I still don't know the difference between a topspin or a slice shot. But this game is so damn smooth to play. The N64 game was good, but it often felt very clunky with the way the charge mechanic worked. In this game every movement of mine felt perfectly executed as intended.

The game lacks any kind of story mode again, which is a bit of a bummer. More excusable on N64 imo, but by now I feel like we should be getting at least some sort of content beyond tournament mode. I may be able to live with tournament mode, if not for how god damn easy it is. I am not tooting my own horn - I will happily admit I lost a few games in the N64 version despite only playing to the regular tournament (not touching the 'special' cups) - in this game it's entirely possible to go through the Mushroom and Flower cup, aka 2/3rds of the tournament, without the opponent getting a single point. They're just that bad. It isn't until the final of the Star Cup that you face anything that could be considered above mentally impaired, and even they're unlikely to do more than get you to deuce on a good day.

Beat the tournament with a character and you once again unlock a harder tournament, this time it's the "Star Tournament". Named so because beating the Star Cup gives the character you won with a star rank, which can be toggled on or off. This supposedly improves the power of their shots. In the Star Tournament every enemy is in star rank, and supposedly the challenge in general is increased, though I couldn't really tell as it's still way too easy to get points in just a couple of hits after the ball has been served.

Beat the Star Tournament and you unlock Ace difficulty for exhibition mode. I tried this out and...yeah, this is an actual challenge from the game, at least for a bad player like me. So the whole purpose of tournament mode is basically to unlock a level of difficulty that can actually be fun, and only use it in the mode that exists for people to boot up when they're low on time or something.

There's also a Gimmick Cup this time around, named so because this game introduces new gimmick courses. The gimmicks on these fields range from mild nuisances like enemies on the field, to ones that change how you play because the shape and size of the field keeps changing. Or it could be the Piranha Plant goop one, which is utterly terrible.

These gimmick courses can be played without their gimmicks... but only in exhibition mode. In Tournament mode, non-gimmick cups will all be played in exclusively in the 3 Peach Dome fields, which are basically just normal-looking Tennis fields. You also need to unlock the gimmick fields for use in exhibition mode via winning the gimmick tournaments. I'm starting to feel like Nintendo really thought players would love to just spend hours upon hours playing matches on what is essentially the quick-play mode. Which I guess if you're playing with friends could be true. But for a single player experience that's generally used for practice and maybe warm-up exclusively.

The mini-games in this game are all top tier though. So many great ideas, and they're actually appropriately challenging too.

One aspect that did disappoint me was the character roster. Don't get me wrong, this is a perfectly fine roster, maybe even good by the standards of the time. But the first game has a roster that felt decently sized for an N64 game, and had so many wild card picks. This game removes some characters (Birdo, Baby Mario, Toad(?!) & Donkey Kong Jr.) and only adds 5, for a total of a net +1. The new choices aren't even that interesting, with Diddy Kong and Bowser Jr. just kinda been auto-includes in any spin-off at this point. Wiggler is a great choice though. Fly Guy is an...odd one, especially when combined with the fact Paratroopa is made a secret character now instead of default, so two of the four unlockable characters are just flying versions of regular ones. The funniest part about this to me is how despite Fly Guy and Paratroopa being intended partners, the regular Koopa and Shy Guy aren't. Shy Guy is partnered with Boo, while Koopa is partnered with...Yoshi? Because Birdo, Baby Mario and even Toad were all removed.

At least now when you play doubles in tournament mode you get to pick your own partner, instead of it being auto-assigned like the last game.

I've gone this far without even talking about the power shot mechanic. Great in concept, each character has an offensive power shot that is basically hard to return and may cause your own character to be stunned when hitting it, or a defensive power shot which can return the ball from anywhere on the field. Each character also gets a fun personality-filled animation for each type of shot (Waluigi literally creates a flowing river and swims to the ball for his defence shot for some reason). The quandary is obvious - do you use your offensive shot to try and get an easy point, or do you save it to save yourself from an otherwise lost point?

The issue with it is these power shots charge up so damn fast. I don't know the mechanics of it, but you and your opponent will both be charged after about 10 seconds after serving. It does briefly reset when a new serve begins, but unless you just used your power shot, you can expect it to be ready again in like 3 seconds. This means any kind of question around it becomes moot. Just spam it if you want, it'll be back again soon. Of course the AI loves to do just that - in fact they will even constantly use the defensive shot even in times when they could easily hit the ball without it (and in doubles matches, I've seen people use defensive shots when their partner is literally just about to hit the ball). Since defensive shots are purposefully easy to return, every time they do this you're almost guaranteed a point just by hitting it back, even without using your own power shot, which is always an option anyway because of charge time.

The whole thing should have been a great idea that made you think about how you use the mechanic. Instead it just drags to the game to a halt, constantly pausing it to show the 5 second animations. I pretty much entirely stopped using it except when necessary - which was rarely ever because as I said, the AI in tournament mode won't really pull any moves that get the ball into a spot you can't reach, until the finals of the last cup.

Oh and you can turn off power shots... but only in exhibition matches.

The last complaint I have is with that whole star rank thing I mentioned. You unlock it for a character by beating Star Cup...but ONLY in singles. You don't even get it for beating the Star Tournament (which is set up the exact same way, but has different names for the cups), despite this literally exists purely to fight star'd opponents. There's 6 total tournaments you can play - Regular, Gimmick and "Star", with singles and doubles for each. You can get star rank for your character with only a single one of these. Yeah, even beating Star Cup in doubles won't give it to you. The challenge tournament isn't even hard itself, so to ask players to have to play the even easier version 18 times if you wanted to do it for every character is crazy.

So yeah. The game plays absolutely incredible. It's so smooth, responsive and fun. The graphics hold up, the Mario Sunshine and Luigi's Mansion theming is strong. Mini-games are great. But the game is just so easy that it's actually boring to play, with the only way to get a challenge, or even play on a better variety of fields without needing their gimmicks, being to play exhibition matches. That might be OK for some people, but I always like to feel like I'm progressing to something in a game, which exhibition matches don't do. Probably fantastic with friends, but a shallow single player experience.

A solid entry into a solid series. The already incredible job system is made even better by adding things like a second class speciality at level 12, and weapons that grant all passives for a job (albeit unlocked very late). The changes to mages is a little weird though, no longer are spells set into a "pack" where you gain access to more of those packs when you level up, but each individual spell takes up a level-up slot. This effectively makes Black Mage much shallower than before, but it also means the Red Mage gets to stand completely on its own and not just a Black Mage and White Mage combo.

The game does unfortunately drop some features that were included in Bravely Second, or even stuff that's been here from the start. The ability to set job load outs is gone, which is a huge pain in the ass because these games are made so that you want different set-ups for grinding, farming and bosses. Now if you don't want to fight bosses with a weak farming set, or don't want to waste JP by using your maxed job set, you have to constantly swap all your equipment and abilities back and forth before and after every boss. Luckily bosses are pretty well telegraphed, but some come out of nowhere, and sometimes you'll see a save point in a dungeon and assume a boss is coming, only for it to be a half way point.

They also removed dungeon maps completely for some reason. That just makes no sense when the overworld still has one.

Some changes I do like - enemies are no longer random encounters, and each one shows up on the overworld. You now get chain battles by setting off an enemy when multiple are nearby, or when using special lure items.

Other changes I'm neutral one. Special moves have been simplified greatly, with each class having their own specific one which is charged by using that classes speciality X amount of times.

A lot of this game is similar to the last 2. You still get a colourful cast of characters for each asterisk, but the main heroes, and the final villains do feel like the ones from the first game copy and pasted in some ways.

While the graphics still kind of keep the simplified almost chibi look for characters, monsters look a lot better with the upgrade to Switch. Cities likewise still look beautiful, but admittedly they ironically suffer from not being on 3DS now as it's no longer "Wow it looks so good for the hardware!"

Music is still great with the same team behind it.

Overall this game is similar in quality to the ones before it, which is to say very good. It improves some aspects like the job system a lot. But I think straight up removing features, including those that were there from the start, made it just a tiny step down, especially as the upgrade in hardware set a higher standard.

With this being the first DS Yu-Gi-Oh game, it was also, I think, the first game that had sprites of the monsters on screen when they were on the field, an aspect that continued for most, if not all, DS Yu-Gi-Oh games. I always loved this, and it's such a shame that even the most modern games don't do it.

As far as gameplay goes it's a very grindy game. You're kinda just forced to repeat duel the same opponents over and over until a plot thread shows up randomly. You don't get much currency per duel to unlock packs, so getting enough cards to try new decks is a slow process. There is a decent selection of cards at least, it's not my favourite stage of Yu-Gi-Oh! (which is around 2008-2010ish), and actual card archetypes are lacking, but there's enough in here to make decks on specific themes, whether that be monster attributes, types or even ideas such as burn or more interesting ideas I can't properly implement like forcing opponents to ram their cards into a high attack monster. Plus some specific cards will have enough support to build a deck around, like Dark Magician.

Unfortunately along with a slow progress of currency the way card packs work means that cards needed to make any deck are usually split into at least 2, if not more, packs, and they're usually spread pretty far apart. For example the first Toon cards you can get are in pack you get by finishing a story event you'll be about level 8-10 for. The second pack of Toon cards doesn't unlock until level 14 - which doesn't seem like a big jump, but there's quite a lot of duels between levels (you'll finish the game around level 18). This kind of thing will just happen all the time - unlock some pieces of a deck in one pack, then wait a long time to actually be able to unlock enough cards to make the deck usable.

There were a couple of duels that implemented something interesting to their mechanics. The building you're in is about to explode and you have a timer to win the duel, but instead of a literal timer it's a turn timer, and specifically the card "Final Countdown" is automatically played at the start of the duel. It's a fun way to use card gimmicks as in-game mechanics. It just doesn't show up nearly often enough, meaning the majority of story battles are just regular duels. Well, technically a lot of them are shadow duels, but shadow duels happen randomly outside of the story too when you run into a bad guy at night. If you lose a shadow duel you get an instant game over, so it just encourages saving often.

What you want from this game will more or less determine how good it is for you. Do you want to relive 2005 Yu-Gi-Oh against a set list of AI opponents over and over while slowly being able to make new decks? Then it's a pretty good game. Do you want a game with a rich story, fast progression and ability to make any deck you want as fast as possible? Bad game. I actually went in to it both expecting and kind of wanting the former, and I was still somewhat disappointed just because I felt the grind was too much. Like I'm fine dueling AI opponents a few times, but they could have easily cut the game time in half while doubling the amount of currency you get, thus leading to less needing to face the same people repetitively and more chances to make fun decks. The post game is just basically an infinite amount of dueling who you want and unlocking more and more cards, so there's no real reason to hide the credits behind so much of this exact thing.

It's basically a level pack for Peggle. It's a little disappointing just how little has changed. But first I'll say that I think this one does better in regards to the level themes. The game takes place in the dreams of the Peggle masters, and each one is centered around a different thing, with the majority of them even telling a story. This doesn't just help keep the levels more unified, but the peg placement felt so much better entwined with the backgrounds. In the last game the background had some cool art, but for the most part the pegs felt at best lazily placed around the objects in the picture, or at worst just slapped haphazardly all over the spot. But in this one not only has every background being more carefully chosen to fit a story, but the pegs feel carefully placed, with some pretty neat details, like a bowling ball rolling down the alley is circled by moving pegs (the ball itself is stationary, it's just that the pegs kind of emulate what the movement would be like).

Unfortunately it doesn't actually introduce any new ways to shake things up. It definitely does a way better job crafting its levels, but it doesn't throw in anything that we hadn't actually seen.

There's literally only 1 new master which you unlock at the very end. Every other master plays exactly the same, which is a missed opportunity. Since these take place in dreams, it would have been cool if they got new powers that either fit in with their dream topic, or allowed their usual powers to be superpowered. The latter would need some rebalancing of levels to not make them as easy, but at least it'd be fun and new.

It's also kind of disappointing that there aren't even any new kinds of pegs.

I'm still giving it a 9, because at the end of the day, despite being disappointing as a sequel, it's a tiny improvement on Peggle, an amazing game. I think the best time to play it would be if you haven't played the original Peggle for a while (if at all) and get that itch to play again, well now you can play again with new levels. Going straight from one to another will feel like one long game, which may be exactly what you want to be fair.

Towards the end of the PS4's life I finally got around to playing what was considered the first "must play" exclusive. I wasn't massively impressed to be playing one of the best games ever, let alone best on the PS4, honestly. It felt like a very average-good game.

This was also my first ever real soulsborne game, so a steep learning curve was needed. It is pretty rewarding to see your own improvements. At the start I pretty much got walled by every single boss after the first 2, and needed co-op help, but by the end I was taking most bosses down in a few tries by myself.

However even once I "got good" the game felt like it was just hard for the wrong reasons many times. Having enemies that can kill you in 2 hits, even normal enemies that come in massive mobs, and can attack you far faster than you can attack, and have ranges far longer than you have, doesn't feel fair. With a few exceptions I never felt like I was doing any kind of strategy to beat anything, it was just a case of being overly defensive while trying to get a hit in every now and then with an extremely high consequence for any single error.

Speaking of being defensive, the amount of options is shockingly low. You have your dodge/side step of course which is what you'll use most of the time. Then there's the parry system which is pretty neat, but doesn't even work against 90% of bosses. And personally, although this is probably my own fault, I found it to be wildly inconsistent even on bosses it does work on. Sometimes they'll just ignore it and attack through the shot, sometimes my locked-on gun will just miss the target 1 foot in front of it completely. There's no blocking or anything like that.

Unfortunately the bad parry system also meant the gun felt useless 99% of the time too, since it's not really used as a ranged weapon but just as a parry button.

There are other annoying features that made it a drag to play. The whole losing souls system upon dying twice just felt frustrating and did little more than to waste the players time and efforts. Having consumables not be replenished after dying to a boss isn't "hard", all it means is the player wastes more time grinding for each try. Having the closest checkpoint to a boss be a 5 minute trek isn't hard, it's just a waste of time. Losing to a boss 10 times before finally figuring out how to beat it can be satisfying. Having to grind for potions and walk back to it every time only serves to be anti-fun, which is the worst thing a game can be.

The co-op system kinda sucks. It didn't work a lot of the time I tried to use it, or it took about 10 minutes to actually find a password-set partner standing in the exact same spot as me. And then you and your partner can only explore the single area you summoned them in, and if either of you die it doesn't auto-join back, and beating a boss will cause your partner to leave. So you have to constantly re-apply a summon if you want to play through with a friend.

Plus for some reason the game has some enemies that ring a bell, which will allow other plays to come into your own game and grief you. That happened to me twice while I was just minding my own business and I can't think of a worse system in a game that let's other plays actually just barge into you while you're trying to have fun and just ruin it for you. I could turn the game to offline mode, but then I'd lose all the player-written notes or the ability to see other players ghosts playing at the same time as me, and I liked those.

The game often felt like it struggled, having a few frame rate drops or weird pop-ins. And NPCs mouths that don't even move when they talk, making the animation in the game feel like ps1-era cheapness.

The entire aesthetic of the game is boring. Only like 2 locations actually standout while everywhere else looks exactly the same as everywhere else. However a lot of locations can be memorable through the experiences you have there, which in many ways is more impressive than simply remembering an area because it stands out.

The actual monster designs on the other hand look incredible.

The map itself is pretty great. It's highly explorable, and rewards you by giving you shortcuts back to safe spots, meaning each time you explore a new area you give yourself a way to traverse through parts you've explored faster.

There's quite a few great little details, hidden things, choices you can make etc. I had a friend who was walking me through the game so I found a lot of them on my first playthrough, but it's a system that massively rewards replays.

it really sucks to not like a game that everyone else seems to think is perfect, but I just don't get it. It's a game that at its best can be pretty fun with a lot of details to uncover, while at its worst it's dull to look at, is full of frustrating features and time wasting mechanics, and generally feels unpolished.

It’s a fun puzzle game that due to its genre hasn’t aged nearly as badly as some other NES games. Unfortunately it’s just not my thing for anything more than light entertainment. I did enjoy the game, completed it fully, and found it very rewarding to finally figure out a tough puzzle, just not enough to grip me.

I have a couple of complaints about the game regardless though. The first is that the game uses a half-square based grid instead of a full square one. Admitedly this does lead to some outside the box thinking in later puzzles, but it also results in way too many slight missteps that result in having to reset an entire level because you pushed a block 1/2 a square too far, or you missed a turn while being chased (or you could just use the Switch's rewind feature but that would be cheating and I would never do that 👀).

Another compliant is that things don't always seem to work consistently. For example, you can turn enemies into eggs, push them into water and ride on them. But the amount of time they spend before sinking, even with enemies of the same species, differs massively. On one stage I pushed an enemy into the water and it sunk straight away. I get that it's to prevent sequence breaking and make sure you do the puzzles in the exact right way, but it's very counter-intuitive for the player.

But those didn't ruin the game for me, just led to some frustrating moments, and the former one even benefited the game in a couple of cases.

I will not rest until Backloggd lets me log and rate each and every game present here.

Nintendo really dared to say "how many games can we make that utilise just 5 total buttons". Then they proceeded to make it work through a combination of addicting fast-paced gameplay, chaotic energy and a smorgasbord of graphic styles to keep your brain thinking it's not just playing the most basic games ever made.

And yes I did say 5 buttons, the A button and each direction on the D-Pad. Even in a very limited game like this, they still decided to omit the B and shoulder buttons (the latter being used exclusively for a handful of unlockable multiplayer games).

One element I really love about the game is how every characters intermission screen (the part that shows up between microgames) has a different appearance, with the lives being represented by something new in all of them.

There's a surprising amount of unlockables, including a fully functional Dr. Mario, appropriately named after Wario instead.

What I wasn't a big fan of were how long the boss stages were. Yes they maxed out at like 3 minutes, and in a regular playthrough they serve their purpose as a slightly meatier challenge to round off a characters stage, but when you replay stages to unlock all microgames those 3 minute sections between 3 second ones really drag the process out.

I also found it weird how 2 characters randomly had introduction games thrown into their own pool for seemingly no reason (technically 3, but the last one is Wario, which is fitting as Wario himself is actually represented in the introduction games).

An extremely strong foundation but it's missing any combination of things that could make it perfect.

The biggest problem I have is how often 1-1 and 1-2 show up. To put it into perspective, the game says I have cleared 1-1 84 times and 1-2 51 times. The third highest clear is 1-3 at 19 times.

I'm still not 100% sure what determines the course chosen, I assume the course you pick at the start adds that course into the pool, and most players are just picking 1-1 and 1-2, however I do notice that when there's fewer players more "hard" levels show up, which makes me think it might only choose courses from players still alive, however that can't be right as the course I pick not show up even in a 1v1 situation. Selecting a course at the start has no obvious impact at all from what I can tell.

Another problem with 1-1 and 1-2 spam is how easy those levels are to rack up time and coins. Both have easily accessible stars which are OP as fuck in this game for gathering time, and 1-1 in particular makes it super easy to get the fire flower, another OP item. Like seriously the difficulty of the enemy spam in the game is way too large depending on if you have a fire flower or not.

The endgame is way too long too. It gets to 10 players surprisingly fast, but those final 5 can last for 10+ minutes.

The way I'd improve it is to either make all the courses go in order, so you can't just spam the easy ones. That way there'd be both a benefit to moving faster (being able to send the stronger enemies to opponents before anyone else) and a downside since you also end up dealing with harder platforming. Right now there's no reason to get through a level as fast as possible because as long as you're on 1-1 or 1-2 it's so easy to keep your timer up and have easy platforming, compared to something like 1-3 which is a much slower stage.

Another way it could be improved is by not reseting resources in a level. So once you get those item boxes in 1-1 you can't farm them from there anymore, and once you use that star it can't be used over and over to get easy time.

If the game could just negate the ability to farm 1-1 and 1-2 all the time, and give more variety, it'd be so much better.

I'll also say it'd be nice to have more ways to interact with other players rather than just sending them fodder for their fire flowers. Something like items with various effects like speeding up the enemies on their screen.

A couple other changes I think might benefit:
-Remove the fire flower and stars from boxes in the game. They trivialise everything. Having only base Mario/Big Mario would make this so much more interesting and make the whole "sending enemies to the opponent" thing actually feel like a threat. This is in combination with the next point:
-Make the item roulette wheel go up in price every time it's used. It's so easy to rack up hundreds of coins in the early game so that when things do start getting harder you can just spam the wheel to keep refreshing your fire flower.

Unless any changes get made this is a fun way to play Mario Bros but is otherwise very repetitive and too simplistic to last. But maybe that's why it's a limited time release anyway.

This is pretty much pure, basic, unfiltered Kirby. There's little bells and whistles to the formula. It won't bring in anyone not a fan of Kirby and won't turn anyone away who is a fan.

There are the ultra powers, or whatever they're called. Supped up copy abilities that can be found in specific stages and essentially exist just to smash everything on screen for 3 minutes and unlock a secret portal to an auto-scrolling platform challenge, followed by a fight with a mini-boss for two of this games obligatory collectibles.

These power moments provide some brief fun, but like the mega mushrooms in New Super Mario Bros. there's only so much you can do with a gimmick whose entire thing is hulk smashing everything.

The mini-game compilation is pretty fun. Of course the real draw of the mode is multiplayer, but they provide lots of encouragement for solo players to try it out, with a challenge list and unlockable cosmetics + items to use in the main game.

What I didn't quite get was why the entire mini-game catalogue opened up straight after beating level 2, then one of the bonuses for collecting the previously mentioned collectibles was unlocking mini-games in the games hub area. I can only assume this was a leftover from the original game where mini-games had to be slowly unlocked?

As a Kirby game you can expect it to be short and easy, but as usual post-game provides both a little longevity and a lot of challenge for 100%. There's "extra" mode, which is literally just the whole game again but basically hard mode. I'm not a big fan of difficulty options that are disguised as unlockables, especially when there's no option to select default difficulty in the first place.

Magolor's Epilogue provides a pretty cool alternate-gameplay journey. Being very combo and upgrade focused as opposed to Kirby's switch-and-swap abilities

And of course you've got your boss rush mode.

All in all, it's Kirby.

This is the perfect example of why I say on my profile that ratings given to games I haven't played in a long time are unreliable. I had originally rated this 3 stars based on my 20 year old memories.

To be fair to this game, it isn't just an outdated version of GTA as we know it, it has its own unique arcade-y style. The goal is to get a certain amount of points on any given level, you can get small amounts via causing damage and crimes, but the only real way to win is to do the missions. And for every mission you complete, your points multiplier goes up. You have a set number of lives, so death has more of a consequence than it does in later entries, and getting busted by cops will drop your multiplier.

One big issue I had with the game comes from the lack of an in-game map. The only guide you'll ever get for getting to and from locations is an arrow pointing you to the objective. Unfortunately this arrow is context-blind, so it constantly took me to the edge of water, only for me to have to spend 5 minutes finding the right bridge to cross so I could actually get on track. This combined with a timer for many missions made the game annoying. The birds-eye view camera doesn't help matters, as the speed the cars go leave you little to no time to react to the screen, causing multiple collisions to slow you down, and you'll occasionally get your view blocked by things hanging overhead. The amount of times I bumped into a pole I didn't even realise was there due to the camera angle.

The game feels unpolished as all heck. One of my favourite moments was when I got into a parked bus, and in this game getting into a parked vehicle starts a mission during the early stages, so I waited for the arrow to come up so I could know where to go, then the bus explodes and THEN I get the mission text at the bottom telling me to keep the bus above 50mph (it must have been a mission based off Speed).

The game takes the "Grand Theft Auto" title a lot more literally than later entries, as most of the game revolves around car missions. This is for the best as the shooting mechanics are pure shit. I swear I could just shoot directly at a guys head multiple times and none of them register. My best option was always just spray like a maniac with a machine gun and hope to kill. On the downside, the last stage has a ton of gun fight missions.

I suffered serious frame rate issues through the game, particularly in later stages.

On top of being unpolished, there's just a ton of glitches - or at least I hope they were glitches. Like one time at a x6 points multiplier, I completed a mission and my score went up by 3 million, easily putting me above the goal for that stage. Later on, with a x10 multiplier, I was barely getting a few hundred thousand per mission. Lots of other little bugs littered throughout too.

There's 3 maps in the game, but all feel more or less the same. The latter two do differ a bit more in terms of visual variety, and funnily enough they have less dead ends than the first map, making them easier to follow the arrows in, which seems like the opposite direction the difficulty should have been. But the first map has this really neat jump over a broken bridge, it's the only thing that really tries anything unique with the level design and it only happens in the very first map.

There are a few secrets in the maps, like a tank is hidden in each one, so it can be rewarding to find them (even though the amount of points they give isn't too great).

I feel like the game could have been more fun if it was just based on getting points by causing mayhem, evading police and the like. Instead all the flaws of the game just make trying to get through the missions a huge pain in the ass.

I've only ever played Bloodborne before in the Soulsborne series, and after starting this my immediate reaction was just how little the developers have evolved these games, at least from 2009-2015. Obviously that's not this games fault since it was the first of the kind. To be fair though this game does make shields useful which was nice, even though they become a bit useless near the end (at least the shield I was using, I never got a chance to use a huge one because my equipment limit wouldn't allow it).

For the first 2 or 3 hours of this game I was frustrated to no end, the lack of ability to level up before beating the first boss was infuriating when you got stuck on a section because there was no way to actually improve, and with each run your healing items would keep decreasing making it harder and harder. It didn't help that I chose what is apparently the worst starting class without realising. But once I beat the boss and the game opened up, I started enjoying it. There were times I had fun, there were times I enjoyed the challenge, and there were times I was angry. But as I kept playing the flaws started seeping through and it felt like with every new obstacle I came to resent the game more and more.

Anyway Demon's Souls is at its best when you're fighting one on one, and, funnily enough, in the boss fights. The game is at its worst almost every other time. I think it'll just be easier to give a full list of things I didn't like about the game:

-Combat is absolutely not suited for fighting multiple enemies at once. While using your chance to attack one enemy (and it's a pretty rare chance in later enemies), the other 5 enemies around you will be on your ass before your first sword swing animation has hit. Plus there's an amount of time after performing a parry or backstab where your character is finishing their animation but you can still be attacked. So... even when you get rewarded for a perfect parry the game still punishes you. It's also possible to be stunlocked after getting hit once, as then the next enemy will hit you and stun you, and while he recovers from his animation another enemy will do it and so on. I'm sure there are builds that can tackle multiple enemies, but it feels like you'd need advance knowledge of the games mechanics, weapons and spells to plan for that.

-Many of the locations aren't suitable for fighting, particular on stairs and bridges where you have no room to roll. And god help you if you're somewhere with no barriers. I remember trying to get to one specific boss room, but it was up a huge flight of stairs with no barriers, and half way up was a magician that had this AOE blast spell that would just knock you off to your death every time. It killed me more than the boss ever could.

-The game is VERY unintuitive and doesn't explain anything. In many cases this can be as little as missing out on a ton of items and content because the thing you need to do is so obscure you'd never work it out without looking it up (swapping items with the crow, wearing a specific outfit to unlock some stairs). But in some cases the game progress is even blocked behind a specific thing you need to do that is never told to you, such as a boss that will infinitely respawn if you don't kill a specific NPC first. Even the world and character tendency, something the entire game is built around and has an entire tab for in the menu, goes unexplained in-game.

-The above also applies to the level design, it's not unusual for the game to introduce new enemy types, or stage hazards in a non-safe environment, leaving you no time to work out what they can do and how to counter it.

-Just like Bloodborne (and I assume Dark Souls), other players can come into your world and just kill you. It once happened to me right after beating a boss and before I could go to the nexus, so basically I lost some world tendency without being able to do anything about it. A mechanic that lets uninvited players come and grief you just sucks ass.

-Just like Bloodborne the visuals are dull. It's just dark grey colours everywhere. They do have some pretty cool location concepts, such as mines and a prison, but it all just looks so bland in practice. Level layouts themselves were a mixed bag. Sometimes they were pretty good and offered shortcuts to reward the player for getting through them, or otherwise were a straight line to the boss but offered side-routes for exploration. Other times they were just a labyrinth where everything looked the same and if you died there was no fast way to get back to where you were (such as the tunnels or Valley of Defilement). You just generally spend waaaaaay too much time retreading the same parts over and over.

-There's this very annoying thing where I'd try to hit an enemy with the usual attack button but he'd just nudge the enemy instead. I never managed to figure out what caused this, even after looking it up, and everytime it happened it just screwed me over.

-The non-linearity of levels creates an incredibly unbalanced difficulty curve. I did 1-1, 1-2, then 2-1, 2-2 and 2-3, then went back to 1-3. After beating 1-3, the first stage of each remaining world was incredibly easy to the point where I'd often just make it to the boss and beat it in a single try. But then the second stage of each world would be a mix of enemies I could easily tank and big enemies that could kill me in 2 shots (and then the boss in x-2 would always be super easy and would do less damage than the big mooks for some reason?). When you let the player do stages in any order you really aren't able to balance the game with their progression.

-The swamp stage exists. I think that's my least favourite stage from any video game ever.

-And then there's the last thing that pissed me off. I was debating whether to give the game a 2 or a 2.5 for a while, but then I fought the 1-4 boss and I saw the message "Soul level drained". There's a boss that can literally undo your progress - multiple hours of your life - and you don't even get the levels back if you die, meaning that the boss you just lost to will now be even harder because you've just lost some levels.

-Equipment weight limit means you realistically only have 50% of what it says you have if you want to have any kind of chance. Also the world tendency thing, if you wanna do it right, means playing the game with 50% health the whole way through.

Basically I just don't like this game because it's boring to look at and its difficulty comes from ignoring game design 101; creating battles that are massively against the players odds by making the enemies attack much faster and stronger than you ever could. Throwing a thousand newb death traps everywhere so that players will often have to spend their time trekking back to their old spot, with the huge risk of losing their souls if they die on the way. Putting battles on stages that go against your defense mechanics, like making rolling impossible, making enemies that can't be blocked by a shield (and getting hit will stun you and turn your stamina to 0).

Weirdly even though Bloodborne is the technically harder game (I can at least say I never needed a co-op partner to beat any of this games bosses), this one felt way more frustrating with its unfairness.

There are definitely times when the game hits the sweet spot of being hard without just punching the player in the face and pissing on their corpse, but damn are they overshadowed.