Not gonna properly review this story arc until Penacony has concluded because I don't want to pull the trigger too early, but man... Fucked up how HSR is the most I've enjoyed a game in this style since Dragon Quest XI.

Yeah, gacha game, I know, but I've been playing JRPGs since I was old enough to read and hold a controller and it feels like every big JRPG developer just gave up trying around 2010.

Yet here's HSR with cool boss fights, endlessly engaging iterations on its mechanics, great intersection of gameplay/story, Tingyun and solid writing that isn't rehashing JRPG writing tropes from uh... The 90s.

Penacony rocks, dude. I hope this statement doesn't age like shit.

10/10 I wish Black Swan would call me 'darling'.

I'm so used to remakes/remasters trying to put a full face of makeup on a pig that I'm actually really glad this game still fucking sucks in all the ways it did when I was a little Mira.

For better or worse, this is just lipstick on the pig. Yeah it looks prettier so it can be sold to single-cell entities that refuse games that look older than 2018, but it's ultimately Destroy All Humans 2 at its core.

It still has that same awful sense of humor, using one of three jokes: Haha weed! Haha sex! Haha cold war! Rinse, repeat, try not to cringe at the racial stereotypes in the Japan level, hope you liked Austin Powers and alarming levels of barefaced misogyny.

It still plays like ass, having floaty and impactless combat where your best option for 99% of the game's runtime is the Disintegrator. Missions are, once again, either total cakewalks or annoying gimmicks with a lot of pointless "go from A to B" that makes GTAV look restrained.

And, naturally, the hollow open levels have returned. If you've ever had a craving for empty open spaces with nothing in them but missions and the odd collectable, DAH2R is a lovely portal that lets you experience them but from the PS2 era.

There are some bits that're better; on the whole it handles a lot more smoothly, they cut that one transphobic mission (mercifully) and a lot of the QoL improvements were ported over from the last remake. Plus, despite what I said up above about the missions, some (not all) were made less irritating from their PS2 incarnation.

...But you're still playing Destroy All Humans 2.

This game was dated when it came out, and it came out on a platform where about 3/4 of the releases from North America ended up dated later down the line. If you have no nostalgia for it, stay clear. Go play Saints Row 2 or something.