Lightningboalt
Local Marsupial Shoves Crystals Up His Ass And Ears
If you ever wondered what it would be like if Borderlands had good writing, here you go. Telltale's greatest achievement.
2001
Usually when you beat a boss in a game you move on to new stuff. In Devil May Cry you fight that same boss like twelve more times before it finally decides to quit and let you repeat the process with the next stubborn bastard.
1988
The best part of SMB3 is throwing a hammer at Boom-Boom and having it make a million damage noises as it hits him, making it sound like you've harmed him so badly that you've retroactively deleted his entire lineage from history.
2023
Louie: History's Greatest Monster?
It's not a unique story to say that I've been excitedly waiting for Pikmin 4 for years and years, ever since that weird Miyamoto story where he once again said "it's basically finished and ready to release" just the same way he did with Pikmin 3. That's the story of half of Pikmin's releases, Miyamoto says it's on the way and then you don't see it for ten years. I'm thrilled the series is still going and still getting high quality entries, and I did love Pikmin 4, but it's also easily my least favorite of the series so far. Before even getting into anything mechanical, I'm so bummed by the fact that it's a weird reboot. There's a lot of weirdness in the decisions of Pikmin 4 that make it feel like it isn't designed for longtime fans, and that story decision more than anything is the biggest sign to me. We've had a pretty progressive narrative build-up across the past three entries and left Pikmin 3 on an interesting cliffhanger with exciting world-building implications - which we even make hints towards here! - but ultimately none of the prior stuff is remotely compatible with this game's plot. Scrap it and move on, we're seeking a new audience. Maybe we'll see it someday, but if Pikmin 5 is anything like the previous two entries we'll hear about it within the next year and not see it for at least a full decade. That it's interested in expanding the audience is not a dealbreaker, nor is it even bad, but it's disappointing when that focus is also the source of quite a few decisions that I feel hurt the game.
There's a lot about Pikmin 4 that tries to focus on making the game easier, and ultimately I do feel it's overall the easiest in the series. Oatchi in particular is so insanely useful that he can often entirely trivialize huge parts of the game on his own. That said, it's worth mentioning that the cave you unlock for beating Olimar's story has some of the toughest challenges in the series, particularly the Purple Key level which has an extremely tight time constraint that manages to be even more threatening than the two rolling walls of death you encounter. There are a few other standouts, like the Sovereign Bulblax in Cavern for a King and the multiple required encounters with the surprisingly returning Smokey Progg, but outside of those few outliers the rest of the game is easy to breeze through. It doesn't help when areas get entirely emptied of things to do as you progress, leaving them as empty wastelands with no remaining dangers to navigate. That's not necessarily a bad thing, the whole ethos of Dandori is more centered on the game being about how quickly and efficiently you can succeed and I think that shines well with how they've designed the levels here, but that's also not necessarily a new thing. It has always been Pikmin's ethos (we just have a catchy word for it now) and after a few days enemies would respawn to both incentivize getting things done efficiently in an area and to keep the world feeling alive. In a lot of regards their Leafling-like focus on Dandori is a success, and with some difficult challenges it shows they can still throw you for a loop when they want to. The problem I have is more that they tend to reuse the same ideas multiple times, where something like an Emperor Bulblax in the past was an imposing and unique final boss it's now... pretty common, showing up repeatedly and making the Sovereign Bulblax feel like "oh, you again" even with it being a harder version more akin to Pikmin 1's original Emperor. There really aren't very many unique or memorable one-off boss moments or surprises, and that's a shame because all the previous games in the series really shined with their unique one-offs that made you really think and try to utilize your skillset on the fly. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it helps make certain aspects feel undercooked and repetitive rather than engaging and exciting, just going through the motions.
Where the clear focus on largely making things easier hurts, I feel, is in some of the mechanical decisions that they made that have the opposite effect. The lock-on is awful and makes targeting things extremely difficult, with no ability to use free aiming. Just killed an enemy in a mob of enemies? Sorry dude, you don't want to target that other enemy, you want the raw materials it dropped - oh, you lost a bunch of Pikmin because you couldn't throw them where you actually wanted? Oops. Similarly, they make it so that you need to whistle twice for Pikmin to abandon a task, which isn't a terrible idea... but if it was a mistake they entirely lose all momentum, and if it was intentional they have a very noticeable delay before finally listening if you're lucky enough for them to actually decide to. I've never had so much trouble getting my Pikmin to listen to me, whether they keep trying to carry something away when I don't want them to or whether they simply won't get thrown or charge, there were tons of times where there is intentionally developed input delay that hurts the experience. In some ways having Pikmin stop being thrown with your inputs when you hit the required amount for an action can be nice, but in many situations I actually WANT to throw more for a more efficient carry or because I want to target something else but the auto-targeting refuses to move. Sometimes I'll throw my guys at an item and they won't even try to pick it up, sometimes they'll just abandon a task for no reason, other times they'll try repeatedly to do a task as I try to stop them and they just decide nah, that wall needs to break and I'm gonna do it, that bomb you threw be damned! God help you if 50 guys decide to attack an enemy without your command, you have to just hope that they'll actually listen and escape from a dangerous situation before disaster as you desperately mash the whistle. Between this and some clunky menuing with the pack, it feels like they've managed to make things feel less intuitive when by all means it should be the opposite. On that note: there is no New Game Plus, so why is it that you can get things like Infinite Rush, Extra Hand, and Olimar's c-stick trumpet feature from 1 and 2 but not until you've 100% completed the game and there is nothing to use them for? Infinite Rush and Extra Hand require saving Louie and doing his optional post-100% completion side quests, respectively... cool that you can get rewards, but you have absolutely nothing to do with them as every area is picked clean and devoid of enemies. What's the point, just easier high scores in Dandori challenges?
My biggest gripe is the regression of the co-op. Pikmin 3 Deluxe's co-op was incredibly good. It is one of the most fun co-op experiences I've ever had, it's wonderful and extremely well implemented. There's absolutely nothing about Pikmin 4 that should prevent it from having a similar implementation - Oatchi can function almost identically to a captain, and on top of that we're playing as a generic create a character so why not allow for a second? Instead, we have Mario Galaxy's co-star mode, which isn't particularly engaging and also kinda breaks the game. It turns co-op from a fun way to engage with the game into something that actively encourages you not to - why go fight that potentially difficult encounter fairly when you can lob rocks at it forever and stun it with electricity? It's not terrible as an extra mode to include someone who isn't familiar with games, but if you have two people who want to play the game together after loving 3 Deluxe together it's a letdown that hurts the game's design to engage with... I do imagine it will lead to some very entertaining speedrun cheats however.
Despite this myriad list of gripes, Pikmin 4 is still an extremely well made game that I'm glad exists. I will replay it multiple times, like I have with all the other Pikmin games. It excels at creating interesting maps to explore, it does an excellent job of making you think about how to plan out your approach to the world, and as with the other Pikmin games the writing is a joy to read. There's more flavor text than ever here, and we have 50+ character voices floating around to make the universe of Pikmin feel livelier than ever before. There's a ton of content here, and most of it is great! I want to point out Night Exploration in particular, which is an amazing addition that I hope to see revisited and iterated on further. There's a ton to build on here, Pikmin could have a very bright and fruitful future! Just next time, have a little bit more trust in your audience and please don't make us wait another decade like we did for both 3 and 4.
It's not a unique story to say that I've been excitedly waiting for Pikmin 4 for years and years, ever since that weird Miyamoto story where he once again said "it's basically finished and ready to release" just the same way he did with Pikmin 3. That's the story of half of Pikmin's releases, Miyamoto says it's on the way and then you don't see it for ten years. I'm thrilled the series is still going and still getting high quality entries, and I did love Pikmin 4, but it's also easily my least favorite of the series so far. Before even getting into anything mechanical, I'm so bummed by the fact that it's a weird reboot. There's a lot of weirdness in the decisions of Pikmin 4 that make it feel like it isn't designed for longtime fans, and that story decision more than anything is the biggest sign to me. We've had a pretty progressive narrative build-up across the past three entries and left Pikmin 3 on an interesting cliffhanger with exciting world-building implications - which we even make hints towards here! - but ultimately none of the prior stuff is remotely compatible with this game's plot. Scrap it and move on, we're seeking a new audience. Maybe we'll see it someday, but if Pikmin 5 is anything like the previous two entries we'll hear about it within the next year and not see it for at least a full decade. That it's interested in expanding the audience is not a dealbreaker, nor is it even bad, but it's disappointing when that focus is also the source of quite a few decisions that I feel hurt the game.
There's a lot about Pikmin 4 that tries to focus on making the game easier, and ultimately I do feel it's overall the easiest in the series. Oatchi in particular is so insanely useful that he can often entirely trivialize huge parts of the game on his own. That said, it's worth mentioning that the cave you unlock for beating Olimar's story has some of the toughest challenges in the series, particularly the Purple Key level which has an extremely tight time constraint that manages to be even more threatening than the two rolling walls of death you encounter. There are a few other standouts, like the Sovereign Bulblax in Cavern for a King and the multiple required encounters with the surprisingly returning Smokey Progg, but outside of those few outliers the rest of the game is easy to breeze through. It doesn't help when areas get entirely emptied of things to do as you progress, leaving them as empty wastelands with no remaining dangers to navigate. That's not necessarily a bad thing, the whole ethos of Dandori is more centered on the game being about how quickly and efficiently you can succeed and I think that shines well with how they've designed the levels here, but that's also not necessarily a new thing. It has always been Pikmin's ethos (we just have a catchy word for it now) and after a few days enemies would respawn to both incentivize getting things done efficiently in an area and to keep the world feeling alive. In a lot of regards their Leafling-like focus on Dandori is a success, and with some difficult challenges it shows they can still throw you for a loop when they want to. The problem I have is more that they tend to reuse the same ideas multiple times, where something like an Emperor Bulblax in the past was an imposing and unique final boss it's now... pretty common, showing up repeatedly and making the Sovereign Bulblax feel like "oh, you again" even with it being a harder version more akin to Pikmin 1's original Emperor. There really aren't very many unique or memorable one-off boss moments or surprises, and that's a shame because all the previous games in the series really shined with their unique one-offs that made you really think and try to utilize your skillset on the fly. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it helps make certain aspects feel undercooked and repetitive rather than engaging and exciting, just going through the motions.
Where the clear focus on largely making things easier hurts, I feel, is in some of the mechanical decisions that they made that have the opposite effect. The lock-on is awful and makes targeting things extremely difficult, with no ability to use free aiming. Just killed an enemy in a mob of enemies? Sorry dude, you don't want to target that other enemy, you want the raw materials it dropped - oh, you lost a bunch of Pikmin because you couldn't throw them where you actually wanted? Oops. Similarly, they make it so that you need to whistle twice for Pikmin to abandon a task, which isn't a terrible idea... but if it was a mistake they entirely lose all momentum, and if it was intentional they have a very noticeable delay before finally listening if you're lucky enough for them to actually decide to. I've never had so much trouble getting my Pikmin to listen to me, whether they keep trying to carry something away when I don't want them to or whether they simply won't get thrown or charge, there were tons of times where there is intentionally developed input delay that hurts the experience. In some ways having Pikmin stop being thrown with your inputs when you hit the required amount for an action can be nice, but in many situations I actually WANT to throw more for a more efficient carry or because I want to target something else but the auto-targeting refuses to move. Sometimes I'll throw my guys at an item and they won't even try to pick it up, sometimes they'll just abandon a task for no reason, other times they'll try repeatedly to do a task as I try to stop them and they just decide nah, that wall needs to break and I'm gonna do it, that bomb you threw be damned! God help you if 50 guys decide to attack an enemy without your command, you have to just hope that they'll actually listen and escape from a dangerous situation before disaster as you desperately mash the whistle. Between this and some clunky menuing with the pack, it feels like they've managed to make things feel less intuitive when by all means it should be the opposite. On that note: there is no New Game Plus, so why is it that you can get things like Infinite Rush, Extra Hand, and Olimar's c-stick trumpet feature from 1 and 2 but not until you've 100% completed the game and there is nothing to use them for? Infinite Rush and Extra Hand require saving Louie and doing his optional post-100% completion side quests, respectively... cool that you can get rewards, but you have absolutely nothing to do with them as every area is picked clean and devoid of enemies. What's the point, just easier high scores in Dandori challenges?
My biggest gripe is the regression of the co-op. Pikmin 3 Deluxe's co-op was incredibly good. It is one of the most fun co-op experiences I've ever had, it's wonderful and extremely well implemented. There's absolutely nothing about Pikmin 4 that should prevent it from having a similar implementation - Oatchi can function almost identically to a captain, and on top of that we're playing as a generic create a character so why not allow for a second? Instead, we have Mario Galaxy's co-star mode, which isn't particularly engaging and also kinda breaks the game. It turns co-op from a fun way to engage with the game into something that actively encourages you not to - why go fight that potentially difficult encounter fairly when you can lob rocks at it forever and stun it with electricity? It's not terrible as an extra mode to include someone who isn't familiar with games, but if you have two people who want to play the game together after loving 3 Deluxe together it's a letdown that hurts the game's design to engage with... I do imagine it will lead to some very entertaining speedrun cheats however.
Despite this myriad list of gripes, Pikmin 4 is still an extremely well made game that I'm glad exists. I will replay it multiple times, like I have with all the other Pikmin games. It excels at creating interesting maps to explore, it does an excellent job of making you think about how to plan out your approach to the world, and as with the other Pikmin games the writing is a joy to read. There's more flavor text than ever here, and we have 50+ character voices floating around to make the universe of Pikmin feel livelier than ever before. There's a ton of content here, and most of it is great! I want to point out Night Exploration in particular, which is an amazing addition that I hope to see revisited and iterated on further. There's a ton to build on here, Pikmin could have a very bright and fruitful future! Just next time, have a little bit more trust in your audience and please don't make us wait another decade like we did for both 3 and 4.
2021
World 10-1 was a genuinely good level, it was actually fun. There's like 4 or 5 other levels that are pretty good, and I love the Fire Hydra(nt) boss. That aside, this game is a baffling fever dream of horrible design decisions and awful levels awash in an obnoxious and annoying soundtrack with some of the stupidest cutscenes I've ever seen. Every button doing the same thing, often overwriting the ability to jump, is absolutely the most insane design decision I've ever seen in a video game (especially in a platformer!). I love how the various NPC storylines range from "this farmer's home and livelihood are destroyed in a tornado" and "this girl is nearly murdered by a dolphin that goes crazy" to "man loses a single game of chess" and "boy doesn't understand gravity". Genuinely hilarious that the game seems to be trying to tell a story of overcoming your fears and reaching out to make friends, but the main villain just gets killed off instead of them doing some power of friendship deal to redeem him. Maybe Act 3 changes that? Who knows, I sure don't care to find out! It's not the worst game ever made, but it genuinely is an awful experience with very few redeeming qualities and I was really only able to derive any entertainment out of it from the co-op breaking the game to a hilarious and unintended degree. Don't put yourself through this.
2003
Greatest pause screen music in the history of pause screens. Wario World 2 is secretly the best announcement that Nintendo could ever make.
2007
Every video game should end with Mario thanking you for playing it. Boundless unrestrained creativity in video game form, coupled with one of the greatest soundtracks in the medium. The only thing stopping me from saying that it's the single greatest video game ever made is the fact that Galaxy 2 exists.
2023
While it's a fair bit shorter and easier than the original due to its nice QOL changes, it's still a delightful adventure. Can't believe it's back even after having finished it. Love its aesthetic and remixed soundtrack, such a welcome experience to revisit it after all this time. Plus, the post-game boss battles are a fun addition... in particular the wonderful payoff to a joke made 27 years ago.
2022
Babylon's Fall is a game where every level has you sprinting down ugly hallways that usually feature four brainless combat encounters where mindlessly mashing buttons as fast as you can is your best route to success. Just equip whatever makes your numbers higher and you'll win effortlessly, and if for some reason you don't you have 10 nearly full heals and you can even die 5 times in a level without losing anything other than the 30 seconds or so it takes to revive in exactly the spot where you died. There are no systems worth engaging with and the story sucks, filled with interminable music, forgettable characters, and pretty bad dialogue. It's a shame that it's going away forever in a few days, but on the bright side there's so little worthwhile going on in here that it will never be missed.
"Metroid Prime Remastered, available now" is the single biggest power move the gaming industry has had since Sony's video about used games on PS4.
2017
This game just makes me so happy. I would give anything to have a sequel with this engine.
2020
Cyberpunk is a bad game, and not because it's broken and unfinished... Cyberpunk is a bad game that also happens to be broken and unfinished. I managed to get through it purely due to entertainment value from its many, many glitches. The gameplay was nothing to write home about, just a mediocre FPS with some of the lamest RPG-lite progression I've ever seen. Oh boy, a 1% increase to bleeding, what fun and satisfying upgrades! The level design was never there, several maps are just corridor shooters or wide open areas, the enemies had almost zero AI, and the only difficulty would be when enemies are actually suddenly able to hit me (or cops, who inexplicably 2hko me every time despite my high value armor). Every boss fight basically involved me almost never being damaged: Sasquatch was the funniest in this regard, just walking forwards with a hammer presenting zero threat whatsoever as I shot him with a turret taking no damage. Oda also sticks out: he can be the final boss you face if you take certain endings, and while he has a lot of tools at his disposal, I just circle strafed him while whacking him with a baseball bat, and I won taking only two hits from him. You'd think a guy with swords, a machine gun, and active camo would be threatening but somehow he was a breeze that I won against with a literal joke strategy.
The story and characters are badly written: V is a bland protagonist who I could never care about, Johnny Silverhand is just an annoying jackass who never actually grows even though the game pretends he does (initially I liked Keanu's performance but he felt extremely monotone by the end of the game), the entire Arasaka plot is stupid... the two highlights to me were Jackie (not enough screentime) and Takemura (thankfully around quite a bit). Why on earth does the plot ultimately boil down to "go play counselor to a rich Japanese family"? The game literally advertises itself as "a heist to steal the key to immortality", but the game never actually talks about that stuff until the actual ending. The heist happens, but for the most part they never talk about it being "the key to immortality", and that's really not actually what it is. For someone who is publicly believed to be the murderer of the most powerful man in the world, V sure faces absolutely zero repercussions to that in the story! Yeah, you're dying, but that's not a consequence of stealing from Arasaka, that's a consequence of Johnny being in your head. Being considered public enemy #1 should be a game changing implication - when Ganondorf takes over Hyrule, things HAPPEN in the world and you have repercussions for your failure to stop his plot. Characters almost have no screentime whatsoever unless they're Johnny or Takemura, and I'm glad I liked Takemura because otherwise I'd have nothing here. Panam and Judy seemed okay but their actual missions are short and I didn't get invested in their sidequests.They exist for such a short time and in such inconsequential missions that while they were pleasant, there was little for me to latch onto. Characters are lucky to exist for more than three scenes, and this especially applies to THE MAIN ANTAGONISTS, Yorinobu and Adam Smasher. And as an aside: would it have killed the writers to just once NOT use shorthand for everything? Jesus christ V, say "I" ONCE! Just once! "I'M THINKING THAT" would've been a godsend to hear just once instead of the constant incessant sentence fragments starting with "thinkin that", "hearin talk that", "might have ta" etc. It's naturalistic writing to occasionally include that, the way they did it was like they were upholding some ridiculous style guide and in an attempt to make the characters sound real it made them sound like voiced text messages. A single fucking pronoun once in a while isn't gonna kill you, CDPR, I know you don't like them based your hilarious and original twitter jokes, but they are useful grammatical tools that would make your shitty writing sound better!
Add onto this the constant glitches and the boring, ugly open world that had almost no interactivity or reason to exist... if it wasn't for Cyberpunk being consistently the funniest game I've ever played (for all the wrong reasons) it is something I would've dropped immediately. My favorite glitch is probably the fact that every time there was a shootout on cars, the enemies would not spawn their guns. Every single time it happened. Jackie talked about needing to take me to a ripperdoc after the first one and I had taken zero damage because none of the enemies even HAD guns, they simply did not spawn in. They were pantomiming shooting me, but they had nothing in their arms. Motorcycle chase from the landfill? Same thing, the dudes just t-posed on their bikes and I took no damage while Takemura remarked about how a ripperdoc wouldn't be able to fix me up if I died before I got to them. Equally funny was my character's shitty hair and clothing desyncing with the character model and appearing in front of me. The hair was especially bad about this, it would somehow hover in front of my field of view, mostly obscuring it and forcing me to save and reload because this would not be fixed otherwise - I tested it, it literally lasted for two hours on one occasion. Sometimes my voice was just suddenly male V, or characters would not have their voice at all (T-Bug is the most forgettable character in the game to me because 95% of her dialogue never played - it's not her fault, this glitch just really screwed her over). I accidentally paid for a prostitute when I was on the phone progressing a mission because somehow the text popups for both conversations popped up and overlapped, and the sex scene was hilarious to witness: she kept turning into a PS1 model, her teeth and eyes would pop out, sometimes the camera was inexplicably inside V's mouth and I would see V's teeth as V opened her mouth, and then the prostitute t-posed and the world disappeared... all this and the whole time, the other phone call was still going on. Model glitches in general were very common too - Panam's arm broke and was permanently hanging diagonally backwards out from her neck for a whole mission, and V's own model broke so much it was hard to keep track. At one point V's head was broken such that it was facing down at our feet/legs, as if I were watching somebody follow me.
I'm sure they'll patch this game to make it playable eventually. But frankly I think simply patching it won't do much to improve it - to me, its issues are beyond that. You can patch a game to make it function better, but stability patches don't fix shitty story or gameplay.
The story and characters are badly written: V is a bland protagonist who I could never care about, Johnny Silverhand is just an annoying jackass who never actually grows even though the game pretends he does (initially I liked Keanu's performance but he felt extremely monotone by the end of the game), the entire Arasaka plot is stupid... the two highlights to me were Jackie (not enough screentime) and Takemura (thankfully around quite a bit). Why on earth does the plot ultimately boil down to "go play counselor to a rich Japanese family"? The game literally advertises itself as "a heist to steal the key to immortality", but the game never actually talks about that stuff until the actual ending. The heist happens, but for the most part they never talk about it being "the key to immortality", and that's really not actually what it is. For someone who is publicly believed to be the murderer of the most powerful man in the world, V sure faces absolutely zero repercussions to that in the story! Yeah, you're dying, but that's not a consequence of stealing from Arasaka, that's a consequence of Johnny being in your head. Being considered public enemy #1 should be a game changing implication - when Ganondorf takes over Hyrule, things HAPPEN in the world and you have repercussions for your failure to stop his plot. Characters almost have no screentime whatsoever unless they're Johnny or Takemura, and I'm glad I liked Takemura because otherwise I'd have nothing here. Panam and Judy seemed okay but their actual missions are short and I didn't get invested in their sidequests.They exist for such a short time and in such inconsequential missions that while they were pleasant, there was little for me to latch onto. Characters are lucky to exist for more than three scenes, and this especially applies to THE MAIN ANTAGONISTS, Yorinobu and Adam Smasher. And as an aside: would it have killed the writers to just once NOT use shorthand for everything? Jesus christ V, say "I" ONCE! Just once! "I'M THINKING THAT" would've been a godsend to hear just once instead of the constant incessant sentence fragments starting with "thinkin that", "hearin talk that", "might have ta" etc. It's naturalistic writing to occasionally include that, the way they did it was like they were upholding some ridiculous style guide and in an attempt to make the characters sound real it made them sound like voiced text messages. A single fucking pronoun once in a while isn't gonna kill you, CDPR, I know you don't like them based your hilarious and original twitter jokes, but they are useful grammatical tools that would make your shitty writing sound better!
Add onto this the constant glitches and the boring, ugly open world that had almost no interactivity or reason to exist... if it wasn't for Cyberpunk being consistently the funniest game I've ever played (for all the wrong reasons) it is something I would've dropped immediately. My favorite glitch is probably the fact that every time there was a shootout on cars, the enemies would not spawn their guns. Every single time it happened. Jackie talked about needing to take me to a ripperdoc after the first one and I had taken zero damage because none of the enemies even HAD guns, they simply did not spawn in. They were pantomiming shooting me, but they had nothing in their arms. Motorcycle chase from the landfill? Same thing, the dudes just t-posed on their bikes and I took no damage while Takemura remarked about how a ripperdoc wouldn't be able to fix me up if I died before I got to them. Equally funny was my character's shitty hair and clothing desyncing with the character model and appearing in front of me. The hair was especially bad about this, it would somehow hover in front of my field of view, mostly obscuring it and forcing me to save and reload because this would not be fixed otherwise - I tested it, it literally lasted for two hours on one occasion. Sometimes my voice was just suddenly male V, or characters would not have their voice at all (T-Bug is the most forgettable character in the game to me because 95% of her dialogue never played - it's not her fault, this glitch just really screwed her over). I accidentally paid for a prostitute when I was on the phone progressing a mission because somehow the text popups for both conversations popped up and overlapped, and the sex scene was hilarious to witness: she kept turning into a PS1 model, her teeth and eyes would pop out, sometimes the camera was inexplicably inside V's mouth and I would see V's teeth as V opened her mouth, and then the prostitute t-posed and the world disappeared... all this and the whole time, the other phone call was still going on. Model glitches in general were very common too - Panam's arm broke and was permanently hanging diagonally backwards out from her neck for a whole mission, and V's own model broke so much it was hard to keep track. At one point V's head was broken such that it was facing down at our feet/legs, as if I were watching somebody follow me.
I'm sure they'll patch this game to make it playable eventually. But frankly I think simply patching it won't do much to improve it - to me, its issues are beyond that. You can patch a game to make it function better, but stability patches don't fix shitty story or gameplay.
2023
A truly Zappy game. Engage nails the Fire Emblem experience by putting me in scenarios that appear to be totally unwinnable until I stuff Yunaka in a bush to make her a god. Peak Fire Emblem is when my best plotted strategies completely fall apart due to bad luck and I'm forced to use obscure loopholes and idiotic bullshit to get myself out of a bind, and Engage gave me that in spades. While the writing is definitely more Saturday morning cartoon than Three Houses' enthralling shades of gray politics, it sold me early on that it knew exactly what it was doing by having the traditional Doomed Fire Emblem Parent ask Sigurd (the protagonist infamously killed in a fire before he can ever be a parent) for parenting advice. That said, my one gripe is that by being a self-referential celebration of the series, the world of Elyos is definitely far less fleshed out and nuanced feeling than most Fire Emblem worlds... but hey, it still manages to be more coherent than Fatesland, so I'll take it.
I think it's worth specifically pointing out that Super Mario Land 2 has an enemy kill counter, which may just be the weirdest part of what already is one of the weirdest Mario games ever made. Mario decides to buy a castle for some reason, and Wario is then invented specifically to steal it. You get eaten by a turtle to then get eaten by a whale, fight Jason from Friday the 13th alongside a bunch of yokai, and an entire set of levels is themed predominantly around ants. Super Mario Land 2 is bizarre and because of that I'll always have a soft spot for it. Just a nice easy breezy hour or two of platforming, what's not to love?