>enemy commander shows up
>"he he ho ho i'm gonna kill you >:)c"
>casts super hell shadow pain missile at him
>enemy commander, dying, opening up a heart shaped locket: "now I, as a single father who is very well loved by their local community, won't be able to pay for my blind child's cancer medicine :("
>enemy commander yelps, falls over face first and drops a potato sack
>1.5 seconds of silence
>"CONGRATULATIONS" in bold and golden words pops up on screen
>the entire Cincinnati Orchestra puts their whole pussy into playing a fanfare tune
>a whole ass audience worth of people scream in applaud at the loot you stole off his corpse

good game

Few people in this industry (or any industry, mind you), are so commited to constructing so complicated narrative paths and rythms, in order to tell the most naive and sincere emotions about human connection.

Won't ever understand those who insist on labelling Kojima as a frustrated filmmaker who turned to videogames and doesn't care about the gameplay. He has proven himself time and time again on both fronts, and Death Stranding's gameplay is inseparable to his aspirations with the game as a whole. Incisive, complex and reaching for new grounds.

The final credits come to an end, with the names of the other porters that have aided you on your journey. There's so much stuff you've built together without realizing.

Alan Wake writing the most twisted fucked up horror story he can conceive: The dark darkness encroached darkly upon me, I noticed my shoes were stained red with blood, red blood, on the ground pooled the crimson ichor of a bloody ritual murder enacted in the name of the Dark Lord of Darkness himself; Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, The Father of Lies, the Lord of Flies; Satanas, Diabolus- The Devil.
Remedy writing the most twisted fucked up horror story they can think of: Imagine being trapped in this guy's writing

"fuck it, finally a fantasy"
~fred durst (2021)

consistently fun but bogged down by way-too-frequent mmo-esque fetch quests, a dogshit main antagonist and jill's comical lack of characterization

when it hits though, it really fucking hits. clive is a terrific lead, (kupka is also a fantastic rival) every major set piece manages to one up the last and the combat, while a bit easy for an action game absolutely braindead, is really fucking fun

only ps4/5 game thus far to feel like a truly "next gen" experience and a crystal clear reminder of the heights this series can reach when it's not rife with developmental problems

edit: that last line is still mostly correct but not in the way i'd like. it's certainly next-gen in terms of scope and scale with regards to spectacle, but the actual writing is piss poor. this was very much a honeymoon game and ng+ made it clear. xvi feels like a first draft

TL;DR: you could build a mountain out of the complaints thrown at this game, but you'd only get a molehill out of the ones that are actually valid

left alive isn't metal gear. it has a fair amount of low budget jank, but outside of the inconsistent performance, some weird animations and a few ai quirks here and there, it works as intended (if you can handle literally anything made by cavia, you'll be fine.) that said - depending on your playstyle and willingness to experiment, the experience is either gonna be totally exhilarating or completely exhausting

let's dispel the myth once and for all: not only is left alive not metal gear - it's not even a stealth game. enemies are armed to the teeth. these aren't dudes in military garb - they're soldiers with armored exosuits. it'd be stupid if you could just 'stealth takedown' them. so what's the solution, especially on higher difficulties? (read: any one that isn't the casual mode that they patched in for people who refused to play the game properly)

RUN LIKE A BITCH

oh, but if only i could easily obtain tools to distract or disarm guards to avoid the constant gunfire. if only i could plant traps or obscure my trail with smoke bombs. if only i could slide tackle into enemies while sprinting as if this were vanquish and knock them on their asses. oh wait - i can do all of that. soldiers are spongy, but the sheer amount of ways you can manipulate them justifies that. sure, it'll take eight headshots to kill someone, but what about when while they're too busy shaking off a molotov cocktail to retaliate? or trying to dismantle a barb wire trap?

on paper it might seem like you've got all the tools you need to dispose of anything, but ammo is fairly scarce and you can't carry much of it. maps are visited under different circumstances by all three characters and the loot in each area is finite. stocking up on ammo or all the scrap you can find might sound like a good idea at first, but you could be giving your other characters a much harder time for lack of preparation

narratively, i don't have a lot to say without spoilers. as a front mission fan, it's certainly cool to dicaprio_point.gif at all the familiar terminology and factions. definitely feels like there could've been more on the narrative front, but what's here is cool and the cast carrying things is surprisingly high profile - even nigh animation-less sidequest npcs are absurdly well voiced. the morality decisions are also interesting and fairly pivotal (ranging from survivors killing themselves because you told them the wrong things, to actually important characters dying unjustly for your actions). i like that what you get out of the narrative is reflective of what you put into it. moreover, i appreciate that because this is a front mission game i can pilot wanzers. that's pretty cool too

look. if you're still here then your curiosity must be sparked in some manner. i'll be frank: this game gets cheap. i bought it for $6 and i'd have gladly paid multiples of that. there are great ideas here and they're not even deeply buried under jank. this is just a fun and unique experience through and through. easily recommended to anyone with passing interest and an open mind. play on the hopeless difficulty too - it isn't - it puts you in the right mentality to get through novo slava as intended. don't sweat the side missions too much - they're tough and staying alive is hard enough as is

moral of this story: never fucking trust game critics or youtube funnymen. seriously. most of the negative reviews on steam have less than an hour of playtime and yet they act as if left alive assaulted their family and left no one alive

it's embarrassing

While a great throwback to the NES Era of video game, Final Fantasy simply fails to live up to its predecessor Stranger of Paradise, keeping in mind its shortcomings and lack of content this game should've been a DLC bonus for Stranger of Paradise rather than its own standalone title.

Final Fantasy is a total step down in everything, even the combat, and story which was greatly shocking to me as I found those aspects of the original to be phenomenal.
Gone are the complexities of the soul shield system, and in exchange, we have a watered-down job system with a tiring and exhausting turn-based combat system which is a complete insult to everything Stranger of Paradise was.

The story is a complete rehash of Stranger of Paradise with plot points removed, despite the fact this is a sequel which greatly upsets me as the story was one of the best aspects of the original game and a follow up had a lot of potential, yet the execs over at Square care not for artistic integrity but trying to make a quick buck cashing on a massively popular IP which makes it safe to assume that Stranger of Paradise was a lightning in a bottle that they will never be able to capture again.