I just don't know. I couldn't put my finger on it, but something about Apollo's character bothered me since DD, and others' reviews shed light on it, and I was like "yeah, he's like a different character every time". It's not something super obvious, but yeah.
Tired of all the retconning these games did, which end up making these later games feel so forced.

This game is absolutely my least favorite of the 6. I dislike the Kura'in monarchy and the STUPID law that the characters are forced under, it's almost comical how ridiculous it is. I also dislike Nahyuta; he's by far my least favorite prosecutor, BUT the last chapter did make me like him in the end.
The last chapter in general was insane, but kind of in a good way. I do like how it ended up, definitely the highlight of the game.
Rayfa is cute and I love her development. Some great designs from new characters. Some really fun twists.
I left this game on a pretty positive note, but I'm so glad it's over.

There's so much I like about this game, but I'll say the bottom line first, it's just WAY too damn long for what it is.
While the combat is possibly the best part of the game, the gameplay is essentially 80% battles. The grinding of skills is awful, especially when you can't skip spell animations.

I got up to Cafu but I can't go on anymore. The world is interesting, but the exploration is lacking. The world doesn't look the best (maybe the HD version makes it look muddier or something?) and the map and minimap orientation is terrible. This is one of my biggest complaints, I never know where I am, no matter which town or field I'm in.

I can definitely forgive the lack of an in-your-face story, it doesn't try to do anything crazy. It's about the exploration, the adventure. It nails that feeling, no doubt.
I wish it was voice acted more than just a few important story scenes, and I wish the dialogue was better. It feels extremely stilted sometimes.
Lots of complaints but I do love a lot about this game; maybe I'll enjoy Grandia 2 more.

The end of Kiryu's saga, part 2, revengeance. (until Y8, oh boy here we go again)
Lots of mixed feelings on this one, mostly negative but some strong positives.
The ending broke me, I got choked up. Some incredible voice acting from Kuroda Takaya, maybe his best performance as Kiryu. That, and the final fight (absolutely contrived as it was) was awesome. Fun and satisfying fight choreography.

The Agent style (spiderman mode) is a cool concept but it just doesn't mesh with Kiryu's fighting style and feels out of place and hamfisted in. The drones are awful, firefly isn't practical, and the grapple doesn't work on bosses. (but crowd control is admittedly fun with it sometimes)
I seem to be in the minority for some reason but I did love the jet boots, as dumb as it is. I would constantly use it on big crowds, it's hilarious and works really well to cull the herds.


This being basically a tie-in game, the addition of forced side content is at its most obvious. Akame is great, I kinda love her as a character, but her patrol missions are SO lame, and the official requests are an absolute snoozefest; they all felt like recycled content. And you sometimes are forced to do this side content. Normally this wouldn't bother me since I like to do side quests in games, but these just weren't it.

The Castle is wholly unnecessary and is pretty much a huge gambling den (and arena) that they tried to implement into the story but...why?
Speaking of the story, I won't get into it because I just don't care at this point, but as I mentioned, the ending was really good.

I really enjoyed this game. A crossover of this scale; just seeing Phoenix/Maya interact with Layton/Luke is so much fun. If I was younger I would have been floored by how cool it is.

The gameplay is, as you'd expect, mixed with Layton and Ace Attorney. It's still mostly Layton-core but there are also courtroom segments.
The Layton gameplay is the same as ever, with puzzles that are mostly forgettable, but they give you an abundance of hint coins to speed things along if so desired. (they even work in courtroom segments!)
The courtroom segments are my favorite, mostly because of the new feature of having multiple witnesses at a time. It's a cool idea that works well; when cross-examining one person, someone else might have a reaction to them, which you can then follow-up on. I love it.
The medieval setting also brings some funny moments. (fingerprints are not a thing here, sorry Wright)

The story is decent. I enjoyed it for the most part, but it got too ambitious and sometimes ridiculous for my liking. The final chapter DRAGS on, with so many twists that I started to not even care anymore. Enjoyable, but nothing special.

The dynamic between Layton and Wright (and their assistants) are very fun. It made me like Layton even more, he's so cool. Wright feels like he took an even more comedic role with the butt of every joke, and Layton being here makes him look even less cool and Layton more charismatic than ever.
Sadly Maya barely does anything and is barely relevant to anything, and Espella (the main heroine) wasn't interesting.

Lastly, I played the English version and I thought the voice acting was very mediocre. Layton was the only voice I liked, Barnham's was pretty good too though.
Overall I would recommend this to any fans of both series.

I've played every single mainline AC game. For the past like, 10 years, every time a new game gets released/announced, I ask myself "Do I really like this?" and the answer leans heavily on the "no" side. I do not think this is a good GAME series, its batting average is terribly low when it comes to FUN moment-to-moment gameplay.
The stories are usually uninspired, lazy and incredibly dull. (Even Ezio's trilogy isn't incredible, but it's still the best for me.)
The characters are PAINFULLY forgettable, and NPCs act like robots most of the time. The LENGTH of the games in recent years, the incessant monotony of collecting everything (because my ADHD/collector's mentality demands it); many negative points.
And yet, I buy it every damn time. And the reason is pretty simple, I love history and am quite passionate about it.
One of my favorite things about these games is how they teach you about actual history, and how it recreates accurate estimations of how life was during these time periods. It always draws me in.
I love exploring the map, finding viewpoints to reveal MORE of the map, and learning things at the same time. I love playing as a badass assassin, stealthily killing enemies.

Mirage handles this particularly well; I think it excels at and encourages stealth more than most of its predecessors, it wants you to use tools and strategy as opposed to rambo-ing through everything. And this is probably not on purpose, but the combat being largely unsatisfying is another point for that mentality.
Uhh I'm not actually praising the combat being bad though, it sucks. It's fine, but...It just kinda sucks.
One more thing about Mirage, while the story was whatever as usual, Basim's nightmares and the twists at the end were pretty cool, and a treat for someone who's played previous games.
I liked this game overall, good length too. Stop making 100 hour games bloated with filler, 20-30 is long enough.

It's like P3, but better. I was so excited for this remake and it delivered like I thought it would.
Amazing QoL updates (no tartarus fatigue lol) are very welcomed, and the character redesigns by Azusa Shimada are incredible. New music also bangs and is on par with the original, and all the added scenes with teammates give even more depth to the already well-written cast.
Voice acting is impressive as usual (I played with JP voices as always with Japanese anime games, but from what I heard the dub is also very good, way better than the original's), and there are much more voice lines than I remember.
Combat is also improved, with P5-style baton pass mechanic (but less broken), and addition of Theurgy, characters' ultimate attacks. It's really neat seeing the animations for these; and some hit really hard, like Junpei's second one...

I had a much better time with this than I did the original. The atmosphere maybe SLIGHTLY loses out to the original's, but it's hard to explain.
The ending is 10/10, no question the strongest of Persona's. I cry.

My biggest gripe with the game is the antagonists. Strega is good, don't get me wrong, but some missed potential I think. Ikutsuki kind of just exists. The pacing is also VERY slow, especially at the beginning. Luckily, it's Persona, so it still never feels actually boring.
Nothing like minmaxing your efficiency with social links and stats etc.
Good game, absorbed weeks of my life.

I dropped it, but it's not like I heavily disliked it or anything. I actually enjoy many things about this game. The humor, recruitment stuff, even the tank battles are fun sometimes.
But the elephant in the room- it focuses on the tank battles/building too much for me. This combined with exploration feeling slow and you only having essentially one move bogs it down quite a bit.
My overall feelings towards this game lean on the positive side, but I don't quite have the motivation to continue it.

It's a wonder that a small indie studio can make a game with this much soul. And a surprisingly deep story with a great ending.
It's adorable, it's therapeutic, it's...a rhythm game, sometimes! Randomly! Very interesting choice for a 3D platformer to have rhythm boss battles, but hey, it works. They could be better implemented, but it doesn't take away from the feel of the game.
The manga-style cutscenes is a unique way of storytelling that I enjoyed a lot.

The weakest part of the game is the dungeons, mostly because of the occasionally wonky controls. In some ways the game is a bit unrefined, but all the passion it exudes makes anything negative about it not much more than an afterthought.