Can love bloom on the Battlefield?

Yes.

Is it more about loving oneself, accepting your genes, and overcoming fate to live your life by your own means?

Definitely.

Funny that I played two games in a row about overcoming family stuff. This with the added nuclear threat looming over head. Wild that in 2024 nuclear war is still on the table from multiple sources and neuralink feeling a little too close to us getting nanomachines being put in our bodies. Kojima is a little too hot on the button.

Really the story is pretty great in this. The themes of understanding our own genes to uncover truths of our past and to not let them control our fate is pretty beautiful and woven in well with the conspiracies and nuclear paranoia. Also the voice acting was also pretty great. It's nice that not everything in the game is extremely serious. Some of the lines in this are so goofy it's amazing. It made the long cutscenes very enjoyable (it's fun to go back to this game see that Kojima has not changed with the long cutscenes and that he's made them longer. Very cool to see his progression as director and the film inspiration on the direction of the cutscenes). I love all of the 4th wall breaks in the game. Psycho mantis shaking the controller was my favorite, mad me laugh like a maniac.

The gameplay also holds up surprisingly well despite the sometimes janky controls. The sneaking was good albeit kind of easy with being able to see exactly what every camera and enemy could see. It was fun to figure out the puzzles, googled some stuff lol, and the boss fights were all pretty enjoyable.

Excited for mgs2 and learn what all the memes are about.

It's kind of crazy how similar Alan Wake 2 is to this game. Similar themes of mental health and the loved ones we surround ourselves with to help us break the cycle. Obviously the story and gameplay are different, with the story in this being very good and the gameplay being a bit lackluster.

It's a powerful story of learning to let go of the pain of loss, crippling self doubt, and generation trauma brought down from our parents. It is a curse not from the gods, but from within. The gods aren't evil, it's a test. A test of self resolve to pull ourselves out to the other side. I'm actually pretty excited to play the sequel and see how she creates her own path after breaking the curse.

The gameplay on the other hand is kind of bad. I liked the puzzles, simple but effective. The combat though was way too easy and pretty slow. I had the difficulty setting set to automatic, so I thought it would get more challenging since I only died once toward the end of the game. Maybe it was, in the background, on hard and it is just too easy. The time I died was during the beast boss fight, which is the best fight in the game. It blends the impressive visuals with the combat which is something I wish they did more throughout the game. The fights are also so slow. Everything moves at a snails pace and the camera lock on still kind of sucks. If the enemies moved a bit faster and I could free look and lock on to enemies I would've enjoyed it more.

The cinematography in this game is pretty incredible. At the time of it's release I would've been even more impressed, but since I've played Alan Wake 2 before this it ruins it a bit. Surprisingly they have a fairly similar style but AW2 takes it to a level that transcends the medium. A thing I like in this that I think AW2 could've done is the binaural audio. The whispers in your ear the whole game is incredible and made me look around my room a few times with my HD600s on. They aren't joking about it being best played with headphones.

Pretty good game. This is the ritual to lead you on.