I mean, it's not Dark Souls II, but I'll take it.

A game made for a very niche audience (people whose favorite Quake is the first one, and people who also really enjoy Soviet aesthetics), which should immediately endear me to it, but it also understandably lacks a lot of the polish and creativity that Quake has. If the far superior Dusk or Amid Evil weren't enough for you, grab this on sale.

They make Barret regret his strategy of blowing up Mako reactors later in the game, but don't worry babe, I know you were always in the right.

On one hand, this game completely shits the bed in the third act and has absolutely no idea what to do with itself when it ends, the 'moral choice' is the most moronic seventh gen tripe, and despite its posing, it has very little of value to say about politics.

On the other hand, it has probably the most engrossing and atmospheric game world ever created and I've memorized basically every line of dialogue over the 20+ playthroughs I've done, so who really knows how good it is?

Played this under the false assumption that it was the sequel to Shadow over Mystara, so I was gonna make a bunch of complaints about how it felt slight in comparison to that game, but now that game makes much more sense as an evolution of this. Anyway, pretty mid!

Trying to make D&D into a beat-em-up was probably the best decision in 1996, but now it just kind of feels like making an arcade game out of My Dinner with Andre. They certainly try to make the social/roleplay elements work, but it feels pretty slight, especially in comparison to the plethora of CRPGs that were out at the exact same time, so they just made it like if Golden Axe had an inventory system and a couple of fork in the road points.

Has a bunch of weird little quibbles - the pointless time limit, the stinginess of spray cans on certain stages, stricter collision detection for grinding - that hold it back, but it has such a clarity of vision that when they made Future two years later, they kept the structure, story, and core gameplay loop essentially the same.

One of the most artistic, stylistic, and mechanically cohesive games ever made, trapped on a console that will literally self-destruct if left untouched.

Nintendo (at least before Breath of the Wild) got a lot of flak for not experimenting enough with Zelda, so they would occasionally hand the franchise over to Capcom, where they would mix genuinely interesting mechanics (shrinking into the Minish world) with the stupidest shit you've ever seen (Kinstones, the figurine collection).

If I was a seven year old playing this in 1990, I don't think I would like video games anymore.

Basically the video game equivalent of a movie you watch on an airplane and think "yeah, that was pretty good."

In a just world, Square would remake this, a game actively struggling against the rigid boundaries of telling a story on the Super Nintendo on practically every level, rather than a PS1 game perfectly capable of speaking for itself.