Still trying to get my thoughts together on this one, so I think I'll try and keep it simple and do some bullet pointing here.

- It's Danganronpa 4. Which I mean, everyone expected, but I was still pretty shocked at just how Danganronpa 4 it was. "But can you spell knife" and "next you get to make a comic book" are in full effect, for better and for worse.
- That said, I am glad Kodaka's willing to move away from the DR setting, even if "hope" and "despair" kind of get search-and-replaced with "truth" and "justice".
- I think the mysteries in this are pretty weak. Chapter 4 (case 5) is fun but the rest aren't much to write home about.
- The bit in chapter 1/case 2 where you had to walk through a room and recreate how the culprit created a locked room was really good, and got my hopes up for more stuff like that later on that would really challenge the player's use of visual space... but alas.
- I think the final case twist was a lot of fun, with one detail that had me clapping and cheering... but man, Kodaka still doesn't know how to make an interesting "mystery-solving" game out of his final chapter twists yet. I was hoping for something more like V3 where you'd be solving a murder and the big mystery simultaneously, but instead it was more like 2's "get a bunch of clues that lay out the plot for you, then repeat the plot 3 times in the gameplay portion."
- Honestly Kodaka just take off the power limiters and write a fully fantastical mystery game already. Don't save the big setting shakeups for the final chapter, use them in the murder plots.
- Characters were fine? I feel like the game expected me to be more invested in the agency detectives than I was. Maybe that's on me for not reading the Gumshoe Gab segments.
- I try not to be too much of a graphics/performance guy but wow this should not have been a Switch exclusive. Even putting aside the vaseline filter in handheld mode, the load times are atrocious.
- The most Danganronpa-ass moment of all time occurs in this game where, following a character's emotional end, you then must play a minigame to spell "email" and are rewarded with an ass shot

Josef Fares is a man filled with an unbridled passion for co-op games, and I truly appreciate his presence in the triple-a space. A Way Out may have felt a little hamstrung by its Telltale-y filmic “your choices matter!!” structure - it ends up working out pretty well in that game, but all throughout were glimpses into small, fun 2-player mechanical concepts in the interactive moments in-between the cutscenes.
His excitement to explore the possibilities of co-op is on full display in It Takes Two’s rambling, playful adventure, repeatedly plunging the two players into unique scenarios with asymmetrical toolsets.

The game features constant genre and mechanic switching. Levels boasting third-person shooting, top-down diablo-esque combat, flying, sailing, karting, and all kinds of bizarre puzzles in-between; reinforced by how they simply never feel under-developed and are tossed away the second they wear out their welcome. Many of this can be chalked up to EA funding, I suppose; many of the ideas this game conjures and then swiftly casts aside would essentially make up the sole backbone of a smaller-scale indie title. It’s consistently inconsistent. A driving force in our playthrough was an element of excitement to simply see what the game has in store for us next.

Very charming how the game is a hulking toybox, absolutely littered with interactive elements and versus minigames. It truly has everything, from a fully-fledged chess board, to musical chairs.

I say that because the narrative certainly wasn’t a driving factor for me, personally!! Cody and May’s bougie divorce story feels the need to throw a child in the mix for any sense of jeopardy before wrapping up with a neat, tidy and highly derivative bow. I simply sleep. The writing is, on the whole, very unremarkable - unfunny, a frankly unbelievably high “wooaaaah” count.

Very very gorgeous 2 look @ though. Whenever they’re not in photorealistic mode with Cody’s Seth McFarlane looking ass, it’s always a stunningly realised Honey I Shrunk The Kids environment. A significant portion of my playtime was spent boring the pants off my co-op partner as I stared doe-eyed at everything. From the sweeping picturesque vistas to the minute graphical details like specular maps and shaders to the unique illustrations adorning every corner. So sikk!!!! The character mo-cap feels like a blunder imo. It looks fine on the human characters where the discerning gamer eye almost expects it to look like shit, but the problem is expounded with the more cartoonishly proportioned characters. Never is it worse than with Fares’ own Dr Hakeem character, a fiendishly fucked talking book that looks and acts like a Facerig preset. Cody and May just seem like theme park mascot costumes with faces that are barely permitted to emote. Hand-touched stylisation with cartoony characters goes a long way - squash and stretch some more. The motion data should be a reference point, not the final product.

Anyway, idk. A very cool game. It’s nice to play a co-op that is oodles more creative than a looter shooter. I like its purchase model where only one person has to buy the title, allowing the other player to download the full client for free - spitting in the face of remote play. More of that, please.

Honestly, the older I get, the more I realize how much I hate time-wasting mechanics.
I really dislike stamina bars and time restrictions that limit what I can do in a "day", especially when that stamina bar dictates everything - from exploration to combat - and does not regenerate automatically for some fucking reason. I dislike trekking through overly-long levels and dungeons with a bunch of inconsequential loot as a reward for exploration. I dislike meandering story-telling where all of the characters are idiots and the pacing is constantly slowed down to explain things to you or being forced to "regroup" and stop your exploration.
I've just been having such a hard time getting into JRPGs lately, even though it used to be one of my favourite genres to play, and I dislike that I don't have the patience for this genre any more. As an adult and having to manage my time to make a place for things I enjoy like gaming and movies and reading, I really appreciate a game that doesn't waste my time more than anything else in the world.

EDIT: original review below. i played it on pc with lightning-fast loadtimes and no performance issues, and guess what? this game still kinda sucks. it made the game playable, but it didn't make it good. my kingdom for another good fuckin rune factory game.

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oof, this is a tough one to write. rune factory 4 is one of my favorite games, ever.

i knew rf5 wouldn't live up to rf4. the only way to do that would be to make a game that is rf4 with a different story/characters/setting/etc. a huge reason rf4 works so well is because everything is very quick. you can knock out an entire day's tasks in five minutes if you want to.

this game, on the other hand, suffers from long load times and really intense performance issues on the switch. i'd love a buttery-smooth pc port, and i don't normally mind jank, but it really hurts this game's pace given the repetitive nature of farming sims.

i will pick this back up, i love rune factory too much to ignore it forever, but the switch to 3d environments was something i was dreading after the ps3 game, and i was right to feel that way. the combat is sloppy and also hurt by the framerate issues. the environments are huuuuge for no reason whatsoever.

here are a couple nice things about it: i have decent first impressions of the characters. i think i will be able to grow to like them once i get to know them more. also, the intro cinematic is clearly going for a persona vibe and it totally succeeds, i watch it every single time i boot up the game. and lastly, the north american release marked the addition of actual same-sex marriage in this series. no more having to switch your character sprite and being stuck with the wrong pronouns or whatever. wooooo

that said, you still select your gender at the beginning by answering a question either masculinely or femininely, lol. baby steps i guess.

I put a lot of time into this game and did enjoy it for the most part but felt very empty after beating the main story line. I didn't really like the story all that much and i generally felt that the writing was uninteresting. Lots of Anime stereotypes, unfortunately not in a good way. The combat was fairly fun, the gameplay loop was engaging enough and i did like the little events and romance quests, but after getting married, i was hit with this sense of emptiness. Somehow i felt like all that's worth experiencing I've seen already and whatever comes next is not really interesting enough to make myself continue playing. So i quit and if I'm completely honest, i doubt I'll ever play this game again.
i don't regret the time i spent on this game and it's definitely fun enough for a while but it had so much more potential and it's unfortunate that it didn't end up being a deeper experience.

i wish this game had a little more time to bake. it's not bad by any means, and i had a lot of fun with it, but it's just a little disappointing that it feels so close to something, but never quite reaches it. i found that after i finished the main story, i didn't really open the game again afterwards, because i didn't really feel compelled to. i felt like i had seen pretty much everything the game had to offer me. (and i hadn't even been married, because i realized far too late the "only one romance chance per heart lv" thing and by that point i was at a high enough heart lv it was just tiring to try and get to the next just so i could reload and try again however many times.) it lacked what it was about rf4 that kept me coming back to it, over and over for years on different playthroughs, making it my most played 3ds game.

however. However. like i said, it's not bad by any means. i found myself extremely grateful for some improvements, and very disappointed by others. in other words, this feels like a title that has the seemingly natural clunky-ness of a series' first foray into 3d (despite not technically being so.) while i may be disappointed, i don't dislike it whatsoever, and i actually found myself very hopeful for what rf6 may look like - if it ever comes. i feel that this game provided much-needed experience, and that, hopefully, the lessons learned will transfer over into a much more refined game in the future.

why'd they lock important story/character development elements behind marriage :(