I rarely ever drop games, but I wasn't having any form of fun with this one after a while. I've beaten Dark Souls about 8 or 9 times, and I adore it's slow deliberate pacing, bits of unique jank that create unique, memorable moments, and it's sometimes antagonistic world and level design that silently leads the player through it. I feel like Demon's Souls has a large handful of these ideas; the steady progression through the worlds was at first giving me the same sense of discovery and learning that I got from the first Dark Souls, but after a while, I felt that antagonistic design genuinely wearing on me, and beating me down to the point where I was wallowing in a really uncomfortable feeling of anger and unfairness. I don't want to be lead through every objective, and receive assistance in every fight, but the cold and mean game that Demon's Souls ended up becoming, is one that I'm fully aware would have sent me down a really bad path for my emotional well being.
I guess I've been beat, this time.

Around the beginning of the year, I looked back at my rating for Outer Wilds with a bit of hesitation. I may be more generous than many other reviewers with my 5/5's, but I still genuinely consider everything I give the perfect score to, a league above the rest, and as I looked at Outer Wilds, I couldn't conjure up as many concrete reasons, as I could with any of the others, to the point where I retroactively changed the rating to a 4. So I began to tackle the DLC, in hopes of remembering what blew me away about this game, in a previous life.
Outer Wilds is a game that I played alongside over 50 other's in the oft unfondly remembered year of 2020. During those months of quarantine, fewer and fewer hours at work, and dwindling social interaction, I took to clearing out my backlog at a rabid pace. It got to the point where I was playing multiple story heavy games in the same day. I begin to get addicted to watching the credits roll after beating a game, and so I just kept going, realistically past the point of burnout, but this was Covid era, I was experiencing burnout with everything. And then in October, after my declaration of a 52 game/One game a week pace for 2020, I played Outer Wilds. I was charmed by the world, the atmosphere, but I genuinely wasn't viewing the game for what it actually is. While I was playing Outer Wilds like an open world adventure game with cool sci fi flare, I was missing out on the layered puzzle at the core of it all. For whatever reason, I viewed the obtuse logic and note rewarding puzzles as obstructions to seeing the credits roll, so I willfully looked up walkthroughs, almost immediately when I'd hit an impasse. By the time I made it to the remarkable finale, I tried my best to feel proud of what I'd accomplished, but over time the victory began to feel hollow, and I desperately wished to wipe my memory of the game and start fresh.
Fast forward to 2023; Life went on, my game completion rate dwindled, but everything else began to improve. It wasn't until I sat down with a newly acquired PS Plus (Extra) subscription, and noticed a familiar space-traveling game, that I decided to give Outer Wilds another shot. It was genuinely like I was playing a new game, despite my previous knowledge undercutting some puzzles, I was still having a blast reading the history of the Nomai, figuring out their technologies and cities, and using immensely satisfying A->B->C logic chains to get a full picture of what I had seen 3 years ago. It was then that I remembered that I had purchased the games' acclaimed DLC soon after beating it, but I had simply never played it.
I had a miniature revelation moment, knowing that this was my chance to experience a chunk of the organic discovery process the base game offered, with completely fresh eyes. I made it my goal to avoid walkthroughs, unless I had tried out everything to the extent of my knowledge, I focused on deductions and exploration, and I ended up being genuinely blown away by what Echoes of the Eye has to offer.
This may be one of the best-in-class complete packages that I've ever seen for DLC of a game, it offers something completely fresh, while keeping the same satisfying design principles that the base game did.
As I type this review, I am about one hour removed from the completion of Echoes of the Eye, the tears have dried a while ago, but the impression that I'm getting, is that I finally understand not only what I felt in 2020, but what I missed, playing this game back then with guides. I hope everyone can find some sense of satisfaction with this weird, messy entertainment medium, because Echoes of the Eye definitely reminded me of what that feels like.

Won't be able to un-tense my shoulders for a while after playing that. No idea why I've made it my mission to play a bunch of games that specifically target my Thalasopphobia, I think this fear is genuinely impossible to face. Very happy I was able to play this in a discord call with someone who's played it before. It added a sense of levity that kept me from actually exploding like a gallon of milk surrounded by rubber bands. I will always love something that pushes boundaries on what a game can be, and how horror can be portrayed, even if it scares the shit out of me.

It's hard to nail down the charm of a handheld exclusive title, especially one using a pre-established formula, but Aria of Sorrow fills that exact niche with an amazing level of confidence. There's something to be said about the simple charms of checking every corner of a map, getting lost, and having that wonderful moment of discovery that blows the whole game wide open, it's pretty intoxicating, and seems to be a driving factor behind the metroidvania subgenre's explosion in popularity. I think Aria takes a great no frills approach to a lot of those wonderful design philosophies and squeezes it down like a fresh orange, and the subsequent game is a tight, joyous, pulpy little romp that kept me entertained through multiple hotel stays and flights!

The most important games for me are ones that seem to pop in to my world at the exact time that I needed them, and Pikmin is a strong example of one of those cases. The moment I was living under my own roof, during the summer before I started college, I felt like a completely different person. I never knew what life was like without the every minor decision or daily bit of minutia being judged with a harsh eye, and subsequent fear, and my first apartment changed all of that. Living alone started as a party, I spent money and time in ways I previously never could, but as the high of freedom wore off, something took it's place, legitimate independence. Local transportation would allow me to effectively perform walkabout's in every area that interested me growing up, and despite growing up in a single parent household, as an only child, this solitude was something different, a vast world that began to teach me thing's. And it was about a year in to this unique solitude that I found Pikmin.
This silly gamecube launch title has valuable lessons about finding peace with death, discovering the logic behind a seemingly harsh world, and most importantly to me, how to deal with being left alone with your own thoughts. I remember sitting in my car in a massive parking structure, before a big event I was involved with, trying to squeeze in a few extra minutes with Captain Olimar and the Pikmin, knowing how important his journey's would feel parallel to mine.
At the end of the day, this is a neat tech demo about a tiny guy fighting monsters, but for someone attempting to finding their own voice; critically, profesionally, and personally, there could be no better companion than Olimar, and no better game than Pikmin.

The Evil started rolling Within and I was like, hmm...

Some choice jokes/running references throughout my streaming of the game include:
-Supernatural Season 1 grey filter
-"Ethan" Sebastian "Within" Castellanos AKA: The Ethan Within
-Joseph's goofy lil saunter & unbelievable axe proficiency
-"Get a f*cking hobby" directed towards the safe room nurse
-GOOP
(This may be updated with more, later)

I think Judgement is amazing, and I don't think Judgment needs Yakuza to be amazing. I believe it is at its best when it strays away from the storytelling style of that series, or uses that style to contrast itself. Compared to the bombastic ever-present, crime world shaking melodrama of the titular decade spanning franchise, Judgement decides to zoom in a bit more, tell a simpler story, and make the people the story is about its #1 priority. This games biggest “moments” see fully realized characters reaching the end of their respective arcs and watching as their shifting alignments shape the world inside and outside Kamurocho, where every single thread of fate will intertwine in the climactic finale.

Actually, lets rewind a bit, because like I said, Judgement really is just a simple story, a story about one man, Takayuki Yagami, and how his perceived failures turned him into a detective, seeking forgiveness for his actions. I could not think of a more perfect protagonist for this sort of story than Yagami. Supremely likeable, but incredibly selfish, he has just the right level of bullheaded determination and craving for justice that gives you hope that he can crack any case wide open. That isn't to say Yagami is just some kind of truth cyborg, he's portrayed as a very logically flexible and legitimately intelligent protagonist, which plays perfectly against his endearing oaf of a partner, Masaharu Kaito.
Kaito, and the rest of the Matsugane family, feel plucked straight from the Yakuza series in a way that seems directly opposed to the murder mystery vibe running throughout the game. He's brash, impulsive, and never beyond a joke, even in the most dire of scenarios, but it's loyalty that makes Kaito such a definitively loveable ally. He brings a simple approach to any scenario that helps Yagami out more than any like-minded genius could.

We'd be here all day (and things would start entering spoiler territory) if I really wanted to start diving into the delightful layers of the entire main cast, and even most of the secondary cast, but the main point I'm getting at here is just how uniquely personality driven Judgement's story ends up being.

One big example of this is the games priority on friend events over side quests. Friend events are unique interactions with permanent fixtures of the overworld, barfly's, restaurant manager's, weird cat bloggers, and after these interactions are over and these people's questlines are "done", they never go away. It gives this tangible, lived in quality to the world, as you turn a corner and see your landlady, or the in-universe inventor of Kickstarter. Judgement ends up creating a unique tapestry of associates, friends, and allies that goes to show Yagami's networking ability in real time.

When it comes to the side-quests however, I can't say I was as much of a fan of their general presentation. Despite having some good laughs, and fun writing for the most part, the side quests all ended up having a similar structure that disincentivized me from even seeking them out after a certain point, especially when the main story reaches about the midway point i was so enthralled that accidentally hitting a side-quest event trigger felt way more like a nuisance than it should have.

Which i think is where an interesting line begins to form between Judgement and the Yakuza series. The DNA of Ryu Ga Gotoku's beloved series can be seen all over Judgement, from its setting, to its combat, but that's why I think the distinctions in tone matter so much. Judgement's existence as a mystery story following a singular protagonist leads to a much more streamlined approach to the storytelling, as the player is encouraged to piece together the mystery right alongside Yagami, rather than simply be presented a story, moment to moment. I personally loved this, and found myself itching to play the game every single day after work into the small hours of the morning. I grew up on a steady diet of Ace Attorney and Danganronpa and those series' taught me that even if the mystery is a bit obvious in places, being in the middle of a spiderweb of deceit and intrigue is just fun in and of itself.

I honestly could go on. I could talk about the incredibly fun, if not slightly unbalanced combat system, how warm and comforting the girlfriend mechanics were (as lonely as that makes me sound), Ayabe being the perfect foil to Makoto Date, and plenty of other things, but I think I'll just leave it there. Judgement is a wonderful experience filled with endlessly charming characters, brilliantly written dialogue, and a brisk pace that sunk its hooks into me and never let go. It's so much more than "that yakuza spinoff". I hope everyone reading this finds the opportunity to play it so I have more people to talk about it with.

Also, if I wrote a one sentence meme review for this game it would be:
Kaito is just Kiryu if Kiryu had sex"