katieelizabeth

I think Blizzard made a lot of really great changes to the game. It has been awhile and we've required a lot of patience, but it feel like this version is worth sticking around for. The campaign is really good, but I think what makes this expansion the best is the war room, the skill trees for end-game progression, the charms, the horadric cube and the reworked class skill trees. All of this pretty much goes to making the game feel pretty cohesive, structured and complete. And with 8 classes in the game and with 5-8 builds per class, that's a lot of replayability right there. Also, the Warlock is real good.

Pokemon Legends Z-A is a great game. It has great performance on Switch 2, it has 75 hours of gameplay to reach 100% completion (more if you want to do Rank battles). It has a fantastic battle system and there's a lot to rediscover as a lot of your assumptions about moves and the importance of stats has changed, and it's fun to explore what this means. The music is also excellent, especially so many of the battle themes. There's also a lot of cool X and Y references. My only major complaints are that the lock-on targeting mechanics are sometimes a little janky, and the day/night cycle can break pacing and be too disruptive while you are exploring. But make no mistake, this is a game with no real bugs, a lot of content, an addictive gameplay loop, and is a lot of fun. It's a very easy 8 out of 10. Anyone who says otherwise is a second-hander - someone who lacks critical thinking skills and is just parroting what their dishonest echo chamber told them to think.

The people calling these games overpriced are just repeating a YouTube talking point. It is not grounded in fact. Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 are full remasters with 4K 60 output, rebuilt lighting, textures, skyboxes, fonts, animations, and control schemes including gyro and touchscreen. Each game costs 40 USD, which is exactly in line with other 2025 remasters. Tales of Graces F Remastered - 50 USD Gears Reloaded - 40 USD Tales of Xillia Remastered - 50 USD Final Fantasy Tactics Remastered - 50 USD Bravely Default HD Remastered - 40 USD It is fine to think all of these prices are too high, but singling out Nintendo while praising the others is not real critique. It is echo chamber bias. These releases are objectively polished and comprehensive, and they are easily the best way to play Galaxy 1 and 2 today.

I think, in general, most reviews of Dragon Age: The Veilguard aren’t reviewing it as a "Dragon Age" game but rather as a game separate from the larger Dragon Age franchise. I think this is a problem. When the game completely changes genres in terms of combat, and offers such poor dialogue and writing—alongside character choices that amount to mere "flavor" instead of real, branching narrative paths—I don’t think anyone can genuinely call this "Dragon Age" anymore. I suspect that a lot of casual gamers won’t find as many faults with this game as true fans of the series will, especially those who have been with the franchise since Origins. Fextralife puts it best: the game was turned into a casual, blockbuster-style experience—a product designed to reach the widest audience possible. It reminds me of the Transformers movies and other similar blockbuster franchises rather than what Dragon Age used to be. The identity politics aspect is also poorly handled in this game, though that’s not the sole reason for its shortcomings—I think all the writing in the game is weak. It often feels condescending, overly safe, and inoffensive to the point of being bland. The characters, in the scenes I’ve seen, are uninteresting, and the fundamentals of writing natural dialogue seem to have been ignored. Even if the broader story structure is fine, the writing itself is just bad. And that's particularly damaging in an RPG series where strong characters and quality moment-to-moment writing are essential. If you compare the dialogue here with Metaphor ReFantazio, there’s no contest. One game respects your intelligence as a player, while the other doesn’t. This is a very disappointing game, and I think it’s fair to say I’ve lost hope in the Western AAA game industry as a whole. I’ve tried to stay optimistic, hoping certain studios would impress me, but it feels like all the Western studios I grew up with have let me down by now. I’m still holding out for Avowed—I hope Obsidian hasn’t lost its touch either—but my optimism is pretty much **** at this point.

D2 was an outstanding game for its time and for many years post-release, especially with the LoD expansion. However, there were always game design decisions that frustrated and annoyed me back then, like the potion belt, the stamina bar, the ninja looting, etc. The control scheme also became incredibly outdated post-Torchlight or Titan Quest, let alone Diablo 3. All of these games improved on many of these issues.I feel like D2R missed a golden opportunity to modernize the game. It is not clear to me why they would say that auto gold pickups are okay, but new controls for mouse and keyboard are not. The stamina bar is a real head-scratcher - even the devs would have given their blessing to remove that ancient monstrosity. I feel like the devs listened too much to purists, which is a tiny vocal minority, rather than the majority of fans who loved playing D2 many decades ago and wanted to re-experience the game but with a modern update. A coat of paint, no matter how nice, is not enough.

I have been playing for over 48 hours since the 31st and I am totally **** in. I don't understand the complaints for this game. They focus on 2-3 things, over and over - things that don't even matter to me - and ignore the 100,000 things Starfield gets absolutely right. Or I just get the vibe that their reviews aren't about Starfield and it's about the stupid console war. I wanted to play a Bethesda game in space, and that's what this is. I love Bethesda games from the Maryland studio - I've played them since Daggerfall. This one is already one of my favourites! The game isn't perfect. The inventory management could have been streamlined a little bit more. The game could have also explained things a little better at times. On rare occasions, npcs walk in front of characters you are in a conversation with. But beyond that, the game is super polished the and amount of content in Starfield is insane. The voice acting (quality and variety), environments, lighting, rpg mechanics, breath and depth of mechanics, and sound design are the real standouts here. And the game is FUN.

I just finished the game and I think it's very good. I too am not sure how different the narrative would be if I had chosen other options, but the game still does a good job making you think your choices mattered. Looking at the narrative that I built, I don't know how it could have ended any other way than how it did. I came across a bug in the game where Carter is supposed to touch a screen to diagnose what happened to a shuttlecraft. I'm pressing everywhere on the screen and nothing happens. When I tapped the screen, it accidently selected 2 buttons at the same time. I suspect it was only supposed to tap one, which is what blocked me. I had to restart the chapter and try again, but I only lost 5 minutes of my time to be honest when this happened. Other than that 1 bug I experienced, the game was pretty well polished. The story and characters were great. I think any Trek fan of the 90's era will really enjoy this game. I'd give it an 8/10. I don't know how reviewers went less than that to be honest. Even the stealth sequences were logical and straight-forward - I don't know what some of the reviewers were talking about. Shooting could have been less clunky, but I don't have much to nitpick in all honesty. The graphics were pretty good too. Some of the areas are downright gorgeous. Some of them really made me feel like I was on the set of the shows. The character animations and such were well done. The music and sound effects were fantastic. Totally fit like the shows, and suited everything perfectly. Voice acting was pretty good, especially by the main characters. Not just Spock and Riker, who had big roles in this game, but also the main bridge officers and the two alien leaders you get to know quite well. The narrative swapping back and forth from the lower decks to the bridge characters and having them ping-pong back and forth was really well done too. The story also had a nice number of twists and turns, and a good element of mystery to it while being logically constructed. At the end of the day, there are not exactly a lot of options for 90's star trek games. And despite how rare it is to see a game pop up in this era, it is of a very high quality and is created by a team of writers and developers that cared. Given that it's of high quality and how rare it is to find something like this, it's a pretty easy recommendation. I hope it sells well.

I have finished about half the game and I'm really annoyed at some of the reviews because Engage game is oozing with quality and polish. I think these reviews were unfair, placing expectations onto a game unfairly and not giving credit to many of the great things Engage does. The combat just feels so amazing. This is probably the best combat in Fire Emblem. The enemy phase is so snappy and fluid - I really like how it's presented. It really does ooze with polish and I can tell they spent a lot of time rethinking things to make getting information easier. The UI is fantastic! I really love it so far. The map design and enemy placement is also extremely well done. You can tell the people designing the levels understood Fire Emblem well. They are a pleasure to play through. I really like the class design in Engage - each unit type is unique and has real pros/cons. A lot of units like thieves, armors and archers all seem like they got a bit of a buff in Engage - armors especially. One change I noticed almost immediately was something no review even bothered to mention - moving the character around gives battle forecasts by just putting your character near them. I know this is a small change, but it makes sense and it's better than the past games. I was not sure about the art style and samey faces, but I gotta admit it looks pretty great on a 4k television - the sharpness and color really pops. I actually like the art style for the most part, apart from the sillier outfits (Hortensia is an example of a pretty awful outfit, but that's just me I guess). I was worried about spending a ton of time on exploring maps after a battle looking for items and stuff, but once I realized there was a mini-map that indicated where everything is, I realized the developers really wanted to respect your time in these sections so you could do them quickly. Also, all the Bond Fragments are automatically collected if you don't talk to people, which really helps with replayability to get through these sections faster. Again, no review mentioned any of this, and it was a concern of mine going into Engage. The developers handled it correctly. The difficulty on Hard seems stiff but fair and feels really good. I definitely fear losing units and must position them correctly to make sure units don't die. Engage feels a bit harder than Three Houses did - more in line with Conquest or Radiant Dawn on Hard. And while I don't think I will ever like the avatar character in these games, I actually don't mind this one that much. At least Alear is not a Mary Sue/Gary Stu, although the avatar worship is still a bit cringy. The twins are kind of annoying and there are a couple of other annoying characters, but there are many characters that are likable too. Also the combat animations finally remind me of the gba games. They are probably the best in any Fire Emblem game, which says a lot because it took them awhile to create stellar animations in most of the 3D entries. The technicals in Engage are fantastic too. The frame rates just feel so much better than Three Houses all around, especially in the Somniel or exploring the maps after battles. The game runs really well on Switch. I really like how the Somniel is very optional. Much of the stuff on the ground is for food items and extra Bond Fragment, but none of it seems necessary and you'll be rolling in Bond Fragments by just playing through the game anyway. The mini-games and social activities also aren't that impactful to the long-term, so I feel it's okay to skip them. This is a huge upgrade from the Monastery, which outstayed its welcome in Three Houses when you replayed the game through all 4 routes. The monastery was very tedious, repetitive and took up a lot of time over a 40-50 hour playthrough. The worst part about the Monastery was that it was not optional and took so much time to optimize. The Somniel is nothing like that. I think the one thing I miss from Three Houses and the Tellius games is the deep world building that could immerse you into the game's world - it's not really there. The Story is also pretty familiar too - likely intentional. It's good enough just to get you from map to map and does the job. It's fine. Overall, I'm really impressed. This is a really fantastic Fire Emblem game and one that I will be coming back to multiple times after I beat it.

My opinion of Awakening has really changed since launch. I think the game is perfectly fine for the new crop of casual fans. It has more accessibility options than past games, and it features a lot of grinding and over-powered child units that more causal or rpg gamers will enjoy. But Awakening is not a very good Fire Emblem game. On Normal difficulty, it is far too easy. Any knowledge of who the best characters are, knowledge of how to use pair-up optimally, how and when to use second seals properly, and what classes are good for units to go into will completely trivialize the game on Normal difficulty. No grinding or marriage is necessary. So this leads me into Hard Mode, which takes a very casual, easy game and transforms it into one of the most unfair and inflexible entries in the entire franchise. Instead of just adding more enemies and increasing the stats to stiffen the challenge, the game features same-turn reinforcements - otherwise known as Ambush Spawns - and these can be brutally unfair as you have no idea how many of these reinforcements are coming, how many waves of them will come, and what types of weapons you will be dealing with. Awakening absolutely loves creating 4-8 new enemy units and moving them on the same turn, and many of these units do high damage and have 1-2 range weapons, making it extremely difficult to protect weaker units despite being safe when you ended your turn. Because of this, the game heavily restricts which characters you can use because most of them will die. By Chapter 17, the game devolves into using Chrom and Robin the most, where these will probably be the only two units that can survive the random ambushes, turn after turn, because they become so overpowered. Tharja and a few others can also do this, but 90%+ of the characters in the game are basically useless due to poor bases and classes. Even characters like Sumia become liabilities because so many enemies and same-turn reinforcements use Silver Bows and super-effective tomes. To avoid unit losses, you are basically forced not to deploy them at all and solo the game with just a few paired-up characters. It is the least rewarding and least fun way to play the game. So basically, Normal difficulty is too easy and Hard is way too frustrating and inflexible - there is no middle ground here. Hard mode devolves into just using S-tier characters with over-powered builds that snowball out of control. Any sense of strategy is completely gone, and that is why Awakening is a bad Fire Emblem game. Normal mode I give a 7, and Hard Mode I give a 0. It's not that Hard Mode is hard - it's easy if you just use Chrom and Robin - but it's incredibly boring and unsatisfying and poorly balanced and unfair when playing blind.

Metacritic, you need to do a better job at filtering out reviews from people that clearly never played the game and have nothing to do with the game. More console war BS. This stuff is not useful for people who were genuinely looking for user reviews. I don't care what Sony fanboys think. Obsidian is a fantastic studio and have made some incredible games - Fallout New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, The Outer Worlds, KOTOR 2, Tyranny, etc. Let them make an indie title with a smaller team if they want to. It's not like they are charging AAA price for it - it's very cheap, priced exactly like an indie title. It was a passion project for them. There really isn't any game quite like it on the market.

The game is still a lot of fun, and it actually plays pretty well on Xbox although for tougher battles I wish I had access to a mouse for complex ability/spell assignments but with the game paused you can live with it. There a few things I wish Beamdog added: 1. More auto-saves. There is some BS encounters in this game that just force you into them and you can die if you're not prepared. If these encounters happen near the end of exploring a big area, you will lose all of your progress unless you manually saved before those battles. I feel like the game should saving every 2-3 minutes to avoid the loss of work. Adding this has to be easy and is welcome for console users. 2. For some reason, traps don't show up for me unless I am manually selecting my thief. Like group infravision, I think these should be showing up when the entire party is selected. On console, switching between your thief and the entire party just to check for traps is way too pedantic for my taste. Checking for traps is a lot easier to do on PC. 3. The journal entries could be a lot better. For example, there is a guy named Perdue who is looking for a Short Sword. While the entry mentions where Perdue's sword is, it does not mention where Perdue is located - I actually had to google that because too much time had passed and I could no longer remember where he was in Beregost. Manually looking around is way too time-consuming - the game should always mention that. Also, time limits and the time remaining for a quest should be listed - I don't know why it's not. I had no idea there was a time limit for Kagain's quest so I never got the reward because the son had died. If I had known this had a time limit, I would have prioritized it. I just feel like the remaster could have cleaned a lot of this stuff up. Also, I don't know why the quests are separated by chapter for, and I wish Finished quests were removed/filtered so I didn't have to look at them anymore. This just makes managing quests more difficult than it needed to be. Overall, the game is quite good. There is still a joy in equipping and growing 6 characters as you explore the world. While a lot of modern games do exploration, questing, etc. better, I feel like the game is still fun if you can get past the controls and these aged game mechanics and the general poor quality of life. Maybe not for everyone but this game and this engine have gone on to influence games for over 20 years no so worth experiencing I think. It's just a shame the 3 things I listed weren't addressed - they seem like easy things to patch in.

This game is way better than the 7's I'm seeing. This game really does feel like a real-time Fire Emblem game. You can tell the developers LOVE Fire Emblem. Everything from the sounds, music, the menus, etc. just feels like Fire Emblem on the 3DS. They did the franchise justice, and really did incorporate all the Fire Emblem mechanics and look and feel into this style of game. The best compliment I can give is that this feels like a main-line entry to the Fire Emblem franchise. All the voice actors are the same from the games and Fire Emblem Heroes too. The graphics really do feel like they are in the Fire Emblem 3DS style. The gameplay is really fun, and there are a ton of characters with different play-styles to play as. There is a ton of content in the game too - a full 21 chapter story with hundreds of end-game maps in the History mode. There's also a Performance mode that runs at mostly 60fps, which I highly encourage people to play. Make sure you set the level-up notifications to OFF, because they become annoying after awhile. My only real complaint is that the main story is really slow to get going. Like Fates, each chapter starts off meeting new characters and resolving a childish misunderstanding between them that results in a battle before they become friends. The main story doesn't happen until about half-way through the game when you have assembled the entire cast. Still, the game is really fun and if you love Fire Emblem, you will love this game. If you were like me and were waiting for the next Fire Emblem game after Three Houses, give this a try. You will enjoy it, even if you didn't love some of the characters in the 3DS generation.

I am mixed on this dlc. It has a great companion, lots of new interesting environments, you can become a vampire, and it adds crossbows. But some of the areas are utterly massive and really difficult to navigate naturally. The Soul Cairn area all looks the same and features a lot of copy/paste to me. Even with the in-game map, I have no idea where I am going as very little is marked or unique. The dlc features a lot of scavenger hunt quests in these massive environments too where there are no quest markers to help you. You absolutely have to use a guide on steam to find all the points of interests - I doubt 99.9% of people found half of them or completed the various side-quests. The quest rewards for this boring, tedious content is also extremely mediocre. Very frustrating dlc. Sometimes less is more, and these bigger environments like Soul Cairn needed to be axed down to their essentials. A lot of the environments just overstayed their welcome for me. It could have been lot tighter.

Spider-man is a decent game. The graphics are quite nice, and the game does excellent job looking and feeling like Spider-man. The voice acting is quite good and generally the game has very high production values. The story is also quite good. The controls are spot-on. It's not a perfect game however. Spider-man had so much open world busy work. The designers took the worst aspects of the Ubisoft open-world design and implemented it fully. A lot of the busy work doesn't even make logical sense - like why would Peter waste time taking pictures of landmarks for? And why are crimes happening every 5 seconds? And why does every Ubisoft tower need hacking to unlock icons on the map? It's completely asinine and once you've done them for even a few minutes, you've seen everything there is to do. This is very outdated open world design and I actually feel like the game being more linear would have made it better seeing as how poorly utilized the open world actually was. Like how is that I can play Skyrim for 150 hours but I get bored of the Spiderman open world after an hour? That's a problem. The variety in the open world was also quite lacking. There were ****, docks and a park. All the police towers looked exactly the same. The rooftops were copy-pasted way too much. There was some cool parking garages and tunnels to explore, but absolutely no reason to actually go down there for longer than a few seconds to get the backpack. I also feel like accessibility didn't go far enough. The white spider-sense is very hard to see at times for me - an audio queue or a slow-time option would have made the game more accessible for people with poor vision like myself. The backgrounds are just too realistic and there's too much white light from the HDR for the spider-sense to stand out for me. Also, a 60fps option could have been added for PS4 Pro users - there's no reason this game couldn't run at 1080p or something like that to enable better frame rates. Locking the game at 1440p to 4k @ 30fps for every user is a very poor and inflexible decision. Not even the PS5 or Xbox Series X can run many games at native 4k @ 60fps, but a 1080p video card in a PS4 Pro is being forced to pump out 4k visuals? That is crazy. On PC, I play games on my GTX 1080 - a very equivalent card to a PS4 Pro GPU - and I run everything at 1080p or 1440p to attain 60fps or better... so why are Insomniac trying to live beyond their means and push to 4k for? It's incredibly stupid and it just hurts the gamer. That GPU is not designed for 4k gaming. That ability is reserved for the PS5 and Series X, and it still has trouble. Spider-man is competent, reasonably polished and engaging enough to play, but it doesn't wow me and the utilization of the open world is very poor. The fact that it's so close to the arkham series would further push me away from giving it a higher score as well - this was done 7 years prior. Hell, Skyrim even had a much better open world and it was done 7 years before this as well. Sorry, it just did not hit that bar for me, not when the bar was raised so high for open-world games by 2018. Ultimately, I think there's a lot to improve here and I hope the next release handles the open-world much better.

Pokemon BDSP are not bad games, but overall I'd say this is a pretty unambitious and mediocre remake of an average game for its time that is frankly too faithful for its own good. In terms of graphics, the game looks completely outdated. The chibi art style is not endearing, nor does it look very good. Fortunately, the character models and pokemon look much better in battle, but all this does is make me wish they were used throughout the entire game. The in-battle models frankly look so much better than the chibi stuff. The environments look bland and look worse than the original pixel graphics from 2006. I wish they didn't maintain the 2D tile aesthetic - it just looks fake/outdated to me. How do several indie games manage to look better than a game produced by a 105 billion dollar company? While the soundtrack is an improvement over the original version on the DS, it still falls way short of the live orchestrated soundtrack from Sword and Shield. Unfortunately, it sounds like this soundtrack is entirely midi-based, lacking any real recorded instruments of any kind. The story isn't all that interesting either. The original script came out around the same time as Mass Effect. The script wasn't good for its time, let alone holding up in 2021. It is a missed opportunity that the developers didn't modernize/reimagine the script to become more engaging and in line with modern RPGs or the very best of its anime. I wish the gym leaders were more fleshed out and part of the story. I wish team Galactic was given a lot more depth. The pacing of BDSP is incredibly slow, and the game finds ways to waste your time repeatedly. Random battles are extremely outdated and are annoying, especially in caves. I am so disappointed the game did not choose to have pokemon in the overworld like the modern games. Eggs take forever to hatch in BDSP and do not benefit from the increased hatching time found in Sword and Shield. I spent over 9000 steps to hatch the egg given to me in Hearthome City and it just wouldn't hatch for me. I got better things to do than rotate my L-stick riding a bike until it hatches. This is such an outdated game mechanic that did not need to be implemented "faithfully" in BDSP. Battles are also super slow to the point of them becoming grating. Essentially, Pokemon battles aren't "show don't tell" - BDSP verbosely tells yous everything in nauseating detail. When I faint a pokemon, it should fall immediately when I hit it - it should be obvious to anyone what has happened to that Pokemon by just looking at the animation and the health bar going to 0. Instead, the game's faint animation happens many seconds after the hit, and BDSP still insists on telling you the pokemon fainted with an additional textbox too. Even FF7 did this properly on the Playstation 1! Why is everything so verbose with text dialog boxes for? Before each combat round, BDSP also shows a textbox saying, "Your pokemon is awaiting directions." No kidding! Does anyone seriously need this textbox??? Stuff like "It's Raining" is also equally redundant - we can see it raining on the screen! And when using a move, there's no reason its name can't be displayed at the same time as the animation too. The amount of verbose and completely unnecessary text in this game is beyond ridiculous. And when a battle starts, can we finally have an option to remove the Pokeball fanfare and just have all pokemon come out immediately to save time? Why does starting every random battle have to be padded with 10 seconds of animations? Can the Switch not load these battles faster? Then there are weird control issues in BDSP, such as the L and R buttons not working in the menus like every other modern game, which tripped me up quite a bit. The d-pad is also unfortunately assigned to walking when it should have been assigned to your 4 registered items. Why did none of the QA staff say anything? Ultimately, BDSP needed to completely reimagine modern Sinnoh in full 3D (similar to Sword and Shield), modernize and polish the script, and increase the quality of life and production values across the board to justify its AAA price tag. Barring that, BDSP needed to be sold for $29.99 given what we got. Essentially, BDSP is a low-budget cash grab and it should not be praised or endorsed in any way. Pokemon fans need to be vocal and reject these cash grabs. Pokemon fans need to demand better for their hard-earned money because BDSP is an embarrassment for a full AAA-priced game, and is simply not competitive with other AAA games on the market. If you want to go back to the past - for all its problems - then you might enjoy BDSP. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy this game. BDSP's archaic and overly-verbose design just doesn't interest me anymore. I would have much rather had a modern reimagining of modern Sinnoh with immersive 3D environments, a modern engaging story, and high production values. Modern Sinnoh deserved better.

Pokemon BDSP are not bad games, but overall I'd say this is a pretty unambitious and mediocre remake of an average game for its time that is frankly too faithful for its own good. In terms of graphics, the game looks completely outdated. The chibi art style is not endearing, nor does it look very good. Fortunately, the character models and pokemon look much better in battle, but all this does is make me wish they were used throughout the entire game. The in-battle models frankly look so much better than the chibi stuff. The environments look bland and look worse than the original pixel graphics from 2006. I wish they didn't maintain the 2D tile aesthetic - it just looks fake/outdated to me. How do several indie games manage to look better than a game produced by a 105 billion dollar company? While the soundtrack is an improvement over the original version on the DS, it still falls way short of the live orchestrated soundtrack from Sword and Shield. Unfortunately, it sounds like this soundtrack is entirely midi-based, lacking any real recorded instruments of any kind. The story isn't all that interesting either. The original script came out around the same time as Mass Effect. The script wasn't good for its time, let alone holding up in 2021. It is a missed opportunity that the developers didn't modernize/reimagine the script to become more engaging and in line with modern RPGs or the very best of its anime. I wish the gym leaders were more fleshed out and part of the story. I wish team Galactic was given a lot more depth. The pacing of BDSP is incredibly slow, and the game finds ways to waste your time repeatedly. Random battles are extremely outdated and are annoying, especially in caves. I am so disappointed the game did not choose to have pokemon in the overworld like the modern games. Eggs take forever to hatch in BDSP and do not benefit from the increased hatching time found in Sword and Shield. I spent over 9000 steps to hatch the egg given to me in Hearthome City and it just wouldn't hatch for me. I got better things to do than rotate my L-stick riding a bike until it hatches. This is such an outdated game mechanic that did not need to be implemented "faithfully" in BDSP. Battles are also super slow to the point of them becoming grating. Essentially, Pokemon battles aren't "show don't tell" - BDSP verbosely tells yous everything in nauseating detail. When I faint a pokemon, it should fall immediately when I hit it - it should be obvious to anyone what has happened to that Pokemon by just looking at the animation and the health bar going to 0. Instead, the game's faint animation happens many seconds after the hit, and BDSP still insists on telling you the pokemon fainted with an additional textbox too. Even FF7 did this properly on the Playstation 1! Why is everything so verbose with text dialog boxes for? Before each combat round, BDSP also shows a textbox saying, "Your pokemon is awaiting directions." No kidding! Does anyone seriously need this textbox??? Stuff like "It's Raining" is also equally redundant - we can see it raining on the screen! And when using a move, there's no reason its name can't be displayed at the same time as the animation too. The amount of verbose and completely unnecessary text in this game is beyond ridiculous. And when a battle starts, can we finally have an option to remove the Pokeball fanfare and just have all pokemon come out immediately to save time? Why does starting every random battle have to be padded with 10 seconds of animations? Can the Switch not load these battles faster? Then there are weird control issues in BDSP, such as the L and R buttons not working in the menus like every other modern game, which tripped me up quite a bit. The d-pad is also unfortunately assigned to walking when it should have been assigned to your 4 registered items. Why did none of the QA staff say anything? Ultimately, BDSP needed to completely reimagine modern Sinnoh in full 3D (similar to Sword and Shield), modernize and polish the script, and increase the quality of life and production values across the board to justify its AAA price tag. Barring that, BDSP needed to be sold for $29.99 given what we got. Essentially, BDSP is a low-budget cash grab and it should not be praised or endorsed in any way. Pokemon fans need to be vocal and reject these cash grabs. Pokemon fans need to demand better for their hard-earned money because BDSP is an embarrassment for a full AAA-priced game, and is simply not competitive with other AAA games on the market. If you want to go back to the past - for all its problems - then you might enjoy BDSP. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy this game. BDSP's archaic and overly-verbose design just doesn't interest me anymore. I would have much rather had a modern reimagining of modern Sinnoh with immersive 3D environments, a modern engaging story, and high production values. Modern Sinnoh deserved better.

If a racing game can engage me, someone who doesn't give two-****s about cars and just plays rpgs, adventure games and strategy games, then you know the game is good. FH5 is like Mario Odyssey - it's a driving game that appeals to everyone, even non-driver fans just as Mario appeals to everyone, even if they don't typically play platformers. It's a very high quality and well-designed game.

As an older gamer who originally fell in love with Metroid on the NES, SNES and GBA, I have to say I really didn't fall in love with Metroid Dread, and I had a really hard time pushing myself to finish it. I stopped playing around the second boss - I had enough. I really didn't enjoy the survival/stealth sequences, or the difficulty and style of the bosses. They are very different from the past games, to where it doesn't feel like Metroid - it feels like the designers took elements from Cuphead, Dark Souls or Hallowknight and other modern indie metroidvanias and molded them into Dread. I really didn't enjoy the melee counters either. In fact, I think the window of success for these counters was much shorter than Samus Returns - it felt like I had to press the counter sooner than before. It could be the latency on my TV - although it is in game mode - but I feel like these counter windows need to be a longer. I'm not saying Metroid is a bad game - it's not. It's very high quality and is very polished. The frame rate is very good and the game looks nice. The character controls are excellent. Unfortunately, due to my vision and my age, I simply cannot meet the timing demands of various activities in this game very well. It's a little too fast and I wish I could slow it down somewhat. The older games were slower paced and I felt like they were fine, even today. I also felt like the game had less emphasis on exploration, at least initially. The game really wants to press you forward, blocking off your ability to go back at various points very often. I can't say I liked this. I'd prefer a world I can freely explore at my own pace, and be able to backtrack more freely than what is on offer here. I'd also like to collect a lot more energy tanks and missiles to help with me bosses, but there weren't any I could find. Again, I'm not saying the game is bad. I think the audience more used to modern metroidvanias by many indie studios will feel right at home with Metroid Dread. I just wish the game had more accessibility options for people like me, so I could tweak it to play more like the older games, which were less demanding and more accessible by design. I never played Metroid for difficult combat that expected perfection, and I don't understand why this is so present in Dread for. Overall, I'm pretty disappointed in what I played. It's just not the Metroid I remember, and as someone who's 40 years old who is blind in 1 eye and 20/400 in the other eye, I just wasn't able to play it like the developers intended.

A game like Life is Strange: True Colors should be running at a solid locked 60 fps at max PC settings on Series X. If it's not possible to achieve this lock with Ray Tracing, then a non-RT option should made available at a 60 fps. Unfortuantely, the Series X version is locked to 30 fps, which is absolutely bizarre, and it can't even hold that in open areas. The developer claims a 30 fps lock was intentional for a "cinematic experience", but I call BS on this. The PC version runs at 60 fps or higher with less powerful hardware. One person was getting up to 100fps with a GTX 1080 Ti, which is inferior compared to what the Series X is running. If the "Cinematic experience" was so integral to the aesthetics of the gameplay, then why wasn't the PC locked to 30 fps as well? Frankly, this is just a terribly optimized game and there's no valid reason why this shouldn't run at 60 fps at high graphical fidelity when all but a handful of Series S|X games are hitting 1440p or 2160p at 60 fps since the console's launch. Nobody should buy Life is Strange: True Colors on Series X until the developer fixes this. When you pay full price for a game, you expect it to run well and this game doesn't, regardless of its narrative or gameplay qualities. It's inexcusable.

This is an excellent adventure platformer with a fantastic story. The art style is inventive and lush, and it runs at a constant 4k and 60fps. The animations are very detailed and smooth, and the game oozes with polish. The voice acting and writing is fantastic. The pacing is very good. The level design deserves a ton of the credit, as the developers did an amazing job mashing 2 disparate ideas into a cohesive concept, and each one sticks with you. Even if you don't like platformers, I'd wager that you would find a lot to enjoy in Psychonauts 2 just because it's a game that is extremely high quality in what it's doing. Highly recommended. If you love video games, you will love this.

I am absolutely baffled at how poor the UX and font sizes are in this game in many cases. Some fonts are light gray on an even lighter grey background, and there's so many fonts within the game that are 6-10 pixels tall with no option in sight to increase them. Screen real-estate is not used very well at all - there's so much empty space that could have been used for larger fonts. I actually reported this many months ago in beta feedback, but it's clear they did nothing to address it. I even provided screenshots and solutions to fix it too - I really wanted this fixed. Amplitude, thanks for creating a game I cannot play.

When I started playing Wasteland 3, I was pretty intimidated by all the options at character creation, and I didn't feel like the premade characters were well-optimized. There are so many skills in this game, and at the beginning, you can only create two characters - you can't have everything. This gave me a ton of decision paralysis. After you get out of the tutorial area, you are allowed to pick or create 2 more characters to add more skills you missed out on, and are allowed to take 2 special companions as well to further flesh out your skill variance. I feel like knowing what those 2 initial companions are in advance can help you optimize which skills you should pick on the remaining 4 created characters. This is one of my big initial criticisms of the game - you can find yourself in a situation where you picked many of the same skills across multiple companions, and this will make skill checks a lot more frustrating in the beginning since you need less overlap. To compound to this skill metagaming problem, respecs are not free - they cost money. So if you realize that you made a mistake, it will first cost you $200 to respec and I heard it costs more in the future. At the beginning of the game, this is a big punish - you only have $400-500 tops for quite a while so the respec is asking almost half of your entire treasury. I believe this was too much of an ask for players not playing on a harder difficulty and are still trying to learn the game. Each of the 4 customized rangers should have been given a free respec on Normal difficulty or lower. It would have made character creation less stressful and less time-consuming because I honestly felt like I just needed to start over to optimize my money situation at the beginning of the game. I did not want to just burn $200 because I was learning. Beyond these problems though, the game is excellent. Once you have a party of 6 characters you are happy with, meeting the various skill checks feels pretty chill and you can just play the game. That is when the game is at its best. There's a really good balance of exploration, dialog, and combat, and nothing outstays it's welcome. Everything is very high quality for this style of game. I also really appreciate the large font sizes and the game's complexity is "just right". If you think games like Pathfinder are too complicated, then Wasteland 3 is a good place to start because its rules are very accessible - it's pretty similar to Fallout 3 in terms of complexity, but your skills and perks are distributed across 6 characters instead of 1. So, I give this game 4 stars out of 5. If Wasteland 3 had been less punishing towards new players and allowed for more free respecs to prevent new players from having to start all over, I honestly would have given Wasteland 3 a 5. Hopefully, inXile will learn from this mistake and make their next game just a little more accessible for new players.

I'm reviewing this in 2021 on the Series X. Pros - Graphics and Star Wars look and feel is fantastic. I can't emphasize how good the intro sequences are when you are blasting rebels in corridors - it feels like you're exactly in the original trilogy. - The sounds of Star Wars is spot on. Voice acting is very good. - The campaign feels like it's very high quality - Smooth 60 fps gameplay Cons: - Shooting is not very accessible on console. The reticle is basically a dot, which unless you are very good at the controller, you will end up missing a lot of shots by a hair, even with "aim assist turned on". Every shooter should use Halo controls with big reticles - I don't know why games like this or GTA5 use the smallest dots for as it's bad for people with poor vision as well. - Restarting a level after dying has a 5-second delay in single-player, which got really annoying in some hard sequences in the campaign. It keeps asking you to change your cards and weapon loadouts every **** time. - Strafing is extremely slow, even if you're not crouching. I have no idea how to dodge in this game at all. Not a clue. - You are often vastly outnumbered in the campaign. In a corridor, this is fine because you can funnel enemies in a choke point, but in a forest it kind of **** because they just surround you and your AI teammates do nothing to cover you. - Levels are not built for exploration honestly. There's a lot of dead-ends that are only there for enemies to come out. This makes levels very linear, but you waste a lot of time checking out these alternative paths and they all lead to nothing but dead-ends. In the more open areas, exploring too far off the beaten path just threatens to kill you in 10 seconds. Wonderful EA. Just Wonderful. I can't even comment on the microtransactions - I haven't even tried multiplayer - but the single-player campaign feels compromised by the multiplayer aspects of the game.

I really hate to write a negative review of a Disgaea game, but the 6th entry is by far one of the most disappointing releases. The biggest problem I have with the game is that it's exclusive to the Switch in the West, but also manages to run like crap on the hardware. I think it's really anti-consumer to gatekeep the PS4 version from the West when it would have played a lot better than the Switch version (which was clearly not designed with the Switch in mind, let's be honest). In Disgaea 6, there is 3 graphic settings, and all of them are unstable - somewhere between 40% to 70% stability, which is frankly embarassing for a game that looks like it should not be struggling on the Switch's hardware. The "Graphics" setting mostly runs at 20fps, but I've seen it dip to 11 and 14fps. This mode is unplayable imo, and I have no idea why it's there. The "Balanced" setting tries to hit 30fps, but it's very choppy as well and it can also dip to 15fps. The "Performance" mode runs mostly around 54-60fps, but it's still very unstable. The worst problem with this mode is how blurry it is. It is a huge shame that this game does not run at 1080p and 60fps like the past entries. I would have even accepted 1080p/30 or 720p/60, but we don't get either. I might have given the graphics a pass if this were a heavily discounted game, but this is a full price AAA game - it's unacceptable. And if the developers had a low budget, they really should have charged less than full AAA price like many indies do - there is no excuse. They set themselves for criticism here. On top of this, this entry really does feel rushed and lazy. For the environments, many of the areas are repeated multiple times. The gameplay is also very repetitive because you kill the same easy boss at the end of every episode, over and over again. The formula is incredibly repetitive. Disgaea 5 felt like it had many more unique episodes compared to this game. In terms the story and characters, I think this is probably the weakest cast that I have played. I enjoyed the characters from Disgaea 1, 4 and 5 a lot more. Melodia actually kind of got very grating to me every time she started singing, just because the delivery of the dialogue was so slow and her singing was constant. Ultimately, the game still is Disgaea, so it has the same progression systems and things fans love, but I honestly felt like the game wore out its welcome too quickly and the plot just never interested me at all. I was actually skipping dialogue quite a bit because I just didn't care, and I felt like I saw everything there was to see after about 20 hours, despite knowing there was so much more left to grind out. There are some good qualities to the game - most of the voice acting, demonic intelligence, auto-battling, but it's not enough for me to recommend the game. To be honest, the experience was completely forgettable. I have no desire to do the post-game - I already burnt out on it after the main story. It is what it is. Sorry I can't review that part, but I don't think it would change my rating.

I can't recommend this game. I played it for a few hours on release with Game Pass, and as soon as I was taking frost damage and died in a few seconds even though there was no frost on the ground around me or anywhere near me, I uninstalled the game. The targeting also doesn't feel very good. The lock-on system zooms in way too much to the point where you can't see the other enemies. Vision is a really important aspect for games like this as it's not an isometric view. And when you are not locked-on to a target, the game is very strict about how it decides which direction you attack in. If your camera is not directly center to the enemy you are attacking (the enemy is center-left or center-right), your character will start attacking the enemy and hit them 1-2 times, but will then start attacking in open-air as the enemy comes out of your attack view as your character moves forward. Dark Alliance really needed to soft-glue to targets when you are in the middle of an attack combo to make sure you don't just start attacking nothing. This is a huge problem because you're attacking stuff for the entire game. Other games in a similar genre prevent this from happening, and they've done so for years. It's absence was really felt. Also, it has to be said that the AI is pretty bad. Maybe the game is more fun with friends, but I only played it Solo and I can't say I had any fun. If not for taking damage unfairly and dying, I might have given the game a 4/10, but as is, it's just to buggy that I am forced to just give it a 0. I did not enjoy myself.

First, I just want to say that I am new to playing these older Halo games and this is my first experienced with Halo 1. Everything I'm going to say does not have nostalgia or rose-tinted glasses affecting my experience, where I might inflate or give passes on things that are not done very well, especially when given the opportunity to fix problems in 2011, a decade after the original game was released. Pros: - The game looks and sounds much better than the original, and is pretty good by 2011 standards - There's a lot of different control options, making it easy to find the way that felt most comfortable to me - Combat feels pretty good still, despite being an old game. Cons - Weapon balance feels a bit off. The pistol seems much more powerful than the assault rifle, and pretty much all of the covenant weapons are better than your starting assault rifle too. There are some situations where the assault rifle is ideal for the situation, but it felt pretty weak most of the time and I usually switched it out. - The story is not presented very well. I'm sure it was good for its time, but 99% of your time will be spent in gameplay and the surrounding story is very thin. A lot of the story is "go find this" or "go find that". I looked up story content for Halo on youtube afterwards, and I could not believe the richness and depth to Halo's story, but it's not available here. There's no character development of pretty much anyone in the cast, and the Covenant might as well be "a group of random hunchbacked aliens". There's just no personality to anything or anyone. When there was a big reveal halfway through the game, I honestly didn't feel any major emotional impact. This is a very weak aspect of Halo 1 imo. Standards for story in first-person shooters might have been really low at the time of release, but they are done much better now. - The audio mixing is off balance - music is very loud and voices are not loud enough. This surely affected my ability to follow the story, as I was often unable to hear Cortona through the rest of the sound. - Health packs are very rare, and spaced out too far in between each other, often by ridiculous amounts in some levels - I wish the game included waypoints, or at least a visible map of some kind. There was a lot of times where I was lost and had no idea where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to do - about once per level. In the middle of game, there is this facility with 2 floors, and there's actually no staircase to get to the upper floors. Why would these people design a facility like that??? There was some purple containers that you could jump on to reach the top floor, but it took me 30 minutes to find them. After this, the elevator I was supposed to take to escape blew up, and at that moment, I had no idea how to progress the campaign - it seemed locked or bugged, and that's why I stopped playing. I wish the game had waypoints and was a lot clearer about how to progress the game, but it's completely silent. - Another really big problem with this game is the overly repetitive levels. Levels are copy/pasted constantly, and there's really no landmarks or unique areas that stand out to ground yourself in the environment. Sometimes these areas repeat 3, 6 or 9 times throughout the game, and the levels go on forever, just going into 1 copy pasted room after another. There were also times after a big fight where I just lost my sense of direction, and I would often backtrack before realizing I went in the wrong direction. I believe this occurred because everything looked the same. Overall, I'm not really sure I can recommend this game to people who don't have the nostalgia for it. The gameplay is average by today's standards, although competent, but the story is presented quite poorly and the level design is pretty awful. Again, I'm sure it was good for its time, but when judged in the year 2021, I can't help but recommend to learn the story on YouTube and spend your time playing another game.

This is an excellent coard/board game with lots of choice, variation and strategy. If you're a fan of Slay of Spire, you will love this. There's just so many combinations of cards and strategies and difficulties, it's unlikely you will explore it all in the first 100 hours. It's very addicting, especially since there's lots to unlock. It is an immensely satisfying game when you win.

I am on Series X and I want to give this game a 9/10, but I can't - it is way too buggy and I've experienced multiple quest-blockers. Some of the quest blockers can be cleared by re-loading your save game, but during "The Heist" quest, I have actually come across a total of 3 unpreventable, game-breaking bugs that revolve around Jackie walking through floors or disappearing whenever you move away from him (like you're looking around or looting the rooms for items). After a point where you jack in and steal the stuff you were trying to steal, the quest says "Follow Jackie" but he's below you, as he walked through the floor and the briefcase is suspended in mid-air. There's no way to finish the quest now. At earlier times, if you went to loot rooms like the bar on the first floor or your own suite, he would disappear and elevators and other quest-forwarding interactions would be disabled because Jackie is no longer with you. Honestly, I could tolerate my character being bald whenever I equipped a helmet, or the bodies floating in the air as if they were suspended in zero gravity, or the constant flickering of assets... but I cannot tolerate game-breaking bugs that can destroy an entire playthrough. Shame on CDPR for releasing the game like this. It needed 6+ months more of development and testing. There is no excuse for this. I can't even progress my story now because of these bugs and my game is broken. What a waste of money.

I was excited to play this game, seeing as so many people say it's beloved and one of the best games last generation, but to be honest, I could not really get into it. If you're a fan of jrpgs, you may not necessarily enjoy this - it's not an automatic shoe-in like other classic jrpgs might be. For one, the time-based simulator did not jive with me. I found it difficult to know what all of my options were in given time period at times, and I was always stressed out in choosing how I spent my time because I really didn't know what the impact of my decisions would be, or what I needed to prepare for. This is the kind of game where beating it once probably gives you the necessary information to make better informed decisions in subsequent playthroughs, but with the game being well over 100 hours, that's a proposition I don't want to take the developers up on. The other part of the game I did not enjoy was the combat. Mechanically, the combat is fine, but the rng is very brutal. If one of your party members misses an attack, or if your damage rolls much lower than it usually does, a fight that would have normally not wasted any HP or SP could spiral out of control and royally mess things up. For example, let's say a character misses an attack, and then that enemy that is on low health gets 3 crits in a row, and now 3 party members are below 25% hp despite being at max HP before the combat started - this can happen. It's very swingy like this. With SP being very limited in dungeons, using it to heal to recover from situations like this will really prevent you from finishing it in a smaller number of trips. RNG also plays a roll in deciding what enemies you will face. You could get unlucky and just face the hardest batch of enemies over and over - it can easily happen. The end-result is that you will have to spend more resources to heal up damage and/or prevent damage than if the encounters were more balanced. All this means is that grinding is actually fairly essential, even on normal difficulty, if you want to reduce your trips to do the dungeon to maximize your social time... which you probably want to do because you will end up with more abilities and stats compared to going in the dungeon multiple times. Beyond how much I did not like the swingy rng, the graphics are actually fairly terrible. Outside of the anime cutscenes and art (which do look great), the actual 3d engine looks similar to what you find in a PS2 game (only the resolution is higher). On top of this, camera rotation and movement is extremely clunky. It almost reminds me of Mario 64 - it's kind of that bad. Like if you tilt your analogy stick slowly to the half-way position, the camera does not move until after you pass that 50% tilt, and then moves suddenly by a lot, exactly like Mario 64 c-sticks did. I wish it was a lot smoother :/ Rotating the camera to see enemies behind corners and stuff feels awful - like it's really bad. There are some good things about the game. The voice acting is really good. The UI's and art style is neat. The music is quite good - some really nice tracks at times. Ultimately though, I did not enjoy the swinginess of the rng in combat or the stress of not knowing what the impact of my social decisions would be, which is basically the 2 largest parts of the actual gameplay. I think if the combat was less swingy and you were not as punished by the rng and if the game did a better job showing available options with consequences to make decisions more intelligently, I might have enjoyed the game. But I sort of think this game is overrated and I enjoyed other modern jrpgs like Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Atelier Ryza, Octopath Traveler, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, etc. a lot more than this. I don't get the hype - I think you need to be a certain kind of person to enjoy this as there is a risk you might just not get into it. I could not finish it after about 10 hours or so - I was done.

I'm sure this will get disliked, but I'm 2-3 days into Origami King and the game is really good. The environments are amazing, jam-packed with stuff to do, puzzles to solve and stories to tell. The music is stellar. Like color splash, the game looks gorgeous. And the writing is superb and the characters are really funny and interesting. Olivia is definitely a standout partner in this game - I really like her - she's naive, witty, funny, honest, etc. The game isn't perfect. The tutorials at the beginning are a bit drown out and I wish I could have skipped them. Anyone who watched the trailers probably knows how the basics of the game works already. There's also some weird resource mechanics where you have finite supplies of resources - like confetti, gold and items - but everything is so plentiful I am not sure why it's finite in the first place. It's a shame we can't control our partners in battle, but I don't really miss the loss the xp progression - the game has other ways to progress in the form of accessories, heart containers, items, etc. As someone who loved ttyd and rpgs in general, I thought the puzzle-like battle system would bother me a lot, but it hasn't. Most battles are required to progress in the story, or at least make it so you don't have enemies chasing you constantly in the environment. Beating them is not pointless like some say because you have to beat them to progress in the story. Solving the same in-battle ring puzzles can get a bit boring and most of them are easy, but it hasn't really been such a major problem to drown out the rest of the game. The rest of the game is so great that the overall experience is still great. I really have fun playing it. Oh, and the boss battles are a lot of fun and each one has different mechanics. At first, they are not too difficult, but by the 4th boss, things definitely ramp up. They hit like a truck too, doing 40-75 damage at this part in the game. Overall, I'm really happy with Origami King. It is a game with lots of polish and love put into it. It just has so much charm, and it does so much so well. I would have given it a 10 if the battle system incorporated your companions more and offered more depth than just solving the puzzle, but I think the environments, the writing, the sound track and the bosses steal the show that I really do think this game deserves a 9/10. I think anyone giving this game a lower score than 8 just because it's named "paper mario" but is not designed the same way as TTYD is being dishonest. A game needs to be judged on its own merits. It's hard to take these people seriously when the game could have had a different title, like "Mario's Origami Adventure" and it would suddenly have a better rating using their review standard. It's frankly a dishonest way to review games. For better or worse, the series has changed - it's been over 15 years since TTYD - the old rpgs games have essentially been discontinued. I miss them too, but that doesn't make Origami King an objectively "bad" game. Part of me doesn't really understand how Nintendo fans of zelda or mario or metroid would not like this game - it's an adventure game like many other Nintendo games. Do these ttyd fans only play rpgs? If so, then I understand why they don't like it, but wow that's a pretty niche interest to only like rpgs on a Nintendo console while disliking all of the other adventure/action games Nintendo has on offer..... seems a bit biased/close-minded if you ask me. If you like Zelda, you would like this, whether you like or rpgs or not.

I will at least praise the game for not being terribly buggy, looking and sounding good, having good accessibility options, having acceptable albeit routine combat, and pushing some next-gen graphics on current gen hardware. The story, plotting, its characters have a lot of objective flaws and is really bad. The irrational decision-making by the characters is comical, and the story not being logically consistent with its characters and their personalities from the first game is insulting to fans. Also, the characters are thoroughly unlikable. The ending is completely pointless and fails to provide a satisfying payoff for all the stuff that came before. On a personal note, I don't like how incredibly violent the game is and how evil and stupid the vast majority of the characters are, and how you're forced to actually take control and carry it all out without any kind of agency to make a more positive and hopeful future for yourself and the world's characters. Lastly, I don't know what kind of moral this game is trying to impart on the player and I don't know who needs to hear that message. It isn't profound like the writers think it is - it's the moral of a story that would come out of an episode of Sesame Street. PS: I am a lesbian woman, so I am not a trans-phobic or gay bigot, and I am not a virgin. If you think this because you simply disagree with my opinion about this game, then grow the hell up.

I pre-ordered this game and I was really excited to revisit one of my childhood favourites with all new cutscenes and modern enhancements. However, the game performs poorly, the frame rate is quite poor on modern pc hardware (less than 2 years old using a gtx 1080 ti), the game stutters when I place buildings and perform other actions, and the unit frame rate is nowhere near as smooth as Starcraft 2 or other modern rts's. What's worse is the advertised cutscenes were cut from the game - I don't see any difference at all from the original. Also, going into the settings and changing your fps or resolution sometimes causes the menus to not come back up again - forcing you to restart the game. Overall, it's super unpolished and I know I am not the only person complaining about stuttering - this was reported by hundreds of people during beta feedback yet it's gone unresolved at release. Shame on you Blizzard. What the hell happened to you?

This is the best RPG on Switch in 2018. I don't really get some of the professional critics... this game is a masterpiece. Everything is so polished, and the game is amazing at what it does. The sprite work is amazing, the environments and HD effects (like snow, water, sand) are absolutely gorgeous. The writing and voice acting (when it shows up) is very good. The sound track is really one of the best sound tracks of the year. And damn, this combat system and character mechanics are so deeply layered and synergistic. This is by far one of the best JRPG battle systems ever. I mean, even 1-on-1 battles at the start of the game are interesting and exciting, and have some strategy to them. How many JRPGs can say that? You're never going to just be pressing A. The game is also really challenging as well. Octopath Traveler presents us with some of the BEST JRPG boss battles I've played in god knows how long! Even bosses 3-4 hours into the game are seriously epic in size and strategy to defeat them. And can you believe the game is open-world with tons of exploration and non-linear story progression? And did you know the game is 100 hours long? Overall, while so many things are the same and polished to a tee, much of the game is very different from JRPGs too, and that's a great thing - it feels modern and not just a remake of the days of yore on your SNES. Yes, the stories of the 8 characters might not tie into a whole, but that's okay - does every RPG have to have the same formula? Octopath Traveler had a vision, and it accomplishes what it set out to do perfectly. It's different, and different is good. This is easily going to end up somewhere in my top 10 games of the year. The game is awesome. And did I mention the soundtrack was the best this year? Seriously, that alone is a reason to play the game! It's that good!

The game is great, but I still don't think the game is perfect like journalists seem to think. There's a few objective problems with the game that nobody can disagree with, like the lack of a viable control scheme that doesn't include motion controls despite all of the duplicate button functionality. Makes the harder content unplayable or overly frustrating with the pro controller or playing in handheld mode. Even with the joycons, the motion isn't reliable for some actions, and the analog sticks are so sensitive at high speeds, some of the moons are more difficult than using a pro controller where the sticks are more subtle. This is big enough to take any game out of 10/10 contention. I feel like if a reviewer only plays on a television using the joycons separated from each other, they will never understand the pains with the other setups, and that's a very big problem for a console that is supposed to be as flexible as the switch and this is their flagship title. I also think there are valid criticisms about the lack of variety and mechanics, as well as how padded out the game feels, although each person will have a different opinion of that. Once the novelty wears off, I can't help but think that Galaxy is just a better game. I think this is more like 8.5 or 9 out of 10.

I don't really know why anyone would give this product less than a 9. The story-telling is super emotional, well-thought out, gripping, suspenseful, etc. I can't even really call any TV shows or movies I've watched in a long time that were this good from start to end. There are times where I just couldn't stop crying - some of the scenes and events in the story really affected me. I feel wiser for having played through the game, and I feel like I've experienced something that I can take with me long after my episode 5 end credits. All of the characters - major and minor - are believable, unique and complex, like real people. I really connected with all of the characters in some way, and if I didn't, I still felt something else for them. They were all very well developed. I really connected with Chloe especially - I knew someone sort of like her in my long past that meant a lot to me too, and I'm female and gay, so lots to relate. The sound track fits the game perfectly. The voice acting is incredible. The colours and attention to even the smallest details and consistency is truly amazing. The story has so much suspense, with lots of twists and turns that will keep you guessing for quite awhile, and everything makes sense when the answers are finally revealed. The themes of friendship and love are the most powerful I've ever seen done in pretty much any media. I can't really call this a game though - if you buy thinking you want a challenge or to experience a permanent failure - like jumping into a pit in a Mario game or losing all of your health in a shooter - then this game isn't for you (and if that's you, that's cool, but that also doesn't mean the game should get a 0). It's really an interactive story, that really connects with you on a personal level - something movies and comics simply can't do. In terms of mechanics within the game, I think the only criticism is the long wait times for rewinding large sections of the game, but that's honestly a minor blemish on an other perfect experience. I will treasure this game forever, and you will to. Play it.

The game doesn't feel like an evolution of similar in the genre - both Dishonoured games and all of the Bioshock games just felt more engaging and interesting compared to Prey. It also doesn't run well on a PS4 Pro - definitely not even close to 60 frames per second - feels more like 25 or 30. If you were to get the game, the YouTube videos of the PC version look much better and run smoother compared to the PS4 version. As I was playing, I honestly just felt like the urge to replay older, better games. I will say some of the music in the game is really awesome though.