Valkyrie Elysium appeals to me a lot and I like it quite a bit but unfortunately it suffers from a lack of meaningful content and a story that is interesting in the slightest. I love the artstyle, music and character design...and the gameplay is actually pretty fun. But the core of the game falls flat, with a boring nothingburger story and repetitive enemies/areas. If the combat of this game was expanded on and the enemies diversified this would be a great game. A better story would have been the cherry on top.

Probably the most conflicted i've been about a game in a long time. To be honest, I went into this game with a very open mind despite its very unfortunate reputation. Having played this whole thing, the reality was more or less what I expected- better than its detractors make it out to be, not as good as its fans hype it up to be.

Xenoblade 2 certainly has many of the components that make Xenoblade great- Its soundtrack is fantastic, its open world areas are genuinely amazing, and its combat greatly improves upon its predecessors. Unfortunately, it stumbles in many areas. There are multiple aspects of this game that feel severely archaic: Movement and traversal, field skill checks, side quests, the shitty tutorials, that crappy map + compass, and the menus all feel like they are straight out of a game that came out 15 years ago. Many aspects of outdated JRPG game design plague XC2 all over the place and its unfortunate to see in a game that came out in 2017.

Other than that, there is the story. Oh boy the story. The early chapters honestly feel like a trainwreck that I can't look away from. The voice acting is all over the place, the dialogue is even more corny than your usual JRPG, and the bizarre attempt at injecting comedy-anime style humor into cutscenes fell flat hard. I rarely use the word "cringe" to describe something, because the word has lost its meaning from over-usage, but it certainly applies here for me. Fans of Xenoblade 2 will swear on their life to you that the story gets much better in later chapters. I will admit- this turned out to be true. However, it's never truly great. I will say that there are several VERY strong moments in the story in the latter half of the game that I quite liked, however even these moments were dampened by the lingering corny dialogue issue, as well as Rex's general aloofness to what is happening around him being increasingly annoying (There are very few things I dislike in media more than a dumb protagonist- I acknowledge this is a personal issue though). That said, I can appreciate a lot about what the story was trying to do conceptually, so I don't hate it by any means. Additionally, in terms of characters, I found most of the main cast to be very likeable and most of the main antagonists to be pretty compelling.

Some other rambling thoughts:

Despite the voice acting's inconsistency early on, it does improve. Additionally, for the english version of this game i think that the casting choices were fantastic. Every character's voice fits them perfectly and its hard to imagine any of them without them. The only one that I don't think fits funnily enough is Rex, mainly because he sounds older than hes supposed to be.

A thought on Blades: I really do not like the blade system foundationally at all and found it disappointing. I just don't like that I have all these neat unique characters but i can't actually play as them. It really rubbed me the wrong way and I never did fully get over it. Additionally, I think having the blades be in an rng gacha pull system was just....horrible.

I also have to comment on the world building. I think that the game built off of XC1's concept perfectly with the idea of Titans and the world tree- I thought both were very cool and a nice way to take the Bionis concept a step further.

-End of extra random remarks

All in all Xenoblade 2 has high highs and low lows, but ultimately the xenoblade magic is still present and I did enjoy my time with the game despite its issues.

As my first and only Darksiders, i can't really make any comparisons to the main series, but I ultimately enjoy this game quite a bit. While it admittedly doesn't do any particular thing exceptionally well, i found it to be a very well-rounded and satisfying experience with combat that feels good, difficulty that suited me, progression that felt rewarding (although simplistic), and a surprisingly great soundtrack. I am also fond of the setting and premise of the game, although I suppose this would probably apply to other Darksiders games as well.

Extremely fun and satisfying gameplay. Movement, melee, and shooting all feel great and never get old. Tons of content and F2P friendly. Unfortunately this game suffers from mechanic bloat that makes it confusing/hard to keep up with as well as an excess of disordered and poorly explained content. You essentially have to keep the wiki for this game open at all times to figure out anything. It's quite a mess, and makes it hard to recommend to new players. Regardless, it is a very fun and addicting game that is totally free. I greatly enjoyed my days on Warframe, and would definitely return to it if I can find the time.

Pretty good JRPG with a nice cast of characters. The gameplay is pretty fun with a nice mix of abilities and party members, although it struggles to hold up long term and by the end of the game I was not really interested in experiencing more of it. Difficulty and boss design is very all over the place- some hard, some easy, some fun, and some boring/annoying. I played a majority of the game on its highest difficulty (Hard, not the stupid one) and I felt as time went on more and more bosses started entering the "annoying" department, which is unfortunate. Gameplay also feels repetitive after about 30-40 hours and party members don't feel different enough from each other to make it refreshing.

Has a good OST, though it doesn't have many stand-out tracks. The game also has great visuals all around, every region and location honestly looks quite good, especially the interiors of the games' various castle locations- lots of intricate details and great uses of color. Even more impressive is the fact that this game is very well optimized and runs perfectly on PC, which seems to be something many Japanese developers normally struggle to achieve when it comes to PC releases.

As for the story...well, it's very much your standard corny JRPG story with very blunt and in your face dialogue + messages and an overall cheesy-ness that often accompanies these games. It is endearing though, and it did at least maintain my interest, with some neat twists towards the later quarter of the game

Tale of Arise is good, but it's not amazing and probably a tad bit overhyped by its fans. It's probably only worth playing if you take a heavy liking towards modern JRPGs, but even then I personally would not consider this game to be a must-play.