I wish I could rate it lower, not because as a fighting game it's bad, it's just fine

But it has no personality, as a child I grew up playing Tekken 3 and since I had no memory card my daily occupation was unlocking all the characters (including Dr. Bosconovitch! ifykyk how long that takes), and the stories were just so fun,

And then you have Tekken 7, just nothing, this only exists as a sole entity for versus gameplay and nothing else, the Mishima plotline I've always fucking hated but it's like even more insufferable here

bad

Witcher 3 carries story elements of the world-building done by prior entries in the franchise but you wouldn't bother playing those because they suck ass and have aged horribly.

The combat of this game is genuinely fucking horrible, and the start of this game is total garbage. It has some interesting quests with consequences on either end which I really like, but after the battle of Kaer Morhen the game just decides to end in a climactic battle immediately after, when the game rolled the credits I was genuinely like "oh its OVER over.... huh".

The actual good content is in both the DLCs, where the painted world has a better story and blood and wine has the better boss (I also like the storybook theme). All in all I get why people like this game, I just personally find it poorly paced on both the starting and the end.

This one gets this high of a rating simply because its dungeon puzzles are genuinely one of a kind, everytime I worked through a solution it felt like an amazing accomplishment, very in-depth mechanics, I do think it's self-indulgent and by the end I got burnt OUT! The game is too damn big its daunting, it's too demanding and has a straight up skyscraper skill curve towards the end, got completely filtered out

Story is decent too! Just excuse the beginning of the game, it's rough, just wait for the first official dungeon

YUNO holds a special place in my heart and enjoys a comical spot on my dusty Visual Novel shelf especially thanks to one of the funniest adaptions I have come across

One thing you need to understand is YUNO has probably one of the most solid OSTs you'll ever hear, just oozes quality and really made me pick it up. Secondly the game is GORGEOUS, PC-98 games have that retro charm that just...... god I can gush at it for hours.

The story is actually one of the most ambitious I've seen in a sci-fi title, but the tail-end of the VN is just bloated, you're hit with far too many explanation segments, and characters make re-appearences where it doesn't really make much sense, with an ending that's just......there? The game has just embarrassing sexual bits (the incest...lord, so much incest), but then it's just straight up goofy (MC takes care of a dragon that grows up into a big-boobed dragon-girl thing that later helps him and another chick escape confinement and then dies from exhaustion, so they EAT HER? WHAT?)

It's an old title and you'd be surprised to find that once you get the time device at the start the game has a pretty damn decent pace and actually has a very interesting story, ESPECIALLY for its time.

Play it and then enjoy laughing at the adaption, brings me personal joy.

Hats off to the modding team for making this game accessible to the wider audience. I know it's a disservice to play the game in any other format because of HOW MUCH the VR plays into the flow of the gameplay and every combat encounter centers around VR, even reloading is something you physically do, but until VR tech becomes way more widely accessible this is a good alternative.

The non-VR mod also insta-solves all puzzles and there's like a billion of them which have already been a subject of criticism by reviewers, often times I had to go into the console and have to spawn ammo or medicine by the absolute scarcity that plagues this game, there's also issues with upgrading which is probably why I had to over-rely so much on ammunition with my lack of firepower.

Cons:
The "comedy" is horrible the borderlands writers were in the room, Russell is a good voice in your ear but the banter just wasn't tight enough, besides that there's elements of the plot I liked and elements of the plot I disliked.

I already knew the ending but now having played the whole game I can confidently say: I don't like the ending. I don't like a mish mash retcon for a game's pivotal ending after a decade, a plot that's been marinating for so long doesn't deserve to be written off, I HATE it. I like the final sequence where reality is warping as you're seeing silhouette's of people who resided in the apartment complex but everything about the implications of the actual finale annoy me. That being said a fresh slate to the plot after so many leaks about what episode 3 was actually I can't really blame them.

The gameplay loop is probably more interesting in VR but it really got tiring having to scavenge boxes and litter to find ammo, and it's clear this is probably way more immersive in VR having to physically move boxes around and shake stuff
I'm going to be controversial, THIS much combat in a VR game does it no favors whatsoever, and having contrived claustrophobic design to insist on a arm's reach VR experience takes away from the series' past design choices in many ways. The enemy body vocabulary HAS to be slowed so that VR can be accommodated but that's not the issue that I have, it's that some of the combat philosophy feels TOO repeated for it's own good, this means that the game is forced to put a lot of barnacles in the game, the combines don't feel good to fight at all

Pros:
The detail in this game is off the charts, there's SO much detail, the animations are done insanely well, the new enemy variants really compliment VR gameplay especially the armor crab and the electric crab (one of the best enemies EVER. It can animated corpses and it shifts and moves around the body while you try to hit it just absolutely amazing).

Jeff is singlehandedly the most genius chapter in the game and the it does a really good job of pre-teaching you what you're supposed to do before you actually do it.
The alien zombie infestation of Northstar just looks jawdropping, this game's horror is really fucking good and I can only imagine how insane it is in VR.

There's some lore implications sprinkled THROUGHOUT the plot which are just amazing as usual valve has really good worldbuilding

All in all, I DO NOT recommend anyone play the game like I did, but if you ever have a VR headset this is definitely a game everyone should try out

Identity Crisis 8

Words can’t define how grueling it was to see this game through till the end, I feel like my interest completely depleted and my mind checked out right after House Beneviento, but I’ll address my complaints further down the line, let’s get the good out of the way.

Pros
(+) I like the fact that the game has this children’s storybook backdrop and it’s very unusual for the franchise to include these kinds of fantasy-like elements (I say “these kinds” because we DO have supernatural Tamil villains who can super sprint and dodge bullets ala Wesker) which work even better when you’re getting your body torn open and your limbs cut off and re-attached, it all feels like you’re not a real person and the odds you face are artificial and insurmountable, you’re transported to this fantasy village with a giantess, a talking doll, mr magneto, even the minor bosses like the fan dude who charges at you (I like how the notes say he gets his own limbs chopped off of his body because of the fan) and then later his internal machinery catches fire and he starts breathing it at you.

I LIKE the creativity they had with this game, in a sea of “fleshy mutant with bulging eye that you’re supposed to hit” this game really had variety even though it’s still bullseye enemies yipee

(+) Ethan being mold cool but executed horribly and shouldn’t have even been a reveal

(+) House Beneviento and the Factory are overall really good segments even when their charm only works once and never again, Beneviento is the only time this franchise has attempted to be psychological in its horror delivery and it felt like for once RE could measure upto Silent Hill in being genuinely creepy and not over-reliant on gore-like elements

(+) The Duke is cool

Cons
(-) Pick one game that you want to call back on, you can’t keep oscillating between different past games that you want to reference. So, Castle Dimitrescu is RE1, Dimitrescu herself is our Mr.X callback so that’s RE2, the weapon
inventory/merchant/starting gankfest is a reference to RE4, the game itself extends the combat for RE7, and in none of these circumstances did I feel like the game faithfully reinvented the wheel, again this keeps contributing to how inconsistent and glued together a lot of the elements of this game feel, just slapped on without any depth or nuance.

(-) RE7 combat sucks and it works only for that specific game where you have limping mold chasing you flailing its tentacle arms around, revamping that almost sluggish combat so the game can have this quasi-action game approach feels so unnatural to play and especially on Hardcore this game is diabolical.
When I was at the Lycan hideout I legitimately zoned out, and there’s one specific reason why the action doesn’t work, the backstep speed, they made it really slow so that whenever an enemy approach you it feels like you’re backed up against an invisible wall only having to expose your back in order to run a few steps behind to put inches between you and the enemy. THIS SUCKS, I don’t get the sentiment of having a high-octane FPS game but actively limiting the player to 2 things, switching weapons and holding your arms up to guard, and the game wants you to guard A LOT.

WHY? In RE7 all the claustrophobic space made complete sense but in RE8 it just feels fucking stupid and counterintuitive to the very idea of making an action heavy game

(-) The bosses suck complete dick and the fact that even after 8 installments and countless spin-offs and remakes they keep releasing this unsophisticated bullseye enemies is so pathetic, and I’m going to be very candid RE could straight up not have bosses and it would largely improve on the quality of the experience,
Heisenburg and Moreau are SPECIFICALLY bad and even though I can give a pass to Moreau for being a filler boss Heisenburg doesn’t get a graceful pass from me, imagine building up this insanely cool character and then having no real payoff for it

(-) The game can be very easily segmented into multiple portions because of how distinctively the bosses and their designated areas work, Castle Dimitrescu, Moreau Lake, House Beneviento, Heisenburg Factory, Lycan Hideout, the Village open grounds, and not only are they structurally different but they also differ a lot in terms of gameplay, the cream of the crop here is Castle Dimitrescu, House Beneviento and the Factory while the rest are just really REALLY bad

Again, the word of the day is consistency and the game is capricious in execution, by the end of the game I nearly forgot that there were village survivors who burn to death in a house fire of which only you make out alive, had the game had you find survivors and set up some sort of “survivors of mother miranda” network instead of having you fight quirky and goofy villains as your only source of communication it could add so much more value

(+/-) The game is linear but it’s done tastefully in my opinion, there’s no deep pathfinding or having to traverse a maze like structure and even if you’re lost it’s very easy to backtrack your footsteps, the factory is the only “technical” section and believe me when I say I wasn’t even paying that much attention and I would still easily make it to where I needed to go, the game has you coming back to familiar areas and opening routes internally which means that it’s pseudo linear with very clear mission goals so the lack of sophistication makes it less frustrating but then it doesn’t replace the simplicity with quality action segments so it feels like they traded off routing in exchange for pretty much nothing.

Conclusion:

Don’t pick this game up, I can’t emphasize the amount of cringe I had to sit through towards the end, Ethan’s death feels inconsequential, the story reveal has no impact, the game wants to have emotional stakes but you really never warm up to Ethan Winters enough to care, you don’t really care about this damn stupid baby either. No task in this game that you perform feels connected to another, the village isn’t mysterious and I didn’t want to know anything about it, even with it’s small wins this game loses on all other fronts, I can’t sit and pretend this even passes as a quality title.

Pure, unfiltered, garbage.

The infamous larp scene, how could anyone possibly forget?

LiS: True Colors was a controversial title even before release, not because LiS 2 was a flop and already tanked audience expectations, but because of Alex Chen. One visit to the official content posted on YouTube is enough to summarize the public perception of this character, her powers of "empathy" in reality are powers of telepathy, you'd somewhat understand this from the trailer but the fact that it is not framed as such doesn't help the case for this game.

LiS: True Colors loves to play safe, all the characters are different shades of nice, for a murder mystery the game is too relaxed and never do the stakes feel like they are weighing down on Alex. The town seems to be healing her slowly and you can't help but root for her a little, Alex feels like a complete character even when she seems to have a bit of a savior complex as she's going from person to person fixing their issues. I like this aspect of storytelling, but it's unsophisticated nature begs for more exploration, these depictions of LOUD emotions that can manifest for Alex as she is slowly consumed by these powerful emotive forces are accompanied by simple but effective imagery and changes in the environment, and all these segments are fun. You're in for a treat as you see these wonderful fluid animations, Deck Nine gives a gentle wave of goodbye to the long gone days of characters with stilted fish eyed faces with quivering lips as they talked.

Besides an offputting internal conflict and resolution for Alex in a neat 20-30 minutes in the end (which has been the main point of contention for mostly any sane person who played this game), Deck Nine made me feel thirsty, thirsty for more plot developments, thirsty for more character interactions, thirsty for more conflict, safe doesn't mean bad and it was necessary to give confidence back to the franchise and this title does exactly that.

True Colors puts LiS back on the map, a hope that seemed stifled after LiS 2. But it's fate lies in the hands of the game that proceeds it.

RE2R feels like it should be at the top of my rankings but it isn’t, this game is the golden standard for horror game pathfinding, it’s a game where you actually do have to make small decisions that can have direct positive or negative consequences, if you don’t board up the windows the next time you come to the same hallway the zombies are gonna be flooding it… Well you can just kill them, right? Nope, you can't. If you kill them next time you circle back here the lickers are going to be feasting on these corpses…. Well you can just silently tread around the lickers….Nope. Mr. X chases you down later and you have to run through these hallways which attracts the lickers. It's such a simple neat way to add small instances of decision making for the player.

Once you grab a key item you have a very good idea of where it’s meant to be used, when you’re going around the place the police station is so well designed that even if you don’t remember EXACTLY where you want to use the key-item you definitely recall a specific section of the map that you can backtrack to and find where it can be used. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t get very confusing at times, and I did have to consult a guide for some parts but the game can be played independent of a guide and you can get the complete experience.

Speaking of lickers, they are my favorite thing in this game, they are our replacement for the Crimson Heads in the first game where killing zombies has a direct consequence of them becoming a Crimson Head, but here a corpse attracts lickers

The game has you finding keys much like the original RER but here they have elaborate lock symbols that helps you keep track of which rooms you haven’t gone inside.

But with all of that said, RE2R is…… boring. I couldn’t stop being bored in this game; I don’t think RE has every necessitated the need for music but I really wish RE2R had some, the backtracking feels cumbersome and if you’re lost the playtime feels REALLY sluggish, I love navigating a maze that has you witnessing something new when you happen upon it with a new key item in hand but I just couldn’t help but feel exhausted by this game. It’s the ONLY game that feels directly boring to me, I don’t have the words to express what makes it feel this way.

The fact that this was the follow-up to Silent Hill 2 and is still revered as a good game is the kind of nonsensical feedback Silent Hill shouldn't be receiving especially not after 2 decades.

This game is shit on every level, it has the WORST story in the franchise where you have your sassy female protagonist whose just fucking yapping her stupid ass mouth, so quirky bro here's her zinger no#2314832 before she faces off against a boss. Her entire persona is supposed to contrast James Sunderland, the previous protagonist, but her dialogue is so bad that it's past the point of being "so bad it's good" and is JUST bad.

Oh you remember how lousy SH2 combat was? All we did was put more guns in and extended a bit of the movement vocabulary, now you can keep fighting in this shitty game that ages poorly every single fucking day. Instead of the rustic empty horror of SH2, SH3 has "purgatory" where everything is fleshy and gore-y, the game over-relies on graphic depictions as well as body horror (such as the scene where Heather "aborts" the fetus of god), and if you want a soft reminder about my stance on the occult heavy SH stories they all fucking suck ass.

All in all one of the worst sequels I have ever played, the only redeeming factor being the opening song which I fucking love. Shit game.

Life is Strange 2

Where do I start, which point do I find contention with? It’s like you pull one corner of the bedsheet and the entire thing slips out of the bed frame, plot-ridden with so many holes that the game just oozes missed story beats, character stories that you wish wrapped the entire game in a neat little foil, but they become undone immediately as they are introduced.

There’s a story here that perseveres, it plays inside your head more than it does on your screen, a story of two brothers against all odds, making their way across a country, the game feels personal even if you don’t have familial bonds as you assume the role of a surrogate father figure while being the brother to a 9-year-old.

What I disagree about the popular criticism for the game:

-Right off the bat I want to say the game’s sense of time passing is captured well between each episode, people find issue with the fact that events feel disconnected when you’re usually experiencing a gap of multiple weeks or months between the ending of an episode and the transition to a new one, I think it works perfectly fine.

-Even though Daniel is an annoying kid, he is written as faithfully obnoxious as little kids are, their entire worldview is so fragile, and their sense of conflict is so lofty, they move the line that offends them back and forth, but they are also easier to make amends with. Daniel throwing a fit, being impatient or bratty, wanting to be an adult and being jealous of his brother finding new friends all make sense within a child’s worldview, you can criticize Daniel for being an obnoxious shithead, you can criticize the plot for writing contrived scenarios around him being the center of conflict, but he himself isn’t that poorly written in my opinion. Daniel’s biggest issue is that his character growth is all over the place, how much he matures is dictated by how much conflict he should be the ignition for, that’s why he seems like he is the same from the start all till the end with minor moments of levity and self-reflection.

-I don’t think the game is blissfully unaware of the fact that Sean running away from the crime scene with his brother is a little bit stupid if he’s truly innocent. I think it’s the other way around, the story is about a 16-year-old who makes a stupid decision out of fear of being implicated in a crime that he cannot reasonably explain or rationalize in any way whatsoever. He is just that scared, I feel like they could have played into this conflict way better instead of framing his entire adventure as morally good in the end.

-I don’t mind the grandparents being offended when the brothers visit their mother’s room, even though it feels childish of them to throw a fit about disobeying the house’s “rules” (thanks for making this the main theme of the episode and name it that guys!!!) what I did find more offensive was how you take the main road to escape at the end so the cops can make chase absolutely fucking blew my mind. What even.

Popular criticism I agree with:

-The game’s racism is too cartoonishly evil, in parts of the plot where it feels unnecessary and a juvenile attempt and chokes the plot up as a means to pad out the episode’s length, or an unnecessary addition altogether. Real life racism can be pretty baffling but in a plot that’s entirely fictional, you have got to be fucking kidding me, Sean can’t directly go to Nevada he has to be dragged out of his car and berated so you the audience can understand that this story is about racism. Oh, guess what? We’re finally at the border and instead of just having the police arrest you there’s 2 racists who get to you first inculcating the same “Mexicans bad … here to ruin country …. No work + come here give birth” racism anthem, it’s tired, and RUINS the game.

-Episode 4 is bad.

My criticism:

This is my biggest complaint; this story would work far better in a novel than it does in the game. Every scene feels like it’s too long, the points of interest for Sean to explore and comment on at any time are made completely insufferable by his lazy unimpressed voice, he seems like he never has energy or he doesn’t even care.

Speaking of slow, this game purposefully forces you to wait in so many moments that it was actually fucking insane. We just got done sightseeing in the canyon. It’s time to slowly pack up every object individually while Sean comments on everything so the audience can catch up to where they are since the episode just started!!! Oh joy we have to wash the clothes in the laundry as slow as the engine can allow, time to cook ravioli for my little brother…. The Agent just came in to question me she’s in the other room receiving a phone call I have to wait painstakingly for her to arrive, and the worst one, WEED TRIMMING, OH MY FUCKING GOD, WE GET IT YOU DON’T HAVE TO MAKE THE AUDIENCE FEEL THE WEIGHT OF TIME AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN

-The part in episode 4 where you have to fetch a file on Sarah lee and Sean and the brother have a long conversation in the file room about gay conversion therapy fucking KILL ME

-Ending feels rushed and you must wallow in “its about the journey not the end” copium

The good:

-I like the licensed music LiS manages to have enough hippie music for you to add to your collection

-On paper, the story is very touching, even when it’s too misguided at a lot of times

-Episode 3 is the best and covers the found family trope the best but the ending is so fucking ??? why do they do the robbery anyway it makes no fucking sense to me that would’ve been a perfect point to majorly branch the plot

-I love the recollection of the events of the game up till the episode you’re playing as a sketched out storybook of the wolf brothers braving all the hardships they have gone through

-Karen basically saying the reason why she abandoned her kids is because she dgaf about being a mother and nothing deeper was funny as fuck and it was such a non-reason that it worked also her making amends makes somewhat sense and I feel like she manages to get redeemed in some weird way

Conclusion:

I want to say I outright hate this game, its characters that don’t stick around too long for you to care about them enough, its cartoonishly evil portrayal of racism, chores that make you want to jump into a pit of fire, attitudes that only exist to drive a sense of conflict…. But I can’t. I can’t say I hate this game, when you’re at some random park with your brother having to pretend like your father is alive, so he would think they are out in a trip, encouraging him to make traps while you prepare wood for a fire so you can barely spend the night, having to comfort him without having any hope yourself, the game feels hollow.

I internalized the story to a certain extent where I felt like it had meaning beyond what it did. The game felt personal at times, my mind was drawing up conversations happening off-screen, between episode moments that we don’t get to see.

I can’t promise that kind of experience for anyone.

This is one of the worst games I have ever played, unlike other entries which limit your SP so you kind of know where to stop grinding levels, this game has a fatigue system that you barely know when you're going to hit, and this fatigue carries over outside of Tartarus and makes your tired, you can imagine how this effects the SOL elements which are also insanely bad.

This game has an extremely unearned positive reputation that will never make sense to me, its so outstandingly bad, I remember having to forcibly see it through to the end because I didn't have wifi for a month.

The AI is also fucking atrocious. Anyways, some of the music is good at least

This game takes a lot of the hallmarks which define genshin and instead of transforming those elements it dumbs it down to a point which doesn't even make sense, instead of a lavish open-world you get hallways that are just reskinned for every new map,

You have "elements" but now they don't play interesting enough of a role like they do in genshin and most of the time you are picking an element just to break the shield on enemies, which makes essentially every element feel the same in some regard, there's a class system such as destruction where you sort of favor more "risk vs reward" gameplay (my interpretation of the destruction class also comes from the simulated world) but the MC is destruction at the start and they have no risk vs reward gameplay so the game doesn't have anything written in stone for these classes, the game's combat loop forcing you to break shields for the smallest vulnerability window makes it feel so fucking useless I don't even know why they even bothered making a staggering mechanic to begin with

This game is also leaps and beyonds more annoying for endgame content since there's an escalation for DPS that just feels annoying to meet, MoC is just a terrible abyss knockoff, simulated world is a very interesting idea and fun to play at the start until you have to do it like every other week for drops and filling out the battle pass bracket and you start to HATE it

The game has the same gacha system and the paimon shop as genshin, it has a way less interesting regional expansion concept than Genshin, with an evil organization that seems so stupid in typical HYV writing, it has the ugliest china I have ever seen and music thats a massive stepdown from what HYV can deliver

HSR fans love to point out that the game has an auto-battle system and I just have to laugh, the game cannot EXIST without one. The issue with the combat is when you want to burst you have to press 2 buttons for no reason, its not like you press 1 button and get to deselect your burst incase you change your mind, in reality it just does this to force player input and the only way to not be forced to do these useless inputs per rotation is to auto-battle. This isn't restricted ONLY to the burst, some characters have this double input attached to their skill, the game is simply UNPLAYABLE without auto, its too fucking annoying otherwise

The dialogue which I found funny and self-aware at the start becomes childishly annoying the more you play the game, in the world of hsr and especially one as bad as this game the charm wears off rather quickly

Even though I'm giving this game half a star, I actually wish I could give it a negative rating, a new coat of polish with some QOL changes mean nothing when the base game has no understanding of what made genshin great and translating none of the good to this game

Horrible