I write this with a heavy heart.

I never played battlefront 1, so having that as part of the collection was nothing but a plus for me but if it had anything wrong with it compared to the original I wouldn't know. 1 is very basic. Its story mode is very barebones, its just a bot match with a slide, a character telling you your mission and maybe movie footage before it. Before I installed the update the movie cutscenes that were really low quality, maybe 360p at best. The update fixed it but the videos were choppy a lot of the time. That same update REMOVED the option to invert the Y axis and also corrupted my saves in both titles. In BF1 I was about 3 story mission in and 2 I just booted to check the menu since I wanted to play while it downloaded. Aspyr you are something else.

Battlefront 2 is one of my favorite and most played ps2 games and I'm happy that I seemed to reacclimate well. Also it has the real menu unlike that awful, lazy concept art that the originl pc version has which I checked last week. The movie cutscenes are also still here unlike in the pc version which again, I check last week, and wern't as choppy as in 1. So as for as I'm concerned this is a better version in that regard natively. Battlefront 2 also seemed like it had more work put into it when it came to the texture upscaling cuz it blew 1 out of the water but it has that issue where using a scope to zoom is still 4:3. Its not all sunshine and rainbows though. Just like Battlefront 1 there is no ability to invert aim despite it being in the older versions which I put in my ps2 to check. Some of the cutscenes cut off early despite me not pressing a button and the last cutscene on hoth didn't even have sound. Also the post mission 501st journals did not exist so I missed out on one of my favorite ones for post Felucia. Some of the heroes voice lines when you are able to play as them are cut off, usually the sith's "what is your bidding" is cut off. Right before I sat down to finish writing this I had the sound die on the main menu as well. I tested it after and its reproducible after leaving instant action. Aspyr might be some of the most inept devs I've ever seen. No wonder you were kicked off the kotor remake and couldnt get the restored content dlc for the switch port of kotor 2 dsepite it being part of your marketing campaign if you can't do something as simple as keep fucking cutscenes in games. They're also too stupid to compress cuz the game was 25gb, and there was zero reason they should have been. Not as bad as on pc where there game is 50.

One of the reasons I was interested in this collection was because it has the content from the xbox release I never had cuz I was a ps2 boy. Kit Fisto and Assaj Ventress were in Renegade Squadron so I got to play them there but never in BF2 proper. Kit was cool with his force ball but I found his moveset to be unwieldy and Ventress had this dual saber connected with a chain with throwing stars. I remember seeing claims that these versions of the characters were a stolen mod and I'd believe it. They don't even have voice lines. The maps were just maps from battlefront 1, I thought they were gonna be wholly new. Assault on all maps ended up being what I thought, force pushing people into pits. Assault on every map is still cool don't get me wrong but I was always sure there was a reason it was only on Mos Eisley.

I had no intention of playing the multiplayer initially as I couldn't give less of a shit about it but with all the complaints about it so I went to see for myself. I booted it up at 9 am on a Thursday and saw several full 64 player matches and many others with 50+. I counted 30 dedicated aspyr server choices among the player created matches. Tried 2 of the 64 player, my internet is comcast bad so it was pretty laggy even wired but hits were registering as I was getting kills and respawning worked. A 30 player lobby had less lag but still there. Whenever someone says something is unplayable, we should all know by now that they don't know what the word means.

This should have been a slam dunk, and EASY slam dunk. Battlefront 2 is still VERY fun to me and the new stuff, new to me damnit, freshened up a game I had over 100 hours in back in the day. However its just all around sloppy in presentation and every mistake the game makes reeks of not caring. Make no mistake, I'll be booting this one up for some splitscreen fun every now and again, but with how stacked the beginning of this year has been and how it WILL be later on, there are better things I can spend my time on like getting a dlc character ready for shadow of the erdtree. I would hope these issues get fixed but as far as I'm concerned its too little to late. You're a joke and a liar aspyr, you deserve the star wars license as much as EA does. Which is not at all.

Damn I despise aspyr. How do you fuck it up so bad?

Before anything, I am mad and I refuse to suffer alone. I saw someone say the Star arcana looks like Todd Howard. Enjoy!

As much as I would like to say "I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS!" the more I heard more about the game before I got around to it as late as I have, the more worried I got. Thanks Sega for releasing 2 jrpgs I wanted to play so close to each other with Yakuza coming out first. Only getting one day off a week isn't gonna stop me from JRPGing! I will wake up MANY hours early to make progress before heading in for the day. Persona 3 FES is my favorite jrpg, one of my top games of all time and should we evoke a "one per franchise" rule so mgs1,2,3,4,and revengence aren't hogging the top 5, it would be my number 2. Some things that follow might come off harsh, nitpicky or complaining for complaining's sake. Its also easier to complain than compliment, especially when a lot of what I like about this game is story related. The only game that would be under even harsher scrutiny would be a remake of MGS1. Regardless of any complaints that follow, thank god people who are unable to handle ai party members and don't want to emulate and mod no longer need to settle for a worse presenting version of Persona 3 called Persona 3 Portable now that this exists.

So lets start with the story, and despite this game approaching 20 years old I'm gonna be as spoiler free as possible. Gameplay I'll spoil mechanics but story is the most important part of jprgs so I'm gonna let that remain obfuscated. In a post FF7R world, every "remake" now has the potential to be a different game while wearing the skin of the old to get people to buy it so just seeing something getting a remake isn't a cause for celebration for me anymore. The plot is by and large the same, including the early months often sited as being "too plow paced" and I couldn't be happier about that. Persona 3's story and themes were something that changed me as a person, and I still hold strong to a lot of those beliefs to this day. Make no mistake, there were changes. Some new scenes and dialogues were added, some of which were there to explain changes to things such as the outfits or the new Theurgy system. The other new story scenes and dialogues don't really take away anything and attempted to do a little bit of fleshing out for some of the more underbaked characters to lackluster results unless it was a link episode. The main villain had a line in one of these that could have been taken from a redditor or your average twitter user. You can also see the post arena aspect of Akihiko and Mitsuru effect them as well. As far as social links go the changes to their contents are minute at best, so the good ones are still good (SUN) and the bad ones are still bad (MOON). You also don't get automatically put into a romance with female characters which to me was a mandatory change. Certain options will raise the romance flag but if you did it accidentally or didn't realize some lead that way, in my experience, you can walk it back before committing towards the end of the link. You can also rewind up to the last 5 "passage of time" events should you think you messed up somewhere. You should still be rotating your saves though, don't be an idiot in that regard. Social links are also fully voiced now, but interactions outside of those such as some weekend hangouts aren't. The male party members didn't have social links in the original and in portable they replaced other social link characters but here they have link episodes I mentioned prior which are more streamlined social link replacements. You don't need to worry about choosing the right options, they are linear and while giving you the expected reward for maxing out a social link (a unique fusion) you get other goodies too, but even without those I think seeing the characters get more added to them is worth it alone. I always appreciate more Koromaru. I've seen this ending several times in my life now, be it by playing or watching other people and it never fails to hit me. That piano has the same effect on me as Secret Base from Anohana. I think I cried harder now that back when I beat the game the first time.

Graphically and animation wise, the game is beautiful. Atlus has really stepped up their 3d game, I didn't play Royal so maybe this has been the standard for awhile, and just more proof at how much of an inarguable downgrade portable was in terms of presentation to the original. All these pivotal moments aren't reduced to shaking jpgs and sound effects. There was also a good amount of anime cutscenes still in the game, which makes me wonder why ones such as the first persona awakening and Aigis' introduction were in 3d among others. Those 3d recreations had for lack of a better word lost some "soul". However I do think the new art direction is at odds with Persona 3's themes and general mood quite often. Outside of blues, the original game as more muted and here is more saturated and bright. Also it has the persona 5 strikers thing where everyone looks like they've been dipped in olive oil. They look damp and shiny at all times. But the "hit the weakness" and critical persona attack busting through the character face cut in didn't get old, and I honestly used it to figure out weaknesses before they even hit. The new Theurgy mechanic's animations were so fluid and fun to watch which is good cuz you can't skip them, just like all out attacks. I'll go into more detail about them in the gameplay section. Having the camera be closer to the MC (who I will refer to as Makoto going forward) as opposed to the birds eye view allows a lot more detail to be seen, especially in tartarus where they went mental in visual design. It doesn't fix the inherent issues with tartarus as a whole but at least its more visually stimulating. Every character has their own all out attack end screen and you bet I was using the screenshot feature for all of them. The battle end animation was also dynamic, with the characters walking away in different orders. I don't know exactly what effects the order other than whoever landed the killing blow has the center focus. That pause menu though, my god that pause menu! It was so smooth I damn near slipped out of my chair when I first saw it in person. The fall into the water transition, the character's faces in the shard in Makoto's hand while looks through the party, the persona flavor text, oozing style. Does that match Persona 3 tone wise? No not at all but I'd be a liar if I said it isn't appealing. That's some more of your unignorable P5 influence in action. The new outfits are also really slick. I like them all but I think Yukari, Mitsuru and Fuuka got the best ones. However should you want to go back to the classic outfit with classic armband, you can since its a costume and wont effect stats. I'm glad that is the case but I didn't take advantage of that cuz again, I REALLY like the new outfits. Also the battle panties and "Sexy armor" (thats what its called) are still in the game and that shocked me as I didn't think those would come back. Maybe I'm just too used to games not having shit like that anymore.

In terms of voice acting, I do think its all good to great. However I still don't see why most of the VAs needed to be replaced (we know why Junpei's old one was gonna be replaced no matter what), especially since some are still in the game as different characters or in Elizabeth's case is still her OG, Tara Platt who was Mitsuru's OG va as well. Like if they can still do the voice and were clearly available since you still have them in the game as smaller roles, it feels to me as you didn't wanna pay their "now a more known name" rates. The treatment of voice actors is a discussion for another time and place, not in a review of a video game like some game journalist would force in. At least I got to hear Liam O'Brien again in some form. Junpei and Mitsuru's VAs, Zeno Robinson and Allegra Clark respectively, sound like they're going for imitation and they do a bang up job. If I didn't know beforehand I probably would have taken a good while to notice the change. Fuuka is a straight up improvement to me, and I find it funny that she shares her VA with FF7R Yuffie, Suzie Yeung. Game crushes from my youth both have the same VA in remakes is quite the coincidence. The main one I took issue with was Akihiko's new VA, Alejandro Saab. He's not bad, I actually think he did a great job but Liam O'Brien is one of my favorite VAs so no one was gonna fill that void and he did not grow on me despite being a main part of my battle party. Koromaru is also actually voiced by a human now doing dog sounds and I never got used to it. Yes it was stock wolf noises in the original but you can't beat a wolf howl. It was just off and he's always in my party since he's the single best character in the series. Everyone else of SEES (Yukari, Aigis, Shinji, Ken) were fine, minor things like I miss the bite Michelle Ruff gave Yukari's delivery and the initial more stilted speech Aigis had that went away as she spend more time with the crew are gone but they weren't dealbreakers.

Now for gameplay. As I said above, you have full control over party members. REJOICE all of you who didn't see the big fuckin TACTICS option and fell victim to the "Mitsuru used Marin Karin" memes. Unlike in portable, the game feels balanced for it. Some character's kits have been reworked such as Akihiko not having as many debuffs but that aint gonna stop me from using him just like how Ken being really good now won't make him a permanent member. You have the "Shift" mechanic with is not quite baton pass but allows you to free swap after knocking an enemy down so you can continue to do so. You're gonna want to do that cuz shuffle time has been reworked with new rewards and buffs along with the original money, sword, healing and exp choices that you're gonna want it after every battle. Grab those major arcana cards for buffs such as more exp, persona stat increases and being able to choose multiple cards during shuffle time and when you grab enough you get an ARCANA BURST which increases the level of all reward cards. The Theurgy mechanic is also brand new and is basically super attacks that ignore resistances or buff/heal your party. Every character's meter fills up by just fighting but doing specific things will make it fill up faster but not all requirements are made equal. For example, Aigis hitting with her physical skills gives her more meter than just regular attacking while Yukari get more for healing, which is what she is doing most of the time. Characters also get specific traits as you bond with them in non social link related hangouts at the dorm such as Yukari having healing spells only use 1/2 their required sp. Another change that I expected to be mandatory was the ability to manually choose persona skills for inheritance, not just for yours but your party members as well. Not only that, but the skill card copying is much better too. You go up to the inari, pray, choose the card you want and you get the copy immediately and best of all IT TAKES NO TIME. There is literally no reason to not copy cards every day that you can and it makes the sword cards of shuffle time no longer being weapons but instead skill cards an easier pill to swallow.

If you didn't like Tartarus in the older games then I don't know if they did enough here to make you like it, unless you're a style first person then you might be shallow enough to be pleased. The floors are a lot more visually stimulating as I said earlier but you're still running through randomly generated floors despite the new mechanics. The sizes of the floors vary greatly. Sometimes its not much more than an L shape even at the higher floors and other times its like 3 large treasure areas with 16 hallways connecting them all. Until you leave tartatrus though, floors are persistent once explored. Going back to a floor will leave any chests as they were when you moved on but enemies will still respawn. Characters would also not shut the fuck up in tartarus. When you see an enemy, a chest, a teleporter, the stairs, after battle, just walking around, dead air is not allowed until you have cleared that floor out. I heard the same lines over and over and even changing character doesn't really change much outside of the non generics. Outside of gold hands, treasure chests, strong enemies and floor centric gimmicks like "enemies have aliments" or "its fucking dark" you now have breakables for items to sell or consumables, locked chests, monad doors and greed shadows. Those locked chests replace the gold chests of the original and require Twilight Fragments to open. Twilight Fragments are one of the most important things you will have in this remake. As I said you need them for locked chests which is where you'll find weapons and gear but now you need to use them to heal at the clock. Yes the clock costs something now and early on you will be struggling to have any amount of those shards. There are a handful of them as one time pickups in the overworld but you mainly get them as rewards for leveling social links as well as rewards from Elizabeth's requests but rarely you can find them as breakables on floors. There is also no bench EXP in this game so you have two options when it comes to catching up characters. 1, the old fashioned way of grinding reapers or two, the great clock. I try to fight the reaper before beating the game each time and outside of the flu exploit in vanilla p5, this one wasn't too difficult even with unoptimized personas thanks to Theurgy. Outside of battle it made me damn near shit myself though. The great clock appears on floors after using a certain amount of twilight shards. How many? No idea but it was definitely more than 10. That allows you two pick 2 party members and the next battle you fight with them, will catch them up to within a level of Makoto. I would have very much rather a bench exp system that at worst started out at like 25% and increased with the fool social link or something. The Monad Doors come in two types, those on random floors and those on boss floors. The ones on random floors are a single hallway with a boss in the middle, and you get two chests as a reward which in my experience was something random and then materials for weapon crafting. The boss doors are several hallways with several bosses and chests that tend to end with you getting a new arcana card for shuffle time so you can access more effects. They're good for exp but I was definitely bored of them after the first couple times. I still did them all, no reason not to. Greed shadows will basically do all your collecting work for you as they open all the chests but in order to catch them you are forced to make choices as you chase. I never missed one but also once Fuuka learns tartarus search it removes that aspect and you can just fight them after a dialogue box.

Music is where most of my complaints lie since I do love me the Persona 3 OST. The new music like "Its Going Down Now" and "Color Your Night" are fantastic, especially the latter. Go listen to it RIGHT THE FUCK NOW! Full Moon Full Life is the new into and its good, but I prefer Burn My Dread. I appreciated the respect to Burn My Dread and Want to be Close in the beginning but I don't appreciate the teasing. Majority of the remixes I don't really care for though, they're at best inoffensive. I can actually understand the dorm music now outside of "HEY HEY HEY" and that was a trip. I think the only one I liked more outright was Changing Seasons and it really felt like they added a lot more lyrics as opposed to the barely audible french in the original that happened like twice. Two of my favorite songs in Persona 3 are "Mass Destruction" and "Want to be Close" to the point where the former is my favorite battle theme in the genre. I could not dislike those remixes any more than I do. I'm gonna start with "Want to be Close" first cuz I have less I can articulate well about it. As begins it sounds great, then when the lyrics start it just feels flat to me. I was able to put up with it and the game replaces it partway through anyway with Changing Seasons. As for Mass Destruction, I was no longer upset that there was a different song that played when I got advantage after listening to it, which is the aforementioned "Its Going Down Now". Just like "Want to be Close" it starts out great, some strong "BABY BABY BABY" as it begins and lotus juice sounds great but after that first "OH YEAH" it sounds like the new singer gave up. The battle theme is no longer the bop it used to be and instead like it had the life sucked out of it. Yes I am aware that "its supposed to be the enemy advantage theme so its purposefully not as exciting" but fuck that, the song isn't worth being the most played song in the game now. At least "Its Going Down Now" gave me my baby baby fix and again is a great song. The new Mass Destruction never grew on me and I gave it until late September in game, then during any non story sequence tartarus runs I was playing the original at full blast. Now I gotta deal with the chance that should Mass Destruction come to other games in the future is has a very high likelihood to be this version. If Atlus releases a classic music pack that AT LEAST includes the original Mass Destruction though it also having the original Want to Be Close is ideal, I'll bump this game up to 5 stars despite my other issues.

Another thing I was not a fan of was certain removals of social link choices. When it comes to clubs, you had an assortment of options before. When going for athletics you could choose between Kendo, Swimming and Track. For culture you could choose between art, photo and music. Here your only options are art and track. Yes I know other than the focal point of the club the actual links were barely different, but Kendo is cooler than Track. I've seen some speculation that its a causality of having all the s links being fully voiced. Thats a shame if true, y'all should learn to read. I also know the game is based off of vanilla P3 which explains other removals (some they allowed to squeeze in like Aigis' social link) but man, if it isn't lame that the Makoto is once again locked to a singular weapon type. I WANNA USE BIG SWORDS! I don't wanna use Junpei to get my big sword fix. There was also a change to a specific boss fight, it removed the player element to it. Anyone who remembers "the roulette" knows what I'm talking about. That was pretty lame. I was expecting a change in the way to "get your desired result" but making it making it full on luck, while can be seen as thematically appropriate, they still went and made it sometimes scripted. Its last spin might have more thematic meaning now that I think about it, given the cutscene that follows.

I write these reviews as I play the game and had my thoughts on the lack of answer and FEMC not being in the game initially in the above section, but two days ago The Answer dlc was announced, cheeky bastards choosing that day, to release in September in an expansion pass alongside P4EX and P5EX music and velvet room attendant costumes. I sure as hell won't be paying extra for these. How about you give me the good versions of Mass Destruction and Want to Be Close back instead? I never liked The Answer both story and gameplay wise and I can't imagine they'd change much with it given how they handled the base game though it would probably be a HELL of a lot easier with access to Theurgy. No details on FEMC, not that I ever thought she'd happen, but I can't say say I would buy the her dlc either especially with the potential of "Time" and "Way of Life" to get treated as poorly as "Want to be Close" and "Mass Destruction".

TLDR if you skipped this far (bars). Reload is the same great story with the themes and characters that made those of us love it way back when with some minor changes to them such as some extra scenes. It has beautiful models and cutscenes, slick aesthetic that in my opinion clashes with the tone and themes of the game, great voice acting, some great new tracks at the cost of butchering remixes of the more played tracks in the game (which were my favorites), but ideally more in line with what I think a remake should be and want from one. It updated gameplay to the current standards of the series without forcing a genre change but left the story 98% intact. A lot of this came off as nitpicky, but when I love a source as much as this its just whats gonna happen. At the end of the day I enjoyed my time playing the game, and thats what I want to happen when I play games first and foremost especially when its a remake of a personal favorite. If you REALLY cannot handle ai party members or don't want to emulate to use the mod for FES, which for the latter I respect and a supporter of original hardware, then this one is a more than fine version to play. You get the most important parts of what made Persona 3 so loved: its story, characters and themes without being an inferior VN and cursor experience like portable. Reload aint the definitive version as it lacks aspects like MC weapon usage, club choice variations and FEMC, though its closer with the recently announced answer dlc. Regardless, its better than having portable as the only official release of Persona 3 on current platforms. Whens the classic music pack though Atlus?

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to take a break from the genre for a while. I continue to suffer from the fact most of the games I want to play are jrpgs.

Within 5 minutes of playing this I somhow made Godzilla. I'm serious I didn't do it on purpose. YOU GOTTA BELIEVE ME! I ended up finding King Kong too.

I still refuse to call these games Like a Dragon in english, Yakuza 8 forever

I got into the Yakuza games with 4 and as such I prefer to play these games with Japanese voices since its not only what I am used to but I was already like 7 games in before they dubbed them again with 7. So yes I played 7 in Japanese as did I for Gaiden. This time however was the first time I had the dilemma cuz Danny Trejo is in this game and he is one of my favorite actors. So whats the dilemma? Since I was unsure going in if they were gonna stick to their guns on this being Kiryu's final game or not, and I'm keeping it vague on purpose, do I stick with Japanese for potentially Takuya Kuroda's last time or I get Danny Trejo and not only miss out on Takuya Kuroda but put up with YongYea Kiryu? I chose to stick to Japanese. I will watch all the Danny Trejo scenes once I post this review. That being said, there was quite a lot of english being spoken in the game outright and usually by the enemies walking around Hawaii.

Gonna start with gameplay and my largest complaint about 7 which was its implementation of turn based combat. Characters would get stuck on things running towards enemies, I'd get basic attacks interrupted despite being LONG past the enemy, and most importantly I hated that the characters paced back and forth in place during battle. When I saw that there was a circle area around a controlled character in 8 I had hoped the characters had gotten their ADHD under control. Unfortunately for me its not entirely fixed. The character you are controlling at that time does in fact not move, however those you do not are still walking around. WHY CANT CHARACTERS SIT STILL?! The amount of times my allies walked out of my buffs/healing and into enemy AOEs was way too high. They don't need to be moving around on their own! You can do the positioning based attacks and team ups without it. PLENTY BEFORE YOU HAVE! Oh and I've caught them walking out of my team up attack range right when I'm about the press the button too. Because of this alone I still do not like their implementation of turn based combat. Unless I put some sort of automatic equipment on a character or activate some auto skill, a character in my party in a turn based rpg SHOULD. NOT. DO. A. GODDAMN. THING. unless I hit the button. This is my hill and I will die on it! I also will never like MC death causing a game over. I will never understand it either. Everyone just becomes braindead as soon as Kasuga dies I guess. Why are Sega published games the only ones I seem to run into who use this dumb mechanic since it still also exists in persona? The game was also still pretty stingy with money payouts, even though they did increase as the game progressed. I highly advise anyone who is for some reason reading this before they are finished/in the middle of their run to get a housekeeper asap to get the money sucker ability and use it on the crown enemies. You'll thank me for that later. Also one party member was gotten WAY too late. There was not enough time to get them set up substantially so they were underpowered for the end of it. I still used them but I really didn't wanna run the dungeons to get them up to par job skill wise (they were also a good 10 levels under me).

As for things they did that I liked, they let you know if an enemy will resist your attack unlike from what I remember in the first one as awell as auto win when you're high enough level. Back attacks, teammates following up knocked down enemies, hitting enemies you smack towards them (which are skills that unlock as your bond increases) as well as knocking enemies into each other/walls/objects like exploding barrels allows the more tankier enemies to not be as much of a slog and fodder to be dealt with quickly with potentially 3 attacks in a single turn for the cost of one skill max. Jobs are VERY unique and it seems like changing jobs isn't as much of a detriment. Stats seem to be handled much differently, like when I gave everyone new jobs when it unlocked I was still beating enemies at my level with ease. I was also getting job exp increasing gear in loads, I had like 6 of the pyrodancer and martial artist gear for instance. Being able to bring over ANY learned skill with the inheritance slots allows a lot more coverage to be had which I do not remember if it was a problem in 7. Going off my hatred of "MC death equals game over despite having multiple characters who can revive you" at least here despite there being no diffiuclty option, unless it was a 1v1, I was rarely in a position where I was in danger of game overing. Plus, you can just pay money to revive at the beginning of the fight as you were or fully healed (incase you got jumped I guess?). The game also let you know what level you should be and what strength gear you should have for certain parts, which is welcome. The parts were pretty obvious when it would appear anyway so its not like it spoiled "Big fight coming! You best be ready!".

I did both the sujimon and dodokon island side content to their completions as soon as I unlocked them respectively, and I didn't really like either of them. Suijimon at least got me a beastmaster job but the actual sujimon battles felt like a mobile game so I never touched them again when all was said and done. Even though I did like the job, it has its issues. Its a barehanded weapon and its abilities use your set sujimon. Even with high rarity, max level and friendship sujimon I found the damage to fall off pretty hard and Kasuga has better jobs to use so it being exclusive to him is a massive detriment imo. Plus you can't transfer any of its skill to other jobs, including essences so it really just felt like one to level for shits and giggles.

As for Dodokon island, I disliked it even more. I'm just not a fan of everything about it. The fact you cant sleep to progress the days until its night, the monotonous resource gathering, the buildings you can use being at least 50% of assets from kamurocho/ijincho that clash hard while you fiddle around with a grid that gives me Dark Cloud vibes (that for whatever reason ran real bad while moving horizontally) and the real time waits (up to an hour) for the farm to get shit done. Oh btw, the real time farming doesnt progress if you go to the mainland. When I was finished with the whole thing I had over 6million dodokon dollars but converting it upon leaving left me with about 600,000. 6 million was again EVERYTHING I had left over after getting to 5 stars in a couple sittings without leaving. A full trip to get my full payout would be 3 days which is about 40 minutes but the payouts would vary due to who was invited. I was getting more on average by vacuuming the rich enemies (who spawn pretty regularly) in a mid game area in less time without money up gear as well. There is a reward when you beat it but it just seemed too costly for the damage it was doing. Since everything is maxxed I just either run around and do the same randomly generated tasks, gather resources from the island and farm to makes buildings to sell or sit there with my thumb up my ass until I can sleep. This is NOWHERE near as lucrative compared to the confectionary side job in 7 where I was leaving with a couple million after like 15 minutes max. Running the randomly generated dungeons and as I said above using the housemaid vacuum attack on the crown enemies and bosses was more lucrative as it takes me half the time and I get comparable payouts ON TOP of being able to level jobs and characters, so it just felt like I wasted my time with dondoko island. The other mini games like Crazy Delivery and Sicko Snap all well and good, I like Crazy Delivery way more than can collecting. Be sure to throw on "All I want" by The Offspring while playing Crazy Delivery from the optimal experience. The arcade also has Sega Bass Fishing in it, the peakest of arcade peak. By the way, did you know Gachapin and Mukku are in irl mascots? They've apparently appeared in Granblue and advertised a Kamen Rider show. That mixed me real hard when I found that out.

The story was once again the best part of the game to me and I will not be going into direct spoilers but a bit after midway through, I was getting even more into it. The game did come to a halt around there pacing wise but I didn't care, cuz I wanted the content it introduced. I don't know if its just cuz of how much time I've now spent with the series and what the side content there represents or having recently gone through a similar situation as one of the main characters with my late Nana, but it made me depressed yet at the same time happy and nostalgic. Also they remembered Dead Souls. I broke down twice during this game. Gaiden almost got me to at its end, but the dam fully broke here. I almost feel bad for anyone who jumped in on this game as their first due to this. I say almost cuz that was your stupid decision to not play what came before. I did not buy the big boy edition so I do not have access to The Big Swell, and do not know what it entails. I don't do NG+ much in games and never once in this series so I'm not shelling out for it. I'll probably just watch it. The ending of the game had me feeling some kind of way and I can't put into words what exactly it is.

TDLR: While some of my issues with the combat were remedied, my largest issue of characters not sitting still was not so I still do not like this turn based combat and a party member was received too late into the game. The story was good despite the pacing issue around the middle but on the whole, well done. The two larger minigames the game introduced were not my thing and there were much better ways to get funds for these dragon quest ass gear prices. The new jobs were unique and the changes to the job system made switching jobs more advantageous than detrimental. I found the repeatable dungeons that they expect you to run if you want to get the best weapons, tedious and dull due to their randomly generated nature. Despite it coming off as I had more gripes than likes, the game is still largely fantastic. I'll have to check my rankings again but I'll definitely be putting it up there. Please play as many as the other games as you can before play this, don't be a slave to fomo and don't be an impatient baby. Put in the work and it'll be worth it.

If you had told me Bloober team made this, I would have believed you. I just have no more patience for the first person, walking sim, run away from any threat horror games ignoring the fumbling of the writing and content warning that ruined any atmosphere for the next 5 minutes after they appeared. The game looks fine visually, the monster design I'd put on the lower end of "good" for the series and getting Yamaoka back for the music are the good things I can say about it

I understand a lot more now why people say they want Sparking Zero to play like Tenkaichi instead of Raging Blast. Granted I agreed regardless but now I actually have context.

Its no Budokai Tenkaihichi 3, which playing this made me boot it up again and that game is still the most solid in existence, but its still pretty good though with how much I played BT3 I could see just how much of the game was lifted from it. Theres a good amount of content here, just the story mode alone too me two days. The What-Ifs are where its at and why you should play this game.
I play on actual hardware if able and this game looked fantastic running on a ps3, I'd even say it looks better than Xenoverse 2. Quite the attention to detail at times (Frieza's transformations, Broly's charging effect) but also some rookie mistakes (somehow remembered SSJ Broly had blue hair but gave LSSJ blonde instead of green). I however did not like the combat much, it felt floaty and the super attacks lacked a lot of impact. Putting super attacks on the right stick was just an awful idea. Unless both my ps3 controllers were broken I had to mash that shit to continue my combos. Rush attack ranges were neutered to oblivion as well so unless you were within 10 feet of your enemy they weren't hitting. Blast deflection was a nice gimmick but I'm indifferent on the crash system.

The customization is nice, it allows there to not have a roster with 18 different Goku and Vegetas clogging it up though some absences both in roster and super attack were baffling. The camera was horrendous though. If you were near a wall you just had to let jesus take the wheel and hope either the ai knocked you away or stopped mashing long enough for you to rapid rise out of there.

I hope 2 fixes some of these issues but I doubt it.

Congrats to the devs for reaching such a massive milestone of like 5 million sales (at the time of writing this) in a couple days without even counting gamepass. Whether you hate the game or not, thats a feat. That being said, If I hear about this "pokemon killer" one more time I'm going to explode. I played for about 4 hours before couldn't continue playing. I do not tend to like survival games, theres too much babysitting and base building is never something I care about. If it wasn't for gamepass I wouldn't have even bothered. I hope for everyone who is actually enjoying it, they don't abandon the game like what happened to plenty of Early Access survival games of old.

Outside of them getting the pokemon style down (plagiarism allegations, ai art or whatever the fuck else I don't really care) for the pals and the fact they can be captured and used for battle, thats where the pokemon ends.
Battles are in real time, you're fighting with them and they tend to spam the same attack in my experience. There is no story that I ran into, so if you don't suffer from wanderlust syndrome you're gonna be trying to find fun with the genre staple of punching trees to get started. Its Ark but without dinosaurs. You WILL be building and you will be interacting with survival mechanics or you will have a bad time. You can then put your pals to work in the fields while others roll up with you to ice some guy, then catch that person you rolled up on and sell them too. You also gotta babysit your own character as well as your pals cuz you both got your survival meters to keep an eye on like hot and cold.

I really don't see this game posing any sort of "threat" to pokemon like the redditors want it to. These aren't even the same genre. If things that are actually close to pokemon in more ways then just "catch monster" like Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, Monster Hunter Stories 2, Yo Kai watch, Dragon Quest Monsters and even SMTsona (who did the catching thing long before pokemon) didn't light a fire under their ass then I can't see this doing it. I hope thats the case too cuz if pokemon goes a survival crafting route, I'm gone.

I really wish this wasn't a rougelite. I just do not enjoy what makes that genre at a fundamental level (restarting from the beginning of a run when you die, having to rely on rng for builds and the procedural generation) by their nature no matter what they do to try and change things around, they get very repetitive after the first two runs for me and typically you need to do multiple complete runs to get the whole story regardless. If it wasn't for the story contained in this I would have continued to ignore it. While I do think Ragnarok's combat is better than God of War 2018's, it is not why I enjoyed the game and I still vastly prefer the style of combat from the original trilogy and Chains of Olympus to it. Speaking of, seeing aspects from those games was nice to see and I would see it as Santa Monica putting respect on what came before especially with a specific line of dialogue in its ending. Even with the story being as well done as it is, along with its ending and Christopher Judge continuing to kill it as always, it did not outweigh the fact that this dlc by design was combat oriented and while generally not daunting, even put difficulty modes in it, it did not feel worth the 5 or so runs it took to actually reach the payoff. I am not a "its the journey not the destination" person, the destination needs to be worth the effort it took to get there. It being free doesn't change how I feel about it and I gladly would have paid for a more God of War reboot duology styled dlc over this.

Finally, a sudoku for my mathematically challenged ass. Another one of those daily timewasters that keeps me sane during my long shifts.

If I wasn't already a fan of Yuffie, I would have been after playing this. Such an adorable little thing she is and the fact her design wasn't changed shocked me. The moogle cape was pretty cute too though. She was just so fun to use with the ability to imbue your shuriken with different elements and the synergy mechanic was a fun change to the combat. A shame Sonon couldn't be controlled in battle cuz I do love me a combat staff but it was clear he's expected to be used as a meatshield cuz Yuffie is maybe 15% more durable than a piece of tissue paper. I liked that early on in the game Yuffie was doing her original victory animation after all the fights cuz its nice to see things like that not just disappear.

In terms of story, its not the best and its breakneck which is the opposite of the base game. Your have a handful of areas you're gonna go to but exploration is not the name of the game. Yet somehow I still found myself enjoying this dlc more than the base game. No, no cuz of my Yuffie bias but I think cuz it was wholly new it wasn't being constantly compared to the OG in my mind. I'm looking forward to running my OG Cloud, Red, Yuffie party in part 2 even more than before.

I initially was gonna wait until all the parts were out so I could play the whole game in succession despite my gripes but since I got a copy of Final Fantasy 16 for Christmas and I want to play it, I decided to play this now so I can appreciate the gameplay without comparing it to the style of 16 and potential reacclimating I would need to do.

And I'm going to get this out of the way, I am a big fan of the original FF7. Though 9 is my favorite, I find 7 to be the far easier game to "pick up and play" as far as jrpgs are concerned. I am one of those people who does not like the direction the remake went narrative wise. I put a fair bit of weight on narrative when it comes to this genre and I do not like that its this is undeniably a sequel. If I wanted a different game or sequel then I wouldn't have bought something labeled as a REmake of FF7. Quite frankly this has made me wary of every single remake announced after it pulling one of these which is not something I needed in regards to my entertainment. I refer to this game as FF7-2 for a reason. At the very least, since that cat is out of the bag, I can look at the later parts without that baggage of being what I expect a remake to be.

Due to feeling the need to have Midgar have enough content to be its own game, the pacing jumps between well done to slower than molasses going down a hill in Janaury. Even if I wasn't taking the time to do all the side quests, missions, weapon leveling etc I still feel these pacing issues would have happened. Also, walk n talks. I HATE WALK N TALKS, not just in this game but all games. Maybe its the Metal Gear head in me but just make them goddamn cutscenes. Making it interactive to have to keep pace with an npc or else they stop due to you being too far away is not worthwhile gameplay. Its Replay poison. There also just felt like there was too much meandering disguised as "worldbuilding" and "fleshing out midgar". Characters who weren't super fleshed out in the original got their due (mainly Jessie from Avalanche) and in terms of the rest of the main cast I enjoyed seeing aspects of them I didn't in the original game. I had several moments where I was smiling like a dumbass. Spending more time in sector 7 before the big event did add to the moment but even if it didn't, seeing that cutscene and aftermath still would have left quite the impression.
Graphically the game is beautiful, except for a couple moments when you're really high up and the landscape underneath had that "its a jpeg" look to them and the two FMVs near the end where they were visibly worse but that one is clearly not in engine since it has Cloud wielding the buster sword despite me not using it at that time.

Gameplay wise I thought the remake was good. The combat felt very good to engage with (except for one aspect I will get into later) and swapping between characters was fast but making magic in of itself and giving orders to ai controller members need the atb system felt more like it halted combat flow more than helped imo. Also the fact using items needed that same bar, which on hard you can't use items at all which makes no sense since thats the difficulty I'd actually need to use them on, made me use them inside of battle less. That classic difficulty is a spit in the face though. There is nothing "classic" about characters moving, attacking and guarding on their own while you wait for the atb bar to fill up. Classic would be them standing in the line not doing a goddamn thing until I gave an input. I don't believe character in any turn based adjacent combat should move a damn muscle unless they were given auto type equipment and that why I didn't like Yakuza 7's combat despite being a turn based supporter. Materia also didn't create a fresh one once you mastered it which threw me for a loop and I'm honestly kind of sad about that, especially the enemy skill materia. Leveling up the weapons I am indifferent about. One one hand it feels like another grind to inflate playtime, but on the other hand the stats are worthwhile as is getting the specific abilities. The fact you could just add materia slots to weapons is a game changer. Having summon materia have its own dedicated slot away from your normal slots was a fantastic idea and whoever decided that should get a raise. The more limited materia selection of part 1 here is kind of detrimental to me but I fully understand why and won't fault the game for that. No playable Red also soured me cuz he's one of my favorites to use. I learned like a day before I started this playthrough that basically nothing is gonna carry over to Rebirth so I stopped caring about maxing all the materia out since I have no desire to play this game on hard where it would be necessary to have them. That did take the wind out of my sails a bit for the upcoming parts though I won't lie. Shame it ain't like .hack GU where the good stuff carries over. "But balancing!" Get outta here. If a ps2 game could figure it out, so can this.

So that one aspect of the combat that I alluded to earlier is how the game handles phase changes alongside its break/stagger mechanic. I just do no like break/stagger mechanics in general and how they are implemented in almost all jrgps that use them except like Bravely 2/Octopath. In 7R's case, it doesn't feel like I'm building up to this big damage but instead feels like my damage is nerfed for no reason until I hit the enemy enough. And then theres the cutscene phase changes...In most boss fights right about when I finally filled up that stagger meter the cutscene would activate and all that work is reset cuz no it doesn't carry over. Its just really annoying, it unnecessarily drags out fights and I don't understand the fascination with these things being put in jrpgs. The fight wouldn't be an more of a slugfest if this system was removed imo.

I enjoyed majority of the remake music and I'm excited for how something like Cosmo Canyon will sound like. Yes I found its disc but I wanna hear it without jukebox crust. I do like that the discs were a thing, cuz I really do love Tifa's theme. Its probably my favorite in 7's entire ost. I hope some sort of portable music system is implemented in REbirth if the disc system carries over. Actually since shit doesn't carry over it doesn't matter. Guess I'll stick to spotify if I wanna boot up a good chocobo theme. Can I also say I like how theres an npc in the party who will sing the classic victory fanfare since the games have gone action? Bonus points to the colosseum for having it as well as the classic victory animations AND having the characters line up while doing it.

I assume I'll continue being late to this party when REbirth and whatever part 3 is called comes out but if you're gonna split what was once a single multi disc game into three separate things Hobbit movie style then I'll stick to paying $20 each piece. That'll be the cost of one "new" by the end of it and I'll have the complete ff7 experience like I do on ps1. I probably come off as bitter, hater of change yada yada but I really did enjoy my time playing it for the most part (damn stagger system) which is why the score probably doesn't seem like it matches my words.


Its always tough rating something that is a package deal.

Rhapsody 2 is a good game, I have little nothing bad to say about it. It going to a more standard turn based system from the grid based of the original was something I was all for. Kururu, Crea and Cello were great and I generally enjoy seeing progression in their characters. I also like seeing timeline progression ins media such as here where it follows the children of the previous entries characters. Despite having a similar goal to the first, Kururu want to find her "prince", it didn't feel like a retread or rehash in the slightest. I think what threw me off the most was the songs weren't in english unlike in the first despite this coming over to the west 20 years later. Either they didn't have the resources/want to translate or the songs were only translated in 1 cuz we couldn't have our kids in the 90's listening to Japanese songs cuz its bad or something.

Rhapsody 3 on the otherhand... What were they thinking?

The story is presented in 6 separate stories with a connection as thin as a piece of fishing line. In general I just prefer a single hallway of a narrative for lack of vocabulary. The only ones I gave a rat's ass about were stories 2 and 5 and 5 even had the internal chapter titlecards which makes me think this game was initially just going to be this story but they couldn't make it a "real game" length. 6 itself is bonus or so the game told me but I did it anyway cuz I might as well (I regretted that decision). Because of this structure, you won't be doing much exploring and you'll be seeing the same few places throughout most of the stories and the game very much felt more like it was a dungeon crawler than what came before. At least the dungeons were more like Rhapsody 2 instead of 1's barely distinct box room labyrinths.

The combat has changed once again. It is still turn based but now theres this 4 row system that at max is 16 characters on the battle at once. Thats now potentially 16 characters you need to keep geared and skilled up, and you will be spending majority of your time in this game grinding to do so cuz both exp and payouts were laughably low imo. The characters not in the front now also cannot be controlled so don't rely on them to come in clutch, or do anything really. The only way to control them is if they are a puppet and that in turn requires you to give up the front member's turn to issue commands to them. Doesn't help that for most of the chapters you're starting out at level 1 and naked. Its not like the game is difficult, the previous tow weren't either but bosses have, and like to spam, massive aoe attacks and enemy hp values felt VERY bloated to compensate for your potentially massive in battle party. If the difficulty of bosses in any given chapter has a graph it would similar to a wooden roller coaster where its a bunch of peaks and valleys. That final story is the worst of it in terms of grinding as its just the dungeon and final boss, even if it does scale to your strongest member it still takes way longer than it should to level a mid 30's character to even 50 when fighting enemies in the 150's. Even with auto battle I could feel my eyes glazing over more half of each chapter and when I got to bosses I just let jesus take the wheel for some of them and hoped rng would be on my side to beat the bosses and end my purgatory of grinding.

I honestly believe only story 2 and 5 are worth your time, but you gotta do all that came before to get to 5 anyway so my condolences. 3 will be used as an example in my future discussions with people for "if it aint broke, don't fix it" cuz this change was not needed in the slightest and feels like they just wanted to flex how many things they can have in battle at one time.

TLDR: Rhapsody 2 is good and should be played if you liked 1 but if you do want to play 3, I hope you like a lot of grinding


This was my first Dragon Quest Monsters game, and my like 4th dragon quest game in general. As a whole the game is fine, as least to me but I'll go into detail later on about my gripes. For the positives: The voice acting was very well done and I love that Dragon Quest's voice acting just HAS to be british. Dragon quest music is always good (if a bit repetitive) and the environments were varied despite each area having multiple levels you'll be going through as you progress. Giving the player access to Zoom pretty much near the onset of the game was also a VERY good decision. The dungeons in the later few levels I thought were not very good as then consisted of a lot of running back and forth through it to get done correctly. I will always love Akira Toriyama's designs, its why I even played the series to begin with. Yes I grew up with Dragon Ball, so the artstyle is comforting to me. I'm gonna buy that upcoming Sandland game for this reason alone. Syncing is also very in depth, to the point where I think its a boon and detriment, more detail on the later later, but you can easily make monsters into your perfect or near perfect specimen if you put in the effort.

People have compared it to pokemon but I think its much much closer to at least smt nocture (only real smt I've played to compare) or Digimon Cyber Sleuth. The main loop of the game is going around the maps as you make your way towards the dungeon to fight the boss, getting monsters to join due to "show of force" based on your party stats, monster types and enemy status, fusion monsters together to get completely different things along with inheritable skills and abilities. If you put in the work, your stuff is strong. One of my monsters was taking 1 damage from the final boss for instance. Other than fighting with monsters you capture, there isn't much other comparisons to pokemon. Actually thats not true, the game runs about as well as Scarlet on a good day. Its not as glitchy though so it has that going for it.

Speaking of performance, its the main reason for the score. It gave me eye strain and then a headache that continued into the following day. This not occur when playing it in the inferior handheld mode of the switch so I unfortunately had to break my "Switch doesn't leave the dock" stance and settle for playing it that way. The game itself just felt very tedious half the time. Like it felt way worse than what I remember from Cyber Sleuth when it came to upgrading monsters. It might have just been because I was trying to get high level monsters too early but even later in the game I just felt like the entire synthesis system was more arduous than it needed to be unless you buy that mole hole dlc (which my impatient ass did, I apologize). Not like you can ignore it either because in true Dragon Quest fashion, it had that spike which lead to my only game over. It was a cheap shot, dumb back to back boss stuff that I beat on the second try so the cheap shot was the only reason I lost. ITS NOT A COPE! I could typically beat all normal encounters in a turn so I never felt outclassed but I couldn't be bothered to make more than one monster above A rank (the third highest) just because of how tiresome I found it all even with the mole hole cuz its has its own issues outside of it being a dlc. When I played there was basically no information on the game in general so I had to scour forums like it was the mid 2000's again for synth trees which rarely ever yielded fruit. Shoutouts to metalkid for their great site that had lots of information which I learned existed pretty much at the end of my playthrough.

As for the story, its not much but it was rather engaging. Not that I expect a grandiose plot from a dragon quest game but it might also have to do with me not having played or knowing anything about 4. The game loves to throw choices at you and aside from the one the decides your starter, every choice the game gives shouldn't even have options. It should have just played the scene out without the unnecessary input. At one point I initially made the right choice at one point but since they aren't choices at all so I had to go thorough the rigamarole of the "incorrect choice" and then go and DO THE CHOICE I INITIALLY PICKED. I assume that was something related to DQ4 given its outcome but as I said above I haven't played that one.

If you are someone who lives for the grind or like monster catching/collecting games then by all means pick this game up as my gripes most likely do not concern you, but do be warned of its performance if you are someone who cares about that. Nintendo's next console can't come soon enough.

Now that all the dlc is out I can think about doing the replay because as a whole I do enjoy Scarlet in spite of its unignorable flaws but I doubt I'll play either dlc again when that happens as both I didn't really find all the good. I'm sad Nidoking didn't make the cut, my dream of playing through a game (pokemon must be catchable before post game) with my 6 favorites without needing to trade or import is never gonna happen it seems.

Specifically here, I didn't care for it being all double battles or influenced by the cancer that is competitive pokemon but I could just breeze through it with my maxed out team so it was a non issue. Well, except for when the game wanted to waste my time and was forced to use a new team so I was petty and just perish songed the whole ordeal with a Lapras. The day the mainline games succumb to that minority of online fans who want these games to "push people into the VGC" or defaulty be difficult to the point you can't viably run with a team of pokemon you like without force feeding them vitamins or selectively fighting specific pokemon for EV yields is the day I leave this series for good. They don't understand why most play pokemon to begin with. Even with how much easier it is to get a team competitively trained, its still such a mind numbing grind that I'd rather have a nail go through my foot again.

The BB quest system's payout is way too small too since its needed for biome improvement, buying items and doing the legendary quests. Its a grind so boring I opted to clean my house over partaking in it once I got the dex completed. Once again its them trying to push co op cuz those pay out more which I am not a fan of in the slightest. Also you NEED to do co op to get all the legendaries which is straight up ass. I found the story to be weaker in this part compared to the Teal Mask as well and I wish you could have walked around with your group at the end like in the base game instead of them teleporting to the next objective.

To get it out of the way, Metal Gear is my favorite series. While I didn't have many issues whilst playing the collection and I can understand that people wanted more, saying the ports outright suck due to your own overzealous imagination is not something I can get behind. Yes this collection is pretty barebones in terms of graphical touch ups but I'm someone who chooses to play games on actual hardware so I'm not drooling over playing something like MGS1 in 4k. I didn't notice framerate problems either, even in MGS3 but it takes some massive drops for me to notice those. The issues I did run into will be given in detail when talking about the game in question. But the short of it is, the games themselves are fully playable but I ran into issues in 2 and 3 that I never had on ps3 Hd collection or in the ps2 versions in all my years of playing that do not have anything to do with the 360 controls I am not used to.

In terms of Master collection specific content you have the entire screenplay and master books which while cool, I'd rather have those in my hand instead of on my tv and only skimmed them due to that. You got some music tracks too with a selection that could be described as random, however I don't turn on my consoles to listen to music so I never gave them much of a listen. I can just pull up songs on youtube or use these things called CDs of the osts I have should I ever want to listen anyway. On PS5 much like the Battle Network Legacy Collection, each thing has its own icon and install instead of it being one all encompassing package. Other language versions are options but in my experience some had to be downloaded as did the digital graphic novels but the main games (MG 1,2, MGS1, VR missions, 2 and 3) were on there from the get go. Pressing L1+R1 brings up a menu which you can use to pause cutscenes (thought it takes a few seconds) but I only had it work in MGS1. A shame cuz I really could have used it when going for no alerts in 2 and 3 since I couldn't get the usual reset code to work.

Onto the games themselves:

MG1 and 2- These are the ones from MGS3 subsistance/HD collection but ripped out and made its own launcher. They even still use the mgs3 save screen. Yes NES Metal Gear and Snakes revenge are in the master collection too but I will NOT play the NES one again and refuse to touch Snake's Revenge. As far as MG1 goes, I've never been a fan of it. It very easy to get yourself suck either due to missing a prisoner, card, ammo what have you and the hitboxes on the pitfalls were always absurd at best. Yeah I get it, old game design but still I find MG1 to be more annoying than enjoyable which is why I've only played it a couple times. I can only take so much near unavoidable damage cuz everything respawns on a screen change. As for Metal Gear 2, its honestly shameful how little I've played this one cuz it cannot be overstated how much of a step up it is compared to 1 and its where you see what the series will become take form. Still WAY too much backtracking especially at the end, and while MGS1 is close to a 3d version of this game, they were smart enough to cut back on it aspect. The other old game design aspects still apply but the addition of the radar at least let me be mostly prepared for the enemy on the other side of the screen change.

MGS1- Still my favorite game and always will be. No problems while playing for me other than johnny has pants on for some reason after Meryl knocks him out. Its the ps1 version complete with its weird texture warping quirk games on that system had. You can make fake save data for Mantis' stuff so this version is 1000% better than the pc release you can buy on GOG and its not up for debate. I didn't see these loading issues with cutscenes people keep bringing up either but even I'm not blind enough to not notice the fuzzyness the game had at times. I also went through VR missions and thats all I have to say about that cuz I never cared for VR missions. Integral is there too and it was my first time playing that version. While its cool to be able to listen to the TAPPY main theme at whim via codec instead of on a third playthrough (my favorite rendition), its not as novel now that youtube exists. Yes I know about Meryl's new costume in it but I pretty much went back to the original MGS1 after that initial playthrough.

MGS2- Still MGS2 where its 1/3 codec conversations despite being 3 feet from each other and why the codec has a bad name. If people weren't bitching about these games being some sort of 720p over the promised 1080p I wouldn't have known, and tbh I still didn't notice much. This was my first time experiencing the new controls that where part of the 360 version of the HD collection. In MGS2 they were fine but even after several playthroughs I still kept trying to play the game the normal way with pressure sensitive buttons that don't exist. It took me several playthroughs and a snake tale to internalize that the coolant spray uses the right stick now and not square. Being able to click the left stick to raise and lower your weapon is something I think is a good idea actually. Other than that I did have the game freeze on me twice for several seconds, one time on two different playthroughs and both on Big Shell while the Tanker had no issues. One of those times was during the Harrier boss and the other while escorting EE where you need to put out the fire. Both of these involved fire effects now that I think about it. As I said these were FREEZES not crashes, they sorted themselves out after like 5 seconds but in all my years of playing this game on PS2 and later ps3, I never saw this before. It reminded me of playing games with scratched discs but mine aint scratched even if somehow EVERY game that I order online is loose in case when I take it out of the mailbox without fail. Since it is the HD collection version it also means you don't get the best optional content in the series, SKATEBOARDING with a kick ass rendition of the main theme!

MGS3- While MGS1 is my favorite, I do think MGS3 is the overall best entry and because of that I have nothing much to say. The game is still amazing and I didn't notice any stock footage, apparently the reason why the original collection was delisted in the first place, missing. Here is where the new controls really screwed with me the most. Honestly kind of felt like it wasn't reading what I intended when trying to slam vs grab. I had a similar freeze moment like I did in 2, once while swimming and once during the bike sequence. The flashback scenes towards the end did look a bit fuzzy as well and some animal models in the food screen looked pretty rough but special mention goes to The End's parrot. I also missed a Kerotan on my first run and I have no idea where so I'm PISSED. And it should og without saying but its the HD collection version so no second disc bonuses. Even the previous bonus of MG1 and 2 are their own things now so its truly just MGS 3 subsistence diet edition.

I do hope a volume 2 happens whether its of similar barebones ports or not. MGS4 deserves better than to be locked on the ps3 though other than Peace Walker I can't imagine what else they are gonna put in it. Will they just throw in the definitive edition of 5? Will they actually go all in and put Portable ops and the Acid games on here? Ghost Babel (though that should have been in collection 1) Revengence?? Lord only knows. I'm just happy more people can play these great games now on more current platforms and don't have to either decide between starting with the likes MGS5 which is an awful decision or something unlike any of the other games like Revengence. As it stands I could see myself using this collection for MGS1 replays but for 2 and 3, ignoring the convenience of already having this collection installed and system set up, I don't think I see myself playing these versions over the ps3 hd collection or ps2 releases. I can't so easily overwrite almost 20 years of conditioning for pressure sensitive inputs.