Alright, I've replayed it so let's try this again and see if we can keep it brief this time (...lmao).

Other than cutscenes and battles, FFXIII has gutted pretty much every conventional RPG element. Exploration is even less relevant than in the similarly linear (but far better) FFX, because of the absence of conversable NPCs, diverse treasures, and fixed camera angles. Resource management and character building are all but non-existent as party members are healed automatically before every fight and are locked in for the majority of the game, their equipment has been reduced to an afterthought (until post-game), and the crystarium offers almost nothing in the way of choice (again, until postgame, but at postgame you're just going to grind it out until you have everything anyway, now aren't you).

All of this means that the game HAS to lean completely on the two legs it actually has, its individual battles and its story. I will admit that in the past I have been overly harsh on them both, yet I maintain that both are lacking.

In its battles, FFXIII eschews the usual careful and proactive decision-making and instead goes all-in on reactive crisis management. It revolves completely around what we ancient World of Warcraft veterans would call "stance-dancing." Switch to buff/debuff mode when it's needed, switch to stagger-building mode as the default option, and switch to healing mode when the big damage shows up. If that sounds extremely simple, it's because it is. That doesn't make it easy to execute. FFXIII accommodates all of this auto-battle streamlining by ratcheting up the speed about a dozen notches. It becomes a game about reacting in the midst of a boss's attack patterns. Unfortunately there's no traditional "wait mode" so it suffers all of the old pitfalls of the ATB system more than ever before. It is a game of fumbling through menus, desperately trying to navigate to the right option at the right second, and if one's characters have chosen to automatically stand next to each other and get blasted by area of effect attacks, well I guess that's just too bad. There are merits in its ideas, but fundamental flaws render them doomed... at least until they achieve their final, radiant forms in FF7R. Against non-boss encounters (which obviously are almost all of them) the system fares worse. In most cases (not all, there are definitely some notable exceptions) the party will be in the Relentless Assault paradigm and the player will absent-mindedly prod at the X button throughout the fight, providing almost no input or thought other than maybe switching over to a heal paradigm if things get bad. In truth this would be functionally identical to MOST Final Fantasy games, were it not for that one crucial difference: resources. In the rest of these games, one must be judicious in their use of potions, ethers, and other assets while exploring their dungeons. It's a core, time-tested element of RPGs, and its absence here (among other absences) places a far, far greater burden on individual engagements to be... engaging. Most of them are not, and areas mostly consist of long, linear gauntlets with only these fights to look forward to.

Well... that and the occasional cutscenes, which are of mixed quality. To its credit, Final Fantasy XIII was then and is now, a gorgeous video game with a stellar soundtrack and an adequate English dub. To its detriment, its storytelling is a hot mess with baffling characterization and miserable pacing. Some scenes stand out as sincere emotional successes, but so many others fail to convey the inner conflicts that the game later attempts to spell out with ham handed bluntness in its datalog. Said datalog is a terrible crutch, used for critical exposition but drowned in redundancy. With or without it though, the middle of the story often feels like purgatory. The first few chapters are adequately paced with plenty of compelling developments, but chapters 4-9 (that's six out of thirteen, basically half the story) are often spent chewing the same bland melodrama with little to no progression in the plot. At best, character backstories are explored, but frontstories stand stagnant. Roughly half of the game's plot is comprised of the main characters fleeing pursuit and deciding what to do. It is aimless and dry in a way that is unlikely to connect with anyone in the way that other games in the franchise do. By the time things feel like they're picking up, the story's almost at its end. It's tempting to call it a more character focused tale than other FF games, but I would bluntly deny such a claim. The casts of Final Fantasy VII, IX, and X all achieve the same levels of character depth across almost all of their parties while still featuring a far more engaging plot and more elegant storytelling. Cloud is, to be perfectly frank, a vastly superior, more interesting character than Lightning ever becomes, and Lightning has three games to develop across. Vivi, Auron, Garnet and Yuna all obliterate the writing of every character in FFXIII with perhaps the possible exceptions of Vanille and Fang, but Vanille suffers from an awkward dubbing process and Fang shows up so late that she barely even matters. Hope especially, is apparently written by someone who has never met an actual child. I've worked in an elementary school, watched the passing childhoods of six nieces and nephews, and of course, have been fourteen years old myself. Even at that age, even under such emotional duress, the leaps of logic that are essential to Hope's character are utterly inhuman. They are conclusions that could only be reached by someone with either a debilitating mental illness or psycho-magical fantasy tampering, neither of which are implied by the narrative. There are traumatized children latching onto whatever they can, and then there are deranged, dangerous murderers. I can only empathize with the former, and the writers seem to lack any awareness of the latter. Lightning suffers as well. While this recent playthrough has done much to curb my visceral disgust at her general abrasiveness and her frequent incidents of physical assault against undeserving targets, I still can't find anything positive to latch onto in her character. She can usually be convinced to do the right thing, but only begrudgingly and in meager doses. She is rude, sometimes unfathomably so, but with none of the cathartic irreverence of Jack Garland. She is sullen, but with none of the lovable goofishness or many vulnerabilities of Cloud Strife. She entirely lacks the extenuating circumstances or subtle, observable arc of Squall Leonheart. As far as I can tell, her character development is intended to be triggered by two things: the visible parallels between her behavior and Hope's clear insanity, and some sort of adjacent nonsense revelation wherein she considers the nature of the world that she's spent her whole life in for the very first time and this leads to a reevaluation of her previous strange decisions? I can only wrap my head around the vague idea that the writers must have had for this character, not what they were really going for here or why on Earth they would choose to convey it in this way. The story as a whole feels as though it has some good ideas and no idea what to do with them, so for the most part what it actually does with them is... nothing. Cid Raines and his subplot feel like somebody tried to cut them from the game entirely and just missed a few pieces. The overarching conflict is only surreptitiously resolved through sudden, unexplained magic in the last few minutes after a final boss that lacks any kind of emotional crescendo, especially when there are SIX utterly misplaced cutscenes separating its phases, sucking any and all energy out of the proverbial room. It's just bad writing, and when that writing serves as the player's only reward for slogging through lengthy battle after lengthy battle, it's a bigger target for criticism than it'd ever be otherwise.

It is no exaggeration to say that before this re-visitation I hated FFXIII. I hated it for many years. I saw it as an emblem of a genre and perhaps even an industry in frustrating, heartbreaking decline. It was a message both loud and clear that Square Enix either had no understanding of what I loved about their franchise or simply didn't care. It seemed to be ashamed of everything about its forbears that I liked, and enraptured by trends that I despised. Final Fantasy XII had eroded some of my trust in Square Enix, but Final Fantasy XIII erased it completely. A Realm Reborn and Final Fantasy XV did little to win me back. It wasn't until FF7R demonstrated a complete and perfect knowledge of FFVII's tone, characters, and shitty minigames that I was again able to open my heart once again to Final Fantasy. In these recent years I have pursued a more legitimate critical voice for myself. Returning to FFXIII with this altered frame of mind has allowed me to more honestly entertain the game's ideas and discern the value in some of its intentions. Many of my old criticisms simply do not hold up to the game's realities. They were blown out of proportion by the disgust (and perhaps, more pettily, betrayal) that I felt at the time, or by my rigid teenage dogma. I can admit when I was wrong, and am interested in doing so because there is no worth in dishonest criticism. Even with these admissions however, Final Fantasy XIII simply has too many cracks in its foundation. It cannot and does not live up to the legacy of its franchises greatest hits. Even FFVIII and IX, two games whose incredible strengths are savagely undercut by the unfortunate failings in their gameplay feel like they're out of FFXIII's league. No, Final Fantasy XIII feels more at home with Final Fantasy III; a game which is serviceable, rigid, and often more than a little annoying, with no great strengths beyond this... only some interesting ideas to be realized more fully in later, better games.

I have never been so upset by a games media news cycle as I am right now, watching the best Pokemon game in a decade be globally dismissed out of hand because it runs at 27 FPS.

The mere idea that there are thousands if not millions of people putting these Gen 9 games in the same tier as Sword and Shield or even below them, enrages me. Sword and Shield, regardless of "dexit" were clownish, half-baked things that underdelivered on all familiar fronts while fumbling everything they could have had going for them and offering nothing new except a poorly thought out and unexciting battle gimmick and a suite of ok new mons. They were depressing, and marked a franchise in clear decline, taking away far more than they gave.

I still can barely even believe how far we've come from the flat, barren wild area that Sword and Shield launched with. Thousands upon thousands of manhours have been been bled for this open world, and it shows. Every sector of it is rich with denseness and verticality, every mile a joy to explore. Craftable TMs strike a healthy balance between the doomed movepools of Gen 1 and simply teaching Close Combat to every mon in your party in gens 7 or 8 and grants the world an MMO's incentive for farming, a process that is vastly expedited by the auto-battle feature. I do certainly question the wisdom of building Team Star's content around this feature, but not the auspiciousness of its inclusion.

The new Pokemon themselves are a strong showing, though they almost always are.

Unthinkably, the writing for this game is not totally embarrassing. After the total fumbling of Team Flare in Gen 6, the incessant chattering of Gen 7, and the multifaceted catastrophe that was Gen 8's entire script, when the best writing the series had seen was in TEAM PLASMA, a tale with its own host of questionabilities, I had completely surrendered. It was clear to me that Pokemon's writing would definitely always be garbage, and that I was really only here for the multiplayer. Against all odds, Scarlet and Violet have mostly proven me wrong. Dialogue is decently written across the board with actual, well-executed moments of emotional catharsis on occasion, and aside from one pretty forgivable instance, twists are handled so, so much more gracefully than in Gen 8. Nowhere in this game is there a moment where a character sees a self-explanatory tapestry hanging in the back of a KFC and uses it as a springboard to perform her eighth remix of a circular, substanceless conversation. Characters are written believably and likably, and no major story threads become disasters like that of Chairman Rose.

I've even come around on the lack of level scaled content, though it's a little too easy to unknowingly pick a fight in a high level area only to be locked into a trainer battle with something twenty levels above you. Some way of seeing the level banding in game would go a long way. Forgoing level scaling also forgoes level flattening. An avid Elder Scrolls player is likely to tell you that level scaling can get very boring, very quickly. In reality a scaled version of this game would make it harder to find a challenge, not easier. I recommend that you go ahead and look up that level map online and take on the strongest things you think you can handle before putting together a second, lower level party to work through all of the leftovers. All regular trainer battles are fully optional now, so it's quite easy to underlevel yourself on purpose. It actually allows for a good degree of challenge, something that this franchise seemed hell-bent on eradicating until recently. Postgame offerings are pretty average. It's no Emerald or BW2 or HGSS in this regard but it at least has more going on than X and Y, with DLC on the way. Co-op isn't where I'd want it to be as the Union Circle isn't exactly rich in functionality, but at least they're trying it. Having to set a separate link code to battle or trade with somebody already in a group with you is absolutely deranged when you consider that Halo 3 had a perfect, friend-based lobby system back in 2007. This stuff has been figured out for over 15 years, and the PSS from X and Y was already a nearly perfect system. I cannot comprehend this.

I suppose that signals us toward the more negative critiques. While I have taken it upon myself to shout praises from the rooftops in hope of reversing the miserable tide of this discourse, these Gen 9 games are not without sin. We'll talk about the famous one last.

A quick first note: Being locked to school uniforms sucks! Fix it in the DLC!

Terastalization (or however I'm supposed to spell this ridiculous name) is inherently a wildly unpredictable mechanic, and wildly unpredictable mechanics (like dynamax) lack reasonable counterplay. Anything that lacks reasonable counterplay by Smogon's own past reasoning, is uncompetitive... when tournaments aren't open-sheet. If players are able to see their opponents tera types before that button is pressed like they can in VGC (which is doubles so it doesn't even matter as much), almost every problem with the mechanic disappears. There are definitely instances where the system pushes an already powerful mon over the edge, but those can all be dealt with by the community on a case-by-case basis. If it were used less foolishly in the main game, it would be a neat toy for the campaign. That's not the timeline we live in. Every gym leader uses the mechanic almost exclusively to their own detriment by terastalizing their last Pokemon to their gym's type every single time. Usually, all this accomplishes is robbing that Pokemon of an otherwise beneficial second typing and making them vulnerable to the exact same move that you just swept the rest of their team with. In the competitive meta, it more likely means that you're just going to have to take a wild, blind gamble on what that Garganacl's tera type is and whether you can actually hit the one, largely unpredictable weakness that it's left with, or gamble over whether or not this set-up sweeper is going to get the single turn it needs to destroy your entire life. The generational powercreep by the way is out of control this time around. It's less about stats as in previous gens (Dragapult and Regieleki obliterating the use-cases of basically any Pokemon previously considered "fast") and more about outrageous abilities and signature moves. Kingambit, Great Tusk and Gholdengo in particular have unique features so meta-defining that it seems outright foolish not to have all three of them. At time of writing, Great Tusk and Kingambit's usage statistics for last month revealed that both were present on just under 50% of all Showdown OU teams, at 46.949% and 46.043% respectively. Gholdengo was on close to a third of all teams, but he would surely be higher if he weren't competing with Garganacl for that "completely immune to all status moves" slot. Combine the percentages for both of them and they'd take third place. Even in the future when power creeps again, the specific niches of these four Pokemon will not disappear. Unless their abilities are nerfed, they're banned forever, or those capabilities are given to a bunch of other Pokemon in gen 10 (like they did with Unaware this gen) these bastards are here for the rest of our lives. Even worse, as those power metrics shift, we'll just have to deal with Houndstone, Annihilape, Chi-Yu, Chien-Pao, Esparatha, Fluttermane, Palafin, and Iron Bundle. Unless gen 10 also obliterates everything that came before it, the gen 9 Pokemon are going to dominate competitive Pokemon to a suffocating degree for the rest of time.

While we're on this thread about the competitive scene, Scarlet and Violet retain the infernal 20 minute timer enforced by their predecessor despite the united pleas of every prominent voice in the community. While this feels like a monument to stubbornness, and players should absolutely have control over such a timer in their own personal battling, my annoyance with this has subsided upon realizing that this meta has been purposely directed toward explosive offense, and thus matches should be shorter on the whole. If they're going to design the game around the timer like this while mitigating the stall-based filth that ran rampant in Gen 8, well... that's fine by me. There is however, still one giant flaw in this, and it's my biggest complaint about the whole game.

Battles in Scarlet and Violet are glacially, unacceptably slow. This has been an albatross around Pokemon's neck for years, and the achievements of Legends Arceus in this area have been painfully undone. When an opposing Gyarados enters a double battle, the following happens in sequence:

-The "sends out Gyarados" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-The animation plays where Gyarados enters the field.
-The "Intimidate is happening" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-An animation plays showing that my partner's attack has dropped.
-The "attack has been lowered" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-An animation plays showing that my attack has been dropped.
-The "attack has been lowered" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-If it's the end of the turn and anyone is holding Leftovers or any other item that needs to activate, the animation for that item plays and then the textbox explaining its effect appears after.

This kind of thing NEEDS to be consolidated. Please, for the love of god, show the textboxes WHILE the animations are happening. Show all of the simultaneous stat drops or increases at the same time. I'm begging here. This is exacerbated by the removal of two features that have otherwise been present for literally all of Pokemon's near-thirty year history: Turning off battle animations, and changing the battle style to "set". The former has an obvious effect on the length of battles, while the latter is more of a hindrance to a specific type of player, and by a specific type of player I mean me. As someone who actually participates in Pokemon's PvP, I hate playing on the default "shift" battle style. It erodes the good competitive habit of thinking about switching Pokemon as something that always carries a cost, rather than a free action. For my playthrough of Pokemon Violet, I ignored each and every prompt the game gave me to switch Pokemon after I knocked out an opponent, which gave me yet more textboxes to mash through. More than this I'm annoyed that Game Freak would raise the entry barriers to competitive Pokemon even higher with this removal. It's something that could only have been motivated by stubborn, backwards philosophy, not time, money, or technical constraints. It's deeply frustrating, even if its impact on the overall experience is relatively trivial. These kinds of removals just feel spitefully anti-consumer and I hate them every time.

In what I'm sure will be a great disappointment to many, the catching mechanics of Legends Arceus are gone. Touching a Pokemon once again triggers a traditional battle, wherein they must be caught in the traditional way. I do not take this as a rejection of those mechanics. These games were very clearly developed in parallel, and we'll see the true results of GF's experiment in Generation 10, not here. While that may be a missed opportunity, the real issue becomes apparent when Miraidon and Koraidon are brought into the mix. Pokemon out in the open world are scaled to their canonical, pokedex-ordained sizes, which means that many of them are absolutely tiny. This in turn means that you will accidentally drive over a Salandit who blends perfectly in with the cave floor your traversing and have all momentum stopped dead as you enter a battle you didn't want. In docked mode on a large screen, this is a pretty avoidable through treacherous predicament. In handheld mode, well... god help you. None of this is aided of course, by the pop-in.

Alright, fine... here we are at last. The notorious technical performance of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. First, the games are locked to 30 FPS. This may feel sacrilegious from 2023's doorstep, but it is not uncommon on the Nintendo Switch, a machine that was born underpowered and is rapidly approaching its sixth birthday. More importantly the game does not maintain that 30 FPS, and rarely reaches it at all.

With that said, let me make this plain: No one but the most decadent of PC gamers should reject these games on the basis of performance alone. In my full, thorough playthrough, I suffered exactly one crash. As a player of N64 games and rememberer of Ultra Sun and Moon on the 3DS, I adjusted to the framerate a few hours in and never thought about it again with the exception of the 2 FPS background characters, which I found hilarious. Lighting can be persnickety, but its fickle whims were little nuisance. In terms of bugs I encountered the following:

-Pokemon clipping through walls in narrow tunnels (trivial)
-Being placed into a wall after a battle and falling until the game sent me back to my most recent Pokemon Center (single occurrence, fixed itself)
-Performing poses in the selfie camera freezes your avatar's face in the chosen expression until you manually reset it, potentially making them perpetually sad or unhinged in cutscenes (humorous, harmless, easily fixed)
-In one cutscene my character's arm was continually twitching (harmless, silly)

That's it. That's the list.

When The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, critical darling, normie favorite, and holder of a 94/100 score on Metacritic released in 2011, I encountered so many progression blocking, quest breaking bugs in the first few days that I had to look up how to use the developer's console to try and fix my quest log myself. In the end I just started over. Pokemon Violet currently holds a 76 on Metacritic. Pokemon Sword sits at an 80.

I've seen a tweet with video from this game where the player throws a pokeball at a target, and the framerate plummets as the game rebuilds the whole scene around the ball from scratch, taking a truly awkward amount of time. The tweet says "the entire game is like this." I had this experience exactly twice across more than 40 hours. This is the kind of outright stonefaced lying that is taking place around this game. It's disgusting. Stop.

If you're going to make fun of Scarlet and Violet, the technical performance should only be one of a thousand complaints. Talk about how miserable the process of tera raiding is. Talk about how the impressive-looking puzzle dungeons that were once our gyms have now been replaced with featureless identical boxes that just direct us back outside to do some absolutely pathetic minigame that one guy probably threw together in an afternoon. Talk about how GameFreak habitually removes gameplay options like the ability to turn off the EXP Share or use the Set battle style, seemingly just out of pure, baseless spite. Talk about how Dexit fundamentally damages several of the series core pillars and disrupting the franchises whole appeal, and how there is currently NO place, AT ALL where players can use all of their Pokemon for literally anything. Talk about how YES, actually we DO want a Battle Frontier, VERY BADLY.

And then while you're at it, talk about how this new non-linear direction plays to all of the series strengths by facilitating the player's ability to make their own, personal story, set their own challenges, and tailor to their individuality. Talk about how the story is one of the series best and how your Pokemon can once again finally follow you around the overworld outside of their Pokeballs at a speed that might even be able to keep up with you. Talk about how the optionality of trainer battles and random encounters means that you no longer have to slog through route after route as an overly linear series of battle hallways.

Scarlet and Violet, together with Legends Arceus, give me hope. Pokemon is still many miles from what I want it to be (an enormous live-service game that cares about its multiplayer) but I have been without that hope for a long time. I have not been completely satisfied with a Pokemon game since Generation 5... half of Pokemon's life ago. Gen 6 was exciting and I had a great time with it, but it left me wanting so much more. Gen 7 felt like it existed only to sell me plastic toys. Gen 8 felt like it no longer cared about anything at all. Shortly before Gen 9's announcement, I made up a Word document that I named "How to fix Pokemon." In that document, I asked for Animal Crossing New Horizon's style of drop-in, drop-out co-op multiplayer. I asked for following Pokemon. I asked for a Battle Frontier. I asked for MMO-styled open zones with cities and gyms in their center. I asked for the gyms to be gauntlet affairs that locked the player in and forbade them from hitting up the Pokemon Center after every opponent. I asked for the gyms to be leveled quite highly when a player first arrives, thus encouraging them to either fight totally optional trainer battles in the surrounding area and scavenge for supplies, or to buckle down and use some actual strategy.

I definitely did not get everything that I wanted from that list... but I actually got a lot of it, and that has to count for something. I'll be honest. If gen 10, which coincides with Pokemon's 30th anniversary and will almost definitely be harnessing the power of Nintendo's next machine is not another large, bold step forward... I'll be done. If gen 10 comes and goes as a low-effort contractually obligatory afterthought, devoid of pomp or circumstance, then I'm taking it as my offramp. That said... based on this and Legends Arceus, I believe that we're going where we need to go... if a bit slower than I would like.

ANOTHER EDIT: The DLC is legitimately great and makes me so excited for the future.

Tears of the Kingdom is Breath of the Wild's Master Quest. Even when viewed strictly as a sequel to Breath of the Wild rather than a whole new Zelda game, it feels more like an extremely ambitious rom hack. It is Breath of the Wild but bigger and with different tools, and that renders it a decent video game by sheer inheritance. It also frustrates and demoralizes me more than anything I have encountered this year, and this is the same year in which FFXVI set up a fantastic story and then somehow disappointed me with it at almost every turn. TotK retains BotW's beloved looseness in its puzzles, its inspiring allowances for creativity, and to my boundless surprise, almost all of its problems.

Regardless of how bright-eyed and hopeful it made us, BotW was never without some rather noticeable deficiencies. While I have always recognized the necessity and the wisdom of the fools-loathed durability system, it brought with it the pestilence of accounting. Most of the times that I opened a chest in Breath of the Wild, I was told that I didn't have enough space to accept whatever weapon or shield the game had just tried to reward me with. This buzzkill moment would then either require me to pop open a menu and choose something to drop, or to close the chest and walk away. This frequent chicanery was one of BotW's biggest flaws, and it was drastically exacerbated by the decision to repeatedly HIDE the NPC who expands the player's inventory. As much as I liked the Korok puzzles in their position as elegant curiosity reward nuggets for any players who intuitively secret-hunted in the nooks and crannies of the world, Hestu served as a bizarre, unnecessary roadblock to put between the players and their fun.

Imagine my surprise then, when instead of the exact sort of basic quality of life improvement that one might expect from a sequel, Nintendo decided to quintuple down on that inventory nightmare. Hestu thankfully stays put in a predictable location after you initially find him this time, but he and his Koroks (like Great Fairies and a rather depressing number of other things) are back in exactly the same capacity as the first game. In fact, most of the Korok puzzles are in exactly the same style. Follow the little sapling, check the rustling leaves at the top of a building, shoot the balloons, hurry to the ring, match the rock formation, match the block formation... all of these return in equal force. There are new ones too, of course, but many of these new ones are far more tedious than types imported from BotW. I have now run right past roughly 80% of the cork Koroks I've seen because I just do not find them in any way amusing. The first time I saw one of the stranded backpack Koroks, I thought it was absolutely adorable, and frankly I still do. Nonetheless, every time I see one now I have to stifle a sigh. For most of the game I just picked them up with Ultrahand to manually carry them, because the thought of building yet another vehicular contraption just for this was so exhausting that I would rather choose the hike.

When I said that TotK had different tools, I was talking about Ultrahand. Sure, it has other rune replacement powers, but Ultrahand is quite obviously in a totally different class. In BotW, it felt as though a similar number of shrines were devoted to each Sheikah rune. In TotK, unless it's one of the new and improved combat shrines or the handful of Recall shrines, it's an Ultrahand shrine. We'll talk about Fuse in a minute, but Ascend is basically just an important piece of your character's mobility kit with very few puzzle applications, and while Recall wonderfully sports creative puzzle, combat, AND convenience applications, it feels tragically underutilized. Ultrahand is very definitely the limitless multitool that the player is expected to use when resolving almost every non-combat situation.

Ultrahand is Magnesis, but everything is metal and everything can be glued together. This means that you can make whatever stupid bridge you want to get over your obstacles, but more importantly it means you can build cars. Building stuff is not just something you CAN do, it's something that shrines and sidequests constantly require you to do. Part of the controversy that has publicly engulfed these building systems is that interacting with them at all requires you to fiddle with pieces and parts until you have something that might work, then you try it, screw it up, and rebuild the whole-ass thing from scratch. The sky islands (a failure of Skyward Sword that I really did not need to be reminded of) demand a particularly goddamned obnoxious amount of screwing around with stupid flying junkpiles. Now would be the opportune time to point out that saving your game does not preserve anything you have built. If your ramshackle whirligig does not have enough batteries to reach your destination or your fan distribution is off balance or if your glider doesn't fall off the edge of the island just right or if you die before you can deliver the 15 logs you've hot-glued together, it doesn't matter whether you've saved first or not. You're building that whole shit over again, and boy, I hope you don't do a worse job this time because of how bored and pissed off you are about having to do it again! The only Zelda game that has ever frustrated me as much as this particular feature of TotK is the raw difficulty and classic cruelty of Zelda 2... but I can save-state in Zelda 2. Mercifully, there IS an auto-build power buried in the game if you can actually find it. UN-mercifully it's highly particular about exact numbers of parts and demands a somewhat scarce resource to make up the difference if you're short on anything, which drastically limits its usefulness. It's good that it's here but bad that it's buried, and it feels insufficient.

Ultrahand's ability to build blows the game's puzzles wide open, and I have to applaud the team for MOSTLY succeeding at accommodating this outrageous level of player power. Between this and Ascend's utterly wild mobility, an extreme amount of attention had to be paid to every situation in every environment, and they've done a remarkable job with this. And yet... when a player has this much power to solve any problem just by building whatever weird bullshit first enters their mind, so many of those problems no longer feel like puzzles. Take the looseness of BotW any further and rather than puzzles with a few different solutions that click into place in the player's mind, you start getting things that just feel like trivial annoyances because they player doesn't feel like they "solved" something. They just feel like they nonsensed their way through some meaningless chaos that only slowed them down. Even in these shrines where the materials the developers offer you have clearly been carefully considered, things sometimes feel as though they've lost all meaning... as if that puzzle wasn't a PUZZLE, it was just a... pile of things. The player no longer feels smart for solving it. They just did the only thing that made sense to them. Doing what comes naturally until it suddenly works doesn't necessarily feel like a satisfying puzzle. Those "aha" moments usually come from being forced to think outside of your own personal box. Without the friction of having to meet the puzzle on its own terms, it just becomes you going about your basic business. Speaking of piles of things...

I hate Fuse. I'll just go right ahead and say it. The idea is clearly meant to inspire the player toward building creative custom weapons, but this is twice as much trouble as its worth. Firstly, just to get this out of the way, most of the fused weapons and shields look absolutely terrible. There are SOME things the player can make that look like reasonable, believable weapons, but especially in the early game players will be gluing boulders to the ends of sticks over and over again. In the first few hours I thought that maybe I was clever for sticking a bomb flower onto my shield, but it didn't take long for me to realize that having a ridiculous floating cartoon bomb forever hovering unstuck from my back was invasive enough to ruin my first viewing of every new cutscene. Fortunately shields aren't all that important to gameplay in general and I simply stopped fusing things to them, but to play TotK without fusing new weapons would be a task beyond misery. TotK has used its story's inciting incident as an excuse to turn every weapon in all of Hyrule into actual garbage. I consider this to have been a big, stupid mistake.

The durability system in BotW exists because while exploration should be valuable through the thrills of adventure alone, as a general rule it should also lead to treasure. In case you somehow STILL do not get this after having half a decade to think about it, your weapons break in BotW so that thirty-seven hours into the game, you will still care about finding a fiery greatsword. You churn through your rewards in order to make room for new rewards, which will still have utility. Otherwise the whole reward economy falls apart, and players start complaining that they put in a bunch of effort to explore something and didn't find anything worthwhile. These little treats are also essential for offsetting the player's opportunity cost. Exploring frequently eats into a player's resources... such as their weapon durability. In Tears of the Kingdom, almost everything that Link finds is either clothing (which is still upgraded in the same way which encourages commitment to a single set, making the player uninterested in almost all of it) or actual trash. If you want new weapons, you're going to have to cook them. I say "cook them" because the process evokes one of the most boring activities that existed in Breath of the Wild... cooking, which also returns in TotK completely unchanged because according to suit-wearers who do not actually play these games, every AAA video game of this decade must have crafting. Cooking, Fuse, and occasionally Ultrahand building all involve the player standing around and scrolling through huge lists of too many things, dropping them out from menu to game world, and then making them into the thing they need to be. With Ultrahand this can get time consuming because it takes a while to get the hang of rotating objects into their desired positions, and even WITH "the hang" it's a lot of inputs. With cooking this can get time consuming because there are too many animations and you're probably going to be making a million things at once. With Fuse this can get time consuming because you have a limited weapon inventory that you are constantly churning through and everything that you find on the ground is unusable, so you have to take time out of your life every so often to drop what you're doing and fill your inventory with things you can actually use. In the beginning you might actually be inclined to experiment with this, but before long you'll just be sticking Black Bokoblin horns onto everything because you have a ton of them, they're not super valuable, and they have decent attack power. In BotW you were likely to hold onto your fancy weapons as best you could, but as you eventually picked up better stuff, you'd end up using them sooner or later. In TotK the game keeps giving me diamonds and I have only used them to complete quests. I have enough of everything else on hand that I don't need to, and they're too valuable. Thus in the name of cost efficiency I slog through enemy health bars with mediocre weapons far more than I did in BotW. You can call this "a me thing" all you want, but this is the kind of player psychology that game development revolves around. If you don't want to stop and cook yourself some new weapons, your alternative is to waste time (and resources) slapping your enemies with pool noodles, which will then make it harder to get any of the resources you COULD use to cook more weapons, because they're all drops from high level enemies.

By now you've either stopped reading because you disagree with all of this and you hate me now, or you've noticed the pattern. TotK improves almost nothing from BotW and either further aggravates the old problems or invents new ones where none existed. I felt the need to establish all of this before revealing just how hung up I am on the BIGGEST problem that did not previously exist. I have already seen this entire world. Zelda as a franchise is, at its very core, about exploration. The darkest moments in the series are those at which it had forgotten this. Can you tell that I don't like Skyward Sword? TotK feels at first like it may still be full of such new frontiers, what with its glue-guns and rocketships, but once the capabilities of the player's toolset have been laid bare on a worse, more annoying version of the first game's Great Plateau (right down to being chaperoned by a king's ghost), players are dropped into the exact same world that they've already milked dry in the first game, only now there are caves and climate change and some huge, distracting pillars of detritus hanging in the clouds and ruining the view.

I am truly, sincerely stunned by how little TotK does to alter the map or your quest across it, especially after seeing it leave systems like Koroks and great fairies without even so much as a re-flavoring. Yes, there are now entrances leading down into a huge, boring, frustrating, single-biome darkness map and yes, the first game's NPCs have shuffled around a bit, but if I may spoil something that becomes evident only a few hours into the game, there has been no significant timeskip. The Korok forest has not burned down. The desert has not flooded. There are no new mountains and the civilizations of the world have scarcely budged. The biggest singular change on the entire map is the removal of a liquid from one of the previous game's four main quest areas. These four places, by the way, all reprise their exact same roles. Your main, overarching quest in Tears of the Kingdom is to go back to the same four places, and help them with a new problem in the same fashion as you did in Breath of the Wild. In each location you will meet primarily the same characters, since, again, it's been only a year or two since the last time you were there. Faron still has some cool environments and not much else. The Gerudo Highlands is still just a redundant mountain zone with a couple of shrines in it so that there isn't a big empty hole in the map. Rather than granting new and interesting significance to any of these places, perhaps precipitated by the emergence of a dungeon, we go to the same Rito village with the same layout and mostly the same inhabitants, only this time it's snowing really hard. The Gerudo Desert at least has somewhat of an interesting hook, but the only things it feels like I'm discovering in this world outside of new game mechanics and shrines is that everything is exactly where I left it. With the exception of A Link Between Worlds, a much shorter, breezier game which was an intentional return to a long forgotten, much requested form, this has never happened in the history of the franchise, and with very good reason. This is not discovery. This cannot possibly compete with a Hyrule that I have not already seen. Breath of the Wild already suffers rather grievously on repeat playthroughs as its main quest content is weak and actually going through the motions of its side content quickly becomes a slog if the player is not discovering that content afresh. I have done all of the shrines in Breath of the Wild twice. Once on release, and once a few years ago on Master Mode with all of the DLC. Going through those motions in Tears of the Kingdom is far more laborious, and I can tell you right now that I don't ever foresee myself wanting to replay it for any reason other than intellectual retrospective curiosity after a decade or two.

I can and DO obliterate Ocarina of Time over the weekend several times a year. I play it by way of its randomizer, but I'd be having almost as much fun if I were just doing the vanilla game over and over. Going through the motions with OoT is fun all of the way through. Going through these motions even ONCE with TotK has been exhausting. Even the overworld shrine quests have become far less interesting, now revolving almost exclusively around figuring out how you'd like to move a big crystal from point A to point B. In BotW they were the endpoints of more interesting sidequests, or riddles given by the game's best character, Kass, who is now mysteriously and egregiously absent from the entirety of TotK. Scrubbing this same map for a third time became a chore for me almost immediately because my wonder with this world has been long spent and the side content, like that of its predecessor, is so vast and so repetitive that I burn out and glaze over by the time I even hit 30% shrine completion. For the record, no, I have not been going for all of the Koroks or all of the bubbul frogs or even all of the lightroots. I did all of the shrines and basically all of the sidequests. I know that I didn't have to do this. I also know that the most fun I had with the game was definitely from the shrines in Akkala and that the alternatives were to not play it at all or to just play the main quest, and I know that the main quests of BOTH of these games pale in comparison to those which came before them.

When I say that, I'm not talking about story. That's another topic for another paragraph. I'm talking about dungeons and their overworld introductions. For the record, a full suite of excellent dungeons was at the absolute top of my TotK wishlist. The Divine Beasts of Breath of the Wild are its most commonly cited disappointment. There are only four of them, they're quite short, they're all very similar. In aesthetic they were virtually identical, and due to their story context as ancient mecha, they weren't even trying to feel like places. The dungeon spelunker's mystique of delving into places ancient, frightful, and beautiful was pretty much totally absent, and that's roughly half of the Zelda franchise's appeal. Please know then, that when I tell you I genuinely prefer those Divine Beasts to the dungeons in Tears of the Kingdom, and that these dungeons are my least favorite in the entire series to date, I do not say so lightly. Not all of TotK's dungeons are created equal of course... I enjoyed my second dungeon significantly more than the first. My first dungeon was that of the Rito, which is, right down to its aesthetic, almost exactly a BotW Divine Beast. It asks you to activate four terminals hidden in self-contained offshoot puzzle chambers in any order, and then activate a main, overarching device so that you can fight the painfully mediocre boss. Even if the jumping path up to the dungeon is counted as part of it, it left me even less whelmed than its BotW predecessor did because of one crucial, critical difference. You cannot move the dungeon. The only thing that kept the Divine Beasts from feeling like stapled together shrines was the fact that each one had a positional gimmick that varied in function from beast to beast. In each one, you needed to assess every state that the dungeon could be in and what the consequences of that would be when applied to the rest of the space. It may not have done so spectacularly, but it did channel the water levels of OoT's Water Temple or the central pillar of Snowpeak Ruins, or the raising and lowering of the statue in Ancient Cistern, or the multiple entrances of Skull Woods, or the pillars supporting Eagle's Tower, or any of the other twelve or so examples I could give off of the top of my head. The Gerudo dungeon which I sought out second thankfully felt like an actual place of danger that existed in the world... a dungeon, if you will. Unfortunately it finally revealed to me TotK's fatalest flaw... the kiss of death for this entire video game. TotK has systemized its entire experience all the way to hell and back. In "traditional" post-LttP Zelda games, players would find a new item in each new dungeon. This meant that they would find themselves in a new space, often with its own new, bespoke mechanics, and would be given a new tool to experiment with and learn how to use. In Breath of the Wild, the unique element of surprise was at least preserved in the different possible states of each beast. Those movements were unique to the space, and were a new mechanic to be learned, even if each was similar in concept to the last. In Tears of the Kingdom, the Lightning Temple revolves around mirrors which I had already seen and used extensively in several shrines. Every gameplay element of the dungeon was one I was already familiar with, and thus I never had to process or explore new information. Being in that dungeon felt no different from being anywhere else in the game. It was full of enemies that I simply ran past because they posed me no actual threat and killing them would have taken more resources than they were worth, and I had to find the not-so-hidden path forward until I could find the four not-shrines and get to the boss. I used the same Zonai devices I'd been seeing all game long and the same powers that I'd had all game long, in the same exact ways. More than ever before, the formula has won. In case I need to make this clear: In a game about discovery and exploration, a game that lives or dies on surprise, the formula is the enemy.

The main thing that I wanted after Breath of the Wild was a Zelda game with a little less overworld and a lot more underworld. Marvel then at my audacity, as I bitch and whine about the underworld that TotK gave me, because I don't like the dungeons, I don't like the depths and I don't really like the caves all that much either. Both the depths and the caves frequently lead to situations where the answer is not in front of you. You can follow a trail of statues halfway across the depths only to find no reward except a dead end because the actual, meager reward is actually something you access from the surface, could have done all along, and has nothing to do with this goose chase you've been on. Many of the times that your shrine detector goes off (once you finally move the mountains the game asks you to move in order to re-unlock this previously free starting feature of the first game that is now withheld from the player for no sensible reason) the shrine it's leading you toward is actually only accessible through a cave entrance that's hidden a few mountains over. When fast traveling to the shrine nearest to your next destination, it is extremely common to find yourself a mile underground, looking for a decent stalactite to ascend through... a tiny and annoying surprise that adds irksome seconds onto your commute. These frustrations just barely manage to outweigh the things that I actually like about caves. Many of them are fun, shrine-like obstacle course diversions and each contains the equivalent of a Skulltula token, which like in OoT only true freakopaths will collect all of, as the worthwhile rewards cap out at around 50 of them. Of the depths however, I'm more critical.

Because the depths were kept under wraps by The Big N until the game launched, the sheer surprise at learning of another whole Hyrule-sized map in the game I think has caused people to give that map a bit too much credit. The depths are all one biome with two appearances: total darkness, or admittedly cool, spore-filled underground cavern. Total darkness is rarely fun as a game mechanic and isn't fun here either. Even if you get cute about keeping a fire weapon out or trying to fuse brightblooms to things or drinking glow potions, you're probably just going to resort to either constantly tossing brightblooms out manually or walking around in the dark. It's an annoyance that contributes pretty much nothing at all. I would have enjoyed exploring the depths significantly more if I could actually see them, because it would have meant that I wasn't continuously running into giant invisible walls and wondering how far it reaches along any spatial axis. The darkness means that I can't even tell if the reason I can't see the next lightroot is because there isn't one or because something else I can't see is blocking my sightline and I'm actually right next to it. Even when I'm willing to spam the brightblooms, finding the edges of walls and obstacles can often take an eternity and it's better just to stumble in blind frustration. Once the lightroots have made it possible to see, there simply are not that many captivating discoveries awaiting on this map, and it was not long before I started to regard it as nothing more than a whole other full-sized map for me to do my chores on. The fact that it's full of more dangerous enemies means nothing to me. Due to the resource mechanics and the sparse distribution of those enemies, I fought almost none of them. Just like in the rest of the game, there was typically no reason to. I did not enjoy feeling my way around mostly enclosed spaces like the Korok Forest, and only the couple of main dungeons found down there were able to get me anywhere near the Old Zelda tomb raiding for which I hunger.

"Found" is a fun word to use here, because I was having a bad enough time with TotK that even though I'd started my playthrough on launch day, the game had been out for three months before I finally got around to fumbling through the depths for enough hours to find either of them, and the one that surprised me wasn't the one you'd expect. The internet had already told me about the "secret" one, and once I'd heard that you could just do it whenever, I became excited. When Breath of the Wild was first showing us its trailers, I was thrilled to see that they were "doing Zelda 1." My pre-release fantasies for BotW were largely predicated on the experience of that very first game's dungeons. In Zelda 1, the player can just stumble their way into Level 8: The Lion within the first ten minutes of the game, and if they are a bad enough dude to save the president, they can totally just beat it. Having been given no guidance, they can just FIND a giant, ancient tomb swarming with danger and evil, and just DO it. I had hoped that upon finding these dungeons, be they jungle temples or graveyard mausoleums or dilapidated mansions, players would hunt in the surrounding area, do their crafting and cooking in preparation, and then venture inside to clear out that vast and perilous complex. These "hidden" main dungeons did not materialize with BotW, and as each of TotK's trailers increasingly fixated on overworld engineering and assorted sky islanding, I abandoned any hope that TotK would finish fulfilling my vision for Breath of the Wild. I was thus quite surprised to learn that players in TotK can simply FIND one of TotK's later dungeons in an unexpected location long before the game's story directs them to it. I was then quite disappointed to realize that they can't actually DO that dungeon when they find it unless they've either looked up the exact steps they have to perform on two other maps in order to open it, know those steps from a previous playthrough, or got straight up lucky while exploring a seemingly unrelated area under zero visibility. I myself was led by my shrine chasing to only a few steps away from the trigger for this sequence break, and missed what was right in front of me because I was flying blind. Even if one jumps through these hoops just to spite the very concept of linearity, they're not playing havoc with the intended storytelling in any way that's actually interesting.

Breath of the Wild had a very light touch to its storytelling. Link is informed from the start of the game that his goal is to recover his lost strength and defeat Ganon, preferably assisted by the liberated souls of his old friends. Outside of maybe a few cutscenes at the homes of those friends, BotW's storytelling is concerned with character, not plot. This makes these scenes perfect for optional content which can be experienced at any time and in any order. They're scenes in a story that we know has already ended in tragedy. Sure, it can sate our curiosities over WHY that ending came to pass, but the plot details and revelations contained therein are basically irrelevant. None of it is important to understanding anything about Link's mission. Instead BotW's memory scenes exist to invest the player emotionally in what they are avenging, and at the very least it certainly worked on me. BotW's Princess Zelda is my favorite iteration of the character by a country mile, and that prequel story with her as its focus is the emotional core of BotW. It provides Link's entire lonesome quest with a purpose both dire and beautiful, even if the Champions are a rote and hollow parade of paper-thin anime tropes.

If Tears of the Kingdom has such a core, I have not found it. I'll keep my spoilers contained to the next giant paragraph so that you can skip them if you like, but in my honest opinion, you had might as well just spoil it now. It's not worth the effort.

In the opening hour of Tears of the Kingdom, Link and Zelda are separated by a reawakened, once-defeated Ganondorf, here presented as an imposing, incredible lich-samurai who should absolutely not be speaking with Matt Mercer's most generic monster voice. For the record, I LIKE Matt Mercer. He's got talent, he seems like one of the nicest people alive, and he is definitely just giving Nintendo exactly what they asked him for. The problem is that Nintendo does horrible voice direction on anything that isn't Xenoblade. In BotW I was able to look past Princess Zelda's thick slathering of Mystical Briticism and overly breathy delivery on every line as well as the strange, hollow performances from everyone else, but I just cannot abide this English Ganondorf. In Japanese, Italian, Spanish and German in particular, he sounds absolutely divine. I played in Japanese, and the other performances have helped to crystalize my opinion that what Nintendo has is not a localization problem. Most of the Japanese performances don't feel much different from the English ones in terms of quality. While I understand that Nintendo rarely focuses on highly cinematic games, I am exhausted with this. It really, really is not that hard to get good voicework into your ultra-blockbuster AAAA automatic game-of-the-year releases in 2023, and I can no longer watch Nintendo Directs in English because the kindergarten teachers they hire to read the presentations make me want to crush my own eardrums. Thankfully the soundtrack is about as blessed as ever and benefits from a somewhat reduced focus on the previous game's piano. Of course, Kass's Theme doesn't even play ONCE, so the rules say that the OST gets a zero. Sorry, them's just the numbers. Anyway, the decision to immediately remove Zelda herself as a character in a direct sequel after she's already played her traditional damsel role is depressing for a litany of reasons that I don't think we need to work through right now. It's not exactly an uncommon sentiment. We do however acquire some things in this somewhat unfavorable trade. The first of our boons is a POV character with which to explore this game's equivalent of BotW's memory cutscenes, but rather than character-building emotional resonators, these scenes serve as lore dumps and critical plot information. Too critical in fact, because one of them unceremoniously spoils one of the other acquisitions: A situation wherein Ganondorf is "distracting" Link by having him chase phantoms of Zelda all over Hyrule. In a certain way, this is an interesting perversion of Link and Zelda's eternal relationship, with Link's entire purpose in most games being the chasing after of his princess, and that being predictable and exploitable. It's too bad that any player who is thinking about what's happening AT ALL will realize almost immediately that every image of the princess they come across is an imposter, regardless of whether they bumble into the cutscene that just blurts out the fact that Ganondorf has done exactly this in the past. Whether you find this scene or you just get fed up with how overbearingly thick the game lays it on and figure it out dozens of hours too early, it's going to ruin the reveal at Hyrule Castle either way. It's a shame, because both the concept and the scene itself are rather strong, and if they had been used correctly they could have amounted to a captivating twist. Instead it constantly feels like the story is talking down to its audience, expecting them to be enthralled by the grand mystery of the Princess's behavior and to be completely unable to retain information of any kind. Each generically named dungeon follows the same stifling formula wherein one of Link's friends receives a phone call from their nameless, faceless, personality-less ancestor who bequeaths onto them the power of a sage. In the process of this, each ancestor recounts the exact same information about The Imprisoning War, a plot element which we have imported directly from A Link to the Past rather than try anything new. This same flashback information is then relayed AGAIN when all four initial dungeons are complete and the group settles in one place. I felt, quite sincerely, like I was playing Pokemon Sword or Shield. Across dozens of hours I was being presented with the same redundant information about a paper-thin non-mystery while the game expects me to respond with "The Darkest Day??????" in all the eagerness expected of a child watching Dora the Explorer. I was still receiving these cutscenes and playing hide and seek to "fall into" Ganondorf's trap literally (I've checked my play activity, though these are very rough estimates) over 100 hours after I found the spoiler cutscene, at least 140 hours after I had figured out the plot myself, and about 30 hours after I found the real princess. Finding her, by the way, is the best of our trading spoils. It's a nice re-take on an idea from Skyward Sword that provides one of the only moments of the game I found truly touching. It's also probably the only thing I liked about the memory scene replacements. As I said, this time they serve as lore dumps more than anything else. Zelda is used as a window through which the game can introduce the Zonai, our less cool Sheikah replacement race who provide the lore excuses for a whole new suite of shrines and the presence of fans, tires, and flamethrowers now covering every inch of Hyrule. I do not like them. Breath of the Wild introduced a strange and fascinating version of Hyrule that exists so far down whatever permutation of The Zelda Timeline you believe in that it become newly mysterious. Anything could have happened in that time, and the idea of exploring the lore of a far future, borderline science fiction Hyrule was captivating. Rather than a deeper exploration of that world, TotK feels like a retcon to it. The Zonai may have been teased as some vanished, mysterious tribe in BotW, but this reveal of them as techno-magical goat people from the sky were REALLY behind everything all along and who are ALSO the royalty of this Hyrule which is ALSO not any previous Hyrule but has played out almost EXACTLY like previous Hyrule because we're re-using all the same plot points, feels like an arbitrary pivot rather than a pre-planned direction. It feels as though the Zonai and their war against Ganondorf overwrite BotW, not expand upon it. It is a somewhat petty annoyance, but an annoyance all the same. More importantly, these cutscenes detailing where Zelda ended up, Ganondorf's rise and fall, and the McGuffins around which the plot kind of revolves is all sort of really important information that would be much better told in sequence. That spoiler cutscene for example feels like it's supposed to be a big dramatic twist but divorced from all of its context and build-up it doesn't much feel like anything at all. All of these should really have been split into groups and played after dungeons during the main story, while the "memory" scenes should have been character moments taking place during the gap between games. It is a story that doesn't feel optional enough for this, which is why the bare essentials of it are told to the player literally five times along the main questline, just in case that's their first time hearing it. Sure, you could just... have a flag in the code to check or change how information is distributed... or you could have people go make sandwiches through most of the main story's cutscenes. Fortunately, this story does lead up to a lovely final confrontation, and I would not hesitate to say that the final boss gauntlet of TotK is the best in the series. Considering that BotW has the worst, I'd certainly call that a victory. Ganondorf puts up a true, genuine fight, especially to someone who hasn't been upgrading their armor. It's a great finale... but it's not enough to lift my tremendous shroud of negativity.

Beyond my initial session on the sky plateau, almost every sitting that I spent knocking out shrines and sidequests in TotK felt like a wasted day. It's not even that the shrines are bad, they're really, really not, but in completing most of them I felt nothing. It's easy to say that I should have just gotten on with the main quest, but much like in BotW, that "main" content did not thrill me any more than my shrine and sidequest meanderings. If I had stuck only to those main objectives, I would not feel that I'd had an experience worth $70 any more than I currently do. The shrines at least allowed me to revel in new mechanics, even if I ultimately concluded that they were not to my taste and that I preferred BotW's diversity.

Even with all of the obvious labor that must have gone into it, I respect TotK less than any other Zelda game. I wanted BotW to be rounded out and made whole. I wanted its annoyances smoothed out and more importantly I wanted the traditional underworld half of Zelda's design to reveal itself. I wanted big, dark, vast, ominous puzzle box dungeons like in any of the previous 3D Zeldae, maybe even with such a focus that the overworld became an afterthought. BotW could have become the overworld half of the duology while TotK became the underworld half, fully representing the whole spectrum of Zelda's appeal across two enormous, beautiful games. I wanted Zelda herself to be playable, making for a more interesting story and adding a great new twist into the gameplay. I wanted a meaningfully different story structure that put a new spin on the world and kept me guessing. BotW didn't satisfy all of my wildest dreams either, but what it gave me was so fresh and exciting, so geniusly captivating, that thinking about what could have been just feels like splitting hairs. TotK enters into a world that has already played Breath of the Wild, and I never thought that I would be able to make such a direct comparison between the two. I have made it through all of this text without even once mentioning Majora's Mask and I have done so with good reason, but let me say once, here at the end, that I could not possibly make such a comparison with the N64 duology. BotW and TotK feel very much like two games attempting the same thing, and it is entirely my belief that one of them simply does that thing better. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask are so spiritually and designomatically different that even when they share an engine, an asset library, and a protagonist, they are apples and oranges. Video gaming's news and marketing culture was vastly different in The Year Two Thousand, and so I had neither the time nor the critical faculties to burden Majora's Mask with the specificity of expectation that I had for TotK, but even if I had, I cannot fathom even my stupid eight-year-old childbrain responding to Majora's Mask in the way that I now respond to TotK. I am more than happy to accept a sequel on its own merits, under the power of its own strengths. I am more than happy to accept a masterful video game like Breath of the Wild, even if it isn't quite everything that I'd hoped it could be. Even when I put aside these desires, these things that I WANTED from TotK, I cannot feel that it is capable of standing on its own. TotK's strengths are simply BotW's strengths, and I'm left with what I can only see as an inferior version of a game I'd rather play for a third time, and given its almost infinite potential, coming from a series that even within the confines Link to the Past's endlessly exploitable formula has radically reinvented itself a dozen times over and produced something preciously unique at every turn...

Look. I said from the start that through BotW's inheritance alone, TotK is a decent video game. I meant that. It would also be extremely disingenuous of me to downplay what a humungous gamecrafting achievement it is to make a game this generously huge and then get it running on the Switch even half as well as this thing does. I had a good deal of fun with the shrines, and there were some cool moments sprinkled throughout the main story. I want to make certain that these things are clear, because I cannot mask the fact that my experience with TotK was drench-saturated with disappointment at every turn. The surprises that it offered me were few and unhappy. The tasks which it offered me did not spark joy, and as art it left me utterly unstirred. The fact that I could build an airplane, within a matter of hours, became no more thrilling to me than rotating a tetromino in Tetris. It's just the mechanic by which the game operates and once abandoned by its novelty it is reduced to tiresome execution. It is a game of endless half-satisfactions. It's a few hours of killer and a few hundred hours of filler, and that fills me with cyberpunk dread.

My backlog gets longer every time Aonuma utters the word "formula," because if I am to survive another winter, my cupboards must be full. Now if you will excuse me, I think maybe it's time to get into Baldur's Gate and Armored Core.

On my backloggd account I maintain a list of my personal Game of the Year picks for every year since 1970. Though 2002 comes close because I really, really love Kingdom Hearts 1, no year has caused me more agony than 1998. On the battlefield of my mind, the war between Metal Gear Solid and Ocarina of Time is more vicious than any other. I have torn down both games to the studs in search of an answer that is not rooted in mere nostalgia. I thought that perhaps I had found that answer when I considered OoT's randomizer. It is, after all, one of my absolute favorite things to play. Alas, I cannot give Shigeru Miyamoto credit for total strangers rewriting the code over a decade later without his consent.

Metal Gear Solid is my Game of the Year 1998 because fighting Vulcan Raven is more fun than fighting Twinrova.

FFXVI is an absolute heartbreaker, but like all good heartbreakers, it hurts because it's beautiful. Final Fantasy XVI hits you like a thunderbolt with its first impression and then leaves you sick and wanting. It is a game with a miraculous first third, a worrisome middle, and an empty, frustrating end. It is phenomenally localized (in English at least, I can't speak for languages I don't... speak) and marvelously voice acted at all times. Graphically it is a drop-dead gorgeous work of software, even if it is occasionally stuttered by the understandable frame drops that accompany such visuals. Masayoshi Soken continues to prove himself as Uematsu's truest successor as his scores sell these grand feasts of spectacle in ways that so few others ever could. The thrills of FFXVI's combat are enough to place it above many games in the franchise all by itself, and yet despite all of these many marvels, the halls of FFXVI discourse quake tremorously with the darkest of vibes, and I myself am far from untouched.

FFXVI's actual PLOT, more than its characters, more than its dialogue, and more than any other aspect of its writing, is ultimately its kiss of death. Naturally I will refrain from running down my long list of specific missed opportunities, fumbled setups, and outright refusals to explore interesting and important subjects, as this is a spoiler free review. I will however, make sweeping generalized statements about how the script seemingly finds the least interesting possible way to resolve almost every thread the early game so beautifully sets up. Almost every easy lay-up manages to miss the net, and it leaves me genuinely stunned. Its themes are so rote, so mechanically ham-handedly shallow that I spent most of the finale in audible groans. When I say this I am not drawing comparisons to Game of Thrones, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Kaiju films, or any of FFXVI's other legendary inspirations. I'm comparing it to other Final Fantasy games. Truthfully this franchise has some of the best endings in the business. Final Fantasies VI, IX, X, XV, and even many of XI and XIV's expansions by this same team nail their deeply emotional landings so gracefully and flawlessly that they make the end of XVI look like something hastily scrawled in the back of a middle schooler's notebook. It is so trite and inelegant that I fail to enjoy it even on a schlock level. Truly, Final Fantasy XVI is the Fast 8 of the franchise. It is big and dumb and loud and... fun, and awesome.

Much internet text has already been spilled over whether or not FFXVI's combat is Devil May Cry Enough. Devil May Cry is of course renowned for its intrinsically exhilarating combo-based, incredibly flexible combat and its sky-high skill ceiling. To master Devil May Cry V is to study an art. FFXVI's naked imports of Nero's grabby hand, enemy step, helm splitter, stinger, devil trigger and more has led some to declare it as "literally Devil May Cry" and others to bristle at any comparison between the two at all, considering the perceived shallowness to be an insult to or lack of understanding of Devil May Cry. This is much ado about nothing. No, FFXVI is not "literally" Devil May Cry, but it has so much shared DNA that to chastise those making comparisons to it is definite hair-splitting. No, FFXVI does not have "only one combo." It has one basic, bread and butter, build-agnostic combo with tiny variations and a lot of equipable cooldown-based abilities that can be used to extend combos according to the situation at hand. Yes, the skill ceiling is lower because you can't have like ten different weapons with completely different combo sets available on your character at all times. You have to tailor a loadout specific to what you're trying to do. That's the RPG part. After some 50 hours that bread and butter combo definitely starts to feel like not quite enough butter spread over just a little too much bread, but FFXVI is not TRYING to be "literally Devil May Cry", and it's succeeding pretty damned well at exactly what its trying to be. Unfortunately that's not RPG enough for people who didn't get over this stuff back in FFXIII and it's not action enough for DMC mavens... but then again neither is Kingdom Hearts 2, another great action RPG.

Personally, I just wish there was something else to do besides fighting. After also being Full of Shit on The Diversity Issue instead of just owning up to it, Yoshi-P infamously joked (and it was a joke, please chill the fuck out) about the main character of FFXVI having more important things to do than play Blitzball. There has since been a great deal of fixation on a perceived insult to specifically Blitzball (which he only used because it's the example the interviewer cited in the question) rather than the underlying bullshit excuse about Clive being too busy for minigame induced variety. Countless sidequests in this game involve Clive collecting literal dirt, picking literal flowers, traveling halfway across the world to get a bone for his dog to chew on, or just picking up deliveries for his supporting cast when sending anyone else would do just fine. There are extremely obvious times and an extremely obvious place wherein Clive could SO EASILY sit down for a game of setting-appropriate cards with ANY of these characters. Triple Triad would have fit here about a thousand times more gracefully than it does in Final Fantasy VIII. One of the chief reasons that I consider FFXIV to be a better game is because it DOES include these kinds of diversions, even if the quest design of both games is functionally identical. Every quest enters formally into the player's log and involves either talking to a few people, gathering some objects off the ground, fighting some enemies, or some combination of the three. Main quests alternate between show-stopper FFXIV dungeon setpieces (linear environments with bespoke, well designed boss encounters preceded and followed by lavish cutscenes) and the same low-rent filler stuff as the sidequests. I tend not to complain much about sidequests in games, as they are in fact designed to be optional. If you love the game and want an excuse to play more of it, that's what they're there for, just like trophies and/or achievements. Once it becomes a baseline part of any main playthrough however, this becomes a very different conversation. FFXIV gets away with this for multiple reasons. It's an MMO, and the sheer volume of content, the cooperative online novelty, and frankly a lower bar of expectation in the genre makes people far more accepting of that filler. MMOs are marathons, and most players approach them with this understanding. However even as a Final Fantasy XIV player TRYING to convince themselves that they're playing an FFXIV expansion, there are some very important details that render this "one of the bad ones." In modern FFXIV, those kinds of MSQ sections almost always either take place in areas that are new to the player or precipitate some kind of big and interesting development in the story, whether that's an emotional character moment or a climactic plot turn. FFXVI by contrast often sends the player pinging back and forth through tired, familiar locales for the sake of uninteresting drudgery that is not worth the trip. So many of these sections add almost nothing to the overarching story and are only mandatory because some detail must (in the writer's eyes) be laboriously established before it can play into the main plot in some minor way. This is exhausting, and contrasts immensely with the game's grand-slam opening chapters and its occasional over-the-top spectacle setpieces. The sandwich makes the valleys deeper and places greater burdens on the peaks, which often fail to pay off the debt they've been handed, even if they'd be welcomed in isolation.

These story troughs and their matching sidequests are absurdly overwritten. This has come to be a creative signature of Creative Business Unit 3. It is an issue shared by both FFXI and FFXIV. While the dialogue is perfectly competent and does deliver its emotional punches when it needs to, there's simply way the fuck too much of it. Situations that require at most five good lines instead revel in a grossly unnecessary twenty or thirty. It makes SKIPPING that dialogue a near necessity, because listening in full to each fully voiced line is certain to wear the player down to the point that they just skip the sidequests entirely and stop paying attention. This would be a tremendous shame, as the sidequest chains contain essential characterization and tender moments with a supporting cast that otherwise feels bland, lifeless, and underdeveloped. In FFXIV players have the luxury of knowing when to pay attention because any such conversation will be voiced, while anything they don't need to care about is not. In Final Fantasy XVI, almost every single line is voiced, and it frankly feels rude to skip through such expert voicework. Those who always let these experts finish their business however might be claimed by old age before they finish the game.

One such supporting cast member exists to facilitate the crafting system, because Square Enix is definitely not above the pernicious misunderstanding that every single AAA video game REQUIRES some sort of tacked on crafting bullshit in order to succeed. The crafting in FFXVI certainly does not get in the player's way, but that's because it's barely there at all. Crafting materials are the main resource that is found from treasure chests and enemy drops out in the world, and thus should theoretically be used as an incentive for thorough exploration. Unfortunately almost all of these materials are functionally worthless, and accumulating mountains of them will avail the player nothing. There is almost nothing to craft, the recipes don't use many materials, and the game drops free equipment upgrades in your lap so frequently that any boosts earned from crafted gear feel completely trivial... until one gets further down the hunt board. Specific, unique, one-time materials from clearing hunts do combine into worthwhile equipment, but the hunts are clearly arranged into tiers based on when they become available anyway, so the reward could just as easily have been given for clearing each tier. The hunt rewards are just funneled through the crafting system to give it a reason for existing. Does this bother me? In a superficial, petty way, yes. Is it anywhere near as detrimental to the game as its plot or its pacing? Definitely not... but it speaks to a broader issue.

Final Fantasy XVI wears the trappings of many things. It's a Kaiju Mecha Game of Thrones Devil May Cry that revolves around crystals, has crafting, swears a lot, and does the big graphics. Those are some extremely cool things... but FFXVI just feels like a fan of each of them, not a creator in its own right. It's a celebration of those things but it doesn't seem to fully understand any of them, and doesn't have anything insightful to say. In what may very well have been a bid to appear more adult, FFXVI accidentally reveals its shallow childishness in front of the whole school... and yet I can think of at least five less competent Final Fantasies just off the top of my head.

Digimon Survive is an attempt on my life. I know not who I have angered at Bandai Namco nor what I have done to deserve such attention, but I have clearly been designated TWTL: Too Wild To Live. I can summon no better explanation for this game and the specificity of its many faults. Someone wants me dead, and they have invested several million dollars into enacting my subtle doom.

I shall not go quietly into this long night. I will not be defeated by Digimon Survive. If I am to be silenced by such a neurotoxin, my enemies will need to up my dosage.

Let me explain.

I have been an ardent lover of Digimon since the English dub of Digimon Adventure (the original show, to ye outsiders) first aired on the Fox Kids Network in 1999. I was seven years old, and had been raised primarily by Pokemon and Power Rangers. From that day until this one, my loving has not lapsed. I have watched Adventure and Tamers a half-dozen times each. On my desk sit an etsy-made tag and Crest of Friendship and a classic 90's style Digimon V-pet. Every day I am pierced by needles of guilt as I remember that my plush Terriermon languishes in a large cardboard box rather than on proud display in this too-small apartment bedroom. It has only been a few days since I unboxed my Vital Bracelet. I have played and loved numerous visual novels. I have played and loved even more tactical RPGs. I am as ripe and juicy a specimen of this Digimon product's target demographic as I was for Digimon Adventure in 1999.

Somehow, against all odds, this is not what any of us wanted... but we'll talk about that later. First, a great deal of positivity.

Digimon Survive is drop-dead gorgeous, and the Japanese voice cast delivers their absolute best. Even as someone who does not speak Japanese (yet... every day my power grows) their delivery enhances the experience. The soundtrack is of similar quality. With regard to presentation and aesthetic, I have nothing but good things to say about Digimon Survive.

It may surprise you, reader-of-reviews, to know that I have no significant criticism of Digimon Survive's combat either. Unlike nearly every other voice I have heard on the topic, I feel that the turn-based tactical battles of Digimon Survive perform their function adequately. They are far from the thrills of a Fire Emblem or X-COM, but they are not entirely without strategy. Due to a semi-automatic frontal guard function, good positioning is critical to success, both offensively and defensively. Later in the game when more significant AoE options become available, the proper usage of unusual attack patterns tends to actually pay off. The Digivolution mechanics and steep cost of attack skills can create situations where resource management may suddenly become an actual factor. These battles are nothing spectacular and usually devolve into circling an opponent and using each Digimon's single unique attack on the target's flank ad nauseum, but there is more going on than many seem to give them credit for. Just don't expect much interesting map design. The real misfortune that befalls the combat is the repetition that ensues in the latter third of the story, where a lack of enemy variety and the circumstances of the plot make battles feel more like filler than ever before. I admit, it's possible that playing the atrocious Digimon games on the Wonderswan has made me more forgiving.

The localization, to no one's great surprise, is flawed. Digimon pronouns seem to be pulled blindly from a hat at least once per scene, and typos abound for the observant eye. Some sentences appear confused as to whom they are supposed to concern. That said, it is the best Digimon video game localization that I have yet seen. It is free of Cyber Sleuth's regular descensions into gibbering madness and sudden, permanent adoptions of baffling, unexplained nicknames. It is far from the flat, lifeless utility of Digimon World 3 or the vague, laughable nonsense of Digimon World 1. It brings believable color to its characters and inflicts no serious damage.

Those characters, in fact, are my favorite part of the game. Unfortunately, this markdown environment does not provide me the tools necessary to insert an enormous asterisk behind that statement. We'll talk about that in a minute. For now, let me confess that I love Digimon Survive's characters and that I want them to be happy. They are written with likability, believability, and depth. This is why it is such an awful, horrible shame for them to be imprisoned in so terrible a plot.

Chapter 1 is beautifully executed. Anyone claiming that it starts too sluggishly is a fool. It is an exquisitely slow burn that accomplishes all of the plot's necessary business while establishing a great deal of characterization and perfectly demonstrating the potential this story has. These moments of brilliance evaporate all too soon.

I have not marked this review with a spoiler warning. This is because there is one immensely dire warning that I must give to potential buyers of Digimon Survive, and those prospective consumers would otherwise be deterred by such a barrier.

Heed me reader: Your choices will not and cannot affect this plot in any way that even approaches significance. Character deaths on the first playthrough are pre-ordained. There are no branching paths worthy of the classification until the last third of the game, at which point the player is presented with exactly one crossroads. The circumstances of this single choice and its results have no logical basis on any previous actions by the player, nor even the choice supposedly being made in that very moment. The "choice" as presented doesn't even fit my definition of the word. A second playthrough on a cleared file allows for one additional branch which was previously locked, and tells you exactly how to get there. Despite a very similar premise and the tantalizing whispers of the game's marketing, Digimon Survive is absolutely not Until Dawn. It is not The Quarry. It is not Detroit: Become Human. Digimon Survive has never heard of a flowchart. Please make your purchasing decision with these facts in mind. Let it be known that I disagree immensely with the design decisions behind this structure, and that I harbor an extreme distaste for the writing that comprises most of the game's plot, as well as a belief that it would be more enjoyable to someone who has never seen a Digimon in their lives than someone like me.

From this point onward, I will speak openly about the game's plot. For those who still wish to see the game with unspoiled eyes, I offer this as your off-ramp. I accept no responsibility for those who choose to stay.

The first half of Digimon Survive suffers from a particular illness... one that is hugely exacerbated by the absence of choice. Starting as early as the prologue, the story adopts a pattern. Ryo's character becomes irrational, irritating, and highly repetitive, and then after a few chapters of putting up with him, dies. Immediately after Ryo's death, the position is filled by Shuuji. Immediately after Shuuji's death, Minoru gets hired for the job. I recognized Ryo as a time bomb almost instantly, and took every opportunity the game offered me to stabilize his situation. When he died anyway, I wrote it off as a "tutorial death." I found it reasonable that this one idiot who had completely closed himself off would be unreceptive to any player outreach, and would be unsalvageable in order to demonstrate to both the player and the characters that death is a possibility. I fully expected to be greeted at the start of the next chapter with a tutorial pop-up, saying "From now on kids can die, so don't guck up!" The pop-up did not arrive. I found this concerning.

The next to flip their lunatic switch was Shuuji, and his was by far the hardest to endure. Shuuji has already developed his overtly abusive relationship with his Digimon and his toxic relationship with the group as early as chapter 3. It will not develop or change until his death in the very last moments of chapter 5. Until then, the player will have no choice but to watch as Shuuji creates the same problems over and over, leading to the same redundant conversations. It contributes to an overarching problem wherein the script is somehow more padded than that of Persona 5. I believe that literally about 50% of the written lines in Digimon Survive could be cut, and it would make for a better product. Takuma provides so much clumsy, unnecessary internal monologue before any given "choice" that by the time options have been presented I have usually forgotten what the context of the question even was. Almost every single chapter after chapter 3 feels overly drawn out, and by the end of the game I was mashing the text-advance button by default, rather than in rare moments of great annoyance. No time was ever worse however than when Shuuji still lived.

It is so unspeakably infuriating to know exactly what the problem is, and be prevented from fixing it for no apparent reason, while an illusion of choice is simultaneously dangled before you. Some of this is narratively intended. The player is absolutely expected to hate Shuuji by the start of the chapter in which he finally dies. The other characters have followed suit, finally becoming almost as tired of this as you are. This is no excuse. I found chapter 5 to be a tedious exercise in abject misery, and to say that I was distressed at the start of chapter 6 to see the pattern beginning anew with Minoru would be a gross understatement. I panicked at the idea that this was how the entire rest of the game would play out. One character at a time suddenly and abruptly losing all of their sense, being as irritating as possible for as long as possible, and then triggering another repetition with their demise.

Thankfully, mercifully, this is not the case... but the case is no more interesting. From the midway point of chapter 6, Digimon Survive gives up on any sort of originality and becomes an even more saccharine Digimon Adventure. The game's latter half is as tropey as it possibly could be, and as a result bored me to tears. I sincerely believe that a non-Digimon fan would have a better time with it. Unfortunately, as established at the top of this overwrought nonsense, I am in fact, a Digimon fan. I recognized Arukenimon at first glance. I identified the full past and future of Garurumon's character the moment he appeared on screen. As soon as Takuma appeared once again in "the real world" my brain auto-completed the entire rest of the chapter, because I have seen this episode of Digimon Adventure at least half a dozen times and it is played completely straight. No new twist on any ideas presented, nothing new done with the concept, no subversion of a fan's expectations. After the player makes a ridiculous non-decision which somehow cosmically and randomly alters the events that will play out over the last few chapters, Takuma returns to find that The Big Twist is that we're now adapting (poorly, clumsily) the end of Digimon Tamers rather than Adventure. I first chose the moral ending and received an ending that was about as cliche as any Digimon product could possibly be, written with the sensibilities of a children's cartoon.

Digimon Survive's actual maturity level in its writing is at least as low as the glorified toy commercial I watched as a child, and nowhere near the eventual heights Digimon Tamers. It feels like a fanfiction written by a fifteen-year-old, where occasional darkness is wielded for shock value, but the writer doesn't know what else to do with it, so these pockets of edge are sprinkled across the piece to give an illusion of depth. The opportunity to speak to a late-twenties, early-thirties, Persona playing Digimon-loving audience is completely and utterly wasted by serving up only watered down versions of that which they have already seen, and in most cases doing it unartfully.

Taking the "moral" route (nonsense names, by the way) results in the player experiencing the whole "illusory doppelganger attacks your insecurities" trope THREE SEPERATE TIMES over the course of the game, providing a conveniently direct means of exposition or demonstrating character development instead of just... having the characters interact with each other in ways that subtly demonstrate such things. To be honest the characters don't interact with each other very much in general. Pairs are formed early and persist through the whole game. Aoi hangs out with Saki. Kaito stays glued to Miu. Minoru hangs out alone waiting for you to show up and be his friend. Miu and Aoi never talk. Minoru doesn't develop any kind of friendship with Kaito. The pairs have been chosen. The pairs must be obeyed. Unless they are core to a character's arc (Kaito and Miu) dynamics between characters essentially never change, contributing to the phenomenon of characters somehow having the same conversations over and over again.

For all of these many reasons, Digimon Survive became my personal hell. I have yelled at my screen while mashing through molasses. I have launched verbal tirades aloud against characters I am otherwise unable to affect. I have gone from elation at the mature take on Digimon Adventure shown to me by the first three chapters to crushed by the sheer maddening mediocrity of it all. My brain has done cartwheels over these last few weeks as the emotional whiplash has rocked my skull, and still I am not finished. While I already know what's in them, I haven't played all of the endings for myself yet, and I cannot rest until I have. It saddens me to know that I landed on the least interesting ending, but it saddens me more to consider the game as a whole. I reached the point of disgust long before that ending split, and no ending will redeem the crippling problems that Digimon Survive suffers as a narrative game. I will return soon to finish this battle, armed with a functional skip button and replenished patience, but for now I shall take comfort in knowing that despite their best efforts, Bandai Namco has failed to extinguish me. Better luck next time, corporation.

URGENT: For the love of god, play the PS1 original, not the PSP version. I have deleted the log that I originally posted here and am re-posting this now in hopes of getting eyes on this and counterbalancing any misunderstanding that it may have propagated. As it turns out, the entire crux of my disappointment with Innocent Sin is the PSP version's doing.

On PSP, REGARDLESS of difficulty selection, Innocent Sin's gameplay is a desert one must cross to reach the oases of its wonderful story. On PS1, Innocent Sin's battles are NOT exclusively a waste of your time! It's NOT a small difference! It turns out that the auto-battle system used to NOT SUCK, and there used to be some modicum of ACTUAL TENSION in some of the fights!!! I honestly feel cheated by having the PSP version taint my first experience! The PS1 version is as good as the PSP version of Eternal Punishment, maybe even better!

It's not a simple matter of being "too easy." The PSP version of Innocent Sin traps you in a position where the encounter rate is disruptively high and then presents you with two options for achieving the forgone conclusion of your victory in any of these encounters:

Option 1: Navigate the menus for each character every turn and tell them each to do the obviously optimal thing every turn with no interesting variations because the only thing enemies can do in their own defense is annoy you but they have too much health to courteously die in a timely fashion,

or Option 2: Press Triangle and sit patiently while the game resolves the encounter on its own in the slowest, most painful way possible, including all of the bosses, with pretty much complete, unquestionable safety.

On the PS1, the game is DESIGNED around a WAY better auto-battle system, and things can actually hurt you, so you have to pay attention! Even if the fights aren't much more interesting on PS1, they fly by so much faster that it's hard to complain about them. It's still by no means difficult, but it at least provides Final Fantasy levels of combat engagement now! In fact, the game clicks into place in almost the exact same ways that a PS1 Final Fantasy game does, as a breezy trip through a meticulously told and thematically resonant story, with gameplay that doesn't turn any heads, but doesn't get in the way of a good time either.

It feels at least slightly insane to bump Innocent Sin from the lowly score it had all the way up to this, but everything wrong with it is in its gameplay mechanics, and on PS1 almost everything I held against the PSP version is a non-issue. It still doesn't sit right with me that the easiest path through the game means never even setting foot in the Velvet Room, and having to grind out demon negotiations if you choose to use it sucks, but compared to my previous problems of constant, meaningless, tedious encounters, that's practically nothing.

Am I willing to give it the full-on five star treatment? Not quite. The design is still too shaky for that. Aside from the Velvet Room thing, money and SP still grow on trees in a way that makes dungeoneering and shopping even less interesting than it is in, say, Final Fantasy VII, and something like materia is enough to blow this implementation of the Velvet Room out of the water.

The question is, will Eternal Punishment bring enough tension back into the battles to overpower those other flaws and win my full marks?

EDIT... again:
The balance is fine. I'm nearing the end of my replay on PS1 now, and I've totally come around on the battle system and its balance. The gap between PS1 Innocent Sin and PSP Eternal Punishment is small, and there's no need for Eternal Punishment to "fix" it. I have however decided that yeah, I do have to dock a bit for pacing reasons. The beginning of the game absolutely knocks it out of the park, but the middle drags. It really does start wearing you down when Lisa's spotlight arc plays out across three of the blander dungeons with only brief glimpses of story in between them. The mundane setting plays a hand in this, because while it may be interesting to see a game turn an exercise gym into a dungeon, it ends up being the fifth or sixth "normal building" dungeon the player has navigated in a row. On top of this... like, the air raid shelter just sorta sucks, dude. Not letting you save before you fight King Leo after you just did a whole dungeon and a bunch of cutscenes? Also sucks. I think there are enough low points here to hold this back from really trading blows with something like Final Fantasy VII or even IX. I guess this really IS an alternate universe Final Fantasy VIII...

Edit AGAIN:
So at the end of this journey, of my many initial criticisms, the following still stand:
-The third or so of the game after the first two hours drags.
-Minor setpiece groaning about King Leo and Air Raid shelter.
-Negotiation sucks and isn't fun to grind so Velvet Room rots.
-For MOST of the game SP is a non-factor (not endgame).

That's... not a long list, and the impact of everything on it isn't really much bigger than say, the overbloated animations and trance system failures of FFIX, another game that I've recently decided I can't deny a spot in the five-star club. The honest truth is that Innocent Sin is so cosmically far ahead of its time in terms of writing that it should take a lot more than that petty list of grievances to lower its standing.

Let it be known that I was not born a hater of L.A. Noire.

The entire concept appeals to me. Detective fiction is one of my favorite flavors. I am a great lover of video games that heavily feature immersive conversations. I prefer period pieces and more fantastical settings to the doldrums of life on present Earth. I have had little experience with Rockstar but know them via a profound reputation for quality, and nobody has ever played another video game by Team Bondi.

Not only would I say that I entered with no biases against L.A. Noire, I would say that I am the exact audience for it.

When I first started playing I was quickly smitten with the actor's in-game performances and the mechanics of crime scene investigation. I praised the multitudes of meaningless junk items that littered each crime scene because investigation should be about finding that which is significant, not just interacting with everything the game allows. The use of music and chimes to denote the existence of unclaimed clues struck me as clever and quite probably necessary. When the game first let me into a vehicle I was happy to obey every traffic law and immerse myself on the way to each objective. This roleplaying did not last. It could not last.

By the time I finished my work at the Vice desk I was so far ejected from the game that I was earning the lowest possible case ranking on purpose, out of sheer, seething spite.

There are no consequences to any action in L.A. Noire other than the possible reduction of that post-mission score. Unless the protagonist dies in a hail of gunfire or loses track of their target when tailing or chasing, they cannot fail, and in those instances the only penalty is that they may need to repeat approximately thirty seconds of gameplay. Failing to correctly intuit the broken, nonsensical logic of the spectacularly terrible interrogation interface does not change anything. Ever. The player will always receive the information that they need to continue the case, even if a suspect has to blurt it out for no sensible reason. If there appear to be two possible culprits in a case, feel free to book whichever one you find more offensive. The script has already decided that they are both the wrong answer, and there is no possibility in this case of finding the right one.

This puts the player at a terrible crossroads. One breed of player will accept the post-case grading system as sufficient motivation, and will try their best to make sense of the stupid idiot moon logic that L.A. Noire requires from the player to earn their perfect score. I have played every Ace Attorney game and two out of three mainline Danganronpas. Not one of those games features as many instances of arbitrary nonsense as L.A. Noire. Ever since the birth of that thrice-damned fools-lauded conversation wheel back in Mass Effect 1, these sorts of AAA games have been horrifically fumbling the roleplayer's intent as it travels from human to machine, and L.A. Noire does it even worse than most. In a good roleplaying game (do not start with me on whether or not L.A. Noire is a roleplaying game) the player is constantly asking themselves: "What do I want to do?" In a bad roleplaying game the player constantly asks themselves: "What does THE GAME want me to do?"

It did not take long for me to decide that L.A. Noire's interrogation system did not deserve the pleasure of my learning how to put up with it. In fact, it reminded me quite viscerally of my life in college, my every action graded by a rubric I did not respect and did not feel represented my interests in any way. I began to feel insulted, as if L.A. Noire were asking me to figure out when to use its stupid doubt button as a sign of submission. So that it could reward me with idiot points, signifying nothing but my obedience.

I still have no idea whether I'm supposed to actually take the context into account or if I'm just supposed to press the doubt button every time a character behaves in a way that no corporeal being ever has, and I refuse to learn. This is not how human beings behave, and thus no social ability I might bring to this game would avail me anything.

I ran down Roy Earle with his own car at least seven times because it was the only agency I had and because I was sick and tired of being surrounded by horrible, insufferable people who have to die. I did as much damage to his car as I possibly could on purpose, and pressed whatever button I damn well pleased in every conversation. What I'm saying is that when I reached the crossroads, I went left... barreling down Hater's Lane.

The moment the illusion shattered and I realized the utter absence of stakes, the floodgates opened. I went from driving patiently and in character to maxing out the gas pedal and road raging at any car I couldn't dodge. I became even more annoyed at the repetitive, ridiculous barks of NPCs than I already was. Not only has every single citizen of pre-television L.A. heard of Cole Phelps, That Cop Who Won The Medal And Is Solving All The Cases, they recognize him on sight without fail, and MUST announce the fact.

I was able to engage with maybe one third of the game's cases. The overly episodic nature of the story turns the characters in most of the cases into meaningless nobodies and their problems into something transient and ephemeral. Many of the cases are so repetitive that even if there were any stakes involved with the gameplay, it would be difficult for many players to become as invested as they should ideally be.

Firefights are always forced and no participant can ever be taken alive. Fistfights can be cleared simply by mashing the A button. Scenario design is frequently unclear which can lead to players having no idea what they're supposed to be doing, even if they haven't fallen victim to the game's many bugs. The PC Remaster crashed on me at least four times.

Not only do the GAME parts of L.A. Noire add nothing positive to the experience, they actively get in its way at virtually every turn. In my world, this earns something the title of "A Bad Video Game" by default. If removing the video game from your video game would improve it, you have made a bad video game, and should have made a movie instead. The problem of course is that by the nature of the medium, video games almost never pull off non-interactive stories better than film does and L.A. Noire doesn't manage it either. Almost all of the meat in the game's plot plays out in the last five hours and the writing is not above some serious criticism.

If you're coming to L.A. Noire looking for a good video game, don't. If you're coming to L.A. Noire for a good Noir story, I'd recommend you just watch or read some of the great Noir fiction of other media. If you insist on getting a fairly robust Noir story from a not exactly fun video game, I recommend you reach for Grim Fandango instead.