The gameplay is not fun. Everything is tedious trial and error with clunky controls and long wait times to get to where you're struggling. And the story is juvenile, feels like a really lame movie. I understand how this would have been really impressive in 1998, but that's all it has going for it. Impressive what it was able to pull off with Playstation 1 hardware, but thankfully it has been completely eclipsed by more modern games. Gave up after trying to beat the tank boss like five times to no avail. The game is so cinematic, but the gameplay is just frustration between the cinematics. It's so weird. Like, Snake is badass and you're just... not. At all.

It's nice to have a version of Harvest Moon with less going on in order to learn what to do and such, but once I upgraded my house, got four chickens, a cow, and all the tools, it's just doing the same thing over and over, and it's only halfway through the first year, and the internet tells me that it takes two years to gain your grandfather's approval and I really don't feel like playing four times this amount. Probably better to just watch a little gameplay on YouTube and then at least pick up the SNES one to get one that has at least a little more happening

You can split Persona 3 FES: The Journey into 5 categories: dungeon crawling and velvet room gameplay, time management gameplay, main story, and side story.

The dungeon crawling is surprisingly good. The game slowly introduces mechanics, and it keeps the gameplay fresh throughout by having new enemies to fight every ingame month or so. Combined with the velvet room, where you get optional side missions to kill x number of a certain kind of enemy by a certain date, get to a specific floor by a certain date, and where you can fuse together your pokemon-like personas into better/different ones, and it's some of the most compelling JRPG gameplay I've ever played. Granted it's also the most modern JRPG I've ever played, but still, it's great stuff. People complain about not being able to control your party members, but like, they're people. You learn how they work, and issue commands that you learn how they follow. If you can't get one to do what you need to be done for a certain boss, you switch them out for someone else who can. They're not avatars, they're people, and that's pretty cool. Yeah it can be frustrating, but that's the game idk. When a game puts in difficulty, that's part of the game and part of the challenge and part of what makes the game fun. What's not fun is the section of the game where many of the enemies have instant death, but you don't yet have the abilities to avoid the instant death. I must have lost like five hours of gameplay to bullshit like that. Not a fan. But most of the game is not like that.

The time management gameplay is intimidating at first, and kinda requires a little save scumming, which can be tedious, but once you get it, it's fun to work around things and decide when to hang out with who to advance everything.

The side stories in that time management though... it's not written well, and it's fucked up. You basically play a sociopath who hangs out with people in order to improve social links so that you can make better weapons personas. The optimal thing to do is to date 4 girls at once, never hang out with a girl again once she's your girlfriend, and agree with everything anyone ever tells you because you're more of a therapist than a friend and they'll like you more that way, thus raising those social links. You have the personality of a dull doorknob, and everyone loves you. And the game praises you so frickin much for... listening to other people talk and never disagreeing. What the fuck.

The main story is spread really thin throughout the game. You have a bunch at the starting, which raises a bunch of questions that you proceed to slowly forget about over the course of 130 hours of gameplay (most of them are never answered), and then a very slow dripfeed of story every ingame month, with I think two points near the end where the story actually goes somewhere. And said story is not actually good. It's dumb saving the world shit that's incredibly melodramatic and... very anime. Speaking of which, there are some problematic anime tropes in this game like objectifying clothing you can give to your female party members, horrible treatment of a trans character, general objectifying of women, the bathhouse peaking scene, more I can't remember. The game doesn't get so much flack for it I think because it's 130 hours long with probably about an hour total of objectionable content, but still, not cool.

So yeah, gameplay is cool, story is lame. I imagine this game is probably fully eclipsed by Persona 4 and 5 considering how much better the writing could be, and some annoying quality of life things in this one like not being able to read what abilities do other than when you have to ditch one because you don't have space for all of them

I have very mixed feelings about Hollow Knight. I played just under 40 hours so there was definitely what to keep me going. I enjoyed it all. And yet I'm kinda pissed at the game. So let's talk about it I guess. See if I can figure out my feelings towards the game.

Let's start with what I liked.

1. Combat is really great. Every time you hit something, there's a small knock-back so you can't just wail on things; you have to be careful about positioning. There's also a small cooldown between hits so you can't just wail on things, each hit is a commitment. And there's a variety of ways of attacking from regular slashes to pogo jumping on enemies to swiping up at flying ones. Additionally, enemy design is really great so there's good patterns to learn and play around. And it's got the Dark Souls mode of thinking where even little enemies are still dangerous later in the game if you don't watch out because you don't have a lot of health and they still hit for like a sixth of your total health, it's just significantly easier to avoid their attacks or heal up.
2. Exploration is pretty great. There's definitely a game loop you learn pretty quickly of enter a new area, search around for notes to find the map dude, fill out your map, but it's a satisfying loop. And the game does mix it up occasionally. Additionally, it's fun to hit different walls to see where the broken walls are and it's fun to unlock different fast travel options and shortcuts and whatnot.
3. Atmosphere. This one is a bit of a mixed bag because I do kinda wish that the game was a bit more cheerful, but fuck that. The game commits to a unique term that's hard to describe and it does it well. It's dark, but also cutesy, it's... nostalgic? wistful? it's great. I did on occasion wish that there was more music, but on the occasions where there was music, usually near benches, the music was pretty decent and made for great atmosphere even if it's not something I'd listen to on its own

And now what I disliked:
1. The game is too goddamn long. I enjoyed every hour of the 40 hours I played, but that doesn't mean the game didn't overstay its welcome. It's not as bad as the Assassin's Creed series, but I definitely would have preferred a 6 hour version of this game. The gameplay doesn't change enough over the course of the game to support the long length and neither does the world. It remains fun, but playing a new game would have been more fun past around 6 hours. Another reason why the length of the game was a problem was...
2. The story, or lack thereof. I played this game for 40 hours and here's the full amount of story I got out of those 40 hours of gameplay. A king in the past (lore, not even story) sealed away The Hollow Knight with three dreamers. You play as an unnamed character who breaks the seal, defeats The Hollow Knight, and becomes the new Hollow Knight, being sealed away yourself. Those two sentences aren't even a summary, that's literally all I could piece together over 40 hours of gameplay. And I didn't even know my goal for the first 25-30 hours, I was just exploring because that's the only thing to do. Usually games try to appeal to a wide audience and even lore games will throw players like me a bone with a minimal amount of story besides for the lore. This game does not care about story players. Obviously that doesn't matter to lore people, but as a story person, it was frustrating.
3. Minor quibbles: ok these two are not a big deal, bu I figured I'd mention them. Firstly, there are a couple parts of the map that are annoying to get to because there aren't really fast travel points nearby. Not a big deal, but kinda annoying. Second, it takes too long to get off a bench. Again, not super annoying, but when I'm trying to beat a boss and it's taking a bunch of tries, I wish I'd be able to just get off the bench quickly so I could get back to the boss.

In summary, Hollow Knight is a good game, but I wish it was made with players like me in mind rather than just not caring at all about those with my preferences.

This game is basically taking just the exploring lore part from games like Dark Souls, improving that with actual video of a good actor, and just giving you that toy to play with and figure out a story that already happened. If you like that sort of gameplay, you'll probably love this. If you prefer things set in the present, you'll wish that the final act of this game was solving the case rather than figuring out a case that was already solved. This game comes pretty close to being what I'd want it to be, but it doesn't come close enough and ultimately I just felt aimless throughout, not having been given proper motivation to search through the videos and then just finding that there was nothing to do with the information learned.