genuinely dont remember where i found this

its part of the anime girl flying around and shooting shit to death genre, kind of like eXceed or much more notoriously, Touhou, which this game takes a lot of inspiration from when it comes to presentation, from the menus and the soundtrack, to more insignificant details like your characters' (or the boss's) portrait cutting in when a bomb is used, or the way the song title fades into the bottom of the screen at the start of a stage

it seems to feature branching paths for the main campaign, which is nice, but unfortunately i cant read moon runes and I was too lazy to find an english patch when I still cared about playing this so i guess i wont be making any sense of the plot

the gameplay itself is pretty unremarkable for a shmup, probably the easiest ive played, though its very akin to Imperishable Night in that you pick a duo of two characters at the beginning of the game, each with a different shot-type, which i guess adds a hint of depth to this otherwise simplistic game

might replay at some point

The only thing this thing made go Up were my colesterol levels





I remember once as a little, little child, back when I first got my ds, Up for the ds was one of the many games I got on my og R4. "Up, like the movie? Oooh does that mean that I get to play as the dog?"
Turns out you don't. You get a whole ass waterfall stage that can only be surpassed by the chubby kid while the old man hits the nae nae I GUESS
You know something? I got stuck here for WEEKS back then. And I had mario 64 ds as an option. Yeah, turns out I didn't really come back to this shitty ass game in 15 years. Didn't even complete that first level, until recently. HOLY SHIT, NOT EVEN THE MUSIC IS SALVAGEABLE LOL. The only reason I even installed it again was to finally finish that first level.Young me would be both proud and nauseated for even daring to go that far into it. But I did!

Hearing that new video game system you’re about to buy comes with a free title designed to show off its special capabilities likely calls to mind some paltry minigame compilation à la Welcome Park on PS Vita. Sony has actually preloaded their latest home console with a full-fledged 3D collect-a-thon platformer of remarkable quality though! It may not end up being as iconic as Wii Sports, but is a very welcome member of the PS5’s library nonetheless.

It feels like a gleeful celebration of the company’s long history. Not in a supercilious, self-aggrandizing way, but in a manner more akin to sitting down with an old friend and reminiscing fond memories. Everywhere you look there’s an Easter egg or deep cut reference that’s been lovingly placed there to bring a smile to the face of any abiding PlayStation devotee while reminding them of the types of experiences they can’t get anywhere else.

As delightful as all of that is though, it’s the gameplay that matters most and if that didn’t hold up then this package would carry no value. Astro’s Playroom manages to succeed due to spacing out the stages meant to make use of the controller’s unique functions with excellent traditional ones that you can explore and grab things in at your leisure. The levels that see you tilting the DualSense and playing around with its touchpad and adaptive triggers admittedly are a tad gimmicky (especially those dang frog suit sections), but remain fun in spite of that by never outstaying their welcome.

Another aspect that really impressed me was the sheer amount of interactivity. In the starting hub area alone, you can smack all of the little Bots to have them tag along behind you and amass a huge horde of followers. What purpose does this serve? None as far as I can tell! It's just a single example of the many neat little features the devs have included that allow you to find extra amusement in engaging with your surroundings. It's something I wish more games would do.

This might also be the perfect length, striking that nice balance between charming demo you spend a little time with before moving on to the games you actually bought the console for and a more fulfilling offering that can keep you coming back for a few additional hours via the healthy amount of collectibles to hunt down. AP won't be on any top ten of the PS5's lifespan lists when all is said and done, yet is a fantastic freebie regardless that there's absolutely no reason for you to not check out if you own the hardware.

9/10

DISCLAIMER: This is a re-edited review of Stellar Blade. Just telling you now, I'm going to be talking about more about the dark sides of gooner culture than the game itself because Stellar Blade is a lynch pin for things I find fascinating about the internet as it stands in the month of May, 2024.

We been spendin' most our lives living in a gooners paradise.

I am fascinated by Stellar Blade and what this game might mean for the future for video games. It's going to sound like I hate this game, but I don't. I think it's Fine™.

If it wasn't obvious, this game wants to be Nier Automata Souls Asura's Wrath Bayonetta. The intro of the game is VERY similar how Asura's Wrath started just swapped with Korean mobile game models usually reserved for Gacha-pull auto-battlers -- doing orbital drops onto the Earth doing Bayonetta moves before getting torn to pieces like Gears of War characters by Infernal Demons. There are other games you could pull into the conversation that Stellar Blade reminds you of and you'd be on the money. The game is a homunculus of other game ideas. Stellar Blade is just the title that dared to glue every game it worships together like this. It feels like an astounding ripoff with enough effort put in it's distinctions for me to not feel mad about it.

My only two real criticisms that I care about is that the parrying is BAD. DELAYED FRAME WINDOWS FOR PARRYING IS BAD. If you are going to have parrying in your game, and the parry timing is not finely tuned to the animation of an attack, then the game is going to suffer because of it. Lies of P did this shit, too. We are half a decade removed from the release of Sekiro. Make the parry windows make sense.

Secondly, the plot and characters are just so bad that I find it cannot be enjoyed even in an ironic way. This game is so earnest in it's stupidity, turning on my brain to pay attention to the game's narrative actually felt like it was my fault. You play as android woman named EVE and you meet a guy named ADAM and you two are basically the last people on EARTH.
It's not deep. It is in fact stupid as fuck. But, at the end of the day, I like the fact that Stellar Blade THINKS it is deep. But who cares what I think. Thinking is for people who are not edging to Stellar Blade in between unemployment checks. Just shut the fuck up, me. You cuck-pilled kink-shame-maxxing soyboy. I'll kill you.

After the intro, the game settles into being Nier Automata with Souls gameplay. You know what? That mix sounds pretty damn nice. It IS pretty nice sometimes. It needs a lot of fucking work in the plot department. I only care because the game wants you to care about the whole lot of nothing happening 90% of the time. Only one character has an arc worth bring a first-monitor amount of attention to, but that goes nowhere too after faking out the audience that it WILL go somewhere and it's just like what the fuck are we doing, people. What the fuck is this. What and why do you want me to care. I demand someone answer me. And why is everything sticky?

I love the checkpoint system, I really like the PS2/PS3 platformer style exploration of the environments. The hair physics are too much and it actually affects the performance of gameplay, but IT IS fun to have Eve walk under a waterfall and her becoming wet and her hair wrapping itself her body so you look like a bog witch. Very funny. I struggle to talk about the gameplay itself. It's a goddamn Souls game with platforming. You can autofill what to expect from there.

Stellar Blade should be something more aligned with how it paints itself. I waited for something beneath the veneer of this game to make itself known, only to let myself down when it didn't really happen. This shit REALLY ain't that deep. Which is ok, but why go through the effort of pretending? You know? Hello? Are you listening? It still feels like I'm not being heard right now. You know what? Fuck it, whatever. Let's move on.

My real fascination with Stellar Blade is the cultural impact. Sometimes I wonder how detrimental it is being a perpetually online, horny weirdo in the long-term. I genuinely wonder how much have mobile games that inspired the character design of Stellar Blade conditioned porn-addled individuals to latch onto this game like a big-titted, zero personality octopus dragging a victim into the ocean? How much was the sexiness of Eve was factored into the marketing equation as a distraction from Stellar Blade's unpolished elements? It's straight up nefarious how mentally ill Twitter people who want to jerk their dicks off their body and continue to jerk off the flesh mass on the ground until it is giblet paste -- will tie their sexual freedoms to a corporate product. That's just the state of the world I guess.

I don't want to see cultural zeitgeists eventually revert back to prudishness when it comes to sex, but what I see online from those defending Stellar Blade from being seen as anything other than the best game of forever -- is cumming from a place of defense for unapologetic gooner-maxxing instead of objective reverence for the game itself. Eve isn't real (yet). Her pussy isn't going to vacuum your internal organs out of your genitalia (yet). Gooners, please. Divest 10% of the blood of your penises back into your brain. I need you with me, buddy.

On the flip side, seeing a character like Eve on the cover and the game not being a complete waste of time is an unironic step forward for the gaming industry. The cover looks like fucking Onechanbara spin-off. I do believe we are close to a real gooner game with undeniable quality. Stellar Blade is in many aspects SO close to classic status.

Still, the game is good, not incredible. Bayonetta 1 is incredible. Nier Automata is incredible. Those two games are gooner games with brain cells in them. Though the guy who directed Nier Automata is saying that Stellar Blade is better than fucking NIER AUTOMATA.. I don't know if this is a work so Mr. Taro can direct the next game from this studio, which would be hilarious, or if he is at heart just a gooner. Guess we'll see.

Stellar Blade has led me to be fascinated with the "pussy over everything" mindset and how much fetishization will override any objective discussion. Loneliness and desire to quell that loneliness with sex has defined the present and most certainly will define the future. Defending women who are not real in a time where real women don't even secure reproductive rights is fucking hilarious. I know none of you care, I do. I enjoy laughing about the state of affairs because it keeps me from going insane.

So yeah whatever I just know half of you reading are saying "shut the fuck up loser smelly bad gay slur-coded cuck and let me teach my semen a lesson that it should be in a jar and not my body." or even better, the other half going "what are you even talking about" crowd. Because the latter are so pure and don't read up on what goes on in the day-to-day discussions on gaming. You innocent sons of bitches. I really, truly wish I was you. I am a man witnessing madness and devolving affairs and speaking on it and you can just tell me I'm crazy and allow my review to pass over you. The innocence of ignorance. You don't know the gooners will be at your doorstep, soon. They'll come for you and your mom's retirement checks that you use to buy Jujustsu Kaisen figures. Truly, willful centrism is your zion.

My real message here: Jerk your dick to your heart's content, just don't let your jerk bait define you.

Stellar Blade, everyone.

When a friend first asked me how I would describe Final Fantasy II, I was about half way through the game, and had just met Leila. I didn’t really know how to describe it, it was something I couldn’t compare to anything I’d played before. It led me through the story like an early JRPG but with early WRPG mechanics. It was bizarre and completely threw me off from what I learned in FFI. So much of what I learned from the first game didn’t matter at all now, and what it was trying to teach me seemed almost alien. So of course, my natural response to my friend was a wary, “Have you ever played… Morrowind?”

Final Fantasy II is nothing like Morrowind. Well, it has its similarities, as comparing any game from the same genre to each other would, I guess. I came into Final Fantasy II having only the original Final Fantasy to compare it to… eh, within the Final Fantasy series at least, as I have played a handful of 3rd-gen RPGs before it. Maybe it’s why I ended up thinking of FFII so positively compared to others. Maybe that’s a negative, but I like to think of it as a positive. It keeps me thinking of FFII in the bubble it originally released to, but unfortunately that also lacks me being able to compare it to much else.

One thing I should warn before diving fully into the review is that I did play the game in Japanese, so some of the names for things might be spelled differently from my own personal transliteration vs other later official English translations (wait his name was Josef and not Joseph this whole time?!). The Famicom version I believe is also missing quite a few additions that future versions had added later on, including ones added even a couple years later in the Famicom dual-release of both FFI + FFII.

—------------------------------------------------------------

From first glance, I could immediately tell that Final Fantasy II had improved drastically from its predecessor. The creators were able to expand A LOT on what they made with the original. Just to list a few:

• You’re now able to fully go into buildings and walk around. You can even see little Firion sleeping in the inn!
• There's a crazy amount of new magic you can learn (which you see early on thanks to Ming Wu).
• You can now see your character’s negative status effects play as a funny symbol on top of them in battle (black glasses for blind, green swirls for poison, they literally turn into a rock when hit with the stone status!). It looks great and makes it easier for players to remember what exactly the current status of their party is just at a glance.
• The character designs are more varied and more detailed, even if Firion is just the fighter sprite from the first game. With Maria, we can now see our first true playable female character in the series, rather than the assumed fully-male cast of the first (or at least that’s how the English guidebook describes the cast which uh, infamously got quite a few things wrong about the game, so take that as you will LOL). You meet a very colorful cast of characters right at the start as well, with a good amount having fairly unique designs (Ming Wu is my favorite)!
• Lastly, the thing I noticed and was so happy to see was that you can now save whenever you want. Well, whenever you’re on the overworld map. But, still! It’s a button that’s always on your menu screen. You don’t have to bank on having a hotel or cottage in your pocket so you can save before a dungeon, which can make expeditions infinitely less frustrating.

The story of FFII is surprisingly engaging for a 3rd-gen game, with it starting out with a 5 minute long interactive cutscene kinda thing. Watching it, you quickly learn that you now have a set story with characters that have a set destiny. You can name them and train them to be whatever you want, but no matter what, the story has a path it will always take with characters you can’t always predict. Oh boy, how you can not predict. About 2/3rds of the temporary party members who join you end up dying! Even NPCs you don’t interact with too often end up dying! But hey, the story does focus around war, and what’s war without loss. Though more realistically, I imagine they killed off a majority of your short-term party members as a way to cycle through different characters and show the player different builds they themselves could evolve on. My favorite non-player characters that I met along the way were Paul the Ninja, and Sid and his son, who offer a shuttle with their flying boat not unlike the one from the first game… hey wait, why does Sid have his clearly underaged son in a bar? Oh well, it works for the story. Just try not to think about it!

There’s little things I can nitpick though, of course. I absolutely hate the new map. I understand this map is WAY bigger than the last, and the illusion of the globe allows them to fit more with less, but holy shit its soooo slow - and if I just want to check what direction I want to go to reach a dungeon, I have to slowlyyyyyyy wait for the globe to turnnn and inchhhh and oooo we’re almost there, baby!!!! Well, this shouldn’t be a problem, right? Final Fantasy I, Dragon Quest, Legend of Zelda are all games that provide a full map for you in the manual to glance at, so there must be one in this manual- nope. Okay, what about the guidebook? You know, the thing you spend extra money on to hold your hand and show you how to get through the whole game- nope. There’s no maps at all actually, even for the dungeons! Remember how Final Fantasy I had big maps for the player to scan through for everything, all within the manual packaged with the game? Well, Final Fantasy II says “Fuck you, why don’t you figure out,” as they hand you Slowpoke Rodriguez’s favorite class globe.

The manual and guidebook at least are very useful in including every little detail about the new leveling system, and also informing the player on what all the new magic does. A stupid complaint, but skimming through this lovely mapless guidebook, I was excited to see Chocobos appear, which are like giant chickens your player can ride on! Unfortunately, I never ran into them once throughout the entire game. They seemed cute, and the book says you can find them in a specific forest if you wander, but I never found one, even when purposefully looking for them. Oh well, maybe I was just unlucky!

Wait, that’s it? Those are the only complaints? It seems like FFII should smell like roses in comparison to FFI after all that, shouldn’t it? Well, it does…! It does, except for one very small, very tiny detail…

GAMEPLAY AND RPG MECHANICS

FFII doesn’t level in the way that Dragon Quest or even the original Final Fantasy do. In fact, the closest comparison I can personally make to a game that I’ve played that came out before FFII is regular tabletop DND. When you want to level up, you have to focus on a specific skill or trait. It’s not as simple as leveling up your magic to improve your magic; you have to focus on what exactly you want to level up in your magic. Did you want your magic attack to be stronger? Then focus on using the specific spell you want to be stronger, as the more you use it the more it levels up. Did you need more MP? Then use more magic to get more magic! Using magic in general also helps level up your magic strength… but specifically your intelligence or spirit which correlate to your black and white magic respectively. See where I got the Morrowind comparison? It’s a lot, but as you can see with my magic example, a lot of it relies on each other, so if you play naturally, you should still level up naturally like you would in FF1.

That would be all fine and dandy, except you don’t level up the way the creators intended. I don’t know whose idea it was to go against the golden rule for JRPGs since Dragon Quest: Allow players to level up quickly with the game requiring more points to level up the further they play. For example, to get to level 2 in… let’s say using a sword, maybe you need to use it 10 times before it reaches level 2. After that, then you need to use it 20 times to reach level 3, and so far so forth. FFII doesn’t do that, and I think that’s where its biggest flaw shows. It requires you to use whatever it is you want 100 times each time you want to level it up, all from the start. It’s awful, to put it lightly. The great thing to remember is all the Final Fantasys on the Famicom are insanely broken! As a result, I quickly found out that you can input a move on a party member and quickly cancel it and do it again. It only takes one move but it still counts the first use, essentially doubling the points I get from it. Do this 50 times, and you just leveled yourself up in one battle. Though of course, it’s just that one thing you leveled up, whether that be a magic skill, your attack, defense, HP, MP, or whatever else you focused on. It unfortunately also can mess with the leveling a crazy amount as well. Ugh, just think! This would be significantly less of a problem if they just followed the guide of leveling-up starting fast only to slow it down the further you go. They did it in FFI, so they must have found an issue to force the mandatory 100 points for FFII… On top of that all, the same issues with magic in FFI still exist in FFII, with a nice chunk of spells being completely broken and not working the way they intended. Most infamously it affects Ultima, a spell intended to be the most powerful in the entire game. The only way to figure out what works and what doesn’t is through trial and error- how horrendous! Thankfully, we live in the future, so I was able to quickly find a guide online that lets modern players know what magic to not waste their time on.

This is the biggest turn-off of Final Fantasy II to players, and I don’t blame them. I especially don’t blame players who had to try and figure out everything without the manual guiding them through this incredibly involved leveling system. I found the manual and guidebook for FFII on Internet Archive, and even with that by my side I constantly had to look at it over and over to remember what exactly I had to do to level-up myself up. Eventually, I just wrote and drew a shitty guide just for myself so I could more easily memorize it. In the end, I got there! Then I had to read and memorize all the new magic spells! Oh, well. As someone who loves journaling and taking notes, I really didn’t mind it, but of course I can understand how unbearable it could be for someone who doesn’t like it. It reminded me, again, of tabletop gaming and how when I play that with friends, I often fill a whole booklet with my little notes. Maybe I was used to it? Maybe I just felt it immersed me better into the story, and helped me feel more understanding of how the gameplay meshed with the narrative. In the end, it helped me gain a bit of an emotional attachment to it all; characters and game mechanics alike.

—------------------------------------------------------------

Well, how would I compare it to my friend now, after finishing it? I’ve been told the Romancing Saga series takes heavy inspiration from it mechanically, and by the time I finished I could see the Star Wars parallels loud and clear. Obviously, it has its Wizardry, Ultima, and Dragon Quest influences… What didn’t back then? But how would I describe FF2?

It’s broken, it’s unreliable, it’s confusing. But it’s also rewarding, emotional, and easy to get wrapped into. It tried crazy things for both the time and platform it released on, but it found its people, and its people found it.

Final Fantasy II is like Final Fantasy II. You wanna know what THAT means? Well, play it and you’ll find out!

4/5

Not a review. I just feel obligated to add to the meagre content warning for this shit because the Developer seemingly did not want to directly tell the people who might download this that there will be pop-up images of GORE that flash across the screen.
I mean legit live leak/rotten.com stuff.
My guess is that the Dev did not want to "reveal their cards" by giving a heads up for this,
like they didn't want to soften the impact of god-dam UNCENSORED IMAGES OF CORPSES by warning that they will randomly appear.

Honestamente no sé por dónde empezar, este juego es terrible por donde se lo mire.
El gameplay es inconsistente y aburrido. Las misiones son excesivamente largas, lentas, repetitivas y aburridas y ni siquiera dan buenas recompensas. La progresión es un desastre donde no te queda de otra que grindear y buscar guías en internet para encontrar enemigos específicos hacia los que el juego no te guía. El combate empieza siendo lento y tedioso, pero con cosas que te dan la idea de que puede mejorar a futuro, solo que nunca termina haciéndolo, sino que solo agrega más y más mecánicas supérfluas para rellenar. Los menúes son lentos, mal distribuidos, feos, y terriblemente mal optimizados, pasás demasiado tiempo haciendo cosas simples y siempre todo parece más complicado de lo que debería. Por no mencionar que el combate contradice de tal manera al guión que a este putno no puedo ni llamarlo disonancia ludonarrativa, va por una completa y total desconexión de lo que se cuenta y lo que se juega.
Los personajes son uno más malo y desaprovechado que el otro, interesantes a nivel conceptual pero que o nunca tienen una agencia particular en la historia o sus arcos se quedan a medias (o no los tienen). Brighid y Zeke pudieron ser grandes personajes en otro juego, pero desgraciadamente se estancaron en no ser nada porque este juego no puede permitirse tener cosas buenas.
La historia se pasa tres cuartos dando palos de ciego y no yendo a ningún lado, para en el último acto dar un rush hipersónico para atar cabos (no todos) donde nada te da tiempo siquiera a que te importe, ni tampoco dando conclusiones a los 50 temas que el juego se molesta en presentarte para nunca desarrollar.
El hecho de que Torna: The Golden Country esté vendido aparte, si bien es benficioso para la precuela, hace que la mayoría de personajes más importantes se sientan incompletos y vacíos. Se nota demasiado que se suponía que fuera parte del juego principal.

Es que este juego tiene tantas cosas malas que hasta me cuesta escribir esto sin hacerlo más largo de lo que quiero, incluso si sólo me enfoco en la escritura: temas que se quedan a medias, diálogo grandilocuente y robótico, una narrativa con ideas desordenadas que hacen que la historia parezca más compleja de lo que realmente es, un worldbuilding mediocre at best, subtramas que el juego deja de lado cuando le conviene, humor horrible, una falta total de cierres satisfactorios para los arcos de los personajes, disonancia ludonarrativa...
Xenoblade 2 es un juego que tiene olor a falta de planeamiento y development hell literalmente por donde lo mires, como si fuera una historia escrita sobre la marcha. De hecho de todos los Xenoblade es el que tuvo el desarrollo más corto con diferencia (¡Menos de 2 años!), y encima en medio de una transición generacional.

Es más triste que nada, porque es un juego que de haber tenido el mimo y tiempo que requería, pudo haber sido una obra maestra como su predecesor. Todo el concepto de su mundo y sus personajes daba para mucho, muchísimo; hay tantas cosas de las que pudo haber hablado, pero simplemente se quedó corto a la hora de la verdad. Es un gran ejemplo de la importancia de la cohesión temática, porque de nada sirve tener 50 temas interesantes en papel, si no les das algo que los cohesione y los haga sentir como parte de un discurso íntegro, porque en ese caso son peor que nada.

One of the coolest things that happens to us as individuals is how our opinions and feelings can change over time.

In 2019, I tried playing Hollow Knight for the first time and played quite a bit of the game, almost 10 hours, and although I was enjoying it, I wasn't captivated by the mystique that the game apparently had, like everyone else was. Fast-forward to 2024 and I start a new save from scratch and well... I think I finally understand the commotion...

Hollow Knight is one of the best games I've ever played and largely because an older (and more grumpy and tired, I admit) "me" simply sees games a little differently and has a much bigger baggage than the "me" from 5 years ago.

What I like most about Hollow Knight is how I see in it elements of several games that I love and are in my pantheon of favorites. For the first time, another metroidvania gives me the sensation of exploring the map of Super Metroid, with its twists and turns, with its dense areas, getting lost in the dark tunnels of Deepnest, being overwhelmed by the bees in the Hive, or stunned by the beauty and ambiance of Queen's Garden.

I love the game's slower pace, which demands much more from you but rewards you handsomely with each new boss.

Or even how visually, somehow, the game sometimes just feels like a 2D Bloodborne to me, oozing in visual style even though this style can indeed be somewhat monotonous and monochromatic at times. At least that brings a very unique consistency to the whole game, making all areas somehow part of the same world, regardless of the variations in temperature and height that the areas may have.

Or even how, in gameplay, it's something smooth, enjoyable to play, to move with the character, with a rich palette of tools to face enemies or simply wander through the vast map. Its combat strongly reminds me of a blend of Mega Man X with Mega Man Zero, or rather, the best of the combat from these two series in one game. And its fluid movement clearly reminds me of Alucard from Symphony of the Night.

Even though it brings me this collection of memories, Hollow Knight is still something with a strong, unforgettable identity, and rarely equaled in the genre.

It just doesn't get a perfect score because, in fact, sometimes the game just seems to waste a little of your time, the Stag Stations aren't enough, and sometimes the feeling of visual monotony can hit a bit. There's some flaws in its design too... You shouldnt have to equip a charm to see where you are on the map and you already have a button to use spells, it is RB/R1, Circle/B should be exclusively used to heal. But who knows if the game won't grow even more in my tastes over time? It certainly has the capacity for that. Hollow Knight is simply amazing all around afterall.

I actually love this game. Now if you asked me what I thought while playing it, I would've said its the worst Mega Man I've ever played. But, after beating it, I feel so accomplished. Its like I overcame a huge challenge. Maybe I'm just a masochist, but man that was a lot of fun.
X and Zero both feel incredible to use. X's special weapons are all really good. They're really strong and are all useful one way or another. Rainy Turtloid, Infinity Majinion, and Bizz Wolfang's weapons are the only ones I didn't really use all that much. Commander Yamark's weapon is incredible. Using it for both Zero and X is wonderful. I really like the Blade and Shadow armor as sidegrades for X. Zero's techniques all kind of suck, aside from Commander Yamark's weapon, but its whatever. The animation and sound effects of his moves just make him feel so satisfying.
The stage design is psychotic. I'm a huge fan. I really like rescuable reploids and the upgrades they can provide. Nightmare viruses make them more interesting, but the viruses themselves can also be super annoying. The Nightmare system adds a twist to all the stages when its in full effect. I played Infinity Majinion's stage when it had all the Nightmare effects and it was insane. The best stages are Commander Yamark, Rainy Turtloid, and Blizz Wolfang's stages. I hate Deep Shark Player's stage since its so slow. The remaining stages all have interesting ideas, just done without any real polish. They are all really difficult and arduous to beat, but man, when I beat them, I felt like I was at the top of the world. Maybe I'm just a masochist. Infinity Majinion in particular felt like such an insane stage that when I beat it, I was just in awe. I had a great time. The Mavericks themselves are all really weak. Its a bit anticlimactic going through such hard stages only to fight such weak bosses.
I like how progression is handled. You only need to beat one Maverick to beat the game. The secret exits in the stages are really cool ideas. I like how that's how you unlock Zero and fight High Max. I wish you could do the Gate Stage 1 as X without the Shadow Armor, but that's whatever. The locations of some of the secrets, like Light Capsules and heart tanks are psychotic. Like one is just through a wall that you can just walk through. Its insane. I am a fan though. I like the chip system and the rescuable reploids. It makes exploring the stages feel more rewarding. The music in all the stages is also just drop-dead amazing.
The Gate stages are fun. They throw everything they have at you and you just have to beat them. It feels like a lot, but after I took it all a little bit at a time, I was able to beat it. It did take like a while, but man I felt so accomplished afterwards. The beginning of Gate Stage 2 as Zero in particular was quite the challenge.
I really like the story of this game. Gate and High Max are good villains. I like how Alia has a history with Gate. I don't like how Sigma comes in at the very end, he feels very unnecessary and forced. His fight is really fun though.
I really like this game. It feels like a great challenge to overcome. The game doesn't hold back. When I beat this game, I felt like I earned it. It feels like a first draft of something that could've been the best Mega Man game ever. We didn't get a more refined version, but I love what I played. Its definitely not for everyone, but it is for me.

Heartbreaking. After playing through the first DOOM RPG I was left genuinely at a loss when it came to thinking of what they could have possibly improved upon to create a bigger, better sequel. Maybe take out some of the level grinding, but even that wasn't too much of an issue in what is basically still the most perfect transition to another genre any franchise has ever made thus far as of this writing. So, the most I reasonably expected to get here was a follow-up that would simply end up being just more of the same. A good, fun time, but nothing to really write home about due to the familiarity. Certainly wouldn't have guessed they would try to radically redefine the experience in ways that ultimately left me highly disappointed. This is such a letdown.

Underneath its flashy exterior of impressive, stylish graphics and frequent cutscenes that make it a technical marvel by J2ME standards, lies a hollow interior where all the new features such as hacking minigames, three playable characters/classes (that really offer no distinguishable differences outside of maybe the occasional line of dialogue from NPCs), and the ability to loot dead bodies provide merely the illusion of added depth. Yeah, they got rid of the leveling grinding, but in the process made leveling up at all feel totally pointless. The change to a linear campaign structure with no option to backtrack to previously completed stages for extra EXP means there's only ever a set amount you’ll be able to acquire at any given time. Therefore, it’s essentially predetermined how strong you can be at specific points. Arrive at a particularly difficult boss or encounter and you’re supposed to rely on special “nano drink” consumables that grant massive temporary stat boosts rather than the work you put into building yourself up beforehand. It causes the whole thing to come off as cheap and overly scripted.

The same great turn-based action remains however, so it’s not a complete wash. As a result, I think my biggest problem might just be how this simply doesn’t feel like DOOM anymore. That irritating element of silly comedy that reared its ugly little head here and there in the preceding RPG has spread like a virus to every inch of this subsequent adventure. From squirt guns filled with holy water that give enemies googly eyes to searching dead bodies solely to turn up useless joke items like pocket lint or severed fingers, the tone is overall extremely goofy in a similar manner to how nearly all our modern movies and TV shows are now since the MCU reshaped the Hollywood blockbuster formula. For those such as myself who prefer the mix of ‘80s action machismo and horror the property is typically known for, this is disgraceful.

They haven't necessarily created an outright bad game here. Honestly, by all reasonable and fair standards it's entirely competent across the board. Their efforts to expand upon the original while making it more appealing to the masses though, has dreadfully stripped it of its soul. Undoubtedly among the strongest proof I've yet seen that sometimes less is in fact actually more.

6/10