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Joonatan Itkonen
- Disco Elysium
- Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Joonatan Itkonen's Reviews
The Final Shape has several staggeringly annoying design choices and raid encounters, and solo adventurers rarely feel welcome. But it's also full of welcome fanservice, tender goodbyes, and a sense of scale this long story has seen before. If it's a farewell, it's well worth it.
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Eiyuden Chronicles is the spiritual successor to the Suikoden series, and a heartbreaking farewell to Yoshitaka Murayama, who passed away unexpectedly earlier this year. As such, it's a bittersweet experience: one that thrills and excites, only to remind us that we'll never see something like it again.
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Sand Land is a traditional action-adventure made better by the iconic style and wit of Akira Toriyama. It's also a sorrowful farewell to the maestro who helped revolutionize how the West viewed anime. We're lucky his final outing is this much fun and provides a fitting conclusion to his career.
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Stellar Blade is exactly what it says on the tin. It isn't big, original, or even novel, and the experience turns tedious well before the 20-hour campaign draws to a close. The aggressive fanservice is equally dour and does nothing to hide the lazy shortcuts the narrative takes.
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Mixing Wallace & Gromit with Terry Gilliam, the delightful Harold Halibut has charm and artistry to spare. It's just a shame the gameplay gets in the way of a good thing, and often left me wondering whether this would have been better as an animated special instead.
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Two years after its console debut, Forbidden West arrives on the PC with a respectable and often breathtakingly gorgeous port. The game still struggles with its linear story spread over a massive open world, but Aloy's post-apocalyptic adventure is still a wild and intoxicating vision worth experiencing.
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Dragon's Dogma 2 does plenty of things right, especially when it lets players immerse themselves in the superlative open world. But the stupid save mechanics and numerous performance issues eat away at that enjoyment to the point the gameplay feels like a chore. It's still fun, but it could be so much more.
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Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is a game without a beginning or an end, yet it's the kind of audacious, breathtaking, and superlative artistry that redefines what we expect from the genre. Square Enix has proven itself once again as a master of the RPG.
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Mario vs. Donkey Kong is still fun and inventive, but there's a sense that this probably didn't need a full Switch release. It has much more in common with mobile games, and the fantastic Mario Run proved we could have an addictive Nintendo experience on that platform as well.
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As a budget God of War, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden deserves praise for its ambitious and often deeply touching story. It's just a shame the gameplay is nowhere as fun as its inspirations. Nonetheless, this is still a worthwhile title to explore, if only to support story-driven adventure games like this.
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Infinite Wealth is like Avengers Endgame for the Like a Dragon franchise. It's full of fanservice, it's bloated, and everything is amped up to eleven. Despite this, it just works, and this emotional climax to multiple storylines from the past decade and a half hits every high you could want. I loved it.
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Forza Motorsport is fine, just fine, and that's about it. It squeaks by with the same dependable racing experience that, at this point, is starting to feel stale.
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Detective Pikachu Returns is a slight but charming mystery game for younger audiences. It won't last you a long time, and the graphics are plain at best, but it's still a light and breezy time that could be much worse. Shame about that price tag, though.
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Star Ocean: The Second Story R isn't just a terrific remake of a classic title, it's a revitalization of a franchise that at some point lost its way. With gorgeous graphics, a killer soundtrack, and a charming cast, Star Ocean: The Second Story R is a brilliant return to one of the original PlayStation's great triumphs.
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The Avatar movies aren't original, to begin with, but it's still a disappointment to see their potential wasted on such a derivative Far Cry expansion. It's a visual treat to explore Pandora. What a shame the gameplay is duller than a thousand years of cryo-sleep.
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I'd love to say that Cities: Skylines 2 is everything we could have hoped it would be, but right now it's more like a blueprint of an idea rather than a finished product. I'm sure it looks amazing to the architect, but the rest of us will have to deal with the broken mechanics and lackluster performance until the promises of a better tomorrow come to pass.
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A dark and twisted vision that mixes Hayao Miyazaki, Isaac Asimov, and Fables into a spellbinding whole, Lies of P won't set the world on fire with its clumsy gameplay mechanics, but the atmosphere and story are second to none.
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Poorly balanced, janky, confusing, and simply not fun, Lords of the Fallen is a prime example that just because you can make a Dark Souls clone doesn't mean you should.
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Mortal Kombat 1 is both a new beginning and a celebration of everything Kombat. It's a surprisingly fun and engaging action film where you get to play the best parts. The new game modes bring little to the table, but the main campaign is as fun as ever.
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Synapse is one of the first games to showcase what VR on a home console can be. It's fast-paced, inventive, and visually stunning. Sadly, it's not much more than that, as the repetitive gameplay can't keep up with the technical splendor. It's fine, but not the system-seller the PSVR2 needs right now.
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