This game offers much of what makes the first Spider-Man game good: a flow state when swinging that is pretty much unmatched, a fun and diverse moveset for combat that allows for fantastic player expression, and boss fights that feel greatly improved from the first game as well. While the story doesn't quite hit the emotional truck-hitting weight of the first game, it does manage to tell an engaging story that had me hooked in the whole way through.

While that's all pretty great, and while I would consider the content of the main story worth the play, I do feel like this game has less side content than the previous entries. Whether that is up to putting more into the main story I'm not quite sure, but I did feel myself finding less and less to do outside of the normal crimes towards the end of the game, which I think will hamper some fun of getting around the city from the earlier sections of the game.

Definitely one of the most mid JRPGs I've experienced. It delivers on all the surface-level things you'd expect from the genre: flashy combat, great music, and memorable character designs are all here. Beyond those, however, the game doesn't do enough beyond them to justify further investment. The story in particular has some very flat characters and far too many gags for the sake of it (moreso even than other Tales games), as well as a large portion of the mid-game dragging far too much to the detriment of the investment in the overall narrative. When it came time for the final act twists and pulls, I found myself not caring much at all.

After playing close to all of the Metroid series, I felt like I owed it to myself to try the other side of the "Metroidvania" coin. While it does have very ambitious pixel visuals melded with 3D models making a gorgeous-looking game, the heavy focus the game has on combat is not exactly the side of the titular genre that doesn't speak to me as much.

The base combat model and the variety of weapons available meant that I enjoyed finding new ways to fight the enemies throughout the game, but that kind of cuts into the platforming and movement side of progression. There are unfortunately only 5 major movement upgrades to help explore the castle, and once those are obtained there really isn't much change in the gameplay for the remainder of the playthrough. Because of this, rooms often don't feel as purposeful as those in a game like Super Metroid. The inverted castle in the latter half of the game truly stretches this problem even further; purely just a gauntlet of enemies and platforming made messy to where using the bat just becomes required to eliminate it entirely.

It’s pretty good, but not excellent. Characters and presentation are for sure the best parts of the game, although I think the combat does not go as deep as I would like it to.

I think the stagger system is the main thing that keeps the game from feeling as expressive as other character action games. Compressing the max damage output you can have into just that small stagger window means you’re simply not doing as much cool shit during the rest of a fight.

Another (commonly stated) criticism is that a lot of the side quests are fairly bog-standard. However, I think they are effectively used to create a bedrock of nice and memorable NPCs within the hub town, giving most of them a nice character arc by the end of the game (FF14 also pulls this same thing over time, too, and I do like it there).