"'It's peak,' as they say" - Aigis, probably.
This might sound cheesy, but every time I play a new Persona game I feel like I learn something new about myself. This time around we tackle themes of death, nihilism, the impermanence of everything, and what it means to truly live. Nothing lasts forever, people die and they're gone for good, this is absolute.
I'm at the point in my life now where loved ones dying is starting to become more of a common thing. As goofy as it sounds, stories like P3 help you recenter and contemplate on this concept.
Philosophy aside, the game is pretty solid. I'm a bit torn on how I feel about their faithfulness to the originals, but I think ultimately they made great choices to improve the QoL and overall experience of the game. I say this as someone who never played any original version of P3, but am familiar with that era of Persona via playing P4G. If anything I wish they had been maybe a little less faithful and tried something new.
It's hard for me to say, but I think P3 has my favorite cast....? Regardless, it's very close to P4 in that area. Interacting with Koromaru is definitely more enjoyable than interacting with Teddy or Morgana at least. The other party members also feel more grounded and mature. I'll also cautiously say that I think P3 has some of the best music out of any Persona game overall, especially when it comes to battle music. Sorry P5 fans, the jazz is great and all but I prefer Mass Destruction and It's Going Down Now. Colour Your Night absolutely slaps, Changing Seasons slaps, When the Moon's Reaching Out Stars is bubbly and upbeat to contrast the melancholy and nihilism. And when the music and tone shift in the last month... that whole month was a gut punch.
Pacing at the beginning of the game is a little strange, but in hindsight I understand why it has to be that way for story purposes. I liked the way P4 handled broaching the main subject of the story with all of the mystique surrounding Personas and the world inside of the TV. P3 felt a little weird in contrast because you move to a new school and suddenly everyone's like, "Sup? we fight Shadows in Tartarus during the Dark Hour with our Personas. You start Monday, welcome to the team." It made the first couple areas of Tartarus feel much less impactful than the dungeons and palaces in other Persona games which were obviously specifically tailored around the relevant character.
Even knowing how the game would end, it still wrecked me. Memories of You hits really hard, it's the kind of shit that makes you want to call your mom or some close friends.
Now do this, but with P4G.

Such a blast. The combat is weighty and satisfying. Blowing up bugs with different weapons and gear is made all the more satisfying with the sound design and visuals of guts exploding everywhere. Bugs and bots play completely different too, it almost feels like two separate games. Running through a dark, dense jungle as lasers from the automatons zip all around you makes for some tense, really atmospheric moments. Honestly, as you slowly get better at the game and slowly crank up the difficulty, they manage to maintain this really nice balance of tension and power fantasy. Can't wait to see how updates evolve the game over time. Definitely an Evergreen title that I'll keep coming back to over the years.

One of the best 3/5 games I've ever played. I really like how the game makes the Pals feel like they're actually interacting with you and helping you. It does it in a way that I don't think Pokemon has ever really matched. Each time a friend would bring a new pal back to base to show off, it was always met with comments like, "WHOA, IT'S SO COOL, WHERE DID YOU FIND IT?" and then we would run off and go find more of them to bring back. Discovering new Pals to put to work in the base is also really satisfying.
Unfortunately, that's about the only good thing about this game. Cookie cutter survival gameplay was only made tolerable by the inherently fun concept of scouring an open world for different types of Pals. It's a feeling that I still think Gamefreak has not even come close to achieving in their games. I would love to see a game with exploration and discovery like this, but with less survival tedium and more towns, characters, bosses, story... anything but fucking mining ore as the core gameplay loop.
Incredible fun with friends, probably pretty bland if you're playing solo.
MANY of the Pal designs are remarkably better than so many modern Pokemon designs. I don't even care if they slightly rip off various body parts from official Pokemon designs, they're just better than most of the shit we get nowadays. Sorry, not sorry. I believe in Penking supremacy. Orserk is goated. So many of these Pals would be instant favorite Pokemon if they were official designs. They have a surprising amount of personality in their animations and sounds. I hope Pocket Pair keeps iterating on this concept and makes a true Pokemon competitor because god knows we need one.

It's a really good time to be a Final Fantasy fan. I'm a bit torn between giving this a 4 and a 4.5, but I think it stands out enough to warrant the higher marks. While it does stumble a bit with pacing and lack of characterization for side characters, it still delivers a powerful story from start to finish. This game also pulls a lot of inspiration from my favorite FF, FFIV, in its tone and setting so it really felt like playing a modern take on that aesthetic. I was a bit disappointed that none of the Bahamut skills involved Dragoon type attacks, and I just found myself wishing I could play a FF action game as a Dragoon with similar combat.
This game is a spectacle, the soundtrack, graphics, and combat all come together to make some truly unforgettable moments. There were so many times during boss fights where the music would sync absolutely perfectly with what was happening on screen. It aligned so perfectly during the Bahamut fight that my jaw genuinely dropped in shock. I don't usually physically react to games like that, so it was pretty noteworthy.
The game does have a few pacing issues though, notably during the Dhalmekia arc. I also feel like it didn't help that many of the side quests just felt lackluster in comparison to the main scenario. Seriously, these side quests never stood a chance. You'll go from these epic, cinematic fights with demigods one minute, to collecting soil samples the next. Thankfully the game marks side quests that are worth doing with a plus mark, I really appreciated that.
The combat was at it's best when stumbling across new powerful enemies in the early game. I definitely feel like you get a little too powerful in the second half of the game, but those fights when you only have Phoenix and Garuda were so thrilling.
Crafting also feels oddly... pointless? By the end of the game I had thousands of materials, but the most powerful gear. It feels like maybe they planned for you to be able to kit out party members or have more options for Eikon specific gear, but cut it leaving hundreds of chests with useless crafting materials in the world.
Not sure what else to say. I feel like this game unfortunately got overshadowed by a lot of the other insane releases last year. I grabbed it on sale for $35 only about 5 months after release, felt a bit wrong to me as I thought it was well worth full price. Remarkable game though, despite its shortcomings. The ending also absolutely WRECKED me and I WAS NOT expecting it to. Something about the flashback scenes and the music, maybe it's because I also have a brother about the same age gap as Clive and Joshua.

Tried so hard to find the fun in this game but I just couldn't. It's like someone just checked off all the features of Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley with more tedium and none of the soul. Just kind of ran around for 4 hours selling fish and all I had to show for it was a general store and a museum. The reason why AC and Stardew are so good is because of everything you can interact with in between the tedium. Having to manually pick up every single item I try to harvest is a big turnoff too.
I grabbed it because I had heard good things and it had high marks on Steam but I don't know how this game is rated as highly as it is.

I got like 13 hours into this game but ultimately I gave up on it. It is simultaneously fun and very unfun at the same time. The game has a lot of cool ideas, but pretty much every one of them feels underdeveloped and half baked. A lot of the story and quests feel generic and uninteresting, and almost every quest has you walking slowly through a big, mostly empty map. I was at the Griffin quest and was excited to finally fight the thing, only for it to fly away and the NPCs to immediately tell me that it went to it's nest all the way on the other side of the map. The journey from point to point wouldn't be as bad if there were interesting things to do in between, but there's just not. The music is good... when it plays. Otherwise the game feels dead silent in a lot of places. The whole experience just feels kind of junky and unfinished.
However, like I said I did have fun with the game initially because it has a lot of fun concepts in its combat and follower system. The formula is in desperate need of modernization which is why I'm still very interested in the new game coming up. I think a modern Capcom can make something really special with the bones of this game. However, the original feels like a chore to play.

I wasn't expecting to like this game as much as I did. A lot of Sony's first parts offerings lately have been pretty hit or miss for me, but Spider-Man managed to pull me in.
The game is at its best in the first 5-7 hours, when you're still unlocking new abilities and getting into the flow of combat. There are a lot of interesting things to see and do in New York City and you stumble upon and complete them pretty organically. This game looks pretty easy to 100% and I appreciate that.
The combat is flashy and cinematic, and as I said earlier feels really good at the start of the game. By the end, you kind of become pretty OP and the game starts playing itself, which is sort of a bummer. The overall presentation was dynamic enough that it wasn't boring however.
The game is... mostly polished. Like the combat and traversal is solid, but it's odd because it's actually one of the buggier games I've played in the past couple years. There were three distinct times where I would be blocked by a bug on the critical path and have to reload a checkpoint to fix things.
Overall, super stylish and fun Spider-Man game.

Lies of P is an incredibly polished Soulslike that even rivals some of From Software's early offerings in the genre they pioneered. It draws inspiration from the structure of Demon's Souls, the combat of Sekiro, and the tone and art direction of Bloodborne. While it doesn't really do any of these better than From Soft, the package as a whole is still incredibly enjoyable regardless. There were times in the game where you could have told me I was playing a From Soft game and I might have believed you. The combat is the only area where Lies of P really shines, and even then I have exceptions to that claim.
Specifically player side combat feels awesome. There are a wealth of interesting weapons that each have their own flair, and to add to that most weapons can be disassembled into two components and recombined into completely new weapons. I can't understate how cool this is, I must have experimented more with different playstyles in a single run of Lies of P than I have with any other From Soft game, with the exception of maybe Elden Ring. The Legion Arm and Fable Arts also provided me with a lot of tools to mix up how I approached encounters.
Now where the combat isn't as exciting is the enemies. A lot of the rank and file in Lies of P are very similar humanoid puppets and monsters. When I did come across a unique, strong enemy, they were usually well designed and super fun to fight. The giant toddler puppet for example was a very memorable encounter.
I would similarly say that the bosses have some... problems. Some of them are really interesting and fun to fight, some of them feel incredibly poorly designed, maybe even intentionally all in the pursuit of that "brutal" difficulty of the genre. It has felt like a trend in a lot of recent Soulslikes, both from other devs and From Soft themselves, where you don't fight bosses, the bosses fight you. You are constantly put on the defensive, spending most of your time during the fight deflecting attacks rather than being on the offensive. I get that that's the name of the game with a parry based loop like Lies and Sekiro have, but it sometimes feels like you're never given a moment to breath and reposition. Bosses in Lies all have insane gap closers that track you the entire way through their animations, no amount of good positioning will spare you from being hit. You must either dodge or parry on the right frame of the animation itself, or you will be taking damage. This limits the kinds of playstyles that can be viable in these games.
A really egregious example of this I had in Lies was against the true final boss, where I usually lead the fight with applying shock grindstone to my weapon. Before I even finished my "walking through the fog gate" animation, the boss had already rolled and dashed within 10 feet of me and begun an attack. This only happened once during all of my attempts during this boss, but it really shocked me. I didn't even react, I did nothing, I let the boss kill me so I could retry with my elemental buff.

This is not a satisfying way to play the game.

When I did finally beat the boss, the fight itself was exciting, but the sense of accomplishment that I've had in overcoming a tough Souls boss in the past was not there. I was just frustrated and glad to be done with the game.
Despite all of its shortcomings, the game as a whole was really enjoyable and if this is their Demon's Souls, I can't wait to see what is next.

Dandori today... Dandori tomorrow...
I didn't play Pikmin for the first time until 2020, but I feel like it's a very underrated Nintendo series. It feels very unique in its identity with not a lot of similar games out there.

Pikmin 4 feels like the ultimate Pikmin game. Caves return to give a bit more depth to the game, there are tons of areas and interesting situations to navigate using your silly little guys. Dandori battles and time challenges were a good way to add some difficulty because the game is quite easy.

My only gripes with the game were that the soundtrack didn't go as hard as past Pikmin games and that it was a bit long to the point of feeling repetitive. I didn't quite 100% it, but was very close, and I just couldn't be bothered to go back in and get the 4 treasures I was missing.

Also I'm very happy that this game is currently sitting at 4.4.

The game drew me in initially with it's incredible atmosphere. It's a pretty simple and relaxing fishing game with an eerie twist. Explores some Lovecraftian adjacent themes.
I do wish the game had a bit more depth to it though, pun intended. It became pretty predictable around half way through and the environment did not feel more threatening. I would have loved some situations that forced me to adapt my playstyle while trying to avoid the horrors of the night, but it didn't feel like there were many.
Solid game, not a lot of others like it.