Kinda floored at how much I ended up loving this game. Having just come off of Ys I & II and reasonably enjoying them, this one has made me a real fan of the series and excited to play more.

Set hundreds of years before the first two games, Ys Origin takes place entirely within the Darm tower. Starting off with two characters to select; Yunica Tovah or Hugo Fact, your mission is for the most part identical. You climb the tower, meeting all manner of enemy monsters and friendly characters alike. The boss fights are varied and (most of them) are fun and challenging, and as you progress through the game you learn more special attacks and other various abilities to deal with them. Yunica is a light-hearted axe wielder (who reminds me of Estelle Bright from Trails in the Sky in a few ways) and has to get in close to effectively deal damage while having pretty good defence to compensate. Hugo on the other hand is an edgy, arrogant, and quite frankly complicated mage character who ended up stealing the show for me. In combat he is very squishy, but deals tons of ranged magical damage and has a shield to help compensate for his lack of defence.

I really do love how the game itself feels. Moving and attacking is quick and snappy, and I bet a really skilled player could blitz through the game in record time without taking much damage. You have a boost meter that is constantly filling up, and when you activate it you have better MP regen to spam your special attacks, attack faster, and do more damage. All the way back to Ys I & II, one of the little things I really appreciated was that level ups felt meaningful. When you levelled up, you immediately felt how much more efficiently you could defeat certain types of enemies which isn't as noticeable in other action RPGs. This feeling is still present in Ys Origin, and I hope that means the other games that came out before this one retained it too.

While the structure and many story beats are identical for both playable characters, their perspectives were polar opposites and it made for some nice contrast on a subsequent playthrough to play as the other and learn some new things. Upon completing the game with either, a hidden third playable character is unlocked and is considered the "canon" route, with a new play-style and some new scenes/backstory to fill in the rest of the blanks.

All in all, Ys Origin is an awesome action RPG that felt so good and had a gripping enough story that I did not mind playing through it 3 times to get the full experience. My total playtime judging off my save files is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 20 hours, and that felt just right. Really looking forward to continuing on with the series!

Devil May Cry is one of Capcom's most popular franchises, and despite being a fan of some of the games that it went on to inspire, I never had any experience with the series itself. As an outsider, the general consensus seemed to be that a majority of people started with Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening or even the latest game in the franchise, Devil May Cry 5, but I figured that I should try and get into the series with the one that started it all. Devil May Cry was one of those games where, for a majority of my six-ish hour playthrough, I genuinely had no idea whether or not I was enjoying what I was playing, because while the game does have some good elements and interesting concepts, it is so heavily bogged down by poor and outright frustrating design choices that it boggles my mind how the game was even able to make it to store shelves, let alone spawn several sequels.

Before I go on and rant about everything that I found wrong with this game, I want to first start off with what Devil May Cry did well, and it's a good thing that there's quite a lot of positives to choose from. Stylistically, Devil May Cry is very striking and memorable, as the decrepit castles, damp caves, and especially the fleshy, pulsating depiction of the underworld made the game feel like an interesting tonal balancing act between effortless cool and an almost horror-like sense of unease with how you're venturing into the unknown. The score by Masami Ueda, Masato Kohda, and Misao Senbongi was incredibly effective in establishing the game's mood with its shifts between roaring, blood-pumping guitars and ominous ambient music, with the darkly ethereal track used for the Divinity Statues eventually becoming a favorite of mine. The core gameplay of Devil May Cry was also quite good, as the twitchy, fast-paced attacks and dodges not only made fighting enemies fun on its own, but it also made chaining combos together in order to get more red orbs feel satisfying. I didn't even mind the exploration that usually took place in between combat encounters, because while this was clearly an element of the game that was left over from when this was initially envisioned as the fourth Resident Evil game, it still gave me more chances to take in the setting's sights and sounds. Despite the unintentionally funny dialogue and voice acting and somewhat barebones storytelling, I still found the game's lore and Dante himself to be compelling enough for me to want to see it through to the end, although I felt that the relationship between him and Trish was a bit forced due to the sudden attempts at emotional impact being at odds with the little time these two characters actually spent with each other.

For every good thing I have to say about Devil May Cry, there's some aspect of it that aggravates me to no end, and while none of it was enough to make me outright hate the game, the flaws still felt glaring. For starters, the game's camera is absolutely atrocious, as having it constantly cut to different angles was annoying enough when you're exploring the area, but it made some of the boss fights barely even playable with how you get attacked by moves that you couldn't even see in the first place, whether it was because the camera was pulled too far back for anything to be visible or it was because it was at an angle where the objects of focus were straight up hidden. This makes the game's repeated boss fights even more annoying to deal with, as the game only has about four or five bosses that are repeated several times each (and in the case of Nightmare, having to repeat a boss fight just to repeat a boss fight), and it gets to the point where you fight a boss in one mission to go on and fight the exact same one in the very next mission. I also felt that the mission design was radically inconsistent, as some missions featured several bosses and took a good fifteen or twenty minutes (which was especially annoying thanks to the continues being consumable items), while others could be beaten in less than five minutes. Although the controls felt good when it came to combat, I can't say the same for the other game's aspects, as the clunky and unreliable wall jumps made platforming take way longer than it needed to and the underwater sections that turned the game into a first-person shooter were so jarring and controlled so poorly that I had no idea why they were even included in the game to begin with. There's a good game here somewhere, but there was a lot about Devil May Cry that held it back for me, but despite my mixed feelings on this game, I'm still interested in checking out the rest of the series (including the infamous Devil May Cry 2).

The most satisfying 2D platformer ever made. Madeline's moves are incredibly simple, yet also incredibly versatile. This game offers all kinds of accessibility features for those that need them, while also offering massive challenges with the Golden Strawberries for those who just can't get enough. The story is incredible, hitting some very deep notes, often a bit too close to home. Top it all off with an absolutely stellar soundtrack, and you have a experience that you will remember for a lifetime.

And of course, trans rights are human rights <3

In the vast landscape of platformers of the '90s Klonoa succeeds with dignity in carving out its own space: the basically two-dimensional structure in which there is occasionally a three-dimensional interaction with elements in the background works very well in maintaining the skill set of traditional platformers, modernizing it both in terms of mechanics and visual richness.
The result is truly a feast for the eyes, in which different paths and areas yet to be unlocked intertwine with each other while remaining visible in each section of the levels, creating a very satisfying sense of progression as you get to solve the simple puzzles that direct the gameplay experience.
Between very cool bosses and neat mechanics that push to use enemies in creative ways to overcome obstacles and unlock new directions, what I think Klonoa can still offer today is a very refined and thoughtful idea of a classic platformer that, as simple as it may be, still remains extremely enjoyable.

A great story presented very well; I particularly like how the game is willing to present you with clearly unreliable narrators, and leaves you to determine what is actually the truth. Stylistically, its also great; the different stories are (for the most part) very creative and diverse in both tone and presentation, and it was always exciting to see how the next one would play.

But at the end of the day, there really is no gameplay here. I know this is one of the classic walking sims, so that should be expected, but some of the story sections come /dangerously/ close to having actual gameplay, and if they'd commited to that just a tiny bit more I think I would have found this a much more immersive and memorable experience. Although having said that, the times when the game comes closest to having gameplay (especially in the first story) largely end up being pretty janky and unpolished.

All in all, there's definitely a great game in here. I really don't think it would have taken much more in terms of interactivity for me to absolutely adore this. Alas, we do not live in that world.