shockingly lovely. one of the only open world games literally ever to understand what's compelling about the concept. that the spaces should become as intimately familiar as your own hometown, not just repetitious landmarks to be sped past. that the game should be about navigating those streets and paths, not fast-traveling over them. that the act of getting around should be the point, not just an arbitrary mechanic to shuttle you between setpieces or a fidget toy for the post-game. i laughed at the self-serious trailers too, but this is a knockout.

there's a lot to like about this one but i think it suffers more from its unrefined qualities than it revels in the creative freedom they enjoin. they clearly knew at this point that the bosses were a major draw for this kind of game, but so many are unremarkable and require little active engagement to succeed against. only a few, like flamelurker and the maneaters, really felt like they were testing my ability to learn animations and timing, but they were still really easy. more challenging were areas like level 5-1, which feels like the only moment in a souls game where the difficulty is truly based in frustrating and overwhelming the player. it's just badly designed, no room to maneuver and a truly stupid number of swarming enemies. there's plenty to appreciate here, particularly in the strangely alien designs of certain enemies and areas, but mostly what's good about this game comes just as foreshadowing of what would come later.

it's genuinely insane how far this series plummeted from the heights of Origins. Valhalla is a bit less sprawling than the disgustingly bloated Odyssey, but it's somehow fifty times more boring. i'm glad they scaled back the loot shit from that game, at least. but it doesn't really help when the level-locked map regions still make the game brutally linear. what's the point of this being an open-world game at all anymore, if you're going to force players to approach each region and its questline in a strict order anyway? there is no reason at any point to explore, to get lost in the world. especially since this world is the most painfully dull in the series since the flat muddy townships of colonial america. i would trade the breadth of the newer titles in a heartbeat to go back to the breathtaking heights of the ezio trilogy. i want to jump off tall buildings again. and then i want to climb back up.

profoundly disappointing, coming from someone who really liked the first two games in the series. the "clockwork city" conceit, where every single npc is an individual with their own schedule and relationships is, at first blush, remarkable. but very soon you realize how impenetrable it makes things. since you're only able to play as npcs who you recruit to the cause, you never feel like you're really inhabiting the world. the second you interact with them, they cease to be who they are and instead slot into a tiny handful of prescribed recruitment missions. these mission never have any relation to who these ppl are, their jobs or histories or personalities. they're just boxes that need to be checked to make the npc playable. and whoever you play as has been yanked out of their procedurally generated routine and made to go on missions. but you can't do their jobs when you control them. you can't spend time with their loved ones. when you are controlling them, they cease to exist. they made this massive real-life simulation, but not for us to live in.