Absolutely god tier game with fun gameplay and some incredibly soulful moments. Could be biased just because I actually like Disney, but some of the worlds were an absolute joy to go through even if some of them could be a bit frustrating. I played on proud mode as well so I kinda got my ass beat a lot but it never really felt unfair to me and I had a lot of fun nearly the whole time. I had the all in one collection on my shelf for about a year now and played this on a whim just because of Sora getting announced for smash. Now I kinda wanna go ahead and play all of them asap lol.

p.s.: the cabal got to me

Gotta admit, I dunno how I feel about this one. To start, I definitely think it’s the weakest cinematic naughty dog game I’ve played so far. As what I’ve been doing for the previous Naughty Dog games + The Last of Us, I played the game on Crushing and Survivor. Even with having to really strategize and plan out how I approached certain challenges, I was very bored for the first half of the game. Certain chapters like the Madagascar one try to be huge open areas but they barely have anything of interest within them. Plus they tend to be really long, which causes a whole lot of moments that are just flat out boring. While the core gameplay is arguably the best in the series, the level design is by far the most important part, and I think the first half pales in comparison to nearly all of what the first 3 games has to offer.

HOWEVER, everything from chapter 14 is great. Like, really, REALLY great. Some of the most difficult fights in the series occur and I found nearly every moment enjoyable in some way, even if it can get pretty frustrating with how much I died. Gotta hand it to Naughty Dog, they sure did go all out with the difficulty this time on crushing. I know a lot of people that think Uncharted 1 is pretty unfair and has aged poorly (which arguably, it has) but there were a lot of moments that I found fun just because of how stressful and exhilarating everything was and the second half of Uncharted 4 gave me a lot of the same feelings. Also, the ending is pretty great and a nice send off for Nate and the gang’s story.

As for some more minor, specific things: the voice acting is still great and adds a lot of charm, the graphics are gorgeous, and the music (while not really memorable) sounds nice and adds a lot to the experience.

Overall, I think Uncharted 4, while a great finale for the series, ends up being a little disappointing because of the pretty mediocre first half. It had the chance to probably be the best in the series and I’m a bit sad that it didn’t live up to that. I’ve grown to love this series within the last year and Uncharted 2 specifically has become one of my favorite games of all time. I know naughty dog gets a lot of flak nowadays alongside other Sony studios for making nothing but “movie games,” but I genuinely think they’re a talented studio that is capable of making amazing experiences (even if the work environment is pretty terrible as seen with TLOU 2’s development). I was hoping Uncharted 4 lived up to their previous works in my eyes, but at the moment, I can’t say it did. Maybe Lost Legacy will give me the same feeling that their previous games have…

So I just finished replaying botw on master mode for the first time but I didn’t really talk about my experience with the rest of the DLC in my review since that was new to me as well so I’ll talk about it here.

I thought it was decent for what it was tbh. The fact that the new armor can’t be upgraded is kinda dumb tbh but I thought the Champion’s Ballad was enjoyable and the Master Cycle was a really weird yet cool addition for the gameplay. I attempted to beat the first set of trials for the Trial of the Sword, and while I do think it would normally be pretty fun, I thought it was pretty frustrating on Master Mode so I decided not to bother with it. I may come back to finish it at some point though if I ever decide to fully 100% the game with getting all the koroks and stuff, but I’m not sure how likely it is that I’ll do that.

Overall, I think it just depends on what you want most out of the dlc to decide if it’s worth buying it or not. Are you like me and wanted to experience the game in a fresh way with a challenging yet really fun difficulty option? Then yeah, I’d say it’s worth it. Did you want a super rich side story that finally fleshes out the champions to be interesting characters? Then you’ll probably be disappointed with it in all honesty. For $20 though, I don’t think it’s a bad deal. I got it on sale for $14 and I don’t regret it. It was nice to finally experience it even though I’m basically 4 years late to the party.

Breath of the Wild was always a game I liked but I never really thought much more about it then that. I never bought the dlc when it was new, but when new gameplay was revealed for the sequel to Botw at E3 2021 and the dlc was on sale, I decided to finally pick it up and replay it on master mode for the first time.

And goddamn I think I understand why this game is so loved finally. The combat and resource management is really fun and now having to deal with much stronger enemies makes combat even more engaging. Plus all the new glitches discovered ever since the game released such as Wind Bombs that allow you to skip entire shrines and travel the map insanely quickly were satisfying to experiment with, even if it did make things overall way easier then it would’ve normally been.

I don’t really understand why people think this game has an empty overworld when I thought there were plenty of interesting places to see and things to discover. The amount of collectibles such as the amount of koroks is dumb, but they were still fun to discover and I thought the side quests and random NPCs you fine throughout the game were also nice to complete and interact with. I also really liked the OST personally, I can understand why some people wouldn’t like the lack of music at certain times but I felt like it mixed with the atmosphere well and there are multiple songs I can remember that I really liked (Molduga’s theme is 🔥).

While I did really like Breath of the Wild still, there were some issues that were made more apparent to me. The story is very uninteresting imo, with all the main characters being boring and forgettable outside of Zelda. Plus the divine beasts aren’t anything too special. I don’t hate them, but at the same time, I’ve only played a little bit of Ocarina of Time so I don’t have much 3D Zelda experience in order to fully understand why they are criticized as much as they are in comparison to previous Zelda dungeons.

However, despite my critiques, I had a lot of fun replaying Breath of the Wild and replaying it only makes me even more excited for the sequel coming out next year.

dang I really should play more zelda games probably…

I think it’s important to note before I really delve into this review is the fact that I used a guide for pretty much the entirety of this game. Hell, I wouldn’t have even attempted to finish it if I didn’t have a guide to use. I did the first couple of puzzles, didn’t like them at all, and didn’t want to go through potential hours of frustration throughout the whole game. I am glad I did that though however, because…

This is probably the best and worst game I have ever played. At least, that’s what I was told going into it. I had never heard of this game and barely knew anything about the Kill the Past series as a whole prior to Killer 7 until a couple of people I met on a discord server started to talk about it a lot. One of them was generous enough to gift me The Silver Case, 25th Ward, and Killer 7 all on steam and I’m very thankful for that because I don’t think I would have experienced this batshit insane game or series otherwise (Thanks, PSI!)

Anyways, about Flower, Sun, and Rain itself. I don’t want to discuss spoilers much as this is a game you need to play not knowing anything about it. Oh yeah, you also need to have played The Silver Case before it to even have a clue on what’s happening. Essentially, the plot revolves around the eccentric searcher named Sumio Mondo who is assigned to go to an island to defuse a bomb on a plane that is soon to leave with his briefcase named Catherine. Understood? Now what if it just so happened that Mr. Mondo went to a certain hotel that caused him to be stuck in a time loop and had to figure out why each night he saw a plane blew up in the sky? Doesn’t sound so simple then I suppose. Each day, Mr. Mondo follows his morning routine of being woken up to a phone call from the hotel manager Edo, falling out of bed, and then enjoying his morning cup of coffee. A time loop isn’t the most unique plot device, yet each day felt so distinct that it never got old. Honestly, I think one thing that makes me prefer this game over The Silver Case is how engaging everything was writing wise. The plot constantly managed to pull batshit insane twists yet it was all understandable. You could be constantly surprised yet you’d be able to put the connections together easily. One of my small complaints with The Silver Case is that I found it kinda boring at times when I couldn’t tell what was happening, but I didn’t really feel that way here.

HOWEVER…. there’s a reason why multiple people told me that this will also be the worst game I’ve ever played. And that’s because of the gameplay. Now I already mentioned how I used a guide to do all the puzzles as I didn’t want to bother with them, but that isn’t even the main gameplay element to this game. In Flower, Sun, and Rain, you…. walk! and walk! and walk… and w a l k… The whole game is essentially designed around walking from area to area constantly and as the game goes on, the walks get longer and longer. Request 14 was easily the worst, and imo it dragged on for way too long. And the thing is? I could hardly even care. This could be the Stockholm Syndrome talking from the fact that I’ve officially started taking the Suda51 pill, but I couldn’t even care how the gameplay was literally nothing happening. I thought going into it about how if a game is genuinely painful to play, then it probably isn’t worth it. But now I don’t know. This whole game completely contradicted my opinion on the value of good or at least tolerable gameplay and now I’m not sure. Could bad gameplay actually be good if it’s made with a purpose? Have my standards dropped so low that practically anything is good to me now? Ok, maybe not that, Mario Party 10 is still terrible.

That’s besides the point though. The point is that I was so entranced by Flower, Sun, and Rain and Suda51’s writing style as a whole that I genuinely could not care about what was happening from a gameplay stand point. So what does that mean for this review? Is FSR a flawed masterpiece? Is it a genuinely terrible game and I’m just trying to cope with the fact that I experienced the whole thing? Who knows! I think what matters the most at the end of the day is that I am glad I experienced Flower, Sun, and Rain. The dialogue, the characters, the fucking schizo-tier plot twists that managed to not fly over my tiny brain, hell I didn’t even talk about how the fantastic sound track complements the atmosphere so incredibly well. Nearly everything about it blends so well together that I managed to have fun almost the whole way through. It may be garbage, but it’s garbage that I’ll probably never get the pleasure to experience again.

Wait a minute. I feel something. I’m getting that DS feeling…