As much as I love brawl as a game and as a collection of Sakurai-ian skinner boxes, even I have to take my nostalgia goggles off sometimes and admit that its a deeply flawed competitive fighter. For most of my time playing it, this didn't really matter to me because I didn't play it competitively, but after playing melee and the slightly more balanced sequels, it became clear that these more blatant flaws at very high level play were still manifesting themselves in the more casual modes. Project+ (and its predecessor PM) is an incredible solution to that problem, combining all of the best mechanics of smash to create a much better foundation for enjoying the incredible brawl content. It's one of the best mods for any game I've seen and is the definitive way to experience smash for my money.

It has a couple of gameplay hiccups around the second half. It falls into the same pitfall mgs1 did where at some point it got bored with straight-up stealth gameplay and starts throwing in a lot of gimmicks to change it up. For the most part it actually works, but things like the swimming section or the nikita section I could do without. Everything from arsenal gear onwards is just about the best of the best as far as metal gear goes, its an incredible way to close the game and this is still probably my favorite from the series thus far. I think the amount of nearly fetishistic detail put into the environment and the number of ways you can interact with it is at its best here, its so much more than the first game which already was miles ahead of anything seen previously. good shit kojima. my brain hurts

It's rare to find a game so mechanically complete as Katamari. Tetris is a good example of this, that game is so well constructed mechanically that you could not remove any facet of it without fundamentally altering the game. Nothing is superfluous, and yet there also isn't anything you could really add to it, as 4 decades of mechanically identical sequels have illustrated. In a similar way, I believe that there isn't any aspect of the core loop of Katamari that could be removed without fundamentally altering the experience, and yet there isn't anything you could add to it that wouldn't feel superfluous. The act of rolling things up is so naturally satisfying to do, and Takahashi clearly understood that completing this task as skillfully as possible was enough to support the whole game without distractions.
Before playing this I was playing thru Final Fantasy 7, and while that game had a beautiful overall arc to it's story, it was in the moment to moment gameplay where it sometimes suffered. In other words, the high-level gameplay was great while the low-level gameplay was sometimes flawed. I think Katamari sometimes has the opposite problem. The game is incredibly good in the moment-to-moment act of rolling, but sometimes in the high-level mission structure it can stumble. In addition to the main "Become X meters big in X minutes" missions, there are optional missions which can ask you to roll up as many of a specific category of things, or roll up the largest of a specific category. This is the one aspect which I feel is superfluous. While I appreciate asking the player to roll in a different way by avoiding the bad items and trying to find the good items, I think the controls and environment can get in the way of the mission succeeding. The whole game is built around rolling without a care, and it's at its best when it lets you do that.
More than anything, this is a game in love with the world. It loves people, it loves objects, it loves the ordinary. Theres so much care put into each model and the levels are painstaking reconstructions of typical japanese life. Takahashi has said that in his games, he wanted to make people realize the importance of ordinary life, and I believe the Katamari games express that love of things exceedingly well. Rolling things up is an act of love. We love katamari

Gonna have to shelf this because I lost my save data 15 hours in, but this was incredible up until then. Midgar in particular was one of the most tightly directed sequences i've experienced in gaming. The characters are developed so well and the music is so good and theres just so MUCH here in spite of the hardware. My only gripe is with the combat, which is usually simplistic and more of a chore than anything. If I didn't know about the big twist everyone loves to spoil it would've blown my mind.
Edit: I feel like I need to elaborate a little on how good the soundtrack. It makes some of the scenes downright gorgeous to experience and this game would not be the same without the tracks. I know the prelude is in like every game but this version really gives me chills when contrasted with the harshness of the beginning. Aerith's theme is great, the world map is great, and the bombing mission and cloud's flashback are given this incredible weight with the score. Its a big, big reason why this was so memorable to me.