While I didn’t enjoy this as much as I would’ve hoped for, it’s damn nice to play another Persona game.

I’m a relatively new fan to persona, Persona 5 was the first game I played in the franchise. As a high schooler at the time my mind was blown by that game and P5R went beyond my expectations and blew me away again. I never played the original P3 so have nothing to say about this game being a Remake and for the sake of this review I will do my VERY best not to compare this to P5R since I want to look at P3R as it’s own game. With that being said, Persona 3 Reload is an interesting game that does take inspiration from P5R. As always I LOVE the art direction for Persona. You go through the daily life of a high school student to hang with friends and study for school. You can join clubs which I thought was really cool. You also get to open up new social links to build bonds in these clubs. You can do all sorts of activities that can gain you new items or accessories or increase your social stats that can benefit you on the combat side of the game during the Dark Hour. There’s many mechanics for you to use to better yourself, your gear or your team. You can also explore and find Twilight Fragments around town which are very useful to open locked chests within Tartarus. Which brings us to combat side of things. Combat is so slick and fun. You’ll pretty much go dungeon crawling in Tartarus for a big chunk of the game where you fight shadows and get loot. Sometimes after a battle you’ll get Shuffle Time which is a system that allows you to choose a reward. These rewards can be anything from money or bonuses to collect or personas and buffs for your run through Tartarus. I really like the visuals and layout for Tartarus which the art direction does great on. I also do appreciate that different sections of Tartarus which would eventually change up the layout and halls for the floors you go through so that you don’t go through same hallways. It’s also good that more things open up in Tartarus so that you don’t always just do the same thing. Eventually you’ll have to rescue people that have wondered into Tartarus and you will eventually start to encounter Monad Doors which lead into a Red Area where you can fight formidable shadows for great rewards. You can also take on requests for Elizabeth where you have to do quests for her in daytime and during the Dark Hour. And with Elizabeth there’s indeed a Velvet Room to fuse your personas. While I did like Tartarus, I did get pretty bored sometimes since it got repetitive unless I had a challenging fight. And that’s an issue I had with Personal 5, Mementos felt like a slog and Tartarus did begin to feel like slog later on in the story. Also the soundtrack is AMAZING. Like in P5R, I loved to just randomly hang out just to listen to the music because it was so good. Atlus doesn’t miss with their OSTs.

Story wise, it was pretty good but I wasn’t all that impressed. The story was okay for the first 40 hours as we have a goal we’re set on but doesn’t do much with that goal other than having to go up Tartarus to find out more and recruit new members to help in our fight during the Dark Hour. After that, the story started to pick up for me, specifically when we started to learn more about the Dark Hour and started encountering the antagonists of the story. The social links in the game were hit or miss. Some will be “meh”, some will at least be interesting, and a few I loved. I didn’t really like Nozomi’s or Hidetoshi’s social links since they were either uninteresting or just couldn’t bring myself to enjoy them. And then we have SEES, our team that fights to find out the secrets of the Dark Hour. The characters are well written and well voiced acted. Junpei is the only character I had a love hate relationship with. He can be funny but cringe most of the time for trying too hard to be funny. I also loved characters like Yukari because of her deeper connection to the story. I also love Akihiko for his cool and upstanding attitude. Or even Aigis for looking for her way of life which is interesting to see. And of course I can’t forget Mitsuru because, one I think she’s totally gorgeous, and two I really liked her social link. Besides all that, it’s really nice how you can just hang out with any of your crew members at the dorm, sadly this doesn’t increase your bond with them but you can still increase your social stats or get items like food or drinks from it. The remaining hours of the story were great and my goodness the ending hit me hard on the heart.

Honestly, I really couldn’t put my finger on why I didn’t enjoy this as much as I would’ve hoped for. Not sure if it’s because the story didn’t get to me as much due to pacing issues or if I felt like something was missing from the game. Nonetheless, I definitely recommend Persona 3 Reload as it’s a great game. There’s a lot to keep you busy and a lot to take advantage of.

Beaten: Feb 02 2022
Time: 8 Hours
Platform: Xbox Series X (via MCC)



There was a tweet, a few days ago, that said something like “Halo’s whole thing is that it’s got the best gunplay and then every few minutes someone says something that doesn’t make sense but sounds like it came out of the Bible”. I read it on Monday, and it got stuck in my brain as I finished FF8 and An Outcry. This morning, I booted up a playthrough of Halo 3 I’d started at the beginning of the month but dropped when I got way too into FFXIV, and now I can in fact confirm: That is Halo’s whole thing.

It also struck me that the second part of that tweet, the way that the original Halo trilogy is written, might’ve impacted me more than I ever thought? I mean, “someone says something that doesn’t make sense but sounds like it came out of the Bible” is kind of my whole thing with games these days. What that means, at least to me, is specific kind of grandiosity to dialogue. In my favorite games, this serves the tone of the game, adding a sense of poetic uncertainty to every word as it drips out of a character’s mouth. 

In Halo I’m pretty sure the idea was “how can we make this feel more epic”. This isn’t unique to 3 by the way, but 2 and 3 are the games with the largest focus on your enemies, the Covenant and the Flood, which gives them the most speaking roles. The humans in Halo don’t talk this way. Just the biblically-referenced Covenant and the just, large and ancient and near-all knowing Flood.

This “epicness” feels like the base idea behind the game. The music sounds lush and large and rich, the sound effects echo off canyon walls like they’re too big to crack, like the explosions just can’t be contained by your speakers. The levels are generally large too, leaning on battles in open valleys and absurd, outsized scale. Rather than trying to be cinematic in a grounded way, an Oscar-ey way like loads of modern triple A games aim for, Halo just wanted to be big.

That’s most of what I wanted to say I think. I wouldn’t call the writing here great or even all that good in places, but I just don’t care. It works tonally and atmospherically, and the more games I play, the more I realize those are what’s most important to me. 

I will say that I uh, haven’t loved any of the post-Bungie Halo games. As to why, it’s kinda weird to put my finger on. I think the gunplay is just a bit off-feeling? Bungie’s gunplay has this thickness, this heaviness to it, and that heaviness gives me just loads of tactile satisfaction? The Destiny games also have fantastic gunplay imo, though the business aspect of those games makes it tough for me to get into them (I’d love to start Destiny 2 from, like, the beginning? Not allowed tho lmao).

Anyways that’s my disorganized set of Halo thoughts. Halo 3 is loads of fun, just like it was when I was a kid, but now I’m also just in awe of the theming and presentation

Alright, strap in. I have a lot to say.

Let's get the elephant out of the room before I actually talk about this game. I am going to bring up issues I have with the game's art direction later on but none of that has to do with how sexualized the character designs are. I am fine with all of those other characters you want to use as a counterargument. That is not the core of my issue with this game, but before I get into that, I'll talk about what I DO like because I do still like this game.

I think on a graphical level, the game looks amazing. It runs consistently well and has been thoroughly play-tested which I shouldn't have to appreciate, but most great games usually have at least some small level of bugginess that this game does not have. Additionally, on this aesthetic front, I love the game's soundtrack, probably one of the year's standouts alongside Rebirth and Prince of Persia. I also think the linear and open-world missions in the game are, for the most part, quite fun! There are some survival horror-type missions that I found particularly memorable, even if they clash really hard with the rest of the game, but we're not there yet!

But the place where I have the hugest amount of praise for this game is its combat and enemy encounters. I'm gonna talk more about the game's "identity" later but this is where Stellar Blade's identity is strongest as it can't really be put in any camp for these 3D hack-and-slash games. It's not slow-paced and deliberate like a souls-like, but it's not super quick and combo-heavy like a DMC or a Bayonetta. The combat feels like a good mix of light comboing, really nice feeling parries, strong finishers, and a good amount of diversity in the way that you can approach combat. The enemies and bosses are also very well-designed and super difficult. The game shines brightest when focused on its great combat and there is a sequence near the end that works well for this game. It's great!

The game for the most part is really fun, super polished, and not particularly painful to go through. If someone might not have some of the same issues I do later on in this review, then I can see someone loving this game to pieces. But.. I have some SERIOUS issues with this game.

Starting off is the one that everyone, even the people who like the game is bringing up. On a narrative front, Stellar Blade is an absolute mess. The game's script is written so awkwardly, almost like it was machine-translated rather than actually localized. The dialogue is super awkwardly written and some moments in the side missions just feel kind of... embarrassing? The story setup is mildly interesting (until you notice something I'll bring up later), but the story's themes are barely explored apart from naming conventions and a couple of moments at the beginning and end.

The narrative didn't even need to be particularly deep or anything. Bayonetta and DMC games don't have deep stories, but A, they're not really trying to, and B, they do have a memorable cast with personalities at least. When I heard from reviews that Stellar Blade's cast isn't the strongest out there, what I DIDN'T expect to find was the most emotionless and barebones main character this side of The Callisto Protocol.

Eve is such a remarkably bland character, lacking a single actual personality trait. They try to develop Eve in a couple of ways regarding her ambiguous relationship with Tachy, who is also boring and has no character and then dies. They do a scene with this relationship in particular near the end of the game and it just felt so stilted and not super earned. But surely the other characters are better, right? I mean... I guess so? Lily at least has.. a personality and Adam, as boring as he is, at least has some interesting things happen with them later on, but the character writing is so incredibly weak in this game and the voice acting, both in Korean and English only makes it worse.

Okay, so that's the narrative stuff out of the way, what's that other major problem I have with the game that I've been edging you out of? This game does not have a fucking identity. I've been trying my best to hold back on comparing this game to NieR Automata up to this point, because I wanted to judge this game on its own, but it's so blatantly apparent just HOW MUCH of this game was derived from it. You play as a sexy android lady from a space base and are sent down to get rid of all of the bad guys that took over the Earth. You run around a semi-open world with a little drone that follows you around everywhere and talks to you. The game goes into detail on who the guys you are fighting and who you're working for REALLY ARE and there are themes of Identity and Religion and Life. The main character is very stoic and emotionless, but unlike 2B, here it's because they aren't written to have one. Hell, there are characters named Adam and Eve IN NIER AUTOMATA.

I know this all seems super surface level, but these comparisons wouldn't be such a huge problem if they had a super strong identity on their own and it really REALLY doesn't. The most distinctive thing about this game is that you're fighting Semi-religious gross penis monsters called Naytiba instead of robots. But that feels more like it clashes with the game's sci-fi aesthetic more than anything. Speaking of clashing, the character designs don't even really feel like they belong in the same game, most notably when you compare Eve, Lily, and Adam's designs. And they are the main 3 characters of the whole game. And most of the side characters don't even have faces, which is super weird? Why does the hairdresser have no hair? What are we doing here?

This also extends to the locations, Xion just feels like a pretty generic post-apocalyptic world. Half the time, in these linear missions, you fight in ruined cities and sewers and the two semi-open world areas you get are both bare empty deserts. I know asking for visual variety in a post-apocalyptic game is asking the wrong questions, but maybe have at least one of the open-world areas not be a desert??

All of these things combined, the art style clash between the different characters, friend, and foe, in this game, the super generic areas, the basic and derivative story, the lack of any characters with more than one personality trait, and the themes it doesn't touch on very much at all, leads to a game that doesn't really have an identity of its own. Hell, even though I love the music, it sounds very much like NieR music. The game's identity shines brightest in its combat, in its missions, in its boss encounters, and in one section near the end of the game that I thought was actually excellent.

This is clearly a talented team and the fact they were able to make a big console game this good on their first try is astounding. I can only hope their next game has more of a unique identity.

TLDR; The game is well-polished, has some great music, some decently fun linear and open world missions, and some exceptional combat and boss fights, but the character designs clash super hard with each other, the environments don't feel distinct, the story and character writing are incredibly bad, and the game just doesn't have a strong identity outside of copying NieR Automata's homework.

Muscle Mommy Kassandra
After 125 hours and completely 100%ing the game, I can say that the only good thing about this game is locations/atmosphere and Kassandra. Oh, also the never seen before Isu DLC. Poorly executed but still, it was interesting to experience it. It could have been WAAAAAY better but here we are. I don't even want to talk about animations and the effort put in this game.
It's not even an Assassin's Creed game, too. I just take this game at face value and subtract the "Assassin's Creed" from it and voila! it's a great game :D

Best part of the game: Muscle Mommy Kassandra :3

Followup to Zero Dawn with somewhat improved combat and a story that's probably a step backwards.

Compared to the first game the story is less scifi with an interesting setup and instead diverges into generic marvel movie territory. The novelty of the unique setting is lost and you are left with some of the most worthless/forgettable villain characters I've seen in anything in a long time. There are some likeable characters mainly because the actors perform well. Aloy becomes a bit more of a character which I think is a positive development. It's not the worst thing ever but the writing hardly seems like a reason to play the game..

Combat is mostly the same but has new techniques and weapon types to mix things up. There are a lot of great new enemy types and enemies are more aggressive in general. Though the valor surge system feels really jank with a forced cut-in animation and inability to switch types without going back to your skill tree.

I still think the constant slow-motion system with concentration and weapon wheel menu is wonky, the game is in constant slowmo switching speeds which was alright for one game but seems a bit off to continue with. To keep up enemies become more and more fast but I don't think that deals with the core issue. Some enemies like Stalkers still feel well designed and fun to fight with the system.
VS humans combat is still ass but the more fleshed out melee combo system makes it better. Fighting bandits in the first game was very forgettable and this isn't too different.

Open world traversal is alright with very accessible fast travel options and pretty environments. Like the first game the 'platforming' mostly plays itself and is turning your brain off, same with puzzles. Somehow the game only stops giving tooltips for basic controls during the final mission (amazing that they noticed it would detract from the scenario). The worst thing is probably Aloy talking to herself constantly and also spoiling every small puzzle solution.

The few Cauldron 'dungeons' might be a step above the first game, each is fairly unique + if you're in it for the mechanical designs these are fun to look at as before.

Probably the most impressive looking game I've yet played on the PS5 - couldn't stop thinking about how EXPENSIVE and lavishly produced it was while playing. My favorite moments were quiet transportive ones, diving into bodies of water as waves realistically rolled in, biological suds forming on top.

Was unfortunately bored for the majority of the experience, though. The sidequests had more character than in the 1st installment but the main quest was less so, in large part because the unfolding mystery of the world and your place in it was already covered in the first. I really think I'm done with open-world games where you predominantly follow prompts to see content, repeat. Combat would have been the saving grace but as fun and flashy as it is, it doesn't have the legs to power a 100 hr. adventure for me the way the combat of a From Soft or Monster Hunter game does.

Burning Shores was pretty dope, tho.

Truly a prime and the best example on how remakes should be made. Capcom is goated for this video game.

Honestly after RE3remake I wasn’t sure how Capcom would deliver RE4remake and I have to say this game was no disappointment AT ALL. First off I was always curious on how RE4 would look like with today’s modern graphics and I was blown away by it. I was always on the edge of my seat because I never had a moment in this game where I didn’t feel ominous. The visuals and small attentions to detail that stood out to me A LOT. This game better improves many of the mechanics from the original. Not saying the original is bad but this remake definitely made those same mechanics feel fresh. The puzzles are fun as always. They always seem challenging but after completing them I just feel so badass to accomplish them. Something Capcom always executed perfectly is the combat. I feel overwhelmed knowing many enemies are coming my direction with very little ammo left and I somehow still manage to survive. Despite Capcom using this concept I NEVER get tired of it as I love the feeling of relief afterwards. I also love all the weapons you can use. It’s awesome that you can now parry incoming attacks using your knife. I’m the assault kind of guy so I primarily focus on sub machine guns and the shot gun felt very essential when I struggled to take down bigger and tougher enemies. Luckily the merchant is still around and I still love him. Always seems reasonable for business all while delivering on cheesy lines. My only problem with the merchant is that he doesn’t usually have ammo in stock when I desperately need it. You can also do side missions for the merchant which will give you Spinels so that you can trade rather than buy items from him. These side missions were fairly straightforward and simple to do so I had fun. They also added stealth mechanics to this game. This isn’t a very big aspect and it’s simple to do and it’s not complex. In some cases to take out a few enemies it works but Resident Evil games were never about stealth for me as it’s more fun to run around guns blazing. The enemies were FREAKISHLY overwhelming and I mean that in a good way. Some enemies would come back to life so I wasn’t always sure if they were really dead or not and it would catch me off guard sometimes. Capcom also did great in getting you to use your knife carefully as it can break. And the boss fights were so fucking epic. Capcom always made horrifying and disgusting bosses that make your skin crawl and the fights itself are full of action. And of course there are many changes but this time I really didn’t mind most of them as it did help improve this remake from the original and added features that were all well worth it.

Story is great and full of excitement. I’ve always loved Leon being this chill man but a professional at what he does. He’s reliable and a badass. Story had a few changes here and there but the major changes to the story were for Luis and Ashley. I’m so glad we got more of Luis and doesn’t seem like a throwaway character. And this time I actually really cared about Ashley a lot. I never knew she needed this character development until I played this game and it got me so hooked on her. She’s a nice young lady that learns what she needs to do and got along with Leon. Something many people didn’t like were the interactions between Ada and Leon but I do appreciate how Capcom handled Ada’s and Leon’s relationship. On one hand I do prefer their interactions from the original RE4 but on the other hand their interactions felt more realistic in the remake. Let’s not forget in RE2remake Ada basically played with Leon’s feelings for her own personal gain which got Leon to distrust her. It’s understandable why Leon gave Ada the cold shoulder in this remake. And I appreciate it because whenever you have a loved one that tricks you to be a fool, it’s natural human behavior to be rude and distrust them or at least be more cautious around them and RE4remake is more believable on that aspect. And it’s obvious Ada still does care about Leon but he has a ways to go before he realizes that. Otherwise Ada and Leon are perfect for each other, after all who doesn’t want a gorgeous woman like Ada who gifts you an RPG at the end of the game? Right…? Jokes aside I love setting of this game, the village, the castle and island in Spain worked out great and parasites can be soooooooo creepy.

Capcom outdid themselves, they delivered on a remake that I can say is my favorite remake of all time. The original RE4 is already a phenomenal game for its time and RE4remake is a modern classic. I can go on forever with the amount changes that were made but I don’t want to make my review any longer than it already is. But I’ve already started on NG+ and I look forward to doing everything I can accomplish in this game. Not sure what Capcom has plans for next but I will patiently wait for it with a smile on my face.