There is a tendency when dunking on Bethesda games, to criticize them from the lens of their failure to be like other RPGs- The Witcher 3 is more cinematic and refined, Baldur's Gate 3 more densely written, Fallout 1 more actually good, so on and so forth. The truth is that Bethesda games suck much more tragically and pathetically on their own terms than in comparison to other games, Todd Howard who began his career with monumental works of termite art in the end forsook the dream of the Bethesda game. The dream of the bethesda game was always to create a holodeck, a simulation for you to inhabit totally- 'Why the hell would I pick up a spoon?' someone asks, perfectly reasonably expecting game mechanics to exist for gameplay reasons, but it's just that you can pick up spoons because it's something a person is able to do. Personally I think this dream is perhaps misguided, but nevertheless they pursued it, which is admirable in its own right.

"With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
The message you receive upon killing a crucial NPC points towards the commitment towards the holodeck dream, it will continue on even if you totally fuck up, and indeed there are generally ways around the death of those crucial NPCs provided you understand the simulation.

And fear of people misunderstanding the simulation is what drove bethesda to make many crucial NPCs invulnerable in Oblivion, you never know when you're actually in a simulation or not anymore, even as the NPC AI had become much more sophisticated with schedules, likes, dislikes and habits, the places you could engage shrunk, and then even the ambitious NPC AI in subsequent games was stripped back for ever more presentable and simpler systems, to the point of Starfield doing deliberately what Morrowind had done out of technical limitations 20 years prior: 24/7 vendor NPCs with no schedules, likes or dislikes, who exist only in service of the player.
But maybe most telling of all, was that in Fallout 4 they decided that the player need a good reason to pick up a spoon.

In that primordial placeless origin, through the mist-veil of time, since man first airbrushed Merlin smoking a pipe on the side of a van, there, you can feel it in the noosphere, a moon-lit dream, The Dream, a call in the heart of the human soul. Some have seen some small part of this dream- The Legend of Zelda, The Elder Scrolls, Ultima, Dark Souls, Adventure, Dragon Quest, King's Field, Wizardry, among innumerable others, nameless here forevermore, all have failed to reach The Dream. Perhaps cruel circumstance chained them to Earthly bond, perhaps cowardice stayed their hand, perhaps they lacked the naivety and earnestness necessary to behold a waking dream. Whatever their individual situation, the results have always been, like Lion of Gripsholm Castle, a mutant, an aberration, at best a passing resemblance. Dragon's Dogma is The Dream, forged in the furnace of the heart, it is not visually plain- it is clean, it is not halfbaked- it is too goodly to exist totally in a world half-evil, it achieves the promise of videogames, and proves that creative endeavour above all else is the greatest goal humanity can strive for. it is the twinkle in the eye of Merlin smoking a pipe airbrushed on the side of a van.

Minstrel Song is an old skool rpg where you get into lots of fights with monsters to level up and learn techniques for your characters weapons as well as entirely new game mechanics, killing monsters is also the only way to advance the in game timer, the monsters will be replaced with stronger monsters at a rate faster than you will improve, on top that it will cause quests to time out, and new quests to become available, so actually you want to avoid combat as much as possible to keep the timer from moving forward and instead to focus on quests for character progression, only carefully incrementing it when you run out of things to do but monsters in the overworld spawn in huge numbers and are highly aggressive, so you can't totally avoid combat, but if you get into a fight you can just retreat to avoid advancing the timer, but retreating costs crucial resources so actually you need to run around like scooby doo with a trail of monsters chasing you while trying to progress quests, but the locations where you can find new quests are unmarked, and where you need to go to progress quests is unstated, so you need to run around the overworld getting chased by monsters like scooby doo so you can find quests to level up because there's no main quest, and you don't even know if you've done everything you can do before making the call to kill some monsters to advance the game clock, eventually you'll do this enough to get multiple quests that specifically tell you to go out and kill shitloads of monsters and they're really important so to do the most important quests you need to ignore everything you've learned about playing the game and potentially time out dozens of quests that you don't know how to do because they don't tell you where to go or what to do never mind the quests that you don't know about because they could be handed out by any of the dozens of NPCs who had nothing to say to you an hour ago, who are potentially in locations you haven't discovered because the only way to discover locations is either to talk to people or to recruit new party members, but you can only have a limited party size so to see if a new party member will give you a location (which they may not) you need to kick out an existing party member first if you are full, the removed party member will later reappear in potentially any one of the many pubs, one per city, scattered around the dozens of cities in the game, including ones you haven't discovered, after doing all that for a while the final boss shows up and you are probably not strong enough to kill him even with all that effort. This anti-lesson on game design could only be enjoyed by criminally deranged perverts.

3D shooters are a genre long and particularly afflicted with 'just so' game design; Half-Life popularized a reload mechanic where you tap a button and wait to have your gun refilled from a pool, and this became a defacto standard for no particular reason over not having reloading, or reloading that actually has gun magazine management, or dozens of other one off systems meant to represent a games ethos. Halo introduced a two-weapon system that, along side a nuanced weapon selection forced you to always accept a trade off, games without nuanced weapon selections copied it wholesale, usually resulting in defacto one weapon system because you really need to carry the M16 at all times to get anything done. Halo Infinite in turn has a sprint button with so little effect that you need a stopwatch to tell if it makes you faster- because Halo doesn't benefit from a sprint mechanic but Shooters Have Sprint. Helldivers is perhaps the only studio published 3D shooter in half a decade if not more where there is no 'just so' game design, from meat and potato mechanics like your gun's recoil being semi-deterministic to help you avoid the regular concern of friendly fire, and your gun being loaded from a small pool of disposable magazines, to fun details like running out of spawns but completing the mission objective still constituting a victory.

I started this game with a hater's killing intent, Final Fantasy simply does not mean anything to me, and I've tended to a garden of dislike for Disney movies from a young age that has blossomed into a forest of disdain as they evolved from saccharine and condescending children's films to emotional therapy for stunted millennials dragging their disinterested kids to watch their dad cry at a cartoon personification of an emotion wiggling it's eyebrows. I had often heard that a 'critical mode level 1' play through was a legendary action game on par with the greats, and had the full bad faith intention of saying this game sucked actually. Unfortunately my faculties are too objective and like the Casu Martz, just because something is conceptually and aesthetically revolting, doesn't mean it's not worth 100 dollars a pound.

Typically, when game developers (cowards) combine arcade and simulation racing, they try to bring together the most palatable aspects of both ends of that spectrum to cast the largest net possible; realistic physics- but not so real that you can't play bumper cars, lots of cars to choose from, dials and knobs to tune to your preference, different game modes and activities to play, all with the essential goal of alienating no one. Noted genius Yu Suzuki decided to take a different approach and combine the least appealing aspects of both ends of the spectrum, for the smallest number of freaks possible; a handful of tracks, no real game modes besides race and practice, strict time limits, vicious AI opponents, and a single car- so realistic that you'll be a qualified driver if you can even finish a whole race without needing to restart once. (Also a tasteful serif font UI that Japanese game developers loved so much around the turn of the millenium)

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