Contextually speaking, Chrono Trigger certainly deserves a lot of praise on plot and narrative alone. A very engaging plotline with a carefully considered timeline of events that unfolds itself in a really satisfying manner as you progress through it. It's intricate like clockwork, and those reveals and storybeats were way beyond what I would expect from a 4th generation game.

It's also incredible how many lines of dialogue they had to write for every party member in each scene, and the sheer amount of ending states this game has is also impressive. Despite most of them leading to the same conclusion, it's still very cool to see how they managed to work out a different finale situation for that many different parts of the game. These loose dynamics of choosing who you want to see in your party at any given part of the game plus choosing exactly where you want to beat it makes the game feel tailor-made for any given player.

With that being said, I still had some gripes with it. Chrono Trigger is a much simpler JRPG than Square's own Final Fantasy. Combat systems, difficulty curve, short overall length, even the amount of active party members being set at 3 is a shift down in complexity (FF7 also did that, but it was a limitation of the PS1). It's definitely more tuned to be an entry-point JRPG, which is fine, but once you combine this casualness of the mechanics with the easy-breezy presentation of the characters and settings, it strips away some of the seriousness that the plot is trying to convey. It feels clashing to me, like the story is pushing this world-ending gravitas but the Akira Toriyama character designs and the kid-friendly combat mechanics were telling another tale. The lack of a main villain also hit me hard, that's usually one of the most dramatic parts of a JRPG's story. Golbez, Kefka, Sephiroth, Kuja, there were instrumental to carry the emotional punches of their games, but CT has none of that.

Of course, I understand that Chrono Trigger is aiming for a Disney-esque feel, but Final Fantasy 6 was also a SNES JRPG that was at times funny and goofy without sacrificing it's somberness. Chrono Trigger lacks that emotional intensity.

The soundtrack is good and the pixel-art is wonderful, and as much as I felt unsatisfied with the overly simplistic combat, I still appreciated how snappy it feels and the amount of different combinations when you mix and match party members.

Chrono Trigger is a game with high-quality visuals, a great soundtrack and overly simplistic combat mechanics that get old fast but never really get in your way. The highlight is the intricacy of the plot and variety of dialogue and story outcomes based on player choices and preferences, but it's levity and short length water down the emotional impact it could've had.

There are four experiences a person could've had while playing TWEWY:

- those who were living the aesthetic and the setting that this game portrays in the moment (Shibuya-based teenagers who played this game upon release),
- those who grew up in that setting and got to re-experience it through playing this game later,
- those who are completely alien to this setting and take this setting as just another visual style, and
- those who were aware of the vibrant, grafitti and hip-hop influenced urban culture of the era, but could only watch from afar.

I fall onto the latter category. As a kid in the mid to late 2000's, I was aware of this culture and similar cultures throughout other countries. My local MTV was full of urban-esque imagery tinged with frutiger metro backgrounds and hip-hop soundtracks. Third-wave emo was dominating the alternative charts with their peculiar clothing and dramatic hairstyles, and anime was inching closer to the mainstream and also being influenced by that style (just look at Bleach's openings, endings and promotional material). I was awed by all of this, though too young to partake in any of it. I dreamed of the day I could be a cool teenager and "rep these fits, yo". Little did I know we would undergo a huge cultural shift, but alas.

When I played TWEWY for the first time last year, I was rushed with nostalgia. These clothing trends? this fascination with pins? this artstyle? I've "been" there. I had a DS around the time this game came out, I had firsthand experience with these graphics, these sounds. There was an immediate emotional connection. The reason why I have this completely subjective paragraph in what's poised to be an objective review is to illustrate how well TWEWY does what it sets out to do: represent a scene. I can only imagine how personal this game must feel to those who actually lived in that environment. It had a vision, and it executed it to perfection.

This atmosphere is the driving force of TWEWY and everything else is shaped around this stylistic expression. For example, the amount of combat options is immense, and your character is forced to switch it up and customize himself tons in accordance to passing trends. Each new neighborhood you hop in you have to change your clothes to fit the local trends, completely altering your attacks and moves. Like a teenager trying to find his place in society. See? this game is genius.

Of course, this also ties into the character arc of the main character, who learns to accept himself and his place in the world throughout his journey. This is why the game is named "The World Ends With You". It has a deep significance to the story, despite at first sounding like JRPG Engrish mumbo-jumbo.

The story itself is very engaging, and I found myself really invested in seeing it through the end. I wanted to see the conclusion, I wanted a certain character to come back, I rooted for the main character and his friends and I was entertained by the machinations of the situation they were all facing. Of course, all of this was enhanced by the gorgeous Nomura character designs, the overall great presentation and the wonderful soundtrack.

Not all is perfect, very unfortunately. The gameplay takes the hit. They could only do so much with such a premise and the limited DS hardware. They sacrificed playability in favor of irreverence. You control two characters simultaneously in this game, one on the bottom screen with your stylus and the other one on the top screen with the D-pad. Unless you sink an ungodly amount of hours rewiring your brain to do two things at the same time, chances are you're going to be mashing the D-pad in the general direction of the enemies while doing your usual combo routes with the stylus. This is really disorienting, but the game offers the convenient solution of having a really fluid difficulty setting that you can customize any time (which also ties into the customization motif of the narrative). That being said, making the game easier doesn't make it any less disorienting. The hard fact is that if they removed a screen, the game would be too boring and easy, so only a total combat overhaul could solve these issues.

As it stands, TWEWY is a fantastic representation of a bygone era with masterful amounts of ludonarrative harmony and impeccable visuals and soundtrack, though one that is often tedious and confusing to play through.

Much like Fatal Frame 1, enjoyment of this game is completely dependent on how much you enjoy atmosphere compared to the other aspects of a videogame.

The story this time around is quite literally what "Fatal Frame 2" sounds like: it's Fatal Frame, but everything is a two instead of one lol. It's almost the same exact story, except that instead of one sacrifice, we have two. Instead of one main character, there's two. Instead of one manor, we have two main ones and a few smaller houses orbiting it. They really invested heavily in this theme of twinhood, and it is an interesting concept, though the rest of the story is a bit too derivative of the story of FF1.

The main motivator throughout the game is rescuing your sister, and seeing the progression of that plotline while being introduced to the past history of the village and how it affects both you and her is very engaging.

As I mentioned earlier, instead of taking place in one large RE1-styled mansion, this game takes place in a small village where you get to explore every building and some outdoors areas. To me, this felt like a trade-off that didn't fully realize it's potential: it abandoned the interconnectivity of the first game's map in favor of a more varied setting, but no area in the whole town packs the atmosphere that the first manor had, and all of them felt a little incomplete and a bit too small. It also meant that backtracking (something this game has aplenty, much akin to FF1) is all the more frustrating.

Environmental storytelling is good and very immersive, with you often times seeing ghosts and then reading about how they died and in which way. Journal entries and recordings are a good read/listen and act both as a break for the pacing and an enhancer for the immersion. Good stuff, I definitely recommend checking them all out while playing. On the other hand, it's been a few months since I completed this game and I don't remember any puzzle whatsoever, so I guess they were really unmemorable for some reason.

The combat is good. First-person movement is great for a PS2 game of that era, and it feels surprisingly fun and arcadey to mess around with your camera settings and different types of films. In FF1, you did more damage by holding the ghost inside of the reticle for longer, but this time around you do more damage the closer you get, regardless of how long you've been trailing the ghost for. Both systems have their merits and cons, but this one felt more fluid to me.

My main gripe with this game, which was also a problem I had with the first FF but it's even stronger this time around, is that this game simply isn't scary at all. It's not scary when you're running solo, and it's even less so when you're tagging along with your sister. Companions in horror games always make the game less scary because they eliminate the feeling of solitude, like Maria in SH2, Eileen in SH4 and Ashley in RE4, and in this game you play around half of it with her by your side.

The graphics are great, and I strongly recommend you to play this game with the undub patch that puts the original Japaneses voices in alongside fanmade subtitles. Not only are they much better all-around, but the very final scene has one spine-chilling performance in the Japanese version that got annihilated in the dub. One of the most intense vocal performances I've seen in any game, plus that ending song is fantastic.

Fatal Frame 2 is a short, non-scary experience with great atmosphere (though a bit of a step-down from FF1), great graphics and gameplay, unmemorable puzzles, tedious and downright irritating backtracking and a story that is engaging to follow but conceptually too close to the story of FF1. It's still not up-there with the quality of the classic RE and SH titles, but I'm excited to experience the other games in the series.

NFSUG2 is definite proof that you can have way too much of a good thing.

If you take a slice of this game, it's near perfect: the driving feels great, the sense of speed is intense and pumping, customizing your car adds a lot of player expression, the atmosphere perfectly encapsulates the aesthetic it sets out to showcase, the graphics are gorgeous, the city is fun to drive around, the soundtrack is the absolute BEST licensed OST I have ever heard in any game, the gameplay loop of winning races>unlocking parts>tuning car>winning more races feels addictive and rewarding, any segmented stretch of the campaign is extremely fun in and of itself.

This changes, however, when you factor in that this game stretches well beyond 35 hours. Do that to any kinectic fun-based game (such as rhythm games, shmups, fighting games, racing, etc.) and you start noticing the formula that, as time goes on, the problems become more and more frustrating and diminishing returns kick in hard.

The more I played, the more annoyed I got at having to drive to-and-fro every mission. At first, it was immersive and fun, then it just became a massive progress-slowing hindrance. The ridiculous amount of races (you'll most likely need to win over 150 races to beat the game) meant I was forced to play every race type I didn't like 25 - 30 times each, and this gets REALLY grating when it dawned on me that half the types of races were overly gimmicky and absolutely insufferable. I'm tuning my car to race it, not have it flop around like a dumbass scoring drift-points. Even when you tune your car completely and get max handling, max acceleration and max topspeed, drifting still feels like garbage, you can definitely tell that the game was not based around that, yet they had the mechanic in and it was part of the streetracing culture of the time so they shoehorned it in to the maximum amount.

Same for drag races, a type of race where you don't control your car aside from switching lanes (like Sonic the Hedgehog jumps from one rail to the other in 3D games), instead you focus on switching gears at the appropriate time and using nitro strategically. It feels like a puzzle game, you're aiming for the perfect sequence of button presses to pass these races. It's unfun. It feels like they added the gear-shifting mechanic in there but figured out everyone would play in automatic mode so they force you to deal with it through these kinds of races. Those extremely short and curvy races are ass too.

Also traffick is often very bullshit here. Sometimes a car will be sitting there right after a tight curve and you're gonna bang ultra hard, drop to last place, most likely have to restart the whole 5+ minutes long race if it's on the last lap and there's nothing you could've done about that, no way you could've seen it.

Like I had said before, doing any of these races a few times would be okay, but up to 30 times each is absolutely ball-bursting, specially when you factor in that you also have to manually drive to the races themselves. Catch-up mechanics are not that irritating in this game, at least.

Another thing that bugs me, one that is also certainly tied to how long the game is, is that you reach a point where your car is maxed out, fully tuned and pimped, and you still have dozens of races left to do. There's no progression anymore, no extrinsic motivators, just a checklist of races you still have left to do in order to complete the game. This is, to me, the very definition of a chore.

The whole structure of having your progression being through fulfilling sponsor requeriments instead of a story is just plain boring overall, it's not engaging in the slightest.

Still, I can't stress enough how awesome it feels to see your car boosting through these streets with that amazing OST blasting in the background. When everything clicks, this game is like no other. As it stands, though, there is no amount of "SCA-VEN-GER!" and "WE GIVE IT AAAAALL!" that can carry me through tens of hours of changing gears while sliding my car to the sides like Pepsiman or drifting like a soap bar inside the world's biggest game of Operation.

Release date here is wrong, 2016 is when it came out on Steam but this game is much older. I remember playing it in 2010 - 2011 so it's at least this old, but apparently it's from 2007 or something.

Run-of-the-mill TDM-based CS 1.6 clone, we got these a dime a dozen back in the day (like Crossfire, Point Blank, Combat Arms, Sudden Attack etc). Plays the same like much, if not all, of them as well: fun arcadey gunplay, ludicrous numbers of hackers, insane amounts of pay-to-win.

For those of you who may have not experienced this era of F2P FPS games, basically if a kid dropped some bucks in the game they'd get triple the base HP and guns that were guaranteed instakills. Fun stuff.

Still, if you managed to fill up a room with friends and just shoot the shit, it's definitely very fun. This type of loud, dumb gunplay is long gone, which is unfortunate.

This game is the textbook definition of a "doozy". It's like they designed a flawless diamond and then smashed it with a hammer and glued the pieces back haphazardly. It still shines brightly, but God damn if it isn't an ugly mess.

The key aspect here is that the core loop of this game does not fit together with the other Souls games at all, to the point where it almost seems like an entirely different genre because of one very specific reason: exploration here is punished rather than rewarded.

Picture Dark Souls, if you will. In that series, if you die, you respawn at a bonfire that's at most like 5 minutes away from where you were, and you completely restock your healing items. This combination of respawning close to where you died + getting all your heals back is the perfect storm for incentivizing exploration. You see that item over there? fuck it, go get it. Even if it's a Soul of a Nameless Soldier, the worst that can happen is you respawning at a cozy, warm bonfire that's right down the alley. In DeS, however, if you die you go back the WHOLE level and you can wave bye-bye to whatever cure you used, it ain't coming back.

You see how that makes you want to avoid going off the beaten path at all costs? what's worse is that, in true Souls fashion, 9/10 of the items scattered around the map are indeed Soul of a Nameless Soldier, regardless of which area you're in. I can't stress enough how stressful this game gets, in many times it gave me a feeling akin to being herbless, ammoless and maidenless in Resident Evil games, except that you're not fighting cracked-up freakazoid goblins while slow-rolling in a poison swamp in RE.

(By the way, duping items is extremely quick 'n' easy in this game so if you're afraid of trying it because of no Estus, there ya go.)

I also shouldn't forget to mention that this game is visually DARK. 1/3rd of the game feels like Tomb of Giants, it's insane. Which also leads me to my second complaint: this game's atmosphere is a hodge-podge mess because the map is not one seamless world like the other Souls games, instead being a Super Mario 3-esque selection of areas through menus. This ruins the illusion of a living world, completely shattering the immersion. The levels themselves, though, are generally cool to play through, all things considered. They're about as intricate and interesting to navigate as you'd expect from a Souls game, which is very impressive when you factor in that this is the first game in the series. Whenever there's a shortcut they're always very impressive, though sadly there aren't too many of them: the game is surprisingly short. At about 20 hours, it's around half of DS1.

Although I just complimented the level design of each area, mostly based on intricacy, this part of the game is also certainly not without it's big flaws. Loads of segments are just plainly annoying to deal with. You know the bridge in DS1 that connects Undead Burg with Undead Parish, the one that has the Hellkite Drake? there are like 5 of these in this game. The arrow bridge in 3 - 1 is absolute bullshit and should've been an optional shortcut, and the aforementioned poison swamp of 5 - 2 is about as rage-inducing as Shrine of Amana. On the opposite direction but still retaining that amateurish nature, most of the bossfights are ridiculously easy and gimmicky. Aside from 5 exceptions, pretty much every bossfight is a joke.

The soundtrack is great, but it certainly is the black sheep of the franchise as well, as most aspects of DeS seem to be. It's not epic and grandiose, but rather strange and somewhat unnerving. It's a very interesting contrast, and it's one of the few points where I'll say that this game has a clear and definite identity that sets it apart from the others in a good way.

Enough complaining though, this game has many great aspects that should be lauded, specially taking into consideration that it was the first one in the series. You wouldn't believe how many Souls tropes originated here, both large-scale setpieces and small details alike. For example, from the previously mentioned bridge dragons and poison swamps (third time these FUCKERS show up in this review), to the shaking carriages we see in Aldia's Keep, the fact that both Irithyll Dungeon and the Profaned Capital are carbon-copies of worlds 3 - 1 and 3 - 2, or how Renalla is just a better version of the Fool's Idol. The Crestfallen Warrior, Patches, the irritable blacksmith, the menu sounds, myriads of other details, big and small, originated here. This is really nuts. My mans Miyazaki had a vision, that's for sure. The gameplay also feels just like DrkS1 as far as I remember, been a while since I last played it.

Also without spoiling it, the ending has a twist that, albeit cool, is something I've seen in at least 2 other games that came before.

The main takeaway is that this game is iconic from a pioneering standpoint, but it's crystal clear why Dark Souls 1 is the one people think of when mentioning which game started this gangsta shit. Who would've thunk that frequent checkpoints, infinite healing items, a less chaotic difficulty and an interconnected world would elevate this game from "great but impenetrable 7th gen JP jank" to, in my eyes, the best franchise in gaming.

Edit: forgot to mention World and Character Tendency, yeah these are kind of a big deal lmao
Honestly don't care about that system. It's essentially a karma system that makes your game more or less insufferable to deal with, so I just kept everything at White and hoped for the best. Can't say I really explored it.

People will often complain about the small pool of songs to choose from, the gimmicky gameplay where modules affect your rating, the weird rating all around and the forced and cringy story mode, and I agree with those complaints, but I don't see people mentioning this game's biggest flaw IMO: the difficulty (or lack thereof) upon first starting it.

I'll explain: due to the story mode, songs are divided into 5 little packs with 5 songs each (and one medley). Once you start playing a pack of songs, you cannot play another one until you completed the one you started, and the game allows you to freely pick the order. What this means is that every pack is balanced with the same difficulty, seeing as the last pack you choose could be someone else's first. The issue with this is that, since every pack only contains 5 songs, the hardest song in every pack can only be as hard as the fifth song you would play in any regular Diva game, give or take. The game has no room to keep making songs tougher and tougher the further you go down that songlist because the songlist never goes past song number 5. This game is too damn easy on normal, and you wanna know the worst part? you only unlock the harder modes after beating the WHOLE game. So if you really like a song and you want to play it on hard or extreme because normal mode is boring you to tears, you gotta beat 29 other songs + that goofy little story mode just to unlock the harder versions of it. This sucks.

Project Diva always had problems with unlocking it's difficulty settings, IMO every difficulty should be unlocked from the get-go in rhythm games, but this one has it worse than any other I played so far.