i had a pretty fun time going through this game and i definitely think the time spent playing was worth it. i found the combat to be pretty fun albeit by the end of the game way way too easy. if you spend time going through missions and getting decent equipment you can kinda bust this game open and make it a trivial experience by the time you're halfway through. i played through about 50% of the game's missions and decked zack the fuck out and had multiple equipment builds that just steamrolled all of the enemies. given, i played on normal since it was my first playthrough but i still was hoping there would be some challenge offered by the later portion of the game which there really wasnt. still, its funny enough to get to those later bosses and beat them in like 10 seconds before theyve put a dent into your health bar, and getting that busted equipment was a fun enough experience gameplay wise since before you get the good stuff it really feels like a climb where the game is against you when youre not quite strong enough yet. also the fucking battle slots mechanic is really funny to me and constantly had me thinking 99% of soldier operatives finish battles right before they hit it big

in terms of story i thought it was fine but i honestly just didnt care much for some of the new additions to the ff7 cast. angeal is fine, his whole "dreams and honor" talk is a bit overdone and just feels like buzzwords that are constant throughout the story, i honestly wouldnt have cared if he wasnt in the game but i didnt absolutely despise him. genesis though is such a lame ass character. i just dont think anything about him is interesting aside from his design, and his whole thing where a majority of his dialogue is just him in his own world quoting a story he likes is so ass to me, just a nothing character. everyone else in the cast is pretty good though, the returning characters from ff7 and zack are all pretty nice to be around in the story. looking at the story itself though, i feel like things were just paced very quickly here. maybe things just didnt feel as tense or emotional when i would just steamroll all of the enemies and bosses, but i tried to do missions in between chapters to at least try and stretch out the playtime, but it just feels like everything is paced so quickly and i just wish we couldve gotten more time to develop relationships between zack and some characters, or just not have as many moments where zack gets pulled away from what hes doing because of sudden conflict. for what story is there, i still liked what i got, but i just wish there was more.

lastly i wanna mention that i played this on the switch port which was something i was very skeptical about considering this is a game on all other current and previous gen platforms which always have been significantly more powerful than the switch. i gotta say though, it does a really great job and it surprised me how well the game performs. occasionally during some cutscenes there would be some random lag but nothing ever too intrusive on the experience, it was very stable the whole way through. given i figured that since its a psp game originally the switch wouldnt have too much trouble since it doesnt seem like too much was added to the game to make it more intensive, but just the fact that this game is on all other very well performing platforms and it can stack up ok to the others made me happy. if youre looking to play this game in the absolute most visually pleasing way possible, then you'll probably want to play it on something else, but if you dont care that much about the slight decrease in quality to accommodate the switch, this is definitely a valid option

this game is kinda unexpectedly amazing. me and 3 other friends booted this up with no knowledge except the fact it was like mario party but really long. we also didnt allow each other to look anything up at all, with a couple exceptions about a couple items, but it seriously was such a great experience that went so much further than we initially thought.

the game itself can be pretty unbalanced but you wont really notice some of these imbalances later on. for example, the alchemist class can just dupe items and consumable magic spells in their inventory as many times as they want which is already an insane skill if you get the right things in your inventory and sell any other garbage you have. on top of this, the alchemist gets a battle skill that lets you earn money based on how much damage you deal and take in a fight. if you use this ability on basic ass baby enemies and hit it with moves that do ~1000 damage, you instantly get 200000 gold. a friend figured this out, went to the casino area and just gambled a fuck ton with a loop he figured out with shop items in the casino area and eventually hit it big getting the best sword in the game and 50 million gold. if this friend hadnt been killed by another friend and all of that money hadnt slowly dwindled away, he would have won the game even after i beat the final boss and got the last reward. at the time i thought the game was over but i pressed on and progressed the plot anyway because i figured there was nothing else i could do. i did end up winning the game but it seriously was in contention for a little while when that huge sum of money kept passing hands. its moments like these and more that make me adore this game even if its so batshit insane with some of the stuff youre allowed to do in it. this game just makes for so many great moments like this that evoke so many emotions from everyone in the room playing.

i think even though this game has some crazy shit that really feels like it was either unintended or misunderstood how powerful it could really be, its the exact type of stuff that will make for such a good party game experience and will create stories within the game. it has to be the best party game experience ive ever had and might ever have. im convinced there will be no two campaigns of this game that will be the exact same and it makes me wanna go back and play again even after finishing it tonight. the long ass sessions me and my friends had after we were done with classes for the day made for such good memories i never thought i could have with a game. if you can convince 3 other people to play this game with you and spend about 30-40 hours together over the course of multiple sessions with no prior information about this game, please do. it will be some of the most fun youve had in a party game and it will have you dying to play more after each session

this game is awesome. theres so much to love with the style, the music, the way the game feels, overall i just had a great time with it. it is very difficult and i remember the first time i tried this game i turned it off pretty quickly because of the difficulty but trying it again now im happy i gave it a second chance even if i used save states a couple times here and there. honestly though i would love to go back to this some time and try to get better at it not dying as much or trying to go save stateless, i think i would find a much deeper appreciation for it on subsequent playthroughs

it was fine, i dont really feel too strongly. fun enough to at least play through. a couple weird platforming things where i would fall through platforms that it looked like i should have landed on, especially weird during the last level in a certain segment where i would land on the edge of a platform, stand still for a split second, then just fall through the floor and die. i feel like this game was a bit overhyped for me, i always saw people talk it up so much and it just kinda seems like a generic unoffensive platformer for the genesis

i think this game brings some new interesting gimmicks but its the same vectorman and honestly with a little bit of random filler and unfortunate cuts. i think i still enjoyed my time with this game as much as the first but theres still some of the same issues like the screen being too zoomed in at times and some new ones like the frequent reuse of level settings and gimmicks especially in the second half/last two thirds of the game. i genuinely thought i was going insane or my game was bugged when they did rollerblading level into asteroids shmup bonus level into digging level into rollerblading into digging into asteroids shmup into rollerblading. like this stretch of 7 levels thats just all the same gimmicks with no new backdrops or anything, what was point here?? just combine these levels into one or just do one of each, it just feels unnecessary to split them up like this. they do the same thing later on with the tank levels and having two back to back, why not just have one long one? i know vectorman 1 reused the backdrop from level 1 a few times in later parts of the game but even still the levels felt more unique overall there, this game just recycles so many things for no reason. i think in the same way that some of the levels could have just been mashed together into a longer one, some of the normal platforming levels felt too short here, and considering all of the boss fights are in separate stages it makes the levels feel like theres nothing to be prepared for at the end of each level, making them feel even shorter.

that aside there is still some good in this game and some newer things to look forward to. they still do transformations like the first game but now you can get them by killing certain enemies instead of having to destroy objects for item pickups that let you transform and theyre an all new set of transformations. also the game still holds up well with its style, the visuals are a bit changed here but i think its for the better and the music is still great. that said though i feel like theres some charm lacking from this game. they just kinda ditch any story explanation like the first game has and just have a cutscene at the start of the game and theres just some aspects like the bland credits sequence in comparison to the first game or after you beat the final boss you just get a shot of vectorman posing with the word "victory" above him. i dont really know anything about this game's release compared to the first but it just feels like this game didnt get as much time to work on as the first and it feels like its missing some of what made the first game special

i remember the first time i tried this i thought it was way too difficult and i just gave up. trying it again now though i persevered through the difficulty and im pretty glad i did. it feels pretty good to play, the levels are explorable, and the game is great stylistically. the game also has plenty of powerups and modes you can change into through item pickups as well as a few gimmick stages that help give the gameplay a little more variety, occasionally for the worse but usually for the better. there's a good level of challenge here but sometimes the challenge can be things that feel intentionally placed and sometimes the challenge is the screen is a little too tight and sometimes you just cant see things youre about to jump into or land on top of which can be really frustrating. i think the way the game is so zoomed in really brings it down a bit and its the root of a lot of the game's problems. if you can get over that issue though and power through i think youll have a pretty good time. also personally i used save states for this one, it just helps but i dont think its entirely impossible to do a run without them, its just gonna be hard

just so boring. i like the idea with the presents and how they can help you and can speed up the game but when you have nothing to help you in your inventory and youve been walking around slowly for the past like 5+ floors i just cant take it anymore. i try to be patient with slower games like this but the gameplay loop is just so so repetitive and slow and by the time i got 5 ship parts slowly walking around a world that constantly looks, feels, and plays the same i just feel drained on playing it and that im not gonna be missing out on anything from the second half of the game i have left

i like the idea of this game a lot with it's progression system of collecting power ups that let you turn into a super powered beast form to fight the stage boss. i also think its cool that each level with the exception of the last has unique transformations with unique attacks. i also think theres a bit of charm with the way the game looks and all the bit crushed voice clips and stuff. thats pretty much where the praise ends though. the game is just kinda janky as hell. theres all sorts of shit the happens that i find so dumb like getting hit during transformations, the way you can just jump and spam kick over and over again and it kinda works sometimes, the way you can get hit and not lose health sometimes but get hit by the same thing and lose health, just weird inconsistent stuff like that. also maybe im just stupid and didnt look around enough but i couldnt find anything like health pickups or extra lives, and the game doesnt have continues at all. even though the game is short its still kinda difficult and in a bad way that inflates the amount of time it takes to beat. i got to the final boss but had practically no health left and no lives, and i dont think its possible to not take damage to the final boss so it feels like you have to get there without taking any or minimal damage and lose no lives which i just cant do, so i gave up. overall, cool game concept, reallll shit execution

when i thought they couldnt do more with cuphead they surprised me, a few bosses here that have really interesting gimmicks and some other normal bosses that are just great. the final boss maybe drove me a little insane and i may have had to sleep on it before actually beating it. the new weapons and ms chalice are also a lot of fun to play with. i ended up playing as ms chalice for the whole dlc because it felt right, and even if she is a sort of "easy mode" i think the game is still plenty challenging when you play as her. idk if there's any more cuphead planned or if there's something completely new planned from the devs but whatever it is im excited to see whats next

game is fun, but could use a little more time in the oven. there really is some great stuff in here like the platforming, emerald powers, ability to switch characters from the hub world, and even trip, the new playable character who is a lot of fun and imo has a harder story that i felt was welcome. i think a lot of the levels in this game have great new gimmicks that are reminiscent of some of the great games in the series like mania and 3&k. also considering i didnt play origins plus it was cool to get to play as amy for the first time and it seems like she's becoming more of a mainstay in the playable characters again just like back during the sonic advance and sonic adventure time period which is great, more playable characters in sonic is something i love. i really wish though that a lot of the things in this game could be the same quality.

as far as the bosses go, i think they could be done a lot better here. they have a bait and attack sort of this going on where you have to wait for them to do their attack first before you can hit them back and sometimes that just takes way too long. the emerald powers circumvent this problem but if you struggle to get the emeralds or forget you even have them the bosses can be a bit tedious. its worse in trip's story where every boss has like twice as much health. also, on the topic of collection stuff in this game, the medals feel so pointless once you realize what theyre for. i kinda hated how they just left you in the dark on what customizing the robot meant just for it to end up being in one cutscene and used for one boss and never again because you scrap it. not to mention if you wanna customize your robot with any cool parts you better pony up those medals because you need a fuckton and by the time you fight the boss, unless youre going out of your way to grind medals, you're gonna end up seeing a shitty half finished metal sonic which is just no fun.

while i personally think its silly to nitpick the story of a sonic game there are some things here that i thought were really stupid to do with the story. for example, fang may as well not have been in this game. it feels like it was a selling point to show fang returning to a sonic game as more than just a cameo for once, and he gets a couple little story moments and a boss in the main story. then in trip's story, even though he's the final boss you have to fight, for the rest of her campaign there's no cutscenes or animations or anything regarding fang barring two bosses and instead you just fight a fucking eggman bot where eggman is supposed to be in the bosses you have to fight again. why? why do this? even if you recycle the boss why not just let fang pilot these robots? they use him later on and give him a unique boss at the end of trip's story but they never do this anywhere else in the story and it sucks because i wish they did more and it feels like fang was just an afterthought, not even made playable or anything. then, there's the super sonic boss in this game which just kinda confuses me what it's here for. they barely allude to it and if you completely forget about the reference they make to it in the opening animation it just feels random and out of place until you watch the cutscene after beating the boss and realizing thats what thats supposed to be.

as far as performance, i played on switch which maybe contributed to some of these things but there were a decent amount of bugs here. they never were really so bad to the point that it greatly interfered with gameplay but they were just kinda embarrassing to see if anything. as someone who tries to vouch for sonic team and the franchise as a whole when this series catches so much flack it felt pretty hard to do so at points when i would just see a bug and be like oop thats not supposed to happen.

overall, even with some of these problems i had i did leave the game happy enough with what i played. i think they really could do some great things with 2d sonic if they just clean up some of their act with the less good aspect of this game, or they could also just hand things off to christian whitehead again and knock things out of the park lol

a great remake that stays very faithful to the original but also has things of it's own to offer. the added features to combat and general quality of life are great here. i also adore the new visuals and all of the beautiful new cutscenes, there's just a lot that's hard not to love in this game.

it's not a very challenging game until you get to the post game content which can get a bit ridiculous, and imo for the worse, and where i feel like this is where my biggest complaint comes from. the whole game is a breeze if you're not inherently grinding but also taking on random fights here and there. then you hit the post game and after the first post game boss you just hit a massive wall where your party members get wiped so quickly, before you're even able to understand why. i really would like to do all of the extra content and new superbosses and shit but they are not forgiving and it turns me away from wanting to fight them because i get the feeling im gonna have to grind which i dont really care to do in this game since ive never had to before, but i think im gonna have to suck it up. i'll probably edit this review when i do