It's definitely a way to start a series ig, nevertheless one of my favorite game series.

Grand Theft Auto is a game that feels alot more like a novelty game nowadays, it has those elements that'll stay in the series like the raunchy and satirical humor and the three main cities but this game has aged badly. GTA1 has no story at all which is insane to think how a story driven series like GTA's first few games have no stories or plots. the whole premise of the game is to do missions to get the needed amount of money to move on to the next part which I'll start by saying the gameplay of this game is really repetitive, a majority of the missions in the game don't really have that much variety and follow the same formula of "take this vehicle and move it here" or "kill this person and destroy this thing" and it doesn't make it any better that the navigation of this game is abysmal.

Navigating the game without a map is literal hell on earth, trying to find a pay n' spray to get away from the cops is a complete chore and honestly makes this game's cops possibly the worst in the series, the arrows that point to your objective in missions are rarely helpful, most of the time you follow it you'll just end up at the edge of the city so it requires you to drive around and find the right path where the objective actually is.

The worst offense this game has done is driving cars and the camera, a core part about the GTA series is speeding through streets and cutting in front of other cars, however in GTA1 the camera's range is really limited and if your car even slightly touches another car your car just goes into a complete stop so you'll see yourself crashing into stuff more than you'll drive a car.

It seems like I'm doing nothing but just bashing this game but I do think there are some good things about it, most notably the soundtrack. GTA 1 all the way till Liberty City Stories used original songs for their radio stations and most of the songs are really good, Grand Theft Auto by Da Shootaz is just an absolute banger and even Rockstar themselves know that as it appears in later entries in the series. The looks of the cities also pretty neat, sure the graphics of this game are not the best but looking at the early versions of the three cities before their true 3D appearances is always pleasing to me.

And finally the influence of the game, it's a miracle how this game that seemingly was supposed to be a one off thing managed to spawn one of the highest grossing game series of all time. While GTA 1 is a very outdated mess of a game with alot of poorly aged humor that hasn't even aged well in 1997 the influence of the game can't be denied at all and for all that it managed to pull off I can't rate it too low.

If there's one way to summarize Ace Combat 04 it'd go something like
"get 1000000 points to beat the mission"
"[WARNING]
"[MISSILE ALERT]"
"[WARNING]"
"[MISSILE ALERT]"
"Now here's some of the best soundtrack and storytelling in the entire series"

For a series start BN1 is solid. the plot is isn't very strong like the other entries in the series but it's still solid, the characters are unique and good I like the dynamic between Roll and MegaMan it's really cute, and the gameplay is amazing and it still applies for the other entries, even BN4.

however I think the biggest drawback with it is the level designs that make it feel like a maze, especially the mess that are DenTown and the ElecMan.EXE puzzle I still get lost in DenTown no matter how many times I replay the game and the ElecMan.EXE puzzle don't get me started, as for the internet it's so easy to run around like a headless chicken not knowing what you're doing especially during the undernet areas.

Overall despite the massive flaws that I cannot name all of them because I'm lazy, Battle Network 1 is a solid but flawed start to a series that I love.