Rewinding back in the series to play MGS3 as someone who played MGS5 first was admittedly harmful to my experience, as the movement and controls felt awful and awkward for my entire playthrough- In general there were many aspects to this game that are quite reminiscent to the annoying stuff you'd see in games from the late 90s and early 2000s. Obviously this game is very impressive for the time it came out though, so I cant totally hold that against it.

That said, it was clear to me while playing this game why it is such a classic. MGS3 is very much a Kojima game and it is certainly not lacking in interesting, eccentric characters and complex war-and-spy based story elements. It also delivers a pretty impressive sense of atmosphere for a game from 2004. It does however occasionally have some of the silly and eye-rolling moments you'd expect from a Kojima story, but it's all very charming and got a laugh out of me multiple times. Ocelot and the final section with The Boss were particular highlights for me.

Cool game, but ultimately I'd be lying if I said i loved it.

I am very happy and thankful to have gotten a modern remake of Persona 3 since it's one of my favorite games. The quality of life and modern visuals naturally made it feel fresh and made it easier to recommend to friends than the original. It's also very faithful in terms of the story (so faithful in fact that it even maintains the same flaws the original had). The other positive thing I can say is that I very much like the several new music tracks introduced in the game, and the remastered tracks are also all good (with the exception of Mass Destruction which i think is just not as good as the original- unfortunate since this is kind of the most iconic song from the game)

That said, this remake has a lot of really small changes from the original that can't stop myself from nitpicking......For one the game's lighting is way too bright and kind of ruins the darker visuals of the original. Turning down the game's brightness helps this some but you can't totally fix it. This game also has a weird obsession with the green hues associated with the Dark Hour in the original, so all the night time scenes in Reload outside of Tartarus have too much bright green lighting going on. In general, I would say the remake simply fails to recreate the creative vision that permeates the original in terms of visuals. There are some other tiny things i could nitpick but personally I can look past a lot of the small issues. HOWEVER, there is one thing I simply could not overlook which was the removal of certain anime cutscenes from the original, which were replaced by in-engine rendered cutscenes. These scenes were very important parts of the story and the in-engine versions are a massive downgrade, seriously hurting their impact. This was by far the most disappointing aspect of the remake.

All things considered I love Persona 3 and I was happy to have experienced it again remastered and refreshed. I would consider myself mostly satisfied with this remake, I just really wish the developers put more effort into recreating the visual style that made the original unique.

Been a long wait, but It's wonderful to finally see this charming series brought to life a proper 3D space. They truly delivered too, the game looks great, and is super fun and addicting.

I've wished for a long time that Granblue could stand on a bigger stage than its mobile/browser origins. I hope they stick with this game and other projects from here on out.

My only complaints really are that i wish we got more scenes of some sort with more of the cast outside of the starting crew members. Some of my favorite Granblue characters are playable in Relink but they don't get any screen time which was a bummer. The story is also pretty shallow and straight forward. The fate episodes have more interesting writing than the actual main plot, but it's still a fun and bombastic time nonetheless.

Jedi Survivor improves upon its predecessor in pretty much every way to varying degrees, and the developers of these games really understand what makes Star Wars great. The locations and characters are cool or interesting across the board. Greez's saloon in particular is honestly the highlight of this game. Combat is fun as well and the lightsaber customization is great. That said, In typical star wars fashion, the main story is nothing to write home about and the main villain comes out of nowhere (more than once)

Cool game overall had a fun time

I am very fond of the NieR aesthetic like many, and there are sparks of an interesting game present in Reincarnation, but unfortunately this game does very little to impress me. The story, while neat, failed to really grab me in any meaningful way early on, and the gameplay is totally braindead. When playing this game I ultimately couldn't help but feel like I was playing another one of hundreds of shitty mobile gacha games, but with a really nice NieR paint job. Perhaps the story gets better later on at least, but unfortunately that ship has sailed and the game failed to keep me playing.

I thoroughly enjoyed a majority of CS3's runtime. The new Class VII cast is solid (and the decision to only have a few of them was wise) and the character moments were pretty strong. Combat is still fun as well. Unfortunately Cold Steel 3 still suffers from all the same pitfalls as the previous games. In the final chapter, the game's story and character motivations once again derail into total schlocky nonsense, and the main premise of "the curse" is something that i can't help but find silly. I eventually found myself repeatedly rolling my eyes in the final hours of this game, but for a majority of the ride things were enjoyable and i was happy with the new Class VII cast, so I look at this game mostly favorably.

This game follows suit with the derailment of storytelling that takes place at the end of Cold Steel 1. I still like this game and its character moments, and I enjoyed the premise of traveling around the game's world on the Courageous. The upbeat music and collection of students aboard the ship felt like I was on a fun adventure and i'm fond of it. But overall, this game really turns into the anime equivalent of schlock. Character motivations and dialogue are as corny as ever and the main story is just a total mess. I enjoyed this game, but I preferred the simpler times of Cold Steel 1.

Cold Steel 1, being the first Trails game I have played thus far, was a very good time and left me generally impressed.

Since i do not have other games in the series to draw comparison to, I can't really say how i feel about it as a member of this series. That being said, I quite enjoyed my time with this game. The combat's movement point based system is a fun twist on the turn-based gameplay that so many JRPGs have, although it does admittedly still have some of the same pitfalls when it comes to enemies and boss fights. it's generally solid- but it certainly starts to get tiresome towards that latter third of the game.

Gamplay aside, the story, characters, and world, are very much the meat of this game (as they are in many rpgs) and I personally feel like all of these things hold up pretty well in this game. I liked a majority of the main and sidecast- although admittedly i can't say i love any of them either. One thing that did greatly impress me about Cold Steel is its dedication to worldbuilding. The universe of this game is very detailed and filled with believable politics of a massive early modern world, as well as a great effort put into its in-world locations. It's rare to see the same level of worldbuilding in many JRPGs, most of which opt for a more straight forward approach. That said- one thing that does hurt the world building in this game is the visual design of enemies- there are lots of very odd and unusual creatures and ghosts which really feel out of place in the world, often reminding me of a the kind of enemy design seen in Dragon Quest but less comical and cartoony. I'm personally not a fan of this, but it obviously isn't a deal breaker.

The soundtrack of this game is also very good- with a pretty nostalgic assortment of synth and traditional instruments that resembles the early 2000s era of game music.

As for the story of this game itself, I definitely enjoyed it as well as the setup for conflict later on in the plot. That said, the story of cold steel greatly overstays its welcome- it makes you think you are finished like 3 different times only to keep on going. To make this worse, the story definitely spirals out of control in near the end. The last several hours of this game is a mess of tropes and twists and cliche dialogue, only to end on a cliffhanger anyway. It certainly dampened the experience, but i still enjoyed it for what it was.

Overall, I come out of this game happy that i played it and looking forward to the next one, but Its flaws hold it back from making it into my top games.