Some good characters but my god is this game padded to a ridiculous extent. For a 40 hr game, it's about 20 hrs too long.

Side quests are filler with overly verbose dialogue in need of cutting and editing that adds very little to the experience. They are 90% of the time fetch quests that feel plucked out of an MMO.

The combat is fine, but it goes nowhere. There is no real progression and the few attacks you have are not enough to carry the repetitive combinations of enemies. What starts off fun quickly becomes a slog.

The story is fun initially and hooks you with its medieval political drama but sort of falls apart in the second and third acts as it becomes a standard JRPG 'let's all kill God' adventure and forgets pretty much everything about the world its been building for the last 20 hours.

Technically, the game is a mixed bag. It looks great (apart from the stiff character animations), but stutters a lot even in PS5 performance mode. There are no real game-breaking bugs though.

This is my first Final Fantasy game, so I have no real insight into the franchise, but I think I would probably prefer the turn-based games. The game is basically straddled between action and RPG and the RPG elements are so light they might as well not exist.

first off, I think the story is outstandingly great, but stuck under a pile of assassins creed esque garbage -- the actual ideas and dialogue is there but feels so heavily weighed down by the poor animation in conversations and the bloat that surrounds the last third of the story.

until that moment, I found it hard to find what I liked about the game -- I picked it up somewhere in 2018ish, didn't really like it and it took until now to buy it on PC instead and finish it. Aloy as a character has so much potential that feels so suffocated by the typical RPG curve -- making her a savior of sorts just pushes her deeper into cliche rather than what makes her special. the gameplay personally doesn't feel great, the bow isn't anything I'd write home about -- I've felt better, the diversity of tools felt non existent as I'd use the same bow for 90% of the game and the skill tree felt useless after a while since I just wasn't interested in some of the skills I was missing.

nothing truly captivated me in this game, I was really just motivated by my own adhd to keep playing and to get some sort of resolution to a game that everyone praises. I wish I liked the gameplay more, god I rebound roll to spacebar so I could be more creative with my movement, but still, I didn't like using the bow and it just made it more of a game of attrition for each fight.

the characters didn't particularly stay with me but I really do think at the core, there's a great idea. aloy's backstory and the history of this world is BEAUTIFUL and something that needs more recognition and it felt like having full cutscenes or even taking the time to script it out a little more would have been magnificent.

i really just want to find a game with a cool woman helming the show ;-;

I feel like I can divide my life into "before I played The Last of Us Part II" and "after I played The Last of Us Part II".

This was, and always will be, a seminal gaming experience for me. Prior to playing the first game, I hadn't had a deep appreciation for the art of storytelling in video games. When I played The Last of Us, I realized that video games could tell stories that were as good as if not better than the best stories in movies, TV or literature. And then I played Part II, and my expectations for a well-told story that could follow-up the first game were absolutely shattered in the best possible way.

I know there's a lot of divisiveness around this game and the decisions it makes in regards to its story, but in my opinion this is one of the greatest stories ever told in fiction, period. I've never seen the cyclical and futile nature of revenge so brutally and honestly portrayed, and while it was hard to stomach at times, I appreciated the fact that this game doesn't pull a single punch throughout its runtime. Everything about this game--it's writing, it's voice + motion capture performances, the music--are expertly done. I absolutely love the first game, and always will, but Part II did something to me that I'll never be able to quite figure out. It's so much greater than the sum of its parts, and I truly believe it's an absolutely vital gaming experience that everyone should experience at least once in their lifetime.

When I think about my favorite pieces of media from the last few years, my mind mostly comes back to things that moved me in some way. My favorite movies, TV shows, books, games and works of art have all made me feel something intensely, whether that was sadness, joy, empathy, or anger. My memories of them are emotional in nature, and I know that when I feel something deeply after experiencing it, it'll stick with me. God of War Ranarök is one of those experiences.

I feel like I could ramble endlessly about this game and what it did for me, but I won't for the sake of my own sanity and that of anyone who reads this. What initially drew me to God of War 2018, and why I consider it one of the greatest games ever made, was the relationship between Kratos and Atreus. Here, Sony Santa Monica have taken this father-son relationship and absolutely perfected it. The growth of both Kratos and Atreus, both during their time apart and their time together, is remarkable, and truly makes this game shine. Everything else--the exploration, the combat, the direction--is icing on the cake when you have a narrative this fucking good.

This game is remarkable, there's no denying it. I haven't been able to play Elden Ring yet but this is my Game of the Year by a long-shot, and it deserves every scrap of praise it's already been given. After finishing this, I was able to appreciate once again why I play and ultimately love video games as a medium--I'm able to experience these beautiful stories first-hand, and this game provided one of the best ways to experience that sort of moving storytelling.

Every bit as good as the original version with some solid improvements and a great new ending. It doesn't completely remix the game or anything but being able to go out at night more often takes out a lot of morgana-related frustration and Maruki is an excellent addition to the cast. Kasumi is alright and at least fits in better than Marie did in P4G. The only notable issue with Royal is the terribly redone Okumura boss fight but that's easily handled once you know to switch to Merciless. Overall I'm glad it finally came to PC so I could justify replaying the whole thing and I had a blast.

I’m just about to complete Part 1 on what will be my third playthrough of this game, and my first in a couple of years. This game is so confusing because there are so many glaring problems in game design and visual animation, problems that make this such an unpolished product that pales in comparison to the franchise’s past three titles released on weaker hardware. But, good God, it is so, so fun.

Unlike other weak installments of this series, Three Houses benefits from having really good characters and really fun gameplay structure. I don’t know how! A lot of the characters are based on anime tropes, but they’re charming! And a lot of the gameplay is bogged down but grinding, but it’s fun! I think what Three Houses mastered is unit customization, and how watching a unit grow in these games is the driving force to getting through a meaty story and grindy chapter structure. All those dozens of auxiliary battles you’ll have to do is worth watching a unit be amazing. Getting into those tougher story battles and watching your schoolchildren all band together and be amazing is satisfying and getting them through the route of class upgrades that I want them to go through, meticulously raising their skill points every week myself, I find a lot of enjoyment in it all.

My problems are that the battle UI is fucking ugly. Having bright, 2D sprites and a bird’s-eye view of a battlefield was really the way to go, because some of these maps are such a strain on the eyes while coupled with the muted, realistic 3D models. The look of this game, I cannot stress enough, is so bad. The animations, especially during dialog moments, are so basic and boring that it makes me wonder why they bothered with them at all. It makes me miss the 3DS games’ portraits-only dialog scenes. The support sequences, especially, are annoying because the animations are boring during them! It makes it harder to watch through them all, and I think a big problem with modern FE is the idea that every character needs to have support with each other. Every character has so many support options and there are already so many characters! Bring back old Fire Emblem’s mechanic of every character having 5-7 characters they can support with. I am not watching all of this, man.