The story, specifically the way it's presented, is an absolute cheese platter full of Nomura-isms and things that really only (some) Japanese RPGs can get away with. In many ways, this is 'worse' than Kingdom Hearts, a franchise notorious for just how campy it is and for how hard it is for some people to really understand why these games affect fans so much emotionally.
But, well, they do. Kingdom Hearts does, so does this one, despite how often I had to roll my eyes or flat-out had to laugh even in moments that were meant to be dramatic and intense.

The script, the voice acting, the voice direction, the cutscene direction as a whole, some of the designs... they all really suck, objectively. Yet, I find them irresistible engaging.

I have nostalgia for this kind of game, and also Final Fantasy VII as a whole, but never actually got around to playing more than maybe 10 minutes or so of the original PSP version of this game; and to be honest, I couldn't really get behind the way the battle system felt, had some eye issues that made playing on a PSP screen a bit difficult at the time, I didn't like the portable-ized structure of this game and similar ones Square released at the time, and didn't quite care as much about FF7 back then to push myself past these problems, so I kinda just always had this game on my 'man, I should probably play this' list but never did until now. Like, I really really liked FF7 but just not quite enough for that, you know. Unlike the Kingdom Hearts franchise, which caused me to binge its PSP installment to great detriment to my health because I was just so hyped to find out where the story was going with that.
But I digress.

My point is that I'm not super nostalgic for this game in particular. But playing it kind of made me feel like I was. Because it rekindled a lot of the love and passion I used to have for certain games, including FF7, especially once I replayed the game a few years after the release of Crisis Core.

And most importantly, this made me incredibly hyped for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which is a pretty rare feeling for me as well these days, since I've grown a bit more jaded and cynical about especially the bigger, more important-to-me, franchises out there.

The dumbest, campiest moments really got me. Gave me chills, gave me energy, made me emotional.
It honestly made me a little embarrassed, even though nobody was even in the room to witness it.

But it's just all these feelings that I thought I had outgrown and that I probably wouldn't feel in this way anymore while playing a game.

That said, there still are a few issues I'd like to address.
Like I mentioned above, the (English) voice delivery isn't always the best. I don't entirely attribute this to the voice actors themselves (and luckily I'm not so used to the original cast that these new voices sound like nails of a chalkboard to me) but rather a lack of quality direction.

It often kind of felt like lines were recorded entirely without context and maybe even out of order, causing inflections to completely change from one sentence to another or sometimes even mid-sentence if there happened to be a gap in there somewhere.
Now I do realize that some of this stems from matching the English script and voices to the rhythm of the Japanese lip movements and body language, but still. There was lots of room for improvement and sometimes that can take you out of the moment a bit, and not exactly in an amusing ways like it happens in some of the campier scenes.

I do like the voice actors -- some more, some less -- and I think with a proper script and direction, and maybe the option to match the lip movements to their line deliveries instead of the other way around, they could have done a great job. But the way it is, is a bit lacking.
I also don't really like that characters like Cloud, Tifa and Aerith don't sound any younger than they do many years later, despite being at an age where such a time gap would definitely change their voices quite a bit.

In terms of gameplay and also visual presentation, the game has been improved quite a bit.
It doesn't look quite as good as Final Fantasy VII Remake does even on Playstation 4, but it looks a lot better and more detailed, and especially closer to said Remake, than the PSP original. Though some people will definitely prefer the stylized character models in that one. I'm honestly a little conflicted on which I prefer myself.

A great example are the Midgar slums, for instance. They look really close to how they do in Remake, down to even the skybox with the JPEG of the plates up above (was a JPEG in Remake as well, though probably a little higher resolution).
On PSP it just all looks really blocky and not very detailed, though you could argue that it's more oppressive in atmosphere there.

The battle-system is the same as the original in essence, but polished to a mirror finish.
Attacks and movement flow well better (though there can be some hiccups and bugs still that can get a bit annoying in harder battles) and instead of having to pick special moves from a menu with the shoulder buttons, these are instead used via a hotkey menu somewhat akin to Kingdom Hearts.

These battles are mostly done in random encounters where enemies just kinda show up around you and the play field is artificially restricted by a ring around Zack and his enemies.

This can sometimes get a little frustrating, especially when the camera doesn't wanna play along, when you evade into a nigh-invisible wall and get stuck there, almost entirely unable to prevent getting hit.

But it's smooth sailing for the most part.

Another aspect that I'm not too fond of is the mission structure.
At any save point, Zack can embark on a number of optional missions that unlock more missions, some nice item rewards, a few more important unlocks and also sometimes some character- and world-building optional story bits.

These were definitely made to accommodate for the Original's portable nature. Square wanted to give players the opportunity to pull their PSP out of their pocket at a bus stop or wherever else someone might wanna kill a couple of minutes, knock out a mission or two, and then just put it away again without being too concerned with getting lost in the story or not knowing where to go.

They do also kind of fit the nature of who Zack is and what he does. He is a SOLDIER, going on assignments for Shinra.
Now these missions never really feel that much like those assignments, especially since Zack never brings reinforcements on those, unlike what we see in mandatory story missions, but the shoe still kind of fits.

The biggest downside though is how repetitive, tedious and mostly meaningless these are though. Grinding out some missions will have you go to the same disconnected environments over and over again, fighting mostly the same few creatures and the difficulty, eventually, is either you one- or two-shot pretty much everyone in every fight, or you're the one getting unfairly killed with little to no recourse, at least until you completely rebuild your Materia and item loadout to work with that one specific encounter.

It's a bit of an exercise in both boredom and frustration, and then you will quickly find yourself overpowered for any main quest, so those become a completely meaningless cakewalk with almost no exceptions as well.

This does make me wish they had overhauled the whole leveling and mission system as well.
And also the DMW system, which is basically a slot machine that constantly runs during every fight and causes different in-battle effects like buffs, healing, summons, attacks and even level-ups for both Zack himself and his equipped materia, determined (almost) completely by RNG.

A ground-up overhaul of all of it would have probably been really good, though I can also see that annoying a lot of fans of the original, so I don't know what Square should have done here.

THAT SAID, I still had mostly a really good time with the game. While it can maybe somewhat negatively affect how one looks at certain aspects of Final Fantasy VII's story, I love how much it expands on things we already knew, makes certain aspects of the story a bit more clear, while building up way more of a connection with certain characters.
It's a work that can stand on its own, while also adding a lot to another standalone work.

Its design is great as a kind of grindy on-the-side type of game. Doing random missions while watching YouTube, for instance, is some pretty easy mindless fun. But if you don't like to do that, it's still a pretty good, though in that case somewhat short, companion piece for the overall FF7 project.

And most importantly, it's a great reminder of why FF7 is so great and an amazing appetizer for Rebirth.

Ah yes, just what Silent Hill is all about: The subtlety of a 40t truck hitting you in the face and the writing of a 14-year-old's tumblr fanfic, complete with shitty, annoying af chase sequences that were done better, and already overstayed their welcome, like 10-15 years ago.
Also runs pretty bad and doesn't look good enough to justify the performance.

No space to build atmosphere, nothing is left to the imagination, nothing spooky, nothing (jump)scary, just absolute trash that defecates all over this long dead franchise's grave.

Let it lie. Leave it be. I haven't had faith in Konami in over a decade now and I don't think they're gonna change that anytime soon; probably never.

An absolute cornerstone of its genre and the video game industry as a whole. While this game was certainly not the first RPG ever made, it did a lot to set a standard for a specific flavor of role-playing video game. Usually, people refer to that flavor as JRPG -- and I tend to as well -- but that term has always been an imperfect and somewhat problematic one and has recently been reevaluated after some prominent figures in the genre have voiced some concerns. So I suppose I should refrain from using that term in my reviews from now on.
Besides that, I also don't think I will waste too much time boring you with the much repeated details of how this game came to be and the immense importance of its legacy.

Instead, I want to look at it from a more modern perspective, as this is this marks the beginning of a lengthy series of (re-)playthroughs of Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy and adjacent RPG franchises, with the goal of re-examining their growth and evolution and to put them into some kind of (utterly pointless) ranking or tier list.

From a modern perspective, especially if we more-or-less ignore its historical significance, there isn't all that much that Dragon Quest has to offer that you won't find in other games; usually done way better.
In many ways it actually feels like a free sample project you would find in something like an RPG maker, there to serve as a template and to give you a basic understanding of what you might want to go for and the kind of things you can do with it; to be easily edited and played around with. This even shows in some completely pointless inclusions such as an NPC in the first town following you around as if she had joined your party -- there is no party in this game -- and a late-game town's tower that you can jump off of, which has absolutely no use or effect and seemingly is just there because the devs wanted to show off the possibility of such a thing; much like a sample project of a game creation tool would.

The premise and plot, while definitely a little more elaborate than your average 80's console game, is super simple; especially for an RPG.
You're, allegedly, the descendent of a legendary hero (a fact nobody believes until you find a way to prove it), the king's only daughter has been kidnapped and is being kept by a dragon, and there is an evil dragon lord threatening to take over the world. Of course, it's on you to right these two wrongs, while also finding a way to prove your heritage.

To do so, you, somewhat aimlessly, wander the semi-open world, exploring caves and dungeons, talking to many NPCs in order to find both the princess and all the necessary MacGuffins, slaying tons of monsters on the way and grinding to a high enough level that allows you to take on the overall villain.

In reality, this means a ton of grinding, going back to safety, using the earned funds to stock up on necessary items and better equipment and aimlessly wandering around until you inevitably find what you need.

This always sounded absolutely horrible to me. A game consisting almost entirely of arguably the worst part of any other RPG; even the good ones? I hate having to grind and a lack of knowing where to go can be the most frustrating thing in the world!

On top of that, there really isn't much else to latch onto. I mentioned the super basic story, but even the battles are the most barebones, basic thing in the world.
They're turn-based, 1v1 fights without much tactical depth. Some basic spells, even more basic items, but mostly you just select Attack until the enemy perishes, then you check if you still got enough HP, MP and healing items to move on or if you should head back to town to heal and stock up.

There also are absolutely no choices when it comes to how your character is built or how he progresses. No choice of stats, no specialization in some type of weapon or magic, no skill tree, no nothing.

Yet... I don't dislike this game at all and have played through it multiple times over the past decade-or-so, without any real nostalgia since we didn't have this where I lived when I was a child.

The thing is, when you know what you're in for and that there isn't any big set-pieces you can't wait to get to, no huge questions that you REALLY need the story to answer asap, you're way more okay with taking things slow.

When I play this game, I enter a kind of zen state that not many other games really give me. It's not too different from, say, an idle game like Cookie Clicker in that regard. Or something like Vampire Survivors. Just without the constantly ticking, increasing numbers pushing your mental buttons. At least not in that way.

Personally, I really like playing this game as part of a dual-monitor setup, or on a handheld (which is where the GBC, Switch and mobile versions really come in handy) while being distracted by something else, like watching a TV show or some YouTube stuff or something.
I don't travel much at all, but I could also see this game being a great little distraction while you're on the train or something, where you might not be able to really focus on anything more mentally engaging.

Don't get me wrong, this game isn't impossible to enjoy on its own, especially if you aren't too far gone from the constant stimulation of modern-day online media. I'm just saying that this game is pretty great as a companion piece to some other side-activity.

The other thing that makes this feel as unique as it does, is the kind of sense of overwhelming adventure that you don't often get from an RPG of this style.
You don't know where you're going, aside from a few context clues here and there. There is no in-game map, you might forget how far away from the last town you are, you don't know where the next point of interest is or what kind of monsters await you on the way.
This makes every step you take, especially on a first, blind, playthrough, feel really really scary. Because you really don't want to die, since the grind is so simple-minded and slow, and dying brings you back to the castle where you began your journey, while also halving the money you were carrying, which can be devastating when you're grinding for a pivotal new piece of equipment.

This kind of progression and flavor of exploration tickles a very similar part of my brain as something like Ragnarok Online did. When I was still fairly new at that game, had no idea where to go or what to do, or where the most efficient leveling spots would be, there was a very unique sense of danger and adventure involved when I tried to travel anywhere without help from other players.

This isn't something we get much of anymore in modern, more streamlined games. We get a way more carefully designed path, fine-tuned to not hurt the pacing. We have quest-markers and maps to keep us from getting lost. And often, dying isn't penalized as much.
All of these are good things, for the most part. And I'm absolutely not asking for any game to directly mimic Dragon Quest 1's nature in that regard.

But this still makes Dragon Quest feel kind of fresh and unique because of that. Which is why I would, if you can stomach the grind and the lack of anything hugely surprising or interesting, still recommend this game to this day.

This one feels like one of the more ambitious, but still really jank and ultimately pretty bad unlicensed, Chinese pirate games. The levels are visually unclear, especially on a shitty Game Boy screen, due to too much detail in the backgrounds and a lack of contrast with the characters and important objects.
It also feels a bit all-over-the-place with environments even from the first world on. You're in the jungle, you find a secret shortcut that you swim through for no reason, then you're in the snow, another shortcut has you on a classic Donkey Kong arcade style construction site for literally a second, then back to the jungle, back to the snow, onto a DKC2 ship... etc.
All in World 1. And all that without there being anything really interesting happening with the levels. Not to mention the leaps of faith and really janky barrel sections they immediately hit you with as well.

But the worst part is probably the controls and overall physics. It's just not fun to do anything and often you take damage or die for really stupid reasons. The roll doesn't always actually defeat enemies, doesn't accelerate satisfyingly, doesn't do the "coyote time" thing with mid-air jumping after rolling, instead you hold A to awkwardly float in mid-air for a second without that making any sense, the bouncing doesn't feel right, the momentum makes no sense... it just isn't very fun and overall just feels like an utter slog.

I somewhat respect what they were trying to do and I also do like the fact that the game isn't trying to be a direct conversion of DKC but instead is its own thing with its own unique ideas here and there, but none of that helps when I just don't enjoy playing it.
In contrast, Donkey Kong Land 2 did a much better job of delivering a stripped-down version of the DKC2 experience, even if it did lose some of its own unique identity in the process. But at least it's fun and can even be a more-or-less worthy substitute for the SNES version for those who wanted to play it on the go or simply didn't have access to that version.

Good game for a kind of watch party setting. I played this one with my mom lol

It's a pretty decent interactive movie kinda thing. It fully embraces horror movie tropes and runs with them, which is both charming but also kind of just makes everything a little too safe and predictable in a way, for the most part. It plays it safe until it goes a bit off the deep end in a more surprising direction, though I found that that change in direction kinda broke the experience a little bit.
The game also expects you to just accept certain things that are a liiiittle too convenient and far-fetched for me. There's also some revelations that are a little too obvious, while another one that also seemed pretty telegraphed, but less obviously so, never actually manifested. Like, for instance, there were some moments of especially bad acting by one of the characters that made me suspect there was something more going on with him than there ever actually was. It was just... bad acting. You know, instead of intentionally bad because of the character, in universe, being untruthful.

Overall it's a bit hard to talk about the narrative here. For one, I don't want to spoil anything but also, it's a narrative that changes based on your choices and, to a lesser extent, your performance. There isn't much gameplay to speak of, besides some clunky exploration where you walk around and examine things marked by a shiny dot in a very linear way, and QTE's that can also be a little clunky.
Besides that, you just get presented with a few choices to make in a pretty short moment and while they don't always clearly mean what you think they mean, that only very rarely ends in any real frustration and if anything it just matches the vibes of having to make quick, rash decisions while panicked out of your mind, like the characters are in that situation.

The consequences of your choices are really impactful, though, which I love. There are some cracks where you can peer behind the curtain of how things are put together a bit too much, like how a choice just loads up a certain scene that doesn't always transition the most gracefully and doesn't take every nuance into consideration, but it didn't break my immersion all that often and was mostly just impressive, especially compared to other, similar games that came before this.
It really is like an actual modern (well, it's almost a decade old at this point, but you know what I mean) take on the kind of FMV game that was popular during the infancy of CD-based gaming.

Also, for a decade-old game, it still looks pretty dang good.

Now, one thing that didn't work for me at all was the scare factor. I guess this makes sense since it's supposed to emulate generic horror movies more than, say, a Silent Hill or Resident Evil game, and horror movies almost never have any kind of effect on me, but I was hoping the fact that I was (somewhat) in control of the action would be enough for me to feel... anything. But I didn't.
Jumpscares by themselves don't do much for me, except annoy most of the time, even when they work. But in this case, I didn't even flinch once. They all just felt really cheap and were way too obviously telegraphed for me to be taken by surprise at all. Plus, the beginning of the game had so many cliche fakeout "just a prank bro" scares that I was already jaded by the time those were replaced with real jumpscares.

I can't say the same about my mom, though, who is in her 60's and doesn't have much experience with horror stuff. They got her pretty good with almost every one of them. To the point where I was wondering if that's something I should subject her to lol. I didn't know there were gonna be that many jumpscares in the game when I started it :x
But anyway, your mileage may vary. If you get spooked by horror movies, you might get spooked by this one. But even if not, it's an enjoyable ride nonetheless.

First of all, I really like the aesthetic and overall vibe this game is going for, and it really seems like the kind of game that I could fall in love with. Unfortunately, I didn’t. I gave it a couple of hours, hoping things would eventually ‘click’ and fall into place but I just wasn’t having that great a time.
The combat is simplistic to a fault and feels quite janky. I also really dislike the button mapping, which can’t even be changed. It just doesn’t FEEL great to play and there isn’t much to really latch on to and for that, there are also too many little frustrations that add up. It’s not terribly difficult or anything, but you also don’t just breeze by everything in a way that makes the jank tolerable.
Idk. It’s just kind of frustrating in it’s boring mediocrity because you keep thinking that you should be loving this but you just aren’t. It deserves to be better but it’s just kinda meh, so I dropped it.

It's classic Mega Man, just not as janky as Mega Man 1, but also not as iconic as Mega Man 2. And not as easily ripped open with a single weapon as Mega Man 2.

Tight, simple controls. Great tunes, okay weapons, okay bosses, okay levels, though some questionable hitboxes make some of the stage hazards a bit more frustrating than they have any right to be. I love getting hit by an extending ceiling spike before that even extended into me and I especially love getting insta-killed by wall spikes whose hit detection reaches into the completely harmless looking bit of ceiling right next to it. Fun times.

There also is quite a bit of padding that comes with a sizeable difficulty spike after beating all the regular bosses which makes the latter parts of the game a bit of a chore to get through.
There's also ways to get softlocked in parts where Rush Jet is mandatory, but you don't get a real opportunity to farm the energy pickups you might need, stranding you on a little bit of level above a bottomless pit, just to then find out, after you jumped to your death, that there still aren't any weapon energy pickups because they don't respawn after you do, forcing you to Game Over and redo the whole stage, including a whole, difficult boss that is mostly recycled from Mega Man 2.

I always remembered this as my favorite of the NES Mega Man games, and perhaps that is still true, but I'm not so sure anymore. It's quite flawed.

When this game was about to come out, I was really afraid of my own hype. The first game, while intriguing from the first trailer on, absolutely caught me by surprise by just how much I loved it. The main gimmick was mind-blowing at the time, was used pretty imaginatively and the level design and overall visual vibe was truly special while also working wonders for the kind of clarity that is sorely needed in a game like this. It didn't overstay its welcome with its short, but honestly kind of perfect, length. But the most surprising thing for me was just how much character and humor was being conveyed through such simple means. I also didn't expect to not be bombarded with Half-Life nods, which was perfect for me since I didn't really care much for that franchise.
As the credits rolled, and for minutes after it was done, I just sat there, dumbfounded by just how much this little pack-in side-product blew me away and by how I haven't ever played anything that felt quite like Portal did.

And when the sequel got announced, I couldn't temper my excitement. And that is also why I was bracing for massive amounts of disappointment.

Portal was really short and felt like lightning in a bottle. A short, simple game with the perfect length and mostly the perfect amount of stuff. Sure, they could add more chambers, more puzzles, some more jokes. But that would always just feel like bonus stuff for the most hardcore of fans. Not something fit for a sequel.

But Portal 2 still looked amazing with every bit of footage I saw. Still, I felt like it HAD to be disappointing. Like it would feel off. Like the joke and the gimmick would just kind of be over and would feel like beating a dead horse. A funny, pretty, fascinating dead horse with puffs of sparkly smoke coming out of it with every hit. But a dead horse nonetheless.

Well, luckily, I was completely wrong and the hype I couldn't help but feel, was absolutely justified and somehow the original Portal wasn't only matched in my book, it was actually surpassed.

Sure, something about the sterile, mysterious simplicity was gone. There still is a kind of special vibe that Portal has to this day that isn't quite there in the sequel and that was even more the case when the game first released.
But Portal 2 just added so much more that both added to what I already loved AND could stand on its own two feet.

Glados was fleshed out into a more nuanced character, there was a kind of all-around backstory and setting I didn't think I would care about as much as I did. The new elements like Light Bridges and the Gels were amazing puzzle pieces, the vibes of an abandoned, ancient facility falling apart were just as unique as the sterile levels of the first game and, well, Wheatley still remains one of the greatest characters in all of gaming for me.
And above all else, the humor was still all there. It was funny, it was quirky, it even had some kind of dark and heartfelt parts. And the level design, while way more elaborate than ever before, still made tons of smart little decisions that would help you along towards the solution of every puzzle without feeling like it ever held your hand.
And we still get a great ending song that slaps.

AND there's a really fun co-op mode entirely separate from the singleplayer campaign.
AND they added post-launch map making tools for free.
AND there was cross-play with Playstation at a time when that wasn't at all the norm.

Truly mind-blowing.

My favorite Mario game and one of my most replayed games ever.
Mario World is amazing as well, but it just doesn't scratch the same kind of itch that Mario 3 does. The power-ups are absolute classics (though I would argue the cape in World is more interesting to actually control), the levels are varied and don't overstay their welcome, the secrets aren't very numerous and, at this point, not very secret anymore, but also kind of just feel perfect.
Above all, though, what I love the most is the kind of globetrotting journey feeling I get from this one. While it's just an NES game and thus pretty simple, they used what little they had amazingly well to really make you feel like you were travelling through varied and mysterious lands in a way that gave every world its own memorable identity that I find lacking in pretty much all the other Mario games.
Idk, I just think it's neat.

The first one, specifically.
Probably my most-played game ever and one that, despite me not thinking I would like it AT ALL when it first went into beta, I have played for literally thousands of hours and one that felt incredibly special to me, especially when thinking about the huge amount of untapped potential it still had even at its peak and the whole vibe around the community and the passion oozing from everything said by the developers during the initial year or two.
Were there issues and flaws? Certainly. But a lot of them were ironed out and the rest was easily overshadowed by how amazing a product this was in general and the copious amounts of faith I had for its oh so bright future.

This game has taught me a lot about myself, about how to deal with people, including the really toxic ones. It has gotten me out of some really shitty times. I don't want to bog this down by oversharing too much but this game has assisted tremendously in me learning to speak again, and even with doing so in my second language, which previously had been a no-go.

There is just so much about this game that I will never forget. And for years I have remained positive, even when a majority of the community wasn't and most of the people I used to play with on the regular ended up quitting. I stuck around and I enjoyed myself so much, pretty much until maybe 6-12 months before OW2 dropped, which has deflated this whole thing completely for me and it breaks my heart how something so special now just feels like yet another cynical, soulless multiplayer cash-grab that's holding an amazing core and tons of great assets and ideas hostage.

Still, that doesn't change the fact that, while definitely flawed, the first game will probably always remain one of my favorite gaming experiences and precious memories I will cherish forever.