Up Your Arsenal is another good sequel. Although it's not as ambitious as the previous game Going Commando, what it does well hasn't changed from the previous games, the gameplay is still frenetic and fun. It has some changes I like, and some I don't.

What I've noticed is that there's a shift in focus that started in Going Commando but has reached its culmination here. Which is that it's finally dropped all pretense of being a platformer, and has cemented itself firmly as being a fast paced run and gun shooter. I don't actually have an issue with this in theory, because I never thought Ratchet and Clank had outstanding platforming to begin with. The problem with this change for me is the simplification of the level design, and how that affects the feel of the worlds and player choice. The previous games had worlds with branching paths for the player to choose from. One path could be a puzzle section and another could be a combat section, and there was a lot of fun in exploring the worlds from different angles. They felt organic, and always rewarded with a new gadget or story progression event. The levels in Up Your Arsenal are mostly straight lines to the end. They're finished so quickly that there's hardly any time to appreciate the ambience of the world, and the few split paths they do have usually only lead to titanium bolts, a cosmetic unlocking item. The mission list is functionally useless in this game.

It also has less variety compared to previous games. There's no grind rail sections, hoverbike races, or space ship battles. Instead there's Galactic Ranger missions where you fight enemy hordes, fine at first but there's just too many of them and it's always the same thing. The writing is funnier, but it lost a lot of its edge and corporate satire, and feels more like a typical Saturday morning cartoon.

As far as improvements, there's a second weapon wheel which cuts down on constant menu opening. The weapons got an upgrade up to 8 levels which keeps them useful. There's less Giant Clank levels, which I detested. The bosses are better, they're back to being about as good as the first game's bosses again. I did enjoy the story more than Going Commando's weird evil furby thing, but that's mainly because I loved Dr. Nefarious and his apathetic butler as characters, and not because the story is complex or has any sort of character development like the first game. It added a mini hub, and it's nice that it let me buy armor upgrades without having to remember which level the armor vendor was thrown into.

Even if it's not quite as varied or innovative as the previous games, Up Your Arsenal is still a fun game, and a solid entry worth playing.

No doubt one of my favorites. It has a gorgeous and timeless artstyle, a great feel of adventure, and the music is fantastic. The story is my favorite in the franchise with the best Ganondorf and a superb ending. It has great feeling swordplay, even more so than some modern Zelda games. It's definitely not perfect. It has very few dungeons and not all of them are great, and I won't excuse the triforce quest, it's not a well executed idea to say the least. Still I adore everything else about this game so much that it's easy for me to look past its flaws. This is a beautiful, emotional and epic game I really love.

So take the gameplay of Drakengard 1 and bump it up from bad to average, but also take the most interesting part of that game which was the insane story and make it boring, take all of the eccentric characters and make them standard rpg flavor with little to no personality, and you have this game here. It's bland as sand. I don't think the story is bad conceptually, it has a few good ideas, it's just really dull execution wise. When the only part of the game that got any emotional reaction out of me was seeing characters from the previous game show up and finish their own story arcs, that says a lot to me about how little I cared about anything happening in this story. I mean as a game, it's fine enough, it plays well, but as the years go on I have a feeling I'll remember very little about it, while there's no way I could forget its predecessor.

This game is absolutely insane. Everything and everyone is miserable, your character is a creepy invincible psycho, your party is filled with pedos and racists, nobody succeeds at anything, the music stinks, the color palette is several different shades of drab, the gameplay is mind numbing. Even though it's a bad game objectively, it was such an odd and unforgettable experience for me. I have no desire to ever play Drakengard again but I'm glad I did. Yoko Taro really came out guns blazing with this one.

This game is a pretty great sequel. The first game laid a solid foundation, but this one refined a lot of things wrong with that game and more. The music, atmosphere, and writing are all as good if not better, but most importantly the controls are massively improved. Ratchet moves faster, jumps faster, and the direly needed strafing is added. The weapon selection is downright awesome, every one minus maybe the throwing stars was a blast to use. The game is packed with content, especially in the new game mode which has money multipliers to incentivize good play, and a lot of extra upgrades.

As for what didn't improve, the story is once again only fine. The humor does a lot of heavy lifting and saves it from being outright boring. The bosses are really bad. These guys range from pushovers to health sponges. The boss on Snivelak gets the honorable mention award for being one of the worst I've ever played in a game. The Giant Clank stages were also not very fun, as the huge boss health pools and slow movement make it a drag to play. Aside from these issues, Going Commando is a great game I could see myself coming back and replaying often.

Definitely not one the best games ever, but for a first attempt at a 3D game I think Nintendo did an admirable job, especially in the movement which has a lot of options and feels great to play when the camera isn't getting in your way. There's no sugarcoating the camera, it's abysmal, and I don't think it or any other areas of the game shouldn't be scrutinized just because it's older. I also think a lot of the levels on the top floor of the castle are very annoying to play. I'd even say it starts teetering off after the first floor. I think it's good overall but later games have improved on this game's formula significantly.

This is a really mediocre platformer. Instead of attempting to fix some of the archaic elements of its predecessors and usher platforming games into a new era, it doubled down and made them worse:

1. The worlds are massive and have very few distinguishable landmarks, so it's very likely the player gets lost or spends a lot of time wandering aimlessly trying to find something to do, and they have the gall to offer a way to make them even bigger.
2. Because the worlds are so big there's not enough collectables and objectives to fill out the world without bloating the count, making the levels often feel barren and empty. They're also sometimes hidden in very remote locations that are difficult to find, especially when it comes down to finding the last few.
3. Progression is regularly blocked with annoying quiz games, because Banjo-Kazooie had them. However in Banjo you don't encounter the quiz until the end, and it's in the style of a board game so it's more interesting to play and doesn't block progression until you are almost done with the game.

Among other issues I had: the minecart levels feel horrible to play, but they have to be there because Rare made Donkey Kong Country. The arcade games are bad, the writing isn't even funny, the character designs aren't very good aside from one or two exceptions. The stamina meter is annoying, the hub world is confusing to navigate. The music is also very forgettable. A soundtrack from Grant Kirkhope and David Wise should not be this bland, how did that even happen?

I do think the controls feel nice and some of the platforming challenges were pretty fun, but this game has no identity and some of the worst elements of its predecessors exacerbated.

Xenogears has one of the best stories in a game I've played, even if it's puzzling at times and surely not helped by a haphazard translation that misrepresents certain plot elements and character motivations. The gameplay side isn't quite as fleshed out, such as elements on moves and combos being worthless. It's serviceable but it feels like something the developers came up with in a few months because this intricately told gnostic alien story needed something to do inbetween the beats. I can't praise how good the story of Xenogears is enough. I actually can't, because it's like a complex work of art that I'm still in the process of digesting and learning more about as the months pass since my initial playthrough. Such an interesting and unforgettable experience.

This is a flawed but good first game in the series. While it lacks certain quality of life features that later games would include such as strafing, it does have a great sense of pace, fun characters and weapon variety. It looks really good for an early ps2 title as well. It doesn't have the most exciting story, but the character writing (aside from a point where Ratchet acts a certain way for a little too long and it was annoying me greatly) more than makes up for it. A solid foundation to build on.

Psychonauts is lauded for being creative and funny, and it is, but what impressed me the most was all extra hidden detail and dialogues. Replaying this game thoroughly I had no idea how much hidden character interaction this game had that expands on the campers' personalities. You have to go out of your way to find them over the course of the day the game takes place in and I really enjoyed looking for them. The controls don't feel as tight as other games, but all of the psychic powers are unique and fun to use, and the levels in the back half of the game especially are very good.

This is a game I enjoy the idea of playing more than actually playing it. I think it's just the tropical vibes. I feel like playing Mario Sunshine at least once a year and then I turn it on and well... it has great controls, but half of the levels are annoying and not fun to play because they're designed to fit in contextually with the game's setting instead of being designed to be fun platforming challenges first. The designers sort of knew this and threw in traditional Mario styled levels with random floating blocks in a weird esoteric video gamey space, and those are definitely some of the more fun levels in this game. It's not a bad game but it's definitely the most flawed in the 3D line of Mario games.