This review was written before the game released

i'm trying to think of when exactly i heel-turned on the pokemon series... i cut my teeth on third and fourth gen, returning back in time for gamefreak's arrival onto the 3ds with x and y, and the cracks certainly showed then, but nothing could have been more damning than the release of omega ruby/alpha sapphire, its absence of the beloved frontier explained away in an interview citing "well, who the hell finishes these games anyway?" and that sort of blew my mind, hearing a game director outright handwave inattention to the delivery of their own product with "oh, who cares?"

inattention... is certainly one word that comes to mind when playing pokemon legends arceus. the entire game feels cobbled together from breath of the wild's sloppy seconds, some mmo styled fetch quests and tasks, and youtube videos of pikachu running through an unreal engine wheat field, comments repeating one another with "THIS is the game eight year old me dreamed of playing!"

well, dream bigger.

here's the gameplay: you, the player, enter a map from rust with unloaded textures. in this ugly mess of morrowind bump mapping, you run around and collect resources. of the many things you can make with them, a pokeball is one, and that is how you'll build your team. once you've lobbed enough of the things at unsuspecting wildlife (or suspecting because you ran full steam ahead and threw the damn things like mad), your new goal is to train the team and fill out the pokedex... in addition to completing story beats, of course.

but let's talk pokedex. capture a 'mon and move on, right? wrong. capture 5 of that mon. kill 7. see it use 'ember' four times, and so forth. you do this for every single pokemon, these series of menial tasks designed to give players SOMETHING to keep them in their far cry 2 usermaps long enough so that they don't run through the game too quick. and you have to do this, by the way--the pokedex acts as gym badges do in the mainlines, each badge ("rank") allowing you to use higher leveled pokemon. don't give a shit about screwing around with budews and geodudes? well you better, and you better do it often lest you lose control of your own pokemon.

how about the battles? it's funny--i feel like the initial trailers made combat seem more involved than it really is, which is... your standard turn based affair, really. there's some reworked 'speed' stuff going on, but it's genuinely whatever you're used to from the mainlines with the strange addition of being able to walk around and harass the poor beast you're fighting (or, rarely, its trainer). it's fine, too--don't mess with what works. it's actually fantastic how smooth the transition is in and out of battle, too, a player in legends being able to cut through five starly in the same amount of time a bdsp player might take with just one. this begs a question, though: why no multiplayer? huh? it's the same battle system as anything else, so what's the excuse? why can't i go fight my friends with the shiny zubat i nabbed? gamefreak can't handle seeing me run around in an arena crouching really fast in front of the opponent?

let's get back to the map, again, where all these battles take place. there's not much going on in them. the moment you exit the city hub's gates and find yourself with newfound freedom (after an hour of excruciating tutorial), you see.... virtually nothing of interest. there are some poorly rendered trees out in front, and some... rocks to the left. some grass. there's mountains in the distance, but don't be deceived--this isn't an open world game. you aren't climbing that mountain. you're certainly welcome to piddle about around them, though, the only 'reward' for exploration ever being just finding large pokemon every so often (at turkey leg dangling higher levels, too). for all the ideas nipped from botw, creating intrigue in landscape design isn't one of them. it's just your very, very painfully average set of bump maps with repeating water textures, repeating dirt textures, repeating rock textures--

it's an ugly fucking game, is what i'm trying to get at.

"graphics don't matter!" graphics matter. they aren't the end all be all, but a book in light grey print on pages sopped with coffee certainly presents a more unenjoyable reading session than you'd like. it's questionable why the game is in this state at all, barely steps past the original alpha trailers. this is the part where i must iterate and reiterate: pokemon is THE most profitable media property in the world, eclipsing genuinely anything you or i can think of. gamefreak and the pokemon company bring in over 170 million dollars annually--so where the fuck has it all gone?

well, i can make a guess: straight into exec's pockets. these games hardly matter when the pokemon company's biggest source of income stems from merchandise of all things, so here's the position pokemon legends found itself in at gamefreak: the studio wanted to make a nintendo-hire-this-man type game, they were told "sure, and you'll do it in two years!" to which someone probably complained, asking why so little time, how they'd have to dramatically cut down the scope and intent, to which they were probably told "so?" among "it'll sell regardless" and maybe even "no one finishes these damn things anyway."

and that's where gamefreak found themselves, having to create a scope actually manageable. it has its good little bits that the team knew they needed to get right, like going in and out of pokemon battles, qol changes making managing a team easier than ever (choose when they level? choose their names after? hell yeah), and even the brief interest of just hearing a faint, familiar pokemon cry quite near you... but it all takes place in these ugly, lifeless worlds sorely lacking trainers, sorely lacking cities and towns and settlements at all, sorely lacking actual level design and creativity and care.

so maybe it isn't inattention. in all honesty, gamefreak probably did the best they could given the time they had and the ideas they wanted to work with, and they knew the shit that was bad... was bad. the end result is a barely fun gameplay loop with tried and true designs smothered in mediocrity, in fetch quests and genshin tasks, in a lack of art style and cohesion, in sandboxes that fail to justify themselves, in a story that i wanted to spend a paragraph writing about but what the fuck ever, it's a pokemon story, that shit was always going to be bad.

let me wrap this review up by describing the (spoiler free) circumstances leading up to deciding i'd had enough. i did my fair bit of exploring and leveling up, and it got very old very quick, so i plowed ahead with the story and ended up at a boss fight with baby's first dark souls mechanics on display--one i ended without even using a pokemon. this granted me access to a new area, and it was there that i found the same ugly level design but with 50% more brown. i hightailed it to a ruin (which was a large, square, empty box) and met a character who hated my guts. i found three bandits after a hyped up cutscene all to just face one level 23 pokemon, and then i returned to the ruin character who now suddenly loved me as a result, her character arc completed in the span of 5 minutes, and i then realized that if i wasn't playing any longer for the exploration, and i wasn't playing for the gameplay, and now i didn't even care enough to play for the story... then there just wasn't any reason to play a minute more.

gamefreak could've done better--even if you end up playing and loving legends, you may still find yourself agreeing with that sentiment. but they won't do better, and they won't have to when these games sell the incredible gangbusters amounts that they do. the pokemon company knows this, and that's why gamefreak's never going to get the dev time they actually desperately need. so long as half baked $60 early access crap like this is peddled out and sold in the millions, nothing will ever change. in other words...

should you buy pokemon legends, you aren't supporting a brave new direction to take the series. you're supporting a grindhouse dev studio forced into mediocrity, and that's the direction they've gone for the past decade, and it'll be the same till they or this series dies. just don't forget an arceus plushie on your way out.

2020

you've turned to page 56 in our lovely gamedev cookbook--wanting to create a smash indie hit yourself? not to worry, i have you covered. first, you'll want some hyper friendly, super inoffensive art. really smooth those edges. "wait, i want a dark twist to it!" of course you do, because your indie darling isn't taking off without one. now what you're gonna do is contrast the inoffensiveness with, i don't know, edgy scribblings found on an eighth grade desk or somewhere in the 2008 archives of deviantart? obviously we can't have anything ACTUALLY visually disturbing or raw, because then you're going down the hylics path, and noooo one cares about hylics. no, it needs to be scary in the same way a hatsune miku vocaloid music video about a "serious" subject is scary--draw a circle a bunch over itself until it's got a tone of lines and looks super disoriented. creepy, right? yeah just do that for everything.

well, that's pretty much it! with the cutesy sparkle artstyle contrasting just the right tint of edge to unnerve slendermen veterans, you just need some basic, serviceable writing and to hire a musician better at music than you are at game dev, and you've got a real shot at things (but make sure it's real easy, too, or your players are gonezo)! what, don't believe me? just take a look at undertale, OFF, super paper mario, doki doki literature club: cute presentations, horror twists, easy to beat. except... you know... every single of these games (okay, maybe not doki) does omori's job better in just about every single way. see, these games have biting writing and make bold, aesthetic decisions, and they all do it in brevity. off, hylics, space funeral, and undertale may all be inspired by earthbound, but their developers each understood that aping its absurd, overly stretched out game length is a BAD idea. hoh, but not omocat!

no, in fact, omori is actually longer than earthbound.

and to what purpose? because after over eight hours, i'm completely checked out of this endurance tester designed to absolutely waste your time. and i'm not saying that in like a "every second of this game sucks" way, but a "no seriously, there is so much garbage and fluff in this game designed to waste your time". backtracking plagues omori like a virus as you juggle tasks and side quests that amount to a lot of holding one direction forward while running for five, six, twenty screens. worse, the game lacks the grace to let you run up and down ladders, so those to-and-fro journeys are best aided with a phone in your free hand. there's this minecart section where you slowly drift down a lane for two screens until coming to a missing piece that then... slowly sends you back another two screens. but perhaps the absolute most grating time and effort waste comes from trying to navigate absurdly inefficient menus.

no, seriously. here's how many actions i have to get through just to heal a party member with another member's heart spell.

1) b button for menu
2) 3 analog clicks to the right
3) a button to select "skills"
4) 3 analog clicks to the right
5) a button to bring up health character
6) a button to select healing spell
7) a button to select "use"
8) 1-3 analog clicks to the right to select character to heal
9) a button to heal
10) 4 b buttons to get out of all the menus and back into the game

holy fuck.

i'm being really hard on the game's pacing because it really, truly is miserable. it's annoying that nearly every object has a useless description attached--does pressing A on, what, a fire hydrant need to give me a text box that says "fire hydrant"? no shit. tell a joke or don't have the box at all. enemies respawn every new screen catching you in a battle with whatever variation of rabbit you're definitely sick of fighting by a certain point. the dialogue's the worst, though, and i'm not even yet discussing its actual quality: it's just so much. there's so much of it (like this review). there is so many words used and a fourth of them are to any actual merit. so much dialogue is wasteful, unfunny, flat, basic, and bloated, and you just sit through it hoping someone will say something interesting.

they never will. omori's a game that decides earthbound wasn't insufferably quirky enough and proceeds to ham it up to infinity but with little purpose, and it results in writing and a world that feels disingenuous. not always, of course--there's a very specific interesting contrast that occurs in the dialogue when you first go from real world back to dream world, and it feels poignant and interesting. this feeling also lasts a very limited amount of time as you realize, yes, you really HAVE been ripped from the curious part of the game and sent back to a creative wasteland, the game proceeding to hammer in a point you already got two hours ago.

let's talk more about that real world dream world contrast more but, first, the combat. it's actually pretty clever and i enjoy the synergy between your characters and how to manipulate that to take on even the biggest of challenges. but then, the game presents a different problem where MOST battle encounters will not actually involve using the system in any meaningful way, the simplest and most straightforward (and successful) way of fighting through your enemies being a mash A fest a la OFF. why? because nothing in this game has any fucking health. and you know what's really crazy about that? the people who play this game do NOT fucking care about the combat. oh, what, you think that's presumptious of me? at the time of writing this, only 29% of players bothered fighting and beating two optional minibosses early in the game. meanwhile, 60% of players finished the first dream world day (taking place post-minibosses)... which means another 40% didn't even bother to get that far.

what this tells me is that half of omori's actual playerbase don't understand the combat system and don't care enough to learn it, and they're just here for the very syrupy soft pastel story. oh, and i'm saying that with confidence because i'm among the only 10% that did not return a character's high five. it's telling.

additionally to combat, i really enjoy the effort put in to give several enemies different "mood" states that may reflect new animations and designs, and that's really cool. the battle ui is sharp, even, and its a great use of colors all around--easily beating out the utterly generic world design otherwise. but getting back to the real world/dream world contrast, what really bothers me about omori is that the game rips this system out of your hands and gives you something immeasurably boring to work with in the real world. but the thing about said real world is that it has the more "interesting" narrative going on and so, when you're sent back to the dream world, you've got the fun(er) combat back but are trapped with a half of the story that you don't care about or don't really need to hear. additionally, the real world shows just as much creative prowess as the dream world in its design--all a series of hallways. it's really flat.

there's moments of charm, like the sound effects similar to animal crossing on the gamecube, pushing over a cardboard dumptruck, and a character that holds a trophy for "most horse second place". and there are moments of complete reverse charm where the intention is inept, like a list of "whatchamacallit"s to collect, a character named smol, and that entire cheese rat segment that just goes on and on and on... like the game. like the game does. the game goes on and on.

i don't know, i've written SO much about this game i clearly don't enjoy, and a majority of where this is coming from really is in response to critical reception i can't understand whatsoever. and i didn't understand the reception undertale got six years ago and felt annoyed by its heavy presence on the internet, but then, well, i started playing it and the experience was instantly lovely, and there was no "oh dude just play thirty hours to get to the cuhrazey part!". it was fun from the start, like a video game should be, and half the length of omori, too. as is OFF, and hylics, and barkley, space funeral, ib, yume nikki--all of these brief indie rpgs i would recommend to anyone over playing ape inc's sloppy seconds.

when i look at omori, i certainly do see omocat in its design: bland, easily digestible, inoffensive, and round edged--just like those t-shirts. and then i realize what this game really is.



before i write on anything else, i want to give a round of applause to hitman: blood money's save system, that which may be the finest the stealth genre has seen and deserves to be seen again. depending on the chosen difficulty, hitman offers you a number of saves; normal is 7, hard is 3, and there's none at all waiting for you on professional. the magic of these saves is they absolutely can be used anywhere you like, just as you may with a quick save, but, because of their nature as an expendable commodity, you can't really... well, savescum. hitman takes the strength and safety of a save system that relies on player input but without cheesing the experience of allowing you to quick save after every small increment of progress (and i am completely guilty of this in other games). the player is thus encouraged to try various different angles to see what decision or string of decisions best deserve being executed and saved, and which ones are best... not. am i making sense? it just feels super impactful every time i specifically save because there's always something BIG i accomplished, and i take some comfort in pulling off all the right moves that mentally let me save and advance (unless i accidentally hit 'restart' and then lost my saves, lol. lol. lol).

anyway, yes, it is a stealth game, and it is completely unlike any other stealth series. there are those like thief and dishonored where sticking to the shadows is your best offense, deus ex and prey where revealing yourself to those perceived friendly is a deliberate choice, and alpha protocol or metal gear where the stealth sucks and i assume you're not playing for that. but anyway, it's hitman that handwaves all that and, instead, invites you to walk among others--to be IN sight and to BE seen--to blend in like a backstage chameleon. it's a system that does require discretion--cornering those you've decided to kill and ensuring their passing is seen by none but your own bald faced stare. and it frankly never gets old.

perhaps the worst thing about blood money is how disgustingly clunky it feels when first playing (and first returning for another replay). everything feels so goddamn stiff and sticky and the controls feel like your keyboard's turned into a chinese fingertrap. you think it'll get better after the tutorial, but it sucks even harder for the followup mission because your options feel real limited. but a light switch is pulled with the following missions, everything coming together harmoniously, and suddenly you're effortlessly navigating complex buildings stabbing and choking and piano wiring every sorry son of a bitch who foolishly came into work well dressed. seriously, i've gone through this whole thing three times and this same experience always happens, and i think it'll happen to you, too.

i'm still gushing, sorry. whenever you successfully finish a mission, you're presented with... a newspaper, acting as your stats screen. how you executed the victim to how many rounds you fired to what witnesses saw what and how close of a profile they can draft of you--all this information and more gets covered in a cute, typed up report surely striking fear into whoever still reads newspapers. it's ridiculously immersive, and it even ends up influencing my decision to replay a level over and over with different play styles just to see what they'll write. now, you do end up wishing the range of what's covered could be even wider and have more fluff text associated with it (and maybe less ridiculous lines like "police found bullet casings belonging to Customized Hitman Classic Silverballer That He Painted White"), but it's still pretty cool. and it's moreso just unfortunate the concept wasn't expanded on in the tm trilogy.

what else... you remember how i mentioned that hitman's a game that turns away from other stealth games to do its own thing? well, you totally can do that, but you can also play things out like garret or jc denton (except with a lot more coin throwing), or you can try going full psychopath no russian (and the newspapers will certainly note it). you can execute targets in a number of ways, and it never has to be part of a path intended by the devs, either. sometimes you really do just stuff a mine inside a briefcase suspiciously placed just enough for a guard to grab it and bring it back to the station where you've conveniently lured the target to right on time to hit the detonation and make it look as if you weren't involved at all.

music by jesper kyd's an amazing touch, too. it's all these sorts of themes bordering on tension, suspension, danger... from the npcs' point of view. for you, these suites are your theme songs, and they fit the job perfectly as you meticulously garrote one target after another with your clown suited hands. visuals are honestly pretty cool: there's a range of environments that 47 visits necessitating a lot of new and unique textures/models, and that comes with a distinct feeling in each new mission. my favorites ended up being a drug rehabilitation center nestled up on a foggy hill and a fancy ferry navigating the mississippi, and it's both just because... i dunno. those are just really cool environments for a video game.

the clunkiness i mentioned that happens in the beginning of the game isn't quite limited to that part, though. there's other weird, stupid things that can occur during gameplay, like whether or not you'll actually pull of a successful fiber wire because you'll feel like you really should've but it didn't happen. sometimes guards really, really let you get away with some shit but other times they'll be completely on you with little warning. i don't want to make it seem like this is always the case, and you do generally have a good feeling of whether you're blending in or not, but weird things can happen.

the upgrade system kind of sucks, too. general weapon variety is already a bit samey--i ended up just exclusively using the silverballer and w4000 sniper this run because i wasn't looking to get into big fights and that made the rest useless. the upgrades are basically a two way straight where you're either making your weapons super effective silently or super effective loud and disastrous, so it could've been nice to have a bit more flavor and variety there. you also are able to earn the real good stuff... real early. and it doesn't feel like you really worked up to them yet. also there's a hideout/gunrange and i'm not really sure why anyone would go to it

but there's a reason why i keep coming back to hitman blood money, and small clunkiness nor boring upgrades is going to stop me from revisiting the same locales and targets with different ideas and approaches every time. also, the reason i really come back is the killer ending, which, despite closing off kind of a dry story, ends up being crazy satisfying somehow. you'll just have to play it to understand how that's possible.

2017

shortly after prey released, raphaël colantonio (founder of arkane) left the studio, his words more or less "i want to make games but i feel like i'm just making products". i empathize. prey, a crown jewel of the immersive sim genre and a fascinating combination of player freedom with tight writing and attention to detail, was a commercial failure. prey was strangled by bethesda who refused to ship review copies and who stapled the completely unrelated 'prey' title onto what is ostensibly a something shock game all in order to hold onto their precious trademark, a spoil of war from human head studios. the game was rigged from the start.

immersive sims are tough to design. you've got to create level design that isn't some last of us cutscene hallway--you've got to allow for all sorts of playstyles, approaches, theories, and strategies... especially when you give the player some very, very interesting tools such as the gloo gun, that which is a metroidvania sequence breaker in handheld form. immersive sims generally have tight narratives (or, at least, strong worldbuilding). prey does both, of course--it's always interesting to discover every little story nestled in every little corner aboard talos 1, the stage for prey's play. but like i said, they're tough to design... so most studios don't bother. and who can blame them when gamers too seem to reject the genre, dishonored 2 a commercial failure, deus ex mankind divided a commercial failure (and square enix's meddling, like bethesda, sure didn't help). no, no, we want more slop. we want more movie games. etc, etc

despite me thinking this deserving of a near perfect score, i'm bothered that i don't feel enthusiastic writing this. i guess i'm down harder than i realized about the current state of the games industry, the current state of triple a. what is it about these games that just don't click with gamers? are they too hard? immersive sims are interesting in that, if you don't know what you're doing or don't make an effort to really understand the game, you're going to find yourself loading a save far too often. prey is merciless in this regard, and i speak to experience. my first playthrough found me desperately scrounging for ammunition and barely surviving encounters with anything. four years later, forgetting near everything, i was suddenly doing so. much. better.

why? well, i started actually scrounging all the trash i could, for one. i stopped breaking down weapons into spare parts--there's more than enough of those around the station. i started REALLY using the hell out of that wrench (don't underestimate it. i used it to the very, very end). but the most important thing i did was using the analyzing helmet tool that researches enemies and offers you advice, strengths, and weaknesses. holy hell, why did i never even bother with that before? enemies i remember giving my hell last time were cakewalks on this run. lord, over halfway through the game i felt like space jesus, undefeated.

awkward transition but there's definitely some negative aspects that hold prey back from being absolutely perfect. art aside, the bugs (when and rarely they appear) are rough. bodies disappearing or clipping through the ground, glitched objectives, flickering lighting, and invisible fire all add up to a laundry list of annoyances... but if you're not going for 100%, you probably won't stumble over many. prey's got an incredible introduction and charges full speed ahead with its first act, but loses steam around halfway when the environments start drying up in creativity and everything starts feeling samey and boring. it's like playing half life's residue processing but for ten hours. and without spoiling, the endings are suuuuper anticlimactic and sloppily rushed through. worse, there's no real good combat payoff before then, either. i was geared up for war, man.

i think my favorite part about the game is that, despite playing through massive runs, i could still definitely see myself going back for thirds in a few years and playing just a little differently. with as many options, styles, and tools the game hands you, it's a little impossible for anything but maybe the same story growing dull. that's the magic of an immersive sim.

bethesda is a lucky, lucky, lucky games company. like, insanely lucky, and i'm not even discussing the legal wins they've bagged against mohjang, human head, interplay, id--no, i mean they're lucky in that, twenty years ago, they developed a really impressive open world rpg engine. that was morrowind, and morrowind allowed for all sorts of unbelievably cool, innovative ways to maneuver its wide world: every building could be entered, every npc could be killed, every item could be picked up, and everyone could be talked to. not only that, but objects in the world had consistency--you could drop your armor right where you stood in the middle of balmora, leave for many moons, and come back to find it still very much there... exactly as you left it. and many of those npcs wouldn't ever respawn should you kill them--your actions had consequences. and all of this... absolutely all, was contained in a massive world that allowed you to walk from one end to the other without stopping.

and this is why the bethesda of today is lucky. see, on top of all those features morrowind bolstered was an excellent story with excellent, captivating, un-tolkein-like lore. but with every subsequent open world release came the same sort of open world mechanics birthed here with a regression of that writing, and a regression of the whole "rpg" aspect entirely. oblivion was embarrassing, lore wise--you could tell the devs saw lord of the rings in theaters together on a company wide trip, shit their pants, and thought "oh fuck yeah, let's just do that." and credit, many of oblivion's side quests and character writing is actually phenomenal... at the cost of its bland, grinded down lore. fallout 3 and skyrim follow, and they're written as intelligently as a cliff racer--they fly with style and take no more than one hit to fell. but all of this doesn't REALLY matter--i mean, it does if you appreciate good dialogue and engaging storytelling, but the majority of bethesda's players just want to goof off in a consistent open world, and THAT'S why this company's lucky. they can get away with it. they can write honest to god slop and as long as it feels good to yell at a dragon or lop off a raider's head, they'll keep going.

bethesda is insanely lucky.

anyway, that's why fallout 4 is so playable--it's easily the best feeling combat they've ever sharpened. calling on the talents of former destiny devs, bethesda put together guns that feel varied and unique from one another, that feel damned good to shoot and damned good to connect. the basic gameplay loop of wandering around the wasteland killing all sorts of whatever, looting the surroundings, and moving on... is fun. it is, or else i wouldn't have put as many hours into this as i did. that fun does come with the fattest asterisks you can imagine, however: the experience needs mods. not "improves" with mods, no--NEEDS.

~~

you have a game where enemies are almost always these ridiculous sponge tanks that absorb all your .308 rounds despite ostensibly defenseless--half these enemies don't wear proper helmets, and it feels stupid. this isn't a human enemy example, but soon after starting the game (with a mod that thankfully skips the default intro), i wandered over to a mirelurk assaulted town called salem. now, killing these things was somehow near impossible no matter what i did, but there was a sidequest there that involved starting up some stray turrets around the city, and i figured i'd knock it out. so, there i am bobbing and weaving through these infinite health lobsters to get all the sentries online, and.... nothing. they do near nothing. you know why? because, in the infinite wisdom of bethesda's developers, all of the turrets are placed high up, aiming down. why is this a problem? well, have you SEEN a mirelurk? let me refresh your memory: they wear giant fucking crab shells on their back, shielding them from damage. so, the turrets did nothing despite waiting around, trying to lead them in front of gunfire, etc, and i eventually get bored and just snuck off to tell the quest giver the job's done. i trek over, walk in--loading screen--and then every single goddamn mirelurk spawns in there. i did eventually wear them down after a reload and what felt like an hour, and--look, i get it. the game has tough creatures that, realistically, you're meant to come back and fight later, and that's fine, but following the mirelurks was a scuffle with some atom worshippers who wore rags around their head and ate ammunition like it was nothing. you can guess what they did to me. you can also guess why i then installed a mod that rebalances weapons.

and a mod to allow npcs to die, because there are dozens that can't. and a mod to increase the weight limit, because you are incentivized to pick up all sorts of bullshit necessitating trips to home base. and a mod to turn off enemy respawns considering any cleared out dungeon would be repopulated with the same threats just after three days. and a mod to remove harvey from the entire workshop and settlement elements of the game--surprising how less annoying it is to just clear out a camp and press a on the workshop. and that mod i mentioned that skips intro this game leads with and just lets you start with whatever ROLE you want? well i got that one, too, considering this game series used to be ROLE PLAYING. and on that note, there's one more mod i installed: it silences your sociopathic, unrelatable, insane protagonist.

he's bad. i haven't played as female either back in 2015 or now, six years later, but i have to imagine she's just as. the male is voiced by a snot nosed marvel movie zinger slinging psychopath, and this shows up in his very basic self narration, when you select a basic object, when you talk to basically anyone. his tone makes the player seem like he isn't processing anything happening like a real human being--all disjointed and awkward, and his sarcastic quips ripped straight from suicide squad scripts land real weird when you just spent the last twenty minutes banging physics based pots and pans against dead npcs to see if their heads would pop off. the generally agreed on problem is that the protagonist's voice has to fit all sorts of varied player personalities whether they be good samiratans or xbox players, and it ends up fitting neither and none. what's even more mindblowing is how dramatically improved fallout 4's immersion is when you gag yourself from any further one liners. you actually feel like it's you playing, almost. it still hurts to read what the player dialogue actually says and realize you're only ever getting three options that all mean the same thing.

also, this is just completely unrelated to that point, but i want to focus on this last gameplay element before i dive completely back into the writing: fallout 4 has some weird bugs and design decisions, doesn't it? have you ever gotten trapped trying to cook something or repair items? has your pip boy button ever just straight up been disabled? what's with npcs trying to ride elevators and then suddenly shooting up and falling from the sky like god almost let 'em into heaven but decided against it? back in fallout 3, clicking on a terminal just brings up the terminal prompt, but in fallout 4, clicking a terminal means your character performs this awkward intepretative dance as they draw up close to it, and the amount of time this takes seriously varies. i've sat there for a full minute watching my character dance around props and hazards, tin cans foiling my efforts to read the screen, and then watching myself die because an enemy just walked in in the middle of it and opened fire. there's also this door thing where npcs will enter a building ahead of you and, i don't know, hold the doorknob shut or something? seriously, you'll stand there like a dumbass for twenty seconds looking away from and back to the door until it finally highlights back to green. bizarre, but the very worst, most baffling, evil design decision i cannot understand is the fading out of black that follows loading in. like, i have died just quickloading because the time it took to completely fade in was the time it took for a raider to pincushion me. so, what this means is you have to just hit tab as soon as possible to pull up your pipboy until you can actually see the damn game.

okay, ooooone more point before we full on dive into the writing. let's talk graphics and aesthetics. because honestly... fallout 4 is a gorgeous looking game, i'm serious. the full range of an actual color palette paired with a brilliant dynamic lighting system both result in an aesthetic miles ahead of that ugly yellow, green mess that fallout 3 was. hell, i think there's a line some brotherhood member offers poking fun at that, something about how "you should see how the capital wasteland looks". and you should see it and compare, because they've come a long way: the commonwealth bolsters weather patterns filled with intrigue whether it be foggy, orange hued mornings or radiation storms, and when things clear up and the sun can poke out, god if the game isn't standing tall, hands on hips, going "goddamn would you look at my lighting engine". you ever seen people posting webms of f.e.a.r. to show off its lighting? fallout 4 does it too and with a grander scope--the fucking sun. it doesn't always work perfect downtown, but it's still pretty damn dope. now i'm gushing on these graphical points because, with a game doing so much wrong, you may as well praise what's done right. its these textures and carefully colored, carefully rendered environments that really sell the post apocalypse. if it had just happened recently--not two hundred years later.

yeah. back to talking about writing. worldbuilding, specifically, because the world fallout 4 takes place in does not make any sense at all and falls apart under any sort of scrutiny. and this? this is scrutiny. the game has received tons of criticism hammering in this point, but the reason poor worldbuilding strikes so many players wrong is because it ruins the believeability of anywhere you're exploring. you feel baffled entering a human settlement and there's just skeletons everywhere that scavengers seem to just step over like calcium decoration, among all the tin cans and trash as well. in certain untouched locations, this makes sense, while in others, it feels stupid. one infamous example of lore fuckery (in which pete hines made a tweet essentially saying "i don't give a shit and neither do my writers"), there's a pre-war vault full of drugs that emerged only after the apocalypse. dumb, but i'm here to describe that circumstances are even dumber than that. see, this vault is full of gunners, right? they've taken over the vault defenses and set up their own sentries and terminals, so they clearly have been here for awhile, okay? now, what's baffling is that, much of the vault is somehow still untouched, even with gunners themselves actually walking among the corpses and trash. and those very corpses all have drugs in their hands and scattered among them. and you're telling me there's not been a single gunner sweep to collect up all those jets and psychos and other valuables? are they under order to leave things exactly how they are? not likely since nearly every gunner i kill seems to have a drug on them. i get this comes across as nitpicking, but the fact that looking at this scenario with, again, any sort of scrutiny makes the entire dungeon fall apart in believability, kind of makes the whole dungeon exploring aspect suck. like, why even bother trying to piece together the story of what happened when bethesda's writers couldn't even be bothered. so, you just mindlessly clear out the vault of gunners, take your loot, and go.

there's more little things that bother me because they're baffling with no explanation, like how i found a farm of two children with a raider camp no more than twenty steps away. if there was a note there that said "i'm actually a good raider and keeping tabs on these poor kids while i sleep in the rain", i missed it. there's a house near vault 111 where a conspiracy nut locked himself away before the bombs dropped. what's in his vault? a fucking copy of the wasteland survival guide, something the fallout 3 player helped make. there's nuka cola machines all over filled with untouched sodas, every cash register seems to be full of both prewar money and bottlecaps, which is... strange, and unexplained. and vault 81 is accessed by making its owners a deal to give them three fusion cores. oh, you don't actually have to prove you have them or discretely dump em in a dropbox, no they just open right up. hey, don't question these things, just mindlessly clear out enemies, take your loot, and go.

but broadstrokes worldbuilding here, what makes the experience of traversing the wasteland most hollow and theme-park feeling is the actual placement of enemies. let me explain: take a look at fallout new vegas' map, and see how the different factions occupy spaces. you have ncr camps on a logical 'front', with caeser on the other side. for the role of raiders, you have a jail of escaped convicts contained to a circular area originating from their prison. for another role, you have 'fiends' who occupy a large strip of vegas ruins in the west originating from a vault they consider home base. even further west, you've got khans who occupy a very defendable canyon, and ghouls are always in areas that reasonably would be untouched or affected directly by the in-game conflict. what i'm trying to get at is that the enemies you fight, and where you fight them, always make sense. there are good explanations for why you're fighting what you're fighting where you're fighting them, and it makes the world feel... real. now let's look at fallout 4's map: enemy placements are shotgunned against map markers with zero cohesion. bethesda designs the dungeon placements first, and then goes "okay uhh how about raiders here and supermutants here and uhh maybe supermutants here too but uhhh maybe ghouls yeah let's do ghouls here and okay this looks like a good gunner place". it feels asinine, and you wonder how any of these fragmented groups are even able to survive, defend, connect with each other. there's this whole eastern part of the map that's mostly wildlands where you're likely to encounter deathclaws and yau gaoi. cool, and then like, in the middle of it is a raider camp. what the fuck? who are you even raiding, you're the only humans out there! no, what enemies occupy what camps is NOT decided by any sort of logical reasoning and instead, just "we don't want the player to kill raiders in one camp and then encounter more raiders in the next, so we chose the easiest solution" amusement park. this is why people describe these bethesda rpgs as amusement parks. but hey, don't question this, just mindlessly clear out enemies, take your loot, and go.

i keep saying that, and it's because that's the impression i got back in 2015 playing through the assortment of side quests fallout 4 offers with all of them feeling like "go here, shoot, leave" with fat-free window dressing because the substance is never there. this playthrough? i haven't even being doing any, i just go around mindlessly killing and looting like they want me to. hey though, i actually shacked up with a companion i "rescued" from an underground arena--could we have had an interesting sidequest where the player participates in that arena, perhaps forced to, or maybe one where the player searches out new talent to compete for them--no that'd be too interesting. anyway, her character is hilarious, like i can't imagine what whoever wrote her was thinking. she's this scottish tough girl who audibly adores that you don't boss her around (even though, yes i do, i make her open every door and walk infront of gunfire), and she eventually reveals her tragic backstory: for almost eighteen long years, her parents merely tolerated her existence until shipping the poor scot out into slavery on her 18th birthday (for probably, like, 40 caps). eventually, she makes it out and back to her parents' old home, and she kills them both. but the look in their eyes when she pulls the trigger... she feels guilt, and that's why she drinks, that's why she's game to slaughter diamond city villagers alongside me. harrowing. anyway, funniest thing about that story is that the parents waited eighteen years to ship off an extra mouth to feed and protect they ostensibly didn't care for, um... but whatever. this sort of character writing is what all of fallout 4's characters are like. no real depth, no actual thought, just funny wacky marvel personalities with fanfiction.net backstories.

just. nothing makes sense in this game, and bethesda clearly doesn't want you to think too hard about it, right? except, they do. no, they have to, have you seen the absurd amount of notes and terminals and audio diary logs the commonwealth is filled with? bethesda tries, and the best they can do is a skeleton next to a computer with three diary entries. diary one says "i'm so glad i'm not a skeleton", diary two says "uooohhh... i can feel myself becoming a skeleton", and diary three says "i am a skeleton now." bethesda tries, and the best they can do is a ghoul family who dearly miss their two hundred year old child you find no more than 40 feet away from their fucking house. they try. bethesda tries. pete hines doesn't get to hide behind "oooh not interested debating a world with talking mutants" because bethesda tried to flesh out that world of talking mutants--they just did a shitty job. and this'll be the most pretentious thing i say all review, but the reason they did a shitty job is because no one in that writing department has the right influences, and they all look up to the wrong people. you can tell they don't like fallout new vegas and they weren't inspired by fallout new vegas because they make no attempt to break down what made the writing and world of that game work, and i know this because, when bethesda was making fallout 3, they made no attempt to do that with the first two fallouts either.

i could go on, and on, and on but there's little point in hammering in the same points repeatedly as i basically say the same thing over and over again: the writing, worldbuilding, lore, and set design in this game is complete, incompetent ass. this doesn't hold fallout 4 back from being fun, or even good, or really good with the right fat asterisk mods. but it's half baked, it's unfulfilled potential. it could be SO much better. and there's absolutely no pressure at bethesda to address that... because they're lucky. they can write the most embarrassing slop of the entire games industry, and it won't matter, because in 2002 they built a fun open world rpg engine, and they're going to squeeze every last drop out of it--forever.

mark my words. without knowing even a single thing about starfield, two things are certain: it'll probably be fun, and it won't make any sense at all. that's a bethesda open world sized promise.

2022

you and i may well be aware of the absolute deluge of indie and double a backed video games that wear childhood nurtured inspiration on their sleeves, titles like a hat in time or here comes niko all too proud to let players know a timeline absent of the gamecube would just as well be one absent of either title. but little did i ever expect a small studio to find themselves filled with inspiration and passion stemming from the absolute most boring fucking trite of video games: those that play themselves. you surely know of those i refer to--the last of uses and the bow raiders and the arkhams and spidermans and ghosts of assassins dogs ages. games that exist as some sort of hollywood mimicry in which high production values are, lol, valued far above anything else, far above the relationship between players and gameplay. games that push, push, push the player forward down the water slide--or really, those dark rides you can watch a defunctland on featuring garfield, because either way, passengers sit tight, see the sights, and leave.

and a large problem with these games lies in their tunnels stretching far, far too long--its passengers lose the novelty of garfield, and most finish climaxing should they have brought a partner aboard far before the eventual light flickers in.

well, the novelty of stray's cat protagonist is one that lasts twenty minutes, a span of useless contextual button presses for reddit and twitter gifs, and this is followed by a further three hours of cinematic slop to slog through. and then the game still goes (for those who have never heard of the sunk cost theory and/or those who, holy fuck, somehow like this shit), and it goes and goes and goes: down linear hallways, up linear walls, along linear paths disguised as well as a blanket disguises the couch. it's a particularly frustrating feeling to emerge into stray's city and find yourself met with all sorts of balconies and vents and roofs and rubble and be able to climb absolutely none of it save the sole path its designers intend.

are linear games bad by design? no. half life 2 is lovely. half life 2 is also not a game made up of multitudes of contextual button presses and cutscenes strung together by cutscene gameplay strung together by more cutscenes. when a chopper chases dr. freeman, the player is threatened and has to haul fucking ass. when completely nonthreatening silverfish chase the stray, the player holds forward, holds their arbitrary run button, the threat of danger not even remotely present, until the next cutscene appears. of course, these moments are broken up by hub world dickery filled with toothless robots who offer no whimsy nor intriguing in their empty words, and the same can be said for your personality-less companion no doubt boardroom blasted to ensure no player would grow weary (or attached).

let's stop dancing around it: stray is an abysmal video game. stray is a complete failure of neutered, paw holding gameplay that is less interested in giving the player tools to navigate its world and more in making sure the wittle pwayer doesn't stway from the wittle path ): and on that note, i wonder to fucking god if its qa players actually enjoyed the experience. were they having fun? were they giving honest feedback? were they actually playing? if i were stuck with this shit, i know i'd be trying to stay off the controller and on my phone as much as possible.

it's rare for a game to truly feel like its designed to waste and absorb your time like a robotic parasite, but stray nails it, let me tell you.

anyway, the star is for the hints of creativity. the half star is for the surprisingly excellent soundtrack from the... guy who did cave story wii of all things. huh.

play this if you don't like video games.

and i thought ddlc was obnoxious. wonderful everyday is an abysmally written shock factor focused cheese-fest that thinks itself smarter than what its philosophical sludge mouthpieced through cartoonish characters genuinely is. wrap all that up with some irony poisoning, pretentious characters, too much self awareness, and pure honest-to-god ego-stroking... and you have this visual novel. sit through four hours of trope jokes and time wasting to sit through another four of chunibyo philosophy and contrivances. dialogue that could be said in three messages are spent on thirty. the game actually thinks you've invested in its characters. if it's supposed to get better, eight hours is a poor cost of admission and i won't spend another minute.

what a frustrating read.

the following is based off my first two hours:

really not impressed with this whatsoever. even the technical bugs like trees popping in sporadically aside, the gameplay is unbelievably clunky and the writing is both bland in concept and bland in delivery. i'm a huge stealth fan and went into this with that in mind, dumping the majority of my points in the sneaky stats. i then sit through what has to be, what, an hour of molasses pacing with nothing really happening? no, really, i picked the corporate tree and here's what your fun, fun first hour consists of:

walk out of bathroom, walk down halls with little of interest, sit in elevator, walk down more halls, talk to my boss for ten minutes, get a fun sounding mission, don't go on the mission yet, sit in helicopter, fly for five minutes, go to bar, walk around bar, sit down, another ten minute conversation with another guy discussing the fun mission, other guys come over, they tell me i don't get to go on fun mission, i frown, my character's friend gets mad and makes it seem like something's about to happen, nothing happens, the guys go away, and then i'm treated to a big montage of my character doing things that i wouldn't want him to do, which is weird because this is an RPG, right?

actually, that's the weirdest thing. why am i not getting any choices? whenever your main character is prompted to say something, the options both seem to offer the same sentiment--that is, if you get any options at all. sometimes, you just get a line that you're forced to say along with the choice to get a bonus throwaway line. still gotta pick the forced dialogue in the end. and this really sucks, because my character keeps saying things that i really don't want him to say. it feels very fallout 4 all over again, and that pisses me off. compare this to deux ex's last two entries where the player is offered multiple dialogue options straight from the start that all have different intentions and, more importantly, give the player a 100% view of what the hell they're going to be saying.

and speaking of which, it's that saying that bothers me. the delivery of the lines are just terrible. your main protagonist, should you choose to be male, sounds like a dumb yokel, and this is particularly funny if you start your background in corporate. he's not hick or anything, but he sounds like he's down a few braincells--there's one line in particular when he mocks his friend for "not being nice" and he sounds like a damn child. there's an encounter with an asian police officer too featuring some real poor English and some even poorer interaction with the player's friend that's just eyerolling. while we're on that topic, there's a part where you get in the car and your friend starts driving, and this... just horrible trap beat starts playing and i could not have frowned harder. i went into the options to see what the radio key was--F, or R, or something--and i mashed the hell out of it. a fruitless endeavor. trapped in the trap.

i said something about the writing, right? it's not really bad or anything--just boring and uninteresting. i won't go into this too much because it's unfair to just say something's bad and not elaborate, and i literally can't remember what any of the dialogue was. nothing memorable. also, any given scene just looks like a generic synthwave album cover. giving credit to deus ex again here, that game's developers saw the writing on the wall and were very forward thinking in their aesthetic compared to this, a vague idea of what cyberpunk looks like.

anyway, i want to end this talking about the gameplay--specifically the stealth, since that's what i cared about going in, what i built my character around, what i brushed up on in the tutorial, and what i set out to do, clearing the entire first mission with no deaths.

it sucks. here, i'm going to describe the process for you. i might mis-remember some exact keystrokes but the sentiment is the same: FIRST, you hit your crouch toggle key. oops, hold on, the crouch toggle key broke, so you have to go into the options, bind the toggle key to the other crouch, and then bind it back (you'll be doing this a lot, so get used to it). okay, what were we doing again? right, stealth. so, you crouch successfully, your first hurdle accomplished, and then you see some enemies. NOW, you have to hit tab and go into batman vision mode. now, you highlight enemies and mark them (with a different key, of course). why are you doing this? why aren't you just going in and sneaking?

because there's no. fucking. leaning. in a game. with fucking. stealth.

why is leaning important? because it allows you to take cover behind objects and peek to see where hostiles are and what they're doing. what's the alternative? you literally have no idea what direction someone's facing so you just bumble out from behind cover and get immediately spotted. therefore, your only solution is to have to highlight enemies so that doesn't happen. but then, this means you're having to spend the damn game constantly with these glow-in-the-dark villains, something that's a powerup or unlockable in games like dishonored or, again, deus ex. anyway, i'm getting off track, let's continue with the stealth process.

so now you've successfully highlighted them, and now you're ready to hunt. you sneak up from behind someone and press F. now you have them in a vague chokehold? it doesn't really... look right. anyway, now you have to decide if you want to kill them or knock them out, so you press F again or whatever the key is. a weird animation plays where your character looks like he's grasping at air, and then, congrats, he's on the ground. NOW, you have to look at the body and hold R to carry it. okay, now we've got to bring it somewhere. you go to a hiding spot and you press--what? what do you press? oh. oh you know. E. and congrats, you've finally achieved your first stealth takedown. now, just to sum it up, let's go through all the steps one more time.

you hit control, then you hit tab, then you hit your second mouse button, then you unhit tab, then you walk forward, then you press f, then you press f again, then you hold r, then you walk, then you press e.

i want you to imagine an exasperated AVGN face right now because WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

i keep bringing up deus ex but holy fuck, in that game you just hold q, they're automatically being dragged, and then you let go and continue on. no need to highlight enemies either because the game goes in third person when you take cover. or hell, if you don't want that, dishonored lets you, in first person, you guessed it: LEAN. YOU CAN LEAN.

i don't really know where the story goes from here, and i don't know how the other backgrounds start, and i don't know how much more fun it is to play the game like an action hero--but i don't care. this was enough. now, i'll probably be back after a year or two of patches and updates, but for sixty dollars? you could do a lot, lot, lot better.

[EDIT: apparently you can lean! you have to specifically have a weapon out and then attempt to aim it while at a corner. seeing as i was playing as a stealth pacifist, i saw no reason to have a gun out at all. that's a good thing! there is definitely still way too many buttons for what should be a simple action. but this definitely makes this more playable, now. i'll update these first impressions with a fuller look if i continue on]

[EDIT 2: yeah it still sucks. play deus ex]

2022

aggressively boring visuals meets aggressively generic rtx lighting meets aggressively generic soundtrack meets aggressively simple wait-and-see gameplay meets gorgeous, charming in-game instruction manual that outshines legitimately every other soulless aspect of this adventure meets aggressively tedious backtracking meets aggressively cowardly lack of writing, dialogue, and environmental storytelling whatsoever meets aggressively cute gator enemy meets aggressively one-note enemy designs otherwise meets thirty fucking dollars.

i like waking up in the morning and typing in the first word that comes to mind. fun and simple and i get to have a daily dick measuring contest with my friends, but i can't type in "whore" anymore so that's pretty gay all considered

why on earth the devs put such a huge amount of effort into art and animation and sound design and music all for a fucking call-and-response keyboard DDR game is baffling. it doesn't matter how good the game looks and sounds when it plays this boringly. a complete waste

This review contains spoilers

i can't tell what i love most about david cage's latest incompetent masterpiece... is it the world ripped straight from deus ex: human revolution and bladerunner 2049 without the nuance or subtlety of either? is it the complete inability to followup on what should be meaningful choices? is it cage refusing to follow the rules of his own world while constantly making up new bullshit as he goes? could it be even the way the female protagonist's route is dead bottom the most boring, straightforward SHE IS WOMAN SHE IS MOTHER story within this genre possible, complete with a worthless twist? perhaps even the unbelievably heavy handed civil rights metaphors that cage himself vehemently denies?

i don't know. i just do not know. but let me tell you, cage is a thoroughly entertaining writer in ways completely unintended. detroit's just so fucking fun to play because of how drop dead serious he is at writing this pseudo-intellectual slop. i mean i just fucking love it, i don't know what else to say. it's incompetent writing in a way that's fun versus something bad but stale, you know? like icarus trying to fly towards the sun with a set of wings made from construction paper and mayo.

just for clarity, i'll tell you how my playthrough went. kara? tried my best to have her surrogate daughter hate her, but despite everything i did, they were simply inseparable. now, towards the very end you've got kara and revealed robo daughter walking towards the gas chambers, and you have ample opportunity to start stressing her the fuck out. so i did so, because i know the rules of this world: a robot gets stressed out... a robot explodes. i figured if the girl exploded, the surviving bots (including kara herself) could escape. so i build her up and up and up aaand... she hits 100%, runs over to kara, gets shot, and dies. consistency, cage. consistency.

as for marcus, i played him as an ultra pacifist to humanity with a mightier message at heart that valued less his android companions and moreso the overall goal. so what this meant was i had every human spared throughout the game, but i let my robobuddies die. it was pretty awesome seeing marcus give a speech completely alone, admittedly. what was hilarious was towards the very end, as humanity marched towards my peaceful marcus and co, that he began to sing. and they all sung, and they all sung the same song together. did i sequence skip the chorus recital chapter or something? taking a step back, i adore marcus's robo jesus deal where he can just tap the shoulder of an android and force them into sentience. and let's be clear: it is forcing. imagine you're asleep and someone suddenly wakes you up, gives you a gun, and says "start firing". and it's not like you have a choice now, because you're going to be found out for going deviant any day from here on out due to marcus' meddling. man, what a guy.

connor was the best, though. i played him as a completely soulless policebot dead focused on solving the case and not a scrap more. that meant he didn't give a shit about android lives, didn't give a shit about deviancy, and most certainly didn't give any ounce of tin can shit about hank. and what this resulted in, surprisingly, was a badass scene. connor ends up going deviant without actually going deviant, which is oddly... brilliant, as he sets up his sniper rifle in an attempt to assassinate the peace loving marcus, and he's stopped by the same police squad from the beginning of the game. connor proceeds to fuck. these guys. up. and it's brutal, and i love it. and cage doesn't do much with it at fucking all after--we get a choice to assassinate marcus at the very end with absolutely no followup. not even a final meeting with his creator or whoever the hell kept bitching at him to kill some androids. come on, man. and here i thought arkane games had no ending.

yeah, anyway, this is great and terrible. wish i played it drunk

a dull, lifeless thing. how can you even get mad at starfield? it's unaggressively nothing. it's barely trying. good god, remember outer worlds? no joke, that game runs circles around this one somehow. i guess outer worlds has an ounce of soul to it while starfield's content to check off the boxes. even with obsidian's surprisingly rough writing--rough's better than generic. most things are.

this game is awesome if your fetishes include unreal stock assets, enemies with sight ranges of two inches from their head, middle fingers to z-targeting, unresponsive health bars, or incomprehensible dialogue and story telling. i think i'm the only player who has ever beaten the first part and i say that with confidence because who else on god's earth has the patience to get through the first chapter. also, there's a mode where you can drive a car with all of its parts missing save for the driver seat around a foggy racetrack. the first best thing about clockwork pussy is its title, and the second best thing is that the writer tried very, very hard.

there is no game that better encapsulates the feeling of being physically held together by duct tape, glue, ambition, and cheese than sonic adventure 1. and here's the interesting thing about it: it's actually pretty good, despite. the ambition is there--it shows in the gorgeous graphics on display (usually), the insane attention to detail in window refractions and reflective surfaces, the mixing of various characters' stories as they intersect and collide with one another... and it all really does truly feel like an adventure, this handful of interesting locales to explore all interconnected to one another that creates a world felt lived in (more on this further down). the cheese is there--the story and dialogue is near absolutely miserable, standing in two different puddles: the left foot resides in so-bad-it's-good (and occasionally, occasionally, absolutely occasionally: so-good-it's-good) while the right foot rests in holy-shit-everyone's-talking-so-slow-i've-seen-this-cutscene-from-five-different-angles-please-move-it-along. and the duct tape and glue is there--sonic adventure feels like it's falling apart at the seams, a myriad of bugs working tirelessly to destroy (or enhance) your experience via collision errors, graphical glitches, camera angles sucked through vortexes and spit out through the fabric of reality...

but i said it's good, right? yeah, surprisingly, i'd say so.

while you start the game with sonic (it's his adventure, right?), you eventually go on to unlock several more, and they all have their own adventures, too (though shipping the game as E-102 Gamma Adventure probably would've resulted in fewer sales...). sonic, surprisingly, plays the dullest. his levels are an endless series of set pieces and gimmicks that essentially play themselves, almost to the point where you can just set your controller down and take a super sonic speed piss and come back to find the level successfully completed. it's the other characters who shine harder: tails gives the player a broken but hilarious recontextualization of sonic's campaign, amy pits you against genuine platforming, gamma is a (surprisingly fun) race against the clock (with guns), and knuckles is exploration dialed up. oh, there's also this rat named big who is coupled with horrific, teeth grating gameplay in which you play a worse version of sega bass pro fishing.

despite how aggravating it is to be locked into watching similar cutscenes repeatedly set to a story barely above acceptable for a children's animated tv show, it is admittedly really cool to see how the various characters play off of each others' actions, consequences, and choices as you yourself slowly put the pieces together in time for the finale. again, it makes sonic adventure feel like a very living, breathing place, and that goes double for the hub world and its npcs. bizarre, by the way. absolutely, ridiculously bizarre writing litters sonic's city that's localized in such a warped way i can't actually tell if it's good or bad. let me try my best to explain: npcs will sometimes have the flattest ass waste-of-seven-sentences to give you, or they'll drop a mind numbingly funny observation of their absurd diet, implying that all anyone can eat is burgers because... there's a burger shop and that's it. one thing certainly intentional is that each npc grows along the story's path, each realizing little arcs of their own. again--it makes it all feel so real and comfortable.

boss fights are probably the worst aspect of the game. they're either really uninteresting, or really uninteresting AND long. cutscenes are rough, as mentioned--they go on, and on, and on, and everyone but eggman sounds like they're acting with the very first take from the studio--tails in particular sounds like sega team kidnapped a genuine child. facial animations are destroyed beyond repair given they lip sync relatively well with japanese--english outta sonic makes him look like a psychopath. something bugs me for sure. and speaking of sonic, again, his levels aren't interesting gameplay wise. sure, the spectacles are interesting, but it's probably a bad sign when the most fun you can have with that blue rat is attempting to break the game with his bugged mechanics.

all that said, it is intoxicatingly charming, and i certainly wouldn't have bothered to finish the game if i didn't like it. it's not the absolute great game it could've been but, for what sonic adventure is, i appreciate a lot.