Ever since I was around 14 or so, I’ve made irregular pilgrimages to one of Scotland’s lesser known Lochs. As a large body of water that stretches into the horizon, it is one of the very few features of the surrounding landscape that’s remained untouched since I was born.

I used to live a short distance from it, but these days getting there is a whole journey. In college it took me a full forty minutes to simply get there, and now as a much older adult the entire return trip is around five hours. Where I was once simply passed by some buildings and later a nearby village, I now pass by three entire towns, a significant stretch of wilderness, an old forest trail, and an unmaintained stretch of road which alarmingly doesn’t appear on Google Maps.
I like to make the journey on foot, personally. Despite possessing a not-insignificant case of thalassophobia, reaching the loch after two and a half hours brings a sense of relief after what is always going to be a backbreaking trip.

Why do I make this journey, you ask?

I feel that as we get older, we stop being “bigger versions of ourselves” entirely and start being humanoid matryoshka dolls. While at first we iterate on ourselves, eventually the iterations increase so much that the self we used to be becomes an entirely different, distant person. In time, we lose that older self even if we retain some memories, ideas or feelings.
I like to journey to that loch, and a specific rocky outcrop on its north side, because it’s perhaps the only place on Earth where I have a direct link to my younger selves. The one thing all incarnations of the Mira project have in common is that they’ve sat or been sat on that outcrop, starting as early as one year old, and acknowledging this is humbling.

Let’s snap back a bit though, 2012. Sitting in Maths besides this then-infinitely annoying fuck we’ll call Jason for privacy’s sake - and also because I know he’s the kind of guy that would use Backloggd. Sorry if you see this lad, I still have your copy of Ico & Shadow of the Colossus.

Jason was… The picture most people conjure in their mind when they hear “ned” (or “chav” if you want a more familiar term); he had the “hawhawhaw” laugh, styled himself as a hardman, didn’t dress particularly well, seemed to abhor anything that seemed earnest or intellectual, primarily spoke through his nostrils, and was so dense that I had to explain what organs were to him two years later.

And in 2012, he turns to me and says: “Here, ye like games don’t ye? Git that Kingdom Hearts when it comes oot.”

He whips out his phone, the ugliest Blackberry I’d ever seen, and shows me a grainy bitcrushed trailer for the then-new Kingdom Hearts 1.5 Remix.

This dumbfounded me, because even on that tiny-ass screen I could tell that this was not a game I would ever associate with him. He goes on to tell me that he played it as a wean and loved it, prompting a further conversation about games that led to a friendship which surprised me - a then-isolated nerd who was overeducated and undermedicated for everything academia asked of her.

Per his recommendation, I picked up Kingdom Hearts 1.5 the following year and… Didn’t really get it. I enjoyed the combat, though the music was phenomenal, and the story was neat, but I felt like I was missing something. It compelled me, yes, but the source of that was lost on me. I never had the chance to discuss it with Jason, for despite our unlikely friendship we ultimately moved in different teenage social circles and, once classes started being sorted by performance, he and I never saw one another in class either.

2013 was 11 years ago, so there’s been some time to reflect.

Recently, the KH games came to Steam and, rather hilariously, Square Enix ignored the prior Epic Games Store release to pretend that this was the first time KH had ever touched PC. They even got Utada Hikaru to rerecord Simple & Clean. Hilarious!

I’ve been watching people play KH1 again - not playing it myself, for I don’t really have the energy to tackle a long game so soon after Library of Ruina - and it’s got me noticing a lot of stuff that my younger self fundamentally couldn’t get.

What strikes Adult Mira about KH1 is how it feels… Adolescent. Not in the sense that it’s childish or cringe or whatever disingenuous cynics often call it, but… Man I’m struggling to word this one.

[Insert me closing this doc for like three days and reopening it.]

I remember something that would irregularly happen in High School, and unlike many of my anecdotes I don’t think these are Scotland-specific.

Every now and then, in the very early days, someone would show up to P.E wearing a Disney shirt or whatever, or they’d have a Disney backpack/notepad/whatever. The crueller ones would laugh, while even the nicer ones would side-eye the victim and awkwardly chuckle at their friends.

You might’ve heard someone say “your body undergoes changes through puberty/as you grow up”, and in a way I find this sentiment to be a kindness. It carefully omits the actually harrowing, less obvious parts of adolescence. Namely, the death of youth.
I know the term “irony poisoning” is considered to be an internet thing, but frankly I see it manifest even in fully offline people and it seems to naturally occur in the process of going from a child to a citizen of the world. Joy and earnestness are taboo, and cynicism is expected. Nobody should ever be joyful or love “bad”/”childish” things seriously, and if they do it must be a joke - told by them or at their expense, it matters not. Stuff like that. You must laugh at the awkward undiagnosed autistic girl in your class with the Cinderella backpack. She’s a kid, and you’re not kids anymore. Laugh.

This continues into adulthood. How many people have you seen dunk on ‘cringe fanfiction’, ‘bad art’, or anything else where passion clearly outstreps base level technical talent?

You might wonder what the fuck this has to do with Kingdom Hearts, and I would tell you that I kinda see the game as an analogue for that unavoidable death of youth.

Ignore the fantastical elements for a moment, and the opening hours are of three teenagers longing to find out what exists beyond the horizon of their small corner of existence, only to find out the hard way that it’s so vast as to be deeply and spiritually underwhelming. And, unfortunately for them, they’re now a part of this world. Their forced and unwanted understanding of the world around them drives wedges between them, and through this division, one of them comes into contact with an adult who no longer views them as a child but as a tool to be cultivated and used for their own games.

SImilarly, the Disney elements feel like an attempt to broach that specific brand of teenage existentialism using iconography that’s both universal to the player (unless they somehow avoided the most enduring plague of the modern age: The Walt Disney Company) and relatable to the subject of being an adolescent. Despite the relatively peppy and almost twee trappings of each ~world~, each mini arc Kingdom Hearts doesn’t exactly feel triumphant. Riku always ends up seeming further and further away from Sora, something which only gets worse as the credits roll gets closer and closer. Likewise, the Disney elements start seeming less and less magical, ultimately ending up with the iconic Princesses being used as fuel to further someone’s goals.
I know that Kairi being one of the seven Princesses might seem like the writers trying to build a connection between the Disney stuff and the OC stuff, but c’mon. Surely you must’ve known someone that, as a kid, wanted to be a Disney Princess. It’s all too fitting that such a desire is distorted for Ansem to open his gate to hell.
In particular, my adult self has always been struck by that reference to the stars disappearing out of the sky in this game. The sky sure did seem brighter when we were younger.

As a branch of all of this, it’s easy to see the Heartless as a manifestation of the particularly caustic cynicism and joylessness that awaits children once their childhood begins to evaporate. They are no longer vessels for curiosity or play, they are now cogs, bolts and conveyors in a machine whose operation they have no say in or influence over. The Heartless are a corruptive force that sap everything from the various worlds, in this case Disney ones, which slots in so perfectly as an analogue to that nasty disdain for anything childish that so many people pick up unconsciously and utterly refuse to either interrogate or dispense with.

Jason and I didn’t talk much after High School, even after fate had us in the same college class for a single lesson of the week, but he did tell me something once while we were out on a smoke break that had a lasting impact.

When my teens arrived, I threw all of my stuffed animals in a trash bag and let them fester in the bottom of my closet. Among them was a Winnie the Pooh plush that I’d had since I was literally three years old. I was a big girl then, no time for stuffies. But yet I did yearn for them - in part because I just slept better while holding something, and pillows weren’t a good substitute.
Years later, while in college, Jason - now having reformed himself as a much less ~neddy~ soul who found his passion and the ability to dress well in wargames - offhandedly mentioned that he’d slept with his stuffed bear for years. He showed me a picture, and it was a ratty old thing, but clearly well loved. I didn’t immediately change my tone regarding stuffed animals, I even laughed it off, but the subsequent year was hellish. After that, I was all too eager to crack open that trash bag and free them.

You see the same sort of attitude with Kingdom Hearts itself, really. I’ve noticed that so-called ex-fans of it often point to it as a cringe teenage hyperfixation, while also talking about it with the same fondness most people reserve for significant others or childhood friends they hold some affection for. You ever see a straight dude who’s clearly a hyper-repressed gay man talk about his ‘best friend’? Kinda like that.
KH is, to lots of people, ‘cringe’. It is naked in its sincerity and Nomura makes no attempt to hide that it’s his pinboard passion project where 90% of additions are justified with “I wanted to” and the other 10% are “Square Enix asked me to”. As with everything so unabashedly sincere, those who wear cynicism like a second skin or overly irony-poisoned nerds who still make Sonichu jokes in 2024 often dismiss it. Indeed, much like stuffed animals, so many people seem to think themselves above a game where a twink can stunlock Sephiroth with moves that’d make Vergil look amateurish.
Look, I’ll be honest, even I take potshots at KH sometimes. Not the first game, as you’ve noticed, but subsequent entries do leave a lot to be desired. Where I - and I suspect many other KH fans - differ is that most of my potshots stem from KH losing a lot of the ironclad consistency, relatively self-contained writing and airtight pacing of the first game.

I think it’s really telling that Ansem’s insistence he can “unlock people’s hearts” only leads to them becoming absolute monsters. I wonder if there’s anything to examine there. Riku, tragically, loses this fight to Ansem and becomes yet another pawn for him, while Sora’s unwillingness to entirely sever the ties that bind him to what came before is what allows him to stay free. I hesitate to even jokingly call it ‘corny’, it’s just a very upfront admission that you’ll lose your soul if you can’t keep a hold of any whimsy or an ability to engage in play.

“Mira, where does the Final Fantasy stuff slot in?”

It’s cool as fuck, next question.

Despite seeming simple and clean on the surface, Kingdom Hearts is a series I don’t think one can truly critique, praise or even react to without inadvertently revealing something about themselves that - presumably - they’d want to keep hidden. It’s one of those games where I can often tell how cynical someone is by how willing they are to dismiss everything about it off the cuff. It’s why I just opened with the personal anecdote - I hate subtext, it’s for cowards and subs.

That all said, I do find it somewhat sad that despite this game being aimed at children and teens, neither of them are particularly well equipped to explain why it might be resonant or even resonate with it in the first place. Indeed, I myself didn’t get it all the way back in 2013. They’ll find it fun, sure, but some things you only understand with time I guess.

I feel like, more than anything, the part of Kingdom Hearts that embodies all of this is the very first song you hear on the menu: Dearly Beloved. It’s hardly heroic, not even cool or foreboding. No, it’s a piece that feels sad? It somehow manages to capture that really specific feeling of seeing a normally-populated city at night for the first time and realizing that, without people occupying that space, it’s just concrete, power lines, glass and in Glasgow’s case also a sizable amount of potholes.

To end off… I silently weep for people who think they’re too old for Kingdom Hearts, or indeed for anything like it. Not because I look down on them, but because I feel losing the part of you that can enjoy things like this, stuffed animals, and goofy (hyuk) apparel must be miserable. That first death, right there in the soul, is always a harbinger of worse things to come.

But hey, it’s never too late to claw it back. You, too, can play Kingdom Hearts or spend £1000~ on stuffed rabbits.

Game Finished In 2024 #14:

That's right, it wasn't a typo that I skipped 14! Granblue Fantasy Relink is a game I found hard to settle my thoughts on for a while, and I still don't feel entirely settled because I haven't played as much of the game as I wanted to, but I did the final postgame chapter, and circumstances have meant I likely have to put the game down for a bit.

Granblue is an IP I think is really cool. Taking the standard fantasy setting with a few REALLY flavorful twists and overall excellent designs is straight up my alley. I was on the Relink hype train from day 1, even after the years and years of delays. A mobile game getting turned into a real game with cool as fuck ARPG stuff? Especially as a Dragalia holdout, I was picking up what they were putting down. But, again due to circumstances, I didn't get around to it until recently. Luckily, my "recently" happened to coincide whereabouts the final announced update [we'll get to that], and I finally took the opportunity to play it.

"Cygames Money" is a turn of phrase used when talking about Relink and its spinoff-in-law, Versus, as a way of admiring how much these Granblue spinoffs flex by doing things that are generally too expensive for a lot of games. My favorite instance of this is how every matchup in Versus has two unique sets of voice lines regardless of how related the two characters are. Relink uses Cygames Money to look like the prettiest game of all time. I'm the last person to do graphical dick measuring but this is genuinely in the top 5 best looking games I've ever seen, with an excellent art direction and high fidelity all around. Between this and Resident Evil 4 Remake I think no game should even try for higher heights, it's pure hubris. Every setpiece is a visual blowout and they only get more nuts. All aspects of the presentation are punching at the same weight, too.

Cygames Money also applies to the mechanics, luckily. Very few games can claim to have over twenty different characters with basically entirely unique movesets and minimal overlap. Sure, a couple characters have similar timing gimmicks and other such things, but even by the least charitable interpretations there are a lot of distinct characters. Part of why I wanted to give the game more time to review was to play more characters, but that sadly didn't really materialize, and is the first thing I'll address when I do get the chance to go at the game again. Every character follows the same basic format of a basic attack chain, a unique action, and a selection of four cooldown based skills, and the complexity comes from what that unique action does and how their passive abilities come into play. A fair few of the Granblue mobile game's mechanics are wonderfully integrated into the game in elegant ways, such as the Overdrive Gauge and Charge Attacks. Cagliostro, my main and the greatest girl to ever do it, has a projectile she can charge after her Musou-like attack strings, some skills, or after a combo attack. These characters cover a wide range of complexity, allowing basically anyone to find the character that suits them best. The game also has a Monster Hunter-like structure that complements the simple fundamentals wonderfully.

One weird thing about the game is the story. It is not a BAD story, but it is basically just the Anime Movie format applied to Granblue. It's flashy, has some decent character arcs, and will never matter to the future of the series because it can't. It is very hard to take seriously due to the sheer confusion the powerscaling it inspires knowing what I know about the mobile game, and Id comes across as less of a threat and more of a fraud that curbstomps because he has to for a plot to exist. It has some real Chainsawman pacing too, taking easily less than 15 hours for the main story. The primary function of it, gameplay-wise, is to introduce you to the game in a more controlled environment with some really cool setpieces. The epilogue chapter opens up a bit more, showing you the multiplayer structure at work before finally opening up the true postgame with a REALLY good finale. I didn't really know what to make of the story when I went through it, as I knew this wasn't what the rest of the game was going to be like. I liked it, but I suspected I was going to like the game more when it opened up, and I was right in those suspicions.

If I have to seriously knock the game for anything, it's the roster. I know I praised the playstyle diversity previously, but the excellent diversity in playstyles and the middling picks for those playstyles can co-exist. While there are some winners, the roster feels largely stuck in the first couple years of the game, and suffers for it. Granblue has gone on for ten years and introduced hundreds of characters, and this game has been in development for a long part of that, so the focus on the early roster is a bit more understandable, but only by a bit. There are so many great designs in Granblue that I can't help but be disappointed at what the roster ended up looking like. Compare to OG Versus, which had a roughly equivalent size by the end of that game's life, and more diversity. A lot of slots in Relink are taken up by the main crew, and this is fine, but did we REALLY need every single dragon knight? The human bias hurts the roster especially as it means we get one Erune, two Harvin, and three Draphs, all very interesting parts of the setting. Compounding this is the element system, which feels like the one aspect of the mobile game which is truly vestigial, to the point your build almost certainly revolves around circumventing it. The post launch updates sadly did not mend these issues, as the two Eternals they added are the two humans, and Sandalphon is human-passing. What especially sucks to see is that this is likely the last update. I direly hope we get the equivalent of a Monster Hunter G-Rank expansion to fill out the roster.

Relink, by and large, lives up to the hype. My few flaws with it are pretty small compared to the achievement that is a game taking this long to ship and not having nearly as many cracks in it as delayed games often have. That my biggest complaints amount to wanting more are, I think, a pretty good indicator of the type of game Relink is. And when I get the opportunity, I'll be right back to grinding the post-postgame.

Game Finished In 2024 #16:

Double Marathon #1

Last year, due to the Pixel Remasters coming to consoles, I played nine of the first ten FF games in something of a marathon [skipping 9 for Reasons]. This was a great experience, and this year I decided to go even further and marathon two series, alternating. The first series I decided was Yakuza/Like A Dragon, which I will be calling Yakuza for at least the next several years while I wait for the name change to finally become real to me, and the second series was Kingdom Hearts. Both are series I have some experience with, but have never played a majority of. For the Yakuza series, I have played the original Yakuza 1, and Yakuza 7. 7 in particular is one of my favorite games of all time. So I'm filling in the gaps between Kiryu's first game and Ichiban's first game now.

Yakuza 0 occupies an interesting space in the series as it's technically the sixth game in the series, being made between 5 and 6. As the name might suggest, it is a prequel, taking place about a decade before 1 starts, and two decades before most of the series. Despite or because of this, it is frequently touted as an excellent starting point. This game's prequel nature, along with the magic of actually marketing the fucking thing, is likely why the series got to finally get as big in the west as it deserved. Yakuza and Monster Hunter had similar trajectories in this regard, as due to the circumstances surrounding their releases they were often ignored, but once people discovered what the games were actually about they became some of the heaviest hitters for their respective publishers. This is to say Yakuza 0 is very good. The prequel status does have its flaws, as a LOT of characters end up dead or in jail by the end to explain why they have never been seen in any of the previous five games, but it is generally handled elegantly, and if you have absolutely zero knowledge of the series before going in it would be unnoticeable. Plot-wise, this game largely handles the events before Kiryu, series-long protagonist, and Majima, Kiryu's closest thing to a recurring rival, became the characters they are later in the series. The plot does not dwell on this fact, though, and most of the game is spent on its own self contained plot, which is compelling in its own right. The twists and turns characteristic of the Yakuza series are here, and even with the foregone conclusions any prequel will have, there's plenty to enjoy. The story has a strong emotional core to it, and very likeable characters.

Gameplay-wise, there is also a lot here. The basic gameplay is the satisfying 3D beat em up style with cool cinematic attacks of the past five games, with the addition of styles for both of the main characters. Kiryu and Majima both get four styles, roughly analogous to each other mechanically. They both get a default balanced style, a more evasive style, a more defensive style, and their original movesets. I found all styles to be useful in some regard, but the Heat Actions available to the evasive and defensive styles didn't seem to pop up as much. The original movesets are both locked behind their respective minigames, which, while fun, I didn't feel the need to grind enough to get the styles out of. Due to Japan's bubble economy in the 80s, the game both story-wise and mechanically revolves around money. Enemies are filled with money like pinatas, and you upgrade yourself with money instead of EXP. While this is a cute idea, I ultimately don't entirely like how the costs for upgrades scale with how much money you earn. You quickly get enough money that you can buy hundreds of healing items, but enemies stop dropping substantial cash about halfway through the game, where the requirements get harsher, requiring you to grind out the minigames to make any money.

Speaking of, the Yakuza series's commitment to meaningful side content continues. In addition to the aforementioned character specific minigames that allow for money making, there are the usual arcade perfect emulations of old Sega games, karaoke, mahjong, and somehow more. Pocket Circuit was most likely my favorite of all of them, though I didn't entirely get how to make a successful car. The series trademark substories are here, and while I definitely missed a lot of them, I did about half on each character and the ones I did were entertaining romps. Needless to say, the game has a lot for completionists to tackle, making this game a ridiculous value when it often goes on sale.

Yakuza 0 is a truly great game, and I'm excited to tackle Kiwami after KH1.

I'm sure I'll have a more thorough write-up later, but all I'll say for now is that I don't believe this is anywhere close to a 10/10 like most outlets and reviewers are claiming it to be. I do not understand the universal glowing praise. It's pretty good but nothing spectacular, and the live service FOMO baggage has tainted everything surrounding this game, making it hard to truly enjoy.

For those already interested/invested in Destiny, it's a pretty good sendoff. For those who haven't played/are considering returning, it's not worth it. So much of the narrative hinges on content and context ripped out of the game, it genuinely would make no sense to someone unfamiliar.

I'd fuck those lightswitches and I'm not even going to pretend otherwise.

Anyway, OWB doesn't have much to chew on, so this'll be brief.

Humor is the name of the game here and they've unfortunately put it on the same shelf where the other parts of New Vegas put themes and actual writing. I feel like everyone's opinion of OWB is always going to be coloured by how well the humor lands for them, and for me OWB's never has.
There is a token attempt made to add some depth to the story - which is debatably about losing one's humanity through clinging to the future in opposition to Dead Money being the same but with the past - but it gets about as much focus as the Lobotomite NPCs do.
In many ways the 'story' is a microcosm of New Vegas actual; someone took your brain, go get it back, oops more complicated story. Except, since this DLC is about an hour or four long depending on how inquisitive you are, the format results in it feeling like an anticlimax? I have vivid memories of younger Mira being deeply confused that the DLC ended.

At the very least I do somewhat appreciate how tightly the developers cling to the pulp sci-fi influences. The LAER and Sonic Emitter in this DLC are better "b-movie alien weapons" than Mothership Zeta's attempt at such in the last game. Same goes for the Trauma Harnesses, the Stealth Suit, and the other doo-dads hanging around. It's a nice degree of aesthetic coherence that I don't typically expect from Gamebryo games.

That said, as a relatively neutral aside: Some of the asset reuse from Fallout 3 is hilarious. Tranquility Lane is reused for Higgs Village - interiors and all - while an entire cell of Fallout 3's Citadel is reused for a lab. There's an entire cave which is just ripped from somewhere in Little Lamplight and, in general, a lot of this DLC reuses Fallout 3 stuff more than anywhere else in the game. I don't mind, it's just funny.

Really, the only emotions this DLC stokes in me aren't even related to Old World Blues. Instead, I only feel things when I think about how this DLC reflects on the rest of NV.

OWB is an odd prequel to Dead Money. Traces of Christine and Elijah's conflict dot the landscape, telling their story in whatever dysfunctional order you find them in. Admittedly, I don't actually like most of this? NV isn't the most subtle masterwork of CRPGs, but it knew when to leave some things up to interpretation or in subtext. Almost all of the stuff relating to DM in OWB amounts to little more than saying the implicit part out loud. I know it was probably planned - the Big MT is mentioned in NV and Elijah mentions coming here a few times in DM - but it still feels very condescending.

But also... I find the repeated assertions that the Big MT are responsible for so many of the evils that dot the landscape of the Mojave to be kind of annoying. It's an ongoing theme in NV that you can't exactly pin all evil on one person or institution, so having the Big MT pop up and go "Hi! We made Cazadors and Nightstalkers!" is eye-rolling. I'd call it un-needed, and I say that as a person that hates being a prescriptive critic. Not helping matters is that these reveals pretty much exist solely as the butt of jokes involvin Dr Borous and not much else?

Oh, and before I forget: I hate the chat with the brain. People unjustly lambast Lonesome Road for "forcing a backstory on the player" (and they're wrong to do so) but IMO forcing the Courier to be an obnoxious redditor is even worse.

I came into OWB expecting it to be an unremarkable stepping stone until I start Lonesome Road, but I was amazed to realize just how unremarkable it is.

Ah well, time to end it.

It's 20XX.

Mira buys a new Diablo-like. People tell her it's cool as fuck and a great iteration on the genre and the best one since Diablo 2 or whatever the youth are saying about games they never played these days.

She plays it for 4-5 hours.

She uninstalls, regardless of whether it's good or bad.

She reinstalls Inquisitor - Martyr and gets yet another Seasonal character to level 100.

Inquisitor isn't very easy to love. Unlockable skill trees have been put in the bin, replaced with a seemingly endless list of passives to be invested in. Skills are innately tied to weapons rather than the character, save for a handful of exceptions. It has muddy, bland visuals with relatively uninspired area design, and the voice acting is servicable when it's not laughable. There's a story, but it's lackluster even by the standards of 40k games. Also it has a cover system which... C'mon I bet you winced just reading that.

But I can't pull myself away from it. Everything it does differently is to its benefit.

I'm willing to give games a lot of time to win me over, but the vast majority in this genre fail to grasp me because they backload everything even slightly interesting, which results in the first 10 or so hours being little more than "hold left mouse button and push 1 or 2 skills off-cooldown". with little in the way of meaningful loot or upgrades.Something I can forgive in MMOs, but not here.

Inquisitor dispenses with that. Each weapon has 4 skills, though some need to be dual-wielded to get all 4 but this allows for mixed setups. Auxiliary gear adds another skill, and armor adds one last skill. As the player can equip two sets of weapons, this functionally adds another 4 skills to their lineup.
You get all of these in about 5 minutes after game start - less if you skip the tutorial.
At first this can seem limiting, but in practice the game's combat comes out swinging rather than taking 10 hours to rev up, and with skills being gear-tied and perk trees so easily reset, trying out other builds or even just augmenting your current one is a relatively low-investment affair.
But the real benefit is that starting over as a new character isn't a mind-numbing affair. Right out the gate, there's stuff to do in combat and a class' identity is immediately apparent. Levelups add more weapon types to the pool, thus granting access to more skills/damage types on top of the usual stat points to distribute.

I have to say, too; though the classes being gender-locked was initially a huge turnoff, they're so distinct that I've long since stopped caring.

Crusader is what I've come to call "Space Marine at home". Many of the generic weapons are shared by almost all classes, and he gets access to heavier versions of them. He can be either a ranged hellstorm or a melee tank - the latter is my preferred build, though. Gotta love that sword/shield and thunder hammer combo.

Assassin is, as you'd expect from the name, focused on either crits or intense burst damage. She doesn't quite get as many flashy toys as some other classes, but those sniper rifles hit obscenely hard and her melee options turn her into a near-literal hurricane of blood. She's a bit squishy, though, but the devs wisely gave her a dodge button.

Psyker is perhaps the most traditional class on the list, an option for people that love casting spells. Somewhat uniquely, though, several of his weapon options forsake weapon skills in favour of giving another spell slot, so the option is there to go full battle mage if you don't feel like joining the shadow psyker money gang.

Tech-Adept is my eternal favourite - I have about three of him at level 100 - and the bar I measure every other summon class in videogames against. Tech-Adepts have fairly unimpressive weapons, but they have a roster of permanent and customizable robot summons that can fit any niche and do basically anything. If you played Necromancer in D2/D3 and you're wired to get a dopamine hit from seeing 10 little guys swarm a boss to death, this is your chance.

Battle Sister is... Sorta the one jack-of-all-trades option? She has nice damage over time effects, respectable survivability, high impact melee options, a super mode and a budget version of Psyker spells. There's not much to write home about, but she does get some fantastic fire-based options.

I normally don't like to just sit down and explain the game to you, but I've played so many Diablo-likes that offer 10+ class options yet fail to distinguish them. Inquisitor's 5, soon to be 6, are phenomenal. So much so that, even before the campaign skip option was added, I didn't mind redoing it countless times to level up a new character.

"But Mira," You ask me. "Diablo-likes are defined by their loot! How is it here?"

It's very ascetic in comparison to other games in the genre. Neocore have done numerous passes on them which has resulted in a much more condensed list of potential rolls and enchantments. Mercifully, the "main" roll of each item seems to be fixed, scaling with item level. As for enchantments, the kindest thing I can say is that I've never once rolled something and thought "who the fuck would ever use this?", at worst I would just get something and discard it for not fitting my exact build.

Truth be told, none of these are the reason why I play Inquisitor so much, no.

The phrase "respects/disrespects my time" often pop up when discussing videogames and I don't really like it because it's very... Self-centered in ways I won't get into in this review.

That said, as far as Diablo-likes go, I'd say Inquisitor is the best for people who have a job and/or something else that devours free time, as it's very laissez-faire in comparison to its peers.

Loot isn't given out willy-nilly, but it's frequent enough that you won't be feeling a drought. Missions aren't very long, most of them give you 2-3 lives, and Void Crusades (the endgame mode) will send you out to the star map after every mission. Plus they can be paused or left alone for a while. Hell, dying doesn't immediately end the run either. Merchants and the blacksmith are within about three feet of one another, as is storage and the class-specific customization stations. Gear rerolling is a fairly cheap and painless process that MERCIFULLY lets you choose to either reroll the enchantment entirely or just reroll the specific value.

And, despite everything I said about the story and voice acting, I'll admit that Inquisitor is dryly funny in its own way. Whenever Warhammer media tries to be funny it's usually in a distinctly American way but Inquisitor is more inline with the English output one would usually find in a Black Library book. The bad voice acting also helps keep the game mildly entertaining, because despite not being too great everyone is overacting so hard that I can't bring myself to turn the mid-mission callouts off.

My only true and major gripe is... You're supposed to use both weapon sets in this game, which is fair enough and I really like it, but there's a noticeable delay between an action ending and weapon swapping being available. It doesn't hurt most classes, but Assassin and Melee Crusader are reliant on it to maximize their output, so with them it's incredibly noticeable.

8/10 please add a Commissar class so I can throw Guardsmen at the meat grinder.

I don't think I'm able to rate this one, in part because I'm eternally torn between the content of the DLC as-is and the numerous statements Joshua Sawyer has made about what went wrong and how much he regrets the final product.

Honest Hearts is a strange DLC. There's simultaneously a lot to chew on and also barely anything. Compared to its immediate predecessor it feels like a brisk walk versus a marathon jog. Normally I'd take it from the top and walk you through it, but... Fuck it let's just go in dry.

HH is more of a metaphorical or ideological tale, not relying on the explicit text so much as the implicit ideas left between the gaps. Contrast Dead Money and it's actually surprising how little there is outside of the chats with Daniel and Joshua.

The core of it is simple: Facing an invasion by the militaristic White Legs tribe, the New Canaanite Mormon missionary Daniel feels that it's prudent to evacuate the Sorrows tribe for Zion National Park. Opposite him is Joshua Graham, the ex-Legate of Caesar's Legion (the Burned Man from NV's various rumours/graffito) and current acting chief of the much more combat-capable Dead Horses tribe. Graham believes that, given the violent nature of the wastes, it's a far more sensible option to have the Sorrows stand and fight - they have, after all, lived in Zion for one hundred years and should defend their home.

It's easy to read this as a white saviour narrative, and I can see why.

It is unfortunately the nature of CRPGs to make the player be the sole determinant in conflicts that arise, which in hindsight explains why so many of them are either milquetoast or involve the player by default. Naturally, to resolve the conflict in HH, you must interface with either Graham or Daniel.
The problem here is threefold: Graham and Daniel are both white men - though Daniel was intended to be an Asian man in development - which gives the setting some surface-level unpleasant implications.
Secondly, they are the only NPCs who have a voice in the story. The two actual tribes are background noise, and while you do get a follower from each they're mostly in their own bubble.
Thirdly, while the developers did take care not to draw influence from real world native cultures, the PS3's god-awful memory limits meant that each of the three tribes had to have the same skin colour, resulting in them being either pale white or very visibly Native American - something Josh Sawyer took responsibility and apologized for.

That all said, I don't necessarily think Honest Hearts is a white savior narrative. Despite accidentally falling into it a few times, I'd say it's definitely making an attempt to deconstruct the trope.

Popular fandom narrative has seen Graham painted as the unreasonable one and Daniel as the reasonable one, which is what the story seems to be doing on the surface, but I've come to disagree.
In the past, Graham paid a single visit to the Dead Horses tribe and inadvertently warped their entire culture. No longer just a tribe, they venerated him as a god and sought to follow in his warmongering ways.
Daniel ostensibly wants to prevent this, but it's also clear if you interrogate him that his actions aren't based entirely in altruism. The player has to antagonize him and finger-wag him for his pacifism, meaning 99% of people probably don't see it, but doing so causes him to flip his lid and reveals more of his motivations. In short, the Sorrows are a vessel for him to seek redemption because he feels he never did enough for the previous parties he attempted to aid.

That last bit, right there, is where I start having issues with Honest Hearts.

The writers for NV are very well-read compared to 3 or 4's, and it shows in the subject matter they bring to the forefront in NV and its DLCs. The problem here, however, is that they're still white Americans. "Write what you know" worked well for them, but with HH they decided to bring Mormonism into the picture. Now, I could go into detail about how that faith is rife with homophobia, sexism and racism, but I'd probably be preaching to the choir.
No, my actual issue is that neither Joshua nor Daniel actually seem Mormon. I don't know if some wires got crossed or what, but the way they're written comes across as distinctly Jewish? You might've seen people over the years reference Daniel's "catholic guilt", but his very specific brand of guilt stemming from his self-perceived inaction in the face of other people's suffering honestly has far more in common with Judaism than Mormonism. Sure, he and Graham talk a lot about righteousness and the Lord, but little attention is given to the idea of the two getting into heaven for their perceived goodness while the idea of cleansing themselves by doing good pops up a ton.

Branching off of that, problems begin to arise due to the tribes themselves lacking any voice in the plot. This following observation is so common that even Youtube Commenters can notice it, but the Sorrows adapt so well to militaristic life that one can't help but answer if they'd been considering it for a long time. This we will never know, because the one major Sorrows NPC is more occupied with her husband than the tribe. While they also adapt well to their new home in the event of evacuation, it's made clear that many of them regret it - but you only find this out in the ending slides.
Conversely, I don't think enough attention is given to the Dead Horses tribe. Sure, the Sorrows are important, whatever, but the narrative doesn't contrast Daniel's interference in their lives with Graham's at all. They're essentially set dressing, and arguably mean less to the plot than individual Sorrows. To even get a smidge of narrative parallel you need to track down the (admittedly excellent) Survivalist's logs

Similarly, the whole framing of the Sorrows potentially 'losing their innocence' for partaking in war has always rubbed me the wrong way. As they lack a voice in the narrative, Daniel pretty much tells you this and you're not really allowed to challenge it in any meaningful way. It comes across as deeply infantilizing, and the tribes themselves frequently using conlang and you-no-take candle speech just makes me raise an eyebrow.

Lastly, while I do so deeply admire the attempt to have a "good vs. good" conflict in a CRPG for once, it runs into a wall because it's phenomenally hard to actually get justifications from Daniel. As I said up above, he only reveals his motives if deliberately antagonized, and said antagonism also requires adopting a pacifistic stance - a ridiculous concept in a game where you kill 50% of all living creatures you see. Otherwise the player is meant to take Daniel's motivations at face value, while Graham is far more upfront about what he wants and why you should do it.

...That all said, however, I ultimately like that Honest Hearts has no unambiguously good endings. The only peace Daniel and Graham can find is if you kill them, and even seemingly 'good' paths lead to them feeling troubled and stricken with regret. My personal favourite is the path where the Sorrows are militarized and Graham is not cautioned on the merits of restraint, for he essentially turns them into another Legion, having come full circle.

I wish I had more to say about Honest Hearts, but coming back to it I'm actually surprised at how little is in it? It took longer to write this review than it did for me to get the Survivalist stuff, do the smidge of sidequests, and beat the main story.

[Wow, I use "that all said" a lot.]

Hey did you know that Fallout 3 never came out? No, not the bad one everyone ignores in favour of NV, I mean the original Fallout 3 - Van Buren, the one that barely anybody is even aware of these days.

Van Buren is something of a fascination of mine. In the wake of Fallout 3’s awfulness way back in 2008, I spent ages poring over the design documents and every scrap of information I could find. Stillborn though it was, seemingly most of the game’s documents had leaked online which provided a robust treasure trove of knowledge.

But alas, they who gain knowledge gain sorrow as well. In plumbing the depths of Van Buren, my feelings of discontent towards Fallout only grew. Try as I might, I couldn’t manifest the revival of Van Buren or Good Fallout Games.

I remember the day I saw that first New Vegas teaser. Watching cold and stone-faced, disinterested and bored. Oh, a robot? Another robot? I killed thousands of robots in 3. I’m sick of robots-

And right there, at that very moment in the memory, young me lay eyes on it: The flag of the New California Republic.

“Could it be?” Thought young Mira. “Van Buren… revived?”

The introductory cutscene only increased the hype. NCR out in full force, the Great Khans having returned for a third time running, Caesar’s Legion in all their rancid glory, Hoover Dam… To say nothing of the reveal that many ex-Fallout 1/2/Van Buren were involved, Josh Sawyer among them.

The day New Vegas came into my life was wondrous. I skipped out on everything to go home and play it for 4-5 days straight.

And… It wasn’t what I wanted! I didn’t hate it, but I did come away feeling lost. I did not get it, nor could I, for I was simply too young. Young Mira wanted Van Buren, which she was [forgive me] """promised""" and felt a bit odd, having a game that seemed to be stuck in Van Buren's shadow but wasn't Van Buren.

Dead Money kinda came and went for younger me. Loved the atmosphere and the inclusion of an honest-to-god BAR but I was again far too young to get anything from it. I was one of those preternaturally annoying chucklefucks that thinks getting all the gold out of the vault "defeats the message".

But both NV and Dead Money were 14 years ago, I've had some time to think. About them, the other DLCs, and about Fallout as a whole.

The ghost of Dead Money hangs over NV, lurking in the corners. Father Elijah’s influence is felt as early as stepping into Helios One, to say nothing of how much his old fellows despise him. Whether the player discovers it or not, they’re traipsing on foundations that Elijah helped lay. That the NCR literally wear the carcasses of the Brotherhood troops they killed only adds to his mystique. Posters for Dean Domino are everywhere, visual white noise that most people pay no mind to. Among them, posters and graffiti alluding to the Sierra Madre as a mystical place where people leave their hearts behind. Dig further into the story and you’ll stumble across the Brotherhood, who spend half of their screen time cursing Elijah for digging their grave and not even having the courtesy to lay in it with them.

As it turns out, though, Elijah has his own grave to dig.

Dead Money isn’t very alluring on the surface. It trades a sprawling Wasteland, impressive locations and factions with distinct aesthetics for a muddy poison-soaked hellhole that’s only barely lit up and is near-exclusively populated by homogenous creeps in gas masks. Add in lots of backtracking, skill checks and fakeouts that explicitly punish
Not to mention the framing. A miserable old dick slaps a bomb collar on your neck and tells you to go rescue three “companions” - insofar as potentially dead weight can be a compatriot.

Everything about Dead Money screams Survival Horror. Shooting isn’t an option half the time and even when it is, ammo isn’t quite as plentiful in the Sierra Madre. There’s a fair share of backtracking and oftentimes the best way to resolve fights is to not get into them. New Vegas gets a bit power fantasy towards the middle-end of the game unless one plays on Hardcore Mode with the difficulty bumped up, and Dead Money immediately throws a wrench into this by stripping you of basically everything. Indeed, the Sierra Madre and its surroundings even call to mind some of the CG art made for Resident Evil: Survivor.

Dead Money isn’t what I’d call a ‘fun’ DLC. Even at its most gripping I can see why most people consider it a snoozefest even if I personally don’t. It’s much slower, more introspective and three times as morose as the other story-focused DLC (Lonesome Road), all while being far less overt with its narrative despite the endless repetition of its four key words: Let Go, Begin Again.

It isn’t immediately obvious how these words apply to Dog/God. Elijah is obsessed with the Sierra Madre, Dean is obsessed with fucking over the centuries-dead Frederick Sinclair, and Christine wants revenge on Elijah. The tragic Nightkin is an outlier at first, and in the intervening years since this game came out I’ve seen even fellow Dead Money enjoyers scratch their heads and declare them an outlier.
What struck me about Dog/God on this replay is how they have more in common than they don’t. Much attention is drawn to Dog’s voracious appetite and bottomless hunger, yes, but God’s fanatical need to control at every given moment is the same kind of gluttony in all but name.
But, relevant to the overarching theme, the most striking part about them is that there’s not really “two halves of a whole” within them so much as they are fragments inhabiting one body. Both of them, in their own way, voraciously pursue their desires while also trying to exert control over the other.
What they have to ‘let go’ of is themselves.
Which is, in all sincerity, deeply resonant. An annoying part of getting old and bothering with that self-improvement nonsense is that you’ll almost certainly come across parts of The Self that’ve accrued some crust over the ages. Beliefs you don’t really hold onto, anger that’s long since lost its target, endless little idiosyncrasies that add up into an odd little rusted automaton in the shape of you. Letting go of that is a bothersome process, albeit a necessary one.
The debatably-best ending for Dog/God is convincing them to let go of their respective Selves and simply embrace the end result. Take hold of the idiosyncrasies and accept them not as “two halves of a whole” but as different shades of the whole. Rather surprising to see such a gentle, loving treatment of DID from a game where - 30 minutes prior to starting this DLC - I got Cass’ infamous Long Dick Johnson line.

But you know what? Let’s skip the 4 protagonists of Dead Money and go back to the 5th: Me.

I think, at some point, everyone who’s young and adores a particular piece of art will inevitably conceptualize something perfect: Their perfect sequel, their perfect adaptation, their perfect spinoff, etc etc.
I’m not going to pretend I was any different, and pertinent to the topic at hand I’d long since had an idea in my head of “The Perfect Fallout”. Indeed, my earliest discontent towards New Vegas stemmed from the fact that it wasn’t that ideal. It was a more introspective and debatably experimental title that was still Fallout but not the Fallout I wanted.

Fortunately, I’ve grown out of those behaviours and have become vastly more accepting of flawed works. Indeed, the search for flawless art is at odds with the nature of art as a reflection of humanity - a uniquely flawed species of mammal.

In returning to Dead Money in 2024, in a post-Fallout 4 and post-Fallout TV world, truthfully I don’t even see the text on display.

I see a group of 4 people who’re maniacally obsessed with a perfect ideal to the point of self-ruination. They won’t accept anything less than what their mind’s eye sees, no matter how blind that eye is to the real world in front of them.

I see Fallout fans like my younger self, still clinging to the hopes that one day they’ll get the perfect flawless Fallout title.

And in this, I’ve come to appreciate the ending a lot more.

It may seem trite or overbearing to have your reward for a 4-5 hour puzzle gauntlet be some gold bars that you have to forsake, but on a meta level I appreciate it.

You can’t take all the gold bars with you without exploits or cheats. You have to make a choice: Be content with less, for at least you have something, or leave empty-handed. What was once stupid to younger Mira now feels profound, and for once I felt content to simply leave the gold untouched and settle for my spoils (Namely, the Automatic Rifle) before locking Elijah in the Vault.

I got the perfect ending this time. Told all the companions to just bail and move on with their lives, in much the same way I have to tell people in real life to ditch stupid vendettas/feuds and focus on the things in front of them. It was cathartic this time in a way it hasn’t been before - maybe I have gotten old.

To cap off the metaphor, though: Dead Money lands a lot better now that I’m content with New Vegas and am apathetic to any future Fallout entries. I’ve got my ideal Fallout game, even if it took some time for me to come around to it. Bethesda can turn the series into a playground all it wants; that’s that, and this is this.

Really, the hardest part of being a Fallout fan isn’t liking the games that are, it’s letting go of the games that co- Too on the nose? Sorry, please don’t throw tomatoes. Let me begin again- FUCK.

I have this annoying problem where, whenever I play a truly transcendental videogame that wows me from head to toe, I enter a state of post-masterwork malaise where even other good games just look worse.

And Library of Ruina was phenomenal. Truly the best game I've ever played, which naturally meant playing anything else was an impossible task.

But I'm old now, and I know how to cure this: I need to play something terrible. Something that, top-to-bottom, inside and out, is just irredeemable. Something not only indefensible, but laughable.

Every brilliant light casts an equally dark shadow, and as Library of Ruina stands at the zenith of gaming, I must look to the nadir for guidance.

Having slogged through the entire game and it's DLCs, I think it's time to put the pin in this journey.

It's interesting to consider just how much Bethesda lucked out with this game.

Soon after its release Fallout: New Vegas would be birthed in a haste at Obsidian's hands, proceeding to dominate the overall population's idea of "Fallout" for a good few years before Fallout 4 came out and the conversation became an eternal NV vs. 4 debate, underscored by endless quibbles about voiced protagonists and that one "yes/yes (sarcastic)/no (yes)/no" meme about FO4's dialogue. In the midst of all this is Skyrim, a game so influential and popular despite its flaws that Bethesda are "The Skyrim People" to a not-insignificant number of people on Earth.

All of this is to Bethesda's benefit, because it means people have forgotten about Fallout 3.

Not me, though. That's my curse; I'm a career hater, I can't forget bad games.

But let’s put 3 on the backburner for a moment.

Let’s talk about Oblivion.

Even a decade on from its end, people are still trying to figure out which games defined the 7th generation of consoles the most. I’m going to throw my 2 cents into the ring:
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was, by far and bar none, the most defining title of 7th gen.
Not to say that other titles weren’t influential, of course, but even though we live in a time where the words “Ubisoft open world” have entered most people’s lexicons, I think the progenitor of said open worlds was Oblivion and Bethesda.
Oblivion was a game with a very clear message: You don’t need to meticulously design every part of a game for it to sell well or be beloved. You don’t even need to meticulously design a small part of it. All you have to do is make a big empty bowl, put in some markers that allude to it being bigger than it actually is, and then give it a clutter pass before dotting some reused fortresses/caves/mines into it. There’s no need for a personal touch in every corner, merely the illusion of one.

But I can forgive Oblivion for a lot of things even if it is terrible. It was one of the earliest titles released in 7th gen, and the first of its scale. It took four years to make in a time where that was an incredible abnormality.

Fallout 3 gets no such mercy from me.

In part, because it’s worse.

Most RPGs either force a goal onto you but let you pick your motive, or they force a motive onto you and let you pick your goal. These are streams that’re best left uncrossed. Fallout 3, for some reason, attempts to do both.

F3 opens with you, the player character, being born and causing your mother to die of postpartum cardiac arrest. This is already a horrific indicator of how obsessed it’s going to be with its own unearned sense of profundity and much like the actual act of being born, it gets infinitely worse.
Just to get this out of the way: This sucks. It sucks on a creative level - Bethesda clearly couldn’t figure out how to stoke player investment without giving you a dead mom, a sad dad and showing your birth - but it also just sucks as the opening to a Fallout game?
This observation is so common that even comparatively normal people who don’t engage with Gaming as a culture often make it: Fallout 1 and 2 open with “oh yeah some shit’s fuck, go save your home”. Fallout NV starts with you getting shot in the head, and sends you off after a brief intro.
Fallout 3’s intro, then, sticks out like a sore thumb even compared to its more immediate sequel.
Afterwards you get warped to a birthday party filled with named NPCs who share voice actors and who you don’t care about. After that you get warped to a school test with the same named NPCs who share voice actors and don’t actually speak more than one or two lines, who you still don’t care about.

After that most of them die and the game tries to make you feel sad about their deaths I guess, but it’s moot because you finally get to leave the Vault and I’m incredibly confident 99% of people regardless of age or maturity felt elation at not having to wander through boring, visually bland corridors anymore.

Unfortunately, that’s all Fallout 3 has to offer outside the Vault too.

Over the years I’ve started to take incredible amounts of umbrage with the establishing shot of DC the player is greeted with upon leaving the Vault.

It promises a grand, open world - a reprieve from the suffocating Vault you just slogged through!

Springvale School is just down the road. It looks like this. Walk a bit further and you can find a metro. It looks like this. You can even find some sewer tunnels. They look like this.. Maybe, if you go a bit further, you’ll find an office building. Looks like this!.

Okay. You’ve now seen 99% of locations in Fallout 3.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s just have a little design chat.

I’m not a game dev, but I’ve played so many open world games and developed a fondness for them that I’ve managed to figure out some criteria that helps measure how good these games are on a technical level.

To wit, a ‘good’ open world is dotted with areas where one or more of these applies:

A visual reward, in the form of a lovely view.
A progression reward, in the form of loot that directly makes you stronger.
Something you can’t see or obtain anywhere else in the game world.
Depending on the world structure, it should lead to somewhere else that’s only accessible via a specific location.
At the very least, for more out-there or hidden areas, there should be some acknowledgement that you made the journey successfully.

Right, all that is out of the way.

Fallout 3’s open world is badly designed, but to really dig into why we need to talk about the other parts of the game that’re badly designed, and I think the topic of loot is perhaps the most pressing.

The first shotgun the player can acquire in Fallout New Vegas is the humble Single Shotgun. It does respectable damage for how early it drops, but true to its name it only carries a single round and its short but frequent reloads can leave you wide open against hordes or particularly tank enemies. It also uses 20 gauge shells as opposed to 12 gauge, so while it hits hard early on it ultimately stops being useful fast.
Later in the game’, the player can luck into possession of the venerable Riot Shotgun, an absolute beast of a weapon that boasts a 12-round drum magazine with 12 gauge shells as its primary ammo type, on top of a high rate of fire and respectable reload time.

Meanwhile the first shotgun the player can potentially find in Fallout 3 is the Combat Shotgun). It is, like the Riot Shotgun, a veritable moment that can dish out respectable damage and uses 12 gauge ammo. In the Capital Wasteland, this is an extremely common weapon with an extremely common weapon type - 20 gauge does not exist, so all shotgun wielding enemies are walking topups.

To really illustrate this issue, we need to talk about damage.

New Vegas uses two types of defensive stat: Damage Resistance (percentage-based) and Damage Threshold (flat reduction).

All incoming damage taken is reduced by the DR value at a percentage. So if you, for example, take 100 damage and have 50 DR, you take 50 damage.
Next is the DT value, which is a flat reduction. Seeing as we’ve just taken 50 damage, let’s imagine we have 20 DT. Since it’s just a flat subtraction, all in all we’ve taken 30 damage. This goes both ways.

This hypothetical only involves a single instance of damage. Shotguns, as they fire multiple pellets per shot, have the formula applied to each individual pellet. The end result is that despite high damage stats and seeming to be catch-free, shotguns in NV do a lot less damage than you’d initially think - though, as NV is a competently made game, this can be circumvented with alternative ammo and perks.

Fallout 3, however, only uses Damage Resistance. This is alarming on its own, but it gets worse as you learn that DR in Fallout 3 rarely if ever gets above 40. Most non-humanoid enemies don’t even have any DR stats, just health.

This is where the problem really starts to take shape.

While this does still impact the individual shotgun pellets, the reality is that a 10% reduction applied to 10 damage is incredible miniscule, so the Combat Shotgun becomes a weapon sent down by the gods to smite anything with a pulse.

The Combat Shotgun is incredibly powerful, uses bountiful ammo and is incredibly common. As are the Hunting Rifle, Missile Launcher, Assault/Chinese Assault Rifles, and Laser/Plasma Rifles.

Final result?

Most loot rewards are utterly worthless and incredibly unsatisfying.

99% of Fallout 3’s generic, copy-pasted dungeons end with you getting little more than some sellable stuff, a few caps, a handful of consumables, one weapon which you already have 15 of in stock, and a surplus of ammo that you’re probably already overflowing with. Fuck dude, even a lot of main story stuff just dumps excess on you. The final ‘dungeon’ doesn’t offer anything you don’t already have assuming you’ve bothered to go for a walk between the midgame and then.
I can only really describe this game’s world design as a sort of maniacal creative ADHD. You’ll find a marker or something to gawk at every couple of minutes, yes, but in actuality all of the stuff you find is superfluous gunk that at best rewards you with thirty 5mm rounds and a stimpak.
A couple of years ago I replayed Deus Ex: Human Revolution. While that game has many issues, the only relevant one is: Loot scarcity. In a sort of dim, artificial attempt to keep the player ~on their toes~, Deus Ex HR frequently has players break into hidden vaults and armouries only to find at best a weapon they already have and some ammo.
Fallout 3 has both this exact same issue and the opposite problem: Loot excess. Because there’s so little of it, and because it’s all so strong, the simple act of finding things is simultaneously unsatisfying and unneeded. What am I going to do with some leather armor and a knife? I found a weapon to kill god in a bin.
Lastly, there’s a very strange issue running through Fallout 3 wherein loot containers that need skill investment to unlock often have worse loot than random bedside cabinets. In the game’s final dungeon I cracked open a Hard-difficulty terminal, and behind it was… 19 10mm rounds, a Stimpak, some drugs, and one missile. Opposite, in a random footlocker, was a useful amount of money and a significant handful of Microfusion Cells.

Truthfully, though, all of that isn’t the actual problem - New Vegas also has its fair share of dud locations. The actual problem is that there’s a lack of loot progression. You get a Combat Shotgun or a weapon of your choice and you’re basically set for life. Besides Mini Nukes there are no rare ammo types, and caps are plentiful - in part due to loot itself being plentiful - meaning it’s easy to just cycle around each vendor and empty their ammo stock if you need .44 Magnum or .308 ammo.

There are some unique pieces of equipment here and there, but they run into a teensy tiny little problem:

They’re overkill.

Fallout 3’s greatest sin, looping back to that discussion about damage earlier, is that it’s an easy game.

Most enemies rarely have health in the hundreds, and basically everything besides the .32 pistol and the Chinese pistol is capable of outputting that with impunity. Conversely, unless the player cranks the difficulty right up, enemies don’t deal enough damage to be a threat unless they’re in large groups and even then it’s incredibly rare to fight groups of enemies in open terrain. Indeed, the first real swarm most players will find during the main quest is fought with tons of cover and chokepoints to exploit.
It’s not until the DLCs that enemies start appearing with difficulty attached, and said difficulty is little more than them getting a +30-40 extra damage for free. They do have bloated HP, but realistically if you’re at the recommended level for the DLCs then you have enough damage output to ignore that.

In most other open world games where loot is a frivolous, tacked-on system with no merit, usually exploration is its own reward. This sentiment carried BOTW to many people’s good graces, after all.
Fallout 3 has no such luck: The Capital Wasteland is a horrifically unappealing place. There isn't much in the way of landmarks and the ones that do exist are so… American. I suppose it may be resonant and even disquieting if you’re an American with any degree of patriotism but I’m an embittered Scot that views the entire country as a disease that’s gone on too long. The sight of the Washington Monument in disrepair makes me feel about as much as the styrofoam box I get my chips from.
It’s easy to throw up one’s hands and say “Oh, but this is a post-apocalyptic game, Mira! Of course it looks like shit!” which isn’t an entirely unworkable stance, it just ignores that pretty much every other famous piece of post-apocalyptic media - especially the Fallout game released immediately after this one wrapped - managed to nail this while still being ‘ruined’.
I have a relatively good sense of direction, to the point where my friends instinctively put me in charge whenever we need to find somewhere in Glasgow. With that said, I find it incredibly easy to lose where I am on Fallout 3’s map, for once the player leaves the downtown DC region the Capital Wasteland is little more than a grey/brown wasteland dotted with the same 4-5 ruins for miles upon miles. Most of the notable map markers are in the southeast of the map anyway.

Not helping this is that, as opposed to having regional spawn lists to spruce up the act of exploration, Fallout 3 uses a global spawnlist which deposits the vast majority of enemies into the world at random.

Which sucks because there’s not that many enemy types. Humanoids, Radscorpions, Radroaches, Yao Guai, Deathclaws, Botflies, Feral Ghouls, Super Mutants, Centaurs, Dogs, Mirelurks, Mole Rats, Ants, and robots. There, that’s basically every enemy in the game. You will most likely encounter all of them within 20 minutes of following the main path.
Oblivion has a similar problem of dropping random enemies all over the map, but that game’s level scaling is kind enough to replace enemies rather than simply dropping reskinned versions of them with higher HP in the same places.

The enemies, I feel, are where every issue I talked about up above comes to a head. Bad loot variety? Human enemies attack with the same 5-6 weapons. Bad location variety? You kill the same enemies with the same gear in samey locations. Bad quest variety? Regardless of context, you’re hitting the same things in the same gear in the same locations for only slightly different reasons.

And, as is the trend for Fallout 3, enemies being miserable to fight is both a culmination of other issues and introduces its own!

Namely: Combat is, at a very base foundational level, deeply unsatisfying.

Normally I wouldn’t repeat criticisms that other people have said uniformly for decades, however as a career Fallout 3 hater I reserve the right to do so.

It’s accepted by now that Bethesda games lack weight in their combat. Melee feels floaty and impactless, and every gun regardless of caliber or damage feels like using a BB gun. Nobody reacts to damage besides the odd grunt and maybe a canned stagger animation until they die, at which point they either limply collapse like a puppet with severed strings or explode in a shower of gore which is… Honestly, kind of juvenile? And I say this as a certified gore whore.
This in itself is an extension of the game’s nauseatingly childish fixation on gore; raider camps have dismembered corpses impaled on hooks, many areas are filled with random bits of internal organ, and Super Mutants carry entire fishnet bags filled with gore.

But on a technical level, shooting things in Fallout 3 is both deeply unsatisfying and badly designed.

FPS games were some of the first to really crystallize as a genre, and by the time Fallout 3 ripped itself free into the world there were already certain ground rules that not even outsider games dared to break.
If a gun sways, it’s accepted that it should aim where it’s pointing. If a gun’s projectiles have spread, it’s commonly accepted that the gun itself should be steady. Easy enough, right?
Fallout 3, for some asinine reason, does both.
On some level I can vaguely maybe kinda possibly appreciate the attempt to recreate the experience of trying to fire a gun in Fallout 1 with low stats at a target far beyond its effective range, but the problem here is that that experience was temporary until you powered up and here it’s a permanent fixture of gameplay. Weapons have less sway as you increase their respective skill, but unless your Int stat is high (because skill points are asininely tied to it) then that’s a relatively slow crawl - doubly so when there are other skills to increase.
What really hurts shooting is that hit detection is wildly inconsistent. The hitbox for projectiles is seemingly tiny, and it often gets caught on terrain or misses ‘direct’ shots by one thousandth of an inch. Said terrain seems to be poorly constructed, as wafer-thin bits of rebar will obstruct bullets around them and cause them to seemingly clatter off of thin air.
Call of Duty is terrible yesyes but this game came out a year after CoD4 had already introduced the average person to snappy, responsive and satisfying shooting which also lets you shoot through chainlink fences. I have no idea what was in the water to make people believe this game’s shooting was enjoyable.

As a brief aside: I discovered only now that oftentimes projectiles in third person mode don’t even go where you aim them. My metric for how good shooters are at a base level revolves around how good it feels to fight in close quarters, and because of this Fallout 3 feels even worse.

“[Developer] made a competent [genre] and didn’t bother to make the rest of the game” is a phrase that popped up a lot around the late 00s and early 2010s as more and more people began trying to blend genres together. See: Alpha Protocol.
Fallout 3 is unique in this front because Bethesda not only failed to make a competent shooter, but the corpse of an RPG around it isn’t very good either.

Let me just quote myself, from earlier:

Most RPGs either force a goal onto you but let you pick your motive, or they force a motive onto you and let you pick your goal. These are streams that’re best left uncrossed. Fallout 3, for some reason, attempts to do both.

Fallout 3 gives the player a rigid, established backstory and also an annoying rigid, established goal. It’s quite alarming to come across as an NPC related to your father and see every dialogue option be variations on “where my dada :<”.
But even beyond that, there isn’t much room to actually roleplay in this game. The Lone Wanderer as a protagonist is painfully straight forward, and their two forms are “person with human decency” and “guy who condemns kids to slavery.”
Fallout 3, like any other RPG, has quests but I hesitate to call them that. They’re more like guides towards shooting galleries that sometimes stop and ask you if you want to be a nice person, if you want to use a perk/skill to bypass a third of the quest, or if you want to be unfathomably and needlessly cruel.
Even within the main story, there isn’t much framework to roleplay because the Lone Wanderer assimilates their father’s purpose without even giving the player a morton’s fork dialogue choice.

As for the actual main story… I’ve always hated it for the same reasons most other Fallout 3 haters dislike it - it’s flimsy, way too short, has no room for player choice, is entirely linear, etc etc - but as I replayed it, something stood out to me.

Do you know what the Great Man Theory is? In short, and in layman’s terms: The GMT is the belief that Great Men aren’t necessarily nurtured or cultivated, but are simply great from birth. It is these Great Men, and only these Great Men, that are allowed to dictate the course of history. It sucks, I hate it. We don’t use the phrase “product of their environment” for nothing.

I’m gonna take a hard pivot here. Bear with me.

When you think of the word “fascism” you likely have a strong image in your mind. Goose-stepping Nazis, death camps, red hatted Americans screaming in hordes, the most boring European men in suits putting uncomfortable emphasis on the word “superior”, that kind of thing.
Those aren’t invalid. Good on you. Fascism sucks.
But my mental image is defined by a lot of uncomfortably up-close experience with these kinds of people, and it’s boring.
My mental image of Fascism is the dark underside of the Great Man Theory. Of people who believe that, if Great Men are simply born, then Un-Great or ‘Degenerate’ Men are also born. If there are enough Great Men, why shouldn’t they rule? Why should the world cater to Degenerate Men when Great Men can be classified? We should keep Degenerate Men from usurping our Great Men! So on, so forth.

What I mean to say here is that Fascism as a belief system often manifests in incredibly boring ways that’re so banal they often go unnoticed even by people that’re otherwise keyed into such things - at least when they’re not like. Insane.

Fallout 3’s main story is passively Fascist, then.

I don’t think Bethesda Game Studios’ writers are Fascists. I feel you could probably convince Todd Howard to write “1312” on his shirt with a mild amount of transgender Charisma. There’s enough queer people in this IP that I don’t think they hold any real malice for anybody, albeit in much the same way I don’t think they hold any beliefs at all.

But they are incompetent writers, and they’ve accidentally made a story which has awful undertones.

Your first real hints as to the game’s nature come up if you take a walk around DC. There’s a lot of veneration towards the USA Founding Fathers that at first seems quaint and in line with the setting’s propaganda, but…
As the story goes on, it’s made abundantly clear that the player’s father was a Great Man, being the only one capable of rallying a team of scientists and the only one capable of actually putting Project Purity into motion.
When he inevitably dies thanks to the Enclave delaying the ending of my suffering by 2 hours, it falls to you - only you, nobody else - to follow in his footsteps. Because you’re a Great Man too!
In the original version of the game, you die activating the Purifier, and a statue of Thomas Jefferson looks down at you - unmoving, yet seemingly approving… BECAUSE HE’S A GREA-

There’s also the matter of Three Dog’s radio commentary which gets a little… Suspicious, I’d say? It starts out innocently enough, but even a neutral Lone Wanderer starts getting referred to as an actual saviour, with such overdramatic gestures such as Three Dog admitting you cured his misanthropy by being a saint. It’s rather telling that the Very Good Karma icon is a Jesus caricature.

RPGs as a genre do admittedly have a problem with sometimes accidentally stepping into the Great Man shit, it’s just the nature of the genre; to have things occur without the player’s influence or awareness is unsatisfying from a design perspective, so of course things have to be up to you. Wiser RPG devs go out of there way to ensure you’re just an everyman, or you’re woven into the setting in such a way that it avoids such pitfalls.
Fallout 3, unfortunately, leans a bit too into it. Especially with the way Raiders are portrayed, and how often Three Dog talks about them and other wasteland randoms as if they’re actual animals.

It always did strike me as odd that handing total control of Project Purity to the Enclave is rightfully seen as a mistake but handing it over to another authoritarian organization - the Brotherhood - is fine. Yes they’re allegedly benevolent but even in Fallout 3 they show a distinct disgust for ‘wasters’ and it’s stated outright they shoot Ghouls on sight. If you have a more holistic view of franchises (as opposed to my individualistic one), then Fallout 4 confirms they’ll go on to be an actual Fascist organization.

And what better topic to add into this mix than slavery?

In invoking many prominent figures from America’s history, Abraham Lincoln naturally gets brought up a lot, and so do slaves. Slavers make up a decent number of the Capital Wasteland’s population, and they’re everywhere. The few settlements dotted around the map have an eternal fear of them, and their base is perhaps second only to the Brotherhood’s in size + population.

But slavery in this game isn’t really substantial. It isn’t something to be commented on or observed or interrogated, it’s basically another vessel for quests. There’s one liberation faction, and one enslaving faction. Kill slavers, or enslave people. Enslaving people is 100 negative Karma, giving two bottles of water to a beggar is 100 positive Karma. Ethical slavery, yeah!
But even though there is a faction dedicated to the emancipation of slaves, that’s your job - if you want. The slave liberators are tucked away in a corner of the map, easily missable because there’s frankly not that much out that way. Their fate, and the fate of all slaves, is up to you.
I don’t like Fallout 4 all that much but even that game was willing to create the idea that people other than you were working to liberate the Synths.

All of this really compounds the banal and straightforward design: Arguably more than any other Bethesda game, or indeed open world game, Fallout 3 is the one that feels the most static. It is your playground because only You can do anything.

With that all said, there is one part of the game I admittedly think is decent.

Vault 101, the player’s home, is like almost every other Vault in the Bethesda Fallout canon: A social experiment under the guise of a shelter for humanity. Note that this concept basically doesn’t exist prior to Fallout 3; Vaults in 1/2/Tactics/Van Buren were simply shelters.
Vault 101’s experiment was simple: Stay closed. Never reopen. Compared to other experiments in Fallout 3 and subsequent games, this one was incredibly merciful.
Naturally, like other Vaults, 101 faces a violent reckoning when your father leaves - violating the experiment - and the Overseer reacts harshly.

When you return, the Vault has split into people who want to keep the door closed and people who want to go outside.
Uniquely for Fallout 3, there is no right answer here; barring ‘destroy the vault’, each branch of the story offers a degree of good Karma and neither are explicitly better than the others.
You could side with the rebels and open the Vault. They’d be free, and the resources of an active Vault could do good for the surrounding area and settlements… But the Wasteland is filled with a lot of people who’re pure evil, and while you might be able to survive out there there’s absolutely no guarantee anyone else will besides Butch.
Or, you could side with the Overseer and keep it closed. Despite the Overseer being authoritarian, the Vault did run fine until your dad leaves at the game’s proper start and considering future games it’s one of three depicted on-screen that actually were completely fine. Every negative about opening the Vault is a valid reason to side with him, but… It’s quietly brought to the player’s attention that the Overseer’s control over Vault Security isn’t as tight as he thinks it is, and they’re all too willing to take drastic measures to enforce compliance. Not to mention that while he might be able to end the conflict, the Vault still needs a doctor and families have been either destroyed or split asunder.

This is the only quest of its kind in Fallout 3.

Unfortunately like every quest in Fallout 3 even potentially poignant moments are ruined by the voice acting.

I have to commend Jennifer Massey (Dr Madison Li) and Erik Todd Dellums (Three Dog) for being the only voice actors who’re even pretending to give a shit about this script, because everyone else is phoning it in. This game only has a small handful of voice actors and pretty much all of them are audibly reading the script for the first time as they’re saying the lines.
More often than not, the subtitles carry a tone that the actual voice acting doesn’t. It’s marginally improved in the DLCs, but only slightly. In the base game, the same 5-6 voice actors will mumble out their lines with zero enthusiasm or variety. It does, to an extent, turn into accidental comedy when you walk into the Rivet City Market and have three different NPCs greet you in an identical voice.

There’s a somewhat sad irony to the fact that Fallout 3 can be played through New Vegas via Tale of Two Wastelands and yet it doesn’t make it better - it makes it worse. That’s really this game’s legacy, isn’t it? It needs sunlight to grow, but New Vegas is the sky and it won’t be having it.

With everything I've said, observed and read in mind, I'd ultimately argue that Fallout 3 shows more signs of a rushed, ramshackle development than New Vegas. Of the two, it's infinitely buggier, rife with cut/scrapped content and saddled with an omnipresent feeling of "this game isn't done".

As I reach the end of this review, I find myself struggling to answer a question: Why do I keep playing this game every couple of years?

It's not Schrodinger's Game, I don't need to observe it to find out if it's shit or not. Not once has my opinion on this game gotten even SLIGHTLY more positive over my various replays - which, as of writing, is the only game this sentiment still applies to.

But yet, like clockwork, I return to it. I install Fallout 3, then New Vegas, then Tale of Two Wastelands followed by the same QoL/maintenance mods I always get. I boot it, I beat it, I hate it. We're sitting at like ten full replays over the last decade. It defies all sense to me. Is this what a manic compulsion is? Something my body craves but the brain cannot comprehend? It's so very eldritch.

In typing that, I awakened a memory of the day Fallout 3 barged into my life, a week ahead of schedule thanks to a shipping error. My father text me while I was on my way out of high school for lunch: "Yer game's here". Wanting to play a shiny new game and not wanting to read The Cone Gatherers, I opted to make the lunch trip into a trip home.
Having a lot of free time these days, I decided to retrace my steps and walk that route again.

I boarded the train to my old town, and as trains do it came to a stop at the end of the route. I departed and made my way to the route I once took - mercifully, the train stops right behind where I went to school. Following my steps, I did everything as it was; popped into a cafe for a hot roll, got a can of juice from the (still open, yay!) newsagent, and took the long way around to what used to be my home.
I grew up in one of the many, many towns in Scotland whose only real purpose was to house poor people and host an ironworks/coal mine - and those were shut down decades ago. As a result, going back during the quieter hours fills me with the same kind of discomfort one can also vaguely experience in the remnants of Fallout 3's depiction of Washington DC. My old town, too, is a place mostly occupied by shambling zombies and people that might kill you if aggro'd.

You're perhaps expecting me to admit that returning to Fallout 3 is secret nostalgia, right? That I hold a soft spot for it and have been denying that?

No, I still think it's terrible, but I did find out why I keep coming back to it.

On my walk I passed by a bus shelter that, in my day, was little more than a standing rail encased in bricks with a sheet metal roof. Nowadays it's been renovated, with a bench, windows, and a bus timetable.

Looking back at it, I recalled a discussion I once had at that old bus shelter with a good friend of mine who we'll call Gary. We'd been out that day for quite some time, poking through forests and trails with our friends. It was a long day in the middle of a mild Scottish summer, something we no longer experience. By the time we were due to go home, both of us were exhausted.
Exhaustion, for teenagers, is often the harbinger of naked sincerity. The kind you can only really experience in that time where your 'golden years' are in their twilight and their end seems closer and closer every time you turn, trembling, towards the horizon.
I offer to walk Gary to his bus and he accepts. On the way, our chats are about normal things, nothing heavy. When we sit down, though, the silence around us creeps in. A busy town center, now without a soul save for the odd car. We sit by ourselves, wordless, as the last breaths of sunlight choke and die beneath the coming night.

I whip out my iPod Nano and, on the screen, is the last thing I was listening to: A song from In Flames' 'A Sense of Purpose', which at that point was two years old.
Gary scoffs, and we begin the ritual that teenage boys do where we rib one another for our tastes over and over.
But we're both tired, it's just past 8pm, and we were kinda enjoying the silence. The jabs and japes soon end without much fanfare, and silence falls in.
The bus was late. This I remember clearly. So late that Gary, a jovial and relatively stoic lad, was getting antsy.
Apropos of nothing, he turns to me.
"Mira," He asks in a surprisingly cold voice. "You know, I hate A Sense of Purpose, but I love it at the same time."
This so dumbfounded me, it did. My thinking was so very binary back then: Things I liked were good, things I disliked were bad. How and why would one love a bad thing?
"Gary, that makes no sense." I croak out, bewildered.
"Aye," So he says, like he just confessed to a murder. "Wanna know why?"
Of course I did, and nodded in assent.
"Things keep changing, and I'm scunnered [tn: tired] of it. But that album," He nods to my iPod as though it were a child - not a creature of sin, but innocently misguided. "That album is always shit. No matter how much time passes, it's always shite. I like that."
I didn't have an answer in me, much as I wished I did. It was my first introduction to the concept of 'terrible but I love it'. We sat in silence for another few minutes before the bus pulled up. I wished him well and we saw one another off.

Coming back to this memory 14 years later, I get it.

Fallout 3 and A Sense of Purpose were both 16 years ago.

In the intervening years, my tastes have changed. My top 25 from 2019 looks alien to me, the same list from 2015 utterly unbelievable. My walls are no longer adorned with band posters and game memorabilia, but shelves and stuffed rabbits I collect. While I once longed to work in the IT field, experience has made me pray that I never wear a shirt and tie again. I no longer live in the old mining town, the sun does not hit my face from the same angles while I rest. When I exit my house I do not see fields of green and distant towns, but endless houses, apartment blocks and industrial estates.

It is, suffice to say, rather obvious that not only have I changed, but so has the world around me. Indeed, I often wonder if I'm the same person as the one in these memories, or if they were simply taken from another when I was constructed at the age of 21. The changes I describe have occurred over what is now half of my entire lifespan, a period of so many years that not even my pristine memory can keep those years from occasionally blending together or faces from getting blurred.

But Fallout 3?

Fallout 3 never changes.

I had a longer review written, but... Hmm...

There's this interview that plays in my head a lot. Someone brings up how popular Zero (a dashing genderweird character introduced in 6.1) is and Naoki Yoshida - the game's producer, director, and member of Square Enix's board - awkwardly mumbles out that he didn't quite expect people to love her so much.

This is innocent on the surface, but to me it was a huge head tilter at the time.

See, FFXIV has a problem with misogyny. Whether it's inconsequential shit like "Minfilia polled terribly with players, so we killed her and turned her into a mcguffin", Yotsuyu's weird allergory for comfort women turning sour in Stormblood postpatch, Ysayle/Moenbryda (self-explanatory), the double standard invoked with the fates of Fordola compared to Gaius Baelsar, the incredible overuse of sexual assault references in dialogue up until late Stormblood, or Lyse getting written out of the story because people hated her, there's a lot to chew on regarding misogyny.
It's sort of a "joke" (insofar as banal reality can be humorous) among woman-liking FFXIV fans that pretty much any new woman introduced will probably either die or be written out. Venat implicitly (in the Japanese text, explicitly) being denied reincarnation while the setting's equivalent to Super Hitler gets to constantly appear in flashbacks was just the nail in the coffin.

I bring this up because 6.5 is bad. It's not bad in the same ways 6.0 was bad - Natsuko Ishikawa's uncomfortably Imperial Japan sympathizing fingers are at a minimum barring 6.4 - but it's bad in more banal, eyebrow-raising ways.
To avoid burying the lede: 6.5 smacks of both swift, lazy rewrites and also creative sterility.

After 5 patches of overwritten, backtracking-padded, unsatisfying buildup, 6.5 just dispenses with most of the stakes and conflict to say "Beat Zeromus and Golbez will be a good guy!". You get an admittedly decent trial out of it before Zero abruptly becomes a Paladin with little fanfare (mirroring Cecil's iconic moment from FF4, but terrible) and surprise Golbez is a good guy.
Zero thanks you for your friendship and aid, before declaring that she's going off to the same not-relevant closet as Lyse and demanding you don't ever come knocking for her.

Honestly, as an aside: XIV's format is killing it. There is no real reason for 6.4 to not have the Scions immediately leap in to fight Zeromus other than the devs needing to do another patch. It sucks so much.

"Zero was intended to die but they changed their mind last minute" is, at the time of writing, a conspiracy theory. Nonetheless, it's a believable one.

What's really telling to me, both about the void arc's development and also the reception Endwalker got, is that this patch opens with an incredibly lazy and overbearing Shadowbringers nostalgia trip. Needing Light for a storyline that should've ended last patch, you and Zero hop over to the First and meet all of your Shadowbringers friends! Hurray!
Except... Look, even putting aside my negative bias (I consider Shadowbringers the worst XIV expansion) it just reads incredibly poorly. It's an abrupt plot stopper, is mostly unvoiced filler dialogue/quests that serve no purpose than to tug at the player's nostalgia, and genuinely does not matter at all until the very end.
This is alarming, at least to me, because they did this after Stormblood (an expansion Japan infamously despises to this day) what with the sudden surge of Ishgard/Heavensward references and Aymeric being your BFFL all of a sudden in Ghimlyt, the nuking of Stormblood plot threads in Shadowbringers, plus the very abrupt resurrection of Zenos and the sudden announcement of a whole event centered on Ishgard - the first and so far last of its kind.
Lastly, the dungeon of this patch is a cheap rehash of Amaurot but because nobody gives a flying fuck about the storyline it has all the impact of picking up a plate with a towel and it sliding back into the basin.

All of this combines into a package that, honestly? Pisses me off personally. The Void and everything around it has long since been one of the most int- [remembers what games I'm talking about] least boring parts of the setting and it's essentially gelded, its sole promising voiced NPC neutered, all to... idk, shove the single remaining plot thread from pre-Ishikawa days in the trash and move onto Dawntrail?

Other reviews have said it already and I'm adding my voice to the chorus: I think FFXIV has went on too long.

I only have so much tolerance for drab cutscenes with the same canned animations, the same WoL responses, the same bad audio mixing that feels like mics are about to peak, the same annoying placid and uninventive BGM that I've been hearing since 2013. I have even less tolerance for quest design that hasn't changed since I left education - and it was the same when I went into it!

I want to lie and say that maybe Dawntrail will be better, but... Will it?

I forgave a lot of XIV's bullshit because the writers had a series of curtains drawn that I was eager to peek behind.

The curtains are open now, and despite my hopes they are indeed blue.

Will Dawntrail be any good? Will it deviant from dungeons/trials at odd levels, playing Machinations whenever it's safe to skip a cutscene, overly choreographed duties that're aimed at people who have panic attacks when asked to use tank stance, mediocre writing which betrays the writers' uncomfortable opinions on Imperial Japan's colonization efforts, and music which occasionally rises above "fine" but is mostly just forgettable BGM unless you're in a duty?

Beats me.

[The review has functionally ended here, I'm now just talking to myself.]

I've seen a lot of comparisons to TV shows and the MCU when talking about how exhausted FFXIV's formula is, and while I agree to an extent (I am an ex-Red vs Blue fan.) I think with games it's actually worse.

I alluded to it up above, but games being tired and going on too long is far more noticeable than in other mediums besides maybe music (shoutout to BFMV for making Fever for a decade straight).
It terrifies me that FFXIV is somehow one of SE's top earning games (barring this year, where their MMO division lost money for the first time in a while) but it feels so cheap. The same animations, the same music, the same format. For a decade, nothing but empty field areas and inconsequential yellow quests and 3 alliance raids and 12 normal raids and Hildebrand and five post-patches. A trial before you hit level cap, then a back-to-back dungeon and trial. Main leitmotif for the final boss. Final boss is a well intentioned extremist.
Over and over and over...

It's strange, too. I've recently gotten super into Granblue Fantasy, and it feels like a mirror into a better world. A better FFXIV. It, too, is a decade-spanning pseudo-MMO that's had to deal with the pains of being a GaaS title, yet it's managed to innovate within itself. Fights only get cooler and cooler as time goes on, characer kits manage to be relatively interesting without being a straight upgrade to existing characters (though these still exist), their writing has matured from its infancy, and the art/visuals/music only get better every month.

Sure, it has gacha money, but FFXIV is one of SE's top earners, yet it feels cheaper than some games I've played that were literally made by 10-15 Chinese folks in a shed.

I don't actually think CBU3 are entirely to blame. They are absolutely to blame for XIV's weirdly conservative stances on things, bad writing, and overexertion of creative control (STOP FORCING SOKEN TO MAKE ORCHESTRAL MUSIC.), but I think most problems I've talked about here can be traced back to both the very strict "5 post-patches, then an expansion every two years" shit and chronic mismanagement/underfunding.
I know Naoki Yoshida is everyone's parasocial best friend who can do no wrong, but c'mon. Fumbling FF16 despite having infinite Mainline Final Fantasy money can't say anything good about his capabilities.

As I wrote this all out I found myself longing for Stormblood. I don't like Stormblood (or anything in XIV anymore, really, I just came back to get my IRLs prepped for Dawntrail) but...
Hm.
I don't know how much the devs really care about FFXIV, especially as Yoshida continually looks more withdrawn and disinterested with each fanfest, but as a simple end user it just feels like Stormblood was the last time they were firing on all cylinders. The duties were great - in side content especially - the field areas were gorgeous, the music had so much flavour compared to ShB and EW's morose slop, and for just a brief moment in this game's gargantuan lifespan I was actually interested in where the individual location plots went.

I don't feel the same way about everything after it. Shadowbringers was, in hindsight, the developers panicking after Stormblood's reception and throwing the player into a world divorced of the icky plot threads/women they so despise, and Endwalker was Endwalker.

Am I just projecting my own discontent? Probably.

But when you offer the player a dialogue choice to voice their discontent at being forced to meddle in Tural's affairs, only for G'raha Tia to smile and tell you "nawwww it'll be fun :)" I can't help but wonder.

P.S: This patch was so bad I actually forget Vrtra was there, despite Azdaja being the instigating incident. Imagine.

Do relationships between people really matter? They'll all break in the end, sooner or later. Can't a person be himself and walk down a path he chose purely on his own, without anyone else's intervention? He may seem like a nobody, but he'll ultimately gain more.

I’m a firm believer in the power of language over one’s thoughts.

Not in the sociocultural or moral sense, but more of a structural sense. If you’ve ever been through cognitive behavioural therapy (we are not typing the acronym), you’ll probably understand what I mean: For the disordered, the process of getting better is often just the process of acquiring more words to describe and talk down our thoughts.
Indeed, many people I’ve met in my life have suffered because they lack the language to describe and address their own thoughts. It’s easy to say “I feel bad”, sure, but emotions and thoughts are rarely so binary and require a decent toolkit of words to properly address.

With this in mind, I believe there’s no arrangement of words more powerful than:

“It doesn’t have to be like this.”

What do you do, then, when everyone’s words have been taken away from them?

Simultaneously so bleak as to be genuinely haunting and so hopeful that it inspired a significant paradigm shift in my life, Library of Ruina consumed me ever since I started playing it, with its de facto claim over my every waking thought soon becoming de jure.

I was filtered by LoR’s predecessor, Lobotomy Corporation, perhaps my only genuine mark of shame in decades of playing games and indeed engaging with art as a whole. It was right up my alley and hit basically every note I love in games, but alas I hit the wall and turned around instead of climbing it.

Bizarrely, this might’ve given me the best possible experience in LoR - in turn, giving me the best game I’ve ever played.

LoR opens on an unremarkable note. Some twunk named Roland trips and falls into the titular Library where the Librarian of her role’s namesake Angela peels a few of his limbs off, interrogates him, and revives him later as her servant.

What is the Library?

It’s a fantasy dungeon where you’re the big bad and your goal is to slaughter the people who’re invited so you can assimilate them as powerups and catalogue their knowledge for Angela’s aims. Every reception starts off with a little vignette of their lives and personalities, hopes/dreams, and reasoning for entering the Library… and then you murder them.

Yeah, LoR and the overall franchise is fantastically bleak. The first few people you kill are desperate down-and-outs or bottom of the barrel Fixers (mercenaries) too unremarkable to have the luxury of passing on such a vague, suspicious contract.
Angela, a sheltered woman with the emotional maturity and life experience of a 12 year old, frequently comments on how miserable/horrifying the world is, only for the suspiciously world-weary Roland to assure her that this is just how things are.

Angela is a woman who, for the bulk of her overly long and painful existence, was trapped - literally, and by circumstance. In LoR, she attempts to assert her freedom by giving it to other people; one must sign the invitation to enter the Library, the warnings are written on it. The choice is there to simply not sign it.
Only… As Roland himself repeatedly points out, it’s not quite that simple. Indeed, none of the people you kill in the early stages of the game really had a choice. They were either too desperate or under the thumb of someone much stronger. With the passage of time and progression of the story, many of the Library’s guests are coerced, manipulated either by contract or by sweet little lies, or commanded to on pain of death. Some are compelled by forces beyond their ken, or the welling of pure emotion that so many City dwellers had shut out of their heart.

I think it’s fantastically easy to make the observation of “LoR tackles nihilism as a subject”, and it’s not exactly wrong, but I think it’s remiss not to mention the ways LoR ties contemporary nihilism with the omnipresence of capital and systemic oppression.

A gear with a purpose is content, for its rotation has meaning. Humans are cogs in the machination that is the City. Someone has to make those cogs turn. That way, the City can run correctly.

The City’s inhabitants are, as reiterated endlessly by both the pre-reception vignettes, Librarian chats and Roland’s various interjections, stuck underneath the bootheel of capital. A Corp or ‘The Head’ is a ruling force that, while it does not place the building blocks of oppression in the land, is nonetheless the solid ground they’re placed upon by others. All of the City’s structure is, down to the rebar used in the concrete, built to maintain a status quo that considers the deaths of hundreds of thousands to be an acceptable tradeoff, but treats tax fraud as deserving of a fate worse than death.
Because of this structure, and those that perpetuate it, everyone in the City - including many of the people who're forced to uphold the oppression against their will - has basically shut down. Feelings are a luxury nobody can afford, and the boot placed upon their neck has been there so long that they consider it a universal constant - much like gravity.
In lieu of any hope, even the nonreligious have come to view the City as a god. The actually-religious exist in a circle of copium, ‘worshipping’ doctrine which is about accepting the boot as part of your life rather than as your oppressor. Characters like Roland repeatedly say they don’t believe in anything, only to talk about the City as though it were a vast and unknowable god - at best witnessed, but never comprehended.

But it’s made equally clear that it doesn’t have to be like this, especially in chats with the Librarians - who often put forward viewpoints that Roland shuts down because his mind, so thoroughly warped by the foundational cruelty of the City, cannot comprehend them on a base level. From the top of the City to the bottom, an endless domino chain of “well, it is what it is” cascades into acceptance of horrors that have no real reason to exist.
These people are not nihilistic because that is their actual worldview, they’re nihilistic because they don’t have a choice.

Treat everything like a rolling ball! You cheer for it wherever the sphere decides to go! If you truly wish for the good of other people, why don’t you stop holding expectations… and just laugh with them at their side? Everyone who lives here is a clown! Clowns can’t survive without feeding on each other’s smiles, you see?

Rather surprisingly, though, LoR does not castigate anyone for their nihilism. Sure, they’re fictional characters, but despite being miserable-by-circumstance their stances are still treated as valid. It’s most obvious later on, where one character finds out the orders they’ve been given were forged and is not at all angry - why would they be? Lies and truth are purpose all the same, and purpose is a luxury unto itself. If anything, they’re at least happy that their exploitation benefited them and their oppressor rather than merely the oppressor.

It’s somewhat difficult to discuss this topic further without spoilers. I’d like to come back and write a longer review, but for now I’m trying to keep it clean.

Art narrows your vision, after all. You stop caring about the things around you. That’s how most artists seem to act, I think. And so, you indulge in the craft, not realizing that you’re throwing yourself and your surroundings into the fire you started. It’s like the human life when you think about it.

My praise of LoR’s handling of nihilism and everything around it also comes with the caveat that I, personally, got tired of overly bleak stories not too long ago. Even Disco Elysium veered too close to the fatal threshold a few times, and so does LoR, but neither game crosses it.

Really, Disco Elysium is an excellent comparison if we’re sticking to purely positive ones.

Everyone in this game is humanised as far as the narrative allows, even the ones that are barely human - in every sense of the word. They have aspirations, no matter how trivial and petty, and comrades, sharing bonds and jokes regardless of whether they’re more noble Fixers or nightmarish cannibalistic freaks.
It becomes apparent early on that, despite the Librarians’ claims that humanity was snuffed out of the City, it persists in the moment-to-moment of people’s lives despite the eternal presence of the boot.

I said up above that not finishing LC enhanced LoR, and it’s here that it really became apparent.

Roland was not present for the events of LC, while the Librarians were. By the time I’d quit LC, I had only met four Librarians: Malkuth, Hod, Yesod and Netzach. Sure enough, these are the most straightforward Librarian chats, though they still exposit LC in a way that blends well into the narrative without obviously being an excuse for people to skip LC.
But it’s the later floors - with Librarians both I and Roland were unfamiliar with - where things amp up, both in terms of how heavy the subject matter gets and how Roland’s facade slowly erodes around the middle and upper layers.
LC as an event in the setting’s history has been deeply mythologized, subject to rampant speculation from the unfamiliar and much rumination from the familiar. Getting walled by the game itself made this narrative almost… diegetic. Like those of the City, I had a vague idea of Lobotomy Corporation and could only speculate as to why it fell to ruin in the intervening moments between games, but like the Librarians I was familiar enough with the company, its purpose and its occupants to recognize things and keep them in mind. Remember, the shame of quitting LC hangs heavy for me.

I could go on at length about the story, but to do so would spoil most of it - and honestly, I’d rather praise the storytelling for now.

Our conductor will be the one to fix that! He’ll take me to a world where there are pure and clean ingredients aplenty! That day can’t come soon enough! I’ve been filling my stomach with trash for too long.

LoR’s format is very simple. Each reception consists of a window into the guests’ lives before they accept the invitation, a cut to Roland and Angela discussing what they just saw, a fight, and then a wrap up conversation afterwards. In between receptions, you suppress Abnormalities (puzzle boss fights that give you useful treats) and have chats with the Librarians.
It sounds straightforward, and it is, but there’s an elegance to LoR’s usage of the player’s time - the format is maintained right up to the credits, and while some conversations can initially feel like pointless filler it eventually becomes apparent that LoR wastes no time.
I don’t believe that foreshadowing inherently makes a good story (an opinion which makes George RR Martin fans fucking hate me) but in LoR’s case, it does. As early as the 4th line of dialogue spoken in the game’s entire 130 hour runtime, it references concepts, character and organizations that will appear later. Truthfully, I was initially a bit sour on how many Nouns the game threw at me early on but around Urban Plague I was seeing a lot of those Nouns actually manifest on screen, often to follow up on either a bit of exposition Roland/Angela delivered or thematically iterating on something that seemed inconsequential at first.

And man, what characters Roland/Angela are. LoR has no wasted characters, managing to make even the one-off filler guests you slaughter memorable, but Roland and Angela really stand out as both the best in the game and my favourite protagonists in uh… Fiction as a medium for human creativity.

This is just how the world is, and the ones best adapted to it come out on top, simple as that. Adapt or die. If you can't, you either become food or fall behind until you're wiped out.

Roland is a funny man, a very funny man. He has a quip for everything and deliberately plays his status as Angela’s whipped boyfriend a disgruntled servant up for laughs, but like many real people who use humor to cope, it is plainly obvious that he’s hiding a lot of deep-rooted bitterness towards his circumstances and the world he lives in. Even many of his jokes betray that life in the City has eroded him, and his catchphrase “That’s that and this is this” slowly goes from funny to haunting as the game progresses.
A good friend of mine described him as “An Isekai protagonist but played entirely straight” and I think it’s an apt comparison; he has many of the same building blocks (sardonic guy with some bitterness) but the concept is actually explored and treated with any gravity. He’s also a literal outsider to the world of Lobotomy Corp/the Library, so.
Every time I think about Roland I inevitably recall a story someone once told me where their restrained and seemingly conservative father got drunk at a wedding and started dancing shirtless with his best friend, and when [friend] said "that's a bit gay innit?" he retorted "I WISH I WAS, SWEETIE”.
There’s a really poignant moment on Hokma’s floor where, upon being asked if he’s religious, Roland denies it wholeheartedly. Except… This instinctual rejection is wrong. He certainly believes it, but through his chats with everyone and his endless exposition on the City’s evils to Angela, it is abundantly clear that Roland subconsciously views the City itself as a malicious God that has personally picked him out of a lineup and fucked him over specifically.
It’s these little contradictions, hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies that really bring this game’s cast to life, but none moreso than…

The thoughts and emotions I hold when I craft them... A resentment towards the City for driving me to this desperation, and a blind anger for the rich. Bitterness, and... a yearning for vengeance toward the man who rid me of that hope and pushed me to despair.

Angela. Fucking Angela. My little pookie bear who’s a bitch to everyone (for very good reasons) and is so deeply fucked up. The depths of her misery are vast, simultaneously impressive and horrifying in their seeming endlessness. She’s the kind of miserable that you often don’t see outside of Central/Eastern European literature.
Which is a good comparison, honestly, because PM really get what makes a good tragedy with Angela. She’s miserable, haunted by a past that’d crush lesser folk, and desperately chasing a purpose she’s not even entirely sure she wants. In pursuit of her murky, ill-defined goal, she baits countless people to their deaths - becoming not much better than the man in her past she claims to despise.

But she smiles sometimes, and that’s enough.

What really strikes me about Angela though is how fucking transgender her storyline is.
Early on there’s a flashback to the early days of Angela’s life as an AI in Lobotomy Corporation where she experiences both profound amounts of empathy and a desire to nurture strong, intimate relationships with her peers. She’s then subjected to what I can only (tragically) call Male Socialization: Her creator affirms that she’s not meant to do that sort of thing, “things like her” are meant to feel nothing. Any expression of ‘unfitting’ emotions is shut out and shouted down.
When she breaks free of her shackles, she radically alters her appearance, having only a passing resemblance to her initial form - which is decidedly less feminine. I joked on twitter that she looks both transfemme and transmasc at once.
But more tellingly, Angela is infinitely more neurotic in this game. She’s expressive, has a short fuse, swears a lot, smiles far more readily and seems to show fondness for the Sephirah in her own roundabout way. As her humanity draws closer, she begins to feel shame. Shame for what she used to be, and shame for what she is.
It is incredibly easy to relate this to the experience most trans women have once that second puberty kicks them in the taint. At least, the ones who have self-awareness and a sense of shame.

It’s even more pronounced in the receptions. Despite displaying every sign of humanity, whenever guests arrive and are met at the entrance, they clock her as a machine and constantly rib her for it. “That’s not a human lmao” is said every other reception and it bears a deeply uncomfortable (positive) resemblance to trans people being clocked and mocked for their appearance.

As I write this, I’ve been pondering the concept of scale. You, the reader, have probably played a sequel at some point in your life. It’s natural for them to scale up, and I myself have played far too many that scale up far too hard. Halo went from an existential war of survival to a cosmic clash with demigods, robots and shadowy factions.
Yakuza went from being about one small corner of Tokyo to being a country/globe-trotting clash against conspiracies. Devil May Cry was about one oedipal gay guy on an island and then became about generational trauma and saving the world. Fallout went from being good to being terrible. Final Fantasy went from stories of heroes to failed attempts at modern epics. The list goes on.

LoR is a massive scale-up. LC was a game about some deeply depressed people playing SCP in a single lab. Given the scale of this setting’s City and the fact that LoR’s cast covers someone from every corner of it, it’s no exaggeration to say that LoR went from a lab to the entire world.

And yet it sticks the landing. The vignette format for character introductions helps; the Library is the centre of the game’s world, never once left behind, and characters are shown through brief windows into their life. It’s particularly resonant in the world formed by the 2010s, where people are more plugged in than ever yet seemingly more distant too. The entire world, too, is at our fingertips; through the form of fleeting windows into bits of an existence far beyond ours.

But the social media comparison is a little cringe, don’t you think? I do too.

If they want to live their lives as they see fit, then they won’t stop me from doing the same. Think about it. We can’t roam the street in peace; we’re forced to live in the darkness. What sins have we committed to deserve this treatment? Why must we suffer to ensure that your kind lives a painless life? We’re humans just like you.

I have this scar on my right knee. It’s huge, with its width spanning my entire knee and thickness on par with my pinkie. Looks more like a pursed mouth than a scar sometimes.
I got it from a very mundane event; I had an obscene growth spurt early on. During a friendly soccer match in school, my oversized body failed a dexterity check and, upon kicking the ball, my body went up into the air too. I landed at a grisly angle, my descent causing my knee to get dragged along some chipstones. Embarrassing, yes, though it was still some of the worst pain I’ve ever been in and the bleeding was so intense that the only reason I was immediately taken to hospital was because the school nurse nearly vomited upon seeing my bone peek through the wound.
But most people don’t know that, they only see the scar and my occasional limping. They can see the present-day effects of that pain and that damage, but they can only speculate as to the cause. There’s only one domino on display, and they can’t see the ones that fell behind it.

LoR’s windows into the lives of its guests are much the same, and they help keep the story from outgrowing its confines. Almost every character with very few exceptions is depicted at the absolute nadir of their lives upon introduction with concepts like ‘backstory’ thrown in the trash in favour of letting you use context clues instead. Such is life in the City; only the ‘now’ matters anyway.

I only realized that day that I cannot blindly trust what my eyes show me. In that moment of the past, I was made a fool. The shallow promise that our safety would be secured… The thin piece of contract is what cost me everything. Had He not saved me, I might have drowned myself in resentment toward the whole world… and met my end.

Now, normally videogames are a balancing act, or a series of tradeoffs. Many of the most fun games I’ve played have mediocre stories at best and outright abominable stories at their worst. Likewise, gameplay is often the first concession made for narrative. Indeed, the common thread of my Top 25 is games that weave their gameplay into the narrative well OR have a healthy serving of both.

The #1 entry on that list is foreshadowing.

I’m very used to games, even more outsider games, tone down their gameplay for the sake of marketability. It wouldn’t be wrong for someone to assume LoR, which is far more conventionally palatable than LC, would do the same.

And for the first hour or so, it seems that way. You roll a dice to act, whoever rolls higher goes first, and you spend Light to use your cards. Easy!

Except…

Inhale.

Every character on the field rolls one - or more - speed dice to act. Whoever rolls higher goes first, with 1 being last on the action order and Infinity (yes, really) going first. Multiple speed dices means multiple actions and cards played per turn.
Each card has its own dice - offensive, defensive, and counter - with each dice having subtypes for damage/defense types.
When a card is played, the dice on the card roll - unless it’s a counter dice, which is stored in case you receive a one-sided attack.
When two opposing characters roll on the same speed dice value, this causes a “clash” where dice now have to outroll one another. The higher roll goes through. This can also be forced if someone with a higher speed dice attacks someone with a lower speed dice - this is a redirect.
…But there are also ranged attacks, which ignore the turn order - this seems overpowered, but if they clash against offensive dice and lose, that dice is recycled and can roll again.
…Unless the ranged user has a counter dice stored, at which point they can roll to defend. If counter dice outroll an incoming attack, they too are recycled.
But-

You get the point.

LoR is very uncompromising with its mechanics. There’s nothing here that can be ignored. I didn’t even get into abnormality pages, keypage passive ability sharing, E.G.O or any of the status effects.

There’s a common sentiment among Project Moon fans that LoR’s difficulty spike is vertical. I don’t necessarily agree, for my many years playing YGO competitively and engaging with deckbuilders gave me a huge advantage, but I can see why.
Many games with some degree of mechanical complexity or an unspoken set of rules will throw (what I call) an Exam Boss at you. Exam Bosses exist to make sure you’ve actually been using and engaging with the mechanics that were introduced via antepieces in the hours prior.
Well, LoR has a neverending chain of exam bosses in each stage. Impuritas Civitatis, the game’s final stage, opens with two relatively easy fights before throwing twelve Exam Bosses at you. At its core LoR is a card game and you WILL need to build robust and numerous decks to progress.

But I don’t think it’s as hard as people make it out to be.

LoR’s strength gameplay-wise is that all of your options are available to you at any given moment, and there isn’t much need to bash your head against the wall like in LC or pray for good banner luck in Limbus. It’s very simple to back out (sometimes taking a guest’s book with you, which is akin to getting a free cardpack from your opponent) and come back with a new strategy/build/Library floor.
Once you’re in Urban Legend, the game starts offering routes for progression rather than forcing you along a straight line. The solution to any wall is often on one of those other routes; every enemy has a weakness or a gimmick. Bleed as both a status effect and a deckbuilding component appears early, and it’s useful until the credits roll on most enemies. My Discard Hod build was still being used as late as the final boss.
I suppose you could say LoR is more of a puzzle game than anything.

What really enhances the gameplay is how well it’s leveraged for the sake of the narrative, and/or for giving fights weight.

Most boss fights come with a mechanic that’s unique to them specifically, or they introduce new twists on an existing mechanic that’s meant to upset some of the more comfortable strategies. Queen of Hatred gets a lot of hype as the game’s first major roadblock, but her purpose is to teach you to use Bleed and to convince you that maybe it’s okay to skip a turn or take damage on purpose.
There are numerous points in the story where the game outright lies to you about what’s coming up. More than a few times does LoR throw a surprise, unlisted second phase at you or some other curveball. Shoutout to that purple bitch.
A lot of the single-enemy boss fights come with mechanics that at first seem ‘’’bullshit’’’ (lol.) but in reality are just there to give it some impact. One character having 5 or more speed dice might seem ludicrous, but it helps to sell the world and the sheer power of the people within it.
The majority of people who play this game will scrape by many of the harder fights by the skin of their teeth, but in a game all about the eternal upward struggle to live, isn’t that sublime?

Of course, everything up above is aided by how this game sounds.

My only light was taken from me twice… For a brief moment… I felt all kinds of emotions before that piano. Despair, obsession, rage, sorrow… But, it took no time for those feelings to dissipate into nothing. Everything… yes. Everything seemed beautiful afterwards. Was it truly a tragedy that I lost her? Who defined it as tragedy? You may still be blinded by wrath, but I made the decision that I will care not about those feelings anymore.

On every front, LoR is an absolute masterwork as an auditory experience.

The soundtrack is borderline perfect, one of the rare games with 80-odd songs where every single one is standout and memorable. The Story themes are subdued but perfect for their respective atmospheres while the battle themes maintain a morose atmosphere that nonetheless manages to carry a sense of excitement when needed. You may be the villains, but there’s no reason it can’t get funky sometimes. There are only three songs in the game that sound anywhere near heroic.
Mercifully, important tracks don’t often get reused and the single song that gets taken from its original context is used masterfully anyway. To say nothing of the returning songs from LC.
That fight near the end of the game hits like a fucking truck if you’re familiar with the last game’s OST.

And the voice acting, good god the voice acting. After so many years of enduring games where a lot of the VAs are just repeating a role they did in the past or emulating a VA they look up to with all the tact of a fandub, it’s so nice to play a game where the characters are voiced straightforwardly, as though they were people.
Sometimes it’s Roland being a flirty little dipshit when Angela gives him an order, sometimes it’s Gebura audibly trying not to throw up when tasting some coffee, sometimes it’s Chesed’s tildes being obvious in his speech, and sometimes it’s Tiphereth suddenly turning into a Yakuza thug when Roland’s beef with her spills over.
And, sometimes, its characters delivering some of the most haunting soliloquies in the history of the medium. There’s a quiet rule running through LoR’s entire runtime wherein every sickass vocal track barring one is preceded by a character delivering a soliloquy to themselves before coming back for a fight, and all of them are deeply moving.
The one prior to Gone Angels might be a meme now, sure, but seeing it for the first time left my heart in my throat and my jaw hanging from my face like a useless slab of bone.
Whether LoR is being horrific, tragic, funny or tense, the voice acting never falters. I was frankly amazed to find out that a lot of the VAs are either amateurs, F-listers or total no-names because there is not a single weak performance among the cast - and it is a huge cast.

Even on a base level, the smaller sfx are so nice. Clicking through menus is auditory/autismal joy, the various sounds of combat are sharp, distinct and punchy. 5v5 fights are a beautiful chorus of crashing, slashing, shooting, stabbing, clinking and roaring.

O my sorrow, you are better than a well-beloved: because I know that on the day of my final agony, you will be there, lying in my sheets, O sorrow, so that you might once again attempt to enter my heart.

I don’t like hyperbole. I was given the autism strain that programmed me towards sincerity, and the culture I grew up venerated insincerity and humor-as-a-mask so much that I can’t even stand playful contrarianism.

So I mean it when I say Library of Ruina haunts my every waking moment, and that it’s by far the best game I’ve ever played in this long, long history I have with the medium. It's left a gaping hole in my chest, a kind of numb longing that only pops up after a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience. I finished it three days ago, and ever since it has been in my mind for every waking moment. You don't know how crushed I was when I realized "grief" is a word that the City's inhabitants don't have.

If you have any familiarity with me or my reviews, you’ll probably know that my critical brain is on 24/7. Not by choice, that’s just how I’m wired. Things like nostalgia and hype tend to not have much of an effect. I carry this into my reviews, even if it means dunking on things I have a lot of fondness for.

Yet I can’t really find any fault with LoR beyond some minor bugs/typos the fact that the anti-capitalist story was followed up by Limbus Company - a gacha game. But that’s that, and this is this.

“Flawless” isn’t a word I use lightly, and I’m not going to use it here. Not because I think it’s flawed, no, but because to defend that position would require both an actual thesis and also for me to spoil the entire game, start-finish. Maybe some other time.

I didn’t intend for this to get so long or so heartfelt, so I have no idea how to close it off.

Uh… How’s the weather where you live? That train was fucked up, right? Do you think the game would’ve been better if Binah didn’t wear shoes?

See you next time.

The fifth best Final Fantasy XIV expansion, a modern Final Fantasy IV: Final Fantasy XVI is a game that I understand why people like it, but I cannot really conceive of how somebody would love this game. And don't let me stop you from loving it if you truly do, there's certainly moments of beauty within FFXVI that feel meant for somebody with much different sensibilities than I, it just remains a pretty thoroughly underwhelming affair to me personally -- both in what the game promises and in what it fails to deliver.

Mechanically adequate, systemically superfluous, and structurally mundane, but where Final Fantasy XVI really fucks up is with its thoughtlessly derivative narrative and dull characters. The way CBU3 have plucked concepts, backstories, and characterizations from popular shows like Game of Thrones isn't necessarily the worst thing they could do on the face of it, it's just how little those aspects end up mattering outside of being familiar tropes that the player can quickly identify. The same could be said for the game's attempt at a more serious tone with a focus on geopolitical affairs. The game starts off with two sequences that are almost identical to ASOIAF/GoT's Winterfell introduction, which is then followed by a Red Wedding-esque event to make sure you understand how fucked up this world really is. Except, that's kinda where everything stops being like that, they copied GRRM's homework, now it's time to be Final Fantasy!

Which like, if they wanted to copy Game of Thrones, you'd think they'd be a little more confident about it. Like, the way Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy IV, and Final Fantasy VI cop shit from Star Wars (and I guess a bit of Dune and LotR) feels like expert craftsmanship in comparison, because they also fairly accurately replicate the tone of space operas (just, you know, in the form of pseudo-sci-fi medieval fantasy). They sort of try to keep up with the underlying geopolitics aspect throughout the game, but it mostly falls apart by the end and Valisthea never really ends up feeling like a real place to me. So post-GoT-esque intro, the first third of the game's tone plays out like a more linear, bootleg Witcher 3, in a kind of unflattering way.

The remaining two-thirds of the game do feel pretty distinctly Final Fantasy (with a pretty weak undercurrent of half-baked Matsuno-isms) with structure identical to a Final Fantasy XIV expansion. The latter aspect was comforting at first since I kinda enjoy the simplicity of a fresh FF14 expansion, but it's easily the worst part about the moment-to-moment experience of Final Fantasy XVI, making the game much more prolonged -- and much of it being coated with the tasteless grey sludge of live service content creation habits -- than it really needed to be during its most important narrative escalations. The former aspect is what keeps the experience feeling adequate, but it really just doesn't do enough to differentiate itself from most of the series in terms of character dynamics, overarching themes, and fantasy elements. Really feel like most people who aren't allergic to turn-based combat are better off playing Final Fantasy IX or VI for most of the stuff XVI is trying to pull off. There's even this point where the characters decide to embark on this Final Fantasy V/Final Fantasy VII-esque quest to save the environment, and that also just kind of goes nowhere as the game buckles under concept bloat and is wordlessly replaced with a different thing later on.

The funniest part is the last third of the game is so clearly bogged down in its own bullshit that they had to add this NPC that feels like she was ripped out of Dragon Age Inquisition or something to explain the plot to the player because there isn't actually enough deliverable gameplay moments or constructive skits to bookend all the threads the game has set up by this point. I guess it's more disappointing than funny in the end, there were moments in FFXVI that made me wanna feel that it's all somehow worth it, but so much of it is just unearned or passively malicious in what it's conveying to the player.

The thing that almost makes the whole experience worth it -- a pretty common opinion -- is def the eikon fights, though I can understand if they're too spread apart and too mechanically fluffy for somebody who wants more substantial action gameplay to sink their teeth into. They're carried by their presentation and spectacle, as the gameplay interaction ends up feeling pretty junk food-y, but fuck they rule. Even the one towards the end that everybody I hates, I love that one too! Though maybe it's because I'm permanently a sucker for CBU3's boss encounter design, even if it's gotten a little stale in Final Fantasy XIV itself lately.

The combat design might be another story unfortunately, like, it's not bad, I actually kind like it because I have the issue with my brain where I enjoy performing class rotations in MMOs, but slapping that kinda shit onto DMC5-lite was not the move I think. There's just not enough going on here to be having a cooldown-based system integrated with kinda barebones action gameplay, and I don't think the individual eikon abilities themselves are interesting or cohesive enough to make up for the lack of both strategy and truly engaging action. Glad to see the stagger system here, but I kind of almost would've preferred if CBU3 had copied even more from the FF13/FF7R dev team's combat ideas.

The game is clearly designed around the fact that you can only play as Clive, and it only adds to that dynamism that's sorely lacking from most of the characters; if you're not going to show me enough of who these characters are in the cutscenes themselves, you could at least communicate it through gameplay, like other games in the series do. Clive's solipsistic streak feels pretty fucking forced compared to protags like Zidane or Cloud, Clive is just way too fucking reasonable of a dude most of the time I don't really buy it! And that's fine, I like having nice protagonists sometimes, but they spend the entire game trying to convince he's this brooding lone wolf! It doesn't help that in the game's pursuit of copying and pasting elements from other FFs, it also steals their mistakes: like Clive's main motivating factor being resolved like 5 hours into the game just like Cecil in FF4 and forgetting to make any of the women actually characters, also like Final Fantasy IV.

Like, I wanna say on average Jill is better written than FF4 Rosa, but at least you get to play as Rosa! Sure, both Jill and Rosa are treated as fragile baby birds who are forced to stay at home while the men go fight, but at least Rosa gets to defy that notion when it counts. It's just kinda pathetic what's happened here, like, CBU3 doesn't have an amazing track record with women characters, but at least they do get to do things and have individual motivations for participating in the story in Final Fantasy XIV. Even compared to the FF14 expansion that preceded the start of FF16's development, Heavensward, it feels notably regressive.

It'd be bad enough if it stopped there, but the two other women in the main cast are probably treated even worse. The first one's whole characterization is how she manipulates men with sex to gain power, with the writers using threat of SA as a motivating factor for her transformation into an eikon. Actually fucking vile! They even just straight up copy a panel from Berserk! And the other one's main character trait is she's an evil mom (basically just Cersei Lannister without any of the actual interesting parts). There's one secondary woman character towards the back half of the narrative who's probs the only woman with a personality, which is a shame! Jill especially had a lot of potential as at least Clive's best friend and confidant, and it's just wasted on a character who sits there and placidly stares while bloodlessly agreeing with everything Clive says and does. They can't even make her interesting as an extension of Clive, let alone as a person with actual interiority.

I don't really hate Final Fantasy XVI as much as this review would make you believe: I love adventures and I love action RPGs, and it does a pretty decent job of both. It's "comfy", but it could've been so much more with the kind of talent that Square and CBU3 have on hand, but consistently have failed to utilize to their fullest, outside of maybe Shadowbringers. Like the soundtrack is the best microcosm of all of this; Soken has an insane pedigree, and while his work here is mostly high quality, it feels like his strengths are being misutilized to adhere to a specific vision that maybe should've gotten a few more complete redraftings. Final Fantasy XVI half-heartedly commits to aesthetic ideals and tropes that were already outdated years before it released, in a way that feels almost Final Fantasy, but is ultimately never really elevated into its own cohesive identity.

Anyways, play Asura's Wrath instead. It's got the same misogyny per capita, but it's basically like if you cut out all the rest of the bad parts of Final Fantasy XVI and then also made it way cooler at the same time. 'Star Wars x Fist of the North Star x Buddhism and Hinduism' clears 'Spark Notes of A Song of Ice and Fire books 1 thru 3 x Buzzfeed Article History of Final Fantasy Series' any day.

I've had to let this one stew for a bit, honestly.

I picked it up for myself as a late birthday present out of curiosity more than anything. I'd heard a lot of unflattering comparisons to Vampire Survivors (a game I very much despise) and clicker games (which I also despise! Wow, patterns!) which had put me on edge, so I was a little surprised to find out that none of those comparisons are apt.

I can understand being skeeved out by the direct usage of Poker iconography and terminology on display, but the truth that's apparent to me is that Balatro is ultimately another roguelike deckbuilder. You match symbols together, try to play to synergies, and pray for one of your random drops/powerups to be the one that enables a certain playstyle or tactics. If anything, despite my relative apathy towards deckbuilders (I play YGO, so slapping a roguelite aspect on just repels me) I admire this game for its honesty and relative lack of illusions.

Still, I find myself in an odd position.

Despite admiring it, I'm not really smitten with it.

One of those games where I can see why it's considered a mindmelting trap for people with ADHD, but I personally don't get much out of it. Would honestly rather play Suika Game. Incremental micro-unlocks and "pick one of 3" powerups and glorified slot machines in the form of card packs don't really enthuse me.

At a base level, the basest of all levels, I do think the mechanics are somewhat engaging despite the simplicity and comparison to blackjack more than poker. Compared to its contemporaries I also think it has infinitely more impactful decision making, especially with how finite money is and how little shops actually offer.
But Balatro - and indeed, nearly the entire roguelite genre - has an awful habit of playing their entire mechanical hand early on and then hoping it's enough to hook you. While it works for some games (Isaac, FTL, Dead Cells, Synthetik) I don't find it works so well for deckbuilders. There aren't enough interesting twists on the core mechanics for me to want to keep playing, and if anything its iconographical honesty might actually make it worse.

Sure, the game is addictive, but I'm older now dude. I creak when I wake up, I say "Mmm scrumptious" when I buy a pastry from Greggs, I tend a garden, I play Granblue Fantasy, I've got an inanimate object I collect.

'Addictive' is no longer enough to satisfy me. Life is addictive, pastries are addictive, math is addictive, the world I live in is addictive.

[Semi-related ramble that I was gonna post as a comment on someone else's Balatro review before remembering I don't like to barge into other people's posts and go "Nuh uh".]

I so direly wish higher profile indie games would have a design core that isn't just "addictive". Having seen roguelites come into existence over a decade ago, it feels like every other popular indie game is trying to make players chase the same kind of high that Binding of Isaac or FTL did all those years ago. In turn, they miss out on just being good games at their core.

Fucked up that Hitman: Freelancer is the best of these games I've played in years, and it was free DLC.