Wife’s Reaction:
“Are you for real asking mefor a comment? You know I didn’t watch it.”

Cyberpunk Final Fantasy 7:
It’s fun to go blind into a game you get from a Humble bundle. It’s also nice to have an RPG that isn’t 35+ hours. In 7 hours I got to experience some great pixel animation and rad music, an okay story with nice characters, and decent gameplay that didn’t evolve much until a difficulty spike with the final boss.

To begin with, having played/watched fan translations first, the localization is fine with a few glaring flaws. Nonetheless, I think it was handled well (although “Rei” will always be Haori to me). With that out of the way, this really is a must-play for Ace Attorney fans. You can tell that this was Shu Takumi’s passion project in both the best and worst ways, but overall it’s a great experience. The characters are some of the best in the franchise and overarching narrative is well thought-out and engaging. This game looks much, much better than the other 3D Ace Attorney titles, and the music is great. That all said, the handling of the period-accurate racism isn’t something I should really gauge, but it’s worth looking into. On another note, there is a lot of tutorial that really makes the first half of the first game (and the second game’s first case) drag. Nonetheless, I can’t emphasize enough how much I enjoyed this, and I think that it’s more than worth the playthrough.

Really liked how starting fresh with a new setting and cast of characters made Ace Attorney unpredictable and exciting again.

Really did not like how long it takes to advance dialogue even when setting text speed to the fastest option.

Probably the best in the Ace Attorney series because it allows the story to evolve over the course of two games.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 takes everything about the past titles and improves upon it in all the ways that make these games great while not really addressing some of the flaws of the past games. This one definitly shines the best and is easily the best spider-man simulator out there bar none.

I don't think the games is without it's flaws like I said but how can you complain when the overall package is this good. Some of the minor gripes I have was that I find the combat actually improved since the last title, however I feel enemy encounters are much worse in this one. It always feels like an enemy is constantly sniping at me preventing me from really getting a good ground game and making some flashy combos. The ground combat mixed with aerial combat is much better in this one and the improvments made to the gadgets and special abilities work really well but I'm repeaditly dodging and disarming baddies nonstop that my cool cinematic improvised combo is always ruined by the annoying spammer. The side content which was really lacking in the first title is much better in this one thankfully but I still feel like scratching my head at some of them. They are wildly different in quality. Like compare the Flame questline to the Science Foundation questline. The side stories are great but there are so few of them in this one. There is a lot to collect in this game for sure but I wish the side content was fleshed out a bit better. It's still not where I think it sound be. The only thing I can really think of is the pacing in the first half is kinda bad. There is so much stretched out content in the Kraven arc that were I felt I put so many hours into the game and I don't even have the symbiote yet. Also I feel the costume selection is somehow not as good as SP1. Am i misrembering? But how the hell could they get rid of the animated classic spider-man from SP1. That was one of my favorites. We really got to have 10 different versions of classic variants expect for that?

Dispite that I was surprised how much I ended up liking this one. I was always kinda mid on the first title, as I thought it had a lot of potential, especially with the traversal. I liked Miles Morales even more after that where I felt the combat and story was much better. Plus with that being a smaller title I felt the pacing was really good in that game. I was starting to think could they pull it off with Spider-Man 2? There seemed to be so much stuff in the game thematically. 2 playable characters, more mary jane sections, kraven, lizard, symbiote and venom on top of several skill trees. Will each character have enough unique content? Relevance and character progression in the story? There felt like there was a lot of ideas here but I'm glad to say that I think they did a great job with all of it. I was also worried that Miles would be swept to the sidelines being a Peter symbiote heavy story but I never felt like he was and was always center stage just as much as peter, which I really appreciated.

I knew I was going to like the gameplay loop. I knew the traversal was going to be great. I knew the double map size with no loading or any pop in was going to feel next gen. What I didn't expect was how much I was surprised by the quality of the story and character developments. There is some real good spider-man shit in here. Once the symbiote starts taking control of peter, oh man I feel the story and pacing really pick up there and never lets go. The story takes many liberties by changing certain aspects and traditional spider norms but it does really work in favor of this game. I did not expect so many emotional beats as there was. There were a lot of surprises and set peices that I really did not expect and glad they were in there.

Venom was everything I wanted him to be. I always knew Tony Todd would do an excellent Venom the second he was cast. I just wanted more lines from him. I would have loved some more quips and insults with that voice but I get thats not what they were going for in this version.

Spider-Man 2 is an easy Game of the Year material and makes me much more excited for a Spider-Man trilogy ender if the escalation is anything to go by til then. I wouldn't mind if they take their time crafting that one as well. Hell, wolverine will be a perfect stop gap until then.

Platinum #191

Insomniac's Spider-Man games are top tier blockbuster video games, there's no denying that. This game has everything dialed up even greater than the previous two games, with larger spectacle and an enormous amount of technical prowess on display. I did find the story to be a little bit weaker than the first game, but after a slower start it leveled out and strengthened. The combat and exploration are definitely better than ever, with an astounding amount of options for dispatching foes and vastly improved web-slinging. The Web Wings also make exploring New York a treat, truly the best open world traversal out of any game I've played. Insomniac definitely "gets" Spider-Man, so I'm hopeful they'll get to continue using this property for some time.

I'm glad yuji naka is in jail

Quick story before going into this; a year or two ago i had a quick 3d sonic stint of SA1/2/Heroes. 1 I thought was bad but had good ideas in it. 2 was overall better but still had some wack shit, but it felt like a good step forward. Heroes was so bad i didnt even bother finishing one route.
I also have that friend everyone has, who really likes Sonic. He tells me that sonic heroes was "okay". I thought it was unplayable. And then when Shadow is mentoined, he said he thought this game was unplayable.
I had to know. I had played this game as a kid so I remembered a chunk of it, but I was a stupid child with no standards. How bad could it be.

It's pretty bad. But in unique ways!

The game's biggest gimmick is it's path system; each mission has 2-3 different ways to beat it; one of them will be just reach the end of the level but other ones will be things like kill X amount of certain type of enemies, find X collectables, ect ect. Depending on what you pick it'll decide what level you get next, making a multi pathed flowchart campaign that lasts 6 levels and a few bosses. The game has 12 different endings which are needed to unlock the true real ending. Even if you're trying to repeat as little missiosn as possible, it'll feel repetitive between just going through levels again and again. You're gonna get really good at westopolis.

Levels and missions have a large range in quality, which is strange because I can't think of a mission that I have an opinion higher then "it's okay". Most missions that are just run to the end are fine enough, while everything else is either tedious or obnoxious. Some levels use it well, where youll go on wildly different paths depending on which mission you're trying to complete, but not enough most will jsut be walking around and killing everything. Hate all the destroy thing before it leaves missions. Also shoutouts to the one mission where the hero mission is to reach the end under the time limit, but the neutral mission requires you to reach the end OVER the time limit, so if you want to go neutral route (it's a 5th mission so its actually important), you just gotta sit there next to the ring until time is over. this is the mission design we're working with here.

Of course in classic 3d sonic fashion, shadow kinda controls like shit. He accelerates into full speed almost instantly and he turns fucking wide. It doesn't help that most of the level design is not made with this character speed in mind; why does shadow blitz into absurd speed in under a second when there's so few parts of the level where you just wont run into a wall or an enemy you couldn't of know was standing there along the way.

Other gameplay mechanics are also all oddly put together. Weapons are around always but because shadow swings wide everything that isn't autoaim feels shitty, but they all do so much more damage then actually air dashing at enemies. I'm not sure why there's even vehicles in this game at all, the only one thats worth using is the one that jumps higher and that's because the segments with it you need to use it. The chaos blast/control meter is also very silly, it's often slower then just shooting things, and while chaos control is very useful for reaching the end of the level skipping to the end is often counter productive to many missions.

Also I'm sure this isn't going to surprise you but the story is Not Good! Normally this would be a thing to mentoin but the game has a pretty heavy narrative push, the idea being what paths you take decides who Shadow ends up being. An ambitious idea but it just doesn't really work; doing anything that isn't just Pure Evil/Neutral/Hero will just end up in a completely nonsense narrative with no consistency, and even the pure routes which feel more structured aren't really compelling, even in a fun campy way like SA2.

That being said if you don't know shadow's whole character arch from SA2 > StH you should look it up because it's pretty crazy. And also just never mentioned again after this game. I sorta miss when sonic had a more consistent world and the events of previous gams were relevant but all these games after SA2 got panned critically until they dropped it so it's probably not coming back.

One last thing worth discussing is the "tone". Many remember this as being really fucking edgy. And it kinda is; characters "swear", you got guns and shoot people, people say "kill", the menu select sound effect is a gunshot. However it's so funny how they dial it back; they could not fucking possibly let this game get even a T rating, I'm sure the E10 rating ate them up inside. You can shoot humans but they don't actually die; they lie on the ground very obviously Not Dead and be like Please Dont Kill Me :(, most of the guns are NERF rifle looking shit and swears never go further then "damn". The game's tone is some kid trying to be cool and edgy but he doesn't want to go too far or mom will notice and get mad at him.

STH sucks. While there's neat ideas in theory none of it really works well at all and ends with a tedious and repetitive game. But I guess I bothered to get to the end so its better than Sonic Heroes.

it was killer when shadow was like "it's like taking candy from a baby, and that's all right" on the HERO route, though.

Its a solid 2D platformer with decent level design and a good moveset. It's not on the level of something like Tropical Freeze because it's missing that extra layer of Nintendo polish but it was enjoyable. The ideas in this game are innovative for the genre like how effecting the overworld can create alternate levels. It had cool ideas. Didnt like the final level very much, precise platforming with janky hurt boxes from spikes and enemies was just not a fun time. Felt like it went against what made this game fun by making you play extremely slow and safe. It's like those slow levels in Sonic 1 you really hate but 10x worse but I got through it with 34 bees. Cool idea for a final level but it needed work.

This game ends on a fade to black screen with text that sasy "This story never truly ends". This is a reference to the fact that this game as so much post game stuff that it seems insane to actually 100%, and also that it ends on like 3 cliffhangers that might never get resolved.

Xenoblade X is very strange. Anyone familiar with the rest of the Xenoblade franchise knows that the games take a lot of inspiration from the MMO; obvious things like aggro being a game mechanic to just how the game map is designed, ect ect. But while XB games often feel like JRPGs that kind of feel like single player MMOs; XBX is basically just a single player mode. The single player part isn't even accurate; this game Kinda has multiplayer. Sorta.

The game's main story is... lacking. While the main setup is interesting and has some good moments it is blatantly an unfinished story and was made with a sequel that has never arrived in mind. The ending of this game's main story is loaded with what feels an endless pile of unfinished story threads or just straight up cliffhangers. This wasn't a huge deal in 2015 when there wasn't a precedent for this franchise yet and assumed that Monolith's next game would be XBX2. And then that game was acutally XB2. And then we said okay well now it's time for XBX2. Then it was the XB1 remake. And before we even got to say XBX2 XB3 got revealed. Maybe XBX2 or just a XBX remake is on the way now that the Klaus trilogy is over, but maybe the next trailer with a monolith logo will just be XB4 with some brand new shit. who knows.

While the main story is lacking I cannot say the same about this game's side quests, which are fantastic and some of the highlights of this game. While there's plenty of really generic one there's also a lot of hitters, and oddly a lot of quests branching paths that actually end pretty differently. A few examples: A quest where you're tasked with rescuing 3 people but if you rescue them in the right order you wont learn + acquire the item that lets you scare off the Giant Fucking Monkey that kills one of them. You help repair a crashed helicopter but end up in charge of picking the right wire to plug in. If you pick the wrong one (which you can figure out from main city dialogue.) the helicopter crashes again because you fucked it up idiot and they die, changing your rewards. In another someone's life is deicided by whenever or not you let them take a Anti-Stress shower. A lot of people can bite it in this game.

This does lead into an annoyance I have with this game however; this is one of the most You Gotta Wiki This Shit games ever. Many quests require you to acquire The random items that drop in the overworld, and there is no clear indicator as to where you get these items, even if you've gotten them before. Thankfully the fellas are the Xenoblade wiki are gods strongest soldiers, but the I Need To Wiki this extends well into a lot of this game; for exmaple, I didnt know that Skells overdrive bonus' change depending on what kind of Skell you use until literally writing out this review. Speaking of lets wiki this, Lets talk combat and class design.

Combat and classes are tied together. Your skills tied to what weapons you use (AKA if your class uses Knife and raygun, you can only use knife and raygun skills), but when you max out a class you are free to equip its weapons to any other class. The passives your job unlocks can also be moved onto any other job; infact the best job in there game is technically the starting blank because it has the most passive slots, but it's not good until you actually make a lot of progress and have a lot of skills unlocked.
Because of the above, this game has a really extensive build options. Probably deeper than Diablo 4. You get to pick from 8 skills from your two weapon choices (there are 12 weapons total), which have around 12-15 skills each, an additional 3-5 passives (each job also unlocks like 6~ passive options). And this isn't even considering your actual stat builds though armor and skells.

The big problem with it is that the eternity of your ground skill build should be based around a single thing; a good overdrive set up. And there is nothing more I Need A Wiki than Overdrive.
This whole franchise is full of I Need A Wiki Or Youtube video things but each game's Chain Attack equivalent I think you can figure out how to get a good result by bumbling you way through some CAs and eventually the neurons start connecting. You will probably need a video to really optimize but thats whatever.
Not the same with Overdrive. OD, the game's CA equivalent (though they are very different), is impossible to figure out on your own. You have got to pick up a video for that shit to really figure it out, and the video that's the clearest explanation of the system came out only like 3 years ago. And unfortunately, like I mentioned previously, your entire ground build should be based around being able to get an infinite overdrive. The entire game opens up once you actually understand how to overdrive, but I've spoken to a lot of people and many of them just never interacted with OD because they had no idea wtf is happening when you hit the button, and the game offers no clearance at all about what it is does. it's crazy.
In truth ground combat is pretty slow even with a good build, and you're relatively weak until you get 3000 tp and then, as long as you aren't getting 1 shot by the enemy, you can kinda just turn into an unstoppable and the game becomes really fun because you're pressing tons of buttons and there's that joy of seeing a build really click together; but if you cant figure out OD it's going to feel really wack.

On the flip side, lets talk skells. Skells, the mechas, get acquired at a later point in the story and are also a pretty important goal in endgame progression. The level 30/50 skells are acquired just through a pretty significant investment in money, while the level 60 and higher skells require going out to getting endgame materials and the alternative resources investment. The customizable skells (some 60 skells just have unchangeable skills are based on) are based entirely on the gear you ahve equipped.
However skell builds and combat feels oddly shallower than ground combat. Looking online a lot of skell builds boil down to:
1) try to oneshot with a super weapon
2) One very high power 60sec~ cooldown skill paired with 7 short cooldown skills, and fishing for cockpit mode to keep it going
3) a pure debuff build, which you probably wont play yourself but shove onto a NPC party member skell.

It often feels like there isn't much to it other than just pressing the buttons when they're on.
Skells are also just loaded with a bunch of weird mechanics that feel like baggage like Insurance, Fuel and jsut getting your skell back wehn it dies. just weird and frustrating ways to stop you from using skells 100% of the time once you get them, which is an annoyance to work with and isnt even that relevant because once you get overdrive the pilot becomes better than skells (assuming we're talking about something that wont get oneshot by a super weapon)

Other things that I can't segway into cleanly:
-I didnt super get to explore the end game/online because there's backlog stuff i wanna play, but this game is filling to the brim with content if you're a compleitionist. Tons of quest, affinity missions, late game gearing, build options yo ucan pretty freely swap between, ect. This game' online is on the way out because the wii u is shutting down all their stuff, so I wanna try going back in and really getting into it before it goes.
-A very large part of this game is having to explore through regions full of enemies that are higher level than you and it is On Sight if they spot you. Many missions really are just Go To This Place And Talk To This Guy which sounds bad... but the guy is in an area of enemies that are 20 levels over you when you unlock the quest. This is kino and it rules. Some of the funniest moments in this game is getting jumped by an enemy while fighting something else.
-just an insane soundtrack. They really just let Sawano do whatever the fuck he wants. It's not my favorite XB soundtrack but it's the most unique one, also the Overdrive song does go crazy.
-The bad fights in this game are BAD. This game is maybe the most frustrated ive gotten in a XB game; any fight with an enemy in the air is very frustrating, and the final section of the game fight where you have to fight 10 enemies that all cleave and aoe stagger had me FUMING.
-skells are cool

XBX is a weird game. It's flies way too close to the sun in its goal of being a singleplayer MMO, something following XB games dialed back on, and almost everything in this game is poorly explained to the user and the game is just not as fun if you don't take the time to figure out its inner working, and has a pretty poor main story. However, if you can dig below the surface it is a game with a ton of a depth and a brickload of content, and just a unique game.

I hope monolith does plan to do something with XBX, seeing how a large chunk of the game is about to just disappear with the Wii U online. However if the next Monolith game is not XBX remake or XBX2, I think thats just them giving up on this franchise.

Finally dusted off my Wii U to play this. Wanted to finish the last Xenoblade game I've yet to play. And overall, I had a pretty great time. It has its issues, the side quests are as bad as always with not much meaningful or interesting story content to be gleamed with annoying dialogue I always skip. And the game does a poor job encouraging trying other characters due to lack of XP share and small gains with class XP for your main character. But the base combat system is awesome, overdrive is amazing once you master it. Just play as Elma the entire game and you are in for a fun time. The open world is great, the probes encourage wide exploration and the 5 unique zones feel pretty dense and varied. Story was a tad forgettable but not bad, it had characters I liked like Elma and the ending was certainly intriguing. I hope it gets a followup and a rerelease on Switch.

Full Analysis of the game if you'd like to support my YT endeavors!

God I wish I liked this game.

From the New World is the type of game that just so so so clearly needed more time to cook. After years of silence the devs have pretty much confirmed that things like the director being replaced had occurred midway through development. Hell they only had about maybe a year after Covenant to get this game out with that happening as well. So I don't wanna be super hard on the dev team for clearly trying their best.

Like for positives, the gameplay is the best in the series hands fuckin down. The stock system making it so you can't just combo shit every turn genuinely adds a nice layer of strategy to fights that you have to consider and makes getting combos hit way harder than they did in Covenant, the fact that magic is so customizable and in your hands with charts and stellars that are able to be swapped around with all of the characters just feels like such a great idea and evolution of the crests from Covenant as well.

The music fuckin slaps, absolutely the best in the series with tracks like Malice and From the New World living in my mind completely rent free.

The vibes and art direction are top notch, the content in this package is absolutely packed. It's impressive the kind of shit you could do at the time within a year and reusing assets, ideas and animations to get by the best you could. If I'd played this as a kid like I'd wanted to years and years ago now, I probably would've had more of a soft spot for this for the sheer amount of time you can invest in this very very fun to play game.

Unfortunately that just ain't how I played and experienced this though. From a narrative perspective (which I care about far more in RPG's where that's clearly the focus like it very obviously is here) it falls so so so flat. Characters come and go within this plot and don't really add much to it. The villains are so paper thin and poorly fleshed out that they spend pretty much half of this game standing around twiddling their thumbs while they wait for you. The main party consists of Shania (who should've been the Main Character like straight up it's mostly her story), Johnny (who is never given enough depth for his story to fully work) and the rest of the party which are mostly gag characters except for Ricardo who is such an explicit Desperado reference and taken so seriously and given ANYTHING within this plot that I honestly loved him along with Shania a lot.

Also just wanna say if you wanna see strangely similarish ideas explored on the Johnny side of things with characters that are more interesting and fleshed out you should seriously watch or read Blood Blockade Battlefront which I think manages to capture the spirit perfectly and I kinda wonder if Shadow Hearts was a slight inspiration on Nightow?

I wasn't expecting this game to be like even Covenant levels of solid but this is just so fuckin disappointing to me. Like past gameplay, music and art direction it just completely lets down everything else. For you that may be whatever and you may love and adore this as a gameplay first experience. But for me the stories in these games, even when flawed like the original Shadow Hearts was, were always something special.

It's a bummer that this is how things ended for the longest time. If I'd played this with no hope of Penny Blood I probably would've been extremely bummed upon finishing this. Thankfully interesting things are hopefully on the horizon but man, I wish this game and what it's going for with revenge, especially in regards to its POC subjects, had more time to breath and they had more time to flesh those ideas and concepts out. This game has its comedy but not enough to sustain this entire experience. It straight up feels like after you finish Vegas the game just comes to a complete fuckin halt in the worst ways plot wise. Shania running from dungeon to dungeon going "I'M GONNA KILL THAT WOMAN" as they constantly run from you and nothing is accomplished.

By the end I was just so exhausted. While this game has positives and I'm not gonna deny those one bit, this game is also an exhausting mess that just left me sad by the end with what it could've been.