An excellent improvement in terms of the gameplay compared to Innocent Sin's. The story's just as good, honestly, two fantastic pieces forming one of the coolest RPG narratives I've seen in a video game period. The soundtrack slaps, I love the cast just as much as Innocent Sin's, most of the dungeons are pretty good, and the branching routes add some level of replayability. All in all, it's a banger game and I would 100% recommend it to people who are curious about the earlier Persona games. I'm so happy I finally got around to playing these games, they were well worth playing!

I'm one of those people who never got the appeal of fromsoft games. I tried Dark souls and bloodbourne but they never clicked. Elden ring is the first soulsbourne game I've finished and I'm very proud of that accomplishment. It took me a long time to do so though, I first started the game in 2022 and got up to the red wolf of radagon where I got stuck and then gave up. It was at the start of this year that I decided to give the game a go again and that's when I really liked it, I breezed through the first few bosses and then had some fun challenges on some mid game bosses. It's when we get to the fire giant that I have an issue, this boss is easily the worst designed boss fight in any video game ever. He has way too much health and can one shot you if your not careful not to mention that he rolls away every 5 seconds. This boss single handedly got me to take a break from the game for 5 months. Until the other day when I thought "why not? Let's give elden ring another go" and after about 10 or 15 tries... I did it, I finally beat the fire giant. Following this the game was a breeze, I beat the godskin duo, I beat malikeith, I beat godfrey and then I got to radagon. I was at the end of a fromsoft game, I'd done it. I struggled on radagon for a while but eventually cleared him, he might be my favourite boss in the whole game if you don't account for the next part of the fight. The Elden Beast. This fight is so bullshit, after radagon you have like no heals left and then the elden beast can kill you in a second if you get unlucky with his moves, not to mention he is also tanky as hell and rolls around a lot like the fire giant. I didn't hate him completely though, I think he has a great design and is a really cool concept that was just executed poorly. This should go without saying but the visuals and music in this game are just so beautiful and it's clear a lot of thought was put into them. It's also crazy how many side bosses there are in elden ring, it's like every second turn there's a new one waiting to be slain. Overall, I had a super fun time with elden ring and I can't wait for the dlc now. I might even go and try some of the other fromsoft games to see if my opinion has changed on them.
(Side note: I haven't beat malenia yet, I'll get to that at some point. She is ridiculously hard, holy crap)
(Edit: I beat malenia after changing builds on my second try 💪)

Eternal Punishment exhibits a sublimely mature, dense, and compelling narrative that pairs flawlessly with it's cast of incredibly well-fleshed out characters that each carry their own near-insurmountable amount of baggage. The chemistry between these characters was engrossing and grounded in a way that very few works in this medium have achieved (at least in my experience) and I found myself completely absorbed as a result. In terms of gameplay, just about everything I enjoyed in Innocent Sin has been escalated and improved upon, while nearly all of the issues I had (primarily the speed of combat and the lack of difficulty) have been addressed and finely tuned with the only notable outlier being that I still find the demon negotiation and method of acquiring personas a bit too cumbersome and tedious. That being said, the only real letdown for me was Maya's transition to a silent protagonist as her uplifting sincerity in Innocent Sin was consistently a highlight of that experience. I can appreciate that the torch was passed to Tatsuya so he could become more thoroughly defined as a character this time around (which is certainly the case) but I couldn't help but yearn for a world in which these two fantastic characters can have genuine conversations with one another, even if it would require me to take more of a backseat as a player in the process.

Infinite Wealth is a huge improvement from Y7 in a lot of areas, but it's also a downgrade in some others.

Starting with some positives first, the combat in this game is 10 times better than Y7's, I've always loved the combat in 7 but it's only after playing this game I realized how much could still be improved upon. The side content is HUGE, just Dondoko Island alone offers hours and hours of content, but there's a ton more minigames that are all really fun, like Crazy Delivery and Sujimon battles. The music in the game is in my opinion as good as Y7's, every single song is such a banger that I spent nearly an entire month after playing the game almost solely listening to this OST and no other music.

However, this game is lacking in some areas, most notably the story. The story is an absolute snooze by the latter half, some characters with a lot of potential feel barely explored at all (looking at you Wong Tou). To add to that, the substories and side content are given to you so early that if it wasn't for Kiryu's Bucket List, you'd have nothing new to do but the main story. You can be finished with all side content by around chapter 7 on Ichiban's side, leaving you with 4 chapters with nothing but the story which, like I previously mentioned, is not great by (a bit later than) this point, making the latter half of Ichiban's section just a bore. This is avoidable if you still haven't done all of the side content, which is likely, but the same cannot be said about the substories, as there is but a single substory you can unlock only after chapter 7.

Overall, as much as I complained about the story, this game is still a very much worthwhile experience. It's just an extremely rare case where the beginning and middle sections of a Yakuza game exceed the ending one.

Final Rating: 8/10

This probably jumps half a star up if I wasn't playing the vita version. The framerate is pretty rough for the action combat. And I liked the action combat. It's pretty fun! And simple. Also some new content in other versions that I can't comment on too much.

I like premises like this, and in ys it's executed pretty nicely. Just some cliched anime cringe to detract from it. And a mixed bag of the character cast. At least they tried and I did like a handful of characters by the end.

Music is so epicccccccccccc damn

In spite of some frustrating aspects, and some really bad stages, I came to enjoy the interesting take on the strategic gameplay in Valkyria Chronicles. The ability of physical objects or character presences to affect the outcomes of encounters outside of their turns, damn. This makes the game feel less conventionally turn-based and more like a pseudo real-time game. Fascinating stuff... Even though it doesn't always work, I have to respect the commitment to refreshing the situations you find yourself dealing with throughout the story.

Story is no slouch either. I certainly didn't expect the narrative of anime but bootleg world war 2 to be nearly as graceful as this turned out to be. It tackles some subjects you wouldn't expect, and I don't have many issues with the way they were handled, just that some parts didn't seem to go anywhere far. I also liked the main cast of characters, Welkin is such a dork xD Shame most of the side-characters don't get anything for themselves beyond combat traits and battle lines, but those do work out for seeing their nature and how they relate to each other.

The picture book approach to ui elements and visuals in general fit VC like a glove

Where do you even start with this? On any given day it can be a completely different game. It's the sequel to a major part of my childhood and when it first game out it was a dream come true. It was a game that lacked the issues I had with League of Legends done by Valve with Icefrog it was a dream come true.

Over the course of the next decade the game underwent a variety of changes both small and large and while I didn't agree with or love them all it was still an excellent time particularly with friends. Over time it became more difficult to keep up with each change and meta permutation, a match became something I increasingly wished I could step away from in the middle of especially during 90+ minute grinders, the game took itself both more and less seriously and slowly I came to realize it wasn't the game I loved anymore. If you enjoy the moba genre and want to try a game with a long standing legacy and engaging mechanics that will reward skill improvement and knowledge significantly then sure give it a shot but if you've been sucked into the moba genre for years and years where the matches are less fun every day just remember you can stop playing it.