Games Beaten 2026

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

21: Spider-Man (2018)

There's always something intriguing about seeing your home town distilled into a video game map. Sony's attempt at Manhattan is the most ambitious recreation of any game. And yet, sacrifices were made. You won't see any scaffolding, you can't take your favorite subway line, you'll never see a banner for the Knicks on MSG, and what the heck happened to Harlem? Seeing and understanding how compromises were made is both fascinating and disheartening. The same goes for many other quirks, most famously, how it's possible to dunk a basketball but not shoot through hoops.

One can opt into a predictable AAA showcase, with rudimentary stealth, whack-a-mole combat, lackluster film scenes, and even simple puzzles representing Peter Parker's career as a scientist. But that is best avoided, as one can enjoy dozens of Spider-Man comics in the time it takes to work your way through this gesampt"kunst"werk.

4/10

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2026 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
* indicates a repeat

1. Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
2. We Were Here (Steam)
3. We Were Here Too (Steam)
4. Tales of Graces f (PS3) *
5. Retro Game Challenge (Switch) *
6. We Were Here Forever (Steam)
7. Tales of Hearts R (PSVita) *
8. Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered (PC)
9. Mega Man 11 (PC)
10. Gravity Circuit (PC)
11. Mario Party DS (DS)
12. Ghost of Tsushima (PS5)
13. Ghost of Tsushima: Iki Island (PS5)
14. Astro's Playroom (PS5)
15. Michael Jackson: The Experience (PSP)
16. Sackboy: A Big Adventure (PS5)
17. Control (PS4)
18. White Album (PS3)
19. Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World (GBA)
20. Kirby's Epic Yarn (Wii)
21. Breath of Fire III (PSP)
22. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (PS2) *
23. Sly 2: Band of Thieves (PS2)
24. Army of Two (Xbox 360)

25. Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves (PS2)

To round out the trilogy, it only made sense to go right on to Sly 3 after finishing Sly 2. While I hadn’t exactly enjoyed Sly 2 very much, it made little sense to turn back now after already going so far (especially with what great trouble it was to import a copy in the first place). After all, maybe it’d actually be good this time? X3. I didn’t do any of the extra challenges (as they seemed really not fun at all), but it took me around 13.5 hours to beat the English version of the game.

Sly 3 picks up a bit after Sly 2 leaves off, but we actually start in media res this time. In the middle of a huge coordinated break in on Dr. M’s base, everything goes horribly wrong and Sly begins to see his life flash before his eyes. It’s in this flashback where basically all of the game takes place as you see how this huge heist got set up in the first place. An old thieving buddy of Sly’s late father tells Sly about an island holding the legendary Cooper family vault where all of the collected riches of his ancestors lay stored. However, the nefarious and mysterious Dr. M has been trying to break into the vault himself for years now, and it’ll take a heck of a dream team to ever dream of getting past the myriad of defenses that he’s got set up around the island. The end of the previous game led to Murray leaving the team and Bentley being bound to a wheelchair, but that hasn’t stopped Sly or Bentley from chasing after this dream. One new team member at a time, they’re committed to reclaiming Sly’s family legacy and kicking this Dr. M guy to the curb.

The story still isn’t anything incredible, but it is *such* a massive step up from the previous games that I cannot help but laud it for that. For the first time in a Sucker Punch game, we actually have fun dynamics, banter even, between characters! Bentley and Sly both have far more life and personality than they ever had before, and that extends to the rest of the cast (both new and old) as well. Sucker Punch have actually managed to make a game that’s fun and funny to hear the characters talk in, which I had frankly totally given up on given how all their earlier games were written up to this point. It makes the game way more fun and entertaining to play as a result, and it’s such a welcome change from the shallow snore-fests that the previous two games largely were.

However, we’re still sadly far from free from the eternal specter of Sucker Punch’s writing habits. The casual sexism is still there, of course, but the casual racism they delve into so often is REALLY bad in this game. While it’s no big deal with all the silly Italian accents in Venice, of course, it comes off as *way* more gross and distasteful when we get to how they handle Aboriginal Australians (especially with how they don’t even bother to let the Aboriginal Australian team member speak in real language :/ ). The China stuff is also far from unproblematic either, but even with how bad their track record up to the present day has been, this is easily the worst of any of their older games.

All that said, though, this is ironically enough incredibly good disability representation at the same time. Bentley actually manages to be really great representation of a character in a wheelchair, even going as far as to have a proper conversation with another character about how conflicted he feels about not being able to walk anymore. It’s not going to win any Pulitzers any time soon, of course, but I was absolutely blown away that a game this habitually thoughtless towards minority groups managed to have such good representation for one kind of them regardless. They’ve also got some deeper narrative themes they take swings at, but it all comes off as so underdeveloped that it ends up feeling weird yet easily ignored rather than some albatross around the game’s neck (as the Australia stuff already does very well instead :/ ). Sly 3’s writing has some really glaring, awful weak spots, but I think the good just about manages to outshine the bad (though I wouldn’t fault someone else for feeling otherwise).

The gameplay is still very similar to Sly 2’s, but the year in between the two has clearly been very well worthwhile. There are still issues around combat here and there, and the “press O to parkour” stuff is still rather imperfect. Boss battles in particular are a lot clunkier than they probably needed to be due to the former, but the latter is a lot less bad thanks to overall far improved level design. Another great boon is a general very significant polishing up of the activities the game has you doing, and the game flows far better as a result. Eliminating any optional objectives like the collectible clues in Sly 2 helps with this as well, but the better map design, greater and better polished variety of missions, and the extra playable characters help give a direly needed improvement to the gameplay loop’s pacing, and it pays off basically the whole game. Hacks as their writing team very often are, Sucker Punch were clearly studying a lot with the mistakes of Sly 2, and the results frankly speak for themselves. I’m not going to say that there were never any parts where I was throwing my hands up in frustration because the rules on exactly what I was meant to do were just that unclear, but much like with the writing, this is the first Sly game where I can earnestly say I enjoyed playing darn near the whole thing rather than just the occasional bright spot.

The presentation is very good very much like Sly 2’s was. We’ve reused a ton from that game, from the engine to a lot of character animations, and it still looks as great as it ever has. There are only six hub worlds this time around rather than eight, but just how massive and varied the locations so often are makes up for that more than enough, and they all have very distinct flares to them as well. The music is overall pretty darn good here too and so are the voice performances. Sly’s voice direction is still really weirdly flat compared to other characters’, but the better script writing thankfully makes that far more easily ignored a problem than Sly 2 had it as.

Verdict: Recommended. While still not a perfect game, Sly 3 manages to be a pretty damn good time that’s actually worthy of the (somehow) good reputation this whole series seems to carry these days. While the other games are ones where I can only really say “I can see why these were popular when they were new”, Sly 3 actually still holds up pretty darn well in most regards. This is a very strong game on the PS2 still worth playing. It’s got its fair share of missteps, especially in regards to the writing, but if you were going to play *any* Sly Cooper game, you’re far better off only playing this one and skipping the others, because this is the one time they *really* got it right.

[Ack]

1. Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil (FPS)(PC)
2. Doom 3 (FPS)(PC)
3. V Rising (Adventure)(PC)
4. Teardown (Action)(PC)
5. Control: Ultimate Edition (Action)(PC)
6. Peak (Adventure)(PC)
7. The Exit 8 (Horror)(PC)
8. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (RPG)(PC)
9. Killing Time: Resurrected (FPS)(PC)
10. Darkenstein 3D (FPS)(PC)
11. Metal Garden (FPS)(PC)
12. Caput Mortum (Horror)(PC)
13. Corridor 7: Alien Invasion (FPS)(PC)
14. Extraneum (FPS)(PC)

Extraneum is another boomer shooter FPS, pulling directly from the likes of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom with its total lack of jumping or ducking. It does require reloading, and there are unlockable alternate firing methods to build out the arsenal, but at its core, it is about going a world without a z-axis, guns blazing, and making every foe you face sincerely regret their life choices.

You're a security guard, which explains your weapons training. You work for some kind of massive corporation working on mining and mutagenics in a futuristic, cartoonish pixel-art town. Mutants get loose. Kill them all. Sure, you could point out there are collectable discs with plot info about a mad scientist turning all the employees into mutants and zombies, but...you have a minigun? Why are we even talking?

Extraneum also offers some secret levels, which require you find enough of the hidden info discs, insert them into special doors, and then seek the alternate exits beyond. These levels often house your alternate fire mods for weapons, so they're worth seeking. And the final one offers a pinball table, because if there is ANY reason to stop firing, it's to play pinball.

I really liked Extraneum, because it doesn't offer you too much extraneous crap. It's simple: get guns, shoot enemies, explore levels. Eventually kill boss and move to next episode. Guns feel good, enemies are satisfying to kill, alls right with the world.

[Note]

1. Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom (SAT)
2. Castle Crashers Remastered (NSW)
3. Soul Calibur (DC)
4. Final Fantasy VII (PS1)
5. Alien Storm (GEN)
6. Captain America and the Avengers (GEN)



7. Final Fight 2 (SNES)

After playing through the first and third games in the Final Fight series over the past few years, I was interested in tracking down the second title, which I had trouble finding in my area for quite a while. I finally came across a copy of it last month. As a beat 'em up fan, I'm always glad to add another one to my selection of games. Final Fight 2 is a title that eluded me when it was released, so while I've played the other games in the series, this one would be new to me.

Gameplay wise, the game is very similar to the first Final Fight on the console. You have access to three characters, with only Haggar returning from the first game. The newly introduced protagonists are Maki and Carlos. For this particular playthrough, I went with Carlos, who seems to be the more well rounded character of the bunch. You have a standard move set here, consisting of a regular attack, jump, grapple, and special attack. There are six levels in the game, so it's a bit on the shorter side. Unlike the first game, which takes place in Metro City, the sequel takes a cue from Street Fighter 2, and all the levels are based on real world locations. It's cool to see some of these places interpreted in 16-bit form.

The graphics are really well done for the most part. The character sprites are large and well animated. The background levels look really good too, and there's some interesting details included in the various stages. I wish we received some short cutscenes between stages though, as opposed to just text on a black screen. That's one of the only visual items that I think falls short. Also, I thought it was funny that the Netherlands level was made to be this dreary and dark place, when it's probably one of the prettiest places I had the opportunity to visit. Soundtrack wise, I found the tunes in the game be more mediocre. I didn't think they were painful, but at the same time, they didn't do a lot for me either.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Final Fight 2. While I wouldn't consider it a top tier beat 'em up on the system, I think if you're a fan of the first game, you'll find some fun here as well. Check it out, if you haven't already!

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

The Dutch love Final Fight 2 for its portrayal of our country, especially the mountains in the background!

[TheSSNintendo]

1. Deja Vu: MacVenture Series
2. Deja Vu II: MacVenture Series
3. Earthworm Jim 2 (SNES/Switch Online)
4. Crash Banidcoot: The Huge Adventure (Gameboy Advance)
5. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (Switch)
6. Lego Batman: The Video Game (Steam)
7. Ys III - Wanderers from Ys (SNES)
8. Suikoden II HD Remaster (Switch)
9. Technobabylon (GOG)
10. Crystalis (NES/Switch Online)
11. Mega Man II (Game Boy/Switch Online)
12. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back from the Sewers (Game Boy/Cowabunga Collection)
13. Prison City (Steam)
14. Mega Man X2 (SNES/Mega Man X Legacy Collection)
15. Tunic (XBox One)
16. Ducktales 2 (NES/Steam - Disney Afternoon Collection)
17. Talespin (NES/Steam - Disney Afternoon Collection)
18. Freddy Pharkas - Frontier Pharmacist (GOG)

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2026 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
* indicates a repeat

1. Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
2. We Were Here (Steam)
3. We Were Here Too (Steam)
4. Tales of Graces f (PS3) *
5. Retro Game Challenge (Switch) *
6. We Were Here Forever (Steam)
7. Tales of Hearts R (PSVita) *
8. Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered (PC)
9. Mega Man 11 (PC)
10. Gravity Circuit (PC)
11. Mario Party DS (DS)
12. Ghost of Tsushima (PS5)
13. Ghost of Tsushima: Iki Island (PS5)
14. Astro's Playroom (PS5)
15. Michael Jackson: The Experience (PSP)
16. Sackboy: A Big Adventure (PS5)
17. Control (PS4)
18. White Album (PS3)
19. Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World (GBA)
20. Kirby's Epic Yarn (Wii)
21. Breath of Fire III (PSP)
22. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (PS2) *
23. Sly 2: Band of Thieves (PS2)
24. Army of Two (Xbox 360)
25. Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves (PS2)

26. Jak II (PS2)

After finishing the Sly trilogy, it only made sense to finally move on to the other major trilogy of western-developed platformers released in the PS2 era. Very similarly to the Sly games, while the first two Jak & Daxter games *did* come out in Japan, the second one is very rare. I tracked down a cheap copy of the first game and played it a year or so ago, but anything more than that was far too rich for my blood, so I had my wife pick up this trilogy pack for me because it was far easier and cheaper than any other alternative. It took me a good while to get to it, but now I’ve finally beaten what’s apparently one of the most infamously difficult games on the PS2. Getting 112 precursor orbs and all of the Dark Jak powerups, it took me about 15.5 hours to beat the English version of the game.

Jak II takes a really hard pivot from the story and tone of the first game. After the events in the first game, Jak, Daxter, and the gang crowd into their machine to go through the strange teleporter gate they’ve found. However, upon turning it on, a big scary monster head threatens them from the other side as they’re drawn in and scattered to the other side of the portal. In this strange new world, Jak finds himself alone in the run down dictatorship of Haven City, the last bastion of defense against the evil invading Metalhead armies. Jak finds himself an unwilling participant in this war as well, as the regime quickly abduct him and use him as their new principle test subject for their secret weapon program. Two years of torture and dark eco experiments leave Jak jaded and on the verge of death, but that’s when Daxter finally helps bust him out of super jail. On the outside once again, Jak and Daxter need to get help from the underground resistance movement to not just get back at the regime that nearly killed Jak, but to also survive the metal head invasions in the first place.

Jak II’s story is infamous for taking a much darker narrative direction than any of Naughty Dog’s previous work. In the face of underperforming mascot platformer sales across the board (not just Jak & Daxter), they decided to take a lot of inspiration from things like GTA III mechanically and narratively, making a story packed with way more contemporary markers of maturity (i.e. guns and swearing). That end product has, at the very least, not exactly withstood the test of time very well. The overall plot spends most of its run time coming off as a loosely connected series of vignettes rather than a more straightforwardly connected linear story. However, unlike how the contemporary GTA games put themselves together, Jak II isn’t a more decentralized narrative to begin with. These plot beats still all ostensibly revolve around the struggle against the regime and the invasion, but that connective tissue between events stays so generally muddled until the endgame that the game winds up with pretty lackluster pacing.

This wouldn’t be a terrible issue if the way to that endgame state was funny or entertaining, but holy heck is it anything but the sort. Jak II’s storywriting is laughably self-serious for a game with such absurd tonal whiplash. Daxter, in particular, is constant strain on this game from the very start. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a character in a game who is such a persistent narrative presence despite being so amazingly unfunny the entire time. I’d reckon that Daxter has well over 1/3 of the game’s dialogue if not over half of it, because he has SO many quips per conversation that it drags them out *so* badly. Jak actually talks now, as it so happens, but it seems like that was just a narrative concession because a grimmer narrative like this would make it farcical to have a chatterbox joke machine like Daxter be Jak’s only method of talking with other characters like it was in the first game. Daxter’s biggest imperative is to spout at least 2 to 4 misogynistic, fatphobic, or just generally distasteful and mocking jokes towards the other half of the conversation in between each and every of their lines, so it’d be quite the challenge to have him as Jak’s interpreter and major driver of the plot. Jak himself just comes off as an arbitrary jerk a lot of the time, and none of the characters are particularly likeable or funny (so Daxter isn’t so much an outlier so much as he’s just the loudest example of the general vibe of the game’s writing). Despite one or two genuinely good jokes/scenes, the game’s writing is torturous, and this is easily one of the most aggressively bad attempts at comedy that I’ve seen in a major game from this console generation.

While we haven’t even gotten to talking about the gameplay yet, things aren’t much better on that front either. The main thing I knew about Jak II’s gameplay before I started it was that it both went far more into being a GTA-clone as well as was incredibly stingy with checkpoints. Both of those panned out to be completely true assertions, but just how much devil is in those details shocked even myself. To start with, Jak II still carries over a ton of mechanical DNA from Jak 1. If you look at my Jak & Daxter review, you’ll find that I was hardly a fan of how that game worked mechanically. The double jumping was far too finicky in how you activated it, and it led to a lot of unnecessary backtracking and deaths from missed jumps. Jak II has fixed absolutely none of that, and the platforming still feels just as arbitrarily mean as it used to if not even more so with how in love with pixel perfect jumps this game is. Given the strength of 3D platformers as a genre in the previous generation, I’d argue that Jak & Daxter is a fairly poor 3D platformer for the time, and it’s largely only impressive as a technical showcase for the PS2’s power rather than being a well-executed platformer in its own right. Jak II doubles down on that approach to game design, but we now have *far* more genres to be poor at rather than just platforming.

Most directly related to the platforming is the hoverboarding. Rather than the simple races that contemporary Ratchet & Clank uses its hoverboard sections as, Jak II actually has the incredibly ambitious decision to put a dedicated skateboarding game into the game. Complete with a full skate park that you can do points challenges in for optional extra goodies, it hardly feels as good as playing a proper Tony Hawk game, but it’s admittedly very impressive what Naughty Dog have managed to pull off with the momentum-based speed and jumps for half pipes, ramps, and rail grinding. However, the hoverboard use does not stop at just this mostly optional skate park. Once you get the hoverboard around 40% of the way through the game, you start seeing tons of missions either use the hoverboard as its main mechanic and/or see rail grinds and ramp jumps as necessary parts of the platforming you’ll need to do to get from point A to point B in story missions. It hardly controls like the worst garbage ever, but I’d be hard pressed to say that working skateboarding into the normal platforming like this feels “good”, especially when so much of it is over bottomless pits. While you at least don’t lose any money upon death (as this game has no money to lose), you’re still sent far back enough to the previous checkpoint that you’ll be cursing any potentially grindable rail you see far before you hit the game’s conclusion.

What you *do* lose, or rather don’t get restored, upon death is ammo. While Jak retains his Crash Bandicoot-esque swirls and his punches, Jak II also seems him take up an arsenal of firearms not unlike you’d see in the GTA or Ratchet & Clank games of the time. Jak ultimately gets 4 different guns, and various mandatory missions will get you ammo capacity and damage upgrades for them as the game progresses. However, unlike in even the early GTA games, Jak has no ability to manually aim his guns in first person. You are entirely reliant on Jak’s auto-aim abilities for success in gunplay, and that gets incredibly tedious incredibly quickly. It also means that the normal single-shot rifle quickly becomes the only gun ever worth using. It combines good range and acceptable damage with efficient ammo usage, and when you can only so rarely expect Jak to fire where you’d like him to on the very first shot, that is an extremely appealing combination of qualities to have.

Jak also only has 8 pips of health between him and death. This may seem like a lot, but it seems a lot worse in the face of all but the weakest enemies doing 2 pips of damage per hit. This means you only have 4 hits between you and going back to that checkpoint yet again, and enemies *never* drop health, either. Health is only ever dropped from specific ammo crates (as their type of loot drop is always predetermined), so you’ve got to play the shooting sections incredibly carefully if you don’t want to lose a bunch of hard fought progress. This is in tandem to how carefully you’ll already need to do those platforming sections with how much this game loves bottomless pits, and this is especially true when various sections aren’t even kind enough to give you ample ammo refill crates around to restore spent ammo between attempts.

To top it all off, the camera is also frequently terrible with how rough the environment design is. Lots of tight spaces to get your camera stuck and cramped into do not play well with unforgiving checkpoints, unreliable auto-aiming, and a very small health bar. During my various attempts at the game’s harder combat sections, I frequently joked to my friend’s that my enemies were only the #2 most dangerous combatant alongside my true ultimate foe: The Camera. While it felt a bit too mean a complaint at times, with just how much harder it makes the final boss and his colossal health bar, my villainization of the camera started to feel pretty darn vindicated by the end XP. Jak II’s combat and platforming sections are a laundry list of incredibly mean choices to test your patience, and we are far from finished detailing the aspects of this game that feel that way.

While I could go into more depth with the aggravating turret sections, awkwardly controlling mech sections (with lots of enemies and no health refills), mercilessly unfair run away/towards the camera sections, and pointless day/night cycle that does nothing but make it far harder to see at night (making everything from the gunplay to the platforming that much more punishing and difficult for about half of your playtime), the last thing I really cannot leave unaddressed is the way the open world gameplay is executed. As an open world environment, Haven City is, in a word, terrible. Contemporary games like GTA III did certainly have problems with being annoying to get around due to the pointlessly massive size of the map, but Jak II takes the bad city design to a whole new level. First of all, Haven City actually isn’t a circuit: It’s a line. If you’re going from the race track to the water district, even though they’re adjacent on the larger map, there’s no alleyway connecting them. You’ve got to travel the entire length of the city to get over there, and trips that long or similarly tedious are things you’ll be dealing with a LOT with how much they love putting the next mission a million miles away from the one you just did.

It’s also not just time consuming, because it’s also actively tedious as well. Haven City isn’t composed of straightaways in most of its design. The majority of the streets are packed with sharp corners, narrow streets, and even total U-turns as you make your way to the next mission start point. As I mentioned earlier, while the hoverboard may be fast, you also don’t actually get it until nearly halfway through the game. Walking is unimaginably slow, so your only other recourse is to drive. While cars are indeed quick, they’re far from an actually appealing alternative. For one, not only are those bad roads already awful to hoverboard through, they’re far worse to drive through with how badly the cars perform. While the weaker ones explode with only one good crash, the hover vehicles *all* handle terribly. While admittedly appropriate for hover cars, it doesn’t exactly make it any more fun to deal with just how floaty their driving is. Even though you can press a shoulder button to swap between ground level or midair, that’s just exchanging one type of road impediment for another, because streets are also packed with pedestrians and other cars which impede your progress terribly. Bumping one of the many patrolling cops will get a hail of gunfire added to the mix as well.

With all this in mind, now you’ve got to consider that this traffic *never* turns off during any of the game’s myriad driving missions. This game is in love with needlessly timed missions, too. While the truly impossible ones are mercifully restricted to optional content, this doesn’t make it any easier just hoping you get lucky enough to have the cars and pedestrians spawn sparingly enough that you can manage to make it through this time rather than fail yet again. To give credit where credit is due, there are some very well appreciated features in Jak II’s open world. For one, there’s a very simple to use retry button upon death that puts you right back to the last checkpoint (or, more normally, the start of the mission because there are no checkpoints). It doesn’t exactly make those bad checkpoints easier to deal with, but it does at least mean that you’ve got that much less awful city to redrive through if you had to go back to the mission start location every time.

The game also has a pretty good waypoint system to show you where the next mission start location is. While you don’t have a line on the floor telling you where to go, the icon will point towards the path on the mini-map that’s the correct way to go from where you presently are rather than just showing you where the next place is as the crow flies like so, so many of Jak II’s contemporaries do. But that’s where my praise ends, because this doesn’t help worth a lick when you’re in actual driving missions. This has “drive through the waypoint” missions for its city driving sections just like plenty of games from this period do, but they only show you the very next waypoint. Never showing you the waypoint *after* that means you’ll have dozens of failed attempts because you just didn’t guess (or didn’t remember) well enough for which way to turn after that particular waypoint, and that gets really tedious to deal with given how long so many of this game’s races are (never mind the actual bike races with mandatory shortcuts that you instantly die on if you don’t take them *just* right).

In short, playing Jak II is a trial that is rarely fun. It’s tolerable at best, miserable at worst, and that’s even compared to the also frequently dreadful “worst story missions” in contemporary GTA games. While those are also bad, you at least have options in GTA as to how to approach most missions. Even if it means abusing the game’s systems a bit, there’s usually a fair bit you can do in GTA to tilt the odds in your favor with more/better guns, body armor, and/or better cars. Jak II has no such luxuries. There are functionally no optional upgrades of any kind, so all you *ever* have at your disposal is exactly what you’re given in the moment, and what you’re given always feels somewhere between simply inadequate and downright spitefully pitiful.

Aesthetically, the game does at least deliver on good visuals (something Naughty Dog have always obsessed over and prided themselves on) even if the music was something I found intensely unmemorable. While the cutscenes certainly aren’t animated Hollywood film quality as some contemporary reviews lauded them as, they’re still very impressive for such an early PS2 game. Some people who watched me play Jak II balked at clash between Haven City’s grungy urban settings and the green nature of the world outside, but I actually quite like the aesthetic composition of the game, and I think they pull it all off quite well to make a cool looking world (even if it’s a world that sucks to play in). While the voice acting is all very solid, my biggest complaint is the character designs. This is particularly an issue with female characters, because (as is and was so often the case) while men get all sorts of shapes and sizes to exist in, women only ever look like the same kind of buxom sex doll. It’s hardly like it’s undercutting great character writing or anything, but the women’s designs in this game alongside Daxter’s terrible humor are easily what mark this game the hardest as a product of the early 2000’s.

Verdict: Not Recommended. Open world games this old are often a gamble to go back to. Back in their day, they were a known compromise of mechanics for the sheer spectacle of both the scale of their worlds and the amount of different genres on display. It was a lot easier to accept relatively poorer gameplay compared to a proper game in that genre because those more tightly designed, narrower games didn’t take place in these big explorable worlds. I believe Jak II’s popularity back in the day is a lot easier to understand through this lens, but it’s a game that time has been far more unkind to than even many other open world games on the PS2. Jak II is just not tightly polished up enough a game in any regard to ever feel more than grueling. Rather than being a “jack of all trades, master of none” as a point of appeal, Jak II ends up feeling nothing more than bad at everything. There is no “good parts vs bad parts” of the experience, because it’s just going from one awful activity type to the next. The ambition Jak II was designed with far outstrips the ability of its creators to actually deliver on it, and that is the video game equivalent of nails on a chalkboard especially given how much better this has been executed on in the many years since.

----

27. Jak 3 (PS2)

Once I finally slew the awful beast that was Jak II, it was logically only reasonable to power right on to Jak 3. I wasn’t exactly super excited for this one, but I knew that if I didn’t do it now, then I’d wind up putting it off forever. Jak 3 is also commonly thought of as the best game in this series, so far as I’ve encountered, so I also had at least some faint hope that this would be a nice turnabout from Jak II that remedied the great myriad of issue that game had. My hopes weren’t exactly granted, but at least Jak 3 ended up being shorter than Jak II had been XD. It overall took me around 11.5 hours (roughly 4 hours less than Jak II had) to beat the English version of the game.

Taking part in the grand tradition of doing both a genre pivot as well as completely ignoring the previous game’s cliffhanger, Jak 3 starts out in the middle of a dead wasteland. For reasons not entirely clear at first, Jak has been exiled from Haven City despite his heroism in saving it in Jak II (and the still ongoing invasion threat from the not actually yet defeated Metalhead armies), so he, Daxter, and their monkey/parrot-thing friend Pecker (aka the one actually funny character in Jak II) have been sent out to this barren desert to die. However, all hope is not yet lost. Thanks to a beacon he was given, Jak is found by the other outsiders of the desert. He’s far from the first to be exiled from Haven City, and the survivors have set up a civilization around an oasis at the far side of the desert. Though he’ll have to prove himself to these merciless ruffians, these new friends are Jak’s best chance of both surviving the desert as well as saving Haven City (and maybe the world, too?) once and for all.

Jak 3’s story is, like most other things in this game, a step up from Jak II, but that’s nothing particularly worth bragging about. Much like in Jak II, the narrative is mostly a big series of loosely connected vignettes. They’re all ostensibly about saving Haven City, unravelling the final mystery of the Precursors, and stopping the oncoming apocalypse, but the way the missions you’re doing actually tie together is woefully unclear for the large majority of the game’s runtime (even worse than Jak II had it, frankly). Mercifully, however, though the actual plotting of the story is weaker here, the moment-to-moment character writing does manage to be better than Jak II’s was. Once again, that’s not exactly a difficult bar to clear, and most of it just comes from shutting Daxter up so he’s not spouting misogynistic/fatphobic jokes so relentlessly, but at least this game isn’t quite as miserable to hear the dialogue in as the last game was.

They *try* for something of a heartfelt narrative with Jak and where he really came from, but it doesn’t amount to much. Despite some pretty decent foreshadowing, Jak is just too shallow a character to really pull off that kind of character story about him, and the overall narrative themes (if you can say this game actually has them) just aren’t focused enough to really do anything meaningful with it. While I’m certainly thankful that this game actually manages to up the ante from Jak II at least a little, it’s such a smattering together of various storylines that it’s hard to really appreciate the story as a whole in any meaningful way.

The mechanics unfortunately take a similar approach. As much as I had a pretty rough time playing this game too, I can’t bring myself to say that Jak 3’s gameplay is actually worse than Jak II’s. However, that’s mostly down to just less merciless quality of life improvements rather than meaningful improvements to the gameplay. Rather than the relentlessly cruel Jak II, Jak 3 has the kindness to make the health pickup distribution better as well as give better checkpoints, too. Not only do normal enemies now drop health from time to time, but you even get increases to your max health throughout the story! It’s grasping at straws in terms of things to praise about this game, I’ll admit, but just how much less you’re dying in 4 hits and having to repeat long, awful combat sections makes this a *less* grueling time than its predecessor at the very least.

But that sadly doesn’t mean that things aren’t still some level of grueling. Much as was the case with Jak II, pretty much everything good and bad (i.e. mostly bad) about the previous entry is back once again on top of all the new stuff this game brings to the table. The bad feeling double jumps, crappy hoverboard platforming, the awful auto-aim on the guns, Haven City’s awful linear design, the horrid floaty hover car driving (and bad waypoint placement on driving challenges), and basically everything else (even my hated pointless day/night cycle) are all still here almost as much as they’ve ever been. In terms of mechanical feel, none of that has been meaningfully improved, so I won’t bother reiterating all of it here when you can just go back and read my Jak II review for a full helping of that if need be.

The only small improvements we’ve managed to get from Jak II’s gameplay design is that the level design is such that the camera isn’t quite so much of a problem nearly as frequently, and Haven City’s side paths have been reduced so it’s still tedious to fly all the way through but at least not quite as confusing. I do want to stress that the better checkpoints and somewhat kinder overall mission design does make the general play experience less routinely miserable than Jak II’s was, so I want to give that credit as it’s due, but it’s also hard to have very positive feelings in the face of the big new bugbear this game drags into the room: buggy driving.

Now that isn’t “buggy” like the bugs games have. This is buggy as in “dune buggy”, because you’re driving all over the desert in a huge new open area outside the new city. At first, I was relieved to have a car that actually had wheels connecting it to the ground. Surely, this would mean the terrible, cruddy driving of Jak II was a thing of the past, right? Well, I was double wrong. Not only is there still a lot of awful hover car driving once the story drags you back to Haven City, but this new buggy driving might be even worse than the old hover car driving in terms of how it handles (the mission design being better in Jak 3 just makes it all hurt a little less).

For starters, even if you’re not in Haven City backtracking to and fro for the whole game this time (only like half of it), you’re now just trekking all around this huge, awful desert instead. It’s something that starts out cool and novel, but it sours hella fast as it sinks in just how empty the desert is and how bad it feels to drive these cars. Perhaps to the game’s credit, maybe driving a dune buggy is meant to feel like this. As you’re going over dunes and getting harangued by marauders constantly (who somehow are immune to the flesh rending sandstorms that your mission timers are tracking your demise from), your car is tumbling everywhere as you try and keep it going in a straight line. Keeping the thing going the direction you want it is a constant struggle. It’s like trying to drive a car with completely hecked up wheel alignment. Between that and your endless assault from the attacking bandits, it only ever feels frustrating when you fail a long (often 5+ minutes) desert driving challenge just because you got unlucky with the bandit spawns yet again.

They even manage to squeeze the fun out of the few interesting parts of the buggy driving they have you do, like how it’s kinda fun doing the jump buggy platforming your first time out to the volcano, but it’s incredibly tedious to do that the third time they’re making you do it. You often only have the vaguest idea of why you’re going out to these quest markers too, so it’s just the story arbitrarily dragging you out to the desert yet again to suffer. Any good will that the game might’ve earned from me through its partial polishing up of returning sections from Jak II was completely squandered with just how much I ended up hating the buggy sections. Granted, it’s not like those returning sections are all that much more bearable this time around anyhow, but the fact that they managed to make a new driving system perhaps even worse than the last one is truly an accomplishment to be dreaded for any prospective player of Jak 3 (and also makes me that much more relieved that Jak X didn’t come out here, because I shudder to think at how rough that game must be to play).

Aesthetically, Jak 3 continues being a pretty darn good-looking series. The VA is still good, and the animation work is as stellar as ever, especially for a game *this* early on the PS2 and for cutscenes that are basically all in-engine rather than prerendered. As much as I disliked interacting with them, the new Metalheads and buggies have cool designs, and the desert city is a very cool and well-realized location visually, too. The big point I noticed with Jak 3’s presentation, however, was the music. Compared to Jak II where the music was so forgettable I barely ever even realized it was there, Jak 3 is far more ambitious with its soundtrack, and there were a good few really jammin’ songs that sounded like something escaped sometimes from Banjo-Kazooie and other times from even Final Fantasy. It hardly makes up for all my other issues with the game, but it’s nice to have *one* aspect of the game that I can just uncritically praise.

Verdict: Not Recommended. As much as this game is, inarguably improved from Jak II, that is something so ill worth bragging about that it’s just damning with faint praise. Jak 3 still suffers brutally from the consistent lack of polish that plagued Jak II’s design, and it’s aged just as poorly as a result. Unlike the Sly Cooper trilogy, where I was really pleasantly surprised by the rise in quality of the third game, Jak & Daxter never gets that turnaround. Naughty Dog were seemingly always so obsessed with chasing the hot, new design ideas they had that there was never any time to meaningfully refine the things they’d already done. Jak 3 is just the largest pile of disparate, middlingly executed mechanics that the Jak series had yet managed, and no amount of more kindly placed checkpoints and health powerups can keep it from being anything more than that. I absolutely understand why this game, much like the earlier ones, would’ve been incredibly impressive at the time it came out, but that sheer ambition has nearly worthless appeal factor all these years later, and this whole trilogy is far better off avoided unless you’re doing it nothing but pure academic curiosity.

[Note]

The Dutch love Final Fight 2 for its portrayal of our country, especially the mountains in the background!

It's good to hear the portrayal is appreciated! It is cool to see real life locations in the game, I just thought some of the areas in the Netherlands level looked a bit dreary. Maybe my perception is skewed, as I was there for a summer.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2026 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
* indicates a repeat

1. Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
2. We Were Here (Steam)
3. We Were Here Too (Steam)
4. Tales of Graces f (PS3) *
5. Retro Game Challenge (Switch) *
6. We Were Here Forever (Steam)
7. Tales of Hearts R (PSVita) *
8. Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered (PC)
9. Mega Man 11 (PC)
10. Gravity Circuit (PC)
11. Mario Party DS (DS)
12. Ghost of Tsushima (PS5)
13. Ghost of Tsushima: Iki Island (PS5)
14. Astro's Playroom (PS5)
15. Michael Jackson: The Experience (PSP)
16. Sackboy: A Big Adventure (PS5)
17. Control (PS4)
18. White Album (PS3)
19. Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World (GBA)
20. Kirby's Epic Yarn (Wii)
21. Breath of Fire III (PSP)
22. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (PS2) *
23. Sly 2: Band of Thieves (PS2)
24. Army of Two (Xbox 360)
25. Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves (PS2)
26. Jak II (PS2)
27. Jak 3 (PS2)

28. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3)

This is a series I’ve been planning to check out for a good while now, but the last time I picked up a copy of this first two games, this first game was the two of them that did nothing but hard crash the PS3 after the title screen. As a result, I had to wait quite some time until I could find another copy locally. As luck would have it, finding this new copy happened to coincide with me finishing Naughty Dog’s previous marquee trilogy, Jak & Daxter, so it only made sense to move right on to this game next. It overall took me almost dead-on 7 hours and 15 minutes to finish the Japanese version of the game (in English) on normal mode while looking for as many goodies as I could (and doing achievement hunting as I played as well to try and unlock as many extra featurettes as I could as well).

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is the story of Nathan Drake. Claiming to be the descendant of the legendary explorer, Sir Francis Drake, he’s managed to con a TV program to fund his quest to find the supposed resting place of Sir Drake’s coffin. Upon finding it, however, they find that the coffin actually holds nothing but a journal. According to what’s inside, Sir Drake actually faked his death for the history books all for the greatest treasure the New World had to offer: El Dorado. With his partner Sully in tow (as well as the TV presenter Elena, who refuses to be left behind), he sets out after the beyond ancient South American ruins where the journal proclaims El Dorado to be hidden. What follows is a madcap adventure full of pirates, lost cities, and unexplainable mysteries, and I couldn’t be happier that I’d managed to experience it all completely unspoiled nearly 20 years later X3

While I enjoyed the Crash games back on the PS1, I had been so miserable playing the Jak games on PS2 that my expectations for Naughty Dog’s follow up series were low to say the least. Nonetheless, I was absolutely blown away with how much fun I had with this game, and the writing is no exception. Near the start of my time with this game, I remember reading Nathan Drake described as someone constantly living “on the edge of his abilities”, and I cannot think of a better way to describe him. While Naughty Dog have undoubtedly taken a lot of inspiration from old adventure serials and such, this game’s tight cast are remarkably well realized, and it does an amazing job of being a playable action/adventure movie.

Nathan Drake himself is a rascal in search of treasure, sure, but he’s also so much more than just some Han Solo or Indiana Jones wannabee. The degree of vulnerability and self-doubt that they manage to imbue Drake with was shocking to me given the usual quality of writing in western video games at this time. He feels like a truly three-dimensional character, and I loved watching his adventure play out. The same goes for the rest of the extended cast as well. Sully and especially Elena are fantastic foils to Drake, with Elena in particular being one of my favorite characters in the whole game. Naughty Dog have put together a confident, self-driven character who even gets to put Drake to shame with her bravery at points. It’s a level of good writing for a female character that I would’ve never believed was possible for a game from 2007 had I not seen it with my own eyes.

The game was honestly really fun to play, too. I’d heard so much for so many years about how rough it was to play Uncharted 1 and how the Nathan Drake Collection did *so* much to make Uncharted 1 playable, but I frankly find claims like that to be grossly exaggerated given how quality the experience of this first game was for me. Perhaps I’m just not picky enough for how my third-person cover shooters play, or perhaps Uncharted 2 is truly that great of a mechanical leap from this game, but with nothing else to compare it to, I had a whale of a time with Uncharted 1.

Gameplay is more or less divided into to main sections: combat and platforming, and they’re interspersed in such a way that they break up the pacing of one another very nicely. The combat is a pretty standard third-person cover shooter for the time. Drake can carry a side arm and one bigger gun at any given time in addition to a few grenades. I’m hardly the best at these kinds of game, but I found the enemies and combat encounters quite well laid out and a fun way to add tension to scenes. There’s a good variety in weapons, and the ammo is also dispersed enough that you’re encouraged to switch to new guns often enough to keep things interesting. However, the game actually has a couple of factors that spice the combat up just a little bit more.

The first is the very surprising way that blind firing (not aiming down sights) is actually a shockingly effective way to take down enemies if you’re in a hurry. The second is a melee system focused around simple combos. If you’re running out of bullets (or just find yourself in quarters too close for your guns), you can just do a square-triangle-square combo to knock the guy’s socks off. Enemies taken down with that “brutal” melee combo even drop twice the ammo, giving you that much more encouragement to engage with this risk reward system. It’s hardly the most in depth thing in the world, of course, but it was a genuinely useful tool to have often enough that I appreciated it was there.

The platforming is nothing fancy either, but it’s also mercifully far more interested in providing a satisfying spectacle than being a true test of your 3D platforming abilities. Drake can jump onto ledges and then climb along and jump between ledges to scale walls and get through the environment. Unlike the Jak & Daxter games, with their double jump timings and long jumps, Drake’s platforming is more a vehicle by which the game shows off its beautiful vistas as well as constructs simple puzzles (of the platforming variety or otherwise). Some areas make it a little unclear how or where to progress with the platforming, but the checkpoints for both combat and platforming are more than generous enough that you never feel more than a moment’s inconvenience if you misjudge where to go and plummet to your death. It’s not Mario 64, sure, but it’s not trying to be and also doesn’t need to be. Much like the combat, Uncharted’s platforming sections do an excellently tuned job of giving the player a satisfying gameplay experience without all of the extra baggage of a more technically focused game. The end result of all of it is a game whose gameplay is paced impeccably alongside the narrative, and the two compliment each other exceedingly well (especially given how much Naughty Dog’s previous work struggled with things like this).

Aesthetically, this game holds up shockingly well for a game as old as it is (not to mention a game as early in the PS3’s lifespan as this is). From the beautiful environments to the remarkably well animated and modeled humans, this is one more aspect that helps this game knock that “playable action/adventure movie” vibe out of the park. The music is also really well done, and it also compliments the action it accompanies very well on top of being very useful for indicating the current gameplay state (such as combat being initiated or ended). Naughty Dog have always prided themselves on their ability to make beautiful and impressive games on the hardware they’re given, and I’ve never felt it as acutely as when I was playing this game.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. I was actually intending to go right on to Uncharted 2 upon finishing this game, but I ended up feeling so well satiated by how well this story is put together that I just couldn’t find it in me to need more at the time. While I could definitely foresee and understand someone being bothered by the shooting or platforming not being quite as up to a polished sheen as more dedicated genre games would have, Uncharted is such a damn well executed product that I think it’s still super worth playing. From the gameplay to the writing, Naughty Dog really threw down the gauntlet with this one, and it’s no surprise that a game of this quality became the new main focus of the company after it came out.

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29. Pokemon Sapphire (GBA)

My wife recently gave me a big gift package of a bunch of her video game stuff from when she was a kid, and this was one of the goodies inside that big present. Even though I’ve played through Pokemon Ruby in English plenty of times when I was younger, and I even played through it again in Japanese a few years back, I’ve never actually played any of the other versions of third gen Pokemon. I was looking for something both familiar and engrossing to calm my nerves in the face of the upcoming new school year, and a trip through this game was just what the doctor ordered. With my team of Blaziken, Gardevoir, Wiscash, Tropius, Banette, and Aggron, it took me about dead-on 24 hours in total to beat the champion of the Hoenn League in the English version of the game. (As a side note, given that I’ve reviewed Pokemon Ruby so recently, I won’t go *too* far in depth for this review, and it’ll probably/hopefully be more rambling than my usual style, so if you want to know my deeper thoughts on the mechanics and such of this game, it’s best to go look at that review).

It was really interesting to see a version of this story where Team Magma weren’t the bad guys. It made for a fun contrast on what I’m used to as well as really helped drive home just how comparatively nonsensical Team Aqua’s plans are XD. That said, even though I’ve played this game a lot in English, it’s been so long that I didn’t remember any of how the game was written in this language (not that I ever read all that much in the games I played when I was younger anyhow <w>). I was frankly blown away by just how rough the translation is. While it’s nothing unintelligible or obviously ungrammatical (it’s not a SNES Enix game by any extent), *so* much dialogue is just so darn rough that I couldn’t help but be amused by it. It reminds me a lot of how the strange, rigid example phrases are in the “English as a second language” books I’ve read are. While that kind of weird, unconventional talking generally works fine for the bad guys, it makes a lot of standard NPCs come off as extremely strange, and I’m definitely happy that games localization has progressed so far from how it was back when these games were new.

The game was also third gen as I remember it, and it always manages to surprise me with just how backwards it feels. As thankful as I am that Game Freak had learned so many important lessons on what not to do in a Pokemon sequel after Gold/Silver, there are still so many annoyances beyond this being the last generation before the physical/special split. There are still way too many HMs needed for navigating the world and the end-game dungeons, and Dive being a better move than Whirlpool was is cold comfort when you’ve still gotta have so much of your main team’s moves or your party’s slots occupied by HM moves or dedicated HM havers. The natural learnsets for moves on level up are still awful, and it never ceased to amaze me just how many Pokemon I’d look up learned barely if any attacking moves of their base type as they leveled up.

The new Pokemon are quite strong and worth using (or at least considering) for the most part, thankfully, but evolution stones being sometimes so hard to get felt like another really needless constraint much like Gold/Silver suffer from so badly. I also know that it’s a meme complaint, but just how many new water Pokemon and water dungeons there are really drags the game out. There were already far too many good water Pokemon compared to other types who were begging for more good inclusions, and third gen does nothing to solve that problem. Overall, it’s still a game that plays well and is fun to go back to (fun to mix and match and experiment with new team dynamics on replays), but it definitely shows its age as merely the third go around at Pokemon with all the baggage that entails.

The game still looks and sounds great all these years later, though. The pixel art is still as charming as ever, and all of the Pokemon new and old are brought to life very well by the power of the GBA. This game has so many memorable and fun tunes, too. The sheer dedication to GBA soundchip horns will always be the most iconic aspect of this game’s soundtrack to me, and I’d never have it any other way X3

Verdict: Recommended. While second gen still doesn’t hold up too well, that is thankfully not the case for third gen. It’ll probably drive you at least a little crazy if you’re someone (like me) who’s so happy that newer games have improved natural move learnsets and removed the old requirements around HMs, but even with all that old game mechanical friction, Pokemon Sapphire is still worth going back to all these years later if you’re in the mood for a walk down memory lane or just something a bit different from modern Pokemon.

[MrPopo]

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025

1. Dead Space (2023) - PC
2. Dead Space 2 - PC
3. Dead Space 3 - PC
4. The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon - PS5
5. Stellar Blade - PS5
6. Dragon Quest VII Reimagined - Switch
7. Silent Hill 2 (2024) - PC
8. Silent Hill f - PC
9. Resident Evil Requiem - PC
10. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist - Genesis
11. Sins of a Solar Empire II - PC
12. Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! - PC
13. Gauntlet Dark Legacy - GC
14. A Street Cat's Tale 2: Outside is Dangerous - Switch
15. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time - SNES
16. Dragon's Crown - PS3
17. Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom - PS3
18. Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara - PS3
19. Shadow Hearts - PS2

Shadow Hearts is a JRPG with a timing-based battle system that landed fairly early in the PS2's life. It stands out with its setting; it takes place right before World War I, rather than being its own fantasy world. It's got some decent ideas, but it also lacks some depth and has some frustrating design choices.

The game begins in Russia, on the Trans-Siberian railroad. The main heroine, Alice, is attacked by the big bad. Fortunately, our hero Yuri is there and decides to step in and save her. They escape the train and make their way to civilization. However, as they move through the countryside they get caught up in a bunch of occult stuff going on in China. And there is still the lingering matter of the big bad wanting Alice for some reason.

The first half of the game is in China, and you linearly go from one map to the next, with no ability to backtrack. The second half is in Europe, and there you can revisit everywhere (and is required for all the end game equipment). The game still uses the prerendered environment style that was popular on the PS1, and it continues to sometimes be hard to read. In hostile areas you can encounter random enemies and get tossed into turn based combat.

In battle you have your standard array of basic attack, magic, and items. This game utilizes a system where whenever you select an action, the game presents you with a ring with one or more highlighted areas. A line will then sweep through the ring, and you need to press the button in each highlighted area. Basic attacks are always three areas, with the first hit being full power and the next two being half power follow ups. Magic will depend on how powerful the spell is. And items have a single activation point. That's right; you need to time things to use an item (which can be a problem if you're affected by a status that affects the ring system itself). The game also occasionally will have you needing to do this in exploration mode, such as activating a plot-relevant device. These can always be repeated, so it ends up just being annoying.

Combat actually ends up having a surprising dearth of options. The cost of your magic is always extremely high, so you really can't use it often outside of boss fights. Non-boss enemies die in a couple of full-power attacks, so there's no incentive to explore things like status effects (which you don't get many of and they are unreliable). And you have very limited access to stat-increasing effects (and zero stat-decreasing effects). As a result, combat comes down to spamming attack and occasionally spells on enemies that avoid attacks. The one wrinkle is that each character has a third resource bar (besides health and mana) that ticks down when their turn comes up. This only matters for boss fights, and even then, not for every character (as some just naturally have higher amounts).

The game's dungeon design is complicated in a bad way. Every dungeon is fairly mazelike with a lot of circling back and forth on itself, rather than a series of dead-end side-branches for items. The final dungeon is especially egregious, as it has a maze of invisible teleporters with no rhyme or reason to what sends you where. You just have to trial and error it.

Overall, I found things to get rote by about the midway point. You don't really get new options past that point in combat, you just deal more damage. The story is mildly interesting, given the recent setting and the occult themes that is unusual to see in JRPGs. Fortunately, the game doesn't overstay its welcome, and you can do some very mean things to the final boss if you save up the couple of busted self-buff items for him, which is a nice bit of catharsis.