With the release of Kingdom Hearts 3, I tried to prep for it by making sure I played all of the past KH games. I didn't even get a few hours into Kingdom Hearts before utterly losing interest.

All you really need to know is that in Kingdom Hearts, every major character has 11 different identities. Some of them are parts of the character that are separated from the whole, and some of them are parts that are combined with another character's parts.

The writing is also just terrible and not worth your time.

I enjoyed Elden Ring significantly more than the Dark Souls series, but a lot less than Bloodbourne or Sekiro.

I'm pretty convinced the open-world aspect of Elden Ring is just a gimmick that isn't even very well incorporated. All the From Soft titles have a linear progression that it expects you to take, and it provides you with tools that you need right around the time you will need them.

In Elden Ring, you have this weird situation where it seems to have an expected linear progression, but doesn't really tell you. If instead of taking the obvious route in front of you, you veer off and kill a few bosses, by the time you come back to continue the main storyline, you'll have outleveled all of content by a ridiculous degree.

I definitely had this experience. The first thing I did was kill 2 bosses the game didn't expect you to kill -- the Tree Sentinel and Margit. Then I went off and fought a dozen mini bosses before continuing the main storyline, which made the entire game a walk in the park from then on.

As usual, it has an amazing story and interesting characters that I loved to follow along. Unfortunately the gameplay just fell flat due to bad design. I didn't end up finishing it myself -- I just watched someone else beat it. Which probably gave me a lot more enjoyment than playing it myself.

I don't dislike this game. In fact, I like the presentation, the style, maybe even the characters a little bit. Unfortunately, I can't compel myself to keep playing it.

The card/deck nature of the game is what put me off. I put it on hardmode to ensure it was a bit of a challenge, but after dying to the 2nd boss 5~ times, I noticed one of the major reasons for failing was not getting the cards that would have been immediately useful. At this point, I also noticed one of the things I would have to be doing was min-maxing the character decks for individual encounters. Some cards are just not useful at all in certain encounters. AoE cards in fights where there's not reliably multiple enemies to hit is a major one.

This is unnecessary busy work as far as I'm concerned. One can think of this feature as having to pick and choose your cards carefully, making sure you have a good mix of power and utility in order to ensure success. I don't see it that way at all. I never once felt like I had to sacrifice anything. I felt like there was merely a perfect set of cards for every encounter, and it was extremely easy to choose.

So while I don't dislike the game, I do dislike everything the cards and deck-building contributes. I gave it about 3 hours of my time before giving up. My understanding is this game is quite short, so I could probably have just pushed through it. But... I don't want to.