GrooviestPine
A pretty obviously great game that I admire more than I actually like. It's doing so many cool things mechanically and it's by far the most interesting of its particular wave of western (or I guess western-style) open world RPGs. I love that it makes adventuring feel actually like adventuring, where you have to do at least a little planning to make sure you're properly stocked and avoid traveling after dusk, and fast travel is heavily downplayed. And it obviously has way better combat than any other game of its ilk. But that combat also kinda feels a lot of the time like playing Monster Hunter with people who have never played Monster Hunter before. And the story is just a big fat nothing, and barely any characters have any life to them, and the map turned out to be smaller and emptier than I expected at the outset, and the world (and worldbuilding) is mostly extremely boilerplate western high fantasy. It got my attention again when it got weird in the postgame, but...I dunno. I get why most interesting game-likers I know and/or follow on the Internet love this game, and I wish I liked it more, but it's just kinda not for me. Maybe the sequel will do the trick. whenever that comes out.
2021
Some really great ideas that end up surprisingly tedious in execution, hampered further by the worst, most tryhard-y Joss Whedon-ass banter I've encountered in a video game in a while. This was my first Arkane game and I gotta say...THIS is the studio that people go so nuts over?
2018
Looks great on an OLED!
2021
A game made for a modern console in 2021 that somehow looks and performs worse than other games in the series from two console generations ago. It's somewhat decent as a farming game, messy and frustrating as a life sim, and absolute dogshit as an ARPG, but for some reason I mostly enjoyed my time with it anyway. The fact that it's the first Rune Factory game that let me be gay went a long way toward papering over some of its issues for me, but it's also that Rune Factory remains one of the few (if not the only) farming RPG series where the townspeople have personalities strong enough that they're actually fun to talk to and hang out with.
Not sure I could ever describe this as a good game (I'm not even going to get into how bad its storytelling is, or how badly it handles its own worldbuilding) but I don't regret the nearly 100 hours I put into it. But jeez louise, have a better handle on what you're doing for RF6.
Not sure I could ever describe this as a good game (I'm not even going to get into how bad its storytelling is, or how badly it handles its own worldbuilding) but I don't regret the nearly 100 hours I put into it. But jeez louise, have a better handle on what you're doing for RF6.
2018
Really terrific shmup that I just didn't have the time to invest the energy to get good at. Will definitely come back to it though.
Trying to figure out why this game feels so uninspired when I loved the previous Rocket Slime so much. For one thing it's maddeningly repetitive; every non-"level" location in the game has the same exact layout. Got about ten hours in and realized I was still doing pretty much the same exact stuff I was doing the first hour, with the only variation being how each stage looks. The large-scale fights are still pretty fun but...I dunno. Aesthetic changes aside (a graphical upgrade, and you now fight with boats instead of mechs) it's really just kind of more of the same, with minimal tweaks or improvements. I remember there being a "town restoration" element in Rocket Slime that made for a good hook to keep building toward; the only driving force in the time I spent on this game was a bog-standard "collect all the crystals before the bad guys do" plot. Kind of a bore, really.
Really liked the first one, thought I wanted more, turns out maybe I don't. It's fine. Good take on Miles Morales, story's a bit haphazardly plotted and paced, runs great on PS5. I dunno.
Played this from start to finish at a Gameworks (RIP) in Schaumburg, Illinois in the summer of 2003. Some other kid came up about 10 minutes into my run and joined me, and we played through the whole thing together while barely saying a word to each other, just this weird and kinda great communal experience. Eventually he had to leave and I said bye and we never saw each other again. I wonder how he's doing now.
I don't remember if this game's any good or not. Who cares.
I don't remember if this game's any good or not. Who cares.
1994
The vibes in this game are off the dang charts
The second dumbest Persona game after Dancing All Night. Very strange feeling to be playing an M-rated game that feels like it was written for children.
This review contains spoilers
I knew going in that this is generally considered the worst FFXIV expansion but I really did not expect this to get as bad as it gets. Centering the narrative around the liberation of Ala Mhigo/Doma isn't necessarily bad on paper but the Garleans had grown insufferably dull by the end of ARR and they don't do much to make them more interesting here. Also kind of thoughtless with the way it depicts Zenos as this all-powerful force of nature that even my WoL can't hope to face until the very end. If I'm capable of defeating countless primals, and Zenos bests me without trouble throughout 90% of Stormblood's MSQ, then why do the Garleans have such trouble beating primals? Just throw Zenos at them, crikey.
So much in this expansion that's inexplicable. Why is Lyse, someone who didn't even grow up in Ala Mhigo, the de facto protagonist when Raubahn is right there? Why did they put the least compelling character in this entire game at the center of this narrative? Spending 4.0 following around someone who spends most of her time onscreen talking down to oppressed people about their own oppression is just not a very fun time, I gotta say.
And then the Stormblood patch MSQ is just actively rancid, the kind of bad writing that's not only stupid and lazy but reveals something poisonous about the worldview of the people who wrote it. Genuinely could not believe how bad the end of Yotsuyu's arc is.
The stars are for the maps, some of the worldbuilding (the Azim Steppe in particular), the raids, and the music. On to Shadowbringers I guess. Sure hope this picks up soon. If this game makes me deal with another fucking primal I am unsubbing on the spot.
EDIT: finally played through the raids and I'm upping this half a star because damn the side content in this game is good. Doesn't excuse how shitty the rest of it is though.
So much in this expansion that's inexplicable. Why is Lyse, someone who didn't even grow up in Ala Mhigo, the de facto protagonist when Raubahn is right there? Why did they put the least compelling character in this entire game at the center of this narrative? Spending 4.0 following around someone who spends most of her time onscreen talking down to oppressed people about their own oppression is just not a very fun time, I gotta say.
And then the Stormblood patch MSQ is just actively rancid, the kind of bad writing that's not only stupid and lazy but reveals something poisonous about the worldview of the people who wrote it. Genuinely could not believe how bad the end of Yotsuyu's arc is.
The stars are for the maps, some of the worldbuilding (the Azim Steppe in particular), the raids, and the music. On to Shadowbringers I guess. Sure hope this picks up soon. If this game makes me deal with another fucking primal I am unsubbing on the spot.
EDIT: finally played through the raids and I'm upping this half a star because damn the side content in this game is good. Doesn't excuse how shitty the rest of it is though.
2022
Pretty neat intro to the Playdate, but...even though I know the platform is built for bite-sized experiences I wish there was a little more to this.
2021
Will probably come back to this someday, but after the immensely tedious first twenty hours (spread out across nearly six months, lol) it'll take some doing for it to get back on my good side. Atlus' attempt at more open level design absolutely sucks; not a single Da'at area so far has felt good to either traverse or explore. And the actual map screen is already mildly unhelpful without the abscesses making it borderline unusable. And the combat, so gratifyingly snappy and quick in IV, is outright sluggish here, making even the slightest attempt at grinding into a massive chore. Really, outside the music and the wonderfully written dialogue for the demons, there's very little in this game that I actually like, which is a huge bummer. I preordered the huge collectors edition and everything so it's not like I didn't want to love it. Some friends tell me it gets much better around the thirty hour mark, but I'm so bored and annoyed with it right now that I'm really not willing to give it more benefit of the doubt, at least for the time being.
2022
The best open world I've ever encountered--moreso than any other open world game, and moreso than any other modern Fromsoft game, this thing feels like a journey, where I've truly gone through so much by the end of the game that I feel like a different person than the one I was when I started. Gargantuan, beautiful, brutal, and honestly more terrifying than an outright horror game like Bloodborne. Masterpiece.
I played this in early 2013 when you had to play with Games for Windows Live. DSFix didn't come out until I was most of the way through. Y'all think you know pain? You don't know pain.