What is easily the best looking game for the Playstation 1, could use a remaster that goes into it like a director's cut. I want the visuals to stay the same, seeing all the facial expressions, all the animations for the characters, the great lighting and everything is impressive, but for one, it's too long and has balancing issues that hold back what actually is a pretty enjoyable experience. I like the unique combat system, that there's no typical leveling up but almost all stat improvements are tied to your equipment, the depth of its weapon customization. But later parts of the game just drag on and on, especially since enemies have a high priority on stat changing spells which turns the fights into a battle of getting nerfed and buffing yourself up again constantly - with unskipable, way too long animations.
This is a good game and there's potential for an even better game, if only Square Enix were to ever lay their finger on it again.

As someone who never watched or read Dragon Ball before, this was a nice introduction! The presentation is really charming, the character models look great for the DS and have excellent facial expressions but the biggest issue are the extremely large levels in the middle of the game. The game is seperated into 8 chapters with 4 to 5 levels each which I found to be a good way to experience the story for a handheld at first. When a level is like 10 minutes long, it would be great to play on the bus or something. It's easy to play too - the game is heavily influenced by the Legend of Zelda titles for DS and basically controls the same which is very intuitive and easy to use but also rather simple and prone to error since every interaction is context sensitive. But with levels up to 40 or even 50 minutes long, checkpoints being 15 to 20 minutes apart, that use the same formular every time, it just gets extremely tedious and at some point I just started to ignore every enemy that I didn't have to fight.

The first The Darkness game is stuck in weird spot, somewhere between some Immsersive Sim esque design decisions in the vain of Starbreeze's previous game Escape From Butcher Bay and a modern first person shooter. Right when you boot it up and get to move for the first time, you'll notice how strange it feels to move thanks to being an actual 3d model in the game world like Mirror's Edge did it, resulting in the most realistic looking first person view legs when you look down. But it also feels heavy to move. The aim assist is very generous but doesn't use a typical crossair but a red dot attached to your weapons instead. A lot of decisions are made to immerse you in its world. There's a lot of time spent going through the subway stations, opening the gate with your ticket, walking to a train to get to the next station, leaving through the rotating gate that only rotates in the proper direction. The subway stations are filled with npcs walking around, some giving you little subquests for extras to unlock. There's no minimap, no objective marker or anything. Getting to the next mission requires reading signs in the game world and listening to your quest givers. I really like all of this, it gives the game a comfy feeling, it sucks you in its world. And I haven't even mentioned how cool the idea for the hell world is. But it's janky. Shooting isn't satisfying and the The Darkness' powers are implemented rather poorly, they almost feel like an after-thought. And when usage is required to continue the game, it's really bad at telling you. All of this makes the game a mess, but an immersive mess which I found more pleasing, the more I got to play it.