The motto of gamefreak - For every 1 step forward, make 2 grand leaps backwards.

Though truthfully, at this point I can't blame them anymore. I have to wonder if gamefreak has any control over the game at all. Pokemon games are essentially mandated to come out at a certain time to follow along with the anime schedule, and will NEVER be delayed, so any internal conflicts and problems are never allowed to be polished. Not only that, gamefreak only has what, 130 employees? Incredibly small for a game studio. You have to start wondering if the suits at the top of the pokemon chain see the games as anything more than a formality.

Okay, with that bit aside, hows the game? Mid. Very, very mid. It's a significant increase from gen 8's absolute disaster that was the wild area, but it's overall a mixed bag. A bunch of interesting ideas on paper with the most basic execution possible on every front.

The open world of Pokemon Scarlet/Violet essentially amounts to a large square of tall grass, with lots of pokeballs strewn about, and some palette swaps every now and then. There's nothing really to do except hunt trainers, which are nice loot baskets of EXP for your team, and go from story progress to story progress, and catch pokemon, and do raid battles. You know, same ol same ol, except much wider distances.

There was one thing I was interested in initially - the towers that gold the Gimmighoul chests and coins. Imagine my surprise! A reward for exploring! A small reward, sure, but it was working towards an evolution for a... weirdly designed but strong as hell pokemon! And... you need 999 coins. And theres nothing else like it in the game. Shame on me.

As far as the paths go, all of them are... okay. Maybe a hot take though, but I think the totem pokemon and ultra necrozma from gen 7 absolutely windmill dunk over this games attempt at big 'boss' pokemon. The titans as they are... have nothing that differentiate them from being just a large grass pokemon. No gimmick, no field, no stat changes, nothing. At the very least I thought the story strong of Arven, while cliche and obvious, was at least... nice to see conclude? It's decent relative to pokemon, I guess.

Likewise same for the team star path, which are a combination of gym + titan, where you fight a big car. These fights are decently fun, but preluded by 2 minutes of time wasting and making you comprehend your life choices as you stand around and mash the R button without paying attention. I'm not at all sure what the design intent of this part of the game is. It's like a mario party minigame.

The gyms themselves are your usual affair, but maybe more depressing of the game is the sad state of the towns. They have themes and personality, but it's truly sad how there is NOTHING to do in any of them. You can't even go inside most of the houses, there's barely any npcs to talk to... you just buy the few pieces of costume customization you can (because gamefreak decided to axe a thing people liked which is their usual) you just show up, beat a gym, and then leave, without ever doing anything. ANYTHING.

What we're left with is essentially a standard pokemon game gaining some, and losing other, features and ideas from others. There's some original ideas but nothing in the game tries to use it in any interesting way. This isn't even going into the massive performance problems the game suffers from.

Honestly, the main reason I'm not rating this game lower is because I think competitively this gen has some potential to be pretty fun in both singles and doubles, and it IS better than gen 8. But overall, this is not a good path for pokemon to take.

I'll also repeat myself from my other pokemon reviews: Gen 5 and 7 for life.

Oh FOMO, what a devil you are.

I was stupid, truly. This is my cross to bear. Hearing people say, 'It's like BOTW but it has a lot of the bad things removed!' 'It's BOTW but better!' 'Look, you can make a gingerbread man with a dick and get 10k retweets!'. The temptation, it got me to try a game I knew, KNEW I wouldn't like, but I felt some horrible urge to try nonetheless.

Largely, I find TOTK to be a project made from hubris. That you can generate a ton of hype and a huge amount of time on a development cycle to do absolutely fucking nothing, and still turn a profit. It's the same world, the same boring design, the same shrines, the same korok seeds. Except now, you have the option to play fortnite in the middle. What a concept. Give players the opportunity to make elaborate but ultimately pointless shit to do the marketing for you.

Dare venture into the depths or the sky, and it will feel briefly like a true sequel to the original BOTW, with new ideas and concepts being thrown around, but don't stay too long or else you'll discover that they are completely devoid of anything meaningful besides their novelty.

When people say this is BOTW but more polished, I have to wonder what people are talking about. This has -EVERY- issue that BOTW has, down to the bone marrow. It's almost like it's the same game, and the extra content was previously planned DLC or something! Same garbage item degradation, same green expanse of nothing of which most of your time is spent holding up, same repetitive shrines. Is Fortnite really that impressive to people? Am I the insane one here?

This game somehow feels more like a demo than the first game did, an idea sold not on the game it is, but what iteration on a formula could produce. Which, considering the long dev cycle this game had, isn't something I'm looking forward to.

It's cute, but overall lacking. It falls for many of the same pitfalls that many English VN's and smaller games that try and approach philosophy normally fall into, and then adds a few more, but it covers the ideas with a nice layer of style.

It's clear that Slay the Princess wants to say... something. Whether that's about how we as people owe much of how we interact with the world to other people, or about change in general, or... other things, it's hard to say. But it wants to. How do I know? Because the game won't stop bringing it up.

The problem is that all it really does is... talk about it. The core premise of the game is there, of course, but all it largely serves to do is act as the introduction to the idea. And then the rest of the game is... just bringing it up over and over again. Metaphor after metaphor, paragraph after paragraph. The dialogue becomes college-level philosophy papers but in prose.

And beyond just how messy and imbalanced TELLING of the idea is, the end result is a game that lands on the same point that many other indie game/VN's land on; 'hey, did you know life has meaning?' and 'existence is cool, you should try it'. I wanna see one of these meta-games do something else besides existentialism for once.

I did like the voice acting, and I did enjoy the overall style of the game, but now after sitting on it, all I'm left with is, harsh to say, a bit of a nothingburger. It's a great-looking and great-sounding burger, but unfortunately, there's nothing there.

Holy Fuck.

You know, there are times when you get worried as someone who's been playing videogames for awhile. Will I never find my 'favorite' game again? Are all the good games behind me, and everything else coming is just decent, maybe once and awhile great, but nothing in compared to what you felt before? That's somewhat where I was at with Elden Ring, and here it is.

All of the things I had at 5 stars prior to now were freeware... and a VN, but that's a special case. That's not to say I'm allergic to any game that requires money to play, but my big favorites often come from small teams, or even single people, making games with a focused vision, or unrestrained ambition. Elden Ring has both, in spades.

From your first footsteps outside, you can tell what kind of game you're playing. Similar to every game in the souls series, you wander around a now dead kingdom, like a fly buzzing over a carcass, but never has that atmosphere been more prevalent here. Architecture sanded away by time, great big monuments in tatters, madness and hostility everywhere you see. But that's not the only atmosphere Elden Ring has. Sometimes it's more mystical and dabbles in the unknown, sometimes it's gross but beautiful, sometimes it's hard to even describe. But the map never stops giving you something new, new senses to experience, new things to find.

See, open world games have been in the same cyclical trap for a long time when it comes to big releases. A map filled with nothing but collectibles, the same bandit camp copy pasted. But Elden Ring, while does have some asset resuse, I won't lie, the entire world feels like it has a purpose. Ruins hide basements which hide ashes, churches are always good to find, towers golden trees. Minor dungeons such as caves all the way to other huge maps and castles entirely. It's not just the amount of content, it's the depth of it.

The souls series has always been desperately trying to evoke this sense of exploration and awe-struck wonder. It's done so in different ways. Dark Souls 1 had it's looping world, Dark Souls 2 had size and ambition, 3 had hostility in combat. Bloodborne evoked a haunting atmosphere. But it was never put together, something always lacked one from the other. Bloodborne got the closest, and now we've hit its apex.

I can't say the game is entirely perfect, of course. The catacomb dungeons can sometimes feel a bit bland, especially with DaS2 bosses usually sitting at the end. But I found I was often at least given a weapon to see. And the natural consequence of a game so open ended is that much of the game can accidentally end up trivialized by finding it too late. It's not a problem to some, of course there's natural satisfaction from feeling your characters strength in a concrete way, but it's worth mentioning.

And I've also seen some people dislike exactly how freeform it is; they get stressed out without a clear goal. I sympathize with this, as someone who can end up lost and overwhelemd and was at times even in this game, but at the same time I wouldn't want it any other way in this game. It's a joy to be lost in.

It's the best in the series for sure, and one of the better games to be released in years in the main stream, and definitely one of my favorite games of all time now.

A pretty fun metroidvania with some strong screen design. A bit glitchy and frustrating at times though.

Maybe this gripe won't ring true to everyone, but there's an item one can acquire relatively early that lets you switch between each character at will out in the 'field', instead of needing to find a station to do so. This actually took away a lot of the fun for me. It was enjoyable to make mental notes and think about traveling to certain areas as the other characters, as opposed to the extreme convenience of pressing a button and being any of the three at once. If you were going to turn off the mechanic so soon, It might as well have simply been 1 character that had all 3 weapon types and abilities, as opposed to 3 distinct playstyles and limitations. Maybe just me.