a couple hours in to endwalker, i became aware of the belief that nothing fundamentally is going to change here. an mmo is built to be endlessly playable for everyone online, zones persist, the world persists. the sun is under no real threat.

that thought kinda continued to grow as i went on, and with that my emotional engagement with the storyline wane. everything just felt so "safe", the despair never truly working its way into my chest. the more characters were killed only to be brought back five minutes later, the more i considered if these some two hundred hours were something i regret.

and i think my conclusion is, maybe. its clear a lot of heart went into this, and i did absolutely love certain parts of it (shadowbringers) and enjoy most of the characters, but i think i would have found more joy in a more condensed traditional jrpg length game with a game engine that did not make me feel like i was trying to connect to a server at the bottom of the pacific.

i would imagine there is a lot more to love in this game were you to really sink into the gameplay enough to get that urge to try to make a digital life in its world. i was never truly able to, and i think in the end, im left feeling mostly indifferent.

yea story is whatever, dont really care. mostly don't care about the open world either, but its the best implementation of modern "ubisoft" open world i can think of. modest, existing more to try and compliment the freedom of the halo sandbox rather than specifically to add hours onto the runtime.

the second i finished it though, i started thinking about a legendary coop playthrough to focus on other abilities etc. the amount of versatility in how to approach engagements is just beautiful. and it feels so much more tangible to me than like, a bethesda fallout game.

i think this might be my favorite halo ever.

you know... its a pretty well made metroidvania game. and i don't say a metroid game, because it doesn't have the most important parts of a metroid game (to me). that being, the solemn exploration of a quiet and lonely world, and a beautiful soundtrack. metroid dread soundtrack is forgettable at every single turn, its such a shame.

the moment to moment gameplay feels fantastic, its fluid and graceful and you can feel the power in everything samus does. but then you look at the emmi parts, a brutally tight trial and error "stealth" "horror" section that whacks the game across the kneecaps and tells it to slow the fuck down. this is too fun, you shouldn't be having fun, you should be frustrated.

and you can bet its frustrating. its the most baffling game design ive seen in an otherwise good game in ... i have no idea how long. FUCK the emmi segments. there is no pleasure they so clearly wanted you to feel in destroying them either. its just a sigh and an acknowledgement that i will never have to do that again because i'm never playing this game again.

painful review to give. wonderful story. ichiban and friends are incredible new protagonists and the world is just as much a joyous love letter to videogames as it always is, but it wasnt enough to wash the dog piss taste the 80ish hours of the not fully realized combat system gave me.

there was WAY too many fights in this game where i tried every element / attack type and an enemy resisted everything. i might be an absolute moron who misunderstood something, but it wasnt infrequent for me to come to the conclusion my best bet was to set my guys to autoattack and walk away from my computer for 5-10 minutes.

that four stars is only my thoughts on the base campaign. it starts off fantastic, atmospherically oppressive, but jesus man i'm not sure i've ever played a more dramatic decline in the final act of a game.

the first 90% of it holds up beautifully, motion feels fantastic and the sound design is still some of the most impactful out of any game i've ever played. had to unplug my subwoofer because the grenade sounds were shaking the house even with the volume cranked down.

monster design is great, except the jellyfish guys. absolutely despised them, and not in a "man i'm having fun with how much i hate these guys" way. towards the end of the game, the spawns on the little spider guys could be pretty unfun when it doesn't really give you much to work with when trying to get out of LOS of the projectiles.

hated the map design of the last few missions. i get the goal, just being a descent into madness or whatever, but it just wasn't fun to me and felt much less thought through than the first 4 episodes. the final boss fight was complete dog shit too, like they ran out of time and threw something together in an hour.

This was a test to see how much bullshit players are willing to put up with for a admittedly pretty lovely 10 hour story. Ending up spending 15-20 hours on the same exact story I just finished to unlock two 1 minute cutscenes and 1 hour long finale.

Anyways, I failed the test. Should have just watched the endings on youtube. I would imagine the busy work was an intentional aspect of the game, trying to deliver some level of exhaustion or frustration to the player in order to elevate the emotional moments with your friends, but jesus christ it was too much.

The main cast (Kaine, Weiss, and Emil, also the king) were all absolutely lovely. Great costume design, incredible voice acting, great dialogue. Combat was fine, but I definitely wouldn't call it enjoyable. Boss fights were all incredibly bland mechanically, didn't enjoy a single one until the new ending added in Replicant. Music was lovely, but I can tell only a couple of the tracks will stick with me like Automata did. The main village theme was incredibly beautiful.

If it wasn't for the absolutely brutal busy work, this would be a 4-4.5 in my head. This is the seed that would grow into one of my favorite games of all time (Automata), but by itself pales in comparison. I often found myself wondering what other video game auteur I would be willing to slog through this for, and I don't even have an answer for that. Probably nobody.

just finished it. up until i got to the red forest, i was ready to mark this down in my all time favorites. the atmosphere is pretty much unmatched, i loved every second of trudging through the countryside getting into skirmishes with bandits and dogs. i loved the horror atmosphere of the bunkers as well, incredibly done.

really did not enjoy the final three maps though. the hardest difficulty setting felt good up until the red forest, where suddenly nearly every piece of cover is radiated, you can be fighting a dozen enemies at once coming from all angles, and any bed / vendor is a good 15 minute walk away. the final two maps, while still having a relatively wide arena, turn the game into one long hallway packed with too many human enemies and too many invisible enviornmental hazards. i played through the final two maps at night as well, where there was basically no visibility whatsoever. this is probably my fault, but a twenty minute walk to find a bed to sleep in to pass the time just did not seem fun to me at all.

that being said, i think this is a fantastic game that is worth a playthrough. i've made at least 4 attempts to get into this game over the years, and i'm glad that i found the patience to appreciate the jank. can't wait to check out the rest of the series.

i thought it would be interesting to revisit this game after dropping it a week after launch, maybe i'd find something to like. i didn't. this is the most disappointing game i have ever played.

i still can't believe they chose this tone for the story, its an 80s sunday morning cartoon where every 30 second map is a new episode that is tangentially related to the previous one. this COULD work, but they also managed to forget to include a shred of charm that makes those 80s cartoons enjoyable to watch. there are no stakes, no threat to fear, nothing to overcome. its just a schizophrenic romp through the countryside, until you bump into diablo and he falls over dead.

the combat would be fine, but it was an enormous mistake to allow the player to constantly change difficulty levels at will. either you are brain dead cutting down monsters with one hit, or you are spending 45 seconds on each one. either way it never really feels great. never really feels like your character is becoming more powerful.

all i did was complete the campaign. didn't experience the infinite paragon grind myself, but jesus what an awful idea to never give players the satisfaction of beating the game. having gotten into path of exile over the last few months, the biggest difference between the two of them imo is how poe allows the player to feel like they have won, to have beaten the game. hell, poe allows the player, through perfectly manipulating the dozens and dozens of character creation systems, to bend the game over onto itself, to the point where it feels like the game and servers can barely handle it.

all in all, this is a game that does not feel like it respects you. it feels like the game openly considers you to be the rat in the skinner box. no thoughts, just press button get reward. diablo 3 just seems to be an infinite, never changing, grind.

30 minutes prior to credits rolling i would have given it a 2, but ... i dont know. i've never played a game where my opinion has swung so drastically from minute to minute. probably an unnecessary amount of misery in here to really drive the point home, but it did contrast with the humanity really well.

going through and finally playing all the big budget sony exclusive games throughout the PS4 lifespan, and i think this one is my favorite.

the sound design is unbelievable. the gameplay is unbelievable. the animations are some of the most polished and refined i have ever seen (minus the jumping one).

its disappointing to me the general reception this game got from the vocal pop culture nerd crowd.