This game basically goes back to it's roots with the 3D gameplay which I'm glad. It got rid of everything wrong with the 4th game which I'm glad.

Story Mode is excellent. The interludes are great but man, some of the characters are buried in this one. (Paul, Kazuya, Law.) Reason I said Kazuya is that he doesn't really do anything in the canon story to this game than take over G-Corp.

But, Jinpachi....one of the hardest bosses in fighting game history. He's an absolute dick to fight. But nowhere near as hard as Azazel! (Oh, I'll get to you soon bitch!)

To be fair, the AI in this game can get difficult. It's a weird rotation. You beat one guy who was a cakewalk but then in the next fight, you get your ass handed. Press Continue then you beat the shit out of him. It's fucking weird. (Either that or I suck hard which I very much doubt. Fuck you lol)

Arcade History is cool. Nice to play the classic Arcade Tekken games and remember how hard and enraging they were.

Devil Within? Fun little mini-game for Jin. Is it canon? Probably not. Though it's cool seeing Ogre again. Can be a bit repetitive at times but not too bad.

So yeah overall, this game is fine. I do prefer Tekken 4 in my opinion but 5 ain't too bad. It's better gameplay wise but I do miss the darker story from the 4th game.

Also, Jin just turns evil at the end after killing Jinpachi. Wouldn't it have made more sense if Devil Jin won the tournament at the end of the story? Jin finally losing himself to the Devil ala Tekken 2 with Kazuya. Jeez, Namco. Get better with your details.


P.S. The opening is sick!

Run around on top of a bunch of Onimusha transitional backgrounds, the weird boundaries and the camera angle combining to make it impossible to tell if you're actually standing next to an enemy until you visibly connect with a swing. The Simple Series, baby!!
I picked the character that was very obviously supposed to be Tetsuya Watari (good) and discovered that Square, Square, X, X will kill pretty much everything in the game no fuss. You can also use this to meaty every boss to death, including the final one, who did not hit me once. The Simple Series, baby!!!

A game that nobody really could appreciate because it was a sequel to a hack and slash action RPG MMO while offering something completely different. This was my introduction to Phantasy Star so I was immune to being let down. PSOEPIII is a turn based, tiled based, card based strategy game. It's a tough sell even if it wasn't attached to the IP of an action game. Yet, I couldn't help but find the depth of the cards, customization and tactics of it all so fascinating. It also has an understated story that reveals itself pretty well unless you talk to every single NPC between every mission and listen to their requests, deploying the right characters in the right missions in order to get more context for the story. The story itself is actually incredibly profound, preoccupied with the struggle between terrorists trying to prevent the ecological damage of a colonized planet. They do this by hacking the technology of the colony and create nanomachine phantoms of the animals killed by their ecocide, using the very ghosts of the planet against them. The greatest part about the game is its grave sadness that bleeds out through the dialogue of the characters and overpowering music. The music of the game is nothing short of breathtaking. I would recommend this game to anyone who likes card games and the soundtracks of Sonic Team games.

Gameplay: 10/10 It's intuitive, engaging, and never gets old.
Plot: 10/10 A timeless tale of the power struggle between two rivals.
Graphics: 10/10 Iconic art style that takes advantage of hardware limitations. The square ball clearly inspired Minecraft.
Sound: 10/10 The defeat sound effect truly makes you feel the agony of failure.
Legacy: 100/10 Gave us G-Force for the Wii.

Conclusion: It's Pong.

My contrarian ass is always on the lookout for another miscarriage of Gamer Justice, failed assessments of misunderstood secret gems of olde - it's my role as tastemaker ambassador in chief to purify the well and let the world drink full with a hidden mineral spring of mastapieces. Vexx looks like if Hugo the Troll listened to Lacuna Coil, why did I think this would be any good. The best compliment I can give this game is that it's "fascinatingly ugly", another misguided 00's attempt to cross Soul Reaver with Banjo Kazooie. Just dispassionately flopping onto the collectathon genre with a sauceless platter of 14 worlds and 100 orbs and 6 skulls and 81 hearts, it's kinda funny it's kinda sad.

Haven: Call of the King: technically, it is marvelously ahead of its time; aesthetically, it is painfully of its time; mechanically, it is dreadfully behind its contemporaries.

Stuff just happens in this game. You platform, you shoot in third and first person, you do rail shooting, jey pack flying, speedboating, driving, and so on. Most of it feels fine, it feels much better than literal shovelware would. Despite the connected environments and lack of loading screens, pretty much everything you do feels completely out of context. After the opening cutscene there is no dialogue for two full levels. You have a narrative goal, but if it weren't for the fact that your current objective is always displayed on the pause screen, you would have no idea what your next logical step for achieving that goal could possibly be.

There's too much mechanical variety introduced too early on, and while you are initially given some space to play with them your objective quickly becomes so narrowly focused that the range of abilities you have and stimuli you're expected to react to is overwhelming. You have a double jump, a shield, a slide, and a melee attack, and all of these moves can be combined in some way (and that's just the core platforming gameplay!), but few of these more advanced maneuvers are ever useful or satisfying. If you pick up a power-up like a gun or a flashlight, your melee attack becomes unusable until the power-up's time limit runs out.

There are roughly a dozen different types of barrel in the game, most of them are introduced within the first level or two. Some have items, some are covered in spikes and will damage you, some cannot be destroyed and will give you a weapon each time you hit them, some turn into turrets (all of these barrels are the same color). Some will explode when you hit them, some will explode when you get close to them, some contain a dragon that will follow you (but only when your shield is active!) and destroy the otherwise indestructible flaming barrels (all of these barrels are the same color).

Voice acting is shockingly sparse, with many characters' reactions to important events being limited to mugging the camera. Important story scenes have dialogue that is spoken so fast that I wonder how badly the different assets of the game were fighting for disc space. You'll walk into a new area and have a short cutscene that introduces a new character, and the next time you see that character (assuming they reappear at all!) you won't even have the option of talking to them. There is no text based dialogue in the entire game; the only text you will ever read is tutorials and hints. Half of the characters in the game talk in terrible overacted voices clearly imitating various racial stereotypes. Between the silly voices, the fast-talking, and the fact that the game has no subtitles, the story as told in game is almost incomprehensible.

The main collectable, like Mario's coins or Sonic's rings, are these little orbs that make a weird monkey noise when you touch them. I got several levels into them game without understanding what they are, and had to check the manual. Basically, you're poisoned, all the time. These items are an antidote that you need to constantly replenish to stay alive. You basically have two health bars, one that only goes down when you get hit, and one that you need to constantly fill with these orbs.

There's a car section where you're in this map, it's a desert area with some small trenches and two towers connected by a bridge. To progress, you need to destroy five tanks. To destroy the tanks, you need to chase and run over these little blue things that are running around in the sand; when you hit these blue things your car gets a blue aura, and you need to hit the tanks while you have this aura. There's other cars in the area that chase you around, and if they hit you, you lose the blue aura.

The second turrent section is, until that point, the absolute low point of the game. You're on a boat with two guns, one at the back, one at the front. At the very least, you don't actually need to manage the two guns at all, as enemies will only ever spawn on one side of the boat, and you only need to move to the other gun once the area is clear. You can't hold down the fire button for very long, for some reason this is seemingly the only area where your gun has a cooldown. To keep firing without overheating, you need to tap the fire button the entire time. The enemies constantly shoot projectiles, you have to shoot the projectiles in order to destroy them. These projectiles exist for the sole purpose of making sure that you spend most of the fight shooting at something that isn't the enemy, making the fight drag on and on, likely for more than a half an hour. If you die, you start over. You probably will die, and you probably won't even know why. Maybe you were walking between the guns and a stray missile hit the boat and made a massive hitbox, maybe you didn't realize that the shield meter acts as the boat's health meter for this segment. More than likely, this is the first time in the game that the player is stuck in the same place doing the same thing for so long that the poison meter actually starts to be a problem. The boss of the level has so much health that it's basically guaranteed that you will need to abandon your post in order to restock your antidote, and in the meantime your boat will be left defenseless. It's a delicate balancing act that goes on for way longer than it has any right to.

I don't know if it comes across in text, but it's almost impossible to talk about this game's mechanics in plain terms without slipping into a James Rolfe impression. That's what I mean when I say this game already would have felt dated in 2002. Mechanically, it operates on logic so obtuse that each individual part of this game's whole could have been an Atari 2600 game. Even so, even in its mechanics, it still almost feels ahead of its time simply because the "Freeformer" (TM) is basically the blueprint for the modern AAA game. Between Tim Rogers' idea of GTA as an "argument solver" or Nakey Jakey's justification of Naughty Dog's prestige titles, the critical glorification of games that are a jack of all trades and a master of none, I had to wonder if the ideal video game for the average gamer is anything more special than a high gloss Action 52. Here it is. Haven: Call of the King is that game.

However, Haven: Call of the King feels ahead of its time primarily because it is simply a technical marvel. This is a PlayStation 2 game, it has no load times. None. You load once when you boot the game up, it lasts barely 5 seconds. You will never see another loading screen again for the entire play session. It has seamless auto-save, it typically runs at 60 frames per second, it has so many particle effects on the screen that I would think even today's particles (which exist primarily to showcase the fine detail offered by 4K) would blush! It has an enormous consistent world consisting of multiple planets.

There are two problems with this. The first is that the game is so linear that there is simply no opportunity to appreciate it. The second is that as a result the most positive impression that the game can leave on someone can be reached just by looking at the title screen for a few minutes; the title screen shows a zoom into the main planet from space, then soaring through various landscapes. Apparently, if you go through the tedious trial of collecting every optional collectable in the game, at the very end, you gain the ability to freely fly through the galaxy and find a handful of hidden levels throughout all the game's planets. Getting to that point (hell, even just getting to the end of the game without the collectables) is so tedious that I can't imagine any significant portion of the people who bothered to play this game at all have experienced it, nor should they feel obligated to.

On the other hand, the fact that the game is technically so well crafted makes it so uniquely playable. There are so many egregious instances of bullshit in this game that if dying carried the penalty of a 20 second reload, I would have dropped it so much earlier. But because there's so little downtime, because the loop of feedback and retrial is so fast, flaws that would usually be inexcusable become more tolerable. It's damn good thing you don't need to worry about lives either; most of the time when you respawn the actual game-state hasn't even changed, you just get moved back to the checkpoint, and sometimes you can even still see the thing that killed you in the exact same place it was before.

One of the other reviews on this site calls Haven a "Jak and Daxter rip-off" (and from various other sites this seems to be a common observation) and while the game isn't good enough to necessarily call this a "disservice", I do think it's inaccurate. Haven is very much of its time, but in a more complex way than ripping off a single game. The aesthetic is a combination of tacky 00's fashion and post-late-90's gross-out cartoon humor that could have easily manifested on its own. There are hints of Lord of the Rings, there's a lot of the Star Wars prequels, and C.S. Lewis (Narnia) was explicitly cited as an inspiration in interviews. It's a piece of media that very obviously comes from the perspective of contemporaneous Christianity; like a video game adaptation of Angel Wars.

The reason for this is that this, perhaps more than any other Traveler's Tales game, seems to be Jon Burton's baby; going by his credits, this appears to be one of the last games that he had a direct hand in programming. It has both a weird sort of heart and an off-putting uncanniness that I would usually only expect to see from outsider art, from random eccentric individuals online. Again, narratively inspired by C.S. Lewis, which "has a clear gospel allegory while still featuring proactive characters". Aesthetically, the concept art was done by one of the artists who did album covers for the supergroup Asia. Mechanically, it was inspired by ambitious Amiga games like Mercenary. The game was meant to be sort of deceptive about its own scope, to slowly open up and surprise the player.

Well, congratulations, we were deceived. Players were so utterly deceived that everyone thinks the game is a boring, linear, lifeless, empty action game, and frankly, they aren't even really wrong.

That final optional space-faring completionist journey is so interesting, because if that had been the game's core loop this could have been something truly groundbreaking. Haven was so damn close. Even if the game opening up had been a more gradual process, it would have made all the difference; for example, there's a moment where the player escapes a prison satellite and crash lands on an unfamiliar planet. If the player landed in a wilderness and had to organically search for civilization, that could have been interesting. Instead, Haven conveniently lands in the only place on the planet where he can find a ship to get back up into outer space.

The popular comparison is to No Man's Sky, another overly ambitious game about going to different planets, but in the actual playing of the game, this is not the experience I think most people will have. Here are a few comparisons that I think are more appropriate:

Imagine if all of Sonic Adventure's mechanics, the platforming, the flying, the pinball, the fishing. Imagine they were all just a little more polished. Imagine that the tradeoff is that half of the game's voice lines, most of your favorite songs, and ALL of the game's flavor text and NPC dialogue were completely removed.

Imagine if Bethesda made a game as big as Daggerfall, but literally every area that wasn't directly relevant to the main quest was completely empty. Imagine that if you managed to replay the entire game without taking damage, you could unlock half a dozen sidequests, and none of them were anything special.

Imagine if The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was ugly, and you didn't get a single new piece of equipment after Windfall Island.

Haven: Call of the King is not good, but it is interesting. Apparently, this game's failure is one of the main reasons that Traveler's Tales is where they are today; with this game flopping so hard, the team that would have worked on a sequel got assigned to a Lego: Knights Kingdom game that the studio would have otherwise turned down, a game that never materialized because Lego would quickly request a Star Wars tie-in in its stead.

Fun fact, if you do a bit of googling you can find out all kinds of things. I'm like 90% certain that the only reason Burton is making a Funko Pop game with his newly formed studio 10.10 Games is because Steve Jobs' widow wants his mansion, and if he's gonna have to move into a new one he'll probably need a few more million for his house-hunting budget. Not to mention Funko probably has about as much access to different IP's as Lego does, Funko is bigger right now than ever, and Burton's favorite game to work on was apparently that Lego Dimensions crossover game. Video games are stupid and I hate them. Our entire hobby really does just mutate to suit the whims of distant multi-millionaires. Very cool.

The story is so flimsy and skeletal that it's hard to truly glean any thematic substance from it at all, but if I were to try, I would focus mostly in the juxtaposition between the Golden Voice and whatever the hell that magic rock was called. Basically, they are functionally identical objects, each made to facilitate a cry for help. One exists to summon the fictional world's Messiah figure, the other for asking Haven to aid Chess, the game's damsel in distress who ultimately betrays him. If only Haven had simply done what all true Christians do, ignore a friend in need. Only then could Athellion have saved humanity.

Anyway, Haven is so out of touch, out of time, that I'm not sure if it's a wicked artifact of a darker alternate timeline, a shining example of what video games could be if developers cared more about optimization and minimizing bloat, or a caricature of exactly what the AAA industry aspires to at this very moment. Whatever.

Played on PCSX2

I hate this game and Iove this game.

The cutscenes and whole story is super bare-bones, and your coach constantly repeats lines, cutscenes are constantly reused, just pretty shit.

The animations and everything are great and this game has so much potential with it, but the controls are just so fucking awkward. Even after you understand everything it will still have you moving how you don't want to. The game sometimes just won't let you go backwards, or let you move left or right. It's so frustrating.

This game is on the cusp of being one of the best boxing games ever, but the controls are just so fucking annoying and awkward it ruins the entire game. I've boxed for about 5 years IRL at the time of writing this review, and this game is not realistic, I've heard so many people say this game is super realistic and it isn't at all.

I got very far in and I beat an extremely hard boxer, was losing my fucking mind, then I beat him and the game freezes and I have to do it all over again. Nope, I'm done.

I suggest looking at this game as it's one of the most unique boxing games I've ever played, but god it's just so fucking frustrating at times.

Side note, this is due to the emulation and not the actual game, but there is constant freezing where I have to keep restarting the game, and the music randomly cuts out.

Part of my 'unofficial Final Fantasy' canon. Like some kind of bastard love child between Tekken and FFX, The Bouncer is a techno-infused take on the beat 'em up genre through a distinctly Y2K era SquareSoft lens. Characters with spiky haircuts and nonsensical outfits fight their way through retro-futuristic locales, set to a backdrop of slick electric guitars and techno rock.

At first glance, you'd be forgiven for mistaking The Bouncer for a new entry in the Final Fantasy series, as they share so much aesthetic makeup with each other that they may as well be related, thanks in part due to Nomura's heavy involvement in both titles. It also feels similarly well produced with an attention to graphical fidelity and a gorgeous all round presentation.

In essence then, The Bouncer is basically a beautifully rendered, feature length Final Fantasy cutscene that's occasionally injected with short and sweet bursts of arcade beat 'em up action, which play out like a simple version of Streets of Rage in the Tekken engine. These sections are fun enough, thanks mostly to the hilarious ragdoll physics which lets you launch enemies into the air and send them hurtling in to one another, but all too brief and unfortunately don't offer much in the way of depth or variety. With a focus so clearly placed on its story and presentation above deep gameplay or mechanics, you often feel like you're spending more time watching than playing- but that's not necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary,The Bouncer takes some interesting creative risks to stand out from the crowd and in hindsight could be considered one of the first truly cinematic movie games.

Clocking in at around only 2 hours, the game is easily beatable in one sitting but offers some decent replay value, as it can be played from three different perspectives with unlockable characters and features branching paths, reframing certain events within the story.

Harshly judged at release for not living up to sky high expectations (being Squares first release on the new console), The Bouncer is more than the sum of its parts and well worth revisiting for those looking to indulge in some mindless fun and early PS2 aesthetic kino, if nothing else. And boy does it deliver on that.

this game is incredibly cruel and unkind to the player. it's full of stupid bullshit, cryptic bullshit, annoying bullshit, and the controls are weird to get used to, but damn if i didn't come out enjoying myself. the music is great, the story is pretty interesting, and the whole aesthetic just speaks to me. the ending credit roll cutscene goes stupid hard for some reason too, i think they intentionally transferred it to VHS and back just for the aesthetic like holy shit??? yo??? based???

good game/10 but you might hate it if you can't handle the garbage it throws at you

also play it in japanese if possible!! idk how well the english version holds up, but probably not very well given that it's published by agetec

FF8 fails at everything of substance it tries to do. But it somehow managed to avoid a bad reputation based on two things. Its excellent presentation for its time, and name recognition based not only by being a FF, but by being an FF while FF was in its prime (it is sandwiched between 6,7, tactics, 9 and 10)

This really needs to be rectified because this game is really bad story and gameplay wise. It has probably the weakest cast of any of the story focused games, Squall is the one thing I'll defend about this game, for Disc 1 and 2 at least, as I found him to just be a dude trying his best to do a really stressful job. But the rest of the cast was awful.

Disc 1 starts off honnestly pretty good. I was enjoying this game for disc 1. Set up and set pieces were really solid. Everything after that just becomes worse and worse with stupid plot points that do not amount to much (the orphanage, GFs causing memory loss). Plot points being sort of dropped (Seifer just kind of....gets away with ending the world, with neither punishment nor redemption). Laguna being an exposotion dump that interrumpts the flow of the game. Rinoa basically bullying Squall into lovjng her, which he suddenly starts to do in disc 3 (simp).

The junction system, dear god, its a painful grind without following the exact steps of a speedrun guide, which is not an acceptable way to play a game casually. The system is entirely dependant on GFs yet makes most GFs easily missable. This is a guide only game as much as Zelda 1 is.

But you know, as bad as I found the whole game starting in disc 2. I was actually enjoying myself. The story was dumb but I always looked forward to what stupidity it might do next, as the game is strangely paced really well. The gameplay was, grindy and boring, but strangely satisfying. The game is pretty easy so you dont feel like you have to be perfect with the junctionning.

Then, Disc 4.

This is possibly the worst final level in a JRPG, bar none. Its a very sudden difficulty spike out of nowhere. And then the game completly spits on you and everything its taught you by removing your access to abilities you NEED, including fucking saving. And then even if you acquired it back, the final boss, who you've never met until you face her, can just, undo your junctionning. Straight up breaking the entire system the game is built upon. Disc 2 and 3 were bad but I was smiling, Disc 4 straight up ruined my day.

All of this for what? A game, that, beyond being bad, has nothing of value to say. What was the theme of FF8? Oh it had a love story? You mean like literally every FF game since 4 has? Oh how unique is it. It dosent even suceed at it, FF9, the very next game, does this exact theme so much better. And FF10 has a much more compelling and well written couple.

The Squall is Dead and Rinoa is Ultimecia fan theories just kind of prove my point on how bad the story is written. As even through they have been explicitly shut down by the game's director, they would make the game better. And to me, is just a sign of the cope people are willing to come up with to defend the game with the pretty cutscenes from a respected series.

This is a bad game, nothing can change my mind. And it saddens me cause of all the games I called bad in my life, this is probably the one I wanted to like the most.