Beaten in spirit, not technically (put a pin in that).

As a remaster, barebones. As an original Xbox mecha game with proto-Armored Core 4 controls? Pretty damn fun.

It has some poorly explained mechanics (how investment works isn't really explained in an understandable way) but the core gameplay of fuckin up shit is just enjoyable on such a primal level.

It has some wild difficulty spikes (battleship level and Liberty Island level say hello) but once you have two of the top-tier energy chainguns you can just farm Arizona for an hour and never need to worry about money again.

The writing and voice acting are top tier kitsch, with everyone clearly enjoying their ridiculous lines. Especially the actor for Richard Hawk who is loving every second of playing an over-the-top villain.

The musical score is great, with the main two contributors being FROM's own Kota Hoshino supplying some nice rock jams and contractor Shohei Tsuchiya doing most of the soundtrack. Tsuchiya in particular does all or the majority of the unlockable tracks which are almost all bangers. "Boku no Moku" especially.

Back to the pin. I say beaten in spirit because I basically got to the end. However both times I was either close to finishing Liberty Island, something bad happened. First my computer's hard drive died completely. Then the PS4 kept crashing on victory. My copy is clearly cursed, and I dare not tempt fate.

In closing, I will leave you with one of the strongest quotes I've seen in a piece of fiction recently, from the ending to the Chicago level of this very game:

"I looked up, and saw God. And you know what?

"God is made of steel."

When it works, it works gangbusters and feels incredible to play. When it doesn't work it's a slog and is incredibly frustrating.

The action is a near-perfect "combat as puzzle" FPS (the machine gun is definitely overturned for this tho, it fucks Revenants, Mancubi, and brain spiders). The platforming surrounding it...uh its fine. The second to last level has some miserable, unfun platforming.

Their valiant attempt to make weapon mods more useful doesn't work as most still have one superior mod. The standard shottie is the only one to really avoid this since bomb and auto are good, but the rifle's scope is better than missiles, mobile turret is best on chaingun, etc.

The Unmakyr, your reward for clearing all the Slayer Gates isn't terribly useful, and I found the BFG outclassed it constantly.

It has one leg up story-wise from 2016 and that's "I'm not trapped in a shitty Half-Life 2-ass 'IMMURSHEV' talky scene and I can skip almost every cinematic". Which I did.

I was going to give it 3 stars but to be quite honest, it's 3 or 4 hours too long and those last two bosses are fucking AWFUL. The penultimate boss has SIX FUCKING HEALTHBARS. It's basically a gimmick fight but until you realize the rifle scope is, as always, idiotically strong, it's awful. And still is even with that knowledge.

The final boss also sucks because it takes forever to do meaningful damage especially when you have to keep running away to refresh health or ammo. This sequence has the blessed courtesy of giving you basically infinite Crucible and gas cans so it's not hard. Just long, tedious and boring.

The first 8 to 10 hours were fun as hell but after that I started chafing against the game's rigidity and overlong nature.

In conclusion, iD shouldn't have fucked over Mick Gordon. Thank you for reading my essay I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

EDIT: Also why was "see mission objectives" mapped to a button on controller? Why do you ever need to see that in-game? There's zero depth to the objectives, you kill or find macguffins to continue to the next part of the game this ain't Goldeneye with a dozen optional objectives

I'm torn. This has some of the moment to moment funnest gameplay in the series. It also has flatout the worst story. It also has a million setpieces of mixed quality.

You can tell Kaimya & Co. took a lot of stuff from Scalebound to use here and I think that stuff works great! The various Demon Slaves are really fun (with a few exceptions), and the Masquerade system also opens a lot of neat opportunities.

Viola the newcomer is fun but very limited. Her skill tree can be maxed really quickly & the game's insistence on giving every weapon a traversal option with a universal input of R x2 or Fwd+R while putting her main mechanic of parrying on the same button is madness. Her variation on the Demon Slave system felt worse overall as well.

The many setpieces are mixed - the first arc in Japan with like 5 goddamn chase setpieces was awful but later ones like the Queen Butterfly or the Paris shmup sequence were great. I just wish there were maybe....15% less of em.

The multiple AU Bayonettas all have pretty cool looks (that you can unlock ofc). I will say the Chinese Warlord costume was the worst. Far too busy.

The Jeanne chapters were... a thing. I didn't hate them. I didn't like them. I still don't understand, like, a lot of the gimmicks.

I won't get into specifics of the story but my main complaints could be summarized as "one of the most nothing villains possibly ever" and "the mechanics the entire story are based on have almost zero explanation". I also have qualms with it wanting me to be emotionally invested in certain things I had no reason to be.

In conclusion I'm glad we're now 3 for 3 on Bayonetta games being super fun but wildly inconsistent in terms of weird things that hurt the experience.

whatever complaints i have are incredibly minor

great game. the story recontextualizes itself consistently, the combat (while weirdly balanced & easy to break) is fun as hell.

i will say the big orb robots are pretty boring and goddamn does the game love boss'ing them up. i wish the guy with the long arms was used more instead.

also i wish the spears had their twirls used in more than just showy animation and actually in attacks because games where you use spears only to thrust make me sad. give me dynasty warriors shit with em i wanna feel like lu bu

Not bad. It's a serviceable PS2 arena fighter that recreates a handful of fights from the related TV shows, complete with the same gimmicks Garo and the antagonistic Horrors have.

It also has modes where you play Silver Knight Zero (which is just the story mode with Zero instead of Garo), a mode where you play Dark Knight Barago and learn abilities and level up, and a weird endless runner kind of mode where you ride your spirit horse Gouten and slaughter baddies.

Is it worth the $100+ you'll spend on it? No but I'm a weird obsessive so I did it anyway. If you must play the only Garo game that isn't throwaway mobage trash, emulate it.

"Completed" in the sense I finished the story for ARR.

The story was dull. The gameplay was fun (I already like Xenoblade so the jump to real MMO wasn't hard). I felt bad and awkward every time I did dungeons with pubs. Nobody was ever upset with me, even when I accidently turned off my Tank aura or when I kept accidentally pulling too many mobs.

I need to sit down & buckle thru the rest of the content between ARR and Heavensward to get to the good things I hear exist.

I wrote a longer review but phones are shit and it reloaded and I lost everything but I had a really good joke in the works so I'll say it has cool premise, nice character art, god-tier music, I love that Keita Amemiya was allowed to make weird redesigns of the archangel squad filtered through his more abstract "Horrors in Garo" mode.

Anyway my joke was that I'd like the game better if I hadn't been forced into Law Route because I forgot that when the Blood Moon is in alignment with Galaticamaru, all of the Bushido Blaster Buster Captain's ki signatures are activated and become self-aware, which meant I wasn't allowed to have rights anymore according to Michael. Or Raphael. Or Uriel. Or whoever I was working for in Law.

A Kamen Rider artist drew some demons so me like ooga

Having had much time to think, to play other SMT, to dwell on the worlds of man and demon -- this was something of a disappointment.

The narrative and characters were paper-thin to the point they weren't enjoyable. "Ah but these games are atmosphere and themes!" Yeah but the two immediate comparisons to this I'd make - Nocturne and IV - have something going on in the plot and a cast that at least have the illusion of change. The story here is almost non-existent - join a thinly sketched anti-demon group, fight demons, people have poorly defined turns in their arcs (his hat says SUCKER but he takes it off so he isn't a sucker anymore!!!!!!) It feels less like experiencing a story and more like reading a book report written by someone who only read the cliff notes.

The soundtrack is superb - can Kozuka miss even once? Goddamn - and the character designs, demon designs- all the aesthetic shit hits. I'll even forgive the fact the maps are all palette swaps. Tho they do all have a different central gimmick for exploring - still palette swaps!

The dungeons - all 3 of em! - are all bad for different reasons. The first is just dull. The second has one idea. It isn't executed well at all, and by the time it feels like they figured out how to set up puzzles with it - its over. The third combines both flavors and adds an extra bit of spice by making rooms with enemy encounters the same way I made them in Timesplitters 2 on Xbox. Sloppily.

I'm also growing increasingly weary of how mainline has basically stagnated with combat. Press Turn was cool in Nocturne but all the interesting iterations were in Persona or got trapped in a spinoff game and completely ignored.

V's idea of shaking up Press Turn is tacking the Magatsuhi system onto it which is a really boring way of slowly grinding up the ability for one free action that is either useful, shit, or incredibly mid. You basically only use it for bosses or those random enemies who are just idiotically strong for no reasons because it's a complete waste otherwise.

I sure hope that if they do a Maniax style cut I ain't gotta buy it again but I know Atlus has no clue how dlc works.

I played this shortly after my father passed away. It was on sale and I bought it hoping that a Zelda game would foster some sense of nostalgia and help ease the pain and malaise.

Well as it turns out it kept my mind off it but in a very mechanical, mindless way. It took until the third Imprisoned fight near the end of the game for me to realize that over the 20ish hours I'd spent in this world, I had basically enjoyed none of them.

The story is weak and as the prequel its meant to be - awful, as it non-commitally goes "oh yeah this still isn't the actual beginning of the story so we still have 20 minutes of exposition about dumb old shit lmao".

The characters that matter suck. Fi is easily the worst sidekick, as the game has the gall to pretend she had some kind of development by the end where she pretends she grew and became a real girl, which would be cool if like, she ever acted like that. The bad guy is only memorable for being a weird flamboyant evil man. Like I guess it was neat when he stops your sword with his fingers but he keeps doing it.

And then there's Groose. People love him. I like the idea of him but he isn't a good rival because he stops mattering for long stretches of the game. He acts like he had a big character development moment but we don't see it. He just disappears from the narrative - again - and the next time we see him he's basically a different character.

The combat and gadgets you get are cool. The sky overworld sucks. The dungeons are pretty boring, the only one that stood out really was the ship in the desert. They also recycle the Tears of Light gimmick from Twilight Princess but in a way that isn't fun or engaging.

It also gave us the stamina system that carried over to Breath of the Wild and that was one of my many problems with that game too.

Categorically the worst 3D Zelda. Even the ones I couldn't finish (Majora and the aforementioned BotW) I could find more things I liked about them.

A fairly average RE game. Has some fun gimmicks mostly with the scanner (tho I wish that was a little more fleshed out). The underwater segments- not fun but they're few & far between.

The final boss is stinky and rather boring. You just shoot a boring monster man in his giant weak point and avoid his Naruto clones. I found it more annoying than fun.

Also story is the usual late period RE nonsense. At one point Chris asks how someone could turn themselves into a monster and its like my man how many insane baddies have you fought that instantly stabbed themselves with whatever virus to become a monster when they were losing???????

Points to Capcom for melding Old Jill design with RE5 Jill design and also for ensuring her booty has as much screen time as possible