It's essentially elevated shovelware, taking a dumb concept with a low budget but making it a very fun experience. The voice acting is funny and kept me consistently entertained, and the scale and absurdity of what's happening on screen was great. It's certainly too long, with a fair share of fluff missions. It can feel like the game is spinning it's wheels at a certain point, but it's worth pushing through to see just how far the game can push it's nonsense (especially with friends.)

Realistically EDF5's a 7. But I wanna give it an 8 so it gets an 8.

This was my first time playing a Persona or SMT game, and, even though this game has been very prevalent in the gaming zeitgeist, I was coming in with a pretty clean slate. I really only knew general things about the game and a few characters like Joker, Ryuji, and Futaba. The first thing that really hit me about the game was just how stylish it is. It opens mid casino heist, and gliding around the first section of the game felt really cool. It is a fantastic hook that had me immediately interested in the game and its presentation, especially because I was a bit apprehensive about what the gameplay might entail. The music, art style, and animations are fantastic throughout and add so much to the experience. Stuff like showtime moves, ziplining, bouncing between cover, and ambushing enemies all work together to create a cool infiltration vibe.

As such, I had a great time infiltrating the first palace of the game. Everything was very fresh, and learning the mechanics felt natural. The battle system is pretty neat. There are so many layers to it that build as you play the game, and I slowly improved with it as the game went on. I also changed the way I interacted with battles as my priorities changed which was cool that there is a lot of flexibility in the system. The bosses were pretty cool, especially late game. The music once again adds a lot to this, but they also challenge you to adapt your playstyle to them which is cool. After the first palace and a half, I did start to get a bit bored by the mid-game dungeons. The keepers are soooo boring early on. They are literally just "Im Mr. big bad evil man and I hate people and love money and hurting people." It hurts the overall vibe of the dungeon and especially the bosses when they are so dense. I was also a bit disappointed by how similar they felt outside of theming. I guess I wish there were more to it than that which they did fix in the later dungeons. I really enjoyed Shidos Palace and especially the final royal palace. Those implemented new ideas and story beats that made it feel like I wasn't just killing a bunch of shadows in a different font.

On the story side of things, I have mixed feelings. Like I said I really don't like the majority of the villains in this game. They are super dense and are just evil to be evil. This makes most of the central conflicts pretty lame until the late game. The characters are okay, really hit or miss. I like most of the party members and it's neat to learn about them for the most part. Some of them I really do not like much at all though. Haru and Yuske are especially cringe. On the plus side, I really like Ryuji, Sojiro, Maruki, and Sumire as characters. The social sim part of the game is decent. Nothing life-changing, but I think it's kinda fun to juggle relationships, priorities, school, work, and momentos visits.

For me, P5R was starting to lose its luster around Sae's palace as it was getting a bit samey and the story wasn't hooking me as much. However, everything after that saved the experience. The dungeons get better. The stakes get higher. The story improves, and the bosses get way more exciting. The Royal post-game alone probably added a star to my score. It is so good and stands out when lined up next to the rest of the dungeons. The palace keeper is so good. He is a dynamic character that you get to know and sympathize with throughout the dungeon. The music and style is immaculate, as they create an aura that feels unique and needed for the post-game of a 100-hour game. They revived my mixed feelings about Akechi's stupid motivations in the base game by making him a deranged goat. The final boss and ending were superb as well.

Overall, I enjoyed P5R. It's got fantastic vision, style, and flare. It has solid RPG elements and dungeons. Its story and characters are hit or miss, but, by the end, I felt connected to them.

I had a great time with Judgment. It's certainly not perfect (in fact there are a few BIG problems) but the good is more than enough to outweigh the bad.

Let's get the issues out of the way first. Mortal Wounds are a lame system. Certain attacks causing permanent damage that takes some work to remove is a good idea on paper. It could limit the infinite spam of healing items these games can fall prey to. However, it just becomes really annoying considering that removing wounds is needlessly time-consuming and not exactly fun at all. The second are the trailing missions. They are all extremely boring, and they make any chapter or sidequest they're in worse.

Now for everything else. Combat is about as good as you'd expect from RGG. It's fun, but not the most refined thing out there. It gets heavily carried by the weighty animation. Side content is great as usual. I spent a lot of time on the baseball minigame, befriended a lot of people in town, and put a fair bit of time into a bunch of other sidegames. I didn't care much for the drone races, but they were still fine.

Where this game really shines is in the narrative. The quests are stupid and fun, but the main story is just fantastic. Yagami is an excellent protagonist and is so fun to watch at every turn. Kaito is a great foil, and is generally a sick character. Pretty much everyone else is really good as well, with standout villains and side characters. There's a constant intrigue that is kept up masterfully, and many moments I was glued to my seat.

In short, fun-ass game with a superb narrative. Go play it

In singleplayer, it's a solid platformer with fun presentation and good level design. Something I really like is the weapon system, which opens up a lot of creative ways to break stages.

In Multiplayer though, it's a complete blast. Just about every stage is a back and forth game of dying to the level and then dying to my teammate. We killed each other countless times, mostly unintentionally, and the occasions where we died like 15 times to the same obstacle over and over but in different ways had me doubled over laughing.

Multiplayer also lets you be even more creative, sacrificing your teammate to jump off their body, bouncing across water with fire, making platforms, doing mid-air jumps off each other's heads. It's shockingly in-depth.

The comedy has aged a bit, it feels extremely "of the era." Some of the jokes still work, and it mostly isn't obnoxious.

All in all? Fun game, but go out of your way to play multiplayer. It's stupid fun.

P-06 is an unfortunate reminder that some games are flawed to the core, and no amount of polish can make it good without fundamentally redoing it.

Before I say anything else, I respect the passion that's gone into this. Porting the game can't have been easy, and it must have taken a lot of commitment.

That being said, this is just a better version of an awful game that elevates it to the level of "just bad." There are some good tweaks. It feels a bit better to play, it's a bit more functional, and a lot of particularly frustrating parts have been polished up here and there. Also, boss fights haven't been added yet, which is definitely a positive since none of them were good.

The game's fundamental issues remain. A generally stilted gamefeel, levels with a lot of stop and go, an over-reliance on boring combat, and levels that go on to long but simultaneously feel like they never get going, just repeating their few gimmicks over and over with no evolution.

Sonic's campaign is still the highlight of the game, with mostly just platforming and a greater frequency of fun sections. The camera is a problem across the entire game, but it's more prevalent here as it whips around all the time that really hurts the sense of speed you should be getting. However, it's a mostly enjoyable time.

Shadow's story is just a worse version of sonic's, taking greater emphasis on clunky vehicles and so much of that boring combat. It's just not very fun, and gets tedious quickly.

Silver's is still terrible. He feels slow, and is slow. His telekinesis AND focus on combat requires him to stop constantly to grab boxes and throw them, which is not interesting or fun in the slightest. I really have a hard time gauging depth with his float ability, which makes it a pain to use. He just never gets going, constantly doing uninteresting platforming only to get stopped by a dumb puzzle or boring combat that requires you to wait for the enemies to act first.

Unfortunately, I didn't really enjoy most of my time with this. It's a valiant effort, but 06 is an unfixable game without completely remaking it (silver especially). I feel bad for the developer.

everyone praises hollow knight for its sheer amount of content, but that strikes me as backward. the biggest issue with hollow knight by far is pacing. put simply, the game is too long. way, way too long. let me put it this way: super metroid has about 14 core power-ups which are necessary to complete the game without sequence breaks, and that game is about 8 hours long. hollow knight has about 6 necessary power-ups, and it's about 25 hours minimum. in other words, in super metroid, you're getting a meaningful upgrade on average every 30 minutes to an hour, whereas in hollow knight, it's every 4+ hours.

in a genre centered around exploration, you need that exploration to feel rewarding. most of the time, you can get away with small rewards, like missile packs in super metroid. but the player needs to feel as though scouring areas will lead to meaningful progress, or at least incremental boosts in power that add up over the course of those areas (an individual missile pack isn't much, but 3 of them from one area is great). in hollow knight, you go massive stretches of time with nothing. even the filler stuff, equivalent to missile packs, is usually pointless. money mostly unlocks benches and fast travel points, so you could remove those fees and just remove money as a mechanic and the game would hardly change. lots of stuff you find is also only used to trade in for more money. most of the equippable charms are useless, so those are a bust. grubs also mostly only get you money, the big rewards only coming in increments of grubs rescued, and most of those big rewards are also useless (because a lot of them are also just money). at absolute best, you find weapon upgrade materials or health upgrades, which are so rare as to, again, be stretched extremely thin across the game. all this results in hours of wandering around, finding new places and seeing new things, but nevertheless feeling like you've gotten nothing done.

the game world is too big. WAY too big. ludicrously big. there is no reason for it to be this big. i expect backtracking in a metroidvania, but this is way over the line. if i know where i'm going and how to get there, it should not take 20 minutes to do so, plain and simple. this isn't helped by the controls being built for snappy, precise boss combat rather than exploration. in super metroid, you can fling samus slingshot-style with crazy momentum, use cool walljump tricks to get places faster, cool skill-based movement tricks like that. because the game is built for speed and navigation first and foremost, not combat. in hollow knight, you slowly plod along at a mild jog, no run button or anything. you have a dash, but it's short, and you have to spam it if you wanna get places. you have one powerup which is like the shinespark from metroid, but you have to stand in place and charge it, and it can only go left or right in a straight line. whereas shinesparks could go in 8 directions, be used anywhere so long as you built up the speed, and even be stored for a short time. because hollow knight is a game made by people who thought they wanted to make a metroidvania, when what they actually wanted to make was a boss rush hack and slash, so they built a boss rush hack and slash character and stuffed it into a world three times bigger than even fast fuck samus would know what to do with. complete mismatch. no wonder all the major expansion content was boss rush content.

the map system is also bizarre and bad. i'm glad they tried something interesting with it, but it sucks. not getting to lock in any of my progress in charting out an area until i've found a special NPC in each one contributes massively to the feeling of non-progress. and why in god's name do i need to equip a charm to have my position pinpointed on the map? why do i have to spend a valuable charm slot on a basic feature like that? it feels like they were trying so hard to shake up the map system and make it something interesting that they forced themselves to try and fix what wasn't broken.

the combat is simple but fun. the platforming challenges are satisfying. the aesthetics are generally beautiful, though a bit too samey. there is something here. clearly a lot of passion and talent went into this game, and i don't recommend against playing it or anything like that. but it's fundamentally and deeply misguided. the aesthetics, atmosphere, and bosses are compensating hard for basically everything else being bad and ill-considered. hopefully silksong makes serious changes.