2020

This game is super special. A few hours in I wasn't sure if the game would have the depth to sustain a length of 20-30 hours, but it sure does. Each location is super memorable and the characters really drive this game, supported by phenomenal music and art. Each and every fan of games like Earthbound, Undertale owes it to themselves to play this game.

// taken from my Steam review

Talk about style, MAN. Pure aesthetic bliss, from the visuals to the music. The best game about photography.

// taken from my Steam review

Just the absolute cutest. Poignant and genuinely funny writing make for a wonderful bite-sized bundle of wholesome summer vibes. What a delight.

// taken from my Steam review

I always avoided CRPGS and usually hate reading walls of text in games. Still, this is one of the best games I have ever played. When the writing is that engaging, the CRPG mechanics so wonderfully woven into the dialogue and the setting is so completely fleshed out and refreshingly unique, all these preconceived notions and biases don't matter - this is just an exceptionally fantastic video game.

// taken from my Steam review

A gorgeous game with beautiful music and a mystery plot that will keep you going for the 3-4 hour runtime. Easily recommendable if you are a fan of walking simulators and the likes of Firewatch and What Remains of Edith Finch in particular.

// taken from my Steam review

This is one of the most unique games I have ever played, from the world to the gameplay. If you want to immerse yourself completely in this fascinating world, you will absolutely be rewarded for it.

// taken from my Steam review

The roughness of its performance is made up tenfold by the gentleness, wonder and beauty of the experience. Eastshade is a wonderful place to visit and fall in love with, full of incredibly charming characters. I felt a purely intrinsic drive to explore that I only ever felt in Zelda Breath of the Wild before. A truly profound and beautiful video game.

// taken from my Steam review

The only MMORPG I ever got stupidly addicted to as a teenager. Still remember scraping together all my money to buy a Kenta card and hire a tamer and it succeeding on the first try. Fond memories, even if it probably was a terrible game by most metrics.

The pacing is all over the place and the gameplay is incredibly clunky and frustrating coming from Kiwami 2. Still, I found myself coming around to it by the end, almost entirely thanks to some great new characters and interesting new city in Okinawa. I wish the slice-of-life orphanage stuff would have been handled better because there was great emotional payoff, even if it was at times a slog to get through. I can absolutely see why this is almost universally the least liked Yakuza.

I have realized that I really don't like course-based Mario games at all. 3D World is fine, sure, but wow did it leave me absolutely unfazed and cold. Perhaps it is due to the quantity of ideas devalueing the quality of the experience as a whole and robbing it of a cohesive identity. Part of it definitely is the fixed camera, which absolutely infuriated me to no end in many levels.

Bowser's Fury, on the other hand, absolutely slaps, might I say. From the first minute I had more fun than the whole of 3D World. The inventory system is a really neat concept that could shine in a dedicated game not tied to the confines of 3D World systems. I hope this is a test run for a truly open world Mario game, but this is a stellar product all on its own.

This is a big leap from Yakuza 3 and for the series as a whole, expanding the cast to four playable characters. It mostly works incredibly well, the characters play and feel distinct and the plot takes away the focus from at this point repetitive clan infighting or foreign threats and instead shines light on different, fresh new players in Kamurocho. It ties back to older entries in the series ambitiously but unfortunately drops the ball hard with incredibly stupid twists and fake outs resulting in a mess of betrayals and feuds that I couldn't care to keep up with in the end. Still, this game has some of my favorite music and combat in the series so far and feels so much better to play than Yakuza 3.

2021

The writing and performances are the main focus here and really stand out to deliver a tender and meaningful exploration of guilt and trauma. The gameplay - short, simple activities between walks to different vignette-style settings rarely adds to the experience, mostly due to poor implementation but the achieved sense of place and atmosphere created by the beautiful environment art and lighting really sell the story in a neat package.

I really wanted to love this game, it has so much going for it, fantastic music, full voice acting, a surprisingly innovative and unique battle system and a strong story. Ultimately, where it falls short for me though, are mostly technical and artistic issues. This game pushes 3D on a console that can just barely support it, resulting in extremely low draw distances and characters losing most facial features and shapes to pixelation and low fidelity outside of cutscenes which made it difficult to connect to the story at all in the first half. This is a thing that has to be really bad for me to fault the game. The game is really short for a JRPG, which is a positive and it is paced really well for the duration of about 13 hours it took me, however the game still has to rely heavily on reusing areas and mechanics endlessly, seriously hurting my enjoyment when flying through the same corridors, fighting the same enemies and deactivating the same terminals for two hours. I can definitely see artistic appeal and justification for some of that. I really really like the whole aesthetic and universe the game builds, mixing Dune, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Star Wars and many other interesting influences into a unique blend creating a ton of mysterious lore of ancient civilizations. The game is way more subdued and restrained in its tone and presentation than most other JRPGs of the time and even since, often evoking the same serene melancholy and beauty seen in Fumito Ueda's games before tipping the scale of minimalism and beauty in simplicity to the side of dull repetition unfortunately. I believe a faithful remake of this game, mainly adressing the technical shortcomings and adding just a bit of environment art and enemy variety could be one of my favorite games of all time.

This game is unique if nothing else, for films I could draw comparisons to Midsommar or The Witch but for games this stands pretty much alone and is worth to try just for that. The visual style isn't always the prettiest, the pencil-drawn textures aren't the exciting feature that they were made out to be, but wow can this game look absolutely stunning in certain environments, making these all the more rewarding. The gameplay features some unique twists that you wouldn't expect going into this game for the first time, but ultimately it is the fantastic atmosphere, absolutely beautiful and haunting score and sound design and firm grasp on unsettling imagery and careful tuning of the horror-screws that shine bright in this game.

yeah sorry, but your blinking mechanic doesn't work THROUGH THESE TEARS