I genuinely could not have been more excited for this game. I felt so nostalgic seeing the titles switch back to colors, both legendaries looked equally as stunning, and the new features seemed genuinely useful and fun even in competitive. Coupled with some lovely characters (Arven, and a number of teachers) why am I rating it only half a star? I'd honestly rate it 0 if I could.

I'll tell you what I love about it. I love the fact that when you hover over the pokemon in the wild to scan them with your pokedex, you can tell which pokemon are actually dittos or zoruas in disguise. I love the fact you can bathe, talk, walk, and explore with your pokemon and even quick battle with them. I love the ability to explore the mountains, the sea, and the sky just like we did in Pokemon Arceus. There is so much I actually love about this game, and I wish I could keep saying nice things about it-

if I was able to play it.

I bought it on launch, and I finished it maybe... a week after I got it. It was one of the worst gaming experiences I've ever had, and it's for reasons that should not have left this huge a gash in my review, but it did.

0/5 My game crashed almost every 5 minutes. I turned the auto-save feature off because I enjoy saving manually when shinyhunting and training, so that made the game a lot more frustrating.

0/5 I was unable to actually enjoy the final fight in the pokemon league because the theme LOOPED the first few seconds and was only patched after I already completed the game. My friend commented "im so glad I played the league after they patched the music" and I remember replying "wow, must be nice".

0/5 It's all "Haha, funny glitches" online until you happen to get stuck in one area and freeze until the game crashes. At times, I'd glitch into walls and objects (like the floor) with Miriadon, and he'd just float for 5-10 seconds until the game blackscreened and sent me back a distance away from where I glitched. All good, right? That would be fine if it happened a handful of times, and if all instances were as simple as a blackscreen, but most of the time, the game would crash.

0/5 Unless you speak with Arven, you will not unlock any of the things needed for Miriadon to explore the world effectively, such as rock-climbing, swimming, and flying. Arven was the last route I did. I finished the pokemon league, penny, and only then realized Arven gives me power-ups for my dragon. Which brings me to the next point-

0/5 For a game that felt proud to say "make your own journey" I've never felt like I've played a game wrong until Pokemon SV. It feels like I was punished by "choosing my own journey" aka- I played by what I loved doing the most, collecting pokemon, shinyhunting, and exploring. I faught the gym leaders based on who I was most excited to see, so I started with Rhyme and Grusha. I did the same with penny, which means I started with Ortega and Eri. As you can tell, I played the game mostly "backwards" but because the map doesn't work like it does in classical pokemon games, your road isn't linear, which means I genuinely had no idea what gym or boss I was supposed to fight first. But as I was told in the trailer- that shouldn't matter, because you can pick to do whatever you want!... No, you really can't.

By doing things out of order, you trigger scenes that normally shouldn't/would not trigger as early as they want you to. By the time I finished fighting Ortega, I already knew everything about team Star because they explain everything after his fight, which makes it even more offputting when the last person I fought was Mela. I didn't seek to play this game backwards or in a messed up order. I was going by who I liked the most and what/who I found most interesting, and I LOVED Nemona! Unfortunately, the only main side character student with any substance to their name is Arven, who actually got a plotline with character growth.

3/5 This is the least of my concern, but still a big one. I've never once complained about lag (and I've played old school Destiny with a very shitty router at the time that disconnected very frequently during PVP, and I STILL never complained about lag or how slow my game was running) so, when I say "the lag was bad" I mean- the game was absolutely unplayable. I mean, the lag was so bad that the music would slow down with the game, and my pokemon would fall very, very, very slowly if I jumped off cliffs. Soon after, the game would crash. There were times where I just put the game down in frustration and considered not finishing it at all because it became unplayable.

For reasons I'd rather not mention, Pokemon is a comfort franchise. I'm incredibly easy to please, and while I don't praise all the pokemon games as masterpieces or perfect (by far, there only is one perfect pokemon game and it's PMD EOS) I at the very least ENJOY the journey in every last one of them. I have fun. I escape from what makes me sad and I play pokemon like I'm 10 years old again. It's one of the few joys that I always have. If I want to have a good time? Mindless little fun? Play a pokemon game, any pokemon game. They're cute, they're fun, they're relaxing, they're usually full of many cool things you can do. If you don't like doing 1 thing, you can do another 5 that you do actually love.

But it just wasn't possible with this game.

I couldn't fight the gym leaders because the game would freeze and it would crash. I couldn't catch pokemon because when I escape from battle in a crowded area, 6 other pokemon swarm me and make it impossible to get out until the game crashes. I can't surf or fly because the lag makes it hard to see, and eventually, the game crashes. I can't move from point A to point B fast enough, and if I do happen to go a little under 50fps by some miracle, rest assure, the game will crash again.

I'm a shiny hunter. Finding shinies was not fun.

I thought i'd enjoy the new shinyhunting method.

I couldn't.

Because by the time I got the shinycharm, I'd already encountered all the shinies I wanted by random in the wild. Sometimes, multiples of the same shiny. At one point, I swore to my friend, "if I can throw all these shinies away just to have the game run normally without crashing for 1 day so I can actually complete it, i'd do it without hesitating".

"Ok, we get it, the game sucks, whatever."

No, that's not what this is. The game DOESN'T suck. The characters are charming. The plot was interesting. The ideas were worth exploring and developing on.

The issue here is that there was no possible way for me to actually enjoy it. Not because I didn't try, but because the gaming experience was just so frustrating and awful.

Pokemon games have made me cry before (happy tears, sad tears) but this time, I actually cried out of frustration. This game really broke something in me. I didn't expect much. I just wanted to have a good time. I didn't expect perfect story, perfect characters, and you know what really sucks? I would have adored this game had I been able to play it as intended. I love the idea of a professor so obsessed with their work they become the final boss. I love tech and past and time travel. I love seeing characters grow closer with pokemon like Arven. This. THIS should have been my FAVORITE pokemon game.

And yet, it's the worst thing I've ever played.

I'm a completionist to a fault. I got the pokedex, got the useless shinycharm I never got to use, and never went back in to re-challenge the gym-leaders because the lag was not worth it and there was nothing the game could offer me to make it worth 15 crashes in 30 minutes.

Not angry. Just sad.

Just sad and disappointed.

no man's sky was the first game i ever bought day one digitally. i remember the guy at the counter specifically telling me "you can't return it since it's digital." up until then, i had never had such a bad experience with a game that i wanted to return it.

then i got home and played it.

nms was honestly, as everyone knows, awful at launch and remained awful for quite some time after. but years passed, and by 2020 i had heard it somehow got good- so i played it again. and yes indeed, it had gotten good. it still feels sort of empty at times, but it's a thousand times better than what it was at launch, and it's genuinely fun and addicting

Horizon Forbidden West tries to improve over it's predecessor but is dragged down by it's overdifficult mechanics. You are always told to try new things like using traps, attacking the weak point of an enemy or going all out, but it's not the way you should be doing it. There's always a prefered way the game tells you to kill a robot, while Horizon Zero Dawn allowed you to take many routes to take out enemies.The traps have been toned down, stealth has never been a worse mechanic and enemies serve more as damage sponges since hitting it's weak point will not warranty a good advantage over that monster. The exploration feels empty, the collectables are boring, just some Lore here, some green stuff here that allows you to upgrade your armor and repetitive climbing. Upgrades are also a drag, there are lots of weapons and you don't feel like you want to upgrade anything due to the low damage increase and knowing that better weapons are on the way. Killing machines is fun at first, but it gets frustrating after a while. As for the story and characters, the story is subpar to the first game. The first game was shrouded in mistery and you wanted to know what happened in this world. Now we have discovered it and the game tries to drag a very convulated story with more clones and aliens. Feels like playing a Kingdom Hearts story. Also Aloy has never been more annoying. She always gets what she wants, she doesn't learn from her mistakes. On the first game she was never trusted and she did whatever it took to get to her goal, even if people disliked her. Now she's the ALMIGHTY ALOY, she is always told how good and perfect she is. Even the tribes on the west who should not know her a lot give her special treatment like she's their hero. I am not saying this game is bad, but it's certainly a downgrade and after 27 hours I feel like i am being dragged to play this just to complete it instead of being inmersed in this world.

For me the allure of Zero Dawn as a new IP was the novelty of its world. Figuring out where the robot dinos came from, learning about Aloy and the tribal civilizations, the “Old Ones”, etc. Despite its flaws it effectively built up its sci-fi mysteries throughout and they were mostly given a satisfying answer by the end. Forbidden West continues from there and tries to expand more on Aloy herself and the people she encounters.

The gameplay is pretty much the same aside for some changes to combat and traversal. Fighting the machines is still really fun, and figuring out how to take on all the new variations is the best thing about the game. That said, combat with humans (which there’s a lot of) is still dull, and using melee isn’t much better than it was. They also claimed the climbing would be greatly improved and more free form in comparison, sort of? Honestly I thought it was somewhat worse since it could be really janky to control at times, though the addition of a glider was good.

I feel like the story in this one wasn’t as interesting without the intrigue of its world-building to push it forward. It does try to address Zero Dawn’s biggest flaw to me which was the characters, by making the cast more involved and giving you a base to interact with them between missions. But they still aren’t particularly memorable and the villains are especially boring here. At least the dialogue isn’t as stilted since the cutscene animations are far better than the first.

I did enjoy the side quests though. I don’t remember Zero Dawn’s standing out much at all, but these are more involving and have their own cutscenes akin to the main story, so actually wanted to do the majority of them. The other world activities aside for that (like errands and the generic outposts to clear) are still bland, though you can turn their map icons off and just ignore them at least.

Overall Forbidden West is a fine sequel. The visuals and music continue to be great and there’s better environmental variety. The ranged combat remains the highlight, and they improved on some of the first’s flaws like the side quests and animations pretty well. But it’s let down by how iterative it is, and it doesn’t really do much to justify its story imo.