I've dipped my toes into plenty of Cygames titles prior to this one. Got knee-deep into Princess Connect: Re:Dive, waded in the shallows of World Flipper, and went off the deep end for Dragalia Lost, including going down with the ship! What I'm getting at is that Cygames definitely has a winning formula for their gacha games, and while the gameplay (obviously) bears the closest resemblance to Granblue Fantasy, there are elements drawn from all their works that feel familiar. Big AoE attack circles that appear on the ground, visual novel side stories that give minor permanent buffs to character stats, raid-styled bosses that shift between normal, overdrive, and break states. They've translated the allure and mechanics of their mobile games into a product you only need to pay for once, and that alone is commendable. But is it good?

One trick that Cygames has up their sleeve is borrowing (and occasionally poaching) talent from across the industry. I bring this up because Relink was announced to be in development alongside Platinum Games back in 2018, only for their contract with Platinum to end in 2019. Either they "borrowed" some of their staff, or someone from Platinum leaked the recipe for their secret sauce, because Granblue Fantasy: Relink is the most fun Platinum game I've played in almost a decade, and it's not even necessarily made by Platinum. Their DNA is written all over Relink with stuff like like dodge offsetting combos, a cooldown after evading three times, and linear story stages with optional content off the beaten path (treasures, extra encounters, hidden items, etc). I hope some former Platinum talent works at Cygames now, because Platinum's going downhill fast, and their action game expertise needs to be preserved, damn it.

So obviously, I can't just use "punching down on Platinum" as an explanation as to why I like this game, so allow me to heap unfounded praise unto Cygames instead. This game is beautiful. I want to exist here. I stroll through the market of Seedhollow and I can hear every stall owner barking their sales pitches at me, it's been too long since I've played a game with a world that feels lived in. No matter who your team is comprised of, there's quite a bit of banter bouncing around during battles. It really hammers home that your group of skyfarers are like one big family going on adventures. And the music? From soothing serenades to glorious battle themes, this game truly looks and sounds the part.

The story is definitely your typical shounen adventure fare, but I never really minded that because it's constantly topping its previous setpieces as threats escalate, and it's just a fun ride to boot. Some people call it a "12 hour tutorial", and they're not exactly wrong. The game eases you into quite a few major game mechanics via scripted events, and you won't unlock most of the story bosses as standalone quests for a good while after it's all said and done. The "fate episodes" are extremely middling, however. Each character brings their individuality and emotional baggage to the table, and usually explores it via whatever random NPC happened to be within earshot that day. It's usually fine, but it often makes what could be a very personal story into something detached from their identity. We've got more than enough characters in the base roster to have them bounce off each other, but I guess they save that level of interaction for the freakin' mobile game.

While I sincerely appreciate the familiarity that comes with this game's gacha origins, it's also haunted by issues carried over from those titles. For every unique Primal Beast, Avia General, and Bahamut you fight, there's also four elemental variants of the same fucking rock lizard. Again, you gotta work your way back up to the good shit once you're done with the story. With all due respect, I think whittling a raid-style boss's health bar down is an exhilarating experience when the fight is actually interesting. Depending on how you've invested resources into various characters, you'll either finish under par, or you'll be in it for the long haul. I personally pumped 90% of my resources into my personal unga-bunga invincibility potato (Charlotta), and spent the remaining 10% trying to ensure that my remaining three CPU party members weren't too hopeless.

Basic attack combos are pretty braindead, but they're usually based around activating a character's special abilities. For example, pressing Y launches Charlotta into the air, and then pressing X will launch her halfway across the map (or towards the nearest enemy). Every single character has a few defining quirks to their playstyle that sets them apart from each other. They all have their own distinct skills to choose from, which is the real determining factor in choosing who you want to play as. Once you click with someone, it's time to build up their passive traits using sigils. The traits provided by sigils have extremely high level caps, much higher than a single sigil can provide on its own. You can equip multiple copies of the same type of sigil in order to min/max the ludicrous bonuses available at the higher levels, given you have enough sigil slots. It's fun to experiment, so long as you aren't addicted to the idea of a "meta".

Most players seem to be settling into the same meta build with little variation, but you shouldn't feel pressured to conform. Take it from me: Dealing any damage at all is more important than dealing the most damage possible. Meta builds don't really matter until the final tier of quest difficulty. Don't be afraid to equip sigils with survivability in mind. Being KO'd is a detriment to everyone involved. Quests end with a score tally and a ranking, dictated primarily by clear time and side objectives. Ranks and side objectives have extra item drops tied to them, encouraging you to play better, harder, faster, and stronger. In essence, make damage number go up, make enemy health go down faster, get more rewards. I am an advocate for straightforward gameplay loops.

I built my justice potato with the intention of taking her online for co-op. Joke's on me, over a month since release, and apparently the matchmaking is basically broken on PC! I thought it could be because everyone's already busy playing endgame content and I'm late to the party, but I swear the "quick quest" option just doesn't work half the time. If SteamDB says the game has 7000-15000 players online, then why do we seem so disconnected? I switched Steam's download region to Tokyo, and it barely improved anything! Regardless, successfully getting a group together gives you the ideal Relink experience, it's leagues above playing with your braindead CPU partners. When every player has their designated build and knows how to properly play as their character, the game's mechanics finally click.

Unfortunately, I can't praise everything this game does. Particularly, you're constantly being showered in particle effects during combat, which makes it really difficult at times to identify and properly react to incoming attacks. I don't consider that a game-ruiner; Relink is much less a pure action game and moreso an action-RPG with very fluid combat. You can tank a few hits and heal yourself up with no harm done in most situations, but sometimes the act of dodging feels closer to a guessing game. Perfect dodges are a thing in this game though, and the brief invincibility you gain for pulling one off feels glorious. Also, guard. Guard guard guard guard guard. You can casually block way more attacks than you'd expect, do not neglect to do so in a pinch.

I hope I'm not overselling it too much, but outside of Monster Hunter, multiplayer action of this caliber is pretty hard to come by. Most importantly though, I can use this game as an excuse to never ever play the gacha game. What can I say? I feel like a kid who got exactly what he wanted on Christmas morning. If this game is successful, then I hope other Cygames properties can be immortalized as non-gacha games. You hear me, Cygames? Do this for Princess Connect! And Dragalia Lost, and Uma Musume, and World Flipper, and

i had higher hopes than most. i don't mind the visuals (most of the time), the bosses or the chaos powers. what i do mind is the sheer lack of energy that carries this whole game

superstars is the negative extreme of what a sonic detractor perceives the series as. there's little to no thought or challenge throughout. you're just constantly going with the motions and holding right - sometimes left - occasionally making some precise jumps - but then it's back to going through the motions

almost every zone bleeds together design-wise. the camera really doesn't help - it's too damn close. i have no desire to revisit and explore the majority of these zones because:

a.) i have no fucking idea where i'm going in them half the time

b.) spatial awareness is unimportant anyway because there's no real upside to being on the skilled path vs the baby road

there's stage gimmicks everywhere, but they largely amount to wasted momentum. the game's constantly moving onto new thing after new thing at a pace more rapid than the tiktok algorithm, but for every attempt at variety there's little to no commitment or follow-through. almost every idea feels half-baked. case in point: one of the final stages being a half-assed shmup segment; or THE final act just being the second-to-last but backwards

ironically the bosses were the highlight for me. they're the only points throughout where you're forced to stop and think for a moment. there's a few annoying ones, but generally they reward efficiency and offer more opportunities for damage than they initially let on. i'd say that's a success as far as sonic fights go

what kills me here is i don't think that sonic team's heart is really in the wrong place - trip's a great newcomer and it's nice to see mostly original zones, but i really hope the next outing isn't so painfully safe. this series is always at its best when it's being bold and confident - neither of which i can call superstars in any capacity

also ditch that garbage ass soundfont pronto

Been a long wait, but It's wonderful to finally see this charming series brought to life a proper 3D space. They truly delivered too, the game looks great, and is super fun and addicting.

I've wished for a long time that Granblue could stand on a bigger stage than its mobile/browser origins. I hope they stick with this game and other projects from here on out.

My only complaints really are that i wish we got more scenes of some sort with more of the cast outside of the starting crew members. Some of my favorite Granblue characters are playable in Relink but they don't get any screen time which was a bummer. The story is also pretty shallow and straight forward. The fate episodes have more interesting writing than the actual main plot, but it's still a fun and bombastic time nonetheless.

I am very happy and thankful to have gotten a modern remake of Persona 3 since it's one of my favorite games. The quality of life and modern visuals naturally made it feel fresh and made it easier to recommend to friends than the original. It's also very faithful in terms of the story (so faithful in fact that it even maintains the same flaws the original had). The other positive thing I can say is that I very much like the several new music tracks introduced in the game, and the remastered tracks are also all good (with the exception of Mass Destruction which i think is just not as good as the original- unfortunate since this is kind of the most iconic song from the game)

That said, this remake has a lot of really small changes from the original that can't stop myself from nitpicking......For one the game's lighting is way too bright and kind of ruins the darker visuals of the original. Turning down the game's brightness helps this some but you can't totally fix it. This game also has a weird obsession with the green hues associated with the Dark Hour in the original, so all the night time scenes in Reload outside of Tartarus have too much bright green lighting going on. In general, I would say the remake simply fails to recreate the creative vision that permeates the original in terms of visuals. There are some other tiny things i could nitpick but personally I can look past a lot of the small issues. HOWEVER, there is one thing I simply could not overlook which was the removal of certain anime cutscenes from the original, which were replaced by in-engine rendered cutscenes. These scenes were very important parts of the story and the in-engine versions are a massive downgrade, seriously hurting their impact. This was by far the most disappointing aspect of the remake.

All things considered I love Persona 3 and I was happy to have experienced it again remastered and refreshed. I would consider myself mostly satisfied with this remake, I just really wish the developers put more effort into recreating the visual style that made the original unique.

Quick prefix, I played this using the SNES thing on switch

I was always very interested in why this game is held as highly as it is. Still to this day being regarded as one of the best Zelda games and it came out 33 years ago. Needless to say this was one of the titles I was looking forward going into during this series replay I'm doing. Upon completion I do really get where the praise comes from, but it still unfortunately suffers from one big issue.

A Link to the Past is the first game in the series to properly nail down the format that the later games can follow. By that I mean that this game adds way more life into its open world through more NPC's, side content and slightly more detailed narrative. Comparing this to Zelda 1 its almost night and day, where that game was as basic as move from dungeon to dungeon, Link to the Past adds so much more to do. It also massively improves upon some framework started in Zelda 2 with towns and proper NPC's. This game is also the introduction of so many franchise mainstays being the first appearance of The Master Sword, Kakariko Village, Hyrule Castle and The Lost Woods. To sum up, this game is where the franchise properly kicks into gear in my opinion.

The dungeons are where this game properly shines. There is 11 dungeons in total if you include Ganon's tower at the end. Each dungeon feels very unique with varying enemy types and layout. The bosses are a big highlight for me as they provide a decent challenge and tend to get tougher as the dungeons go on and also as Link gets stronger. I like that most items are made useful throughout the game unlike in Zelda 1 where most were useless outside of the dungeon you got it in. Traversal is made less boring with the addition of the Pegasus boots letting Link dash across the screen, also allowing fast travel using the flute item which can annoyingly only be used in the light word.

This is also the first Zelda game to have a "Gimmick", such as how Majora's mask has the masks and Tears of the Kingdom has the ultra hand stuff, Link to the Past has the ability to switch between the light and dark world. The dark world is much more of a challenge with enemies dealing way more damage and being harder to kill with weaker weapons. I think this is a great feature for its time but I wish that you got to spend more time properly in the light world as outside of the three introductory dungeons, you spend the entire game in the dark world. Obviously you can jump back and forth to collect items/heart pieces but I wish there was more main quest to do in the light world.

Im a big fan of the SNES art style on a lot of games, something about it just feels nice. It keeps the retro aesthetic but adds in more colour. A lot of enemy variety with sprites and Links design is very unique when comparing to later games. Soundtrack wise it has a slightly more diverse track list than Zelda 1 and 2 but still ends up with tracks becoming repetitive. I also had this issue where whenever I would enter somewhere like Kakariko Village or The Lost Woods, the regular overworld theme would play instead of the specific theme which was annoying.

Now all the positives that I have said about this game come with this one massive * beside them. This game is borderline impossible without a guide. If you want to be on level with the dungeon you are going to, good luck finding the items/heart pieces you need as they are so well hidden that its a surprise people found them in the first place. I think a big reason for this is because of all the advances this game makes in its story and gameplay, it neglected to fix the biggest issue with the first Zelda which was "I don't know how to find anything" which is in turn made worse in this game due to its bigger scale. If it were not for the guide I would of had no clue how to get all the heart pieces I needed, how to get certain items or that you can upgrade the master sword twice. This problem comes with age as Videogames used to be designed with no hand holding whatsoever so that people would spend more time looking around and combing the game for secrets, unfortunately this has not aged well at all. I should also mention a few dungeons are like mazes with lots of unnecessary rooms just to throw you off. Its a massive problem that effects most games on OG Nintendo consoles not just this specifically. There is no shame in using a guide to play this game as you will have a 10 times more enjoyable experience that way and not be walking around lost.

That being said I will still give this game a decently high score. It properly starts a lot of trends the franchise follows from here on out. Besides the caveat of the aged game design, its still a great Zelda game and one of the best 2d Zelda's. For the love of God though, use a guide.