Playing this and Valhalla back to back gave me whiplash sufficient to kill an ace combat protag. This was the peak, it didn't get much better than this without trading off for SOMETHING. Besides the tower defense shit you have to engage with like once ever, Revelations just DID NOT MISS. From the gorgeous Constantinople setting, the parkour in this beautiful dense city aided with the invaluable hookblade, to the conclusion of Ezio's story and his PERFECTLY rugged dripset.

Brotherhood's recruit system retained, so you get to build a network of homies who kill shit and get goodies for you over the course of the game. Pretty often I just didn't wanna waste good metal on an opp so I sic'd the boys on him.

Revelations introduces a bomb crafting system that never gets used again, gassing jannies by the half dozen was overpowered as shit but never got old once.

It's a miracle that this game exists in the first place and I don't really mind that it does.

DMC2 was what a new director could cobble together from broken pieces over the course of six months. The end product is a dull game, where the best and fastest option for every encounter is always "sit in a safe spot and spam guns". Despite having some interesting ideas, the movement and melee combat are too inconsistent and clunky to cook with, and Dante's twin 1911s were made powerful to compensate. Broken AI, bizarrely open levels, janky animations, and bizarre characterization of Dante all combine to make this game funny at best and dull at worst. DMC2 is a stain on the franchise, but interestingly, it's not the most hated by a long shot, it's just kinda mourned laughed about.

DMC2 is objectively horrendous dogshit that only exists by the grace of god (Hideaki Itsuno) but it's an interesting and important part of the franchise's history, and it's really funny to meme about so I'm glad it exists.

O, we are the valiant infantry!
We are the alpha team with passion and comraderie!
Hear as we shout at the top of our lungs,
"Be calm, be bold, and raise your guns!"

High up in the air our comrades fight,
Dashing through the sky now like a million bolts of light.
We shall spread our wings wide and fly high,
Soaring, gliding through the endless sky!

It is only with our sacrifice
That mankind can still exist down here in paradise!
To defend our dearest Mother Earth
We're ready to give up our lives!

Now, pick up our weapons, off we go!
Firing at the flying saucers, shooting down our foes.
We shall not allow these aliens
To rule we Homo Sapiens!

Rise is fun, but it's not what I want out of Monster Hunter. It changed the moment-to-moment gameplay a LOT for the sake of a faster pace, but in doing so it makes the pacing of the fights seem unnecessarily frantic. In addition, the wirebug mechanic exacerbates the already pretty bad weapon balancing. Longsword, which was already strong, flashy, and popular, is even more strong, even more flashy, and even more popular, all while other weapons have wirebug moves that are either bad, or just situational. I'm bitter about this cause my main, lance, got hit by this pretty bad. But other weapons arguably got gutted even worse, Hunting Horn is not the same weapon in the slightest, and SA's axe mode is made obsolete by wirebug actions.

I played MHW and Iceborne for over 800 hours and find myself coming back for a couple hunts at least once a month. I have barely 200 hours in Monster Hunter Rise, have no particular interest in the expansion, and I got bored of grinding before I hit HR100.

Maybe Sunbreak fixes everything I personally disliked about the game, but it doesn't look like it, and I'm probably not going to find out any time soon.

Got Fallen Order for 15 bucks on a steam sale and it was well worth that price. A few more force abilities would've been cool but the selection given plays very well with what's probably the second best lightsaber combat in the Star Wars vidya library, as well some very fun platforming, exploration, and spectacle. Some of the puzzles kind of sucked (or in some cases just didn't work for some reason), but besides that, exploring and investigating the solid 4-5 planets, all of which have beautiful scenery and solid level design, was a blast.

The combat is also fantastic since it copycats from Sekiro, the best combat system Fromsoft has conceived. Your dodges and rolls kind of suck and enemy tracking is very aggressive, so you're intended to either block or parry normal attacks. Parrying a blaster shot will send it directly back to whichever shmuck brought a blaster to a lightsaber fight, and using the double-bladed saber to do that to a whole squad in one or two R1 holds never ever gets old. Playing aggressive with aggressive enemies and having a mix of parries and dodges is much more fun to me than spam roll until an opening presents itself.

Not having a fucking crafting or equipment system was really nice too. Your exploration is awarded with estus-like heal charges and cool colors for your poncho. And just the sheer factor of having wearable ponchos with physics raises this game from a 4 to 4.5 out of 5.

Everything besides the parkour and traversal was either boring or utterly unfun for me. Unless you grind up your survivor level, melee weapons are utterly worthless by endgame due to how scaling works. So I spent the majority of encounters either cheesing zombie AI or using overpowered guns that I got via dlc. Either way, the combat didn't feel engaging or interesting once I reached a certain point. That was probably partially my fault, since I elected to rush through the story mode, doing minimal side content, and in this game, side content and survivor level are actually important, which I was never made aware of until the final boss was dead. But I also didn't want to play this game for any longer than necessary, since by the time the zombies started out-scaling me, I was already growing tired of being outscaled and I just thought the game was "like this".

If you play Dying Light, run as much side content as you can to get your survivor level up, particularly airdrops and doing stuff at night for the double XP. If you don't, the whole thing will be a slog by the time you reach Old Town. Cause apparently in the first person shooter action parkour zombie game with no health bars, your numbers matter.

Fantastic game I probably won't ever finish. I used to have a PSP with a copy but that's long gone, so now all I have is emulator, the multiplayer is a bitch to set up on PPSSPP and everyone playing it is in super endgame by now. Playing solo is clunky but satisfying. If I had a mobile device to play it on, I'd do gathering and tedium to prepare better for hunts, but that feels a bit too drawn out on an emulator. Easily a game you could sink 500+ hours into if you have the right autism for it though.