Much adored cult classic that I really wanted to love, but mostly everything about the gameplay and dungeon design made me want to throw someone's baby out a window.

The game has a lot going for it with its large connective world that I enjoyed mapping out, and the amazing voice acting and personality of Kain himself. The soundtrack and simple but engaging plot were also enough for me to want to see the end.

I think this is a game i'll have to return to someday to see if i can fully get over it's mechanics, but for a first playthrough they really harmed my enjoyment of an otherwise beautifully crafted game.

This game is a pretty mixed bag. It's particularly a highlight for me that Altair can't realistically fight off armies of people like in later instalments, which makes you engage with being an assassin a bit more.
The problem is that the core loop is just pretty boring and aside from the main assassination events it feels like a slog to get to where the game shines. Add to that hours of standing listening to Al Mualim chat bollocks or not really having much in your arsenal to spice up gameplay, and it starts to feel like a chore.
What's great about the game is the environments that feel lived in and the freedom to scale and explore practically anything. I also prefer the story to some other games in the series as it keeps the Abstergo stuff mysterious and is a little less on the nose with its villain. It's just that ultimately, this game feels like a pilot that would allow Ubi to take all the best elements and remove the worst moving forward.

In this installment Kiryu has become such a dad his fighting ability has apparently vanished, and he gets block spammed by every enemy in the game.

The story is more goofy fun and the orphanage stuff is such a great arc for Kiryu. I also found combat improved as the game went on with more abilities to counter and deal with enemies.

But Jesus i could not enjoy the combat for a large portion of the game, and the substories also suck with a lot being 'play this sport minigame 10,000 times'.

It has my favourite final boss in the series and the latter half of the game picks up a lot in fun factor, it's just torture for new players to reach that point

This is an annoying one. The inclusion of Mara Jade is great but that's kind of it.
I love Dark Forces II, and this did a lot of things wrong as an expansion.

For one Mara is far weaker than Kyle and you have very little in the way of force powers by the end, where we should have seen different things. The levels in Dark Forces II felt fine enough for me, but a lot of this game takes the piss with how silly the solutions are. The final levels also throw such retarded enemies at you it's rare you'll ever make it round a corner without save spamming.

That aside, the game is still enjoyable to play like DF2 and i liked a couple of bosses at the end so the core experience was still there. It's just been buried in a lot of shit.

AC Origins is a pretty clean reboot of the franchise. It does enough of its own thing while paying respects to past games without going on for an eternity like Odyssey and Valhalla.
It doesn't hold back with being an action-RPG which isn't what I want out of this series, but stays grounded enough that you can still get an assassin experience.
I quite like the story in this one a fair bit, but with long stretches of time and side content between each beat my interest started to dwindle being used to past titles. I was also so lost with the modern story at this point that the new protagonist didn't interest me at all.
I find Origins worth playing for the solid mechanics more than anything and being able to just explore ancient Egypt, and I do prefer it to some previous entries.

I really appreciate this game and enjoyed it for the most part.
Unfortunately I am severely mentally disabled, so when my party members died from so much as stepping on dirt the wrong way my tiny brain could just not conceive of how to play.
This resulted in me activating baby diaper gagagoogoo mode but I don't care because I just wanted to see the world and story after a point and not have 7 Excel spreadsheets open. It's a testament then that even if I broke the game, it still had me hooked on the exploration and little moments. The main story is kind of generic fantasy shart, but then it's D&D so I'm not about to judge that.

I can see the arguments for why people would prefer Going Commando. It's almost immediately jarring to see how much got left behind going into this one, and the levels have largely been replaced by more linear corridor shooting.

However, I felt this game really achieved what it set out to. Going Commando built and expanded on the first game, but the combat in UYA has been refined and perfected. It focuses far more on shooting through everything, so the expanded ranks and range of weapons gives a lot of incentive to use many different approaches. Unlike the previous two games, I didn't feel locked into using cheese weapons because of bad endgame scaling, and I was generally able to use the weapons i enjoyed throughout the game.

The goofier elements are also still present, with Qwark vid comics being more enjoyable to me than the clunky racing and ship combat of GC. It leaves a lot behind, but makes up for it with a stellar focus on combat and making sure everything got time in the oven here.

The story is more of the same, but i wasn't left expecting anything of it since it's just taking these characters we've grown attached to round another tour of the galaxy. Going in blind in 2022, this ended up being my favourite of the PS2 trilogy and I'm excited to try and play some of the other acclaimed games.

After suffering in Yakuza 3, we move to Yakuza 4 and i think the decision to have 4 protagonists is such a good one. People might not like this for many reasons, but i felt so refreshed toying around with 4 different styles.

The flow of combat is largely the same, but each character feels unique and offers enough variety to hide some of the stinkier aspects. Early game is pretty frustrating for a couple characters, but i felt i progressed far faster than Y3 and that kept me engaged.

It's also not just the combat. Having 4 protagonists lets us see the world from different perspectives, and Akiyama particularly became an instant favourite for me.

The downside i find here is that with all the shifting and balancing, the plot is a bit of a mess. These games have windy, twisty and silly plots and that is part of the charm, but here certain beats feel so stitched together i barely cared by the credits