This rating is based on playing through the game on a Dreamcast.

The parts that are actually good are really good (some of the Sonic levels, the overall reasonably fun story) and the game is incredibly charming. What keeps me from being able to endorse this game in any way is what the actual experience of playing it is like... it's a real slog to sit through for a lot of reasons, such as cutscenes that are PAINFULLY slow and a lot of repetition amidst its multiple character playthroughs constructed mostly of reused content. Honestly, this could have been a really incredible game if they infinite development time and resources because the ideas are all there- for example, playing as Amy pretty much sucks EXCEPT for when there are level segments designed specifically for Amy, all of which are pretty cool but which make up like 10% of her campaign. The robot whose name I forget has cool gameplay ideas but a real lack of levels to make use of them and most of his bosses can be beaten by standing still and repeatedly pressing the attack button. You get the idea.

What Chrono Trigger does well it does better than any SNES game, possibly any RPG, possibly any video game ever. At its peaks it's engrossing in a way that needs to be felt to believed. The soundtrack is also incredible. So it's a real shame that most of the game is just, like, completely boring. All of that "immersion" (as much as I hate the term) bleeds away as you get into random battle after random battle after random battle- as cool as it is that fights take place without a transition to another screen, it's really not a replacement for substance.

There's nothing inherently wrong with turn-based combat. At its core, turn-based combat just boils combat down to a series of decisions, so as long as there are meaningful decisions to be made (or some other way to make that appealing) it can be a great system. Chrono Trigger really fails there- 95% of combat encounters just involve scrolling through menus to pick the same option for the 999th time. Bossfights try to spice things up with unique mechanics, but they're nearly all so easy as to be insubstantial or.. just actually insubstantial, like if you didn't even notice they were there it wouldn't hinder you at all.

[Very minor spoilers ahead]

As much as Chrono Trigger takes you on an incredible adventure, the actual plot is barebones (which is fine). The bigger story flaw is that its characters are actually all varied and interesting and have some great moments... all of which are stacked together right at the game in a series of optional sidequests. Half of the characters in the game join the party after speaking one or two sentences, then go silent for practically the rest of the game. Interestingly, there's a section later in the game where the (silent) protagonist leaves the party, and the rest of the characters (now freed from having to speak to someone that can't respond) all seem to come alive, interacting and bouncing off of each other in really charming ways. All of the elements to make something great are there but they're jumbled in such a way that it's impossible to feel any real emotional investment- I suspect a lot of the reason people love this game is that they've played it multiple times through so they care less about the back-loading of character development.

It's still worth playing, the highs are worth experiencing, just expect to spend quite a bit of time bored and don't expect to be too emotionally invested.

The story is good, but it gets no points for that because it's just a series of cutscenes disconnected from the legendarily awful gameplay. Even if you love the card-based combat system 99% of the game is just fighting the same completely easy enemies over and over and over and over. Before the final battle, you have to do (exactly) 100 regular enemy encounters in a row, with a counter counting down from 100 and everything. They're completely easy and you get through them by just pressing the same button over and over again (which you've been doing for the entire game), and that pretty much sums up RE:COM.

Overdesigned slurry. So much of what you can do in this game is mechanistic and utilitarian to a fault- yes, giving the Doomguy a little dash like he's an Overwatch character does open up new encounter design opportunities because now he has a dodge button, but it's the most boring form of mobility imaginable. I think Doom Eternal's design is best understood by looking at the Flame Belch- one of many activatable-on-a-cooldown abilities that you have at your disposal, the flame belch shoots out a tiny little gout of fire in front of you. When you hit enemies ignited by it you get armor. It looks and feels like shit to use and doesn't really add any depth to the combat (you use it when you need armor, not rocket science) but it's necessary to fill out the game's overall design philosophy of Doomguy being self-sustaining, never needing to stop to get ammo or health or etc. because now there's a button to get that from enemies instead. You have like 5 buttons that are basically the equivalent of the flame belch- they serve a clear mechanical PURPOSE but don't improve gameplay. The result is you can do a bunch of stuff. None of it is fun or satisfying to do and you're going to do it a lot. It doesn't make for a bad game, just a dull one. It would be a lot better off if the level and encounter design wasn't largely generic and dull (the DLC improves the encounter design a lot and finds ways to make the same enemies interesting; if you like this game that's the best part of it). A lot of design choices meant to incentivize weapon switching (which is good) are way too linear and one-dimensional- for example, one enemy has a little weak spot disconnected from its body, so when you see one of those guys you switch to the gun that can scope in a shoot the weak point. I used the same gun to do this every single time. It didn't make combat more dynamic, it felt like playing simon says. Any interesting emergent gameplay or actual improvisation in combat is lost beneath the flood of systems that create obvious correct options in most situations.

It's still pretty fun. It's not terrible or anything, if you like Doom 2016 it's probably at least worth trying.

Really excellent story, Emet-Selch is fantastic. Genuinely unbelievable that even when the writing has improved so dramatically the game still manages to constantly run into the same pitfalls over and over and over- the big dramatic climax is randomly interrupted so you can go to a new zone and talk to some extremely boring fishmen. I get that it's a product of trying to simultaneously tell a story and be an MMORPG expansion that's obligated to introduce the new content, but it feels like even at its peak FFXIV is outright hostile to the concept of "pacing."

Still hate the art style; the washed out color scheme and enemy designs straight out of "What If Final Fantasy Was In Real Life?" fan art left the aforementioned fancy new underwater zone substantially visually duller than the average vanilla WoW zone.

Love to see a game that's not afraid to REALLY make you suffer. A true work of ludonarrative excellence (and also just plain narrative excellence). Don't be afraid of the game's purported impossible difficulty, it's not actually that "hard" per se, it's just (deliberately) arbitrary and unfair (the difference being- it doesn't take a lot of skill or a huge brain to beat the game, it just takes the stubbornness to keep retrying). The ultimate goal of the game is to use the meta-progression tools at your disposal to avoid having to deal with the unfair bits.

Some will tell you Deadly Premonition is an offbeat genius masterpiece with a great story, some will tell you it's basically a "so bad it's good" game. It unquestionably contains elements of both, but what makes the game special and an absolute must-play is where those two modes intersect and muddy each other; the patently awful gameplay is funny in a way that's simultaneously clearly unintentional but also clearly intentional. A lot of genuinely smart design elements (see: long, boring car rides) are wrongly dismissed as unnecessary padding because of how clearly unfinished so much of the game is. Best played with friends, but you'll find yourself spending as much time discussing how great the ending (unironically) was as you do laughing at the game's comedy (intentional or otherwise).

Profoundly well-designed combat, nowhere near as hard as most say as long as you're willing to experiment and keep working on new builds (which, vitally, is very fun). Be forewarned- there are some really arbitrary difficulty spikes, but nearly all of them can be overcome by just creating loadouts specialized to beat that fight.

The story lacks the focused, engrossing intensity of Lobotomy Corp (and is generally worse-off for it) and isn't quite as on-point from a ludonarrative standpoint, but it makes up for it by greatly expanding on Project Moon's incredible setting through what are essentially short stories that all intersect in cool ways.

Basically everything you've been told about Kingdom Hearts by its detractors is wrong (and I say that as a detractor). Every Kingdom Hearts game has the same problem- a huge portion of the runtime is devoted to running through an empty, dull, flat environment themed after a Disney movie while being subjected to what essentially amounts to a Wikipedia plot synopsis of that same movie. It's shockingly dull. Kingdom Hearts is at its best when it's just being corny (and eventually convoluted) Final Fantasy but with Mickey Mouse running around in there.

KH2 is the only game in the series that's actually good enough to justify the massive time-waste of boring plot summary and dull world design (seriously, every original environment- twilight town, hollow bastion, etc. looks amazing and every Disney movie world just looks like a generic video game environment). The gameplay is.. fine. It has high highs (many of the bossfights are excellent, the Final Mix version's additional fights are some of the best gameplay in the series) but low lows with plenty of dull combat against generic enemies due to Sora having a very limited moveset at any given time (lots of options, but you can't use many at once). The real draw is the story, which (when it's not Disney stuff) oscillates wildly between being astoundingly great (the prologue/opening sequence of KH2 is just straight up excellent story telling) and ridiculous unintentional comedy.

Other reviews have already said everything I would want to say but I just want to add that I adore how the final boss of the final ending completely invalidates all of the progress you've made as a player by 1. completely disregarding how you've developed your character (since your level is ignored, weapons aren't used, etc) and 2. completely disregarding how you've improved as a player by randomly making you play a janky rhythm game. Perfect irony for the game to make you perform the most Pointless Video Game Task of all time by collecting every single weapon just to turn around and say "that was a waste of time and you're a moron for doing it. Fuck you." I don't think any of Yoko Taro's games (many of which are trying to do a similar thing to Drakengard) pull it off nearly as well because most of them are at least trying to be fun.

Incredible first 2 chapters followed by an equally incredible faceplant. Any semblance of horror or tension or atmosphere is lost and you spend a full chapter walking down linear hallways disarming trip mines (and occasionally backpedaling back through them while you shoot a monster that poses no threat). The latter half of the game feels like a completely different one from the first (many such cases in the RE series but in this case the second game is just... terrible). Still worth playing for the good parts, but a real missed opportunity.