This is turning out to be a "100 hours played, Don't Recommend" kind of game for me. The monsters have really good movements, but in high rank ("Mighty" monsters) they're now so aggressive and accurate that it no longer feels like Monster Hunter, it feels like "What if a Dark Souls 3/Nioh boss fight took 15-20 minutes". It's still a good game with lots of cool ideas that I definitely think folks should check out when it's on Game Pass, or at least heavily discounted, but it's hard to recommend to people that aren't already into very difficult action RPGs.

By far the worst first person dungeon crawler I have played. It keeps the most tedious and frustrating aspects of these games without any of the parts that make them interesting. It's so much worse and with fewer QOL features and character customization options than Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land, which came out 10 years before this!

Day 1 of Hi-Fi Rush:
This seems cool! I like the art style, but I'm still trying to get a handle on the combat.

Day 2 of Hi-Fi Rush:
The beat has infected my soul. I hear the soundtrack even when I'm not playing the game. All of my actions are in time with the beat. I wash my hands to the beat. I chew my food to the beat. I pet my cats to the beat. By the end of the day tomorrow, I will likely be nothing more than a shattered husk, still toe tapping to the beat.

Day 3 of Hi-Fi Rush:
Snap snap clap-clap-clap

I really want to like this game more than I did. I like the characters, the concept, walking around the city with your friends, and a lot of the combat, but the level design is a little too rough for me to finish the whole game.

Now this is a fucking VIDEO GAME! This game is how I remember the best parts of PS2 third-person shooters.

The moveset is very engaging and satisfying; each option has a distinct and valuable purpose. The level design is expertly done. Every encounter is a puzzle you solve with bullets that forces you to vary your attacks, keeping things fresh and interesting.

The sound design also whips? I love the BGM and all of the sound effects. Sounds cues for the gameplay are very clear, and the soundtrack just makes me want to keep playing.

This is also the most beautiful game I have played all year. The cutscenes and animations look so good!

My only real complaint is that the translation of the dialogue is kind of rough. However, the story isn't very important to this game, so that doesn't really matter. The only translation that matters are the ridiculous acronyms and ability names and that stuff is all great.

I think this is the best piece of quarantine media that I have seen so far. It also makes me very glad that my own experience was... so much less traumatic.

I don't get why other people are down on this, it smells like lavender to me.

Look how they massacred my boy!

I liked the Warriors games a lot in ~2011 and was excited to revisit them because I have recently learned more about Romance of the Three Kingdoms, so I tried the newest one. The UI/UX is very bad, the open world stuff makes the game worse, the new reaction commands make the combat more mindless.

Yes, it could be that my memories are rose-tinted, but I still think these changes dampen what I liked about the series: specific scenarios that require you to frantically run between all fronts to keep your army moving forward, managing a bunch of spinning plates. You still technically have that here, but on a much larger scale, so it feels like coloring the map in in an Ubisoft open world game instead of managing an army in a battle.

Not a bad game! You aren't really doing gymnastics, but I think the controls do a good job of conveying the process of memorizing a series of movements and executing them consistently.

I recently got a used Wii U and this was one of the games I wanted to check out since it's never getting ported. I am only ~7 hours in, but I really like this game and plan to stick with it for a long time. I bounced off of XC1 and I don't know if I want to play XC2, but I am really enjoying the gameplay and story of XCX. However, if I had bought this game when it came out, I would have felt like an absolute clown because it compares so poorly to all of the games it's in conversation with at the time of its release.

• The structure and aesthetics of this game really make it seem like it is trying to compete with Phantasy Star Online 2, which came out in 2013. I think it's personal preference whether you like this game or PSO2 better, but that is a free to play game that was available on PC and the Vita and already fairly successful in Japan.
• I was having trouble articulating why I don't like the combat in XC1 and XCX until I realized that it's specifically just that the Arts Palette is a bad way to control games like this. I understand that it's an attempt to do MMO combat using a controller, but it's a much worse method than what's in Final Fantasy 14 (ARR in 2013), Dragon Age 2/Inquisition (2011/2014), or PSO2 which also have similar cooldown-based skill systems.
• This one is more general to the Wii U, but this game looks like a 360 game and came out 2 years after the PS4/Xbox One were out. The vistas are beautiful, but the character models are really not great and that's a pretty big part of a game with lots of cutscenes where all dialogue is voice acted.

Playing this game now, divorced of its context, there's a lot to like (especially the music) and I'm having a great time, but I also completely understand why it was not very popular at the time.

Edit: 20 hours in now, I take back all the nice things I said about the game. I hate all these damn nonsense fetch quests. I refuse to run in circles to collect 3 Beagflea Squashes in order to complete part 1 of quest 1 of the 8 quests needed to get my mech license.

I don't like the combat, it feels very button mashy and the enemy attacks are hard to read because things that look like attacks aren't. Also, the cutscenes are very long and none of the jokes land. Maybe I would like it more if I played it at the time, before more things copied the Witch Time mechanic.

Lesbian Devil May Cry, plus real-time Pokemon. It's not as good as that sounds, but it's still pretty good. It's a shame that performance is so bad on the Vita version because this game would be best as a handheld game played in short bursts.

I am now farm-pilled. I love coming home and doing chores after work! In this game, not in real life.

There but for the grace of God go I. Extremely effective and harrowing.

I like basically almost every change they made to the game? Very fun to play and make the numbers go up.