Slaps the roof of the Persona Franchise

"Ah yeah, this can fit so much peak in it."

Because I played Portable not all that long ago, I won't speak in as much detail as I usually do about new titles. My P3P review can be found here, what I do have to add is below:

Persona 3 Reload rectified an incredible amount of issues I had with P3P, a game which I played last year as it hit PC for the first time, jumping my Persona 3 experience from a 2.5 star to a 4.5 star rating. What did the Persona Team do in this recreation of a fan favorite? Viewable character models!!! Though that is a tremendous boon to my enjoyment of this title, it was just the tip of the "wow this is pretty damn good" iceberg that is Reload. Improvements made to the OST, design, and combat all turned this experience from a simple rehashing of a game I found decent at best to my smash hit of 2024.

"Persona Vibes" have been a joke in my friendgroup for some time... that silly stupid smile you get from simply existing in the Persona world going to school at whatever institution MC-Kun attends with the whatever group of misalined teammates that you call your friends with some of the best soundtracking to grace the medium of videogames... but damnit if it isn't really a thing and doesn't hit as hard as it does. The jump from Portable to Reload for me was a massive reward in this regard, just being able to run around Tatsumi Port Island with a high-definition display and consistently present hip-hop music creates an amazing vibe you can only get from Atlus' marquee franchise. I felt a noticable lack of buy-in to the world and characters at hand in Portable when I was mousing over and clicking on still profiles, it means so much more being able to physically approach and interact with the richly variable (yet still not deep) cast in terms of creating immersion. While I still don't find myself as into the cast of P3, nor the location (since its so small in comparison to P4 and P5,) it's still Persona at its roots. Maybe if I'd played FES or the original release, my approach to P3R would be a little more tempered, however I can't stress enough how nice it was to actually experience the world. I didn't forsee this being as much of a difference maker in my enjoyment of P3 (because I still have my issues with the game) as it was, but it did rectify the absence of Persona DNA and feel that existed in Portable.

As I've touched on a couple of times now, Lotus Juice and company did a fantastic job modernizing the work they and Shoji Meguro did in Persona 3's original OST. The instrumentation and mixing sounds far superior than in the original P3 suite, with the modern renditions of songs like Changing Seasons and the Dorm Theme (oh my gosh, they really did fix the dorm theme from the horrendous HEY HEY HEY version) as examples. It's more crisp, goes along with the redone and colorful locale, and lends itself to a more seamless Persona-experience. What I had originally imagined would be just a simple re-use of the already pretty strong P3 OST ended up as my front runner for Soundtrack of the Year. Normally I wouldn't count remaster/remakes/ports in this category but the lifting job in Reload to take an already great work of music into the stratosphere is as commendable as you can get.

I applaud the improvements made to integrating your party more into seeming like actual members of your crew through linked episodes which feed directly into the combat boons that are Theurgy's. Having a sort of ultimate attack/limit break in Persona is much needed for some of the longer weakness-lacking boss encounters, which are a plenty in P3R. You fight a lot of rather tough and long winded enemies in this game and it's nice to have a way to blast through that a little quicker while still having to retain a sound strategy and mind.

The negatives that existed within my P3P review that still remain in P3R include: horrible social link optics in many arcana's (Maiko, Maya, Kenji to name a few) which unfortunately were not re-written/fixed, abysmally slow pacing in the early sections of the game, and tartarus being the worst in-game mandatory dungeon in gaming (that I've experienced.) While these negatives still remain, the good in P3R was pretty damn good and enough to offset any and almost all sour feelings I had with my experience in P3P.

While it's not flawless, Persona 3 Reload rectifies Persona 3's biggest issues and breathes elysian life into a game that had the ingredients for a fantastic dish. I'd recommend Persona 3 Reload to fans of Persona and JRPG's alike, it's one of the best experiences I've had in a GOOD WHILE in games and has left a Persona sized hole in my heart once again. I mean with no announcement for Persona 6 what do I even do? Are there otherr games out there?

Starved Ocean

Star Ocean is a franchise that remained largely out of my view for most of my life as I didn't make the crossover to JRPG's formally until I played FFX after it hit the Switch in 2018 or so. As a result, many famed series' borne from the Golden Age 90's flew under my radar and I didn't have a chance to experience them until fairly recently. Over time I've tried to dabble into many of these in an attempt to understand gaming history and get a taste of the genre as it grew. I didn't "play" my first Star Ocean until the Divine Force demo release on PS5, immediately confused by the plethora of mechanics going on and monotonous combat I dropped it. I'd only gotten into it because of name recognition, knowing that Star Ocean was one of the "big" Square/Enix titles from the SNES/PS1 era, but dropped it because I figured it wasn't going to be up my alley. I didn't want to remove Star Ocean from my lexicon though, because I'd known that a unanimously "good one" had to exist out there somewhere, and with The Second Story getting the remake treatment... I figured it was time.

Upon launch of Second Story R, I immediately fell in love with the science fiction setting and incredible HD-2D visuals. As a big fan of the graphical direction of the Octopath/Triangle Strategy team, Star Ocean's graphical sheen was an immediate reward to my eyes. I paused every few moments of meeting characters, running through villages, and existing within the world to take screenshots and send friends images from my playthrough. Enamored I was by the world and the plot leaving your imagination of what could happen next to a pilot landing in an unfamiliar world. That's kinda where the praise stops unfortunately, as the curtain fell pretty quickly after that into my Second Story R playthrough... along with my rating.

The bad wasn't necessarily as grating as a lot of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's bad was for me (which I reviewed recently,) it was just confusingly grating. To start is the seemingly random difficulty spikes and settings of Star Ocean: The Second Story R. I played on the "normal" difficulty equivalent for a majority of the game and it felt, fairly hard. I figured with some time dedicated to grinding that I could make the experience easier for myself and breeze through what I considered to be the "tougher" dungeons at the time. I found out after about two hours of grinding and gaining some thirty plus levels that there was no different "feel" in my strength levels. Enemies could still one shot you and perma stun your party with remarkable ease, your characters didn't feel like they did any better damage per hit, and the game didn't actually get any easier. Now this changed a bit later on as I grinded north of level 100 and gained new abilities for my secondary party members because they gained access to new spells that seemed to disrupt more and do more damage, but they got one shot just the same. All the way from world enemies to dungeon encounters to the final suite of bosses, I found myself furiously mashing resurrect items and healing spells to get through encounters that felt like they should have been a breeze with how much I grinded. I spent hours effectively AFK just listening to my own music while I ran around in circles soaking free exp, and nothing actually felt easier. I tuned up my stats across the board, which mediated issues I had with the difficulty, but I was still dying with 9999 hp from petrifications and paralysis' all the same.

This brings up another issue I had with Star Ocean... information and skill overload. I joke a lot about how Persona 5 effectively tutorializes the player for the first like, fifty hours of gameplay, but hey nothing feels confusing or rushed at that point in the game. Within the first few hours of Second Story R, the entire skill tree and IC/Speciality suite is opened up to the player to understand and dive through. It's more than just levelling up your attack, magic, and defense. It opens up the Pickpocketing, Crafting, Music, Writing, Alchemy, Cooking, list goes on trees that the player is supposed to fully understand. From what I knew with my experiences with these tertiary skills is that they accented the player and made it easier for me to level and be strong... but outside of training and scouting I had absolutely no idea. I couldn't tell how worth my time it was to construct books to level attack or perform songs to summon certain enemies because the tradeoffs were completely unclear and the materials necessary to do so were obfuscated or gated behind currency. This resulted in my levelling up train (sacrificing damage for exp gain) and scouting (populating more enemies on the world map) so I could stand still and let my characters go to town on consistently spawning enemies. I'm not sure if this was the best way to go about it, but I didn't want to have to study Star Ocean tactics for longer than I did to understand it. Grinding is pretty much never fun in games, especially in older JRPG's where the heal/save options aren't as desirable as they probably could be, but Star Ocean's levelling systems felt like watching paint dry, but the paint occasionally personified to get up and slap you in the face before going back to the fence it was being applied to.

Combat was bad, voice acting even worse, and the plot was lukewarm at best. Star Ocean: The Second Story R was an ultimately milquetoast experience that I'm not really even glad I got to play. It lands and bombards the player with lots of great visual fidelity (and the cutscene work/character portaits are rather impressive throughout) but lacks the sticking power to create a compelling experience worthy of note. I cannot recommend Star Ocean: The Second Story R to anybody except maybe fans of the old Action JRPG genre.

Not Funny: Didn't Laugh

I can hardly muster up the strength to review Immortals: Fenyx Rising. It's such an affront to every thing I deem "positive" within the history of gaming and the industry at large that it's honestly hard to narrow down in an honest and complete writeup. It's more Ubisoft garbage, meant in with full connotation of what such terminology in 2024 could possibly bring. Want your towers? You got it! Want your frivolous objectives to complete? You got it! Want your battle pass thrusted into your eyes at every conceivable moment (including completion of the game?) You got it!!!!!!!!! Hey and to chase that all down, we'll even include a faux mouse on the menu screen for controller instead of letting d pad select what you want... because why not!

Genuinely little to nothing about this game was good except for the fact that it was easy on the eyes? The terrain looked pretty swell, and the game ran crisply at high settings throughout... but man the world was lifeless and filled with nothing to interact with. I get that it's effectively the story driven playfield of Prometheus and Zeus as they telll the tale of your titular "hero," but the world felt pointless to explore. For a game that is as shamelessly a Breath of the Wild knockoff as Immortals, you'd think they'd have understood that part of what makes Zelda special (especially BotW) is that the world that is out there is teeming with life and fresh experiences to be had. You can find new villages with new NPC's that are sure to give you dialogue with sharp wit or humor along a hopefully interesting task. This title has none of that, it has vaults for you to complete... challenges for you to painstakingly comb through. Because why become inventive with your copycat title when you can simply become lazy?

I spoke briefly about the narration from the legendary titans in Zeus and Prometheus, and I'll warn the reader that this remains a constant throughout the entire game. From minute one to the end, these two narrate your every move and try their hardest to be "funny" the whole time. I won't try to argue that I know the complete definition of "humor," but the constant attempts at creating jokes and funny hee hee ha ha's wore thin as soon as it could. Again, the beauty of BotW and TotK lies within how many moments are spoken by the player's mind. The journey Link shapes as he explores Hyrule and takes in the sights and sounds of a boundless expanse lie ultimately in origin to the person guiding it. Immortals throws this all in the garbage, drives it to the incinerator, and turns the flames to their hottest temperature. No moment can be truly taken in by the player and enjoyed as is with the two speakers accompanying every single step.

I can't with good confidence recommend anyone play Immortals Fenyx Rising. This game isn't fun, it isn't funny, and it was surely a waste of the time and $6 spent on it.

Dragon's Dogmeh

I feel like I've been collectively gaslit by the gaming world for the better part of a decade after finally getting to play Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen. Throughout the past eleven years post release, I'd heard of Dragon's Dogma as this legendary cult classic from Capcom that championed a great game filled with the Western approach to wizardry and fantasy. A process unlike myself, I bought DD before really looking into anything about how it played or what made people so excited for its incoming sequel. I figured that as a fan of Capcom's marquee titles and RPG's rich in scope and lore in general that I would take to it, but I did not. It's like ordering a Whopper because you thought you were going to get a succulent juicy hamburger like in the photo, but instead you got two patties enveloped in year old mayonnaise and someone's Burger King Foot Lettuce.

This is genuinely one of the worst looking games I've played, and I will go as far to say that playing Metal Gear Solid (a 1998 release) for the first time a year or two ago, I'd rather look at the four polygons that make up Otacon's face than half the characters in DD. Everyone looks so... off, a far cry from how great Capcom's facial and character design would look a few years down the line. In terms of the character elements of DD, the VA is real real real bad, which is unfortunate because there are some recognizable names, most notably David Lodge, but the title simply feels bad to listen to.

The narrative is... boring, effectively not existing until the latter half of the second act, and then materializing moreso in the third. Nothing really inspires you to care about this drab and boring world. Even Shadow of the Colossus, a game I absolutely despised at least looked more interesting and had more intrigue into its boneless landscape, Dragon's Dogma's world and capital city of Grandsys just kinda feel like Diet Water. For how much you have to run in this game, which is a lot, the world does little to nothing to engage with the player. Recycled enemies placed in locations just simply because the devs felt like they needed enemies, which breaks the rhythm of travel, made traversal feel worse than it already did. Because the devs don't believe in fast travel, something ultimately too convenient and useful, you have to run from point A to point B and then back to point A every time. This feels awful the first time you do it, and then the second time, and then the third time, and so on and so forth. Add into the mix that you're operating off of a scant stamina bar outside of hub worlds and your perception of getting anywhere in a reasonable amount of time crumbles to dust.

My real favorite part about Dragon's Dogma is how the damage is calculated. In most RPG's, and many games outside of the genre, you have a clear progression route for weapons and gear. You start weak and then upgrade your way to bigger and better items. In a game like Dark Souls for example, you have clear points in which you realize you should probably be levelling up your weapons, it's those moments where you're conceivably doing less damage to enemies and bosses than you feel like you should. You can still conquer any foe, but you have to put in more and more work when the world becomes stronger and your weapons relatively become weaker. In DD, your weapons at a certain point simply do not hurt the enemy. This concept is so laughably flawed that I found myself doing the Jackie Chan meme face from like fifteen years ago at my computer screen on multiple occasions. I get having a sign of "maybe you should upgrade your weapons" but getting into it with a group of bandits or goblins and slapping Sauron with a literal wet noodle that didn't even touch the health bar was incredibly bad game design.

I'm adding another miscellaneous complaint here about silent protagonism. I love having this emotional and lore heavy moment going on and my character is just standing there, mouth agape like she was waiting for a bowl of Golden Grahams with a little itty bitty scoop of milk included. For a game that relies upon the actions of your character and how they shape the entire world at large for the infinite future, there is a resounding lack of feeling important in Dragon's Dogma.

I can't recommend this game for anyone, and it solely (along with dev comments about fast travel) made me take any interest in the sequel away. It's ugly, it plays ugly, it's dated, it's Dragon's Dogmeh.

Baldur's Deflate 3

It's been a long time coming and it's finally came, for Bun B Weepboop to get his shot at the game and the results are... well... we beat it? Last year was filled with a plethora of large-scale video game releases and unfortunately a finite amount of time to play them. In my quest to play as many GOTY nominees and new titles as I could, I had to prioritize games based upon the feasibility of completing them within a certain time frame and their general approach of play. In deciding how I wanted to tackle the year, this led myself to selecting long RPG's like Final Fantasy XVI and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in lieu of other nominees like Marvel's Spiderman 2 and the relevant Baldur's Gate 3. I dodged Baldur's Gate largely because of the time investment necessary and my life embarking on an increasingly busier schedule, but a large part of my avoidance came down to the fact that it is a Larian Studios CRPG. I'd previously put thirty or forty hours into Divinity Original Sin 2 to milquetoast results, the game was fun to play with friends but its open-ended quest design and generally uninteresting world and narrative failed to pull me in. With Baldur's Gate 3 finally on sale and a new year on the horizon, I purchased it with the intent to play it as soon as I returned to my home and computer following a vacation.

Just about everyone I know fell head over heels with this game, either because they were D&D heads and had finally gotten their video game manifestation of the years playing the legendary tabletop IP, or because they found the near infinite possibilities of exploration and quest-solving attractive. I lent my ear to each of these people and their affinity towards BG3, happy for them to get the lengthy RPG it seemed forever wanted by the gaming world, but thinking I would personally never touch the game. I asked and listened to each one my friends and peers about the who's, what's, when's, and why's of why Baldur's Gate 3 was so good before I ever thought about my purchase. The common answers melted down to the lengthy involved questlines, rich world with decades of lore attached, a complicated D&D combat and world traversal mechanic, and a narrative ever so mysterious. Going into it, this was quite attractive for the most part, despite gaming as a genre having been fairly in depth and mechanically significant since the advent of the new millennia, it's felt like we've been continuously chasing a title in which our choices sincerely mattered and the agency of us within a fantasy world was paramount. If only this legitimately held true in Baldur's Gate... more to come on that later.

I'll start with what I liked about the game, and maybe that will diverge into my issues and qualms with it as well, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. One of the many things I didn't like about Divinity Original Sin 2 (DOS2) was its heightened level of ambiguity in quest design and locations. The journal, or attempt at one, within the game would say things along the like of "Well we talked to a wizard, wizards know magic, maybe somewhere on this island there is a wizard who likes magic a lot" and that would be your clue to find a magic spell to continue upon your journey, without an indication of where specifically to go. Of course this is a slight hyperbole but it was a microcosm of a challenge I had with narrative direction in Larian's previous large scale effort. In BG3 I largely didn't have that issue, as there was a "show on map" option for many of the questlines, all of which seemed to quickly update for new direction once new information was discovered along the journey. I've ranted and raved about quest marker design and the general lack of knowing where to go in games quite often in my reviews thus far, and I have to give credit to Larian for understanding the QoL this brings to BG3. I don't have the wherewithal anymore to exhaustingly read each note or follow each fine word of dialogue as to my next movements within the story, that would be unfair to the average gamer and attention span within the 21st century. What I do have is the ability to recollect summarized information and work with general hints as to where to move next, and BG3 did a fairly good jo overall with that.

Outside of that, there were a few items in which I was generally impressed with BG3 and greatly surprised about going into it. Majorly was the effort put into making the characters of the game complicated and fleshed out against the lukewarm and mostly uninteresting narrative at hand. Each character within your party, should you recruit them (of which I successfully did with each able NPC,) is vastly different and has their own motivations to move through the world and story of Baldur's Gate. Your interactions and conversation with Karlach will forever and always be different than they are with Astarion, and likewise with Gale, Shadowheart, etc... Though I had significant issues with the way a majority of these plotlines resolve, I have to give the staff at Larian some serious credit for crafting the stories of your constituents and making them relevant all the way until the end of the title. In an RPG, the motivations behind your party members to continue along the journey with the main character is integral for creating a believable and striking story. Even in some of my favorite titles of all time, the mark here is missed (cough Final Fantasy cough,) but BG3 was able to tie in the cast with the story. For the most part this was a success, and this is tough to do without divulging spoilers, but one of my most significant gripes with this game was the actual difference you make in their lives upon the completion of the game. Though I felt like the characters were intricately written and different from one another, each with their own needs and values that applied to defeating the big bad and moving on with their lives, I couldn't help to care for just about any of them.

In an effort to be unique, I felt like certain party members were different just for the sake of being different and had no legitimate value to care for. Like Gale is cool and all, and his plight of being an effective walking bomb is tragic, but what does he really do in conversation or in act throughout the entire 90 hour+ runtime for me to care about? Shadowheart's questline involves a deep and serious conversation about her faith and life up until the events of BG3, but why does that matter to me? Again, Wyll's character dilemma involves a binding contract with a devil that it is up to me and the gang to resolve... but why? And why does everything have to be an ultimatum? This felt like a cheap narrative mechanic that the majority of successful western RPG's I enjoy do not use. It's fine to have a tragic ending, it's okay to have characters die, but when you understand that each of the cast members within BG3 are going to have some tragic ultimatum at the end of their respective questlines, that becomes tired. I look at Mass Effect for example, another party based western RPG that I consider to be amongst my holy trinity (ME3, RDR2, and The Witcher 3,) which sees Commander Shepard and the Boys take on galactic big bads with the fate of the universe on the line. Your party members from game to game have their respective tragedies and relevance to the survival of the Normandy and galaxy, but they don't all involve some frustrating stipulation you have to grapple with at the end. One of my major gripes with BG3 is thus, resolving most of these questlines involves a sacrifice or impactful decision that doesn't feel necessary for the story of the game, rather just for emotional shock value. I cared about characters like Karlach, Astarion (sort of,) and Shart, but did I care about them enough to make the grand decision they are asking about? The answer resoundingly was no. In essence I felt like BG3 attempted to make the resolution of these questlines filled with a faux sense of gravity, and I'm not a fan of that.

You have a lot of scenes take place in camp with this cast in the first and second acts of the game, just for them to completely disappear in the third. I wasn't a fan of this rug pull as it personally felt like they ran out of ideas to make the in-between moments of BG3 interesting and focused on the players self-investigation of the end of the story.

I think a part of this manifested in the romance of the game, something that just about all my BG3 "super-fan" friends were quite into. Part of the fun in open-world/zone RPG's in which you control the avatar or social relationships of is choosing which of the games cast members you want to link up with. Now, I didn't really care about anyone in BG3 to that degree, as mentioned above most of the cast greatly waned on me in terms of care and motive, but I did try to pursue one for the why not of it all. This didn't work out, despite playing their storyline to perfection and pursuing their questline in the best of their interest, with max intrapersonal affinity, all because I missed a scene in Act 1. Now imagine I'm trying to move along the story and complete this game some forty hours later and can't move on with their relationship because of some error I didn't even know I didn't make in the first act. This more than anything felt cheap, as the game had not made any gravity of said moment clear down the line and did not indicate to me that I had missed anything. Several characters within the story approached my avatar for a relationship even though I didn't embark on this massive journey for them, and it had me pondering why this was so complex, and for what reason? Other RPG's made these romance and relationship checks much more cut and dry, and it worked far better in those scenarios. I hope the reader sees this moreso as a qualm with the lack of clarity in relaying plot/story checks to the player than anything else.


I've spoken on it a little before too, but the narrative of this game, something I thought would be the strong point of a near 100 hour experience, was genuinely unimpressive. It relies on a fairly tired fantasy trope in a world I as the player was wildly unfamiliar with. The story simply felt like something I was working towards, and not working with. The narrative at no point rather than the closing scenes of each act, felt like something I was actively involved in. There was no real attempt at worldbuilding, rather just letting you interact and converse with the denizens of the land about the respective plights within each act. I don't know, maybe as a Final Fantasy Fan (I hate that alliteration,) I'm a little spoiled about worldbuilding, but outside of the city of Baldur's Gate itself, do you really ever feel like you truly belong or understand the world of this title? My answer to that rhetorical is no. Even in a game like FFX, a short little cinematic of Tidus and the Blitzboys in Zanarkand gives you enough inference upon how the world is within that game. Beginning BG3 in a crashing Nautiloid with some vagrants who would inevitably become your party members, and no real hub world until the last act made me impartial to the world at large. Sure you have some inns and rests along the way, and a camp to call home but... it never felt to me like a place where I could see myself living in (in a fantasy setting.) Environmental buy in is something that matters to me a lot in a title like this, something that the aforementioned Witcher 3 knocked out of the park, going a mile to make the world Geralt takes on the Wild Hunt in feel like it’s a place he needs to defend and call home. In Baldur's Gate 3, in conjunction with the abrupt beginning of the game, I felt like I was rushed into a world I did not know, and simply had to pursue a big bad that was dead set on the destruction of a city I had never been to and did not care for. My plea throughout the ultimate act of BG3 to Larian Studios was to please make me care about this game, please make me care about these characters, please make me care about this world. The onus of buy-in should not be imparted upon the player, rather demonstrated by the game, and that I personally feel like BG3 missed out on by a country mile.

Another qualm I had with BG3 was the fact that I generally am not a fan of D&D, and not for the lack of trying. Now you may say, you idiot why are you playing a long winded narrative set in the historic world of D&D that utilizes D&D mechanics if you don't like D&D? I would reply with, well shut up! But, what comes with that is an unfamiliarity and general annoyance with the way the non-lore aspects of that IP are set up. To begin, every single aspect of this game is a dice roll... and I understand the reasoning behind that as I have played multiple campaigns of D&D, there is a nuance to discovery, speech, and combat that relies upon the chance of dice. Of course your character's intrinsic stats player a role in the success rate of these encounters, but largely you are at the mercy of chance. I dislike this... a lot, it makes for a bad video game experience. Is it true to form for the tabletop version of this IP? Yes! Do I like having to roll a dice for things like opening a chest that has two apples and a rotted herring? No! Do I like having to roll the dice because I'm trying to convince a talking cat to roll over on its paws? No! Do I like having to intimidate and persuade on a dice roll just to simply convince someone they smell funny? Also no. Of course those are probably all made up scenarios, but a general pull on the plight I had in the minutiae of BG3's over-reliance on dice rolls. For this reason combat was also aggressively annoying, every hit no matter how close or logical relied upon another series of hidden dice rolls. You had your chance to hit, the chance for the enemy to retort, the chance for an opportunity attack, the chance for a saving throw, the chance for this, the chance for that... it made for some seemingly unending fights with an over-reliance on re-loads, lest you wish to take the brunt of being burnt by RNG. I may be a little burnt after playing several Fire Emblem titles within the last year, in which the simple majority in an accuracy chart meant that you were likely to hit your opponent for full damage, but in BG3 with a 90% chance or greater likelihood to hit, I missed a frustratingly large amount. I legitimately never felt confident in my attacks, be it melee or at range, and again I understand this is true to D&D but man, it also felt true to a rather lukewarm combat experience.

To further the conversation about combat and a foreign experience with the inner trappings of D&D's long running history, I take issue with the fact that Larian did not feel it necessary to simplify or explain just about any of the mechanics of combat and status effects within the game. I hope you know what all the status effects do and how they combine, I hope you are privy to the advantages and weaknesses of spells and cantrips already, because this will not be tutorialized in the slightest for the player. I've joked before with my brother and friends about the tutorial section of Persona 5 and how it effectively lasts the first fifty hours of the >100 hour experience, but you know what it does do? Adequately explain the workings of another storied franchise and its involved mechanics and submechanics. Baldur's Gate has even more going on in the way that strengths, weaknesses, spells, counter-spells, and all the like interact, and it does almost zero to explain this to the player. Of course, should you have enough time to rival that of twenty year WoW vets to read every subtext of items and spells and their effects, you might know, but to the average joe these will go largely unexplained through the runtime of the game. Combine a obfuscated combat system with the "Oops-All-Enemies" nature of this game and you're in for a largely aggravating time. There were too many fights to count that started with the enemies of BG3 outnumbering your party four or more to one. This isn't the worst... in theory until you remember everyone has to act once before your turn relapses. I was in one of the last fights of the game just now and spent most of my time on the app formerly known as twitter, talking to a group of pals rather than having my hands on the keyboard ready to counteract whoever I was in combat with, because it took that long. This was uniform throughout an unfortunately long period of the game, outnumbered and outgunned, fighting powerful bosses that had their own unexplained gimmicks solved best by google and re-loaded trial and error rather than by working through the games motions. I get that its true to D&D to have fights in which the player is greatly disadvantaged in number and in locale, but as I mentioned above it really just makes for a gameplay experience most foul. I get why the narrative would want me to be locked in with a boss who has more than 600 hp and a cohort of demonic followers fighting at his behest, but is it fun? The answer reluctantly is no. This happened time and time again with slight variation, and I felt like what began as an enriching open-world experienced eventually led to a frustrating rehash of mechanics I disliked, over and over again.

Miscellaneous complaints to round this review out revolve around silent protagonism, a plethora of crashes and performance issues, and the abhorrent long rest mechanic. I chuckled a little too often at the emotionally heavy moments within the game in which a motivation speech was needed, or my character was having a heart to shadow-heart, only for my avatar to nod and say dialogue through text. I get that there's a lot of dialogue necessary in a game like this, and Larian likely wanted to truly convey that our avatar was an extension of ourselves... but to me it just felt like I was playing a boneless NPC. I did not feel like I mattered at all within the story, I was simply a vehicle for the plot. I did not understand my code of ethics, did I even have any? I couldn't grasp why anyone would consider me to be their leader or friend, I'd never even said a word. Baldur's Gate simply did not do a good job, in my humblest opinion, of making you the player character feel like a worthwhile member of your party. You could ask yourself "Who really is the main character" and I don't know if there's an answer.

In the end, I can't recommend Baldur's Gate 3 to anyone who values a strong narrative, freetime, or a game worth playing. It was pretty, I didn't want to put it down, but it eventually became a frustrating gameplay experience in a world I found largely uninteresting.

I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down
And the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns
The ring of fire

"Haahahahaha how the f*** is cyber bullying real hahahaha just walk away from the screen like just close your eyes"

It's always tough to take apart RGG's games in a review setting because I don't like to divulge spoilers, so I will remain abstinent in doing so here, but Lost Judgment is a tremendous step up from its predecessor while also suffering from the same good 'ol RGG trappings of years previous. What began as a mundane story investigating the gossip heavy bullying scenes of a yuppie high school in Ijincho quickly developes into a multi-faceted Batman-esque snafu stretching multiple generations. As is tradition with RGG, the spider-webbed nature of the story will grasp you as soon as you start to put the pieces of its mystery together. Moral greys run amock around both Yokohama and Kamurocho, forcing Yagami to side with previously sinister factions and tackle what it truly means to be just. He's a detective, lawyer, and ass-kicker all in one within this story, something that the previous title didn't hit all in one go to the degree I'd looked for.

As is second nature with the Like a Judgement games, therein lies a strong supporting cast that cascades the emotional moments into memorable sequences. Strong characters like Higashi, Suigura, the Genda Law crew, and Kaito are a fitting cast for Yagami's brazen attitude towards solving conflict, each lending a unique approach and a fresh state of mind to problem resolution. Mix this in with some of the best voice acting I've heard in a game in a long time (Greg Chun reprises his role as totally not Kaname Date, Steve Blum as Higashi, ProZD/Sungwon Cho as Tesso all for example) and you have one of the better crews in contemporary media. Just two short games spent with this crew and they feel familiar, like friends that are legitimately down to ride and invested in Yagami's mission and detectively mantra.

I enjoyed the game overall bigtime, however the typical Yakuza/RGG trappings hit me like a wall of bricks. Ah yes I do enjoy running to my objective to see every street obstructed by four to five hooligans in which I will beat the exact same way each time. Ah yes I do enjoy having to fight through four hundred miscellaneous members of "insert bad gang here" before the ending credits. Ah yes I do enjoy employing the same asinine sneaking mechanics and going through some slippery parkour sequences that felt like jumping through zero gravity bubbles of molasses. Even with an elite story, magnificent supporting crew and another excellent display of protaginism with Yagami, the issues I have with RGG still remain as an indictment onto my enjoyment of the game. For any fans of RGG at large I recommend Lost Judgment, and if you haven't played any of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon titles, Judgment and Lost Judgment are a good place to start.

The good, the bad, and the... Starfield.

I was a believer, I really was. I didn't dislike Fallout 4 as much as most of my constituents and peers, and decided to waste none of my time on Fallout 76. Despite going on a somewhat downward trajectory since the release of Oblivion, I had faith that with the Microsoft purchase and subsequent fiscal investment that Todd "It Just Works" Howard was going to be able to Houdini an amazing game out of effectively thin air with Starfield. I, like many others waited with bated breath as the marketing wave for Bethesda's newest IP in decades pushed into the gamingsphere. WIth every announcement, every showcase, I became more and more invested in the world I would soon embark in. Science Fiction when done right is an exploration of limitless possibilities, of worlds and galaxies foreign to the audience waiting to be freshly explored. This is what my dream for Starfield was, and did I get it? The answer is simply: not really.

Fallout and the Elder Scrolls succeeded in the moments in between, starting with the trademark cold opens (as seen in Oblivion, Skyrim, and the Fallouts) and continuing on to your first moments of freedom. Remember in Skyrim as you escape the executioner's block in the first thirty minutes of runtime, how the entirety of the land the Nords call home is open to you? You have a loosely defined main quest to embark on, but there is an entire world and path to craft between you and your destination. Nothing is forced. Once you began to creep into the stories of each respective game, it felt like there was a limitless possibility of what you could find on your way from Point A to Point B. In Fallout, walking through a simple cliff face could see you crossing path with an entire colony of people with the name "Gary" all yelling their name as they attacked you without rhyme or reason. In Oblivion on your way walking through the countryside could find the player interacting with a formidable prince of an otherworldy deity.

Starfield however, it never had that... magical spunk that the aforementioned titles did. In Starfield you spend the majority of your time doing two things: chasing down quest markers and flying to said quest markers. In theory this isn't a terrible idea, effectively the other titles are all about the same thing, but the issue in translating that mantra to Bethesda's big 2023 title is that there is no in between. Now much against my chagrin this is my biggest gripe with the game, the inability to have a reason to explore and the lack of reward of doing so. As I mentioned previously, in the "good" Bethesda titles I found myself overjoyed at taking the long way because it meant that I was likely to find myself distracted and taken on a path to a babbling brook of curiosities. In Starfield, this doesn't exist as it takes the form of grav jumping from system to system (as your ship's capabilities allow) with complete lack of middle ground. You fly from your starting point to your destination, there is no random occurrence, there is no vista to pause at along the way, there is no mysterious force that will stop you in your tracks to explore. Not having anything to look forward to in my active journey in a Bethesda game just felt... wrong. They'd always been the antithesis of the open world epidemic as sprung by Ubisoft, which had towers to climb and random outposts to capture. Bethesda titles championed the random and gave you a reason, completely unprodded to explore. That wasn't present here. It's hard to stress how strange it felt getting an objective for a faction that was taking you to a world a plethora of lightyears away only for it to require the same sequence of system jumps that the twenty quests before it did, the only variance being the end destination. As I mentioned previously, this was my greatest and gravest letdown with Starfield and an unfortunate result of a scope that didn't quite meet expectations.

There's another avenue of complaint to my issues of exploration and scope, and it is in the worlds of Starfield at large. My next statement may gesture itself as hyperbole but I assure the reader that I mean it in sincerity: I found there was genuinely nothing interesting about the planets in Starfield. Outside of legitimately well constructed cities like Neon and New Atlantis, the planets you do land on for side and main stories alike felt completely lifeless. Recycled clear procedural generation made for planet after planet of monotony with no motivation to poke around in other than completing a flora & fauna scanning log and collection of materials for resource crafting that I also found rather unengaging. Starfield didn't position itself to be No Man's Sky in that aspect and the expectation of the general public for it to be so is completely unfounded and misguided. But in the times I did find myself off the beaten path on the seemingly endless worlds at large, it was simply a nothing burger out there. I'd look out at the vast expanse of the freshly landed-upon planet and continue straight on my way, as there was nothing for me to poke around and find.

This takes me to my next issue with Starfield, and I promise this review is not just a laundry list of problems I had with the game, as I am giving it a favorable score. I touched previously on the great job the (recent) Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles did, and that was give the player an organically engaging approach to side content in the ways of questing and base building. Starfield sort of just... dumps everything on you pretty much right away. Quickly jaunting through New Atlantis (the game's starting city and most important location,) dumps more quests on you than you can count, and they are almost all unprovoked. By walking through each district the activity log grows with people you need to speak to and places you need to find as a result of NPC's conversating about them to eachother. This in particular felt strange to me, you were no adventurer in need as you were in the Elder Scrolls helping the woman in her painted world, you were just an eavesdropper who heard a character complaining into the void. This didn't necessarily impact the quality of the sidequests, but beginning the game with four factions dropped on your and a laundry list of people I needed to seek out before even beginning the second main story quest was numbing.

My favorite part of this game was easily the factions and side content that it throws at you, despite the awkward nature that you first interact with it. I loved the way the factions worked and varied from one another. If you wanted to dabble in humorous corporate espionage, you had the Ryujin Industries questline. If you wanted to embark on a well thought out space pirate adventure (and who doesn't,) you had the Crimson Fleet storyline. Players looking for an excellent piece of science fiction with an incredible twist, there was the UC Vanguard. And lastly for cowboys, you had the uh, Freestar Collective. Each of these brought something new to the questing and enjoyment table that the other ones didn't, and I found the bulk of my seventy hour runtime was spent with these storylines and the missions throughout. I greatly enjoyed the variation of writing styles, mission structure, and combat that were involved and showed that Bethesda in all of its recent faults still had some incredible scenario writers on retainer.

I left out a faction, and that one would be "Constellation" AKA the main story questline. Because of the nature that Starfield drops its side content on you, I made sure to do as much as I could of it first before engaging with the main scenario. This meant for practically fifty hours I had gone without talking to the members of my crew patiently waiting for me in New Atlantis to set the events of the story in motion. By the time they had asked and instructed me to explore the galaxy, I had already done so. I had done things that led me to interesting storylines and met many interesting people. I'd been to the other two major cities in the galaxy, Neon and Akila City. I had already travelled from one end of the explorable system to the other and had weapons that could one or two shot most opponents. The point of the above is to effectively say that the main scenario felt diluted after doing the side content. I felt like I was saving the best for last, but in reality I had set aside the most mediocre and uninteresting narrative in the game which is... unfortunate to say the least for what is the main story. Maybe unfair because the tertiary questing in the Elder Scrolls/Fallout series was also probably more "fun" than the respective narratives of each game's set path, but the gap was just too large in Starfield. I didn't feel a connection to quite literally anyone in the faction that you fight tooth and nail with to protect. Sarah had a moral compass and ability to annoy you more than Fi did in the original Skyward Sword, Stroud was fun for the few missions you had with him but ultimately was a rich playboy, Sam was a boring version of Irvine from FFVIII, Vasco was a robot doing the recycled dry humor robot schtick, Barrett was supposed to be someone we cared about, and Andreja was just kinda... there. I couldn't empathize with a group like Constellation and their ongoing mission if I couldn't connect with any of the group. I felt a connection to the plight of Martin Septim and Jauffre in Oblivion, I felt a connection to the issues plaguing my father and the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 3, I didn't get that in Starfield. Every time I walked into The Lodge (Constellation's hub area,) I did a side eye at those around me. I just felt... 100% detached from a group I was meant to empathize with. I know they're completely of different strokes, but its impossible not to think of a series like Mass Effect and how it quickly got you to care about each of your party members in its expansive sci-fi narrative. Bethesda's never been about that to the same degree but man, it just makes you think.

Honestly thinking about it too, you just straight up don't matter in this game other than an advancement to the plot. Once more, I don't really expect too much more from Todd and his expertise but there came a point towards the end of the game where I read some testimonials from my brother and others who were also playing and came to the question: Am I really present in the story? I don't have the opportunity to say anything very interesting, I'm quite literally just the vehicle for a questline that chooses you as important within an hour of the game. I'm not the dragonborn, I'm not the son of an important figure reshaping a wasteland, I'm not the father of a child whose importance is likely beyond my scope... I'm just a character who touched a rock. Not the end of the world, but it made me ponder my actual intentions and level of engagement with the world(s) at large.

Speaking of engaging... you know what's really hard to engage with even with an Nvidia 3090 GPU? Ding ding ding... it's Starfield! Performance in this game on a good rig is straight up inexcusable and is responsible for a large degree of my detriment to this game, even more so than the previously mentioned dissent on worlds, questing, and player agency. I have a good rig, I'm fortunate enough where I'm at a position to be playing with effectively top of the line hardware... I should not be able to see Steam's frame counter register sub thirty in combat towards the end of the game. This is not okay. First person shooters are not fun below a certain threshold and Starfield managed to reach it. One of my favorite gaming experiences of all time, Bloodborne, saw its personal rating fall by quite a bit from me because it was locked at thirty on the PS4 and that was a third person action game! Starfield is a first/third person shooter in which aiming is... important! Movement and tracking is... important! Running around Akila City and feeling like I was in slow motion because of how astonishingly low the framerate was felt like a slap in the face to me as the player. Even Cyberpunk ran better at launch... on worse hardware!!! Sometimes I would find reprieve in smaller zones inside cities or at space stations where I was able to hit a reasonable seventy to eighty frames per second, but these moments were remarkably few and far between. The majority of my seventy hours of Starfield were spent sub fifty and I can sacrifice framerate SOMETIMES for fidelity and beautiful vistas... but that was not present in Starfield. When it was running well the game looked good but not great, not worthy of the tradeoff that came in the form of gutter-level performance.

The framerate issue made combat tougher than it should have been. I didn't expect fighting in any way to be the best part of Starfield, as it decidedly isn't in any Bethesda game, but it was another element of this game that added my ultimate takeaway of "meh" as I saw the end credits roll. The guns didn't feel very interesting to me as they were all variations of familiar Fallout formulas but without the nuance and strategy of V.A.T.S. You use shotguns, snipers, pistols, melee, and lasers to cut your way through unimportant humanoid and arachnid enemies alike just as you did in Fallout. Aiming though was a nice callback to the pre-Oblivion days where it felt like a complete dice roll. I laughed at the amount of times I'd have my reticle on enemies only to whiff shot after shot after shot because the combat mechanics of Starfield deemed a miss necessary. I was never frustrated... just confused.

Combat leads into another point of contention I had with Starfield: space flight. Not only is the shipbuilder resoundingly obtuse and unfair in the way it gates creativity, but actually employing the ship you carefully crafted in a combat scenario is a most woefully uninteresting and grating endeavor that I could have easily gone without. Dogfighting is a tall task to make work, but EA and Pandemic studios were able to do it with Battlefront way back in 2005. It wasn't complicated, as it was a simple follow and target system, but it was fun. Starfield's space combat requires the player to face slam three attack buttons that control cannons, missiles, and lasers, until however many ships you are forced to defeat have been silenced. The tracking system was a dud, and I didn't want to chase the skill tree to make it any better as I knew that would take away my enjoyment of more tangible and useful things like the persuasion system or on-world combat. If you accidentally ported to a system that had space pirates or enemies target you upon entry and didn't have enough ship parts to heal right away, you were effectively S.O.L. Enemies have a tendency to fly right over you and evade your targeting, forcing the player to spend an awkward amount of time just so they can recalibrate. Weapons had an annoying level of recharge period that took the active interest and engagement levels of the fights completely away. For something I really wanted to love and have that simply living-out-my-Star-Wars-dream-jubilee with, I was rather against ever partaking in. All in all, I stopped having fun with a lot of the appeal of the title real quick.

Starfield was a game meant for a lot of people, it is Bethesda's first big IP in too many years to count and unfortunately, it missed my mark by a long shot. What I had hoped would be a game to rival FFXVI for my GOTY spot, is really nothing more than another candle in the wind. Starfield is a game somebody is going to enjoy, but not me. If I want to build outposts and get some sort of vindication in doing so, I could play Satisfactory. If I want to dogfight, I'll just jump on Ace Combat. If I wish for an engaging first person shooter, I can get back into DOOM. If I want peak Bethesda, I have my Oblivion GOTY edition sitting on the shelf next to me. I can't recommend Starfield and it breaks my heart. It's the first time I've played a Bethesda game and truly felt indifferent. I reached the credits and I didn't clap, I didn't smile, I did the worst thing imaginable... I asked my friends to play League of Legends.

Full Series Playthrough Review
What an absolute gem. I was turned off by the gameplay as a kid, but I got used to it this time and DAMN this game is tight. Polished to a shine, everything is meaningful and interesting. If its in the game, its worth seeing and doing which is such a breath of fresh air.

Because of this, the game is very short. I'd make that trade every time. Everything that I loved about later Fallouts from the aesthetic, to the characters, to the interconnectivity is here without the fat.

Fallout 1 takes YOU seriously, and if you do the same for it, you'll have a great time.