Shymain
2018
There's so much that could be said about the thematic depth of this game, of the pure emotional core that Dontnod captures perfectly yet again despite their writing always just being a little bit off, of the brilliantly real characters that light up this fictional world... but I'm lazy, so for now I'll just say: I want to live in chapter 3 of this game. Best LiS moment of all time.
It's a full 180 from the original, somehow. They made the story actually good this time (no more lazy audio file lore dumps, thank god, and the dialogue isn't the most stilted garbage ever this time around) but in the process, everything else became generic AAA filler content. The combat has declined sharply in quality from the perfect balance found in the Frozen Wilds DLC, the world is so much bigger and filled with so much bloated unnecessary content, and I just couldn't bring myself to care enough to binge the fuck out of this game like I did HZD. At least they got rid of the annoying inventory restrictions, I guess.
My least favorite moment was discovering Cauldron Kappa while at level 15 and realizing I needed an ability I didn't have to enter, something which would not have happened in HZD because the game wasn't fucking stupid enough to think that locking content away behind arbitrary walls in an open world game is a good idea. My favorite moment was returning at level 19, after making a beeline for Poseidon, and beating the whole Cauldron while severely underleveled and with mid as fuck gear. If only the game actually had the balls to be legitimately challenging in any other instance (instead, it opts to just throw hordes of damage sponge enemies at you and call that "difficulty" rather than "lame boring bullshit").
My least favorite moment was discovering Cauldron Kappa while at level 15 and realizing I needed an ability I didn't have to enter, something which would not have happened in HZD because the game wasn't fucking stupid enough to think that locking content away behind arbitrary walls in an open world game is a good idea. My favorite moment was returning at level 19, after making a beeline for Poseidon, and beating the whole Cauldron while severely underleveled and with mid as fuck gear. If only the game actually had the balls to be legitimately challenging in any other instance (instead, it opts to just throw hordes of damage sponge enemies at you and call that "difficulty" rather than "lame boring bullshit").
BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD
I had SO much hope for this game. It looked gorgeous. I bought a PS5 solely to play it. I fucking adore the first two games. But Deck Nine doesn't get these games at all, they don't understand the heart of Dontnod's writing, and this game authoritatively proves that it is a disastrously bad idea to give LiS to any other studio. This game represents the death of one of my favorite game series of all time. (Either that, or the game was just rushed as fuck, which I wouldn't be surprised by given the disastrous remaster situation.)
The Steph side content was pretty neat, at least.
I had SO much hope for this game. It looked gorgeous. I bought a PS5 solely to play it. I fucking adore the first two games. But Deck Nine doesn't get these games at all, they don't understand the heart of Dontnod's writing, and this game authoritatively proves that it is a disastrously bad idea to give LiS to any other studio. This game represents the death of one of my favorite game series of all time. (Either that, or the game was just rushed as fuck, which I wouldn't be surprised by given the disastrous remaster situation.)
The Steph side content was pretty neat, at least.