8 reviews liked by opalisk


a lot of the reviews for this game are from people who didn't hack their save data. i did and it was a lovely time (though it is UNPLAYABLE if you don't do that, shit was a total slog at the beginning + grinding out daily tasks for a pittance consistently killed my buzz). very solid picrossin' all around. the alt world levels were unnecessary (i still don't know how that shit works and i refuse to learn) but the main game and the mural tiles were really cool

No Man's Sky drives me insane in a particular way which no other game really has in a long while. It has two viciously opposed things it is trying to accomplish, in a slapdash way that really feels like it is just continuously adding stuff without thought.

I am playing this in the year 2023, when the game has been out for a while. It has been patched numerous times, with all sorts of content. And every single piece of that content feels like it was made for Gamers™. I don't know what I am but I don't feel like I'm the core demographic here, because every one of these things feels like a superfluous feature that obscures what must've been a hauntingly pensive game.

No Man's Sky is also one of the bleakest capitalist games I've ever played. In it, you pilot spaceships which require no more attention than mining some resources, with the ultimate goal of finding more planets to visit, to carve giant holes and canyons out with your mining laser, so you may reap more rare materials and treasures to sell to an abstract space market. Plants are treated by this game with equal care and diligence to stones. A gorgeous tree that has evolved over a hundred thousand years is carbon, and maybe oxygen! Loads of delicious carbon. You carve it down and destroy it, not even letting it be wood, not even letting it be something to shape with your hands, but evaporating its form and reducing it to a basic molecule.

And for what? So you can do this a hundred more times? In dozens of more systems full of strange personality-vacant aliens with the same mysteriously vapid dialogue? So you can "discover" planets covered in settlements and crashed ships and aliens and you never can walk more than 500 meters without finding some remnant of civilization?

What scant environmental storytelling I can pick describes that the sentinels wandering around may be the remnant of some sort of fascist apocalyptic war. What then is this resource extraction hell we now exist in? Is all of No Man's Sky in some kind of purgatory? They added pirates and pirate raids recently, and they are the most boring flavorless call-to-action unnecessary gameplay I've experienced all year.

You follow leads after some entity named Artemis, slowly figuring out that they've crashed on some strange foreign planet. They describe it being covered in darkeness or something, and being utterly alone. How I wish I empathized at all. Can you imagine the weight this would have if I wasn't assaulted with a hundred meaningless NPCs before finding my way to finally speaking with Artemis? Imagine if the fascist Sentinels and idle fauna were the only signs of life except this one distress call, and finally after a dozen hours we connect our radios and talk, and they tell me how lonely they are, and how they feel so lost. How much resonance, how much solidarity we would feel!

But instead I am caught feeling that such an exchange must be an error of some degree. Some sort of remnant of the old game. It is impossible to fly to another planet before passing a dozen ships. Artemis cannot be truly so lost.

I was minding my business once when some pirates started attacking a base I was nearby. The game encouraged me to intervene. Why though? I found myself struck with the snarkiest thought: It's called No Man's Sky, but the way they're carrying on - I don't know, must be their sky!

No Man's Sky is so terrified of letting you feel alone, and I imagine that's because gamers yelled at them about it. And that's a damn shame, because when I landed on my second planet and discovered a poison mushroom planet full of giant worms that filled the sky, I did feel awe for a second. And then the game directed me to scan, and pointed out all the fun ore deposits and things for me to pillage, and the feeling was gone.

It's definitely somebody's sky. But not mine.

it's... alright. i think today's praise is a bit overblown. it's like, there are a bunch of gameplay things, but they all feel pretty disjoint, kinda because they are, and that's how they were added to the game over time.

As far as the actual gameplay, it's pretty good. I mean who doesn't enjoy picross. And being able to capture pokemon and use their special abilities is a nice twist, if not the most obvious tweak you could make with this concept.

The real issue with this game lies in its progression. Progression is locked behind two things: energy and picrites. Energy just limits how many squares you can place in a given time period, but with enough upgrades it's a manageable roadblock.

The real issue with this game is the picrites, which are tbe main currency you use to progress in this game. It's very obvious this game was designed with microtransactions in mind, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. However, I've been playing this game as optimally as possible every day for almost a month, trying to conserve as many picrites as possible for progression. I've made it to World 6 out of 30. If I wanted to actually complete this game without the microtransactions (which is no longer possible since the 3DS e-shop closure) I've estimated it would take me another year of grinding for picrites every day. Ain't nobody got time for that.

So while it was certainly fun to play for a little while, and I may pick it back up every now and again, I'm certainly not willing to invest the time it would take to complete it, as much as I adore this game's concept. Granted, it was free to download, but I would much much rather pay £5 for a game with much more natural progression.

This review contains spoilers

this is a review for golden but ill probably also be talking about the ps2 original cus thats the platform i played as a kid

i have such a love/hate relationship with persona 4.
persona 4 is quite possibly one of the most mean-spirited games ive ever played. this game perfectly embodies the conservative liberalism of (especially) late 2000s japan, with a lot of hollow gesturing at acceptance and finding your true self but in reality obsesses over people and is constantly judging them for their decisions. in persona 4 there is no bigger crime than thinking that life could be more than this, that this cant be all that there is. yukiko wanting to leave behind her dead-end family job at the inn is framed as selfish and its good of her to sacrifice her own happiness for the good of her dead-end dying town. naoto, no matter how people spin it (and they do), is written as being extremely dysphoric. s/he is highly uncomfortable with her/his breasts (which the game makes a VERY CLEAR POINT IN EMPHASIZING on a 15 year old's body), s/he highly considered a sex change, s/he wears a binder through the whole game, and her/his romance route encourages you to directly overstep her/his boundaries and force the way you want her/him to dress on her/him (which, for the romance route to start, is highly feminine). naoto being so uncomfortable with her/his body and gender is shown directly as a sign of weakness, naoto needs to Accept Her True Self, which doesnt mean reflecting on the way s/he feels about her/himself, it means blindly accepting that the way youre born is the only way you should stay and changing from that norm is just really uncomfortable for everyone else and you should really be thinking about the way they feel.
with all of that whinging aside, i cant help but love this game. persona 4 directly impacted my life and i think for the better. as my first persona game, this game made me fall in love with rpgs, understand what rpgs can be. the characters were unlike anything ive ever seen, they were nuanced and seriously felt like real people. the game was difficult but rewarding, the style was incredibly smooth and it made me engage with it on its own level. its not that much of a stretch to say persona 4 taught me what video games could be and im eternally thankful for it in that sense but in another sense whenever i play it now i just get frustrated that its not what i saw in it when i was a child anymore. still, occassionally, when im wandering around those foggy inaba streets, going to the metalworking shop and buying new gear or going to aiya to try the beef bowl again (i got a courage upgrade since last time!), i can catch glimpses of the old magic. this is, for better or worse, a very special game.

also the new character in golden sucks and i hate her

this is the best dragon age game and im tired of pretending its not

Huge day for gay people

Jokes aside, as much as I love this game, it's aged poorly in many aspects and can be a total slog to get through. I wouldn't recommend it unless you're a tried and true RPG fan and willing so sit through its bullshit, but the reward is great characters, the best persona girl, and an insane ass story that's so memorable.

i'm kinda bummed this games never gonna get touched again because theres really so much potential here, give this game different writers and a different direction and it could have come out looking so much more flatteringly

some thoughts from my twitter:
"theres an awkward and shivering earnestness to mass effect andromeda that i find extremely compelling
it kneecaps itself often by trying to play cool or pretend it doesnt care but it does care and if it showed that more i think more people would be able to see what i see in it
me3 is a Far better game than me:a and they share a Lot of issues but for some reason i think i feel lighter towards the latter"

jaal is honestly one of the best companions in a bioware game so theres that

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