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Showing posts from September, 2025

Reimagining a Tradition: Silent Hill f Review

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My obsessive passion toward the Silent Hill series makes me evaluate the most recent release with excitement and anxiety at the same time. It's not a dread in a horror sense but a dread borne out of the fear of being disappointed. Walking through the Silent Hill foggy streets over a hundred times has and will always leave an imprint.  Silent Hill 2 has left a benchmark which I consider so high that I regard it as impossible to touch. The new entries that have been released under the Silent Hill title always bring with them a certain burden. Unfortunately, most of them fail to deliver. The most recent release, Silent Hill f, has not been able to hold on to the Silent Hill name in terms of the setting and the lore, and has turned the entire franchise on its head. This game, Silent Hill f, is something completely new yet familiar, which has been transplanted into new soil. The Setting: A Shift to 1960s Japan Your first baffling moment of Silent Hi...

Visions of Mana – A Return to Reverie

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Visions of Mana is not experimental or nostalgic in any way. It is and remains an assertion that Square Enix still knows how to create worlds filled with myth and melody. The Mana franchise was largely dormant and viewed mainly with nostalgia. It was viewed and has come to be viewed as a relic and artifact of the 16-bit era that was filled with magic, splendor, and grandiose. On the other hand, among the new action role-playing games, it is among the few games that still have support for the previous generation of consoles, and you can safely get it if you buy cheap PS4 games . It can summon and harness the atmosphere of Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana while still being designed for an audience that won't put up with outdated, clunky mechanics or any form of superficial sentimental nostalgia. The Weight of Expectation It is hard to talk about the Mana series without talking about history. At one point, Mana was considered alongside the likes of Final Fanta...

Mafia: The Old Country: A Beautiful Postcard From A Bygone Era

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I’ll be blunt: if you’re waiting for  Mafia: The Old Country  to flip the whole genre upside down or set a new bar for storytelling, you’ll walk away empty. The game feels like it slipped between the pages of the past, parked in a familiar playbook where the moral map is printed in black and white and the biggest twist is which of the big bosses gets dumped in the river. The scenery is gorgeous, the cars and suits gleam like museum pieces, and the shooting and driving still hum the right vintage tune. But the story is so carefully hemmed in that even the sturdy ma like Godfather would raise an eyebrow and mutter “let loose a little.” I can’t deny it feels warm, like sliding into a diner booth that still has the same vinyl menu. Yet, among today’s Haunting, year-long character arcs and villains you can’t even high-five in the mirror, the chapter-long saga of who-stabbed-who feels like a love letter you tuck away rather than write back to. The game is a big bowl of m...

Dynasty Warriors: Origins – A Clever Comeback to the Roots

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Bringing Back the Heart of Dynasty Warriors Dynasty Warriors: Origins aims squarely at the soul of the series. After Dynasty Warriors 9 tried to shoehorn the franchise into a half-baked open world that scattered its best bits, Origins locks back onto the core thrill of single-handedly flipping a whole battle in your favor. This isn’t just a “remember the old days” move, though. The game brings back the classic tight lanes and the satisfying ping of foot soldiers flying off the screen, and yet it kinks those tried-and-true systems with just enough new polish that everything feels both like a familiar friend and a surprising new date. After twenty-plus years, that’s no small trick to pull. The Power Fantasy, Polished to a Shine At its heart, Dynasty Warriors is the rush of raw domination—charging into a sea of enemies and stepping back out spotless, a tide of broken armor marbling the ground. Origins bottles that rush and hand it to you with the stopper off. Swords swipe and foes bo...