tl:dr If your a harvest moon then you'll probably like this title once you download some mods to make it feel like home. If your not familiar with harvest moon at all you'll love it even more.

Harvest moon series is a weird roller coaster in terms of quality. As soon as the actual devs of the series moved on to make stories of seasons is the second the series dropped in quality in immeasurable ways. This left a huge gap in the farming sim/Life sim market.

Stardew valley attempts to fill in that gap and I'd argue it's done an impressive job and does even better then certain natsume titles. Socializing with the townsfolk, crop management, mining, and super natural elements are all here with a different shade. Some features have been streamlined for the better like buying upgrades for the home and crop placement. New additions like sprinklers and scarecrow management have been added along with a slew of other things. Mining borrows some aspects of runefactory in the shape of combat.

Overall the towns folks are the least interesting aspect of the game. They tend to be very bland, and have less interesting dynamics and personality. You won't get popuri dying mother or a prier boy who's an orphan living with the pastor. Instead you'll get Sebastian's lifestyle of smoking, being an edgy boi, and step dad that just doesn't get him. Sam father being a military man who's often not around his family. Dynamics certainly, but honestly many of the cast are not as relatable in there struggle as the classic harvest moon titles.

Rivalry not a thing in these titles despite the fact that it seems the dev might have had it in mind when designing the relationship the towns folks had. The combat is honestly not good, and should be removed anyways. It is harvest moon after all not runefactory. Options for crops looks varied, but you'll soon find that there's only 1 real viable way to get as much income as possible.

Walk speed is way too fucking slow and the overall village is way too large and needed to be more condensed. Plus another normal feature in harvest moon was the fact that in building time stops moving all together allowing you to essentially do whatever task you had in whatever building without worrying about the shops or events shutting down. A feature that honestly doesn't change much in it's removal, but feels weird to not add it anyways.

Alot of my issues can be modded out of the game and because it's so easy to mod the crap out of this title you can actually just create an entirely different game. Or even add sudo expansion that expand the city, and add more townsfolks. Replay-ability is endless and it's not uncommon for someones title to look completely different from others.

The Dancer of the Boreal Valley made me want to launch my Series X out the window. The fight wasn’t even that bad, I just kept getting her to a splinter of health and she’d whip out moves I’d never seen before. Loved it.

This was actually the first Souls game I tried, but, as is often the case with things wholly unfamiliar, I just couldn’t get into it at first. Got to the big tree boss in the undead settlement and shelved it. So say what you will about my personal game of the year Elden Ring, but it broke down the door to the franchise for me.

My only issue with Dark Souls III is that most of the areas felt kinda same-y. The game even repeats some content close to the end, and has a major DS1 throwback area, but I thought they made it all work. Like with Elden Ring, it’s not even close to enough to really detract from the overall experience.

So, Dark Souls III aka Spooky Cathedral Souls wasn’t as sprawling or varied as Elden Ring or as thoughtfully intertwined as the first Dark Souls, but it’s still unbelievably high in quality and an easy recommendation for anybody who likes this type of game. It also runs particularly well after the 60fps update.

Ah Rocket League. At first it’s just a silly car football game and then you are 100s of hours deep screaming when your team mates don’t know how to rotate back post.

Mechanically the game has so much depth it’s insane. From fundamentals like aerials to advanced moves like wave dashing.

Although the game hasn’t seen any crazy overhauls since it’s inception, it’s stayed relevant, fun and engaging.

The community content after several years has made the game more accessible than ever but this has also come at the price of the skill floor being raised considerably as the game has gone on.

Monetisation is there but it’s not as sinful as other games.

The real reason this isn’t 5 stars is because the developers have boxed themselves in.

Other than cosmetics, and maybe some forge style tools, the game has no other content to offer.

The devs can’t change the core gameplay without invalidating several years of muscle memory and therefore the most we may ever get is some meme game modes.

I played overwatch consistently for at least 2 years, theres a lot i adore about it still, it has some of the best sound design and character design in any game ever, its deeply satisfying and strategic, but after so many changes it not only became unrecognizable but unplayable, Bastion is my fav character in the game but you cant even play him anymore because they set up this bullshit queue system where you have to do so by role instead of the simple mechanics before, I understand this system for competitive play but its actually braindead to implement it in QP, made every wait between matches 10 mins even if you stick to support which always remains the quickest queue, additionally its constant balancing issues which have always plagued it and its complete stall on interesting content both in and out of the game really fucked it, sad :(