I feel crazy with this one. I keep hearing people calling it the first soulslike to rival From Software’s games, and… I just don’t see it? This still was a very mediocre experience. Yes, this is probably the only soulslike that comes close to doing things that Fromsoft are doing in their games at their level, but that says more about the priorities and quality of most other soulslikes than of Lies of P’s good qualities. Mind you, this is an okay, competently made game, with an interesting idea for a narrative, but it’s not even close to Fromsoft level. It feels like a retread of everything I have seen in From’s games, but on a smaller scale and in a less interesting way. There’s the regenerating health from Bloodborne, there’s the prosthetic arm from Sekiro, there’s modular weapons mechanic that’s reminiscent of Bloodborne, there's a gothic Victorian city from Bloodborne. But unlike those games, this game doesn’t have some kind of idea upon which everything is built. It isn't focused around parrying like Sekiro, or aggressiveness like Bloodborne, or RPG customizability like Dark Souls. It tries to do all those things a little bit, and ends up doing all of them mediocrely.

And the overall quality of the game is not on a very good level. Level design is unimaginative and too formulaic, writing and voice acting feels stiff and boring, art direction is unimpressive, combat is just okay. Final nail in the coffin of my playthrough was bosses - they are so focused on being crushingly punishing and difficult, that it stops being fun. Lies of P overall is focused on precision on the player's part way too much. It’s like this game doesn’t understand its own inspiration - where in Dark Souls hard difficulty was there to cloak players in a dreadful and suspenseful atmosphere, there it feels like the bosses are hard just for the sake of it. Like the game feels pressured to have bosses that are harder than that of its competitors, just for the sake of it. Of course, it’s good to make a game that focuses on different things than your inspiration. But this game doesn’t feel like it focuses on anything in particular, or like it has any certain vision. It feels like Lies of P game design is purely reactionary to its contemporaries in the “soulslike” genre and “git gud” culture that’s formed around them.

By the time I finished writing this I feel like maybe I’m focused too much on comparisons to From’s games and being too reductive, but I think this game justifies it - it's just too derivative and too stale. I find nothing of note to say about its positive qualities except that it’s just a competent videogame.

This seems very overrated... I don't get it
I'm guessing it's one of those games people love due to the nostalgia of playing it when it came out. Not discrediting how ahead of its time it is for 2007, it is refreshing for a game to have this aesthetic when every shooter in the 2000s looked so ugly with the brown filter. The art direction is really good and probably the strongest aspect for me.
However, as good as the atmosphere is I can't get over how the story is told through hundreds of voice memos you find that are hard to pay attention to while you're shooting. It makes it really hard to connect and be invested in it. People praise bioshock's story so much and then... that's it?
The gameplay is clunky and for me it wasn't that much fun. Maybe I'm spoiled by today's standards but it just didn't click, even with all the different plasmids it's still very basic and it just got very repetitive.
And lastly, what made me quit is that technically it's a mess. I tried installing all the patches, tweaking the settings and everything but it's a mess. I managed to stop it crashing randomly mid gameplay but it still crashes constantly just by opening the map or saving the game. And you do have to save constantly cause you never know when it might crash again and make you lose progress. It just got too frustrating and I felt like I was making too much of an effort for an experience that wasn't that rewarding.

Leading up to the release of Persona 3 Reload, this was probably the most excited for a game i had ever been. Having only played P4G and P5R this was the last of the modern Persona stories to venture through and it did not disappoint.

With probably my favorite story of the three, P3R tackles themes of death and finding a meaning to life through not just the over arching main story but even through social links, particularly the moving social link with Akinari and the heartfelt Aigis social link. The main party cast is introduced pretty early into the story with their storylines overlapping other characters story lines which i found to be the most effective character story telling as oppose to Royal’s “one character arch at a time” method of story telling as i felt like it took away from characters later on in the game when it’s not a characters turn to have the spotlight, they just kinda get put in the backseat for someone else’s moment.

Reload’s social links has had quite possibly my favorite of the persona games with my favorites being the before mentioned Akinari and Aigis, along with Maiko, Yuko, Bebe, and Mutatsu. Though with every Persona game there’s bound to be a few misses, and for me I didn’t particularly care for Kenji, Maya or Keisuke. The game does have the downside of not being able to have a social link with the male party members, however there is an opportunity to spend time with them at night which helps get to know the character a little bit more, but i would have enjoyed a fully fleshed out social link more.

The music as does every Persona game completely rocks and this game might have my favorite of them all. The mall theme, the battle themes, the credits theme… what a stellar soundtrack.

The game does come with its downsides however. Primarily, i found myself just meandering around in between full moons with not much to do at times (especially at night, which is a problem i experience with every Persona game) just waiting around for the next full moon to come for the next big event to happen, and due to that the pacing felt a little sluggish. And the controversial Tartarus can get really boring and repetitive really fast, though the game does add a new background area every few dozen floors and a few elements to focus on (i.e. the grand clock, missing people, monad doors and passage ways), though they can only do so much with the tiring Tartarus. And some boss fights within Tarturus were annoyingly gimmicky to face (fuck you table)

Persona 3 Reload offered an amazing play through with its lovable cast of characters, addicting and fast paced turn based combat, stellar soundtrack and beautifully tragic story. With some minor criticisms that i mostly forgive, I absolutely adored this game and 100% recommend it to any JRPG fan.

it's 2:30 am after fighting the final boss for like an hour and a half straight, because its fight is just that long, and this sort of feels like it perfectly sums up my second-biggest issue with xenoblade 3, which is that it doesn't respect your time. sidequests are filler, dialogue and animations and battles in general are all plodding and drag their feet, much moreso than the previous two games despite those being similar "80-hour jrpg" affairs. xenoblade 3 just feels like it's 20 hours longer than it has to be because of fluff and because of thoughtless design.

speaking of thoughtless - that's my biggest complaint. so much of the world is just sort of, put forward as a given, in ways that make me wonder what's going on at monolith soft. i don't think anyone needs me to tell them why the tirkin are weird, but this game is just FULL of shit like that. bizarre worldbuilding decisions where the writers desperately want to have their cakes and eat them too. no one MADE them write it like this. i can't say much more without spoilers but so much of this is fumbled royally.

and yet, at the core of everything there is a certain refined xenoblade charm that remains there. i know i've front loaded this review with negative things i have to say. i dropped this game for like a year halfway through before i could finally finish it in 2024, and that's not for no reason. playing this game on hard mode is pretty miserable. but i came back for that certain something, and i don't regret doing so either. the thing about how much of this they Fumbled is that in saying so i'm intentionally implying they had something with potential here. and in a lot of cases they really get the most out of the concepts they're playing with. sena's side story is just really good, dude! i'm outta steam but yeah it's a Pretty Good Game provided you have a tolerance for those long-stretching 60+ hour jrpgs.

It's Star Wars-flavoured Dark Souls, essentially.

A pretty simple "go here to get this thing" story, with a cast of interesting characters and fun set-pieces. Weirdly, even as someone who has played all of the Soulsborne games I really struggled with the combat at points. Still, it's a fun ride, Merrin is a cutie and the final chapter is a blast.

I've heard that Survivor improves on this in every way so I'm looking forward to playing that (now that they've fixed the bugs).