The Legend of Xenogears: Trails of Cold Saga IV
(the game that broke my brain)

Where do I even start with this game? The lore is batshit insane (derogatory), everyone treats Rean like he's the second coming of Anime Jesus, the characters take literal days to rest in the middle of WW3 after doing a day or two of hiking, the vast majority of the returning cast is flanderized to hell and back TO THE POINT IT HAPPENS IN THE MIDDLE OF ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT CUTSCENES IN THE GAME (thankfully Renne is at least spared such a tragic fate), they revive 3 separate characters (Toval, Olivier, and Victor) who died very much onscreen, in a very unambiguous way, to which the party's reactions were very apparent, because Falcum can't stand killing off their OCs (yes it's a spoiler and no I don't care), they revive Crow 3 times by taping his soul to Valimar or some shit, the curse only exists to make the party have 3 billion boss fights with the most rando characters imaginable (WHY AM I FIGHTING THE FUCKING MUSIC TEACHER FROM CS1 GET ME OFF THIS TRAINWRECK), Thomas fucks off for the 4th game in a row despite being built up to hell and back (hey remember when Dominions were actively involved in the plot and eventually became party members? well that sure is a thing of the past), TOWA ISN"T PLAYABLE YET AGAIN, Musse becomes a grand chessmaster or something idk, McBurn sure is a boss fight and mcburninates everyone and activates his inner Trogdor and gives you an item that unlocks the true ending (?????) and you can only get the true ending by completing all the quests in the game (????????????) and the last quest is beating up the dragon Holy Beast (???????????????????????????????????????), all the women party members, INCLUDING REAN"S FUCKING STUDENTS (INCLUDING FUCKING ALTINA) (AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA), are romanceable (screaming internally) (I still can't get over the Laura cave scene and that's a whole other bucket of worms), TOWA ACTIVELY FORGIVES CROW ON SCREEN FOR BEING DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR ACTIVELY AND QUITE POSSIBLY KNOWINGLY PUTTING HER LIFE IN DANGER IN CS1 (that shit should give her PTSD at least and that's not even getting into her very possible abandonment issues SET UP ONLY 1 GAME PRIOR), Alberich is there to be a bad guy who does evil bad guy things because that's what the evil bad guy do (on top of functionally being a really bad ripoff of Dmitri Yuriev which should be a war crime on its own), Kloe isn't playable yet again AND IS LITERALLY PUT IN A POSITION TO BE PLAYABLE but Falcum didn't want to animate her or something I guess (I don't think she even gets a Brave Order either when Schera of all people does which is extra retarded, especially with hindsight from Hajimari BECAUSE SCHERA IS PREGGERS AND IS IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ACTIVE WARZONE), the party fights Osborne and Arianrhod at the bottom of the Gnome BDSM factory hobbit hole thing (??????????????????????????????????) way before the end of the game which takes away what little crumbs of gravitas he had left (I don't think he even gets an Anti-Order WHICH YOU"D THINK HE WOULD SINCE HE APPARENTLY CAN SPREAD THE ANTI-ORDER VIRUS TO THE IRONBLOODS), the writing generally being barely passable at best and an absolute fustercluck at worst, the gameplay being the easiest it's ever been even on Nightmare and every enemy being walking bags of HP (I checked at least a few times per chapter if I didn't accidentally switch it to an easier difficulty even when I wasn't optimizing everyone), and a lot of other stuff that probably slipped my mind but I don't care because this game's plot is frighteningly worthless.

Before I start ranting about the game's comically lopsided reception compared to how it actually is, I want to say that there are a handful of things I did like about the game.
-I liked that Juna was basically the protagonist for the first chapter of the game (and honestly she should have just been the protag, or at least a deuteragonist, for the rest of the game). Alisa entirely dropped being the deuteragonist during CS2 and it would have been nice to have someone fill in that role, especially since it would give a chance to split the cast to focus on other parts of Erebonia with Class 7 focusing on one part and Class 7 2 focusing on another part (why in the shiny fuck we didn't get to go to Jurai or North Ambria instead of farting around for the entirety of Chapter 2 I will never fathom). But anyway, Juna protag I very much appreciated for the short time it happened, since she's easily the only one left with any amount of tangible reason to want to stop Daddy Osborne from being a big ol' meanie (and NO, Crow no longer counts).
-There were a handful of bonding events I liked, despite easily being the worst handled aspect of the arc. I liked the one with Altina where she tried to help liberate Ymir from Imperial soldiers, the one where Emma tried to purge Ishmelga from Rean at great personal risk to herself (even though, let's face it, the only reason they did it was to have a reason for Emma to be naked), and the one with Musse showing Rean her suicide gun. There were a few problems with the setup for each of them (and frankly for Emma's it really should have just been a plot scene instead of Insert Epic Anime Fight #236754762354) but the fact that I really like the ideas for them more than makes up for their shortcomings.

And now for the rant.

If it isn't obvious, this is one of the worst games I've ever played, and not just because it's such a massive blueball for longtime fans who want something more substantial than having shiny objects dangling in front of them. And it really stinks because the plot can be summed up as "Xenogears meets Highlander during WW3" which sounds fucking awesome, but somehow Falcum made it the most boring, mind-numbing, tedious waste of time ever. Falcum has been building up Osborne since FUCKING SKY THE THIRD and his scene in Ao where he was openly threatening Dieter in a room full of dignitaries from other countries was easily one of the best scenes in the entire series, and in this arc he's been nothing but an absolute tin can of a person. I legitimately can't even tell if it's one of those "iT wAs JuSt iShMeLgA aLL aLoNg" plotpoints or if Osborne was completely in control the entire time because the way the writers explain the mind-melding whatever the hell was going on with him and Alberich is extremely confused and misleading. To be fair I completely clocked out by that point in the game, but I actively tried to look it up and ask other people what was happening with that, and either method didn't help me to understand much better beyond "Ishmelga and Osborne were doing stuff together". To put it in perspective, one of my favorite game series is Xenosaga. There is a very delicately woven, intricate plot of subterfuge, corporate spying, fucky experimentation, and intrigue all centered around an event that took place 14 in-game years ago. There are many different factions with different interests either trying to vie for control or to oppose the factions that would disturb the peace. To say that the player needs to almost take notes at some points while playing the games would not be an understatement. And those games are much easier to follow than most of anything in this game and Cold Steel because the writers had a goal they wanted to accomplish and actively articulated what everyone was doing when they were doing it, and the player can easily see what was happening and can make reasonable guesses as to what could happen next, and has many twists and turns to keep it interesting that don't come out of the same nowhere that Ishmelga showed up from. With this game, that sense is very much absent, at least for me. And Takahashi's plans got derailed partway through making the series; he had to cut down from 6 games to 3 games, with some supplementary content to fill in necessary gaps that couldn't make it into the games proper. What Takahashi accomplished in just 3 games, a VN and a phone game was monumental; what this game accomplished with all the buildup, time to develop and money that Falcum could muster was a tragedy. And for the final nail in the coffin, the entire Xenosaga series can be 100% completed in roughly the same time someone would 100% complete CS1.

And I'm not here trying to say everyone who likes this game is bad or anything, but I genuinely envy the people who can just turn their brains off and enjoy this shit. Superficially, longtime favorite characters make appearances and generally do things that they might do in this situation, so the immersion isn't ruined. There's a lot of pretty crazy stuff happening after Rean makes a comeback which amps up the stakes for the latter half of the game, and Cassius comes out of retirement to teach Rean a pretty cool and (relatively speaking) mechanically interesting S-craft that, admittedly, is one of my favorites in the series and can reasonably compete with all-time greats like Sakura Morning Moon.
All that being said, the amount of praise this game gets despite how much of a shitshow it is at a glance deeper than cursory always baffled me. There's people who either love this game to pieces or there's people who absolutely hate it with every fiber of their being, which is really unfortunate because the writers (might) still have an amount of passion for the series but to have it fail on this scale, especially with a relatively decent track record, says to me they need to slow production of this series down and let the series breathe a bit and have them think through everything properly. With the few things that I liked, even when it's an unfortunately very small part of the runtime it's genuinely up there with some of the other games I really enjoy. And to top it all off, I don't think Trails is even recoverable after this game; Hajimari did a decent job of trying to retcon a lot of the really dumb nonsense that was set up in this game and is basically just CS4 2: The Search for More Hanging Plot Threads, but Falcum's braindead insistence on having characters futz around on screen until the plot happens has finally caught up to them, and the plot is no longer something I can take seriously in any capacity.

Anyway, Cold Steel in general is an arc that I suggest people skip (the amount of stuff the player needs to know from it to get into Kuro can literally be summed up in a paragraph) but especially skip this one. The only parts of it that I think are worth watching are up on Youtube so just search around there.

Revelations Persona: Nanjo finally gets the N-word pass

Despite the localization basically being 4kids tier on crack, I have a soft spot for it just due to how unintentionally hilarious and insane it is. Nanjo gets turned into a cracker, Mark's favorite food is fried chicken, the "I'm white so you know I'm true" line by Elly (which to be fair back then white was supposed to be a metaphor for honest but taken with all the other racial stuff makes it way worse than it was intended), and of course, everyone's favorite superhero

SUPER GUIDO

(he's also Italian and runs a mob racket)

All jokes aside, the PSP version is an improvement over this one but not by much, the PSP version adds a few QoL changes but imo not enough to really make an improvement, at least in terms of gameplay. If you're used to other Megaten games the spell names are drastically different but you can usually pick up which ones are which, and same goes for the item and Persona names as well. In the PSP version you also have to install a patch to listen to the original soundtrack, which fits far, far better for the very particular tone this game is going for, and still holds up to this day as one of the best Megaten OSTs.

All in all, it's still worth playing if you have a twisted sense of humor and want to see what amounts to basically a time capsule but I would definitely recommend playing the PSP version first since it's a far more faithful translation, and the plot is actually pretty solid.

SMT4A: So Very Close To Being A Great Game

This is a game I have a hard time rating, because I'm in 2 minds about it. The plot, while having interesting concepts and has a pretty fresh take on the alignment system so near and dear to Megaten, suffers largely from having Persona-tier writing for most of it as well as a handful of gameplay problems admittedly only relegated to endgame, but they're still there and can still stand a bit of polishing.

Asahi and Toki are pretty much there to only be love interests for the protag (and for the love of God Toki is 14 which is already fucky enough on top of being conditioned to basically be a submissive tool for whoever owns her (which can work in anything that treats the subject matter with any amount of respect AND WHICH THIS GAME SERIES OF ALL THINGS IS THE PERFECT PLACE TO EXPLORE THINGS LIKE THIS)) (and on Asahi she's just generic bubbly anime girl who gets a criminal amount of screentime compared to more interesting characters but otherwise fairly inoffensive), Gaston and Isabeau are just coming along for the ride, Navarre is cool but unfortunately gets few moments to really stand out beyond the "murder your friends" ending (small aside on the voice performance but I legit think Sean Chiplock is perfectly suited for semi-comedic roles like this instead of Wet Paper Towel Protag man) and Hallelujah gets a really cool moment where he stands up to his foster father/mob boss. And that's the really unfortunate thing about this game, it has excellent ideas and the execution is mostly fairly solid, but I didn't care too much about the two main characters you spend the most time with so large parts of the story didn't have much weight to them when they really should have.

And for the protagonist, sticking to a silent protagonist works for a few of the Megaten games, and initially the story was more about exploring opposing ideologies and the horrible atrocities one has to make when following through on them, but in most games and I think in particular this one is where Megaten really needs to drop that formula entirely. At the very start of the game the protagonist gets killed by a sudden demon attack, he goes to Japanese hell, and there he has a schizo edgelord ghost named Dagda who decides to hold the protagonist hostage to his whims in exchange for returning him to life. Dagda wants the protagonist to become his personal Godslayer and to kill Dagda's former comrades with the ultimate goal of killing YHVH. Over the course of the game Dagda is constantly whispering into the protagonists ear about how worthless his bonds between him and his friends are, and this entire subplot would be entirely benefitted by the protagonist being his own person and having legitimate reasons to go in either direction beyond those shown by the plot.

Another major issue I have with this game is the fact that, besides Dagda holding the protagonist hostage, he doesn't give much reason to support his cause beyond a vague notion of "kill god because it's epic and based lol". In addition, it's never elaborated on why Dagda left the Divine Powers to begin with other than he's super edgy edgelord man and they're not. Large parts of the script are solid and very much feels like a proper Megaten game, despite my Persona comparison, but it feels like a first draft in many points and would have definitely benefitted from being in the oven for a rewrite.

For things in the plot I like, I really like Krishna and the Divine Powers. They're basically a dark-neutral alignment with their goal being to create a new universe with a McGuffin dungeon called a Cosmic Egg with the goal of doing so to keep YHVH out of the equation and be free from his influence, and to have non-[REDACTED] gods rule in his place. However he is not above manipulating humans to achieve his own goals so he's still ultimately a snake-tongued usurper who ultimately isn't all that different from Lucifer. I still like him though, because of the spectacular voice performance by his VA, which elevated what would otherwise be a fairly generic SMT villain, and since it's not just one person who's pulling the strings it's a group of demons all with their own motivations to do what they are doing, which is neat.

With the negatives out of the way, there are very legitimate reasons to enjoy the gameplay. This is honestly the tightest gameplay I've ever gotten out of a Megaten game and I've played my fair share of them. The smirk mechanic from SMT4 comes back, but virtually all of its problems have been eliminated and even touched up on to make it work as its own buff and debuff instead of "sometimes its a crit but it can be used up by healing/buffs and doesn't do anything for them for some reason". It works as a powerup for attack spells/skills, offering a damage boost as well as forcing a crit, but it can also serve to power up many skills in the game, including many unique skills on lategame demonns. My favorite smirk buffs are reworking how expel/death spells work and (to a degree) reworking how Salvation works. Instead of just being two types of instakill spells, when they are unsmirked they work as 2 additional damage spells, but when they are smirked they do damage as well as have a chance to instakill. With Salvation, instead of it being Mediarahan + curing all ailments, the ailment cure is the smirk effect now. On paper this idea looks good, but since it's a lategame skill and a number of bosses in lategame, and especially the DLC, love to spam ailments, it can make smirk management even more hectic than it can already get. I think if instead, smirk let you remove debuffs that would be a good enough adjustment to make it worth keeping around, as well as making the smirk effect feel worth it. That being said, just these changes alone makes me wish it will show up in some form in a later game, since it adds a ton of variety to what you can do with certain skills and adds an additional layer of management to combat that unfortunately a lot of Megaten games are missing.

However, with these positives also come some negatives on the gameplay front. MP management is fine in the beginning since there are many options to do so, either through resting at the Hunter's Association or apps that passively restore MP. However, for consumables they only restore a set amount of MP at a time, which works for a good portion of the game, but especially toward the latter half MP costs balloon and the consumables simply don't keep up. In addition to that, every item has a cap for the amount you can carry, and they are often lower than what should be reasonable. When you can only carry 10 Chakra Pots around, which only restore 150 MP at a time, and endgame spells like Mediarahan can cost upwards of 90 MP or more, and they need to be cast fairly often, it can make battles much more stressful than they need to be. And keep in mind, I played this game on War so I'm not just a wussy n00b. All that being said, this game is doable and I managed to beat the entire game with a good amount of effort put in, but the game could use a little more polish in this area to make it a truly stand out title in terms of gameplay.

Now lastly, the final dungeon. The soundtrack for almost the entire game up to this point has been immaculate, and keeps to what Megaten players expect a mainline game to sound while also keeping its own sound and not just turning into Meguro Soundtrack #2930502935 like DDS2 unfortunately did. However, the final dungeon theme was the most boring, droning dungeon theme I think I've ever heard in any game I've played, and made the already abysmal dungeon more awful to the point I just turned the music off about 25% of the way through, which also stinks since it's a remix of the boss theme from SMT2. And for the dungeon itself, I got lost in it several times even using a map to get through it since every single room has the same exact block textures as the previous one, and no easily distinguishable landmarks or environmental changes to tell them apart. When Sector Grus in Strange Journey is easier to navigate, the dungeon design might be a problem.

All in all, there's a number of pretty significant issues bogging down what is otherwise a solid gameplay experience, and easily has the best combat system of any Megaten game I've played to date, even including Nocturne Hardtype. I think if you drown out most of your party members and only listen to Krishna's epic VA (seriously the only other game I know him from is a fucking minor villain in P5 of all things and even then he still was easily the best voice performance for the villains, this guy should show up in way more stuff) and appreciate the good things it has going for it, I think you can have a good time with it.