Charming in the very specific ways that late 90s/early 00s parody anime are (think Di Gi Charat or Excel Saga). The game being structured into episodes with goofy preview segments is cute. The characters are well defined and fun to watch blabber about random shit (with the exception of the humans). It's really chill and has a clear unity of purpose in its mechanics and story that few games have. The Innocents and item world systems layer to give the game a soft modular difficulty where you can either engage with them to breeze through the story in like 20 hours or take it slow. If the main game is too easy the post-game offers a massive grind with optional dungeons. Disgaea doesn't overstay its welcome if you don't want it too, which is rare for RPGS which are usually well paced until you have to spend hours grinding to beat the final boss.

Burnout games are phenomenal, Legends for the PSP was way up there for me as a kid. Easily one of the best handheld games ever made. This on the other hand just doesn't work. I played Paradise when it first came out around 2008 and remember dropping it pretty early on. Revisiting it in 2023 I could barely play an hour. The driving is great, the soundtrack is solid (tho not as good as Legends), but the open world stuff is abysmal. Driving from race to race feels so much worse than selecting the next thing you want to do from a menu. The scale of the city makes the challenges annoying. I'm spending more time looking at the map to make sure I'm going the right way than I am looking at the road.

I'm reminded a lot of my disappointment playing Elden Ring earlier this year. I liked DS3 but the open world stuff in Elden Ring just ruined it. Instead of going through meticulously designed dungeons I was fighting the same copy pasted mini bosses over and over in between long walks across empty spaces with a few enemies scattered around. Burnout Paradise is like the racing game version of that experience. It stinks.