I bought this game based purely on the art style and I absolutely don't regret my decision! I was really invested in this game, I finished it in a week!

Eastward is an action adventure RPG. You play a father, John, and his adoptive daughter Sam. John is the one you will be playing the most, since it's him that has the ability to attack, with guns, bombs or in melee combat with a frying pan. Sam on the other hand uses magic to freeze enemies. Gameplay alternates between exploration-combat and puzzle solving, using the abilities of the 2 characters.

Like I said, I picked up this game because of it's art style and omg it's beautiful!!
The game is in pixel art, but a very detailed kind of pixel art. Characters are very expressive and over animated, backgrounds are filled with details everywhere and the colors are very soft to the eyes.
I really dig this kind of pixel art, but what makes this game even more beautiful is it's effects! The game may look and play like a 2D game, but it is actually running in 3D. This allowed the devs to create impressive light / shadow VFXs. Every sprite in the game reacts to light sources and can receive shadows according to the general shape it should have. For exemple, when trees cast a shadow on top of a train, the shadow isn't the same on the side and on the top of the train, because the surface isn't inclined the same way. This creates a great sense of depth while keeping the 2D pixel art look intact and I am really impressed by this technique!

This game is a RPG, so its story and setting are very important. And wow, once again, I was amazed by the beauty and creativity put in the environments you traverse. The story is set in a post-apocaliptycal world, where humanity is doomed by a mysterious miasm that kills everyone it touches. But post-apocaliptycal doesn't mean dark and muddy, quite the contrary in fact! The world of Eastward is very natural, with a lot of vibrant colors and filled wih strange structures and creatures. Characters all have A LOT of charm and the general mood of the game is pretty upbeat. This contrast between the looks and the real nature of the world makes the tragic events all the more impactful and brutal.
Pacing is also really good, with a great mix of action, exploration, puzzle solving and story progression. There is only one chapter that felt a bit too long, because you are stuck in a time loop, seeing the same cutscenes over and over and with pratically nothing but walking and talking to NPCs between the cutscenes.

I won't say I understood all of the plot, because I didn't (there is quite a lot of things happening at the end), but I really enjoyed my adventure alongside John and Sam. The duo really feels complementary, both in story and in gameplay! The perpetual flee in a train going toward east is a great concept, and it is well executed.
There are some strange decision here and there, like wanting to have a playable character that never talks or express anything begin to show regrets and trauma, but nothing breaking the immersion.

For at least half of the game, I was thinking that audio was the weakest part of the game. But after finishing it, I'm not as sure about that. Audio in the game definetly feels a bit weak, even more so in epic or dramatic scenes, but I think the problem mostly comes from SFXs and not from the music.
There are a lot of tracks in the game, but I had a feeling of constantly hearing the same ones in every cutscenes. BUT, it may be because I played the whole game in 5 or 6 long sessions :'). The intro and final chapter also contains some really good chiptune bangers!
And by the way I think I'm being picky: bear in mind that while I said that audio is the weakest part of the game, the rest is absolutely amazing, so it's not really that bad.

There is one final thing I would like to applaud: accessibility!
This game is pretty easy if you use all the tools at your disposal, but remain challenging for all players depending on how they choose to play. If you decide to invest a little bit of time in cooking, you can create food that heals + buff your attack or defense for 1-2 minutes. You can also buy refill items that you can use to completely refill your ammo at any time.
When exploring, if you don't like fighting you can also choose to evade monsters and don't deal with them. And during bosses, you can either try to optimize and hit the boss while it attacks you, or you can focus on evasion and you will always get a large window where the boss just lets you damage it.
I think that the game can adapt itself to a large variety of play style and skills and this is a good thing! It allows people not very experienced with action games to enjoy the story without feeling frustrated, and other players will not feel the need to abuse this because the fights are fun and engaging.
There is one boss that doesn't follow this rule. It requires to do perfectely timed parries. But the timing windows are very generous and the fight comes very late in the game, so I think even less experienced players can beat it, maybe with a couple tries.

All in all, I loved this game! It's cute, it's beautiful, it's fun, it's exciting! A perfect introduction to RPGs, without the boring Excel stats and complicated turn-based gameplay or combo systems!

Pikmin is the Nintendo licence that everybody knows (mostly because of Smash I think) but very few people have actually played it. And I'm like everybody, if a friend had not lent me his cartridge, I don't think I would ever have played Pikmin 3.
But I am thankfull he did, because Pikmin is fun and intersting!

Pikmin 3 is a RTS, and it's the first game of the genre I have ever played I think. I may have played some games that could be categorised as RTS on the DS but I'm not very sure...
When I think of RTS, I always associate the genre with complicated gameplay, precise ressource management and very steep learning curves. But I'm happy to say that I was wrong!

At first I felt a bit lost, because I am not used to this type of game, but the controls are very intuitive and it quickly became very natural to move and command the Pikmins. There is basically 2 actions you can do, call Pikmins to you or throw Pikmins on something. Every other command in the game does something that is similar but a little more efficient depending on the situation. This means that the game is very easy to take in hand!
Same goes with the "go there" command. Since there are 3 playable characters, you can have one go to one spot while you do something else with another one. This lets you be a lot more efficient and I struggled a lot less when I started using it!

The game tries to give you a sense of urgency by using a hunger system. Every day that passes consumes one food ressource, and to get more food you need to bring back fruits to your ship. It felt like a real danger at the very begining of the game, because you only have enough ressources to survive for 3 days, but it quickly became a non-threat as I learned to be more efficient, and I quickly gathered more than 30 days of food (I finished the game in 17 ingame days).

The story mode is very chill and fun, puzzles are well balanced. Fights in general are a bit more messy, but the more Pikmin you have and the less trouble you'll have to kill enemies. Bosses on the other hand are good puzzle fights, each one of them requiring you to use the correct pikmins to deal damage to them.

I love how the brutality and cruauty of the player actions is completely ignored in the game. Sending these cute Pikmins to their death is so much fun and it feels right! It's like controlling an ant colony, individuals don't exists, only the group is important. If you have to sacifice a few to reach your objectives, then go ahead! It's no problem, you can always create new ones anyway haha!

While I enjoyed the story, what really hooked me to the game were the 2 side stories with Olimar. In opposition with the story mode, you start with no Pikmins and you will have to play with the ressources you find. You get an objective and a time limit to reach the highest score possible. I found it very engaging and beat every level on the platinum rank, because the levels are really well constructed. It's like figuring out the optimal way to solve a puzzle and it feels really good! Plus the platinum rank is generally pretty generous and allows for mistakes to happen!

So once again I had a blast playing a new video game from a genre I'm not familiar with. If you are like me and only know Pikmin from Smash, you should check out the game, it's a lot of fun! And fruits. Juicy fruits. Very juicy fruits...

Well this game is definitely is "MGS1 but more modern". This description can be applied to almost every aspect of the game, gameplay, story, characters, graphics, etc.

Gameplay is very similar to MGS1's, with a few extra additions:
･ First perspective view is now a lot more important, as it allows you to aim precisely to shoot specific part of the bodies of your enemies. To push you to use the feature, the game introduces a gun with sleeping bullets, more effective if you hit the head of your target. And since there are a lot more enemies than in the first game, you will quickly realize that you have to be really attentive and aim precisely if you don't wan't to get caught! Managing to put a guard to sleep and crossing a room unseen feels definitely more satisfying than in MGS1!
･ There is now platforming in the game?? I don't really understand why they added this feature. You can now hang over the edges of specific platforms, with a gauge telling you how much time you have left until your character looses grip. This part works and I don't have any issue with it. But the second thing you can do is what I don't really enjoy. Compared to MGS1, your character is a lot more agile. You can climb small steps and do cool evasions by doing a cartwheel. This is cool, BUT, the game uses those moves to make you do platforming and it feels very clunky. At one point in the game, you have to cross a diagonal gap by climbing on top of boxes and then performing a cartwheel above the void to jump to the other side. I understand what they tried to make, but the problem is that it is impossible to be very precise with the direction you go to when doing the evasion move, plus the character automatically jumps down when he reaches the end of a platform. So I spend 15 min on an obstacle when it should have taken me 30 sec to pass. But fortunately it is the only time it happened and I think I talked a bit too much about this small issue :')

I thought the double hexagonal level design was really clever! This structure manages to create a playing ground that feels quite small and restricted, while also allowing and favouring exploration. You can always go in any part of the map relatively quickly since its constucted in a loop. Plus, this makes it impossible to get lost, because you will always end up at somewhere you know.

While level design definitely feels better than in MGS1, bosses on the other hand are a bit weaker. But, there still are some really good fights, like the one against Fat Man! His design is so goofy, and his fight is really good. having to both disarm bombs and shoot the one placing them makes for a great fight with good rythm! Quite the opposite of the RAYs boss fight that feels long and repetitive, as you have to take down I don't know how many RAYs that all have the 2 same moves that can be evaded simply by moving in circle...

Story was fun to follow, even if I'm not sure to have 100% understood everything. There are so many twists and people being double agents, but actually they are triple agent, but they are in fact quadruple agent... xD
Raiden character felt like a good protagonist to play after Snake. They are perfect opposite in terms of experience and personnality, so it was interesting to watch his evolution.
Cutscenes are top level, they always felt like a great reward for progressing in the game! And I must say that for a 20 years old game, it looks really good!
On the other hand, the codec chats have a tendency to drag on a little to much. Fortunately (I think?) you can at least play with the cameras framing the characters speaking, so you have something to do while waiting.
And also, the ending cutscene felt strange after all the action and fighting, a very bizarre way to end a game like this.

Music is very intense and it works really well with the gameplay! When you get spotted, you know that you have to fight or die, and the drum and bass stresses that point very well!

All in all, a excellent sequel to an already fantastic game! It is less perfect in every way than it's predecessor, but what it does good is definetly better than what MGS1 achieved.

I played Zelda: Wand of Gamelon and actually liked it, so I figured I could give this one a shot.

This game is more or less the same thing, but with a different map and new levels.
The game let you choose freely where you want to go and figure out by yourself how in what order you have to do things in order to progress. But I felt this one was not as good as Wand of Gamelon with guiding you and giving you hints. I felt I was doing a lot more random things before finding something that worked, and the NPCs gave very vague hints.

Also, the enemy spawn rate feels higher than in WoG, and it gets a bit tiring. Plus there are a lot more traps that will almost kill you in one shot. But since you don't loose any progress when dying, exception made of your position in a level, it's still not a big problem.

I don't have a lot more things to say as pretty much everything I said on WoG also applies here. I got through the game in about 2h, and I enjoyed my time on it!
And since in my review of WoG I linked a remix of a level music, here is one from the bazaar level, made by the same guy!

I recently watch a video review of Link - Forces of Evil, and I was surprised to hear that the game wasn't that bad at all! I had always heard that the CDI Zelda games were awful so I knew I had to play them to find out myself if this reputation they have was deserved or not.
And I have to say, this game is not bad at all!

Technically, I played a fan made PC port with a lower enemy spawn rate, faster shield and with controller support (you had to play with a remote on the original, and the jump was mapped on the up key), meaning it was not the true CDI experience.

But I mean, if you forget those QoL changes, the rest of the game is really solid! Zelda controls really well, and is very reactive, almost every enemy die in one hit (even bosses when you have the right object), and the gameplay is very fast paced. Progression goes quick too, you obtain new items very often and unlike in a lot of Zelda games, these items will stay useful throughout the whole game. There is a real feeling of becoming stronger and stronger, even though the game only last 2 or 3 hours.
I really like how the game lets you freely choose the level you want to go in, and figure out in which order you have to do things. Cutscenes give great hints to guide you and I almost never felt lost!
Also, the game isn't very punitive. When you die, you respawn at the start of the current screen. When you die three time in a level, you go back to the map. But everything you did in the level is still active, so you don't really loose a lot of progress and you can go back pretty quickly to where you were!
Graphically, it really isn't that uggly! Yes, the cutscenes look weird and have super funny (in a weird way) dialogs, but the gameplay environments and characters look good and are very varied! There is only one time I got stuck because I didn't see a door in the background because it had the same color as the wall.
And finally, the music. Yes it has nothing to do with regular Zelda games, but wow it's great. Every screen of every level has its own music, and the more you progress in a level, the more intense the music gets. My favourite must be the graveyard one, I found a great remix of it on Youtube and I'm very happy!

So, if you have a couple hours to spend, and you like fast action platformer, give this remaster a try! You could be surprised how despite its reputation, it's actually a fun game!

I enjoyed this game a lot!
I never played any modern Castlevania game, I only know the NES games. So this was sort of the first modern Castlevania game I played haha!

In the game, you play as Miriam, a Shardbinder who has the ability to absorb the power of demons. You goal is reach the top of a mysterious castle from which hords of demons are being summoned and stop the one responsible for this. In order to do so, you will have to explore and unlock powers allowing you to progress to places you coudn't go before. All in all, it's a Castlevania game!

The first thing that stroke me when I started playing is the music. It is very catchy and energetic, pushing you to move forward, while also being extremely fitting for the area it plays in! And this not for only the start of the game, the whole adventure is filled with bangers haha!

Bloodstained is a very simple game to take in hand: you can run, jump and attack. The character is pretty agile too, so it feels great to control!
If these options feel a bit limited, do not worry because there are a ton of different weapons, each with their paterns and secret abilities. You can spend the game trying out new weapons and it is awesome!
Your character can also use abilities. You get these abilities randomely during the game by killing enemies. Every enemy can give you one ability. Most of the time it's an ability this monster uses, but you can also sometimes obtain the power to summon the same enemy to fight by your side. There are as many abilities as there are monsters in the game, meaning there are A LOT of abilities haha! It follows the same principle as the weapons, you will be testing new abilities very often.

But this is also where lies a weakness of this title: menus. Everytime you get something new, you will have to go in the menu to equip it. Weapons are not equiped in the same menu as the abilities, abilities have multiple sub-menus depending on their type... there are menus and sub-menus everywhere and it gets a bit tiring to change your loadout.
The game knows about this issue, because it offers a shortcut feature, allowing you to create presets and change your loadout without opening the menu. But, because you are always getting something new to test out, it solves nothing. It only transfers the problem from the Equipement and Ability menus to the Shortcuts menu.

The story was interesting, I had fun uncovering the mysteries behind the birth of the Shardbinders. I was also very happy each time the game said to me "You though it was over did't you? Well it actually isn't!" :')
I must mention there are some really nice staging throughout the game, both in the gameplay and in the cutscenes! There are some neat ideas using the 3D camera in a 2D gameplay!

Difficulty is nicely balanced I felt! I always found save rooms right at the moment I was starting to get very low on health, and had no more healing item left haha!
Some bosses can maybe feel a bit brutal at first, but except for 1 or 2, I beat them all under 2 or 3 tries. And if you really struggle on a particular boss, the game lets you craft food that can heal you and give you permanent passive boosts on your stats. The more you cook, the easier the game gets!

However, the difficulties of exploration and advice on where to go or what to do next are not really well handled... I had to open a guide multiple times because I was stucked, and most of the time it was because of something very dumb... (e.g. I had to speak to a NPC twice in a row for him to spontaneously find an item in my inventory and converting it into a key, even though he had never talked about before)

I played the game on the Switch and I got to say, they used pretty cleverly the HD Vibrations feature of the controller. Everything you do in the game (jumping, moving in a menu...) gives you a very light vibration feedback and it feels great! I love how you can feel the character's heartbeat in your hands when she is low on health, it is such a nice touch!

But the Switch port has also a downside: it runs pretty poorly. The game never has a stable fps, there are constant drops everywhere. Plus, if you play on portable mode, the resolution can drop very low. Fortunately, those problems are the most present in the hub area, where you don't have to be has precise and reactive as in the rest of the game, and I got used to the unstable FPS after some time spent on the game. Just remember to save as often as you can because the game crashed once for me.

I felt this game was made with a lot of love and care, even if it is a bit rough at times. For me, the quality of the gameplay and presentation overcomes its performance issues.
Also, when you finish the game you unlock a ton of bonuses! You can replay the game with 2 new characters (without story tho), in new difficulty settings, try the time attack mode or even the classic mode (a game mode that plays like the NES Castlevania).

With all of that, I think it's time to wrap up this review. To sum up, it's a great game! It has some issues but in my sense its qualities largely compensate for that and I had a really good time on it!

Well this is quite literally Celeste in Mario 64 haha!
It was refreshing to play this very small game after spending 75h on a heavy RPG :')

Celeste mechanics transfer very well in 3D, more than I would have imagined! Still, the game has been developped in about a weak, so don't expect Celeste level of polish. The game is far less precise than Mario 64, but given that death has literally no concequences and that it takes about 15 sec to go back to where you were, it not frustrating at all.

N64 graphics replicated to perfection! The music and sounds use the N64 soundfont and it works great also, even tho the bonus level music really wants me to go crazy hahaha!

A fun 1h game!

Etrian Odyssey IV is a game I've been wanting to play for quite some time now. In fact, the first time I played its demo was in 2013! I really struggled to play back then, since the whole game is in English and I had only just started learning the language :')

But since then, I have discovered Etrian Odyssey Untold, which became one of my favourite games of all time, and played a bit of Untold 2 (I don't own a copy and I never finished it). I was really wanting to play some more EO lately and since it is the least expensive of the 3DS EO titles (seriously, I am so sad when I look at the prices for EO5 or EOU2 in Europe), I decided to pick it up and see what it had to offer!

For those who may be unfamiliar with the series, EO games are dungeon crawlers with turn based RPG combat. You control a guild of 5 adventurers that you created and your goal is to explore and map a labyrinth, trying to uncover its secrets. The games are narrated almost like "choose-your-own-adventure" books. There are no fancy cutscenes or anything, everything is told via text and you will often get to choose between one or another action (mostly with secrets you find in the labyrinth) resulting either in a good find or in something bad. If you don't like reading, this may be a bit much, but I find it really well writen! Plus, the characters speak in an old english, and as a french it amuse me to find all those french words everywhere hahaha!
Also, these games are knowned for not being very beginner friendly, as you will have to be very careful with every action you take in order to survive the deadly Yggdrasil Labyrinth. A game over means loosing all of your progress, except for map data, and it can happen very quickly if you are not careful enough.

There are 3 main things that I love in Etrian Odyssey:

The map system
I'm very surprised that this feature wasn't copied by any other game, because I find it amazingly clever and immersive! In EO, when exploring a dungeon, you don't get the map from the get go. If you want to know where you are and where you want to go, you will have to draw the map by yourself. So, as you progress through the labyrinth on the 3DS's top screen, you fill in the walls, doors, treasures and secrets you find along the way on the bottom screen. This tool makes exploring really enjoyable, because even if you don't find anything, you will have completed a part of the map that wasn't uncovered before and it is really satisfying to see the map of a floor come to completion. Plus, if you are careful enough with the notes you take on your map, you will be rewarded when side quests will ask you to find specific things in a labyrinth!

The F.O.E.s
EO games feature random encounter battles. But these are not the only encounter you can get in the labyrinth. There are also monsters that you see in the labyrinth, called F.O.E.s (Foedus Obrepit Errabundus, or Field On Enemy in Japan). Every type of F.O.E. have a unique kind of behavior, like running in a circle, standing still until you get in their field of vision and then chasing you, or alerting every other F.O.E.s in the area to hunt you down, etc. These enemies are very strong and you want to avoid fighting them as much as you can. A lot of the puzzles you will have to solve revolve around finding a way to use their behavior to evade them or force them to open a new way. This feature also goes along very well with the map feature, as you will see F.O.E.s on the map in the areas you already explored.

The music ❤
The music in Etrian Odyssey is something I consider very important, since almost all of the narrative of the areas you explore rest on it. Every track you hear in the games perfectly reflect the area you are currently in and there are some amazing tracks! From the happy and uplifted day town theme, the tranquil first labyrinth theme, the energetic battle theme and the menacing F.O.E. theme, you understand almost instantly how you must feel.
The soundtrack is composed by Yuzo Koshiro, who you might have heard of if you like video game music! The music in EO is so good that Atlus released more than 30 albums of rearrangements of the themes of every game in the series. Unfortunately, they are sold only in Japan but you can listen to them on TheFabulousTroup youtube channel! There are many different genres represented, like jazz, classical, orchestral, chiptune, pop, rock, metal, even eurobeat (yes there is an eurobeat arrangement of EO1 first labyrinth and it is amazing), so it is impossible not to find something you like!

Finally, about the EO4 specific aspects:
I liked the airship parts, as it brought some new ways of exploring (small dungeons everywhere, labyrinth with two entrance...) but the ship is too slow! And because the only way to buff your party is to find food on the sky map, you are kind of obligated to cross the sky before entering a dungeon, and it gets a bit tiring. But the 3 levels open map exploration and the F.O.E.s to evade or manipulate is fun!
The dungeon mechanics are great! I really enjoyed that main dungeon are only 3 floors instead of the usual 5, and that there are very small annex dungeons with a specific mechanic for each of them.
The story is good but loses a bit of pace towards the middle. Fortunately, it gets better when you finish the third area and discover the final one, with a new epic battle theme that will boost your motivation! The ending fell a bit flat however.
I can see why some players prefer the main line titles, because you can really create vastly different set of characters, but I prefer the way the Untold games handle the story. And since I don't feel like replaying the same game over and over, I don't mind having set characters.

All in all, I really liked this game. I liked it so much in fact that I decided to go through the post-game bonus dungeon. It was fun (except for that one room in the 2nd floor)! I didn't beat the boss since it wouldn't bring more story and I enjoy exploring way more than strategising. The puzzle to weaken the boss was fun to resolve however!

If you never played an Etrian Odyssey game and are curious to try one out, I would encourage you play one of the Untold games rather than this one (if you can find one at a reasonable price lol). These games are a lot more beginner friendly, you get a second chance before a game over, and there is a story mode with a set party and some animated cutscenes, meaning that you won't have to handle team composition and your characters will be involved in the story!

If you reach this part of my review, well this is the end haha! I can't make short reviews so thank you for reading the whole thing :')

This game aged so well :o

I played it for the very first time, I had never touched any Metal Gear Solid game before, and I'm really impressed by how great it feels to play this 25 years old game! It is so creative and well crafted that if it wasn't for the graphics, I wouldn't be able to tell that this game is that old.

Gameplay is very solid (snake lol), situations varies a lot and are always renewing, and there are so many tools to use. Not a single one feels useless. In every situations there is always something you can do or use to make things easier. Every time. And items you get at the start of the game stay usefull during the whole game and that's not something a lot of games manage to do!
Weapons are also very varied, there is one for every situation you can possibly imagine! Not a single one feels like its taking the job of another, even tho there are a lot of them.
The only item I didn't really use is the camera, because I don't really want to fill my PS1 memory card with screenshots :')

Also, something I really want to mention: everything is justified. It is mindblowing how any incoherence due to this being a game has been thought about and justified in universe. Just one example to explain what I mean: when someone calls you to give you orders, you hear a ringing sfx. This is so that you, the player, knows that you can answer the call. But in universe, this sound is emitted by a small device in the inner ear of Snake, meaning that only him can hear it. And there are things like that for everything and anything that the game does to be a game, it is both ridiculous and amazing hahaha!

From a pure playability perspective, the game is almost perfect. The character controls feels very responsive, the camera angles are never playing against you and everything works really well. I have only two criticisms to make, both of which are forgivable if you consider that this game was released a quarter of a century ago:
･ Menus (both the items and weapons ones) are a bit tiresome to naviguate. This is even more true on the second half part of the game because you have so many items and you have to switch very often, meaning that you are pausing the game and scrolling through aaaaaaall the list very frequently.
･ The sniper rifle is very slow to aim, because it's so zoomed in, and it makes using it really hard for nothing. But you don't need it very often so it's alright.

I'm so glad I got to play MGS on the original hardware, because the game tends to do meta stuff in very clever ways. I think the best-known example is the Psycho Mantis fight, but what really got me was the way to find the frequency to contact Meryl. Those who know know, but when I figured this out it felt so smart and unexpected! This alone was already worth the money I spend to get a physical copy to play it on my PlayStation.

Speaking of Psycho Mantis, it's a boss fight and there are many others. I feel I'm repeating what I said about the weapons but all of them are very unique! They all have very precise weaknesses to dicover and it always feels very rewarding to beat them.
You will probably die a few time but once you know how to beat a boss, it is just a matter of doing the right thing. The game is never too hard and it is very generous with checkpoints, so progression is very fluid.

The music contributes greatly to the atmosphere, whether during stealth sequences or the iconic "Encounter" track when you are spotted! And it also works really well during cutscenes!

And cutscenes this game has, and some amazing ones even! It's impressive to see the level of detail in the staging. There are so many creative decisions with camera shots and the depicting of the scenes!
The plot is very interesting and it catched my interest quickly. Characters are great. They all feel like they had things happen to them prior to the story and that makes them interesting. Only complaint: it's a shame but the game is a bit sexist at times...
The writing is great, the story is full of mysteries, conspiracies and betrayals, and it kept me hook until the end!
Also, and that may be the most important aspect depending on who you are, the game has a really strong message about war and nuclear weaponnary. Games with strong messages are the games I tend to like the most, so I enjoyed this part a lot.
I played the game in french, and it is knowned for it particularily cheesy dubing. I don't know how the original japanese version was, but I actually really enjoyed how the actors played. It is a bit goofy, but somehow when tragic events happens, it still works and the mood is absolutly not ruined by the dubing. It's so strange because I was expecting it to sound ridiculous, considering all the parodies I have heard prior to actually playing the game.
By the way, I love Mei Ling and her quotes that you get every time you save. It's very entertaining and made me look forward to the next time I would save! In what other game are you hyped about saving? Not a lot of games I think :')

So! All in all an excellent game that I recommand to everyone! Play it on original hardware if you can, because I think otherwise you will lose some fun ideas that work only with the way the game was originaly meant to be played.
It's rare to find games that aged as well as this one, so well that I found it more enjoyable than many other games that came out way after this one! It is also realtively short (count around 10h to go through the whole thing on your first playthrough), so it is absolutely not a huge time investment.

I'm now really looking forward to playing the other MGS games!

Thanks for reading my thoughts, as always its super long but I can't help it haha :D

Luigi's Mansion 3 is a fun puzzle adventure game disguised as a survival horror game!
If you are the type of person that is easely scared, you can rest assured! The game never really tries to scare you or to put pressure on you. The only one scared in this game is that poor Lugi haha!

So, in this game you play as Luigi, who must explore a haunted hotel to rescue his friends, that have been turned into paintings. To do so, you will have to solve puzzles and fight many ghost using your vacuum, that can suck object and ghost or blow air, a lamp and a suction cup grapple, in order to unlock and explore the many floors of the hotel.

The first thing I noticed when playing it, every object reacts to physics. Coupled with your ability to vacuum or blow in any direction, every action you take creates a huge mess of flying objects everywhere on the screen and it is very fun! What's make this even more impressive is that the game looks gorgeous, the lighting is amazing, and the game never slows down!

Puzzles are all very clever and varied! Part of the fun of this game is to see how objects react to your arsenal of tools and try to guess what chain reaction will lead to the next door opening.
There are also many secrets everywhere! They serve no purpose other than completion, but I found myself really invested in finding them, because it is fun to interact with everything in the scenery!

You can tell that this game has been made with children in mind, because by default the game gives you hints on what to do next. This can thankfully be disabled in the option and I recommend doing so, because the game don't even wait for 30s before telling you a hint, and it really hinders the sentiment of discovery. And if you really get stuck on a particular puzzle, you can always re-enable this feature temporarily, just as I did on the Cinema Floor.

Speeking of floors, there are a total of 17 and they all have their unique theme and mechanics. I loved that there are no limits with how crazy they can get, from the very classical hotel look to the egyptian desert, a pirate bay or a medieval castle. It makes unlocking new floors even more fun because while you wait for the elevator to lift you, you always try and guess what you will see next!

Apart from the bosses of each floor, there aren't many different ghosts (I believe there are 4 main types and small variations for each of them), but the situations in which you encounter them are sufficiently varied to make you forget that.

My only real complaint: I would have liked that the game told me I could control everything using only the triggers, instead of having to use the face buttons. When I discovered that R = A, L = Y and L + R = X, it made combat and puzzle solving a lot more enjoyable, because it increased my mobility by a lot.

So, if you are searching for a good puzzle adventure game, with goofy characters and cathartic gameplay that allows you to destroy every object that you cross, I can recommand this game! Its length is reasonable (I beat it in 12h30) but if you are really trying to find all the secrets, I think you could take almost twice as long as I did!

I liked this game!

First of all, I must say that I played it for free, because a friend invited me to play with him. That definetly had an impact on my enjoyement, because I was not expecting anything from the game :)

So, It Takes Two is a 2 players cooperative puzzle platformer. You play a couple contemplating divorce. At the start of the game, the daughter of both characters will turn her parents into very small creatures, like in "Arthur and the Minimoys", and your goal will be to find a way to become human again.Therefore, you will have to platform and help each other along the way, restoring the bond between the two as you progress.

That being said, the writing is not the strong aspect of the game. The topic chosen is good for a cooperative game, but the way it is treated is just too cliché and boring. The "book of love" character is unbearable and he appears way too often to interrupt gameplay. There were multiple occasion where we just wanted to skip the cutscenes, a thing I usually avoid to do.

Also, I played it in French, and the subtitles do not follow the voice acting at all! Sometimes a character says something and the subtitles says it using a negative. This leads to some weird timing where a character says "yes", but the subtitles says "no".

Thankfully, the gameplay on the other hand is pretty good. The character controls feels great, once you've learned the moves you can really go fast, even in the platforming sections.
The game is not hard at all, there are checkpoints very regularly, the platforming is very permissive and the puzzles are more designed to stop you for 5 seconds than to make you think. In a solo game, this would be kinda light, but in a coop game, where the two players don't necessarly have the same experience it is a good approch to allow everyone to have fun. Just don't go in expecting great challenges.

Gameplay is also very varied, the game allows itself to completely change the controls schemes from time to time to create small sections in a completely different genre. It is never really develloped, but it keeps the gameplay fresh.

The pacing is strange tho, there are amazing chapters with great mechanics and ideas, but there also are very slow sections with boring repetitive task to do (pushing crates, yayyyyyyy).
Also, in every part of the game the two players each have a unique tool that they can use to solve puzzles. For exemple, near the beginning, Cody has some nails and May has a hammer. Those tools are usally fun to use, but the more you progress, the less interesting they get because even tho the object itself is different, it does the samething as another object you had before. Moreover, the some will let you interact with your partner, for exemple you can pin May in the ground with a nail or hit Cody with the hammer to press him in the ground. This is fun, but unfortunately this is not a recurring thing, and it is way less fun when you have no way of trolling your friend.

There are also a lot of bonus mini-games spread across the adventure. Those are usually fun, there are a couple of great ones (the curling one is really fun) and some very boring ones (every mini-game where you have to aim at something quickly and precisely, and also chess). This is cool, because it makes you want to explore and you always have something to check in the scenery while waiting for your friend.

The last section of the game felt a bit rushed and was disapointing. There were some great boss fight during all the game, but for the final moments of the game they choose to have a "Hold Y to win"... At least it was funny to stop holding Y and completely stop the action in a very akward way, just as in every other games that uses this mechanic... I guess.

Other than that, the game is really beautiful and filled with many little secrets and interactions. Having the characters being the size of a chessnut allows for some fun environment and they are very varied. Also, the game is pretty long considering it's a coop experience. It took us more than 6 month to find the time to play together haha! Fortunately, the story is not very important or interesting so this was not an issue.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a EA game where the second player can just download the game for free and go through the whole experience! More so, I did not encounter a single networking issue during the 15h it took us to play the whole thing. Very surpring coming from EA!

This is my review for It Takes Two!
Should you play this game, I would recommend to play it with someone that likes friendly competition, instead of playing with your lover like the game makes you think it was made for. I think you will have more fun like this, because the things it tells on love and couple health are very conventionnal and do not make you think deeper.

Thank you for reading my thoughts! :)

This game is fun!

First thing, I'm not a big Kingdom Hearts player. In fact, with the exception of the time I played the first 3 hours of Kingdom Hearts 1 on an emulator, this was my first experience of a KH game as a player. I have to specify "as a player" because I used to watch KH let's plays when I was younger, so I'm kinda familiar with the story and characters.

For those who don't know Kingdom Hearts, it's a series of action RPGs featuring characters from Square Enix's games (particularily from Final Fantasy) and the Disney movies. While it sounds like a strange combination, I would say it works pretty well in the narrative that has been developped around it, which is very "Light VS Darkness" driven. But let me introduce the game I played because this is not a review of KH story as a whole.

In KH: Birth by Sleep, you follow the story of 3 friends: Ventus, Terra and Aqua. The three of them are training to become Keyblade Masters, wielders of swords named Keyblades, that have the power of unlocking hearts and opening pathes to other worlds. The game is structured in an original way: the 3 friends will be separated at the start of the game, and you will play each of their stories in any order you like, trying to piece together the complete story.
While the game lets you pick who you want to play first, there is an optimal order that the game gives you (it is Terra, then Ventus and finally Aqua). I chose not to listen to this suggestion and played in this order: Ventus, then Terra and finally Aqua. I don't think it matters too much but you should know that some of the intial exposure happens only in Terra's story, and the final chapter that you can unlock after beating all stories takes place from Aqua's side of view.

That being said, if you are not familliar with KH I would not recommend playing this game only for the story. It serves as a prequel to explain stuff that happens in KH1, 2 and probably 3. If you don't know either of those games, a third of the story elements brought in the plot will remain unexplained.
Moreover, while the story concepts are great and have potential, I found that the writing was pretty bad. The characters are almost every time either very good or very evil (most of them being Disney characters, it makes sense, but it is kinda boring on the long run), plus they have a tendancy to repeat themselves a lot and the usage of many of the Disney worlds seems uninspired. It's a shame considering the unique mix of Square x Disney has a lot potential to create some great scenarios. And it happens, sometimes. But there are also many moments when it feels like you are watching a Wish adaptation of the movie, with some characters that do not belong here. It is underwhelming to have the most interesting parts of the game story-wise not having anything to do with the Disney worlds directly.

The poor writing is a shame because otherwise the game looks amazing for being on a PSP, the animations are very cartoony and expressive and there is some cool scenography in some cutscenes.

I think I made my point on the story of the game now.
And after reading all of that, you must be wondering why I still put 4 stars on my review. And that, is because of the gameplay!

The 3 characters controls are about the same, with slight variations in movement speed, jump height and dash. Also, Terra specialize in physical attacks, Aqua in magic and Ventus is the middle ground.
The movement and combat system is very slow and not really satisfying at the start, but this quickly evolves as you unlock new skills and abilities like dash, parry, counter, etc... To fight your enemies, you have many possibilities:
First, you can swing your Keyblade to deal damage to an enemy close to you. You are allowed to perform a small combo, both on ground and in the air. Your second option is something called a "Command Deck". This deck is basically where you put your skills, that can be magical or physical. Each of these skills can be used at any time if in the deck. Once used, they are put on a short cooldown to prevent you from spamming them. Your deck starts with 3 slots, but rapidelly increase in size as you progress.
Attacking enemies with thoses two types of attacks allows you to fill up a gauge, which quickly runs out if you spend too much time not attacking. This gauge is what brings this battle system all its fun! When filled up, depending on what type of attacks you have used, you will activate a "Command Style". This changes your combos for better ones for a limited time, while also giving your attacks elemental powers or extended reach. And then, as you continue attacking, you can fill up the gauge once more to either activate second or even third "Command Style", or activate a devastating attack corresponding with the command style you are currently in.
This is what makes the game fun to me. Trying to always be attacking an enemy so that the gauge stays filled up, and managing my skills to activate the right "Command Style" that leads to the best combos.
Also, I have to mention that your strategy is constantly evloving. This is because your skills can level up. There are between 3 and 5 levels per skills, and they level up if they are in your deck, even if you don't use them. When a skill levels up it becomes stronger, but more importantly, when it reaches its max level you can fuse it with another skill to create a new one. This allows you to mix a Physical and a Magical skill together for exemple, to create a physical attack with elemental properties.
And what pushes you to change your deck as often as you can is this: every skill that is created by mixing two other skills will have a small passive boost that is active if the skill is in your deck. BUT, if you are able to level this skill to its max level, the passive boost will always be applied to your character, even if your remove the skill or fuse it with another one.
I think this system is brilliant because it rewards you for changing your play style very often and pushes you to improvise a lot during combat. This means that the regular enemy encounters are not as repetitive as they could be without it.
(There are also summons that allows you to access the moveset of people your character created bonds with, but I didn't use them that much.)

What's more, the game manages to have a decent camera despite the absence of a second stick to control it (instead you use the L and R triggers to rotate the camera around your character). You will sometimes get hurt by an enemy offscreen but most of the time you have a good view of all enemies, or the enemies will be numerous but mostly passive.

That being said, I have to talk about the difficulty. When you start the game, you must choose a difficulty, between "Story", "Standard", "Hard" and "Proud", and you will be locked in that difficulty until the end of the story you are playing. I played Ventus story on "Standard". It was fine, but outside of bosses I felt the game was too easy and I didn't need to use it's systems. That's why I switched to "Hard" difficulty for Terra's and Aqua's stories. While I overall enjoyed the game much more, I encountered severe difficulty spikes.
The game does not give you character invulnerability frames when getting hurt, so if there are many enemies around you, life can go down very quickly. Sometimes it almost feels bullshit when you die in 2 sec at full health. Also, the parry, which is another important part of the battle system, feels very slow and unresponsive. I've had multiple occasions where I saw an attack coming, pressed the parry button but nothing happened and I got killed. This can be a frustrating, especially if you are under leveled. This is more true at the end of Terra's story and at the beginning of Aqua's.

Last thing, the soundtrack is great but I which there were more tracks, because there is only one music for exploration per world and it gets very very repetitive (I still have the Cinderella track playing in my head, help).

So, if what I described sounded interesting to you, I recommend it. Each character story takes around 8 to 10 hours to complete and you can take breaks between them if you want so it is not a very time-consuming game. But if you want to unlock every secrets, then you will have to grind for hours and play horrible mini-games (fun).
As for myself, I am curious to play other KH games, maybe the mainline ones, to see if the gameplay is as fun as in this one and if the writing gets better when it's not a prequel.

Thanks for reading my review!

This game is strange. It feels unfinished, it is buggy, it does not look or sound good, the voice acting is awful (OH MY GAAAAAWD) and the NPCs are as lifeless as they can be... BUT, it is also a game very different from any other game I have played.

The main concept is that you play a camera man in a team of three people. You and your team are in charge of investigating a mysterious fog that has engulfed the city of Chicago. Because your hand are on the camera, you can't do anything but watch your environment and point at things while your colleagues interact with the environment. This creates an interesting situation in which you have to help your reporter survive, but you can't intervene directly, only show, alert and watch.

While this concept is unique and has potential, it feels more like a 3D point and click than a survival horror game. The thing is, you are (almost) never in danger. The worst case scenario being you fail to protect a reporter, she dies and you go to the next level, where you will meet a new one. That lack of tension or danger kills any potential scary atmosphere. The game tries so hard to spook you, by playing random spooky noises for no reasons in certain locations, but it never works because you know that you are not a part of its universe.

But this is not at all a negative aspect if you are open to a different type of experience! In fact, this dissociation of the main character from the rest of the universe fits in very well with the low budget of the title. It creates a surreal experience where nothing makes sense but nobody seems to mind. Every location feels empty as if it had never been inhabited, the NPCs scream in fear when there is a monster, but they are not animated and they freeze right next to it while looking away, action scenes are just as slow as the rest of the game, everything just feels out of place.

The real thing I'm not so enthousiastic about in this game is the scoop/morality/erotism meter. In every levels, you can choose between investigating, helping your colleagues or straight up sexually aussaulting your female colleagues. This doesn't really affect the story, aside from some small pieces of dialogue and some lore clues to find (lol). I feel like the erotism part should not have been included because it serve no purpose other than score. It sometimes manages to create funny moments, but most of the time it is just disrespectful to women.
ALSO, when you finish the game, you unlock a strip club mode where you can make all the reporters pole dance in underwear... and it is way more animated than any other element in the game... there even are jiggle physics :')
I think it explains why the rest of the game has no budget lmao.

While this is not a perfect game, or even a good game, I enjoyed the 5 hours it took me to complete it. It's a strange experimental game that tried some neet ideas. Nothing more, nothing less.

I didn't know where to put this but props to the voice acting and the run animation of the guy you meet just before the end of the game. I don't think I have ever seen a better run cycle than this one hahaha!