I’ve been a MegaTen fan for a super long time now, ever since I found Persona 2: Innocent Sin on my Dad’s PSP. That game changed me as a person to be completely honest. I then dove further into the series, playing Eternal Punishment, Soul Hackers, Digital Devil Saga, etc etc. I eventually got around to P3FES in the summer of 2019. I loved it to death, as I was going through a lot of change in my life at the time and the game was like a little escape for me. It took me all throughout June, and I beat it at the beginning of July. The ending, which is iconic itself, had me crying a little bit, and Memories of You quickly became one of my favorite songs from a game ever.

Now when I heard that there was going to be a remake of Persona 3, I was super skeptical. I couldn’t believe it. Then, when the trailers started rolling out, I was even more skeptical. I really didn’t want Atlus to “Persona 5ify” one of my favorite games, and from the first couple trailers for Reload, it kinda seemed like they were doing that. But, as more things started to come out about the game, I became more hopeful and was actually pretty hyped for it. I preordered it, and played it at midnight on launch. Needless to say, I was pretty immediately blown away, and I adored what Atlus had done.

I did (and still do) have some minor nitpicks so I’ll go over those here.
- Some music (mainly near the beginning) didn’t play in the right spots
- Some of the remixes are pretty meh, the big ones I didn’t really care for were Mass Destruction and Unavoidable Battle
- I much prefer the anime FMVs from the OG for the most part, but there were a couple exceptions
Those are all of my complaints, seriously. Only 3 things, which even baffles me considering how critical I am of remakes.

Everything else that the game did though I absolutely loved. Like loved loved loved. Most of the new remixes are fucking phenomenal, the new hangout gimmick with the SEES members was super cute and they were super fun to go through and Tartarus had new life breathed into it and it looked great. The ending got me hard here as well. It was a mix of just how good the cutscene direction was, how good the music was, and my overall nostalgia for the game and how it helped me through a hard time in my life. I was sobbing, HARD. My shirt is still drenched as I write this. The Memories of You remix is gorgeous, and I will not be able to listen to it without sobbing uncontrollably for the foreseeable future.

Overall, an amazing game.

A tenacious and beseeching defense for childlike creativity and the necessity of cherishing wonder in growth. In typical RGG fashion, Like A Dragon attempts to favorably honor the yakuza as an institution, and this time around with a charming new face for fans to get reattached to. Perhaps this job is done too quickly with how strikingly likable Ichiban is, and proof of this is found when we understand his place in all of this. He is not even a decade younger than Kiryu, yet his exuberance and excursion from rock bottom redeems him from feeling aged. Like A Dragon questions the very essence of torch passing while also reminding us how wisdom in the yakuza (and most organizations) is experiential. Ichiban is anything but young in society but evokes a spirit that rejects denotations often associated with a quadragenarian. This is what makes Ichiban so unique and worth rooting for against his adversaries.

It also subverts the typical rise in narrative RPGs as Ichiban has no concern of being at the top to bask in his own glory. His growth from nadir results in newfound solace in the ordinary. Sure, there is a power-of-friendship aura looming around your party, but that’s what Ichiban’s course is all about, and you’d be hard-pressed in denying me of that value morally. Plus, if we are scaling power in this ultimately ludicrous series in terms of defying human strength, then you should be able to get by with realizing Ichiban can force a stalemate with the power giants of previous entries after bountiful training. Even then, the most irrational fight ends up being the most challenging and will not hold your hand if under-levelled. Your inability to simply coast by later fights without preparation is a stark difference from other Yakuza games and that’s a minor difficulty spike that I do commend RGG for implementing.

And yes, our ‘hero’ is an everyday hero. Optimistic, specific, and caring. Empathy worth matching with Kiryu. Bless you, fans of RGG games, where your empathic accuracy is attributed to every human character, except for Kume, who represents a contemporary kind of evil. An emotional and stirring climax comes across as a desperate plea from Ichiban himself at an all-time high for vulnerability of not just this game, but all Yakuza games before it.

Six years was worth the wait.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink helps scratch an itch for both fluid action combat mechanic and MMO-style boss mechanics. This is the perfect game for the era of live-service schlock- a flawlessly integrated online co-op ecosystem, with all its substantive content able to be fully enjoyed offline as well. The only way it could be fundamentally improved (outside of the crossplay issue) is allowing for LAN play- but that's sadly something of a dinosaur in today's AAA releases. Otherwise PlatinumGames, well known for its ability to translate beloved IPs to quality action games, has stuck the landing here.

Any Cygames veteran can attest to the quality that goes into each of their productions, but they somewhat fail to transcend their mobage framework. Granblue Fantasy (2014) proper is a ridiculously tedious grind, such that even spending tons of money doesn't fully circumvent it. Hidden deep within Granblue's stigma as a gacha game is actually an extremely in-depth JRPG storyline, to speak nothing of its combat mechanics and boss design. After several years, I couldn't be bothered to enjoy it anymore underneath the crushing daily grind- but there was so much to love about it. There was incredible art direction by the CyDesignation team (which also did similar fantastic work on Final Fantasy Brave Exvius: War of the Visions) and wonderful music by the likes of Nobuo Uematsu and Tsutomu Narita. A vast, well-established world and characters whom the team truly cared about, meticulously developing their stories and updating units. That is what makes Relink that much more special- seeing these characters and their various skillsets rendered beautifully and allowed to escape the small aspect ratio of the phone screen. Each respective character was brought to life here with a stunning attention to detail by PlatinumGames. And that's not to discount the wonderful job Arcsys did with Granblue Fantasy Versus, but the game is far more accessible to a wider audience. This is what helps bring this game from fan service to a niche base to something capable of engendering an entirely new audience to its universe.

Cygames was actually no stranger to highly-polished action combat either, with Dragalia Lost (2018) offering some of the best co-op boss raids for its respective platform. The gameplay loop in Dragalia was a cut above what most gacha shovelware was offering, and it had a similarly well-respected single player campaign to Granblue as well. Dragalia's end of service was a stinging loss to many people, but PlatinumGames has managed to deliver them from janky private servers. The boss mechanics are highly reminiscent of Dragalia's and serve as a worthy successor. It is pretty easy to pick up and play too. The only real hurdle Relink players will have getting started is wrangling the camera and targeting system, something Dragalia didn't really have to contend with due to its top-down perspective. I did get kind of frustrated with this at first, but it mostly boils down to a couple hours of experience to resolve. Kind of a Super Mario 64 situation, but a lot less egregious.

Everything in Relink just manages to feel right, and feel good. Surely it won't hit as hard with people who aren't interested with things like incremental mastery of the different characters' mechanics, or people who don't like seeing numbers go up. But there is a market for that, and its a big market if Monster Hunter's meteoric rise was any indication. Action game fans with no knowledge of the source material won't really find any of this too daunting either. The 10-15 hour initial campaign can be played and enjoyed standalone, and the combat itself is self-explanatory. I do recommend getting acquainted with the basic Granblue lore through the Lyria's note section (as well as the Fate Episodes) as it will help contextualize a lot of what people love about these characters and their world. The writing might be a little flowery in some parts, a little nekketsu in others, but overall its pretty good. I would consider Relink's story basically akin to a movie adaptation of an anime- with dubious implications as to the canon and basically non-consequential to the overall plot. It is thus pretty easy to just enjoy as its own thing.

Notably, it's kind of hilarious how Cygames integrated the source gacha's DNA into the UI, sometimes seemingly for the sake of it. It's never too intrusive and its really only there for the hardcore players, but it is still very funny to see cursed Granblue mechanics like Plus Marks, Over Mastery Bonuses, and Spellbooks in an action RPG title. They all work well enough though, and the difference-maker here is the pacing. Take the Treasure Trade and material system they transplanted from the gacha. The grind in OG Granblue for certain materials can take weeks, even months. In here, its just going to be a few hours at worst. Allowing one to enjoy all the aesthetics of Granblue without having to devote enough time for it to being a second job? I would have stuck out ten years for this.

I don't have much to say that's new about this game or the original, this is a remake that lives up to the original- and even surpasses it. Something I was hopeful for yet didn't quite expect with how most remakes turn out.

The team that made this clearly holds love for the original and took tons of care to preserve its essence in as many ways possible. While it does miss some of the ludo-narrative poignance of the original and certain charms or scenes the original had, it makes up for it fully in reimagining Persona 3 in such a fresh, vivid and more satisfying manner by delving deeper into characters they couldn't do the same for in the original.

My few gripes are with the audiovisual aspects, I like the OST a lot but it's certainly not as iconic as the original which is fine but in certain songs it's a little too off. And for the visuals, on most fronts this is one of the prettiest games I've ever played yet the lighting can be completely out of sync in certain areas. Besides the things I've mentioned, this game is essentially perfect.

Now for a little personal footnote, this game came into my life when I started questioning the meaning of life and why I was alive at a very tender time of my pre-teen years, still unaware of how to deal with a loss. Back then, this game was a guiding light to me, it helped me sit with my fear of death despite how much it posessed me. Death is something I fear even to this day, this moment. But unlike 10 years ago, this time I know the meaning of my life is mine and the people I surround myself by to find. It's alright if I can't find it as long as I'm alive, my life already means something to the people that love me.

And that's fine enough, no matter when or how I pass. This realization only came to me then due to this game and today it comes back into my life in a further fully realized manner to pat me on my back and remind me of the same, to keep walking on and adore the burning glimmer and brilliance in life even if it means enduring all the suffering I have to face or that it'll all come to an end.

And as the game says, "Nothing's a waste...my life will have meaning."

There's a moment near the very end of this game that I think really epitomizes Simon's Quest for me. You're going up to Dracula's Castle again.... and it's quiet. Nobody's home, just the eerie ruins of a place you once passed through long ago. There's no real twist to it either, it's just played straight. You walk in, unceremoniously kill Dracula, and that's it. It leaves this sort of hollow feeling, a deep reminiscence of the Castlevania that once was.

Simon's Quest is the most interesting kind of sequel to me, one that seeks to completely invert and upend the status quo of the original game. If the original Castlevania was about a methodical seige to defeat evil and save the day, then Simon's Quest is a showcase of the genuine aftermath shadowing such a task. Even after defeating Dracula, Simon doesn't have much of anything to return to. The world that he supposedly "saved" is completely dead looking, and he's left with a curse that's constantly eating away at his body. It's a premise that lies in stark contrast to the elating feeling that came with beating the first game, almost as if we've been kicked down and mocked despite our greatest efforts and supposed victories.

Simon's Quest is a game I'd consider to be genuinely brilliant and forward thinking, but not everyone seems to agree with me. Perhaps there couldn't be more fitting fate for it. A game reviled and dismissed by most, just as its hero is left with nothing but bitterness and decay.

Dark Souls 2 has to be one of the most unfortunate victims of circumstance in gaming of the modern age.

I wholeheartedly believe most of this game's "negatives" can only be read as such if you're comparing everything about DS2 to its precursor. In any random game, not giving you i-frames for animations like open doors/chests would not make the game 'unplayable', it would simply be a part of the game you have to play around. But, because so much of how people view DS2 has been informed by how people view DS1, it becomes a negative; some runbacks are incredibly frustrating because of this, and you're now unable to just dive into a room, aggro 20 enemies, get a gate open, and expect to make it back to a bonfire. In general, you can't play most of this game like DS1. If you watch a video like Feebleking's 'critique', the constant thing you will find people comparing this game to time and time again is, naturally, Dark Souls 1. A lot of the people that adopt a 'ds2 bad' attitude like Feeble are very eager to blame the 'incompetencies' of DS2 on the b-team devs, which to me reads as a very blatant, hostile and unearned disrespect to the people who made the game.

I just can't buy into the idea that this game is 'bad' because people who didn't know what they were doing took over. Every design choice about this game strikes me as trying to purposefully disrupt almost every tie this game has to the 'Dark Souls' name without severing the core ideology of the franchise. It's not like the devs didn't know about the first game when they were making this. They didn't come into production trying to drum up the best way to make the most divisive game of all time. There's an intent and purpose to the design changes of this game that the prevailing negative lens fails to interrogate. For example, take Lifegems; Lifegems completely disrupt the Estus system of the first game which itself has been gimped dramatically as Estus healing is much slower and more limited, especially in the early game. DS2 is a game that takes place in a world where bonfires are on their way out or forgotten by most; Firekeepers are spoken of as if no one's seen any in years, and the fact that there are three of them living together a five minute walk away from Majula is an absolute oddity. It's the same world of Dark Souls, but it's absolutely nothing like it. This game is not Dark Souls 1, nor can you really play it like Dark Souls 1, which is why I think pointing to Dark Souls 1 as to how DS2 could have 'done it right' is a really flawed idea; It's absolutely trying to not be DS1. But it still is very much a Dark Souls game.

I think about systems in DS2 like Lifegems, ADP, Bonfire Ascetics, and Soul Memory and think 'Dark Souls 2 was made to be broken', which I think a lot of people have overlooked as the years have gone by and DS2 has been relegated to being the 'black sheep' of the series. When I realized Ascetics could be used to re-fight bosses, it wasn't long after I learned how ridiculous the souls drops from The Rotten were on higher NG+ iterations. Then, I learned I could buy a stack of ten from Grandahl (so long as you're part of his covenant), and another ten from Agdayne, and after a few hours I jumped like 150 Soul Levels and got Rotten up to Intensity 19 or something before the returns became ~1.5 levels per clear and I had most stats for my build at their softcaps. I was in shock during the first couple clears, half expecting myself to walk through the fog gate at around Intensity 10 to see like, three Rottens in the arena, or maybe he grows four more arms each with a new weapon; any sort of indication from the game to say "ah, I see what you're doing, you naughty boy. But this is where your fun ends!" but the game just lets you do this. The game just hands you a car, the keys, and enough gas for the US to plan an invasion, and doesn't even try to call to make sure you're still in the state or something (This is also a large part of why ADP just doesn't bug me nearly as hard as it seems to for a lot of other people. I had ADP at 24 for 99 Agility for almost the entire game and I was fine, you absolutely do not need to farm levels to dump into this stat like some people would have you believe). This isn't some strange glitch like menu duping in DS1 or the areas of the Elden Ring map that will give you hundreds of thousands of runes if you jump off them with Torrent that sometimes get patched. You were absolutely intended to do this if you were clever enough and not averse to experimentation and risk. This is also 'the' way Soul Memory becomes a useful tactic for skipping the first half of the game; on NG+0 the Soul Memory required is 1 million, which you can get with <5 Ascetics.

I really hate to just sum up why I'm nowhere near as bothered by the game's shortcomings as most people to a 'skill issue'. Honestly, if you've tried playing this game and can't get past Iron Keep or Shrine of Amana or wherever, that has to suck, and I wish there was more that I or anyone could do to help you besides saying 'sorry, guess you're gonna have to kill everything enough times for the enemies to stop spawning or possibly respec/restart your playthrough after researching tips on builds or what weapons to use on fextralife.'

But let me just be honest having only played the first two Dark Souls games so far: Both of these games are built on mountains of jank. Dark Souls 1 manages to give you a view pretty enough to distract you from what you're standing on, but Dark Souls 2 is just begging you to look down. It wants you to realize what you're walking on, no matter how jagged, abrasive, and clunky it is, is actually not that different from the sky.

Thank you Yakuza, Thank you Like a Dragon. For everything. For whatever may come, for whatever passed. This series has left a mark of the highest significance in my heart after this despite being an immense fan for quite a few years.

I'll probably make a more deep-diving review someday but this is all I can write in the flooding tears and emotions I have right now.

I wrote about it a little, spoiler-free on here
https://twitter.com/ldealAndTheReal/status/1752357474663903677

Odd game; having done all of the arcade modes and playing catch-up before release on the plot, this really feels like a proper conclusion to a majority of the cast. Ending in either death or a return to normalcy, Sys:Celes feels purposeful in wanting to be the end of the Hollow Night: but it also feels like the prelude to a larger conflict in this world. I feel that in both, I can respect that Under Night's focus is not in story, but can also make its characters reach a proper, satisfying end point.

Gameplay's perfect however: everything feels fine-tuned to perfection, making every character feel stronger both with Sys:Celes's new universal mechanics and unique new moves. I found a new main in Kaguya, someone feeling perfect for my playstyle, but I also feel every character continues to be fun. It's a game I feel I can pick randomly and still have a great time with friends, but also feel that I can happily commit time and effort to improving as a player. And the inclusion of rollback is a welcome addition; the online's playable! It runs very well! Sys:Celes feels like a perfect end point to Under Night as a series, but I'm also ready to see in what ways it continues to grow with its DLC.