Those that have called this a soulless cash grab really haven't played more than a handful of hours, initially I was rubbed the wrong way as well because the change in atmosphere is immediately noticeable, though I don't think you can keep that same feeling it originally had considering the evolution of gaming and the time gap of release, recently noticeable with the Resident Evil 4 remake as well. The more I played it the more I loved it and while I still prefer FES, it's better to look at Reload as a companion piece rather than a replacement.

A lot of problems the mass had with the original release have been fixed to a certain extent here, people griped about Tartarus always feeling the same, the Tactics system not allowing for creativity (there's even a well known mod to allow for controllable party members in FES), the general lack of content in spare time you had to experience, but Atlus listened to a lot of the criticism and touched upon what's dated. I love Persona 3 for all of its flaws and it wouldn't be the same game without some issues, so to say Reload is Persona 3 "perfected" would be an overstatement as it has an equal amount of problems, but that's moreso because it's Persona 3.

I appreciate Reload so much for offering a different perspective on the characters and story, one easier for modern audiences to get to experience while delivering the same emotional response that it's always had with its gut-wrenching final month and more importantly, I think Aigis was done better in Reload which is arguably the most crucial aspect to what makes the game as impactful as it is, for its core themes. There's so much more optional character interaction this time around that really fleshes out the main cast, and even Takaya believe it or not.

Is it the "definitive" version people have sought out ever since the release of Portable? It's still a difficult question to answer even now... I think you can't go wrong with Reload if you don't like the idea of going back to an older release, though if you're patient and want to answer the "definitive" question yourself, play FES and then Reload in the future.

Been a really long time but I finally finished it - and I'm glad I took my time. Kamurocho and Sotenobori grabbed me immediately with their mesmerizingly rich detail and cinematography recreating an era that a lot of Japanese still look back on wsitfully - its practically virtual tourism, I could just walk for hours. 4 years later, I've visited both those places (Kabukicho and Dotonbori) and its truly incredible how similar they are - well except for the incredibly crowded Starbucks everywhere. This is how you do an open world. Just like Discol Elysium, only two maps for a small area of a city, yet its bigger and more immersive than any ubisoft game could ever be. The game itself was fantastic, truly something for everybody,. And best of all it used the world so well, so many characters, items, and interconnected minigames that take you to every nook and cranny. And I loved seeing Yakuza film veterans like Riki Takeuchi, Hitoshi Ozawa and Shingo Tsurumi (not the first time they've acted together! That was in Takashi Miike's DOA) and of course, Yakuza film royalty Tetsuya Watari (Tokyo Drifter, Yakuza Graveyard). Probably as close as you'll get to playing Battles Without Honor and Humanity on your PC.

I went into this like "ok time to do all 365 days!", but after 6 or so hours and ~75 days (plus another 20 I had to play through again because the game hung? So ~95) I feel like to keep going over and over would just ruin the experience. I was starting to tire of it! And what a shame that would be.

It's not a "game" like that; you don't really "complete it", maybe eventually you get to a full year, but I don't think that's the point. It's like a nice bonus if you come back for a whole year of emulated dreams. The ending on day 365 goes through the traditional symbols of a Hatsuyume. That is to say, it's a dream journal. Your dream journal.

It was really fun after the fact to go and see how the procedural generation worked, but in the process of playing through it I found it really easy to just want to sit and look at the scenery. I ended up taking a lot of photos. A single batch of those is here.

I think it's a cool vibey piece of digital art. It's something you can come back to and revisit. It's something I could pull up for an hour or two with friends if I was entertaining and let the ambiance play with people. If you let the menu sit for 10 seconds a video starts anyway — it wants to keep the scenery going, to set and maintain its tone.

Finally I want to point out just how unobtuse it is. The game doesn't want you to get stuck. It doesn't want to be a puzzle. It puts the atmosphere and mystique first and foremost and designed the entire game around the surreal traversal of the dream world. So you can't "lose", you can't have an obstacle in your way; it's all just ways of moving to another image, another set of symbols. Within its constraints over time the maps felt repetitive but the textures didn't. I felt like I would occasionally be given an exceptionally rare symbol in a sea of patterns.

I feel like in a sense it got a lot of mystique in the late 2000s/early 2010s when I was young, and it felt overrated for a moment? But I don't think it's scary or creepy. I think it's cool. Neat. Etc. It runs at like 12 fps at best too but don't think too hard about that.

What a fun game! It has a simple and fun story, with very fun and lovable cast of characters especially our protaogonist. The gameplay is brilliant! I have played a few rhythm games(and enjoyed them), but nothing that combines both the rhythm game aspect and action game aspect so well, everything in the games moves to the beat and It is especially satisfying when you're in the groove and hit those combos to the beat! And of course, it also have a great soundtrack which ties into the gameplay.
Insane to me how they just dropped this game without any promotion...
Absolute must play if you're into rhythm games or even if you're just an action game fan you should be able to have fun with this!

This game has a nice aesthetic and is very applicable to the internet entertainer life even if you don't personally relate to it. The dialogue in this game from Ame to the chat looks very legit and believable and the endings that aren't joke ones are pretty well written. Gameplay is fun for the first few runs but it does unfortunately become a grind if you really wanna get everything out of the game. You eventually have to pull up an achievement guide to finish it cause the endings start to get very specific. Overall fun game and my aesthetic needs are pleased.

Before I start this review I need to preface that this game is an extremely good game there's no reason to deny the sheer quality and scope of such a project.

With that said, was it a completely satisfying game to me ? A long time Zelda fan who also happened to have the original BOTW ranked super highly as one of my favorite game of all time ?

Heeeeh not quite

By the time I'm writing this review I have completed every single shrine, gotten every single light roots, gotten every single bubul frog crystals, done a couple of the most important mission, got all the dragon tears and ofc finished the 5 temples as well as defeating the evil Ganondorf.

So I'm confident in saying that while all of this was still a relatively fun and addicting experience, there's a lingering feeling at the back of my head telling me that this wasn't really that great of a sequel to BOTW

But why ? Why did I have this awkward feeling ?

I guess it's because BOTW was such a unique experience on release, one that could be difficult to top even with the best of effort, it's such a unique take on Zelda going back to its roots and giving the series the proper evolution it needed after years of stagnant attempt at recapturing the magic of OOT with more or less good success.

It was an ode to freedom, to adventure, it was a game that had the balls to throw away 20 years of Zelda convention and was making no compromise to deliver the best experience possible.

It's hard to deny how much of an amazing title BOTW was when the only people complaining about it are game design illiterate Zelda fans who thought it wasn't "Zelda enough" (which in my book was a good thing) and personally speaking it was hard to recapture a similar experience.

TOTK feels more like what happens when you're bored of playing Minecraft Vanilla and you want to spice things up with some mods to add more stuff to do and that's how I feel about most of the new features in this game, nothing that truly enhances the original game experience in any significant way but just add more stuff on top of what was already a pretty meaty game.

But in doing so, I don't feel that the new stuff was thought with the same minutia or the same sense of vision that BOTW did.

I start with the big elephant in the room which is the map of the game.

As you may know, the map of TOTK is mostly lifted off of the one from BOTW, the surface world isn't entirely devoid of new stuff but it's still relatively the same world just slightly touched up.

The problem with this is that it completely change the way you experience the world, in BOTW I was discovering the world, I was letting myself go loose and absorb the entirety of the game in all of its scope, in TOTK the exploration feels a bit more processed.

I know these plains, I've climbed these mountains, I've sailed those seas, I've been there so I don't approach the world of TOTK the same way I did the one in BOTW.

BOTW felt like actually exploring a world and creating your own adventure, TOTK feels like checking a list of stuff to revisit to see what's different as well as progressing through the very disjointed story of the game (more on that later).

But TOTK has 2 more layers to its map, the sky and the depths !

These were the main selling point of the game (especially the sky) and the two biggest addition to BOTW's world and what do I think of both of them ?

They're honestly not that amazing, there are very few sky islands and most of them outside of the starting area are just the same copy pasted layout of one island with a rotating platform, a distributor and an empty shrine you have to bring a crystal to either by going to an island with an underground where it lies or going to an island where the same cube boss guards it on its back.

There's only maybe 2 or 3 sky island that are actually different and offer a different set of challenges and going to them is kind of bothersome with no proper way to traverse the sky (unless you decide to create an airbike), at some point the sky islands were becoming a bit too predictable but at least they were better than...

The Depths...

So ok, when I first entered the depths my jaw dropped to the floor, these crazy mf made an entire map under the map ???

But then you actually explore the depth and realize its depressingly void of interest, it's the same biomes and structure repeated infinitely with little to nothing of value to be found in here and the only real appeal of it is making surface shrines easier to find (due to the map being symetrical) and grinding for Zonite Ore to upgrade your battery (and I guess that neat little quest with the Yiga Clan but even that got dull pretty fast), every trip down here ended in disappointment and felt like a massive waste of my time until I decided to make an air bike to skip on most of the cumbersome traversal (because god the geography of the depth coupled with the limited light sources just makes me loose my mind)

The best addition to the world at least to me are the caves and wells, these should've been more advertised because these are awesome ! They're the kind of places that feels like it actually belonged in the original game map, they have unique and interesting layouts and they hold lots of surprises within them without feeling too samey and I wish the Sky Islands and The depths were designed with the same philosophy as them.

Another problem arise when discussing the story of the game. See BOTW structure really doesn't mesh well with a more narratively driven story and it shows, you can feel that there was an intended order in how you're supposed to experience what the game has to offer but if you played BOTW before, you don't wanna do that, you just want to explore the world and do things in whatever order you want !

But TOTK encourages to qualm your drive to explore and go on an adventure because not doing so will lead to a worst narrative experience, sometimes you get cutscenes out of order, you experience story segment out of order and the whole story gets broken because the first memory you get is of Zelda traveling to time and the second could be Ganon transforming into a demon and there's like 15 different step you just skipped.

It's sad because it makes some of the stronger more controlled moment of the story less effective as a result

In conclusion TOTK is a game that I enjoyed but it lacks the cohesiveness of the original game even if its fun to play around with the new ability