I was only gonna give this 4.5 but honestly I have no reason not to give it a 5 there's so much here. Despite the GBA having a lower resolution than the SNES they still managed to make a game with incredible spritework that has its own unique identity and style, and the music is just great as well. The story is really a wonderfully emotional tale that instead of focusing on childlike innocence and wonder of the previous game decides to focus more on the sadness that comes with loss and uncertainty and how revenge isn't always satisfying. It also has a pretty interesting subplot of capitalism and the negative things it brings into previously trusting and open communities that probably wouldn't come out of a Nintendo game in the modern era.

The gameplay is also a great improvement from Earthbound. Combat encounters can still take a while, and you still have your normal PSI/Item users, but there's a bit of spice added with normal attacks where you can tap the A button along with the beat of a song playing to rack up a chain all the way to 16 hits, with continual damage dropoff per hit similar to power bouncing in Paper Mario games. The game plays well off this and has varying difficulty in finding the beat to certain songs, with a specific one designed purely to have an irregular beat making it difficult to even start a combo. Also as an aside it's worth checking for any emulator delay when you play the game in any form besides cartridge cause I know when I first played there was just enough it made combos impossible.

I know a big part of this game is the fact Nintendo refuses to localize it and people are waiting for that, but being real I think that's just not a great excuse in the modern era anymore. There's a lot of great tools for emulation and holding out for what would eventually be an overpriced port of a game that actively has messages about the negatives for capitalism would just be ironic. I think that Tomato does wonderful work in the field of localization and really does this experience justice so don't let it deter you! I believe as long as you aren't wholly turned off by rpgs in general or have personal experiences with others who sour the concept of even interacting with something they liked (I completely understand) there's something here for you.

Damn I just lost a run on lost because of a chest double adversary run starts another run. God I hate delirium it's not even that fun of a boss starts another run. Greed mode is really fun but greedier mode takes it way too far and there didn't need to be the ultra greedier phase starts another run.

I don't know how this game can keep getting updates that add in content that pissed me off so bad I would close the game and then come back hours later for another run. It's really addictive and there are very little roguelikes that manage to accomplish the sheer amount of variety and replayability that TBoI had even back in the flash days when there were 5 characters and the ending goal was just Isaac in the cathedral. It's a game that will straight up screw you with RNG because you don't get any good items in a run to the point you'll just hold R on less powerful characters until you start next to an item room with a rarity 3 or higher and it still manages to be fun. I think the only thing keeping this from being full marks for me is I genuinely think bosses like Delirium and Ultra Greedier are way too much for how long runs take to even get to them.

I genuinely think this game is fun even solo, but it's definitely 10x better with friends. Take a typical jRPG, give it rock/paper/scissors combat, put it on a board, and let loose. It's fun to balance all these elements like getting towns for better income, getting rare gear and even some involved job unlocks, and of course everyone loves messing with their friends a little bit. There's a fair bit of freedom with ways to play this game as well with the ability to set up games where you start at a certain level of progression and only play for [X] numbers of turns, but if you have the time in your life try setting up a campaign game with some friends using netplay (or wait for the switch version coming out) because there's genuinely not really a game like this.

If you're unaware, Blaster Master is originally a very old series of games that started on the NES made by Sunsoft. After a long time in hybernation the IP was eventually given to Inticreates who launched this game as a soft reboot of the franchise with a pretty accurate recreation of the 1st game with a lot of Quality of Life changes and small rewrites here and there. You'll spend half of the game in a 2d sidescroller section using the Sophia tank to traverse the map similarly to a metroid game, and then the other half is spent playing a 3d top-down perspective shooter fighting many enemies in small maps and occasionally a boss as well.

The biggest change to this game is the story, which now has our protagonist Jason as a well researched scientist and his eventual support droid Eve who helps him trying to find his strange frog that escaped through a wormhole. The game isn't very difficult, in fact once you unlock a shield that works sort of like the Mantle from Binding of Isaac it becomes very easy to keep your gun level high to spam wave which is easily the most broken weapon shot type.

Slight spoiler warning, but you can only get the true ending of this game if you basically get 100% (iirc it's at least every sophia upgrade, but you might as well go the full mile at that point) which is a bit of a rude requirement, but it honestly doesn't take that much more effort to do so and I think it's worth adding since it unlocks some pretty fun new content and a really cool final boss. Overall it's definitely the weakest entry in the series, but if you enjoy the gameplay enough to stick with it then it's definitely worth your time!

Fantastic game and well worth preparing by playing most the previous games in the series for, but even if you haven't it's just as good a newcomer experience I feel. There's only a few missions I really loathed (all NG++) because of specific enemies like the ones that are Armored Core equivalents of those little bone wheel fuckers from Dark Souls but overall wasn't enough to ruin the experience I had from start to end with this one. Fantastic game and well worth the three full playthroughs to see everything.

I put 60 hours into it and have helped multiple friends reach endgame while still grinding out endgame weapons and mats myself. I really am happy this game came out finally after first seeing its announcement as a concept like 7 years ago and having played a lot of the mobile game in the past. It's great, I really don't have many complaints, and I hope they continue to update the game even more past the planned content map cause I'd love to see what more they could add from the vast and wide variety of characters and fights that Granblue has.