Really kinda hoped I'd connect with what other people see in this on a replay (I was on the fence before) but unfortunately this snuffed out any gleam of potential I saw in it before. There's absolutely nothing to appreciate on the narrative side - the main story is bad, there's no real narrative to the side quests, the characters are underwritten and boring. The art direction is fantastically boring and lends itself perfectly to the bog-standard, uninspired generic European-style fantasy of the setting and enemy designs.

The world is laid out in basically the worst way possible - you go on long treks down linear corridors with no real points of interest. There's no meat to the world - no environmental storytelling, no history of the people, nothing to be learned about the structures and why they exist.

The combat is excrutiating - janky slogs where you spam one or two moves that actually do something while you run and jump awkwardly to avoid damage from huge enemies. Your pawns rarely use the right abilities when you'd like them to and you have no way of communicating anything to them. The climbing is neat - albeit very janky - but there's basically 2 enemies where there's a real reason to do so. Issues with the way damage is calculated in this game mean you will have combats with enemies where you do basically no damage if you are underleveled or not using the right damage type. This could be fine if there was any sort of signposting about it but very early on the game flings you all over the map.

I had remembered Bitterblack Isle as a high point of my previous playthrough - much more enemy variety than the pitiable assortment in the base game, less attempt at a story and more focus on the dungeon-crawling feel that marked the best moments of the main story. I was wrong. The encounters have no thought to them, the setting is boring and repetetive. The 3 boss fights before you meet Daimon (who?) are slogs with insta-kill mechanics that absolutely dragggg. The overall leveling in this game is completely busted. This playthrough I completed maybe 80% of base game sidequests, fought nearly all enemies I came across, and I finished around level 50 after beating the main quest. I farmed for another 10 levels before continuing on to Bitterblack Isle, and yet - despite spending hours after beating the entire base game grinding I felt completely and utterly underleveled for nearly all the content in the DLC. I've seen some people suggest that jumping in after NG+ is the way to solve this, but there's absolutely no way I'm playing through this ever again.

Really evocative and delightful visual design, fantastic synthesizer score, and perfectly tuned puzzles. The graphic style is Outer Wilds-esque in a way that really serves the alien X machine style that so much of the setting and characters have. Sounds are all really pleasing and otherworldly, and the synth soundtrack is great - sweeping in moments, very subtle in others, and used perfectly to indicate when you're on the right track with a puzzle.

Very interesting to have a puzzler with boss fights, but I think the occasional confrontations helped break up the core orb-based puzzles and provided some stakes that might've been missing if you were otherwise just wandering around. The puzzles themselves are clever and escalate in difficulty wonderfully. There are moments where you can just get in the zone and swim through the easy puzzles, and there are some real thinkers at the end to give the satisfying feeling of triumph, but it never gets too close to frustration. I played it in two sessions and it feels like the perfect length - I feel like the core mechanics were explored and it did not overstay its welcome.

There's some interesting stuff here - I am still a fan of Arkane's shabby storytelling/killer worldbuilding combo, and I think the actual world space is interesting in this even if a lot of the "dungeons" are not even close to the imsim level design quality of their previous games. I think the backlash (worst game ever, biggest first party failure ever) is maybe slightly too strong but I don't really see a reason for anyone to play this except as a document of Arkane history. The quests are dull, the gunplay is decent but insanely repetetive. The RPG elements are let down by the fact that all the character abilities suck and so the upgrades do too. The looter shooter aspects are lame (very little weapon differentiation which I think is a must). The enemy designs are cool, especially the bosses, but those fights are let-downs narratively and in gameplay. Beyond that a lot of the game is barely holding itself together - even nearly a year post-release the leveling is often bugged, audio is bugged, quests and quest markers often bug, multiplayer occasionally completely breaks.

I loved the soundtrack and (moments of) the story in this, but it's a little tough to get through because of how repetetive the combat is and how much of a chore traversal can be. Additions from the original Nier do little to spice things up (multiple characters) or actively detract from the experience (chip system). I still think it's worth a play but I think the first game is ultimately stronger (or at least I remember it that way) - it has a better soundtrack, more cohesive story, more compelling world, and fuller commitment to genre-bending sequences.

Very interesting concept that really doesn't get explored much. I like the way it looks, I like the tunes, and I like the drawn aspects of the cutscenes. Other than that it's pretty rough. It controls very poorly, often plodding and sluggish, and frequently glitchy. I got softlocked multiple times in a 3 hour playthrough. The narrative is garbage - it's uneven, it's trite, it doesn't resonate. The voice acting is really bad despite the actors attached.

The puzzle sections are uneven too, but they're the most enjoyable part - unfortunately it feels like you spend a solid third of the game being dragged into poorly written cutscenes. I think this is a decent game with exactly as much meaning if you cut out every bit of floating text or voiceover.

When you skip the story a little bit this doesn't seem like a step down from the first anymore. The level design is encredible, every environment and interior is completely gorgeous, and the two "gimmick" levels are some of the most creative I've ever played. Gameplay is super smooth and there's way more powers and items to play with. The overarching plot is dull and a little stupid but the worldbuilding and the environmental narratives (notes, mission briefs taken alone, npc dialogue) are all really really good.

It's pretty fun and I really like the core loop of switching weapons to tackles specific challenges, then using your other abilities to replenish health, armor, and ammo - I think it's way more fun than running around looking for ammo drops in the world. Unfortunately I think I'm a little baby and I just found the game a little stressful, even on the normal difficulty. I think maybe shorter levels (twice as many levels but make them ~a half hour) might've helped, but I'm sure that's mostly on me. I don't think the music is as good as some other entries in the series and I wasn't a huge fan of the brighter, more cartoonish visual style. A lot of the levels were impressively designed, and I really liked how different they were visually.

I've never played an Armored Core before (or a mech game in general), but I tried this out on the strength of the trailer and my enjoyment of the Souls series. I was expecting good combat and got maybe my favorite FromSoft game? As soon as I took down the helicopter in the introductory mission I was really interested - dodging barrages of bullets and missiles in three dimensions (so much more dynamic feeling than Souls!). When I took down the first chapter boss after perfectly-difficult trial and error sequence, I was completely hooked. When that fight opens with the sky completely eclipsed with a fireworks show of missiles, and that fucking music kicks in - video games are rarely that purely awesome.

That was a feeling I had over and over in AC6. It's pretty certainly the coolest feeling game I've ever played. Soaring above ruined cities on giant thrusters, punching huge robots in the face with a giant captive bolt, getting shot across the ocean in an aircraft carrier sized railgun, fighting on a city sized ship in outer space: this game is full of moment after moment that completely awes with the sheer spectacle of it all. There are a ton of setpieces here that are sick as shit that feel like they would happen once in a cutscene in another series - and you do them over and over here. And it's all enhanced by From's (certainly not newfound) impeccable sense of scale and artstyle. Most of the missions aren't huge but they convey mindbendingly huge machines and endless destroyed cities that provide perfect backdrops to the core robot fighting.

The combat feels fantastic. There's a good variety of enemies and challenges, and the loop of mission > garage > mission is immensely satisfying - it's almost as much fun to look at the new parts and speculate about builds as it is to actually test them out. The missions themselves are a varied mix of search-and-destroy sorties, duels with other armored cores, bigger boss fights, defend-the-point, and even an escort mission (that isn't actually that bad). Outside of the first mission, I played largely after the patches, which I think smoothed out the experience and enhanced what was one of my favorite aspects - the vast array of viable weapons that you can taylor to each hurdle. Most everything I tried felt like it could get the job done if I wanted to make something work, and there were plenty of weapon types that seemed like they would be best suited to a couple of specific challenges if I wanted to tailor my loadout to a certain boss fight. These boss fights are magnificent, too. Spectacular visually, literally the best music Fromsoft has ever had in a game, and really solid difficulties that kept me completely locked in but rarely frustrated. It was truly a pleasure to play this game, even as I replayed it once, and twice to really finish the main story.

The story side of things surprised me the most. The game is told entirely through MGS-style disembodied voice lines, with the occasional log picked up mid-mission, and yet - it's probably the most emotional From game, with poignant and tragic moments and really well defined characters despite that definition coming purely from a voice (and sometimes a mech design). The story itself is captivating, evolving and deepening as you finish NG and move to NG+, which is largely the same but with some extra details and an occassional mission from the opposite side, before finally peaking in NG++, where the entire thing takes on a different flavor. We start out as a mercenary, a cog in a disgusting corporate war machine, defending one company's supplies before blowing them up for a competetor in the next mission. As the game progresses it hits on themes of revolutionary struggle and capitalist greed, colonialism and environmentalism, AI and humanity, and sometimes the familiar Fromsoft fare of a mankind dooming itself in its pettiness and excess. It's still on my mind weeks after I finished, remembering badass lines, marvelling at the way they managed to keep the story perfectly paced and intriguing through 3 largely similar playthroughs, and thinking about the way it ends. Game of the year.

Really fantastically presented game that would be an all time classic (and maybe still is) were it not for the combat. I'm not usually a fan of beat-em-ups which doesn't help, but I became increasingly frustrated as the game went on with how often I was forced to fight enemies and how tedious some of the late-game setpieces were as I was slowly working through room after room, each with 8 or 10 enemies that are exactly the same as the others. I also think the game has issues with ranged enemies and some actually pretty difficult quicktime events. Other negatives - not being able to adjust difficulty after starting and limited save points, as well as being forced to spend much of the game playing as Kiryu (whose fighting styles suck compared to Majima).

That said, those are basically all of my complaints. Beyond the combat - which can thankfully be minimized for most of the game by speccing into some upgrades which allow you to dodge random encounters - Yakuza 0 is an utterly charming and completely engrossing game. It has a fantastic sense of setting - the neighborhoods of Kamurocho and Sotenbori are meticulously realized. One of the great pleasures of this game is just walking down the streets, looking at all the intricately detailed signs and 80s clothing, listening as all of the dynamic and realistic sounds flood in from friends chatting and restaurants serving food. Small details enhance this neighborhood quality - you primarily replenish health at restaurants which could be treated generically in a Pokemon Center fashion, but instead each is a unique store with a unique look, host, and menu, and each food has its own graphic, description, and price. There's no reason for any of this to be so specific but it is that specificity that gives Yakuza 0 so much of its charm.

The minigames are great fun, both the small ones like darts and pocket circuit racing, which are deeper than you'd expect and often have a short sidequest attached that will feature some quirky resident, to the bigger ones - Real Estate for Kiryu and Cabaret mangement for Majima. These deeper minigames are important, since they're the best method to earn money in the game, and money buys you important upgrades to your combat abilities. These minigames are deep, with involved questlines featuring a number of characters and often unique fights that are only accessable through the minigames. For the most part they're seamlessly intertwined with the narrative, and the characters, which makes it easier to return again and again. Most of all, they're pretty fun!

Yakuza 0 also shines narratively - the story is told in two divergent paths, each centered on a different protagonist. The story is often a mystery, since you're controlling low-level gangsters that are just pawns in the larger machinations of organized crime, and it was a pleasure to slowly reveal our purpose as we completed tasks for the bosses. The shady characters of the yakuza are super well crafted, each with bombastic stylized designs and personalities that are well rendered with really high quality animation work. Even non-story characters from side quests are often memorable due to the game's strong sense of design and (often really geniuinely funny) sense of humor. There's a lot of cutscenes that are super well directed. A lot of later story beats are effective and made genuinely emotional by the fantastic characterization of both protagonists and the incredible work by their voice actors.