Star Ocean: Till the End of Time (PS2 / PS4)

Star Ocean:  Till the End of Time is the third game in the Star Ocean JRPG series.  Originally for the PS2, it was ported over to PS4 with HD resolution and trophy support.  Despite the minor enhancements, you still have to keep in your mind that this is an old game, with a lot of aged gameplay mechanics.  While the character models are fine, the environments are muddy and pixilated, as are the cutscenes.  It also has a weak tutorial system and this is the series’ first game to 3D, so camera controls, using the shoulder buttons, are awkward.  At least it has widescreen support.

While you can rotate the camera in all environments, the camera angle is locked in looking down from above.  The developers used this as a way to hide treasure chests but this also makes it hard to see afar where enemies are, or where you’re going.  You end up relying on the mini-map, so you miss out on checking out the scenery which is half the fun.  At least there are no random battles, instead enemies roam the environments so you have a chance of avoiding them if you don’t want to battle.

The game has a clunky battle system at first.  In particular, the aiming is horrendous as you’ll miss more often than not.  It’s quite difficult to time your attacks when you first start off the game, since enemies always seem to land the hit faster than you, interrupting your attack which is annoying.  This gets much better as you slowly get used to the system and your characters gain skills so you can actually use the combat mechanics to its full potential.

The game uses a real time battle system where everyone has a Fury bar.  If the bar is full, you are protected from normal attacks.  A strong attack must be used to break the shield.  This is quite annoying since strong attacks are normally slower, so you might have to wait for the enemy to attack to leave enough time in their opening so you can land yours.  In addition, you can side step, run around the battlefield, use items and magic.  Not only do you have to constantly be on top of the three status bars of your characters (HP, MP and Fury), but also the rest of your party since their AI is pretty bad.

Attached to your character’s strong and normal attacks are skills, such that you can activate them when attacking.  This leads to the cancel attack mechanic where you can chain the skills right after an attack and this gives it a damage multiplier.  Unfortunately, using skills not only cost MP, but may cost HP and Fury so as mentioned, in the heat of things, there are a lot of bars to manage.  One thing to note is that if your HP or MP is reduced to nil, that character is knocked out.  Yes, you can be MP killed, but you can also use this to your advantage against enemies with low MP.

Your party is comprised of a maximum of three characters.  During battles, you can change the party member you’re controlling instantaneously with the shoulder buttons.  This is required given you need to select that particular character in order to get them to use items or to use specific spells.  Unfortunately, most skills use up HP as well as MP and in conjunction with the dumb AI, it is the perfect recipe for party member deaths and constant low HPs, as the AI is too stupid to conserve their HP.  Instead they spam skills on enemies, causing them to be perpetually on the brink of death and then because of low HP / MP, they stand around doing nothing to “preserve” themselves.

This is a game where the PS2 roots are obvious.  It loves to give you absolutely no guidance at all in progressing the game.  While there is a short tutorial on the battle system, it is poorly implemented and left out a lot of the most important aspects like the cancel attacks and skills.  It makes no mention that you gain SP when you level up that you can boost your stats with.  Dungeons are a confusing maze, filled with gimmicks that are absolutely annoying like locked doors, levers and on-rails sections.  Interacting with objects is also hit and miss since you need to angle the character just right.

The game uses save points.  Naturally, this is terrible in conjunction with the later long confusing dungeons that is extremely easy to get lost in.  Considering that dungeons are designed for you to get lost in, and difficult to see the whole map at once, you could be spending upwards to two hours before finding a save point.  This is always a terrible situation and when it happens, it is really obvious and frustrating, even more so with dungeon gimmicks like warping you back to the start of the current floor if you’re touched by moving obstacles.

Backtracking is pretty annoying later on too.  There is one particular point near the end of the game where you have to trek through an extremely annoying dungeon with a large and confusing layout filled with traps and high levelled enemies.  To make it even better, you have to fight multiple bosses along the way (and forcing you to trek back if you want to save).  The icing on the cake?  You have to trek all the way back out after going in, talk about annoying filler.

The story following Fayt, along with his childhood friend Sophia as they are chilling on a holiday planet.  However, the planet is attacked and everyone evacuates on a spaceship which is then caught in the crossfire.  Fayt ends up being separated from Sophia, dropping into a planet with less advanced technology (pretty much medieval ages).  He eventually gets caught in that planet’s affairs, and this spirals to a grand scale adventure where he learns that his father is more than he seems.  It ends up being a pretty interesting story, despite the poor voice acting.

There are huge amounts of story cutscenes so you’ll be watching a lot of them, which can break the flow of the game where several of them are quite slow and boring.  There are awkward pauses and lingering shots during scenes, especially during points where you advance the text and it takes a few seconds to register.  The graphics are quite decent, especially for a PS2 game.  The towns look great with the only slight negative being the low amount of people at times in the towns so it isn’t as bustling as it could have been.

There is a marked shift in the story towards the end of the game.  The majority of the first part takes place on one planet and you’re invested into the happenings of it.  Then a huge revelation comes around, and it’s a completely different type of story now which can feel jarring (but not unheard of in a JRPG).  It’s not bad, the story is still quite interesting, although it is somewhat lame that you recruit your full party so late into the game, meaning they join you at a very low level and you need to put in some effort to grind them up to scratch for that point in the game.

Dungeons and enemies towards the end of the game become noticeably harder and more annoying.  While if you have grinded enough then your stats aren’t an issue.  What is an issue are the enemies who has the frustrating combination of:  unable to be interrupted, fast attack animations, and being able to spam their moves which hits you multiple times in succession, thereby stunning you.  So when you are facing off against two or more of these enemies, you are constantly interrupted unable to attack and die in a very cheap way.  This causes the final parts of the game to really test your patience.  The difficulty spikes up really hard, as both normal enemies and bosses do a ton of damage.

The final boss can feel extremely cheap because it is so easy to beat if not for the fact that it has a party wide super move that will easily kill all your party members, and can be difficult to dodge without preparing beforehand to cheese it.  It is these types of things that make the game so terrible and unfair at times.  The dumb AI rears its ugly head here too, and the MP kill aspect is terrible.

There is a lot of post-game content, all of which are optional dungeons, several of which are extremely hard, and has the game’s toughest superbosses.  If you followed a walkthrough, beating the game takes around 30 to 40 hours without speed running through.  If you play blind, then it’ll be more likely to be 50+, and more likely to be a lot longer given you’ll constantly be lost.  There are also Battle Trophies, which are in-game achievements.  It’s a good idea but the actual implementation is clunky as it requires a secondary menu confirmation every time you get one and it asks you to save.  This happens as well when you load the game, since you need to load this separately.

Overall, Star Ocean:  Till the End of Time is both a great game and an annoying game.  It has cheap game design, whether it’s the unfair boss moves, extra hard enemies, confusing dungeons or save points that are spread too far apart, all these points ruin the game.  On the other hand, it is an enjoyable game where the combat is fun and you end up caring about the characters and their current situation.  However there are too many gameplay flaws that prevent it from being an amazing game, which is a shame as it tends to frustrate the player, blocking their progression, rather than allowing them to play the game without excessive grinding.

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Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2 (PS2)

Shin Megami Tensei:  Digital Devil Saga 2 is the second part of a JRPG duology, and a spin-off of the Shin Megami Tensei series with a standalone story.  After the cliffhanger ending of the first game, Digital Devil Saga 2 dishes out the heavy hitting revelations from the get go.  We get explanations of why the world of Digital Devil Saga was the way it was, the characters that appeared and what's happening in this current desolated world.  The battle system remains the same being the Press Start battle system.  You gain extra "half turns" if you target an enemy's weakness, but lose turns if you use something that they absorb or repel.  These rules bound the enemy as well and thus if you do not prepare well, you might be locked into a battle where the enemies end up doubling their amount of turns as they continually target your weakness.  You may also spend half a turn to pass with a character, to allow another character extra turns instead.  Battles go by faster than the first game as animations have increased in speed.

Unlike the mainline Shin Megami Tensei series, this game allows you to pick and choose what skills to equip your characters.  This is done through equipping Mantras, and gaining experience remains the way to get more skills for your characters.  The skill tree is not linear and grouped by similar skills anymore, instead, it is on a map-like board, giving you a bit more freedom and non-linear progression.  Gaining more skills remain as addictive as the first game, especially later on in the game where grinding for lower tiered Mantras to round out your characters is a lot more efficient.  The game mainly involves exploring dungeons.  It features random encounters but the encounter rate seems to be more reasonable than the first game.  It can be a little bit higher than normal at some places but it is really well paced for most of the game.  Dungeons can feel repetitive especially since it reuses the same environments many times in the one dungeon.  Thankfully, there is a map which you can pull up making it much easier to traverse and getting your bearings.

Unfortunately, the later dungeons have a gimmick to them which makes them extremely annoying and aggravating to push through.  Warps return but there is a really annoying section where you have to run away from a chasing enemy in the dungeon.  Action sequences are not the game's strong point and not what players would play this game for, so it is especially annoying when it decides to throw paralyzing traps that stop and pauses you for a sec before the enemy catches up to you requiring you to start the section again.  Then even if you pass the section, but forgot to heal, and you're unlucky enough to enter a random encounter where the enemy has the first strike and die, yay, you can now replay the whole section from the beginning again.  Like the first game, bosses are the highlights but they are trial and error.  You will rarely be able to defeat a boss on the first go.  This is because you need specific skills that you will only find out when you battle them at least once.

Bosses are also where you might need to grind for skills and having well rounded members is more important this time around as the game will force certain party members on you at specific points.  The grind can be painful at times, made worse if bosses decide to spam party wide status moves or multiple elements (since you can only put up protection against one element per turn).  This feels lame and cheap especially since you know your party is strong enough, just that you haven't developed the exact skills the developers wanted you to for that particular boss.  Even worse is when the game consistently rearranges the members of your party, throwing out your planning in the skills developed for each character to cover all your elemental weaknesses.  A nice bonus is if you have a cleared save file from the first game, you can import it to gain additional minor bonuses such as increased money at the start, extra items, sidequests and unlock hard mode from the get go.

All in all, Digital Devil Saga 2 feels easier than the first game, especially since you can gain a lot of levels easily if you're lucky and encounter the right enemies.  Despite that, some sections are still dependent on luck as you may just get a random encounter where the enemy consecutively gets critical hits and destroys your party in one turn.  There is also a massive difficulty spike in the final two bosses, requiring you to grind heavily for specific abilities.  It's annoying and frustrating since it stops you in your tracks to the finale that you know is very close.  It's pretty disappointing when the game up until then was perfectly balanced, no requiring excessive grinding and able to get away even if you don't have the optimal abilities.  While the first game had limited amounts of story, that is not the case here.  The story is a lot more developed and cutscenes are more frequent, giving you more purpose in the dungeon crawling.  The story is fantastic and really steps it up.

The story begins right after the first game where Serph and his tribe members are thrown from The Junkyard and into Nirvana.  Unfortunately, what they find there is not the paradise that they were promised.  Furthermore, Sera has been captured, thus the party aims to rescue Sera and along the way, rescue the world from the crisis it is currently facing.  The story gets really good towards the finale, with some saddening dramatic moments.  You feel that the game was building up towards these scenes and it delivered.  It culminates into a nice ending that is satisfying after two games.  Powering through the game, you can finish it within 25-40 hours, depending on how much you get lost during dungeons, how many times you died and how much time you spent on grinding abilities.  Overall, Digital Devil Saga 2 is a fun game.  You definitely have to have played the first game in order to fully appreciate this sequel (also given that there is no tutorial for the battle system either).  The game is a lot more balanced than the first game, which in addition to the higher amount of storytelling, makes it a rewarding and fun experience.

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Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga (PS2)

Shin Megami Tensei:  Digital Devil Saga is the first part of a JRPG duology, and is a spin-off of the Shin Megami Tensei series with a standalone story.  The game uses the Press Start battle system, which is turn based with the turn-order being based upon the order of your party members.  Each party member has a human and demon form.  In human form, they use guns.  In demon form, they have stronger physical attacks and access to magic and other skills.  Battles usually start with them in demon form, unless you are ambushed in which case you will start in human form and if you want to, spend a turn to change form.  The unique spin here is that anytime you use an attack that targets the enemy's weakness, or do a critical attack, then you gain an extra half-turn.  You can also pass our turn (which technically uses up half a turn) for another member to use.  However, if you miss an attack or use one that the enemy is resistant to or absorbs, then you lose a turn.  The same rules bound the enemy and thus battles become quite a strategy affair.

You learn more skills through the use of Mantras, which is similar to materia from Final Fantasy VII.  You can only equip one mantra at a time and you need to purchase them from in-game vendors.  While equipped, defeating enemies provides it with experience and once full, you learn the skills associated with it.  It's addictive and gives a lot of versatility to your characters.  Stronger enemies later in the game will give more points maxing out the lower-tiered mantras with ease, allowing you to catch up some of your other less used characters to round out their skills.  For the main character Serph, every time you level up, you can spend the points in whichever stats you wish, giving you heaps of freedom in the type of build you want him to be.  Characters start off with only four slots that you can choose and it can be expanded up to a total of eight slots.  This means that it becomes quite tactical in swapping skills before you enter battles and especially before facing bosses, to ensure that you have the right mix.  If you have characters with certain skills equipped, it may unlock more powerful combo skills.

Digital Devil Saga takes place in the Junkyard, in a post-apocalyptic world, where there are six tribes at war with each other.  During a skirmish, a demon virus occurs and brands everyone with a mark, as well as allowing them to transform into demons, devouring others to gain strength.  At the same time, a mysterious girl named Sera arrives with no memory and the higher being known as Angel appears, telling the tribe that they must defeat the others in order to ascend to Nirvana.  The main character is Serph, who is part of the Embryon tribe, along with fellow members Heat, Argilla, Gale and Cielo.  They decide to form alliances and invade other tribes, in order to get to Nirvana.  Thanks to the setting, all of the dungeons take place in buildings, rooms and sewers, so it can be a bit bland.  The game features random encounters and the encounter rate can be high at times.  However, at least it doesn't have the cheap difficulty of Nocturne.

Unfortunately, there is no way to completely turn off random encounters, the best you can do is purchase consumable items that reduces the rate, but still feels high.  The game uses a save point system and using a save point does not heal your characters, you must rely on recovery points instead, which is more infrequent.  Despite that, save points are evenly spaced.  No matter how good the story is, it's disappointing that the story to gameplay ratio is so low.  You're looking at 2+ hours of dungeon crawling for a few minutes of cutscenes.  However, towards the end of the game, there are some pretty massive revelations that will keep you hooked.  The ending itself is a huge revelation which gives another meaning to the title and is an excellent set up for the sequel.  The earlier dungeons are easy but later ones, especially the final dungeon, are a pain thanks to the various puzzles, plenty of dead ends and tendency to constantly warp you around confusing you further.  The high encounter rate will only serve to annoy you even more.

While the game is easier than Nocturne, if you do not pay attention or you treat the game lightly, you will be annihilated.  There are some really annoying encounters with waves of multiple enemies that causes status effects, that even when you are prepared, one unlucky turn is all it takes to turn the tables around, forcing a restart.  Even worse are bosses and normal enemies who loves to use status effects that target multiple characters at once, making it a huge pain to waste your turn to remove them before it is the enemies' turn to cast it again.  That's not to mention the instant death spells which feels cheap no matter what.  Boss battles will require very specific abilities and if you do not already have them, then have fun grinding to gain those abilities.  It's actually really annoying when some bosses take away a party member to constantly heal themselves while having huge amounts of HP.  Even better is when they use a move to gain multiple turns and then spam party-wide attacks.

At times, boss battles are a battle of attrition or straight dumb luck if you don't want to grind for those abilities.  It's also certain that you will never be able to beat a boss on the first try as they do require specialization and tailored skills.  It's trial and error gameplay at its finest.  The graphics are pretty decent for a PS2 game, it's just that the color palette makes everything look dull and grimy.  For a JRPG, it's not that long.  It takes around 25-40 hours to beat, depending on how lost you get during dungeons, whether you go for all the optional bosses and whether you bother to explore each dungeon fully.  Overall, Shin Megami Tensei:  Digital Devil Saga is an addictive game.  The simple battle system soon turns into a clever and tactical affair.  The mantra system is addictive and the difficulty is just right.  It isn't hard enough to turn away less experienced players but it's not each either. rewarding players who stop and plan ahead.  The story is decent, although you wish there was more of it instead of the larger focus on dungeon exploration when the dungeons are so bland.

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Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2)

Grand Theft Auto:  San Andreas is the sequel to Vice City and is the final mainline GTA game to be released for the PS2.  It carries a grander scope than the previous two games combined.  The map itself is massive and it is incredible that such a big and detailed world was able to be created like this at the time of its release.  As the undisputed king in open world games, San Andreas marks the return of all the features from previous games and then adds a lot more to it.  We see familiar features such as the day/night cycle (along with annoying restrictions on certain missions that can only be taken up within a specific time period), carjacking at any time, a huge amount of freedom to explore the world and the Wanted Level where police will increase their efforts to apprehend you when you perform crime.  The game utilizes save points but there are various properties on the map which you can buy.  Each of these includes a save point, therefore you don't have to traverse half the map just to save.

Weather effects are more varied with sandstorms, fog and rain amongst the other more standard sunshine and cloudy weather patterns.  New additions include limited environmental destruction such as vehicles that can now break fences, the character CJ being able to climb structures and a skill system, introducing RPG-elements into the series.  The skill system is such that the more you do a certain activity, the better CJ will be at it.  For example, riding a motorbike for a long time and leveling up your skills will reduce the chances of being flung off when you hit an object.  Or when you use a specific type of gun enough times, it will improve your accuracy.  CJ can eat food which he can then convert into stamina and muscles by going to the gym, leaning new moves and increasing his health.  Furthermore, he doesn't die instantly when he touches water, he can swim now.  CJ can crouch, allowing you to take cover during gunfights and do stealth kills when sneaking up on enemies.

The standard side missions such as police missions, ambulance missions and taxi missions are a given.  New are burglary missions where you rob houses and gang wars.  Certain areas will be controlled by enemy gangs and as CJ, you can incite a gang war, defeat the opposing gang and then claim the territory for yourself.  Finally, for the first time, you can freely control the camera without going into first person view.  This is extremely welcomed and makes the game a lot more fun.  Gunfights is what most of the missions will involve.  It retains the same lock-on system using the R1 button, and then attack/shooting using the Circle button.  You can change targets on the fly with L2 and R2 buttons.  If you wish, there is also a free-aim option but using the analogue sticks to aim can be difficult.  Unfortunately, aiming in a vehicle is horrible.  It is even worse when you have to contend with your own vehicle's health otherwise you fail the mission.  Heaven help you if it is the last part of a long mission because hooray, you get to repeat everything up to that point just to get another chance at it.  Free-aiming with the analogue sticks with sensitivity that you cannot toggle while the vehicle is swerving at high speed is definitely not fun.

The terrible handling of vehicles from the previous two games is the same here.  It is easy to spin out of control while turning or touching an object.  This crappy handling is frustrating in the racing missions and chase missions.  To advance the story, you complete missions.  The mission structure is exactly the same as the previous games.  Each mission will have multiple cutscenes to tell the story.  There can be multiple missions available at any one time and you have the freedom to pick which ones you want to do first.  Unfortunately, there are no checkpoints within the missions (bar on) so if you fail one, you will have to restart the whole thing again, including driving to the starting point.  There are specific missions where if you fail once, the second time you can skip part of the driving to go straight to the mission.  The missions encourage trial and error.  The attention to detail is impressive in that there are some unorthodox ways to beat the missions such as shooting the train operator to stop a train.  The early missions eases you into the game and in general, most of the missions in San Andreas are easier than III and Vice City.

There is an annoying trend of the game forcing you to trek over half the (enormous) map from one mission to the next.  This occurs within a mission too where you have to drive from one city to another, only for the next mission to be in the first city...  This is really annoying and significantly pads out the game.  With 101 missions in the game, this is the longest Grand Theft Auto game ever.  The horrible controls come to the forefront towards the later part of the game where it forces you to pilot aircrafts and pass through a series of training missions.  This is fine... except that the place is extremely sensitive to control, making it easy to spin and crash.  While it is a technical achievement in fitting this huge world without any loading screens between "islands" like the previous two games, the PS2 simply wasn't powerful enough to make it completely perfect.  There is a short draw distance with plenty of pop up.  If you are on the plane travelling too fast, the environments will not load fast enough and it will show up as low-res models instead.  The story follows Carl Johnson, or CJ, who returns to Los Santos after many years.  He is part of the Grove Street Families gang.  The gang is decline in its power and influence and CJ is not seen in a good light since he had been away for so long.

The first part of the story is more grounded and has CJ bringing the gang back to its former glory.  Along the way, he is constantly being forced to help out corrupted cops.  Eventually, CJ will travel to the country side and other cities to help out other characters, building up his influence and power.  The first part feels more personal than previous GTA games and you root for CJ.  Once he exists Los Santos though, it ends up being like the other games and CJ is helping out one character after another with the story becoming weaker, following a more predictable path.  CJ will end up doing literally everything from learning how to fly to grabbing a jetpack to breaking into secured military areas.  The finale is a long mission and is extremely tough.  This is also the only mission to have a midway checkpoint which may seem like a boon, but you still have to repeat huge chunks of the mission if you fail.  Lastly, there are plenty of minigames that you may never discover if you just focus on the main story.  There are rhythm games, gambling, having a girlfriend, basketball and pool.  There's so much to do it is mindblowing.  Overall, Grand Theft Auto:  San Andreas is amazing.  The world is huge and immersive, with plenty of varied environments such as deserts, urban and rural areas.  The signature freedom and amount of things to do will entertain you for hours on end.  While some of the missions are tough, in the grand scheme of things, San Andreas is one of the best games that is still fun today.

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Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PS2)

Grand Theft Auto:  Vice City is the sequel to Grand Theft Auto III, set in the 1980s and in the fictional Vice City.  Vice City makes numerous improvements to the previous game.  However, the camera is still automatic unless you go into first-person.  This makes it annoying when camera angles get in the way, especially after some cutscenes.  You can press the left shoulder button to recenter the camera to wherever the character is facing, but this doesn't work well when you need to face another direction quickly during shootouts.  Vice City itself is big and comprised of several islands.  Initially, you can only explore the west island but more is unlocked as the game progresses.  The game gives the player heaps of freedom after the opening cutscene.  It carries all the gameplay from III such as carjacking any car to drive it.  The car handling is still the same lightweight feel of III, as if you are driving on ice swerving like crazy whenever you so much as touch a pole.  Vehicles love to flip over if you don't release the accelerator 2 seconds before turning.

The problem with vehicle handling is that it seems the developer knew this was an issue since during certain missions where you can steal an opponent's vehicle, their vehicle handling is so much better and stable.  However, at least vehicles are a little more durable and can sustain more than a few hits before exploding.  One of the most touted additions to vehicles is bikes.  They are faster but they are also harder to handle at high speed and the slightest touch will fling you off the bike.  Another addition is that you can now accelerate a vehicle and then jump out with the vehicle keeping momentum to smash into things in front; this is very awesome and fun to do.  Lastly, there are flying vehicles in the game which is fun but creates massive lag in the game.  Getting into a car will play one of various radio stations (which you can toggle and change), complete with "ads" and talk shows, which can get extremely humorous.  Vice City nails the 1980s atmosphere, right down to the neon lights, sunset on the beach and the music (a lot of which are licensed songs).  The day/night cycle makes each location feel different, while there are different weather patterns such as rain and cloudy days.

The player can obtain various weapons.  You press the shoulder button to auto-aim against an enemy and then the circle button to shoot.  With certain guns such as sniper rifles, you can aim with the right stick.  Combat remains clunky and extremely frustrating when you are surrounded by enemies shooting at you, the PC version with mouse aiming is far superior in this aspect.  If you feel evil, you can go on a rampage destroying vehicles and killing bystanders.  However, performing crime in front of police will increase your Wanted Level.  This level can go up to six stars and each additional star will cause the police to use more resources in order to capture you.  If caught, you lose some money and the weapons you had on hand so the penalty isn't too big.  It's just more of an annoyance when they chase you when you wanted to do something else.  As expected, Vice City has heaps of collectibles and sidequests to encourage exploring the city.  There are 100 Hidden Packages which gives you tangible benefits once you finish it.  It's the same with sidequests which gives you bonuses if you fully complete them.  Most of the sidequests involve vehicles such as delivering pizza, carrying passengers in a taxi and quickly saving patients in an ambulance.

The story follows Tommy who has been released from jail after serving a 15 year sentence.  He travels to Vice City where he climbs from the bottom to the top, with him ending up taking over Vice City at the end of the game (not really a spoiler since you expect that to happen).  It is your typical Grand Theft Auto story.  The characters that Tommy meets can feel random and the way that he meets them is weak and contrived.  Then for no reason at all they immediately go ahead and give Tommy some errands to do.  The story is progressed via short-ish missions which are marked on the map.  A full sized map can be pulled from the Start Menu which is a fantastic addition.  Heading to the marked area will begin the mission.  There are usually more than one mission available at any point in time giving you some freedom to choose which one you want to do first.  Missions have cutscenes in front.  If you fail a mission's objectives, you have to travel all the way back to the location to restart it, which is annoying.  However, if you failed by dying, then a taxi appears when you respawn which takes you back to the starting point which is welcome.  At least you can skip most of the cutscenes.

There are a variety of missions from races, deliveries, shootouts, sniping and placing bombs.  Nearly all missions will involve driving of some sort.  However, Vice City has disgusting mission designs.  It's like the developers didn't test play their own designs.  Some missions are so frustrating with no checkpoints resulting in you having to start it again and again, toughing through it each time.  Not only is there a friggin short time limit to kill everyone quickly, then you have to race to a destination using the terrible vehicle controls, WITH five cars smashing into you all at once and exploding your car, WTH.  It is one of the most frustrating pieces of gaming ever and the fact is, it feels cheap.  Vice City is hard because it is cheap.  There are plenty of missions where you are always put on a handicap such as you having to get into a race but you start with a slow crappy car while the opponent has one of the fastest cars.  Therefore you have to replay the mission a few times, pre-plan ahead by getting a nice car and parking it in such a way that it is close to the starting point but doesn't disappear when the mission loads and then quickly swap and catch up.

In other missions, you will then have a checkpoint race using a boat but the boat is designed for high speed at straight lines yet the checkpoints are planted in twists and turns.  Finally, the final story mission is also a frustrating mission due to the clunky controls and overwhelming disadvantage.  Tommy has to face off against unlimited spawning enemies toting machine guns firing away at him.  Tommy himself dies easily, there is no easy way to take cover, no checkpoints so that you have to repeat the early sections again and again and again (which aren't easy), it's complete bullshit.  The fact is, when a game has such a reliance on arbitrary time limits with terrible controls, then it is no fun at all.

You can only save at specific locations.  There is initially only one save point but you can eventually purchase property which can also generate periodic income.  Unfortunately, if you are playing the PSN version on PS3, it is prone to frequent crashing which will literally kill your PS3 requiring a reboot of the machine, hope you saved!  It seems to be caused by driving fast, and the game can't load it quick enough.  Overall, Grand Theft Auto:  Vice City has improved on a lot of aspects from Grand Theft Auto III.  However, just like III though, time has not been kind to Vice City and it has not aged well at all.  The game has clunky controls, terrible vehicle handling, repetitive mission designs too reliant on arbitrary conditions and frustrating difficulty that feels cheap.  Vice City was ambitious in its day and did a lot of stuff, but many games since has improved upon the formula and improved on the style of gameplay such that going back to Vice City can be tough.  It's still worth a play and roaming around the map is fun, just maybe not so much with the missions and getting 100% completion.

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Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES (PS2)

Shin Megami Tensei:  Persona 3 FES is an updated rerelease of the original Persona 3, exclusive to the PlayStation 2.  Not only does FES added to the original's story with more story events, now known as The Journey, it presents an epilogue to the game's ending, called The Answer.

The Journey
Unlike previous entries in the Persona series, Persona 3 FES made a pretty significant revamp to the game.  While still set in high school, it incorporated sim elements into the gameplay.  The mostly silent protagonist, whom you can name, attends high school.  The game takes place over the course of a year, where you will be studying and taking exams, creating friendships and of course, fighting to save the world.  You play through each day and you will have free time on most of the days.  This is where you complete what the game calls "Social Links".  Social Links are where you create bonds with NPCs and learn their backstories, getting to know them better and trust them.  Their stories are actually quite interesting and are one of the highlights of the game.  By the end of it, you truly do feel that you have created a close bond and their circumstances will genuinely sadden or hearten you.  It gets to the point where you feel guilty that you brush them off after they asked you if you wanted to spend time with them, in order to focus on other Social Links... Social Links can be levelled up which ties into the Persona system as it gives them extra experience.

As Social Links take time, and you have limited time in the game, if you wish to max out all Social Links, you will definitely require a walkthrough or thorough planning through multiple playthroughs.  The other portion is of course the dungeon crawling.  The main dungeon is called Tartarus, where every floor is randomly generated every time you enter it.  It can be boring since it all looks the same.  Even though there are different "blocks" where the theme is different, the layout is too generic which gets boring fairly quickly.  There are 264 floors to conquer and since it generates a different layout each time, you can't even map out each floor for future reference.  The enemies, called Shadows, roam the battlefield but will chase you if you get within their field of vision.  Striking from behind gives you the advantage of having one turn first, while them striking you first has the opposite effect.  If you are at a significantly high level than them, they will ran away which is great if you just wanted to grab some treasures.

Persona 3 FES utilizes a turn-based battle system but has a few annoying "features".  You can only control the main character and AI will control the other three.  This means that there will often be times where they spam HP or SP intensive attacks on weak enemies or using an item when you would rather them cast a spell.  You have little influence via setting Tactics which boils down to either dedicating them to healing/support only, specifying one target or not do anything at all.  Furthermore, if the main character dies, it is game over which is frustrating when you're grinding for levels and you lose hours of progress (since you cannot save unless you return to the first floor, but you can only go back to specific floors and then have to climb up again).  It is worse when you encounter enemies that spam instant death attacks, it feels cheap if your character just got hit with one that connected and you see the game over screen.

If you attack an enemy (or are attacked) by something that they're weak against, you gain one extra turn and they are knocked over.  If you knock all enemies over you can initiate an All Out Attack which has all the characters rushing in to attack at once, and quite cool to watch.  There is a "rush" option where it sets all characters to automatically use their normal attack.  Fairly useless in most situations since even during grinding, you would want to pay attention to health and spells.  Characters and enemies can miss with their attacks, and you WILL miss often.  This has a chance of causing them to fall over, losing a turn, too bad it mainly happens to your characters and not the enemy.  While characters can attack with their weapons, they utilize a power called a Persona.  These are summoned beings who can attack using special moves and spells.  The protagonist is unique in that he can use any Persona and you gain Personas randomly during battles or more reliably, fusing two or more together.  You can buy back any Persona you used in fusion which is helpful.

Unfortunately, there is a fatigue system where characters will get Tired after fighting a certain number of battles.  When a character is Tired (or heaven forbid, "Sick"), they become weaker and more susceptible to status effects and attacks.  Characters who get these statuses will automatically become unplayable for the rest of that session when you return to the first floor of Tartarus (to save, for example).  This limits exploration and is easily one of the more annoying aspects of the game early on.  Thankfully, it becomes a no-issue when everyone is levelled up, as the higher the level a character is, the more battles they're able to participate before getting Tired.  Plus, when you get the full roster of playable characters, you can swap them at will and continue on your quest to reach the top of Tartarus easily.  The difficulty, even on Normal, if you are not expecting it, can be punishing and tough.  You cannot change the difficulty after you have selected it at the beginning of the game.  Experience points are capped so the game kind of forces you to be at a preferred level it thinks that is appropriate to challenge the boss.

Bosses get progressively harder.  Buffs and debuffs become a lot more important than most JRPGs.  Bosses will spam instant death attacks, high level multi-target magic, high resistances and immunities.  It requires high amount of preparation and a few bosses definitely feels cheap.  The camera can only be rotated in certain environments and dungeons, and is fixed for a lot of the time.  The game is generally really addictive with its mix of high school simulation events and dungeon crawling.  Once you're around 5 hours in, and can form a full part of four, that's where the fun starts.  In terms of the main plot, it is on the darker and more serious side.  It uses anime cutscenes and text dialogue using character portraits for its storytelling.  The unnamed protagonist is transferred to a new school and discovers that he has the power to summon Personas, in order to fight Shadows.  Shadows appear in the hidden 25th hour after midnight, called the Dark Hour.  The protagonist will join forces with other high school students who are also Persona users to destroy Shadows and explore Tartarus, which seems to be the source of the Shadows.  Of course, their aim is to eventuallyd destroy all Shadows, find the secret of Tartarus and remove the Dark Hours, thereby saving the world.  This is because people can get killed or become brain-dead during Dark Hour.

There is an interesting twist two-thirds into the game.  However, there are plenty of moments where characters become annoying and unlikeable.  The story ends up feeling underdeveloped though.  The social links portion was meaty but the main plot involving Tartarus, Personas, Shadows and the villains didn't really meaningfully move forward too much.  However, the relationships between the team members are great and there are some emotional scenes towards the end of the game, perfectly accompanied by the evolving soundtrack.  If you're following a walkthrough, The Journey takes around 50 hours to finish depending on how much you grind and the difficulty you are playing on.  Playing it blind and on Hard will definitely cause you to take much longer, upwards to more like 80 hours.  Overall, The Journey is fun and merges two distinct elements into one coherent package that hasn't been seen before in a JRPG.  While the story is solid, reflecting back on it, it doesn't cover that many events.  The dungeon crawling aspect is hit and miss since the repetitive layouts of the dungeon is disappointing, while the combat system can be frustrating due to the AI deciding to do stupid things.  It's still a fantastic game though and a lot of fun.

The Answer
The Answer is a new addition in FES and is an epilogue to the main game.  It takes place one month after the ending, starting off with a surprising revelation (which kind of ruined the ending, feeling contrived).  The team is in the dorms planning to move out when they end up encountering a time loop.  Metis appears and they discover the Abyss of Time, a dungeon similar to Tartarus which has appeared beneath the dorm.  Metis is an anti-Shadow weapon, similar to Aigis, and she is a new playable character.  The team must fight through the Abyss of Time in order to break the time loop and in the process, learn the truth about Nyx and the fight against the protagonist such that they can put it all behind them and move forward.  You get to learn in more detail the characters' pasts which is probably the best part about this new addition (along with the fairly epic ending).  The Answer removes all the social interaction of the main game and instead is basically just dungeon crawling and combat.  There's no more attending school, no more Social Links and no more events to increase your character's charm etc.  This isn't inherently bad but considering you have just spent 50-80 hours on the game, doing another 30 hours of just solid grinding can be too much.

The general flow of the game is that you push through the dungeon, fight the boss, have a short story event and then rinse and repeat.  It is mind-numbingly boring, especially since the plot isn't that engaging in the first place.  You control Aigis as the main character this time around since the plot centres around her.  The combat system remains the same as the main game, with AI controlling the other three party members.  The Abyss of Time is just another word for Tartarus since it features the same randomly generated dungeons, the same drab backgrounds and boring layouts, and the same Shadows as enemies who are either reskinned or recolours of existing enemies.  Upon starting The Answer, you're treated with the message that is harder than the main game and to please enjoy the difficulty.  Basically, this means that you cannot pick the difficulty and is forced to play on "Expert".  Have fun being forced to grind in order to level up to summon the appropriate Personas to face the bosses.

The other thing is that there is only a save point before bosses.  If you want to go fuse some more Personas or change your team members, you have to trek through all the previous floors again to get to that point, wasting heaps of time.  Bosses are cheap, doubly so now that a lot of them have skills to dodge their own weaknesses.  There's nothing more annoying than an even higher chance of characters' attacks missing.  Fusing Personas is really important but what is annoying here is that you don't get access to the Compendium anymore.  Once you fuse a Persona, the two that you used disappear and the only way to get them back is randomly by winning battles.  Impressive though is that all the new scenes are voiced, with some new character models and portraits.  Overall, due to the repetitive gameplay with no other events to break things up like the main game, and a story that doesn't provide that many answers, The Answer could have easily been compressed into a 5-10 hour epilogue.  If you were a fan of the story, and a fan of the dungeon crawling aspect, then The Answer is worthwhile, otherwise, you might be better off just watching the cutscenes on YouTube.

Overall
Shin Megami Tensei:  Persona 3 FES is no doubt the complete package for Persona 3 and is the definitive version of the game (barring the improvements to the mechanics and the female perspective from Persona 3 Portable).  It presents huge value since playing through both The Journey and The Answer will give you 80 to 100+ hours of content (although a lot of that is repetitive combat).  Persona 3 FES is recommended for any JRPG fan.

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Grand Theft Auto III (PS2)

Grand Theft Auto III is the first GTA game on the PS2, making the jump to the next generation console hardware at the time.  It converted to using a 3D environment with a third-person camera.  The game tries out a lot of new concepts at the time, and while it was no doubt ambitious when it was first released, with nothing like it and being a pioneer in 3D open world games, however, it has not aged too well with clunky gameplay and frustrating missions.  There are more than a few annoyances but nothing that breaks the game, such as low health, low durability of vehicles, free camera rotation only available in first-person view and poor aiming mechanics.  The game takes place in Liberty City, a fictional city comprised of three islands, which gradually unlocks as you play through the game.  There is no in-game full map but the minimap usually more than suffices and the city is small enough such that you'll be able to recognise the landmarks.

Grand Theft Auto III gives you heaps of freedom and the ability to carry on with the story at your own pace.  The story is told via a mission based structure, you will head to the starting point, a cutscene will play and your objective spelt out, then you would go and do it.  If you fail the mission, you have to repeat the mission from the beginning, including travelling back to the starting point, which can get tedious.  The mission variety is low and they generally involve driving or shooting.  Some of the missions will have a time limit, while others don't.  The addition of the time limits in most of the missions is arbitrary and creates artificial difficulty, which is frustrating.  On missions with a time limit, the time given are tight which doesn't help when vehicles control like they're made of feathers, flipping over all the time, being unstable even at low speed and downright not fun to control.

What makes vehicular control worse is that some missions are reliant on luck and you have to keep repeating until the vehicles on the road spawn in such a way that it doesn't obstruct you and waste your time.  Be prepared to keep repeating missions again and again for muscle memory before you pass, and of course, trek over half the city to accept the mission again (worse are the ones where the mission start at one island but the whole mission actually happens on another island).  This makes the game frustrating and unfair because it feels cheap.  It's not because you're not good, it's because the terrible and clunky controls are rubbish.  One of the worst offenders is the mission where you are given a short time limit but expect you to complete the mission by no hitting your car anywhere and have to angle the car just right in the garage.  These terrible mission designs are tedious, repetitive and a lot of the time, not fun.

The game utilizes an auto-aim for most of the weapons where you hold down the shoulder button and it'll target the enemy in front of you.  Other weapons such as the sniper rifle and the rocket launcher have a more traditional target screen for precise aiming.  In terms of story, you control the main character, who is unnamed and mute, although later games references him as Claude.  At the beginning of the game, he is being transported to prison since he was betrayed by his girlfriend Catalina.  He manages to escape with some help and then proceeds to help out the gangs of Liberty City and builds his reputation.  It is a weak story that boils down to little more than helping out all the gangs, then effectively making enemies of all of them such that they will now shoot on sight while you're exploring, and then escaping to the next island to repeat with those gangs.  Thanks to the mission based structure, it means that the pacing and tightness of the storytelling cannot be maintained.  All the characters act badass and seems to blame a lot of things on Claude when things go wrong, so it doesn't give you a sense that there is any friendship, loyalty, gratefulness or actually, anything that bonds the characters together.

Thankfully, many of the cutscenes can be skipped otherwise repeating missions would be even more of a slog than it already is.  The story missions are only a portion of the game since you're free to explore all what Liberty City has to offer.  Side activities include finding collectables that unlocks useful weapons or vehicles, taxi missions, ambulance missions and fire truck missions, in addition to other side missions, all of which are as difficult as the story missions.  You can steal any vehicle on the street, including police cars.  There are fun variations such as when a car alarm goes off when you steal a parked vehicle and you attract police, or the driver comes back and angrily pulls you from the vehicle.  If you perform a crime in front of police, then your Wanted Level rises.  As your Wanted Level rises, the more resources the police will have to track you down and arrest you.  Once you get to the maximum level of 6 Stars, good luck since tanks and helicopters will be following you, and tough police vehicles will be constantly ramming you.  There is only a relatively small financial penalty if you get caught, although you will lose all your weapons.

The game has a day/night cycle and weather effects such as fog and cloudy days, which is very impressive.  It also means some missions can only be started during certain time frames.  The graphics are decent for an early PS2 game, and for a game that is over 15 years old, it surprisingly still looks passable.  Note that you have to save manually by returning to your safe house.  You cannot save during missions.  Saving also causes time to fast forward a few hours into the day.  If you have a tough time, then the game has cheats such as unlocking all weapons, spawning tanks for you to use and lowering the Wanted Level.  Overall, Grand Theft Auto III is a technical marvel at the time, trying out and succeeding in a lot of things.  Unfortunately, as many games have taken what Grand Theft Auto III has tried and further refined it, the game hasn't aged as well.  With repetitive missions, tough objectives and restrictions and archaic control schemes, be prepared to be frustrated while playing.

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