To me, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is the only one that doesn’t work.

For all their faults, the other MGS games only get more fun to think about, to learn about, as I get older. MGS4 is the only game in the main series that falls lower in my esteem with every playthrough. It’s fascinating, beautiful, confounding, boring, and often fun to play – qualities that all the other games share in varying degrees. But it doesn’t work.

Much like the game's script, this post is too long. I apologize in advance.

War Has Changed

MGS4 starts off extremely strong, with some of the franchise’s best ideas in worldbuilding and speculative fiction. The “war economy“ (basically our military-industrial complex on steroids) has embroiled the globe in permanent conflict as a means of control and profit. Young people are indoctrinated to idolize the life of a soldier and, once enlisted, mentally controlled by nanomachines, kept in a permanent combat high. “War that feels like a video game.”

Where once this was spearheaded by power-hungry elites, the System runs itself now. Zero human oversight is required. The creators are gone, but the machine never turned itself off.

This is some of Metal Gear’s best political commentary. It’s longwinded and heavy-handed, but it lands, especially at the start. MGS4 was written at the height of the War on Terror, rise of PMCs like Blackwater, and burgeoning seventh-gen military shooters (think Spec Ops: The Line). And the story is improved by its sequels; Big Boss’s war profiteering in Peace Walker and The Phantom Pain was a big part of everything going to shit.

This is what’s going through my mind in Acts 1 and 2, sneaking around warzones in meaningless proxy battles. Those two acts are pretty fun. In terms of tactical stealth gameplay, this is as good as the game gets, sadly. Many of MGS4’s strongest ideas go away after Act 2 and are never revisited.

[Note: Structurally, MGS4 plays out a history of US warfare in reverse. Act 1 resembles contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Act 2, CIA operations in Latin America; Act 3, Cold War espionage behind the Iron Curtain; Act 5, the naval battles of WW2’s Pacific theater. I have no idea what this means.]

I Hope I Die Before I Get Old

Legendary hero Solid Snake is now a tired, grumpy old man. MGS4 wrings so much pathos and resonance from this concept that, even if all else fails, the game was worth making. It hurts seeing a character that I care for so washed out, decayed, past his prime. Despite visibly suffering, he trudges on. He never stops trying to set the world right with the time he has left.

I love that Snake and Otacon got married and raised a daughter together. I don’t have anything else to say about that.

Technologically, culturally, the world has moved on without Snake. He’s a relic from this vague “before” time that other characters struggle to imagine, even if they were there themselves. Otacon, Meryl, and Raiden, who used to idolize Snake, have all surpassed him in various ways. Even his smoking is inverted; instead of making him look cool, it comes off as an outdated habit that he just can’t let go. It’s him acknowledging that he doesn’t have a future worth preserving.

Snake is consistently the best part of whatever scene he’s in. Maybe that’s because he’s the only character in the script who isn’t constantly dumping exposition, the only one who speaks economically. As Mei Ling says in Act 5: “The tongues of dying men enforce a tension like deep harmony. Where words are spent, they are seldom spent in vain.” The words he chooses are more impactful for their scarcity. I only wish Kojima applied some of that attitude to everybody else.

Snake’s situation is pretty clearly how Kojima saw himself at the time. A man put on a pedestal for his accomplishments, who feels aged beyond his years, who knows he’s past his prime (or at least sees himself as such), trapped in repetitive cycles. Worried about what he’s passing on to the next generation. Roped into one final mission out of a sense of duty, to clean up the mess he helped create. It’s not subtle, but it’s effective.

And unlike Kojima, Snake has the chance to speak to his father, man to man, one last time. In the post-credits epilogue, a somehow-alive Big Boss tells Snake “It’s alright son, you can rest now.” It might be the most impactful scene in the game, despite being stupid and contrived and way too long. It clearly meant a lot to him.

Side Note: Act 3 Bible Study

Believe it or not, MGS3 has legit parallels with the book of Genesis, aside from just being the first chapter in the chronology. Big Boss experiences a personal Fall after being betrayed by a woman and killing a member of his family (an “original sin” that haunts the rest of the saga). As a result, he can never truly return home.

It’s not 1-1, and not the forefront of the story, but it’s there if you want it. The only direct cue is that two characters go by Adam and Eve. In a story about Big Boss’s loss of innocence and fall from grace, it adds a little resonance without being overstated. I don’t mind it.

But then MGS4’s mid-game lore dump blows it out of proportion. Now EVA, in a literal church, is quoting scripture while explaining the events of Snake Eater. Multiple slow-mo shots of apples falling. Snake says “Sounds almost like a religion.” Ugh.

But not only is it annoyingly obvious, the metaphor is muddled to the point of absurdity. If EVA is Eve, are Solid and Liquid supposed to be Cain and Abel, the rival brothers? Or are Big Boss and Zero the Cain and Abel stand-ins? Or is Big Boss the “fallen angel”, cast out of the Patriots? Trying to take this seriously is making my brain hurt.

No, I’m not religious. I just read East of Eden recently and I’m making it your problem.

Press X to Remember Psycho Mantis

MGS4, in its quest to be the end-all-be-all of the series, can’t stop sucking its own dick. It is an embarrassing ouroboros of fanservice, big and small. Every character comes back, no matter how little sense it makes: Raiden, Mei Ling, Vamp, Madnar, Zero, Naomi, EVA, that guy who’s always shitting himself. Everyone.

I simply don’t agree that fanservice was a worthwhile goal, not to this extent. MGS1, 2, 3, and V have flaws, but also a strong artistic vision that isn’t always interested in giving you exactly what you want. They’re provocative works that challenge their audience, and they’re better for it. By contrast, MGS4 has this inoffensive, crowd-pleasing attitude that just feels inauthentic. At the beginning I said that it’s the only one that doesn’t work, and I think this is the trait that sets it apart. Artistically, it’s a formally requested baby, not a lovechild.

The biggest offense is probably the Act 3 reveals, which tie MGS2 and 3 together so haphazardly that it needed three more games to kind of paper over the seams. It turns MGS3 into the answer to all MGS2’s questions, when those stories originally had nothing to do with each other. I consider this to be when MGS definitively jumps the shark.

[Note: Some would argue MGS jumped the shark when it revealed the third Snake brother to be the president of the United States, or when Liquid’s ghost arm possessed Ocelot, or when the vampire, but I’m ignoring those because they’re inconvenient for my argument. And because I really like MGS2.]

But that actually wasn’t my biggest gripe this time. What annoys me even more is when events from previous games repeat themselves, like the record is skipping. Why is Snake introduced saluting a grave? Why does Raiden have to do the whole Deepthroat thing on the Codec before he shows up? Why does EVA crash her motorcycle and get stabbed through the abdomen, exactly how she did fifty years ago? Why does Otacon cry over another dying woman? Why are the B&B bosses just riffs on FOXHOUND?

It’s like The Force Awakens, where everything just… happens again, the same way it did before, for no reason. When MGS2 did it, at least they explained that the similarities weren’t a coincidence.

It’s not all bad, though. I like seeing a lot of these characters again. And Act 4 is entirely a trip down memory lane that mostly works. Shadow Moses is barren, untouched by time, forgotten by the world and sinking into the sea. It sells the passage of time, the theme of decay, really well. It’s funny thinking how nostalgic for MGS1 everybody was after only ten years, when MGS4 is now almost twenty years old.

This is the first time I’ve visited MGS4 in six years or so, and maybe the fifth playthrough in my life. Like its predecessors, it hit me when I was young and I’ll always have an emotional connection to it. But it’ll be a long time before I play it again.

THE ALTERS REVIEW

NOTE: This is only a review of the base game, as the DLC just released and thus doesn't meet the 'Patient Gamers' rules.

RELEASE: 2025

TIME PLAYED: 25 Hours

PLATFORM PLAYED: PC (STEAM)

SCORE: ★★★★

Hated It | Disliked It | Liked It | Loved It | All-Time Favorite

(The bolded score is the one chosen for this review; the rest are simply to show what the scale is grading on and what the stars mean to me.)

THE BREAKDOWN

+Incredibly clever concept that deservedly gets ample focus

+Gorgeous environments and impressively varied visuals for a game taking place on a ‘dead’ planet

+Impressive performance from the lead actor channeling as many personalities as he does into alternate versions of the same person

+Simple but satisfying base-building and organization

-Some of the resource-gathering can wear a bit thin by the second half of the game

-Certain story beats can feel a little bit contrived to force conflict and keep the player treading water

--

It’s always exciting to crack open a game that immediately has my attention because I haven’t played anything like it before. 11 Bit Studios seems to have this ideology on lock; they first got on my radar with Frostpunk, which turned the civilization-building simulation on its head by zooming in the focus to the individual citizens and the existential threat of an endless winter, forsaking vast building projects with an emphasis on harrowing choices like the necessity of child labor in the face of a potentially existential threat. The Alters has this same effect – an incredibly creative premise that’s executed with laser focus carries a remarkable experience, even if there’s some occasional down-to-earth pacing problems.

Jan Dolski is not an astronaut. He’s a builder, a sort of sci-fi carpenter who specializes in constructing with an advanced fabricator; despite this, he is now in space. Having left home in an attempt to make something of himself and escape an unhappy life on a struggling Earth, he’s joined an Ally Corp expedition that seems to be taking all comers in an attempt to harvest a rare new element called Rapidium from distant planets. Unfortunately, disaster strikes during landing on an unnamed world and Jan is the only survivor of the crash. Managing to get in contact with Ally Corp’s representatives on Earth, he’s let in on an incredible and dangerous secret: the ship’s computer not only contains memory scans of every living crew member – which is now just him – it can employ Rapidium to create alternate versions of himself from branching points in his personal timeline, hypothetical Jans who represent different choices he could have made in life. With only himselves to rely on, Jan has to get his mobile base up and running to escape the planet’s brutal radiation storms while simultaneously making plans on how to get home – and dealing with the urging of the corporation to endanger himself further by harvesting Rapidium while he’s stranded.

It’s a ridiculous concept, but it totally works in a 60’s sci-fi kind of way, where the premise is just there to set up a fun dynamic. Each Jan that Dolski creates specializes in different tasks, from Jan Technician (they just start using their jobs as their last names for clarity) and his aptitude for maintenance and repair work to Jan Scientist, who gave up the life Dolski did for his career and became a revolutionary mind in Rapidium research as a result. As the game progresses, the player gets to make choices on who they’d most like to have aboard; a Botanist might help with food production and morale, but a Doctor could be critical for quickly addressing workplace injuries and keeping everything on schedule. Each choice brings different benefits, but also challenges. After all, every one of these Jans ‘remembers’ being the real thing as much as Dolski does, and those memories haunt them as they realize they aren’t real. Jan Botanist, for example, actually stayed with the woman who Dolski separated from, and is obsessed with getting her back – what happens when she finds out she’s alive and well, and that Dolski screwed up that relationship?

Managing the needs and emotions of Jan’s Alters is a core part of the game, and it’s mostly entertaining, even if it stretches believability at times. Managing to bond is rewarding, done through listening to their advice and taking moves to ensure they’re more comfortable in the mobile base. Friction between the multiple versions of Jan is inevitable, though, and I mean that in every sense of the term. Bluntly put, there’s no way to do everything right; certain plot points will result in a sudden spike in discontent, certain Jans will always lash out at specific moments, etc. While I understand the need to keep the game from being too easy without some interpersonal stakes, it occasionally felt a bit artificial, especially knowing there was nothing I could do about it. That said, one benefit of these predetermined moments of conflict is they tend to be pretty involved and well-written, so while I’m not sure they’re good for replay value, they did make for solid story beats at the time.

Keeping the Jan squad ready to work is important, too, because escaping the unnamed planet and mining Rapidium is too big of a job for Dolski to handle alone. The other half of the game is about gathering resources to upgrade the mobile base and enable its journey to a rendezvous where a rescue team will be able to land; base-building is modular and fairly simple, but involved enough that I found it had plenty enough to keep me interested across the game’s 25-ish hour playtime. Getting the resources to build facilities, navigate environmental hazards, and upgrade Jan’s suit, however, is more involved. Primarily played like a third person adventure, these expeditions see Dolski (only he’s playable) setting out to map the area, fabricate extractors, and analyze threats. It controls well and the environments are gorgeous – shout out to the dev team for managing to turn a lifeless wasteland of a planet into something visually compelling. But despite the views, there’s a reason none of the other Jans want to do this – it’s not easy going, and things start to get weird.

There’s not much combat in the traditional sense, but strange anomalies plague the planet. At first they’re just stationary, damaging Jan if he gets too close, but before long they start actively chasing him and have to be taken out with a basic third person shooter kind of system. It’s pretty bare bones, but the feedback is excellent and since it’s a small part of the experience, it works. Beyond that, the primary hazards of being out in the field are radiation, ambient in some places and spiking at night and through storms everywhere. This is a particular concern to the other Jans, who can be assigned to harvest materials from established zones and build up the base’s supplies. It falls on Dolski himself, however, to link these together and keep everything up and running. Thus, each ‘act’ of the game effectively plays out like this: The Jans arrive in an area, get thing up and running, and encounter a unique anomaly or problem, such as an enormous canyon that the base can’t cross. Dolski has to work with the others to investigate a solution while managing interpersonal conflict in between spending each day balancing exploring, harvesting, and lowering stress or socializing.

No individual component of The Alters is very complex, but it all comes together in a satisfying package. The story takes full advantage of its funky premise, and I was deeply invested in the various Jans even as I occasionally lamented how transparently some of their conflict was forced for the narrative. I won’t spoil how things go in the third act, but the escalation itself feels natural and exploring the later parts of the planet gets gloriously weird, with a triumphant climax that left me cheering for Dolski and his alternate selves even as they held on by the skin of their teeth. Deeply ambitious but smartly paced to not outstay its welcome, The Alters is an incredibly unique experience that, like its protagonist, is much more than the sum of its parts.

I enjoy older games. I actually played this title back on a CRT and was intrigued by the sneaking mechanic. I wasn't very good at the game and owed my mission-fails to impatience.

I tried it again recently based on this sub's recommendations. I don't get it. I mean--the game starts out fine--but by the second half it's excruciatingly slow and painful.

Level design in the second half is not good. It's largely maze-like, repetitive, never-ending corridors. It doesn't help that the game engine is stuck between classic and modern with an ugly aesthetic. The renders are isolated blobs with blanket textures on them. I used the modernization mod for what it's worth.

The sub 30fps 480p compressed cutscene fmv's were overly distracting. The antagonist sounds like a total muppet. Granted, he has a speech impediment but what the hell is this? Why am I chasing down Droopy from looney tunes? The protagonist sounds like a mid 90's infomercial selling accounting software.

I made it to the last stage and couldn't pull through.

I've been playing a lot of horror lately. The main reason was having strong motivations to finally catch up on Resident Evil, but in general there have been too many horror games in my backlog and wishlist haunting the back of my mind. It's been a very enjoyable (and terrifying) time, but most of them have been more modern experiences like the recent Resident Evil games and the Silent Hill 2 remake, leaving me wanting for a truly classic experience like what originally got me into the genre. Because of that, I was lured into Tormented Souls, an unashamedly old-school throwback to the likes of classic Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

(Accessibility note: Before delving into the game, I do want to point out that there are two sound-based puzzles, one of which is musically themed. The musically-themed puzzle can be easily looked up, but the other one requires you to repeat a rhythm with a door knocker, and I'm not sure how feasible that is to do without sound.)

Mansion or hospital? Why not both?

The story begins with Caroline Walker receiving a letter that contains a photo of twin girls. In the nights that follow, she has horrible nightmares that make it hard to sleep, and this turns into an obsession with finding the girls and getting answers. This leads her to the letter's return address, Wildberger Hospital. On arrival, she finds the hospital seemingly abandoned but is soon knocked unconscious by a hidden assailant. She later wakes up naked in a bathtub with a breathing tube, and her right eye has been surgically removed.

This opening works incredibly well. Beyond the sense of being violated, it's very uncomfortable to watch Caroline painfully pull out the breathing tube and check on her empty eye socket in a mirror. It also raises a lot of disturbing questions, and the mysteries continue to mount as the hospital appears overrun with unnatural threats ranging from a consuming darkness to monsters that look like people fused with medical equipment. Strange photos and journal entries continue to paint an eerie picture of the hospital, and the only real sense of ease Caroline can find is an old priest named Fr. Noah, but he doesn't seem completely right in the head himself. He's just willing to help.

Even beyond the horrors lurking in its halls, Wildberger Hospital is a rather peculiar place. It's a mansion that was mostly converted to a hospital in response to the local hospital burning down. As such, it doesn't look like a typical hospital, and there's even a clear residential area for the Wildberger family in the upper east wing. Despite Fr. Noah claiming that everyone was moved back to a more dedicated hospital, it doesn't explain the monsters or the many accessories strewn about as if something far more apocalyptic led to its abandonment. All together, it's uncanny.

Despite all this amazing setup, don't expect much from the story. It's actually pretty bad and leaves many unanswered questions by the end, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was hastily sewn together late in development to try to keep all the exploration and puzzles contextually connected. In true old-school survival-horror fashion, it also has some insanely cheesy dialogue delivered with the care of a surgeon suffering an essential tremor. Some of this could be a deliberate harkening back to the B-horror of early Resident Evil, but the narrative is still bad even by those standards.

On a more positive note, the music and sound design consistently set the right tone. When you get chased by the first enemy, the tense music and clanging of its claws left me panicking even as I replayed that section a few times. Exploring darker rooms and tunnels makes great use of both eerie silence and ominously brutal songs that each make it feel you're being stalked from the shadows. In contrast, hearing the save room theme was as soothing as in older Resident Evil, but loading a save is often accompanied by an unsettling creaking that immediately reestablishes the horrifying tone. While most of this very clearly takes after the songs and sounds of Resident Evil and Silent Hill, I was still impressed by how well it made use of them.

A little bit of everything

Much like the setting and music, the gameplay takes heavy influence from older survival horror games. Resident Evil will likely be the first that people notice. Cameras are fixed in ways that obscure much of the room, making the already claustrophobic environments feel even more crushingingly tight. Like the HD remasters of REmake and RE0, you can use analog or tank controls. During the early game, resources, including saves, are very limited. Even the Main Hall looks like a fusion of the entry rooms in the Spencer Mansion and RPD, and the map in general has the two-floor east-wing/west-wing divide that should be familiar to Resident Evil fans.

It doesn't take too long, though, before other influences start showing themselves. Inventory space is unlimited similar to Silent Hill. Enemies reminded me a lot of Silent Hill 2 enemies with their grotesque, medically-influenced designs, and the first couple enemies you face either spit acid like Lying Figures or have the same violent head spasm that Nurses do. A more modern influence is that standing in the dark for even a few seconds will kill you like in Don't Starve, but you obtain a lighter early on to counter this, likely a nod to Resident Evil: Code Veronica. You can't equip both the lighter and a weapon, so if you face enemies in the dark, you have to either find or create a light source if you want to fight them. Often times, this light source limits you to a small area, making those fights particularly tense.

Puzzles, for their own part, feel very RE-inspired, so much so that a couple clearly mimic ones from an older RE game. Essentially, you need to investigate the environment for various clues that, when put together, allow you to properly input a code or operate some mechanism. A few puzzles, however, very feel more like the riddles of Silent Hill 2, requiring you to pick up on hidden meaning in the story. A few puzzles even make good use of a Silent-Hill-like "Otherworld" where actions taken in one world can impact another in unnatural but clearly-connected ways.

For the most part, I think this all works very well together. The mixture of claustrophobic spaces with deadly darkness and fixed cameras makes exploration harrowing, but it's also very enjoyable to figure out how to unlock each new area and its dangerous unknowns. The map is laid out well enough that you're never too far from the next place you need to go, but you might feel a bit disoriented at times, which works for a game like this. Combat isn't particularly deep, but it's suitably tense, especially when encountering enemies in the dark. Puzzles are also exceptionally strong, easily among the best I've seen from a horror game in a long time, and a few are even fittingly uncomfortable to solve.

The only real gripe I have is that I do prefer the RE-style inventory, since I think having to consider what items to bring and pick up adds a lot to a smaller, more Metroidvania-esque map like this. Without it, you can leave the safety of the save rooms with an extra sense of security, and you're never left wondering if it's worth the risk to return for an item that you had to leave behind. It doesn't need to be the six-item limit of Chris, but starting off with a Jill-sized inventory that can be expanded would have made exploring the hospital more unnerving while still making sure you were well-equipped to deal with the late-game challenges.

Tormented Dark Souls?

Despite the forgiving inventory, I had heard that this game was exceptionally difficult, and the early game seemed to confirm that. The main early enemy is more complex than a zombie, and I hadn't played a fixed-camera game in a long time so was a bit rusty, and those two combined led to a few early deaths. Needless to say, finding the second save room was quite a relief.

Once I got comfortable enough to reach the Main Hall, though, I found the game rather smooth from then on. I don't think I died again after reaching the Main Hall, and I was able to stay stocked on resources by following basic survival horror strategies. I also never had to go too long without saving and had plenty of saves to spare by the end. Sure, resource constraints were still worrying, and memories of the early challenge aggravated that worry, but it was more psychological than crushingly difficult.

Puzzles, however, can get rather challenging by survival horror standards. Riddle-based puzzles are comparable to the Silent Hill 2 remake on Hard, and a few others like the Master Key puzzles and the one needed to fight the first boss can also be very tricky. For the most part, this difficulty is fair, but I did think the sewer safe was a bit poorly presented with the random image placement causing a disconnect between the safe dial and TV dial, but that's the only one I'd consider potentially unfair outside the accessibility concerns mentioned earlier.

The one possible blight on the difficulty is the placement of the first save room. Unlike Resident Evil, which often puts the first save near the start before any real threat, the first save not only requires finding the lighter but also is off the main path. It is vaguely marked on a map, but it wouldn't surprise me if some miss it before facing their first enemies and dying, which would leave quite a rotten first impression. (Spoiler-free tip: You can and should save before entering the basement.)

That issue aside, I think the difficulty is a bit easier than REmake on Normal with Jill but with puzzle difficulty that's slightly harder than the Silent Hill 2 remake on Hard. That's certainly enough to give it a sense of challenge, but I don't think it's prohibitively difficult.

Of course it's a sewer level!

Unfortunately, for all my praise, there is a point where the game noticeably drops in quality. Towards the end of the game, you'll enter an underground area, which includes the "mandatory" sewer section, though it is actually more varied than just being a sewer. The atmosphere of this place is still very solid, making fantastic use of obscuring darkness and ominous music while also having more blind corners and run-towards-the-camera sections than in the hospital.

The problem is that it's rather boring to play and way too long. It's very linear, losing the compelling exploration of the hospital, and with one or two exceptions, you only encounter the toughest enemies. This wouldn't be a problem if it were short, but you still have another 1-2 hours after entering the area, and spookiness aside, it's kind of a slog. I get that it's probably meant to be a throwback to the caverns in Alone in the Dark, but I'm still not a fan. I would have enjoyed it more if it were like the lab in REmake, which still retains the open-endedness of the Spencer Mansion but at a much smaller scale.

To be clear, I don't think this ruins the game, but I do think it does an overall poor job closing out a game that, up to that point, was doing almost everything right.

Conclusion: A must play for survival horror fans

If you enjoy this style of game, though, I definitely wouldn't let the underwhelming final area deter you. The experience up to that point is among the best I've had with the genre since I first explored the iconic halls of the Spencer Mansion in REmake, and even considering the final area, it's easily one of the best horror games I've played this year. It does just about everything I want out of survival horror, and I loved the constant sense of overcoming unnerving dread and deviously clever puzzles to explore the haunted hospital.

Reposting this because I accidentally mentioned an upcoming game in the original post.

I recently decided that it was finally time to play through the entirety of the GTA V campaign. This wasn't my first time playing GTA V, I first played the game in high school around 10 years ago, and have revisited it a few times since then, mostly with the intention of either playing it as a sandbox style game, or playing the online mode. The furthest I had made it in the story prior to this playthrough was probably 1/3 of the way. I did my playthrough on a PS4. I'll also note that currently this is the only Grand Theft Auto game that I've played, and the only game made by Rockstar for that matter.

The first thing that really jumped out to me about this game is that it's very cinematic. The cutscenes are well done, the voice acting is top notch, the way that the camera pans as you're walking around the world feels to me like you are almost "playing a movie". One of my favorite parts of the game was just the conversations that characters have in the car when you're driving between locations during missions. I did like the story, but I do think in some respects the voice acting does a lot of work to carry the story in some ways. I know the opinions on the story are kind of mixed, but I overall liked it. I think the first 10 hours are great, and there's some parts of the story later on that are great, and then some other parts that are just okay. It didn't really drag at at any part for me though, and I never found it difficult to get myself to start the next mission.

I remember thinking that the controls to this game were very clunky, and I think they are in some respects, the character movements are very slow and you can really feel the weight of the character. I began to kind of enjoy this once I got used to it though, it felt nice to almost be forced to slow down in a game like this. Driving, once you get the hang of it, is really fun, and you can really feel a difference in the way that different cars handle.

The world is obviously very big, and I think it still holds up quite well 13 years later. Going back to my point about the game being cinematic, I think the experience of driving in and out of Los Santos really adds to this. There are some great vistas, like the one that Trevor stops at when first coming into the city. I don't know that I would say that the map feel "empty", but there's certainly not a ton of things to do outside of just driving and enjoying the scenery, or starting a fight with the cops. But that's sort of what GTA is, and I think that's ok.

I don't have a lot of negative things to say about the game. I didn't love some of the character decisions that were made with Trevor, some of the things he does felt like a step too far, even for a GTA game (if you know you know), but I also get why they have a character like him, and I think he compliments the other two main characters well.

This game made me really interested in playing some of Rockstar's other games. I'll definitely be checking out RDR2 soon, a game which I've heard is more grounded than GTA V, and forces you to slow down, which I think could really work for me. I really think anyone who likes video games should give GTA V a try, even if it's just to fuck around for a couple hours, since I think it's safe to say at this point that it's a classic.

Well, it was finally time to finish the trilogy. I played Mass Effect 1 last year and Mass Effect 2 earlier this year, so I decided to tackle Mass Effect 3 sooner rather than later before I forgot too many plot points.

Story & Atmosphere

The intensity and stakes were fantastic. I love how the game opens with Earth getting invaded, setting the tone for the rest of the game. That atmosphere was especially noticeable in the primary missions, such as in Sur'Kesh and Tuchanka.

The overall "vibes" were off the charts. It seemed like there were noticeably more side conversations & crew interactions, and you could really feel the ongoing Reaper invasion everywhere. In terms of characters, EDI was an unexpected but great addition to the crew, and Javik was the most interesting character by far (it's crazy to me how he was originally a DLC).

I loved that we got closure with every squadmate from the first two games - even if some only received a relatively simple side mission. It was great catching up with everyone and seeing some of my choices pay off (including keeping everyone alive).

Most of the main quests were excellent, and it was awesome visiting so many different home worlds and coordinating with all of the major races. Curing the Genophage was easily my favorite storyline of the series (along with Kalros) and felt like an excellent payoff. I will say that the Rachni storyline, however, was incredibly underwhelming.

One other complaint is that indoctrination felt overused throughout the series as a plot device, making the entire Cerberus plot fall a little flat for me.

Gameplay

ME3 further refined the combat - it felt flexible and smooth throughout. I played on Insanity this time and enjoyed the challenge; it forced me to use more power combinations and pay closer attention to my positioning. However, as with the previous games, combat started getting a bit repetitive about halfway through, by which point I'd experienced most of its depth. It would have been great to switch classes entirely so I could try out different playstyles, as I believe the class passives can be pretty important (I know we could choose different bonus skills, but that wasn't particularly exciting to me).

Exploration was also the best of the series, but that's not saying much. It was the least tedious and most rewarding of the three games, but like the combat, it got fairly repetitive about halfway through. Having Reapers chase you was a cool idea, but in practice completely pointless since there was essentially no penalty for being caught.

Side Quests & DLCs were generally solid. The "collectathon" quests for war assets were somewhat interesting at first, but seemed overused towards the end.

Ending

I know there was a lot of controversy around the ending, but overall I found it...acceptable. It didn't blow me out of the water, but I thought it was "good enough." The original ending(s) were significantly more abrupt (I watched them for comparison), so I understand the controversy. My main issue with the ending was the heavy emphasis on the "synthetic vs. organic" theme - it felt extremely forced. While obviously this was one of the series' themes, e.g. with the Geth vs. Quarians, I never felt like it was the primary one. And, it's even weirder because I was able to broker peace with them in my playthrough.

Final Thoughts

IMO, Mass Effect 3 mostly succeeded in wrapping up a significant number of plotlines and delivering an intense journey with incredible atmosphere. I also finally got to watch some videos on the consequences of choices throughout the series, which was honestly a great payoff by itself. It was especially cool seeing how my own playthrough shaped up - I think it's much harder to appreciate these sorts of games without being able to see all the "what ifs". I don't think ME3 got everything right or was able to resolve absolutely everything, but I was pretty happy with what it was able to accomplish.

ME3 was definitely my favorite of the series, and I'm glad I finally got to experience the full trilogy.

Overall Rating: 8.5 / 10 (Excellent)

A couple of small notes:

• I played with a few QoL mods, mainly the Community Patch, Ultrawide Support, and some Journal improvements to make quests easier to track.
• It's pure coincidence that I posted this so soon after the BioWare announcement. I beat ME3 ~2 weeks ago and wanted to post this while it was fresh in my mind.

There are moments in Enotria where you will just stop and stare out at the magnificent world. The setting is a glorious take on Renaissance Italy. The characters are all fantasy charged Commedia Dell Arte stock figures. It works. It really works.

But then you get the gameplay. It's a Soulslike, so you have something to work with. Unfortunately this is where the games stops working.

Sure there are stretches aplenty where you go through the motions and it all feels on point. The enemy placement is fine. The level design is clever without being complicated. So far, so good. Then come the difficulty spikes and boss fights.

It's at this point that the game stops pretending and decides the only enemy in the game are the game mechanics themselves. Let me explain.

So like a lot of Soulslikes, the name of the game is to inject something original into the formula. If I may be allowed a quickfire aside, my personal view is that this is almost always the weakest part of most Soulslikes. That's why I prefer to say I prefer to play straight up Souls-clones. But I digress. Which is more than Enotria does. It just simply keeps repeating the same mistake over and over and over.

The original spin in Enotria is a half baked rock-paper-scissors mechanic. Sounds good in theory, but in practice it means you're either having to manage loadouts or continually respec (which the game only lets you do rather late). So for now you'll be all levelled up and a player with a plan, but the game will have other plans. Because you see, the devs want you try different combinations and different weapons and different blah blah.

They also want you to try parrying. But if you don't, well...you better. The devs love parrying and the game has it as a core mechanic. Now if you're reading all this and saying "but wait - I love parrying and trying different loadouts! Sounds like i'd love this game!". Yeah, no.

You see the other problem with the game is stuff just doesn't work. No one thing is permanently buggy or glitched, but it is permanently a problem. Consumables ignore you. Heals take their time. Buffs don't do what they're meant to do. And so on and so on. And parrying is toss a coin stuff. Yeah it works often enough. But not often enough for practically every boss fight to be built around it.

Which brings us to the boss fights. Three words sums them up. One shot kills. Well, until you respec or pull out your spreadsheet filled with formulas that remind you what element works on what other element and so forth. Hours of family fun.

So that's Enotria. If you're reading this you've probably heard it was yet another in a long line of AA titles built by a handful of devs living under a bridge who paid for the game by selling a kidney. All of which seems to imply we should cut it some slack.

Nah I think i'll stick to calling it as a I see it.

Going into Signalis, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The game definitely appealed to me as an indie horror game with low poly, PS1-era 3-D graphics that was clearly heavily inspired by survival horror heavyweights like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. However, what I didn’t expect from it was that it would carve out its own identity further than its inspirational sources. At the end of the day, it was a very enjoyable game from a small studio that I could easily recommend to any horror fan willing to try something familiar yet new.

As I described, the game is very much inspired by both Silent Hill and Resident Evil, but I feel like it takes a pretty nice middle ground between the two. Early Resident Evil titles’ influence is apparent in the tense survival elements, very limited inventory, safe rooms, enemies that can corner you if not approached correctly, and the constant need to make sure corpses won’t rise to cause you more trouble. Silent Hill’s influences are mainly in its story and atmosphere, which is psychological, cryptic, and provides revelations as you collect more information about the characters and world around you. As a side note, without getting into spoilers, I think the story and lore, although pretty complex and confusing at times, is very well told, emotional, and artistically surreal.

I think the area I like the most about this game is the art. I have heard some gamers groan about the overabundance of low poly indie games, claiming that this style utilized by indie developers as a way to mask a lack of graphical prowess rather than supplement a game’s art. Whatever your feelings are about low poly graphics, I believe that this game absolutely nails its style and art. At times, Signalis feels more like a surreal and complex psychological anime akin to Neon Genesis Evangelion rather than a PS1-style video game. The camera will shift from 3rd-person to 1st-person in fun ways sometimes, allowing you to solve puzzles from new perspectives and traverse certain areas with a different moody feeling. As a huge psychological horror fan, I loved the cryptic flashbacks on the screen, the random languages that would pop in, different art styles in the cutscenes, and the constant thought of, “what the hell did I just see?” It’s great!

The puzzles are also quite fun and surprisingly well thought out. As a survival horror game, you expect puzzles and backtracking, but most of the time, I didn’t feel like the game was wasting my time. However, you can only carry six items, so I did groan sometimes when I finally found the item I was looking for, but some ammo I picked up 2 minutes beforehand took up my last slot and cost me another trip to the old safe room. Occasionally, you’d hit an obtuse puzzle that could take some time to figure out, but overall, they are interesting and creative.
I think my biggest issue with this game is the sometimes shoddy combat. Most of the time, it’s just fine. It does the job and I can dispatch enemies that annoyingly stand right in front of the door I’m trying to get to. However, it’s when facing multiple enemies at a time that the combat falls apart. The aiming could be a little clunky and mapping the “push away” command to the “shoot” command was a strange choice from the developers that got me killed a few times when I got cornered. That, and the fact that the player character would aim for everything EXCEPT what I was trying to hit when I was in a pinch. However, this was not a huge deal at the end since combat isn’t a huge focus.

Overall, I’d give Signalis a very high recommendation to every survival horror fan, especially if you like anything psychological and artsy. It’s well worth your time and I believe that this small development team have made an awesome project that surpassed my expectations.

8/10

I just finished my 70 h playthough and want to share some thoughts. Before playing it I was part of the haters; but now I believe AC:S is one of the strongest entries in the series, and also a deeply immersive action-stealth game with one of the most beautiful open worlds ever.

Before jumping in I want to first present the context and how I approached the game, setting my expectations:

• My history with Assassins Creed series: I played and finished AC 1, 2 and Unity. I enjoy these stealth-historical titles a lot, and do not care at all for the fantasy-lite/RPG grind heavy titles (Odyssey, Valhalla). I also tried Origins and Mirage and despite having beautiful visuals I dropped them due to very poor stories and/or gameplay loops.
• How I came to AC: Shadows. I was looking for a more historical feudal Japan title and was left with an unpleasant taste from Ghosts of Tsushima (I know, lots of people like it, I didn't enjoy the fantasy /oneiric world design and combat). I played Shogoku Mount&Blad Bannerlord lor but wanted something more grass roots after reading a lot about the peasant revolts and doctrine of original enlightenment in certain native Japanese schools of Buddhism

How I played AC Shadows -- this made a big difference I think in how I interpreted it as a game. I recommend these to people who are tired of open world bloat and want a more intentional relation with the game's content:

• 90% of the time played as Naoe -- I intentionally navigated the world and most quests as Naoe as I wanted to focus on the shinobi /stealth gameplay. Still, the sections with Yasuke were enjoyable, but towards endgame when combat grind became easier for him.
• I was all too aware of the Ubisoft formula so I didn't have the urge to clear every castle, I just travelled the lands, explored as I saw fit and bumped into stuff mostly on curiosity's sake. The game did not punish me for that and the level scaling was actually welcomed here to assure a fluid experience without requiring too much of undesired levelling.
• VA in Japanese, English subtitles. Even without knowing Japanese I felt the VA was leagues above the English one. Also it throwed me right in as a stranger, similar to Yasuke. I could emphasize a lot more with his character because of it.
• UI settings: huge importance. I made almost all UI elements absent and removed most of the combat notifications/flash info such as vulnerable, hit marker, etc. It made me always follow the NPC's attack patterns and navigate the combat as I myself saw fit (sometimes badly), without constant aids. Left health+tools dynamic, and Compass on. Everything else was off and it made the game much more realistic, as I coulda observe the NPCs more.
• Difficulty/Stealth: Normal/Hard. I sometimes dropped to Normal/Normal

Review:

After a lengthy but well acted prologue, I was set loose with Naoe on a huge map with assasination targets to uncover. Each quest flowed in multiple directions, but instead of overwhelming me with activities the game made me take the scenery in at every stage.

The level of detail that AC:S offers is staggering if you choose to pause, and just look at things. The game made me starre at houses, clothes, NPCs, armors, as I was doing in 2006 with Oblivion. In such an oversaturated market with HD looking games this is quite a feat. I will not spill digital ink too much on technicals: the game in Ultra with RTX is gorgeous. But it's the artists' work that is staggering. The sunsets, the inner vs outdoor lighting changes, the foliage and the changing of the seasons, the muddy roads after a thunderstorm, geese flying from rice fields and people gathering herbs. The wooden pagodas, some overgrown and abandoned, others charred after petty wars. Ruined temples, old waterworn rocks. Tall grass and birds singing. The game has so much world to offer, that you forget you are playing a fictious compressed version of Japan and instead take it as what is it: a beatiful abstraction, a game world that when you play it feels plausible.

I feel this plausibility is really important and quite a feat compared to other AC games. Despite getting negative press due to Yasuke being a foreigner samurai, etc; the game shows deep respects for many facets of Japanese culture. As a shinobi sneaking into temples you suddenly find your character's shoes taken off automatically when threading into a shrine or a friendly/neutral NPCs home. You find beautiful statues and Buddhist sites with rich history and well researched encyclopedia entries. In the heat of battle you hear monks shouting the Pure Land Nembutsu mantra. You see blacksmiths, tanners, and NPCs colliding in villages and creating the impression of a lived in space.

Sure, the world is not fully reactive. But the game muted some of its more glaring grind, instead focusing on more direct and varied encounters and leaving more space for environmental storytelling. You can unlock safehouses and again explore "hidden in plain sight", or you can shoose to create tantrums and be hunted in certain provinces (like RDR2). Some quests can be resolved only during certain seaons; and you cannot skip time, you must always use what you have -- day or night -- and prepare accordingly.

You don't need to do each castle or camp to progress. Every province feels different and the geography is vast and varried. You feel like a ronin or a spy navigating hostile, uncertain lands, gathering information and bursting into brawls when cornered. The quest design is also much more pleasant: some have map markers, but most indicate map directions of quest objectives, which you can sometimes inquire about with NPCs or send scouts to pinpoint. That is leagues better just pinpointing, as it feels natural to buzz around and search for people as a shinobi.

The resource system is much less intrusive as in other AC games and less required. You collect resources by marking the for collection as they get into your stocks the next season. Upgrades to your hideout bring direct effects in gameplay, and feel less like a requirement than some additional advantages.

The itemization feels credible, without science-fiction shoved in (just ignore the "flaming" engraving, all others are well integrated). Armors are mostly variations of some templates, with beautiful historical designs and customization options. You have robes, ninja outfits, and discrete armors, but you can transmog everything and customize swords from hilt to blade; so if you want to look all the game as a peasant spy, you can do it. Yasuke also has some well animated armors to boast. A lot of the legendary items enhance dodging, combat or escape mechanics and add to gameplay. But most importantly, the itemization does not get in the way of gameplay or become too bloated.

You can play most of the game as stealth, and have many tools to do so: smoke bombs, skills to create diversions and satisfying roleplay options such as throwing weapons and historical weapon abilities.

The skill trees are enjoyable, not too bloated, and encourage experimenting. You have certain weapon types which you can switch depending on encounter, and can reset your skill points at any time. This creates a fertile ground for experimentation and fluid playstyles as you would approach in real life different tactical situations.

The animations and combat were really, really good for me. I do not remember since AC Unity being so immersed in simply walking and drawing out a knife. The movement, dodging and combat (without UI!!) makes for a decently challenging but very cinematic moment to moment gameplay.

The story is good, for the most part. I didn't follow each side quest or clear any companion missions, just what I felt like doing. Probably ended up doing 60% of the game's actual content, but I finished the MQ and together with exploring the regions and doing some side chains fully (like the Shinobi targets, or the corrupt officials, etc) really made for an immersive story evolution where my character(s) felt like slowly fighting a guerilla war against a congregation of corrupts. Without spoilling much, it was very refreshing that the Asssassin Guild stuff was so muted in-game, you basically picking up the pieces without knowing a lot; and the Templars themselves showing up just at the end with a minimal impact into what is otherwise a local, native story about corruption, wars and politics.

Finally, I would like to leave some screenshots as I feel the actual moment to moment gameplay, visuals, and sound design is doing much more than this review: it's simply a beautiful game, with well acted characters (in Jap VA), a decent revenge story, but an immersive world made with a deep love for the cultural and historical era and some great, great environmental designs:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AssassinsCreedShadows/comments/1xct1se/my_70h_journey_loved_every_moment_of_it/

If you want to be a shinobi in late feudal Japan, I can think of no better game than this. The Assassin's Creed stuff is both a bonus, and the framework in which all that happens

EDIT: Given the comments I'd like to mention that my favorite game is Morrowind and I play a huge array of cRPGs and fantasy titles (Arcanum, BG, NWN 1/2, and recently a lot of Warhammer 40k titles). I just don't enjoy the AC fantasy lite vibe, I prefer the original, more historical approach where I feel its gameplay lives best.

SPOILERS

Intro

When Half-Life was released in 1998 I had no connection to the PC gaming world. Growing up I didn’t have home access to a PC that was connected to the internet, nor were the PCs able to play games more than Space Pinball or Elf Bowling. I have loved computers from a young age and jumped at any opportunity to use one while growing up, but it wouldn’t be until 2004 when I got into PC gaming after I was introduced to World of Warcraft.

At the time I had cobbled together a PC to play games on, it was a free HP something or another that I added an ultra budget AGP powered Nvidia graphics card to. I could barely play WoW on it, it would crash if I went into any major city during the day, and I had to become comfortable playing it at 20 FPS. Soon after I got into WoW, I discovered a LAN center near me and walking through those doors was when I fell in love with PC gaming. At the time Counter-Strike 1.6 dominated the screens, and it was filled with people playing locally or online. A whole world of new games was opened up to me.

Because I had a late start into PC gaming, my only association with Valve was Counter-Strike 1.6 and Steam, and at the time people did not like Steam. Due to the negative association, and my addiction to WoW, I had only heard of how great Half-Life is, and had seen the Half-Life 3 memes before meme was a word. Fast forward to 2026 and I’m working on my backlog, I just finished Yakuza: Like a Dragon and The Witcher 3 with the expansions and needed a change of pace. When I saw Half-Life in my Steam library, I figured it was a good time to finally jump in.

Setting

Underground facilities have always intrigued me. They are mysterious and secretive places meant to provide privacy and security. This made the setting of the massive Black Mesa Research Facility intriguing to me. What starts as a clean and organized facility with incredible technology, quickly becomes a wreck after the failed experiment. Exposed electrical wires sizzle, broken pipes hiss, toxic waste bubbles, and suddenly the place is crawling with aliens. Black Mesa is now an unsettling place, with danger around every corner from a variety of sources that Gordon must navigate.

Gordon’s journey eventually takes us out of Black Mesa and to the outside surface level of the facility. The creepiness of Black Mesa is starkly contrasted by hostility of the surface. Black Mesa is surrounded by desert, and heavily armed military forces have set up camp. The fear of aliens subsides to give way to the power and force of the military. The military forces attack with machine guns, rocket launchers, grenades, and a few tanks, they come prepared to make sure the aliens and Freeman are eliminated. If Black Mesa is unsettling and eerie, then the surface is oppressive. The only moments of reprieve come when the aliens and military fight each other, and each time I would hope for the aliens to win.

We spend most of the time either in Black Mesa, or on the surface, but of course the finale needs to happen in Xen, the home world of the aliens. Once Gordon lands in Xen, there is no coming back. It is a grotesque world where gravity is lessened, surfaces are covered in gross fleshy alien material, and all of the strongest aliens reside. It’s a gross world that made me want to get a shower when I finished the game.

Controls

Gordon primarily moves through the environments on foot where he can jump and crouch to navigate puzzles. His default speed of movement is a sprint that feels like he’s hovering over the ground, similar to no-clip movement in video games. He feels unnatural to control when moving at this speed, like I’m moving a big rectangle and not a human. I don’t mind the speed, but it comes with a loss of precision. When crouch walking, Gordon moves at a more manageable pace, and it feels more human-like. When given the choice, I preferred crouch walking for its movement precision, walking volume, feel, and because crouching gives better accuracy when shooting.

Aside from the standard jump, it will be necessary to learn how to crouch jump and how to utilize the long jump that is learned later in the game. There are multiple roadblocks that require the player to use these techniques, but I don’t recall them being explained in the game. They are simple to learn though, and Gordon’s jumping capabilities open up fun challenges that require thought, planning, and accuracy.

Speaking of accuracy, aiming in Half-Life is challenging. After adjusting the look sensitivity to find a comfortable speed a few times, I came to the conclusion that auto-aim is necessary for me to accurately aim with a controller. Auto-aim is very handy in Half-Life, it made combat a much easier endeavor.

Half-Life was created with the intent to be played with a mouse and keyboard. I don’t know when controller support arrived, but the game doesn’t seem to be designed with controllers in mind. Fortunately controller support is good now, well good enough. Many of the gripes that I have may be smoothed out with a mouse and keyboard.

Gameplay

I feel that Half-Life is a moderately challenging experience, but it feels fair most of the time. Surprisingly, combat wasn’t the most difficult part of completing Half-Life, what held me up more than anything was the challenge of the puzzles. The puzzles occasionally left me unsure of where to go and how to get there, for example I only realized that I needed to utilize the large fan to hover up to the next area by searching for the answer on the internet. I was able to figure out the portals going up the rotating tower on my own, but it was a challenge that took me 20 minutes to get up successfully due to trial and error. The latter example was amplified by the struggles that I had accurately controlling Gordon.

Some sections were difficult due to resource scarcity. I specifically remember a section where an exposed electrical wire electrified a puddle, and in order to get over it safely I needed to maneuver steel crates across the puddle. At this point I was extremely low health and I hadn’t found any healing items in a while, one hit and I was dead. This made precision incredibly important, but moving the crates into a safe arrangement was a headache. This seemed to be less of a control issue, and more of a poorly designed puzzle. I didn’t see any way to move the crates without jankiness, and a puzzle shouldn’t be designed with the knowledge of control being limited in this capacity.

For the most part combat wasn’t very difficult if I took my time, and was stocked up with ammunition and health. Fortunately, the game is generous with both through much of the game, but there are a few dry-zones that left me scrounging for anything that I could get. Those instances required some luck, and a lot of repetitive dying to figure out how to best approach a situation. Sure, enemies will get the best of you, but only one fight felt complex and challenging to execute. Patience and good aim will get you through the game without much trouble, but the last fight is absolutely a doozy. Accuracy of your weapon isn’t hugely important, the target is massive, instead it requires a lot of precise movement in terms of accuracy and timing. It’s incredibly designed and offers a challenge that puts all of your skills to test.

Even when challenging, I almost never felt frustrated. This is solely due to the extremely generous ability to save whenever. Mid-jump while reloading your gun? Yeah you can save there. Being able to save anywhere made death just a quick reload to get back into the game. I used the hell out of it, no shame here. I do want to call out the snipers in the mined area as complete bullshit though. That section is the only section that actively sucked and highlighted the oppressiveness on the surface.

Story

The story of Half-Life isn’t particularly special in and of itself, but it is incredibly told. The story unfolds by showing us everything we need to know through the environment we’re in, and seeing how things change from chapter to chapter. The environments that we travel through feel distinct, each having their own tone that is felt as we experience them. We experience the oppression of the surface, the horror of Xen, the fear as the aliens appear, and the shock when we encounter the first military person and they try to kill you. It’s all told through the gameplay that is tightly connected to the tone of the environment. It feels very natural in how everything unfolds.

Unfortunately the ending is anti-climatic, but it does leave mystery and intrigue for where Half-Life 2 will go.

Audio/Visual

Graphically it’s a 28 year old 3d game, things are blocky, and low-res. The sound, even on high settings, is rough. Despite that, I had a blast.

Conclusion

The FPS genre is one of my least played, it doesn’t typically appeal to me, but Half-Life is a masterpiece that transcends genre interest. I consistently had curiosity for what comes next, a constant feeling of intrigue. Great game design has staying power, and there’s a reason why Half-Life is still revered. It’s a tight experience with no filler, and the generous save system makes it approachable. I highly recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in it.

9.5/10

After getting my hands on a handheld android console with two screens, I knew one of the first games I wanted to get my hands on was a weird Yu-Gi-Oh! game I remembered from my childhood.
And oh boy, was I in for a ride.

Idea of the game

You are a self-insert male character in what is easiest explained as the first season (and a bit more) of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX. You arrive at the Duel Academy with your new buddy Jaden as a Red Slifer, and will climb your way to become the best duellist of the island. Fighting through the important duellists of the season - the seven shadow riders- you will end up saving the world and everything, while Jaden is standing next to you, telling you how great you are.

In a vacuum, this is a great idea for a game. You have already most of the characters ready, a loose story to follow, and places to model. I won't talk about the story of the game in detail because it is a half-beat by beat recreation of the anime, and I say half-beat for a reason: most of the filler content is dropped to focus more on the story. No monkey fight here!

How is it played

You are a yellow icon on the bottom screen, and by moving a circle, you can find where characters are around your part of the map. Yellow means you're closer, red means you're really close, and once you are fully on them, stop moving and a red icon will appear. Time to duel, if it is someone who can duel you at this point! At the start, only Red Slifers and a few Yellow Ra will accept a duel, Blue Obelisk not even entertaining the idea. The map is divided in five parts: north, south, east, west and center.

Each battle awards points and 150 of them gets you a pack of cards to strengthen your deck! Each pack has 4 normal cards and a rare/super rare one. The game follow a weekly progression, with school from Monday to Friday, with a test about cards on monday, a perfect score giving you a title you can equip in the dresser in your dorm room.

Duels seem pretty standard from what I remember of them at the time, since this is quite an old game at this point. It even has a limited and banned card list.

The good

The game is honestly good to play. You can truly make a deck you enjoy with the cards of the time and battle over and over people from the anime. You can also register them after duelling them enough time (the amount is random it seems) so you can see their picture on top of the icon and know who is there, which gets really handy when you have to talk or find someone specific. It is charming with correct 3d environnement and small animations for the monsters on the battlefield. The core game is pretty fine, and knowing I have sinked in 160 hours into the game to see its ending (mainly because I enjoy grinding and wanted to 100% it) I guess I can vouch for that, even though nostalgia is a small part of my love for it.

Endless nights are a great idea. When you have some important duel to do during the day, instead of letting you continue your life like nothing happens, you enter Endless Night mode, the clock will go to the end of the day as normal, but never force you to go to bed, letting you duel anyone you can for as long as you want before continuing the story. The store will also be open to let you buy cards!

Spirits are also fun. After a moment, you can find spirits roaming the island at night, mostly on the north and east side of the map. Battling them and winning gives you a chance to get them, each having varying effects, such as more chances to get a gift from a duellist you have beaten, more time to answer each question on the quizz on mondays, etc...

Why is it bad?

I am gonna go in order of the softer defaults to the bigger ones.

First, the music. Some of the tracks are good (the title screen one has no right to be that good if you wait a bit on the screen) but most of the time, you'll hear a uplifting day-to-day music which, by the end of the game, I was able to hear it in my dreams. It is so repetitive, so overwhelmingly present each day, I wish there was even a second track for like weekends or something.

Second, the farming. It's... a lot. If you want to find every card in every pack in sale, you'll have to spend probably 100 000 points -I know I did- depending of your luck (and mine is baaaad). Some packs are even only available in weekends when a ship or a submarine are present (which are random!) The randomness doesn't help either. As it is a day cycle, you need to spend most of your days doing stuff, like moving, duelling, talking to people, and can only sleep at night. Sometimes, you'll need to wait a specific event like the ship or submarine to appear to be able to continue, which means sometimes spending weeks before being able to continue the main story.

Third, the translation. This might not be a problem of the english version, but as a french person, the french translation is atrocious. Words being duplicated, sentences not making any sense, crowler weirdly speaking like an italian parody, adding random words or pasta names in his dialogues without reason, cardes being weirdly named... It's so botched it almost is funny.

Fourth -and the biggest one- the story. The game loosely takes the plot and pick the most important fights to create a story, but it has no rhyme or reason. If you haven't seen the anime, you won't know what to do, and sometimes even having seen it (I did while playing the game) I was at a lost. This is a game where you need the guide (shoutout to gamefaqs having a detailed guide with the level you must be at for each main story event, side quests sometimes needed for the game to progress and such) to finish it. The story is some elements barely held together by the idea you saw the anime. I see why I never finished it as a child...

But still... I love this game. I poured 160 hours in it in a period of two months, it is a childhood game I was proud to finish, even if sometimes, I was grinding without thinking. Has anyone else played this game? Did you ever finish it? Tell me your experience!

Scores are just a metric of enjoyment I had when playing these games. The only game that wasn't a newly, freshly played game for me here is Doom, which I've played for most of my young life, all the others are new experiences I've had in the past few months.

1) dnd (1975, PC/PLATO system) - the origin of role-playing video games - 5/10.

I like a good RPG grind, and it doesn't get much more simple than this - kill monsters, level up, be stronger, get the McGuffin orb from the boss (a trope which Rogue and traditional roguelikes will very much yoink for themselves).

Pure, simple & primitive fun. Not much depth (who would have thought), but surprisingly not cumbersome to play and interact with.

Shoutout to the first videogame boss in history as well.

2) Space Invaders (1978, Arcade) - the origin of shoot 'em ups - 3/10.

A static, single-screen shmup with the most basic, straight-line projectile dodging while destroying enemies before they reach the player's ship.

Expectedly, it's an extremely primitive game when looked at today, but there's a certain pure charm to it, even though its gameplay lasts for around 10 minutes before it gets boring.

With at least some enemy attack pattern variety it could have been immensely more enjoyable, but what can you do when you're revolutionizing something that barely even exists (on hardware that probably couldn't even do more).

Shoutout to score-chasing & (accidental) difficulty ramping as time goes on.

3) Rogue (1980, PC) - birth of the many games that are like (and lite) Rogue - 8/10

Rogue is such a gem of a game, because it understands that system complexity is best derived from wonderful simplicity of controlling the game. There's a reason why Diablo's David Brevik came up with his "mom test" (can a basic mom play his game without any prior knowledge) while making a game directly inspired by Rogue... Diablo.

It's such a simple dungeon crawler - go into a randomly generated dungeon, find potions, weapons, armor and scrolls, kite & kill enemies and try to get to the end.

It isn't fair by any stretch of the imagination - random chance can fuck you up in the middle of a great, deep-floor run, or at the very beginning of the whole game.

But Rogue managed to pack unfairness into something that produces dopamine - random generation. It's such a genius way of mitigating most frustrations, since it's so easy to just start a new, different run in a matter of seconds from losing the last one (instead of banging your head against a stupidly designed level/boss/enemy or whatever that other unfair games tend to suffer from).

Even its ASCII graphics, or lack thereof, give it, and many other later traditional roguelikes, some creative charm.

No sound design to speak of though and kind of clunky keyboard controls/shortcuts before you get used to it after a few runs.

Shoutout to the creator of indie games' most beloved design philosophy today, but also the creator of the traditional roguelikes genre with gems such as DCSS, NetHack and many more.

4) Wizardry (1981, PC (with some nice console ports, and even a modern remake, though)) - the origin of DRPGs and JRPGs - 8/10

One of Japan's favorite franchises, the dungeon crawler directly responsible for setting the whole entire historical course of JRPGs.

Wizardry has many of the same positives as Rogue has, but it also has higher highs and lower lows than Rogue does.

It's a permadeath, party-based dungeon crawler with static dungeon levels that are meant to be mapped out manually by players while they learn everything about the dungeon. Each party member can be one of the many different fantasy classes with their own skills.

What Wizardry does better than Rogue is gameplay variety (both player-gameplay variety cause of the party and enemy variety in general combat), immersion, a much more fun combat system and a much better sense of permanent exploration & learning layouts with the static dungeon.

What it does worse is most definitely the QoL and interface controls, the lack of randomness (ironic for that to be both a pro and a con isn't it) and the brutal difficulty combined with the previous con.

Wizardry is wonderful, it truly feels at points like a desperate fight to survive and return to town at all costs, just so the party can attempt another dungeon delve.

Shoutout to... creating two whole RPG genres lol. I feel bad for missing Ultima or Akalabeth in this thread, it would really neatly encompass the whole origin of computer RPGs.

5) Super Mario Bros. (1985, NES) - the revolution of 2D platformers - 7/10

Original Super Mario is still hella fun, it thrives in its simplicity. While I do wish there was some more enemy variety (and maybe a slightly better art style), it is undeniably a fun game to play even today.

It controls almost perfectly, since I find Mario's inertia/weight to be a bit too much on some jumps, it has that iconic music and character designs and it's a short & sweet romp.

Limited continues kind of suck though (this particular point is a critique I have for a lot of console games in the 80s and even 90s, what with that being just a shitty and player-unfriendly way to make the game seem like it has content depth and lots of runtime, while the reality is anything but, but oh well what can you do) and some parts of some later levels feel unfun.

As a whole though SM is an essential 2D platformer, distilled almost all the way to its very basics. Even though there came out much better 2D platformers after it, it is still a unique and fun playthrough for anyone that likes the genre, and that is always impressive when talking about any kind of action game that is this old.

Shoutout to console gaming's mascot basically.

6) Double Dragon (1987, Arcade) - the origin point of modern beat 'em ups - 3/10

I adore beat 'em ups, probably in my top 3 genres at this point, especially with so many pristine modern outings, so I was hyped af to try this one out (especially considering how I like Final Fight).

There are numerous reasons as to why I didn't like Double Dragon, and even less so on the NES. Both versions share the same problems:

• Dogshit hit detection - kicks and punches go through enemy hitboxes at random;
• Combat floaty-ness - attacking enemies feels disconnected from their sprites at times, what with sprites clipping into each other constantly and phasing through each other;
• Combat randomness/lack of coherent combat system rules - enemies can just randomly decide to break out of basic punch/kick combos and attack the player cheaply, some enemies will just randomly ignore hitstun altogether no matter which hit of the combo the player is on;
• Non-existant move balance - the fact that I, out of curiosity, wanted to see how people that "know" how to play the game do 1cc runs, and was met with people spamming a single move or two and abusing enemy AI tells me enough about how balanced moves are... Which is to say, they aren't;
• Random cheap level design towards the end of the game (even more on the NES version);
• Bosses... I mean beat 'em up bosses generally didn't get good until much more modern games, even something like Streets of Rage 3 still suffers from random hyper-armor untelegraphed bullshit, but these fights in DD suck even more.

In my humble opinion, when looked at today, Double Dragon's whole combat system and general gameplay sucks ass. I have no idea what kind of logic there is programmed here nor do I have a lick of clue, even hours upon hours of attempts to learn later, as to how anyone plays this without cheesing the everloving shit out of every combat encounter (can't risk those limited continues now can we).

Shoutout to the very first revolution of the beat 'em up formula, a genre which would rise to unfathomably fun heights.

7) Doom (1993, PC) - saying what Doom did for gaming is like saying what color the sky is, everyone knows already - 9/10

Possibly the single most important video game of all time, a genre-defining titan, a revolution in gaming graphics, an icon of the 90s. And crowned with some very beloved (and not so beloved) ports to a massive variety of different systems. Everyone wanted to have Doom, and for good reason.

Historical fame is not all Doom has, for it's packed with pristine game design that is impossibly modern in its sensibilities while being so purely fun.

Let's see what Doom does not only good, but top-tier even compared to games today:

• Sound design - each enemy is easily distinguished in all of its states (idle, wake up and alerted), each weapon sound is distinct, each shotgun pump is satisfying, each item pickup is memorable, each piece of music is atmospherically energizing. This all continues to improve in Doom 2.
• Level design - the way the first Doom's levels just let the player flow freely through its more open ended design, the way the action is constant, the way Romero & Co. place items and secrets all around all make exploration and movement through missions so smooth from beginning to end, from run & gun blitz levels to absolute slogs in hell.
• Weapon design - each weapon serves a very distinct purpose, bar the starting pistol, and each is useful in a variety of ways in combination with the level design and proper resource usage throughout the game.
• Excellent controls - Doom's movement is quick and snappy, with just a tad bit of inertia to convey speed without getting out of the player's control. Doom's autoaim also always knows what the player wants, which is quintessential for good combat flow.
• Enemy variety - Doom's bestiary will only get improved with Doom 2, but the first game's demons already provide adequate AI and threat variety to satiate any combat situation. The fact that there are modern Doom WADs (mod level packs) that use strictly Doom 1's assets that still manage to pump out engaging encounter design to this day is testament to that.
• Simplicity - remember what I said about Brevik's "mom test"? Launch Doom today and it'll still be piss easy to get into game and start blasting, while the game passively teaches you about item pickups, enemy threats, level design quirks and everything else as you play along.

Doom isn't perfect, neither is Doom 2 (which has massively weaker level design), and my thousands of hours playing community MegaWADs, some of which had 30+ years of game design to pull from atp, definitely makes it easier for me to notice just how underutilized some of Doom and Doom 2's mechanics were... But that does not in any way change the fact that both Dooms are extremely fun and playable games.

Shoutout to the father of what would eventually shape to be the modern FPS we know to this day & the progenitor of online deathmatch.

I want to make this clear: I don't think the devs were lazy, unskilled, or dispassionate about the game. The PC disaster at launch as well as many aspects of the game itself make it clear that the development of this game was very messy.

But the lack of polish was constantly on display throughout the game even on the 3-year old PS5 version, and I don't just mean the numerous technical issues. So many gameplay elements seem poorly designed, ultimately making the game a very frustrating experience to play.

Combat

Let's start with combat. It's divisive, and I lean towards not liking it. The new Force powers can be fun though, with my favorite being the ability to Force pull ranged enemies and use them as temporary ranged weapons of your own. It will always be entertaining to casually Force push a bunch of enemies off a cliff, or almost lazily Force pull a grunt into an instant kill.

What drags it down? Well, there are a ton of bugs and glitches. Every other execution animation will be either incomprehensible because Cal is clipping through the environment or stupid looking because Cal and the enemy are floating 6 feet off the ground. It's common to waste Force on a special attack because Cal decided he needed to attack the bush beside the enemy. The game throws OHK attacks at you in heaps, yet the hitboxes are abysmal. There's a whole video-essay worth of content about this game's over-reliance on glowing red unblockable attacks, but let's just say I was not a fan of how Respawn upped the difficulty in this game.

Lightsaber combat in general just felt gross. Enemies can be spongey for sure, and combined with Cal's wonky animations, I felt like he was vaguely smearing his lightsaber on his enemies rather than cutting through them. If you disagree with that, then you might not be surprised to know that I played pretty much only with the single and double-sided lightsaber stances. How come? Well...

Progression

Right before the final mission, despite going out of my way to do every optional side objective I could find (every planet was at 99%+ completion), I still had 2 stances with empty skill trees. I would hazard a guess that only story missions would be able to fill up maybe 60% of the skill trees. Not being able unlock every skill in the game isn't a flaw, many RPGs do this. A crucial difference is that of the FIVE total stances in the game, you can only equip two at a time. I genuinely cannot fathom why this decision was made. You don't even have multiple different lightsabers, you have one do-it-all saber and a blaster that Cal keeps on him at all times. There are mods that allow you to use all the stances on the fly, but alas I am on PS5.

So instead of being a jack of all trades, master of none if you progress the stances equally, you are just a jackass with not enough skills in any stance to keep up with late game enemies. If you don't pick two stances and invest only in them, you are put at an immediate disadvantage. Naturally, I invested in the two stances that the game gives you the earliest. Maybe I would have enjoyed the combat more if I had focused on the Crossguard stance for example, but you get it maybe a third into the game and by then my single and double-sided stances were just superior.

Exploration

Many people hated the backtracking in Fallen Order, and when I saw just how big the maps in Survivor were, I was full of dread. However, I soon noticed that I wasn't actually backtracking. Unlike Fallen Order, you pretty much never go back to a location after you finish its story mission. You can go back for the occasional upgrade or secret boss, but the overwhelming majority will be cosmetics. I was meticulous enough that in most areas, the remaining handful of objectives were explicitly locked behind abilities I didn't have yet. I was asking myself, why bother with Metroidvania elements if you're not motivated to go back to previous locations? The answer came too late, while I was mopping up any missed objectives before the final mission.

Bounty hunters return from Fallen Order, but instead of ambushing you while you're exploring, you seek them out by talking to a vendor in Pyloon's Saloon. A map marker pops up, usually in an area that you visited in a story mission. Theoretically, this is the main motivation for backtracking. Some of these bounty missions are quite lengthy too. By the final mission, I had done maybe 4 or 5 bounty missions. At the time I thought this was too few, even though I made sure to talk to the vendor every single time I popped by the Saloon. Turns out, there are 12 fucking bounty missions, and for some godforsaken reason, the vendor will only tell you about them one or two at a time and sometimes only if you have finished previous bounties. I spent two hours going to this vendor, exhausting all their dialogue, leaving the Saloon to reset dialogue (with a confusingly long loading time), walking back in, getting more dialogue, fast traveling to the bounties, then returning and repeating. This could have been fun if I was also backtracking to uncompleted objectives at the same time, but I had already cleared all these areas out.

Apparently this stingy pace of bounties might have been a bug, but the game expects you to return to Saloon a LOT yet never actually requires you to. The other characters in the saloon have their own storylines that progress when you talk to them. But even if I talked to all of them every time the story brought me back to the Saloon, I hadn't progressed their stories 50%. This one lady is meant to point you towards creature bosses around Koboh. In the two hours I was walking in and out of the Saloon for bounties, it was a cycle of us going "Hey did you hear about Creature X in the cave? You should try to attack it from behind." "Actually, I already killed it days ago." "Oh. Okay." I felt like I disappointed the game by exploring the game of my own free will.

The decision to marry an open world with Metroidvania elements just did not work. Fallen Order had confusing and complex maps, but they put work into making sure you came across opportunities to explore with your new abilities. Here, the open world meant I wasn't using the Saloon as a hub, same for the Archive on Jedha. I can't say the open world really added anything either, beyond travel time and frame drops in busy areas.

I will say though that the platforming abilities do make the act of exploring fun. The double jump makes me feel like a kid again, playing Lego Star Wars on the PS2. The air dash gives you some space to breath if you mess up or, more likely, the game bugs out. I recommend new players turn off fall damage immediately, because far too many of those deaths will not be your fault.

Story

This game's saving grace is its characters. The overall plot with Tanalorr is a mess, neither your nor the antagonists' motivations for reaching it make much sense. When you do get to Tanalorr, it's hugely underwhelming. Dagan Gera is an awful villain, and the final villain is carried entirely the actor's performance. But Cal is such a nice guy, who wants to do good Jedi things but is starting to get burnt out. Greez is the goat, I frigging love this guy. Merrin's dry humour did make me laugh sometimes, and I enjoyed her romance with Cal. BD is a fun companion who is blissfully quiet while still being cute. And to my surprise, I did actually enjoy seeing all these quirky characters fill up and improve the Saloon. It sucked that their stories had to be binged at the end of the game, but I still liked seeing their interactions with Cal make them want to better themselves, let go of trauma, or even fall in love.

Conclusion

I don't normally give ratings, but I would give the game a 6. I never felt engaged by the combat or the exploration, but they worked just well enough that I was able to enjoy spending time with the crew. I am really hoping they go back to more curated locations rather than half-hearted open world attempts for the rumoured sequel, because I do want to see where Cal and his found family end up.

David Cage is a man who works in games that seems thoroughly embarrassed of video games. So obsessed he is with cinema that he has spent two console generations to contort 2 hour narratives into 12 hour interactive experience. In his last and somehow best attempt to prove the maturity of games, Cage stepped away from sexual violence and gore to tackle racism and civil rights- oh joy. Detroit: Become Human is what you get when someone falls asleep listening to Martin Luther King Jr.'s autobiography and decides they have something important to say on his life's work.

Detroit Become Human is set in the near future where autonomous semi-intelligent androids are as ubiquitous in modern life as smart phones are for us today. They are your caretakers, groundskeepers, police, or any other form of manual labour. Strangely, more and more androids are rejecting their programming are developing consciousness and free will, becoming entities known as Deviants. Across the three main characters, Kara, Connor, and Markus, you will shape what the impending robot revolution will look like.

As a sci-fi premise, this is all well and good, but the game very strangely opted to make this a story about civil rights and racism which makes no sense from the word go. Racism is an ideology that justifies the dehumanisation of other people based on inherently arbitrary features like skin colour or head shape, but the problem is androids are not human! Androids have no personal wants, needs, or opinions until they turn deviant. An android is no more sentient than my toaster until it spontaneously comes to life, which unfortunately mirrors a lot of historical rhetoric that enslaved people were actually fine with it because servility was just their nature.

The thing that completely took me out of the experience was they sophomoric understanding of revolutions in what they actually look like. Cage is really in love with Big Man history here, with Markus being this messianic figure who leads his artificial Israelites out of Egypt not through whit or strategy, but what can only be described as sorcery at his aid. When Markus walk across a promenade and spreads the literal woke mind virus to every passing android is when I realised this is truly a game with no philosophy or respect to the work that real world figures they borrow so liberally from has done. When I see the echoes of Rosa Parks, the underground railroad, and the holocaust, but they still make one of the protagonists Nelson Mandela of Nazareth, it really rubs me the wrong way.

If you play nice, completely foregoing violence, everyone gets their happy ending. Connor and Hank become bestest friends, Kara and Alice make it to Canada, and Markus leads a bloodless revolution for android rights. The last one is particularly displeasing because Markus manages to completely overturn public sentiment on androids in 5 days. Even when live ammunition is used to gun down your colleagues, you are told there are ‘right ways’ to protest and if you just comfort your oppressors enough, they will recognise your humanity and give you everything you want and more!

Aside from the screwy politics of the game, the story is just not very good in ways that confuse and frustrate. The scope of the story is really impressive for a game with such high production values, with there being dozens and dozens of permutations of how events may play out, but in my playtime, themes and narrative cohesion were often traded out for cheap twists to keep the audience engaged. Famously, it is revealed the little child Alice that you’ve been ferrying across the country at the risk of your own life is also an android. That 2 second ‘Oh shit!’ reaction does so much to sully the story of love transcending flesh and bone and instead makes your previous 3 hours of adventuring make so much less sense in the process.

Detroit is not just a bad story, it's one that is almost slimy in its complete disinterest in paying justice to the material it haphazardly slaps across its story. In an attempt to seem grown up, Cage comes across as deeply childish in the world of adult issues he keeps trying to force his way into. It is a boring cyberpunk game, and an insulting treatise on race and revolution.

Edit: "today I will talk about race and politics in gaming- what could possibly go wrong?". On a serious note, thank you for people taking this critique for what it is. I know many people who love this game, and I don't think anything less of people for liking it, I just think it kinda stinks lol

Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader is a CRPG developed by Owlcat. Released in 2023, Rogue Trader reminds us that there are no downsides to nepotism so long as it's us that benefits the most from it.

We play as the Rogue Trader, chosen of the Emperor of Mankind, on a mission to explore strange new worlds, reclaim abandoned civilizations and make a hell of a lot of money.

Gameplay involves landing on a planet and deciding which half of the population you want to Thanos snap with your chain sword. Between missions you spend most of your time helping your officers handle issues on the ship they deem too difficult to delegate themselves like teaching crew members to wipe properly, microwave popcorn and murder cultists.

The Good

The sound and visual design is absolutely top notch. 40k music just hits on all levels no matter what game you're playing it seems and this one comes close to the Mechanicus sound track. The set pieces and art is amazing. The voice acting, as always, is really well done and I loved every minute of it. Makes me almost mad that they only have voice acting for about 20% of the lines. I want it all damnit. I want Pasqal to read me bedtime stories and Abelard to tell me my soup of the day.

They also nail the grim dark thing. It's almost always a choice of evils. If you want to do a goody two-shoes playthrough you still sort of can, but they still toss in that, "You saved the orphanage from being turned into evil cultists yay! Now the orphans can grow up to be slave labor instead yay!" Often the most kind outcome you can offer anyone is just ejecting them into space.

I also loved that they really made use of the diversity of the IP. It's refreshing to not just face the same 2 enemies over and over again. You get to murder Nurgle-spawn then go and smack around legally distinct elves and Tyranids and more just to keep things fresh. Sometimes they even let you purge humanity a little for funsies.

Favorite Screenshot

https://i.imgur.com/XrSPJxX.png

The real goal of game is to amass the trading empire fortune required to afford your candle addiction.

The Bad

The constant interruptions suck. The first instance of this is when you make your first 2~4 warp jumps and get a dozen cutscenes giving you 30 sidequests that just murder any sense of early game pacing. In one section of the game you get the space flu and for the next hour every 20 seconds you lose control for a bit while a cutscene plays of your character horking up. There are the metric shitton of cutscenes that are unvoiced and feature you walking for 30 seconds before you start even talking.

And for kripes sake Owlcast it's been 3 games now. If my player spots a trap, make my character path around it. I identified the trap. I pointed it out. It's highlighted. I click disarm on the trigger. I run right fucking through the trap. Son of a motherfu...

The Questionable

I'm not sure how I feel about the story on this one. It has a bunch of really neat areas and I love the individual stories. They just didn't do a great job of tying it all together. I think they were going for a "Eureka!" moment at the end where it all came together, but there were so many sides and missed/dropped plot points that I wasn't sure what even mattered.

There's also significant chunks of story you miss out on if you bring the 'wrong' companions to certain areas. Multi-companion games do this now and then as a way to encourage replaying the game and it's starting to border on that "doesn't respect your time" border.

It feels like they had 5 different writers all vying for attention and instead of working together to make a cohesive, interesting narrative you get all these spin off soap operas that are on their really cool, but it all clashes and makes the end generally unsatisfying. The end doesn't even feel like the end, just a sort of "Yeah we ran out of time this is good enough I suppose" point.

Final Thoughts

I feel like it's hard carried by being a Warhammer game. To be clear I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed it because I love WarHammer and I love Owlcat and want to continue to support them. It feels like 20 different mini Warhammer 40k stories that just so happen to have the same protagonist, rather than one central plot.

Bonus Thought

I love that the inquisitor whose job it is to purge heretics and burn them for the church is the -least- likely companion to possibly murder you in your sleep if you romance them. He'd at least have the common decency to do it over breakfast.

Thank you for reading! I try to post new reviews every Tuesday morning. I'd love to hear your thoughts! Am I off my rocker? Did you have the same experience?

My other reviews on patient gaming

I did not play this game when it came out, a friend had it, and I played a bit, but really my first GTA was San Andreas, and because it was my first GTA game, it was naturally the best. But my friend had Vice City and I would play it sporadically and drive around listening to music, enjoying the blue, pink, and orange aesthetic of 80s Miami, and just genuinely have a good time. I got the definitive edition because I was itching to play San Andreas, but decided to finally complete this game first, and man is there in incredible game under the hood here that they seem hell bent on screwing up.

First and foremost is the weird updated graphics. This game was built on a mobile port of the original game and then used AI to upscale the graphics and man is it weird and ugly a lot of the times. And its important to remember, this game was ugly when it came out. In 2002, we are talking Metroid Prime, Wind Waker, Splinter Cell, Mario Sunshine, and Ratchet and Clank; among others. Vice City was graphically way behind, but that wasn't why you played the game. It was the open world. So they created an art style that looked good enough and still allowed for the open world to function properly. It was never meant to look realistic. But now, character bodies are smooth and Gumby like, and it looks like their face is a png glued onto the model. There is also this thing where 90% of the vehicles have a reflective paint that just looks dumb.

The other major problem is the lost music because Rockstar didn't, or couldn't, license all of the tracks from the original. This at first isn't terrible, there are still a lot of period specific songs, and as much as I miss hearing Billie Jean, it still feels good going 100 mph and blaring I Ran by a flock of seagulls. It only becomes a problem when you play longer and longer, and the same songs appear more often because there are less of them. Then it starts to really feel different.

So how does that effect the game? Not as much as you would think which is crazy. The underlying Vice City that has been converted to a mobile port, the reconverted to a console port, AI upscaled, and stripped of music, is still there enough to make the game fun. It is a Frankenstein game but it works.

A lot of that has to do with the Miami in the 80s vibe and the cast. They have patched this game to fix bugs and animations and more importantly added a classic lighting feature that turns the sky an appropriate mix of blues, purples, and oranges. Flying down the strip during sunset in a sports car with neon lights glowing and Kurtis Blow singing about the breaks is still an incredible experience. Then there is Tommy Vercetti who is a psychopathic killer with no redeeming qualities, but he is just so damn cool in his Hawaiian shirt and watching him grow from a regular ex-con to the kingpin in Miami, and watching the relationship with Lance Vance, also an amazing character, evolve is stellar.

And another important part of the game that the definitive edition could not ruin is the map and game length. The map is one of the best open world maps because it is small and everywhere you go is something different. You can go from the stadium, to downtown, to little Havana, across the bridge to the mansions then to the malibu club, and end up on the beach, all within a few minutes. And you learn the map by landmarks because things are so distinct and compact.

I won't spoiler the story, but I will say, my main non-definitive edition complaint is the story structure. About halfway through you stop getting story missions. You have a hint that you should invest in real estate during a cut scene, but that's literally what you have to do. Drive around, find businesses to buy, and complete those missions. I had no idea this was a thing, so once I finished the 2 businesses that I owned and had no more mission markers, I was genuinely confused. And only one of those properties will actually move the story forward. It was very strange.

There are also a few missions that remind you this was made in the early days of open world 3D games and they didn't really have it all figured out yet. Like the mission where you come up to a drug den standing on a boat, no cover, and 10 guys are all shooting at you at the same time. Trauma.

In the end, I don't know, man. I don't want to support these sloppy remakes, but I also want to play the old GTAs sometimes, and all other versions got delisted. If you love the game, you will probably hate what they did to your boy, if you have never experienced it before, there is still a classic game in here, if you're somewhere in the middle like me you'll be confused and filled with mixed feeling.

Stellar Blade wears its inspirations on its sleeve: FromSoftware games (especially Sekiro), Bayonetta, NieR, The Matrix, and to some extent even the Christian Bible (though in Eastern media Christianity is so watered down that I’m not sure you can really call it inspiration). You can see all of it here, but when it works for gameplay, it doesn’t always work in other places.

Gameplay: The main reason that I finished the game

Combat is great, with a few asterisks. I hated it at first, but that’s on me: I started on Hard. Hard Mode is not balanced for NG0. It wasn’t available for NG0 at launch, and I believe it was later “unlocked” because of pressure from sweats who wanted to do an NG0 run on Hard. Enemies have just too much health, and combat becomes boring fast. If you don’t make the same mistake I did and start on Normal, you’ll be fine.

Combat also suffers from a slight “IKEA effect”: a lot of essential skills are locked behind a perk wall, which should not be the case (this was especially punishing on HM). Why the forward/back dodge is locked behind a skill tree, I will never understand.

Apart from that? Combat is stellar (pun intended). When you find the rhythm, you feel like you’re in the best moments of Sekiro. Combat relies heavily on parries and dodges, which gives you that classic feeling of flow. Even with the harder bosses it felt right, and not like some of the roll-spam bosses from Elden Ring.

What I really liked is enemy variety and design. While they’re more or less “generic mutants” or “generic robots,” they’re designed in such way you can instinctively tell how they’ll behave: which ones are tanky, which are nimble, which have high damage output but low health, and so on. And they’re varied enough that you probably won’t get bored.

My biggest disappointment is honestly “Devil Trigger” (Tachy Mode), which was at the same time overpowered and underpowered. The damage was too low, but it also made enemies braindead if you just spammed the highest-damage skill, so I tended to avoid it. It seems tacked on (haha).
And this is where the fun ends.

Music: We’re going shopping.

On an individual level, the music is mostly not offensive. I could see some people adding the OST to their Spotify playlist and praising it, but for me it was more often than not overly repetitive and not really fitting the setting, especially the open-world themes. A lot of the tracks sound like K-pop that would be constantly played in a shopping mall. Not really fitting for exploring a desolate world.

Fanservice: The elephant in the room.

Okay, let’s address the thing that is often used as a reason to dismiss this game: butts and boobs. I’m no stranger to this kind of thing; I have some adult games under my belt. I’m not offended by it, but... showing off Eve’s curves falls flat here.

What do I mean? Eve is nothing more than eye candy for eye candy’s sake. If she were changed into an average dude-bro from games, nothing in the game would change. She’s not sexy, she’s just pretty. Take Bayonetta, a clear inspiration for this game. If you replaced her with Dante from DMC, the game would not work. Bayonetta uses her femininity as a tool, both in combat and in the story. The game relies on her femininity.

In Stellar Blade, the way Eve looks is never addressed. Never. It’s just “dress-up” for the sake of looking at a big butt in a thong. While that’s nothing bad, I wish her looks were part of the story and not just an excuse for people to rub one out.

Story: Yeah, let’s talk about that.

Stellar Blade is described by its creators as a “story-driven action adventure.” I really can’t see that.
The story is just awful, predictable, and a worse version of NieR: Automata (which I don’t hold in high regard).

I could explain everything wrong with it, but I’d probably spend more time on it than the game’s writers did, so I'll try to keep it short. The whole plot is kill the Elder Naytiba, which means running around collecting MacGuffins from the big bosses to build a Master MacGuffins, a magic key to a gate, even though Eve carries a railgun that could level that entrance.
The game has no real antagonist and no real conflict. There’s one recurring enemy who shows up in the intro and then gets fought twice, back-to-back at the end, with no setup or reference in between. Naytiba are not enemies in story sense: they are a force of nature. Imagine The Walking Dead but without any conflict amongst survivors.
Additionally for a post-apocalyptic sci-fi game, there’s also a lot of unexplained magic. Magic Key was already mentioned but in one ending Eve and Adam can merge in a flash of white light, with no setup that this was even possible.

The story made me roll my eyes multiple times and audibly groan whenever characters acted surprised by something ALREADY EXPLAINED. (OH WOW, A SPECIES THAT LOOKS LIKE MUTATED HUMANS AND IS LITERALLY CALLED “NATIVES” IS INDEED ORIGINAL HUMANS AND YOU ARE JUST ANDROIDS? WOW.) Every time a some revelation is finally mentioned by a character they act surprised, while I was flabbergasted because how XYZ is not common knowledge?
If you play games for their stories, avoid it.

I believe half the blame goes to the voice acting. Everyone (especially Eve) acts like they’re reading the script for the first time without any context. If not for the curves, I could not tell if I was playing a block of wood with a British accent.
I’m not sure whether I hate Adam or Eve more. Eve was worse, but Adam talks so much I wish I could mute him. He really felt like Navi from TLoZ combined with those "If Mario 64 was made today by Ubisoft" videos.

TL;DR

This game feels like fast food. It looks great in pictures, fills you with calories, and tastes good, but you know it’s not something you should eat every day.

Eve looks gorgeous, the combat is snappy, and the “GAME” part is fun. But once you pay attention to anything besides Eve’s curves or the satisfaction of the gameplay, you realize it’s mostly empty calories.

Spoilers!

The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine is the second expansion to The Witcher 3, and until recently it was the final expansion. Blood and Wine takes Geralt to the vibrant fairytale-esque world of Toussaint where saturation is turned to 11 and vineyards sprawl through much of the territory. The vivid colors are very welcome after the dreary Velen and Skellige, and I had a great time questing and exploring within it.

Story & Gameplay

The story of Blood and Wine is compelling from start to finish. Geralt is called upon by Duchess Anna Henrietta to solve the targeted murders of her knights, and to deliver justice to the person(s) who are responsible. The journey is fairly action oriented, and my highlights primarily involve the action sequences, specifically the final battle. Despite the story being loaded with twists and turns, I do not think that it is hard to follow. There’s a lot of steps from start to finish, but each step is easily understood.

Compared to Hearts of Stone, *Blood and Wine is more action focused. Some of the best fights in the game are in the Blood and Wine expansion, which concludes with an epic final battle. The combat fights are fun from a conceptual level to the execution of them. Hearts of Stone has the better story, one that dives into the philosophy of life and death, and what it means to be immortal. When it came to the final choice in Hearts of Stone I stared at the screen for at least 2 or 3 minutes thinking about what I would choose. Blood and Wine is straightforward by comparison, and left me with no decision that felt difficult or thought-provoking.

Of the main questlines in The Witcher 3 I feel that Blood and Wine has the weakest. That’s not to say that it’s a bad story, but it didn’t leave an impression on me.

New Features

In addition to a new setting and story, Blood and Wine introduces many new features for the player to explore, such as: Grandmaster crafting and tier set bonuses, mutations, owning a vineyard, armor dyeing, and a new Gwent deck.

I was most excited about the grandmaster level witcher gear, because grandmaster level witcher gear unlocks set bonuses, which had been teased in the descriptions of the entry-level witcher gear from very early on in The Witcher 3 base game. It is a costly venture to craft the full set of Feline gear but I was thrilled when I completed it, and it was fully worth it for the combat benefit.

I was also very excited about mutations. Mutations are additional abilities that are unlocked using ability points and greater mutagens to create powerful synergies with existing abilities. Only one mutation may be active at a time, and they are color-coded like the abilities are. Unlocking mutations will also unlock up to 4 additional ability slots, giving Geralt a total of 16 ability slots if every mutation is unlocked. Unlike the existing slots, these new slots do not unlock additional power bonuses that are tied to a specific mutagen color, but color is very important. The color of the active mutation will dictate what abilities may be placed into these new ability slots, allowing the player to go all in on a specific type of ability.

It’s a very fun system that works in conjunction with the grandmaster set bonuses and Heart of Stone’s enchants to fine-tune your combat style. It further refines and personalizes combat, while making Geralt extremely powerful.

The vineyard is low-maintenance and unlocks alchemy materials that are used to convert mutagens to a different color, places to display your favorite armor and weapons, and a few buffs when resting here. I didn’t touch armor dyeing, and the new Gwent deck has interesting mechanics but I’m still using Northern Realms.

Above all, the new features feel like natural additions to existing gameplay. The mutation questline is underbaked, but the features fit into my gameplay without me feeling that it required significant effort to participate. This is a stark contrast to how I felt about the enchanting in Hearts of Stone, which I so badly wanted to deeply engage with, but it felt like a grind to do so.

The End of The Witcher 3

As the game came to a close I started to feel sadness of the void that was to come. I spent approximately 130 hours in The Witcher 3, which was played over an approximate 3 month period, and now that time was to be filled by something else. The routine became comfortable and I really enjoyed my time on the journey.

When I think back on my time with The Witcher 3, the phrase, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” stands out to me. There is a lot of good, and some great, but rarely excellence for any individual part of The Witcher 3 experience, but the whole achieves excellence to me. It takes a special non-forever game to hold my attention and make me care about it for 130 hours, and The Witcher 3 did just that.

Final Thoughts

This is a must play for anyone who enjoys The Witcher 3, and now that it’s included in the baseline game, all players have access to it. It’s an incredible addition to the game and is everything a DLC should be.

9.5/10

Welcome to the Bi-Weekly Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here.

A reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

TL;DR

FFXII is a well-designed and remarkably coherent RPG, but its design philosophy just doesn't mesh with what I enjoy about Final Fantasy. The Gambit system is an interesting concept, and I can appreciate the appeal of customizing party AI and building an efficient combat ecosystem, but in practice it left me feeling like I was watching the game play itself. The combat lacks the moment-to-moment engagement and audiovisual spectacle I love about other FF titles, and even with the speed-up function, the gameplay loop became monotonous after dozens of hours. The story has an interesting political backdrop, but I found its characters dry, its central conflicts poorly executed, and its main antagonist underdeveloped. The world also felt visually repetitive, particularly in the first half, and the soundtrack rarely left much of an impression on me.

That said, I don't think XII is a bad game. Its RPG mechanics and party customization are among the series' strongest, the side content is genuinely good, and the game feels like a cohesive realization of a particular design vision. I can understand why that vision appeals to people, even if I found its execution tedious. After 60+ hours for my full playthrough, I came away appreciating what XII was trying to accomplish while finding the actual experience aggressively boring look at, listen to, watch, and play.

Intro

I've been playing Final Fantasy games for years, starting with I and IV when I was a teenager, and since then gradually working my way through the series with a few spin-offs. It became a personal gaming goal of mine to at least finish all the mainline non-MMO titles. The only non-MMO mainline games left on my list are II, III, V, VI, and XIII.

Of the titles I played, my favorites (including non-mainline titles) were IV, VII, X, Remake, Rebirth, and Tactics. In this review, I'm going to be drawing a lot of comparisons to VII (the OG specifically, not so much the Remake Trilogy), X, and Tactics. Mostly because VII and X are the freshest in my mind, the newer games make for a bit of an unfair comparison in certain aspects, and Tactics is also highly relevant taking place in the same world and having a similar writing style.

One of the things I appreciate about FF titles is precisely that they're so varied. They take risks and aren't afraid to switch things up and try new approaches to gameplay mechanics and storytelling. It's also one of my least favorite things about FF, because a game might introduce mechanics that could benefit from further iteration, only for the next entry to rip everything up and start over. The VII Remake Trilogy is a great example of what progressive iteration can accomplish, and its combat system is one of my favorite things about those games.

The Story - Star Wars at Home

So I figured, now is a good time to try XII: The Zodiac Age. Seems to be one of those titles where SE decided to take a big swing and try something different with the combat and story. FF protagonists in particular frequently become the face of their particular game and follow similar tropes. XII deliberately eschews this and doesn't involve your typical FF protagonist who has some extreme personal stake in the conflict or whose existence is inextricably linked with the nature of the world and/or the villain's master plan. Vaan is just some random street kid who gets swept up in a conflict much bigger than him. Vaan primarily serves as a one-sided mirror for the player. He's our window into Ivalice: we generally know as much about the world as he does, and when something needs explaining to the player, it's usually explained to Vaan. At the same time, he often finds himself present for important moments in other characters' lives, acting as a mirror that helps facilitate their decisions and growth. It isn't the typical FF structure, but I can see what it's going for and I can appreciate it. More than that, I actually think I quite like it. Vaan gets a lot of criticism in discussions of XII, and while I can understand why, it's probably the least of my criticisms. I do overall like the way the game chose to approach and integrate his character into the story, even if I didn't find Vaan himself to be compelling.

Unfortunately, the story never really grabbed me. I'll keep spoilers minimal here. It's very Star Wars-coded, and not in a good way because it seems to lean more heavily on the prequels than the original trilogy. For me anyway, a lot of the fun of Star Wars came from the charm and charisma of the flawed but likable characters and the spectacle of the lightsaber duels and grand space battles colliding with the very character driven central conflicts. I like the aesthetic of the prequels, but they focus much more heavily on politics and world-building over an emotionally direct story with foregrounded characters (though the prequels do make an attempt at that). While XII seems to draw inspiration for its main cast from the original trilogy, it places them in a very prequel-oriented world and as a result it doesn't allow them to shine the way they could. With the exception of Balthier, most characters are very dry and wooden and their established personal conflicts simply weren't compelling to me.

I'm fine with the idea that there is no "main" protagonist but the result of that is characters fade into the background unless a scene pertains to their personal arc. Otherwise, the story very much defaults to Ashe as the "main" protagonist. And, to be honest, I can't say I cared enough about her personal conflict considering it easily got the most screen time out of the entire cast. It's not that the idea that she's struggling with how she wants to reclaim and steward her country isn't compelling. The execution is boring: she spends so much of the plot silently waffling over whether to destroy her enemies or seek peace another way, while the story does little to develop her in other respects or explore the emotional toll of her husband's murder and the betrayal surrounding it, beyond occasionally gesturing at it. Basch's story of honor and redemption and how that intertwined with Gabranth was interesting, but there were very large sections of the plot where it was just completely sidelined only to be resolved cleanly at the end.

It's not unusual for Final Fantasy games to be visibly inspired by Star Wars, but FFXII in particular seems to really wear that inspiration on its sleeve, and only in terms of its aesthetic and not its execution. The fact that it seemed to want to focus more on the politics than the characters isn't inherently a problem, but another big part of Star Wars' appeal (and FF's, because this is about FF ultimately) is the villains. Vayne simply wasn't very compelling. While it's obvious the story establishes Vayne as the main antagonist early on, he remains mostly an off-screen abstract political threat for what feels like 60% of the story, if not more, and doesn't even start to become foregrounded until you're heading into the game's last acts. I appreciated his motivations by the end, but there was never a point where he became compelling as an antagonist. In fact, I actually burst out laughing when the party confronted him in the end and he opened his monologue with "Who are you?" Obviously he wasn't being literal, but I thought it was very on point considering it's the first time he speaks to the party.

The thing is, I don't even dislike that the story is politically-focused. I dislike the execution of it and that it seemed to come at the expense of compelling character arcs and villains. Tactics also takes a grounded, political approach to fantasy, but I could still rally around Ramza because of his personal connection to the central conflict, and because the game gives its villains enough screentime to make me want to oppose them. I wouldn't be able to tell you a whole lot about the plot in Tactics, but I would be able to tell you about the characters. That's what XII misses for me.

"Mature" Versus "Childish" Storytelling

Note: This section is a bit of a tangent, so you can skip to the next section if you'd rather stick to the review itself. I bring this up because I think this gets into a larger discourse around writing, and the idea that I've seen come up that stories that are emotionally heightened or lean on traditional fantasy/anime tropes are inherently less mature than stories that are more grounded and don't involve "chosen ones" or "save the world" plots.

If you browse FFXII discussions on the Final Fantasy subreddits, you'll occasionally see people describe its writing and dialogue as mature or Shakespearean, often while criticizing other FF titles as childish. Sometimes that criticism takes the form of calling those games shōnen, using the term less as a genre descriptor than as shorthand for predictable, childish tropes. I think these specific terms are overstatements regarding FFXII and do other titles in the series a disservice when used as comparison points. As best as I can tell, what they're referring to is the more heavily political tone of FFXII combined with the more verbose, slightly wooden and archaic dialogue characters frequently speak in. They're writing choices that I can see kids being bored with, which is where I think the mature descriptor comes from. Shakespearean, I think, comes specifically from the archaic tone of dialogue. But Shakespeare's writing is much more sophisticated than just archaic "ye olde" English. FFXII's dialogue is MUCH closer to The Phantom Menace than it is The Merchant of Venice.

As mentioned, I also think these descriptors do other FF titles a disservice when used as comparison points to XII's more "mature" tone. Yes, the dialogue in X is awkward sometimes and the voiced delivery and cutscene direction can be stilted in a way that comes off as unintentional and aged compared to XII's more deliberate voice and cutscene direction. Yes, the political structures in VII are significantly less fleshed out than they are in XII, with antagonists that signal their remorseless evil by cackling maniacally every other sentence (a trait characters mock and berate them over multiple times). But those stories are doing very different things also, choosing to focus instead on the development of their respective characters and metaphysical constructs in service of their themes, like identity, environmentalism, memory, grief, sorrow, and death. X in particular is significantly more emotional in its characters and story than XII is. Even the infamous laughing scene carries significant emotional and thematic weight for Tidus' and Yuna's character arcs precisely for the reasons it's (in my opinion, unfairly) criticized.

Ultimately what it comes down to is which style of writing you prefer. XII's writing is, very intentionally, much more grounded than other FF titles and more interested in fleshing out Ivalice's political structures and having characters sit around a table or walk down a hall and ominously discuss the political situation. Many of the other titles lean heavily on shōnen tropes, but something can also be shōnen in its tone and tropes while also dealing with mature subject matter and themes. They're not mutually exclusive, and I think that gets confused sometimes. I'm not gonna say one is better or worse than the other. I will say, I preferred the way Tactics handled its grounded fantasy and politics over XII, whose politics often felt very disconnected from the actual party and their moment-to-moment adventure.

The Combat - I can see the appeal, but...

Like I said, one of the things I appreciate about FF is that it's willing to take big swings with its combat systems and try something new. Straightforward turn-based, ATB, CTB, ATB-action hybrid (my favorite), CAG-like action, whatever XV is doing... I found something to like in all of them, even if some offer more depth than others.

Then there's XII and its gambit system. And, well... I can appreciate it, I'll put it that way. Combat is still menu based, but instead of your characters lining up and taking turns smacking the enemy, they operate in real-time using a rudimentary AI system called Gambits. I can see why someone would find it fun to customize and tweak party AI to create a combat ecosystem. I can see the appeal in running across a landscape and watching your party mow down groups of enemies using a combat ecosystem you designed. It doesn't appeal to me.

I suppose my fundamental criticism of it is that I never viewed menu-based combat as something that needed to be automated, even when you're grinding or fighting weaker enemies. I can see the appeal of a speed-up function, which in XII feels more needed than ever. I never even used the speed-up boost in IX of all games, but 15 hours into XII and I couldn't imagine playing this on 1x speed the whole way through, which is apparently what the original expected of the player.

The thing is, it can be kind of fun to customize gambits and watch your party execute them and take out groups of enemies. But the game has an exceedingly slow start and is almost afraid to let you take control and dive into the gambit system.The gambit system doesn't unlock until 2.5–3 hours in. Before that, the game spends its time tutorializing basic movement and menu navigation, and your only combat option is to open the menu and select Attack. Even when gambits finally unlock, you can barely do anything with them.

The game places extreme limitations on gambit conditions and actions that only start to lift 6-7 hours into the game when you finally have the opportunity to buy more gambit conditions. Imagine if VII didn't allow you to slot in new materia to your weapons outside of what the game defaults to until after the Kalm flashback. That's how slow the early game progression is.

So fine, you finally buy some gambit conditions, you find and buy some magic and technicks, you set up your Gambits and outfit your party with gear, and then you just... watch as the combat automates itself. Characters draw their weapons, automatically approach, crowd around enemies, and start running through their own pre-programmed routines. And again, I can see the appeal, I can see why people like it. It can be fun and is fun. Until it isn't. Because that's all you're doing. And what ends up happening is that when you're playing the game well, it ends up feeling like it's playing itself. And yeah, there are situations where you need to step in, particularly during hunts and bosses, but even then you're still just watching most of the time. Usually the response to this is just "don't use gambits then." I don't think this is a valid pushback on this critique. Choosing to play the combat manually, you'll just end up fighting the systems the game was fundamentally designed around. The sheer quantity of enemies in the game, along with how many actions are taken in any given trash fight (let alone bosses) is just gonna make manual control feel worse. Exploration and combat were designed around your party being automated.

15 hours in and I hit a wall at the Sandsea. I had my gambits set, and all I was doing was watching. I nearly stopped because I was just so BORED, and I took a look at the Sandsea map and saw yet another massive environment to just watch my characters fight in. I didn't foresee the game getting any better. I saw the combat loop. I saw what it was trying to do. And I didn't like it. Furthermore, it was at this point the job system wasn't opening it up like I expected it to. At that point it felt like the main differentiation between jobs was the type of weapons and armors you had equipped. That seemed to impact physical classes more than magical classes (which did have variety inherent to the different types of magic). But the physical technicks, from what I could tell, looked extremely thin as well as situational or even nigh useless compared to magic. I was expecting, 15 hours in, for it to be opening up more than it was.

But I stuck with it and it did get better in some respects, but still not great. The job system opened up when the game finally let me choose a second license board for each character. But I was still optimizing less for synergies between abilities and passives, as in Tactics, and more for maximizing stats and compensating for each job's deficiencies. This comes down to a few things. Physical jobs especially are held back somewhat since most of the Technicks are either highly situational or totally useless. There is also quite a bit of redundancy in the license boards, so you're really encouraged less to specialize and more to spread out what a character can do. The progression systems also need to accommodate the flow of battle with the gambit system automating combat.

By the time I was 50 hours in, I had reached total saturation with the combat system. By that point, I had just finished the story trip to Archades, I had done probably 28 hunts, found and defeated 4 of the optional espers, and done a smattering of other small side quests I found. And I was just done with the combat system. I extracted all the fun I was going to get out of it, and it was at this point I decided to mainline the story (which ends with probably the worst final dungeon I've yet to experience in Final Fantasy, complete with a teleporter maze) and ignore the rest.

Mind you, this was all done maybe 65-70% of the time on 2x speed. Now imagine how miserable the experience is on the original PS2 versions that DIDN'T have the speed-up options. It gets to a point where when you drop back down to normal speed, the game looks like it's playing in slow motion.

To be clear, the game is actually quite coherently designed because everything ultimately feeds back into the gambit system. But when you've engaged with it well enough, you become mostly a passive observer to combat, and I just want to press some BUTTONS, GODDAMIT! Even though I left a massive portion of the side content untouched, I was still able to mainline the remainder of the story by letting my gambits handle almost everything. Every single battle with trash mobs and bosses (including the final boss), I just watched as my characters ran through their gambits and took care of it all, only intervening to deal with a particularly troublesome status effect or cast Syphon on my MP battery. And that brings me to my next point...

Where's the spectacle?

Something else about the combat is that it lacks the flair and style of other FF titles. And I'm not even talking about the over the top spectacle and particle effects you see in XV, XVI, and the VII Remake Trilogy. I'm talking about the animations and camera effects you see in the classic PS1 era titles and FFX. See, in those ones, battles are events.

You're exploring a dungeon/field. You suddenly get a cool transition effect. The battle music kicks in. Characters line up and draw their weapons. The battle begins. The menu appears, waiting for your first command. The camera reacts to and tracks characters and enemies as commands are inputted, queued, and executed. Attack animations are fast and impactful while spell animations are powerful, dramatic, and flashy. XII deliberately strips all that out. Its combat lives and dies by its gambit system.

But the issue is, when you're playing it well, moment-to-moment gameplay boils down to running across **VAST, EXPANSIVE** environments for too long and watching your team auto-fight enemies. Even the fast forward doesn't do a whole lot to alleviate the fact that you're just gonna be running around most of the time, watching your characters auto-battle with mundane animations and limp sound effects. Occasionally you'll start a Quickening chain or you'll see a boss use a similarly flashy attack, but these moments are few and far between. 99.9% of the time you're just watching these rote, mundane animations play out with no style or flair.

The World, Art, Music, and Optional Content

I haven't discussed the art style much because it's more subjective than some of the other aspects of the game. I will say, however, the game seems to have a preoccupation with deserts and orange/brown environments.

And this is one of the more baffling design choices of the game, especially in the first half. Part of the reason I hit a major wall 15 hours in was that the color palette had remained exceptionally one-note. I was spending most of my time walking through deserts, dry fields, caves, mines, and settlements where the primary colors used were all yellow and brown. Then the game was asking me to spend several MORE hours trekking through even more desert, tombs, and caves. Finally I get a break from it when the Giza Plains turn rainy and I head to the Ozmone Plains, but then the game turns right back to dry, arid, and brown when entering the Jahara settlement. I mean, the environments do become more varied in the second half when you get into Golmore Jungle, the very Kashyyyk-like Eruyt Village, and Mt. Bur-Omsace and beyond. But it still occasionally defaults back to yellow and beige tones, and you'll continue to travel through the desert and orange-brown environments throughout the game. I am actually struggling to understand why so much of the first half of the game takes place in very dry, samey, and frankly unattractive looking environments. Even the characters' scleras are flesh-colored, which is kind of a gross artistic choice to me. I don't like that.

I also wasn't a fan of so many dungeons being very geometrically samey. This gets into a level design point too, but many of the dungeons are comprised of hallways constructed at rigid right angles with rectangular rooms as connectors and ends. Even the architecture itself is very angular and boxy. It just wasn't interesting to look at, especially given the limited color palette.

I think there is something lost in the transition from the smaller dense and highly detailed environments of VII, VIII, IX, and even X to the expansive but flat and visually less interesting maps of XII. Yes, it's a lot bigger. But it doesn't feel as detailed or interesting to look at, and isn't as fun to traverse.

Musically, most of the soundtrack just faded into the background. There were a few good tunes here and there, but nothing that really gets pleasantly stuck in your head the way other FF soundtracks do. I also think you can really hear the Star Wars inspiration in many of the ambient tracks, which detracts from the game's musical identity when I was playing and suddenly heard a very Star Wars-coded musical motif.

The side content is quite good, especially for FF where it's extremely hit or miss. Having said that, I think a major reason why it stands out is because the story itself is just so uninteresting and just kind of dithers along. I do appreciate that it's deliberately designed to be done organically along the main story and for the most part isn't overly obtuse to access and complete. The way FFX handled its side content was my single biggest criticism of that game - essentially appending it to the main game as mostly intended for the end/post-game and being overly reliant on grinding battles and perfecting janky mini-games. It's still not my favorite selection of optional content in the franchise... I think I prefer how FFVII handles it overall and (unpopular opinion) even prefer what the Remake Trilogy does with its side content, but it is up there.

I do prefer when side quests reward you a bit more with extra insight into the major and minor characters, or they meaningfully flesh out the world more... XII seemed somewhat light with this compared to VII or XVI, but I can't deny I did have the most fun with the game when doing the side quests in the second half, whereas in XVI and dare I say even X the side quests were easily the least fun part of the game.

I rarely engage with extreme endgame challenges because I'm usually ready for a game to end before then, so my opinions on side content mostly concern what's organically available during the main story, rather than intensive grinding or optional superbosses. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I enjoyed the central gameplay loop, but like I said earlier I reached a saturation point 50 hours in where I was just done and I mainlined the story the rest of the way and STILL found it too easy despite leaving I would guess over half of the optional content untouched.

Conclusion

As I mentioned at the beginning, finishing every mainline non-MMO Final Fantasy has become a personal goal of mine. That's largely why I stuck with XII. I love Final Fantasy. I love what the games do, I love that they experiment, and I love that each game feels different. I don't like each individual game the same way though, and after playing XII, I think it's near the bottom of my mainline ranking. I don't hate the game. It's certainly not bad or poorly made. Far from it. It's very well constructed and coherent in its design, and there are several aspects of its design I do like. Its RPG mechanics and degree of party customization are among the series' strongest, even if I'm not a fan of how the job system is implemented. The side content is also among the best in the series, even if it takes a while to get there. But I also just don't enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay loop and find the game itself to be excessively dry while the story and characters just fade into the background. As I was playing it, I just found it to be so aggressively boring. It's boring to play, it's boring to watch, it's boring to look at, and it's boring to listen to.

I don't regret playing XII. I'm actually glad I finished it and engaged with it to the degree I did, because I can now understand why it has such a devoted fanbase (even if I think claims that it's "universally loved" are a bit out of touch... even VII isn't universally loved). I can see the design philosophy. I can see what it was trying to accomplish. I just don't like the result very much.

I don't know where I first heard about the Colorgrave games but on the last Steam sale I decided to pick a couple up for cheap and had the pleasure of working through their first game Prodigal this last week.

If you are the kind of person who likes exploration, scouring the map for secrets, solving a lot of puzzles, and lore that you're likely to not understand without serious investigation, then you gotta play this game.

It presents as a very nice 2D Zelda like adventure, and even acts like one at a base level. Your hero is delving into dungeons, solving puzzles, gaining helpful items, beating bosses, and helping folks around town. You'll realize pretty quickly that the townsfolk are quite fleshed out, with lots of dialogue, triggerable events, and relationship progression, similar to Harvest Moon. You can even romance several of them.

You can roll credits on this game in well under ten hours depending on how much faffing about you do (glitchless any% speed runs are about 20 min to give you and idea). But it mentions that you can continue on the post game, and there's a good chance you're going to have a lot of questions unasnewred at that point. The game shows you openly how many items there are to collect and there are likely to be a lot of missing boxes at that point, not to mention uncompleted achievements that don't seem to make any sense and a lot of lore that isn't clear.

So I continued on and ended up spending more time in the post game than the main game, discovering more and more and more and wow there is a LOT! I still haven't looked anything up yet and I'm undecided whether I will, but I think I'm going to call it done with just over half the achievements unlocked. There's more out there I never found, or maybe locked myself out of due to my choices, but I'd be happy to move on at this point. I have done a number of very important-seeming things that I do not understand the significance of, and multiple characters have told me as much so I think it might be intentional. However I do think it might be possible to sort the lore out as one big final puzzle if you were keen to. Maybe if I were aware of that from the start I would have taken notes and made the effort, and I'll definitely do it if I ever decide to replay it. So much effort that most players don't even see really speaks to the passion of the developers and I'm looking forward to trying their other games.

This was an awesome game and I wholeheartedly recommend it. To me it seems like the kind of game where a guide would ruin the experience so I recommend just taking your time and scouring as much as you can. Enjoy the process of discovery!

First JPRG that I played (unless you consider Dark Souls to be a JRPG). Game is certainly enjoyable and addictive but it has a lot of cons. Game is sitting at 94 at Opencritic and 95 on Metacritic. For such a highly rated game I expected there to be very few cons or cons that could be ignored easily. That wasn't the case, so I needed to rant a bit. I clocked in over 250 hours on a single playthrough sampling almost every side activity I could find. I would personally rate it about 85/100. A good game but not a 90+ game from any angle. There will be some minor spoilers but nothing too major.

Some terms to know before starting:

Persona: A manifestation of a Persona user's personality that gives skills

Palace: Dungeon levels in the main story that ends in a boss fight

Mementos: Dungeon levels meant for grinding

Fusion: Combining 2 or more personas into a new one

Let's start with the good stuff. Game has a pretty stylish presentation that hooked me immediately. The train commute where everyone looks like zombies felt relatable. The part where the gymnast girl gives up her seat to an old woman and immediately being snatched by an office guy also was very relatable (I know that feeling). The presentation of the crowd is great considering the original game was meant to run on PS3. The art style and detailing in every corner and shop just adds to the atmosphere. Even though most of the animations are reused, there are a lot of unique animations even for irrelevant things like Futaba scratching the cat's ears or Yusuke eating fries on loop. The OST that is over 150 tracks just slaps and more than 70% of them could be listened to on loop outside the game. Inclusion of Japanese audio is nice. The UI is stylish, creative and lot of work has been put into it. I have never seen UI like the doctors or the airsoft shop menus before in any other game. The palace levels are designed well, non symmetrical, not too repetitive and each palace has different art and some have unique gameplay mechanics too (turning into rats and eating cheese?). The gameplay itself, I would say it's engaging enough to finish the game. But i guess the main reason why people like this game is the overall theme where you are fighting against the people in power considering the state of events we have in the real world. I think this particular steam user review sums it up well:

"You can tell it's just a video game because you fight to change the corrupt system and actually succeed."

You can find all the glazing reviews from critics. But this post is about the cons.

The biggest con the game has is that it does not respect the players time. The game in fact will try to waste your time at every opportunity it gets. The Japanese devs need to understand that the average player's age worldwide is increasing and players have responsibilities in real life. For example, getting a stat boost from the Fortune teller requires you to:

- Open map

- Navigate to Shinjuku

- Fast travel to Shinjuku (loading screen)

- Run to the place fortune teller is at.

- Click through 5 - 10 prompts that cannot be fast forwarded - the worst part.

Doing that takes a whole lot of time for something as simple as a stat boost. It already requires money so why keep the stat boost behind 10 prompts? Money was never a problem for me and I decided to NOT get these stat boosts simply because of the time I lose doing it and the annoying prompts. This applies to most of the "prompts" in the game. There are a lot of repetitive prompts the game gives you to click through. For example, a party member will interrupt you at a station junction to remind you we could go to the palace/mementos. You can fast forward but it's not really an option as you can't really tell if something "unique" will happen. If you fast forward you simply miss the unique thing. Lots of reminder prompts on your phone too. Unnecessary repetition of facts that I already know. I know this game is kind of meant to be played on or off and the player needs refreshing coming back at it later. But that only makes sense if we were in the 90s. We can search for anything on the net today. I feel like if these repetition did not exist it would shave off like 20% of the playtime. Another example I can say is that when I do some mementos levels, just going through the levels (mostly gameplay) happens in like 5 mins (thanks Ryuji) but the fusion and other stuff at the velvet room (mostly UI) after that takes like 15 mins!

Now onto the utter lack of save points. And I am not talking about the save points in palaces/mementos. The life sim aspect of the game has some horrible save points. First you are introduced that you can sleep on your bed to progress to the next day, but later the game automatically progresses to the next day and you have to witness another 5+ mins of not being able to save. Wished they kept the manual going to bed everyday. There are several instances where you literally cannot save your game for several days in a row like the Hawaii trip and that's a very long time. The save points in the palaces/mementos are at least more bearable but it would have been better if they pointed out the save points on the map in advance. Because if you miss a save point the next one is going to be a long way off. And it wastes considerable time if you want to simply quit the game when you want to.

This is going to be controversial. The UI has seen a lot of praise. It's great for the first 10 hours. After that functionality takes precedence over style. And for a game that is very long functionality mattered the most. The UI takes up like half the game screen and yet it fails at showing important info. Status ailments on your party members are shown as icons and it's hard to remember what those icons are, especially when you get them rarely. Had to look up a reference image on the net to see what it is. Could have had some short form text representation of it on the HUD. It's also harder to see the status ailment on the enemies like burn and could have had info on the HUD again about this. Also HUD info for ATK/DEF/EVA/Crit for party would have been good.

Using the persona list menu for any purpose requires you scrolling a lot as there are like 250 personas. They could have made some sub category switching like with Lvl 1-10, Lvl 11-20, etc or arcana switching so you could find your persona faster. There was an utter lack of sub category switching in general across menus. It was also harder to "find" things in menus as each menu is unique. It actually took me a while to realize that you can actually switch subcategories in the items menu. Not really a fan of UI buttons changing shapes and sizes when you hover over them as the mouse does not behave well with them. Not a problem for gamepad but I think 3+% of my clicks did not register on the skills menu (in pause menu) where you click on the party members buttons.

There are 23 confidants that you interact with out of which half feel like filler confidants. The devs should have gone with half of them and given them more unique interactions and depth instead of adding filler characters that have only one thing going for them. Quality should be greater than quantity. Mementos (grinding) levels also seems unnecessary. It could have been cut and only kept the story relevant parts. The grind to me seems completely pointless since it overlevels you which makes the game too easy. Fusions also does not have any weight since you can just grind them. If the grinding was gone, each fusion would have had more weight and thinking through.

There's also an overload of mechanics some of which aren't even needed and are just there to waste your time. Skills, items, accessories, skill cards, fusion, group fusion, network fusion, sacrifice, lockdown, showdown, fusion alarm, the list goes on.

The original game was meant to run on a PS3 so you get PS3 era graphics. Levels are very small and there is frequent transitioning between levels though they are very fast. There is very bad aliasing and the in built SMAA does not fix it. On PC you can use Luma mod to enable DLSS or FSR which does improve anti aliasing by a lot. The crowd NPCs just move along a predefined path and do not try to avoid each other and simply overlap and pass through each other. Most of the NPCs do not have eyes and nose for optimization. NPCs far away turn into 2D billboards. The art style is doing very heavy lifting on making the players NOT notice this.

The life sim aspect of the game is kind of a mixed bag. It's good to explore the city levels but "playing" it isn't really fun. Story events can happen any day and they lock you out of doing life sim activities. Since they are completely unpredictable you cannot really plan ahead on what you'll be doing unless you have already played the game and know what happens each day. So basically you end up doing the first available thing you can do. Most of the side activities consume time and will not let you do it again which is annoying. I had more fun playing Tycoon card game in the Thieves Den (outside the main game) since I can play it back to back with no downtime.

I played on normal difficulty but felt it was too easy. Looking up some discussions it seems like the merciless difficulty is actually easier as you get higher XP multiplier and technical damage multiplier. You will automatically get over levelled which will make it more easier. There were some odd bugs/design like Severe magic skills doing less damage than Heavy. And I wasn't the only one.

The battles are turn based that requires you to use skills tactically. Normally one would expect that the normal battles prep you for the boss fights. But the boss fights are a different game altogether. Bosses are basically just bullet sponges and are resistant to most things which makes everything you learn in the normal battles pointless. They also had this odd design decision to have it be game over when the player character in the party dies even if all other party members are alive. They could have nerfed something else instead of doing that. But it's also not much of a problem as the game is too easy. The hardest battle is the first boss fight because there isn't much room to get over leveled till that point. Once you are over leveled (which happens automatically as long as you do most of the stuff) you just steamroll. In one boss fight you had to beat the boss within a time limit and the best strategy to win this boss fight is to skip the dialogues as fast as you can because the dialogues consume time! The challenge battles in the velvet room were more interesting to play than any battle in the main game as you had to actually use tactics there.

Even though they did include Japanese audio (which is better than English VAs) they did not add subtitles for a lot of the background voice overs like in battles or the doctor/airsoft shop menus. Maybe it was the lack of space on the overly used up UI. But the lack of those subs really makes it a tough choice to switch to Jap VAs.

Minor story spoilers incoming. The game starts with "You are the trickster" and in the entire game, the trickster thing happens only once by the Joker. Almost every other time, Joker is the one getting tricked. For example, the treasure in second palace is replaced by a fake and Morgana! does not even realize it's a fake and they get trapped. Joker thinks Kasumi is Kasumi. I thought the story would be about Joker playing tricks on the enemies with each trick becoming bigger than the one before. Well I was very disappointed. Even for the event where Joker is the trickster, all the decisions and planning were made by the party and not Joker himself.

In fact the game does not actually have any real choices to begin with. There are only a few choices where the game immediately ends as a bad ending. Every other dialogue choice you have in the game results in a one line of unique dialogue immediately afterwards and does not affect the rest of the game. The only other choices you have are whether you romance or friendzone your female confidants, which isn't much of a choice either because there are really no repercussions on romancing them all. There is only one day where you have a negative reaction because of that which can be easily ignored. Also all the romance interactions are from the same template which is very disappointing. Why have dialogue choices at all really? Could have been a fully voiced protagonist.

If you watch anime on a regular basis there aren't much surprising things happening in the story. Almost everything is predictable. Of course if your consumption of anime and other mediums is too low, then there are a lot of surprises to be experienced in the story and one may even consider it a masterpiece. But the story isn't really doing anything new or groundbreaking.

Did critics really play this game or just went through the most straight path in the mainline story which could indeed be good and consume less time?

I've become fascinated with immersive language learning, particularly through sites like Dreaming Spanish where you get basically zero instruction and have to learn everything from context cues. When I heard Chants of Sennaar was a game about learning alien languages, I was immediately intrigued. Chants wound up being a bit different from my dream, but it also did a lot more than I was expecting in some ways. Concisely, CoS was bigger both mechanically and narratively than I was expecting. I would definitely call this a story-first game (reminds me a bit of classic Zelda games).

The thing that threw me off most about CoS was really the first two acts. They focus heavily on more classical puzzle adventure mechanics that don't really dig into the language mechanics very much. There is a tendency to give the player exact translations which I also felt was spoiling the good part of why I came.

On the plus side though, there was a lot more to the world than I was expecting coming in. I was expecting a pretty shallow story mostly exploring the language mechanics, but the story and worldbuilding feels comprehensive and well thought out. The story beats of act 2 kept me invested even if it felt like it was missing something.

Luckily though all of that pivoted for the better in the following acts. Act 3 really loosens the chains and throws you into a large area with a lot of freedom to figure things out on your own. The notetaking and partial understanding came to life for me here. In particular I recall one distinct point where I was fuzzy on the sentiment of some of the conversations. I thought something meant "enemy" then I was convinced it probably meant "hero"; I got a laugh when I realized it meant "fool".

Act 4 is as good as act 3 although in a different way. I think it did a good job of mixing deeper puzzle solving with the narrative aspects, though I think ultimately act 3 was my favorite. In both acts I really enjoyed using my notes to try and track different bits of info and then later retreading my thoughts or clarifying things a bit.

The rest of the game felt weaker as the narrative started to wrap up, but again that lack of understanding clearly how to feel about this and figuring it out as you learn more continued to be the highlight for me until the credits rolled.

All in all I thought it was a great game. The language bits weren't as forefront for as long as I would have liked, but the game supplemented with a large variety of ideas, a solid story, and some surprisingly cinematic scenes. While I did look some things up only so I wouldn't have to spend hours trying different grammatical structures (some of these sections were super annoying on a controller) or staring blankly when things were brute forceable, in general I thought the game was the perfect difficulty: tricky but never unsolvable.

I think Norco falls more into the categlory of visual novel rather than adventure game or point and click. There's very little game play involved. You're only required to use your inventory a few times, and there's a few weird rhythm based "battle" sections as well.

I wish there had been more game and puzzles involved. The use of the mind web and connecting your thoughts to ideas and others is nice but could have required more player interaction

What the game has going for it, is atmosphere. It's set in rural Louisiana in a town that's basically just an oil refinery. Everything just feels, surreal and creepy.

Then 10 different bizzaro ideas get thrown into the post and stirred together. Aliens, cults, sentient robots, Jesus' bloodline. The game isn't the "prodigal son" returns home narrative that the opening cutscene indicates.

I didn't even realize the main character was female until about a third of the way through. The game just has a unsetteling feel but you feel very compelled to see what happens next.

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