Tears of the Kingdom is a really weird game to talk about, because I feel like I should enjoy it a lot more than I do. I ended up playing the game for 150 hours, I ended up getting all the shrines (though definitely not 100%ing...), but I don't know that I fully enjoyed those 150 hours. There was a lot of the game that was just downtime where I was going through the motions, and it was never straight up unenjoyable, but I also don't know if I'd say that the game has 150 hours worth of content - rather that's just how long it took me to go through it.

I feel like ToTK 's content gets less interesting as you play through it. Exploring the depths was fun at the start, when fog busting was novel and it hadn't gotten tedious yet, but it got tedious by the end of the game. While there are vehicles you can use, all it does is make boring content go by faster, as there's very little interesting to discover in the depths. It's basically just currency to upgrade your battery, armor you're never going to use, and resources. It overstayed its welcome. The same can be said of exploring the sky. It was novel at first, and then the sheer amount of copy pasted islands with similar puzzles got a little tiring. Even the labyrinths suffer from the same problem. The first time I found one, and explored it from start to finish, I was amazed. It was a super novel experience. And then all three are formated the exact same way, which eats away at how interesting it was to explore them.

Building stuff was interesting in theory, but in practice I found it took way too long. You could use autobuild, but even that isn't perfect since you needed to either spend zonite or take the parts out of your inventory ahead of time, which was a little tedious. Building anything new took forever, too. The time between finding a solution, and actually executing that solution, was too long. A lot of the time I just found myself finding other ways to travel (gliding, spamming the same plane model, horse) rather than building anything novel. That aside, I don't like that it allows you to clear puzzles in such a wide variety of probably not intended ways. The feeling of "Eh, definitely not the intended solution, but good enough." is just not one that I actually enjoy, especially when that solution is so often "just use a rocket/just use a generic fan + control stick vehicle/just build a long stick or bridge."

Combat is just as fundamentally broken as it was in Breath of the Wild. I enjoy it more, because I don't feel like it's a dark hole of resources I'll never get back thanks to the fusion system, but Zelda combat should just not be about RPG numbers, at least defensively. Offensively it's mostly fine since they mix in goobers alongside the big boys, so you still get to feel yourself becoming more powerful, but defensively it's just ridiculous. You can just upgrade the hylian set for nearly no materials and just... take no damage from enemies. And conversely, it means that whenever you're wearing something other than your hylian set, you take a ton of damage, more than is probably reasonable. And since it takes forever to upgrade armor outside the hylian set, I just end up not bothering. Hell, a lot of the utility ones barely feel like they matter. The one that lets you climb in the rain barely feels like it does everything, even with the full set.

Shrines were OK. Not much to say about them, there was a lot of them, most of them had creative ideas, but they were often too short to scratch the same itch as a dungeon would. Likewise, I don't really care for the dungeons in this game. I liked the approach and build up to the dungeons almost universally more than I enjoyed the dungeons themselves. The Divine Beast style of just finding 5 things then going back to the central room to fight the boss just isn't interesting to me. At least there's more variety aesthetically than there was with divine beasts.

Story wise, it feels like the game is being held back by the way that the game is set up. The story can be found out of order when it comes to stuff like Zelda's tears or the master sword, and then conversely they're so obsessed with the idea that they have to make sure you get the story in order-ish that the cutscenes for all temples are copy pated. It's not a bad story, I like it conceptually, I like elements of it, but I hate how it's told because of the open world nature of the game.

All in all, TOTK is just a really weird game for me. I had a really good time early on, and while it never fully lost its steam (I still completed it), I also feel like I'd have enjoyed it more if I just ended the game early rather than actually going for all shrines and map completion. There was just a lot of the time where I was coasting through the game rather than fully enjoying myself.

man 10 year old me must have poured hundreds of hours in flipnote. This was an amazing network of incredible talented kids and a looooot of pre-historic shitposting, the first AMV I watched was likely on my DSi screen through this software. I remember working tremendously hard to make my flipnotes, I was an avant-gard flipnote artist I swear to god, everything I made was abstract as shit. I remember once I poured hours and hours into one specific flipnote and I recall my dad turned the ds off or something? I don't know, I don't really know how or why my dad would even turn it off, let alone if he knew how, but that's how my 10 year old self remembers it. I remember crying and throwing a tantrum on the couch in my living room, and refusing to go to dinner. Man, what an annoying little shit I was.

Mystias Izakaya is a game i am unlikely to finish due to its large amount of content, but i feel satisfied with what i have played enough to write something up on it.

This game takes place in the touhou universe, where you play as Mystia running a travelling restaurant that stretches to various environments from several different mainline games. The core gameplay loop is managing your time to strategically purchase various ingredients and learn recipes in order to appeal to the guests at whatever area you are setting up in. In the second phase of the night, you focus mainly on cooking and waitressing until the end of the day where you get paid.

This loop certainly has a very addictive feeling to it, during my first few hours i really didnt want to put it down. It has the same appeal as certain flash cafe management games i played in my youth and i feel like it carried that feeling well throughout my playtime. There was something about the simplicity of what you had to do and the seemingly endless possibilities for improvement that motivated me to continue playing, for a while.

However i feel like it gets stale after a time. You hit a limit long, long before the story ends. Nights become challenging and very long, tiring. It starts feeling like something of an endless chore to get through.

The art is nice and leaves little room to be creepy but the story and writing in general is a huge miss. Im quite certain it is not a fault of the localization team, but there are several references to online popular culture that just completely take you out of it and makes you feel like youre playing a game made by weirdos, which you probably are at this point. In one line of inquiry Chen calls someone a NEET. An otaku NEET? something to do with NEETs but definitely very embarassing. There was an entire questline dedicated to giving a youkai a picture of Meiling's... "thicc" thighs. I also see recently there is dlc where Mystia is dressed up as Jotaro from jojo. So you can see why this game has become a problem for me.

Obviously the characters suffer from the same fate they do in other fan projects which is that theyre disgustingly one dimensional, completely overtaken by a fanon element and they will run that element into the ground. I dont like much seeing touhou done so dirty when this game and normal touhou are essentially two different beasts. I feel like it does little for the characters though it has so much emphasis on it, and it feels disgraceful somewhat. Marisa likes mushrooms! Meiling is lazy shes sooo lazy she sleeps all day Patchouli likes books and hates everyone else Remilia is a vampire Rumia darkness Sayori is sleepy blah blah blah.

The brevity of your encounters with characters is what makes the people in touhou shine the most, as well as their phsyical appearance and more importantly: their bullet patterns. When one of those things has already been established and you remove the other, youre missing a lot of nuance that comes with the rest of the elements. So its flat and completely cookie cutter characters. I feel like this game has a vast misunderstanding of the world of mainline touhou, and even if its irrelevant right now i also dont like the injection of men into the game. Touhou is special for that reason and its strange to revoke that reason with various nameless customers and villagers and whatnot. Who cares?

The dialogue is definitely the games largest flaw as well as how it protrays Gensokyo, but without that the gameplay feels somewhat meaningless and it all falls in on itself. For a good 30 hours its still quite fun to play and i will have good memories of it as it was gifted to me by a friend for my birthday. Im very happy i even got to play this at all and my friends definitely made my last birthday the best one ive ever had, so i feel somewhat bad about not liking the way it went, but its on the devs for talking about Hong Meiling's thighs so much. Pick it up if you like management games but do not expect a touhou fangame that lives up to actual touhou, for once.

Xenoblade Chronicles is a game of unrelenting excess.

This is a big part of the game's sense of spectacle. The game's setting, located upon the bodies of two colossal titans caught in a freeze-frame of an ancient battle, is one of the most startlingly imaginative world concepts I've ever encountered. As you explore these titans you explore mammoth, gorgeous regions, the best of these conjuring up a sense of wonder (Bionis' Leg is a clear highlight for me, but I also enjoyed Satorl Marsh and Sword Valley a lot), whilst the worst regions whilst still pretty get bogged down by their sheer scale (Eryth Sea is simply just too large, whilst Alcamoth feels weirdly empty and lifeless).

For every moment of wonder brought by the game's sense of scale, there was for me alongside it a moment of frustration. The game has just so many systems to it, some of which legitimately feel good to use and are engaging; highlights are the arts system where you choose a character's moves and level them up individually, and adding gems to your characters armour allowing for personalisation with their stats (although the sheer variety of gems felt very intimidating in a bad way). The flipside is that a lot of the systems feel excessive and like you could easily get bogged down in a miasma of trying to optimise every single number; again I won't give a complete list here, but at the very least gem crafting and being able to copy across skills from other character's skill trees are systems that feel entirely excessive, and like they'd quickly turn into nightmarish abysses if you actually wanted to seriously engage with them. All of this is to say nothing of the ridiculous affinity map of the relationships of every named character in the game, or the Collectopedia (a name which unintentionally borders on self-parody) where you can stash individual copies of various collectables that you will seldom use to get rewards that you will also seldom use. It's all just so much.

I have a similar feeling towards the side quests in the game, which there are almost 500 of. There are a handful that are legitimately pretty good and help add to the feeling of the locations you've visiting or that give you nice insight into these communities, but there are also an absurd number of generic fetch-quests, item collection quests or missions to go kill a certain number of a regular enemies where the game just turns into this flavourless mush, you just ticking off boxes to make the game give you more minor rewards and small pats on the back. Again it feels like if this was more trimmed down and honed the experience with the side quests would be good, but it so easily turns into this blur where after a couple hour session of completing side quests I'd not be sure I could actually tell you what I'd even been doing with my time in any detail.

The most frustrating thing for me among all of this though is the battle system which relies on MMO-style cooldown moves. The best battles in the game are very engaging forcing you to actually figure out a strategy, but the vast majority of encounters I found essentially reduced down to just mindlessly and obediently pressing whatever attacks are ready to be used again when the game tells you they've finished cooling down; this is even worse than it sounds because moves having set cooldown times means most fights will work out as you using moves in very similar sequences over and over too. Shulk's positional moves that reward you for attacking from the side or behind the enemy help this situation a bit but not nearly enough to carry the 60 hour runtime.

Whilst I don't like this battle system particularly I think it would have been completely fine in a shorter game, but as is I felt like by 20 hours in I was already mostly done with what amounted to doing the same fights over and over and yet the game was still going to path me through countless enemies (inside the Mechonis was the roughest bit in this regard where what could have been a cool two or three hour long journey instead took several hours due to how many identical robots you're dragged past to have identical fights with).

I think, ultimately, I find myself liking almost everything about Xenoblade Chronicles other than having to actually play it. If I'm sounding really negative it's partially just out of frustration that the actual gameplay for me really didn't live up to the promise of everything else the game has to offer, rather than me considering the game at all bad. The soundtrack is legitimately great, even if the battle music specifically suffers from over-exposure, and I can see myself listening to it occasionally once I have a bit more distance from playing through the game. The world is conceptually wonderful, even awe-inspiring at times. The cast is very likeable and easy to root for.

Even in regards to the story, what starts out as a fairly typical story of revenge eventually turns into a tale of breaking cycles of violence and learning to overcome fate via communication and the power of free will. Much of the story is solidly told with some reasonably affecting emotional moments, but in the final ten hours various different aspects pay-off very well, whilst the ending itself is all at once bold, fascinating, impassioned, and in its final moments downright soulful, so much so that its hard for me not to buckle and forget how deeply frustrating and numbing much of the gameplay that got me to this point was.

It all leaves me feeling very conflicted.