Here is what I'll say... good game! Fun combat, cool exploration (kind of), a great vibe. It's very enjoyable to play.

Story is super convoluted, didn't quite care for it. I was really into the collectibles until I realized there's literally infinite collectibles and I didn't have the time or patience to look at all of them. They didn't really help unravel the story that much anyways. But navigation is sometimes extremely fucked, the map system is pretty rough when there are multiple floors and the sense of progression can sometimes get completely derailed by an ambiguous mission detail. There's a difference between a game not holding your hand and some of the shit this game does, where you literally have on clue what you are supposed to do because there's no context or proper information given. It doesn't happen a lot, but when it does, it's very annoying.

But, good game!

A huge mixed bag. If I had just played the story and done nothing else, then this might be a 3.5, but I went for the 100% trophy, and that's where a lot of my grievances came from.

The missions, when you're actually doing shit, are pretty fun. They're mostly cover-based shooting missions, but Rockstar's gunplay is always fun. It's the lead-up to these missions that becomes such a slog once you reach mission 40, 50, or 70. The fifteen minute horse rides, the ten minute cutscenes, the walking around before you actually get to do anything. It gets so tedious. The story itself is cool, and I really like the characters. Dutch and Arthur are very unique and layered people, and the way Arthur's story came to a head was actually genuinely effective emotionally.

But then comes the side stuff. The side missions are cool. But some of the tasks you have to do are just horribly broken and insulting. This is easily the most taxing and grueling platinum I've hunted for (and i am obsessed with platinuming, i do it with most games i can i wish i wasn't so obsessed i can't help it!!!!), not because of a lack of skill on my part, but because Rockstar emphasizes quantity over quality. They think that the more shit they put in the game, the more exciting and immersive and cool the game becomes. But the fact is, when I'm going on these random hunts for dumb animals, it isn't fun because there's no logic to any of the hunting. None of it is designed or programmed well at all. I had to exploit the game's save spawn system, I had to rely on stupid guides that are like "hey if you go to this spot at this exact time then there's a 1 in 25 chance that a Western Bull Moose MIGHT spawn. But also there's a 1 in 3 chance if they spawn that their carcass will be perfect, so make sure they have a perfect carcass before you kill them. But also there's a significant chance that your gun will ruin the pelt." It's dumb shit like this that Rockstar requires you to do in order to get their dumb platinum that just sucks the fun out of everything. "Win 3 Blackjack games after hitting 3 or more times"??? WHAT? It's a farce! It's a fallacy! It's horrible! It's just sitting there pressing buttons waiting for the RNG to throw you a bone.

There's definitely fun stuff, like the Bandit challenges where you just have to kill people in random ways. Or hunting Legendary Animals, where there's actually a bit of logic to the way you go about it. I even enjoyed some of the collectables. But goddamn, dude. GTA 5 was fun to 100% because it was just "Hey go do everything we put in the game" and it wasn't shit like "hunt all 180 animals and skin them but also 50 of these animals are impossible to find because we don't know how to program shit we just wanna put all these animals in the game so people will think it's a good game". I don't hate this game. I like it. The story on it's own and some of the open world stuff is cool.

It's my fault! I'm obsessed with 100% stuff! Even if I don't love the game! I'M DUMB, OKAY.

I know this isn't considered top tier in the From Software canon but honestly this is really up there for me. Dark Souls was a revelatory gaming experience for me, and while I love the subsequent games in the series as well as Bloodborne, they never posed a challenge in the same way that first game did. None of them had a "click" moment for me, although I did enjoy playing them.

But Sekiro is the first game that they've made where I felt like I was being really challenged again. For the first time since Dark Souls, I started playing Sekiro and I was angry that I wasn't good at it lmao which forced me to get used to and learn the ins and outs of the combat. And when I beat my first legit boss in the game, I felt that rush of like "holy shit i'm fucking good at this now". Which is a feeling I have missed and I'm glad I got to feel it again.

And on top of that of course this has amazing level design, amazing boss fights, awesome lore, all of the shit you expect from a From Software game at this point. The Guardian Ape boss fight is a goddamn triumph. Love this game.

I have a LOT of complaints. As far as gameplay goes, it doesn't have a single original idea, except for the combat but you can still feel threads of other games in it. The exploration is very God of War and Red Dead Redemption, the side quests are very Arkham inspired, the stealth is very Hitman and MGS. It's a lot of other gameplay elements fused into this game. A lot of missions are pretty boring, with emphasis on trailing rather than combat. The main emotional conflict between Jin and his uncle is really dumb, I get that it's probably historically accurate but I could not bring myself to care about Shimura's insistence on killing with honor. The camera can really fuck you during combat. I ended up doing some side quests backwards??? Like, I found a mission in the game where someone was getting revenge for their dead kids, then I found another mission like ten hours later where I was helping this same character look for her children who she had lost that she thought were alive. So that was weird.

But! Having said all that! This game is pretty fun! I liked it. It is very gameplay focused, which is never a bad thing. The emotional story is weak, but the siege of Japan by the Mongols is an excellent setting for a video game and I think they use it to its full potential. Taking out the Mongol territories was so fucking fun and exactly the type of shit you would want in a game like this. The combat is addictive and satisfying, despite the janky camera, I think it works really well. The map is beautiful, and holy shit, the LIGHTING is gorgeous. And while I still believe that the gameplay is not original at all, I think the gameplay elements it rips off blatantly are actually made more accessible? And convenient? And fun? Like your horse, for example. In RDR you have so many fucking different buttons for the horse shit, but in Ghost of Tsushima you just hit a button and your horse comes immediately no matter where you are. Also climbing up cliffs, in other games you would climb up a ledge and have to press X over and over to get your character to jump to the next ledge, but in this you just hold the stick towards the next ledge and the jumping happens. Fun! Convenient! I enjoyed my time with this game!

PLATINUM'D THAT SHIT TOO BITCH

I liked it but I think the base game provided a more balanced experience. I loved the Maria boss fight and the Orphan of Kos boss fight. Fun, balanced, tough but fair. Living Failures were laughably easy, which every Souls-like has a boss like that so it's fine. But Ludwig? HATED him. Did not enjoy the challenge at all. Took me about a week, thought the fight was very clunky, his movement was very weirdly programmed. But everything else was really good, the exploration is still great, the enemy types are fun, the areas are unique. It's good!

Fucking love it. I haven't played Sekiro or Demon's Souls yet, but this is easily my second favorite of the FromSoftware games, and with Dark Souls being my favorite game, it's pretty hard to beat.

Despite being obviously of the same kin and of the same developers, it's its own unique experience with the devs inspiring a new and more offensive play style (the addition of the gun and the removal of the shield). On top of that, the excellent setting, the Victorian and gothic vibes give the atmosphere of this game its very own flavor. It's spooky! Not super scary, but it has some eerie moments. And to top it all off, I love the level design. There's a strong emphasis on exploration and players are encouraged to really comb over this world. There's never a clear path forward, and a lot of the areas are technically optional as they don't progress the main story (which I could see pissing off a lot of players, but I personally loved that choice). But they help by adding to the lore, adding to the atmosphere, and also helping the player become better at the game. It was a real treat to play. Also, the Chalice Dungeons??? Such a cool addition!

My one and only real issue with the game, and this is an issue I have with all the Souls games, is that the only time it feels unfair is when you try to attack an enemy and there's a wall near you, and your weapon hits the wall and bounces back and you can't hit your enemy. But seemingly every enemy in this game, with projectiles being excluded, is able to morph their weapons and attacks through walls to hit you. Just a design thing that I wish they would focus on fixing for the next game. Maybe they did for Sekiro! If not, hopefully they do for Elden Ring. But I noticed it being a pretty prevalent issue, maybe more than the other games.

Gamer standards these days are too loose. This game is OKAY, at best. At it's heights, the combat is really fun, and the exploration is fun. But every person pretending that Respawn didn't knowingly release 85% of a complete game is a goober. At times this game is barely playable. Frame rate dips, texture glitches, AI glitches, cutscene bugs, combat bugs, loading times, pauses in gameplay for loading, it's awful. And obviously the game borrows so much from other recent games, which would be fine if it just fully developed and designed these elements, but again, the game, almost a year later, still is so clearly not finished. It borrows gameplay and combat elements but doesn't fully maximize on the potential of any of them. The story is stale, completely forgettable. The graphics are good, but the character models have some uncanny valley moments, especially with the eyes. But the combat is fun, but familiar. The lightsaber battles are genuinely great. It's okay.

Again, I platinum'd it, so I'm a hypocrite.

Really solid. I love the minimal mechanics and the gorgeous landscape, but obviously the main thrust of this is the puzzles. And the puzzles here are pretty fucking sturdy, in a way that's challenging but almost never feels unfair. And the game manages to teach you to walk away from a problem, which is hard when you're playing a game. But the game gives you the tools and sells the idea that you can gain the knowledge necessary to beat any given puzzle, without overtly explaining or giving you directions. It's really awesome. I solved over 300 of those grids and only had to look up hints for two of them.

My biggest beef is the story, or more specifically the payoff. It doesn't really feel like there's a main thrust to get invested in, it's just your natural curiosity. Which, if you are naturally curious, you'll be motivated to finish the game, so that's fine. But while the puzzles were obtuse and abstract in really fun and creative and intuitive ways, I thought I knew what the main goal was. And I felt like I was working towards this main goal through the whole game, and then finally, after over 30 hours, I managed to make it to my "goal". But then the game SMACKS you with some of the most gleefully annoying and absurdly aberrant puzzles that the game has to offer. To the point that it breaches beyond what I thought the game was all about. Some of these puzzles were completely outside of the realm of the vibe and the feeling that the game had set up, in my opinion. I was so frustrated, but not frustrated in a way I had felt when I had gotten stuck earlier. When I was frustrated early on in the game, it was because I knew I hadn't yet obtained the tools or the knowledge to solve the puzzles I was stuck on. But I knew those answers were out there, and I knew I could find them if I kept searching. But in the final chunk of this game, I felt like the game devs were pointing and laughing at me, because I wasn't on their wavelength or some bullshit. It was dumb. It was very dumb. And then after that, of course the payoff was not gonna be worth it. Oh well. Still a really solid game, worth playing if you're into puzzle shit.

The combat and the swinging are very fun, and there's enough of it in the game to recommend it. It looks great, the lighting is great, the music is great. It's solid fun!

But this is FUCKED UP overrated. This has perhaps one of the worst main stories that I've played in any AAA game. The people who complain about Spider-Man 3 being overcrowded but also say this is one of the best Spider-Man stories? Get the fuck out of here. All of these villains have basically zero rational or developed motivations, shit just happens. It's a whole bunch of villainous Spider-Man elements cobbled together until the gameplay reached a certain number of hours. The Doc Ock shit is super dumb, super underwritten. On top of the Mr. Negative stuff. There is one effective emotional hit in the game, and it comes at the very end. But almost everything else is a bit undercooked. And thus there's no emotional engagement, and thus the real fun comes from side missions and free-world Spider-Man engagement. But also a lot of the side missions are fucking lame. Catching pigeons? Collecting gas out of the air? Spraying a vaccine over rivers? What the fuck is this? The Tombstone stuff is cool. I don't know, the side missions felt pretty lackluster here.

Also, the game wants to be Arkham so bad. Wish there was a little more ingenuity. It's a fine game. I fucking platinum'd it, so I'm kind of a hypocrite.

Didn't love the story. Kratos and Atreus are fine characters, but you can see the path and the arcs laid out right in front of you from the get-go. Kratos's whole "I need to be harsh on my son because he needs to learn the harsh lessons of the world so therefore I must refrain from being a loving father even though that's clearly what I want" schtick is tired, but still, it executes some of the more emotional moments better than I expected. But the actual plot of take the ashes from A to B isn't done super well, it's basically an excuse for the game writers to say, "You NEED to go here, but something is blocking your path, so now you have to go HERE, but uh-oh, something stopped you when you got there so now you're over here and you need to get back to that place so you can get there!" Which, don't love that.

But what this game does really well is focus on the gameplay, and the gameplay is very fun. Very satisfying brutal combat that evolves consistently and interestingly that it maintains it's fun. And roaming the world and finding lore is great when it's you discovering it, not when it's being forced on you in cutscenes. I can forgive a game's story and characters as long as it's fun to play, and God of War is extremely fun to play and I had no qualms about playing it for hours on end.

P.S. Sigrun can eat my balls.