Update: replayed the game again and lowered my score from a 5/10 to a 2/10. After learning about how I'm actually supposed to play the game, I encountered a new problem in which the game is now repetitive and boring. So all the positive things I had to say about some of the boss fights are retroactively nullified. Almost everything about the game is a regression from the first two games. Story sucks, gameplay sucks, the UI is somehow worse than the Wii game, the objective marker doesn't actually tell you how to get where you're supposed to go and is somehow worse than the objective arrow from the first game on the Wii, the world does not feel anywhere near as grand as the Bionis and Mechonis in the first game or Mira in X, I'd make the argument that the art direction in general is not as good as X and definitely not as good as the Definitive Edition of the first game, the character designs are extremely Incohesive with Torna along with a bunch of rare blades feeling like they belong in different games (reminder that Pyra and Malos are supposed to be siblings), the game resorts to extremely pandering bullshit even in scenes that are supposed to be serious, and locking story content behind a gacha system is such a horrible idea I hope that whoever at Monolith Soft came up with that got fired. The only things I enjoy about this game are the music, the world being kinda fun to explore, some of the designs of the rare blades and I guess Torna even though they all feel like they belong in different games, and Nia, who is really bogged down by ending up orbiting around Rex's dick like Pyra and Mythra along with her ears being backwards, that's such a stupid design decision, but these do not carry a game that is fundamentally bad in almost every other way. I dropped the game after getting Poppi QT. The point in which I should've dropped the game was during that stupid filler arc about Gormotti orphans trying to stop a rag-tag group of bandits from attacking the most militarized city of Gormott so they can introduce Roc. To this day I have no idea how this game has the fanfare that it gets. I feel like I've played a completely different game.

It's crazy after two decades there still isn't a game like it. The level design in Deus Ex is in its own league. The game does not give you any clear answers when it comes how you should approach a problem, which cannot be said for most stealth games, or later games in this series for that matter. The game encourages the player to experiment with the games mechanics and think outside the box to solve problems, and the world will react to the decisions you make in ways that still surprise me when I revisit and play a different way. This isn't even getting into the story, which I feel is extremely important that people experience. For a story about nanomachines, clones, secret societies, and conspiracy theories, it's extremely grounded in reality. The game uses this spectacle to point out real problems with American society: the military-industrial complex, the degradation of the middle class, the price gouging and scarcity of proper healthcare, and warned its players about the state using counter-terrorism as a means to take away their citizens' civil liberties BEFORE 9/11. Play this if you somehow haven't already! Your life depends on it!

It's a love letter to all of video games: a celebration of the some of the best of the best video games have to offer all packaged in one of the best fighting games of all time. Everyone is here! You can feel the love oozing from this game with the levels inspired by all these games, the reprised music, the spirit battles inspired by different characters from all these games, and all the trophies you can collect including the Pokémon and assist trophies. I find fighting games to generally be inaccessible to me as I feel they require a significant time investment for me to even understand the mechanics of a character before can even practice on getting good with them. Smash Bros as a series solves this problem by providing simple yet extremely deep gameplay. It's my go to party game if I want to play with friends for this reason. But let's be real, you don't need me telling you why this game is great. You probably already know by now.

Monolith Soft took the gameplay from Xenoblade Chronicles and made it 100 times faster with even more options available for approaching gameplay. The world is so beautifully detailed that the fact it's able to run on the Wii U with seamless transitions and few pop ins is an amazing feat. The story takes a bit of a back seat in this game, with instead having the goal of making the player feel like that he's a small part of a large team. It feels like Monolith Soft wanted to make an MMO but knows they cannot do that, so they pack in features ubiquitous to MMOs like raid battles and a variety of classes to choose from while balancing the game around a single player experience, making the multiplayer feel broken as most people play with similar builds to maximize damage. Another reason why I think this is that the devs seem to have taken some inspiration from Phantasy Star Online with how you can target specific appendages on enemies to incur a debuff when it is destroyed. There's still lots of fun to be had with doing the game's side-quests, exploring the world, experimenting with the game's mechanics, and learning more about the game's cast of likeable characters. Elma is my waifu

Boggles my mind that the devs thought that the best direction to go with for the expansion was to make a rougelike where you're playing the same levels over and over and over again when all they needed to do was just add more levels, add more mechanics, expand on the story, and add more challenge modes. Adding powerups to start with a weapon right from the start of each level screams that the devs strongly misunderstood what made the game so fun. I want to feel like an action movie star that pulls off the impossible when the odds seem like they're against me, not a super soldier. Just play the challenge modes in the original instead of playing this garbage.

One of the most unhinged AAA games ever made. It's up there with the PS3/PS4 David Cage games as some of the most insane and laughably bad writing while being completely lacking in self-awareness. It is literally the most unintentionally misogynistic piece of media I've ever consumed. The fact that this studio had the gall to call Trish and Lady prostitutes with guns only to have the girl that's part of the group serve as a bargaining chip for the game's villains and have a character who was only able to find meaning in her life by being the main villain's incubator and actively punish her for it is so laughably ironic. It also features two of the most insufferable main characters that gaming has to offer as the game insists that they are so cool, they are cooler than the real Dante and Vergil. The writing is also one of the most pretentious in any game ever, and I don't even mean that the game is artsy, it's far from that. It instead insists upon itself when it comes to how smart the game is while having one of the most intellectually shallow scripts ever. It's literally "wake up sheeple" type writing. The gameplay also sucks ass. The gameplay is what some people think of when they say that the DMC games are a series of button mashers as spamming the same moves over and over improves your combo score just as much as keeping things varied. It also doesn't even have a lock on: one of the most ubiquitous features of any third person action game. The game is also littered with mediocre platforming segments to pad out the game. The game is also fugly. The game is both filled with segments with the colors being so saturated it gets in the way of playing and cutscenes that look extremely washed out and drab. The character models are also extremely visually unappealing with one of the villains being a stupid Botox joke, the female character of the group looking like a doll, Dante looking like an emo boy with a MySpace account in the 2000s, and Vergil being a wannabe fascist. The game is extremely creatively bankrupt. One of the arcs of this game literally rips off the slurm queen episode of Futurama and has the most obnoxious parody of Bill O'Reilly. The fact that there are still defenders of this game in the gaming press goes to show that there are still remnants of this weird tribalism against Japanese gaming studios that has existed throughout the 2000s. Play this game if you really want to get angry after playing the first four games as you think about how this exists because of Keiji Inafune trying to westernize Capcom and how it took so long to get a real sequel to DMC 4 because of it.

At a time where highly anticipated JRPG releases were underwhelming to much of the gaming community, Monolith Soft came out of left field with one of the best RPGs released during the seventh console generation. This game has it all: deep gameplay, extremely likable characters, a charming art style, great worldbuilding, a fantastic soundtrack, and an epic tale that removed a lot of the convolution but retained much of the thought and heart the Xeno series has been known for. It all culminates in one of the best endings video games have to offer. The Wii version's art style stands out enough on its own to warrant a playthrough after beating the Switch version, which I imagine will be the first experience of most Xenoblade fans by now.

The best way to play modern Yu-GI-Oh. Regardless of your opinion of the state of the meta in this game or in the OCG, it is easily the most accessible way to experience the mechanics that have been added over the years. Easy to keep track of yours and your opponent's graveyard and banished cards, easy to keep track of what the effects of yours and your opponent's cards do, and basically not have to deal with any of the BS that would come with dueling with someone that is using an archetype that you haven't played against before or not being up to date with the rules of the card game in real life. It's also the least expensive way to experience the game. As a programmer, I also very much appreciate what had to be taken to account how all these cards should interact with each other and always work how they are supposed to exactly like following the effect of the cards and rules if you were to duel in real life, all the while the game being smooth and not very resource hungry. The look of the game also has a lot of polish. It's easily the best thing Konami has put out since Metal Gear Solid V.

One of the best games from the seventh generation of consoles, nowhere near as good as the first game. Human Revolution does a lot of things well, a lot of things much better than games that came out at around its time, and I argue its still much better than most first person shooters that came after it, but a lot of its shortcomings come from it being a AAA console game. Human Revolution, while telling a compelling story that does fall in line within the first game, feels very detached from it with the game's art direction and setting. It's sometimes feels like it's more caught up with its transhumanism vs humanism themes than it should be when it could be telling something much more thought provoking at times. The level design is much more binary than the first game. While the first game's levels never gave a clear answer of what would be the best way to approach a problem, Human Revolution has multiple instances where you choose to go through a hallway where you would get caught and have to go loud, or a vent where you sneak past everyone. The game also doesn't feel as reactive to my decisions than the first game aside from the first mission after Adam gets his augmentations.
With that aside, the game is still good. It retains much of makes the first game good and repackaging to a new audience of gamers and appealing to their sensibilities for the time.