Look, as much as I treasure this game I completely understand the (usually clear-headed and astute) swathe of middling reappraisals that I've noticed recently. I think the uniformly positive SHOCK 2 THE INDUSTRY reception this had, along with its legendary/unassailable art game™ status, are somewhat responsible for a glut of lazy contrarian game design theorizing--and the now VERY tired trend of copycat "nonviolent guideposted explorathons" that reek of a certain elitist hostility toward any games that dont fall into this hyper-accessible, beauty obsessed, pseudomeditative format. I'm sick of this very narrow concept of what constitutes an artistic or thoughtful game too!

However, I can't blame Journey for the cultural response that engulfed it, especially because I truly believe that Chen and Santiago operated from an honest and inquisitive place of creation while chasing the ideas that most captivated them--not out of some pompous guiding impulse to shake up the system or merely prove that games could be "more". Watching interviews with Chen where he barely holds back a giant beaming smile while discussing his inspiration for Journey--the sense of disempowerment, awe, and unity felt by those who had seen the Earth from space--showcase an entirely uncynical fascination for an implicitly compelling subject to explore through gameplay. Journey feels incredibly bright eyed and open: its taut aesthetic beauty, welcoming accessibility, ambiguous spirituality, and intimate nonverbal social system don't come across as demands or provocations to me, but as the shared passions of a group of artists culminating into this radiant, excited thing. A lot of the game actually feels metaphorical of the game-creation process for this small studio of friends experimenting together: the stone-carved glyphs and histories of bombastic past creators are present and noted, of course, but they're merely abstract window dressing in the much more personal collaborative journey being discovered.

I do think ThatGameCompany's prominent reputation HAS affected their process, and no longer feel the same spark in their work. I don't know if I believe in the whole "art has a singular soul" concept or even invest too seriously one way or the other in auteur theory in general, but I do know that for me, Journey emits a purity of spirit that makes me feel an intense affinity with those who created it--one that isn't matched by later games with very similar structural trappings. Maybe it's not possible to feel that anymore if you're coming to it with the foreknowledge of the game's reputation and legacy, or if you've already had this sort of experience with one of its many stylistic second cousins. I'm not sure.

Justice for All is one half a bad continuous slog, a quarter decent legitimately ok story writing, and a last quarter that's just entirely amazing. It's a mixed sequel to the first game to say the least, it keeps most of the charm of the first game although a considerably weaker soundtrack at the same time. It keeps up character writing and introduces a couple mainstay characters that are fine and then one really irritating and excruciatingly underwritten character that takes up way too much screentime.

The casewriting is pretty much the same, with two cases that are bad with trash characters and a complete waste of time both in a writing sense and a structural sense, but also contains easily the best case I've read so far from this series by a very very significant margin that not only characterizes the personalities of the people involved but also has such an excellent motive, logical reasoning for how the case happened, and fantastic thematic storytelling. Had it not been for the rest of the game, I honestly would have called AA2 really good. Unfortunately the poor sides of the game manage to be lower than the first game and it's hard to look at this game as a cohesive whole.

That being said, it did manage to keep my attention and interest a little bit more than the first game, and I think the highs equalize with the lows to where I can say AA2 is still alright and worth reading alongside the first, maybe even a pinch more. It's a sidestep forward instead of a genuinely competent sequel, but I had my fun where I could. (6.5/10)

Not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but, man, this series used to challenge the boundaries of the medium with multi-perspective, multi-generational stories with innovative systems that changed the landscape of the industry. And now it just sort of...wallows in itself, rolling around in the muck of its past glories and sniffing its own farts.

Again, it isn't bad. It looks wonderful, it's very charming, and the dialogue is witty. It's a nice time. And if this was 20 or 30 hours, that'd be just fine. But it isn't. It's 80, 90, even 100 hours long. For a game that demands that much time investment, I want it to do something, to say something, and Dragon Quest XI just...doesn't.

Not only is the battle system too simplistic and shallow for a tale of this length, but the story itself takes a massive nosedive in the final act, chickening out of almost every theme it touches on, reversing character arcs and plot points, all for the sake of more Fanservice. Because Dragon Quest doesn't care about anything anymore, except itself.

Oh, and the soundtrack fucking sucks. Sugiyama isn't even good at his job, Square, why are you keeping this decrepit fascist around?

Just so you know, this is review is coming from someone who played XC2 first. So going in I already had pretty large expectations from what the community has said. And you know what? It lived up to every single one of them for me. The story was absolutely better than XC2's, with so many twists and turns that always got me to keep playing to find out what happened next. The characters are amazing too, with some of my favorites being Reyn, Alvis, Melia, and Egil. Riki is so much better than Tora it's not even funny. Not only that, but it also has an amazing soundtrack. Guar Plains, A Tragic Decision, Engage the Enemy, You Will Know Our Names, Riki's theme, Beyond the Sky, Mechanical Rhythm, An Obstacle in Our Path, and many others are absolutely amazing. Out of the games I've played, I think the Xenoblade OSTs usually tower above the rest. The one gripe I have is that sometimes the gameplay can get extremely repetitive. A good amount of the game is spent topple locking enemies, and struggling for ages to kill opponents that are immune to topple and break. However, it was also pretty fun at times and it was hilarious how much you could cheese some fights. This game gets a Better than Wii Play out of 10

I'm usually not a "wow trope bad" kinda person when I analyze media, but I'm frankly a little shocked that Barlow managed to slip by scot-free while loading his writing wall-to-wall with "beautiful, quirky woman later revealed to (spoilers, I guess) likely be either delusional or manipulative w/r/t her dissociative identities." I dunno, it's not a particularly charitable character study, so it ends up feeling just as wack as the stuff that usually gets raked over the coals for it. I guess this game's design was amorphous and novel enough for people to accept it?

I do like the design premise (though the "play until you're satisfied" angle is a little overstated imo), but I was seriously done with this game the moment she picked up a mirror and, while gazing deeply into it, started to pontificate on the nature of identity. Definitely a thing mentally ill people do, Sam. Thanks for the rep.

“An American tragedy. An odyssey of debt, of grief, of broken promises, of hope. A painful, melancholic fable composed of fables and more fables, spreading out and weaving in and out of itself. A dream ebbing back and forth between memory and fantasy. A plea for you to care about something.”

...This was my original review for Kentucky Route Zero. I still think it’s a good description. But on consideration, I feel as though I need to be bold and say it: Kentucky Route Zero is not only one of my favorite games, but one of my favorite things ever made.

This is not an assessment of quality. I am not telling you what to feel. I am telling you how I feel. And Kentucky Route Zero makes me feel a way.

I specifically say “Favorite Thing”, because Kentucky Route Zero doesn’t affect me like a game. When I think about many of my favorite games, I often think of them as games. They are full of mechanics, of challenges, of systems. That’s certainly not all games are, and games can be many things, but in the capacity that they affect me, enchant me, or fascinate me, it is often within this vague category of “game”. But Kentucky Route Zero is different. To call it “my favorite game” and leave it at that misses something. It’s certainly a game, but it doesn’t make me feel the way games usually make me feel. First and foremost, Kentucky Route Zero is a story. It’s unlike most. The main body of this story is a game, but it’s also a multimedia saga. There’s something quintessential permeating my experience of Kentucky Route Zero that transcends that category.

It is a hauntological melancholy. It conjures a world more like a memory than a reality. Kentucky Route Zero tells the story of people who seem familiar but you’ve never met, with jobs that were never really secure, in situations that could never happen, in a version of Kentucky that has never existed. Magical realism constructs a vision not of reality, but of memory, of a sensate fabric that you swear could have been but never was. Americana is a mythic entity made visible, standing in front of me within Kentucky Route Zero, and it’s on its last breaths.

It’s a hopeful story. That doesn’t mean it’s happy. The world around you is a wasteland. Everyone is dying. Everyone is suffering. Everything is weighed down by debt, pulled deep down into pools of darkness. To live is to work, work, and die. But there are other ways to live. There always have been. Should we move on? I think the answer is clear. But that doesn’t make the pain go away. We have to be willing to feel both grief and hope in the same breath.

All of its blemishes are dismissable. Fleeting problems with UI, incidentally clunky writing, weird mechanical tangents, overwhelming scope, these melt away when I take a moment to remember what Kentucky Route Zero is and feel the frisson travel up and down my skin. I'm trying to not be too longwinded here, but it's hard. I can't get into specifics. So I wax poetic instead. I could write thousands of words on every minute I spent with Kentucky Route Zero and still feel like I was forgetting to say something. It is a multitudinous masterpiece, refracting and reflecting endlessly, timelessly, quietly.

Kentucky Route Zero is one of my favorite things.

I've softened a bit in my opinions on this one but it's still pretty blatantly the worst mainline Resident Evil game. There's just one bad design element after another (Code Veronica X rivals Zero in this regard) and it all adds up to an immensely frustrating experience.

For every pleasant bit like the train setting or Billy as a character you have the absolute worst with the inventory system, the monster design, the enemy AI, backtracking as a result of bad puzzle design, and more. I've never seen a game where you can see glimpses at something truly special go out of its way to make you feel like a fool like this one does.

Fixed camera angle Resident Evil is my favorite style for the series and one of my favorites for any kind of game but after this game I'm not surprised we didn't get another one. The fact that this released only months after the much superior remake of the first game blows my mind every time I'm reminded about it.