I never had the "pleasure" of playing GTAV in its prime back in 2013/2014. I eventually got to play it a bit on my Xbox 360 for a bit but the loading times and the torture mission completely put me off of it as a 13/14 year old. Years later after it was given away for free on Epic, I finally started a new playthrough without having played any other Rockstar game except Max Payne 3, so my judgment on the game isn't clouded by its predecessors.

The 2013 cynicism that fills this game is one of the most poorly aged facets of the overall experience. Nearly every single character in the game hates the world and everyone in it which makes meeting new characters completely uninteresting. On the other hand this makes the few positive or opportunistic characters a breath of fresh air, like the old couple Trevor meets, the daredevil Franklin hangs out with, Solomon the movie director, and Franklin himself. Other than when those characters are present, it feels like most dialog exchanges are simply characters espousing how much the world sucks and how everyone in it should die, them included. The trope is so played out at this point that it makes the main plot nearly unbearable to me. Characters in the side content are overall more bearable due to their eccentricities but they have another issue going for them.

Most of the content in this game just involves you driving for several minutes to sit and watch a cutscene for a few more minutes, to then drive for a few more minutes until something might happen, or maybe you'll just end up seeing another cutscene and driving some more. This is the one reservation I have towards the side content, as the lengthy drives combined with lack of rewards don't make going out of your way to do them fulfilling. I didn't find any of the minigames particularly enjoyable either which I feel is mildly inexcusable due to other contemporaries such as the Yakuza series having such engaging side content despite their tiny budget when compared to GTAV. There is one thing this game does quite well though.

The sandbox that is the open world has some of the highest potential for chaos and comedy. This is where the 1.5 stars for my rating comes from. I have had such a good time just causing chaos while driving around, my personal favorite thing to do being hitting motorcyclists as fast as I can. Just being able to cause mayhem at a moment's notice is one of GTAV's biggest strengths. Honestly I don't really have anything to say about this facet other than it's just fun compared to everything else in the game.

It feels odd to not have enjoyed the second highest selling game of all time. You'd think it'd be near flawless with the fact it's still making as much profit for Rockstar as it is, but when it comes to the singleplayer content there's very little I can give praise toward. Maybe there's something about the multiplayer that makes up for the missing 3.5 stars in my rating but I feel I'm about eight years too late to play it and I'm not willing to drop the real world money required to get fully invested into the game. I'm glad I played this game though, as an adult it's interesting to me since it's a time capsule of 2013 culture in terms of how vapid and worthless celebrity culture and media could be. I can't recommend it if you're looking for an interesting story or fun characters due to both being simplistic and cynical, but if you just wanna smack a car going 110MPH into an innocent person on a moped, I can't think of many better options.

Digimon World is fascinating because it fills a niche that most other JRPGs wouldn't attempt and still won't: A very short, non-linear experience with meaningful exploration, no random encounters and almost no dungeons, sidequests that put you in unique scenarios and actually give valuable rewards, and a low-key soundtrack with many songs being made up of only ambient sounds. And when I say short, I mean "it took me 13 hours to finish my first playthrough" short (albeit while using a guide, but there's no way you'll be wanting to play it without one for reasons I'll elaborate on later anyway).

While other games may have incorporated elements of these ideas, Digimon World is unique because of the way it combines all these concepts together and then throws a pet-raising simulator on top of it. While anything related to raising stats or battles is very rough around the edges (combat involves almost no interaction, evolving your Digimon is extremely messy without a guide which I'll talk about in a moment, and many of its systems are incredibly unintuitive just in general), the rest of the game is so refreshing and almost genuinely subversive that it still shines through as a distinct experience that I wish more RPGs would take from.

It's a shame that parts of it are so unapprochable. When it comes to the actual Digimon raising process your playthrough will be greatly streamlined and mercifully sped up if you use a guide, because the alternative will be trying to manipulate numbers you don't understand and figure out what vauge parameters mean with NPCs barely illuminating anything. That last bit is the worst part--it'll be common for characters to tell you that these systems exist but not give you any way of finding out which stats you need to evolve into which Digimon, and sometimes they don't even let you track some of these parameters in-game at all.

If the game's other ideas sound interesting to you and you're willing to push past that clunkiness then it's worth trying out--again, just make sure to use a guide. And if the frequently memed Digivolution mechanics still seem too intimidating, they do give you an Ultimate Digimon for free later on which will let you finish practically any main story fight without having to stress out over raising your Digimon in a specific way.

I first played Shadow the Hedgehog a couple of years ago where me and a friend laughed at the opening cutscene, went through a couple of levels, and then moved on with our lives, content to not play through the entirety of it on the basis of it being Shadow the Hedgehog. Yet since then, dropping it that fast has almost left a bit of a void for me--what was the rest of that game like? The premise sounded so bizarre that I knew I needed to come back to it someday and see it through to the end, and so I did, completing all 10 endings plus the true final boss.

Shadow is definitely an ambitious title: Guns! Vehicles! Branching paths and moral choices! It turns out that first thing actually works pretty well, for as memeable as the idea is. Shadow, Heroes, and 06 are all Sonic titles that will lock you in a room until you get rid of boring enemy waves, but in Shadow you're able to get past this nuisance the quickest, due to most enemies going down in just a couple of shots. The implementation is still clunky, but it's something!

Don't get too excited, though, as the level design is very clearly several notches below other Sonic games released around the same time, being filled with lots of copy-pasted rooms, repetitive environments, and absurd amounts of waiting for moving platforms. Given how the story expects you to do several playthroughs in order to reach the true ending, having to replay stages so often is something that seems like it would actually be faithful to the core design of Sonic: getting better and better at a level as you do more playthroughs, allowing you to speed through it quicker while taking all the fastest routes. Unfortunately, while the below-average level design could be passable in a vacuum, replaying it as much as you do just makes it more obvious how much of a step down it really is. There is also, of course, the notorious objectives that turn the level into a marathon in order to kill every last enemy or do some other mundane task. It's not great!

And yeah, that morality system sure is something! I was really interested to see how this was handled, how your decisions would affect the plot and characters, and it... doesn't, really. Sticking to a full dark/full hero playthrough leads to a fairly coherent run, but straying even slightly off the beaten path (which you will need to do to get all the endings and unlock the finale) leads to the plot becoming outright incomprehensible. You'll be teleporting around from stage to stage with no explanation for how you got there, plot beats will constantly be introduced and then dropped, and while characters will comment on your actions during gameplay, they'll completely forget about it by the time the next stage rolls around, as though their memory was just wiped.

It's a system that is certainly interesting on paper but it's too loose to go anywhere--when you can switch sides so often without anyone acknowledging it, it's hard to feel like anything you do has any actual consequences. It's a shame that the concept of the branching paths is also attached to this morality system, because if there was an alternate universe where a more traditional Sonic game picked up the idea of having alternate levels unlocked by completing extra objectives, without any of Shadow's baggage, without any of the hero/dark nonsense, it could make for something really cool. Unfortunately, the fact that it's part of Shadow means it's going to be forever tainted, and we probably won't see a successor to the concept. Everything about Shadow's presentation is antithetical to Sonic, but looking at the progression structure purely mechanically? They could've had something. (Although Sonic CD does admittedly have some mechanics that are kind of similar, to be fair.)

Shadow the Hedgehog is a failed experiment and it'll probably always be remembered as one, but I won't deny that this was also easily one of the most fascinating titles I've played this year. And hey, I Am All of Me is still the best Crush 40 song!

Look, I could sit here and wax poetic about how this has the best characters in the series, how the plot does everything 4 wanted to do but good, how RGG finally invented fun combat, and how this game has so much fun side content your head will explode.
However, I could also wax poetic about how the ending feels somewhat anticlimactic, how Saejima's portion almost burnt me out on Y5 entirely, how his game beats you to death with its themes, and how the final boss doesn't know why they're here (or is fun to fight, for that matter.)
But at the end of the day, none of that matters. The final boss is still gonna rip their shirt off and yell KIRYUUUU and they charge at each other and the title card shows up and I nut because I am a simple man with a monkey brain.
Yume/10

great synthwave ost and funky character designs, but as a game its pretty damn simple when you get into the swing of things. That process of getting in there though, i found incredibly satisfying. id say this was probably my starting point with getting more into "character action" games - sucked at the start and found much more appreciation for the genre by the end. ive done a couple normal mode playthroughs and find most bosses pretty fine, so since those playthroughs ive used a couple fights that i know fairly well to relax
furier seems af hard though i cannot get through that old man last phase someone help