I now get the people that told me that Halo was boring because it took an eternity to kill anything. Some enemies take like TEN strikes to kill in the early game, and your troops move like TWO tiles per turn, so every combat takes FOREVER.

Also, this games has some of the worse communication I’ve seen in a game. Sometimes you hit an enemy and that enemy moves, sometimes you do extra damage when he’s against a wall, sometimes when he’s trapped between several characters from your team they also get like a shot at him, but the game doesn’t explain why this happen, or when. It looks like it has these cool intricate systems but it refuses to present them to the player. And no amount of interesting classes or fun team compositions or complex scenarios can save such a flawed experience.

The story is fine, I guess, I mean, they are trying at least.

It also looks ugly. I don’t get how this looks worse than both previous versions. The characters portraits are fire tho.

Very seldom do sequels manage to get the mistakes their predecessors made with such accuracy and move the needle just enough to improve in just the right areas without loosing the essence that make said predecessor a worthwhile experience despite its shortcomings. Zwei is that rare sequel. The controls are just tuned in enough to be actively fun, at all times, and not just the means to enjoy the vistas and sounds. The graphics are better and are now able to take advantage on the barren landscapes and otherworldly architecture they depict, making this destroyed universe that much more poignant and vivid. The writing, while still minimal and vague, adds just enough texture and gives the game a feeling of pace and weight, like at the end of the fifth level, when everything seemingly stops for a minute, letting you indulge in the caos you helped create. Everything has improved, and while these improvements may seem quantitative from an outsiders perspective, I assure you they are not.

Panzer Dragoon was an enjoyable oddity. Zwei is a game I feel comfortable calling a masterpiece.

Every Mario Kart is in essence a party game. Exciting and cute courses, funny karts, your favorite characters when you were a child and crazy items that reduce the ability gap. Some, like the latest entry in the saga, are also extremely competitive experiences full of tricks and shortcuts and very demanding turns and whatnot. Double Dash is in the other end of the spectrum, fully embracing the craziness inherent in its genre, sometimes it even seems every inch is covered with banana peels and fake items. It’s just fun. The double character gimmick is curiously not the defining aspect of this entry, but rather this overabundance of things happening at all times, and a heavier more deliberate driving experience that’s perhaps not as well tuned as the newer games, but that is also more inviting to players when you already own those. It’s just more different that I would have imagined. Anyway, fun game, but I would’ve liked more content.

You go to face the monster.

The monster is too fast and strong for you and defeats you effortlessly.

You fight it a few more times and you start learning its patterns, getting familiar with its moves, anticipating to its attacks.

Suddenly, almost by mistake, you kill it at the last second, the mission, what brought you to its lair, is accomplished.

But you come back.

Now you kill its brothers and sisters, each time faster than the last.

You become so accustomed to its kind that they are not even nuisances in your path, your weapon designed specifically to hurt them, your clothing made from their corpses.

You are no longer the prey. You are the hunter.

Incredibly stylish and cool hack and slash that exudes extravaganza in every component of its design. Pretty much every graphic designer likes this game, and that's for a reason, as everything looks and feels outlandish and over the top in the best possible way. I also really like the core game design of a typical Hideki Kamiya game where you have a short, conclusive and enjoyable main campaign where the extra juice is replaying the levels and doing it better, faster, taking more risks and knowing where to look for the extra levels. I even liked the gimmicky boss fights, as they're a spectacle, which is the objective, but the gimmicky levels are a chore at best and an absolute disgrace at worse. Sadly, the first playthrough is potentially the worst one, because that's when you're more likely to call bullshit on the timing of some enemies (a few are trial and error) and watch the nearly THREE HOURS of cinematics that depict an extremely convoluted and uninteresting plot, with mediocre action sequences that don't hold a candle to the bonkers fights you can actually do while playing the game.

Pretty much a perfect game, I’m extremely surprised this even runs on the NES. And not only that, like, this game is kinda gorgeous, and full of very charming sprite work. The type of thing people can come back to every once in a while and not only for nostalgia reasons, it is also cool to play this, and there is an amazing variety of abilities that constantly changes the way you play. The controls aren’t perfect but damn it they are not that far either.

People seem to love this music and I frankly didn’t see why. But the biggest negative is by far the final boss. You know the drill; much harder that the rest of the game and invincible for large periods. I would fight to death to whomever came up with this. Seriously.

Broken ass game from nearly 10 years ago with two awful main modes that require microtransactions to work and with another game mode that asks you to spend several hours (mygm) before letting you do the cool shit that you actually want to do and that is plagued with stupid fucking incessant micromanaging garbage like talking to your players to keep their morale up or whatever. Most of the money seems to go to the fucking mycareer cutscenes that most people either don’t care about or actively hates. Every little thing they tried to do to make the game cool and hip is boomer nonsense that messes with the actually cool things of a basketball games, it just gets in the way between the player and a decent sport simulation. The engine is slow as shit and now you can’t even TAKE FUCKING JUMPSHOTS because the margin of error is so slim that you have to actually like get the timing down to a frame BUT EVERY PLAYER IN THE GAME HAS A DIFFERENT ANIMATION AND A DIFFERENT TIMING SO IT IS SEEMINGLY ONLY OPTIMIZED TO BE FUN IN A COMPETITIVE MYPLAYER MODE BUT BREAKS THE REST OF THE FUCKING GAME AND YOU CANNOT CHANGE THIS WHY WOULD THEY DO THIS STUPID ASS SHIT I DON’T UNDERSTAND PLEASE SOMEBODY TELL ME!!!