Although I love the idea of this "Gold Master Series" of documentaries and its importance in video game history preservation, as a product, I feel like some improvements can be made in the future.

There hasn't seemed to be a lot of editorial choices in what to put or to omit from the game here. Everything and the kitchen sink is thrown in, which results in a lot of correspondences and interviews that are repetitive or flat out boring.

It generally feels like the story of Karateka is not that interesting to tell apart from a few fascinating tidbits.

I'm super glad this exists, and it is a polished product, but it did outstay its welcome since it didn't always aim for quality in historical content, but quantity and completeness.

On the upside, the next documentary appears to be about a game designer and a bunch of his games which seems like a fantastic idea. It might just fix all the gripes I had with this first experiment in innovative documentary by having a lot more material to go over.

I love the idea of making this more than a documentary and really leveraging the medium.
But it’s also mostly just short documentaries that aren’t amazingly produced, interspliced with what feels like random quotes from the diary.
Unfortunately, even the ingenious parts like overlapping the sprites with recorded video and traces is clunky and has you going across the menu to see the next stage, instead of it all being integrated together.

But there’s a lot great here and I’m really looking forward to seeing where the Gold Series goes from here. Just hoping we’ll see more innovation and less iteration

this developer has two gimmicks:

- asset flips without any marketing or presentation, which probably don't recoup their very low production costs

- "fuck none of my games sold, have you considered the Soviet Union killed 10 billion people and NOBODY talks about it"

As a Polack, I feel like there needs to be an international movement to prevent more games from coming out of that goddamn country until there's an actual denatizifcation. You shouldn't be allowed to download Unity until you can screw in a lightbulb with less than 10 people.

A tad flawed but solid collection of 2 JRPG classics whose critical bugs have been thankfully ironed out.

GRANDIA:
If you can get past the ugly sprite filter of the collection you'll find an awesome and adventurous game, with a battle system that stands the test of time. The game has its fair share of odd design decisions and a somewhat flat plot, but the sheer charm and heart make it something you have to try out at least once.

GRANDIA II:
While foregoing the lighter tone of the first game, GRANDIA II is a marked improvement over its predecessor in pretty much every way, especially the plot; additionally the battle system has been translated pretty much identically but improved thanks to a few additions and the higher-fidelity graphics, and a few archaic mechanics have been axed for much smoother ones, resulting in a game I will gladly revisit when in the mood.

This one's been getting a ton of praise for its writing and strong, political narrative. I found that praise to be justified. At times, I found how effectively the game presented its space-faring capitalist dystopia to be so biting that it shook me to my core, and made me want to put the controller down. And I can't say enough good things about the other aspects of the production - the artwork, and the synthwave-inspired soundtrack. All of this perfectly sets the ambience for the kind of stories Citizen Sleeper is going to tell.

But as a game? I can't really say that I had a lot of fun, and I'm not sure why. I read a lot. I love Persona. I've never played a tabletop game, but I'm interested in them. Still, something about the whole package failed to click until way too late, and I spent most of my playthrough just kind of doing random things without much deliberation. Though, I think the game would greatly reward that second, more informed playthrough.