Persona 3 Reload is undoubtedly an incredible game. It takes the already great game that is Persona 3, and goes to pretty great lengths to modernise it. This is a beautiful story with a new, fresh coat of paint, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't appreciate that. But in truth, I wish they did more for this game. Activities still feel way too sparce, exploring Tartarus is still, though much less, a bit of a slog, and a lot of moments from the original game feel less impactful here. I love the new aesthetic when it comes to UI, but the anime cutscenes used to have this eerie vibe to them which has been completely replaced by a pretty generic looking style.
Of course, the inverse is true as well. Undoubtedly, I'd recommend Reload over FES in a heartbeat. It's just a more fun way to spend so many hours of your life, and more accessible to boot. But I can't help but feel like a little more could have made this game truly perfect. That may have been FeMC, or a redone Tartarus, but I feel like Reload was almost too faithful at times.
I also absolutely can not defend ATLUS withholding content that was present in FES only to sell it in a DLC bundle that also includes the other waves of content you may not even want. It's such a disappointing thing to have to consider for a review of a genuinely great game, but it'd feel disingenuous to not bring it up. In spite of that, Reload is a game I'd recommend to anyone who's never played the original P3, but maybe not to someone who has.

So, it's been a little over a year since I opened Tears of the Kingdom for the first time and I still technically haven't beaten it. What I have done is spent over two hundred hours almost locked inside this game's Hyrule.

From the moment I got my hands on the game to the moment I decided I was done with it this game was almost all I could think about. Though its story leaves a decent amount to be desired, and I can think of a dozen things Breath of the Wild did better, Tears is a game I doubt I'll be forgetting about any time soon. The gameplay here is absolutely stellar, and better than its predecessor's almost perfectly across the board. Exploration is so much fun, ultrahand and fuse are such freeing mechanics, and somehow, they managed to preserve a sense of mystery to the same Hyrule I'd already spent hundreds of hours in in a different game.

One of the areas I think this game really shines in is its side content. They use the game's wealth of tools, and just let the player have fun doing them. The freedom from ultrahand also means I had more opportunities to just get lost on my own goofing off, which produced some of my favourite memories from the previous game. There were so many times I just decided to ignore the main story and ended up doing story flags before I was meant to, and wasn't punished for it, which was such a genuinely amazing feeling every time. And even when my offshoot exploration didn't result in story progress, I was having fun just finding things in this gigantic world. The atmosphere here is also just incredible. The new songs are really good, and I love this game's visual identity, and the many similarities and differences it has compared to the previous.

I will say, this game is one I've rated a ten, but I don't think this is a ten in the same way as BoTW. This game is not as flawless, and its obvious the developers took a lot more risks here, not all of which worked out perfectly. One of its main issues is actually how derivative it is. Though I enjoyed seeing the changes made to the familiar world, the story absolutely didn't have to follow the same four dungeons in the corners of the world structure, and I really wish the sage abilities were better handled. Also, for how derivative the game is, removing all traces of things like guardians was really disappointing. I also wish the game was more voiced. There were a couple times it would have been more natural for a character to speak, but it was obvious they just didn't have an actor for them. For a game of this scope and scale, putting more emphasis on the actual storytelling would have been so appreciated because this game has some of my favourite gameplay of anything I've ever played.

The thing is, though I can complain about Tears, for every bad memory I have of it, I have about ten good ones. I genuinely adore this game, and even after having a full year to think about it, I think this game was absolutely a worthy successor to one of the greatest games of all time, and whether it's traditional, open world, or something completely new, I can't wait to see what's next for 3D Zelda.