Finished replaying this for the first time in years and despite it being fairly aged, i ended up appreciating and enjoying it way more than i did the first time i played through it.
There’s just something so impressive about being able to completely build a new universe from the ground up to me, especially one that is this detailed and well thought out. Best way i can describe this games general feel is how It feels to watch “new hope.” nowadays. There’s just such a fantastic feeling of iconography and nostalgia. The simple, colourful character designs and costumes of ur crew are kind of genius.
The actual gameplay isn’t particularly complex or engaging but i do feel as if the game makes up for it with a very gripping feeling of immersion. The mako is annoying and the gunplay will feel especially clunky unless you are playing on the remastered version (which i did.) The dialogue wheel was revolutionary at the time, and nowadays no RPG really has attempted to match the system.
The main draws for this series in general are the universe/world building and the character writing/dialogue and something i wasn’t expecting is how well the writing in this game holds up today, it’s actually full of good humour, especially if you go renegade. But i was more surprised at how relevant many of the political discussions within the game really were. The universe is ridiculously entertaining but importantly as well it is tangible.
Fantastic Game 8/10

Very solid, definitely has a learning curve and is not really friendly to newbies at all, even after finishing the game, feel like there’s a lot of systems i could have delved into but didn’t. Combat clearly has quite a bit of depth and is quite unique but not sure the bosses or normal enemies really make the most of the combat system, like as far as normal enemies go there really isn’t a great deal of difference when it comes to like my strategy when dealing with em. There’s afew exceptions for sure but point still stands. Also i think the boss design is mostly very hit or miss, like i’m really not sure i’m looking forward to fighting any of the bosses again on new game plus which is kind of a shame and also there’s a good few of them that can be genuine BS man, i’m talking hit boxes, random shit hitting me off screen and then just absurd mechanics and health bars. But like combat never got old and the art design is mostly cool, i was just wearing ninja gear the whole game cuz i wanted to look cool, there’s some like cool stupid shit that happens in the story but ain’t nobody playin this for that so eh, overall a good game but slightly generic i could say and not sure how memorable this game will be to me.

It’s top tier, like almost masterpiece shit like 60% of the time, low-key falls off at the end, doesn’t get better after the house section. It’s never bad or boring but the end section especially just ain’t as good as the rest of the game. The level design falls off so hard it’s crazy and the enemy variety is quite thin, it stops being scary too cuz you learn exactly how to deal with everything pretty quickly and by the end you have so much ammo and weaponry that nothing can stop you anyways. It’s really not a hard game either, i died 4 times in my playthrough with 4 steroids used.
That being said i definitely don’t regret playing it, the atmosphere early game especially is really effective and although i didn’t find it all that challenging, the encounters with the family members were tense and engaging. The most enjoyable parts of the game for me are when ur set free in the house and just left to explore at ur own leisure. The level of detail in the game at times was reminiscent of an immersive sim, very impressive stuff. The problems just get really egregious when you leave the house and go to the ship wreckage, everything past that point is kinda mid.

Decent indie title that has weirdly got so much unnecessary hate on this site. It’s kinda short and it’s lacking some more complex bosses but i personally don’t mind if games like this are short as long as the content is well constructed and for the most part it is.
I think the opening area is the game at its best tbh, very similar to fire link shrine in DS1 not just in its aesthetics but also in its function. The way every dungeon is immediately accessible no matter its difficulty is something i dig. I started with one of the harder ones and it was really challenging for where i was at progression wise so i came back to the hub area and explored different pathways and then later in the game i returned to that dungeon and absolutely walked through it like it was nothing which was pretty satisfying. That being said the level design in the separate dungeon areas isn’t so satisfying, a lot of them are very linear and i think some areas in the game are pretty poorly paced and go on for too long which is pretty damning considering this game is considered to be quite short. Nevertheless the art direction is pretty cool and the combat can be cool most of the time. Bosses can be enjoyable but they are nowhere near the complexity of anything in the souls games and most of them are pretty easy.
As long as you are able to accept that the game is mechanically really quite unoriginal, i think it was a decent time.

Just a whole lot of silliness really, only reason worth playing this is if you like sekiro and you want something else that scratches that itch, it’s not near sekiro levels of hard but still quite challenging and it’s a pretty meaty game too, some of the bosses are genuinely quite good, and the whole fortitude system is actually kinda cool.
The loot game is actually fucking tiresome and annoying, spent half an hour trying to sort out my inventory halfway through the game, not fun!
Narrative is ong the stupidest thing i’ve ever heard + english voice actors are very funny. Enemy variety for such a lengthy game is lacking also.
This was more fun than nioh but overall i think nioh is a better game, more purposefully structured imo.