I want to make clear that this is a reveiw of A Realm Reborn only, and that of someone using the free trail. So I never really got a chance to interact with other players.

Lets start with the positives. The music is amazing and the graphics really hold up. I think a lot of the mechanics are really cool so with all of that considered I totally get why so many people love this game.

But that being said the MSQ for A Realm Reborn might be the most miserable and mind numbing time I have spent playing a video game. Most of the MSQ are made up of mindless kill and fetch quests. Even when you do get something inportant to the story it dosen't matter because the story sucks too. Maybe I didn't give it a big enough chance due all of the filler but I felt nothing the during 95 percent of the story.

Part of me feels bad for this reveiw becuase I know that a ton of people love this game and it probably does get better in the expansions. But I can only write what I felt and I did not have a good time playing this game.

This is the JRPG of all time. Everything in this game feels so heightened. If something is exciting you're jumping for joy, if something is sad you're bawling your eyes out. And every single asspect of the game is like this, the combat, expolartion, minigames, music and story all come togethor in this beautiful package. I'm aware that this reveiw really dosen't get into the nitty grity details but I think what's more important is communicating the emotions I felt while playing. Because I have never felt this much while playing a game, and I think that's what matters most.

The first half of this game is inoffensive. The controls feel nice and the graphics look great. The thing that kills this game for me is the screen crunch. In a game as fast as Sonic it feels super unsomfortable not being able to see where you're going. This problem gets even worse later in the game where the levels are stuffed with enemies, bottomless pits, and spike traps that you can't see. All of that combined with one of the worst special stages in the franchise makes for a game I don't particularly care for.

I had always thought Yakuza was going to be one of those franchises that I find really cool but could never get into. I tried playing Yakuza 0 years ago and while I could regonize it was a really good game, but I found the combat pretty boring. Fast foward to 2024, since I like RPGs and wanted to buy something from the Steam sale I picked this game up on a whim. I am so happy I did that. The story feels so raw. the combat is fun, the side content feels botomless. I'm glad to have finally beaten a Yakuza game and I'm looking foward to playing Infinite Wealth and going back to 0.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake was my favorite game of 2020 and my first introduction to Final Fantasy. I mostly want to reveiw the new content added to Intergrade. The game looks and plays amazingly on PS5, I can't imagine going back to the PS4 version now. The Intermison campaign was also really fun. Yuffie might be my favorite character to play in this entire game and just makes me even more excited for Rebirth. They just added even more great stuff to a really great game and I can't ask for any more tham that.

Sonic Dream Team is one of the best 3D Sonic games ever. The controls are silky smooth (with a controller) and the level design is really engaging. I'd recommend this to anyone who likes platformers. I do have two major gripes with this game though. Most of the music is pretty forgettable and the performance on non mobile platforms. I played this on a MacBook Air and the game could get really choppy even on the lowest graphics settings. The game ran perfectly on my iPhone 13 so I believe it is an optimization issue. The problem I have with this is that there is no way to play this game comfortably with a controller without dealing with performance issues. Even with all of that said I still really liked this game. Just buy one of those controller clip-on accessories for your phone before playing.

Sonic Adventure 2 fixes my two biggest issues with the first game. The game is more polished across the board and every character has levels tailor made for them. While it does make some new problems along the way it is still a stark improvement over its predecessor. Instead of 6 game play styles Sonic Adventure 2 cuts it down to 3.

Sonic and Shadow’s stages provide all of the speed based platforming you’d want from a Sonic game. Compared to Adventure 1, stages are more linear with an emphasis on speedrunning. The only real complaint I have is that so many actions are mapped to the same button. So I would often try to light speed dash and end up somersaulting or spin dashing. This happens much more than one would think and can be pretty frustrating.

Knuckles and Rouge’s treasure hunting stages benefit greatly by the changes made to character movesets and level design. The tracker can only track one object at a time and the target will not change until you collect the first object. This makes finding everything more annoying than they have to be. They also suffer from the button mapping issue. There were so many times where I would try to attack an object but I end up talking to a hint monitor instead, cheating me out of an A rank.

Tails and Eggman’s stages are all about locking on to as many things as possible and blowing them all up for massive point bonuses. It provides a very arcade-like satisfaction. The biggest issue comes from the controls. The mechs are very big and slow, so I’d run into situations where you are unable to avoid damage causing me to lock off all the enemies. Aside from that I liked these stages more than I thought I would.

The side content didn’t do much for me personally. I’m not a Chao person and I don’t have anybody to play multiplayer with but they are still really cool. I would still prefer if this game only had Sonic and Shadow stages but I cannot deny the increased quality of what is here.