My only issue with this game is a lack of crossplay otherwise it’d be one of my favorite games ever made

This game is too damn good to be stuck on Netflix of all things

I played this game shortly after starting the second part-time job I've ever had in my life, a job which made me absolutely miserable, and which I still have to this day. I'm sure there are jobs with worse conditions out there, but when I started this job I was REALLY going through it.
Even though it was probably meant to do the opposite, in a way, playing this game made coping with my job easier.
The premise of this title really resonates with me, I adore Penny as a character, the art style rocks, and the way it plays with the vn format in such a short game really impressed me.
If you have a job that you hate and want to fuck a manipulative (technically) robot girl, I cannot recommend this game enough.

As a visual novel I quite like this game. It's charming with a great aesthetic, an interesting start to a story, (that is at times held back by translation issues, more on that later as it's a bit complicated) fun characters, but sadly some of the most tedious gacha-isms I've ever seen. I can imagine this game being absolutely incredible in the future, but for now it's still pretty good.
Firstly though, I want to address easily the biggest strength this game has, which is it's cast. This game is way more diverse than any other anime-styled game I've ever played in my life. (Excluding a few fighting games but I don't really play those.) Characters in this game come from all kinds of cultures, and getting actors from those cultures to play those characters makes the cast feel very alive, and it almost feels like a celebration of different cultures in the 20th century.
Onto it's writing though. This game is very obtuse. Things that should feel incredibly important are never properly explained (seriously, how does the storm even work. If the Foundation has a humanist faction, does that mean humans can survive in the storm too? How are the foundation buildings immune to the storm in the first place???) which means that the story very much expects you to go with the flow and not worry about the large details. If you can manage that, the story has some pretty good moments. Another thing worth noting is that the pacing is extremely fast too. Scenes never feel like they drag out too long, and if anything I would love it if the scenes were a bit longer.
In spite of it's obtuseness, I think Reverse 1999 does manage to cover a few interesting topics however. Chapter 2 and Chapter 4 especially have some surprisingly potent political messages at times. Nothing groundbreaking, but hearing a sixteen year old cry upon finding out that people were killed by the government simply for being poor did make me quite emotional.
Onto the thing most people talk about when it comes to this game: the translation. It's rough. It's not unreadable, by any means, and the dialogue being roughly translated is something I can forgive due the circumstances of this game's production, (Originally written in Chinese for a Chinese audience with english audio for the sake of aesthetics rather than accessibility. As an American I completely respect using British and American culture for aesthetics.) however the unvoiced writing having major translation errors is a bit frustrating.
I think the characters speaking odd english at times is charming and not something inherently bad, though I do wish that the text on screen at least matched what the original chinese writing said, instead of just scribing what the english voice actors say. Hopefully with how much money this game has already seemed to make that can soon become a reality.
One last thing before I get into the gameplay: yeah the yuri in this game is good. That's what most people will probably play for and as an avid enjoyer of lgbt media I think Reverse 1999 is very solid. Having explicitly lesbian characters like Tennant and Matilda is really nice, and Medicine Pocket being agender is super cool (even if that's unrelated to the original point about yuri.)

Now onto the gameplay
As an (unfortunately) active gacha player, I think the main appeal of the genre is accumulating recourses to build a variety of characters and seeing your teams grow in real time.
As far as the combat side of things go, Reverse:1999 is pretty fun. There's fun synergys for team building, and the card mechanics add a bit of randomness to avoid making combat feel stale. However when it comes to recourse gathering, Reverse:1999 is bad. Very, very bad.
Think of every negative with Arknights recourse gathering, but make the stages slightly faster. In exchange, add an additional two tiers of tedium for no real reason.
Easily the biggest issue with this game is that i3 should fundamentally not exist. It is a bullshit recourse dump meant to make you have to play/pay more for what should take far less time. In Arknights, each promotion feels incredibly necessary for the characters. Promotion 1 and 2 both unlock a skill for each character, and promotion 2 especially unlocks a passive than is usually game-changing. It's a large recourse dump, but all steps of the process feel rewarding, especially getting new artwork upon reaching max promotion.
Reverse:1999 clearly did not learn the right lessons from Arknights, because the promotion (or insight) process is literally just the Arknights system but worse.
Instead of having 2 levels, you have 3, for literally no reason other than to make you waste more recourses. Like Arknights, unlocking insight gives your characters new passives, but the primary problem is that insight 2 passives are actually bullshit. Every single insight 2 passive, for every character in the game, is just a 5-10% stat bonus. It has no reason to exist, and all it does is make unlocking their incredibly important third passives much more annoying, as you have you effectively reach what would be e2 max level in Arknights in order to unlock a character's REAL potential in Reverse. Also it's obvious that i3 was an afterthought to earn them more money because you unlock a character's new costume after reaching i2. You don't even get a new promotion line after reaching i3, they literally just repeat the same line from i2. It's a pointless mechanic that has no purpose other than being player unfriendly.
And 4 star units not being able to reach i3 is straight up bullshit why did they do that.
Anyways, gameplay gripes aside, I quite like Reverse:1999. I'll hopefully be sticking to this game for a bit, so I'll probably update this review as more chapters come out (and hopefully as the translation improves.)
If you like games with diverse casts, yuri, and don't mind egregious recourse grinds, Reverse 1999 is a fun time.
Thanks for reading my unedited rant.

It was better than Nirvana Initiative at least.

I played the demo for this like a billion times when I was a kid and finally got around to playing the full game. It was fun :)

Everything bad about this game can be explained by the director being the same person who wrote Ultra Despair Girls.

It's like stormblood in the sense that the gameplay is great and the story is mid but it doesn't have Lyse so major points there.

Quite possibly one of the most insulting sequels ever made. I honestly can’t believe the developers had the gall to advertise this game as if it had a female main character for 3 years when the male mc was decided on back in 2018. Absolutely disgusting.

Gameplay wise this is easily the least inspired mobile game I think I have ever played, and is a completely insult to the anime. Revue is a one of a kind series, but everything in this game mechanically is just a carbon copy of something else without even bothering to add a Revue skin on it most of the time. Nothing about the gameplay has any sense of identity beyond the brief times when activating supers, when you can hear the only positive aspect of this game, the music, for a few seconds before a battle ends.
While I've heard the story eventually gets good, I don't think I could be bothered to read 15 chapters just to get to the point of actual writing, but if I ever change my mind I'll probably update my thoughts.

When I first started this game, I was almost immediately hooked on the mystery, and thankfully the core mystery remains strong the whole way through. Unfortunately, the mystery is the only thing in this game that remains strong, as nearly everything else is a direct downgrade to it’s predecessor.
Most every single flaw in this game (aside from the abysmal pacing) has a single point of origin. The decision to make a sequel to Ai:The Somnium files, while trying to make it newcomer friendly and make Mizuki the main character, two choices that directly contradict each other.
As a result of not spoiling the original Ai, nearly every character who appeared in the first game is a shadow of their former self. In the best case scenario, they have very little screen-time, and in the worst case, all nuance is drained from their character and they become a hollow shell designed to make perverted jokes.
Mizuki herself similarly suffers from this issue, though in her own unique way, that being that her arc is laughably mediocre in comparison to the original game. Everything in this game is a completely unnecessary addition to her character, that adds absolutely no depth to her character, and occasionally even retcons aspects of the original game just for a cheap twist. As a result, it’s clear that this isn’t a game that was written for Mizuki to serve as the protagonist, rather a mystery that had already been written for another character to solve, only for Mizuki to become the main character.
If it isn’t clear, the character who this game was truly written for is Ryuki, and he’s honestly one of the only good characters in the entire game.
Without spoiling anything, Ryuki is stellar. He has an incredibly strong introduction, and the mystery around his character only gets more interesting as the game continues, that is, until you start the second half of the game and all the screen-time is shifted onto Mizuki instead, a character who’s arc isn’t nearly as interesting.
Nirvana Initiative has a few flaws I didn’t go into detail about as well. The pacing is incredibly repetitive, the script was incredibly weak at times, and the abundant amount of sequel bait is nearly comparable to VLR, but at the end of the day, it’s not a terrible game, just a disappointing one.
And the worst part is that I’ll probably buy the sequel for full price as well.

This game was incredibly fun until I reached endgame and it became the worst gacha I’ve ever played. Too many things to grind for no real end goal because the only semblance of “endgame” gives practically no reward. Not to mention weapons and characters both being gacha with rates like that is comically scummy.

I played this game on an emulator as a joke, and when I finished it I genuinely started to love the series. Even after playing 3 games Burst is still my favorite.
Firstly, the game's two stories, Hanzo and Hebijo, each telling the story from a different perspective, and both provide very different experiences. Hanzo is definitely the better of the two, but they compliment each other in a way that makes both necessary. Hanzo tells the main story of the game, while Hebijo elaborates on the antagonist group, and despite being weaker as an overall story, it makes the experience better as a whole by fleshing out the Hebijo cast. Both routes contain great character moments, and it's a bit sad that they contradict each other, because it means that all the great character growth moments in Hebijo route didn't technically happen canonically.
Burst's story is a tale of two opposing groups who, through fighting, come to respect each other, and realize the importance of their differences, and how the world can't function without opposing viewpoints. It's a cliche story, but a surprisingly well executed one, especially due to the likable and fleshed-out cast.
It's here that I have to elaborate that I did play on an emulator, Citra specifically, which definitely impacted my experience with the gameplay. Because I played using Citra, I experienced very few frame drops during the gameplay portions of the game, usually averaging around a consistent 40fps. However, during the dialogue portions of the game, it ran so badly that I had to mute the game, otherwise the audio would have pierced my ears. It was an interesting experience to play a game that ran at 40fps during combat and 10 fps during dialogue sections to be sure. However even when not experiencing frame drops during combat, it's not great. It's not bad by any means, but every character plays very similarly. Use a launcher, spam aerial rave, then use a super. It's satisfying, but it definitely gets repetitive during the later stages of the game. Additionally, despite every character almost playing the same, the balancing is not good. Hibari specifically feels much weaker than the other Hanzo girls, having only a single good super with the rest being comically bad.
Despite the mediocre gameplay I thoroughly enjoy Senran Kagura Burst. Even after playing the later games with much better gameplay, I still appreciate this one the most, as even if those games have better gameplay, this is the only game where two of the characters act out a Kamen Rider skit in the main story.

I've said this for every Senran Kagura game I've played so far, but I really wasn't expecting to enjoy this game as much as I did. The stories for each group are all fun, though they do contradict each other quite a bit, the music is great and probably my favorite soundtrack of the series so far, the gameplay is fun, but I did somewhat prefer Burst and 2's 2.5D style, and the characters are mostly great. I say mostly because some characters suffer from oversimplification, such as Yomi, who relies far too heavily on bean sprout jokes despite being one of the best characters in Burst.
In regards to the story itself, every group's story is fun, but some are much better than others. Oddly enough, Hanzo has a better conclusion to Gessen's character arcs than Gessen's own story. However despite how the stories contradict each other, they work well as a whole package.
Overall the game is great, each character is likeable and fun to play, the music is nice, the visuals are, well, senran kagura, and the story is incredibly fun.