I regret putting off this franchise for THIS LONG. After playing the first Portal last week, I dove into Portal 2 with expectations so high they scraped the stratosphere, and somehow, this game launched them straight into the moon.

Portal 2 has some of the most fun puzzle gameplay ideas packaged with an iconic visual style, alongside some of the most dynamic environments Valve has done, but what truly left me speechless was the narrative. I went in expecting the same funny writing from the first game, and got a surprisingly emotional rollercoaster ride that expands on everything that I went through in Portal 1 with GLaDOS and adds Wheatley into the mix who is the complete opposite of GLaDOS. This game is brilliant AND I CANT WAIT TO PLAY IT AGAIN!!!!.

The overall package of the game is wonderful but the standout feature is undeniably its infectious soundtrack, a seamless blend of trance, electro, French house, hip hop, and ambient genres that perfectly mirror the game's eclectic energy. While a few tracks are a tad bit repetitive, they never detract from the overall captivation because the songs are ear-catching. Unlocking new songs feels very rewarding and contributes to the sense of discovery, adding layers of excitement and depth as you traverse through New Amsterdam. Drawing inspiration from its predecessor, Jet Set Radio, the soundtrack pays homage while carving its own musical identity, transitioning from the sounds of the early 2000s to a more modern yet familiar retro futuristic vibe. Nearly as seamless as Jet Set Radio and its soundtrack and a beyond-worthy follow-up, this is one of my favorite soundtracks so far in video games and will be a tough one to top.

PRESS E TO EXAMINE THE CLUE
Max: "I needed to stop dawdling. People were dying, and I was just standing here."
Giovanna : "AHHHHHHHHHHHHH MAX NOO! THEY'RE SHOOTING AT ME MAX!!!"
Max: "Giovanna had a lot of courage. And she was smart. Very competent woman in a lot of respects. But right now, she needed me to shoot these guys before she ran out from behind cover in a hysterical panic."
Evil Brazilian military cop: "Stupid American! You don't even know our language! How could you hope to understand this?"
Max Payne: "Maybe I was a dumb, violent gringo subsisting on whisky and my own self-pity, but I still needed to do what needed to be done. Brazil was diseased to its core, the roads and rivers were a circulatory system filled with sewage and cocaine. I was a white blood cell sent to tear out the infection, one U.F.E and gangbanger at a time. But still... I had sympathy. These people had been raised to hate middle-income assholes with delusions of grandeur (GRANDEUR) like me, but that wasn't gonna stop me from saving the decent folks who just happened to live in this cesspool.... everything slowed down. That AC unit looks loose. I can shoot the air conditioning unit to make it fall."
COLLECTED! GOLDEN SMG PARTS: 2/3!
Max: "I had let these scumbags go the first time. But now, they were about to have their way with a gorgeous female woman. Not on my watch."
ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: "YOWCH! Shoot 100 guys in the dick"

Edit: To actually explain my thoughts on MP3 in a non-goofy way, the shoot dodge is very fun and it leans into the ugliness of Max as a character and makes gunplay feel genuinely morbid and grisly in a way I liked. great cutscene direction as well and in theory I like Max's arc here, but those elements come along with some very Xbox 360 racism/annoying third person shooter design from that era that feels as if it's rubbing up against the tone. should've been called White Man's Hurtin'.
Would really recommend reading this review by replicantgestalt for a way more detailed and informed take on how it handles Brazil as a setting: https://backloggd.com/u/replicantgestalt/review/1541848/

DISCLAIMER: This is a re-edited review of Stellar Blade. Just telling you now, I'm going to be talking about more about the dark sides of gooner culture than the game itself because Stellar Blade is a lynch pin for things I find fascinating about the internet as it stands in the month of May, 2024.

We been spendin' most our lives living in a gooners paradise.

I am fascinated by Stellar Blade and what this game might mean for the future for video games. It's going to sound like I hate this game, but I don't. I think it's Fine™.

If it wasn't obvious, this game wants to be Nier Automata Souls Asura's Wrath Bayonetta. The intro of the game is VERY similar how Asura's Wrath started just swapped with Korean mobile game models usually reserved for Gacha-pull auto-battlers -- doing orbital drops onto the Earth doing Bayonetta moves before getting torn to pieces like Gears of War characters by Infernal Demons. There are other games you could pull into the conversation that Stellar Blade reminds you of and you'd be on the money. The game is a homunculus of other game ideas. Stellar Blade is just the title that dared to glue every game it worships together like this. It feels like an astounding ripoff with enough effort put in it's distinctions for me to not feel mad about it.

My only two real criticisms that I care about is that the parrying is BAD. DELAYED FRAME WINDOWS FOR PARRYING IS BAD. If you are going to have parrying in your game, and the parry timing is not finely tuned to the animation of an attack, then the game is going to suffer because of it. Lies of P did this shit, too. We are half a decade removed from the release of Sekiro. Make the parry windows make sense.

Secondly, the plot and characters are just so bad that I find it cannot be enjoyed even in an ironic way. This game is so earnest in it's stupidity, turning on my brain to pay attention to the game's narrative actually felt like it was my fault. You play as android woman named EVE and you meet a guy named ADAM and you two are basically the last people on EARTH.
It's not deep. It is in fact stupid as fuck. But, at the end of the day, I like the fact that Stellar Blade THINKS it is deep. But who cares what I think. Thinking is for people who are not edging to Stellar Blade in between unemployment checks. Just shut the fuck up, me. You cuck-pilled kink-shame-maxxing soyboy. I'll kill you.

After the intro, the game settles into being Nier Automata with Souls gameplay. You know what? That mix sounds pretty damn nice. It IS pretty nice sometimes. It needs a lot of fucking work in the plot department. I only care because the game wants you to care about the whole lot of nothing happening 90% of the time. Only one character has an arc worth bring a first-monitor amount of attention to, but that goes nowhere too after faking out the audience that it WILL go somewhere and it's just like what the fuck are we doing, people. What the fuck is this. What and why do you want me to care. I demand someone answer me. And why is everything sticky?

I love the checkpoint system, I really like the PS2/PS3 platformer style exploration of the environments. The hair physics are too much and it actually affects the performance of gameplay, but IT IS fun to have Eve walk under a waterfall and her becoming wet and her hair wrapping itself her body so you look like a bog witch. Very funny. I struggle to talk about the gameplay itself. It's a goddamn Souls game with platforming. You can autofill what to expect from there.

Stellar Blade should be something more aligned with how it paints itself. I waited for something beneath the veneer of this game to make itself known, only to let myself down when it didn't really happen. This shit REALLY ain't that deep. Which is ok, but why go through the effort of pretending? You know? Hello? Are you listening? It still feels like I'm not being heard right now. You know what? Fuck it, whatever. Let's move on.

My real fascination with Stellar Blade is the cultural impact. Sometimes I wonder how detrimental it is being a perpetually online, horny weirdo in the long-term. I genuinely wonder how much have mobile games that inspired the character design of Stellar Blade conditioned porn-addled individuals to latch onto this game like a big-titted, zero personality octopus dragging a victim into the ocean? How much was the sexiness of Eve was factored into the marketing equation as a distraction from Stellar Blade's unpolished elements? It's straight up nefarious how mentally ill Twitter people who want to jerk their dicks off their body and continue to jerk off the flesh mass on the ground until it is giblet paste -- will tie their sexual freedoms to a corporate product. That's just the state of the world I guess.

I don't want to see cultural zeitgeists eventually revert back to prudishness when it comes to sex, but what I see online from those defending Stellar Blade from being seen as anything other than the best game of forever -- is cumming from a place of defense for unapologetic gooner-maxxing instead of objective reverence for the game itself. Eve isn't real (yet). Her pussy isn't going to vacuum your internal organs out of your genitalia (yet). Gooners, please. Divest 10% of the blood of your penises back into your brain. I need you with me, buddy.

On the flip side, seeing a character like Eve on the cover and the game not being a complete waste of time is an unironic step forward for the gaming industry. The cover looks like fucking Onechanbara spin-off. I do believe we are close to a real gooner game with undeniable quality. Stellar Blade is in many aspects SO close to classic status.

Still, the game is good, not incredible. Bayonetta 1 is incredible. Nier Automata is incredible. Those two games are gooner games with brain cells in them. Though the guy who directed Nier Automata is saying that Stellar Blade is better than fucking NIER AUTOMATA.. I don't know if this is a work so Mr. Taro can direct the next game from this studio, which would be hilarious, or if he is at heart just a gooner. Guess we'll see.

Stellar Blade has led me to be fascinated with the "pussy over everything" mindset and how much fetishization will override any objective discussion. Loneliness and desire to quell that loneliness with sex has defined the present and most certainly will define the future. Defending women who are not real in a time where real women don't even secure reproductive rights is fucking hilarious. I know none of you care, I do. I enjoy laughing about the state of affairs because it keeps me from going insane.

So yeah whatever I just know half of you reading are saying "shut the fuck up loser smelly bad gay slur-coded cuck and let me teach my semen a lesson that it should be in a jar and not my body." or even better, the other half going "what are you even talking about" crowd. Because the latter are so pure and don't read up on what goes on in the day-to-day discussions on gaming. You innocent sons of bitches. I really, truly wish I was you. I am a man witnessing madness and devolving affairs and speaking on it and you can just tell me I'm crazy and allow my review to pass over you. The innocence of ignorance. You don't know the gooners will be at your doorstep, soon. They'll come for you and your mom's retirement checks that you use to buy Jujustsu Kaisen figures. Truly, willful centrism is your zion.

My real message here: Jerk your dick to your heart's content, just don't let your jerk bait define you.

Stellar Blade, everyone.

basically just a SNES port of a goosebumps book.

far too early in VN history to have any sort of QOL features like text speed adjustment or auto-advance, so it's agonizingly sluggish. doesn't seem that bad at first since it's a bit faster than speaking speed, but the dialogue and narration are pretty rambly and repetitive, so the inability to skim hurts it greatly. very shlocky and very slow overall, some good music tracks and manages to do some cool things with mood-setting but it inevitably shoots itself in the foot once it leaves the tension and shows you the thing you're supposed to be scared of and it's like a scooby doo villain.

only really worth a look if you're interested in the history of the VN medium as a whole. in that respect it's neat to see where most of it all stemmed from! but on its own merits its just not very good at what its trying to do lol

I thought I liked this game for the longest time until some youtuber I don't remember who finally set me straight.

A top-down action game should never have an accuracy gauge for its characters, first of all. When you walk up to an enemy and swing your sword at an enemy it should 100% hit that enemy.

Also, you can tell me all you like that it’s the first ever two-player rpg, but if boss fights are impossible unless you have to sit there and cast your elemental spells over and over until it powers up to a level where bosses are then laughably easy, I really doubt your friend is going to sit there and watch you for very long.

Aside from that, story kind of sucks, music and graphics are kind of good, and I’ll never ever ever forget the moment you rescue Santa Claus from the corrupting power of the mana seeds. The mana seeds are a hell of a drug

Was the SNES ready for action RPGs? Not really, honestly. They did this anyway. It's beautiful, it's soulful, it sounds good, it plays good, it looks amazing.

... HOWEVER.........
The way you grind in this is insane even for a game of the eastern variety. The sheer amount of pointless time spent literally firing spells into nothing nearly just for the game to finally say I've done it enough to "be good at it" really should not be several hours. It's counter-intuitive, because the actual melee combat requires some skill and is fun to engage with, but to beat basically anything you need to giga-invest in levelling magic, which is point and click and consists of watching an animation play. A beautiful animation, yes! And I love some turn based bullshit menu combat! But it feels weird to give the pointy stick mechanic so many flourishes only to invest all the gameplay time in ol' faithful giant spell animation, and then tie any progress whatsoever to watching 40 giant spell animations in a row. At least in ATB I can grind efficiently and have the non-efficient big blast fireball power up from it, but in Secret of Mana I instead fuck myself in the ass.

Also you know the drill old rpg obscure ass questline yadda yadda where do I go lol inflated gametime muh fucking map take the hint from villager #9 and go to the poopoo castle to progress (stuck for 1 hour)

Anyway I still enjoyed it. If me and my brother had this as kids we would have loved playing it multiplayer and probably also hated playing it multiplayer and also hated eachother while playing it multiplayer. But not as much as I hate the NPCs. Probably.

I don't know what has possessed me to give this game shot after shot over the years. I think I was just convinced on some level that I must be playing the game wrong, because so many people I've trusted have told me how this is one of Square's best games, but every time I play it I get frustrated with the combat design and fall off after a couple hours.

This time around I was determined to finally understand Secret of Mana and engage with it completely on its own terms. I read guides, learned every little perfunctory mechanic, grinded to make sure I was on level with the content I was engaging with, and surprise surprise it still sucks. I see the bones here of an action RPG that aspires to play more like a turn based RPG than the other action RPGs of the time (Zelda, Ys, etc.), and I think that is a really phenomenal idea to take the menu driven JRPG systems of Final Fantasy and put them in an action context. In the last couple of decades we've seen the birth of the Kingdom Hearts franchise as well as Final Fantasy VII Remake which both prove that this idea has merit, and when executed on by masters of their craft can make for some of the best video games ever made. Secret of Mana was not executed even a quarter as well as the worst Kingdom Hearts game. I think a huge portion of this comes down to what I originally billed as poor hit detection, but have come to realize is a hit%/dodge% stat built into the game that seems to serve no other purpose than to make the game feel like shit. I see the idea behind carrying over those stats from traditional RPGs into your action system, but in an era of the snappy swordplay of Link to the Past it just comes off as sluggish at best and at worst extremely frustrating. This is without even getting into how the charge system slows the combat down to a crawl or how the game is so extraordinary balanced in favor of magic that at a certain point it feels like one of your party members is just tagging along for the ride.

I truly hope that the unbelievably gorgeous cover art by Hiroo Isono never honeypots me into giving this one another shot. This is one of the few cases where I went against my gut on a game time and time again and I should've just trusted my 7 year old self bouncing off of this.

Unlike the vast majority of Square's SNES-era releases, this game aged like milk. No doubt it was a technical marvel for its time, but there was so much frustration.

Just to zoom in on one aspect: the hit detection. Some enemies were large but had small hitboxes, it was possible to hit the hitbox but have the RNG decide that you missed, and (worst of all) sometimes enemies would experience a delayed reaction to your attack, where the damage numbers would appear several seconds after you attacked. This meant that you would often swing at an enemy for no visible effect, but you would have no idea if:
- you hit the wrong part
- you hit the right part but the RNG decided you missed
- you actually did damage but it wasn't displayed or displayed late.

In addition, thanks to the bizarre "waiting" mechanic of having to charge up your weapons, you would often end up charging your weapon for over 10 seconds, only to have the attack most likely miss anyway.

Levelling up your spells did make the game much easier, but 1) it was needlessly grindy and 2) if the most viable strategy is to select a spell off the menu to spam then you're better off playing a menu-based RPG instead.

I've played a bunch of SNES games and this was always that one title that I never got around to. I'd always hear great things about Secret of Mana, and how it's one of the greatest games on the system. Being a fan of Square for a large portion of my life, playing this one was a no-brainer. I am shocked at the quality of this game, to say the least. I know I shouldn't be judging media off public reception so heavily, but man, this was disappointing.

This is the worst translation I have experienced in any video game. After finishing earlier today I have more questions than answers about the story. Conversations feel extremely robotic and not enough context is given about the world and the mysteries surrounding it. The story isn't anything crazy either but I feel like I would have at least cared for it a little bit if it was told properly.

The gameplay is atrocious. Almost everything about it is horrible and is what makes this game so bad. The game sports a charge system where you will have to wait a few seconds to do full damage, which you need to do if you want to do significant damage. This isn't an issue, but the rest makes it one. I genuinely cannot tell what the hell is wrong with the hit detection in this game. The hit boxes are horrible, and there is what I believe to be a chance of missing your attack, but, there is no indicator telling you that it missed. When enemies are toppled and you attack them, sometimes the attack will register a few seconds after you hit them, so it feels really weird. The AI is also dog shit at following you. My party members were constantly getting stuck on pieces of the environment and I had to constantly backtrack to get them to follow me properly. The games FPS constantly lowers too. The game can't seem to hold a proper framerate when there's any enemies on screen. Everything about the gameplay just feels gross to play. It's a simple game in nature, but everything just feels like it's working against you. All the boss fights are also really abusable because you can just spam the Sprite's magic in quick succession.

I'm shocked this game was also released in the state it's in. This game is really buggy. The biggest bug that I have encountered was party members getting stuck in walls. You can't progress on screen if your characters are not always in the vicinity of each other, so, it just left me soft locked in most cases. It even happened to me in the final dungeon once which really pissed me off. Other than that, it's usually just visual bugs.

The best thing about this game is the soundtrack, which quickly became one of my favorites on the system. It's so good that it made me think I was enjoying the game a few times.

This is one of those games where props have to be given for molding the genre, but, it really does not hold up in the slightest.