some spoilers below, which im not tagging because i don't care about them and neither should you, but if having the game spoiled will turn you away from playing it, then i have done you a favor, and you're very welcome.

here's the positive stuff: willem dafoe does a pretty good job here, and the other actors are overall decent. their talents are utterly wasted here, and there are many line reads that land awkwardly, but overall it's fine. that's the absolute best thing i have to say about this mess.

playing this game is a slog. there are a lot of frustrating moments where you know what you need to do, you've uncovered the information, but it turns out you needed to click on an item three more times for your character to piece it together properly (literally), and then go use the info elsewhere.

i could forgive some of that frustration if the story was interesting, but aside from going "ah, that's fucked up" when you figure out the main twist, the rest of it falls flat, and it only goes downhill afterwards. and no, i wouldn't call it ambitious. it's cliche-ridden, masturbatory, and derivative.

none of it is given any sense of metaphorical gravity, and the story told is pretty heinous, not because the unnecessary trauma porn simply exists, but because the trauma porn serves no purpose that justifies its presence, nor is the quality of writing enough to redeem the experience in general.

drugging your pregnant sister/wife repeatedly is a critical path requirement. watching her get killed while you hide in a closet is a critical path requirement. torturing a man is a critical path requirement. gruesomely murdering your pregnant sister/wife with a kitchen knife is optional, but available if you feel like doing that for no reason (and you might be likely to try it if you don't yield to a walkthrough and go into "use everything on everything else" mode).

all of this could be used effectively by a more skilled writer. i'm not the kind of person to say story beats are inherently off-limits in art. but if you're gonna come packing, you better be able to justify going there. this clearly isn't a shock value trolling game, they're trying to make film major/psych minor bullshit, but you don't get a pass just because you threw a Kubrick reference on the carpet. you know why we still watch Kubrick films even knowing he was a huge piece of shit? because they're good movies. you gotta earn it. oh, the fucking paintings change over time? ooooh, does that get used anywhere? no? fuck off.

the gameplay and design are bad, the story and writing are bad, this is just a failure on all fronts.

i bought it on steam, but i know its also on gamepass, if you have that. that said, i'd skip this mess entirely, even if you can play it for free. if you want compelling and profound art from a small team in which you know a man is coming to kill you, go play adios instead. if you want a time loop game where the time loop is a worthwhile mechanic, go play outer wilds or majora's mask instead. all three of those games are masterpieces, especially compared to this garbage.

Your usual R&C action, but dominated by what feels like hours and hours and hours of the most obnoxious, unfunny cutscenes ever, I swear to God. There's no way that whoever wrote the last two games (which were legitimately funny at times) did this cringefest. Dr. Nefarious is beyond grating. The Secret Agent Clank stuff is this ill-fitting lolrandom thing that I can't believe turned into a recurring plot point. Anything that was ever funny about Qwark is driven into the ground far past the point of no return. The crude humor and winking sex stuff has been cranked up x100 for some reason. It's legitimately really rough.

Aside from that incredibly unfortunate new tone, it's clear they were stretching on this one. Lots of padding, super-linear levels, artificial difficulty by suddenly making checkpoints scarce. The guns are pretty good, but it feels uninspired at best.

This one's a slog.

There's some rushed development here, what with shorter levels and cut side content like races. But it doesn't feel like the game necessarily suffered from it, instead it's more like the game just got a higher focus on the action aspect (which may or may not be a good thing depending on who you ask).

There are times when I did feel the shortcuts taken though, like how some levels have 4/5 missions that all take place in the same exact area and just have you mow down hordes of enemies. The hovership sections are hugely nerfed and less fun versions of the spaceship battles. The arena battles don't have anything as flashy as the cage matches from before (but there are now a few extra challenges like cycling weapons, and of course the obstacle courses...which reuse the same routes for all 10 or so ones).

But Up Your Arsenal definitely has some direct improvements, particularly some quality of life ones. Being able to refill all ammo at once from a vendor is such a huge improvement.

The plot now feels a tad more focused by having a hub world that you go back to between many of the levels. I liked that it utilised many of the past side characters well. Much better than past games which kinda just chauffeured you from one planet to the next.

Great villain with fun chemistry with his sidekick/butler.

The Qwark Vid Comics are a really great side activity, not only letting you play as Qwark, but also bringing in a brand new style of gameplay (2D Platformer).

Even the Clank sections didn't feel that bad this time around. But maybe that's just because I'm used to them now. The giant clank battle was definitely infinitely less annoying than the ones in Going Commando though.

There's some things that I think remain the same too, obviously the combat itself is basically the exact same (which isn't a bad thing). But it even carries over the flaw of puzzles just not being hard. Like when you use the refractor it's always 100% obvious what you need to do, so it feels like you're just wasting a bunch of time to equip the item over and over. Plus like I said in my last review, I really dislike how the weapon upgrade system works in these games. It promotes using weapons in bad context, and, ironically, ignoring fully upgraded weapons because it feels like a waste of exp. It is at least nice to see how close you are to levelling up weapons in terms of numbers now though I guess.

I'd basically say this game is a sidegrade than an upgrade or downgrade to the last game. It giveths and it takeths away.

How do you reinvent a classic? Well thanks to this being the first of a few games in the FFV7 Remake series, we do not currently know. However, if FF7R is any indication of where this project is going, I have high hopes.

Though Tetsuya Nomura has a catalog riddled with some of the worst games to come out of Square Enix within recent memory, he is a legendary game designer and artist and came through with a masterpiece with help from FF7 veterans. Seeing iconic scenes from the Midgar route like Shinra Tower, Wall Market, and the Bombing Mission come to life in glorious 3D with a fully orchestrated soundtrack made my jaw-drop. Upon hearing the FF7 main theme play in the demo I simply set my controller down and was nearly brought to tears.

This game features great music, most of which are redone and updated versions of songs that existed in the first game, yet new music is also added. Most of this new music is not very good, except for the Nobuo Uematsu composed "Hollow" which plays at the end credits and again, nearly got me to tear up.

Combat is the best Final Fantasy has seen since... ever? FF12, FF13, and FF15 were all experiments as to how Square-Enix could evolve from its beloved ATB turn based combat and none of these three hit the mark perfectly (though 12 did have a fun combat system.) FF7R did succeed though with a perfect blend of standard action combat with skillfully timing magic and heavy based attacks. The Materia system was rewarding, and players feel good experimenting with playing different characters through the story.

I can't even get started on characters, everyone in this game looks so dang GOOD. Series icons like Cloud, Aerith, Tifa, and Sephiroth all return in the most extravagant brain melting fashion. You could spend hours looking at how much they've improved from the few polygon days they saw in 1997. The job the 7Remake team did to make this happen is nothing short of a miracle and a true love letter to fans of Final Fantasy and the 7 story in general.

I'm excited to see where the franchise takes one of the most famous stories in gaming.

The dungeon that you to enter multiple times throughout the course of the game and have to rely on your notes from the previous times is absolute genius. All time best Zelda dungeon for sure.

There is a point in it where you meet a passive aggressive NPC who is like "imagine trying to do this with traditional controls huuurrr" but the game totally earns it imo. The controls work very well.

Bonus points for introducing the all time best Zelda character in Linebeck. Double bonus points because Toon Link owns.

Quantifying everything I love about Pikmin 2 into a single text review is, simply, impossible. Pikmin 2 is a game so personally aligned with me and my tastes that it's incredibly difficult to explain just why I like it so much. I plan one day to make a full video review explaining why I love the game, which I will definitely link here whenever I make it, but as is, I'll make bullet points:

>A major improvement over Pikmin 1 in gameplay mechanics, polish, and scale. The longest Pikmin and most content packed Pikmin game to date, with all the previous game's AI and bugginess polished out
>One of the most interactive, immersive, dynamic, and atmospheric soundtracks I've ever heard. Every single track in the game is specifically designed and layered to dynamically adjust depending on various contextual factors, such as time of day, the actions your Pikmin are taking, your proximity to enemies, treasure, specific items, your health, I haven't found a game with this musical dynamicism before or since.
>The atmosphere is thick, within the caves the music is abstract and cavernous, while each area theme perfectly represents the area they're assigned to.
>The caves are, in my opinion, the best aspect of the game. Allowing for pure, unfiltered challenging gameplay with no restrictions. Despite being completely randomly generated, there seem to be restrictions in place within the generator to make the caves feel designed. I've had multiple friends play the game and not realize the caves were randomly generated until they either reset in a cave floor multiple times, or I TOLD them it was, that's how good the system is. Being able to take your time to plan out a perfect course of action while traversing an underground complex, searching for treasures and using your knowledge of the game and awareness to max capacity to ensure no mass loss of life is enthralling and I can never get enough of it.
>The worldbuilding is immaculate. The previous end of day logs have been changed from personal captains diaries to emails, and while you lose the direct connection to a character and their thoughts like in Pikmin 1's desolate, hopeless atmosphere, you instead get a much wider look into Pikmin's world, as well as the background characters, such as the family members of the protagonists back home, or the President's wonderful tomfoolery with a stint involving some debt collectors. Beyond that, the worldbuilding of PNF-404 only doubles with the introduction of the Piklopedia, which gives full pseudo-scientific analysis of the various creatures on the planet, giving them biological explanations, family trees, predator and prey relationships, everything. The captains also all comment on the treasures they collect, which can often lead to introspection which results in some great characterization and more lore. The world is fully fleshed out.
>The game looks stunning for a GameCube title.
>The Submerged Castle is one of my favorite moments in any video game period.
>The game is actually rather challenging! It'll test you and your abilities, as well as your knowledge of the game. If you aren't careful, you could lose your entire armada in the literal blink of an eye. But the game dropping the full game time limit means that no matter how devastating a loss you face, you can ALWAYS bounce back and recover.
>the core gameplay, micromanagement, exploration, treasure collecting, all of it, it's an absolute joy and completely addicting to me, I can't get enough. I always find myself pushing the boundary of how ballsy I wanna be and how much I wanna try getting done in a day. If I really can make it to take cave on the other side of the map before this 10 second timer ends or not. If I can really perfectly clear this cave floor with no deaths. It's probably why, despite being somewhat long (15-20 hours), the game is still so replayable.
>Two unironically super fun multiplayer modes. While Pikmin 3 most likely has the better multiplayer content, that doesn't stop 2's from being great either. A fun versus mode, and a great Mission mode featuring 50 pre-set (?) caves that can be challenged in single player or co-op.

I could really, truly keep going. But I'll stop there.

Let me give the only real criticisms I can give the game.
>On very, very rare occasion, the cave generation can fuck up and result in an incompletable cave floor. I've played the game 4 times and for god knows how long and never had this happen to me, but I've seen footage of it happening, so it's something to note.
>The balancing is a little out of whack. While the game is quite difficult, most combat encounters can be solved rather easily with the usage of Purple Pikmin. This can be alleviated by just not using them as much or keeping a limited supply with you, though.

I believe this to be the best game Nintendo has ever produced by and far, and I love literally everything about it. Please, please, play the Pikmin franchise. It's absolutely worthy of at least a shot. It's filled with personality, love, and soul, something that's a general rarity in modern Nintendo games.