Rating this is kind of impossible because I really didn't play the same game everyone else did. I abused the shit out of my emulator's rewind and turbo options, ESPECIALLY the latter. If I didn't, I probably would've thrown in the towel about 30 minutes in. However, I credit these as a workaround to the game's poor aging, because the story at the heart of the game is incredibly compelling and kept me just interested enough to keep going. The final 15 minutes was, surprisingly, worth all of the pain of grinding and pushing through the constant encounters. I think the best summation I could give of this game is that everything you've heard about it is true. The grinding is pretty excessive, the encounters are way too frequent, and in general it feels like a dry run for Mother 2, but it is saved by having really intriguing worldbuilding and themes, an absolutely stellar soundtrack, and an impactful final boss fight that sticks with you despite its simplicity. I wouldn't recommend that you play it, maybe just watch someone else play it instead, but if you do, there are a lot of hacks to make things more enjoyable; I'd personally recommend the all-in-one Demiforce hack.

Also, Backloggd dropped the ball on this. It's called Mother. Nothing else. Don't listen to Nintendo's lies.

Speaking purely critically, I would give this a 9/10, but the amount of love, care, heart, and soul this game has makes that rating feel almost unfair. Majora's Mask has the reputation of "how did Nintendo put this out", but I would wager that this game raises that question more, since the themes in this are incredibly mature and thought out to the point where you almost don't even believe Nintendo made it. Not much I can say, it really is a play-it-to-believe-it type game. Beautiful music, touching story, loveable characters, and a narrative that's surprisingly gripping and much more of a throughline than most of Nintendo's other works (EarthBound included). Play it, it's good, you'll cry, and that's okay. The gods are watching over you.

This will be a much more ramble-type review, because I genuinely don't know where to start with this. For the most part, I want to talk about why this game is one of my favorites and convince people on some of its more contentious elements. It's such a hard game for me to sell to people because I don't know what to say other than "everything is good please trust me." I guess I'll start by talking about the bad stuff, seems easy enough.

This engine is not good for gaming of this size. It worked ("worked") for how scant Fallout 3 was, but New Vegas is much more alive and thriving, and that liveliness means the game has to suffer for it. Constant visual bugs that fans will tell you to "just get used to", inconsistent crashes that seem to happen at random, loading screens every 30 seconds, it's the antithesis of what you would want out of a game going for immersion. Not only that, but the lack of budget is apparent in the voice actors; there's roughly 6 or 7 outside of main characters, and it's so blatantly obvious to the point where it hurts. You'll talk to two NPCs in the same room with the exact same voice actor, and just... try not to notice it. Again, not very immersive. Similar to the engine problems, the gunplay is very rigid and not as smooth as nearly every other game around it at the time, with few guns lacking the punch that a lot of weapons from the classic games had.

Now, all of what I've said so far would turn off most gamers (both normal and Gamer™) from playing this. Why would someone want to put up with a buggy, rushed, unpolished mess? The simple answer is because everything is good, just trust me.

New Vegas is a once-in-a-lifetime game. It is a miracle on every front, considering the constraints put on it. The depth of the world around you, the freedom you have to solve problems as you dictate, the dialogue system that feels genuine and impactful, the landmarks making the wasteland feel interesting and lived-in, the (main) characters all feeling so human and real, everything outside of the gameplay works 110% to make you forget the flaws of the gameplay. There are few games that manage to suck me into a different mindset and world quite like this, which is such a compliment to the writing that it feels like an understatement. But this isn't what I'm here to talk about, because everyone has already said all this. You can find playlists of hour-long YouTube essays explaining what I said in 20x the detail. What I'm here to talk about is the champion of this game, the best showcases of the writing, the most human characters in the entire franchise, the reason this is in my top 5 games of all time.

The DLC.

New Vegas' DLC is such a perfect extension of the game's world that it blows my mind trying to think of how they pulled it off. All 4 stories work to serve as either background to areas of the game not shaded in, thematic experiences to provide food for thought both in-game and out, and in the best scenarios, both. Are they perfect? No, of course not. Honest Hearts' length has always been a mark on an otherwise beautiful story, and Old World Blues' quests are... less than stellar. But that doesn't matter because, much like the main game, every flaw is made up for in the writing. I have my own weird order for discussing them, both for the sake of review and kind of as a ranking, so let's go.

The first one I want to discuss is Old World Blues, because I feel as though I have the least to say about it. Does that mean it's bad? Absolutely not! I find the humor to be very charmingly quirky, reminiscent of high-tier Futurama, and the characters to be an extension of that humor while still somehow having such unique personalities that they feel like more than just jokes. Muggy, the miniature robot "neurotic busboy" could've been nothing more than the butt of the joke, and yet they take the time to tell you why he's the butt of the joke: because one of the scientists who created him is a spiteful jerk who made a robot that could never be happy just to laugh at the original manufacturers. They could have just left him as "haha he's manic and sad", but they reinforce the humor by making it make sense. Outside of the Sink's personality cores, the main 5 (i'm not counting 8) scientists are equally humanly humorous. I don't want to go over each, so I'll go over my favorite example, Doctor Borous. Throughout the entire DLC, he's OVERDRAMATIC and emphasizes random words to seem more intense and theatrical, like he's trying to impress anyone in earshot. One of the main quests sends you to retrieve data from a test center skinned as his old high school, where he's on the loudspeaker basically venting his frustrations about being bullied through school. Doing his side quest for him reveals that, as spiteful and fueled by childhood resentment as he is, there is still humanity within him that you can help bring out. As with all the other scientists, their best endings come from you seeing through their technology and reaching out to the humans inside, which leads to a strikingly poignant finale in an otherwise zany and eccentric DLC. There was Old World Blues and New World Hope, and hope ruled the day at Big MT.

Next on my list is Honest Hearts. As I mentioned, its short length does somewhat boil it down to what I can talk about, but I'll still try my best. Honest Hearts works as well as it does for what it is because of how thoroughly crafted its actors are. Joshua Graham, Daniel, and the two tribes are not only a compelling drama within themselves, but also a brilliant microcosm for the troubles the Courier faces back home, which makes it even more enriching with how you go about dealing with things. It's a very subjective DLC, since it's basically a bunch of leadup to one choice you have to make. Do you side with Daniel and get the Sorrows to safety, avoiding bloodshed and keeping them "pure", or do you side with Joshua and fight back against the White Legs, crushing their entire tribe but ensuring peace for the time being and one less tribe being under the Legion's power? Being the overly soft-hearted pacifist that I am, this DLC nearly broke me. I debated with friends about the choice, thought about hypotheticals that could come before or after the events take place, got as much information as I could to know for sure just what choices I was making, before finally sighing and knowing what I should do. I won't say what I chose, but the strength of both main characters makes it so engaging on both sides, to the point where there really isn't a "right" answer. Each one of them has positives and negatives, nearly equal in balance to the other, which makes it really feel like you're the one making the choice, and not the game leading you to one. I don't want to spoil it, but this DLC also has maybe the best environmental storytelling ever with the Survivalist. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I recommend looking up a list of where to find his logs and going to find them next time you play, you won't be disappointed. It's been a gift to me to behold innocence.

The title of "most controversial New Vegas DLC" is one that's admittedly hard to bestow, and while I don't think this is the most controversial overall, this probably has the most disliked character in all of them. That's right, it's Lonesome Road. A lot of people, my past self included, see this as nothing but Ulysses rambling to you over a typical post-apocalyptic set piece. People find it irritating, condescending, overly wordy, and mark points off for it. And you know what? They're all absolutely right, except for one thing. That's the point. I don't want to come off as the "bad thing is good because it's bad on purpose" type person, but I seriously feel like a lot of people don't actually read into Ulysses enough and toss him to the side because he's overly cryptic and impossible to talk to, and I don't blame them, but I'm here to defend him to the best of my abilities. Ulysses' story is hard to find, deliberately on his part, which can be a double-edged sword for the player. On one hand, it's an interesting melding of story and gameplay, where you have to literally search through destroyed buildings to find history, but on the other, it can lead to some pretty major character details being completely missed. Brilliant thematically, risky design-wise. If you manage to find all of them, without saying too much, you realize that he's just as guilty of the crimes that he points the finger at you for, and he's even more reluctant to listen to his own ideology than you are. He boils down other factions to symbols to make it easier to disregard them, to dehumanize them, because he doesn't care about the people behind them, he sees only what they do than their potential. He buries his meanings behind his overly wordy, pretentious manner of speaking because it makes it easier for him to tell himself what he's doing is right. He is a flawed person, and you can literally talk him down from destroying the NCR('s Mojave branch) by calling him out on it, which leads to perhaps my favorite exchange in the entire series, even more than The Master's in FO1. There's a very powerful beauty to the fact that you can convince someone willing to destroy so much to take a peaceful route by connecting with their beliefs and using them for right rather than for wrong, and he even admits that to you. As much as I love Ulysses, and I do, he's my favorite Fallout character, there is so much more to Lonesome Road than him. They managed to make Deathclaws something you're afraid of again by making them scale with your level, giving maxed-out Couriers a legitimate reason to fear running into every area guns blazing, which is something that Fallout hadn't done since the original game. There was a time, however short, where Deathclaws were something terrifying, haunting the minds of any wasteland wanderers who knew of their existence, and it's really satisfying to see the makers go back to that mindset. That's just a minor example of what the entire backdrop of Lonesome Road manages to do: tap into what Fallout started as. It's easy to forget, with how surprisingly booming the Mojave is, but the original Fallout was much more dire and scarce, with calves of settlements stumbling their way through a war-torn hellscape, and it's so pleasing to me that the developers went back to that style of world design here. The key example I can give is the Cave of the Abaddon, the tunnel built up of overturned building and destroyed houses, literally having you walk through Pre-War times and reminding you of what all used to be here before the bombs. It's stupidly effective, and can really send a chill down your spine if you take the time to look around and take in the details. The blend of classic post-apocalypse atmosphere, thematic unity of gameplay and story, and a deeply gripping narrative about ideology, political affiliation, the past, the choices you make (accidental or not), and the power that one can have on the world around you results in one of the best stories the series has to offer, and one that I really hope naysayers will try again to get more out of. They say that war never changes; men do, through the roads they walk.

And yet, as much as I praised Lonesome Road, it's not the best. But that's not an insult to it. It's the highest compliment I can give to Dead Money. I don't know how they made this DLC. I don't know how they managed to throw out everything people knew about Fallout and turn it into something completely different, and nail it perfectly. But they did. Dead Money is aggressive anti-player. It strips you away of everything that you have, puts you in an unfamiliar environment, and smacks you in the face at every turn and for every mistake you make. The enemies don't respond to your attacks the way you want them do, there are environmental hazards around every corner, and the entire time you're being berated for not being competent enough to move quicker. And I love it. The way that the creators managed to make a section of the game so dedicated to disempowering you in a game full of overpowered-ness is so striking to me that I'm taken aback just thinking about it. Fallout games let you have any weapon at any moment, given you can carry it. They let you solve problems however you please, giving you the freedom to do what you want rather than what the game wants. Dead Money doesn't do any of that, and instead makes Fallout into something I never thought it could be; a survival horror game. The suffocatingly oppressive atmosphere, the exaggerated yet believable characters, the legitimate danger you find yourself in nearly constantly, the dark color scheme and chilling sound design, the repeated theme of letting go, all of it comes together to make something wholly unique and stand-out in the Fallout pantheon. Obviously, this might ruffle some feathers, and could lead to this DLC being considered the aforementioned "most controversial", but if it clicks with you, it's one of the best experiences this series has to offer, bar none. Despite having the smallest cast of characters (outside of Lonesome Road), it somehow manages to make the most of them, rivaling the base game's best moments in its peaks. Connecting with Christine by understanding her gestures due to her lack of speech, Dean's dialogue being dynamic and actually paying attention to what you say without giving it away immediately, Dog/God's inner demons that serve as both a gameplay and story obstacle that you have to solve, and the final encounter with Elijah being the best reinforcement of the themes of the DLC by far. Keeping with the spoiler-free tone of this review, I won't say what exactly happens, but the dialogue and gameplay elements all around you forcing you to "let go" just as much as every other character is just so genius and cool and well-written and this is my favorite DLC I love it so much aaaaaaaahhhhh. Despite being the first to play, it's the last I wanted to write about, because it gives a good quote to end on and because I feel like it's cooler for the review to look like that. I hope I managed to convince anyone reading this to give the DLC's another try if you were mixed or negative towards one or more of them, and I hope you can find as much as I do in them on a replay. You've heard of the Sierra Madre Casino. A promise that you can change your fortunes, begin again. Finding it though, that's not the hard part.

It's letting go.

TL;DR if you don't want to read my incredibly pretentious, artsy nerd review: If you think you'll like it, you will. Play it regardless.

Reviewing, describing, and even just talking about a piece of media to someone can be difficult sometimes, since tastes are always different and what could be a positive for one person is a negative for another. It's impossible to view something in a wholly objective light, because even that can be skewed by personal views. Now, of course, this is known to anyone who's tried their hand at speaking to something's strengths or weaknesses, especially on a public platform like this. So why bring it up? Simply put, because this game's traits are so subjective to the core that it would be completely out of my hands to even attempt to try and speak from a non-biased point of view. That being said, this game is all about overcoming seemingly impossible odds, so let's try.

Pathologic is a challenge. Not just in the sense of the game's notorious difficulty, but in the way that it acts as a reflection of how you specifically would go about solving problems with no solutions and deciding on things that can not be decided on. The game sometimes even resists your choice, by giving you dialogue options with no clear "right" thing to say, as compared to other games that tend to give you the options of "good, bad, or neutral" with no deviation. Of course, it's all just a game, so why does it matter? Why does the inability to say what you want to say affect you at all? After all, it's not you, it's just a character. But, try as you might to suppress the feeling, you still feel that twinge of pain when you end up saying something that hurts a character in grief or suffering. Why?

Blanket statement, I know, but I truly don't know of another piece of media, of any type you choose, that could match the immersion this game provides. It's been described as Kafkaesque in many circles, and while some would say that term has been beaten into meaninglessness, I would say that there has never been a better piece to file under it. From the kickstart of being thrown into the deep end of a situation you barely understand, to the suffocatingly oppressive nature of the town around you, to the dream-like architecture and dialogue of certain characters, it wraps you in a tight, engrossing cloth, not letting up until you either quit or beat it. This immersion is what makes everything in the game so meaningful. The realistic disease makes you dread even going near sick areas or carriers without proper protection, your ever-present physical needs don't feel like something tacked on to further the "survival" aspect of the plague, but rather something more devastating to you than the plague itself. By pushing you to your physical, mental, and emotional limits, the game forces you to make choices that cut deep and make you look at yourself when it's done. You don't want your best friend to die, but if you die, then it's all for nothing, both as a character in the game and as a player.

Eventually, you'll have to kill off your desires to save everyone or to even fully protect yourself because you just don't have the choice, not because the game didn't provide you with it, but solely because it provided you with the choice. Everything you do has consequences, minor or major, sooner or later, and it makes for an experience in which even your own inventory management can be seen as a choice, depending on the circumstances. The game lets you act exactly how you want to act, yet somehow simultaneously refuses to budge from how it wants you to play, again reinforcing its confusing, mind-warping tone that never ceases until you quit resisting and play your part. But then that begs the question, how do you feel about playing your part?

The lore of the game, while not necessarily its focal point, is something I would feel ashamed of not at least bringing up. It is so meticulously carved out throughout the game that, despite me completing it, I still feel like I only know a fraction of what there is to learn. The Steppe's history, its traditions, its meanings, almost everything is not handed to you, but rather something you pick up through finding out for yourself. The logic of the town is revealed slowly as time moves on, in unnoticeable increments; rather than having a revelation, a moment of clarity, you steadily build up your knowledge of how the people around you function and think until eventually, you feel as though you're one of the town's own, living and breathing right next to them, furthering the game's grasp on your mind in the best possible way.

I feel as though I've exhausted all I can say without going into spoiler territory, which is not something I want to do, I'd much rather try to sell you on the game by praising its brilliance and pulling you in to try it than to spoil the experience of learning the world for yourself. I want to end on this note, though. If you play it and you don't finish it, that's alright. If you play it and you don't like it, that's alright. If you don't even want to play it to begin with because you hate every detail about it, that's alright. Some things are challenging to get enjoyment out of, and it's only human for you to not want to go through hardships, especially one as optional as a game. I don't view myself as better for finishing it, and I don't view you as worse for giving up or avoiding it. However, I do ask that you try. Even if you think it's too much, keep trying. It took me over a year to finally beat it, and I could not have been happier to see it through to the end. Everyone deserves to experience the reflection this game provides, and seeing it through to the very end is an incredibly rich, rewarding experience.

Some scattershot thoughts I wanted to tack on and found no place to do so naturally:
- The imperialist themes are incredibly well-done and were a huge driving factor in how i dealt with certain situations
- This might have the best sound design in any game; the soundtrack itself is fantastic but the constant incomprehensible noises from around the Steppe are so effective
- I deeply care about the worms
- I don't think the ending(s) was fantastic in a vacuum but in the grand scheme of the game, I think it works perfectly
- This game occupied my brain for the entire time I was playing it to the point where I was struggling to sleep, thinking about how I would survive the next day once I played it again
- I really, really hope the other two routes come soon, this is already a near-perfect game as it is, having the other two would earn it a spot in the hall of fame

"MGS2 is the smarter game, but MGS3 is the better game." - my art teacher

Can't think of a better way to put it. I don't think this is as thematically rich an experience as 2, but I believe it's a much more emotionally rich one. Truth and lie, friend and enemy, us and them, all lines are blurred throughout the entire game, which leads to one of the most impactful climaxes to a story I've seen. Outside of that, the game itself is a very fun experience, with many different ways to think outside the box to solve your problems; my personal story is using a shaky rope bridge to drop a body off the side by running past it.

There's a sad irony to the fact that a nearly 20-year-old game this linear allows you to experiment and find your own solutions to a degree that many modern games boasting the same don't even come close to.

Wait, this was... good? I'm serious, I thought it would just be dated 90s humor and annoying hyper-masculinity, but this was a legitimately fun experience all the way through. The weapons were fun to use, the enemies were tough but not bullshit (for the most part), the level design was shockingly kind of great for a game like this, my only real complaint was with the sound design. The soundtrack isn't memorable outside of the main theme, the sound effects don't really pack a punch, and there were times when the audio drivers decided to torture me whenever I was underwater or in a metallic room. Overall, this was a nice experience that kept me entertained throughout, though not one I see myself coming back to often like other games of the same ilk. Hail to the king, baby.