I genuinely don't understand how this game has garnered the praise that it has for the story and its characters. Every chapter is filled with a mcguffin or a deus ex machina type reveal that removes all possibility of increasing stakes or tension. And the characters are so bland, I feel like Mario in Paper Mario somehow is more endearing and that dude doesn't have any dialogue.
The combat does rule though and the pixel art clearly has so much care put into it which combined were barely enough to carry me to the ending.

Also what is it with games that make you hunt down collectibles that are frustratingly difficult to find or lack record keeping of which ones you've found in order to reach a "true ending".

I never played the 1.0 but it's hard to imagine the 2.0 getting the same vilification that the original launch did. Not to say that the base game is perfect, I thought the open world gameplay was middling at best, random citizens on the street aren't particularly believable and most of the side quests just remind me of the phrase "empty calories". However, I'm a pretty vocal hater of open world games as a genre so these complaints coming from me can be applied to basically every other entry in the genre. The combat is exciting at first but once you reach the mid-game, there really isn't any variety or strategy in how you tackle each encounter. What really saves Cyberpunk in my eyes then is the exceptional setting. I mean it does say it right in the title but this is the absolute most "cyberpunk" cyberpunk game ever made. I really do feel like everyone should try this game at least once just to experience what it's like to roleplay a character in this world (even if the character you're playing is as bland as V).

I haven't played all of the games in this series but I can't imagine Pikmin getting any better than this. Controlling your horde of PIkmin feels great (especially when you look back at how terrible the first Pikmin was) and the addition of Oatchi makes travelling around the stages so fluid. The main stages are filled with so much charm and treasures to collect and the Dandori challenges are a really fun way to stretch the part of your brain that wants to optimize each run. However, the caves were a bit of a miss for me since they felt so visually drab compared to the main stages and I never felt that the Dandori battles were very strategic. Also there's soooo much un-skippable fluff dialogue, it actively discouraged me from collecting my side quest rewards.

Really charming game with some of the best pixel art I've seen. The core diving gameplay is pretty solid as well, although the restaurant portion is a bit light I suppose. The surprising thing about this game is how many mechanics they keep throwing at you, it feels like one of those bloated Kickstarter campaigns that reached a million stretch goals but somehow they actually managed to deliver all of them. Some of the new mechanics are not that interesting (especially the post-village ones) so this feels like a case of "less is more".

I think there's an incredible game buried in here somewhere if they just trimmed half of the nonsense in this game. The core plot of this game is so good but it absolutely struggles under the weight of all the open world bloat and meaningless side plots. The filler level content isn't even avoidable if you skip the side quests, the Harlem museum questline has some remarkably wooden dialogue which feels especially flat when compared to how strong the acting is in the opening and final acts. There are some steps made in the right direction to make the side content palatable, almost everything including the minigames are skippable but that feels like an admission from the developers that they know this content isn't very interesting.
However, I'm still glad I powered through because there are moments in this game that are some top tier Spidey gaming. Venom just makes everything better.

Absolutely one of the best "role-playing" games I've ever played and also the only CRPG I've finished.

It's hard to nail down all of the reasons why this game succeeds compared to others in the genre due to how absolutely massive the scope of this game. One that is obviously clear to me is how fully formed all of the playable characters are. Over the course of the game, you get to really learn about each of your party members and help them through their respective character arcs, though some stories I feel are better written than others by a noticeable margin. And that kind of strong character writing extends to the Player Character (aka Tav) as well. By offering a ton of different meaningful choices in how your character responds to conflicts, you can form a strong idea of who your PC is as a person.

The combat is based on the DnD5e system and is overall a very good adaptation. I think having a foundational basis that's familiar to a lot of people makes it easier to digest and the enables a ton of creativity in how to solve each encounter. I can't say that I'm creative enough to really explore the absolutely buck wild stuff you can do but just knowing that the possibility exists made me take a pause before each action and consider all of my options. That being said, I think there's a few too many spells/abilities that feels a bit daunting, especially when some of them don't offer a lot of creative utility.

I think where this game falls short a bit is that overall it feels a bit less polished as you get closer to the end of the story, both technically and narratively. I didn't find how the main plot developed in Act 3 particularly satisfying and there were quite a few bugs that I encountered that definitely hampered my closing impressions of the game.

STORY? INSCRUTABLE
VIBES? IMMACULATE
MECHANICS? UNEXPLAINED
MACE? CHUNKY
METROID? VANIA

When Handler Walter slides into my DMs asking me if I want to be tossed around by different corpos just looking for another mech jockey to fly in and spray bullets, the answer is always yes.
At first, it's just to get another chance to jump into your insane death robot. Piloting your mech feels crisp and responsive, the mission environments absolutely whip in a dystopian kind of way, and there's an endless swiss army knife of weaponry and kit options waiting for you back at the garage that promise to make your next excursion feel fresh. Each new mission sells you further on the rules of Rubicon. You're sold to the highest corpo bidder, often times it'll be the execs who saw you tear through their wage slaves in the previous mission and want to strike back at your former masters. Even when you're hired by the rebel forces who want to kick the parasitic corpos off Rubicon, you'll find that they still have to buy their guns from their enemies because everything in this world costs credits. Even the ammo you spend each mission gets deducted from your paycheck.
Eventually, those shiny bits of gameplay start to grow stale. Almost all of the weapon loadouts can be reduced to holding down L2 + R2 to mow down waves of trivial mobs and even when you hit those insane boss battle difficulty spikes, most of the challenge there is just trying to keep them on screen long enough to pump lead. Because of that, the missions end up feeling like stretches of filler to get you to the next set piece boss encounter.
Still finished the game though because I ended up caring about how this story and its characters would end up. And I would never ever let down my road dawg V.IV Rusty.