I've been recently thinking about fighting games franchises lately (horrible I know this is a cry for help) and upon remembering that MK is still a somewhat annual franchise I came to a really odd conclusion

I don't think mortal kombat has any actual identity anymore aside from liveleak gore videos and incredibly lacklustre mechanical design, Now I know this is a bit harsh and I'm not exactly speaking from a position of objectivity despite how much i think objectivity is a meme but really think about it.

With how much every other fighting game franchise has adapted and changed to meet the times whether its tekken, street fighter or even KOF I cannot think of a single reason for MK to still exist beyond nostalgia value as an IP and really over the top liveleak-esque gore.

For one NRS cannot design characters for shit every one of their games i feel has always had that one character that one badly designed character that just completely ignores the fundamentals and destroys whatever is in its path whether its NRS adherence to the policy of never designing good zoners or completely batshit overpowered DLC characters (which to give credit many companies are also guilty of) I cannot think of a single reason to continue playing a single NRS fighting game past its launch window when everyone has figured out all the broken tediously designed characters.

Now I don't think anyone is willing to defend NRS character design but if they are just remember they were okay with injustice's base roster.

Another point of contention I feel is NRS's insistence on always following the worst monetization plans in the industry now typically I am one to ignore this kind of thing as if it isn't directly affecting the flow of gameplay it is of minor concern to me but when the last 3 or so NRS games have had the worst monetization on cosmetics possible its something you eventually notice and take into account when viewing these games fucking holiday exclusive fatalities that are paid only? wtf is this company smoking? To give some slack however it isn't like other companies have followed suit people seem to give shit to trend setters but never the people to then follow those trends Tekken 8's awful monetization scheme deserves a special mention as it was a catalyst for a review shitstorm on top of contributing to what seems like them ignoring blights on the current balance but that's a story for another day.

Now despite all this musing over how much of a failure I feel MK is as a brand it will still sells like hotcakes because unfortunately nostalgia IP's like MK will sell well regardless of quality because MK's audience of edgy teenagers and boomers aren't ones to typically question quality after all who care's if the net coding has been terrible since day one and highly requested community fixes for matchmaking aren't implemented look its peacemaker from that show you like! and look its homelander you guy's like homelander right from that show you like on streaming right guys? be sure to keep buying time crystals so you can buy skins that used to be free in older titles!

Sarcasm aside I think ultimately ed boon should be hunted with an harpoon gun at sea but that's just me.

I wouldn't consider myself the biggest XIV fan but this game definitely has its moments under all that tedium and monotony of a tab targeting MMO that being said I'm a little disappointed in endwalker, I don't think that endwalker is a bad expac mind you far from it I think what EW brings to the table is excellent but having said that this story really needed another comb over because it is rife with incredibly weak execution and the most monotonous filler I've seen in an MMO so far.

I'm not exactly against the pacing in XIV but it can absolutely murder interest if you're going from expansion to expansion with an ever unchanging pacing structure that seems designed to waste as much time as possible while forsaking giving plot elements actual time to breathe the fact garlemald and zodiark are handled in the actual story feels really weak and somewhat insulting if you were expecting these plot elements to take up more then two quest chains then the story has to take a huge detour to actually set up and tell you what its going to do in the next 5 or so hours and frankly I was really exhausted by the time I was approaching the last few quest chains.

Again this is not to say i despise or even dislike EW's story but man that second half really needed another look over the whole end of the world aspect doesn't feel as urgent as it should either the towers are completely forgotten about within like 2 hours of story and I never felt pressured to do anything which is a far cry from a game they released much later XVI which actually handled that aspect far better and grander then they did.

Good expansion, mediocre for a decent chunk story and really bad story I think people are possibly crazy for thinking this was better then shadowbringers lol.

Calling this a remake has to be one of the most bold tricks anyone has pulled in this industry.

I do think the original Final Fantasy VII is a much better game both mechanically and narratively but honestly this isn't as bad as I initially thought, I was there day one shitting on all the weird narrative decisions and wasn't too big on the gameplay, felt like it was a bad typical hack and slash ARPG. But upon sitting down and playing both the original Final Fantasy VII and the remake due to a somewhat impulsive buy of the 7R and rebirth twin pack on PSN what I ended up finding wasn't honestly that bad as I had initially thought and thought at the time.

There's plenty to rag on here this is a modern Square enix title there's plenty of modern game design moments™️ with slow walking and talking moments crawl spaces and ""platforming"" where you hold the stick forward and cloud does everything for you and honestly I could do without the mediocre repetitive side quests (also fuck the gym minigames lmao), But what I did end up liking was surprisingly the combat It took a bit of getting used to and frankly the first 5 or so hours can be absolutely miserable the first reactor segment does not give any good first impressions of the system and I blame the original PS4 demo for some of my apprehensions about this game.
But once you start getting more materia and weapons surprisingly I found the combat to be quite intuitive, of course this goes without saying that I think at the end of the day I much prefer the original game's systems there aren't that many games that can quite replicate the satisfaction of a w-summon mime knights of the round wombo combo that takes 30 minutes each and will more then likely kill the boss on your first summon. But I do think it goes without saying a little bit that while FF7R is very mechanically similar its attempting completely different things and due to the scope and ambition of this trilogy they obviously had to tone down cloud's power a bit so the materia and stuff you have access to aren't gamebustingly good, However this does mean I found myself using stuff I typically ignored in the original FF7 actually bothering to use the magic materia and obtaining for myself master magic materia without beating a superboss felt pretty rewarding and because of how the game is structured and balanced I found myself actually using these regular magic materia instead of benching them until disc 2 when you get contain materia, Though the balance isn't perfect Cloud's counterstance that he gets very late in the game (and i do mean late the game has like 3 chapters to go by that point) can trivialize a ton of fights the final boss ended up just being a race to get my ATB up and spamming counterstance until the boss was staggered.

As for the weird sequel meta narrative stuff honestly to me its probably the most interesting thing about this game, Typically I don't mesh well with overly self referential media but when you have a career like Tetsuya Nomura and Kazushige Nojima Its a little bit earned, I do think that if this stuff wasn't in place FF7R would be a very safe skip for me I don't tend to agree with remakes on a fundamental level rarely ever are they warranted (consider for a moment we live in a console generation where the original Resident Evil 4 was remade as a filler game to pad out a fiscal year) but to me at the very least I think calling this game "Final Fantasy VII Remake" does it a bit of a disservice obviously if you get into semantics this game is a Final Fantasy VII remake and I completely understand this contradicts my point a little but suffice to say I don't agree with this game being a remake if anything its more like a strange sequel that has some meta stuff about being a remake its not quite a "point at the screen and clap like a seal with your mouth agape" game and while those moments exist because they know their audience, to me at least I found the newer stuff far more interesting then the base FF7 narrative that was sprinkled in feels more like a alternative take on FF7 rather then outright remaking it faithfully (and to be completely honest a straight edge FF7 remake sounds like the most boring thing imaginable).

Overall I'm glad I gave this a second shot I don't think this is the best thing ever nor do I think it supplants the original in any meaningful way if anything this game NEEDS the original to thrive none of the references or greater FF7 compilation stuff at play here would make any sense without it and to me at the very least co-existence is the best possible scenario for a game claiming to be a remake dismissing the original title because the remake exists is frankly really childish and honestly disturbs me how quickly the industry has adopted this POV dooming aside this is worth a shot if you have played the original FF7 and have at least played or know of the FF7 compilation stories.

I went into kuro 2 with high hopes given that the previous entry was a pleasant surprise and a departure from the absurdist hacky writing of the cold steel games and thankfully kuro 2 manages to hold itself together.

For the most part I had already some idea on what to expect It was a direct follow-up released in a year after the previous game and so I was keenly aware that this would be on the cheaper side of things, And while that assertion was true I think I and many others kind of dismissed this game as simply filler, However this game did surprise me as despite that assertion kuro II felt more like the missing second half of the first game rather then being its own entry its more like a duology if anything its continuing character arcs mechanics and general gameplay to the letter and that I feel works incredibly well for this.

For starters while they didn't revamp the mechanics entirely I feel that the new additions really do help revamp some of the sore spots, In particular the new shard skill UI is much cleaner and easier to read and the addition of cover shield being far easier to achieve and some re-balances I felt the shard system was overall a lot cleaner and easier to wrap my head around, No longer did I feel as if I was extremely limited with my options in fact I found myself actually building other characters I rarely used which definitely spells out to me that the slight revamps were much needed.

The plot is fairly interesting albeit I found there was way too many moments where the outcome was way too obvious it never quite got to the point where I felt the writing was actively disrespecting my intelligence or destroying its own intentions which the previous saga was very guilty of but there was a few moments that I felt if they were placed into the context of the CS games would not be nearly as endearing or charming.

I do have some criticisms for the patch I used however its not technically finished at this point so I expect it'll be cleaned up later (quite a few spelling errors and outright wrong item descriptions just to name a few) but aside from that I found it was acceptable even in its current state.

Despite all this my only major criticism I suppose is how dull the middle point can be, Its pretty much a repeating set of chapters with the only difference being the variables and characters change but the general outcomes are all the same and honestly I could have done without them.

Given all that I honestly do recommend kuro no kiseki II especially with its nature of basically being the continuing half of the first game good companion piece and i'm looking forward to kai no kiseki whenever that drops.

Dev team is genuinely incompetent and Void's hiring practices are not very good and it shows with the 1.0 launch rescinding everything good they managed during the early access period and instead launching a game that is at the best of times a functional tactical shooter that is much more realized then something like a ground branch, and at its worst its a dysfunctional failure that trips over itself 50 times down a flight of stairs.

For starters the AI of the suspects has taken a hammer to its cranial having played this game as early as 19th of august 2022 I am quickly reminded of the old suspect AI incredibly inconsistent and prone to wall banging at nothing for 5 minutes later builds did fix this and the suspect AI was in a much better place, now somehow they've managed to revert it to much older builds and have completely ruined it.
It is almost impossible to breach rooms now without having your aimbot teammates always charging ahead because 9 times out of ten you will get wall banged from nowhere to the point it does not feel intentional and rather feels like shoddy programming (which it is), if you want evidence of this go on YouTube right now and look up ready or not AI you will see tons of clips of the suspects somehow wall banging or flipping around and doming you immediately in precarious or impossible positions.

And I haven't even gotten into the fact that despite all their attention to detail in the gunplay they neglected the fact to even properly balance the weapon roster non-lethal is an absolute fucking joke and barely works and most AR's are dogshit compared to shotguns which can dome at ridiculous ranges and usually one shot 90% of the time while AR's can take 3-4 shots on armoured suspects and have annoying recoil patterns, if you go play swat 4 right now (you should do that anyway save your money and either acquire a copy from a friend or purchase it on gog) the story is completely different non-lethal is both incredibly viable and also 100% required for higher rankings ready or not does need non-lethal for S-ranks which opens the non-lethal options to heavy scrutiny and sadly they do not hold up under this scope, this also isn't aided by the fact that S-rank is completely pointless and is only for completion even at best you only need maybe an A+ for cosmetic and trophy completion which I feel like defeats the point of even going for non-lethal.

I do honestly wish that the post launch updates address some of these glaring issues but I also have to call into question the competency of the dev team for even thinking this was remotely ready for launch I have completely not mentioned the fact that optimization has somehow plateaued into the fucking marina trench because I feel this needs to be said last because holy fuck how did they manage to make the launch build run worse then the early access builds?? its a complete conundrum to me because usually its the exact opposite.

Also worth mentioning that even if they do fix the issues the map pool is terrible, The maps are way too large and feel tedious as fuck like look at the postal map this is not a clear job for a 5 man team there should be multiple teams deploying in lmao if you thought swat 4 had too many times where you felt like you were going crazy trying to find the last civvie or gun drop boy are you gonna love this game!

But yeah my opinion on this game even if they do fix the issues is just go play swat 4 apparently that game was too subtle for some folk lol.

This one sure did take me a while.

After being continually flabbergasted by the writing and systems of the cold steel games, It was nice to play a kiseki entry for once that didn't make me feel like my brain cells were being numbed to death yet despite I still do think kuro suffers a little bit from how bloated this franchise quickly became.

Frankly I don't think kiseki's writing has been that good even during the zero/azure days but there were stand out moments and charming worldbuilding and engaging storylines, Kuro does return to that era a little bit by having a much more darker storyline with characters that actually stay dead instead of magically being saved off screen to show up later, Its not perfect if anything these games really need a glossary button during dialogue because there are way too many characters and factions to remember all at once and the writers attempts to make van the connective piece of the next saga can only mean this is going to get much worse very quickly.

Speaking of the writing the pacing in kuro sure is something game has about 7 chapters including intermission and boy are they long the general formatting is the same as previous titles but you'll be doing it multiple times a chapter and it got old very fast, In general I would prefer them to tone down the amount of side quests as there's very little thought required for these quests as they mark every single little thing for you.

But enough about the superficial how is the new orbment system and mechanics? well its interesting enough I suppose, It seems like they took some criticism from how downright stupid the orbment system in later cold steel entries got and for the most part they have tried to bring it back up to snuff with pre-CS era orbments but I still think its kind of dumb overall they did bring back elemental requirements for skills (but not arts) which is appreciated as that kind of system was very fun and intuitive, Which made me groan at how little thought the newer systems needed despite this though a lot of the old meta's are here best spellcaster setup is pretty much just boosting your given element and slapping on arc feathers for extra damage and delay and with the addition of arts drivers that have replaced art orbments I find the system has kind of lost the plot. While i wasn't the biggest fan of art orbments in the later CS games if they were gonna bring back elemental points I have to wonder why didn't they just use the sky to azure system instead as you could still keep the shard skills but you would have a system that's much more engaging, Instead of a system I found i was actively ignoring well into the endgame as the skills loose their lustre pretty quickly once you figure out what's worthwhile and what's useless (spoiler alert its 90% of the non drive attack skills).

I will say though this has given me hope for the next few entries but I'm still going to hold my breath as I picked up on many telltale signs that things could get screwed up very quickly...But with all that said Kuro's a nice game highly recommend seeking it out early on steam instead of waiting for the NISA translation.

Continuing to impress me even on a second playthrough pathfinder WOTR mechanically is everything I could want in a CRPG tabletop adaptation, Character building feels complex yet simple on further inspection of its mechanics, The huge variety of feats and archetypes really makes multiple playthrough unique with the additional flavouring of the mythic paths (any game that lets you play an effective lich is already gold star in my book) and yet despite all this WOTR is bogged down by some of the worst filler mechanics possible.

A terrible HOMM3 clone that you have to engage with if you want access to a majority of the side content and the secret ending some mythic paths are even locked from progression if you decide to turn on the auto mode even with mods to circumvent its mechanics and just turn it into a wait for stuff to pass mode its still utter tripe and barely worth exerting any effort.

Despite this unfortunate inclusion I found pathfinder to be a continual surprise and ultimately the most fun I've had with a video game in some time BG3 did scratch that itch but I found myself wanting more and 5E's mechanics simply weren't cutting it and that's on top of the replay value seemingly lacking meat since most choices felt very binary and had little actual effect on the rest of your playthrough something pathfinder has at attempts but I found the choices having a much more tangible effect on you and your surroundings was something I craved from BG3, I do fully intend to continue another set of playthroughs as I write this review fresh off a second playthrough I fully recommend this game but I do caution you to either look into mods to help skip crusade mode elements either grit it and just bear the tedium of the mode or simply give in and just turn on auto mode (you will be missing tons of side content however).

Genuinely baffling at times and stuck in perpetual beta 24/7 nothing has changed since its inception al mazrah is still a boring map none of the resurgence maps are good, (rebirth island is coming back woopdedoo nobody has to play these dogwater maps anymore) the UI consistently shits itself every season with a billion different sensory overload icons that bloat your vision (i have lost actual engagements because a HUD element was covering what i was aiming at so i couldn't even see).

I also admire the fact that activision has convinced themselves they need a billion crossover skins that all look like shit none of them are thematic or even look good all the season 6 crossover stuff is fucking awful the only good spawn skin is locked at tier 100 in the battle pass (seriously who the fuck gives a shit about al simmons the character??) and the rest of the skins are absolutely atrocious looking representations of the comic characters (violators skins is awful) this also somewhat ties into the fact that the new battle pass system has been consistently awful since day one the zones system is fucking stupid and makes it feel ten times more grindier (auto claim wasn't even added till like 4 seasons in).

Also dear god even with the increased health pool every firefight either drags or ends in two seconds the balance has always been horrendous but its even more on display here everyone uses the same 3 guns because everything else doesn't do as well their commitment to having a billion fucking guns doesn't work when the same 3 guns are always consistently in use.

Quick footnote on DMZ but it sucks support for it has been atrocious since day one they slammed a beta tag on it to i assume deflect some criticism but its clear they think its seaworthy enough to sell P2W fast track bundles that give you in game items i wouldn't even have a problem with DMZ if you could even do the main missions maybe its just an issue with the servers i land on but every lobby feels like a thunderdome killathon where everyone is trying to join a 6 man fast enough so they can gang up on the lobby and ensure you're not allowed to play the assimilation works well enough but it also lends itself to the issue of entitled players thinking they deserve to be revived after every firefight (because they want to stomp with players they think are "good") realistically a truce system would solve maybe 2 out of 50 6 man kill squads but i barely trust the playerbase to be able to engage in critical thought let alone use a truce system to say they aren't gonna treat it like its warzone.

Do i think MW3 integration will fix it in its current state? not really sledgehammer has proven to always be the black sheep of the studio and i don't think they're beating those allegations anytime soon the movement might end up being better but my hope for the new map is nill and i think a lot of the issues here are both tied to the fact raven software cannot manage a seasonal FOMO experience without shitting the bed.

I'm going to be real with you I have an extreme love hate relationship with this game warframe has been something sitting in my back pocket for years at this point starting in 2015 with a PC account that only played up to venus then in 2017 my current MR 27 account on playstation began and the rest is history.

Warframe at core is enjoyable the gunplay and movement has always been insanely satisfying to me (otherwise I wouldn't have invested so much time into the game) but that's not really where my issues began my issues with the game started to crop up around the launch of railjack an update I was pretty excited for, Only to then be met with an update that launched half finished with key features either missing or straight up broken I've never seen such a disaster from a smaller studio before in recent memory and I believe its where my heavy scrutiny for the dev team came from I really do think they have the best of intentions with incredible ambition but they lack the time, budget and ability to meet those ambitions and I truly think this is Warframes biggest hurdle and its potential downfall.

Numerous updates have launched either completely broken or missing features that were promised The old blood was a buggy mess with a grindy main objective that took months of updates to bring to an acceptable state, The Duviri paradox launched with badly explained mechanics and plenty of bugs that ruined the experience and plenty of runs (my favorite was the bug that never loaded the next undercroft stage so you lost all your progress).

I don't believe warframe is a bad game but I do believe the current team needs to re-evulate a lot of their ambitions and current content the fact railjack was touted as a tentpole release only to be met with no additional expansions aside from the already promised corpus railjack proves that they have a strong FOMO mindset in regards to updates and I believe this is what will ruin future updates not the overambition not the general lack of polish the fact they consistently abandon ideas and content in favor of what they perceive to be superior and better for marketing.

Boy this one's been sitting in my backlog for a fucking year now lmao yeah having finally gotten to it i honestly didn't hate it as much as i thought i would, I think whether you'll care for this or not hinges on what you thought of the last game if you were like me and dropped it midway through because of consistent gripes with the game's combat and enemy AI design then you'll probably end liking this part II fixes a lot of my issues with the first game and turns it into a decent ultraviolence guerrilla warfare simulator.

As for the story i uh didn't particularly care for it but its simple enough so don't try to overthink it because you won't find any deeper meaning.

Village is what i'd call an ideas game it has plenty of ideas to throw around but it also doesn't extrapolate or develop any of them what village basically equates to is a 9 hour on rails shooter with different set dressings to fit an idea
"what if lycans"
"What if castle with vampires"
"what if factory with bio-mechanical monsters"
All of these set dressings are way too short as well.

The set pieces in general too are greatly formulaic and lack any sort of concrete gimmick what every area amounts to is
-scripted encounter with main boss
-barebones exploration for 5 minutes
-progress through area fighting bullet sponge enemies
-fight boss at the end that plays like a personified scooby doo chase
nothing better describes this lack of expansion more then the doll house everyone describes it as "the scariest part of RE8" But what it actually amounts to is a boring puzzle with a death stranding fetus baby chase at the end that's easily avoided and then a LITERAL scooby doo chase bossfight at the end.

As for the VR2 port which i played it through its a very good port some of the weapon mechanics felt odd as someone who is right handed (F2 rifle especially felt odd and half the time i would accidently grab the gun again instead of pulling the bolt back) and the cutscenes are inconsistent they can't really force the player to look where they want you to so you end up accidentally seeing a ton of things too early before the scripts trigger (the scene in the castle where your hand gets cut off you can see lady d clip into existence through a wall lol).

In general though the experience was worth the price of admission with the headset even though i wish the experience contained within was for a much better game hopefully the upcoming REmake4 VR version is better.

Honestly wasn't as bad as i was expecting going into this from the awful conclusion to the cold steel saga my expectations were incredibly low possibly because of this i ended up really enjoying myself by the end there's still the usual bad marks that the cold steel games love but i really did enjoy a lot of this games ideas and executions even if i felt a little underwhelmed by the end with how underdeveloped some of those ideas felt.

Part of this has to do with the main progression dungeon the TRC because Reverie doesn't play like a typical trails games with exploration and side questing they instead bring back the Reverie corridor from CS2's epilogue for you to get your main grinding done despite its actual purpose it honestly felt like it should have been the main focus of the game the main story itself isn't anything to write about and the fact they gave up on having exploration at all means they really should have pulled a the 3rd and just set the entire game in the TRC perhaps expanding on some of the concepts a little bit.

Despite this i did enjoy this game quite a bit although i don't think i will be revisiting for the NISA butchering come july The zerofield patch if you can find it is perfectly acceptable and some of the rumours regarding some of its more unfinished aspects are greatly exaggerated (seriously its a few NPC's and some UI elements not a big deal) highly recommend buying the CLE port and playing through that instead if you can.

I think if I had to really pinpoint which game best represents the shallow melodrama, clusterfuck of plot threads and ideas, bad character writing dumbed down gameplay and lack of care or attention given to its mechanics of cold steel i think IV fits the bill in every aspect.

Nothing about this game feels cohesive every one of its ideas and executions feel stale and messy the experience is marred constantly with the same issues every cold steel game seems to have and i'm not sure if they're even aware of what they're doing half the time as it seems like CSIV looses track of what it's trying to be halfway through although at times it seems like not even they knew what they wanted to be.

In general if you want an idea of what exactly is wrong with cold steel's direction look no further then the pantagruel scene big setpiece with all these characters from better games mingling with the CS cast which then results in the same 5 villains repeated ad nauseum since fucking SC getting in a zoom call with the cast while they're all angry at them which then culminates in a series of piss easy filler boss fights that ends on a deus ex machina with a character that was thought to have died in the previous entry coming to save them out of nowhere.

I really don't think i can say much as anything else would just be repeating the obvious fuck cold steel lmao