The revisionism around Cyberpunk 2077 and the reception of this DLC makes me feel like I’m going fucking insane. It’s like everyone forgot how bad this game was because a mediocre anime launched on Netflix.

Cyberpunk 2077 had a myriad of foundational and structural issues regarding its world design, writing, quest design, and mission structure that cannot be fixed by making slight edits to the leveling system.

It wanted to be every kind of AAA game simultaneously without succeeding at any single junction (probably because it’s impossible to combine some of these game styles). It wanted to be an open-world RPG with the density of an Immersive Sim and a Grand Theft Auto-style game with bombastic, setpiece-driven missions like Call of Duty.

Phantom Liberty septuples down on the latter pairing in particular. It is a meaningless open-world that buffers what are essentially Call of Duty missions centered around set pieces, complete with walk-and-talk and press F to pay respects segments.

It’s a shame because, for all of the original game’s faults stemming from a hellish development cycle with a lack of a cohesive vision, with multiple rebooted versions of the stacked on top of one another to create a freakish AAA homunculus, Phantom Liberty offered a second chance on a fresh slate.

Instead, it’s just more of the same inharmonious game design, except this time, the characters and writing are even less interesting.

Cyberpunk 2077 was never good, and it can’t be good until CDPR makes a new game. I think people struggle to accept that CDPR dropped a massive fucking turd, and the reception to this DLC and the 2.0 version of the game is just a sunken cost fallacy for the games media hype machine.

Now that the game isn’t in a state where it’s literally falling apart at the seams, it can receive the ecstatic fanfare that people have been edging on for the past three years.

As great as Cyberpunk 2077 looks and sounds, it’s nothing more than a celebration of shallow AAA tropes and bad taste in a hollow open world. Now that the stink of its fraudulent launch has been cleaned up and laundered by an anime, post-launch support, and media fluff pieces, people can hop back to touting CDPR as an industry paragon.

If you already like this game, then Phantom Liberty and the 2.0 update will probably be up your alley. For people like me who didn’t enjoy the original game, they will not change your mind.

It’s also funny that after all of the controversy surrounding the transphobic imagery in this game, they couldn’t be fucked to remove it after three years and a “game changing” update.

Oh, I also ran into a game breaking bug that prevented me from beginning the last mission that made me have to go back two hours and replay multiple missions.

This is the first Souls-like to ever come close to From Soft quality. Even more shocking is that it actually does reach that level of quality at some points.

+ Great Atmosphere
+ Excellent Art Direction
+ Superb Bosses
+ Surprising variety of mini-bosses/elite enemies
+ Spot-on Soulsbornekiro gameplay
+ You can play records in the Hub and vibe while you go about upgrading, restocking and leveling up
+ Fantastic Sound Design
+ Twink

- Very Linear
- The stagger system could be communicated a bit better to the player, the lack of an on screen stagger bar can be frustrating
- Some of the elite enemies are a bit HP Spongey
- Sudden difficulty spikes (Not a huge deal but it can be a big turn-off to some)
- Last chapter is too long
- Balance is a bit messy, certain blades are just soooooooo much better than others

Bloodborne may have the hardest early game difficulty than any FromSoftware Soulsborne games. Central Yahrnam may come as a confusing labyrinth of multiple layers for first time players, and the two bosses that inhabit it are some of the hardest bosses in terms of early game (the boss arena for both being particularly unfavourable to the players doesn't help either). But it doesn't feel "unfair." It is very punishing, yes, due to vials and bullets being consumables that don't recharge, but it is a hurdle that can be overcome. Unlike Dark Souls 2 where both the character growth system and the early level design actively forces the player to have more difficult time than they should, Bloodborne instead is expecting the players to catch up to it.

And when the players do catch up, it's a marvelous experience. The action is fast, tight and balanced just right to constantly reward the aggressiveness, but also punish going too far. That may be the general way of things in other Souls games too, but what Bloodborne does is that it allows the player to dance on that fine line between in a tighter sense. It expects a lot from the players, but it also rewards a lot. And there are plethora of smaller ways that the game offers to knock down the difficulty without making it seem like it takes away the agency from the player. It is a meticulously balanced game, and its level design takes the best of Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 DLCs.

Okay I kinda loved this game and kinda hated it. Loved: the aesthetics, the oddball comedy, the surrealist touches, and the gameplay, which has just the right amount of balance and variety to keep you engaged for ten hours or so.

Hated: the fact that all this game's excellent style and design is basically in service of...nothing. Based on the title you might expect Yuppie Psycho to have something to say about corporate culture, institutional dehumanization, upward mobility, bureaucracy...something! But the few promising gestures at satire in the beginning fade quickly into the background, and it becomes clear that this game is not really about yuppies (or psychos) at all, the developers just thought a sinister corporation would make a good setting for a survival horror game.

Which, fair. It is a good setting, and the developers do, as I said, knock it out of the park with the aesthetics. The horror is more conventional than the premise suggests (you won't get much commentary on the more mundane horrors of an office job), but well-done as these things go. The plot, however, is some hot nonsense. I understand the mystery-box style of storytelling they are going for here, and I'm definitely not averse to a little ambiguity or confusion, but the plot is just so obviously cobbled together from spare genre parts, it really feels like they had some cool character designs they wanted to use and just kinda tossed them in a story-blender. I dutifully earned every ending, clinging to a desperate hope that one of them, just one, would provide some faint sliver of thematic resolution, but it was not to be. Maybe the biggest flaw in the end is the flatness of the characters; everyone is colorful and quirky but no one is very human or memorable, which sadly dilutes what little message the game has.

That said, if you like horror, and you're in it more for the style than the substance, Yuppie Psycho is worth playing. Despite my reservations, I did enjoy it enough to play it to completion. I just wish the aftertaste wasn't so bitter.

The Pikmin platformer that Nintendo wishes they'd made.

That's a little unfair to Tinykin though, as it manages to stand out on its own merits - it's a genuinely good 3D collectathon platformer that looks and runs brilliantly and pulls you in with large, detailed but rarely overwhelming level design filled with interesting scenarios and some quite fun dialogue with the world's inhabitants. The game is also smart enough to realise that dealing with enemies can actually be a chore in this type of game and as such just does away with them which really helps the flow and allows for more exploration.

I'm a bit of a sucker for games where you play as a little guy in a large setting (especially a homestead) so I think this was always going to do well with me but it turned out to probably be my favourite game of the year so far.

I couldn't get very far with this game before getting absolutely fatigued with it but I think it utterly fails at capturing the aspect of ff7 I really like the most.

Other than the fact that the original is one of the most earnestly introspective games, had commentaries on nearly every archetype presented in the game, is chock full of content and plot with perfect pace, and manages to utterly demasculate and break down the shounen jrpg hero figure, the original final fantasy VII bucked the tone of the action hero fantasy by both playing up the heroism and swashbuckling with a thick, palpable layer of melancholic and innocent irony.

Irony is often something cynical, something too adult or hardened. A way of coping with the world. But the irony in ff7 was pure, a kind of return to the true nature of what people are. It's not judgmental, it doesn't have expectations, and it's not cynical or bitter. It's simply a sense of peace, with life, oneself, loss, defeat, heroics, struggle, hardship, passion, all the products of friction between a human being and the world around them.

The remake simply lacks that tonally. For the best possible example I can think, watch the moment in the original game near the beginning after the first bombing mission, where every exit of the screen Cloud tries to exit through, he gets cut off by troops and the player is presented with the choice of running or fighting at each turn. It's a straight swashbuckling scene, the hero is cornered at every turn and the choices are weighed against him over and over, and like some of those great heroic stories and films, the hero's not really in any danger; we've seen cloud oneshot those goons earlier with ease, it's purely an aesthetic situation. Yet, the music is utterly at conflict with the scene. It's somber, it's innocent, it's complicated, and very, very subtle. There's something amiss. The scene begs the player to expect a deconstruction, a demasculation, and the undoing of what people know and expect from the game without overtly stating it. It acts as the prelude for the game later changing its own writing and having the player reevaluate what it stands for.

I don't care about nomura ghosts, action combat, new scenes, or any other changes as long as the game gets that one aspect right. That one tone that only the original ever had. I couldn't detect it, so I gave up. I could be wrong, and maybe find that core spirit somewhere else in the game if I come back to it. Or maybe the remake just plain goes for something else, and maybe that's worth it in the end. Still, I feel something's missing.

Also a few other notes, the sidequests Suck ass. Going from ff14 ARR to 7r felt like I was moonlighting one job for an even shittier one. Not recommended!

All else said, that combat system is like the complete evolution of what kingdom hearts started on the ps2. I'm happy it's gotten this far. Mechanically this game plays like everything I wanted when I was 12.

Final fantasy has always been a game about putting all your ideas and the sum total of everything you have to say about a theme and design into one game. Every game in the series is both the first and final game in its own franchise. Those designs and ideas could have anything, any kinds of gameplay systems or plot ideas as long as it grandly tells a story with roleplaying and mechanics. I welcome the real time combat, as it's the series trying to understand and remix what else is out there and put its own spin on things by creating a newly aestheticized experience of combat. Final fantasy 20 might have no combat it in at all. Be ready for it!

This game is unimaginably horrible and it's baffling it's the hill so many are willing to die on. There is no enemy variety, which is for sure a good idea for a modern open world game. There is no spell variety either (26), which again certainly was a great idea for a modern rpg based solely around it's magic set at a magic school, but hey Harry Potter has always had a terrible magic system so ¯\(ツ)/¯. For reference Final Fantasy (1987 NES) has triple as many spells (60), and Skyrim a more modern open world game for comparison has over 100 AND both those games have multiple combat classes besides magic. The game will let you use the "unforgivable curses" but it has no morality system to give any meaningful consequences to your actions because according to the devs it would be "too judgmental on the game maker's part". The world is empty, which is always a problem with open world games (not remotely a fan of the genre tbh) and every door is a loading screen. The game is also a buggy mess and anyone saying otherwise is just lying, the game literally has Denuvo lmao. But none of this is surprising, ignoring the original author for a moment, every trailer made it look lackluster and it's made by the developers infamous for Disney tie-in shovelware.

And now for the elephant in the room... The game doubles down on all the racism and antisemitism of its source material, anyone saying Terfling had nothing to do with this game is bending the truth. The official Q&A for the game on their site says they worked closely with her team so it perfectly fits her world, and that it does a little too perfectly. The main premise is squashing a goblin rebellion riddled with antisemitism. The goblin rebellions are not new to the franchise, they are a thing mentioned in the books and expanded material as something the students learn in history class. And what were all the rebellions about? The lack or basic rights like using wands, and checks notes wizards attempting to enslave them "as house elves" but we’re supposed to believe they’re still the villains throughout the franchise?
Which brings us to the next topic, the house elves... As in the source material Hogwarts is run by slave labor and the franchise doesn't want us to look deeper into what that means, waving it off with "well they like it". But if wizards can attempt to enslave goblins as “house elves” what does that actually mean, what exactly is a “house elf” and why doesn’t the series creator want us to examine it? The head house elf at Hogwarts becomes a companion, so you don't actually get to own a slave but you still get one by proxy. The game also lets you decorate the Room of Requirement with mounted house elf heads, with how controversial this aspect of the books has always been idk who on the dev team didn’t think “maybe we shouldn’t keep the mounted head of a sapient creature decoration item”. Again none of this is surprising given the source material where they decorate houses with elf heads and the kids put little hats on during christmas, oh isn’t it so cute and whimsical? And the fact that one of the lead devs was a gamer gate youtuber (them stepping down was never going to divorce the game from these elements). The game is also a prequel set in the 1800s so it can't actually effectively deconstruct the issues with the source material, the goblins are still the anti-semetic bankers, the house elves are still slaves, and the ("good") wizards are still the good guys that have every right to oppress them. Just like Terflings own politics and the politics of the source material the game's message is about preserving the status quo, nothing meaningful can change and it shouldn’t cause we have a continuity to uphold damnit!
The game also throws in the series "first trans character" who they named "Sirona Ryan", this is a name of a Celtic goddess (as many people will point out in an attempt to ignore criticism, despite the origin not being the issue with the name) but just like "Cho Chang", "Anthony Goldstein" and "Kingsley Shacklebolt" it's certainly a choice out of all the Irish names to deliberately use that one for your first trans women. Sirona was also very obviously thrown in last minute in an attempt to save face and say the game was divorced from Terflings and her raging transphobia, but as you can see the game is quite the opposite.
But you know despite all that 9/10 IGN-ostalgia am I right!

In conclusion this game is truly the “Legacy” of this franchise and I can see why fans say “this is everything I ever wanted in a Harry Potter game” because this is all the franchise really truly is. I certainly hope everyone who bought the deluxe edition for the sole reason to spite a minority the author is actively harming daily love their overpriced shovelware and fuck off. Remember yall were the same people in the 90s who hated and wanted to boycott the books for being “satanic” and "progressive". (spoiler alert they never were)

And for anyone who can’t let go of the franchise because of “childhood” and cause “it’s so magical”, let me recommend “Earthsea” by Ursula K. Le Guin, “Discworld” by Terry Pratchett, and “Percy Jackson” by Rick Riordian. None of those series are perfect and have their fair share of problems, but they were written by authors who actually cared, who actually took criticism and grew from it. You can let go and grow too.