This game has its strengths when it's story kicks in. It focuses very heavily on Cloud's mental instability, and his relationship with the rest of the gang, specifically Aerith and Tifa. If Remake was the Buildup for Aerith's story, this is the payoff, and if this is the buildup for Tifa's story, then Remake 3 will be the payoff (assuming they have the common sense to follow up plot points from this game, and follow the original game's narrative). The combat is significantly improved from Remake with some characters having aerial attacks and abilities, in addition to a generally improved moveset, and we get new Synergy abilities and skills, where two party members team up to do one attack.

However the open world unfortunately fails in my opinion. It's far from the worst open world in gaming, and has plenty of things I like (each region is treated as its own mini-open world, and for most of the game fast travel is contextual), sadly though most of the areas arent that unique to explore, and you could remove the open world entirely from some regions and the narrative would be completely unaffected. This is ignoring the obvious "open world checklist" that sadly the game has. If they severely cut down on side content to maybe two or three big things per region as opposed to a bunch of smaller things, it would be far better.

Issues that you might personally have with the narrative aside, I'm sure we can all agree that's where this game shines. It's story and it's characters, in both the main story and the sidequests. Just sadly I feel as if there is just far too much extra content that ends up dragging down the experience if you are a completionist.

7/10 for it's story, characters and gameplay. 4/10 for everything required for platinum.

Alone in the Dark is a pretty good investment for anyone who's a fan of survival horror games to look back on and see where we have come from. The game is more difficult than it needs to be with some questionable controls or camera angles, especially during specific sections requiring platforming, or aiming a bow down a hallway to shoot at something (that is also shooting you).
The game does have some fun with its gameplay structure, which I give it credit for. You can skip the enemy encounters in the first room entirely by simply blocking their entrances, there's a room with a healing flask inside but going in risks more harm than the payout, there are books in the library you can read that causes your character to contort and bang their head against the floor (or just float for a second before dying). I'd say the biggest flaw is the trial and error gameplay structure that arises from being a game of its age.

If you know what you are doing, it is a very short experience. If going in blind, a pretty decent older game that you can see spawn a whole genre, just be sure to keep that giant pot of human soup handy for a few rooms down.

Overall, this is personally my favorite way to experience dragon quest 1 and 2. Maybe the super Famicom version is better though, but I haven't played it since it's in Japanese only.

But everything about these is a huge step up from the NES versions and I mean that in the most loving way possible. I understand also that this version is based off the super Famicom version, which might explain why, but even still, the Switch version is also based off the super Famicom version, and I think that game looks ugly as sin so I rate this one higher.

Dragon Quest 1 is the one that spots the most obvious improvements for me compared to its NES counterpart. We have a new intro showing the princess get kidnapped, battle animations for the attacks, more detailed towns, NPCs are more expressive (such as shivering when talking about how scared they are) and so on. Dragon Quest 2 was already such a massive improvement from 1 that you can already imagine that all of these improvements but added to DQ2 make it feel even more like a proper, modern RPG.

In fact, the only reason why this is 3.5 stars and not 4 or 5 is because its still literally just DQ1&2. DQ1 is, despite all the improvements, still a very, very basic game. And DQ2, while still being very enjoyable, even moreso in this package, is still ultimately a flawed experience.

For fans of the series, or for first timers, I cannot recommend this (or the super Famicom version probably since they are virtually the same aside from graphics from what I hear). It's an amazing bundle of two games, neither is horribly long, it gives you a good taste of the franchise and overall made great use of the extra technology between the decade between the original games and this remake.