I can understand the hatred for this one, but also really struggle to see how this game has gotten so much worse reviews and heapings of hate despite just being an okay-ish open-world game.

Forspoken is a pretty good game, when it feels like being a good game. I think the people who did the storyboarding, setting the lore for the universe, and who did the enemy and character designs should absolutely get a raise, promotion, or whatever you can give them. I've seen a lot of people call this game "bland" or "boring" in design, but when you see the half-dog-zombie monsters, crystallized orcs, and lavish outfits for the royalty and upper-class members of this game, I think it's a lot harder to call Forspoken "boring."

In reality, this game has a good amount of good, settled in with a good amount of bad. It's a game I don't think I can dissect too much outside of listing what I liked and what I didn't.

For what I liked? To start, the gameplay and traversal were pretty fun. I don't think there's a lot of great open-world games that want you to move at the speed of light, dodging through rocks, mountains, craters, and valleys, but Forspoken is totally okay with you skipping around its world as you check off objectives and quests (more on this later). It's fun to feel so free, and I think it gave me a lot of good memories with something like Spider-Man or Infamous coming to mind. It's not just a generic horseback or trodding through the world game, it wants you to rush through it and lessen the limitations you might feel in other open-world games.

On the gameplay side, it's a mostly good game with a few modifications that would have helped it be better. I think the game has overall good gameplay, and most importantly, it's unique. It's a good mix of peppering in spells, assists, and ending your attack with a crushing ultimate attack. It doesn't really go beyond this in any tree - one of my gripes - but it does a good job being this magical fusion of DMC and generic guard-breaking, enemy weakness spamming you'd see in a Ubisoft game.

I'm also generally favorable on the way this game handles upgrades - it's fun and again reminescent of something like Infamous when you're picking up the blue mana pools around the world. These are used to purchase new spells and enhance your abilities, and on top of this, you're able to change challenges at certain markers in the open world to enhance that specific ability better with a challenge, also permanently making Frey stronger. This is one of the best ways I've seen a game do this, outside of some challenges being highly situational and hard to accomplish. There really shouldn't have been a limit of three of these you can obtain at one time (it's three, and sometimes you can be in a story mission, unable to change these from a menu or anywhere else until you are back at at a safehouse).

Getting more into the meh or bad parts of this game, there's really no shortage on where to go. On the world design, I'm sort of in the middle. The strange obelisks, the gothic architecture of certain castles and each bosses domain? Very, very good. On the other side? Yeah, there are a lot of areas in this game that are fields and plains. Fields, and more plains. Did I mention they had fields and plains with some enemies in a generic looking field of rubble from a town? Forspoken does a great job on the main path of the game, but veering off to the side can really ruin the magic of the game and put you in sort of that open-world nausea so many of us face when being bored while playing these games.

The story for the game, again, is mixed. I think the game was written pretty well to start, but once you reach the sort of "isekai" moment for Frey...yeah, we're talking YA fiction levels of dialogue. Generic swearing, Marvel-isms, and just a lot of tell-not-showing. It's something that can sometimes, on occasion, actually land well. Frey's voice-actor does a pretty good job of selling the frustration and anger of being trapped in this other world, but the dialogue choices are pretty often mediocre and not what even a normal person would say in a lot of these scenarios.

Along with that, there is a lot of talking in the open-world segment, but I don't find it any more infurating most JRPGs are with repeated voice lines after combat or while exploring dungeons in games of their own. I kinda hate to see people bring that up and go to see something like Xenoblade or Persona or even games Square Enix has made in their favorites. It's repetitive and annoying but no more annoying than most games that have only thirty to fifty voice lines per character.

I think if there's anything to rag on this game for, it's for the massive lack of side content, fun minigames, or really anything to do other than progress the story. There are fun boss-fights and dungeons to explore, but for one of those, there are three "visit an empty town and kill some enemies". Or even better, sit at a statue while we raise your health or defense by +1. Really nothing engaging to see while you are progressing the story. The townspeople missions are all horrifically bland fetch-quests as well, most of them not even requiring that you leave town, but instead running chores for the townspeople as they spout off about how much they hate you (Frey is pretty much hated for 2/3rds of this game by most of the town). This game really has some of the most lackluster side content that will be making this platinum on PSN much more frustrating than if it just had the dungeons, difficult bosses, and more fun challenge runs left in as side content.

Overall, I think this is a good open world game as a bargain bin game. I got this for $20 and have no regrets in beating it or playing through it, unlike if I had maybe bought this for $70 at launch.

mi·rage/məˈräZH/noun
an optical illusion caused by atmospheric conditions; something that appears real or possible but is not in fact so.

Y'know, I hate doing the whole "Webster's defines..." as an intro but it works very well for Assassin's Creed Mirage. A case study in why Ubisoft cannot help itself but crank out more middling, regurgitated slop with nuggets of gold in it. Those nuggets of gold are only building to my definition of insanity: continuing to play these games when they continually disappoint, waste my time, and fill up my backloggd with more mediocrity.

To start with as much good as I can try to mine - if it has been a few years since you have played an Assassin's Creed game, this is a decent entry point gameplay-wise. They have wholeheartedly toned down the open world combat and stomping people's heads in like in Valhalla, to a much more somber, city-adventuring affair similar to those found in games like Assassin's Creed II or Brotherhood. It's a pleasure to feel like most encounters that are entered have to be stealthed out, have numerous routes to make it to the goal, and put stealth back into a franchise that arguably hasn't been that since 2016. Along with this, you get access to tools that put even the peaks of the series to shame. Throwing knives, smoke bombs, and noise-traps are all satisfying gimmicks to throw and manipulate Ubisoft's brain-dead NPCs to their fatal ends.

The only other positive I can elaborate on is the sometimes-okay mission ideas and routing. Most importantly, the assassination missions. These come with an asterisk, as they're light-years away from something even close to Hitman when it comes to variety of assassination and choice of method, but it is a good mechanic to allow players to choose their way into invading a palace or festival. Ubisoft should work on the different kinds of assassination because all of the different paths you use to get in all pretty much narrow down to the same sort of assassination. It's just the method of entry they're using as the illusion of choice.

Now for the negatives, which there is quite a lot. Starting with the story: burn it all down to the fucking ground. I cannot think of anything redeemable and I'm writing this review today so I even just remember what happened in it. I won't cover spoilers but all I can say is...wow, it's bad. The side characters are atrocious, Roshan sounds like a woman out of those old "former smoker" ads and it's grating to hear the whole game. No one else has a name or does a great job at reappearing. Basim is about as interesting as wall paste as Ubisoft only elevates him in the final act to actually being someone important.

Maybe a side-tangent too, but is anyone else really fucking sick of the whole "Order of the Ancients" crap? It's continually thrust in your face, ooh, these "evil characters who are so evil they have to die". Ubisoft was so kind as to even give each of them a 30-60 second FMV before the mission proceeded. However, we're not introduced to any of them before we assassinate them, and all their evils and horrible things are done off-screen or recanted in horrible notes. Can someone at Ubisoft just go to a different company who's decent at writing villains, dear God, I struggle to think of a great Ubisoft villain since Vaas. Part of building up these assassination missions and treating them like a climax is actually finding a way to make me care about what I'm doing, and yet Ubisoft continues to not just miss the mark, but miss the whole target by creating these generic-ass power broker characters who I spend time killing.

This just builds to the dark sides of the game when it comes to gameplay or enjoyment. In favor of Valhalla's gratifying stories to complete in each region, each region of this game has one 3-5 minute side-story, none of which is memorable. Everything else is that annoying collectable gathering you may remember from Valhalla, like Ubisoft thinks they're so smart for creating these houses that are locked in and you have to go to the other side to burst the door open. Wow, so much better than any puzzle game ever. I feel so challenged by something even a 9-year-old could figure out.

Gameplay also, while I did thumb it up earlier, has sore spots. Ubisoft still struggles to program your character to move the right way sometimes. There was at least ten times in the game where Basim jumped opposite of how I pointed, got me spotted, and thrust me into the annoying, pre-2010 action combat they have in this game of parries insta-killing most enemies. The NPCs still sometimes have god-tier acknowledgment of where you are at all times and when you are spotted, will call everyone in the building to meet you. There were plenty of times when I caught myself having fun, only to be caught by some guard through a wall and next thing you know, ten enemies are in a 6-by-6 foot room with me.

On top of all this, the game still leverages some of the biggest complaints of the open-world games. The forced-in crafting system. I will not stop the crusade against that until it is leveraged properly in most AAA games. The generic repeatable side-content missions take all of 5 missions so the game is "replayable".

Going back to the definition, there's a reason I highlighted certain parts. This game was marketed to older AC fans as some sort of return to form, a return to the good ol ACII era of the game, when in fact, it's a mirage. A illusion. This is just Ubisoft's marketing hard at work to make you want to revisit an old friend from high school, when in reality, they're still living with Mom and smell like they soiled themselves. Yeah, there are nuggets you may share and enjoy like chatting about anime and new video games, but you should stay away.

I'm getting real sick of writing that Like A Dragon/Yakuza games are good. They're all good. LAD: Gaiden is continuing the streak of very good games they've made. It feels weird to review this before LAD 8, as I don't know if this game will feel more like required reading before LAD8, or more just like a spinoff, fun side story of Kiryu's storied life.

For the story, I have mixed emotions. I think the game's ending is one of the most heart-wrenching moments in the series, and it's worth playing through and getting to watch that moment unfold. However, maybe it's just all the Judgment and Yakuza 7 in my mind, but the main party for this game just sucks. Hanawa is about as bone dry as they come, Akame is just there to give you boring substories and plays hero, most of the characters from the Yakuza just seem retreaded rather than new ground. It all somehow comes together as RGG intends, and there are some great moments in the story with fun action-packed sections as well as moments that will drain your tear ducts.

The gameplay is great, it's a lot like how Kiwami 2 should have felt. Kiryu has two different movements, both of which work in his favor. The agent style is a bit broken and unlike much of what you're used to as Kiryu, especially when fully upgraded, it's very easy to break the game in your favor. The Dragon style probably should have been what stayed more, as it's the classic Yakuza combat with rush combos, etc. I found myself more in this style for bosses, Agent is a great clean-up style with rooms of enemies.

I think my biggest gripe that lowers the score here is what I ran into with Judgment, but even more grave. There is not a single memorable side piece of activity in this game. You get "Akame Requests" in which most are beatdowns of gang goons, sandwiched between some line of dialogue in which they're mistreating homeless people, which Akame seeks to eliminate. I understand Gaiden is not a full game, but if anything, I'd rather them cut the fat on the story and provide even more fun things to do outside of that rather than giving us nothing but Ubisoft-level fetches quests and "go to this spot to beat up a group of guys". It's insulting, and it's the worst Yakuza has ever been on side content. It does make Judgement and the Fist of the North Star spinoff look more flushed out, and this game's been made years after. I want to reiterate - I understand this is a small game that was not to be the same size as a Yakuza game - but I'd much rather have 20 substories and a few more activities they could have taken from 5, 6, 0, you name it; rather than 40 substories that are all mostly single-fight encounters that end with Kiryu spanking them and walking off.

Overall it's a great game, probably best to play it on Game Pass and beat it in a short amount of time rather than dumping $50 on it. Super excited for LAD 8 coming next month!