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!

Like I have mentioned some times before, I usually get quite turned off by games that lean too heavily on the 8-bit or 16-bit styled graphics, especially if they also use chiptune extensively in their soundtracks, because I think it negatively influences the image of video games, as people you know who do not play games themselves often think about 8 or 16-bit when they think video games. However, I try my best to put this bias aside when playing new games, and I am glad I did for this game, because I found Celeste to be incredibly enjoyable, and there are many reasons as to why. Let's start with the most obvious one: the gameplay! This game, like many other platformers, is based on different levels, but one big strength it has is that it never feels like you are playing individual levels. In Mario games, levels feel pretty arcadey, in that you go in, beat the entire level, and then you continue to the next level from a selected overworld. This system has many benefits, like for instance the fact that an overworld or hub world can give more clear breaks between different hard segments, and as long as a game is structured around this, it's absolutely fine to use. But I'm glad that some games work differently, like Celeste for instance. In this game, the entire world is one long segment, where you restart from the beginning of a room if you die. This is better for world building in my opinion, because it makes the world feel coherent, instead of every level being a sort of microcosm. The worlds are also very well designed in my opinion, especially some of the final worlds. They usually take the classic approach of giving you a certain gimmick, and then using that gimmick in as many ways as possible in an increasingly difficult row. It's great! My favourite worlds are probably the two final ones. These ones are great because they are also great from a story perspective, and feature some difficult, but fair platforming. This game always manages to be completely fair in its challenge, because there are no lives and you can just retry as many times as you want until you succeed with a challenge.
The story in this game is very interesting. You play as Madeleine, who has decided to climb this mountain called Celeste Mountain. But she is unaware that the mountain has the magical ability of making your inner demons into a physical entity, which is something that you fight throughout the game. This is a game about depression, unsurprisingly, and it goes about the theme in a good way in my opinion. It also manages to be very cute at the same time. I loved how all of the voices were synths that just sounded like voices. That was incredibly satisfying to listen to in my opinion, and it made me want to engage in all dialogues that you can engage in within the game. But the main thing I loved was the gameplay, not to mention how satisfying the musical progression felt. I especially liked the music of the final world and the hotel, with the hotel being the one that I still listen to a lot. Lovely, cute little game!

I decided to dive into this series after a friend recommended it to me. And I decided to start from the beginning. Initially, I felt very lukewarm towards this game. I was not underwhelmed, because I didn't really have any high expectations to begin with, but it was not really that impressive up until the second to last dungeon, which was where I was beginning to have a LOT of fun with this game. The main reason for this is probably the combat. It works really well, and even though it does at most times feel like a glorified "spam x" simulator, it felt satisfying to get incredible combos on enemies, which really started happening once you got to that point in the game. But the thing that kept me going so that I could reach that point in the first place was definitely the music. The soundtrack has to be in my top 10 list, because every single song is just so solid. I loved all the world themes, all the battle themes and so on, my favourites probably being "Night of Fate", "Hollow Bastion" and "Forze del male". Yoko Shimomura has gotten a huge upswing in my personal rankings list after having played this game. The best part gameplay wise was the final two areas, with the exception of a particularily bullshit fight thrown in literally the room before the final boss. I think I died more in that room than to any actual boss in the whole game. I didn't bother to do a lot of the extra content, so I never got to fight Sephiroth or any of the other optional bosses. I don't think I would want to 100% this game, as it seems to require a lot of grinding, and grinding is very frustrating in this game. I definitely noticed that I was a bit underleveled for the final dungeon, but it was pretty fine with the exception of that one fight. The story felt coherent and satisfying to follow, and I really liked Maleficent as an evil force throughout most of the game. She had such a perfect voice in my opinion. The game does have its fair share of goofy moments (no pun intended) though, usually through the stupid stuff Sora does in certain cutscenes, but I thought those moments were funny, and certainly didn't made me dislike the game. I had a good time with Kingdom Hearts, and I am thankful that I played the Final Mix version, as I heard that the original didn't have the option to skip cutscenes, which would have been incredibly annoying against some of the harder bosses. Definitely give this game a shot if you like hack n slash games with RPG elements!

Dropped this game because Spirit Caller was just so much better, and I started playing that around the same time. This game is unfortunately way too slow, and your opponents are ridiculously strong in the beginning in my opinion. While that was initially fun, I found that the system of reserving battles was pretty boring unfortunately, and I don't think Yugioh got that good as a game until archetypes really became a thing, and that was not here. I did enjoy building a deck and finding the optimal strategy for winning, but in the long run it is simply outclassed by later games it seems.

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!

I haven't really delved into real time strategy games that much (Spore is probably the only game that is even close to this among my played games), so I figured that Pikmin would be a great start. Also, I love playing Olimar in Brawl, so I figured I should find out how his game is to play. And I honestly had a blast. It was super easy to get in to, and pretty addictive while I was playing it. It was very fun to control all the pikmins and to make them do different things. It was cool how every area was almost like an open world where you could collect things in whichever order you wanted, and it felt natural after a while to just bring a whole lot of pikmins into the field and structuring their duties difficulties. I made some of them collect other pikmins so that my pikmin count would increase, and others would just follow me along to battle all of the different enemies that this planet offered. It was pretty hard to find all the ship parts, but I managed to get every one of them, even though some seemed to not even be required. The music and the atmosphere were other huge pluses, especially the music. The sliding guitar chords played in the third area was such a cool song, and I immensely enjoyed my time there. But probably my favourite aspect of the game was that it made you learn through trial and error in a way that didn't feel unfair or unfun. You simply had to test what would work. I remember seeing the enemies that breathed fire in the third area, and thinking "I wonder if the red pikmins are immune to fire", and they absolutely were.A related story is that the first time I got near water, I actually lost half of my pikmins through drowning, but it didn't take that long to get them back fortunately. Olimar's narration made the game feel more immersive, and made me love the day system, because I could always look forward to Olimar's funny comments at the end of the day. There were of course some things that I enjoyed less, like how it could take a long time for pikmins to react to my commands sometimes, but I feel like it would have made the game worse if that was absent, because it would make the pikmins feel less like living creatures and more like mindslaves. I wish it could have been done a bit differently, but as it is, it is not the worst thing in the world, and it was not really something I thought a lot about when playing through this game. I recommend this game to everyone, because it is very accessible, cute, sort of sad, and fun!

An incredible game, an incredible journey through a gigantic undergrond world. A world that feels living, but corrupted by all the different diseases going on throughout the different parts of it. Needless to say, the art is incredible, and really sells all of the different locations to you. Another thing I really liked a lot was the stag network. It just makes sense that there would be a subway of some sort underground, and not only is the stag damn useful to travel around quickly, he is also cute as hell, as is actually most creatures in the game. With games, I usually play them quite slowly, one hour here and there on and off for like a month or something. But I felt myself coming back to this game for multiple hours, sometimes up to five in a row, which to me is really a sign of an incredible game. One drawback of a game being this addictive is that you can get tired of travelling around, which definitely happened to me a bit. But whenever it did, I tried to just slow down a bit, and take in the environment, which immersed me more in the feeling of travelling through this broken world.

The combat in this game is also an incredible part of it. I love how you can use different charms to give yourself a certain edge in battle. I liked range and speed over everything else, so I picked charms that would increase those stats, so that I would become a fast-attacking monster that slaughtered basically everything in a matter of seconds by the end of the game. It felt awesome, and very appropriate to its metroidvania status, as one key aspect of those games to me should be how incredibly overpowered you feel when you have collected everything, and is just powering through all enemies that previously gave you trouble.

It was a true joy to explore this world. The map system is great, because it doesn't give you too much information at first on where you are heading, but reveals everything you have explored when you get to a safe zone (which in this game are benches). This makes the map exploration of this game feel rewarding, as the map gets expanded all the time simply through your exploration, and most importantly, it shows you the paths that you may have missed sometimes, which encourages further exploration. By the end of the game, I had found almost everything there was to find, that's how much fun it was exploring.

So, what we have is an incredibly fun game here. I enjoyed myself so much every second, and it all gets tied together into a nice big package by the fact that everything feels so coherent in the game. There are no creatures in this massive world that feel like they do not belong there, they are consistent with the art style of the whole game, and most importantly, they make this world seem so incredibly alive.

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!