Great game and easily one of the better FFs. While the story does sort of lose some of its luster when it drops the political conflict for the usual JRPG business of fighting god and his mindless droves of enemies, it's still compelling throughout with a cool mature atmosphere, a very likable main character, and very solid voice acting. The game was very impressive visually and thankfully the PS5 load times prevented another "slowly crawl through crevices while the next area loads" catastrophe like with FF7R. The soundtrack was also really nice and the boss theme in particular really got me pumped.

The combat could have used a bit more depth but it was still substantially enjoyable with a variety of satisfying eikon abilities to wreak havoc with. I personally loved tossing out tornadoes to shred encounters with a lot of enemies. The boss fights were also generally fantastic with a ton of really cool setpieces. The only really notable problem with the combat is the copious amount of boss/enemy reskins in the last 1/4th or so but to be fair a lot of them are relegated to optional content. I also would've liked to have a bit more focus on party members, like being able to level up their abilities as well. There's just so much focus on Clive that it's pretty easy to forget about the others which is a shame when you have a rad combat wolf.

The sidequests were close to being great since plenty of them contain some solid story bits and they're all fully voice-acted on top of the fun combat but they are let down by lackluster rewards. I was extremely annoyed to be completing endgame sidequests and getting my 500th useless meteorite or an accessory that reduces magic charge time by .2 seconds. The ability to sprint while in non-combat areas would've greatly helped as well with how much they make you run all over the hideaway.

Very cool paranormal investigation game. Love the artstyle, the soundtrack, the pacing, and just the general atmosphere of everything. If I had to name a flaw it would be that the prologue is ironically too strong. I enjoyed the entire story quite a lot but the exciting setup with having to fulfill your curse conditions and avoid others gets practically zero use outside of the prologue and the curses don't even work for half the game due to it being daytime which was pretty disappointing. Luckily the dialogue is a lot of fun and the investigation is still plenty compelling so the game was never a drag. The meta plot elements and puzzle solutions were also very cool and I always enjoy seeing those kinds of things in games, though it did lead to a somewhat lukewarm ending.

Excellent remake that does everything it can to convey the story of the original with the best presentation in the medium and greatly expanding on Ciel's route. I was very weary as a big fan of the original VN, but Nasu's team surpassed my expectations and did a great job modernizing the story without sacrificing all of the original's soul and atmosphere. Only complaint is that I do think Ciel's true ending goes too overboard with the scale of things and takes way too long despite not really adding much over the normal ending. The new characters generally range from great to inoffensive additions with Noel being a big highlight and Arach being the only obnoxious one. Would've liked to see Nero come back as well but Vlov is a solid enough replacement. The art is immaculate, the soundtrack is beautiful and the animations really make the fight scenes come alive. I just hope I live to see the far side routes.

I enjoy the novel introduction of tower defense to gacha and think it's a good way to make use of a large team of characters. There's also plenty of really cute designs and Utage is probably the hottest thing this side of the google play store. The edgy setting and story don't appeal to me at all so I ended up skipping the story but I had a good time grinding out the stages. Eventually the lack of a skip button or higher replay speeds just started to drag and the chibi sprites don't hold up well enough in the post-blue archive age. I am also a massive brainlet when it comes to tower defense so a lot of the gimmicks could get pretty frustrating. Definitely still in the upper echelon of gachas and worth trying if you're in the market for them.

Solid remake. Environments look great and the revamped animations feel very good. I am really not a fan of the design changes made to a lot of the NPCs and enemies but aside from the very obvious ones like Old Hero looking like a total loser and the larger bosses unnecessarily made to look a lot more gross, the rest aren't that apparent when actually playing the game and not just looking at a side-by-side comparison. Also what they did to Allant's voice acting after you beat false king is painfully hilarious.

I appreciate the purist approach they took by not changing the actual programming of the game much but even as someone who has a deep love of demons souls, I can admit they could've patched up a few things like the janky AI on the maneaters or some streamlining of the weapon upgrades. I guess they do at least let you have an increased drop rate ring which is a welcome addition.

Great game but a mixed bag of a sequel. The dungeons are a straight upgrade over the divine beasts and they even fleshed out the story aspect quite a bit. The boss fights aren't all great but I'm very glad that it's not just different flavors of blight ganons this time. While the dungeons are an improvement, I found the shrines to be a lot weaker this time around. The vast majority were incredibly simple and I can count on my hand the number of shrines that actually stumped me.

The building mechanic is interesting, but you're rarely forced to use it in creative ways. The crazy twitter videos are fun but as far as my experience goes that mechanic is mainly just used to stick fans and wheels on objects over and over again for the same handful of results. When it comes to using it for shrines, any solution beyond the basics is typically just shown to you and the challenge is fumbling with the controls to stick it together correctly. Fuse was also fairly underwhelming since it doesn't significantly change combat and usually just grants an attack buff or common status effect. Ironically Ascend ended up being my favorite ability due to how forgettable it was and it led to some fun moments where I got stuck wondering what to do, and suddenly remembered I can just shoot straight up through half a mile of rock.

The world certainly feels different enough, but the exploration largely lacked novelty since it's built on top of BOTW and you're still mostly doing the same things. Shooting up in the sky is pretty fun just due to the sheer verticality of the world design but there's really not much interesting going on up there. The depths are cool conceptually and at least contain some dungeons but the drab aesthetic and constant darkness get tiring if you're down there for a substantial amount of time.

The story isn't going to win any awards, but there are plenty of cool scenes this time around and they do a decent job of giving Zelda herself more significance as well as making some kino master sword and final boss sequences. I am very annoyed at whichever nintendo employee in the sound department keeps forgoing basic volume controls because I could barely hear anyone speaking over the music and sound effects.

Despite this just sounding like a laundry list of complaints, I really did have a good time and I'm just judging it in comparison to BOTW. It certainly ended up being better than I expected given how similar it looked to BOTW pre-release. I'll be very weary if they go for a 3rd game in this exact style though.