Before I begin my one-size-fits-all bitching and moaning, I would like to give Nintendo my sincerest gratitude in sacrificing this game upon their altars of public relations. I seriously could not imagine trying to play this game, knowing that real world is happening with it's cartoonish depictions. I'm sure Activision is more than willing to do the same for all their Call of Duty games, they could learn a thing or two from them. Since the game has finally released, I assume every war is now over. What a relief! Now I can game with peace of mind!

The constant delay gave me more than enough time to get over my initial shock of them remembering that this series once existed, and start bringing myself back on the level and stuff my inner fangirl back into their hole. The new artstyle for this game? Way too clean, I know it's WayForward's typical style, but I was never the hugest fan of it. Some COs like Lash look cute, but others just look drab. This isn't helped by the overly smooth animation for their in-battle portraits that look insanely cheap to me, it feels like I'm watching a bunch of vtubers in a multiplayer game. This is obviously pretty apples, oranges and melons. I'm sure some enjoy this new art style, but that's completely minor in the grand scheme of things, I would like to talk about the actual in-game graphics.

They are shit.

Awful. The most PepsiCo-sponsored corporate looking mobile 3D that looks tailor-made to run on the most budget cellphone you could imagine. I get that the Switch may as well be a shitty budget cellphone in comparison to my PC rig or the PS5/Series X, but surely you could've done better. It could be because it's hard to duplicate the original game's colorful spritework and backdrops that were created with the brightness of the GBA in mind to a more modern system with stock polygons, but I don't get why this unimpressive-looking mess also apparently runs at uneven frame rates. It clashes with the portraits of the COs, and this difference makes it even more noticeable. This is beyond my usual "sprites > polygons" bullshit when it comes to remakes, there's a clear winner and loser in this affair.

I know I'm going on purely about the visuals, but that's always the biggest change when these dreadful remakes pop up. If it looks shit compared to the original, then I don't care about the QoL improvements. It's great that they are there, but zooming out the map to see even more of the utterly dull landscape of this does little to excite me. I don't always have this attitude with remakes, I can be less mean-spirited. The Spyro Reignited Trilogy managed to survive my wrath despite it's glitches, and I think that speaks for itself enough considering my unspeakable adoration for the originals. A good touch could give an old game a new look for modern hardware that's pleasing for everyone, and this doesn't do it for me.

It's poop, I'm afraid. 💅

I would like to also bring up another thing, the price. It is outrageously rare that I would ever bring this up. I don't consider myself to be made of gold bars and pirate treasure, nor am I starving in the back of a McDonalds parking lot, but I know when something is fucked up. A few months ago the Metroid Prime Remaster was released, it was forty didgeridoos. I consider that game a nice glow up of a Gamecube classic despite it still being a bit much, this is a sixty didgeridoo mixed bag of opinions of two GBA titles that are very obviously running off the same rom file.[Biggest tell is AW1 Olaf losing his chair and Sturm no longer looking like Captain Snifit] I haven't had this feeling like I was about to be mugged since the Space Invaders Invincible Collection dropped, and attempted to put me into bankruptcy. It's way too much, you know the alternative. A sad day when your pricing approaches breathing distance of current-gen Taito re-releases.

If you're still interested, cool. The QoL will surely be nice, since underneath the Great Value presentation are still the skeletons of the gameplay by Intelligent Systems. However I consider this to be a mockery, and I no longer wish it to be in my kingdom. If WayBackward were gonna take up the reins, then they should've just done a new game [and it probably would've smelled even worse]. Maybe WayForward should've just made their way forward into a bottomless pit, because apparently their involvement would've made me angry regardless. I'm just hoping this remaster existing doesn't equip their GBA workers with the slow block when it comes to bringing the originals to NSO.[you know it's gonna be 2026 by that point]

I hope Arin Hanson accidentally bites into the world's most sour lemon, and has his mouth perpetually closed shut for the rest of his life.

The worst one, apparently! Gaiden is undoubtedly a weird game and a black sheep, but I'd be very hard pressed to call it bad, or without merits. In fact, Gaiden is actually really cool, and many of its issues are grossly overblown. Just like with FE7, I feel that just because a bunch of fetubers have said it's bad, or pointed out its issues, it's become the general consensus, and in Gaiden's case I personally doubt many of its detractors have even played it because of its infamy. I don't blame them - a clunky, slow, Famicom SRPG with poor balancing and bad map design doesn't exactly sound fun, and it certainly seems like perfect punching bag material, but believe me when I say this; these are not egregious enough to make Gaiden unenjoyable, at least to me. If you want a tldr, I typed up my thoughts in a previous review, which was admittedly very passive aggressive and rude, which I apologise for. I just get heated trying to defend games I like, I suppose. But yeah, Gaiden is actually cool and you're all wrong. (Not really. All opinions are valid but I do heavily disagree with the negative sentiment this game has garnered.)

Gaiden is actually really impressive for a Famicom game of the time. Having a multi-faceted narrative with two ongoing, playable routes is probably the biggest part of Gaiden's identity, and I can't think of any other games from the time that dared to try this, at least within the realm of SRPGs and JRPGs. The world map is also surprisingly detailed, always fully visible, and fully traversible from top to bottom, albeit on a fixed path. I never saw any sprites flicker, and the battle animations are nothing short of eye-candy. I really like some of the attention to detail too, like having Alm and Celica's portraits change slightly on promotion, or the final boss' battle sprite completely changing when weakened. Not to mention the unique animation Alm gets for landing the finishing blow. That shield toss gives me chills and I don't think any other NES game has ever made me feel that.

Although I already knew the gist of Gaiden's narrative, having already played Echoes, I still think it's worth pointing out how good it is, especially by NES standards. What starts off as spearheading an uprising against a corrupt general spirals into the conquest of an entire nation, and wrestling control of the world from Gods back into the hands of humans. If you know me, that last bit is one of my favourite tropes in any form of media, and I think this might be one of the first ever examples of it - so good on Gaiden for starting the trend.

Here comes the hard part, though. Addressing Gaiden's biggest issues is difficult. The common complaints aren't totally unfounded, but they're definitely exaggerated. I guess I can try by getting the most notorious out of the way; the map design.

Gaiden map design is....weird. I don't think it's necessarily bad though. There're lots of open areas, and terrain bonuses are a bit excessive. Map layouts are reused, and some are questionably designed, but it never felt unfair, or unfun, which are probably two biggest contributors to what makes a map "badly designed", at least for me. Obviously this is entirely down to personal opinion. I won't deny some maps could've definitely pissed me off in another timeline, though, like some of Celica's lategame bog maps, or Nuibaba's mansion on Alm's side, but they just didn't annoy me too much, and maps like these are the exception, not the rule. And guys, please stop acting like Celica's route is all boat maps when it only makes up three of like, godknows how many total possible individual encounters there are on her route. Seriously though, Gaiden map design is fine.

"But Gaiden is grindy! The XP payouts suck and you're better off playing on easy mode."

In all of my time playing Gaiden, I only stopped once to grind, and it was right before the point of no return on Celica's route to give a few units that nudge they needed to get their promotions...which I didn't even end up using on the final map. So ultimately, no. Gaiden is very beatable without grinding. Consider that most actions reward your whole party experience, and that's a lot more exp that your units are getting than you realise, even if it initially seems like very little. And before you say grinding is slow in Gaiden, that couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, it's faster than just about any contemporary RPG of the time. The game gives you very easy access to infinite mummy encounters on both routes (maybe to Celica's route's detriment because those graveyard tiles always initiate an encounter) that are guaranteed to give your characters boatloads of experience and in many cases a flat 100 xp.

Moving on to level ups and growth rates; growth rates being low is also a very deliberate design choice. They're there to add variety to playthroughs, and make some units end up potentially better or worse than others, as per traditional Fire Emblem's design philosophy, but only marginally in Gaiden, since promotions automatically bump stats up to class bases if they're lower, as opposed to providing a fixed increase to stats like other games in the series. This means that, actually unlike most FE games, Gaiden has a surprisingly balanced cast. I actually like this approach. It's definitely in line with Gaiden's whole idea of being an SRPG with traditional RPG elements baked in, given this incentivises just levelling your characters instead of relying on random variables, and, again, it makes for a mostly balanced cast. There's no doubt that dread fighters and falcoknights are by far the best promotions, but it does mean that everyone is viable if you invest in them. Regarding characters who don't promote until very late though, like Mae and Delthea, they don't even need the promotion. Being able to use Aura is more than enough. Seriously, everyone in Gaiden gets a chance to shine. Maybe some less than others, though, because of bases or stats that are unchanged by promotions. cough Clive.

"Witches being able to warp to your units is unfair!"

Ok, so, don't count me on this, but I heard that the witch enemy ai was intentionally made to be really stupid and to not be able gang up on your units. Not something I can actually verify, but I think anyone who has played gaiden can safely say that witches are stupid and very rarely actually do anything that could be anything considered remotely strategically beneficial. It didn't happen to me, but I dunno, if it does, Gaiden is one of the few FE games that gives you the luxury of reviving dead characters. Not once, mind you. Up to six times. Three per route, though characters who die on either route can be revived and brought over to the other. Silk seems to be the most common use of this, given warp utility is invaluable and I can't blame people for wanting to skip more than just the maps on Alm's side. Going back on map design though, I think the game gives you two extremely good, high move, terrain ignoring fliers on Celica's route for a reason. Three if you're willing to feed kills to Est for a bit. Her bases are actually pretty respectable.

(Protip, by the way, for people who've decided to read this far - you deserve it: Once you get to chapter 4, do all of Celica's route's stuff until you unlock Alm's promotion, transfer the angel ring over to Alm. Level up Alm a bunch in the ensuing maps thanks to his inflated exp gain and once you get to Nuibaba's mansion, just warp him in on a heal tile and pray he kills Nuibaba with a bow before they can land Medusa. Once they're gone you've practically beaten the chapter, and trivialised one of the most infamous FE maps in the franchise's history. You can reuse this same strategy for the final map, if you keep the angel ring on him long enough. Those boosted stat gains will likely remove any need for the regal sword. Just substitute using a bow for the Falchion, obviously, since it's required to beat the game not counting using nosferatu.)

"But Gaiden is too slow!"

I have genuinely nothing to say other than; "what did you expect when booting up a famicom SRPG"? Of course it's going to be slow, and clunkier than what you're accustomed to. The key factor, I feel, that will decide whether or not you like Gaiden, is your mindset. If you go in thinking it's going to suck, because of its slowness, or stiff controls, or anything else, your brain's just going to keep honing in on those thoughts, and you'll never be able to adapt. Gaiden's controls and speed are something I was able to get used to, and I'm not immune to losing my patience over old SRPGs, or JRPGs, or anything, either.
If it helps, turn off animations. I got through the whole game with animations turned off and only used fastforward maybe a handful of times.

So, is Gaiden better than Echoes? Of course not. The big question though, is "Is Gaiden worth playing?"

Yes. The answer is yes. Form your own opinions, please, I'm begging you. Stop believing word of mouth and try things for yourself before speaking of them as if they're gospel.

What a load of shit, if I could give 0 stars I would. I only liked some of the character interactions, the story was stupid and had no substance. I don't see how it can be the ending to a trilogy when its a prequel to a game that leaves the player with more questions than answers. Xenoblade 1 didn't even leave you with questions that really needed to be answered, it was a complete story that didn't need a franchise tacked onto it. Games like this are what ruin the image of Xenoblade. Additionally, nothing was explained outside of lore dump monologues that were hard to keep up with, and the characters are shallow husks with little emotion. The only redeeming factor regarding characters were Shulk and Rex.

an impressive study on what makes yakuza tick. crosses a line that the other ps3 titles wouldn’t dare to even tread near. each character is pushed to their absolute limits, placing them under a stern spotlight that shakes the audience’s hearts incessantly. its length is often criticized but realistically demonstrates what a pure, fully thought-out yakuza experience looks like. every part is given their own respective time to shine in full.

where yakuza 5 succeeds is not in the grandiose scope of its overarching narrative (though i do like it better than the previous two titles), rather in the intimate character moments - kiryu’s stoicism against mayumi’s passion, saejima intently conversing with his cellmate recluses, park & haruka’s heart-to-hearts, shinada clashing with familiar faces from yesteryear - the series’ writing is at its peak here. there’s some real thought provoking analysis on each of our protagonists. truly feels like the whole team gave it their all in coordinating the entire experience to insure it felt balanced and emotionally rousing. this is the ultimate blend of every strength this series holds. and fortunately it doesn’t feature a climax that puts the entire narrative’s quality into question.

some other positives i can’t highlight enough would be the gameplay and sheer scope of everything. the combat is some of the most fun i’ve had since 2; i especially enjoy the frequent brawls filled with massive clusters of enemies. i thought they were formidable tests of your skills, almost feeling like a musou at points with how it demands precise spacial awareness to minimize damage taken. wandering around the new and old recontextualized cities in the new engine was just as immersive as it was for me when i sank into 1 & 2’s thick metropolises. something about them here feels more polished than in 3 or 4.

nothing gets left out, nothing is undercooked, and most importantly everything is impactful. i absolutely love the finale and how it wraps up everyone’s characters. kiryu’s final moments are some bone-chilling stuff. yakuza 5 is the quintessential embodiment of what this series stands for.

Understands that the true Dark World is adulthood and that Time will mold us all into adults, whether we want it to or not. Collect your spiritual trinkets if you want some illusion of choice, but those in charge are pulling up the strings of your playpen from the shadows. Seven years will pass and the apocalypse will arrive with droughts and flames and frozen wastes, the leaders and heroes of youth rendered useless against the unstoppable forces of evil, leaving you to pick up the pieces. Masterpiece. You had to be there. Each playthrough allows you to see your past gaming selves as Young Link; you now naively see yourself as the more capable and wise Adult Link who is too embarrassed to use the boomerang. A Nintendo game that forces you to grapple with mortality and innocence and the cycle of fathers and sons in ways that grim Atlus JRPGs about demons could only dream of. Godlike!!! Majora's Mask stans will talk about their little stories that they write down in their little bomberman notebook or whatever, but it was all in here too - you just didn't have a checklist or trinkets to reward you for engaging with the material. Gameplay is still rock solid (on Nintendo's first try!!), but you come to this thing for mood, atmosphere, text, subtext. OCARINA OF TIME BABY

among the releases of established (well, at the time) portable gaming franchises such as professor layton, yokai watch and inazuma eleven, videogame developer level-5 snuck in a tiny little innocent game by the name of weapon shop de omasse. the game is part of a compilation of small games developed by level-5 in collaboration with several artists of the gaming industry, or not, titled guild01. this game in particular was born and written by an outsider of the industry, comedian yoshiyuki hirai. it is the realization of one of the many realizations that come to a player's mind when playing through one’s typical role-playing game, that is: 'what if i played as the xxx npc?', where xxx in this case refers to 'blacksmith'. the project develops from this basic premise into trying to become a full-fledged game. it doesn't truly reach that status.

the game could be neatly divided into three parts: a shop management system, where you have to sustain your smithing efforts through purchasing the necessary materials; then a smithing rhythm minigame, where weapons are created in order to be rented by rhytmically molding a slab of iron until it achieves the desired shape; and lastly a tangential role-playing game, that you assist in by renting appropriate weapons to the various characters that need them, who you only observe from a distance through the grindcast, a vague technological device embedded into all forged weapons that captures the dialogue spoken by characters during their quests, showing it in text form in a way reminiscing social media feeds.

what bugs me the most is how disconnected the three feel from each other. the items that go into the forging process are frankly unimportant and count exactly as much as the odd fodder trinkets in role-playing games. the grindcast is the kind of solution a designer would come up with in a brainstorming session i would assume. it is one of those extremely natural, and extremely boring, solutions that somehow ended up as a main game feature because nobody found anything else more interesting to develop. first because the game does not have the balls to go all in on being a blacksmith-based videogame. second because the grindcast feed is continuously updated but only shows messages as a list and continues to be updated for the most part live, thus even during parts of the game where your concentration is required elsewhere, such as during smithing(!), you are likely to miss parts of it, defeating its purpose.

i cannot avoid thinking how these game must have garnered 2 or 3 very enthusiastic meetings among the main representatives of the development process, and then anything past that was followed by a complete deflation of ideas. hirai's writing aims at comedy by playing on common role-playing game tropes. some it tries to play straight and some it tries to subvert, and frankly all of them were unimpressive. one thing seemingly impressed me in the overall storytelling was how most stories seemed to revolve around this magical item, i think it was called the revival herb, which was tied to the evil lord. well, that whole multifaceted narrative goes simply nowhere. in line with the lack of creativity theory, one of the most bizzarre developments in the game for me was how at roughly halfway through the game we are introduced to elemental weaknesses. there was absolutely no need for this. there is already a rock-paper-scissor mechanic through certain weapon characteristics, stacking another weakness mechanic (along with status effects!) so long into the game on top of it all is devastating, and a key proof i got that the team ran out of ideas early.

what starts off as a fun-to-funny experience in the first hour is then followed by an average of 9 hours of constant repetition of that same initial gameloop, ad infinitum. in fact, the game seems to achieve some level of self-consciousness when, after you beat the final boss with every single ‘hero’ at disposal, you are thrust into an infinite final boss mode! so hey, if you are into this game, then you can play it to your heart’s content. i mentioned at the beginning that this game was 'innocent'. well, yes. if this game ever crosses your path, you look at it, smile, and then walk away, forgetting ever after that you even had the encounter in the first place.

Artstyle, humor, environments, shrines, sailing through lakes and rivers with a bowl, etc; all were enjoyable for me. This game has neat moments like when you try to fish that giant koi and it drags you around a flooded village. In these areas, the game feels solid and polished, so far so good.

However, I was expecting this to be a game big on stealth (ninjas and all that), but it isn't, at all. There's even a dedicated sneak button that I rarely used. So you have to fight aggressively if you want to actually have some fun with this game (and level up your character), since you will end up getting caught easily by all the samurai on the whole damn map at the same time anyways. Turning into animals is cute and all but samurai still spot you easily if you get even remotely close, and most animals are incredibly slow so not really an option for exploration as maps are huge.

And, there were too many spells and playable characters cluttering things up. You don't need to use any characters besides the main one and the hammer dude (for bear samurai). The game doesn't challenge you with any difficult or interesting enemies or scenarios to justify the huge amount of options.

Encountering the exact same squad of samurai for the 100th time gets old really really fast, no matter how many items or spells or characters or gimmicks you throw at it. I didn't enjoy any of that, I think most levels could've been scrapped entirely to have a more quick but focused progression. Some levels just drag on and on and on and it made me want to just drop the game and never play again a couple times. I didn't dislike boss encounters as I found the bosses themselves to be creative, however you beat all of them with quick time events except the last one (at least)

If they focused on maybe 2 characters only and polished up the enemies, stealth and mechanics (more types of samurai, all characters can use a few spells exclusive to each one, players are able to set up elaborate traps for samurai, catch them through tall weeds one by one, create mirages, turn dangerous wild animals against them, etc) it would've been a good game worth remembering.

As it stands, the game left me feeling lukewarm on some areas, and frustrated and disappointed in all others. I was expecting something much more special mechanic and stealth-wise when I catched a glimpse of this game on youtube years and years ago.

I get many people played it and loved it back in the day, but right now, I don't recommend it at all.

Miss a beat in Hi-fi Rush and Chai will attack on beat anyway. It’s probably unreasonable to expect it to punish this sort of thing in the same ways that other rhythm action hybrids like Patapon, Metal Hellsinger or Cadence of Hyrule do, because it’s so notable in part specifically for being so different from everything else, but there’s being different and then there’s being disincentivisingly handholdy. It’s a symptom of a larger problem – Hi-fi Rush seems almost afraid of allowing the player to fail.

With a scarce few exceptions like one of the final boss’ more belligerent attacks, the contrast between proper timing and mistiming in Hi-fi Rush isn’t success versus failure, it’s success versus negligibly less success. It’s true that enough mistimed attacks can detract from your final rank, but this is inconsistent with how assist attacks contribute to your score despite not requiring any timing at all (exacerbated by their charitable cooldowns), as does an offbeat jump if it ‘avoids’ an enemy’s attack that was nowhere near you anyhow, and the penalty’s so minor it’s hard to notice. Rhythm Master difficulty goes some way toward assuaging all this by giving you an immediate game over if your rhythm meter falls below C, but it’s not hugely impactful because of the aforementioned inconsistencies, while the fact that it’s only available after beating the game also makes the common action game mantra of “the first playthrough is the tutorial” feel unfortunately literal.

As another example of this, Hi-fi Rush affords the player a generous helping of attack magnetism, or whatever you prefer to call the melee equivalent of aim assist that’s particularly common in western action games. Chai’s mobility is so rigid that I imagine the designers may have felt the absence of this might’ve led to a frustrating amount of dropped combos. Even still, it’s at best unnecessary given that Chai already has an equivalent of Nero’s Snatch from DMC4 & 5, and at worst a net negative for how it diminishes positioning. It doesn’t stop Hi-fi Rush from getting better as you yourself do, like any other worthwhile action game, but being able to both feel and see the developers artificially nudging things in your favour like this does cheapen the appeal of getting to grips with what is, in the grand scheme of things, quite a cool combat system.

Apparent influences from other action games, like its equivalent of Astral Chain & Bayonetta 3’s wink attacks, lend themselves naturally to the combat’s rhythm-based formula and complement the game’s lovely presentation well. Environmental doodads bounce to the beat like in Metal Hellsinger, diegetically communicating helpful information to the player not only in terms of timing but also because enemies always attack to the beat, which ensures consistency on their part (albeit hampering their ability to surprise you). Another caveat to the combat’s strengths, though, is that there isn’t really enough of it, at least until you unlock Rhythm Tower i.e. the Bloody Palace analogue.

Most levels in Hi-fi Rush are very long by action game standards and a hefty proportion of nearly all of them consists of platforming segments. This sounds inoffensive in a vacuum, particularly for a genre in which “gimmick” seems to be a dirty word in most people’s minds, until the stiffness of Chai’s movement and the absence of a proper bossfight for two or three entire chapters in the game’s midsection make it apparent how drawn-out these sections often are. The latter feels especially deflating because the bosses that are here are of a really high standard, being diverse both visually and mechanically, with a huge amount of effort and artistry gone into even just the freezeframes in their introduction cutscenes. I’d much rather have had a couple more of them than be Letz Shaked twice in a row.

What makes it feel especially disappointing to be part of the internet’s propensity for contrarian armchair criticism, aside from the fact that Hi-fi Rush couldn’t be any more up my street conceptually, is that it isn’t a game that deserves to be ragged on like this. At the end of the day, this is a new IP in an historically niche genre that’s feature-complete out of the box, bereft of tonal carcinogens like irony or cynicism, stuffed with substantial post-game unlocks and has Korsica in it. It’s just also one which is eclipsed several times over in depth, variety, pacing and general well-consideredness by any number of other action games both modern and from the period it’s a love letter to, which don’t tend to lack for sincerity, charm or bonus content in the first place.

Is it funny, deserving of success and easy to recommend to anyone interested in action games despite this? Yup. Is it the best action game ever, as suggested by its average rating here (at the time of writing) and elsewhere? That's kind of wild. I’m potentially open to the idea that Hi-fi Rush is in the top seven or so best games that Masaaki Yamada has worked on.

More firmly, I’m genuinely delighted that Tango’s thrown its hat into the action game ring and that doing so’s rewarded its clearly, transparently talented staff with their most unambiguous success so far. I’d love even more to be able to speak of them in the same vein as Capcom or Platinum or Team Ninja who, barring one or two semi-recent and enormously overemphasised missteps apiece, have long comprised a reliable triumvirate of quality action experiences which light up my frontal lobe in a way few other developers can. How often I found myself smiling during Hi-fi Rush’s cutscenes and character interactions versus actually playing the game means that I can’t yet, but it’s still promising enough to be indicative of their potential to someday join them on stage as one of the action genre’s rockstars.