Meh. I'm unimpressed. For how much I've heard about this one over the years, it's nothing special.

I had bad vibes as early as glancing at the title lmao, I'm sorry, "Before the Sequel" is a VERY dumb name. Straightforward and self explanatory, sure, but creatively bankrupt. Which is weird, considering the Frankenstein-esque cutscenes chopping up frames from Sonic CD's intro and recontextualizing them. Clearly, creativity isn't lacking here.

But something feels... Off. Like those bootleg Spiderman toys that play Butterfly by smile.dk when you wind them up. Yeah, sure, it's Spiderman, but... Hmm...

Devil May Cry 5 is not only a much needed return to form for a series that’s been standing on shaky grounds for the previous eleven years but is mainly a victory lap that encompasses everything that made the series special in the first place.

The amount of love poured into Devil May Cry 5 is undeniable from its highly detailed character models to its beautiful environments to the fine-tuned gameplay. The jump in quality is as impressive as the jump between Uncharted 3 and 4. The world is presented in beautiful stylized realism that is a great fit for the series. The gameplay takes the best parts of what made DMC3’s gameplay so good and adds welcome quality of life improvements to deliver the best combat system in the series. It might have a new coat of paint but it’s definitely DMC and better than ever!

Aside from a couple of characters getting mishandled and a few minor quirks, I actually don’t have any major criticisms to give to Devil May Cry 5. It pretty much excels on everything it’s trying to do and delivers a fun and campy action-filled experience with loving callbacks to the previous installments.

It might be a celebration of the series but i don’t think it’s a culmination in any way. Devil May Cry 5 feels more like a powerful revival that also lays solid groundwork for a supposed future of the series. I’m not gonna lie, seeing DMC get an entry like this has made me feel increasingly bitter that Bayonetta, my preferred action hack-and-slash series, got an installment like Bayonetta 3 instead of one like DMC5. To fans of Devil May Cry, I can’t express how happy I am for you to get a celebration like this for a series you cherish.

I’ve played a couple Professor Layton games before but never to completion. I finally decided to see Curious Village through to the end and it definitely didn’t disappoint. I ended up getting an extremely solid small puzzle adventure with an interesting story.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village has an absolutely gorgeous Ghibli-esque art style that’s ever so comforting. The environments adorn a beautifully hand-drawn look and the animated cutscenes are animated so much like a Ghibli film that I was surprised it wasn’t Studio Ghibli themselves producing the scenes. The art style is just astonishing from the scenery to the characters designs.

The puzzles are absolutely ridiculous though. This is only the first-entry in the series so I hope that future installments don’t have puzzles as convoluted and math-driven as the ones in Curious Village. The logic-based puzzles are brilliant though so I hope the series leans more into those.

The soundtrack is also a weak spot for this game. It’s not bad but just very limited to the point of making not being able to play the game for long hours. The repetition and lack of variety in the tracks makes the game feel like a slog when it really isn’t.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a great first entry that has obvious room for improvement but gets so much right the first time around. I can see a next installment of this be a complete masterpiece if they choose to improve the right elements. As it stands, though, this game is pretty great.

No spoilers in here but just need to get something out of the way first, I HIGHLY recommend playing Lobotomy Corporation first or at least watching the cutscenes (if you're a coward/j) since it genuinely adds so much to this game it cannot be overstated enough. Yes the gameplay in Lobotomy Corporation also adds to it but enough of that you know why you're here. No spoilers also means I cannot delve too deep into why I love this game so fucking much but trust in the process!

This game almost made me fail my finals, rewired my cerebral cortex, took away my motor functions and the ability to feel fear. This a game whose difficulty spike is so vertical it makes economic inflation seem tame, this game will NOT babysit you, it expects you to read the entire Bible at the age of 3 and then go fight a group of bears with your bare hands. All this accompanied by such intricate gameplay mechanics, an absolute banger of a soundtrack and a story that is so convoluted, bizarre and most of all: intriguing that you'll think you hallucinated how it still ends up being so disturbingly coherent at the end of it.

But lets get into the premise now, this game NEEDS you to read, like a lot. The setting? Have you ever asked yourself what if humanity fucked up so bad we thought letting mega business corporations dictate our lives would be a good idea? Well here it is, the finish line to that fantasy. The setting takes place in the titular continent sized City composed of 26 distinct districts each controlled by a mega corporation and because of humanities ingenious idea to let said corporations dictate their lives the world is, in a nutshell, divided into the super fucking rich and the super fucking poor. Which one are you? I'll leave that up to the imagination. This game quite possibly has my favorite world ever made in a game accompanied by stellar world building to back it up, every single section of the game sheds more light onto the world and its inhabitants. The poor live in a lawless hellhole known as the Backstreets while the rich live in places called the Wings under the direct jurisdiction of the corporation controlling them. The poor? Well in classic fashion they simply don't care! Happiness? Dreams? Stability? Sorry buddy we don't have that here. Murder? Organ harvesting? Cannibalism? British people? These are the horrors waiting for whoever is unlucky enough to live in the Backstreets (most people).

The game begins through the eyes of our good buddy Roland stumbling into the titular Library while looking for a sandwich, getting made into a kebab by the director and then healed to then be a slave. This could be you someday at your local library! The synopsis on this sure explains it pretty clearly I just wanted to be funny but yes this is the end of the review so might as well give a warning to NOT look up anything about the characters, all info you need is neatly presented to you in a controlled manner and kept in the game itself to view at your own leisure. Now go play Lobotomy Corporation so you can hop on peak fiction! This isn't a request, its an invitation.

A damn good step in the right direction, building a solid foundation for future games. My favorite RPG series, brought back to life in a pretty neat, albeit overpriced collection.

That right there is the biggest problem with EO Origins: The price. I don't know what Atlus was thinking marking the games up this high, but it 100% guarantees that newcomers will think thrice before giving them a shot, especially people living outside the U.S.(R$400 for the bundle, anyone? :') )
Now, don't get me wrong. I absolutely believe that these games are worth their price, but that's just the thing: I already love this series. I've been playing Etrian Odyssey for a long time, so I knew right away that I would be happy with the collection. Newcomers may need a bit of convincing(or a generous price drop) to take the plunge though, and that's completely understandable.

The remaster itself deserves praise. Poor font choice aside, they added a ton of QoL features to all 3 games, and they run great despite Denuvo being a thing. No crashes or any other jank cropped up, although using mods such as the font replacement mod or portrait mods will make things a bit screwy with Denuvo. The community is already working on solutions for both the up-to-date Denuvo version and the un-updated version without Denuvo implementation though. They're all very dedicated and super fun to hang out with!

Textures were redone pretty nicely, no lazy AI upscaling either from what I could tell. There's some artifacting on portraits and backgrounds, but considering these games originally came out on the DS with its 256 x 192 screen res, Origins' assets are a massive improvement. Apparently it lets you run the game at very high framerates too, although I didn't feel any need to try em out; 60 is good enough for me.
Mapping was my biggest concern, but I'm happy to say it works pretty well. On a Keyboard+Mouse setup, you don't even need to think about it; not as fast as drawing with a stylus on the bottom screen, but just as accurate, and very comfortable. Mapping far from the screen with a Controller is definitely slower, but using the Auto-Map: Full option makes the experience a lot more comfortable. Some series vets may say that Auto-Map: Full ruins the experience, but I alternated between manual mapping with a KB+M setup and Auto-Mapping on a Controller, and exploring the dungeons was really engaging on both setups.

Now, the Map window itself takes up quite a bit of screen real estate. It didn't bother me too much personally, but I can see some folks wishing they could maybe resize the Map window or have transparency settings to mess around with. Origins is very much a "testing the waters" sort of deal, to figure out how they're going to make these games work going forward, so I'm 100% sure they'll take the feedback and experience from these ports to make the next game, or a future collection, even more optimized and customizable.

Just being able to play these games again on my PC or Switch already makes me super happy, but to see that the team actually put some effort to make this a really nice remaster, is more than I could ever ask for. It's far from a "just package them together running on an emulator or smth lmao who gives a damn" sort of collection; they put in a lot of good work here.
It's not perfect, there's plenty of things that can still be improved in the future, but for a first time outside the DS family of consoles: I'm very satisfied. Here's hoping for more EO in the future.
(And here's hoping they actually take it easy on the pricing next time, too...)

It's now 7am and I just got the final Guild Card achievement, 1 hour after defeating the post game final boss, having stayed up 25 hours doing nothing but playing this game.

I was going to write a tl;drish review for it like I did for EO1HD and 2HD, but I honestly think I can't fully express what this game means to me, no matter what I say. This will forever be my favorite game of all time. No other game can make me stay up till the ass crack of the morning after working a full 9-5 the day prior, except EO3.

The same excitement exploring all 6 strata, the same joy that comes from kicking back and listening to some of Yuzo Koshiro's best compositions, the same overwhelming-yet-fulfilling sensation from trying all sorts of stupid party comps thanks to the subclass system, each and every time I play it.

Come hell or high water, Armoroad will always be there for me.