Metaphor: ReFantazio was announced as Project Re Fantasy in 2016, in 2024 it properly released, an at least 8 year (probably) development cycle created one of the best games of that year. Metaphor's gameplay is a kind of marriage of their Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series', with combat using a slightly modified version of SMT's press turn battle system, with the weather system implemented in Persona 5 Royale, topped off with a customizable job system echoing Digital Devil Saga while also paying homage to the OG Job Systems of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. While combat is an important part of the dungeon crawling experience, Atlus has added a new layer which has really changed my expectations for games of this type. Lots of JRPGs have forgone the random encounter model by having enemies walking around in dungeons that you can choose to engage with to give players a bit more control, with this new system if players a higher enough level than enemies they can kill them on the overworld without having enter the turn based system. This is a fantastic addition which really improves the dungeon crawling experience. While the foundation for combat is incredibly solid, unfortunately it isn't without its tripping points. One of the biggest issues is something I'm going to call "XP Route", where if you progress through the game at a regular pace doing all the quests and dungeons you'll still end up short 10 or so level at the final dungeon. Speaking of, once you're at that point of the game you have access to a series of bosses that lead to a super boss, (which could be considered super bosses themselves) a JRPG classic. I beat these three bosses, and they are some of the least fun fights I've undertaken in my JRPG playing career, notably a boss that will instantly kill your party, also a classic, but with no telegraphing, so you just have to guess. Following that another boss that repels every element in the game, sans one that is fairly difficult to come by. Following that were two more bosses that I didn't even bothering giving a serious trying because they just weren't fun to engage with. Something else that isn't fun to engage with is the weather system ported over from Persona 5 Royale, this is a fairly minor system that you'll generally forget exists until it rears its ugly head. How it works is that if you enter a dungeon while bad weather is active on its tile you will not be allowed to exploit enemies weakness, in exchange for more XP. This doesn't seem like a big issue until you remember that exploiting weaknesses is the main system by which you gain extra turns, the main gameplay mechanic of the combat, this feels absolutely horrible, you've spent however many hours training yourself to always hit weaknesses and then for it to not reward you, its not good. A final gripe, while not nearly as damning as the rest, a lot of enemies in the late game seem to have wildly inflated HP pools, while they're not particularly difficult to deal with it can get grating to feel like your time and resources are being wasted. While the dungeon crawling and combat pulls from Atlus' strong combat design in SMT, the other half of the game, the social sim, is almost directly lifted from recent Persona entries, while there will be a few familiar mechanics to those familiar, there have been some changes, notably with your Supporters (this games version of Social Links or Confidants), you cannot give an entirely wrong response, there of course are different amounts of success, but this is shown by the amount of MAG (a resource used to upgrade your Jobs) instead of effecting your narrative. Moving on to the story, I think Metaphor has a really fantastic narrative, the crux of the story is that the king has been killed in a mysterious assassination, its your mission to track down the assassin and dole out justice. When you finally have the chance the voice of the dead king speaks out and declares that the new king will be decided through a process of each resident of the kingdom voting through the kings magic, all of a sudden you find yourself in the race for the throne instead of taking out simple revenge. Metaphor is an incredibly political game, and I absolutely adore it, this isn't simply a "oh if you read in between the lines" type story, it looks you directly in the eyes and tells you that racism divides us and nationalism will destroy us. While I really really enjoy this, I think the story does stumble with some of its symbolism and choices that seem to a bit counter to its progressive message, but over all the story is absolutely fantastic, every character is incredible to watch on screen. Visually Metaphor is inline with Atlus' other work, that is to say, incredibly strong, from the menus and battle UI to the overworld map and the loading screens, the entire game drips with fantasy style. And the designs! Your job designs are incredible, the characters and different races stand out from each other and the final cherry on top is the boss designs, these "humans" pull designs cues from old medieval world guides and the detailed paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, and they're a horror and a treat to behold. And finally the soundtrack, Metaphor has a beautiful and unique sound to it. Largely its unique sonic identity comes from the decision to have it entirely in Esperanto, a constructed language, while it sometimes fades into the background, it snaps you back with some of the best composed music when it needs to. Overall Metaphor is a fantastic game, one of the best I've had the joy of playing, I think it should be played by everyone, very very possible that its my game of the year 2024 and possibly a top 3 JRPG

I *love* Monster Hunter World, I've been playing and trying these games since Monster Hunter Tri on the Wii with its garbage ass Wii Remote and Numbchuck control scheme, but this, this finally made everything click after bouncing off game after game after game. The gameplay is what makes this game and franchise, Monster Hunter relys on a very very simple loop, kill or capture monster, get parts make new weapons and armor kill new monster get better parts, new monster too hard? grind out old monster until you're better. This loop as basic as it is carries the entire game and its great and I wouldn't change it for the world. The only issues I could even come up with that since the game is mainly a 4-player co-op experience that makes life for me as a primarily solo player very difficult, not to mention the incredibly unstable servers when you actually do want other players kneecapping you at every turn. World does have a story, but its threadbare, you're a hunter on an expedition to the new world to catalog and witness the new monsters. But thats not really the carrying focus for most players. The visuals are impressive I'm sure, but a reoccurring issues with games like this who seek after a realistic aesthetic is that their realism tends to blur together and create a grey blob of vague realism tinged with dirt and grime. The soundtrack is very much a background feature and never leaves that niche, I don't think I could pick out a single track if there was a gun to my head. Monster Hunter World is a wonderful game, with great additions making a franchise that has been difficult to penetrate just that much easier to get into and it is absolutely worth the effort

Persona 3 FES was the first Megaten game I played, which set me on the path to become the megaten megafan that I am, I unfortunately never finished the game at the time, but I have remedied that thanks to Persona 3: Reload. I feel like I should also state that I played the majority of this game with the community made FeMC mod. Modern Persona is defined by two things, social time management and dungeon crawling. Now these things are an acquired taste, and by god I'm eating it up, I found engaging with the social link and time management much easier and clearer than in the original, as well as better communication for when I was at time or story wall with moving forward. Persona's combat system, One More a modified version of Shin Megami Tenseis Press Turn system feels wonderful to engage with, enemies designs and known spells allow you to sus out weaknesses without needing to look them up using in-game or meta methods. The new Theurgy attacks that take the place of Fusion Spells from the original are wonderful and add an additional layer of enjoyable strategy. But, there is occasional enemy design that I feel deserves a little bit of critique, your entire time with the game it teaches you a two step process. 1: find weakness, 2: exploit weakness. During the several hours you'll spend with this game you'll come across various enemies, bosses and common that will have no weakness for you to exploit, I'm of two minds on this, one side says that this is the game challenging me "what happens if we take away this system you've been relying on" but also it does feel really bad to lose the ability to stack turns like I've been doing and instead reduced to just fishing for crits. Persona 3: Reload is a beautiful game, Atlus has been refining their UI and graphical design in large strides since the release of Persona 5, and you can very much see this as the next step forward, the world is vibrant and even the menus look better than whole other games, but occasionally this dedication can lead to some issues, like certain battle information being hidden behind additional menus, two examples of this are tied to battles both of which are tied to strategy, important information like known enemy weaknesses and who goes next are both hidden by an additional button press, due to this I wasn't even aware that one of these features even existed or thought it might have been story gated. Music is something that has become strongly associated with Persona and Megaten as a larger franchise, Persona 3's original sound track was written by Shoji Meguro largely featuring vocals by hip-hop artist Lotus Juice, this sound track is widely beloved and revered by fans. With the release of Reload there came a new version of said soundtrack, some people were very upset about the songs being re-recorded and featuring a new female vocalist. I think most of their complaints are more just not liking something new tbh. I personally really enjoy the new sound track, and if I want to go back and listen to the original? Its still there and easily accessible. Persona 3 has a wonderful story and a wonderful cast, I feel like I didn't full appreciate the characters or the themes as a child and as an adult I'm not sure I can do that now either. But there is something that does feel different about Persona 3 versus its younger siblings, I think its that the game is not afraid to actually put its characters its characters in danger and take them from you, it gives the story an actual weight where losses actually matter and aren't undone in a few minutes to a few hours.

In 2006 ATLUS released Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army, the game was an action based spin off of their already existing Devil Summoners sub-series of video games in the greater Megami Tensei franchise. In 2025 ATLUS released RAIDOU Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army, remastering the original graphics and adding many many features such as improved combat from later entries in the series, fast travel, voice acting and more! Raidou is primarily broken down into two gameplay styles, Navigation and Combat. Navigation its self can be broken down further into two more sections, Overworld and Darkworld. The overworld sections of the game largely take place in populated areas where you walk around, speak to NPCs, preform simple quests, visit shops and occasionally use Demons to solve puzzles. Darkworld sections take already existing areas and twists them into demon infested dungeons, these dungeons are rather simple as all things go, navigating areas that are already familiar with the occasional straightforward puzzle, with only one or two outliers that will take more than a second to solve, it leaves a bit to be desired in my opinion. As for the combat, I feel that unfortunately that the game falters here pretty heavily, the combat is an attempt to bring over the celebrated press turn system from mainline Shin Megami Tensei into an action game context. This isn't quite successful, the combat feels, spiritually muso-esqe, as in your inputs are very simple, a strong and weak attack which can chained together, where this fails and muso games succeeds is that in those games combat is fast and enemies die quickly, where as in Raidou your combos feel rather slow, with heavy attacks feeling down right sluggish (but do do almost 4x damage) and the enemies take an eternity to die, which can either feel incredibly boring when the enemies pose no threat or downright unfair when enemies or bosses have the have the ability to kill you in two hits from full health. Continuing from that point, many of the bosses in Raidou are straight up not fun in the slightest, I'd say more often than not I would be very very frustrated with every boss fight with few exceptions. The problem was largely the same in each fight as well, the first problem was the sheer amount of damage each boss was able to put out, most bosses were able to kill me in 1-2 hits, sometimes being guaranteed due to some of their attacks having additional stuns that could last up to 20 seconds, following that, attack tells or telegraphing is very minimal or doesn't give you enough time to react especially if you're locked in a combo. Occasionally bosses will have mechanics, you'll see lines where devastating lasers will or puddles on the ground where fire will rain from this sky, this is good, I like this as an idea, unfortunately there are only about 4 or so mechanics in the whole game that get reused very often with no variation so it doesn't really feel special anymore after the 3rd time. When it comes to your own combat options, you have a few to choose from, in addition to Raidous basic and heavy attacks you have summoner skills, more powerful or utilities that have a cooldown of various times, usually around 20-30 seconds. Passive sword skills which can increase the defense of guard, make recruiting demons easier and much more, both of these are great features, and do allow for more building opportunities to create a unique Raidou, which I think has always been a strength of the megaten games. But largely I feel like these don't amount to much more than "I need this element to hit a weakness". Raidou does have a few other elements in his kit, a new gun attack that allows you to do ranged damage, Devil's Bane, a counter-attack that triggers on a perfect dodge and Spirit Slash, a big attack that hits all enemies, most of these new additions are negligible at best, at most being a nice little bonus and worst being forgotten, with the odd one out being Spirit Slash which is incredibly useful, especially during sloggy boss fights. The other half of combat comes from your demons, in classic megaten fashion you can recruit most enemies to fight on your side, in combat you can have two demons deployed out at once, they act of their own accord attacking and casting spell at their digression, you can give them specific commands but thats in menus so I never used it, I doubt the game was designed with pausing every few seconds to issues commands in mind. I'm honestly don't really care for this system, it feels mostly like a set and forget system, as long as my demons have the right abilities I'll just leave them to their own devices, and they'll hit weaknesses eventually. Which feels very un-megaten to me, megaten has always felt strategic to me in my brain, planning out all your moves so you can maximize your turn economy, obviously this can't be a 1:1 thing because of the genre change, but I wish it felt better. Lastly the combat system MAG Drain, I think this system could be fine, but as it is now, I think it needs more time, how this system works is that you have a resource called MAG, which is spent when your demons or you use magic or certain abilities, you can recover MAG by preforming weak attacks, but at the rate that your MAG goes down there's almost no reason to do anything but weak attacks because if you run out and your demons can't heal you anymore you'll die rather fast. Overall I do think the system might have something there, but either cost or regen could do with a rebalance so I have some wiggle room to work with. The story is where I think that Raidou really shines and is what kept me invested, it starts as a low stakes supernatural detective story, which almost immediately starts building up with insane twists and turns, where the game starts and ends are so far from each other that you'd swear you were playing a different game. Thats the beauty of the writing of Raidou, If you went from the beginning to the end with no journey in the center you'd accuse the game of jumping the shark, but the journey between points A and B slowly raise your acceptance levels of odd happenings until you're at the end of the game and incredible things are happening. I really love the characters and world around Raidou, theres so many NPCs to talk to with so much dialogue which can be expanded by using demon abilities, and even more as the story goes on. One of my personal favorite things is how the demons feel much more characterized than in other entries, some are friendly and will chat and hangout with you, I really hope to see things of this nature in future games. But if there's on spot Raidou falters, its in the writing and choices around the newly added side quests, instead of following a traditional quest giver system, the game forgoes it entirely and just puts every quest you have access to into your log, this can lead to confusing instances where you're exploring around the cities and accidentally completing a quest and getting surprised by a quest complete screen. I think this could be addressed by instead of auto accepting the quest you would have to talk to an NPC first, you could still have them listed in the journal but involving the player more would bring a bit more engagement I think, as for the quests themselves most of them aren't anything to write home about, very very uninteresting fodder, though some do give you some neat insight into demon and human life and a few that are very neat and fully voice acted, but those are few are far between. The visuals in Raidou Remastered are very solid for the most part, Raidou already had a very striking art style, as did many megaten games, so they already had a very solid base to work with, if there was anything to complain about its that many of the filler NPCs that you can't interact with still hold their PS2 polygoness, while that does have its own charm it is worth mentioning. A final thing (and the thing that bugs me the most) When you enter a battle or complete a side quest, you get a little PNG of Raidou on the screen and it just looks so bad, maybe from the animation of it or just the still image, there's something about it that feels very cheap. But if I need to nit-pick something like that, it must be doing pretty well. ATLUS games and especially megaten games have been known for decades at this point for their incredibly good soundtracks, and this is no different, Raidous soundtrack is brassy and full of good times, and worth the listen. Raidou Remastered is a rocky game, but I do believe that its worth the time if you enjoy stories that a go a little nutty, but maybe consider dropping the difficultly because its not fun to engage with and not worth the headache.

Drakengard is a game unlike any other, in no place will you find a game that is as bad, is as good, is as such a spectacle as Drakengard. Drakengard has 3 distinct gameplay styles, on foot fighting hordes and hordes of enemies as you pursue an objective, usually killing specific enemies. The second gameplay style is airborne on dragonback, flying through open stages taking down aerial enemies ranging from D&D-esque Beholders to full-on airships using your dragon breath and the all-mighty dragon sneeze which will destroy your speaker system, this gameplay style also makes a less appearance in the first gameplay style where you can switch between the two of them as the situation calls for it. The third and final gameplay style is much akin to the first but with a fixed isometric camera angle, it is used the least out of all of them because, it doesn't really add much to the other game modes than it does take away features from them. What can I say about Drakengards story and characters? What starts as a basic save the princess narrative is corrupted into something wholly unrecognizable, featuring such hits as the suicide fairy, the baby eater and of course, incest. One of the biggest issues I feel is once you're dead set on getting every ending it can become difficult to sus out where you are in the story and what events have actually happened in your current reality. The visuals are well... lacking due to the visual tone of this game, which is pretty dark, things can tend to just blur and fuse together. The soundtrack is something to behold, it was designed to make you feel like you're going crazy, and it certainly accomplishes that. Remember riding home in the back of your parents van with with your favorite CD in your discman and every bump and jostle in the road would cause the disc to skip and repeat? Imagine that but your disc is the work of the old masters and it never ends. I suppose you could call it Avant Garde, and I guess I will. Drakengard is a game ass game, its horrible, its great, its an unforgettable experience, mind numbing gameplay, brainblasting cutscenes and story. You should play it, experience it. But like don't do the the thing where you have to manually unlock the 60+ weapons for the last ending, just cheat lmao

Kingdom Hearts 2 is a wonderful nostalgia trip, I grew up with this game so I'm certain that this absolutely effects my view on the game but still it is my view. Most people consider KH2 to be the peak of combat of the series, I'm not sure if I'm one of these people because I haven't played all of the games, but still I think it is very good, theres a little room for improvement, but it is precious little. Kingdom Hearts story has sort of become a meme on the larger internet as being very confusing and convoluted, I partially agree but also think its very overplayed, yes the franchise as a whole is messy because odds are it wasn't all planned out which leads to confusion, but also storys on an individual level aren't that hard to follow. But also I don't think the story is like, engaging? Its enjoyable sure, but I don't think I ever felt engaged. Thanks to its visual styling KH2's visuals have aged much better than some of its PS2 kin, it still looks great. Like many Square games, KH2's sound track is full of bangers, Yoko Shimamura is an incredible composer who needs more recognition than she gets.

Lord of the Rings: The Third Age is perhaps the worst game I have ever played on stream. LotR:TA is a turn-based RPG, which takes heavy, HEAVY cues from Final Fantasy X, one of the best JRPGs ever made. It falls on its face with nearly every aspect of its game design, leaving no reason for it to be played, whether you're a RPG enjoyer or a Tolkein fan. Let's start with the gameplay, the meat and potatoes of what you'll be doing, essentially there are two methods of play, the overworld, where you navigate a largely linear area, picking up items, changing your equipment, leveling up your characters and getting into fights. Which leads into the second gameplay variation, combat. It plays out much like you would assume, on your turns you chose your actions, attack, spells, items or switching your active party members. While all this seems fine enough, the execution of each individual part takes what would've been a mid licensed RPG, with not much to write home about, to a crass homunculus of the RPG genre. Theres so many issues that it makes it very difficult to even start discussing them, so I will start with a very simple concept, recovering HP, there are a few ways of recovering HP in LotR:TA, Skills that heal, items, leveling up and interacting with a save point. All of this is standard issue RPG fare, where the game stumbles is healing on the overworld. You cannot heal on the overworld using skills, you can only recover using items or a save point if you are near one. Which brings us to another issue, healing items. In most RPGs if you run out of healing options, no biggie you can just pop back to a town to restock. This is not an option in LotR:TA, as there is no currency in the game, there are also no towns. However, there is an option for obtaining more items, you can learn a skill that allows you craft more healing items if it is used in combat, how ever this leads to another issue. Combat. More specifically how encounters are designed, this game does not have random encounters, normally this would be something to be praised, however their solution is awful. Instead of a traditional encounter every X amount of steps it has set encounters within certain areas on the map, which are exhausted after you complete them. This means that you can do every encounter in an area, and will probably do so each time. This design choice means you cannot grind levels, ability points (to learn new abilities) or crafted items. Meaning that theoretically you could run out of resources and soft lock yourself. And all of that is just scraping the surface level, not even touching on turns where two enemies take eight turns, lacking of a respect option for stats and much much more. On to the story though, it's not much to talk about, its hard to follow at the best of times and inane at the worst. It follows a Gondorian who was struck down by a ringwraith and was revived by an elf, they together follow after the Fellowship, through each area from the movie meeting new allies a long the way. The story is incredibly unclear about what you're supposed to be doing other than "just follow the fellowship", I do think this story is the fault of the licensing agreement that EA had, which only allows them to work with things depicted in the Peter Jackson films. In addition to cutscenes that don't communicate much, there are also "Epic Scenes" which are recut scenes from the movies with narration dubbed over them, mostly from Gandalf. There are 109 of these scenes, which range from not really adding anything to massive story revelations to straight up telling lies about in game lore. Speaking of, if you're a bit of a lore hound, this game will probably do massive psychic damage to you, it varies from small inconsequential things like the amount of trolls in Moria, to your party fighting the Balrog or killing all 8 ringwraiths post-witch king death (which they also helped with). As for visuals, theres not much here, I suspect that this game largely reuses models from EA's previous LotR games, which is not a bad thing. Its a 6th gen game seeking an at least semi-realistic visual style, which unfortunately hasn't aged the best. The worst thing I have to say is that many of the characters mouths are actively broken when they're moving or screaming, as well as the battle UI looking very very rushed. Lastly the Soundtrack, it mostly consists of tracks from the films soundtrack, and if I said anything negative about Howard Shore's work I would be drawn and quartered and then crucified, as I would deserve. However I feel like the over usage of it really cheapens the impact of the music. Overall this game is one of the worst games I have ever played, there is absolutely no reason any person should give the game the time of day.

Magicka 2 feels like such a relic of a bygone era playing it almost ten years after the fact, it barely iterates on the previous game, not that thats a bad thing, its more of the same and if you like that you'll probably like this. Magicka 2 brings back the 8 element system from the previous game, your favourites are here, big rock, arcane (which is death for some reason now) lightening and much much more! In addition to that you can now assign non-beam spells to numbered slots on your hot bar! This makes pulling out a favorite in a pinch much easier while you're trying to navigate the usually chaotic battlefields of Magicka 2. The story is pretty simple, as is standard fair for wacky co-op hijinx games, though it does have some surprising twists and neat settings as the game goes forward. There was something bugging me during my entire playthrough though, there was just something up with the writing that just felt *off*, it was almost like they were trying to make Magicka grounded, which I do not think would be a good move. Don't get me wrong, Magicka 2 is still silly, but the silly feels a lot more restricted to dialogue and jokes, but when it comes to equipment and weapons, its just regular run of the mill swords and staves, not as out there as the previous game and it feels kinda empty without that stuff. The visuals here are a minor upgrade from the previous game, its not a lot but you can tell that the game feels a little more vibrant, a little less muted. That said, theres something about the textures in this game that just don't feel as homey, they just feel off and odd. As usual for me soundtracks are a weak point, most of the time I don't parse their existence, occasionally I'll catch the odd harpsichord note and my ears will perk up but then not much follows. Magicka 2 is... an okay experience, theres no reason to run out to market to procure yourself a copy, but if you've got a group of friends who're done for a few hours of team killing nonsense you could do worse than Magicka 2, but you could also do better

I feel like I should preface this, I never played TTYD growing up, and I think that really will colour my experience with it. TTYD has two major gameplay sections, overworld and combat, lets start with the overworld. Overworld navigation is pretty simple, jumping feels good, the problem arises with with attacking, you can attack to initiate a first strike on any enemy, the issue is that you may only attack to the left or the right of Mario, while enemies can attack from below and above and you generally will not have enough time to reposition yourself before you're hit and forced into a battle. Another minor issue is that you can acquire a badge that allows you to insta kill significantly weaker enemies without a battle (good) the problem is if these enemies get a first strike on you, you're forced into a battle with an incredibly weak enemy that you gain little from fighting, I feel like it would be better if you just took damage and weren't forced into a battle. One last reoccurring issue is that often times you're forced to walk across long swaths of screens, usually 3-4, for very simple reasons, generally talking to NPCs, this happens a lot and really starts to wear on you when you just want to progress in the story but instead you have to retread ground you've already covered, maybe a few times over. As for combat, its very very simple, now this isn't necessarily a negative but I personally find it a bit boring and less fun than systems that have a bit more cogs turning. I think this is a symptom of the two person party system. Later in the game it does open up slightly more with buff items and the ability to engage with the badge system, however both of these are severely limited due to your very limited inventory which is generally better suited to carrying healing items instead of buffs and how little badge points you can choose over HP and FP making builds as a concept harder to engage with. The story is much like the gameplay, not very complex, which again isn't necessarily and ding against the game, Mario receives a treasure map, Princess Peach is kidnapped, hi-jinx ensue. I feel like I should state that I have emotional processing issues, making some of the story beats that I'm told are really tear jerkers fall flat. The visuals are incredible, stylized games like this often appeal to me, due to their immortal good looks, but this being uprezzed from its old look on the gamecube to the switch just makes everything pop like nothing else. The original TTYDs soundtrack was no slouch by any means, but listening to it versus the remasters is like night and day. The originals music feels very contained and the switch version feels so wide and expansive, like it has opened a whole new world of music that just wasn't possible on the Gamecube.