just on a completely different wavelength then me. i do like the sense of decay and growing abandonment that pervades every environment especially as a build up and contrast to breath of the wild's world being almost entirely reclaimed from ruins like these. even in the few populated areas you're encouraged to be weird and antisocial and keep escape plans in the back of your mind so you can skulk off to a secluded corner and turn into a wolf or teleport away. vibes city in the twilight world. all great stuff that made me wish i made a stronger connection. strange adventure gameish item/environment combinations at times that i never once got used to. lame bosses and an extremely annoying penultimate dungeon. so fascinating to think about when the game's off and so hopelessly boring when you're actively engaging with it.

i feel like a weird contrarian for even holding this opinion but i really don't think this entry is as good as sport. sport was incredibly confident in it's presentation and gameplay and knew exactly how it wanted to be played. it was less freeform then other entries in the series and more demanding in terms of raw player skill but the tighter focus really let it find a unique identity. the ways in which it broke off from the traditional GT/Forza experience felt really fresh (if not somewhat dry and pretentious). mostly i just can't help feeling that sport's music selection was just better and the menus were cleaner and more stylish. it does feel like somewhat of a regression moving back to the traditional GT formula when they don't do anything as unique or interesting. the game seems to figure that because it's been two console generations since gt6 you won't realize that there isn't really anything new here.

for some insane reason I've seen an uptick in people saying that driveclub was Good Actually. out of all the games this usually happens with this one is the most baffling. even back when the servers were up and the game was firing on all cylinders with all its social stuff driveclub sucked. the main draw for this was the Club aspect of Driving and it just meant sometimes in a match you'd see your friends pfp and have a drift challenge or something pop up. and also there was a facebook style timeline on the main menu to show you your friends Achievements. despite all the social elements being so heavily emphasized in the marketing (and in the name of the game) none of it is any more meaningful or complex then what you see in forza horizon or even autolog when nfs was doing that. the game outside the social aspect is just junk too. the tracks are boring, the driving model feels broken, the graphics honestly aren't even that good. they're technically impressive but usually just really flat. I don't know what it is about evolution studios in particular but people do this with every one of their games. actually the motorstorm games were pretty sick. man driveclub was ssooo underrated. why didn't people give onrush a chance!!!

it's just much more tasteless then dark souls or even dark souls 3. there are so many areas that feel like they expect you to go in and do a suicide run to trip some persistent switch or otherwise engage with the level in a way that makes it actually manageable your second or third time around. that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world but it is unbelievable that they built soul memory alongside these levels that demand you sacrifice yourself for the sake of progression. areas that you can just walk through like a normal level still love to have encounters that are purely one or two ranged guys pelting you with the worlds most damaging arrows while three knights sprint towards you. the world is so decompressed but all that means is you'll find a key in the iron keep that you need to bring back to the forest of fallen giants and that's what passes for Exploration and Progression Puzzles. the plot is just "damn would it be crazy if everyone you know had alzheimer's???" so many of the weird shortcomings feel unintentional in an extremely naive and innocent way. a bunch of developers who played dark souls 1 and got told "now YOU get to make one" and this is what they came up with. i got to the throne of want im still on the fucking brume tower but i beat the game whatever it's over it's done i really cannot take another second of this.