It's hard to know for sure, but I think this is the one I spent the most time with. Played a lot of the in the years before and years after, before only going for Pro Evolution Soccers and ignoring FIFAs for years. Game still looks amazing to me for 2001, having power bars for almost all non-panic moves is bonkers and it's so hard to do anything correctly, but it creates a lovely mess on the pitch. Still can't pull off my trademark goals straight from the kick-off I mastered back in the day, doing that was insane.

Visually and audibly impressive, messy but refreshing mechanics, decent database with some questionable choices in both names and attributes on top of iconic soundtrack (can't beat 19/2000 Soulchild Remix), it's hard to have too much against this.

"Kamurocho, it's a city of dreams where even from the gutters you can shoot for the stars"

Judgment (Judge Eyes in Japan) is a 3rd person beat 'em up/action RPG spin-off of Ryu Ga Gotoku's mainline Yakuza series, but other than taking place in the same city of Kamurocho there's almost no ties to Yakuza and Judgment stands alone as a self contained story separate from the Yakuza series so don't worry about having to play them before Judgment.

In Judgment you play as Takayuki Yagami, a disgraced former defense attorney that got a client he believed to be innocent an acquittal, but they ended up murdering their girlfriend shortly after so believing his "judgement" wasn't sound enough he left the lawyering profession behind. Three years later, still living with the guilt of his failure as a lawyer, Yagami is now a private detective based in the city of Kamurocho, alongside his best friend the ex-yakuza Masaharu Kaito the two run the Yagami Detective Agency and get wrapped up in the mystery of a serial killer known as "the Mole" who kills Yakuza by gouging their eyes out.

Judgment is a murder mystery and what good is a mystery without twists? Thankfully there's plenty of twists and turns in Judgment that will have you guessing all the way until the end and with each new reveal the plot gets even more complex introducing more characters and slowly pulling at the threads of a grand conspiracy until everything is finally unraveled for one of the most climactic finales I've ever experienced in a video game. The way everything comes together in the end and how all the plot threads and characters connect is just absolutely masterful writing and gives such major payoffs in the end.

Another thing worth mentioning is the incredible voice performances both in sub and dub which really help bring this cast of characters to life. I especially have to commend Takuya Kimura and Greg Chun for both making Yagami one of my all time favorite characters.

As with most Yakuza games when not tackling the main story there's a wealth of side content to complete as well. From the 50 "Side Cases" which act as Judgment's form of Yakuza's sub stories and could be anything from helping someone find their lost cat to getting proof of infidelity these smaller cases are how Yagami makes his living paying in both money and experience and they help flesh out the world of Kamurocho better. I will say that one of the side cases which revolves around rival gangs and spans the length of the whole game is cool and one of the best side cases, but the mechanic it introduces with the "Threat Meter" and how the gangs become more aggressive and increase the random encounter rate a lot until you go out of your way to beat the gang leaders becomes tedious and breaks the flow of the story at times.

Along with the side cases there's also a friendship system that allows Yagami to become friends with almost everyone in Kamurocho by helping them with their smaller matters, all these characters have their own minor arcs and also give benefits once they're your friend from giving a discount at a shop to helping in battle or even unlocking new side cases, there's always incentive to befriend everyone you see. There are also plenty of mini-games in Judgement with everything from darts and poker to Mahjong and Shogi or Virtua Fighter 5, Outrun and even a Kamurocho themed rail shooter called "Kamuro of the Dead", plus my personal favorite a VR Mario Party-esque board game called "Dice and Cube" you could spend hours of your time on the mini-games of Judgment alone.

Gameplay of Judgment can be broken down into two types. The first being Yakuza-like beat 'em up combat. During combat Yagami has two different combat styles based on kung-fu, the "Tiger" style which is primarily used for 1v1 fights and the "Crane" style which is used for crowd control against multiple enemies. Yagami can also perform special cinematic finishing attacks known as "EX actions" and even after seeing them for 50+ hours I never get tired of how over-the-top and stylish they are, the martial arts choreography (especially in the boss battles) is just action packed and top notch. A new addition to Judgment that the Yakuza series didn't have is a mechanic known as "mortal wounds" and this happens when a boss or powerful enemy does a charge attack or uses a weapon like a gun or sword on Yagami. It'll permanently shave off a piece of your health bar until you go to the doctor or use a med kit and honestly this is one of my biggest complaints about the game and I don't understand why this was even added because it just breaks the flow of combat and becomes tedious at times.

The second type of gameplay revolves around Yagami being a detective and outside of combat you'll engage in Ace Attorney-like investigation segments where you have to search your surroundings for clues and evidence in a first person mode and when not searching for evidence you'll also have to use disguises and tail suspects in stealth missions and that brings me to my next biggest complaint about the game. There are WAY too many tailing missions and some near the end of the game or during specific side quests get very tedious and felt poorly balanced. I like the concept of tailing and giving the game more of a detective feel and I understand wanting to show off a new mechanic, but they went a bit too overboard with it as far as I'm concerned.

Graphically Judgment is a beautiful game and replaying it on PS5 really helped enhance the realism which really fits the gritty tone of the world and story and the OST is great too with jazzy noir sounding pieces that enhance the detective atmosphere to triumphant and bombastic orchestral tracks that have a very law-and-order feel or crunchy heavy guitar centric tracks for intense boss fights, there's plenty of variety to the OST and it all fits the themes and enhances the atmosphere of the game.

Overall Judgment is an incredible game with a murder mystery narrative full of crazy twists and turns that will keep you guessing and plenty of compelling characters including a fantastic lead protagonist with tons of depth and development further enhanced by great voice acting performances. Featuring hours upon hours of enjoyable side content, fluid and stylish combat full of top notch martial arts choreography and intense boss fights, beautiful graphics and an OST full of memorable tracks and while it's true there's a few flaws and tedious new mechanics such as mortal wounds, tailing missions and the over abundance of random encounters thanks to the threat meter, these are very minor problems that only slightly detract from my over all enjoyment of the game and both the story and combat of the game are so good that I've thought about the game non-stop since the first time I played it 5 years ago and that's ultimately the reason I decided to replay the game and if a game made that strong of an impact on me you can bet I also strongly recommend it and think everyone deserves to have that kind of experience as well and take it from me, Judgment will give you an experience you will not soon forget.

Apparently, it is only made by one person. Which doesn't seem that way in most of my playthrough, but I will take that into account.

I don't typically play side-scroller, but I will say that the combat is really engaging and fun. It has a complex system, which can get pretty formulaic late in the game, but I guess it's a given, considering how broken you can get later on.

The soundtrack is actually incredibly hype.

The story is where it's at. You started off playing as a hero with a bird looking for someone dear to him and you get this feeling that something is.. off. It's nothing special or unique at first glance, but this game is the epitome of going from 0 to 100. Never in a million years would I have ever guess the game's final sequence of moments or even the hours leading up to it judging from how it starts. There are a lot of plot twists that you won't expect and fortunately it's quite well done. It does get pretty "anime" at times, not in a bad way mostly, I would say it's part of the game's charm.

The characters, especially the main cast, have a soul and personality and not just there to push the MC. They all have their own goals and role to play.

My only complaint for this game is that, it does get slightly dragged near the end. There are new elements but some things are also recycled. Since, it is made just by one person, I will let that slide. Though at this point you're probably too invested for this to make you lose interest anyways.

Overall, this is hands down one of the best Indie games I've played, especially in terms of narrative. KEIZO really poured his soul into this, and I hope to see more of his work.

Due to work and family stuff this game took me a month to finish, an entire month (Which was like 100 hours play time), but it was more than worth every minute of time I spent on it and now I feel like that one Danny DeVito meme, the biggest "I get it now" moment I've experienced in video games in awhile.

The game was simply peak. Like holy shit, probably the best indie game I've ever played (Not counting like Falcom stuff and whatnot because while they're an indie company, it's a much different situation) and the fact this game was made by 1 guy and it was literally his life's work that took like 15 years to make is just so admirable and inspiring and you can feel the passion and creativity in literally every part of the game.

The plot for Astlibra starts out simple with the protagonist and nameless hero looking for his long lost childhood friend and home town, but it slowly evolves into one of the most insane and mind-bending narratives I've ever experienced, all I can say is it was certainly an adventure. Astlibra has a penchant for the kind of storytelling you'd find in a visual novel and the amount of plot twists is just crazy and the variety of philosophical themes explored is baffling, but the best thing is despite having so many different elements everything felt fully fleshed out and by the end there were no loose ends either, definitely the kind of game you want to go into as blind as possible due to just how surprising it can get.

I'll just say that Astlibra perfectly represents Thomas Sowell’s philosophy on choice. There are no solutions in life, only trade offs. You’re always giving up one thing for another.

However a lot of games feel that to make a good story they have to sacrifice gameplay, but Astlibra isn't one of those because the gameplay was also one of the most addictive gameplay loops I've experienced in quite some time and from the moment I picked it up it was difficult to put down. The combat itself might seem simple at first being a basic side scroller hack n slash/beat em up, but it only gets better and more complex as you find technique scrolls throughout the world and learn more moves and abilities because by the end the combat actually has so much depth to it and it's very challenging at times, especially the bosses which almost have a bullet hell feel to them at times like in older Ys games.

Although the most fun part of Astlibra to me is the depth in the customization which is just unfathomable between all the weapons you can find, all your spells and all the ways to upgrade and enhance your character from learning skills through mastering weapons, leveling up with experience and also using an item known as Force to acquire permanent stat boosts and abilities on a system called "Growth" which is like the Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X. I also love the grind of having to craft your own weapons/armor with material you get from different enemies, it makes the feeling of progression more impactful because you really work for it.

Astlibra is also just a beautiful game too, the background arts, monster designs and character sprites are gorgeous and done by Vanillaware alumni artist Shigatake and some can be a bit excessively horny at times (If you've played Dragon's Crown, you already know what I'm talking about) but it's all gorgeous art and really makes Astlibra such a beautiful game to play through making all the various levels so vibrant and diverse.

And the OST is also INCREDIBLE too. So many artists collaborated for the music, but there isn't a bad song in the game and there's so much diversity too with everything from full on prog metal to old school Nobou Uematsu sounding synth tracks, some strong melodic shredding with violins that remind me of Falcom Sound Team JDK's work especially the stuff they do for the Ys series and even some electronic type music too.

Astlibra is one of those rare gems where genuinely every thing about it is just so well crafted from the mind-bending narrative to the fun, fast, fluid combat and intricate progression systems which give so much customization, to the beautiful level design and art and the masterfully composed OST. While it clearly takes inspiration and influence from many of the classics of both the J-RPG genre and the visual novel genre, there's really nothing else like the game in terms of execution and I can't recommend it enough because of that. I know that it's an experience that will stick with me for many years to come and I can only thank KEIZO for dedicating his life to giving so many such an incredibly passionate and creative game that everyone deserves to experience.

Cultist Simulator is absolutely a genius game. And it is absolutely not for everyone, it appeals to a very specific audience. And no, it's not one of those ironic simulator games about building Kool-Aid tanks.

If I had to quickly summarize:

It's a game about maintaining a balancing act, spinning a dozen plates while taking risks and experimenting to further your goal of supernatural ascension, with the ever-looming presence of catastrophic failure in the back of your mind.

I can easily identify all the aspects that would make someone hate this game with a passion. Obscured mechanics, ticking timers, and especially the lack of clarity. Most first-time runs of Cultist Simulator will be confusing and end abruptly by dying of overwhelming dread or by going mad within 30 minutes. And that's by design.

It hands the player a few cards, some action tiles, and says:

Do you want to run a cult? Want to know how? Well, combine some cards and figure it out yourself. Good luck.

Of course, the game teaches you the basics, but it doesn't explain anything in detail, if at all. And when it does, it is in cryptic sentences and keywords, with mechanics obscured behind the combination of cards and verb tiles. On the surface, it all seems overwhelming, or even unfair, but it's really not. The game does give you (veiled) information, not enough to hold your hand, but enough to figure things out if you are paying attention.

However, If you have no patience to read and put some thought into what you are doing, it will be a very frustrating game. Mindlessly clicking through things will lead to dumb mistakes that will send your run head first down the eldritch toilet.

Which was exactly what happened to me when I first played.

But Cultist Simulator snared me, even with the initial frustrations the game tapped into some kind of obsessive behavior I didn't even know I had. The allure of possibility and the desire to learn more was strong enough to push me forward, to the point I took pen and paper and started writing things down. Combinations of cards, aspects, negative effects, and the ways I found to combat them. In time my desk slowly started to get messy, creating an oddly immersive connection to the game board and the overall vibe of uncovering the occult.

And that's when everything clicked.

If I wanted to progress I would at least need to understand the game's lore, or at least what each symbol represented and was capable of. It wasn't gonna be like other games were to succeed I just needed an abstract intelligence stat level up. Understanding, planning, and then finding ways to manipulate that knowledge to my advantage was the key to progress.

If the game did explain each and every mechanic in detail like so many people criticize it, Cultist Simulator wouldn't be nearly as engaging. Taking risks, making mistakes, and having breakthrough "AHA!" moments are the core experience of this game.

What at first looked like nonsensical flavor texts started to make sense, I figured out what the symbols and keywords meant, how I could use them, and how aspects feed into each other. Mechanics like the aforementioned Dread that felt like it relied solely on RNG to decide whether or not it would kill my run turned out to not be the case at all. I just couldn't see past frustrations before.

And just like that when I least expected it, I was easily destroying police evidence, summoning demons to teach me foreign languages, murdering my day job supervisor, reanimating his corpse with necromancy, funding expedition parties across the world to steal artifacts, biding at the auction house on cursed texts, and painting masterpieces with arcane pigments. All while maintaining health, funds, fascination, notoriety, and dread in check.

In no time I had all the tools I needed. I sewed their severed bodies onto mine. The feast of the True-Birth had started. Swollen with the lives of others, I returned from the Tricuspid Gate. My flesh reborn. I have become a Long, favored by the Grail. I shaw not grow old.

Plagued by unnatural dreams and supported by a small inheritance that I received from an eerie old man who died in the hospital where I used to work as a janitor, I set myself to pulling back the veil that protects our reality from the abnormalities beneath it, searching for answers, direction, and something more, something I couldn't yet put to words. Slowly, I collected a few followers and established a fledgling cult with little to our name besides ambition and a crazy idea, and a mission that would put us on the map. I kept telling my followers to just wait, we'll soon take on that big mission while sending my most trusted believer seeking opportunities in the streets in the hope of alleviating our sudden financial troubles as the inheritance ran out and I was busy working myself into another sickbed. Finally, having no vitality left to fight another bout of illness, I croaked, leaving behind a lost believer and two hangers-on who returned to their regular life with nothing to show for it. As for the believer, I hope they'll forgive me in time or, at the very least, raise me from the dead.

I tried again.

This time I was the inspector who, following a lead, had happened on the trail of the wannabe cultist leader. The leader might have died, but his right hand was alive. But as I got closer and closer to her, the new-found madness in my dreams started to envelop me and just as I was ready to nail her with damning evidence, dread devoured me and I was lost.

I tried again. And again. And again, the cycle furiously repeating into another early death.

You get the point. It's a complicated game to get into with little direction and no hand-holding, the realities of a cult simulation quickly beating the novice into the ground just to start again with the same story from a selection that becomes increasingly limited walking down the familiar streets into another unexpected and seemingly unavoidable death. You might learn something from your every last loss, but there are so many other losses waiting.

Slowly a sense of meaningless creeps in as I tap through the same actions I've done before, stumbling into the same problems I faced before, with too little knowledge to still deal with them. I feel more comfortable with its fiddly interface that is constantly threatening to become just way too much, especially on the small cellphone screen, and there’s still a desire to dive deeper into this weird world that so successfully seems to evoke the feeling of being called by the secret whispers from another side to become the person that you usually take on in some horror game as the mid- or late-game boss, depending on whether it's going to send you against the demon itself in the end or not.

But it’s a game that encourages experimentation and exploration in its intro but punishes you severely for not knowing how to play the game properly. It’s as if to really enjoy it, you must read a guide beforehand; but I’d prefer a game to convince me there’s value to reading a guide for it before I actually do that.

In another playthrough, thinking myself ready, I took on the big mission, but it soon proved to be much more demanding of our resources than I had thought, and as my closest believer succumbed to the wounds suffered, we returned with nothing to show for it, back to our withered home. Our cult was done and I returned to my normal everyday life that could never be the same again, now aware of the precarious balance between our worlds, but impotent to do anything about it. I hope my believer behind the veil will find it in themself to forgive me; I will not be raising them again. My Google Play subscription is through and I’m not renewing it for this game.

Excellent game but definitely not for everybody. I have the same complaints everyone else does but besides that I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing it.

- No option for quick weapon switching. I didn't mind the menus and everything since at a certain point it was almost meditative but it takes a loooooot of time.
- Mandatory saves after containers. Pretty much all my issues in this game have to do with time. I get what they were going for but I wish you could just throw stuff in without sitting around for 25 seconds waiting for it to finish saving
- I thought I was gonna have more complaints but I guess not I will mention though the final boss is hard as fuck (same difficulty spike as Parasite Eve lol)

Most reviews for this game seem to hover in the "mid" territory. I kind of get why, since in some ways the game does have an empty feel, can be a somewhat repetitive, AA budget, different from the rest of the "Valkyrie" series and is very light on story... at first. At worst I found this game pretty cozy and fun despite its repetitive nature at some points, at best I was genuinely surprised at how good the narrative turned out. I definitely get the "6/10" reviews but I feel this game has a lot to offer if you give it a chance. The empty feeling really serves the story well and reminds me of the weird "something isn't right" vibe of Nier: Replicant. Feels like a PS2 game structurally (positive) but with more refined gameplay than a PS2 budget title would have. Not on the level of something like a Platinum game, but it really clicked with me. Get the true ending, play on Hard Mode, and get the outline removal and film grain removal mods if you play on PC. Personal 8/10, more realistically a 6 or 7/10

Valkyrie Elysium is one of the most 6/10 games I've played in awhile. I wanted to find an underrated hidden gem, future cult classic of a game something like NieR was back in the 360 days, but Valkyrie Elysium just isn't one to me. It is perfectly ok in almost every regard (and less than ok in some), but nothing more. No part of the game stands out to make it exceptional, almost everything it tries to do you've probably seen other games do much better already and that's fine, it's far from a bad game. It's just the definition of mid to me.

The plot starts out very slow and pretty uninteresting for almost 75% of the game. It's just "Go here, fight undead and purify souls because Odin said we have to do this to save the world" and while there is a lot more than meets the eye to this world and its lore, almost all of it is crammed into the final 3 hours of the game to where it just feels tacked on, convoluted and rushed. Reminds me of how Kingdom Hearts III was. I like most of the concepts and ideas presented, but think the execution left a lot to desire. Gotta say I'm not a fan of how the writers take so many creative liberties with Norse mythology and butcher some of its characters and concepts though mixing it with OC anime bullshit because at that point you're better off just making your own mythology.

During the journey Valkyrie slowly meets companions in the form of spirits who she turns into her chosen warriors known as Einherjar and all the Einherjar have stereotypical archetypes we've seen in J-RPGs before, the cunning rogue pretty boy, the gallant knight, the headstrong girl, the shy girl etc. However while they're quite stereotypical, all the characters are still quite charming and their interactions with Valkyrie provide some good character development as they help Valkyrie to appreciate and value humans more.

The combat is definitely the best thing about the game. It's like DMC, but with a much heavier emphasis on magical attacks and support from summoning your Einherjar to exploit the enemy's elemental weakness. My only problem is the actual weapon switching isn't nearly as fluid as DMC and you can't do it mid attack so it breaks up the pacing of combat and almost makes switching weapons pointless a lot of times to me. Also maybe this is just because I was playing on a harder difficulty (Normal was too easy when I started the game on it) but a lot of enemy's just felt overly damage spongy.

Boss fights were another highlight because while they were also overly spongy for my liking, the designs were cool and the fights were well choreographed and provided a decent challenge. Motoi Sakuraba's OST was also pretty good. The ethereal and atmospheric style of music really complimented the dreary and lifeless world.

Speaking of lifeless world, Valkyrie Elysium definitely shows its budget because the world really is lifeless. There's barely any side NPCs, all the side quests you do get feel relatively pointless and tacked on plus they reuse previous areas of the game, all the level design is essentially completely linear and corridor like with barely anything to explore or find off the beaten path besides a handful of treasure chests with potions in them and that's not even mentioning the outdated textures and lip-synching problems.

Valkyrie Elysium is at this weird crossroads where it doesn't know if it wants to be a character action game or an action RPG and a lot of the design choices clash with each other because of that. It has the foundations for a solid combat system, some good bosses and nice atmosphere and music too, but when the narrative and characters are underdeveloped for 75% of the game and then overly rushed and convoluted in the last 25% and the game is so short as it is with little to offer outside of the main story aside from a handful of fetch quests which reuse locations you've already been to...I just can't really recommend this game to anyone when you'd just be better off spending that time playing DMC or NieR instead.