Forgive me, for I am about to go off. I'll preamble with just enough text to imagine most of my review is pushed below the "read more" link because addressing this game indirectly seems at best obtuse, at worst negligent. For what it's worth, I'm not intending to address much in the way of the racial, sexual or political mud this game doltishly trudges through, both because better writers than I have already done it and their life experiences carry more weight in at least the former two categories than mine does. I had a good time with this game, all told. I think I'm at the hem of the veil now, yeah? Let's get on with it.

GAME OF THRONES

It feels appropriate to start here because, for better or worse, this was such a focal point of the marketing. And it makes sense! So much of this game's framework is wrapped in a shameless homage to that franchise, and without acknowledging that up front later narrative critiques can be more easily dismissed as "genre standard".

The first...dozen or so hours concern the player assuming the role of an outcast son of a formerly noble house. While the writers diligently attempt to dance around the rest of this, beginning with the main character being a true blood heir rather than a bastard, the following also occurs:

Said woebegone son possesses a purpose beyond understanding, his best friend prior to exile endures unthinkable mental and physical torture, his realm faces an unflinching (and iron-obsessed) threat from the far northwest and an even greater, magical (even...zombie-like) threat from the far north, his disinterest in royal machinations is only matched by the misguided territorial ambitions of those with a throne, his textual and literal guide through all this is possibly the most handsome and clued in wingman ever...yada yada, he reaches the royal capital and everyone dies thanks to a dragon.

It's not that George R.R. Martin has sole claim to any of this that I point it out, rather that this is easily the best part of the game in spite of constantly confronting the player with its influences. More importantly, as I'll get to later, it doesn't seem to understand how aggressively mediocre these hat-tips are.

THE WITCHER (PART 1)

While the franchise titling this (and two additional) paragraphs deserves plenty of retroactive critique, it always feels important to recognize how monumental its third entry was at the time. The following decade has whittled away at many of its surprises, but for now let's focus on this: The Witcher knew it was rated M for mature, knew it was inspired by an era of unquestioned (white) male superiority and owned those things.

It's easy to imagine all the ways that could have gone wrong, and would have, if not for two key decisions: firstly, the world building is astonishingly consistent in its point of view. As the player is introduced to anything, be it man, woman or beast, the game draws a clear line from each character to the culture they come from. In other words, while the world of The Witcher is starkly patriarchal and womanizing, the women of that world always bring a perspective to it.

They are people, and they scheme when they feel it suits them. And more importantly to the hornier side of the internet, they fuck when the opportunity presents itself.

GOD OF WAR

So much hay was made about the involvement of Ryota Suzuki's history designing combat for the last three Devil May Cry games (with little mention of Dragon's Dogma or Monster Hunter) that little attention was paid to the handful of times Hiroshi Takai, himself overlooked in favor or Naoki Yoshida's production credit, divulged a fondness for both the 2018 reimagining of the God of War franchise as well as the iconic trilogy that preceded it.

Even without that knowledge, the franchise is essential to understanding FFXVI. In a very direct way, this game is structured as though the 2018 game were both gospel and impossible. It consists entirely of deceptively wide open areas that funnel the player into a series of funnels, the end result of which is inevitably the biggest bad dude. The game even insists on implying the weight of Clive's journey via doors that require both a button press and a hold; bizarrely, a significant number of these interactions are separated by a matter of seconds.

But more importantly, and most significantly, despite droopily mimicking God of War 2018's structure, Final Fantasy XVI often threatens to subsume all of entertainment when its immediately iconic Eikon battles begin. It bats leadoff with an extremely incoherent and profoundly boring battle between Ifrit and Phoenix, but from there this game seems to be extremely disappointed by the God of War franchise's pivot from scale to intimacy. The most cultured people I know also point to the cult classic Asura's Wrath for comparison, and they might be right, but as somebody who has both loved the latest God of War entries while noting the relative normalcy of plenty of its major encounters, every increasingly insane encounter from Geruda through Ultima had me pondering why exactly Kratos had to fight dragons that behaved like SNES-era Contra bosses.

THE WITCHER (PART 2)

This segment's alternate title could be Final Fantasy XIV. I freely admit that I'm not an MMO player, but I did get into the PS2 beta for Final Fantasy XI and listen to enough podcasts / read enough forum banter / know enough super cool folks that I get the gist of the format. I happily accept that the format works, particularly in a social context, but probably more importantly when there's a carrot at the end of the stick.

Just as this game fumbles the way many of its secondary characters perceive the world, man or woman, it extravagantly fails to incentivize its side quests. On the delicate side of things, that damn game I'll make three headers out of is far from immune from thematic repetition, let alone tropes. By their very nature, side quests struggle to interact with the primary adventure, so it's expected that most are a means to an end. These side quests are almost always designed as if the end goal were to thrust the player's time into a black hole.

To that end, there's a character who's primary purpose is to dispense rewards for completing tasks in the game (some would accuse many of this game's side quests of spurning the player, but matter of factly it's just withholding) and to the diseased gamer brain, it feels nice to visit her whenever a yellow dot gets attached to her icon. Which only makes it more depressing when one of the last rewards of her impressively extensive offerings is some bauble that reduces the cooldown of some ability by, no joke, 0.2 seconds.

LOL.

Tell me a tale twice as long as this review about all the useless trinkets and buffs you've encountered in games - Geralt knows many of them intimately - and I doubt you'll conjure something as dumb as most of the accessories in this game.

FINAL FANTASY (PART 1)

There's a specifically exhausting conversation surrounding this game that I don't care much about. So I'll say it here: Final Fantasy isn't anything more than text on a box, no matter how much I agree that it's easier to draw a direct connection from the first to the tenth entry in the franchise to anything since. The most important utility of those two words is selling video games, and they tend to succeed.

That being said, I played a lot of Yakuza 7 alongside this game and it smeared a highlighter all over something that really sucks about this game: the party and gear mean absolutely nothing. I'm a total sucker, so it was impossible not to feel a ripple of satisfaction whenever my damage went up 2 points. Initially, it was even more exciting to find items that meant an attack I loved would hit harder. Being a game that can be played upwards of 50 hours, however, it takes a certain level of clever design to separate players from the interactions they trust.

In this respect, Final Fantasy XVI continuously drops the ball in a fascinating way. Successive skills become increasingly passive, offer benefits to the player that are consistently confusing, and worst of all struggle to obviate their correlation between the apparent power of their source. Each new skill tree Clive gains access to does significantly change the flow of combat, but they don't seem to have any remarkable impact on the flow of gameplay beyond aesthetics. In fact, because the later abilities are so abstracted by time - whether charge meters or mere patience - this becomes the rare Final Fantasy where gear upgrades inspire near zero curiosity while late game specials paradoxically behave like more of a burdensome lark than an expansion of the game's possibilities.

Likewise, you'll find yourself joined from an impressive array of sidekicks. You'll have your fellow Eikon-attuned buddies, beaten down fellow Bearers struggling to make the most of their magical attunements and even run of the mill soldiers devoted to your cause. If it sounds like that should probably matter, it's certainly disappointing that it in no way does.

Because there are no elemental weaknesses, elemental proficiencies mean nothing. Because Clive operates in this world almost entirely without equal (including most bosses) the idea of a "party" is rendered essentially invisible anyway. As his skills progress, the game becomes a cornucopia of extremely satisfying (even impressive) visual effects, but the shadow effect of his (and his enemies') attacks littering the screen with particle splendor is that companions are often invisible from cutscene to cutscene.

Perhaps weirdest of all, there's no point going into the astronomical nothing that is the gear progression other than how abjectly weird its pointlessness is. Even still, it feels important to point out that this bit of the game reaches its apex very, very late in the game. If you choose to see Blackthorne the blacksmith's story through to the end, you'll be rewarded with a one-of-a-kind sword called Ragnarok with an appropriately endgame-like description that its makers can barely believe they forged.

Within an hour, you'll have a better sword. Okay?

FINAL FANTASY (PART 2)

If I haven't said it already, I disagree that the Final Fantasy franchise is obligated to behave one way or another. Perhaps this is because I completely ignored the XIII series as well as XV, but I'm comfortable hand-waving many of the mechanical similarities providing genealogy from roughly Final Fantasy IV through Final Fantasy X in order to recognize each game in that sequence offered a radically different take on itself.

That being said, whatever alterations were made to the gameplay always felt divorced from the franchise's true core value: variety. Final Fantasy IV forced the player to lose party members they depended on. Final Fantasy V let players design their party however they saw fit. Final Fantasy VI centered itself around era-defining cinematics and perhaps the platonic ideal of a video game antagonist. The seventh game balanced intense conversations about mental health against gambling and tower defense.

The eighth, an incredible (and potentially, sadly destructible) card combat game against a smorgasbord of polarizing, fascinating (it's my favorite of the bunch) design decisions. Final Fantasy IX panicked in its wake and delivered an impressively weird distillation of why the franchise has proven so durable. FFX then behaved as a sort of dark room negative of that impulse, taking every opportunity it could to honor the franchise's history while shoving all of its tropes into unrecognizable disguises.

I did play and greatly enjoy Final Fantasy XI and XII in their time, of course. I don't mention the former because it has nothing to do with this discussion other than its obvious incompatibility, while I find the latter game to be something I'm quite nostalgic for but felt so dramatically let down by its most recent remaster that I honestly can't put the screws to how I feel about it anymore.

In any case, I say all that to explain how misguided I think it is to view the Final Fantasy franchise as an institution that demands traditions be upheld. Except...

THE LAST OF US (PART 1 & 2)

I love giving due to voice acting and dialogue writing. I wrote album reviews from roughly 2009 through 2015, but even more importantly I spent plenty of my early teens writing (extremely bad) original science fiction for school assignments and Resident Evil 2 fan fiction on the franchise's IGN message board. While I understand the impulse, at my core I find the idea of activating subtitles, thumbing through dialogue and especially skipping cutscenes anathema to the joy of video games. Sure, at this hobby's core gameplay is, essentially, everything, and yet I can't help but care most about all the things that bookend and explain my button presses.

From this perspective, Final Fantasy XVI fails over and over. As I said a lifetime ago, no matter how earnestly the game attempts to reframe its inspirations within the context of Valisthea the game never succeeds. I'll grant that the challenge inherent in assimilating at least three successfully subversive stories into your own new thing seems terrifying - that is, unless you just fire variations of "fuck" off with consistently comical timing and rapidly shed that complex web of inspirational guidelines for an adaptation of Dragon Ball Z's basic structure.

Line by line, performance to performance, I'd catch myself wondering why this was one of a handful of games I'd activated subtitles solely so I could pop a wheelie through nearly every NPC conversation. Eventually, I realized this was because Final Fantasy XVI barely, meekly attempts to earn its significance. This might rank among my most arguable critiques, both because it's clear plenty of people LOVE the vibe of this game and it seems like every performer is delivering exactly what was asked of them. Admitting that, I still constantly found myself wondering what many of my favorite 16-bit RPGs might've sounded like if they were voiced, but even more importantly I couldn't escape how regularly the characters punctuated sentences with some kind of sigh seemed to mirror my own curiosity regarding this game's scope, or intent, or something.

FINAL FANTASY (PART 2)

I recognize I probably promised to follow up on something earlier in this episode that I haven't made good on. I've never wanted to say more about a game, to the point I wrote this chronologically in 4 sessions over nearly two weeks. Without re-reading before this final denouement, I think if I need to make anything clear it's that I did enjoy this game. It gave me the sort of boss battles I'm surprised the modern God of Wars have mostly shied away from, the combat was constantly engaging (especially in the middle of the game) e
in its smaller moments as well and even when I was put off by the game, I couldn't help wondering why and soldiering on in pursuit of clarification.

If I didn't say it before, I expected to love this game. I'm not dogmatic about what a Final Fantasy game should be. But the further I get from actually playing this game...I just don't get why or how it wound up included in the franchise. Just about every character between Clive and Ultima get their moments, but the structure of the game makes all of them feel ephemeral. Maybe it's the rewards for engaging with them, maybe it's the one-note vocal direction, maybe it's even as simple as how intangible nearly every other character feels by the end.

But a lot of my disappoint, really, stems from the fact that this game balked at committing to its missions statement. It becomes less political as it goes, less sexual as it goes, less morally complex as it goes, less relationship bound as it goes, less driven by mechanics or inventory as it goes, even less violent as it goes, less mysterious as it goes...

Final Fantasy XVI often felt like interacting with a significant other perforated with commitment issues, or more to the point an opportunity to see myself through the lens of a video game. If I were to remove even a handful of critiques from this review, it's easy to see an ideal game at the core. Unfortunately, the more I got to know FFXVI, the more its quirks came to feel like self-defense mechanisms, afraid to let me down by the insecurity that drives it.

Despite the high score, I'm very conflicted about this game. On the one hand, part of why Disney's exploitation of Star Wars has felt so bafflingly dull is that the imagery and sound design that Lucasfilm and Industrial Light and Magic scuffled into existence 40-odd years ago remains perhaps the most inscrutable library of pop bangers ever created. From its subtle but no less direct commentary on fascism's mighty, comedic weight to ambience as simply relatable as a radiator's hum, Star Wars looks and sounds infallible. That it has become known for - even defined by - its failures is almost as remarkable an achievement as anything from the original trilogy.

But this franchise is ultimately a story of incredible failures, and this isn't the project to shake that weight. Admirably, to an almost overwhelming degree, Respawn puts in the work to prove Star Wars' worth. There's a hub world of daunting density, boss fights that insist (at least on the Jedi Master and above difficulties) on a near chemical mastery of the game's mechanics, a story that shames most beats of the modern big screen trilogy and a generally inspired breadth of game design that ought remind any fan of Titanfall 2's campaign what it means to sacrifice one's ego to a game designer. Never more so than when you find one of their combat or platforming challenges tucked inside a glowing gem inside a cave...though the latter can often demand just a little more than this game's systems are willing to account for, to the point they feel equally heavy handed as clever.

And yet...as much as Respawn clearly GETS IT, they don't...got it. That aforementioned hub world slowly becomes a constant pest, thanks to its incredibly misleading (hi, DOOM 2016) holographic map and innumerable dead ends owing to powers unlocked via story progression. Exacerbated by only being unable to fast travel via this franchise's eternally inexplicable bonfires (or, for non Soulsians, "meditation points") the world of Koboh is often disappointing to explore. And that's before you realize most of it's secrets are just new ways to trim our hero's beard or paint his lightsaber.

But the first game primed us for that sort of thing, so as disappointing as it is to experience it again, at least this time around almost all of these little puzzles conclude with fun, unique fights beforehand. I didn't play much Apex Legends beyond the 4th season reboot, but I did play a LOT of it beforehand, and if Respawn's three flagship titles say anything about the hundreds of people on its payroll, they love designing game mechanics.

I'm adding this paragraph last, because I can't figure out where else to put it: I don't think many of the characters rise above the roles they play in either the primary narrative or the expectations of a sprawling, pseudo-role playing action game. But I get why Turgle became a sort of mini-meme. For me, he's little more than an obvious, extremely loving ode to Psychonauts' Razputin, from design to voice actor, and that's enough.

But his stories are impressively off kilter as well, in stark contrast to the Pyloon's other most interactive regulars: a stereotypical cowboy bounty huntress, some treasure hunters disbelieving they're past their prime, a couple wanderers that just want to call anywhere home and, perhaps most notably, some grim looking guy apparently, and truly shockingly, allowed by the Star Wars arbiters to slowly unravel a story of what sounds like an intergalactic cocaine deal gone wrong. It must be hard to be an executive overseeing a game of this scope but...wow, and lol.

Which leads to something I wanted to ding this game a lot harder for, but began to feel it felt personal - the final third of this game consists of several extended sequences in which, especially on Jedi Master difficulty, the scenario designers seem to believe players can stomach heaps of shit. Whether it's boss fights that evolve over four or five phases with multiple - egregiously, unskippable - minute-long cutscenes or sequences of arena battles with no save point in sight, I suppose it's not for me to say whether a Star Wars game shouldn't be so damn unforgiving, but damn can this game be unforgiving.

I don't complain about that just to do it, either. Like the first game, Jedi Survivor seems to be in its pocket when the deck is stacked. Throughout the game, Jedi Master seemed like the obvious difficulty to play the game on, requiring an extremely satisfying level of attention while still allowing for just the right amount of skin-of-your-teeth, I usually play games on Normal but let's fucking go fuckery that a lot of games miss by only tipping the scales of HP/damage one way or the other.

But this game has a trifecta of boss battles that are so nuanced in their design, so punctuated by story beats and most importantly (for, it should be said, quite valid story reasons) biased against the player succeeding that I'd be fascinated to interview the designers of these fights. These three fights ask players to have such locked in mental and technical memories that they truly feel more unforgiving than most From Soft bosses, if and even only because progressing from the first to third phase can involve as much as three minutes of unskippable cinematics. If it's meant to be a test of focus, I failed.

Thankfully, the game allows you to drop the difficulty at any time, and believe me I descended the ladder gradual. I don't take pride in things I do privately, but each time I slinked down from 30+ hours of regular campaign play on Jedi Master to a lowly Padawan during these boss fights, I couldn't help but wonder...is it me, or the game? And how many of the millions of strangers who also played this game will judge me for my cowardice?

Because I worry this review might focus a bit too much on the negative, here I want to emphasize: I enjoyed trying to study and learn these bosses. Again, I played all of the game on Jedi Master otherwise. But at each pass, a combination of said cutscenes and other wild assault combos or, even worse, one-hit kills broke me. I had to move on.

Worst part being, again, I loved the design of each of these bosses. I wish I'd kicked their ass on concrete instead of silly putty.

Especially because the combat kicks ass, and there are gonna be enough professional and user reviews out there that explain why I don't need to go much into it. I often felt like an idiot forgetting that I wasn't just a guy with a laser sword but a full on Jedi, so other than the infinitely entertaining "force push a guy into the abyss" scenario I can't speak to the bemusing skill trees as much as I'd like to. But as someone who expected to love, only to spitefully appreciate, Sekiro's parry-based sword duels I truly love this franchise's only just so slightly softer approach to the same kind of idea. Maybe the lightsaber should be deadlier - of course it should - but at least it still makes all those crisp, wavy sounds whether it's bouncing off a Stormtrooper's shield or barely damaging a droid.

I wish it were just that one big thing, which at its core might be me being a thoroughly average game player, that held this game back from greatness. In some sense, it might even be nice if technical flaws marred my experience, though for me it was mostly noticing the ways in which these relative newcomers to the third person blockbuster had to cheat at things that studios like Naughty Dog, Crystal Dynamics or even Remedy have come to personify.

On a Playstation 5 I didn't experience the debilitating glitches, crashes and so forth that PC and XBox players did - I just saw a game that often had to cut corners to attempt some of the big screen shenanigans of its inspirations. I'm talking chase sequences where NPCs are constantly warping into position for dramatic heft, traversal that belittles Jedi mobility for the same of a puzzle, or even simply, ironically, environment design that feels convoluted for designer satisfaction rather than player legibility.

But that's fine, because some of those games are unimaginable to begin with, and some of them have gameplay flaws that Respawn could never even dream of allowing to define one of their games.

But I do have to say, perhaps much like this review...this game has a hell of a pacing problem. I believe I mentioned it early, but once you realize the traversal skills come through story progression, story progression becomes the thing...only sometimes you want more health, or force energy, or stim pack capacity, and you can never be sure which tangent those things are tucked behind. But you CAN be sure that they are behind a tangent, some kind of tiny platforming or combat adventure the game will never outright tell you to do. This leads to a constant argument between what may or may not be worth pursuing, expectations about the difficulties of the next boss fights and honestly most often of all whether your brain can trust what your eyes thing they're understanding the map to be saying. At some point, no matter how exciting a slightly bigger health bar might be, the idea that the end of any given tunnel is just a new beard trim or color wheel for your lightsaber is far more discouraging than the gamer sickness of plundering every possible nook and cranny of a map.

This will likely read like a petty way to cap this, and I really don't mean it as an insult in the slightest. Like any regular guy, I'm more than prepared to say in the same breath that the original three Star Wars films had an impossible to describe impact on my adolescence but it's a mostly shit franchise full of junk and sorrow. Jedi Survivor does NOT, and because per Disney mandate it's quite an official Star Wars tale so why not feel strongly about it, do anything more than manipulate its characters into telling a standard video game hero's arc. It hints extremely early and often at what it wants to say about the nobility of Jedi, while also force pulling some incredibly flagrant references into the mix just to remind you that for all intents and purposes there's only one story worth telling in this timeless, multiple-galaxy spanning IP.

Anyway, I was Blaster + Dual Wield. I never figured out the love for Crossguard. Too slow.

More than anything, it feels very strange to finally be, essentially, current with this franchise. I still have Lost Judgement and the Ishin remake in the hopper, but in the grand scheme of things it feels like the long journey that began with a humble Giant Bomb Quick Look of Yakuza 0 six years ago has finally reached its end.

Though, happily, it feels more like a new beginning!

For all the entertainment this franchise has provided me over half a decade, I feel I've made it pretty clear that the ecstatic highs were balanced by some nearly intolerable lows. Of course it was always going to be impossible to fully reconcile this franchise's sprawling mid-section with the considerable gameplay and presentation advances they'd made by the time Yakuza 0 came to serve as a new entry point, so I tried and mostly succeeded to take the franchise's lumps with a grain of salt.

After Yakuza 6, however, it was clear that the team at RGG Studio were essentially doing the same thing. Kiryu Kazama may be as iconic as video game archetypes come, but he was also a bizarrely limited character to spend so much time with. Obviously it allowed him to act as a sun around which the franchise's increasingly bonkers characters could orbit, but it also meant that once the conspiracy went all the way to the top way back during the events of Yakuza 2, the franchise was essentially trapped in an endless loop. If Kiryu must perpetually refuse to shape the world in his image while the Yakuza must similarly refuse to align themselves with his world view, all the character moments in the world couldn't save a franchise from turning back on itself, remixing and repurposing old, good ideas in decreasingly fresh packages.

Enter Ichiban, a man of the lowest rung on the Yakuza ladder, slowly but forcefully exiled by the only social structure he'd ever known to answer two simple, burning questions: why am I so unwanted, and why can't these people understand I'd do anything to change that?

Anyway, there's a video game here too, and while I completely understand some of its more glaring issues, this shit kicks fuckin' ass, full stop. Early on I was reminded of the DIY charm brought to the South Park RPG experiment The Stick of Truth, in which the kids reimagine their playground goofing off as life or death combat with world destroying stakes. But after nearly 80 hours with this game, the marriage of an idea as simple as way more money to the mad man assembly line they've got going at the RGG creative desk results in a game that takes full advantage of this franchise's sense of fun that makes that game look like a student project. While Yakuza's combat could be fun in fits and starts, it always threatened to become a slog, something to wade through on the way to the next side mission or TV-episode length main cutscene.

But now? I feel like I could just write two paragraphs full of enemy names, attack descriptions and a few errant side quest synopses and earn these 4.5 stars right away. This is a game where you fight worryingly oily men toting pool floaties and a penchant for club drugs three floors deep in a basement fight club. There are wild enemy puns like Dotcombatant, Druggler, Shillboard and Pornogra-Pharoah. The game isn't afraid to be uncomfortable about some of these jokes (and of 252 enemies, I'd say a good 2/3 of them are jokes) either. The Pandemicist very much plays up communicable disease, while the hosts (Biting Barker, Hostile Host, etc.) very specifically use attacks that double as rape and abduction tactics.

In other words, the game is still willing to wade in the darkness of its chosen world, which only makes its ability to coax humor out of these realities even more stunning.

As is tradition, the last three chapters of this game are a LOT. The only reason I completed the first chapter at the end of February but didn't see the final credits roll until early July is because of how discouraging a certain infamous chapter 12 boss battle forces players to do a bit of grinding to stand a chance. When I finally came back, it turned out this wasn't such a huge deal - just turn the auto battler on, queue up a podcast or two and punch your way through the battle arena - but compared to the rest of the game it's such a stark reminder of classic mid-90s RPG design that it feels as malicious as it is clearly intentional.

Likewise, the final major, actual boss definitely follows in a long tradition of demanding the player recognize its one primary gimmick, be as stocked as they can be on items (in this case, as a novelty, MP-replenishing Tauriners rather than HP replenishing Toughnesses and Staminans) and just grit their teeth. But even here, the shift from a brawler to a turn-based RPG is a balm because if the fight is getting a little exhausting, the player can simply set the controller down and chill out. This alone, even when just auto-battling through the streets, is such a balm to what can be a very monotonous franchise on the gameplay side.

Lastly, while it's heightening and cartoonish, somehow RGG have found themselves at the very foreground of the facial animation cutscene, with some of the most subtle (and outlandish) expressions you'll find in story-rooted games. Oftentimes this is all it really takes to make Ichiban feel like such a fresh shift from Kiryu, as his animations sell much of the late game drama even better than the early game comedy - the last bits of this game may be the first time this franchise elicited visceral emotion out of me, rather than the more empathic but flat ways heavy story beats tended to land in previous games.

I feel like I barely said half of what I wanted to say about this game, but I also think I've said enough for one unpaid batch of thoughts. Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a real triumph, and I'm so, so excited to see what this team can do with this iteration of the franchise with all the experience of this game under their belt. Especially if it's literally a fish out of water story?!

Ichi, I already miss you.

Paradise Killer equally values exploration and style with a liberal dose of visual novel seasoning, and while I must acknowledge the Playstation Plus fog lingering over my takeaway that does little to devalue how I powered through this game in two pretty visceral, almost astonishing pair of seven hour sessions.

I'll grant that as I got into the back third of the game that the city's labyrinthian construction became extremely annoying, and the mystery isn't actually all that mysterious. After my first marathon, I felt confident enough to approach the judge with my accusations only to realize I had very little evidence to present.

That could've felt discouraging, but instead it was exactly the push I needed to keep digging into Paradise 24's secrets. And I was truly surprised by many of the later revelations Lady Love Dies' detective work offered, and even if I was only confirming my early suspicions I really enjoyed the process of finding out exactly why some character made a choice, let alone their role in the broader mystery.

Better yet, the trial made me aware that I'd forced the hands of some characters to solidify my hypotheses, that there were several more clues to find and mysteries to solve, and that while I may have satisfied the demands of the court I may not have fully solved the mystery of Paradise 24.

As I began uncovering lie after lie, it was undeniable that not only did the Blood Crystal economy feel mightily restrictive (though I'm sure more than enough of them exist for the obsessive collectors) but the city itself was quite a burden to navigate even with all the movement upgrades. It got less and less fun making my way towards the character I wanted to talk to the closer I got to the end...but the thinker in me also began to interpret that impatience as an extension of the gameplay. In those moments, I started finding the time it took to get from one suspect to another a representation of both my and Lady Love Dies' frustration with the increasingly desperate lies of her former friends who'd become my new adversaries.

I'd like to think I nailed the trial. It sure seemed to feel like it. But I also know that there are mysteries I didn't solve, environmental puzzles and narrative links left dangling. Perhaps I was allowed to accuse one person of too many crimes, and finishing one or two of those Resident Evil-esque puzzles may have been the key.

I suppose for now I'll just have to feel okay with what I chose. But I wouldn't surprise myself if I came back to this when I'm looking for something to play and tried to uncover the mysteries I presented to the Judge as tangential.

At the very least, it'd be nice to wander around this place listening to its dope ass, mysteriously joyful soundtrack in search of the various Sinji interactions I missed. Because at the very least, the truly curious player just has to know if the reward for finding all of his instances is the removal of the hilarious emoji obscuring his banger.

I'm not done playing this game, and I get the feeling I'm well on my way to making it one of my small handful of Platinums a second time, but I've gotta exhale a bit.

Where in my original review I found myself surprised that this wasn't my favorite game of 2018, on a 2nd replay I can see plenty of the things that less generous players might frown upon. From the intense level of focus some of the encampments and later story missions demand on the hardest difficulty to the simple joy of making my way around the 40th floors of Manhattan, Insomniac's concept of Spider-Man's experience feels about exacting as it possibly could. Obviously if it didn't tell the version of Peter Parker's story that it tells the copious side missions, side activities, side curiosities and side story moments would efficiently overwhelm the core story.

Fortunately, so much of this game's story hinges on what one may have to sacrifice to do what must be done that players are given an out if they'd rather experience what these interpretations of Peter, Miles and MJ are going through than fill out skill trees, complete aesthetic collections or even just level 'til levels no longer exist.

What I was trying to convey in my review, after a third replay, of the PS4 version of the game but truthfully barely touched on is that despite the many familiar designs that gird this game, and maybe it fully depends on the emotional trap you allow Peter's place in life to charm and deceive you...it is stunning to me how well Insomniac captured Spider-Man's capability in combat - as much as many want to make Batman comparisons, the web abilities allow for Peter to play God (of war?) in a way Bruce just can't - while softly, attentively addressing the ways in which his years as Spider-Man may not have dulled his core sweetness but have certainly diffused his charm. While this isn't a game about such a normal, human problem, it's interesting to see the ways this game questions how Peter sees himself in his world.

That said, I'm not equipped to properly address the two bigger social issues that this game approaches in extremely misguided fashion, but I can at least acknowledge that the Spider-Cop jokes, Patriot Act substory and, frankly, the entirety of the F.E.A.S.T. sub-sub-stories and how most characters seem to regard supporting the houseless as a burden is pretty lousy.

Speaking of lousy, like many I threw my hands up when this remaster was announced alongside a new face model for Peter Parker. But I also didn't want to be reactionary, and at the time I had no idea when I'd find the money or time for a PS5, so I also chose to forget about it.

In the wake of Across the Spider-Verse, I needed to keep indulging in Spider-content, so I'm finally playing this remaster and...first of all, if you read any of my other reviews, you'll find I'm the bastard that justifies modern consoles having both performance and frame rate modes. I love The Witcher 3, A Plague Tale, God of War, Horizon and GTAV at 30fps with the most graphics possible. I love Returnal, Death Stranding, Ratchet & Clank, Destiny 2 and all Street Fighters at 60fps. I've never felt dogmatic about performance, but perhaps because I spent over half of the PS3 generation on a 480i (yes, interlaced) CRT and all of the PS4 generation on a 720p 60", now that I'm finally playing on a TV meant for the console I'm attached to, I gotta say...let it chug, baby, so long as the image occasionally stuns.

Which is all to say that I have no strong thoughts about Ben Jordan. It was heavily implied that this motion capture performance didn't owe much to John Bubniak, and that greater fidelity demanded a facial structure that more closely matched the actor on the capture set. The most low effort Google search suggest most of the facial animations were based on Yuri Lowenthal, whose vocal portrayal of Peter is intensely enjoyable...

And sadly I just don't see it. I get re-casting, especially when it comes to these sort of immortal, unending, we'll all die before they do sorts of roles, but almost never do you see it happen retroactively to something that already exists, let alone received such praise for its portrayal of its main character. I've got absolutely no reason to believe that, behind the scenes, Jordan's face matches Lowenthal's expressions better than Bubniak's did...but if that's the case, the artists who tweaked Bubniak's face from cutscene to cutscene did a hell of a job, and that same attention was not paid to Jordan's mug.

There are a pair of superficial issues worth glossing over - primarily that Jordan is vividly cute in a way one needs to marinate with Bubniak to see, while the subtle haircut change makes Jordan's portrayal seem like a guy who always has time for a Great Clips visit while Bubniak's seems to put it off as long as he can - but the most striking issue is that, despite the animation reasoning, Jordan's Parker is lifeless.

Luckily not in a fully bad way, thanks in large part to Lowenthal's vocal work and the remaining charismatic portrayals of all the other characters, but whenever the game leans on Parker for an emotional beat, and honestly I feel bad for this dude I don't know that was thrust into this position, this new Parker pretty much 100% of the time deflates the scene. His eyes are dead, his cheeks are flat, his hair and chin are perfect and, more than anything, he doesn't look like he belongs.

There's a brief series of side missions where you use your knowledge of the Manhattan island to locate some lost students - Jordan's "performance" (because, again, it must be emphasized that he has very little, if in fact nothing, to do with how he comes off in this game) would've fit better over one of these extremely minor characters than Peter. Primarily because no matter the reasoning for the change, Bubniak looked like a guy who'd use charm to make his way through life, who was wearied by the balancing act of being both Spider-Man and a broke man approaching 30 and dwelling toxically on a relationship he'd lost because of that struggle.

By contrast, the Jordan character often looks, and I'm deliberately choosing a boring description here, non-plussed by just about everything he experiences. He doesn't seem desperate to please Mary Jane, he doesn't appear despaired by his mentors' descents into madness, he just doesn't express much of anything at all. Which, again, was supposedly the entire point of this face/off exercise.

But I apologize for the tangent, because I also don't think it ruins the game, or even dulls the impact of it's most interesting and nuanced story beats. If you've been reading this and raging about the most obvious counter to this flaw, yeah, I know - this is a big game, with 20 to 60 hours of content, and Peter will be wearing a mask for nearly all of it! - and I agree.

Fundamentally, Insomniac has still done a fascinating job of allowing players to engage in the fantasy of Spider-Man. As I said in my original review (of my second replay), this game so acutely nails both how fun it would be to be Spider-Man, how sad it would be to be Peter Parker, how catastrophic it would be to realize your heroes are even more flawed than the obvious villains no matter your identity, then again just how fun it'd be to be Spider-Man.

Also the ray tracing is neat in this remaster and you 60fps boys can kick rocks.

If you read my review of Forbidden West, you'll find a man who enjoyed himself quite abundantly yet struggled to figure out why that spark of joy he felt during Zero Dawn never quite resurfaced. In the months since the game's release, if I've found any words to explain that feeling it's these: the Horizon franchise has a bloat problem.

That extends from everything, from the story it's telling to the graphics it's presenting to the gameplay it's offering. Each piece of the puzzle has become so layered and intricate that I can't help but worry abundance has overtaken coherence in the design philosophy of this franchise.

Speaking strictly in terms of gameplay, Burning Shores honestly doesn't offer much. Its new enemies only serve to emphasize the combat's flaws, as they all either fly or jump astronomically while delivering area of effect elemental attacks that seem to coat the entire play field. For the eleventeenth time I can't stress enough that I find Zero Dawn, as well as its DLC Frozen Wilds, at the peak of its powers playing on Ultra Hard. I am definitively NOT a "hard mode guy", but for me that game just WORKS.

Forbidden West, with its density of mechanics and an armory intent on quadrupling that density, mucked up the bullseye Guerilla Games had hit previously. Burning Shores doesn't even pretend to acknowledge that criticism, instead doubling down with even more new mechanics. Paired with new enemies that, again, are purely pieces of shit that can get wrecked, by far the greatest sin this DLC commits is something I never thought I'd say about Horizon: I just wanted the combat to be over with.

In other words, I played on Normal, and I sometimes fantasized about Easy.

That being said, the DLC is so short and ultimately lacking in normal combat encounters it never came to that. Still...in comparison to Frozen Wilds, it's odd that Burning Shores ultimately amounts to a boss rush, shoehorning tried and true boss mechanics into a game that was always about improvisation on an open battlefield. The worst of these is the pair of final bosses, who in tandem do a titanic job of kneecapping one of this franchise's great terrors. Turns out, it's just a bunch of glowing red dots - some world eater.

So why three stars? Despite a brevity that's honestly shocking considering how laborious Forbidden West's storytelling could be, the new characters are interesting and/or likable. Complaints that everything moves to fast are warranted, because without the pull of goofing around on side quests and taking on machines just because they're there to be fought this story can be completed in what feels like three or four hours. This means we get an older style of video game story, with characters asking players to fill in some blanks in terms of their hows and whys. In terms of gameplay (or trophies) this also means you'll encounter plenty of vendors with new equipment, strangers with new tasks they can't handle on their own, even a new cauldron to delve into...but nothing about the DLC motivates the player to care about these things. Even a special new weapon introduced by the story can be entirely ignored - it's all so much, and for what?

As for where that ultimately takes us...which is controversy of the most inane order...the player is met with perhaps the first choice they can make for Aloy that has some actual stakes to it. Granted, it's the final moment of a DLC, so there's no use presuming which if any Guerilla will choose for themselves in the inevitable third part of this story, but I understand the impulse. This is a DLC with an extended nod to The Last of Us Part II's museum scene, after all - it's fan service, clunky and enthusiastic as this sort of thing tends to be.

I made the choice that felt right for Aloy. Others will make the choice that feels right for their Twitch streams. Others won't even play the game and hate it on misguided principles. To which I say that's a real shame, because there sure are lots of concrete reasons to be worried Horizon as a franchise is a little lost at sea.

It'd be so easy to call this game perfectly imperfect and move on. It's been nearly a decade since this game first came out, after all, and there's nothing to be said about The Witcher 3 that hasn't already been said. A brief summary of my take on the core game?

Its opening 30 or so hours are some of the strongest in all of gaming, so thoroughly engrossing and complicated that it can be all too easy to notice that the game essentially coasts from that point onward on the strength of those opening world building moments and character work in Velen.

While it's important to maintain perspective here - primarily, how pioneering much of the work done here was, much the same as a Super Mario Bros. or Resident Evil 4 for their respective genres - it's just as important to recognize this game isn't foundational in nearly the same ways. Gameplay is clunky, menus far too cumbersome on consoles (that they couldn't get item descriptions to load instantly on PS5 is pretty insane) and more than anything the main story screeches to an absolute halt for dozens of hours once you reach Novigrad, only to ramp back up into a stereotypical apocalypse scenario complete with a raid-like experience and some boss battles whose "epicness" strains against an engine that can't portray that level of action in its cutscenes nor offer anything unique in its combat scenarios.

I've decided to review the DLCs as their own things as I get to them because, well, I might take a break from this for a bit but also because their grandeur honestly deserves to be addressed separately, but I've always imagined a world in which the Wild Hunt and the search for Ciri was paired back considerably if not completely removed from the game so CD Projekt could have just brought Hearts of Stone or Blood and Wine into the main game to begin with. It's when the witcher be witchin' that The Witcher 3 is at its highest highs, and too much of the base game gets mired in Save the World theatrics.

So if this isn't a purely nostalgic experience, I could see someone coming to Witcher 3 fresh, on a PS5 in 2022/23, wondering what all the fuss is about eventually. But I also struggle to envision who that person would be, because as I said even knowing all the beats the first 20-40 hours of this game is so damn excellent...and 40 hours ain't nothin' anyway!

Lastly, while the PS5 upgrade introduces console players to some new Eurojank experiences - and this was already a notoriously wrinkly game, one that I'm reminded I ultimately dropped back in 2015 for Batman: Arkham Knight while the kinks got worked out - that are pretty unfortunate at times (the autosave system being capable of hard locking the entire game, for example) the upgrades by and large are extremely worth it.

Over about 80 hours I played the game roughly half-and-half with map markers turned off and then on, further calcifying my feeling that it's not the map markers that ruin open world games for some people so much as their compulsion to complain about games letting them know where the fun can be found. Much like playing Elden Ring and Horizon: Forbidden West side-by-side this time last year, I understand the novelty of stumbling around Kovir and getting into trouble completely on my own while also deeply appreciating that I could turn Witcher 3 into a podcast game and grind out bandit camps when it came time to line my pockets and start playing the fashion side of the Witcher experience.

Probably the most important upgrades are to the lighting, which are starkly obvious in comparison screenshots but an absolute miracle in motion. This game sometimes approaches Red Dead Redemption levels of atmospheric beauty now, and recasting every possible source of light as such makes the world feel fundamentally modern despite the immense weight of its old bones. On the whole, The Witcher 3 is launched back into the conversation for best looking game around, which is just bizarre to me.

Last of my last notes in this, lol, "brief" review: I love the new Signs system. It makes the combat so much more fluid and a Sign build far more interesting on consoles than it was originally.

This game is still funny as sin, too.

"Don't look so satisfied about this."

All it took was one line for me to brush aside most of my misgivings about this game. And let me be clear, they were already mostly in the realm of nitpicks, so I'll get to them in a bit. Upon further reflection (and some helpful reminders of some of the weirder moments in the game from Eye Micah's great review), the surprisingly emotional line deliveries from Haruka and especially Kiryu during the final act aren't actually enough to make this a full four, but they are close. Unfortunately, I'm reminded that Onimichi is actually a kind of annoying map to get around (I'd just gotten so used to it while grinding out side content at the end I'd gone numb to it) and while ultimately more focused than either Yakuza 3, 4 or even 2 in some ways this story still isn't quite as well realized as Zero, Kiwami or 5.

That aside, I wanted to establish that I had a pretty good time with this movie for a reason I see not many would agree with me: as someone who has always found the combat in these games to mostly act as a nod to the video game medium Yakuza uses to tell its stories rather than truly fun, hard disagree on some of the criticism directed this game's way. While it's undoubtedly true that the variety of additional characters during the PS3 trilogy, or the many stances of Zero, keep the gameplay feeling as fresh as it can over dozens of hours, I LOVED this combat system.

Not only is it hilariously easy to over level thanks to a combination of the food XP system I last experienced in Kiwami 2 (I don't remember how much of this system made it into Judgement, honestly) and a benevolent decision to dole out buffet-sized portions of XP during most of the main story beats, but allowing for multiple weapon-based heat actions on a single charge thanks to the orb system allows players to trivialize pretty much every combat encounter as soon as they'd like. Similarly, Extreme Heat's "mash square to mash square more" mechanic may be offensively simple, but paired with a bunch of Staminan and/or booze it sure does render Yakuza's infamously aggravating boss fights hilariously trivial.

Beyond that, it's clear that this game emerges from the same era as RGG Studio as Zero and the Kiwamis because the level of gravitas and humor on display in the writing is constantly at the peak of this franchise's potential. Generally speaking I'd say Zero and Kiwami 2 still represent the peak of this studio's inspired, broad take on Japanese customs and social mores but Song of Life is still remarkably adept at dropping biting one liners that can either cut the tension or establish just how scathing these people can be to one another in equal measure. While the game may go on and on and on (and on) about "the secret of Onimichi" and family and all the things this franchise has been droning on about for hundreds of hours now, it's this secret sauce that keeps it palatable no matter how repetitive the main beats can feel.

And make no mistake, Yakuza 6's primary flaw is probably that, especially having played most of these games over the past 2-3 years rather than over the course of nearly two decades, it's impossible to overlook the dire lack of inventiveness when it comes to the primary plot. For some reason these games find it impossible to resist piling surprise villains on top of surprise villains, buoyed by supporting characters that oscillate at a moment's notice from foe to frenemy and back again, and the succession plans of the various Yakuza clans have become so contrived at this point it's impossible to care about most of the big picture plotting these people are up to.

As for those nitpicks I mentioned, they mostly amount to the game opting for a Yakuza 3-esque obfuscation of the side missions that makes much of that content easy to miss. I wound up doing all of the bar chatting, baseball and fishing side quests while wearing a tuxedo on the precipice of the endgame because I'd realized the game was nearly over and I hadn't seen so much of a hint of activities I knew were in the game. The fishing is a charmingly simple little lightgun game (sans lightgun) while the baseball manager stuff was bizarrely abstract for a mode that presents as pretty straight forward (I admit years - in literal time spent - of MLB The Show provided an additional mental hurdle to get over) and the Snack Bar stuff disappointingly half-baked. It's odd to be graded on the "liveliness" of a conversation when Kiryu can only provide the most boring responses.

To a similar end, the less said about the cabaret mini-game the better - Yakuza can have an uncomfortably transactional relationship with male-female interactions to begin with and this is easily my least favorite version of it.

Oh, almost forgot - huge props to Beat Takeshi, the only actor other than maybe Claude Maki as Nishikiyama to figure out how to present an actual human being in this universe of gods and demons. Part of what I love about the Yakuza games is that, being entirely in Japanese, I can simply read the subtitles and otherwise thumb through much of the repetitive, Jenga-stacked expository dialogue without feeling guilty about missing something in the performance of the dialogue (I am staunchly anti-subtitle for English language entertainment for this reason) but whenever Hirose was on screen I found myself a snack or an article to read while glancing back at the subtitles because he just has that it factor, man.

I'll come back to this for a full review and score once I'm done, but I just had to make note of some things after a few hours (the PS5 isn't tracking me on this one for some reason) at what feels like the halfway point of the game.

To start, the game brings over some of the things I found really unique about Mafia III, particularly its fishtail-heavy but oh-so-fun driving engine and substantial abuse of lighting to provide some really overwhelming glare effects but also some B-tier Saint Denis in the rain type atmosphere with crazy lightning. Hangar 13, if nothing else, knows how to make a rain storm appealing.

That said, while I can see how impressive this story would've been back in 2002, I can't believe that this is being passed off as a more in-depth, naturalistic portrayal of that story updated for modern audiences. This is no better evidenced than two bits of dialogue that are almost immediately dismissed - early in the game Tommy admits to a problem with bathtub gin that led him to giving up the hooch, only for him to accept several swigs of alcohol throughout the story without as much as a grimace. Around the point I'm pressing pause now, the Don of your chosen family suspects his business partner for most of his life of espionage, tying the likely cause to...something he did to a dog when they were kids? What?

The writing in this game is full of stuff like that, and because it's trying to tell a linear story over roughly a decade's worth of time the lack of character building via side stories or even diegetic moments in the open world is quite glaring. Mafia III wasn't always immune to this problem, which I think speaks to a general imbalance between Hangar 13's ambitions and their acumen, but these characters' lives move too quickly for the player to have any interest in it. Tommy goes from bachelor to married in about two hours, though almost all of the "intermezzo" can't explain the how of such a huge life choice because it's gameplay, and gameplay means cars and guns.

Lastly, I've been fascinated by a sort of feeling I've been searching to find a term for ever since the launch version of Final Fantasy VII Remake on PS4. There are some infamous moments (since patched out) during the early Midgar exploration segments where you can see a PS5-like Cloud standing in a late-gen PS4 environment surrounded by PS2-era textures talking to PS3-type mannequin NPCs. I found that utterly fascinating, and Mafia: Definitive Edition is taking that to an entirely different level through it's alchemical failure of mission design, cutscene direction, facial animation, audio fidelity and so much more.

It's quite a curio, in other words, and I'm almost sorry to say I'll probably have much more to say about it in a week or so.

...And now that I've finished, it turns out I kind of don't? While you can go back to watch the original game's cutscenes and get a sense of how ambitious it must have felt back then, it turns out Mafia didn't really have much of a story to tell nor the high budget, talented Hollywood voice crew Rockstar could muster and so that ambition mostly looks like what we've come to learn is pretty standard European developer overreach in terms of storytelling. If you've seen just about any mafia movie you'll know every beat of this thing before you've met a single side character, and again because the story is covering such a broad stretch of time in a pretty rapid fire manner (it took me just 7 hours to finish this game) story beats feel like exactly that and nothing more - unearned and bland.

While the voice acting is marginally better this time around, the audio quality is pretty universally terrible. Pauly doesn't sound like a real person, like, EVER, while Sam often slips into a rough interpretation of Ren from Ren & Stimpy and Tommy, for whatever reason, seems to have made a point to breath heavily onto the microphone as often as possible. It's a breathy, nasally game in general and almost never achieves the level of verisimilitude necessary to make voice acting worth having. I have to imagine this more than anything is a casualty of being developed during the height of the COVID pandemic so it's hard to completely fault the game for it...but it's also impossible to ignore.

This is exacerbated by some pretty rudimentary facial animation (not to mention distracting false eyelashes on every single face) that obfuscates whatever emotions these characters are hinting at behind dead eyes and creepy smiles.

The weirdest thing about this game is that it feels trapped in two eras at once. On the one hand, this makes for the rare remake of an old game that makes little effort to modernize what made it tick originally, but on the other it looks so modern and imports just enough of the most recent game's more annoying mechanics (namely, the puppet-like enemy AI that operate more like an arcade lightgun shooter than 3rd person cover shooter enemies) that it feels like a half-step.

Please know that I waver from four stars pretty hesitantly. For a game to feature zero voice acting and an at times ludicrously abstract narrative still manage to be just as funny as a Psychonauts or Monkey Island game is no small feat. Sadly, because of the game's determination to be as obtuse as possible some of the best jokes, like the infamous Showgoer story about "edible" hot dogs or a chance meeting with a dingy public park rest stop's urinal (I, sadly, missed this) are entirely (even easily) missable.

In fact, for a game that's exactly as simple to progress through as it is a little overwhelming to parse the point of, I must say given that the writing and sense of place are Norco's two strongest qualities I can't say I'm entirely jazzed by how many moments, no matter how tiny or inconsequential, one can miss if for no other reason than taking even just a day or two off between play sessions.

I'd also argue that despite being just ten or so hours long, the first act is a pretty slow burn that does little to hint at how batshit things will get later, and if it doesn't sink its hooks in return visits to the seedier side of New Orleans can be incredibly disorienting without the help of a guide. Additionally, just as the game is picking up a full head of steam it just sort of...stops, bringing to mind a reality where Kentucky Route Zero never made it to the finish line. To say the game ends in frustratingly blunt fashion is an understatement.

For all these reasons, as much as I loved my time with Norco and find it an obvious recommend to anyone that loves narrative driven games with a unique, comprehensive voice, I also think its flaws are just too out in the open to hand wave. No doubt some of this is also stoked by having played on a Playstation; Disco Elysium seemed to have figured out gamepad controls for point and click adventures, but still so many others make some awfully wonky decisions and Norco is no stranger to clunky UX.

I have such deeply held nostalgia for this game that, despite all the negative reviews and photographic evidence they were entirely justified in their disappointed tone, the game went on sale and I gave these shucksters some of my cash. I think some of the graphical complaints might be a little overblown, but my mistake was made obvious stupidly quick for something that should've been even more obvious to me as I hovered over the purchase button: this game plays like trash on a controller.

Having played Civilization IV and V for hours and hours (and hours) on my 2011 MacBook and my 2008 iMac before shifting to hours and hours (and hours) of Civilization VI on PS4/5, and also having not owned a proper gaming computer since an ill-fated 5-year sabbatical from Mac Life in my early teens (Windows XP, get wrecked!), I'm not as easily reminded of how poorly suited to controllers some PC games are...even though I probably should be. Hello, Tropico 5, Crusader Kings III, Planet Coaster and more! Mayhaps I'm just a fool...

That being said! The voice acting is the same as it always was and that's still absolutely fantastic, as is the writing. It could come off a little stilted compared to modern games but overall, even beyond the voices, this game sounded and sounds awesome. It's the one thing about the Blade Runner aesthetic that just can't be diminished by shoddy ports or endlessly debatable alternate edits or decades later sequels.

But I have to actually give this a super poor rating despite barely making it back to Ray McCoy's apartment. While I didn't find it as ugly as advertised, it IS ugly as sin on a big 4K screen as compared to a late-90s/early-2000s PC monitor, the controls ARE that bad without a mouse and all the charm of the real-time storytelling, as someone who played this game over and over and over as a kid, absolutely has to be ruined by how clunky this all is. So much of that mechanic involves being in the right place at the right time or doing the right thing at the right moment and that must be impossible here.

Lastly, this game does have two infamously bad bits involving a time bomb at one point and McCoy's pistol in another. These are the most precision (and luck, honestly) dependent bits of all and I'd bet the timebomb escape alone is an absolute padlock on progressing through the rest of the game when using a DualSense.

I will not actually rate this because I'd consider it rude, but the following I feel is VERY IMPORTANT for any curious Playstation 5 owner who sees this game they've heard Rob Zacny wax so philosophical about is actually available on a console and thinks they might want to see what all the fuss is about:

If you've seen literally six seconds of footage of this game you should understand why Sony and Paradox Interactive have done console gamers such a favor offering up a three hour trial to Playstation Plus subscribers. The tutorial takes what feels like two hours to complete on a DualSense (actual time: about 30 minutes) and the exact moment the training wheels are taken off the bike gets wobbly as fuck.

I think I made it five minutes before I realized without at least a mouse, the PS5 port is a noble if equally, dubiously villainous effort. Noble in that the madmen did it, evil in that anyone who spends money on this version is either their own worst enemy or woefully unprepared to want their money back soon.

I am an incredibly disorganized person. As a result, playing the game normally makes me irrationally irritated at this fictional girl's preferred placement for her things - I looked up a solution image for the first room after a miserable 45 minutes and nearly threw my iMac out the window - but turning off those requirements just made Unpacking, well, interactive unpacking. Using a mouse with a DualSense. It's unpacking but worse. That's really all that needs to be said about why I hated my time with this game.

But because I'm normally so long-winded, a few more notes for the time-rich among you:

• The music is totally good That Kind of Stuff. And that kind of stuff is the kind of stuff I like. Unfortunately, by some stroke of madness it isn't programmed to loop indefinitely, leading to at least a full minute's worth of silence before a given level's soundtrack kicks back in. I can't speak for everyone but, personally, this constantly made me feel like I was taking too long, like the game was staring at me with the plain face emoji flashing incessantly.

• I like the aesthetic, but I also found myself wanting to recognize more clearly what many of these objects are. Sure, smarter folks than I could pick out more references than "ooh, a Gamecube!" but I could only stare at the same vague set of novels for so long.

• I think the logic of the closets, desks and cupboards is absolutely insane.

• Even more insane, who packs their stuff and doesn't label ANY OF IT?! I may be a messy son of a bitch with the organizational skills of a nine year old, but whenever I move I'm AT LEAST gracious to myself enough to label the box with the knives in it. I get haphazardly dumping the living room stuff in the bathroom just to get it the fuck out of your grasp as quickly as possible, but each box felt more like a random item generator than another piece of this girl's puzzle.

• Lastly, and this is just a nitpick compared to all the rest, but without knowing much about this game other than how many podcasters I love and Giant Bomb guest Game of the Year lists (R.I.P., apparently?) it wound up on, I'd forgotten Unpacking was about a very specific girl-to-woman arc. Sometimes I wondered if my maleness, or having named my character "David" after myself, contributed to how little I seemed to understand where certain items go. We should have just all had to be "Rebecca" or whatever.

I think it's important to note right away, assuming this account somehow at sometime becomes valuable to future scholars, that relative to the first game Requiem is a slog. Which isn't to say that it doesn't go, but this game is devout in its belief of more being good.

The story, or should I say plot, asks the least of this fervor for more because it mostly says what players of the first game already knew. The Boy is a menace, but The Sister loves him, and The Sister is also The Player Character, so The Boy must be saved. To both Innocence and Requiem's credit, the obviousness of the problem fails time after time to subsume the narrative. From a pointillist's perspective I'd eagerly argue Asobo Studio is wasting its time with this, but thanks to the fantastic imagination of their environmental artists and game designers these games - and this game in particular - are quite fascinating.

Being a video game, let's address that bit. This is a sequel to a game in which the main character primarily wielded a slingshot and some pots. The slingshot had to be charged and the pots couldn't kill, no matter their contents. At various moments Innocence tries to address this with a new elemental effect, a crossbow and even the critters by which it's predecessor demanded attention, unfortunately its DNA often demands at least one death animation if not a scramble towards guides that not only tell you to do what you've been doing but make it sound easier than serving a single scoop of ice cream.

The combat explicitly stank whenever it was highlighted by Innocence, and whatever satisfaction this sequel allows the player is often couched more in the conquering of sub-menus than the men their elementally infused rocks and pots allowed for. But Requiem seems to think otherwise, replacing typical boss fights with arenas upon which a mysterious number (imagine every enemy type you've seen prior to said arena - hell, imagine every enemy you might expect to see in said arena while collecting materials before you trigger their entrance) of enemies descend upon you ... and yet it does all build to this one conflict that feels all the more satisfying for the knowledge that makes it quickly become as manageable as it appears overwhelming. So maybe I insisted on being dense for too long.

(I had to edit this in after the fact so I'm making it parenthetical just in case, BUT: more than anything, I spent most of this game marveling at its lighting. Particularly later in the game when both story and setting can be very dark, Innocence is VERY dark. Some of the more open areas carry a Red Dead Redemption 2 level of verisimilitude as well. The motion capture, facial animation and general cinematography belies the studio's budget, but the objects those variables sometimes fail are ALWAYS stunning. Despite the many, many inspirations you can immediately recognize Asobo Team drawing from, their results are fascinating.)

Still, being a year in which so many sequels seemed to understand "more complicated" as "more interesting", A Plague Tale takes the crown. Horizon held its ground against the bloat, God of War sashayed its way through several game designers' ambitions and The Last of Us Part I shied away from reinvention period (I swear I played more than Sony first party games!) but this game is absolutely dense with, well, game.

The really neat thing about both of Asobo Team's Plague Tale games is that despite their ambitions they have no interest in ignoring the core of video games. Sometimes this makes some of their dramatic beats absolutely comedic, but then even in their storytelling Asobo seems eager to ask themselves "if we already did X, what the hell is Y?"

This game has seventeen chapters - and some of them aren't much more than walking and talking - yet Asobo finds a way at every turn to make the player feel like a part of the story their telling. In the press for Innocence it seemed like they loved to point at Uncharted and Brothers as frames of reference. But here they've realized what I felt the first game was straining to commit to: this is a story about blinding passion, unrealistic faith and absurd love.

I'd never say this Plague Tale sequel is a better game than The Last of Us Part II but I think it has a more intuitive understanding of what it means to manipulate the player into being a villain.

So here is where I'll say it: this game is full of likable characters, but only a madman could love them. I love the reasons why the eight or so main characters in this game are all incapable of recognizing the shadows they cast - that number comes off the cuff, so I'd like to note that Hugo is absolutely not included in that count - but it also makes for a wildly incongruous experience. For those who've played the first game, it should come as no surprise that every festival is a funeral, nor every companion a friend.

But when you recognize that early (or remember it from the first game) and catch what the chapter breaks are implying (like the first game) you can be gifted with this truly unique amalgamation of Resident Evil 4, whichever Wicker Man you please, The Last of Us and Rise of the Tomb Raider that is truly bizarre. Because environmental art costs what it costs so many games have chosen to either bask in the relatively cheap labor of the Philippines or cross their fingers that animation, art or - ugh - gameplay will dominate the trailers and criticism.

Like Innocence before it, Requiem spends all of its time finding new ways for you to use its tools. I found this took nearly half the game to get used to, as you spend most of the game with four interactions containing five (four?) modifiers selected via either one supremely dense weapon wheel or fully logical yet no less mystical hot buttons on the d-pad. I'd love to say that when I'd finally earned more capacity for crafting materials (the game doles out some core character progression based on, supposedly, your play style) I got more inventive during combat, but it's honestly impossible to enjoy this game's definition of conflict after playing Horizon, Elden Ring and God of War this year, let alone some rabbit in a hat like Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando.

Or, y'know, Resident Evil 4 or Last of Us Part II. The Last of Us Part I had this problem as well I suppose but the latter game really hammered home that just because the player/protagonist alerted some foes doesn't mean they can't just find the progression point and nope the fuck out. Requiem loves punishing a player who finds the exit before they've introduced death to whichever lumbering oafs know that door or hatch means asylum.

Anyway, yes, not always a great game! However, as I said before but couldn't possibly emphasize enough what this game aspires to be and what it is fascinates me. Without saying more than amounts to a sales pitch, this game imagines a world in which H.R. Giger were asked to dream about and then illustrate Ellie Williams (The Last of Us - don't worry, I had to look it up too) and Nathan Drake (Spider-Man's alterego) noshing s'mores and sharing each others' adventures.

But that's also barely this game at all! Despite some clear animation shortcomings this may be the best looking game of 2022, and despite a heavy dose of schlock this story worthy of being told by a game this year as well. I recognize this is particular to the Playstation 5's DualSense but there are two specific moments during the game's last five or so chapters where the combination of contextual rumble and trigger pull blew me away. Especially in the trigger's case, I'm talking about a situation anybody who's played a Naughty Dog game from Crash 2 onward would be familiar with. It's relatively rote, even bland, in description. Yet I was absolutely roped in, as though I'd never helped Nathan Drake scale a train before.

I don't have a full paragraph for this because ultimately I'm an idiot and even I could tell most of this game's puzzles were pretty elementary, but if the imperative was to create 17 (disclosure: yes, 17 chapters, but not all 17 carry the same weight) mutations of the previous game's puzzles, they both mildly succeeded at replicating the first game and spectacularly failed at making Naughty Dog's Portal 2. Said another way, it's fun to see these puzzles for what they are up to the point they refuse to be anything else, and then you're just stuck following a script you've never read, merely acted out wrongly over and over.

And I think that's ultimately where this franchise - franchise? - wins with me - the bit from the paragraph before the last! It isn't just that the first game was wildly propulsive and charming in its Cleveland-esque ambitions, nor that the second game satisfactorily delivers on the promises of said propulsion or ambition. This game's a bit of a mess at times (I'm not sure I said it just before so I'll make it plain now: the sling Amecia relies on might be cute and she may only be 15 but them blokes got iron helmets and chain mail) and from the vantage of a Goodyear blimp I think the real evil behind the rat infestation of 15th century southern France is clearly the player characters we puppeteered along the way...but I can't help but root for these kids.

Rats off to ya.