Shin Megami Tensei has a lot going for it.
+Banger Soundtrack
+Really Cool Settings
+Great amount of RPG elements (customisation, party builds, alignment)

But its pretty fucking tedious.
The environments are awful, the difficulty is absolute bullshit hard unless you use one of the thankfully easy cheesing methods. I'm not someone who usually shits on "boring centrism" but this game ruins its alignment system by making Neutral the clearly much better route out of the 3.


I like the game well enough, but its a relic of gaming history and the start of a mega franchise, and that ends there. I dont reccomand this.

Unlike Yakuza 4, i dont think Yakuza 5 is a "bad game". It is a substancial improvement on 4 in terms of writing a multi layered narrative.

The individual stories of all 5 characters are actually quite good.

But once they meet. It becomes an absolute mess akin to an mcu ensemble. Actually thats the best description of Yakuza 5: its a mcu cramped into a game.

Coupled with extremly tedious gameplay sections (looking at you Saejima). A 35 hour runtime for a minimalist run. You got a game that feels like an absolute chore to get through. Even there are excellent moments, especially in the Haruka storyline suprisingly enough.

So as someone who's quite fond of Yakuza, i did actually enjoy my time quite a bit. But i struggle to say i enjoyed "Yakuza 5" so much as I enjoy "Yakuza". If that makes any sense.


If you're into yakuza already, stay away from it. If you're a 0nly, then stay away from it. If you like Yakuza, then you dont need me to tell you to play it. You'll likely enjoy it more than I did, people seem to rank it pretty high. I probably would too if not for that mess of a final chapter.

I will say through, when this game has high points. There are high, and that is what makes me think that, despite the clunkyness, this was worth it.

I have never been as disapointed with a game as I have been with Xenogears.

This game has an absolutely beautiful, late 90s anime-ps1 aesthetic that I cannot get enough of. And it has a very promising premise. The first couple of hours of this game are very good actually.

But eventually, it falls on its face and becomes an absolute unsufferable mess.

The story is ambitious, yes, and it aboards themes you very rarely see in games, especially considering when it released. However I dont think this means we should give it pass for ambition. Many many games were very ambitious yet failed.

What appealed to me about this game was the numerous esthetic resemblances between it and Neon Genesis Evangelion. And I can say that Xenogears goes into Freudian psychology even deeper than Evangelion did. But that dosent mean its story is well told. Again it starts off pretty good, but regularly takes detour to introduce you to new party members who have a mini arc and then never become relevant again. Factually speaking, the game would have had more than enough with Fei, Elly, Citan and Bart. And its not just this, the worldbuilding is admirable but ultimately detracts from the game more than it adds, because the game regularly expects you to take hour long infodumps on you and make sense of it. The second disc basically becoming a visual novel out of nowhere due to frankly poor planning by the developpers only aggravates this.


But the real falling of Xenogears is the gameplay. Now if Xenogears was a book, or an anime, maybe the issues I listed with its story and presentation could be forgiven, but its not. Its a game.

The battle system is awful, the combo system sounds so good, until you realise you cant keep your build up between battle making it a useless gimmick to be used against bosses and nowhere else.

The dungeons fall into the typical JRPG trap of being absurd mazes with no rhyme or reason, with an added bonus of awful camera angles and piss poor platforming.

The pacing is the worst through. You will go hours navigating these mazes, hoping for a story section to come, only to be bombarded with info for an hour. Creating a vicious cycle, where when you're in gameplay, you hope for cutscenes, but when you're in cutscenes, you hope for gameplay. When I realised this, I just.....couldnt lie to myself about how much I hated this. No amount of deep dive philosophical talk will make this experience enjoyable. And the fact that Evangelion exists just I can go get my 90s-Mecha-Anime-that's-actually-a-philosphy-thesis fix elsewhere.

Truly a remarkable game, let's not kid ourselves. But I can't stand it and I never want to touch it again. It's an energy vampire.

Symphony of the Night was made by people who hated how hard the older games were. That's the only explaination I could have for why the game has such piss poor difficulty balancing. The first hour of the game will be classic castlevania hard, but then out of nowhere enemies will only deal you 1hp of damage, and soon enough, bosses will too.

It's good then that the game has a very addictive progression system that pushes to see just how ridicoulously OP you can make Alucard, coupled that with the beautiful 2D artwork, and you got a pretty banger game. If a little mindless and cheesy, yes even without the old voice acting, the "points" this game tries to make are the equivalent of a stoned guy telling you "duuuuuude, why aren't we more like, nice to each other bro?"


Charming PS1 cheesyness. Great game

Fallout 4 is pretty bad. There's a decent game buried under there. But, it's.....such a waste.

The biggest problem is that unlike past Fallouts, the game isn't designed to be a replayable experience, but rather an endlessly played one. Choices rarely matter, 3 of the 4 factions have the same ending, the dialogue system might be the worse in any game that has one.

I think the best way to put it is that Fallout 4 is a single player MMO. Every single quest, main or side, is designed the exact same way. Be given an objective, it will most likely take you something around 5 minutes to get there, clear out a ruined interior area full of this world's infinite amount of raiders, it will take 10 minutes, the exact determined time that it will hold your attention but short enough that you can keep going and doing another quest. This makes the entire game feel incredibly samey and you ironically get sick of it way quicker if you arent into endless dopamine loops.

This game just.....isn't worth your time. It's a waste.

One of the most disturbing games I've played. Incredibly ambitious for its time. Adressing really really heavy subject matter that even puts Silent Hill to shame. There's no horror quite like this world.

AM's hatred for humanity is both foreign and understandable

All 5 characters are burdened by their past, guilty of it or not and they are meant to reflect on it. The horror of imagining this scenario being replayed on loop over and over is quite something.

An incredibly scary game.

I really dragged my feet before playing this because Episode 1 disapointed me to no end.

But damn this was actually really good. It's well paced and has very good set pieces, especially the ending Tower Defense section.

Fuck Valve for not continuing this story tho.

Review mainly focused on campaign but multiplayer is good.

MW is very fun and very well paced. But I have to admit, I think it's tonally confused. I dont know if this game is trying to be Bush era neocon propaganda or some deep scary depiction of what war could be. It's probably both. But I feel it dosen't really achieve the heights of what could be done with either if that's the case.

Also not gonna lie, just flat out aint a fan of the war fiction in this game. Pure evil unnamed middle eastern country (totally not Syria) and Russian ultra nationalists are kind of hard to care for even now that they've prophetically become relevant since this game's release. They're done in such a caricatural exagerrated way that they come across as comical, which coming back to my previous point, I might have actually taken in stride if the game wasn't also trying to be "deep" with its nuke scenes and its game over quotes.

It's good then that the game is as good as it is.

As good as people say it is.

Rarely does a game attempt to do so much yet nail all of it, but Baldur's Gate 3 knocks it out of the park.

I've never cared so much for every single party member in a game like I did in this.

I genuinly didnt want to do evil actions because I cared so much about this world and the people in it.

The absolute gold standard of WRPGs for years to come like New Vegas was for the 2010s.

Play this

Metroid Prime 3 Corruption is a very complicated game for me. It was the first Metroid game I received, around its launch window, yet here it is, the last one that I'm completing. Feels weird.

This game is pretty good, but it does so many extremly weird decisions that it can't help but feel well below it's 2 gamecube predecessors, especially Echoes.

The main issue is, obviously Hypermode. So much of the game relies on this absolutely broken mechanic that removes pretty much all the challenge. Corruption decides to take a much heavier focus on combat than Prime and Echoes, yet somehow strips down the Beam system back to what it was in the 2D games, and doubling this, make missiles feel extremly weak. So what does it do to compensate? Hypermode. Hypermode is far from a bad idea within itself, it's kind of like Devil Trigger in Devil May Cry, and the use of health as ammo is pretty interesting. Except enemies pretty much die on impact the second you pull it out.

Oh but you use health as ammo, so it's a risk reward system that gives you even more of an incentive to search far and wide the game world to find energy tanks? Right? Wrong, the game gives you every energy tank on a silver platter. Exploring and secrets are basically only relegated to find missile packs, which again, feel much less useful in this game than previously, so the whole Metroidvania aspect is severly damaged.

All this gives is a game where you're braindead just shooting at stuff. Metroid was never survival horror per se, but exploring the world felt extremly tense sometimes, Echoes was so good at this, making you carefully plot your next step, making you save ammo if you could, now that's just gone, with save points even fully healing you and remplishing your ammo now. Maybe it was a way to hope to get on the Halo trend, which was at its peak at the time, but if that's the case, I'm sorry, this dosent even come close. The simple gunplay of Metroid Prime is fine in a game that puts first and foremost exploration, but it will not stand up to games with a focus on gunplay.

So what saves the game? The World design is simply put, brilliant. Bryyo, Elysia and the Pirate Homeworld are all top tier locations with excellent music, I think this might be the strongest selection of worlds to explore in the entire Metroid series, and I am not kidding, traversing these is amazing. This coupled with great presentation and a strong sense of finality to this trilogy does make Corruption stand out, but all and all, it just can't help but feel lesser. It's "just a good game" in a series that has excellence as its standard.