I gave the first game a 5/5 so I had to do it here also since this is just an improvement in almost every way. The only area I think one could argue its not as strong is the plot, which don't get me wrong its a good plot, its just that both are good so its moreso about which is better. I'll need more time with this before making that decision myself.

Gameplay refined, side quests more personal, much bigger and more frequent set pieces and boss fights, some fantastic suits for both characters, I just loved this experience so much in so many ways, had an amazing time this past week playing through it that while I can't think of any real gripes I have, any I could possible think of would be so minor in the grand scheme of things. Is it absolutely flawless and trans-formative of the open world formula? No but for me it didn't need to be, it was what I wanted and more. I am curious will Insomniac play a follow game less safe, time will tell.

Wow. I had a feeling I might enjoy this game, but never did I expect to absolutely love it the way that I did. After beating the game I read some reviews to see what did others pick up on that I missed, and while I could somewhat see some peoples gripes, I legitimately did not encounter any of them or think about them while playing.

- Right off the bat, anyone with eyes and ears can recognize the beauty of this games pixel art and its stunning music. Thats all that needs to be said about those, its a given.
- The gameplay I found to be really engaging, the combat keeps you focused and rewards swapping around party members with no punishment around levels. Exploration always rewards you with new gear or secrets and almost gives a bit of a zelda-esque experience doing through the different areas and dungeons, perhaps that will be their next genre?
- The plot and characters I thought were really well done. The two solstice warriors can be argued as bland or basic but if you spent your formative years training with an old man, you'd be a bit boring also. Luckily this is where the supporting cast of characters and party members comes in, each of them with their own personality, motivations, and secrets. Meanwhile we have a plot basically themed on responsibilities, ones that are inherited, ones we feel compelled to take on etc, and how we handle those responsibilities. I would advise going for the true ending, the requirements aren't steep if you've been engaging with the game as you go, took me maybe an extra hour or two max after beating the normal ending. Some people take issue with certain plot beats and twists but honestly it did all I could have asked for it to do and I'm more than ok with how it all ended up.

If you played The Messenger you will also get some added joy and cheeky nods while playing Sea of Stars. But you also don't feel left out if you didn't. Where one person sees a familiar face, another sees a cool new character, its very well balanced but rewarding for those involved.

Overall, Sea of Stars is a delight of a game. Thankfully the kickstarter raised enough to hit the dlc goal so I will return for that, and I will absolutely be keeping an eye on Sabotage Studios next game.

Starfield is a weird one. Started off really enjoying it but the more I played the more the flaws started to show and wear on me. That being said, my final play time is almost 100 hours so it definitely did enough right to get me to keep playing.

To make a long review short, basically any of the procedural stuff like the random point of interests on planets and the mission board quests get very repetitive very early, and the menu travel really becomes a bore after 50 hours lol. Going from quest to quest is fine for the most part but there is some charm lost by missing out on that sense of exploration you'd get in fallout or skyrim. The companions are fine individually but the game really suffers from them all basically being the same morally good people, theres no variety in them in terms of how they react to your decisions.

As for the positives, the hand crafted side quests are quality bethesda so you'll enjoy those. The gunplay is also surprisingly good and the world is very detailed with its items and weapons and I like how the skills are setup. When you stumble across a planet with a colony of cloned people or a spaceship filled with people from earth who were in cryo sleep, thats when you get that bethesda feeling. As for the main quest, hard to say much without spoilers but it was decently interesting up until the very end for me personally.

Is it weird that playing this has made me want to prioritize finally playing New Vegas? lol

All the pieces of Rain Code truly came together in the last two chapters for me. I debated whether to give it a 4 or 4.5 but I think with its consistency, music, aesthetic, characters, and plot, its strengths overcome the few weaknesses it has to justify the higher score.

If you liked Danganronpa I think its safe to assume you'll like raincode. The only reason you wouldn't is if you really can't stand the idea of a Miu x Monokuma style character being with you at all times cause thats basically what Shinigami is but I loved it and her eventual arc so it was fine by me. I don't think the characters of rain code will hit the personal highs a lot of people will have for various dango characters, but they also won't hit the lows of characters you despise, they are just consistently good at their role as allies/enemies/suspects. The protagonist Yuma is also probably the most fleshed out protagonist from out of any of these type of games I've played and honestly Shinigami is probably second.

Out of all the chunsoft games from this same vein, dango/Ai/zero escape etc, this probably has my favorite gameplay section after danganronpas class trials. While I think there was room for more mini game variety in the mystery labyrinths and the hallway walks were a bit annoying, what we got was good and reminded me a lot of the trials which I really enjoyed.

Speaking of trials, the mysteries of each chapter are pretty good here, like the dango games, some are better than others, but really theres only one weak one here in the 5 or 6 available. And while the overall plots mystery probably isn't as well sprinkled throughout the game as it is in other chunsoft games, it does come full circle in a way thats better than any of the others. In a weird way its the most fucked up but also the most likely/believable plots of any of those games lol.

For a game that seems to be splitting long time Final Fantasy fans and newcomers to the series between loving it or hating it, I managed to fall somewhere in the middle, leaning more towards like than dislike because while I have a decent list of gripes and issues with the game, it does still have a lot of excellent qualities and I think if it was willing to commit to those more and cut the fat, this would easily have been a top tier game for me.

For the cons, I've mentioned it a few times but I just did not care for the semi open world approach, the side quests were largely weak and unrewarding, and the RPG elements felt tacked on. I think the pacing isn't great at points either but maybe thats a side effect from doing most of the quests for the first 2/3rds of the game and not enjoying them.

For the pros:
- I mostly enjoyed the main plot. I don't really get the complaints about any sort of kingdom hearts-esque plot twist(s), it all seemed fairly tame if we are comparing it to that series. Maybe people were just upset it wasn't the GoT style plot they maybe expected but I was happy with the revenge plot and what it eventually became, though I do think it loses a bit of steam towards the end but thats just a JRPG trope I'm not a huge fan of anyways.
-I didn't dislike the characters but I can't say I loved any of them, didn't feel a sense of connection with them compared to similar games.
- I enjoyed the combat decently enough, I'm not fully sure why but it just never fully clicked for me, it was always serviceable but never much more. I think a lack of enemy variety that would encourage various playstyles and builds could have been a cause.

Overall, theres a decent mix of pros and cons for me. I think if it leaned more into the linear action adventure and could dive deeper into what worked and cut what didn't, this would be a top tier game for me as I mentioned earlier. Probably wouldn't have gotten this at full PS5 price if I could go back in time but at least it both motivated me to finish it and also this was probably the best window to play it due to the next few hectic months of releases.

While I can definitely see the appeal of the game and how at its core design it has lead a new format/genre of games, and that the visual and control improvements of the remaster greatly improve the overall experience, this is still a game largely stuck in its 2000s roots and you painfully feel that as you play.

As someone with no prior metroid experience, I come into this completely clean with no nostalgia or understanding of the game, which means I had to have a fucking guide open as I played the game or else I'd have an extra 4 hours on my playtime running around to finish this game. My main complaints are:
- lack of fast travel/shortcuts around the map, makes backtracking in the latter half a pain in the ass.
- meta ridley boss fight is ass, the rock monster fight drags way too much, and overall the difficulty seems to just spike in the last 1/4 of the game
- some enemies are just fucking annoying, especially the face suckers and the jetback guys, legitimately just made me mad with how aggressive the room respawns can be when I'm trying to run through an area
- "plot" told through scanning random shit across the world = zzz

All that being said, it still gets 2.5/5 cause it doesn't overstay its welcome, and I did enjoy the visual improvements and the very very core design of powering up as you progress through the game is solid and popular as we see in the years to come.

Not much I can say about this excellent game that countless others haven't said so I'll try not to repeat too much, but I'm honestly just blown away with how much more I liked this game compared to BOTW. I think it fixed almost every gripe I had on list against the original game and a large reason for that is just the open ended-ness of how to approach any given objective.

Shrines and side quests are a large example of this, shrines in particular in this game are lightyears better than botw shrines, and side quests, while still fairly basic at their core, feel more fun to do because of the wider sandbox approach of how to complete them.

I also much preferred the story here compared to botw. It still largely takes place in the past like the memories of botw, but it does feel a bit more immediate/impactful, because its sort of two stories playing out at once and you don't immediately know the outcome of the past storyline like you did in botw where you know they lose. The story does repeat itself a small bit however, all the temple cutscenes are basically the same. I also still don't love how memories can be unlocked out of order, I think its very easy to spoil yourself on big plot points early by mistake, I'd hate to have been spoiled on the conclusion to where is zelda and the location of the master sword.

In terms of gameplay, this one is a bit more of a mixed bag and part of what holds it back from a 5/5. I think exploration is vastly improved here, I do feel more rewarded for exploring because even basic resources are more usable now compared to botw, but I think the sky islands concept feels slightly underused and I don't think weapon fusing is the solution to weapon durability as it may initially seem, it just becomes another essential required process to keep up with the damage scale of enemies. I also wish the combat had been fleshed out more, its basically the exact same as botw and something just a bit deeper would have gone a long way.

Overall, an excellent game that proves that once you can see past graphical fidelity as the end goal, fun and interesting gameplay mechanics will always triumph over photo realism generic shite.

This is probably my favorite pokemon inspired game I have played and I've played a lot of the big ones, nexomon extinction, temtem, coromon etc. What makes this better than all of those in my opinion, is that its what most resembles pokemon for me, but isn't afraid to improve where pokemon doesn't/won't, whereas sometimes in the other games it feels like they hold back in certain areas or make the same mistakes pokemon does. The main example of this is the gameplay flow for Cassette Beasts, its very similar in structure to Scarlet and Violet where there is a mostly open world map, and you have 2-3 core objectives to complete in order to beat the game. It even has unlocking overworld abilities to help you progress the map like SV does but its implemented better here imo. And overall that gameplay flow is done better here thanks to firstly the map design and secondly the level scaling implementation.

I'll start with the map design. While the game is marketed as open world, its not really, but in a good way. You are meant to do the right side of the map first until you complete enough of it to travel to the left side, and how you progress through that right hand side and what order you complete objectives is up to you. This is where the level scaling comes in. At the start of the game you are giving choices in how the scaling will be implemented, for example will bosses scale down to you, how will enemy AI move in the overworld etc. This level of tweaking is fantastic as it allows you to essentially make a custom easy/normal/hard mode, a sorely lacking pokemon feature. This is what truly helps the game flow, as you never feel over or under leveled, I left it on the default settings and while I never truly struggled like say in TemTem at times, I also couldn't just blindly mash away like you often can in pokemon and SV (depending on your order). I also really liked how none of the objective locations are just given to you immediately on the map, you either have to find them yourself or have an npc in town tell you as a quest, its a nice touch for those into exploration.

In terms of beast designs, I liked a lot of them, I feared that the roughly 120 count wouldn't be enough but it is and they are distributed well throughout the map. I also like the sticker move system and the star system for evolving, it makes having a rotating squad very feasible. The fusion mechanic is also cool, the algorithm used is very good in that it never feels like the fusions are just slapped together like the default pokemon fusions.

If I had any gripes, its that I wasn't a fan of how the companions quests are generally tied into a handful of the main objective boss fights, which means for about half of the Archangel fights you have a companion with you that can't fuse until you do the fight. Not a big deal but it came up as an annoyance once or twice. The other gripe is the awkwardness of swapping around beasts, especially if you want to take a beast off a companion to give them a fodder one if you are swapping, you should be able to remove your active beast from the tape inventory menu rather than having to back out to the party specific menu, it just becomes a hassle if you find yourself swapping companions a lot, which you will have to do some amount of due to the quests.

Overall, thoroughly impressed with this two person dev team and I'm glad its on gamepass as that should help with discovery a lot and even on steam its a very fair price of €/$20 I believe. If you are a fan of monster catching games, this is one to try.

PS the music is very good but sadly theres only maybe a handful of tracks, would have liked a few more but at least what we have is good so you don't mind hearing them often.

I know a lot of this will seem like I did not like the game but thats not the case, its just easier to talk about the gripes a bit more but overall I did really enjoy Hollow Knight and it still gets a 4/5 as a game in a genre I don't really have any interest in. But I do have gripes that stop it from being any higher for me personally and they are as follows:
- I'm not a fan of this style of narrative/lore, like ik there's a lot of lore to this game, but from my perspective there was basically none cause of how it's told if that makes sense. It's kinda like botws plot where you aren't experiencing it as much as others are telling you that it already happened
- I think most of the fights I fought were fair and could be done in probably 5 or less attempts, which I think is a good sign of balance, but some are just a fucking headache and would make me want to self rope like the guardians and Traitor Lord
- I think part of this is just getting more used to metroidvanias but I think some of the games progression is a bit more abstract than I would have liked, I think maybe marking more points of interest on the map, specifically points where say you come across a door you can't open yet, so that when you get the key or ability required, you remember where to go, rather than the generic markers you can drop yourself

That seems like a lot, but in the grand scheme they aren't much, I still overall had fun playing, it's got great visual and style, good music, combat feels rewarding when you get into a flow, powerups and abilities feel useful and keep things fresh

Same score as what I gave the original re4, I think its hard to call one better than the other, when they both have different strengths and weaknesses. Obviously the remake is modernized and adds a bit more depth to Leons combat arsenal, but I feel like certain actions, like shotgun blasts and roundhouse kicks don't have the same oomph as they did in the remake. The knife changes are actually better than I expected. I think it does a good job of showing off memorable locations from the original with modern graphics and lighting, vastly improves most areas but I think some actually lose a bit of magic.

I don't think the remake manages to capture that feeling of "cool" that I had in my original play-through but it does flesh out more of the characters and story, and I think towards the back half is does a better job embracing the cheesyness of the original, when Leon has someone to talk to he hits more one liners and has some banter.

Overall I liked it and any fan of the original will also, some are much more die hard than myself so their mileage may vary but I don't think you can come away disliking RE4 Remake.

PS, they are absolutely setting up an RE5 Remake in this :O