The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit is a free demo set in the Life is Strange 2 Universe.

The game is about a son and a dad who live in small town in the US. During this demo, you'll know more about them but not enough to complete their story. You'll see them again in the second chapter of Life is Strange 2 and you will only see how their story ends there.

What you do in this free demo will change what will happen in the second chapter of Life is Strange 2. To be honest, it's not much, almost everything is for cosmetic purpose and to introduce the characters.

The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit fails in introduce the franchise to new players. I missed almost everything that makes Life is Strange one of my favorite franchises. I only recommend if you're planning to play Life is Strange 2.

Life is Strange 2 is that kind of game that let you decide how your character will interact in some dialogs and situations. Every choice you make will change the end of the story. There are really good games that are perfect on it like Detroit: Become Human and Heavy Rain.

The fisrt Life is Strange and Before the Storm are masterpieces. They teach us how to conect with the characters, something really important in this type of game. Life is Strange 2 does not do that. To be honest, I didn't like the brothers and thought the small one really annoying. This is really bad and the game fails in something really important.

That makes you don't care about some parts of the story that the developers tried to make you shocked. To be honest, threre are just two scenes that made me fell some emotion.

If you don't know how this game works, I can tell you is pretty simple. Like I said before, the game focus in how you will interact with world arround you. There's no action segments that let you control the character. You'll only decide how to answer some questions or how to react in a situation. Everything you decide will make the following events change. That's another problem here.

You won't have a different story if you play the game multiple times. Only the end will change. For me, it's pretty bad. If you compare with games like Detroit: Become Human and As Dusk Falls, almost everything changes with your decisions. That's a problem for me here.

It's not a bad game but it's not as good as the first two. Life is Strange 2 is the most forgettable game of the franchise and I'm saying this after True Colors that it's a just a cool game, nothing more than that.

When the first Harry Potter movie was in the theaters, EA decided to realese a lot of games about that story. Almost every plataform in the market had a Harry Potter game that was unique. They did the same thing when the Chamber of Secrets came out in 2002.

This review is about the Gameboy Advance version. It's probably not the best one but it has a special place in my heart.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is a classic isometric action game for GBA. Like almost all games from this console, the visuals are incredible for its time.

When I was a child, I played this game several of times but never finished (i couldn't beat the final boss). When I started the game again a few weeks ago, I understood why I loved this game so much: it makes me fell like a student of Hogwarts.

The action segments are ok. Nothing special. You attack the enemies from distance with your spells.

There's also stealth parts and to be honest, they are pretty bad.

The story is the same of the book. Probably it wasn't the best way this story was told but that's not a problem here.

It's a short game and takes just two hours to finish. Again, it's not a problem. It's a game that could make you fell bored with more time of gameplay.

This game was made for Harry Potter fans, so if you don't have any connection with the franchise, you probably won't see anything to make you like this game.

If you lived the GBA era and like Harry Potter, you'll probably like. It's not a fantastic game but this world is so special for who grow up with the books and movies.

If you have to play this version of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets? I can say that you have to give it a chance only if you like this world and GBA isometric action games.

God of War Ragnarök is the sequel to one of the best PS4 games. As a sequel should be, Ragnarök takes the features of the previous game and makes everything better.

It’s important to start this review by saying that it’s necessary to know the story of the last game. If you have never played the 2018 game, they will tell you what happened right at the beginning of Ragnarök, but you will probably miss the connection between the characters. It’s not necessary to play the other games of the franchise, but if you did, you will understand more about Kratos at this moment of his life.

The gameplay is almost the same as the previous game. Some powers were added, but nothing special. Don’t get me wrong... I can say the battle system is nearly perfect.

The visuals are nothing special. If you are playing on the PlayStation 5, you'll see that it could have better effects. They chose to release a PS4 version, and it makes the PS5 users pay a price.

To finish here, I say it’s a must-play game if you have a PlayStation console. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great game from an important franchise. I had fun, but nothing more than that. The fact that they decided to improve the previous game and release a PS4 version makes me feel that this game could be even better.

Florence is a graphic novel game that depicts a specific phase in a girl's life. It's a brief experience that didn't resonate with me.

The game features relatively easy puzzles and doesn't offer much in terms of gameplay. It's more reminiscent of a visual show than a traditional game.

The artwork is quite enjoyable. Frankly, the game appears to be hand-drawn, which is likely its standout feature.

You can complete Florence in about 40 minutes, making it worth a try. While I personally didn't connect with it, your experience might differ if you can relate to the challenges the main character faces in her story.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom had a challenging mission to accomplish: to surpass Breath of the Wild. In the end, we can say Nintendo achieved this goal and delivered one of the best games of all time.

To start this review, we have to mention that the game is quite similar to its predecessor. The developers reused the same main map but added an entirely new world in the skies and in the depths. Furthermore, the game improved Link's abilities, which, to be honest, are much better.

The graphics in Tears of the Kingdom remain consistent with what we saw in Breath of the Wild. It's a beautiful game, but it would have benefitted from more powerful hardware to run at a higher resolution and without any frame drops. I frequently encountered issues with low frame rates, but it's impressive to see a game of this caliber on the Nintendo Switch.

The story is quite compelling and is undoubtedly the best in the franchise. It's remarkable how the developers crafted such an emotionally engaging narrative and allowed players to have unique experiences due to the myriad possibilities for progression.

Honestly, towards the end of my journey, I started to feel a bit fatigued and rushed through the game a bit. It happened to me, although I haven't seen others complaining about it.

Another important point to mention is that you shouldn't play Tears of the Kingdom if you haven't played Breath of the Wild. Not just because the stories are connected, but also because, after playing Tears of the Kingdom, you'll realize that Breath of the Wild almost feels like a beta version in comparison. So, you won't be able to fully enjoy the first game after experiencing this superior sequel.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a modern classic. It's incredible how Nintendo developed a game that lived up to all the hype players had. It's a must-play title in the Nintendo Switch library, and we'll still be talking about it for decades to come.

Final Fantasy XVI is being classified as a new direction for this traditional franchise. The game has abandoned the classic RPG system to focus more on action-packed battles. For some people, this change was welcomed, but some longtime fans didn't appreciate this new direction.

As I'm not a huge Final Fantasy fan, I enjoyed the battle system. My only previous experience was with Final Fantasy XV and VII Remake, so I come from this new action-oriented era of the franchise, and all the action on XVI didn't bore me.

It's a complex system, but it can be quite easy to manage all the characters' powers. The game can provide challenges at the hardest level, but it can also be a "walk in the park" for beginners. In the end, it's a classic action battle system that we've seen in other games.

The boss fights are really good and a lot of fun, but I can't say the same for when we are playing as Eikons. Controlling and facing these massive monsters feels like completely generic battles.

The world is lacking. There's hardly anything interesting to explore. We have small open worlds that don't invite us to visit other places. During my gameplay, I was always heading toward the main objective, and it didn't affect my level ups.

The map is pretty similar to what we saw in the Xenoblade franchise. It's incredible how similar it looks, even with how enemy encounters start.

The best thing about Final Fantasy XVI is definitely the story. I can say for sure that it has one of the best storylines I've ever seen in video games. The characters and their motivations are really deep. It's a complex story, but it's also really good and clearly inspired by Game of Thrones. The game touches on topics like slavery, war, and the excessive exploitation of natural resources. I didn't like how it ended, but that didn't ruin my overall experience.

Something I really enjoyed is the fact that we can consult a summary of the game anytime we want. You can pause a cutscene to see information about the character, place, or army they are talking about. By pressing a button, you can quickly read a small summary based on what's happening in the part of the game you're at. With such a complex story, this feature was very helpful in preventing players from feeling lost. It's a feature that I'd like to see in other games.

In my opinion, Final Fantasy XVI represents a new direction for the franchise, aimed at a broader audience. It offers enjoyable gameplay and an amazing story. While there are some downsides, they aren't that significant. I highly recommend it for players who haven't experienced the series before but are familiar with action games.

Like a Dragon: Ishin! is undoubtedly the best hidden gem of 2023. This Yakuza series spin-off transports players to a pivotal moment in Japan's history, circa 1860, when the nation was encountering visitors from other countries, reshaping crucial aspects of its way of life.

This game is a remake of a title originally developed for the PS3 and exclusively released in Japan. This remake version boasts stunning visuals and modern gameplay. With its new features, it stands out as one of the top games available on PS5 and Xbox Series, while also being accessible on PS4 and Xbox One.

The narrative revolves around Sakamoto Ryoma, who grapples with conflicting pressures and uncertainty surrounding his identity and societal role. Amidst a coup in Tosa, he is determined to uncover the assassin responsible for his mentor's death, leading him to operate under a secret identity on the streets of Kyoto and aligning with the formidable Shinsengumi.

One drawback for me is the reuse of faces familiar from other Yakuza games. In a story set two centuries ago, it feels off to see these faces interacting again. The presence of undercover villains is somewhat undermined if you're familiar with the Yakuza storyline, as it becomes predictable, affecting the impact of plot twists.

The game offers an open world to explore, although not overly expansive. Despite its size, there are some noteworthy locations to visit.

Combat in the game is both enjoyable and accessible. While there are four fighting styles available, players will likely find themselves primarily using just two during gameplay. The standout moments in combat are undoubtedly the encounters with bosses.

It's unfortunate that Like a Dragon: Ishin! isn't receiving as much attention as it deserves. This release is unquestionably solid, and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys action games.

Trim it down, to the best parts

Gaiden is essentially what they advertised, a small Kiryu...I mean Joryu adventure after the events of Yakuza 6 and during Yakuza: Like a Dragon story.

The story in this bite-sized adventure can very much rival mainline entries if you ask me. I'd recommend you to play Yakuza 6 to really understand what is going and why Kiryu ended up making deals to dissapear from his past life since it's pretty much a continuation of the latter. Unlike previous games it's not that convoluted and is pretty straightforward, it knows it's scope and plays with it nicely. At least, do it for the ending. Hits so much harder once you know who are those kids.

Don't think this game will have a lot of content on it's shoulders, in fact only the basics remain while some of the rest gets ditched or removed. And that's perfectly fine, this means this game has it's focus on the story first, content second. And while there is side-content to be enjoyed it's as basic as it gets. An excuse to level up, basically. During the story we'll meet this red haired chick "Akame" that gives us some missions to complete, this is how Gaiden handles substories and it mixes it with a completion tab. After completing a mission, we'll be gifted with both points and cash. To unlock new abilities you'll need both of them; Cash and Points. As I said before, it mixes both the completion tab and substories under one simple label "The Akame Network".

In case you have played The Kaito Files, the Lost Judgment story expansion you'll get a very similar feeling regarding it's scope, which differs from the main game. While in Gaiden we don't have clearly a game to be based on unlike The Kaito Files and Lost Judgment, it mannages to stand on it's own, even with a Frankestein-like structure. Technically speaking, Gaiden uses the latest rendition of the Dragon Engine which has seen several improvement over the years since it's debut with Yakuza 6. It takes elements from a lot of RGG games, like a ton and they're not afraid to say it so. Most of these assets went up being used in "The Castle", which if you have played previous Yakuza games you may recognize it as "The Colliseum".

"The Castle" is a free-for-all battle showdown where you can recruit fighter that can help you to overcome challenges. Familiar faces avaible as troops are definitely present in this mode. It's as complete as any Yakuza side-mode is and I wish they could expand more on this concept. Basically Mugen in a Yakuza game. It's the definitive timesink of this title and arguably the most fun I had with this game.

Combat takes huge inspiration from a lot of past Yakuza games, and it doesn't try to reinvent the wheel. Even some Judgment and Lost Judgment mechanics makes it's first appereance on a mainline title. "Yakuza Style" is the signature style Kiryu has been using since the series began. Heavy charges, strong punches. It's somewhat close to Kiwami 2 combat system. And then we have "Agent Style", think of "Crane Style" from the Judgment games but with a few extra "Gadgets" added on top. The Gadgets are the key in this fighting style and it makes fighting hordes of enemies much easier to manage, while on bosses is ineffective at best, useless at worst. I'll be honest, the combat is not as good as Lost Judgment even if it releasesed two years after it. It's not as polish as you may expect and there is a lot of bullshit moments to occur, specially on boss fights. That's why I say "The Castle" is great, it doesn't requiere precision in the amount of chaos that is hapenning there and combat generally favours going against hordes of enemies rather than a simple oponent.

Gaiden feels like the series "Greatest Hits" album, carefully selecting the elements that makes this series unique. It does come at the cost of not feeling fully-fletched and having a unique "something" that makes each title special, but for a small sized adventure is a perfectly serviceable title to have while waiting for Infinite Wealth.

the swinging package here is sewn up by three mechanics: the boost, the web zip, and the charge jump. in a modern design, the boost would inevitably be restrained by some kind of resource like a meter or a cooldown thanks to the idle nodding of designers seeing a chance to add an explicit limitation to the system. spider-man 2 doesn't need that; the boost's only mechanical restriction is that it can be used once per swing with no other catch. simply obtaining the speed that it comes with using it adds enough danger to traversal to avoid any need for an artificial check on its power. the web zip (once obtained) defrays this by opening up an escape hatch when you need to bail out. its ability to quickly change your angle and briefly cap your speed reins in runaway or unexpected swings. the charge jump overlays all of this with the ability to influence height out of the swing and weave in ground movement without losing momentum. it gives the player a variable amount of impulse based on how long it's been buffered, and it sits completely independent of the other moves, making it chargeable in the background while simultaneously swinging. these three beg not only multilayered decision-making, with fingers working independently to control different systems, but also robust split-second decision-making that keeps the player constantly juggling the three as the micropositioning constantly evolves.

that's primarily because the micropositioning (partially) controls where spidey's webs go, and it's nuanced to such an extent that you'll often have no idea what exactly it'll attach to or how you'll swing around its fulcrum. watch this quick speedrun of the pizza missions and you'll see even a world record holder overshoot objectives, muddle with awkward climbing angles, and get stuck inside a fire escape. this chaos persists even at lower speeds, so there's no point to holding yourself back; boost as often as you can and be prepared for disaster. the game's challenges accept this fact and run with it by featuring generously sized rings to run through without many "tricks" involved. in fact, most of the challenges would feel like filler if not for the volatility of the swinging system giving much-needed variety to what otherwise are checkpoints slapped inside city blocks. you're never expected to plan intricate routes through these because accepting inconsistency and learning to work around it is the core of the game's unique movement system. even simple additions to a challenge such as mandating wallrunning, loop-de-loops, or landing on the ground inside particular checkpoints wrinkle the necessary traversal in such a way that you'll remember one-off challenges days after you originally played them. these nuances are the crux of the game's appeal.

whether this sounds appealing to you in the long run depends on how much intrinsic enjoyment you can get out of this system without much structure surrounding it. its these challenges and the pizza missions providing most of your sustenance, and luckily they're available from mere minutes into the game. however, to further upgrade your base speed, expect to pay the piper by sleepwalking through ~4-5 hours of story-driven setpieces. it shockingly does little to play with your swinging chops and instead alternates extremely lax "get to the objective" segments with dull beat-em-up combat that rarely escalates beyond spamming the air combo and the contextual dodge. it luckily rarely veers into true frustration, but the fact that you have to engage with it all was a rather sore point to me. having to eat my veggies to enjoy my traversal dessert doesn't hit quite as hard when the dessert itself is a bit of an acquired taste, riddled with its own frustrations and inconsistencies. holistically the experience feels often more like something I enjoy dissecting in theory and less so in practice.

the similarities to gravity rush occurred to me while playing, as I outlined in my review of that game that it was also a bare-bones open world experience buoyed by its exciting traversal yet limited by rarely leaning into it outside of optional challenges. spider-man 2 is an even purer expression of that sentiment, with a washed-out, flat version of manhattan replacing the anachronistically rich hekseville and an even more wild and disorienting swinging system replacing the comparatively straight-forward gravity control. a game I see myself continuing to pop in to pick away at the remaining challenges, but not necessarily one that kept me enthralled.

didn't really talk much about the combat in my last few classic RE reviews because so much of it boils down to pressing aim and shooting until the zombie goes down; the main appeal is the resource consumption, where every shot counts and evading enemies is often preferable. on its face re3's combat focus seems to violate this core appeal, as the increase in enemy counts across the board comes with a corresponding increase in heavy weaponry. shotgun shells weren't even sparse in re2, and in re3 you might as well just use your shotgun as your daily driver given how lush the ammo haul is. between this, chokepoints with explosive barrels, the contextual dodge, the wealth of gunpowders, and the grace pushdowns you get if you've previously been bitten in a room, it really feels like jill is nigh invincible in most regular encounters. with the more claustrophobic corridor design and increased enemy limit in rooms, there are certainly more times that the game pushes you into one of these options instead of going for straight evasion, but at the same time the core conceit is still the same: click aim, click shoot. a lot of mechanics to defray what is still relatively rudimentary gameplay.

however, the devs went out of their way to keep the routing intact. the addition of nemesis as a mr. X replacement so thoroughly trumps its predecessor that it feels a bit shocking they didn't get it this right the first time. mr. X was a effectively an ammo conversion spot; this lumbering beast you could pump full of cheaper ammo to get drops of the nicer stuff. nemesis completely flips this on its head by offering a real challenge between all of his different mutations, with attacks such as full-screen lunges, tentacle whips, and a rocket launcher. tackling him requires a much stronger focus on positioning and dodge acumen than mr. X (or even many other early RE bosses), and fittingly in return for choosing to fight you get parts for specialized weapons. granted, actually mastering the dodge in these fights plays up the issues with its seemingly random outcomes and directions, but at the same time tanking hits or controlling his speed with the freeze grenades gives much-needed leeway in what is probably the hardest boss up to this point in the series. unfortunately, killing him in optional encounters doesn't seem to influence rank at all, and I never got a sense that these optional kills help make his later obligatory fights easier, but his presence still gives the benefit of influencing your ammo route. killing nemesis isn't cheap, so if you're interested in his weapons, the regular fights that are so easily trivialized by the bounty of grenades you receive becomes moments for you to tighten your belt and conserve ammo.

small variations to the campaign are also more prevalent in this entry, from randomized enemy layouts and different item locations to subtle route-dependent event trigger alterations. the least interesting of these are timed binary choices that are occasionally given to you during cutscenes, which generally are nothing more than knowledge checks, especially when you can get a free nemesis kill out of it like in the restaurant or on the bell tower. occasionally these actually affect routing, as on the bridge prior to the dead factory, but more often than not the difference seemed either negligible or not a real tradeoff. the rest of these do affect routing in meaningful ways, from things as minor as changing a room from hunters to brain suckers to major changes such as the magnum and the grenade launcher getting swapped in the stars office. this plus the plentiful ammo fosters a nice "go with the flow" atmosphere where reloading a save and getting thrown into different circumstances is often a worse choice than just limping along through mistakes. on the flip-side, the actual effects of this feels like it would be most relevant between many separate runs, so I really haven't played around with really planning a route for this one as much as I would have liked. it already took me a year to play through this short game lol, hopefully next year once I'm done teaching I'll come back to this one.

with that in mind, the real thing that elevated this for me over re2 was the area design. re3 sticks with general design thrust of the first two -- bigger early areas, smaller later areas -- but it moves away from interconnected inner loops and major-key gating of the mansion or the police station in favor of something more akin to spokes coming out from a wheel, where each spoke has its own little setpiece and order of exploration feels more loose. the best example of this is easily downtown, which implements an item collection challenge similar to chess plugs or medals puzzles from previous games (get supplies to fix a cable car). each primary location in this section is a building, whether a sub station or a press office, all connected via alleys and streets with interactables strewn along the way. does a good job both corralling the player into fighting enemies in narrow spaces as well as providing many separated nodes with their own little sparks of action and intrigue. not really as genius as the mansion's taut, intertwined room layout, but it's cool to see them try something a little different. the later game devolves into mini-puzzle areas on par with the guardhouse (or even smaller in the case of the park or the hospital), but these are a significantly improvement over the undercooked sewer from re2. the puzzles themselves are pretty fun too; I like spatial puzzles more than riddles, and they lean into that more here with stuff like the water purification check near the end of the game.

VVVVVV has faded into the background somewhat despite its positive critical reception upon launch, and that's a shame: I think more developers should take notes, as it succeeds at appealing to both casual and competitive audiences. From a casual viewpoint, VVVVVV takes a classic deconstructed concept ("what if we removed jumping in 2D platforming?") and expands upon this in meaningful ways with little downtime. I've often complained about the lack of tech-skill in 2D platformers, but VVVVVV remains a key exception because it's simple to pick up (just gravity flip and walking as controls) yet difficult to master due to its weightiness. Additionally, it never feels stale with its utilization of gravity flipping by innovating upon this with classic obstacle escalation, introducing flippers, screen wrapping, teleporters, and auto-scrolling in respective levels as just a few married mechanics. On the other hand, from a competitive viewpoint, VVVVVV presents itself as an almost perfect beginner's speedrunning game thanks to the general lack of RNG; all rooms begin from the same state once entered, following the same pattern every time. Upon exiting, the rooms will always reset to that exact same state playing the same pattern, meaning that timing cycles don't have to be accounted for on a broader scale and players can just focus on correctly routing the first time around. Due to the simplified routing and committal movement (since you can't flip mid-air and have very restrained control over aerial drift), players must both react quickly enough to meet single room cycles and carefully plan out input timings. It certainly helps that a solid speedrun takes less than an hour and individual sectors can be practiced as "challenges" added in a recent update.

Notice how I said "general lack of RNG" however, because this is where VVVVVV throws a wrench into the works. One of the game's twists is that upon rescuing three crewmates (i.e. clearing 3 of the 4 main sectors), the player is thrown into a 2nd intermission dubbed "The Gravitron," an arcade-like section that bounces the player between two flippers as they must dodge incoming projectiles without any vertical control. This particular intermission is the only case of RNG (in the form of randomized projectile waves) throughout the game, and unfortunately sticks out like a sore thumb in an otherwise completely consistent speedrunning experience. As an endless arcade sidemode that can be unlocked via collecting every trinket, I think it fulfills this role as a reward well, but when considering it from a deathless run perspective, it is an absolute killer in the middle of the run that cannot be easily planned for. Outside of this complaint though, I find very few things that I can fault VVVVVV for. The game's simple visuals are bright and catchy, it's got a great sense of humor with its room names and stylized pixel hazards, and the soundtrack goes harder than it has any right to: Pressure Cooker and Potential for Anything never fail to blow me away with their energetic melodies. This is an easy recommendation for anyone looking to get into speedrunning platformers despite the need to heavily practice for the Gravitron, and it's an even easier recommendation for general players looking to understand how indies can thoroughly yet succinctly explore creative yet familiar concepts in a cohesive package.

I actually beat Rollerdrome back in March and was quite enamored at first, but I've since cooled down on it somewhat. A quick replay today has only confirmed my suspicions that there's unfortunately a lot left to be desired. Feel free to take my word here with a grain of salt: I'm not a particularly huge Tony Hawk fan and was more or less playing this as part of a warm-up via Jet Set Radio-likes (since Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is coming out in less than a week, and I replayed the original Jet Set Radio right before this). Still, if I had to put my finger on why this didn't hit the mark the second time around, my best guess would be that Rollerdrome doesn't understand how to create an engaging difficulty curve, and here are some of my theories as to why:

- Progression: Rollerdrome locks its stages behind completing challenges (collect all the tokens, do a certain trick while killing a certain enemy, rack up enough points, etc), with ten challenges per stage and sixty completed challenges required to unlock the finals. This is supposed to incentivize players to tackle as many challenges as possible while going through stages, but in reality what I found myself doing was farming the earlier stages for the easiest challenges to get the base completion requirement out of the way, and throwing away dry runs to farm the more manageable challenges at the beginning before resetting and running through the stages proper. This unfortunately feels like an artificial implementation of coercing me to explore its mechanics when I was usually more concerned with straight efficiency regarding combat.

- Tricks: You need to perform tricks constantly in Rollerdrome to restore your ammo, and tricks are also a way to quickly rack up points in-between shooting to exploit your current combo multiplier. Again though, I found tricks to be unnecessarily complicated and superfluous outside of doing the required tricks to complete necessary challenges: if you don't care about your score, then all you have to do for quick ammo restoration is to just hold the stick forward and perform the same grab/flip/spin while not in combat, or just spend your time grinding on rails/edges and firing since you'll automatically regain ammo for grinding up to a certain point. It also doesn't help that I found the inputs for more complex tricks a bit fiddly and perfect dodges refresh some of your ammo anyway, reducing the reliance upon tricks. Speaking of which...

- Dodge/Super Reflex: The dodge is a little too good in Rollerdrome. You can basically invincible frame roll at any time in the game (including in mid-air and while grinding), outside of a few frames right after the roll animation ends as far as I can tell. This not only provides a reliable method for quickly getting out of danger, but also you can roll in any direction to quickly alter your momentum and enter Super Reflex if you activate bullet-time right as you perfect dodge (that is, dodging in the first few frames of an active enemy attack). To summarize, this strategy easily gets you ammo refills, allows for relative invincibility when confronted by a barrage of attacks, and powers up your shots while in Super Reflex, which as a result makes Rollerdrome almost feel too reactive as opposed to proactive since it's far too advantageous to not abuse this to safely and quickly wipe out waves.

- Stages: Rollerdrome only has 11 stages, and quite a few of these stages are just repeated locales with few hazards outside of the enemies and a lot of empty, open space outside of a few trick ramps and grind rails/edges. A bit more variety in the set design (and more walls to wall-ride, which I thought was a little underutilized) would have been appreciated since by halfway through, some of the arenas started to bleed into one another for me.

- Laser: I'm fine with most of the weapon balance in Rollerdrome, but the Z-11 (the in-game laser gun) is an exception. The main caveat to using the Z-11, aside from the three shot capacity (still more than the grenade launcher though), is that you can't use aim assist to automatically lock on to foes with it and thus must manually point your reticle at them. Not a very difficult task though, since Reflex gives you more than enough reaction time and the reticle turns red as soon as you hover over a target. Because the shotgun and pistol are limited somewhat by range for aim assist (especially the shotgun due to perfect slug shots), the laser is a godsend: it bypasses this system entirely and lets you snipe foes from across the arena, taking out most enemies after a double charge and can also pierce through multiple enemies at a time. It further disrupts this balance because the Z-11 is unlocked halfway through, meaning the game's earlier combat/combo challenges are a lot more difficult without it at first but often rather trivial once you've unlocked it.

- Boss fights: I've already mentioned that Rollerdrome's dodge roll is a bit overcentralizing, but nowhere does this become more evident than during the two boss fights, shifting the prevailing strategy from any semblance of ammo management/route planning to just basic bait and punish. Simply wait for enemy attacks, dodge to regain ammo/enter Super Reflex to finish off goons, and then approach the big robot to deal damage and enter the next phase. There's no scoring optimization or crazy tricks/maneuvering involved, and as a result, these tend to be pretty dry affairs that could have been removed from the game entirely with little value lost.

I certainly get the appeal of Rollerdrome, given its potential for optimization to maximize the combo meter and quickly speedrun stages, but unfortunately I find that the game doesn't get harder, but rather gets longer with more enemies that take more hits and throw out more attacks. Even so, I had enough fun constantly filling foes with lead in slow-mo, but even this thrill began to wear itself thin an hour in. I can't help but feel that the separate movement and combat mechanics are undercooked despite how promising "Tony Hawk with bullet-time gunplay" sounds on paper. More power to those who find the core gameplay engaging enough to try and complete all the challenges + the "Out for Blood" post-game replay with stricter margins: as for me, I'm content with putting this down after a few hours and completing Finals with a C rank. Rollerdrome is by no means a bad game, but I know Roll7 is capable of so much more.

I should have known something wasn't right about Memories of Celceta by the one-hour mark. Looking back, I’ve now repeatedly picked up and shelved this game a grand total of five times over the past year, with my feelings upon the game becoming more mixed every time. In fact, it actually made me question whether or not I liked Ys Seven to begin with. Upon a quick replay though, I can confirm that the issue was not so much Ys Seven’s baseline mechanics but rather Celceta’s interpretation of said mechanics. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll refrain from poring over Celceta’s general background (since the core ideas have carried over from Ys Seven and have been thoroughly explained here) and treat this write-up more as a compare & contrast.

The first thing that comes to mind is that despite carrying over the baseline combat mechanics from Ys Seven, Celceta’s pacing feels far more sluggish than Ys Seven. This struck me as quite odd at first, because there’s no immediate culprit that would draw my ire as anything that was excessively grindy (as compared to Ys Seven, which really suffers from an end-game resource grind for the best weapons in the game). Upon further reflection, I came to realize that it was actually a mix of smaller factors that kept intrusively interrupting the flow of Ys’s traditionally frenetic bread-and-butter gameplay over the course of the entire run. For example:

- Celceta has tons of slow swimming thanks to all the different water bodies and water elevation puzzles scattered throughout the overworld and the dungeons. This gets even more obnoxious because there are tons of enemies present in the water that Adol and company have to fend off with a very committal thrust (since you can’t dodge or flash guard while swimming).

- The first half of the game doesn’t let you freely teleport between differently colored monuments, which becomes very tedious when backtracking for resources/side quests/healing. It’s not until the Primeval Lands are unlocked and you obtain the Gold Wing that backtracking becomes much more efficient.

- There’s some coding/binding oversight that doesn’t let you use your special attack bound to the Y button without expending your EXTRA attack/gauge if it’s completely filled up. The result is that I felt pretty reluctant to use the Y special attack most of the time, and accidentally threw away my EXTRA attack plenty of times, forcing me to engage in additional grinding to enter every boss fight with a full EXTRA gauge.

- There are some high-level enemies near the beginning of the game with tons of health that you’d think would be a good idea to avoid; however, it’s actually pretty easy to defeat them by flash guarding the telegraphed attacks and they're worth boat-loads of experience. The Golden Pikkard near the middle of the game functions similarly to this, in that it can grant multiple level-ups at a time and is otherwise a somewhat unengaging fight since it will just run away from you while tanking attacks. These opportunities feel too good to pass up since it’s often very little risk for significant reward, resulting in the player occasionally grinding to become over-leveled for a good chunk of the game.

- The game encourages you to go for “aerial combos” juggling enemies for extra damage, but most characters are incapable of using standard attacks to hit launched foes because there’s no jump and most standard attacks aren’t pointed upwards. This creates this gap in combat where after hitting enemies with launcher special attacks and running out of the SP gauge, you have to wait for enemies to return to earth before resuming your assault.

- Each of the six playable party characters has a “unique” action that requires you to switch to them to activate something in the overworld (ex: Adol is the only one who can access memories, Duren is required to unlock chests, etc). This wasn’t completely absent in Ys Seven, but it’s significantly more intrusive in Celceta because there are many more instances requiring character-specific context-sensitive prompts, so a lot more time is spent menuing to switch party characters on the fly if the ones you’re currently using for combat don’t correspond with those required for overworld actions.

- While there’s no late-game resource grind as previously mentioned, there’s something far more egregious that players may feel incentivized to do. Due to some developer oversight, Falcom misaligned the world map, which means that to achieve 100% map completion, you have to unintuitively “hug” walls of certain areas to register them as part of the percentage. This gets particularly grating because the game is very picky as to what has/has not been registered, to where unregistered parts of the map may not even appear to be visibly faded while looking at the map display. You don’t have to 100% the map to beat the game of course, but since the item you receive as a reward for doing so is extremely valuable (a sub-item that accelerates the accrual of your EXTRA gauge), most players will probably end up going through this laborious and unclear clean-up that was fortunately addressed in Ys VIII with far more generous guidelines.

Looking past these pacing issues, Celceta does at least expand and often improve upon the toolkit from Ys Seven. For instance, dodge-rolling right when enemies attack performs a “Flash Move” that grants you temporary invincibility and temporarily slows the enemy down (as opposed to the Flash Guard, which is more of a “parry” that builds up your SP/EXTRA gauge), which should theoretically open up more avenues of combat. In addition, new special attacks for characters are naturally unlocked as the player progresses through the game’s fights; while Ys Seven ran the risk of players potentially not gaining permanent access to new special attacks if not used enough with new weapons, Celceta’s unlocks operate independently of purchasing new weapons to avoid this issue. Lastly, Celceta provides a stronger incentive for utilizing special attacks by allowing players to regain half of the expended SP if the special attack is used as a finisher, rewarding players for wisely timing special attacks to improve the flow of combat.

The more pressing issue then, is that the enemies and bosses are not scaled appropriately to match the player’s buffed toolkit, resulting in what is probably the easiest Ys game to date. Ys Seven at least ran the risk of punishing the player for mistiming the Flash Guard: if the player is hit during the end-lag after the active parrying frames, they would receive critical damage, thus balancing the risk vs reward. Meanwhile, Celceta not only removes this risk altogether, but in fact allows the player to mash the Flash Guard with no delay between inputs to quickly build up the SP/EXTRA gauge in practical invincibility, trivializing fights. Similarly, the charged attack is streamlined from Ys Seven to Celceta: Ys Seven forced the player to commit by holding down the attack button, while Celceta instead links the charged attack to a built-in timer (wait long enough without attacking and the next attack you launch will be charged). While this doesn’t appear to be a drastic change, there’s a lot less decision-making that goes into the latter compared to the former; the player is consciously making the decision to charge up an attack in Ys Seven, but in Celceta, it’ll naturally charge while dodge-rolling around anyways. Finally, remembered when I mentioned that most characters are incapable of hitting launched enemies with standard attacks for aerial combos? There’s one exception to this, and she’s the most busted character in the game: Karna can often infinitely juggle enemies with her ranged standard attack, and can in fact out-space the vast majority of mobs in the game. Couple all of these things with the activated flash-moves from rolling through enemy attacks, and Celceta’s combat often devolves into mindless hit-and-run strategies where you can dodge-roll/flash-guard through every attack in the game with little risk to the player.

As a result, Memories of Celceta lacks an engaging difficulty/learning curve compared to other games in the series; the same broken strategies that work at the very beginning are just as effective at running through late-game bosses, and there’s not much incentive for the player to experiment outside of their comfort zone considering how easy it is to fall back upon hit-and-run. I imagine that Falcom caught wind of complaints regarding spongey bosses in Ys Seven and thus toned down their health bars accordingly, but it feels like they went in the complete opposite direction because even the final couple of bosses absolutely melted in a couple of minutes from abusing flash guard critical-boosted EXTRA attacks. The game also lacks a satisfying payoff to justify the tedium: Memories of Celceta tries to place more emphasis upon the individual party members as opposed to the overarching lore (which is why Ys Seven’s limited storytelling feels more acceptable), but so much more time is spent mindlessly backtracking for side-quests that fail to provide interesting lore/character development, and the game abruptly grinds to a halt after an anti-climatic final boss fight that fails to provide any resolution or catharsis to any of the game’s party members. It really feels like Falcom phoned in Celceta's ending in comparison to the simple yet impactful narrative that Ys Seven provided, thanks to Ys Seven’s well-developed tragic villain and emotional climax.

Many have described Ys Seven and Memories of Celceta as a sort of “transition period” between the Ark-era isometric 2D-3D games and the “modern-era” party-based fully-3D games with broader scopes and longer runtimes, but I will go a step further: Memories of Celceta is the stepping-stone of the Ys stepping-stones. The short and thick of it is that while there is no single abhorrent quality or moment that makes the game unbearable, it's also the first Ys game that's struggled to hold my attention and I can’t think of any reasons to recommend it as opposed to its peers. If you want a tougher game with less developed mechanics but a tighter execution to fit its rougher toolkit, then Ys Seven is the way to go. If you want a more expansive and polished toolkit with a more engaging difficulty and learning curve to justify said toolkit, then Ys VIII is your weapon of choice. Finally, if you just want the tale of Celceta told to you in a more succinct and colorful manner, then I’d suggest playing through the original Ys IV via Dawn of Ys. Memories of Celceta loves to emphasize the importance of treasuring the past… but I sure as hell wouldn’t be surprised if this was the first Ys game that I ended up forgetting.