Taking DMC/Bayonetta style combat and making it rhythm based is a fantastic idea and when this game comes together it is so satisfying to play - you get into the music and you enter this flow state where you feel the rhythm and the combos come naturally out of it.

But I didn’t love it nearly as much as I hoped. I think there are a couple reasons for that - there’s a few frustrating mechanics, it can be boring at points until your combat options finish opening up which takes about half the game, and there’s only a few licensed songs (they’re the absolute best bits but I wasn’t into a lot of the original tracks, and the game suffers if you aren’t vibing with the music).

But what really got me was the tone and the game’s sense of humor. This is absolutely down to personal taste but it was extremely not for me, and it dragged the whole experience down.

i am so mixed on this.

-setting and music do nothing for me but its so clearly supposed to be a lot of this experience
-enemies hit quite hard, which makes exploring sometimes tense and fun, and other times a complete slog
-platforming is pretty fun once you get a few movement abilities but they are So Spaced Out
-equippable souls are varied and interesting, but i never liked having to level them up, it made trying new ones less fun

in the end i dunno man, i never want to feel that i have to grind to fight a boss when im playing castlevania, and certainly not at the slow rate you level up in this game

probably the best final fantasy ive played/seen???

fun (if underused) cast, interesting story, great setting, gorgeous backgrounds filled with a ton of detail, incredibly charming and characterful animations, great music, weird and engaging systems, and many classic moments. i was in love with this game nearly my entire time with it.

the game doesn't explain itself very well, the story is oddly told at times, and most of the party isn't used nearly as much as you'd want, but what is here is still just excellent, absolutely recommended.

(selphie's blog and the credits video are just two of the best things in final fantasy)

I don't know if it's quite fair to Pizza Tower to say that it's a rebuttal to Wario Land: Shake It's style-over-substance approach to iterating on Wario Land 4, because Pizza Tower is definitely not lacking in style. Shake It not only relegated most of Land 4's more expressive abilities to discrete level design widgets, in "upgrading" the visuals to Production I.G.'s professional hand-drawn animation the game completely lost its snappy flow. Pizza Tower not only incorporates the more situational maneuvers of Wario's toolkit into the core moveset, it offers wonderfully expressive animation without making a trade for the game's tactility. This game provides a logical evolution for Wario in the same way that Spark 2 finally offered a logical evolution for 3D Sonic.

Even on repeat playthroughs, with a better understanding of both Peppino's movement and the enemy's patterns, I do not like the boss fights in this game at all. The platforming is loose, hectic, and pretty forgiving, the only punishment in typical circumstances is a decreased score. Conversely, the boss fights demand a level of precision and concentration found nowhere else in the rest of the game, they all have too much health and drag on, their mechanical gimmicks don't mesh well with the game's core, they often rely on cheap tricks (the second half of The Vigilante's fight being in silhouette is particularly frustrating), and they must be overcome in order to progress and access more of the actual fun parts of the game.

Like Gothic fiction, the best classic survival horror games thrive on a sense of place - not just a setting itself but the game's aesthetic, the environment design and layout, the unfolding layer of puzzles by which you progress through that place. More than any other genre, a strong sense of place is essential to tying a survival horror game's various elements together into a cohesive and memorable experience.

Signalis absolutely understands this, going all-in on a creepy, industrial sci-fi facility with low light, killer androids, and pulsating, fleshy masses that slowly encroach on everything. Each individual section of the facility is its own self-contained puzzle box full of intricate shortcuts and backtracking that build an intimate map in your head that helps them stick in your mind. It's all helped along by the game's gorgeous, anime and PS1-inspired aesthetic that looks like very little else out there.

Best of all though is the game's storytelling, which explores themes of memory and identity in a thoroughly disorienting manner, utilizing unexpected fragmentary flashbacks, dream-like first-person segments, still images, and snippets of text to keep you confused and uncomfortable while remaining grounded in emotional truth. I've never seen a game attempt storytelling like this and it's brilliant (and also wonderfully sapphic).

If I had any real complaints about this game, it's the frustrating boss fights (the final boss especially is a pain, even with a boatload of healing items and a shitload of ammo) and the extremely small six-slot inventory, which forces a little too much running back and forth, as well as a frustrating area that disables the mapping feature (intended to keep you disoriented, but I found I just kept running into frustrating enemy encounters). It can definitely be a little frustrating sometimes, but it's absolutely worth pushing through for a game that truly understands what made the survival horror classics effective and builds on that in unique ways.

Might re-review after playing more on Infinite Climax but am disappointed with what I've played thus far.

The action is better than what I remember from Bayo 2 but some flaws of that game compared to Bayo 1 (variable witch time, piss-weak combos, too many giant enemies, etc) haven't been addressed. I don't think the new Demon Slave mechanics are as good as Astral Chain's take on the idea either.

About the story, Bayonetta games aren't exactly Shakespeare, but Bayo 3 is unfortunately the most bloated, least interesting and least entertaining out of the three. They did our girl dirty too.