corbitgun
2017
Single player is a huge step down from the first game. Multiplayer is still frustrating to play because of no ways to effectively communicate with my team. Just play the octo-expansion.
2022
Literally this game would be way better if I could communicate with players via voice chat or other means instead of having to use the NSO app that nobody uses to play it. Being unable to communicate effectively makes Salmon Run and Ranked so frustrating to play. Fortnite has voice chat and way more kids play that than this game. There is no excuse. Single player campaign is pretty fun though.
Update: replayed the game again and lowered my score from a 5/10 to a 2/10. After learning about how I'm actually supposed to play the game, I encountered a new problem in which the game is now repetitive and boring. So all the positive things I had to say about some of the boss fights are retroactively nullified. Almost everything about the game is a regression from the first two games. Story sucks, gameplay sucks, the UI is somehow worse than the Wii game, the objective marker doesn't actually tell you how to get where you're supposed to go and is somehow worse than the objective arrow from the first game on the Wii, the world does not feel anywhere near as grand as the Bionis and Mechonis in the first game or Mira in X, I'd make the argument that the art direction in general is not as good as X and definitely not as good as the Definitive Edition of the first game, the character designs are extremely Incohesive with Torna along with a bunch of rare blades feeling like they belong in different games (reminder that Pyra and Malos are supposed to be siblings), the game resorts to extremely pandering bullshit even in scenes that are supposed to be serious, and locking story content behind a gacha system is such a horrible idea I hope that whoever at Monolith Soft came up with that got fired. The only things I enjoy about this game are the music, the world being kinda fun to explore, some of the designs of the rare blades and I guess Torna even though they all feel like they belong in different games, and Nia, who is really bogged down by ending up orbiting around Rex's dick like Pyra and Mythra along with her ears being backwards, that's such a stupid design decision, but these do not carry a game that is fundamentally bad in almost every other way. I dropped the game after getting Poppi QT. The point in which I should've dropped the game was during that stupid filler arc about Gormotti orphans trying to stop a rag-tag group of bandits from attacking the most militarized city of Gormott so they can introduce Roc. To this day I have no idea how this game has the fanfare that it gets. I feel like I've played a completely different game.
2017
Way better successor to System Shock 2 than the first Bioshock. Much more thought provoking writing and way better game design when it comes to encouraging problem solving. Flying around in space is also extremely fun. Great art direction too. I'd say it's Arkane's best game.
Boggles my mind that the devs thought that the best direction to go with for the expansion was to make a rougelike where you're playing the same levels over and over and over again when all they needed to do was just add more levels, add more mechanics, expand on the story, and add more challenge modes. Adding powerups to start with a weapon right from the start of each level screams that the devs strongly misunderstood what made the game so fun. I want to feel like an action movie star that pulls off the impossible when the odds seem like they're against me, not a super soldier. Just play the challenge modes in the original instead of playing this garbage.
2016
Gameplay is basically perfect. I feel so cool whenever I rotate my body to dodge a bullet. I hope there'll be a real sequel with a lot more content.
It's a love letter to all of video games: a celebration of the some of the best of the best video games have to offer all packaged in one of the best fighting games of all time. Everyone is here! You can feel the love oozing from this game with the levels inspired by all these games, the reprised music, the spirit battles inspired by different characters from all these games, and all the trophies you can collect including the Pokémon and assist trophies. I find fighting games to generally be inaccessible to me as I feel they require a significant time investment for me to even understand the mechanics of a character before can even practice on getting good with them. Smash Bros as a series solves this problem by providing simple yet extremely deep gameplay. It's my go to party game if I want to play with friends for this reason. But let's be real, you don't need me telling you why this game is great. You probably already know by now.
2019
Despite the few duds within the main story of this 100+ hour game, Persona 5 has some of the best sociopolitical commentary in any piece of media ever made. Anyone that's at least a little bit knowledgeable about societal issues within Japan would know that the villains in this game are reflective of very real issues that exist that stem from the very cultural foundations of their culture. Very few pieces of media I've consumed have been so scathing of the culture it was born out of. Even then, I've yet to see something that goes into so much depth when it comes to the trauma these societal issues would cause to a person as well as how one would learn how to overcome it. The Phantom Thieves as well as most of the other confidants are extremely fleshed out characters, all with unique and memorable personalities. Even with Haru, whose arc could've been done WAY better still has a lot going for her. It also has what I consider to be the most tasteful portrayal of neurodivergence that I've ever experienced in a piece of media ever with Futaba Sakura. Everything that makes her different from her peers is celebrated and is portrayed as a unique strength that compliments her fellow thieves, especially in the game's climax. It's extremely meaningful to me as someone with ADHD. She has become my favorite character of all time. Everything else about the game is great. Some of the best turn-based gameplay, one of the best video game soundtracks of all time, some of the best usage of level design as storytelling, and the best UI design in any RPG I've played. Everything about the way the game is presented is slick. I was really surprised when I read just how much was added to this game compared to the original version of P5. The improvements made to this game are much more substantial than the improvements made in Persona 4 Golden. Some of these really should've been in the game to begin with, especially Akechi's new confidant. I'm honestly really glad that this was how I played the game for the first time because of it. The new arc in Royal also has one of the best final arcs, boss fights, and endings in any video game ever, and it reinforces what the characters have learned in the story as well as the confidants in the most spectacular way possible. It also challenges the beliefs of the characters in a much more thought provoking way than the original ending did. I've you've already beaten the original version of Persona 5, play this. If you haven't yet, play this.
2013
One of the most unhinged AAA games ever made. It's up there with the PS3/PS4 David Cage games as some of the most insane and laughably bad writing while being completely lacking in self-awareness. It is literally the most unintentionally misogynistic piece of media I've ever consumed. The fact that this studio had the gall to call Trish and Lady prostitutes with guns only to have the girl that's part of the group serve as a bargaining chip for the game's villains and have a character who was only able to find meaning in her life by being the main villain's incubator and actively punish her for it is so laughably ironic. It also features two of the most insufferable main characters that gaming has to offer as the game insists that they are so cool, they are cooler than the real Dante and Vergil. The writing is also one of the most pretentious in any game ever, and I don't even mean that the game is artsy, it's far from that. It instead insists upon itself when it comes to how smart the game is while having one of the most intellectually shallow scripts ever. It's literally "wake up sheeple" type writing. The gameplay also sucks ass. The gameplay is what some people think of when they say that the DMC games are a series of button mashers as spamming the same moves over and over improves your combo score just as much as keeping things varied. It also doesn't even have a lock on: one of the most ubiquitous features of any third person action game. The game is also littered with mediocre platforming segments to pad out the game. The game is also fugly. The game is both filled with segments with the colors being so saturated it gets in the way of playing and cutscenes that look extremely washed out and drab. The character models are also extremely visually unappealing with one of the villains being a stupid Botox joke, the female character of the group looking like a doll, Dante looking like an emo boy with a MySpace account in the 2000s, and Vergil being a wannabe fascist. The game is extremely creatively bankrupt. One of the arcs of this game literally rips off the slurm queen episode of Futurama and has the most obnoxious parody of Bill O'Reilly. The fact that there are still defenders of this game in the gaming press goes to show that there are still remnants of this weird tribalism against Japanese gaming studios that has existed throughout the 2000s. Play this game if you really want to get angry after playing the first four games as you think about how this exists because of Keiji Inafune trying to westernize Capcom and how it took so long to get a real sequel to DMC 4 because of it.
The best way to play modern Yu-GI-Oh. Regardless of your opinion of the state of the meta in this game or in the OCG, it is easily the most accessible way to experience the mechanics that have been added over the years. Easy to keep track of yours and your opponent's graveyard and banished cards, easy to keep track of what the effects of yours and your opponent's cards do, and basically not have to deal with any of the BS that would come with dueling with someone that is using an archetype that you haven't played against before or not being up to date with the rules of the card game in real life. It's also the least expensive way to experience the game. As a programmer, I also very much appreciate what had to be taken to account how all these cards should interact with each other and always work how they are supposed to exactly like following the effect of the cards and rules if you were to duel in real life, all the while the game being smooth and not very resource hungry. The look of the game also has a lot of polish. It's easily the best thing Konami has put out since Metal Gear Solid V.
2013
Fake deep video game. At it's core Bioshock Infinite is no different from every other guns blazing railroaded first person shooter that came out at in the seventh gen, regardless of how much it tries to tell the player that it is something else. One thing I will give it credit for though, is that the gameplay is more fun than other games like this.
This review contains spoilers
Was extremely excited for this game and felt like I played a different one than most people.
For some reason Monolith Soft was somehow able to cram a ton of useless tutorials, such as how to climb a ladder or open a chest, and at the same time poorly communicate the importance of other mechanics within the game. I did not realize how important pouch items were until I watched Chuggaaconroy's guide on the game. The game's side quests that I did do felt like a huge chore for me to do, they were not as easy to do along with the main story as the first game, and they were not as fun as X's. Because of this, I focused primarily on the main story, and sadly I was extremely underwhelmed.
I do not like the game's main characters at all. I find Rex's naivete to be extremely annoying, and I don't think Pyra has any real agency in the story that she's in. Pyra is supposed to be a different person that takes up the same entity that Mythra does, and they both reach the same conclusions as one another. Mythra is also basically the single source of all of her problems. She didn't want to deal with the consequences of her actions herself so she basically created Pyra to deal with them for her. Pyra had to deal with the stuff her and Rex encountered by herself until Mythra stepped in when she had to or else they'd be dead. Not once does Pyra show any resentment towards Mythra for creating her and leaving her to deal with Mythra's emotional baggage, which she expresses is the cause of her self-loathing to the point of wanting to go to Elysium to commit suicide along with Mythra. Aside from this, much of the writing had other really glaring faults that broke me out of the immersion. I can go on and on about that but that'd be a waste of time.
Playing through the story, the game has so many blade ability checks in order to progress, it makes HMs in Pokemon look tame in comparison. I'd end up making the assumption that I had to return after I leveled up significantly to get to an area that I wasn't ready for yet, which is a staple for the series at this point, only to take an alternate path that my character wasn't ready for because I didn't have high enough blade abilities for the path I was supposed to actually take. This happened on the way to abandoned factory, and this happened when I was trying to figure out a way to get past the miasmas at the Crucible (Don't even get me started on this area of the game. I hate it so much. Those who played it will know why) only to realize that I did need to grind to have enough blade abilities to progress through the game.
Afterwards, I didn't take this approach anymore after I realized that much of these ability checks needed to be passed in order to beat the game, so whenever I encountered one I grinded until I had high enough levels to pass them.
The gacha system is extremely annoying and I hate it. I'm fine with the concept of recruitable partners that you can unlock but the gacha system in place does not feel rewarding.
This game has some of the worst enemy placement in any RPG I've ever played. There are multiple instances when you'd have to cross Rex across a bridge and there'd be enemies to fight that have moves to knock Rex off and lose your progress from the last checkpoint.
Fights with regular enemies are often not very fun, the often dragged on for over a couple minutes each for just one enemy, and when progressing through the story, you're very likely to fight multiple enemies at once, or instigate a fight with another enemy as you're already fighting one, so fights often dragged long. Needless to say, I didn't have much fun for most of the game.
I know I sound like that I hate this game with every fiber of my being. So I'll say some good things about it after a lightning round of nitpicks.
Having to play Tiger Tiger to upgrade Poppi is extremely frustrating, that boss fight in the Crucible is just fighting the same enemy over and over again and the debuffs at the Crucible make fighting there less fun, fighting at the Crucible isn't fun, sometimes the objective marker for fetch quests would be broken so I stopped doing them entirely, the anti-aliasing makes the game look like a blurry mush when at Mor Ardain, there seems to be no design philosophy in place when designing blades so a lot of the blades feel like a bunch of artists mailed Monolith Soft their OCs, why did nobody look at Morag when the Praetor talked about dispaced Gormotti when Mor Ardain colonized Gormott?
Okay, moving on.
The music is very good. Some of the overworld themes are more memorable than some of my favorite tracks from the first game.
The character designs vary. Malos looks like he's from a completely different game while he's supposed to be Pyra and Mythra's sibling. I know he's designed by Tetsuya Nomura, along with the rest of Torna (except Nia), but I will say that the designs from Torna are some of his better designs from recent memory.
Some of the art in this game is really good, with some unique and sweet designs that stand out, and there's much better worldbuilding than Final Fantasy XV by a long shot.
Fundamentally, the rhythm-centric gameplay it has is very fun, and yes, I did dance to the music as I played and timed my moves with the rhythm whenever I was enjoying it.
Two of the boss fights are the most creative I've been with killing a boss in any RPG I've played.
The other characters in the main party are good. I was much more interested in Zeke's and Nia's backstories than I was with Pyra and Mythra.
It seems with that Monolith Soft had less staff working on this game, as much of their other staff were working with Nintendo on Breath of the Wild. This explains why in many ways this feels very scaled back compared to X. The definitive edition of Xenoblade Chronicles borrowed more QoL features from X than from 2, so I'm hoping that the next game Monolith Soft develops leans into that direction. I don't know if I'd want to play a game that spiritually more of a successor to 2 than X.
For some reason Monolith Soft was somehow able to cram a ton of useless tutorials, such as how to climb a ladder or open a chest, and at the same time poorly communicate the importance of other mechanics within the game. I did not realize how important pouch items were until I watched Chuggaaconroy's guide on the game. The game's side quests that I did do felt like a huge chore for me to do, they were not as easy to do along with the main story as the first game, and they were not as fun as X's. Because of this, I focused primarily on the main story, and sadly I was extremely underwhelmed.
I do not like the game's main characters at all. I find Rex's naivete to be extremely annoying, and I don't think Pyra has any real agency in the story that she's in. Pyra is supposed to be a different person that takes up the same entity that Mythra does, and they both reach the same conclusions as one another. Mythra is also basically the single source of all of her problems. She didn't want to deal with the consequences of her actions herself so she basically created Pyra to deal with them for her. Pyra had to deal with the stuff her and Rex encountered by herself until Mythra stepped in when she had to or else they'd be dead. Not once does Pyra show any resentment towards Mythra for creating her and leaving her to deal with Mythra's emotional baggage, which she expresses is the cause of her self-loathing to the point of wanting to go to Elysium to commit suicide along with Mythra. Aside from this, much of the writing had other really glaring faults that broke me out of the immersion. I can go on and on about that but that'd be a waste of time.
Playing through the story, the game has so many blade ability checks in order to progress, it makes HMs in Pokemon look tame in comparison. I'd end up making the assumption that I had to return after I leveled up significantly to get to an area that I wasn't ready for yet, which is a staple for the series at this point, only to take an alternate path that my character wasn't ready for because I didn't have high enough blade abilities for the path I was supposed to actually take. This happened on the way to abandoned factory, and this happened when I was trying to figure out a way to get past the miasmas at the Crucible (Don't even get me started on this area of the game. I hate it so much. Those who played it will know why) only to realize that I did need to grind to have enough blade abilities to progress through the game.
Afterwards, I didn't take this approach anymore after I realized that much of these ability checks needed to be passed in order to beat the game, so whenever I encountered one I grinded until I had high enough levels to pass them.
The gacha system is extremely annoying and I hate it. I'm fine with the concept of recruitable partners that you can unlock but the gacha system in place does not feel rewarding.
This game has some of the worst enemy placement in any RPG I've ever played. There are multiple instances when you'd have to cross Rex across a bridge and there'd be enemies to fight that have moves to knock Rex off and lose your progress from the last checkpoint.
Fights with regular enemies are often not very fun, the often dragged on for over a couple minutes each for just one enemy, and when progressing through the story, you're very likely to fight multiple enemies at once, or instigate a fight with another enemy as you're already fighting one, so fights often dragged long. Needless to say, I didn't have much fun for most of the game.
I know I sound like that I hate this game with every fiber of my being. So I'll say some good things about it after a lightning round of nitpicks.
Having to play Tiger Tiger to upgrade Poppi is extremely frustrating, that boss fight in the Crucible is just fighting the same enemy over and over again and the debuffs at the Crucible make fighting there less fun, fighting at the Crucible isn't fun, sometimes the objective marker for fetch quests would be broken so I stopped doing them entirely, the anti-aliasing makes the game look like a blurry mush when at Mor Ardain, there seems to be no design philosophy in place when designing blades so a lot of the blades feel like a bunch of artists mailed Monolith Soft their OCs, why did nobody look at Morag when the Praetor talked about dispaced Gormotti when Mor Ardain colonized Gormott?
Okay, moving on.
The music is very good. Some of the overworld themes are more memorable than some of my favorite tracks from the first game.
The character designs vary. Malos looks like he's from a completely different game while he's supposed to be Pyra and Mythra's sibling. I know he's designed by Tetsuya Nomura, along with the rest of Torna (except Nia), but I will say that the designs from Torna are some of his better designs from recent memory.
Some of the art in this game is really good, with some unique and sweet designs that stand out, and there's much better worldbuilding than Final Fantasy XV by a long shot.
Fundamentally, the rhythm-centric gameplay it has is very fun, and yes, I did dance to the music as I played and timed my moves with the rhythm whenever I was enjoying it.
Two of the boss fights are the most creative I've been with killing a boss in any RPG I've played.
The other characters in the main party are good. I was much more interested in Zeke's and Nia's backstories than I was with Pyra and Mythra.
It seems with that Monolith Soft had less staff working on this game, as much of their other staff were working with Nintendo on Breath of the Wild. This explains why in many ways this feels very scaled back compared to X. The definitive edition of Xenoblade Chronicles borrowed more QoL features from X than from 2, so I'm hoping that the next game Monolith Soft develops leans into that direction. I don't know if I'd want to play a game that spiritually more of a successor to 2 than X.
Monolith Soft took the gameplay from Xenoblade Chronicles and made it 100 times faster with even more options available for approaching gameplay. The world is so beautifully detailed that the fact it's able to run on the Wii U with seamless transitions and few pop ins is an amazing feat. The story takes a bit of a back seat in this game, with instead having the goal of making the player feel like that he's a small part of a large team. It feels like Monolith Soft wanted to make an MMO but knows they cannot do that, so they pack in features ubiquitous to MMOs like raid battles and a variety of classes to choose from while balancing the game around a single player experience, making the multiplayer feel broken as most people play with similar builds to maximize damage. Another reason why I think this is that the devs seem to have taken some inspiration from Phantasy Star Online with how you can target specific appendages on enemies to incur a debuff when it is destroyed. There's still lots of fun to be had with doing the game's side-quests, exploring the world, experimenting with the game's mechanics, and learning more about the game's cast of likeable characters. Elma is my waifu
One of the best games from the seventh generation of consoles, nowhere near as good as the first game. Human Revolution does a lot of things well, a lot of things much better than games that came out at around its time, and I argue its still much better than most first person shooters that came after it, but a lot of its shortcomings come from it being a AAA console game. Human Revolution, while telling a compelling story that does fall in line within the first game, feels very detached from it with the game's art direction and setting. It's sometimes feels like it's more caught up with its transhumanism vs humanism themes than it should be when it could be telling something much more thought provoking at times. The level design is much more binary than the first game. While the first game's levels never gave a clear answer of what would be the best way to approach a problem, Human Revolution has multiple instances where you choose to go through a hallway where you would get caught and have to go loud, or a vent where you sneak past everyone. The game also doesn't feel as reactive to my decisions than the first game aside from the first mission after Adam gets his augmentations.
With that aside, the game is still good. It retains much of makes the first game good and repackaging to a new audience of gamers and appealing to their sensibilities for the time.
With that aside, the game is still good. It retains much of makes the first game good and repackaging to a new audience of gamers and appealing to their sensibilities for the time.
2000
It's crazy after two decades there still isn't a game like it. The level design in Deus Ex is in its own league. The game does not give you any clear answers when it comes how you should approach a problem, which cannot be said for most stealth games, or later games in this series for that matter. The game encourages the player to experiment with the games mechanics and think outside the box to solve problems, and the world will react to the decisions you make in ways that still surprise me when I revisit and play a different way. This isn't even getting into the story, which I feel is extremely important that people experience. For a story about nanomachines, clones, secret societies, and conspiracy theories, it's extremely grounded in reality. The game uses this spectacle to point out real problems with American society: the military-industrial complex, the degradation of the middle class, the price gouging and scarcity of proper healthcare, and warned its players about the state using counter-terrorism as a means to take away their citizens' civil liberties BEFORE 9/11. Play this if you somehow haven't already! Your life depends on it!