The Witcher 3 is a grandiose and emotional story of a man looking for his daughter. Because finding said daughter takes time and a man's gotta sit down and rest every now and then, in a more immediate sense The Witcher 3 is a game about Geralt stumbling on all of his old friends who all happen to be in the same corner of the world at the same time and going for a drink and catching up with all of them.

You may think that this is a role-playing game because of the RPG tag but actually the G in the RPG here stands for Geralt, so you're Role-Playing Geralt, who is, lucky for you, one of the most terrific video game protagonists that you'll ever meet (you're also him in this game!)

The writing is all-around great here, which makes even all the side-quests worth experiencing too. Many times the smaller stories will surprise you and blow your mind. Different outcomes in quests based on your choices mean there's plenty of replayability here too.

This game is too long for its own good. To get to the ending, you will need to essentially play the same game with 5 different characters, and chances are you are mentally done after just one. There's also something discouraging about having to start from level 1 with each new character over and over again when you've just finished a playthrough with a lvl 70 something character. Another unfortunate consequence of all this is also that there is a high chance you'll be forced to play with a character or two whose gameplay you're just not feeling. Thankfully you can always switch the difficulty to easy if you want to speed things up by a few hours.

The gameplay is good. It's satisfying to chain different skills together to juggle an enemy for a long period of time, or to cause a massive barrage of explosions and damage indicators popping up on the screen by casting spells and using items back to back in a quick succession.

The prose is also good when it's good, and I'm glad to have got to the ending to see how the game wrapped up everything. Some of the story moments will also blow your mind to a degree when things that were foreshadowed earlier come together in a logical manner. However, the payoff of the ending struggles to be substantial enough to justify the time and the amount of repetitive gameplay needed to get there. Come for the gorgeous art and stay for it too, I guess.

Final Fantasy VII Remake is at its strongest when it is unapologetically Final Fantasy VII and at its weakest when it tries to be a modern game. The scenes that were magical in the original are mostly even better here and crafted with love. Every boss battle in the game is a spectacle you'll be looking forward to. The materia system is as enjoyable as ever. The battle system has enough depth to accommodate expert-level play. Cloud ends up having a good character arc, even though it is a little hard to buy into him in the beginning.

However, the new story content is 50-50 in that 50 % of it is good and welcome, and the other 50 % will make you roll your eyes. The side quest content is also throwaway checklist fluff, a departure from the organically integrated secrets of the PS1 era, even though the optional battles you'll discover are good stuff. The game could have also used a little bit of "less is more" in regard to the length of the dungeons. Many times it feels like the dungeons you visit go on for a little too long in order for the game to meet some arbitrary hour count to prove that the first act of the original game can be a full-length game. It also doesn't help that where as in other JRPGs you'll visit ancient temples, magical woods, floating islands, ride on the back of creatures the size of a mountain etc., in Final Fantasy VII Remake you'll visit such exciting locations as a slum, a maintenance corridor, a power plant, a garbage dump, a sewer, another garbage dump etc. Hmm... no, wait! That was just a different corner of the same garbage dump. Sorry, only one garbage dump here!

The storytelling also falters a little towards the end when Aerith starts spouting incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo and the other characters are nodding along as if they have a clue as to what the hell she is on about. The ending itself will scare some people off too but it also leaves interesting potential for the sequels. My personal GOTY of 2020.

Suikoden is a game in which a seemingly normal young man gets caught up in a empire-spanning quest to get to the root of the corruption in the empire, and amasses an army of allies in the process.

The game is caught up in a strange limbo where the game itself is on the Playstation but the compact and at times vigourless storytelling is from the earlier eras. Important story moments that would deserve more savouring are sometimes shrugged off with just a few lines of dialogue. Sometimes this leads to unintentionally comedic scenes where a character sacrifices themself in a dramatic fashion to the tune of emotional music, and then a few seconds later the music cuts off and the other characters effectively go "Okay, gg guys! Let's go home and eat lunch." On the other hand, sometimes the game goes out of its way to give emphasis to scenes with animations that are only ever seen once throughout the course of the game.

Ultimately, though, the game balances this out with the brisk pace of the story and its interesting concepts, delightfully expectation-subverting character-driven moments and their hijinks. These just about elevate the game to be more than a companion game to the greater Suikoden 2.