It's nothing. There's nothing here.

If this were an abstract art piece on how little you have to put in while still making something that can recognisably be called a video game, then I would praise it for that, but alas no.

The box for the game will provide you more amusement than the shoddy quiz game itself ever can.

Psycho World (not Psychic like the ports) is a pretty impressive MSX2 game for 1988. If you’re familiar with the Game Gear or Master System ports then you’ll know what you’re in store for in this adventure. It has more worlds than the other versions. I can’t tell if the GG and SMS versions just combined the last few levels into one. There’s also a jungle level I don’t even remember from the other versions.

I always really loved how by the end of this game you feel so strong that nothing can stop you. Psycho World is a pretty easy game though there’s no checkpoints for levels. I think there’s a lot about the game that just feels interesting for a computer game. I love all of the platforming you have to do and all the cool abilities you have. Getting to upgrade all of your attacks is also cool, again adding to the strong factor of it. Even the music and graphics are nice and this probably has the best cutscenes of the three versions.

It’s a must play if you’re looking for MSX2 games to play and it even has a fan translation for the few cutscenes it has though it sadly doesn’t translate the text for two moments. If the awesome cover art didn’t convince you to try it then I hope my review will at least convince you to give it a go. I’m still not sure if this is my favorite version but I still really enjoy it regardless.

Disclaimer: I am not a high-end raider. This is all from the perspective of a casual player. I played this game for 3.5 years. TL;DR this expansion sucks.

Coming back to this game (and this review) after 6 months to grind a bit for mogtomes---my opinion on this expansion has not changed much. Outside of raiding, there is virtually nothing new for casual players to do. Gameplay is still the 1231231234123-type gameplay we've known for years, and dungeons are still straight lines so your female au'ra dark knight can waste no time getting back to afking in Limsa in their dollskill-tier "goth" glam as soon as possible. It seems the developers have taken notice of that, as they're dumbing down old content and completely revamping PVP maps that don't need it because I guess the community is too stupid to look at their map for more than 5 seconds and actually PLAY the game. If they change up any of the Stormblood trials to compensate for the fact that trust AI is braindead, it will spell the end of any remaining fun content in the game.

There is little reason to log into this game every day. In fact, now that I think about it, I haven't seen any hunt trains whatsoever in the 2 years since this expack came out, and I played for a good year after I finished the main story. Yes, I am well-aware of their "we want you to play other games!" spiel and lots of people LOVE whipping that one out to deflect criticism, but that doesn't change the fact that the content they're putting out is sloppy and low-effort. New content can be beaten in a 2-3 weeks, maybe even a week if you feel like it, and the patch cycle is every 5 months. Who is this game even for anymore? Where is the longevity, the challenge? Casual players won't stick around for short-lived content and hardcore raiders won't stick around for half-assed raids. If FF16 isn't taking developers away like people deluded themselves into believing, what the hell are they doing over at Square??? WHY DID IT TAKE 10 YEARS TO ADD PHYSICAL/MAGIC ATTACK INDICATORS???? This is THE most profitable Final Fantasy game TO DATE. Where is the money going? Modders can fix up the game's horrendous UI (amongst other things) in a few days, but the developers drag their feet and claim "it's too resource intensive :/" when asked about QOL changes.

The story right now is just FF4 fanfiction, and quest design has gone down the tubes (it was never that good in the first place, honestly. I don't know how I put up with it for 2000+ hours). I'm not sure how many more "go talk to person A, talk to person B, report to person C and go back to A" and pseudo-stealth quests I can handle. Alongside this, the whole "power of friendship" theme is getting a bit tired. Using it as the main theme of Endwalker and now FF16 has turned it into an empty platitude and made the writing painfully predictable. I have no issue with this sort of story, but when it's poorly executed (like how this and 16 was) it starts to get grating. It's such a messy wrap-up of a decade-long story that it's actually incredible. They spent 10 years beating into our heads that summoning primals is bad and tempering is dangerous but at the end of 6.0 they summon Garuda and all the other primals to hitch a ride on our spaceship because who gives a single flying fuck about consistency anymore. I don't even remember WHY they summoned them in the first place. Aether supply, maybe? That's usually how they weasel their way out of bad writing. Things happen in Endwalker not because it's the natural flow of the story, but because the writers needed it to happen. For example, the threat of the Telophoroi is instantly negated within 5 minutes of MSQ because we just so happen to create this invincibility device that we just so happen have the ability to mass produce. Crisis averted! Zenos can also bodysnatch people for whatever reason. He had ample opportunity to throw the WoL off the nearest cliff or incapacitate a Scion, but no, he decides to just stand and stare at them like a fucking moron. God forbid we have any stakes in the literal end-of-the-world expansion, right?

In conclusion, after 3 years of this game, I think I'm ready to throw in the towel. Unless they drastically overhaul the gameplay system, the quest design, get better writers, and actually give Y'shtola a fucking character arc because it's been 10 goddamn years and she's still a cardboard cutout (and kill Thancred because he sucks), I don't think I'll be coming back to this game anytime soon. A shame that it ends like this because I really did enjoy the game prior to this expansion, but with the dumbing down of content, said content being formulaic, and the devs barely taking feedback, I don't see the point in dropping $15 to play this game anymore. I wouldn't mind a week-long subscription to be quite frank, since that's about the amount of time I play this game anymore. They already nickle-and-dime you for basic shit like changing your name ($10 btw) and transferring worlds, what's a $5 sub tier going to hurt?

If you read this far, thanks for sticking around, you also probably think I hate this game, and if you haven't played any FF games before, I would not recommend this as your first. It is nowhere near the other FFs in terms of quality, so play literally any other game in the franchise. Any criticism of this expansion, whether it be about the lack of content or said content being lackluster is always met with "Just play another game", or "Just do old content!" and it drives me up the goddamn wall. This is an EXPANSION, it's supposed to add NEW content to keep you playing. Telling people to just play old content defeats the purpose of an expansion pack and is also a blatant deflection of criticism. I don't really care if it's "kino" or whatever you lot describe everything as, Square isn't going to give you a sub discount for defending their milquetoast output. Maybe I'll actually sub again and go through the rest of the patches to write another review before Dawntrail, but I literally had to drag myself through the first few awful post-patches in 2022 before I just quit the game completely. It truly blows my mind that people praise this as one of the best JRPG stories ever written. Sure, if you haven't played anything else! Anyway, the music is the last remaining positive of this game, and even that is wearing thin. There's more to music than nondescript chanting vocals.

One of the ugliest main characters I've ever seen, looks especially bad in the lighting of the game's engine. An unacceptable amount of core movement mechanics are left unexplained and are not intuitive to figure out on your own. The left face button performs three wildly different actions depending on whether you tap, double tap, or hold it. There are so many pauses in animations that kill the flow of movement. The right stick yoyo aiming feels useless outside of forced gimmick moments. It is so easy to grind yourself to a halt and kill all of your momentum from one wrong motion. The yoyo ride sometimes refuses to turn and sometimes doesn't and it feels random. It felt like I needed to completely master the controls to even have a chance to experience flow in any level.

The music leaves no impression on me. Level design feels homogenous and makes my eyes glaze over. The powerups feel unnecessary. The side quests where you do tasks for people are boring at best and an annoying diversion at worst. Bosses feel like 3D mario bosses in the worst possible way. The quick time events, especially the stick rotations, feel horrible and slow and only made me want to purposely land lower on the end level setpiece. On several occasions I became locked out of a collectible unless I killed myself or restarted the level. To get to options you have to go all the way back to the title screen, for some reason "Tutorials" is more important to put on the pause menu than options.

There are so many bugs it's insane, at one point I had to play the same level 4 times because it kept locking me in an animation on the level complete screen and freezing my game. The number of walls and floors I clipped through was hilarious. The most fun way to play is by ignoring almost every stage mechanic and even then it's not fun. I would never want to replay this game.

Note on all expansions: Every part of FFXI takes an enormous hit in my ratings for existing within the god awful, unconscionable interface, code base, and general design philosophies of FFXI. These things are the foundations of the whole game, and thus no expansion can fully escape these sins. Despite this I have chosen to log them all separately because they are each different beasts.

Chains of Promathia is what happens when your DM who is on the spectrum somewhere does some adderall and a line of cocaine and then fixation dumps his whole DnD campaign setting's worldbuilding on you in an incomprehensible word-salad hurricane. To call it "an ambitious story for an MMO in 2004" is like saying that that when Mount Vesuvius erupted it was a bad day to be in Pompeii. To be perfectly frank I believe that this glorious audacity blinds many to the deep, deep problems that haunt the writing of CoP.

While the base game and RoZ were quite notably underwritten, CoP is overwritten in the extreme. There is about 400% more text than there should be, and much of it is a garbled soup of overused jargon that would make Kingdom Hearts blush. This is a story that dearly loves its twists, and it's true that having twists AT ALL in such an era was virtually unprecedented, but CoP just doesn't know when to stop jerking the player around. Almost every major piece of information that is dramatically given to the player for most of CoP's playtime is a red herring that will soon be paved over with newer, similarly incorrect information. When the expansion is nearly over, it is revealed that none of these answers that have been painstakingly collected across these hours of gameplay are true, and that the truth is actually far less satisfying than any of them. As far as the plot is concerned, almost every cutscene can be written off as a waste of time which sends the characters on a dozen more hours of chasing their own tails because the game isn't yet ready to end.

Thank god then, that plot is not all that makes a story. With the exception of a perplexingly tacked-on elvaan dude and a triplet of tedious tarus, the character writing of Chains of Promathia blows its predecessors out of the water. It's characters and many of the scenes built with them are genuinely touching. I would, in fact, be willing to say that this is the first time in the genre's history that an MMO manages to accomplish this... but now we must ask again that dreaded question: Is it worth putting up with actually playing FFXI for?

Maybe. You actually don't have to even start RoZ in order to do most of CoP. You'd need to at least hit what was once the level cap in order to finish it, but the road to playing CoP isn't THAT steep, there's some worthy stuff to see, and with a few very notable exceptions (like climbing a certain mountain for a certain mandatory mission) the missions of CoP don't ask too absurdly much of the player. I'd say it's worth thinking about, but be wary of anyone who tells you that CoP is "one of the best stories in Final Fantasy." These people are narcs and frauds. People who tell you that CoP is one of THEIR FAVORITE Final Fantasy stories however are probably just cool weirdos and it's okay to hang out with them.

the dark and melodramatic streets of kamurocho, contextualized by punctual camera angles, neon signs that dampen dark alleyways, and wacky inhabitants. kamurocho is alive. for every fun filled casino or arcade, an oppressive gang infested street lies just around the corner.
in the week or so since i've finished this game, i haven't stopped thinking about it. the dynamic cast of characters, the aforementioned bustling streets of kamurocho, the hard hitting sample induced rock soundtrack, and the clunky yet earnestly goofy combat; it's extremely honest and heartfelt in pursuit of a crime drama, and it certainly delivers. i think the themes of family bonds really tie everything together. the moments with the florist and his son, or date with his daughter were a bit of a deviation from the main narrative but they were ultimately for the sake of driving a point home, which i respect. yakuza 1 isn't afraid of itself unlike kiwami, it'll confidently present you its themes and gameplay without hesitation. while i do see the combat as inherently flawed it never got on my nerves or hindered my enjoyment of the game. it's clunky for sure but every attack, daft in approach, feels impactful when it connects. and with the backing of rough hardass rock beats mixed with the hip hop sample here and there, i couldn't help but be pumped up for every battle that ensued.
despite its flaws, i still appreciate yakuza 1 for what it sets out to do. the atmosphere is almost unparalleled in the ps2 library. between every freeze frame loading the next street, a sense of curiosity and infatuation follows. i don't care if kiwami is objectively better or whatever, this is the real yakuza experience to me. kiwami WISHES it could be this genuine.
BRING that shit, Kazuma.

So this is a big beautiful and sometimes messy game that's hard to articulate into words just what it's all about.

First of all, let's start from the top. The gameplay here is so much improved over LAD7 (which was already fantastic) and Hawaii is just a wonderful sandbox to explore, this was exactly the shot in the arm this series needed.

The story is fantastic most of the way here, there are some dumb things here and there (like every yakuza game if we're being honest) but just such an incredible amount of heart to go along with this. Ichi is an amazing protagonist, as much as I love Kiryu he's totally captured my heart at this point and will hopefully be the guy going forward.

I do have some issues with this game, the biggest one being how bad the game is at telling you things. The final dungeon had no level requirement, and I was a few levels under, making it very difficult to complete. There are many side quests that you do, and if you do them too early you get wiped and the game offers you no way of knowing this. Stuff like this was a massive time waste, and unfortunate, but not enough to hurt this game overall.

The ending is....interesting. I can't say I love or hate it, I have to see where it goes, but it left more questions than answers for me. It still brought out tons of emotion (as did this entire game) and I can't wait to see exactly where they go from here.

I think realistically, this is certainly a top tier Yakuza game, and I wouldn't be shocked at all to see this one go into people's top spot. For me, it's just going to miss out on that, but a genuinely incredible game, that RGG cooked on.

a lesser person would say "i'm speechless" when reviewing this. i am not speechless. i got the speech.

this is, somehow, really fucking cool. i love experimental and surreal shit, and this is obviously not exactly a "game" but more of an experience. you watch this weird ass footage while INCREDIBLE music plays -- no shit, this is going on my list of the best soundtracks of all time.

i played this purely out of curiosity. i watched a bit of a gameplay on youtube but i wanted to know how it actually controls, like what do you do while watching. basically nothing. but i still think it's something cool. and i must note, if these weren't images of a near naked woman, i would still love it, hell, i'd probably love it more. if it were bad early 2000s surreal cgi, it would be amazing. this is going on my list of "dream games".

i'll probably not watch this all the way through because i honestly don't care but i'm really impressed lol.

The historical spinoff I've been waiting for in years has been finally translated into English and released worldwide. And they go and make the game inferior to the original.

Like a Dragon: Ishin does nothing to address the issues the original Ishin had, and in fact, adds more problems into the mix.

Bosses have an insane amount of hyperarmour now, making them impossible to actually combo. The damage in Brawler style has been nerfed into the ground, making it virtually unusable except for parrying/tiger dropping. The four styles still have no cohesion between them, and are imbalanced as fuck as a result. Ground attacks have been removed in favour of just swinging the sword when enemies are on the ground and having them take damage. And most of all, both the trooper card system and boss magic attacks add nothing to the game except annoyance.

The sword upgrading system has been completely fucked as well, based on random enemy drops. It was so bad, the game had to patch this drop rate. It worked fine before, why change it?

On top of this, Unreal Engine adds the usual UE jank into the mix. Although, to give the game credit, the lighting in the world is quite beautiful and it has a quite robust options menu as well.

Overall, it's just disappointing that this is what we ended up getting. 100% an unnecessary remake, even just translating the original into English would've been better. If you don't want to play the original with a guide, go for this one, the base game is still great.