I came into the early Final Fantasy games with basically zero expectations. As far as I was aware, the first game in the series worth talking about was 6. Imagine my surprise when FF2 managed to fall FAR below these nonexistent expectations.
The most impactful feature of FF2 is how stats grow. Instead of level ups, your stats now improve with certain actions (attack to improve attack, use magic to improve magic, etc.). And while this sounds interesting in concept, playing the game reveals just how awful the system really is. For one, growths seem to be somewhat character specific. If I spammed attack with all the characters, Firion and Guy's strength stats always increased 3 or 4 times over before Maria's went up once. It doesn't feel like much of a "guild your own character" when you're still trying to railroad me. Secondly, since there's no longer a hard number of predicted battles to fight before I take on tougher foes, the stats are all meaningless numbers until you've gotten thrashed by enough enemies to know when you're outmatched. For example, in FF1 and most other RPGs, you'll know when your levels are adequate because you aren't struggling with the current enemies you're facing, and because the amount of exp they give you are pennies. In FF2 however, your stat growths are battle-specific, so the only way to know if your stats are adequate is to test out each and every one on a multitude of different enemies, which is obviously ludicrous.
This leads us to the fact that FF2 wants you to GRIND. Not just fighting a certain number of enemies, no. You've got to be nose-deep in whatever stats you're trying to improve to even be able to keep track of your improvements.
The saving grace of grinding in a lot of other RPGs is that you can simply disassociate while you do so. FF2 does not have this luxury. Despite spending around 3 hours less on FF2 than FF1, 2 felt it had been going on for WEEKS.

Then there's the issue of story. FF2 has a far more involved world than FF1, both in story and in layout.
In FF1, you don't really have much to go off of other than solving a town's problems and restoring the crystals. This makes your goal easy to keep track of, since at any given point you know exactly WHY you're doing what you're doing.
In FF2 however, the overarching plot has far more say in what you do and where you go. So I stead of simply finding the next town and continuing your adventure, you must constantly talk to the same NPCs over and over again to get your next objective.
This also means that your movement is very restricted to the progression the game wants you to move at. FF1 progresses you from land, to seas, to rivers, to skies, naturally allowing the player to figure out where they want to go next through the number of areas that were previously inaccessible. FF2 tells you to go from town to town, but only after you talk to a specific person. FF2 tells you to fly across the world, but not in an airship you explore in, but rather from paying Cid to constantly be your taxi driver. By the time you finally unlock sea travel in FF2, there isn't even anywhere you'd want to go. By the time you unlock full air travel, you're at the end of the game.

Perhaps it's unfair to compare FF2 so heavily to FF1. But FF1 was a mediocre game to me. It did the bare minimum of everything it needed to get right, which means that it's the perfect springboard for how FF2 gets it so wrong.
It astounds me that there are people out there who consider this game to be the hidden gem of the franchise. To those people: did you think 2 was good because it's UNIQUE, or because it was actually of quality? Because if it's the latter, that hidden gem must be a pretty tough dig.

Danganronpa has made me seriously consider the worth of a visual novel as a video game. On the pessimistic side, my opinion of games such as the Ace Attorney series have soured now that I know visual novels can be far more than glorified movies with point-and-click elements.
But as you can probably tell from my score, this is a VERY good thing for Danganronpa. The class trials have so many elements to them that you'll still get introduced to new mechanics into the second to last chapter. These all exist to engage you with the material and actually feel like you're playing a video GAME as the story plays out.
And speaking of the story, it's incredibly good. Obviously I won't be spoiling anything here, but know that this game puts a lot of work into properly pacing its story elements across its runtime, making the climaxes as satisfying as they are.

Despite what the not-so-flattering 5/10 might seem, I actually enjoyed my time with FF1. It's such a simple experience that it's hard to really hate, the score is mostly due to the opposite, there's very little the game does well.
The vast majority of this game will be spent spamming the same attacks against what feels like the same enemies for a dozen hours. There's basically no story to follow, and no gameplay elements outside of the combat, but the combat itself is extremely shallow. Some enemies have elemental weaknesses, but unless you have more than one black magic-capable mage, this won't come into play very often. Plus, since recovering magic can be pretty expensive until about the middle of the game, you will be spamming melee attacks for a VERY long time.
The one point of praise I can give this game is the unique magic system (at least unique to most RPGs). Like DnD, spells work on a charge system rather than drawing on a universal magic resource like other games. This means that once you start to learn different levels of spells, you can spend charges from a level without letting it affect how you treat the other levels. At the same time, having two spells that you use a lot on the same charge level will make you put more thought into how you use your spells in any given situation. If the game had more complex enemies, this system could easily skyrocket the score. Alas, the remaster of a JRPG from the 80s can only do so much for design sensibilities.

Kingdom Hearts 2 is a strange game. For having come out 2 decades ago, it's still far and away the best game in the series (not that there was much competition). And then astoundingly, the final mix version makes it even better.
From the minor tweaks like new abilities or cutscene changes, to the major changes like entirely new drive forms and a dozen new bosses, Final Mix goes out of its way to make a good game even better.
Given all this praise, me giving FM the same score as the original KH2 might seem strange, but it really comes down to the fact that at the end of the day, its still just a tad too simple.
KH2's critical mode is often praised as the peak of a balanced challenge in the series. And while I admit that it's far better than 1, BBS, or 3's hardest difficulties, KH2's critical mode is still a breeze to play through. Despite being 15 levels lower than my base game playthrough, I still made it through the game with very little hair pulling. Did I die more than the original KH2? Sure. But they were all to bosses that were tougher in the original game too, like Xaldin or Xemnas. Had the numbers been scaled down, I can't say that I would've been challenged at all. Though perhaps this is my fault for having gotten so good at the series in a relatively short span of time.

KH2 FM is fantastic, and while I weep for the fact that this is where the franchise peaked, I'm still glad that it peaked at such a height.

This is one of those series I experienced as a kid that I assumed was just nostalgia when I grew up. Upon replaying the series plus the new Completing the Mission, I can confidently say that NOPE IT WAS ALWAYS GOOD.
I find it to be very high praise of a visual-novel type game if I manage to like them, considering I don't hold them too highly as representative of the medium. But Henry Stickmin is so insanely funny that it absolutely makes up for the lack of gameplay.
Really the only criticism I can make of the series is that it very quickly became more about seeing the fails than actually succeeding at the objective. But even then, Completing the Mission manages to somewhat circumvent this by playing with expectations both in what does or doesn't work, again, making up the difference by simply being really funny.

This is very much a "one step forwards, two steps back" kinda game. The addition of grenadiers and polish to a lot of mechanics make some aspects better than the first game, but far too many missteps occur to say it's better as a whole.
For one, I didn't mention it in my VC1 review since the story was so good, but the way cutscenes are presented in this series is less than desirable. Instead of just letting you watch the cutscenes, you exit to book mode in-between each one to individually select and confirm each cutscene. This was less of a problem in VC1 since the story was good and well-paced. But VC4 is like double the length with half the substance, so it becomes more of an issue.
And speaking of length, the long animations have not been resolved. In fact, due to the addition of ship commands, there are even MORE. The final boss has a move where EVERY, SINGLE, TURN, it will move across the map. This animation is 2 minutes long. I need not say much else.
Also the maps in this game suck compared to the first. Not only in design but in enemy placement. Take a drink every time you complete a level objective only for the game to tell you "SURPRISE, ENEMY REINFORCEMENTS :))))))".
I wanted to love VC4, and the post-game content looks pretty good. But I can't be bothered to think about it past the ending.