Virtually identical to last year's release, right down to the in-game menus and graphical interface. There's nothing wrong with that - hell, there's everything right with that! - but it did contribute to the overall "been there, done that" feeling I had while playing this game every night for the month of April. I think I dumped more hours into The Show 22 than I did The Show 21 last year, but felt like I accomplished even less this time around. As long as I have Game Pass and as long as these are part of it, I bet I come back every April for more. But thirty or forty hours into this particular title, it's just time for me to move on, not out of boredom but self-preservation. There are only so many hours and so many days, and such.

as a gt megafan i had fun with gt1, but there's really not much reason to go back to this one over gt2 unless youre like me and you just really want to complete every game in the series. gt2 has way more cars, way more tracks, way more events with more variety in the entry lists and far less track repetition (no reverse tracks!), WAY better soundtrack imo (both in the menus and in-race), etc. i have tremendous respect for this game and what it accomplished in 1997, it's a true technological wonder. but that pioneering status can only carry it so far in 2022. 5 stars, but unlike gt2 i dont see myself ever playing through this one again.

Standing here, I realize you were
Just like me trying to make history.
But who's to judge the right from wrong.
When our guard is down I think we'll both agree.
That violence breeds violence.
But in the end it has to be this way.

I've rolled credits, but I'm far from done with this yet. Aside from the baffling level of detail, and its execution - which to me is the firmest evidence yet that we could indeed be living inside of a simulation - for me, the thing I'll remember of GT7 is how it felt to experience it.

The closest analogue I can think of is something like the experience of sitting at a bus stop, waiting for a bus, when the person next to you starts talking about something you know next to nothing about. Great, you think, all I wanted was to get on the bus, and here I am now, trapped in a wonky plastic wind shelter, only a third of my arse is supported by the tiny metal rail that's ostensibly installed as a bench, and I have to endure whatever this conversation is going to be.

Hours and buses go by, and there you still are, enraptured, deeply uncomfortable and worried for the future state of your arse, and suddenly an expert in manufacturing innovations. Did you know rally can trace its roots to medieval times? No, me neither. What a weird, wild ride it is.

(Actual Review for this game: It's Really charming and the best piece of Saints Row DLC)

In these times where everything feels like it's fucked and you have no idea what to do, I just wanna come out here and give everyone a Marry Christmas, A Happy Boxing Day, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, have a great Winter solstice, and have a whatever the fuck a Yule is.

and most importantly, have a Happy New Year.

I was worried that after so many games, messing with the formula was going to ruin it. But honestly, it was the breath of fresh air it needed. Everything in this game is a MASSIVE nod to the classic JRPGs that Ichiban grew up playing. The story is the same incredible fare seen in all the Yakuza games, no surprise there. And it's a great place for new fans to jump in with the series. There are a couple of small nods to the previous games, but everything makes enough sense in-game that I don't think if you haven't played them you would be missing out.

So it seems that after the fairly simplistic, different sort of metroidvania experience that Circle of the Moon provided, that they decided that the next GBA game would be far closer to Symphony of the Night. In theory, this sounds like a cool idea, essentially having a portable reimagining of such a classic title, but in the end, the game falls flat, as it seems that the designers thought that SOTN was a good game because of mind numbingly easy difficulty, the main character having a trail behind them as they walk, and having 2 castles. I find it quite unfortunate that a game with such potential ended up being one of the weakest main games in the series for seemingly being unable to do anything particularly decently.

From the moment you begin the game, it becomes immediately obvious what one of the main problems with this game is, and that’s the awkward way which the player moves, seemingly in between a state of rigidity and fluidity in all the worst ways. While Juste Belmont is able to dash forward and backwards from the very start of the game, which completely kills the feeling of gradually understanding how to optimize one’s movement as the game goes on, instead encouraging constant dash spamming to make it through basically any situation, this is contrasted by the fact that any time the player attacks in the air, their jump becomes committal, making dealing with airborne enemies awkward at the best of times. Furthermore, this is the one game in the series so far that manages to make the player feel overly floaty in all of their movements, having no real weight to any of their movements, causing the game to feel unsatisfying to play on a base level.

That said, I feel like I’d still be able to garner some serious enjoyment from this if not for the fact that this game has the worst navigation out of any of the games in the series without even being close. What this game fails to do in particular is telegraph where the player is meant to go, with many of the paths for progression being considerably more cryptic than even the most obnoxious aspects of SOTN all across the place. These issues range from having to break walls within save rooms to get key items, dash under fake walls that have no visible difference from regular ones, and having to locate a specific warp point that initially seems quite out of the way and unimportant. This issue becomes worse once the 2nd castle is introduced and the twist of the warp points taking you between the castles comes into play, showing that you’d only explored parts of the map during the journey that you initially thought was nearly over. This admittedly is executed very well, explaining why there were some places that were inexplicably locked while walking through the castle and the overall unusual feeling separation of the castle throughout, and gives potential to give another dimension to exploration, something that I consider far superior to the inverted castle which just felt tacked onto the end of SOTN for extra padding. The problematic aspect of this is the way it’s handled, instead of causing the player to feel as if they’re progressing through the labyrinthine mess of these 2 converging castles, this instead causes backtracking to become an absolute nightmare, with multiple key progression points being on other sides of the castle or just requiring extremely long, winding pathways to be traversed multiple times, making the game a slog despite me finishing the entire thing in under 5 and a half hours.

This game just feels rushed or simply poorly conceived in a lot of other ways as well that all contribute to making the game feel unsatisfying to play. The overall game balance feels absurdly off, with the opening couple of sections having extremely long, grueling areas that seem to punish even the slightest mistakes, before quickly devolving into a game that almost rivals SOTN in terms of easy difficulty, but feels far less satisfying due to not having the insanely fast, snappy and varied moveset of Alucard, instead having nothing more than a handful of spells and the slow as molasses whip attack as your tools to deal with what the castle throws at you. I also feel that the boss design for the most part ends up causing the game to feel quite incomplete, most fights only having 1 – 3 attacks to deal with, even in the late game, making for extremely simplistic encounters that end up feeling tedious and anticlimactic more than anything else, often without even a grand visual spectacle to make up for the disappointment.

In the end, this game clearly feels heavily inspired by Symphony of the Night, but without any understanding of what made that game so good despite all of its flaws. This instead feels like a game made up of parts that almost have something good going, but never quite gets there in any field, making for a game that’s painfully mediocre at the best of times. Of all of the portable Castlevania games from GBA and NDS, this is easily the game that I’d recommend the least, to the point where I’d straight up say that you aren’t missing out on much at all if you just completely ignore this.