My contrarian ass is always on the lookout for another miscarriage of Gamer Justice, failed assessments of misunderstood secret gems of olde - it's my role as tastemaker ambassador in chief to purify the well and let the world drink full with a hidden mineral spring of mastapieces. Vexx looks like if Hugo the Troll listened to Lacuna Coil, why did I think this would be any good. The best compliment I can give this game is that it's "fascinatingly ugly", another misguided 00's attempt to cross Soul Reaver with Banjo Kazooie. Just dispassionately flopping onto the collectathon genre with a sauceless platter of 14 worlds and 100 orbs and 6 skulls and 81 hearts, it's kinda funny it's kinda sad.

This is probably one of the easiest 10/10’s I’ve ever given.
Disco Elysium is a special little oddity, it’s concepts don’t seem outwardly foreign, you are a detective tasked with solving a murder, with a variety of skills on hand, you can talk, fight, or think your way through most problems, even the amnesiatic spin isn’t anything new. The real brilliance comes in the execution and complete breadth of the games world. Martinaise, Revachol, and the entire in-game world have politics, flora, fauna, and interpersonal connections that seem to be moving and developing every second that the player does. The dialogue is the greatest indicator of this, conversations with one person can go on for minutes on end, with truly individual personality and takes on the war-weary land they have to sit in. This, alongside the brilliant and detailed watercolor backgrounds transport you to this fictional country.
My favorite part about this game was diving into the mind of your main character. He’s unmistakably fractured, and this is heavily represented by twenty-four independent chemical personalities floating around and verbalizing themselves in his head. The leveling and skill checking RPG elements of the game go directly towards the power and influence of these voices, crafting a protagonist who may be a walking encyclopedia, or perhaps a screaming electrochemistry driven meathead. It’s one of the first games in a while where I feel a distinct level of say in who I’m controlling.
I’ve circled around it a bit, but the writing is truly this game's main attraction. A brilliantly tight script that lends itself to any number of playstyles, full of legitimately fun characters was all I could think about between play sessions this past week. The impact of every action you take sending ripples across the world, that was continuously and directly expressed through nearly every interactable character was just astounding.
All in all, I can truly say that I loved every second playing this game, and I felt a drive that I so rarely feel when it comes to media with narratives this heavy. Please seek out a copy of this masterpiece for yourself, and enjoy.

More like NieR: Auto[play]a.
Desolate in every sense! Combat is purely numerical and exists solely as power gates - simply upgrade your units, weapons and companions, then breeze through this battery vampire of a .apk for a few more missions before you need to upgrade again. OR u can Pay a humble fee for a chance to win epic units for you to also waste upgrade resources on :)
I just feel so wise and numb to the Twisted Mind of Yoko Taro. Grim "tragedy first" writing that passionlessly beelines towards an arc's desired sad outcome, a soundtrack that is essentially just spacy yoga music, vast post-post-magical-apoc environments that serve absolutely nothing. Sad to see Akihiko Yoshida designs wasted on this.

In the middle of two much larger projects I'm working on, I decided to take a little time to write down my experience with this game. For context, I enjoy Journey quite a bit. I also enjoyed Abzu despite its lack of originality. It was like eating the same really good meal for lunch and dinner. If The Pathless was "Journey in a forest" in the same way Abzu with "Journey in the ocean" I would have been satisfied. Unfortunately, The Pathless is a study in maximalist game design, and minimal originality. In a misguided attempt at adding new gameplay mechanics, Giant Squid walks a terrible line between not being mechanically interesting or allowing you to fall into that "Journey Feeling". While Journey was never a mechanic heavy game, it submerged you in a world that never took you out by throwing a million red targets all over the landscape. It all feels like the developers had an okay concept, but began adding things to it to make it more “full featured”. In many ways, it’s a very bad attempt at mimicking Breath of the Wild’s success. Someone should have told Giant Squid that Breath of the Wild was not great because it added a hundred tepid puzzles around the world, it was in spite of that. Speaking of those puzzles, if you thought they were boring in Breath of the Wild, you have a tall glass of lukewarm water to sip on here. The only concrete reward you get from most of these puzzles are essentially keys to unlock the next level. I nearly wrote that that was the only reward you got from these puzzles, because the other reward is a miniscule amount of progress on a bar. This bar, when filled up all the way, increases your run meter. I believe many of this game’s issues all lead back to this meter. Its existence pushed the developers into adding so much unnecessary filler to the world. One of the game’s main draws is its movement, and this meter just puts a limit on how much fun you can have with it. Well, it would have if the movement was any good at all. It’s not even as fun as pressing R2 in the Insomniac Spider-Man games. At least in those games there was some sense of momentum, that every swing would bleed fluidly into the next and (pardon my cliche) make you feel like Spider-Man. If you let go of the run button in this game, your character grinds to a halt. In fact, doing anything except holding forward, holding the run button, and pressing R2 over and over again to hit targets ends any semblance of inertia. I feel like this is a step backwards from the simplicity of Journey and Abzu. In the process of trying to make the movement more of a mechanical interaction, Giant Squid removed any overlooking I can do in favor of aesthetic.
It goes without saying that The Pathless also rips Team Ico off at many turns. Its bosses are big forces of nature that have an attempt at seizing empathy in their death. While its narrative isn’t wordless, it certainly feels like it should be. It’s the desolate world that evokes Ueda’s output the most though. It’s no surprise that The Pathless doesn’t do a good job with its Team Ico inspiration (I can’t really think of a game that does), but its attempts at replicating the smaller moments really irked me. In all of Team Ico’s games you would happen upon little interactions with your NPC companion. These range from dialogue to animations to physical input from the player. It’s a little time for you to grow closer to the person/animal you’re journeying with. They have no pretensions, and just give some humanity to digital creatures. I almost put my controller down and shut off my console when The Pathless directed me to press square to pet my eagle. This was, of course, after a forced stealth segment where I had to turn my brain off lest I lose my mind of boredom. The way it all plays out is downright insulting, down to the miniscule patches of darkness that you have to go back and rub before you proceed. This game is just so passe. I don’t remember the last time I’ve played a game this bankrupt on fresh ideas or simple fun. I’ve also never played a game whose title reflects the developers much better than the product itself.
Edit: Out of morbid curiosity I finished the game. I can't believe how bad the ending is. I thought that the ending would lift the game up in a similar fashion as Journey and Abzu, but I was wrong. I knew that they would assume that I cared at all about the eagle, but I didn't know that that was going to be the main conceit of the ending. My review also neglected to mention the lack of a health bar, which worked in Giant Squid's previous game, but it siphons any stakes from the boss fights in this game. It's not like simply placing a health bar into the game would make it any better though, as every boss is insultingly easy after you learn their patterns. For some reason, the final boss has the most evergreen patterns in the game. Once you beat his first phase, you will have a hard time failing. This is probably the worst game I've played since Outlast 2. It's a Frankenstein's Monster of good ideas from other people, but with none of the tact to bring it back to life.

I only played up to the Stage 5 boss but goddamn, what a wildly fantastic ride.
As a big bullet-hell fan, Touhou always was something I knew about, but never got the chance to play until now. I've seen all the memes, all the fumos, all the fumo memes, but I think those things help me appreciate just how beloved this series is, and for good reason.
The gameplay is extremely fun and addicting. Follow that up with a godlike soundtrack and you've got a spectacular shoot em up. It's dumb fun and I can't get enough of it.
Couldn't recommend this enough, don't let the internet scare you away from this so called "cringe" series.

No More Heroes 2 does have some redeeming qualities. The visuals are improved, the boss fights are mostly more fun and creative, the soundtrack is arguably better than NMH1's. The opening hour promises more violent action, horny dialogue and intriguing narrative of a somewhat darker tone.

But then it doesn't take long for everything to start coming apart at the seams. Let's address the elephant in the room first -- Santa Destroy's no longer explorable and has been reduced to a list of shops, missions and side jobs. It's not like the city in NMH1 was particularly fun to explore, but it gave you with an opportunity to settle down and get a sense of this place. Santa Destroy used to have character, and now it's just a barely recognizable monochrome map screen. More importantly, city exploration helped with the original game's pacing. Having to earn money to enter the next proper level provided the player with some down time to wind down and goof off. Go dumpster diving, find lost cats, search for collectibles, do combat challenges. And this kind of work ethic was a tangible foundation of one of the game's themes.

None of that is present here. Jobs are still there (now functioning as cute and somewhat fun NES-style mini-games), but they only serve as a way for the player to earn money. Where to spend that hard-earned cash? Well, there are two swords for sale, one of which could even be considered useful. You can buy new clothes, but that also comes with another disappointment. Airport51 now sells goofy themed outfits and shirts you can barely see under the jacket. Part of the fun of going all "fashion souls" in NMH1 was that it reflected Travis's personality. Of course he'd be happy to proudly wear a MIAMI BASS t-shirt under a tacky white jacket. But a "nerd" or cyber goth outfit? That's Silent Hill bonus content levels of comedic.

The aforementioned broken pacing means that the player will go through the levels quickly, barely stopping in-between. And since the gameplay in the levels is mostly just mashing through waves of goons, it's doesn't take long to start feeling burnt out. The designers try their best by introducing different types of baddies and mixing them, but by the end they just give up and have you cut through an endless stream of enemies that all take way too long to kill. One of the end game levels starts with a 10-minute section of just fighting waves of dudes in a parking lot. That's it.

At least those levels lead to generally quite good bosses that never fail to put a unique spin on the usual fights. They're not always challenging, but my monkey brain still appreciates the spectacle. But herein lies my main complaint. In NMH1 all bosses were an important part of the narrative. Engaging with their personalities and various outlooks on killing as an activity served as a boost for Travis's tangible character growth. In NMH2 you get flashy and colorful characters that are mostly just archetypes of various facets of the entertainment industry, and that's about it. Not much of a foundation for thematic exploration. In fact, the interactions with the assassins are generally so brief the game tries to provide intriguing background info in disconnected monologues given by Sylvia in cutscenes, not in a dialogue with Travis.

NMH2 actually takes on quite a few things narratively -- Travis is confronted with the consequences of his actions in the first game, not just in the way of a revenge plot that kicks things off, but also in that he has become a proper figure of myth, an inspiration to many "performers" that want in on the new assassination entertainment craze and to wearied souls that just want to find an out of this vicious circle of bloodshed. Travis is no longer a goofy otaku that he was a game ago. I mean, he still jacks off to anime and occasionally acts as a gullible oaf, but he's mostly proper cool now, no longer posing. He's a knight on a noble quest, and in the end he gets the girl and finds paradise. And this is fine. After all, NMH1 did lay down considerable growth for his character. But it doesn't feel like Travis has moved anywhere internally throughout this journey. In fact it's his relationships to other people that make progress instead. There's a romantic attachment to Sylvia, an unwanted mentor position with Shinobu, and begrudging respect shared between Travis and Henry. It's almost as if this thread of Travis finally making a set of close connections should intersect with the ongoing exploration of grief and revenge that takes most of the place in the plot, but there's no connective tissue here.

A lot of the game feels like it's missing something, be it weapons, open world exploration, level variety or thematic focus. NMH2's development cycle was infamously rocky, with Suda being mostly hands off with the game and some aspects having been changed almost last minute. And there's an occasional glimmer of detail that shows this game never quite reached its aspirations in full. Travis's motel suite is getting redecorated with every collectible you find. Every shop can be fully explored for no real reason. Santa Destroy is mostly finished in the credits sequence. Hell, there are two bonus characters with unique movesets that are barely utilized. Unfortunately, this isn't quite enough to excuse the flaws the game has. And quite frankly the last hour or so of your playthrough is guaranteed to leave a sour aftertaste. But I can't help but think it would not be fair to dismiss the game outright. It's jank but not soulless.