Hi-Fi Rush was surprisingly good. I've never played a rhythm game before but I enjoyed it a lot. The visual style and sense of humor helps it stand out for me. The way the game almost seamless shifts between ingame cutscenes and 2D cutscenes is impressive. I like the cuts we get from gameplay to 2D stills seamlessly for impact almost like how 2D animations sometimes hover over certain frames for impact.

The game knows when to be funny and when to just stop and let the gameplay take over. The characters are fun and goofy without being annoying. The story itself isn't anything really special but the characters made it entertaining.

The music goes unimaginably hard. The original tracks are all good and it has an interesting selection of licensed music that manage to fit the scenes where they play very well. It is fitting that the first and last boss fight themes are Nine Inch Nail songs.

My one complaint would be the last fight which somehow fails at two aspects of the gameplay that the game had done so well until that point. The last fight is a mess in terms of visual clarity and audio clarity which is horrible for a rhythm action game. At some point I left that fight to the gods and got through by being lucky. No amount of timing was helping me there. Its a shame because that fight had a lot of potential.

if Baldur's Gate 3 didn't come out in the same year, this would def have been my GOTY for 2023.

This game is kinda rubbish. It feels like someone trying to recall Final Fantasy VII while drunk, and also while never having played Final Fantasy VII.

That said it's a triumph of maximalist late 90s/early 00s style. It's basically the last great psx game, and it's not even on the psx. It's as if someone had made a game out of the tribal-tattoo-design gba, but with more FMV.

Also, the combat is less bad than people say. Like it's STILL fairly bad, but I've played worse.