Initially, my thoughts on this game were not very positive. While I enjoyed the aesthetics quite a lot, and found the boss battles quite fun, I thought the whole run-n-gun part of the game ruined the game. I also thought that some of the bosses in Inkwell Isle II were incredibly annoying and frustrating, and I couldn't really see this game as anything incredible.

But then I got to the good part. As soon as you reach Inkwell Isle III, this game gets really good. The boss battles are a huge step up in my opinion, mainly because they all have such cool concepts I think, and the run-n-gun levels are a lot batter, which is due to the fact that they feel a lot easier. Maybe I just got used to the formula, but I was having a lot more fun with this game when I reached that point, and up until and including the end, I was having a very good time. The aesthetics is probably the strongest part of this game. I don't think anyone would dispute that, so I won't dwell on it for too long. I also loved the sound design, because it felt suitably cartooney at all times. What I didn't like as much was the music unfortunately. When it comes to jazz, I am a big fan of the outliar genres. Spiritual Jazz, Free Jazz and Avant-Garde Jazz. This game seems to play it way too safe in my eyes, and the result is a soundtrack that is appropriate, but uninteresting. Nevertheless, I did come to appreciate this game with time, and I will definitely play it again!

After many years, I finally played the last part of the Metroid Prime Trilogy. I don't know why I waited so long considering that I loved the first two games. But I do regret it, because I did love this game too! Metroid has always been about enviromental storytelling and atmosphere a lot, and I love how Metroid Prime took that idea and immersed you more than most first person shooters had done at this point in history. In the third game in this series, the game feels a lot bigger because of all the different planets you go to. I find the planets to be a really good thing, because it makes it easier to find your way around the world. In the earlier games, you had to usually traverse huge distances to get to some areas. In most cases this was not a big problem, but it is nice to see a different approach. I was also a big fan of the lore from the races who used to live on the planets, and I did go out of my way to find all of the lore entries. The game felt a lot more streamlined than the other two games, but that wasn't something that I considered bad, just different. It made the pacing really smooth, and I don't think I ever got stuck, which definitely happened in the earlier games. Because this was released on Wii, motion controls were a big factor, and I think it was a resounding success. The controls feel amazing, and I also really liked the way it used the nunchuk. It felt a bit awkward to shake it in the beginning, but that was something I got used to, and it was definitely super satisfying to rip off armor from bosses with the flick of my wrist. The music was also good, although not really as memorable as the first two games. Even though this was a really good game, I do have to favor the two earlier games, mainly because of the atmosphere, music and setting. Still a damn good finale to this trilogy though!

This game took forever to beat. More exactly 90 hours and 13 minutes. But I loved it from the very start! I began playing it in the summer of 2020 with the goal of beating it before summer's end, as my PS2 is in my vacation spot, and not where I live. Needless to say, I did not manage to beat the game, but had to complete it during my winter break instead. I spent many hours playing it during the break, and I actually managed to beat it just hours before I was leaving. That felt incredible. But enough backstory, let's talk about my opinions, of which I have plenty!

I came into this expecting a pretty standard JRPG, and that is also basically what I got. The unexpected thing was how basically perfect it handles this "standard" JRPG idea. It has a story that is reasonably intriguing, but pretty simple compared to some other games, but where the game succeeds is how amazing the sense of adventure in this game is. It's not just that there is an overarching quest, but every town you visit (and trust me, there are many) has its own sub-quest so to speak, so it feels like the game is telling an overarching story and lots of small stories too. This adds to the feeling of adventure, and another thing that really accomplishes this is the amazing soundtrack. Really one of the best I've heard probably. It sounds absolutely wonderful due to it being played with live instruments, and I love the neoclassicistic style that most of these tunes have, especially when it strays more towards the "neo" part (looking at the final dungeon theme as one of my favourites). I also grew to absolutely adore the battle system. I like games where you don't really have to grind, and this game balances that out with the tension system. By charging up your tension, your damage will increase in exchange for your turn, and once you get to high tension, you will deal ridiculous amounts of damage (but tension returns to normal after doing something with it, so it's not completely busted). You can actually potentially one-shot certain bosses with this, and it's definitely an incredibly satisfying mechanic to play around with. I managed to beat the game while being under the recommended level according to a strategy guide, and that speaks volumes as to how useful the tension system is. This game also features a great roster of characters, which all have great voice actors. The voice acting and the dialogue is definitely the funniest part of the game, and just made me appreciate it a lot more. The game also has a massive world which feels great to explore, and it feels like every new place has a different and unique culture, and I can definitely remember basically every town I went to. So everything feels unique in that way. Overall, probably one of my favourite RPGs ever played. Highly recommended if you have like 90 hours to spare!

My feelings on this one shifted a lot throughout the game. I was really enjoying myself in the beginning. It felt really nice controlling Samus in this game, which was one of my main issues with Super Metroid, that the controls felt a bit clunky. Here they worked really well, although I wish that you would keep your ground speed when jumping, which was something Super Metroid had. I felt like the level design was pretty suited to the game. In Super Metroid, you had a map, which meant that you could make the game very big without having to worry about the player getting lost. Metroid II has no map, and therefore it is much more fitting to have the game being more linear, which it also is. This game is incredibly linear compared to basically all other Metroid games. But it works because of its limitations. I also really enjoy the main premise of this game. In Metroid II, you are basically committing genocide on a planet's population of Metroids. Your goal is simply to kill them all. And you have a counter at the bottom, which helps you keeping track on how many Metroids are left to kill. The game starts off pretty easily, but has a pretty smooth difficulty curve, which towards the end turns into a difficulty spike. The final four metroids and the final boss are without a doubt the hardest parts of the game, which is as it should be, I guess. And this was the point where I was getting a bit frustrated in the game. It all worked out in the end, though, because after countless tries, I finally defeated the final boss, which was incredibly satisfying and kept that mood until the end of the game. And that is a really important thing. It's ok for a video game to frustrate you as long as you feel that reward after the struggle. There were some things I disliked about the game, like some rooms being way too long, but ultimately I felt like this was a really good game. Possibly even better than Super Metroid, but I'll have to replay that game on the original console to see how I feel about that. For now, this stands as a great Metroid game!

Man, this game is such a mess. The gameplay is absolutely terrible, plagued with all the problems that an RPG game of this flavour can have. Repetitive combat, uneven difficulty with spikes and valleys and boring gameplay for the most part. However, the story has to be one of the craziest I've experienced in a long time, and I believe it's accented by how the gameplay is. How many games have you played where the main characters consist of a mute guy who loves to kill people, a pedophile, a child cannibal, a misanthropic dragon and among those, a pretty normal child. It's so fitting for a game where the gameplay really doesn't make you feel like you are the good guy, and that's a big plus. I will admit that some segments of this game were pure pain to play through. And I couldn't bother to collect all weapons for ending E, so I just watched it on YouTube instead, but this game was a worthwhile experience despite its lackluster gameplay. It would be a crime to give this game anything less than an 8 in my opinion because of how deeply authentic it is.

The original game is one of my all-time favourites, and this remaster was wonderful and did a lot of things very well. First of all, playing this on the ps4 feels really good. It was always a bit inconvenient to play it on the PSP in my opinion, as it ran out of batteries quickly, and had a very small screen. But I played this game for bloody hours on the trashy PSP that we had with duct tape holding the battery in place as the battery hatch had been lost. But on the PS4, this game simply looks incredible. The artstyle really gets a boost from being that upscaled. Wonderful stuff! I played it like crazy for many days in a row, and was seriously addicted for a while. So I decided to 100% it, because I had never done that in Patapon 2 before. It was quite a journey, although it made me very aware of one of this version's biggest flaws: the fact that it is on the ps4 means that there is a bit of input lag from the controls, which makes playing this game a lot harder timing-wise. It isn't a big problem though, and some of the challenge was welcome, but you felt a bit cheated by the fact that you couldn't really do the inputs that you wanted to at all times. I would often intentionally get out of Hero Mode back in the day to protect my hero from harm sometimes, but Hero Mode became way too unpredictable to reliably be able to do that this time. Overall though, this is a great way to experience one of my favourite games of all time!

Maybe not the best way to play this game, but at least I finally played it. And man, what a game it was! The first thing that stuck out to me from the beginning is how absolutely gorgeous the backgrounds are! I was playing a bit of Donkey Kong Country while playing through this game, and these two games really made me fall in love with the prerendered backgrounds as a concept. They look super detailed, and they always seem to paint a picture of what is happening. In Midgar, it seems like every single background tells a story of the people who live there. And that is absolutely amazing. Something that isn't technically as impressive are the 3D models, but I found them to be very cute and made the game feel like a toy theatre or something, which is something that was successful in disarming me for some of the heavier moments in the game's incredible story. And it really was incredible. I felt like I got to know the main cast very well, especially Aerith, Tifa and Cloud, which are now some of my favourite RPG characters. But a story and aesthetics can seldom carry a game alone, so luckily this game has very nice gameplay and one of the best soundtracks. I like that the battle system is timer-based, because it makes it very exciting and stressful. This was especially true during some of the final bosses of the game. I wouldn't say that it's a particularly hard game, but I don't think it really needs to. Playing the game without grinding and facing every enemy was something I found worked very well to increase the difficulty, and if it ever gets too hard I also find it super satisfying to grind, as you progress so quickly between levels, you level up quickly, and the battle theme is a major jam that I love. I loved almost every song from the game with the "Hurry!" theme and the two final battles being my favourite songs from the OST. Fortunately, the OST is on Spotify, so it's very easy to access. But one of the biggest reasons as to why I love this game is because it does something that even some of the darkest games I've played haven't done. If you've played the game, you probably know what I am talking about, and I won't say what it is. But trust me when I say that it is incredibly well executed and gives you the exact feeling that it wants to give. This game was basically as good as it was hyped up to be, and probably exceeded my expectations. Everyone should experience this!

I don't even know where to start with this game. This may be the most fucked up game I've ever played, and as a result, it is also one of the best games I've ever played. People usually say that the story is the main reason for this, and while I do agree, I think that the character development the main character goes through was interesting, and the gameplay is easily some of the best in the series! And the music may be the best video game soundtrack I've ever heard. Don't look up story info about this game, go into it completely blind, and you may have the time of your life! I sure know that I had that!

Ok, so this is solid proof that Kojima still has it in my opinion. This game was absolutely masterful from start to finish, and I will gladly tell you why I think so. First of all, the level design is probably the best I've ever seen. It feels like every rock, cliff and river is placed there with care, and therefore almost every mission feels absolutely amazing to play, with its own peaks and valleys, but in this case literal peaks and valleys. It literally feels like every option has been given thought, so no matter what route you take, it ends up feeling like a true journey. Now, secondly, controlling Sam feels absolutely incredible. It took a few hours to get used to, but after that I was hooked on controlling him! You truly have to treat the ground like a puzzle in this game, navigating around rocks all the time while simultaneously controlling Sam's balance and speed so you don't go too quickly or fall over, dropping all your packages. And finally, we get to the story, which felt like a beautiful rollercoaster ride of emotions. I have almost nothing bad to say about it, and it ends wonderfully on some moments that make you recontextualize a lot of things that have happened in this game. It has so much lore too, and most of it is very well developed and makes sense within the logic of the world. I feel really bad for people who didn't like this game, becuase I fear that they simply played it the wrong way. I've noticed that people who dislike this game in reviews and stuff are mostly people who try to speed through everything, where as I liked to take it slow and had a blast with just about every second of the way through. It's a shame, because I really think some of those reviewers would like this game a lot more if they just got through the first three chapters, because everything beyond those is top of the damn class in my opinion. One of the best games of the last decade, and a true masterpiece in my opinion!

Few games I have encountered so far have had such a big gap between story and gameplay. Lots of games have amazing gameplay with mediocre stories, but I've rarely come across games with this mediocre gameplay, and a story which honestly shook me to my core. Story-wise, I think this may be the best game I've ever experienced. I cannot really go into why without spoiling the game, but trust me when I say that there is something absolutely amazing inside this game. Another huge plus for me was the music. I love the constant use of choirs. I think the choir is an underused component in music, which almost always adds to it, and therefore my favourite songs from the game are "Snow in Summer" and "Cold Steel Coffin", which perfectly reflect the parts of the game that they are used in. I think the characters are another huge plus, because they are so well developed that they frankly put many other RPGs to shame. The gameplay is ok for the most part, with some segments being incredible (the intro for example, something about fighting all of the enemies while listening to "Snow in Summer" felt cathartic to me), but if you want to get all four endings, you have to repeat a lot of events which become boring the third time around. Thankfully, the game skips to a middle point every time you complete an ending, so you don't have to play through it all, but man does it add a lot of dead time. If those problems were fixed, I would easily consider this a masterpiece. I can't really put it at that level, but I would recommend it anyways. The story is just that good.

Dropped this game because of a couple of reasons. I don't like this game. I think Mario is annoyingly hard to control, which is not exactly complemented by the level design that has a huge preference for platforming, which becomes incredibly awkward. People often praise SM64 for its level design, but I think it's frankly horrible. The levels are ugly and unrealistic in their structures, and while there are some cool tricks, it's far too often incredibly annoying to move around. I will say that I do not hate everything about the movement. I like how fast Mario can get. Unfortunately, this is done a lot better in Super Mario Sunshine, which is probably my favourite 3D Mario game, so 64 can't really compete. Another thing that is absolutely atrocious and unacceptable is the camera, which barely functions in my opinion. This makes traversing some of the landscape a nightmare, and after a while I couldn't stand it anymore. Sorry, SM64. I gave you an honest chance, and I probably played you a lot more than I actually enjoyed. But this is not a good game unfortunately.

Talk about a game that was almost the complete opposite of what I expected. For a while I have disliked the huge fetishization of retro games, as I felt like they put games in a stereotypical mold that I disliked a lot. I don't want video games to be a medium where the music associated with it has to be 8-bit tunes (which unfortunately is still the case, and chiptune-inspired albums or songs are still generally seen as being "video game inspired"). While it is true that 8-bit music has a very valuable place in video game music, this fetishization of everything retro risks obscuring more games with more modern sensibilities. Maybe not the games per se, but definitely the soundtrack. If you ask any layman to name a tune from a video game, he will most likely name the main Super Mario Bros. theme, or maybe the Legend of Zelda theme. This shows how modern video game soundtracks have unfortunately fallen in the shadow when it comes to the general population. But what does all of this have to do with Rain World, I hear you ask. Well, Rain World managed to completely shatter that expectation. I walked in expecting a retro-inspired game that would be fun for a very short time and came out at the other end having just played one of the most exciting, beautiful, unique and amazing games that I've ever played. I know that I've placed a lot of high scores for games recently, but it's probably just because I have played so many good games recently. But Rain World is definitely the best of these. I have never in my life played a game that emulates nature and the ecosystem as well as Rain World. I have never encountered something as beautiful as this game. I will admit that it was a bit rough in the start due to its extremely high difficulty, but as soon as I got into the game, I was completely hooked and never looked back since. The environments are simply incredible both to look at and to play in, as the levels are almost always extremely well designed. Some areas in particular, like Five Pebbles and Subterranean, are probably some of the coolest locations I've ever been to in a game. And it's not just the gameplay that is absolutely top notch. We are talking about a masterclass in sound design, which is so good that there is a YouTube channel dedicated to basically just uploading ambience from different locations in the game. And the soundtrack, which comes in once in a while, is always welcome, and provides a very strange but compelling mix of synthwave-styled stuff and more modern production styles. I always felt welcomed into the world every time I went back to the Shaded Citadel from Shoreline and that incredible trip-hop-ish tune started to play. So, to summarize: this is one of the best games I've ever played. Basically everything is absolutely top notch, and I would recommend it to anyone and everyone. The creators deserve the money, so buy it at full prize. You might not like it at first, but the environments and sheer beauty of the entire thing will keep you coming back most likely. What a game!

Continuing my period of retro games, I decided to try to get into the Kirby games. And so, I started from the beginning, at Kirby's Dream Land. Now, I've played some small bits from Kirby games before, mainly from Kirby's Epic Yarn for the Wii. But this is the first Kirby game I've completed. And god damn, was it short! Only 5 levels with the last level basically being a boss rush. It was a lot of fun though. The bosses were pretty varied, and although everything was a bit on the easy side, I still had a lot of fun. It felt like something I needed after the huge challenge that was Ninja Gaiden. Something more chill, you know? The music was pretty good, especially King Dedede's theme and the second stage's theme. A really fun time that I could probably return to a lot in the future!

I've been a fan of the Legend of Zelda series for quite some time. I've never played many of the 2D Zelda games though, only like Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. So I figured it was time. And after a really long time, I have completed A Link to the Past! And it was a lot of fun at some points. The dungeon design was mostly good, especially in the final dungeon, and I really liked some of the songs, my favourites being the final battle theme and the shop theme. Something that really dragged the game down though, was the Skull Woods dungeon. I don't think I've ever been that frustrated at a game. It seemed like the dungeon was designed to drive me crazy with frustration. And well, it worked. Another thing that bugged me is that you sometimes get stuck on something and cannot advance until you have found a certain item. I've never liked this design philosophy. Its obvious purpose is to make you explore the overworld more, but if you dislike the overworld, you are not gonna want to explore it, and if you like it, you will do that anyways. It isolates players who dislike the overworld, or exploration. Exploration should only be used to give you optional upgrades in this kind of game, not to give you things required to beat the game. In all cases but one where this happened, I just looked up the answer on the internet because I really couldn't bother exploring. So, to summarize, momentarily great gameplay and some major annoyances are my thoughts on this game.