Portal 2 is a game that means so much to me. It's a game I genuinely believe is as close to perfect as one can possibly be. From its writing, to its gameplay, to its visuals, everything about it is just fantastic.

I've never been able to recover from the time a friend played it for the first time and he said "Oh so you probably based your entire personality around this game in high school" because he was 100% spot on. I even had a Portal 2 backpack in high school. All four years.

Playing it again with the developer commentary is also a great time, highly recommend it.

I don't think I know enough words to fully express how much Portal and its sequel mean to me. And buddy, I know a lot of words.

If you're like me and have played through this game over a dozen times throughout your life, and also have an interest in game design, definitely give it a go with the developer commentary enabled. It's so fascinating, hearing firsthand how they iterated throughout development to create, in my opinion, one of the most perfectly designed games ever made. You won't regret it.

A dramatic improvement over the main game that fails to do as much damage control as Torna did for Xenoblade 2. The logical connections to the franchise universe are made more clear, but I didn't want any of that in the first place! It's fucking weird but mostly very funny to make Shulk and Rex dad guys. Junya Enoki is great as Matthew here but he's also literally just playing Itadori Yuji. All that's really achieved here is getting to the caliber of shitty Chrono Cross, down to having very similar farewell scenes at the end. The modifications to the exploration and combat is a cool mix of old and new, but it fails to enrich or remedy the ludicrous gaps in the main game. Future Redeemed mostly highlights what really should have been in the game in the first place, in the sense of more obvious callbacks via environmental objects and narrative details, neither of which would be an issue of further dev time. The length of this expansion is its saving grace and, along with Torna, is a constant testament to the fact that Monolith should be making shorter games.

CWs for Xenoblade Chronicles 3: body horror, mind control

A very beautiful and patient young people's road trip RPG via the absolute sobriety of FFX which is unfortunately and devastatingly ruined by a botched retreading of Xenogear's big twist late in the game along with a generally shallow back third. The ways in which this game decides to be a Franchise Sequel at the last moment completely guts a placelessness and emptiness of the world that really flavored the meandering coming of age journey that most of the game is. This shift makes the unremarkable geology of the world instead feel like poor design rather than a meaningful choice, where clear environmental callbacks are discarded for indiscernible house-style melange.

The character work done in the first two thirds of this game is easily the best Monolith has ever done and then it gets spat on and torn apart for every hour the game continues after about chapter six. Literally everyone's character arcs have been resolved in totality, yet everyone is dragged around as they must bumble through resolving the equally incomprehensible nightmare of Xenoblade 2's ending. Entire factual details are left out or hidden at the margins while the combat goes completely unchanged for thirty grueling and needless hours. I cannot reiterate how much I loved this game and how severely I soured on it as it developed. Begging the powers that be to free Monolith from making Time-on-machine farms and have them make weirdo shit again.

Impressively sleek game design for a 3D platformer of this era -- chock full of gimmicks, but able to back them up at every turn.

Seriously, if you told me that you have to twirl the right analog stick to hover jump in this game, I'd have laughed at you... but it works. It works well. Everything in Ape Escape feels deeply thought-about, playtested, crafted just-so. (In another world where anyone cared about cutsey 3D platformers, I would love to see an Insomniac take on this).

The difficulty curve is almost the most impressive thing. It was essentially a rule back in the Playstation era that your game had to have some absolutely ridiculous, frustrating spike near the end, something that you'd have to look up a GameFAQ guide for, or get a friend with mysteriously-way-better skills to help you complete; but Ape Escape walks the tightrope between that and so-easy-it's-sleepy. Every ape capture feels just hard enough to provide a little jolt of satisfaction, but not so hard you want to throw your controller, and the later levels are masterful in their scattering of brisk, bite-sized challenges.

The controls here are from an alternate dimension: R1/R2 to jump? Right analog stick for all actions, and face buttons only to... select different gadgets? And it feels... fucking great?

Nothing could be more indicative of how in-a-rut we are with current AAA games, how beholden we are to a specific set of withered conventions and muddy aesthetics, than playing this game for a while. It's a cliche, but it's true (and it's all the more impressive considering I never played this when I was younger!): it made me feel like a kid again.