Review Score of 8-10

Video Game Review: Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

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Details: This is a review for the base game and all the free downloadable content that came with it. Played the game for about ninety hours. Official site is https://assassinscreed.ubisoft.com/game/en-us/home

Score: 8.6/10

The Assassin’s Creed franchise has always been a warm blanket to me. I’m familiar with the tone, the atmosphere, and the gameplay generally established in this series. Which is why I was very curious about how different things would be in Odyssey. The last Assassin’s Creed game I played what Syndicate, and things have become substantially more like a role playing game since then. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey feels a lot like The Witcher 3, and that’s a good thing. Odyssey is an adventure and I enjoyed that adventure very much.

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Video Game Review: Persona 5

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Details: Originally released in 2016 for the Playstation 3 and Playstation 4. I played it on the Playstation 3. I beat the game in about ninety-five hours. The game received an M rating, so it’s for those 17 years old or older. More information can be found at the official site at https://atlus.com/persona5/

Score: 8.8/10

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 was easily my favorite Playstation 2 game by a wide margin. It combined the gameplay mechanics of a Final Fantasy game, a dating sim/visual novel, and a Pokemon game into an epic, maturely told adventure. Like how the Shin Megami Tensei preamble was dropped from the game title, Persona 5 refines the formula, cutting out things that didn’t work and adding a ton of refinements to this franchise’s formula.

It is no exaggeration to say that at the time of this review’s writing, Persona 5 is very likely the greatest turn based role playing game of all time, the greatest Japanese role playing game of all time, and perhaps even just the greatest role playing game of all time… or at least one of the greatest. With that said, this game definitely belongs to its genre. If you like Japanese role playing games and anime, I simply cannot recommend this game enough.

The only story spoilers ahead will be a brief synopsis of the first fifteen minutes of the game. The average time to beat the game as per howlongtobeat.com is around 100 hours, so that’s not much.

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Video Game Review: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

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Details: Released in 2004 for the Nintendo GameCube. I don’t think it’s been released for any subsequent console or on the virtual console so the only place to play it is on the GameCube. Played the game for around forty-two hours. More information can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_Mario:_The_Thousand-Year_Door and http://www.metacritic.com/game/gamecube/paper-mario-the-thousand-year-door

Score: 8.2/10

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is a surprisingly funny, charming game despite coming out over a decade ago. It is visually simple, but the writing and satire here is top notch.

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Video Game Review: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

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Details: Released by Nintendo in 2017 for the Switch and Wii U. Played the base game without any of the downloadable content. Played for around fifty hours on the Switch.

I’ve seen a lot of reviews for Breath of the Wild and the majority give it a perfect score. I think this game definitely does not deserve a perfect score. However, I do think it’s really, really fun. Breath of the Wild is an open world game that adopts many of the mechanics already well established in other popular open world games while making a few new additions of its own. Many of those additions are great. Some of them are not.

There won’t be any discussion of the story except whether it’s good or bad, but there will be discussion of game mechanics. I guess that’s sort of a spoiler in a game like Zelda.

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Video Game Review: Super Mario Odyssey

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Details: Released in 2017 by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch. Spent over forty hours playing through the game. Played mostly using the Joy-Con Grip. Got all the moons except for three, because screw jump rope/volleyball/bouncy races. I got a day job and I’m not a kid with summer vacation anymore. Ain’t no one got time for that repetitive stuff.

The last Mario game I played before playing Super Mario Odyssey was Super Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64. That was over two decades ago. I really enjoyed that game and I came into Odyssey with high expectations. Super Mario Odyssey is a fun game. Unfortunately, it is an imperfect and often times a dated game that made clear to me that since Super Mario 64, I’ve gotten older and my tastes in video games have changed.

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