One thing that's becoming abundantly clear as I play through this trilogy is that the Spyro formula hasn't aged quite as well as the Crash Bandicoot formula. I played through the entirety of Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy last year - a faithful collection of remakes just like Spyro Reignited Trilogy - and found that the HD recreations of Crash's PS1 jaunts were either on a par with the originals or even surpassed them. With Spyro, it's a different story. The original Ripto's Rage! (or Gateway to Glimmer as it was known in the UK) was a worthy sequel that I found much to my liking back when it came out, but this HD makeover really shines a light on how mundane the minigames are, and how detrimental they are to the experience as a whole. Ripto's Rage! is essentially the first game, but with an extended move list, a (very) half-hearted metroidvania structure, and lots and lots of crappy but mandatory minigames. You want those orbs in order to progress through the story? Best start playing them minigames! The vast majority of which are braindead, repetitive and just plain not fun.

And again, like with the remake of Spyro 1, something's missing. The Insomniac magic just isn't here. Everything feels watered down, generic and lacking the distinct art style of the original. It's a vague criticism I know, but those PS1 titles were an absolute joy on visual and aural front, and that just hasn't been translated well to this HD trilogy.

Onwards to 3.

The original Spyro the Dragon is an all timer in my book. I simply adore it. So by rights, this remake, with its glamorous visual makeover and QoL enhancements (you don't have to stand still and press a button to look around anymore!) should be objectively better, right? RIGHT?!

Well, I know how all the puritans who were chagrined over the minute changes made in the Demon's Souls remake must feel now, I guess. Toys for Bob's recreation of a PS1 classic is perfectly serviceable. It plays well, it looks good, and it sounds about the same, especially if you turn on Stewart Copelands' original legendary score, but OG Spyro just had that certain magic that this is missing. I can't even put my finger on what it is. Maybe it's purely down to nostalgia, I don't know, but this remake didn't bewitch me the same way PS1 Spyro the Dragon always does.

Anyway, onwards to the second entry.

Octopath Traveler was an interesting game for me, I initially started playing this game near the beginning of 2023, but dropped it just because I had other games I wanted to prioritise. I didn’t dislike the game, in fact I loved it.

Octopath Traveler, as in Eight-Path Traveler, covers the stories of eight different characters on each of their own journeys with different motivations and goals. My starting traveler was Therion, The Thief, and that was a great choice imo, I love thieves in games. You meet a variety of NPCs throughout each characters story, and many villains. It is truly a bummer that this game didn’t have the stories intertwine at all, as that could’ve been a huge selling point for the game.

The game has it all, a beautiful art style, great music, good combat, good exploration (thought I hate the encounter rates without an ability that reduces them). I didn’t mention stories because that’s what I want to cover mainly in this review.

I will say that a majority of the stories aren’t that great (in my opinion), without any spoilers, I’ll just say that the only stories that really captivated me were from the Dancer, Thief, and Apothecary. The others just didn’t click for me. Now I will say this may be because I stopped playing the game for a bit after completing each characters Chapter 1s, and some of their Chapter 2s, but that definitely wasn’t the main reason. Some of them personally just seemed really really boring that I didn’t really care about what happened. Also, the language used in one of the protagonists stories was a HUGE turn off, especially coming from me who hates that type of language. Like I stated before, they should’ve made the stories interconnect at different points, it would’ve been much more interesting that way, truly a missed opportunity.

In terms of the world, I enjoyed how each sub area had three different cities/towns. You had the sunlands (deserts), frostlands (snowy plains), flatlands (plains), highlands (mountains), riverlands (river banks), cliftlands (cliffs), woodlands (forests), and the coastlands (by the sea). I enjoyed exploring each of the different little towns and their own unique styles. One has a grand theatre and prioritises theatrics, whilst another is very reminiscent of Salem. All in all, the world of Orsterra was full of life and I enjoyed exploring the world.

Now, in regards to gameplay, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The boosting system is probably one of my favourite systems (except when enemies either disable your boost gauge or steal your BP, that’s not fun). I guess I just love doing big unga bunga damage. Bewildering Grace is simultaneously the best and worst skill, and it probably killed me more times than it actually helping me. I initially had no idea how to use the Apothecary class, but once I found out how good it was, I could never be stopped. The one thing about gameplay I dislike is the fact you have to grind, you might’ve not needed to grind (might be a skill issue on my part then), but the grinding just probably killed the momentum of the game for me, especially trying to reach the minimum level for each story chapter. I liked how each character came with a different path action, like Steal, Purchase, Allure, Guide, Challenge, Provoke, Scrutinize, and Inquire. Stealing was a god send, and found it funny how you could (if you really wanted to torture yourself), attempt to steal a high level item that has a 3% successful steal rate, and if you fail, to just reset the game and resume your save, and repeat. Another dislike about the gameplay is that each dungeon had a purple chest, and only Therion was able to open it (I had Therion on my team all the time so it didn’t really affect me at all, but I can understand how annoying it is). Also, the side quests being riddles from hell did not incentivise me to complete them. I also tried doing the true final boss, but after finishing the boss rush and dying like instantly from the final boss and having to do it all over again, I called it a day.

In my opinion, the game is solely carried by the world, the art style, and the music. Everything is either tedious or boring.

Overall, the game is solid, and I enjoyed my time with it. It was tempting to play OT2 before this game with the many quality of life changes, but I decided against it so I could have a better experience with both games. The game might not be your cup of tea, and that’s okay, don’t try to force yourself to like something like this, it can turn people off. Great game, with some questionable decisions, but they do not affect my overall enjoyment with the game.

Octopath Traveler II is an overall improvement of the first game in every single possible way. The OST, the artstyle, the battle-system, the gameplay, the characters, the UI, it's all great. I will always hold this game close to my heart because of how much of an enjoyable experience it was. I was reluctant to replay Octopath Traveler I before this game, but I'm honestly glad I did because now I can see the great parts of both games, but also some potential flaws.

The story for this game is great. Unlike OT1 where I only actively liked three of the stories, there really wasn't a story I disliked, despite how cliche some of them are. Standouts for me are definitely Partitio, Castii, and Temenos. I also enjoyed the addition of side stories between two of the characters but they really didn't do much for me and just felt like an addition to have the bare-minimum of interconnectedness between the stories. I did enjoy the overarching plot of the story, but I refused to fight the final boss because of my experience with the final boss of OT1, and decided to just watch it on YouTube. Great stories and was a big improvement from OT1.

Gameplay wise, this game is great. You got the addition of Day and Night Path Actions, with different quests being present during the night, and others present during the day. Also have Latent Power, which probably makes Castii broken as an Apothecary. I also enjoy the little additions they put into some of the classes, like how Hikari can learn different skills from dueling different NPCs, and how Agnea can have different bonuses depending on the NPC that she has Allured. I'll also include exploration in the gameplay section because that's another big thing for me. I love that there's a Western and Eastern continent, and the different towns, like OT1, just make the game that much more enjoyable for me. There's also definitely more lore that I haven't gotten into, which seems pretty great for the people who like lore. I also enjoy the little addition of being able to ride a boat in the water on certain maps, it just makes exploration that much better. Also, I can't forget the big overworld map, and how you can essentially buy a ship, and you're able to explore many previously unexplorable islands. Some things I will take away from the gameplay is the encounter rate, I despise random encounters, especially the encounter rate without having the reduced counter rate skill equipped. Also, I dislike grinding, but thanks to getting two lucky Bewildering Grace procs, I didn't have that much of an issue with it. However, that's a minor incovenience, as the game as a whole is great, and clearly outclasses its predecessor in terms of gameplay.

Music & the artstyle slaps so hard in this game. They really gave me the nostalgia factor for OT1 even though I had just completed that game, and the different tracks are great. The artstyle is gorgeous and I just loved seeing each little sub-section in this artstyle, I was just amazed by nearly everything in this game.

Overall, Octopath Traveler II is a great game that improves all of the problems that Octopath Traveler I had (with a few exceptions of course). If you're thinking of giving this game a chance, then please do, it's a great experience.

Tales of Arise was able to quickly captivate me as my first Tales game, and I quite thoroughly enjoyed it, but I do have some glaring issues (some are more like skill issues on my part but whatever). The game has such a strong opening, and the concepts it introduces us to are great.

The first three regions: Calaglia, Cyslodia, and Elde Menancia are honestly perfect in my opinion. You get to see how each lord treat the enslaved Dahnans, and their differing ideologies. I enjoyed the story for each of these regions and they really had me invested in this game. However, I need to state that I utterly despised Mahag Saar and Ganath Haros, it felt like the game was starting to drag out. Mahag Saar I didn't mind as much, I enjoyed exploring Niez and the surroundings but I just started to get sick and tired of the game. Ganath Haros was probably my breaking point because I gave up after defeating the final lord, and it resulted in me dropping the game for 9 months. I came back 9 months later to tackle my enormous catalog, getting games out of the way that I had started but not finished, like Radiant Dawn, and Tales of Arise. I was not impressed with the ending, it was very meh, and the final boss felt extremely underwhelming.

The dungeons are fine, there's really nothing positive or negative I can say about them, but I enjoyed the variety of different areas we could explore. The combat was very satisfying for me, especially coming from someone who doesn't really play games with action-combat. Though I will admit that I did get tired using Alfyn's combos for the entire game, only to realise that you could switch characters at the end of Mahag Saar (skill issue), but I couldn't be bothered to learn another characters combos and skills so i decided to persist on with Alfyn. As for the characters, they were quite enjoyable, and I enjoyed the dynamics that perpetuated between the Danhans in the party and the Renans. I also enjoyed the little duos that would form within the party, it just felt neat.

I really enjoyed the skits, but I did start to get tired of them at the end of the game. I couldn't be bothered doing quests, especially because of my immense burnout near the end of the game. But I must say, the opening song really got stuck in my head. Overall, I experienced more positives than negatives in this game, and my dislike for the game only started to be prevalent after the 'main-story' had concluded. The setting and the characters carried this game hard for me, as I found the combat to be average. Even though half of my review might be negative, theres a reason why I've rated it at 7/10, I thoroughly enjoyed the first part of the game. I do have Tales of Vesperia in my library because a friend got it for me, but I think it'll be a while before I'm ready to try another Tales game.

TLDR: Fuck this game. I am NOT coming back.

If you're like me and picked up this game expecting a fun space alien shooter with cool powers and spooky enemy designs, do NOT get this.

Prey is my first time with the genre “immersive sims” which I’ve seen defined as: “games that allow the player multiple options to engage with combat and puzzles, and multiple paths to progress past a roadblock.”

When I found out that Prey wasn’t some sort of “Doom clone” I was a little bummed. But I wanted to give it a fair shot before I went to write off the game altogether. And after watching a Youtube video or two about Prey and immersive sims, I decided to go in as blind as possible.

Before I get too negative, there are a few things I liked about Prey. I really liked how the first hour of the game tries to emulate a sort of "Truman-Show" vibe. Leading you to find out everything you know is fake, and slowly uncovering your place in the grander story was pretty sick. There's also a few horror sequences that get executed pretty well, and music's good too.

But on a surface level, the game wasn't very interesting to me. You don’t get any cool powers early on, and most of the combat isn’t very engaging. If anything you just walk back and forth between dull rooms in silence.

While there are a few good things that Prey has going for it, they’re completely murdered by the game's LACK OF COMMUNICATION and GLACIAL PACING.

Strike one for me was one of the game’s “gloo gun puzzles”. So early on, the game tells you two things.

One, that puzzles and routes to rooms have multiple solutions, (with multiple npcs and remarking about this to really drive this point home).
And two, that you can make stuff with the gloo gun. (With the gun being able to be used as a weapon, and with environmental hazards).

While it is true that both of these things are said in the beginning, they aren’t said in tandem. What I mean is that the game provides you with the puzzle pieces, but it doesn't really give you any direction on how to put them together.

So in the beginning of the game, I found myself getting stuck after failing to open a door. So the first thing I did was look for a vent to crawl through, or a keycard that I could use. Since both of these solutions have been successful for me. But in this instance neither worked. I wasn’t able to find a keycard, and there was no vent to crawl into. So I ended up just wandering around aimlessly and frustrated.

Eventually I found a corpse next to a lil gloo ladder. Now I assume the intention of the developers was to show the players that you could build a ladder to get up to the place where I was stuck. But despite this, my “lightbulb” didn’t go off. The npc was already dead, meaning I didn’t even understand that the “gloo ladder” was climbable, and missed out seeing a visual cue of a npc using it in action. So in reality I saw this weird npc, looked at him for like 5 seconds, and then walked away.

Ironically enough, it wasn’t until I watched a video about immersive sim’s in general, that I stumbled onto the puzzle’s solution. Sure yes, technically the game provides you with two separate thoughts, one relating to the gloo gun, and another relating to “multiple solutions” But it poorly alludes to the possibility of a ladder even being possible.

I totally understand the idea of a game offering multiple options to progress, but when you’re new to immersive sims, sure you can have just as many options as a veteran player on paper. But if you’re completely unaware of them and if the game doesn’t really tell you/point you in the right direction, they might as well not be there.

I’m aware that I’m 100% missing stuff, and not understanding what the game wants, due to my own stupidity. But I do think the game could help me better grasp what it’s trying to ask of me.

BOTW and TOTK have moments similar to this, but those games do “ah-hah” moments much better. While Prey demands experimentation to progress, Zelda provides experimentation as a bonus. Zelda makes me feel smart when I cheat through a shrine because I chose to do it on my own. But I never felt smart playing Prey. Especially when small things like story objectives are left very vague.

Despite all this shit, the final straw was Dr. Calvino's lab.

By trying to “go in as blind as possible” I’ve been mindlessly wandering around, growing more and more impatient and frustrated. I must've wasted at least 2hrs just looking around for the next thing to do.

This wasn’t at all helped by Prey’s fucking awful map. I genuinely don’t understand why the devs provide any sort of live mini-map for this game. Especially with the level of backtracking you do in this game.
Pausing and opening a menu to figure out where i was supposed to go, just to open that same shit again like 10 seconds later when I realized I went the wrong way, got HELLA OLD HELLA FAST.

At the end, I genuinely felt like someone was watching my gameplay and was actively trying to find the best way to waste my time.

Like, oh cool I found a door that needs to be opened. Every door that’s needed a keycard so far has only needed one.

Wander around for an hour and then finally get the ability to go out into space. Go outside, find a dead body with a keycard. Yay I did it. Now go all the way back to the door I was trying to open.

Oh wait what’s this, “keycard not accepted”? But why? I got it??

Google the puzzle online, apparently there’s two cards????

OHH MY BADD

IM SO FUCKING SORRY

I’m such a fucking mongrel idiot how could I not have seen that coming??? It’s not like every single fucking door in this stupid game only used ONE KEY CARD.

Backtrack allllll the way back into space, and then FINALLY GET THE CARD.

And then, I just quit.

Prey is one of the only games I’ve ever played where even after playing 3-5hrs, you still feel like you’ve done nothing. It’s painfully obvious that the devs did this shit to just pad out the runtime.

I'm not gonna rate the whole game, since I didn't beat it, but if I could rate the first couple hours, I'd give it a fucking 3/10.

This game is absolutely magnificent, I will start this review off by saying it's not better than Uncharted 4 but it holds up well for being its own game instead of an expansion title. Given that it probably would've worked better as an expansion game, it's pretty impressive it can stand up on its own. That being mentioned though, one of the main faults in this game (to me) is that its wayyy too short. It could've stood to be just a little longer in my opinion, though I can appreciate how it doesn't overstay its welcome like Uncharted 4 kind of did, playing 4 I often found myself thinking "Okay, we're definitely near the end now" and nope, no we were not, but I don't think that knocks off any points for me though, I do like a long video game. Moving on to my next critique, the pacing in this game just seems so slow and off at times to fall under the action category, nonetheless an Uncharted title. The open world chunk of the game is really where you'll spend most of your time, especially because they send you on a fetch quest for the Hoysala tokens needed to get the Queen's Ruby bracelet that assists in finding treasures near by glowing red and vibrating your controller, if you don't care to do this side quest, you'll spend a lot less time in that section than me and many others and the pacing will probably march along to the beat of a normal Uncharted game. Speaking of the Queen's Ruby side quest, I'd like to say I did thoroughly enjoy doing it even though it can be simplified into just driving a ton of places, killing some bad guys and maybe doing some parkour or puzzles (I can't really remember each token's requirement to achieve) and then going onto the next one, I found most of the puzzles quite enjoyable and I will say it did add a nice texture to the world. This brings me to my next point, the Uncharted franchise is consistently breathtaking in the views and world building, Naughty Dog knows how to make a game regardless of what people say about some of their more "scandalous" story telling decisions, which I'm sure we all know what I'm talking about (cough, cough Joel's death) Naughty Dog's games are never anything short of some of the closest games to perfection we'll ever get, every cutscene has something beautiful to appreciate, each view significantly more gorgeous and grandeur than the last. Not even to mention how amazing the views are when Chloe has a photo taking opportunity, just so damn close to perfection it makes you wish it was real and if there are actually places in this world that exist that are so perfect like that. Continuing on, the landscapes in the open world are so cleverly placed and mapped out and fun to explore and traverse, nothing to write home about but they're better than a lot of other "levels" or areas made for combat or puzzles. I will mention, for the first couple hours in the open world portion, I found it so hard to traverse and drive through, I was looking at my map literally every other couple second to make sure I was going the right way because it was so easy to drive in one direction to get to one area and somehow end up in another because of the map connects different corners of the map, this is MOSTLY player error though because I am a tad directionally challenged at times in video games, I am not too mad at this part and it doesn't really matter to me because I feel it fits the thick jungle environment you have going on in the game to get lost or confused. One thing that SEVERELY annoys me about the Uncharted franchise is no dedicated run or stealth button, I absolutely hate that and there isn't too much to say about that in this review because it's self-explanatory, but I feel like in an action game not being able to run especially when you're doing a timed puzzle such as the water fountain jumping puzzle is utterly asinine. However, the combat aspect of the game is, in my humble opinion, superior to the Uncharted 4 combat, I mentioned in my Uncharted 4 review that the hand-to-hand combat feels heavy most of the time and I still 110% stand by that, but the only other game I've personally ever played with melee combat that silky smooth is The Last of Us 2, which TLOU2's is miles better but I digress to say they're somewhat comparable. I really enjoyed Chloe and Nadine's dynamic, they're both such softies for each other, when Nadine was mad at Chloe for working with Sam behind her back and they were fighting was one of the best parts of the game and I sincerely hope their story together gets expanded on in the future and we get to see more of them being little softies for each other, I hope we see more of Nadine, Chloe and Sam together as a trio way more though, I loved that little glimpse we got of them right at the end. I will say the character dynamics and the views are really the backbone for this game for me because the story and Asav, who is supposed to be the "villain", are both just so bland... Maybe it's my attention span, but I really couldn't even tell you Asav's motives for wanting the Tusk or the story of the game, I just found this game substantially harder to follow than 4 which is really disappointing and let me down because the potential of this game was ample, I found a lot of areas of the story to lack creativity and the gameplay to be predictable which is why I say if you've played one Uncharted game, you've played them all. All in all, I think for the amount of time this game takes up (for me, around 12 hours over the span of multiple days), it wouldn't hurt to play it, it's all good exploration and action fun and you can't really go wrong with that. Would I say it's a must play for every gamer? Absolutely not, but if you're someone who likes Naughty Dog or games like Uncharted, I'd totally bring it up as a suggestion. My only genuine advice would be to play Lost Legacy before Uncharted 4 because there's no way you can play 4 before LL and still appreciate LL for all of its good qualities without constant comparison between the two and that's what really put a notch in my experience with this game, knowing how much better it could've been and that the potential of this title was not even close to even a quarter of being maximized for player experience and enjoyment.

Shelving this one because the “escape the eruption” sequence at the end of Act 3 genuinely started to give me a migraine

It’s like all of the wonkiest aspects of the game came together into one glorious mess of platforming hell

My frustration DEFINITELY doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that I’ve been asked to work late 3 days in a row now, why do you ask?

EDIT 5/10: ok I stopped whining, went back and 100%-ed the game. The story, art, and characters are cute/interesting and some of the controls are pretty fun if unpolished. Like there are times I would be platforming then just get stuck on the ground. Nothing would be around me I’d just be stuck like my feet were glued to the ground and I’d have to jump again to recenter myself. Also the fact that half of the game feels like its centered around gliding through caves with one hit kill spike traps makes me want to send myself to the spirit realm

I hate video game card games
I hate rouglites/rougelikes
I hate AR games

I was forced to play this for Halloween. I'll admit, the first part of the game, although unfair and rage-inducing, was interesting and the atmosphere/visuals were really cool. After I beat that, the rest seemed stupid and annoying so I didn't bother with it.