If only this had less...gameplay, or at least better gameplay. It doesn't even try to hide the fact that most of it is running back and forth doing random stuff for people.
Because yeah, the story and how it's told is fantastic. Games that can manage to move me in ways that this has are very few. Absolutely beautiful message/themes that hit hard now, and would have been possibly life-changing if I was 15 years younger.
I've rated it pretty low (struggling between a 3 or 3.5) because I can't quite forgive the slog that is the actual gameplay, but if I was rating the story itself it'd be much higher.
And I feel like I should also point out the pixel artwork because it's just phenomenal.

"A game for everyone is a game for no one."

This is something that Hoyo failed to consider with the start of Honkai Part 2, as they tried to appeal to both existing players and new players, but in the end alienated them both.

Part 2 had a lot of marketing back in February. More than I’d ever seen during Part 1. It’s very obvious that Hoyo were hoping Part 2 would appeal to a wider audience and bring people over from Genshin and Star Rail. But it didn’t work. Not very well, at least.

New Players were alienated by Part 2’s overreliance on Part 1.

Part 1 is extremely long, which can be daunting to a lot of people. Meanwhile, Part 2 was meant to be a fresh start where new players can jump in without prior knowledge of Part 1. Unfortunately, Hoyo couldn’t even execute this properly and decided to lock Part 2 until you reach level 30 rather than simply include a gameplay tutorial at the start of Part 2. This forces new players to play the worst chapters Honkai has to offer, giving a poor first impression.

Then, Hoyo decided it would be a great idea to use existing concepts and terms without even explaining them. How is someone who only started playing for Part 2 meant to know what the Sea of Quanta or a Bubble World is? These things don’t get explained until way after you would have reached level 30.

Existing Players were alienated by Part 2’s lack of a connection to Part 1 and desire to be something that it’s not.

Despite there already being two great storylines that Hoyo could’ve turned into Part 2 - A Post Honkai Odyssey and the Previous Era, Hoyo chose to set Part 2 somewhere with as little connection to Part 1 as possible, likely as part of their efforts to make it easier for new players to get into without prior knowledge. As a result of this, so far Part 2 has an entirely new cast (besides from Ai and Vita but they don’t count since they’re just narrators now). While it’s confirmed that the old cast will have a role in Part 2, and we know that someone from St Freya will make an appearance after the end of the first arc (more than 20 hours into Part 2), it feels wrong to not even have one existing character in the main cast. After all, this is Honkai Impact, so why are there no Honkai Impact characters? The new trio should’ve had an existing character (like Susannah or Sora) in it, or they should’ve saved Griseo’s return for the start of Part 2 and had her take a similar role to that of Welt in Star Rail. (Also I just want to clarify I don’t hate the new cast. I like the new main trio, along with Dreamseeker, Songque and Thelema.)

Honkai Impact is not an Open World game. Aside from APHO, Open Worlds do not work well in this game. Hoyo should know this after the backlash they received when they tried Open World Chapters towards the end of Part 1. With Part 1.5, they created what I consider to be a near-perfect system, returning to Stages but keeping Side Stories and the Open World level design. And then they decided to throw it all away and return to non-replayable Open World Story Chapters for Part 2, now with an added (mostly optional) Artifact/Relic grind. It’s obvious that this was meant to appeal to Genshin / Star Rail Players, but Honkai Impact isn’t either of those games.

Both New and Existing Players are negatively affected by poor writing and Honkai’s current identity crisis.

The game is in a weird place right now where half of the UI has been updated to feel more modern and streamlined (removing any of its identity and charm in the process), somewhat resembling Star Rail’s UI, while half of it hasn’t. This makes it feel like two different games mashed together, which I suppose is fitting.

And then there’s the poor writing. I don’t think anyone will argue against the writing having declined in quality since the end of Remaining Flames, what with the technobabble and bloated dialogue of the final arcs. Unfortunately, Part 2 hasn’t fixed this. I have seen so many people say they barely understood what was going on in the first Chapter of Part 2 due to the way it was written, and I can relate. Plus the pacing of Chapter 1 was awful. We barely even got introduced to the new cast before moving onto the Seven Shus storyline.

TLDR Part 2 is poorly executed and alienates both new and old players due to having both an overreliance on Part 1 while also having too little of a connection to it storywise (so far). It doesn’t fix a lot of Part 1’s issues while also bringing back the mostly-disliked Open World format.

Not to sound like an epic gamer contrarian but Hollow Knight is a game I've never really understood the overwhelming hype for. It feels incredibly safe, lacking any originality whatsoever and desperately trying to appeal to the masses (which it obviously succeeded at). Most things it does pretty badly to fine with few things it's truly outstanding in.

Let me start off by explaining what I mean by saying Hollow Knight is <safe> and <desperately tries to appeal to the masses>. I think this is most obvious in its aesthetic, being minimalist scrimblo (bug)guys in a dark world. These things obviously work and have wide appeal. The easily ignorable lore-based story is also a victim of Hollow Knight's addiction to playing it safe, I really wish metroidvanias in general would get over lore-based storytelling, it's really boring. I could go on and on about how safe this game is from the world design, to the simplistic combat, to the movement upgrades being as bland as possible, but the point is that these things make game feel like it lacks any personality, putting that aside to be safe and easily marketable to the masses. It's basically The Minions but for adults. This isn't a problem depending on who you ask, but to me it really just made this feel super unremarkable. I love when games try new things being as creative as possible, this game is the opposite of that, some may even call it ehehhehehehehhehehehehhehe hollow.

Anyways on to the aspects of this game I actively dislike and think are bad. I think the easiest things to call bad are the bosses, while there are 2-3 great bosses the majority of them feel extremely underwhelming to outright bad. They just kinda feel like nothing and are very forgettable. Shoutout to the dream bosses for being especially nothing. The walk of shames back to bosses are also pretty bad but none of the bosses are really difficult enough for them to be that annoying, still worth nothing tho. The lack of good fast travel also makes some areas feel like an extreme slog to return to, very often having to retread the same ground you have before, the pretty w/e level design also doesn't help this at all. Most of the souls-inspired mechanics in general feel tacked on for no real purpose and only add tedium, I really wish games would stop taking inspiration from Souls when they have no clue what makes those games so good. I also wish there was more customization, the badges don't really give you much to play around with and aside from those there's practically nothing customizable which isn't great when this game is as long as it is.

That being said it's not like I despise this game, there's honestly a good bit of things I think Hollow Knight does absurdly well. Despite the boring setting the game visually looks fantastic and the sound design I'd easily place on top of the genre. This game also feels fantastic to control. I may think the bosses suck ass but the actual enemy design is really good, with plenty of enemy variety to make every area feel unique. It's absolutely worth noting that what this game does well it does VERY well. It just doesn't have much that really goes over the bar of <ok>.

tldr this is like basically the golf of video games when u rlly think abt it

It's pretty frustrating how time-gated 90% of this game is, upgrading even just one character, progressing through the story, leveling, etc. Under the progression system is a solid rail-shooter with great visuals, music, and gameplay. I guess my main complaint is the story should be easy for casuals to get through, but even after literal dozens of hours I'm barely halfway through the chapters that came out after launch.
If the story wasn't interesting I would not be playing anymore, but even then my patience is tested when 95% of fights are waves of trash mobs. You spend most of the time fighting pointless waves of enemies between each cutscene, separating them by multiple minutes at a time. The often poor translations sometimes makes dialogue feel disjointed and nonsensical.
It has "potential" and I can see this game improving a lot in the near future, but there are too many small issues that add up.

Rank 250, with level 230+ teams, currently on chapter 24.

Feels weird to have such a sour aftertaste after loving most of Penacony, but man, 2.2 is the first time since Belobog I've felt like the game just makes no effort to set itself apart from its inspirations in certain regards.

There's only so much they can do with the game's structure and the allotted screentime characters can have, but with how much Robin and Sunday feel like they were just meant to fit moulds necessary for the story, I'd rather they just keep it at that and give its genuinely unique characters more time to shine, because I truly could not care less for the time spent on them here.

Whether intentional or not is hard to say when there's countless examples of settings like Penacony, but especially considering the dynamic of Sunday and Robin, it reminds me a loooooot of Caligula Effect 2.
The problem here is that, Caligula Effect 2 is one of my favorite stories ever that spends approximately 25 hours on being an absolutely fantastic commentary about the pressure of society's expectations (especially through the pedestal idols are unwillingly placed on) and every character uses its premise so incredibly beautifully and uniquely to truly make that emotional core of it hit.
Now ofcourse, Star Rail couldn't and shouldn't have that amount of depth with its structure as I mentioned before - but it's a bit hard to set it apart when it's so similar and yet utterly shallow in comparison. Any character development Robin gets is essentially a switch getting flipped off-screen that makes her go "hm, maybe the Family isn't so pristine actually!" and that's about it - but you can't really expect much more when they've hardly given her an hour of screentime. Her popularity makes it clear I'm definitely in the minority in needing more substance to really appreciate a character though, and that's fine. I'm glad there's still plenty of people who can appreciate her for what she has to offer.
Sunday is.. okay. He's nothing you probably haven't seen before but he's exactly what the story needed so it works. I'm not too well-versed on HI3 but I appreciate how he's intended to parallel Kevin as a nod to Acheron, so there's that atleast.

So yeah, I'm essentially at the crossroads where I wish these characters were more than they are but also can't really see a way for that to be possible, which is a weird feeling. They couldn't ever match up to my expectations and if they did get more screentime without setting themselves apart from their current roles in any unique way it'd probably just lower my appreciation of this arc further so I guess I'm just fated to feel unsatisfied about them, unfortunately.
It's just hard to say I truly love Penacony even though I had a blast with 2.0 and 2.1 when its core at the climax makes me feel.. nothing. Pretty much everything they got in this patch was exactly as I expected it would be and I groaned through whatever screentime they got as a result.

Luckily, it's not all bad though! There's plenty of characters that use the dream world setting really well. Gallagher and.. Misha, of all characters (surprisingly!) were the highlight of the patch for me by tugging at the heartstrings unexpectedly and I love that Firefly of all characters challenges Sunday's nihilistic, haughty perspective of humanity needing Penacony to live the most considering she's just about the prime example of it. But no, despite her circumstances, she's going to use whatever limited time she has to truly live and continues to cement herself as the absolute best Penacony has to offer, and I can't wait for her to continue to carry the absolute fuck out of it when the epilogue drops.

It just sucks to have to look towards the smaller parts of this patch for me to be able to appreciate it, and I can only hope having her in the spotlight makes me feel less conflicted about it all by the time it wraps up.

Ok, this game is nowhere near the master piece or excellent game everyone here makes it to be.
Gameplay got generic and the plot have a lot of plot holes and conveniences. Some of them stems from the 2nd chapter mess that Namco provoked and some others are on the game itself.
So why so many people think that this is a 5/5 game? I think it's because this game has one of the most BEAUTIFUL BITTER SWEET ENDING EVER IN ANY VIDEOGAME, even with all the flaws, the ending got me, like I did this epic trip with beloved characters, but alas, when I put aside the ending and think about all the way I did through Xenosaga, 65% cutsecenes or more, poor world building, under developed characters, the mess about the 2nd chapter and so many more... it was not, in fact, an epic trip...

I'm sorry to say that I can't recommend this series, it's not worth the time, but with the plot twist of Xenoblade 3 dlc maybe this series can get a second chance and I hope Takahashi and her wife can learn from all that went wrong in the past and all of their experiences with the blade series to give Xenosaga a golden revival.

"I just moved here, but Aoba sure is a great place." (Young Man)

Before starting this review, I need to say this kind of works as my combined thoughts on Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment. My score is indicative of just this game, but I never felt like I wanted to make a review for both since the gameplay is practically identical and I'd just be repeating myself a lot.

Eternal Punishment has some seriously missed potential. There are some great ideas here that are tough to appreciate from the gameplay that is present.

Being that Eternal Punishment is a direct sequel to Innocent Sin, it reuses a ton of assets from the original game, with the major culprits being the dungeons and music. Logically, the reused dungeons make sense as they pertain to the story's happenings, but I think there comes a point where, in development, the creators should have asked themselves if that was truly an ideal way to entertain the player. I would have liked to see how the settings have changed atmospherically in the sequel, but all we got were map layout updates. I was also disappointed by the game's soundtrack this time around. Most songs are either remixed or just reused entirely. There's some new songs though, one of which is the Aoba Park theme which is a beautiful track, and this remix of the Mountain Trail theme, but I enjoyed Innocent Sin’s OST more since all the music was brand new.

It's clear the developers drew some inspiration from Phantasy Star when making this combat system. Combat revolving around auto-battling, a 5-character party, and most notably, fusion spells. Differing from PSIV, you're able to switch around turn orders mid-battle, which is a great addition for fusion spells considering PSIV had you making your characters defend to link the turns for people with varying speed stats. I honestly never really ended up using these in Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment, as a lot just seemed worse than their non-chainable counterparts. An instance being when you use spells that target groups of enemies that share the same element, you can be prompted to turn it into a fusion spell that only attacks one enemy instead, which was inconvenient in standard battles with enemy groups. You can opt out of using the fusion spell before it happens in battle, which is another great addition, so it's not really an issue. The only time I ended up really using them was when combining two elements to do a bit more damage in boss fights. A major oversight, or intended mechanic, depending on who you ask, is the defend trick, where you cancel auto-battle and make everyone defend after their action. It's tedious to use in standard battles but proves extremely effective in boss battles due to you taking close to no damage. It really does make me believe it's an oversight, unless the developers thought it would be too useless to waste an extra turn defending. A cool aspect of the combat was the ability to have characters be able to switch their personae without wasting a turn, which led me to use it quite frequently. Turning anyone into a healer out of the blue was very helpful.

EP is known to be one of the harder entries in the SMT franchise, and I was well aware of this from friends. I know it sounds condescending, but I thought it was going to be a case of Persona 5 fans playing an older RPG, but Eternal Punishment is one of the harder RPG titles in the PS1 library, in my opinion. The difficulty was kind of mixed in its tedious structure along with its slow combat and frustrating encounter rate. By tedious structure, I am referring to demon fusion, which is done by gathering spell cards through demon negotiation. When fusing demons, there are different arcanas of cards they will give you pertaining to their arcana. Later on, demons will give you more and more per negotiation as the card requirements for fusions rise for higher-leveled personae. It's pretty easy to find a way to entertain them for cards, as there's multiple character combinations that work, but the strategy you want to go for is to form a contract with them, which usually has a very small amount or 1 specific character combo that raises their joy stat. The reason you want to do this is because after contract formation, when you entertain them for cards, they'll give you wild cards, which you can give to someone in the velvet room to change into any arcana you want. Considering there's over 20 card types in the game, this is the most convenient method of fusing personae. There’s different personae to fuse in each arcana of cards, which explains why you’d want the wild cards for complete freedom of your team's builds. It’s frustrating to find the joy-raising action to initiate these contracts, part of it being that they’re integral to the gameplay. There’s an art to demon negotiation; you’ll be able to tell what works sometimes from your characters' personalities meshing well with the demons, but it is by no means consistent. It’s something that’s fun at first but quickly becomes tedious when you're tasked with doing it more than a few times. It felt like I was just aimlessly trying anything that might work, which most times resulted in the demon getting mad and you having to enter a new encounter to try again. The salt on the wound is that making them mad will have them break your contract… Persona 2 is best played with a notebook nearby to write down the correct prompts for these demons. Even though the end result is a team with some killer personae, it's a goal that’s hard to work towards with all the tedium associated with it. 

Now, the slow combat. Not only is the game some of the slowest combat on the system, but it is also grindy as all hell. Throughout the game, you’ll need to fuse new personae a lot to stay on top of the game's difficulty. To unlock the moves on each persona, you’ll have to use any of their moves to get them to slowly rank up to their max level of 8 and get each move associated with them. Why would you want to rank them up all the way? Because sometimes the personae will have an integral move like healing everyone, or attack moves which you'll need for them to be useful. This was by far the most annoying part of the game's combat. When I’d get to a skill-check boss fight, I’d have to back out and grind up new personas, which got really irritating. I honestly wouldn’t mind the idea of it if they’d rank up quicker, because later on it started to tread on multiple hours of grinding. You can get them to skip 2 ranks from finishing battles with fusion attacks from a lucky mutation, but I could never get this to happen, so take that as you will. Even though I have a lot of complaints about this game's systems, it’s still fun to make builds for your characters with persona fusion. You can add a stat boost card and a card to add a certain move during the fusion, which adds a good layer of customizability. There’s also a level-up bonus for each persona to add a point to a particular stat, which is something you need to think about so you can boost your character's strengths. It’s as fun as the rest of the series in that regard; there’s still a bunch of pondering time spent in the velvet room, but it’s hard to look past the requirements of doing so.

I will say, though, that Eternal Punishment has great boss fights; almost every boss in the game will make you switch up your strategy and punish you if you don't. For instance, there's one fight later on where the boss heals a set amount of HP passively every turn, so you'll need to utilize fusion spells to maximize damage while balancing out support for your party. They were always a challenge to look forward to, and I was always preemptively aware that there would be a challenge that I'd have to face when outside boss doors in dungeons, no matter how high level or good my personae were.

By far the most endearing aspect of Eternal Punishment is its cast of characters. It's really nice to see a game tackle aspects of adulthood in such a blunt way in a real-life setting. These characters are people that most can truly relate to. By the time they started revealing a lot about them near the end through flashbacks, I got a bit emotional. These characters have realistic internal conflicts, not some shit out of Persona 5. I do wish there was more of it throughout the game. It may be the absurd amount of time spent in dungeons, but it really feels like there were barely any cutscenes for these characters to develop. Of course, the ones we have are great, but I wanted more.

I'm being told I should have played the PSP releases of these games, but I always like playing original releases because I like to admire what games did at the time of their original release. Part of the reason P1 is so interesting to me is that it is an early 5th generation title, and it was up in the air what to make next since there wasn’t really a blueprint yet. I feel more in tune with the innovations associated with games when I play their original releases, since a lot feels lost to me when I look at HD re-releases. Just looking at the UI in these titles and how they tried to make P1 overly accessible with the fast movement and out-of-place soundtrack, which completely alters the heavy atmosphere the Revelations version has, it was evident enough that these were not the definitive ways for me to play these titles. For the P2 games, though, the redone soundtracks actually sound really nice, but the battle UI looks and plays awful. So, that's just in case anyone was wondering why I played these versions instead.

What can I take away from these games? I will never complain about lengthy combat animations again. Kidding, but not really... These games definitely got me more interested in trying out the classic SMT games, and newer SMT games, for that matter, and I liked P2’s structure as opposed to the later entries in the Persona series. If you like this game and feel like I’m missing something, feel free to let me know in the comments. I’m curious to know aspects of why people enjoy this game.

Side Note: Whenever I play SMT games, something befalls me every single time. When I was playing Nocturne, I was incapable of sleeping for a week for some reason? During Revelations, I got hacked on every single account I own from what I think to be my cookies getting logged, and yes, even my Backloggd was hacked. Can you believe the nerve of someone to hack a Backloggd account? Someone must really hate me. During this game, I got sick for the first time in like 2 years and feel like shit. I fear for my life next time I go back to this series. I'll end off this review by reminding everyone to use 2 Factor sign in for your accounts. Stay safe out there, fellas...

Tem um universo interessante, junto de um enorme potencial para sua construção, mas o jogo faz questão de jogar tudo no lixo com sua escrita porca, como no caso de Xianzhou, onde fingimos que simplesmente não aconteceu pelo quão ruim foi, e atualmente Penacony se prova no mesmo caminho da mediocridade, descartando inúmeros potenciais que poderiam ser interessantes para a narrativa e simplesmente jogando o mistério do assassinato no lixo com um plot merda.
Genuinamente espero que a história do jogo melhore, porque consigo ver potencial nela, mas no ritmo em que se encontra, será complicado.

My first venture into Takahashi's video game design, as well as the "Xeno" series and well... it's interesting that's for sure.

This game is insanely ambitious, to a fault. The combat is unique, but poorly executed and therefore mediocre. The platforming is atrocious, and the sudden shift in puzzle-heavy dungeon level design near the very end is confusing. It just doesn't mesh. But at the same time, I respect the game even at its faults because I can tell there was a lot of innovation, or at least an attempt.

What makes Xenogears iconic is its story and presentation and, even then, I'm widely conflicted. There's much that I really liked, but much of the plot beats and resolutions either just didn't hit or were compelling but extremely convoluted and so rushed that it all comes at you in waves of exposition instead of natural build-up. It's a real shame that the most intriguing portion of the story (Disc 2) is incredibly rushed and cut. Therefore, the most climactic and important part of the story felt kind of... hollow.

I respect the hell out of the ambition this game has, but I also equally don't care for how much that ambition really got in the way of itself sometimes.

✔️ Verified Steam Deck compatibility.

I really liked the OST and the ending, and the combat part is pretty entertaining despite feeling flawed and simple. The female characters didn't really sit well with me since it feels like they are just there as some sort of development for the main character. Their personalities were too plain and cliché for my taste.

Also, this is the first visual novel I play where the achievement farming is actually tedious (lol)