ive put a grand total of 193 hours into this game without actually completing all that i want to, i beat the game originally in about 2 weeks and it was an unforgettable experience but now that its over, and months have passed i feel like my opinions on this game have been soured by how much of it i played and how quickly i played it. this game ticked every single box i wanted it to tick and i seriously appreciate it more than i can say here, and i so badly wanted to write something formative about it but idk! i just feel like the game has been weighing heavy on my mind so much that its made me lose track of other things i want to do, unfortunately. i love this game so much, so, so much, but, i feel like its something ill be able to revisit in about a year or half a year when my completionist lizard brain needs feeding & ill probably end up coming away from it feeling much stronger about the total product like i did with yakuza 0. from now on i will listen to yokoyama when he commands i do something i am at the mercy of his will o7

shinji mikami worked on this & i think that guy genuinely does understand horror, and how to mix in horror elements with other aspects to create something coherent and digestable; but i REALLY do not think it hit on this one unfortunately. incredibly cool concept and presentation with a remedy-esque art design but it would have absolutely benefited from NOT being an fps game, you genuinely cant make fps combat interesting i fear, the bosses will always be the same, the encounters will always be the same, etc, etc, etc. with that, and the generally bad quest design where ur doing something big & then ur just running around cleansing gates for 15 minutes, this game is just a missed opportunity

a very rare game, but this isn't something that nobody's ever said before. i think this game is extremely good, and deserves all the praise it gets, but i also think its one of the few games i've played that i went in with my expectations FAR too high for due to how much i had heard about it for yearssss. genuinely an incredible game about so many things, you very rarely, if at all, see a narrative tie in drug abuse, suicide, heartbreak, the supernatural, socioeconomics, discrimination, and a murder case together to neatly. a once in a lifetime thing to experience even though i got hype fatigue from it, and a game ill probably never fully understand (mostly cause i cant replay choice based rpgs) & thats okay! i loved my little bicurious marxist cop & his gay car obsessed partner, they will be in my heart forever

this game was really fun for about 4 hours and then i hit the halfway point, the story started getting very good but the gameplay got significantly more gimmicky, i appreciate the 4th wall breaking stuff that was put in to match the era like the disk case & the entire psycho mantis fight but from there it just got so tired tbh. i'm still really excited to get more into the series but being someone who spent the first 12 years of my life playing ONLY pokemon games over and over, i just dont have the nostalgia for this era and i cant turn my blinders on like some people who grew up with this can, which isn't really the games fault but its important to mention regardless imo

i have very little nostalgia for survival horror as a genre, but i feel like with how much artistic inspo this takes from some of my favorite media properties ever (eva & nier) i felt very at home with this game. this is a game that is extremely messy but also extremely refined, like organized clutter i guess? it has so many creative inspirations and treats all of them very well but theres almost too much? but thats also not bad? it's very confusing in that sense, and i think its the main thing that's keeping this from being better in my eyes, but i feel like regardless of how i feel about it as a game, i will forever appreciate the art that this is and the creativity that went into its development, and maybe i'll come back in a couple months/years and it'll become something even more to me

a game i want to sit with me for a long time, a game that could potentially be a new favorite of mine, but also a game that has consumed too much of my brain and i think i need to move on from. i wanted so badly to write a proper review for this but i have truly nothing to say about the game that other, smarter people havent already said, all i can say is that this game understands this cast extremely well and cares so deeply for a group of characters that i've come to love a lot and i appreciate it so much for that

16 is a really good game, but is also a game that i really didn't like playing sometimes. i loved the kaiju fights so much & generally the bosses were all pretty fun to do (except for the final boss), but the combat was so mindnumbing at times, which could very well be skill issue, i dont care, it was very flashy sometimes, but when it wasn't it felt like some crisis core shit where ur just doing the same loop attack over and over until ur sparkly ability came up. the characters mostly drove this for me, i fell very very in love with the main cast and i will remember them for so long. much smarter people than i have talked about the treatment of characters like benedikta, and jill (later on) so i wont get into it but i do think they got treated poorly, which is annoying cause they had a lot going for them. my thoughts on this game are relatively final but i would love to replay when its on pc so i can do it with the dlc & spend more time on the side content

i actually adore how this game is made at like all angles, the music, the artstyle, etc are all sooo well made and very cozy even though i didn't grow up with the era it's imitating. unfortunately it soured on me a lot, WHICH, is NOT the fault of the dev or the game, it's just so well made that it got past my blinders that are setup specifically for platformers because i fucking hate them and will always hate them, which should be props to the dev tbh, definitely not a criticism! my brain is just too bad for these games

so fun when i bought it while i had the worst cold ever cause it was low effort and i could just have it on, but then i got better and had to play the game for real and started hating it. for a game so centered on gameplay, they seem to love cramming the extremely boring story down your throat. so much so that they dont even let you skip cutscenes or dialogue without just spamming the skip button. bosses all felt like i was fighting the developer instead of the boss. i think i could appreciate a lot of the little things if they let me but towards the end the game just felt like a chore. unfortunately i WILL be there for godzilla though

literally does everything a dlc should do, actually perfect, not super long, not super short, the best combat in the entire game. yuffie is scrunkly, fuck nero, im so ready for rebirth

turned one of the (in my opinion) worst arcs in final fantasy vii into a full game & did it extremely well. one of my biggest problems with final fantasy vii's opening arc was how fast it was despite how dire the consequences ended up being. the turks being played off as ruthless killers and then later being characterized like team rocket only softened the blow of what they did, and remake not only humanized the tragedy they committed but ALSO humanized them, and showed how they actually do have some sort of empathy despite what they were forced to do, and this in combination with forcing you to spend time with the people of midgar created a much, much more impactful result of one of the saddest things in the original game. the biggest complaint i think i have with this game is how they characterized sephiroth, but i'm giving it time

this game made me cry like a disgusting little baby all through the ending & i love what the story added to the ff7 canon but as a game i dont think i'll ever really love it. it's a very faithful remake of a psp game from 2007, i know the gameplay is not gonna be extremely smooth or anything, but i feel like the fact that the bulk of content is fighting the same bad enemies in a side menu hundreds of times just to get some cool materia isn't really that fun :\. final boss is also the worst boss fight ever designed so i'm very glad the ff7 compliation continues to break records!

my only issue with this game was how focused on gameplay it was, and with how the gameplay has been dated. art doesnt age, but gameplay absolutely does, and tbh i think i would have enjoyed this game a lot more if i didnt feel like i had to do literally everything and collect all materia to have some normal enjoyment with the combat, i loved the materia system and it very obviously inspired the kiseki orbal system which is my favorite ever, so i would've loved to interact with it more in my first playthrough without forcing myself to spend 100 hours on the game, but that part's less of a criticism on the game and more of a personal thing. i still rate this incredibly high because i know for a fact i'll go back into the game with a fresh mindset months, or years from now and have an incredible time interacting with all the systems (and hopefully get a random encounter mod)

arthouse video games are real baby!!! i was a person who really did not enjoy alan wake 1 & i stand by that still, but this was just so artistically driven that a lot of the alan wake-isms that i despised, that were still present in this one were completely overshadowed by how creative the ideas were. in alan wake 1 i feel like they didnt have the technology or the funding to make what they actually wanted to (this), and now that they do and are getting mass praise for it, i feel like we'll continue getting incredibly creative games from remedy for the next couple decades, and in the meantime between their releases, we'll get a lot of studios attempting to make something as incredible as this and end up producing a whole genre of extremely creative horror and i could not be more excited. people called this oscar bait for video games but oscar bait fucking wishes it was this good

continuing the team ladybug metroidvania trend of making a really cool game and then having one of the worst last areas & final bosses ever. i think this game would be near perfect if they put less creative stock into making the game look and sound gorgeous (which it does) and spent more time making sure the bosses were fun and unique, cause fighting the same 3 humans 3 times each and then 3 dragons is not very fun! and is definitely not being repaid by playing against the worst castlevania archetype at the end

not to be a twitter user but idk depicting the mentally unwell character as this crazy freak villain demon made the games narrative feel really useless. the whole time ur seeing how this guys whole apartment complex hated him and treated him like shit & him being the big evil guy almost reinforces the bullies the whole time? feels very unsatisfying. game was genuinely unsettling though & had a couple really good scares

if this was my first chilla game i think i would never play another one

coffee making fun but the endings were all really unsatisfying

i honestly dont think shmups are for me, but despite that this was an incredible accessible & extremely fun one and probably the best way for me & anyone in the same position as me to dip into the genre. very easy game but thankfully i dont have the brain debuff of thinking every single game should be hard so i enjoyed it a lot!

its so rare that a game can make me wince at every decision i make, can make me truly regret things, feel real anger, betrayal & real empathy for characters who arent real themselves. you can say what u want about how a lot of cyberpunk's story is written overall but i dont think at this point anyone can challenge that the character writing in these games is anything other than incredible. everytime i was invited somewhere by one of these characters i felt like i was being called on by a friend, a real person. somi is one of my new favorite characters in fiction, shes being added to the long list of robot women who make me cry uncontrollably. one thing i need in writing though is that some of the people reacting to this game online need to be studied as to why Gamers™ shouldnt be allowed to talk about morality, the same dudes who are saying that people only care about songbird cause shes a woman and shes like ontologically evil or w/e are all 1000% massive fans of characters tohru adachi and need to shut the fuck up about complicated moral decisions

i think one of the major reasons i was so blown away by this game the 5th time i tried it is because i bought it in 2020 with an already longstanding, pure, condensed hatred for the cyberpunk aesthetic (watch techno orientalism by maia c. ^-^), a hatred that i still have but was somehow able to ignore for the duration of this game and even almost embrace? a weak point i have is that when i hate something, i really fucking hate it, i struggle to let myself enjoy things if i have a moral objection to something related to it and i think this game was just kind of a proxy to let me figure out more about myself and how i consume media which is pretty cool. story was incredibly bleak and left me feeling nier-levels empty towards the end (went devil route i fear) but thats the kind of shit i remember for years so im ok with it. my thoughts on this arent coherent enough for a review and i think i would need to sit in a discord call and ramble for a half an hour to fully get my thoughts across to someone on this game

this mixes a really unique narrative with a unique way of delivering exposition with the worst most uninspired uncreative ps360 era gameplay and gameplay loop i've ever seen. this is like getting an extremely good script and then putting michael bay on the director chair and calling it horror all because ear piercingly loud noises play sometimes when it gets dark. the only video game that is better experienced through a youtube cutscene compliation

not very scary but had more substance than okaeri

giving this credit cause its the first chilla project but oh god this was rough

lovecraftian themes are very new to me but i think this did a good job presenting them in a way that isnt too extremely weird. love the vibes and love the hopelessness of the story and the endings, i think it really works with anything related to the cthulhu mythos

sat on this for a while.. it bounced around a lot between being my goty, being near perfect, being really unfun at times and just being a flat upgrade of the past games but i think i finally settled on the final choice. nobody can say with good conscience that this game isn't an improvement in every single way over the original, i saw reviewers saw prior to the release that this lacked the emotional highs of the first game and was a lot more "comic-book-y", which i agree with but it still held all of the emotional moments for me while also making the game significantly more fun to play. enemy design still needs work, not every boss should have midir health values, not every encounter needs 3 waves of shields and robot dogs, venom can get it, that is all--very excited for the 3rd game and whatever dlc this ends up having
(i also played this twice and the second time i felt a lot more of the problems i ignored on the first, which is something, ig?)

so very convinced that these were all half finished ideas that were just pushed instead of saving them for something better, if they had put these in the oven for like another year i feel like this could have been just as good as the base game, in these short like 4 hours, so much of it was padded by story breaks and so much of that padding had bugs that forced me to restart from checkpoint. genuinely only played this cause i wanted context on yuri's place in msm2 so i got what i came for ig? just felt like a waste of potential

adored how creative this was, it mixed so many different game styles into one package and thats pretty rare to see. needs the refinement that im sure the sequels have (based on what i've heard) but otherwise was a really fun experience, area 7 suckkkkkkked though

could have been so good if not for the fact this was very obviously written and designed by people who have weird obsessions with feudal japan and action movies. we're on an island right? east of japan? yeah, its entirely overrun by russians for some reason who have full military gear and say each others very russian names in american accents to show how russian these russians are! oh yeah we're on a japanese island btw, heres some long dead samurai who they just call "the oni". the combat is almost entirely just shooting waves of enemies that fall from the sky (sometimes literally) that do the same thing every single time and all the puzzles (theres like 4 of them in the story) are as simple as possible so you can get back to doing action movie things asap. the best thing about playing this was realizing how much i've grown as a person from the time i bought this