While I didn’t enjoy this as much as I would’ve hoped for, it’s damn nice to play another Persona game.

I’m a relatively new fan to persona, Persona 5 was the first game I played in the franchise. As a high schooler at the time my mind was blown by that game and P5R went beyond my expectations and blew me away again. I never played the original P3 so have nothing to say about this game being a Remake and for the sake of this review I will do my VERY best not to compare this to P5R since I want to look at P3R as it’s own game. With that being said, Persona 3 Reload is an interesting game that does take inspiration from P5R. As always I LOVE the art direction for Persona. You go through the daily life of a high school student to hang with friends and study for school. You can join clubs which I thought was really cool. You also get to open up new social links to build bonds in these clubs. You can do all sorts of activities that can gain you new items or accessories or increase your social stats that can benefit you on the combat side of the game during the Dark Hour. There’s many mechanics for you to use to better yourself, your gear or your team. You can also explore and find Twilight Fragments around town which are very useful to open locked chests within Tartarus. Which brings us to combat side of things. Combat is so slick and fun. You’ll pretty much go dungeon crawling in Tartarus for a big chunk of the game where you fight shadows and get loot. Sometimes after a battle you’ll get Shuffle Time which is a system that allows you to choose a reward. These rewards can be anything from money or bonuses to collect or personas and buffs for your run through Tartarus. I really like the visuals and layout for Tartarus which the art direction does great on. I also do appreciate that different sections of Tartarus which would eventually change up the layout and halls for the floors you go through so that you don’t go through same hallways. It’s also good that more things open up in Tartarus so that you don’t always just do the same thing. Eventually you’ll have to rescue people that have wondered into Tartarus and you will eventually start to encounter Monad Doors which lead into a Red Area where you can fight formidable shadows for great rewards. You can also take on requests for Elizabeth where you have to do quests for her in daytime and during the Dark Hour. And with Elizabeth there’s indeed a Velvet Room to fuse your personas. While I did like Tartarus, I did get pretty bored sometimes since it got repetitive unless I had a challenging fight. And that’s an issue I had with Personal 5, Mementos felt like a slog and Tartarus did begin to feel like slog later on in the story. Also the soundtrack is AMAZING. Like in P5R, I loved to just randomly hang out just to listen to the music because it was so good. Atlus doesn’t miss with their OSTs.

Story wise, it was pretty good but I wasn’t all that impressed. The story was okay for the first 40 hours as we have a goal we’re set on but doesn’t do much with that goal other than having to go up Tartarus to find out more and recruit new members to help in our fight during the Dark Hour. After that, the story started to pick up for me, specifically when we started to learn more about the Dark Hour and started encountering the antagonists of the story. The social links in the game were hit or miss. Some will be “meh”, some will at least be interesting, and a few I loved. I didn’t really like Nozomi’s or Hidetoshi’s social links since they were either uninteresting or just couldn’t bring myself to enjoy them. And then we have SEES, our team that fights to find out the secrets of the Dark Hour. The characters are well written and well voiced acted. Junpei is the only character I had a love hate relationship with. He can be funny but cringe most of the time for trying too hard to be funny. I also loved characters like Yukari because of her deeper connection to the story. I also love Akihiko for his cool and upstanding attitude. Or even Aigis for looking for her way of life which is interesting to see. And of course I can’t forget Mitsuru because, one I think she’s totally gorgeous, and two I really liked her social link. Besides all that, it’s really nice how you can just hang out with any of your crew members at the dorm, sadly this doesn’t increase your bond with them but you can still increase your social stats or get items like food or drinks from it. The remaining hours of the story were great and my goodness the ending hit me hard on the heart.

Honestly, I really couldn’t put my finger on why I didn’t enjoy this as much as I would’ve hoped for. Not sure if it’s because the story didn’t get to me as much due to pacing issues or if I felt like something was missing from the game. Nonetheless, I definitely recommend Persona 3 Reload as it’s a great game. There’s a lot to keep you busy and a lot to take advantage of.

Penny's Big Breakaway is a game I had been excited for since its announcement. Sonic Mania veterans Christian Whitehead, Tee Lopes, and others have created something wholly unique, and while a Mania sequel would've been great, I really love that they went on to do something as creative as this.

PBB to me feels like a mix of more classic level design, with each level containing a somewhat linear progression, mixed in with momentum based movement of more recent 3D platformers. PBB definitely takes inspiration from Super Mario Odyssey with Penny's moveset allowing you to stay in the air and use her yo-yo to attack and reach new heights, very similarly to Cappy from Odyssey. Within the first few levels I was immediately enamored by Penny's moveset, which felt easy to learn but hard to master. Everytime I fell off a platform, I felt like I could learn what mistakes in my "moveset planning" led me there. I love platformers that take an unconventional and new approach to movement, and PBB is no exception. Much of the level design is based around speed, and the game rewards you with new areas if you're capable enough to surpass a daunting obstacle. Many times there will be a ramp that you need to roll off of with enough speed to reach a collectible, for example. Throughout PPB's runtime, I felt like Penny's moveset was adequately used, with some exceptions.

The presentation of this game, graphics wise, is spectacular. The game has this bright, dreamy presentation that really catches your eye, and many times just starting a level the camera is panned out, allowing you to take in the gorgeous visuals before you enter. I've seen some people note a few glitches, like clipping into objects, which I've encountered but only 2 times through my runtime. Which is a shame. Hopefully there is a patch soon that fixes some of the rough edges, but overall I think the presentation is very well done for a studio's first game.

This game also tends to prioritize speed and a point based system, which I find really interesting for a modern 3D platformer. At the end of a level, you have the opportunity to score some extra coins/points by going through a quicktime event called a "busker bonus". Honestly, I didn't really care about how many points I accumulated by the end, so I think these events were more annoying than anything, and I think the reason I didn't care much about points is because there is hardly a reward for getting a high score. What I did enjoy, were the 6 "collectibles" throughout the levels, though. I ended up getting all of them, and some of them were tough to pin down at times. But I felt like they were perfectly challenging. Not too easy, but also not too hard.

Another point of the gameplay I really didn't care for were the penguins. I get why they are here, they motivate you to keep going through the level as fast as you can, but when I'm looking for collectables or trying to look for more health, I found them more annoying than anything. They weren't a huge issue, but just a small annoyance.

I think if a sequel were to be made for this game, I'd love for there to be even more cool yo-yo movement options. I think what they have here is great, but I can see a lot of potential for the future. Also, the wall jump was rarely used, which I found a bit confusing. Wall jumps are fun and I wish the level design allowed for its use. There's like one bonus level that centers around it and it uses it well, so to me it felt like a conscious decision to keep it away from the main game, which felt odd.

Also, really didn't care for the story, partially because I think the cutscenes felt like an after thought. I think the story pacing was just a tad weird, though I enjoyed the characters and their designs.

I really enjoyed PBB. While it doesn't completely realize its ideas, what is here is remarkably creative and very fun to play.

I got through like 6 hours of this before I was like, “ok I’m 30 and I don’t find high school to be a captivating setting and I don’t want to play through 500 floors of Tartarus doing the same shit over and over again for my only respite to be talking to the old people at the book store and leveling up my academics by studying at the shared computer.” Baldur’s gate 3 ruined this shit for me lol. I might have enjoyed this in my early 20’s but I just can’t do it anymore. I enjoyed the original but there is just not enough new content and the game might look pretty but I got like 100 games to complete on my list and I would rather play live a live or silent hill 2 then this shit. Signing off

If I could give this 6 stars I would because I think this game is in a different caliber than almost every game over the last few years. Might be my second favourite game now next to bloodborne. I have played dnd, divinity 2 and dragon age origins. That’s about the level of experience I had with this kind of game. At a glance it’s similar to Larian’s other games, however it may have set a new standard for story presentation in games. It has superb voice acting, writing, enemy design, character design, world building, and map design. This is not even getting into the actual gameplay. It is in someways a step back and forward for Larian, I really enjoyed the environmental style of combat from divinity 2 but this game simplies that and instead refocuses on giving you a variety of abilities which can lead to a variety of creative ways of handling battles. You can still do trippy things like fill a box full of high weight objects and drop it on enemies using telekinesis, but you also have a variety of simple to complex ways to build different classes. The game’s power progression feels appropriately passed for what took me around 80 hours to finish and I was hauling ass to get through this game. I actually found myself dropping the difficulty halfway through as the fighting on balanced difficulty got a bit too much to handle for me when not min maxing my build.

The story takes a great amount of twists and turns as it goes on and is wound together with its unique and fleshed out cast of characters which have delightful backstories and quests related to them.

Overall this game reminded me of why I love RPGs so much and has given me excitement for what hard working passionate developers can put together in a time where large business is destroying creativity and quality in gaming.

Coming back and reflecting after a few months, I think in some aspects the story feels to bloated and a bit rushed, but there are story beats and character arcs I loved nonetheless. Surprisingly fun are the young Peter sections and side missions. The total 180 on this game especially on twitter is wild. I think it’s just a case that mainstream audiences see this and say “game of the year” and the self proclaimed “real gamers” have to say “uhhh actually this game is so mid, baldurs gate is better” as if that’s even a good comparison to make. Very excited to see what they do with DLC.