Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 are my favorite games of all time, so when I saw the first trailer for Baldur’s Gate 3, I was beyond excited. I knew it was going to be a little different, as the story in the original games is pretty well wrapped up with nowhere to go narratively, but Black Isle had plans for a third entry (The Black Hound), so I figured things would be able to be worked out. I was also completely geeking out because I absolutely love Mind Flayers. They were terrifying in Baldur’s Gate 2, and there was a whole cut/unfinished subplot with a Mind Flayer colony in Athkatla that just brimmed with potential on how they could connect the dots here. One of my DND group’s favorite dungeons we ever ran was a giant library in the astral plane that had been taken over by a singular Mind Flayer that I tortured them with through manipulation, stealth, cunning, and pitting them against each other over 12 hours. By the end of it, they were deathly afraid of him and hated his guts. It was fantastic. I was really ready to love this game…and I tried so hard, but I just don’t.

Turns out, it was a bad idea to make the new 5th Edition game Baldur’s Gate 3. There is a fantastic skeleton here with interesting characters and fun locations, but as a huge fan of the early games, I can’t help but feel like it’s significantly held back by what Wizards of the Coast did to the Baldur’s Gate canon. BG3 isn’t a sequel to Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 - it’s a sequel to the WotC canon of Baldur’s Gate, and it’s done very poorly. Some of the characters that appear are completely divorced from their characters in the originals, as if the person writing them had no idea of their motivations or any understanding of who these people are. I don’t know whether to blame that on Wizards for the terrible choices regarding canon, or to blame Larian for the awful characterization, but it drove me insane. I realize I might sound like a whiny old-head, but it is just such a strange choice to make a sequel based on a game when you can’t actually adhere to the plot of that game.

The legacy characters aren’t the only strange moments of Baldur’s Gate 3’s writing unfortunately, as it struggles to maintain a foundation between being grounded in the Forgotten Realms setting while wanting to tell a grandiose story. At the beginning of the game, I recruited three companions - one that was incredibly fearsome fighting Demons in the Blood War, another was such a powerful mage that he actually had an intimate relationship with the Goddess of Magic herself, and the last one was sent on a mission to retrieve an incredibly powerful and rare artifact from a race of other dimensional beings. They’re also level 1 and we’re fighting goblins. This type of narrative/world disconnect continues on throughout the rest of the game and I constantly felt out of place and just at odds with the game’s representation of the Forgotten Realms.

For a game that is effusively praised for player freedom - don’t get me wrong there is a ton of it - it does itself no favors with regards to pacing. In particular, Act 2 is paced in such a way that players easily can find themselves locked out of almost all the Act’s content if they simply explore the area, which is the exact opposite of how Act 1 encouraged gameplay. When Act 3 rolls around, BG3 again flips things around and gives a giant sandbox city to run around it, all the while dumping quests on you that beg to be solved with urgency. There isn’t inherently anything wrong in this approach, but because the pacing isn’t consistent across the game, it can be very overwhelming and disorienting.

This disorienting feeling carries over to companion quests and the rest system as well, as the game seems to discourage you from long resting too often, but in order to continue companion quests, long rests at camp are necessary. I actually missed an entire companion questline because I did not rest enough in Act 2, and it wasn’t until late game that I realized the game does actually have a cue to tell you to rest. Every time a party member complains about being tired, a new conversation or cutscene is available at camp. Otherwise, the resting mechanic makes a nice balance between the original games’ dungeon rest-a-thons, and the fear of running out of resources in combat.

Encounters and combat were something I personally was worried about, as I’m much more a fan of the Real Time with Pause system, but I actually think Larian did a great job implementing 5e into crpg format. Most of the time, combat feels engaging and quick due to the encounter and level design, and the environment takes a much bigger stage than it ever did in the older games. Later on, the encounters do seem to fall off regarding intentionality and then it can be frustrating when there are just too many enemies and allies for things to go quickly. In the later stages of the game, Larian also becomes obsessed with placing trap after trap, which just makes things tedious in this engine. Traps are a classic part of DND dungeon design, but throwing 6 of the same DC trap in a room does not make a good dungeon. Honestly, this is true for the game at large. Act 1 in all of its Early Access polished glory is wonderful in pacing, encounter design, world detail, and narrative beats, however the whole thing starts to fall apart as the game goes on and then all of the little, minor things that were overlooked as nitpicks start to become giant thorns.

While the combat system mostly does a good job, it does lack polish with basic functionality. There were so many times that I clicked to attack an enemy, was told “too far, can’t reach,” and then I moved my character manually in range and was able to attack. There were entire battles where certain enemies just stood still for their turn, wasting 10-20 seconds without doing anything. There were times in which I got stuck with one character fighting six by himself because the pathing for the other character broke while jumping, and they couldn’t join combat until forced because they were stuck in a different spot. There were many times where I was told I could not see the enemy, only to swivel the camera around to find that character has a perfect line of sight on the enemy, but just can’t attack because the game says no. After 50-plus hours, all of that began to wear me down, and the experience just felt clunky. Apart from those minor things, I also started to hit real bugs like companions talking to me about events that haven’t happened yet, doors not loading, people popping into cutscenes, among others.

It is highly ironic that Baldur’s Gate 3 has gotten so much praise from people pitting it against other AAA releases that were deemed broken, as if the game does not have its share of cracks and broken bits as well. Ultimately, there is a good game here that I’m sure will grow and be ironed out as a “Definitive Edition” arrives, but for me the entire experience was disappointing and lacking. Baldur’s Gate 3 nails the upfront presentation with cinematic style, but what lies beneath is mediocrity.

Okay,

I've dabbled into a lot of Character Action games for the past three years and was excited to finally give this one a swing since the 3D Ninja Gaiden games are the only few CAGs I have yet to explore, but after finishing this one I can't help but find myself having very mixed feelings on it. I feel like an insane person for not liking this as much as I should, considering how much praise this game gets around the CAG community, and while there are aspects of NGB I like a lot, I couldn't help but be a little dissatisfied with this one.

That disappointment stings more for me considering I took a full week trying to get the game physically and pulling out my old Xbox only to find out my Xbox's disc drive stopped working when I was testing it, an issue notorious with old Xboxes. The Xbox is kind of a worthless console, like if this thing didn't have Halo I'd probably prefer owning a Dreamcast. Couldn't emulate this game either because Xbox emulation is still very far behind and unstable. But luckily I still had my 360 laying around (until I realized I had no controllers for it so I had to spend another 30$ on one) so I could finally play it. Thanks Microsoft for at least having decent backwards compatibility on your platforms. This'll be the one credit I'll give you, you evil bastards.

Tangent aside, finally booting up this game after all the trouble I went through had me on the edge of my seat. The game makes a strong first impression. This is hands down one of the best looking Xbox games and it still holds up fairly well to this day with the exception of overly shiny, plasticy looking character models common in the 6th gen era of consoles, but even they have a higher polygon count not seen before from that era. The most notably impressive aspect is the animation. Ryu’s movement and attacks have a perfect amount of weight and impact to them. Whether you’re running on walls, doing the Izuna drop, or doing a fully charged Ultimate Technique, the game never stops selling you on the idea that Ryu is this badass skilled ninja. His weapons also have some of the most visceral sound effects in any CAG I’ve played. The swords have this loud comical slicing sound upon every hit while the flail’s whipping sounds always made it fun to, well, flail around. The presentation of this game cannot be understated and the fact the game always runs at 60FPS (arguably the most necessary inclusion for these types of games) is beyond impressive. On a technical level, Ninja Gaiden Black is still a mind-boggling marvel.

The game also makes it apparent how different it’s combat is almost immediately from it’s competition. You notice right away Ryu’s moves have quick start up frames but a ton of end lag to them, necessitating every attack to be a commitment and inviting enemies to punish Ryu upon missing, and enemies don’t let up, they’re dynamically aggressive and hit like bulldozers. Ninja Gaiden Black enemies see you from a country mile and will make an immediate B-line towards Ryu upon smelling him. They’ll charge in numbers, dodge/jump over your attacks, grab you if you’re blocking for too long, throw projectiles or shoot guns at you etc. This makes every encounter an immediate threat to be dealt with, but upon successfully killing them you get rewarded with Essence, a multi-purpose item that either gives you currency, health, or Ki charges (a limited use special move Ryu can use), but what’s interesting is charging a strong attack near these will absorb them and decreases the time needed for an Ultimate Technique, a super powerful move that does devastating damage and makes Ryu fully invincible during the animation, but normally requires a long charge up time to activate them. Normally these Essences are picked up automatically near Ryu, but if Ryu is blocking they won’t be collected, allowing the player to choose whether to take them for their bonuses or absorb them with a strong attack for a quick UT. This turns the combat encounters into a gigantic split-second decision making balancing act where the player upon every kill has to decide whether to collect their earnings, heal, refill their Ki, or sacrifice all of that for a more aggressive option in combat. All of this makes Ninja Gaiden Black’s combat stand out from other CAGs I’ve played, and on paper this makes for a really engaging combat system. Here’s the thing though, as I got more comfortable with how NGB works, I found I liked these ideas more in isolation.

The reality is because a lot of Ryu’s normal combos aren’t rewarding enough to justify them in normal use, it railroads a lot of the combat into doing the more obviously viable options. A lot of Ryu’s combos surprisingly don’t do a ton of damage, can’t deal crowd control very well, and carry a lot of end lag baggage with them, making them feel flimsy and weak to throw out. Except for one: The Izuna Drop. For the low cost of 100 Essence at the shop, Ryu gets a combo from a light > strong attack launcher that puts him in the air to execute it more safely, instantly kills whatever is in it, and does a small AoE when he lands on the ground to deal damage around Ryu which makes him more safe upon landing. This works for every human-sized enemy in the game, and while the Izuna Drop is indeed the sickest move in video game history, I begrudgingly became rather tired of looking at the same animation for the 200th time to set up essences around me for UTs with every Ninja/Soldier/Human-sized fiend demon thing that approached me. To compensate for this, you sometimes have to fight larger sized enemies with super armor moves or weak flying enemies that ask you to think more outside the box, but even they have a samey feeling strategy attached to dealing with them. Because UTs reward is so massively safe and strong, this makes fighting the larger enemies like the dinosaur fiends or zombies with full UTs the more sane option and the same can be said after killing a few smaller enemies and waiting for the rest of them to charge into a UT. I see a lot of praise go towards the humanoid enemies in this game like the Spider Ninjas, but not these enemies and because none of them are fun or interesting, and don’t get me started on the command grabbing Ghost Fishes that spawn in front of you in swarms and can pin you down and loop you if you don’t mash fast enough. For about 90% of the encounters in this game I found myself rolling back and holding Y near essences to watch the same five second animation over and over again or positioning myself to do an Izuna Drop on a human enemy over and over again, and after a while I couldn’t help but find the combat surprisingly dull and stale, no matter how cathartic that Izuna Drop animation is.

But if I wasn’t straight up bored by the lack of options in combat, I was frustrated with the design decisions that the game was built around. The most obvious complaint being that Ryu has a 3rd person manual camera throughout but lacks a hard Lock-On mechanic similar to games that predates NGB like Kingdom Hearts or Devil May Cry and the game’s soft Lock-On is not really intelligent, making it a real hassle to reposition the camera in the middle of combat to see the enemy only for a move to miss because Ryu wasn’t targeting the correct person, or if he was targeting anything at all. I’ve grown more and more disdain for manual cameras in CAGs that aren’t Bayonetta or God Hand (But even Platinum Games had to compensate for Bayo’s camera by making it so enemies don’t attack you unless they’re on screen, despite that game both having a soft and hard lock-on. This is why the isometric camera in The Wonderful 101 was good, people! Because you didn’t have to manually adjust the camera to see what you’re fighting! It just simply displayed everything on screen! It was just too “different” for you guys to appreciate!) so this is like a CAG nightmare for me. It also doesn’t help that the game doesn’t really care where these enemies are placed. A lot of praise is given to this game for it’s Resident Evil-esque level design, but the cramp hallways mixed with the aggressive enemies makes it so you will get side-swiped by enemies running at you with an attack near a corner or shot at by a bullet across the level on a first playthrough. It’s like they designed the map first and made the decision for the game to have hyper-aggressive AI after. The most funny example I found highlighting this haphazard enemy placement was at a save point in chapter 6 I walked out and was immediately surrounded and hit by three Spider Ninjas that were spawned just a little off-screen from the save point. This was the only example of this happening near a save point to be granted and may have been intentional for this one save point, but stuff like this happens in normal play nearly all the time, especially in the city missions.

Speaking of the city, let me bring back that Resident Evil-esque exploration into the spotlight again. A lot of praise is given to it’s lock and key design similar to those games, but here I don’t like it. Because this game is chapter based, when a chapter ends there are a lot of times the game doesn’t give you good direction on where to go next unless you’re in a linear set piece chapter. You kind of just have to stumble around the city to look for a key item that just might be relevant to the current chapter you’re on. (Some of these items you grab don’t even get used till the end game like the stone tablets.) and some methods of getting them are clumsy. Like in chapter 5 you’re supposed to go into this bar and the guy tells you that you need a ticket to get in. I’ve walked around the plaza for a while fighting the same enemies respawning over and over again only to figure out I was supposed to go into Muramasa’s shop and buy something to trigger a cutscene of him giving me the ticket, even though before I triggered the “need ticket” cutscene I actually visited Muramasa’s shop beforehand. I have no idea why he couldn’t just give me the ticket when I visited his shop for the first time, but it made the realization all the more frustrating when unintuitive flags like this show up in the game’s progression. The level design also makes the chapters long dude, like I was clocking in about 30 minutes to an hour each chapter, ballooning the runtime to about 17 hours on my first playthrough (HowLongToBeat reports around 16 ½ hours.) making this the longest CAG I’ve played so far. Even The Wonderful 101 which I always hear criticized as being too long is only 14 hours, and that kind of pacing for an action game like this is grueling and tiresome! Chapter 11 is all about fucking swimming in water for half an hour and then the boss fight shows up and it’s Doku, your rival fight the game built up to! In a level where you barely have combat encounters for the entirety of it! Why!? This is like Jeanne 4 being after the 40 minute After Burner level in Bayonetta levels of bad here and nobody talks about it! At least let me dry off my boots a little.

The boss fights in Ninja Gaiden Black is kind of what kills this game the most for me personally. One of the things I love the most about CAGs is how many of them come up with very unique and interesting boss fight concepts to test your mastery of the game’s mechanics. They’re usually my favorite parts in each of these games, especially rival fights that pit you against an opponent that mirror the strength of your character like Vergil from Devil May Cry, Jeanne from Bayonetta, Azel from God Hand etc. Good boss fights alone is what gets me coming back to replay these games, and I think here in NGB they’re all kinda bad! Don’t think I can name a single one I liked except for maybe Alma, because she dodges around your attacks dynamically which forces you to deal with her attack animations and punish them quickly, which can lead to her getting knocked down for more attacks on her deleting mass chunks of her health bar. Everything else though are either kind of boring like the boss in Chapter 4, or the bone dinosaur, or the dragon, or the rehash fights of the tentacle monster or the elemental worms (You hit a big thing that doesn’t flinch and dodge it’s slow super armor attacks at the right time.) or boss fights in the military base chapter where you fight two tanks and a helicopter where all you do is shoot arrows at it with your bow and roll away to go refill them. (Boy I hope that's not a trend in the sequel!!!) and then there's just fights that don’t make a lot of sense even after beating them? Doku was easily the biggest disappointment for me because he not only highlights how limited your combat options really are in this game with his arbitrary windows to deal damage to him without him blocking. (Speaking of which, you get this jumping dive attack with your Dragon Sword called “Flying Swallow” that kinda breaks the game, and Team Ninja knew this so they made the bosses simply not take damage from it, rather than just rebalancing the move better. Lol.). It was incredibly frustrating to go after him with a laggy attack while he was throwing his sword only for the sword to magically appear back into his hands, blocking the attack and punishing me before I got a chance to dodge roll. Very unsatisfying rival fight, and then you get to fight him again in his spirit form with a worse arena and camera! Aw yeah now this is gaming!

Look, I get it, I get that there's a lot of people who are really into this game. Whether I watch videos of it, scroll through reviews, or talk about it in Discord servers, there's a lot of people who herald this game as "THE GOAT" or "ONE OF THE BEST XBOX GAMES" or "ONE OF THE BEST CAGS" and yeah I get it, there's still a lot to like about this one. It's presentation is slick and sharp like a katana blade, the game does it's best to give Ryu all the grace of a badass ninja whether he's running on wall to wall or elegantly finishing off crowds of enemies in rapid succession. Putting all my grudges with the combat aside, there's a genuine satisfaction in stumbling into a room with seemingly infinitely spawning enemies and after clearing it being rewarded with a health upgrade, it triggers all the dopamine receptors in my brain most of these dumbass games give me. But like any other blade you use for too long, I found it to dull out on me after a while. Annoyances I've had with the combat and level design kept rearing their ugly heads over and over again and I just kept wanting the game to be over 4 hours ago and yet Team Ninja kept insisting to throw more gimmicky sections for another half hour chapter at me. I know this review is probably my longest and rambly yet, but as I said, this is what the game did to me: it made me feel like an insane person bro! So many times this game made me turn over my shoulder and look at my library of CAGs I could be replaying that arguably does a lot of the things this game does but better. I thought about replaying this game on Hard mode before writing this down, but then I thought about fighting those fucking Ghost Fishes again and figured I'd take my internally planted advice and go replay Bayonetta instead.

Sorry guys. :/

Not quite my preference for the first game but you can't really go wrong with any version of the 2004 Ninja Gaiden. In comparison to Black, it adds in some areas, subtracts in others, and has some very odd changes made seemingly at random (for example, berserkers in Sigma can easily be countered to death, making solo encounters easier; however, berserkers are far more aggressive off screen than in Black, making group fights with them more difficult). Overall, it's still a great game. Its changes from Black result in a preference for one over the other, but either game is worth playing, so don't feel bad about picking up whatever is most accessible to you. Rachel is very hot.

© 2023 GoonerSteve

A CRPG with a unique and very well-crafted story and setting and truly truly awful gameplay.

I’m of very mixed feelings about Arcanum. My playthrough ranged from having a great time with many of the quests and getting blind-sided in the most pleasant way by some of the twists and surprisingly insightful/realistic writing to truly hating myself in dungeons and being genuinely angry at many of the mechanics, and neither side triumphed over the other in my memories months later when writing this. I appreciate a lot some of what it does and I’m glad I played it, but despite the potential for replay value, I doubt I’ll ever touch it again.

I’m generally fairly opposed to remake culture in games, but if any game ever deserved a remake, remaster, sequel or honestly anything to explore its amazing setting just a bit more, without the things that weigh it down, it’s Arcanum. I could go on and on talking about things I loved and hated but I guess that just goes to show how strong my feelings on it are. Gnome quest kinda sus tho

So people complain (rightfully) that these games are formulaic and soulless, but when this one, the first in the series, actually establishes the main conventions that the other ones would eventually follow albeit in a more refined way, is picked as the worst of the bunch? I repeat, the first one? The one with actually decent writing and purposeful direction? The one whose design wasn’t “make the same game, only bigger and in another place, and make it prettier… and put an historical figure or two” but tried something kinda new and exciting? The one with this, like, menacing aura that despite its many flaws it succeeded in telling a compelling story both with Altair and Desmond?

I don’t believe you.

BORN TO CAMP
IMMOLATOR IS BEHIND ME
ニガーKILL THEM ALL Mosin-Nagant M1891
I am cowboy man
410,757,864,530 DEAD HORSES

Of all the games I’ve played, this might be the hardest to do express my opinions on but I’ll give it a try. On one hand, Xenogears is a mess of a game with an overly ambitious director held back by dated mechanics. On the other hand, it’s an awe-inspiringly ambitious game that’s changed the way I look at storytelling in the medium. It’s hard to talk about the story without getting into spoiler territory but this game does not take long to strike you with tragedy. Despite this heavy introduction, much of the first disc of the game plays out like a standard JRPG in terms of both gameplay and story, with very clear signs that something much bigger is going on than the player is led to believe. Throughout your journey, you’re shown unexplained flashbacks and mysterious dialogue of various figures scheming, most of which won’t be explained till dozens of hours later. Despite the confusion of these hints, I believe they’re placed perfectly and help to motivate the player to continue and find out what is really going on.

This game’s most infamous aspect is its second disc. While not confirmed, the common belief is that the game ran out of budget halfway through, leading the second half of the game to be told almost entirely through text. While it’s definitely a jarring change in pace, the game’s second disc is where all previous questions are answered. From an objective standpoint this is pretty poor game design, but I was so invested in the story that I didn’t mind a more concentrated plot. This game goes in incredibly ambitious directions with its storytelling, with heavy religious and psychological themes that people much more qualified to talk about than me have talked about. These themes never felt forced and really help to elevate the game’s plot and characters in ways I’ve never seen before in a game.

Perhaps the weakest part of the game is its actual game part. Nothing about it is terribly offensive, in fact I really appreciate its unique take on turn-based combat, with standard attacks being a combination of button presses using a certain number of points. Over time you unlock different combinations of buttons for “deathblows”, which deal a significantly higher deal of damage. The sprite animations of these attacks are gorgeously detailed and hit sounds feel extremely substantial, making them satisfying to pull off and a joy once new ones are unlocked. This is only half of the combat, as the other half are fought on your characters’ gear mechs. Gear battles are a bit different, only allowing you to use one attack at a time with a combat level dictating the deathblows you can use. Each action you take in your gear uses up some fuel. You can’t heal with items while in your gear and fuel can only be restored by charging it for a puny amount per turn so if you run out of fuel, you’re pretty much screwed. While I absolutely love the gears’ designs in this game I found their battles to be pretty boring, as most boss fights in gears can be won using the same strategy. You’re given some customization with your gears’ parts but it’s mostly a numbers game where you’ll be wanting to just upgrade to the part that has the best stats. It’s definitely interesting in concept but I found these battles grew tedious over time.

Another aspect of the game I felt pretty mixed on were the dungeons. Most of them were fine and were short enough to not overstay their welcome, but the aggressive encounter rate started to really wear on me. In particular, one dungeon contains excessive platforming. This platforming was jank enough, but to add to the frustration your jumps can be interrupted by random encounters, resulting in you missing and having to start over. The confusing camera angles and homogenous design don’t help these longer dungeons either, and I found myself running through the same halls over and over.

Despite the qualms I have with some of the game’s design choices, I never once felt like quitting. I was so engrossed in the characters and winding narrative that I pushed through the tedium to finish the story. Certain scenes are so powerful that I forget all of the game’s annoyances, they’re really that good. I’ll be thinking about this game for a very long time.