One of the only N64 games where the performance actively hurts my enjoyment of the game. Tetrisphere's gameplay loop isn't bad at all, but the game chugs like a CAVE shmup with too many bullets on screen. The difference being, instead of a helpful hardware exploit to make difficult sections manageable, the puzzle flow comes to a halt.

There's been late 90s/early 2000s D&B/Jungle reassessment, and while I do like a lot of soundtracks that fit into that genre, a lot are hookless, boring and repetitive. Tetrisphere's soundtrack is closer to the average than we'd like to admit.

You can name your mom, so throughout the entire game I had to deal with a character named Milf. Awful things happen to that woman.

What a strange, kinda slow, horny, racist, tonally incoherent SNES RPG. It plays the tragic elements of the story totally straight, but you still have wacky shit happening all the time. All that being said, the combat wasn't terrible, and the plot of the game stuck with me enough to where I didn't regret sitting through some of the slower parts. Nothing in the game really irritated me, and I played this game shortly after the translation dropped without a guide and basically had zero issues. I really wish the PS1 version would get a translation, it'd be very interesting to compare the two.

This isn't a must play RPG on the platform, but it has enough weird swag to warrant a playthrough for JRPG diehards.

As a Bemani/BMS simp, I would kill to have a client as slick and easy to set up as Clone Hero. Customization of elements of the UI is really easy to tweak. The game supports multiple instruments competently. Song packs are easy to find and cover ever commercial release from GH/RB and even more fanmade selections.

As much as I adore the Komoney in house artists and the days worth of music they've produced, I'm sorry, it's nice to have a rhythm game that has shit that people in my personal life have listened to before. It's not like you can boot up Pop'n Music and play Ace of Spades.

A relatively uncompromised portable version of Pop'n Music. The song list of heavily truncated from arcade versions, but there's still 80~ songs to pick from, ranging from PM3 songs to anime OPs. A good amount of the cast is selectable too!

The major issue is that Popn music on intended controllers is fucking hard. Playing this on a PSP is a major learning curve, and if you're willing to grind that out, you're probably better off just building a con with 9 buttons and grabbing a proper arcade rip.

Sonic Pinball Party isn't even the best Pinball Party of 2003.

If you check the reviews for Sonic Pinball Party, you'll get a lot of "It's a pinball game, but I don't like pinball!" And if you're judging the genre off of games like this, it's hard to argue against that. Sonic Pinball Party's tables suck ass.

There's only three tables, and none of them have the focus or depth of games released a decade prior. It's also a very traditional pinball game on the surface, where you try to hit specific targets multiple times in order to active other elements on the table and score more points, but the rulesets are restrictive and boring. Multiball is an active detriment to hitting some of the score thresholds needed for story mode. I would say that the reduced screen real estate would be detrimental towards control of the mode, but Sonic Pinball Party is easy enough to where, combined with tilt, I rarely lost a ball on accident. Most of my ball losses came from the Samba De Amigo table's outlane.

There's also just a bunch of little things that hurt the experience for pinball diehards and new players alike. The ball physics aren't great. Visually the game isn't anything to write home about. The faux-DMD they use isn't visually interesting and eats up already limited screen real estate. There's a time limit on most of the story mode sections, and pinball with a time limit feels real rough.

I know, for a lot of different reasons, this probably wouldn't have been feasible but I wish they just put their whole effort into making one really detailed, interesting board with visuals that didn't seem tied to the genre, and relied on the Chao Garden to keep casuals hooked. A total skip for diehards of both sonic and pinball.

Es stands for "Embryo Storage". She's two years old in the game.

Originally, I was going to say that this game feels like the visual novel you'd get out of a happy meal, but there's too many scenes of nude underaged girls for that. Even if you give a shit about the story (aka should be put on a list), the news snippets you have to constantly be on the lookout for destroy and flow to reading that you could possibly have.

I've played Es in every game Arcsys has thrown her in, and even I'm like "yeah, they gotta take this game out back and put it down like ol yeller". Even for people who don't think Mori is a Shouzou Kaga-tier creep, you're gonna have a better time reading the wiki.

Originally, I posted a review comparing this game to other titles with a ton of depth that demand a lot from the player (like IIDX, +R, etc). I deleted that review, because I wasn't totally sure where I stood on the game after a few more races.

And then after doing even more races, I realized I was right the first time. This game fucking rules.

The tutorial is still awful, but I'm really glad I did it because I would not have thought to use stuff like quick drop without it, and the dialogue between Tails and Robotnik is endearing. It's probably the worst part of the game, and it's irrelevant after the first 45 min outside of the on-boarding process for new players. "Oh, you think you're hot shit? Beat this max CPU level race then" is based, actually.

Otherwise, it's a kart racer that asks more from you than most other entries in the genre, and that's rad. The ring system is sick as hell. The courses aren't all bangers, but an overwhelming majority of them are, and they all look and sound so good that you genuinely forget that the game is a fan project.

The Brawlesque unlock system is only frustrating if you want all the content at once and don't give a shit about the single player experience. The actual process of unlocking everything is, much like it was in Brawl, a fantastic way to encourage new players to plumb the depths of the game, and the key system lets you skip over any challenge you find especially egregious.

Nobody's mentioned the little pets that you can have follow you. I love having a little guy around me at all times for emotional support. No notes, should be a feature in more games in general.

This game is not trying to replace SRB2Kart, and divorced from the context of that game, I don't think it would have nearly as bad of a reputation. The average rating on this page has gone up steadily since this game's release, and as I posted before, in six months after the rough patches of the game are smoothed out (as they have been already in some cases!), it'll be appreciated for the home run that it is.

Devil Survivor 2 is a slog, a train-wreck that manages to capture none of the magic of the first game. The cast is weaker across the board. The outcomes to each of their stories are weaker. The concept of the plot weakens the connection you have to the setting. The tension that the first game had is totally absent in this game. While the game mechanics have more depth, it wasn't like the first game was too simplistic (with the superboss encouraging abuse of revive loops). They did not fix the previous game's main weakness (kinda really bad map design), and instead made more gimmicky stupid ass maps.

They brought in an Evangelion artist to do the designs of the Septentriones, and these ice cream looking rejects lack the personality of Bels from the original game, or even the spectacle of Evangelion's angels. They never become more captivating obstacles to overcome, and most of the secondary antagonists come from NPCs doing stupid shit that's success or failure hinges on this jackass of a high schooler. Bunny is the only good thing about this game. In other SMT/Persona games, people like to extrapolate a personality out of potential dialogue choices for silent protags. If we do that for DeSu2's main character, he either does not fully understand what is going on in the plot or just can't be bothered to give a fuck.

As for the rest of the game's art, it's fine up until you hit the point where anatomy matters. Not only are there bruh character designs for high schoolers (like in the first game, to be fair), the other designs lack the modern, "this is just what I threw on to go to the grocery store" look of the previous game.

Devil Survivor 2's endings allow the player to reshape the world in the image of one of his party members. In one of the endings, the world is created in such a way that everyone on the planet unconditionally cooperates with each other. Those in power sacrifice their temporary comfort for those in need of their own volition, while still fully retaining their personality. In the game's on words

"It was a true utopia, the sort men had dreamed of for ages".

This is treated as a lesser ending than "reset back to the status quo of 2010s Japan", because hey, what if something bad happens? What if universal cooperation and acceptance isn't as productive as the ending where everyone is climbing over dead bodies? DeSu2 sucks shit outside of this ending, but over a decade after this game came out, this remains one of the most misanthropic moments in the medium.

I have more nice things to say about all the boring SPRGs everyone's rightfully forgot about like Feda or Stella Deus than I do Devil Survivor 2. This game's highlights are the moments it seems to have contempt for itself, instead of the human condition as a whole. Not recommended to fans of other Atlus games (including the first), strategy games or weebs in general.

This game owes more to noted "least funny man on the internet" Hideki Naganuma than Jet Set Radio Future. The music from the four different contributors in this Sonic DS spinoff carries the experience of what would otherwise be a "fine, not fantastic" mobile Sonic game for me. The ending of this Sonic game has genuine emotional impact, and the music playing during it might be the most underrated track in the franchise.

My major pros for this game are "I like the character they introduced and the music's really good" but that's a 4/5 sometimes, I don't know what to tell you.