- 14 hours played
- Hardcore difficulty

This year has already delivered me a remake of one of my all time favourite games, Dead Space. And now 2023 also has bestowed upon me Resident Evil 4 Remake and it’s beautiful.

The OG Resi 4 is a game I have played many times and owned on many systems. I never wanted a remake and in fact I came away from a replay with only two things I wanted changed here. The first being in the original, when you pick up an item it takes you to a black screen to confirm the item and if you want to pick it up. It also does this every bloody time you pick up gold. I wanted it so that after the first instance the item just goes into inventory automatically with a little notification at the top of the screen to inform me what I have picked up. That way it doesn’t break the flow of gameplay. This change was made in the remake.

The second issue I wanted addressed was the gratuitous up skirting of Ashley. Something slapped in the original to please teenagers. Thankfully here that no longer happens and Ashley is much more of an actual character. But I did find some issues with Ashley in this remake. I found her more bothersome to actually escort in the remake. In the original Ashley has a health bar so I can see when she’s in trouble and how many more hits she can take. I could also heal her from a little distance away. In the remake she doesn’t have health which most would see as a great change but she seemed to go down after one hit. Which required me to run right up to her and press a button to pick her up. This opened me up to attacks and left me stationary when TNT had been thrown my way. This led to a lot of frustration, especially during a short chase sequence where stopping to pick Ashley up led to the enemy catching us resulting in a fail. Also you can’t tell Ashley to wait unless it’s in a locker, she always follows you around and sometimes I missed telling here to wait somewhere safe whilst I kicked ass.

And kicked ass I did. The combat in this game is utterly immense and buttery smooth. I find the original is still extremely fun to play. I love the tank controls and the footsies you play with enemies. Thats gone here, enemies are faster. Leon is faster. He can move and shoot at the same time 🤯 the knife opens up parry opportunities. Nothing is cooler than blocking a thrown axe by reacting quick enough to block it with a knife. Being able to run and reload is also a god send. But one thing I wasn’t a huge fan of is that shooting enemies in the leg never seemed to knock them down as often. So crowd control never felt as effective and melee prompts only seemed to come as a result of head shot stuns.

Story wise both Luis and Ashley have a little more to do and say. Leon has lost all of his cheese so here he’s a badass. But just a bad ass, he’s very bland overall where as in the OG he’s dropping insanely poor and cheesy one liners like their going out of fashion. They kept the bingo line and gave us the “Nighty Night, Knights” line but other than that, OG Leon is the cheese king.

There’s been changes to the combat encounters. Some enemies and bosses have been redesigned. The Regenerators are now truly horrifying, never imagined they could make such a scary enemy scarier but here we are. But due to these changes I felt the pacing to suffer a little bit. Overall the ramp up to this games finale felt more of a slog. I think that’s down to the game having just as much combat but at a faster pace with way more aggressive enemies. Therefore it feels relentless and therefore a little tiring.

There’s a tonne of re playability here but I think I am done after my initial playthrough. I really enjoyed my time with this game. But Resi 4 to me is still the Orignal. And that’s coming from someone who first played the OG on Xbox 360. I don’t have nostalgia for that game, so it’s not for that reason. I just think the OG is a better paced game that I have more fun in because it’s a damn cheese fest and I enjoy the older combat model. But man this game is fantastic as well and I am so glad we have both.

With this being my first RE game and my first true survival horror game, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I knew about the acclaim this game received when it was released, and I knew that I wanted to play it before playing the more recent RE4 remake since RE2 is the beginning of Leon's story. I'm glad I decided to give this game its proper due because it's downright excellent.

I'm honestly a huge wimp when it comes to anything horror. I can barely get through horror movies, and I've always avoided horror games because they're even more immersive than movies and I thought I wouldn't be able to handle it. I will say right off the bat that this game is fucking nerve-wracking, and I honestly think that's a huge reason why I enjoyed it so much. There were a few jump scares here and there, but what really impressed me was the atmosphere and tension that Capcom created here. This game has some of the best use of lighting and sound design I've ever experienced in a video game, and it kept me on edge the entire time I played. You can hear the groans of zombies in a room before you see them; your flashlight creates just enough of a light source to let you see what's in front of you but still leaves things in the shadows; and there are few things that have terrified me more than hearing the footsteps of Mr. X searching for me throughout the police station. RE2 is a masterclass in environmental storytelling and game design.

Speaking of Mr. X, holy shit. I knew he was a part of this game before I played, but I didn't quite realize just how imposing of a presence he really is. This fucker follows you everywhere, and knowing that he was on my tail as I moved from room to room was so damn stressful. I appreciated that he added an element of urgency to my play-throughs, or else I would've been content to take my time and pick over every inch of the station for supplies.

The story was a lot of fun--it felt like a corny action-horror movie, complete with crazy set pieces and amazing one-liners from Leon and Claire alike. There were some truly emotional moments sprinkled in, and the game felt like the perfect length. I completed Leon and Claire's play-throughs in about 12 hours combined and I felt satisfied with my time with the game.

I've been eyeing RE as a franchise to get into for some time now, but wasn't sure I would be able to handle the tension and spookiness of these games. I'm happy to say that I'm glad I took the dive and played RE2, and I'm excited to play RE4 remake and make my way through the other games. I know RE7 is supposedly a lot scarier than the previous games (and it's played in first person which really skeeves me out), but that'll be a bridge to cross when I get there.

I adore this game. The perfect finale to the 2D Metroid series. As a big souls fan, I loved this game's boss encounters. They felt sufficiently difficult, and utilised the game's fluid movement to its fullest. This game also takes the series' story in a great direction, giving Samus some of her coolest moments. Even for someone new to the franchise, with context for the story I can recommend this as a starting point. Definitely one of the best Metroidvanias of the modern generation, if not of all time.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is perhaps the most consistent and polished 2D Zelda of them all. Every aspect of this game is a massive improvement over its predecessor, A Link to the Past, and in-terms of the pure dungeon and level design, could be considered one of the best in the entire franchise.

The game's dungeons are practically perfect. Every single one is designed with such great care to where this game may be the only Zelda with 0 sub-par dungeons. I mean, even Ocarina of Time has the Water Temple. The game doesn't handhold you at all, yet its puzzles are designed in such a way solving them is genuinely fun, extremely satisfying, and just the right amount of challenging. Nearly every puzzle I solved, I found myself saying "God, that's so clever!". This is even more impressive when you realize that all 7 of the game's main dungeons can be completed in any order.

The overworld remains largely the same in terms of design from A Link to the Past, however, seeing it in 3d for the first time is wonderful. There are also enough changes made to where it feels familiar, yet new. There are a decent amount of hidden items to find, and the game's fast pace (greatly attributed to the extremely fast walking speed and quick travel) prevents finding them from feeling like a chore.

In terms of design, this game is almost perfect. Almost. The ONLY gripe I had with this game was its newly introduced "Weapon Loaning" system. Renting the items feels completely pointless as you die so rarely in this game. Even when you do die, the items only cost 50 rupees to rent, which considering how many rupees you get in this game, is next to nothing. All death means is a quick trip to the shop, and then back to exploring. Not finding any key items inside the dungeons removes the fun and surprise of acquiring the next major item, and makes the dungeons feel just slightly less satisfying to complete. By mid-way through my playthrough, I had permanently bought all the items and the "loan" system...just kind of vanished.

However, in the grand scheme of things, this nitpick is extremely small. A Link Between Worlds is otherwise a flawless game, and makes me yearn for another 2d Zelda.

Nintendo, just come on. It's been nearly 10 years.


Please.

It's a fire emblem game, so the combat is fun. Some of the cast is nice. However, this is another game where I can't really wrap my head around why people like it so much. The story isn't particularly attention-grabbing and I don't really notice any moments that stood out enough for it to be more than just your standard fire emblem experience. I'll go over what I like about it first before I forget..

To start with, one thing I enjoyed was the 'how's everyone' feature on the preparations menu. I thought it was a pretty good way to get dialogue from characters you don't get to use or interact with. And I enjoyed the amount of support conversations that were in the game, I just wish more of them were between other characters that weren't my protagonist. I enjoyed a good chunk of the characters in this game, my favorites were Malice, Minerva, Sirius, Arren, Linde, Navarre, and Palla... they were all pretty interesting without falling too much into a single trope, and their designs are pleasing to look at. The art in this game is very good but I especially enjoyed the drawings that would show up during key moments and in between chapters... I don't really know the name for what they are but the point is they looked very visually distinct, I almost wish the whole game was made in that style. And the attack animations are very smooth too, which was a nice surprise.

That's all the praise I can really give this game. Personally, I can not stand Marth. But maybe even more so, I can't stand our custom protagonist. I obviously chose to be a female, and the way this game writes your female protag is very much indicative of how the series would end up in its next entry. Constant mentions of how my character wasn't 'feminine' enough and how much that truly worried her, multiple scenes where characters were talking about her body being 'manly and rough' and there were even a few anime-esque moments involving my characters chest. Very obnoxious... if I'm choosing to be a girl then why would I find it blasphemous that she's capable of fighting? And I gave my character a really short haircut too, I obviously don't care that she doesn't look like a pin-up girl. Beyond that, she only cares about training and Marth and fighting and it's really exhausting when every support conversation is just about one of those three subjects. I got to choose her backstory, which is nice, but I didn't know making her an orphan would give her an abusive grandfather that raised her from day one to be in the army. Which is uncomfortable but the game talks about it like it's a laudable thing. I did not enjoy playing as a fantasy boot-boy.

The gameplay is nice but aggravated me more than any other fire emblem game besides Echoes that I've ever played, and I had save states. Where do I begin.... well, it's very confusing that every character but Marth lacks a distinct sprite. I had several swordmasters and they all looked the same on the map, leading to me accidentally moving characters that I didn't mean to pick. And they all look the same in the zoomed-in attack scenes that happen too, which is maybe more understandable, but it's still off-putting. And on that subject, there are far too many characters in this game. There is someone you have to talk to to recruit every chapter, and it's very very stressful. It gets exhausting really quick, especially when these characters are set up to be your enemies and you don't want to kill them or else Marth will get sad at you despite the fact that he's a prince and therefore is destined to screw people over by the nature of how monarchies work. But anyways, most of these recruitment characters are not interesting at all and are mostly filler, which makes it even more of a chore to have to recruit them. And only Marth can talk to them most of the time, which is very inconvenient and difficult to plan out. Besides that, your armory never upgrades so it's always selling iron weapons which is very annoying. The amount of people you can take into battle seems really low for the amount of characters in the game. I also had to reset constantly because even my strongest units died far too frequently for my liking, even during drills, which is a really aggrivating descision that you can permanently lose a unit just from training (that you pay for).

The story was not bad but I also felt no attachment to it either, partially because I do not have any interest in stories like these that revolve around princes and princesses and very fantastical politics. That's why I liked playing fe7 as Lyndis, and my favorite fe game overall is Path of Radiance. And my final regret with this game... the process which you have to go through to get Tiki is really frustrating, and I missed out of her; one of my favorite characters that I was really looking forward to finally seeing. That obtaining her relies on getting missable items that are very easy to kill a unit trying to obtain them is very unfair, and even on a second playthrough is incredibly easy to miss and never have another chance at it again.

Overall I didn't have a very fun time with this game. It was very stressful and grating, and I feel like there was not enough to coarse me to finish it. I spent more time strategizing on how to not kill certain recruitable units, which really interrupted the flow of the game for me. And some of the writing makes this game feel reminiscent of Awakening, which isn't what I play a Fire Emblem game to see. I think I found my match in Path of Radiance, so I think this is the last fe game I'll check out. That and the gba games are enough for me!

i didnt really expect this going in , but mario galaxy - with it's bombastic opening and incredibly typical saving princess peach plot - ends up being a very thoughtful and often melancholic rumination on both the wonder and loneliness of space.

this is in large part due to the incredible score, which delivers on all fronts. the majesty and unbridled joy of "Gusty Garden Galaxy" has been praised to the center of the universe and back, but the soundtrack also explores space in a more melancholic way. the theme of "Space Junk Galaxy" is a standout here, it really captures the beauty and loneliness of the universe's expanse.

of course this stuff goes beyond just the soundtrack. it's in how the game frames mario Galaxy's planets, clustered together, but still hanging adrift in space. it's in the domesticity and liveliness of the hub world, how all of the individual "observatories" in the game are actually the rooms of a house. and it's in the return from a level when you collect a star, and are rewarded with a moment of downtime.

at the end of the day it's still a mario game, it's still about saving princess peach, it still has an ontologically evil antagonist, and it still has dumb minigames and poor underwater controls. the gameplay - while being far beyond serviceable - didn't really do it for me either. but that's okay! because mario galaxy is an incredibly special game, and is so so much more than just the sum of its parts

Aesthetically wonderful with its colored pencil artstyle and great OST. Gameplaywise it is a definite slower vibe than something like superstar, but it still has its own unique flow that can be exciting. I think the level objectives to get the heart stars make the levels more memorable and keep this from falling into the dreaded forgettable kirby game hole. Animal buddies are back and there are even new ones this time around! There's also multiplayer but only one person can ride an animal at a time which is lame. I think a lot of people like to be harsh on this game because it's not as good as super star but this games great in its own ways.

While it feels a touch disingenuous to leave a negative review for a chunky game like Octopath after only ten hours, what I've seen in those ten hours was enough to convince me it wasn't cutting it (again).

If you are someone whose main criticism of Octopath 1 was something along the lines of: "The characters don't interact, and have nearly zero reason for teaming up with each other," then I'm here to tell you it's much the same. It would have been comical when aspiring merchant Partitio joins up with warrior Hikari on his quest for vengeance had it not been so stupid. Even better when hometown dancer Agnea joins the fray when her goal is to become a star performer.

The foundations of friendships and alliances in Octopath was always its achilles heel. No one is here to question its techical capability, so when such an obvious flaw (and one so vocally criticised!) is seemingly ignored like this, and the only notable changes thus far have been to combat I'm left feeling lukewarm.

I'm rarely satisifed by more of the same in media, so when a promising game like Octopath had a real shot at improving critical flaws with it's structure and characters I jumped at the chance to see it do so. Sadly however, it hasn't learned from its mistakes, and I'm not willing to roll the dice on another four individual stories of potentially wildly varying quality for forty hours.