It's hard to describe how much this game means to me I think partially because I don't really know why it means so much to me? Certainly it has a great hook, playing an rpg campaign where "your characters are the bad guys but not really" isn't unique but I do think the cast of berseria are for the most part genuinely amoral in a way that is fascinating. The way that the game becomes very explicitly about people who are Others asserting not just their right to exist but their right to be fucked up bad people by the terms of their society perhaps just hit me harder in 2023, where a lot of my rights are being actively eliminated throughout the united states, than it did in 2016, where that was only the promise on the lips of many lawmakers. Maybe it's just the cast! I really love these guys, all of them, which is rare for me in any RPG, let alone a TALES game. Velvet Crowe is possibly the greatest fictional cannibal, and i love both of her girlfriends, one of the all time OT3s in my heart I think. Idk man the whole thing just works. I even love the battle system, I think once it unfolds a bit it becomes a really clever and satisfying and dare i say tactical offshoot of normal 3D tales combat. It's a lot more careful and you have to be a lot more deliberate but I think it just feels way better to pull off cool shit and put together good combos in it. Idk man the game rocks I think about it all the time. One of my faves.

"After Y2k the end of the world had become a cliche. But was I to talk, a brooding underdog avenger alone against an empire of evil, out to right a grave injustice.

Everything was subjective. There were only personal apocalypses. Nothing is a cliche when it's happening to you."

THE GAME GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSS

i have never been simultaneously so hungry and so in my fuckin feeling about my indian mother in law while engaging with a piece of media as i was when playing venba

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It was really hard for me to imagine that a studio could come out of the wild, scrappy moment that birthed Max Payne 1, shed a lot of the really specific aesthetic stuff that made it so visually and sonically captivating, and go back to a narrative well that felt really perfectly fulfilled to me in the first game, PLUS taking this second stab with big fancy publisher money and backing and presumably associated pressures, and have anything even close to what made me love the original work at the end of the day.

But Max Payne 2 does it. Lightning in a bottle twice. They make it look easy. Finding ways not just to return to Max but to find something for almost every living named character to do, and do substantially in this story, and giving thematic weight to all these people coming back and acting out this shitshow that almost all of them know will be a disaster. The goofy sensibilities that fueled the original game are back in full force in subtle and obvious ways, and employed to different effects. Max's new face is different but Also Good. A total success. It's unbelievable that these games are so good.

ps2 smt vibes genuinely untouchable, no video game will ever look this good ever again, few video games will ever sound this good again, and smt will be chasing these vibes forever. untouchable.

A rare game that is About Politics and specifically About Communism in a way that suggests the people who made it actually understand what they're talking about and have a passionate interest in exploring the subject matter. To say that's all it is would be really reductive though - it's almost fucked up how wide I Was a Teenage Exocolonist's ambitions extend, especially considering how successfully I think it hits all the notes it aims for. A game that really asks you to consider what is valuable in the act of living, and to approach that question from many angles, some of them challenging. Beautiful thing, imo.

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It's got a billion songs AND the most robust RPG mechanics yet in the series. Total package imo. I love the theatrhythm series and this is a great one!

imagine if they made a cold steel game that had........characters in it....characters who had things like "story arcs" and "personalities" and "relationships with each other" and who "did stuff" and "who the story was about." Imagine if anything at all happened and the conflicts both large and small scale affected the characters but were also inherently dramatically interesting and sensical. What a fucking world.

Cold Steel 3 inherits a lot of problems from its two predecessors (largely having like fifteen main characters from that game show up to eat screentime and continue having absolutely fuck all to do with anything), and the series' absolute refusal to have Rean Schwarzer be even remotely capable of ever doing anything bad or wrong for any reason at any point in his life is probably at its most ridiculous and most dramatically suffocating here. Let him be a war criminal! It's the only thing that makes sense! Let him be a war criminal and feel bad about it! That's okay! It's okay to have a guy do bad stuff the game isn't real it makes him more interesting!

DESPITE THESE ENORMOUS AND GLARING FLAWS the stuff I said in the first paragraph is the stuff that shines for most of the game; the new cast is one of the best the series has had, Rean, despite being the locus of most of the problems here, is at his most likable and uh, written, ever, by a wide margin, and Cold Steel as a series finally feels like it has anything interesting at all happening on the macro scale, finally ready to admit that the fascist empire is uh, Bad, and, Fascist, and that these things are problems that need to be addressed but are politically volatile. Maybe not the absolute cream of trails but it hit really well for me, close to the top of my personal list I think.

I personally prefer Zero to this one in terms of tone and atmosphere and general vibes; getting to know spaces and the people in them and ingratiating with a community is my favorite part of these games and Zero's probably always gonna be the best one of these for that, just by the nature of its setting. You can see a lot of the seeds of What's About To Go Horribly Wrong with this series in Cold Steel actually planted here - Lloyd gets a huge dose of Clueless Harem Anime Guy Disease for no reason, they start hiding stuff essential to characters' stories in exclusive scenes tied to how well you've filled up their secret friendship meters, and you can only watch one per playthrough! All that shit starts here really, just more quietly.

That said, I don't think any other Trails game goes as hard for as long or as dramatically as Azure does. Crossbell just has the best cast in the franchise, easy, no question, (rivaled, MAYBE, only by the cold steel 3 kids) and the game tries hard to do right by pretty much everyone here, and succeeds, I think! Wise tweaks to the battle system too, lots of sick boss fights with unique mechanics. I GET it. I GET why this is a popular favorite in the series. It's a sick game.

i wrote a big long review about how emotionally affected i was by this game but i didn't even mention that every time the main character talks to a woman she pops a huge boner and forgets how to talk for thirty seconds and it's pretty good every time

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Memoire 0079 checks a lot of my boxes: a deep love for tomino-era UC gundam, a sense of disconnectedness from one's body that blurs into something simultaneously passionate and ghostly, a virulent sense of loathing for abusive systems of power and callousness that perpetuates them, and games where you're clicking around piecing bits and pieces of stuff together to form a mosaic of history for yourself by the end of it all. Memoire 0079 spices its really well done historical narrative with some really sincere and gutting character writing and I think it all comes together into something totally successful.

i think this is just like a genuinely incredible remake of a great game, like i am a huge remake hater on principle but if you're gonna do it I think this is a solid example of how to: art by the same artist but in his modern style; a new localization that is more accurate to the original game; subtle tweaks to the gameplay that bring in a lot of pleasant features from other games in the series but NOT getting rid of any of the stuff that's unique about this game even if it would have made things more convenient; unobtrusively cutting some content to make things pace more smoothly; gender and sex stuff doing laps around almost every other game, comically so; preserving the visual and audio styles of the original even with an overhaul of the color pallet. Whole thing rocks. Best bunch of girls in the series also you just can't forget about that. Not a loser among them. I love how weird and sad everybody can get. Obviously not a game for adults but I appreciate that they dare to imply a world beyond the imagination of children.

It turns out all they had to do to make me unequivocally like a persona game was take out all the shit i hate and make all the characters likable, who knew! It's also I think a really good Etrian Odyssey spinoff - close enough to its parent series to scratch that itch for me but with enough unique and well thought out gameplay systems and and its own sense of balance for it to feel distinct from its parent series. Really cool thing altogether I think.

i try really hard not to be that guy and i swear to god i'm not posting ironically or whatever but every time i think about dead souls i think it gets a little closer to being my favorite like a dragon game, like give it a couple more months and i think it's gonna pass yakuza 3 for me

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Feels much more like the blueprint for what SMT would become than the original Megami Tensei RPG does, and despite being a narratively linear famicom game you could really plop almost everything here into an smt game any time from the last twenty years and I think it would go down really well. There's a lot of bold, rowdy stuff in this game, from the stark opening imagery to the tutorial dunking on the first game and also gamers in general to the playable maiming sequence in the middle to the demon on demon politics that pervade the first several acts of the game, I was hooting and hollering all the way through it. Even once it settles into a more typical story by the standards of what the series would become I found a lot of reward here.

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i haven't finished deus ex but i played like two thirds of it before i went out of town for a weekend in july and completely forgot it existed OOPS and despite EVERYTHING about it that is easy to raise your eyebrows at and despite the TURGID racism it's just like, one of those games where every five minutes you're like holy shit dude i get it. i so get it. it's fuckin deus ex.

they made deirdre like REALLY horny for nancy in this one so it's likely to end up pretty high on my personal nancy drew ranking in the end, but it being one of the best Nancy Drew games on top of that does help its case a lot i will admit

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i would say this has basically all the problems and all the good parts that every one of these has, but the problems are not quite as bad as usual and the good parts are more creative than usual so it balances out into something pretty good by the series' standards!

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sometimes you play a game and you just see the next like four decades unfold in front of your eyes and you're like shit dude that's fucking video games. there's games coming out in 2023 with mechanics identical to this motherfucker and they're still good. sick game. dope game. wizardry.

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bro imagine doom okay? you got it? alright imagine that but they got stairs. i know dude. blew my fuckin mind too

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I'm such a fucking sucker for the specific kind of high tech for the time analog computer magical stuff that megami tensei sets up but i'm ALSO such a fucking sucker for the bizarro flying pyramid "what if a weird guy talked to you" that is the other side of the coin of these games and ALSO i love dungeon crawlers so yeah man i'm thinkin i'm digital devel story

review of this game and its sequel's combined remakes

Now this might be the game that makes me the most actively angry on this list the most often but it is also the game that singlehandedly stopped me from picking my self-harm habit back up in September so who can say whether it is good or bad

alright that's only like 10% actual Persona 5 and like 90% because I spend most of my insomniac hours reading Persona 5 fanfiction these days (i'm branching out lately though because i'm actually starting to run out of p5 stuff lol) and if you wanna hear about some of that please check out this 8500 word review i made right here on backloggd dot com that i love to get attention for

i know. i know. sorry. i know. i'm so sorry. the upside down castle sucks so much.

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i can't believe you've done this (made me transition from 'cal kestis liker' to 'bitch who will say things like actually i think the writing in the cal kestis game is pretty good')

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really loses the charm of the cutscenes but is also just like WILDLY more ambitious and weird in its level design and that's always gonna get me like catnip

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DEMONSTRABLY worse in every way than its prequel BUT it's got those live action cutscenes and they're SO fuckin good

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Do I desperately miss the stories and the business management elements? Yes.

Is the handling of gender and bodies cowardly and prejudiced? Yes.

Is there a BAFFLING lack of a neckware option? Yes.

Do I get a bigger rush than anything else in my entire life when someone deems my avatar worth making a thoughtful outfit for, or when they like an outfit that I made for them? Yeah man. Yeah. Sorry. Can't help it. Nothing like it.

This is not particularly exciting to me as far as Inkle games go, and this is perhaps reflected by the way that I haven't gone back to play any of the rest of these that continue to gather dust on my phone, but I DO love gamebooks and I think this is a well-written and charmingly illustrated one, and Inkle adapts it really well. It's just ultimately not doing anything particularly interesting in any of its pedigrees

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I actually think that fire emblem is really good, it mostly ends up this low on the list because 1. i know my taste well enough that I don't really play a lot of games i'm at risk of DISliking these days, and 2. i just don't like tactics rpgs very much at the end of the day, so even though i am actually like TURBO impressed by everything that's packed into this game it doesn't ultimately move my spirit much.

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This game has all the same problems that Cold Steel 2 has but I find its core tension of taking place entirely before things break bad in the fascist empire, with the kid protagonists only dimly aware of how fucked up things are but the player and all the adults present very KEENLY aware that the pot is boiling over in the background of the game's events and nobody knows when exactly things are gonna explode, I find that really fun IN THEORY. Unfortunately the game is itself monumentally unprepared to turn this stuff into actual tension so despite good details and the occasional well played moment it doesn't really capitalize well on any of its really juicy setups, something that will become a consistent theme with the cold steel games

In trying to make a game that iterates upon and one ups its predecessor I find that TOTK wrings everything I liked about BOTW right out of the experience. I LIKED how sparse so much of the map was, how much of your time was spent filling things in for yourself, softly clinking around with only the steady rhythms of the shit on your back bouncing around to mark your passage.

TOTK is absolutely stuffed with shit to do and it makes things feel a lot less like they exist in a place to me. It doesn't help that I think the writing in this game is the most like actual dogshit peepee poopoo baby garbage I've ever seen, like actually embarrassing. Set aside the racism (it is unbelievably racist), I think everything happening in the story is like actively sub-the quality (quality as in tangible quality not like, how good or bad it is) of media for five year olds. What the fuck happened guys.

I also hate every single new mechanic, everything new about this game is essentially repulsive to my sensibilities.

Misfire on every level for me.

Trails games will always be kind of ugly coward liberal games politically but TRULY I don't think it's possibly to plumb deeper depths of Both Sides nonsense bullshit than this one. That would be bad enough but like you can't do that while ALSO indulging in all the bad 2010s pop light novel shit AND wasting one of your most fertile settings. Cold Steel 1 really sets this one up to fail but they beef it IMPRESSIVELY badly. Nadir of the franchise.

when a hot girl has no swag :'(
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i like how the game is beautiful in every possible aesthetic way but i don't like how it's possibly the most unpleasant video game to play of all time!

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