Took me a few times to get into it. Such a radical departure from previous FFs in terms of tableaus. Materia is fun, the story is stymied by the PS1 era translation. Watch out for the edgy ableist slurs!

Clever little tech demo that did something truly amazing in its time. The puzzles were not terribly challenging, but the joy in the motions of solving them carries the game.

The story is camp, the combat is so complex it's ridiculous, and the best part: nanomachines, son.

The concept of "Open world Mario" sounds rancid, but it works. Opening up the moons to be gotten one after the other makes the mission-esque nature of old games nigh unbearable. Still, it felt a bit soulless compared to the personality of Galaxy/Sunshine.

Let's make this clear: it's certainly not what you're expecting. It's a perfectly serviceable collect-athon, that makes 100% feel feasible and mildly exciting to get. If you commit to doing a lot of the dex entries as the story progresses, the game feels much better paced. It is still a checklist at the end of the day however.

If you thought Dark Souls was hard, learning the rhythm of Bloodborne felt impossible. I only did it because I'm a real goth.

Beautifully quirky game that borrows heavily from both western and eastern RPG styles. The bullet hell combat juxtaposed with the humor and empathy of saving monsters ties the game up beautifully. My only complaint is it can feel almost too esoteric, and that I'd like to have gotten a perfect save on my first playthrough, since I qualified. Loading my save to end the game again was painless, but also somehow irritating.

The combat in Elden Ring is high octane, for better and for worse. It really tries to have its cake and eat it too, by making sorcery viable again it's become too powerful. The aggression in enemies feels oppressive without the fine tuning of Bloodborne. It is undeniably fun and addicting, but I would have liked the game to be designed to do all the content with one character/playthrough, or get locked into more discrete paths boss-wise.

A huge departure of the series, the exploration and puzzle solving is unique in that it encourages multiple solutions. Often there were shrines I accidentally broke to a solution by a crazy scheme, which I only found out after looking at a walkthrough. Needs more (unique) dungeons for a 5 star.

An all around excellent concept. The cult aspect is an amazingly fun and light God game, mixed with a very barebones roguelike dungeon crawler. The cult aspects felt too easy to brute force, and the combat was unexciting but got the job done. Regardless, I'm looking forward to a hypothetical Cult of the Lamb 2.