“Yesss! Let’s disable the four locks and get into that lab!
Sounds kinda video-gamey when you say it out loud, huh?”
-Nemona Pokemon.

I don’t fucking care about graphics nor glitches. It’s the type of thing that you see and forget about 5 minutes afterwards. I didn’t care about them in cyberpunk and I don’t care about them here. It’s true that demanding that the company with the biggest gaming franchise in the world do better it’s the right thing to do, but c’mon man, if that’s the only thing you have to say about this and other games then you don’t care much about the medium as you say.
That being said, this game sucks ass.

The last Pokemon game I played to completion was Moon, so I don’t know about Sword and the other games in between, but I’m gonna pretend they don’t exist for this review.
The main problem with this game is also the problem I had with other recent releases from other franchises (SMTV, Elden Ring…) but I think this one here is the worst of them all.
It’s the open world thing. It’s a very sad thing that this is the norm now.
My main gripe with this new approach is that it’s supposed to give you ‘freedom’, but in reality, while being true that you can go anywhere you want (not that much though), the game openly reveals the points of interests you need to know, and in a very open-worldy fashion, becomes rigidly structured. You can do A, B, C or B, C, A, but that’s it, it’ll never allow itself to divert from that. It becomes a checking boxes simulator with stealth and crafting. Just beat 8 leaders, 5 paradoxes and 5 star members, collect shit and get the ending. It’s just the open world way man, you’ll never understand…
All the tera stuff is pointless, in combat, in raids, in minibosses. The paradox bosses, gym tests and team star bases were boring as fuck, the last two are specially jarring because the pre-gym dungeon/team bases were the most fun part of the series for me, and they replaced it with mini-games.
Let’s not forget about the difficulty, since I feel that the series became a bit too easy the past few gens. I would say that it’s all over the place with spikes and all but you can also make your own path here, so maybe it’s my fault in some way. But it’s also true that the game makes no attempt to adjust itself to the path you choose, it doesn’t need automatic level scaling, that would suck, but for example: very early in the game you get to choose between two doors, east and west, but when you do so, instead of leveling up the path you did not take, they leave it as it is, and when you reach there you wipe everything instantly and it kills all the hype of those bosses. And do not tell me that you can beat one gym and take the other door; you probably can, but it’s still a very boring alternative imo (and even nurse joy tells you to keep going the way you were, but that system just works like shit). I’ll say that the boss battles that are around your level are pretty fun, but they were rare in this long game, mostly the late game stuff.
Open world ruins everything. Trainer battles became glorified normal encounters most of the time. The UI is hell, especially the map. The world itself feels like a minecraft server with towny, this is not a jab towards the graphics, it’s a design issue, I just can’t explain further, just look at the world with that thought in your mind and you’ll see. And populating the world are the pokemon, that look like mmo monsters walking around their spawn spots. Compared to the old, invisible random encounters, seeing them in the overworld makes them less special, it strips the encounters from the surprise, and finding the rarer forms stops feeling special; your mind used to fill in the gaps and all that. At first thought they were going to go with a bugsnax-style approach for the mon hunting, but outside of the occasional wigglet, just throw a ball at them and fight, that’s all. And sometimes you will accidentally step on a microscopic pokemon with your giant koraidon, starting a battle. Random encounters, please come back. I need you baby.
The only thing that redeems such an empty feeling world, is the characters themselves. I love their designs and, while still being unidimensional asf, they successfully managed to give a feeling that they like to be around each other. They carry this game’s world. Director Clavell is GOD. I really like the team star storyline, love what they tried to do there.
But yeah I hated this most of the time. I can’t wait for Palworld, that’s gonna rock.

tl;dr si hubieran puesto el juego acá en burzaco en lugar de españa hubiera sido bueno

since they added the watched category i can safely say that i played danganronpa 2...... or that is what i would say if i had watched it in its entirety.
truth is, when the game wasn't released on the west, i watched the first two cases when someone was translating them in video form, and then i read the third and fourth cases on a tumblr mirror of the somethingawful let's play, and the last case i read on a translation of a korean let's play.
so i'm humbly asking the backloggd administration to IMMEDIATLY add the "read" category to this website, or there will be consequences.

I'm sure this is 10/10 in a timeline where p5 never released.......

Jokes aside, I think the gameplay and soundtrack are amazing and the visuals are good too. The dialogues are weak, I think it felt a lil' better when there was no voice acting too, maybe I'm bad at judging dialogue but it felt like people reading twitter threads out loud. The dating parts are what bothered me the most, I ended up ignoring them altogether (sidenote I did the golden ticket thing that exists for some reason???) and it turns out the social links affects the ending lol.
It is a pretty fun game to try out though.