There are few gameplay mechanics I have the kind of contentious relationship with that I do with the Pipe Dream hacking minigame of the original BioShock. It feels a little bit like a bipolar marriage, or an easy but tedious office job that holds your life together and ensures your civil safety while draining you of the will to live, each failure bringing you closer to just ending it, while every success feels hollow as you wait for the next puzzle that requires you to somehow guess that you must replace the first pipe to correctly direct the flow, or be chased by flying murder robots for 60 seconds. All because you just wanted a discount on those damn chips.

It's a necessity, one that has been decided for you. The illusion of choice is presented in the options to simply not hack the machines, or to bribe them (actually my favorite "hey did you know capitalism is BAD?" nod of the game) which will always pose a clear detriment to your well-being and success. But hey, it's your choice. Choice is what matters, freedom of choice is freedom of man. But not really. It's one of the central themes of the game, or something.

While not that deep, the moral and philosophical musings in this one are grounded, subtly reflected in the beautiful background you navigate as you do what you must do in Rapture. At no point is the mind-numbing, pretentious faux-intellectuality of BioShock Infinte even so much as approached.

I do not consider Ken Levine to be a creative genius. I do not consider him to be a particularly good writer either. Still, the atmosphere, the visual and level design and tight gameplay make the original in the series one of the most standout shooter experiences of its time. If only it could have been left at that...

Very fun little game. Striking visuals, great soundtrack, and fun puzzles. It never got too difficult but never felt too easy, which can be a very tricky thing to balance with puzzle games. One note though, is that it recommends playing on a controller and I'd strongly second that. Keyboard controls are serviceable but controller feels significantly better.

The New Game + playthrough is an interesting thing for a puzzle game to have but because most of the puzzle elements of the game are seeing an spot and trying to figure out how to get there, they're able to move the orbs around and make sort-of remixes of the puzzles without having to alter level geometry at all. I think some of the orbs have been moved to silly positions (like hiding them in a bush so you can't see it at all) but for the most part it's a fun addition if you want to play the game for another hour or so.

It's cool! It's got a strong opening and an interesting world that makes it genuinely fun to find the collectables and learn all the little extra bits of lore. The story does fall a bit flat in the end but it's mostly pretty good.

I'm not great with horror games but this one was barely a horror game for most of it. The jumpscares are cheap in the exact ways that all jumpscares are cheap. The chase sequences are never really scary they're just occasionally frustrating. And the ambiance is never quite right to make it properly spooky. But for me that's all totally fine because it meant I could actually play the game to completion!

I did have some gnarly texture glitches with somethings being extremely low-res despite having quality set to high (making some puzzles un-solvable) and, very occasionally, textures were completely missing. It doesn't seem like a super common issue but your mileage may vary.

After about seven hours (and 16 chapters?) I can't put up with this game anymore. The combat feels bad, the story is bland, the characters are mostly unlikable. There are plenty of interesting ideas and things that I want to like but none of it was coming together so I had to tap out. Seven hours oscillating between boredom and frustration is a lot more than I'd give to most games but The Last Story wouldn't give anything back.

The combat wants to be tactical but has too many limits on it for it to really give you the ability to think about engagements. You can order your allies to do specific actions but only when your meter has charged up enough so oftentimes they'll just hang out and maybe do something useful if they're feeling generous. You can use Gathering to draw aggro but I found that usually just results in death because of how limited healing is. The automatic attacking feels bad and makes it hard to move but manual makes it hard to dodge which became more and more necessary the further I went. It all felt so clumsy and like it needed some more refinement to make it all come together properly.

The characters. I wish I liked the characters. But Zael is just some bland guy, Calista is a generic love interest, Syrenne is 50% jokes about alcoholism and 50% sexual innuendo, Yurick is a jerk, and Lowell is a misogynist. Dagran and Mirania seemed alright, at least, but they weren't enough to salvage the cast.

The main plot is a pretty generic JRPG story, for better or worse. I've played more than enough of them to see this and have a solid idea of how it's going to play out and it wasn't enough to make me want to put up with any more of the un-fun combat to see it through.

Also, it is very funny to me that the title of this game is just a synonym for "Final Fantasy". They wanted it to be a Final Fantasy game so bad that they even named the dang game after it.

This is partially a review of the game itself but also a bit of a PSA about the fan translation of the game that was released a few months ago.

The game itself is better than I was expecting it to be. The combat is a pretty different system that attempts to make it much more like an actual MMA game with different fighting styles and making each one play a bit different. The story (as far as I got, I quit after about 10 hours due to technical frustrations- more on that later) is largely unremarkable. You play as Tatsuya (who I did not find to be particularly likable) and you fight people until you learn to become a better person while also discovering a secret plot within the Tojo Clan. The vast majority of side content is untranslated which is unfortunate because I think that is where the Yakuza games hold quite a bit of charm and where some of the most interesting world building is done.

Now, about the fan translation. Enough of the game has been translated where you can play through the entirety of the main story but most things outside of that have been left untranslated (and because of how the translation was done, the original Japanese text has been replaced with asterisks, meaning you can't even get a rough machine translation without a Japanese version of the game). That on its own wasn't enough to dissuade me from trying the game out but the translated version also has a lot of technical issues. Several segments of the game crash, opening certain menus can cause crashes, starting certain substories can cause crashes. Most of it can be worked around but it because so tedious and frustrating to deal with that I eventually tapped out and decided to wait/hope for a better and more complete fan translation to appear in the future.

So, overall, I would only recommend playing the game through this fan translation to the most diehard of Yakuza/RGG fans. Are you absolutely desperate to return to Kamurocho one more time and are willing to put up with all kinds of technical issues? Well then this game is there for you.

Maybe the most unfortunate thing is that I highly doubt this game will ever get a re-release or a remake. In interviews, it's never been brought up whereas RGG Studio have talked about wanting to do something for Kenzan and Ishin. So it seems this game and its sequel may be lost to time.

Watch_Dogs 2 is a pretty clear step up over the first game in every possible way. It feels better to play, the world is more interesting, much of the excessive fluff got trimmed out, and (most importantly) the characters are actually likable now! Marcus, Sitara, Wrench, Josh, and Horatio are all great characters that were a ton of fun every time they got to have some dialogue together.

The main story did have some issues in that it felt like disjointed series of short stories with little to no impact on one another. In addition to that, the antagonist feels like he only matters in a conceptual way rather than any him be any actual threat. This all made the story a little tough to feel motivated to complete and resulted in the ending feeling a bit flat.

My final issue is that the politics of this game are in a weird place. The game paints itself as very rebellious and anti-establishment and while it mostly is that, it doesn't seem to want to go all the way with it. For example, there's a mission where you find out that some cops are using data they get from ctOS to do illegal stuff with a gang. It'd be a great time for the game to go on about police abolition or about the ways in which police don't actually serve the people but instead it goes into a bland "we need to get rid of the Bad Cops so that the Good Cops can be in power instead" and it makes it fall flat. The whole game ends up feeling like it wants to be perceived as progressive and very far left when it really isn't.

But overall, it is an enjoyable thirty-ish hours. Not my favorite of Ubisoft's open world games but a very solid one.