This is the best roguelike In have ever played and I enjoy it every single time I pick it up; that being said I utterly despise this game and hate every second of it.

I have had runs where I feel more powerful than any game has ever made me feel, only to die to the single dumbest thing I have ever experienced. This game will straight up just kill you in like 80% of your runs, and it will feel terrible and you will be furious. Then you'll boot the game back up five minutes later because this game will put a strangle-hold on you like nothing else.

It's completely uncanny how something this dense and obtuse and infuriating can be so addictive and fun(?). It very much feels like a game that was not designed with the idea of being played in mind, and everything in it will act accordingly. It's a very impersonal kind of difficulty; Noita does not care if you beat it, shelve it, or rinse it for every secret it has. None of that has anything to do with how much you are rewarded or punished, it will simply act how it is irrespective of any sort of sense of progression or design, and that is fascinating.

It's one of those rare games that feels like it never stops getting bigger and deeper the more you play it, and the sense of discovery just never really slows down. The main path of this game seems to be a fraction of it's full world, but exploring that outer world is so difficult to pull off that any new thing you find there feels like a major discovery. It's the kind of design that inspires communities of secret hunters and lore gatherers to try to make sense of it all.

It almost feels like I haven't played enough of it to review it despite "beating" the game in a sense, but I get the feeling that I will always feel like that to some degree. I don't think I'll ever truly complete Noita, and that's really something special.

Playing through this had me wondering if I'd just outgrown Borderlands. I then replayed BL2 a bit and found that I just do not like this entry, which is really unfortunate.

There are things I love conceptually, I think a character creator is a really cool idea for this series and something I would like to see in a mainline game. There is very solid queer rep, which is also cool. I think that visually, it's also really impressive, even if it took some tweaking to run well.

Other than that though, I just really didn't connect with anything else this game had going on. Things like Tiny Tina, the DnD setting, and the campy spoof humor are things that work in small doses and with good writing. None of it really worked for me, Borderlands is a setting that I really need to be invested in for it to vibe with me, and this game just does not deliver.

The worldbuilding-heavy base for my favorite stories ever told.

I am probably more passionate about ARR than your average fan of this game, as it tends to be pretty widely disliked to some degree, but I honestly do like it, even apart from its significance to the greater story of FFXIV.

I really enjoy the world presented here more than the story it's telling and the characters you're spending time with. Every city, zone, race and faction are established in sometimes painstaking detail, and it provides so much for future stories to work with. Because of its extensive structure, I am intimately familiar with the mechanics of this fantastical world in a way that I’m not with others. It makes for a wonderful framework of options when making new storylines and characters.

That being said, this game is truly extensive, and demands a level of patience and attention that can get exhausting in long play sessions. This is massively alleviated by its MMO structure, allowing you to explore a plethora of supplementary side content to break up the somewhat tedious structure of ARR. It is still a massive undertaking, and tends to shake off newcomers who come to the game hearing about its stellar expansion storylines.

The story itself is rather standard for an FF game: There is an evil empire, a stoic and imposing villain in Gaius van Baelsar, a motley crew of powerful people to aid you on your quest to topple them, and a dark and sinister evil lurking underneath it all. One would be forgiven food not expecting much from the main cast of allies, as they are unfortunately pretty lackluster in ARR. None of their personalities or designs stand out, something that would be remedied almost immediately in the following expansions. The voice work isn’t particularly strong either, which isn’t a huge issue as they’re entirely replaced going forward.

As far as gameplay goes, it’s difficult to talk about this in a segmented way considering how much has been changed and improved over time, but in its current state, the lvl1-50 stages of ARR are a bit slow, but provide a good basis for those new to tab-target MMOs. With the recent restructuring of the dungeons and trials of ARR, it almost acts as a longform tutorial at times, slowly rolling out mechanics that will be combined and subverted later.

I have a deep level of nostalgia for the early moments of this game, and I’m never personally bothered by slow-burn storytelling. As dense and slow as ARR can be at times, I find it to be kind of novel in a strange way. It’s far from my preferred way that this game delivers its narrative, but I have a deep appreciation for how much it informs the outstanding stories to come.