As usual with my writing, this review is going to be focused on Final Fantasy VII Remake’s gameplay, an aspect of which I regard highly but might be easy to overlook for most people who play the game, mainly due to the game’s own fault. I did enjoy the game’s other aspects enough that it motivated me to play the original game to completion and I will leave it at that.

I played this game on a whim during the PC release, so I never got to experience the original PS4 release from which Intergrade apparently made many adjustments (changing animation canceling, adding unblockable telegraphs, changing how some materia work, adding quick retries).

When I first played it, I didn’t expect to like the combat much, I was just here to look at pretty characters and listen to good music cuz I was bored by everything else at the time, but was very pleasantly surprised by the combat system in play, so much so, that after reflecting back on it and replaying it multiple times since, I can easily say that this is best new combat system created within the last decade. A focus on resource management, controlling multiple characters at the same time and coordinating their actions, giving each of them compelling action mechanics that can feed into a game plan involving your full party, and nuanced defense compared to most action games make this one stand out from most of its peers. To try to describe why I like this combat system so much, I’d actually first want to talk about my biggest issue with it:

Enemy Health is too low.

Final Fantasy VII Remake’s battle system was designed by Teruki Endo, a Capcom game designer who has worked on the Monster Hunter series since Monster Hunter Tri. Given that Monster Hunter contains my favorite combat in video games bar none, it’s not a surprise I ended up liking this game so much. There are some shared elements in the design enough to make me suspect something after fighting the Type-0 Behemoth. For one, both of these games go out of their way to de-emphasize i-frames as a defensive mechanic, with Monster Hunter having very few to make you to consider many variables when trying to i-frame attacks, and FF7R choosing to have literally none, thus forcing you to heavily consider which attacks are dodgable and which you are better off blocking, and making your choice of direction and situation really matter when it comes to how you use the roll. The current trend of action games thrives on timing-based mechanics and challenges, this game and Monster Hunter are the only modern action games to my knowledge that deliberately make it so that good timing can’t nullify most attacks in the game, and that’s a breath of fresh air unlike any other for me.

To get back to my criticism of the game’s balancing, another similarity is that both of these games are designed with tanky enemies in mind. Much of the depth is placed in the realm of damage optimization. When the enemies are big damage sponges, players are forced to actually interact with the mechanics that allow them to maximize the damage they get from their openings. It’s an easy way to add a lot of depth to fights and make them really replayable as you learn how to take advantage of the patterns better to set up the perfect punishes. Whereas Monster Hunter creates the depth in its damage-dealing through complex weapon movesets that require precision and monster behavior knowledge to take advantage of, FF7R does it through a bevy of system mechanics that govern enemy states; a Stagger system that borrows heavily from FF13 but adjusting its dynamic to be more suited for a real time action game. However, when the enemies die too fast, most of that depth does not come into play.

So let’s get to the nitty gritty: How does this combat system work and how does high health make the game better?

The core mechanic of the game is ATB, a real time translation of the ATB system from the original where you waited for a bar to fill up before being able to perform any actions (spells, items, so on). In Remake, instead you fill up the ATB bar by controlling a character and hitting enemies or blocking attacks. Your choice of character to control is also the choice of who you are giving ATB to, as the other characters only gain ATB slowly when not being controlled. Carried over from the original, defensive and offensive actions both compete for ATB, but with Remake being more of an action game, damage is generally avoidable (but not always) and thus allowing yourself to lose a lot of HP means losing attack opportunities in the future with spending ATB to heal, as well as Mana which is a limited resource on Hard Mode.

I find it important to note the value added by attacks not always being avoidable in this system. Most action games stick to completely avoidable damage because heals/HP often represent a number of mistakes you can make before a Game Over, and healing commitments ala Souls usually just means needing to miss on an attack opportunity before commencing with the regular game, which is good for tension. But in FF7R’s case, the fact that healing takes from a dynamic resource which you actively create with your in-game actions gives it enough depth that it justifies having enemies be able to pepper you with chip damage or giving some bosses unavoidable attacks that make you consider protective spells and pressure you to keep your characters always topped up in health.It makes the resource management all that much more demanding when damaging enemies properly isn't the only thing you are thinking about, and the game goes the extra step of giving you a variety of different healing abilities with varying benefits and costs, allowing you to adjust the way you need to play around Health as a resource. An example would be the difference in using Cure, the regular heal that consumes ATB only heals one character at a time, or Pray, which requires two ATB but uses no mana and acts as a wide heal, letting you save mana for other actions but requiring a bigger commitment to use and smaller healing numbers offset by being an AOE heal.

To get into offensive uses of ATB, it’s mainly used to interact with the Stagger system and it’s what makes using all the characters effectively so important. The basic rules of this system is that all enemies have a Stagger bar under their regular health bar, which starts empty and when filled up puts enemies into a Stagger state (BURST in the Japanese version of the game) where the damage dealt is multiplied for a short period of time. The way in which the player increases the Stagger bar is something that can change completely depending on the enemy, but generally to really Stagger efficiently you need to put the enemy in Pressure state (HEAT in Japanese) where the enemy takes multiplied stagger damage. For most enemies hitting them enough or using elemental weaknesses can put them in Pressure state, and then using certain abilities that deal high stagger damage puts them in Stagger very quickly, and from then you use your pure high damage abilities to take advantage of the multiplier…
But an issue arises! Using your ATB bar to induce the Stagger state as quickly as possible often means you don’t have any ATB left to actually do much damage during your short burst window as your regular attacks don’t actually do much damage, making it feel wasteful and causing you to go back to square one trying to fill the stagger bar again. Careful management of all characters is how you play around this.
An example situation early in the game would be to have Cloud induce the Pressure state with his flurry of attacks, but not before you are sure Barret has a bar of ATB ready to hit them with Focused Shot once Pressure is induced, while Cloud saves his bar to deal big damage in the burst window. Another option would be delaying when you induce the stagger, use character specific mechanics or materia setups that give you additional ATB when you need them, and many other possibilities. But the point is that you can easily overspend ATB to achieve Stagger, and the ways you can prevent this and balance this create very compelling moment-to-moment decision making and planning.

All the characters have extra mechanics that add layers to this Stagger system and ATB management. Barret has a big attack on a cooldown which gives an ATB on use, a free bar on short notice whenever needed while the cooldown is up, but it also makes you constantly need to keep Barret’s cooldown in your head while you switch to the other characters who are more efficient at dealing damage on their own so you can be ready to switch back to him when the time is needed. Tifa has a system where she can buff herself and expend those buffs to perform attacks that increase the Stagger damage multiplier, making you need to spend ATB stock her up with buffs before the Stagger is induced and having her do her attacks early in the Burst window in order to give other characters the chance take advantage of the increased damage.

But here’s the thing…optimizing ATB usage, becoming proficient at staggering enemies, and needing to consistently learn how to avoid attacks before their damage burns through your MP reserves isn’t something that will matter if the enemy dies too fast. For FF7R’s normal mode, that is the case most of the time, and even in its Hard Mode I’d say enemy health is still too low.

I think what I find amusing about this flaw is how it really is just enemy health that is the issue. The damage they deal is fine, the underlying mechanical design of nearly all the enemies and bosses is excellent, and the systems of the game scale very well. Installing a mod on the PC version that simply doubles the enemy health, making no other changes, actually makes the game a lot better in my opinion while still feeling very balanced and well paced combat wise. It shows how strong the core design of this game is that you can simply beef up stats like that and the skill ceiling is more than high enough for it to work, giving you the room to push yourself and letting you actually get exposed to the design of the enemies when you need to contend with them for much longer.

I get that this combat system can be pretty difficult to play properly and apparently people complained about bosses taking too long even in the vanilla game normal mode but It’s a massive shame that the game locks hard mode behind a full playthrough and it doesn’t give you many variables to adjust your own difficulty, since level ups are forced and your damage/health is always scaling with it. This wouldn’t be a problem if more difficulty options were present, but if the game really didn’t want extra difficulties, items that limit XP growth could have been cool too. Regardless of this, I still loved the game’s gameplay, and the existence of many challenge mods on PC allows the game to realize its full potential and I really recommend trying 2x HP even on your first playthrough.

Now I wanna get to the enemy design. While the regular encounters and enemies can be very fun too, the game shines brightest during boss fights, of which there are many. The game demonstrates very strongly how the mechanics of staggering change heavily per encounter with its first boss, the Scorpion Sentinel, who changes to a different method of stagger in each of its 4 phases. Initially it works like a regular enemy who just needs to be hit with regular attacks and thunder magic until it goes into Pressure state, before using the ATB you stored to use staggering attacks in the pressure window. Then in the second phase you need to hit a weakpoint on its behind to break a shield that makes attacks bounce off otherwise, successfully breaking the shield puts the boss in a very long Pressure state until the shield regens, allowing you to get multiple Staggers if you use the window correctly. The third phase has him only entering Pressure after performing a highly telegraphed laser attack, making you stock up bar in preparation for the attack and take advantage of Barret’s ability to use two ATB for single powerful attack that fills up their Stagger bar, compared to Cloud who cannot fit in two ATB attacks during the Pressure window to stagger the boss. In the fourth phase the boss begins healing itself and requires you to break its legs in order to induce Stagger and stop its self-heal. It’s a crazy demonstration of mechanical variety and maybe one that happens far too early as most players don’t really get the system yet and sadly the balancing means you can beat it with all this stuff going over your head.

This stuff only gets expanded on with more unique and demanding gimmicks. Two notable ones I wanna mention in this review are Hell House and The Valkyrie.

Hell House requires the player to hit the house with elemental magic based on which attack its using, as each attack it performs will change its attunement to a different element. The interesting thing about this is that often the character being attacked does not have the time to cast said magic after dodging the elemental attacks, so it’s up to the other character to cast the spell while the aggro’d one dodges, meaning your opening is not after the attack but during it. The player actually very directly controls the aggro of enemies in this game since they will always target the character you are controlling upon the start of their attack, and due to the different defensive options available to each character, you have to be very careful about when you control a character as Aerith or Barret have much more limited defense to trade off for their ranged attacks and utility, but you still need to find the right time to control them and generate ATB with them but switching back to a more mobile character in time for the next attack.

The Valkyrie is a very interesting boss in Hard Mode, its a flying robot (with an amazing boss track from guest Ace Combat composer) whose final phase adds an orbital laser that tracks the currently controlled character and detonates upon catching up to them, which is something you’re supposed to use to your advantage as the Valkyrie also shields itself during this phase preventing it from taking much damage or stagger but one can break the shield by hitting it with its own laser. On normal mode its a fairly easy task of simply letting the laser catch up to you during the attacks that leave the Valkyrie floating still, made more interesting by the fact that all of the robot’s attacks control space by leaving sleeping gas clouds and fire spots around the arena limiting the way you can move while dodging its attacks and escaping the laser. However on Hard Mode, the behavior of the orbital laser changes completely, instead it now refuses to detonate even when it reaches your position until the Valkyrie hits the controlled character with another one of its attacks and locking said character in hit/block stun, and the laser will detonate inflicting heavy amounts of unavoidable extra damage. It creates a much more interesting dynamic where you either need to forget about trying to bait the laser entirely, needing to rely on much harder tactic of trying to punish it during certain attack animations that turn on Pressure state, or you can also be creative and try to give Barret a buffet of defensive materia and buffs and to allow him to tank the laser at full health and score a stagger that way, but setting up the situation for that is not easy either and requires heavy investment and sacrifices in other areas.

These are just some of the examples of the creative boss design in this game, but there is so many that test you in so many ways, creating new problems with a system that offers many creative and compelling solutions for you to execute. I would be here all day if I were to write about all of them.

Instead I will move on to touch on the Materia system and my few gripes with the game.

Materia serves as your way of having many different builds and possible playstyles for each character, changing your available toolkit and stats to a considerable degree. The most interesting materia are the ones that let you change the flow of ATB in combat, there are ones that allow a character to spread ATB to other characters by spending ATB themselves, or get a free bar by performing three different ATB commands in sequence. Paired materia and its rarity can also lead to interesting playstyle changes, like one that makes a specific character always do a spell of your choice automatically regardless of their available ATB gauge after the player-controlled character does an ATB command.

As far as magic spells go, I really appreciate how the different magics have different properties attached with variable base damage, making them useful for more than just hitting an elemental weakness. Ice is a delayed bomb attack meaning you can’t use it on a moving target without a plan but it deals the highest damage making it useful even on things that aren’t weak to it, Fire is shot as a projectile and thus the angle needs to be considered if you want to hit a certain part of a boss, while Lightning is hitscan and strikes from the sky, allowing it to hit any enemy part with perfect accuracy but it does the least damage as a tradeoff.

In the Intergrade version, the game handles the need to restart fights to change your materia setup to suit the battle pretty well, giving you a quick restart button for every individual fight. However, what sucks is that the game doesn’t have a Materia preset system which I think the game would really benefit from, having to re-arrange your team’s entire materia setup can be kind of a drag sometimes and it would be great if one could save presets and reuse them quickly.

I also don’t love how the game chooses to teach its enemy mechanics, which involves you casting Assess to get a brief description of the strategy you are supposed to use against them. Sometimes even this description is very vague and not helpful. I honestly think this game would benefit from Doom Eternal style tutorialization, which might be an unpopular opinion but I really think for a game as complex as this one having prompts that give you a general idea of what you’re supposed to do works out a lot better than hoping players bumble their way into understanding the mechanics. I also think many of the move descriptions are lacking and make it easy to miss out on the extra mechanics and nuances of each ability, which you can actually find on the Final Fantasy fandom.com wiki which populates its gameplay pages for the game with detailed info taken from the Japanese Ultimania (god bless whoever translated all that info and put it there). Like did you know that Barrett can press his ability button to cancel the recovery of every ATB command with a quick reload that cuts a couple seconds from his cooldown, or that the transition animation from Operator mode to Punisher mode contains a guardpoint that allows Cloud to his Punisher Mode counter attack without needing to be already in Punisher? There are a lot of hidden details to every character’s mechanics.

One final gripe I’m gonna mention is the aerial combat, though its a minor one as not many enemies fly in the first place. It feels pretty awkward and usually your goal is to use ranged attacks and put them in the ground anyways but I wanna bring it up because the sequel to this game, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has already been showcased and is overhauling that aspect greatly, making it so characters cannot go into the air automatically by attacking flying enemies and instead you must use specific new synergy attacks or ATB moves that put your character in the air and allow them to go for air combos and dodges while also giving them the ability to cast many abilities in mid-air. One of the bosses they’ve shown explicitly takes advantage of this and is a flying boss from the original that before acted as a way to make you use long range materia, now acts as a way to force you to use all the new aerial combat mechanics to hit it. It’s already making me giddy with excitement for all the potential these mechanics bring.

I really love this game, so much that I find it difficult to write about and describe properly with how many ways it layers its mechanics to create the kind of fun I enjoy. I think it’s already very polished and deep as is, but I am excited to see how they will be refined and expanded upon in the upcoming entries. And if you didn’t feel this way about the combat when you first played this game then I hope reading this has given you some insight into the sheer amount of quality design and inventiveness that I find hiding in its combat system….now if only they would give us better difficulty options in the next game.

Earlier this year, I played most Armored Core bar the PS3 games in anticipation for this game, though not really out of pure hype, but because I was curious what bedrock of design From Software was working with. I didn’t expect to like them much, as I'm not a big mecha fan and I rarely hear high praise for its gameplay, but I was pleasantly surprised. Armored Core had a great niche in which fast movement did not mean great flexibility. You can boost around at high speeds, but your ability to turn and aim is limited by your mech’s legs and your FCS Lockbox. It was an incredibly compelling way to design a console shooter in which traditional aiming was not the main skill, but instead the usage of movement and positioning to supplement your limited tank controls was heavily emphasized. It tickled a very different part of the brain than most games usually do, and this is not without getting into how deep and detailed the mech-building was and the way in which it very directly affected how you control and move with your AC.

I felt very positive towards Oldgen AC as a whole in spite of some issues with mission design, but I also felt like there was no chance FromSoft could replicate any of this. The core conceit of the system after all was limited and unintuitive controls. Without it, none of this would work, and in the year of our lord 2023 we’ve already had a couple releases whos primary objective to sand off anything awkward to the modern gamer even if it leaves glaring flaws in the design (looking at you, Resident Evil 4 Remake) so I prepared myself for Armored Core 6 to not really reach those same heights.

Having played it now, I can call it decent as a brainless mecha-themed action game, though only decent, as even on those metrics it is greatly brought down by poor balancing and some core mechanic weaknesses. It had cool spectacle, and the music was occasionally good, and the plot had enough intrigue going on with answerable questions if you cared to find hidden data logs. The challenge that some bosses give at the beginning was interesting, and I particularly liked the Ibis Chapter 4 boss, who moved too fast to brainlessly shoot at, demanding you wait for openings and keep closing the distance to make sure your shots don't ricochet. Though unfortunately that challenge faded and never returned, even as I completed the supposedly extra difficult content of NG++ and attempted to nerf my own builds to allow the game to shine more while it had the chance, and FromSoft missed the chance of fix Armored Core’s long standing issue of boring mission design, which in some ways is made even worse as they are all made much shorter and less demanding and ammo/repair costs feeling like a complete non-factor to the mission gameplay thus failing to incentivize you to play around saving costs.

The game’s greatest virtue in my opinion is the mech creation sandbox and how much flexibility you have with the ability to place numerous decals anywhere and change the material type of the different metals all over the mech. You can create some very beautifully rendered custom mecha in this game and it makes it easy to get attached to your particular creation if you put some effort into them, and I think that alone can definitely carry a playthrough of this game. However, that about sums up all the nice things I have to say about the game. The actual gameplay suffers and does not justify replaying the game three times to see all the content, and that's what the rest of this review will be dedicated towards.

One of the core issues that hurts this game’s vision is the Stagger system. It acts like a simplified but more extreme version of the Heat mechanic from the older games, however the changes made to it hurt the game’s balance severely. Armored Core 6 rewards the player exponentially for adopting a burst damage based playstyle, often turning fights into complete stomps in favor of the player once you put on a shotgun or grenade launcher. In contrast, anything that doesn't include some form of burst feels heavily undertuned and weak, try playing assault rifles in this game and you will have a bad time for multiple reasons. The issue is twofold here and I will be using it to segue into my other issue with the game’s design.
Stagger leaves the enemy open to critical damage for a small window, and so in order to take advantage of that window, some kind of burst damage is sorely needed. Building Stagger bar itself is also primarily dependent on the damage being dealt, and this makes it so slow damage over time weapons often are bad at causing stagger too, whereas burst damage options will both inflict Stagger very fast while also allowing you deal massive amounts of damage during the window. Finding a build that allows you to take advantage of the stagger system to a reasonable degree while also not completely invalidating the enemies is a far far more challenging task than anything in the game itself. But why balance it like this? Why are Shotguns so obscenely strong?? I suspect the answer to that lies in them being carryovers from Old AC design without much consideration put into how their power changes when the core limitations of tank controls were removed.

In Old-Gen AC, options like a shotgun or a stationary rockets/grenades were much harder to line up the shot for due to the nature of tank controls and FCS. This especially was felt with Shotguns, which demanded you to stick up close to an enemy to get worthwhile damage, which in Oldgen this meant that you were consciously moving into a range where you cannot track your target very well as they can move much faster than you can turn around to chase them, and thus lining up the shot properly took a lot of skill and finesse. Your movement needed to make up for your limited turning and made it so your ability to deal high damage was highly reliant on moving in smart ways, but this conflicted with the demands brought on by needing to dodge enemy attacks and keep yourself out of their sights. This created an incredibly complex dance of challenging priorities that made the high damage feel earned once you manage to land the shots.
However, in the world of Armored Core 6, the mechs are blessed with hard-lock auto aim and insta turning around, nearly all your shots will land, the negligible drawbacks of hard-lock are not felt whatsoever in PvE and the game’s much too stationary bosses. Your movement rarely needs to take into account your ability to land shots, just do whatever it takes to dodge the enemy’s telegraphed cannons and stay close while spamming the shoot buttons.
The assault rifles and other long/mid range options still had a strong place in Old Gen because in order to track targets within your lockbox, you had to keep a certain distance that made their movement manageable, allowing them to be good ways to chip away at enemies with ease. In comparison, AC6 gives you no reason to ever be far from opponents. With the increased power of laser blades, the addition of assault boost kicks, and the bosses who constantly dash up to you for Souls-like melee attacks, there is nearly never a reason to play long/mid range. You need to stay close to even dodge most boss attacks which ask you to hover over them and/or dash past them. It’s telling that most FCS given to you are close-range focused and that Sniper Rifles didn’t even make it into this game.

I find these flaws to be the result of the sacrifices made by the game for the sake of ultra-intuitive controls, but when you take away the entire skill of aiming and the movement, positioning, and weapon balancing factors that come with it, issues like this are bound to bubble up. It's also because of this that none of the mech types really feel as different as they used to, with the controls homogenized the way they are, many of the drawbacks and strengths of different mech-types are not as apparent. Of course the flipside of this is you can now bring a tank leg into any kind of fight you want, whereas Oldgen AC tended to railroad you into making a fast AC if you wanted to deal with its endgame challenges. But unlike this game, Oldgen AC often still had a lot of bite and challenge left to it even when you develop an AC that has the right tools for the mission. That isn’t to say that you can’t cheese difficult fights and challenges with some broken weapons/setups, but you had to go out of your way to make them and most challenges feel beatable without a cheese build, you just need the skills to push yourself over the finish lines. The demands of the build were only one half of the puzzle, but playing well enough to beat challenges was even more emphasized, which I don’t find be the case in Armored Core 6 as the “right build” is both even easier to make and once created, utterly destroys any challenge and doesn’t let me have any fun with the boss. Perhaps this is great for the type of player who likes the power-fantasy of crushing infamous Souls bosses by changing their build, but I was never that kind of player and even if I was, the relative ease and simplicity at which you can create a build that dominates all this game’s content makes even that part of the game unsatisfying in concept.

It's hard to look at the game in a good light after three playthroughs, with the flaws in the game’s balancing and the limited depth of its systems becoming more apparent as I attempted to find ways to make the game challenging. This a game where you never need to worry about anything but dodging once you’re locked on and while yes, the ways in which you dodge in this game are definitely more fun than Souls i-framing, dashing over forward moving attacks that every boss spams is not enough to make me fall love in with a game, especially not with the vast majority of missions being some flavor of “boring” with how little they demand of any of the systems in place. At the very least I hope the way this game introduces mech-building can serve as a nice way to ease players into the older games.

To me, the heart and soul of Resident Evil 4 is the combat, and that’s what this review is about. Everything else about the remake is something I can take or leave, but I have many issues with the gameplay and its design, and I’d like to talk about why because it feels like everything that the original did right has been forgotten by both the devs and the fans.

To be clear, I am okay with Resident Evil 4 Remake being a different game than the original. In fact, I would like it more if it was more different and tried to execute a new idea well. My issue with it is that I don’t think the remake succeeds at carving out its own niche gameplay-wise, and instead it feels like a mismade version of RE4 held up by band-aid fixes to try to maintain the illusion of being a decent action game, and I will try to explain why I feel this way.

A core pillar of RE4 is the tank controls, they are what adds nuance to even the simplest encounters in the game and everything is designed around the limitations brought on by them. The Remake inevitably takes out the tank controls and, because of that, much of the original design crumbles, the solution to which is to make an entirely new game around the modernized controls. However, they did not do that, they instead applied a bunch of reactionary changes trying to make the game feel functional and challenging despite the removal of its core design pillar.

To illustrate this, let’s talk about one of the basic enemy types of the game, the axe-thrower. An axe is thrown at you in the original RE4, the tank controls prevent you from easily sidestepping the issue. You need to either walk forward at an angle to dodge it which drastically influences your positioning and can move you towards the crowd of enemies, or you need to shoot the axe as it’s being thrown at you to stop it. Both of these options have quite a bit of nuance to them, as dodging with your movement requires you to turn in advance since Leon’s turn speed isn’t instant, meaning that a level of prediction and foresight is required to pull this off, and shooting the axe requires you to ready your weapon, get a read on the axe’s trajectory to aim at it, and expend ammo. These are not the only ways, but they serve as good enough examples.

Come to the remake and now you have a variety of options to dodge the axe that make it a non-threat compared to the original. You can sidestep it to get out of the way, you can block it with your knife by holding a button, and you can duck under it to dodge it without needing to move. All this stuff lets you get around it in ways that dont push you into interesting situations. These enemies however are still here in the remake and they act about the same, seemingly just because they were there in the original, not because they do anything interesting for the combat. This to me exemplifies a lot of the ways most of the enemies lost their purpose and "fun" since the mechanics that made them interesting to deal with are gone, and illustrates the value that the tank based controls brought to simple interactions. For some reason we have even more options that are even easier to use against an enemy that is already made ineffective by the core system changes.

So how does the game maintain any challenge? The devs tried to do so in a couple ways but I don’t think they make for a fun or nuanced game. For one, they made it so that all unarmed enemies have long, lunging grabs that require you to sprint away from for quite a while as they chase you. If they are already close, they perform instant grabs that can’t be dodged in any way. Enemies also can’t get stunned by your shots as consistently so that you can’t counter their aggression with your guns. In short, on the highest difficulties your best bet is always keep a safe distance from all unarmed enemies. Yes, I am aware that lunging grabs can be ducked, but grabs that begin at close range cannot be ducked, so your gameplan is ultimately still the same, be far from enemies to prevent unwinnable situations. The ability to duck far lunging grabs ultimately doesn’t change your decision making in any significant way.

Another big factor is that melee was nerfed and made extremely inconsistent, especially on the higher difficulties. Shooting an enemy in the head no longer guarantees a stun that gives you a melee prompt, and the kick itself has a much smaller hitbox and no lasting i-frames. While the kick being nerfed is something I can understand and play around with, the fact that it was also made unusable due to the RNG to trigger it is baffling to me. I am okay with it taking more than one headshot, but you can shoot an enemy 5 times in the head in professional and never get the stun. If the stuns were consistent to trigger through applicable rules, you would be able to pick an enemy in the crowd to get a stun on, lure enemies around them for crowd controls, or use the kick animation to i-frame through other attacks by planning ahead. But because of its inconsistency it's not a reliable strategy that allows you to play aggressive and risky with enemies. The melee stun is now essentially a random thing that the game “gives you”, similar to how you randomly get crits, and that change on its own removes half the appeal of RE4 for me, and I don't think the game compensates for it sufficiently.

Given what they did to melees, it’s quite funny that they still have enemies who wear helmets to stop you from headshotting them. In the original this mattered a lot since it meant you can’t headstun them to use them for crowd control and i-frames, and instead you had to go for knee shots which were less reliable and weren’t useful for dealing with a crowd. Yet the enemies in the remake still wear helmets as if it matters, but all it does is simply force you to shoot them in the body which only takes one/two more shots more than shooting the head. It’s another case of the enemy design losing what made it compelling due to short-sighted changes in mechanics and the devs failing to realize how much it would take away from the game.

The kind of gameplay these changes lead to is one of constant backpedaling, since your melee is no longer strong and reliable, and enemies have instant lunging grabs with no counterplay to them at close range, at higher difficulties the game devolves to simply running away from enemies and shooting. Sometimes you get lucky and get to do a melee, but it’s not a part of the plan. The plan is to make space, sprint away, and circle around the arena and shoot. If anything gets in your way, a quick shotgun shot can disable them. The game’s challenge is now simply asking you to run and use ammo. I don’t think this is a particularly compelling gameplay loop when the ammo management never feels difficult as long as you hit your shots due to the leniency provided by the dynamic difficulty ensuring you get the drops for the weapons you are low on ammo on. Even if the ammo management was super tight, what kind of gameplay would that lead to? Simply clumping up enemies into tight corridors so you can shotgun/rifle multiple of them at a time for ammo efficiency? Or doing the same gameplan except slower to get focus shots with your pistol? Or if you play for rankings, simply run past all the enemies and encounters. It’s not fun to pull off, it’s simply boring.

There is another aspect to the defense in this game which I haven’t mentioned yet and that is the knife but I think it only exacerbates the game’s issues. On the surface you can say the knife adds more flexibility to the gameplay and parry allows you to get melees consistently, which is true, but to me that undermines the appeal of the mechanics it’s meant to interact with. The knife allows you to parry the attacks of any armed enemy, which in a kind of backwards way makes all the armed enemies way less dangerous than unarmed ones and their undodgeable grabs. Being able to get a melee off of it consistently is a sad way to relegate the mechanic, since it prevents you from using it aggressively and making your own choices when it comes to who and and when you want to use melees on, instead its simply something that happens to you, you get to do parry into melee if the game pits you against armed enemies that allows you to circumvent anything that could be challenging about them with an easy timing challenge. Even when made a bit more challenging with enemies varying their attack timings on Pro mode, the parry doesn’t ever feed into the rest of the game’s systems as the knife durability cost is virtually nothing for doing it. All it does is simply give you a “Get Out Of Jail For Free” card when it comes to armed enemies since their attacks are a boon to you, and in a backwards way it makes them easier than unarmed enemies and their grabs.
This is probably one of the places where I have the most disconnect with this game because I really don’t get the fun of parries in a game like this. Dodging through positioning and making decisions by planning around enemy behavior is where I get fun from this kind of action game, but with an instant parry like in RE4 with the static and slow enemies of this game it does absolutely nothing for me. If it had a big durability cost then maybe it would be a justifiable decision where you trade the damage and utility of the knife to escape a bad situation, but instead you just know the timing and nullify the entire enemy’s presence. The coolness of the animation is not enough to make up for how damaging it is to the game design to put so much on a simple timing challenge.

Ultimately, a big realization I made about RE4 Remake compared to the original is that it’s a game where things simply happen to you, rather than a game where you can make things happen.
You do the melee prompt when the game graces with you a stun animation, it’s not something you can reliably control and make decisions around.
You use knives to finish off enemies when the game lets you do so against transforming enemies, but you can’t control when it pops up since it doesn’t appear on most enemies and it’s not like you have a way of identifying Plagas enemies and knocking them down in advance. Because of that, stabbing grounded enemies never feels like a decision, just a prompt that you obey since you have little reason not to unless you wasted your knives getting grabbed. If every enemy on the ground had a stab prompt then at least you would be thinking about which enemies you choose to not do it on to save your knife resources.
You aren’t meant to use the knife aggressively since it can’t stun well anymore and the wide swings do pitiful damage, but you are meant to use it to parry attacks when an armed enemy happens to get into your range. When you parry attacks, you always get the same melee as a reward, you don’t get to make the choice of using a knee stun melee or a head stun melee for different purposes. You have little control in this game and most of the gameplay loop is obeying on-screen instructions in-between kiting and shooting

Compare this to the original RE4, where your backwards movement is much slower than your forward movement, so playing aggressively is encouraged, and running away from something comes at the cost of losing vision to it. You can choose what enemy to shoot in order to stun them, you choose where to shoot them to make a choice between the roundhouse kick for great crowd control or the straight kick/suplex for better single target damage. You can weave around enemies, bait them into quick attacks that you can feasibly whiff punish with your knife to get a headstun and turn close quarters situations in your favor. Compared to this, constant running away and shooting at enemies in the remake feels shallow and boring. To make it clear I don’t think the remake is hard, the strategy you are pushed into is so effective and easy to execute its hard to be very difficult once you get a hang of it, but it’s not fun either, and even if they found a way to make it hard it would just be boring due to how limited the mechanics are and how little options the player has in actually influencing the way fights progress.

And that about sums up my issues with the game. I can’t think of a good way to tie it together other than that I am deeply disappointed by what this remake had to offer. The devs clearly don’t have experience in making action games, they want to make a survival horror game so badly with the way professional is designed but it’s just not a good survival horror game either. If this was a more horror and resource management oriented RE4, that would be cool, but I think it’s simply a shitty action game where you point and click at enemies in-between kiting them.
If it were not a remake of RE4 then I would just see this as a mediocre third person shooter that tries hard with the encounter design, which is better than we get most of the time, but this game was made off the incredibly strong foundation of RE4 and yet managed to miss just about everything that was fun about it to me.
That this could be viewed as a good remake and a refinement of the original feels very strange to me, but I guess I’m completely divorced from the way people view action games nowadays. I guess as long as it has good animation work and easy controls it’s good enough, but I want more than that out of these games and the industry isn’t interested in providing that anymore. Unfortunate that I grew up to care about this stuff.

Addendum:
Since people gaslight themselves with this game into thinking the stuns are consistent, here is evidence of them being inconsistent and unreliable where I can shoot an enemy to death without ever getting a stun:
https://streamable.com/fovauq
https://streamable.com/a6jcux
https://streamable.com/nmb8lz
https://streamable.com/08vazy
First two clips are on hardcore with a fully upgraded Red9, last two clips are at the start of Professional.

It feels pretty rough to dislike this game cuz on paper its more interesting to me than any fighting game to come out in the last 5 years. It goes against the trend of recent fighters by keeping the movement options of Melty, speeding up the pace even further, and emphasizing a new host of defensive mechanics, a development that I would normally think is really sick if not for the fact that in practice, I dislike just about every change they made from MBAACC.

Stages are now horizontally massive and vertically shorter, compared to AACC where stages were really tight and tall. This makes forcing aerial engagements really difficult and combined with the new dash changes gives a lot of power to dashing under aerial movement. Moreover, blocking in the air is really unsafe now, as it will make you fall very quickly while causing no pushback to the attacker, allowing them to start ground pressure from most blocked air normals. If the aerial footsies and air counter hit fishing of AACC is what you like about Melty Blood, then I don’t think you will find that here.
Speaking of which, the new aerial counter hits have hitstun that heavily scales with the button that caused the counter hit which makes them really unstable compared to the old counter hits which had a consistent freeze that helped you get a full conversion everytime. Stuff like Kouma’s 22A anti air no longer nets you a full combo on successful application and aerial jabs can be really awkward to convert from. Not really sure why they decided to do this.

To compensate for the large stages, ground dashes now accelerate to become uncontrollably fast and pay for that speed with a hefty startup, but walk speeds haven’t been increased to accommodate the new stage size. These changes together make ground movement feel like total ass and microspacing feel like an impossibility. The new dash startup and speed forces you to hard commit to movements in neutral that interact really awkwardly with aerial movement and it makes the game feel like a total scramble at all times. Maybe I’m just really bad at this game's neutral, but I feel really unmotivated to learn it when it feels so comparatively bad to play and even watching high level I can see many of the same scrambles and gung-ho movements which doesn’t give me much faith. It feels like the game wants to kill the ability to get rewarded for cautious play and instead wants you to make big gambles to win footsies and I just haven’t experienced a good feeling of back-and-forth in this game.

Type Lumina’s stronger defensive mechanics and weaker offense compared to AACC is probably one of the more eye-catching things about it, given how oppressive offense has been in the last decade of fighting game design. Unfortunately, the way it's implemented in Type Lumina I find rather unfun, especially the new Shield mechanic.
In AACC, Shield required a different input for defending against standing and crouching normals similar to an SF3 parry, and like that game, tighter timing rewarded you for figuring out the opponent’s habits with a guaranteed punish. It’s a mechanic that saw a lot of use once players could figure out each other’s habits and it prevented the game’s defense from ever feeling stale to me as predictability can be hard-punished in most cases.
In Lumina, Shield is now a super block with 0f startup and 10f of recovery that doesn’t care about stand vs. crouch or tight timing, and the reward for shielding an attack is getting to play a looping RPS mini-game that takes away the prevalence of character kits, positioning, and the context of the situation, and instead it forces both parties into a static guessing game. It's so unrewarding yet also so prevalent and powerful because of its ability to remove the Shielding player from any unfamiliar or uncomfortable situation, making both the risk and the reward of shielding feel unsatisfying to me. The only nice thing about the new Shield is that it gives an easy way for beginners to call out and punish Heat activation, but aside from that it's honestly such a net negative for me because the more it's applied the more it replaces interesting situations with the shield RPS game.

When it comes to offense, Melty Blood has never been a series with much plus frames, but Lumina is -1 the game. Rebeats in AACC allowed you to whiff cancel in order to create true frametraps, but in Lumina that ability has been taken away and instead all characters get a universal spaced -1 in rebeat scenarios, which gives the defense some really powerful options to stop pressure and requires the aggressor to do some really hard callouts to counter them. The classic anime 2A pressure feels weaker than ever before due to the slow dash startup and the increased recovery on 2A animations, making it very easy to safely fuzzy mash and causing that type of pressure to be far too risky to be worth it. This isn’t to say that pressure in Lumina is weak, but the way it's designed it only adds to the scramebly nature of Lumina with how many characters rely on weird -2/-1 spacing traps that make the winning and losing options really unintuitive and dependent on character and frame data in a way that I dislike.

This isn’t everything but I think you get the point. I just don’t like any change they made to the gameplay. It doesn’t help that on top of that I am not a fan of the sprites and soundtrack, which aren’t bad per se, but I find the aesthetic in this one to be really plain in comparison to the lively and well animated sprites of AACC, the wacky backgrounds, and the much more experimental and unique music.

And honestly the biggest thing is that looking at all these changes from a big picture perspective, I really can’t figure out what new direction this game is trying to push. A better balance of ground and air neutral maybe? An emphasis on flashy interactions with the clashes and shield RPS? But I don’t think it really works. Contrary to what the last 1000 words would lead you to believe, I didn’t come into this game wanting it to play exactly like old Melty, and I would have liked to enjoy whatever new direction they chose as long as it's solidly implemented. The way it is now though, I just don't see it, as everything that used to be appealing about melty is still in Lumina, just done worse, and every new addition doesn’t do much but detract from those appeals.


I guess the one good thing I have to say about the game is that it's nice to have autocombos that allow new players to get to mid level much quicker and it's nice that its got a somewhat functioning ranked and lobby system compared to AACC. But aside from it being easier to get my friends into, I can’t find much reason to commit to learning this game. I can’t help but finish my sessions with this game feeling rather unsatisfied everytime, something that I haven’t ever felt with a fighting game. Maybe this is just me being stuck at a mid level wall and I will eat my words later, and perhaps the later versions of the game will clean it up and make it feel a lot nicer, but I don’t really see anything I complained about changing. The reception to the game is really positive and most recognize that the game’s mechanics are total clownshoes but “loves the game for it”, whereas I’m really not vibing with the clown fiesta. Is it unfair to compare a highly polished doujin fighter with multiple revisions to a newly released modern fighter? Probably. It just sucks that I can’t really see what new gameplay style or unique flair Lumina is bringing to the table. If I could see some unifying direction behind the changes, then I would respect them even if I didn’t like them (which was the way I was with Strive), but the changes feel so unpleasant and whatever explanations I draw out for why they would design the game this way feels so wrong and worrying for the game’s future.

Until Type Lumina’s qualities aren’t just worse versions of what I like about older Melty, I don’t think I will be excited about playing this game. I wish they’d have embraced a whole new direction rather than making a game that feels almost familiar yet so off.

I finished Omori thinking it was an alright 3 hour game that stretched itself into 12 hours, but the more I thought about the game and its story, the more those 3 hours lost their value and the weakness of its execution came to the forefront of my mind. It's a game that I wish was less afraid of showing its unique aspects, but it plays it safe and refuses to dig deeper into all the touchy subject matter that it brings up. The game is spends most of its time indulging in the escapist fantasy while leaving the meat of the story feel undeveloped, held back by the game's desire to fit into the mold of Earthbound-inspired RPGs.

Much has been said about the game’s pacing issues, the hours and hours it spends on tedious progression in the dreamworld before letting you get tidbits of real story. That content was probably meant to be fun for its own sake and that’s probably the biggest disconnect between me and someone who likes the game. As charming as the visuals were at first, they weren't exactly carrying the weight for me given how standard most of the areas feel for a place rooted in imagination. The quirky humor also fell flat for me as I found it to be missing good gags or any unique bite, most of the jokes felt kinda played out to me before they even started. The various “puzzles” and collection quests didn't do much but waste time when I wish they acted as space for compelling character interactions or story development. I only have good things to say about the music though, which was great throughout.

The combat also took a big chunk of the game, with most of the content geared around it given that the primary reward for all the sidecontent is items to make combat easier.
I’ve never been a big fan of turn based RPG combat and Omori did little to change my mind, as I found it an easy and boring exercise in attack/heal for most part. The emotion system, which gives party members unique effects such as using their mana pool as an extra hp pool, increasing crit chance, e.t.c was badly used IMO. I had hoped the game would allow me to use those emotions creatively to solve problems, but instead, the game explicitly states that it's an RPS system where certain emotions will inherently win against others, turning it into a glorified element system.

It doesn’t help that the story bosses were mainly a knowledge test of whether or not you guessed which emotion they would be inclined to. The only time I ever died was to Kite-Kid, who locked himself into a happy state early in the fight, and I lost because I already had some party members set to Angry. Restarting the fight with this knowledge in advance and setting my party members to sad preemptively made the fight a cakewalk. It was hard to get anything out of the combat for me when it operated on such a simple knowledge check.
That one death also exposed me to an oversight in the game’s design that would make it a chore even if it did attempt to leverage its systems to be challenging. If you lose, it's probably because you don’t have the right skills equipped to take advantage of the emotion you are meant to use. Unfortunately, if you die, the game will restart you right at the fight without giving an opportunity to change your build, forcing you to exit the game and reload your save to do so. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that most bosses were preceded by long unskippable dialogue scenes, so I can’t imagine how miserable the experience would be if you weren’t as lucky as I was with the equipped skills.

Now unto the story, and this is where my feelings with the game get complicated.
The game’s biggest disappointment to me is the criminal misuse of its setup. The game introduces a dreamworld that our depressed protagonist escapes to in their sleep, where he gets to hang around with “dream” versions of people he knew, and then switches gears to the real world, where most of the plot progression happens, and continues to alternate between the two. I think it's a no-brainer that one would use the dreamworld to explore the boy’s deeper psyche and issues through the metaphor and symbolism offered by the flexibility of the dreamworld’s visuals, giving us perspective into his personality, thoughts, and the way he views the world and people around him. Then, that internal struggle that he goes through in the dreamworld would then affect his behaviour and actions in the real world as payoff, right?

Unfortunately, the application of this idea is extremely limited in the game. I get that the dreamworld is meant to be an escapist fantasy, and that is well established within the first hour of the game. We spend a lot of time interacting with characters in the dreamworld, who’s antics and storylines end up being shallow and unfulfilling and fail to give any insight into the real story that’s going on. I can attempt to read into it by saying that SWEETHEART’s antagonistic antics are reflective of Sunny’s negative view of self love, Space Boyfriend’s heartbreak as his fear of relationships, and the whale as his fear of...water? Even with these interpretations, it all feels incredibly weak, at best tangential to the game’s plot, and not nearly enough substance to justify the sheer amount of time spent in the dreamworld.

The reading that makes most sense to me is that the time in the dreamworld was simply meant to depict the protagonist's escapism and how he used it to avoid meaningfully confronting his problems. Maybe it was just that I didn’t find that ecapsim to be fun and worth escaping to in the first place that made it not work for me, but even if it did, I feel like this use of the dreamworld falls so short of its potential that I can’t help but be disappointed.

I understand that the warning posted on the Steam page and the start of the game is a trigger warning for people who are sensitive to those subjects, but the way it's presented almost makes me feel like its the game flaunting what it’s really about before it even gets to pull the rug on you in its intro. It’s unfortunate then, that the game seems to shy away from exploring any of those subjects meaningfully, especially given how ripe the dreamworld setup is for that purpose. I am not asking the game to give a clinical examination or intense psychoanalysis, but the game struggles to use its dialogue and characters to give us a lens to how our protagonist is affected by and parses all his trauma. Instead, much of the game is about him intentionally forgetting the source of his trauma amidst his dreamworld escapism and the conclusion of it being him finally remembering.

The game’s clearest thematic throughline instead, is that of communication, everything else feels like fluff that is only lightly touched upon. The protag’s want to save one of his friends who direly needs him, but his fear of communicating with him and acknowledging what they have done is what drives a major part of the story. Given this theme, I expected Sunny’s position as a silent protagonist to be deconstructed or at least acknowledged, but it's often ignored in a way that is customary of the genre but feels ill-fitting for the game’s themes. On top of that, the game does little in most of its run time to give us his perspective on those fears, and instead is content only implying the depth the character might have.

There is one section of the game however, where the theme and setup is used incredibly effectively, and that is the Black Space chapter. The game homes in on its Yume Nikke inspirations and presents a series of horror vignettes that represent the protagonists darkest thoughts and fears. Not all of it was a hit, as seeing the protag’s friend die gruesomely from neglect loses its shock factor after the third time in a row, but the way it was presented was very captivating to me and I appreciate that the game finally decided to use its visuals to effectively communicate something. It felt like the game was finally delivering in these scenes, but then it ends very quickly and doesn’t feel worth all the tedium of the 8 hours preceding it. I would have preferred if the storytelling of Black Space was something that was spread all around the dreamworld, perhaps delivered with varying levels of subtlety, rather than the way it used now which feels too little and too late.

The biggest victim of the game’s unwillingness to explore its protagonist is the ending. By the time the protag finally confronts his friend and overcomes his fear of communication, it feels undeserved as I never got to know how he parsed through that fear and what he did to overcome it, given that most of the game is spent avoiding the issue entirely. The journey in his mind fails to meaningfully reflect on his actions in the real world, making its “power of friendship” way of solving things feel rote and unimpactful by the end.
Instead, most of all development happens very quickly with him rediscovering the reason behind his trauma. In retrospect that story beat really hurt the game for me, as the reason ends up being so overdramatic and extreme for an otherwise grounded story that it impaired the story's ability to approach these issues in any relatable manner.

Given all that, I have to confess that a big part of my disappointment with this game is likely my fault, given the issues I was tackling when I played the game and still do. I too am afraid of communicating and the hurt I can cause, I’ve spent many nights crippled by my inability to reach out to people who really cared about me. A part of me wanted the game to tell me something nice and inspire me to get better, which is unreasonable to expect from any piece of media, but it's what happened regardless.
Despite all I said about Omori, I do think it has a heart and the strong impression it makes is not a fluke. It hurts for me to dislike this game knowing how personal it must have been to its creator. To tell someone that their depiction of their mental struggles was weak and unimpactful is so awful that I’d rather believe that it’s my own fault for being unable to appreciate what the game does, but to me the game itself feels like it's afraid of communicating too. It feels like a declawed version of itself, afraid of opening up about the issues it wants to talk about and too scared of hurting anyone with its content.
There is a strong chance that I’m just projecting, but regardless, I hope the devs don’t take any of what I said as discouragement. While it didn’t work for me, your game has earned its recognition and popularity for a reason. It might not have left the most positive impression on me, but I can appreciate its heart, the captivating imagery, and the sentiments it wanted to stir. I just hope the success will empower you to be more honest and more daring with your future projects.

I find it kinda hard to put my own opinion on Strive in an interesting way. I’d say “it's an alright but janky not-anime-fighter” with some wack mechanics and occasionally cool kits. I see it as the kind of game that won’t be many people’s favorite due to how many compromises it makes in the attempt to be accessible and expansive at the same time, pulling mechanics from all across fighting game sub-genres to do a little bit of everything. It’s far more interesting for me to think about what it represents culturally and what the game is trying to do with the FGC.

When the game was first revealed as the unnamed new Guilty Gear, it’s creator said in an interview that the game was meant to be a “bridge that connects people”. I took it as a corny exaggeration that's just meant to communicate that “its an accessible fighter”, but a couple months from launch now, I see how much the devs really tried to make true on that message and how much the game, in spite of its rocky launch and somewhat negative perception, managed to succeed at it.

Since its launch, Strive has been the talk of town for the FGC in a way that extends beyond the fad of a new release. Look at major tournaments and you will find the players that are pros and legends from across different fighting games. I never thought I’d see the Zangief legend “SnakeEyez” go toe-to-toe with Guilty Gear vets and Marvel players, transferring all his SF grappler experience into Potemkin and taking advantage of the GG systems in ways I haven’t seen GG players do, but here we are. Within my personal circle I saw friends who had always been waiting for a fighting game to break into and this game finally became the one to get them to feel competent and comfortable with the genre, and people who never ventured outside their niche of Tekken or Street Fighter gaining a taste for new gameplay styles through this game. Daisuke wasn’t talking out of his ass after all.

It’s main virtue is having a combo of elements that makes it easy to introduce to most people without having to put asterisks, which somehow no FG has managed to do in the past decade. These are:

A. Look Pretty
B. Have Good Netcode
C. Be Easy To Pick Up
And
D. Have A Playerbase.

No fighter in the last decade has managed to get all of these right to achieve proper flagship status. If you have good netcode you’re probably an inaccessible anime fighter or something on fightcade, you also don’t have a playerbase. If you have a playerbase you’re probably Tekken, Street Fighter, or DBFZ, which all have their own set of problems that stop them from being a flagship for the community. Strive did have terrible SFV-esque server issues on launch and still suffers from its lobby system which I think is the only place where it fucked up in this department of approachability, but otherwise these elements make it an easy game to get someone into as it won't be difficult for them to learn, they will be able to play against you regardless of regional distance, and they will have an ample playerbase and an active community to work with.

The other way in which Strive tries to bridge people is in its mechanics, and that’s where the game gets a little contentious. It prioritizes presenting a large variety of scenarios and archetypes in easy to understand ways, using high damage for strong feedback. Knowledge and execution walls are made much smaller and this comes at the price of much of what people liked about the older games. Stuff like every character being designed to only need to learn one easy BnB to execute their gameplan, and slowdown on counter hits to let anyone hit confirm, go a long way to allowing anyone to get to competency fairly quickly, but those who wanted their lab playground won’t get it here.

Changes are made to make its neutral and offense more Street Fighter like while keeping a distinctly Guilty Gear defense. A slower airdash encourages more grounded play without eliminating air footsies, the redesigned gatling system seeks to emulate SF’s risk/reward structure while keeping anime delay cancel pressure, and initially the game seemed to take cues from SFV in the lack of chip kills before that was patched out. The changes to its character kits lead to a lot less high/low or left/right and a lot more hit/throw which is a far simpler mixup to understand, execute, and defend against. Despite that, defense still focuses on up-back air blocking, using FD and meter correctly,
The experimental ways in which it tries to bridge SF and GG’s gameplay styles lead to a lot of jank. The unintuitive nature of its new gatling system receives flak for good reason, its airdash feels much worse than anything you played before, and the design philosophy seems a bit all over the place with how some hitboxes and kits are designed, leading to large power disparities like Sol vs Ky which feels like a barely toned down Guilty Gear character fighting a mediocre Street Fighter character.
The game’s throw is probably the most problematic result to me, with SFV-esque high reward and range but anime-style fast startup that beats normals. Usually fast/strong throws are incredibly short ranged but Strive is the only game I know that doesn’t do this, and combined with its character kits and the fact that throws put you in counter state on whiff, lead the game to a highly volatile throw-based meta that focuses on static 50/50s far too often. I find it hard to look at the game’s current state without feeling that it needed another pass of mechanical polish before launch.


Some changes are, however, more generally enjoyed: universal wake up timings, character weights that don't affect combos as drastically, and mapping multiple mechanics to the Roman Cancel input to have them activate depending on context instead of using unique inputs for context sensitive moves like in previous games (e.g Dead Angle).

RC mechanics are, in general, where the game almost succeeds at having its cake and eating it too. The creators claimed that they wanted to make things easier to understand yet “retain the depth” somehow, and there are some really admirable attempts where nuance is added in inventive ways that make things easier while also deeper.
The new Red-RC allows players to convert off of any attack with ease and use the staple mechanic for its intended purpose without grinding conversions from every possible situation. A new drift system that gives RCs new neutral, mixup, and combo possibilities, and the ability to cancel the slowdown to RCs allows players to have both Xrd RCs and +R style fast RCs.

These new systems are highly praised for a good reason, but a common criticism of it is that game locks too much of its depth behind a metered mechanic (in a game where you can only hold two stocks of meter at most too), meaning that the times you can be creative and crazy in the way old Guilty Gear used to be are limited to but a few instances per game. However, this criticism is probably seen as a success by the devs when thinking about it from their “bridge” point of view. The game lets you play with more classic neutral and mixup structures, but the RC system gives you a lens into more complex movements akin to crazier anime fighters. It allows you to taste the potential depth without having it take over the game and turn it into something too unorthodox and based around RC gimmicks.

This general philosophy is why I think that even when this game is all patched and polished up, it likely won’t stick as anyone’s favorite fighter, as it constantly refuses to indulge in a strong niche. I like my specialized games that revel in their niche, and overall have never been a big fan of Guilty Gear’s lab-heavy execution wall and oki focused gameplans, so I thought I personally wouldn’t get much out of Strive.
However, they succeeded at appealing to me with the design of Zato. I think he is one of the few cases in this game of a character that actually managed to retain his depth while also becoming easier, and they did not do this through removing mechanics, but instead opted to add new ones on top of the existing template.
Clap cancels and redesigned summon moves allow Zato insane possibilities he didn’t even dream of before, while simultaneously making him easier to pick up. But they did not, as most predicted before release, opt to remove his old mechanic, and thus allowed you to layer his classic Negative Edge mechanic on top of the additions, giving the character a really satisfying learning curve. He avoids most of the issues I would have with Strive, and instead souped up and more powerful compared to his previous iterations without requiring the massive labtime requirement that old Zato used to have.

I imagine many people had that experience I had with Zato with some other character that they always wanted to play but never could get through because of the lab-time barrier required in the past games. And while I think the way Zato did this is great, most characters aren't flexible enough for this kind of design. Millia stands as a stark example to me, a character who’s difficult multi-layered disc mixup has been made easy to execute and heavily directed by adding a forced jump after her disc, which comes at the cost of anyone who thought “what if I didn’t wanted to do a left/right mixup after disc?”, gutting much of the character’s interplayer variety.

That aside, much of my positive outlook on this game comes from what it did to the community and the potential it has as the devs continue to foster its growth and polish its mechanics. If you are already comfortable within your niche of fighting games and are having a good time playing with your group of friends without the want for a larger playerbase, there is probably not much for you in Strive, and I think I would almost be the same.

But I do like the playerbase, I do like having this game that I can use to introduce people to the genre, or to get existing FG friends to get a taste of new gameplay styles they never considered before. Even if I don’t think it’s a very good FG for my tastes, and would usually groan at ceaseless simplification of the genre, I highly respect what this game strived to achieve (heh) and I am very glad it exists.

This game is fucked. What’s more fucked is that I really like it.

A lot of what this game does appeals to my ideal idea of a comfy game: A crazy amount of mechanical depth and variety comes paired with a behemoth amount of content that gives you adequate space to explore all that depth while also ticking off progression. You will get into a loop where you’re always being introduced to new encounters and new tools to play them with and once you’re in there this game is something special. Issue is uhhh….you won’t get there, not for 10 hours and not without the help of a dozen online resources.

idk where to begin with the new player experience because it's so fucked on so many levels. This game has some of the worst pacing I have ever experienced and is filled to the brim with awful elements surrounding the core gameplay. This is an unfortunate side effect of it being an anniversary title, as it spends a lot of its first hours homaging MH1/2’s quests and pacing, subjecting you to shitty gimmick monsters that were coded 16 years ago and forcing you through slow paced gathering quests with obfuscated objectives.
Remember in MH1 how you first encountered Rathalos when he interrupted an egg delivery quest? Well, you probably don’t because you didn’t play that shit, but this game is gonna make you do that four times for each of the flagship monsters of the game!


The experience from 1★ to 3★ Village is so painful that I think you have to either be an MH veteran, have friends egging you through it, or are a little crazy to go through that shit on your own. I’m probably in the “a little crazy” camp. Combine all the above with the fact that the player is subjected to the worst content in the game right at the start while they are still new and uncomfortable with every aspect regardless of how well designed it is, and this game’s starting hours are a fucking disaster.

What’s most tragic about many of the game’s issues is that it feels like the devs knew about them and included secret ways to fix them.
Sick of not knowing where the monster is and forgetting to paintball them? Psychoserums do that for you and you can get them for practically free.
Hate the idea of grinding for mega potions and whetstones? There is a quest here that lets you get an infinite amount from a trader, and there is also a free pack of essential items hidden in the most random menu option.
Hate the fact that the ore you want is a 3% drop chance? There is this random short quest here that gives you a 100% chance of getting a whole bunch of them, and there is also an item that lets you duplicate them if you already got some!
At first, I was in disbelief that anyone could get into this game, but after figuring out all this stuff, I can see how this game is playable by people who don’t devote their days entirely into Monster Hunter, but that still begs the question...Why? Why hide all the features that make this game not a pain in the ass? I will never know.

On top of that, if you played this game on your own, you will likely not even see the potential in the combat considering the game doesn’t tell you anything about the crazy movesets it provides you with, and without the use of community guides and resources you will probably play like a headless chicken and not get much out of it.

At the very least, in terms of community resources there is a lot of good stuff online that I think is necessary for playing the game. A well laid out spreadsheet of all important quests for progression, unlocks, e.t.c, and a highly informative set of guides for each weapon that lay out the differences between every style and the important skills and sets to look out for each. Most important of all is God’s Gift: Kiranico, a japanese-made resource where you can search up practically anything and get the info you want. What's this monster’s hitzones? Where do you get this item? What’s the upgrade path for this weapon? Which quest gives the best rewards for this resource? It's amazing how much effort was put into it.
But the fact this is all information is stuff you need to access outside the game is ridiculous and heavily discouraging to say the least.

Despite spending the last six paragraphs trashing the game, the unfortunate truth is...I really like it. Once you get past it all and get in the groove, it really is good, Trust Me Bro™.


On top of Monster Hunter’s classic diversity of weapons, this game provides Hunter Arts (supers that can be used after filling up a bar) and Styles (alternate weapon movesets). Very few of the styles feel ill-considered, and I found a good reason to want to try every one of them (though some are clearly above the rest in terms of immediate fun factor). The combinations you can create with styles, arts, and sets make the game feel like an immense playground of overwhelming possibilities where there is always a new thing you want to try. These elements enhance each other too, as the set building becomes much more interesting when you factor in how you can use it to optimize the specific style/art combination you are going for.


I want to illustrate a quick example in the writing but it's honestly hard for me to describe without presenting unintelligible word salad to anyone who hasn’t played the game, but the point is that as you get invested into one aspect you will probably find yourself getting pulled into others with how greatly all these systems synergize.
You pick a weapon/style combo you enjoy, discover a weird super that is meant to be made into a powerhouse with use of a specific set to play around it. Find another super and you will start connecting the dots with how a different style/set can make for a viable and completely different way of playing the weapon. It really puts the RPGshit in these games to the best use possible, combining them with its core combat mechanics to allow you to experiment with playstyles while also giving you incentive to grind out more content to make all the shit you want to test those ideas with.

It's also a great fit for the absurd amount of content in this game. The game contains monsters from games all across the series, designed by all sorts of people for different console gens and under different design philosophies. The diversity in encounters would easily turn into a negative if not for the fact that the player’s array of options that allow them to adapt wasn’t equally expansive. Having trouble with a flying monster shitting your day up? Maybe try Aerial Style. Finding this monster’s attacks too aggressive and difficult to avoid? Try Adept style to counter it and get insane evade windows and parries.. Just about every encounter in this game can be hard countered and it works well to make me try new things I haven’t considered before.

The grinding experience in this game ranges in quality, but I have more good memories than bad ones as targeting specific parts can change the experience of a fight dramatically. One highlight I had was trying to grind for Gore Magala horns which required me to intentionally get afflicted by his debuffs in order to activate his awakened state earlier to force him to reveal his horns (which are usually hidden), and play around traps to get the opportunity to break them before he gets knocked out of awakened state, the whole thing felt like a secret hard mode version of the fight. That shit probably sounds too fucked up for most people, and the drop rates for some stuff is unreasonably low, but I really enjoyed it when it was used to give a new spin on fights.

Finally, and this is just a me thing, I do quite enjoy the visuals of this game as old and varying in quality as they are. Despite the re-textures there is a lot of 6th-gen charm in the maps that appeals to me with a wide variety of vibes. The forest maps tend to make me think of MGS3 a lot, and shoutout to Verdant Hill’s awesome ambient sounds. The hodge-podge that this game is doesn’t make for a cohesive whole but I ultimately liked it.

Before I finish I do want to put it out there that aside from having a knowledgeable friend to ease you into the game, there is the option of playing this game on emulator instead. Playing on emulator gets you the ability to use a save transfer to skip much of the game’s shittier content, use a save editor to tailor the experience to yourself by skipping the fishing/mining, as well as the nice bonus of 60fps. If you use Ryujinx to emulate, it's relatively easy to run and comes with built-in online support so you can play with anybody else who uses the emulator (without having to go through hamachi or anything of the sort!). Having played on both, I think it's a far superior way of playing the game, and I’d probably play it on PC all the time if not for access to the wider playerbase on the Switch (since it's hard to find friends willing to download an emulator to play this garbage with me).

But yeah umm, Capcom does it to me again, a game that is fucking terrible in so many ways but also addicting in how well it succeeds at what it sets out to do. I probably won’t need another game for a while.

If I gotta use one word to describe World, it's that it’s bloated - not in content, but with goals and concepts that come in conflict with each other. An always-online game with unskippable cutscenes and terrible story progression that makes the co-op experience near unplayable for anyone going through the game. Attempts at QoL and tutorialization all over the game to make it more newbie friendly, yet confuses them with distended menus that are much more difficult to navigate and and a variety of unintuitive tertiary mechanics in the form of clutch claw and slinger that badly attempt to solve MH pain points (that were never really a problem) yet only serve to overwhelm new players and hurt the core combat for veterans. And on a more personal note, the more realistic aesthetic takes away a significant amount of the series’ charm to me. It's easy to see now why this game pushed me away from Monster Hunter.

Despite that though, it's still Monster Hunter, and Iceborne adds some pretty fun fights and a mix of cool (and terrible) mechanics that made it worth revisiting. The core movesets of every weapon were revamped in really fun ways in this game that while lacking the spice of GU’s arts/styles or Rise’s wirebug shenanigans, still holds my interest. The game feels pretty balanced on top of that with a decent amount of viable setups and playstyles (elemetal in this game being actually a thing as opposed to Rise’s rather one-sided raw meta)

Though on that note, the way they handle much of the RPG side of things is another contradictory step back from previous games. Moving decorations from craftable to drops makes a bulk of your set’s skills at the mercy of RNG, forcing you to focus on craftable armor for skills and making for less freeform set building overall despite the redesigned skill system being intended to make builds more flexible. Sounds stupid? Yeah I know.

Pretty standard take incoming since the community has made it pretty clear how much it hates the clutch claw mechanic. It involves grappling unto the monster to deal a special attack which weakens the part you are latched on to, meant to give players more flexibility in what parts to attack. In practice though, with monsters balanced around it, it becomes more like a chore that requires you to use up big openings to re-apply a debuff every two minutes or else you deal no damage. The best it does for the game is give every weapon a universal way to latch on to flying monsters and deal some damage, but otherwise it de-emphasizes weapon mechanics and emphasizes a lot of the game’s jank.

It really sucks to get a good opening and instead of engaging with your weapon’s unique tools you just clutch claw because hunts would take way longer otherwise. Finding opportunities to clutch mid-fight is honestly a terrible experience that varies too wildly from monster to monster depending on how the coders felt about placing the hitbox that day. Some monsters make it really easy to clutch on the none-attacking part and make an opening that way, but using the same logic on other monsters will only lead to you getting fucked as you discover that their tail swipe inexplicably places a hitbox on their whole body. It makes certain monsters insanely abusable by this system and others nigh-impossible (without topple/stagger) in a way that has no relation to the overall difficulty of the monster. Overall this mechanic, along with slingers, only make the combat less focused and more inconsistent.

Other minor annoyances are mainly the theming of the game around the “World” and making it a more “believable ecosystem” end up hurting the gameplay for me more than anything else. The maps are a lot more annoying to navigate than anything of previous games. Ancient Forest is honestly one of the worst offenders with this, the dense foliage makes for poor visibility and its design lacks the interconnectedness required to make it work, and forces you into a lot of long and un-intuitive pathways to get where you need. The more “realistic” monster A.I and constant turf wars just add a lot of randomness to the combat.

There are things I like that are unique to this game. The Guiding Lands is a really cool idea for an endgame that could honestly be a whole game of its own. The game uses its position as a console game for some cool monsters every now then, like Namielle’s water, Nightshade’s smoke, and Shara Ishvalada’s sand, which make for good spectacle as well as neat ways for monsters to control space, and the game features really good iterations on most weapon movesets, which makes it hard to not have fun once I'm deep in a hunt.

But all in all, if Rise had more content and was on PC, I’d never touch this game again.

As a disclaimer, I didn’t finish the game. I got to the 5th region with about 40 hours clocked (felt longer) and the last boss I beat was Ryomen.

I enjoyed the concept of Nioh 1, but Nioh 2 actually hooked me in for a while. The good qualities of the combat stood out a lot more, the weapons were more complex, the enemies felt better balanced, and the yokai form was far more exciting than the living weapon. It helped that the game had a really nice character creator to boot, and a decent bit of QoL.

Unfortunately, the game’s fatal flaw to me is just how unambitious it is. It is a game that decided from the get-go that it only seeks to do what Nioh 1 did, but a little better, and nothing else. It has decided on a formula for its enemies and level design, and it sticks to it like superglue, promising to never bring anything new and exciting to the table.

But first, lemme talk about what I liked.

I mainly fucked around with the three weapons that were added to Nioh 2 (Fists, Scythe, Splitstaff), I found a lot to like in their movesets with many attack and movement options that play well into the ki pulse and stance switch system of Nioh 1. My favorite of these was the Fists, which had a unique mechanic that actually leveraged Nioh’s RPG inspirations for cool gameplay.

The Fists allowed me to cancel special attacks into each other in order to gain a stack of a buff. At first the main appeal is the fact that this lets you string some combos with great reward, but the more interesting aspect is managing the buff. The more stacks I have, the faster the buff runs out, the buff’s timer that can be slowed down with a ki-pulse or reset completely by gaining another stack of the buff (by doing another special cancel). And since choosing to special cancel means I have to forgo ki-pulsing, there are ever higher risks to maintaining the buff, forcing me to be incredibly fast and decisive in my gameplay to maintain it while also not running out of stamina. It’s a mechanic that adds a really nice spin to Nioh’s fundamentals by giving you a reason not to ki pulse, and leveraging it well was a real adrenaline rush.

On the enemy side, I enjoyed how much more manageable attacks were in this game, everything felt really fair to me. I especially enjoy the variety of defensive options and how there is a valid reason to use all of them. High stance dodges give more i-frames, but with more recovery and stamina cost than low/mid stance dodges. Guarding is a real defensive option in this game worth using against many quick attacks, but loses to slower attacks that are meant to be avoided, and using guard to get out of hitstun is a really good mechanic that plays into the ki management that is core to Nioh. There is a lot to think about just playing defensively in this game.

Despite the awful bloat that surrounds the game’s menus and its poorly implemented RPG aspects, I had a good amount of fun with this game...initially. Things started to fall apart when the game started to show its monotony after the difficulty bump of its third mission and began to settle into a formula.

Nioh 1 was notorious for its issues with enemy variety, a complaint that Nioh 2 very much attempts to respond to. However, in their response I feel like they have failed to solve the core of the issue. The game introduces a good variety of enemies, but said enemies are never designed in a particularly inventive way, and don’t force me to engage with the systems differently, usually just bringing a host of slightly different melee attacks to the table, with maybe one projectile.


That’s the problem on a micro level, but on a macro level, an even bigger problem is the game’s never changing encounter design. Nioh 2 seems to have decided on five-ish types of encounters. Ones involving human enemies, some involving groups of small demons, some with two big demons, or one big demon paired with a couple small ones, and variations of those involving some archers in the back. Which big demon or small demon it chooses to bring this time was usually different, but the encounters played fundamentally the same. The game has many enemy types, but it never escapes the mold of its rote encounter design, and even if they wanted to, I feel like the “standardness” of their enemies limits how creative they can be as few of them feel made for synergy with other enemies or level design.

The mechanics themselves also began to reveal issues. A minor annoyance I want to mention is how much of the game’s movesets seem to be tailored around fighting human enemies, with many moves being literally unusable against enemies who can’t be grabbed/tackled, and can’t guard. This makes the game’s abundance of demon encounters to be one of the less fun parts of the game.

But the human encounters too, began to break apart. As I became comfortable with ki-pulsing and stance switching to keep my aggression up, the enemies were never able to catch up. Once their ki was downed, it was very easy to keep it down and the human boss encounters, which were previously the best parts of the game, became incredibly trivial. Enemies began to practically kill themselves with big attacks that expend large chunks of their stamina, and once I start my rushdown they can’t really recover and usually get stunlocked to death. If human enemies fully regen’d stamina after a knockdown, or if the game was better at balancing its values, this could have been avoided. Human group encounters would normally avoid this problem, but never seemed to evolve in the number and types of enemies they mix.

It doesn’t help how boring the game’s texture is, mechanics aside. The new locations and bosses the game brings me to are never particularly cool. The level design felt always by the numbers, its “souls-like" looping shortcuts were rudimentary. It felt like the game was determined to never wow me, and I was playing solely for the thrill of its combat which was starting to lose its lustre. If I was a history nerd, maybe I would have got something out of the narrative, but that ain’t me.

When my experience with this game was ending, I had fought 3 bosses in a row whom I killed on my first attempt. The game’s levels stopped bringing anything challenging or exciting. In an attempt to remedy this, I tried to stop doing the side missions and play underleveled. Another two bosses go down, both on the first try. And then I reach a new region, severely underleveled. I start to die, but not in a fun way. The enemies are still the same, the encounters are still the same, but their health values were bloated and most of their attacks one shot me. The game’s RPG aspects came through to finish it off. And with that, I dropped Nioh 2, wishing it aspired to be more than just a sequel to Nioh 1.

Before playing this game, I tried to get into MHWorld and failed despite nearly finishing the base game, so I wasn’t expecting to get much out of MHRise when I played it at the request of a friend who definitely wasn’t going to follow up on playing with me, but I was motivated primarily by a dearth of things to occupy me in the time between semesters. Turns out, this game is pretty nice.

The first two things that made a good impression on me were the better pacing and the movement. The game rushed through tutorial prompts to get me into playing the “real game” as soon as possible. The information overload isn’t for everybody but I preferred it to the unskippable cutscenes and tutorial missions of World. In general, most shitty inconveniences from previous MH have been filtered out of this game.

When first forced to do a gathering quest, I was surprised by the game’s map design and movement. The wirebug swinging and dog-riding made moving around the map, at worst, a fast and painless ordeal, with room for improving your efficiency at routing and tons of collectible resources hidden in vertical spaces encouraging you to swing and climb your way around the locale. Moving around the map was a tedious and boring necessity in older MH, but in Rise, it's comparable to and perhaps better than a game like BotW who’s entire appeal is exploration. Having nearly every surface be climbable at the cost of stamina reminded me of BotW, but unlike BotW, Rise’s movement is fast and arcadey, and wants you to get to the real star of the show (the combat) as soon as possible. That alone made dumping time into this game much more palpable, since I'm never dreading the dull moments that I had in MHW.

When it comes to combat, I should preface that I primarily played insect glaive, longsword, and greatsword. Everybody knows that MH’s gameplay structure is a standard rpg compulsion loop, but the secret sauce imo is that MH’s compulsion loop exists to give a natural incentive to mastering its deeper systems in a way that most action games don’t do. Usually, a scoring/ranking system grades your gameplay in order to incentivize you to play better even if you can complete the game by playing badly, but MH’s depth comes specifically from optimizing your use of the weapon’s moveset with knowledge of the monster’s quirks in order to kill it faster. Strong gear is gonna require a lot of materials, and there will usually be some material with a very low drop rate that you will need to grind for, making you fight the same monster over and over again. Naturally, you’re gonna want to learn how to kill that monster as efficiently as possible.


This is where MH’s monster and weapon design comes in. Monster attacks are generally easy to avoid if the only challenge were to be surviving, but dodging while also placing yourself in position for a rewarding punish is more difficult than it is in a game like Souls due to less i-frames on your standard dodge, slower movement with your weapon out, and the nature of enemy attacks. In order to get that meaty punish after avoiding an attack, you will need to take advantage of your weapon’s quirks, and all the ones I've tried are full of wonderful nuances to take advantage of, allowing your ability to kill monsters to effectively scale with your skill.

For a simple example, the Teostra (a late game boss) flame breath attack where they sweep the area in front of them from side to side with a highly damaging beam of fire. Running away from it works, but will leave me unable to get much damage after his recovery. With the Insect Glaive, taking advantage of this attack is easy, as that weapon allows me to leap above fire breath and hit their head with aerial attacks. It makes me pay attention to how monsters control vertical spaces and how to take advantage of that.

With the longsword, I want to counter the flames with a well timed and highly rewarding samurai slash that nullifies the flame’s damage, but that will require me to place myself in harm’s way in order to “parry” the attack. Since he begins his attack from the sides, I position myself in the center to make it easy for me to react regardless of which side he is coming from. Good timing and reflexes are heavily rewarded by the Longsword.

With the greatsword, I need time to charge up its highly damaging charge slash, which requires me to be safe from damage while I charge. So I want to get to the blindspot at the side of his head as soon as possible to do that, which made me pay very close attention to the tell for the flame attack. If I successfully recognize the tell, I can wirebug dash into the side from which he starts his attack, where the return stroke will miss and give me ample time to charge my counter attack. Gauging my punish windows and positioning carefully to see what kind of damage I can get away with is the main skill encouraged by Greatsword.

Different weapons emphasize different skills, can take advantage of different aspects of the monster’s moveset, and the same weapon can have multiple correct responses to the same attack, but give higher reward to more intelligent responses. This is where I found the appeal of MH’s combat.

The game’s lack of difficulty for most of its monsters is a noted criticism that I agree with. Hunts give you too much time and too many resources, which can make it pretty easy (and relatively unfun) to blow through every monster once, and consider yourself done with the game. This game really benefits from giving yourself a build goal and grinding for it. In most other combat focused games, this could be a deal breaker, but given what MH combat is about, I don't think traditional boss difficulty is required to enjoy mastering the game.

Speaking of which, I'm not a big RPG build-making guy, but I do like what MH allows for with its builds. For example: I went for a standard meta critical hit build. The premise of the build is to make a weapon with a high crit chance, and pair it with gear that increases your crit chance when hitting weakpoints and makes it so that your weapon doesn’t degrade in sharpness when hitting weakpoints. This makes your damage pathetic when hitting anything that isn’t a weakpoint, but highly rewards precise hits, making this a build tailored for higher skilled play, but punishing to other playstyles. There are other gear skills that allow you to break resistant parts easily and deal more damage to them, allowing for a less efficient but more flexible style. I see a lot of potential in how the builds can facilitate a nice variety of playstyles and allow the player to tailor the game to their preferred approach.

The biggest criticisms I have with the game come from the camera and the console. The default “target camera” type usually isn’t bad, and you can adjust it to be more zoomed out and turn more quickly (which I highly recommend), but some of the game’s later bosses, most notably the poster boy Magnamalo, are insanely mobile and attack in ways that are difficult to track with traditional target camera, feeling more designed for the lock-on camera mode. The issue is that MH’s implementation of lock-on is kinda shit.
The game requires you to be precise with hitting monster parts and the lock-on camera often gets in the way of that. This wouldn’t be a problem if you were allowed to toggle lock on with the tap of a button, but it can’t be turned off and instead switches the lock-on to other major monsters in the map. Bizarre fucking design that could be easily fixed, dunno how they let that one through. Just make tapping L1 toggle lock-on, that input currently does nothing in the Lock-On Camera type.

Also the Switch kinda sucks for playing the game, at least for my situation. On top of fps drops, it makes it very inconvenient to play the game with my circle of friends. It would be so much easier if it was a PC game where I could be in a discord call, but it being a switch game makes the process of communicating with friends while playing awkward as hell. Because of this I only got to play with pubs, and never experienced any real coordination to gauge what Monster Hunter gains from the co-op play that made it so popular in japan. Thankfully a PC release is planned, and I’d like to play the game with 60fps if I’m alive for it. If you’re on the fence with MHRise I recommend you wait for the PC release.

You made it this far? You read something this long? Weird. Here is some extra random thoughts:

I love the music, it's catchy.

The Nargacuga and Valstrax are easily the coolest looking monsters. The Valstrax’s attack animations are so fucking cool.

Zinogre looks kinda ugly and overdesigned to me, but still managed to be cool to me despite that because of his moveset and concept. Really fun monster to fight.

fuck the Tigrex. i hate that his name is “Tiger” and “Rex”. i hate that he has a jurassic park trex head pasted on a wyvern body. i hate that he has no consistent theme and all his abilities are random bullshit. He can throw rocks because he’s smart?? but he also bites walls like an idiot?? He glows red for no reason?? And worst of all most of his moveset is him spamming a charge attack where his entire body is a hitbox. even his music fucking sucks. fuck you you ugly sack of shit.