Finally… one million roses… my Katamari white whale is harpooned, after becoming my most played game of 2023. I never managed it on the PS2, but having it portable made it possible! Of course, I’m not going to 100% the whole thing because that way lies madness, but you know.

Game’s great. There’s a lot of debate here whether the first or second game is better, but I’m gonna be real, I’m glad both of them exist and have gotten a rerelease. The first game has some stone cold classics and I like the music a little better, but this game has some real bangers. I think I got the deluxe edition and that came with a few extra tunes, which I think was a pretty good investment. I will admit to having a preference for some of the weird gimmicks of this game as well, like trying to raise money for the red pandas… and I’m gonna be real. I’m not sure if there’s a way to play as the cousins in single player in the first game and that being really accessible in the second game pushes it over a little for me. The Prince is great, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not as much of a little freak as, say, Daisy or Slip or Kinoko, and I LOVE getting to play as a little freak. It’s fun to switch between the cousins and see how the presents show up differently on them, too.

In terms of gameplay, I think it’s a little more forgiving than the first game in some ways. I went back to play the original some night when I wasn’t feeling well and I was kind of surprised by how easily stuff got knocked off my Katamari… granted, there are some really mean challenges as well, like Bearcow and how unforgiving some of the meteor requirements feel. It does feel like there are some weird RNG elements too, like how many variants on the Field of Sweets level there are… but I do think that’s kind of worth it for the King’s weird dialogue. Also RIP to the original English voice acting, I miss SWEEEETS.

The story is, of course, just silly, but it’s very fun getting to see the King’s wild backstory. Speaking of, I can’t say I was particularly compelled to do extremely well on the Reroll-specific levels, even if I appreciate their presence. I know people were talking about how they liked the ghost level but that one just made me kind of mad… I’ll admit to being curious to see what the other games made without Keita Takahashi’s input are like, so if they decide to rerelease those, I’ll probably check them out. I wonder how they’ll feel? The vibes of We <3 Katamari and the original feel kind of hard to replicate, even if I think the gameplay itself will probably be good. Although… man, I saw a few of those post-We <3 Katamari cousins and they are some delightful little freaks I want to play as. Hmmm.

This game aged so well :o

I played it for the very first time, I had never touched any Metal Gear Solid game before, and I'm really impressed by how great it feels to play this 25 years old game! It is so creative and well crafted that if it wasn't for the graphics, I wouldn't be able to tell that this game is that old.

Gameplay is very solid (snake lol), situations varies a lot and are always renewing, and there are so many tools to use. Not a single one feels useless. In every situations there is always something you can do or use to make things easier. Every time. And items you get at the start of the game stay usefull during the whole game and that's not something a lot of games manage to do!
Weapons are also very varied, there is one for every situation you can possibly imagine! Not a single one feels like its taking the job of another, even tho there are a lot of them.
The only item I didn't really use is the camera, because I don't really want to fill my PS1 memory card with screenshots :')

Also, something I really want to mention: everything is justified. It is mindblowing how any incoherence due to this being a game has been thought about and justified in universe. Just one example to explain what I mean: when someone calls you to give you orders, you hear a ringing sfx. This is so that you, the player, knows that you can answer the call. But in universe, this sound is emitted by a small device in the inner ear of Snake, meaning that only him can hear it. And there are things like that for everything and anything that the game does to be a game, it is both ridiculous and amazing hahaha!

From a pure playability perspective, the game is almost perfect. The character controls feels very responsive, the camera angles are never playing against you and everything works really well. I have only two criticisms to make, both of which are forgivable if you consider that this game was released a quarter of a century ago:
･ Menus (both the items and weapons ones) are a bit tiresome to naviguate. This is even more true on the second half part of the game because you have so many items and you have to switch very often, meaning that you are pausing the game and scrolling through aaaaaaall the list very frequently.
･ The sniper rifle is very slow to aim, because it's so zoomed in, and it makes using it really hard for nothing. But you don't need it very often so it's alright.

I'm so glad I got to play MGS on the original hardware, because the game tends to do meta stuff in very clever ways. I think the best-known example is the Psycho Mantis fight, but what really got me was the way to find the frequency to contact Meryl. Those who know know, but when I figured this out it felt so smart and unexpected! This alone was already worth the money I spend to get a physical copy to play it on my PlayStation.

Speaking of Psycho Mantis, it's a boss fight and there are many others. I feel I'm repeating what I said about the weapons but all of them are very unique! They all have very precise weaknesses to dicover and it always feels very rewarding to beat them.
You will probably die a few time but once you know how to beat a boss, it is just a matter of doing the right thing. The game is never too hard and it is very generous with checkpoints, so progression is very fluid.

The music contributes greatly to the atmosphere, whether during stealth sequences or the iconic "Encounter" track when you are spotted! And it also works really well during cutscenes!

And cutscenes this game has, and some amazing ones even! It's impressive to see the level of detail in the staging. There are so many creative decisions with camera shots and the depicting of the scenes!
The plot is very interesting and it catched my interest quickly. Characters are great. They all feel like they had things happen to them prior to the story and that makes them interesting. Only complaint: it's a shame but the game is a bit sexist at times...
The writing is great, the story is full of mysteries, conspiracies and betrayals, and it kept me hook until the end!
Also, and that may be the most important aspect depending on who you are, the game has a really strong message about war and nuclear weaponnary. Games with strong messages are the games I tend to like the most, so I enjoyed this part a lot.
I played the game in french, and it is knowned for it particularily cheesy dubing. I don't know how the original japanese version was, but I actually really enjoyed how the actors played. It is a bit goofy, but somehow when tragic events happens, it still works and the mood is absolutly not ruined by the dubing. It's so strange because I was expecting it to sound ridiculous, considering all the parodies I have heard prior to actually playing the game.
By the way, I love Mei Ling and her quotes that you get every time you save. It's very entertaining and made me look forward to the next time I would save! In what other game are you hyped about saving? Not a lot of games I think :')

So! All in all an excellent game that I recommand to everyone! Play it on original hardware if you can, because I think otherwise you will lose some fun ideas that work only with the way the game was originaly meant to be played.
It's rare to find games that aged as well as this one, so well that I found it more enjoyable than many other games that came out way after this one! It is also realtively short (count around 10h to go through the whole thing on your first playthrough), so it is absolutely not a huge time investment.

I'm now really looking forward to playing the other MGS games!

Thanks for reading my thoughts, as always its super long but I can't help it haha :D

Luigi's Mansion 3 is a fun puzzle adventure game disguised as a survival horror game!
If you are the type of person that is easely scared, you can rest assured! The game never really tries to scare you or to put pressure on you. The only one scared in this game is that poor Lugi haha!

So, in this game you play as Luigi, who must explore a haunted hotel to rescue his friends, that have been turned into paintings. To do so, you will have to solve puzzles and fight many ghost using your vacuum, that can suck object and ghost or blow air, a lamp and a suction cup grapple, in order to unlock and explore the many floors of the hotel.

The first thing I noticed when playing it, every object reacts to physics. Coupled with your ability to vacuum or blow in any direction, every action you take creates a huge mess of flying objects everywhere on the screen and it is very fun! What's make this even more impressive is that the game looks gorgeous, the lighting is amazing, and the game never slows down!

Puzzles are all very clever and varied! Part of the fun of this game is to see how objects react to your arsenal of tools and try to guess what chain reaction will lead to the next door opening.
There are also many secrets everywhere! They serve no purpose other than completion, but I found myself really invested in finding them, because it is fun to interact with everything in the scenery!

You can tell that this game has been made with children in mind, because by default the game gives you hints on what to do next. This can thankfully be disabled in the option and I recommend doing so, because the game don't even wait for 30s before telling you a hint, and it really hinders the sentiment of discovery. And if you really get stuck on a particular puzzle, you can always re-enable this feature temporarily, just as I did on the Cinema Floor.

Speeking of floors, there are a total of 17 and they all have their unique theme and mechanics. I loved that there are no limits with how crazy they can get, from the very classical hotel look to the egyptian desert, a pirate bay or a medieval castle. It makes unlocking new floors even more fun because while you wait for the elevator to lift you, you always try and guess what you will see next!

Apart from the bosses of each floor, there aren't many different ghosts (I believe there are 4 main types and small variations for each of them), but the situations in which you encounter them are sufficiently varied to make you forget that.

My only real complaint: I would have liked that the game told me I could control everything using only the triggers, instead of having to use the face buttons. When I discovered that R = A, L = Y and L + R = X, it made combat and puzzle solving a lot more enjoyable, because it increased my mobility by a lot.

So, if you are searching for a good puzzle adventure game, with goofy characters and cathartic gameplay that allows you to destroy every object that you cross, I can recommand this game! Its length is reasonable (I beat it in 12h30) but if you are really trying to find all the secrets, I think you could take almost twice as long as I did!

This game is fun!

First thing, I'm not a big Kingdom Hearts player. In fact, with the exception of the time I played the first 3 hours of Kingdom Hearts 1 on an emulator, this was my first experience of a KH game as a player. I have to specify "as a player" because I used to watch KH let's plays when I was younger, so I'm kinda familiar with the story and characters.

For those who don't know Kingdom Hearts, it's a series of action RPGs featuring characters from Square Enix's games (particularily from Final Fantasy) and the Disney movies. While it sounds like a strange combination, I would say it works pretty well in the narrative that has been developped around it, which is very "Light VS Darkness" driven. But let me introduce the game I played because this is not a review of KH story as a whole.

In KH: Birth by Sleep, you follow the story of 3 friends: Ventus, Terra and Aqua. The three of them are training to become Keyblade Masters, wielders of swords named Keyblades, that have the power of unlocking hearts and opening pathes to other worlds. The game is structured in an original way: the 3 friends will be separated at the start of the game, and you will play each of their stories in any order you like, trying to piece together the complete story.
While the game lets you pick who you want to play first, there is an optimal order that the game gives you (it is Terra, then Ventus and finally Aqua). I chose not to listen to this suggestion and played in this order: Ventus, then Terra and finally Aqua. I don't think it matters too much but you should know that some of the intial exposure happens only in Terra's story, and the final chapter that you can unlock after beating all stories takes place from Aqua's side of view.

That being said, if you are not familliar with KH I would not recommend playing this game only for the story. It serves as a prequel to explain stuff that happens in KH1, 2 and probably 3. If you don't know either of those games, a third of the story elements brought in the plot will remain unexplained.
Moreover, while the story concepts are great and have potential, I found that the writing was pretty bad. The characters are almost every time either very good or very evil (most of them being Disney characters, it makes sense, but it is kinda boring on the long run), plus they have a tendancy to repeat themselves a lot and the usage of many of the Disney worlds seems uninspired. It's a shame considering the unique mix of Square x Disney has a lot potential to create some great scenarios. And it happens, sometimes. But there are also many moments when it feels like you are watching a Wish adaptation of the movie, with some characters that do not belong here. It is underwhelming to have the most interesting parts of the game story-wise not having anything to do with the Disney worlds directly.

The poor writing is a shame because otherwise the game looks amazing for being on a PSP, the animations are very cartoony and expressive and there is some cool scenography in some cutscenes.

I think I made my point on the story of the game now.
And after reading all of that, you must be wondering why I still put 4 stars on my review. And that, is because of the gameplay!

The 3 characters controls are about the same, with slight variations in movement speed, jump height and dash. Also, Terra specialize in physical attacks, Aqua in magic and Ventus is the middle ground.
The movement and combat system is very slow and not really satisfying at the start, but this quickly evolves as you unlock new skills and abilities like dash, parry, counter, etc... To fight your enemies, you have many possibilities:
First, you can swing your Keyblade to deal damage to an enemy close to you. You are allowed to perform a small combo, both on ground and in the air. Your second option is something called a "Command Deck". This deck is basically where you put your skills, that can be magical or physical. Each of these skills can be used at any time if in the deck. Once used, they are put on a short cooldown to prevent you from spamming them. Your deck starts with 3 slots, but rapidelly increase in size as you progress.
Attacking enemies with thoses two types of attacks allows you to fill up a gauge, which quickly runs out if you spend too much time not attacking. This gauge is what brings this battle system all its fun! When filled up, depending on what type of attacks you have used, you will activate a "Command Style". This changes your combos for better ones for a limited time, while also giving your attacks elemental powers or extended reach. And then, as you continue attacking, you can fill up the gauge once more to either activate second or even third "Command Style", or activate a devastating attack corresponding with the command style you are currently in.
This is what makes the game fun to me. Trying to always be attacking an enemy so that the gauge stays filled up, and managing my skills to activate the right "Command Style" that leads to the best combos.
Also, I have to mention that your strategy is constantly evloving. This is because your skills can level up. There are between 3 and 5 levels per skills, and they level up if they are in your deck, even if you don't use them. When a skill levels up it becomes stronger, but more importantly, when it reaches its max level you can fuse it with another skill to create a new one. This allows you to mix a Physical and a Magical skill together for exemple, to create a physical attack with elemental properties.
And what pushes you to change your deck as often as you can is this: every skill that is created by mixing two other skills will have a small passive boost that is active if the skill is in your deck. BUT, if you are able to level this skill to its max level, the passive boost will always be applied to your character, even if your remove the skill or fuse it with another one.
I think this system is brilliant because it rewards you for changing your play style very often and pushes you to improvise a lot during combat. This means that the regular enemy encounters are not as repetitive as they could be without it.
(There are also summons that allows you to access the moveset of people your character created bonds with, but I didn't use them that much.)

What's more, the game manages to have a decent camera despite the absence of a second stick to control it (instead you use the L and R triggers to rotate the camera around your character). You will sometimes get hurt by an enemy offscreen but most of the time you have a good view of all enemies, or the enemies will be numerous but mostly passive.

That being said, I have to talk about the difficulty. When you start the game, you must choose a difficulty, between "Story", "Standard", "Hard" and "Proud", and you will be locked in that difficulty until the end of the story you are playing. I played Ventus story on "Standard". It was fine, but outside of bosses I felt the game was too easy and I didn't need to use it's systems. That's why I switched to "Hard" difficulty for Terra's and Aqua's stories. While I overall enjoyed the game much more, I encountered severe difficulty spikes.
The game does not give you character invulnerability frames when getting hurt, so if there are many enemies around you, life can go down very quickly. Sometimes it almost feels bullshit when you die in 2 sec at full health. Also, the parry, which is another important part of the battle system, feels very slow and unresponsive. I've had multiple occasions where I saw an attack coming, pressed the parry button but nothing happened and I got killed. This can be a frustrating, especially if you are under leveled. This is more true at the end of Terra's story and at the beginning of Aqua's.

Last thing, the soundtrack is great but I which there were more tracks, because there is only one music for exploration per world and it gets very very repetitive (I still have the Cinderella track playing in my head, help).

So, if what I described sounded interesting to you, I recommend it. Each character story takes around 8 to 10 hours to complete and you can take breaks between them if you want so it is not a very time-consuming game. But if you want to unlock every secrets, then you will have to grind for hours and play horrible mini-games (fun).
As for myself, I am curious to play other KH games, maybe the mainline ones, to see if the gameplay is as fun as in this one and if the writing gets better when it's not a prequel.

Thanks for reading my review!

I liked this game!

First of all, I must say that I played it for free, because a friend invited me to play with him. That definetly had an impact on my enjoyement, because I was not expecting anything from the game :)

So, It Takes Two is a 2 players cooperative puzzle platformer. You play a couple contemplating divorce. At the start of the game, the daughter of both characters will turn her parents into very small creatures, like in "Arthur and the Minimoys", and your goal will be to find a way to become human again.Therefore, you will have to platform and help each other along the way, restoring the bond between the two as you progress.

That being said, the writing is not the strong aspect of the game. The topic chosen is good for a cooperative game, but the way it is treated is just too cliché and boring. The "book of love" character is unbearable and he appears way too often to interrupt gameplay. There were multiple occasion where we just wanted to skip the cutscenes, a thing I usually avoid to do.

Also, I played it in French, and the subtitles do not follow the voice acting at all! Sometimes a character says something and the subtitles says it using a negative. This leads to some weird timing where a character says "yes", but the subtitles says "no".

Thankfully, the gameplay on the other hand is pretty good. The character controls feels great, once you've learned the moves you can really go fast, even in the platforming sections.
The game is not hard at all, there are checkpoints very regularly, the platforming is very permissive and the puzzles are more designed to stop you for 5 seconds than to make you think. In a solo game, this would be kinda light, but in a coop game, where the two players don't necessarly have the same experience it is a good approch to allow everyone to have fun. Just don't go in expecting great challenges.

Gameplay is also very varied, the game allows itself to completely change the controls schemes from time to time to create small sections in a completely different genre. It is never really develloped, but it keeps the gameplay fresh.

The pacing is strange tho, there are amazing chapters with great mechanics and ideas, but there also are very slow sections with boring repetitive task to do (pushing crates, yayyyyyyy).
Also, in every part of the game the two players each have a unique tool that they can use to solve puzzles. For exemple, near the beginning, Cody has some nails and May has a hammer. Those tools are usally fun to use, but the more you progress, the less interesting they get because even tho the object itself is different, it does the samething as another object you had before. Moreover, the some will let you interact with your partner, for exemple you can pin May in the ground with a nail or hit Cody with the hammer to press him in the ground. This is fun, but unfortunately this is not a recurring thing, and it is way less fun when you have no way of trolling your friend.

There are also a lot of bonus mini-games spread across the adventure. Those are usually fun, there are a couple of great ones (the curling one is really fun) and some very boring ones (every mini-game where you have to aim at something quickly and precisely, and also chess). This is cool, because it makes you want to explore and you always have something to check in the scenery while waiting for your friend.

The last section of the game felt a bit rushed and was disapointing. There were some great boss fight during all the game, but for the final moments of the game they choose to have a "Hold Y to win"... At least it was funny to stop holding Y and completely stop the action in a very akward way, just as in every other games that uses this mechanic... I guess.

Other than that, the game is really beautiful and filled with many little secrets and interactions. Having the characters being the size of a chessnut allows for some fun environment and they are very varied. Also, the game is pretty long considering it's a coop experience. It took us more than 6 month to find the time to play together haha! Fortunately, the story is not very important or interesting so this was not an issue.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a EA game where the second player can just download the game for free and go through the whole experience! More so, I did not encounter a single networking issue during the 15h it took us to play the whole thing. Very surpring coming from EA!

This is my review for It Takes Two!
Should you play this game, I would recommend to play it with someone that likes friendly competition, instead of playing with your lover like the game makes you think it was made for. I think you will have more fun like this, because the things it tells on love and couple health are very conventionnal and do not make you think deeper.

Thank you for reading my thoughts! :)

This game is strange. It feels unfinished, it is buggy, it does not look or sound good, the voice acting is awful (OH MY GAAAAAWD) and the NPCs are as lifeless as they can be... BUT, it is also a game very different from any other game I have played.

The main concept is that you play a camera man in a team of three people. You and your team are in charge of investigating a mysterious fog that has engulfed the city of Chicago. Because your hand are on the camera, you can't do anything but watch your environment and point at things while your colleagues interact with the environment. This creates an interesting situation in which you have to help your reporter survive, but you can't intervene directly, only show, alert and watch.

While this concept is unique and has potential, it feels more like a 3D point and click than a survival horror game. The thing is, you are (almost) never in danger. The worst case scenario being you fail to protect a reporter, she dies and you go to the next level, where you will meet a new one. That lack of tension or danger kills any potential scary atmosphere. The game tries so hard to spook you, by playing random spooky noises for no reasons in certain locations, but it never works because you know that you are not a part of its universe.

But this is not at all a negative aspect if you are open to a different type of experience! In fact, this dissociation of the main character from the rest of the universe fits in very well with the low budget of the title. It creates a surreal experience where nothing makes sense but nobody seems to mind. Every location feels empty as if it had never been inhabited, the NPCs scream in fear when there is a monster, but they are not animated and they freeze right next to it while looking away, action scenes are just as slow as the rest of the game, everything just feels out of place.

The real thing I'm not so enthousiastic about in this game is the scoop/morality/erotism meter. In every levels, you can choose between investigating, helping your colleagues or straight up sexually aussaulting your female colleagues. This doesn't really affect the story, aside from some small pieces of dialogue and some lore clues to find (lol). I feel like the erotism part should not have been included because it serve no purpose other than score. It sometimes manages to create funny moments, but most of the time it is just disrespectful to women.
ALSO, when you finish the game, you unlock a strip club mode where you can make all the reporters pole dance in underwear... and it is way more animated than any other element in the game... there even are jiggle physics :')
I think it explains why the rest of the game has no budget lmao.

While this is not a perfect game, or even a good game, I enjoyed the 5 hours it took me to complete it. It's a strange experimental game that tried some neet ideas. Nothing more, nothing less.

I didn't know where to put this but props to the voice acting and the run animation of the guy you meet just before the end of the game. I don't think I have ever seen a better run cycle than this one hahaha!