Rage takes a lot of the worst ideas from other shooters and fails to deliver as a result; actually, maybe it'd be more accurate to say it takes ideas that could be good and have definitely worked in other games, but doesn't put in the effort to refine them further or add something interesting to the mix. With so little of what makes nearly every other id game so fun to play, the final product is a game that's rather unsatisfying and unfocused with what it's trying to do.

Had this been the last game from id Software, it truly would've been a pity, as I definitely believe this was their lowest point. Not a game I really want to return to.

I leave Three Hopes feeling a bit more disappointed than I was with the original FE Warriors. The game looks noticeably better than Three Houses did on the same system, and there are certainly some areas where the developers put care into the game, but Scarlet Blaze is a story without a resolution, and the reclassing system (pretty much lifted straight out of Three Houses) coupled with a lack of class variety makes for fairly same-y movesets across characters throughout the game (besides the few blessed with unique personal classes).

Structurally, I think this game would've benefited from FEW's format - an exceedingly short main scenario with "postgame" challenges to max out each character and their unique weapon making up the bulk of the runtime for those really into the Musou gameplay. As it is though, Three Hopes pads its story's length with numerous skirmishes that offer no real challenge or interest beyond "you should use lances/swords/bows on this map" and "you should use tomes/axes/gauntlets on this one" stringing you along to each chapter's main battle. It basically becomes busywork as each chapter offers more and more skirmishes before it allows you to continue with the story.

My enjoyment of this game would perhaps be have been higher if I'd been able to play it with another person, but as it is, my only real points of praise are that I continue to enjoy the Three Houses cast, and it was neat to be able to use Jeralt for once.

The challenge of Super Princess Peach is less about making it through each stage and more finding every single Toad before facing the final boss. However, this game has nothing in the way of puzzles or brain teasers to challenge the player like how difficult reaching some of the secret exits can be in Super Mario World. The most resistance the game normally offers is placing a clearly visible obstacle that the player has to go "Oh right, I use [one of three emotions] to clear this" and badda boom, there's the missing Toad right behind it.

Between the extremely low difficulty and the complete lack of the conventional "lives" system in about every other Mario game, it very much feels like this game was designed with kid gloves (or maybe girl gloves?) on, and it's less interesting than it could be as a result.

Cute game, but not terribly fun to play.

I’ve thought a lot about what I want to say here.

Doom is one of the games, if not the game, I have earliest conscious memories of. It has been with me all of my life. From watching my dad and older sister play it while sitting in his lap, to playing it on my own, to mastering it on my own, to making my own levels for it, to seeing other people play and enjoy (and hate!) the levels I made. My time with the Fire Emblem series may have brought me to many people I know and love today, but Doom was one of the first things that shaped me into who I am. In a way, it’s no stretch for me to say that all videogames I have ever played (and will ever play) begin and end with Doom.

Thank you for making this wonderful game, id Software.

I played my first route of Three Houses (Crimson Flower) right when the game released, and I blazed through it in the space of a week. I was in love. I loved the characters, the freedom with reclassing, the monastery that gave more opportunities to talk to my characters and do things with them, the way the setting felt so alive... There were a couple of missteps I noticed in my first run, but even so I was convinced that this was it. The best Fire Emblem game I had ever played, bar none. “Awakening and Fates were fun, but their stories are basic and the character writing just doesn’t hold up; Genealogy had a great story, but the gameplay’s a bit of a slog and it lacks a lot of modern conveniences; Three Houses, though, has it all”, I told myself. And had I stopped after playing just the one route, maybe I would’ve continued to hold those convictions.

However, despite what the developers believe, the narrative of Three Houses invites you to play the game time and time again, at least until you’ve seen all four (4!) routes. It was when I was chasing after this idea of “truly completing the game” that the cracks really started to show, and my enjoyment of the experience started to wane. Once the initial intrigue of the story wears off, Three Houses becomes a much less interesting and far more monotonous game than most other Fire Emblem titles, only propelled along by its cast of characters. One might feel inclined to use the boon of NG+ items to get through the tedium faster, but at that point you’re probably focusing more on the narrative and writing, and in my experience focusing more on the writing in the other routes really brought the story’s flaws to the forefront.

As a result, I’m left feeling a little disappointed in my time with Three Houses compared to other FE games. The character writing is definitely a strength, and it’s still probably my favourite overall FE cast, but the multiple routes concept is poorly implemented and actively works against the idea of replaying the game to see more of the story. Outside of speedrunners/LTCers, I would confidently say that most peoples’ best time with the game will be their first playthrough.

Mirror's Edge has a serviceable/functional story, a sharply-dressed but fairly one-note cast of characters, and guns that feel tacked on to the combat system so that the game could be billed as a "shooter". None of these elements are "bad", but they're all executed in a clearly lacking fashion that suggests the developers didn't really think about them while creating the rest of the game, leaving a noticeable amount of room for improvement.

Everything else about Mirror's Edge though is stunning. The feeling of the parkour, the design of all the levels and environmental puzzles, the visuals and sharp colour composition, the synth soundtrack... All the other parts of the game absolutely knock it out of the park and come together to make a wonderful experience that is endlessly replayable (even in spite of the shortcomings mentioned above). No game I’ve played since has captured the joy of movement like Mirror’s Edge manages to.

Almost everything in Engage feels like a step back from what FE games are usually able to land with ease, and I actively balked at continuing the game for a solid month upon seeing the opening for Chapter 14. About the only good experience I had with this game was getting through Chapter 10/11 – that was the only time where I felt “Okay, Engage is actually trying to do something interesting now” and the various elements of the game actually came together in a satisfying way. Past that point, nothing really worked for me.

Having completed Engage, I can confidently say it is the most disappointing FE game I've ever played (besides FEH), and it was definitely not worth my time.

If P5R had been around when I was in high school, it would've changed my brain chemistry. Sadly I'm no longer in high school (or college for that matter), but nevertheless I had a blast with it.

Of the mainline Persona games, I still think this is the best overall package (but I'll admit I respect Eternal Punishment more). If you haven't dipped into the series yet, this is definitely the one I would recommend starting with.

Nice job, Atlus!

I have to imagine that a “game as a service” must evolve in some meaningful way over time for the experience to continue to be worthwhile. For example, MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Runescape regularly add more content – places to explore, quests to do, bosses and raids to play, and so on. Fire Emblem Heroes though really only “evolves” in one dimension: increasing the power ceiling of new units. Outside of the 1,000+ units that continue to skew more and more powerful with each new addition, only a handful of new (and actually different from preexisting) gamemodes have been implemented, and the level of writing in the main story and events has only evolved a step beyond “Hi, I’m Belf; I’m gonna Belf all over these guys,” which I have to say is embarrassing for a game coming on 8 years of live service.

When the largest positive I have for FEH is “at least you’re not expected to grind it as much as some other gacha games?”, I think there’s a problem, and at this point in FEH’s existence there’s no reason to expect the situation to change. The Fire Emblem series has decades of characters and stories to draw on to create something of interest, and yet this game has never capitalized on it beyond asking the shallowest of questions like “What if Tharja put on a bridal outfit? Would you wanna pull for her? Or how about if Byleth wore a swimsuit? That’s gotta be worth a few dollars, right? Hey, do you remember Sigurd? Wasn’t he pretty cool in Genealogy of the Holy War? Why don’t you try pulling for him here? We gave him a boatload of powerful effects, just like he had in his original game!”

This game is not worth your money, or (more importantly) your time.

Upon completing Innocent Sin, I was left feeling a bit unsatisfied for a few reasons – the contact system, the ending, etc.; there were of course a lot of things I liked (and even loved) in Innocent Sin, but I wasn’t left as wowed by the experience as I would’ve hoped for. Instead of immediately playing Eternal Punishment next though, the next game I went into was Persona 4 Golden (a game that turned out to be significantly less interesting than P5R or P2 IS), and that gave me about a month to really chew on my experience with Innocent Sin.

When I finished P4G and felt ready to return to Sumaru City, I started Eternal Punishment. And by jove, this game just... delights in being a sequel to Innocent Sin so much.

On the gameplay front, so many of my hangups with Innocent Sin were improved upon – the contact system was greatly simplified, the shop rumors were pared down to the essentials, Salam Ladeen’s maps gave a great incentive for fully exploring dungeons in the latter half of the game, some of the sillier fusion spells were “nerfed” to be less over-centralizing, etc. Playing the Playstation version of the game, there were still some QoL things that nagged me here and there, but I can forgive that in a 24-year-old game (especially when using an emulator with speed-up), and overall, I can only see its gamefeel as a direct improvement over Innocent Sin.

On the writing front, the setup for Eternal Punishment naturally leads to revisiting a lot of the same ground covered in Innocent Sin. However, each time the thought “This is cool, but it’s not too different from what happened in the previous game” started creeping out of the back of my mind, Eternal Punishment would yank the rug out from under me, telling me “No, this is different, and you better buckle in.” Between that and in general a stronger cast, at this point I’m left believing that Eternal Punishment is simply the most well-written Persona game of the lot, let alone being “just” an improvement over Innocent Sin.

In the end, I found Eternal Punishment to be one of my favorite videogame experiences of the last decade, and I think my time with it (however brief in the grand scheme of things) will continue to inform my perception of story-driven games for a long time to come.

When I was a kid, my family would take summer trips to visit relatives in Lebanon. Computers and game consoles weren't too common over there at the time, so besides the odd day or two we would spend with my uncle (who had a home PC with internet access and games like Quake III), my brother and I were limited to playing on the one piece of videogame hardware my father brought back from America as a present for his nieces and nephews: a SEGA Genesis.

For some... inscrutable reason, my cousins loved Alex Kidd. I did not. My brother did not. We would be forced to take turns playing this awful game whenever someone lost a life, our cousins clapping and cheering at the rock-paper-scissors fights and goofy helicopter music. Blissful were the days that it was only me and my brother at our grandparents' house and we had the television all to ourselves so we could play anything but Alex Kidd. Just an absolutely terrible game.