Holy shit, I don't even know what to say. I wasn't expecting this.

The original Granblue Fantasy always had my attention thanks to its visuals. Tried playing it at one point and, as it usually happens between me and Gachas, I fell off pretty quickly. But it stuck with me because man, that art is pretty.

I remember when Relink was announced; my first thought was "Whoa, now I can actually have fun with it. Sick! Can't wait!" Yeeeeeeeears went by and the game wouldn't come out. Tried the fighting game too, had fun with it(why did they make Charlotta a charge character orz), but it also failed to hook me.

2024 rolls around. Extremely burned out with FFXIV(FF as a whole tbh, given that 16 and 7R did very little to entice me), unimpressed by Monster Hunter Wilds' announcement, disinterested in Yakuza Gaiden/Yakuza 8 and twiddling my thumbs until anything Etrian related gets announced, the past few months have been kind of rough for me in terms of engaging with games. It's that shitty kind of mood where you feel like you're done with all the things you used to be SUPER into, you know?
Tekken 8's release helped a lot with that since I'm always down for some good ass Tekken, but there's only so many ranked matches I can take until I start to look elsewhere.

And look elsewhere I did: To the bottom-right corner of my monitor, when Steam notified me that a friend started playing Granblue Relink. "Huh. That came out? I completely forgot."
I checked out the store and found that the game was cheaper than I thought. With fuckall to do, I picked it up.
42 hours passed by in a flash. what happened. what the fuck happened.

Cygames happened, baby. This is some premium shit right here.
Everything clicked. Quite literally a love at first sight type beat. Every location, every character model, every VFX, every track, every UI element, every detail in how characters move and how attacks connect, every setpiece during the main story, the pacing of quests, the Materia-- sorry, Talisman--, sorry, Sigil system...

It all just worked for me. Kicking back on the sofa and grinding the same quest until I got S++ on everything despite being pretty underleveled/undergeared at the time, exploring each new area in the main story to find crabs and chests and always being rewarded when checking things off the beaten path or atop a hard to reach spot, the warm colors, the flair, the increasingly intense battle themes during optional fights that had me at the edge of my seat...

It was made for me. Solely and exclusively for me. It takes my favorite things from games like Monster Hunter and Final Fantasy, seasons it with a lot of original goodness, and serves it all on a golden platter with my name on it.

You'll probably notice I failed to mention the story at all. It's simple, pretty predictable, but it doesn't overstay its welcome; it's on screen just enough to flavor the world and its characters, and then lets you do your thing until it's time for more. I was more of a fan of isolated character interactions; I think the banter between the crew is very fun and cozy.

The only negative thing for me was the game's main antagonist. Very generic and extremely bland, every scene with her was kind of hilarious(for the wrong reasons) since I literally managed to guess what she was about to say 80% of the time. In a more story driven game, this would be a huge problem, but I knew this was a "style-over-substance" type story from the moment I started playing; just the way I like it.

I don't have much else to say, except that I'll be looking forward to any updates to Relink, as well as any news from future games in this style from Cygames. This was a VERY nice surprise.

Persona is a series that I don't revisit a whole lot. 4 was my first, then 3, then years later I picked up 5 when it first came out. Finished all of them, even Platinum'd 5 despite not enjoying the story and characters all that much because as it turns out, the dungeon crawling and battle mechanics in these games are super fun. But that's not all you're doing for the whole game, is it?

Tl;dr, I hate the calendar system. There's nothing wrong with it objectively, it works, but in recent years I became increasingly aggressive towards missables in games, and Persona games from 3 onwards are treasure troves of missable shit.
You gotta plan out(a.k.a. open a guide and follow it to the letter) your actions so you can cram as many social links and stat increasing activities as you can in between dungeon crawling. This means that if you fuck up, or forget to do a certain thing on a certain day, your whole schedule(again, your GameFaqs tab on a separate window) is thrown out of whack. Not a problem in the Yakuza games, not a problem in Etrian Odyssey, not a problem in Monster Hunter, but definitely a problem here. In those games, you can just go back to do shit you left behind or happened to miss if you want to go for 100% completion. Sometimes you may have to wait until postgame to do that, and there may be one exception here and there, but in Persona nearly everything relating to Social Links and stat building is missable if you're not careful enough.

And that's only because you have a time limit to do things. Again, I get why, it's well integrated into the story and makes sense considering the whole "you're in high school, make the most out of the time you have" approach, but it's a design choice I personally grew to loathe as the years went on.

I also hate having to interact with certain characters just because I want to increase their Social Links for compendium purposes. I couldn't care less about Marie, she already had me staring blankly at the screen with indifference from my first interaction with her, but guess what? She's a new Social Link option, meaning she has an exclusive Persona locked behind her Maxed SL Rank, meaning I have no choice but to interact with a character I don't give a shit about just because I wanna see that percentage go up.

And then there's Teddie.

It's not a bad game, I just don't fuck with it anymore. For whatever reason I still enjoy playing Persona 3 even though it suffers from basically all trappings I just mentioned, but 4 and 5 very much have me wishing I was playing something else when I'm not in combat. (Or, thanks to Teddie, even during combat. For the love of god shut up)

Ok, let's start with the positives.

As others have said, this is Tekken 7 but better. Combat feels great, with every hit carrying a ton of impact. I don't know how the super high level players feel about the new mechanic(Heat), but as a midcore player, I found it pretty damn fun to use. I wouldn't mind if Rage Arts were replaced entirely by it; it's a snappy mechanic that doesn't interrupt the flow of matches and is fairly easy to pick up.

It obviously looks a whole lot better than its predecessor. Stages, characters and effects all look really good. The story mode cutscenes are GORGEOUS, Yakushima being one of my favorite areas because of them. Character customization also got an upgrade: Custom attires no longer look like they're all made of satin, though customization options are a little barebones right now, but considering the leap in graphical fidelity, I guess that's to be expected. I'm pretty sure more items will be added in the future, so let's keep an eye out for that.

Tekken 7's OST had REALLY high highs, but some agonizing lows(Helicorp - Night being the worst offender there). Here, the soundtrack is pretty good across the board, even though none of the tracks really jumped out at me like Infinite Azure did.
But hey, even if the soundtrack sucked ass, Tekken 8 brings back the Jukebox feature! And this time, PC players can use it too! Rejoice, it's time to play Yodeling in Meadow Hill on EVERY stage!

Guess what else is great? Rollback right from the get go, AND cross-play! This is how you do it. I heard some players experienced crashing when trying to play online, but I hopped on a few online matches and had no issues playing.

I like the new characters, chuunibyou queen Reina being my favorite, but Azucena probably managed to break the record for fastest instance of flanderization ever recorded. (I don't think she has a single non-coffee related line? Like, I get it, it's a cute character trait, but come on.)

Didn't play a ton of Arcade Quest yet, but avatar customization was super cute. Chibi not-Kazuya had me laughing a lot lmao

Character episode endings are still around and just as entertaining. Really makes up for the actual story.

Speaking of which...

As I mentioned earlier, the cutscenes look incredible. It's crazy to think we got to the point where pre-rendered cutscenes look better than the actual CG movie that came out years ago. But that's as far as my praise for the story mode goes.

This is a worthless story. Irredeemable, much like its protagonist.

It genuinely feels like whoever was in charge of writing for Tekken 8 had a MASSIVE crush on Jin. Like, stalker levels of obsession. I swear, 90% of the time, you're looking at characters saying shit like "Jin, you're the hope of mankind." "You're the only one who can save the world." "Everyone knows that your will is strong.". The other 10%, you're watching Jin go "I can't save anyone!" "I won't reject my past... I need to atone."

This entire story revolves around Jin's quest for redemption. A.K.A, a continuation of the writers realizing how they MASSIVELY fucked up his characterization in Tekken 6, and wanting to fix it.
The messages they're trying to communicate with this narrative aren't bad. There are times in life we fuck up, but we can't chain ourselves to those mistakes; we need to move forward, and create something better from it. Our blood or turbulent family relations isn't what makes us who we are, we can become whatever we want in spite of the cards we were given. And of course, the usual shonen trope of "You're not alone, as long as you have people you can count on you'll be ok".

The problem is, these messages are being transmitted from the perspective of the guy who LITERALLY, ACTUALLY STARTED WORLD WAR III IN THIS UNIVERSE. LIKE, NOT A JOKE.
"Oh but he did it to purge the Devil Gene from the world and defeat Azazel before it could awaken." I won't even get into how dumb that whole setup is. Leaving that for an eventual T6 review because holy shit.

Regardless of his reasons, all out war is too high of a price to pay. From T6 onwards, we get to see the destruction wrought by his decision, the people who suffered by virtue of it. Shit, Miguel's ENTIRE motivation for living is avenging his sister's death after Jin's planes bombed the church she was getting married in.

There is no redemption for Jin. He ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and faced 0 consequences for it. If only it ended there.

Tekken 8 decides that, not only should JIn face no consequences for his actions, he should also be elevated by his peers at every possible moment. Jin is the star of hope for mankind! Jin is the only one who can put an end to Kazuya's reign of tyranny! He's not like his father, his oopsie poopsie-- COUNTLESS LIVES SACRIFICED FOR A PLAN PURELY BASED ON SPECULATION THAT DIDN'T EVEN WORK IN THE END-- isn't what defines him.
No, Jin is an angel. A symbol of hope. Fully realized when Jin literally gets an angel form in the final chapter of the story.

No interesting character interactions between the rest of the cast, no other arcs or conflicts to resolve, nothing. This story campaign serves only to provide the player with a fantasy where they get to stroke Jin's hot topic branded [REDACTED] for 2 hours, nothing else. Aggressively incompetent and tone deaf, a baffling waste of resources that could be spent elsewhere in the game. After evolving into this embarrassing amalgamation of conflicting ideas, and now that some characters have been reduced to nothing more than caricatures of themselves(Paul and Law STILL arguing about splitting the prize money in the middle of an actual war), this series desperately needs a reboot, more than ever. Which won't happen, considering that last cutscene.

Gameplay peak of the series, absolute embarrassment in terms of story and characterization. A shame, since I considered pre-T6 Tekken to be my favorite fighting game series in terms of story.

With all that said, the story hardly matters. I'll be playing this game for hundreds of hours, and it certainly won't be because of this piss poor excuse of a narrative. You should, too. hop on tekken

EDIT: Forgot to mention, dedicated Kazuya Mishima tits button on the title screen. 10/10

EDIT 2: KAZUYA'S SNEAKER COLLECTION IS FULLY FEATURED IN HIS CHARACTER EPISODE ENDING. ACTUALLY MADE ME UPDATE THE RATING TO 10/10

Holy shit, this is good. Tons of different modes, even better soundtrack(BLADE CHORD fucks tremendously), and every single character is super fun to play. 3D cutscenes in Story Mode were a little boring to watch though, considering characters don't move their faces at all, very stilted in that sense.

It also sucks that I had no one else to play this with. Obviously not the game's fault that none of my friends are into Musou, but I can only imagine how fun it'd be to play it with someone.

When I come back to Basara after this revisit, it'll either be this or 3/Utage.

This one's been on my backlog since birth lmao

Let me just start by saying that I absolutely adore the way this game looks. The cute, play-doh-esque character models contrasting with the semi-realistic environment textures is a timeless look, like an adorable low poly diorama you could replicate in real life.

The PS1 was my first console, and Back to Nature just happened to be one of the games my brother had lying around for it. Picked it up when I was like, 7 years old, messed around for a bit, had a chicken die because I didn't know I needed to feed it myself, and then put it back down. It's a game I would continuously revisit through the years, getting farther each time, but never finishing it. Not because it's bad, mind you! I just didn't have what it takes to appreciate a farming/life sim like this before, I think. Close to 20 years later, and the deed is finally done. I had a lot of fun with it! Maybe a bit too much in fact, to the point where there was nothing left to do for the entirety of the game's third year.

Back to Nature has you taking over your late grandpa's farm, with the town's mayor warning you that if you don't take good care of the farm and neglect your neighborly duties, you'll be kicked out in three years. Off you go then! Milk that cow! Pick up those eggs! Chop that tree! Give that sheep a dope fade! Drown Elli in flowers and get married in a year! Sell 200 fish and become the 𝐹𝐼𝑆𝐻𝐸𝑅 𝐾𝐼𝑁𝐺! Faint after brushing your horse! Beg the harvest sprites to help you with the cattle because oh god there's so many of them help,

There's tons of things to keep you busy! But maybe I was a bit too efficient in my approach?
By the end of Year 2, I had all Power Berries, all fishing prints, all recipes done(except for the Harvest Sprite one, which I got shortly on the next Spring), maxed out my coop and barn slots, just had my baby, max affection with nearly all my animals, shipped every item, and viewed almost all random events.

But there isn't any way to speed up the three year evaluation period. Sure, you can go straight to bed after waking up, but your animals will most certainly die/lose affection for you before you're halfway through the year-- hell, halfway through the season even. So for an entire year, there was... Nothing to do. Sure, I had a few animals under 10 hearts, but that's it. I even had over 100k burning a hole in my pocket with nothing to spend it on. There weren't even a lot of random events left to see; just like, two or three, and one of them was locked until year 4.

This ultimately made going through that last year a big slog. Yeah, I could come up with arbitrary goals like "Ship 999 of every crop" or something, but that doesn't really change anything, does it? Just makes a number go up in your status screen, and it doesn't even affect your completion %. If there were more things to do, something that I assume the GBA remake took care of, then BTN would be an easy 5* for me. As it stands though, things slow down a bit too drastically before the evaluation, completely overcooking the anticipation for the credits/ending sequence.

Still loved it though. Maybe on a revisit I'll just play until the wedding and consider that my personal ending.

Add this one to the pile of DS games with outstanding soundtracks, good lord. Just like Actraiser, that's what drew my attention to Professor Layton a long time ago: its music.

Professor Layton's theme, The Looming Tower, Veil of the Night, Ferris Wheel Park, The Village Awakens, the ending theme... Curious Village has one of the most unique OSTs out there, easily.

That said, I wouldn't actually finish it for real until recently, despite knowing about the series for like, 10 years by now. I sampled the first game at one point and did enjoy it, but didn't push through more than the first couple of hours for whatever reason. Revisiting the Ace Attorney series brought my attention back to it though. "Oh yeah, there's that crossover game, right? I better check out the PL games before going into that, then."

Playing this during breaks in my routine in the past week was really fun! Curious Village is a pretty good mobile/portable game, best experienced in short bursts over time. That is, until the story finally hooks you.

One of Professor Layton's defining traits(aside from its masterful soundtrack, I will not shut up about it) is that it features a story on top of its puzzles. You're not just completing a series of challenges on a list like Picross or something, you're also supposed to piece together the truth behind a mystery taking place in the village. I read somewhere that originally, Level-5 didn't plan on taking this approach at all and were instead going to release a puzzle collection a-la Brain Age, but I'm SO glad they went this route because the story is actually pretty interesting!
I don't know if it was thanks to me playing the game on short bursts or initially paying more attention to the puzzles than the story, but I did not see that twist coming at all. Eventually I put the hints together and immediately went "Holy shit, what?????" and HAD to get to the end in one night. Cut to me at 4am, drifting to sleep to one of the most beautiful ending themes I've ever heard.

The aura that hangs over the game once you realize what's going on is so bittersweet, and it's SO effective. A short and simple story that knew exactly how to aim for my heart strings, helped in no small part by its beautiful, often melancholic soundtrack.

That said, this setup does raise some issues. Once the story caught my attention and had me wanting to see the end, the puzzles felt more like bothersome roadblocks than interesting brainteasers. Thankfully I had already completed most puzzles in the game by that point and the last ones blocking your way to the final room mostly didn't give me trouble, but when they did pose a challenge, I just ended up looking up the answers online instead of racking my brain for an answer like I had done with every other puzzle until then. I'm curious to see how they'll address this balance in future games, if at all.

Oh, right-- the puzzles! I spent all this time talking about other shit, but at the end of the day this is a puzzle game after all. They're good!
130+ short problems that'll have you scratching the side of your head with a stylus for a good, long while. Loved the sliding block and Queen puzzles, and the wordplay ones were my favorites. Picking out little details on what exactly was being asked of me for a solution had me thinking back to testimonies in the Ace Attorney series.

Now, they don't all hit the mark. The "who's lying?" puzzles were a bit samey, and there's a couple of them with pretty bullshit solutions. (The chocolate keyboard one comes to mind)

All in all, I really wish I had played these games earlier. Curious Village is such a good starting point, I'm gonna dive in the next games right after writing this. Considering how much I enjoyed the story here, I can hardly wait to see what lies ahead.

Man, the DS really is goated, isn't it? Ace Attorney, Professor Layton, Etrian Odyssey, Trauma Center; so many great gems on this little guy.

And here we have one of the greatest trilogies you could ask for.

I'll just get it out there: I'm not a reading guy. I think I've read like, 2 books in my entire life at most. Sure, I love JRPGs but often times I'm interested in their combat systems just as much if not more than their stories. That's just monkey brain for you; if I go too long without bonking something over the head, my mind starts to trail off.

With that in mind, a series like Ace Attorney would naturally be a gigantic miss for my tastes, as would any other visual novel. But there's SOMETHING about the secret sauce here, something about how everything comes together that makes it my favorite little text adventure/VN series, and probably the only one I'll ever give a shit about. And thank God I decided to make THIS the one to go for!

In my Justice for All review, I mentioned that Franziska von Karma is responsible for helping me have a wife and a job irl. Won't repeat myself too much here, you can check that review out if you're curious. But can you imagine if I decided to ignore Ace Attorney because of my unga bunga brain bias? I'd be living in the streets AND single!

It wasn't all smooth sailing though. The third game was a gigantic hurdle to go through. Cases 3-2 and 3-3 were consistently putting me to sleep, making me drop the game and forget about the series for a year. Then I'd pick it back up, play through 1 and 2 while thinking "man I LOVE these games. Why didn't I play through the rest of them yet?", finally arriving at 3 and having a BLAST with the first case, until it was time for the brick walls of 3-2 and 3-3 to show up again. Back to shelving the series.

But not this year. AA Trilogy went on sale. "Oh it's on now."
Played all three games back to back, and I'm SO happy I decided to press on after 3-3. Trials and Tribulations, shitty cases aside, is SUCH a good game and I'm a damn fool for not sticking with it earlier. Although... The next HD trilogy will be releasing in a couple of months, so maybe I picked the best time to fully dedicate myself to the series. To play all 6 mainline games in full HD glory... What a day and age we live in.

The port is pretty damn good too. Wide-screen, every asset(with the exception of some stuff in 1-5 specifically) was beautifully remastered, QoL additions and even achievements leading me to find little interactions and Easter eggs I never noticed before.

A decisive trilogy... A decisive port... What else could possibly be required?

Ah, err... Nothing, of course. That should be fine.

Good lord, this is weird.
In my original ActRaiser review, I mentioned that its simulation aspect was really charming, and that I'd be skipping ActRaiser 2 in favor of Renaissance since I read the latter brought back the sim stuff.

... I guess I need to pay more attention to what I read, because this game went WAAAAAAAY too far with it. On top of the town building and helping your followers, you now have tower defense segments. And all of them are stretched super far.

One of the things I enjoyed about the original SNES game was its pacing. You do a little bit of sidescrolling, a little bit of town building, then back to sidescrolling, and neither aspect felt dragged out or overstayed its welcome. I actually don't mind the tower defense segments of Renaissance; I grew up with those kinds of games, so I can appreciate it. What I don't appreciate is how there are multiple segments in the same land. If it was one big demon invasion per land, that would've been fine; kind of a way of testing how well you helped your followers before the showdown. But that's not how it's structured here.

Also I don't appreciate the writing. Another cool thing about OG ActRaiser to me is how... Honest it is. You're God, you have an obedient angel to do your bidding, and your followers constantly display their faith on you. No witty commentary, no jokes. Very straightforward, and it made that game's ending feel very effective as a result.

Here, the angel is a smug bastard who eats your offerings and says shit like "I mean, you could strike your faithful children's houses with lightning, but we know you wouldn't do that right? LAUGH TRACK", and while the followers mostly remain the same(from what I've played anyway), you now have "Heroes" that you can recruit for the tower defense segments who are not very enthusiastic about your godhood.

Finally, while this isn't a negative to me: This game looks fucking rough dude. I actually laughed out loud when the first stage loaded and I could count the pixels around everything except the HUD. I kinda loved it actually???? In a twisted way, I guess. (Props for the Alucardesque afterimages, too)

I'm kinda disappointed honestly. I didn't grow up with ActRaiser, but after finishing it just hours before trying Renaissance, this felt far less enjoyable than the original. And by what I've read from other users' reviews, the game just gets more and more bloated and repetitive later on.

Careful what you wish for, I guess.