Talk about a comeback! After the abortively disastrous Angel of Darkness, who could have imagined that Lara's next adventure would be one of the most fulfilling, replayable and, yes, underappreciated games of the entire console generation? Probably Nostradamus, if he wasn't too busy predicting his own death.

Tomb Raider: Legend is a tour de force and a half. Sporting a revamped gameplay system and a design philosophy consistent with the century it's in (a big ask of a Tomb Raider game up to this point), it's one of the breeziest and most enjoyable games I've ever played. It's short - so short you can beat it in one or two sittings - but immensely satisfying. The controls are smooth, the story marvellous, the graphics stunning, the soundtrack exquisite. This is the one Tomb Raider game all newcomers should play.

This is among my most-replayed games ever, and across three different platforms - the PS2, PC and PSP. If possible, I recommend you try the PS2 version; it runs the best and is free of any hindrances. The PC version is the next-best choice, but configuring a controller is slightly troubling, and the 'Next-Gen Content' features introduce a lot of bugs - it's better to play with them off, as it's not worth getting a plasticky early-Xbox 360 sheen on Lara's beautiful face once the textures start spazzing all over the place. The PSP version suffers from a lot of slowdown, but is still completely playable should you need this game on the go.

And why wouldn't you? This is the definitive Tomb Raider adventure - encapsulating all that was good about the 2000s and about the world at large. I don't need to summarize the Wikipedia article or any of that stupid shit for you. Just take my word on this and go play it.

Uncharted, eat your heart out. This game codified action-platformers for years to come and yet somehow never gets credit for it. What is wrong with people?

There have been dozens of Angel of Darkness reviews before this one, and there will be dozens more after, that start with the vapid high-school-essay preamble about how Core Design had to work really hard and Eidos gave them impossible deadlines and that's why Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness was stillbirth in video game form. To them I say: Bull-fucking-shit. Angel of Darkness had a three-year development cycle. Imagine the horror Core's veteran designers must have felt when they walked into the office, two years into production, to find out that their team had achieved fuck-all.

Angel of Darkness is infuriating to think about, let alone play. There genuinely is the potential for a wonderful game in here, and they could have gone about it any which way. The early Paris segments showcase the potential for an open-world, Shenmue-style murder mystery, or a Eurojank immersive RPG like Gothic. Lara Croft is at her queeniest bitchiest here, and any 'X minutes of Lara being iconic' video you find will have half its runtime dedicated to her dialogue in this game. Any decision would have been better to make it an action-platformer like past entries, because this game controls like shit. I would have taken a point-and-click over this.

The biggest reason Angel of Darkness sucks is the controls. These are not the precise, responsive, consistent tank controls of the previous games. Nor are they the three-dimensional, free-floating controls that the series had spent seven years refusing to adopt. Instead, they are the synaptic routing of a slug trying to do ballet. For fuck's sake, Angel of Darkness, make up your damn MIND. Do you want to be a medieval tank sim or not? Do you want to register my button presses as holding them or a toggle switch? I activated sticky keys more than once trying to walk. It's downright vulgar.

A lot of discourse around Angel of Darkness is, "the gameplay sucks, but the story is pretty good." These people did not finish the game. Yes, the setup of a murder mystery is an intriguing one, and the early game shows a lot of promise - particularly as the killer is literally Jack Nicholson. Talking to NPCs and doing chores for story bits is the best part of the game, particularly because Lara is well-written. But this whole system is soon abandoned in favour of the miserable platforming and combat, and the plot unravels completely in the second half.

A prologue segment in the main menu showcases how even making Angel of Darkness a fucking audiobook would have been a better choice. It tells us how Lara survived the events of the fourth game, became a Bedouin tribeswoman, and formed a rivalry with a guy named Scar who looks like Jafar - two Disney villains in one. This is never brought up again in the main game. Instead, at the end you meet a guy who Lara recognizes, and it is heavily implied that the audience should recognize him too. I have no fucking clue who this man is. I have never seen him before in my entire life. Not in this game, not in the entire series before that. It ruined the entire boss fight to constantly wonder, "Who is this guy? Am I supposed to know him?"

But no character stirs quite as much animosity in me as Kurtis Trent, the deuteragonist who walked right out of a shitty young-adult novel. This guy is a void of charisma. He is without charm. He is without nuance. He is a combination of every bad-boy trope the nineties and noughties are made fun of for today. He has a big motorbike and an unfortunate soul patch. He wears a turtleneck-and-T-shirt combo over baggy cargo pants. He has a cowboy holster. He has these annoying fucking oily bangs that almost, but not quite, cover his eyes. He smokes cigarettes and hardly speaks and sexually assaults Lara in their very first proper meeting.

I found this character so downright abhorrent that I decided a bit of investigative journalism was in order. Since Kurtis was obviously added as a bit of fanservice for the ladies, I had to find out if any of them actually found him attractive when the game was released. My intention was to find a 40-year-old veteran raider, and ask her if Kurtis really is what girls liked back then, or if it was just what a middle-aged executive thought girls liked. I found out there was an entire fansite called Kurtis Trent Estrogen Brigade. This proves nothing. There are Reviewbrah groupies too.

And get this: you play as him. Why they thought people would want to play as this fucker, I am unaware. He's weirdly animated, too - Lara looks okay when she stands and runs with her legs together, because she's a woman. Not this macho bastard. When the guy's entire personality is trying to tell you he listens to Incubus without telling you he listens to Incubus, it's funny to see him wiggling his gynoid hips all over the place.

Angel of Darkness harboured great promise in its design, but in execution it's a disaster beyond redemption. After such a colossal failure, it would be an act of sheer naivety for a publisher not to confiscate the IP. Core Design created one of the greatest video game series of all time, but they had lost their mojo long ago - from Tomb Raider III, in fact. If I ever start feeling sympathy for Core, remind me to play Angel of Darkness again. Thank God for Crystal Dynamics.

"Sega have no plans to bring Valkyria Chronicles 3 over to the West." Few sentences in the English language are capable of causing as much everlasting grief and misery as this one. With the possible exception of, "Honey, I'm in love with your younger sister."

Yet that was what my twelve-year-old self had to deal with, shortly after finishing Valkyria Chronicles 2 and deeming it my favourite game of all time.

takes a long drag of his cigarette

You kids, you have no fucking clue what it was like wanting a JRPG localized, waiting for the day that never comes. You get your Trails, and your Shin Megaymi Tenseis; you take the good goods away and the kickbacks, the shakedown cabbage and the pistoleros, and you're NOTHING. I played half of this game in Japanese, guessing at the story, simply because I loved the series that much. I played it with a machine-translated script of the game open in my browser, glancing between screens to get some semblance of a plot. I only stopped when I could no longer figure out what the fuck to do because kanji is not my strong suit. In fact, it isn't my suit at all.

Have you any idea the shit we did to get some of these games localized? There were whole-ass fan campaigns dedicated to showing, "Yes, we will buy your game if you let us." Operation Rainfall succeeded at this; so too, eventually, did Operation Moonfall. 100, 000 Strong To Bring Back Mega Man Legends 3 failed miserably, and so did the Gallian Liberation Front, a much smaller campaign for a much smaller title - an earnest attempt to make Sega change their minds and translate Valkyria Chronicles 3 so that the series' dedicated but hopelessly diminutive fanbase could enjoy it.

Even at my tender age, I was one of the most involved in this campaign - we sure showed those fucking Operation fellas how it was done, I'll tell you that much. We swarmed Sega with snail mail demanding the game on what I'd like to think was called V-Day, but I'm not sure. We printed a few T-shirts for a community contest (which I won, yet never received my shirt). A sleek black briefcase containing 2500 separate signatures petitioning for the game's Western release was delivered to Sega's community manager at a New York Comic Con, courtesy of the lovely people at DualShockers.

Sadly, it was all for naught. The third game would not be localized. I wish I could say at least our little fan campaign formed bonds that last to this day, but it didn't. Discord hadn't been invented back then, and Facebook was getting subsumed by boomers. Our ragtag collective disbanded without ceremony, and that was that. A postscript to a footnote in gaming history. Even the video chronicling the briefcase's delivery and the subsequent hollow reassurances by Sega has been deleted. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Even as our fan campaign was realizing its demise, a group of nameless heroes had started working on an English patch. Because fuck it, we were only at the bargaining stage yet while these guys had reached acceptance. This patch came out in 2014 - three long years after my heartbreak - and it was how I finally managed to play through the game.

And the verdict? It's excellent. Valkyria Chronicles 2 is my favourite, but objectively, Valkyria 3 is the best game in the series. It's not as polished as the previous entries, but it makes up for it in sheer heart and expanse. True to series form, it has made various incremental improvements to the gameplay. Your ability to wade through bullets to rush objectives has been hamstrung (you do unlock certain orders much later that allow you to cheese maps), and you have to put more thought into what equipment to put on your troops. Your main characters have special abilities that help cull the huge numbers of enemies this game will shamelessly throw at you - something the previous ones were lax on. You can actually play as a Valkyria now, something the previous entries didn't have (minus a secret mission in the first game's subpar DLC).

While Valkyria Chronicles 3 does recycle many aspects, sometimes entire maps, from the second game, it also brings with it a wealth of new content. This is a huge game, with probably the lengthiest story - and the Extra Edition adds even more secondary campaigns. My suggestion: once you're familiar with the gameplay, go to the options menu and set Enemy Phase to 'fast.' It'll shave tens of hours off your playthrough. Turns take a while to get through; your PSP's screen may well go to sleep while the enemy is getting things done. There is also a lot of recapping.

But the story itself is superb. It's a contender for best in the entire series. Let me explain to you brainrotten children: You play as Kurt 'Kurutos' Irving, a goated based chad with sigma rizz in the Gallian Army, fighting off an Imperial invasion. (For brevity's sake, let's just say the Empire is Nazi Germany and the USSR combined). Lil bro literally thinks he's the main character, but a goofy ahh military tribunal finds him sussy even though it's cap, so he's forced into a penal suicide squad that takes Ls like an Ohio skibidi. Despite their difficult missions, the regular army Fanum taxes all the credit and hits the griddy, so they're fucking depressed. Kurt tries to make them a unit that cooks and eats, but they think he's delulu and say, "What is bro yappin' about?" Eventually however, they see his bussin' leadership skills and say 'bet,' and he takes charge of getting them enough military drip that they can make it out of the backrooms. His main besties are Gusurg, tank pilot; Riela, with the Grimace shake dispensers; and Imca, a tomboy with a big gyatt and an even bigger lance.

This is the worst paragraph I have ever written.

Dating elements in JRPGs were starting to become widespread around this time, because Persona 3 and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. In Valkyria Chronicles 3, you can choose whether to romance Riela or Imca, or equivocally, whether to cuck Imca or Riela. This really boils down to just two choices and a few unique cutscenes, but it leads to different yet equally heartwarming endings. As an aside, I highly recommend you romance Riela. Not only is it the canon pairing, but it's also the will of Allah, because Riela is a sweet loving tradwife with big milkies, while Imca is a spiteful little incel bitch whom only masochistic lolicons would want. Oh yes, she's underage, and you're going to JAIL, tsundere-lovers.

Fuck this, I'm high. Look, what I'm trying to get across to you is that Valkyria Chronicles 3 is a stellar culmination of the series' trademark addictive gameplay, a stirring score and a plot that's mercifully devoid of most of the anime bullshit you see in JRPGs where they go against sensible decisions because power of love and all that tosh. The cast is well-realized and pragmatic; the only way to have made them better would be to have some actual criminals in this penal unit, someone with a redemption arc, but it's still an anime game, so they're ALL very nice people who were falsely tried. The mechanics are refined even if the graphics are not, and overall it's a fulfilling experience.

Pity Sega tried to keep it from us. Eat shit, Sega. You funded Shenmue III and not this.