While it sounds crazy enough to write a review about a game that's not even OUT LMAO. I why I can 100% confirm that this game will be my favourite game ever when it releases.
Song for Prism is from a series I'm genuinely very familiar with, besides owning physical copies of their albums. Having played over 200 hours of Cinderella Girls and Shiny Colours before calling it the best shit ever, it wouldn't be insane to call the biggest entry from a series where your interest was always fully captured and grasped to have the latest entry be your FAVOURITE GAME EVER?! Well here I will try to concretely enough explain "my insanity" or for some of you guys "my stupidity" I'm assuming.
I found out about Idolmaster over 5 years ago after checking out the anime out sheer curiosity, which came out nearly 18 years ago now. I accidentally stumbled upon the game on a pure whim. I was checking out anime recommendations on YouTube and I saw a promo for it on my FYP. I didn't even wanna click on the trailer nor did I want it to play, YouTube autoplayed it for me when I went to the toilet lol... but when I came back I was like "Fuck it why not" and pressed replay and my mind was blown away... To most it's a standard trailer nothing outstanding or experimental enough for someone to lose their shit over, but man... I WAS IN. From the music and the narrator to the competitive atmosphere but with a strikingly distinct visual style. It reminded so much of every show I love and it happens so rarely that I ever have such a strong sense of nostolgia from past of something in the present that I have not seen in YEARS. But from the previously mentioned things and stunning visuals and awesome music that compliment each character. I just knew it was the one. The idol genre is a VERY important genre to me because it helped me a lot as a person throughout my life and I honestly played a lot of the gacha and rhythm games but super rarely has this same feeling been matched before. I literally searched up every information about the game since and don't think I've ever been as hype for something as this game. The latest Info dump just made me even more confident in my feelings. I read the interviews with Yusuke Takayama over 100x and watched the demo over 10x. Did as much research as I can on the people working on it. Theorize heavy about future idols , cards and potential story beats. I genuinely have 100% trust in this game and don't think I can get disappointed really.
So it really a case of pure feelings of nostolgia , charm and trust that makes me so sure. I know this seems goofy asf to write this but I know myself the best so I know best what my true feelings on the game will be.
( P.S I've done this before and know how my expectations work so I really cannot be disappointed. also I will do a follow up on this when I play it.)

"Are you excited for Spider-Man 2?"

If you asked me this question 2 years ago I would've said "Hell yeah man! I love Spider-Man." I was really fond of my playthrough back in 2020 and was also among many others pretty pumped when I saw the announce trailer in September of 2021's State of Play. Needless to say I was looking forward to it at the time but as time passed and my interests changed, so did my anticipation.

My friend Canti did a pretty good job covering how I feel in their Breath of the Wild review. As more developers run out of ways to innovate the open world "Go to this big shiny button on your map" formula, so does my patience and while the web-swinging is fluid, the action and stealth are varied enough and the side content is well there, it reached a point where during my 20 hours spent, nothing really surprised me anymore. I couldn't begin to tell you how eye-rolling it was to hear New York will be twice as bigger compared to it's predecessors especially in a time where games like Elden Ring and Tears of the Kingdom are receiving massive acclaim from critics and it doesn't look like developers won't be trying to cash in on the success of them with Ubisoft's Star Wars Outlaws having just been announced recently.

However, despite all the nitpicking, I can't say I regret the spent with Spider-Man PS4 or Miles Morales. I played this with the initial goal that this would be what I need to retire from the open world genre but I was able learn something from my playthough.

Re-experiencing something can be as ambitious as it is frightening because you might have put aside your bias to keep an open mind and when faced with that reality, you'll come to learn some of the things you loved about it the first time just can't be replicated as you mature and so does your preferences so when something can't extract the raw emotions you had when you were younger, you just have to wonder if those memories were better as just that. Memories.

So where does this all end? A question I'm going to ask and answer for myself.

"Are you still looking forward to Spider-Man 2?"

Yes but I have bare expectations and am so done with open world afterwards.

Oh yeah also this game has a very twisted sense of activism. I'm sorry Insomniac but no amount of pride or Black Lives Matter murals mean anything if you main plot has a eco-terrorist trying to carry out their dead relatives wishes and stop a corporation from making people sick and the best rebuttal you can dish is a grade school ass "Uh guys, that's illegal actually and people might get hurt.".

Atlus: Hey guys we heard your complaints about the lack of Akechi and Sumi content in Strikers and Dancing so we added them Tactica. All you need to do is beat the $20 sub-4 hour dlc and you get to play them.

Me: Price tag is a little bit steep for that amount of content but sure the requirements don't seem too bad.

Atlus: Wait, people actually caved? Shit uhhhhhhh. SCRATCH THAT! Now you need to beat both the expansion AND main story campaign in order to unlock them. Yeah good luck gamers :)

😐

"There will always be things in life that escape our control. We cannot fight them all. But we can mourn, remember, learn, share, and accept."

I'll try not spoil too much because I think Cosmic Wheel is something you should experience as blindly as possible but Deconstructeam just gets it man. Most of your time is spent in these confined walls of an asteroid. Trying to find ways to past the time playing with your deck, going through your backlog of books, or in some cases I end up reflecting on the choices and conversations I made with visitors. They understand that histrionic feeling of isolation. Wanting your voice to be heard. To feel like you truly exist in this world and the desperate measures you might take to make these thoughts a reality. This is the kind of game where you leave with one of the themes reaching you on some level whether it be depression, sexual frustration, anxiety, discovering your role in the world, or gender dysphoria.

Fortuna was such a great protagonist for this type of interactive narrative too. Watching her grow or regress from her coping mechanisms or quirks while doing her best to talk to visitors and perceive what future fate has in store for them. The decision to have your each of your playthroughs have one dedicated slot that gets override via autosave adds to this as well. No one truly knows what fate has in store for them and how we deal with it is how we grow as people. Do we try to face these odds head on? Will we get overwhelmed by them and flee? Is there something to learn from these hardships or will they haunt and torment our memories?

There's a demo but also buy this game if this kind of experimental storytelling intrigues you. It was nice to see future my tarots saw mentioned as the story progressed. The visuals, music, overarching messages and tranquil moments of creating your tarot cards to your upmost vision are all magnificent.

I wouldn't be surprised if this ended up ranking high or even being my number one game of the year.

I'll take obscure PS1 games for $300, Alex.

I honestly have to thank Kingdom Hearts 3 for referencing Schwarzgeist in an optional Gummi Ship boss otherwise I would've never found this. It’s unfortunate that this is plagued by the infamous continue system because as long as I'm still young and ignorant, I've definitely found a game I want to replay and improve on in my spare time.

An addictive ballet with bullets with gameplay that is simple at it's core but has an emphasis on experimenting with different gunpods and finding a layout that best suits the stage at hand. Knowing that all it takes is one hit to bring you down informs your reflexes and every waking second is a litmus test of whether you’ll survive in the midst of all the chaos or succumb to it.

The striking 90s sci-fi aesthetic and enemy spacecraft designs and Kenichiro Fukui's electronic music only compliment it mentioned even more.

My only issue is that from stage 4 and onward, there's a bump in difficulty and that can be a bit overwhelming for a novice like me but all the more reason for me to revisit and get better.

An actual hidden gem if I've ever seen one.

THEY CALL ME 007

0 SKILL
0 SPIRES SLAIN
7 SUICIDE ATTEMPTS

Over four months of on and off playing, Steam says I finished the game with 144 hours clocked in and I'm finally finished with Baldur's Gate 3. Even though I don't agree with the popular conscious this is going to be a gateway into the next revolutionary RPG (Player choice and a game with vocal range and performances for nearly every bit of dialogue you encounter is not innovative.) one thing I can say with confidence is this is probably the independent game with the biggest budget I've seen in recent time perhaps even ever. You'd find it hard to believe a RPG with the much scope and ambition was originally crowdfunded. They did exactly what they promised to deliver on. This is 5e Dungeons and Dragons for people who don't have the time or friends to actually sink into tabletop sessions. Even though I don't really like how character classes function in this version compared to 1 and 2.5e (Warlocks especially. I loathe whenever I have to use Wyll for combat encounters) Larian did try their best to make it viable. Maybe it's because I was able to make the Custom Origin character I wanted to build around when I started but despite my issues like with how slow and excessive the downtime is between turns is, I was still able to enjoy slowing working my way towards a decent kit by the end of Act 1 to a building fairly powerful characters but the time I was two-thirds into Act 3.

Speaking of Act 3, I can't help but feel like this was kind of unfinished. The fact one of this game's recent patches added in epilogues only reinforces my point further. For how overwhelming the amount of side content and expositions are laid upon you which lead to my burnout around October, a lot of them really just end up being kill quests or companion questlines that just end abruptly until it's time for the final dungeon. I want to say I'm underwhelmed but the ending I got felt so bittersweet I honestly couldn't help but grin by the time the end credits rolled.

Albeit this is still one of the better games I played this year. Dark Urge replay when definitive edition drops next year will save me. My ass is not touching the Original Sin duology for at least 2 years minimum. I don't know how many 80+ hour RPGs I have left in me and I haven't even gotten around to finishing Starfield yet.

Also, I just beat this game on December 24th so I pretty much altered the fate of the world right before Christmas :) Happy Holidays everyone!