Like a Dragon: Infinite Runtime

Forever an infinitely difficult series to review without turning it into a minefield of spoilers, I'll tread carefully in my Infinite Wealth review and provide a fairly short writeup for a game that is as cavernously deep as the eigth-ish-ninth-ish (main) entry in the Yakuza/Like a Dragon franchise. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth was a game that despite being a tremendous fan of the series' heart wrenching moments, delicately web narratives, and impeccable lived in worlds, I was timid about actually playing. The gargantuan length of its immediate predecessor and slower grind-heavy gameplay took a lot out of me, even if I was a pretty big fan of the story being told. From what I'd heard through media outlets and friends alike, Infinite Wealth had made the game even larger and more grandiose, and after playing it myself I can verify that to be true.

LAD 8 is the first title within the series to take place significantly outside of Japan, this time having the bulk of its gameplay (mostly through Ichiban) taking place in the fiftieth American State: Hawaii. Previously I thought this would be a significant boon to my enjoyment of the title because I thought the series could use a fresh start outside of its typical close quarters Japanese city streets where you're shoulder to shoulder with pedestrians and throwing down in alleyways. It turns out that I actually wasn't a fan of the transition in the slightest. Never having been to Hawaii myself I can't verify this to the actual existence of the city, but much of Infinite Wealth's streets felt almost too large and full of empty expanse. With the series prior, I'd grown use to the almost claustrophobic feeling of having too much to see and too much to do around you. However many of the games taking place in Kamurocho be damned, I took to a significant liking of the familiar sites and sounds. As the series grew and expanded to Okinawa, Osaka, and Hiroshima, I felt like Sega and RGG did a pretty good job at introducing the player to new locales that played into the DNA of what players knew. Hawaii felt big and... interestingly empty for a Yakuza/LAD title. I didn't feel connected to the valley-like wide roads and emptiness between buildings... the beach and the town didn't really feel inviting to me, for whatever reason nothing took. In addition to this, the enemy placement for such an expansive entry was abnormally dense. It felt like I couldn't run my party more than a few feet without turning myself into an engagement. I understand this is probably beneficial to levelling up characters and jobs, but man does it make for a disrupted and un-rhythmic experience. I was dodging streets and pulling detours to a far greater level than I ever was in the beat-em'-up titles that came out prior.

On the topic of not being able to buy into the new world put forth by RGG in Infinite Wealth, the voice acting and languages used came off as a bit... strange. I understand that Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is a Japanese game that takes place in America, and in an American state that has a significant Japanese population, but I didn't understand the rhyme or reason behind how many characters spoke and understood English or Japanese. It seemed like the language spoken altered based on narrative convenience rather than a logical sequence, which made some characters that spoke in a broken English like the American born Bryce interesting. This doesn't really matter to anything in the long run but it made buy-in to the locale a little more difficult for me.

Now outside of the map being not my fancy, what actually rubbed me the wrong way? Mandatory fungames! I didn't buy Animal Crossing, please don't subject me to three days of woo hoo tee hee ha ha silly Animal Crossing on an abandoned Island in an otherwise (mostly) serious game. I didn't enjoy going from chasing disappearances and trying to dissolve Hawaii's gang violence to talking to the Western Kentucky mascot Big Red and cleaning trash so I could raise tourism to a location I did not want to be at. When I found out I couldn't leave at my own will, I looked up at the sky like that one gif of Willem Dafoe from At Eternity's Gate. Adding this on to the two forced moments in which you have to participate in a Roguelike a Dragon and I was (sarcastically) livid with several moments of the game. I get why you include these things, and in the long run its good for people trying to get the most dollar per hour value out of the game, but my plead with RGG going forward is that they strip this out of what the player has to do and leave it up to what the player could do. Rebirth made this same mistake and I'm wondering why this trend is proliferating in the modern JRPG space.

This review comes off as overtly negative, and for honesty's sake it kind of is... but there is a lot of Yakuza charm once again present in this title. There are the silly moments from Ichiban and company that have you (metaphorically) rolling on the floor in laughter, and the gut wrenching moments minutes later that the series is known to inflict. I was a fan of... about one half of this game and those were the sections devoted mainly to series mainstay Kazuma Kiryu. It's not necessarily because he's the old guy who we've grown accustomed to over the last few decades, but because his story felt more focused and mature. I do really enjoy Ichiban and think he's a perfect protagonist for the series henceforth, but the segments focused on him felt a little all over the place narratively and didn't hit me as hard as what we see the Dragon of Dojima go through. Familiar faces hit hard, and the cast in Infinite Wealth can go toe to toe with just about any game out there, I just wish they were employed in a more uniform and focused plot.

I usually wrap up my reviews with a plead to either play or not play the title based upon its expectations from the player base and my enjoyment of the title overall, but I feel like people looking to play Infinite Wealth and continue the story of Kiryu, Ichiban, and company will do it regardless. I didn't enjoy this title nearly as much as I did LAD7, but I'm glad we got to ride out with the crew one more time.

"Mom I want Persona"

"We have Persona at home"

Persona at home:

Eternights is truly a video game, and one that jumped on my radar almost immediately after watching a Sony State of Play sometime last year. As my intro details, it was effectively billed as a hack and slash Persona-lite with heavy dating sim elements. Knowing myself as a filthy Persona consumer and a reluctant weaboo, I cautiously wrote down the title as something worth keeping on my docket for whenever it released. I vividly remember reviewing the games I had notched as "interesting" following the State of Play and thinking "There's no way this one is any good right?" and it turns out... yeah it wasn't really all that great. To be level with you the reader, Eternights is pretty much the Coors Light of video games. It's not great, it's a lesser version of something you can get better elsewhere, it doesn't stay with you long, but it's not the worst way you could have spent your time.

The game begins with a zombie apocalypse, as many do, and of which you and your best friend (who felt like a very watered down version of the Ryuji/Yosuke archetype) must survive. You quickly run into Japan's biggest pop star, Yuna, and link together with a mysterious force to fight against the architect of this malice. The premise of the story is mildly exciting at best, which is whatever because that wasn't necessarily the guiding light of the allure of Eternights. What drew me and probably most people into the title was the dating sim and Persona-esque nature of it. Now naturally you are a male protagonist on a train venturing out to do some dungeoneering with a team of waifus and two husbandos, all of whom you can earn affection and I believe romance with. Just like Persona these conversations are checked with substats, but instead of guts, charisma, or intelligence, you have acceptance, expression, and confidence (and a few more.) I appreciated this game for doing more of what Persona did, but I found the way that you gain each of these respective stats was a little too hamfisted and awkward. Much like Persona you do the bulk of it through selecting the right words in conversation... but I felt like what my intention was (for instance, trying to level up expression) didn't always match what I was saying in conversation. Early on in Act 3 I decided that I wanted to romance Yuna, but my expression wasn't high enough. I spent the rest of the act and the one after trying to pick the answers in conversation that leveled up expression... but I was wrong almost every time. This was okay in the end as I got to romance another character and go down their route, but it was mostly via incident and not intention. Persona did it right in having alternate routes to level up these stats (P5 for instance eating at Big Bang Burger leveled up your guts,) however that was not present in Eternights and made the dating sim element, a main draw, unfortunately too vague.

The other main element of the game outside of the dating sim aspect is the combat, and man did it look real nice in the trailer. An ongoing issue with anime action games is that the combat will often look pretty and clean (Tales of Arise, Scarlet Nexus) but in practice feel like slapping sand against a brick wall, and that is an apt descriptor of Eternights' combat system. Much like Scarlet Nexus you wail and wail against waves of enemies in a group in a button mash style. These enemies will sometimes have barriers that require popping with your elemental powers granted to you by the select group of waifus you call your team. While not every enemy has a barrier, and you can bypass many of these weaknesses by just using whichever element you want, it just becomes another game of matching the shape to the peg hole. This is what killed a lot of Scarlet Nexus for me, it was just lukewarm button mash combat with added in weakness hunting. On top of that, the game will throw a lot of enemies at you that require dodging before you can attack, and man there's few things I dislike in action games then staring at your opponent waiting for them to attack so you can get your own hits in... it just straight up kills any pace and flow that the title has.

I feel like this is probably way more than anyone will write about Eternights, but what else are we to do.

The positives of Eternights are thus: it's actually pretty funny and self aware of the lewditiy of it all... and no that is almost assuredly not a word. And honestly? Sometimes a Coors Light can hit the spot, they're low in ABV and go down like water, and sometimes you just need water. I'm between Starfield and Lies of P, with a Cyberpunk DLC on the horizon so this game tucked in with a pretty short runtime and some decent humor that got me to crack a grin every now and again. There were a few callbacks to animes and videogames that must have been influences on the developer that I appreciated (hello Final Fantasy X!) as well.

I can't recommend anyone to play this game, unless they really like Coors Light. It's a decent at best game with some weak to middling dating sim elements that are better done in many other series, and an unfortunately poor combat loop.

War has changed.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is an achievement in fiction not just as a game or "movie" as some would describe it, but as a work of transformative art made only possible by a man as intricate and fascinating as Hideo Kojima. What Guns of the Patriots is able to do is close a chapter on the world of a franchise born in the eighties, with poignant and predictive storytelling truly ahead of its time. There is nothing like Metal Gear Solid in media today, there was nothing like it before, and there may be nothing like it after. The way MGS and Kojima were able to weave meta commentary on politics, war, and sociocultural impact is nothing short of miraculous. Touching on this story without devolving into spoilers is rather difficult, but I will say to anyone willing to embark on this incredible journey, it is worth it. This is the first time in a long time that I am truly speechless and having a tough time writing my post gameplay review. They almost always flow naturally from my fingertips, written as if they were a stream of consciousness... but alas Kojima has checkmated anything I could put to proverbial paper.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is a conjunction of MGS2/3's sneaking playstyle and the storytelling of a feature film. There's countless moments where you as the player are invited to put down your controller and watch a narrative maestro at work, carefully weaving together histories and plotlines that developed fifty years before this game takes place. In a way Chekov's gun reigns true, as KojiPro was able to close almost every conceivable plotline and moment from the series in this title alone in the way of convenient plot elements and character monologues/soliloquy. The story that began with the hero known as Snake aka Big Boss, Zero, Ocelot, and Eva all comes to a halt as does the hatred that drove them and the world all apart. The control of information and the puppetering of the war economy become a driving force for the antagonists as they steer humanity into a dark age of conformance. Can Solid Snake, Otacon, and their crew of problematic miscreants save the world in a myserious war against their psyches? The answer is provided in Guns of the Patriots, and it will take you and your creative whimsy into a previously untapped locale of media.

With the recent news of the revival of MGS for modern platforms, I am cautiously optimistic for a new generation of gamers to encounter (heh) the incredible world that Metal Gear truly is. I hope they are able to dissect the commentary that is written in about our future and our past from the game they are playing. I hope they can laugh in one moment to ponder the existence of memetics as a cultural driving force in the next.

Shine on Big Boss, Solid Snake, Otacon, and Hideo Kojima.

War has changed.

Baldur's Deflate 3

It's been a long time coming and it's finally came, for Bun B Weepboop to get his shot at the game and the results are... well... we beat it? Last year was filled with a plethora of large-scale video game releases and unfortunately a finite amount of time to play them. In my quest to play as many GOTY nominees and new titles as I could, I had to prioritize games based upon the feasibility of completing them within a certain time frame and their general approach of play. In deciding how I wanted to tackle the year, this led myself to selecting long RPG's like Final Fantasy XVI and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in lieu of other nominees like Marvel's Spiderman 2 and the relevant Baldur's Gate 3. I dodged Baldur's Gate largely because of the time investment necessary and my life embarking on an increasingly busier schedule, but a large part of my avoidance came down to the fact that it is a Larian Studios CRPG. I'd previously put thirty or forty hours into Divinity Original Sin 2 to milquetoast results, the game was fun to play with friends but its open-ended quest design and generally uninteresting world and narrative failed to pull me in. With Baldur's Gate 3 finally on sale and a new year on the horizon, I purchased it with the intent to play it as soon as I returned to my home and computer following a vacation.

Just about everyone I know fell head over heels with this game, either because they were D&D heads and had finally gotten their video game manifestation of the years playing the legendary tabletop IP, or because they found the near infinite possibilities of exploration and quest-solving attractive. I lent my ear to each of these people and their affinity towards BG3, happy for them to get the lengthy RPG it seemed forever wanted by the gaming world, but thinking I would personally never touch the game. I asked and listened to each one my friends and peers about the who's, what's, when's, and why's of why Baldur's Gate 3 was so good before I ever thought about my purchase. The common answers melted down to the lengthy involved questlines, rich world with decades of lore attached, a complicated D&D combat and world traversal mechanic, and a narrative ever so mysterious. Going into it, this was quite attractive for the most part, despite gaming as a genre having been fairly in depth and mechanically significant since the advent of the new millennia, it's felt like we've been continuously chasing a title in which our choices sincerely mattered and the agency of us within a fantasy world was paramount. If only this legitimately held true in Baldur's Gate... more to come on that later.

I'll start with what I liked about the game, and maybe that will diverge into my issues and qualms with it as well, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. One of the many things I didn't like about Divinity Original Sin 2 (DOS2) was its heightened level of ambiguity in quest design and locations. The journal, or attempt at one, within the game would say things along the like of "Well we talked to a wizard, wizards know magic, maybe somewhere on this island there is a wizard who likes magic a lot" and that would be your clue to find a magic spell to continue upon your journey, without an indication of where specifically to go. Of course this is a slight hyperbole but it was a microcosm of a challenge I had with narrative direction in Larian's previous large scale effort. In BG3 I largely didn't have that issue, as there was a "show on map" option for many of the questlines, all of which seemed to quickly update for new direction once new information was discovered along the journey. I've ranted and raved about quest marker design and the general lack of knowing where to go in games quite often in my reviews thus far, and I have to give credit to Larian for understanding the QoL this brings to BG3. I don't have the wherewithal anymore to exhaustingly read each note or follow each fine word of dialogue as to my next movements within the story, that would be unfair to the average gamer and attention span within the 21st century. What I do have is the ability to recollect summarized information and work with general hints as to where to move next, and BG3 did a fairly good jo overall with that.

Outside of that, there were a few items in which I was generally impressed with BG3 and greatly surprised about going into it. Majorly was the effort put into making the characters of the game complicated and fleshed out against the lukewarm and mostly uninteresting narrative at hand. Each character within your party, should you recruit them (of which I successfully did with each able NPC,) is vastly different and has their own motivations to move through the world and story of Baldur's Gate. Your interactions and conversation with Karlach will forever and always be different than they are with Astarion, and likewise with Gale, Shadowheart, etc... Though I had significant issues with the way a majority of these plotlines resolve, I have to give the staff at Larian some serious credit for crafting the stories of your constituents and making them relevant all the way until the end of the title. In an RPG, the motivations behind your party members to continue along the journey with the main character is integral for creating a believable and striking story. Even in some of my favorite titles of all time, the mark here is missed (cough Final Fantasy cough,) but BG3 was able to tie in the cast with the story. For the most part this was a success, and this is tough to do without divulging spoilers, but one of my most significant gripes with this game was the actual difference you make in their lives upon the completion of the game. Though I felt like the characters were intricately written and different from one another, each with their own needs and values that applied to defeating the big bad and moving on with their lives, I couldn't help to care for just about any of them.

In an effort to be unique, I felt like certain party members were different just for the sake of being different and had no legitimate value to care for. Like Gale is cool and all, and his plight of being an effective walking bomb is tragic, but what does he really do in conversation or in act throughout the entire 90 hour+ runtime for me to care about? Shadowheart's questline involves a deep and serious conversation about her faith and life up until the events of BG3, but why does that matter to me? Again, Wyll's character dilemma involves a binding contract with a devil that it is up to me and the gang to resolve... but why? And why does everything have to be an ultimatum? This felt like a cheap narrative mechanic that the majority of successful western RPG's I enjoy do not use. It's fine to have a tragic ending, it's okay to have characters die, but when you understand that each of the cast members within BG3 are going to have some tragic ultimatum at the end of their respective questlines, that becomes tired. I look at Mass Effect for example, another party based western RPG that I consider to be amongst my holy trinity (ME3, RDR2, and The Witcher 3,) which sees Commander Shepard and the Boys take on galactic big bads with the fate of the universe on the line. Your party members from game to game have their respective tragedies and relevance to the survival of the Normandy and galaxy, but they don't all involve some frustrating stipulation you have to grapple with at the end. One of my major gripes with BG3 is thus, resolving most of these questlines involves a sacrifice or impactful decision that doesn't feel necessary for the story of the game, rather just for emotional shock value. I cared about characters like Karlach, Astarion (sort of,) and Shart, but did I care about them enough to make the grand decision they are asking about? The answer resoundingly was no. In essence I felt like BG3 attempted to make the resolution of these questlines filled with a faux sense of gravity, and I'm not a fan of that.

You have a lot of scenes take place in camp with this cast in the first and second acts of the game, just for them to completely disappear in the third. I wasn't a fan of this rug pull as it personally felt like they ran out of ideas to make the in-between moments of BG3 interesting and focused on the players self-investigation of the end of the story.

I think a part of this manifested in the romance of the game, something that just about all my BG3 "super-fan" friends were quite into. Part of the fun in open-world/zone RPG's in which you control the avatar or social relationships of is choosing which of the games cast members you want to link up with. Now, I didn't really care about anyone in BG3 to that degree, as mentioned above most of the cast greatly waned on me in terms of care and motive, but I did try to pursue one for the why not of it all. This didn't work out, despite playing their storyline to perfection and pursuing their questline in the best of their interest, with max intrapersonal affinity, all because I missed a scene in Act 1. Now imagine I'm trying to move along the story and complete this game some forty hours later and can't move on with their relationship because of some error I didn't even know I didn't make in the first act. This more than anything felt cheap, as the game had not made any gravity of said moment clear down the line and did not indicate to me that I had missed anything. Several characters within the story approached my avatar for a relationship even though I didn't embark on this massive journey for them, and it had me pondering why this was so complex, and for what reason? Other RPG's made these romance and relationship checks much more cut and dry, and it worked far better in those scenarios. I hope the reader sees this moreso as a qualm with the lack of clarity in relaying plot/story checks to the player than anything else.


I've spoken on it a little before too, but the narrative of this game, something I thought would be the strong point of a near 100 hour experience, was genuinely unimpressive. It relies on a fairly tired fantasy trope in a world I as the player was wildly unfamiliar with. The story simply felt like something I was working towards, and not working with. The narrative at no point rather than the closing scenes of each act, felt like something I was actively involved in. There was no real attempt at worldbuilding, rather just letting you interact and converse with the denizens of the land about the respective plights within each act. I don't know, maybe as a Final Fantasy Fan (I hate that alliteration,) I'm a little spoiled about worldbuilding, but outside of the city of Baldur's Gate itself, do you really ever feel like you truly belong or understand the world of this title? My answer to that rhetorical is no. Even in a game like FFX, a short little cinematic of Tidus and the Blitzboys in Zanarkand gives you enough inference upon how the world is within that game. Beginning BG3 in a crashing Nautiloid with some vagrants who would inevitably become your party members, and no real hub world until the last act made me impartial to the world at large. Sure you have some inns and rests along the way, and a camp to call home but... it never felt to me like a place where I could see myself living in (in a fantasy setting.) Environmental buy in is something that matters to me a lot in a title like this, something that the aforementioned Witcher 3 knocked out of the park, going a mile to make the world Geralt takes on the Wild Hunt in feel like it’s a place he needs to defend and call home. In Baldur's Gate 3, in conjunction with the abrupt beginning of the game, I felt like I was rushed into a world I did not know, and simply had to pursue a big bad that was dead set on the destruction of a city I had never been to and did not care for. My plea throughout the ultimate act of BG3 to Larian Studios was to please make me care about this game, please make me care about these characters, please make me care about this world. The onus of buy-in should not be imparted upon the player, rather demonstrated by the game, and that I personally feel like BG3 missed out on by a country mile.

Another qualm I had with BG3 was the fact that I generally am not a fan of D&D, and not for the lack of trying. Now you may say, you idiot why are you playing a long winded narrative set in the historic world of D&D that utilizes D&D mechanics if you don't like D&D? I would reply with, well shut up! But, what comes with that is an unfamiliarity and general annoyance with the way the non-lore aspects of that IP are set up. To begin, every single aspect of this game is a dice roll... and I understand the reasoning behind that as I have played multiple campaigns of D&D, there is a nuance to discovery, speech, and combat that relies upon the chance of dice. Of course your character's intrinsic stats player a role in the success rate of these encounters, but largely you are at the mercy of chance. I dislike this... a lot, it makes for a bad video game experience. Is it true to form for the tabletop version of this IP? Yes! Do I like having to roll a dice for things like opening a chest that has two apples and a rotted herring? No! Do I like having to roll the dice because I'm trying to convince a talking cat to roll over on its paws? No! Do I like having to intimidate and persuade on a dice roll just to simply convince someone they smell funny? Also no. Of course those are probably all made up scenarios, but a general pull on the plight I had in the minutiae of BG3's over-reliance on dice rolls. For this reason combat was also aggressively annoying, every hit no matter how close or logical relied upon another series of hidden dice rolls. You had your chance to hit, the chance for the enemy to retort, the chance for an opportunity attack, the chance for a saving throw, the chance for this, the chance for that... it made for some seemingly unending fights with an over-reliance on re-loads, lest you wish to take the brunt of being burnt by RNG. I may be a little burnt after playing several Fire Emblem titles within the last year, in which the simple majority in an accuracy chart meant that you were likely to hit your opponent for full damage, but in BG3 with a 90% chance or greater likelihood to hit, I missed a frustratingly large amount. I legitimately never felt confident in my attacks, be it melee or at range, and again I understand this is true to D&D but man, it also felt true to a rather lukewarm combat experience.

To further the conversation about combat and a foreign experience with the inner trappings of D&D's long running history, I take issue with the fact that Larian did not feel it necessary to simplify or explain just about any of the mechanics of combat and status effects within the game. I hope you know what all the status effects do and how they combine, I hope you are privy to the advantages and weaknesses of spells and cantrips already, because this will not be tutorialized in the slightest for the player. I've joked before with my brother and friends about the tutorial section of Persona 5 and how it effectively lasts the first fifty hours of the >100 hour experience, but you know what it does do? Adequately explain the workings of another storied franchise and its involved mechanics and submechanics. Baldur's Gate has even more going on in the way that strengths, weaknesses, spells, counter-spells, and all the like interact, and it does almost zero to explain this to the player. Of course, should you have enough time to rival that of twenty year WoW vets to read every subtext of items and spells and their effects, you might know, but to the average joe these will go largely unexplained through the runtime of the game. Combine a obfuscated combat system with the "Oops-All-Enemies" nature of this game and you're in for a largely aggravating time. There were too many fights to count that started with the enemies of BG3 outnumbering your party four or more to one. This isn't the worst... in theory until you remember everyone has to act once before your turn relapses. I was in one of the last fights of the game just now and spent most of my time on the app formerly known as twitter, talking to a group of pals rather than having my hands on the keyboard ready to counteract whoever I was in combat with, because it took that long. This was uniform throughout an unfortunately long period of the game, outnumbered and outgunned, fighting powerful bosses that had their own unexplained gimmicks solved best by google and re-loaded trial and error rather than by working through the games motions. I get that its true to D&D to have fights in which the player is greatly disadvantaged in number and in locale, but as I mentioned above it really just makes for a gameplay experience most foul. I get why the narrative would want me to be locked in with a boss who has more than 600 hp and a cohort of demonic followers fighting at his behest, but is it fun? The answer reluctantly is no. This happened time and time again with slight variation, and I felt like what began as an enriching open-world experienced eventually led to a frustrating rehash of mechanics I disliked, over and over again.

Miscellaneous complaints to round this review out revolve around silent protagonism, a plethora of crashes and performance issues, and the abhorrent long rest mechanic. I chuckled a little too often at the emotionally heavy moments within the game in which a motivation speech was needed, or my character was having a heart to shadow-heart, only for my avatar to nod and say dialogue through text. I get that there's a lot of dialogue necessary in a game like this, and Larian likely wanted to truly convey that our avatar was an extension of ourselves... but to me it just felt like I was playing a boneless NPC. I did not feel like I mattered at all within the story, I was simply a vehicle for the plot. I did not understand my code of ethics, did I even have any? I couldn't grasp why anyone would consider me to be their leader or friend, I'd never even said a word. Baldur's Gate simply did not do a good job, in my humblest opinion, of making you the player character feel like a worthwhile member of your party. You could ask yourself "Who really is the main character" and I don't know if there's an answer.

In the end, I can't recommend Baldur's Gate 3 to anyone who values a strong narrative, freetime, or a game worth playing. It was pretty, I didn't want to put it down, but it eventually became a frustrating gameplay experience in a world I found largely uninteresting.

I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down
And the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns
The ring of fire

If I wasn't such a fan of Final Fantasy X, I would say without a shadow of a doubt that Red Dead Redemption 2 is the greatest game I've ever played. I got into RDR2 at the request of several around me who had been prodding me for years and years to finally get on it, I didn't have a PS4 for some time and didn't have a capable PC either so I had held if off. Lo and behold upgrade time came and I finally got on both the proverbial and actual train.

RDR2 starts off slow, and I mean really slow. I think for the first few hours I might have touch a key other than W maybe one or two times (major hyperbole there) but you are doing a LOT of walking and following. However throughout the story of Dutch Van Der Linde's infamous gang, things and people start to change. Greed and anger seep their way into the gang slowly but surely over the fifty+ hour experience.

This game is the definition of a slowburn, but what you get in the payoff is quite easily a top two written story and the greatest open world in attention to detail ever made. Fans of the original Red Dead Redemption are probably aware that this is no shocker, but the minutia that Rockstar gets into here is absolutely off the wall. Animals, people, the weather all interact in unique ways, you're never sure to see the same thing twice in the same location.

The story of Red Dead 2 takes the form of a multi-season cowboy television show, it feels almost surreal in how un-rushed and realistic it is. Fear and death follows Arthur Morgan everywhere he goes whether its his fault or somebody elses. The twists and foreshadowing that occur throughout this game will have you audibly gasping and pausing as they unveil.

Though the ending you can see a mile away, it's the delivery Rockstar achieved that will make anybody no matter how manly they are, cry some damn cowboy tears.

Animal Well Done

Like seemingly everyone, my appeal and interest in 2024's Animal Well stemmed from my even much earlier interest in Videogamedunkey, the head honcho of its publisher BIGMODE and longtime Youtube veteran. A fan of his for over a decade, cutting my teeth watching his now archaic League of Legends content, I knew that he had a knack (heh) for games that were fun if nothing else. I've disagreed with my fair share of his takes, but I knew with the announcement of Animal Well that there was a vision he had in Billy Basso's breakout title. Like many others, I waited with bated breath with more information about the game's mechanics and release date. Release came and reviews were staggeringly high for the ambitious sub fifty megabyte title, whose marketing campaign effectively boiled down to "Let Dunkey cook."

A disclaimer for this review: I struggle with Metroidvania's from a personal standpoint. I've played a handful of Metroid's, got into The Messenger, and maybe one whole hour of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, but I could never stick with them on the principal of how they play. Without a consistent path of clear exploration towards narrative completion, I struggle for reasons unknown. With Metroid I had a hard time putting together item unlocks to their eventual applications, and didn't do too well in remembering where to traverse. My problems with previous experiences translated almost completely to Animal Well which was... well quite a good game regardless.

Animal Well is gorgeous, one of the factors most apparent in its reveal. Each screen is filled to the brim with colour and purpose, the backdrops consisting mainly of statues, mysterious creatures, and absconding movements of water. As my little blob made his way through the games sub ten hour runtime (probably shorter if chasing the main path,) my eyes scanned just about everything within the environment because of the visual reward that entailed. One touch I greatly appreciated is the (optional) setting that places faux CRT scanlines on the screen for a more mysterious vintage feel. For a game as consistently dark and dimly lit as Animal Well, having a feature that exaggerates its despair and gorgeous loneliness like that accents your time with the game in quite a great way.

Platforming and movement in Animal Well is fairly par for the course within the realm of 2D platformers and metroidvanias as a whole. You use a small selection of items naturally found through exploration for traversal and puzzle completion. Apt timing is required for successful jumps, and running is done at a brisk enough pace to make the game feel like it has a sense of urgency and quick completion to it. One thing I do want to commend the title on within this space is that it never feels like it is trying to do too much or require a finesse in perfect timing or long jump sequences. Though the puzzles can become slightly infuriating and rub you the wrong way, the issue rarely lied in me having to gamble on a perfect platforming sequence.

I said "rarely" in that last paragraph because of one of my main gripes with Animal Well, which I might as well start off with now. One of the notable features of the game is that there is no combat... but the catch is that there are enemies. How do you fight enemies in a game where you can't actually hit them? By running away! This isn't the end of the world in theory but it leads into another issue with Animal Well: the save system. Not unfamiliar for the genre but saving and checkpoints happen at telephones scattered around the map. These are mostly well located and central to places in which you spend your time and often do unlock as you progress to become even more centralized than you first encounter them, but not all is well that ends well. There are several mandatory chasing encounters in which you must run away from a big bad that follows you screen to screen. Death, which can happen by taking damage down to zero hearts or being crushed by an object, leads you to reset at the most recently visited aforementioned telephone. I spent a disgusting amount of time last night failing in the late stages of a chase sequence only to reset at a telephone, having to run all the way to the encounter, and then run all the way to attempt to complete the segment. As a Souls player I am no stranger to runbacks, but doing this ad nauseum and having to repeat and repeat which the occasional random instant death on a platforming sequence was infuriating. Animal Well in multiple points lacks respect for player free time in having to traverse to an area where you had progressed. This becomes more annoying in the chases because you can't pause and open the map... an unfortunate page to take out of the Dark Souls cook book.

Overall Animal Well is a phenomenal debut title for BIGMODE and an impressive title put forward by Billy Basso. Even though there's no real narrative to stick to, the save system requires a lot of work, and the chase scenes are needlessly grifting... this game has a lot to like about it. I'd recommend Animal Well to casual Dunkey fans or fans of Metroidvania's.

Starved Ocean

Star Ocean is a franchise that remained largely out of my view for most of my life as I didn't make the crossover to JRPG's formally until I played FFX after it hit the Switch in 2018 or so. As a result, many famed series' borne from the Golden Age 90's flew under my radar and I didn't have a chance to experience them until fairly recently. Over time I've tried to dabble into many of these in an attempt to understand gaming history and get a taste of the genre as it grew. I didn't "play" my first Star Ocean until the Divine Force demo release on PS5, immediately confused by the plethora of mechanics going on and monotonous combat I dropped it. I'd only gotten into it because of name recognition, knowing that Star Ocean was one of the "big" Square/Enix titles from the SNES/PS1 era, but dropped it because I figured it wasn't going to be up my alley. I didn't want to remove Star Ocean from my lexicon though, because I'd known that a unanimously "good one" had to exist out there somewhere, and with The Second Story getting the remake treatment... I figured it was time.

Upon launch of Second Story R, I immediately fell in love with the science fiction setting and incredible HD-2D visuals. As a big fan of the graphical direction of the Octopath/Triangle Strategy team, Star Ocean's graphical sheen was an immediate reward to my eyes. I paused every few moments of meeting characters, running through villages, and existing within the world to take screenshots and send friends images from my playthrough. Enamored I was by the world and the plot leaving your imagination of what could happen next to a pilot landing in an unfamiliar world. That's kinda where the praise stops unfortunately, as the curtain fell pretty quickly after that into my Second Story R playthrough... along with my rating.

The bad wasn't necessarily as grating as a lot of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's bad was for me (which I reviewed recently,) it was just confusingly grating. To start is the seemingly random difficulty spikes and settings of Star Ocean: The Second Story R. I played on the "normal" difficulty equivalent for a majority of the game and it felt, fairly hard. I figured with some time dedicated to grinding that I could make the experience easier for myself and breeze through what I considered to be the "tougher" dungeons at the time. I found out after about two hours of grinding and gaining some thirty plus levels that there was no different "feel" in my strength levels. Enemies could still one shot you and perma stun your party with remarkable ease, your characters didn't feel like they did any better damage per hit, and the game didn't actually get any easier. Now this changed a bit later on as I grinded north of level 100 and gained new abilities for my secondary party members because they gained access to new spells that seemed to disrupt more and do more damage, but they got one shot just the same. All the way from world enemies to dungeon encounters to the final suite of bosses, I found myself furiously mashing resurrect items and healing spells to get through encounters that felt like they should have been a breeze with how much I grinded. I spent hours effectively AFK just listening to my own music while I ran around in circles soaking free exp, and nothing actually felt easier. I tuned up my stats across the board, which mediated issues I had with the difficulty, but I was still dying with 9999 hp from petrifications and paralysis' all the same.

This brings up another issue I had with Star Ocean... information and skill overload. I joke a lot about how Persona 5 effectively tutorializes the player for the first like, fifty hours of gameplay, but hey nothing feels confusing or rushed at that point in the game. Within the first few hours of Second Story R, the entire skill tree and IC/Speciality suite is opened up to the player to understand and dive through. It's more than just levelling up your attack, magic, and defense. It opens up the Pickpocketing, Crafting, Music, Writing, Alchemy, Cooking, list goes on trees that the player is supposed to fully understand. From what I knew with my experiences with these tertiary skills is that they accented the player and made it easier for me to level and be strong... but outside of training and scouting I had absolutely no idea. I couldn't tell how worth my time it was to construct books to level attack or perform songs to summon certain enemies because the tradeoffs were completely unclear and the materials necessary to do so were obfuscated or gated behind currency. This resulted in my levelling up train (sacrificing damage for exp gain) and scouting (populating more enemies on the world map) so I could stand still and let my characters go to town on consistently spawning enemies. I'm not sure if this was the best way to go about it, but I didn't want to have to study Star Ocean tactics for longer than I did to understand it. Grinding is pretty much never fun in games, especially in older JRPG's where the heal/save options aren't as desirable as they probably could be, but Star Ocean's levelling systems felt like watching paint dry, but the paint occasionally personified to get up and slap you in the face before going back to the fence it was being applied to.

Combat was bad, voice acting even worse, and the plot was lukewarm at best. Star Ocean: The Second Story R was an ultimately milquetoast experience that I'm not really even glad I got to play. It lands and bombards the player with lots of great visual fidelity (and the cutscene work/character portaits are rather impressive throughout) but lacks the sticking power to create a compelling experience worthy of note. I cannot recommend Star Ocean: The Second Story R to anybody except maybe fans of the old Action JRPG genre.

How do you even write a review for an experience like Elden Ring? It truly feels like a piece of media that only comes around once in a blue moon, up with the all time greats in their respective genres. My feelings after playing FromSoft's magnum opus probably replicate those of fans of Breath of the Wild. This is an open world game in which EVERYTHING feels rewarding to explore, EVERY fight presented a unique challenge or mechanic, EVERY environment took my breath away. I'd tried Dark Souls, tried Bloodborne, tried Sekiro, and bounced off them all. It wasn't until Elden Ring that the genius of Miyazaki and his cohort finally clicked. This is a game that is earnest about the challenges it presents, about the difficulty in the road ahead, but is cathartic and greatly enjoyable.

I enjoy difficulty to a degree in video games... there are times where I feel it is genuinely unfair and not worth the time (SMTIII) and other times where it feels rewarding beyond belief because it rewards learning and reacting correctly (DMC3/Bayonetta.) Elden Ring is most definitely the latter. The combat in this game and the bosses within are definitely not easy, and being cocky will result in a game over, however after feeling out and learning boss patterns, it becomes a simple endeavour. I LOVE how this game emphasizes that feeling of becoming better, it rewards the player time and time again for the effort they put into the fight. Rarely can you just get "lucky" and out DPS a boss or cheese them into a frozen state, you have to put in the effort to outplay them. From the very first story boss to the last, each fight is something new to try out and learn from. Your confidence grows and grows over time, making you truly feel like you are worthy of becoming the Elden Lord toward the end. I went a pure melee STR build, and I felt a little unfairly challenged at times because of bosses that were quick and in your face, making beating them a harder task, however my ability to do so made me a much more confident player. As the game went on, and I gained levels, my inner confidence and mental resolve did as well.

The first thing a lot of people will talk about in regards to Elden Ring is the environment and man... if it isn't one of, if not the, most beautiful games I have ever seen. From your first moment in the Lands In Between, you are exposed to the gracious extravagance of the Erdtree. The bright yellow shines over the world in its ever present glory, a great start to the eye candy that is the rest of the game. Every zone you go to is a new biome entierly, from the luscious greens of Limgrave to the eerie reds of Caelid, to the righteous yellows of Lyndell to the harsh swamps of Liurnia and more. The world was filled of life everywhere, with each part of this MASSIVE zones filled to the brim with purpose; with animals or trees or activities for the player to join in. The only other game I felt this as present in was Resident Evil Village. With a whole world in front of you, the player is begged from the start to explore. The crazy thing about that? It ALL feels good to do. It's been a VERY long time in a game, perhaps since Skyrim, that I have felt the unbridled excitement to just keep on turning over every rock and exploring. I scouted every environment from head to toe, running up and down every mountain and every tower, checking every minor Erdtree, taking every portal I came across. The "hey check this out" factor of Elden Ring is a phenomenal factor of Elden Ring's player driven adventure. The game feels naturally lead by YOU to create your own takeaways and experiences. Sitting in a call with my friends and saying "hey dude I just found something cool" and having them all go to that place in their respective playthroughs felt like the days of gaming pre-internet, where the legends of items or cool finds were spread through word of mouth. Elden Ring's map is massive, not in a daunting and unrewarding way, but in one that you always wished were bigger so you never had to stop looking around the expansive world.

I still have to do some deep dives on the lore to understand exactly all that is going on in the world, but I didn't find it too difficult to follow along with the item stories and overarching plot. I can't wait to watch hours of lore explanation videos as well to dive even deeper into the intricate world penned by George RR Martin and the creators at FromSoft.

Elden Ring is a challenging game at first, but immediately grabs the player and holds them for what is one of the freshest and most enjoyable experiences I have ever had in a video game. Simply put, it is one of the greatest video games ever made.

Kiryu and company go back in time to do the same thing they always do: tell a phenomenal story with captivating characters in an engaging setting.

I've spoken before about how RGG/Like a Dragon reviews outside of Y7/Like a Dragon boil down to the same talking points, so I figured this review will run pretty short as I want to condense the pros/cons and how that aligns with other RGG titles.

The first positive is that this is again a fantastically written tale of deceit and treachery, however unlike the other titles in the series, doesn't take place in contemporary Japan. I'm a sucker for a well done period piece like Ghost of Tsushima or the Red Dead Series and it's a no brainer at this point that RGG could and would join the ranks of those works by releasing a title of their own. I know this is a remake of a previously released game, but this is my first time playing it. Jidaigeki stuff is under-represented, lets get some more quality titles out of this era! Seldom do you see games release in the west that touch on the unique piece of history that was the beginning of the Meiji restoration and the departure of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Running through it with an ensemble cast of characters from the franchise I've spent the last year focusing on based upon real people who existed in actual ancient Japan (yes that was intentional) made me feel like I was in a candy store. The familiar allies and foes make this journey into the past feel significant, as you have a ground base for who will help you, who will betray you, and who might be a little... mad (I love Goro Majima and I'm not afraid to say it.) To not ramble on about another RGG story I'll wrap it up by saying this is a typical interweaving RGG tale about a captivating piece of history that houses their trademark plot twists and out of the blue assists. Second to how well the story is written, this game is downright beautiful. The zones are small, which is typical at this point for the series, but crafted perfectly to make them feel alive but most importantly the characters look GOOD. RGG has spent the last few years narrowing down on an engine that makes Kiryu and the gang look better than almost any other developer out there, almost turning the characters within the game into real people with how realistic the engine does its work.

Cons are, well, more Yakuza/Like a Dragon cons. The combat is... mostly good, honestly I had more fun with the wild dancer class than I have in any Yakuza game since Majima's bat class in Y0, but it still falls flat when it comes to boss fights. Bosses are simply awful throughout this game, and for the most part that isn't the worst because you can employ the tried and true "stack healing items" strat right before the chapter ending battles, but that gets annoying after doing it time and time again. Surely you could say "git gud," but these battles feel more like a war of attrition and learning unblockable combo timings than they do a test of skill. Bosses have pools of health so inflated they could be used in a pool and will instant break out of your stun-lock (which isn't new to the franchise.) At least this time they don't have multiple health bars (minus the armor bar,) yet the ability to cheat the actual mechanics of the game that the player can't even pull off is straight up antagonizing to you. Additionally, the constant falling when taking damage and having to press A/equivalent to get up is excessively furstrating and kills a lot of rhythm that the combat has. The taking a combo from a boss, pressing A, getting combo'd again, pressing A, combo'd again loop had me in a tizzy. In an attempt to test how much bosses could break the game, I attempted to see how many attacks I could get in before the boss I was attacking would stop blocking near the end of the game and got to thirty-three. Abysmal. Lastly, the ending gauntlet of this game is maniacal, giving players five bosses and a plethora of enemies in between to fight without an opportunity to obtain more healing.

I'd recommend this heavily to any fan of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon franchise. My qualms ending up longer than my positive takeaways with the game are only a result of my previous experiences with RGG and the zero-sum game of propping-up each game's story without spoilers. I had a great experience overall and more Kiryu (rather Sakamoto Ryōma) is always a good time.

Pacing Land

I caught Sand Land at the 2023 Summer Games Fest, an event I always try to catch in the postmortem of the once monumental E3. Despite being largely indifferent and avoidant of Bandai-Namco's arsenal of seemingly endless anime video games, something about Sand Land caught my eye. In the end it was reminiscing to my youth and those late nights spent watching Toonami when I was supposed to be asleep. Night after night I'd stay up and catch what I could understand about Japanese anime, something I was largely unfamiliar with and unsure about how to follow, but was enthralled nonetheless. There was one anime at the time that seemed to interject itself the most into the zeitgeist of my childhood, and that was Akira Toriyama's magnum opus: Dragonball Z. Despite this game clearly not being Dragonball, I gave that little preamble as a sort of introduction and reasoning as to why I became interested in the game Sand Land. I'd never read the manga, only ever having read maybe three manga in my entire life, but because it felt familiar. Watching gameplay of obviously Akira Toriyama created characters running around and engaging in general buffoonery felt familiar, and thus I was interested.

Now if you've read my reviews and looked at the score, you'll notice that the beginning monologue is almost always followed with a "but" in detraction to how "fun" the game was... and yeah here that is. Though it was nice to experience simple Saturday morning cartoon vibes in a fully voice acted anime game, I actually had to play it. I liked the cast, thought the game had some charming dialogue, loved the character art (re: familiarity with Dragonball,) and liked the general lightheartedness of the story, however the gameplay loop got tired eventually and the game itself was ultimately far too long.

The story revolves around the Prince of Darkness and Company running around on (initially) a quest for water what leads them to astounding secrets, betrayal, and a war against systematic power they could not have predicted. The first arc, taking place over maybe fifteen or so hours of the game's ~twenty-four hour runtime, was pretty fun and well paced. Your crew goes from one area to the next with a decent speed and the scale of enemies and power makes sense... mostly. It's once this first arc is finished and Forest Land becomes involved that things slow down to a shuttering halt and the pacing becomes pretty poor. You engage in many repetitive quests, dungeons, fights (re-used bossfights... yay!) and the ending quest itself lasts about three hours too long.

Gameplay in Sand Land is about 70% tank/vehicle based, which was a pretty nice 180 from the last few games I've played which largely ignore vehicle combat/interaction (minus Rebirth I guess.) The Prince utilizes a growing roster of Bots, Tanks, and Hoverboards that each carry their own use. The Tank is a great all-around damage dealer, the Jump Bot allows you to gain verticality in traversal in fights, the bike gets you from Point A to Point B in a reasonable amount of time, and so on. Sand Land does a pretty good job of allowing you to pick what you want for combat while making traversal a little bit of a gimmick, which is okay. Upkeep of the bots isn't too hard, and I found that levelling and upgrading was a natural progression of materials I was already finding in the world. Outside of the vehicles you engage in a hefty deal of hand-to-hand combat, which leaves a LOT to be desired mechanically, and also sneaking missions... because who doesn't love one button combat sneaking missions??? Playing the game outside of what is advertised and plastered in the marketing was a real snoozefest and adds just about nothing to playing the game.

While it was fun to get a mostly humorous fun adventure out of Sand Land, it was largely a nothing burger and definitely not worth full price. I don't recommend Sand Land.

Moon Fantasy IV is a sizable step up from Final Fantasy III in regards to narrative and character ambition. Giving each playable character you come across a name, class, and history in part of a larger story outside of simply collecting the crystals to save the world is what the series needed to keep itself fresh in the early 1990's. While the story pails in comparison to what the series would later have in FFVI/VII and beyond, I was shocked at the amount of effort put into making this piece of antiquity a memorable experience. Cecil as a protagonist was actually pretty alright, having a simple hero's journey from dark to light and a responsibility to protect those around him that he held so dear. Kaine's evolution as his sidekick was well done, Rosa as Cecil's effectively betrothed was a good inclusion for overall character depth, Rydia having a background of her own with the summoners is a great way to give a character out of the initial limelight some depth, and Edward despite not being playable for much of the latter half acted as a great voice of valor and motive. For a game that came out when it did, this was a much better plot experience than I initially thought after knocking out the Pixel Remaster of FFIII however many years ago. The overall story isn't too in depth, there is a big bad that has a sinister motive that uses other big bads to do his bidding, but it was enough to keep me going from one destination to the other. Outside of the improvement to the story, the music (as per usual with FF) was top notch and the pixel remastering of the sprites and world was again well done.

Where the experience waned for me occurred in a few places. One major issue being that the frequent party switches interrupted a lot of ryhthm and preferential party makeups throughout the game. There were times where I felt like I didn't have enough melee options, then not enough magic options, and had to constantly equip and re-equip party members that would be leaving and coming back. While I liked this story more than FFIII, I felt like the ability to level in III towards the end game made more sense and was overall easier. I got my jobs in III all to the level I needed and pretty much waltzed through to the final boss. In FFIV I spent a decent bit grinding just to be at an acceptable level for the game's final dungeon, which was adequate but made me sweat a little more than I'd like. Outside of those slightly minute detractions, the world was pretty bland across the main map, underworld, and moon. I know this is partially evidence of the system and time, but man it's hard to run around these towns and areas and have any sense of belonging or want to spend any extra time in this fantasy world. FFVI came out just three years later and greatly improved upon making these areas mildly enjoyable. The world in FFIV was devoid of flavour and greatly bland. In relation to that, making it from point a to point b in dungeons and on the overworld was a grand chore because of the annoyingly high random encounter rate.

Overall I'd recommend Final Fantasy IV as a necessary stepping stone for fans of the Final Fantasy series. It's a good time generally speaking and has some memorable moments, sounds, and characters held within.

Breath of the Wild Too.

Years ago I purchased a Nintendo Switch at Best Buy along with one game: Breath of the Wild. The game had been out for maybe a year, if even, but I'd heard from numerous friends and publications that it was one of, if not the greatest games of all time. I played it, enjoyed my first solo playthrough of a Zelda game, but largely dissented from enjoyment as a result of the game's lack of narrative focus, recycled dungeons/bosses, and weapon durability. I like to think of myself as malleable and approachable to change, so when Tears of the Kingdom was announced many moons ago, I got excited for a change to re-try the BotW formula. What I got in this go around was... an experience all too familiar.

Tears of the Kingdom begins on a high note... literally. You effectively start high above the fields of Hyrule in the sky aisles that had appeared after the events of the prequel title. This was a major focus of media marketing for the game and subject to a majority of promotional material, adding a whole new vertical element to an already expansive game. Here you go through a sort of proving grounds and tutorialization of Link's new "powers" which are completely different from BotW. No longer do you have the ability to magnet and slingshot items across the map as it is replaced with spells that let you freely attach materials together, fuse items to your weapons, and ascend through almost any vertical challenge. While these were really neat from a physics standpoint and added an invaluable amount to the already peak sandbox that was BotW, it removes a sense of integrity from the way the game is "meant" to be played, but more on that later. You have a few hours of messing around up here before you're thrown into the familiar world of Hyrule and tasked to track down the Princess of the land herself, Zelda. Stop me if you've heard that one before.

From here your gameplay loop remains largely the same, not only from the way you experience the sandbox itself, but who you interact with on your mission to stop the Upheavel and defeat the series' longstanding antagonist. I won't touch on story spoilers but I think most players of BotW have a sense of where this game is heading. Traversal across Hyrule is a bit of a hodgepodge of utilizing the shrine network, towers, Zonai contraptions, and new powers gifted to you by one of the four civilizations you visit. Horses as a method of movement are pretty much completely outclassed by the above. Shrines give you a place to fast travel to and for the love of all that is good in this world, are much more entertaining and enticing to complete in TotK than in BotW. Where the shrine monotony comes into play for me in the previous title was that a lot of the solutions relied upon combat endeavours against Guardians or pinball-esque flip games that relied on the Switch's faulty Gyro to complete. In Tears of the Kingdom, there was a great deal of thought put into making these unique from one another, relying heavily on the new powers link is given to complete. The unfortunate byproduct of this is that you can absolutely cheese and bypass the intended way of completion for these shrines with your fuse/ultrahand powers. I'm a strong proponent of cheesing certain mechanics in games to get solutions, but with the amount of it you can do in Tears to completely move aside from the way the game wants the player to solve puzzles... it just feels kinda dirty. I mean if you can do something faster, then for efficiency's sake, why wouldn't you? So the shrines are more innovative, but easier to break. Towers are a great way to move across the vast world, and give you a tremendous insight into what to attack next. You can see almost the whole world, and with the right amount of stamina it practically is all reachable. I thoroughly loved going into the sky in each region's tower, which also fills in the area on your map, and identifying all the shrines, villages, and general points of interest on my map that I could so that I could eventually tackle them. It was the first few days in TotK of playing that I felt my greatest joy, because the world felt so tangible and achievable, I could see it all and do it all.

I've played a lot of open world games at this point, most of us have, and it takes a great deal to set them apart and make them feel fun. In my opinion the games that never get me to stop and ask "why am I doing this?" are the good ones. One of my favorite games of all time came out last year, Elden Ring. I scoped what felt like the entire map from top to bottom, taking on each and every boss fight, sifting through each and every cave I could, just because it felt rewarding in and of itself. In the hallmark Bethesda titles I chased each guild/faction subquestline, did all the sidequests I could, just because it felt rewarding. I began to do that in Tears of the Kingdom, in fact I did it almost exclusively for the first few days of playing, but I hit a "why" and never really turned back. In my initial run of Tears of the Kingdom, I went shrine hunting, solved all of the glyphs, helped every villager I could in the game's major settlements. I had a great time personally with the silly little town of Hateno Village, with its exceptionally cozy soundtrack and perfect-for-Zelda quirky constituents as I tried to play mediator in a mayoral race between two polar opposites. It was here that I found I was at my greatest enjoyment of the world, I wasn't asking myself any questions, I was just basking in the game's moment to moment quirkyness and personality. After I unlocked more shrines and completed some more sidequests, I realized that I was at the same point I'd reached in Breath of the Wild. I had completed two of the four major questlines in the game, which utilized the same exact races from BotW, mostly including the same exact people. Despite having been across the entire map and decyphering the truth behind the numerous glyphs, I still had to help the same exact peoples I had done a few years ago. Stop me if you've heard this before: Link must approach the Rito, Gerudo, Goron, and Zora and obtain the help of their champion and embark on a short quest to bring you one step closer to defeating the great evil, which involves using their one gimmick power to complete a dungeon in which you must find four-five macguffins to reach a final boss, of which is a largely mechanically uninteresting fight. I was greatly let down, again with the way this game had approached dungeoneering, which was previously a staple of the franchise. I had my qualms with Skyward Sword being TOO much of a dungeon-dungeon-dungeon game, but at least they felt unique and different from another. In Tears, just as was the case in Breath of the Wild, they all kinda felt... the same. I had hoped Nintendo would put a greater focus into this after the first game, but I was gravely wrong. Doing these dungeons is almost completely futile too if you've already solved the mysteries behind the glyph's, it's completely pointless, but you still have to do it for the sake of the storry. I made the mistake of doing the Rito and Gerudo, doing all of the glyphs, and then doing the Zora and Goron, which helped me realize how futile this endeavour truly was. I said I wouldn't spoiler above, so I won't, but if you've beaten it, you'll know. To end the commentary on dungeons, the final two-three dungeons in this game are genuinely awful and as anticlimactic you can get for a game that was six years in the making and has as much lore implications as Tears of the Kingdom does. The game starts off with a bang in the sky, then gets you going into the four-race dungeons, and then ends on a few wet noodles... it was beyond disappointing.

Weapon durability was a bad idea in the first place, and it's one of the few points of contention that I will not back away from. In a game where exploration is as big of a focus as it is, why should the player be de-incentivized from engaging in combat if they know that their best weapons are going to be destroyed in just a few strikes, even with the assistance of the fuse power? Again to harken back to Elden Ring, other than wasting my time, there was no negative element to engaging in frivalous combat. If I saw something I wanted to kill, I could do it knowing that the worst that would happen would be a simple respawn. In Tears of the Kingdom, I still had to wager my the next major fight I was going to do against taking out a group of world enemies for a sidequest. It was here again where I'd ask myself the "why," of engaging in the open-world exploration of this game, why would I ruin my best gear if I don't know how beneficial the end result is going to be? Doing some of these sidequests reward you with powerful weapons too, but why would I even take or use those if I know a few hits against a moblin is going to tarnish them forever? I don't get it, I didn't get it beforehand either. The argument that it enforces the player to use their surroundings and take advantage of what the world offers is a weak one to me too, because this to me does the opposite of what a game like Zelda should do, it fights against the power fantasy. You play as the damn Hero of Hyrule, why shouldn't you be able to take on any group of bokoblins or moblins that you see without destroying your gear? I just genuinely don't understand the developer appreciation for this, nor why the "fuse" power was supposed to be the saving grace for this as a detriment, it just prolongs the inevitable. I don't mean to prop up Skyward Sword as the magnum opus of the series, as I still have yet to play a great deal (myself, not as a younger sibling watching,) but the combat was snappy, and I felt like I could and SHOULD engage with each of the enemies I came across.

Now I've spent a lot of time dunking on this game, and in my humble opinion (shocker,) it has been rightfully so, there is a lot of sauce in Tears of the Kingdom that made it a generally enjoyable experience. Despite what I would call a miserable way to end the game, Tears was full of that Zelda/Nintendo magic that's brought them to where they are now. Even if the game doesn't run very well and is bottlenecked by the Switch, the artstyle is beyond gorgeous. Hyrule in its moments of Link flying and running around holds a plethora of jaw dropping beauty within the unique biomes and meticulously crafted cities and environments. The characters are again intricately designed and filled with personality through their design. Link, Zelda, Purah, Riju, Impa, and everyone else have been brought to life in such an impressive way. This game is eye candy, and even if its not in a completely new engine, another great moment in Nintendo world/character design. Even if it soured on me eventually, my first few days of exploration were filled with memorable moments of interaction with the game's engine, as well as fun moments of discovery into the seemingly endless hidden nooks and cranny's that there is to offer. Zelda, much like Metroid to me, is an IP that has the advantage of having some really damn cool lore, and it's at great display in Tears of the Kingdom. One of the chief complaints I had with Breath of the Wild is that much of the story exposition, like almost all of it, was resigned to flashback cutscenes which is a pretty bad way to tell a story. Now, that's not entierly different with Tears of the Kingdom, but the amount of story they manage to tell through the glyphs and temples is far greater than it was in BotW. I found myself sitting up and revelling in the cutscenes that TotK had to offer, as there was so much to pack up and take away that I could use to solve the game's mystery. I enjoyed that, and it's almost exclusively because of that, that I rated this game higher than its predecessor. I felt like Nintendo and the Zelda team sucessfully navigated the complaints about narrative and made a rather positive change.

In all, most people that are reading this, if any have actually read this in its entirety, are probably already playing/played TotK or are going to. I had fun, but I highly doubt this will be my game of the year, and probably not a game I'll return to.

"It's a terrible day for rain"

"But it's not raining"

"Yes... it is"

Life Is Strange: True Colors is much more a journey through emotion and grief than it is a video game. This is something I thought would be a pleasant use of a few afternoons, but what I found became a cathartic experience that dealt with my own insecurities of leaving home and starting anew, losing those we love and finding confidants in my closest friends. In the maybe ten hours I spent in Haven, I felt like I, as Alex Chen, was real. Though she has the powers to feel the emotions, good or bad, of those around her and I don't, she is believable.

Coming to Haven to reunite with her long lost brother, seperated after joining foster care, Alex moves to a small town in the Rockies, far away from city life and society at large. Here throughout the story's events she meets new friends, drifts from her loved ones, relives past tragedy, and discovers her past. The first chapter is a build-up to an unfathomable tragedy which will rock (pun intended) her world and turn it on its head, sending her on a path for truth and inner trauma.

Who do we turn to in times of sadness and despair when there are no family members to support us? How do we shed the degree of vulnerability and approach friends for help? How do we navigate the problems of others while healing ourselves? True Colors approaches these topics with the utmost degree of care, making Alex a realistic figure dealing with the death of someone very close to her. While she searches for the truth and enrolls the help of her closest friends in town, Steph and Ryan, she realizes that she isn't the only one dealing with the loss. Fellow citizens are hurting too, they are displaying their fear, anger, misery all in different ways. As Alex, you the player have to way the consequences of valuing your motives over theirs? Can we be altruistic in the time of sadness, and does that help us move past tragedy? That is ultimately what True Colors does best. It shows us, and especially as someone who has been through traumatic experiences (not of the same cause as Alex,) that the best path to healing ourselves is by demonstrating that we want to be helped. By treating others with respect and care, that will reflect upon us. When you're down and out, your actions previously will impact how those reach out to help you.

Alex Chen is funny, she's cute, and she's wholesome, but also very... human. I feel like a lot of choices matter games and slice of life's like this miss the mark, making characters one dimensional and overtly passionate without the necessary logic to support it. Alex isn't this. She gets bummed by the things that should bum her, she gets down by the things that should bum her, but she's not afraid to lighten the downtrodden mood by making an out of hand sarcastic joke. She knows that people don't want to hear "oh feel better" when they're sad, they want someone who can demonstrate that they care to console them. That's something I absolutely loved about this game. When I'm down, when my friends are down, the last thing I want to hear is "I'm sorry that happened." I want someone who will sit with me and talk it out, and that's where Alex makes a difference. She sits down and cares for the citizens of Haven, who in turn care for her. When Steph is mourning the loss of a close friend, Alex invites her over and they play foosball with eachother, reminiscing over old memories and familiar friends. It's the realism of this that helped me through tragedy. When I had something hit extremely close to home to me, me and my buddies went to IHOP and laughed the night away.

Man, I really loved Steph, not just because she was the romanceable option I picked but because she just felt... so believable as a friend and eventual lover. She demonstrates how much she cares for Alex and her brother Gabe, how she is a soul always dreaming of more. She loves music, but she loves the joy of just... being alive. Every moment I got to spend with her as Alex felt was fantastic, often being the most memorable parts of the game for me. Their relationship felt so much like "love" for eachother rather than romance for romance sake. Their degree of care reminds me of Squall and Rinoa from FFVIII, and Manami and Yukio from Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad. They love eachother (should you go down that romance arc,) not just for the plot, but because it makes sense for them to. They share a common loss, they share a passion for music, they share the will to be so much more than what fate has written for them. It's hard to drive home how well the developers made the way they look at eachother and smile feel so apt. Ryan was great too, I really enjoyed him as a best friend to Gabe and Alex and Steph, but I chose not to romance him as Alex because Steph just felt right.

One major aspect of True Colors that spoke me to me was the phenomenal selection of music for the game. The setting, as mentioned previously, is a picturesque town in the Rockies of Colorado. These are the people who wear flannerls, Carhartt hats, drive Subaru's, and love flowers and the outdoors. What kind of music makes sense for this game? A lot of indie, but appropriate Indie and singer-songwriter songs. The moment early on where I ran into Steph's record store and sat down to listen to "Scott Street" by one of my favorites, Phoebe Bridgers, meant a lot to me. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself as Alex Chen, falling in love with the calm and fragile voice that Phoebe carries. Other moments, like where Alex covers the Violent Femmes "Blister in the Sun" felt so... right! The Violent Femmes are a indie band out of the flannel wearing, outdoors loving state of Wisconsin, and playing their jubilant songs acoustically in front of a festival crowd was a perfect love letter to the game and the band, perfectly capturing the vibe the track brings to me. There's much more, but mxmtoon as Alex does a lovely job bringing this song and the credits to life.

In all, I'm probably rambling here, but Life is Strange: True Colors felt like, therapy strangely enough. I think I'm too stubborn for therapy, but with games, music, and film, I find like I'm able to heal and move forward with myself because I get to interpret what the connections and meanings of said media means to me. Much like Alex, I've lost and dealt with trauma, and I've had the friends to rely on. I've had the power of music, the power of nature, the power to keep on keeping on. While some people may find this style of game a little... extra, I felt like it all hit the mark. There's a beauty in humanity, in who we love, in how we move on. While we keep the tragedy with us, it's how we consult our memories and use them to become a better us. Life is Strange: True Colors is a fantastic journey through healing.

Okay-mi

Okami is one of those titles that was impossible to avoid if you were present in soaking in games media in the early-mid 2000's. Everywhere it was, that cool new Capcom title starring that adorable dog Amaterasu that featured some beautiful stylized cell shading and took place in Japan of yore. I never had a PS2 so I didn't play the initial release, and I had a Wii but was admittably too stupid to play a game like it back then. Why am I finally playing it? A friend recommended I play it and I figured I had some time to kill before FFXVI releases, and thus into the world of Okami and old Nippon I journeyed, once into the breach to defeat the big bad evil as gaming's most beloved pup. I figured this would be a fun title going into it as Hideki Kamiya's works have had a tremendous influence on my enjoyment of games and even though I'm mostly a newbie, I've come to like my experiences with the Legend of Zelda series (of which Okami effectively is.) What I got after nearly fourty hours of trotting and barking my way through Japan was decisively not a good time... but as they say: "No Regrets."

The good of Okami is the most apparent material if you take a look at gameplay or anyone streaming it, it's absolutely gorgeous. The art team over at Capcom/Clover Studio did a bang up job making this game feel unique from its Nintendo/Zelda influence in its visual style, a graphical tone that I hadn't seen and still haven't seen replicated in any way. Each zone was a gorgeous watercolour, the characters all distinctly different in composition and away from gaming norm. I enjoyed the conversations with the characters all over Japan, from the valleys that you start in to the snowy mountains you discover later. Outside of the design, there was a very Kamiya silly charm to the characters in which humor was always present and whitty remarks were oft in conversation. Even though there were a plethora of interactions/cutscenes that dragged on a little too long, I frequently chuckled at the bits and gags. Issun having the hots for every girl Amaterasu came across was funny in the way they treated the interactions, even if its a tired trope. As one of those kids who grew up reading mythos from various cultures, I enjoyed the way Okami treated the criminally under-represented Japanese pantheon and mythology from ages prior. Amaterasu herself being the main character is neat, so is the existence of characters like Yamata no Orochi, Susano, Princess Kaguya, and Issun.

Unfortunately my praise for Okami pretty much ends there... it's at the end of the day nearly fourty hours that I won't be able to get back... which is alright because I played the entierty of it while talking and streaming to my pals. Starting with combat, this is definitely Kamiya's weakest journey and while that makes sense given the material, is a little much for as long as the game is. Fighting is effectively one button (X) to attack and using your brush strokes to side swipe during weak points, plant bombs that do massive damage, and occasionally slow down time. For how much time you spend, the brush gimmick never really feels old or over reliant, but the x to attack being your best bet of DPS for most of the game is a little lackluster... especially after playing a DMC or Bayonetta which you do a lot of the same but at a pace meant to match the gameplay. Okami plays pretty slow and these fights tend to drag, even learning the dodge mechanic at the dojo doesn't feel like a great improvement. The final boss did its best Kingdom Hearts impression as well, consisting of a boss rush just beforehand and a five phase battle of some sandpaper-esque combat. I couldn't even muster up an emotion after completing it, I was simply indifferent.

My next point of contention is something I've already touched on quite a few times: the runtime. The way the story is setup portrays the game as if it will end somewhere around the fifteen hour mark, which is the perfect length for a game like this. You don't have a sense of scope like you do in its Zelda influencers, you don't know that Ganon is waiting for you over at Hyrule Castle or whatnot, you have no real scope of what the ending of Okami is meant to bring. Okami builds it up for you though, a resounding battle agains the foe that nearly brought upon the end of the world 100 years prior. The result of this battle would have a player who didn't know any better thinking that they had purged Japan of its agressor and could move on to the next title, but alas that would be very wrong. In the most Wonderful 101 way, this game just keeps on going...and going... and going... and going. Each Mcguffin leads to another Mcguffin, the dungeons are alright in practice but have the most minute and lackluster reason for existence. If you need one item to penetrate a spiritual barrier that hampers your progression, it is gated behind another dungeon. If you need a brush technique to progress the story, it is gated behind a dungeon. I have a lot of Zelda left to play but my experience with the series thus far has been a lot more kind to dungeons in advancement of the plot. Even recently with Breath of the Wild, I understood why the Divine Beasts needed to be activated from the get go. In Okami you learn of all these items as the story progresses, and that each new one you need requires another hour long jaunt through platformer/action slog. I spent fourty hours (some of that being AFK time) trudging through a gameplay experience not really meant for me, and once I got past that first battle that felt like it should have been the end point... the rest of it felt like it was eating at my enjoyment overall.

Amaterasu is adorable, I mean everybody likes a cute dog but man... this game did not have the charm it seems like it has for everybody else I know. I genuinely feel bad about the way I received this game, my good friends I think thought I would really enjoy it, and I really wanted to! Okami is a cool game on the eyes, but with its poor narrative construction, Mcguffin reliant plot, lackluster combat, and lack of direction in questing, I can't recommend it.

Tactics Ogre more like Tactics Thankfully It's Over.

I'm clearly missing something big about this game because my takeaways seem to be a tremendous contrast from almost everybody I know and the majority of reviews I've read, but Tactics: Ogre Reborn felt more like a slog of mishandled opportunities than an engaging tactical experience. Maybe it's because I've been spoiled on the advancements tactics games have made in the recent years, with my first formal Tactics game being Valkyria Chronicles 4.

I have a big problem with games that tutorialize and demonstrate information to the player poorly, and this is the biggest gripe I had with TO:R. I felt like almost none of the games deeper systems were explained to the player, with what they do explain being the basics of tactics/grid based gameplay and that was about it. I struggle, generally speaking with how information is presented to me, and games that hide this through self search or menus not directly shown to the player are legitimately tough for me to grasp. I felt like there were some cool mechanics I could attempt with Ogre, but I had no clue about optimal party makeup and the differences between classes, absolutely no idea on the benefits of slotting skills/magic, and was left ignorant of what the elemental signs do that are attached to every character. Now, I don't need a game to sit there and explain how to do everything the best way to me, but some basic explanation of these things could be nice. I could (almost) excuse that if this were still the older version of the title but it's not. This is a symptom of a lot of older Japanese RPG titles (and still some today,) that make said genre(s) generally unapproachable for me. I hope this doesn't come off as whining about the game not over-explaining, but rather a complaint to the lack of helpful text to make TO:R an engaging and fun experience. Things like elevation and weather affecting accuracy/movement are easier to parse through and understand but, are they really fun?

Outside of the unexplained deeper systems of the game, I had a major issue with pacing. Tactics games last notoriously long, with my runthrough of the recent Triangle Strategy lasting ~fifty hours, but it felt like a quick and chipper fifty hours. Tactics Ogre's battles feel reallllllly slow, and there's a LOT of them for what seemed like the sake of just having more battles. The upfront mechanics of this game weren't interesting enough to me to make this feel warranted either. Most inexcusable was there being no way to quick restart a fight, even where the Chariot Tarot wouldn't help. I don't care what year it is, if it's a tactics game, it should have a way to restart the battle if you want. Games that don't have this or save-anywhere mechanics (Souls games nonwithstanding) are not acceptable in the current gamesphere. There was a moment I got maybe thirty minutes into a fight, realized I was losing due to poor tactical decision making (or lack thereof heh) and discovered I couldn't go back to the start of the fight. I put my controller down, stood up from my seat, let out an audible "bro" and then sat down and let the AI take over until my party was wiped. This pacing issue struggled all the way to the end battle gauntlet of the game, it felt like it was never going to end.

I also took issue with the map design in this game, and after reading another reviewer on this site, I'm glad I am not alone. The large issue is that the maps are either too big or the units don't move far enough. It often takes 2-4 turns of movement around the map before the parties can engage, and that's all just wasted space. These maps are pretty poorly designed too, often lacking any concept of "realistic" combat. Now, that's not to imply you're coming to a game called "Tactics Ogre" for its realism, but rather to imply that there should be some sense for a world you are fighting in rather than squares mounted on other squares. The fortresses and castles in some of the fights in TO:R were just awkward, having your party start way at the bottom of a water-falled castle and having to climb up. It doesn't make sense in terms of combat, there's no logic or flow to the design of the map, rather just the need for "elevation." If you want a better look at Tactics games employing elevation on a grid based system in a medieval setting, look at Triangle Strategy this year. You often fight in courtyards and castles in that game, and the cities/towns feel a little more approachable to both game design and basic architectural logic.

Outside of the above issues with the game, I found the Sprites to be as dated as they can be, and the music to be largely repetitive. Again, maybe I'm spoiled by Fire Emblem Three Houses and Valkyria Chronicles 4 in regards to musically backing my longer tactical engagements, but I had to mute the TO:R OST after a while and play my own music over it because it was becoming rather cumbersome to my ears.

I can see why others enjoy this game but I cannot recommend Tactics Ogre: Reborn based off my experiences with it, and having played titles I find much more enjoyable in the same genre.