecting something like Enter the Gungeon or Hades. It's a quick ten or so hour jaunt that's simple but fun.

I remember playing the original release at launch and not being particularly entertained by it due to a plethora of reasons: boring writing, uninteresting characters, bland areas, bad combat, I could keep going. Now with this re-release I got to play the DLC finally and one of them was notably better than the rest of the package. Murder on Eridanos had much better pacing, more interesting characters, and the overall mystery had substantially more intriguing writing than anything else in the game. It's a shame the other DLC just feels like more of the same base game. Even when doing the alternate main plot, the game never picks up in any way, shape, or form. Despite 100%ing the game in 34 hours, there are plenty of other better RPGs to put your time into.