Play any combo-focused fighting game or beat ‘em up for an extended period of time and you’re bound to catch yourself thinking “Damn, I wish I had a second wall bounce!”. There’s nothing more frustrating than developing a theoretically strong combo in the lab and then discovering in practice that you already used up your OTG allowance 16 hits back. Sure, it might break the game if you could loop that EX move a third time, but it would look so cool, right? You deserve that shit, man! This combo is built different! If only you had unlimited ground-bounds, things would be different…

Urban Reign is the furled monkey paw’s fulfilment of this wish. Namco’s spirited attempt at a standalone Tekken Force game is wholly defined by its disrespect for the laws of the known fighting game universe, allowing you to wallsplat, sweep and breaker to your heart’s content - no idea is off-limits here if you have a demented mind that's capable of dreaming in the language of juggling. Lemme tell ya, it feels GOOD to football kick grounded opponents into the wall over and over again until their little polygonal souls leave their body!! Remember when your little brother threw down his PSX pad in a fit of rage because your King combos weren't "letting him play" in Tekken 3? This is a dark resurrection of that feeling writ large and legitimate.

The first dozen or so stages are borderline pornographic in their allowances to smokin’ sick style, making an aggressive argument for why doing damage with a super should allow you to build enough meter for another super than can be cancelled into from the first super. “Why can’t fighting games be like this all the time?” is something you’re bound to ask yourself when the second boss battle against the helpless sap Sick Rick ends with you infinitely hammer-tossing him into a pool table; you can practically imagine the little computer inside your PS2 throwing down its proverbial controller because you made it watch your mastubatory Brad Hawk combo video, packing up its shit and telling its mother you cheated at the game by "spamming too many moves".

But the law of equivalent exchange is alive and well here, and every player-positive design decision requires a reactionary advocate for the equality of CPU rights. Ever commented on EventHubs that “the best way to balance a game is to make all the low tiers as strong as the S-rank characters?” - well, here’s a look at what you could have won. Once the ten tutorials are done and the goons’ gloves come off, this becomes another game entirely. You thought you were safe from all these cheap hands you were throwing out? You’re built different, right? Pure skill? Shhhhhhhhhhhhhit. Sit down. PT-22 is gonna show you how truly broken this game is.

The mid-game of Urban Reign is a fascinating experiment in fighting game design, built almost entirely around how you think up a combo (both in sequence and circumstance) and how far ahead you can take it - given that some enemies can start chain-killing you with their first flick of their wrist, you’re forced to constantly plot random bullshit infinites out of sheer self-preservation instinct, the desire to "style on em" put aside in favour of hiding behind a shelf with dodgy collision-detection in the supermarket stage.

Strings that involve trash bins, jukeboxes, couches, lampposts and a whole lot of running up/suplexing into walls are only the tip of the iceberg here; you will have to go to the deepest, most depraved depths of your fighting gamer's mind in order to out-cheap the cheapest of the cheap shit. Let up for even a split second and it could all be over, and don’t forget that the CPU has the same rights as you do to do Guilty Gear-style bursts mid-combo - meaning no victory in this street war is ever guaranteed for even a second… Did I mention that while you’re being thrown by one enemy, other enemies can still kick you in the head? Damn! And there's no wakeup invincibility or reversal options? God DAMN!

Don't Stop until you reach the top and you'll be rewarded with the only language this game knows - more sadistic pain and suffering. After 99 stages of maverick midtown Marvel 2 madness, what could a final boss possibly look like? Well, the answer's hilariously simple - it's a dude with a gun who can kill you in one shot. Another one of gaming's greatest punchlines. Was it worth it? Hard to say, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime game that's worth checking out for a hot sec, even if you never make it past the karate guy in the 7-Eleven parking lot who can kara-cancel off a sneeze.

N.B. Really sad that this game's rough lil excuse-plot was written by the same guy who directed and scripted the Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War story. I refused to skip all the cutscenes and intro text because I was expecting Something Clever would happen at some point but no, this is just the narrative equivalent of a Final Fight game where you munch turkeys and beat up guys called Golem and Mr. Motor who say stuff like "Ow! That hurt!" lol

bolearis my beloved

Doesn't quite reach the narrative heights nor the unspeakable narrative lows of Xenoblade 2. I think I had lofty expectations for the end of the trilogy, and Xenoblade 3 did not deliver.

The endless side content is back too, but now you'll have to do side quests as a pre-requisite for each class you want to fully level.

Combat is a lot more comprehensible than Xenoblade 2, and the QoL and UI are a step up from XBDE. Unlike XB2, shops finally have unique icons on the map, but now they have barely anything worth buying. Monolithsoft giveth and Monolithsoft taketh away.

this game is for a very specific audience and i dont think thats me

it feels unfair to rate it but i did not like it

This game is fucked. What’s more fucked is that I really like it.

A lot of what this game does appeals to my ideal idea of a comfy game: A crazy amount of mechanical depth and variety comes paired with a behemoth amount of content that gives you adequate space to explore all that depth while also ticking off progression. You will get into a loop where you’re always being introduced to new encounters and new tools to play them with and once you’re in there this game is something special. Issue is uhhh….you won’t get there, not for 10 hours and not without the help of a dozen online resources.

idk where to begin with the new player experience because it's so fucked on so many levels. This game has some of the worst pacing I have ever experienced and is filled to the brim with awful elements surrounding the core gameplay. This is an unfortunate side effect of it being an anniversary title, as it spends a lot of its first hours homaging MH1/2’s quests and pacing, subjecting you to shitty gimmick monsters that were coded 16 years ago and forcing you through slow paced gathering quests with obfuscated objectives.
Remember in MH1 how you first encountered Rathalos when he interrupted an egg delivery quest? Well, you probably don’t because you didn’t play that shit, but this game is gonna make you do that four times for each of the flagship monsters of the game!


The experience from 1★ to 3★ Village is so painful that I think you have to either be an MH veteran, have friends egging you through it, or are a little crazy to go through that shit on your own. I’m probably in the “a little crazy” camp. Combine all the above with the fact that the player is subjected to the worst content in the game right at the start while they are still new and uncomfortable with every aspect regardless of how well designed it is, and this game’s starting hours are a fucking disaster.

What’s most tragic about many of the game’s issues is that it feels like the devs knew about them and included secret ways to fix them.
Sick of not knowing where the monster is and forgetting to paintball them? Psychoserums do that for you and you can get them for practically free.
Hate the idea of grinding for mega potions and whetstones? There is a quest here that lets you get an infinite amount from a trader, and there is also a free pack of essential items hidden in the most random menu option.
Hate the fact that the ore you want is a 3% drop chance? There is this random short quest here that gives you a 100% chance of getting a whole bunch of them, and there is also an item that lets you duplicate them if you already got some!
At first, I was in disbelief that anyone could get into this game, but after figuring out all this stuff, I can see how this game is playable by people who don’t devote their days entirely into Monster Hunter, but that still begs the question...Why? Why hide all the features that make this game not a pain in the ass? I will never know.

On top of that, if you played this game on your own, you will likely not even see the potential in the combat considering the game doesn’t tell you anything about the crazy movesets it provides you with, and without the use of community guides and resources you will probably play like a headless chicken and not get much out of it.

At the very least, in terms of community resources there is a lot of good stuff online that I think is necessary for playing the game. A well laid out spreadsheet of all important quests for progression, unlocks, e.t.c, and a highly informative set of guides for each weapon that lay out the differences between every style and the important skills and sets to look out for each. Most important of all is God’s Gift: Kiranico, a japanese-made resource where you can search up practically anything and get the info you want. What's this monster’s hitzones? Where do you get this item? What’s the upgrade path for this weapon? Which quest gives the best rewards for this resource? It's amazing how much effort was put into it.
But the fact this is all information is stuff you need to access outside the game is ridiculous and heavily discouraging to say the least.

Despite spending the last six paragraphs trashing the game, the unfortunate truth is...I really like it. Once you get past it all and get in the groove, it really is good, Trust Me Bro™.


On top of Monster Hunter’s classic diversity of weapons, this game provides Hunter Arts (supers that can be used after filling up a bar) and Styles (alternate weapon movesets). Very few of the styles feel ill-considered, and I found a good reason to want to try every one of them (though some are clearly above the rest in terms of immediate fun factor). The combinations you can create with styles, arts, and sets make the game feel like an immense playground of overwhelming possibilities where there is always a new thing you want to try. These elements enhance each other too, as the set building becomes much more interesting when you factor in how you can use it to optimize the specific style/art combination you are going for.


I want to illustrate a quick example in the writing but it's honestly hard for me to describe without presenting unintelligible word salad to anyone who hasn’t played the game, but the point is that as you get invested into one aspect you will probably find yourself getting pulled into others with how greatly all these systems synergize.
You pick a weapon/style combo you enjoy, discover a weird super that is meant to be made into a powerhouse with use of a specific set to play around it. Find another super and you will start connecting the dots with how a different style/set can make for a viable and completely different way of playing the weapon. It really puts the RPGshit in these games to the best use possible, combining them with its core combat mechanics to allow you to experiment with playstyles while also giving you incentive to grind out more content to make all the shit you want to test those ideas with.

It's also a great fit for the absurd amount of content in this game. The game contains monsters from games all across the series, designed by all sorts of people for different console gens and under different design philosophies. The diversity in encounters would easily turn into a negative if not for the fact that the player’s array of options that allow them to adapt wasn’t equally expansive. Having trouble with a flying monster shitting your day up? Maybe try Aerial Style. Finding this monster’s attacks too aggressive and difficult to avoid? Try Adept style to counter it and get insane evade windows and parries.. Just about every encounter in this game can be hard countered and it works well to make me try new things I haven’t considered before.

The grinding experience in this game ranges in quality, but I have more good memories than bad ones as targeting specific parts can change the experience of a fight dramatically. One highlight I had was trying to grind for Gore Magala horns which required me to intentionally get afflicted by his debuffs in order to activate his awakened state earlier to force him to reveal his horns (which are usually hidden), and play around traps to get the opportunity to break them before he gets knocked out of awakened state, the whole thing felt like a secret hard mode version of the fight. That shit probably sounds too fucked up for most people, and the drop rates for some stuff is unreasonably low, but I really enjoyed it when it was used to give a new spin on fights.

Finally, and this is just a me thing, I do quite enjoy the visuals of this game as old and varying in quality as they are. Despite the re-textures there is a lot of 6th-gen charm in the maps that appeals to me with a wide variety of vibes. The forest maps tend to make me think of MGS3 a lot, and shoutout to Verdant Hill’s awesome ambient sounds. The hodge-podge that this game is doesn’t make for a cohesive whole but I ultimately liked it.

Before I finish I do want to put it out there that aside from having a knowledgeable friend to ease you into the game, there is the option of playing this game on emulator instead. Playing on emulator gets you the ability to use a save transfer to skip much of the game’s shittier content, use a save editor to tailor the experience to yourself by skipping the fishing/mining, as well as the nice bonus of 60fps. If you use Ryujinx to emulate, it's relatively easy to run and comes with built-in online support so you can play with anybody else who uses the emulator (without having to go through hamachi or anything of the sort!). Having played on both, I think it's a far superior way of playing the game, and I’d probably play it on PC all the time if not for access to the wider playerbase on the Switch (since it's hard to find friends willing to download an emulator to play this garbage with me).

But yeah umm, Capcom does it to me again, a game that is fucking terrible in so many ways but also addicting in how well it succeeds at what it sets out to do. I probably won’t need another game for a while.

Sunbreak takes the already outstanding base that was Rise and trims the fat and further polishes a combat system that has been already shined to near perfection over the last several entries. Simultaneously it ups the difficulty substantially and adds several standout monsters, both new and old. New Master Rank armor gives a greater degree of control over player build options, and the new skill swap abilities gives an unprecedented level of expression and freedom. As far as combat in video games goes, it just doesn't get better than this.