The game is another amazing immersive sim alongside the likes of system shock and bioshock. the interactivity in this was really fun and the memory loss story of morgan works really well with the audio log style of the game.
The game does have a lot of weird audio issues though like the audio mixing for characters you directly speak to are way too loud, music sometimes just gets stuck and repeats the same ambiance even when it doesn't fit forcing me restart. audio logs also don't carry on playing between area transitions so you have to constantly wait for it to end before being able to travel.

Fantastic video game. Goddamn this was a fun one.

I'll get the 1 negative out of the way: only 3 boss fights. The final boss was so badass it almost makes up for it. It's not a huge deal but the first game has several bosses so I was surprised it only had 3.

Ok, all the levels are so fun. This game reminds me of Sly 2, lot of unique levels with unique activities that are all fun to play. Loved all the characters you meet. This game just wants you to have a good fucking time.

Great music, all the songs fit their respective levels. Game ran at a locked 30, which for a PSX game I will never complain about. Never felt nauseous playing this one.

A must-play for the PSX. First one felt more epic which is why I felt this was a 9/10 and not a 10/10.

Stellar Blade is the gaming equivalent to vanilla ice cream, its good but well..
its fucking vanilla

The game is a solid sekiro clone, game really peaks during boss fights but my ONLY GRIPE is that each boss has a "telegraphed attack" where its a flashy cinematic move where you don't have control and will most likely get hit from it, but the thing is you don't actually take damage because the whole move was just a tease to show the player that the boss can do that move now. Its honestly like the boss is some fucking "Tales of" party member where they unlock a new move in the middle of battle.

The Story is bland, like it doesn't even try to hide the big twist its as subtle as a frying pan to the face. None of the characters will be remembered after like a few months. While Eve is very pretty, she's also pretty fucking basic both character and design wise. I honestly liked the other characters lily and tachy's design more
so basically wait for sale if you want a sekiro derivative
8/10

Compared to my last review I’ve spent a decent amount of hours at one of the arcades in my area playing this game, I genuinely wanted to in a sense defeat how blunt I was in that but even just meeting the game on its terms and practicing I just get frustration more than anything.

While I can squint and see the outline of games like Tekken existing because of this if you think about this existing a year after Street Fighter II dropped and this was developed by the second biggest video game company at the time you add up something that feels gimmicky rather than what it is, innovative.

For starters, there is no cohesion between 2d fighting and the 3D space fundamentally. When you’re off the axis your opponent is on you are essentially caught in the stream of wherever you can move until the game eventually corrects itself. This one fundamental piece crumbles the house of cards this game is built off of, if I can die because my opponent can be in a space I cannot reasonably counter (or because the resources this game provide me do not teach me these mechanics), what good is the 3D space if I can’t utilize it besides being a way to sidestep the entire genre I’m playing?

It’s one thing to develop technology that changes everything (I imagine it was incredibly hard for them to even make the hit boxes as decent as they are here which rival even most 2D fighting games at the time), but it’s another thing if the game you’ve made just doesn’t feel good and the art of game design is making the compromise between fun and technical.

Summary: I wanna see how the other games improve upon this

Easily the best open world game I've ever played. Putting souls gameplay into an open world is genius and works perfectly. The game is massive but the quality of items, bosses, areas, music is excellent and consistent throughout the entire game.
A couple of the areas like some of the dungeons were a bit underwhelming but you go through so many interesting areas throughout the game that a couple bad ones are whatever.
Despite souls games being known as hard and stressful this game is just chill and you can explore and fight at your own pace

Might be the best platfomer ever made. It's either tied with Ape Escape or is better than it. Have to let the time simmer since I just beat this game (and almost 100%ed it)

Incredible levels, music, characters, story, everything. Except some chuggy framerate at parts, this is a perfect video game. A classic, an essential play. What more can I say?

For fans of living.

Gave myself a day to kinda just sit with the whole experience of my first playthrough. Xenogears is one of those games that kinda just existed within the culture in a way where I always heard people vaguely gesture at its greatness, but never actually got any full details about what exactly made it so great. So for years and years and years and years and years I kinda just kept putting it off, playing many other games before and after it, hearing about its complexities but never really the details as of what those complexities were. Finally experiencing it for myself I completely get it.

An experience that is some parts Neon Genesis Evangelion, some parts Gundam some parts sci-fi novels and films, Xenogears wears all of its inspirations firmly on its sleeve and proudly bears it all as it goes into its own psychological, religious explorations of the self.

The ways in which it talks about running away from your problems rather than dealing with them and how that inevitably comes to bite you in the ass, there's a quite good example with the martial arts tournament you enter that genuinely surprised me when it happened.

The ways it delves into how trauma can inform and explain behaviors, can cause people to drift one way or another instead of facing the real problems within themselves, be lead to more and differing kinds of abuses, or completely shut themselves down due to their inability to truly cope with the things that've happened to them. But it also firmly discusses how important it is to continue to live, to continue to fight and go on despite the struggles we face in life, how we have to take responsibility for ourselves and the things we do despite our traumas, that again our traumas can be an explanation for behaviors and actions you may take, but at the end of the day you have to be responsible for your own actions.

There are a few characters I do wish were able to get more from the story (Rico, Maria, Chu Chu) and the very clear rushing of things does absolutely fuck with what was clearly supposed to be this ambitious and sprawling experience, though I will say in spite of the clear rush job that Disc 2 ends up as, I genuinely still quite loved the way they handle the presentation and style. Some of the quick cuts are really sharp and effective, I dig the kinda play stage type beat they do for some of the cutscenes they didn't have time to fully make enviornments for, I like the way they frame each part from differing characters POV's. There's a lot of cool things that make that second disc really interesting, kinda reflecting episodes 25 and 26 of NGE in ways.

It's such a strange feeling in ways cause like I kinda despised the gameplay at times (ground combat relies a bit too heavily on deathblows and grinding them out where-as I feel like the Gear combat is a bit better balanced in terms of building up to your deathblows and having to strategically manage your fuel levels in interesting ways). But even though I wasn't huge on the combat or some of the dungeon design (fuck Babel Tower) the whole thing just really came together for me. Everything it was doing was absolutely fuckin aces, it honestly reminded me of watching NGE for the first time as a teenager AS WELL AS watching both Shiki-Jitsu and Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0+1.0 with what exactly it was going for in its messaging and just how much it resonated with me. How much Fei's character arc resonated with me, how dense and packed of an experience it was overall.

I think I can safely say that I'm getting into the series cause I wanna see what else can come from anyone involved who was able to put this together.