My first exposure to Bayonetta, as I'm sure is the case with many others, was through her addition to Super Smash Bros. on 3DS/Wii U. I was lucky enough to find a 360 copy of the game at GameStop very shortly after the fact, and I picked it up excitedly. Keep in mind, this was back in... 2016? I was a dumb little kid back then, with absolutely zero experience in the genre of hack n' slash. Yet I loved it! I absolutely loved the game back then, as awful as I was at it. Unfortunately, that love could only get me so far. Dumb child wheatie made it all the way up to Chapter XIV, before reaching an absolute barricade. I could not, for the life of me, manage to beat Jeanne that final time. A couple years later, I wound up selling that Xbox 360, to be replaced by a PS2 due to my growing interest in its absolutely stellar library.

It wouldn't be for another few years that I'd even learn the first Bayonetta was on PS4, and even then I was little skeptical after hearing the horror stories of the PS3 release. After some research, a bit of convincing, and the necessary funds to buy the game on sale in its 10 year anniversary bundle with Vanquish, I was once again in possession of Bayonetta... and then I put it off for another 2 years.

But hey! I finally did it! I managed to make my way through its entire campaign over half a decade later, and I'm glad to say I still enjoy it just as much as I did back then. Potential new record for the longest it's ever taken me to finish a game, if you don't count Wall-E for the DS.

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Bayonetta follow a very simple philosophy. If you don't get it, you will get fucked. Similar to the Devil May Cry series, it heavily encourages replay value not only through unlockable difficulties, but through absolutely brutal encounters, whether it be with regular enemies or actual boss fights. As weird as it sounds, I really like stuff like this. It might be the fighting gamer in me, but I love the feeling of improvement a substantial amount, and that's what games like Bayonetta want. What might seem like an impossible task thrust upon you in your weakest moments, can be turned into a remarkable turn of the tables with proper knowledge and adequate experience. Bayonetta achieves this fantastically, and knows how to make it feel even better.

yhea here she goes again Accompanied through each and every battle is some of—and I mean this—some of the greatest songs of any video game I've ever listened to. To the point where I cannot begin to describe it in any more words than beautiful. Even outside of battle, it holds one of my favorite tracks (combined with one of my favorite settings in general) in Rodin's otherworldly bar, The Gates of Hell. One of the few games I can happily include in my regular playlist, I just wish I could include more of it (i lub u fly me to the moon).

I do wish, more than anything though, that I could've gotten more into the boss fights. A very large majority of them tended to boil down to waiting for the big Angel Monster to throw down their hand, dodge, wail on them for a few seconds while they're slowed down until they pull back to repeat the process. It's why I can say I enjoyed all the Jeanne fights the most, since they were some of the only ones where I felt involved and active all the way through. To add to this, frankly too many times does Bayonetta include a short little cutscene in the middle of its boss fights, that are abruptly interrupted by a Quick Time Event that will 95% of the time catch you completely off guard, and kill you in an instant. While I did praise the game earlier for incentivising replays and improvement, it can still get a bit frustrating taking such a hit to your ranking not due to being bested in your fight, but simply by not having the split second reaction time that is asked of you so often.

It's still peak though. God, it's so peak. It was so fun playing those first 14 chapters again, reminiscing on everything I could still so vividly remember, even after all these years. While I wasn't the biggest fan of everything what came after, I still enjoyed every minute of this game at least a decent amount. If I wasn't already looking forward to its sequel, I would love to just do it all again in hard mode while it's still fresh on the mind. What a cool game. One of the greatest of its kind, and I've heard even better of the second.

McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure is a Sega Genesis classic that reminds me of a time when going to McDonald's was a treat. The salty fries, crunchy McNuggets, different themed resturants, the toy I'd get when I opened my Happy Meal, the delicious McDonald Land cookies they desperately need to bring back, and lastly seeing Ronald & friends were all what made eating at McDonald's a joyous expirence. McDonald's used to be a happy place during a happy time before they modernized it making most resturants look like a soulless husk of what they used to be. I could go on about my McDonald's nostalgia, but we're not here to talk about a supersized corporation. We're here to talk about a video game using characters made by them. That game being McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure made by the one & only Treasure.

You play as Ronald McDonald who is on a mission to find all the pieces of a map that will lead him to some treasure, hence the name of the game. As far as the gameplay goes, its a pretty simple platformer. You'll run, jump, and climb across the platforms to move onto the next level. At the end of each world, you will fight a boss. You might be wondering, How does Ronald fight enemies? Does he feed them an endless supply of big macs? Nope, he uses magical wizard powers that I did not know he was capable of. A missed opportunity from Treasure, but I digress.

As a platformer and as the first game that Treasure created, its decent. It's no Mario but as far as platfomers & licenced games go around the time this game released, I'd say its one of the better ones. It doesn't overstay its welcome and its relatively easy compared to a majority of games made during the 4th generation of consoles.

In conclusion, I had a fun time playing through it. It may not have anything on Treasure's later games like Gunstar Heroes, Sin & Punishment, and Ikaruga, but its an interesting title in their catalogue definitely worth playing.

Probably the most overrated Yakuza game of all time. I took some time to think about the game after I finished to see if I'd like it more when thinking about it, but no it just keeps getting worse the more time I give it. I won't even mention the DLC nonsense they did with this.

I'll give it credit where it's due though: the combat is miles ahead of 7. Although they took out shortcuts from 7 and level-scaling is much much worse in this game, the overall casual experience in terms of difficulty felt much better. Removing the big level and money walls that 7 had is a great change and the fact that they give you a recommended level and equipment quality before you start a sequence is a change in the right direction. It also has some incredibly good boss fights. It genuinely has one of the best boss fights RGG has ever designed. The last boss felt appropriately "final" as well with a top notch theme to boot.

Dragon of Dojima style actually made the turn-based combat interesting to me for the first time (and it's also the only job that is tonally consistent with a Yakuza game). The game starts throwing you a lot of money after a certain chapter so making the best weapon isn't as much of an agony-inducing quest as it was in 7. So many quality of life improvements for navigating the map like being able to call taxis from the map and looking at the menu of restaurants and shop items on the map (although you can't view all the selection so this could be improved).

Now what are the problems with this game? I don't know about other players, but I play these games primarily for the story. And... it has one of the worst stories in the entire series. It's a mish-mash of a bunch of themes from previous games, but done 10 times worse in each case. Incredibly tonally inconsistent like Y7. I already disliked Kasuga's character in 7 (I've explained why in my review), and this game actually managed to make him a worse character than he already was. Incredibly boring villains with only one new non-party character that was genuinely well written. The ending was probably the worst Yakuza ending I've experienced considering its position in the story and the relevance that its ending has to the franchise. If Kiryu wasn't in this game and if we didn't have the Kiryu content, this would probably be at the bottom of my list, just barely above Gaiden, but the Kiryu content was good enough to elevate it quite a bit.

It'd be excusable if the story was bad with a good pacing, but unfortunately, that wasn't the case. It has the absolute worst pacing in the series. Why did we have to replay Y7 for the first couple chapters and constantly repeat every plot point that happened in that game? It took me 10 hours of in-game time before the Y7 recap started to die down. There were so many times the game forced me into trash side-content I never wanted to engage with, while I was invested in the story and just wanted to move on. Why did I get dragged into dondoko island and forced to engage with it for so long before they let me go back? Why did I get dragged into sujimon battles when I was just trying to move on to the next story sequence? Why did I get dragged into a delivery game? Why are the poundmate tutorial fillers always this annoying and intrusive to the main plot? Imagine that one filler part you have to do with Saejima in Y5 but it's literally the entire game now. Even the substories have poor pacing. They are so unnecessarily long with very little interesting content. I think Y7 had way better substories. The only genuinely great substory in this one was the Let It Snow and the others were either too long or not interesting enough to engage with.

I felt the OST was much better in this one compared to Y7 and some of the boss themes are amazing. The final boss fight theme is one of my top Yakuza tracks of all time.

It is a genuinely good game, but it has so much bloat weighing it down and the story doesn't do it any service. If they at least stuck the landing with the ending, the 60 hours of painful slog I had to get through would have been worth it, but it wasn't. It's kind of weird that when rating this, I had to keep telling myself that I probably liked it more than Kiwami 1 and 2 to justify my rating, but I'm not even sure if that's true.

o jogo em si é muito legal, a história e o protagonista são muito legais, os personagens secundários igualmente, tem mecânicas muito interessantes que inclusive eu acho que mais jogos de herói deveriam ter, você pode seguir o caminho do bem ou do mal nesse jogo e isso vai influenciar na forma que a cidade e os habitantes vêem você, além da gameplay que é bem fluida e dinâmica, apesar do ps3 ter diversos problemas de otimização então o jogo dá umas lagadas monstra, e outro problema também infelizmente é que a dificuldade do jogo é muito mal balanceada, por muito tempo no jogo eu até joguei no modo difícil sem saber mas quando eu mudei pro normal ainda ficou difícil pra caralho kkkkkkkkkk mas é legal que os inimigos são também tem muitas variações e os poderes diversos, fazendo com que o jogo não fique repetitivo

A huge improvement on both Spider-Man and Spider-Man: Miles Morales, making them pale in comparison in pretty much every way from gameplay to narrative, becoming THE definitive Spider-Man video game experience.

When it comes to the gameplay, many people playing this one will tell you that they don't think that they could ever go back to the previous games and I couldn't agree with a fanbase more. Spider-Man 2 is such an innovative step in a better direction, I remember having huge issues with repetitiveness and bloated traversal that got really old after awhile, but here's that's like... barely an issue. The open world and it's crime activities (that gave me fatigue in the first) are such an improvement, there's a lot more variety and it's super satisfying, too. I really liked the approach to bosses, it feels a lot more like how video game bosses should do. I always had a slight issue with the older bosses, they felt way too easy and cinematically scripted for my liking so I was very pleased to actually face a challenge on spectacular difficulty for once and be able to sandbox a little with the bosses, which were some of the best I've ever seen in a video game and the best in the superhero genre (so far.) The little combat moments are super good, too. Combos are way more satisfying with the additions of power skills as well as some extra little tidbits like kicking the absolute shit out of an enemy against a wall which scratched a little bit of a Yakuza itch for some reason. The level design overall was really well done, the first didn't disappoint there but they went and topped it without even much of an effort.

A very emotional and heartbreaking story, it starts a little slow but with some awesome moments already, the pacing is absolutely perfect. Not sure why this game gets a lot of hate for it's narrative in certain corners of the internet, because it was perfectly fine. It's still not the best narrative games have to offer, and by no means do I think it's at "best PlayStation exclusive" status just yet, but compared to the first game? The stakes are so, so much more higher and the story does not nearly feel as generic as the first. There was maybe some rough dialogue here and there, but given Spider-Man is also catered towards a younger audience, that's totally acceptable, there were still some really well written moments regardless and I think a lot of the excess hate for this narrative just comes from weird ass bigotry towards Miles and Mary Jane (typical for the community, though)

I really liked how ominous the narrative started to feel and seeing how far certain characters would go to get what they want. There was a perfect blend of wholesomeness with stakes so high even the player starts to become hopeless if there really is a good turning point for any of the characters involved. It really pushed the boundaries for the superhero genre in games I think and could be pretty hard to top for the upcoming Marvel releases. I was also surprised by some of the side missions, specifically the one concerning Howard. A lot of effort were put into some of those that really gave the open world a sense of character the first didn't achieve on the same level. It made things much more personal and down to earth and I would have liked to have seen more of that, I really hope Spider-Man 3 goes absolutely balls out with the world building and smaller things.

It's a really solid sequel in a year of very solid games, definitely a step in the right direction for Insomniac's Spider-Man and I'm really eager to see how they'll improve on the franchise next.