One of my favorite games that is also a really good example of well written female characters and mental illness. For a game that is often so bleak in it looks and unforgiving in the punches it delivers it has an ending (meaning the canon ending) that is not overly happy but hopeful. Made me cry like the stupid bitch I am but also left me hopeful and with something that felt like catharsis...?

One of my few "I have it on vinyl" OSTs, too whatever that means. ;)

I don't remember the option to pet any of the cats. Kind of crime I think...!
;)

Look: it's pretty, the Soundtrack is great and I had fun playing it.

But the amount of cutscenes are not for me and I'm not THAT interested in the gameplay that I'll finish the game.

But I get why people like it. I also get why others don't.

Anyway, thanks for introducing me to "Low Roar", I really like his stuff.

Like it's predecessor, NG has a very engaging Plot and eliminates a few of it's former 'flaws' while filing off a bit on it'S gameplay.

Noticeable is for example that every character has flaws that let them be morally gray instead of completely innocent. Tinging them gray fits the morally ambiguous world they live in and fits the backstory of the protag quite nicely.

I could have done without the sister needing to be saved but here we are...I could also have done without the constant sexualisation of female characters in situation that are really not calling for that right now, but it's a japanese game and I'm not the usual target group so whatever.
Stuff like that took me out of the game because it didn't fit it's serious tone.

I also had quite to laugh at the evil motive of our main antagonist. When you get there, you know what I mean. It's like - I was afraid of her for a second and then THAT happened I was like "...all of this....so you could...do that....? You could have gotten that WAY easier, girl..."

So that didn't work for me and kinda ruined the ending a bit. :/ I mean: she was still a thread but she wanted was....well....at least it was unique! Never seen THAT motive I think! :/

I also liked the limited cast! At least when it comes to your party. That also helps to flesh out these characters and the world they and the protag live in. I got the feeling that this character had a life with friends and family before he got dropped into this shit.

This has of course a lot to do with him not suffering from amnesia like in "Death Mark" but even after that protag got his memory back, he never felt that real to me.

Anyway. Still a good game with too much naked flesh when it should have been spooky and a weird ending.

Ok, there's only so many chopped-up women I can stomach without thinking the game has an issue. Even though they always killed one and the same person. Kinda makes it worse though.

The game has its charms with weird 2D-sequences, the OST, the sometimes funny dialogue and the weird storybooks you find in-game.

And even though the game seems to be self-aware of its own pulpiness, it's not aware of other things it did, that I really hated: sexualizing, killing, and - third time's the charm - CHOPPING UP the main female character. I get storywise why - but that story was a choice Suda51 made and that I had to play through to move on in this game.

There's too much of the old "woman dies so the man gets something to do" going on for me, which is why I didn't finish it.
Got to the last bit of the game and called it quits then.
Looking up the ending I'm glad I did.

Okay this was something...let's go through the thing that might bother some people:

The horror of the game really comes from HOW the patients get treated and not from how mentally ill people are ~ScArY aND WEirD~.
The game punches up, not down. That's a rare one for horror games. :/ Sadly.

If you need a list of the triggers, you can find one in the my review of the 2020 edition of the game. It's marked as a spoiler review. This here is the non-spoilery one. :)

This game hits harder because it's not a fantasy horror game like Evil Within or Clock Tower or one that uses it's horror theme to talk about real-life topics (Silent Hill 2, The Cat Lady). This is the horror people have suffered through and ARE still suffering through. For me, that just hit harder.

Story is a bit confusing but I think I got it in the end. ;) Just made it engaging for me not to know for a long time what happened to whom, when, and why.
Emphasizing with the characters was easy thanks to the first-person narrator and the pieces of information that the game sprinkles around the building for the player to find. Not a lot lot of music in here but when it hits it hits hard.

It's an engaging game for a calm day when you are in a good mood for everyone who has the stomach for real-life horror.

Still prefer this one to OoT. It just feels...rounder? I loved the world, the characters the sidequests...and just had the feeling there was more to do for me than in OoT.

The eerie atmosphere and the way sidestores would have different dialogue or outcome depending on what you did and WHEN you did it is still something that makes it stand out among the Zelda games. I cared for these weirdos. Even when they were annoying idiots and even though someone should have called PETA on Link for RIDING A FOAL but whatever.
Rolling around as a goron was way more fun anyway.

You also get to watch dog races and even hear the little buggers talk if you have the right mask.

Other fun activity is raising chickens by making them join your military march band for a minute and preventing cow theft by shooting aliens with arrows.

BOY, did want to love this game!

But you can't love a soulless husk. The character dynamic doesn't work for me because they barely interact with each other without the MC prompting it. It's like they only hang out with each other because of me and not because they found some friends along the way straight into hell.

The dissonance between what the game tells my storywise about blondie (what's her name? already forgot) and how they presented her in the game gave me an immense whiplash. The fact the guy 'subtly' tried to make her the MC's main love interest also pissed me off. In general, are the interactions with the women in the game and the MC just a bit off for me.

The Game has style, a killer OST, neat gameplay - but the story is a weird clusterfuck that just dumps the solution to the main puzzle on me in a sequence of one and a half hours without giving me really the possibility to solve it myself. Sure, I got hints. But they were meaningless because too much vital information just wasn't given to me.

I get that they didn't want anyone to find out what was going on bc people figured out who the killer was in Persona 4 way too fast. But I think persona 5 tried to be clever way too hard.

I had fun playing it. But I won't replay it.
Too bad. It really IS the prettiest one of the persona series. :/

Holy cultural appropriation, Batman!

Really felt uncomfortable with the depiction of the Native Americans and I don't think that a sombrero-wearing, heartthrob-musician-Mexican guy is the best you can do in terms of characterization, my dear Shadow Hearts...!

The weakest of the trilogy but the gameplay is fun at least. I found Lady and Killer to be far more interesting and that is not a good look on me and/or the game. Maybe it's because they are color-coded.

Nice soundtrack again, though.

Also, you have a fat mafia cat in your team. And a gothic-lolita-vampire.
I preferred the cat.

The game won me over when the first village I encountered was inhabited by cannibals.

It made me wary when the cannibal kids that greeted me talked about eating Alice and made it sound waaay to sexual.
It's a JRPG so yeah, this shit happens. :/

Otherwise I really liked the story and especially liked the ring-system. Soundtrack was weird but nice, too!

One of the rare games that has a heart. The characters are weird and the same goes for the story and sure the gameplay is shitty and the graphics to run for but I was actually interested in what was happening to the characters and felt for them like I rarely do.

The game stayed with me after finishing it. I don't get that so often. So yeah, awesome.

Also, the dog gets petted and is plot relevant. That'S also nice.

I mean - it's true: this game is not perfect.

But with every minute that I played it, it practically oozed with the love the devs had for the lore and the story. Between the Uncanny and old fashioned Lovecraftian horror, lie a bunch of weird characters with their own little lives and sorrows being absolutely one with the history of the place they live.

There was a reason for most folks ignoring the monsters, there were cases of human and monster clashing, there were weird cult guys, weird fish people and even the gorilla man had an in-game-reason as to why he was a gorilla man.

The soundtrack remained subtle but always fitting, esp. with the overall theme of a city drowning in water.

I was not a fan of the underwater-bits but those don't take a lot of room so it's fine.

I could have done without the combat system and found it to be wonky most times but this is also something I - personally - gladly deal with, if I get this type of experience out of it.

I also found it to be refreshing that the main character just didn't give a fuck from the very beginning about anything unless he got paid for it. This "fuck this shit" attitude made sense to me - the guy needs money and has enough baggage on his own that he REALLY doesn't need anyone else's - but he wasn't heartless.

Depending on the answers the player gives, he's between a "devil may care" and "jerk with a heard of gold" attitude. He doesn't really talk about his own demons but what he talks about is enough to get a good impression of it.

I also liked the stories in the mini-quests that basically play out in diary entries or letters only. They were a nice touch and I think the fact that they left a lot to the imagination, they were sometimes creepier than the bigger sidequests.

I did not enjoy what happened to the dog! :/ And so will no one else who reacts sensitively to animal deaths. Just a warning.

Another aspeckt that I liked was about the conclusions you make at the end of each case. There are always two of them and it is (as far as I remember) never stated which one is the "right" one.

Save those guys who are infected with madness - everyone around them goes mad too. Good job. Not.

Leave them where you found them - they starve to death and that's shitty too. :/

There are better examples of this but that would mean I get too spoilery.

You also have to actually use the map and find buildings and streets by yourself. Can't remember the last time a game had this much trust in me. :D
It shouldn't have done that. I was lost a lot. But that's just my dumb ass I guess. shrug

Anyway, I really loved the game. I think frogware threw a very solid piece of horror on the market that is a good cross between psychological and body horror.
Esp. the cutscenes of the protags nightmare visions were a treat for me!

P.S: The game lacks a satisfying ending. That sucked. :(

!!!YOU CAN POSSESS A CAT AND RUN AROUND MEWING INCESSANTLY AT EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE!!!

GAME OF THE YEAR!

Anyway, it was a decent enough game with a boring protag, decent side characters and game play that was engaging enough but sometimes frustrating.
Has a few actually scary moments but those rarely happen in the main plot.