Persona 3 Reload is a well-intentioned retread of Persona 3 which "modernizes" it by sanding off the vast majority of the PS2 original's charm. What we’re left with is a strange, paper-thin idol of worship in a new coat of paint, an oddity which at once reveres itself wholly and yet scorns its prior anachronisms, a game with no concrete artistic identity except to serve as a Fast Pass for people who like Persona 5 but can’t play 3 because it’s “too old”.

I feel like I should preface this review by saying that I don’t really care for modern Persona games anymore. I’ve never really been super crazy about Persona 4 or 5, even when I was younger, but I LOVED Persona 3. It was angsty and depressing and felt “teenage” in the best sense of the word. It was so self-assured in its presentation and scale. Persona 3’s foundation was so strong that they were able to revive the entire Megami Tensei franchise and coast two mediocre sequels off it. Part of what made Persona 3 so special was its cast. They actually allow the characters to interact with each other outside of the player’s perspective. Obviously, right? We have an ensemble cast of ten main characters, and their dynamic as a group is the driving force of the narrative. So, it would make sense then that the player is privy to their private interactions, so that we can see their growth over the course of the narrative. Modern Persona games seem to have all but abandoned this notion. Everything in the narrative occurs through the perspective of the main character, meaning we rarely see two characters interact with each other outside of the main character’s purview. This devolution in narrative design makes very little sense to me. It’s such a minor shift in direction, but the impact of never seeing two characters who aren’t controlled by the player interact over the course of an eighty hour narrative is palpable. This begs the question: why does Reload exist? Since Persona 3’s release in 2006, the Persona series has remained more or less the same. Is Persona 3’s perceived “oldness” so crippling? What new ideas are being brought to the table in Reload that meaningfully iterate on the original version?

Persona 3’s main strength was that it had a real sense of friction to it. What I mean by this is that Persona 4 (especially Golden) and 5 are games intended to facilitate the player’s growth at all costs. It’s nearly impossible to waste time - you are disproportionately rewarded for every possible move you make in the life-sim, so that when it comes time to participate in combat, the game becomes a complete cakewalk. Persona 3’s most genius artistic move was forbidding the player control over their three fellow party members in combat. This is clearly an evolution of the battle systems introduced in the Persona 2 duology - those games heavily incentivized the usage of autobattle features to breeze through battles. In those games, each step you take restores SP, so you can blast away at enemies with your strongest attacks and not waste time menuing unless you encounter a particularly challenging fight. This system was pretty flawed, so Persona 3 innovated nicely on this by forcing the player to engage with autobattle at all times - it’s easy and intuitive to get your party to make the moves you want them to by using Tactics commands, and combines with the isolation the members of SEES feel between each other in the main story. At the end of the day, the protagonist only has the power to suggest what his friends do: he does not have the ability to force them to do anything. Persona 3 is the only game in the modern Persona trilogy where the main characters feel like real people. I’m not trying to argue that all of P3's characters are especially well written - honestly, I could take or leave everyone except Yukari, Junpei and Aigis - but there was a definite desire here to make the characters more than dolls for the player to make dance for their own enjoyment.

On the state of the Persona series' combat design, we should take a look at Persona 5 Royal. If you've played the game, or even just seen people discuss the game online, you'll likely encounter the much-bemoaned Shadow Okumura fight. It's condemned by many players for supposedly being overly difficult, and it’s easy to see how this conclusion could be drawn. It serves as the only real test of the player’s understanding of the one-more mechanic, a mechanic which can be easily ignored or half-understood due to the lack of need to utilize it to succeed in fights. Thus, when we reach this skill check, those who have not taken the time to understand the one-more system will be stopped in their tracks. This has lead to the Shadow Okumura fight being labeled “poorly designed”, but it seems much more logical to me to instead view the fight as being endemic of the rest of the game’s combat design, that it fails to teach the player the game’s basic systems to the point where any slight hurdle becomes a brick wall.

Reload wholeheartedly adopts the “Persona 5” style of combat. There were no moments in my playthrough where I felt meaningfully challenged, even while playing on the highest difficulty. I’m not asking for an insane amount of difficulty, but modern Persona’s interest in turn-based battles is clearly at an all-time low, despite the bedrock level of the battle system being quite fun to experiment with. Playing an RPG as long as Persona 3 Reload with an immense amount of battles which can be effectively dissociated through leads to a pretty dry experience.

Persona 3 Reload is definitely better than Persona 5 and Persona 4 Golden because it’s still built on the foundation of Persona 3, something which from a storytelling perspective Reload does little to change, aside from the removals of some of the more overtly misogynistic and homophobic tendencies of the original, which is always welcome. You have a great English voice cast, and not the at times unlistenably bad original cast. Although, the game does become awkward to listen to again when you have to listen to Koromaru be literally some guy woofing and panting into a microphone - I’ll gladly take the stock dog sound effects present in the original. Still, I would say that those are the only two objectively superior changes made in the remake. Graphically, we’re treated to dreadfully boring ATLUS classic cutscenes, with character models sort of just standing around and occasionally producing canned emotional reactions. This is certainly faithful to the original, though perhaps not on purpose. I’m more than happy to forgive a PS2 game of Persona 3’s scale for boring cutscene direction than I am to look past how completely drab Persona 3 Reload looks (that is, when you’re not engaging with some kind of menu outside of battle). The decision not to retool all the original’s beautiful 2D animated cutscenes was a huge misstep in my opinion, and some of the remade cutscenes have weird shifts in tone that fail to stand up to the original’s cutscenes artistically. Compare the original and remade cutscene on the boat to Yakushima - is the original’s not ten times more intriguing?

I’d also like to talk about the changes made to Tartarus, which is probably the most hated aspect of the original game. On one hand, I do sort of enjoy the utilitarian nature of Tartarus, in that it is a place strictly designed to battle enemies and engage with the fun combat mechanics, but on the other hand I totally understand why people don’t like it. Prior to the game’s release, I was hoping ATLUS would focus most of their efforts on revamping Tartarus entirely: perhaps changing it from a procedurally generated tower to an all-encompassing dungeon, with thought-out level design and puzzles. Then, you wouldn’t have to make 250 damn floors to communicate the scale of the structure: it would be seamlessly integrated into the game’s narrative. We would feel its scale not through the mind-numbing trek through hundreds of effectively identical floors, but with our time spent engaging with the structure through play. Now, I obviously wasn’t expecting them to do this, as it would be a pretty major change to the original, and surely be very costly to develop, but I was hoping for something which at least meaningfully updates the way Tartarus operates throughout the game. Suffice it to say, that’s not what we got. Tartarus looks nicer than ever, but he’s still the same old guy he was back in 2006, still procedurally generated, still boring, despite his hot new look.

Persona 3 Reload's existence makes perfect sense as a business endeavor. What we have here is Persona 3’s circle peg being shoved into Persona 5’s square hole, creating a game which is at once creatively vapid and yet all but guaranteed to print money. Fuck the old, terrible Persona 3 with its meaningful storytelling and unique mechanics: Give me the Homer Simpson Donut Hell Persona Slop Conveyor Belt. Give me a bunch of skill cards so I don’t have to learn how to use the Velvet Room, give me giant super-kill-moves in combat so I can breeze through any battle, and top that all off with a hilariously overpriced expansion pack, for good measure. At least they didn’t shoehorn an ATLUS Girl into this one. Persona 3 Reload is a game that does not need to exist, though at the same time I recognize that it’s certainly the best way to experience Persona 3 on modern-day hardware without emulation. It’s better than Persona 3 Portable, that’s for sure. Maybe ATLUS decided to port Portable instead of the objectively superior FES version because then Reload wouldn’t sell any copies. Maybe ATLUS makes all their business decisions by throwing a dart at a spinning wheel. I don’t know. They certainly lucked out with Reload’s sales, if that’s the case. From my perspective, it’s hard for me to see this game as anything but a half-hearted cash-grab.

Dragon Quest IV’s experimentation with structure makes it a super impressive achievement among NES RPGs - the chapter based plot progression system is handled quite well (with one exception), and is used to craft a narrative which almost brute-forces player immersion and investment. IV’s heavy focus on player investment meshes quite well with the DS, and IV’s remake is graphically stunning (though sometimes at the cost of performance) and seemingly quite faithful to the NES original. Party Chat’s exclusion from the North American release is somewhat frustrating, but is easily remedied by playing a rom with it patched in, or playing the mobile version.

The DS version starts with a prologue, teasing the inevitable player control of the main hero slightly, though honestly I find the NES original’s immediate switch from “name your guy” to “you are Ragnar McRyan” much bolder. That’s not to say the prologue is bad, per se. It’s not about characterizing the main hero: it’s about characterizing the world surrounding the hero, a trend which is mirrored by the game’s structure. We’re introduced to some of the townsfolk, and given just enough information to make them somewhat memorable while also not giving away enough to leave the player with a full understanding of the village. As we play the preceding chapters, thoughts of the village and the fated hero hold a fraction of real-estate inside our brains, as though we can imagine that daily life in the village continues even throughout our journeys with other casts of characters. This adds a lot of weight to the village’s eventual destruction at the start of Chapter 5

Ragnar McRyan is the player character for the first chapter, and aside from having like the sickest name ever, lulls the player into a sense of normalcy, with his JRPG McJRPG guy-like knightly appearance and plot function. We gain a sense for the flow of combat while controlling a single, powerful fighter, and a sense for that classic Dragon Quest charm through Healie, a friendly monster who joins our party. Ragnar does some heroic shit, we learn a bit about the world, and the chapter ends with Ragnar setting out on a quest to locate the very same hero we briefly controlled during the prologue. In a perhaps more typical RPG of time, we might have continued to control Ragnar on this quest, meeting more characters until eventually reaching the main character. Instead, Dragon Quest IV is content to pull back the focus onto an entirely separate group of people.

Before I continue, I should note that during each character’s individual chapter, they are relegated to the role of silent protagonist, something which I was not immediately fond of, but which creates the “brute-force immersion” I spoke of earlier: the player assumes the role of Ragnar, Alena, Torneko and Meena before assuming the role of the player character in any meaningful capacity. Essentially, you ARE these characters, before you are yourself. We control these characters, and through the player’s input, we perhaps unknowingly ascribe to them personality traits based on the limited text of the game. We have no choice but to identify with them - our own control pushes them forward on their quest. This creates a super interesting effect upon the characters leaving the control of the player and regaining their voice: the actual written text of the game and the metatext of the player’s perception of the character combine to create characters which are perhaps not complex from a strictly craft perspective (in that they don’t express complex emotion and have limited agency), but are easily malleable and accommodating of player perception. From the perspective of an NES game, it shows great understanding of the precise limits of the system’s ability to tell stories, and a very smart workaround which succeeds in creating a story which is at the very least somewhat emotionally affecting.

Alena’s chapter is next, and it’s definitely my second favorite. Alena, Kiryl and Borya combine to create a very standard RPG party, being a warrior, healer and mage. In adding magic to the player’s arsenal, the battle system becomes just complex enough to not be completely mindless, while retaining a sense of comforting simplicity. This focus on experimentation with battles is mirrored in the chapter’s plot structure, with Alena traveling out of the confines of her castle and seeking strength through combat. I feel like the content of the chapter speaks for itself for the most part: having a relatively self-contained mini RPG adventure within an already massive game is super impressive and fun to play. Party Chat really shines in this chapter, as all three of these characters have a lot of personality, especially Borya who is without a doubt my favorite character in the game.

Torneko’s chapter is perhaps the most acclaimed chapter of this game, and for good reason. Torneko Taloon is without a doubt the best character in Dragon Quest IV. He’s a big, silly family man who wants to be the richest arms merchant in the world. Unfortunately for him, at the beginning of his story, he’s working for some rando arms dealer in his hometown, getting paid a somewhat low yet consistent wage and eating homemade lunches lovingly made by his HOT wife (there are like three people in his hometown that remark on his hot wife). You play this merchant minigame where you sell people weapons as they come into the shop which is pretty mindless and boring, though this is kind of the point. We’re able to identify strongly with Torneko, as even if we don’t care about his motivation to become the world’s most successful arms dealer immediately, after four or five shifts at the weapons shop we’ll be right there with him, wanting to escape the monotony of his daily life. As soon as he can afford the necessary equipment, Torneko ventures off into the world searching for better opportunities. His journey breaks with tradition in JRPGs in that it’s largely based around making money as opposed to defeating enemies. Torneko isn’t the most powerful combatant, so battle is ultimately a means to making money as opposed to growing stronger in order to defeat some sort of shadowy mortal enemy, which is a fun change of pace considering the two previous chapters were largely based around fighting. Torneko’s chapter shines because it most effectively combines the will of the textual character with the player beyond the text.

As a side note, Torneko’s goofiness really adds a lot to his character. Once you recruit him to your party with the main hero, he tends to do whatever he feels like during combat instead of his orders, be it whistling a tune or just generally being kind of a buffoon. This makes me wonder if the intended message here is that he was doing something similar in his combat encounters while under player control, under the guise of the vague prompt “fight” and acting on his own intuition as opposed to someone else’s orders.

Meena and Maya’s chapter is the final expository chapter before we take control of the main character, and it’s probably the weakest one in the game, so I don’t have as much to say about it. I really enjoyed Maya’s character, largely because she had a voice, and made some funny observations about her surroundings. I also found her gambling addiction to be a pretty hilarious addition. Meena (and Maya, to an extent) unfortunately lack a connective thread with the player, as her goals are closely tied to her character outside of her role as player surrogate. She wants to take revenge on the man who killed her father, but the text required to create meaningful narrative tension and character motivation feels very lacking, possibly due to hardware limitations. It’s not bad, necessarily, it just fails to reach the heights of some of the prior chapters. It doesn’t help that it comes immediately after the best chapter in the game, either.

I won’t cover the entirety of Chapter Five, because it’s literally the entire second half of the game, but I think the opening scene of the hero’s village being razed and slaughtered was really effective in returning the player’s attention back onto their player character. It’s a genuinely heart-wrenching moment where the entirety of the hero’s world collapses: everyone he has ever known is killed by Psaro, everything he’s ever seen has been destroyed. This singular scene creates all the motivation the player might need to see the game through to its completion. More than that, we want to see the hero be supported by the many characters we once controlled over the course of the first four chapters. In many ways, it functions as a metaphor for adulthood - the player character has just turned eighteen, after all - through the destruction of the player character’s old self and life, a new foundation can be built.

Dragon Quest IV is a truly amazing game, and all the more impressive given its basis as an NES game. The DS remake is absolutely worth your time if you have patience for Dragon Quest’s specific brand of exploration and combat. An all-time classic, for sure.

Final Fantasy VI's greatness is so painfully obvious that it honestly doesn't really bear repeating, but I'm going to repeat some of it anyways. It's visually stunning, especially for the time, harnessing the unique capabilities and limitations of the SNES's hardware to its limit and conjuring up some truly beautiful images. Nobuo Uematsu's soundtrack is excellent, as usual, though it feels like VI is where he really started to hit his stride, dropping classic after classic on this soundtrack alone. I’ve only played Final Fantasy “III” with the Woolsey translation, but the writing is clearly a step up from IV (or “II”, if you like). We start to get real characters in VI, and not vague amalgamations of pre-existing tropes. That’s not to say you’re getting the same level of complexity as PS1-era Final Fantasy, but Terra and Celes specifically are some of my favorite characters in the entire franchise. VI has the most weird little freaks you can add to your party, with Mog, Umaro, Gogo and Gau, which I always appreciate.

I’d also be remiss not to mention VI’s plot, because it’s a clear step forward from IV, at least in terms of scope. I hope it doesn’t come across as ragging on IV, because I like that game, but VI to me marks the beginnings of a shift in the RPG landscape from “role-playing” games to “cinematic” games. Most RPGs of the NES and even early SNES era are somewhat flat, largely due to hardware limitations being unable to accurately depict human thoughts and emotions (this may not be true for the Japanese language original texts). Not only that, but the scale of plot events were held back by what was and was not possible to depict on the hardware. This creates games which are generally more meditative, and ones which rely heavily on player interpretation and imagination to fill in the blanks intentionally left vague by the developers. Player interpretation is still key in VI in order to gauge aspects of some of the minor characters, but for most of our main characters, we receive lots of exposition and expression: I don’t need to create a version of Terra in my head to enjoy her character, as I am given a character which is for the most part fleshed out. Final Fantasy games would continue to experiment with player interactivity in their narratives in VII and ESPECIALLY in VIII while also presenting the player with increasingly complex characters and settings - though VI is the genesis point where we begin to see complexity sprinkled into the narrative.

VI’s combat systems are also excellent, though I’m not sure how much they owe to V, a game I haven’t played yet. Players are given a lot of options to customize their party members using Magicite, but this customization doesn’t end up encroaching on the individual identities of the characters: most primary party members have unique combat mechanics (Sabin’s Blitz, Edgar’s Tools, Cyan’s Sword Arts, etc.), and these unique mechanics go a long way in retaining the identities of their respective party members. Compare this to VII's Materia system, which is robust and interesting in its own way, though at the cost of every combatant feeling somewhat homogenized.

I played VII many years prior to VI, and with liberal use of the Switch version’s cheats, so VI feels like my first “real” Final Fantasy experience. For my money, if you want to “get into” Final Fantasy, you should start with VI. It’s the beating heart of the franchise, laying the groundwork for future entries in the series and meaningfully iterating on its predecessors. While you don’t see any of the narrative or mechanical peaks of the series, the bedrock level of quality is astoundingly high. An absolute masterpiece of a game, to be sure.

Metal Gear Solid is a remarkably polished game for 1998. It's visually very striking: the UI design is slick, and all the menus feel really good to navigate, from the satisfying clicks of the equipment menus and the beeps and boops of the Codec. Shadow Moses Island's environments are beautifully portrayed, and for the most part feel very visually distinct from each other while still communicating the same cold, inhuman and metallic vibe. Yoji Shinkawa's character artwork is AMAZING, and it made the many long Codec calls so much better. I thought the English voice cast did an excellent job, especially for the time, though holy shit Liquid Snake’s accent is horrible (in the best way possible).

My favorite part of the game was definitely the meta-gamey real world “put your controller to your arm so Naomi can give you a massage” type shit. Of course, the most famous instance of fourth-wall breaking comes with Psycho Mantis, and he’s amazing (though MGS was the first game I played on my PS1 memory card so he didn’t have anything cool to say about my nonexistent Konami library), but I was surprised by other cool stuff like having to mash circle during the torture scene to stay alive - my last save before the torture room was at least an hour before, so it really felt like I was mashing to save something important: not just Meryl’s life, but my game data. Revolver Ocelot even reminded me that I hadn't saved in a while, and it literally made my heart sink. It was really tense, and unlike anything I’ve ever played before.

I wasn’t really blown away by MGS’s writing, and found all the stuff about genes and genomes or whatever entertaining, if not also really stupid. I think that’s all kind of the point, though: from what I gather, at least, Metal Gear Solid isn’t really meant to be a grand, emotionally resonant narrative. It does exactly what it needs to do to progress the story along and keep the player hooked. While I wasn’t exactly emotionally invested in Snake’s mission, I needed to know what insane plot beat was next. As for characters, I feel like Snake and Otacon are the clear standouts. Kojima's infamous inability to write women definitely manifested in Meryl, a character with a pretty lackluster and boring arc, as well as an extremely forced romantic relationship with Snake, but at the end of the day it didn’t really hinder my enjoyment of the game too much. At the risk of giving Kojima too much credit, it seemed like it was all an intended part of the experience.

I generally liked the moment-to-moment gameplay. This was basically my first experience with a game where stealth is a primary mechanic, and for the most part I liked it, aside from bullshit like getting spotted by security cameras out of your vision and spotted by guards off-screen. Metal Gear Solid’s polish starts to dull once you actually have to fight things, though. I’ve not done much reading about general receptions to this game, but I’m very sure that thousands of other people have lambasted the game’s clunky shooting mechanics, so I won’t continue beating on the dead horse, but man some of the boss fights sucked ass, specifically the final boss and Vulcan Raven.

I’m really looking forward to playing MGS2. If they can polish the gunplay up a bit, I could see it being one of my favorite games ever.

Game kicks ass. I tried to get into the missions and actually play the game but I couldn't really get into them, especially not when driving around and fucking with cheat codes is so much more fun. I enjoyed what little I played of the story mode but I don't think I'll ever finish it, a bit too much tedium for my liking. There's a lot of really good voice acting - I had no idea Samuel L. Jackson was in this game, the opening cutscene kinda stunned me. Rockstar got a lot of (rightful) shit for saying they'd sell GTA 6 for $100, but if the gameplay completely consisted of stealing motorcycles and doing crazy ass stunts off cliffs I'd pay $100 for it.

Devil Survivor’s number one goal is to make the player feel like they’re playing something cool. It has this aesthetic I haven’t seen in many other games which I continually referred to as “trashy anime” while playing - it’s so over the top, so stupid, so edgy, that it actually tips the scale back to being kind of amazing. I love the main character’s stupid fucking cat headphones, I love Naoya’s weird-ass cloak. I sincerely regret not recruiting the playable Black Frost, and I love that there’s even an option to use a demon as a main party member. There's only so far this charm can go before it dissipates, though. I found the heavy sexualization of the women in the game who are overwhelmingly minors to be disgusting, though. Devil Survivor’s writing reeks of misogyny - the most present woman in the game, Yuzu (a character who I’m sure capital g Gamers were very Normal about in 2009) spends most of the game either whining about wanting to go home, or fawning over the protagonist. At first, I enjoyed Yuzu’s trepidation towards the whole act of demon summoning. I found it to be somewhat realistic to how someone might react in a similar situation in real life, but it became clear over the course of the narrative that Yuzu was not going to get any big character moments throughout the story to grow. Her ending is pretty insultingly bad, in my opinion. A complete waste of a potentially interesting character.

Generally, I found the writing in Devil Survivor to be kinda hit or miss. They do a good job framing the narrative with interesting plot devices like the Death Clocks and Laplace Mail, but the game’s pacing removes all the interesting tension that those devices could create. This game’s midsection, especially days three four and five, are dreadfully boring, with little of note happening aside from the boss fights. The player just kind of aimlessly wanders around Tokyo, talking to random NPCs to pass the time and lock in their alignment. Devil Survivor’s pace in general is just far too slow - I hate being that guy who needs a speed up button to play RPGs, but without a speed-up button I seriously don’t think I would’ve been able to finish this game. Though, when the writing hits, it hits. I love how they handled routes in this game - there are no routes that felt objectively bad (aside from Yuzu’s), and I appreciate that the game lets you select which route you want instead of just thrusting you into whichever one your alignment score matches up with. Unfortunately, this doesn’t salvage any of the game’s pacing problems, but at least after slogging through painfully slow and unfun battles you’re rewarded with something cool sometimes.

Before I get into the gameplay, I should note that I played through Devil Survivor using a strength build. According to the few fourteen-year-old GameFAQs threads I read about this game, this is the shittier build compared to magic. It definitely tainted some of my experience. I did the Naoya route as my first (and probably only) playthrough, and two out of three of my party members going into the endgame were using physical skills, those being Atsuro and Kaido. With my MC taking all the good physical skills and Naoya gorging himself on literally all of my magic based skills, I was left with Kaido taking all the non-preferred physical skills and poor Atsuro being forced to use support magic, something he’s not very good at. I ended up kind of loving this team aesthetically, but it was miserable to slog through the seventh day with just the main character, Naoya, and what essentially amounted to dead weight.

Most SMT games require little to no grinding thanks to demon fusion - all you really need are three demons that are around the player character’s level. Swapping out demons for boss fights is easy because you only need to create three demons at most. This entire approach is lost in Devil Survivor because the player is deploying eight individual demons in every battle. Deceptively, this causes the game’s most frustrating problem: in order to create stronger demons, you’ll usually be fusing demons from your rotation of eight. When you create a new demon, odds are you will then need to fill a vacant slot on a character’s team. Mind you, there’s no Compendium in the DS version of this game, which drastically changes the way the player interacts with fusion. Any demon that you’ve leveled is essentially lost forever if you fuse it away. You can fuse the demon again, but you’ll have to re-level it to relearn all of its skills. So, you must use the Demon Auction system to bolster your roster for fusion. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if demons weren’t so expensive, but in the late game, demons become absurdly expensive and thus necessitate grinding Free Battles to be able to afford them. Not only that, but Free Battle grinding is further necessitated for cracking skills and leveling your team for the many absurd late-game spikes in difficulty.

Speaking of difficulty spikes, the spikes in Devil Survivor are pretty egregious. Having to run a boss rush of all the previous Bel demons into the final boss was stupid. It didn’t feel like my tactics were being challenged in any way, it was just abusing the game’s imbalance (Drain + Holy Dance) until I finally won. In general, I strongly disliked that Devil Survivor was an SPRG, but my only experience in the genre is from Fire Emblem so I don’t really feel qualified to critique Devil Survivor’s implementation of the genre. The SMT-styled battles were pretty good, but nothing special.

Devil Survivor is like mainline SMT’s less cool younger brother who can do Tech Deck tricks - it's neat, but ultimately nothing of real value.

Probably my favorite Animal Crossing game. In my first week of playing I was called basically every PG version of "freak" possible. The "mean" villagers give the game a super unique tone, and make the villagers more endearing to the player. They really do act like animals. They're often irrational, prone to quick shifts in temperament, blunt, sometimes annoying, mischievous, and a little stupid. I lost a game to Samson, a little rat guy in my village, and he took all of my money and gave me a pitfall seed for my troubles. Fucker. Villagers in Animal Crossing don't just exist to hang out, look cute, and occasionally give you items like in future titles, they're a key part of the play experience. They feel real, whereas in New Horizons they feel like vaguely personable humans wearing animal flesh.

The player has limited influence on their town, but honestly I feel like that enhances the experience for me: In New Horizons especially and New Leaf to an extent, the player is bombarded with quality of life tools which can be used to fully decorate and beautify their town. It gets to the point where I feel obligated to engage with these systems and create a spotless, boring town that is exactly to my liking. Animal Crossing doesn't even give you the chance to do this- aside from planting flowers and trees, there is little you can do to influence the layout of the town. This made the game far more relaxing for me, as I could play at my own pace and enjoy whatever the game decided to throw at me. I really like this game, and see myself continuing to play it for a long time.

(also the music and graphics are really good)

Inject the PS2 version's aesthetic into my fucking veins. Final Fantasy X's remaster is borderline insulting and an inferior way to experience this amazing game. Square really nailed the RPG mechanics in this one, with the battle system innovating nicely over the somewhat dated ATB system. Being able to seamlessly swap party members in and out of combat with no action penalty allowed me to make full use of my entire party, which is something I really appreciate. The Sphere Grid is pure brilliance as well: it is a system that is at once mechanically rich and simple to understand. It's a shame Square completely dropped these systems in future Final Fantasy titles, because I would do anything for another Final Fantasy that plays like X.

It's a testament to how insanely good this game is for me to be able overlook the objectively awful and downright painful cloister puzzles and still see this game as an absolute masterpiece.

Digital Devil Saga doesn't reach the mechanical or narrative heights of other Shin Megami Tensei games, but it's a super consistently enjoyable game. I adore the game's early 2000s techno aesthetic, which is bolstered by the game's excellent soundtrack which is some of Shoji Meguro's best work.

I'm not sure what it is, though, but I'm not really sold on playing a second game's worth of Digital Devil Saga. I feel like I've already gotten what I want out of the duology despite only playing the first entry. I liked the narrative and characters well enough, but they didn't really capture my interest beyond a simple "oh, this is cool". I'll get around to playing it one day, though.

Also, the English opening is dope as fuck.

I'm normally ambivalent towards single-player shooters, but I think that Half-Life's focus on strategy as opposed to the actual act of shooting captivated my interest. Resource management combined with intelligent enemy AI and smart level design coalesce to create a deeply tense atmosphere which is further strengthened by the game's immaculate presentation.

Though the dated graphics can at times impact the readability of certain environments, their contribution to the game's tone is palpable. Black Mesa's sterile gray halls, the surface's red desert, and the orange dimension of Xen combine to give the player a great sense of alienation and loneliness. The sheer size of the Black Mesa facility was conveyed very cohesively as well: despite each level being different in meaningful ways, I never felt like I was in a completely different location. I love how seamlessly the game's levels flow in that way, where you'll be chugging along and all of the sudden be thrust into a new level.

There's some really great sound design, too. I love how loud the game can be, with military soldiers barking nonsensical radio messages, aliens making weird noises, explosions, gunfire and occasional music all piling on top of each other in combat scenarios to create unbelievably tense encounters. This clashes with the utter silence of the game when the fighting is over, creating an eerie effect which kept me on my toes throughout the entire experience.

In many ways, it felt to me that Half-Life was the natural evolution of DOOM, which I already loved. For me, it's in the "Legendary Game That Lives Up To Its Reputation" club, squeezed between Final Fantasy VII and Super Mario Bros. 3.