Damn, this was some trippy shit. People have made comparisons to Twin Peaks or The X-Files (I can only vouch for the latter currently). Despite this, I was still very engrossed in the story. Jesse is one of my favorite female protagonists in recent years. All the abilities you learn really add to the exploration and combat. I've always been a sucker for psychokinesis, and getting to pick up and destroy everything around you is so satisfying. I couldn't help thinking of Luigi's Mansion 3 in a way (though, it's arguably more impressive there since the Switch is less powerful). It's also extremely gorgeous to look at. It makes me hate that Sony removed Facebook functionality. I have a lot of pictures saved.

As you can tell by the rating, it's not perfect. The difficulty can be very cheap at times. Certain enemies can take out huge chunks of your health and you'll have little time to recover. You could just want to explore, then a barrage of them will spawn in a room. One boss fight was so annoying, I ended up turning on immortality. The final moments feel pretty anti-climactic compared to what came before, but it leave things open-ended for a possible sequel (plus, I still got the DLC to play). There are notable framerate issues either from all the action onscreen or simply un-pausing the game. I figured it was just on consoles, but even the PC version does it. I didn't think that was possible.

And my biggest gripe, the map sucks ASS!!! Sure, it will highlight your next location, but it doesn't take into account whether there's a locked door or some kind of debris in the way. I had to look up walkthroughs on occasion because of it. Metroid got it right in 1994, so what's the excuse here? Regardless, I really enjoyed this one. I look forward to more from Remedy. Praying that the next game is Alan Wake 2.

A near perfect gem! Unlike Breath of the Wild (which it's been compared to), its flaws are a little harder to ignore. Jumping and climbing never felt quite right, the character animations can be janky (at least in the base game. They were improved a bit in Frozen Wilds), some NPCs are rather flat, and the melee combat is...there. The option of overriding the machines was sadly undercooked as well.

Everything else was amazing though!! I love all the different ways you can kill your enemies. Your focus allowing you to scan for any weaknesses and also read up on people from the past. I was so caught up in the lore, I did just about everything. I only require five remaining Blazing Sun medals. I only did a little bit of Frozen Wilds, yet I still made sure to get every artifact. The environments are absolutely gorgeous. I learned from The Completionist that the areas were based on Colorado and Utah. Having visited the former, yeah that's about right. Finally, Aloy is one of my favorite protagonists in recent years. A great arc combined with a fantastic performance by Ashly Burch.

I'm looking forward to the upcoming sequel. The comic sounds promising too.

Silly dog raps the corniest bars possible over goofy aaah beats while completing basic tasks.


Charming game with a bizzare aesthetic. I played a few times years ago on a emulator (on my phone lol) and it’s stuck with me since. Mainly for the cutscenes and songs. The music as I mentioned before is corny as hell but genuinely really enjoyable. The story and characters are all really fun.


Parappa is so based dude. He’s got swag and he’s just tying to live out his dreams. I hope he wins over that stupid flower girl someday. He should make a soundcloud account and drop a collab mixtape with Yeat.

Also go watch the PaRappa The Rapper Anime it’s pretty good.

https://youtu.be/3iyi1bk0Bvo

light 4/5

Oh man oh man oh man. I was chasing this one for a long time, every single emulator in middle school I would try to get this English patch to work and it would end up breaking for me some minutes in, so I was convinced I was missing out on this long-lost cousin that looked nearly identical to FF6 and seemed cinematic as fuck.

With this gorgeous remaster, I found out I was both write and wrong. After beginning multiple playthroughs just to get stuck for 30-40 minute periods, I've become a little weary to see this one through. Despite a tight af opening, the plot kinda falls by the wayside for the open-ended open-world esque exploration where adventure finds you. Which is all fine and dandy, probably revolutionary for the time, but makes for a dated and frustrating experience, especially when you have a battle system that feels equally as open-ended and has so many mechanics to wrap your head around with an anything but linear path to expansion. Once your party fills up you don't know who to keep and who to let go of(and lucky if your shittiest party member even is willing to part with you at all), annoying RTS minigames, a multitude of things dragged down this experience for me.

With that said, all the reasons I laid out for my annoyance is probably the exact reason why someone would love this game. If I were in middle-school and still had the hundreds of hours at my disposal to explore every facet of this game, I might have fallen hard in love. Some of my favorite pixel-art character designs are to be found here and this remaster is absolutely gorgeous and is the HD treatment that all the SNES era Square games should get, either this or the Octopath style but not that "pixel perfect" BS they're trying to peddle to the FF fans currently.

The saving grace of this for me is that I still have it on my phone, and can pick-up and play it as I please pretty casually, but with a DS emulator that's becoming more frequently my go-to I'm not sure if I will be making progress on this as often as I'd like, if at all. SaGa Frontier just seems more my speed.

Yeah, this is the JRPG to recommend if you want to guarantee someone will witness how on their fucking game Square was in the '94-00 period. Steeped neck-deep in Freud, the bible, and Hideki Anno as influences, this story never lets up and finds ways to cram in so many ideas that if not rushed for time it would have expanded for another 20-30 hours at least with some of the darkest implications ever put to a narrative game. Insane I'm only getting to this now, but at the ripe age of 22 I think this came at the right time for me, coincidentally when I'm in the midst of reading some Freud and Jung thoroughly for the first time.

You lose grip on the narrative with the characters and it actually does the old Squaresoft amnesia/split-personality trope effectively for once, as in a way that actually has an impact and sends the player through a real mindfuck. The NPCs are rich with complexity, you spend about 20 minutes getting to know an Orwellian dystopia that conveys all it needs to say, there's more sprite-fucking than I ever thought a T-rated game could get away with, and the mixed-media styles was the perfect way for them to utilize the Playstation hardware to the exact scale they needed, and this just feels grand as fuck. Like if the Emerald/Ruby weapon section of FF7 just extended its the operatic tone for the entirety of a game.

Yeah, it does need updates by today's standards in some areas though. Mostly with the text-boxes themselves moving so slow, with text this dense I don't have time to wait for it and wished I could speed it up for my preference(this is where emulator fast-forward becomes a god-send). And, controversial opinion, a lot of the music I noticed to be a little loopy at a certain point. All the sounds and instruments are excellent, maybe it was just a result of not enough variety, particularly when you are watching about 40 minutes of cutscenes in a stretch with about 4-5 pieces of background music.

However, none of the inconveniences, not even the having to juggle multiple battle systems, a few somewhat irrelevant party members, a rather small and unvaried world map, high encounter rate, etc, ever hold this game back from wholly impressing the player and proving itself an ambitious touchstone masterpiece of the medium. I mean, they even cram in a multiplayer arena fighter with tons of mechs in high-speed fights in addition to all this shit!!! This should have permanently pushed the medium forward in terms of writing and content a team is allowed to tackle, and I hope it gets some resurgence or further recognition somehow in the near future.