This title didn’t hook me as much to Phantasma or the original to be frank.

I’ve come to appreciate the mission section of AC more as this title has like 5 total necessary missions to be done. I’ve had little to no difficulty for this title too, while it maybe due to better skill now, but I saw me never having to do any of the missions as money and management to it was NEVER an issue. Unlike AC 1 especially, where I was cutting it close throughout the entire game.

Oh the story, it has mystery, a clear antagonist, protag show some personality, and mystery. While the characters aren’t as well done to Phantasma, this title is ever so satisfying if you’ve played AC1 as it answers the biggest question I had the end of the game and interconnects with AC1’s story! Great tone of storytelling and hope they keep this going for AC2.

While this is a flaw to the mission sections, how the arena is done here is good, but not great. I much prefer how AC 3 handles arenas (only future tiles I’ve beaten and to make want to play the previous titles and future ones.). What is done here is better to enjoyment to Phantasma, but not by a large margin. Well done, this title is a solid middle ground for the ps1 era for me.

Overall, I had a fun time and beginner friendly I would say by how many resources are to your deposal.

As a Bayonetta fan since day one, I had sky high expectations for Bayonetta 3. The third in a trilogy of increasingly unlikely-to-exist games, six years of development, and coming over three years after Platinum released their last major single player game. Bayonetta 3 would have to be spectacular to meet my expectations after all that time, but not only did it meet them, somehow it managed to surpass them.

After Bayonetta 2 opted to refine and focus up what Bayonetta 1 already excelled at, to middling results, Bayonetta 3 is an explosive gambit that takes everything Platinum has ever done and launches them full force at the player with shocking fury. Genre switchups are constant (if brief) and the core gameplay itself has seen radical changes with the addition of the Demon Slave and Demon Masquerade concepts. From a distance these changes may seem worrying or clunky, but when playing it all flows so smoothly and feels incredibly satisfying to utilize as a part of your ever expanding tool kit. Not only does Bayonetta 3 have the most overall weapon options in the series, these options are more varied and more fun to use than ever. You could play for 100 hours and not hit the ceiling of what this combat system can do with Bayonetta alone. And that's not even getting into Viola, whose combat flow is wildly different from Bayonetta's and requires a real gear shift to lock into.

Bayonetta 3 never rests, setpiece after setpiece blow your doors down and threaten to drag you out onto the street and mug you in front of your neighbors and God while you try desperately to keep your cool, clenching the controller to aim for those good scores. The game is effortlessly engaging and fun, with the variety of its combat and the expansiveness of its adventurous level design always keeping you busy with something or another, and that something always changing into something equally fun.

Bayonetta 3's only falter is in minor QOL concerns, things like replays not allowing restarts of verses and a few enemies not giving good enough audio cues when they fire their bite-sized arrows at you from the other side of the planet. These are nagging concerns, concerns that become annoyances when you're going for pure platinum rankings and trying to master the higher difficulties. But those are only issues for the crazy people like me who actually want to attempt to do those things. For the sane gamer who just wants to experience a thrilling action game, I posit that you can do no better on the Nintendo Switch than Bayonetta 3.

even though this is clearly not the best they could do and the game shouts cheapness at your face, for some reason i really enjoyed it. klonoa 1 is one of my favourites of all time and even though it doesnt even come close to the ps1 level of quality, i still enjoyed it. a big problem i had when playing klonoa 2 is i thought it was prety ugly for a ps2 game, but with time got used to the plain textures and weird colour and ended up loving the aesthetic (also i think not upscaling the game to 1080p in PCSX2 helped me aprecciate the visuals even more). klonoa 2 is a lot more polished than 1 in this remasters, but in some cases it was really weird for me, some textures seemed like a texture pack some dude made in 2011 and it just looks wrong. other times it just looks beatiful, i'd say mira-mira mountain and maze of memories is where the visuals of this remaster shine the brightest. also most of the textures in klonoa 1 are just upscaled versions of the wii or just the same low resolution texture without upsacling, which look awful.

i think the problem here was the budget namco gave to the devs, cause there's a lot of changes that they could have just not do like changing every cutscene in klonoa 1 to match the ps1 script or add those extra details to the klonoa 2 ending. these devs really cared about making a good product, but it seems rushed in a lot of ways. another thing i think almost nobody said is the castilian spanish translation is incredibly bad, it seems extremely rushed or some kind of misscomunication between teams because i cannot comprehend how someone could translate lines with its literal sense without testing if it even makes sense in 2022. klonoa 1 psx had this problem too but in 1997 this was extremely common, and the klonoa 2 spanish translation was perfectly fine, it didn't need another translation but they did it anyways. i'm not sure if this is a problem in other european languages or not but this is inacceptable. comment down here if somoene got problems with the frech or italian or german or whatever translation i'm curious now.

even though this collection has all this problems, i've enjoyed it a ton and i couldn't be happier klonoa gets another chance to get revived (even though it doesn't seem very likely having whatched the 0 advertisement this game got) and i'm sure this remasters could have been extremely good with some more time and budget.

quick thing i forgot to mention, the font used in texts is fucking awful and is the same font in every damn thing i hate it.

is this really a win for klonoa? namco puppeteering his corpse with the prospect of future games that may not deliver or even get made? i'd rather this series die if this is the quality we can expect from it.

nevermind the obnoxious practice of holding series' hostage like this, it's deeply upsetting that the only compromise we get is a butchered representation of what came before. because god forbid people play old playstation games that "look dated" next to other games releasing today despite there not being a good way to experience how the original games were presented to begin with. you'd think more people would push back against this; especially considering the cries for more klonoa content from those who grew up with this series, but to my surprise basically everyone seems to be eating this up no questions asked. every few years this happens, an old series gets a spark of life in miserable fashion and sometimes it leads to something greater, but even with the best outcome i think its a bad precedent to set. sure crash bandicoot 4 crushed all expectations and is in the running for best game in the entire series, but it rubs me the wrong way that it came as a result of scrubbing away the hard work done by the original developers back in the late 90's.

i understand that much of this stems from publishers more than developers (it's not like they've been very forward thinking when it comes to the preservation of old games to begin with) but when companies demand stringent deadlines with no regard to quality control of course the product will come out half baked, no matter how much love was behind the wheel of it. i don't have a bird's eye view on the development of this project, but i can't imagine it was enjoyable or flexible to work under. even if their hearts were in the right place, theres no chance they had the tools needed to really do this series the justice it deserves.

no matter the circumstances though, this is what we're left with. a botched collection of beloved titles that, for the foreseeable future, is the only way to comfortably play these for most people. i'm not upset that it's overpriced or not stuffed with extraneous crap to justify the cost, i'm upset that this is the standard for preservation the industry is setting for itself. who cares about the game's legacy and how it impacted people, just slap a name on it to excite fans looking for to rekindle memories of better days gone by.

best case scenario we get a new sequel out of this collection and it really delivers on fan expectations, but is that really the lesson to be learned here? treat the past as a frivolous step to success so we can move onto the next new shiny thing? i can't help but feel deeply cynical over the industry if this is how we think we should celebrate the past. klonoa deserved better

This game has left conflicting feelings inside of me. For one part, I like it, I like the characters and thought it was fun especially when things went down, but the other part of me wishes it was better in some regards, in the script, in the world around this futuristic version of Tokyo and most importantly, in its pacing.

Like how other reviewer said in this very site, I liked it but I wish I loved it. It's a very good murder mystery, but it's no Zero Escape. It takes a very long time to set in and put you in a spot where you just want to read more and more, ESPECIALLY if you go down the right route in the first Psync sequence, it's like they never meant for you to go down there in the first place if you haven't experienced half of the game because of how lame it feels as they don't introduce you correctly to a lot of concepts and the characters.

And, about Psyncing, I'm bittersweet about it, for one part it felt right coming from Zero Escape, having these small puzzle-solving sequences to continue further in the story seemed neat, until it wasn't.
I get that the puzzles are supposed to be in a dream world where only vague reconstructions of our memories take place in, but that doesn't equal to a good puzzle-solving experience, in Somnia, everything is so bizarre and arbitrary that sometimes you don't know how to start in doing certain things while also causing confusion, and it doesn't help at all that the time system forbids you from completing all actions and just looking for all dialogue inside of these. Sometimes they felt like a roadblock in an otherwise smooth experience, when I knew I had to enter a Somnium at some point I rolled my eyes because I thought again of having to stress over saving TIMIEs and making sure I'm doing everything in order so I don't run out of time doing many actions. It feels poor and without much reason.

My problems with the script are mainly how fast the tone-shifting is in this game, you see somebody die then two scenes after Date is already lusting and doing some weird stuff, and I normally wouldn't have a problem with it but it happens so often in-between what's supposed to be serious and delicate situations that it just makes me wonder how worth it was it to keep there and not for some comedic relief in another time entirely.

I'm pretty sure an Uchikoshi happened again and he (and his team) didn't have enough budget to make a very ambitious title, as you can see they recycle the same overworld places, animations (That are very stiff, by the way! Making action scenes very awkward), models and other things, I won't blame it on him but I just wish there was more to amplify the world that these characters inhabit because moving from ABIS to Matsushita Diner to Marble got repetitive very quick, as you can see.

In the other hand though, the story was well thought out, classic for Kotaro Uchikoshi. Its not his best work but he did a good job on writing it, I just wish it did more towards the direction it was heading, the sequel looks promising just because of that, so we'll see!