Just like the movie it's based on, this is not a particularly good game. But unlike the movie this actually does a few ambitious things that I find very charming and interesting, even though they're rarely executed in a particularly decent way. First of all, it really is as open as I remembered it, but often for no reason whatsoever since there's usually no reward for going off the correct path, and some stages have side quests that give you no reward at all. I think both of these things are just symptoms of a very rushed development cycle where some things were added without being fully completed. However, it also makes the game world feel a lot more real and like the galaxy far, far away doesn't just exist for the player to find something cool wherever they go (it's actually pretty stupid to not rush towards where you're supposed to go when you're in a hurry and there're enemies everywhere!), or that a Jedi should need a gameplay beneficiary reason to help someone in need.

The game's also just plain weird. There're small dialogue trees for most conversations you can have, and you're really allowed to act like the biggest Jedi asshole that ever lived. You can even kill most NPCs in the game without much repercussion, even being able to beat the gungan stage by killing every gungan rather than talk your way through on the way to release Jar-Jar Binks from prison. From absolutely nowhere, the middle of the game also almost completely abandons its action gameplay and turns into a fairly simplistic adventure game where Qui-Gon Jinn has to trade with people in Mos Espa to get the right parts for Anakin's Podracer, and later has to trick a man to lead him to Watto by buying him enough drinks (and after having taken money from Jabba the Hutt for fighting some weird monster of his). Maybe strangest of all, though, is how one stage lets you play as Captain Panaka, who I'd be surprised if most people would remember even appeared in the Phantom Menace movie, but is given a weirdly large part in this game.

So Phantom Menace is kind of a whirlwind of a game that would probably not get made today since it is a strange as it is, but that's not all it is, because it's also quite bad. I would genuinely recommend everyone with an interest in the game to play it because it really is a memorable experience with a lot of ambitious ideas and weird combinations of genres, but I would warn them that it controls like absolute garbage (too stiff with the d-pad, too sensitive with the stick), guns are almost impossible to aim with, enemies do an insane amount of damage very quickly, the isometric camera is way too zoomed in on the player, and the platforming is a nightmare whenever it rears its ugly head. There's also quite a bit of slowdown as soon as there are more than, like, two enemies on screen, and loading saves (which is a frequent occurrence since death comes often in this game) certainly takes a PS1 amount of time.

The escort missions are kind of a nightmare since the AI you're escorting is dumb as bricks and just walks into enemies' lines of fire, get stuck on geometry which sometimes forces you to restart the entire stage, and I even had Padme fall through the floor and despawn once which gave me a game over. Playing this game can be real pain at times, is what I'm saying, and it's really only my love of its many idiosyncrasies that makes it fairly enjoyable to me. It is also a bit charming to go through the movie's locations in these charmingly primitive 32-bit graphics, and John William's soundtrack is still some of the best scores he's composed (though it's bizarre how Duel of Fates appears in the game, but not when you're fighting Darth Maul at the end).

The Bloodbornification of Dark Souls = the Blandification of Dark Souls. Can't help but feel this game sets out to be the spiritual sequel to the PlayStation exclusive than its namesake series in an attempt to have its cake and eat it too.

Particularly Dark Souls III retains almost none of the atmosphere from its predecessor partly due to the removal of its labyrinthine, interconnected map design - exploring in this game is essentially reduced to clearing out a map and painstakingly breaking every barrel and peeking over every crack in a wall to see if something was missed, and if it has been rarely is it of any intrigue.

Basically this game is an exemplar of the issue I have with a lot of more modern games where more powerful hardware equals bigger, busier maps which very rarely equates to better game design.

Still though the sheer rush of adrenaline and endorphin from landing the final blow of a game-ending boss still hasn't been beaten by any other game series, and the combat is as frustrating and tedious and addictive as ever so it can't all be bad.