Trying to play this again after taking a bit of a break from it.

I'm gonna come back to this eventually because I really do want to see it through but I just become so uninterested in so much of it that even the wonderful and lonely exploration can't save the frankly terrible combat and extremely boring storytelling.

What it excels at is very well done but what it fails at absolutely taints the experience to an almost unbearable degree for me.

Solid mix of JRPG and early horror genres, with good voice acting and interesting story, albeit a bit short. The entire game is set in a huge haunted monastery filled with secrets and in that pre-rendered ps1 greatness in which every room feels like a piece of art. I really enjoyed the exploration, even though sometimes it can be a bit confusing to navigate. I wouldn't have it any other way though, as the vibe the game is going for only works so well thanks to the fixed camera angles.

Also I feel people exaggerate when they complain about the combat being too slow, it kinda is, but it gives you a ton of options on how to build your characters and you can, for example, pump magic to one hit everything, so personally I don't think its slower compared to most JRPGs at the time, including the famous ones. However I believe the random encounters don't really add much to the game, they're pretty easy to begin with, so you don't feel threatened and even the battle music at times feel too "usual" and kills the horror vibe the game is going for. Probably for scaredy people like me that's actually good though.

this game is absolutely phenomenal, dare I say it's even better than any ace attorney. short and sweet, this game doesn't suffer from bad pacing, everything is p straight-forward, the puzzles were just right, no need to rip my hair out or smth, everything went pretty smooth, the music is so good and the character designs are really bright and unique as well as their personalities. i can't go into spoilers because this game just needs to be played blind. one of the rare games that got me so immersed and obsessed to just finish it because the plot is so appealing and makes you just wish to know what's the deal here. 5/5 from me also missile my most beloved doggo <3

The Definitive Action 52 tier list

SSS: Micro Mike, Ooze, Storm Over the Desert
SS: Mash Man, Fuzz Power, Non-Human, Streemerz
S: Slashers, Timewarp, Meong, Haunted Hill, Ninja Assault
A: Star Evil, Bubblegum Rosy, Underground, Crazy Shuffle, City of Doom
B: Dedant, Illuminator, Space Dreams, Evil Empire, Chill Out, Manchester
C: Alfredo, Dam Busters, Robbie Robot, Thrusters, Megalonia, Cry Baby, Bits n Pieces, They Came...
D: Operation Full Moon, French Baker, Silver Sword, Lollipop, Sombreros, Hambo, Jigsaw, Star Breathers
E: Lazer League, G-Force Fighters, Billy Bob, Jupiter Score, Atmos Quake, Boss
F: Beeps n Blips, Rocket Jockey, Spread Fire, Sharks, Critical Bypass, Shooting Gallery

Think I forgot one🤔...

Whip Rush has all the makings to be a sleeper hit shmup for me, an oddly adorable player ship, an incredibly hype first stage theme and a desperate attempt to emulate R-Type down to a battleship stage, bosses with tricky weakspots, an organic final stage and a boss designed after some form of genitals.

Unfortunately it does that shit where starting after the midway point it dials the difficulty up from 6 to like 22, and as always that's when these games start falling apart pretty easily. Stage 5 with the battleship is by far the hardest shit in the game with it's insta-lasers across the screen and asking the player to move through a bottleneck as five turrets rain down suppress-fire, it's hard and also somehow just feels amateur-ish. The stage 5 boss I didn't even know you could blow it's arms off because there was no indication I was dealing damage, so I was constantly dying thinking the game was asking me to do some horrifically dodgey movement to hit the weakpoint on that son of a bitch. A special shoutout to the dick monster final boss with it's fucking arms flying all over the place at seemingly random leading to unavoidable deaths.

A shame, it started pretty good. Still think the ship is cute though, wouldn't mind hanging out with it.

I guess it's fitting that after my first (serious) review that I review a game I find on the opposite spectrum. In my MOTHER review I briefly touch that my interest with the game transcends its mediocre review score, and while granted, my rating for this game isn't much higher than that of how I rated MOTHER, it is a game I hold considerably more contempt for. Persona 5 is a game that while at its best is fun to think about certain aspects (namely the gameplay and aesthetic which I will talk about shortly), the writing of this game has disgusted me and left me uncomfortable at numerous points that it considerably sours the experience for me. There is some seriously messed up and problematic material in this game, but I figure I should start with the positives first.

It goes without saying that Persona 5 is a visual marvel. It oozes flair and confidence in its music and especially visual presentation that has left me awestruck on multiple occassions. The UI feels like a streamlined and futuristic graffiti, aptly representing how the Phantom Thieves rebel against their society. It's one of my favorite art styles for a game and I have tried to emulate it on my own time it's that good. But that is just the style, how is the substance?

Gameplay has this weirdly satisfying pacing to it. Whenever I get bored with dungeon crawling is just often when I near the finale of a palace (I usually do palaces in one day if possible), and when I'm wanting to get back to it the game usually starts heading towards its next arc. Persona fusion makes Joker feel like an invincible badass, which is funny because if he dies your game instantly ends. A bit of a side tangent but I never liked that in games, why have the party leader be the load bearer in jrpgs when revival items work on other party members. Sometimes Joker just keels over because of a few enemies targeting him and that just feels frustrating and unfair, especially with this game having quite a few instant death spells. Besides that however, gameplay is pretty simple but pretty enjoyable which is usually how I like my JRPGs. Blasting enemies with your favorite colors of magic and shooting them in the head with assorted firearms is satisfying due to all the vibrant and poping effects. That is only half of the gameplay, and sadly is what I think is the better side of the coin.

Now, that doesn't mean I think the social sim is without merit. Theres a lot of various activites, especially in royal, to take care of, with just enough days to get what you want done. Routing what you want to get done feels satisfying, and it feels nice to see your bonds grow closer with others. Ryuji, Yusuke, Sojiro and Yoshida are very charming characters that have great moments, and raising not only their confidants but of everyone else is satisfying due to their affects on gameplay. I just wish that the game didn't spend an eternity to unlock certain things to do in the city, from locations to other confidants. Considering each arc can take 10+ hours, it feels like I'm just waiting to unlock certain mechanics as I wade through the first few chapters of the game with limited options. If only my issues with the game ended there.

You may have noticed that I only listed male characters when talking about confidants I like, and that is not a mistake. Persona as a series, or at least starting from 3, has had issues depicting women and your relationship with them. Hell, one of the biggest memes I hear about the series is how the writer doesn't think men and women can exist in non sexual/romantic relationships. This has lead to issues throughout the latest 3 games, but as I have not played those, I would rather keep my discussion to 5. Now granted, I have not finished Persona 5. I played the original release up until the end of Futaba's palace and Royal up to the end of Kaneshiro's, which is earlier than in the vanilla game. As such, I will mainly only talk about what I have experienced while also somewhat mentioning other issues I have heard later on in the game.

To say the writing of persona 5 objectifies women is a complete understatement. They're half baked and uninteresting characters at best and completely disgusting in their portrayals at worse. Of the ones I've seen so far, Makoto is by far the least offensive, but she also doesn't do much besides be the general brains of the thieves. She's not who I have issues with however. Ann is a character I just feel bad for. A victim of sexual grooming in the first arc, the fact that she then goes on to be constantly hit on, sexualized, and otherwise just made into a general pin up model is appalling. While yes I understand that she still wants to become a model, it feels off when the game makes it a constant joke to point out her in universe hotness, from her cleavage revealing skintight thief costume to out of character moments such as Yusuke asking her to strip model for him. And to those who say that her wanting to be a model empowers herself and has her growing out of an abuse, why would you give this sort of arc to a 16 year old? Even then, shes more of a victim of this games writing, and she actively wants to not be sexualized outside of her modeling gig from what I've seen. The same cannot be said for Kawakami. After your local incel forces you to order a maid you get to see your teacher all dressed up to work for you wow! While she doesn't want to work for you and would wish you to forget about that encounter, the fact you can have her still be her maid and still press on in the relationship is borderline creepy. It gets worse with the fact you can eventually romance her like any other women in this game, especially after the first arc made it a point that teachers dating students is wrong. I guess if you don't outwardly abuse them it's fine I guess! Absolutely horrid.

Those are the main two I wanted to talk about, but they're not the only ones I have problems with. I think Mishima is a fucking tool, the jailkeep twins are annoying, and while Haru is an aesthetic gender apparently her arc has her dealing with her getting sold off and then having little to no screentime afterwards. They're all pretty minor gripes for characters sure, but I wasn't done yet. There's something evil left in this game. A being that haunts my brain stem and I only wish absolute suffering on. Anyone who has played this game talking about, so I'm just going to get to who it is.

Morgana is straight up my most hated characrer in gaming. This whiny shit bitches 24/7 and does nothing productive at all. He contributes to Ann's horrible treatment and has the gall to make everything about him. Never have I wanted to erase a character off my screen more than him, and from what I hear he gets even worse later in the game. He is just generally unlikable and I don't know how else to explain it. The biggest irony of his existance is that his VA has also voiced my favorite character in all of gaming (Nami from League of Legends), so that's like one positive I guess? Except not really because that ties him to League which is a massive L in itself, lmao.

Persona 5 is a game I want to really like. I want to take the gameplay and art syle and apply it to games that aren't pedophelic or hate women, but I can't. I'm still going to finish this game, but probably on PC so I can mod over it and have a more ironic enjoyment. While my experiences are often mixed to positive in the moment, it's one of those games where I sour on it more and more as I distance myself from it. Considering this is the first MegaTen I've ever played, it doesn't set a good precedent, yet I'm still morbidly curious to play other Persona and SMT games when I'm done. It's weird, but for as much as I hate this game, there's something weirdly charming like that. That I can just want it play it and other games in its series even with its humongous fault. I don't see my opinion on this game changing anytime soon, but hopefully the good parts of it shine more when I get my third fucking copy of this game (why) and beat it for real.

My introduction to the Tomb Raider franchise was the deeply unpleasant, poorly designed 2013 reboot, an awful game and an awful experience that somehow did not deter me from playing its sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and having a much better time with it despite the presence of a lot of modern AAA design elements that really put me off of that sort of game. Having, I guess, committed to those, I figured I would return to the roots, as I so often do with these things, and I’m glad I did because Tomb Raider 96 is both an excellent 3D platformer and in incredibly WEIRD game full of funny quirks and bizarre choices that are I think mostly pretty bad in concept but never affect the play enough to do any actual harm to the experience.

The core of the experience, then, is that platforming. If I had to compare it to a modern game it would be less the modern tomb raiders and uncharteds that are often compared to this and something closer to a precursor to the Ubisoft 3D Prince of Persia lineage. Most of the levels here do involve other elements like occasional combat and puzzle solving to a greater or lesser extent, but Tomb Raider MOSTLY just sticks you in often very large, occasionally complex 3D environments and asks you to kind of just jump over to that ledge, then that one, then that one. The platforms are often gussied up as pleasant environmental features like natural rock formations, bridges, statues, etc. I think the game does a good job in general of disguising how rigidly all of its geometry adheres to a clear grid structure, disguising it sometimes with the aforementioned décor and sometimes letting the jagginess of the early PS1 dev cycle create the illusion of restriction, when the reality is the game is clearly this square on purpose. And that’s a good thing, it lets the game demand a great deal of precision from you, but it also means you very rarely find yourself in a situation where you’ll be making a jump you shouldn’t be trying, or where you’re uncertain about the scripting of a sequence because of the environmental design. It makes the world feel a little bit more artificial, with how obviously constructed around Lara’s verb set everything is, but it makes for a more rewarding play experience.

Lara’s verb set rules, by the way. As one of the biggest ones if not THE progenitor of semi-realistic 3D platforming, it’s wild how much of this feels exactly right for the needs of the game. Tomb Raider came out before Playstation analogue sticks and LONG before 3D action controls had been standardized, so there IS a learning curve, but there’s also an optional tutorial selectable from the main menu to walk you through the movement specifically (it tellingly doesn’t teach you about weapons or inventory or contextual actions). Once you have a handle on things it becomes apparent that your set of actions is slightly more robust than something you might find in one of the older, less streamlined Assassin’s Creeds or those weird Lord of the Rings games. The big difference between Tomb Raider and one of those is that rather than any action being contextual, you have to actively press and/or hold every button for every action as you need them, for things like jumping at the right moments, grabbing ledges after a jump, shimmying, dropping and catching, everything you do requires active input. After just the tutorial and a couple of the early, simpler levels, these controls were singing to me. The experience is so engaging when you have to be ON it at all times. And while it is a somewhat clunkier experience by nature than more modern games, the team at Core Design was obviously aware of this and accounted for it. You have dedicated buttons for slow walking, taking small sidesteps, and quick 180 degree turns – everything you need to be able to position yourself with the precision necessary to do what the game asks. It’s a somewhat complex control scheme but it’s an excellent one, that understands the limits of the controller, the hardware, and the map design and elegantly adapts to their needs. This is how you create a genre.

Of course, it’s not all jumping around cool obstacle courses in Tomb Raider, but before we can talk about the OTHER stuff you get up to I think it’s important to discuss Lara Croft herself, and the game’s narrative. Tomb Raider doesn’t really HAVE a much of a narrative, maybe ten minutes of cutscenes spread over a fifteen-hour game, and usually with absolutely no connective tissue between levels, just a results screen that tells you how fast you went and how many animals you shot and how many secrets you found then BAM you’re in the next one. What scant few cutscenes it does have are MOSTLY here to make Lara Croft seem COOL AS FUCK bro. She’s a hot babe who lives in a MANSION built on STOLEN WEALTH. And YEAH, she may break into tombs and ruins and historical sites and ROB THEM and then SELL THE GOODS for CASH and yeah, she starts the game by taking a job to do exactly that for somebody and only stops because that person tries to double-cross and kill her, but she assures us out loud early on that SHE’S NOT IN IT FOR THE MONEY, only the THRILL. It’s a very weird and funny portrait of an anti-hero who is simultaneously supposed to be one of those detached 90s asshole characters who we like despite knowing they’re a shithead while still being thumb-twiddlingly self-conscious about her moral character. They’re constantly making sure to try to make Lara seem not as evil as she obviously is, these white British developers seemingly aware how much of A Problem this premise is politically even back then when mainstream media was still getting away with A Lot. She’s not in it for The Money, she seems at least KIND OF annoyed when an innocent man is killed by equally innocent wolves that she led him to, she HAS this big mansion but she’s converted it into a gym! (do not worry about the many stolen artifacts she is hawking in the foyer). She’s not as bad as THAT OTHER adventure archaeologist, the evil French one who uhhhh, litters? That is the only evil thing he does that Lara does not also do. She kind of vaguely thinks genocide is bad, I guess. It’s really funny, she’s seriously awful.

So that’s Lara, some kind of meandering adrenaline-seeking sociopath, so it is fitting that the other bit of the gameplay loop that kind of mindlessly pads out these levels is all the GUNPLAY as she mercilessly guns down random bats, wolves, bears, crocodiles, gorillas you fuckin’ name it, if it breathes Lara will shoot it with guns. A borderline comical amount of animal violence and it’s all so needless. Bats do no damage to you and they go down in one hit why are they here??? There is no aiming mechanic you just pull out your guns and mash the fire button until there are no more bats. It’s super funny to fall into a hole in the first level and be absolutely run over by a gigantic bear you didn’t know was there. None of the combat in this game is good and there’s not even that much of it but it feels very cool to jump around and shoot guns in mid-air. There are precisely two human enemies in the game and they’re both miserable to fight so I GUESS I would rather just mow down endless wolves but I am mostly wondering if Tomb Raider couldn’t have just had more slapstick adventure action in the vein of running away from large boulders or something.

Or maybe more dinosaurs. There are dinosaurs! coulda just been dinosaurs the entire time. See this is the secret third pillar of Tomb Raider: that it’s an extremely bizarre game, where just every element that ever made its way onto the ideas whiteboard also made its way into the game. What if there were dinosaurs in level THREE, no buildup, no story context, no sense of design pacing, and then they’re just GONE. Hell yeah gamer. At one point there’s like some King Midas themed shit and every time you turn into gold and die it’s accompanied by this incredible cartoon BONK sound effect, like, why?? You remember Pierre the evil French archaeologist? He appears in like EVERY level to try to kill you like the fuckin terminator. You never know when you’re gonna turn a corner and find Pierre there ready to pop you, and you have to shoot him like a hundred times until he does NOT die but instead runs around the nearest corner or behind a pillar or something where he will DISAPPEAR, ready to harangue you again in the next level. This happens like twelve times it’s insane! This game’s primary inspiration is obviously Indiana Jones but we cannot forget how big John Woo was starting to hit in America and I guess also the UK in the 90s and this is extremely obvious in Tomb Raider because Lara has the iconic two pistols and all of her attacks involve huge jumps and flips and shit it’s so funny and out of place in this otherwise very strictly laid out rules-heavy platforming game to have Lara just blasting infinite ammo pistol shots as she does a ten foot horizontal flip eight feet in the air from a standing position. All of these choices are nonsense but they add up to a game that does have something of a unique identity from its inspirations and certainly from its successors. Tomb Raider 2013 could never and more importantly WOULD never.

I don’t really know how to sum up a game as uneven as Tomb Raider. I feel like I just spent a lot of time bashing parts of it that feel half baked or like they don’t work, but the core appeal of it is so good, and makes up the majority of what you’re actually doing outside of setpieces. I barely talked about the puzzles which I think have a pretty high hit rate. They’re not like Puzzle Puzzles as much as they are just further extremes on the idea of environmental challenges most of the time. When it’s focused on stuff like this, using your core verbs to interact with the environment, Tomb Raider is almost unassailably good fun. It’s just when it does almost anything else that things get shakier. I do appreciate that it leaves the immense racism that is baked into the premise MOSTLY in the margins, as much as possible, in favor of a much stupider story about Atlantis. All the villains are Bri’ish stereotypes of Americans and French people so the worst shit gets left to context but it’s impossible to truly escape from it, as much as Core Design tries to divert you from thinking about it. I do feel that the things that are successful in this game and the things that aren’t are SO obvious that it’s hard to imagine Tomb Raider 2 being this weird, which would be a shame. That combination of incredible polish and comically rough edges in all the right places really make this one what it is, for me.

Coryoon is one of those games I knew I had to try just from the cover alone and it was a pleasing experience all around. Though it does have some issues I'll go over.

This game lets you play as a cute little dragon. Well he may be little but hit hitbox is bigger then some other ships ive seen in the genre. You'll go through 8 stages having to fight many enemies and bosses along the way. The game has a lot of variety with enemies and environments. Though sadly every boss area has the same look throughout the whole game.

The game be pretty fun with it's nice speed if a little bit slow at times and it can be a comfy experience. This game is really easy for anyone to just go through. Sure you may die to the bosses but you get lives so easily in this game it makes it pretty much hard to even game over. You also can just sustain from dying if you have a powerup on you.

There's also these powerups in the form of a heart, clover, spade, and diamond. I mostly used the heart because I really like the extra protection against projectiles. I'm still not sure what the clover and spade do though, if anyone knows I'd like to know what they did.

If there is one huge gripe with this game I have is the flickering. Maybe I just had poor emulation but there are times I don't even see what killed me at first because of this problem. I remember it the most on the 7th stage's main boss. It thankfully doesn't happen most of the time but I really don't like that it happens at all. Second I also just don't like games where it feels like they just let you take hits before dying because a lot of times it makes me think they can get away with some poor design at times or maybe I'm just bad. At least it's an easy game anyway so it's not the worst problem. This game also does the thing where playing on easy won't let you finish it. I'm just never going to play easy on these schmups ever again because of this. Seriously the game is barely much harder on normal why lock this?

In the end you got a nice cute little schmup that can be fun for anyone but veterans might be turned off at how easy the game is. Personally I think it was good yet flawed. I would like to see another game like this though that's probably never going to happen. Give it a try if you are ever curious!