i recently played this game and i can firmly say that it is a masterpiece which is why i am going to explain what i understood and try to be as comprehensible as possible

James was frustrated that his wife, being terminally ill, could not indulge herself, and for this reason his unexpressed sexuality presents itself in monsters as in nurses who are terrifying but at the same time skimpy.
the continuous dualism between Maria and Mary which represent the two objective conceptions of woman, on one hand the woman absolutely virginal, pure, maternal, devoid of sexuality like the Christian Mary who is destined to die as too pure for this world, on the other side the sensual woman, temptress, more similar to Mary Magdalene who represents the woman who Mary was not for James, what he would like but can not accept because he feels guilty failing to let go mary, and this guilt is manifested in the pyramid head, which in my opinion has the most particular character design of the game, a terrifying monster imposing and strong that rapes the other monsters present in the game.
pyramid head is the punishment, chases James continuously because it is James in reality that needs to be punished for his desire towards Maria, is he himself in the final to ask to kill Maria because he can not do it alone, he in fact in the final that says to pyramid head "i was weak, that’s why i needed you, i needed someone to punish me for my sins".
the plot of silent hill 2 is a big metaphor of depression, silent hill is the fog in which there is never sun, from which you can not get out, where negative thoughts haunt us and in the end it is the pyramid head to split and weaken letting itself be killed easily because its function has come to an end, James can now do it alone.
James feels very guilty for the death of mary, he’s responsible, whether he killed her or he had nothing to do with it, but did he kill her out of hate or pity? This is what the different endings reveal, in one the protagonist commits suicide reaching the beloved in the afterlife, in another instead you can go with Maria and start over in an endless cycle, in fact maria coughs sign that she too is sick.
the plot of silent hill 2 represents mourning so a first phase of denial (James at first believes that his wife may still be alive) then of anger and bargaining given by the fight in search of a possible replacement, and then move on to the already explained depression and finally to acceptance, and James must let go and not start the cycle from scratch therefore the positive ending (that i personally got) is the one in which he goes with Laura, a child and therefore pure who runs for silent hill without being hit by the monstrous sexual metaphors of the sins of adulthood, and then start again as a father without falling into the sins of the past.

ps. my personal favourite character is angela and at the end of the game a cried a bit...

I was extremely excited for Persona 3 Reload when I first heard about it. As a big Persona fan for nearly a decade, one of the biggest things this community has been salivating for was a definitive version of Persona 3. One that included all the content from Persona 3 FES, Persona 3 Portable, and all the new stuff from the Persona 3 movies. It was something we had all so desperately wanted.

And well, this isn't that.

Instead, Persona 3 Reload is a remake that attempts to make the game more accessible for a wider audience. It tries to recapture the magic of the original game, while offering a more comfortable and entertaining experience than the original had to offer. And does it succeed at that?

Well, I would argue yes... but at the same time, I can't help but feel that the direction this game took was the wrong one, and that despite trying to make this game accessible for everyone, the end product is absolutely not for everyone. It's a game that I can easily recommend to most people, but its a recommendation that I would have a lot of reservations about.

Let's start off with the good stuff.

Firstly, I love the changes to the UI and the overall visual flair that the game has. The use of water as a primary motif is absolutely genius; it conveys the same meaning as the original game while also finding a creative way to interweave the color blue without it becoming distracting. Navigating through the menus was constantly fun. And while I still prefer Persona 5's UI design by a pretty decent margin, this was still great.

I also really loved the small additional character moments they added into this title, especially for the guy members of SEES who don't have social links. These added so much more to the characters and helped me get into them way more narratively. Listening to the guys' problems, cooking together, watching movies, and gardening were always so much fun to do (when I didn't have any social links that night or didn't have to go to Tartarus). Persona 5 already had stuff like this in it, but giving a more tangible benefit for gameplay is just such a great way of making the player care about the characters and I hope they bring it back for Persona 6, whenever that comes out.

And finally, I also just have to praise all the small details that just make the game fun. Small improvements to out-of-date aspects from the original game that easily would have held it back for some. I'm happy they got rid of the jealousy mechanic, and that hanging out with certain social links doesn't just make a whole day pass anymore. Persona 3 was the first in the series to really try this whole social aspect so a lot of its designs were experimental and bizarre, but this game easily improves most of those issues.

Okay, now with all the praise out of the way, it's time for my problems.

Persona 3 Reload just doesn't understand what Persona 3's original intent was.

Persona 3 is one of those rare, unique, and important games that proves video games not only can be, but are art. Games like Persona 3 show how game mechanics can be used to convey themes and get the player invested in the story in a way that far surpasses other forms of media. Film, television, and books all require the person engaging with them to take a mostly passive role. Video games are the only medium that require the person engaging with them to actually get into its world, to be a part of it in a way other mediums just can't achieve. And Persona 3 was a great example of what that could look like.

Similar to how Far Cry 2 conveys its themes of nihilism by forcing the player to engage with endlessly repeating tasks that literally never end until the player character dies, or how Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number uses overly large level design and mechanical changes to prove its hatred towards sequalization, Persona 3 uses its game mechanics to convey its primary theme of death, and how the only way to defeat its unending power is to love the connections you make with other people. And it did this by making all the other characters feel like their own people.

Nearly every single aspect of Persona 3 is designed around the idea that every character is their own person living their own life in their own world. This can be seen literally everywhere. From the way that social links are structured to be from vastly different walks of life, to the way people talk and how they react to events. But nowhere is this more prevalent than in the combat.

If you ever wondered why you couldn't control your teammates in Persona 3, well, this is the reason why. The game tries its best to make it so that the other members of SEES don't just feel like extensions of the player, like they do in most other JRPGs. By forcing you to interact with them as though they're their own people, and having to actually give them commands instead of just doing their actions for them, you end up treating them as though they're actual people you're playing with on a team, instead of just a bunch of fake people you're controlling.

And then the game goes even further by giving you an xp system that divides up the xp by the number of people in your party and prioritizes the lowest level ones, and by making the characters get exhausted after venturing into Tartarus for too long.

There are several other aspects to the system that I haven't mentioned, but these three primary aspects are what really ties everything together: fully AI controlled party members you have to give commands to, an xp system that divides xp amongst the active party and rewards the lowest level character, and an exhaustion mechanic that forces the player to switch up the characters in the party after a certain amount of time. Together, these all create a phenomenally unique system that makes the characters really feel like their own people. And man, it works so well. Persona 3 is the only RPG, hell, the only game I've ever played where I cared about my teammates beyond their importance to the story. I actually, truly, viewed them as their own people.

And Persona 3 Reload completely ruins it.

I'm not surprised they took out the AI controlled teammates. Consumers didn't like it in 2006, and they probably still wouldn't like it now. (I'd love to see a timeline where Atlus kept to their guts and just kept making Persona as they wanted to instead of giving into consumer demands). I kind of hoped they would keep it in, but I knew that wasn't going to amount to anything. And sure, you can choose to play with AI controlled teammates, but why on earth would you? When you can just directly control everyone and dominate the battlefield, there's just no reason to bother with the more thematically important option, especially for the average player.

But you know what? I'm okay with that. If they wanted to make a more user friendly game that any player could get into, that's fine. More power to them.

What baffles me however, is how they try to do this while also keeping some of those old mechanics for seemingly no reason, and in the process, completely butchering them.

The exhaustion mechanic is gone sadly, but for whatever reason, they decided to keep the divided xp. The game still rewards the lowest level characters and it still divides the xp among your party, but it just...doesn't work anymore. In Persona 3, you could, at any point, split the party up and explore a floor of Tartarus. This would result in a floor getting covered quickly, but it would also mean greater xp boosts for all characters. If you're able to take out a group of shadows on your own, you'd get all the xp that fight would offer, instead of just a quarter or even less. It was a great way to grind through the game.

But in Persona 3 Reload, that mechanic has been basically removed entirely and replaced with this stupid rng thing where one character might piss off at the end of a fight and just fill out the floor for you and that's it. The entire mechanic was just basically obliterated. And that's not to mention that you now have Fuuka the entire game who just eats a fifth of your xp for no reason, making levelling up even more bizarre.
They did give us this stupid clock though, which allows you to just instantly level up two of your characters if you happen to get it. It's fun when it happens, but it's a garbage mechanic and is far worse than the previous one by miles.

Again, if the game had just abandoned all of Persona 3's mechanics in favor of something more akin to Persona 5, that would have sucked, but this weird middle ground where the mechanics lose all of their context and meaning is just as bad, if not worse.

And then on top of that, there's a few really baffling new additions that I just do not like. The worst of them is easily the greedy shadow, which might be one of the worst things I've ever seen in a video game. Why force the player to make three rng choices to get a floor's reward, only to give you a way to just circumvent it a few hours later? It's just so weird. No other additions reach the level of bizarreness that addition brings to the game.

There is so much more I could talk about here, but I don't think I could do it justice. Instead, I'd recommend watching the video How Persona 3 Lost It's Identity | Original VS Reload by Nam's Compendium. That video sums up how I feel about this game pretty much perfectly.

Though, if I had to sum up how I feel about this game and how I think others would feel about it, I'd say this: Your enjoyment of this game will depend almost entirely on if you've played a version of Persona 3 before.

If you haven't, then you'll probably love this game to death! It does everything you'd expect from a Persona game, and the story is profoundly emotional!

But if you have, then you'll probably be like me and come off it feeling decently disappointed. Sure, it'll still be fun, but it won't click the same way the original did. Not at all.

I'm giving this game an eight out of ten because, despite all my problems with it, it's still Persona, and an eight out of ten is pretty much the baseline of what Persona can be. (I still think this is better than Persona 4, but its significantly worse than Persona 3 FES).

Overall, I'd say give this a chance if you haven't played Persona 3 or hell, even Persona at all before. But if you want something really special, something really unique, just emulate the original or FES. You'll likely have a much better time.

I wasn’t completely surprised when jumping into one of Kojima’s earliest games and immediately recognizing how much Snatcher’s genealogy is inherited through his later body of work. His signature hallmarks are all proudly showcased here. Yeah, Kojima definitely whipped out his love for cinema with this one to gush how much he loved Blade Runner, Terminator, Akira, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. That signature quirky meta humor he enjoys injecting with how everything in the game is deeply aware of the fact it’s, uh, well, a video game. Your miniature robot companion, “Metal Gear Mk. II”, is a cheeky nod to the game Kojima previously worked on before and, interestingly, even gets reintroduced down the line in MGS4 as a reverse callback. You can especially see how much of Snatcher’s story-driven adventure gameplay, interacting and talking to a colorful cast of characters, would evolve into the codec calls in Metal Gear Solid. Above all else, Snatcher helped pioneer what elevated Kojima to renowned status as a legendary game developer by tackling bold ideas through his commentary. It weaves the very on-its-sleeve science fiction inspirations to create a dystopian cyberpunk noir setting plagued by uncertainty and distrust. Technology being a mere tool for manipulation preying on humanity’s distrust for control which gave it room to exist freely in the first place. Which overlaps with one of the bigger themes explored in the Metal Gear Solid franchise with the importance of human ingenuity against technological artificiality. Something that our protagonist grapples with himself, bumbling around with a case of amnesia, too flirty with every woman he meets, trying to be on the same wavelength with his robot partner, while being wary of who’s real or fake during his investigation.

It never overstays its welcome, wrapping itself up as a tightly paced seven to eight-hour narrative experience with a moody vibesworthy soundtrack and some phenomenal pixel art to stare deeply into. While there’s a logical progression of how you’re supposed to go from one point to the next in advancing the story, aside from a few clumsy moments, it doesn’t reach the point of hitting a deadend. You might fail in some investigative detective work the game puts you up for the test, but you’re still narrowing down options for the right course of action instead of getting abruptly softlocked. I only suggest that you didn’t need to exhaust every single dialogue option or action, multiple times even, just to trigger something to get the story moving along. It’s gotten a cult following overtime, but I kinda wished this left a heavy footprint on an entire generation of aspiring game developers, y’know? There’s a lot here, creatively, that isn’t too far apart from what made Undertale so charming and influential. In a completely different alternate timeline I could even see a version of myself that has more stock in making games taking unashamed heavy cues from this tbh.

I don’t really have too much to say about Snatcher by itself, and what I do have to say about it is in relation to another game that I’ve been writing a “review” (read: book length essay) on for about 6 months, so I’ll put a few points below on small things I think about Snatcher:

- Game designers have really only recently, en masse, started to actually reckon on what their interplay of systems allowances and object interaction do to create meaning when colliding in an environment that exports the same ideas of commodification and exploitation that occur in reality. What a player is able to do when interacting with the environment in games runs a commentary on what the developers consent to as flavour or storytelling hutzpah, as well as what they consider viable as a character portrait through interaction of their cast. Explicitly what I’m saying is this - 2B climbing a ladder and the player being able to jam a camera up her ass shows what Takashi Taura thinks, or at least assents to agreeable commodification, about the function of looking in a game and the reasons for looking, at least in part, when in a game; similarly, Resident Evil 4 having Ashley (at least in her non fetishized outfits) demurely bunch her skirt when the player directs Leon’s gaze at her is lampshading the idea of the player’s impulses interacting with Leon and Ashley’s interactions. They both as games have hard programmed textual abilities to conform the reality of simulated approval, and physical law generated within a framework, of objectification that considers the objectification of real life women which has reinforced the desire to do these things in game, and have both fallen on sides of that being cosmically approved of by dint of manufacture. Kojima, for all his faults, seems to want to avoid this type of implicit approval. Kojima, because of his faults, apparently thought this type of system interaction should be made explicit instead, and so created a verb that lets you smell every woman in this game.

- For a game that is in no way original as it draws from its sources of inspiration - which in itself is charity towards the idea of inspiration; in would be no hyperbole to simply call Snatcher the lowest rent Blade Runner one can imagine - it’s a bit surprising to feel like the beats of the story are in themselves freeform developed from the minor tweaks of internal logic to the Snatcher reality of humanity that differs from Scott’s Los Angeles. While Kojima, deftly, doesn’t try to entangle his writing with any of the weight or gravitas of the existential inquiries that Decker and Batty are forced to consider, so the actual progression of character takes a backseat to the Dashiell Hammett style plotting that causes realisations instead of reckonings, he Kojima does have a path for his characters that mostly adhere to the differences of his cyberpunk future instead of the similarities it shares with the more foundational one. Whether or not this borderline Cold War propaganda fares better than it would have had it more openly cribbed the themes instead of the iconography is up to your take on how Hideo has handled weighty ideas in his career.

- I like shooting game. I think it makes sense within the world and allows for some actually quick gameplay in a game that is weighed down by looking and investigating everything 10x before allowing progression

- The sprite work is pretty marvellous; if they ever re-released this game, I would love to see most of the character models and backdrops kept the same in grandeur with only a bit more movement and texture added for parallax.

How close can you toe the line of homage without falling completely into plagiarism? While hard to ignore the obvious influences that Kojima and his crew take inspiration from, the gorgeous and colorful 16-bit pixel art of Snatcher is able to create a path of its own into the cyberpunk genre by offering a tonal deviation from the gritty dystopic movies it aesthetically steals from into vibrant comic book territory filled with police procedural twists and turns and injected with just enough japanese melodrama.

Many indie games try their best to recreate the look of those old japanese PC-98 and MSX games, but playing Snatcher nowadays it becomes clear that achieving such an identity extended past just replicating its 16-bit sprite work and was instead a byproduct of the videogame technology and anime cultural zeitgeist that permeated so much of the 80s/90s Japan and filled Snatcher with its color, sound and style, a magnum opus of what can only be now considered a lost art. Despite how static Snatcher can be at points, the power of the Sega CD turns every screen a joy to look at and listen to, making the case for why VNs are a venue to take in the realm of videogames.

Thankfully, at this point in time a not so confident as he is now Kojima was at the helm of the project, managing to restrain his obssessive nerdisms into the background and instead utilizing the premise of his cinema aspirations to create a much more subdued and logically competent thriller that gamifies Blade Runner and takes advantage of the medium of interactivity to immerse the player in clever detective work and satisfying plot point progression in ways film never could. The simple choice of being able to call your wife on the phone and talk about your day and feelings does more for the universe of Snatcher than whatever post 90s Kojima lore dump ever could.

It isn't without it's problems. Much of its "deductive puzzle solving" solely consists of exhausting every combination of "look" and "investigate" commands until the characters decide it's time to advance, the rushed and campy ending would have actually greatly benefited from Kojima's tendency to tie in world socioeconomical politics with his characters personal struggles which would have more strongly cemented Snatcher's themes of human connection and distrust, and the constant forceful "flirt" with every single woman (and child) that shows up on the screen quickly goes from being mildly amusing to straight up creepy. Still, the self awareness and sense of humor keeps things light and fun, and Snatcher's addition to the canon of japanese art that has its finger on the pulse of modern technology makes this a must for Kojima fans. Snatcher 2 would be a joy to witness, though I doubt they could ever manage to recreate the 90s in such a fashion.

A few years ago I got into collecting Sega CD repros, despite not actually owning a Sega CD. This wasn't a big deal, of course, since you can just pop the disc into any CD drive and play the game through emulation. This is how I enjoyed Snatcher for the first time, and shortly after I picked up a very authentic looking copy of Policenauts with an English patch applied.

Policenauts is may not be as good as Snatcher but still works well as a spiritual successor, borrowing just as heavily from movies Hideo Kojima likes as that game. Instead of being a love letter to cyberpunk classics like Blade Runner, Policenauts is a pretty straight-forward police procedural/buddy cop homage, with the two leads clearly being analogs for Riggs and Murtaugh from Lethal Weapon. In fact, if you want to be very reductive about it, Policenauts is essentially "Lethal Weapon in space."

The player controls Jonathan Ingram, sexual predator and founding member of the Policenauts, the first law enforcement entity in space. An accident during a space walk sends Jonathan adrift, though he's found many years later in stasis. Now estranged from his fellow officers, who have all grown older and found success higher up in the political food chain, Jonathan works as a hostage negotiator. However, he's soon called back into space where he reconnects with his former partner, Ed Brown, to unravel a conspiracy involving former members of the Policenauts and the mysterious Tokugawa corporation.

Like Snatcher, progress is earned by solving environmental puzzles, engaging in conversation with other characters, and (occasionally) whipping out a light gun and blasting some dudes. And, like Snatcher, the light gun segments are probably the weakest part of the game. They're very infrequent and they escalate in difficulty rather quickly, and since I played this via emulation I was stuck using a controller for all of them. One day I'll pop this into my Saturn and play it properly, but I suspect it will make playing these sections a lot more tolerable.

Puzzles are a lot more complex than they were in Snatcher, and a few of them can be pretty tense. One involves disarming a bomb under a tight time limit, and apparently this segment of the game does not play nice with emulators because the screen turns completely black during it. I could not fix this no matter how hard I tried and had to resort to using a youtube video as a guide and feel my way through it. Even without the added layer of anxiety, it's a pretty demanding puzzle, and I appreciate how much more Policenauts asks out of the player.

You also have to figure out where the bomb is even located before you can diffuse it, with one possible hiding place being a woman's chest. This does at least earn you a pretty funny game over, but... yeah. Policenauts is arguably Kojima's horniest game. In my Snatcher review I mentioned how Kojima's crass humor can sometimes cross a line, but at least Gillian wasn't capable of grabbing every female character he talks to.

It's also fun to spot all the things that show up later in Metal Gear Solid. Meryl is a prominent secondary character, Tokugawa Heavy Industry's logo is on the Cyborg Ninja's helmet, augments bleed white blood similar to Raiden in MGS4, hell Ed Brown was supposed to be a supporting cast member in Metal Gear Solid 2 before he was cut entirely. I always appreciated these little connective bits that loosely tie together Kojima's games, even if I don't think any of them can be considered part of one larger shared canon. It's just neat. I think it's fun.

Policenauts does lack some of Snatcher's personality and strangeness by rooting itself in a (comparatively) more grounded world, but that's not to say it's bereft of it. Every step of the way you can tell this is another project where Kojima was able to pour in a lot of references to media he loves while opining in his own unique way about real world theories on genetic engineering and space exploration. The sort of stuff you know is well researched, but still exists very firmly within the realm of fiction. There should be a term for that, really. Like... "Science fiction", or something. I don't know. Maybe not like that, sounds kinda dumb. I mean, it's alright too, you know, whatever.

Policenauts is not for everyone, and it is perhaps one of the harder games from Kojima's catalog to recommend to someone who is not already familiar with his work. It helps that this game is also pretty inaccessible. Emulation ain't great, and soft-modding a Sega Saturn and patching an ISO might be more work than it's worth for most people. However, if you find yourself drawn to Kojima's games then I do think you should try to check this one out. It's interesting to see how Kojima's storytelling grew (and regressed) from Snatcher, and as Metal Gear Solid's precursor, it makes for a good companion piece.

And with this game, we can see how Kojima: The man never shuts up born...

Joking aside, this game is a beast in itself. Unlike the previous game snatcher, in this one Kojima put world details to the MAX. What I mean is in this one, we have lore conversations in almost every goddamn single clickable pixel a game console can support and I am not kidding about that.

Also this is gonna be the deciding factor in your enjoyment for playing this game. Let me ask you this: Do you like mgs's radio conversations? If yes, then you are gonna have a hell of a good time.

But if you don't, then I would say try Snatcher, because it's pacing is lightning fast unlike this one.

So if we return back to the game, was it good? For me yeah. But unlike Snatcher, I like it for the opposite reasons.

What I mean is, this game is slow, conversation heavy and less on action. This sometimes makes the game slower than a turtle unfortunately, but also unlike snatcher, this slow pacing is the reason that made me connect to the characters more.

It's still a quite predictable story like snatcher (until it isn't), but hearing characters argue between themselves and open themselves more was extremely fun to watch for me. I even go as far as clicking every single thing in the environment just to hear more of them and I somehow find myself invested in this cliche buddy cop characters and when the epilogue came, I realized I was actually get a bit emotional for them. I would say it was enjoyable as much as metal gear 2, the characters that much enjoyable for me.

But will this be that much enjoyable for any of you too? I don't know about that, because this game just like snatcher, have a lot of pervy conversations and it's extremely nonsensical romance could make a lot of eyebrows rise. But for me, sometimes it's best to not think about it too much just like back to the future 2's plot. But if this sounds not good to you maybe it's best to be stay away from it.

For me I liked it, only thing was a bit of a letdown was it's soundtrack and atmosphere wasn't as energetic as the snatcher one. But other than that, both of them almost match with their positives and negatives. Both of them fun, a bit cliche...

But full of heart.

Every time I play this game, I find myself gaining respect in how it is presented. It looks like early Silent Hill, which I really like...But everything else, the story, combat, gameplay. It's fucking atrocious.

The game gives you like a billion weapons too, it's weird and adds comedy to the game. Storyline is really bland, and should've focused on Travis rather than being an origin story. The gameplay is buggy because the fixed camera angles and lack of tank controls still being here. Therefore jolting you around.

The combat is also real bad. I hate it. There's QTEs in the game now, because that was the thing ig.

Did you guys know the game was initially planned to be a dark comedy? Yeah I know, it's kinda hard to tell cuz even then the game is still goofy as fuck.

Silent Hill: Origins is your step-dad trying his best to be that father figure of yours, but you were already forming memories a while before your parents got divorced. The older you get, you appreciate the valiant effort he made trying to fill that hole in the family, but you know it just isn't the same. And, despite this new father figure's heart being in the right place, you want him to just stop trying to talk to you the same way your dad did.

This game marks the beginning of Konami outsourcing the "Silent Hill" franchise to Western devs as the team behind the original 4 games disbanded. And, in my opinion, their most valiant attempt at recreating the magic from those original games. However, its monster design is uninspired and the writing is especially poor. When it isn't boring, it's insulting, especially to those familiar with the 1st game that Silent Hill: Origins is basing itself on.

If I could say one thing, it's probably one of the best-looking PSP games. Some of the environment is impressive, but layering that with really annoying core design that is the "mirror" function is mind-numbing, especially for a game that puts a heavy emphasis on exploring.

From the horror to the puzzles, just about everything in this game is just a vain attempt at recreating the magic of the original games. One that I don't find suitable to play as part of the series, never-mind the very beginning.