Never have I seen a game abuse its status as a video game this hard, it never even once tries to convince you you're playing anything BUT a video game, it's batshit crazy, weird and the entire game feels like you're sick

But where I find a lot of it creative, funny or disturbing, I think much of the game is absolutely atrocious, the combat is bad, the navigation is bad, I know all of these contribute to the weird "acid-trip" like feel of the game, but it's just completely half-baked in its entirety, sometimes I genuinely felt like the game was trying too hard to be weird when it should've been trying hard to be a functional game at the very least

With an otherwise interesting story, I think the game doesn't strike a balance between weird and plain convenience very well. I guess a game should leave you different than how it finds you, and this game can certainly give you a taste of that.

"Master! We're in a tight spot!"

Man, I'm so disappointed. Not in the sense that Killer7 fell short of expectations or that it failed to meet them, that there has never been a game that feels interesting and unique, to which I can't seem to play. Born from the Capcom 5, Killer7 is nothing more than a weird and feverish cult classic born from the spirit of Suda himself. The Kill the Past series, or what I've played so far, is so innovative in itself. Flower, Sun and Rain, for example, unmistakably changed what it meant to be a walking simulator and had the story to tell the message to destroy the burden of your past. The mundane loop and gameplay , though tedious at first, hits slow and the game ends with one of Suda's strongest works in an outstanding series.

And Killer7?

I honestly don't know, I'm having a hard time getting anywhere far in the game. Weird Rail shooter/survival-horror-esque gameplay is probably not my thing. I don't like doing pausing and having to take my shots anxiously, I've always assumed this game to have fast and smoother action. The puzzles, in my opinion, do not match my assumed mood of Killer7. Weird, must-haves of survival horror are known their puzzles, Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil the works..I don't know, maybe I'll go back and try playing this. This is not a review or criticism of itself, in fact you should go install it and at least try it now. Just frustration that I can't seem to enjoy it as much as I wanted to. It sucks, everything surrounding the game is captivating and it tries to draw you in, but god it's a challenge to see this game's wonders. Just sadness, but nothing but respect for this title. Unsurprisingly, one of most bizarre works by Grasshopper and a style, direction and story that can never be replicated again. There will never be anything again like Killer7.

Except Hopper7.

Or Killer8.

"In the name of Harman..."

X8 is what you get if you decide you're going to fix X7 but somehow figure that the only issue with that game was the camera, which is an incredibly daft way of looking at the problem. X7 was going to be a bad game from the moment they started developing the tech for it, trying to map a fast-paced 2D action game to 3D, without much regard for preserving the way it played.

The result was a tedious mess with a long list of issues, which includes: awkward physics that create problems not only during fights, but while climbing and moving around on platforms. 3D animations that are just not as snappy as 2D -- achieving that requires a lot of polish -- resulting in a game that feels slower overall. Characters feel unresponsive, as attack animations are far longer and unnecessary additions such as turning animations are added. In fact, while the playable characters are the ones for which this issue is immediately noticeable, almost every enemy in the game has this issue too, which means that bosses feel stilted and unthreatening.

There's more: back when the games were 2D, there was a clear distinction between foreground and background due to distinct rendering styles (X6 is arguably an exception, but it's not a bar for quality). When everything is 3D and stuff flies into and from the background, that distinction is a lot harder to make, resulting in stages that are more difficult to read, and hits or deaths you would have seen coming from a mile away before.

This is also an issue with lighting, color, and the use of perspective. For the former two, 2D games enjoyed well-defined color palettes with defined edges between one stage element and the other. You could see spikes in your peripheral vision as soon as it entered the screen, thanks to their marked shape framed by the clearly understandable platforms, whereas now they blend into details on floors and walls. Details which, by the way, you wouldn't normally see, if not for the use of perspective to accentuate that yes, this is a 3D environment you're looking at! It looks pretty, but adds more noise and makes distances harder to parse compared to the 2D analogues.

The PS2 itself factors in, its relatively low processing power for a 3D console contributing to the limited visuals, slower pace, loading times, etcetera. Only after all that, then you have the design issues, including the camera that seems like it belongs in an RPG of sorts. But forget about the camera for a moment, and look at everything else that comes before it. Can a good Mega Man X game come out of that mess? It can't. And that's what X8 ultimately felt like: a sequel that removes the 3D gameplay from X7, but keeps most of the other problems.

Which isn't to say the game is an exact copy of X7, it did bring new ideas to the table, among which are some very cool ideas and some terrible ones. On the good camp, characters have been reworked and are much more interesting this time around. All of them are available from the start, and power ups are no longer restricted to the character that picks them up. Each of their main gameplay issues have been solved, as well.

X is now back to having two armors, the Hermes and Icarus armors, both of which are crazy powerful and can be mixed and matched if you feel like it. The downside is that they're ugly as heck, but I'll take it after X7's pretty but anemic Glide Armor. His charge shot is back to being good, since it covers a larger part of the screen and there is no lock-on mechanic anymore. This also means Axl loses the spot of top ranged character, but as he can now hover for an extended period of time as well as control the direction of his shots, he finds himself a niche in shooting things outside of their attack ranges.

Something that also helps Axl is a newly added mechanic where switching characters allows the character in the back to restore HP, encouraging the player to not focus on a single protagonist. Still, I prefer having Zero in the back, who still feels sluggish compared to his X4 incarnation, but his Z-Saber now reaches farther, and if it doesn't fit your playstyle, he can collect other weapons to use, like a glaive and a hammer. It's all very stylish, and while I personally stuck to the Z-Saber, I hear the extra weapons are legitimately useful on the Hard difficulty setting.

That said, to get those weapons, you have to go through the upgrade system, and this is where things gets stupid. X8 decided just picking up the upgrade in a stage was too easy. Not only did they make the acquisition methods convoluted -- I don't think most of these are possible to figure out without a guide -- but you also have to grind metals in stages to be able to equip them.

How grindy is it? About a third of my final playtime was spent away from the controller while the shoot button was held down and Axl farmed metals for me. There are faster methods than the AFK one, but it's still hours worth of farming, and you have to do it to get all the upgrades. To add insult to injury, extra lives also have to be bought with metals: the EX-tank is gone, the game is back to booting you to stage select on a game over, and if you want to have more than two lives, you're going to have to fork over those valuable metals.

It's an awful system. Better than rescuing reploids for upgrades and having to redo stages over and over, I guess, but still awful. And then again, you still have to do that, since backtracking is at its worst since X5. In fact, X8's stage design is centered around frustration more than anything else. There are two Ride Chaser stages that play like X7 stages on steroids and can just eff right off. There's a Ride Armor stage that's infuriating in how the armor handles, and in the wonky stage gimmicks that force you to retry dozens of times. There are spikefests that call to mind all of the innate issues to the game I've mentioned above. It's all awful.

There's also a ranking system for the stages, NG+, multiple navigators you can experiment with on stages, but god, I am not submitting myself to this game one more time, and neither should anyone. Mega Man X8 is a sad attempt to salvage the franchise, and puts a long-delayed end to a franchise that kept going for at least three games too long.

The short version is, that Star Ocean: The Second Story R is a good remake of a PS1 classic that includes a lot of helpful features and tools to make this a good way to experience the game for the first time. With updated graphics that are quite appealing in the HD Pixel art era that other remakes like Live A Live have been utilizing. There are a lot of interesting ideas that are explored in Star Ocean Second Story R, and it is something other RPGs could learn from.

The long version, is that the gameplay can suffer from being incredibly unbalanced due to the way that the IC system interacts with the combat system. The IC system offers interesting ways to have characters do out of combat actions that all interact with each other in very interesting ways that then help your characters get stronger. Leveling up alchemy gets you materials to then craft into accessories and blacksmith into armor and weapons when you have enough party members with high levels of crafting. Your writing skill allows characters to write books that help other characters to learn these IC skills faster, and publish specialty books that earn you money through the game at publication houses, and cooking gives you very good healing items with effects that can improve other stats. Beyond these are many more combinations that fit into this addictive system. However, the major problem is the combat system is also reliant on this, as there were large difficulty spikes which make it so that the game seems to want you to be investing large amounts of time into leveling these stats up when the game itself is incredibly short outside of the grinding. It is fluff to expand game time when the actual amount of content as far as the main story is short even if it can be fun fluff. The issue is it not being optional by the last dungeon and being required to actually stand a chance against the final boss, let alone the upgraded and enhanced final boss.

Characters were initially interesting, but in the latter half of the game they fall off and are weaker than PS1 contemporary characters, with some of the weakest female characters I can think of from that era. Rena while being a good character, suffers heavily from being an optional protagonist who is so reliant on her other optional lead Claude who is clearly written as the main lead of the story. So much so that when large emotional moments happen for Rena, they are often ignored in favor of Claude to give him more moments even on Rena's route when Rena arguably goes through much more traumatic things than him. It is very much ripe with the feeling that Claude is the main character, and Rena is just an optional character you can play as for a second play through if you really want to. The different paths also don't feel as distinct as I would have liked, with only minor differences between each route, which usually just results in Rena getting kidnapped and trying to escape vs. Claude rescuing her. The major difference being then in the PAs, the system by which small side stories appear for characters. On paper PAs are incredibly interesting, but they fail in the end due to a few limited factors. First, they are very short, and not significant moments for characters most of the time. Secondly, they are very congested, usually getting a lot at the very moment you unlock a new character, before becoming sparse and empty until the latter half of the game, where there are again very few of them. There could definitely be more of them. Finally, they also highlight how shallow the writing is for the women characters, with all of them being either boy crazy, hysterical, or clumsy in a cutesy way to the point where there were no women characters in the party that escaped unscathed. There are two NPC women that actually do anything to the plot that are not mothers, boy crazy, or something similar, and both nearly die. It is that dire. The men for their credit usually have more fun scenes and are more enjoyable to watch PAs of.

A lot of this is cut in favor of the various different endings of the game, which come in the form of different character pairings based on which characters in your party have the highest affinity like the Fire Emblem series. However, similar to the PAs, while there are 99 different endings like the game boasts, they are too short and feel very insignificant compared to the Fire Emblem endings that usually use paragraphs of text to convey things in a better manner that feels more conclusive. Many of the ones that I had gotten feel rather disconnected from the actual central ending which is the same. It might have been that I had just gotten some poorly written ones, but that 4 of the 99 that I had gotten were so rushed, short, and inconclusive that they left me feeling kind of hollow at the end is staggering, especially as I repeat how short the central scenario of the game ended up being.

Star Ocean: The Second Story R has very interesting and fun gameplay that for the time of the original release of the game was something that made it competitive with its contemporaries despite its relatively lower level of storytelling and characters. However, in the modern day with a remake of it, it just highlights all those flaws that other games have learned from since then.

Se me hace todo demasiado simple y genérico, sobre todo en historia y personajes. El gameplay es demasiado caótico, pero se salvan las disciplinas y la creación de objetos, que tienen sinergias chulas. Por lo demás es un juego que me dice poco. Me da pena porque creo que tiene muchisimo mas potencial del que aprovecha y varias escenas de Claude y Rena me han gustado muchísimo, les he cogido cariño. Tiene puntos concretos que incluso sorprenden un poco. Pero es que en general este juego y esta saga son como comer pan blanco

I genuinely don't understand the ratings... If this is the best Star Ocean has to offer (this was my first game of the franchise), I don't see myself beating any other Star Ocean game.

The game itself is good, couldn't have been remade better, all the QOL stuff, the mechanics and even the story has been changed up a bit but It's VERY hard to go beyond what the OG Star Ocean 2 was.

The music is good, not on Final Fantasy's level or Octopath but still VERY good.

The dialogue is very thin, but I found myself liking that a lot because the game respects your time in that regard, if it needs 5 lines to explain something it WILL take 5 lines and 5 lines only. That's the one thing that kept me going and interested even though the plot was the most generic thing ever.

When writting about the characters I need to make one thing clear, you may see so many party members, but there's only 2 characters, Claude and Rena. The rest of the party are just there for the sake of being there.
The main duo have some decent moments but they're both pretty bland and their relationship barely evolves until the very last scenes of the game. I like Kenny though but I expected more from him.

The story itself is, well, the most generic thing I've seen in my entire life. When the game starts I genuinely thought only the start would be generic. Then I saw how the game tries to pull an FF6 separating the game in 2 big parts in a pretty obvious way and I started to think that the first part being so generic was only the buildup for some grand, mature and filled with cliffhangers second part. Boy was I wrong... The second part is not only more of the same but it becomes even worse, drags you for no reason and presents a convenient problem that didn't exist fixing it in a very convenient way. The ending itself left me standing there like... That's it?

I have mixed feelings about the combat. It's fun and engaging but sometimes I felt like the game was very unfair. It's almost pointless to dodge because if you happen to miss you're pretty much dead and the enemies become sponges that gradually hit hard.

The art is MINDBLOWING. Incredible falls short, although I expect more mob and npc variety. There's not much more to say about it besides asking Square to keep going at it, because I love this new 2D style that started with Octopath.

Overall a good game, I do get that some people are getting hyped with how fun the game starts but I do think most of them haven't beaten it and will probably change their opinion once they get there. It's a solid 7.5 in my books, but I genuinely can't believe how anyone thinks this is the best JRPG ever with how many games do the same but better.