Beneath a fading silver sky, I found myself locked in a timeless dance of catch with a stranger.

Good +30

Our hands connected across the expansive field through the shared rhythm of a baseball's flight, while our hearts bridged the chasm of anonymity with every gentle toss.

Good +30

Amidst the soft thud of the catch, we listened heartfully to stories that spilled like fragments of a soul's journey.

Normal +20

Each throw, a moment shared, a piece of the intricate mosaic of their life.

Perfect! +50

Hit ten hours of playtime in this game, although How Long to Beat threatens me with another seven or so before the campaign is cleared. When I realised my biggest pop-off was from finding and activating the option to skip puzzles I realised it was best I just tapped out.
I try to be polite and only log the games I've finished, but wow I am not enamoured by how much this glossy boot slurping sim traded my precious time for such little reward. This overly smooth slick and oily control scheme elicits nothing in me. The webslinging has no weight no turbulence no torque, it only serves in favour of noclipping from waypoint to waypoint collecting endless upgrade tokens to unlock exciting new flavours of web, all the while empowering the police state thru ubitowers. Pure slop no matter how gorgeously the sun bakes the building tiles. What is with this Hannah Barbara Voice acting direction also.

Low brain capacity podcast chic (children's game). Genuinely impressed by so many aspects of this game and glad most of my apprehensions were subverted.

I think seeing a screenshot of a Total Collectables screen years ago filled me with primal dread and put off trying this right until now. What really helped ease me in was learning that most of the pickups (the eggs, Red and gold feathers) are all charitably spread around the levels and act as infinitely replenishable resource pools. The hunt for Jiggies was exhilarating because they're never earned through the same means twice, demanding of a level of mastery or attentiveness to the little details of the densely designed highly interactive maps, and rewarding you with pure variety.
Genuinely love this hulking monolith of a central hub world that is cumbersome bullshit to navigate, the quality of the subtle character animations, the "na-na-nananah, you can't catch me" playground taunt for the invincibility jingle, Big Jinjo.

https://i.imgur.com/AbGZYCb.png
Game's heavier than a honey baked ham!!!
For every moment in Yakuza 5 that lead me into thinking I was playing an untamed vortex of passion and uncompromised vision, there were two-to-five other uncomplimentary moments that felt like spinning plates and taking the meandering narrative for walkies. Spreads its roots far & wide across so many ideas and gameplay concepts that, on paper, scans as a maximalist daydream I'd love to lose myself in, but all of it feels so perfunctory and checklisty. Fifty different minigames to micromanage and level up in individually to access Harder Levels of said minigames - - - Vidcon Gospel since time immemoria but my patience has limits :(

Haruka's chapter was probably my personal standout, if only with thanks to how vastly different her story played to any character to come before. The rhythm battles were so fun albeit with the game's slim tracklist, and her substories took on a refreshing dynamic too. The combat in these games has never impressed me but I'd much rather play an unimpressive rhythm game than a brawler I've lost heart in. From a narrative perspective, it is infuriatingly complacent with the practices Japanese idol industry in a way I find legitimately toothless in a series that tends to dedicate fisticuffs to rooting out corruption and it makes Haruka's characterisation weaker as a result.
When came the Shinada chapter I was desperately hoping the end credits would finally begin to roll, which is a shame because he and Koichi's dynamic is probably my favourite spark of character chemistry in the entire series.

I in complete honesty couldn't tell you a single thing that happened in the final hours. This was a game I had started months ago and it rather hilariously demanded for me to recall with perfect clarity a cloak and dagger conspiracy that happened in the initial chapters. The overarching story was a wash for me but I much preferred when the leading cast were locked in their own little bubbles, & exploring their own vignettes about dreams lost & worth aspiring 4. Truly believe that in another world, this would have been a younger me's One Playstation 3 Game For The Month and I'd have completely melted into it - but sadly, I had to play this in incredibly granular sessions that largely felt like clocking in for community service.

There's a point near the very beginning of the game where you climb on top of a high up vantage point to mark points of interest onto the map. Suffice to say that Immortals' colour palette is beige at worst and orange at best; those said points of interest are only made noticeable by their video gamey red glowing aura - wisely chosen to pierce through the duststorm and not be swallowed by the monotony of its visual design. You then spend the next few minutes cataloguing these red lights one-by-one as new UI waypoints are revealed. Every single one of them is made immediately apparent to be different flavours of collectable. The title card quite literally hasn't even dropped yet, and you're surveying the land with the same adventurous spirit of a warehouse worker doing a stock check. It's an Ubisoft game, by the way.

Just kind of a pathetic game, honestly. Breath of the Wild coattail rider with all of the charm and creativity you should really expect from the French videogame machine with a clot of coal where its heart should be. Between this and Genshin Impact, it's sad to grow so weary so quickly of the type of open-world Breath of the Wild vitalised. It may not have gatcha, but it boils the wonder of exploration into a skinner box of chests, collectables and distractions strewn scattershot around an environment in a way that feels completely dispassionate and built only to addict. This awful dialogue is such a waste of good greek accents.

Put off playing this for so, so long! Nice to see how much of the little minutiae of MGS1's gameplay they exploit in creative ways for some genuinely devious and endearing missions. I'm sure much of this is just a compilation of heavily stylised playtesting rooms the developers used to stress test enemy and weapon behaviour, but the abstraction allows for a litany of challenging vignettes that would otherwise be impossible in the main game. It even managed to wrangle a series of murder mystery missions out of this engine. Stupid, bully-able AI and primitive physics are simply the best, and this game knows it. Most of the best challenges force you to think of the enemy guards like bowling pins to knock around.

The task list is doubled up with time trial variants of almost every mission, making this nowhere near as lean as it should be. I'm sorry... I just don't find time trials interesting in any context. Didn't exactly love this, but came out of the experience with a boosted appreciation for the wonderfully textured player freedom in MGS1, and newfound knowledge of ways I can traumatise the Genome Soldiers.

I adore so many of the things this game has going for it, but I just can't cope with the drudgery. Wedged in between all interactions with Baten Kaitos are pregnant pauses - forced to wait repeated five-second intervals for things like a character to slide onto their mark and grace you with their dishwater dialogue box, exploring the world map or going through the combat. It's just too slow & it breaks my heart because the meat n potatoes here is really cool.

At BK's core is a deckbuilding rpg ordeal with the devil in its details. I really enjoyed my time with the half of Disk 1 I could feasibly play before becoming comatose, because every few screens served some kind of insane revelation as to how the game actually works. Not only do you need to negotiate with a limited deck size to allot your battle abilities - weapons, spells, items etc., you're also limited in how many quest items you can carry. Quite literally everything in the game you can pick up becomes entrapped within a card you have to shuffle and thumb through, it's a fun obfuscation of the normal menu system! Where things get really devious is the point where you realise the milk quest item you stored at an earlier point has curdled into yogurt because you took too long travelling between locations - your ice blades have thawed and are now a useless basic dagger. There is a combo system in which certain cards used in specific orders trigger special effects, and this is extended to seemingly(??) mundane objects, like spending a turn mid battle to use a knife to trim a bonsai tree you found. It's all very satisfyingly scrappy, I desperately wish it wouldn't take days out of my life to simply experiment with the toys it has given me. I thought Monolith Soft were openly hostile to completionists with the deluge of sidequests in Xenoblade, but this game reads like a ransom note to anyone with OCD. I looked it up and Oh My God there are so many fucking evil missables and one-offs.

The presentation is particularly beguiling, the similarities to FF9 are hard for me to ignore. Gorgeous mist-laiden high fantasy setting with surprisingly good monster and character designs. The backgrounds are all pieces of pre-rendered or sketched artwork with noticeable variation in quality. Sometimes you'd be looking at painterly postcard chic and one screen transition over you're in Hyrule Town. It becomes a juggernaut of beauty whenever the environment calls for some kind of cloudy sheen, honestly some of the most sublime 2d effect work I've ever seen, my jaw repeatedly hit the floor at all things waterfall. I'd share a million screenshots, but they don't do justice to what looks unparalleled in motion.

Really want to say stuff about the story but it'd mostly just be speculation, I'll probably never finish this. We're heavily leaning on angel wings in our theming here and I can't help but gobble that stuff up.

Invader Zim levels of critique on capitalism.
We're better than the corporations because our social atomisation, dissociation from community doesnt have a Pip Boy mascot. Let's kill "Marauders" (please don't ask who or what they are). Damn is that gun a Gucci? We replaced the politics of New Vegas with a gripping perk system that entirely leans on combat stat boosts. The extent of this game's role-playing capability is deciding whether or not to be a character who presses the bullet time button. Randomly generated loot lends to the sheer artifice of this world, the characters are all jokes and interacting with them is like flicking a bobblehead. This review is as short and unfocused as the game is.

Really enjoyed Breath of Fire 2; despite being a bit of a mixed bag, it is a significant step up from BoF1. Surprisingly well-defined characters for a ‘94 SNES title, most of this game’s best moments are when it manages to deftly utilise them through meaningful interactions and mechanical nods to their personalities (like Lin desperately wanting to learn magic, but not quite having the capacity to chant the spells she learns). Felt so good to like, want to play as every single character because their roles in the battles feel tuned and identified just right. It may feel thin by today’s standards, but I’m just so impressed by how much dialogue they’ve managed to squeeze into this game. Plenty of opportunities to shuffle your party around to see how the world reacts to who, even has a townbuilding component where you can touch base with everyone in your roster. It’s very character-focused and feels so much warmer because of it. Thru tears, cursing modern gaming for insisting upon only ever rigging a human skeleton for playable characters, I want more fucked up creatures like this, we were eating good.

I often struggle with some RPGs from this era because they tend to be a little one-note. I get uncharitably bored by the droning daisy chain of sauceless overworld dungeons with labyrinthine layouts to snake around as the random battles chip away at my sanity. BoF2 is def one of the JRPGs that manages to avoid this by adopting a variety show-like format for its dungeons. Every one is unquestionably unique, often themed around a character or subquest, and fleshed out with mechanics and funny gimmicks that won’t be used elsewhere. This is kind of the key to my heart. If you want me to feel like I’m on an adventure, write a new rulebook every hour and give every point of interest their own flair. Has a few particular showstopper-grade setpieces and story beats I never predicted, at times it really does feel like you’re playing one of the best JRPGs ever. Could honestly be my new #1 spot for “most deserving of a remake to maximise potential”.

The story is peaks and valleys, sections can be cute but wear out their welcome (frog castle), or feel poorly planned yet have some rather standout character work (Highfort). The game has a “shaman system”, a couple degrees removed from FF’s job system, essentially granting new forms and buffs to your party members and it’s all a very good idea, but it feels so out of the way. By the time you’re able to make the most of it, the game is already drawing to a close. The worst wedge in the experience by far is the random encounter rate that is just dumb high and only exists to crush momentum. You're going to want to map a fast-forward function to a trigger.

Played with this retranslation patch and this rebalancing/QoL patch. I can’t exactly speak to the content or quality of either, this being my first playthrough, but they came strongly recommended to me, and I do love hatchet quality of life solutions.

Want to quantum shift to the alternative reality where the Breath of Fire franchise is as huge as our Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series. What are they up to? What are we missing out on?

Pokemon, for me, is at its best when it focuses on its conservation science and ecology theme, allowing their cast to feel like a part of their living world in ways more meaningful than random encounters materialising out of tall grass. With every mainline entry, it feels like they make the world map first and drizzle Pokemon on top like a complete afterthought, their inclusion almost never feels cognisant to the way the human inhabitants build their cities or live their lives - we're STILL fixated on collusiums. New Poke Snap takes advantage of this to charming extent and is the prettiest of the 3D games imo in part because of it. It's so nice to just passively glide by and be reminded that Pokemon can just vibe in a forest, any step away from constant tedious battles and cold hard stats is a step closer to primo.

Kind of weak as an actual photography game, though, but I've yet to find a game that has any idea how to gamify effective employments of elements of composition like the rule of thirds or whatever. You want one (1) pokemon in dead-centre of the frame, looking like an idiot, for max pointz.

Since this game is all about Looking, my most tedious complaint would probably that the human characters look fucking weird man. Bizarrely high quality clothing textures and soft plastic lighting on their faces making them look like uncanny Sylvanian Families dolls??? Cel shading is a dirty word these days I think, this weird toy rendering is all anyone does. Look, I just think Herdy Gerdy was on to something and we've been regressing ever since.

Anyway, this is fun! A little grindy, but this is a comfy game I'll be returning to for months to come.

\*WHO ARE YOU ?*

My comfort. Ever since I learned how to emulate, I've returned to this title with semi-regularity just so I can trip through it again.

\*DON'T COME ANY CLOSER !*

Rez is like if Char Davies' 1995 art installation called "Osmose" was a shmup. Experimental explorations through 3D spaces that, while primitive, are teaming with vibes, life, and anthropologic influences. There's such a grit to it all, it's like decoding the earth's DNA, weaving it into strings to pluck, and playing along to the universe's heartbeat. Did you know that all the data on Rez's PS2 disk amounted to 91mb? That's how much a soul weighs.

\*WHY ?*

You could definitely say it peaks early by starting with the best level - its music is incredible, the escalation in instrumentation and aesthetic complexity is unmatched, you can't power up enough to become one of the forms with annoying sound effects. It's worth playing the slightly less spectacular middle levels just to eventually hear Fear is the Mindkiller again. Never dull, always reinventing itself and finding new ways to overwhelm the player, enemies and patterns that never show up across levels - it's a journey.
The Area X level they introduced for the Rez Infinite port is welcome optional content that isn't hurting anything. Many people love it, I'm kinda nonplussed. Empty void of Unreal Engine particles and none of the progressive trance choons that keep my heart bumpin.

\*AREN'T YOU AFRAID ?*

Still about as visually spectacular as games ever got!!! This is up there with Zone of the Enders 2 for Apex Graphics.

\*SAVE ME .....*