Soul Hackers 2 is an endurance marathon of a video game that left me with an shockingly profound case of Stockholm Syndrome.

I gave 76 hours of my life that I will never get back to trudge through the most abysmal dungeons in any video game that I've ever played, a remarkably bland story, mostly unlikable characters, and I don't even know if I'm upset.

This game has so few redeemable qualities in regards to the time it requires out of the player, it is downright impressive.

Soul Hackers 2 is an affront to the adult human. Time is not respected. Sanity is not respected. Intellect is not respected. The hypothetical of watching the entirety of One Piece is a resoundingly better use of time.

Little about this experience in retrospect could be described by the four letter use of diction in the English language that is the word: good.

Usually I would write a long form review, as I do with most of my plays, for games that I have a generally strong positive/negative reaction to, but Soul Hackers 2 drained enough out of me, Dracula would be proud.

I liked Tokyo Mirage Sessions, but no game should have the player ever, in a modicum of occurrences, say "I would rather play Tokyo Mirage Sessions."

Seriously, I have never complained about a game I've played this much, for this long, and had that come up in my review. I am mellow, I am very mild-mannered, but Soul Hackers 2 had me considering donning a purple jacket, some clown makeup, and changing my legal name, that my lovely mother and father gave to me, to Arthur Fleck, also known in the DCComic Universe as The Joker.

Speaking of Joker, man do I miss Persona. This is an SMT game through and through, that should've been a sign to me. I knew it was SMT, and I kinda like SMT, but I don't Liiiiiiiiiike SMT.

I pledge to play video games that respect my time a little more.

The genuine pros of this game, is that the hub vistas that you revisit are quite beautiful and the game design of the environments (minus the dungeons) is great. The character design, minus Arrow, is awesome and some of the better that I've seen in the JRPG space recently. Ringo, Figue, Milady, Nana, and Saizo all had great and unique designs that were candy to the eye and played to their respective characters. Speaking of the (main) characters, they were pretty good actually. Though they were sort of juvenile in their approach
to the tentative apocalypse that would lead to the death of all humanity, they were fun to listen to talk and hang out in the downtimes.

The shop menus and art style was very well done too. The presentation of Soul Hackers 2 was the lone spotlight in a sea of begrudgingly depressing and miserable decisions.

I can't recommend you play this game, unless you have a lot of free time, and not the will to enjoy a good game.

This has legitimately numbed my approach to video games, I'm hoping in a sort of shell-shocked fashion that I will get over. I hope the next game I play, has some redeeming quality that makes me smile or interested in what I'm interacting with, Soul Hackers 2 may be a paradigm shift in the way I approach games. I hope one day, that the spark that Elden Ring brought will return, because playing Soul Hackers 2 is the complete antithesis of everything I enjoy.

The more I think about the plot, the more I want to go out into the country of the state I live in and lie in a field of grass so that I can forget how poor it is.

Saizo really was a great character though, I just wanted to let that be known.

I really have to hand it to Bluepoint's Shadow of the Colossus remake, it was the first game to fill me with such vitriol at its mechanics and gameplay that I started emitting a red glow from my face and steam from my nostrils and ears. I realized that there is no being capable of deserving as much hate in media, across the thousands of generations of human storytelling, as the damn horse in Shadow of the Colossus. I am 100% certain this horse was meant to be sent to a glue factory. This is the Elmer's glue horse, this is the horse that started it all. Some pooor shmuck popped in Shadow of the Colossus into his Industrial era PS4 and jumped on the horse. It was his inspiration, it was his Joker moment. He quickly realized there was no being in history, nor the future, who could be as pain-giving as this horse. If you have recently played Elden Ring, Metal Gear Solid 5, or any video game post Magnavox Odyssey, you have played a game with a horse that has controlled better. I would rather eat clay and stick my head in mud while being smacked on each side by a baseball bat, than play this game using the horse as a mode of transport.

Plotwise there is probably a story here, but the narrative is played off in the obscure, meaning that you're dripfed some form of narrative into the game that is supposed to pay off at the end. Did it? I don't really care. I stopped caring the more I had to use the horse, maybe that's the narrative intention of this game. I think the creator has some form of equine-phobia. Just play Nier, any vibes of a cool game that I got made me think of Nier Replicant, it's a better game. Now this is all my subjective opinion, and given user/critic reviews and general influence of this game I am probably wrong, but I will continue to complain anyways. I streamed this game to a small crowd, and multiple times I had to stop, get on my knees, point towards the sky and apologize for my misdoings. I now know, what it is truly like to experience a game so mind numbing, that I can no longer experience true pain. The puzzling of the boss fights felt terrible and gimmicky, the soundtrack was extremely quiet, the game runs at a poor framerate on PS4, the flimsy attack mechanic feels generally awful as the game goes on, I am full of sorrow.

Uh, cool things about this game!
-Colossi design was great, Bluepoint did a great job bringing the ancient back to life.
-The world: while there was almost nothing worthwhile in it, the environment sure looked good.

Oh blah dih, oh blah dah, la la la la life goes on.

I remember buying and experiencing Borderlands for the first time in 2009, I grew up on the first person shooter so the idea of a co-op RPG FPS was something that I was absolutely in love with. It was fun at the time, rocking through waves of seemingly endless enemies with my buddies on late night XBL binges is something I miss dearly, but looking back at it was the series actually good? It's hard to say as I lack the memory or patience to go back and play the first two games. I generally forgot a lot of the story in each and gameplay sequences but I recalled having a good time. When EGS announced that Borderlands 3 would be it's bi?weekly free release game I downloaded it immediately because I knew that was the right price for me on a series I wasn't certain I'd enjoy as an adult. Many things have changed since I played the first two games; the first being that I've since come to dislike loot based games, the second that I have understood how critical a game's story is to me, and the third that I no longer play co-op games with the same crew and mostly game solo.

I really had little to no expectations in booting up Borderlands 3 which admittably took a really long time. It required a lot of troubleshooting to get the game to run on my 4K display at a reasonable framerate and graphical suite. If this game had come out around the time of Borderlands 1 or 2 I might have excused that, however for a 2019 release I found it waaaaay more trouble than it was worth. Finally though, I got through and was able to experience what the long wait finally had to offer, and for the initial 75% of the game... I was not impressed.

Character and narrative writing in this game is absolutely abysmal, maybe the worst in a Triple-A title that I've played. It felt like the writing team wanted to make every line a joke, make everything humour, except none of it was funny. I was genuinely impressed with how low-ball and awful the character conversations and expose's were, to the point that once a character started talking I would sprint to the next door/objective to skip whatever they were going to say. Look, the VA's did a generally good job actually voice acting, but the subject matter they were given was laughable. I don't want to sound like a snob, because I probably often do in my longform reviews, but I implore whoever plays this game to contrast it to their favorite narrative based title in the way the characters interact. Humor is usually written in a more tongue-and-cheek or nuanced manner, rather than trying to face-stuff punchlines and gags at every opportunity. Character archetyping and stereotyping is done A LOT in games, especially in blockbuster titles, so I am not going to knock the game necessarily on that, but rather how poorly they do it. Ellie being the fat country girl got old REALLY fast, Tannis' quirky xd scientist gal gimmick was annoying minute one, and the f* Instagram influencer twin villains made me groan at every appearance (WHICH IS A LOT.) I challenge you, the reader, the player, the whoever, to find a more detestable and cringe worthy pair of antagonists than you'll find in Borderlands 3. I guarentee it is not possible. It's not the funny kind of cringe, it's not the wholesome kind of cringe, it's a real, real bad cringe. This cringe is so large, it may be the weapon to surpass Metal Gear.

Gameplay-wise Borderlands 3 felt pretty good at least with the Beastmaster class I picked. I never felt alone on my journey 'cause I had my trusty utility Skag who provided me with some awesome buffs and took aggro. It was nice having a freedom of movement and ways to fight with my gun setup, which Borderlands has always been pretty good at doing. For the majority of the game, outside of the skag and actual diversity of approach to combat, I felt like fighting was a slog. The waves and waves of enemies with the weapons I had picked up thus far didn't make me feel strong at all and had me taking the endless engagements quite slow. Once I got THAT Borderlands gun, and THAT second one, I felt like a badass. It's that moment I thought I'd be getting far earlier in the game, I didn't feel like a vault hunter, I felt like another soldier. Once I got my pistol that shot a triumverate of explosive rounds? Yeah I felt like I could kill anything in a matter of seconds, and I did! I'm not asking for the game to have housed a power spike much earlier in the game, I would have just preferred to have felt like I scaled with the enemies and bosses better than I did. I didn't grind but I did clear all enemies in my path through the main story. I found myself constantly picking up weapons above my level which was a little frustrating granted how little inventory space you get, thus resulting in me having to drop quite a bit of what I had obtained.

In the final quarter of Borderlands 3 I felt like everything combatwise and designwise had clicked. I was adequately strong, being able to blast through hordes of COV and Maliwan with ease from Point A to B to C to D. The beautiful cell-shaded world was painted with a jaw-dropping attention to detail in making the end feel like the end. The grandiose nature of rooms and set pieces had me in awe at the care and gravity of the scenes. If only it hadn't taken that long, that is my major gripe with Borderlands 3. On top of a middling story and poor graphical performance, the game took TOO long to get good for me. If you had taken the way the gameplay felt in that last 25% and applied it to the rest of the experience and optimized the game to run like it did in that segment, then this game would have gotten a much higher rating from me, even aside from the middling story and cast.

Borderlands 3 is not a game that I expected to have this strong of a reaction to, but ultimately I'm glad I played it and closed the book on the series. I didn't feel like it was exactly the experience I had played many moons ago, but it didn't feel too different either. If you like looter shooters or the Borderlands series thus far, the odds are that you have either played Borderlands 3 already, or would enjoy it.

If I wasn't such a fan of Final Fantasy X, I would say without a shadow of a doubt that Red Dead Redemption 2 is the greatest game I've ever played. I got into RDR2 at the request of several around me who had been prodding me for years and years to finally get on it, I didn't have a PS4 for some time and didn't have a capable PC either so I had held if off. Lo and behold upgrade time came and I finally got on both the proverbial and actual train.

RDR2 starts off slow, and I mean really slow. I think for the first few hours I might have touch a key other than W maybe one or two times (major hyperbole there) but you are doing a LOT of walking and following. However throughout the story of Dutch Van Der Linde's infamous gang, things and people start to change. Greed and anger seep their way into the gang slowly but surely over the fifty+ hour experience.

This game is the definition of a slowburn, but what you get in the payoff is quite easily a top two written story and the greatest open world in attention to detail ever made. Fans of the original Red Dead Redemption are probably aware that this is no shocker, but the minutia that Rockstar gets into here is absolutely off the wall. Animals, people, the weather all interact in unique ways, you're never sure to see the same thing twice in the same location.

The story of Red Dead 2 takes the form of a multi-season cowboy television show, it feels almost surreal in how un-rushed and realistic it is. Fear and death follows Arthur Morgan everywhere he goes whether its his fault or somebody elses. The twists and foreshadowing that occur throughout this game will have you audibly gasping and pausing as they unveil.

Though the ending you can see a mile away, it's the delivery Rockstar achieved that will make anybody no matter how manly they are, cry some damn cowboy tears.

Resident Evil Village (or RE8 as I'll refer to it) is an absolute masterclass in comedy, survival horror, puzzling, and first person adventure. Every mark that the game attempts to hit, it does and exceeds any and all expecatations I had.

I'll start with the environments, from minute one I was wow'd (as I was in RE7) with the insane amount of detail Capcom put into each and every room in the Winters' home. Moving from their home in Eastern Europe to the titular village intensified my feelings and awe for sheer beauty in design. Every single house was filled to the brim with items to make it feel real, as if someone had actually lived their and been displaced (true to lore,) the backdrops were gorgeous as the snow filled ground complimented a bright background and the massive Castle Dimitrescu pierced the sky, and each zone has a distinct visual pop and aesthetic to it. To that point, I was completely blown away by the aforementioned Castle. Even though you spend a reasonably small amount of time within the Castle's doors, Capcom maticulously crafted each room, be it small or large, with adherance to both Dimitrescu as a character and with the idea in mind as to how an aged up and renovated castle would actually look. The entry foyer and grandiose hallway make a phenomenal mark on how seriously Capcom takes their design. You know right away that Dimitrescu (whom you have met very briefly) is a woman of class and intrigue, she is a royal and has a home that matches her beauty. This continues on in each of the other lords' zones: Donna Benevinto's chaotic misery of a home matches her mental illness, Morreau's duel cave and dock based zone matches his fish-like demeanor, and Hesienberg's factory matches his inherent power and love for machinery. I genuinely do not believe any other game I have played, nor game I have not played, has matched character aesthetic to environment as well as Capcom did with Resident Evil Village. Everything within the village feels so visceral and real as to what I imagine small town wintery Eastern Europe is, and each lord's domain is so well done to fit the character's themselves.

Next are the characters themselves, and again Capcom (as it has done across most of their major franchises) has knocked it out of the park. Ethan Winters returns as the game's protagonist, yet they sprinkled in some of Leon Kennedy's one liner's from RE4 and turn him into the most meme heavy protagonist in Resident Evil to date (almost matching up to Dante as their funniest character.) He's just a genuine goofball, absolutely oblivious to the scenario going on around him no matter how serious it is. He'll state things that are hilariously obvious and dole out the absolute worst insults to the enemy's he fights. Honestly, I love the direction RE has had with their protagonists. You go from serious in Jill/Chris (RE1) to the oblivious and fresh Leon/Claire (RE2) back to Jill, then to the MGS-Lite Leon Kennedy himself in RE4, then to Chad McBiceps in Chris (RE5/6) then to full meme in RE7/8. Protagonist aside, the entire rest of the cast was beautifully done as well. The villains are legitimately the highlight of RE8, and to anyone who saw marketing material of Lady Dimitrescu should see this as no surprise. From very early on you are exposed to the sick cast of characters that populate the near seven hour experience. Lady Dimitrescu as I touched on earlier is regal and beautiful, speaking as someone who is high class and wealthy. She walks with a tremndously elegant stride and is dressed impeccably, looking like a celebrity dressed up out of the 1920's. Even though you can't look at her for very long (because she's constantly trying to kill Ethan,) I found myself very interested into her pale white skin and white dress combination, because it was so interesting as a villain's design. Going on to Donna Donna Benevinto and her sick dolls who make a very brief appearance. You see and hear very little of her (as the lore explains) which makes her a very cool villain. It's almost like my idea of the riddler who leaves his clues all over Gotham, but instead she contacts Ethan through context clues, puzzles, and her crazy creations. This mirrors her personality and is a nice reprieve from how in your face the rest of the villain cast is. Morreau is the next villain/lord of note and he is honestly the most forgettable to me, as his hunchback like figure and oft repeated tragic creation angle is really a callback to horror and science fiction that predates RE8. He is a sad character to talk to and be in proximity with, but nothing necessarily new. The next two main villains in Heisenberg and Mother Miranda are also captivating, each working toward their own motive that seems at odds. Heisenberg has a little bit of a mad scientist x Nicolas Cage demeanor, speaking and acting erraticly yet clearly is a character of heightened charisma. He's someone you'll find yourself laughing at in one moment then being in total fear of the next. Mother Miranda, because of her importance to the story (though she is mentioned throughout) I will refrain from talking about her in great detail, other than that her designed is absolutely fantastic. Other characters like a returning series favorite (play and you will find out,) Duke the lovable merchant, and the denizens of the village make for a lively and intruiging experience. This entire cast is memorable and for the few characters you meet is very impactful, I strongly believe this is one of gaming's best cast of characters of the last decade.

Gameplaywise, RE8 is more of the same (in regards to RE7) with some great quality of life updates. New to RE8 (From RE7) are the removal of item boxes in favor of a rather large inventory and an improved crafting system which outright tells you which items you need to complete recipes for ammo and health. In that respect, getting those materials is extremely easy and non-grindy which I felt gave the game a lot of legs to run on. Anytime you kill a lycan/zombie, they drop a material that can be crafted (or money,) meaning that I never felt like trudging through the enemies they throw at you and actually felt the need to interact with them and kill them because I knew I'd be getting something in return. Money never felt scant in RE8 either, giving you items from the world and lord zones that sold for quite a pretty penny, allowing you to upgrade and purchase items as you pleased. A great returning feature to the RE series was the item fitting inventory style of RE4, except this time with a very forgiving size. In RE4 I often found myself having to sacrifice quite a bit to make my loadouts work, I never felt that in RE8. Continuing on gameplay, the puzzles in RE8 were very well done, and in the vein of the RE2/RE3makes one thing led to another and there wasn't ever a time where I felt completely stuck or had to look at a guide for assistance like I did in RE1. Puzzles clues lead to solutions very naturally and rarely feel "too easy."

The story and lore were fantastic in RE7, however they felt very isolated, which makes sense as you were rebooting the beloved and deep franchise with a new protagonist in a new setting and a new genre. In RE8 those two items again are very well done and due to spoilers I will not touch on them in detail other than to say that they answer many of the questions I had from RE7 and add on greatly to the intrigue and depth of the series' lore.

Resident Evil 8/Village is a game I never wanted to end, it's the definition of an instant classic and in my opinion, the best entry in the Resident Evil series. I strongly recommend this game to gamer's who appreciate memorable experiences and survival horror. It features jawdropping design and environements, memorable villains and moments, and very fluid combat and mechanics. This games' lore is best bolstered by playing the series to from the first mainline entry on, but I'd say RE7 is a requirement for playing RE8 as the story is a direct sequel to that game's events.

Death Stranding is an experience that could only ever be possible in the world that exists within Hideo Kojima's mind. It is an experience that is difficult to really put into words, as it's the culmination of so many factors put together to create what felt like much more than a video game. What I completed was clearly Kojima's creative magnum opus, completely evident was his free reign over direction, narrative, sound, and atmosphere. No moment in the journey of Sam Porter Bridges' journey across the country feels without purpose, no element of the mystery behind the plot at large is wasted, no character is left feeling unimportant. Completing a game like this felt like it did when I finished Red Dead Redemption 2, I was experiencing the peak of an artform. Gaming is such a visceral platform because, unlike television, music, or film, the player is the ultimate decision maker. The person controlling whoever your protagonist is, is ultimately the one experiencing those emotions, those story beats first hand. I wasn't watching a movie of someone trek across the country whilst combatting the paranormal, I was Sam Porter Bridges. I was connecting the United States by foot, I was the one saving humanity. Every mountain I scaled, every BT I put away, every delivery I made was an impactful push towards the conclusion of the story.

The narrative in Death Stranding was excessively ambitious and something I previously never thought I'd see in gaming. I've seen anime and movies get abstract in the realm of Death Stranding, like Neon Genesis Evangelion, but I found that unlike NGE, Death Stranding did a phenomenal job explaining its eclectic and boundary pushing story. There's so much at hand here that I can't even begin to write about it in a review, other than that it will have the player absolutely gripped to their screens. Just like in MGSV (which I will touch on below in regards to its influence,) the lore and story are drip fed to the player over time. As you first get into the cutscenes and mystery of the Voidouts, BT's, Death Stranding, etc... your ears perk up and your mind wanders as to what they could all mean. Mission by mission, chapter by chapter, the expose of these items become explained and more impactful to the player. Once the ball is rolling in regards to Death Stranding's story, you'll never want to get off its ride.

The world is downright gorgeous and purposefully empty in many places. The game takes places in a sort-of post-apocalyptic sort-of United States that beckons the player to start in the East Coast by Washington DC and asks them to end it in Los Angeles. I semi-recently upgraded my rig and this was decidedly one of the best games to experience on it. Everything from the luscious greens in the eastern United States to the powdery whites of the Rockies popped in colour and detail. I felt like I could almost smell the air running through the scenery because it felt so realistically detailed. Every mountain I scaled had me audibly gasping to those around me, it was a frequent occurrence for me to stop and stare, the sign of a phenomenally designed open world game.

Adding on to the fantastic visual fidelity of the eye-popping environments was the character and enemy design. Hideo Kojima has always put a heavy emphasis on the visuals and intracacies of his characters, and Death Stranding is the most recent and sucessful forray into bringing the characters of gaming to life. Kojima tapped into some of film and television's biggest names in Guillermo Del Toro, Norman Reedus, and Madds Mikkelsen for Death Stranding. With the power of some extremely impressive CGI, the characters these actors portrayed seemed almost lifelike. While Guillermo did not provide the voice for his character, the rest of the cast did an impeccable job bringing the emotion of their unique personalities to the S tier animation. While it's most definitely a meme at this point, this game is laden with lengthy cutscenes that detail these characters interacting and talking at length. I had to pause frequently and sit there in awe that I was actually playing a video game. This was a far cry from the polygonal days of Metal Gear Solid 1. You could see the sweat pores in Sam Bridges, the tears trailing down from Fragile, the silky black chiralium exuding from Higgs. Everything in regards to the cast of the game was so crisp. Their perfect animation wasn't the only thing impressive about the character base of the game, as the outfit design, which I believe is an underated aspect of many modern games, was also very well done. Sam's clunky delivery outfit was purposeful and unique, Fragile's black suit was slick fit in her background very well, and Higgs' mask and outfit fit his mysterious allure to the T. I only named a few as to not wear it out but Kojima again strikes gold in how his characters are outfitted in varying and unique threads.

Usually with video games I try not to listen to soundtracks before I play whichever game they belong to. Sometimes they are unavoidable earworms like Persona 5's which I'd heard quite a bit, and othertimes I am able to avoid them like Death Stranding's. This was paintstaking as I always watch the game awards every year, and it took home the Soundtrack of the year in 2019. After finally playing the game and running through the emotional gambit, I can completely see why the OST is held in such high regard. The artists Kojima tapped for the game wrote perfectly for the narrative and expansive open world. I was very happy to see Chvrches and one of my favorite recent artists in Okay Kaya get some light in the gaming world!

Functionally Death Stranding is a loooooooooooot like it's Kojima predecessor MGSV. Instead of sortie-ing for missions you are taking deliveries. This makes the game feel a bit like a big budget television show in the same manner as the Phantom Pain did. Characters appear in cutscenes in between deliveries and give Sam details as to his missions in the same manner as Ocelot and Emmerich did. Instead of Kiefer Sutherland you have Norman Reedus. In Lieu of the sounds of the 80's, you have synth pop bands from the current era producing futuristic sounds. In both games you have an expansive open world that beckons the player to exploit the mechanics of the game and try new things to complete their objective. I don't mean to say that Death Stranding is a copy of MGSV, but moreso an evolution of the direction Kojima has been taking his games in the last few years. There lies a strong departure from the early Metal Gear Solid days, not necessarily a bad one, but it sure is distinct.

While I think Death Stranding is one of the coolest games ever made, it definitely had its frustrations. These for me boiled down to: reverse trike movement and BT interactions. The game, as most people know revolves around the player making deliveries to connect the United States from coast to coast. You could run this all on foot while toying with the intricate weight mechanics, or you could elect to try it via the games motorcycle, the reverse trike. The trike is great because it moves fast but the player has to rely on the beneficiary porters who have played the game previous and their own precarious planning so that they can have a steady line of generator's to power their journey from point A to B. That part wasn't difficult, as I understood generally what it took for me resource wise to make sure my bike was charged, what got annoying though was the fickle momentum mechanics of the game that made accelerated jumping extremely unpredictable and wonky. I would take my bike everywhere with me because it was a great way to take the heavy delivery loads off of Sam's back and not have to deal with the intentionally difficult weight system. The drawback was making my way up mountains required "Skyrim-ing" which, I signed up for so I can't complain, however the trike's interaction with rubble and moving uphill or over rocks was so inconsistent that I was constantly mouthing my frustrations at the screen. My second point is more of a minor one and not as frustrating as the trike dilemma. BT's are the primary enemy in Death Stranding that you'll encounter. They're initially invisible and the BB attached to Sam's chest serves as a detection system so that you don't run into them. If they do catch up to you though, it's a reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally big setback and can take you way out of the intended direction that you were on. I wouldn't mind it if these were set encounters and fights that the player actually had to go through like you'd see in a Souls game, but most of the time I could just run out of the immediate vicinity of the BT that had nabbed me and everything would be back to normal. It made any sort of fighting outside of the few story moments that you had to fight BT's fairly pointless.

My slight negations aside, Death Stranding is the latest in masterclasses from gaming's most eccentric auteur. This is the most ambitious AAA project you'll find in the world of gaming for some time and is a breathtaking experience from start to finish. If you have a mild degree of patience or are familiar with the works of Hideo Kojima, I strongly suggest you take a dive into the world of Death Stranding. It is an experience like none other, a dive into full immersion and what science fiction narrative is like at its peak.

Chrono Cross has almost impossible shoes to fill. How do you perform as a sequel to one of the greatest games to ever be released? How do you follow up a JRPG darling that took a combined superteam behind Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Dragonball? Well, Square decided to move the "series" in a completely different direction from the first game.

Many people, as the average rating of this game currently indicates, took an issue with this current remaster/port of the 1999 PSX classic. I did not play the original so this was my first experience with Chrono Cross, and I honestly after spending thirty some hours with this using the "new" graphics I... didn't really see a big problem? I found that textures by and large, from the characters to the text to the environments looked pretty good. I honestly really liked the watercolor-esque backgrounds, and thought the graphic upscaling/sharpening made running through an archaically designed world pretty enjoyable. Frame rate could have definitely been better when it came to fights, but the speed up feature and general ease of combat meant that I wasn't very preterbed. I think the performance and graphical overhaul was largely exacerbated as a problem by the community and made out to be a much larger problem than it should have been. It's a JRPG from 1999, it looks good enough and for the price of $20 I really wasn't expecting anything more.

For the game itself, I greatly enjoyed my playthrough as Serge and company. Combat was mostly rewarding, and the use of the innates/element system made for a unique approach to combat. The jump from Trigger to Cross in these combat systems reminded me of going from FF7's Materia to FF8's Junction system. Cross greatly shook up what was a very simple JRPG formula in it's predecessor. With Cross, each character has a stamina bar that allows them to attack a certain amount of times. These attacks grant them combat levels which the summation allows them to use magical abilities. This means that fighting for a majority of the game revolves around a dance between basic attacks and elemental powers. This took a few hours to get used to, but once I got a hang of it and messed around with my ability lineup, I found a rhythm that took me all the way through the game. Having fourty+ characters was both a blessing and a curse to this game in regards to combat. It was nice because I never felt pigeon-holed into one elemental style or grouping for my party, but I felt mostly uninterested in adding new characters to my party as the game went on because that meant re-speccing abilities and items everytime. Each character of course has their own involved story and background, but when it came down to adding them to my active team, I felt mostly unconvinced to move outside of a group of five or so. With Trigger, and again this is almost unfair as a comparison because I'd call it a "perfect" game, each character served their own unique purrpose and because of tech system there was a unique benefit to almost any combo of characters. Combat and fighting in general though was extremely easy, I genuinely don't think I've had an easier time in any JRPG that I've played, even including FF8 in which I played with the limit break always on option enabled. I got one game over in the entierty of Chrono Cross, and that was to a mostly RNG mini-boss late into the game. Other than that every fight was done with relative ease which... honestly I'm alright with? This was a game that I wasn't playing for the difficulty or depth of combat, much like Chrono Trigger, it was for the atmosphere and story.

Now for the story of Chrono Cross, up until about three-fourths of the game I honestly had this pegged as a 4.5 or 5 star game, as the mystery of the story had me glued to the screen. I was constantly theorizing about the relation this game has to its prequel. How could they relate? How does Trigger lead into this? Does this character seem familiar? I ran through these questions as I spent every waking hour triyng to complete the story, however as it went on and the lore dumps occurred, I became a little less interested. The story became rather... convoluted and strayed away from Trigger's thought provoking simplicity. I appreciate the dev team for trying to get weird with the story and taking risks in the telling of time travel and the two worlds, however it didn't pay off asmuch as I would have liked it to. I just think Chrono Cross got a little bit too much in the late game lore explanations.

One fault Cross has in relation to Trigger that became more apparent as I went on was the "too many cooks" dilemma. I'll give them credit, they really did the best job to create interesting enough stories and backgrounds for the expansive cast, but I think this came at a detriment to the emotional storybeats of the game. Trigger was a game riding high on emotion of the tightly knit party and their motives. Chrono and Marle were close like lovers, Lucca was Chrono's childhood friend, Robo had a story full of loneliness and tragedy, Frog was a fallen hero and Ayla was... Ayla. These characters had motives and passion that was apparent and prevalent at all parts of the story. With Cross you have a story that features a great deal of the recruitable characters in your party. Many of the members in your team make appearances as main dialogue options or centerpieces of action, meaning that I never really knew who I should have had in my party as certain points. It became tough to be attached to some characters knowing they'd have their fifteen minutes of fame, then go dark for ten hours of gameplay, and come back as a center focus of certain narrative elements. Sad character backstories were relegated to retrieval of their techs, and many you never visited more than once. To boot, the one character in this game who is packed with more time in the front and center than anyone, Kid, I absolutely couldn't stand. She was supposed to be the Marle type for Serge, the one that would always be there for him, his emotional centerpiece. She is billed as the star crossed lover, however had a real "tough girl" attitude that didn't match what the narrative was trying to portray her as in relation to Serge.

The soundtrack is another masterclass by Yasunori Mitsuda, the same hero behind Chrono Trigger's OST, however this time I felt like it was a little bit weaker as many soundtracks were when they made the jump from the 16 bit SNES era to the MIDI PSX tunes. Certain remixes of Trigger songs that made their way into Cross were very well done, like the main theme and victory fanfare, and new songs like Kid's theme and the second to last boss theme were fantastic, however I think the expansive nature of this game and jump in technology hurt it a little bit for me when it came to music.

Overall though, I had a great time playing Chrono Cross and it is nice to finally be able to mark it off my list of Square classics to play. If you like any other games from Square-Enix's legendary run in the 90's including Chrono Trigger, or like JRPG's in general, Chrono Cross is a worthwhile playthrough. I wouldn't let detractors of the game's performance or graphical changes be a deciding factor personally.

Six months ago I bought Bloodborne with the goal of playing and completing my first From Software game. I brought it back home and popped it in my PS4 which had been lying mostly stagnant ever since beating FF7R and P5R. I marched and trudged through the streets of Yharnam. Upon getting to the game's first (optional) boss Cleric Beast, I died, lost my souls, and retired the game indefinitely.

A couple days ago I returned to begin a new adventure as a Hunter, fresh off a playthrough of Elden Ring. I felt like after understanding From's punishing overworld, combat, and mysterious narrative, that I could tackle Bloodborne with a new state of mind and undertake the game's difficult nature without putting the game down. It turns out, I was right. Returning to Bloodborne was a fantastic decision and helps me understand the genius of Hidetaka Miyazaki even moreso after completing 2022's current GOTY.

Bloodborne is an incredibly disturbing take on HP Lovecraft's absurd paranomal writings and Victorian England. The environment is meticulously designed to make the player feel uneasy; filled with dark greys that paint the buildings and streets, sound effects of people and beasts suffering in their moments of "life," pools of dirty water everywhere, and bodies draped around the atmosphere like they are normal. From minute one, Miyazaki and company establish the concept of dread as normal to the player. Of course, those who are friendly to From's previous titles, or those that have come since, know that none of the games paint an uplifting picture in their world, Bloodborne is no exception. You awake in a dimly lit room, only to strut forward and be killed (unless you are a seasoned Souls vet) by the first enemy you see in brutal fashion. This is the beginning of the grueling mystery of the game's combat and narrative. Again because this is Fromsoft, the story is hidden behind a multitude of sidequests, world events, notes, item descriptions and the occasional exhibition by NPC's in the main story. It's hard to grasp it all, but if you dedicate the time in game to reading and putting things together along with what you are witnessing firsthand, it quickly becomes captivating. There is so much "WTF" in this game, players will find it hard not to be interested. This is now a classic From tactic, by putting things in front of the player that are inherently interesting and not telling them outright what they are or what they mean in the grand narrative, the player becomes naturally invested.

I found myself after conquering the first (optional) boss in this boat, things around Yharnam were grotesque, but I felt like I needed to unravel the mystery of my character and the NPC's I interacted with. Who is Gehrmann? Why are the Hunter's Necessary? Why does my character seem like the only one who still has "it" together? These were all questions I immediately began to ask myself upon my first trip to the game's hub. This is what happened to me in Elden Ring when I had first played it as well, I questioned who and why, what and how, because the game made me WANT to do so. Often games dangle their narrative in the face of the player and decide to push whichever narrative in their face. This works in some regards, for example the Story and messaging of a game like Mass Effect is fairly direct, but Bloodborne is the perfect example of when a polar oppposite form of story telling is done, that it can lead to near perfection. While it doesn't hold the same benefit of an open world to freely discover like From's most recent title, Bloodborne has a world interesting enough and filled with a plethora of intrigue that its genius of discovery shines.

It shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone who has seen even a tidbit of this game to understand how impressive the art and environment are, but one such piece that I was genuinely surprised by in Bloodborne's strengths was the music. As previously stated, I had just completed Elden Ring within a couple weeks of starting Bloodborne, the music was pretty good and generally interesting. That is sort of where my praise stops for the soundtrack though. With Bloodborne I was continuously impressed with EVERY single boss encounter I had because of how incredible the orchestration and composition were. Each theme was designed in a perfect manner to couple with the character's story that they were attached to. Sinister characters has sinister themes, tragic characters had motifs and themes full of sorrow and despair. The genius of this games composer to match the histories of the world that Bloodborne takes place in is amazing. I don't want to speak on boss theme names because, that is inherently a spoiler, but I sincerely recommend listening to them, even if you're not a fan of classical oriented music.

Combat in Bloodborne is considerably easier than Elden Ring and genuinely surprised me with how un-difficult this game felt to me. I don't consider myself to be the best gamer, but I almost felt a little let down with how easily I was able to handle the bosses of this game. With the aforementioned Elden Ring, until the end game it took more than a few tries on many bosses. You were cut down very quickly if you mistimed a dodge/roll and punished very hard if you got greedy. Though, the games differ in how you rebound after a player death. In Elden Ring you had more Sites of Grace hanging around and could respawn at the statues of Marika, with Bloodborne you had corpse runs from a advanced distance. In Bloodborne it felt like getting hit very rarely was a death sentence. There was only one fight in the game that I felt like I legitimately struggled on in terms of bosses, and that was mostly due to the PS4 struggling to maintain a steady framerate and the boss arena being poorly designed. I had been told on and on about how difficult the final few bosses of the Old Hunters DLC were, and yet I beat them in just a few tries. Maybe this is a boon after playing Elden Ring recently that had prepared me for a more difficult fight, so I don't know if the game is really easier or I had just been already prepared. I will say though, the concept of having twenty plus healing potions from the beginning of the game was pretty nice. These potions are farmable very easily early on too which means that farming after a tough fight wasn't very hard as you could replenish quickly. The combat itself was alright and nothing too special. Dodging was just like it was in Elden Ring, and I presume in the previous Souls games, and attacking ran on a basic stamina meter. What is nice about Bloodborne's fighting is the sheer amount of offensive options. Multiple playstyles based on weapon combinations (in your main hand and off hand pistol/torch) is encouraged and genuinly fun to discover, I imagine even moreso on NG+.

Art. Story. Music. So where does Bloodborne draw the line for me that keeps it out of the five star spot that I gave Elden Ring? Well I can answer that in quickly: performance and mapping. What is a map? They don't know! In a game that is excessively intricate, Bloodborne could still have maintained its mysterious nature, yet save the player time in getting lost. It's wouldnt be impossible to have a map for how vertical this game is either, as game's like Resident Evil and Metroid have found great success in filling a map to the brim with content and being able to map it out successfully. This would allow the player to properly discover and explore locations without the folly of getting lost and dying with a high echo count yet still feel rewarding. Performance is frustrating, and I finally understand why for years people in my circle have complained and longed for a PC port. This game, being a title based on precision timing and beautiful enviroments, could HEAVILY benefit from a game running at a better framerate on a system with the power to support it. Multiple times I had been hit and lost fights because of the game's framerate taking a dive into the unknown. Thankfully the game was still amazing nonetheless, but tough to reason a five star rating when it at times felt miserable to power through from a performance standpoint.

Nonetheless, Bloodborne was a fantastic time and another masterpiece in From Software's catalog. If you like a game that entices discovery, tough combat, and player control in a dark world full of mystery, this is a great pick for you.