i got halfway through chapter 3, and quit playing the game. while the presentation is immaculate, the gameplay was completely unengaging.

the shooting felt clunky, apart from the dead eye mechanic, which was fun but oversimplified shootouts to an embarrassing degree. riding your house to the waypoint, mashing the x button, while feels good for the first 5 hours of playing the game gets old super quickly.

seeing as i wasn't enjoying the gameplay whatsoever, i decided to just watch the rest of the story on youtube. and that's why as a game, this is a 3.5 for me. the story is incredible for a video game. i found myself enjoying watching the cutscenes quite a bit, coz the story is just that good.

while the animations are incredibly well done, my impatient ass got pretty tired of them early on. looting a bank with these slow ass animations is really funny, because you hear the police coming yet arthur still has a very calm animation when collecting the money. don't you think there would be a little bit of urgency in the looting at that time?

i feel like an insane person because, this is a deeply flawed game with many shortcomings, but i feel like the story and presentation distracts players from the issues. idk man, phenomenal story, but i probably wont return to this in a while.

super ambitious, very well executed, the sound design is easily the highlight of the game. gameplay wise, while the puzzles were cool for the first hour or so, they got old fairly quickly for me.

combat is pretty good, and i really like how when you're low on health your moves are actually slower and senua looks more tired. it suffers from a lot of just walking forward very slowly like many other 3D games of the 2010s, and apart from the concept, some of it feels pretty conventional at times.

apart from that, i think everyone should at least give this a go, it's definitely an experience, one that i haven't fully appreciated yet.

1,050 hours on the game and casually, it's fantastic. content wise it is insane, but competitively or anything that isn't casual feels awful. ultimate's neutral is akind to two rams running into each other mindlessly and whichever ram gets hit harder is the winner. neutral has as much depth as a fucking shallow kid pool. characters like palu are rewarded for running in with a mindless move and will get 50 percent off of it. characters like snake are in the very small minority where you have to condition your opponent and actually be clever about winning neutral. the game feels terrible to play. input lag, buffering, online, sticky platforms, it makes some inputs impossible or just really difficult to do. thanks for sora though that was cool.