The story and voice acting is really solid for a metroidvania, but I found the platforming and progression of abilities a bit lackluster compared to the metroidvania stand-outs for me. The combat also won me over by the end with a diverse enough toolkit and enemy variety to not get stale over the games shorter length.
Overall a really solid first game for Surgent Studios and while it won't go down as one of my favorites of the year, I will be there day one to see how they improve on their next game release.

This game would be 5 stars if it was just an open world sandbox with no story except "slay the dragon once you have good enough gear." This game was the most enjoyable when I would just pick a path and start checking every corner for seeker's tokens. Many of the classes are interesting but only having access to 4 skills at a time was kind of lame and limiting.
The main story is simply not good. None of the sidequests were standout and just served to direct the player to more interesting areas of the map that I had already discovered on my own.
Oh also I had to mod my game to even get decent performance with a ryzen 5 5600 and 4060ti which is ridiculous when Horizon Forbidden West released on the weekend, looked way better, and ran way better.
All these complaints and still 4 stars should tell you how solid the core of this game is gameplay-wise. This game is frustrating because it had goty potential and fumbled with legendarily terrible execution.

This is not the successor to pokemon but good fun. The end gets extremely grindy. The last few levels and last 2 bosses took me as long as the rest of the game to complete. If you don't like survival games like ARK, then this one doesn't do enough to win you other imo. I'm interested to check back in at 1.0

Late-game pal designs are great. I like the gameplay mechanic of managing pals at the base but there isn't a ton you can do with them that you couldn't do in the first few hours. The story is not there yet. You can't fly to the tree they reference in the intro cutscene. All the bosses feel the same just different element and each drastically more bullet spongy than the last.

I have my compaints but the mid-game of this game is quite enjoyable when you are fighting new alpha pals and I really enjoyed searching and trying to fill out my pal-dex.

The Tartarus Key strikes a near perfect puzzle difficulty for me. I never immediately knew the solution. The puzzle would feel difficult at first. Then, after trying a few things, I would take a moment to think through all the clues in the room again and have my eureka moment where I solve it.
The atmosphere is the real star for me with this one though. It was very reminiscent of Resident Evil 1, finding yourself in a mysterious, creepy mansion with something sinister pulling the strings. Not to mention all the flavor text for the creepy paintings and other grotesque subject matter you can click on that adds so much to the setting and adds to your understanding of the protag's feelings and motivation/thought process.
My main disappointment was that the mansion was not as interconnected as I had hoped. When you enter a room, all you need for that room is in that room. So much so that you can't even access notes and items you gathered from rooms you are not currently in. I would have liked the mansion to feel more like one giant puzzle rather than a series of puzzles, personally.
I wholeheartedly recommend this to fans of this aesthetic and/or genre. It's also at a great price! But I don't think this will wow anyone who isn't already a fan of this stuff.

I wanted to play this game for more context to the changes they made to the remake and upcoming rebirth.
While I went in ready to call this game overrated, what I got was a grand adventure that I couldn't put down. Playing every spare second I had over the past week and seeking out all the side content I could find to total a 52 hour experience over the course of 8 days. It didn't overstay it's welcome and I didn't want it to end! This is rare for me when an rpg goes past about 30 hours these days.

Reviewing one of the greatest or at least most iconic games of all time, 26 years after the US release seems like a pointless task so I'll give quick opinions.

Highlights: The soundtrack gave me chills at every major moment. Sephiroth is a cool, layered villain. The ramp up in power level and new materia was well paced and satisfying. The materia and gear system is great, allowing you to change characters and their role in battles completely whenever you want. I found myself really experimenting with different combinations and very satisfied when I would come up with a new build for a character.

In the middle: Cloud is kind of a dull protag being way outshined by your lively and memorable party members. Although towards the end I was tired of about half of them but continued to love the likeable half. (Halfway through part 2, I was only using Barret, Tifa, and occasionally Vincent.)

Disappointment: So many mini-games that just weren't fun to play. Sometimes the "platforming" is frustrating, having to move the joystick in one direction to have cloud perform a jump or go up a staircase/ladder in a different direction. Many of the environments are quite ugly today and hard to tell what is even a walkable path. When the pre-rendered environments are beautiful, they clash extremely with the items and characters on screen, sort of ruining any admiration you may have for it.

P.S. It played great on the steam deck (once I switched to a community made button layout). Grinding limit breaks and chocobo breeding/racing and battle square seems less tedious when you are just turning on your steam deck for an hour or so while laying in bed.

This one hurts. The combat and gameplay of this game is extremely dated since it is the oldest that has not got the phenomenal kiwami treatment. The story in this one is weak comparatively. Sure there are still plenty of moments of that yakuza series charm and heart that I still cracked a few smiles here and there, but the story is near meaningless until the last 3 chapters. Yes, morning glory orphanage is cute but wow it feels like half this game you are either lecturing your kids on various life lessons, or you are searching for your kids that wandered off. It just didn't make for an interesting game at the end of the day. This game will be a big disappointment for anyone looking to play-through the series in the modern day.

Yes the performance issues are unacceptable.
But also the sim elements of the game are underwhelming. If you follow a citizen around you will see that the kids just stay in their homes 24/7 and don't actually attend school, if someone is going to university they are marked as "student" and may or may not occasionally go to the school and only ever the school. And the working citizens are not much better. So many service building just don't work how you would think. An example is that the incinerator will often take garbage seemingly from neighboring cities rather than prioritizing clearing you own mountains of garbage.
The leveling system is busted because you get a little xp based on population but loads based on building certain buildings, so you can just spam build/bulldoze the same building and have a megacity with under 1000 pop if you wanted. The terrain tools are the worst things to use ever and if you ignore manipulating the terrain all your buildings are going to be sloped and roads are not gonna connect properly because everywhere is so hilly.
BUT WORST OF ALL: seemingly NO autosave?! I haven't had to think about manual saving in years. I lost 2 hours of progress once to a crash and had no idea the game only manually saved.
On a positive note, the progress of unlocking stuff and watching your city grow from a small village to a massive horizon-spanning wall of skyscrapers is quite satisfying and there were times where I was enjoying myself. But that satisfaction is found in any city builder. The elements that were supposed to set this one apart are buggy, computer-crashing, frustrating, or janky at best.

Not the game I thought I would be playing on Halloween with the lights off, but a surprisingly great short title to beat in 1 sitting. (It took me 3h40m.) The story was solid, not great to me and I ran into a few frustrating moments with the simplistic gameplay but the atmosphere was doing some seriously heavy lifting. It also might be one of my favorite soundtracks of the year. The music was a real highlight.

Don't expect to be blown away but don't skip this if you have game pass.
Just carve out 4 hours, put the headphones on, silence your phone, and experience Jusant. (and have a big water bottle next to you cause all these notes about water in game made me thirsty irl)