Oddly, Sifu benefits from its hefty disconnect between the player and the player character. Whereas the protagonist spends eight years honing their martial arts craft in pursuit of their vengeance, you’re learning on the fly, the game’s pseudo-roguelite structure gatekeeping you until you achieve mastery and can progress with the proficiency of the protagonist. You get to experience the training arc montage and the rising action at the same time, giving Sifu an intoxicatingly satisfying structure of learning, practice, and progression. The mechanic that lies at the center of the combat system is my own personal gaming catnip, Sekiro’s parry system. As in From Soft’s seminal 2019 title, fights are about simultaneously managing both the posture meter of you and your opponent by creating consistent pressure and enduring against their attacks with precision blocks. However, parrying in Sifu is even more dangerous, with less opportunities to recover posture and guaranteed chip damage from regular blocking, not to mention the steeper consequences of revivals, with each death increasing your character’s age (and decreasing your health bar) until you either run out of revives or restart the level. The game provides other defensive options, such as dodging, but parrying automatically defeats all high low mixups, and enemies with throws, which beat parries, are quite rare, so the system emerges as the most consistent option in the base toolkit. The game does have lots of unlockable abilities, including perks, special moves, combos, and super moves but fundamentally, parrying is the core skill you need to learn to use and it can carry you through the game if you master it. What this adds up to is a combat model of aggressive defense that encourages and facilitates the most exhilarating style of play that will see you taking on mobs of enemies with stylish aplomb. While the combat itself is mostly just a variant on an already successful mold, the combination of its structure and its combat are what distinguishes it and makes it worth playing.

Now you might notice that I didn't list narrative and aesthetics among the reasons to play Sifu, to which one of those is an unfortunate omission on my part, while the other is not. The story takes the form of revenge pulp, and the issue with revenge stories is that they tend to have binary outcomes. The protagonist either succeeds or fails in taking revenge, and it is presented as either justified or not. It is the particular contours of a revenge story that make it stand out, and this where Sifu stumbles in its minimalistic approach. Speaking in broad strokes, pulp revenge stories thrive from the catharsis of righteous violence and prestige revenge stories trade in the thorniness of the act. Spending almost no time on story means there's no build up to enjoy taking down the villains, and it means that the Eastern philosophies that inform the games morally didactic conclusions are only engaged with as shallow references. However, where the game benefits from a minimalist sensibility is the artstyle, which carries a painterly touch to its 3D models and allows for abstract, non-literal sequences, such as the elevator in the art museums. These sequences demonstrate creativity and vision that if they had been applied to the narrative, would have created a substance that made Sifu worthwhile beyond its flurries of parties and strikes, as legitimately enchanting as that system combat is.

>Removed all Platinum content (Trainer teams, Gym layouts, Pokémon variety, E4 Rematch, Battle Frontier, Distortion World, Map/Puzzles, Villa, Improved narrative)
>Removed Secret Base customization
>Removed Game Corner
>Removed 2/3 Contest minigames
>Removed numerous Online Features (GTS, Draw, Egg Spin, Mix Battle, and Platinum’s poffin cook, minigames, WiFi Plaza, and WiFi Club)
>Removed GBA-insert Pokémon encounters
>TMs are finite, but EXP Share is forced, PC is now portable, and HMs are removed
>Level curve is FUCKED as a result of forced EXP share https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tUdDSA11xo
>Following Pokémon receive affection buff (increased EXP, dodge chance, crit chance, attack, remove status conditions, and ability to survive moves that would faint you)
>Game is poorly optimized and crashes at random https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=320&v=308IkypGo9A&feature=youtu.be
>Horrendous presentation, trainer models just snap in place
>Music is STILL trash midi, the trailers were doctored
>Copy and pasted animations from XY/SS that aren’t faithful to the DPPt animations
>Non-existent Pokémon scaling
>No Ranked Battles, no new battle modes
>No real new content like FRLG, HGSS, and even ORAS all got
>$60 game (DPPt was $40)
>$50 online (DPPt’s was free)

It’s over. This is the worst mainline Pokémon game ever released.

There is no such thing as a perfect video game. No matter how good a video game could be, or how much it is beloved by the general gaming public, it will never be able to reach the status of truly being beloved by everybody, to where nobody could find a single flaw in it, or everybody could love it as equally as another. However, even if there will never be a perfect video game, there will always be… our perfect video games. The ones that we hold near and dear to our hearts, ones that we love everything about and will continue to love about all the way until we die, no matter what anyone else says, or even if another video game comes along to take its place as your own perfect video game. So, I figured it was about time that, for my 500th review, I would go ahead and talk about my absolute favorite game of all time, without question: the original Mega Man X.

But, before I get into gushing about this masterpiece, we may as well lay down some history for those that somehow aren’t in the loop as to what this is. At this point, it was 1993, and people were getting FUCKING SICK of Mega Man. There were 13 different Mega Man titles that had been released so far, and while there were some different, unique titles of this bunch that we don’t like to talk about, most of them played exactly the same. Yeah, they each had their own set of differences that made them stand out for hardcore fans of the series, but to the general public, they all just seemed to be the same game over and over and over and OVER again, to the point where franchise fatigue set in pretty goddamn early. So, if Capcom was gonna continue making these games, or even take the series to the next generation of consoles, they were going to have to step up their game a bit. They were going to need to add a bit more attitude, a bit more color, a bit more to do, a bit more to find, and more of this universe to explore. To sum it all up, they were going to need to take Mega Man… to the Xtreme (no, not that Xtreme...not that one either).

Needless to say, this experiment with the series managed to become a major success. This singular game would go onto being widely praised by critics and fans alike, selling over a million copies in its original release, and it is now considered to be one of the greatest video games of all time. Not only that, but it would also lead to creating another separate series alongside the original Mega Man series, one that would continue getting games all the way up to this day, whether it be through main entries that would progress this game’s story and mechanics, side games that would take the series in new and interesting directions, or even things like… Mega Man X Dive… (oh trust me, I have some choice words for that game whenever I get to it… you know, in 5 years). As for what I personally think of it myself… I mean, I think my profile page on this website says everything I need to, but I will go ahead and continue showering this game with all kinds of praise either way. You may as well get a drink or some snacks, because if you couldn’t tell already, this review is gonna be a long one.

I don’t remember specifically when I first learned about Mega Man X, but I do know for a fact that, at that point, I was quite familiar with the Mega Man series, having played quite a bit of the NES games in the past, and falling in love with them enough to where I had become obsessed with them. The first exposure I had to the game was with the original video on it made by The CharityFraudist before it was removed from the internet, and from that first impression I got from the game, I was… mildly interested in it. It did look pretty good, but it just looked like another Mega Man game that just so happened to be made for the SNES. Nothing that I felt like I needed to get my hands on immediately. However, as time would go on… that mild interest I had in the game would only grow from there. I would watch more videos about the game, more videos that would go deeper into it, explaining how it advanced the series further, how it was designed so intricately, and how these decisions made turned it into the classic that we knew and loved today, which got me more eager to get my hands on it then ever before. It was only when I had gotten my Dad’s permission to download it on my Wii U that I finally got the chance to play it for myself, and needless to say… it was love at first sight.

The story of the game is one that is somewhat familiar for the Mega Man series, but at the same time, it takes it to places it had never been before. The game takes place 100 years in the future after the classic series, where an archaeologist by the name of Dr. Cain would discover a capsule within the remains of a robotic facility, one that contains a robot created by the late, great Dr. Light. This new robot, known as Mega Man X, was different from all the other ones, able to feel complex emotions, have human-level intelligence, and even its own free will to do whatever it feels. This type of technology was then replicated by Dr. Cain over the years, in order to create a new set of robots that would also carry these same traits, which would go onto be known as Reploids. Over the years, Reploids and humanity would then co-exist with each other, learning to help each other out and make the world a better place. That is, until some of the reploids started going haywire, starting to cause destruction and commit crimes all over the world, now being labeled as Mavericks.

In response to this, a group of Reploids would be formed to take care of these rogue robots, including Mega Man X, known as the Maverick Hunters. However, eventually, the leader of the Maverick Hunters, Sigma, would end up going maverick himself, and with the help of eight other different mavericks, would go onto spread a level of chaos across the world that nobody had seen before. Feeling partially responsible for this, Mega Man X, or just simply X, decided to set out to take out all of these mavericks, as well as Sigma himself, to ultimately save the world. Again, like I mentioned earlier, it is very similar to the original Mega Man if you only look at it on the surface level, but there is a lot more going on here in comparison, which I can really appreciate and love.

The graphics are fantastic, having the perfect fit for a Mega Man game made for a new generation, while also having plenty of life, energy, and personality through all the stages, characters, enemies, and bosses, the music is some of the best that I have ever heard in all of video game history, having plenty of BANGERS to accompany you through the many different stages present in the game, while also managing to fit the tone for whatever is happening in the game, the control is just right, being mostly what you would expect from a Mega Man title, but also integrating new mechanics that feel buttery-smooth to pull off, making playing the game just that much more satisfying, and the gameplay is, once again, mostly what you would expect from a Mega Man title, but it adds enough to where it feels like a completely new experience, one that many would go to love and adore for years.

The game is a 2D action platformer, where you take control of X, go through many different levels in plenty of different locations, with a good majority of them you can choose to go through in any order you want, run, jump, and shoot your way through many different obstacles and enemies that stand in your way, gather plenty of different health and ammo pickups that will assist you along the way, fight many different bosses and Mavericks of varying types and sizes, and gain plenty of different power ups from these Mavericks that you can use against other enemies and bosses to your advantage. On the surface, it is pretty much what you would expect from your typical Mega Man title, which could cause some who were sick of the series to be drawn away immediately, but when you actually get into the game, not only does it have plenty of new features that would become a staple part of the series, but also that X-factor that breathes new life into this series that it desperately needed at the time.

For starters, aside from the many weapons that you can get from the Mavericks in this game, there are also now many different new, optional goodies that you can find which will greatly benefit you on your journey forward. From the start of the game, you may notice that your health bar is significantly smaller than the life bar from the NES games, which may seem like quite the downgrade at first, but then as you go along the game, you will then find the Heart Tanks, which will increase your health till it is at its proper size. Some may call this completely unnecessary, but I love this change, since it allows for a sense of progression not only for yourself, but also for X as a character, which I will get more into later. Alongside this are the Sub-Tanks, which are the replacement for the Energy Tanks in this game. Unlike E-Tanks, which you could only use once before they go away forever, you are able to use these tanks an infinite amount of times, as long as you are able to store plenty of energy in them to fill you up. Once again, this could be seen as a bit of an unnecessary change for some, but I greatly prefer having a few E-Tanks that I can refill rather than a bunch that I can only use once, so this change is all good in my book.

From the beginning of the game, you can also see that, as an upgraded version of the original Mega Man, X has plenty of new moves and capabilities that the original Mega Man never had. On his own, he is taller, faster, stronger, and he has the ability to jump up walls repeatedly, which is a fantastic enough addition to your moveset already, but that is only the beginning of what X is truly capable of. Throughout the game, you can find many capsules laid around the stage, each one containing a brand new piece of armor for X to use, as well as a message from Dr. Light on how to use it. Of course, there are ones that are pretty situational or typical, such as the helmet upgrade, which lets you break blocks, as well as the body upgrade, which allows you to take less damage when hit, but then you get the GOOD shit, such as the Buster upgrade, where you are able to charge your X Buster even further to fire an extremely powerful shot and to charge up your weapons, and the leg upgrade, which lets you dash along the ground and move through stages a lot faster than before, which would become a staple ability of X for future games in the series.

All of these upgrades and optional goodies that you can acquire are all fantastic in their own way, and they do a great job at making both X and the player much stronger than ever before, able to take on anything that stands in your way with the amount of style and aggression that feels just right. Sure, not all of them are too useful, and you could just view them as a means of completing the game, but not only does it feel satisfy to find a good chunk of these goodies, which are actually pretty cleverly hidden among the stages, but they do add to your character in numerous ways, and they don’t feel like just simple “things to collect”.

Not to mention, they all contribute towards you getting the ultimate reward for your effort, which you can gain from Armored Armadillo’s stage before the end of the game. After performing a cryptic sequence of events, you can then find a final capsule on the edge of a cliff, containing another message from Dr. Light, who just so happens to be wearing a very… familiar costume. You then get the upgrade, and it turns out to be the Hadoken, straight from Street Fighter II, which you not only perform in the exact same manner as in that game, but it also is your most powerful weapon, able to one-shot any enemy and boss no matter what. This, in my opinion, is the PERFECT reward for getting all of the items in the game, not just as a Street Fighter fan, but also just in general, as it feels incredible to nuke every single boss after this with this weapon, but not to the point where it feels broken, since you can only use it if you have full health.

Ignoring all the new additions, the game itself still remains incredibly satisfying, even if you disregard all of the different goodies you can find. This can all be seen as early as the intro stage of the game, which is one of the best intros of any game in video game history, even more so than World 1-1 in the original Super Mario Bros. Upon pressing start, you get thrown right into the game, without any kind of intro cutscene or instructions screen to hold you back, and you can learn all of the basic controls right off the bat, blasting through the many different enemies that you are faced with. Not only that, but it also places you in unavoidable situations where it also teaches you how to use your new abilities, such as when you get thrown down into a pit upon destroying a giant bee robot, forcing you to climb back up the cliff to get back in action.

It not only does a great job at setting you up for the gameplay, but it also manages to integrate the game’s story and theme in perfectly. Upon reaching the end of the stage, you are then stopped in your tracks by a brand new foe: a purple-Boba-Fett-reject in a mech suit known as Vile, and upon fighting him, he seems practically unstoppable! None of your attacks seem to be doing any damage, and he proceeds to wipe the floor with you, with there being seemingly nothing that you can do to counter him whatsoever. It eventually leads to a point where you get trapped in an energy shot, grabbed by the fist of Vile’s mech, and taunted as you face what could be your final moments in the game. That is, until… you hear something from off-screen start to charge up.

All of a sudden, an energy blast is fired from off-screen, ripping through the arm on Vile’s mech suit, and freeing you from his clutches. Vile then flees the scene, as a new ally comes in to chase him off, known simply as Zero. And let me tell you, when you first see this guy in action in this scene, you think he is BADASS. He’s got the style, the power, the attitude of a warrior, and… flowing, blonde locks, which is kinda weird, but he is still cool! Infinitely cooler than you, that is. It is then at this point that X starts to doubt his capabilities as a Maverick Hunter, being unable to defeat this one foe, who seemed to overpower him in every way imaginable. However, Zero then gives both X and the player reassurance, saying that you are destined to take him out, and that you will get stronger as you press forward… maybe even stronger than him.

It is then, from that point on, that your goal is clear. You then proceed to take on all the different stages, defeating all of the Mavericks, gaining all of their powers, finding all of the upgrades, and getting stronger, faster, smarter, and overall better throughout the whole game. You then feel this power fully envelop you as you take on Sigma’s Fortress, defeating the many different enemies, bosses, and even all the Mavericks again with all of your newfound powers and abilities, even going as far as to fully come back around and defeat Vile after all this time. This, right here, is what makes this game perfect in my eyes: that feeling of growth, the immense satisfaction of achieving these goals, the hidden potential you have right from the start, and seeing it through all the way to the end in the best and most timeless manner a game could ever manage. It’s just like real life, when you think about it: just when you are at your lowest point, all you need to do is to just simply pick yourself up and keep on going, trying new things and going down different paths, until you can ultimately find the right path for you, and having the ability to prove all of the nay-sayers wrong. I’m sure we have all felt that at some point. I certainly have, believe me.

Overall, there are some things about the game that I could nitpick here or there, such as the helmet upgrade being useless after a certain point, some points of the game being somewhat annoying to go through, and the boss rush of the game going back to how it was in the original Mega Man, but at this point, none of that matters to me, and none of that ever will matter to me. This is, without a doubt in my mind, my favorite game of all time, one that I loved from the moment I first pressed that start button all those years ago, and one that I will forever continue to love, enjoy, praise, and remember for many, many years to come. I would absolutely recommend it, not just for fans of Mega Man or 2D platformers in general, but for EVERYBODY to play at least once in their lives, as it truly is that great on its own, and it is that special to me. There may come a time where I find a game that will manage to surpass this in terms of… well, everything that I had just mentioned, and when it does, I will gladly welcome it with open arms, but until then, I will always forever love Mega Man X, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon……………………….. so that means it is all downhill from here, folks! No, I kid, I kid, but it is a shame that Zero, Vile, and Sigma are now dead, and that they will never come back after this……………. nope, never. Nope nope nope nope. Certainly not in the next game, no. Certainly not in the third game either, nope.

Game #485

One of the things that makes Guardians of the Galaxy interesting as a comic property is that there isn't really decades of source material the way that even obscure characters often get in shared universe superhero comics. Sure, there's a version of the team from the 70's (with an entirely different roster) and the characters in the current iteration started cropping up in the 60's, but it's the 2008 Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning run that built their modern identity with a radical departure from what came before. What this means is that creators working on the franchise have the opportunity to create ideas that wind up becoming an essential part of their mythos, much in the same way that Fleisher’s Superman's cartoon introduced flight as a part of his toolkit. It’s too early to say if Eidos Montreal’s take will have any lasting impact on the legacy of the team but its chosen medium does offer synthesis of the more detailed lore facilitated by the serialized storytelling of the comics alongside the tighter emotional focus of the James Gunn films. The titular galaxy flourishes with texture and history because it pulls from the decades of cosmic Marvel stories that the Guardians were born into, and much like how Arkham Asylum’s encyclopedia entries drew me into comics to begin with, the ones on offer here shows how the hypertextual nature of video games is well suited to contextualizing and capitalizing on the fascinating unwieldy behemoth that comes with shared storytelling projects. However, I must admit that I have a strained relationship with superhero fiction these days, for a myriad of reasons, but especially in the medium of comics, due to their unwillingness to ever end. This forms the second part of the appeal of the Guardians video game, telling a long but definitively finite story with these characters.

To that end the game delivers the broad storytelling, colossal stakes and sincere goofiness that superhero comics are known for. Plus you get extra video game goofiness as well! If Rocket being able to use a gun five times bigger than him, assembled with the barrels of a dozen oversized weapons, because he overcame his trauma isn’t using the game using its medium to its advantage, I don’t know what is. The broader narrative writ large tackles the consumptive nature of grief, which is hardly new territory but it’s a natural fit for Guardians and the game distinguishes itself by exploring and refuting the seductive but unachievable appeal of living a life free from it. Of course, the gameplay itself is also part of how the game tells its story, and this is where we must confront the fact that Peter isn’t that fun to control, without much to do but hover around on floaty jet boots and to chisel away at enemies with anemic pistols. The game offsets this by allowing you to give orders for your teammates to set off power combinations, but I would have preferred switching between characters mid-combat, but I do appreciate the focus on leadership, and it works well enough. While it’s most likely destined to be lost in the veritable flood of superhero media that our era has produced, Eidos Montreal’s take deserves to be remembered for its cohesive assembly of what makes the Guardians team fresh and interesting; its rich and dynamic characters.

"It's pretty impressive that you put so many ingredients into a dish and it came out tasting like nothing." - Persona 4 Golden

I cannot get over how bland, boring, and uninspired that this game is, it actually retroactively made me question why I've played around 10 Atlus RPGs, since this just feels like the most soulless and lame version of an Atlus RPG.

I can safely say that characters like Fuuka, Teddie, Morgana etc have been completely vindicated because Figue could be the worst wacky animal sidekick. Having an anxiety attack over an enemy that couldn't be more disinterested in me and then saying "Now we can relax" every 10 seconds. Holy shit.

And I cannot get over how boring the dungeon design is. Dumping into the human psyche makes sense (Atlus RPGs have done it a ton of times), but they all look the same. What in the hey. And with the rumored Persona 3 Remake just waiting to be announced, this feels like an issue that will not be remedied any time soon.

If you like Atlus RPGs, avoid this one. It does a disservice to SMT, Persona, hell, even Soul Hackers 1. I'm only giving it 2 stars because it's serviceable and technically competent.