Blockuza: Like a Dragon Quest

In a rush to beat as many new video games as I could with my increasingly busy schedule this year, I elected to dedicate my time in attempting Yakuza: Like a Dragon before the release of Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name this coming November. What I didn't really understand was how involved and lengthy that Like a Dragon (Which I'll just call LAD in this review,) would be, even if this is now the 9th Ryo Ga Gotoku studio game that I've played. I knew a fair bit about the game, never intending to have played it when it released in 2020 I watched many streams and listened to a plethora of podcasts on the departure of a longstanding franchise's direction, tackling the game mechanics and overall design of games from a bygone era: the standard JRPG. Going into LAD, I knew that the new series protagonist, Ichiban Kasuga, was a happy-go-lucky Dragon Quest nerd (a series of immense popularity in Japan) and a complete 180 from one of my all time favorites in Kiryu Kazuma. What I didn't understand going in though was how intense and in depth Kasuga as a character was, willing to display a full range of emotions rather than "everything will work out" syndrome that I'm used to in Shonen animes or JRPG's like the ones he is a fan of.

Now as I've already mentioned, the most clear departure between LAD and the many games that precede it from RGG is the massive change in combat. Combat in the Yakuza games was unfortunately the weakest point in each entry to me, barring what I felt like were amazing titles from a legitimate rhythm and smoothness that they could have had in telling their stories. The Blockuza meme I referenced in the title is real, the real time action combat was excessively rigid and unintuitive unless you had perfectly understood the game's nuances and had the patience to subvert excellently calculated enemy timings. With the company continuing to move in that direction with the Judgment games (and LAD: Gaiden apparently,) RGG elected to take Ichiban's journey in the most Dragon Quest way possible: a JRPG. The rudimentary definition of this as most people would understand is turn based combat that uses a party of x many characters (in LAD's case: four) to take on world enemies and bosses with a continuous level system that ranks up classes/jobs which are required to take on tougher opponents as the game goes on. I've mentioned Dragon Quest probably too many times already, but this is the in-game explanation for the mechanical alteration of LAD's combat systems. Legitimately, just because Ichiban was a big fan of DQ as a kid he sees the world like a game that needs to be beaten with his party of friends to defeat the big bad evil. This results in him and his party having classes, world enemies morphing into mysterious beings like evil cleaners and amorphous trash bags when they begin to brawl, and several key story elements being stylized in a fantasy setting. As a fan of JRPG's in general I appreciated this change going into LAD because as previously stated, even though its a series I love, the rigidity of Yakuza's combat had begun to weigh on my greatly going into each release. In practice though, the JRPGification of LAD greatly waned on me as I realized the reality of the grind required to make the game manageable. I greatly appreciate the effort that RGG went through with the Poundmates, diversified class system, incredible visuals, and lengths of explanation in the mechanics, but at the end of the day the systems just aren't for me. No love lost, it's a Yakuza/LAD game and I knew the story would be there to back it up, but I feel like there is a better way to do combat going forward. Maybe in Infinite Wealth (due out in 2024) will remedy my issues with grinding and the timesink required to do so, but that might be wishful thinking.

Outside of the combat changes, I came out of Like a Dragon immensely satisfied with the experience I had. In terms of narrative, it's a safe bet with RGG and this franchise that you'll get something that is resoundingly silly but also incredibly impactful and serious. Our story follows Ichiban Kasuga, a lowly Yakuza grunt at the bottom of the famed Tojo Clan totem pole take the fall for a crime he didn't commit. The world he returns to eighteen years later is disparagingly different, not only in the way that society has changed but most importantly in the organization he used to refer to as his family. We follow Kasuga along his journey out of prison looking for answers from those he was trusted that had betrayed him, looking for a way back into the world he once knew and discovering a sinister plot to control Tokyo from forces he never would have expected. As is typical with my reviews, I don't jump into story elements, but I will say that the early game of LAD had me gripped to my computer screen pretty much right away. The narrative loses itself a bit by design as Ichiban and company meet more and more adversity from teh powers that be, but this all setup. As is tradition with the Yakuza franchise, the narrative swan song that RGG puts Ichiban and the player through can be described as nothing but beautiful. I wanted to end the game last night but after a long day and way too little sleep, I knew I'd be doing a disservice to the work RGG did in weaving a spider web's worth of narrative intrigue into the last few chapters, so I cut it early and woke up today to round out Chapters 14 and 15 of the end game, and I'm very glad I made that decision. Ichiban's unveiling to the player reminds me of my first watch of Fullmetal Alchemist and Edward Elric. You're introduced to a spry young red-clad youth, eager and ready to make their mark on the world after tragedy befell them in their earlier years. While they begin their journey in good faith with willingness to tackle the evil at large, the continuous depraved malice they are exposed by their friends and foes alike slowly strips them to their core. Edward has a moment when he first really draws blood in FMA that rattles him and completely breaks his mental image, and you see that a few times in the later chapter of Like a Dragon as Ichiban's grasp of the answers he is looking for drifts away like sand in the wind. There's a strength in having your protagonist lose their cool. As a narrative technique it shows that for one, the character is not impervious to stressors of the world they're in, and secondly gives the hero a benchmark at their lowest to measure themselves to as the game progresses from there. Like a Dragon utilizes this mechanic a few times as Ichiban discovers his journey has a lot more going on than just exposing corruption within the police and the Yakuza, and that blood is thicker than water. What I thought would be a man who was all smiles going into LAD, I found was one of the most emotionally well-rounded protagonists of any game that I've had the pleasure of playing.

To round out my review, I figure a little blip about the setting is important, as RGG intricately crafts their fictional takes on Japan ever so feverishly. Though you begin in the familiar Kamurocho and return a time or two, the bulk of LAD takes place in Ijincho, their version of Yokohama's Isezakicho. Again the city feels lived in and alive, something that RGG is completely unparalleled in the gaming space of doing, but for some reason it felt... too big? In a JRPG where you need to craft diversified encounters, sidequests, and general experiences there is a need for a world that trends to be larger in scope. Though because the location is so massive in comparison to Sotenbori, Kamurocho, Osaka, and Hirsohima from the series past, I felt like no location within LAD really felt like home or felt too familiar. You need to transition to and visit more and more locations as the narrative progresses so you can meet/fight new foes, which is natural in game design, but as it takes place in an insular city I felt that it reduced upon the familiarity that Yakuza games succeed in. Maybe this is a result of me not engaging in as much side content as your average LAD player, since I've been burnt out on that from playing as many of these games in a fairly short time span, but I didn't ever feel at home in Yokohama. Maybe this will change as the series progresses, but Kamurocho in Yakuza 0 to me was an immediate affinity, I can't say the same about Ijincho.

I would absolutely recommend Yakuza: Like a Dragon to fans of the series or of JRPG's at large. The fanservice, familiar faces and locations, and again amazing narrative from RGG are a treat to fans of the series and hopefully will attract newer fans as well. Ichiban Kasuga gained a fan in me.

Shortform review here, but the tl;dr is that I can't say I had the same level of enjoyment playing this for the first time that fellow new players and returning veterans had. Not to beat a dead horse, but Ada's VA and/or her voice direction sullied much of my enjoyment of her character by making a badass double agent spy seem like a lackadaisical bystander. Gameplay was alright but I felt like the ammunition/healing constraints were a little tight for my liking in an experience packed this tightly with action. I loved revisiting the moments that are familiar to the main RE4 and watching Ada connect the plot dots to get her to where Leon was and needed to be.

Probably a good purchase if you're a fan of RE4 and an excellent value for the price point, especially if you are a Resident Evil

When the Going Gets Gonk

I was an early supporter of Cyberpunk 2077 during its less than stellar launch in December of 2020. Even though I had an experience unfortunately filled with bugs that didn't run the best on a recently upgraded system, I loved the world and story that CD Projekt Red had crafted. I felt like Night City was one of, if not the most, enriching metropolitan locations of any game that I've played in my two-plus decades of PC Gaming. I think the criticism of the game's launch for last gen consoles and PC issues was warranted, but I also strongly believe a majority of healthy discourse for the game was lost in the internet anger and hid what made Cyberpunk special. For all intents and purposes, this review will not cover changes made in the 2.0 patch.

Now with the good faith of the anime and CDPR's commitment to pulling a No Man's Sky on Cyberpunk with the announcement of DLC to come, I got excited once more. I pledged that I would jump into Phantom Liberty with a new mind, no longer excusing any performance/mechanical issues and not blindly hoping for a remarkable experience. What I got in loading in and playing through the probably twenty hours of expansion was a reminder of how incredible CDPR is at constructing worlds that tell the narrative in their ambience, and at authoring characters whose relationships with the protagonist stretch far beyond the scope and expectation of your average video game.

Phantom Liberty felt like a part of the main game, and in a perfect world probably could be. Not only does the physical location of the DLC in Pacifica's Dogtown lie in the middle of the map of Night City, but tonally the degree of heinousity, treachery, and general scumbaggery of the characters within felt very true to the narrative already in place.
The narrative here is fantastic once more. As I usually do, I will evade embarking on narrative spoilers, but the amount of suspicious nuance in character motivation in Phantom Liberty leads to some incredible hard decisions that have monumental consequences on newly added endings to Cyberpunk 2077. I found myself frequently paused at decisions between helping two equally morally grey parties because I wanted to plan for any eventual fallback from supporting their campaigns. Am I going to assist in this person who has dragged me into deeper into a mess far beyond my comprehension under the guise that they will be able to help me? Or will I side with the party who is looking for the best interest of the State? It gets rough and it gets tough, and in true Cyberpunk fashion... there is no real winner. What decisions you make, what ending you come across will leave you feeling like dust in the wind. I felt equally crushed finishing Phantom Liberty as I did watching the anime, they really know how to take the emotional wind out of you.

There were so many special things that remind you how impressive the staging and environmental design of 2077 are within this DLC. Moments like where your conversations begin and end with Idris Elba's character Solomon Reed: a basketball court overlooking the dilapidated and defunded skyscrapers that stand tall over the downtrodden community. Another being the beginning sequence in which you are evading inquisitive opposition forces with the President of the NUSA, frequently peering over balconies engulfed in flames that feature paradiddles of rain collapsing through the concrete. It's the staging of these events within the DLC that are located all throughout that are easy reminds about how phenomenal the direction, writing, and choreography of this game and CDPR truly are. The ability to utilize environmental scale to aide in the telling of a story is something that propelled the Witcher from a standard low fantasy fare to one of the greatest works of the genre is present once more in Cyberpunk. Even if the distance travelled in the DLC feels a little small, because in truth it is, you are constantly reminded about how tiny of a cog you're V is in the machine that is Night City.

The experience was not without its frustrations though, but that's PC gaming in a nutshell in 2023 apparently (after playing Starfield to boot.) There were a few times within the main questline that missions would either not load, I would bug out of objectives, or I would be softlocked and couldn't move. These were nowhere near as egregious as they were in the base game closer to launch, but they did rub me the wrong way. The ultimate mission in the DLC (not counting the added missions to new endings) was beyond bugged for me, and the important enemy that is supposed to be your last match was completely non aggressive to me. This just felt... not great. I felt like the DLC story was heading to a climax that was manifesting into a monumental implosion of the interrelationships of its characters and then pop, the big bad that was sent after me wouldn't attack. My immersion wasn't completely ruined but it was tarnished in a way that is hard to ignore, and I didn't want to re-load the entire questline.

I strongly recommend Cyberpunk 2077 to anyone with a knack for science fiction and open worlds (and fans of Bladerunner,) and I'd say that Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is a must play for fans of the base game.

I have a couple hundred hours into CS, I was never too serious because I know I'm a decent AWPer and an average at best aimer in general (in big part due to wrist/nerve issues,) but I legitimately had no idea in my short return to CS2 how much had been changed or why.

Call me a casual, which I am all things considered, but at least the rebrand was less of a train wreck than Overwatch 2 in terms of outright removal of features and crafting a malicious monetization scheme and an overall worse experience.

As someone who has been around for effectively all of the history of Counter Strike, this is a step in the direction. Not a good direction, not a bad direction, just a step somwhere.

Shadows of Bloodborne: Puppets Die Twice

This is a very odd game for me to review because my main commentary on its positives and negatives rely on two almost equally powerful items: the setting and the difficulty. I'll dive into those in a second, but I just want to commend Neowiz and the development staff on putting together a complete Souls-like experience from top to bottom out of seemingly nowhere. The amount of effort into creating this game and staying true to the genre, while also presenting something new in and of itself is a masterful feat of game design, however it came with some headache...

My major gripe with the game, as Souls veteran IronPineapple pointed out in his Lies of P video, is that this game is really, really, really damn hard. I've spoken before about difficulty in the Souls series and how its hard to actually score a game based upon such a category because at the end of the day, difficulty is subjective. What may exist as a tough move to block or hard parry to hit for you, could be done with ease by me. Now is a game "hard" because a vocal majority seem to say they can't power through the mechanics set in stone by the developers, or is it truly a difficult experience? This is again not easy to answer as someone who has played every FromSoft title post Demon's Souls, because I'm used to the way these games are played. I know how to navigate corpse runs, when to dodge towards attacks, the benefits of certain builds, etc... I went straight from Elden Ring to Bloodborne for example and beat that game with ease, with almost every boss being completed in less than five tries. I might call Bloodborne easy, but by the accounts of the many, it is not. It's with this commentary about Souls-like difficulty that I want the reader to approach my review.

I don't know if I'm more qualified than your average bear to say that Lies of P is objectively hard, but I will offer my two cents as someone who is now a "vet" of this genre. For clarity purposes I'll tackle the difficulty of Lies of P in two main categories: Rigidity and Fairness, starting with the former. There's one thing that I disliked about Dark Souls 2 more than anything, and that was how your i-frames on rolls were tied to the stamina stat. Now this isn't Dark Souls 2, but it does employ something almost equally annoying that makes the combat feel odd for an awkward amount of the game, and that's the P-Organ system. P-Organ sounds funny, and it is, but it's basically a tertiary skill tree separate from your main stat upgrades that gives the titular Pinnochio new moves or upgrades to items/abilities he already has. These P-Organs are split into tiers that each have four separate unlocks. These four unlocks grant certain abilities per tier like extra recovery for your estus flask equivalent or the ability to use multiple gold coin tree cubes (I'll get to this later too) per fight. The quartz required to complete each unlock grows per tier, one for the first, two per slot for the second, and so on. This was a cool mechanic at first because each of the quartz you input allows for you to augment either your offense, defense, pulse cells, or miscellaneous other stats. Where this got annoying real quick, was how certain life-saving moves were locked behind having enough of this finite quartz resource. I mentioned the EXTREMELY useful double dodge, but there's also the ability to roll from a knocked-down state, and also the aforementioned ability to use your cube twice in a bossfight which can vastly alter the way these fights go. I am very opposed, like I was in Dark Souls 2, to how the rigidity of fights is effectively locked behind a finite resource and how much it can change the way you play the game.

Outside of the success based stat upgrading, I felt like enemy hitboxes were rather dishonest. My qualm here is probably holdover from playing several of FromSoft's cleaner titles within the past few years like Elden Ring, Sekiro, and Dark Souls III in which I felt like the boss moves hit where they looked like they would hit me. Multiple times in Lies of P as the game went progressed, I'd get hit by moves that clearly did not touch but had clipped me League of Legends style because I'd dodged or parried after the game registered the hit. Not the biggest deal, but in those life-or-death moments that do so often occur, I felt like I'd had some momentum stolen.

Now for the elephant in the room, the difficulty of Lies of P. With the above added into consideration, this game starts hard and ends even harder. This is the first time in a game I've knowingly got the "good" or "true" ending and specifically chose not to do it because of the added on BS I was about to go through. The weird thing too is that I don't even know where to start, but I guess I'll begin with the health bars. My favorite game Elden Ring notwithstanding in the Soulsborne franchise is Bloodborne... for a lot of reasons. One thing Bloodborne did right was NOT give every boss a second phase, meaningful or not, and if they did it was packed into one healthbar. Once you get past maybe halfway in Lies of P, every single chapter boss has a second health bar. Not only does this cheapen the experience of making fights seem "special," but it also turned every fight into a marathon of resource management and heightened luck moreso than a battle of skill to will. In most FromSoft titles I felt like my learning of the bosses moves, mechanics, and timings would guarantee me victory over time, and it did. This contrasts to Lies of P, where often times you don't even get to the second phase to be able to learn the bosses moves because you spent the last lifetime fighting through the first healthbar. Once I killed the big first speed bump of the game and got through its first healthbar, I thought it made sense to have a second one too because it bolstered the importance of this character in the games lore and his stature as a strong opponent. As the game went on and I began to realize EVERY single boss was doing that, my enjoyment of Lies of P waned greatly. The game had gone from an endearing Souls-like to a poorly tuned title that was clearly intended to just be "hard" for the git-gudders out there.

As is tradition for me in a Souls-Like game, I went with Lies of P's strength build equivalent: Motivity. This was a grave mistake in part due to the health bar issue as mentioned above, but also because the attack windows on a majority of bosses through the latter half of Lies of P effectively do not exist. In some of the fights, especially in the ultimate boss fight, your window to attack is quicker than the blink of an eye, and going to slow will result in a massive chunk of your health bar disappearing. It wouldn't be the end of the world if there was a payoff for the risk of attacking the boss on the end of its rest cycle, but the bosses in this game straight up do not have hitstun. There's a loose stagger meter, and you need to use this to beat the game, but if you're stuck in animation lock on an attack (as strength users often are) you will pay the mortal price nine times out of ten. As someone who greatly enjoyed the risk/reward playstyle of the Souls games and heavier items, this was beyond aggravating. I made the mistake in the "easier" sections of the game in throwing my upgrades into strength and health, without realizing that I was just hammering myself down a path of furious anger. In fights where I'd summon my specter, I'd have to wait for the boss to aggro to them so I could use a heavy attack and stagger the boss into a critical hit. If it was just me against the boss because my specter had died (and I didn't have a second gold coin fruit to keep him up,) I would miss out on a grave majority of these stagger opportunities. This happened because of the lack of hitstun on the boss, as well as the stagger windows being exceptionally slow on special enemies. Of course you can upgrade this through the P-Organ system to give bosses a larger stagger window, but I felt like having the ability to dodge correctly was more important. I hope you the reader are now beginning to see the issue with the way Lies of P makes you choose between mechanics that just seem... like they should be granted right away.

Now that I've outlined my complaints with the fairness and rigidity of Lies of P, it's time to get into the rest. I wasn't a fan of most bosses having 270 degree attacks, nor was I an enjoyer of the fact that certain bosses could attack up to fourteen times in a row. Fourteen! 1 4!!! There were several moments I'd think it was time to stagger or heal up, only to see the grave danger in front of me wind up for its third set of whirling blades out of five to come. There was a boss in the final chapter towards the end who had me in complete shock in disbelief as I saw them General Grevious style spinning their sword for the nth time against my Specter and I. In the Souls series the bosses have their archetypes and what not, but within the games I feel like they are mostly different. In Lies of P it felt like they all had their own degree or BS that could stretch around their body, hit you from cross arena, or gap close. Sometimes you just want Covetus Demon man... not a two healthbar Malenia for the fifth time. Lastly in the qualm department, as I've mentioned it a few times, I really did not like the way the Gold Coin Tree was inplemented. Basically, there's a tree within the game that drops fruits you can use to augment yourself or your summoned specter in bossfights. This tree exists solely within a certain area and can be accessed freely once you get to the story point in the game. The catch though, is that it's tied to REAL WORLD TIME, meaning that every eight minutes it will drop a fruit which you can then use to purchase augments from the correct vendor. This felt... gacha to me. I strongly disliked having the success of boss fights tied to how long I waited in real life to get this extra currency that was immediately helpful. C'est la vie or something though, I beat the game and will not look back at the combat or its systems.

Now for the Good!!! Lies of P does a lot of good!!! Years ago I sat with my mother at bedtime and read our copy of Pinocchio as written by Carlo Collodi. It was addressed to my brother by my Sicilian grandmother, who used to read it to my father when they lived in Italy. It's with this that I always had an affinity to the world of Pinocchio and its roots as an Italian story as opposed to the Disney'd version that most probably first experienced it as. Lies of P does a FANTASTIC job adhering to the source material of Pinocchio while also putting its own spin on the story to make it the harrowing and decrepit story that the game is. Pinocchio is already a pretty depressing story at its core, but the way that Neowiz crafted a world in which puppets have run amok and basically overthrown society into a hotbed of chaos while a merciless disease shakes those who still yet live was a thing of beauty. There was a lot of work done into creating an interesting lore behind the world, motivations of each faction within the world, and the plagues at large. I have to applaud the developers on taking my gripe of FromSoft’s microdosed lore and spinning it into a great melding of direct and indirect storytelling. Characters like Geppetto, Cricket, Fox, Cat, and Romeo all make their appearances in the world of Krat with entire new meanings and motivations to their actions. There's a pretty awesome tease at the end of the game to as to which fairytale the team might tackle next, and man I expect everybody who came away with positive feelings toward Lies of P to get excited at it!

On top of staying true to the source material, Lies of P did one thing that FromSoft has had some extreme difficulty in doing: They made a Soulslike that ran well. This game is jaw droppingly gorgeous in its steampunkified late 1800's/early 1900 take on western Europe. Multiple times during my playthrough of both the demo and the main game did I stop and just look at the world as it fell into pieces around me. Moments where you climb to the highest tower, or take an elevator up a mountain and see the world of Lies of P under you had me seriously in love with the game. I may have been harsh on the actual playing of Lies of P, but when it came to crafting a believable horror fantasy world, this was a tremendous success. It looked great and it ran great, and in 2023 that's what we should be asking for.

All in all, Lies of P is truly a recommendation enigma to me. One on hand I would love to suggest to it to all of my friends who are either into the Souls-like genre or would appreciate the beautiful aesthetics of the game. On the other, I don't want to break their heads and hearts as they cleave and grieve their way through some draconian encounters. I don't recommend Lies of P to anyone unless their looking for a similar challenge as Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice with a tremendously respected IP as the backdrop.

Me and my Co-op partner managed to destroy our banshees on Two Betrayals and had to back track to the starting area to get one. After one and a half hours of watching Youtube videos and attempting to get the banshee through the door that breaks. We did and screamed, clapped, and laughed.

Halo: Combat Evolved is that level of jank to the T, as a longtime player who was there for the first title, it feels just as wholesomely scuffed as it did so many years ago. Playing it with someone who hasn't experienced Halo before was a real treat. I got to be there for their first experience with the flood, their first melee teamkill, and their first time running through the library.

The first Halo is decidedly not perfect, but it is a great introduction to the greatest first person shooter franchise of all 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.

The good, the bad, and the... Starfield.

I was a believer, I really was. I didn't dislike Fallout 4 as much as most of my constituents and peers, and decided to waste none of my time on Fallout 76. Despite going on a somewhat downward trajectory since the release of Oblivion, I had faith that with the Microsoft purchase and subsequent fiscal investment that Todd "It Just Works" Howard was going to be able to Houdini an amazing game out of effectively thin air with Starfield. I, like many others waited with bated breath as the marketing wave for Bethesda's newest IP in decades pushed into the gamingsphere. WIth every announcement, every showcase, I became more and more invested in the world I would soon embark in. Science Fiction when done right is an exploration of limitless possibilities, of worlds and galaxies foreign to the audience waiting to be freshly explored. This is what my dream for Starfield was, and did I get it? The answer is simply: not really.

Fallout and the Elder Scrolls succeeded in the moments in between, starting with the trademark cold opens (as seen in Oblivion, Skyrim, and the Fallouts) and continuing on to your first moments of freedom. Remember in Skyrim as you escape the executioner's block in the first thirty minutes of runtime, how the entirety of the land the Nords call home is open to you? You have a loosely defined main quest to embark on, but there is an entire world and path to craft between you and your destination. Nothing is forced. Once you began to creep into the stories of each respective game, it felt like there was a limitless possibility of what you could find on your way from Point A to Point B. In Fallout, walking through a simple cliff face could see you crossing path with an entire colony of people with the name "Gary" all yelling their name as they attacked you without rhyme or reason. In Oblivion on your way walking through the countryside could find the player interacting with a formidable prince of an otherworldy deity.

Starfield however, it never had that... magical spunk that the aforementioned titles did. In Starfield you spend the majority of your time doing two things: chasing down quest markers and flying to said quest markers. In theory this isn't a terrible idea, effectively the other titles are all about the same thing, but the issue in translating that mantra to Bethesda's big 2023 title is that there is no in between. Now much against my chagrin this is my biggest gripe with the game, the inability to have a reason to explore and the lack of reward of doing so. As I mentioned previously, in the "good" Bethesda titles I found myself overjoyed at taking the long way because it meant that I was likely to find myself distracted and taken on a path to a babbling brook of curiosities. In Starfield, this doesn't exist as it takes the form of grav jumping from system to system (as your ship's capabilities allow) with complete lack of middle ground. You fly from your starting point to your destination, there is no random occurrence, there is no vista to pause at along the way, there is no mysterious force that will stop you in your tracks to explore. Not having anything to look forward to in my active journey in a Bethesda game just felt... wrong. They'd always been the antithesis of the open world epidemic as sprung by Ubisoft, which had towers to climb and random outposts to capture. Bethesda titles championed the random and gave you a reason, completely unprodded to explore. That wasn't present here. It's hard to stress how strange it felt getting an objective for a faction that was taking you to a world a plethora of lightyears away only for it to require the same sequence of system jumps that the twenty quests before it did, the only variance being the end destination. As I mentioned previously, this was my greatest and gravest letdown with Starfield and an unfortunate result of a scope that didn't quite meet expectations.

There's another avenue of complaint to my issues of exploration and scope, and it is in the worlds of Starfield at large. My next statement may gesture itself as hyperbole but I assure the reader that I mean it in sincerity: I found there was genuinely nothing interesting about the planets in Starfield. Outside of legitimately well constructed cities like Neon and New Atlantis, the planets you do land on for side and main stories alike felt completely lifeless. Recycled clear procedural generation made for planet after planet of monotony with no motivation to poke around in other than completing a flora & fauna scanning log and collection of materials for resource crafting that I also found rather unengaging. Starfield didn't position itself to be No Man's Sky in that aspect and the expectation of the general public for it to be so is completely unfounded and misguided. But in the times I did find myself off the beaten path on the seemingly endless worlds at large, it was simply a nothing burger out there. I'd look out at the vast expanse of the freshly landed-upon planet and continue straight on my way, as there was nothing for me to poke around and find.

This takes me to my next issue with Starfield, and I promise this review is not just a laundry list of problems I had with the game, as I am giving it a favorable score. I touched previously on the great job the (recent) Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles did, and that was give the player an organically engaging approach to side content in the ways of questing and base building. Starfield sort of just... dumps everything on you pretty much right away. Quickly jaunting through New Atlantis (the game's starting city and most important location,) dumps more quests on you than you can count, and they are almost all unprovoked. By walking through each district the activity log grows with people you need to speak to and places you need to find as a result of NPC's conversating about them to eachother. This in particular felt strange to me, you were no adventurer in need as you were in the Elder Scrolls helping the woman in her painted world, you were just an eavesdropper who heard a character complaining into the void. This didn't necessarily impact the quality of the sidequests, but beginning the game with four factions dropped on your and a laundry list of people I needed to seek out before even beginning the second main story quest was numbing.

My favorite part of this game was easily the factions and side content that it throws at you, despite the awkward nature that you first interact with it. I loved the way the factions worked and varied from one another. If you wanted to dabble in humorous corporate espionage, you had the Ryujin Industries questline. If you wanted to embark on a well thought out space pirate adventure (and who doesn't,) you had the Crimson Fleet storyline. Players looking for an excellent piece of science fiction with an incredible twist, there was the UC Vanguard. And lastly for cowboys, you had the uh, Freestar Collective. Each of these brought something new to the questing and enjoyment table that the other ones didn't, and I found the bulk of my seventy hour runtime was spent with these storylines and the missions throughout. I greatly enjoyed the variation of writing styles, mission structure, and combat that were involved and showed that Bethesda in all of its recent faults still had some incredible scenario writers on retainer.

I left out a faction, and that one would be "Constellation" AKA the main story questline. Because of the nature that Starfield drops its side content on you, I made sure to do as much as I could of it first before engaging with the main scenario. This meant for practically fifty hours I had gone without talking to the members of my crew patiently waiting for me in New Atlantis to set the events of the story in motion. By the time they had asked and instructed me to explore the galaxy, I had already done so. I had done things that led me to interesting storylines and met many interesting people. I'd been to the other two major cities in the galaxy, Neon and Akila City. I had already travelled from one end of the explorable system to the other and had weapons that could one or two shot most opponents. The point of the above is to effectively say that the main scenario felt diluted after doing the side content. I felt like I was saving the best for last, but in reality I had set aside the most mediocre and uninteresting narrative in the game which is... unfortunate to say the least for what is the main story. Maybe unfair because the tertiary questing in the Elder Scrolls/Fallout series was also probably more "fun" than the respective narratives of each game's set path, but the gap was just too large in Starfield. I didn't feel a connection to quite literally anyone in the faction that you fight tooth and nail with to protect. Sarah had a moral compass and ability to annoy you more than Fi did in the original Skyward Sword, Stroud was fun for the few missions you had with him but ultimately was a rich playboy, Sam was a boring version of Irvine from FFVIII, Vasco was a robot doing the recycled dry humor robot schtick, Barrett was supposed to be someone we cared about, and Andreja was just kinda... there. I couldn't empathize with a group like Constellation and their ongoing mission if I couldn't connect with any of the group. I felt a connection to the plight of Martin Septim and Jauffre in Oblivion, I felt a connection to the issues plaguing my father and the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 3, I didn't get that in Starfield. Every time I walked into The Lodge (Constellation's hub area,) I did a side eye at those around me. I just felt... 100% detached from a group I was meant to empathize with. I know they're completely of different strokes, but its impossible not to think of a series like Mass Effect and how it quickly got you to care about each of your party members in its expansive sci-fi narrative. Bethesda's never been about that to the same degree but man, it just makes you think.

Honestly thinking about it too, you just straight up don't matter in this game other than an advancement to the plot. Once more, I don't really expect too much more from Todd and his expertise but there came a point towards the end of the game where I read some testimonials from my brother and others who were also playing and came to the question: Am I really present in the story? I don't have the opportunity to say anything very interesting, I'm quite literally just the vehicle for a questline that chooses you as important within an hour of the game. I'm not the dragonborn, I'm not the son of an important figure reshaping a wasteland, I'm not the father of a child whose importance is likely beyond my scope... I'm just a character who touched a rock. Not the end of the world, but it made me ponder my actual intentions and level of engagement with the world(s) at large.

Speaking of engaging... you know what's really hard to engage with even with an Nvidia 3090 GPU? Ding ding ding... it's Starfield! Performance in this game on a good rig is straight up inexcusable and is responsible for a large degree of my detriment to this game, even more so than the previously mentioned dissent on worlds, questing, and player agency. I have a good rig, I'm fortunate enough where I'm at a position to be playing with effectively top of the line hardware... I should not be able to see Steam's frame counter register sub thirty in combat towards the end of the game. This is not okay. First person shooters are not fun below a certain threshold and Starfield managed to reach it. One of my favorite gaming experiences of all time, Bloodborne, saw its personal rating fall by quite a bit from me because it was locked at thirty on the PS4 and that was a third person action game! Starfield is a first/third person shooter in which aiming is... important! Movement and tracking is... important! Running around Akila City and feeling like I was in slow motion because of how astonishingly low the framerate was felt like a slap in the face to me as the player. Even Cyberpunk ran better at launch... on worse hardware!!! Sometimes I would find reprieve in smaller zones inside cities or at space stations where I was able to hit a reasonable seventy to eighty frames per second, but these moments were remarkably few and far between. The majority of my seventy hours of Starfield were spent sub fifty and I can sacrifice framerate SOMETIMES for fidelity and beautiful vistas... but that was not present in Starfield. When it was running well the game looked good but not great, not worthy of the tradeoff that came in the form of gutter-level performance.

The framerate issue made combat tougher than it should have been. I didn't expect fighting in any way to be the best part of Starfield, as it decidedly isn't in any Bethesda game, but it was another element of this game that added my ultimate takeaway of "meh" as I saw the end credits roll. The guns didn't feel very interesting to me as they were all variations of familiar Fallout formulas but without the nuance and strategy of V.A.T.S. You use shotguns, snipers, pistols, melee, and lasers to cut your way through unimportant humanoid and arachnid enemies alike just as you did in Fallout. Aiming though was a nice callback to the pre-Oblivion days where it felt like a complete dice roll. I laughed at the amount of times I'd have my reticle on enemies only to whiff shot after shot after shot because the combat mechanics of Starfield deemed a miss necessary. I was never frustrated... just confused.

Combat leads into another point of contention I had with Starfield: space flight. Not only is the shipbuilder resoundingly obtuse and unfair in the way it gates creativity, but actually employing the ship you carefully crafted in a combat scenario is a most woefully uninteresting and grating endeavor that I could have easily gone without. Dogfighting is a tall task to make work, but EA and Pandemic studios were able to do it with Battlefront way back in 2005. It wasn't complicated, as it was a simple follow and target system, but it was fun. Starfield's space combat requires the player to face slam three attack buttons that control cannons, missiles, and lasers, until however many ships you are forced to defeat have been silenced. The tracking system was a dud, and I didn't want to chase the skill tree to make it any better as I knew that would take away my enjoyment of more tangible and useful things like the persuasion system or on-world combat. If you accidentally ported to a system that had space pirates or enemies target you upon entry and didn't have enough ship parts to heal right away, you were effectively S.O.L. Enemies have a tendency to fly right over you and evade your targeting, forcing the player to spend an awkward amount of time just so they can recalibrate. Weapons had an annoying level of recharge period that took the active interest and engagement levels of the fights completely away. For something I really wanted to love and have that simply living-out-my-Star-Wars-dream-jubilee with, I was rather against ever partaking in. All in all, I stopped having fun with a lot of the appeal of the title real quick.

Starfield was a game meant for a lot of people, it is Bethesda's first big IP in too many years to count and unfortunately, it missed my mark by a long shot. What I had hoped would be a game to rival FFXVI for my GOTY spot, is really nothing more than another candle in the wind. Starfield is a game somebody is going to enjoy, but not me. If I want to build outposts and get some sort of vindication in doing so, I could play Satisfactory. If I want to dogfight, I'll just jump on Ace Combat. If I wish for an engaging first person shooter, I can get back into DOOM. If I want peak Bethesda, I have my Oblivion GOTY edition sitting on the shelf next to me. I can't recommend Starfield and it breaks my heart. It's the first time I've played a Bethesda game and truly felt indifferent. I reached the credits and I didn't clap, I didn't smile, I did the worst thing imaginable... I asked my friends to play League of Legends.

Armored Core VI: Possible Game of the Year

I've written a few times about my introduction to From Software and how despite playing Dark Souls way back in 2011, the company's trademark difficulty and cryptic narratives didn't grasp me until Elden Ring in 2022. I, like a lot of people in the zeitgeist know Fromsoft as the "Souls" guys, but therein lies a deeper origin, one that involves Armored Core.

I never was a Playstation kid, we had a way to play PS1 games on our Emac growing up, but it wasn't until Final Fantasy 7 Remake that I used my hard earned adult money to buy my first Playstation, a PS4. As a result I missed out on a lot of pivotal games and moments in the history of 3D gaming. One of these titles was the seminal cult classic mech franchise: Armored Core. Coincidentally outside of being really into Zoids as a wee lad and taking part in the Transformers media wave in the late 00's, I wasn't really into Mechs or Mech related media until I got into Code Geass in 2019. I knew that Japanese gaming, anime, and film loved the mecha genre but wasn't cognizant about the when's, where's, and why's. There were two names that stuck out through time and the aforementioned Armored Core was one of them, the other Zone of the Enders. Through conversation with my friends over time I learned about the importance of these two and how they diferred. Kojima's ZoE was balls to the wall action that utilized speed to create immersion, whereas Armored Core was the nerdy stat reliant customization game for those who were into the minutiae of mech creation. I decided that with the announcement of Armored Core VI, off the heels of From's insane post Dark Souls 2 run, that I should embark into the legendary mecha franchises. Earlier this year I sat down and hooked up my Xbox 360 to finally play ZoE and it was... alright, so I then set my eyes on Armored Core VI.

I watched quite literally one gameplay trailer before the game dropped and decided it would be something I was into, it was the one featuring the smelter demon, wait wrong game. It was the one featuring the Cleaner Robot with the furnace on top of it, acting like a Blowhole. The richly detailed factory landscape coupled with crisply quick movement was an immediate sell for me, and thus I anxiously waited for the release of Fires of Rubicon. What I got on release was the exact kind of game I'd wanted, Fromsoft's punishing combat with a richly customizable path through completion. I had a grand time comparing my progress with friends and family and how we approached each fight. While some of my buddies went with the grounded tank approach, others went with a speedy in and out build. I waxed poetic about the glory of the double Songbird (mounted Howitzer-esque cannons) and its ability to stagger bosses with ease. This approach to gameplay, where everybody has their own build that works for them is awesome and I heavily commend From for making a game that is so uniquely accessible in its player agency, because I'm all about player agency. The fights are hard, and the bosses are extremely punishing in places, but there are so many avenues for you the player to bypass them.

I struggled with one of the games first real bosses for anywhere from five to six hours (Balteus for the experienced,) because I wasn't respecting the multiple avenues of approach to defeat him. I was getting greedy, thinking I could brute force my way through the encounter like it was Dark Souls, but no I had to strip apart my oonga boonga playstyle and approach it with a Bloodborne attitude, dancing with the boss to learn and react to its every move. Once I got the patterns down on Balteus, I felt like I understood the game much better. You can create a build that allows you to take more hits, but ultimately you'll have to respect what the encounters do to you, and the limitations that ammunition and only having three repair kits has in store. With my double songbird, double gatling gun build with a heavier mech body, I created a mech that hit like a bruiser. I dealt heavy stagger damage with the cannons, and could melt damage during said stagger state with the barrage of gatling rounds. Creating a strategy that worked without the assistance of looking online through my own determination was greatly rewarding. I more or less used this with some slight variations all the way to the end game and again would like to shout out the devs for allowing this to work.

Fights in Armored Core VI were unique in the fact that they were so wildly different in terms of mechanics but generally the same degree of difficulty that prevented anything from being a cakewalk. From the first main boss to the ultimate encounter, I felt greatly engaged to study boss patterns and timings in my immediate introduction to each fight. Whether it was AC on AC action in which you were in a duel with an enemy that could heal and mimic your own actions like expansion and shoulder firing, set piece bosses in which you had to utilize a specific item to succeed, or just a good old fashion Fromsoft rumble in the jungle against a larger menacing foe, nothing came easy and battles could only be won through hard work. Outside of the one I mentioned above, I don't want to give anything away as to remain spoiler-free, but the boss at the end of chapter four was really dang cool and reminiscient of some of the fun I had in Dark Souls 3. Fittingly enough, the last boss of the game also felt like a callback to some of From's most glorious moments. Outside of bosses, the world fights were the exact right amount of difficulty. You are plopped into a world with a finite amount of ammo and often tasked to take out jobbers and tougher enemies alike, but rarely did I feel like it was unfair. Armored Core VI is checkpointed well enough that should you be stressing your limits on resource, you'll be reimbursed for your efforts upon completion of an area. There were occasionally moments where I felt like the standard zone enemies werew winning against me simply because of a war of attrition, particularly in a "protect the objective" battle near the end of the game, but everything felt manageable as I reassessed my strategies and approached with a new state of mind.

The real unsung hero of this game was the environmental design and oh man was it absolutely incredible. From the moment you step foot on Rubicon, Fromsoft wasted no time in demonstrating the innate talent of their art teams and their ability to craft unforgettable and jawdropping vistas every chance they could. Numerous moments throughout my playthrough did I exclaim "this is really f* cool" to the friends I was streaming it to, stopping to stare at the great expanse of the delapidated world at large. Fromsoft have been the kings of ambience for quite some time now, with each title that I've enjoyed since DS1 in 2011 having that "Fromsoft Moment" where the landscape appears after entering an area and speaks volumes about the world and story at large without saying a single word. As chapter four wraps up and chapter five is introduced, there is a moment in which this happens that had my jaw near the floor, a significant factor in my remembrance of this game. Science Fiction often lives and dies upon the world it exists in, where effectively translating the nuances of the diverse locations is imperative to helping the titles stick out amongst the plethora of others within the genre. You remember the diverse locations of Star Wars, of Mass Effect, of Cowboy Bebop because of the way they are communicated to the audience. Armored Core VI with its Fromsoft DNA follows suit in offering enriching and memorable moments throughout the entire twenty hour runtime via optimal enemy placement, gorgeous vistas, and intricate cityscapes.

While Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon is surely not for everybody, it checked the fast paced and difficult action game box for me in the absolute best way possible. Engaging fights, a rewarding customization system, and incredible environmental design all are elements that make this one of the best new games I've played in recent memory, and a hallmark of the mecha genre. I strongly recommend Armored Core VI to anyone who is a fan of Fromsoft, science fiction, and/or action games that require intense focus from the player.

Wake up Jet Set Radio Future, there's a new CEO of funky fresh beats in town.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is the spiritual successor that everyone hoped it would be, bringing that beautiful combination of rollerblading, graffiti, bombastic soundtracking, and nonsense storytelling to the modern gen after a significant hiatus from the Sega cult hit JSRF.

What I thought would be a decent game turned into something I recommended to multiple friends and family members as I spent more time in New Amsterdam with the elite OST and generally fun (and not difficult!) parkour/movement along rails, billboards, and light poles. It's easy to get around and is fun to do so on your chosen method of transport depending on which character you like to play as. I preferred Gel's rollerblades so I stuck to her most of the game, skating around in style as Hideki Naganuma and company guided my path forward. The plot, while not entierly important is completely nonsensical which adds to the ridiculuous nature & ambience of the game. I like the crew you get to know, I enjoyed the turf battles you entertain with each crew on your quest to go all city, and as a hip-hop afficianado, I LOVED the inclusion of the oldheads as the judicators of all inter-crew combat.

My points of detraction come in two main ways. The first being that I felt like the police mechanic was a little too wonky and unecessary for general enjoyment of exploring the cities zones. The more rep you got and the further you got into the game, the police became more aggressive and annoying. I didn't feel like they added much and just made exploration an awkward amount more annoying. My second "issue" was that I think the creativity and ease of exploration waned significantly in Bomb Rush Cyberfunk's last two chapters. I wasn't a fan of the Pyramid's verticality and long winded nature of the last area that sort of... abruptly ended.

In all, BRCF is an eclectic game made for the patient. Fans of Jet Set Radio Future and the old Sega style should absolutely pick this up. I recommend Bomb Rush Cyberfunk for those who want a tight sub ten hour experience of block rockin' beats and dope graphics.

Hypnagogia: Boundless Dreams is a short but tight surrealist trip through a series of dreams in a hip PS1-ish aesthetic vaporwave worldscape that kept me interested from start to finish. While the platforming is light and puzzling extremely rudimentary, the gameplay and vague philosophy about the world at large was very well done when coupled with an elite visual and audio pallette. I don't think the narrative itself is meant to be a hallmark work of fiction, but I found the mystery of the worlds at hand and the doomed denizens within to be both humorous and captivating.

I'd recommend Hypnagogia: Boundless Dreams to anyone who might think that a quick thought provoking platformer with a unique creative element attached could be up their alley.

Dark Souls Peak

Far and away the best of the trilogy, Dark Souls III seems like a complete F-U to the two games before it. A polished experience from start to finish, the third entry into the series feels like the best moments of Elden Ring at times with some of the annoying trepidation of the previous two entries.

The first thing that I have to salute DS3 about and it's almost a little sad that I am, is the fact that it ran at a glorious 60 FPS with a nice graphic sheen to it that reminded me of last year's GOTY: Elden Ring. The visual fidelity didn't just do the environments of this title justice, but made movement and boss fights much more manageable and approachable throughout the ~30 hour experience. From the moment I loaded in to completion of the game I was in awe at how fluid it was, and there were many times that I felt like I was in the world of Elden Ring.

Gameplay took a tremendous leap between the previous title and this one, dropping silly things like I-Frames that are tied to a stat and accelerated weapon degradation against bosses in favor of a smoother and more enjoyable experience. I went with my Fromsoft staple oonga boonga melee build, swapping great club and a giant axe until I found Dragon's Tooth (my Dark Souls 1 go to) later on. There were moments where I felt I was a little cheated, but it was never at a point where I thought it was overbearing or simply bad game design as it was in DS1 & DS2. Upgrading weapons felt vindicating as you could fully tune them to your playstyle, and were giving ample resources to do so. Gear didn't have to be upgraded as it was in DS2 either, making for a playthrough where you could worry moreso about the actual "game" of Dark Souls rather than material management.

Bosses were a tremendous leap between the titles too, clearly taking a page from the improvements Fromsoft made with Bloodborne the year prior. From the moment you fight Iudex Gundyr all the way until the final boss of the DLC, you are matched against bosses who will not just test your raw stats but also your ability to improvise, adapt, and overcome. That was my favorite part of playing all of Dark Souls III, the fact that bosses weren't gimmicks to be understood and passed by, but actually difficult opponents that could be beaten by learning their patterns and how to react appropriately. Again, very Bloodborne and a clear pattern they would replicate with Elden Ring many moons later. I don't want to give spoilers because the lore and sequencing is rightfully important to many players, but there were some bosses later on I would jump up after beating and say "I hated that, it was one of the best boss fights I've ever done." My favorite part of Bloodborne was how each match against each boss felt like a dance to the death because of how fluid and integral constant movement was to that game. Now, Dark Souls III is notably slower but you still feel like you're in an honest duel with these bosses, in which pure skill will reign supreme.

Like I touched on with comments on visual fidelity above, the game is absolutely gorgeous and filled with those "Fromsoft Moments" where you enter a new area atop a cliffside and pause just to gaze at the incredible vistas in front of you. Beauty is abound throughout the entire game, however I found myself most in awe when I played the ultimate "Ringed City" DLC. Such rich use of colour and scale is utilized to craft a believable environment of dilapidated buildings and past socieities.

While it wasn't perfect (it was too short!) Dark Souls 3 is a jaw dropping experience that engages the player from their first moments all the way into its conclusion. A massive improvement from Dark Souls 1 & 2, it improves on just about everything to make it clear how great of a job Fromsoft has done in gameplay innovation and creativity. I would absolutely recommend Dark Souls III.