isabella
77 reviews liked by isabella
Devil May Cry 5
2019
my only complaint with the game is that i'm not good enough to do everything i want to and my solution is playing the game more so im gonna do that until i S rank ever level on Dante Must Die
wasn't going to review these one by one but god this game is so good and the whole world really works so perfectly in this game
good game
Persona 3 Reload
2024
After platinuming the game I’m still struggling on whether I like this game more than 4
I've never been more distraught in a video game than when yuffie took off the moogle hood
Pokémon Platinum is a title that resounds loudly when Pokémon discussion comes around, it is a game that has gotten through every stage of fanaticism, with it being the improved version of seemingly one of the worse received and sluggish titles from everyone having played this specific one in the their childhood years thus marking what a Pokémon game would be forever for them. It's truly a generational game that has inflicted in the life of many people to get into the franchise to stay or video games in general... Or so I've heard. People all around me always have considered Platinum to be between one of the best Pokémon, if not just Nintendo DS games of all time and of course that going into this I was a bit excited, maybe they were right all along and I've always adverted myself to the thought of it being that good ever since I first tried out at the ripe age of eight years old... And I simply couldn't feel more disappointed by the end result.
Pokémon Platinum Version is the next big step in the Pokémon series of games, we're talking generational leap from the Game Boy family of handheld consoles to the new and shining, 3D-capable double-screened for double action Nintendo DS, a marvelous invention when it came to the ergonomics of handheld gaming as a whole and a series of handhelds that Pokémon would pretty much see as a home for the next decade or so. With it came completely new graphics mixing 3D objects with the tile-based sprites we've seen before, dynamic day/night cycle due to the clock functionality built into the system and a whole new screen to menu your menus easier I guess, they really haven't found an actual good utility for this one yet so it plays more like just your average GBA game with better graphics and sound.
So, with the new capabilities of the hardware you would expect that they make good use of them and actually bring the experience to a new standard, maybe this new Sinnoh region is vast with never-seen before Pokémon coupled with classics from Generations I-III coming back, right??? The answer would be, kinda? Only one of those is really correct and none of it is really in a good way.
Platinum marks the first Pokémon game to be abnormally long compared to its predecessors, and very little of it is actually used in any sort of meaningful way that would excuse it being this long. The whole game took me 41 hours and with having done a lot of optional stuff, I didn't skip out on any battles nor did I spend time grinding, so I reckon it probably wasn't just me being slow but the amount of padding there is throughout the whole journey, with routes being extra long with trainers that have some killer (hard) teams with little to nearly no time to actually spend in the cities and towns you visit, in Emerald it felt like the location of certain places you needed to go to were in very remote areas but in Platinum it feels like everything is a remote area. It's long, drawn out and so boring because out of those hours spent going everywhere only like 10 of it are actual things of substance relating to the story with Team Galactic and Cyrus, and the story isn't that good to begin with, it has the bare minimum of actual nuance to it and by the end of it I just simply couldn't care no matter what they did, I much prefer how the story was lied down in Emerald with it being spread out through the entire game and the resolve of it tying into the ending and stuff like that.
It being so long could've been somewhat excused if the usage of Pokémon wasn't so badly spread throughout, there's barely any familiar Pokémon from past Generations that aren't just Geodude, Magikarp and Zubat and every single trainer uses the same pool of like 20 mons while Team Galactic goons use the same pool of like 4 (four) mons, by the end of the game I had to check my Pokédex to see if I was actually lacking gray matter in my brain to make me forget about it but in reality is that there isn't nearly as much interesting wild Pokémon, and most of the Pokémon that were interesting enough came from the Ace Trainers that you fight in said long routes.(One particularly interesting one was Tropius being used in one of the teams, Tropius is such an underrated and unknown Pokémon that I was legitimately surprised, but it was an NPC's team so it's not like I could do anything about it) And then when you look at the Pokémon that Generation IV added you notice how bad is the variety of types is and how some like fire type Pokémon are simply neglected if it isn't Chimchar, it's probably my least favorite Regional Dex so far as there's simply nothing to it.
By the end of it, with the help of hacked Rare Candies and abusing the hell out of a measly 1.5x fast forward button the geniuses over at MelonDS headquarters crafted for me, I challenged the Pokémon League with a team at around level 50-ish, I struggled, hard. I know I'm not the best at Pokémon battling in general and I think my methods are a bit meat-headed when it comes to strategy but I didn't think it was that bad, and as an amazing surprise, by the end of it... Turns out I was underleveled. So I had to spend the entire Elite Four battles playing like a little bitch reviving and healing and waiting for the numbers to give me their blessing and coincide perfectly so that my damn Whiscash would actually use Surf once and for all. The game not only is 35 hours long minimum but to add insult to injury is also grindy as hell if you actually wanna have a slight margin of error when it comes to beating it, it's no surprise that leveling up anything past level 35 via natural means in Pokémon sucks and it's a long process but damn, you need to be around 65 to actually comfortably get past all the Elite Four challenges and that's just so much adding onto the pile of miseries this game has held for me.
In general I don't think I've ever felt more bored playing a Pokémon game, or a RPG in my life. Nothing really shines through, the story and characters are nothing otherworldly as people like to think it is, it's slow and has no variety when it comes to its monsters in this monster catching video game, and it's sluggish and slow as all hell. But hey, bonus points for the music department because damn did they pop off for some tracks here and there.
Pokémon Platinum Version is the next big step in the Pokémon series of games, we're talking generational leap from the Game Boy family of handheld consoles to the new and shining, 3D-capable double-screened for double action Nintendo DS, a marvelous invention when it came to the ergonomics of handheld gaming as a whole and a series of handhelds that Pokémon would pretty much see as a home for the next decade or so. With it came completely new graphics mixing 3D objects with the tile-based sprites we've seen before, dynamic day/night cycle due to the clock functionality built into the system and a whole new screen to menu your menus easier I guess, they really haven't found an actual good utility for this one yet so it plays more like just your average GBA game with better graphics and sound.
So, with the new capabilities of the hardware you would expect that they make good use of them and actually bring the experience to a new standard, maybe this new Sinnoh region is vast with never-seen before Pokémon coupled with classics from Generations I-III coming back, right??? The answer would be, kinda? Only one of those is really correct and none of it is really in a good way.
Platinum marks the first Pokémon game to be abnormally long compared to its predecessors, and very little of it is actually used in any sort of meaningful way that would excuse it being this long. The whole game took me 41 hours and with having done a lot of optional stuff, I didn't skip out on any battles nor did I spend time grinding, so I reckon it probably wasn't just me being slow but the amount of padding there is throughout the whole journey, with routes being extra long with trainers that have some killer (hard) teams with little to nearly no time to actually spend in the cities and towns you visit, in Emerald it felt like the location of certain places you needed to go to were in very remote areas but in Platinum it feels like everything is a remote area. It's long, drawn out and so boring because out of those hours spent going everywhere only like 10 of it are actual things of substance relating to the story with Team Galactic and Cyrus, and the story isn't that good to begin with, it has the bare minimum of actual nuance to it and by the end of it I just simply couldn't care no matter what they did, I much prefer how the story was lied down in Emerald with it being spread out through the entire game and the resolve of it tying into the ending and stuff like that.
It being so long could've been somewhat excused if the usage of Pokémon wasn't so badly spread throughout, there's barely any familiar Pokémon from past Generations that aren't just Geodude, Magikarp and Zubat and every single trainer uses the same pool of like 20 mons while Team Galactic goons use the same pool of like 4 (four) mons, by the end of the game I had to check my Pokédex to see if I was actually lacking gray matter in my brain to make me forget about it but in reality is that there isn't nearly as much interesting wild Pokémon, and most of the Pokémon that were interesting enough came from the Ace Trainers that you fight in said long routes.
By the end of it, with the help of hacked Rare Candies and abusing the hell out of a measly 1.5x fast forward button the geniuses over at MelonDS headquarters crafted for me, I challenged the Pokémon League with a team at around level 50-ish, I struggled, hard. I know I'm not the best at Pokémon battling in general and I think my methods are a bit meat-headed when it comes to strategy but I didn't think it was that bad, and as an amazing surprise, by the end of it... Turns out I was underleveled. So I had to spend the entire Elite Four battles playing like a little bitch reviving and healing and waiting for the numbers to give me their blessing and coincide perfectly so that my damn Whiscash would actually use Surf once and for all. The game not only is 35 hours long minimum but to add insult to injury is also grindy as hell if you actually wanna have a slight margin of error when it comes to beating it, it's no surprise that leveling up anything past level 35 via natural means in Pokémon sucks and it's a long process but damn, you need to be around 65 to actually comfortably get past all the Elite Four challenges and that's just so much adding onto the pile of miseries this game has held for me.
In general I don't think I've ever felt more bored playing a Pokémon game, or a RPG in my life. Nothing really shines through, the story and characters are nothing otherworldly as people like to think it is, it's slow and has no variety when it comes to its monsters in this monster catching video game, and it's sluggish and slow as all hell. But hey, bonus points for the music department because damn did they pop off for some tracks here and there.
Pushmo
2011
This review contains spoilers
Pushmo is a 3D tile-based puzzle game released exclusively on the 3DS eShop back in 2011, the year of release of the console. And it is an oddly charming and cute title fitting for the handheld, the story is pretty much null but the objective is very clear, you're playing as Mallo, a sumo looking lil' guy mascot of the series that must solve these "Pushmo" wall thingies by pushing tiles and climbing to the top of these most of the times, the idea is that all tiles that are connected and are of the same color move along, so with that and the three levels of depth you can move them in the three-dimensional space you basically have a few things to think ahead of when climbing these puzzles, luckily enough you're equipped with a Rewind button so you can fix up any mistakes you make. It's a simple premise, and kind of made so you chip away at it slowly as a sort of "night table" game, you beat a couple of puzzles one day and then come back the next to hopefully beat some more and so on, quintessential grandma gaming basically.
So, this might strike as weird, why do I decide to make a review out of a game this simple? If the game was just baby puzzles this would've ended a while back, but I'm here to expose the absolute demonic intent this game hides behind the cutesy facade...
First of all, this game has a bit of a problem with its difficulty curves, there's no real gradual difficulty and it's all over the place, one puzzle can be absurdly easy but then the other one is hard hard, the indicators with stars that define the difficulty also seem to be off sometimes, I've had some trouble with some three-star puzzles more than I've had with some five-star ones and that's just weird, and this wouldn't be a problem if the hardest puzzles weren't such a headache to figure out. With the medium comes that you have to use much more of your senses to actually play the game, it's not just some crossword that you can do pretty much in automatic, so when a puzzle is very hard instead of getting the satisfaction of beating it you instead beat yourself over it for not getting it, later on they become exponentially longer so it's not really a thing of popping one to play every now and then or before going to bed.(ESPECIALLY looking a those DAMNED Bonus Murals you unlock at the end when you think you're done, they're a nightmare.)
In Pushmo there are also some hidden elements of platforming, it's more seen in the later stages but sometimes it isn't enough to climb up but you need to actually make tight jumps, jump all the way down to go elsewhere to set up a path or make a movement without activating a switch that will move tiles to the front, now, if this is the thing with the later and more difficult stages I have no idea why movement is so limited? There's a lot of jumps that could be done theoretically, and you can even buffer your Zoom Out button for precise frame movements and you'll notice how Mallo is purposefully not allowed to do those jumps, he gets sent back. And then these nerfings work against you in the last stages of the Bonus Murals where you actually need to make some intricate platforming, and that's really annoying because it's not like the 3DS circle pad is the best for those kinds of moves too.
Cutesy and iconic of the long-past Nintendo 3DS eShop era, however could probably have used some more refining to make it more of a zen puzzling experience, but if their objective was to indeed hurt people who think they're smarter than the game (me) then I salute, you've done it. Now take your mid rating and go.
So, this might strike as weird, why do I decide to make a review out of a game this simple? If the game was just baby puzzles this would've ended a while back, but I'm here to expose the absolute demonic intent this game hides behind the cutesy facade...
First of all, this game has a bit of a problem with its difficulty curves, there's no real gradual difficulty and it's all over the place, one puzzle can be absurdly easy but then the other one is hard hard, the indicators with stars that define the difficulty also seem to be off sometimes, I've had some trouble with some three-star puzzles more than I've had with some five-star ones and that's just weird, and this wouldn't be a problem if the hardest puzzles weren't such a headache to figure out. With the medium comes that you have to use much more of your senses to actually play the game, it's not just some crossword that you can do pretty much in automatic, so when a puzzle is very hard instead of getting the satisfaction of beating it you instead beat yourself over it for not getting it, later on they become exponentially longer so it's not really a thing of popping one to play every now and then or before going to bed.
In Pushmo there are also some hidden elements of platforming, it's more seen in the later stages but sometimes it isn't enough to climb up but you need to actually make tight jumps, jump all the way down to go elsewhere to set up a path or make a movement without activating a switch that will move tiles to the front, now, if this is the thing with the later and more difficult stages I have no idea why movement is so limited? There's a lot of jumps that could be done theoretically, and you can even buffer your Zoom Out button for precise frame movements and you'll notice how Mallo is purposefully not allowed to do those jumps, he gets sent back. And then these nerfings work against you in the last stages of the Bonus Murals where you actually need to make some intricate platforming, and that's really annoying because it's not like the 3DS circle pad is the best for those kinds of moves too.
Cutesy and iconic of the long-past Nintendo 3DS eShop era, however could probably have used some more refining to make it more of a zen puzzling experience, but if their objective was to indeed hurt people who think they're smarter than the game (me) then I salute, you've done it. Now take your mid rating and go.
thank you solid snake
Yakuza
2005
My friend anthony finished this game
Tekken 8
2024
add Wang as DLC and ill consider changing the score
