Kinda way too disillusioned by the superfluous pageantry of P-Studio's Persona titles to keep up with this and it's making me hate playing video games, so shelving this and P3P for my own sanity. Maybe I'll get around to it in a few months once I'm in the mood to push through a fluffy monster RPG with concerning portrayals of women again. Which like, even though I say that, Persona 3 feels a lot better in that department than P4 or P5, especially from what I've also been playing of Persona 3 Portable, where Yukari in particular almost feels like a real teenage girl with actual interiority! Really wanted to see more of Mitsuru, she seems pretty cool. Same with the autistic trans-coded robot girl and the dog, those guys are like 50% of the reason I wanted to play this game.

Tartarus was also way fucking cooler than I expected! Well, not in Reload, but in Portable it was pretty comfy and had enough going on with its moment to moment gameplay to make me not fall asleep. Though early on your power scales up way faster than the difficulty of the floors themselves do, and the bosses felt more like brute forcing them instead of instigating a strategy. Reload feels like it makes that whole dealie even worse, like you get all the fun midgame toys from Persona 5 like right away, and I feel like it just trivializes the whole thing (I am not playing on hard mode ever again though, it literally just makes the game twice as long, made the mistake once in Persona 5)! They also had an opportunity to give Tartarus sections more of their own mechanical identity to mix it up from the more pure dungeon crawling of the original, and at least what I've played it just feels worse somehow, even more lifeless and toothless. Maybe I'll change my mind once I get to the later portions, but I was not very impressed.

I don't wanna carry on with the negatives too much, there's clearly a lot to love here, and I'm sure this will end up being a lot of people's go-to way to experience P3, but man, Reload is so much. Seriously considering just playing FES first instead next time, and then working my way up through each iteration, because even as somebody who has only had minimal contact with the original Persona 3, something really feels off about this game. I don't trust it. Maybe I'm just annoying and old though.

Anyways, Persona 6 should be about a 40 year old lesbian detective and her talking tanuki tulpa that nobody else can see who says kinda borderline problematic shit. Also probably put a different kind of music in these games next time; maybe it's just the remixes that were giving me a migraine though.

third time giving this a shot. was not the charm. for all the comparisons people made to quake when hyping it up, it fails to do ANYTHING that made quake good. movement is Amiga level bad, weapons are lame (so much hitscan...), music is filler, levels are Alright at best, except for the part where every single one of them has a rape joke hidden in it so you can unlock a rape joke steam achievement. had this actually come out in the 90s it would be relegated to the same bins as SiN and Gunman Chronicles; the idea anyone likes it more than Doom is, genuinely, driving me to drink as i type.

there's a reason the multiplayer is deader than Daikatana's.

this review is AAAAASS i'll rewrite it in the morn

i don't know what rating to give dusk. the difference between its first episode and its second and third it is that of mundanity and rivet-ing fun; there's not quite as large a quality difference as some other episodic games (see: half life 2), but it still irks me. despite the solid framework of punchy weapons and hyperspeed quake movement, the maps of the first episode are too amateur to take advantage of it properly. makes sense: they were made by an amateur. though david now sits among the ranks of my favorite fps developers, episode 1 was his first time trying his hand at level design. good gamefeel alone will not carry an experience where the maps don't cater to the game's strengths. shit's tedious, and i don't like it.

on the other hand, i'd say the following two episodes reign supreme in an endless sea of unconvincing and overhyped throwback shooters. if i rated this game on those two alone it would be in my 4 stars - which is a damn high rating, considering my hateboner for other new blood titles (i'm looking at you, ultrakill). i simply can't resist the atmospheric flair on display! without failure i enjoy and remember every level from e2m1 onward. barely a 3 star for the first episode, 4 stars for the last two, i don't know what rating to give it.

Black-handed tomfoolery in three dimensional havok. You see, it's grandly outdated- You can't even shoot a pedestrian through it's invisible windshield and everything SCREAMS prototype hell. But this is an atmospheric witchcraft. Antiquated commonplaces of gaming, floating icons to affordably wreck mayhem and peaks of infuriating, faulty, hair-ripping difficulty rooted to laborious ballistics and open-roam incompetently forcing you to go hell-and-back just to replay a mission before dying stupidly. It's challenging roughness makes it an equally gratifying circus if you brace for it to be a time-consuming maelstrom of jumping through hoops of fire. I just know i grinded my TIME on my PS2 back in the day, some of it i cried out of furious anger, but a sheer lot of it i stood hypnotized by blowing up police cars and driving boats in a fit of a nervous breakdown until achieving meets end. It's gonna drive INSANE anyone accustomed to modern GTA V gameplay. But it's a challenging, gratifying hood classic that comes off as cathartic when you almost seemingly impossibly let it. Also, the simplicity of everything seems funnily fresh for taking place on such a big fictional universe, someone as cryptic as Claude deserves a glorious comeback somehow.