In the early 2000s I would spend summers with my grandparents who lived pretty far from me. My grandfather loved toys and video games, and had a pretty huge collection built up over the years of consoles - and that's how I spent my early childhood with stuff like the Intellivision and Atari Jaguar. Utopia is one of the first "city builders" to exist, and on top of that, it supports two players. Player 1 gets the island on the left, Player 2 gets the island on the right. You can passively build your wealth by planting crops and hoping for a rain cloud to come by, and you can get your hands dirty and buy a boat which you can use to chase after schools of fish. After you rack up enough money, you can place buildings, which don't do much other than increase your score. This is basically the entire game, rinse and repeat - and I absolutely love it. You barely need to pay attention to it and it's endlessly relaxing. The game lets you decide how long each "round" lasts and we'd always crank it up to the highest and just shoot the shit.

When I lived in Osaka briefly, I visited some of the bigger arcades in the area. On one such visit I saw a fairly old man playing an Initial D game with a giant wheel, racing chair and all that shit. The Eurobeat was insanely loud and he drifted flawlessly throughout the entire track.

The next day I went out in search of a console version and found this. Obviously not as extravagant as the arcade, but a great game, with one of the best soundtracks out there. Decent customization, a fair amount of courses, and the cutscenes are presented like manga panels. You do get to try and balance the cup of water on your dashboard. Really fun to pop in for 20 minutes and mess around

Knowing a bit about the troubled life cycle of the Sega Saturn and it's limited 3D capabilities, one definitely gets the vibe from Panzer Dragoon Saga that people died to make this game happen.

It's hard to separate the history of PDS and the context of its enduring prestige from the actual game itself. Playing PDS for the first time in 2020 feels like playing a forbidden game, an experience that only a selected few had the pleasure of having and that you would never have the chance to, only hearing about it on the internet like it's some urban legend. It's fascinating to see how much juice the team managed to squeeze out of the Saturn, and to think of all the programming tricks and shortcuts they had to come up with to solve an otherwise unsolvable problem.

In some regards, PDS is highly impressive, boasting a big number of FMVs throughout the game during it's most important setpieces, having good and competent VA for all its dialogue that makes the characters shine beyond just being NPCs, and massive boss battles that fill the entire screen. The combat alone is worthy of praise, having you on the back of your dragon flying around the enemies to gain better position and locking on to them to release your dragon's homing laser. The transition from the rail shooter games to this one couldn't have been done better, and it really gives a sense of action and dynamism that wasn't present in most of the JRPGs of that time.

On the other hand, the console limitations do present themselves from time to time. Despite the game being 4 discs long, it's a relatively short JRPG, lasting about 15 hours. You spend the whole game waiting for the world map to expand, and it never does. There's barely any hub areas and sidequests to explore and do, with the game only having one major town. The pixelization does tend to leave a lot to the imagination in some instances, more so than what a PS1 game would, and the draw distance is very poor.

But nowadays, these aspects that would be considered negative, only end up giving a lot of charm and personality to the game. The short runtime removes a lot of fat and filler that plagues so many other JRPGS, instead giving a bigger sense of adventure and urgency to the story, and the design of the world of PDS alongside the outstanding and unique soundtrack creates the occasional beautiful and contemplative moment, despite the low fidelity graphics. The Saturn might be inferior to the PS1 in the 3D graphics department, but the team managed to take advantage of every single component and technicality of the console to make PDS uniquely impressive.

As far as the story goes, it's surprisingly nuanced and subtle, opting to let the players decide for themselves the meaning of it's message and outcome. The characters were intentionally designed to be counter-culture to the videogame landscape at the time, with heroes that didn't present the "anime" look and personality, and villains with much more ambiguous intentions and goals. The story has a plethora of noticeable inspirations, with Star Wars, Evangelion, Dune, and Miyazaki being some of the ones more apparent, creating a very solid and compelling story dealing with ideas of environmentalism, evolution, free will, power and human interference on the course of nature.

Is it worth 400 bucks? No. You would be hard pressed to find any game that would be worth that amount. Is it worth emulating it if you have no other option (like I did)? Yes. It's a part of videogame history, a time where hardware limitations brought the best out of developers, and paved the way for more auteur styled development and artistic expression in the medium, preceding the works of people like Fumito Ueda and Yoko Taro.

"I'm going to fucking kill myself" were the words I found myself uttering over and over while I played this game.

Coming off of the third game you'd expect Devil May Cry 4 to be much better than it is. Enter NERO. Moody and arrogant, in essence he is HIM. You know I had a really funny joke regarding Nero but it's too funny and I'm absurdly proud of it so I'm going to save it for later and don't you fucking dare say that it probably wasn't gonna be funny it absolutely fucking is everyone I've told it to has laughed at it fuck you. Anyways this kind of thing is exactly what DMC4, it set ups tons of things which make you feel like this will be "peak peak goatly goat raw fire", you kill demons in the first level that banger of a soundtrack comes in and you are getting into the grove of playing as Nero and just when you've had enough of the foreplay the game rips your nuts apart by having dogshit level design and enemies which range from mediocre to annoying

Devil Bringer is really something I felt was missing in DMC3, a way to bridge the gap between you and the enemies outside of mashing Stinger. The game is smart with it as almost every enemy in the game feels like they're designed with Devil Bringer in mind, right down to the bosses. Speaking of which, how are they bosses? Well they start off all right and it all goes downhill when I got to Mission 6 and went "oh my god this is so dogshit". Agnus can SHOVE those fucking swords UP HIS ASSHOLE and fiddle them around like a fucking DILDO and I hope that he doesn't have a G-spot cause my god that fucking FUCK does not deserve any form of pleasure. Then in the last 8 missions they start fucking reusing bosses like crazy to the point where the second final/final boss (depending on who you ask) is just a fucking beefier version of a boss you've fought before and they made said boss even MORE dog shit fuck your fucking BUBBLES fuck YOU.

Right when you get the hang of Nero the game throws you a curve ball and gives you control of Dante and baby? This was the best Dante yet, gameplay wise. "YEEESSSS BRO YESS 😍🥰🥵" was my reaction once I remembered how to play Dante. I should add that I didn't buy this game myself to play it but got it from a friend, and I noticed that she had bought souls with real world money, so I had an abundance of souls at the beginning which I spent into upgrading myself. In hindsight I'm kind of grateful for it as it gave me the chance to get my bearings in the game without being overwhelmed but when I got to Dante's section I was running low on souls. Fuck you Angela could you have seriously not bought MORE??? WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO FOR THE LAST FUCKING HALF OF THE GAME?? PLAY IT NORMALLY? Fuck you it costs like 2 fucking pounds, are you really THAT broke???? And don't you dare act like you don't have 2 pounds, I am the poor broke boy from a third world country, NOT you. So please sell that fucking Nando's gift card already and give ME the fucking money you are fucking RUINING my gaming experience.

Remember how I said how each enemy was designed with Nero in mind? Well that comes back to bite this game in the ass when you play as Dante cause it's something that becomes really apparent especially when you start to fight old bosses again. Don't worry my DEAR reader, I didn't do a gamer rage moment and throw my controller. No, I'm a civilised man. I just beat the shit out of cardboard boxes like a REAL man cause this game is for REAL men like me and nobody should dare challenge me on that fucking front.

Level design and atmosphere is something that's also worse in this game. As bad as DMC2 is I will at least admit that due to the fact it reused a lot of shit from DMC1, it remained just as atmospheric. DMC3 was also really atmospheric! And I know DMC4 came out during the height of ugly brown Unreal Engine 3 games but goddamn does this game not hold up as well graphically as 1 and 3. I could really go on about how shit some of the puzzles in these levels are like holy fuck DICE WOO DICE it's fucking YAHTZEE ALL OVER AGAIN but I feel like I'd add nothing to the discussion except dry humping a limp corpse while I go "what's up my fellow Devil May Cry-ers I am also on the team".

Now we come to the story and there's really nothing much to be said. I don't CARE about old dude, I DON'T care about evil scientist, I don't CARE about the fact the girl who has 3 minutes of screentime. Nero aside, all new characters are a bust and even old characters take a hit. Still, I fucking laughed out loud when Dante used Royal Guard in his boss fight. Although, there is one new character I'd like to talk about...Gloria.

Let me start off by saying that, as you may have surmised, me and "sex" don't have the best of relations. I never had sex-ed in school, I didn't know what a "clit" was until I was 16, when a girl said that she'd make me her bitch I just replied with "woah cool", when a girl confessed to ME, I FUCKING RAN AWAY. So to have Gloria pop up and have my mind for the first time in a while go "Hmm while I usually don't find characters attractive this Gloria person is very pretty I hope she's good" is no easy feat. "Is this it?" I wondered. Like Nero, did I finally awaken a demon inside me, but instead of being a cool fucking arm that can grab things, the demon inside me is called "sex drive". Maybe I could finally give this sex thing a shot, maybe I don't have to be scared of anything sexual, even while alone, anymore. In that moment, I got Nero, I became him. I looked at my hand like it was Devil Bringer as I wondered if I should give this "jacking off thing" a go. Is this a new chapter for me, Quade Pad? Did Devil May Cry 4...change my life? As I slowly came to terms with this new side of me, it all came crashing down via the fucking costume select screen where I got spoiled on Gloria's true identity and oh my god jokes aside I laughed so fucking hard. Which made me realise a new truth.

"White women are mid"
Thank you Devil May Cry 4, for opening my eyes and changing my life.

The final mission pretty much cemented my view of the game. Truth be told I'm going through a rough patch in my life at the moment, and during these trying times where I've distanced myself as much as possible from everyone who loves me, I'm playing one of the worst boss fights I've ever seen in a video game. FUCK that boss FUCK you FUCK Dante FUCK old men FUCK statues FUCK everything FUCK me and Dante WILL WE FUCK AGAIN?

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to kill myself and this review is my last mark on this world. Also it's my birthday! Please say "Happy Birthday Quade!" in the replies. It'd really make me feel better! Cheers and god bless Devil May Cry. I will see you next time.

i was expecting a lot better due to the game being so notable but it was very whatever. hits never felt like they mattered, and the flying mechanic never worked the way i wanted it to. all of the redesigns are really good tho, and i think the writing was really fun, especially the meiling boss. voice acting was ok.
dropping a half star because the horrible hd filter is on by default and you cant change it without having to manually patch it yourself. that filter is so fucking hideous no matter what game its used in why the fuck do devs keep including it, let alone turning it on by default???