Dragon's Dogma II is all rough edges - intended and otherwise. But as I marched through to its true ending, I came to navigate those the way I can navigate my parents' house in the dark. Sometimes I still stub my toe, but I not only understand all its intricacies but love them. I don't love DD2 despite its flaws, I love DD2 because of them. The game is janky, there are plenty of glitches, the story is weird, and half the time that I completed an objective or reached a goal, I felt like I broke something along the way. But I liked playing in that space and pushing it, figuring out how the game works and embracing where I, and it, fell short.

It doesn't feel like DD2 is a game full of oversights, it just feels like it's a beautifully game-y and authentic creation that has none of the polish that makes a lot of AAA games feel way too smooth. Whenever I had to fight against the controls when scaling a boss or wrestle with the camera, whenever I had to try and find a seemingly despawned NPC, I was intrigued by how I felt like I could see the game's gears turning, like I could see where their teeth didn't quite mesh. This is very subjective but to me I felt like a lot of the hiccups actually helped make the game feel more playable. Like I, and the developers at Capcom alike, would be surprised both intentionally and unintentionally around each corner.

Much has been made about the game's friction, and I think what works most for me about DD2 in this regard is just how dispassionately it treated me as a player. I could screw up questlines if I wanted to (and I did), I could get bodied by an enemy in one brutal hit (and I did several times). It really made the adventure's stakes feel higher, and I think that's part of why the jank was appealing here.

I specifically want to call attention to the geography - I loved how natural it felt. The idea of dispassionate design feels really clear here too, I don't have the typically game-y tools to bend the environment to my will, and it wasn't designed for the sake of convenience. It really felt like Capcom made a fantasy world with little care for how annoyingly tall its mountains would be, how frustratingly wide its rivers would be, how many times I'd get confused and have to consult my map, how many times I'd have to reroute when nature impeded my way. To me these are all positives. It all feels very organic.

Also the combat just rocks. I was playing as a thief and at a certain point DD2 just turned into an open-world character action game. I maxed this vocation out and just stuck with it - curating a set of weapon abilities that let me play this almost like Devil May Cry (Itsuno is one of the greatest to ever do it). Scaling massive bosses is just a perfect mechanic and idea, by the way. Despite the enemy density being way too high in some places I never got tired of the combat because it's just so much fun.

Ultimately, DD2 just let me explore at my own pace, dip into the main quest whenever I felt ready, and generally craft my own adventure, which I greatly appreciate. I felt a Breath of the Wild level of agency here, and that's a hard sentiment to recapture. Highest praise I can give DD2: I will definitely be starting a New Game+ sometime soon, and I never do that. Absolute highlight of 2024.

Good-Feel's name has long become synonymous with accessible fun. Ever since collaborating with Nintendo to realize Wario Land: Shake It!, the studio has become a consistent force in the Nintendo ecosystem, curating platformers that push you only as far as you want to be pushed. They can be enjoyed for their joyous presentation and simply whimsy or they can be dug into: despite Epic Yarn, Woolly World, and Crafted World all being incredibly linear, they are also remarkably explorative. There's so much to discover, the name of the game isn't mechanical challenge but instead curiosity.

This is all a tee-up to particularize my issue with Showtime. The problem isn't a lack of challenge, it's a lack of engagement.

I can't find almost any DNA from Good-Feel's past titles in Showtime, or even many of the touchstones that define Nintendo's larger catalogue. The propulsive force behind the game is a cocktail of auto-running sections, cinematic camera shifts, stilted narrative scenes, and a surprising number of QTEs. When I say that Showtime plays itself, it truly feels like it does - there is no room to experiment or desire to explore. This is one of the least inquisitive games in Nintendo's canon, and certainly the least in Good-Feel's lineup.

How this game ended up feeling so antithetical to both Nintendo and Good-Feel's philosophies, I'm not sure. Is it a different director leading this project? Is it the team's inexperience in 3D game design? I'm not sure, but I have a hard time seeing the vision.

Star Wars: Battlefront II is one of my favorite games of all-time. I played it endlessly as a kid, and even when I got the first Battlefront second-hand later, despite having already played hundreds of hours of the second, I really didn't spend nearly as much time with the original. In the years since, I've continued to revisit Battlefront II across PC and Xbox Series X, barely returning to this first game. Having now replayed the campaigns and messed around in both Galactic Conquest and Instant Action, playing this game deliberately for the first time since I was probably nine or ten, I now realize why.

Everything that I love about Battlefront generally is here, but everything feels clumsier. The guns feel less precise, the movement feels stilted (why would I ever bother going prone), and the units are unbalanced. The Droidekas make playing as the Clones on any non-vehicle map an exercise in frustration, and the inability to do double-zoom a sniper scope as that faction is frustrating too.

There's no doubt that Battlefront simply has a different pace than its sequel - no sprint, no forwards roll, no changing classes at control points, etc. And to that end, these mechanical differences do lend a certain feel to this game than II, but it's not one I prefer. The balance just doesn't feel right to me, and the more arcade-like sensibilities of II are what put it in my top-tier.

I'm hammering in on my complaints largely just to try and articulate why there's a star-and-a-half difference between my score here and my score of the second game, which launched a year later and repurposes these bones entirely.

After all, I'd still rather play Battlefront I than most games that exist; the map selection here is great, certain units like the Dark Trooper are among the most fun in series history, the intrinsic excitement of a conquest match is pretty phenomenal. There's a reason that these games are lauded as being among the very best Star Wars games.

And yes, I am playing via the collection (on Switch). If, like me, you're just trying to play offline it's largely flawless.