I'm a life long Fire Emblem fan. I've come to terms with the fact that there's many, many flaws in almost all entries in the franchise. I'm a firm believer that you can love something while still admitting it's faults, as well as dislike something while singing it's praises.

In the case for Three Houses, I think it is a cesspool and exacerbation of almost all the flaws of the franchise to date, in a way I never thought possible.

It's frankly too deep and complex of a discussion for me to cover every aspect that I've found annoying and/or frustrating with the game(none of which are difficulty based, this is a notably easy entry which is not necessarily bad).

In short, this game does a disservice to the franchise. Indie projects have more polish and care put onto the gameplay systems, experiences, menus, and UI, meanwhile 3H invested all of it's time and energy into the teen-school drama dating simulation visual novel. In concept I never hated this, I just accepted it as something that wasn't in my taste, but seeing what the game turned into as a result, has soured me on it. It significantly and negatively impacted so many of the systems, experience, and story in directly noticeable ways.

As far as fit and finish, the game isn't laggy, nor buggy, no visual errors to speak of. It's potentially unjust to give it a score as low as I have, because normally that would be for true disasters of games. But I think in the context of this game franchises history, the simplicity of the core gameplay and story elements(which could still be done in bare-minimum 2D pixel graphics, no voice acting, etc) and be a great game, this is such a pitiful and disappointing missed mark. They failed to read the room of what people likes about Awakening and Fates, they failed to jump on the trends and direction that gamers and specifically anime-inclined fans wanted, instead, everything came up short for everyone.

The best part about this game is that it was successful enough(somehow) to warrant another main game entry in the series.

Ghostwire: Tokyo manages to be deeply monotonous even when it has a lot going for it on the surface. The immensely compelling urban Tokyo setting feels completely wasted in what seems like a pseudo-ubisoft open world chore simulator.

The combat fails to have any depth to it with all the components of its very bare-bones system being given to you right out of the gate, therefore upgrades are relegated to being bare damage scaling or a flat percentage buff on a status effect of some kind making the whole experience feel like it drags on for far too long. I thought that exploring the haunted urban Tokyo setting would be the highlight of the game however there is little to no content to discover in this rendition of the city making it feel like a very impressive blender model that you can explore but not interact with. While the side content is usually based in amusing set-pieces the game fails to motivate you to do any since you only get minor rewards for completing each quest.

The visual style of the game is its only redeeming quality. The Tokyo's neon nightscape never fails to impress visually, I only wished for the experience to be a lot more than that.

The story is outright dull, making each cutscene feel like more and more of a chore to get through. The characters fail at being well, characters they have no depth to them no external motivation and it stings a little bit more that the teeny bit of characterization they do get is isolated to the prelude chapter that you have to download separately. This game as a whole just feels like a let down considering the potential that it once held.

Ask Yourself Whether It Is Normal Or Paranormal.. Whatever It Is, It Sure Is A Letdown.

VC is a unique game and you have to give merit where it's due. It's a hybrid mix of TRPG and third person shooter a way I've never seen before. As a kid, I always wanted to play this game but unfortunately I had no machine that was able to run it, hence I never did.

Unfortunately, the game is very far from being flawless and can turn into a rather frustrating experience.

By the way, there's another mechanic in this game which I find quite unique: you can play the same character multiple times per turn, granted you're willing to spend your command points on them and they'll have 33% less action points every time. This has its merits but at the same time, I think it also points the game into a narrower direction and encourages players to spam a small group of characters, if not just one or two and therefore lessens the strategic aspect of the game.


An opponent that doesn’t feel humane is not fun:

This game is frustrating in many ways. For example, you'll often find yourself shot by rocket launchers or tanks that manage to snipe you from very far away when you have nearly no chance of doing the same. Interception fire seems very useful until you realise that while you're getting shown under a rain of bullets every encounter, your characters will barely shoot any bullet before an enemy's turn is over because your opponent is a robot that doesn't hesitate and stops to get shot while thinking of what to do.

Your character has to be smart about approaching a tank because you'll get shot by the machine gun otherwise and die within seconds but when an enemy approaches your tank, they act so fast that your tank will hardly shoot once and deal extremely little damage to them, so they'll just come from the front. Essentially, the enemy seems to have many advantages the player does not, as if it were a cheating player.


Lack of balance:

All units except scouts also have a very low movement potential and it makes it so that the scout sets the entire pace of the game. Combined with the fact that you can use a single character multiple times per turn, it's really no surprise that the optimal strategy ends up being the "scout rush". Even if you want to use other characters, they seem to not be built for this game. What exactly are you supposed to do, spend multiple turns just to get them to the same position as a scout? The maps are big and not very dense, spending multiple turns just to move your characters from point A to B does not sound intuitive at all. Thankfully, there are mods that try to balance this issue.

Many things also feel very random: for example, the AI might decide to spend an entire turn spamming multiple attacks of the same character against one of yours and you see no strategic merit to it, it just feels unpredictable, random and fucks up your plans out of nowhere. It doesn't feel like the AI acted in a smart manner and managed to outsmart you so it's frustrating.


Too linear, not enough freedom. No strategies, just die and retry:

The game also seems to be designed more like a puzzle than a very complex strategy game. Oftentimes, it feels very limiting in the approaches you can take and it's even more so the case when there's a strict objective to follow. Some of them are really horrendous, boring and take a long time to accomplish. It's really easy to lose the game and restarting a map often involves redoing the exact same strategy until you arrive at the point where you fail and take another decision. It's very "die and retry" at times, which doesn't fit the genre. The worst about this part is that the game genuinely wants you to retry missions, there are so many things pushing you into this. You don't even get a map showing you the limits of the area before you actually deploy a character, there are hidden enemies whose placement only serves to kill the main character sending you to a game over screen, gimmicks are not explained or don't happen before you reach a certain point in battle (usually, you need to move to a specific part of the map) hence you can't take them into account on your first attempt...

There are many ways the game could have given more freedom to the player. For example, some maps have two paths where you need to deploy troops and simultaneously lead an attack from both sides. Why not... let the player take this decision on their own and simply create branches on the map? Why not have branches on EVERY map instead of having them be so linear? And I really think the game needs to be more forgiving considering all the uncertainty it involves.

If the above didn't clue you in to the fact the game is more about solving puzzles than tactics, then I'll let you know the game has absolutely no interaction with the environment. There's a crouch mechanic behind sandbags, that's IT. You can't crouch behind anything else, you can't hide behind walls and shoot, enemies have absolutely no sense of their surroundings and won't spot you for killing their friend right next to them, a mortar shot will not damage allies of the shooter or destroy anything, not even mines. Hell even the grenades are just another type of rifle, their area of effect is so reduced you can hardly hit two enemies at once.

This isn't much of a problem if you save and reload a load. It may just be me but I was completely unaware that you can save during a battle until the last third of the game and it's a game changer. It would certainly be better if you didn't have to rely on savescumming but I highly advise it since it allows you to counter many of the game's problems such as not having a proper oversight of the battlefield until you deploy or messing up a character's turn.


Gorgeous game with a unique artstyle, but uninteresting story:_

On another hand, the game is gorgeous to look at. The art style is very neat and I personally love it. It's a shame that most cutscenes are limited to 720p and suffer a lot from aliasing. These cutscenes don't offer much unfortunately, despite the game being very story driven. The story is a mess and not very substantial. While I enjoyed the banter between some characters, *it can get extremely tropey and even the characters end up very shallow, which is really a shame. All that's needed in this type of game is a solid cast with good interactions but I can't say this game goes far enough. One thing about the story that especially bothered me is that I was expecting a somewhat grounded war setting but at some point it introduces some kind of magical power... yeah.


So it's a fun, unique game overall but also a pretty frustrating experience and I would only recommend it while mentioning that you can savescum. Do it, do it a lot and at least use the "Quality of life" mod. It's not missing a lot to be an absolute blast but it doesn't have this "not a lot", unfortunately.

This was the longest game to date, but only in favor to the biggest piece of worldbuilding seen to date with the enourmous land of Erebonia. The nation is by far the most interesting and developed with all kinds of traditions and names to familiarize. It's neat seeing how many familiar faces populate the school and even country, and the story while slow, built everything up incredibly well. It's a lot like FC, with an ending that hits equally as hard. I'm left just absorbing it all. I'm in love with this series man.

Troubleshooter is not a perfect game. There are problems I could list with the story as it stands, or small issues in gameplay that largely live in the later game of the DLCs.
But those nitpicks pale in comparison to the passion and ambition dripping from every inch of it. A small studio decides to spend the better part of a decade on a project, one which in essence is a prologue for a somehow even larger planned story despite being well over 100 hours long, and it works.
Getting to the credits and seeing that the game had TWO programmers was an extreme shock. Seeing that the devs have a 400 page thread on Steam to take ideas and feedback they've been maintaining for 6 years was too. The fact that such a small team created such a deep and intricate TRPG is downright inspirational.
Every character is unique and fun to use. Every character has a ridiculous amount of customization. Many maps provide a challenge even on the normal difficulty. It's a massive pile of ideas and systems built up over years that should collapse under its own weight, but never does.

Brawl feels like the Smash game with the most complete package in terms of satisfying content. It has a wide variety of interesting game modes, including the Subspace Emissary, which replaces Melee's repetitive Adventure Mode. I know a lot of folks don't care for it, but I personally loved the Subspace Emissary. I cleared it on Intense difficulty multiple times and aside from maybe the Great Maze, which feels like a very long and drawn out way to conclude the game mode, I never really understood what people had against it.

I also think that second to Smash Ultimate, it has the best newcomers in the series, with a lot of varied and interesting picks from across many of Nintendo's franchises, as well as the first third party newcomers Solid Snake and Sonic the Hedgehog, two extremely memorable inclusions.

The gameplay is slower than Melee, but I still had a lot of great fun with it casually. However, the random tripping mechanic was never fun, and it was such a questionable decision adding that into the game.

I love Brawl. I'm very nostalgic for it, and it'll always be a huge part of my life.