I wanted to like this game so much.

I love the Fallout setting.
Fallout/Fallout 2 were formative games for me.
Fallout 3 was only okay but a decent entry into the modern era of design.
New Vegas is still one of my favorite RPGs, and frankly one of my favorite games overall.

The nostalgia and love I have for this series was overwhelming at the time. I truly wanted to love this game. I gave it so much time, just hoping I hadn't reached "The good part" yet. At the time reviews were good so it had to get good eventually right?
It's such a disappointment.

I will start by giving the game some credit: It has a pretty decent main story. I did like the premise of trying to find your kid and the idea of "synths" vs humans struggle. And that's all the praise I have for this game.

The gameplay was outdated the day it came out. This was already evident in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, but as time went on and shooters kept improving, it became more and more apparent that Bethesda's combat never evolved. More importantly though, the previously mentioned fallout games had other elements to fall back on to help carry the sub-par combat, such as RPG elements, interesting characters and a living world you want to explore. So lets talk about those.

The RPG mechanics in this game are horrendous. In the place of the more nuanced and varied dialogue system of previous games, in this game the player was offered only a few options per dialogue, usually consisting of "Yes", "No", "Sarcastic", "Mean" or "End conversation" answers. On top of that, certain answers like the "sarcastic" answers could sometimes lead to my character saying something drastically different from what I expected to say when I picked the option. Not only did this make the character feel less like my own, but it made all diplomatic types of playthroughs feel hollow and not worth doing at all.

This lack of dialogue options made it very hard to connect with any characters, even my own, and this in turn made me less inclined to explore and find new characters.

When I did explore and find things, they were not very memorable. After 114 hours on this game, I can only recall one single distinct encounter in this whole game.
I spent like 20h with Fallout 1 as a child and I remember more from that. My memories of the other Fallout games are littered with good memories and moments. This is the only one where I remember almost nothing.
Nothing in this game was impactful; it all felt like filler. The worst part? There's SOOOOOOO much of it. This wouldn't be so bad if it were in any way compelling, but with so much worthless content in the game, I eventually lost interest in even trying to find the only plot thread that still had any interest at all to me: The main story. Even the sunk cost of time I'd already put into the game ended up not being strong enough to get me through finishing it.

TL DR: This game is bad and I waited way, way too long to see if it would get better because of my love of prior Fallout games. I want my time back.

This is a game it hurts to rate so low. It delivers very well on the premise, which is Megaman X roguelike. The gameplay is smooth and fun.
The reason I'm not rating it higher is this game also showed me why we should not want a Megaman X roguelike. Since it seems like you have to get through every level to complete a run, and mid-run upgrades didn't seem to make a huge difference to the run, the game felt very repetitive long before I actually reached the end.

There are roguelite progression elements allowing for permanent upgrades to make the game easier on progressive runs, but most of them did not seem very interesting, being mostly numbers tweeks and quite expensive. There were a few with more effects such as a larger item pool, but they were a bit expensive and by the time I reached them I'd already mentally checked out.

It makes me sad to say this because Megaman X1-3 are my childhood, but sadly the joy I felt when first starting this game very quickly evaporated leaving only frustration.

For a very long time, this was my favorite game of all time.

It's partially nostalgia for sure, but even with that aside, this game is incredibly solid. It redefined what a Mario game had to be at the time, helped bring RPGs to the West and is overall an excellent game.

The characters and world all have more personality than any Mario game to that point had even come close to offering. The graphics were incredible at the time, and in fact even looked better than a lot of the 3D graphics that followed it.
The music still lives up to this day as well (Well some of it).

What really sets this game apart though in my opinion was how much the setting, theme and their opinion of Western gamers forced Square and Nintendo to deviate from typical RPG tropes. Sure they could do the typical "Warrior, mage, healer" type of shtick, but we had to make it fit the Mario lore. To that end, Mario has to jump and has to throw fireballs. How do you make that interesting to western gamers who at the time didn't buy RPGs much? Make the attacks interactive minigames. Now all of a sudden your physical damage dealer is dependent on your ability to time your button presses for extra jumps, putting some degree of player skill and interactivity back into the player's hands.
Their decision to turn every offensive and defensive action into a minigame was actually genius, and has been the hallmark of all Mario RPG series going forward.
Their mish-mashing of classes to fit both the Mario archtypes and RPG archtypes was also an excellent decision, which led to fan favorites like Geno (Even though I think Mallow is a better character don't @ me).

The story itself is nothing too spectacular, but some of the writing along the way is excellent. I particularly like Booster Tower, Bowser's character arch, Johnny's (short) character arch and Mallow's character arch.

All in all an excellent game, and the fact that it's no longer my favorite game ever anymore is not a knock against it but rather a testament to how good some of the games have been in recent years.

I'll be honest, I HATED it but also biased because went into it thinking it was a sequel to Starfox 64 and it is very much not that at all.

It's like they took Banjo Kazooie and Ocarina of Time, unlearned everything that made those good and inexplicably returned to 3-d game design of the N64.

I got it for $3 and have felt generationally ripped off. It may unconsciously be the reason I avoid Targets most of the time.

This is exactly what it sounds like.

Once you get a hold of the controls and how to load games, you can start playing any board game you want on your PC.
This can be by yourself, hotseat with friends, or over the internet with friends or people in discords.

It's really hard to give this a real ranking since this is less of a game and more of the ability to tap into any board game you want, but it does that excellently.

I'm in awe of this game. Let me back up.

I'm generally not a huge fan of monster taiming rpgs, and haven't been into pokemon since way back in Silver and Gold. I truly did not expect to enjoy this game much, but kept hearing hype about it so gave it a shot. I can't tell you how glad I am that I did.

I write way too much and the rest is going to be a huge gushing synopsis about the game, so if you want to skip it all, just know this is an excellent game worth playing.

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The premise is basically open world pokemon with mild cosmic horror elements, and a lot of exploration and discovery. This might sound like a lot, but the execution is top notch.

Combat plays out in 2v2 battles where typing doesn't affect damage but instead gives status effects or can even change typing based on the type interaction. Used electric moves on metal or water types? They get the "Conductive" debuff, which makes them take damage when any electric move is used. Used an ice move on a water type? They will become an ice type and be stunned for a turn when they "froze". There are a lot of these interactions, but they make sense so it's not too hard to keep straight.
Even outside of these interactions, the game offers a variety of unique status effects which are really fun to play and strategize around.
Another interesting thing about this combat system is the fusion mechanic, which allows you to combine both active trainers to form a "super monster" with the movesets of both, a unique "fusion attack" and upgraded stats that takes the buffs, debuffs and types of both active monsters.
On top of that, your trainers "Become" the monsters, meaning they keep debuffs when they switch and excess damage is dealt directly to the "trainers". If a "trainer"s hp bar is depleted, then that character can't call in another monster, making it a 1v2 battle and disabling the fusion mechanic. All of these mechanics work together to add a depth I haven't seen in any other monster training game I've played.

Outside of combat though, the exploration is top notch. The game is fully open world, and you can explore anything at any rate you would like. This game relies heavily on "Knowledge Based Unlocks", which makes progress locked behind player knowledge, which I love. That said, it also uses "Metroidvania" tactics and gives certain unlockable powers that help with terrain traversal and allow you to access new areas. These powers are obtained from capturing certain monsters the game will indicate to you. In fact, while the open ended nature of the game may be a turn off to some players, rest assured that the game does a good job of guiding you along the way should you choose to follow it. While a lot of quests give exact location markers on the map, some of the main story quests do not BUT after a while NPCs can be found in town giving hints and eventually quest markers for those main quests too.
On top of that, the "Captains" quest line, which I'm pretty sure is optional and acts like the gym leaders in Pokemon, tends to lead the players directly to important locations that advance the main quest line while still letting you feel like you found it on your own. As a big fan of exploration style games, I found Cassette Beasts pulled it off excellently and it's a big reason for why I love the game so much I think.

Finally let's talk about story, writing and music. First off, the music is EXCELLENT. I do wish there were more tracks for variety's sake, but the tracks in this game are bangers, ESPECIALLY the one that plays during Archangel fights (Called "Same Old Story"). I need Spotify to put all of the songs (including instrumental versions) online so I can add them to the playlist.

The story is what I've seen come under fire a lot, but honestly I really liked it. It does take a long time to get interesting, but I really enjoyed the payoff. In the meantime, the character writing and interactions between party members are absolutely phenomenal. While I've finished the game, I do plan to go back just to unlock all of the character interactions. I'm invested in my party members at this point.


All in all an absolutely excellent game, and I strongly recommend it to any and everyone with even a passing interest.

This is Luck be a Landlord but with RPG theming. It's more fun than I expected, and I enjoyed this about as much as Luck Be A Landlord. Maybe I just like this genre.

EDIT: My opinion on this keeps going up along with my playtime. I have gotten every achievement now. I don't know what it is that's making this game so addicting but I keep coming back. No other autobattler has had this hold on me and frankly I don't understand why. But yeah, it's good and I've now played it a lot more than Luck be a Landlord.

This is one of the most fun puzzle battlers I've played. I see now why it had so much hype.

My only complaints are that the campaign difficulty curve varied wildly throughout, with it seemingly randomly getting much harder or easier, culminating in a final boss you kind of have to cheese.
The only other complaint is that I don't see people online when I try to quick match, which tbh is sort of expected I think.

All around though an excellent game that I'd recommend to anyone who likes puzzle battler type games.

I'm probably biased, but Kirby Superstar and any updated version of it is to me still the best Kirby game to exist. The main game modes are almost all bangers. The buddy system made the game a blast to play in co-op. Pretty sure this is the first game to give each power a whole moveset. The minigames are all insanely fun.

I have so many fond memories of this game. My brother and I would often run Milky Way Wishes, Great Cave Offensive and Metaknight's Revenge, a large portion of that being me as Ninja Kirby and him as Plasma buddy. We beat this game so, so many times. Years later, I won a Samurai Kirby tournament which was a blast.

I know Nostalgia is helping it for me, but that's okay. Nothing but love for this one.

I never thought I'd be interested in an auto-battler before Loop Hero came along.
This is such a clever game concept, with your hero reassembling the world as they go, creating both positive effects and more monster encounters of increasing difficulty as you go. This makes for a very interesting risk/reward system, especially when mixed with the meta progression system which depends on you bringing back loot you find as you travel the various tiles you place. You lose a large portion of your loot on death too, meaning sometimes it can be more interesting to stop a loop early to ensure you keep all of your loot rather than risk another potentially dangerous loop.

This system of constant risk/reward keeps you engaged throughout the game's story, making for a very unique and fun experience. I do admit that I didn't play it much more after completing the story, but that in and of itself was a complete experience that I strongly recommend.

I very strongly disliked this game.

The incredibly weak story being split into 3 games annoyed me. The stage gimmicks were very hit or miss, with maps like poison cave and the wind stage turning me off the game completely.

On top of this the game quadrupled down on what Awakening had started, and the game became unapologetically fan service-y.

This truly marked the end of the era of Fire Emblem that I enjoyed. Don't get me wrong, that's okay and not every game needs to be targeted at me, but this was a game that really showed that they were doubling down on the aspects of the series that I didn't like and I should move on. Unfortunately, I didn't do that until after Three Houses...