Hi-Fi Rush is a Kingdom Hearts.

Power of friendship, magic weapon, bad guys to good guys, pattern based bosses, idiot but cheerful protagonist.

Aside from that it's an okay character action game mixed with an okay rhythm game that manages to be better than the sum of its parts.
When it all comes together, it's sublime.
When it doesn't, it can get frustrating. The audio mixing can make it really difficult to stay on cue, or really easy to miss important sound effects in battle. The camera turns really slowly, which is bizarre. Visually, things get a bit cluttered too which, again, make it very easy to not be able to react to threats.

The combat flow is pretty standard character action game and gets much more interesting when you're given a parry. This does lead to some enemies getting block strings that that have a defined pattern that I don't think you can work out first time (unlike the pre-defined "duel" segments).

I played through on Hard mode, so I'm looking forward to jumping up a difficulty with my full game knowledge to see if it unlocks any complexity.

The story is all pretty standard shonen anime, but I thought the main gang of characters was really endearing and I'd be very up for seeing more from them!

In summary: It's a no brainer on Game Pass and it feels like a great deal at it's below-average RRP.

A totally fine shooter that doesn't really do anything that made the first one good.
The level design very rarely creates exciting encounters, the enemies don't feel "smart" any more.
The melee moves very rarely have a chance to shine.
The story, and particularly the ending, are dreadful.
It's decidedly not scary at any point.

But, for the most part, shooting stuff is fun.

Fucking hell, man.
Maybe this was good at the time, but going back to it now is hell.
The character moves like an old resi character, the platforming sucks and the combat is mostly just non-stop Izuna Drops (This is actually a good thing).

The Rachel bits were dreadful, and this was the point that made me quit for good.
https://twitter.com/ViewtifulGaz/status/1612124904106639361

I always remember hearing that Doom 3 was the black sheep of the family, and was more of a horror game than the rest. This really only holds true for the beginning portion of the game, and the rest of it was way more Doom like than I expected!
You just have to approach it with the mind of the Doomslayer.

My only real complaints are that the AI totally sucks, and will frequently spawn directly in your face to die immediately to a shotgun, and that all of the imp "Jump scares" are really annoying.

The weapons do feel lame at the start, but by the time you're in the midst of later combat, you totally forget about it.

The shotgun is also nowhere near as bad as everyone says, and it totally serves its purpose of making you run up to the enemies to kill them.

What is a sequel for?

Is it to continue with the adventures of the previous cast and see what they're up to? See how they've grown and how they face new adventures?

Or do we instead focus on exploring the world and the plot? Wrapping up old threads, making new ones.

Is it to continue the themes and ideals but put a new spin on it; Seeing the world through the lens of another?

The problem with NEO: The World Ends With You is... I don't know why it exists, and I don't think it does either.

The original DS version of The World Ends With You wraps itself up nicely, with room to think about it, but the journeys of the characters are pretty much complete.
Then the mobile version teased an extra piece of information.
Then the Switch version had an extra scenario which pretty much undoes the original ending (this is clearly meant to be important in a sequel).
Then they released an anime of the original game; intended to be the "definitive cut" this was touted to be the true predecessor to NEO: TWEWY.

So Square Enix basically created the need for a sequel out of nothing. Fair enough, they want to make money.

But the new scenario in the Switch version is pretty much hand-waved away with no explanation in NEO and the anime doesn't cover it at all. So there's this clearly important past event which did happen, and is central to the motivations of characters, but is just entirely dismissed by the game itself.

So if we see NEO as a sequel of plot: it doesn't make sense. They didn't keep the plot thread cohesive. Which, again, is fine. The original game was about the themes and character development, maybe this one is too...

NEO: TWEWY mostly follows a new cast of teens, but doesn't really give them room to do anything beyond their gimmicks. Interesting characters are killed off as soon as they threaten to become interesting, motivations change with the wind. Returning "legendary" characters just kind of show up to undo the events of a different mystery which is trying to change another thing which hasn't been explained yet. So you get this jenga tower of mysteries that totally undoes itself in a way that leaves you with a net-zero of satisfying mystery solutions... So what's the point in it?

The same goes for the "theme sequel". The original was about opening up to the world. This one is about... friends are good? Don't time travel? God could fix anything he wanted in to seconds but just fucking doesn't?

The game also has a literal Deus Ex Machina which has no impact before or after it beyond getting the plot out of a corner that they put themself into. So yeah, I think the theme is that God could fix all of this. Sometimes he fixes some of this, some times he shows up and says he would have fixed all of it but didn't.

In summary:
- It doesn't continue the exploration of the themes of the original or try to pave new grounds
- New characters are under baked, old characters are like ticking items off a to-do list
- The driving force of the game comes from an event that the game itself pretends didn't happen until it needs to and then forgets until it needs to not. It's impossible to get a read on it.

As a game NEO: TWEWY is a pretty fun action/rpg game with an unsatisfying plot that really settles me in the camp of "sometimes things don't need a sequel".


Assorted musings:
It feels like the end of a trilogy, but the second game just never existed and they're pretending that it does and we all played it.

Character motivations and mysteries are constantly teased, and then are basically settled & solved back to back to back in the last portion of the game making them all pretty unsatisfying.

There's a lot of characters you're meant to feel bad for, but they're barely on screen and then you're meant to feel sad for them, and then they're gone. Rinse and repeat.

The character that was originally teased in the mobile port of the original has essentially no impact and I don't get what her deal is.

They bring back an original character in a sort of "I know what's going on, but I'll be mysterious about it" role, but then just fucking forget to do anything with him until the end. A hundred different plot points that would make sense for them to be involved in are shoved inexplicably onto someone else.

So many of the days are incredibly padded out by sending you all around the city or doing a bunch of extra fights. I was willing it to end by the time I hit the final act.

As soon as you get the final 300% team attack, there's no reason to do anything else. Ignore all pins that don't massively boost your groove,

Not being able to skip stuff you've already seen is a crime.

Sifu is a game about overcoming adversity and bettering yourself in the process; I just wish it did a better job at helping you get there.

My enjoyment came in waves, from thinking it's the best thing ever into something totally bullshit and finally settling on really good wiht room for improvement.
The combat is an evolution of the Batman's Creed formula, with much more freedom (eventually) but much more punishing. Enemies have no qualms ganging up on you to make you mess up all your parries. Some of them attack with difficult patterns that you really have to learn; there's no "slow down time to react" here.

The hook to failure in Sifu is that when you "die" you get right back up, but you're a little older. Eventually you're too old and you die for real.
The problem is that failure is a distant fantasy until it's right up in your face. Fighting goons is usually a magic time, but once things start to go wrong the damage comes in so FAST that it's difficult to readjust before you die.
So chances are you'll need to play stuff over and over, which is fine if you enjoy it as much as I do.

Eventually you'll permanently unlock enough skills to allow you to deal with anything and really make that combat shine.

Miscellaneous thoughts:
It really needs a better training mode.
Sometimes the camera is dreadful and will get you dead quick.
The tutorial is bad, doesn't tell you about a few basic (and necessary) features and is bad at telling you the "why" behind the different strategies.
The bosses mostly blow.
The music is good, but I didn't find it ramp up enough for any of the big fights.

Closing:
Once I'd finished the game (and there is a "true" ending) I dind't have much to do except start over or do it again better, but the combat is so fun I really hope they add some sort of random challenge mode or Bloody Palace type deal.

The logical conclusion of roguelikes.

I've tried 'em all, and usually you get to a point where you've made a build so unkillable you just play until you get bored or the game ramps up in a way where even an unkillable build is overrun.

Vampire Survivors is a very simple roguelike where you pick up and combine items to kill very simple enemies in a very simple map.
It has all the joy of roguelikes: Finding new weapons, combining them in interesting ways, working out which ones are good and bad, and slowly re-evaluating them over time.

Over the course of 30 minutes the game gets steadily more difficult, occasionally throwing waves that seem impossible to beat. But you will beat them, learn something new and get a little further.

Eventually the game is no challenge. You stand still and kill everything; you've solved the game.
As a reward, at the 30 minute mark the Grim Reaper shows up and kills you.
The only way to survive for 30 minutes is to have a broken build and your reward is death.

It's roguelikes as a genre boiled down to its bare essence and sold for about £2.

When you read or hear people talk about Tetris Effect, you'd think they'd had a religious experience.
Sat on my hard drive for months at this point I'd have a look and think "It's just Tetris. I'll get to it eventually.".

And then I had my religious experience with Tetris.

The thing about Tetris Effect is that it so quickly clicks as to what it is and how you're going to experience it. It is confident to let you play it and just let the euphoria wash over you.

It's genuine magic.

Oh man. What a disappointment.

Not so much a review, but a list of things to try and explain why I didn't like it.

This is probably my third or fourth go at it, but this time I was going to get to the end no matter what.

To get it out of the way: It looks and sounds nice, but I don't think even those aspects are realised as well as I expected.

I really did not get on with the gameplay at all. To an extent where I worry that it soured me on all the other parts of the game too.
I tried so many combinations of effects and everything ended up being the same "Hit for as much as you can, run away for five seconds". It's incredibly unsatisfying, with the most frustrating dash to ever be put in a video game.

I eventually settled on a combo that jumped through enemies, turned them to my side temporarily and did damage over time. This made every fight in the game a joke, so I swung from thinking the combat was bad to pointless.

The final boss just felt bad to play.

On the narrative side, I actually found the narrator gimmick super annoying in this (even though I enjoyed it in Bastion). I didn't really care about anyone in it. I know they were going for a "start in the action" type deal, but I just didn't see why I'd care about anyone or anything.

HowLongToBeat says 6 hours to play through; my total time (including probably an hour's worth of false starts) is 4.7 hours, so maybe I skipped half the game or something.

But that's just, like, my opinion man.

Everyone in Drakengard 3 fucks and they have to make sure you know about this at all times.

What a strange one. Probably more fun than Drakengard 1, but SO different they may as well be unrelated.

Played on emulator so I thankfully avoided the seemingly dreadful technical woes.

Like Nier: Automata, the gameplay is pretty much functional enough to drag you through and you can feel the early DNA of that game in here.

It has the Yoko Taro classic "multiple ending" and "every character is a fucked up little guy" but a lot of this stuff is worked into the world itself here.

Interesting time to be sure, but fuck that final boss, man.

Edit: After re-evaluating the final boss, and realising that the trick is to just not look at it and rely on the "song" it made it way easier and I now think it's incredible. Thanks.