The game certainly did not disappoint! I can totally see why it is so many people's favorite game in the whole series and it's def top 3 for me.

Almost all Trails games usually start out pretty slow, but Azure starts off intense and the action hardly lets up the entire game. Also it perfectly expands upon the world and the story Zero no Kiseki built up, plus the characters get even more fleshed out. I really can't go into depth about the story without spoiling, but I will say Azure has some of the craziest and best written plot twists in the whole series and there were a couple moments when my jaw physically dropped because I was just so shocked, but everything was so perfectly foreshadowed in a subtle way that you'd never notice it on your own and none of the twists felt unnatural or asspulled.

Oh and the OST is incredible as always. The Azure Arbitrator is easily one of the best and most epic boss fight themes I've ever heard and if we lived in a fair and just world everyone would know and understand this.

What an incredible journey! After spending almost 200 hours on the Crossbell arc I still think about and miss my adventures with the Special Support Section of Crossbell.

One of the greatest games ever made. One of my top 10 favorite games ever made. The best Final Fantasy in everything, but the name. Both Sakaguchi and Uematsu's magnum opus.

The characters are amazing, Kaim is one of the best protagonists ever, the world is super unique and fleshed out, I'm always a sucker for that 'Magical based industrial revolution' aesthetic. The visual novel styled short story segments are just incredible, the main story itself is really well written and feely and if you didn't cry or tear up at least once while playing this game you probably have no soul. The gameplay is godly, one of the most fun turn-based systems I've experienced and the OST is just simply one of the best ever composed for a video game. If you haven't played this game yet, please do yourself a favor and rectify that.

PLEASE GIVE US AN HD REMASTER PORT, MICROSOFT I'M BEGGING YOU, I WILL LITERALLY BUY AN XBOX SERIES X FOR IT I DON'T CARE.

It's one of the most stylish and fun fighting games around even to this day, there's a lot of depth to the moves and combos and it's the best game to nail that comic book aesthetic. The Marvel side of the roster may be inferior to MVC2 (There's still plenty of great characters and new additions though like Doctor Strange, Ghost Rider and Dormammu to name some), but the Capcom side more than makes up for it. They really didn't have to go as hard as they did on the Capcom side of the roster, but I'm sure glad they did. You can't go wrong adding Phoenix Wright, Dante, Vergil, Trish, Wesker, Chris Redfield, Amaterasu, Viewtiful Joe, Zero and Frank West to name some, such a stacked cast of iconic characters. What else is there to say other than IT'S MAHVEL BABY.

When your game has so much text in it that the English word count is longer than the Bible itself (Not this game, but Trails of Cold Steel III, another game in the Trails series does)

When your game has so much lore they have their own unique measurements system in Rege, Selge and Arge.

When your game series is so focused on world-building that it has one massive continent for a world that actually has multiple fully fleshed out countries (Liberl, Erebonia, Crossbell, Calvard etc) with their own unique political, governmental and militaristic systems, even their own economies and trade-routes.

When your game is so story driven that even the most inconsequential NPCs have fleshed out story arcs, backgrounds and personalities if you choose to talk to them multiple times throughout the game and see them unfold.

I can honestly see how these games can be overwhelming to the average person due to the sheer amount of detail they have in them, but I absolutely LOVE that about the series, it's like the J-RPG equivalent to Tolkien or Wheel of Time.

So if you're like me and all that sounds interesting to you, I'd highly recommend buying this game ASAP. There's literally nothing else out there like Trails, no series is as deeply interconnected and detailed and what better way to dive into the world than start at the very beginning?

A journey with realistic and relatable characters, rife with political intrigue and masked by a grand conspiracy lurking in the shadows awaits you!

One of my all time favorite platformers and favorite games in general.

The gameplay mechanics are vastly improved since the first title, the combat has more variety, is much more fluid and has a stronger emphasis on hack n slash elements. The art and aesthetics still feel ripped straight out of Tim Burton and Todd McFarlane's imaginations, the story continues to be a dark and twisted version of Alice in Wonderland, but this time it tackles some more realistic and profound topics as well and I'm sure more than a few people will relate. Level design is just incredible, every world is so distinct and there's just so much variety and creativity on display. Seriously the game is just so memorable and amazing in every regard, I really can't recommend it enough.

Sips Monster

Ahh, they just don't make 'em like this anymore

One of my favorite shooters of all time and an incredibly influential and iconic game. That D-Day mission speaks for itself. Played it a lot with my dad as a kid, was a great bonding experience.

My favorite Guitar Hero.

By the time this game had been released Guitar Hero's core gameplay was perfected. The charts on these songs were really well designed and a lot of fun to play and the career mode was a blast, but ultimately your enjoyment of a rhythm game comes from how much you like the actual music and thankfully for 15 year-old me Metallica was my favorite band so there were very few games I played as much as this one. Metallica hasn't been my fave band in years (That honor now goes to Rhapsody of Fire) but I do still love a lot of their music and play these old charts on Clone Hero for nostalgic value.

Incredibly unique game being a mix of a bullet hell and metroidvania.

Great level design with lots of variety that's just super fun to explore. The bosses are very difficult like any Touhou styled bullet hell would be, but they're still a lot of fun to fight and they're quite creative too. There's a lot of dialogue, a bit too much and it can get annoying at times for a game like this, but it also has great moments where it can be pretty entertaining with some solid comedy and unexpected 4th wall breaks too. The character designs certainly aren't going to be for everyone, but they fit the style of the game so it doesn't bother me much honestly. Lots of little pop culture, anime and visual novel references in the game to enjoy too.

There's not a whole lot to say about this game. The RPG mechanics feel almost completely superficial, tacked on and pointless (Though unlocking characters and being able to make your dream team of 4 does have its novelty) and the graphics/art style/presentation make it look like a cheap mobile game, but that doesn't change the fact that Theatrhythm has always been a celebration of Final Fantasy's history and music and Final Bar Line is the absolute best version of Theatrhythm to experience to date with over 380 songs available and more DLC featuring music from NieR and Octopath Traveler among others as well.

This is the ultimate love letter to Final Fantasy and its musical history spanning over 35 years, If you like FF and its music and enjoy rhythm games this should honestly be a no-brainer to get, I've sunk over 20 hours into it in just a few days already. My only complaints are the charting on some songs could definitely be better (No surprise with the sheer amount of songs though) and I also just wish they would've implemented a long or short version of songs option instead of just cutting every song down to a 'radio edit' version because some of us are crazy enough to want to play the entire 17 minutes of Dancing Mad, thanks.

It's just Mega Man 2 again, but worse. Worse boss fights (There's a couple cool ones like Gemini Man and Shadow Man, but most of them are pretty forgettable), worse stage design and the Doc Robot fights are the most unfun fights and unnecessary padding just to make the game longer for the sake of it plus the final fight was super lackluster.

However just because everything about this game is inferior to Mega Man 2 doesn't mean it's a bad game, it's not awful or great, it's just kind of ok. I will say I respect how this game was the first to add the slide feature and Mega Man's dog Rush which certainly help with platforming, but other than that there's not much here to care about.

Valkyrie Elysium is one of the most 6/10 games I've played in awhile. I wanted to find an underrated hidden gem, future cult classic of a game something like NieR was back in the 360 days, but Valkyrie Elysium just isn't one to me. It is perfectly ok in almost every regard (and less than ok in some), but nothing more. No part of the game stands out to make it exceptional, almost everything it tries to do you've probably seen other games do much better already and that's fine, it's far from a bad game. It's just the definition of mid to me.

The plot starts out very slow and pretty uninteresting for almost 75% of the game. It's just "Go here, fight undead and purify souls because Odin said we have to do this to save the world" and while there is a lot more than meets the eye to this world and its lore, almost all of it is crammed into the final 3 hours of the game to where it just feels tacked on, convoluted and rushed. Reminds me of how Kingdom Hearts III was. I like most of the concepts and ideas presented, but think the execution left a lot to desire. Gotta say I'm not a fan of how the writers take so many creative liberties with Norse mythology and butcher some of its characters and concepts though mixing it with OC anime bullshit because at that point you're better off just making your own mythology.

During the journey Valkyrie slowly meets companions in the form of spirits who she turns into her chosen warriors known as Einherjar and all the Einherjar have stereotypical archetypes we've seen in J-RPGs before, the cunning rogue pretty boy, the gallant knight, the headstrong girl, the shy girl etc. However while they're quite stereotypical, all the characters are still quite charming and their interactions with Valkyrie provide some good character development as they help Valkyrie to appreciate and value humans more.

The combat is definitely the best thing about the game. It's like DMC, but with a much heavier emphasis on magical attacks and support from summoning your Einherjar to exploit the enemy's elemental weakness. My only problem is the actual weapon switching isn't nearly as fluid as DMC and you can't do it mid attack so it breaks up the pacing of combat and almost makes switching weapons pointless a lot of times to me. Also maybe this is just because I was playing on a harder difficulty (Normal was too easy when I started the game on it) but a lot of enemy's just felt overly damage spongy.

Boss fights were another highlight because while they were also overly spongy for my liking, the designs were cool and the fights were well choreographed and provided a decent challenge. Motoi Sakuraba's OST was also pretty good. The ethereal and atmospheric style of music really complimented the dreary and lifeless world.

Speaking of lifeless world, Valkyrie Elysium definitely shows its budget because the world really is lifeless. There's barely any side NPCs, all the side quests you do get feel relatively pointless and tacked on plus they reuse previous areas of the game, all the level design is essentially completely linear and corridor like with barely anything to explore or find off the beaten path besides a handful of treasure chests with potions in them and that's not even mentioning the outdated textures and lip-synching problems.

Valkyrie Elysium is at this weird crossroads where it doesn't know if it wants to be a character action game or an action RPG and a lot of the design choices clash with each other because of that. It has the foundations for a solid combat system, some good bosses and nice atmosphere and music too, but when the narrative and characters are underdeveloped for 75% of the game and then overly rushed and convoluted in the last 25% and the game is so short as it is with little to offer outside of the main story aside from a handful of fetch quests which reuse locations you've already been to...I just can't really recommend this game to anyone when you'd just be better off spending that time playing DMC or NieR instead.