"The Auditore are not dead! I am still here! Me! Ezio Auditore!"

Ubisoft's first breakthrough in the Assassin's Creed franchise. A timeless classic with little in the way of poorly aged mechanics, which is very seldom compared to it's predecessor. For it's time, absolutely groundbreaking and knocks the first out of the water by a landslide. The plot is well developed, Ezio is such a charismatic and interesting character as opposed to Altair and the gameplay itself is still pretty enjoyable to this day.

This is a game I have come back to countless times and even went out of my way to platinum, along with attempted platinums over the years, so it's definitely up there on my personal list. The only thing I would change is improving on the parkour, which can still feel a bit rigid and aged, but nowhere near as bad as the first game.

This game is so good. Everything I disliked in the old im@s console games was either removed or improved dramatically in Starlit Season. They handled 29 idols together really well. This game captures the length of the franchise. 16 years later they welcomed all of us Ps back. My Japanese is terrible but it hit me hard when Haruka's 1st commu when she tells you, "Welcome home, Producer!" This game is a raising sim where you schedule your idol's stats and performance to grow to become the best idol. there are 3 parts of gameplay, There's the communication part of the game where you socialize with your idol to raise their affection to perform well in their jobs. Sorta like social links in Persona games but not really since the choice actually matter and they can get mad at you and lower their mood which affects their performance in auditions. There's the raising sim part where you have to manage time to raise stats of the idols and play minigames to improve their stats. I think the similar gameplay for this is like Princess Maker 2 and the Monster Rancher games as well as dating sims like Tokimeki Memorial. and last is the auditions, The rhythm aspect of this game is more strategic since you have to give an appeal that will give you the highest score. This is indicated by the stat values and its appeal percentage, which decreases every time you press it while the other increases. I had a blast and even if I don't understand everything due to my Japanese being terrible, and when there's stuff I do understand, it is the best console im@s game I ever played. This game has so much replay value that I still playing it. I heard that im@s 2 amazing so I'll have to try that when my Japanese improve.

Content Warning for Attempted Suicide, Terminal Illness, Death, and Chronic Illness

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It’s September 2011 and I’m seventeen years old when I try to kill myself. There are two ponds near my parent’s house. It’s like 4 AM. I like to be out this early. Nobody else is awake, and they won’t be for a while. It’s like the whole world belongs to me. I wander around between the neighborhoods, along the roads, and in the fields. In ten years these will be fresh real estate properties but today they’re still farmland. This hour and a half is the only time the anxiety quells. The real world never knows peace. There’s a dread that accompanies every action and every moment; living in that house, going to school, hanging out with my friends (are they my friends? They are but I won’t be able to understand that until I’m healthier). I’ll always have to go back home. I’ll never be able to articulate what’s happening to me. The pressure is too intense. I don’t plan it, but, the pond is right there, and it’s deep enough, and early enough that no one will hear me. Not having a plan is what saves my life. Turns out impromptu self-drownings are difficult to pull off when the water is still and not THAT deep. So, it doesn’t work, and I’m soaked, and grateful to get home and hide the evidence before my parents wake up, but I don’t feel BETTER. I feel despair, still. There’s no way out. I wish I could just climb up the stairwell, out of this. I wish I had the clarity to understand what was wrong with me.

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What do you even say about Silent Hill 2? To say that it’s one of the best video games ever made feels simultaneously obvious and like I’m underselling it, right? Fuckin, uhhhh, Resident Evil 2 is one of the best video games ever made. Ace Attorney 3 is one of the best games ever made. Come on! When we see people talk about old games that they like they’ll so often say stuff like “it holds up really well for its age” or some similar comment that implies that progress is the same as quality. This is, of course, nonsense. I wouldn’t say video games are better as a medium in 2021 than they were in 2001; on the whole and in the mainstream I would say they’re demonstrably worse in almost every way – how they look, how they sound, how they feel. Silent Hill 2 was a AAA game. What do we get now instead? Far Cry 6? The fuckin, THE MEDIUM? We’ve lost everything in pursuit of bad lighting and looking like a mediocre episode of whatever was popular on HBO three years ago. Silent Hill 2 looks great and sounds great and fuck you it plays great too it feels good and even the puzzles are MOSTLY FINE. MOSTLY. Listen I’m saying this is the all time best video game I’m not saying it fuckin ended world hunger.

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It’s October 2012, I’m nineteen and I’m sitting in a business communications class when I get the text confirmation that Sam’s brain tumor is back, again. It’s not the first time, and I know that there’s nothing left to do, he’s going to die. It’s fast, untreated. He’s one of my best friends, and the only person I know from home who went to the same college as me, but we live really far apart on a big urban campus and I haven’t seen him as much as I’d have liked to. Now he’s gonna spend the rest of his time with his family back home. When I see him next it’s at a hometown charity event for his family in December. He’s unrecognizable physically, and he can’t speak. The event is at our old catholic elementary school, in the gym, where in the years since we graduated they’ve painted a giant tiger on the wall. It’s the school mascot. I feel incredibly awkward around him and spend most of the time away with our other friends. I only speak to him briefly, and when I do it’s a stupid joke about the tiger mural. These will be my last words to him. I do know this will be the case, I think. Later that month I’ll be one of his pallbearers. I spend a lot of time angry and ashamed of myself for not being better to him, not knowing how to act or what to say. I’m about to drop out of school for reasons financial and related to my mental health.

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So what DO you say about Silent Hill 2? That it’s a masterpiece? That it’s the most well-conceived and executed video game ever made? That every detail of it dovetails into every other in a legitimately perfect cocktail story, presentation, and play? That the performances, cinematography, soundscape, all of it are untouchably top of their class? That when Mary reads the letter at the end I WEEP because it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever heard? That if I ever meet Troy Baker it’s ON SIGHT? These things are all true. We all know it. Everybody knows this. It’s Silent Hill 2.

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It’s August 2019, I’m twenty-five and I’ve just managed to graduate college in time to move to a new city with my partner as she enters her third year of medical school. That’s the year they kick you out of the classroom and you start going to the hospitals to do your real hands-on training month to month. I’m job hunting unsuccessfully and we’re living exclusively off her loans, when what seems at first like a pulled lower back muscle becomes a fruitless early morning ER trip (five hours, no results, not seen by a doctor) becomes an inability to get out of bed becomes a forced leave of absence. Without a diagnosis she can’t get disability accommodations. While on a leave of absence we can’t have her loans, and in fact we have to pay them back. We’re getting desperate, thousands of dollars in debt, and I take the first soul sucking job I can find. It takes almost a full year of visits to increasingly specialized physicians but eventually my partner is diagnosed with non radiographic axial spondyloarthritis, an extremely rare condition that culminates in the fusion of the spinal column. We can treat the pain, sort of, but it’s only a matter of time until it’s likely to evolve into a more serious condition, she’ll never have the strength or stamina she had before, and the treatment options are expensive and difficult. Her diagnosis doesn’t even officially exist as a recognized condition that people can have until September 2020.

Suddenly I am a caretaker and everything is different now. Obviously our mood is stressed from the financial dangers, but she’s in pain, terrible pain, constantly for months. She can’t sleep, she can’t eat. There’s nothing I can do. It’s exhausting to live like that. She’s depressed. On good days we try to walk outside but good days are few and far between, and grow fewer over time, and her body makes her pay for the walks. She’s on drugs, a lot of them. Do they help? It’s unclear. They don’t make her feel BETTER. Nobody knows what’s wrong with her. Her school thinks she’s faking, they’re trying to concoct ways to get her kicked out. She wants to die. It breaks my heart. She’s everything to me, all that there is. She has literally saved my life. And I can’t help her. But it’s exhausting for me too. I don’t want to admit this, not even privately, to myself. It is hard to be the person who is leaned on, especially when the person you love can’t give anything back. I’m tired. I’m not angry, and I don’t think I’m resentful. But I’m tired. I feel shame for thinking about it, for acknowledging it. I know it’s silly to feel the shame but it’s there. I do find a job eventually, thankfully, but it’s still a long time before we get a diagnosis, much less an effective treatment. Even after things settle somewhat, it’s a hard year. And there are hard times to come.

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Ever since I first played it as a teen, Silent Hill 2 is a game that has haunted me through life, like a memory. It struck a deep chord with me when I was too young for that to be fair, too young to identify why I could relate to these people and their ghosts. I used to think this was a special relationship that I had with the game, the way you kind of want to think you have these when you’re younger, but the older I get the more I recognize this as part of growing up. Silent Hill 2 doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve encountered situations in life that closely mirror that of the protagonist. I mean, Angela’s story resonates deeply with me despite little overlap in the specifics of our family traumas. Silent Hill 2 touches me – and most of us – so deeply, because it has such a keen understanding of what it feels like to be Going Through It. It is a game that knows what it is to grieve, to despair, to soak in the fog, and also, maybe, to feel a catharsis, if you’re lucky, and you do the work.

I’ve been Angela, parts of her. I’ve been Laura too. I’ve had more James in me than I would prefer. I suspect all of us have these people, these feelings in us, to some degree or another. We collect them as we get older. That’s just part of it. Silent Hill 2 isn’t a happy game, but it’s one that Gets It, and lets us explore those spaces in a safe and cathartic way. It does this about as well as any piece of media I’ve encountered, on top of being so excellent at all the cinematic and video game stuff. But that’s really what makes it what it is. The empathy, and the honesty. I think it’s beautiful.

There are few games as utterly captivating as Elden Ring. Throughout it's runtime, I found the game's world and it's dungeons just absolutely sucking up my play sessions and spitting me out on the other side, way past 11pm and wishing i didnt have work the next day. It's a hard game to drag oneself away from, with an open world that constantly rewards curiosity, enormous main dungeons which you can now have a degree of vertical exploration and platforming, and constant beauty to be found in it's locales and vistas.

The world design and the main levels of Elden Ring are just astounding. If you exclude the copypasta mines and catacombs, which fortunately arent too common, nearly everything else is high tier Fromsoftware stuff, and the world design itself is fantastic. It's kind of like New Vegas in that whilst it's very open, there's a clear route the game is always nudging you in, and the world design being much longer than it is wide ties into that. Towards the end of the game it also gladly funnels a bit more, so just as the open world fatigue feels like it might set in and the world looks like it might be overstepping, it pulls it back just enough.

The gameplay itself is basically dark souls 4, which is pretty much what everyone wanted, so cool. If there is a significant difference between them, it is that Elden Ring is a game that encourges far more resourcefulness and usage of tactics and items that were pretty useless in previous games. The item crafting allows lot more liberal use of things like firebombs and knives, crossbows and bows are massively more viable, and multiclassing a melee build with some magic is a natural path to take as scaling seems way less important than stat requirements for wepons and abilities. With spirit ashes as well there seems a fairly large emphasis on using a wider variety of resources available to you, which is a good change, and discourages the R1-roll-r1 that souls can sadly boil down to.

On a core gameplay side, the only real issue i have is the scaling of enemy health and damage. It's just a bit overtuned. Unlike other Souls games, Vitality basically has to be your primary stat here - having about 40-50(!!!) seems appropriate for the endgame, in a game where other stat demands remain basically the same compared to previous games. Enemies also get vastly inflated health pools in harder areas than where you should be, and whilst i get the purpose to sort of corral the player in the right areas, it's a bit much. It leads to coming back to early areas being a cakewalk whilst lacking a few upgrades in a lategame area to be a nightmare - something that can easily happen becasue the drops required to upgrade weapons are kind of a mess to get and you may well end up in a situation where missing one low level stone prevents a massive jump in power. Reducing this quite massive range would have helped a lot, and I don't really get why the decision was made to be like this when none of the other souls are, excluding the chalice dungeons and the New game plus cycles - which is kind of what going to a new area feels like in gameplay terms.

The bosses are also a very mixed bag. Many are great, of course, but there's some serious dark souls 2 energy to quite a couple of them - bosses with really weird wind ups that track your position to an insane degree with only tiny windows to fight back with. And worst off, very occasionally you'll get to fight two of those fuckers at once.

There's also just too many bosses in general. I know they're often the best part of these games and that since you can run past so much of everything else in this game, it might be neccessary, but there's a large amount of copypasta of the minor bosses in particular, a lot of similar dragons - and the game basically ends with 5 bosses directly after each other, which is a bit much. They could have toned it down a bit.

Other than that, perhaps the biggest dissapointment for me is the narrative and world "lore". Especially in the early hours the world of elden ring feels a bit like bootleg dark souls, to the point i dont know why they didn't just make this a direct spinoff. There's so much stuff which is just "dark souls stuff but named different" that it feels a bit fake, and wheras something like bloodborne could get away with it due to a vastly different setting, Elden Ring's really is quite similar. The conflict of the game is also quite poorly defined unless you're really paying attention to stuff. Fortunately some very good NPCs (ranni my beloved) and the world design itself rises to the occasion, but yeah, I really think they should have made this just a dark souls spinoff, it just means it feels awkward at times, especially in the early hours which are just straight, boring high fantasy.

To be honest, there's an overwhelming amount of nits to pick with Elden Ring. I could write a review much longer than this one alone about individual locations in the game that feel like they were given to the team who made shrine of amana, or the weird quest design, or wonky performances issues or whatever. But, y'know, that's From. Every last one of the souls games - and all the earlier games of theirs i've played - have problems that I would dumpster other games for. I will forever make fun of the Cathedral level from Code Vein, but you'll probably catch me defending lost izalith if you got me drunk enough. Because just the general play experience of Elden Ring is so damn strong.

It's not the best soulsbornekirofieldtowerring - the honour still goes to bloodborne by a long shot as far as i'm concerned. Ultimately i do think enough of the issues i've mentioned, particularly the wonky balance, large amounts of reused stuff and some bad bosses definetly knock the game down a peg. But it's still clearly the best open world game since Gravity Rush 2, and FROM's first crack at this really doesn't feel like the sellout my cynical self thought it would be. It's like they've been doing this all along.

listen. i grew up with banjo. even during my mid-teens, first time seeing the reveal trailer my reaction was pretty much "oh this is different than what i grew up with but it looks fun".

i still stand by N&B being actually pretty decent if you go in not expecting this to be a platformer, and also if you enjoy building stuff and doofing around in physics sandboxes. that being said, i'm not a fan of the more self-deprecating writing in N&B. yes, i know (shockingly) this was actually a game the banjo team wanted to do, but the writing does make the game feel at odds with itself.

jonathan tronathan eat my shorts

I've always said that in order to reach new audiences videogame developers needed to be bold and make changes.

And let's be honest here, FromSoftware games were in dire need of some changes.

However by making these changes there's a possibility that some members of the core audience might be alienated.

This is a necessary step of progress.

Unfortunatley for me, I'm part of that alienated core audience.

I think this is a good game, great at times even.
But I'm 15 hours in and I just can't lie to myself any longer.

It's not for me. I've seldom been this bored while playing a videogame.

Hope everyone else on here has a great time with the game though.

I do think that changing things up like this was a good step for FromSoftware and I can't wait for their next project.