Writing this while I just finished the game so i might change my opinion but, this game really means a lot to me now. I'm new to the persona series, even with the popularity that is persona 5, I never really had anything good to play it on so when I finally got my hands on one i just decided to wait for this game to come out.

this came at a right time for me and the message it told really spoke out to me. and unless I'm missing something, the only real problem i can see right now is strega being alright even with the new content they got in this game compared to the original.

I really adored the gameplay too, it can get repetitive but with the game throwing new things at you it felt every time I visited Tartarus i had something new so i really enjoyed my time with it's combat, the social life was also pretty fun. A lot of my friends didn't like the social links, and this could very change when I delve deep into the other entry's, but i enjoyed my time with the ones in here. Lack of male S.E.E.S. member SLs is a shame even with the new linked episodes they added, i would've much preferred full-on SLs but i can't really blamed them since it could've made more of a mess if they replaced the ones they already had in the original game.

All in all this is a fantastic game, i enjoyed most if not all aspects of it, it might be a pretty simple game compared to a game like persona 5, but it's simplicity and amazing story is just so full of charm.

Pokémon Platinum is a title that resounds loudly when Pokémon discussion comes around, it is a game that has gotten through every stage of fanaticism, with it being the improved version of seemingly one of the worse received and sluggish titles from everyone having played this specific one in the their childhood years thus marking what a Pokémon game would be forever for them. It's truly a generational game that has inflicted in the life of many people to get into the franchise to stay or video games in general... Or so I've heard. People all around me always have considered Platinum to be between one of the best Pokémon, if not just Nintendo DS games of all time and of course that going into this I was a bit excited, maybe they were right all along and I've always adverted myself to the thought of it being that good ever since I first tried out at the ripe age of eight years old... And I simply couldn't feel more disappointed by the end result.

Pokémon Platinum Version is the next big step in the Pokémon series of games, we're talking generational leap from the Game Boy family of handheld consoles to the new and shining, 3D-capable double-screened for double action Nintendo DS, a marvelous invention when it came to the ergonomics of handheld gaming as a whole and a series of handhelds that Pokémon would pretty much see as a home for the next decade or so. With it came completely new graphics mixing 3D objects with the tile-based sprites we've seen before, dynamic day/night cycle due to the clock functionality built into the system and a whole new screen to menu your menus easier I guess, they really haven't found an actual good utility for this one yet so it plays more like just your average GBA game with better graphics and sound.

So, with the new capabilities of the hardware you would expect that they make good use of them and actually bring the experience to a new standard, maybe this new Sinnoh region is vast with never-seen before Pokémon coupled with classics from Generations I-III coming back, right??? The answer would be, kinda? Only one of those is really correct and none of it is really in a good way.

Platinum marks the first Pokémon game to be abnormally long compared to its predecessors, and very little of it is actually used in any sort of meaningful way that would excuse it being this long. The whole game took me 41 hours and with having done a lot of optional stuff, I didn't skip out on any battles nor did I spend time grinding, so I reckon it probably wasn't just me being slow but the amount of padding there is throughout the whole journey, with routes being extra long with trainers that have some killer (hard) teams with little to nearly no time to actually spend in the cities and towns you visit, in Emerald it felt like the location of certain places you needed to go to were in very remote areas but in Platinum it feels like everything is a remote area. It's long, drawn out and so boring because out of those hours spent going everywhere only like 10 of it are actual things of substance relating to the story with Team Galactic and Cyrus, and the story isn't that good to begin with, it has the bare minimum of actual nuance to it and by the end of it I just simply couldn't care no matter what they did, I much prefer how the story was lied down in Emerald with it being spread out through the entire game and the resolve of it tying into the ending and stuff like that.

It being so long could've been somewhat excused if the usage of Pokémon wasn't so badly spread throughout, there's barely any familiar Pokémon from past Generations that aren't just Geodude, Magikarp and Zubat and every single trainer uses the same pool of like 20 mons while Team Galactic goons use the same pool of like 4 (four) mons, by the end of the game I had to check my Pokédex to see if I was actually lacking gray matter in my brain to make me forget about it but in reality is that there isn't nearly as much interesting wild Pokémon, and most of the Pokémon that were interesting enough came from the Ace Trainers that you fight in said long routes. (One particularly interesting one was Tropius being used in one of the teams, Tropius is such an underrated and unknown Pokémon that I was legitimately surprised, but it was an NPC's team so it's not like I could do anything about it) And then when you look at the Pokémon that Generation IV added you notice how bad is the variety of types is and how some like fire type Pokémon are simply neglected if it isn't Chimchar, it's probably my least favorite Regional Dex so far as there's simply nothing to it.

By the end of it, with the help of hacked Rare Candies and abusing the hell out of a measly 1.5x fast forward button the geniuses over at MelonDS headquarters crafted for me, I challenged the Pokémon League with a team at around level 50-ish, I struggled, hard. I know I'm not the best at Pokémon battling in general and I think my methods are a bit meat-headed when it comes to strategy but I didn't think it was that bad, and as an amazing surprise, by the end of it... Turns out I was underleveled. So I had to spend the entire Elite Four battles playing like a little bitch reviving and healing and waiting for the numbers to give me their blessing and coincide perfectly so that my damn Whiscash would actually use Surf once and for all. The game not only is 35 hours long minimum but to add insult to injury is also grindy as hell if you actually wanna have a slight margin of error when it comes to beating it, it's no surprise that leveling up anything past level 35 via natural means in Pokémon sucks and it's a long process but damn, you need to be around 65 to actually comfortably get past all the Elite Four challenges and that's just so much adding onto the pile of miseries this game has held for me.

In general I don't think I've ever felt more bored playing a Pokémon game, or a RPG in my life. Nothing really shines through, the story and characters are nothing otherworldly as people like to think it is, it's slow and has no variety when it comes to its monsters in this monster catching video game, and it's sluggish and slow as all hell. But hey, bonus points for the music department because damn did they pop off for some tracks here and there.

Kingdom Hearts II is a game I've been really eager to try out, its phenomenal reception and just the constant chatter surrounding the game really sells it. It's kinda funny how you have to go through two games, one pretty average and the other bad to get to this point and to some it's quite literally impossible to go back to the first game, me included. And that's simply a testament on how much they improved the formula this time around, In reality, Kingdom Hearts II feels and plays like Kingdom Hearts on crack.

Everything in this game is like trifold what it was in the first one, so much more content, more combat and movement abilities, more worlds to go through and a generally more cohesive and better story overall, it's really just crazy playing this and then going back and realizing how much the scale of things have changed and how much of it was augmented literally in the same generation of consoles, and this all makes for a pretty timeless game that has aged stupidly well and that is a marvel to play nowadays, with it being really charming, polished and fun as hell.

The updated combat makes up for a large learning curve of combos and different builds you can make for pretty much any occasion, something neat is that even the most seemingly bad abilities have a use and a certain level of potential to it, making them all very important overall and crucial for practically reaping through the game with the newly added Forms system that inclines you to approach combat differently as activating them usually restricts you from using certain other abilities or having a focus on things like Magic or Limits, and if you use these more than enough you eventually get Growth abilities that'll carry the enhanced high-jump or dodges to Sora's usual gameplay, kind of pushing you to think about using them more often than not.

Being able to properly tweak the tactics of your team in a hierarchy of using certain attacks more often, every now and then and less often is neat too, makes the party members feel a whole lot more useful than they ever did in past entries, although overall I wish giving them AP was way more worth it, because I'm pretty sure everyone just stacked up like 100 AP for Sora and then left Goofy and Donald in the 30's, can't say I didn't, but it's pretty much due because of the range of abilities you can actually have with Sora meanwhile the other party members are always stuck with the same basic ones.

Moving onto the worlds themselves, this time around they have pretty much cherry picked the most interesting/fun worlds to play from KH1 and brought them back, like Halloween Town and Olympus Coliseum and added a plethora of new ones, with the addition of smaller bite-sized worlds that are usually more of a plot thing than compared to the rest of the worlds. That and the addition of some particularly weird ones like Port Royal (Pirates of the Caribbean) and Space Paranoids (Tron) being the first worlds based off of live-action Disney properties, but I'll take them any day over Deep Jungle, Monstro or Atlantica. Needless to say the preexisting worlds have gotten significant upgrades when it comes to actual value in cutscenes, characters or locations from these classics.

Now, it's about time I start complaining about certain things, these are in no way completely experience-tarnishing and didn't personally bother me when I played the game but are things that I recognize that could have been done better for an ultimately perfect experience. So, with Kingdom Hearts II I've always felt that this game rides off of being better than KH1 a little bit too much, almost to the point where they forgot to be better AND expand further.
Take for example the levels in this game, KH1 had a really bad case of most levels' design being really obtuse, having a lot of obstacle courses when the mobility wasn't the best and having every level be a block with adjacent blocks around it that would contain chests and other collectibles that you would have to go out of your way of getting... Kingdom Hearts II is the complete polar opposite of that.

In Kingdom Hearts II, every level/world is comprised of hallways. Every single level you can go to you can go from point A to point B without any disturbance, not even anything that would require any sort of the new mobility the game likes to show off so much, and that is honestly so disheartening, and really shifts the focus of the game from making you look around and explore the worlds to just getting to the end of the hallway to fight a boss and then nothing else, by then you've most likely already collected all chests in the area and there is little left to see, and it's truly a shame because exploring and going around in this would've been so much fun especially considering the Forms and the Growth abilities. Ironically enough, this is the first Kingdom Hearts game with a minimap that you don't really even need for exploring, as it is a menial task in this game.

Another thing that I kinda wish they'd done better was the story and the beats of it, in KH1 I understood why the original Kingdom Hearts story wasn't really the spotlight as it still was a risky move in case the game didn't sell all that well, but in here... You have a whole Chain of Memories behind you, that game was pretty much comprised of 70% original Kingdom Hearts story stuff, then you have the chance to expand upon the new characters and plot points that were already pretty much secluded to a pretty bad game, to just fall into the same formula for the second entry. I clocked in around 33 hours of playtime, and between the story taking its sweet little time drip feeding you actual original story content, having to play all of the worlds and then do it AGAIN after the first big lore dump (marking the halfway point of the game) is just insane, if the game wasn't as fun as it is this would be horrible. Then the last 5 hours is like the thing that they kept on talking about over and over during the whole game and it just doesn't feel as satisfactory as it being a constant through the game, kinda just feels like they kept everything until the end so that the final act would feel satisfactory, but to me it felt rather cheap.

Overall, Kingdom Hearts II is an amazing game with pretty good things going for it, but it's literally gracing perfection and it saddens me that this could be refined ever so slightly to make it that. But as it stands, it's a good game, and would definitely recommend. Just make sure you play on something more than Normal if you're a competent enough player, a few levels over and you're already launching nukes at the poor Heartless.

I love the concept of this game. The idea of having a compilation of fake mobile game ads as actual games sounds like a dumb and fun idea. However, whether intentional or not, the actual quality follows the same quality of said ads.

Looking at the games separately, Pin Pull and Color Lab are both fine in quality, just a bit too easy at times and that's about it. Cash Run is so picky when it comes to ranks and the controls aren't precise enough to work with them. Sometimes it comes down to 1 or 2 A-button presses or even just actual luck in some levels. Parking Lot is solid overall, but the thugs in later levels are just annoying instead of being any hint of a challenge, and the cars aren't on a grid which makes moving them frustrating when they collide at times despite looking like they shouldn't. Lastly, Number Tower is probably the game that'll make you think the most (or guess the most depending on how you approach it). It's fine but takes way too long for some levels, even when mashing.

Overall, the whole game compilation is fine and you get what you pay for, but this game could be much better with just some simple quality-of-life improvements or general polish. If the developers were intending it to have this same level of quality shown in the ads though, then they hit it perfectly.