What a game. Its script gets a bit messy by the end with all the ideas being juggled, but it's an exceptionally strong game with some of the most potent and poignant moments in the history of Final Fantasy. Its pacing is fantastic, constantly switching up what you're doing and who you're doing it with. The music is among the best in the franchise. The battles, while certainly slow, are enjoyable and some of the throughline boss fights stride the perfect line between challenging strategy and simple wins. There's so much to love here.

The side content is generally pretty annoying though. The worst of the worst of PSX era nonsense, completely RNG based tedious minigames and slow combing of a large map for nigh-invisible pixels. Don't bother with all that and you'll have a much better time. As a start to finish journey with minimal mucking about, FFIX is hard to argue with. A stone cold RPG classic and one of the mandatory FF games for anyone trying to worm their way through the series.

I enjoy this game, I really do. It's a fun little spinoff to the main drama tracks and manga plot of Hypnosis Mic, with some really fun and interesting rhythm game mechanics (besides the scratch notes. I'm not talking about those.). I initially rated this 4 stars, but I've since dropped it to 3; now, it's a rhythm game, so perhaps I shouldn't be so critical, considering most of them are just cut and pastes of each other, but hear me out.

As of writing this review, I've sunk a solid 225 hours into this game, and had a lot of fun playing it, if the fact I'm DJ Rank 132 wasn't evident of my enjoyment. But honestly, when you reach a certain point, it just becomes really repetitive and boring. The only consistent thing to do is complete new bingos that come out, which generally give lacklustre rewards (100-200 crystals), and play to get event points to get the latest event card. That's honestly about all there is to do once you reach around DJ Rank 100. By that point, you've completed all the songs, maxed out your decks to get high scores to complete the individual song missions that get you crystals, and that's genuinely one of the only places you'll get a hefty amount of crystals, the only other places being stories (which are released periodically, and typically give you about 200-300 crystals), bingos (which I've mentioned previously) and the character ranking system, which is fun, but once you get everyone to around rank 20 like I have, it takes a long time to level them up again for such a low reward. Considering the gacha rates are about standard for a gacha/rhythm game, and one 10 draw costs you 2500 crystals, it becomes impossible to actually get the cards you want when they frequently come out, especially when you're a fan of the more popular characters, particularly Samatoki, who genuinely never gets a break from gacha and seems to have a new card at least once a month. This becomes an issue, especially if you're constantly having to spark for these cards, which takes 150 pulls.

I've had a lot of fun playing this, but unless the developers actually give more resources to grind crystals and start regularly adding more game features - as Hypnosis Mic as a whole doesn't regularly release songs, and the game is now nearly caught up to what's currently out - I don't think I can see it being something I will continue to play actively. In-game stories are also pretty much impossible to consume, as the western fandom for this series as a whole is miniscule, and even smaller for the fans that know Japanese who are willing to translate, which is a big selling point of the game in the first place, considering it has an exclusive story that doesn't follow the plot of the canon timeline.

I'm not even sure why I'm so passionate about the bog standard rhythm gacha game, considering these things are cash grabs half the time anyways, but HypMic as a whole is a series that holds a lot of meaning to me, so this I have a lot of feelings about this game, too.

Night creatures call and the dead start to walk in their masquerade

When people wonder if MJ really had all that hype back when he was alive, the answer should be a resounding yes. What other popular artist back in the day had a video game based off on their movie, and was also a lover of video games to the point of having a home arcade and composing soundtracks for other games due to seeing the early potential of the medium and wanting to tap on it? Cause it sure wasn't Madonna.

An absolute fever dream of a game based on an even wackier movie. If you feel like you don't understand anything plotwise, don't worry, the movie won't help you on that regard, it's just Michale saving children from the mafiosos. It works.

The atmosphere, music and graphics were on point. It's hard to believe Michael was disappointed with the output of the Genesis soundchip, because his renditions of Smooth Criminal, Bad, Billie Jean and Another Part Of Me are on point.

The gameplay could be a lot better, having to waste half your health on a screen clearer that doesn't really help you past level 3 makes it rarely worth it when added with the windup, and the span of enemies and cryptic hiding of kids can be really annoying, but hey. Seeing Michael Jackson turn into a decepticon when catching a shooting star makes it all worth it.

Celebrity tie ins and games from this generation past tend not to age that well together, but this one is better than it has any right to be

Legends: Arceus is incredibly fortunate that it's a Pokémon game, as there's a lot here that would be nearly unforgivable in any other context.

The story has some nice moments, and a handful of enjoyable characters, but is achingly plodding, tedious in its repetitions, and ultimately overstays its welcome. The core gameplay loop often feels like it amounts to little more than making numbers go up and ticking boxes. The boss fights were actually pretty enjoyable to me just because they broke up the core gameplay loop, but they do amount to an E-Grade Souls rip-off with some pretty bad game-feel. In general I think game-feel is something Legends: Arceus really struggles with, especially when this aspect collides headlong into some of the ways where the game feels unfinished (attempting to traverse hills and edges of terrain makes this really obvious).

The game also feels like it is suffering a bit of an identity crisis at times; a common occurrence for the first half of the runtime is that you'll end up in a battle with some story character, you'll have six monsters to their one or two meaning you can never really lose no matter what happens, and then as soon as you win your party is healed for you. It's like they didn't want the trainer battles to define the game, but were too scared to move away from them to a more dramatic extent in case the lack of them might disappoint long-time fans.

Easily the most damning problem though, and the one I really can't shake, is the world design. These environments are just so lifeless, so lacking in intrigue. Big, bland, bumpy, and ultimately distractingly ugly, expanses that exist solely to plonk down critters upon. If you removed the Pokémon themselves from the equation it's hard to imagine people actually wanting to exist in these spaces, or having any real desire to explore them.

Legends Arceus has a lot wrong with it, and yet despite this it is still a Pokémon game and this does some serious heavy lifting in its favour. Despite all my many complaints, sometimes you just see the most perfect, adorable little critter wandering around in the wild, you crouch down in the grass to try and sneak up on it, and in that moment it's hard to harbour any ill-will against what's going on here. Pokémon has always been a franchise that carries with it an incredible amount of charm and the best moments in Legends Arceus are the ones where that charm shines through, and for all the game's faults I was left smiling more than this review might suggest just because it's hard to feel too bad when you get to spend your time vibing around all these lovely monster-friends.

A weird, weird game. I have always called it the Final Fantasy VIII of Ace Attorney. It's ambitious yet profoundly strange and tends to miss the mark a bit in regards to what it originally set out to do. Some of this is a result of Capcom forcing Takumi to put Phoenix in the game, some of it is not. It's a game that should have started its own arc but instead became a sequel in a long-running narrative. I think it's a bit overhated and I did enjoy it (aside from 4-3), especially the last case, but I do understand the criticism.

I think there's a lot of broad problems with certain parts of the ending and how the writers don't necessarily know how to write a story that doesn't end with all the characters getting paired up. There's a few points I would've liked the game to commit to or elaborate on, and some other weird writing choices here and there. Might put those problems in a rot13 comment later.

But for the most part, the experience of 13 Sentinels is really something special. A complicated web of a story that's arranged to be completely baffling for much of its runtime. It plays a number of tricks to deceive and confuse you. Much of the game's run focus on the player just utterly confused, trying to decipher all the bits and pieces and try to make it all even vaguely coherent in their heads. The real magic trick is that, by the end, the entire game makes perfect sense. All the game's spinning plates land perfectly on this immaculate dinner table its created for you to feast on. This game has some of my favorite characters of all time in it and even the characters I didn't connect with are endearing in some way. Its a truly incredible work of fiction and its a miracle it all flows as well as it does.

Even beyond all that character work, the gameplay was a delight. The real time strategy sections are crunchy little delights that reward a player's experimentation and care. I specifically want to praise the distinctions between the PS4 version and the Switch version I played. The Switch version gives each character unique attacks that weren't present in the original game. It helps differentiate your playable characters and helps encourage switching them out to see what everyone has to offer.

All these little factors combine together in one of the most overwhelmingly satisfying games I've ever played. There's a part of me that was dreading continuing because I didn't want the experience to end. I wanted to spend more time with these characters. Experience their everyday lives and conversations. After 36 hours, I wanted more. And that speaks to the incredible depth Vanillaware managed to put into this experience. One of my new favorite games of all time. What a phenomenal journey.