can't even begin to consolidate my thoughts on this. made me tear up an embarrassing amount of times, just so, so beautiful to look at and play, even with a couple mechanical shortcomings and a lack of guidance. i'd call the battle system more "creative" than fun to play past the start of the game but building a web of buffs and debuffs is always my favourite part of any turn-based battler and thus a robust system for that makes it fun for at least the first 3/4

ended up having to spend half an hour grinding for hack chips to beat the endgame cause it was faster than doing the dungeons i missed out on through the course of the game and i can wholeheartedly say all of that time was incredibly well spent. a year or two on from when i played and i'm still heartbroken we're never seeing a sequel because people misinterpreted the ending so badly

save the world and battle royale aren't split so i'll make it clear that this is mostly because i love stw with my whole heart

these people dont know how to rotate a block Do better

scroll speed is a little choppy and the tracklist has too much filler... Bosses make up for it but compared to the true perfection of the third game i can't justify putting this on the same level

i fear this really did save my life when i was in high school. i'm not convinced a vengeful spirit didn't craft and release this without konami's approval because there's barely any monetisation here either

i always got this confused with Raitendo's flash port of Air Pressure before i played this. at least to someone who grew up so closely with kongregate, this felt like a huge figurehead of "art games" in my developing mind alongside the aforementioned air pressure and gregory weir's work. short and sweet but there's probably a star or a half in this rating purely off of how important it was to me.

Yes i showed this to my friends when i was 17 yes everyone thought it was dumb

it's actually extremely funny how much they nickel and dime park players so i have to support that somehow

very interesting and innovative game but the content (and car list) dries up and the novelty wears off about 3 hours before the game ends for no real reason. Those menus really are beautiful though, the booth babe silhouette gif is burned into my retinas by now

anything that lets me see more polyphony ui is a worthwhile experience to me. gameplay-wise, probably only interesting if you were there in 2003 waiting for GT4 to come out

schlocky plot, weird physics, about 5 songs total in the soundtrack, content dries up an hour before the game ends, black character that has an accent unheard since the 70s. came out 5 years after it feels like it should have. still remains fun somehow

very very cute-looking. unfortunately i tried for way too long to get past that initial wave of pain points and little frustrations you always get with games in that Q? Entertainment vein and just could not get with it.

feels way too common with SCE projects for people to say "oh it's just a tech demo lol" and that definitely doesn't apply here even with the runtime. it really is impressive not only how much they managed to wrangle out of the console graphically so early into its life, but also in how beautifully overdesigned all of its UI/UX is

would be 5 if they just removed car collisions. every time i get thrown off a corner or into a hazard i get more convinced they designed and made this in creative in like a week

not quite on the level of grid handling-wise but still almost the peak of late 2000s piss filter racing. more content than all its sequels which is pretty funny. i don't get why the non-sim rallying market was immediately abandoned after 3 outside of what, art of rally?
this also might be the least compatible game i've tried to run on windows 11 ever lmfao why does it not even have an option for fullscreen/windowed anywhere in the settings

gave me the worst joint pain of my life but im top 500 for endless so who really won?

you can mash the boost button and it crashes the game and you have to restart your console it's beautiful in a way