had a fun time with this one!

the level design in this game is really creative and fun, letting you do stuff that just feels Fucking Cool, and the mech segments are neat too, letting you play around with a bunch of different loadouts and switch between them as you find them on the fly

that platforming is never that hard but it always feels fantastic and so fun, especially once you start trying to do fancy moves mid wall-kick

the story in this game is Nothing, but thats fine because its just a vehicle to have you flirt with your mech via action movie quips and do great levels which is what really matters here anyway

After over a decade since enjoying the first Alan Wake, and having recently played Control (about which I was very lukewarm), I was skeptical about Alan Wake II. A lot about taste can change in a decade, and so much about Remedy's most recent game rubbed me the wrong way.

I am really glad I gave this game a chance!

Alan Wake II totally nails the atmosphere and a bonkers layered story that somehow manages to be follow-able, with a cast of sympathetic characters who have a surprising amount of depth. The game is visually stunning and weaves between real-time in-engine rendering and "FMV" style cutscenes seamlessly -- it's the kind of thing you might expect to be jarring but it feels completely natural. The FMV cutscenes are truly something special and are probably my favorite part of this game.

And I won't spoil it, but the "Initiation 4" chapter is one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time.

Since I played Control very recently, I couldn't help but note the contrast in the character writing. Where Control's characters were (for the most part) boring, or in the case of Jesse, annoying as hell, Alan Wake II was a breath of fresh air. Alan and Saga are both characters I enjoyed getting to know better (and by the way, I have a hard time thinking of another game where you play as a mom). There's no "well THAT just happened"-style quips here.

Don't get me wrong, Alan Wake II is at least as bonkers (if not more so) as Control, and it's goofy as hell. But its characters take the world seriously, and I never felt like they were winking at the camera asking me to GET A LOAD OF THIS.

Despite my distaste of much of Control, I did enjoy the tie-ins to the FBC, and I'm intrigued to see where Remedy takes their expanded universe in the future.

The story feels like a bit of a pretzel - you get the gist of it through one playthrough, but there's so much going on here and it feels so layered that I could see a second playthrough being quite rewarding.

Now for the not-so-great, I do have a few complaints with the game.

Firstly, the gameplay isn't actually very fun. It's not BAD, it's just... pretty mid? Nothing very exciting, and the difficulty feels very off in my opinion. After a couple of hours I decided to turn the game down to "story" difficulty, expecting the fights to be trivial. Strangely, bosses still have a surprisingly large health pool on story mode and it's still pretty easy to die during a boss fight. The regular enemies can be taken down in 1 or 2 hits on story mode, which feels correct, but I'm not sure what's going on with the boss fights. It makes me wish they had included the granularity that Control's difficulty settings have. That said, I appreciate that combat isn't such a big part of this game.

As I said earlier, the game is visually very beautiful, but it's also very DARK. Combined with the fact that there isn't a mini-map (there is a map but it has to be opened full-screen), navigating some of the levels can be a little confusing, and I did get lost in some of the game's maze-like areas because of this.

My final bone to pick here is that the game is graphically demanding. I played on an RTX 3080, which is a pretty decent card, but even at 720p on the lowest settings (which still look amazing) my framerate dipped pretty regularly. It's a minor complaint for me because it was still completely playable but I really wish it hadn't been the case.

In the big picture though, I'm only taking a half star off for my complaints because I enjoyed it so much. Alan Wake II was a fascinating genre-mixing experience that does things I've never seen before in a video game, and it does them successfully.

I love GNOSIA. I love the vibes, the mystery, and the characters, who are all unique and fun. I loved gradually gaining bits of information to see how the characters tie into the mysteries.
Even got a couple of great, explicitly non-binary characters (notably, the player can also play as non-binary).
I almost didn't take a chance on this, as I'd never gotten into any games categorized as "roguelite", and the concept doesn't generally appeal to me. I feel that there's narrative utility in the repetitive gameplay loop, in really feeling the situation wear on the player. For me, it was a somewhat immersive aspect.
For anybody who enjoys this gameplay despite the repetition, this game has a lot of replay value. After one full playthrough, I'm still coming across a lot of new things. It's kind of amazing.
The computer AI is "smart" and well designed (as a single-player social deduction game necessitates). Catching subtle hints based on NPC behavior is fun, as well as developing one's own strategy in order to influence the NPCs (lying gave me such intense anxiety though, LOL). The different characters each have unique ways of behaving in different situations, and varying inherent (and circumstantial) affinity towards other characters, including the player.
I wish they would allow for a multiplayer mode (separate from the story)!! I would love to play simultaneously with both the computer AI, and a friend.
I also wish I could casually spend more time with the characters. There's so much to work with here!
Cotori's lovely artwork, and the unusual music are the perfect dressing.
It's exciting to see such a cool game come from such a small development team.

Without Uchikoshi I would never get to experience an anime girl with pink hair explaining Jung's theory of the collective unconscious.

Overall really enjoyed this game. A good story with good twists and didn't feel overly convoluted, and one of the best uses of a flow chart I've personally experienced. It actually felt significant to see these different possibilities play out, although as I always tend to feel with these types of games I did begin to grow tired of working my way through similar feeling content just to get to the end. Some of this is alleviated by a great cast who I was very invested in.

I have to ding the game in a few areas. Again, the flowchart means repeating some of the most annoying content (for me this is stuff like the action sequences - I can only sit through so much of the same joke). The somnium sequences were a bit hit or miss for me, and wow the performance issues on the Switch got quite frustrating. But it really speaks to the quality of the story that I eagerly powered through all of that to get the conclusion to the mystery.

More Breath of the Wild, warts and all.

The skinner box grind is still entertaining enough and I ended up completing more of the game (90% of shrines) than I expected given how little they did to address issues I had with BotW - lackluster dungeons, storytelling, and progression systems all remain. But it's impossible to deny the charm of even a phoned-in Zelda title.

I think my bitterness is more a reflection of Aonuma's claim that this is what the future of Zelda games looks like. It's neat enough and it has mass appeal, but the "every solution is valid!" nature of open-ended puzzle design in these BotW-era Zelda games means there's fewer "a-ha!" moments in finding intended puzzle solutions (not that any of the puzzles are remotely challenging anyway). So much of the game is (still) defined by the dominant strategy of climbing and gliding everywhere - and for being such a long game it's pretty sad that there's less modulation in your traversal and puzzle solving abilities than earlier Zelda titles. I just need to accept that Nintendo will never make a dungeon with the complexity of Stone Tower Temple again - especially not now that Zelda sells more copies than Mario. This is not a franchise to do weird experiments with, anymore.

The good:
-The map is huge, and it's packed with content.
-Most of the new mechanics like fusing and recall are very fun to use.
-Exploring the islands was very fun and easy to do.
-Creating your own machines is fun, and it offers thousands of possible inventions. Despite the battery being a big problem, the huge amount of freedom the developers give you to create your machines is great, and I wish most of the game gave you this much freedom.
-It has a way better final boss and story than BOTW.
-The new abilities offer a lot more uses compared to BOTW.
-Obtaining extra parts to build machines is very quick and easy.
-You can fuse several solid objects and items with your shields like bombs, springs, mine carts and a miniature flamethrower which you can also use while shield surfing to give you several new ways to travel.

The bad:
-Combat wise, Link feels very stiff and hard to control. Several boss fights boil down to flurry rush spamming.
-Traversing on land takes way too long. Most of your time is going to be spent running with a stamina bar that depletes in 3 seconds with a character that runs and walks very slowly.
-The majority of the weapons break in 10 to 25 swings.
-Unlocking anything in this game takes way too much time and effort. It also requires you to do a lot of uninteresting side quests and grinding.
-There are a lot of unskippable cutscenes.
-It's so tedious to complete quests, mainly because it revolves around a lot of back and forth location wise.
-The hitboxes on most enemies are way bigger than they look.
-If your bond meter with your horse isn't maxed out, your horse is going to occasionally steer away from where you are moving. The horses can't teleport near you, they will only run towards you if you're very close to them, and they refuse to jump off any cliff that is 5 feet tall and higher.
-Link easily ragdolls from most enemies and bosses attacks, making fights very tedious. Ragdolling becomes an even bigger annoyance whenever you're trying to fight a dragon without a bow, since most of their attacks will knock you to the ground.
-Even though creating your own machines makes exploring easier, it still requires you to grind a lot to upgrade your battery capacity and to unlock most of the machines, since the first options they give you are too slow and inconsistent for traversal.
-Shrines were too easy most of the time.
-The camera is mostly awful when fighting a singular enemy, and it's even worse when fighting multiple enemies. The targeting system doesn't help much either because of how it constantly focuses on the wrong enemy and because of how it turns the camera to the side, making it difficult to backflip to avoid attacks.
-Despite the story being better, Ganondorf is still a very bland villain, since most of his character revolves around hatred and vengeance.
-The amount of weapons, shields, and bows you're able to hold is so little that it revolves around constantly fusing whatever weapon and item you can find, making it very repetitive. Upgrading your inventory is easy at first but becomes very long and tedious the more you upgrade since each inventory upgrade is divided into weapons, shields and bows, and each upgrade further increases the price by one korok seed. You can only obtain one extra inventory slot per upgrade.
-Exploring caves is such a drag because of the insane amount of boulders that cover most of the caves. You also need to use weapons that are fused with rocks to be able to destroy it, which revolves around breaking several of your weapons and constantly fusing the new ones that drop from inside the boulders with nearby rocks.
-Outside the main story, the characters are very bland and forgettable.

Even though I wrote a lot of criticism about this game, I honestly had fun when I wasn't being forced to grind for hours and hours. I just think that the developers should've given the player a more consistent way to travel near the beginning of the game. For example: In Elden Ring they give you a horse in the beginning of the game that doesn't get tired, runs quickly, can jump in the air, can teleport to you and follows anything you tell it to do. Another problem that even Elden Ring suffers is annoying upgrade systems that slow down the pacing of the game by a lot. Finally, I just think that the fun and tedium are constantly at odds with each other until you put in like 60+ hours to unlock most things.

(Played Through Legacy Collection)
they say it was the first game in this whole series but maaan were some of its flaws really exhaust me to finish this game.
The combat is,fine. it's not overly complex as i thought it would but it stays relatively simple and some of the bosses in this game are pretty cool.
The story is basically monster of the week type beat with world ending threat,i honestly couldn't care less aside from very early 2000s dialogue here and there.
The soundtrack was......okay i guess?idk some songs hits but some really torture my ears especially the dungeon ones and now let's move on to the dungeons,or the progression of the game.
The game overall lacks any direction for player where to go,this not only happens in the dungeon but also in DenCity,there's a lot of time where i have to wonder what or where the fuck should i even go and it doesn't help that the dungeon designs are awful combine this with very high random encounters as this only creates exhaustion rather than challenging.
Battle Network 1 is a game that not only suffers from first game syndrome but also has many flaws that can't just be overlooked by first game syndrome or a GBA launch title,i'm still looking forward to play more titles in the franchise more but as of right now it was certainly a game.

This game was a banger.

You may know that the main mechanic of this game is walkin'. You're a porter and you deliver stuff from point A to point B. The game does this really well. Planning your trips by figuring out what to bring with you and optionally plotting a route to roughly follow feels like a puzzle, and it's incredibly rewarding to make a plan that works out. Walking in this game feels very good. It honestly feels as close as you could possibly come to emulating how it feels to hike using only a controller.

Most of what you do is walk, but it's far from the only thing you do. There is combat. I wasn't a huge fan of how the actual violent combat feels. I don't know if this is because it's been a little while since I played a game where you shoot a gun using a controller rather than mouse and keyboard, but I had difficulties moving and aiming at the same time. But I think this might be intentional, because Sam is, well, a porter. He's not a soldier. And luckily for me and for Sam there isn't a large amount of combat required to finish the game.

There's also stealth, generally performed when trying to avoid "BTs", which are essentially just ghosts that can really mess your shit up if they catch you. Sneaking around BTs was, besides just walkin', my favorite part of the game. The trick to making this part work, I think, was the fact that you cannot see the BTs -- you have to rely on your funky fetus in a jar to tell you where the BTs are. The tension during these moments is fantastic, and the sound design here imparts the perfect sense of unease.

There is also a very cool aspect of the game which is the internet connectivity. You don't ever directly play with other people, but there is a way to connect that is similar in concept to Dark Souls messaging but wider in scope. The biggest thing here is that you can build structures in your game, such as bridges, generators, and ziplines, and these will show up in other players' worlds for them to use. This is not only extremely helpful when you're trying to navigate the difficult terrain of the game, but it gives a sense of connection and collaboration with other players. I don't want to talk too much about the story but this ties in well to the themes of the game.

Speaking of which, the story was a wild ride. This is a Hideo Kojima game and there is no way to mistake it for anything but. There were certainly times that I groaned at a line a Very Famous Actor was made to say in this game. There's often a sense of whiplash as the game tries to be incredibly serious but also goofy at the same time. This game loves jargon (maybe more than it loves Sam's naked body and fluids). I was confused about the story many times.

Yet I loved it. Death Stranding has a lot to say about humanity, about connection and disconnection, about grief, and about country. I found it completely fascinating.

If you haven't played this game yet and this sounds remotely interesting I strongly suggest giving it a shot. I hadn't considered playing this game since it was released in 2019, but I was curious after seeing the trailer for the sequel, so I took a chance on an $11 physical copy of the standard edition and I'm so glad I did.

A gorgeous game with fun and rewarding gameplay. Feels like some kind of blend of Zelda and Dark Souls, in a very nice way.

The difficulty level is a bit inconsistent, but for the most part I found it to be a nice level of challenge. The game (almost) never feels unfair. The doors (checkpoints/portals) are frequent enough, and you don't lose anything from dying, so even sections where I was dying frequently didn't feel too frustrating.

Progressing feels great, when you unlock a shortcut there is a real feeling of accomplishment. The puzzles are not very difficult but are fun and engaging.

The reason I took off a half star is the final section of the game, which is a very long boss fight with multiple phases. It was a big difficulty spike and was very drawn out. I like what they were doing here in theory but I desperately wished for a checkpoint every couple of phases so I could stop redoing the same boss phases over and over.

If you asked me what I thought of this whole modern anthology of Fire Emblem, I’d probably say something like “it kinda sucks but its so weirdly compelling im gonna keep playing them until i die”
I replayed Awakening last year, and it showed to me that its maximalist approach to revitalizing the series has aged like milk - both in gameplay and tonally.
Fates: Conquest shows a team who genuinely has the skills to improve this framework, but the series was then tossed to another team for Three Houses; the game receiving an improvement in tone, but generally rolling its gameplay innovations back. The qualities and content of each entry feels like a dice roll, but that’s probably the most compelling part; you could probably make a masterpiece if you mashed these games together. And while I’m truly hoping one day we’ll see that to fruition, I think we all knew this wouldn’t be the game the moment that trailer dropped. Instead we all thought
“is that a toothpaste girl”

PRESENTATION
The infallible strangeness that Intelligent Systems keeps trying to turn their war simulator into a poppy smash hit is not lost on me, but some things take higher priority in that discussion. This game contains a toothpaste girl. She is somewhere in here. It’d be punching below the belt to bully this design, but it feels like one of those designs that could only exist in lighting that compliments them, and her 3D model doesn’t make me feel anything. Sucks that Mika Pikazo was brought in as lead artist for the game that ditched illustrated portraits, because the game doesn’t get to play to her strengths. The overconfidence in its 3D also bleeds into the game’s map presentation - barely any of your party members have immediately readable key-poses, with toothpaste girl’s hair colours being the only relief from this frustration. This combined with some poor colour choices for the game’s four enemy range indicators resulted in me playing most of the game fully zoomed in.
Even the battle animations–the main part of the aesthetics I’ve seen praise for–have their own polish issues, their slick movements almost always undermined by bad camerawork. Sharp jump cuts before attacks land already result in busy visuals, but where it’s most obvious is how it clashes with the game’s readily available x2 speed button - making even the most basic attack animations unreadable.
And while this game’s art design isn’t a complete loss–there’s some wonderful cutscenes here and there–what surprised me the most was a soundtrack that’s just...not good? These games don’t like worldbuilding very much, so Awakening’s accordion-romanticism, and the Scot-Noir broodings of Fates: Conquest do a lot to enrich their worlds - it’s only natural this out of touch J-Rock leaves the game feeling toneless. With notable composers such as Takeru Kanazaki and Hiroki Morishita still present, I would never want to blame the individual creatives on the project, because you can tell this modern direction for the series has a lot of corporate influence.

Story
We could talk about this game’s plot, but that’d require it to have one of its own; it’s more of a greatest clips montage edited in Sony Vegas with a ton of colour aberration and dubstep. We could also talk about how the crossover element here feels misguided - the broadly personified protagonists of the series were made to be reactive, rather than interactive, so they all feel like uncharismatic brick walls here. This game did nothing to fanservice me as a follower of the series, but more importantly (to the developers), it did nothing to sell me on the characters I hadn’t played the games of. The villain here isn’t even the storyline, it’s really the scriptwork. Early on into the game, a character is mortally wounded, and as they die in your hands, they spend their last moments explaining that they are not dying because they were shot by a big evil magic orb, but because of some high concept lore machinations. In their dying moments, they hand you a macguffin.
At the climax of this scene, toothpaste girl does a “pinky promise” with this person, which despite making me instantly burst out laughing, is in fact a choice! A choice made by the Tetsuya Nomura impersonator you hire for your kid’s birthday party, sure, but it does paint her as someone who is emotionally stunted and clings onto childish mannerisms. But toothpaste girl takes on her role as goddess-worshiped-by-everyone-in-the-world in strides, is immediately complimented as “humble” and “human” by everyone she meets, and is also apparently just the greatest tactician in the world! This is at least partially the fault of a vision messied by corporate; the director of the game noting in interview that Nintendo asked them to tone down the worldliness of toothpaste girl. Where’s the censorship controversy about that, huh, gamers???
I’ve seen this plot pitched as a sugary saturday morning cartoon romp, but it sorta just lacks the humanity for me to see it as sincere - a key trait to loving that style. That’s not even to mention the even more obvious contrast: how this plot is driven by tragedy without moments of relief. It’s an e10+ war game, but it’s still a war game - we’re out here playing tactics ogremon red and blue version.
But…I know and you know that this sort of analysis isn’t going to get us closer to understanding why people like these games. Talk to any Fire Emblem fan–and don’t grit your teeth too hard thinking about that, I did it for you–and they’ll tell you they like these games for literally one thing.

It’s the gameplay.
The gameplay is alright, I played on hard classic and had a good time with it. The real standout here is Break: a new system where if you win the weapon triangle RPS, you knock your opponent’s weapon out of their hands until you hit them again, or your turn ends. Making it easier to play your turn damageless enables this game’s goals as being a more aggressive Fire Emblem; encouraging you to stand your ground and make confident offensive plays, so you can wade through the onslaught of enemies. There are also secondary roles tied to classes; grounded offense units have Backup, the ability to join other teammate’s attacks, for example. Armored units are the real winners here, they’re given an immunity to break, which makes them the most interesting to pilot they’ve been in years. The cherry on top here are the Emblems, which exist on the same wavelength of Pop game design as supers in a fighting game. They’re all flashy comeback mechanics that give you buttons that are fun to click and make the good numbers happen, but I also love how they’re very flexible if you use them to prop up a unit’s flaws, or play to one's strengths. I like how they their big fuck-off buttons don’t necessarily feel congruous with each other either; they’re like giant puzzle pieces that you have to attach a million microscopic ones onto to complete the picture. The way that Emblems can flexibly be moved between units makes this the most prep-centric Fire Emblem I’ve played!!! yes i love nerd shit :)

But for all of this to work, the map design’s gotta be strong. And it does start rock solid, lots of well placed secondary objectives like running thieves to keep you on pace. But Emblems, for all I like about them, definitely ripple out negatively into the game’s balance - this game mostly runs on “defeat the boss” win conditions, so every boss needs to have multiple health bars to counter Emblems. It made me feel like a badass to kill them in a single turn the first time I did it, but when I realized the map design heavily enables this playstyle, it started stagnating pretty quick. That’s when Chapter 17 rolls around, where you face down six bosses on a single map, with knights and dragons creeping in between. Not only that, but one of those bosses was a huge knowledge check for me - being a mage knight with both massive defense and res made me unable to kill him in one turn, all while another boss was barreling for me. I had to carefully exploit break, and position my backups around him in a way that didn’t get them killed by a combination of the two bosses attacking me. It’s genuinely a series highlight chapter to me, so it’s a shame it doesn’t last; you spend the rest of the game fighting those same bosses in different, smaller orders. Not only does this fail to progress the challenge of how you play around bosses, it’s also just…lame. Significantly less cool. And the developer’s priorities were different from mine, because the last 4 chapters of the game instead introduce stage hazards that border on being gag levels at times.

While playing this game, I ended up thinking “maybe if I’m having this little fun with a Fire Emblem, it’s time to graduate to maddening” quite a bit, but then I ran into another problem
…This is the most prep heavy Fire Emblem
Once you’re finished with a map, go ahead and run around its overworld for a few minutes picking up items. Then load into Somniel–the game’s Monastery–and play a bunch of minigames to activate surprisingly noticeable temporary stat upgrades for the next mission. Lastly, remember to read those 650+ supports (that’s over twice as many as Three Houses!), and 1300+ bond conversations. While the Monastery system and how it clashes with the replayability of Three Houses is definitely worth critique, and on paper, Somniel does sound better–being entirely optional and not attached to a calendar–it’s easy to see why Somniel misses the point of Monastery. Simply put, every decision I make trickling down from a bigger macro decision made it at least feel like I was playing a video game while I was in the Monastery, and Somniel feels like I’m doing mobile game dailies. It’d be a lie to pretend hard classic was difficult enough to require those temporary buffs, but I can only imagine the looming frustration of losing in Maddening, and thinking “I should’ve played that fucking fishing minigame”... That isn’t even commenting on some minor issues, such as how Emblem customization is managed from 2 rooms in Somniel that have a 10 second loading screen between each other, making me wish the whole place was just a menu. I only started enjoying the game at all when I started doing some self care; choosing to not interact with a lot of its frustrating mechanics, but… if I’m playing this for the gameplay, and even the gameplay loop is awkward, what am I even left with?

The combat.
The combat is alright, I played it on hard mode classic, and had a good time with it. But like, dude. DUDE!! Every time I read someone call this game a “return to form”, I feel like I have temporal insanity!!!! This game’s idea of fun is herding your sheep, rolling for gacha pulls, and giving your fav 11 year old a wedding ring!!!!

I could probably pump out a graphic like this:
PRESENTATION: 60
STORY: 30
GAMEPLAY: 65
OVERALL: 51.666666666667
but it’d be a disservice both to understanding why people like this game, and why I don’t like it. Fans of this game have gracefully chosen to appreciate it for the best parts of its vision, shielding it out of what I can only assume to be genuine empathy, which kinda owns. But when I put it down, it felt like this game’s loop demands your immersion into its world, and trying to play it the way I did is something it rejects.
These fuckin’ Fire Emblem fans, dude, I watch them perfectly cleaning the dirt off a burger they pulled out of a dumpster, and I try to mirror them and just get stale ketchup all over my hands.
…So. Is Engage worth playing? I probably won’t have the most time-withstanding take on the game, but I’ll tell you what I know for sure


you should probably not buy the new nintendo game just to be in on the conversation with your friends
you’re thinking of “getting into fire emblem” and you haven’t even cleaned ur room today??? say it aint sooooo 😱😱😱😱

man i wish someone would just make a new portrait of ruin

(i generally like the inti sidescrollers ive played and this looked castlevania-ish so i did no research on this before getting it. unfortunately this means i didnt realize it was a spinoff of some ecchi series, so i really didn't like the story or setting. this game is definitely a sequel to their curse of the moon games, (of which i only played the first and only kind of liked) and plays a lot like them.

the music was bad the whole way through, the levels were standard and not that interesting, and the bosses were a fair challenge but the rest of the game being so :/ really brought them down to me. unlocking new abilities to get around stages was kind of fun, but they were all just awkward enough to use that they never felt all that freeing or exciting to use.)

well if nothing else, this game has at least kind of put me in the mood to go back to/restart touhou luna nights, so that's something i guess