I mean, it's the OG for a reason, right? There's something to be said for sitting down, turning your brain off for a few hours, and just hitting loot pinatas. Let the dopamine flow.

I actually started this a long while ago, put it down for a few years, and just platinum'd it on PS4 in my quest to actually finish all the games I've started. It was the perfect game to relax after a day at work, and I still like how varied the classes feel. Witch Doctor is still my favorite, and Barbarian is my least favorite. There's enough content after being out so long to keep people going, and it's super easy to level with Adventure mode, rifts, and a whole host of other little bonuses and things to ease the process. No more banging through the main story quest a billion times to level.

It's flawed, no question. The gameplay loop does get super old after a while (hence why I put it down for so long), and Blizzard themselves didn't do this game any favors early in its lifecycle. Near the end of my platinum push, I'd get a class to 70 and just leave it for the next character, because I was sort of sick of that class.

I'm cautiously pessimistic about Diablo IV, particularly with some of the monetization decisions and for-cost season passes, but Diablo III was a fun romp that, aside from the price of the game, didn't cost me a dime.

If you ask me the question "What's your favorite Final Fantasy game?", Final Fantasy IX is my unironic answer.

This was something like my fifth complete playthrough of this game, and I still love it the same this time as I did the first time. The music hits me in all the right places, the character growth some of the characters experience is fantastic (Vivi remains my favorite FF character), and I just like the atmosphere, the struggle, the philosophical ponderings of what makes a man, and basically everything inside this package.

I will agree with most people here that the combat is pretty slow. But this particular version comes packaged with several helpers that alleviate that problem (and others) entirely, and would highly recommend it if the slow combat has turned you off in the past.

Just a great game. Can't wait for my next playthrough in the future already.

Man, I loved the DS games. When I heard that a new one was coming out for modern systems, I was over the moon. My friends were all excited about other games announced at the same time, but all I could think/talk about was Theatrythm and how much fun I had with it. I even still have the special stylus it came with.

I had just as much fun with this one as I had on the DS, all my expectations were met, and it was a joy to play. If you like Final Fantasy and rhythm games (a Venn diagram that I had no idea intersected), definitely give this a go. Controls are intuitive, the menus are snappy, and there's customization aplenty to adjust timings to your specific needs. I especially appreciated simple mode, which turns the swipes into normal triggers, when ramping up into the harder difficulties.

It's not a perfect game, but what game is? I didn't like the Event Music Stages (EMS), because it felt like the background was way too busy/flashy/jittery to pay attention to the triggers. You can toggle off the movie sequences (which is a nice touch if you're concerned about spoilers for games you haven't played yet), but that feels like a band aid that shouldn't be necessary. The song selections for some of the titles were also uneven. Most of the mainline Final Fantasy titles have 12-18 songs, some have much less, and inexplicably Final Fantasy 14 has over 30 tracks. It's understandably an evolving MMO, but it felt like we could've seen more from other titles and less from 14 and still been fine. Some key tracks from titles were missing, and did we really need a million versions of Battle at the Big Bridge?

Still, super fun game, I'm glad for the time I put into it. It made me smile.

More Vikings on the Oregon Trail, what's not to love?

The art style and music remain fantastic in this sequel, and I took more than a view screenshots along the way to use as backgrounds. The gameplay loops are basically the same with very few additions, which is nice if you're picking this up immediately after playing the first game. A whole host of new character classes were added as well, adding a lot of potential variety to your battle setups. Buckle up though, because the story gets super crazy super quick. The first game mostly played it straight with the story, but in this sequel things take abrupt left and right turns often.

I still have several holdover complaints though. This game plays around with fight mechanics often, where the path to victory isn't necessarily being the last side standing. There's no indication up front that there's special conditions, so it's up to you to pay attention to battle dialogue and react accordingly. This can lead to fights where you've brought along the wrong setup, and arenas where Varl are more hindrance than help. Additionally, some fights were relentlessly difficult, or were chained one after another so that even if you win one, you're thrown immediately into a second or third without much time to prepare. The upside here is that not all fights need to be won to progress the story, but this also has the downside of not feeling very compelled to repeat a fight I lost. Finally, the ending just....happened. I knew I was getting close, but there's no indication that the final fight was, in fact, the final fight. You win (or lose, I guess, because I lost and it still let me proceed), and roll credits. Had I been playing it on release, the mile high cliffhanger and unresolved plot would've killed me.

Delightful game still, though, and I can't wait to see how things wrap up in the third game.

This is like someone, somewhere said, "Okay, Oregon Trail is a fantastic game that you can't improve on...... but what if you were Vikings?? I played through this game in 2016, but wanted to revisit it this year so I could have an excuse to play 2 and 3. It remains delightful and flawed all at the same time.

You and your little caravan make your way across a (huge) map, bound for story beat points to progress, ostensibly to flee a scourge of Dredge and mount some sort of defensive front. The map is massive, full of clickable features and points that all have their own little bit of lore written in, if you take a minute to look around. As you progress, there's a combination of written-in events that have lasting consequences as well as randomly generated events that affect things like morale, food, items, etc. You also trigger battles along the way, which take place in a tactical RPG-esque field with squares, movement points, etc. It's basically games you've seen before in a Nordic/Viking wrapper.

The good points are many. The art style is fantastic. I'm not sure I've seen another game that has the same look and feel as The Banner Saga, honestly. The backgrounds are simple and elegant, without feeling too sparse, and the animated character designs are superb. The music, too, is fantastic, and really sets the mood for whatever is going on at the time. I also felt really connected with the characters, and really tried to put myself in their shoes to make the really important, game-hinging decisions along the way.

My only true complaint about the game is the weird difficulty spike at the end. I played on normal difficulty and, aside from myriad injuries along the way didn't really have trouble making it through the fights. I leveled up my characters, tried to give them useful stats, and mostly felt like I was doing what I should to prepare for the ending of the game. Turns out I had specced entirely wrong, was woefully unprepared for the ending battle(s), and ended up having to drop the difficulty to easy to avoid replaying the entire thing again. Because it's a linear game, there's no grinding or seeking out additional fights at the end to correct poorly placed stat points, and you basically have to take the ending as it comes. The difficulty spike was incredible, and even after doing some research on teh Googlez, I noted many people expressing similar frustrations about the end fight sequence.

Still, this was a delightful game, and I'm really looking forward to my playthroughs of 2 and 3 now.

I hadn't heard of this series, so this was my first experience with the franchise. I finished the game (once) and walked away vaguely unsatisfied with the whole deal.

For the good, the weird mashup of card battler and Dungeons and Dragons makes for some really neat aesthetics. As you explore fields and dungeons, cards are flipped over as you walk across them, square by square. The card art is fantastic, and I sort of loved the story's presentation of being told via cards through a "Dungeon Master" narrator of sorts. And the music! Fantastic stuff from the NieR team again. The whole package is sleek and shiny in appearance.....

....but then you hit the bad. The battles are incredibly repetitive, and those sleek, sharp-looking card art aesthetic transitions and moves suddenly make each battle take longer than they should. Your overworld random battles are also incredibly frequent, often just two or three squares away from the battle you just finished. The cards you use in battle can be "leveled up" by finding higher star rated cards from the same line or replaced with newer cards you find later, but I used basically the same loadout from beginning up until the final boss fight without issue making the whole card diversity thing meaningless. I also thought the difficulty was paced strangely as well. I mentioned frequently to the friends I was streaming the game for that I never felt challenged at all by any of the fights. I approached all of them the same way with the same moves in the same order and basically emerged victorious each time. The final boss fights though were a weird ramp up in difficulty I wasn't prepared for, but after a wipe I was able to cheese it rather easily with just swapping in a single new card. The boss fights at the end aren't particularly nuanced or engaging, just big HP sponges you need to outlast.

The story also wasn't very engaging. I won't speak on the ending so as not to spoil (though I have strong feelings on that as well), but the story told throughout the rest of the game was....kind of boring. The characters also weren't all that memorable, except Tralis who I think deserves her own game and carried my entire experience.

So, I guess, with music I really really really liked and story/gameplay I really really really didn't, I give it a middle of the road 3 stars for my overall experience.

If someone were to ask me "what's FFXI to you?", the Wings of the Goddess era would be my answer, and was my peak FFXI experience. The level cap was still 75, you had level sync to smooth the leveling process a little bit (but not too much!), your jobs were fleshed out, you had Dancer(!), campaign was a blast, and there was just so much to do! Abyssea and onward watered down the game a bit for me, to the point where it's not recognizably FFXI to me.

I play on a private server these days, and am enjoying the experience now just as much as I did back then on retail.