I've given Strive so many chances since its release and like, nah dude fuck this mess of a game, this shit sucks.

There are things Strive does right that are worth pointing out:

- Bridget
- Testament outside of giving them Slash's hat
- a 3rd of the soundtrack goes really hard
- Being able to grab a combo in client to practice is cool

Almost everything else comes off as a dud. The game isn't fun to play. The damage is higher than previous games, there's less of an execution barrier to that high damage (which, you can argue about balance yadda yadda, but you can safely assume that not every +R Sol is going to hit every Sidewinder), except in weird cases where they still have that limiting execution like Happy Chaos's clean hits (which like, didn't work to balance him out). There's also less defensive mechanics (DA is sorely missed, and the changes to IB are fucking terrible considering how good they were in almost every GG game prior). The gatling system is gone, and while most of the roster works off of the same rules, it's more arbitrary and confusing than "just go down the line like a slightly fucked up magic system". The wall breaking mechanics are confusing for new players, while they're still able to be manipulated in a way to either give oki setups or greatly reward players for breaking the corner. It's not even like Tekken/DOA where stage breaks enable different combo routes or ways to change the game, it's just a disorienting reset to neutral. Some of the character reworks (like Anji and Faust) missed what made those previous versions of the characters so fun. Anji in particular was a sign early on that they had no idea what to do with this game. Why would you release Sin or Elphelt and give them the most 4/10 buttons in the game?

I think the story of the game is bad, there was a clear critique of American jingoism (they called this dump "a country" for a reason) that they go back on for no gain. Some of the redesigns of the game are insipid (Baiken's key art is fucking embarrassing), bland (Strive Sol's design is my least favorite in the series) or just trash the character for little story or gameplay gain (Faust). The new members of the roster are fine, and if we ever get a Xourth, it'd be really cool to see them fleshed out, but outside of HC they seem more subdued than the returning cast.

The game is also just a fucking chore to actually play. The lobby system is the worst they've ever had by a country mile. Trying to connect to another player in a public or private lobby shouldn't be this active chore to accomplish. Invites to friends regularly fizzle. If you're using the quick match feature, the game will regularly push you into whatever dead room it wants, pray that you're not just sitting in an empty queue for 15 minutes. I'm not a big fan of ranked systems in fighting games to begin with, but why is this ranked setting the default way of experiencing the game? You're going to lose a ton when learning a fighting game, that's part of the appeal if we're being honest. Telling a player "you lost too many times, get fucked" or "you won! time to stop your set with this player even if you think you aren't ready" is horrendous for the new player experience and installs the same sort of bad habits that chasing PP in Osu! does.

Strive feels like a game that's development was hurt by the pandemic and they still launched the game and have been trying to do band-aid fixes without a clear direction ever since. I'd pop in every now and then to see if the game would ever get to the fireworks factory, and I think at this point I've totally given up. As a game for newer players, I think it fails. As a game for fans of the GG series overall, I think it fails harder. Strive is an incoherent disappointment, and at this point I'm just waiting for them to move on to the next game in the series. Nothing against you if you still have fun with the game, god bless your heart, but you deserve better than this.

The original GBFV was the "anime street fighter" that a lot of FGC twitter wanted, and found a dedicated scene, but I didn't find that appealing. Rising is a true blue ArcSys game, which is to say "it's designed by baseheads".

Getting the negatives out of the way, no, this should not have been sold for another $50, and while the netcode upgrade, new system mechanics and relatively few new characters are welcome, the price along with a battle pass and DLC characters is outright predatory in a genre that, while not great, usually avoided the worst of these excesses. There's also weird design issues with the cast. Older members of the roster were clearly built with a different design philosophy than the newer members of the cast, and older members were either brought up to parity with the older members of the roster with band-aid fixes to frame data/new EX moves (shoutouts to giving my beloved Bubs a full screen unblockable setup, again, fighting games made by junkies) or in a few cases just left to rot until they hopefully give them needed fixes a year or two down the road that might not fix core issues with their design, but can slap enough good numbers on them to make them kinda viable (see: Strive Anji). Nier and a few characters get more reward off of stray hits than the rest of the crew for seemingly little downsides, but that's balance shit, again, they'll even it out (if not go overboard).

All that being said, I have really been enjoying this game, so much more than I thought I would. The "everyone runs strike/throw" mix has actually been doubled down on, with the universal overhead button moving to 5XX6X instead of just being a thing you can press. Alpha counters/dead angles were added, and they're very strong while presenting enough counterplay to bait them out and get a big punish if you can get the read. As of now, the roster is sizable and the characters play very different from each other in ways that feel less homogeneous than some other FGs. Within the constraints of "if you get a safejump off of oki, count your lucky stars", there's a lot of cool shit characters can do under the hood, and even relatively simple characters have enough setups to keep the game from getting stale. It still looks and sounds just as good as the original game, and while I haven't touched the single player or party mode of the game, I'm glad it's there for the people who like it and if it ropes more people into the game, it's hard to complain. Special moves tied to cooldowns seem less restrictive than before, even though with the new EX moves you'd think the timer crunch would be felt more. The netcode is also excellent, even across continents I've felt that it's good enough to not impact the competitive integrity of the game.

GBVS: Rising is what I wanted out of Strive, or DNF Duel. There's a lot more to chew on than the original release, while not being as frustrating as either of the previous games. I think the price of the game and its monetization is bad enough to where it seriously impacts my willingness to recommend this game to someone, and if you don't like stagger pressure/fishing for counter hits like everyone's Sol Badguy, this isn't going to do much for you. If you're someone new to fighting games and want something more approachable than other titles, or you're a vet who wants something that doesn't take 50 years of labbing to jump online and crack skulls, Rising is a game that, even alongside new FG releases like UNI2 or Tekken 8 is worth considering. ArcSys is clearly moving away from the design tendencies that gave us +R/Xrd/CF, but if this is the result going forward, I'm looking forward to seeing future releases.

I don't know if Shin Megami Tensei is a good game or not, but I do know it's the most based JRPG on the console. You start off as this fucking dweeb living with his mom. No combat experience, not a chosen one, he's not magical, he's just living at home until one day noted Epstein associate Stephen Hawking gives you a computer program to summon demons. The main character is Doomguy with Kaneko drip. There are like, six different end of the world scenarios that the main character copes with by perforating everything with a coherent ideology with a minigun.

Like after a certain point, it really doesn't matter how "good" your dungeons are or if you remembered to give bosses status immunity. You can shoot Yukiko Mishima in the fucking head, and then the nukes the drop. There is a skynet scare 2/3rds through the game that poses a real threat to the remainder of humanity, and so much bad shit happens in this game that most of the people who've played the game probably don't remember.

There's still historical significance to the game, SMT1 establishes what the franchise would be going forward, even moreso than MT1/2. SMT1 is just playable enough to not get in the way of the Deadly Premonition meets Book of Revelations plot they squeezed into a SFC cart. Also, the title screen cutscene still goes hard as fuck.

Bad Rats served a very specific purpose, intentionally or not. It came out at a time where Steam pretended to have some sort of curating in terms of what hit the storefront. Bad Rats wasn't just a bad game, it gave the impression (true or not) that this $1 game was as bad as you could get on Steam. You'd send it to a friend, laugh at them while they try to play an inconsistent physics puzzle game for 20 min, and move on with your life.

By 2016, Steam had a deluge of games worse than Bad Rats. The joke was four years old and had gotten played out after two. Bad Rats Show is cringe. It is cringe first, cringe second and cringe third. It is an old meme that exists not as a chance to improve upon the previous game or as a critique of that game's success, but as a way to recreate the """magic""" of the first game.

If you're the sort of person who still rickrolls your few remaining friends, this game will scratch a deep itch. This is an embarrassing artifact of 2016 (a very cringe year) for everyone else.

In the running for one of the greatest console rhythm games ever made, with most of its major competition coming from other Bemani ports or other games in the series. DJMax Portable and the rest of the PSP series holds up so well that when people ask "how do I get into rhythm games", I'll send them here.

There's a misinterpretation of what rhythm games mean to me, and what other people might think of when the genre is approached, and that's mostly due to a lack of clarity within the genre definition itself. You have Parappa-esque rhythm games with more of a focus on narrative. While I adore these games in their own right, they're a different beast than the Beatmania format of "here's a collection of a bunch of unrelated songs, see how good you can do". The Beatmania format emphasizes developing a skill over a long period of time and self improvement while getting to listen to a variety of good music. It's not the sort of game you play through in one sitting. Harder songs will ask the player to replay them, or play other songs to improve their skill until they can hope to clear the song fully. It's similar to the appeal that shmup players get trying to 1cc a game like DoDonPachi, but in shorter bursts and with less focus on memorization and strategy.

DJMax fits into that later category. There are three different playstyles (4 button, 6 button and 8 button) and a variety of difficulties within those playstyles. The onboarding process isn't a nightmare in the same way that Pop'n Music would be, but the high end of the game is still brutal and progress through the tracklist still feels like an achievement. The 55 songs that the game comes with aren't licensed tracks. This sounds like a negative, but it's actually a series selling point. The "original" (many songs were taken from previous rhythm games like DJMax Online) songs are fully keynoted (when you press a button, it corresponds with a noise that would play in the song), cover a variety of genres, all have unique, animated music videos to accompany them and are great tracks in their own right. If I started talking about the songs individually, it would just devolve into me going through all 55 songs and saying "Yeah, this is a classic rhythm game banger". They're fun to play. The songs have a distinct personality to them, and playing them multiple times creates an attachment to the music that wouldn't work as well if the game was more of a disposable product. Blythe is my favorite rhythm game song ever, and I say this after a years long trek across the entire Bemani catalogue. Once you get behind the wheel and let this game claw itself into you, even if you're not familiar with the genre or see videos of people playing a difficult song in a rhythm game and think to yourself "I could never do this", it'll change how you approach video games fundamentally. It did for me.

The rest of the game's package holds up to the same level of quality as the setlist. There's different modifiers for how you want to play the song. There's tons of unlockables. There's customization elements to the UI years before we'd see that meaningfully in the IIDX series. If you had this game back in 2006, when getting your hands on rhythm games stateside was much harder than it is today (outside of Guitar Hero and a few compromised Bemani PS1/PS2 ports), this game could have lasted a years worth of bus trips, waiting rooms and lunch breaks. If Mother 3 didn't come out this same year, this would be my GOTY of 2006. If you have a PSP laying around, grab this game and try out a few songs. It might break your hands.

Mega Man, to me, has always been a 3/5 series. I've played through the entire mainline series, the Zero series, most of the spinoffs (outside of Legends) and to a T, they seemed like "good, not great" games that I didn't regret playing, but didn't see the appeal outside of nice presentation. Mega Man X was the first time I really saw the hype.

That's not to say this game is free of sin, there's enough little mistakes to drag down the game from "an all time classic" to simply "really good". These errors, like the pixel perfect jumps needed to collect some of the optional upgrades or the way the game handles sub-tank health stick out more considering how good the rest of the game is.

The level design, so far, is my favorite of the Mega Man games. This might say more of my taste than the actual quality of the stages, but in previous games it felt like a lot of the difficulty came from obstacles that required learning their precise placement beforehand, or you'd just eat shit to them. There are frustrating deaths and enemy placement in this game, but it's been severely reduced. The stages have a great flow to them, especially when combined with your increased mobility from previous games. I've seen people say that the stages come off as bland, but I'd rather design be safe instead of memorable for all the wrong reasons. These "critiques" extend to the boss fights, even with weapon weaknesses the bosses didn't feel as invalidated as they did in previous games, but they also came off as less annoying and their patterns easier to learn.

I didn't play this game until a few weeks ago, but if I played through this when I was younger, the X series would have given me brainworms. The game's undeniably cool, it's one of the few times I've seen an "edgy" redesign of a franchise that I prefer over the original. The reploid designs take more risks than the robot masters of previous games. The music doesn't reach the highs of previous games, but is still a great soundtrack in its own right. I liked Zero's design enough to play through the GBA tetralogy, but even in his first appearance, you get why every ten year old that played this game developed an affinity for him.

All that praise aside, Buzz Lightyear's design brings this game's score down half a point by itself. I struggle to think of a series antagonist with a worse design, holy shit how did they stick with this stupid bald motherfucker over 8 games. Vile was right there! The concept art of this game has a charm that, if it doesn't elevate the source material, I can still appreciate it as a reflection of design tendencies from when the game came out. I've never seen any representation of Sigma Balls that makes me think "wow, this character's really cool". He has the backstory and setup to be this compelling rival to this artificial lifeform that still could choose to rebel but chooses to fight for humanity, but he's saddled with the burden of looking like a toy that would have been recalled from Dollar General for giving children lead poisoning.

Even that chrome dome fucking dweeb can't bring the game down any lower though. I wish I played this game years ago. Mega Man X is an easy recommendation to SNES/platformer fans nd a great first impression for this series.

It's hard for me to judge the original Mega Man. The game design concepts behind the game were so protean that Crapcom helped form many of them with this entry. When compared with the rest of the console's library from around this time, there's an argument to be made that it's one of the better games you could have picked up, especially from 3rd parties. I even think the graphics and music hold up well, and only start to look really dated when you compare it to the releases we'd seen on the NES in the 90's.

Mega Man still isn't that fun though. The actual stages themselves are a decent time. The type of difficulty that the series overall presents isn't something I prefer, and obviously it would be done better in almost every game going forward, but if you're looking for the series's specific type of flavor then you won't be disappointed. I despise the bosses in this game. I don't know what else to say, didn't have fun with any of them. Yellow Devil really is that bad.

Don't play this series in chronological order. If you're a series completionist, save this for later on. The only benefit you'll get is that everything from here on out is less frustrating. I don't have any negative feelings towards this game, but I'll never willingly return to it.

The xplay jrpg. Introducing this game to specific sections of the younger queer community was like the CIA introducing crack to black neighborhoods. I mourn for those impacted, you know who you are.

This isn't the worst JRPG I've ever played, or close to IdeaFactory's worst, but it is the most embarrassing, including all of their games that had to be "censored" (removed child pornography) so they could be sold in the west. If this game came out in 2007, when VGCats was the height of popular culture, this would have caused white 9/11. It's humor is an artifact from a different time, but this series persisted long after we progressed as a society past it.

The game itself goes out of its way to be boring. Having fun with the game? No you aren't, and please refrain from lying to me in the future. If you get joy from this game, then rejoice! You will enjoy almost every other JRPG out there, because this accomplishes the bare minimum to not be incompetent, and jack shit otherwise. Again, another example of how this game feels out of time, this seems to have the same design ethos that drove the famicom Dragon Quest clone deluge, down to "progress is relegated behind your raw stats, grinding is intended game design".

I don't have any numerical rating for this game. If I had a coworker of mine say that they played Neptunia, I would suggest they refrain from sharing that fact in public.

One of the best games in IdeaFactory's catalogue.

That's to say "the original version has cards that depicted anime children in a g string, but this was removed from the international versions because western audiences might have reservations about playing loli on the bus" (remember this when people complain about this game being "censored").

It's shameful, the plot could not be more boring if it tried. The card mechanics feel both stock in a way that shouldn't be possible considering how few card games the Vita has, but convoluted in such a way that progression takes for fucking ever unless you blew cash on in game card purchases. The campaign has nothing to compel you to continue through the story. The UI doesn't even handle well! Komoney got this down on the GBA, you have a touch screen and you couldn't manage that.

The bar for IdeaFactory is somewhere in the earth's crust and yet I still can't suggest this game, even on a curve. Like, if this game was as acceptable as the GBA Dragonball Z card game, or the FMA DS card game, I'd probably give it a higher score. The only thing saving this from a rock bottom score is that there are technically worse playing card game video games. I would say, this is probably the card game the least amount of people have played against real humans.

I was looking for a time waster for work, and Rogue Fable III really hit the spot. In the same vein as games like POWDER, this game isn't a replacement for a more dedicated roguelike session, but aims to scratch the same itch within a shorter period of time. The overall speed of the game is its best quality, you can clear floors within 30 seconds if you're comfortable with the hotkeys and combat. I don't think the game looks or sounds particularly great, but everything is readable and there weren't many times I was confused as to what was happening on screen, so it's hard to complain that much.

Anything I would change about the game's core mechanics would defeat the purpose of a roguelike you can clear in 30 min or less. If you see this on a steam sale for $3, you'll get more than your money's worth.

If Brian from Family Guy could make a video game, this is what he'd make.

The acting, presentation and concept for a game like this is kinda interesting, and that's the only thing that saves this from a half a star. The plot (a left wing not UK government wins after the first not Thacher administration but turns out to be ebil gommunism) is executed so fucking poorly that it's fucking insulting. Even from an alt-history standpoint, this comes off less charitable than those weird 90's polish games with robot feminazis.

There's no actual allegory of real world left movements, or mimicking actual examples that could have applied to this game. it's been about a year since I played the game, and I started off this review going bit by bit on how the real life examples of each faction wouldn't act like the way they do in game, but after awhile I was just breaking down each turn of the script and saying "this is fucking stupid". This is a game where the ebil gommunism goberment is literally 1984 and would preemptively nuke major population centers because of their imperial ambitions and harsh sanctions from other countries, just like all the times that happened in real life. The plucky resistance group just organically forms due to frustrations with such evils as "land reform" and "they don't let fake Newscorp continue along shitting up the airwaves".

Their idea of a far left government's final public plans are implementing UBI and "free education". They nationalized major industries (which, by the way, look for the words "capital flight" anywhere in this stupid script, you won't find it despite it being a very real consequence of nationalization because this game was written by inbred Brits) but they let the education sector still be ran for profit. I can't add anything onto that, that's fucking stupid and if you think that's a genuine assessment of the left outside of assuming mild social democracy would lead to IRL Paper's Please, you should be put under conservatorship.

I didn't mention much about the characters, or personal drama of the game, and that's because I don't care, they fucking suck. I want to punch Alan James in the teeth every time he comes on screen. Jeremy and Megan's performances are a highlight of the game, because much like every existing UK news broadcaster, listening to them for an extended period of time curdles the food in my stomach. So much of the game is filled with these little character interactions between the cast, and while it's a respite from the trainwreck that's the main plot, static would start playing in my head whenever they're blurt out the sub Harvester-tier dialogue.

I hope notGames lost their shirt on this production. It's not the worst FMV game I've played, but it's the most British one. Sink that goddamn island into the sea, nothing good ever came of it.

I felt less guilty playing through this game than other idle games, mostly because of the solid ending to work towards. Gnorp doesn't manage to fix the issues with the genre, the game still feels like empty calories. It also felt very linear towards the end, the game could have used a few more upgrade options and it's easy for a new player to get stuck on a run by improperly balancing DPS/collecting. The lack of depth is forgivable with the game's "reasonable" runtime. The humor sucks, but not in an obnoxious way.

I'll probably forget I played this in a year, but it made a work shift go by pretty quickly, that's worth a 3/5.

My girlfriend and I have been playing this game together as our next main RPG for awhile, but we took a bit of a break before the of disc 1. We're on the couch, she's doing her own thing and I stared through Skies of Arcadia. Despite kinda just looking out of the corner of her eye, she was more compelled by what was happening in this gamecube game she never heard of prior to this night, than the game that both of us had wanted to get around to for years, but just didn't have the time.

It's not like I don't have a strong taste for boring ass JRPGs. We just got done with Grandia 3. Every time I give this game a sincere shot, it comes off as less essential than almost any alternative on the console outside of like, the well known dreck. There are elements of the game that totally work, I like the soundtrack and the graphics are technically impressive.

The vibe's just not there. I don't give a fuck about this Sol Badguy knockoff, I have played +R against too many ratchet sidewinder monkeys for that archetype to carry me through four CDs. Why are the fights so fucking slow. The transformation gimmick isn't interesting from a mechanics standpoint and they take a billion years, to the extent that the developers put in a "get the fuck on with it" button in the options. The relationship with the main love interest is unfathomable boring, has man ever been in love? Why did you make the main character's best friend a lamer Rudolph Stiener?

There are attempts at worldbuilding and like, character development you would see in a really good RPG. Not the biggest fan of the Tales of series, but I think skits are really cool. The Legend of Dragoon has these developmental scenes and the writing is so fucking boring I do not care. Outside of "this is a genre on a console that's library has a bunch of fantastic JRPGs", and "I'm Blue" being the background music in a castle, I can't think of any reason I'd suggest this game to someone or a reason for it to cross my mind of a regular basis. There was effort and talent, and it isn't horribly inept, but The Legend of Dragoon just doesn't work.