Kinda way too disillusioned by the superfluous pageantry of P-Studio's Persona titles to keep up with this and it's making me hate playing video games, so shelving this and P3P for my own sanity. Maybe I'll get around to it in a few months once I'm in the mood to push through a fluffy monster RPG with concerning portrayals of women again. Which like, even though I say that, Persona 3 feels a lot better in that department than P4 or P5, especially from what I've also been playing of Persona 3 Portable, where Yukari in particular almost feels like a real teenage girl with actual interiority! Really wanted to see more of Mitsuru, she seems pretty cool. Same with the autistic trans-coded robot girl and the dog, those guys are like 50% of the reason I wanted to play this game.

Tartarus was also way fucking cooler than I expected! Well, not in Reload, but in Portable it was pretty comfy and had enough going on with its moment to moment gameplay to make me not fall asleep. Though early on your power scales up way faster than the difficulty of the floors themselves do, and the bosses felt more like brute forcing them instead of instigating a strategy. Reload feels like it makes that whole dealie even worse, like you get all the fun midgame toys from Persona 5 like right away, and I feel like it just trivializes the whole thing (I am not playing on hard mode ever again though, it literally just makes the game twice as long, made the mistake once in Persona 5)! They also had an opportunity to give Tartarus sections more of their own mechanical identity to mix it up from the more pure dungeon crawling of the original, and at least what I've played it just feels worse somehow, even more lifeless and toothless. Maybe I'll change my mind once I get to the later portions, but I was not very impressed.

I don't wanna carry on with the negatives too much, there's clearly a lot to love here, and I'm sure this will end up being a lot of people's go-to way to experience P3, but man, Reload is so much. Seriously considering just playing FES first instead next time, and then working my way up through each iteration, because even as somebody who has only had minimal contact with the original Persona 3, something really feels off about this game. I don't trust it. Maybe I'm just annoying and old though.

Anyways, Persona 6 should be about a 40 year old lesbian detective and her talking tanuki tulpa that nobody else can see who says kinda borderline problematic shit. Also probably put a different kind of music in these games next time; maybe it's just the remixes that were giving me a migraine though.

Simply moving around and charging your attacks in Magic Knight Rayearth fees about as good as any arcade action game could, and there's a whole 2D Zelda-esque adventure in here as well. A team of top talent working at Sega in their prime making a licensed game this good, is pretty much the 90's equivalent of the Sony Spiderman games, except in this case it's based on a Clamp IP so it owns way harder.

I played this with the Un-Working Designs patch which certainly made for a smooth experience, though if I could Un-Working Designs the localization I would love to. This might be the biggest gap between quality of game and quality of localization I've ever seen, and it consistently took me out of it unfortunately. Other than that, game rocks so much that I would recommend playing it while skipping all the dialogue to have a real good time.

Small town. A few brahmin herds, and a single watering hole. I step into the musty saloon. A local girl slithers up to me, complaining about her quiet farm life. She tells me about a local Vault - Vault 15. She mentions it by name. I press the "ask about" button and ask her about Vault 15. "Never heard of it" she says. I try to ask her about anything else whatsoever. She's never heard of anything. Alright. Keep your secrets honey... I tell the local gay man, Ian, he will get paid if he follows me forever until his eventual inevitable death. He agrees immediately and eagerly, because I am very "good at speaking".

We wander to the Vault that doesn't exist. We wander back, because we forgot to bring 50 ropes. We try again - the dungeon takes 10 minutes and nothing happens. A weapon is hidden in the bathroom smeared by 10 layers of poop, piss, pixels and blood. We find what we came here for (it's nothing), and go back to town. "Noo you gotta save my girl she's gonna get boiled in shit". I find the raider camp - I tell them I will fuck their mom. They let the girl go for some reason.

8 hours later my dog and all 3 of my friends I tricked in the same way as Ian the Twunk die in a single dungeon because they won't wear any clothes thicker than a dress shirt. It's a Mad Max reference or something. The travel time on the overworld gives me time to think. I think about the giant, barren wasteland. I think about how far and dangerous there is between settlements. I think about how no one has grabbed a broom in 100 years. I think about telling murder mutants where my family lives. I don't know what my meds do and I'm not sure how to find out. I found a backpack in this videogame that I simply couldn't figure out how to use - What? I think about why I have 4 CHA instead of 1. I think about the 2 hours I spent getting this game to run on a modern PC and a 4K monitor. I think about so far only having found one character that allows me to sex and cum in the entirety of California. It's lonely out here. Many games would throw sex and cum at me. Fallout? In Fallout it's about the lack thereof.

Eventually my player character completes their quests and drowns in an ocean of jank - jank that would later continue on through an entire genre shift, a new company, several new engines and somehow be recognizable still as the same old jank. After being stuck for half an hour I had to google an alternate solution for one of the final dungeons because it bugged out on me. Luckily there was one, because many quests don't have that kind of privilege. Some bugs in this game somehow persist in Todd Howards' Starfield. No one knows how. It's beautiful in a sense. A red string of jank.

This game is unfinished - like half the quests have cut content and an entire act of the game got left on the floor. It's a good basis. I hope the sequel will use it well. I hope someone mods it for Steam Deck controls.

really fresh take on a 3d platformer character controller, the wall kicks in particular are nasty stuff (positive connotation).

adding a map was the right choice in the long run i think - even if i didn't need a map so much as a guide to remind me to go back to a certain place i hadn't considered after several loops of the game world.

you shoulda seen some of the tricks i pulled to get where i wasn't supposed to be yet. i did everything except for one of the switches for the theater key without getting a certain extremely useful powerup

There is a tendency when dunking on Bethesda games, to criticize them from the lens of their failure to be like other RPGs- The Witcher 3 is more cinematic and refined, Baldur's Gate 3 more densely written, Fallout 1 more actually good, so on and so forth. The truth is that Bethesda games suck much more tragically and pathetically on their own terms than in comparison to other games, Todd Howard who began his career with monumental works of termite art in the end forsook the dream of the Bethesda game. The dream of the bethesda game was always to create a holodeck, a simulation for you to inhabit totally- 'Why the hell would I pick up a spoon?' someone asks, perfectly reasonably expecting game mechanics to exist for gameplay reasons, but it's just that you can pick up spoons because it's something a person is able to do. Personally I think this dream is perhaps misguided, but nevertheless they pursued it, which is admirable in its own right.

"With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
The message you receive upon killing a crucial NPC points towards the commitment towards the holodeck dream, it will continue on even if you totally fuck up, and indeed there are generally ways around the death of those crucial NPCs provided you understand the simulation.

And fear of people misunderstanding the simulation is what drove bethesda to make many crucial NPCs invulnerable in Oblivion, you never know when you're actually in a simulation or not anymore, even as the NPC AI had become much more sophisticated with schedules, likes, dislikes and habits, the places you could engage shrunk, and then even the ambitious NPC AI in subsequent games was stripped back for ever more presentable and simpler systems, to the point of Starfield doing deliberately what Morrowind had done out of technical limitations 20 years prior: 24/7 vendor NPCs with no schedules, likes or dislikes, who exist only in service of the player.
But maybe most telling of all, was that in Fallout 4 they decided that the player need a good reason to pick up a spoon.