Wii Sports is many things.

One of the most important games of all time.

A showcase of a revolutionary new way that games could be controlled.

A game that can be played with anyone regardless of their familiarity with or affinity for videogames.

And a bit of a barebones pack-in game if we're being honest.

But putting that aside, I think you really do have to give it credit for being one of the only video games to ever have entire non-gaming families playing together all across the world. It's the ultimate casual game and it's worth noting over something like Wii Sports Resort because it represents the motion control fad at its peak.

That's right, motion control was a fad. Or was it? It's hard to tell, but we did learn one thing from the Wii era and that's the fact that many hardcore gamers don't like getting up from the couch and moving their arms to play games. It's true that those people would never use motion as their main method of control. However, I think others had the potential to be convinced, but were ultimately unimpressed by motion control as a concept. We might have to blame Nintendo for that.

Nintendo popularized motion control without showing the potential. They didn't include gyroscopes in the initial Wii remotes, making for an extremely limited execution of the motion control concept. Wii Sports was a worse game for not having compatibility with a Wii Motion Plus gyroscope. This is clear once you see the giant increase in quality with the motion control in games like Red Steel 2 and Wii Sports Resort. Maybe motion control would still be a popular method of play if the original Wii Sports had Wii Motion Plus support.

But then again, maybe motion control would have fizzed out eventually anyway. It's impossible to know. But given the fact that Wii Sports was many people's first and/or only experience with the Wii, I think we can both thank Wii Sports for popularizing motion control as well as blame it for relegating that control method to only be used with VR, Nintendo consoles, and gyro aiming for the forseeable future.

We are never getting Red Steel 3.

Man am I glad to be done with this one. This game has been a barrier to getting into the Devil May Cry series for me because it's hard to get myself to play games that I don't really like. I could have skipped over DMC 1 but the fans kept saying that this one is worth playing - with some fans even saying that it's the purest form of Devil May Cry and future entries water things down. The idea of anyone being elitist over this game is ridiculous to me. I suppose if the motto of JRPG fans is "It gets good after 80 hours" then the motto of character action game fans is "It gets good after you go for a perfect ranking on the hardest difficulty". Yeah, I'm not doing that. I'd rather invest my time in an action game that isn't randomly flipping the camera all over the place with no regard for the player.

The camera ruins the game for me. In a game that's supposed to be hard but fair, the camera does everything in its power to make sure the player experiences plenty of cheap deaths. It should be obvious, but a resident evil style camera doesn't work for a game that's very fast paced, relies on a quick succession of inputs, and allows the protagonist to perform different moves depending on the direction he's facing. A random camera shift could happen at any moment that changes what your inputs do, resulting in a loss of player control. Once again I have to ask why there are any hardcore fans that prefer this game when the constantly shifting camera limits the degree that you can be in control of your own moveset. I know people prefer Kamiya directed games because of their focus on the ranking system but this easily one of Kamiya's worst games. It has a solid combat system for the time and you can really see the aspects that make it a Kamiya game... But it's just needlessly frustrating due to the camera.

Devil May Cry can feel like a boss rush at times and while there are a number of challenging encounters, most of them you have to fight 2-3 times with little variation in their movesets. I can see that Devil May Cry wants to be the game that's constantly throwing challenging fights at the player, but this isn't as impactful when it's the just the same fight in the same way repeatedly. The final boss encounter was also underwhelming. There's a shmup section for the first phase, which is fine. It is a Kamiya game after all. But the second phase which is fought on land is also just a battle of projectiles, which seems like a ill-fitting way to round out the experience. It's not an outlandish idea to suggest the final boss should have used the melee mechanics which you've been using the entire game.

For the origin of the acclaimed Devil May Cry series I was pretty surprised to see how weak the story is. I enjoyed the character Dante more from cultural osmosis, memes, and SMT Nocturne than I did in his own game. His personality is far less confident and quippy than the internet would have you believe. I've heard from purists that the games after DMC 1 ruin Dante's personality... bro, what personality? When people compared original RE4 Leon to Dante I was expecting him to be similarly badass... But it turns out Leon makes a better Dante than Dante himself. I never once bought into Trish and Dante's character relationship. The game expects you believe that these two care for each other but they've only spoken to each other a handful of times... And one of those times was Trish betraying Dante.

I respect and appreciate what this game accomplished by inventing the character-action game genre. But as a game I didn't enjoy it very much. This is the only DMC game I've played so I can't speak for the series, but I'm already seriously doubting the purists who say that this one's the best.

When I heard that Trails of Cold Steel had the weakest reception for a Trails game I was curious as to why that is. It's the first game in the Trails series that reaches AA level in terms of production quality, so you might assume that the overall experience would be better as a result. Other people probably assumed the same, as apparently it's popular to skip over the Trails in the Sky games and the Crossbell duology in favor of starting with this game.

After playing Trails of Cold Steel myself, I think the upgrade from a small-scale series to AA levels of production quality drew in a lot of unfavorable comparisons to contemporary games. Instead of being impressive for a small series, Trails is now underwhelming for AA standards. Trails of Cold Steel is a bit ugly. There's pop-in, ugly textures, way too many low-poly objects, stiff animations, and it all unfortunately gives off the appearance of a cheap looking game. And personally, I think the new presentation loses a bit of the charm of the older games. Trails of Cold Steel uses 3D character models instead of character portrait artwork to accompany its dialogue. The faces of the character models are way less expressive than the character portraits, so it sometimes feels like this game has less of a personality than the older ones. Speaking of lost personality, the treasure chests no longer talk to you when you check them twice. I'm aware that's something that was only in the English translations of the older games, but it was one of my favorite things about those games so it's unfortunate that it's not here.

The presentation is one thing, but I think the big reason why this game has a mixed reception from fans is its story. After Trails to Azure we've now reverted to a Trails in the Sky style setup game where very little happens for the majority of the story's duration. But where Cold Steel differs from Trails in the Sky First Chapter is that FC managed to have a self contained conflict that was resolved by the end of the game. The late stages of Trails in the Sky are about stopping a military coup. The late stages of Trails of Cold Steel are about putting on a school festival - with some random ass-pull final dungeon and final boss in the mix that come out of nowhere and don't push the story forward much. The climax of Trails of Cold Steel actually happens after the final boss... but there's no real additional final boss, just a series of gimmick fights before the game ends and tells you to play Trails of Cold Steel II. Don't get me wrong, the ending was actually my favorite part of the game, but I can't say this trend of making an uneventful 80 hour RPG where the ending is the only time something significant happens is something I'm very fond of. But I will say the ending definitely saved the game for me.

Trails of Cold Steel feels a bit like a Persona game, as it takes place at a military academy. There are school life segments in addition to the field studies which advance the main story. This is fine as a setup, but what I think Trails of Cold Steel gets wrong about this formula is that there's no sense of looming danger while the school life segments are going on. In the Persona games there's always a countdown until something bad happens while the school life segments are ongoing. In Trails of Cold Steel there's no danger during these parts so it just ends up feeling like a life-sim cozy game that drags the pacing of the story down. This is still the case even though the life sim elements of Trails of Cold Steel go by fairly quickly. Contextualizing the gameplay loop back into the main story is important. Also I just have to say... At this point in the Trails series I am really starting to get sick of all the busywork sidequests that are required to advance the story. It looks like the sidequest doors of Trails in the Sky the 3rd will remain unmatched.

If the purpose of this first Trails of Cold Steel game was to get the player to like the main cast, then they did a passable job. I liked how certain characters were antagonistic toward each other but became better friends due to the events of the story. But I will say that for all that effort in trying to make the characters likable, there are a number of characters that I straight up dislike. As far as first games go, it seems like Trails From Zero accomplished a lot more with its characters without any life sim elements and without a plot with the pacing of molasses. Also, because of certain characters, Trails of Cold Steel is the most cringeworthy game I've played since Xenoblade 2.

It might just be stockholm syndrome as a result of trying to play all the Trails games in sequence but I actually enjoy the combat of this game a fair bit. It's the same combat as in the previous games but the addition of link attacks is pretty fun. Combat is where the the upgrade in production values really shines. Having full character models instead of chibi sprites allows for attacks to have more impact with the increased animation quality. However, I'm not a fan of the changes to the orbment system. In previous games maximizing your orbments to get the best possible arts felt like a satisfying puzzle, but in Trails of Cold Steel the system has been dumbed down to just allow you to choose what arts you want directly. Lame.

My favorite thing about this game aside from the combat system is the music. Is it a hot take to say that Trails of Cold Steel has one of the best selections of music in the series? Every battle theme is good - even the normal battle theme, which is something I can't say about some of the other Trails games. It's my favorite normal battle theme in the series because it actually pumps you up for battle. And you can definitely tell that the sound team has gotten a lot better with JRPG town and field music since Trails in the Sky FC. I think Cold Steel I and Trails in the Sky the 3rd are my picks for best overall soundtrack so far. But I'll have to give them all another listen to be sure.

I don't hate this game. But there are a good amount of things that I don't like about it. I'd be a lot more negative if the game just ended after the final boss without the events that take place afterward. I think this could be the start of a good story arc but I'm a little concerned that the other Trails of Cold Steel games seem to have somewhat lower reception from fans as well. But one thing is for sure: don't start the Trails franchise with game. Not only does it spoil the events of Trails to Azure, but the slow pacing and uneventful story might be enough to make you disinterested in the franchise.