Although my playtime with this game is pretty small, I feel like I am experienced enough with both Musou games and Dynasty Warriors 3 to have my opinions on this game summed up.

So first off, the general gameplay of Dw2 is pretty much the exact same as Dw3. However, there are some pretty small but very key changes which takes this from being just a good game to a great game which is what they achieved in the third installment.

The actual attack strings in this game are limited to 4 compared to the 6 that would be in Dw3. Now these 6 string combos weren't there straight off the bat for dw3, you'd unlock them by progressing through to harder stages and unlocking them by either finding them in crates on the map, or defeating certain generals. Going from 1st weapon (4 attack string), 2nd weapon (5 attack string), 3rd weapon (6 attack string) and 4th weapon (6 attack string weapon sometimes with an elemental buff and unlockable by meeting certain requirements. These changes to the game make dw3 infinitely more replayable than dw2 and although I am really enjoying the game, this definitely will contribute down the line to coming back to the game and already contributes to general gameplay.

Speaking of general gameplay, there are some very unbalanced mechanics when it comes to battling officers specifically. So this game is probably considered to be the most difficult in the series next to Dw3, and there is a mechanic where any time a general is knocked down, there is a good chance that they will get a healing, defensive or offensive buff. This makes the game really tedious at times because you can damage someone all the way to having very little hp left but if you knock them down there's a chance they'll just heal their health back up to full which makes some fights drag out for ages which leads me to something else similar. There is a parry system in place. However, for Zhao Yun at least (the only character I've done a proper playthrough with) this parry knocks them into the air and it's quite tough to juggle enemies in this game so it basically means that if you use the parry feature, you're probably going to get punished for it. It doesn't work.

One of the last key changes that Dw3 fixed is that they added somersaults. This makes the flow of battle work so much better as it allows you to jump back onto your feet quickly after being knocked down or into the air and it's to the point where it actually feels weird that it's not there having being a staple of the series since 2001.

I won't say much on voice acting and stage design. Ultimately I feel like a few of the stages are pretty much the same and this is also 2000 so voice acting wasn't all that prevalent in gaming yet and when it was it was kinda awkward, bad, cheesy or all 3 combined.

Most other things in this game feel pretty much the same as dw3 so it's interesting to see that the Musou formula was already pretty much figured out from day dot. Just needed some tweaking in certain places to make it what it became a year later and still is to this day.

Final note is that I am still going to be playing the game as I am having fun with it so if I notice any more things I feel need brought up then I'll add it but ultimately I feel like this covers everything, I'm finding it very interesting going back to see how it was to play.

So after doing a short series on PS4 (streamed on Twitch come see me @mariov33 if you wanna see more of the older FIFA games) I had a great time playing FIFA 14 and although there are some things that got improved in future games like the graphics and certain aesthetic and gameplay changes, overall this game is still very fun because it's still actually challenging and it knows what it's trying to be which is the pitfall of modern FIFA. They can't decide if it's an arcade game or if it's a realism simulator and now it's just an awful blend of both. Hence, FIFA 14 a 10 year old game now, is leagues ahead of the current game.

So after doing a 5 season Career Mode I feel like I can talk about this with the game fresh in my memory. I think this for a lot of people may be the best Fifa for the gameplay, the Ultimate Team scene was starting to pop off and the Career Mode, although stagnant at this point, was still fun to at least play for most people given that they added player training into the previous instalment.

So what did they add to this game? Low driven shots and driven passes were added to this game. Driven passes were basically a harder pass to a teammate which had the risk of being less accurate but it was quite useful for getting up the pitch quickly. Low driven shots were pretty much the way to score goals for most people although sometimes they would go very wayward. 9 goals out of 10 would go in though so if you played Head to Head or Ultimate Team or Pro Clubs, 90% of the goals you'd concede would be low driven in the box, the other 10% being long shots or set pieces.

Speaking of set pieces, most of these were also changed from the previous games which went for a timing system where you'd have a bar down the bottom with a little bit of green and you'd have to time your shot with the slider and then aim, something that took time to get used to. FIFA 17 went for a simple aim the analog stick at wherever you want to put it with an arrow which you could toggle on and off if you wanted to. This might have been my favourite penalty system (probably because I was good at it.)

Unfortunately the servers for this game have been taken down so I can't look at my online stats anymore for both Pro Clubs and Ultimate Team but what I do remember is that for Pro Clubs I played a mixture of CAM and CM in our team and it was probably when I first started getting good at clubs, and for Ultimate Team i just had a cheap EPL team, mainly remembering having Ross Barkley, Demarai Gray, Musa and Theo Walcott, getting to Division 4 or 3 before stopping as I didn't want to play FUT Champions. I also won the EA Cup on Head to Heads with Bayern Munich which I still treat as an accomplishment as I find people who play these games online to be usually just abuse exploits but I think I did a great job at the time.

I don't know where this ranks for me in all of the Career Mode games I have played as I've had a lot of fun with most of them but it's probably top 5 with Fifa 16, 19, 21 and 14. These are the games I would recommend playing to people who want to try one of the Career Mode games for various reasons.

After completing my second run of the story on this game since 2014 I feel like I appreciate both the story and the actual characters in this game more than I ever did before. The game 10 years later still looks fantastic and I'm on PS4 so I can only wonder how it looks on PS5 or PC and I really wish I had the opportunity to play in the RP lobbies online.

Franklin is the most balanced of the characters I feel. But he doesn't suffer fools easily. Take Lamar, his (childhood?) buddy. Towards the end of the game he doesn't seem to really have the time for Lamar despite how much Lamar still wants both to be around Franklin, and for Franklin to be around him. Frank also tries to settle the endless squabbles between Michael and Trevor which I feel is a really neat character dynamic although I am mostly invested in Michael and Trevor. I also find Franklins gangster background to just be the least relatable which I believe effects how I really connect with him.

Michael, who's probably my favourite has some major flaws but some good qualities too. The flaws are highlighted a lot when he's around Trevor "OHHHH THERES A SURPRISE! I KNEW IT WOULD BECOME ABOUT YOU!" He really grows towards the end of the game though as again when his family and Trevor calls this out he decides to really take action to fix this behaviour by abandoning his own movie premier to save Tracey and Amanda, and also joining Trevor to help him on his own personal endeavours with Ron.

Then there's Trevor. Trevors pros and cons appear to be the most striking as he is the most loyal of the 3 characters but he's also just a maniac. They make no secret of this with his introduction and also that any time you switch to him outside of missions he's usually found in a dumpster or sleeping on a roof somewhere or... puking into a fountain? But he has a really interesting character being endlessly funny but I do sometimes feel bad for him when he talks about his childhood and his relationship with women and also his mother when she appears at his home and he's left looking very vulnerable compared to the guy shouting the ear off Michael every other time they have a scene together.

One of the repeating issues I'm noticing I have with these newer rockstar games is that the shooting controls can be a little too stiff and rigid and as much as it is quite fun to shoot people I feel like whoever I'm using needs oiled. The other issue is that too many times when you go to do missions or finish missions you lose your vehicle and are given the characters personal vehicle instead. Now this is fine generally I quite like the cars they have, particularly Michaels Tailgater but, this would've been fixed if you could obtain other vehicles and set them as the personal vehicle instead if you felt like it. If I want Trevor on a Faggio, let me put him on a Faggio goddamn it!

Los Santos as a map, I actually probably know better than any other city, real or fake. I've spent so many hours traveling around it in GTA Online that I can pretty much get anywhere without using waypoints, not that the map is complicated but the waypoint is obviously a huge helping hand with a map that's new, those who have played GTA 3 know exactly what I mean.

I won't bother going into the story, this game is one of the best selling games of all time so everyone knows about it. Even the people who haven't played it. One of my exes knew about the story for GTA 5 and she didn't even play games, but she had GTA 5, that's how popular it is.

I would spend a lot of time talking about the online but, frankly a lot of it is soiled by poor decisions made by whoever adds the content to the game. MKII Oppressors ruined the game for everyone for such a long time and they're not the only vehicle that have ridiculous homing missiles but it makes the game really frustrating to play if you just want to mind your own business and well, literally just run your businesses. For a long time you were unable to do this in private lobbies at all and eventually they let you do it but even now I hear about them finding ways to slow down your profits in game. I have 36 million in online. You'd think that I own everything but inflation in this game means cars cost anything from $3k to $10m if you want to buy something like the super yacht or a gold plane. There's simply too much to talk about in the Online but a lot of it comes down to an egregiously uncivilised playerbase and generally poor decision making.

I wish they'd actually made the single player DLC for this game. It would've been amazing and for a game as big as this it deserved it, as did RDR2. I'm going to continue playing this for a while, there are certain things I really want to do like getting all the space parts and getting a few more obtainable trophies before moving on to San Andreas and Vice City indefinitely.

Excusing the fact that I did save scum my entire way through the game on Jedi difficulty, the game itself is actually very fun to play.

Although I do believe that the lightsaber combat can be a bit clunky, I did really enjoy it and understand why people refer to this as the best lightsaber combat a Star Wars game has to offer even if my only other Star Wars combat experience is Lego Star Wars and Battlefront 2. That being said, I did find some of the fights frustrating. I don't know if that has anything to do with the fact that I chose a single lightsaber over the double sided saber ot having 2 as this may have made the game a bit easier, or maybe it's just the difficulty I chose or regrettably, I suck at the game.

The music is all of the licensed Star Wars music so naturally it gets a 10/10 from me, I love it all. The graphics are ps2 era so I don't really mind as graphics do not effect how I grade a game unless it makes the game unplayable in some way, I don't believe any game from the PS2 era can have that effect though.

I really like the map design in this game. It forces you (no pun intended) to think about how to actually progress using the force abilities the game gives to you, most of which I don't think I made great use of like 'Absorb', 'Protect', or 'Sense' all being light side abilities. Force lightning wasn't great but I don't think I maxed it out. Force choking however, is really fun and really useful when maxed out as you can lift people up and drop them anywhere. This is particularly good when on any high landing with big drops at the side. The AI don't allow you to do this any time you want though so you can't just abuse it which is again a good thing.

I got the Light Side ending of the game. I don't know what difference it made to the story as I don't know what happens in the Dark Side ending and I don't know if I will do a Dark Side playthrough but, I assumed that because after every few stages, the game gives you an ability to either boost or acquire, light side and dark. So I figured that whatever abilities you had more of would result in what ending you get but towards the end of the game, there's an important boss battle that seems to be the time where you actually choose which to do but I can't say for certain.

Overall a fun game with aspects that seem to make it frustrating for me as a player without having to constantly save, if this wasn't an issue I reckon this would get the full 5 stars but I can't tell if it's just a misunderstanding of the combat, a skill issue or something else. That said, I'd still recommend it to any Star Wars fan.

This games servers will go down soon and I've had a blast playing it over the past few years but I'd be lying if I said it was anything along the lines of a "masterpiece" of a game but I don't think any other game in the same genre is quite as casual and fun as a result.

It isn't scary at all, it's actually quite funny to play and watch Jason doing his silly run around the maps. It's also full of stupid glitches but it just adds to the game in its own way because of how janky it is and it was just a bit sad more than anything when they got patched.

Deborah was the best, she had a cute bunny outfit for the DLC, great stealth and great repair so as a team player, she was my favourite to play as.

I got bored of Pokemon about halfway through this game so I feel like I may have unfairly criticised it during its run. I enjoyed making my team despite using Raichu for the 17th time. I couldn't get to grips with the catching sometimes though I wasn't entirely sure how it worked.

My Team:

Jet the Raichu Lv. 56
Moz the Charizard Lv. 56
Ringo the Starmie Lv. 56
Jamieleigh the Venusaur Lv. 56
Elly the Eevee Lv. 57
Ninetales (unnamed) Lv. 61

A game that although I really enjoyed it once I got into it, I don't really see the need for it to exist as it does. It was fun to go through after having a pretty healthy break from the series and trying out Empoleon among others but it should be based on Platinum.

My team:

Pingu the Empoleon Lv. 59
Little Mac the Machoke Lv. 60
Zizou the Zubat Lv. 59
Tiramisu the Pachirisu Lv. 60
Jezebel the Mismagius Lv. 61
Jirachi (unnamed) Lv. 58