I haven't played this game in almost 3 years but hey what the fuck. Backstory time. As a kid I was not allowed to play games with combat in them and I didn't have any money so all my games were hand-me-downs and I was playing dos games and pre-wasd Windows games. In 2016 I got an Xbox 360 and jumped from Goblet of Fire being the newest game I'd played up to that point (and I hated that and it was borrowed from the library so it doesn't even count) to playing modern games like Halo 4, Orange Box, and Tomb Raider (2013).

All that is to say that Tomb Raider was one of the first shooters I've played and it's difficulty was perfect for noob me. This game challenged me and taught me how to play third-person shooters. It's not dumbed down or anything, it's just set at a difficulty level that's lower than most games and thus the perfect level of challenge if you've only ever played 0-2 shooters before it. But that's not the main thing I love about the game. What I love is the graphics, the voice acting, the story, the atmosphere, the exploration, even the campy porn death screams. I love it all. This game is so fucking good and remains my GOTY for 2013. GTA V can go suck a dick (though that's quite good and whatever would be GOTY it would probably take second place)

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.

The biggest problem with this game is the tutorial. The game doesn't do a great job teaching you how its movement mechanics work and you end up running everywhere full-speed and jumping up random things you don't want to jump up because you don't realize the difference between running with R and running with R and A so you end up jumping when you don't want to because you shouldn't be holding down A unless you want to be jumping soon. Also the game can be a bit wonky with how it interprets which direction you want to jump.

Still, this is a great game and a fantastic starting point to the franchise. This was my first Assassin's Creed game and I'd recommend it to everyone. You do not have to play the earlier games first, just jump right in. Beware that the starting is kind of boring especially your first three quests for your family, but once you get past that and the game really starts, this game takes off and is awesome. There's a reason this is many people's favorite Assassin's Creed game. If you want a taste of what Assassin's Creed is all about, they made a live action short film that kind of covers a little bit before the game and the starting of the game and it's fantastic, check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcE8xJkK6t4

I just... I don't get this game. I tried to play it, it doesn't make sense. So you do these missions collecting recon on your target and you're supposed to be all stealthy and everything, but then when you get to your target, it doesn't let you sneak up and kill them. Instead it then starts a cutscene where all the info you've gathered is now useless and guards are aware of your presence and you can't close in and I just don't get it. I tried playing this game, I got somewhat far, but it never clicked. This game needed better on-boarding. Good story stuff though. I like how it started the franchise.

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.

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