you max your damage by swapping turns, alternating physical and magic attacks, moving enemies into a stack on a grid, uppercutting that stack into the sky and doing honest to god air combos complete with hit counter

so it's a real shame it has characters and a plot and both suck

the unravelling horror of Bloodborne's mystery is matched only by how sick it is to nail a boss with the stake driver. It's a shame most of the fun weapons are locked in the back half of the game, because few things in souls are as cool as trick weapons

Elden Ring is a competent souls game spread thin across an open world that came alive only once: transported to Caelid without a map, I navigated my way back to Limgrave, leaving directions for would be victims of my own misfortune. For this to happen I had to ignore fast travel

You work for anyone, which means you work for the corporations, administering expensive, frustrating, blink-and-you'll-miss-it violence on their behalf. What for? Money, parts, choice. In exchange for power, your agency is subsumed by the machine (I named mine Big Iron)

Yes it's largely unremarkable, but in an enjoyable way. The only mind blowing thing about it is that it stands alone--for some reason, there aren't hundreds of 3 star magical girl JRPGs, and Blue Reflection is a clear sign that there should be

Yakuza Kiwami's writing and style are both fine, but Majima should not be Everywhere, and every 30 minutes you get thrown into yet another fight that has its own dedicated corner of reddit where people insist it's the worst bit of the game

50% crunch, 40% vibe, 10% listening to your weird friend say the most fucked up shit imaginable and just nodding like, "yeah bro I get you." Nocturne is raw SMT: a dungeon crawling aesthetic experience fuelled by incredibly satisfying combat and party mechanics

in P3 social links were designed to make you choose how to spend your limited time on this earth. in P5 they're for letting you tailor your dream high school experience, where you're aloof, confident, and sexy enough to fuck your teacher

Is that good? I dunno. the dungeons blow

if movement feels good you are 90% of the way to a great video game. you have to REALLY fuck up that last 10% to make a bad video game. Gravity Rush 2's one big fuck up is as follows: there isn't a Gravity Rush 3

Dark Cloud is too much grind, combat is too fiddly and repetitive, and the last third of the building projects offer no creative leeway. Still, scouring a dungeon to retrieve shops and NPCs to add to a village remains undeniably satisfying

a dungeon is a map, not an aesthetic. in Soul Hackers 2 the map is always onscreen by default, and in order to see the repetitive subway tunnels you have to peer through the growing translucent labyrinth that lends them meaning. a refreshing cast and plot are a bonus

yo they were not exaggerating about this being a resident evil mansion damn

this dying world is so full of life--one comically tiny solar system made emotionally vast by a thousand carefully crafted wonders and horrors, all connected by a deftly woven mystery that comes complete with digital corkboard and string

you have 1 moveset + 3 switchable buttons (2 of which are on cooldowns) to cover 40 hours of fighting boring enemies that mostly wait to be killed, all while watching an unhinged plot that keeps going "your father always loved his slaves... unlike your harlot mother"

the tech of the xbox 360 allows AC6 to simulate a million enemy and allied planes immediately behind your fighter (a multirole fighter as every mission is like 8 missions in 1), following your every move, never once shooting at each other because they all know you're the player