A rough draft; The bosses are experimental and inconsistent - but the vision is spectacular. Mines that cross prehistoric biomes to uncover the lost prison of a god? A society of death-worshippers entombed in the cliffs of a sea-stack hounded by storms conjured by flying stingrays? A sprawling kingdom beneath twin peaks, a moonlit eldritch parish, a canyon transformed into a gutter. A whole new brand of sauce.

Fromsoft had made fantasy RPGS (both High and Gothic) for 15 years up to this point but its hard to deny this was the start of a new trajectory - and even in its nascency, its wild how much this title is a reference point for. How many other games have a boss that summons other players to fight for them? How many other games have bosses that track you using sound instead of sight? In many ways Demons Souls is still way ahead of its time.

Chaos game is good game.

Combat system is fleshed out with the job system and there is a ton to do with it. My favorite was monk, I used it the whole game and there is even more too. On top of the special moves you get, and the ability to steal spells, I struggle to understand how people can call this repetitive. How fun the game is depends on how much you choose to interact with it. I think people on this site just don't like action games that much. They'll complain that this 10-hour game is too repetitive and then talk about a 50-hour jrpg being the best game ever made. I also see a lot of complaints against the Team Ninja games that they have bad level design, and I personally don't see that. All of them kinda hit the same notes that souls games do, with the exception of Nioh 1 that is a game where the developers intentionally try to make to hate it.

This game is also a love letter to the FF franchise. So many levels are modeled off of areas in mainline games. There's an area that's based off the first big FF12 dungeon with walls that push you into pits. Sunleth waterscape, a song from FF13 gets repurposed. There's a FF15 level, and so much more.

The story is fine, I like seeing jack do the chaos things and talk about chaos and being chaos and destroying chaos. It's kind of a big task to make a prequel to a 40-year old game. If you hate it, you probably take stories too seriously. Team Ninja has never done stories well, and I still don't know why people expect some masterpiece from them. A small complaint from me is that I don't like having to choose difficulties. I like having just one and you have to deal with it. But I also understand that this is a Nioh game for babies so it is what it is.

Chaos good, Game good, and now I am CHAOS.

A surprisingly pretty fun little re-imagining/prequel to the O.G. Final Fantasy. The combat system is 100% the best part of the entire experience, with so many levels of customization made possible by a wide range of job classes, weapons and abilities. You can fine-tune so much of your experience that it's honestly a little overwhelming, but it's great fun to mess around with different builds and move-sets to find what works for you.

The game is very challenging, which is something you'll either love or hate. I personally put the difficulty down just to get through it a little easier because the one bad thing about the entire game is the story and characters. For the vast majority of the runtime, the characters are uninteresting and the story is boilerplate nonsense. It's only really the last handful of missions where the story becomes good and the characters start to shine through, and you get the whole picture of what the game was going for. It would have been much better if the story had been reworked a little bit more to make the overall experience more enjoyable because honestly, the combat solo carries until the very end of the game.

I also didn't complete the "Bahamut" trials or whatever, because I just have no interest in grinding for better equipment and replaying the entire game again. It already took me 30 hours to get through it once, so much like the endgame of Middle Earth: Shadows of War, I just left it.
Overall though, this was a good experience. It's not going to blow you away in any way, but it's a very solid action game akin to Nioh, and you get a nice payoff for seeing it through to the end if you're a fan of the Final Fantasy series. I honestly wouldn't mind a complete remake of FF I & II with this combat style, but just keeping to their original plot lines.

So I was wrong about God Hand, but I don't entirely disagree with my past takes. God hand is a silly, goofy game, and it doesn't waste the players time with elements that aren't engaging. It tosses you into the game with bare-bones tutorials and expects you to figure it out.

The gameplay is the main focus and it is good but brought down by the need to make a difficult game. God Hand has great 1-on-1 combat, once you get into a rhythm, you can stomp out enemies. The problem is that the game is constantly throwing the player into these gank fights with 6-8 guys that are really tanky. It isn't that damning early on because they give you tools to use, but later on, it can get real annoying. My strategy typically consisted of just spamming dash attacks and slowly chipping down enemy health. God Hand is not built to fight so many people and it is typically where you spend your resources at. Some of the multi enemy boss fights suck ass. Like a lot of ass. Like BBL type of ass. I really wish there was more 1-on-1 boss fights against actual human guys. The custom move system is cool and how you increase your damage, but moves aren't that diverse or usable. Again, because it is so difficult, some moves are just worse so you will never use them. When a game is so difficult, it forces players to abandon other options and focus solely on the best options, even if they prefer the others. There is also a system that constantly punishes you for playing good. The better you play, the harder it gets. I don't really know why this system is here when you can select a difficulty at the start. They should've just let hard mode be playable at the start. You'll often just die so you can get it down, otherwise, you will be eating shit often at the highest level.

Besides those flaws, God Hand is a game I could only really recommend to gamers who can really tough it out. Nevertheless, it is still a quality game that is 100% worth your time. A game that doesn't take itself so seriously and just lets you play. A game that embraces the desire to just do whatever because the developers wanted to.

I'm gonna write a proper review of this after I replay it again, but I want to get my thoughts out there on all of the people moaning "ohhhh the strafing there's no strafing how do I fight the bad guys if I can't strafe waaaaaa"

R&C1 isn't built around strafing. As such, you can't approach it like the later Ratchet games where you can fight most encounters with most weapons and just switch between your favorites each time you run out of ammo. The weapons here each serve a particular purpose and deciding which one is best for each encounter is part of the challenge. So is not being able to move in one direction while shooting in another. If you come back to this from the later Ratchet games, you need to shift your combat mindset from "go go go shoot shoot shoot" to "I need to make a plan for this fight given the tools I have and execute that plan." Once you make peace with the controls, once you meet them on their own terms, you'll find that the combat here is fun in its own way, different from the rest of the series.

And I'm not saying this to shit on the later Ratchet games! I love Deadlocked and that one is like 85% strafe shooting. But I don't think people will be able to fully appreciate this game if that playstyle is all they associate R&C's combat with.