After five long years of slowly working away at it, I've beaten my first Fallout game and it feels pretty good. Counterintuitively, as much as I profess myself a fan of RPGs, I'm actually quite bad at finding the time to complete longer ones. If I'm not sitting at a tabletop with friends, it's hard for me to stay invested in the story and world I'm being tasked to interact with. Despite all of this, Fallout New Vegas has been the one I could return to and I think my beating it is proof enough of its quality.

Great game, but I think Ryza 2 is my favorite of the trilogy. This game feels like it takes a lot of the fluff out of Ryza 2 and replaces it with different fluff, like a needlessly big, SMT5-adjacent overworld that makes it really hard to find specific materials and enemies without looking it up. The fact that there are a staggering 11 party members; 4 more than the previous game; constrains resources quite a lot, as you really need to be crafting the best gear you can for everybody to keep up with the increasing power of enemies. Before you get to that, though, the early game for this one is such a drag; it takes a really long time before it feels like you're really in the swing of things and crafting some quality stuff, and for the first 10-12 hours of the game, you're gonna be stuck scraping by with whatever crappy gear and items you can get.

That being said, once it does get going, it really gets going; it's got by far and away the deepest and most complex crafting and combat systems in the trilogy. All of it culminates into a very satisfying game to sink your teeth into, even if some of it feels a bit undercooked, and some of it overwhelming. Loved the new iteration of the Wind Shoes.

the game outright lies to you in a tutorial about how one of its core systems works so naturally i'm way into it. i don't know if i'd go so far as to say it's "good" but i've played it a bunch and really enjoyed wrangling its obscure and uncooperative mechanics

the story turns out less interesting than it could have, the characters aren't anything special, but to me the way the game doesn't explain itself very well lent its world a sense of danger and mystery that's difficult to achieve otherwise

For the most part, this game is junk food. It's not the most fulfilling, but it's fairly low-effort way to experience an appealing if trashy flavour. The combat is never particularly challenging, but it still demands just enough input from the player - and shoves enough flashy nonsense into your eyeballs - that it remains engaging without being stressful, so you can pass the time well enough while you sit back and enjoy girls being gay.

It's worth noting that I skipped straight to this game, not playing the first - it seemed to be reviewed quite a bit more poorly, with reports of fanservice that might've bordered on outright uncomfortable. I was already taking a gamble, with very little idea if this would actually be any good, so it made sense to shoot for the best chances.

One really standout aspect of this game is the way Rena and Yuki's relationship is handled - undeniably explicit, a core part of their arcs, and a consistent factor the game still pays mind to once it's established. It had me grinning from ear to ear. That said, it does make all of the other casual intimacy in the game kind of weird - like, in almost any other context, I'd be saying "yeah these girls are gay as hell", but since the game has proven it's willing to actually come out and say it... what does it mean when it doesn't? I dunno. Nonetheless, seeing the girls walk around holding hands and go on "dates" where they lie in bed together is good for the soul.

The game does have a number of rough edges that add up to a janky experience, like, I could seriously nitpick all day. So I will.
- The camera in fights is all over the place.
- Enemy designs are just kind of weirdly abstract without any connection to what's going on in the game.
- The skill names all being in different languages for ~aesthetic~ makes them very difficult to memorise and assign meaning to.
- The crafting system demands a tedious excess of material grinding if you care about upgrading everything.
- The fragment system has a lot of niche or redundant effects, rather than encouraging interesting builds.
- The stealth segments are godawful and contribute little.
- There's a lot of asset reuse and padding - even if that one time it was totally justified and really cool.
- Having to wait for skill animations to play out makes timing awkward when blocking big attacks or in the whole one-on-one mode.
- Asking a whole second playthrough for the true ending in a game that is neither short nor deep is very questionable.
I definitely wouldn't go so far as to call this an outright bad game, it's just, I dunno - making good art is really hard, actually, and when you focus on the standout masterpieces that's easy to lose track of. Sometimes you need a little mid in your life.

That's a lot of complaining, but the game's pleasures are comparatively simple, as already described - flashy spectacle, hella yuri, and a relaxed pace. Ultimately, I did enjoy my time, and the game was exactly what I needed right now.

EO4 is my least favorite EO game. The airship part is probably one of the main reasons why; I hated traversing the overworld. It is uninteresting as hell, and basically a giant waste of time that completely misses the point of the series. In this game, you aren't delving deep into a increasingly fucked labyrinth, you are traversing some random continent that is designed to be as frustrating as possible. The overworld FoEs all suck and the gimmicks are all very annoying. The labyrinths themselves also suffer because there's a lot of random 1-2 floor labyrinths that are really boring. Every single EO game has something that stands out from the others; and EO4's being the stupid overworld means that the rest of the game is pretty vanilla. The OST is also underwhelming; the only music is liked was a couple of the stratum themes. The raw gameplay is fine for EO, though, and I still found fun in the gameplay even if I hated the overworld.

Kaneda is a hack!

Eventuell der Teil, den ich am wenigsten genießen konnte.

Das Alchemiesystem wurde mal wieder verbessert und das ist auch schon das einzige, was verbessert wurde.

Es macht keinen Sinn, sich in die Alchemie hineinzuarbeiten, da es nicht gebraucht wird. Das Spiel ist nicht nur zu leicht, es wird auch nie gegen starke Gegner gekämpft, was den Alchemieprozess unnötig macht.

Der Soundtrack ist für die Reihe unterdurchschnittlich.

Die Story spielt in einer Traumwelt und ist daher absolut irrelevant.

Ausnahmslos alle Frauen haben riesen Brüste..

Kein Gespräch wirkt unbeschwert, wie es für die Reihe typisch ist.
Es geht ständig um belanglose Probleme, die keinen interessieren. Die kindliche Unbeschwertheit der meisten vorigen Teile ist nicht vorhanden.

Die NPCs haben nun wirklich gar nichts mehr interessantes zu sagen, es gibt zu viele und die Stadt ist viel, VIEL zu groß.
Warum soll ich mehr als eine Minute durch die Gegend laufen, um am Ende einen!! lieblosen Satz zu lesen?

Und da dieser Teil offenbar der erfolgreichste war, wird sich an den Problemen nichts mehr ändern, was wirklich bescheiden ist.

I feel very strongly that Skyrim is not a good game, but I do understand why so many people like it. The quests, the lore, the dungeon design, and the sandbox nature of the game are all great, but I think basically every piece of the gameplay is actively bad at it’s intended purpose. Oblivion is the same way. It’s very frustrating to me because I would like to play these games as first-person dungeon crawlers, but they just aren’t designed for you to think about how the game works, so any build is either extremely overpowered or hopelessly useless.

For example, two-handed weapons are inferior to one-handed weapons in every way. You have less flexibility, you can’t cast spells, you do less damage per attack than dual wielding, and you attack slower. Also, not only is blocking less effective, most of the perks in the Block tree only work when you have a shield equipped. I like big swords, I want to smash skeletons with a big sword, but the game heavily punishes me for trying to use a big sword, so the only option for playing that way is to turn the difficulty way down.

That said, this is one of my most played games and the above complaints make me spend a lot of time trying to download mods to "fix" the game.