'Those great, beautiful ships, rocking silently on the calm waters, with their idle and wistful sails, are they not telling us in a silent language — when will we depart for happiness?'
     – Charles Baudelaire, Fusées, VIII, 1887 (personal translation).

One of the most difficult issues in fantasy studies is to define its contours and, by extension, its relationship to reality. In her seminal study, Fantasy: The literature of subversion (1981), Rosemary Jackson points out that fantasy violates the conventions and rules of our reality and: 'threatens to subvert rules and conventions taken to be normative [and] disturb "rules" of artistic representation and literature’s reproduction of the "real"' [1]. The capacity for deviation that speculative fiction offers is both an opportunity and a danger. Jackson points out that this subversive potential does not mean that fantasy or the fantastic are genres that always aim for social progressivism. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the pulp tradition was steeped in racist, homophobic and misogynist tropes that exerted a lasting influence on fiction throughout the late twentieth century and to this day.

     The misogynist issue in Western-style fantasy

Many authors hide behind these historical precedents to conceal a conservative discourse. The existence of multiple races allows for the perpetuation of social oppression, and while female characters have generally become more active in recent decades, they continue to fit into old-fashioned stereotypes [2]. The Final Fantasy series is part of this dynamic and has always oscillated between these major themes of fantasy fiction, notably by offering a regular comparison between magic and technological modernity, nature and industry, good and evil, humanity and divinity. These dichotomies are relatively common and allow the story to touch on issues such as capitalist exploitation and the use of natural resources. However, the representation of other topics remains disastrous: Final Fantasy XIV (2010) is especially characterised by deep-seated racism and sexism, the latter partially masked by the presence of strong female characters in positions of power.

It is hard to say whether these precautions were taken to appeal to a particular audience, but it is clear that Final Fantasy XVI ignores all these concerns and plunges into the most outrageous archaism, piling on misogynistic scenes wherever possible, supposedly justified by the harshness of European medieval society. Excuses of this kind obscure the real issues. The player follows the story of Clive Rosfield, drawn into a quest for revenge after the Phoenix Gate incident, which spells the end of the Duchy of Rosaria. Miraculously reunited with his childhood friend Jill Warrick, he joins Cid's group, determined to change the situation of the Bearers – magic-capable individuals enslaved across the continent. Final Fantasy XVI is therefore a tale of free will and independence, pitting the dark nature of the world against the purity of Cid and Clive's ideals.

To create this atmosphere, as well as the division between good and evil, the title makes extensive use of violence, sex and sexual violence as narrative drivers. Lenise Prater explains that Fiona McIntosh's Percheron trilogy (2005) constructs: 'a series of juxtapositions between good and evil [...] through the representation of sexual violence' [3]. The same processes are at work in Final Fantasy XVI, from the very first narrative arc of the adventure, where Benedikta is cast as the archetypal femme fatale, ready to use her body to manipulate her rivals: the character is constantly brought back to her status as a woman, and it is the threat of sexual violence that cements her development – Annabella is constructed in a similar way. Final Fantasy XVI revels in the dichotomy between whores and innocent virgins. Despite the Western aesthetic of the title, Jill is no more than a yamato nadeshiko who is constantly sidelined by the game. She mostly serves as a narrative device to advance the plot, through her multiple visits to the infirmary or because she is kidnapped by Clive's enemies. The title denies her any agency, and her nuanced fragility is only hinted at in a few sentences before being brushed aside: it takes almost thirty hours of gameplay before Clive explicitly asks her how she is, despite her constant concern for the protagonist's anxieties.

     A case for centrism and laissez-faire

This conservative portrayal is echoed in the discourse on the Bearers. The game is moderately critical of slavery on the continent and fails to make it a structural issue for Clive, who always remains somewhat detached from the problem. This issue is structurally embedded in the way the player interacts with the world, as they are extremely passive in relation to the events portrayed in the story. While the player is aware of the political manipulations taking place in Storm, they cannot act on them directly; Clive is blindly thrown into the fray and the situation is simply resolved in a battle that depoliticises the social stakes. Similarly, the Seals donated by certain NPCs guarantee Clive's reputation in the community in a highly artificial way, removing any roughness from the interactions. Clive fights to free the Bearers because he inherits this mission from his father and Cid, but this task seems disembodied throughout the game.

Beyond the main quest, the side quests are particularly lacklustre and do little to deepen the world-building. Because they can be accessed at any point in the game, Final Fantasy XVI chooses to exclude companions from them. They simply disappear from the cutscenes and thus have no chance to react to the world around them. Since the intention is to establish Clive as an ideologically good, open and self-governing character, all side quests are resolved by Clive's ideological concessions or miraculous unifications in the face of artificially created danger, without the slightest contradiction from any of the other main characters. Only in the final stretch does someone point out Clive's hypocrisy and domineering power over Jill, but the scene is quickly swept away by the return of Gav, the comic relief of the group.

Final Fantasy XVI is more concerned with shocking, melodramatic or cathartic platitudes than with radical denunciations of inequality and oppression. Worse, these shocking scenes do not even make the world dynamic, so poor is the structure of the narrative. Two problems stand out. Firstly, the interweaving of high-intensity sequences with slower passages: instead of building up the world through genuine slice-of-life sequences, the game multiplies banalities that the player has already understood for several dozen hours. The temporality of the story is also incoherent. Clive seems to cross the continent in a matter of hours, while his rivals remain completely passive. The confrontation between the Sanbreque Empire and the Dhalmekian Republic is characterised by irrational stagnation and passivity, allowing Clive to strike unhindered. The Twins always remain static, despite long ellipses in time.

     A hollow and meaningless experience

Perhaps Final Fantasy XVI should not be taken so literally, but rather accepted as the nekketsu it becomes in the second half of the game. Such an interpretation would be acceptable if the game did not take itself so seriously. However, as in Final Fantasy XIV, the writing wallows in a very uncomfortable theatrical heaviness – which the actors generally manage to save from disaster – as if clumsily mimicking the drama of Shakespeare's historical plays. However, Clive's disillusioned, self-deprecating, borderline comic character breaks up this fiction. Some characters work well, playing up their theatrical nature, such as Cid or Lord Byron, but they are quickly relegated to the background or an essentially comic role.

The shifts in tone and pacing detract from the development of the narrative, which cannot be saved by a few flashes of brilliance. The aetheric floods seem to have been imagined as a reflection of nuclear risks, highlighting the danger of Japan's post-Fukushima energy crutch, but in the end they are only used as a narrative expedient to create danger where the plot needs it. The pinnacle of dishonesty and disrespect for a title that centres its discourse on human free will lies in the choice of names for the NPC fillers. In the pure tradition of Final Fantasy XIV, they include puns and comical alliterations ('Broom-Bearer') that strip them of all substance and reduce them to ridicule. In the second half of the game, a little girl is introduced as a character of some narrative importance, but the title does not even bother to give her a name or address her living conditions.

Meanwhile, the action sequences prove to be particularly hollow. The choreography in the first few hours is quite ingenious, highlighting Clive's agility with complex movements and rather creative camera angles. As the title progresses, this aspect is abandoned in favour of fights that drag on and resort to nekketsu clichés. The duel against Titan lasts forty minutes and is a miserable succession of attacks around the stone tentacles. Final Fantasy XVI even has the audacity to end the battle not with the obvious cinematic climax, but with a dull and particularly unpleasant aerial sequence. Subsequent encounters also drag on for no apparent reason other than to demonstrate a genuine – if futile – mastery of the lightning engine.

     Ergonomics, gameplay and fluidity

While Final Fantasy XVI boasts detailed environments at first glance, the facade quickly cracks. The early areas are indeed highly detailed, to the point of drowning the player in detail – navigating through the thick vegetation is quite difficult, forcing the player to use Torgal to progress – but the quality deteriorates as the game progresses. The dense environments disappear in favour of vast open areas that struggle to convey the majesty of the world. Although the cities visible on the horizon are beautiful backdrops, they fail to radiate materially onto their surroundings, which then become mere abstractions. Moreover, Clive's movement is extremely sluggish: even getting on his chocobo is an unpleasant task that constantly interrupts the fluidity of the action, while the player is condemned to an extraordinary passivity in order to get from one place to another.

In the Hideaway, this impression is reinforced by Clive's inability to sprint: in the second half of the game, getting to the backyard is a gruelling chore. The magic of this cocoon quickly vanishes, as the various characters keep repeating themselves and are only mediocrely animated. Despite the detailed scenery, the game borrows all its animations from Final Fantasy XIV, giving a very artificial tone to the discussions. The Hideaway is less a place where the player can comfortably catch up with their favourite NPCs, and more a burdensome obligation to access NPCs, side quests and the hunt board – requiring the player to physically go there to see the location of elite monsters, a design mistake that even Final Fantasy XIV avoided.

The enjoyment of the combat system is left to the player and their experience of other character-action games, but it is absurd that the player has to wait at least twenty hours to finally be given a modicum of flexibility in their attack options: Final Fantasy XVI justifies its unique protagonist with a deep combat system that encourages the creation of diverse builds, but this philosophy is only appropriate in a New Game+ where all powers are unlocked from the start. In a first playthrough, the player must suffer from an impressive slowness, to the point where the Story Mode becomes an obvious option. The title here echoes the recent problem of Shadowbringers (2019) and especially Endwalker (2021), which first designs its battles with the Extreme and Savage versions, before cutting out the most difficult sections for the Normal versions – the result is a sense of incompleteness that is particularly damaging when combined with the very slowly evolving combat system.

It is difficult to place Final Fantasy XVI in the landscape of modern Japanese video games, so awkward is it in every way. With the title still in its cycle of artificial marketing in preparation for the DLCs, one can only speculate as to the reasons for these failings. Perhaps the lack of coherence can be explained by the fractured development team working on two major games, and the highly eclectic nature of the directors brought together by Naoki Yoshida. His design philosophy is particularly well suited to an MMO, but Final Fantasy XVI suffers greatly from it: the endless succession of side quests involving the Hideaway characters just before the final battle is incomprehensible, as if the game had remembered that it needed to conclude. Hiroshi Takai and Kazutoyo Maehiro's narrative vision is a series of shocking, empty, meaningless scenes: players of Heavensward (2015) had the opportunity to suffer from Ysayle's portrayal, and it is surprising that Final Fantasy XVI does even worse, a standard-bearer for passive misogyny in modern fantasy. That Jill's theme becomes 'My Star' and denies her any agency in the game's final moments is particularly painful and aptly sums up the title.

__________
[1] Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The literature of subversion, Routledge, London, 2005 [1981], p. 14.
[2] On the topic, see for example Peter Bebergal (ed.), Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots Of Dungeons & Dragons, Strange Attractor Press, London, 2021. In the afterword, Ann VanderMeer discusses the conservative roots of pulp fantasy and of the historical TTRPG.
[3] Lenise Prater, 'Monstrous Fantasies: Reinforcing Rape Culture in Fiona McIntosh's Fantasy Novels', in Hecate, vol. 39, no. 1-2, 2014.

Just a blindingly infuriating game. Feel like there was so much wasted potential here buried under horrible pacing, some of the worst side quests I've experienced in a AAA game and combat system that once you get past the flashy colours, is extremely hollow. The story is what pushed me through and the high points are incredible, filled with amazing spectacle I haven't experienced in a game before. But those high points make the middling and low parts of the game even more frustrating. When I finished my playthrough, all that I could reflect on was that this was a super yacht that is riddled with holes, progressively sinking the longer it went.

Wasteland 3 makes a few improvements to the gameplay of the previous title. There is better skill and weapon balance, attributes are now balanced so any character without a high intelligence score is no longer worthless, and the traits that you can choose at character creation are no longer as overpowered or useless as they were in the directors cut version of Wasteland 2. They removed some of the more Tabletop style RPG features like percentage failures for doing things like lockpicking or different attribute ratings coming together to effect stats but it wasn't really handled in an interesting way in the previous game and just simplifying it was for the best. There are combat abilities that characters can learn that can chain together well, some skills might do bonus damage to bleeding, stunned, or otherwise status effect characters.

Although, even with those skills, there are no real interesting character builds like you might find in Pathfinder Kingmaker/Pillars of Eternity/etc, just things you should know in advance to set a character up well (knowing toaster repair is an important skill if you want your character to use a flamethrower, that the nerd stuff skill that allows you to hack robots might not be a good skill for your sniper that wants to stay away from the frontline, if you are going to want weird science to use armor or weapons that you will find later, how much AP you are likely to want from coordination before focusing on other attributes, give your sniper the stealth skill, knowing that the initiative and detection stats are basically completely worthless, etc).

The characters that can join your party have been limited to two this time around instead of three, giving you a total of four created rangers and two NPCs that you can have join you. The number of recruitable characters is much smaller but they tend to be more talkative this time around and some have a lot more to do with the overall plot and characters that you meet.

The plot, level of violence, and some dialogue can be a bit juvenile and the game is never one for subtlety. It's not a narrative you will play to reflect on what is going on like you would Planescape or Disco Elysium, the commentary of Fallout, and not one where you are likely to build much of a connection with the characters, groups, or world like in Divinity or Pillars of Eternity. Narratively often doing little more than an attempt to amuse with the absurdity of situations and characters, never giving any quests or options that end up even being as memorable as some of the ones found in Wasteland 2.

The animal whisperer skill and random robots/animals/followers you can obtain still allows you to amass an army of followers for your party, at one point in addition to my six party members I also had three robots, seven animals, and a guy following me around and joining us in combat. You can pet all of your animals (or attempt to) and it is probably one of the more amusing elements of the game. Getting to destroy a cult and AI supercar dedicated to Ronald Reagan was also a high point. The close up shots they use with some of the more important character models when you meet them are fun to watch, extremely expressive without being overly cartoon like.

The ending is a rushed mess that not only hurts the end of the game but makes a lot of your decisions prior to it pointless as well. Your choices so far made regarding the main story end up meaning nothing when it comes to how you have followed the order of the ruler of Colorado, your choices regarding how you have been following another character mean nothing (and one of the main things she wants you to do doesn't even make sense or fit her character and seems to happen as an ending slide to one of your characters even if your actions should have prevented it), only your reputation with one of the game's factions (the Hundred Families) really matters and that requires you to be at the loved the rank, your skills suddenly become useless as you have no way to talk sense into characters with some of them even assigning nonsensical values and actions to your characters that might be the direct opposite of what you have been doing, you have essentially been the leader of the rangers in Colorado and are at no point able to make any logical decisions to prevent negative things from happening, one of the factions trying to take over Colorado at the game's end is completely ridiculous and should be impossible without following through with other quest options (going with Wasteland 2 and 3's terrible and annoying usual stance of everyone in the world is completely useless except for your party), there is a machine faction that is given almost no role in the game and could logically step in to fill the role of another faction if you destroyed them but you aren't even given the option to bring this possibility up with them. Any choices just leads to a laughable boss fight before you make your final decisions with some of them being just as poorly thought out. You can make a less than maximum speech check to just casually have the rangers abandon Arizona and the people there to die after sections of not being able to convince people of anything. If you aren't loved by the rich families one ending might have them going back to their roots as guerrilla fighters living off the land fighting a war against you to regain power, as if the pampered bunch of losers you have met throughout the game are anything like the families were 50+ years ago when they were taking over Colorado.

I thought some of the ending parts of Wasteland 2 were a little, dumb, but the ending and ending sections of Wasteland 3 are massive hits against the game's quality. From the small amount of forces and low stakes ending areas to just completely removing any point of the main story choices and your RPG abilities to use your skills or find solutions to the end game problems.

I finished the game on hard which basically made both armor and health almost useless. Even my characters with the best armor in the game, maxed out strength for the most health, and one of them having a quirk from character creation giving them even more health would still see themselves getting downed by a single enemy that at times may have done around twice their total HP value in damage. This lead to an odd type of game where we would start a fight, kill most enemies, have the remaining enemies down a few characters but with all the doctors and medical equipment to heal afterwards it just never really mattering, and then killing them with our followers or on our next turn or two.

A bit buggy, though I never ran into anything game breaking or that couldn't be fixed with a reload or some thought, and it can have some fairly long load times that can be made worse when you need to quickly travel through multiple separate areas to get where you are going.

With some patches and if found at a lower price point it can be a decent purchase with some funny moments and decent mechanics but the combat and plot don't come close to meeting the better games in the genre and the terrible ending sections and taking so little interest in what you have done or what your skills and allies should allow for really hurt the game.

(There has been updates since I played it that may have improved on certain things)

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1308599051747647491

While a dramatic departure from the rest of the Yakuza series in terms of gameplay, almost everything else about Yakuza 7 is the franchise at its absolute peak. It’s not only one of, if not the best entries in the franchise, but it’s also one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. It’s tremendously addicting in just about every regard, once I started playing it, I had such a difficult time putting it down.

The story is very well told, and I think it’s up there with some of RGG Studios’ best work. The new protagonist, Ichiban, is not only my new favorite Yakuza protagonist, but one of my favorite video game characters of all time. It is impossible to not get swept up into the flames of his kindness, passion and charisma. While I absolutely adore and idolize Kiryu, and he was my favorite character in the series until this point, I was absolutely won over by Ichiban and his grueling journey of losing everything and then crawling his way to the top. I enjoyed the rest of the cast quite a bit as well, but I did find that they all take a backseat to Ichi as far as their involvement in the story goes. This isn’t really a bad thing, just noticeable. Thanks to the Bond system, you do get a chance to learn more about them and get involved with their personal stories on the side. I just prefer it when the party members of a JRPG are more involved with the overall story.

Whether or not you’ll enjoy the combat will hinge entirely on how you feel about JRPGs. If you actively despise turn-based combat, there’s admittedly not much here that will get you to reconsider your feelings for it as it’s mostly pretty standard. Skill attacks require you to either mash a button or press a button at a specific time similar to the Heat actions of old but otherwise it plays like a traditional turn-based JRPG. My only complaint when it comes to the combat is that if the protagonist, Ichiban dies then your game is immediately over, and I absolutely despise it when JRPGs do that. It just makes no sense when you have party members or items that can bring other party members back to life. Normally it's not a huge issue, I rarely found it happening to me, but later in the game there are bosses and certain enemies who have either instant kill attacks, or attacks that can kill a party member if they weren’t at full health already and it's when Ichiban dies during moments like this that make this design choice absolutely infuriating.

My only other complaint about the game is how the game handles enemy encounters. Enemies in the overworld have a wide and far range of vision, especially compared to previous Yakuza games. This makes it easy for them to spot you and difficult as well as annoying to avoid them. I also can’t tell you how many times I’ve defeated a squad of enemies on my way to a destination, only to watch another 5 or 6 dudes literally materialize right in front of me and I’m forced to fight them as well. At the very least, they completely vanish from the map if you successfully run away, but this was still annoying to deal with, especially in Sotenbori, where the streets are so narrow that it's almost impossible to avoid enemy encounters altogether.

Everything else about the game is absolutely top notch. The game has an abundance of different mechanics and systems that all feed back into one another and make for a title that feels like it's constantly rewarding you. This is primarily what makes the game so addicting. I couldn’t put this game down when I started it. I was thoroughly engaged and entertained from beginning to end. Fantastic game.

I'm not a Yakuza expert or whatever, but I feel this game did an amazing job transforming the series' usual formula and vibe into an even crazier, and slightly more lighthearted RPG adventure. I'd wish for it to be more whacky, honestly, because at times LaD feels way too much like Yakuza and not enough like whacky urban Dragon Quest, and the story ultimately doesn't quite manage to bring these two influences together. The ending was especially rough for it, with two consecutive boss-fights that were pretty boring both narratively and gameplay-wise, in large part because the Fantasy Adventure-stuff was weighed down by the Crime and Conspiracy stuff, which wasn't that cohesive or well-developed.

In terms of gameplay this was a blast. Perhaps a bit more complexity and strategy could've been injected, but stuff like your entire supporting cast technically traveling with you, thus allowing you to shuffle your party on the fly, was a nice touch that also fixed the ever-present issue with optional party members in JRPGs, where some of your characters would sit in the hub, not participating in the story. And overall, the bombastic presentation of Yakuza combat was pushed to the limit here, and I can't wait to see what crazy shit they're going to do with Joryu in the sequel.

P.S.
I honestly don't like the fact that Kiryu is returning in the sequel, it felt like we're turning a new leaf here, with this ever-growing cast of supporting characters and an idealistic shonen protag to bond with them. But now we're just back to Kiryu? And any party member after Nanba wouldn't be returning? Kinda sucks man.

The word "deconstruction" gets thrown around a lot these days. Formally defined as "questioning traditional assumptions about the ability of language to represent reality", it's often used to describe works that seek to criticize a specific genre. I disagree with this use of the word, but less because of the "what" and more because of the "why". I believe deconstruction should be used not only to criticise media, but to use that media's pieces to build something new.

An excellent example of this is one of my favorite films: Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's 2007 action-comedy masterpiece Hot Fuzz. It deconstructs both the contemporary American cop flick and the traditional detective story by flipping classic tropes on their heads. However, all of this is done not out of criticism, but as a way to both pay tribute to those genres and highlight their potential.

In that sense, yes, Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a deconstruction of the JRPG. Rather than a teenager killing God, you're a 40-year-old man trying to find a job. But the game is still very much a JRPG: It has all the classic mechanical trappings, numerous references to other games, including multiple explicit mentions of Dragon Quest (and people still compare it to Persona), and yes, it relies on the tried-and-true trope of the power of friendship.

That last one is a major criticism of JRPG's I've seen from certain online sources, and I feel Like a Dragon does everything in its power to embrace it. Everything from the combat to the substories to the summons to the incredibly complex management minigame revolves around helping others. There's a major mechanic that involves spending time with your friends and helping them work out their personal issues (alright, it's a little like Persona). A lot of the strongest attacks in the game involve working with your other party members.

But more than anything else, Yakuza: Like a Dragon embraces the theme of friendship through its story, especially through its protagonist, Ichiban Kasuga. He's someone who spent most of his life at "rock bottom", and gets dragged through the mud on a regular basis, often by powers much greater than him. But he gets out through a power even greater than that: the people he can count on. Everyone who supports him, from his party members to the most insignificant NPC, makes his journey just a little bit easier. Even in his darkest times, Ichiban can still bounce back to his infectious optimism thanks in no small part to the support he gives to and recieves from the people around him.

Of course, the game still isn't perfect. While it's an amazing first attempt at a JRPG, you can also tell it's a first attempt. Dungeons are a slog and sometimes combat is too (you didn't have to borrow everything from Dragon Quest, guys). Job systems are fun, but the lack of ability mixing combined with not being able to switch on the fly means there's very little reason to experiment. Also, there are some pretty nasty difficulty spikes near the very end. I get why they're there, but I would've appreciated a little warning.

Despite all my criticisms, Yakuza: Like a Dragon is still an excellent game with a wonderful story and the best deconstruction ever made of the JRPG. Suck it, Undertale.

When the new protagonist of the Yakuza series was revealed a few years ago, I was partly worried about his often humorous appearance and expressions signifying that the series was going to lose a lot of the more emotional elements and problems heavily grounded in reality to fully embrace the absurd. That was not the case. Ichiban is a fun and likable protagonist with a backstory that fits the series norm of having a protagonist that never had the culturally accepted family lifestyle which also causes him to fit in well with his new friends and companions. Even his Yakuza back tattoo of a dragonfish highlights the way his past is viewed, being seen as someone lower in society while also representing trying to take the reigns as series protagonist from Kiryu. He even comments when asked about his tattoo by saying he wanted a dragon but that represents the top of the food chain, and that one day it will shine brighter than a dragon. His look and usual antics make him seems like more of a doofus but he can often be smart and frequently uses his knowledge of criminal and Yakuza lifestyle and hierarchy to trick or intimidate the games antagonists. There is also a focus on bonding with your party and friends that often feels like an extension of the bar friends and conversations from Yakuza 6 with conversations at your favorite bar hangout spot, conversations when you go to certain parts of the city, and conversations that happen when you eat certain meals with your friends that all allow for a deeper understanding of each character. The usual high quality voice work, character expressions, and clothing detail the series is known for continues in this entry.

The change to an RPG battle system is both fun and fits well with the main character's desire to be a hero like in the old Dragon Quest games that he played, and that ends up supporting a plot often dealing with Ichiban becoming a source of support towards the abused and forgotten of society (homeless, sex workers, orphans, elderly, immigrants, poor, whistle blowers). With the main plotline also having the usual well written Yakuza fare of the dealings and backstabbing of Yakuza and police, rising politicians, a family at odds, surprising reveals, and a group of foreign gangs that put your party in the middle of a decades old counterfeiting operation that has been keeping the peace between three rival factions.

A well made assortment of side quests are here, featuring both the touching and funny situations that the series is known for. There is also a variety of activities to participate in throughout the cities such as karaoke (with all but one of your party members having their own song to sing), go kart racing, shogi, mahjong, cabaret clubs, Sega arcade cabinets, gambling, baseball, darts, golf, pachinko, movie watching, a bicycle riding can collection game, and a property management and shareholder meeting side quest. Three different areas are featured with the main one being Isezaki Ijincho and with both Kamurocho and Sotenbori being available to travel to at a later point in the story. The new area is well detailed and as enjoyable to explore as Kamurocho.

The new battle system is fun and often works well but the biggest issue is one that I didn't expect the game to have. A shift to an RPG like commands seemed like a change that would just get us even more of the great visceral/hilarious/bone crunching heat attacks of the main games (even more so with a lot of the more out there combat elements just being what Ichiban sees in his head), instead many of moves are just dull to look at until you start getting into a lot of the late game unlocks or co-op attacks. You also miss out on a lot of the environment based combat that has been around since Yakuza 6, apart from hitting enemies into cars that are still moving in the background, you won't be seeing friends help you out with special heat moves, knocking enemies into stores, throwing them over railings on trains, throwing them into microwaves, etc. Other problems involve awkward battle positioning when it comes to hitting multiple enemies, people getting stuck on things (though the game will eventually just teleport them to the correct position if it the environment is causing characters to get completely stuck), and using objects in the environment to attack doesn't always seem to work to the extent that half the time it doesn't even seem functional. The camera can also make it difficult to block attacks well (by hitting O/B before an attack lands) and can sometimes be so slow to react that you can be hit before you even seeing the attack coming.

Grinding job XP if you want to try out new things, the sudden loss of 4th party member unless you have done the business management side quest to replace him, quests to find and beat certain enemy types that the game sometimes just never seems to want to spawn, at times almost immediate enemy respawns, and enemies that have no chance of killing you but have ridiculous amounts of health can all make the game feel like an old JRPG in a bad way. The women in your party job role's and some of their character skills are much more sexualized and flirty than anything the men get and some of the enemy types you run into can be questionable (like how most any black guy you run into is giant muscleman, wearing giant chains, or someone who draws a gun on you and starts shooting it sideways). Plot wise the game ends with some of the most expressive and emotional acting in the series, rivaling Yakuza 0's best moments, though also hurt quite a bit by having your only real attachment to the moments being what Ichiban is personally feeling. This is due to one of the main antagonists that you watch him pour his heart out to being easily one of the most repugnant people in the entire series, to the point that I can easily see people (especially people from the kind of backgrounds that you have been supporting through the game) liking Ichiban less for his actions at the end of the game.

There is a decent number of classes with every character tending to fit two or three of them well, but all job skills and animations are the same for each character. While you can learn and keep two skills in every class that can then be used in a different job those two carry over skills are the same for every character, taking a bit of characterization out of it (though each character does have different color costume options). Each party member does have their own unique class (Ichiban has two) to give them a few unique options, though three of them basically start as their most useful one. It is also unfortunate that two of the classes are locked behind paid DLC.

Like A Dragon succeeds at not just being one of the best Yakuza games but at creating a new protagonist that isn't just a great character but who is every bit as strong as Kiryu and reworks the series into a completely different combat and party focused style that, for the most part, works well while being fun to play but also further surrounds you with the friends, allies, and social issues that have always been at the heart of the series. It sounds like Ichiban is planned to head future games and that is a great choice. If the series continues with the RPG like battle system I think a lot of the issues would be fairly easy to fix and what we have here was a good start to a new gameplay style.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1343379463740878848

For all the survival horror that I've dabbled with over the past few years, this is the title that made me the most cognizant of the "survival" aspect. It’s this elaborate balancing act of juggling every limited resource at your disposal: ammo for bosses and enemies, kerosene to burn necessary corpses after downing zombies to secure routes, health items as fail safes, ink ribbons to save when deemed necessary, and most importantly, inventory space to minimize backtracking with the bare minimum (knowing what you’re likely to use up as you progress so you have enough room to forage). What’s key to all of this is that it’s often worthwhile not downing zombies at all to not only conserve ammo, but also prevent the possibility of a more dangerous Crimson Head when kerosene is not only limited but requires further planning for refueling and additional inventory slots (lighter + flask). It’s punishing, but in the best way possible; damage and death become instruments of observation to properly plan out backtracking and understanding exactly what goes where. Perhaps my favorite example of this in action was abusing the various doors in a room connecting the shed corridor with a safe room; by quickly going in and out of the entrances, I could not only reset a Hunter’s awareness and spawn, but also place myself in a position where I could immediately run at the Hunter to proc an attack and slip past every time. It certainly helps, regardless, that there’s plenty of leeway for careful experimentation, thanks to all of the scattered health items about the mansion (granted, often requiring careful planning to optimize grounded herbs in rooms and keeping enough inventory space open for trips). It’s also fairly firm at setting its boundaries by telegraphing enemy placement far in advance with rattling doors/windows to signify enemy shifts, background moaning when a zombie is present in the room, and even environmental noises like crunching fallen glass to make up for the lack of vision with fixed camera angles.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the horror has been neglected. If anything, I found this game far more unsettling beyond sudden surprises. It’s not so much the fear of the unexpected, but rather, the lingering fear of waiting for the other shoe to drop while you’re expecting the unexpected. They're scripted events, sure, but they're well disguised thanks to every room often acting as its own isolated microcosm without the presence of the protagonist (not to mention that it's pretty easy to get caught up in the middle of things and forget about each individual room, which makes it all the more viscerally shocking) and there's still a feeling of player control with careful planning and routing. This fits perfectly alongside its core philosophy of risk versus reward, the existential dread of having to backtrack through several zombie infested corridors when you realize you forgot an inventory key and having to constantly and deliberately throw yourself into tight situations just to save another trip across the map. It’s what makes this such an ideal speedrunning game: not necessarily because of satisfying movement or combat, but because Resident Evil is really a game about time management. Every second wasted tromping through another passageway is time that could contribute to a zombie reviving as a Crimson Head or another second spent replaying if you’re not willing to use that extra ink ribbon. The primal fear arising from guaranteed safety as a fleeting resource lends perfectly to the need for optimization; in that sense, pressuring players into constantly checking the map to avoid confrontations and getting lost goes hand in hand with spending as little time as possible, for nothing is more terrifying than having to rewind the simulations in your head for another go.

I can’t help but feel that every detail of this game was thought down to the bone, even the original tank control scheme. That’s right, I’m actually defending tank controls for once in my life… how the turns have tabled. Dodging enemies can seem tougher, but most are conveniently placed near corners and more open areas to give you the room necessary to dodge with a backstep/quick burst to the side if you’re willing to wait and bait committal attacks. More importantly, using tank controls lets you maintain your direction and momentum while running through different camera angles of a room. With alternate controls, you most likely have to hold down the joystick to maintain velocity and upon a new camera angle, will have to quickly retap to keep the intended direction with each new angle. This becomes paramount in tighter chase sequences, where even slight moments of stagnation can lead to damage/death, as well as one timed puzzle where I had to press a button and then quickly run through several fixed angles to get into position to push a statue. In addition, I found it rather difficult to reliably walk (as opposed to running full-time) with alternate controls over tank controls, which can absolutely backfire during an end-game sequence where running for a prolonged period can trigger an explosion during nitro delivery. Therefore, the circumstances created by the environment not only are doable with tank controls, but in fact necessitate the usage of such controls.

Everything just comes together as this tightly designed package. Puzzles have fairly evident tells and can be figured out with careful observation of the surroundings while facilitating the inventory scramble that plays so heavily to the game’s survival elements. The lore never feels overbearing or excessive, and does a great job weaving in hints for crafting approaches and figuring out exactly what has to be accomplished. There’s never an explicit timer on screen outside of the final ending segment, yet the game is great at creating circumstances where you’re forced to make decisions on the fly from environmental stressors and considering the mansion not just on a per room basis, but as a sum of its parts. I genuinely don’t think I have any gripes; it was more than happy to beat me down, but understanding its parameters to scale up against its challenges was an incredibly fulfilling experience. I’d damn well say that REmake is the most focused and cohesive survival horror experience I’ve ever played. Not just a perfect remake, but perhaps a practically perfect game.

Fallen Order has you taking the role of a former Jedi Padwan coming out of hiding from the Empire to follow the trail of a fallen Jedi Master looking to track down a holocron with information that could revive the Jedi order. Gameplay mostly takes inspiration from Dark Souls style action games and light metroidvanias.

Your passive force power of sensing memories is a nice way to get history and cultural information, combined with your droid scans to tell you about tech or creatures. Fascism of Empire somewhat explored with disinterest in casualties, evictions/deportations, slaves, worker exploitation, stealing cultural artifacts. It's pretty, all the AAA games are pretty, they are always pretty now, we've even made Gears of War pretty. It's typically well acted, even if you do have three pretty boring cliches as main characters. Your hair blows a lot in the wind and when fighting, he knows this, and sometimes fixes it after a fight or action. Planets and locations are varied enough or see enough change as you go through and climbing is never an overly lengthy undertaking making traversing the planets as you go through them the first time mostly enjoyable.

The main character is a somewhat broody boring 20 something human white guy with a blue lightsaber that is more personable after he finds his droid buddy, then he is more broody after he is lied to, then gets over that and is friendlier again. His growth as a character is rushed through. Going from a life of hiding and self doubt, for idiotic reasons, to pretty much ready to take on the Empire all by himself once he meets his droid friend. He goes beyond being the most generic video game protagonist you can make, to also being the most generic Star Wars protagonist you can make. The droid beeps, he is small, he sometimes does amusing things, saves you with his droid tech abilities, you get the feeling he can be a bit of a smart ass, so he's a generic small Star Wars droid that teams up with a Jedi basically, which by default makes him more easy to like than the others. Former Jedi character who is taking you on your journey was a Jedi but then cut herself off from the force to not be bad Jedi, cause the evil darkness and this ain't KOTOR 2, and she now waits in the ship for you to do everything. Short four armed alien character that is there to be a cowardly Han Solo tells me that he used to only care about himself before running into the rest of us changed him, I think we had only spoken about four times before that event where we exchanged no dialogue of any importance. I suppose we've become like a family through our long trips back and forth from planets over and over again, shame I can't see any of that actual development or moments of down time, going back to character development seeming rushed. Any developments that could have lead to interesting content from the supporting cast or antagonists were pushed to the side by the bland protagonist taking center focus even in moments that should have belonged more or entirely to others. He also told the droid to prevent the sexy enemy Jedi with a voice I find soothing from hacking into his comm line to make threatening comments, cementing my dislike of him.

Character development aside the actual plot is that you are all idiots on a quest to do something that is obviously monumentally stupid and driven by their own varied degrees of self loathing. In a galaxy with an order dedicated to hunting Jedi and able to almost immediately be where they are if they feel any use of the force, you all think it's a great idea to gather a hidden nonsensical list of force sensitive children to force them all together under your training to overthrow the Empire. This seems like the worst possible and most immoral thing you could do, which does line up with the Jedi I suppose. An interview said they didn't want to make the main character an alien or woman because they wanted him to be relatable and some of the current movies already have women making up about 1/3 or a 1/4 of the main characters, so naturally the Nightsister who joins you at the end is the only likable one that tells you that your objective seems like a terrible idea and the only one I would ever want to see again in another Star Wars property. I wouldn't think her personality or some of the things she says make sense for her backstory and being a Nightsister, and her character is further damaged by what seems like a sudden crush on your character, but she is adorable and not an idiot so I'll take what I can get.

She asks you basic questions, that I've been thinking about the whole time, that no one else really has an answer to. Things like, "How will you protect the children?" "Do you know how to train people?" "Would the Empire know about this hidden list of force sensitive children if you didn't start looking for it in the first place?" "So you're going to force children to fight a war for you with the alternative being to be killed when discovered?" Questions that really highlight the problems the prequels caused, in the wider setting outside of any messages Lucas was trying to convey, where the Jedi are incompetent, weak willed, manipulative, basically evil child abducting weirdos and that any story about rebuilding the order is going to be as asinine and unrelatable as games like Homefront or movies like The Postman wanting to bring back America just as corrupt, unequal, and nuclear weapon happy as it was before. Let's tell all the children about being peaceful and how using your powers to kill things will turn you into the dark evilness and then let's get to killing. It's really odd that she took your word for it that the Jedi were peacekeepers and that you weren't the reason all her people were killed, because, you're clearly a bad person hiding behind your creepy religious order's bullshit hypocritical teachings to justify forced conscription and a lot of killing of an organization that she knows nothing about. Also, you kind of threatened to kill her for no real reason while trespassing in her home.

The game is set up somewhat like a metroidvania, while clearly having no real desire to be one. The only thing you will tend to find in out of the way areas is light lore and mostly ugly cosmetic items you will have no use for. This is not anywhere near reason enough to have you traveling back and forth between planets and running back and forth to your ship because they didn't allow for fast travel. This seems like something you would do to say that your, already perfectly acceptably lengthy game, is even longer to appeal to people not wanting to buy single player only games at full price. In general you will see and find nothing of value from backtracking, exploration tends to only be new and interesting as you are progressing through new areas. In wanting to be like Dark Souls they borrowed momentary loss of XP earned after your last checkpoint on death until you do damage to the enemy that killed you, I haven't seen this system so pointlessly and ineffectually implemented since Hollow Knight. Just like that game, this never caused me to lose me XP, and if it did it would have been nothing more than a strangely implemented annoyance you could easily grind to get back. Obvious shortcuts can see you falling through platforms to be told you fell off a cliff, even though the map is loaded and those are platforms you can and will stand on after taking the longer way to them. So don't think that you can use the map in obvious ways or make use of any sensible or tricky platforming skills to make travel quicker.

I saw a lot of people saying to play this on the harder difficulties and other people saying to play it on story mode. I played it on hard, I should have put it on story mode. It's still very easy on hard, it's just boring as you awkwardly kill your enemies after a ridiculous number of hits. Fighting human opponents is passable, probably at its best when you are blocking a lot of enemy blaster fire (though this takes no skill so it's more that it's just visually amusing). Combat in general is at its best when you find openings during or after enemy attacks to get a blow in when they can't block, even on hard some human enemies do die in one or two hits. When you have to wale on enemies to break their guard to get one blow in before their meter fully recharges it's monotonous. The most effective move is to do running (an action Cal doesn't always respond to well) attacks at enemies, it does high damage, has good range, might not be blocked, does decent guard damage if it is blocked, and requires no force to use. You want to take down the fascist empire, deflect blaster shots while running along walls and sliding down steep slopes, toss storm troopers off cliffs, and get into duels with enemies trained to kill you? Well, too bad, the game is unfortunately obsessed with you fighting bugs and small and large animals and doesn't have much in the way of different enemies. Just what you've always wanted to do with a lightsaber, just like how you want to fight robots as Wolverine.

Your lightsaber handles more like a club as you keep smacking these often large creatures 10-15 times to kill them, sometimes before it plays an animation out where you cut off a body part of your enemy. You learn very few combat related skills over the course of the game so the three hit combo, dodge, and roll you start with is pretty much how you will handle all of your battles. You get a double sided lightsaber that is faster and does less damage, I don't really know why you would use it. One of the very few combat moves you can unlock is the ability to do a kick after dodging. A fairly slow kick that makes no sense to do ever but it ends up being really funny because there are so few enemy types and a lot of them are large creations or large droids.

The game has abysmal lock on and target prioritization combined with an awkward camera when anything is above you. It will refuse to lock onto enemies that are high, low, or more than 10 feet away from you, change lock-ons in odd ways, and if you aren't locked on you will often see your force powers automatically targeted at the worst possible enemy choice the game could have made. Eventually they thought it was a good idea to throw three or four of these larger creatures together to fight you, where they will of course conceal your moves as they get in each others way and clip through each other to hit you, you used to run into creatures fighting and damaging each other but now that they all want you dead the laws of physics just don't apply anymore. Luckily in what would be the most boring of these encounters they are only there to guard ugly cosmetics you have no reason to want, so you can usually just jump on a little ledge and ignore them.

You get a small assortment of force powers slow, push, pull, saber throw, and double jump. In combat they are of varied use depending on what you are fighting, some enemies are weak to certain powers while performing certain actions. You would think slowing time would be extremely useful except it is costly to use, stops as soon as you hit an enemy, and for some reason doesn't slow down their ability to turn and reorient themselves while under its effect. Sometimes it just doesn't seem to work, ignore incoming blaster shots (not that using your force to slow those is a practical use of your meter, problem with it being charged by kills is don't waste it on doing cool things) and sometimes it would slow a group of enemies and sometimes it would slow some targets but not all of the ones in the area it should effect. If it created something like an bubble in an arch that effected things that moved into that would have made it much more useful and a good choice of stopping gunshots (could even more easily throw in types of shots you can't block like the charged shots or the disruptor sniper rifles in the Jedi Knight games). The most use you are going to have for that power is to slow down fans you need to climb through or rotating machinery that you need to stand on as a bridge. Your force bar also doesn't recharge, it raises when you kill things, probably the strangest feature in a game where you are a Jedi (but you can just use your powers constantly to interact with navigation or puzzle elements). Your force powers are slow and weak to fit the slow and awkward combat and some of the very few combat abilities you get like swing overhead and running and slashing at an enemy require force to use. I didn't know slowly raising my arms above my head and bringing them down made me a Jedi. I imagine the problem these games have with limited powers after games like Jedi Knight come back to the limited number of buttons on a console controller where every power needs its own button dedicated to it or button combination.

The puzzle are not good and you are, obviously, prevented from using your lightsaber and force powers in logical ways that would get you through them. I might have glitched my way through two of them, one from them I think they put button to close to me on the other side of a wall and let me push it through a crack in the wall (you should just be able to do this with the force but the lack of an animation and a 10 second freeze made me think it didn't want me to do what I did) and one from outsmarting the game by doing an obvious thing it tried to stop me from doing by awkwardly spawning your droid in different places just before reaching the spot you need to get to. Puzzles might have you throwing fire into vines to burn them away so you can get to the climbable vines that look less climbable than what you just burned, or rolling large balls with force push and air currents onto platforms that they will give power to (how else would you design your mystical temples).

The game also feels fairly rushed with a lot of animation issues, characters seem to miss their cues in scripted events (in one case leading to one of the most unintentionally hilarious scenes I've ever seen from a glitch), and you can fall through or get stuck in a lot of objects.

Fallen Order has locations that can be enjoyable to travel through but combat that can't come close to the better games in the genre and rushed plot and character development. You are not going to be using the force in either powerful or interesting ways, it clearly does not want to be a metroidvania while trying to be one, and the most interesting thing you will find in the entire second half of the game is some gloves that make you climb faster. It is at least nice that it doesn't rely on generic Star Wars iconography or character throughout its run-time (until Vader shows up leading to some ridiculous moments but they probably had to throw that in the advertising for sales).

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1198148422164856832

The Witcher 3 is, now that I've played it, officially a part of the Holy Trinity of Western RPG's with Red Dead Redemption 2 and Mass Effect 3 due to its tremendous character writing, unparalleled world building and lore, and overall style. Seriously, there is not one thing about this game that after completion, I felt it needed.

Characters in the Witcher, be it in the games, show, or books, are the definitive strongsuit and most important aspect as set in place by Andrzej Sapkowski way back in the 90's when first creating the story of Geralt that would eventually sweep the world by storm. Everybody in the series matters, nobody is intrinsically good, nobody is faultless. Geralt of Rivia, who is probably the greatest protagonist in video game history is a man of imperfection, a mutated shell of a human whose history is marred with bloodshed and tragedy. Geralt never looks back though, he is a pragmatist with a heart. I've never encountered a character in a series who is as multi-faceted and believable as Geralt. He bows to nobody and adheres to his own code, owes no alleigances to men of state or people of power, loves those who he wants to love, and is confident in his staggering ability in combat. One beautiful aspect of the series is how often you split between fighting and conversation, as the history of the continent and people within are decided by Geralt's words, which he carefully must pick and cater to those he speaks with. He is a sly and cunning man, and always cognizant of the intentions of those around him, he is no fool. He knows his love for Ciri, Yennefer, and Vesimir can lead him astray, but his abilties make up for it.

The protagonist Geralt takes center stage as the player character and decision maker within the story, but every single character within the world crafts what is the greatest low-fantasy adventure and most well fleshed out world in video game history. Secondary characters like Yennefer, Triss, Vesimir, Ciri, Dandelion, Zoltan, Keira, Djikstra, Ehmyr, and many more add an invaluable amount to not only the story, but the passion behind the player's actions. Each character has their own unique motives, their own special relationship to Geralt and the others around, their own piece that fits together for the final puzzle. You spend hours seperately with each of these characters, disputing romance, debating politics, bargaining, and laughing in good faith. The depth that The Witcher 3 goes in to with your supporting cast, without ever overstaying its welcome is only paralleled with one game, Red Dead Redemption 2. I only want to spend MORE hours with the Witchers of Kaer Morhan, with the two beautiful Sorceresses in Triss and Yennefer learning about their world and complicated relationships with Geralt, with the beautiful and evasive Cirilla, and countless others. Few games are like the Witcher 3 and have you smiling when you reunite with characters from previous games or books, when I met with Roche for the first time I jumped with joy, same as with the lovable duo of Dandelion and Zoltan. I can not drive the point home enough, these side characters are some of the most fleshed out peers and comrades of any video game ever. Even the more minor characters, involved in singular quest chains like the Bloody Baron, Cerys, or [REDACTED DUE TO SPOILERS] leave a mark that you shant forget, as their memories and experiences add an extreme amount to the overall journey.

Now, this is clearly evident to anybody who has seen the show or read any of the books, but aside from the characters, the thing that lays the groundwork for the Witcher's success as a game franchise is the beautiful worldbuilding by Andrzej Sapkowski. EVERYTHING from the Eastern-European influenced folklore to the medieval European architecture and setting is meticulously laid out with extreme thought and care. The cities withing the Witcher 3 feel like real Medieval cities reflecting of their culture. The royal castle of Vizima feels like that befitting of a grand emperor, the free city of Novigrad is one of the most impressive and fleshed out cities in any video game in the history of the medium, and the multiple communities within Skellige are a thing of Scandinavian beauty. The towns and world were so beautiful to traverse, many a moment was spent stopping and staring at the colorful countrysides. Disclaimer, I did play this game with a 4K texture pack enabled to make the pretty things more pretty. But man, I could speak for days about how REAL this felt as a fantasy setting. There is a perfect balance of power within the universe of the Witcher, and that is evident in its third entry. Sorceresses are extremely powerful, yet their volatility is too high for excessive power usage. The Wild Hunt are an impressively scary force, however they are kept in check by certain abilities that will be explained. Geralt and the Witchers themself are the strongest of human warriors, however they are the last of a dying breed. The power in the Witcher series is kept in check by wit and chess-like geopolitics, as it would be in an actual medieval setting. Not by a superhero or undefeatable protagonist. The Witcher is a carefuilly crafted universe of lore that has been in motion for nearly thirty years, culminating with the effort that it took to get to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Each narrative empowering, passionate, and given an incredible amount of thought.

The music of the Witcher 3 is something of note as well, and those who have played this game can easily find a common ground in this aspect, whether they liked the other aspects or not. These songs are long and drawn out, borrowing aspects from Medieval instruments and fantasy choruses and sounds. Each song, whether its for a specific zone or character, couples with the mood and settings perfectly without any shadow of a doubt. I paused when I was riding the trusty steed Roach through the winding hills of Skelige as the beautiful soundtrack played and looked at the open ocean. I was in awe, completely lost in the world. I felt like Geralt, wind howling and hitting my face on a horse looking over a familiar crag. It's moments that games like this and RDR2 nail that have the player completely divulged into the immersive nature that they put forth.

The only knocks I can give the Witcher 3 is the combat being far less than stellar in difficult and rigidity, and the ham-fisted relationship with Yennefer that is more of a qualm I have with the series as a whole. The former is excusable with the addition of the points I made above, however the latter irked me to a fairly large degree. I don't like Yennefer, full stop, which is interesting because she is clearly Geralt's canon love interest if you know anything about the series or have played even a few minutes of this game. The topic of whether I like her or not is strictly an opinion of subjective nature and each player is left to their own vices in that regard, however my qualm for this post is moreso how the game deals with that if you pick Triss as your romantic option. The game does a mostly great job in dealing with this, even hiding nuggets of voice lines in conversation about the awkwardness of having Yennefer around when you're romantically involved with the sorceress you spent time with in the last few games. It does get a little awkward sometimes when there are plot elements that pair you with Yennefer and imply that she is your betrothed, but as this review is a five star review, that is clearly not enough to detract any major points away from the game.

I had not played the Witcher 3 until now because I was not a fan of the low-fantasy medieval setting. Once I played the Witcher 2, I became invested and watched the show, read some books, and became completely enthralled in the world of Geralt. With the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt you have a tremendously crafted narrative, flawlessly written memorable and diverse characters, a lively fleshed out world with a cavernous lore and history, and a magnificent soundtrack that thrusts immersion into the the player.

I strongly recommend The Witcher 3 to those who are looking for a narrative video game journey that they will not forget.

“You don't need mutations to strip men of their humanity. I've seen plenty of examples.”

I’ve never played a Witcher game before, nor have I journeyed into the world of the novels. Knowing nothing about the world, I was expecting a high fantasy universe of thrilling swordplay, bombastic wizards, and heroes triumphing over evil. The Witcher 3 did indeed have all of those things, but honestly, those were the low-points in my journey as Geralt of Rivia. The meat of the game lies in the “ordinary” NPCs – relationships between peasants and lordship, husbands and wives, fear and shame, and the reconciliation between justice and prejudice. The game deftly weaves these stories in as side-quests that offer more moral conundrum that the standard RPG fetch-this-item and kill-this-monster quests. Which is a little ironic, since the point of being a Witcher is to kill monsters, however CDPR does a fantastic job of making each quest fairly unique – never missing an opportunity for world-building in the process.

I will admit that I was not hooked during the tutorial area of White Orchard, but once I got a greater peek at how the politics, both between nations and neighbors, worked, my interest was officially piqued. The first true area available in the game is Velen, the most beautiful swamp and bog-ridden video game land I have ever seen. The landscape perfectly represents its ruler(s) and people as well – brimming with dingy life, dirty and twisted. It sets up perfectly for the rest of the world. The vistas and areas do become more visually pleasing, but corruption still lurks under the surface. I honestly think Velen is where the game works best, as you’re still trying to figure everything out in the main quest, but you are forced to run Witcher Contracts as well. You are dead broke, trying to understand it all like everyone else. The only difference is that Geralt is a Witcher with his swords.

Novigrad is also a triumph as one of the best medieval cities I have ever seen in a game. The streets really felt alive, and the inclusion of so many different areas like Hierarch Square, the docks, and Far Corners really helps immerse you in this town. The map, twisting and turning on itself through the buildings, also brings Novigrad to life in a way that many RPGs fail to with their miniscule cities.

The main quest, unfortunately, does not live up to the rest of the game. I am sure that a good portion of my distaste is because Witcher 3 is a sequel of a sequel of the books, but everything became much more esoteric the further along I progressed. Not much is offered in way of explanation of the Wild Hunt, and everything becomes over-the-top magic oriented. There are also some pacing issues which arise from the game giving the player false-expectations. Suffice to say, I was a little burnt out after finally finishing the seemingly marathon sprint of the game’s last act.

Part of this burn-out was also a result of the combat and leveling systems. The strength of the Witcher 3 is its stories and characters, and the gameplay/combat is simply a means to experience these events. So when the stories suffer, the other flaws begin to show. Geralt’s leveling system could use a focus on gaining new abilities rather than the generic “gain X damage,” “make X ability more powerful,” and etc. Give me a different way to approach an enemy; maybe a leaping attack, or a disarm move, or even some combos to pull off between the heavy and light attacks. Help me chain the signs and attacks together in some meaningful way. There are different attacks to unlock in the combat tree, but they don’t come until very late.

In the same way, the enemies and world also become static after a while. Higher level enemies are the same as their ordinary counterparts, just with more health. They need different attacks or tactics that differ from dodge-attack. Some of the best enemies in the game are the Rotfiends that require you to back away when you see they are preparing to explode, or the wraiths that require you to use a sign to even deal decent damage to them. They represent a mix-up from the standard, vanilla combat that makes the encounters feel fresh and exciting. Even the world traversal needs more work – more ways to approach an objective other than following a road. Let me climb, let me jump onto more things; let me fall further than 3 feet without dying instantly. Why make a giant world and then not let me play with different ways of traversing it?

These things converge into the main flaw of the game’s design for me – it’s stuck between an RPG and an Action/Adventure game, indecisive as to which way to lean. The combat is a low-light in the experience, and the RPG elements aren’t vast enough to meaningfully change the way the world is experienced. The player is Geralt, and they will always be Geralt. There are different builds within the leveling system through prioritizing signs, combat, or potions, but at the end of the day, you’re still going to be fighting things with your two swords. The ability to unlock companions to travel with would be a wonderful way to deepen the interaction with the world and allow you to indirectly experience different types of combat while still staying true to Geralt.

Overall, the Witcher 3 is with a deep and intricately crafted world of interesting stories, characters, and politics. Sure, the gameplay itself certainly has flaws, but the journey and experience outweighs those issues. The folktale-esque lore of the Witcher universe stands on its own as some of the best in the fantasy RPG genre.