While I thought the first game was good, it had so many rough issues outside of the core gameplay. Remnant 2 fixes all of those issues while providing few of its own and amplifies the core formula of the first game up to eleven.

I can gush about this game so much, but lets keep it to a minimal:

The gameplay is phenomenal, even moreso from the first game. Shooting is satisfying, dodging enemy attacks are fun, and melee attacks actually do something while having a lot of weight behind them.

The random tile-based map generation of the first game comes back to this one as well, but with way more variation, each including unique loot, bizarre secrets and sometimes entirely new bosses.

The bosses are SIGNIFICANTLY improved from the first game. Bosses no longer spams you with normal enemies to provide an artificial challenge. Rather, bosses provide a real challenge by having hard attack patterns to dodge, while also providing unique gimmicks in such a fun way. Not to say every boss is a star though, as Gwendil, Bloat King and Primogenitor are pretty trash, nothing bosses. The rest are good at worst, while the best ones are some of the greatest bossfights I've seen in video games (such as the final boss).

The music and ambiance, while I personally wont go listen to it on my own time, made a noticeable impact on the game. I never really considered the first game to have good music, but this game takes it up another level.

A lot of people didn't like the fact that you couldn't upgrade your armor's defense, but in my opinion, that's such a great change. Now, enemies and bosses are designed around these armor sets having a set value, instead of being like "Ugh, I'm getting wrecked. Let me upgrade my armor." Even then, there are damage reduction traits and rings you can equip to help you become tanky.

Speaking of rings, I love the fact that there are four now. While they may not be as strong as they were in Remnant 1, adding four rings makes the build variety that much better.

There are two things I didn't really love about this game. The first complaint is the trait system was a little too lackluster for me. One, they're hard to unlock (spent 10+ hours trying to get the achievement). Two, there's too few of them. Finally, I think the current trait point system (65) is way too small, because, although I think faster mantling and climbing speed would be excellent, I don't want to spent my limited 65 trait point on that. I will simply choose the obviously much stronger traits. I understand why they have a trait cap, but it was executed horribly.

Although a minor complaint, I miss the armor set skills from the first game. It would have been cool if piece-by-piece armors would provide a smallish unique benefit, but unfortunately that's not the case. There are no armor skills in this game, which could have provided much more build variety.

Overall, an unexpectedly fantastic game that exceeded my expectations as a sequel to the first game. With the DLC coming out within the year of this game, I can potentially see this game become one of my all-time favorites (assuming the DLC is good of course)

I don't want to get too in-depth, but its an extremely fun game with satisfying combat, and excellent job system and (for a team ninja game) surprisingly good bosses minus death machine. I was going to clown on the story, but it did make sense towards the end + DLCs. I imagine if I was a Final Fantasy fan, I would love it.

But my god is this game a grind fest. Level 500 equipment to beat the game (endgame starts at about 200), level 300 jobs, rat tails grinding and especially equipment grinding to make a half-competent build for the challenges that await you. I don't mind grinding too much, but it became a little too much.

This is my first Final Fantasy game I've played for more than an hour, and quite possibly my gateway drug into the entire series.

Across multiple playthroughs with multiple characters, both singleplayer and multiplayer, I've had a lot of fun with this game, it is just very flawed and rough around the edges most of the time which deterred my experience.

I do like to start with the positives, and one of my favorite features of this game is the variety of loot. Now, the word "loot" has some negative connotations around it because most gamers (including myself) associate it with something like Borderlands, Diablo, Destiny, etc. where there are different types of loot, but ultimately they're all the same and mostly you want to equip whichever has the highest number within that category. In Remnant, nearly every single piece of loot is unique. Different guns which obviously affects combat, armor sets which provide vastly different skills to make builds around, and to different rings and amulets which can be simple % increases, or it can provide an entirely different playstyle, such as a ring that decreases your health by 50% while increasing attack, or changing a dragon's heart to heal gradually instead of instantly. The properties of these weapons, armors and rings can provide a wonderful variety of unique builds, which is always appreciated.

Another thing I appreciate in this game is its campaign randomness. Though I had mixed feelings about this feature initially, I've grown to like it. Every campaign is re-rolled with different locations, loot (which is amazing because of the above point), puzzles and bosses. Even with the playthroughs I've done, I still haven't seen many rooms I've seen online. In addition (though I haven't used this feature), you can play "adventure mode", which is a mode where you can choose a location you want to play in and teleport there, which the random generation rule still taking place. This means you don't have to reroll you campaign constantly if you just wanted to see what else that location can provide, which is a nice touch.

Atmosphere was nice, and visually I loved all the locations.

I do think the combat is excellent due to its gunplay, though I do wish the melee combat was better.

Getting into the straight up flaws now, my least favorite thing about this game is the world traversal. For a game that is meant to be replayed over and over, every time I think about the movement in that game I decide not to play it. Every location is huge with only one or two exit point, and you move to the speed equivalent of a snail, while you rapidly decrease your stamina, which you also have to manage because enemies can spawn on you throughout your journey. This explicitly makes me NOT want to explore, and just hurry up from point a to point b. There is a trait to increase you movement speed, but to this day, I haven't unlocked it, so clearly it is unnecessarily hard to unlock such an essential quality of life improvement.

I also dislike the level design. Outside of the unnecessarily long trek you need to do around the world, the dungeons themselves are uninspired and samey, and with a garbage map like in Remnant, you could very well get lost in such a tiny room.

Finally, I'd like to talk about the bosses. All of the bosses can be extremely fun, but once you start having fun, the bosses spam you with normal ads which you have to deal with, which there are a LOT of them and makes it unnecessarily hard to the point where it's borderline unfun. Now, I don't mind them spicing it up with enemies or traps, but I mean it's just way too much. Not all bosses do that, but every boss on the top of my head does that which sucks.

I do really like this game, but its dire flaws prevents me from enjoying the game to its fullest. I hope Remnant 2 will be able to address these odd choices and make a genuinely great game.

Played via Mega Man Legacy Collection on PC.

A massive improvement from the first game. One of the few times where an NES sequel to an NES is better than the first game (think of Mario, Zelda, Castlevania, etc.). In MM1, I felt forced to do the boss order or I will have a worse time. In this game, though I did do the boss order, most bosses feel accomplishable with the default power, which is nice to see.

Hard to give this game a higher rating, as there is still remnants of cheap level design, but overall seems much more fair. Boombeam Trap being the main point of contender for an unfair level.

I should start this review by saying that I did not like Breath of the Wild that much. I never got around to reviewing it, but it would score wayyy lower than what a lot of other people. That being said, I adore this game so much more. It gives me the freedom I've wanted from BotW with no restrictions.

An example of what I mean by this "freedom" is the abilities. In BotW, most of your abilities were on a cooldown. You could reduce them, but never remove them, which slowed the pacing down and meant me trying less things because I had to wait 30 seconds for stasis to become usable again. Tears of the Kingdom introduces more fun and versatile abilities, being straight upgrades from previous abilities. And also, I hated the bomb ability and so glad it got replaced by bomb flowers instead. Sure, it's not unlimited, but I don't have to age 10 years to use it again.

With this newfound freedom, it finally makes exploring the open world fun. From building cars to traverse the miles of landscape, going from one sky island to the next with an airplane, or simply ascending directly above you to get in spots you definitely shouldn't be, it is a lot of fun. No more packing stamina meals to slowly ascend a mountain or tower.

Speaking of traversing landscapes, lets talk about the world. Now, a lot of people do complain that it is the same map. While it definitely is, it is new to me personally because (again) I did not like BotW nor exploring it, so I legitimately cannot tell what is new and what is not. Even then, I can imagine the abilities can make the world seem a lot more different than it actually is. What is completely new is the sky islands. While they come few and far between, I personally like the more intentionally designed and smaller packed areas, but they seemed to have skimped out on that unfortunately. What they haven't skimped out on, is the depths--an underground that spans the entire overworld. In my opinion, it is too barren with very few Yiga Clan outposts in between, and even then they're not in depth. The coliseums are cool though, and sprouting lights everywhere to smartly traverse the area is fun (reminds me of Deep Rock Galactic). The most important aspect of the Depths come from the progression. This progression is Getting Zonite to further increase your battery to further increase what you can build to build much more weird and wacky stuff, which can branch off into "just fucking around" to "just fucking this dragon up". And that's hardly scratching the surface, as there's multiple bosses to fight (for crystalized charges, monster parts, etc.) coliseums to participate in for rewards, and old treasure maps to find to get previously amiibo-exclusive armors, as well as just plain cool armors.

One of the biggest flaws in BotW was weapon durability. While unfortunately it is still a thing, it's not nearly as bad (but still mixed on it though). I don't get how anyone defends BotW's durability system, since it actively discourages you to fight enemies. If you had a weapon of less attack than the enemy, you should obviously fight them. If you had a weapon of equal or more attack power, you'd actively avoid combat, since most combat is avoidable. Bokoblins? Waste of durability, doesn't give good rewards. Hinoxes? Waste of durability, doesn't give good rewards, and so on and so fourth for almost every enemy type. In Tears of the Kingdom, there's a "fuse" ability, where you can fuse items or monster parts with your weapon to make it stronger. This made it so you could farm some monsters with equal or slightly higher weapon power than their, let the weapons break, take their weapons, fuse their monster parts, and now you have a more powerful weapon. This also makes it so you can fight minibosses, as they give incredible monster parts for fusion. This entire system makes it so a weak weapon can easily become a decent or very strong weapon. But, there comes a certain point where that becomes irrelevant, and in turn, you stop fighting the mobs and focus on bosses mainly.

Now, I've talked about exploring extensively, but I've avoided of what you should be exploring for. The main point of exploring (and I'll emphasize "main") is to find shrines. Similarly to how I feel about shrines in BotW, I do not like shrines in this game either. Of the 75ish shrines (which is half, mind you), there has been 15-20 shrines I've genuinely enjoy myself in. Most of the others are either tutorial shrines (shouldn't exist, btw), insultingly easy puzzles, or Rauru's Blessing. They are marginally better than BotW's, but not good by any means. Funnily enough I do prefer korok seeds over shrines, but I don't like how they're essential to upgrading your backpack, which is a pretty essential thing to do despite being optional content.

Now, one of my most anticipated features of this sequel were the dungeons. In short: most of them were horrible. I won't go into too much detail, (I'm not spoiling too much, but skip if you're afraid of them) but essentially: Fire temple was goated and had the most depth of any dungeon in the game, lightning temple was a bit small but had some really good puzzles, wind temple was essentially a divine beast (I hated divine beasts) and the water temple is literally five platforms suspended in the air. Though I am trying to avoid major spoilers, but there are more dungeons and all of them are bad.

Speaking of bad, the voice casting. None of them sound like their character should, and the acting sounds shoddy at best (I would go more in depth, but I am trying to not spoil)

A few spitball points: The story has some bs moments, but I'm not a huge zelda nerd so idk if it's bs in the confines of that universe. Performance ticks from "surprisingly good" to "borderline unplayable" way too quickly. Menus are not that smooth. Music is awesome.

I decided to cut this part out, but I'll shorten it: It is not a $70 game. Price doesn't affect my review in anyway (long explanation with exceptions), but I just don't see where that extra $10 brings us to on last gen hardware.

All that being said, I do give this game a 7.5, but since this site only solid numbers, I'd give it closer to an 8/10.

This used to be my favorite Zelda game when I was a kid. Played it on N64, Gamecube, a little bit on 3DS, but after replaying it once more, this game is a lot more flawed than I thought.

First things first, I do have to give praise where it's due. This game fixed a lot of issues people had with OoT. A few examples, the world is less of a slog of a wasteland and overall more compact, fast traveling to more locations the Z-targeting has longer range and is more reliable, as well as so much more I'm forgetting at the top of my head.

In addition, controls are so much better. To me, there's a lot less input lag compared to the previous entry which makes me less afraid to make my jumps correctly or sidestepping. Surprisingly, for a N64 game, the underwater mechanics are really good. Once you get the Zora mask, swimming underwater feels like a breeze. It is very majestical and calming. Definitely some of the best underwater controls on the N64, if not all of gaming.

The story and atmosphere of this game is also really good, I like the more dark, despair-filled feeling of this game, but it does get goofy at times which I don't mind.

Now before I get into flaws, I do want to clarify a discovery I made only ten minutes ago: You do NOT need to collect all the masks to beat the game. For my entire life playing this game, I've always collected all the masks and got pissed at how bullshit some of the requirements are. While that doesn't change my opinion, I don't think the difficulty to 100% the game should be a factor in this review, but keep these feelings into consideration.

That being said, one of the biggest gripes with this game is the dungeons. There are only FOUR (4!!!) dungeons in the entire game, and they're mediocre at best. The Woodfall Temple is a boring, forgettable starter dungeon (which is fine), the Snowfall temple is narrow and badly designed for Goron's kit and making the camera claustrophobic as a result, the Great Bay Temple was fine and probably the best one, the Stone Tower Temple was intriguing but ultimately became tedious using the ocarina to play a long ass song every couple of minutes, as well as waiting for the unskippable cutscene of the temple flipping, or the rocks being put into place.

Though I praised the world for being smaller this time around, it now feels disconnected. At this point, it is a glorified level select screen there is no substance to the overworld, nothing to see and hardly any secrets. You spend very little time there because you are just going to fast travel instead, because there is literally no incentives to go into Termina field. In addition, this makes the inclusion of Epona all the more confusing. Goron is faster than Epona AND the world is super small, so why use it? Oh yeah, because there's conveniently placed fences in two areas that force you to go do that side quest, before hitting the owl statue and never seeing Epona again.

When talking about games with great music that is generally not talked about for having good music, the phrase "Surprisingly good music!" comes to mind. The opposite effect applies here. A series with really good music releases a game with "Surprisingly bad" music. It's not ear-screeching bad, but it is a major let down. In terms of brand new music, "Song of Healing" comes to mind as a top tier music, as well as the eerie music that plays before the moon crashes, the Woodfall Temple theme and MAYBE "Oath of Order". Everything else is either reused from OoT, forgettable, or downright bad. Snowfall Temple and Stone Tower Temple themes come to mind as not good music, especially for the theming.

I haven't delved deep into both my positives and negatives about the game, but I do think it is a generally good game, but foolish to think it was the best Zelda game. I am torn between a 6 and a 7.

Certainly not my first time beating this game, but it's been so long since I've played it that it may as well be my first time.

It is crazy to me that a game with tons of issues compared to modern standards (such as overworld travelling sucks, hidden sidequests and items, 20 fps with input lag, etc.), it is still one of the best games out there. Perhaps it's nostalgia, but everything flows so well. The combat, Z-targeting, the dungeon designs are good, interesting puzzles, the story (surprisingly), the music, the sound design, so on and so fourth. Definitely did not expect all of that after revisiting this old N64 game.

This game is great, and to many people this is probably one of the greatest JRPGs if not, overall game of all time. I see that 100%, but I personally have my nitpicks with it, such as:
-The pacing of the game
-The fact it only gets good 30-40 hours into the game
-The fact that essential, strategic, and most importantly, fun mechanics are locked behind confidants such as switching your party mid-battle
-The lack of freedom to do what you want
-Similar to SMT IV/IV:A (and maybe other SMT/Persona games, idk) they sell DLC for super powerful personas. In SMTIV at least, these were entirely optional and you had to purchase them. In Persona 5 Royal, they included the DLC, which again, I could ignore if they are optional, but I can't. Unlike in pervious games, there are legitimate fusions using legitimate personas that allow you to straight-up just get these P2W personas naturally, which I absolute fathom and throws the balance of the game out the window.
-And more importantly, the entirety of Kasumi's character pre-third semester (I want to punch her)

But despite all of that, this game is such a breath of fresh air. In an era of where every game has to copy Destiny's UI, Persona 5 gives us a fresh, cool looking and highly functional few games even attempt to reach. The UI is not a balance between style and function, it is the extremes of both with little to no compromise. The gameplay is surprisingly deep and extremely satisfying (again, once you unlock certain confidants). For a JRPG, there is very little grind involved (I played on hard, and only had to grind once in the entire game. Even then, I didn't need to). Despite my feeling on Royal's music over the original, the music is excellent. The story is great, albeit a ruined a little by Royal but still phenomenal. The characters are fun (minus Kasumi).

Overall a great game deserving of its praise.

I'm pretty bad at rythm games, but pretty good at character action games. The two combined never really appealed to me, but this is an amazing game through-in-through. The combat is great, music is awesome, the art style and animations are done so well, the story could of been better but was executed well. I don't really know what to add that hasn't been stated before.

I do have a few issues with the game though. Macron being a requirement to kill certain enemies is a bummer. The last boss fight was visual diarrhea, and I would have liked a few more moves to flesh out the moveset a bit. Aside from that and a few minor bugs, it's a great game, and I can't wait to play more of it.

A pleasant surprise. I was going into this game half-thinking that this game was just a side project hastily put together, but is honestly one of my favorite halo games (so far), behind Reach. The gameplay is exactly like 3's, maybe a little bit better, the story was an enjoyable ride for the most part, I love how the story is actually told, characters have personalities*, the music is wonderful and the best in the series, but they especially nailed that atmosphere. Atmosphere isn't a thing I thought about in a Halo game, as its non-existent, but this game does it well. From walking through a rainy, dark, destroyed city while piano keys lightly play in the background, to riding and blasting your way through hordes of enemies in a tank while some spy action movie music strums in the background, but overall great.

I would love to give this game a higher rating in fact, but there's a few flaws holding it back. One of the more major ones is that there's barely any meat on its bones. This game is very short, which a very short but very good game is not at all a bad thing, it just that I wish they'd gone more ambitious. The level design is fine, but I would've liked to seen it expanded more, with more flank areas and better ways to stealth through enemies. I would've liked longer missions to get to know the characters more.

Another thing I didn't like about this game is that you can skip missions. I didn't know that I was doing it at the time, but I completely missed missions 3 and 4 because I thought it would be fun to explore the city more. Turns out its not and ruins the experience a bit.

A nice improvement to Halo 2, which was a massive improvement to Halo 3. There are less missions, but with the level design being so much better than the previous entry, I'm more than happy with it. Weapons feel way better than they did in the previous entry, making them all fun to play around with while not focusing on getting a specific weapon. To top it all off, I thought the story was great for the most part, making the Halo 2 cliffhanger worth it.

What nearly killed my enjoyment of the game however, is the AI, both friendly and enemy. Enemy AI seems a bit dumber, as I'm flanked much less when I'm low on HP and they like never flush me out from cover with grenades or whatnot, which is disappointing. The friendly AI is much worse. When you're driving them, they don't hit their shots or they focus on the wrong target (assuming they don't suicide kill you in the car if they have a rocket launcher), or if the AI is driving, they will drive right in front of a Scarab that's charging up and push on the breaks. Either way, it is frustrating and the previous games had way better AI, as stupid as they could be.

An absolutely massive upgrade to the first Halo in every way. More guns (though imo, less good ones), more missions, a way better story, a banging soundtrack and most importantly, way better level designs. There are less (but not none) copied and pasted rooms and more uniquely designed rooms, each bringing their own atmosphere with them (provided you played with the OG graphics, because the new ones ruin it).

Though I said the story was good, I hate how its delivered. A lot of important details are left in secret terminals, so I was not able to experience everything unfortunately. In addition, the story is left on a massive cliffhanger, so while I'm excited to see what Halo 3 has to offer, it sucks that the story ended where I was super engaged.