90% of this game shares similar pros and cons to the first part of the Remake trilogy. The story is extremely dragged out via a much larger map, an entire chapter of filler, and unnecessary changes. For what it's worth though they did make some good changes like making Yuffie and Vincent main story characters instead of optional like they used to be. Unfortunately though Vincent and Cid are both not playable. They really should have been. The dev time was all put into developing unnecessarily long roads, mountains, and caves, along with filler beach scenes, instead of fleshing out the combat with characters that walk by your side and were playable in the original. I still wish they just made a real remake of FF7 with just minor changes at most like the previously mentioned inclusion of Yuffie and Vincent in the main narrative, but instead they decided to shove brand new timeline shenanigans into the plot. The worst part is it's usually just for shock value. Characters dying or not dying often leads to nothing significant in the long run. Why are multiple timelines being included out of nowhere? It genuinely comes off as pure shock value without any substance at times. There are some hype moments to be had via these and I am intrigued by some. Heck I do actually think one character's timeline shenanigans is actually modestly used well (compared to the others at least), but a lot of these additions do nothing for me. At the end of the day though this is still Final Fantasy 7 for the most part. It's filled with moments I love like Barret's backstory, Red XIII's backstory, and more. I loved seeing iconic moments like Sephiroth walking through fire in HD, but I wish they actually kept all the iconic moments instead of replacing them with what can only be described as completely nonsensical narratives. Now we have to wait years to know what any of these scenes even mean.

A deeply messy and conflicted game that shows the strains of the capitalist need to remake this game for money versus the interesting metanarrative of what it means to remake FF7. Swings from some of the most beautifully written and heartbreaking moments in any game ever to some of the most tedious gameplay slogs ever. It is the best and worst game in so many ways. The pacing is horrid and at the end of the day i think the open world bloat gets in the way of all the good this game does have. On the ending: it wants to have its cake and it eat it too. It shouldn't. Remake set up so many big swings and this game refuses to make good on those.

There's probably a 10-12 hour really cool game buried in here, but damn is this a mess. It got its hooks in me for sure and I'm still interested, but I'm not sure I can justify playing Rebirth full price.

The story has compelling beats even if I have no clue what's going on, but there are so many lulls in between that it makes it difficult to stay attentive. Ton of shots that linger on silence too long, needlessly long animation sequences, and tons of Gears of War 1 style slow walking sections.

Then there's the combat. It's shines every now and then when things hit just right, but for the most part it's just frustrating trial and error until you Google what gear and materia you need to fight whatever boss you've never been taught how to fight.

Maybe I need to play the og to understand what the fuck that cat was after the plate fell.

Releasing this game in the same week as plumbers filled with wonder and two Spider-Men is just a recipe for disaster. Sonic Superstars is the latest 2D entry from Sonic Team that is entirely original instead of rehashing old zones and or using uninspired titles under the guise of a "new" level (looking at you Sonic Forces and Sonic 4). I love Sonic Mania, but it's clear after the game's release, it was time for something different making Superstars a bit refreshing. Sonic Team wasn't alone in making this thing a reality as this was co-developed by Arzest whose previous works include Fantasian (co-developer) and... Balan Wonderworld (goddammit). However, I was still optimistic about this game after it was shown off at Summer Game Fest because one, it looked promising, and two, since Arzest is a Naoto Ohshima studio, naturally, he got to work on another Sonic game again. He is the true father of Sonic the Hedgehog and after all that shit with Yuji Naka, I'm glad that he was able to work on his child again. For the game itself however, I've never been this conflicted about a Sonic game in my life.

Before I get into gameplay, I want to touch upon the presentation briefly. The game goes in the direction of a 2.5D platformer, and while I prefer the pixel-based look, I don’t mind this style, in fact, I like how this game looks visually. The environments are colorful, and the character designs fit right in with the classic Sonic entries quite well; plus I think the 2.5D style makes the characters look adorable. Anyway, the gameplay. While plans fell through to get Evening Star (Christian Whitehead's team) back to create the game, the physics from Mania were translated over to Superstars, and as expected, they're great. They are completely identical and genuinely the best thing about Superstars, which is good because I can't imagine Sonic Team working on this after they failed physics twice in the Sonic 4 duology. All of the character's moves were kept intact and they're all fun to play, but I want to give the spotlight to Amy. I haven’t played Sonic Origins Plus, but from what I understand, all of her moves were directly taken from the game and improved upon; from my experience, she's one of my favorite characters to play as. She uses her trusty Piko-Piko Hammer to demolish anything in her path, has a large hitbox when jumping in the air, and has a double jump which is already a plus for any character regardless of the game. I'm glad that she's a part of the team now and I hope SEGA continues to make her playable in future entries, and the same can be said with the new character, Trip the Sungazer. She’s unlockable after completing the main story, and I dig her moveset. Like Amy, she has a double jump, but it’s her Ring Rolling ability that makes her distinct from the team. It’s sort of akin to Knuckles’ climbing ability, but fast, that can make going up and down walls such a breeze.

The Chaos Emerald Powers are what Superstars added to the table. Rather than the sole purpose of obtaining them all to unleash the eventual Super Form, each emerald has its own ability that every character can by holding a button and selecting it with the wheel for a limited amount of time. The Blue emerald emits clones to attack all at once, Red transforms the player into a bullet to shoot them in midair, Cyan helps you maneuver through water levels easily, Green grows a large vine assisting you to reach higher levels, Purple reveals hidden platforms and items, Yellow slows down time, and White allows an extra move depending on the character like Sonic’s homing attack and Trip fireball for instance. To be honest, I never utilized the system that much; even when the game prompts you to use powers like Purple’s Vision ability, they were never my first instinct as jumping and running were my main priorities to progress through levels. Out of the seven, I took advantage of two emerald powers, the Avatar and Bullet, but I only used them when the game started dicking with me, but I’ll get to that later. Overall, I found most of the powers to be sort of redundant as it didn’t really change how I experience Superstars, instead I found them to be a waste of time.

Now onto the levels themselves; they’re… okay I guess. Bridge Island, Speed Jungle, and Pinball Carnival are decent, Sky Temple, Sand Sanctuary, Lagoon City, and Cyber Station are okay, Golden Capital and Frozen Base exist, and Press Factory and Egg Fortress are easily the worst. Superstars has the same problem with Sonic Adventure 2 (and probably a few more 3D Sonic games) where the first half is solid, and the second half is kind of ass. The best levels that I’ve listed above are fun and give off the sense of speed that Sonic is known for while the second half consists of annoying gimmicks like the spheres in Press Factory Zone Act 2 that they somehow screwed up from Mania and added an insta-kill timer to annoy you, or slow side-scrolling anti-gravity sections in Egg Fortress Zone in a way that feels reminiscent to Sonic 1, my least favorite in the Genesis era. There are also character-exclusive acts, which are solo adventures for each of the four characters in the main story meaning more levels for a single-player experience, but not so much for cooperative play.

I think this is a good segue to talk about the multiplayer, SEGA’s main marketing push for the game. In past 2D Sonic games, the maximum amount of players you could have was two, serving as either local co-op or duking out in multiplayer modes. Superstars goes in the direction of the modern 2D Mario games by having up to four players at once for cooperative play, which seems cool in concept, but you have to remember that 2D Mario and 2D Sonic are vastly different. Mario games are designed with a pick-up-and-play approach so everyone can experience the fun no matter the skill level. Sonic all is about speed and momentum, so having more than two players running and jumping through each zone seems like a recipe for disaster, and from what I’ve seen online, the multiplayer is not great. One, playing with other people is restricted to local co-op (very Nintendo move), and two, even if you have real people to play with you, it’ll still be a disaster as everyone will have different speeds, meaning players are susceptible to being off-screen most of the time. Heading back to the aforementioned character-exclusive acts, I should mention that I played through the whole game by myself, so going through those levels was no problem at all. The real drawback is when more people are involved and they have to wait patiently for you to clear the level that can only be done with that particular character. It just makes me question why they even exist if only one has access to them. We also have Battle mode, and unlike co-op play, this one has online functionality as you play through a variety of events to see who will come out on top. The problem is, I don’t think anyone would give a damn about this mode as again, SEGA advertised the hell out of cooperative play, and you don’t even get to play any of the Sonic cast as you’re relegated to mecha characters that you can customize by spending medals that you’ve collected in the levels or bonus stages. If you don’t care about multiplayer, then the medals are kind of worthless.

Now let’s talk about the bosses. These are what soured my overall experience playing Sonic Superstars as every boss follows a cycle where you have to wait about 15-30 seconds dodging their attacks until they leave an opening for you to attack, making them balloon in length. They can drag on for like 3-5 minutes, and if you die, you have to restart the fight; it is so freaking annoying. The worst offenders are the final bosses as this feeling of exasperation kicks in. Starting with the Eggman fight in the main story, it’s the least offensive out of the three, but it’s still not great. The wait times are even longer ranging from 30 seconds to over a minute, and you need 12 hits to take him down, and if you die, you have to redo the whole fight, and this was where I started to use the Chaos Emerald powers near the end to assist me because this was ridiculous. After beating the main campaign, you unlock Trip’s Story, which is essentially replaying the same levels as Trip, but it’s a bit harder, and for the bosses, they take even more hits to kill. Exclusive to Trip’s Story is the encounter with Fang the Sniper in his giant mech, and this was where my frustration kicked in even further. Instead of waiting around for long for an opening, how about avoiding all attacks that will instantly kill you because that’s how I would encapsulate this entire fight. With some practice, the first phase isn’t too bad, it’s the second phase where I have issues. This is where Fang goes crazy with the insta-kill attacks and where most of my deaths took place. At that point, it wasn’t really difficult anymore as it was downright cheap, and I spent more than two hours beating this boss. TWO HOURS!! I already wanted to snap this weasel’s neck after the pain he put me through. I feel like they’ve done this because of, you guessed it, multiplayer. I get that a co-op experience would make the boss encounters easier, but they left it all in for the single-player people, and even if I did experience with a few people, I think they need some tweaking.

Spoiler Paragraph (If you even care): After beating both campaigns and collect all the Chaos Emeralds (which are really easy to obtain), you’ll unlock the Last Story where the true final boss appears, and he reveals himself to be… Dark Barney with wings. I could’ve made this a spoiler tag, but this boss came out of left field with no build-up whatsoever that there’s no real significance to leaving a spoiler tag. It’s one of those blink-and-you-miss moments if you didn’t see the purple egg in the hub world, and even if you did, this boss just happens out of nowhere because the game does a terrible job of explaining its purpose as the story is almost non-existent. For the fight itself, it’s not as excruciating as Fang’s was, but it’s still terrible as It’s entirely based on RNG and pure chance. His attacks don’t even harm you when you’re in Super Sonic form, but you’ll just be wasting time as you scour around looking for rings. This is the longest fight in the entire game and dying just once will send you right back to the beginning and wasted ten minutes. This is the most disappointing final boss in any Sonic game, and I was so glad that it’s over.

Now let’s talk about, in my opinion, the single most disappointing element of Sonic Superstars, and it’s the music. This might be the most disjointed soundtrack I’ve heard from Sonic, and there’s a good reason why. When rolling credits three times, you’ll notice that Superstars has a lot of composers. You have some good names like Tee Lopes, Rintaro Soma, and Hidenori Shoji, but then we have the elephant in the room which is Jun Senoue. I said this in my Sonic 4 Episode II review and I’ll say it here again; Jun Senoue is not good at making or even replicating Genesis music, and his works on the soundtrack are extremely noticeable due to the overabundance of those damn snare drums. It makes the soundtrack in some ways feel stuck in the past, and given that there was Sonic 4 placeholder music before the game was released, you can tell something was up. I want SEGA to let Jun focus on what he’s good at making with his electric guitar as I do not want to see him compose another classic Sonic game ever again; just leave it to the others who know what they’re doing. Outside of him, there are also some songs in a zone that don’t have any melodic connection, like Speed Jungle for instance. The first act, composed by Tee Lopes is an absolute jam that captures the overall speed and jungle aesthetic the level is known for. Act 2, composed by Hidenori Shoji is not a bad song at all; it captures the speed, but doesn’t have that jungle feel Act 1 provided. You can literally put this in any new Sonic night level and it’ll sound better there. I can go on, but I think you get the picture here.

Sonic Superstars is the definition of an identity crisis. It fails in what it wants to be, what it wants to do, and how it executes things, leaving a middling mess of a game that isn’t worth the $60 price tag. This is what frustrates me about the new Sonic entries; they have neat ideas, but they don’t go the extra mile to make it work properly like four-player multiplayer. If this has a bit more time in the oven, I’ll be singing a different tune, but I already got the platinum in this game in December, which translates to being a one-and-done for me. While I don’t think it’s a bad Sonic game, this isn’t something I want to return to in the foreseeable future, and it’s a damn shame that it had to be like this.

I tried so, so hard to like this game. I wanted to enjoy it so bad. Not least of all because I'd spent $60 on it. But good god, it's so boring.
The controls are clunky and confusing, the mechanics are incredibly unintuitive, and the gameplay loop... the gameplay loop. It's like an annoying walking simulator, but to try and make that interesting and engaging, they made walking hard.
It really feels like Hideo Kojima wanted to make a movie and just... thought gameplay wouldn't matter. Character exposition is so long and feels hard to get invested in because they're constantly throwing a thousand different bits of terminology at you that you don't really even understand. You could talk a bit about how some of the storytelling is pretty contrived and on the nose with the whole Bridges Bridges Bridges of it all, but I wouldn't really care about that. My issue is that the game was so boring and difficult to play that I couldn't even get into the narrative like I wanted to. It really just felt like an endless slog with no reward.
I did enjoy the moments during long journeys where music would start to play. The soundtrack was excellent and the visuals were gorgeous, as were the concepts. I just wish it had been even a tiny bit fun to play.

19 INCHES OF VENOM (Spoilers ahead)

This game was absolutely great, another beautiful Spidey adventure on the PS5. I have a lot to say for this one, and very little negative.

The story was very well put together, balancing it's character selection very well. It starts off with a bang and slows down for a little bit, but It really picks up around halfway through the game. The story kept topping itself after every main event, you didn't know exactly what to expect next. It was quite the ride. We got some really nice character development for Miles, and watching Peter and MJ really come together again was very charming. It was also very nice to see Harry and Peter reunited.
Unlike Spiderman 3, this game doesn't suffer from having multiple villains. The 2 big villains are nicely handled, and the side villains don't take anything away from them, yet still add their own nice touch. Not a lot more to say here story-wise. It was pretty peak

Gameplay wise? they absolutely killed it. The abilities and gadgets and super intuitive to use, the new movement mechanics are AWESOME, and the (somewhat) new combat system is extremely well done. This game is a decent bit more difficult than the last 2 games, which is a much bigger positive than you'd think. The best improvement imo is the fact that they greatly reduced the amount of shitty stealth sections. There's only like 2 in this game and they're all decently short. They don't feel like they slow the game down at all, either. (Thank you insomniac) The new parry mechanic encourages the player to make the gameplay a little less more of a dodge-fest. The many boss fights greatly benefit from the new and intuitive combat, as each boss is a lot more fleshed out than ever before. They have health bars finally, meaning the game doesn't force one way to beat them. They are a lot more challenging than before as well, making it all the more satisfying to come over your enemies. There are some absolutely insane gameplay sections, too. And once again, they keep topping themselves over and over again with each one. Absolutely stellar gameplay experience here.

The side content is pretty good. The old annoying wire and chemical puzzles from Spiderman 1 are completely removed and replaced with unique missions, they did well on making sure that you weren't fed up doing the same stuff over and over for story purposes. The new collectibles aren't all entirely new, but they're not anything familiar either. The suit selection is absolutely incredible, and most suits have 4 selectable styles for them. Side missions have also been pretty well done and some provide a little more of a complete storyline than they used to.

Overall, this game was a really, really great experience. This is one of the games this year that I'd say is worth picking up without much hesitation.

Remedy absolutely knows what's up when it comes to making games.
This game takes all the ideas they experimented with in their previous games and cranks them up to 11.

Can't say more without spoiling it.
Definitely go into this one blind.

It's not a loop, It's a spiral.