Hogwarts Legacy is one of the games that I've been most hyped about in years. I was a Harry Potter fan when I was a teenager, and the idea of an RPG game set in Hogwarts couldn't excite me more.

Besides all that, shortly after its release, I was on vacation in New York City. In the Big Apple, I reconnected with this franchise by visiting the official store and attending the Broadway play. It couldn't be a better time to return to Hogwarts.

But talking about the game, I can say that it didn't meet my expectations, but it's not a bad game. It's definitely one of the best games of the year (2023) and the best product of the Wizarding World, excluding the original seven books.

As for the gameplay, I can say it's pretty good. To be honest, despite my hype, this was the part I had reservations about. The last Harry Potter games based on the movies were generic shooters, but that's not the case here. It still feels like a shooter, but much better than I was expecting.

The story is pretty good, second only to the original seven books. The game is about a new Hogwarts student who enters the school in the fifth year and has the ability to harness ancient magic. To be honest, it feels like the story was created to make the game possible, with its mechanics and the idea that it wouldn't be fun to play as a first-year child who doesn't know anything about magic.

By the way, it was a good idea to set this game a hundred years before the Harry Potter saga to disconnect from the characters we already know and allow those who have no connection with Harry Potter to enjoy the game.

The best part of the game is its atmosphere. It's really cool to return to Hogwarts. The entire world is very well done, but the school is the best part.

Hogwarts Legacy is the best Harry Potter game ever and one of the best things the franchise has offered in years. I truly recommend it to anyone, even if you don't have any connection to the saga. It's a pretty good game on its own.

Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name is, for one, quite a mouthful, but also something of a conflicting release. On one hand, it’s a cool addition to the tale of Yakuza 7 and an important part of Kiryu’s story, especially in light of the upcoming Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth. On the other, it feels unnecessary in parts, largely forgettable in key ways, and extraordinarily expensive.

Story
I think the story of Gaiden is, at best, awkwardly delivered. I wholeheartedly agree with the majority that the finale is excellent, and some of the best work RGG have done in terms of an evocative and emotional narrative beat. The intro is pretty good as well, if perhaps a little odd. Everything else in between feels shoddy at best. Chapters 2-4 have merit and progression here and there, but they feel largely incomplete and force the player to do mindless stuff to just make the next plot beat happen. There were more than a few moments with the Daidoji x Omi plot in the first couple chapters that I went “What? Why? That doesn’t make sense.” As the game comes to its inevitable conclusion by syncing up with the events of Yakuza 7, these complaints fall away a bit, but the need to force in a whole narrative to explain how Kiryu ended up where he was while keeping it in line with the idea that the Daidoji were using him just results in a clunky story. Akame, Tsuruno, and Shishido are all exceedingly likable characters and don’t feel at all out of place in the wider series. The Daidoji agents, Hanawa included, are… ehh… I didn’t care too much for them. Overall, the switch from Daidoji being a political club manipulating government to actual superspy group with hundreds of agents and secret weapons comes off very strangely to me. Yakuza 3 has secret spy groups, sure, but this particular development feels out of touch with the ending Yakuza 6 was going for. All that said, yeah, that ending is phenomenal. Kuroda’s performance is fantastic. I hope we see more of this caliber from Infinite Wealth.

Gameplay
Sotenbori is overused. There, I said it! This version of Sotenbori is such an afterthought in terms of player enjoyment. Usually, there’s an effort to make even repeated areas feel different from game to game, giving them new locations and activities to stave off the repetition. Here, the Castle is sort of supposed to take the edge off, but given that its activities are limited to coliseum battles and the gambling minigames, it really only serves as a pretty area to look at. Combat is an improvement over Y6 in some ways, but the Yakuza style is largely the same and, as such, a bit clunky, and Agent style has some neat gimmicks but hardly feels like a full on style to me. This was a great opportunity to bring Kiryu’s style into Lost Judgment’s combat engine but they completely swerved away from that, resulting in what feels like, to me, a lot more of the same. In a related sense, tying all of the upgrades (which are largely just single move unlocks and stat upgrades, very lacking in any meaningful changes to your kit) to Akame’s point system AND money is such a drag. Yakuza 6 / Kiwami 2’s upgrade system was awkward, but consistent. The Judgment style is probably the best, giving you free reign to spend your upgrade points. Tying it to multiple sources of imaginary income weighs down the narrative as getting to meaningfully increase your combat potential means going to grind not just for money, but ALSO Akame points. For a game as short as this one is, I can’t see this any way other than an attempt to stretch the runtime. Add to it that substories are now packaged as part of Akame’s storyline and it really feels at points like they were lacking central mechanics or ideas to make this game click and instead relied on the existing systems to make it work. The story segment where you show off to Nishitani by going to Sotenbori and spending money is so sloppy, just making the player run around and do the minigames that have been a part of this engine for damn near a decade at this point. Is it still fun to shoot pool? Sure! But is it meaningful as story content when I can just do that on my own for kicks? Not really. The coliseum is the biggest offender in this regard. A random coliseum battle here or there in the main series is not uncommon, but it’s usually a one-off as an introduction to the side content or for one plot beat. Making it a key point of this game’s story and tying it directly to the upgrade system is seriously uncreative. Even the advertised “Elite Fighter Pack” with Saejima, Daigo, and Majima is just recycled movesets from previous games! Yakuza 5 is one of my favorite games of all time but I’m not going to spend a couple bucks to see half of Saejima’s animations from 2010 in the year of our lord 2023.

Price
It might not be clear from the number of games I log and review each year, but I do buy a lot of games. I have little issue spending $50-70 on new releases upwards of a dozen times a year. Despite that, and despite the fact my own spending has never bothered me, I spent more than a couple points of Gaiden regretting my purchase. Initially I criticized RGG online for making this a digital only release in the West, and while I still do, I wonder if it wasn’t intentional for its size. See, tying the story to multiple different mechanics that are, at best, secondary in other RGG releases in order to make it stretch to a 10-12 hour ordeal feels bad to me. For many people, playing all the minigames and doing all the substories will warrant them another 5-10 hours, and they’ll feel perfectly happy with a 25-30 hour jaunt. That’s great! I seriously hope they got everything they could out of this. But for me, having played the whole series to this point, doing coliseum battles and grinding for money and doing substories just to have upgrade points feels like a huge slog and less than I expect from Ryu Ga Gotoku. It feels like to me that they had a couple of great ideas - Kiryu hiding out, tying into the Omi dissolution, Shishido and Tsuruno’s story, the character of Akame - and then had to figure out a way to make this hit a $50 price point. I kept thinking back to Lost Judgment’s The Kaito Files expansion for comparison. That goes for $30 solo, and is included in the $35 or whatever season pass. You can check my review of that release here - I quite liked it a lot! Despite its length (8-10 hours doing nearly everything) it told an original story about a fan favorite character, provided new locations to explore, and the plot felt all-killer-no-filler to me, a lean and mean distillation of a whole Yakuza plot into a tight ~7ish hours. Gaiden did not give me this feeling. Kiryu’s moveset has fewer original moves and ideas than Kaito’s two styles, the upgrades are far worse, the story meanders more, and the bosses are far less imaginative - minus the final boss, who is excellent. I just couldn’t shake the feeling while playing Gaiden that I was being ripped off. All that work went into a DLC for $30 (which people thought was too expensive!) but here we have a full release for $50 which feels like it does less? I’m not the arbiter of what’s worth it or not in a video game, so take all this with a grain of salt, but at the absolute minimum I don’t think Gaiden is 5/6ths of the value of the Ishin! remake from this same calendar year. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it was worth it for you or not.

At the end of it all, there’s always going to be fun to be had in a release like this. Kiryu is fun, there’s great activities to do, lots to see, and karaoke to be sung (First Summer Uika knocks it out of the park as Akame here). The story feels unnecessarily stretched out and I think imperfectly delivered. I have serious issues with the pricing of what feels like a glorified DLC. But despite it all, it will stick with you. The ridiculous spy gadgets, the excellent final boss, the phenomenal finale cutscenes. I hope the latter elements are signs of what’s to come in the next mainline release, because in that case, we’re in good hands.

It's actually kind of insane how good this is despite its position as a post-launch DLC. RGG took Kaito, a fan favorite character who deserved more time in the spotlight, and wrote an immensely compelling personal story for him. I wouldn't call any of the mainline Yakuza games bloated (maybe 5, but personally I don't feel like it's a bad thing), but trimming the usual fat and instead writing a no-nonsense 7 hour campaign was genius.

Purely by chance, I replayed the ending to the Majima Saga last week, and it's night and day when comparing the quality of these two releases. MS was lacking in unique content with only a couple fights, no real side objectives, and no fighting styles, making it feel pretty blatantly like reused content. Kaito Files, on the other hand, gives Kaito two unique styles with a large skill tree to upgrade through, some pretty funny side content in the form of his primal senses, and an absolute BOATLOAD of fights. In fact, the Kenmochi fight is maybe one of the best in the series.

The story itself is paced to perfection, jumping from beat to beat at a solid chop. For only 4 chapters and about 6-7.5 hours, it covered way more than I expected. The antagonist's motives aren't that shocking if you're familiar with the series, but the lengths he goes to end up being way darker than I expected, resulting in a pretty original tonal structure for the series. The finale is quite good. The epilogue after it, however, is hilarious. The mix of current and past Kaito is really interesting, Mikiko is a strong contender for best female in the series, and Jun's storyline is grounded and hits the mark 9 times out of 10. Special points for all the fanservice, like the constant Higashi gags and funny interactions with other series regulars. Yagami's texts explaining his absence are a treat.

On the gameplay side, Kaito's moveset is fantastically fun, adapting parts of Kiryu (some literally canonically taken from what Kaito has heard of Kiryu) but adding unique animations and new options to make it feel very fresh and fun. There are actually a few DMC-esque button + stick motion input moves, which are pretty rare for this series. I think 0 has a few? There are some pretty funny QoL things too, like Kaito getting an upgrade to wear his disguises freely around Kamurocho, something Yagami couldn't do in either game. The boss fights are fantastic, with some really good choreography and setpieces. The overall presentation here is slick as hell. Also, KF might actually make better use of the detective sequences than the main game does, there's some cool stuff in here.

I wasn't really sure what to expect with Kaito Files, especially for the $30 price point, but it delivered way more than I expected. This is essentially a mini Yakuza game with a surprisingly tight and impactful storyline, fantastic character moments, and the usual addictive gameplay. Highly recommended.

In January of this year (2023) I was going through an extremely bad period of my life. My depression was at an all time low, and I started to show a few symptoms of being schizotypal (which have since disappeared a little bit). Around the same time, the next game in my backlog was this game.

As I was playing it, something strange happened. I started to feel extremely happy. Shenmue taught me about the intricacies of life: how to keep a schedule, how to be more friendly towards people, how to explore and interact with the world around you, and so much more. It does seem silly to talk about how a game has changed the way you act in real life, but it happened for me.

For a game to do this to a human means it transcends the lowly status of being a "video game". Shenmue I & II is a magnificent sprawling work of perfection that rarely shows its age. Everyone should play it; not just gamers, but salarymen, wives, children... everyone.

I first started Alan Wake years ago, but only got into the tutorial before my attention wandered. After playing Control on release and with the hype for Alan Wake 2 building, I figured it was time to sit down and play through the remaster. While this is still probably the right call for maximum enjoyment of the sequel, I found the original game to be dull, frustrating, overly long, needlessly repetitive, and honestly outright bad.

The story is Alan Wake’s only real appeal. What clearly begins by resting on the laurels of Twin Peaks does blossom (with the help of the excellent Control) into a wider narrative that is genuinely engaging. For the most part, anyway. I won’t go into too many specifics because I do think that’s what makes the game tick. It’s relatively well delivered, but paced terribly and is overly vague. There are a couple details that get expanded on in the DLC and the spinoff Alan Wake’s American Nightmare that do originate from this game, but… they’re not really actually explained. Even the wiki is a little unclear about how certain details line up. It stinks that you have to get info from so many other places to see the full broader narrative, but I guess that was the intent from the start, so it’s hardly worth criticizing. The full cast is shockingly small, with really only Alan and Barry and the Anderson brothers being consistent characters. Agent Nightingale is basically absent from the story and the other Bright Falls residents are genuinely window dressing. Still, despite these issues, there is an appeal here. YMMV if the game itself is worth trudging through for that.

The real death knell for Alan Wake is the gameplay. For a narrative focused game, almost nothing you do is related to the actual narrative. The cutscenes and manuscripts tell the story, and the bulk of the chapters (“Episodes”) of the game itself are mostly traipsing through forest segments fighting shadow people. The third person shooting mechanics here are laughably shallow. Alan’s flashlight burns the darkness off of infected people - “Taken” - (who I guess are beyond saving despite that, because he then kills the shit out of them) and your weapons kill them.
You have a pistol, a shotgun, a hunting rifle, and a variation of each (ex: pump shotgun). Flares act as “get off me” tools and flashbangs are grenades. That’s about it. Alan moves like a tank through a swimming pool of high-grade molasses, and his stamina is awful, giving you very little mobility in fights. A not-super-reliable dodge can save you sometimes, but once you’re surrounded you’re likely to take damage regardless, as the terrible camera and bad environmental design allows enemies to easily swarm you. There are really only about 5 enemies, and they’re all variations on either lumberjacks or fishermen. I figured from the first chapter that this was an aesthetic choice for that part of the story, and I would go on to fight, say, Taken engineers, or Taken chefs or something. No, it’s just lumberjacks all the way down. The game loves to just send Alan into the woods to fight things, and it is actually a majority of this game’s runtime. I cannot stress just how dull and repetitive these sections are - I groaned audibly when I figured a chapter was ending only to find out I had multiple more forest segments to go. The game also only knows to switch things up by taking away your weapons, not by throwing new enemies or challenges at you. Alan will regularly get into a car / helicopter / window accident that causes him to run into the woods, having forgotten or lost his guns and ammo, forcing you to scavenge new ones that are exactly the same. The game will throw a wave or two of enemies at you over and over until you reach a checkpoint, get given ammo for every gun you have, heal, and then do it again.

To be a little more analytical, Alan’s iconic flashlight doesn't work effectively as a mechanic since it is REQUIRED to make enemies vulnerable - there's nothing clever you can do to manage a crowd like in Resident Evil 4, you literally just have to focus one Taken at a time and kill them all. The addition of the flares and flashbangs helps, but these are just an escape from the central mechanics being extremely weak. The level design is atrocious, and it feels like the increase in enemy numbers is always hiding the fact that the mechanical depth is simply not enough to create any meaningful sense of progression throughout, resulting in a need to bury the player under the weight of sheer numbers and the time it takes to flashlight each enemy down before killing them.

In terms of pacing, there's rarely any payoff to a bunch of different objectives - when Alan runs from the cops (sigh... into the forest) and he sees the radio station, you'd think that once you get there you'll get character building, context, even just a break from woods-walking. Nope, the second you see the DJ inside, a cutscene plays and the cops shoot at Alan through the window so he jumps out and runs into the forest. Not a single second of this exchange is worth anything, it is blatant and embarrassing filler. The player is teased with an objective, a possible meeting with another character, a break from the mediocre gameplay - only to have it last less than 20 seconds before returning you to a carbon copy of what you did for the last 15 minutes. The other objectives outside the woods feel like busywork: get this gate open, go get a generator running, etc. Episode 5’s walk through the abandoned Bright Falls is a real highlight of the game as it is not just a break from forest segments, but also feels connected to the narrative and worth engaging with.

some bullet points:
- sheriff breaker is an agent of the bureau of control, which is kind of awesome
- there's this one clip of the dark presence taking Alan's wife that plays probably 10 times in the story when he like has a flash of pain in his head and it's only like 0.8 seconds long and it repeated so many times i thought my game was bugged
- Nightingale calling Wake different authors' names is pretty funny
- the possessed barrels and girders flying at you suck so much
- i hope you like Adidas bc this game could be an ad for it with how much that one enemy in the tracksuit shows up
- Barry gets a head torch and Alan wants it. yeah me too man, me too
- that final "boss" is such a whimper to end a game on
- the whole final act is weirdly quick and anticlimactic for a game that's already double the length it should be
- the episodes of Night Springs that play on tvs are the most well written part of the game, they really capture the tone that makes Control feel so special

I feel like I haven’t even really touched on how many things about this game bothered me, but I’m going to end there. A truly frustrating and dull experience that offers gameplay so wretched that I did consider stopping and watching a Lets Play for the last half. While looking some stuff up about it, I saw someone say that they believed this was the best linear third person shooter ever made. I truly hope for their sake that they played RE4 or Dead Space after they made that comment, because it is a grim statement otherwise.

I was a little worried that this game was dropping so soon after the first Voice of Cards game, but luckily my worries were misplaced! Pretty much everything positive I said about The Isle Dragon Roars also applies to The Forsaken Maiden - the presentation is great, the simple combat system is fun and addictive, and the writing is of the high quality you expect from a Yoko Taro project.

The thing that elevates The Forsaken Maiden above its predecessor is Laty. The entire story here is a character study of Laty, and it's phenomenal. Laty is mute so seeing her relationship grow with every character she meets gives you a really interesting look into her personality and character development without ever hearing her speak. Honestly one of the best character arcs I can think of in a JRPG, and its worth playing the game for even if it doesn't seem appealing to you otherwise.

I've come to view this game less highly over the years, but nothing can change the fact that it's a seminal RPG for many newer fans. The story is complex and well-realized. The world is a joy to explore and take in, with some genuinely impressive stuff for the hardware. Music is top-tier and really is half of why I like it so much. Combat has quite a few things to learn but there's some really cool ways to customize it, and it's fun to learn.

Characters can be rather lacking and the quests are often repititive and one-note, but I don't believe it's enough to drag down what is otherwise a great standalone JRPG.

A (mostly) solid remaster of a JRPG that would've been extremely ambitious in its time, but aged like milk. I think the leveling system is really cool! The most fun I had in FF2 was grinding in the early game to do stuff that I shouldn't have been able to. It's fun to break a game over your knee like that. Unfortunately I think the leveling is by far the most interesting aspect of FF2, and once the novelty wears off you're left with a JRPG with some of the worst dungeon design I've ever seen and a sky high encounter rate. It's just not fun, and that's coming from an unironic Strange Journey stan.

I will say I'm much more willing to give SaGa a chance after this, cuz it can't be any worse.

Solid. Has some improvements over Odyssey, has some negatives that game doesn't. Probably not going to finish this but I've had fun with what I played. Combat is relatively good, feels meaty and you have lots of options. I was glad they included a setting for lethal assassinations. Eivor is a pretty fun personify protagonist, especially female. Her meeting Kassandra is probably quite fun, haven't played that DLC though. As usual, the "real world" story is boring as sin. Why they can't come up with new contexts other than "a person in 20XX is using an animus" is beyond me. Parkour is good, if pretty underused due to the rarity of towns. While I didn't get more than 30 hours in, the story is actually pretty good. The writing on the individual areas and the characters in each is above what I expected and the central plot seems appealing. The game's focus on the supernatural aspects of Norse culture is pretty cool and Eivor's visions are fun. The missions that actually play with reality are some of the best in the game, like the white horse hallucination. Raiding towns is fun.

There's not really anything that's reinventing the wheel that Origins and Odyssey built but Eivor is an enjoyable central figure in a story that's more engaging than I expected with the same quality of pseudo-RPG combat in this trilogy of games. Recommended for a straightforward good time.

2-3 years after only playing Yakuza 0 to Kiwami 2, I've finally caught up with most of the Yakuza games. As for why I only played those 3 at first, I'm not quite sure myself truthfully. But this game...I don't even know where to start with this masterpiece. An emotionally devastating yet breathtaking end to Kiryu's story, now my favorite video game character. This is the best RGG has been with it's writing, completely unrivaled from characters to storytelling. It's not as ambitious in scope as Yakuza 5 was but it still does a good job in finalizing Kiryu's character and Haruka's relationship. The callbacks throughout this game were spectacular, each and every one of them making everything hit so much more harder. Even the substories are easily at it's best in this game, with surprisingly amazing writing throughout all of them.

Moving on to the gameplay itself, I really enjoyed the return of the Dragon Engine, albeit in an older state since this game released before Kiwami 2. I seriously don't think the Dragon Engine is that bad; and while yeah I do agree that 0's/5's/etc is better, It's still pretty fun for a prototype.

Finalizing my thoughts on this, I'm just glad I could experience the rest of Kiryu's journey throughout Kamurocho and the rollercoaster of emotion it offers. He is easily my favorite video game character ever as I've said before, and this game was pretty much confirmation of why. The RGG games as a whole has taught me a lot and I'm so glad I could experience these games. From beginning to end, it’s truly been an unforgettable journey.

Much to my surprise I really enjoyed the first 2/3rds of Final Fantasy XIII. Yes, it's kind of a mess even early in the game - the story is filled with jargon, the combat seems very restrictive, the characters seem unlikeable, every area is a hallway etc. However, once most of the party meets up and the combat system opens up I think it coasts along as a pretty great JRPG for a while.

The characters all have interesting arcs, and a reason for seemingly unlikeable at the beginning. I despised Hope for the first few chapters, but he ended up being one of my favorite characters. Very few games are able to make me completely flip my opinion on a character like that.

The combat system is really interesting too, I've never seen anything quite like it. Initially it presents itself as a dumbed down version of the ATB system from previous games, but as you unlock more Paradigms (jobs) and abilities it becomes so much more engaging. The system does run out of steam towards the end when most encounters boil down to the same routine (buff/debuff, attack, heal, repeat), but I think it has a lot of potential.

That actually leads into why I think the last 1/3rd of Final Fantasy XIII drags it down so much. You reach a point where most of the character arcs have been resolved, you have access to almost everything in the combat sandbox, and the characters have a very clear objective they need to do to finish the game. This is the point you get deposited onto the Side Quest Planet. The next 15 hours of the game contains almost no story, and is essentially just a series of escalating combat challenges that are not balanced as meticulously as the first 2/3rds of the game due to the linearity being stripped away. Not only does the gameplay become a chore without story being dispersed as evenly as before, but it also completely kills all the narrative momentum the game had been building towards up to this point. Yeah, the plot isn't that great overall, but it feels like the rug was pulled out from under me at the climax just so they could pad the game out.

Very mixed feelings on this one, but it's still far from the worst Final Fantasy game in my opinion.

Wonderfully self-aware, Village is a masterclass in balancing genuine scares with over the top absurdity. It consistently keeps things fresh by cycling through different horror lenses, and knows exactly when to veer into campy humor as a palate cleanser. Exploring the village was a joy for me, I loved that sense of discovery when I realized I could finally go somewhere and see what it hid. Ethan Winters is the biggest dork in video games and the hand scene after that one Dimitrescu encounter is the absolute peak of video game comedy. Looking forward to going on this rollercoaster ride many times to come, I adore this game.