This review is mostly about the gameplay and fun I had playing this game. Please check out my friends' review on some insight about the cultural misuse present in the game.

Finishing the Max Payne trilogy with a game that isn't made by Remedy, and it shows. Not in a bad way mind you, what is here doesn't conflict with what was present before, but rather focuses on different elements. Where the remedy titles had some great atmosphere, and weird stuff like the dream sequences, this entry has more of an emphasis on action and the gritty underworld of São Paulo, which is realized very well in my opinion.

The gameplay is a lot of fun, with some very memorable bullet-time setpieces. The game often gets criticized for repeating the formula of cutscene-shootout-cutscene-shootout. What do you want from the game? puzzles? stealth? It worked fine for me.

The cutscenes are too long according to some people, and I can see that being in issue during replays. Because the cutscenes mask lengthy loading times. But for a first playthrough the pacing was good, though it felt longer than the 9 hours I spent on it. Not a bad thing, just an observation.

Before this review starts, I would like to preface that this is by no means an actual, in-depth critical review of Max Payne 3. I won’t be touching the story or gameplay AT ALL in this, so let that be warned. This is purely about how I feel about Max Payne 3’s portrayal of my region of Brazil and how it affected my enjoyment of it to the point where I just can’t really stand it and think it is one of the most racist video games ever made. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that Resident Evil 5 is frequently cited as a super racist video game when Max Payne 3 is literally right there and does the exact same things that game does!

The average person who played Max Payne 3 will probably not bother to do an inch of research on the country of Brazil, probably thinks Rio is the capital, and believes that it is an absolute warzone hellhole where people get shot on the street constantly. This is the kind of audience Rockstar was trying to appeal to with this game. I do not believe, even for a second, that they made this game out of respect for Brazil. They simply wanted a 3rd world country to throw their white American hero into so he could shoot and kill without a care in the world, because the 3rd world is so lawless, right? They wanted to portray their weird, twisted view of Brazil so much that they even went so far as to scan a thousand residents of the favela of Paraisópolis into the game, acting as backdrop NPCs in the chapters that do take place in the favela. You can kill actual residents of São Paulo in Max Payne 3, which is crazy once you consider how the rest of the game handles this stuff. You can sit there in your little house just outside Little Rock, Arkansas, and get your greasy hands on the controller and shoot at people who were probably paid less than a penny for their faces to be plastered onto enemies. It's the most pure depiction of the average 40-something-year-old American going to a country that doesn't belong to you and killing brown people for fun!

There is so much arrogance in Rockstar's approach to developing Max Payne 3. A huge inspiration for the game was the 2007 Brazilian movie “Tropa de Elite," which is very funny once you learn what that movie is about. It's like Rockstar saw that movie as just an average cool awesome shooter romp through a favela and not as a critique of Brazil’s problems and struggle with violence. I think taking a movie that presents a very thoughtful critique of violence and using it for their little American power fantasy video game is insanely disrespectful. But it’s not like it really matters to the audience for this game. The audience doesn’t know what "Tropa de Elite" is; most of them couldn’t even tell what language Brazil speaks, and most of them probably don’t even know Portuguese is a language. It appeals to the naive, the Americans, who think going to Brazil to shoot at some mixed-race thugs is the coolest thing in the world because they can live out their little soldier hero fantasy.

The depiction of lawful Brazilian citizens, who all seem to hate gringos and be aggressive on sight despite Brazil frequently being cited as one of the most friendly countries to foreigners, is an objectively wrong, offensive depiction. Brazilians do not hate gringos; I, being one myself and being friends with a lot of gringos and foreigners, can personally attest to this. I have been around a lot of São Paulo because I live fairly close to it and there are always gringos around, and no one minds, and in fact, most Brazilians really enjoy helping out gringos or foreigners in any way they can!  Rockstar seems to have this weird, twisted idea that since it's a favela and not the clean, corporate building of the Brancos, the people are totally different. The people from the favelas are wonderful people, despite the bad hand most of them have been dealt in life: stuck in poverty, living in run-down buildings on top of other buildings, stacked up so high. They have a resilient spirit; they, to me, represent the Brazilian spirit more than any other group of people in this world, and I respect them deeply for it. I think choosing to depict these people as inherently hostile to Max, the American hero, is so disrespectful to them and their home and the culture they were raised around, and it paints a picture that is absolutely not true. I believe Rockstar chose to depict the favelas like that because it would sell. The depiction of the favelas as lawless wastelands with gangsters and thugs at every corner is the most pure evidence you could find of the ignorance of the average American writer. You can visit a country and study it, see how it is, then go home to your little flat in your little apartment and depict it in a way that would make sense to your audience, which is the American, the one you want to please because they at the end of the day give you money; the citizens of São Paulo don’t really matter in the end much at all, and their input was never needed.

Brazil already gets misrepresented by the world at large, and I am a firm believer that media can affect and alter reality and how people perceive things in significant ways. Rockstar seemed to be drawn in by the allure of Brazil that exists in the minds of only foreigners and not the actual experience of the average Brazilian. The funk, the favela, the scorching sun, the people, the beaches, the drinking, the soccer—everything that people stereotype Brazilians as is present in this game! I don’t feel proud saying this is THE game that takes place where I live, that this is THE game that is supposed to “represent” São Paulo. I personally struggled with my Brazilian identity for a long time because of certain notions and preconceptions people held and still hold against Brazilians, particularly online, which tends to get very very nasty and racist. And I cannot sit here and pretend like I am fine with the way these Americans wrote about my country and my people.

Even when you get to the real villains of the game, the Brazilian UFE and Victor Branco, the game never changes from its weird attitude towards Brazilians. Chapter 12 is literally named “The Great American Savior of the Poor,” and as ironic as Rockstar’s intent may have been while writing that, they characterize Max and Brazilians in such a way that that is actually the case! He stops the Comando Sombra, he stops the UFE, he stops political corruption, and he saves a bunch of favela citizens from getting their organs harvested. He, a white American man, really does become the savior of the poor through this game's absolutely naive and frankly stupidly racist writing. And the critique itself towards the Brazilian police and political world is absolutely shallow and warped. I mean, Victor Branco is kind of a silly caricature of a stereotypical corrupt Brazilian politician, but the game doesn’t really delve any deeper than that, and it frankly makes me quite sad. Just a few years after this game came out, Operation Car Wash started, and honestly, I wish this game had come out during that time frame so they could have developed that plot point further. But then I also worry they would’ve handled it in the worst way possible and made the most Brazilian right-wing propaganda piece video game of all time, and that thought alone sends shivers down my spine. Like Imagine in your head right now a game so right-wing Bolsonaro would probably use clips of it in his 2018 campaign. I already think the game is inherently right-leaning simply because of the way it handles a lot of the subject matter, and I honestly fear what a 2017 Max Payne 3 taking place in Brazil during the Temer era would look like...

If it seems like I have gotten emotional or angry while writing this, it is because I have! I do not live in the city of São Paulo proper; I live on the coast. But I have been to São Paulo quite often in my life due to a few of my relatives living there, and those relatives live in the parts that Max Payne 3 chose specifically to depict. It makes me sad that this is the product that was made; this is what Rockstar chose to depict of my family, my friends, and my country. To the people that live here, to the people that know and love people that live in the world Max Payne 3 chose to take place in, it is a very painful experience to go through again and again. São Paulo is really a beautiful state, and most will never ever get to experience it; only the people that have lived here would really understand how amazing and beautiful it truly can be. But to the average audience that loves Rockstar, all of this is alright and fine by them; they’re never going to feel offended, and they’re never going to have a problem with it. They’re never going to feel their blood pressure rise when the game says something so insanely racist you have to take a step back. They’re never going to wonder how their friends and family are viewed due to the negative connotations being from a favela already carried, made worse by a totally inept and ignorant development team. Because they don’t care. To the average American consumer, it is just another game set in a "shithole," a "warzone," where they get to escape their privileged realities and pretend they’re some sort of hero. Rockstar manages to reinforce every single negative stereotype about Brazil for these people. And they’re going to eat it up; they’ll believe it because they are inherently ignorant. It is a game made for Americans, not for the Brazilian people, and there is nothing more American than pretending to be a badass hero in some “shithole” where the only goal is to kill as many brown people as possible.

I have gone on a few tangents here and there, but I have stated my case. Max Payne 3 is a racist video game, plain and simple. It's not going to beat around the bush and pretend it's because Rockstar is doing it by accident because it honestly feels very deliberate. They had writers approve a lot of this stuff, and it baffles me that at no point a writer went and said how kind of messed up it all is. I will leave a single quote here that I feel perfectly illustrates what I mean by all of this:

“We’d half destroyed São Paulo’s most hallowed place of worship.” A stadium.

I first played Demon’s Souls in 2021 right after the remake first came out. I think at the time I gave the game something like a 7/10, but in actuality I really just did not like that game and I was being nice. I lied! I'm sorry…

Demon’s Souls on PS3 was a really interesting experience for me. To be entirely honest, I'm not sure what made me want to replay the game. The game just has this weird pull to it unlike other fromsoftware games, save for BloodBorne. I knew i wanted to get the Platinum Trophy (we will fucking get to this i promise) but I really dont even know why i wanted that either. Well, whatever the reason, I'm glad I went and revisited the game. The PS3 version makes it a lot easier to meet the game on its level. The art direction is just simply more cohesive than in the remake, which does a whole more than you would think in terms of pulling you into its world. The game definitely devolves into a slideshow at points… but what PS3 game doesn't have an awful framerate? It's a part of the charm. The PS5 version has a lot more issues to it than just the art direction, being honest. Not only is the look of the game just really generic and very distinctly NOT fromsoftware, it also creates a really peculiar juxtaposition between cutting edge ultra extreme graphics and gameplay that is genuinely the exact same in both feel and function to the 2009 original. I’ve seen people complain about the gameplay in the remake and the art direction separately but not how they intersect to create a game that just feels wrong. This is not to say that the original is at all bad, but like i mentioned earlier, it's a lot easier to meet the game on its own level with the original rather than the remake. When i first played the remake i honestly just took it for a really mediocre souls game that didn't do much interesting and had terribly just insane design choices attached to it. There's still a few things I definitely still dislike about Demon’s Souls and I want to talk about what I appreciate about the game more now.

To start, I think it's incredible just how much they got right with this game. This is genuinely their first try at creating an entire game sub-genre and despite its faults, they did a great job. What Demon’s Souls does right, it REALLY does right. The level design is intricate and meaningful, and while the game is very linear within its individual levels, it allows you to tackle them in any order you wish (for the most part), giving a sort of Link to the Past style of player freedom. The combat is very simple, but it allows them to design enemies that provide a meaningful obstacle for the player. I’m still fairly mixed on a lot of the bosses, but one thing I praise the most of them for is the way in which the bosses actually interact with the arena in which you fight them. The bosses aren't like the boss's you'd find in a game like Dark Souls III, and instead are more focused on some sort of central gimmick that the player must exploit. As an example, a lot of bosses have separate AI patterns depending on how the player chooses to approach the fight. The Tower Knight will take the player head on in a grounded fight but if the player chooses to get to the higher vantage points of the arena to use magic/a bow the tower knight will instead fire soul arrows continuously at the player. I think this is really cool and works in some cases, but unfortunately, 99% of these boss fights are solved by simply using magic. Being a spellcaster makes this game genuinely trivial. There are a few bosses that are more akin to those of the rest of the series, and they’re pretty underwhelming to be honest. I really like Penetrator, since he has a huge polearm he stabs you with in a horizontally challenged arena. It bridges the gap between more gimmicky yet interactive fights and more interesting fights that challenge player skill, but the rest of them are either copy pasted into its sequel, (man eater becomes the gargoyles in dark souls 1) super underwhelming (flame lurker), or really cool but can permanently lower your level (Allant). Relating to the bosses, I STILL think the boss runbacks in this game are absolutely fucking dreadful. Some of them require you to run an olympic marathon with dumb fucking idiot skeletons that fucking hate you only to fight a stupid boss that is either the easiest shit of your life if you use magic or one of the worst video game experiences if you have with a strength build (the correct way to play these games). I would really like to know what the fuck happened here. A fair few of the bosses have really nicely made shortcuts that make for simplified but still engaging runbacks, but some of them just dont have shortcuts and they fucking SUCK. I would really like to see boss runbacks return to the series because they're honestly a really interesting and underrated aspect to the game design of these games but if a game as popular as Elden Ring is willing to forgo them I doubt we will ever see them again. I think the last truly negative i have on this game is the healing items, but honestly who fucking cares. Use the dupe glitch like the rest of us. It's fine. Everyone has already talked about how much it sucks, but it's really not even that bad without the glitch.

This paragraph is reserved for talking about the platinum trophy experience. OH my GOD this platinum sucks. Honestly, at first it's not too bad. If you make sure to follow a guide and get unique weapons as you go through the levels and pay attention to world tendency, it's pretty fun. It only gets fucking awful once you get close to beating the game. Since it's a 100% run, you have to do all the crafting bullshit before you go and finish up with the final boss. The crafting system in this game is so insanely obtuse and fucking stupid i cannot possibly imagine that not a single person in this design room didnt think it was ridiculously contrived and a massive time waster at least a little bit. Honestly most of the materials aren't that bad to get as it's likely you can get most of them just by playing normally, but the real problem is with pure greystone. I spent 5 hours farming for this shit and that seems like a godsend compared to some of the horror stories you can find about it. The rest of the stuff you have to farm for took me 10 minutes so they get a pass. You also have to do specific weapon crafting and fusion that is hardly explained by the game and is really contrived for the unique weapons trophy. Once you get past all of that stupid crafting bullshit you have to make sure you can get pure white character tendency so you can get a ring for the ring achievement. Doing this in a game that has its servers forever shutdown is really stupid, because there's only 5 red phantoms per save file and it means that if you mess up even a little bit you need to go and replay the game all over again. World Tendency and character tendency are honestly fine mechanics but their biggest issue is that they refuse to actually tell you in clear wording what the tendency actually is. BEcause of this you’re entirely left up to comparing screenshots of pictures of peoples TVs from like 2012, since all the search results are flooded by the remake. I actually managed to take advantage of the private server fans have made and had some absolutely lovely people let me kill them like 5 times so I could get the ring I needed, but even though I did legitimately do it on a PS3, it kind of falls into an unofficial limbo that I can't expect everyone to be willing to try. Overall I think the platinum was really rewarding but for the love of god please do not fucking do this to yourself.

If you haven't played Demon’s Souls on PS3, I think you should really give it a shot. It’s definitely flawed but it's a great game and I think it's a whole lot better than the remake, which honestly is just a really confusing product. If it was on PC it would make a bit more sense, but as is it's a just as inaccessible version of the game that seems to fundamentally misunderstand what the game is and what it was trying to be back then. I think it’s a little silly to say this after a whole review of me pointing out what I appreciate about Demons Souls, but I still think the game is a 7/10, I just mean it a whole lot more now. If you're wondering, yes, i finished platinuming the game on 4/20, and I did get so high i forget what happened next after finishing the game. If there are any typos in this review i will cry. I didnt capitalize my Is, im so sorry

The game is absolutely fucking terrible.
The puzzles range from bad to tedious.
The graphics are lackluster.
You spend the biggest chunk of the game walking up and down the same 3 roads.
The story is nonexistent for 70% of the game.
When the last 30% of the story does pick up it makes no sense.

Soundtrack is good though.

But the game still, in spite of all of this, manages to weave an engaging experience. You might not understand the narrative, but you will be engrossed by it regardless. You might hate the walking, but you still want to see what happens next. You might not want to do another tedious puzzle, but you still want to read the witty dialogue after.

If you play this you'll come to see all these glaring issues aren't really issues at all. Everything about the game feels deliberately crafted to deliver a certain experience. And regardless of the merit you get out of this game, it definitely conveys what it wants to convey. How you interpret that is up to you. And you have to respect games like those.

After a week I already miss waking up in the morning and playing this on my 3ds.

Halo: Combat Evolved is a fun but flawed game that unfortunately shows its age in quite a few ways. This game shines brightest when it shows off its unique and incredible locations, each with their own incredible atmospheres, and ties it all together with its very interesting story. Unfortunately however this game is not always at its best. A good portion of the game is spent navigating tight corridors, often seeing the same rooms copy and pasted over and over again, and fighting the same bunch of enemies. Master chief is fun to control in combat, however a few controls feel a bit outdated or awkward, such as the vehicle controls and lack of a zoom button while shooting. This game also suffers from not really having a proper waypoint system. Despite all of the levels being pretty linear it's still very easy to get lost due to the often confusing and repetitive map design. Overall Halo's biggest problem is its repetitiveness. Whether it be enemies, weapons, or maps, after a certain point you'll start to feel like you're just doing the same thing over and over again. The story is definitely still interesting however and though repetitive it is fun. Despite its rough patches I'm very glad I completed this game and would still recommend checking it out.

Drakengard is one of the most interesting games I have ever played. At its first glance and in its opening hours, it seems like the standard RPG affair, and it's not until after the first of the games 5 endings did the gears start turning in my head. Drakengard’s thesis statement might as well be to subvert the players expectations at every turn after that first ending, and it's honestly one of the most ethereal gaming experiences I have ever witnessed. To be honest, I’m having trouble even formulating all of my thoughts in an even slightly coherent manner, because this game is so fucking good. I think it is inevitable that in a few months I will find anything I say in this review somewhat shallow but that's the beauty of interpretive art like this. I didn't truly understand Evangelion after I first watched it at 15 and I think my Metal Gear Solid 2 review is extremely surface level now but I leave it up as a digital time capsule. Can you tell this review is going to be a lot of yapping?

The game is a deconstruction of RPG and general fantasy tropes in such a brilliant way, at first seeming to give into them. However, as you go on and dig under the surface of these characters and realize their complexities you start to understand and appreciate Drakengard that much more. Caim at first looks the part of your standard pure of heart RPG protagonist, even going mute at the very beginning of the game to mimic this. However, you very quickly realize that Caim is an absolutely bloodthirsty maniac. He is purely fueled by blind rage and bloodlust, yet will still protect his sister because he knows he's supposed to care for her. The game calls you out on this constantly but you must continue the bloodshed in order to press on with the game…
His sister Furiae seems to be your standard pure and innocent “damsel in distress” character, but this presentation of her character early on is almost like a red herring of sorts. Her lack of development is a critique of that archetype in and of itself. She purposefully keeps the less savory parts of her locked away, and it's not until the end that it's revealed more. Her feelings for Caim are just subtly incestuous which serve to drive home the point that despite her surface level appearance as your standard pure damsel in distress, that's really not what she is. Every character is like this really, Verdelet constantly accosts Caim for his bloodshed yet he is the one that drives him to action most often and routinely benefits from it. Inuart seems like the standard best friend character but gets consumed by jealousy and a pursuit of power to protect his lover, almost acting like the protagonist of a story that's not his. The greatest thing about the complexities of these characters is that it's never too particularly in your face about it either. I absolutely love how this game urges you to dig deeper into its themes. Other than the deconstructive elements of the plot, I feel like Drakengard is a story about hatred, revenge, the things we lose, the importance of love and what a lack of love can do, and the inherent faults of humans. In endings A B and C, Caim loses those closest to him due to his endless conquest of bloodshed. He ends with less things than he started. Ending A he not only loses Furiae and Inuart, but Angelus as well. Ending B he loses not just the three mentioned but the world is doomed and it seems like whatever battle that comes next won't be one Caim survives. Ending B in particular really brings things full circle for Furiae to me as well. After an entire game where she gets minimal screen time or development, the world is filled with grotesque clones of her that doom the world. She no longer has any love for Inuart or even Caim, after Inuart obsesses over protecting her. In Ending C Caim is forced to kill Angelus with his own two hands, the final price of his senseless killing is killing one who he holds the most dear. In each of these first three endings Caim is explicitly punished for his bloodshed. None of these endings are happy, and when I was playing I thought that surely endings B and C would be happier endings than ending A. However, Drakengard does not feel compelled to do this and each ending gets even more bleak than the last. You could take this as the game just being edgy, but I think to do so would be to blindly deny the game of its narrative qualities. Ending D sees the world caught in a permanently frozen state, but not before Caim dies in the end. It's so bleak and just so ethereal. Ending E is the most out of left field one. Caim and Angelus end up in fucking Shinjuku where they play a rhythm game to beat the final boss before being shot down by two missles from the Japanese defense force. The atmosphere is just so chilling and the imagery of Angelus being impaled on top of Tokyo Tower is one of the coolest things ever. The point I'm really trying to make here though is that every ending ends in varying degrees of misfortune for Caim as a result of his blind rage. Even in D and E where he tries to save the world and do a good deed he is punished with death. In attempting to save the world he also dooms it. Another core theme I find with this game is love. You see this a lot with Manah, who is seemingly manipulated by The Watchers/The Gods into thinking she is loved by them, as she received no love from her own mother and was abused by her. This sends her on a path to creating the apocalyptic scenarios that appear in basically every ending. In the end of ending A, she begs for death from Caim yet neither of them think she deserves such a release. She ends with no one left to give her love, not even The Gods. Inuart constantly tries to look for love from Furiae, completely misunderstanding her at every turn, eventually blaming Caim for his own infidelity and seeking revenge on him. These two themes come together to show that the world is this way because of the faults of mankind. Caim is only a coldblooded killer because of his parents death during the war and the attempted reconstruction of the world is due to the easily manipulated nature of humans especially those that are young and not cared for. In the more abstract, things are this way because of the genre that this story is. There is war, there is untold amounts of bloodshed because this is a fantasy RPG. Caim kills because he needs to level up and continue with the story. Which brings me to the gameplay.

The way people talk about the combat of this game makes it seem like the biggest piece of dogshit ever crafted, but really it's not that bad. The systems present in this game are fine enough and far from what I would call bad. However, the combat in Drakengard IS monotonous, but I think this serves a thematic purpose. You’re not meant to enjoy all the senseless killing, and as I said earlier Caim is punished for the indiscriminate bloodshed. However, this is a video game and you must do what the game says to keep going. You must kill even when you don't want to, to continue the game. It's a commentary on the genre in the sense that in RPGs and most video games in general you are rewarded for bloodshed. You are rewarded for killing senselessly and are never called out on it simply because it's a video game. Drakengard breaks this mold and goes as far to try and make the killing itself unenjoyable. I think it’s a really cool aspect of the game that gets overlooked by some because they simply write the combat off as bad and don't interact with it in a ludonarrative sense. The flying missions are awesome though I cant lie. They do also get a bit grueling at times so the ludonarrative cohesion remains intact but they’re definitely more fun than the ground missions.

The last thing I really want to talk about is the music in this game. Drakengard has the most interesting soundtracks in any game I've ever played. It has the sound of what you would expect from a high fantasy game, except it doesn't. Every song in the game uses samples from famous composers in really interesting ways. From Mozart to Tchaikovsky to Holst, you're bound to recognize some of these composers when you see them in the credits but it's doubtful that you'll actually recognize the songs as they appear in game. The game will often loop the same very short sample over and over to create songs that sound traditionally orchestrated but still have a distinct electronic feel to them. I’ve never heard anything like it— I wouldn't necessarily say that the songs are good in a traditional sense but as far as experimental music goes it's really unique and fun to listen to. The best of these songs is the ending B credits theme, “Growing Wings”. Give it a listen if you'd like to see an example of what I'm talking about.

I think that's about all I have to say about the game at this time. This is a serious contender for one of my favorite games of all time and I implore you to play it if you haven't. This probably isn't the case if you read this spoiler tagged review but the point still stands. This game is a masterpiece