I've been dreading giving this game a (real) review ever since I finished the main story and looked up the other endings. My thoughts on it are so conflicting but I'll attempt to give an honest review to highlight both it's victories and it's numerous cardinal sins.
I don't like doing this but I'm going to use a pros and cons list to help stay organized because I feel like I could get rambly on this one.

Pros ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

- This game definitely gets down the "feel" of a from soft souls game if only on the surface level in the game play loop and how the combat feels (sometimes)

- The soundtrack, design, animation, and most of the voice acting is great

- A society being overthrown by puppets who in the end were powered by dead people souls somehow is an interesting premise (if not a little too much like iRobot)

- There were some pretty awesome bosses and I liked the way they reused some areas and made enemies "evolve" over time by making infected versions of earlier enemies, different weapon variations, etc

- Deflecting can feel fun at times and the puppet string prosthetic is fun to use

Cons -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

- First off the game being about Pinocchio is a huge detractor. It makes it insanely hard to take this game seriously. So much stuff feels forced into the game just because it was in the original Pinocchio story despite the fact that they're changing things so much that it hardly represents Pinocchio in any way at this point. Did the localization not realize that P sounds like another word in English? Who named the freaking "rise of P" ending? The WHAT organ? It's nearly a miracle we never had to collect "P liquid" or that they didn't refer to the Pinocchio nose on the picture frame as the "P stick".

- This game is crammed full of pointless items, systems, and an overabundance of confusing mechanics. More options doesn't = good if a large portion of the options suck.
- These characters are all boring and one note. I feel like the game expected me to get close to all these hotel people but all they do is give me stuff or sell me stuff or talk about their one character trait over and over again. Yeah I'm Korean and that dog guy saved me! Yeah I'm a rich billionaire who's parents were murdered by a puppet! They never grow or change and you never spend any meaningful time with them. The fox and cat were the closest to having progression but they ruin it by just being dicks to you at every chance they get.

- This game copies way too much from souls games just to say they copied something without thinking of whether it's good or fun. This game is on par with and/or worse than dark souls in the cheap ambushes department. Seriously this game is freaking obsessed with cheap stupid ambushes. Literally anytime I saw an item or chest I walked in backwards just because 80% of the time some stupid mob is waiting for you. This was never fun in dark souls or bloodborne, it was just kind of cheeky but I forgive it in those games because usually it's just now and then.

- Half of these weapons do not mesh well with the combat system and the way you're often forced to play the game to succeed. I could go into more detail about certain enemy attacks and move sets that bugged me and felt like they were clashing with the style of gameplay but I'll just stop here.

- I absolutely hate that you can't cancel out of attacks to do a deflect. This is my personal opinion and I learned to overcome my desire to want to do attack cancel deflects but it still felt bad. After having played Sekiro and Sifu going back to a game with deflects like this felt like having to write a letter to someone after years of having email.

- This camera is the real boss of the game. The fact that the camera doesn't auto adjust angle or almost ever auto adjust at all is extremely damning and frustrating. So many times I got stuck in corners while trying to dodge an attack or stuck in freaking enemy geometry and couldn't see where I was going. Also faster enemies like some late bosses or the second phase of the archbishop were an absolute nightmare with the camera flailing everywhere and just feeling terrible.

- The overall quality of the English localization is just not very good at all. I would forgive this if this was a smaller Indie studio but everything else about the game feels AAA so why is the English this bad? There aren't that many misspelled words though there are some but mostly the bad grammar and strangely worded sentences are what frustrates me. As someone who worked a Japanese to English translation job in the past I'm seeing lots of cases were I think direct or even machine translation might have been used with very little or maybe even zero native English speaker proofreading.

- Lastly (I promise) is that this story is just so weird. The way lies are integrated as a game play mechanic is so half baked. Sometimes the things you have to lie about are your opinions (Am I beautiful? Do you think she loved me? Was I a good dad? etc) so at first I thought "oh maybe the lies are the 'good person' answers" but no there are straight up other times where you have to lie to get the warm fuzzy points by lying to someone which leads them to somewhere dangerous. So many other parts of the story are just so forced either to make the game more like dark souls or to include something from Pinocchio. Seldom is anything added to the game at all if it's not to fulfill one of these delusions.

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Yet the game was actually kind of fun. This is all on just some bosses being cool and my affinity for the souls game play loop. To summarize my thoughts, the game feels like a symphony with a ton of different melodies going on but the melodies seldom go together very well and when they do it feels entirely on accident. It feels like someone did an AI generated from soft game and yeah if you squint a little it looks like a from soft game but if you take any time to look at the details you'll see weird artifacts and mangled hands and strange geometry in the background. Ultimately worth a shot if you like games similar to dark souls or bloodborne, but vastly flawed. It feels to me like so many people give this game a pass for all of these flaws just because of the Victorian/belle epoque/whatever vibe it gives off and this bugs me like crazy.

Note: I compare this game to Dark Souls and FromSoft's titles a lot in this, which I think is understandable, but I do want to shout out the developers here for making something than can stand alongside them. They deserve a huge amount of respect for, despite being very similar to Bloodborne in particular, did a wonderful job of making Lies of P their own thing and were able to carve out a unique piece of the soulslike pie.

Of all the soulslikes I’ve played, I think Lies of P comes the closest to nailing the FromSoft feel, and is by far the most playable and fun of all the ones I’ve tried.

It’s pretty blatantly a Souls game, almost more so than other soulslikes, even. From the second you start it’s immediate – it looks like Bloodborne, controls like Bloodborne, sounds like Bloodborne, and pretty much feels like Bloodborne too. Bloodborne feels a little snappier and more responsive, but Lies of P comes pretty damn close. It’s very impressive.

There’s a lot of different mechanics and upgrade trees for Pinocchio in this game, that help it stand out a little bit more from its inspiration. Aside from the typical weapon upgrades, Pinocchio’s grinder can be equipped with a special upgrade that either adds elemental effects or boosts your stats, he gains a magic cube that functions similarly to Elden Ring’s physicks, and the hilariously and wonderfully named P-Organ provides him with passive buffs.

Weapon customization is pretty cool too – you can mix and match blades and handles from any of the weapons you find, allowing you to really customize your special attacks and moveset to your liking. It’s unique and fun. I loved the Legion Arms – mechanical arms Pinocchio can swap out that provide different secondary weapons, from a string that pulls enemies towards you (or you towards them), to a powerful shield that can perfect parry any attack thrown at you. They’re really fun and varied and add a lot to the combat, I think.

As goofy as it is, I loved the story and presentation. Edgy Bloodborne Pinocchio is a concept that is really hard to take seriously, emphasized by the game’s goofy presentation such as the loading screen stating Now Lying…. It’s a hilariously dumb concept and I love that they treat it so seriously without a hint of irony. It feels like earnestness is so rare in games nowadays, so I found it really refreshing to see a silly concept take itself so seriously and honestly come up with a pretty compelling plot and world lore.

Combat has an emphasis on blocking and deflecting like Sekiro, but it never felt very consistent to me and the windows to parry are extremely strict, so I found myself more often than not just step-dodging most enemy attacks. I-frames during dodges are comparable to Bloodborne, so it’s manageable. Most of these soulslike games feel so slow and stiff, and it's nice how snappy Lies of P feels. Pinocchio controls well and you never feel like you're fighting against the game to play it. I fell naturally into controlling the game because it feels so similar to the FromSoft titles.

Level design is super solid, and enemy placement never feels cheap or intended to make the player rage (which the same can’t even be said for all of From’s Souls titles). Levels are pretty small and linear until the end, where Lies of P’s equivalent of Anor Londo is merged with its equivalent of Sen’s Fortress in an absolutely massive tower to ascend. A lot of the environments look straight out of Bloodborne, but it has a nice variety and many different locales to explore.

Boss fights are ok, I found most of them to be pretty basic and incredibly easy. I don’t know if it’s just my experience having played and beaten every FromSoft Souls, but I found Lies of P overall to be incredibly easy in comparison. The game is extremely generous with its checkpoints and picking what tough enemies don’t respawn upon death. The boss fights are really no exception, they’re either huge and slow, or human-sized but with low health and easily staggered. The last 3 bosses, with the true final boss in particular, are pretty tough fights and require you to fully learn all the mechanics at your disposal.

My biggest issue with the game is probably enemy variety – there’s like two categories of enemies, puppets and carcasses. There’s maybe 15 to 20 enemy types in the game, total. Doesn’t seem too bad but in a 20-30 hour action RPG you start seeing them over and over, and most of the enemy types are reserved for special non-respawning miniboss encounters. I know it’s impossible to expect From’s level of enemy variety from them, but maybe a 3rd class of enemy would have helped mix things up a little bit.

Is it perfect? No, but it’s absolutely the closest any developer has come to matching From’s Dark Souls games. It absolutely scratched the Dark Souls itch for me and I would genuinely recommend it to fans of the series. I look forward to the developer’s next game and hope they can build on this game’s strong foundation and make an even better soulslike next time.

This was probably the best non-FromSoftware souls-like I’ve played. The environments and character designs were incredible and very distinct. The world and story were really interesting, and it motivated me to explore every inch of the levels. The only character I didn’t like was the talking cricket that you’re stuck with. It might’ve been intentional, but the voice actor was performing almost like he was in a Disney film, and the way he chimed in to explain things to you like a child sort of ruined the tone and mystique at times.

Apart from being one of the best and most original souls-likes I’ve played, it was also one of the hardest. I felt underpowered through most of the game, and I probably only got through it because of how powerful the throwables were. It’s tough to find the right balance of challenge and fairness for these games, and in this case, I think the game probably could’ve used a few more tweaks towards fairness. It’s possible I just played the game wrong, but I definitely found it to be far more challenging than the Souls series and Elden Ring.

But despite its difficulty and the annoying cricket, I’d highly recommend trying this one out if you’re a fan of the genre, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what this studio does next.

I recently received a very kind comment, where someone said that they enjoyed my reviews in spite of the fact that I give all their favorite games two stars. That’s just an unfortunate side-effect of beating hundreds of games; the potential for a novel experience shrinks while the bar for excellence goes up. Also, I only write a review when I feel strongly about a game, which means it’s either something I love (rare for the aforementioned reasons) or something I’m particularly dissatisfied by. So, I hope no one takes it personally when I say that this game is slop.

I’m fine with remakes. In fact, I endlessly talk about how REmake might be my favorite game, and I even enjoyed the remake of 3, the one people don’t like. It has plenty of flaws, but at least I know why it exists. I can feel its thesis: it wanted to take a game designed to evoke Terminator, and cut down on all the parts which didn’t fit the explosive pacing. So, out goes the clock tower, in comes the rail gun. With this game though, I feel absolutely no thesis, since it doesn’t commit to either a new direction or general refinement. The main problem I had with the original was its pacing, with hours in the middle where there’s hardly any mechanical escalation. In the remake, this issue isn’t corrected, but doubled. Now you have asinine sidequests ranging from rat-stabbing to item fetching, randomly grinding the game to a screeching halt. The difficulty adjustment system from the original would elegantly tune supply levels for each area, and the new system tries to do it in the same way, but players can now craft ammo of any type at any time, trivializing challenges on demand. Knifing an enemy on the ground was perfectly simple, now it’s cluttered with contextual prompts. Even simply dodging an attack is cluttered, with a few scarce attacks requiring contextual dodges, which didn’t feel great in the original even when it was kept outside of core combat. People were ok with knife durability in RE2, so let’s just throw that in while we're at it, despite how the flow of combat was originally designed around its constant use. People didn’t like Ashley in the original, so let’s give her infinite health, making it beneficial when she gets hurt intercepting attacks. Let’s expand the treasure-combination system to the point where players have to futz with crafting every time they visit a merchant, because it’s a safe change we can sell as a new feature. The list goes on with complaints like how most encounters begin with enemies teleporting behind you, a hit-or-miss new script, and so on, but the point is that none of these changes are even in service of a greater goal. The core experience isn’t revolutionized even a tenth as much as the other modern remakes, it isn’t scarier or more action-packed, the mechanics are less elegant, and the problems were, at best, left untouched.

That’s why this game is just slop to me. It's a disinterested ladling of content onto the beige plastic lunchtray that is my psyche. It wasn’t created through passion, but to fulfill an obligation. Resident Evil remakes are safe investments, so Capcom felt obligated to rearrange a near-perfect formula, even without a creative vision for it. All it was intended to be is “more”, a version of Resident Evil 4 they could port to the next few generations of consoles for $70 instead of $20. Well, they certainly achieved THAT goal, but if their idea was truly to recreate the magic of Resident Evil 4, they didn’t even come close.

As one of the two pairs of mainline titles I haven't played in the Pokemon series (the other being Sword & Shield, which I'll get to soon), I almost felt obligated to check this one off so I can finally rate and rank it among the other games. I played Brilliant Diamond on emulator with hardcore-Nuzlocke rules, to try and make things a little more interesting.

Uh, this thing sucks? What I got was an uglier, boring rehash of a game I played almost 20 years ago. I think we all knew this was gonna be a turd when it was initially revealed, with series sole developer Game Freak handing it off to a fucking storage app developer, not to mention its absolutely heinous art direction. Not to give too much credit to Game Freak as a competent developer, but maybe a little credit where credit is due when the first mainline title released by someone else was the roughest, buggiest launch until maybe Scarlet & Violet. Also hurting its initial reveal was it being announced alongside Legends Arceus, which looked much more interesting and also turned out to be exactly what the stagnant franchise needed at the time.

A very common, irritating defense I've seen of BDSP from its few defenders is that it's a "faithful" remake. I guess? It's convenient that it picks and chooses where and what to be faithful, including plenty of modern day QoL updates, like updated effectiveness tables, the Fairy-type, and tons of Pokemon that weren't included in the original Diamond & Pearl pre-postgame in a totally new, upgraded Grand Underground. But then ILCA decides to be faithful in the worst ways - Diamond & Pearl's asinine gym leader & Elite Four teams (the Fire-type Elite Four member has the majority of his team not Fire-type), a vile chibi-styled art direction that I think is attempting to translate the DS sprites into 3D but look laughably bad in HD, and an incredibly bland and boring "remastered" soundtrack that has no life to it.

Previous remakes, namely, FireRed & LeafGreen, HeartGold & SoulSilver, and Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire, took the games they were remaking and brought them forward to meet the standards of the current generation they were in - Kanto reimagined in the style of Hoenn, Johto reimagined in the style of Sinnoh, and Hoenn reimagined in the style of Kalos. They brought new story elements, new gimmicks like Mega Evolution, fun redesigns of iconic characters, and wonderful remixes of classic tunes. BDSP does absolutely none of this, providing the absolute bare minimum of a functioning product (failing even that at launch) and basically has nothing in this that would intrigue a Pokemon fan to play it over the originals or the superior Platinum version.

Countless arguments against the game have been made and there are literally too many issues to list - the barely remixed soundtrack not even being in the game without the day one patch, follower Pokemon that are horrendously scaled to the massive chibi player models, lack of any content from Platinum being among the biggest - but my biggest issue is that these are literally just worse versions of Diamond & Pearl. As contentious as ORAS have become over the years, at least they tried something new? Like, they made those games distinct from Ruby & Sapphire. What the hell is the point of playing BDSP? To fill out the Sinnoh Pokedex on modern Switch hardware? Legends Arceus, arguably the true Sinnoh remake, accomplishes this exact thing in a game that's unique and fun to play.

All of this and more has already been said. An utterly pointless, useless, soulless piece of corporate slop that even Game Freak couldn't be assed to bother with. As Pokemon fans, we're in the unfortunate position of just kind of having to take what we can get (completely unacceptable for such a large IP, but that's a different convo) and BDSP fails to reach even that incredibly low bar. Fuck this game and everyone who defends it.

Why aren’t there more love games? The term “love game” itself sounds extremely weird, but love songs are practically all you hear on the radio, and for a while, it seemed like every movie regardless of genre had a romance subplot. Meanwhile, pretty much the only games about romance are dating sims, a niche genre that is frequently mocked and perceived as lesser than the highbrow and urbane violence we’re accustomed to. Maybe it's because romance doesn't translate to interactivity very neatly, making it hard to get players involved in the drama, and causing even the best emotional climax completely flop for a large portion of the audience. Recognizing this potential problem, Final Fantasy 9 did something pretty smart, setting up multiple love stories in parallel to resonate with almost anyone’s personal experience. Each party member’s personal journey revolves around a different kind of story, from a classic fairy-tale romance to something more abstract, like the love of one’s people or country. The game skillfully balances the focus on each of them by mixing combinations of characters, letting their different perspectives build on each other to give players insight into the authors' thoughts about being in love.

Of course, the amount of patience that players will have for indulging the parts that don’t resonate is another matter entirely, especially when so much of the central plot and gameplay are grounded by a love of the franchise itself. While this may include the best parts of the series, like its beautiful aesthetic and compelling characters, the worst parts are here too, like two-dimensional villains and a pace that is uncomfortably slow at times. Towards the end in particular, the love it shows for classic Final Fantasy grandiosity borders on obsession, and it muddles the beautiful individual stories with unnecessarily high stakes. It’s a case of missing the forest for the trees, forgetting that the big dramatic showdowns of the series were memorable as a payoff for emotional investment, not just for their own sake. Final Fantasy 9 may stumble when it comes to the handling and pacing of those big scenes, but luckily, the little interpersonal moments are strong enough to make up for it. It’s a game where I recognize all the flaws, and I wouldn’t say that I like it as much as other RPG's, but for the whole-hearted appreciation I have for a game trying to tell this kind of story, I guess I have to admit that I love it.

Flying around as a giant mech and blowing up everything in my path was about as fun as I thought it might be. The only real challenge of the game is when you come across a boss that requires a very specific mech build to even have a chance of survival, but once you find the right pieces for the difficult bosses the rest of the game is a breeze. Unlike the Souls games, the story here is pushed on you pretty heavily and I didn’t really find it that interesting, and it doesn’t help that it’s mostly just radio chatter. But just like the other FromSoftware games the level design and the gameplay loop in this game are incredible and it’s definitely something I could see myself going back to.

I had tried Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice once before on PS4, and quickly bounced off of it, mostly due to the steep learning curve that punishes you for playing it like Dark Souls, and quite frankly the performance and load times on PS4 did not help the situation. Jump forward about a year and I’ve finally started and finished it front to back on PC.

As I said, it’s hard to not go into Sekiro not being stuck in the so-called “Dark Souls brain”, where after four Souls titles, Bloodborne, and for me, Elden Ring, all of which play incredibly similar and sort of wire your brain to their unique eccentricities and gameplay styles, Sekiro comes in and expects you to throw all your knowledge and experience out the window. Yes, it shares many elements of the Souls titles – Sculptor’s Idols are bonfires, the world laid out in distinguishable zones with difficult boss fights at the end, the overall dark fantastical tone of the world, and the subtle purposefully vague story (though Sekiro is more of a straightforward plot than any of the Souls titles).

However, the real change is Sekiro’s approach to gameplay and combat. This is not an RPG, you cannot change your build up or grind up some levels to make encounter easier. Your options are to simply fail at your objective, or learn the new combat system. Every Souls game has a certain level of forcing you to engage with the game’s mechanics to improve, but none more than Sekiro. It is quite simply, a game of adapt or die.

And it is so, so incredibly worth pushing through the difficulties and hardships of the first few hours. For most players, it “clicks” around Lady Butterfly or the first (really second) encounter with Genichiro. For me it was the latter. Once you grasp the full spectrum of your arsenal, from perfect deflects, your wide selection of ninja tools, combat arts, the rock-paper-scissors style system of knowing when to block/parry/dodge/jump/Mikiri counter, and perhaps most importantly, knowing when to swing your blade and when to simply just block a hit and get out to reset the flow of battle. When you’ve got all your abilities and tools going at once, Sekiro is borderline a character action game with the amount of options you’ve got.

Genuinely I cannot gush about the combat system enough, it’s really that good. Once it all clicks and you’re in the deep end fighting the harder/late-game bosses like Owl and Isshin, it’s a spectacle to see all you’ve learned come together in a beautiful display. Funnily enough, Isshin himself tells you the key to victory in the early stages of the game – “Hesitation is defeat.” It really all comes down to confidence, the second you hesitate, you’ll spiral into a series of mistakes that end your attempts prematurely, and most of the game is growing and learning in order to gain that confidence required to win. In none of the other Souls games do I find the boss fights to have such a sweaty, hand-shaking intensity to them, nor do I find the same immense level of satisfaction.

Combat aside, the game’s levels are designed immaculately, fun to explore with rewarding finds around every corner. The game is absolutely incredible looking, with the most beautiful vistas and intricately cool location designs outside of maybe Elden Ring. Sunken Valley, Senpou Temple, and Fountainhead Palace stand out as incredible, memorable locations. A staple of director Miyazaki, Sekiro brilliantly mixes a sense of grand beauty along with a tragic, disturbing tone. Additionally, Sekiro’s hordes of regular fodder enemies are also fun to fight, with a crazy amount of work and detail poured into even the most basic of enemy. Everything is way more complex than you’d think and it adds a lot to the experience.

Sekiro has more “setpiece” style sequences than any of the other games, thanks to its much more linear design. Standouts for me were sneaking past the giant serpent in the Ashina Depths, narrowly avoiding the maneating koi fish in the Fountainhead Palace, and using the umbrella shield to cross a rickety bridge in the Sunken Valley while blocking dozens of riflemen unloading on you.

I will admit I have a couple gripes with the game even after finishing everything it has to offer – primarily I think the need to refill your resurrection charges is a little obnoxious. I understand not being able to spam resurrect, that would defeat the purpose of the game, but if I deathblow a boss, it should fully refill the next charge. I had all three resurrection charges, but more often than not I’d only get to use one in a boss encounter, even after deathblowing multiple phases. A minor gripe but I found it problematic more than once when a full charge would’ve gotten me a victory I was mere inches from without.

The main story and cast I found interesting and endearing, but I found the game’s various NPCs and their questlines to be sort of forgettable. I liked Hanbei the Undying and Blackhat Badger, but even their quests felt kind of unsatisfying. The rest of the NPCs I either completed their quests without even realizing, or just missed entirely. The Souls games frequently have really cool memorable characters, so this was kind of disappointing in that regard outside of the main core cast.

Outside of those admittedly minor gripes, I have pretty much almost nothing negative to say on Sekiro. It’s incredibly brutal, unforgiving, and punishing, but at the same time one of the most satisfying games I’ve ever conquered. And it genuinely does feel like an accomplishment – I did the Shura ending on NG+ and I completely blew through the first half of the game in a fraction of the time it took me initially. You watch yourself in real time get better and better to the point you can run circles around bosses that you struggled against and turn challenges into nothing more than obstacles in your path. What an awesome feeling it is.

In short, Sekiro is unsurprisingly, another fantastic title from FromSoft – it is not a Dark Souls title and it is not an RPG. It is a brutal, fast paced action game more akin to something like Ninja Gaiden, and it requires your full attention and focus in order to improve and conquer its most difficult challenges. It is incredibly difficult, rarely frustrating, and wonderfully satisfying.

Suddenly, Square wants to remaster all the first 6 mainline games in the franchise and release it under the name "Pixel Remaster". I, who really wanted to play the older games, was quite happy with the announcement.

In this case, this review is about the first game of the 6. Final Fantasy was the game that literally brought Square out of bankruptcy, so I had a lot of expectations.

In this game, the plot is very simple. 4 Warriors of Light unite to end the darkness of the world they live in, caused by the 4 elemental demons and their commander. For this, the group needs to rescue the powers of the 4 elemental crystals to prevent the world from falling into darkness.

It's one of the simplest RPGs I've ever played, really. We can attack, use spells, items, defend and run away while in battle. We have a cool level up system, and lots of stats to level up.

However, a criticism of the game, its difficulty is... strange. The whole game is pretty easy, but when you get to the final boss... my god, the difficulty SUDDENLY goes up a lot. I had to grind to lvl 60 and use a specific build.

With all that in mind, Final Fantasy manages to be a fun game to try out, and this version (Pixel Remaster) looks like the best one, in my opinion (I'm not really into the PSP version). It's a GREAT game to introduce yourself to the franchise in general, given that each Final Fantasy has something different about its experience. A simple but fun game.

Right after the first game, I decided to play the second, with the hope that it would be a little better. Well... in some facts it's better, and in others it's worse.

The game certainly has a much better story, where you control rebels to the oppressive empire of Palamecia, in which you want to control the whole world. This Final Fantasy was the first to introduce Chocobos and the first Cid as well.

Its battle system are both good and bad. We finally have MP to perform spells, but the level up of the game is very strange, really, basically, Every time you attack an enemy with a sword/weapon/etc, you gain experience points related to the weapon. The same with spells and life (yes, to increase your HP you need to TAKE DAMAGE).

In general, I had more fun with this game than the first, as much as I could see why it was the first black sheep in the franchise. I feel like this game either you really like it or you just hate it. It's by no means the best RPG I've ever played, or the best game I've played in my life, but it's a solid game. I ended up not platinuming this game, but I did the first one. I just didn't have the motivation to level up a spell/weapon to level 16, and that's pretty hard to do.