I found myself actively paying attention to it, during both gameplay and story, so it's better than Diablo 3 all across the board.

It was fun over a free weekend trial. But I'm not buying a $70 premium currency storefront that wants me to treat it like a 2nd job / smack habit.

People are still playing the latest giant-ass tentpole fantasy titles by the likes of Larian and FromSoft; not because they're built around marketing-driven habit-forming FOMO hooks, but because they're cool games that are fun to play.

Maybe the real horror was the predatory practices that watered down the media experience along the way.

History continues to vindicate Tekken 4. It was risky, it was bold, it was big-time mechanically borked.

It didn't matter how unbalanced everything was; everybody looked great. No fighting character before or since has had a fit as rad as King's 2P outfit.

Fights moved out from abstract arcade arenas and into recognizable places, with walls and uneven floors and destructible obstacles. Everything was more tangible; no more giant robots or ancient gods of fighting--the final showdown was us in a cage match, beating the stock options out of an evil megacorp's old-ass CEO.

Can generational trauma be unlearned, like forgetting a cursed family karate style? Is it worth avenging a fallen mentor, if you have to abandon your principals to do it? Is it possible for pepper beef to be too spicy?

Like its aesthetics and soundtrack and gameplay, Tekken 4's story tried stuff, man. And even though most of it didn't stick and was immediately walked back by Tekken 5, it still pushed the entire series into interesting new directions.

It's good, it's a classic, it holds up.

But, I dunno--what I loved about the original Diablo was feeling like a doomed adventurer delving deeper and deeper down into a hostile hell far from the safety of the surface.

The impersonal art style and isometric camera, the chunky echoey sound design and tension-building music, the nervous NPCs back in town and the horrible gore and demons waiting underneath them; everything worked together to build a fantasy horror that grew from gloom to the creeps to pandemonium the further down we went.

Diablo II still does a lot of that. And I appreciate the grimdark theme of evil being something which can't really be beaten, only delayed, as previous people and places from the first game reappear as ruins of themselves. And sure, there's lots of cool new characters and items and spells and stuff, and the soundtrack still slaps.

But Diablo 2 is where randomized loot and item sets and painstakingly fishing through guides for crafting recipes to complete required optimal builds started overshadowing the rest of the experience. That skinner box design shift bled out into the rest of the industry, and not for the better.

It's like: the games industry is the Dark Wanderer, and the diablo soulstone sticking out of its head is marketing departments using the term "RPG elements" when what they mean is 90% of the experience will be sorting through vendor trash. You know what I'm saying?

Anyway, Diablo 2 is still pretty good I guess. Sure hope they don't add a bunch of stupid retcons and noxious online requirements to its sequel or something, haha.