As a child this was the coolest thing known to man even as a Non FF player at the time. Though, in reality, it's a JRPG disguised as an arena fighter. A lot of the RPG elements fight against the Fighter part of the game. I'll discuss more on BOTR, but my biggest gripe with this game is that characters feel concrete. They give you slots to add HP attacks and different bravery attacks, but...you don't get that many attacks to really customize your favorite characters. So a lot of the time you spent spamming the same two moves to actually do damage even in the postgame sections.

I've grown to be a surveyor of Jank and weird C to Single-A games. For every B-Boy and Shinobi, You have games like this. Without Warning is a game with a lot of potential.

From a technical aspect, the game runs like a bag of dog shit. Constant 19fps and frame rate drops with some of the most obnoxious repeating banter from the totally not racist stereotypical terrorists make for an unbearable listening experience. The premise of constantly changing characters that all indirectly affect one another's paths in the timeline, Is severely undercooked. Often you are playing as the three-man spec-ops group as they kill mooks in an arcadey run-and-gun auto lock-on shooter. Objectives are pretty much always the same: Free hostages, clear the area, and defuse the bombs.

This gets increasingly repetitive when these missions are bite-sized and can be beaten in less than 5 minutes. There are other characters such as the security guard, the secretary, and the news cameraman. The Security Guard's levels are just like the Spec-Ops team but with a pistol instead. The beginning of the game is a lot of back and forth between these 4 gun-wielding characters into the later third. The last two aren't introduced until the last couple of missions, and sadly only have a handful of missions between them. The pacing of these characters should've been added in between these shootouts. Since it goes in chronological order, you sit there thinking "Wait, where were they for 4 hours of this situation?"

For the quickness of the levels, there are a lot of them and I feel the game would've been better gutting half of them to give better credence to the 3 nonmilitary characters. For 50 whole levels, you spend most of the time with a majority of the characters doing the same thing, and that thing isn't even done well.

My interest waned in the latter half due to this repetitiveness. while the introduction is strong as hell and I wanted to give it a fair shake, but after rolling credits, it'll probably collect dust until an eventual trade-in.

My disc was scratched to shit, so Pox would repeat the mission objectives incessantly while I destroyed stuff to broken sound effects. Which sucks because the voice acting and jokes were funny, at least before it started to mess up. Being an alien is fun, and each level allows for it to just be a sandbox of destruction. They just don't make 'em like this anymore.

Though there's some stark difficulty spikes on certain missions after the Psi Majestics are introduced that made repeating missions with broken and skipping audio torture to get through. I can't fault the game for it cause it ain't its fault (and I could've just played the remastered version I own on Steam), but by this point I struggled a lot against the hordes of military doops. Having to charge up every weapon kinda got tiring towards this point where I just wanted an alien rocket launcher that shot on command instead of charging, or an anal probe beam that didn't need to be fully charged 6 times to defeat someone.

I'm left amazed at the vast improvement Mass Effect 2 is. The core gameplay has been refined and tweaked to make the firefights and biotic slinging that much more impactful. Along with some superb storytelling. From the bombastic opening, I was hooked more into this game than I was in the first game which left a sour taste in my mouth coming into this game. I thought of this game more like a training arc between the first game and the second game that allowed me to truly explore the galaxy at my leisure. Being able to see the slums of Omega to the Love Hotels of Illum made the galaxy feel as full of life as it implied.

I came to a realization that through my goals for 2023, that I only really wanted to play DMC5 instead of the entire series. Unlike my recent trek through the God of War series, I've actually played this series extensively except for this entry. So my excitement for playing this game just took over to skipping 3-DMC.

While this is the best the series has been yet. There are still some personal flaws I didn't enjoy while playing. I did not like the changes to Nero. The Devil Breaker arms and systems, while cool, didn't feel good to me. I hated the finite charges, and having to unlock on to an enemy to oftentimes miss your DB ability annoyed me to ultimately not diving deeper into the system and working it into my combos.

V is another sore spot for me. Claw gripping to read, use all the summons, and actively dodge and lock on was not fun at all. I didn't feel like I was actually hitting or even in combat a lot of the time. I loathed the few boss fights he had, as I could see them being better with another character.

Dante is the best he's ever been. Every weapon is fun to use, Every style is fun to use. Every mission that I played with him reminded me why I love this series so much. That, and the fact that the story went exactly where I thought it was going to go. I enjoyed every second that Dante and the gang were on screen fighting against the obvious antagonist.

Though I can say I was kinda let down. I'm glad I played it. I was just expecting more. Initially, those expectations were met, but my personal dislike for certain play styles just overrode that. The good thing is now that I've beaten it, I can go back through with my two favorite characters, Dante and Virgil.

Yuck. The switch to teams is really awkward. Even the change to it being a watch and repeat, would be cooler for more engagement, but the older more fighting game style from the first two games called out to me more. It looks better, that's for sure, but the music is sadly the weakest part of this game. The songs just aren't that catchy and don't feel like the songs I would choose for a dancing centric rhythm game.

I should like this game, and that's the part that's tearing me up inside. It just doesn't feel right. Every time I finished another team's story, I was kinda lukewarm about it. The visuals during the stages are a little too over the place, which took me away from enjoying the dancing once it got too hectic.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the team system, nor with the change in the core gameplay to more simon say-esque button presses. Yet the jump into the next generation didn't necessarily call for such sweeping changes, when Bust-A-Groove 2 was already a great improvement on the first. A more fleshed out story and interaction between characters that the PS2's power would've allowed for could've been the right call for the game. More depth into the actual combat that happens in stages. idk

This is like a wet fart as a game. If I wasn't playing the legendary edition I wonder how much of this game I would've loathed more. There's so much to unpack story-wise, that I don't think BioWare thought about certain parameters actually being met come the finale. There are two literal walking plot devices in the party and the main one that you waited three games for is regulated to a background character after their introduction.

The overabundance of "hey let's chill at the bar" character interactions was annoying especially with what's at stake currently in the galaxy. Hanging out and getting to know my party members was the highlight of the second game, but in this game, they didn't even have some background catching up to talk about. They become just one-liners until you see them somewhere else. And for a game that pushed so much one-on-one time with these characters, It felt forced at this rate. Certain characters didn't get a proper ending to their built-up arcs over the years.

Story aside, while once again the gunplay and moment-to-moment gameplay are improved, something is adversely affected by it. This time it's a compound of a bunch of small things. While guns have better modification and distinct use cases, the weight system is a really neat feature to stop the class-based limitations, and the combo systems with powers make for more engaging firefights, not being able to just put your gun away is weird. Planet scanning is annoying with the Reapers chasing you for hitting scan one time. Side quests being regulated to scans and random pickups and eavesdropping made them boring to do.

I guess that's the best way to put it. This game is boring, not because the story wasn't engaging or the gameplay was, but because after trekking through 2 games of build-up, I expected more. My disappointment just compounded when there wasn't a "man that was all worth it" moment. I slogged through unbearable gauntlets of firefights only to end off with a lackluster finale, and I'm not talking about the ending, but the entire third game.

I traded Naruto Clash of Ninja 3 for this game years ago at a Con and never played it until now. An always loved trope of mine is JRPGs in modern settings. I loved the premise, though dumb as hell if you analyze it hard enough, it was enough to keep me going until the end. What really stood out to me was the amount of animations within just standard dialogue. For a PS1 game, I didn't expect that much detail.


The battle system was pretty fun once I got the hang of it. Though, it felt limited because of how few of the guns differentiate themselves. My biggest complaint would have to go to the gun customization. It's maddening that it's treated as a one use item with no chance to think about what to use it for. The same could go for BP. I could use the BP to maximize damage on a gun, but then I could just use a tool to bring those BP over to the new gun, or I could take the passives on this gun and bring it over. It was very frustrating trying to plan out my upgrade path, especially on a blind play through because I didn't know when I would find "my" gun.

I think for me from a historical standpoint it's really cool what was done here, but can't see myself going back to this game ever. I hope that the second game rectifies some of these complaints and continues on with an otherwise intriguing story along with even more intriguing gameplay.

I expected nothing, and I'm surprised that I really did get that.

I've kept myself as blind as possible before going into this game, other than whom the main antagonist was from the reveal trailer. I really only wanted Peter from the first game and Miles from the Second fused into one game with some upgraded abilities. I think the luster of these games are kinda wearing off for me. Essentially replaying the same city with the same side quest type, with the same combat shared between both Spider-Man made the game feel familiar, but It didn't really do anything extraordinary.

The out of suit sections dragged on a little too long, the story is great, but the characters are really weak this time around. Most of the abilities that you get further in the game all feel samey, even though they might look differently. Honestly, if this game wasn't so short and easy to 100%, I probably could've enjoyed each power. Or if Miles had more Venom powers while Peter had more Gadgets to differentiate them.

But, I'm also being extremely granular with my nitpicking here. Like I said, I genuinely expected nothing to wow me, just more of the same but polished better with more cool stuff happening, and I got that. Just like Ratchet and Clank before, once you make something killer on the first try, making the sequels feel "worth it" per se is hard to do. At least with a R&C there might be different planets and weapons, but here I'm playing through the same game for the third time now with a different big bad. Which....is what I wanted.... and I enjoyed my time, but I just feel really conflicted about this game in my memory say 5 years from now.

What a disappointment... but I should've expected this, especially after the previous two games. Dawn of Dreams does a lot to change the formula in a bad way. While the parter system is novel, it's proven worthless when your partner can't stay alive, and if they are alive are barely noticeable in combat. The game is entirely too bloated with multiple stages and bosses being reused. The worst part of it all is how lackluster the story is. Even with 2 which I still think is the weakest game, the story was at least engaging enough to keep me going through. Where as the story here takes a huge shift from what is expected. Like others have said going "full blown anime" was a detriment to this game as the story is by far the weakest part of this game.

The last goal I set for myself for the year
"Beat the Mass Effect Trilogy"

I'm conflicted on this introduction because usually this is where I would go, "Aw man I've been missing out this game was amazing", but that's the last of my impressions from beating this game.

While the story was pretty captivating, I could feel this not being the full story even when defeating the final boss. That kinda rubbed me wrong because I didn't feel complete. Of course, I will be going straight into the second game, but from the many forgettable feeling side quests, to the extremely lackluster gameplay; I never felt locked in to my play through.

Gunplay feels gross, and as an Adept, most of my powers looked cool and felt cool when they worked, but navigating the maze that is the menu system in the heat of combat was a headache. Most times, using abilities other than throw disrupted the flow of combat. I never really got comfortable. Yet it wasn't necessary because of how easy the game was even after bumping it up to Hard.

I often forgot that my party members were more than extra bodies in combat. By limiting my ability to speak to them other than on the ship, I found myself interacting with them only to get the same couple of one-liners instead of sitting there and talking about what just happened. This was on brand I guess with my renegade choices, but when serious shit is happening, like life or death of an entire species of that exact party member, i expect more dialog.

There's a bunch more I can hark on that I hope will be immediately changed in 2. Such as the horrible Mako sections, the Myriad of glitches and softlocking from shitty geometry and physics, or the empty planets to survey that's basically busy work. But I have high expectations for the series and hope that a lot of my negative reactions are averted in the second game.