Tears of the Kingdom is an evil video game. It is a shallow, meandering homonuculus in the shape of a "critically acclaimed video game." It is sinister in how it slithers along wearing the skin of a game we all liked seven years ago. It is deceptive in how it tricks the player into thinking it's wealth of "content" is fun. It is manipulative in how it attempts to wring tears out from the player despite the story meaning nothing.

It is a game about nothing for everyone. It is formless sludge to keep your fingers busy and your mind vacant. It is the death of art. It loots the corpses of the good Zelda games and uses them for fuel for the content mill.

It's kinda fun to skydive though

I won't call Tears of the Kingdom the worst game I've ever played - that'd be obviously hyperbolic. It's mechanically sound, looks nice, and there is some meager bits of fun to be had. But I think it's absolutely one of the worst pieces of art I've ever experienced. It does nothing to justify it's own existence, seemingly satisfied with just being. It has nothing new to say, nothing interesting to do, nothing cool to see. But hey, there's 900 Korok seeds, 700 locations, 194 caves, 152 shrines, 120 lightroots, 58 wells, 35 chasms, 35 settlements, 60 side adventures, 31 shrine quests, 139 side quests, 18 memories, it's so awesome dude there's so much content the game is great it has content I like this game because it has content I love content

It's really just frustrating me with how un-great it is, i actually liked Sword and Shield AND Arceus despite how unambitious the former was, it just felt like a good Pokemon game, Scarlet feels like it's caught inbetween both of those good games, and what comes out is that horribly okay.

Terastallizing is by far the worst gimmick Pokemon has ever had, and i'm not a fan of any of the gimmicks, they're horribly forced and make you play a certain way every single time, and leaning them is a chore because you know they're just going to remove them in the next game, they're wastes of time that divert resources from actually improving the game. This one is so, so much more awful than all the others. Tera types can be anything for any pokemon, so type advantage as an entire concept is essentially thrown out the window when they're in play, any pokemon can be any type, but this doesn't even work in your favor because afaik the tera type is fixed to a specific pokemon and there is no way to change it, no idea how this is supposed to work in multiplayer, if it's even there. I encountered a gym leader who's main pokemon just doesn't have weaknesses due to their ability and tera type, not having any weaknesses at all is absurd, and a terrible way to try and create difficulty. The entire point of type advantages is so the game comes down to something other than just numbers, it's what makes the game about playing smart and not hard. Without type advantage the only solution to beating a pokemon that can one-shot all of yours is to just go and grind, and that's in a game where every single battle takes forever.

They still have yet to make the combat faster, it takes several minutes just for random battles sometimes. A good gym fight can take half an hour just because of how long it takes for messages and and animations to play out, and the animations don't look good enough for them to force you to watch them every single time. Fire Emblem has let you skip animations since 2012, technically 2007, and Pokemon still refuses to catch up on making the game more playable rather than more watchable. The performance wouldn't bother me as much if it wasn't making an already slow game slower.

The non-technical aspects of the game are very mixed. The region simply isn't interesting, the areas to explore just feel like stock video game settings, mountains, forrests, deserts, we've been here before. The civilized areas have some good detail to them, just not as much personality. I can remember the tropical setting of Alola, and the industrial setting of Unova, but even while looking at this game i find it's setting tepid and dull, and i can't say i feel like i'm going to think about it after i'm done playing it. The character designs are mixed, some are great, some are the most boring i've ever seen. There are some good new pokemon designs, but nothing killer.

The story and characters are a step-up, as they feel more unique and more expressive than any game before. The open-world nature of the game makes the story's lack of focus work in it's favor.

The open-world isn't a meaningful addition for multiple reasons, it's gatekept by level, it's not an interesting setting, and there's not enough to actually do in it. Being able to challenge the gym leaders in any order would be cool if it actually had a level-scaling system, instead they still clearly have a right way and wrong way to do things, it's actually made even more rigid by removing weaknesses to exploit, i don't see any way you're supposed to beat a significantly higher level gym leader, so a vast majority of all players are just going to go in the exact same order.

I can't see any reason why this game would be considered better than the previous two, it removes all of Arceus' improvements, and accentuates Sword and Shield's flaws.

Update: Starting to have fun with it again.

What is it like to live a fairy tale?

I posit that the Souls series has been attempting to answer this question since its inception, and with Elden Ring, From has finally succeeding in realizing a world that was able to do so.

Your only goal in Elden Ring is to effect an upheaval, to dismantle the current system that you may bring about a new beginning -- or simply an ending. You forge your own myth as you venture through the dying, stagnant world of the Lands Between, bringing hope and despair to its denizens. Around every turn are wonders and horrors; the world is a sick one, but it is a beautiful sickness. Regardless of the ending you choose, there is a true sense that you have accomplished something epic by the end of it all, epic in the most classical sense of the word.

While you can argue that this approach is no different from the Souls games which provide the foundation for Elden Ring, it really "clicked" for me here in a way it didn't in previous games. I attribute this largely to the sheer scale of Elden Ring's world. Miyazaki describes ER as a game based on a mythology by GRRM, and if you ask me, the world lives up to the mythology that shaped it.

Truly a monumental experience; this is what games are capable of. I don't regret completely destroying my sleep schedule to play it for 10+ hours a day at release lol.

A solid title but reels on the fatigue more than it should

It's already been said that Elden Ring is the culmination of From Software's action role-playing efforts throughout the decade. The developer's collaboration with George R.R Martin brings what I think one of their best games yet with some caveats. I feel like this game is taking 2 steps forward but 1 step back in terms of how the levels and gameplay are presented. If you just want the short version, Elden Ring is a great game with some of the luster being lost quickly when you realize some things about the locations.

There is a lot to praise about Elden Ring: The gameplay, the world, the music and even the lore was something I found myself actually interested in. The gameplay plays like how your typical Dark Souls would play with some important flourishes here and there and taking a lot from their previous titles as well. Posture breaking and jumping with Sekiro is what I'm mostly seeing but I'm sure there are some Bloodborne influences but I haven't played it yet so can't comment on that. You can probably get away with doing what you did before which I did until a certain point but the more fun aspects is mixing and matching to an extent since they managed to make spells really fun (and broken) in this game not to mention the addition of horseback combat which is actually pretty decent too when fighting the larger than life bosses and enemies. I can't comment much on the multiplayer aspect as I actually rarely got invaded nor got any summons since I figured the servers are overloaded to the point it'd take too long to get something going and at that point, I rather just play the game on my own. I will go by saying that the world is probably one of the best things about this game but it does have some repetition issues that I'll address in the next section. For now, I'll give the praise in that there is a huge amount of places and areas to explore here that even in the 70 hours I've put into this game that I felt like I barely touched the surface at certain points and the open world is extremely realized to an extent. This is not to mention that they managed to seamlessly add these huge expansive open ended dungeons in the world with no loading times which I think is extremely amazing in that you can spend hours in a tiny speck of the map and it's just as dense. I've never cared too much about soundtracks for games like these since it all sounds like generic epic western fantasy with choirs to me but I think this soundtrack is pretty good. Less of the former I've mentioned which is still here but there are some more quieter tracks like Rennala's theme and I'll admit some of those epic tracks actually hit for me here like the final boss theme actually combining both the choirs and eerie calmness surrounding the fight. From what I can tell, one of the few things George R.R Martin worked on for this title was the lore for the world of the game and I honestly think this has been the most interested I've actually been in the lore of the game and this includes their past efforts here, I'll give them that despite this game not feeling aesthetically different at times that there is enough here that I wouldn't call it the same at all in what I think is their coolest world and and attempt at world building yet.

As much as I loved exploring the open world of Elden Ring, there was a certain moment that it sort of lost the feeling of exploration and lack of expectation. Most of the locations in Elden Ring composes of several location archetypes such as catacombs, caves, hero graves, ruins and etcetera. Now despite each location is technically different in layout, the overall visual level design and enemy placement in these locations border on random procedural at times. What doesn't help is also knowing which rewards are generally gonna be in each of these archetypes with some exceptions such as catacombs always giving you spirit ashes and caves mostly giving talismans. After a while though, I think when I realized this is when I sort of didn't want to explore the world anymore. I already knew what was I gonna get myself into when I explored a certain area and then fight the same miniboss again which is something I'll mention too. The game reuses a lot of enemies in this game but I almost can't blame them due to the scope of the game and the design and gameplay mechanic's team nightmare of having to design a unique fight for every area of this game being way too much of a herculean task.

Now I don't really mind the traditional gameplay flow of From Soft's recent catalog of games after Demon's Souls but I think I'm also starting to feel the series fatigue after this game in particular, I will still think the gameplay is always fun in a sense but I was hoping Elden Ring would be a more radical departure for them as a developer that has mostly been making the same game for almost over a decade now. There is only so much you can do with the gameplay that revolutionized the gaming space before even that becomes bordering on the stale. Anyway with that said, I've felt like I've been too negative. Elden Ring represents a triumph in the open world rpg genre despite my criticisms and for their first foray into it, it's a home run. An unrelenting odyssey through The Lands Between that manages to have the scale of an ocean with almost the depth to actually match it.

You have fought long and hard. I have no doubt you will become Elden Lord. May you take the throne.

One of the greatest action platformers of all time, though it might not be what Metroidvania fans in particular are looking for. While the game does follow Metroidvania progression, with an expansive and lovingly detailed world, exploration elements take a backseat to combat and especially platforming.

If you are confident in your gaming skills and seek a real platforming challenge, few games are more satisfying than Aeterna Noctis. As a platformer, it is endlessly creative and rewarding, challenging the player to master its mechanics and design language. The teleport arrow mechanic which serves as the core of its platforming design is almost comically overwhelming at first, and yet by the end of the game it will have become second nature; if you ask me, the appeal of difficult games is pushing past your limits, overcoming yourself, and this is something Aeterna Noctis facilitates brilliantly.

But again, this is not a game for people who desire an exploration-oriented experience or RPG-esque progression -- Hollow Knight and SotN this is not. Aeterna Noctis's framing as a Metroidvania perhaps does it a disservice, because there is a fairly significant portion of the Metroidvania fanbase that is never going to appreciate its approach; at the same time, "Metroidvania" is a very convenient descriptor, and the basic progression of the game largely adheres to genre conventions, so I'm not sure there's actually a better way to market it.

So I'll just say this: play Aeterna Noctis if you want a Metroidvania with gorgeous graphics and platforming harder than anything in Celeste.