Very cool game, especially for its time. The plot, setting and tone are rarely ever seen in a JRPG and they're handled pretty tastefully. The story is decently written and greatly enhanced by its freshness. The character stories are a bit of a mixed bag with some clearly having more effort put into them than others but they're generally well-done and do a good enough job endearing you to the characters for the amount of time spent on them. I think I would've preferred getting less party members in exchange for more depth but the wide selection has its own appeal. The voice acting isn't great most of the time but it adds a lot of soul given how rare it is to get so much voice acting from an old PS1 JRPG. The progression of the game is very simple but liberating in a way. Getting to choose which artifacts you keep to exchange evaluation with key items, choosing which characters to send to odin every chapter, picking from a large cast of characters for a varied party, it all comes together very well. You're technically locked to just a few new areas per chapter but just giving you the choice to fly to any of them at any point during the chapter feels much less restrictive. It also helps that you never spend too long in one place besides Lezard's tower so it feels well-paced. Speaking of Lezard he was a joy to watch in action and I would've greatly preferred him as the primary antagonist over Loki but I suppose it would also feel weak to not give the god side of the plot any noteworthy events. The visuals still look great to this day thanks to the good spritework and backgrounds and the music is stellar and super memorable. Combat, while unique, can be pretty repetitive and difficulty is weirdly inconsistent. 70% of the game is a cakewalk but there's sudden spikes in difficulty like Lezard's tower and Bloodbane which makes for a rather annoying experience. Having to follow a guide to get the good ending is also pretty lame.

I have my fair share of problems with Ciconia so far but thankfully my expectations were tempered from the start due to the setting and scale. The abnormally large and varied cast is handled fairly well and they have good interactions. The non-wartime parts are entertaining and do a good job of endearing you to the characters while building up the world. The wartime parts end up feeling very repetitive with a lot of redundant dialogue regarding the WALLS OF PEACE and DONT KILL DONT DIE and generally uninteresting action scenes. It feels like every other scene features ryukishi using the game as a mouthpiece to tell the reader how bad humanity is and how much war sucks and it ends up detracting from the story. The themes are meaningful and interesting but the lack of subtlety makes it feel very tiring after a while. Often I was subjected to scenes where everyone would be all buddy buddy and spend 5 minutes talking about how much they'll support peace which is annoying when anyone with more than a couple brain cells knows from the start that they will end up killing each other. Presentation is upgraded from the other WTC games but it doesn't really get a lot of chances to shine given how few legitimate fights there are. Music is good as usual but not really as memorable as umineko's or as impactful as higurashi's. Despite my problems, the ending was great and I'm interested to see where the story is going to go from here now that they've built everything up.

Uchikoshi brings the magic again with a big return to form after Zero Time Dilemma. Presentation is massively improved although still with a bit of jank. But I think that jank adds to the charm. There's a lot of interesting imagery in the somniums, models are pretty high quality and animations aren't bad. The characters have a lot of fantastic interactions and Date is a wonderful main character who makes every scene entertaining, especially with his great chemistry with Aiba. The story is very compelling and consistently throws out unexpected twists and turns while still cleanly wrapping up every loose end by the credits. I do find it odd that Mizuki's super strength wasn't explained but since it was established early on and isn't abused too often I didn't mind it too much. Every route offered interesting revelations and even the somewhat annoying characters like Iris and Ota still brought great things to the table. The psync with Ota's mom even got me to tear up a little which I wasn't expecting to do in Ota's route of all people. My only real problem with the game is that the somniums, while consistently interesting, had some pretty nonsensical solutions which is annoying when you're on a time limit. The game also has one of the best credits sequences in a video game I've ever seen, rivaling God Hand.

Pretty cool flawed gem of a game. The horror tone isn't scary at all but it's rarely ever seen in jrpgs so it felt quite fresh. The party is interesting but Margarete and Keith don't feel like they have enough of a stake in the fight compared to Yuri, Alice and Halley. Besides bosses, the fights are pretty simple and repetitive with long animations thankfully mitigated by emulation speedup. The ring system thankfully keeps battles more involved and interesting but having to use them for items and some story segments is a bit much. The story isn't great or anything but the tone and likable characters did a good enough job of keeping me invested. The presentation of the game could've used a bit more work. It's difficult for the cutscenes to have impact when they're mostly low quality 3D models jarringly imposed on a 2D background doing very simple animations. The music is also very unique for a jrpg and fits the tone well.

Extremely soulful JRPG. Wonderful sense of adventure and a very likable cast of characters. Vyse is a great main character and one of the few JRPG MCs I would genuinely describe as "cool". The villains manage to be quite compelling and likable as well so none of the interactions are very dull. The setting is interesting and fresh and the story is actually pretty well-paced, if a little standard. The music is great and the dreamcast visuals are brimming with ambition. God bless the dreamcast. The on-foot battles are pretty simple and changing colors all the time can be tedious but the way it changes how you unlock magic is cool. The ship battles are annoying in the beginning but fun later on when you can take more than a couple hits and you have more to play around with. The biggest problem with the game which is mostly alleviated by dolphin's fast-forward function is the slow animation and movement speed combined with the relatively high encounter rate. This wasn't really an issue for me but having to hold the fast-forward button down for 90% of the game was a little annoying.

The new monsters are all really cool and fun to fight. The clutch claw is a pretty fun addition as well. The difficulty is ramped up which is a welcome change since there wasn't much in the way of challenge in the base game aside from nergi. I really hate fighting tigrex though. The more annoying parts of the expansion were the master rank versions of previous monsters like legiana and beezlegeuse but thankfully you're only required to fight them once. The story is still completely uninteresting and the fact that it keeps you from doing multiplayer until you see the cutscenes amplifies this problem. That being said, the cutscenes showing the monsters in action were very cool so it kind of balances out.

Actually a pretty good game. It's clearly inspired by Mother but it's still very creative in its own right. Most of the characters are fairly likable and charming aside from alphys. I feared most of the game was going to be HAHA WE MAKE BAD JOKE AND ACKNOWLEDGE IT BAD but that's mostly just relegated to sans and toriel and it's pretty subdued. That being said the general sense of humor didn't really appeal to me either but it was still endearing in a way. The serious part of the story is interesting and well-made but it didn't particularly strike my emotions. However, it was very annoying going into the game knowing I should be a pacifist but being unable to do a true pacifist run because you need flowey to tell you not to kill anyone first. This was even more annoying when you start the second run and flowey says "hey don't kill anyone, I shouldn't have to tell you this". The fights are fun and do a good job of staying unique throughout the entirety of the game. The music is great and the visual style is also pretty good but the main character's sprite annoys me. In the end I don't really have many complaints about the game but it didn't hit me as hard as it did a lot of people. Even hotland which was my least favorite part of the game due to alphys was salvaged mostly by mettaton and the music.

A very good game with some missed potential. The combat is a blast, especially as you get more legions and learn to utilize their abilities. I did feel the dodge was a little too weak though, especially compared to other platinum games. The presentation is great and the action is always fun to look at. The story is decent enough but I couldn't really get invested in it very much. There's too much non-combat stuff in the game and it got pretty tedious past the halfway point. I typically appreciate the variety but stuff like tailing missions and carrying boxes just isn't fun. The exploration sections in the gates could get pretty annoying, particularly involving the chain jump platforming that sprang up way too much. The investigations were also pretty weak and didn't really sell the cop aspect of the story since most of it just boiled down to "track this person/thing to the gate where they got snatched". There were some fun characters hanging around the police building and sadly they were underutilized. I think an Astral Chain 2 that expands and improves upon the police aspect with funner minigames and more interactions with your fellow officers would make for a great experience.

As much as I enjoy the cheesy cutscenes and voice-acting, the levels typically either bore me or annoy me. Damage feels inconsistent in that sometimes my bazookas will destroy things in two hits and other times in 10 combined with stomps and machine gun fire. Damage from enemies also feels inconsistent since sometimes I can survive in the middle of a group of enemies no problem and other times i have to run from a couple. This inconsistency combined with the lack of checkpoints gets very infuriating. The levels also just generally feel pretty same-y in both visuals and gameplay with the only differences being some target locations and time limits. I've also had my fair amount of crashes which were very annoying.