Five Dates is a very cheesy FMV dating simulator that takes place during the covid lockdown. The male protagonist goes on video dates with 5 women and you have to choose conversational answers and responses that will charm them. The dialogue is.... not very good, to be blunt. The actors are trying their best, but they can't weave straw into gold, especially while performing in a vacuum and not having other actors to play off of. That being said, if you are the kind of person that enjoys the "so bad, they're good" movies that are featured on internet shows like RiffTrax or Red Letter Media, this game can be pretty entertaining. It bills itself as "an interactive romantic comedy", but there are barely any jokes! I did laugh a few times but it was AT the game, not with it. So to recap, Five Dates is a game so bad that its flaws make it endearing and memorable. I have to confess I'm morbidly curious to try the sequel!

Tales of Arise was able to quickly captivate me as my first Tales game, and I quite thoroughly enjoyed it, but I do have some glaring issues (some are more like skill issues on my part but whatever). The game has such a strong opening, and the concepts it introduces us to are great.

The first three regions: Calaglia, Cyslodia, and Elde Menancia are honestly perfect in my opinion. You get to see how each lord treat the enslaved Dahnans, and their differing ideologies. I enjoyed the story for each of these regions and they really had me invested in this game. However, I need to state that I utterly despised Mahag Saar and Ganath Haros, it felt like the game was starting to drag out. Mahag Saar I didn't mind as much, I enjoyed exploring Niez and the surroundings but I just started to get sick and tired of the game. Ganath Haros was probably my breaking point because I gave up after defeating the final lord, and it resulted in me dropping the game for 9 months. I came back 9 months later to tackle my enormous catalog, getting games out of the way that I had started but not finished, like Radiant Dawn, and Tales of Arise. I was not impressed with the ending, it was very meh, and the final boss felt extremely underwhelming.

The dungeons are fine, there's really nothing positive or negative I can say about them, but I enjoyed the variety of different areas we could explore. The combat was very satisfying for me, especially coming from someone who doesn't really play games with action-combat. Though I will admit that I did get tired using Alfyn's combos for the entire game, only to realise that you could switch characters at the end of Mahag Saar (skill issue), but I couldn't be bothered to learn another characters combos and skills so i decided to persist on with Alfyn. As for the characters, they were quite enjoyable, and I enjoyed the dynamics that perpetuated between the Danhans in the party and the Renans. I also enjoyed the little duos that would form within the party, it just felt neat.

I really enjoyed the skits, but I did start to get tired of them at the end of the game. I couldn't be bothered doing quests, especially because of my immense burnout near the end of the game. But I must say, the opening song really got stuck in my head. Overall, I experienced more positives than negatives in this game, and my dislike for the game only started to be prevalent after the 'main-story' had concluded. The setting and the characters carried this game hard for me, as I found the combat to be average. Even though half of my review might be negative, theres a reason why I've rated it at 7/10, I thoroughly enjoyed the first part of the game. I do have Tales of Vesperia in my library because a friend got it for me, but I think it'll be a while before I'm ready to try another Tales game.

*I played this game on Nintendo Switch.

Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge is a competent, yet hard game that in retrospect is not really worth much now. It's the very first Mega Man game on a portable console and it shows.
The game only has four Robot Masters to fight (Ice Man, Fire Man, Cut Man, and Elec Man), and the levels have a mixture of their original Mega Man 1 levels that incorporate elements of some Mega Man 2 levels. The Wily Castle also has you fight four Robot Masters from MM2 (Quick Man, Flash Man, Bubble Man, and Heat Man).
The game is fine for what it does. You can still shoot, jump, and use weapons as Mega Man. However, due to screen scrunch, the movement of Mega Man does feel slow and he and all other enemies become larger to accommodate the Game Boy's screen. This results in dodging enemy fire becoming a lot more difficult. Combine that with the rate of enemies dropping more weapon refills than health, and then the game becomes even harder.

The only new things from the game were the Carry weapon which creates platforms that does come as a clutch for the Wily Stages and the Mirror Buster which simply invalidates the final boss.

Music is alright, though the Game Boy does limits to composition.

The only negatives I have is the slow movement, the poorly designed Wily Stages that rely so heavily on falling down the pits only to not be clear that there were spikes down there too, and the low amount of health refills over the course of the journey.

MM: Dr. Wily's Revenge is just an alright game, though it's existence is considered moot since you can have a portable Mega Man experience through the Legacy Collection on Switch. Despite that, it's a short, yet hard game that is ultimately inoffensive in the long legacy of the series. 3/5.

I love this sullen, gangly, size zero interpretation of shinobi. I love the freezeframe bisection polyptychs, the d'n'b soundtrack, and the mobility. it's an exceptionally stylish, confident game, and while a lot of folks have already said it: when it works it really works

the big draw past the point when you're no longer in awe of its scarf physics and relentless bangers is the tate (殺陣; fatal wind) mechanic. it's like the chip BURST chip dynamic modern action games love, only instead of an mmo-grade phase rotation it's more of a split second setplay puzzle where the "burst" is seeing an entire health bar explode in a single hit while you go full vogue

each successive kill within a four second window builds power and prolongs the chain until it's ready to come together for the photogenic finish. it's the most shinobi shit on the planet, and when everything plays out the way you planned you immediately forget how much the camera made you wanna bite the controller as hard as you could ten seconds prior. you no longer wanna send magazine cutout letters to the guy who decided the wretched lock-on should only target stuff you've never seen before. you might even find it in your heart to forgive the paul ws anderson lasers (I actually kinda liked em!)

main knock against it's that the levels & encounters are borderline procgen. on 3A I was getting a bit dozy and for a second there you could've successfully convinced me I was playing persona 4. there's no discernable sense of structure or pacing to the stages; they go on, cycle through a handful of identical rooms with identical enemy setups, and then a boss shows up whenever the mappers felt there were enough empty boxes, shiba dogs, and bottomless pits to call it a day

but the one thing that puts a bullet in the idea of replaying it on higher difficulties is the final boss. I hate this hocus pocus motherfucker. iframes and teleports out the ass, flying minions with wonky hurtboxes, one of those long intro sequences where the real fight doesn't start til you're a minute in. the sighs and groans I made when he decided to spin like a beyblade every time I managed to get the 8-chain going were downright ancestral -- real cave creature shit. I never wanna do that again, and I probably never will

happy to have played it but happy to be done. I hate mages so much man, you don't even know

This game felt like it was 1000 hours long to 9 year old me. Thats a shit ton of podracing. Why did I do so much podracing?? I must have raced through the ceramic mosaic water world of Choot Chumba 100 times, somehow enthralled and also bored to tears as I piloted Kirtl Jonkta and his giant twin swamp cooler ass pods. I raced through the battle marshes of Terkwue, served my sentence in Anikins home desert of Bhutupo-3, and washed through the magma halls of Mount Dooq, all for a chance to unlock Darth Vader, the only Star Wars character anyone really cares about.

But in all honesty I do think I gravitate to Star Wars alot more when its focusing more on the “Star” and less on the “Wars”. Pod Racing isnt exactly the most mystical or sexy thing in a Jedi universe, but it actually presents an interesting cultural exposee with the fact that pod racing itself is an exotic popular sport. You race on planets that dont typically feature in Star Wars media and get a more involved look at how these societies might construct themselves - in some cases you can even see how they engage with the sport itself through contestant racers. Its alien Gran Turismo and thats still got more going for it than regular Star Wars.