Great visuals and soundtrack with some fairly emotional post-boss cutscenes and solid metroidvania action. The spirit customization is pretty fun and it's cool having some small context behind all the weapons you get but aside from that the game brings very little novelty to the table. Starting with the catacombs the difficulty really ramps up and aside from a few annoying rooms here and there it's not too bad until the verboten domain takes it to obnoxious territory. I do not enjoy every enemy taking off more than half my HP per hit or being one-shot by a boss if I don't play perfectly. I could've done a lot of grinding to try and balance the damage out but the mobs were annoying to fight so I really didn't want to and it made me wonder why the game even has levels in the first place. But hey, overall nice game.

As much as I enjoy the cheesy cutscenes and voice-acting, the levels typically either bore me or annoy me. Damage feels inconsistent in that sometimes my bazookas will destroy things in two hits and other times in 10 combined with stomps and machine gun fire. Damage from enemies also feels inconsistent since sometimes I can survive in the middle of a group of enemies no problem and other times i have to run from a couple. This inconsistency combined with the lack of checkpoints gets very infuriating. The levels also just generally feel pretty same-y in both visuals and gameplay with the only differences being some target locations and time limits. I've also had my fair amount of crashes which were very annoying.

The story is standard fighting game fare in that it's a mess that constantly jumps around all over the place with little to no context. Cutscenes are all 10 seconds long or less and characters fight over absolutely trivial things. The fights are also all only 1 round each and super easy. Honestly I would've preferred if they dropped the silly Raidou plot and just stuck with having goofy character interactions throughout the tournament. The gameplay is fun and the girls are cute but sadly the content is lacking. Even the costumes are irritating to unlock considering you can only get them RANDOMLY while playing the lackluster DOA quest mode. While it's still a decent fighting game, the 3DS game was better at providing a complete quality product.

A very short, pretty cool rail shooter. The 3D saturn graphics have a neat look to them and the stages are atmospheric. The soundtrack is also pretty good but it can be hard to hear over all the shooting. The story is simple and not very interesting and the intro cutscene goes on for too long but the dragon and rider designs are neat. The gameplay is pretty standard fare for a rail shooter, though it's cool that you can rotate 360 degrees at all times. I'm never a fan of movement being tied to aim but it's only really an issue in the tighter spaces. I don't really have a problem with the length since I didn't pay for it but I do feel they ramped up the difficulty to compensate for it and that can get annoying.

Despite it's almost complete lack of difficulty, it's immensely addicting. It's easy to spend hours just steamrolling the hundreds of enemies and leveling up my favorite robots with a smile on my face. The attack animations are great, especially some standouts like Amuro's all-range attack and shin getter's shine spark. I quite like a lot of the theme song arrangements too, though I got pretty sick of the first 5 seconds of the majestic prince OP in the early portion of the game. The betterman theme sounds awesome shut up it doesn't sound like farts.

The story is pretty enjoyable; I love the messy combination of all the different shows' timelines and there's a lot of fun and surprisingly natural interactions between the characters. Certain series interacting more closely than others like Gun x Sword with Code Geass ends up making a lot of sense and in that respect SRW30 succeeds in probably the most important aspect of crossover games. Unfortunately I did have to skip a decent amount of Majestic Prince and Rayearth scenes since I'm watching those and don't need the spoilers. There's also a tad too much focus on J-decker for my liking but it wasn't bad. The original characters are nothing remarkable but still solid with Az and Mitsuba being cute enough and Caruleum being a surprisingly enjoyable villain/rival with a decent amount of character development. The skits are really fun too with a lot of them featuring all the manly mecha pilots talking about how much they LOVE super robot wars.

Bringing up the skits reminds me of my disappointment regarding the game's presentation. Despite being a big deal with it being the 30th anniversary and the first non-OG SRW game to get a localization and even a PC port, there's 0 voice acting outside of battles and skits. I know there's a LOT of talking but they could've at least done it for the particularly important scenes. Also while it's obviously not as important as the battle scenes, some higher quality animations for the map would do wonders in making the game not feel so cheap considering it's what you're looking at for the vast majority of gameplay. At least add some small idle animations for the sprites or walking/flying animations. Speaking of maps, the mission map is the most pointless addition in the entire game. It's nothing but tedious to traverse and I practically never used it past the first few missions aside from checking out the DBD fairy a couple times. While I'm complaining, it's pretty annoying that the game encourages you to level whoever you want but on certain stages will not only force you to deploy certain units but will also toss them into the middle of a dozen enemies for story reasons. I barely leveled Red 5 or the Rayearth units but the game loved to toss them into mobs of enemies, often right next to stage bosses.

This is all paltry compared to the biggest complaint which is the dev team's abhorrent handling of the first DLC patch which introduced a slew of crashes into the game even for non-DLC owners. The most intimidating part of the final boss was the fact that he would instantly crash the game if he used his MAP attack which really killed the moment.

Overall though, I really did have a blast with the game and I'll happily play another SRW. I just hope the devs spread out the work put into presentation and pay some more attention to their patch work.

I was weary of KnS 2 to begin with due to the first couple hours consisting mainly of incredibly dull slice-of-life high schooler antics. Thankfully it serves the purpose of introducing a lot of the primary players in the main mystery and afterwords we get right back to the main appeal of Kara no Shoujo: The detective drama starring a mature tired adult. KnS 2 is a straight upgrade from the first game thanks to it's beautiful art, tone-setting music and focus on a single larger overarching mystery with a complex string of branching sub-mysteries that tie into it. The first game suffered from being rather short and still splitting its focus between 2 cases and antagonists even if they did tie into each other, while KnS 2 is much longer and more focused. While Reiji is a great protagonist, it's nice that the game regularly switches perspectives to different characters like Ayato for a little bit just as a change of pace since the game is so lengthy. It was a bit disappointing that Uozumi and Takashiro are pretty much absent from KnS 2 but I do like Yaginuma having a larger presence since his antagonistic-yet-competent-and-understanding demeanor contrasts well with Reiji and makes for some entertaining scenes. The new side characters like Toji and the takoyaki merchant are great additions as well. Aside from the intro, the game proceeds at a good pace and the cool 50s detective drama atmosphere makes up for the slower parts. The mystery is complex with enough bits and pieces to keep you from figuring out everything for 90% of the story, though it can spend a bit too much time on blood type analysis. KnS 2 also ends very well with a cathartic but depressing conclusion reminiscent of Max Payne 2. While a part of me would've liked for the story to be a bit more connected to the first game, I appreciate that it's set on the backburner as a closed case much like the search for Toko.

With the state of modern pokemon, I didn't have high hopes for this but it really managed to build on and surpass the original in pretty much every way. Unlike gamefreak's recent mainline pokemon entries, new snap does a great job displaying the unique personality and mannerisms of pokemon much like the original snap did back on the N64. The environments are very nice-looking and cozy with a lot of interesting hiding spots and interactive geography for the pokemon to mess around with. While still pretty short, there's more content than the original game with more islands and being able to explore them at different times.The light gimmick that the game focuses on is alright, it's not very interesting on regular pokemon but the patterns on the illumina pokemon look quite nice. The progression of the game's levels is pretty straightforward which I don't mind too much but it would've been nice if there were more obscure level unlocks like powering up the clawitzer to break through the rocks underwater. The new characters are alright enough but they don't really do much besides assigning requests. It's cool that they brought Todd back though. The only real problems I have with the game are that if you take multiple pictures of a pokemon with different star levels you can still only keep one, and if you take a picture that would've completed a request you still have to take it again after you get the request for it to count. Otherwise really nice sequel.

Best in the series so far. The levels are smoother and more fun than in 1 and 2, there's more boss variety, the cyber elves being split into options and usable items makes them much more interesting, and you actually get some nice upgrades like the double jump and auto-charge. Story still isn't really worth caring about but it was fine. The new tonfa weapon is kind of lame since it doesn't really act differently from the z-saber besides pushing enemies back at the cost of less speed and range. Also the ability to finally skip cutscenes is VERY much appreciated.