For what it's worth, I think this is a testament to how beautifully this game has aged. It's more of the same Persona 3 that you have played before either through Portable or the original, but sprinkled with fairy godmother dust. It's a gorgeous game, the UI is incredible to just stare at, just like Persona 5.

A lot of people will simplify this to "just Persona 5-ifying Persona 3", and they wouldn't be wrong to make that assumption. Certain QoL features, like the Network surveys, trivialize the need for a guide to follow for quiz answers and what to do on a daily basis. Though most are a welcome addition, such as the limit break like theurgy system, or the Monad Passageways. I played through the game with my party on Act Freely to relive that experience I had just like the first time I played FES all those years ago. The game was easier in the later half once I switched over to direct command.

It's a true remake in the best of case: making the game prettier than ever, while adding minor modern changes to improve that experience for newer fans.

What a disappointment... but I should've expected this, especially after the previous two games. Dawn of Dreams does a lot to change the formula in a bad way. While the parter system is novel, it's proven worthless when your partner can't stay alive, and if they are alive are barely noticeable in combat. The game is entirely too bloated with multiple stages and bosses being reused. The worst part of it all is how lackluster the story is. Even with 2 which I still think is the weakest game, the story was at least engaging enough to keep me going through. Where as the story here takes a huge shift from what is expected. Like others have said going "full blown anime" was a detriment to this game as the story is by far the weakest part of this game.

I've grown to be a surveyor of Jank and weird C to Single-A games. For every B-Boy and Shinobi, You have games like this. Without Warning is a game with a lot of potential.

From a technical aspect, the game runs like a bag of dog shit. Constant 19fps and frame rate drops with some of the most obnoxious repeating banter from the totally not racist stereotypical terrorists make for an unbearable listening experience. The premise of constantly changing characters that all indirectly affect one another's paths in the timeline, Is severely undercooked. Often you are playing as the three-man spec-ops group as they kill mooks in an arcadey run-and-gun auto lock-on shooter. Objectives are pretty much always the same: Free hostages, clear the area, and defuse the bombs.

This gets increasingly repetitive when these missions are bite-sized and can be beaten in less than 5 minutes. There are other characters such as the security guard, the secretary, and the news cameraman. The Security Guard's levels are just like the Spec-Ops team but with a pistol instead. The beginning of the game is a lot of back and forth between these 4 gun-wielding characters into the later third. The last two aren't introduced until the last couple of missions, and sadly only have a handful of missions between them. The pacing of these characters should've been added in between these shootouts. Since it goes in chronological order, you sit there thinking "Wait, where were they for 4 hours of this situation?"

For the quickness of the levels, there are a lot of them and I feel the game would've been better gutting half of them to give better credence to the 3 nonmilitary characters. For 50 whole levels, you spend most of the time with a majority of the characters doing the same thing, and that thing isn't even done well.

My interest waned in the latter half due to this repetitiveness. while the introduction is strong as hell and I wanted to give it a fair shake, but after rolling credits, it'll probably collect dust until an eventual trade-in.

Listen, do not let the naysayers steer you away from this fucking raw ass game. Once you get used to analog-controlled combat, the game is a poignant Metroidvania with deeper puzzle-solving. I can best describe this as a 2006 Straight to DVD action movie in game form and it's so amazing to see until the credits roll.

While there is some annoying difficulty spikes towards the later half of the game that makes surviving the extreme backtracking the real challenge, It was all worth it for that finale. That final boss goes down as the best final boss I've ever faced in a video game. I'm not being hyperbolic.

What happens when you combine a rhythm game with a character action game?

, in theory, this should be my GOTY, as both of my favorite genres meshed into one, but for me, the rhythm elements took away from an otherwise breathless experience. The story and the characters are amazing. There were many laugh-out-loud moments and the art direction is top-notch. Even when it switches to FMV or the comic book-esque rundowns it still looks so clean.

For me combat was visceral. I loved the combos and mix-matching with your gang to combo people, but the rhythmic timing was a little off. At first, I thought it was my frame rate being too high and capped it at 60. Then I thought it was my latency and tested and recalibrated it for almost an hour. I just couldn't hit anything on time and it threw me off for most of the game. Luckily this game is beatable without having to be super precise with your controls.

I dug this a lot. I want to go back to it on consoles or on Steam Deck eventually to see if the latency issues continue.

This is like a wet fart as a game. If I wasn't playing the legendary edition I wonder how much of this game I would've loathed more. There's so much to unpack story-wise, that I don't think BioWare thought about certain parameters actually being met come the finale. There are two literal walking plot devices in the party and the main one that you waited three games for is regulated to a background character after their introduction.

The overabundance of "hey let's chill at the bar" character interactions was annoying especially with what's at stake currently in the galaxy. Hanging out and getting to know my party members was the highlight of the second game, but in this game, they didn't even have some background catching up to talk about. They become just one-liners until you see them somewhere else. And for a game that pushed so much one-on-one time with these characters, It felt forced at this rate. Certain characters didn't get a proper ending to their built-up arcs over the years.

Story aside, while once again the gunplay and moment-to-moment gameplay are improved, something is adversely affected by it. This time it's a compound of a bunch of small things. While guns have better modification and distinct use cases, the weight system is a really neat feature to stop the class-based limitations, and the combo systems with powers make for more engaging firefights, not being able to just put your gun away is weird. Planet scanning is annoying with the Reapers chasing you for hitting scan one time. Side quests being regulated to scans and random pickups and eavesdropping made them boring to do.

I guess that's the best way to put it. This game is boring, not because the story wasn't engaging or the gameplay was, but because after trekking through 2 games of build-up, I expected more. My disappointment just compounded when there wasn't a "man that was all worth it" moment. I slogged through unbearable gauntlets of firefights only to end off with a lackluster finale, and I'm not talking about the ending, but the entire third game.

I'm left amazed at the vast improvement Mass Effect 2 is. The core gameplay has been refined and tweaked to make the firefights and biotic slinging that much more impactful. Along with some superb storytelling. From the bombastic opening, I was hooked more into this game than I was in the first game which left a sour taste in my mouth coming into this game. I thought of this game more like a training arc between the first game and the second game that allowed me to truly explore the galaxy at my leisure. Being able to see the slums of Omega to the Love Hotels of Illum made the galaxy feel as full of life as it implied.

The last goal I set for myself for the year
"Beat the Mass Effect Trilogy"

I'm conflicted on this introduction because usually this is where I would go, "Aw man I've been missing out this game was amazing", but that's the last of my impressions from beating this game.

While the story was pretty captivating, I could feel this not being the full story even when defeating the final boss. That kinda rubbed me wrong because I didn't feel complete. Of course, I will be going straight into the second game, but from the many forgettable feeling side quests, to the extremely lackluster gameplay; I never felt locked in to my play through.

Gunplay feels gross, and as an Adept, most of my powers looked cool and felt cool when they worked, but navigating the maze that is the menu system in the heat of combat was a headache. Most times, using abilities other than throw disrupted the flow of combat. I never really got comfortable. Yet it wasn't necessary because of how easy the game was even after bumping it up to Hard.

I often forgot that my party members were more than extra bodies in combat. By limiting my ability to speak to them other than on the ship, I found myself interacting with them only to get the same couple of one-liners instead of sitting there and talking about what just happened. This was on brand I guess with my renegade choices, but when serious shit is happening, like life or death of an entire species of that exact party member, i expect more dialog.

There's a bunch more I can hark on that I hope will be immediately changed in 2. Such as the horrible Mako sections, the Myriad of glitches and softlocking from shitty geometry and physics, or the empty planets to survey that's basically busy work. But I have high expectations for the series and hope that a lot of my negative reactions are averted in the second game.

I traded Naruto Clash of Ninja 3 for this game years ago at a Con and never played it until now. An always loved trope of mine is JRPGs in modern settings. I loved the premise, though dumb as hell if you analyze it hard enough, it was enough to keep me going until the end. What really stood out to me was the amount of animations within just standard dialogue. For a PS1 game, I didn't expect that much detail.


The battle system was pretty fun once I got the hang of it. Though, it felt limited because of how few of the guns differentiate themselves. My biggest complaint would have to go to the gun customization. It's maddening that it's treated as a one use item with no chance to think about what to use it for. The same could go for BP. I could use the BP to maximize damage on a gun, but then I could just use a tool to bring those BP over to the new gun, or I could take the passives on this gun and bring it over. It was very frustrating trying to plan out my upgrade path, especially on a blind play through because I didn't know when I would find "my" gun.

I think for me from a historical standpoint it's really cool what was done here, but can't see myself going back to this game ever. I hope that the second game rectifies some of these complaints and continues on with an otherwise intriguing story along with even more intriguing gameplay.

A fun replay with the Mrs for spooky month. While its surprising how fine this game has aged, a part of me was thinking the entire playthrough, "Why don't I just play the remake?". Yet as I played I kept trying to figure out why a remake was even made for a game that can still scare me like it did when I played in 6th grade.

Dismemberment and the thrill of fighting off Necromorphs is still a tense feeling that makes the game for me. This time playing, though, I found myself not really scared as my wife was, but more so hyper fixated on the inner workings of the Ichimura. Issac being the repairman isn't talked about enough. Slowly fixing the ship and traveling to that Tram station made me feel like an accomplished mechanic. Seeing the debris cleared and rotors restarting gave me more accomplishment than fighting claw demons. For me, the necromorphs started to become a burden to my fun little space repairman game.

I'll be hopping into the rest of the series after finishing up some other titles.

I expected nothing, and I'm surprised that I really did get that.

I've kept myself as blind as possible before going into this game, other than whom the main antagonist was from the reveal trailer. I really only wanted Peter from the first game and Miles from the Second fused into one game with some upgraded abilities. I think the luster of these games are kinda wearing off for me. Essentially replaying the same city with the same side quest type, with the same combat shared between both Spider-Man made the game feel familiar, but It didn't really do anything extraordinary.

The out of suit sections dragged on a little too long, the story is great, but the characters are really weak this time around. Most of the abilities that you get further in the game all feel samey, even though they might look differently. Honestly, if this game wasn't so short and easy to 100%, I probably could've enjoyed each power. Or if Miles had more Venom powers while Peter had more Gadgets to differentiate them.

But, I'm also being extremely granular with my nitpicking here. Like I said, I genuinely expected nothing to wow me, just more of the same but polished better with more cool stuff happening, and I got that. Just like Ratchet and Clank before, once you make something killer on the first try, making the sequels feel "worth it" per se is hard to do. At least with a R&C there might be different planets and weapons, but here I'm playing through the same game for the third time now with a different big bad. Which....is what I wanted.... and I enjoyed my time, but I just feel really conflicted about this game in my memory say 5 years from now.