is this really a win for klonoa? namco puppeteering his corpse with the prospect of future games that may not deliver or even get made? i'd rather this series die if this is the quality we can expect from it.

nevermind the obnoxious practice of holding series' hostage like this, it's deeply upsetting that the only compromise we get is a butchered representation of what came before. because god forbid people play old playstation games that "look dated" next to other games releasing today despite there not being a good way to experience how the original games were presented to begin with. you'd think more people would push back against this; especially considering the cries for more klonoa content from those who grew up with this series, but to my surprise basically everyone seems to be eating this up no questions asked. every few years this happens, an old series gets a spark of life in miserable fashion and sometimes it leads to something greater, but even with the best outcome i think its a bad precedent to set. sure crash bandicoot 4 crushed all expectations and is in the running for best game in the entire series, but it rubs me the wrong way that it came as a result of scrubbing away the hard work done by the original developers back in the late 90's.

i understand that much of this stems from publishers more than developers (it's not like they've been very forward thinking when it comes to the preservation of old games to begin with) but when companies demand stringent deadlines with no regard to quality control of course the product will come out half baked, no matter how much love was behind the wheel of it. i don't have a bird's eye view on the development of this project, but i can't imagine it was enjoyable or flexible to work under. even if their hearts were in the right place, theres no chance they had the tools needed to really do this series the justice it deserves.

no matter the circumstances though, this is what we're left with. a botched collection of beloved titles that, for the foreseeable future, is the only way to comfortably play these for most people. i'm not upset that it's overpriced or not stuffed with extraneous crap to justify the cost, i'm upset that this is the standard for preservation the industry is setting for itself. who cares about the game's legacy and how it impacted people, just slap a name on it to excite fans looking for to rekindle memories of better days gone by.

best case scenario we get a new sequel out of this collection and it really delivers on fan expectations, but is that really the lesson to be learned here? treat the past as a frivolous step to success so we can move onto the next new shiny thing? i can't help but feel deeply cynical over the industry if this is how we think we should celebrate the past. klonoa deserved better

I can't believe EA came up with something so original!

There is so much I love about this game, and the parkour mechanics are a good place to start. The moveset is intuitive and tight, the controls mostly feel smooth, and the first-person camera manages to viscerally capture the 'feel' of parkour for a couch potato like me to enjoy, alternating between being exhilarating and vertigo-inducing. You also know that a game mechanic is effective when it starts to bleed over into your real-life experiences, and that's what happened here; Faith's instinct and insight on how to get around the environments is represented in-game as various key objects being highlighted in red, and when I went out after a particularly long play session I walked a path I'd walked many times before and noticed some pipes and AC units I'd never paid attention to before.

The aesthetic and character designs are great - I particularly like that Faith is a badass Asian female lead who they didn't sexualize at all, and her design reminds me somewhat of a modern-day Ayame from the Tenchu series (another of my favorite characters). But let's be real here, the best 'character' in the game is the city itself. A dystopia in utopian make-up, with its beautiful skylines and starkly sterile colors (even the plants look more white than green!), with buildings everywhere but seemingly no one in them but cops, the City of Glass takes on a life all of its own. The design of the city parkour sections is incredible, and while there is a key that you can use to point yourself in the direction of your end goal, the level layout does a really good job at subtly directing your eyes towards where you need to go anyway!

This makes it all the more a shame that some aspects of the game just feel 'off', for lack of a better word. The fact that this game was so unique and fresh makes a certain lack of polish inevitable, but I can't pretend it didn't affect my general gameplay experience. For one, certain moves were rather unreliable; wall-running is rather finicky, and there were plenty of sequences in the final act of the game which required near-perfect wallrunning in order to progress. The difficulty curve was all over the place, which I can excuse, but the placement of checkpoints didn't seem very well thought-out. One particular moment stands out to me where I must have died and retried dozens of times: I pressed a button to open a door (which took about 5 seconds to open), walked through the door and was killed within 5 seconds, and was sent back to before the button press, ending up in a very unpleasant loop of playing five seconds and waiting five seconds.

I also feel, given the game's laserlike focus on parkour, that it could have leaned even more into it. Just prior to the final act, the game made a big deal about introducing a new enemy type - a parkour cop that could follow you around the rooftops - and that idea was strangely underutilized in favor of a more action-based final act that mostly took place indoors and shone an unwanted spotlight on the game's gunplay mechanics which are functional but not much more.

As a final point, I wish the game weren't so linear in the paths it sets out for you. There are of course different ways to tackle the various obstacles, and the robust parkous mechanics lend themselves to all kinds of insane speedrun strats. But there are almost no instances of branching paths to get from Point A to Point B, and it really kills the illusion of freedom for me. I'm aware that it's sequel/reboot somewhat botched the transition to open-world, but I would have loved some form of open-world mode in this game because the moment-to-moment gameplay was so good.

The relative failure of the sequel, combined with a seeming lack of spiritual sequels, mean that Mirror's Edge still feels fresh 14 years later, but also means that (AFAIK) we don't have a game that transplants the wonderful spirit of this game into a more refined experience. Mirror's Edge is one of a kind, both for better and for worse.

(PSA! I nearly gave up on this game due to motion sickness at first. If you have the same problem, switch graphic quality to 'low' and remove the reticle - it saved my playthrough and I hope it helps someone!)

Higurashi is at its strongest when it is concerned with trauma, both on a personal and a communal level. When it understands the effects trauma can have on someone, and when it dearly wishes to find some way out of the cycles of violence that can so often cause traumatised individuals, groups and generations to, knowingly or unknowingly, condemn others to trauma also. Whilst these are words that don't always apply to Higurashi on a broader level, in its exploration of these themes Higurashi feels both mature and astute; there are so many moments when someone's reaction to the trauma they've experienced or are experiencing feels painfully, heartbreakingly, incisively on-point.

This element of Higurashi is so successful in part because Ryukishi has a deep empathy for his characters. He has an unwillingness to wholly discard someone for their misdeeds, and a deep desire to look inside people and see what makes them tick, what makes people choose the paths they do, and wants you to understand this also. There's one particular instance where I can't bring myself to be onboard with his hardline approach of "hate the sin and not the sinner", and this approach feels to me incongruous with the fact that there are characters in the story that are just wholly irredeemable (Satoko's uncle, for instance), but it's hard to deny there's something compelling about how much Ryukishi cares, and him asking you to try and care just a little bit more too.

Beyond all of this, Higurashi is concerned with generational divides, small village cultures on the edge of being wiped out by modernisation and a fury at the heartlessness of bureaucracy and how it leaves people to drown, with paranoia and fear and the kind of deep, unrelenting love that would have you tear apart everything for someone, with hope and despair and miracles. Higurashi is also concerned with friendship, and despite "the power of friendship" being one of the most worn out and uninspired themes for anime, manga and (I assume) visual novels it actually manages to make such a deeply impassioned plea towards this that I was just entirely hooked in by Higurashi's beating heart.

These are the highs of Higurashi, but it is also ultimately an often-uneven experience. There is a small amount of content here that is indefensible, and which I'm shocked I don't see more condemnation of. Basically any scene set in Angel Mort is just a lock to star creepy sexualisation of teenage girls played up for humour and treated as just completely acceptable, multiple side-character adults in the story make occasional creepy comments along these lines also, and a key character, Irie, is obsessed with the idea of putting one of the game's youngest characters in a maid outfit and marrying her. This content accounts for maybe 3% of the game if I had to guess, so a very minor amount, but it's all just wretched. It's so bizarre too because elsewhere Higurashi is able to render its women with remarkable depth, taking common character archetypes and ultimately subverting just about every expectation you enter with about them in ways that feel natural and which let you really understand how each character ticks by the end of the story, and yet despite this it just can't consistently Be Normal about them at all and just has to have its creepy moments. A couple of the Angel Mort scenes genuinely made me feel a bit ill to read and I would not blame someone for just refusing to read Higurashi because of this content.

More broadly, Higurashi is also desperately in need of a harsher editor at points. Higurashi's eight chapters combined are over one and a half million words long, or longer than reading the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy three times over, and took me 100 hours to finish (which I gather is faster than most people, even). During my readthrough I had multiple extended breaks, which is partially just that my life has been busy this past year, but partially that Higurashi has a habit of stretching out its slice-of-life scenes, confused metaphor-laden inner-monologues and moments of hopeless despair far beyond their point being effectively made. My final break from Higurashi lasted four months, only for me to discover upon my return that the final chapter, beyond a certain point, starts to descend into what feels at times like third-rate fanfiction, and it left me wishing that Ryukishi knew how to communicate his story a little bit more succinctly rather than stretching things on beyond the point where all the intrigue had been quelled and all the questions answered.

A mixed bag, then, but one with a lot to say and a lot it believes in, with an amazing sense of mystery, and some lovable characters that have a lot more going on that you first suspect. Wildly imperfect, at times exhausting or even just reprehensible, but fascinating and with a lot of heart behind its horror. I can't say that I would ever recommend Higurashi, but I did get a lot from the experience.

The most terrifying, oppressive, claustrophobic experience I've had in the medium is no surprise a stalking disturbing message of an encroaching patriarchal faith. Heather wants nothing to do with it, and neither will I. Monsters of repressed memories and physical/sexual trauma stalk the corridors, but catharsis is found in making them all Burn. Aborting god is probably the rawest turn on killing god tbh. I personally got lost in the woods of the threads near the end but I think on just initial reflection that there's a large point in there about an incomprehensibly massive societal issue that makes it difficult to form into something tangible (e.g. male gaze and abuse). It's also like a crystalized end to everything the series culminated in before, tying everything back together. Genuinely super well crafted, and a crazy good final message. That cycle of disparaging hatred is still overturned by the real spark of sympathy, we just want love.

ive been a fan of .hack//SIGN since i was around 12 but i never played the games because i didn't really expect it to be much like it, plus i had heard a lot of criticism of these games as not really using the mmo conceit for any real purposeful ends. id definitely say those criticisms were unfounded at least to me, the desktop-login-game-and-back loop really makes use of the conceit on really interesting narrative structural levels, which is really helped by how pickup/putdown the core loop is, dungeons are 10-20 minutes long and I never had to grind save once before the last dungeon because the level spike was huge but not unmanageable. aesthetics are gorgeous, the music is good and makes sense for both the in-game and desktop ambiances but it's definitely not on the level of SIGN which is Yuki Kajiura's best work imo, but that's fine, this is going for a different texture, less introspective and more social, which is really reflected in how different Kite is from Tsukasa as protagonists, both work in terms of what the texts are doing. it's good. makes a strong case for the three further games.

I don't think I've mentally flitted around so much in my opinion of a game over 100 hours of playtime but after everything from hatred and exasperation to respect and admiration I've ended up feeling pretty positive indeed on my experience.

It's a hard game, and one I didn't think I'd particularly enjoy especially having bounced off Demon's Souls and Bloodborne quite heavily, but maybe it was the fact that I actually spent money on this (rather than getting it as a 'freebie' through PS Plus) but I persevered and had myself a good time. The feeling of satisfaction when you finally beat a boss is honestly hard to match, and the critical path 'dungeons' are easily the best part of the game - it makes me think that I need to give these previous games (and the Dark Souls series in general) another shake.

Did the open world help here? Maybe - I'm not sure it necessarily added that much to what was on offer other than having somewhere else to go if you got stuck, and I also don't think it's a particularly well designed one, but there were enough interesting places to discover that I went off the beaten track more times that I expected to. As for the story and lore of the world though, I was left underwhelmed - it was fine, but I knew I wasn't getting invested in the hows and whys of the main 'story' or the sidequests.

At the end of the day though, I was surprised. Surprised that I'd had such a good time after dying a lot and having to deal with a lot of minor frustrations caused by seemingly purposefully obtuse design decisions. Despite going through phases of loving and hating the game in equal measure at various points, when it works, Elden Ring is a great experience.

fromsoft's strangest, most disturbing and effortlessly surprising game since demon's souls, and one that feels like it absolutely should not exist

i have more issues with elden ring's gameplay than most other souls games but i seriously think this thing has a lot of fromsoft's best, most haunting art & direction ever, and it's a real success compared to the exhaustingly rote version of souls seen in ds3

i like it a lot :)

Every other cutscene in this game made me feel like I was losing my goddamn mind. Consider that there's a reason there aren't many Japanese games about WWII. Additionally, consider why anime tropes might feel out of place in a story which more or less presents itself as the greatest hits of WWII. You may be starting to get the picture as to how certain minute aspects of the game start to overshadow the parts we're obviously supposed to be focusing on.

That being said, with the right mindset this game is genuinely fascinating because it’s incredibly well-executed for what it is. The game as a whole frames itself as a depiction of a book written about your SRPG squad, which not only sets up the methodical and highly controlled representation of the battles, but also an enormous number of cutscenes and extraneous text. While it’s not exactly half-and-half or anything, there’s a ton of the game which does nothing but tell you about the game’s chronology and world, and it’s just begging to be picked apart and held up to the real-world events they’re trying to invoke.

Also! I feel a need to say that this is an extremely playable game on its own, its class matchups are intuitive once you get the hang of it, the progression systems are engaging and robust, the battles themselves are delightfully positional, it’s great. Really my only complaint is that the game expects some form of grinding from the player at some points, which I think we can all agree only happens when the developers are told that the game needs to be longer for some arbitrary reason.

If that seems like an exceedingly surface-level review of all of the game mechanics, that’s because it is. It’s not what really drove me to irrevocably sink 60 hours of my finite life (which admittedly isn’t that much in terms of RPGs but existentially terrifies me anyways) into getting through all of its content. Like, the systems are cool, I like how they make this whole new spin on SRPG mechanics as a whole by making the world’s most complex menu in the form of an intuitive third-person shooter. But truth be told, I kept playing the game because after each mission, it would unlock a block of text for me tucked away in a glossary which would tell me about some insane social darwinist shit and make that a central aspect of the lore. There’s nothing else like it.

With BOTW 2 allegedly coming out this year, I realized that I have a pretty big Zelda backlog I need to get through beforehand. I mean, I haven't even played BOTW 1, and the only 3D Zelda I've played are Wind Waker and Majora's Mask 3D. So I'm going to be dedicating the next couple months to playing through several Zelda games, not because I need to know the lore, just because I really want to see the evolution of this series over the years, and why some games get the reputations they get.

The first thing that really pops out about Ocarina of Time is it's ambition and presentation. In my head, when you wanted to make a "cinematic experience" during this era, with big cutscenes that constantly change camera shots, a large cast of characters, and a story that feels mythological in its scope, you did that kind of stuff on the PS1. And yet they pull it off on the N64 to an impressive degree. I understand why people were head over heels in love with this game on release, it conveys the grandness of this world and story so well both in cutscenes and in the environment itself. It's funny, nowadays the word "feels like a movie" is used as an insult, but Ocarina of Time definitely borrows from film and anime in order to present its story and world, but in ways that never betray the gameplay and only enhance it. I mean, z-targeting literally adds letterboxes to the screen and it does usually make fights feel way cooler. You're doing backflips, blocking attacks, trading blows, and while the camera occasionally freaks and ruins the moment, a lot of times it really enhances the drama and scale of these fights, whether it be giant bosses or an enemy with their own sword and shield. The Dark Link fight would be raw as fuck if it were in a movie, but it's in a game and it's raw as fuck to play.

The cutscene direction really gives off this feeling of excitement the developers had over finally being able to tell a story like this, a whole new dimension for expression. There are some cutscenes where the camera just fucking swings all over the place, some that use first-person, some that cut rapidly between different shots and angles, it really has the energy of "look at what we fucking did!" I've gone on about the presentation too much already, but it can't be understated how good this game is at making this story and setting feel huge, like I said at the beginning, mytological. Ocarina of Time obviously borrows a lot from Link to the Past, but ends up feeling more like the sacred text that every other Zelda game has to respond to.

Despite this grand feeling, Hyrule Field itself kind of feels both big and small at the same time. Like, it does take a while to get from place to place on foot, but also it's very funny that Hyrule Castle is like a couple minutes away on foot from Kokiri Forest. Coming back to this feels like when you go back to your elementary school and feel like a giant, which is pretty fitting considering the whole premise of the game. It's kind of genius, the game is all about seeing the world in two different ages, the things that change and the things that stay the same despite everything, and interacting with the game at different points in the player's life changes how the player sees it. Part of me feels like I'll never really completely "get" this game the way its greatest fanatics do because I wasn't there when it came out and I didn't interact with it the way they did and still continue to.

But the thing about playing Ocarina of Time right now is that, well its kind of hard to get through its most obtuse moments knowing that later on there are games that fix them. Obviously its kind of foolish to hold an old game like this to modern standards, but throughout my playthrough there were little moments that just made me think "man, I really wanna move on to the next game". Part of it might be the fact that I know so much of what happens in this game already due to hearing about it from other people, whereas games like Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword are mostly unknown to me outside of very basic parts of their premises. Especially in the beginning, when you don't have the conveniences of adulthood, the urge to drop the game was honestly something I had to fight. While the dungeons have some cool moments and real nail their atmosphere, I didn't find many of them mechanically interesting until you get to the future.

Another thing that bothered me was the lack of substantial side stuff. This is probably a selfish expectation to put on this game, but Wind Waker and Majora's Mask have a huge amount of side things to do, in Majora you could argue that the side objectives are just as important as the main ones. But I found myself constantly going "Okay what side stuff is there to do before the next dungeon...oh nothing I guess". I love WW and Majora for their side content, so this ended being one of my biggest turn-offs for this game. I was also surprised how there wasn't that much interaction between the past and future timelines, in terms of doing something in the past to affect the future, outside of the actual story of course. I mean, there were definitely moments that did that, the Spirit Temple being one of my favorite instances of that, but I don't know, I guess I thought it would be more like the Dark World in LTTP.

But the game does do a really good job of making Adult Link feel so much more empowering and in control than Child Link. You go from every adult talking down to you to basically every NPC falling in love with you, you actually have a ride instead of walking everywhere like a high schooler with no license, and you can wear red clothes instead of the clothes your tree dad told you to wear. Plenty of great writing has been done about how Ocarina of Time portrays growing up and having to leave the innocence of childhood, so I won't try to write a worse version of those reviews. I'll just say it's all really effective and smartly done, and it being done in an N64 game with, compared to other large game stories at the time, not a particularly long script, is kind of mind-blowing.

I'm glad I finally finished this game, but I understand why I put it down several times in the past. It's a fairly bumpy road but I understand why it has the status it does, and why someone could still find a lot of value in it even when more modernized takes on this game exist. Some stray thoughts that I couldn't fit in the review:

- No wonder so many kids had this game invade their nightmares, it's terrifying and isn't afraid to just show you some fucked up shit. Honestly huge respect for never holding back on the horror and grotesque aspects.

- Water Temple wasn't as bad as it could be, but that's unfortunately because I saw a video of someone analyzing it before playing this, and while I didn't remember everything in the video, a lot of the things they brought up helped me navigate it in a way most people were not able to. Still died to Dark Link and still had a "damn it I need to find a key" moment so I still had some of The Water Temple Experience.

- Music is firing on all cylinders in this game, Kondo shows an insane range here between the Ocarina songs, the overworld themes, and the dungeon themes. Love in general how otherworldly and intimidating the dungeons present themselves as. Also being able to pitch bend on the Ocarina is so cool, it really feels like an instrument, which is something Wind Waker honestly missed out on.

When you grow up having a tumultuous relationship with your parents, houses become distorted. Creaking floorboards and door handles, rustling keyholes, deep sighs and stares, tones of voice. All signals your brain receives as alarms. Danger. Be quiet. Poke your head into the hallway, but don't be seen. Rest your ear in the door and listen closely. Don't come out.
The house the Finch family lived in is empty, but also isn't. There's no one here, but some things remained. Their favorite things: be they toys, trophies, or photos. Their history is embedded into every wall of the house, sometimes even their deaths are etched into its architecture.
I have lived in many places throughout my life, unlike the Finch family. But still, things remained. I look back to all the houses I've lived in and yet everything feels the same, because I remember what remained. Because it followed me to every house. It lives in the creaking floorboards and rustling keyholes. It lives in the stares and the sighs. Because a house, a home, is not just somewhere you live in. It transcends the physical plane and becomes something much more abstract and hard to explain. I feel like I have always lived in the same house, even though that's not the case. They begin to blend in my mind as a towering structure constructed by memories that feel too familiar.

When you're a kid, the relationship between your parents and grandparents can seem a little whimsical. But when you start growing up, you begin to see the cracks. You see the lies, you see the fighting, and little kid tears just can't fix it anymore. And eventually, the big fight breaks out and you choose a side. Things change forever. You start to learn more of the history of your mom's life. You learn about the abuse, and of the things that remained and eventually escalated into this new reality you've been trust into.

And as time goes by, things get worse. And when things get worse, you start to see what remained with your own eyes, because it's happening to you. The fighting, the screaming, the belittling. Except you're not the observer anymore.

You try getting tough. You also begin to lie and scream and fight.
You try to make distance. To avoid small talk or eye contact all together.
You think you're gonna be different, that you won't be like that.

But you start doing this with the wrong people. To people you love and care about. And this is where the "curse" is born. It takes form out of that cyclical abuse and begins to seep into everything you do. It molds your life into a nightmare and you become convinced. You start to believe there is a curse, that this is how it's gonna play out no matter what. That how you are is predestined: if everyone else couldn't beat it, how could you? The curse takes a hold of you. And it won't let go.


But something eventually happens. There's a change for the better. Maybe life at home is better, we who remain start working out the issues, maybe we find solace in others and we start to realize it doesn't have to be like this. It never had to be.
Our life doesn't have to be dictated by who our parents are, who they think we have to be, or any stupid "curse". The cycle can be broken, be it by our parents or us. And when we break it, what matters is what we leave behind. What remains.

It would take me an unreasonable amount of time to explain all of the reasons I love this game, so I won't even try to do so for the time being. The long and short of it is that I see it as this sort of theoretical maximum amount of purpose you can wring out of modernist game design. The basic concept of the story is clearly informed by the need to Make A Shin Megami Tensei Game, ie it must 1) be conducive to brutally difficult boss fights, 2) be highly allegorical and religious, 3) be exceedingly dark, and 4) contain at least 3 philosophically distinct story routes.

This boxes the game in to some extent, but beyond the basics it sets out the game becomes this genuinely insane story pulling together Mahayana sutras and the book of Job into this profoundly depressing psychological challenge addressing a unique range of topics (themes that jump out to me personally include fascism, sexuality, the need for metanarratives, and powerlessness). Since these ideas were already set up to work within traditional game design, you get some of the most playable JRPG battles I've ever seen and some of the tightest balance between those and the dungeon crawling out there to totally reinforce it the whole way through. The boss fights in particular are a highlight, with each one having some immediately interesting strategy they run on you which you can only get past by keeping your wits about you.

It's a slick game with writing better than most novels I've read, cutscenes more stylish and expressive than many movies I've seen, and design more meticulously balanced than essentially anything else in the medium. On a meta level, it also speaks to the limits of the SMT franchise, the requirements I listed out earlier in this review of being "the next Shin Megami Tensei game". It fundamentally tries to show the player that these can only go so far, even seeming to tacitly encourage them to want to essentially destroy them. However, even in that ending, the game ultimately puts its faith back into it. It's like when I'm playing this game I'm hearing rumblings of something which would finally make me less than embarrassed to admit my love of games, that I might live to see a game which is self-aware enough to deconstruct its own mechanics and build them up into something greater than the sum of its parts. Nocturne stops just barely shy of this; it's an anticipation of a masterpiece that I hope to play someday.

Spoiler-free

I didn't want to do another list format review but I have so many thoughts about so many different elements here that I'm not going to even bother trying to try writing this out. Oh well! I didn't intend to binge this game but when I started this review I'd put 40 hours into the game over 2.5 days. You'll see a lot of comparisons to DS3 as it's the most recent entry (and the one most fresh in my mind).

- Don't be fooled by the name, it's Dark Souls 4. The bones here are clearly DS3's, but if you're a Souls fan who hated DS3 you should still give it a shot - most of DS3's most objectionable traits are either irrelevant here (due to being a different IP) or have been buffed out. There's a surprising amount of DS2 DNA here as well, from the theming, to the gameplay (power-stancing), and the exploration (Pharros' Lockstones)

- I'm not the type to get riled up by the idea of Souls games getting easier in the first place, but there are so many QOL improvements here that make the game better to play without necessarily being easier. Changing your character's name/appearance at any time, modifying armors to remove cloaks/capes, changing weapon/scaling affinity at any bonfire (without grinding materials!), more throwables/weapon arts blurring the line between melee users and mages. There are so many more options here that allow for more creativity without turning the game into a joke.

- Good GOD the environments in this game. DS already had a way of making you feel tiny, but the sense of scale here triggers something ancient in your brain. Climbing a mountain for hours only to reach the top and see walls as tall as modern skyscrapers overpowers the part of my brain responsible for video game logic and triggers an instinctive feeling of unease. I've played many games, but FromSoft is the only developer capable of eliciting this reaction.

- The new system that lets you chain successful blocks into a followup attack makes defensive playstyles a little more interactive/interesting without simply parry spamming. If you get good at it you can turn some bosses with lower poise into a meme, but it's not going to carry you through the required bosses to advance the plot.

- So far I haven't seen anything as wacky as some of the DLC weapons in DS3 (Aquamarine Dagger, Crow Quills, Door Shield, etc.) save for one weapon. It would be nice to have crazier stuff (assuming I'm not just missing it) but the fact that you can freely swap weapon arts at any bonfire single-handedly makes up for it. Edit: There's plenty of visually weird content here, but nothing as mechanically weird as the above. EDIT: These exist, you just have to do some serious exploring to find them. With the number of weapons in the game, you're going to spend a lot of your time finding boring straight swords, but finding the shield that fires a cannonball or the buckler that unleashes a poisonous snake bite will always be worth the time investment.

- Instead of having DS3's paired weapons, dual-wielding two weapons of the same type gives you the paired weapon attacks on L1 - power-stancing is BACK. I'm dual-wielding twinblades atm (more blades per blade) and I don't think I've ever felt this cool in a FromSoft game.

- Flails! I will always advocate for adding flails to any game but nobody ever does. If I could've made any addition to DS3 it would've been a flail and now I've got my wish in the best form possible.

- Movement is a lot better. The dismounted jump isn't going to blow any minds but it's absolutely better than the absolute joke of a jump in previous games. I've seen people complain about how they chose to "add stealth" to the game and the reality is that stealth already existed in the Souls games, the crouch just makes it less tedious (instead of slowly pressing the analog stick).

- A small negative: With the open-world, the leadups to bosses don't have the same mounting tension that a single, themed level could (think Anor Londo before O&S, or the Grand Archives before the Twin Princes). Story bosses make up for this by being hunkered down in some elaborate complex, field bosses usually make up for it through some other kind of spectacle.

- Multiplayer! You can now set multiple passwords at once for playing with different groups, and there are designated markers to place summoning signs around (and an item to automatically send yours there). Haven't done any PVP yet, will have to revisit this, but co-op is easier than ever and not getting invaded in singleplayer (unless you opt-in via an item) is really quite nice.

- Crafting isn't nearly as bad as I expected and can basically be ignored wholesale if you want to. This will be a dream for ranged players, though, as my crafting menu is like 80% different types of arrows. Only complaint here is that I am now constantly running into situations where I'm poisoned and I can neither make nor buy the anti-poison item yet.

- Bosses have all been fun and fair so far (cleared 2 of the big 5, have fought 3) and have a clear flow of combat. Nothing really feels like bullshit. Unless something serious changes in the last region (and change) I've left to discover I'd say this is the best overall batch of bosses yet and the fights themselves look gorgeous too, from the stages to the movesets. Needs more Royal Rat Authority. EDIT: I probably wouldn't say this is my favorite batch of bosses any longer - large bosses in large arenas leave you feeling like you're constantly running to them instead of hitting them, and late bosses especially have a problem with large AOE attacks that get spammed (which is a bit tedious). It's still a mostly good set of bosses, but the experience is wildly front-loaded, since the bosses that aren't tedious to fight often get re-used elsewhere which ruins the sense of novelty a little bit.

- Lastly - NPCs and hub area: I really like this hub area! They have some intriguing interactions with each other and it's got me genuinely interested in their stories. NPCs in general seem to have more to say on average although I suspect it'll be a lot harder to finish their quests without a guide unless you're routinely visiting areas you've already cleared. Favorites so far are Millicent, and the place that gives you invasion quests that makes me nervous 24/7 even though combat is disabled there.

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EDIT: Everything after this point was added after finishing the game. I still stick by everything I wrote above, but if you'd like more in the way of criticisms, this might be what you're looking for. Still keeping things spoiler-free.

- Completed the game around level 130 after 100 hours exactly - this is at a pretty leisurely pace (plenty of coop, plenty of exploring) but by no means a completionist playthrough. My stats are all over the place (no more than 40 in anything, except for 50 Vigor) so you could probably do this a lot earlier with an actual coherent build.

- NPC questlines are still fantastic. I've fully finished Millicent's, Hyetta's, Fia's, and Ranni's, with one of these being especially notable for unlocking an ending, a whole new section of the map, and a kickass boss fight.

- I don't really need a quest log, but as someone who didn't think to keep a journal or anything about where I've run across these NPCs, I do wish I could at least look back on a log of things they've said so I could try to find them at future locations. I also think it would be nice to have some kind of marker that shows me whether or not I've beaten the boss at the end of a cave/catacombs/etc (instead of fast travelling there and seeing if I'm allowed to fast travel out - not the fastest solution!).

- It really feels like they want you to run some kind of hybrid build this time around - running pure dex/str/quality feels like you're really handicapping yourself, especially given how many melee weapons have relatively high fai/int requirements.

-The game really undersells how important it is to kill the white scarab beetles. They often have some stupid good Ash of War abilities that you can get for 5 seconds of time and two R1s. Absolutely goofy. I just ran right past so many of these things because I remember it being explained as "oh they replenish your flasks and shit!"

- It's still nice not being invaded when playing solo, but PVP is pretty miserable for invaders. It's sort of balanced out by the fact that invaders can run some of the busted madness/bleed builds (or that one bugged deathblight build) with the intention of using it in PVP, but I've seen plenty of gank squads in my limited attempts at PVP and that shit always sucks.

- The bosses continue being great for the most part, but the pacing is a little weird as the end basically makes you complete several bosses rapid-fire. Most of the most annoying boss mechanics are limited to optional bosses, but the late game bosses love AOE-ground-pound-bullshit which is pretty annoying, even if you learn to deal with it.

- There's a fairly major change in world state towards the end (similar to the arrival of night in Bloodborne) that fucks with how you use bonfires in one region of the map. It results in some really genuinely intriguing story beats, especially in the hub, but most annoying is how it messes with your ability to play co-op. I assume using the "send sign to summoning pools" thing is how you work around this, but sometimes the summoning pools are placed strangely. Whatever! EDIT: It's not! You're just boned if your friend wants to play co-op in the area most affected by the world state change.

- It is so easy to upgrade weapons in this game. I've managed to get 9 or 10 weapons to +9 or +24 (depending on what kind of upgrade materials they use - basically one step short of being maxed out either way). It takes a LOT of runes if you're buying them from the Maiden Husks, and the bell bearings to enable buying them are often only made available in the late game, but the ability to just straight up buy your way to an upgraded weapon is a lifesaver, especially if you're trying out a new build.