What a fucking game.

Yeah, it's obviously not perfect. The open world has some busy work, the ending will be controversial and leaves mixed feelings and it still has plenty of "hold the stick forward" moments, but it all doesn't subtract from the amazing package we've got.

I expected Square to go crazy when the Remake project reaches the open world portion. The original game always had tons of mini games and silly interactive moments but instead of getting rid of those they really went ALL IN. If something was a little mini game in the original that took a minute, it is now a full blown minigame with high scores and mechanics.

You can tell that they tried their utmost to please fans and not skip anything. And the things that are skipped will surely be in the final game, I'm absolutely confident nothing will be missing in the end.

The combat system feels even better than before, with aerial combat being improved for Cloud in particular and the added synergy attacks add a nice layer of strategy. The new controllable characters are really well integrated and I ended up using Red XIII for the majority of my playthrough.

The gigantic soundtrack is utterly ridiculous. The amount of remixes of classic titles kept throwing me off-guard and most of them are great! When the OST is uploaded on YT I'll definitely grind away at it.

Rebirth will certainly not be for everyone. People who are tired of big worlds and don't enjoy engaging with side activities will probably be annoyed and just want to get back to the main action. Which luckily are the best parts of the game at least.

Not 100% sure if the 5 stars will stick or if I'll go down to 4.5 later down the road, but in any case, this was an amazing time and the wait for Part 3 will be painful. Now excuse me, I still got some card games to play, arenas to beat and hard mode to tackle.

Replayed the game in preparation for Rebirth. This time on PS5 for the first time and finally got to play the DLC.

My overall opinion on the game hasn't really changed. I love the foundation they built. The ingredients are all amazing: The way it looks, the character models, the voices, the characterization, the battle system, the materia system, the music ... It's utterly amazing.

The unthankful thing about the first part of the Remake trilogy is having such a small part of the original game to adapt. Stretching out the Midgar portion to an entire game is bound to lead to some filler content and while they really did their best to include meaningful content, there is plenty of downtime where you're squeezing through tight spaces, balancing over bars, slowly climbing around and having some unnecessary detours that are fun on a gameplay level but pretty bad for the pacing of the story.

I still think it's the best thing they could have done, because judging from the original there isn't really a better way to stop the first part for quite some time.

Nevertheless, the linear structure of the game, the lack of freedom and the amount of times you're left with only a few party members takes away lots of freedom in player agency. It only really opens up in the last stretch of the game and at that point you don't really have much content left to explore.

This might sound negative, but what I'm really trying to say is that it's sequel has ridiculous potential as far as I'm concerned. If they take what's in Part 1, add more to it and give the player some real freedom it could turn out to be a real masterpiece. I can't wait to explore Gaia, level my materia and experiment with all the characters.

The story of the remake is intriguing. I still find it fascinating how they're handling this remaking of FF7 and so far it hasn't disappointed. I really hope it won't blow up in our faces, but considering how on point the writing is so far I got no reason to be worried.

The Intermission DLC was a really great addition. Yuffie controls wonderfully, making aerial combat actually fun and her toolkit is pretty fun to play around with. I also really liked the Sector 7 bit with it's Fort Condor minigame, little cameos and turtle shop sidequest.

The additional bosses (which include one for the base game!) turned out to be a bit frustrating for me, but I ended up feeling rewarded after overcoming them. I think superbosses should be handled a bit better, but I'm glad they're here in the first place.

As for Yuffies characterization ... I love that they're giving her a serious side and that she ceases to be a comic relief character exclusively. Her backstory adds a nice layer to her behaviour and I'm even more curious about the Wutai part of the game. It's great how they're taking the optional parts of the original and expand them in a meaningful way.

The ending cutscenes just added to my hypelevel and at this point I really can't wait to play the sequel. It's so close!

"Kamurocho, it's a city of dreams where even from the gutters you can shoot for the stars"

Judgment (Judge Eyes in Japan) is a 3rd person beat 'em up/action RPG spin-off of Ryu Ga Gotoku's mainline Yakuza series, but other than taking place in the same city of Kamurocho there's almost no ties to Yakuza and Judgment stands alone as a self contained story separate from the Yakuza series so don't worry about having to play them before Judgment.

In Judgment you play as Takayuki Yagami, a disgraced former defense attorney that got a client he believed to be innocent an acquittal, but they ended up murdering their girlfriend shortly after so believing his "judgement" wasn't sound enough he left the lawyering profession behind. Three years later, still living with the guilt of his failure as a lawyer, Yagami is now a private detective based in the city of Kamurocho, alongside his best friend the ex-yakuza Masaharu Kaito the two run the Yagami Detective Agency and get wrapped up in the mystery of a serial killer known as "the Mole" who kills Yakuza by gouging their eyes out.

Judgment is a murder mystery and what good is a mystery without twists? Thankfully there's plenty of twists and turns in Judgment that will have you guessing all the way until the end and with each new reveal the plot gets even more complex introducing more characters and slowly pulling at the threads of a grand conspiracy until everything is finally unraveled for one of the most climactic finales I've ever experienced in a video game. The way everything comes together in the end and how all the plot threads and characters connect is just absolutely masterful writing and gives such major payoffs in the end.

Another thing worth mentioning is the incredible voice performances both in sub and dub which really help bring this cast of characters to life. I especially have to commend Takuya Kimura and Greg Chun for both making Yagami one of my all time favorite characters.

As with most Yakuza games when not tackling the main story there's a wealth of side content to complete as well. From the 50 "Side Cases" which act as Judgment's form of Yakuza's sub stories and could be anything from helping someone find their lost cat to getting proof of infidelity these smaller cases are how Yagami makes his living paying in both money and experience and they help flesh out the world of Kamurocho better. I will say that one of the side cases which revolves around rival gangs and spans the length of the whole game is cool and one of the best side cases, but the mechanic it introduces with the "Threat Meter" and how the gangs become more aggressive and increase the random encounter rate a lot until you go out of your way to beat the gang leaders becomes tedious and breaks the flow of the story at times.

Along with the side cases there's also a friendship system that allows Yagami to become friends with almost everyone in Kamurocho by helping them with their smaller matters, all these characters have their own minor arcs and also give benefits once they're your friend from giving a discount at a shop to helping in battle or even unlocking new side cases, there's always incentive to befriend everyone you see. There are also plenty of mini-games in Judgement with everything from darts and poker to Mahjong and Shogi or Virtua Fighter 5, Outrun and even a Kamurocho themed rail shooter called "Kamuro of the Dead", plus my personal favorite a VR Mario Party-esque board game called "Dice and Cube" you could spend hours of your time on the mini-games of Judgment alone.

Gameplay of Judgment can be broken down into two types. The first being Yakuza-like beat 'em up combat. During combat Yagami has two different combat styles based on kung-fu, the "Tiger" style which is primarily used for 1v1 fights and the "Crane" style which is used for crowd control against multiple enemies. Yagami can also perform special cinematic finishing attacks known as "EX actions" and even after seeing them for 50+ hours I never get tired of how over-the-top and stylish they are, the martial arts choreography (especially in the boss battles) is just action packed and top notch. A new addition to Judgment that the Yakuza series didn't have is a mechanic known as "mortal wounds" and this happens when a boss or powerful enemy does a charge attack or uses a weapon like a gun or sword on Yagami. It'll permanently shave off a piece of your health bar until you go to the doctor or use a med kit and honestly this is one of my biggest complaints about the game and I don't understand why this was even added because it just breaks the flow of combat and becomes tedious at times.

The second type of gameplay revolves around Yagami being a detective and outside of combat you'll engage in Ace Attorney-like investigation segments where you have to search your surroundings for clues and evidence in a first person mode and when not searching for evidence you'll also have to use disguises and tail suspects in stealth missions and that brings me to my next biggest complaint about the game. There are WAY too many tailing missions and some near the end of the game or during specific side quests get very tedious and felt poorly balanced. I like the concept of tailing and giving the game more of a detective feel and I understand wanting to show off a new mechanic, but they went a bit too overboard with it as far as I'm concerned.

Graphically Judgment is a beautiful game and replaying it on PS5 really helped enhance the realism which really fits the gritty tone of the world and story and the OST is great too with jazzy noir sounding pieces that enhance the detective atmosphere to triumphant and bombastic orchestral tracks that have a very law-and-order feel or crunchy heavy guitar centric tracks for intense boss fights, there's plenty of variety to the OST and it all fits the themes and enhances the atmosphere of the game.

Overall Judgment is an incredible game with a murder mystery narrative full of crazy twists and turns that will keep you guessing and plenty of compelling characters including a fantastic lead protagonist with tons of depth and development further enhanced by great voice acting performances. Featuring hours upon hours of enjoyable side content, fluid and stylish combat full of top notch martial arts choreography and intense boss fights, beautiful graphics and an OST full of memorable tracks and while it's true there's a few flaws and tedious new mechanics such as mortal wounds, tailing missions and the over abundance of random encounters thanks to the threat meter, these are very minor problems that only slightly detract from my over all enjoyment of the game and both the story and combat of the game are so good that I've thought about the game non-stop since the first time I played it 5 years ago and that's ultimately the reason I decided to replay the game and if a game made that strong of an impact on me you can bet I also strongly recommend it and think everyone deserves to have that kind of experience as well and take it from me, Judgment will give you an experience you will not soon forget.

Like with most games I think there are two ways to look at Control. And in this case it's interesting because that's exactly what I did. Once in 2019 and today in 2024.

Back when I first played it I was basically expecting a super creative and wild shooter with supernatural elements, and in a way that's exactly what it is, but the shooting or rather the entire combat let me down quite a bit.

It certainly did not help that I first played it on a base PS4 that had some serious performance issues but that wasn't really the main issue. I wanted to shoot things, fly around, explore and use crazy powers and the game turned out to not be that fun.

Combat in Control is pretty broken honestly. I instantly figured out that the Launch ability is the way to go after seeing that every new unlocked skill gives it another insane damage boost. I one-shotted most of the enemies and the ones that survived simply got hit with another Launch attack. It made large amounts of the game very trivial. Even enemies that dodge your launch can just be hit with another one right after. And when your ability gauge is empty you can just shoot enemies with the pretty powerful Pierce weapon and you're probably already full again.

It's okay for the game not to be hard and nobody forced me to use the dominant strategy. I did mix it up a lot and tried to build an army with the seize ability in some fights. I also used the shield more often, but realistically these are just options that drag out fights and there are tons of them. Later on they get a little more crazy and you get to fly around a lot mid-battle and it's a layer of the combat I really enjoyed but after a while even that gets a little stale when you're still just launching items around and effectively make yourself a bigger target.

The skill tree and the mod system are things that make some sense in a longer and open game like this, but I don't think it really added much to the game since most skills simply are not interesting. 90% of it boils down to raising percentages. Ideally in a skilltree you're making some tough decisions to decide what character you're going for, but Control does not really have that.

You can't really be a specific version of Jesse Faden, you're always playing roughly the same. The whole combat system revolves around launching things and every point you're not putting into that effectively means you could be stronger. Putting some points into your energy and health is a given. Everything else is just a bonus. There are some cool perks you can acquire but most of them are in the Launch tree anyway ... I got the ground slam since that's a fun one, but it's the second thing you can unlock for levitation and you get it so late into the game that your character is mostly set anyway, so it's once again not really an interesting choice to make.

The mod system is similar. I'm not even gonna get into the inventory for it being too small, the whole thing is just there. I don't really want to repeat what I said above, so I'm making it short: It's another aspect of the game where you're just going to focus on damage and health. If you happen to get those drops anyway. Otherwise you'll just take more ammo or recharge or whatever. And even if you're trying to get some more niché stuff like more damage after a melee attack or less ammo consumption while levitating ... It changes up your playstyle very little. It's a system that's there for the player to have something to collect in chests and given as quest rewards, but barely adds anything to the gameplay.

The other part of the gameplay is exploration. I constantly read that the map is terrible and I can only agree. It barely helps you getting somewhere specific and mainly acts to show you where you haven't been. On paper it's an interesting concept to have this huge open place that opens up gradually, but aside from the levitation and the dash there's nothing that opens up to the player naturally. Most of the stuff is locked by keys and story progression ... Which is a shame, because it had the potential for a 3D metroidvania structure, which is very rare to begin with. I get that the storyline demands linear progression but there was definitely some opportunities to do some missions in a different order. Basically what I'm saying is that I never actually went back through that building to hunt for new areas, to look around for items or anything. There is lore scattered about in the game, but unless you care about literally every single bit of written text I don't think it's worth it.

And that was pretty much the criticism I had in 2019 and I feel like it all holds up. I wasn't really there for the story and it all flew over my head anyway, so that aspect did not really do much for me.

So here comes the "two ways to look at a game" part into play. Because this time I wasn't here for the gameplay. I just recently finished Alan Wake for the first time and I'm pretty excited to play the second one since it looks great. So when I replayed Control I was more interested in the story and lore because this whole Remedy universe is something fairly unique that I'm curious about.

On my second run I tried to view the game as more of an experience. Try to immerse myself in the setting, reading every paper, try to comprehend the story ... and it was pretty fun! The beginning is already amazing and there are some really great ideas here. The whole 'Oldest House' setting is fantastic and the visuals in this game are simply great. I'm not a person who does screenshot in video games, but here I couldn't help but take some. It might be a bit of bias since I love colored light (I love the aesthetic of Winding Refn movies) but the surreal parts of the world also manage to impress.

This time I tried to empathize more with Jesse as a character and tried to view the combat as more of a power trip than an actual challenge to overcome. It turned out to be a little more fun that way, but ultimately combat will never be the thing I play this game for and that's fine.

In the end it finally made me appreciate the game. I would say that I like it quite a lot now! But unfortunately even the story part does have it's problems. The countless texts that are scattered about do sometimes have interesting information but there is simply so much of it that it becomes a chore to read after a while. And lots of it is also just meaningless fluff.

The actual main story is engaging. Jesse, her brother, Polaris, the previous director, the board, the janitor ... There are lots of interesting characters here and the idea that Jesse is looking for her brother at this crazy place and ends up in this inescapable scenario is cool. I even like the fact she takes it all so well because it's the thing she was looking for all her life and supernatural stuff isn't exactly new to her.

The ashtray maze is something everybody mentions and for good reason, it's an amazing section. But I also like the Overlook hotel bit that makes me uncomfortable everytime, the section with the clocks, the flamingo bit and several other setpieces that simply look cool. The game offers some highlights but they are far and few between. The Objects of Power bit was the perfect opportunity to really go into some insane directions but often it just didn't. Like following a letter that teleports around and then doing the same thing with a rubber duck that also randomly changes places isn't really on the same level as some of the psychedelic stuff other objects make you go through.

And since this is getting way too long, I'm getting to the main story ... It ended on a somewhat disappointing note? I'm not spoiling it, but aside from setting up a sequel, which is fine, I think the antagonistic force did not turn out to be fit for an interesting finale. What one can consider the 'final boss fight' is a serious let down and even though the actual finale is pretty cool, I think it should have ended with a bigger bang.

Control is more of a worldbuilding game than a storyline game I would say. The world is fascinating to explore, but I wish it would have more character moments.

I'm not gonna get into the DLC too much, just wanna say that they're a nice addition overall. The Foundation adds some needed challenge to the game and the bit with the 'tunnel' (if you know, you know) was amazing. Definitely do the object of power quest in this one. The AWE DLC is a nice way to lead into Alan Wake 2. The added light mechanic wasn't all that interesting, but I liked the antagonist in this one. Curious how they pick this one up in AW2 and if Jesse will play a role there.

Despite all of my criticism ... I now like this game. I do think this universe is really cool and I'm actually excited for the sequel. I just hope they give Jesse some more powers to play around with and make her go through more wacky shit. Add some more character moments to the story and it'll probably be a real highlight. Fingers crossed!

After feeling a little mixed on the first one, I went into the sequel with lower expectations. A bit afraid of more slow pacing and drawn out jury segments. However, Resolve proved me wrong.

The way the whole overarching storyline comes together in this one is simply amazing. Each case in this game is at least good and escalates to great. The last three episodes are all top-notch.

I still felt a little downtime in some parts and despite loving Herlock Sholmes, I don't really care for the detective sequences that don't really require much thinking but overall the pacing felt way more smooth in this game, despite having insanely long cases at times.

Also really fell in love with the cast of characters and will miss them.