Real happy to see a brand new Fate installment, because it's been a hot minute since Extella Link!
And I loved this one. Really cool new take on the Holy Grail War with Masters that have some really unique motivations and Servants that suit them perfectly.

The cast is fantastic - definitely one of my favorite Fate casts yet, mostly because it's in my opinion honestly pretty rare for them to be as consistent as this one.

The setting is great too, and I love how well it's characters and their motivations are acclimated to that; they all fit in really well.
And the music, although for the most part not too memorable, accomodates it nicely too.

My absolute favorite thing about this game is it's gameplay though, which is admittedly pretty rare for me! Something about the way it portrays the power dynamic between Masters and Servants through gameplay is unlike anything we've seen in the series before, and I love that.
Regular encounters definitely feel like your average musou fight, but when a Servant steps in (or when you've built up enough meter to play as the Servant you're with) the game changes entirely, in a really good way. Bosses can be terrifying here, and that's exactly as they should be when a Master like Iori runs into a fight meant for Servants. They're tough, but really fun and well-paced once you figure out how to fight against them and properly get your Ripostes off, and it makes beating them feel SO good.

Arguably the most interesting thing about this game however (which is definitely recommendable if you're interested in it's cast) is how much it hinges on a replay.
New Game+ is ridiculously streamlined - pretty much everything you've done in your first playthrough is carried over; so if you've done all you could, you won't have to worry about any side-content you've already done. BUT, if you want to - simply because you want to experience a Servant's sidestory again or just get it's rewards twice - you can! It'll simply be counted as Completed either way, and that's really neat.
But more than that, there's quite a few NG+ exclusive scenes, sidequests and even an additional ending that adds SO much substance to it's cast; and it lets you know what is and isn't new by making the original story's text gray and adding a feature skipping through all of that whenever it pops up.
It's a fascinating decision! Adding all of it to the first playthrough would've definitely messed with it's pacing a lot (of which the only issue in my opinion is already big groups of sidequests at the same time, so yeah lmao) and there's also a few scenes that are definitely made in mind with you already knowing the main story and what happens next.
I'm not quite sure if it's solely to preserve the pacing - it could very well be them being too proud of those scenes (they should be) and never being able to figure out how to properly squeeze it into the main game, but yeah, I've never seen anything like that.
I really liked it personally, especially with it being as fast as it is. Takes about 1/3rd of a regular playthrough, of which about 75% will be new content and the other 25% being the route you didn't take the first time around, so it adds a lot to the experience! Didn't feel right making this review until I've explored it fully, because yeah, it's major stuff.

Iori especially profits so much from it. NG+ essentially confirmed everything I thought about him through the foreshadowing the main story contained and goddamn man he's up there as one of my favorite TM protags yet. Insanely unique character.

So yeah, cool game. Definitely unique! In some ways good and some ways bizarre.
I had a lot of fun with it, and I hope there's more games like this in store to keep bringing some new perspectives to the Fate series in the future :)

I'll admit first and foremost, I saw the leaks before release, I saw the trailers for this game, and I thought it looked like absolute dogshit! I was terrified to see where Fire Emblem was headed with this, and lord knows I wasn't anywhere close to interested in those avatar designs. I thought it looked like complete and utter ridiculousness, but... time went on, and it grew on me. As wheatie does, the game released and I saw a few clips of it floating around on different platforms. It looked ridiculous. Almost... intentionally so?

The story is terrible, yeah, of course, I think that's been made abundantly clear by everybody, but I can't help but smile at it still. Everything about Fire Emblem Engage is silly, from its writing, to its character designs, to just its whole damn premise, it's absurd! And yet, they seem to know that! So instead of desperately trying to claw its way into a dark and brooding story, it almost felt like they were more leaning into the absurdity of what they had. This isn't a game you're supposed to take seriously, and I fuckin' love it.

Looking past that, though, as a Fire Emblem in gameplay, it does a stellar job. I don't feel the need to go over what everyone else already has countless times before, general consensus seems to be shockingly positive regarding the map design and the gameplay, but I also really enjoyed some of the paralogues, getting to revisit maps from the older games and even getting to walk around them somewhat freely after the fight's over. That's something I'd also like to talk about, because good god this game is so fucking pretty! Maybe I'm just surprised after having played Three Houses for so long and staring at its boring and repetitive maps so many times, but even besides that, the hub worlds like the Somniel or the post-battle, fully modeled maps, I was absolutely astounded by just how beautiful Engage was to look at. Could very well be the prettiest game on the Switch, helped by its already vibrant and colorful/flashy design everywhere else.

Now combine those beautiful atmospheres with a just as beautiful soundtrack, pure bliss. I spent so much time in the Somniel just spacing out and wandering the area, listening to whichever song fit the time, and at this point I think it's going to stay with me for the next while. The serenity that comes with these tracks is something I find scarcely matched in other media. Shit, I'm listening to them even now, writing this review, thanks to this cool little compilation I found of all of 'em. That's not to say the other tracks aren't amazing as well. Being as obsessed with this series as I have been for the last eight years or so, it was more than exhilarating listening to the throwbacks they whipped up for all of the Emblem Trial paralogues, or the slow and gratifying buildup of Last Engage at the end, to be followed shortly after by a lovely vocal track for the credits roll, among god knows how many others.

Engage was a stunning, whimsical, and just overall fun experience, in every sense of the word. I regret being so doubtful of this game at first, and I especially regret taking 14 entire months to finish it (oops). It's, as I said, absurd and ridiculous the whole way through, and I've learned to appreciate that sort of thing so much more over the years. I can't call it my favorite Fire Emblem, Sacred Stones has that nostalgia (and GBA) bias over me, but this was still a marvelous love letter to one of my favorite franchises ever, even despite some of its more prominent shortcomings.

"camp" as the kids say

Have you ever felt the saddening passion of loving someone, knowing that in but a few hours you’ll be parted forever?

There’s so much I could talk in-depth about with Tsukihime. The rough art style that detracts not at all from its characters’ iconic charm. The deep world it tries to immerse, sometimes drown you in. Story beats that knocked me off my chair as a kid in the late 2000s. The story of being a fan of this awkward, weighty fan-translated game. The unintentionally comical sex writing and the shocking, off-putting scenes of rape and violation that run through its trunk like fungus on a tree. But none of those explain the feeling I get when a random playlist in the background, gone unnoticed, picks a song from this game. What makes me stop what I’m doing and look up at the sky.

To me, Tsukihime is about impermanence. It is about knowing how easily we lose the things we cherish, and how we act when faced with that knowledge. Whether it’s facing those who’d do anything to avoid their own mortality, or realizing that even timeless figures bleed and hurt. Our protagonist, Shiki, lives an impermanent existence, his life uprooted, his health as fragile as glass, cursed to see the fault lines that live in all things, no matter how powerful they might seem. The thread of his life is intertwined with that of the women of this story, each powerful in their own way, each in some way scarred by a man’s inability to process impermanence. There is no immortality in Tsukihime. There is only false security bought by inflicting loss on others, becoming the thing you fear in the eyes of others. Everything goes away, including the ones you love.

Yet Tsukihime remains a story of love. In each of its routes there will come a time where crisis has drowned the story, where the foe seems unstoppable. There will be a scene where Shiki and his lover somehow snatch a sliver of precious safety amidst this deluge, sometimes no more than a few hours. At no point are they, or you, allowed to forget about the imminent danger. This is a temporary reprieve, coming after a narrow escape and before a doomed last stand with everything on the line. Neither expect to make it unscathed. Even if they do, there’s always something that’ll make their victory short-lived, whether it’s Shiki’s health or the tragedy of his lover or just the nature of the world, but whatever it is they know the face of the end they cannot avert.

In those moments they let their love for each other spill out. They spend their tiny moment of quiet on each other. The music is never joyful in these scenes, but it is gently, warmly sad, tender with anticipated loss. Love is made cruel by impermanence. It would be so much safer, so much more reasonable to keep your distance. But that very same thing makes love so powerful in the moment, allowing you to feel incomparable longing for someone even though they’re right here with you. To choose to feel that pain for a lifetime just to be with them with all your being for just a few more hours.

If you’ve lived through that, then you know what it feels like to wish you could put your entire being out with this person, to make every part of them feel precious in an uncaring world, one last time.

And if you haven’t, Tsukihime might be able to show you what it feels like. I can think of no higher praise than that.

Tsukihime Mudou Minha Vida!

Uma história sobre morte, uma história sobre aprender a aproveitar a vida, uma história que me ensinou sobre deixar as coisas acontecer! um dia tudo terá um fim e tenho que aceitar isso, tohno shiki vivia lado a lado com a morte e por isso ele busca ao máximo aproveitar sua vida a cada segundo..

Essa novel é quase perfeita! o único problema é que é ultrapassada e senti falta em CGs detalhando mais as cenas, além do uso de hot desnecessário que não dá pra pular.

Porém se não fosse por isso eu daria um nota 10 sem pensar duas vezes, concerteza irei dar 10 pro Remake! Só é muito ultrapassado e sinto falta de trilha sonora, e tem problemas de escrita(nasu ainda era inexperiente)

Coisas essas que foram todas consertadas no remake! Então estou ansioso, foi uma das histórias mais lindas que já consumi.

9,5/10 Obra Prima, nasu gênio...não tem como🔥

(Aliás, a rota da Hisui é indiscutivelmente a melhor🙌)

Before this review starts, I would like to preface that this is by no means an actual, in-depth critical review of Max Payne 3. I won’t be touching the story or gameplay AT ALL in this, so let that be warned. This is purely about how I feel about Max Payne 3’s portrayal of my region of Brazil and how it affected my enjoyment of it to the point where I just can’t really stand it and think it is one of the most racist video games ever made. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that Resident Evil 5 is frequently cited as a super racist video game when Max Payne 3 is literally right there and does the exact same things that game does!

The average person who played Max Payne 3 will probably not bother to do an inch of research on the country of Brazil, probably thinks Rio is the capital, and believes that it is an absolute warzone hellhole where people get shot on the street constantly. This is the kind of audience Rockstar was trying to appeal to with this game. I do not believe, even for a second, that they made this game out of respect for Brazil. They simply wanted a 3rd world country to throw their white American hero into so he could shoot and kill without a care in the world, because the 3rd world is so lawless, right? They wanted to portray their weird, twisted view of Brazil so much that they even went so far as to scan a thousand residents of the favela of Paraisópolis into the game, acting as backdrop NPCs in the chapters that do take place in the favela. You can kill actual residents of São Paulo in Max Payne 3, which is crazy once you consider how the rest of the game handles this stuff. You can sit there in your little house just outside Little Rock, Arkansas, and get your greasy hands on the controller and shoot at people who were probably paid less than a penny for their faces to be plastered onto enemies. It's the most pure depiction of the average 40-something-year-old American going to a country that doesn't belong to you and killing brown people for fun!

There is so much arrogance in Rockstar's approach to developing Max Payne 3. A huge inspiration for the game was the 2007 Brazilian movie “Tropa de Elite," which is very funny once you learn what that movie is about. It's like Rockstar saw that movie as just an average cool awesome shooter romp through a favela and not as a critique of Brazil’s problems and struggle with violence. I think taking a movie that presents a very thoughtful critique of violence and using it for their little American power fantasy video game is insanely disrespectful. But it’s not like it really matters to the audience for this game. The audience doesn’t know what "Tropa de Elite" is; most of them couldn’t even tell what language Brazil speaks, and most of them probably don’t even know Portuguese is a language. It appeals to the naive, the Americans, who think going to Brazil to shoot at some mixed-race thugs is the coolest thing in the world because they can live out their little soldier hero fantasy.

The depiction of lawful Brazilian citizens, who all seem to hate gringos and be aggressive on sight despite Brazil frequently being cited as one of the most friendly countries to foreigners, is an objectively wrong, offensive depiction. Brazilians do not hate gringos; I, being one myself and being friends with a lot of gringos and foreigners, can personally attest to this. I have been around a lot of São Paulo because I live fairly close to it and there are always gringos around, and no one minds, and in fact, most Brazilians really enjoy helping out gringos or foreigners in any way they can!  Rockstar seems to have this weird, twisted idea that since it's a favela and not the clean, corporate building of the Brancos, the people are totally different. The people from the favelas are wonderful people, despite the bad hand most of them have been dealt in life: stuck in poverty, living in run-down buildings on top of other buildings, stacked up so high. They have a resilient spirit; they, to me, represent the Brazilian spirit more than any other group of people in this world, and I respect them deeply for it. I think choosing to depict these people as inherently hostile to Max, the American hero, is so disrespectful to them and their home and the culture they were raised around, and it paints a picture that is absolutely not true. I believe Rockstar chose to depict the favelas like that because it would sell. The depiction of the favelas as lawless wastelands with gangsters and thugs at every corner is the most pure evidence you could find of the ignorance of the average American writer. You can visit a country and study it, see how it is, then go home to your little flat in your little apartment and depict it in a way that would make sense to your audience, which is the American, the one you want to please because they at the end of the day give you money; the citizens of São Paulo don’t really matter in the end much at all, and their input was never needed.

Brazil already gets misrepresented by the world at large, and I am a firm believer that media can affect and alter reality and how people perceive things in significant ways. Rockstar seemed to be drawn in by the allure of Brazil that exists in the minds of only foreigners and not the actual experience of the average Brazilian. The funk, the favela, the scorching sun, the people, the beaches, the drinking, the soccer—everything that people stereotype Brazilians as is present in this game! I don’t feel proud saying this is THE game that takes place where I live, that this is THE game that is supposed to “represent” São Paulo. I personally struggled with my Brazilian identity for a long time because of certain notions and preconceptions people held and still hold against Brazilians, particularly online, which tends to get very very nasty and racist. And I cannot sit here and pretend like I am fine with the way these Americans wrote about my country and my people.

Even when you get to the real villains of the game, the Brazilian UFE and Victor Branco, the game never changes from its weird attitude towards Brazilians. Chapter 12 is literally named “The Great American Savior of the Poor,” and as ironic as Rockstar’s intent may have been while writing that, they characterize Max and Brazilians in such a way that that is actually the case! He stops the Comando Sombra, he stops the UFE, he stops political corruption, and he saves a bunch of favela citizens from getting their organs harvested. He, a white American man, really does become the savior of the poor through this game's absolutely naive and frankly stupidly racist writing. And the critique itself towards the Brazilian police and political world is absolutely shallow and warped. I mean, Victor Branco is kind of a silly caricature of a stereotypical corrupt Brazilian politician, but the game doesn’t really delve any deeper than that, and it frankly makes me quite sad. Just a few years after this game came out, Operation Car Wash started, and honestly, I wish this game had come out during that time frame so they could have developed that plot point further. But then I also worry they would’ve handled it in the worst way possible and made the most Brazilian right-wing propaganda piece video game of all time, and that thought alone sends shivers down my spine. Like Imagine in your head right now a game so right-wing Bolsonaro would probably use clips of it in his 2018 campaign. I already think the game is inherently right-leaning simply because of the way it handles a lot of the subject matter, and I honestly fear what a 2017 Max Payne 3 taking place in Brazil during the Temer era would look like...

If it seems like I have gotten emotional or angry while writing this, it is because I have! I do not live in the city of São Paulo proper; I live on the coast. But I have been to São Paulo quite often in my life due to a few of my relatives living there, and those relatives live in the parts that Max Payne 3 chose specifically to depict. It makes me sad that this is the product that was made; this is what Rockstar chose to depict of my family, my friends, and my country. To the people that live here, to the people that know and love people that live in the world Max Payne 3 chose to take place in, it is a very painful experience to go through again and again. São Paulo is really a beautiful state, and most will never ever get to experience it; only the people that have lived here would really understand how amazing and beautiful it truly can be. But to the average audience that loves Rockstar, all of this is alright and fine by them; they’re never going to feel offended, and they’re never going to have a problem with it. They’re never going to feel their blood pressure rise when the game says something so insanely racist you have to take a step back. They’re never going to wonder how their friends and family are viewed due to the negative connotations being from a favela already carried, made worse by a totally inept and ignorant development team. Because they don’t care. To the average American consumer, it is just another game set in a "shithole," a "warzone," where they get to escape their privileged realities and pretend they’re some sort of hero. Rockstar manages to reinforce every single negative stereotype about Brazil for these people. And they’re going to eat it up; they’ll believe it because they are inherently ignorant. It is a game made for Americans, not for the Brazilian people, and there is nothing more American than pretending to be a badass hero in some “shithole” where the only goal is to kill as many brown people as possible.

I have gone on a few tangents here and there, but I have stated my case. Max Payne 3 is a racist video game, plain and simple. It's not going to beat around the bush and pretend it's because Rockstar is doing it by accident because it honestly feels very deliberate. They had writers approve a lot of this stuff, and it baffles me that at no point a writer went and said how kind of messed up it all is. I will leave a single quote here that I feel perfectly illustrates what I mean by all of this:

“We’d half destroyed São Paulo’s most hallowed place of worship.” A stadium.

After finishing both routes, I'd say this is probably a perfect remake to me. The main problems with the Near Side routes were that action was unappealing and Ciel's route was too similar to Arcueid's. Welp, this fixes both of those problems. The actions become an absolute spectacle to watch, while still retaining all the heartfelt moments, while Ciel's route is basically completely changed and gives her character far more to work with.
Not to mention, the production on this is insane. While slightly less cinematic than Mahoyo, the amount of backgrounds and CGs is truly astounding.
My only complaint is really that it's only half the game, but I already know that Red Garden's version of the Maid routes will have me bursting into tears so I'm willing to wait.
10/10