Starting my commitment to experiencing more FE with one of it's more challenging entries did a lot to help me appreciate the games more, as well as giving me fodder for why it needed to tone it down a couple hundred notches. This game will beat you into remembering it's systems. Every wrong move it's catastrophic, since party members are fragile and die for good. This is a playstyle I never even considered in new entries. The idea of losing out on the social element felt like ripping out a chunk of the game itself. That isn't how this game works, and it's honestly a great challenge and feels incredibly rewarding. That is when it isn't yanked away from you over and over again.

I know there are old FE heads who would like for the series to go back to it's brutal roots, but I just ain't one of them. Besides the aesthetics of the GBA, I felt absolutely fatigued from a lot of how this game manages itself. Hit rates are abysmal and just waste so much time. Having every single board sucker punch you with an ambush at the eleventh hour lost all effectiveness when it wouldn't have even been a problem had I not failed to hit the boss 3 TURNS in a row. Pair all that with the enemy incredibly effectively dogpiling a single unit like a school of piranha, and you just feel robbed over and over. Having to restart chapters that take well over an hour to get through, I just couldn't be bothered.


I've been saying this about a lot of series lately, but playing newer entries makes it real hard to go back. This game helped me internalize a lot of good habits with these games going forward, while giving a strong apprehension in going back.

Combat feels a bit off. Switching styles could be more instantaneous to help it flow better. You can do this by activating your EX mode but it barely lasts and using it up removes your ability to use special moves, so I barely got a chance to use special moves which sucks the enjoyment out of encounters. There also felt like less variety in your special takedowns. Even after scouring Kamurocho for the QR codes necessary to get vital combat abilities, opportunities rarely presented themselves to really showcase the cool moves I earned. The hyper-specificity of how to get them to proc led to me just kicking fools while they were down 4 out of 5 times. I really wish I didn’t find every RGG games combat so shallow because it’s genuinely the only thing that keeps these games from entering my personal upper echelon. No Yakuza game ever clicked with me 100% on a gameplay level so it might just be me. The tailing minigame put me to sleep, and they use it exponentially more than in other RGG games. They drag on so long I genuinely think it’s the thing that’s keeping this game from a higher score for me.

Thankfully this game has the best narrative of any Yakuza game so far. I'd never describe a Yakuza game's story as "gripping". They're schlocky but more than serviceable, but this time around I was fully invested. It helps that it shows a lot more restraint with the twists, even with it being a detective story. Excellent cast of characters. Yagami is cool and likable. The crew you end up assembling are also great, and some of the antagonists are my favorite in the series, Hamura was excellent in particular. The dub is really strong. I could easily recommend it.

I didn’t really care for the side quest structure at all, in that some of them need you to make friends with unknown individuals to progress them, and without, after all these years, decently functional quest marking, makes some of them impossible to complete without a guide. I ended up just befriending everyone I could before doing any side case, which aren’t nearly as fleshed out and way more tedious. The side cases themselves are an absolute joy of course. Multiple multipart stories feel way more intimate this time around, which admittedly does lend some justification to the friendship system.

It’s such a brief moment but I can’t not mention the woman harassment simulator that I honestly can't tell if it was supposed to make the characters in question uncomfortable or uplift them in some cumbrains idea of empowerment.

The diegetic UI is still amazing. There is a weight to the combat that feels perfect. The excellent sound design keeps the atmosphere constantly tense. I wish they did anything at all to make the story less predictable, even for those new to the experience. The game also looks unreal, mostly due to the fantastic lighting. I played the original Dead Space on a Toshiba laptop in 2009 that was falling apart so I can confirm the upgrade is fairly tangible.

P.S. no game should ever cost more than 60 dollars no exception.

Leave it to pure contempt to get me back into using this site.

The whole game reads like no one in development had any passion for this product. There is nothing exceptional here at all. I don’t know if the Luminous engine just can’t handle gameplay where you do more than hold a button or if this is that team's idea of engaging and are just wholly committed to it, but somethings gotta change here, which is unlikely since I don’t see that studio existing into next year. There’s this parkour system that would have worked if they didn’t drop every obelisk of side content haphazardly onto the world map like a 5 year old playing SimCity. These biomes were absolutely supposed to just be fields lightly dotted with things to see before the Ubisoft curse took hold and instead crammed 6 different iterations of “do our bad combat slogs”. This game makes use of 4 different magic types: short range, long range, long range, and long range.

I could in no world conceive of writing this bad in anything, not even the worst TV show has anything this devoid of character. Not even Marvel movies are an apt comparison anymore, those can have neat things in them. Nothing exemplifies this more than going on a side quest for who might be the only half decent character in the game, inspecting a room with three dialogue prompts that all say “this character must have had a complicated history with one of the villains”, after which you find a diary that “might delve into that relationship further” and when prompted to read it the main character says “nah”. Every idea is only explored to its most basic form. The setting could have been so much more. The story could have stuck to its theme of rising from nothing to do great things, which is already an overly bloated message, instead of spinning out around the last turn and adding the addendum “as long as you were born super powerful and special and important.”

The music feels safe and forgettable. Hearing the first 5 seconds of the battle track over and over as I sped away from combat was very grating but also kinda funny. I do have exactly one positive thing to say about Forspoken, and that is the visual effects are pretty great overall. Magic looks like it feels cool, when it’s not congesting the screen.

I would call this a saltine cracker of a video game, but at least those have salt. This is straight up a communion wafer. Lacking flavor, dry as shit, and a strong association with being in hell.

I've been a big fan of skateboarding and skateboarding games since I was old enough to have interests. The slow death of the arcade style of Tony Hawk style games to the more simulation adjacent Skate style was a tangible shift in the gaming space. It has not since Proving Ground in 2007 that I have touched an arcade style skateboarding game. I liked the game then, but I was also 11 years old, and 11 year olds don't know anything. Seeing how literally no good Tony Hawk game released since then I reconciled with the idea that maybe they were just not going to be good again, that the fidelity of modern platforms didn't allow for these games to really be what they once were. Obviously I have been proven wrong. This remake is basically as good as I could have hoped for. Which makes the cancelation of future remakes make me want to go to ActivisionBlizzard's head office and [REDACTED] Bobby Kotick right in his stupid little [REDACTED].

The asynchronous multiplayer aspect is a neat concept, but seeing as I wanted to play through solo, I wish it would have been structured similarly, giving me one character to play through the game as, maybe even selecting whom at the start. It would incentivize replays if you only wanted to play solo and it would ensure you get to experience all of the content. The curators cut is a step in that direction but the initial playthrough just wasn't what I wanted so it felt like a waste to go through it all again.

As I leave off the Dragon of Dojimas saga, I can't help but feel an immense relief. It took me 7 games to come to terms with the fact that I just don't love Yakukas beat em up style combat. It's stylish and makes for some great gifs but after all of these games it just reveals how lackluster the actual inputs are. This time around feels especially simplified. No alternate combat styles. Not alternate characters. It just makes me go wall-eyed after a while.

The new engine is really impressive. The game looks sharp even outside of the cutscenes, which includes sidequests. This along with the studios commitment to having all side content voiced is such a huge buff. The side stuff is always excellent in this series and it getting a glow up is fantastic.

The story writing is kind of a mixed bag. I'm really impressed how I was able to enjoy characters who not only are entirely unestablished, but also start out as the most insufferable dipshits in the world. It is super telling that I basically called every story beat in this game moments to hours before they occured. The novelty of the telenovela style drama wears off a few games in. It's such a staple of the series identity that it's hard to picture it any other way, but it wouldn't be a big deal if my expectations were subverted at any point.

Overall I'm satisfied with the way Kiryu's story ends. It's bittersweet and is the only kind of resolution that would make sense at this point. It just would have been nice to leave on the highest note possible.

Crash Bandicoot was absolutely a staple of my childhood. I was too young to appreciate the original trilogy, so my experience was all post PS1 era, at which point Crash was already steadily falling out of relevance, and eventually just kind of vanished entirely and unceremoniously. Seeing an entirely new entry ignited the deepest cockles of my heart.

The art direction stomps the remake trilogy into the earth. Every bit of movement has such bounce and personality behind it. There is a huge variety of locales and they are all lengthy and dense with stuff just happening. It's just fun to look at.

The game has four different playstyles revolving around the character available for a level and they all feel great… mostly. The last character you get just feels off (I won't mention who for the sake of spoilers but I feel like it's kind of obvious who it would be). The addition of a marker indicating where you will land is absolutely necessary. It feels weird to give praise for a feature that feels like it saves the game from being miserable, but it is genuinely a much needed touch. The game provides a pretty decent challenge at the base level as well as absolutely brutal challenges if you want it. And you definitely don't want it.

This game is great if you just want to go through it without any of the added fluff, but if you are intent on completing it wholly like I was you're gonna be in for an absolute dick kicking. This game expects an unreasonable amount of commitment for a completionist playthrough. It wouldn't be so egregious if the goals were at all sane, but they involve going through levels over and over again trying to collect gems. I liked doing the initial 6 gem runs and the time trials are always a blast, but once you add the inverted levels into the mix, which are just the level flipped with some sort of filter applied, the repetition kind of mulches your brain.

I can't help but to feel a sense of vindictiveness if you played this game like I did. I resigned myself to just collecting all of the costumes because doing everything was too much of an ask for really no tangible gain. I liked this game even as I was struggling with it but it taught me my limits when it comes to what I will endure for the sake of completion.

For the record, this game does satisfy the very subjective desire to just comb through a big open world map and just clean it of any content available. I can't really quantify the value in that since it may have ruined this games structure, and I definitely would have preferred something more guided, but seeing as I did quite literally everything this game had to offer and didn't feel as burnt out as I could have been, perhaps due to the mindless gameplay loop, the argument that the games size was detrimental doesn't ring true for me personally. However, the systems around this structure feel so at odds with itself.

The game plays so slowly. You move slow. You get slower when you enter combat. You fight slow. You stop to pick up any and all items. You even progress through the game's own narratives slowly. You need to acquire power and levels to but into story progression, which you have to run around the world map (slowly) picking up any side quest you find, which at best engage in the boring style of character interaction which just hovers the camera around, or at worst has you picking up notes giving you directions to another note. It's all so impersonal, why even bother? Oh right because you can't continue on without at least doing a handful.

There are also narratives unlocked through the War Table, which literally have you wait real time hours to unlock the content behind them. They could be unlocked by one of three advisors you have and would have different outcomes based in who completed it. Problem is they all had varying times to complete with each member, so considering the difference in time could be hours in some cases, I almost always went with who would get it done more quickly rather than weigh my options at all. You can go through the game while waiting for the timer to run out, but once you hit near the end of the game in which it unloads a lot of War Table content that may disappear after the final mission, it leads the player to either go do something else while waiting hours for the potentially banal content, or continue through the end of the game potentially missing out on something. It's such a bizarre way to handle a feature like this.

The War Table also lets you access quests for your party members. These quests really vary in quality. Some even turned me around in some characters who I thought were pretty lame. Dorian and Blackwalls quests were excellent, even if they only amounted to a scene or two. And then there's fucking Sera, perhaps the worst party member in any game ever. This game also has some pretty aggravating story threads. It's hard to talk about without going into specifics, but essentially there are instances where an ideal outcome is possible, but the writers just didn't even seem to consider it even when it's so obvious. I can't describe how frustrating it is to be like "just let me do this" and the game to plug its ears and go "lalalala".

This is a prime example of overcorrecting. The finale is a wet fart. Everything takes too long. The mandatory story stuff is pretty weak overall. I tried playing this game before any of the others and found that it just doesn't establish the setting at all. Dragon Age seems to be BioWare's test dummy and it makes the series messy. The more I reflect on it the less positive feelings I have.