I'm a fan of persona 4. As always with persona, I like the story, I like the gameplay and the gameplay loop, I like the music, I like the whole package, and Persona 4 definitely fills all those boxes. I feel like Persona 4 is the most all around game in the series, but it doesn't really excel in any area, but it doesn't really supremely fail in any area outside of a few key flaws. The key flaws in this game for at least is the awful opening hours, nothing really happens for 3-5 hours and I can see why a lot of players may drop this game, if it wasn't for the fact I was a big fan of persona 5 I would have potentially dropped this whole game. My other main gripe is the flip flop lgbtq representation. One of the characters, Kanji, and his whole arc could be considered pretty good representation, especially by 2008 standards, then on the other side of the coin you have rampant homophobia by other party members which is never called out. Thankfully the good outweighs the bad here but it is still a problem to be called out. Also fuck hot springs scenes, they add nothing except 4chan pedo jerk off material.

Overall I'd say persona 4 is a decent persona game, and for me that makes it a pretty solid game overall, but if you're not a fan of JRPGs, or if you've never tried a persona, this isn't the game to play right now.

Persona 3 is a wonderful game. It was the first game in the series to use the modern persona formula, and it is a formula that has worked extremely well for these games. I only got about halfway through the game before shelving it however, I didn't really shelve it out of a lack of quality, but instead playing the series in a reverse order can make it hard to appreciate the start of the formula when it has quite a few errors that are hard to look past. The current problem with Persona 3 is that there are 2 main versions, FES and Portable, that each has their own major pros and cons, and because of this, it's hard to feel like you're playing the right version. Thankfully this will hopefully be rectified by the rumored and leaked remake that can hopefully stand as a mostly definitive version of this game fixing this game's biggest flaw.

While I did mostly just talk about my issue with the game I want to make it clear I love what this game has to offer it's just hard to enjoy in this current form, I especially like the setup and the story going on in this game. I hope that with the release of this remake, I feel compelled to fully play the game and give my true thoughts on it, but until then I'll have to leave it as is, I don't want to try and recommit to it and then have the seemingly definitive version be announced while playing it.

At first this game looks like it will be an all-time great, the biggest souls game of all time. All of the pieces are here for a masterpiece, the art direction, the gameplay loop, the lore, everything, but after playing Elden Ring it becomes clear this is all a facade, and the more you play, the more the cracks begin to reveal themselves.

First the open world design. This game takes a page from the BotW book and it lets the player free almost immediately to go wherever they want in the world, free to fight any boss, however it seems Elden Ring just took the appeal of BotW without putting in the effort. Enemies and bosses aren't properly scaled meaning that while you can go anywhere, in reality you'll basically be going the same way every playthrough with some variation.

The other problem with the open world is exploration and loot. Elden Ring has a lot of cool things to find and they always reward you in some way, however due to the sheer amount of playstyles and character paths, 80% of the time the reward found will be useless, what this does is make the player no longer want to explore themselves and just google how to find the loot they can actually use, in turn killing a lot of the enjoyment.

Finally, there is the boss design themselves, and there has been a noticeable nosedive in quality. Bosses in souls game used to be tough bu fair, you learn what they did and you strategize a plan to beat them, however, it seems Fromsoftware this design philosophy and decided that the series was only known for difficulty so the bosses have to be obscenely hard with sporadic and delayed movements. It seems after years of everyone calling the souls franchise the "hardest games of all time" the design philosophy of the games has gone through Flanderization. This new philosophy reaches its singularity in the last third of the game where the boss design is so horrendous it punishes anyone trying to play their own way and slaps the player in the face for not using magic; having your 100-hour run basically be slapped in the face and being told it was the wrong way to play the game is frankly terrible game design. The cherry on top of all this is how in the last third the game becomes horribly balanced, bosses like fire giant take 20 years to beat, malenia feels like scrapped Sekiro DLC, and the character you play as is slower than Dark Souls 3, leading the game to not be hard but fair, but absurdly hard and unfair, leading the whole experience to be unfun.

I do like Elden Ring, it has the makings of a masterpiece, but it fails in so many ways and is only really enjoyable for the first 2/3rds of your first play-through.

This the most difficult game for me to talk about. I absolutely adore this game most of the time, other times I absolutely despise it. There is a lot of great things this game does such as its visuals which are practically unmatched in video games IMO. The story also has its absolutely fantastic moments. The combat is incredibly fun to play around with. While all of these are reasons why I love the game there are still times when I dislike or outright despise it, such as its weak story moments around the 3rd palace, or how the difficulty curve is in the wrong direction, or the time it used homophobia as a joke. Despite all this, the new content presented in royal created by a much less homophobic director leaves an impeccable after taste leaving me to still love the game when I finish. My overall opinion of this game reminds me of Breath of the Wild, where I recognize all the flaws it has, and fully acknowledge it is far from perfect, but nothing can ever really be perfect, and that's why I still consider Persona 5 Royal a 5/5.

While turning a 3d beat em up into a JRPG while also introducing a new main protagonist after 7 games sounds disastrous, Yakuza: Like a Dragon made it work and came out being what is in my opinion a great RPG. This game feels like Earthbound for a new generation in a sense due to how it subverts the classic JRPG tropes. Despite the genre change this game managed to keep the series' charm of being both hilarious but intriguing and serious at times in this new genre. My hope is that Yakuza: LAD serves as a foundation for a new even better game by RGG.

A massive rollercoaster of a game that takes both climbs and falls in quality repeatedly. Overall though this game is too big for its own good and its best parts are found in the smaller less connected bits compared to the story at large. Since each part of this game is big enough to justify being its own smaller title I would rate each of them like so:
Part 1: 4.5/5
Part 2: 2/5
Part 3: 3/5
Part 4: 5/5
Part 5: 3/5