i finally beat doom (2016)! i got the game when it came out, and upgraded to a 1440p 144hz monitor. it was the first game i'd seen above 60hz, and i was enamored when i saw it at my friend's house.

idk exactly why it took me so long to finish this game. i put it down twice, despite never feeling burnt out or annoyed with it. other games just kept getting in the way.

glad that i listened to my friend and picked the game back up. it's over the top and great.

while the entire game didn't live up the absurd excitement i got from the first couple missions, it was still very fun. i even liked the ending lol.

loses half a star for the difficult map system and the clunky and unnecessary weapon upgrade mechanics.

A complete misunderstanding of what made the first Bayonetta game fun

When I think of Bayonetta, I think of fast, fluid combat. There's a lot going on, but the signature "Witch Time" mechanic of temporary slow motion when dodging an attack with precise timing allows you to embody the hero: seeing thru the chaos and enacting an elegant balet of fists, feet, and bullets.

Sadly, I don't think the directors of Bayonetta 3 and agree on that as the core of the Bayonetta series. It seems that they were more caught up in the spectacle of Bayonetta.

The game opens with a literal apocalypse, and abruptly thrusts you into a story where multiverse theory is real, and new protagonist Viola can hop between universes to battle Singularity, a villain who is absorbing power from every universe in order to challenge Paradiso & Inferno (Heaven & Hell).

In the opening moments of the game, Manhattan is completely destroyed by a cataclysmic wave created by an enormous kaiju-sized aquatic beast. Many games would wait a bit to up the ante like this, but Bayonetta 3 starts at "11" and doesn't let up.

I did not enjoy the pacing of the story because of this. The stakes immediately feel at max and never let up, causing no single moment to actually feel important.

From a gameplay perspective, it honestly feels like Platinum has become bored of the bread & butter smooth combat they're known for. A massive amount of this game is the player controlling either boss-sized beasts (which move as slowly and unresponsivly as you would imagine), or full-on Godzilla-sized kaiju creatures.

The first two Bayonetta games had their occasional frustrating QTEs that could result in instant death, as well as novelty levels based on shmup games and driving games of old. I never liked these levels, but someone at Platinum sure does.

Bayonetta 3 features:

• 1v1 skyscraper-sized kaiju fighting game (and you have to play it twice)
• A stealth minigame featuring Jeanne that plays out like a mediocre Xbox Live Arcade game
• Several different "shmup" sections that are completely inscrutable (some are "airplane" style and others are "on rails")
• A rhythm game during a boss fight
• A "treasure hunt" game with a proximity sensor, with absolutely no explanation

The game is constantly name-dropping weird things that are never really explained, but also not interesting. I'm definitely a "show, don't tell" kind of person when it comes to stories, but I was frequently confused and uninterested in this game due to the amount of "Arch-Eve" and "Arch-Adam" nonsense being spewn.

Another thing about pacing: these weird mini-games popup in so many missions I lost count. They are frequently used as the capstone verse of a chapter to make a boss fight feel "epic", but given how boring these modes are it feels more like a punishment than an epic finale.

In short, I do not recommend anyone play this game. And frankly, I'm confused as to how it currently has an 88/100 on Metacritic. I've seen many people say the game is "fantastic" until the story gets bad, but frankly I didn't like this game from the opening hours thru the finale. It's just not fun and not what people expect out of a Bayonetta game.

TO THAT END, I really wanna talk about the story and go into spoiler territory:

Serious spoiler territory starts now

Um, so you may have heard by now that Bayonetta falls in love with Luka, the bumbling moron who follows her around in the first two games and is infatuated with her.

Unfortunately, this is true, and the setup for it is basically nonexistent.

One of the main story concepts of this game is watching Bayonettas from other universes die, and Luka has a tender moment with Bayonetta as she's dying and being dragged to hell. Luka holds her in his arms and comforts her, and she eats it up like a romanceable little lady, in stark contrast to her behavior in the other games.

I knew about this ahead of time, so I was bracing for it rather than taken by surprise. It's really stupid and feels like it was written by someone who wishes they could marry Bayonetta, and who imagines Luka as the self-insert character.

Also, Luka is actually extremely powerful in this game. It's hinted at early on but eventually everyone realizes he can transform into a crystal werewolf thing that beats the crap out of Bayonetta with ease. He has some weird narration about how he's always felt useless or something and this power grew in him. Like what a weird character arc no one was asking for.

Which, let's back up and talk about Bayonetta's sexuality for a moment. When the first game came out, it was highly criticized for the hypersexual portrayal of Bayonetta. This was at a time when Feminist Frequency was highly relevant, and the male gaze was the phrase of the day.

Many people suggested that Bayonetta's design is that of pure sexual fetish: she's basically a walking sexy British dominatrix witch action figure.

I tend to think this is a pretty accurate assessment of Bayonetta's design, but a new opinion started to emerge around the time of Bayonetta 2. In that game, her BFF Jeanne is hinted at being her lesbian lover (they go out shopping together and talk about going home together... also Jeanne sacrifices herself to save Bayonetta in the early game, and much of the story content is Bayonetta literally going thru actual Hell to save Jeanne; y'know, just "gal pal" stuff).

So there was a new popular head canon of Bayonetta as the lesbian witch full of female empowerment.

I tend to think that her repeated humilation of Luka in the first game is less of "I'm not into men" and more of "I'm a dominatrix lol", but perhaps some people saw it as an affirmation of her sapphic-only love interests.

I personally think this is nothing more than a head canon, and that what sapphic quality the Bayonetta series has is just more of a result of Bayonetta's hyper sexuality and all the combat-capable protagonists being women.

This is not to say that I dislike the head canon. I think it's cool if you see a super hot woman kicking ass and you're like "it me, the power lesbian". That's cool and I'm happy for you. I just don't think the creators of Bayonetta ever had that in mind, and I think Bayonetta's newfound love for Luka is more evidence of that.

And OMG I completely forgot the other thing about her love for Luka. Well, now we're going neck deep into massive endgame spoilers for Bayonetta 3, btw.

The new main character Viola is literally Bayonetta and Luka's daughter from another timeline lol.

And Bayonetta "passes on" the family name to Viola, who is referred to as Viola Bayonetta by Rodin at the end of the game, where she's seen wearing Bayonetta's glasses and Luka's scarf before going out to hunt demons.

For me, the story has never been a motivating or key factor for the series, so I don't really care. It just feels like more mediocre decoration as I expected.

The real issue for me is that the core gameplay is just embarrassingly NOT THERE and constantly replaced with half polished mini games.

Based on timing from announcement to release, Bayonetta 2 was in development for around 2 years, whereas Bayonetta 3 took 5 years. I feel like they must've had some internal development hell with this game, because it is jam packed full of ideas and feels incredibly disjointed.

Random note: I uploaded my score after beating the game and apparenlty I had the 23rd fastest run on "standard" difficulty. Kinda surprised to see that, since I wasn't really trying too hard lol.

ANYWAY there's so much more I could write about this game, but it's an actual miracle if you've read this far, so I'm going to wrap this up.

PLEASE go play a better character action game instead:

• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (PC)
• Devil May Cry 5 (multiple platforms)
• Bayonetta 1 (Switch)
• Nier: Automata (multiple platforms)

THE WITCH HUNTS ARE OVER

ADDENDUM: I've been informed that Bayonetta's original designer (who is a woman) may have intended Bayonetta to be a lesbian from her initial creation. I wouldn't be surprised if this was de-emphasized from her character strategically due to misogyny and a desire to reach a "larger" (more cishet male) audience. My interpretation of Bayonetta's lesbian sexuality as a head canon is not meant to be offensive to Bayonetta's original designer, but as a contrast of people's interpretations of some ambiguous presentation in the games.

A promising new direction for Pokémon.

The new stealth-action Pokémon catching system is a breath of fresh air, in what is one of the most sluggish turn-based game series I can think of.

I want to be clear: I love Pokémon dearly, but I think the games have grown stale.

The boss battles are a little weird, but otherwise I love the various zones you can wander around in.

The game is like a bunch of mini open worlds, in the style of Mario Odyssey. Being able to see Pokémon on the map, and even get into 1v2 or 1v3 battles is incredibly exciting.

This game does a lot to shake up the formula, and most of it lands.

I don't really care for the feudal Japan isekai setting, but it's mostly ignorable.

The fashion is still pretty good in this game, and collecting monsters is better than ever.

Where to start. I didn't play this in its era. This was my first time ever playing the game.

First, it barely works on a Windows 10 PC. I had to install a few mods just to get the graphics to render at a reasonable resolution and also scale the UI a bit. Plus there's a massive issue with the default renderer making the game unbearably dark and hard to see.

The game freezes constantly when I enter menus, and there's zero checkpointing, so make sure you remember your quicksave and quickload keys.

The games systems are woefully underexplained and hard to manage. I didn't realize I'd been upgrading myself incorrectly with augmentations until well over halfway through, and you can't change your mind later.

Skill points are too hard to come by, and rewards feel very small, especially early on. Eventually I accidentally found an infinite skill points glitch, which I abused to max out every stat. Amazing how much better the pistol feels especially at level 4 vs level 1. It's like aiming drunk vs being Revolver Ocelot lol.

Much of this game is just wandering around hoping you don't suck with a gun, or trying to slap enemies on the ass with a baton because for some weird reason that's their crit spot.

The game is not very large, and is mostly linear, yet I found myself constantly lost. This map design is not it. And the maps are all static, relying on you to use a compass to get anywhere, if you even have one. I get that this is a "simulation" type game so maybe that's just not for me.

Managing your inventory was not super fun, and I found myself doing it a lot. Manually arranging items in a grid is just tedious lol, and the game really hurts if you have "I might need this later" syndrome.

Strangely enough, Deus Ex: Invisible War was my first DX game. I then played Human Revolution and eventually Mankind Divided (plus that phone game Deus Ex GO; surprisingly good). I eventually tried this based on the recommendation from a friend, but honestly I'm not really sure that PC games from 2000 hold up so well, in my opinion.

It's really not the graphics, those are actually kinda fun once you get it rendering correctly. The game design is dated, the controls are monstrous, and the whole game just feels like you're an awkward failson rather than the most elite genetically engineered agent ever lol.

I could maybe see this game being fun the second time around, once you know where everything is and what to do, but I had an awful time fumbling my way thru it.

I can see why by the standards of 2000 this was cool, but I think anyone still playing and enjoying it probably has some nostalgia fueling their run.

## general thoughts

i really wanted to love this game, but i only liked it. as a (nearly) solo developed indie game, you can get really well executed clear vision on projects like this. emphasis on can. my general impression of this game is that the core developer drew inspiration from too many different sources and ended up with something perfectly tailored for themselves, but not necessarily others.

the game balance in particular is all out of wack, and i had to turn the game down to easy because i was spending far too much time in "random" battles. speaking of that, the game doesn't have random battles, but it literally roadblocks and ambushes you with enemies constantly. especially since XP grind isn't a thing in this game, i'd love more chances to avoid combat and save my energy for the bosses. i initially enjoyed the boss fights, but playing on easy mode made almost every fight trivial, yet i had a hard time being motivated to go back on that.

## what i played

i did a lot of the side quests, but not all of them. i didn't do any of the "post game" stuff. i recruited all 12 party members. i played for about 45 hours.

## the short version

> i don't regret buying, playing, or finishing the game, but i can't see this as "an indie masterpiece" or new best JRPG by any metric from myself. it's a solid 3/5 game for me.

## pros

+ 12 playable characters
+ despite being set in a single nation, neighboring countries and even continents are relevant to the story
+ music is generally good
+ art is generally good
+ lots of "quality of life" changes compared to older JRPGs
+ not too much backtracking
+ lots of characters involved in political struggle, war, and fighting god

## cons

- crafting is tedious (but skippable on easy mode)
- "no random battles" is true but the game has a massive amount of forced battles anyway
- level and map design is not good
- sometimes the perspective on the art is a little wonky
- mech combat is completely unique from on-foot combat, and nowhere near as good
- leveling system is horrible for folks with choice paralysis like me
- too many systems to learn with little payoff
- difficulty curve looks like a sine wave
- localization can feel dry
- a character complains about how growing up rich actually sucks because his sister got raped into a coma by a group of poor people
- i'm not kidding btw

i love the wario land series and really really wanted to like this game more than i do

it has two major flaws that spoil an otherwise near perfect game for me:

1. it's so fast. seriously, the sprint speed in this game is absurd, and it really tests your level memorization and reaction speed. this generally isn't a huge problem for me since most of the game isn't timed and doesn't have any death mechanics, and the escape sequences generally have fairly generous timers.

2. this is the big one. what the heck is up with the boss fights. the 4 main bosses all have 8 HP then they come back with a second form that's way more chaotic and have another 8 HP. and 3 of the bosses have a QTE at the end of the 2nd form to actually kill them. the final boss is a 7 part boss fight: 3 new bosses and all 4 previous bosses (with reduced health, at least), followed by a timed escape sequence.

i love that this game is trying for a la carte difficulty, where you choose how many "extras" to get, and how fast to beat the level, and your combo meter and such, but the boss fights are absolutely unnecessarily difficult.

i think an "easy" mode that reduced the amount of onscreen enemies would be helpful, because a lot of bosses cover the whole screen in enemies and it becomes extremely hard to dodge things and even tell what's happening. or heck, even a mode where all the bosses had half the HP would be a godsend.

i'm still waiting for a good wario land successor, and i really wish this could've been it.

What I played

I played all 26 chapters of the game, a total of 95 hours of play time. Chapters 1-23 I completed on Hard/Classic (permadeath). Chapters 24-26 I completed on Normal/Classic. I completed a few paralogue missions and a couple skirmishes.

Summary

If you're dying for tactical combat, this could be your fix. There's a ton of video game to play, and it certainly isn't easy on Hard/Classic. Beware that it's very cheesy and difficult to actually get lots of the support conversations. Late game levels abuse frustrating game mechanics to simulate difficulty by wearing the player down mentally.

Pros

The weapon triangle is back!

Lots of great music

Characters are rendered extremely well (very nice anime style)

Hard/Classic provided an engaging tactics experience on most maps

Character support dialogues were generally interesting


Cons

Character designs are almost all completely over the top and awful

Level scaling for skirmishes is completely busted, making it impossible to level up weaker units or work on supports if you play on permdeath (unless you want your units to die)

It's just too long. 26 chapters + 15 paralogues.

The same 4-5 villains are reused for half the game, and they constantly get away from you without dying

The beginning half of the game is just a glorified trek around the world to collect a bunch of characters and is VERY anime bullshit

The maps are simply too big. The latter half of the game frequently features 25x30 combat maps with 12-14 allies, up to 5 boss units, and frequently infinite enemy reinforcements.

The story is just a bad shonen battle anime. The writing of the main story scenes is initially just super corny, and then eventually it just gets melodramatic. I hope you like death monologues, multiple deus ex machina moments, constant talk of "dragons" despite almost no dragon ever showing their dragon form, weird creepy worship of your character as a god, recurring villains who constantly "get away" rather than dying, and a lot a lot of obsession with family relationships

The Somniel is a massive time waster, like Garreg Mach in 3 Houses. it was not uncommon for me to spend 2 hours between missions early on, before i started ignoring most of it.

Revive Stones. these are abused to make bosses unreasonably tanky. bosses often have 2 revive stones, meaning they have 3 total health bars. what's worse is that overflow damage doesn't carry over, so you have to micro manage who hits in what order to do optimized damage. i feel like the idea here was that on normal this encourages you to do a very anime bullshit thing of surrounding a boss with all your favorite units and making sure each gets a turn stabbing, but on Hard this often meant i needed multiple turns of 4+ attacks to kill a boss, which really got absurd when combined with infinite reinforcements on a lot of maps. this led to more silly AI abuse where you skirt the boss's engagement range by one square and pick off their support units with ranged attacks, a strategy i don't always find super engaging. tho sometimes the AI just gets tired of your shit and comes after you anyway. it was hard to find a single answer for how bosses work here.

Build crafting. omg this game is over the top. you have like 30+ characters and 12 emblems each of which can be paired with any unit and you can teach units skills from any of them. there are so many currencies to manage in this game. you can also upgrade and engrave weapons. you can switch classes and promote units. any unit can switch to any class in the game via weapon training via emblem training. it's dizzying tbh. the few times i looked up guides on the later levels, i was always shocked to see who had what units configured how, and like, they often seemed way stronger than i thought was possible. i didnt understand how a few of these game systems worked for way too long, so i may have been spending my resources poorly. but it's hard to grind to get more resources in this game due to skirmish level scaling.

Disappointing. Probably the clunkiest and least fun Metroidvania I've played.

I backed this on Kickstarter because I love Metroidvanias, visual novels, and trashy reality TV.

Sadly, this seems to be a case where the team was probably spread too thin, and the overall design suffers.

The story is really cringey and is too busy trying to be ironic and meta. The game is consistently so dark you can't see your character or the enemies. There's a complete lack of movement abilities which makes combat very frustrating. The camera is jumpy. The attack animations feel bad.

I only beat the first chapter (66 minutes) because I was in shock. I really wish this game was better.

An interesting mix of Metroidvania and Devil May Cry. I really like it sometimes, and others I just find it frustrating.

For a Metroidvania, it's extremely unwilling to offer maps in most areas, and when you do get them, it's an item you pick up like in Zelda. But you can't map anything at all until you get it. This makes it very easy to get lost.

A lot of jumping and ledge grabbing seemed bug, requiring pixel precision. I think some of that was fixed in a patch that came out today.

The real thing that killed this game for me though is boss difficulty. I only made it what looks to be about halfway through the game (fight against the cat boy), and it took me over an hour of nonstop attempts to scrape by a narrow a victory. The cat boy's hitboxes are janky, and attack "tells" are extremely bad for his overpowered homing projectile attack. This made for a unfun fight where I was constantly running away and only doing 1-2 hit combos on the boss, making it extremely slow and tedious. Sadly, I can't lower the difficulty without just starting the entire game over. At this point, I don't think it's worth my time. Oh and the next area of the game gives the enemies poison rain that's unavoidable and does massive damage over time.

Also, the music wasn't memorable to me, and the main character is a little bit boring.

I think if I could've tweaked the difficulty mid-playthru, I'd probably actually finish this game and give it a 4 or so. It's playing with some interesting ideas. But it feels like a small team made a game that's just a bit difficult and finicky for real players, compared to their own playtesting. I could be wrong, that's just the vibe I get.

I played the first Hitman campaign as part of the HITMAN 3 / World of Assassination collection.

I'm upset that I waited so long to play this. This is one of the best stealth games I've ever played. It's absolutely gorgeous and really immersive, other than the complete lack of notable accents as you go across the globe lol.

I've replayed multiple levels multiple times already. I'm honestly baffled at how some of these achievements are possible. I'm trying to strike a balance between replaying some levels and not burning myself out, since I want to see the whole trilogy.

Wow. Impeccable.

Fantastic co-op puzzle game!

+ You build giant Lego-style models
+ Most of the levels are really fun
+ The art direction is charming
+ The music is cute

- The camera angles are awful, and the levels are constantly obscuring critical information
- Sometimes it feels like the fastest way to play the level is to get tricky and do funny things with physics, instead of using one of the many cranes they provide
- Some of the levels focus on making you explore them in order to gather pieces, but I found this tedious and silly compared to actually putting together puzzles
- A few of the later levels took an entire hour to put together, which is just a bit much for this game, I think. They were generally cool though.

What a wild conclusion to the World of Assassination trilogy. I think overall I preferred the levels in Hitman 2, but Hitman 3 does some interesting changes to the formula that keep you on your toes. Without spoiling too much, the Berlin level was truly unique mechanically, and really intense the first time because of it. Subsequent replays of the level lose the element of the unknown and become more like a standard Hitman level, which is still good. I liked the murder mystery story in Dartmoor a lot. The twist ending of Chongqing was very tense. The final level was shockingly linear, though not unfun. I didn't really care for the bonus Ambrose Island level, though. So mechanically not as good as 2, but has enough unique flair and storytelling that I still give it full marks.