Going to start off strong and say FF3 is the best game in the original trilogy. An argument can be made that 1 is better if you like that the game is more simplified or you have nostalgia for the first one. But both of these clear 2 easy.

This game continues the tradition of the main party tracking down objects surrounding the 4 elements. A tradition that carries on to a majority of future titles. We are finally getting to the point where the story in FF games matter and there’s actual effort being put into it. It’s nothing astounding by any means but there’s effort being made to make you care about the story and characters. Speaking of characters they’re also fleshed out and there’s a lot of named side characters. This game even lets you talk to the guest characters after they join your party. You get a few lines of dialogue or hints about what to do next. For the first time I could also pick out a favorite character because they finally decided the characters actually have to have personalities and stuff. They don’t just exist as guideposts. For the main party I’d go with Refia and for side characters you can’t go wrong with picking Cid.

But not everything is improved with the story and characters. FF3 will still have a guest character join your party to go into the next dungeon. Then at the end of the dungeon they get killed or sacrifice themselves. It happens to almost every single person in 2 and 3. In terms of the story they probably spend days or weeks together but that doesn’t translate well to the player. You probably know them for less than 30 minutes. For this to work you need to introduce the characters earlier. When they die they play an emotional scene like you are suppose to care about this person you barely know. With it happening so often you already learn to not care about anyone that joins your party.

This game introduced the job system and I love it. It lets you make your team and play however you want. Though a downside of this being the introduction of the job system is at certain points in the game you are basically punished if you don’t have at least one member of your team a certain job. It’s like the devs wanted you to experience certain jobs so they almost force you to use them. One example is if you don’t have a dragoon during a certain boss battle the fight is basically 5x as hard. The final boss also almost requires you to have 2 certain classes. My favorite starting class was the thief. I love that they are actually useful in this game unlike FF1. Most of the time you’re better off going with another warrior but not here. The thief has a passive ability that lets you unlock certain doors. Usually you have to buy magic keys to open the doors but if you have a thief you can just do it and a lot earlier than you normally can too. In fact my strongest character was the thief who I never changed their job class until end game when I unlocked ninja. They were the first person to hit 9999 damage well before anyone else even came close to that damage. FF3 also introduced summons and there’s a lot of the classics here. They are treated like magic and a lot of them you just buy from shops, but 3 of them you actually have to track down and fight to be able to summon them.

Another first is that this was the first FF game to crash on me. It only happened once and it was after someone joined my party. I tried talking to them over and over to see all the dialogue after the 4th or 5th talk the game went to a pure white screen and froze.

The game also has unique sections that change the gameplay up a little by making you cast mini or toad on yourself to go through certain places. It help to diversify the dungeons. Though during the mini sections you have to have a magic user to do any real damage otherwise you’re better off running for every fight. Something else that’s new to 3 is that they got rid of the ability for anyone to use items that cast spells in battle like the fire rod. Now you can only use that item in battle if you can actually equip it. It does make the game more balanced and makes you use the actual items that cause magic damage instead of everyone using the infinite use stuff.

There’s a fat chocobo in the game and I love it. He acts as an item storage which is pretty useful in the original NES version but useless in the PSP game since you don’t have an item limit. You can summon it in certain places and to store items you feed him whatever you want to store. Then I guess when you want the item back he either throws it up or you just shove your hand down his throat and pull out whatever you need. Another interesting thing is the amount of airships you get. You go through them like candy. You get one it blows up, you get another one it gets shot down, etc. The final airship rocks. It has a place to rest, store items, buy anything you need. You never have to run to town to rest ever again.

There’s so many hidden pathways / items in this game it almost becomes too much at points. I mean hidden paths have hidden paths in them. I enjoy hidden things when used sparingly but this game takes it to the extreme and hides stuff / paths everywhere. In this game you can only find / rarely steal phoenix downs. You can’t buy them anywhere. So if you use all of them up early on or you don’t find them you are out of luck. You can steal some, which needs a character using the thief class and their thief level needs to be high enough to even have a chance at stealing one. Some enemies do drop them too but it’s extremely rare that happens.

Unlike FF2 I never felt overpowered in this game. I actually had to plan out my moves and use strategy instead of smashing the attack button until the fight was over. The dungeons are also fun unlike FF2. They got rid of most of the BS and made interesting dungeons…. That is until my biggest gripe with this game, the final dungeon.

The final dungeon sucks ass. It’s a 2 part dungeon, The Crystal Tower and The World of Darkness. You have to do both back to back without saving, resting, or leaving the dungeon. You have to go through the multi floor CT to fight a boss then after that you go to the WoD. Here you have 4 hard bosses to fight in opposite corners of the dungeon. You also have the 3 optional bosses you can fight. Now I say optional but they are basically mandatory. They drop ribbons that protect you from status effects. You only get 1 during the story. Without these the final boss uses Bad Breath and can turn you into a toad, sleep you, poison you, among many other things. So after all of that you can go fight the final boss. Now that’s 9 bosses in a row plus random fights with the hardest enemies without saving the game because you can’t leave the final dungeon once you start it.

My first attempt at this I lost. It was a 15 minute back and forth fight where I used every elixir I had struggling to find time to attack. That cost me 3 hours. I had to do every boss fight and both dungeons again. Before I tried again I went and grinded some exp. So far in this journey through FF history, this is the first game that I had to grind in. Everyone always talks about how grind heavy old FF / RPG games are and I always laughed because I never felt I had to grind just to beat the game. But not here. I felt if I didn’t grind some levels I would never beat the boss even though I was in the low 50s during the fight. So I ended up grinding 5 more levels and got 3 more levels while defeating all the bosses again. In total I was about 4 levels higher than the first attempt because I didn’t have as many random battles as I did during the first attempt. At this point I was around 55-56. Even then I still almost lost. The boss gets multiple attacks per round and sometimes they go before me and sometimes some of my characters go before them. Everything was going fine, it was still hard but not oppressively so. That is until near the end when the boss used a party wide attack that did over half to everyone for their first attack. If they would have done that again I would have lost and there would have been nothing I could have done. And that’s not it, if on the next turn the boss got to go first before my heal went off and used that attack it would have been game over.

This final dungeon has to be the reason why you can save in dungeons in every Final Fantasy after this one. They know what they did and how much everyone hated it.

Easily my favorite of the older games before the 2018 soft reboot just because not only is the scale and sheer spectacle raised to ridiculous heights, but this time around the combat system can actually back it up too. I never liked how the previous two games felt to actually play because of how health spongey everything was and there just wasn't enough variety in Kratos' moveset to hold either game up for very long, even if they were impressive back then on the PS2.

God of War 3 gives Kratos four different weapons, four utility items that aren't just for puzzles but give an actual use in combat as well, upgrades have meaningful additions than just "more damage", and the enemy design is much more polished in favor of giving the player a fair challenge without being overly tedious this time around. The level design has also nailed the perfect balance of quiet time and fun puzzles to solve without going too overly long without something else happening to break up the silence and monotony. It's just a really fun campy time that also happens to be one of the most violent video games I have ever played! like jesus christ oh my god some of those kills go far

There is something to be said about the way 3 handles and writes its female characters. Everybody in this universe sucks and isn't a good person, but there's something about how 3 only makes its women either damsels in distress that Kratos uses and/or abuses, or despicable greedy good-for-nothings that Kratos just abuses. There's almost something there with Pandora, but it's too little too late and not to mention she's more of a MacGuffin, a means to an end more than an actual person. I don't think it's enough to ruin the game per se, but more just a weird thing that felt kind of noticeably strange and off. The other games in the series can be mean-spirited and Kratos isn't a good guy, but 3 seems to draw more attention to this aspect in a way that kind of makes me give the side-eye to whatever was going on with the writers.

Like, what the fuck was with the needless bit with Poseidon's Princess? I think Santa Monica Studio must have realized years later how gross and in poor taste of a bit it was considering the PS4 remaster removes a trophy that was named "I didn’t do it... But I wish I did!" for killing her but like, holy shit, that probably wasn't okay even for 2010 standards? Can't wait to see how the 2018 game will justify that one.

Pros:
+ one of the progenitors of the modern Roguelite genre
+ movement is fast and combat is tight
+ magic is fun to use and varied
+ some funny and unique character traits
+ meta-upgrades are plentiful and highly motivating
+ map is useful and well-implemented
+ progress is felt in any moment-to-moment action
+ unlockable classes change up the gameplay
+ final story reveals are surprisingly good

Cons:
- sprite work is only passable
- no weapon variety
- hitboxes have serious issues
- challenge rooms that are tied to specific runes are frustrating
- camera not being movable verticably makes combat situations often unfair
- no quick restart after dying
- huge difficulty spikes in the later two stages
- hostile projectiles follow no clear rule of going or not going through walls
- collectible items are not explained and serve no apparent function
- final boss is simplistic and feels unfinished
- pop culture references were already dated when it came out (e.g.The Matrix)
- some tasteless and annoying traits (e.g. dementia)

Playtime: 8 Hours with 102 "children"
Magic Moments: Connecting the dots on the way to the final boss. Using a class-specific ability to clear a challenge room for the first (and only time) in a playthrough.


Verdict:
One of the progenitors of the contemporary Roguelite craze is still an enjoyable experience after all these years. Even though combat situations are frequently frustrating and the imperfect dungeon and enemy creation algorithms continually lead to cheap deaths, the meta-upgrades are motivating and keep you coming back for more pain.

Rogue Legacy is a quick and dirty experience with enough charm to warrant a a quick (re-)play and helps you understand how independent gaming and Roguelites in particular evolved in the past few years.

Pros:
+ looting and leveling up never gets old
+ streamlined interface and controls on consoles work splendidly
+ dodge move is a welcome addition to the vocabulary
+ trap kills and other environmental elements are smart innovations
+ the quality of the loot is roughly estimated before pickup
+ the sound design and music are as great as ever
+ incredible technical performance on PS4 Pro

Cons:
- comic art style is unbefitting of the series and setting
- single player feels unfinished and generally neglected
- story mode and endless audio logs are forced upon first time players
- settings are mostly recycled from D2
- quests are mostly fetch quests and offer no variety
- no build variety and RPG elements are locked behind the level cap
- difficulty level is generally far too low, with options locked behind progress
- life restoration equipment and reworked potions make combat mostly trivial
- item durability has basically been made redundant, removing strategy from the gameplay
- most passive skills are just entirely useless
- damage number inflation is silly and breaks the immersion
- item management has been dumped down and is unrewarding (especially compared to the PC version)
- bosses are recycled from previous games and have become talky parodies of themselves
- final boss of Act V is a brick wall with cheap attacks
- animations are choppy and feel unfinished (attacks into thin air, rolling recovery etc.)

Blahgic Moment: Entering the same old desert from D2 and almost falling asleep from the boredom.
My Class: Crusader, finished at level 70 with a few Paragon levels.

Playtime: One long, tedious weekend in April, single player only.


Verdict:
Long before the spineless betrayal that was Diablo Immortal, Diablo 3 already watered down the core tenets of the franchise and chose mainstream appeal over quality: its streamlined approach to the classic gameplay loop and fantastic atmosphere created by the first Diablo and perfected by the second has been turned into a casual, tedious experience for the masses. Even with greedy ideas like the auction house removed from the console version, the game appears to be solely designed around multiplayer and the endless repetition of a handful of dungeon ideas, with solo players able to get through the entire campaign in a weekend. The laughably low difficulty makes suicidal runs into enemy positions a viable strategy, and with the exception of some of the later bosses, mindlessly circle-pushing the skill buttons will win you the game without even looking at the screen. In fact, I used my first potion at the end of Act I by accident, died for the first time at the end of Act IV because I wasn't paying attention and only ever got stuck on the boss of Act V because it is flatout badly designed. Additionally, there are no memorable set pieces or boss areas to be found, and the events on the overworld are rare and not worth discussing.

It's no wonder that this game is mostly ignored by the fanbase, which has largely opted to stay faithful to Diablo 2 instead, and I don't think there is any reason to play this ever again... or even once. What a fall from grace for this series.

this is the best game in the whole "shock" series full stop.

I dont like "rpg" wannabe adventure games: Making players pick a specific build and then locking them out of other play styles. Thats how system shock 2 plays.

system shock 1 gives you all the tools and you use them how you want to.

you can fight with melee weapons, use guns, hack etc.. its more about balancing your resources than it is picking a specific play style.

the vast majority of issues with the game were done away with in the enhanced edition. The control scheme is now great and in many ways the combined drag and drop inventory style and fps look is superior to what you get in other games. Its another layer of complexity and challenge for you to master.

Anachronox is a labor of love that suffers in the gameplay department.
The game's writing, characterization, and storytelling are all top notch, and the cutscenes that go with that story are all directed fantastically (to the point where the game was edited into a film at one point).
The game's environments, while occasionally not the best graphically (specifically areas like the canyons of Democratus), are still very unique and well designed, and this is supported by great sound design and a phenomenal soundtrack (highlights for me being the theme of Hephaestus and Stiletto's theme).
The one place the game suffers, unfortunately, is in its actual gameplay. Combat is slow and not very strategic (though the idea of moving around the battlefield and interacting with the environment is a great one), only two or three dungeons are more interesting than a leisurely walk, and the puzzles can occasionally become tedious and annoying.
However, I don't think Anachronox's gameplay failings override the rest of the game, which is absolutely fantastic. If nothing else? Absolutely worth watching the movie edit. Otherwise, highly recommended for those who enjoy rich worldbuilding and witty writing alongside a great story.
Oh, and one final thing, this game easily has the most unique party in any RPG. Without question.

Everything like this got wiped off the face of the universe the second DOOM came out, obviously, but this is a meaningful improvement on WOLFENSTEIN 3-D and pretty damn good in its own right!

Good art, good (goofy) sound, interesting ideas like items in boxes, enemies lying in wait as items, teleporters, a goddamn MAP ... not everything works perfectly (like the enemy who can get stunned and then get back up) but it all hangs together and makes for a fun time.

I remember playing this as a kid post-DOOM and not really giving it the time of day. I imagine that's more or less representative of the entire gaming public, lol. And that's a shame! It's much better than I expected, revisiting it.

Lost Judgment is one of those rare games we only get every few years; a game so passionately made, so effortlessly executed, so engaging from beginning to end. It's a step up in nearly every way over the original Judge Eyes, which was already a pretty great game itself. The combat has been refined to the point I feel tempted to put this up in a pedestal next to some of the action game greats. The tweaks to crane style and the addition of snake increase the depth of the combat a lot, throw in the already fun tiger style and you have one of the best combat systems we've seen from an action game in the past 10 years. Switching from style to style to match the situation, or to straight up be stylish in front of your foes, never stops being exciting, and the ways these three styles can interact with each other make every counter feel unique. I do have to admit that it would've been nice if each style had been mapped to individual buttons on the dpad, DMC style, instead of cycling through them with one button. There's so much to do too! This is one of those rare cases where there's quantity AND quality. The side cases are tons of fun for the most part, side activities are plentiful, and the introduction of school stories add a lot of flavor to the game. Between the two cities it feels like you can never run out of things to do.

The stealth and parkour segments stick out like a sore thumb, they're by far the worst parts of the game. The parkour is plain boring and so is the stealth, with the added bonus of sometimes being frustrating. Not because it's difficult, not at all, but it's very arbitrary in what you can and can't do which leads to some unfair game overs.

Lost Judgment, much like its predecessor, starts out really good, gets a bit slow in the middle, and towards the back half becomes genuinely legendary. The last five or so chapters of Lost Judgment are some of the most engaging pieces of writing I've had the pleasure of experiencing since maybe Umineko Chiru. It's not as good a mystery as Umineko, not even close, but the drama and character writing are so on point that some moments brought me close to tears. Lost Judgment's antagonist is, in my opinion, one of the best this medium has to offer. Yagami is no slouch either, he is definitely one of my favorite protagonists now, and his interactions with said antagonist are the best scenes in the game. The themes of truth and justice the game tackles are very heavy, sometimes to the point of being almost exhausting. This isn't something I hold against the game, but it might be something that puts some people off. The game does an overall great job of balancing light heartedness with some really heavy topics like bullying, suicide, murder, political corruption, and more. It's a true detective story through and through, and never pulls any punches. The ending is particularly impactful and left me speechless.

Lost Judgment deserves to be called a modern classic, 100%. It's a bit of a shame that this series lives in the shadow of its big brother Yakuza (or Like a Dragon, whatever Sega feels like calling it here in the west), but I'd highly recommend it to anyone looking for something to play. In a medium currently plagued by mediocrity and lame attempts at mimicking the Hollywood machine in the AAA space, it's nice to see a game that marches to the beat of its own drum; one that takes risks by tackling sensitive topics while also being proud of being a video game. Raidou Kuzunoha may be no more, but I'm glad to see his spirit live on through Yagami and the Judge Eyes series. Just don't take this one away from me, Sega. Not this one.

UNWAVERING BELIEF.