FYI this is still the best one. Most inspired soundtrack, most painterly and phantasmagorical setting, best hub zone and maiden, and laden with the most lyrical sense of tragedy and loss. Sure the gameplay is a little bit clunky compared to (some of) the later titles, but Deal With It!!

it makes me deeply sad that the online has been discontinued and we haven't heard anything about a re-release. Still totally playable offline, but the full experience deserves to be remembered and kept alive!

EDIT: WAIT I SAID RE-RELEASE NOT SLEEK HIGH POLY REMAKE DEVOID OF ATMOSPHERE AND RESTRAINT!!! WHY MUST THE DEVILS AT BLUEPOINT CONSPIRE TO MURDER EVERYTHING I LOVE

One of the tightest and most kinesthetically satisfying 2d platformers I've ever played. Stellar music and artwork an utter joy to experience. Celeste has just the right amount of challenge: equal parts testing your reflexes / re-contextualizing your traversal moveset in new and exciting ways. -1 star for the super patronizing story with the same paperthin motifs of FACING UR ANXIETY AND ACCEPTING URSELF via really embarrassing and trite visual metaphors. Definitely a personal grievance, but as someone who has a lot of these difficulties, I can't help but find stories like this to be nonspecific and a little patronizing. I'm all for thoughtful explorations of anxiety and self sabotage but Celeste is just a bit too saccharine and neatly wrapped up to come across as anything that compelling or useful. if it worked for you that's awesome and i'm jealous! OTHERWISE its a total 10/10 this game rules 2 me

sorry 4 the beyond tired analogy but this game is like a frail and defiant flower blooming uniquely through the rubble of its own technical limitations. It's simultaneously a nearly forgotten relic and an undeniable genesis point / clear creative influence for countless other game achievements for both the fractured Team Andromeda artists themselves and other inspired gamedevs (Rez, the team ICO oeuvre, thatgamecompany, from software, etc). An eerie and sensitive story with so much more brevity and respect for player time than typical JRPGS (probably both by intent and as a technical necessity) but also an unparalleled amount of spaciousness and quiet power. The still unimitated positional combat system is a complete revelation and so so beautiful in its graphic framing and expressivity. The closest thing I can think of is the (also spellbinding) Evrae battle from FFX, but magnified tenfold and constantly eclipsing the presumed limits of its prior majesty over the course of an entire game. The dynamism and propulsive grace within the compositions of each battle tableau grant an ATB-based jrpg the sensoral exhilaration of an Ace Combat game. The fact that the balancing is a bit too easy hardly matters when PDS remains such a bold declaration and unmatched proof of concept for an entire school of systemic evolutions it was denied the chance to ever iterate upon. These battles set my imagination on fire!!!

The game is tragically inaccessible and unretrievable (the source code is completely lost and the effort/interest level required to reverse engineer a faithful re-release seems unlikely), but it also feels fitting for something with such a lamentful cadence to end up as a lingering piece of gaming hauntology. if fucking bluepoint or whoever decide to remake this absolutely peerless achievement in HD i will officially detonate the vest.

Emulate on Yabause/Yaba Sanshiro, SSF, or Satourne, the full game runs extremely well now! if you are having issues 4 real find me on social and message me and i will walk your ass through the whole process because truly everyone interested in games should play this game

10 Yakisoba Pans out of 10!!!
Vanillaware's greatest accomplishment by a landslide. Hyper-ambitious, utterly indulgent, and convoluted as all fuck, but miraculously never buckles under the weight of its own intricacies. 13 Sentinels pulses with a sense of delirious vitality and freewheeling passion that is so so rare in games with this level of production value and craft. 13S' disarmingly dense story construction feels a bit like the tangled web of plot complexity in the Kingdom Hearts series, but it actually uses those twists in service to its own emotionally resonant characters and conceptual intentions (instead of rendering everyone a charmless exposition machine giving you truly insane loredumps that ultimately dont impart anything that meaningful). The nonlinear, fragmented story delivery is filled with literally hundreds of galaxy-brain twists and turns and occupies dozens of genres at once; different character narratives make up an amalgam of pastiches including Evangelion, Perfect Blue, Macross, Sukeban Deka, Madoka Magica, Barefoot Gen, and more... and it all feels TOTALLY fitting in a game that's clearly a meditation on the experience of coming of age while awash in Japanese history and cultural memory--without a lens of pure nostalgia and nationalism. There's real nuance to the game's exploration of Showa Era Japan's wartime suffering/shame and its eventual globalized cultural/industrial recovery here, and I felt this deeply even from my semi-clueless outsider perspective. It's actual thought provoking stuff that the nonlinearity totally works in service to, and also happens to be an extremely well-crafted and fresh style of story delivery for its' own sake.

Much has been said about the gorgeous illustrative art within the Remembrance portion of the game, and I could gush about it for years (PLEASE MORE PUPPET JOINTED/PERSPECTIVE WARP 2D ANIMATION IN GAMES I LOVE IT) but I feel like the Destruction segments are being a tad undervalued! They're extremely snappy and fun (especially if you play on Intense, which is totally surmountable for average players like me but raises the strategizing requirements considerably). I've seen a lot of responses lamenting that Destruction doesn't share the vivid, illustrative style of the Remembrance segments and can see why people might think that from the trailers, but I totally disagree after experiencing the game. The depersonalized, infographic-style representation of truly harrowing, wide-scale mech carnage feels like a very conscious and effective creative choice to contrast with the intimate and sentimental visual novel sequences. Both visual styles absolutely work in harmony with one another, and the juxtaposition only serves to strengthen them. The combat music is some of the best shit EVER too, who needs fully illustrated mechs when the bops are this massive

Also, I was totally blindsided by the FUN AS HELL queer stuff in this game! It's definitely not "perfect", but said romance is so charming and allows its complicated, lovable characters to be confused, flirty, devious and loyal in ways that few other games do. While there IS some (funny!) humor surrounding one character's klutzy and confused queerness, same-sex attraction itself is never treated as an absurd joke, only validated: the joke is that said character is too bone-headed to admit to himself what's plainly obvious (and beautiful!!!).

anyway I lub dis gaem you should play it it's v special and a truly rare experience. Props to Vanillaware and thank you for toning down most of your skeevy fanservice to a degree where I'm not irritated by it constantly

mascotizing, de-eroticized, de-humanizing wooby doo-doo that started out as a low key homophobic ~sooo randim~ joke about how funny gay cultural nomenclature is to its straight creators but then got agonizingly retconned into game grumps' (ugh) flailing attempt at a self-serious inclusivity project. Too ignorant and afraid of offending anyone to portray anything resembling adult human intimacy or eroticism, and reeks with the no homo!!!! creator's fears of depicting anything messy, hot, or specific about icky degenerate gay sexuality. Never overtly cruel and clearly interested in playacting safeness and inclusivity, but the placid smoothness of everything feels like its own form of erasure--and it's a smug, self congratulatory one. This is clearly not really trying to provide anything meaningful or substantive for gay audiences: it's for obnoxious straight "allies" to play and have fuzzy wuzzies about how great they are for wubbing the cutesy wootsie daddy poos--they're smol pastel beans just like us!!! Heinous. I dont want to yuck anyones yum too hard or whatever but if you're a queer adult and love this game I kind of think you're a fucking idiot

Yoji Shinkawa's stately, elegant mecha designs pair so strangely with the hilaribad dorky writing/VA and give ZOEII such a campy, stylish flavor. Loads of exhilarating, thoughtful combat encounters and setpiece sequences that play with scope in ways that were rare back in the days of the PS2, and many still feel dramatic and impressive today. The whole soundtrack rules but the opening trip hop track and Ardjet are all-timers. I tried playing this in PSVR and it looked and felt amazing but sadly my entire body filled with vomit within 10 minutes

some of the environmental art direction here is the best in the series. I love so many individual elements in this game: the life cycle of the pilgrims, the graceful Pontiff Knights, the Cathedral of the Deep, Irithyll Dungeon, and the cataclysmic surrealism of the DLC. The Twin Princes are my favorite tragic bossfight since Astraea from Demon's Souls. It's sad that so much wonderful art design was paired with so many tedious lore callbacks and easter eggs that make DSIII feel more like a dwindling continuation of a cycle (lol hmm) held back by lorehead and fan expectations than its own dark fantasy universe. I thought this was the most difficult of any of the games and not in a good way: it has the same fast-paced combat speed as Bloodborne, but with none of the counter and mobility toolsets that made that freneticism work. I'm also not into the 8 phase bossfights with constant attack animation changes requiring a lot of rote memorization, but I've never really enjoyed this series for its challenge level like a lot of people seem to. I felt frustrated and overwhelmed a lot of the time, or like I was being pandered to as a DS1 superfan in ways that cheapened the experience.

I'm enthusiastic that fromsoft are exploring new universes with Sekiro (even though I had issues with that game too) and now Elden Ring, because I don't know how much more they can realistically mine from the Dark Souls license without robbing future titles of the surprise and uncompromising experimentation that made the series so great in the first place

peculiar and hysterical and barely holding itself together! Some serious Deadly Premonition vibes. I love how many sprawling role play dialogue options there are that let you be a child-bullying money-hungry lesbian megalomaniac cult member during this horrific incident of mass carnage and how literally none of your choices matter all that much! I wouldn't have it any other way--the absurdity in many of the "choices" you're presented with are a delight on their own, there's no follow through needed. love 2 be a misanthropic little troll fashionista and nonchalantly parade around in the rubble of millions of lives, negging everyone in my sushi chef apron/ten gallon hat/heart sunglasses power uniform while every NPC questline still somehow works out great for me and gets me EVERYTHING my pampered princess survivress heart desires <3 I also am a huge fan of games with an "I need to go peepee poopoo" status icon, especially ones like DR4 that use it as an empty threat--I made it a personal point NEVER to shit during my playthrough and if there were any negative repercussions for doing that they were way too miniscule for me to notice

The many-year development struggles this game went through are very apparent: barely any of the mechanics amount to anything or even exist beyond UI element suggestions, and the game jerkily alternates between somewhat successful moments of tiny human connection (exploring an interpersonal framing of Japan's very real earthquake trauma) and complete absurdist nonsense that feels like a zany Benny Hill skit. The overall effect is disorganized and busted and incredibly charming.

absolutely adored my bizarre time with Disaster Report 4: Miracle Water!!!!!!!!!