Singleplayer:
Excellent Halo, but a really weirdly executed story.
I'm not sure if the sort-of reverse story telling really worked, since apparently a bunch of shit happened off screen before the game.
The open world stuff doesn't really work, so here's hoping they sack it off, or improve it.
Multiplayer:
Cracking Halo.
Weird battlepass, with silly challenges.
I dunno how much longevity it has, but I'm having a great time right now.

What a strange game to play in 2022.
First off, as a game it's aged dreadfully and I feel like it wasn't very good at the time.
The camera is DREADFUL. You can't rotate the camera (but you can temporarily look to the left or right... for some reason) and the only way to force it behind you is to block. But blocking mostly will focus on a random enemy. This makes blocking useless because attacks from the back will still hit you...

They saw it fit to include a dedicated jump button though, which only sees use during a single boss fight.

ASIDE from all the, the story is okay; it's classic Yoko Taro "what if everyone was a fucked up little guy?" story telling. The most interesting thing is the way the story evolves to different endings by allowing you to revisit previous scenarios with new knowledge/items to create new branches. This proto-Nier storytelling saw me through all the way to Ending E - for my sins.

On to Drakengard 3!

Everyone in Drakengard 3 fucks and they have to make sure you know about this at all times.

What a strange one. Probably more fun than Drakengard 1, but SO different they may as well be unrelated.

Played on emulator so I thankfully avoided the seemingly dreadful technical woes.

Like Nier: Automata, the gameplay is pretty much functional enough to drag you through and you can feel the early DNA of that game in here.

It has the Yoko Taro classic "multiple ending" and "every character is a fucked up little guy" but a lot of this stuff is worked into the world itself here.

Interesting time to be sure, but fuck that final boss, man.

Edit: After re-evaluating the final boss, and realising that the trick is to just not look at it and rely on the "song" it made it way easier and I now think it's incredible. Thanks.

The logical conclusion of roguelikes.

I've tried 'em all, and usually you get to a point where you've made a build so unkillable you just play until you get bored or the game ramps up in a way where even an unkillable build is overrun.

Vampire Survivors is a very simple roguelike where you pick up and combine items to kill very simple enemies in a very simple map.
It has all the joy of roguelikes: Finding new weapons, combining them in interesting ways, working out which ones are good and bad, and slowly re-evaluating them over time.

Over the course of 30 minutes the game gets steadily more difficult, occasionally throwing waves that seem impossible to beat. But you will beat them, learn something new and get a little further.

Eventually the game is no challenge. You stand still and kill everything; you've solved the game.
As a reward, at the 30 minute mark the Grim Reaper shows up and kills you.
The only way to survive for 30 minutes is to have a broken build and your reward is death.

It's roguelikes as a genre boiled down to its bare essence and sold for about £2.

Sifu is a game about overcoming adversity and bettering yourself in the process; I just wish it did a better job at helping you get there.

My enjoyment came in waves, from thinking it's the best thing ever into something totally bullshit and finally settling on really good wiht room for improvement.
The combat is an evolution of the Batman's Creed formula, with much more freedom (eventually) but much more punishing. Enemies have no qualms ganging up on you to make you mess up all your parries. Some of them attack with difficult patterns that you really have to learn; there's no "slow down time to react" here.

The hook to failure in Sifu is that when you "die" you get right back up, but you're a little older. Eventually you're too old and you die for real.
The problem is that failure is a distant fantasy until it's right up in your face. Fighting goons is usually a magic time, but once things start to go wrong the damage comes in so FAST that it's difficult to readjust before you die.
So chances are you'll need to play stuff over and over, which is fine if you enjoy it as much as I do.

Eventually you'll permanently unlock enough skills to allow you to deal with anything and really make that combat shine.

Miscellaneous thoughts:
It really needs a better training mode.
Sometimes the camera is dreadful and will get you dead quick.
The tutorial is bad, doesn't tell you about a few basic (and necessary) features and is bad at telling you the "why" behind the different strategies.
The bosses mostly blow.
The music is good, but I didn't find it ramp up enough for any of the big fights.

Closing:
Once I'd finished the game (and there is a "true" ending) I dind't have much to do except start over or do it again better, but the combat is so fun I really hope they add some sort of random challenge mode or Bloody Palace type deal.

What is a sequel for?

Is it to continue with the adventures of the previous cast and see what they're up to? See how they've grown and how they face new adventures?

Or do we instead focus on exploring the world and the plot? Wrapping up old threads, making new ones.

Is it to continue the themes and ideals but put a new spin on it; Seeing the world through the lens of another?

The problem with NEO: The World Ends With You is... I don't know why it exists, and I don't think it does either.

The original DS version of The World Ends With You wraps itself up nicely, with room to think about it, but the journeys of the characters are pretty much complete.
Then the mobile version teased an extra piece of information.
Then the Switch version had an extra scenario which pretty much undoes the original ending (this is clearly meant to be important in a sequel).
Then they released an anime of the original game; intended to be the "definitive cut" this was touted to be the true predecessor to NEO: TWEWY.

So Square Enix basically created the need for a sequel out of nothing. Fair enough, they want to make money.

But the new scenario in the Switch version is pretty much hand-waved away with no explanation in NEO and the anime doesn't cover it at all. So there's this clearly important past event which did happen, and is central to the motivations of characters, but is just entirely dismissed by the game itself.

So if we see NEO as a sequel of plot: it doesn't make sense. They didn't keep the plot thread cohesive. Which, again, is fine. The original game was about the themes and character development, maybe this one is too...

NEO: TWEWY mostly follows a new cast of teens, but doesn't really give them room to do anything beyond their gimmicks. Interesting characters are killed off as soon as they threaten to become interesting, motivations change with the wind. Returning "legendary" characters just kind of show up to undo the events of a different mystery which is trying to change another thing which hasn't been explained yet. So you get this jenga tower of mysteries that totally undoes itself in a way that leaves you with a net-zero of satisfying mystery solutions... So what's the point in it?

The same goes for the "theme sequel". The original was about opening up to the world. This one is about... friends are good? Don't time travel? God could fix anything he wanted in to seconds but just fucking doesn't?

The game also has a literal Deus Ex Machina which has no impact before or after it beyond getting the plot out of a corner that they put themself into. So yeah, I think the theme is that God could fix all of this. Sometimes he fixes some of this, some times he shows up and says he would have fixed all of it but didn't.

In summary:
- It doesn't continue the exploration of the themes of the original or try to pave new grounds
- New characters are under baked, old characters are like ticking items off a to-do list
- The driving force of the game comes from an event that the game itself pretends didn't happen until it needs to and then forgets until it needs to not. It's impossible to get a read on it.

As a game NEO: TWEWY is a pretty fun action/rpg game with an unsatisfying plot that really settles me in the camp of "sometimes things don't need a sequel".


Assorted musings:
It feels like the end of a trilogy, but the second game just never existed and they're pretending that it does and we all played it.

Character motivations and mysteries are constantly teased, and then are basically settled & solved back to back to back in the last portion of the game making them all pretty unsatisfying.

There's a lot of characters you're meant to feel bad for, but they're barely on screen and then you're meant to feel sad for them, and then they're gone. Rinse and repeat.

The character that was originally teased in the mobile port of the original has essentially no impact and I don't get what her deal is.

They bring back an original character in a sort of "I know what's going on, but I'll be mysterious about it" role, but then just fucking forget to do anything with him until the end. A hundred different plot points that would make sense for them to be involved in are shoved inexplicably onto someone else.

So many of the days are incredibly padded out by sending you all around the city or doing a bunch of extra fights. I was willing it to end by the time I hit the final act.

As soon as you get the final 300% team attack, there's no reason to do anything else. Ignore all pins that don't massively boost your groove,

Not being able to skip stuff you've already seen is a crime.

Fucking hell, man.
Maybe this was good at the time, but going back to it now is hell.
The character moves like an old resi character, the platforming sucks and the combat is mostly just non-stop Izuna Drops (This is actually a good thing).

The Rachel bits were dreadful, and this was the point that made me quit for good.
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