i pretty much finished this game, quit at the final boss. which is the reason i quit altogether in fact, elden ring is an extremely good video game to say the least, the world and exploration are something to be looked upon as an achievement in the open world genre. not being lead anywhere by markers (except for the occasional arrow pointing somewhere at sites of grace), it truly immerses you and gets you excited whenever you come across anything new. the way you can also get super experimental with builds is wild as well! magic builds are better than ever, the weapons stand out more than any other souls game to date, it's really great! but the reason i left 3 and a half stars on this was due to the last 3rd of this game, the end game dungeons and bosses are absolutely miserable to me. the godskin duo, elden beast, and radahn if you need any specifics. it really tore me apart because i do love the first parts of this game! it just wore me down and felt not fun when it came to these aspects, and having your end game build with 50 vigor get 2 shot by some random boss that shouldnt be that hard is very, extremely, disheartening and feels like you're being punished for no reason. overall, great game, still recommend you play it, but if you're like me and the end game got to you as hard as it did, you won't be seeing another replay from this for a while.

live a live was extremely enjoyable when i was going through the 7 chapters that are on display. the distant future chapter and the near future were by far my favorites! but when it got to the secret 8th chapter, aka the middle ages, that's when my enjoyment started to fluctuate and my frustration waned. random encounters are perfectly fine in some cases! but the way live a live implements them and the amount of backtracking it expects you to do makes it extremely menial. the ending didnt shock me much or stand out to me seeing as how i did not have the patience to get the true ending unfortunately. still enjoyed my experience, but its a shame it faltered in the end (for me personally). still recommend!

was really surprised by this game. it has its cliches and it’s tropes, as well as a first act that drags on a little too long, but even then it shows charm and expands on the world of digimon (which personally I have never delved too far into) and I loved pretty much every second of it. there were also some weird plot holes and pacing issues which bugged me when I finished, but I only got 1 out of 5 endings and plan to finish them all, so here’s hoping it saves itself there.

on the other side of the game that’s NOT the visual novel part, aka the SRPG sections, it’s very lackluster in my opinion! it suffers from being an extremely boring and simple SRPG but with digimon! it has its difficulty spikes too which I wasn’t a fan of seeing as how I was already doing some light grinding on the side and only played on normal difficulty. but it’s honestly easy to just set that part aside, turn the difficulty onto very easy, start auto battle, then watch as those mons get slaughtered by the dozen.

i completely forgot to mention as well how dark this game gets which is something I did not expect going in, I knew that it was,
A) a visual novel
B) a SRPG
and
C) digimon related
so being a couple hours in and then seeing
SPOILERS!
a bitch straight up just die after running into an illusion of his dead mom after being sent into mass hysteria is insane. but god I loved the darker take on the monster collecting genre.

overall, you’re gonna be playing digimon survive for the story if you’re playing it, and if that’s what you’re after, I highly recommend!!! but if you’re just looking for a solid SRPG, look somewhere else man im sorry.

first half/second third is peak metroid honestly, the formula of the 2d metroid games put into a 3d environment is something that seems like an inevitability honestly. it works so well and the exploration is so fun and rewarding. except when it gets to that last third. the blatant fetch quest that is prevalent near the end of the game and is mandatory to even get to the final boss is really not my cup of tea, and speaking of the bosses, spoilers!!!!

the 'metroid prime' boss and enemies/fights similar to it are hogwash im sorry. i hate the idea of having to panic kill enemies while youre trying to find the boss by switching your lenses and flicking your camera around like a madman. and dying at the second phase of the fight sends you right back to the beginning of the final area which was not fun i will say! after beating the boss i didnt feel accomplished, just thankful it was over.

lastly, one more negative, the backtracking is absolutely a slog and brings the game down a couple of points in my opinion. since the game is in 3d now, you have many more traversal options and ways to layout rooms, but these new 3d rooms combined with said backtracking makes it a nightmare sometimes to go through. having enemies respawn every 2 rooms does not help as well, definitely makes running around trying to find everything a hell of a time and not a good one.

though ive ragged on the game a fair bit, i still love this game to death, it's not perfect by any means, but god the metroid formula of exploring and finding new shit to open more of the map is a tried and true formula that just works. hopefully prime 2 gets the same treatment as this remaster.

(by the way this was a review on the game itself not the remasters enhancements because this is my first time playing prime! thanks yall! <3)