There's a degree to which I'm torn on Pikmin 4. It's pretty good! I had a good time and got 100% and spent 35 hours on it or whatever so like, I don't hate this. It's gonna ruin the series though because they filed off all the rough edges and made it into a Ubisoft open world game where you just systematically fill out a map and check off tasks. Combat is dead easy and there's no stakes to most of the game so despite how often the characters won't shut up about Dandori there's not much to actually motivate you to DO any of it. I'm sure speedrunners and other maniacs will make it into a cool game though. And also, I think there is something to it. Every Pikmin ganme has been different, which is one of the things I like about the series, and being kind of a minigame collection of little challenges IS different. It IS new. It's just a shame that if this one took off I know Pikmin 5 is going to be an exact copy of it.

But in their defense, the biggest sign that I'm being cynical about that is this feels like a Pikmin sampler platter, right? It takes place in an alternate timeline and combines elements of the plots of the other three games. All the various 'mins are in it, plus one new kind that I actually quite like. There's dungeons like 2. You even unlock a little baby version of Pikmin 1 later on, which was the first sign that there was some good content in here. So if you're looking to call me a big dumbass the evidence is there to support it.

So here's some stuff that I like: Only allowing you to take out three kinds of Pikmin at once is smart and lets them design areas to sort of rely on the three recommended types. It matches with the "challenge room" nature of most of the rest of the game, but does allow you to try some other combinations if you were enough of a sicko to play this through a bunch of times and try to do better. That much all makes sense. Also, while I don't love Dandori Battle because it's multiplayer against the CPU, I do love doing Pikmin challenge rooms and the nighttime segments are very fun even if they're dead easy. You can do a spirit bomb and everything it's great. The endgame challenges were great and I enjoyed them very much because you could make them sicko difficulty in a way that the whole main game can't. This is good! This is all good!

For what I don't like, it's the fact that like 25 of the 35 hours of this are just watching number go up with no stakes. Oatchi is a very good boy, but I have mixed feelings about him from the gameplay perspective. He's clearly designed to take the edge off of whatever part you don't like, right? He carries stuff, he fights enemies, he does it all depending on how you build him (the game has skill trees and an upgrade shop yeah sure). In order to make most of the game interesting, you have to just kinda not use him or not upgrade him? The biggest one is actually just the fact that while riding Oatchi, all the pikmin you have with you ride too. This means that the entire conceit of the series, the friction of dealing with a big squad, just goes away and Pikmin are reduced to mere ammo reserves. In the hardcore challenges, it's assumed your Oatchi is fully powered and he becomes a single Super Pikmin that you have to use strategically and that's when I enjoyed his being around, but that's a very small portion of what the game's about.

So it's like... I dunno man! This is probably the worst Pikmin game in a lot of ways, but how I really feel about it is going to depend on the next one. On it's own it's got advantages and disadvantages I guess. Much like each fun variety of Pikmin(tm)(copyright Nintendo)

Action games generally operate on the concept of player empowerment, granting the tools to overcome any challenge without a scratch, as long as players have the skill to realize that potential. Meanwhile, horror games operate on the concept of player disempowerment, giving the bare minimum in order to foster a tense atmosphere, so balancing the priorities of each genre seems like mixing oil and water. Resident Evil games are famous for trying to do so, but they usually break into a horror-centric first half and an action-centric back half, without a true blending of the concepts. The Evil Within meanwhile actually managed it, but had to alienate players in some key ways in order to do so. Firstly, the logic behind the story is nearly impossible to follow at first, leaving players unable to find their footing, confused at why the progression is so jumpy and unfocused. Then, the mechanical restrictions feel like they’re equally arbitrary: Sebastian can only initially carry about twelve bullets, and not even a full healthbar’s worth of recovery. He can barely run at all, and in order to alleviate any of this, you may have to bank up green gel over the course of multiple chapters. It can seem like the game is simply trying to make action feel scary by stressing out players with cheap deaths, but once you commit to learning the game, a brilliant method behind the madness reveals itself. While the story is mostly nonsense, the abstract nature of it allows for level design suited to a wide variety of challenges. With new mechanics being introduced at a steady pace, players are constantly kept on the backfoot, and thus disempowered, even as their growing mechanical knowledge empowers them. The shallow capacity for supplies is an obvious form of disempowerment which prompts players to spend resources cleverly, but their abundance between each fight empowers players to use their entire toolkit freely. The upgrade system empowers; the below-par baselines make unupgraded stats more of a problem in the face of scaling challenge. For every give, there’s a take, and thus, a harmony between action and horror is reached. As stated before though, the “take” for that brilliance is a frontloaded sense of disempowerment, with players having to get through most of the game before they’ve experienced enough character growth and skill development to redress the balance. So, I really can’t blame anyone for bouncing off of this game, but I also truly believe that as of today (less than a week away from RE4 remake), it’s the best merging of action and horror in gaming. Resident Evil 4 is pure satisfying action, Dead Space commits to bloody horror, but The Evil Within is purely… both.

You're trying too hard, bro! More or less, the main reason as to why I'm generally disinterested in modern horror games, which tend to serve as vehicles for cryptic lore dumps for YouTube analysts to pore over rather than fright-enhanced decision making. I don't want mindfuckery, I want regular fuckery, something that I was hopeful would be present in this kind of return to form. This game was sold to me as the best of Resident Evil meets the best of Silent Hill, but, in reality, it's the worst of both: Resident Evil's cramped item management without any of the brilliant circular level design that makes Spencer Mansion thrilling to route through even after dozens of playthroughs, and Silent Hill's scary-because-it's-scary imagery without any of the dread that defines each and every one of Harry Mason's fog-enveloped footsteps. Instead, we've got jumpcuts to character closeups and spooky stanzas of poetry, pulsating masses of flesh on the ground, and handwritten notes conveniently censored at the most ominous places- surface-level stuff that makes horror games effective for people who don't understand what makes horror games effective. I'm not engaged enough to decipher your jumbled-up story, I'm not interested in your generic sci-fi setting, and I'm not even scared! But, maybe if I actually felt like the character I was playing as, I would be! Fast movement speed and wide hallways make enemies pitifully easy to juke, and thus not at all intimidating. Exploration isn't exciting or intriguing because of how straightforward it is on a grand scale. Plentiful items and infinite saves mean there's not any pressure on you even if you do wind up making a mistake somehow. I initially chalked this all up to misguided attempts at balance, but they get harder and harder to defend once you realize that all you're really doing is (often literally) opening up a locked door just to find a key for another locked door somewhere else on the map, which makes the experience feel more like a parody of classic survival horror games rather than an earnest attempt at recapturing the magic. I hardly took out any enemies, I didn't burn a single body, and, on several occasions, I killed myself on purpose because doing that was quicker than having to run back to the save room to retrieve the specific contextual item I needed, which is about as damning as you can get for this kind of game. The only strategy to pick up on is keeping nothing at all on your person in between storage box visits so that you can handle when the game inevitably dumps five key items on you in successive rooms. Mikami's rolling in his grave!

The lone bright spots are the traditional puzzles, which, although are few and far between, frequently nail the physical satisfaction of fiddling around with a piece of old, analog equipment that you're half familiar with and half in the dark on. If this game had understood its strengths better, it would've been a fully-fledged point-and-click or even a Myst-style free-roaming puzzler. The actual survivor horror feels tacked on, as though it's obligated to be this kind of game because it's attempting to tell a story in the same emotional vein as the Silent Hill series and the player needs to have something to do before being shown the next deep, thought-provoking cutscene. I can't even say that it understands the classics from a visual standpoint, forgoing the fixed-camera perspective that gives each of Resident Evil's individual rooms a distinct cinematographic personality and instead opting for a generic top-down approach that makes every location feel the same. Though, that's not to say the art direction itself is bad. In fact, it's phenomenal, and easily the standout of the game's features, but it doesn't make up for how bland everything else is. At some point, this one demoted itself in my eyes from 'mostly boring but worth playing just for the aesthetic' to 'downright painful.' Maybe it was after the game pretentiously transitioned into a first-person walking simulator one too many times. Or, more likely, it was when some of the small details- red-light save screens, items conveniently located right on top of their respective instruction manuals, and even the sound effect of equipping your pistol- started feeling less like homages and more like creative crutches, indicators of an entirely rudderless experience. I really feel terrible for ragging on something that's evidently a passion project and extremely competent from a technical standpoint, and I sincerely hope the devs keep at it. But, man. I wish I got anything at all out of this. The one game I've played that's managed get this done, I mean, spiritually succeeding an era/genre rather than a specific series by remixing several blatant inspirations so proficiently that it ends up feeling like something entirely new, is still Shovel Knight, but I'm not sure the world's ready for that conversation quite yet...

Bravely Default 2 is quite possibly one of the worst, and definitely the most insulting, games I have ever played in my entire life. Literally every single aspect is worse than the first game, which came out 9 years earlier and $20 cheaper. Do not play if you value your time, your money, and your sanity.

In-battle gameplay loses most of the menuing improvements of Bravely Second and replaces the round turn system (i.e. speed determines order but everyone gets 1 Turn Per Turn) with a poor attempt at Active Time Battle, where slow classes are regularly lapped by enemies getting 2-3 turns before you can get 1. Compounding the speed problem is a new and completely unecessary weight system for equipment, which serves no purpose other than to make slow classes even slower, and create some extreme headaches when switching equipment between classes.
As for the classes themselves, Bravely Default 2 builds off of Bravely Second's incredibly unique and borderline wacky class additions by making most of its classes extremely typical and boring; abilities from the first two games are swapped between classes seemingly for no reason, leading to a lot of the classes with unique identities from the first games blending together and feeling samey; when BD2 does try to have a class standout with unique mechanics, they tend to make a class that doesn't even synergize with itself. One notable example is Spiritmaster, which when maxed out passively removes all of your buffs, including the one unique to that class. There is no way to turn this off once that character has mastered that class other than to just not have it equipped, turning what would be a great support class into a straight up trap.
Baffling gameplay decisions aren't just limited to your side of the aisle; new to Bravely Default 2 is the Counter system; previously a unique (and well thought out) feature of One Guy from the previous games is now haphazardly slapped onto Every Single Enemy In The Game. If you hit a specific trigger (which is unique for every enemy type) (which there is no way to learn beforehand, or to keep track of afterwards, other than triggering it) (which are not guaranteed to happen, meaning you can try to learn a trigger and get fooled into thinking it doesn't exist until it then proceeds to kill you), the enemy gets a free action in retaliation. These go from Annoying at the start of the game (Buff yourself with the last class you got and have the next boss automatically steal your buffs) to Ridiculous later on (Try to use an item and get hit with a free party-wide ballslap). There are eventually ways to counteract some of these counters (that are borderline mandatory to have on everyone by the end), helping the problem a little bit... until the endgame introduces Counter Any Ability, which punishes you for having the audacity to Do Anything by giving bosses free BP with which to spam turns at you while you struggle to keep up (remember all that speed nonsense from earlier). What should be the highlight of the game, fun and uniquely challenging bossfights, becomes a repeated exercise in frustration as all of them devolve into the boss simply overwhelming you for free.
Outside of battling, the overworld replaces invisible random encounters with enemies on the map, which means you no longer have the ability to adjust your random encounter rate to 0% or 200% at any time, making both grinding and traversal more tedious. The traversal problem is also not helped by BD2 getting rid of the 3DS games' minimap, making it very easy to get lost in the game's bland and mazelike dungeons. There are also the sidequests; previously very clearly marked and always providing a new job or something else of equal importance, now hidden in places you have no reason to be in, hard to keep track of, and never worth the effort to do.

The saving grace of many an RPG with bad gameplay, The Story, is treated like an afterthought in BD2 to an embarrassing degree. The well thought out world and fun story with twists and turns of BD1 is followed up by a generic, cookie cutter fantasyland with plot points checked off an Early FF Homage shopping list and barely given any thought, with no cohesion between chapters as you're shipped off to the next series of grating scenes and boss fights. The party's main defining trait is being more boring than the party of BD1; noone has much of a character arc or an especially notable personality (the main character Seth being the worst, perhaps one of the blandest protagoni in gaming history). Most of the bosses are even worse; where BD took the time to explore and develop its bosses as much as it could (perhaps to its own detriment), most of BD2's bosses are thrown at you out of nowhere and die without leaving any impression. The only exception to this is the first two bosses in the game, who actually do have a nice development arc throughout the game... that can only be seen through well out of the way sidequests. Good luck with those.

Despite the benefit of being on a more powerful system, BD2 manages to somehow look worse than the 3DS games. The game may be much sharper at its higher resolution, but it loses out on the fuzziness that complimented the first game's art style, and it doesn't try to make up for it in other ways; the still chibi characters with the now modeled (instead of textured) faces puts the game firmly into the uncanny valley, especially when the cutscenes love to give you closeups that are much less flattering than the directors thought they were. They also try to make use of more dynamic camera angles in battle, which generally just makes what's actually happening a lot harder to follow (not helped by bosses loving to flash moves or buffs at incredibly high speeds).
And unfortunately, while they did get REVO back to do the soundtrack, they also squandered the opportunity by mostly having him do remixes of previous tracks instead of new motifs (which would be more appropriate for a game that is very explicit about having nothing to do with previous games). The soundtrack ranges from good (the main battle theme and about 2 of the 5 various boss themes) to bad (the character themes lacking the energy of BD1; the best thing you can say about them is that you can tell which one is which) to actively headache inducing. By the time of the third chapter, the absolutely atrocious town theme, combined with the increasingly nonsense boss mechanics and absolutely inane writing combined to give me an actual splitting migraine. I cannot name another game off the top of my head bad enough to actually cause me physical agony, but BD2 is just that kind of special.

Bravely Default 2 is so bad that for a time it sent me into an actual depression. It stripped me of my optimism and threw it back in my face for daring to think that a sequel would improve, in any way, off of the games that I love. My only hope is that Square Enix reevaluates themselves after this game and Octopath Traveler (another stinker) and manages to make the Bravely sequel we actually deserve.

tl;dr wish I could give it a 0