OK
Adjective: okay
Satisfactory but not especially good.

This pretty much sums up my thoughts on Chasm. It's a Metroidvania with nice 2D pixel art but it simply doesn't excel at anything. It uses a 'seed' system as it's stand out feature. Though main rooms are in the same set places, the corridors and side rooms are procedurally generated so it's different each run. However having played through it twice in quick succession for the platinum I can tell you it's utterly pointless as the game feels the same regardless. What it does effect is the level design which just comes across as kind of bland or unfathomable for the most part. As an example at the bottom of a shaft might be a shrine to give you more XP for 30 seconds but the nearest enemy is 20 seconds of platforming away so there just isn't any point.

Combat is okay. It's functional but just not interesting. You get a main melee weapon and a magic spell which is basically a Castlevania sub weapon. (throw knife, axe, shuriken etc.) The magic attacks are just dull to use and don't do enough to warrant it. I ended up doing the bare minimum in fighting anyway because the loot drops are wildly inconsistent and the drop rates from enemies is laughable I think on my first playthrough I changed armor once to a craft gold set and didn't get anything better as I wasn't spending an hour trying to gain anything better by grinding.

The game is about 10 hours long to 100% going in blind, I did a speed run on hard in about 5 hours afterwards and I did kind of enjoy my time with it overall but I will forget all about it with in a couple of weeks. It just didn't have any real lasting impact. It's 'ok'.

+ Some nice pixel art.
+ Ok.

- Seed system is pointless and feels like it impacts level design negatively.
- Loot and drop rates are poor.

Definitely one of the best Rockstar games i've ever played.
The world in this game look and feel amazing with extreme attention to detail and it really makes you feel like you're in that world and featuring that amazing soundtrack which perfectly sets the tone of the game. Story, writing, characters are one of my absolute favorites and Arthur Morgan is easily one of my favorite protagonist from any Rockstar game.
Gameplay is great and the shooting feels extremely fun despite the clunky cover system and even though some things can get really repetitive like looting, i do think it's cool to see the player manually pick up items or loot dead bodies for the first time but after playing the game for a while it gets really boring and it's better to just speed up a little.

As much as i love this game and love how it can make you feel like a total badass, the game can also make you feel like a little kid with how mindless and easy the missions are and how you're always being told what to do and if you do anything other than what you were told to, you fail the mission which i think is pretty ironic considering that this game is about outlaws who breaks the rules. One thing i find interesting about this game is the Honor system which is really only useful for the end of the game and it barely affects the story at all because you can literally just be the biggest piece of shit and the story just keeps on going.
About the whole extreme attention to detail thing is that this game is really inconsistent with the lawmen who is one of the most important features for a game about cowboy outlaws, example being you can rob a train in the middle of nowhere and somehow the cops not only know that a train is being robbed but the suspect as well which is dumb.

Anyway that's all for now and despite everything i said, i highly recommend you get the game.

The bullet explodes from the rifle as the camera zooms forward in slow motion, a plume of gunpowder smoke behind it. The angle of the slowly spinning projectile hits a shambling corpse of a former Nazi soldier in the side of the cranium with extreme force. An x-ray view appears of the bullet smashing through bone, shattering it into splinters. As the bullet exits the other side of what once was a skull it continues it's downward trajectory with surprising momentum hitting another undead soldier in the crotch resulting in another over the top x-ray view as it bursts the zombie fascists' testicles.

This game is stupid, hilariously fun and runs super well on PS5 with lots of Easter eggs and details hidden throughout. The downloadable content is insanely expensive and incredibly invasive to the experience in the menus though which I hate.

Overall however, with some friends this is ball burstingly fun.

A fun, relaxing and colourful slice of life JRPG that takes all the positive aspects of the first game and builds on them.

The story once again focuses on the titular Resilin Stout (aka Ryza). Three years after the events of the first game and Ryza is visiting the mainland at invitation of her friend Tao. He has discovered some legends of ruins around the capital which might have something to do with Alchemy so naturally Ryza is invited. Similar to the first game the main storyline isn't so much the point of the game, it's more about the slice of life elements of a group of friends. It's been three years, everyone has moved on, things have changed etc. I really love that aspect of the game. The overarching plot is more about excuses to explore and bring everyone together though it's not bad in itself. (It even made me cry at one point XD).

The crafting has been streamlined a bit so you buy recipes for your alchemy from a menu grid now that unlocks more as the story progresses. They are bought with points from either crafting or completing adventure board quests for the city residents. This both encourages you to actually use alchemy and gives you somewhere to use a lot of the ingredients you collect towards quests. Speaking of you can now also give items to one of the merchants building up their quality for that item type the shops sell.

Ryza 2 is full of little quality of life improvements like that. The combat also has received little polishing touches. Items no longer have limited uses but build up CC points to use them based on how many special attacks you've used to build them up. It still uses an ATB based system I like where everything moves in real time but based on a turn based structure and you can swap characters anytime. You can now also do special item combinations that will do a special move called Core Drives as well as each character has their own ultimate attack if you can build up to it called Fatal Drive.

Speaking of which, I sent a video of Ryza's Fatal Drive to a friend as she finished off a boss and he commented how good the game looked visually. It does, those animations especially look impressive and each of the many cutscenes has these animations and expressions that look great. (Coming off the back of Scarlet Nexus and how bland and static that was it's a real breath of fresh air). That said there are some caveats with that. The screen quality looks gorgeous and it has ray traced reflections in puddles when it rains in game but is comes at the cost of being 30fps only. Coming into it from a lot of 60fps games took a while to adjust as it felt like it was chugging. Having a PS5 game without a performance option was really disappointing to me.

Artistically Ryza 2 mostly wins. The art itself is great. The buildings are colourful, the characters are well realized and the hand drawn still art screens that appear sometimes are just gorgeous. That said some of the character designs are just bad. Clifford looks like he walked out of a brokeback mountain bondage club, Lent looks like a Mad Max gladiator with a mullet and Serri is wearing just a thong and a loin cloth which wouldn't be so bad except for the dodgy camera angles and general insane jelly tit physics again. It's a wholesome slice of life RPG, just why?

Overall though I had a great time with it. Got the platinum in about 80 hours (I got really sucked into needlessly crafting the best stuff) though it's really about a 30 hour game.

+ Great quality of life improvements from the first game.
+ Great colour, art and animations.
+ Excellent music.
+ Fi

- No performance mode on PS5.
- Some terrible character designs.
- Hints of unneeded creepiness.