So I actually finished this game about a week ago and I was ready to immediately post a review right after finishing it since I had this Notes app note all ready on my phone that I would update as I continued to play which had a bunch of points about what I liked about the game (a lot) and what I didn’t like (just a few pet peeves), but it was honestly super messy and super lengthy that I needed a little bit of time to get my thoughts in order since I made a note for every little moment of the game so there’s a lot to cover lmao I kid U not I sunk every minute of free time I had into playing this game like as soon as I got off work I’d keep playing til like 3AM, pass out, go to work, then continue playing and I repeated this cycle for over three weeks this game was so fucking fun and immersive and just GREAT.

To preface (I think that’s the right word) I’ve never actually played the original FF7 and my first time even knowing who tf Cloud is was seeing him fuck it up w Sora in KH2 but I played a bit of Part I a few years ago when it was free on PS Plus (I think 2021) and it’s been a while so I needed a bit of a refresher when jumping into this next one. (Pro tip: The game’s own recap is ASS go to YouTube for this one mama) Needless to say, it was super comforting being able to see these characters interact again like hey girl..it’s been a while let’s get back into it..

Okay let’s actually talk about my experience with this game the open world was really great, it wasn’t a complete open world of course, you still had the invisible walls and specific rocks that you just couldn’t jump over but I honestly didn’t mind like every area of the game just felt so intentional and it was so rich with content and stuff to do and it made exploration feel less daunting and more fun since everywhere I was led to had a purpose. Even when there were areas where it seemed like there was nothing to do, I knew that I’d probably have to drag my ass back there either for story purposes or for something relating to a side quest/world intel.

In 2015 I was FF15’s biggest supporter (in denial) like wow now THIS is an open world amazing game so much to explore! …Yeah it definitely wasn’t like I had my fun with it but it didn’t lead on as much as it promised (let’s ignore the part where it went through development hell) BUT—I have a point to make with this I promise—with Rebirth it felt like a redemption of that modern open world concept where there were so many unique biomes, sometimes even within the same region that had large towns that actually had things to do and weren’t just pretty little set dressing. The world, although limited, actually felt expansive and had a grand scale that I was traveling across the world without feeling too empty and lifeless, it still felt like this was a real world that these people lived in.

A little thing that FF15 had over Rebirth though was that characters were interacting with each other even outside of battle. I kinda wish the party weren’t just silent little puppets following you around when you weren’t doing anything story relevant. Not to say that that they didn’t interact enough though, this game had plenty of story cutscenes and side moments that made up for it but that was just a little thing that I’m hoping they’ll improve on for Part 3.

Combat was fun, it was quick and fast paced but still allowed for an opportunity to think and strategize for battles without just endless button mashing..though in some cases I still ended up doing that lol. Battles were challenging and enemies had enough variety that you could approach them in all sorts of different ways. Another little side note though, I enjoy playing games but I am no expert gamer! Sometimes the harder bosses would be kicking my ass like a bitch since I’m not good with precision blocking but I don’t have any pride for this sort of thing IDGAF I’ll put it on Easy Mode for an easy beating (Odin).

In some parts of the game though, controls did feel a little janky though I feel like that might have been partially my fault since I refused to do performance mode for most of the game, I kept it in graphics mode so the game was mostly locked at 30fps and made responsiveness feel a little delayed which was a little annoying in certain mini games that wanted more precise inputs (that fucking piano man..)

Speaking of mini games, there are a SHIT ton in this game. It was getting to a point where they were sometimes being blatantly thrown into the main story which threw me off a bit like damn we’re really taking this kinda serious moment and turning it into a mini game huh. You weren’t completely forced into playing these mini games (I think..I never skipped any I played all of them lol), if you’re just focused on the story then the game allowed for an opportunity to just not participate and skip certain sections with no penalty and all you’d really be missing out on is some gear or materials that you could probably get through other means later on in the story anyway.

Mini games were fun for the most part but not all were made equal. Some just weren’t my taste or just frustrating to play like Fort Condor, Gears and Gambits, and 3D Brawler GOD I fucking hated 3D Brawler. They weren’t REQUIRED per se but I wanted to at least wrap up all the Protorelic Phenomenons of the region before moving on and I wasn’t a fan of having to play some of the less fun mini games to complete it. On the topic of less fun mini games I had a love-hate relationship with the piano mini game it took me a while to really get a hang of the controls and it started getting easy after that but GODDDD was it hard as fuck to master. I was stuck to that fucking piano chair for an hour just trying to perfect combo certain songs and I think I just gave up when for the Chocobo song. Toward the end game, mini games starting getting ridiculously difficult where it wasn’t even challenging, just annoying and I’m no completionist gamer by any means I’m not gonna try to perfect clear everything when it starts getting frustrating so once I felt like I had my fill and did my time I just abandoned that shit like I don’t care about a platinum trophy bro or some special gear like if it’s not a weapon and the rewards aren’t really all that deep I really don’t give enough of a shit to play the mini game again.

I did try to make an effort during my play through to clear all of the side quests but once I got to the final stage of the Protorelic quest and I had to fight two summons at the same time I gave up like beating these bitches by themselves was a pain in the ass now I gotta fight TWO of them at the same time?!?!!? I like a good challenge occasionally but late game challenges just felt unnecessarily unfair and felt like a cheap way to pad out the hours in this game.

But honestly even if I didn’t get sucked in to do any of the side quests or any mini games and only focused on doing the main story I still feel like I would have gotten my money’s worth out of this game, the story was seriously so immersive and lengthy with lots of good quality voiced dialogue that even some of the more absurd parts of the story didn’t feel out of place. I honestly don’t think there was a section of the game that didn’t have voiced dialogue they really turned it out. Not really much to else to say about the side quests though, they were mostly just cute little ways to expand regional lore and meet some new characters along the way but in terms of overall plot they’re nothing special like maybe I don’t actually care about this Chocobo rancher’s backstory idk.

Okay now we can talk about main story stuff, I know this review is marked as having spoilers but for the most part I’ll be trying to keep it vague. Like I mentioned, I’ve never played the original so I don’t really have anything to directly compare it to but I could tell that the game made an effort to really flesh out not only main party’s backstories and relationships but even side characters and antagonists. I especially loved the little details of the party’s relationship like although it wasn’t quite shown enough for my liking, I love Tifa and Aerith’s close friendship.

Now towards the end of the game..it gets a little messy. The game’s story has pretty solid steady pacing at first but they love to just bomb everything at you all at once in the final acts with a bunch of information without really going fully into depth into the reasoning.

The actual finale gets even messier it’s like they were tiptoeing around this concept of merging worlds then just jumble it all together at the end for the sake of a cool Sephiroth Final Boss and a shot of Cloud and Zach fighting together. I was definitely leaving this game with more questions than answers.

Okay so I’m also gonna talk about the Thing that happens to Aerith..I still don’t really get it myself but I’m pretty sure she still died and I was pissed that they gave me that fake out that Cloud saved her only for her to still end up being stabbed they were fucked for that omg! I completely understand the reasonings for this decision and why it had to happen for not only the story but for character development but it almost feels like a waste to have to set up this entire concept of “changing the course of fate” from Part I only to back out by still having Aerith die anyway. Even though a little part of me knew it was still gonna happen, I was sobbing like a bitch like DAMN..I really liked playing as her now they’re gonna fuck me up for Part 3?! Who’s gonna be my slayful magical girl healer?! Not to mention we’re down one tolerable girl in the party now Tifa’s stuck having to bond with annoying ass Yuffie I’m gonna be sick…Anyways, I’m pretty sure she’s dead but the game is trying to hold onto this little bit of hope by not outright saying that she’s gone forever and opening the possibility that she could maybe come back, though I seriously doubt it.

I’m not quite sure what to expect for Part 3 when it comes out in 2050 but I’m excited of course..I’m one of those people that likes my endings wrapped up in a pretty bow so although unlikely, I honestly do hope they take the final part as an opportunity to have everyone live and be happy lol. I can’t believe we’re this early into the year and I’ve already played another Game of All Time™.

This was my first Pikmin game and it was a great time! I’ve seen gameplay before of older games through random clips and I never really wrapped my head around what gameplay was like based on that but now that I’ve played it first hand it was actually a lot more straightforward than I expected lol.

Even though this game didn’t really require that much prior knowledge to past games, I still watched a video of someone playing the older games to get some better context of why Olimar keeps getting fucked over lmao. Knowing that, I can tell that this game was definitely a dedication for longtime fans of the series since it takes the best parts of each game, improves them, and adds even better features for the sake of convenience.

I started playing this game as sort of a cutesy little palate cleanser after recently playing some games with heavier, darker themes and yeah this was a cutesy little game with cutesy little pikmin but oh my god why are some of these caves and the monsters lowkey terrifying omg like I thought we was all rainbows and sunshine and here I am fighting a biblically accurate angel with 15 eyes and 12 legs hello?!!?

In terms of “story” it definitely felt like it was a lot more open in progression, where you could just go into any new region and explore to your hearts content and whatever you discovered along the way helped slowly push the story forward in a way that didn’t feel like I was being pushed to do something I wasn’t ready to do quite yet. I won’t lie though, the loop of daily gameplay did start to get a bit harrowing as I went on with the game and while night time expeditions that were unlocked later on did provide some variety, I’m not that fond of gameplay where I have to “protect” something so I avoided doing that whenever I could until my leafy guys started piling up and I HAD to start curing them. Some other MINOR complaints that I had was also the lack of fast travel. Some of the regions were really big and I get why they wouldn’t do this but after a certain level of progression, I feel like that should have been an option for the sake of convenience when I go back to the region to do some minor cleanup to 100% it and I only really need to find 1-2 items or those times at the end of each day where I’d forget one pikmin across the map and my perfectionist ass could NAWT handle abandoning it so I ran all the way back with that final countdown ticking so it wouldn’t die.

Okay, overall my experience with this game was generally a positive one but I’ll be honest: I didn’t finish the game. (SPOILERS IF YOU CARE) This game has this fake-out ending where after you rescue Olimar, the credits play but afterwards, it unlocks pretty much the entire second half of the game where you unlock even more regions and have to rescue even more castaways. I was kinda already content with what I had accomplished at that point because I was starting to get over the gameplay like this game is by no means bad but it definitely wasn’t something that I could see myself sinking another 20+ hours into and enjoying it so I kinda just stopped after that point and watched someone else wrap up the game and honestly..I’m glad I did. I saw that the final cave in the game is a 20 sub-level girl fuck that??? I was already getting tired doing caves with 5 sub-levels let alone 20.

My first Pikmin game was definitely an enjoyable experience—the gameplay was fun, environments were beautiful and had just enough variety to not feel repetitive but I wasn’t that invested that I could see myself pushing through it’s harder difficulty content to see its “true” ending. This was a solid 7 in my book, and I'll be looking forward to any possible sequels in the future! Now that I’ve played this game, I can consider myself a #REAL Pikmin fan and I can buy cute little merch of the flower boys without looking like a hypocrite yup I'd definitely kick it w Pikmin if it had a blunt.

The game was pretty good overall, although I do feel that it dragged on in the second half, especially with the final act, where they kinda dump all of this major lore onto you and expect you to be able to keep up with all of these confusing terms. It introduced all these different themes of oppression, slavery, and racism but then it kinda just…didn’t go anywhere.

I also wasn’t a huge fan of some of the forced romances like…well you’re the opposite gender that’s around the same age as me I guess I like you like ok sure..definitely could’ve done without that but it didn’t hinder too much from the game where it became annoying gameplay-wise, I thought it was really fun to play. The battles were always super flashy which is fun but it feels like it was trying to be too much at once at times. On one side it wanted this deep, detailed battle system while still being a fast-paced action RPG.

In terms of exploration in this game..there’s barely any lmao. Sometimes there would be these big open areas but it just empty with not much to do in them and dungeons were just one long hallway with some alternate paths that led to chests or a mini-boss. Once you complete an area, you really have no reason to go back unless it’s required of a side quest or materials. The world just didn't feel all that connected and cohesive.

I’d say that this was a pretty good attempt for them to approach the formula of the Tales of games in a newer, modern way. I guess they can only go up from here with newer gen consoles.

I started playing Persona 3 Portable when it was ported to Switch in early 2023, but I had some issues with its overall quality so once I heard rumors that the remake was coming I dropped it halfway and decided to wait for the release of this game.

I would call myself a pretty decent Persona fan since P4G was released back in 2012, so I kinda already knew about some of P3's twists but playing this would technically be my first complete experience of Persona 3 in its full context and GOD it was so worth the wait.

So like I mentioned earlier, I played P3P up until around August around the time the second semester started. At this point in the game, the team's character development was still in its early stages but I already had my expectations set on what the characters were like and what their relationships were with each other and with the MC going into the remake.

Playing P3R, I finally got into the details of their character stories throughout the following months I had yet to experience from August to January, and god I kinda dropped it at the perfect point in the game since the parts I didn't know about were when the characters went through major growth.

SEES was a different type of dynamic than I was used to when I was playing P4/P5. Where later games felt like these friends coming together on their own volition to fight evil, early months of P3 gave off this vibe that none of the main party were friends with each other and were almost forced into this situation, having something more akin to an amicable coworker vibe, which was an unfamiliar but nice change since major story beats felt more impactful and you could see everyone starting to get closer to each other as the game progressed.

Once I reached the end of the story and everyone forgot about the Dark Hour, I like lowkey felt hurt like damn all those months spent together were for nothing, and then at the final scene when everyone suddenly remembered, I was bawling like a baby like THEIR BOND IS UNBREAKABLE...

In terms of the actual GAMEPLAY and presentation, it was obviously a huge step up from the shitty visual novel and still cuts of the portable version. Tartarus was still a slog to traverse with its randomly generated layouts but I appreciate their attempts at making each block have its own unique visual style to make it feel less monotonous.

I didn't experience any major issues with the gameplay, and all of the quality-of-life updates made the annoying battles way easier to get through and were at least optional for the people who like..want to make themselves suffer and keep the game hard idk THAT'S NOT ME, I'm in it for the experience baby no shame I played mostly normal mode but I'd cheese harder battles by temporarily lowering the difficulty to Peaceful IDGAFF

Voiced social links were a nice change too, I played with English dub and it was all pretty good quality and I while it took a little bit of getting used to from playing P3P, the voices suit all the characters well and noone felt out of place or annoying to listen to..except Bebe probably sorry to the gay French man I can only handle so much of the bad accent before I go insane.

I saw lots of people complaining about how maxing all social links were hard but like...I didn't even use a guide and I still managed to max out all the social links before the final deadline, except for Junpei and Shinji's character episodes.

I would've liked a CLEAR deadline on those character episodes since I completely missed Junpei's over the summer and never had the chance to make up for it later in the game when I had some more free time SMH. I also didn't do any of Shinji's episodes because I didn't know Persona fusions were locked behind them so I just ignored him because I knew he was going to die OOPS..

I seriously enjoyed by time with this game, even though I went through it kinda "quick" within a month after the game was released but that was because I was literally playing for hours on end whenever I had any free time before or after work so I still managed to log well over 100 hours with my gameplay. This was seriously the perfect way to experience Persona 3 for the first time and later this year, I plan on booting up P3P again but this time as the Female MC for a different experience to the game. I'll be looking forward to that rumored Answer DLC too.