A bit of a letdown after how much I enjoyed the previous games. It outstays its welcome a bit and the battle system ends up completely leaning on a fairly lame stagger mechanic. By the end it just feels like the game's preventing you from using your items and skills more than dealing with them more directly which makes even basic fights much more spongey than they need to be. Item management feels kind of a pain too. It's still fun to blow up bosses in one shot, you just need to spend a few turns lining that up, even more so in late bosses where not only does it have the stagger point but also summon enemies which soak up even more damage. Ultimately unsatisfying.

A great fit for Game Pass. After Avengers I had no interest in this, but word of mouth convinced me to give this a go.

There's a lot to like about this game. The story's interesting, the characters are likeable and talky (to the point where it's a little too easy to interrupt something that's being said by moving forward) and the soundtrack's great. The combat isn't amazing but the game doesn't really outstay its welcome either.

Well worth the time spent on it.

In many ways this is exactly what I wanted from a GT game: licenses are back, the cafe menus structure makes for a nicely directed single player 'campaign' and the car fandom/museum aspect is even better (and quirkier) than ever. The problem is that once the credits have rolled I've found absolutely no desire to go back to it.

I've talked about the curate's egg in other games as a lazy shorthand for a good game negatively affected by a single aspect. In this one I think it's closer to the original story of a rotten core that you can try to get around but eventually cannot avoid. In this game it's the GAAS implementation. Credit rewards are far too low - I can't even afford one of the high end cars from Brand Central after 20 hours in the game, assuming the game actually allows me to buy one. The game's always online and it fails silently if you do something like go into rest mode in the middle of a multi-race series. I've lost multiple races' worth of progress from this. Most of all though is the way the game cycles stuff in and out to make you try and log in every day. I've packed in multiple mobile games recently because of the amount of time I was spending doing my daily logins and this is in a similar place. At that point it stopped feeling like a fun game and went into that cynical GAAS hole, where I just won the right to buy that Koenigsegg but only for the next 7 days, better get earning credits! Want a particular car? Well you'd better wait for it to turn up!

When I went through the game I really enjoyed the progression from my Mazda Demio up to the racing thoroughbreds in the end, via some real classics on the way. After playing another Forza Horizon game where I could rely on two or three cars (FH4 in particular just boiled me down to driving a Ferrari F40 around everywhere) it was a much better sense of progression. In the end though, I do want to buy my Ferrari F40 but the game won't let me. Apparently it was in the Legends area a fortnight ago, at over three times the price it was in GT Sport. I guess I missed out.

As much a toy as a game - and a fun and interesting one at that. A somewhat anachronistic Web 1.0 simulator, infused with that typical vaporwave nostalgia for a past that never really existed but it's so dense with detail it's hard not to like it.

I'd have liked a few more chapters but I can see why they didn't do that - there's already a fair amount of flailing about at times trying to find the next bit of the game, and an extended scope would have increased the amount of content exponentially. Ultimately an interesting piece and I think you do get out what you put in, to an extent.

A great port of a 90s classic with some real care and consideration put into it. Having not played it previously, I was extremely impressed at the quality of the level design (notably, I never got lost in the mazy levels even though I thought the keys and doors were visually too indistinct and the map isn't great) and the weapons were decent, though it did lack a good shotgun equivalent.

The thing that I liked the most was the sense of progression though. It goes from a game where you slowly pick off enemies with a pistol and can tank a fair amount of damage to one where you're a glass cannon flying around spewing fire and lightning from your hands; it reminded me of the progression in Control. The intelligent map design made returning to levels for items and new routes a lot of fun.

Thanks to the addition of checkpoints the game feels surprisingly fresh, too. If I'd been chucked to the start of a level on death I might have found it a bit frustrating but having checkpoints (and no quick saving) meant that I just had to push on rather than getting too caught up on things. I did have to manually restart a level once when I hit a checkpoint with almost no health and a bunch of tough enemies ahead but otherwise it felt nicely balanced.

Having watched some videos of the 'original' PC version running on Build I'd like to give that a look too, as it looks completely different aside from the graphics.

Finally played through the game in Japanese and I really liked it a lot. The writing, especially in the earlier parts, is full of personality, and the plot really moves along extremely quickly.

I still really like the battle system; again, fast and generally easy to operate, with the only really clunky bit (using equipment as items - which turns out to be key to making the game much easier) being largely alleviated by intelligent use of the macro system.

Overall if there's a weakness, it's that in general it's quite short and easy, especially if you know what you're doing. When I first played it in the 90s it was very much my first JRPG and, combined with not having the manual to hand, I ended up mostly grinding my way through any problems. This time around, knowing what does what, it's actually a pretty standard fight and heal type system. Dungeons I remember being massive slogs actually go by extremely smoothly, buffs make boss encounters much more manageable, and good use of some of the equipment as items massively reduces the amount of magic and skills you need to deploy in the field.

In the end though the whole package comes together so well, in spite of the fact it's nearly 30 years old at this point. It's not super long but there's loads of variety. The script's lively, the story is constantly moving forward and the cut-in graphics do such a good job of raising the presentation you could add an intro animation and some CD music and you'd have a damn good Mega CD game. Essential.

A messy game with an imperfect port. The new sprites and music tracks are nice but that's about where it ends.

The game has three major issues which I cannot get past: the extremely weak dungeon design (featuring large numbers of rooms which just exist to waste your time and move you into an inevitable encounter due to the extremely high encounter rate), badly programmed menus where neither cursor memory setting feels right and a bug that's been introduced which means that enemies have a 100% chance to inflict status ailments which means that the only actual threat in the game is being surprised by a large group of enemies who 100% stun you and then just stunlock you to death.

I love dungeon crawler type RPGs but the design and interface issues completely ruin the game. Since they haven't even made the scrolling smooth I wouldn't expect this to be fixed, either.