better than it has any right to be. solid platform fighter with a ton of polish. really fun team mechanics. would never play solos. tom and jerry is one of the best animated characters i've ever seen in a fighting game.

people also hate on the monetization, but you've been begging for f2p fighting games for years now. this is what f2p looks like. pick your 2 characters before you start or pony up and drop stacks. f2p has battle passes. f2p is pay per character. if you think Project L is going to be "different" f2p, i've got bad news. this is what you were asking for. hold the l and deal with the mess you've made.

(and for the record, i'm not defending the monetization. i just realize what f2p means. i will continue to, and would honestly rather, buy full price fighting games with season passes. but this is the world we live in, and you have to accept the realities of the f2p you've so desperately been begging for. learn to deal with the predatory aspects and be smart.)

inFAMOUS is a decent experience overall, but its frequent foreshadowing towards that bomb-drop of an ending is unforgettable. Certainly blew my mind as a kid, quickly becoming one of the most memorable video game endings during my childhood. And that still holds up.

There's a lot to like here, from each new ability instilling a sense of great power to the city's hopeless atmosphere. The script is dark and delivered with a satisfying dryness. Cole never feels like a goody-two-shoes hero, even when the player is at the maximum in the "Hero" meter. There's a lot of morally ambiguous lines of dialogue, and it seems he's constantly struggling with a balance between selfishness and selflessness, even if the player is making the "good" choices.

Many of inFAMOUS' side-missions are not fun, with some of the worst being when the player is doing cool tricks for a photographer, or when you need to steathily follow a guy with a package (in a game where stealth is non-existant), or when you need to scour every corner of a building to find surveillance devices to destroy. These all suck. I stopped trying to complete them after the first island.

The game's main missions are fun, with the setpieces where the player is climbing the tower or exploring the junkyard city being pretty memorable. All of the gangs are also friggin' cool. The Reapers are like weird shadowy people, and the junk fellers straight up just have scrap all over them.

Zeke is pretty obnoxious, although I respect how flawed Sucker Punch attempts to make him. His decisions throughout the game paint him as someone the player is supposed to hate, but his constant self-doubt and self-loathing makes him feel real.

While all of this might make it sound like inFAMOUS is a great game, the base mechanics that surround this experience aren't particularly fun. There's really nothing to do in Empire City. You can do the game's side-missions, but they're small objectives that feel surprisingly inconsequential. inFAMOUS seems like it could've been more effective if it were a linear experience, as the game essentially came down to me just running from one part of the city to another to get to the main missions. However, the benefit of the cities being open means that you can freely parkour and grind on the train rails. That stuff is pretty cool.

My overall verdict here is that I like inFAMOUS' main campaign. Cole's electricity abilities are satisfying and even though the story can be a bit boring, there are some cool twists and turns. But I hate inFAMOUS' side-missions and I think the open-world is subpar. Its XP progression systems are fine, but I never felt any incentive to collect blast shards or jump around the city for fun.

How much action can a horror game have before it is no longer able to be considered survival-horror? It's a topic gaming journalists and gamers in general have been discussing for a while now. F.E.A.R certainly has an interesting place in that debate. When you look back at the Resident Evil franchise you'll find that there was a relatively brief (and fairly recent as of this writing) period where its fans had basically turned their backs on it after the 5th and 6th main entries supposedly strayed too far away from their established roots by adopting big set pieces, a more energetic pace, cooperative gameplay, and third-person shooting mechanics that would rival even Gears of War's. They did retain some core design staples like item and inventory management though, which on paper still makes them a better representation of their original genre than this relatively standard FPS experience would be.

Rather than forcing you into slow, clunky combat encounters against grotesque monsters, or not giving you any means of self-defense at all as is the modern trend, this title is completely centered around fast and furious firefights against military-esque soldiers. Ammo is never a concern, medkits are plentiful, and you even have the ability to slow down time Max Payne style in short spurts to give you an edge. It's genuinely an absolute blast. The way your foes gush or explode into red mists of blood while debris from the semi-destructible scenery fills the air leads to visually exciting confrontations. The (to this day) highly touted enemy AI has begun to show signs of jank and age, but I remained impressed nonetheless by their capabilities on the battlefield. They'll vault over obstacles, communicate your position to one another, form strategies and try to flank you. Essentially coming up with tactics that extend beyond merely ducking behind a piece of cover with their heads poking out just far enough for you to score a headshot, which feels like all you see in our current post-CoD era. It's hard to complain about any of this from a pure fun standpoint, but it should come as no surprise that such an approach completely removes all the feelings of helplessness you would find in something like Outlast. So the only area where an accurate comparison to gems of that ilk could be made is the tone.

F.E.A.R. is structured very similarly to Half-Life in that rather than completing a string of segmented levels, you'll be making a mostly continuous progress through the world, save for the occasional interruption by a loading screen or segue-esque helicopter ride to an entirely new location. A style we haven't seen much since the BioShock series. Outside of a brief excursion into a rundown apartment complex though, the environments you'll at times get momentarily lost in lack the personality of standouts like Black Mesa, Rapture, or even the underground mining tunnels from the first Red Faction. What they do have however is atmosphere. The dynamic lighting and disquieting soundtrack craft a wonderfully tense, unsettling vibe. To the point where I felt a sense of legitimate apprehension every time I was faced with going down another pitch-black hallway. The source of my anxiety being a raven-haired little specter clearly inspired by J-horror phantoms. She's never actually a physical threat to the player, but her unexpected appearances are good for a chill up your spine or a quick jolt regardless. Allow me to inform you, this is coming from a guy who didn't find Dead Space scary in the slightest. It's terror is sporadically undermined by a few out of place segments of intentionally comedic intents involving chasing down a "Cheezee Pooz" eating fatso in a Hawaiian shirt as he tries to cram his overly wide backside into air vents in an effort to escape, or elevator rides accompanied by comedically cheery music that get stopped on every floor by hostile gunmen. Although the biggest thing that may keep you from appreciating the full scope of the nightmare offered here are the sound mixing issues which cause it to be hard to hear dialog without severely lowering everything else in the options menu, or how much of the supplementary information is hidden away in answering machine messages that are boring to listen to. Flaws that will limit your possible enjoyment of the dark, twisted story.

While developer Monolith mostly nailed the thematic and presentation aspects, it's the side of the package you control that makes it difficult to justify calling it true survival-horror, rather than just horror-flavored, given the lengths it willingly goes to ensure you think you're Arnold Schwarzenegger or somebody. A fact that's slightly worse on consoles due to the exclusive "Instant Action" mode that's entirely focused on the gunplay and nothing else. Yet, I guess I'm in agreement with what IGN said once, that "survival horror is one of the only genres defined not by gameplay mechanics, but by theme, atmosphere, subject matter, and design philosophy." Because of that I can't help but put F.E.A.R. in the same vein as the Silent Hill's and Amnesia's. Having the ability to more effectively stand your ground against threats shouldn't matter in my mind so long as the rest of the surrounding material fits the bill, and are we honestly going to pretend the more commonly accepted into fold Condemned duology didn't emphasize forcing you to fight rather than flee, or that The Suffering wasn't basically a near straight-up shooter? Nevertheless, regardless of whether you agree with me or are wrong not in terms of what this should rightfully be classified as, I believe you'll come to the same conclusion that it's a pretty great game. A product from a time when the single-player was the main focus so it doesn't even matter that the multiplayer is dead. Worth seeking out if you're a fan of those not quite Boomer, but no longer "Modern" shooters along the lines of the original Prey or Doom 3.

8/10

I finally made it to the main event….The reason I started playing all the games again….You know I never! Ever! EVER! Thought I’d be here doing this. But the impossible just happened….I’m giving BlazBlue Central Fiction 4/5 stars (and I bumped up Calamity Trigger to 4 as well since I still like that game more as a package). Like….You guys don’t understand I spent years hating this game with the fury of 1000 suns. This is gonna be a long one. So please bear with me.

To be honest this playthrough put a lot into perspective. But I guess we should get the new characters out of the way. But before that once again I’m not looking at this game from an entirely competitive perspective.

Hibiki finally became playable after being robbed of the honor in Chronophantasma and he’s a rush down character with the ability to create shadow clones.

Naoto Kurogane is basically an alternate dimensional counterpart to Ragna and his move set reflects this in subtle ways. His Drive Bloodedge allows him to create weapons out of his own blood. However that’s not the main attraction. That would be a special trait known as the Enhancer. Which allows him to do well enhanced special moves by doing them off of a dash and because of his absurd execution due to this I’ve heard him referred to as “arthritis the character”

Nine The Phantom is a midrange character with no drive ability. Instead of that depending on the previous 3 normal attacks she used she can use one of 20 different spells!

Hades Izanami is an oppressive rushdown character with a variety of tool including her Drive Exodus Arc, the ability to float instead of double jump and a shield special that blocks all incoming attacks as long as she has barrier gauge left. She can also stop time Dio style if you feel like it.

Susanoo is yet another rushdown character with a catch. He has access to none of his special moves at the beginning of the round and needs to unlock them with his Drive Divine Warrior. Which in my opinion is one of the dumbest character gimmicks of all time but considering he has a move for literally any situation I guess it’s warranted…Sort of.

Es is an all arounder with her Drive Chrest Arts allowing her to create after images with her sword slashes that explode into spikes after a set period of time. She also has access to her enchanter specials that enhances her type slasher special moves.

Mai is hard to explain…She’s one of the easiest characters in the game. But explaining why takes a bit of effort. There’s her drive which let’s her throw a spear and can make it home in on the opponent. But that’s practically a footnote. The real attraction is that instead of a typical chain combo system she uses something called the Variable Arts system. Basically she gets auto combos. Guess that wasn’t that hard to explain after all. There’s a little more to it but yeah…

Last but not least we have Jubei who finally finally finally after all these years became playable. He’s a mixup character who’s drive allows him to slash through his opponent and it can be enhanced to follow a path but using his Install super. Admittedly he’s the character I know the least about playstyle wise and I wish I could say more but I need to move on.

This is a pretty good set of newcomers with most of them actually being a long time coming. Although I wish so many of them weren’t from side games or Manga/Light Novels that I have no interesting in reading/playing. Sorry Es but I skipped your subseries.

In terms of major systems changes there haven’t really been many just tweaks the only major additions being the inclusions of a new type of super “Exceed Accels” these work that by activating overdrive while it’s already active it will end instantly with the user preforming a super attack. I like these as they’re a fun way to end overdrive combos. The other is the addition of the “Active Flow” state. While in Active Flow you deal more damage among other buffs. I don’t really have an opinion on this because while it rewards taking more offensive actions it kinda just goes off at random in my experience. There is a science to it but in practice it just goes off when it feels like it.

The other change to gameplay worth noting is that several character had old moves replaced with new ones. I admittedly find these hit or miss personally. Because on one hand I love Jin’s new snowflake move. But on the other I hate Nu-13’s Luminous Slave move since at least to me it’s a blatant downgrade from Spike Chaser.

So I’m going to put this simply. In terms of pure gameplay this is the single greatest fighting game ever created. It took Chronophantasma Extend which was a big improvement over Continuum Shift Extend which was already a great game and improved it to perfection. As much as I find Active Flow to be inconsequential and don’t agree with all the movelist changes this game just plays so fucking well. It’s just so fluid and fun. It’s perfectly easy to get into but has so many things to master. If you only care about playing competitively this is the game for you! The PC version has rollback so you literally have no reason to not play it when it goes on sale.

Now for the part for people like me who don’t exist only to play online…This is where the game faulters a bit and is the part that made me hate this game for so many years. Oh boy the single player modes. To start off with the good:

The Combo Trials in this game are the best I have ever seen! Seriously if you even remotely enjoy combos trials you will have a good time and they contain some actually useful combos. Es’ straight up teaches you the Es loop! I love it! Buuuut that’s probably the best mode of the bunch…..Well Tutorial is the same as always I guess.

Speed Star is probably the most pointless mode I have ever seen since you can achieve the same result with arcade mode and a stopwatch and Score Attack is just Score Attack…

Arcade Mode has been changed in that now the majority of the cast has 3 arcade routes forming a 3 part story…This is pretty neat or it would be if it weren’t for stuff I’ll get into with the story…Also playing all 3 routes can be a little draining if done right after the other.

Now for without question the most interesting side mode. Grim of Abyss Mode. Which is essentially a fusion between Abyss Mode and Unlimited Mars mode. Except being worst then both individually. So to start with the basics your goal is to complete the boss dungeon which is a gauntlet of powered up versions of the base cast beside Susanoo (Es, Mai, and Jubei were DLC). With you being able to restart from the boss you’re stuck on. This mode is great on paper. But in practice…

First problem: These aren’t Unlimited Characters. Those were completely removed from the game. Okay that’s not entirely true because in arcade mode Nine, Izanami, and Ragna all have Unlimited forms which they carry over into this mode. But everyone else? NOPE! Completely gone! Instead they just get a special trait like reducing the damage they take from everything but Astrals or being able to infinitely use their Astral or do more damage the more meter they have. Just stuff like that.
Now while these are cool and can create challenging fights. They have nowhere near the creativity the Unlimited Characters from the previous games had not to mention Unlimited Characters would show up in Abyss mode in previous games so what’s the point! Once again they’re not even in Vs Mode. Which is such a shame because at least for me a highlight of each game was unlocking all of them and seeing how busted they are by using them in Vs.

It's just so weird to see them removed since most the cast were already done in the previous game and all they would need to do is tweak them slightly. This gets even weirder because of Nine, Izanami, and Ragna who do have them and because there’s an unfinished Unlimited Susanoo in the game’s code so odds are they were planned to be in the game but were scrapped.

My friend told me that the reason might have been people hacking them into online ranked matches in the older games. But was that really that rampant of an issue and is it really worth purposely removing content from the game and once again you can still do it anyways with Ragna, Nine, and Izanami! So what was the point!

Anyways….As you beat these bosses you unlock normal dungeons where you can grind for Skills and Grimoires. You unlock a random Skill which will give you a bonus to your abilities of the dungeon’s tier every time you defeat a normal enemy and a Grimoire every time you defeat a boss. Leveling up your character along the way. Once you finish a dungeon you can head to the Magic Workshop to equip a Grimoire set skills into it and enhance your stats with player points obtained through leveling up. You can also extract skills from a Grimoire deleting it and have your player points refunded which can then level the skills up based off of how much you used the Grimoire with higher tier Skills requiring higher tier Grimoires and if you haven’t already noticed this is an extremely convoluted and grindy system that gets annoying after a while!

Especially with some of the later bosses (looking at you Terumi!) being horribly designed! Terumi is literally just a level check that requires very certain skills and stats in order to beat! But I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t still a very fun mode and it’s probably unironically the best mode in the game.

sigh alright here we go. Time to talk about…Story Mode….The big finale to the story line of the series…Or at least Ragna’s story….There’s only one place to start with this one…Anyone who knows anything about the launch of this game knows what I’m about to talk about…The voice acting….Yeah…for the 3 people who have read my reviews of the previous games and Cross Tag (which actually came out after this game) you might have been wondering why I talked about the English voice acting so much…Well it’s because this game cut it. For no good reason! Seriously the reason they gave was so they could get it to the west faster! I’m not joking! Youtuber MikeTheVA actually made a great video on this topic which I totally recommend you watch since he does a great job explaining the situation and did it far better then I ever could.

I do have to disagree with him on the Japanese cast being great. I personally think it’s decent with a few great moments. It just lacks the charm and character the Dub has. But even if for the sake of argument the Sub cast was the best thing ever. It doesn’t change the fact that this was lazy as fuck! To put it into perspective for the Sub is always better the Dub people in the room. Imagine your favorite anime which you could watch Subbed. For its final season was only Dubbed. The subbed version was never made. Wouldn’t that be irritating as fuck?

On to the next presentation issue. The animated FMV cutscenes don’t have music. This hasn’t been a thing since Calamity Trigger. There’s a reason there’s a lot of insert CF cutscene with fitting music here videos on youtube and on the other end of the spectrum the VN style cutscenes (the majority of the mode) might be a bit too animated. Mind you this one is a bit of a nitpick. Buit the game still uses 3 portrait poses for most characters. Idle, Attack, and Defeated. This was fine in the first 3 due to them not moving very much even in CP where a lot more was added. In CF they move all over the place and it just looks wrong a lot of times.

Okay you say the presentation is off most of the time but how is the writing? It’s an absolute Travesty! Holy shit is it terrible. You know it’s bad when the first third is pretty much complete filler and by the end Ragna the Bloodedge aka the guy who spent most of the series being the only sane person in the room. Starts spouting completely nonsensical bullshit that’s so far up it’s own ass I’m genuinely impressed. Like characters making up powers on the fly is the least of this story’s problems. Seriously why can Ragna suddenly steal people’s memories? Like what the hell. This is so weird considering the series was an expert at foreshadowing up to this point. Seriously this is never implied to be something he can do in the first 3 as far as I’m aware. But once again that’s the least of this story’s problems. Seriously I will challenge you on the idea that BlazBlue has its head up its ass for every game but this one!
Not to mention the lack of Unlimited characters strikes again in the form of making a ton of climatic fights extremely underwhelming.
There’s also some issues with the structure as every so often you unlock sub scenarios which show a different perspective happening at the same time as the main plot. Problem is that you have to exit the current chapter head to the story menu then select the scenario and half of these could have just been part of the main story. Serious Ragna meeting Naoto for the first tine happens in one of these. Not to mention more then one character is introduced in these most noticeably with once again Naoto and Es. So it’s really weird just seeing them randomly show up in the main story with no intro just because you didn’t do these.

So overall what are my thoughts.. Well honestly…. I kinda love it. Once again this story is horrible! But at least for me it’s horrible in a so bad it’s good way. I was laughing my ass off at several points and by the end I was genuinely excited to see how the next mainline game will follow up on this dumpster fire. Whenever that happens…I hope it happens…

Here’s the thing though…Even with my complains about the side modes… even if I only enjoy the plot for how terrible it is. Even though they got lazy and cut things…This game is still many, many, many times better then most fighting games in every regard.

That’s what this playthrough put into perspective for me. Most fighting games especially modern ones tend to launch with literally nothing to do besides go online and play locally with friends and maybe a barely interesting Arcade Mode. But BlazBlue at least the mainline games isn’t like that. Central Fiction even when it fails at its single player content still bare minimum tries to give the player a ton of fun things to do.

It’s honestly sad that the only modern game made by a reputable studio I can think of that even tries to be close was Granblue Fantasy Versus and that game has it’s own problems holding it back even worse then CF (KOF XV gets an honorable mention). Central Fiction should be the standard which fighting game single player should try to be. Calamity Trigger is the bare minimum a game should have and Continuum Shift Extend and Chronophantasma Extend should be the stretch goal. The reason this game gets its 4 out of 5 is because it goes above and beyond what most fighting games even attempt to do and I’d say this full replay was worth the 5 year wait. I’d still say the first 3 are better but this game is still great. Shame Cross Tag couldn’t do what this game did despite it’s best efforts.

This is exactly the type of game I would have loved to be able to get behind. It's a small project made by a team of only 8 people who really poured their hearts and souls into trying to bring their wild vision to life in as close of an approximation to a triple-A title as they could manage on what was likely a very tight budget. The premise feels like something you'd see coming from Remedy Entertainment, with you playing as an amnesiac, completely insane man with psychic powers who at any point will just start having nightmarish hallucinations on his quest to uncover the mystery of his origins. It leads to a lot of crazy sights and inventive scenarios that, while not really pretty to look at thanks to the ugly graphics, are certainly interesting to behold. Unfortunately, the experience frustrated me from literally the second it began and did not relent until it's conclusion.

Things kick off in one of the more horror-flavored dream sequences in which you run around a small apartment for far too long firing away at weird mannequin monsters who will instantly kill you if they get too close. It's an aggravating process due to the limited amount of ammo you're given forcing you to make every shot count, lest you be left with an empty clip and an unavoidable demise marching straight towards you. A task that's easier said than done as a result of the loose aiming making it difficult to line up your reticle with a target quickly, effectively, and without wasting precious bullets before they reach you, leading to a lot of irritating checkpoint reloads (which in my opinion are always placed too far apart). It never gets better from there. Whether what you'll be doing next is a Silent Hill-inspired stealth/puzzle stage that takes place in a creepy location, or a Jason Bourne-style action level set in a posh hotel, the tedious design, unreliable controls, poor damage detection (sometimes headshots flat-out won't register at all), and plethora of cheap one-hit deaths suck all the fun out of this remarkably varied, unpredictable adventure. The writing doesn't fare much better...

With all of the crazy concepts and unique imagery floating around, you'd hope the plot would at least be somewhat decent. The narrative is a jumbled mess of ideas however, constantly hinting at hidden agendas for the supporting characters, giving you a glimpse of a forgotten tragedy in the protagonist's past, or implementing some new sci-fi element like Matrix-esque pills that don't receive the slightest bit of explanation or development. We never even find out how the leading man got his abilities or lost his memory, which was supposed to be the whole point of this! It's the kind of thing that will leave you confused, unfulfilled, and with a TON of unanswered questions after the credits have rolled. A cliffhanger ending offers a vague promise of actually exploring the litany of components introduced here in a sequel, but to be brutally honest a follow-up probably has next to no chance of ever coming out.

Past Cure does a legitimately great job of presenting an intriguing package brimming with imagination, creativity, and uniqueness. The devs were even nice enough to further flesh it out post-release with stuff such as entirely new sections and mechanics through a free patch/update that acts as a soft relaunch. Yet, it altogether drops the ball with its storytelling and gameplay in ways that cause it be both unsatisfying and downright painful to persist through, despite the glimpses of inventive potential shown by its creators. So while I've been able to embrace similar low-rent anomalies in the past when others have lambasted them (i.e. Deadfall Adventures, Zombeer), I find myself wholly unable to recommend this at all. It isn't just one of the worst games I've played in recent memory. It's one of the worst games I've ever played period.

3/10