I don't know how to go about writing my thoughts on the most critically acclaimed game on Backloggd. How daunting of a task is that?! Especially when, to put it politely, I hold a dissenting opinion. And maybe the only one ever about this game. So, instead of trying, I'm going to copy and paste all the notes I frantically jotted down when I finally finished it at 1:30 in the morning, a play session that was bookended by work the night before and work the following morning. Feel free to read, critique, or ignore at your leisure.


So much irrelevancy to the case
Very frustrating for me in particular. I am not a Skyrim gamer. I do not appreciate when side quests take so much spotlight away from the main quest.
I want to solve this murder. Anything that isn't directly related to that is worthless to me (outside of getting xp). Why should I bother painting walls, looking for imaginary bugs, starting a night club, exploring cursed buildings, attempting to persuade a cargo container to open, or any number of other quests that I never did?
Even the history and world building of Revachol often distracts from the case, although these often provide motivations for key characters and establish the tone of the world, so I'm more forgiving of it. Even if I skim through the details and forget them immediately afterwards.


The ending is amazing
I appreciate how many quests are neatly brought together and wrapped up in the end. It still does not justify the time spent on the quests since they are optional, regardless of how seamlessly they bolster the ending
That said, I love the phasmid


Very respectable above all else
A game that dares to talk about serious subject matter (politics, long-term consequences of our actions/allegiances, corruption, racism, rape victims)
A game that doesn't need to "game-ify" itself with marketable clichés, and is confident in its own identity
A game thats gameplay is reading , yet still embraces interactivity and its inspiration in table-top mechanics to make it something only possible in this medium
Is it the best example of something like this in the medium? No. But it's the exact kind of game that we need more of


The voice acting is stellar, especially the narrator, even if the deliveries often lack a natural-feeling speaking pace.
And also thank god for it, I could not imagine playing through all of this without voice acting


Concept of allegiances is a little half-baked in my opinion. Like, sure narratively maybe my political allegiances say something about me as a player or about my character or some larger thing about my political allegiance itself or the corruption of police, whatever. But at the end of the day, my sole objective is to solve a murder. With a game with this many branching dialogue options, what information I choose to disclose or not disclose to other characters is important, and as this game often shows, people are easily manipulated. Saying the right thing in the right way to the right people gets me to my objective faster. My perception is that my precinct thinks I'm a joke anyway, how much influence over their reputation could my actions possibly have? I guess I think that what politics I choose to "side with" doesn't actually have as much impact as the game thinks it does. What if I just want to role play as a cop who lies? Do the means justify the ends? Does that make me corrupt? Who cares about what a drunk, disgraced cop does anyway? I have no significance here. So long as I can do my job, nothing else matters


I think the game is undeniably pretentious. Maybe its the point? Being an amnesiac protagonist is so overdone, and the ending kinda deus ex machinas some bullshit excuses about why I have the potential to be a complete god at everything despite what an ugly, pathetic, sack of shit I am. The whole limbic system, reptile brain, shenanigans of spouting hopeless cynicism about life circumstances I have no idea about is very pretentious. Please stop attempting to overstimulate and impress me with overly detailed writing and your enormous dictionary and preaching to me the relatively shallow, cynical, and nihilistic perspective on life and the world (the expression, my mysterious ex-lover, all my internal systems, etc.)


Easily save-scummable, disappointingly so. I wish the game would incentivize living with your failed checks in a better way


Game lies to you. Don't know if I like that. I like how it encouraged you to take agency over you interactions with the game and not just exhaustively explore every possible game interaction. It's good for storytelling as well as thought-provoking gameplay decisions. On the other hand, it's stupid. The game constantly encourages you to do things that are in your least interest, and can sometimes feel like a cheap trick or slap on the wrist for not knowing better. Maybe it's even a little demeaning.


The writing is great. No denying that. Very detailed, communicates multiple perspectives well (thoughts/characters). Dialogue is always believable given what we know about the people. The characters are all surprisingly memorable and distinct, despite the large cast.
All that said, a work cannot be saved on writing alone. The pacing is often awful. Every time we meet a new character or find a new area, we have to spend half an hour learning everything they have to say/it has to see. It exponentially worsens the game when you factor for how irrelevant many quests are
Maybe just my playstyle? don't care. Also it's kind of the entire game, and in your best interest to do so, so no, not just my playstyle. I can't justify "oh just don't talk to/click on everything/one." Not engaging with a game is not justification for it doing something poorly


No humor. A little light-heartedness goes a long way to investing me in these people and the world they inhabit that make the tragic moments hit harder

I love Kim (and Titus)
I wish you talked with Kim on the balcony and reflected every night


Characters dying has little impact. Mechanically the only difference is that you can no longer talk with characters, but I feel like that doesn't matter, as many characters I have little interaction with anyway. I found it more impactful when Lisa and Morrell left after failing to discover the phasmid. They felt more "gone" that the characters who died


I believe most of my criticisms are criticisms about the game at its core, which is an unusual perspective for me. Ordinarily my criticism of a game (at least one I ultimately enjoy, if only partially), comes from how the game ultimately feels misguided or strays in some way (Chrono Trigger, Nier: Replicant, Zelda: MM & WW, Donkey Kong Country, Persona 5, Mother 3, Shadow of the Colossus, Owlboy). Otherwise I just hate it/feel indifferent about it.


My appreciation for this will definitely grow, and I may be persuaded to love it more


I feel like Ace Attorney challenged my understanding of the case and was a more effective "detective" game than this. I mostly went with the flow here
The game doesn't really give you suspects. You don't find out who the culprit is until you meet him for the first time. This isn't a detective game about narrowing down a list of suspects. It's a detective game about getting as much information as possible from everyone, and they all seem detached from the act itself. Even the Hardie boys who straight up confess to it. This isn't necessarily a criticism, but something I thought about a few days after playing.

YUNO holds a special place in my heart and enjoys a comical spot on my dusty Visual Novel shelf especially thanks to one of the funniest adaptions I have come across

One thing you need to understand is YUNO has probably one of the most solid OSTs you'll ever hear, just oozes quality and really made me pick it up. Secondly the game is GORGEOUS, PC-98 games have that retro charm that just...... god I can gush at it for hours.

The story is actually one of the most ambitious I've seen in a sci-fi title, but the tail-end of the VN is just bloated, you're hit with far too many explanation segments, and characters make re-appearences where it doesn't really make much sense, with an ending that's just......there? The game has just embarrassing sexual bits (the incest...lord, so much incest), but then it's just straight up goofy (MC takes care of a dragon that grows up into a big-boobed dragon-girl thing that later helps him and another chick escape confinement and then dies from exhaustion, so they EAT HER? WHAT?)

It's an old title and you'd be surprised to find that once you get the time device at the start the game has a pretty damn decent pace and actually has a very interesting story, ESPECIALLY for its time.

Play it and then enjoy laughing at the adaption, brings me personal joy.

You can trash GTA III with a lot of reason from many sides, but it was a game that committed to its still fresh open world, focusing the missions on playing with how that place worked and keeping the exploitation of clunkier or derivative systems for the later half when the ideas that the game managed well ran out. Vice City takes where III left off, that is, the few first missions that seize the now less lively open world feel already exhausted and it takes a much shorter time to add gimmick missions or to focus on shootings and other barely working devices.

The “new thing” is obviously the setting that, aesthetically, is not bad at all, being more a game set in the 80s with actual references from the 80s than the retroactive monsters of nostalgia seen through the past decade. At the same time, probably because references were mostly about pop media, the life from III is not here. Gangs taking different parts of the town, citizens and vehicles changing depending on the zone, even how some of the NPCs (the aggressive ones) responded to your presence depending on your actions within the story, everything is barely there if not totally gone at all. Yes, GTA III was a game about (childish) walking stereotypes as NPCs, but at the same time NPCs that were rooted in some, very twisted, reality. Here everything is a distorted view of some gangster movies that fail to inhabit a proper place. Which could be fine if, again, it didn’t constantly lead to the worst action scenes imaginable.

At least you have some better tunes on the radio to have a drive around.

Pretty much the ultimate love letter to any Dragon Ball fan. Featuring a massive cast of characters - even more than any game in the franchise up to this day (except maybe Xenoverse 2 with all its DLC), equally impressive amount of stages and more fanservice than you can shake a stick at.

Unlike a lot of Dragon Ball games this one doesn't just focus on Z and some movies. EVERYTHING from the series at the time is here. Even the original Dragon Ball gets a hefty amount of characters and stages. Even Arale is in this game.

It's not all balanced equally. If you wanted a competitive fighting game, this isn't that. This is a game where characters on the weaker end in the series are equally as weak here. Of course it's set up so you can technically win with anyone (except maybe Mr Satan...) but you'll be doing less damage and taking more playing as Chaozu, or making much slower and easier to counter moves as a giant character.

The lack of focus on any one series does show up in the story mode. In order to fit DB, Z, GT, Movies and even what if battles, stories jump around rapidly. For example we go from Majin Vegeta vs Fat Boo straight to Vegetto vs Boohan. It's a bit weird, and doesn't always make sense with the fights they chose, but the game seemed focused on showing off the sheer amount of scope it has, rather than trying to put the player through the same Raditz-Boo story as most DB games do.

The battles in story mode set themselves apart from regular battles greatly. The team system allows fights like everyone vs Nappa to happen in a single unbroken fight, with characters switching in and out on a button prompt after a certain time has passed, or you've dealt enough damage. Scripted events like beam struggles happen automatically. It's all just great.

Mission 100 provides, as you might expect, 100 event battles, with each enemy team focusing on a theme, like female fighters, Super Saiyans, sword users etc. The last few pages of these are basically boss fights with a single character with buffed up stats. The last of these, SSj4 Gogeta, is the hardest battle in the game and provides a fitting final boss.

Another great example of how much content this game has is the tournaments. The game has 5 different tournament modes, each with its own gimmick based off the series (the regular WT has ring outs, the Cell Games uses a stamina based system, like how Cell intended it to be, and the Yamcha tournament, fitting as it is the most random inclusion due to not being based on a real tournament, makes you use a random character).

My main complaint with the game would probably be the DB collecting. There's only two ways to get dragon balls - either luck out and get one as a prize for winning the tournament via RNG, or play a story mission and break buildings and hope to get one through RNG. So you won't be able to find them during the huge grind through mission 100, and considering you need to summon the dragon many times to get everything in the game, having to grind out getting them through the same story mission over and over is a chore.

Mostly though this game is just an amazing toy for DB fans. It's not balanced, but it has so much content and so many details for DB fans (Saiyan characters that can turn great ape cannot do so unless they are on a night stage, except those that can create an artificial moon like Vegeta), that it remains one of, if not my favourite DB game.

The first PS2 title is a strong outing for the Harry Potter games, it really raised the bar in a lot of ways and provided a great deal of wish fulfillment. Most importantly, it has a fully explorable castle, and the game leans into that a lot.

The game is split in two: day activites, such as classes in which you gain new spells and quidditch, and night acitivites, where you do things that go against the school code, which largely just mean that you'll be sneaking around prefect which patrol the halls. At night you can also visit a shop Fred and Goerge set up, with additional cards, prank items and even a spellbook to buy for beans. This currency is a tad bit too scarce for my liking, but it's not a terribly important problem if you decide to complete the game.

This version of the story takes several major liberties in order to make both sections relatively short, meaning that, for example, in this iteration of the story it is never revealed that Lockhart is a conman. He's only ever seen twice, once in Diagon Alley and once during his class. Some liberties were also taken with the intro, having two tutorial sections in Weasley's household for the very basics and some minigames, and then the Knockturn Alley and Diagon Alley, which are largely about stealth and items. It's a very memorable section, similar to the portable titles, where the Alleys are much more expansive and you get to visit all sorts of shops and other buildings. Afterwards, you get to Hogwarts itself.

With a hundred cards to collect (every 10 increases your health), there is an abundance of chests, locations, secrets and even sidequests available once you begin the aforementioned Hogwarts day-to-day routine. During the day you can use everything you've learned to get closer to completion without too many threats. The problem is, everything is a bit too spaced out, and, just like in the RPG title of this part of the series, there is just so much running back and forth for some of these things. You go to the grounds and find these tiny objects, sometimes without any indication of where exactly they could be, and to return them to their owner, you either have to fly around the grounds or go all the way back up to the top of the castle, to your common room. You have to do a lot of this to win the House Cup, and without that, the ending just doesn't feel satisfying at all. It's a bittersweet design choice, having to do ardous tasks just for a short moment of satisfaction at the end. There are some minigames to go in-between, like gnome-throwing (every attempt costs beans and is also a bit too finnicky for my liking) and a genuinely fun version of Quidditch, but they're still very short bursts of variety.

Worth noting that the castle grounds are only fully open in the PS2 version, the Gamecube and Xbox ones may avoid this problem, as they simply teleport you across it to fit on the disc.

This particular part of the saga has probably the most video game potential, with several major encounters that can be turned into bosses and several areas that are only ever appear in it. It's a shame that a lot more of your time will be spent on these mindless, clueless searches, because the story sections are actually really fun. They're a bit more nonsensical than even your standard HP game section perhaps (Some spell challenges have BUZZSAWS in them) but this style of a game works so well with the extremely nefarious and oppressive nature of the Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban, where the danger is always looming, even though it is only felt as poignantly by Harry. The Basilisk is always waiting within the Hogwarts pipes, and you can hear its faint whispers if you listen in on the chatter, though it sometimes also speaks very loudly, directly to Harry. There are also spiders roaming the halls from day one.

And, as mentioned, the bosses should deliver, and they actually do! They're not fully polished, but both serve their purpose well enough. Aragog perhaps less so, it feels like he should be able to completely destroy you, but when you fall into a hole and go mano-a-spidero he is just very limited. The Basilisk, on the other hand, is fantastic, it slithers through the pipe holes in the Chamber, it can feel your presence, but it cannot see you—it was blinded by the phoenix beforehand—so it crawls randomly and you have to avoid its gigantic body. After each strike the sword (or a dagger: it's very short because it's actually a reskinned wand) falls out of your hand and the snake attempts to slither its way before you can grab it back. In the original book, and in the movie as well, this encounter is so cool because it's more so a stealth section—Harry is running and hiding and gets that one, big final blow in— so it's weird that they never utilize actual stealth—which is a core mechanic in every iteration of HP video games up to this point—but at least the gigantic blind snake boss battle feel is there in this one.

This game in particular is very fondly remembered by people who played it, and is considered one of the best, but I honestly think a lot of the other games have it beat, even back when it was released. Technologically it was rather impressive, and it was an absolutely awesome game to show around when HP was at peak popularity, but going back to it, it sadly hasn't aged very well. Other HP games have really switched their focus onto that exploration aspect after this one came out, and they do it a lot better, while this game, unfortunately, does it rather poorly. It feels like playing a tech demo, where a lot of the ideas for what to do with the assets and the castle itself were mere prototypes. However, as a Harry Potter video game, this is an impressive and ambitious title indeed. All it really takes for this game to seer itself into an impressionable mind is to use the broom, go for a ride on the Hogwarts grounds, and stare for a bit at the giant building in all its glory.