Inside Round8 Studio's boardroom

scrub Round8 employee: "Sir! We can't just make this game an exact copy of Bloodborne!"

CHAD Round8 BOSS: "Fuck yes we can. Bloodborne fucking OWNS."

NOTE: This was written in March of 2021. I got nostalgic looking through my old writings, and liked what I wrote here. It is in no way a critique of the game in it's current state, as I have not played it. However, it is important to remember the past, whether that be the shitty video games we've played, or the small pieces of ourself we've left across the Internet. I am leaving it mostly unedited (got rid of a few things like how it addresses a list I had put it on) because I used to get anxiety while proof-reading, then deleting my work. It seems fitting to present it as I would have back then. Please enjoy.

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Now that we are, at the time of this writing on 3/30/2021, almost three full months removed from the year 2020, I feel it is both necessary and appropriate to unpack how severely our lives, and the lives of our many billions of other human beings, were affected by the COVID-19 virus. 2020 was a trying year for anyone who was not lucky and/or skilled enough to possess the required attributes for maintaining employment in a safe and well-paying workplace. Even for the many who began to work remotely were forced to become intimately familiar with the walls of their own homes, even more so than what had been previously known. The only people who appear to have succeeded throughout the pandemic which currently continues to rage appear to be those in a position of power over some industry which benefits from everyone being alone and depressed. The true 2020 experience was one of utmost despair. It resulted in countless lives being destroyed by death and by other means such as depression, drugs, and finances. With all that surrounded us, many took solace in media, which provided a portal to escapism which was, at times, drastically needed.

2020 was not a year in which I experienced the need for escape. I acknowledge my situation involved me knowing the right people and having the exact skillset I needed in order to find work. The harshest parts of my 2020 were entirely unrelated to COVID-19. In January, I began to experience intense depression after having whored myself out in October, November, and December to three different women in the most unfulfilling and shallow ways possible. I even went off of my medication for my anxiety-related disorders because it was not allowing me to perform well in these encounters. After literally being celibate for almost five years, I had expected to find joy in such excursions. In reality, I became more aware of my emotional needs being far more complex, and such a prospect caused me to become severely distressed. I found out toward the end of January 2020 that my internship supervisor was planning on hiring two of the three interns which were working under him. I was the one who was not being hired. I became obsessed with this negative feedback, attempting to become far more pushy with clients, making a strong effort to “force” improvement. Anything I could do to show that I was, in fact, hirable. In early February, I was told by my supervisor not to come in after he heard I had conversed with a client in a way he felt was reductive. He explained to me that the client in question had understood my comments toward how he was feeling suggested I was telling him these were not real and were instead being forced. I explained my true meaning behind the dialogue was to enforce reframing to explain how he didn’t deserve these feelings. My supervisor told me to take the day off, and that he would think about what needed to be done moving forward. The next day, I was told by one of my teachers that the internship was being terminated. To this day, I have not had contact with this man since that morning when he told me that I was not good enough.

After this experience, my emotions took a nosedive into the darkest territory they had ever touched. I can comfortably say, toward the beginning of March 2020, I was not wanting to continue on with my life as I wanted. I had signed up to take part in a class which involved traveling to Jamaica to perform casework and therapeutic services with severely neglected populations in the mountains. The night before going, I did not sleep. A part of me intended to not show up. To tell the instructor of this class that I had overslept through a text I planned to send moments after the flight was set to depart. I am not sure what possessed me to go against this plan, but I had found myself in the tiny lobby of an airport in southern Indiana hours before the flight would depart. I had done this trip before, and I found the experience life-changing. The time spent on this excursion became a desperate grasp to achieve the same feeling I did in the year prior. I craved a way to escape the reality of my situation. The reality that I had not succeeded and would need to wait an entire year before I could try again.

I only slept for about three hours on my third night in the small Jamaican campground our group was staying at. The next morning, I requested to speak to my professor in private about everything running through my head. She gave me insights to my situation I did not know or think about prior. I felt better afterward, but my situation did not change. I was still not going to be able to graduate in May like most of my other classmates. I still needed to level with the fact that I was told I was not good enough to do what I felt was my calling. I still craved an escape. One can become intimately connected to their fellow human being when they are unable to utilize an electronic carrying device such as a phone or laptop in a setting where you are surrounded by extreme poverty and severe physical and mental disorders. I shared with classmates, most of whom were total strangers, my issues, and they listened. I felt better. I had not escaped. It has become clear to me that shifting my reality to something other than my own is not a productive way of dealing with my own thoughts. I can not escape my life, whether I want to or not.

When I returned from Jamaica, COVID-19 had just claimed dominance over the United States. The restaurant I was working at to pay my bills had to shut down, and I was laid off from my position as a server. I spent two weeks doing basically nothing. I filed for unemployment but never received word back. After a couple more weeks, I moved back in with my parents, despite my lease still having three more months on it. I got a part-time job at a wholesale grocer I had worked at before starting graduate school. I made fifteen dollars an hour, which was significantly more money than I was making as a server. I asked my Jamaica classmates if they knew of any opening for social work. One of them gave me information. I applied and was hired. This was my first full-time job. I went back to dating. I met a girl. We hit it off. Currently, I am still at the same job and still with the same girl. I never escaped reality. I never changed reality. I simply lived life honestly, and managed to succeed while the world around me burned.

Video games are not a form of escapism for me. I do not become immersed in the experience of false worlds in the same way the average person may consider immersion. When you have as intimate of a relationship with video games as I do, they don’t take on that sort of role. ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ came out while I was sick with COVID-19. I was halfway through my extended quarantine, having no interaction with anyone in-person aside from my mother, who forcefully hugged me without my consent. She also got COVID-19 after this. We are all fine. If there was any time I could have immersed myself in a video game, allowing that to become my reality for a brief period, this was the time to do it. When I started playing ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ I literally had no responsibilities. As I was playing ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ on my base model Sony PlayStation 4, I heard constant criticism online concerning the extremity of the game’s visual bugs and performance issues. I spent five paragraphs on what seemingly has nothing to do with ‘Cyberpunk 2077’. Aside from my own personal decompression over events of the prior year, I wanted to establish that I play video games to be entertained. I did not anticipate immersion. I did not anticipate an escape. I did not go more than five minutes without experiencing a visual, audio, or input bug. I did not log this for active proof, but I am pretty confident in saying this, and I welcome CD Projekt Red pursuing legal action over this comment. The game also crashed, like, forty times over the course of my time with it. Again, I have no logs of this, but I feel confident in my ability to defend myself in a court room if it does, in fact, become that sort of thing. I, however, did not care about any of these. I am saying this, not as a CD Projekt Red simp, but as a man who both plays video games and is grounded in his own reality: I enjoyed ‘Cyberpunk 2077’.

Obviously, given it’s score, I have many issues with the ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ experience. The overarching story is quite shallow and redundant in comparison to many other gaming experiences. The looting system is barren of any interesting ideas. The combat encounters, whether you choose to be stealthy or action-oriented, are incredibly barebones, and you see the extent of their depth within the first hour of gameplay. There are many systems, such as crafting, vehicle buying, and crime rating to name a few, which are not fleshed out in any way and simply exist to be there. The “cyberpunk” in ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ is merely there as an aesthetic, and there is little in the overall plot to address many of the more complex themes the genre is capable of tackling.

One quest I find particularly annoying involves a monk who is being forced by actual criminals to modify his body with cybernetic enhancements. The potential for a complex moral quandary is quite significant. Much of Night City, the sandbox which one plays ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ in, operates around an assumed use of cyberoptics. The ethicality of designing services and support of basic needs around the assumption that civilians are utilizing cybernetic enhancements could be fun to explore, even in a light manner. The study of transhumanist philosophy is quite intriguing, and it asks many questions about the nature of improving our quality of life in favor of becoming a bit less fully oneself. ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ dips it’s toes into something potentially interesting, then turns it into a mission where you simply rescue the monk by murdering his captors. He thanks you and you get the experience points. Did it seem like it would be too boring to make a quest where citizens were mandated by the government to enhance their bodies with cybernetics, and you had the job of working with the monks on this issue? The problem with designing quests around whether or not you will be able to murder individuals is that it railroads you into a specific structure. It’s why the game’s three best quests: ‘Pyramid Song’, ‘Sinnerman’, and ‘Coin Operated Boy’, involve no murdering. The writers on the team excel in telling smaller-scale stories with minor consequences. I murdered hundreds of actual criminals in ‘Cyberpunk 2077’. The gratuitous death lost it’s weight quickly.

As far as I’m concerned, the bugs in ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ actually enhance the experience. This leads to an interesting question of how games criticism operates. Is it a critic’s obligation to discuss a game’s many bugs if they personally do not care about them? Even more interesting, should talks of these bugs be displayed in a negative light if the critic in question feels they improve the quality of the experience? I like the bugs in ‘Cyberpunk 2077’. They are funny. I do not like the crashing, though. By the time I had completed ‘Cyberpunk 2077’, I felt empty. The parts of the game I enjoyed were long removed from the experience, and all I had left to do was murder the correct amount of actual criminals. The bugs were the most enjoyable part of the experience. I had exhausted all the entertainment I could find in the gameplay and story, and was playing to check it off of my list of games I had to finish. The bugs kept me coming because they were consistently fun to experience.

‘Cyberpunk 2077’ is not a game I would recommend to most people. As an experience, the moments where it excels above competition are far too sparse. In a year where we received the gunplay of ‘Doom Eternal’, the stealth of ‘Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales’, the story of ’13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim’, and the graphical prowess of ‘Demon’s Souls’, it becomes abundantly clear that ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ is an imitator, too self-absorbed in the prospect of having numerous systems and taking no time to flesh any of these out. At their basest level, they are enjoyable. But the game never moves beyond the basest level, so you have 50+ hours of video game that I would describe as, “fine”. Also the driving is the worst I’ve ever seen in an open-world game.

Back when I was in undergrad and majoring in advertising for some stupid reason, I played ‘Dead Space’ and had a weird time with it. I, for another stupid reason, didn’t pick up on the need to fight enemies by attacking limbs, despite the many obvious “hints” dropped on me. Notably the words “CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS” written in blood right next to the first weapon you acquire. Whether the two reasons are related is for you to decide and me to ignore. Needless to say, I went through the first ‘Dead Space’ scoring headshots like a massive hard-ass, and being confused about why that did not secure a kill, believing it to be the result of bad game design. This was a certified DUMB moment for me.

So when I discovered there was a spiritual successor to the game I so defiantly refused to play properly, I was mildly interested in the prospect of correcting some perceived wrongdoing of my past self. Once it was offered for free on PSN, I became moderately interested in it. After playing ‘The Callisto Protocol’ for about two hours, I lost that interest and am currently unsure if ‘Dead Space’ would have been good regardless of how I played. Fortunately, there’s an easier metric to distinguish this, as the remake of ‘Dead Space’, aka ‘Dead Space’, released shortly after this did. It was boring as fuck, so I guess I got my answer.

In my short time with ‘The Callisto Protocol', one thing became very clear to me. That is, it's difficulty in removing itself from ‘Dead Space'. The melee combat is introduced with some of the deepest fascination with violence I’ve witnessed, opting to showcase the excess blood splatter resulting from your blunt weaponry smashing into the game’s enemies, with chunks of meat tearing from their bodies with each swing of your baton. One enemy encounter will frost your character with blood like icing on a cake. This is not only highly reminiscent of the aforementioned franchise’s grotesque sensibilities, but a heavy reminder of how ‘Dead Space’ marketed itself back in the late aughts and early 10s. ‘Dead Space 2’ was presented as a game your mom will hate, given the voracity of violence committed unto both the player and your enemies. Whether or not your mom actually hates it, one thing we can all agree on is it being a very “seventh generation video game marketing strategy” marketing strategy. One of my favorite interactions ever was as a teenager in a Wal-Mart video game aisle with my brother, as we were approached by a child and told how cool ‘Assassin’s Creed II’ was because you could stab two people at the same time, which was "badass”. I wonder if this child remembers the interaction and cringes, because I always remember it and laugh at him.

My point, I guess, is the gore present in the ‘Dead Space’ games was notably a product of it's time, and I don’t feel it’s why the games were as big as they were, even if that is how advertisers saw the games. And to the children who did put stock into that violence, well, they are grown now, and have hopefully matured enough to stop considering Ubisoft games as “badass”. The gore in ‘The Callisto Protocol’ is incredibly silly, and merely reminded me of when video games were more interested in how many limbs could be uniquely animated to fly off a body, as opposed to engaging gameplay. Yes, this is me shitting on ‘Dead Space’, and no I am not sorry, nor am I done. It isn’t a very good game and it never was.

This got way off rails, my bad. Anyway, I didn’t play ‘The Callisto Protocol’ long enough to see if it eventually managed to find it’s own identity. The awful melee combat and even worse gunplay kept me from doing that. As-is, it’s just the same sci-fi horror with aggressively uninspired aesthetic design and a complete inability to actually be scary, all of which was done in a better way, fifteen years ago, by a mediocre video game. 2/6

I dropped ‘Sonic Superstars’ less than an hour into it, because I got to a part where the physics didn’t make any sense to me. If you want a critique of Sonic Superstars, look elsewhere. I am not going to give a fair and balanced review of the game. I am going to offload my pent up rage toward society in the form of a faux analysis of ‘Sonic Superstars’, and you cannot stop me.

‘Sonic Superstars’ is the latest side-scrolling entry into the ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ franchise. Similarly to ‘Sonic Mania’ before it, inspiration is drawn from the design seen in the early-1990s Genesis games, aka “The Good Ole Days”. I played ‘Sonic Mania’ and thought it was solid, then never played it again, forgetting everything about it. Needless to say, I don’t remember if ‘Sonic Mania’ was actually any better than the average ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ game, or if I was merely craving a gimmick-free retro throwback to my times playing ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 2’ on my grandfather’s Sega Genesis. It has been six years since ‘Sonic Mania’ initially dropped, and Sonic has hit a bit of a multimedia renaissance since then. The children I work with seem to know Sonic purely as a character from the ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ film franchise, and consider themselves fans of ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’, without having played a single ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ video game. If I was given this information five years ago, I probably would have had increasingly dumb “kids these days”-type thoughts. But having the information now, I can only lament the reality of new ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ enjoyers entering one of the most unhinged fandoms in all of media.

‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ no longer feels like a video game franchise to me. It advanced past that stage long ago. Despite never playing most of the games released after ‘Sonic Adventure 2’, I feel like it’s continued to be present in my brain. I know about each game released, and the drama surrounding them individually, but I haven’t played them. They exist less as video games and more as lore, fueling the eternal discourse surrounding Sega’s megalithic franchise. I’m not sure why I specifically chose to pick up ‘Sonic Superstars’, given my poor engagement with the franchise, but I can confirm it was a mistake to expect a new ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ video game to make me feel happy.

Within the opening minutes, I was reminded of the unfortunate reality that Sonic’s speed is difficult to keep up with. As Sonic chastised many moons prior, I am too slow. But not in a physical sense. I have always been too slow to move like Sonic, but I was once able to process his speed. For various reasons, though mostly the process of aging, I am no longer able to read screen action as well as in the past. So when I’m immediately put in a situation where I take damage for moving faster than I can follow, multiple times, it kills my motivation to continue playing. This alone would have likely eventually led me to drop the game, but the nail in the coffin came in the third zone, when a wind storm began causing the platforms to tilt, and I couldn’t get Sonic to stop jumping horizontally into the abyss.

Maybe ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ isn’t for me anymore. I did not have any drive to keep up with what was happening in front of me, and the decision to stop playing was far easier than it has ever been for me to drop a game that I wasn’t just intending to “mess around with”. ‘Sonic Superstars’ immediately made me a fool, mocking me for not having the time, energy, or skill from my childhood and adolescence. This, as sad as it may be to admit, is my vengeance. I do not wish ill on Sonic or his fans, be they young or old. I am merely fighting back against the unending march of time. Sonic may be able to occupy my past, present, and future, but he can’t control how I decide to interpret his existence. And my interpretation is that ‘Sonic Superstars’ sucks. 2/6

The ‘Doom’ franchise is an odd one for me. I first played ‘Doom (2016)’ in 2017, which was a solid 4/6. I then played ‘Doom (1993)’ and was pleasantly surprised at how much I ended up enjoying it. ‘Doom (1993)’ is an old game from the year 1993. Good video games from 1993, aside from ‘Doom (1993)’, include ‘The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening’, ‘Mega Man X’, ‘Kirby’s Adventure’, and nothing else. Most games from this year are bad, and all of them are old. ‘Doom (1993)’ is not bad, and it does not show it’s age in anything beyond the literal joke of a soundtrack you listen to as you murder demons. I then moved on to ‘Doom II: Hell on Earth’ and hated it. I played no other ‘Doom’ games until ‘Doom Eternal’ soon after it’s 2020 release. When I initially built my 2020 GotY list,, I had it scored as a 3/6 and ranked fourteenth. Evidently, something has shifted since my initial playthrough of ‘Doom Eternal’.

Sometime around early April of 2020, the original ‘Doom’ trilogy went on sale on the Nintendo Switch eShop. Because I simped for the Nintendo Switch at the time, and because I had an odd craving to play ‘Doom (1993)’ again, it seemed an opportune moment to replay ‘Doom (1993)’. It still held up, and I feel fully comfortable stating it is one of the best first-person shooters ever made, even removed from the cultural and technical significance it holds. I then played ‘Doom II: Hell on Earth’ on that very same Nintendo Switch, and came to the realization my past self was an absolute moron. ‘Doom II: Hell on Earth’ is just ‘Doom (1993)’ but better. I then attempted to play the bonus packs included within these Nintendo Switch versions of Doom, and I did not get very far before realizing this was a waste of time. Then came ‘Doom 64’ and ‘Doom 64: The Lost Levels’, which I already wrote about in the past, and refuse to write about again for at least 15 more years. After this came ‘Doom 3’ on the Nintendo Switch, which is as much a ‘Doom’ game as I am an intellectual. Meaning we pretend, though it is impossible to hide the reality of such falsehood. On my own personal list of every video game I’ve ever played, which is a secret that you are not yet powerful enough to understand, I gave each game the following scores:

Doom (1993) — 4/6
Doom II: Hell on Earth — 5/6
TNT: Evilution — 2/6
The Plutonia Experiment — 2/6
Doom 64–4/6
Doom 64: The Lost Levels — 4/6
Doom 3–3/6

It took twelve years following the release of ‘Doom 3’ to receive a fully realized, completely new ‘Doom’ project. That project culminated in one of the more innovative first-person shooters to come out from the previous console generation, ‘Doom (2016)’. I replayed ‘Doom (2016)’ and realized it was the best ‘Doom’ game I had played at that point. My first playthrough of the game was fun, but having an entire catalogue of ‘Doom’ games under my belt, as well as having just completed the notably subdued ‘Doom 3’, ‘Doom (2016)’ cracked my ass like a whip to the ass. ‘Doom (2016)’ is one of the most impressive shooters ever created on both a technical and philosophical level. It has an abundance of ideas presented through combat and level design, never appearing to fail in any of it’s ventures. I can’t name a single moment during ‘Doom (2016)’ where I remember feeling underwhelmed. It comes supremely close to perfecting itself in one of the most beautiful ways possible. ‘Doom (2016)’ is the type of game that led me to utilize a 6-point scale rather than a 5-point scale. I feel five points does too little to allow for the best of the best to separate themselves from the games which are merely of high quality. Games that go the extra mile to either ensure a high level of quality, or appeal to a very specific love of mine, deserve to be treated on a separate level. ‘Doom (2016)’ is a 6/6 video game.

‘Doom Eternal’ is not ‘Doom (2016)’. In fact, it isn’t even close to ‘Doom (2016)’. The aesthetic is there, the weaponry is there, the gore is there, but it revamps the combat and level design entirely to fit to it’s new mechanics. It took massive testicles to make the decision to shift away from the critically and commercially successful power fantasy of ‘Doom (2016)’ into a skills-based cooldown-focused style of game that is ‘Doom Eternal’. When I first started ‘Doom Eternal’, I was bad at ‘Doom’ games. I had only played ‘Doom (2016)’, ‘Doom (1993)’, and ‘Doom II: Hell on Earth’ one time each, all on the easiest difficulty setting available. Because I have issues coming to terms with my masculinity, I decided I would play ‘Doom Eternal’ on the normal difficulty. I did this for most of the game and did not have fun. When I did move to the easiest difficulty some time in the latter half, I had more fun, but I had been having so little fun prior that the pace of my play had extended past two months, and I felt quite ready to remove myself from gaming with ‘Doom Eternal’ specifically. When I finally finished ‘Doom Eternal’, I had determined it to be a restrictive experience as opposed to the freeing sensation ‘Doom (2016)’ presented through it’s 10+-hour campaign. It was difficult for me to wrap my head around just how much the game forces you to utilize very specific mechanics in order to survive even the smallest of encounters. My first playthrough was spent constantly running out of ammunition and basically never remembering to use the Flame Belch. I spent a majority of my time on critical health, trying to forage around like I would in ‘Doom (2016)’, and doing so unsuccessfully because this is ‘Doom Eternal’. I wanted to utilize the Super Shotgun in at least 95% of my encounters, as I deemed it the most fun weapon and I became annoyed when I no longer could use it after a few shots. I hated the enemies which required me to “counter” their attacks because I just wanted to fire away with no interruption. It is abundantly clear to me, now, that what I wanted to do was to play ‘Doom (2016)’

When I made my return to ‘Doom Eternal’, it came immediately after another foray into ‘Doom (2016)’. There was no longer a 3-year gap between my experience with a 6/6 video game and an experience I assumed would be similar. I, as well, was not necessarily in the mood to play something which needed as much attention and focus as ‘Doom Eternal’. I think I played it around the same time as I played ‘Tomb Raider (1996)’ for the first time, which was a slow and methodical experience that I loved. On my return to ‘Doom Eternal’, I had become full on the stress-free shooting from the games ‘Doom (1993)’, ‘Doom II: Hell on Earth’, ‘Doom 64’, ‘Doom 3’, and ‘Doom (2016)’. I wasn’t experiencing the same craving I had earlier in the year during my initial playthrough of ‘Doom Eternal’. In short, I actually engaged ‘Doom Eternal’ as it was designed to be engaged on my second time around. And that engagement made it my favorite game of 2020.

There are few gaming experiences I’ve had which have been more satisfying than mastering a single combat encounter with ‘Doom Eternal’. I’ve heard detractors state that ‘Doom Eternal’ asks the player to specifically do too many things to the point of not being fun. I agreed with this argument when I was bad at ‘Doom Eternal’. But ‘Doom Eternal’ is not asking you to do specific things, it merely requires you to meet a standard criteria of actions during each battle. How you go about performing those actions is where one can express their freedoms. In my second playthrough of ‘Doom Eternal’, I wasn’t forcefully restricting myself to the Super Shotgun, nor was I ignoring the less immediately gratifying mechanics such as the Flame Belch or ice grenades. ‘Doom Eternal’ needs the player to think actively about how each tool can be used, not only to be enjoyable, but to present itself as the masterpiece it actually is. Utilizing your weaponry in successful combos to maintain full health and full ammo as you are slaughtering dozens of powerful enemies creates a special kind of gratification I have never had before. Weak points were added to many of the stronger enemies, making battles become even more mentally involving. The combat in ‘Doom Eternal’ is always asking you to think and act quickly and intelligently, and it is always a blast. Even the Marauder, an enemy that not even ‘Doom Eternal’ simps tend to defend, became fun for me when I realized how many ways a single Marauder can shake up one’s playstyle and encourage on-the-fly adaptation.

There is not a single moment in ‘Doom Eternal’ that isn’t fun. Much like ‘Hades’ from the same year, game designers should be ashamed of themselves for being unable to create something this good. There may be some tonal problems with ‘Doom Eternal’ such as how arcade-y pickups and environments are and how overly serious the story is in comparison. However, this is also hilarious. ‘Doom Eternal’ is the gold standard of 2020 video games, and I am an embarrassment of a human being for almost failing to see this.

So at the time of this writing, there are 1460 reviews from other users on this website. And certainly, I’m struck with the immediate conflict of being in the position of creating a review which I hope will be different enough from the other 1460 people who also wanted to create a review. Odds are this won’t get seen by more than the few friends I decide to share it with, and I would assume it only gets read by 2 or 3 of them, since they’re normal people. So what exactly is my role in this critique, and how serious is the expectation for me to put forth quality writing, exactly? Well, I don’t really have the answer to that, which sucks, but I at least have thoughts and opinions which I’m willing to share to anyone unfortunate enough to put their valuable time into reading this.


I have talked a lot about ‘The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’, whether that be good or bad. Ultimately, my feelings settle to finding the game fun, but ultimately finding it meanders through a campaign which does little to evolve itself past the first few hours, failing to fulfill the same energy for the other fifty hours I spent with it. It’s important to make the distinction between ‘Breath of the Wild’ having core mechanical flaws versus its apathy towards expanding upon its most engaging concepts. In fact, the level of polish, even with the chugging framerate at times, is immaculate, as few games of such size manage to stay as consistently thorough in their design and functionality. ‘Breath of the Wild’ was an incredibly cool concept, but with a scope grander than what the designers were able to fill.


So when ‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’ was announced as a direct sequel, it was easy to have optimism. On one hand, you have people unlike me, which is most people, who saw ‘Breath of the Wild’ as one of the greatest games ever made now getting a direct sequel to that. Then you have the subset of people in my camp who thought ‘Breath of the Wild’ was fine, but missed out on a lot of potential to be significantly better. Potential which, given the talent behind the team, could certainly be achieved with enough tinkering. But all of that faded a bit, at least for me, when it was confirmed that the overworld would be the same. Any excitement I had was flushed away when this was announced. I’m not suggesting that I knew, at this point, the game would be bad or anything. But the greatest strength of ‘Breath of the Wild’ was its ability to amaze you with its surprises. There were so many times in ‘Breath of the Wild’ where you would find something which felt completely new and unexpected, and it was really cool to figure out what you needed to do to get whatever reward may be waiting for you. Once it got to the point where I realized every reward was a weapon that broke after a few fights, this feeling of wonder quickly left, but at least it was there for a little bit.


‘Tears of the Kingdom’ removing this feeling of exploration, discovery, and reward is an unfortunate side effect of reusing a map from a previous game. The sense of discovery is lost quickly when you figure out how much of the game really is the exact same. As much as I love the sound effects the Koroks make, did we really need this many more of them with almost no change? The only legitimate changes I noticed were Ascend puzzles and puzzles where you help a Korok find their friend. The former is where you ascend through a log from below, which is just as mindless of a puzzle as the other ones. The latter is one of the least fun methods of engaging the game’s new Ultrahand ability, where you fuse different objects onto each other to create all kinds of different things. Primarily, what these puzzles ask you to do is to create a vehicle capable of transporting the Korok to where they need to go, which is a fun idea in theory. However, the magic of building is torn away after realizing most of the vehicles are extremely situational, and that strapping a rocket to a Korok is a much quicker method of crossing large gaps with less resources. Similarly, strapping a couple of fans onto a steering stick was by far the most efficient way of traversing all three of the game’s massive overworlds. Combine this with an overall jankiness the Ultrahand fails to manage, and you’ve essentially trivialized a mechanic which feels like it took a majority of the development time to piece together.


Similarly to these new Koroks, we’re also introduced to another game-wide puzzle involving a man who cannot figure out how to keep his sign standing. It’s the same man every time, but you’re meant to use the Ultrahand to piece together objects in order to hold the sign in place. These puzzles are always incredibly easy, and the reward was never worth the time spent in doing them. I eventually just began ignoring them. These are the two most common types of puzzles the game throws at you, and they never evolve these ideas. They just continue to show up everywhere you go, with little to no alteration of difficulty. Obviously you don’t have to engage these, but when a game is reusing the same overworld which is heavily reliant on the sense of discovery, it’s the added content which is important to make exciting or surprising. Knowing that the biggest surprise I might find is a Korok who whines about needing to reach their friend, or the sign guy who’s gimmick ran stale after his third appearance, is not a fun way to engage players of the previous game.


Shrines are back, and they do little to improve upon where they were at in the previous game. While the Test of Strength type shrines have been revamped from 1-on-1 fights into larger sandboxes which force you to fight without the gear you came in with, they feel more like far less interesting versions of Eventide Island than improvements upon their predecessors. There are still a ton of shrines which don’t contain a puzzle, and even more where the puzzle is far too simple to feel like a legitimate reward. While I couldn’t give an exact number of shrines which I felt were legitimately fun, I’m certain it didn’t exceed five. I completed 90, according to the loading screen, and towards the end of the game I started to ignore shrines altogether. They continue to serve the sole purpose of allowing you to upgrade your health and stamina, neither of which feel like good ways to implement their growth. I’ve already spent way too much time telling people why I think the stamina wheel is among the most poorly-implemented mechanics in open-world gaming, so I’ll spare this review of any of that discussion for everyone’s sanity. My argument has never been all too convincing, so I’m willing to just accept it’s a bad take.


What I refuse to accept as a bad take is the durability mechanic, which was awful. From what I could gather, based on the arguments for it, is that it was meant to create tension and emergent gameplay as you cycled through a variety of weapons with their own unique movesets and interactions. I find this argument to be troubling, however, as ‘Breath of the Wild’ isn’t really difficult or varied enough to facilitate any of those feelings. The flow of action is incredibly important to any game with regular combat, and the addition of such a regular need to open a menu and swap your equipment so that you can continue fighting is a massive issue in dire need of being fixed. Even worse, Link remains locked in place when you do a standard attack for any weapon, removing any forward momentum and causing the combat to feel stiff. You really aren’t going to be able to make exciting combat if this is what you’re expected to work with. ‘Tears of the Kingdom’ doesn’t fix any of these problems, but one thing it does do better with is the new fusion mechanic. Allowing me to improve the strength and capabilities of weapons depending on what random resource I attach onto it is great, and I love that you can attach basically anything onto any weapon. You can even attach a piece of raw meat onto the Master Sword if you’re a sick fuck. The ingenuity runs its course by the middle of the game when you realize there are only a few interactions in total, which merely vary in strength with rarer materials, but I appreciated it for giving more of a reason to engage the durability mechanic, since I was actually going through my strong weapons as opposed to hoarding them like I did in ‘Breath of the Wild’.


But I do want to be careful in suggesting that this is a fix. It’s more of an improvement. Limited inventory and poor durability are still issues which don’t jive well with the game’s overall feel, but the addition of fusion allows those problems to be more of a headache than a migraine. Where fusion takes it’s biggest hit is with some pretty baffling interface in relation to what you’re able to fuse onto weapons. The menu you pull up is a single line of everything you’ve collected at any point in the game. You get a few sort options, but if you’re aiming to try something new, it can take a number of seconds to scroll to the necessary items. When a friend told me about how Keese eyeballs functioned, I wanted to try these out, but I was so far into the game that I’d already used so many different items, and having to sort through the menu each time I wanted to attach an eyeball to my arrow would keep me in menus instead of actually fighting. Perhaps it’s a shallow argument to make, but it only furthers how dull combat manages to feel, being locked into menus instead of engaging the action directly. There could’ve easily been a method of saving certain materials to a smaller chain of boxes to choose from, but instead we have an interface which disincentivizes trying anything new.


Another addition to this game is the use of sage companions. The first one I got was Tulin, who uses gusts of wind to push you forward. This is an excellent ability and is much appreciated. It makes flying on your paraglider a much more feasible option for moving through areas, at least until you get enough Zonai charge for the aforementioned steering stick and fans combo. It also activates any time you jump from a decent height. This is awesome game design and gets an S+ rating. Good shit. But then I got the other sages, none of which are anywhere near as helpful. The key issue is that the other four sages you acquire are almost specifically dedicated to combat. You can make the argument that Yunobo is more for clearing rubble, and you would have a point, but I can’t really identify any reason why the other three would be used outside of combat. The issue is less of what they add, and more about how they’re implemented. In order to activate their specific powers, you have to walk up to them and press the interact button. This sometimes overrides other things you might be doing, like collecting items, and can actually impact this by having Tulin blow them away from you or Yunobo burning them. It also directly interferes with the flow of combat yet again. I know I’ve spent the past few paragraphs harping on how much they botched the combat in this game, and I’m sorry if you’re still reading, but this is just such a critical part of the game to have messed up this badly. In order to activate the unique powers of each sage you have to step away from the fight to try and interact with each individual sage. They are also going to be fighting with you, and are sometimes actively running away from you, towards the enemy, making it a chore to actually use them. I basically never used my companions for combat because activating them is more of a struggle than just swinging a weapon at an enemy. There’s a button dedicated exclusively to whistling which I used in exactly two situations over the course of the entire game. Why not change that into a menu where you can whistle, but also easily summon the powers of your sage companions? This would completely alleviate the issue and would allow a more free environment to actually experiment with the tools you have. Also, on the subject of whistling and summoning things, why the hell are we still dealing with stables as the only means to access our horse? “The Witcher 3’ figured out, in 2015, that having your horse summoned to you at the press of the button was a good idea. I doubt it wasn’t even the first game to do that. Hell, in 2022, Elden Ring realized that having your horse on you at all times was a good idea. You just press a button and you can start riding. It’s perfect. Why are these open-world ‘Legend of Zelda’ games heralded as innovators when there are so many piss-poor decisions I wouldn’t even anticipate from mid-2010s game design philosophy? Sorry, this is a bit of a tangent, but why?


I dunno, I kinda just don’t want to bother talking about my other issues, as I’ve pretty thoroughly sent my message, at least I feel I have. I’m not even going to delve past the surface level into my issues with the uninspired dungeon design (Outside of the Fire Temple which was quite good), the poor storytelling (Story itself has legs, but it’s implementation is sloppy. Still better than ‘Breath of the Wild’ though.), or the disappointing realization that The Depths are not very dangerous and are actually super boring (I loved this place and the concept behind it for my first 2 or 3 hours down there, but man, you see everything exciting it has to offer incredibly quickly). The only real solace I can give the game is that it is a little bit better than ‘Breath of the Wild’, but you really have to squint to see it. Hell, some of the reasons I feel I enjoyed this more are less about the game correcting any flaws, and more about me optimizing my play. During ‘Breath of the Wild’ I put little focus in upgrading stamina, and I would remain focused on a singular objective, even when that objective was intruded upon by rain or a lack of resources. In this game, I prioritized stamina, and made the decision to immediately move away from what I was working on if it started to rain or if a wall was too steep or if I didn’t have the right materials to complete a quest. The game was only more fun because I altered the way I play, and I think part of that is my own fault for misreading the queues the game initially sent me. But I think it truly is a massive let-down that I need to play this game in a specific way to have fun. Because these games are supposed to give you the freedom to do whatever you feel like. That freedom rings hollow, however, when you’re at the mercy of the systems which oppress those opportunities. Actually wait, are these games metaphors for capitalism? Shit, nevermind, these games rule.


In my initial draft of this rambling stream of consciousness masquerading as a review, I ended it there. A silly joke meant to lighten the mood of my fairly dour take on the game. But that’s not fair to the game, nor is it fair to anyone reading this, or even fair to myself. I have been playing 'Zelda' games since I was quite young. I honestly can’t remember a point in my life where I wasn’t at least somewhat engrossed with the franchise. The games played a critical role in my most formative years, helping to shape what video games would inevitably mean to me. And while delving into the extent of that is far beyond the scope of what you’re reading today, I sincerely do mean it when I say that I love these games. Don’t get me wrong, there have been plenty of lows (coughTri Force Heroescough), but it doesn’t separate this franchise from that key feeling I experience when I simply think about it. I think there is great importance in taking a critical examination of the games we play, and I feel this rings especially true when it comes to the games we love. And those critical examinations need to be treated seriously.


I try my best to be harder on these long-running Nintendo franchises simply due to how established and prestigious they are. Whether or not it’s fair to take that approach or not is a different debate entirely, but it’s the critical and fan feedback which affords creators the chance to see how their work has impacted others. Whether I like it or not, ‘Breath of the Wild’ was a wildly transformative game, not only to the franchise and the medium as a whole, but to a large amount of individual people who were impacted by it. And, whether I like it or not, ‘Tears of the Kingdom’ appears to have captured that same feeling in most of the people who have played it. Not everyone wants to be hard on the games they love, and, sometimes, what you play just amazes you so much that it’s hard to see others share their more negative experiences. One of my favorite games of all time is ‘The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker’, and I can say, from experience, that seeing people address their personal grievances toward it is a really crappy feeling. But the ‘Zelda’ games would not have taken the shape they currently do if not for those same people showing that same passion in addressing legitimate flaws of ‘The Wind Waker’, ‘Twilight Princess’, and, quite crucially, ‘Skyward Sword’. If everybody just accepted the critical reaction to these games as evidence of their total quality, we would still be getting games which were making the same mistakes while doing little, from a design standpoint, to actually advance the franchise. And unfortunately, I feel the reaction we are seeing, at both a critical and commercial level, may inadvertently be contributing to us repeating the cycle started by ‘Ocarina of Time’ over two decades prior. ‘Breath of the Wild’ was able to capture that same flame its older brother did back in 1998, and it did so by taking bold risks and challenging itself to build into something unlike what anyone had seen, while remaining familiar enough to be comforting for those who grew up with the games. Those efforts can’t be overstated.


With ‘Tears of the Kingdom’, the development team had the chance to continue the boldness that allowed ‘Breath of the Wild’ to flourish. The opportunity to continue shaking things up and to make continued steps forward, expanding on the strengths of ‘Breath of the Wild’ while eliminating the flaws. To continue moving forward instead of stagnating and becoming comfortable in what the expectations for them are. They have the skill to do that. And I guess I just feel a bit melancholy that, despite those opportunities, the creators of my favorite video game series have decided to remain in the safety of what they know will be acceptable. 3/6

It's hard to believe this is a PS1 game, given how basically all of it feels like it could've fit into a SNES cart. Obviously the animated opening and the music are far too advanced, but the game doesn't really look to impressive outside of the occasional cool sprite animation and the dynamic battle camera. When viewed from the lens of modernity, the stuff this game pulled off which likely seemed exciting at the time are no longer very impressive. I was 2 in 1995, so maybe I'm wrong, but the big features seem to be the size of the playable cast, the inclusion of large-scale battles, and the cinematic battle scenes. I already briefly touched on that last one, and it certainly looks cool for a bit, but it doesn't necessarily carry the otherwise simplistic combat you will spend many hours in.

The sheer scope of having 108 individual characters, with most being payable, is neat in theory but ultimately leads to a bloated cast where individual characters aren't really able to shine. Gremio, Viktor, and Flik really feel like the only characters who are explored in depth. You could argue Tir gets more exploration, but he's a silent protagonist so you don't really see any growth. You're allowed to make dialogue choices, but unless you are deciding whether or not to recruit someone, it doesn't have an impact on the story. If the story was just the small band you're forced to carry around for most of the game, it likely would've been more engaging, especially since I liked the personalities of a number of characters which never received more than some brief story moments.

The large-scale battles certainly feel neat in concept as well, but if you break it down, you realize how lame they actually are. They're essentially just rock-paper-scissors, and whether or not you pick the right one is completely by chance unless you send out scouts to determine enemy attacks. It's really lame to have such a mechanic in an RPG, and they make it even worse by including another type of 1v1 battle which does the exact same thing. I can't help but feel the concepts in this game were thought out long before they actually designed any of this, which is normal I think, but then when the game didn't shape out in a playable way, they didn't bother ironing anything out and instead watered down these ideas.

All that being said, there's a certain appeal to the collecting of soldiers as if they're Pokémon. I had a blast searching for all the recruits, and I still had a blast when I used a walkthrough to find the rest. You even get a surprise near the end if you collect everyone, but that surprise is kind of bad imo, since it takes away a solid character moment while also being a wet fart of a climax since it feels like it was written in at the last second. Anywho, it's also great to know that I can just take whoever I want into battle, assuming I have open slots. Most of the game you're force to have at least one other character with you, but you can use open slots with whoever the hell you want. And if someone is underleveled, the game has this neat feature where they'll just shoot up in level super quick and can be on even footing with the rest of the team. It's good stuff.

And honestly, if you stripped this game of all those somewhat unique features, you'd have a fun JRPG to play with. It's not lighting the world on fire with it's combat, and it especially isn't doing so with it's level design, but it's never repetitive or aggravating to play. It's just a well-polished turn-based RPG and that itself is worth praise, even despite the poor execution of it's grander ideas. 4/6

Now that I've had some time to marinate on my feelings and be forced to acknowledge whether or not they are legitimate, I can confirm that yes, this is a fantastic game. I could preach on about how awful the performance and constant visual bugs are, but doing so would mean putting far more weight into something which didn't actually matter to me. Yes, the game is a poorly optimized mess. Yes, the fact that it released in it's clearly unfinished state is nothing short of an embarrassment, and GameFreak deserves all the bad PR it got because of how poorly cobbled together their $60 game was. In a perfect world, GameFreak would've prioritized polish over arbitrary deadlines, but we are dealing with the video games industry, and for every title that releases as complete as, say, Elden Ring, we can expect 15 individual AAA releases to shit the bed.

All that aside, I have to acknowledge I am part of the issue. I love these games, and was still willing to buy them at full price after the uninspired debacle that was Sword/Shield. But Pokémon Violet shows the same thing Pokémon Legends does, and that is that the formula of catching, training, evolving, and battling with all sorts of different Pokémon is hard to fuck up. The actual developers, limited in time and resources as they are, are still very talented and creative when they get the chance to put their ideas forward. This is seriously one of the best uses of the classic formula yet.

While it takes a step back from Legends in regards to pure efficiency, this open world is far more engaging and well-realized than Legends. The world is fully connected, as opposed to you having to choose different zones. from a world map. The pointless space which plagued Legends is still here, unfortunately, but it's offset by the sheer abundance of Pokémon to catch, as well as a decent chunk of trainers to fight if you please. As you progress through the game, you will unlock different mobility upgrades which allow you to seek more of the world, and this is also done better, as it sends you darting back and forth through it's world, allowing you to slowly open each individual segment. This does create some issue, as you can very easily miss the intended path, and there are no efforts to scale the difficulty with your level. But I don't think the game is ever particularly challenging to begin with. The main stories in these games have never been where the legitimate challenge lay since the very beginning, so messing up the order of events and not having optimum balance is more of a franchise-wide issue than one exclusive to this generation.

It does lose out on some things, like battles no longer being as quick as they were in Arceus. Load times between attacks takes some getting used to, and it never really gets to the point of being unnoticeable. You also can no longer move away from battles, which takes away the best thing Legends did, which was letting you escape without touching a single menu button. And since Pokemon are scaled to legitimate size, you can end up getting into a number of encounters you have no desire to be in. This wasn't a big deal in Legends, and it's still not a big deal here, but it's a bigger deal now than it used to be and it feels a bit unnecessary, y'know. However, I would take these issues over the abysmal inventory management from Legends, but actual good video games, like Elden Ring, don't have any of these issues.

I'm also glad they tried to write a fun story. Like, it's not amazing and is still very silly and made for children, but holy shit, I actually felt invested in the plot toward the end. It was paced horribly since most of the notable events occur in the final part of the main story, but it's neat to feel engaged regardless. I could probably drone on more about hyper-specific things I liked and didn't like, but I definitely don't want to do that right now. Maybe later, but probably never. 5/6