biaza
Super fun and astonishingly deep combat, an interesting extension of the concept from the first Xenoblade, really strong visuals, but the character writing is often so bland and trope-reliant that it is painful. This game is kind of carried by its DLC, the base game I would only give a 7/10, but with the addition of the challenges and Torna, it's a far better game overall.
Great combat just like the previous game, but falls behind in a few places. The early game feels extremely un-polished with cutscenes featuring almost no SFX or music, the main antagonist is uninteresting and it has even more tedious things to grind in the postgame than Xenoblade 2. Where this game shines is the character writing, combat and the score. The main cast is a dramatic improvement over the last game, making Xenoblade 2 look a bit like a black sheep in comparison to the rest of the Xeno games, where many of the main characters were reduced to tropes and the characters who had room for depth were given little to no screen time. In spite of all this, the DLC, which adds a very replayable roguelike mode as well as a massive story expansion, elevates this game to a masterpiece in my opinion. The final DLC alone is some of the most fun I have ever had in an RPG, I found myself nearly completing it 100% before getting to the ending just because I was having so much fun. Xenoblade 2 may have felt a bit like a black sheep if it weren't for its DLC which elevated it to an excellent game, but this game's DLC elevated a great game into something truly phenomenal.
The last great Pokemon game. Battle Frontier is super flawed, only like half of the facilities are actually fun, but the fun ones add a pretty significant amount to this version over Ruby and Sapphire, especially since gen 3's meta is absolutely goated. I appreciate the attempt to make each facility different at least.
Truly baffled as to why this was recommended to me so highly. I love the other GBA FE games, as well as Tellius and FE4, and I heard so many people gas this game up and recommend it as the peak of this era of FE. On the contrary, this is my least favorite FE game that I have played. Painfully bland characters, mediocre maps, absurd requirements for actually fighting the final boss, horrible ambush reinforcements and worst of all are the bosses. Too many instances of bosses with 30+ crit rates, making them effectively a coin flip at the end of the chapter. Having your own coin flip to combat them with Rutger is very little consolation, I had to reset at the very end of a chapter due to the boss getting a lucky crit too many times. Just obnoxious while offering nothing to bring me back to it over another FE game. Do not play this on original hardware like I did, at least not on a first playthrough, because this game is so full of garbage, unfair bullshit you could never properly prepare for without prior knowledge of the game, forcing you to reset. Play on an emulator and savestate every turn. I am not joking, it is truly cruel. The visuals are all that saves this from being lower, as a GBA FE game, it is full of gorgeous animations and character designs, and deserves credit for being the basis upon which the other GBA FE games built off of/reused.
This review contains spoilers
A 4+ hour story that could have said all it needed to say in a half hour tops. The one girl committing suicide early on actually was surprising for me, but the ludicrous amounts of padding and creepypasta-tier writing are insufferable.
2023
Shocked how much I enjoyed this game after how put off I was by everything I saw before the game's launch. The gameplay and mechanics are strong enough to offset my issues with this game, of which there are many. I do not like the aesthetics, the story, or the characters, but that doesn't matter as much as how great the maps and mechanics are. I will praise this game's score as well, it's not on the same level as 3 Houses was (few games are), but this game definitely contains its fair share of solid tracks.
Even though I consider this to be the only Prime game that is truly a mastapeece, I really hope Prime 2 and 3 get the same treatment this game was given as well, this is easily the best-looking game on the Switch and it's as much of a blast to play now as it was back in 2002. No Fusion Suit is stinky though, come on Retro.
2022
I'm glad so many people liked it, but the more I think about this game, the more I remember how much of my time was spent not having fun. I wanted to like this game, I wanted to be on the hype train with everyone else, I wanted this to be what Dark Souls 2 and 3 weren't and actually make me enjoy a Souls-style game as I did with Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne, but it just doesn't do it for me. Perhaps the DLC will change my feelings toward it, but as a total package, only the first 10-20 hours were truly fun for me, and I regret how much time I spent trying to enjoy this game instead of just accepting my feelings and stepping away after the first playthrough.
Man, playing this again as an adult was a lot less fun than it was when I was younger. Some bosses were still really fun, but a far larger chunk of my time was spent being in a really bad mood. I love this game's story and atmosphere, but actually playing the game is not fun the majority of the time for me. I think my mental health may have played a part in me not enjoying this quite as much though, I have been dealing with a herniated disc for 3 months and it's preventing me from doing a lot of things I enjoy, it's been really wearing at me, and I think a game that really tests your patience is not what I needed right now.
2022
This review contains spoilers
This is one of those pieces of art where, while I resonated with it a lot, I understand why a lot of people just hate it, like movies I love, such as The Lighthouse, or musicians I love like the band Abyssal (who have barely over 1k monthly listeners on Spotify and deserve way more. If you like extreme metal, please check out their record Antikatastaseis, it's fantastic). These are the sort of things that doesn't care to make sure the viewer understands what they experience, but will reward a viewer who attempts to make some sense of it. The game is a visual treat, it reminds me a lot of Garage: Bad Dream Adventure, which I also enjoyed a lot. I am a big fan of Giger, Beksinski and horror art in general, so when I saw images of this game, I knew it was something that I had to check out. The visuals and art direction are very much Scorn's most outwardly impressive aspect, but I think its themes are also worth taking the time to interpret for yourself.
This review will mostly be my analysis of themes from this point, which are entirely subjective, and may even go against what the developers intended, I have not looked into anything the developers have said about the game's themes or read other analyses of the game, this is just what the game said to me.
I see Scorn as a reflection of human life, a heightened, horribly pessimistic metaphor for the human experience. At the very start, you see bodies on the ground, birthed from the same wall as the player character, who fell to their deaths the second they began life. Perhaps at some point there was a system in place to assure they would reach the ground safely, but that is not the case anymore. The world of Scorn, and whatever it was that created that world, does not care about the plight of the world's inhabitants, they don't care how much the world decays, so long as those below them continue to work for them.
This review will mostly be my analysis of themes from this point, which are entirely subjective, and may even go against what the developers intended, I have not looked into anything the developers have said about the game's themes or read other analyses of the game, this is just what the game said to me.
I see Scorn as a reflection of human life, a heightened, horribly pessimistic metaphor for the human experience. At the very start, you see bodies on the ground, birthed from the same wall as the player character, who fell to their deaths the second they began life. Perhaps at some point there was a system in place to assure they would reach the ground safely, but that is not the case anymore. The world of Scorn, and whatever it was that created that world, does not care about the plight of the world's inhabitants, they don't care how much the world decays, so long as those below them continue to work for them.
2022
The racing feels fantastic, but the game desperately needs more events with more variety, and better custom event options.
2021
TikTok sludge content gaming
2016
Plus .5 stars for the baby running into the wall making me laugh until I thought I was going to pass out
I very rarely use the term "overrated", as it is not a substantive critique, but it very much fits this game. This game was hyped up to me by so many people that I was expecting this to be the best Zelda game by a significant margin, they truly circlejerked this game until they ripped the skin. The reputation of this game likely damaged my perception of this game somewhat, if it hadn't had so many people telling me how it was kino, the best Zelda, and one of the best games of all time, I may not have felt such disappointment. I definitely did enjoy many aspects of it, there were some very fun dungeons, I loved the aesthetic, and I loved the trading sidequest, but the later dungeons especially were a slog for me.
2011
There was something magical about games back when I was young and didn't understand how they worked, didn't understand their limitations. Back when I thought there would be secret areas out of bounds, behind doors you couldn't open, back when I convinced myself that games just went on forever if you could just run fast enough to break through the walls in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, walk through walls in Pokemon Gold to find Celebi, or go underneath Ganon's castle to find the Triforce in Ocarina if Time. I feel like retro game design, and how so little was explained to the player in-game, fostered that imagination in me, and I have been searching for games that spark that same kind of intrigue, and that is the key thing that made Dark Souls so special to me.
No other game has given me that feeling of childlike wonder so strongly before, and it's a big part of what makes me dislike the later Souls games and Elden Ring in comparison. The feeling of being completely lost and slowly trying to figure out how things like covenants worked, why I would only get invaded sometimes, what a Gravelord is, what that weird white circle that looks like the lock-on icon is, what the little crab phantom I only saw once was, all completely blind, no guides or prior knowledge of the game, took me back to a state of mind which I never thought I could return to again. The slow pace, obtuse mechanics and carefully curated snippets of story make this game ironically feel magnitudes more grand than a game like Elden Ring to me.
No other game has given me that feeling of childlike wonder so strongly before, and it's a big part of what makes me dislike the later Souls games and Elden Ring in comparison. The feeling of being completely lost and slowly trying to figure out how things like covenants worked, why I would only get invaded sometimes, what a Gravelord is, what that weird white circle that looks like the lock-on icon is, what the little crab phantom I only saw once was, all completely blind, no guides or prior knowledge of the game, took me back to a state of mind which I never thought I could return to again. The slow pace, obtuse mechanics and carefully curated snippets of story make this game ironically feel magnitudes more grand than a game like Elden Ring to me.