[This review is sponsored in part by My Buddy Erick, who so generously gifted me my copy of Elden Ring]

FromSoft's latest dark fantasy dodge-roll extravaganza is a game I was perfectly content to let pass me by despite the insane hype built up by its memetically-long development cycle and the critical acclaim heaped onto it by its rabid fanbase. The Soulsborne series is something that I'm very aware of as an avid gaming enthusiast (it's kind of impossible to ignore the biggest action RPG craze of the past decade,) but it's a series that I, up until now, admittedly had zero interest in. I'm not one for the fantasy aesthetic or its vast amounts of masturbatory lore about the adventures of ancient knights named Big Shoe Lorentz et al, and the online circlejerk of hardcore Souls masochists who get their rocks off by being elitists online isn't my kind of scene. It wasn't until every single friend, mutual and countryman I knew seemed to be playing this damn thing that I eventually caved when I was generously offered a copy by a friend of mine who was similarly swept up by the Elden Ring cultural zeitgeist.

As my first Soulsborne experience, I was surprised by how many of the positive qualities in Elden Ring are in none of the popular conceptions perpetuated by the Soulsborne fanbase en masse. The often-lauded nightmarish difficulty isn't nearly as tough as gamerbros will lead you to believe, often being more of a test in patience and observation instead of any particularly taxing test of "Pure Gamer Skill" you'd see in a character action game (except for maybe Malenia). The story is relatively understated all things considered and the quote-unquote lore is mostly left to the player to piece together on their own instead of being forced down my throat via lengthy exposition, which is a far cry from the initial impressions I had set by the enthusiasts stripping these games down into 6 hour loredumps. It's honestly kind of refreshing! The exploration in Elden Ring is nothing short of magical in those first few hours; stepping into Limgrave, searching every nook and cranny for adventure and constantly being rewarded for doing so. I could see exactly how this series managed to get so popular, and Elden Ring certainly dug its claws deep into me with all the hours I sunk into this damn thing. The bases are loaded, which makes the surprise foul all the more disappointing.

Disappointment is often the brood of expectation, especially when you have such a rabidly devoted fanbase that would proclaim the release of Elden Ring equivalent to the Second Coming, so the shoes to fill were quite large (almost as large as the shoe of aforementioned legendary knight Big Shoe Lorentz, if you will), and for what it's worth, Elden Ring does a good job at tricking you into thinking it manages to fill them. The awe of these stunning landscapes and sprawling world do well to mask the inanity of it all, and it's a charade Elden Ring manages to keep going for an impressively long time, but once it starts to funnel you towards the finale, the jig is up. For a series hailed for its innovation in the action RPG genre, Elden Ring isn't really convincing me that FromSoft is doing anything truly innovative. It's very pretty to look at and well-executed mechanically and all that, but I struggle to see how you manage to maintain a fanbase as rabid as Souls fans with something like Elden Ring.

From the outside looking in, it feels like they've made this game at least four times now: fucked-up, decaying dark fantasy world where some Average Joe called something vaguely demeaning is beset to dodge-roll their way to the front doorstep of the setting's head honcho. It seems the well has run dry if the only difference I can gleam from Elden Ring is that our Average Joe now has a jump button and a bigger playground to explore, the triple A idea of relentless biggering being the final step FromSoft has taken into true mainstream appeal (even despite all the xenophobia peddled by western devs in their criticism towards Elden Ring's design philosophy like we're back in the 7th gen or something.) I'm not very partial to the open-world genre in general, these massive timesinks with tons of little repetitive checkmarks to fill-out a sprawling sandbox, and Elden Ring is no different in this regard, even if it manages to keep the fresh ideas coming for an admirably long time, which begs the question of what makes Elden Ring stand out from the crowd besides the big names behind it and its innate goodwill built up by a decade of prior entries. By the time I reached the Mountaintops of the Giants, I had already checked out, and very nearly dropped it when Elden Ring kept dragging its feet and setting up more hoops for me to jump through in an attempt to pad out its already ludicrous runtime.

So as my first Souls experience: It's fine. If you've already drank the Kool-Aid, you were never going to be anything but pleased with Elden Ring, but as a first-timer looking in: I'm not entirely sold on what Miyazaki is peddaling. I can only hope the other Soulsborne games do a better job at selling me on their core appeal.

✅Open world
✅Abyssmal collect-a-thon of plants and animal stuff
✅Shitty crafting system completely tacked on
✅"Stealth" mechanics revolving around hiding in bushes and takedowns
✅Enemy campaments with useless rewards
✅ Annoying npcs

Far Cry haters are awfully quiet today

degenerate fighting game hiding behind illusory veil of 'honor' and 'fundamentals'; in other words, it's essentially perfect. love literally everything about this. haohmaru's heavy slash is the greatest fighting game button of all time. if samurai shodown 2019 had rollback netcode it'd probably be more of a 'forever' fighting game for me but it cant possibly match the lunacy of v special. go ahead, tell me what the D button does. you cant because its a fickle mistress that exists beyond the realm of logic

Tekken 3 is a sort of mood-focused masterpiece for Tekken in the same way that Third Strike is a mood-focused masterpiece for Street Fighter; where 3S is a game where the atmosphere causes the gameplay to get a distinct tint of bittersweet nostalgia and a light fear + hope for the future, Tekken 3 is a game where every single part of it oozes the feeling of grungey, rough and halfway to being sleazy 90's edge - with just enough sophistication to not get lost in the sauce.

Heihachi's theme in this is an absolute fucking ALLTIMER. They never gave the old man a theme better than the one he got here.

I first played this when I was like 11 and didn't grasp the concept of MOBAs at all and I thought Ashe's utility arrow that grants sight along the path it travels was capable of doing legitimate damage to the enemy's nexus so I would just sit at spawn and shoot arrow after arrow at the other side of the map while my teammates screamed at me to play the game, all while I was convinced I was single-handedly carrying the team. About 8 years later one of my friends was like "okay everyone we're all gonna play League" and over the next week I quickly learned that this game is actually better if you're a sub-80 IQ child who doesn't care about actually engaging with the playerbase and can delight in watching the pretty ice arrows go swoosh

xcom: EW takes the goodness of EU's tactical gameplay and applies a bunch of cartoonishly bizarre shit to it, the highlights being MECs and gene mods.

the result is a game that is still as intricate as the original, but far more fun. this game is at its absolute best when you're still learning the ropes: every mission is super tense and you can feel the weight of each one of your decisions almost immediately. thankfully, by thinking carefully about your squad's composition, positioning, loadouts and abilities, you can succeed in every possible situation, because there are always so many options to deal with everything. figuring out the best options to use in each one of those scenarios and making the most out of what you have to either squeeze through a tough spot or completely crush your enemies is so pleasant, i love this gameplay loop.

that level of quality remains until somewhere around mid-late game. unfortunately, when you near the final stretch, you're much stronger and smarter than the aliens, to the point where all of that aforementioned tension is lost and you just kinda have to go through the motions while doing the necessary procedures to unlock the final mission. (MINOR SPOILER WARNING I GUESS??) and the final mission has awful, jarring level design. it's nothing like the rest of the game.

despite that though, i'd definitely recommend this game to anybody that might be interested in the xcom series. EU was great when it came out but this expansion is just.. the better version, and xcom 2 feels more like a challenge designed for veterans of this genre/series

I hate that I don't like this game. I wish I did. For the first thirty or so hours, I did. But then I finished it, and I thought about it, and I realized that I don't like Persona 5. Some things here are excellent, and some things here are atrocious, and they all blend together into something that's only ever able to peak at the heights of "okay".

The writing is my biggest problem, with the way the game handles its characters being the strongest flaw. The trauma these people face is treated as a punchline at their expense far too often. It's not an uncommon opinion that Ann gets it the worst of the lot; she's a survivor of sexual assault at the hands of a powerful teacher, and the game constantly takes time out to make her own party members leer at her and make her uncomfortable. Yusuke's "nude model" scene is talked about a lot, but it really isn't that bad, especially compared to later instances — one scene forces her and every other woman in the party into swimsuits to seduce a keycard out of some old rich lecher, and it's played as a joke until the guy grabs Ann, threatens her, and then turns into a big shadow monster who you kill and take the keycard from regardless, making the whole seduction plan pointless. Ryuji and Joker will try to stare up her skirt when she lays down on a couch, gawk at her thighs when she gets caught in the rain, and peer down her top when she's fanning herself in the desert. Ryuji may just be a dumbass who Ann can easily rebuke, but Joker is the leader of the group, and unquestionably holds power over her and the other Phantom Thieves. He doesn't treat any of the other characters this way, and he keeps doing it in cutscenes that you have no control over. Regardless of how the player treats Ann, your character won't stop creeping on her as soon as you give up control. It's weird. It's really fucking weird. Speaking of Ryuji, it's just as tasteless to have a character who was physically abused by that same teacher to the point of broken bones and ostracization be the butt of so many jokes where the punchline is him getting the shit kicked out of him. He's rewarded for both getting the track team back together in his confidant route and for saving every single member of the Phantom Thieves from a sinking ship with the exact same thing: the people he's going out of his way to protect punching him senseless until he's left in a crumpled, bruised, moaning heap on the ground. Ha ha. It's also implied in a scene that comes completely out of nowhere that he gets molested by two gay men in Shinjuku. All of this is played for laughs. It should be obvious to anyone reading this or playing the game for themselves that none of this is funny. It's fucking horrific. It's made worse that someone (or several someones) on the ATLUS writing team think that any of this is funny. I've heard that the localization team begged to be allowed to make script changes to address these issues, and were refused; whether or not this is true, the script that's here is the one that we've got, and the few changes made don't fix these core problems with the writing.

I'm still kind of confused to see all of the "I hate JRPGs!" crowd (your Dunkeys, your Yahtzee Croshaws) circle the wagons around this game and talk about how Persona 5 broke the mold. Mechanically, it's Pokemon. There's nothing wrong with Pokemon. Pokemon can be fun. But the core combat loop is "fish for the enemy's weakness, use the element that they're weak to, win the encounter". It's every single-player Pokemon game. Sometimes, if the fight goes long enough, you can cast a debuff, or maybe even a party-wide buff if you're really feeling brave. Bosses and mini-bosses are completely immune to status effects like shock or sleep, so any foe that you can't kill on the first turn of combat boils down to a DPS race where you either have enough damage and healing to outlast them, or you don't. This is in stark contrast to other entries in the Shin Megami Tensei series where bosses can have mechanically interesting gimmicks or one-off skillsets with unholy good synergies, rather than just being walls of health and damage; the closest thing you get to a boss that challenges your conception of the mechanics in Persona 5 are Okumura and his waves of robots that need to be killed within one turn of each other, which are in a fight so ridiculously easy to brute force by just having enough AOE damage that it barely even qualifies as a challenge. Futaba's later support skills make the game completely trivial, with her Ultimate Support constantly being cast to full heal, buff, and revive every member of the party. I tried to kill myself on a boss by enabling rush mode and walking away, and it still took six and a half minutes before Joker actually went down and I got kicked to the death screen. The guns — while certainly a unique addition — are borderline useless in most encounters, serving only as a middling damage dump (or as a status applier, which only works on trash enemies that are more easily killed by hitting their weak element anyway) and are utterly outclassed by Persona elemental skills. Many Personas can even deal Gun-type damage, giving you almost no reason to ever use the actual guns.

I've seen it said that this game hates women. My gut instinct thinks that's an exaggeration, but it's unquestionable that the writing handles them like shit. Every female confidant in this game leads as smoothly as a car crash into a sexual relationship, with four (!!!) of them being adults pursuing our underage protagonist. There's not a single woman in this game that you can just be friends with without needing to turn down their advances or dodge making your own, first. The men, conversely, do not have this problem, as the only gay men in this game are the sexual predators who assault Ryuji. Lala Escargot, the owner of the Crossroads bar, is the only character who is both a) not a walking punchline and b) queer. The game never actually confirms if she's a drag queen or if she's transgender, but she's at the very least gender non-conforming. That's it. Nobody else. I realize that this may come off as me pounding my fists on the table and demanding token representation, but the way that the female confidants are treated is already token. Every single woman in Joker's life desires him sexually, because this is a shounen harem game masquerading as a serious adult thriller that explores serious adult themes. It's juvenile. The game likes to talk big about rebellion and putting down the system, man, but it's remarkably intolerant of anyone whose inclusion in any mainstream anime would attract death threats for being "too woke". The writing in Persona 5 doesn't put down the system, it is the system. It should not come as a surprise that a series that's based the past three games around the trappings of Jungian psychology is this achingly stupid when it comes to how it handles social issues.

It is endlessly frustrating that ATLUS has accrued as much money and prestige as they have — Joker got into fucking Smash Bros. — and this is still the best that they can do with all of it. Outright bad writing and middling RPG mechanics that feel like they've hardly evolved since 2006. What's left? The UI and the music? Both are great, but there's not a chance they can carry a game that insists on being this long. What missed potential. It's a shame I waited this long to get a chance to play it. I wish I hadn't bothered.