What is there to talk about Half-Life 2 that hasn't been said thousands and thousands of times? If Half-Life 1 is a fun game that revolutionized the way stories can be told in games, Half-Life 2 simply revolutionized the way games work.
It's almost unbelievable that this was released in 2004, its graphics are frankly surprising to this day, physics are perfect, gameplay is adorable, storytelling is superb (and such a great atmosphere). The only thing I could complain about this, is that I didn't like the ending, but hey, 2 more expansions to go!

I really REALLY wanted to like this. Felt up my alley because I love chill games, I love visual novels, I love modern fantasy, and I love just getting to know characters. This just never clicked though. It felt smug and almost pretentious at times about its writing and commentary which never goes past "real world issue but with a fantasy coating". The dialogue and characters also aren't anything special, which would be fine, but it's again that smugness that just makes that feel worse. Even the gameplay of making coffee is lackluster, where it is simply trial and error of only 3 ingredients and never goes beyond it. I was just disappointed and annoyed with this.

On a technical level, this game is an improvement over Yakuza 1 in pretty much every way. It is genuinely incredible that they were able to make such a huge jump in quality in only a year between the two games.

The main plot of the game is kind of a mess all throughout but especially falls apart in the finale. The good bits of the story can be very good and it is compelling all the way through but I dislike the bad parts of it too much to come away from the game feeling positive about the story.

It's interesting seeing this game after having played the remake a year ago. There's an entire minigame (with its own subplot) about working as a host, the hostess management minigame is completely different, and there's even an entire third city (although it's tiny compared to Sotenbori and Kamurocho). Between the differences and how well the game holds up, I think this is genuinely still worth playing.

Pry this game out of my cold dead hands. I still want to eat the cake I made with Fatty. Whenever I need to traverse my home in the middle of the night and get spooked, I still think of Fatty Bear and feel better. This dang bear was the impetus for my desire to ride a laundry chute, a thing I never even knew existed before this game. I dunno dudes, between this and Corduroy, I have an incredibly soft spot for brown bears in overalls with poc families because no kids in media resembled me so I was just drawn to ALL poc characters and I liked to imagine that my bears loved me just as much, yada yada yada, you know the sob story. Game good.