I've been sitting right outside the final boss for a few months now but have lacked the motivation to go back and actually beat it, and now with some ongoing hand problems I don't know when or if I ever will.

The game is better than BotW but the longer I thought about it, I still don't think it's, like, great? I don't know how to structure my thoughts on this either, because there isn't a clear delineation on what I like and don't like about the game because I like certain aspects but at the same time I think those same aspects are bad? So this is going to be kind of ramble-y.

I think at it's core, I like the fuse system. Building weird vehicles, solving physics puzzles, crossing gaps and climbing huge towers with ways that felt like I was cheesing it was fun! For the first 30 hours. And then it was all the exact same thing for like 60 more. They did give you some nice tools to facilitate making things easier, like being able to save construction recipes so you didn't have to build the same thing over and over again. But still , I would've liked some more unique challenges/ways to explore that weren't just blatantly better than the rest?

Here's where it starts getting ramble-y because to explain my issue I need to talk about the dungeons which I think were mostly a step up from the Divine Beasts. The Rito one was the worst by far (though the boss fight made up for it) but like, I honestly don't know how you're supposed to do the Goron or Zora temple legitimately because I just skipped it all using rocket shields. Why would I bother doing anything but buying rockets? It was fun finding them the first time and experiencing doing a rocket shield skip for the first time, but by the time I'm making my 200th rocket shield it's like. Just boring. I wish they would've scaled back the fusing tools and had dungeon items that would introduce new ways to traverse the overworld rather than giving you noclip upfront.

Speaking of boring, the combat! It still sucks! Enemies scale way too hard way too fast and become pure tanks WAY too soon. And hey, apparently there is a way to upgrade your armor, but thanks to the non-linearity of the game, I never found that! So for the last 40 hours of my gameplay, EVERY SINGLE ENEMY could 1 or 2 shot me. Except the bosses which didn't scale! So I was more frightened of a fuckin moblin then I was a giant robot spider 40 times bigger than me! Weird!

I wasn't a hater on weapon durability in BotW. Both of these games throw weapons at you. You are never in danger of running out of good weapons. I give them props for that. People just got burned in some game in like the 90s that wasn't designed well and assume any game with consumables is going to be like that. Just use your stuff, it's fine.

But what wasn't fine is that the weapons you get have to be fused with materials, and the controls for that are abysmal! I started to despise weapon durability in a game I was fine with it just because that if a weapon broke I would have to go through the labyrinthine act of opening menus and dropping materials and then choosing a weapon and then swapping ultra-hand abilities and jesus christ just let me do it in bulk in a menu.

In general, what the hell were these controls? BotW sure, it's a different style Zelda, you weren't sure how to set up the controls, but you had 6 years since then. Why are they the same? We've figured out 3D game controls years ago, where the hell were you? Why do I have a dedicated button for calling a horse in a game where I can build flying machines and cars? Why are jump and sprint ACROSS from each other and not next to each other to make running jumps not a nightmare? Why can't I rebind them??? JFC. Also, I hate having the NPC party members running around with me because they get in my way and I trigger their ability when I don't want it and then when I do need it I have to sit and wait because they just wasted it. Cool!

I liked the way the cutscenes were directed. At least, the Zelda stuff. It all had a nice look to it. I kinda HATE the actual story they tell and it's a joke how they treat her, but it looked nice! The dungeon cutscenes, however, are a complete joke. The first time I saw one I thought "Wow, that was more elaborate than I expected! Can't wait to see the rest!" and then I got to the next one, and it was the EXACT same cutscene, they just pan the camera to a different character. What a joke.

Somewhere I can be fully positive is the music. Loved the whole soundtrack. BotW's OST was good for what they were doing but it wound up being too same-y and incidental. Here, I loved all of it! Shrine music was great, overworld and town themes were great, boss themes were fantastic. Good stuff! Oh yeah, and the Depths. Super awesome. Yeah, when all is said and done there wasn't actually that much down there. But holy crap the moment you fall down there the first time? Wow! That's what I'm talkin about. Exploring that place was one of the highlights for me. Wild that I don't think they ever talked about that place pre-release? It was way more interesting to me than the sky islands which I think were severely underutilized.

Yeah, I dunno. This game was trying to be so many things for so many people so it's understandable that it feels like a mess at points. My rambling here sounds overly negative, but don't get me wrong. I had fun with a lot of things! I just had anti-fun with a lot of things too! I think in a weird way it did a good job of capturing the spirit of what I personally like about Zelda but failed in a lot of the execution. I'm kind of pessimistic about the future of the franchise though. An impressive achievement worth checking out nonetheless.

Super fun set of movement tools in this game. Really had a blast seeing a location I just BARELY couldn't get to and then spending like 20 minutes trying the same set of jumps over and over until it's pixel perfect and manage to make it.

The game goes for a very specific look/vibe of n64 platformer and it executes on it exceptionally well. Good music, textures are muddy in just the right way and the models animate just right.

Not a huge fan of the combat. Sometimes struggled to tell when I was colliding with an enemy and something about the lock-on camera just felt... not right, even with the follow option on. The menus are kinda ugly and I wish there had been a map of some sort, or like an item screen with collected/totals in the zone or something. Can't fault it that hard though, menus and maps are hard and I have to assume it's from a solo dev.

Absolutely worth checking out if you like movement heavy platformers. Recommend paying full price too, it's such a good value at only 6 bucks.

never heard of this but I kept seeing someone I follow on twitch stream it and every time i went "is this dude really streaming roblox?" watched 30 minutes of it and purchased immediately.

so refreshing to get the enjoyment of a AAA shooter without having to free up 200 GB and upgrading 3 different PC components just to still be plagued with poor optimization issues. the game is 2.1 GB and runs at over 140 frames, even with a massive 255 player match and destructible environments.

especially love the voip comms. no one has been toxic, everyone is just roleplaying, it owns. i love that when you die it auto triggers your mic and you can let out a death gurgle. good fun.

Capcom truly did something exceptional here.

Street Fighter was in such a rough spot. SFV launched so badly, completely barebones and lacking features that are standard for the genre, horrible balance issues, and poor netcode. Even after Ono left and the new leadership managed to bring it to a pretty alright state (barring the prevalence of Luke) it still had that launch stench that no one wanted anything to do with it.

The team learned well from that experience, and Street Fighter 6 has launched as one of the most feature rich, well polished fighting games of all time. A diverse cast of fighters including incredible redesigns of the classic world warriors along with a whole host of new faces that are realized so, so well. A massive amount of content and things to do, both offline and on. A hip hop street aesthetic hearkening back to the arcade days of the 90s. They managed to do what fighting game devs have been trying to do for the past decade and managed to design a game that is wholly welcoming and easy to pick up for newcomers while offering a tremendous amount of depth and tech for the hardcore.

The main menu has you select between 3 main modes:
World Tour, a single player open world mode where you create your own avatar, train under the iconic cast to learn their moves, converse and get to know them like it's a Persona social link, and put together a wild Frankenstein of a fighter. It's pretty fun, I don't really have too much to say about it. Once I finish it and grind out the zenny for everyone's costume 2 I don't really see me coming back to it that often, but I love that it's here at all. Before netplay became a thing and when I was living in the sticks, I pretty much only played fighting games offline, by myself. So if I could have had a mode this fleshed out back in the 90's I would've been in pure bliss.

Battle Hub is the online lobby, where you take your World Tour avatar online to play matches at arcade cabinets, participate in tournaments, tackle "Extreme Battles" with goofy Smash Bros style hazards and rulesets that can level the playing field between players of wildly different skill levels, and even play classic Capcom arcade games in the Retro Corner for a place on the leaderboards. Sometimes I just hop in to go look at the eldritch horrors people have turned their avatar into. It's a functional lobby system which I guess has to be stated after Guilty Gear Strive's HUGE fuck up.

Fighting Ground is the final mode that kind of has a bit of everything in it. There's Arcade Mode, which gets you a little bit of character story for each fighter. There's local play, obviously, but you can also local play the same goofy modes that are in the Battle Hub too. You can set up custom rooms, which are the best I've ever seen in any fighting game that allow you to set up 4 cabinets how you want with any of the game modes and even training mode, and anyone in the room can spectate any of them. And if you don't want to load up Battle Hub you can queue for ranked or casual matches from here too.

There's one other section of Fighting Ground that I wanted to talk about in it's own part because SF6 contains what is possibly the greatest training mode and tutorial section of ANY fighting game ever made. In addition to a basic system tutorial they have character specific guides that are written as if the character themselves are explaining things as a nice touch, but the guides themselves are excellent! They do more than just teach how to do the characters special move inputs, but more importantly, WHEN and WHY to use them. They really try to layout a super basic game plan for them so that you can pick up a new character and have SOME semblance of what to do with them. Then in the training mode they give you so much useful information displayed in an easily digestible way. They explain frame data and show it to you in such a clean and efficient way that it's easy for ANYONE to understand. They offer several drill type exercises to help learn super fundamental aspects of fighting games.

The star of the battle system is the Drive Gauge, allowing full access to universal offensive, defensive, and movement focused abilities. For casuals, they allow you to press your EX moves (now called OD in what I have to assume is a full embracing of FGC slang) to see big flashy damage and the Drive Impact, similar in use to Focus Attack from SFIV, allowing for an easy "get off me" button that's simple and easy to throw out. And for higher level play, where DI is too committal and punishable, you get Drive Parry a la SFIII as well as Drive Rush which lets you gain advantage on ANY special cancellable normal. The mental stack is massive but I look forward to managing to handle it better over time.

It's not totally perfect though and I do have a couple qualms. The music is really hit or miss. Some themes are pretty good and I like the dynamic implementation of them, how they weave from round start to low health to the next round. Ryu and Jamies theme really stand out, but a lot of them are stinkers. I play Marisa so I've heard her theme the most and it's so, so, SO bad. Graphically the game is pretty ugly too. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's easily the best a mainline Street Fighter has ever looked in 3D, but I kind of wish they'd dropped PS4 like Tekken 8 and MK1 did. Like I look at SF6 like "wow this looks so slick" because I'm used to SFIV and V, but my friends who aren't look at SF6 and go "wow why does it look so ugly" and honestly? I get it. This is also going to be the most monetized SF has been, with both character passes and they're about to launch a battle pass, so who knows how that will end up. I hope it's not too bad but only time will tell.

Oh, I also forgot to talk about the whole Modern Controls thing. They're really pushing Modern as a selling point. Essentially it turns SF into an anime style control scheme where you only have 3 attack buttons instead of 6 and then a special button to get all of your specials, which are no longer motion inputs and instead Smash Bros style where it's just a single direction. The downside is you lose about 20% damage from them and you also lose access to your whole kit and only what they mapped to the Modern combos. I don't have an opinion on it because I haven't used it. With years of SF legacy using Modern is much harder than Classic for me. But if you've never really played them much you can hop on and skip the execution barrier somewhat, though I feel you'll be hampered in the long run.

This wound up being way longer than I expected. I had a lot to say. Last night, 62 hours after I first launched the game, I had 28 hours in it. It is truly so much fun. The team has a clear reverence and love of Street Fighter, Capcom's legacy, and the fighting game community in general. I will not stop playing this game for a very long time. I cannot wait to see what this team does over the game's lifespan.

There's never been a better time.
Get into fighting games.

Played this when it originally released but got stuck in a quicksave death loop and abandoned it but finally came back so I could play Control.

Loved the story and all of the flavor around it. the manuscripts, the radio shows, the TV shows, all fantastic. Great cast and super engaging and was the main thing keeping me from dropping the game again.

Gameplay really wore thin and this is maybe the quintessential 360 era game of all time. Forced walk and talk segments, story beats undercut by having to walk backwards to pick up some mundane collectible, super simple gameplay loop stretched out 4 hours longer than it needed to be, unnecessary and boring vehicle segments, long "epic" holdout action segments, it's got it all.