I haven't played Baldur's Gate 1 or 2, but I feel thoroughly satisfied with how standalone-friendly the game is. More to the point, this is the best game I've played since I was a kid tearing hordes through KOTOR. In fact, I want to highlight the experience of exploring Faerun with my companions, since it feels exactly as incredible as I remember doing it in Bioware's opus. This game absolutely shines in the little interactions you share with your companions and the bond you grow with them. The romances are INCREDIBLE, the sheer number of permutations available through your choices leads to always unique dialogue or reactions. Even if the villiains were quite on the weak side and the macro scale of the plot was not especially remarkable, you just can't stop having fun with your party. Seriously, the companions are THAT good.

Exploring Faerun is my joint-top favorite aspect of the game. You can just spend the time searching around the map and you'll always encounter big chunks of amazing lore or trigger cool dialogue with the party. On that note, the landscapes and dungeons look really good and I couldn't stop staring at the scenery. Faerun is dangerous, but beautiful.

Cutscenes and voice acting are another massive strong point. The cinematography and the absolutely gorgeus character models elevate even the most superfluous interaction.

Combat is something I've read the game get bashed for by Infinity Engine enthusiasts, but while I loved KOTOR's combat all my life, I firmly believe turn-based combat is the best (and easiest, to me anyhow) way of effectively managing how your whole party behaves, as opposed to waiting on them to fuck it up and quickly changing to them in order to set them straight as you need to in Real Time with Pause. You could argue pausing at the end of each round basically works the same, but I simply prefer to take turns and be done with it.

The OST is the only aspect where I feel this game does drop the ball a little. It's a perfectly good score, but I've heard better (this is where JRPGs just take the cake).

To wrap it up, this is a solid 10/10 game if I've ever seen one. Thanks to Larian for reviving western turn-based AAA's with this one, and I hope they continue putting out excellent offline roleplaying experiences before they inevitably turn to making shooters, like every developer I ever held faith in has.

When I finished Umineko, I thought it'd be impossible to find another game carrying such meaning in its plot. Well, here we are lads, this is absolutely the best story ever put to a game. It touches absolutely everything: Religious deception, cyclical history, Jung psychology, genetics, even animal breeding for food. Yes, that's right, this game is even seriously making me consider going vegan. And this was made in 1998, for the PSX. If there's a game that completely deserves being called ahead of it's time, it's this one, but not by far. The PS2 era would have made it the indisputed best game ever, but maybe with how the industry has grown, it was already a miracle that a conceptual mammoth of this caliber was even accepted for production back in the day. And that's the saddest thing, really. That this got shafted, time-limited and budget-cut in favor of FF7. Don't get me wrong, I already gave FF7 a five stars rating here and was my previous pick for GOAT, but after this journey... The scale is completely on a whole new level. Xenogears DESERVED to be FF7. To sum it up, this game has the best plot in absolutely anything I've played up until now, a banger OST by Mitsuda (like always), a really fun and engaging combat system (I liked it far more than FF7's for example) and is even technologically impressive with how it renders all of it's environments in 3D. The only downside to all this virtues is how rushed Disc 2 came out, but considering everything the team had to go through to get the game out, I wholeheartedly thank them for finishing the story in a respectable presentation. Go play this right now, ffs.

What can I say about the, probably, most polarizing game made in history? Well, I say that it's a bona fide masterpiece and the smartest game I've ever played.

Kojima was getting exhausted of seeing how his portrayal of Solid Snake in MGS, a broken man who was trying to find something to fight for, was completely misunderstood and instead Snake was to the fans a badass who could do no wrong. He took every single thing the fans loved about MGS (even those he didn't intend to be loved) and turned them upside down, one by one, smashing the whole concept of what a sequel is supposed to be, and actually putting the sequel definition over it's head: He made a game that doesn't just rehash MGS, it takes everything you knew about it and uses the in-game parallels as an actual plot point.

All while breaking the concept of how a game should adress itself, or if it's even permitted to do it, with a 4th wall breaking final segment that genuinely scares you with how outlandishly is the twist carried out. It even makes a social commentary on the massive influence of social media as far back as 2001 - no one could really understand how true what the game touches upon would become during this decade.

There's so much to be said about this game that this mere 4 paragraphs won't do it any justice, but be sure that playing the original MGS is absolutely mandatory to completely understand the utter madness of what Kojima has brought to us with this game. No game EVER has come remotely close to the magnitude of what this game has done for the videogame industry.