Yeah I just didn't get this at all. Feels too trapped by the quiz to do anything with the subject matter/narrative and this just really didn't click with what it was going for. Feels too brief and too held back to say anything actually impactful.

Dating sucks sometimes and sometimes ya fall in love with people who suck/make your life actively worse/are toxic as shit. Sometimes its best to just leave and do you instead of continuing to try pining for the attention of someone who clearly doesn't give the same energy back you give them.

Was bored and just reminded me of old wounds and I'm glad I'm not in that headspace anymore but this was incredibly nothing for me.

First off, thank you to the options menu and the kind people who developed the 1.3 patch for making this game playable so that the AI were functional and also I didn't have to play with the inane save gems mechanic. Anyway.
Kinda the inverse of Quake. Where Quake is very stripped back and minimal and purely focused on making its mechanics feel razor sharp, Daikatana is a very slow burn game where there's a whole mess of systems that all have to slowly come together before the game really clicked for me. It does not help that the game opens with it's two worst levels, and then for some reason follows it up with it's 3 hardest levels. But once you've started leveling up your abilities, and once you've actually had your team mates cover you in a fight successfully a couple times (assuming u installed the 1.3 patch lol), and once you start to get a feel for the weird non-standard obscenely bloated arsenal, every now and then it all just comes together and you can see the genuinely great video game hidden behind all the broken half finished parts. The shooting here is not at all as fast nor as perfected as Quake, in fact fights are often held in awkwardly shaped cramped rooms. But weirdly enough that flavor of combat gradually grew on me as an acquired taste. A lot of fights in Daikatana force you to think critically about and utilize the restrictive environments. The best parts of the game are in the 2nd and 3rd episodes, where they experiment most with the time travel premise as a way to play into different styles and gameplay approaches in a genuinely really cool way. The dramatic shifts in tone as well as the complete overhaul of your arsenal every episode make me think that John Romero and co. wanted to make a game that felt like 4 whole different games with each episode, and for those first 3 episodes I think they genuinely succeeded. That being said, the forth episode is hard to describe as anything other than halfhearted, with most of the more unique designs of the earlier levels being absent, and it just feeling like one corridor with easy enemies after another. Another big problem is that most of the puzzles in the game are basically "figure out which indistinct object the level designer decided you can interact with/shoot to interact with this time", which were never fun to get stuck on. But like, despite All That, I still found myself having a pretty dang good time playing Daikatana, somehow? I don't know there's something about the odd shape of the gameplay loop formed by the RPG elements combined with the constant shift in tone and jagged level design that I found oddly difficult to pull away from. It's not gonna be one of my but favorite games anytime soon, but I mean, I guess he made me his bitch after all.

outside my typical taste in a lot of ways but given its theoretical and Occasionally Real AAA genericisms, there's an undeniably high level of creative love oozing from every moment. it works so hard to systematize batman in a way that many licensed games never bother with, and tho a more experimental/demanding title would perhaps do a better job with things like the detective work (hilariously automated which is perhaps to be expected), the combination of comic book nerditry and AAA polish absolutely makes the weighty fights and amusingly constructed stealth scenarios shine, the construction of the campaign is an extremely fun series of claustrophobic hijinky rabbit holes, and its loaded with the kinds of creative flourishes and memorably eccentric moments a lesser game would miss. if theres a glue holding everything together its that propulsive dark atmosphere, and also how batman feels in your hands, simultaneously weighty and powerful while also being potentially nimble enough to cut through traversal slick and smooth, a balance i imagine was extremely difficult to polish. unsure how to feel about its somewhat noncommittal exploration of the horrors of arkham, its sadly not rly equipped to fully dissect the implications of a world with a fucked up abusive institution that is also deemed Necessary cuz theres a bunch of supervillians written to be always-active serial killers. at the very least, the heightened tone and comic booky aesthetic abstract it enough for it to go down easier then hyper-grounded bullshit like the nolan trilogy thats much harder to not just read as blatantly authoritarian. all this is to say is that i want a batman and robin game i think thatd be the ideal tone!!!

This is like fine.

Big number go up idle game type beat and there are games I find that do it better but its still got likeable charm, loads of content and is a fun couple of hours. Idk how much longer I'm gonna play it but it's alright.

I don't really see the GOTY praise at all this has been getting from some but it's a fun time killer.

Paper Mario fanatics are kind of the worst, huh? They're like the most annoying attributes of Nintendo nerds amplified by ten; they constantly whine about how dead their series is, get into absurd fights over which game is the best, they shove their games down your throat without giving you room to breathe. I suppose it has died down a little since that recent installment for the Switch, but I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about. It gets really tiring sometimes to hear the same things hailed as godsends, and instead of making me want to check them out it just drives me away out of annoyance. This can also be said for stuff like Outer Wilds and Hollow Knight, but I remember tracing this feeling in my head back to games like this.

All that being said, this game is damn near masterful in many aspects. The amount of heart and soul thrown in is just staggering. The story in particular is one of Nintendo's finest and most captivating. You probably couldn't count all the memorable characters here if you had four hands, and same goes for the songs featured throughout. It's also a really good RPG for beginners, seeing as the difficulty as a whole is very very low up until the final two chapters. There's a lot to love here. I do love this game, and ultimately I can indeed see how it reached its status.

A big thing about the ridiculous levels of hype, though, is that it makes the lower points sting that much more. This game is absolutely not free of those, I can tell you that much. Most notably, the backtracking can be pretty exhausting. In particular, Chapter 4's ridiculous amounts of wandering back and forth reduce it to a tedious nightmare, even despite the introduction of Vivian, whom everybody loves and everybody should love.

Less significant, but still worth noting is that the battle system started to wear on my nerves after a while, though I guess this is usually an RPG problem as a whole. I guess it's pretty hard to get that right, admittedly. But things like the Twilight Town/Creepy Steeple fiasco, or Chapter 7's asinine fetch quest...they really just make me wonder, what was the point? Was there not a better way to pad those chapters out? I don't know, man.

And the thing is, I probably wouldn't be as worked up about moments like this if its fans didn't tout it around as a flawless masterwork. It feels like the cracks are bigger than they really are, since everything good has been already said and then some. Sometimes when things reach this status it's just easier to talk about the negatives, even if it really is a wonderful time as a whole.

So for the most part it looks like the aforementioned loud, annoying fans were right. But really, in the end I still don't think a return to form for this series is necessary. It's part of what makes those early ones special, how one of a kind they are. Every series eventually declines with time, and it's not really a big deal how early or late it happens.

It's also just that like, projects like Bug Fables? That has "oh, this is for the REAL fans" energy all over it. That shit is annoying. Not touching it with a ten foot pole. Gootbye.

Anyway, uh, it's like 2 AM. This is a very scatterbrained and ranty review, if you can't tell already. I tried to bum rush through the last three chapters of the game today and I am totally out of energy. It's also deliberately my 500th game logged, though, so I wanted to write something longer despite being tired. Ultimately I'm glad I caved in and gave this a go. I think it was worth it.

For the first hour or so of playing Jet Set Radio, I was fully considering dropping the game soon after. Fortunately I ended up sticking with it, because with a bit more time I finally started to see this as an absolutely fantastic little experience. At its core, JSR is also a game that felt as if it allowed me to better understand certain dichotomies between the game design approach between Nintendo and Sega and how they were able to cultivate a lot of experiences that felt remarkably distinct, each with their own pros and cons to them. While Nintendo tended to approach games largely from the perspective of having a player understand the majority of the game's systems immediately and intuitively to make for something inviting and accessible, Sega consistently seemed to more go for the approach of "Hey, the first few hours of this are going to suck but once it clicks it's the best stuff ever". This feels especially true for this game however, as getting into it proves to be a bit rough due to the control scheme feeling incredibly loose and difficult to handle, with a wide turn radius and a constant sense of momentum that means you can't immediately slow down making it really difficult to start off with as even the most simple obstacles feel like fighting against the game. However, with a bit of time, once you get used to it all, it becomes increasingly clear how so many of the mobility quirks that you have lend themselves perfectly to the level design.

For a movement system that practically requires the player to be getting a bit of a running start to properly gain momentum and actually reach a lot of higher locations, not to mention maintaining this speed for a pretty long time whether you want to or not since rollerskates just tend to do that, it needs to be complemented by level design that supports this, and here's where Jet Set Radio largely shines. Grind rails, secret areas and just your general avenues of traversal tend to be spaced out in such a way where you can flow naturally from one location to another as long as you have a general idea of where everything is. Jumps are spaced in such a way that you'll be finding yourself effortlessly perfectly positioning yourself to barely slow down after a while, it goes from something that feels like it's fighting against the player to something that feels incredibly intuitive, but then also satisfying due to the player knowing how much they had struggled at first to make even the most basic of manoeuvres. It all contributes to a feeling that the game is less interested in seeing you merely beat the stages, and instead wants you to absolutely master them.

This idea of mastery continues to be represented through the way that the enemies within the game are handled, initially seeming like pointless distractions that serve to frustrate and slow you down, but actually being utilised as a clever way to further force the player to understand the levels and plan their routes carefully from the start. Because the intensification of enemy waves is based exclusively off of how many spots you've tagged without the time taken having any bearing, planning is a far more important step to the game than it first lets on, to the point where once you figure out how to approach getting around a stage, the pacing can often feel rather leisurely, with even the most intense waves still being easily managed due to the remaining targets being simple to reach nonetheless. So many elements that initially seem like a hindrance to the Jet Set Radio's experience ultimately prove to contribute to the core gameplay loop in an incredibly organic way to the point where you'll often feel as if you're just being let loose without any real sense of overbearing guidance, even though the game is really nudging you in the right direction for the entire duration.

This reaches its peak with the rival battles thrown throughout the game, that either make you race against someone or just follow what they do, which doesn't only often lead to you being taught about certain tricks to make getting around easier, one example being sliding across walls for extra height, but you'll often be taught about little shortcuts as well. These end up feeling exciting not only because you're being taught about so many things that were always there that you probably just didn't know about, but it all links back into making replaying those stages later all the more satisfying as you once again get to entirely redefine your route with these new tricks and passages in mind, feeding into the remarkable replayability that the game has. Of course, despite all of this, it's still hard to deny that the best aspect of the game for me is just how much insane style it has to it, with the colourful, cel - shaded art making every area be filled to the seams with so much charm, bringing life to what could've potentially been a dreary urban sprawl. The art is further complemented by Hideki Naganuma's amazing soundtrack that takes a lot of cues from instrumental hip hop and the big beat scene to make for one of the coolest OSTs to a game out there, with even the occasional lulls in quality still carrying such a strong vibe to carry the game's aesthetic up into the stratosphere.

On the whole, while I cannot fault anyone who plays this game and hates it for the way you control your character, it not only is a system that progressively feels better the more you play, but the design of the levels and encounters themselves is absolutely incredible in how it perfectly balances between knocking the player around and silently guiding them into feeling like they're pulling off some absolutely insane stunts. While I already love the game, it's also another case where it almost feels built to be replayed a bunch, and those small annoying moments that appear from time to time are nowhere near enough to tank the experience by very much. Definitely worth a shot especially if you love its aesthetic, and even if you've played it and didn't like it very much, honestly give it another small shot, you might be pleasantly surprised.