Not quite as good storywise as Judgement but the combat in this is insane.
Moment to moment experience is much MUCH better compared to Y0 and first judgement. You get to skip all pointless busywork from early on once you get a crazy fast skateboard, if it's not enough you can also use the taxi from anywhere finally (why did the other games not let you call a taxi lmao). Letting me skip tedious running around the map and the excellent combat pushed me into completing the most side content in these games so far. I ended up doing 40/54 side cases and completed all school stories.

Speaking of school stories, They're pretty much exactly what I wanted from the side stories in Y0 and judgement. They're much more expansive and significant than any given side story in Y0 and judgement, and they're tied together into a single overarching plot. It's a full fledged story that exists next to the standard main story of the game. Gameplay wise they're a mixed bag. About half the clubs are pretty fun I'd say, boxing club being the standout. But you also have stuff like the girls' bar and robotics club which are an exercise in tedium.

When I say the combat is on the level of pure action games I'm not kidding. Lost judgement keeps the cool stuff they introduced in the first game like wall jump and leapfrog, but crane style and tiger style have been massively overhauled. Tiger style is now no longer a one size fits all solution, crane and tiger now complement each other. On top of that you can now instantly style switch(which cancels certain animations) and receive 2 new styles. All styles have insane amounts of moves to them, they all fill different roles and you're encouraged to switch between them frequently. This results in amazing potential for creativity, just watch some combo mads on YouTube for reference.

Unfortunately, while bosses are generally great, it feels like the regular enemies can't keep up with your options. They often simply die too fast, to the point that I recommend not leveling your damage until very far in the game. Even aside from the low health, the regular enemies could really benefit from more variety. They have similar movesets and all exhibit the same behavior. When you swarm the player with enemies, you often have to compromise to make the encounter more fair. The way they do it is by making all regular enemies stand around and do nothing most of the time, this is just too simplistic of a solution. In a way it's something they brought upon themselves, almost all enemies in lost judgement have some moves that are not reliably reactable and have indistinct audio cues, so you can't have them be agressive when they're in large quantities.
I hope in a future judgement game that they keep the excellent combat but work on the enemy design, give them more variable behavior, give every move a clear audio/animation telegraph and for the love of god get rid of the Agony and Blind status ailments, shit's gay af.

Shinji Mikami demonstrates again that he can make a very competent action game. Kamiya should take a course from him on implementing gimmicks seamlessly. Seriously.
I do have some gripes though. The licensed music is 30x better than the filler tracks, having no lock on is painful(especially when trying to grapple) and enemies that can't be touched without first calling in assists are annoying and borderline colorcode design which I hate. I also really wish one of these "rhythm-action" games would let you attack on more variable timings than just quarter and half notes to a 4/4 beat.
But overall... it's a good time. The visual style puts many recent AAA releases to shame while asking a FRACTION of their required computing power. Animations look impressively natural despite the contraints of having to be tied to a certain cadence. While not landing often for me in terms of comedy the character dynamics are quite charming in a way that isn't really seen often nowadays, especially at a higher budget. Also the licensed songs are stellar.
I doubt many releases this year will be able to match the care and SOUL put into Hi-Fi Rush.


Xbox can finally claim they have a game now lol

Unlike RE0 this one actually doesnt suck. Enjoyable, scratches that puzzle exploration itch. Only issue I have really is the doors in the mansion, it asks too much memorization work to remember what kind of key each door requires since theyre visually identical. You end up wasting a lot of time trying out every door whenever you get a new key.
It also felt bizarre to me just how few enemies the game threw at me by the last third even though I was loaded with guns and ammo. I played Jill on normal mode though, maybe it's a different story on hard but im not interested in finding out.
If I had to choose a survival horror I'd probably still play silent hill over this, even if resident evil 1 admittedly has better level design than any SH. I just dont find managing a super small inventory all that fun, even 8 slots on Jill feels suffocating.

It's all right, probably about as good as you can get as a remake.
I ended up preferring the original, it's more attractive to me. The remake has this really dark and hazy look to it with most of the game having a very elevated black level that makes the game appear desaturated. The new soundtrack is also just a bunch of white noise, the original soundtrack gave the game a certain character that this remake misses for me. I also didn't really gel with how the script and characters have changed, a lot of them come across as crass or annoying, leon and claire basically don't interact in the remake which is really odd to me. The sherry stealth part in claire's story stood out as a particularly low point for me, it's a very typical modern AAA game type deal where interactivity is essentially ignored in favour of the player having to sit out a setpiece.
Highlight for me in the remake was in the sewers, that's the area that got redone most extensively and didn't give me the feeling I'm playing an inferior looking version of a game I like. All enemy redesigns were great as well, particularly the lickers and the plants.

Against all odds I managed to finish this game. Unlike other open world games I think this one has a little more meat to its combat, so it manages to stay interesting enough to finish the main quest at least. Unfortunately the whole experience is dragged down by unnecessary busywork and tacked on mechanics that are just there to cross off the obligatory AAA open world game checklist, it makes the experience much more annoying and tedious than it should be.
It also features by far the worst character writing in a Sony first party title - that is no small feat.