I guess I’ll start off this review by saying that I am not Final Fantasy VII’s biggest shooter. I’ve played the original and the remake and it’s a pretty good story, but it’s not my favorite Final Fantasy. I don’t really have any outward complaints about the narrative because of this, except for what’s directly presented to us. If they were to remake X or IX and do whatever they wanted with them in the same vein as this trilogy, I’m sure I could understand a lot of fan’s frustration, but for the most part I’ll be talking about the core gameplay. I’m gonna be trying this new thing where I talk about spoilers in hyperlinks instead of cramming them in the bottom of the review and describing them in vague terms, so don’t worry about getting your eyes tainted to something you don’t want to see. For the most part, it sits in a weird place in my head because I liked a lot of what they did but also despised a lot as well. As soon as I opened the menu and saw crafting I was extremely hesitant. It’s really funny to me that this game had so much discourse about yellow paint breaking people’s immersion, but no one seems to care about the pouches of crafting materials just laid all over the place for no reason. I would describe this game as a complete descent into madness personally.

I’ll start with the combat because it was my main gripe with Remake, and I want to get the positives out before I get into salt territory with the negatives. I’m much more of a turn-based connoisseur and getting used to the action gameplay was like getting shoved into arctic waters. I always felt like the dodges on the characters weren’t effective and the ATB gauge build up would drop a sledgehammer on my balls every time I’d get caught with it empty and unable to heal during a 45 minute boss fight. It sucked ass in that game, and it wouldn’t benefit from the fact that most chapters are just endless roadblocks of bosses that fly and cancel out your actions with cinematic cutscenes. Some of this is still present in Rebirth, but they managed to both fix the momentum of the characters in combat and delete half the health on most of the enemies. It was like leagues different and done way better here. Most of the character’s dodges were changed and were actually able to dodge attacks. Cloud was given this ranged laser attack that allowed him to build ATB from a distance which made him so much better to play as, especially because he’s the only party member that can’t be switched out. I found both Red and Tifa to be extremely overpowered due to their critical chances. If you give them ATB boosting items, they turn into automatic weapons that barely need to reload. It was just a much better experience overall. Instead of rolling my eyes at the giant mech boss, I was actually enjoying myself for once. I do still think Aerith is atrocious to play as though. She has better Ward abilities, but she’s still cannon fodder. Everytime she was forced to do a battle by herself, it was like Guantanomo torture.

The addition of the other party members hanging out on the side was neat, but I honestly can’t tell if they were actually helping or if they were just there for moral support. I definitely saw Barret pressure some enemies from afar when the stars aligned, but it seemed like Red and Cait Sith would just stare menacingly off to the side. It was still like, the perfect small change that you didn’t really know you needed though. There’s never any questioning what they were up to while your core 3 get to kill everything, because well… they’re right there! What I would love to see in the next game is the ability to potentially swap characters out on the fly, similar to Final Fantasy X. If the characters are there anyways, it shouldn’t be hard to implement. It would just be so nice if you ran into a flying enemy and could swap your melee attackers out for Yuffie/Barret mid-battle, instead of having to do it before battle after a reload. Since you’ll have the full party for that game, I feel like it’s going to be a must-have feature and I hope they don’t continue these full chapters of split parties just for the sake of forcing you to play as someone else for 3 monotonous hours. It helps that enemies are much easier to stagger in this game, meaning that they’re also much easier to kill overall. The combat is just a huge step up and it was actually fun in this game.

Just like in Remake though, there are a lot of highs and lows in this game. The highs are monumentally fantastic, while the lows are like slamming your face into concrete. If you thought that Remake had a serious issue with padding out its ass, then I’m so sorry to say this, but it’s made so much worse in this game. The issue is still extremely prevalent, it’s just that it’s relegated more into the side content than it is in the main story this time. Rebirth does benefit from taking place across multiple locations, and they are beautiful, but the chapters are still bloated beyond all Hell by chores masked as mini-games and mini-challenges. And here’s the thing, I don’t want to hear anyone in the comments raising a finger and going, “well, it’s all optional and you’re very dumb!! Why did you do it if you didn’t enjoy it? ☝️🤓” Is it though…? Is it truly optional content if your party’s EXP, SP, and relationship with them are tied to the side quests and intel? You can say all day that the shit doesn’t have to be done, but it doesn’t eliminate the fact that your main level progression comes from playing the same QTE puzzle 6 times per area and turning on shitty ass Tears of the Kingdom towers so that Chadley can constantly bitch in your ear about shit you do not care about. I’m genuinely wondering if people actually liked doing these? Not just, “I didn’t mind it.” Nope, did you genuinely enjoy doing this repetitive crap? Don’t hesitate to raise your hands. Even if you did, just because the shit is “optional” it does not mean it’s not in the game, and I’m here to talk about what I don’t like in the game, bucko. Like 75% of the playtime of this game is just as much bloated trash as the Trash Island that’s swimming in the ocean right now.

The mini-games ranged from very fun to complete horseshit. People are like, “man I wish Final Fantasy had mini-games again, what happened to them??!!” What, you mean these torture devices? I’ve never been a fan of most Final Fantasy mini-games. They’re at their best when they’re short and confined to one area. If they’re forced to be played, they should at least wrap into the story in the same way that Blitzball does. And I KNOW!! Final Fantasy VII was like mini-game central, there’s some sort of mini-game from giving CPR, snowboarding, to changing your damn clothes. I got it, but in Rebirth there are more than just the recreations of the original mini-games. There is a mini-game for doing the most mundane shit in this game and it’s overbearingly god awful. The beginning of the game was so overwhelming; you’re tossed into this gigantic landscape and get 37 tutorials thrown at you at once. How to run around, how to do combat, how to get a chocobo, how to ride a chocobo, how to tie your shoes, how to sit through Chadley’s dialogue without killing yourself, how to use SP, etcetera ad nauseam, until finally it just leaves you alone. There’s got to be a better way of introducing players to open-world games because the first 6 hours of each one always feels like sitting through job orientation everytime. Now toss in 24 mini-games per square inch of each area and you have my Joker origin story. I think it was in Chapter 9 when I was doing a side-quest for Aerith and it turned out to be another mini-game where you have to use the controller bumpers to rip mushrooms out of the ground, the inner coil of my being keeping me sane just burst like the engine belt inside of a car. From then on, I was hanging on a ledge by my last remaining fingers. I did eventually fall off the ledge, but it’ll be brought up in spoiler talk due to it being extremely late-game.

To be honest, not all of them were terrible. The Costa del Sol events, while extended way beyond its original counterpart, were easier to swallow because they were meant to be a fun respite to the major plot. The Gold Saucer events obviously were fine, it’s like the one part of the game where you’re supposed to fuck around. Queen’s Blood was genuinely interesting and the Junon marching was really fun when the game finally let you fucking get on with it. However, Fort Condor can drink my piss, especially because they changed the rules of the game for the sole reason of probably annoying me. Chocobo Racing can die in a ditch off the highway. That punching mini-game was needlessly complicated for no reason at all. The Cactuar mini-game might as well have ripped my face off instead. These are just the ones that annoyed me the most, the 50 other ones were either less annoying or just forgettable. It’s nice that the soundtrack is amped up to its extreme, with this being what seems like a 500 song discography, but that only slightly mitigates how annoying the games are to play. (I would drop that one dog song here, but everyone else beat me to the punch a month ago.) The PS5 has some dogshit bumpers too, like I can’t be the only one who thinks this? They hurt to use for someone like me with wrist pain, and there’s a lot of mini-games that require you to mash them. They’re too busy trying to ooh and aaahh you with motion controls and sensory features that they forgot how shit it is to mash bumpers that are literally fighting back. It’s nice that you can turn that off, but they put it in by default as the intended way of playing it. It’s just so egregious and doesn’t help with the pacing issues that most people had in Remake, in fact it’s made somewhat worse.

ring ring “Hey, it’s Chadley here!! I’m going to remind you that this game was $70 and therefore your complaint is rendered discarded. Just don’t do the content, forehead. It’s that easy."

Chadley, I will not hesitate to split you in half. I keep seeing this flimsy argument thrown around every time someone complains about this game. They get swarmed by people dropping the $70 comment like it’s the ultimate backhand. That it’s okay for the game to be overflowing with boring slop because it justifies it being $10 more than it would have been 5 years ago. It’s so cool that you like watching paint dry, but I don’t. There are games worth $30 and 5 hours long that were much more pleasant and much more memorable experiences than this. Baldur’s Gate 3 discourse has rotted all of your brains thinking that every game has to be 200 hours long to be worth it, when in reality if that game had been cut 50 hours it still would have been great because it was fun and had meaningful content. All the boring chore work in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth bothers me because it does nothing but waste your time and take you away from the character writing, which is the good shit. I will never forget how this game forces you to do a shitty on-rails gun mini-game 5 seconds after Barret has one of the most heart-wrenching cutscenes in the entire game. You might as well have played a laugh track over it. It’s not enough that you talk to the characters and maybe sometimes go on an outing with them, nope, you have to do a 6 chain side quest of killing monsters and playing mini-games, or looking for locations from a photograph, or crafting an object for the local idiot. There’s literally one Yuffie quest where a character you don’t remember from the Intermission DLC basically says “Hi” to you, then you run around the entire map looking for a monster for 30 minutes just for him to leave and have nothing else to add. It was worth it to get brownie points for Yuffie and unlock better dialogue for her that actually rules, but did they really have to make you work that hard for it? I guarantee no one will remember these quests in like 6 months.

It just blows honestly, because they put so much care into fleshing these characters out to the extreme. Their friendships are more prevalent and actually matter in this game. The comedy is funny when it hits and there’s sprinkles of silly moments that work well in making Cloud less of a hardass and more of a softie as the game progresses. I have never given a shit about shipping in this game, and it doesn’t matter here because they finally give those fans what they want if they work for it, so just about everyone is happy. Aerith and Tifa are actually friends and not weird competition, it’s so refreshing. And no matter how you feel about the narrative changes, the plot of FF7 is still just as fascinating as it ever was so the game is fantastic when you’re actually going through the main events. This has got to be one of the most rag-tag cast of characters in the whole series, maybe right next to IX’s gaggle of weirdos, and I genuinely care about what happens to them so of course I want to unlock all of their special dialogues. It’s just so unfortunate that it’s all bogged down by the most monotonous content ever. The writing prevents the game from being less ass than it could be, but it also could be so much better at the same time.

This link is everything I have to say about spoiler territory. Click at your own discretion.

Some other random things I felt: I’m glad that they introduced a fast travel mechanic because it's the one thing that doesn't waste your time. It’s not just a fast-travel at chocobo stops, but just about any location you discover has the ability to teleport to it. Without that, it would suck. The landscapes are amazing and so beautiful, but it came at the cost of mobility. Everytime my chocobo clipped onto a rock or refused to leap off of a small cliff, part of my soul cracked. It just made travel a pain in the ass sometimes, especially in the rocky, ruin like areas. Every action from getting out of the dune buggy and sitting on benches would feel excruciating because Cloud would always pause for a second before and after doing it, just breaking up the flow of the mobility for no real reason. I really hope they fix this in the next game because it was just another thing in it that started off kind of annoying, but then grew to extreme displeasure as the game went on. Selena is by far the best chocobo though.

The game over screen is worded atrociously. The multiple options to reload are confusing and I learned the hard way that reloading a checkpoint instead of a battle was a deathly mistake. These needed to either not exist or be rephrased differently. Why on God’s green Earth would I ever want to go back 3 hours on reload? It’s also really awful that you can’t adjust game settings mid-combat. More like ASScessible if you ask me. There’s no real reason for this, especially when some fights are right after cutscenes because the reload brings you right back to the fight, not before it. It made a certain Chapter 12 fight so fucking annoying to do because the NPCs wouldn’t shut the hell up the whole time. Jesus Christ. Imagine someone needed to adjust color blind filters or some other visible- oh wait, there aren’t any accessibility features at all, except for the scary yellow paint everyone pooped their pants about.

I really did want to like more of this game but it seemed as the longer it went on, the more psychotic I felt. I have found out how much of a pushover I truly am because of this game at the detriment of my own sanity. Critiquing this game seems to be an act of war in some parts, like having criticism for it is somehow removing the mask that I'm actually a gluttonous consumer that doesn't appreciate the art of games, which is nonsense. This toilet is art and I'd piss on that too. I'm glad that people found things to love in this game, and while it is beautiful, it is much more boring than anything else. There’s so much that I liked and yet so much that I hated, so I can only hope that the final game fixes a lot of the issues I have. I’m not going to hold my breath though because that’s exactly what I said in my review for Remake. This story never needed three 60+ hour games to tell itself and it’s getting more clear as time goes on. If the combat stays the same or changes for the better again, then I’m willing to see it through to the end. I'm already 2 games deep and I want to see where the story is going, but I imagine this game without the combat fixes and shudder at the possibility of its existence. We'll see in another 4 or so years.

As much as I wanted to like Drill Dozer, the game has very significant flaws that I cannot overlook. The platforming is extremely bad and the drilling mechanics gets incredibly dull and repetitive a few hours into the game. It got to the point where I felt I wasn’t having a good time and wanted to wrap the title up. The last half of the game has some absurd difficulty spikes, making you wonder how did the devs at Game Freak expect players to react to certain situations when the platforming is so mediocre. That sky area, especially, is the absolute lowest point of this game to the point where I had to question if it’s even worth continuing this game. It was a very frustrating experience and I question if it was even play tested.

While I did love the music (it’s probably a more realized sound coming from the GBA era Pokémon games) and the beautiful sprite work, the last half of the game dragged so much for me that I will probably never be returning to this game ever again.

Three Houses might possibly be the most divided I have ever felt with a game. For everything amazing this game does, there is something terrible that meets its match, and I am not sure it fully balances out.

This is the most in-depth world building and character writing we have seen in the series since Tellius. But the actual story is terribly told, paced and structured so it doesn’t hit as it should. Unit building is complex and free form, making it one of the most flexible and customizable games in the series. But the map design is weak, and balance is out the window, making for a mediocre gameplay experience that sacrifices unit individuality in favor of little substance. This is one of the most ambitious games in the entire series, with fully explorable environments, in-depth unit building, and three different stories with their own unique casts! But the monastery drags, unit building is tedious, and it’s arguable this should have been a game with two story paths at most. It has some really standout female writing for a JRPG, building some extremely strong willed and memorable women with some great social commentary of the patriarchy! BUT…but actually I don’t have anything bad to say about this. Edelgard hype is justified, she is unlike anything else I have ever seen in the genre. But everything else, and I mean, EVERYTHING ELSE feels like great ideas with questionable execution at best.

Three Houses is frustrating because it’s close to being the excellent game it tries to be, but at the same time it's also so far away from its lofty ambitions. It’s even more frustrating this is the most popular game in the series, because it tries to be more of a life-sim RPG hybrid than the strategy game series I actually cared about. A real fear of mine was that this would be the direction of the series going forwards, and while Engage thankfully proved me wrong (for now) this will always be a dark sheep in the franchise for me.

Three Houses is a mess I respect, because its sheer ambition is commendable, but a mess nevertheless. As a tactical RPG it is mediocre, and as a narrative experience it wobbles. Deserved Three more years in the oven, me thinks.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have had some specific beef with this game for the longest time, to a point I refused to buy a Switch and play it, even as a massive fan of the series. As an addendum I will post some of this beef as scattered thoughts, so that you can hopefully understand why it’s one of my least favorite games in the series.

-This is without a doubt the most viscerally ugly game I have ever played. I have hated the work of Chinatsu for the longest time, long before TH was announced, and her work here is just as terrible. I find most character designs painfully dull, if not outright repulsive. The graphics and presentation are somehow worse? Poor cinematics, poor textures, poor scene direction, poor menus... This is a game that makes me mad over how ugly it is.

-The concept of playing as a teacher, with your students as the rest of the playable cast, was off-putting to me. When you add being able to date them into the mix, regardless of their age, it’s genuinely uncomfortable. I will clarify I don’t judge people for not sharing my sentiment, I am aware it’s a personal thing.

-I have played and enjoyed plenty of homophobic, transphobic and well, generally morally questionable games, but Three Houses is one of the only ones that genuinely made me FURIOUS over how its male gay romance options were treated. It’s a pity because this game was a giant step for lesbian romance in FE.

-This is partly my fault for pirating this on the Deck, but the text size is TINY. I haven’t played a game that strained my eyesight this badly in forever.

-Hottest take? I think the overall cast is a mixed bag and I can’t agree with the common fanbase perception of being the best in the series at all. The house setup understandably sets the entire house as the main characters for that specific route, but the reality is that some characters are a lot worse and irrelevant than others. I think Blue Lions are probably the best of the three main casts, I am generally positive on most of them and their chemistry as a group (at least from the little I saw), but I found some real stinkers in Black Eagles and Golden Deer that negatively impact the experience in a way the series had never struggled in the past. Most Fire Emblem games have some really bad characters, but they were rarely the ones shoved at the player’s direction. It’s important to remember the series was explicitly built in a way where you could create the army that you wanted with your favorites, and it worked beautifully. Choosing a whole cast of characters you know nothing about at the start of the game that hopefully you like to carry the huge majority of the narrative is ass backwards to the philosophy of the series.

-I touched on it before but I really dislike how manual unit building and everyone being a blank slate is a core element of the experience. Fire Emblem is at its best when each character feels unique and interesting. Stats, skills, levels, classes… they can tell so much about a character with no words. I think how effortlessly the series flew over concerns of ludo narrative dissonance was a strong reason why I fell utterly in love with it. I am not going to deny experimentation isn’t great and healthy, but this is a similar case as Radiant Dawn and Genealogy for me, where the experimentation directly hurts core elements of the experience I love and replaces it for… a half assed teaching simulator I didn’t want.

-Three Houses’ premise, tone and character interactions fall apart in a conceptual level that bothers me a lot. Why are the heirs of these three territories participating in mercenary missions and putting their lives at risk? In fact, why do the nobles push for their children to join the monastery, instead of breeding armies of crest babies? Why can the students move between houses so freely without no political repercussions? Why are most of the students interacting with each other so casually, when they are directly interacting with high-rank nobles that could (and will) completely shape their future? If you don’t take your premise seriously, it’s hard to take anything seriously.

-I still love this franchise in its current state, but probably the most boomer doomer elitist thing about it I can state is that the turn wheel may have permanently damaged the series. It was already bad in Echoes. It’s terrible in Three Houses and it directly affects the game design in very negative ways. Why do so many people defend it? Guys, this is not the Classic vs Casual debate, this actually affects the core game design of the entire experience. I try to completely ignore the turn wheel in my playthroughs (and fail, because it’s so damn tempting), but I cannot ignore terrible enemy reinforcement spam if I play in Maddening. Let’s not even mention how the narrative bends around it’s inclusion very poorly.

Vegeta's gonna drop his BALLS when he sees how good we've blocked his overhead. He's gonna be like "oh no, my Dragon Balls!"

I've been a Dragon Ball fan for a very long time, yet I've never really played the games. Play a little bit of Budokai Tenkaichi 3 at a friend's house as a kid, I adored Raging Blast 2 (hope to play that again eventually), and I played 20-ish minutes of FighterZ. But I always wanted to dive into the games more, so I might try to do so more this year, starting with the Budokai games.

I always loved seeing gameplay of this game growing up cause even by the mid-2000s it looked way older than it actually was, subsequent games pretty quickly looking more their time, it made it charming. Though I was also much less interested back then because the Budokai Tenkaichi games looked way more like actual DBZ battles (and with insane rosters).

The story of Budokai is pretty simply just retelling the plot of Dragon Ball Z up until the Buu Saga. This is a pretty eyerolling thing nowadays because so, so many DBZ games have just retold the show/manga instead of doing something original, and it's 50/50 on if it does the Buu Saga (the Buu Saga is skipped so often that I still don't really know everything that happens in it or the order of events or much about Buu himself). However, in 2002, it was pretty novel (I assume) as the story hadn't been repackaged for a fully voice acted 3D game before. I love the Saiyan, Frieza, and Android Sagas, so I don't mind re-experiencing them since it's been a while for me, though I couldn't help but notice how much is skipped throughout.

The battles between the Z Fighters and Nappa/Saibamen is a mere footnote. Krillin, Gohan, and Vegeta collecting the Dragon Balls and fighting the Frieza's minions and the Ginyu Force are just mentioned in a few words and shown minorly in cutscenes. Once Goku is taken out from his heart virus, there's a few fights as Piccolo (the only character you play as besides Goku and Gohan iirc), but there are a number of other encounters that are skipped. As it turns out, though the game doesn't tell you this, after doing the main story (the final fight between Gohan and Cell), you are able to go back and play through most chapters of the story that wasn't previously covered. Piccolo vs. Saibamen, Piccolo vs. Nappa, Vegeta vs. Recoome, etc. Did they think players would find the game too bloated if they included these parts at first? I think people new to DBZ would be quite confused by this. Hell, Dodoria isn't even in this retread despite being a playable character in tournaments/duels. How strange.

However, the story retread has some nice surprises as well. After filling in the missing chapters, another chapter will unlock where you play a "what if" scenario where the villains win. You beat Goku and his friends as Frieza and he has his wish for eternal life granted, for instance. Nothing too crazy, but neat to see before it would become more common in the games. I recommend the Cell one more than the others if you don't feel like going for them all.

Besides the story mode, there's two modes of the game. Duels (PvP battles) and the World Tournament. The tournament is where you'll be spending most of your time. If you want 100% then, uh, you're in for a long ride. There are 23 characters in this game, each of which have a bunch of skills you need to purchase from Mr. Popo. You only get money by placing 1st or 2nd in the tournament, so you're gonna be grinding it out a lot. But that's not the worst of it. Each character has a particular skill that can only be gained by Shenron granting you a wish; to do so, you need to buy all seven Dragon Balls individually for every single character. Yeah, no thanks, that's so much grinding. And the tournament sounds like a not ideal time for such grinding as simply being launched out of the ring once takes you out of the tournament. Save yourself the trouble and don't try for 100%.

Oh, there's also a Hercule mode after you unlock him. I didn't feel like unlocking stuff so I didn't go after it, but it sounds like it a sort of arcadey mode where you only play as Hercule and fight in various nontypical conditions.

But none of this speaks to the main gameplay. How is it? Well, it's much more of a standard fighter than a lot of other DBZ games succeeding it. Fights are mostly 2D, but with the ability to shuffle along the z-axis, mainly just to dodge attacks (ala Tekken... I think. I haven't played Tekken). Most DBZ games allow you to input a command to do special moves - Kamehameha, Galick Gun, etc. - at the cost of some Ki energy, but instead you have to do specific combos in order to pull them off here. Punch > punch > punch > punch > Ki energy for a Kamehameha, things like that. That one in particular works well, but I found that anything more complicated was quite inconsistent. This is very likely a "me" issue, just not able to execute the commands correctly, but it seemed like they'd only come out when I wasn't trying to do them instead of when I was trying for one. Not helping things is how you regain lost Ki. You have to hold the guard button, then double tap (and then hold) the direction away from your opponent. It sounds simple, but it felt so finnicky, and there was never a good opportunity to charge Ki. Getting opponents away is already a task, but once you start charging up, your enemy will just blitz you anyway. Later games (from my limited experience) will have the computers charge their own energy when you start because of how annoying it is otherwise, but I guess they didn't consider that in this first time.

The main gameplay was a lot deeper than I expected, and I was continually discovering things as I played, which was pretty cool. But the previously mentioned hang-ups really hurt the experience on harder battles. Speaking of which, the final fights against Frieza and Cell, and Piccolo's fight against Napa were huge random difficulty spikes. They fight so much harder, and you are given less health than them. There are a lot of easy fights between these ones, so it truly is just one hard battle that's really annoying, followed by a bunch of rather easy ones, and then a random hard one again. It made the lack of specials working all the more frustrating cause I was counting on them to help me out, but they just never worked for me (again, this might just be a me thing). I like the idea of making specials a sort of reward for doing a combo, but it more often than not came at my detriment.

Also, something that was quite comical to me is that losing Ki energy will make characters revert forms. Perfect Cell, for example, will revert to his first form upon being low on Ki. Not even his second form, it's only the first and last form I'm pretty sure, same with Frieza. This makes no sense in-universe because Cell can only revert to old forms if the androids he absorbed are knocked out of him, but here he just goes back to basics if he's a little tired. It was amusing in these cases, though it was kind of annoying when you want to keep Super Saiyan but it's so cumbersome to charge Ki and it keeps dropping.

Overall, Budokai is a good time. It's frustrating at times, but when a battle is going well, it's fun, and I find the graphics quite charming, and the roster surprisingly large. It's very much an early take on this kind of game, though. It wears its age on its sleeve, but that's part of the appeal, to me.



also if you do the post-game chapters, the finally boss is technically yamcha, that's perfect

Wish I could rate this 3.25 stars, but I can't. I'm gonna round down.

This is still very much a new randomizer and being worked on with new updates frequently, so this review is only accurate for the moment in time I'm writing it.

Majora's Mask's randomizer is one I already really liked with lots of options and a great new way to play Majora's Mask. However, I always wanted a randomizer for the 3DS version of the game. I know a lot of people have problems with this version (I don't, really) but I think a lot of the quality of life changes would make the randomizer play a lot more smoothly and... I was pretty much right. I enjoy being able to skip to specific parts of the day so I don't have to stand around for several in-game hours for what might be a blue rupee, I like being able to look down while flying as a Deku, and being able to use the 3DS's gyroscope makes the archery - particularly the archery minigames - much easier and way more fun.

The main problem with this mod is simply its newness. There are bugs for them to work out of course, and it doesn't have a lot of the random options like shopsanity, skullsanity, and fairysanity - probably worst of all is not being able to shuffle the songs yet, they're always in their default spots which is a little uninteresting. But in due time, they intend to add these all and more!

Consider this review more of method to spread awareness for this mod rather than an actual review. If more people play it, they'll have more playtesters and can work on things easier through feedback on their Discord. Check it out!

also, this was my first time adding a page to igdb, i dont really plan on doing that much at all, and this page is rather blank cause of it, but yeah, i just wanted to be able to talk about it

The Kamehameha is the powerhouse of the Cell

(ok that was a lame one)

So I think 2024 might just be the year where I become fine with dropping games and not thinking "but I'll consider this part of my backlog, I'll finish it eventually." Between Spider-Man and this game, I just have not been feeling all the games I've played this year, and ya know? There's nothing wrong with just dropping them forever. I don't need them.

But why am I doing so with Budokai 2? After all, I did give the first one a generally positive rating and review, and this one seems at least slightly more well-liked. Well, this game ended up cutting things I liked from the first one, having a worse singleplayer experience, and didn't improve on the main gameplay practically at all.

The main singleplayer mode of Budokai was simply a retelling of the Dragon Ball Z story up until the Cell Saga, with fully animated and voice acted cutscenes. This game went for... something different. Each chapter takes place on a board, where the player and computer enemies take turns moving one space across the board where they can grab power-ups, collectibles, story-important items, and run into each other to fight. The immediate comparison people make is Mario Party, but that is way too high of praise for this. You can only move one space, board events are nothing more than getting teleporting across the map or more enemies appearing (from my experience), there's no sort of fun items or minigames, it's just a slow, boring trek to your goal. I see the appeal of trying something new, and on paper I adore the idea of a Dragon Ball board game in one of these, but in execution it was just so bad. Not to mention the extreme repetition. For example, the very first board has Raditz, Nappa, and respawning Saibamen. Each of the Saibamen is a battle, but defeating them doesn't really matter because more will grow, they only serve as an annoying obstacle. Then Nappa and Raditz both take 2-3 battles to fully defeat due to how the health works on the board. It's so repetitive, and it only gets worse.

One thing I was really looking forward to with this game was the Buu Saga. Despite being a Dragon Ball fan for most of my life, I've never really experienced the Buu Saga. The games I've played never goes over it, Dragon Ball Z Kai didn't cover it back when I watched it, not even Dragon Ball Z Abridged covers it. It's surprisingly elusive for such a major thing for the series as a whole. And, well, Buu is all over this cover and it only makes sense that it'd focus on the Buu Saga, right? Well, to be fair, it does seem like the story mode of this game largely focuses on the Buu Saga, it seems like the longest part of the story. But I didn't get to it. And even if I did, this would be a pathetic way to experience the story. The version of the DBZ story that plays in this game is so watered down and mismatched that I wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of the Buu arc. Raditz and Nappa come to Earth to collect the Dragon Balls for Frieza and nothing else; Vegeta doesn't exist in this Saiyan Saga, only appearing in the second Frieza arc board; Cell shows up, absorbs the androids with no preamble, and then you just fight him three times and that's all she wrote. What is going on here? Maybe they do things better with the Buu Saga, go over it a bit more in-depth, but I'm not sticking around to find out.

On top of the gameplay being repetitive, they really didn't improve the basic gameplay much at all. You can now use Kamehamehas (and other similar moves) on command instead of needing to use a combo first. They're much more effective post-combo than using them dry, but there were many times where I wish I could whip it out whenever in Budokai 1, so it's greatly appreciated. Some characters' special moves also have more dynamic inputs (pressing a series of buttons to do fusion, rotating the control stick ungodly fast to reach full potential with an attack, and guessing what button your opponent will press in order to hit them), but I honestly found these more unapproachable than anything. I didn't have to deal with them in the story, but the tutorial had them and they weren't very fun to play with there.

This game also has an all new artstyle. I thought the previous game's artstyle was really charming, albeit evident that it was the earliest 3D DBZ game. This one is probably more conventionally pleasant - more cel-shaded with thick outlines - and I think most people would prefer it overall. I'm not sure if I prefer it overall or not, though, because this game foregoes the great fully animated cutscenes for textboxes. I would have loved to see these models and setpieces in a similar way to the first game, but that just wasn't the case.

I totally get why this game has a higher average rating than the first game, but I just can't personally stand by it. I hear great things about Budokai 3, though, so perhaps that'll be a big improvement? I sure hope so.