What a massive improvement over Her Story lol. Playing these back to back (for my horror game podcast The Safe Room) gave me whiplash.

Unfortunately I think this is still pretty tiresome. The first time you encounter "the twist" (several of the people in Immortality are actually two immortal beings simply called The One and The Other One) is legitimately un-nerving and it is slick to move through clips. But it explains itself too much and is too cute by half.

Lot of people have talked about how this critiques the "male gaze" while indulging it, but I don't think that's exactly the problem. A lot of Immortality's horror is found in the kind of woman who has been eaten alive by Hollywood being able to look back at you, being actually the most powerful person in the room. The One is obviously meant to be sympathetic and I understand the move of turning a victimized woman into an ageless vampire. But it's difficult for me to read this in an unparanoid way. The concluding conflict is that The One physically cannot hold themselves as both male auteur and female star. They almost die doing it. Rough!

This may just be a me problem but: The juxtaposition between scenes, individual cuts, is cinema! Having those be algorithmic (on some level anyway) is kind of soul crushing to me. To be clear there are some effective beats in this vein. Though I dislike how expository the hidden talk show scene is, the way it gets more distorted the deeper you get into it very cool. But the construct is so artificial, I wish it would either let itself have some damn shot-reverse-shot or actually lean in further and have takes of the same scene from different angles. It's already work! Do interesting things with that friction instead of trying to rub it away.

That said I will probably be around for whatever Half Mermaid kicks up next. It's better to have things to say than nothing.

It took me like 3 years to actually finish this replay good god. Got a big essay about these coming... soon, so look forward to that!

I did play it on the highest difficulty, but this is a supremely cool action game. They finally figured it out. Big, expressive classes with bombastic powers that interact in simple but strategic ways. This is the least expressive ME as an RPG, which was already slim, but goddamn it feels so good! Shooting infantry with fiery ammo and then exploding with them a biotic attack... Truly never gets old.

Narratively this is. well. hmm. All of ME3's core conflicts boil down to "can't we just get along?!" Shepard as UN ambassador to the stars. Nice to have some moments where they get legitimately humbled that cannot be negotiated away, but this is as vapid a power fantasy as the series has ever been. The thing that ME1 has over all the others is tone; it's melancholy and spacious. Basically all that is evacuated here in favor of Naughty Dog blockbuster design. This is also maybe the weakest core cast of the series, which is admittedly helped a lot by the frequent cameos from previous party members.

Thane is still MVP. The only person in the franchise that really feels three-dimensional and it's nice that he just gets a lot to do. His deathbed scene is the single most moving part of the franchise to me and it's the only moment that questions Shepard in a resonant way.

The other thing that emotionally works here is despair. The flickering moments Shepard spends on the ground of massive scale conflicts underline that, no matter how "good" you are at the game or how many persuasion checks you pass, a lot of people are dying. This has some political... issues. The only thing that can defeat the reapers is throwing lives into the grinder, accelerating the war machine. There's a mission where you recruit child soldiers and then they turn into numbers in your spreadsheet! But if you can take it on its own terms (I can't personally lol) there's some legitimate melodrama!

The ending itself both tries to make you powerful and weak and therefore it doesn't really succeed at either. You HAVE to be the galaxy's most special boy or girl, but also you can't just win outright. Think the game does a fine job with that incredibly tough hand, but it would help a lot if the stakes weren't scaffolded by being the GREAT MAN who is willing to make the HARD CHOICES.

This is moment-to-moment the most successful Mass Effect I think, but it gets that through a slickness that lacks some of the last twos compelling edges. Despite it all, I thought a lot about ME1's empty spaces. Would make a big difference to have that kind of emotional room here.

I'm really such a narrative bitch.

BotW has plenty of flaws, but it sings for me because it has such a solid emotional core. Link and Zelda's partial failure 100 years prior drives the emotions of exploring the world, trying to remember a memory that just barely eludes you. It's melancholy, even if it ends in triumph.

Tears of the Kingdom makes similar moves with Zelda's disappearance as well as her ultimate fate. But it's a dramatic retread, we already had a game where Zelda was trapped somewhere else. I truly do not expect Zelda to ever be a completely active agent, but TotK invents new novel ways to be misogynistic (perhaps turning her into an animal that resources can be gathered from was uh... ill-advised). It's also completely bizarre how much this feels like a reboot, with barely any mention of the events of BotW and all the signs of that game's calamity completely gone. I don't feel like I'm asking for a lot when I think several characters should maybe just recognize Link? It gives exploring towns and cities a strange flatness.

There's plenty positive to talk about too. It's incredibly technically impressive and the dungeon and enemy designs are a massive improvement over BotW. The underground areas add some much needed texture. BotW was a world of surfaces and TotK does some cool work accounting for that. It's just a few steps closer to the traditional open world, contraptions aside, and feels all the busier and un-emotive for it.