It's weird. I wasn't really expecting a Resident Evil game of all things to get me teary-eyed.

There's a lot of things about the game in general that are a weird intricate combination though. It's oozing with blood from RE4 despite being nowhere even close to that game with 8's current gameplay of keep-stepping-back-and-shoot. It has Silent Hill vibes that eclipses any scares in every other RE game with the dollhouse. Iconography of the series is embroiled in, culminating in a particular 'hype' scene that while nowhere near earned, directly references the action side of 5 and 6 in one extended sequence. A theme park ride and attractions is what I've constantly had the game called around me, but that's really selling it short. They're practically full on Zelda dungeons that you go to between the overworld, each of them tying neatly to the setting and tension and never missing a beat.

And overall it's just grand! A celebratory but earnest almost standalone piece in its own right. Its heart is so strong that thinking of the game now I can only see it retrospectively as an emotional journey about and surrounding Ethan and about family, despite how really the general structure of the narrative only has that come in less subtly in the last quarter, and how it is extraordinarily goofy and far less grounded than 7 was.

Yet I don't think I would have it any other way. I imagine that in time I might even call it one of my favorite games, despite me not really even being attached much to the RE series in general. I'm excited for what the year will bring when stuff like this manages to land familiar punches with meatier landings than anything else of its ilk.

Now that time's passed enough I feel more confident talking about this expansion. When I first played it, I dropped it about 2/3 in. I was tired, disappointed, thoroughly washed out of attempting to get into Destiny 2 in any regard. There's a lot to that, combination of feelings of Forsaken being good (but not like, that good. It's weird how venerated it gets but maybe when it's your only piece of good content that's just how it goes), surrounded by friends who were FOMO on Shadowkeep's launch culture, who could never stop talking about how awesome it is. I ended up getting it right before Beyond Light was launching, sort of trying to catch up.

The first mission was a solid tonesetter, getting a bit of my intrigue with some of the imagery and looking visually splendent. I was excited, there was a feeling that they really had found their place with Forsaken and knew what they were doing.

That was wrong. So utterly wrong. The remaining 80% of Shadowkeep is grinding, a strike, grinding, overworld boss bullshit, grinding, a final level mission and a boss. Nothing happens to the story, and pacing is at an all time low again. It reminds me strongly of Year 1 content, but worse personally in that Shadowkeep genuinely feels like it has an idea behind it, unlike those expacs. It drowns itself in familiar imagery of the series, fanservicing alongside its slew of pointless gather a bunch of dead enemies so you can unlock the path forward. So I walked away so defeated, so utterly demolished that I could trust the Destiny 2 community or the friends who tried to get me into this game. They're still my friends mind, but it was not a good feeling at all to feel genuinely gaslit about things about Shadowkeep that weren't actually there (and really, they did lie about some shit I have a grudge about).

Ultimately, over the year following I did actually end up doing the garden of salvation raid and finishing the campaign. The latter honestly wasn't worth it, but the raid was fun. It balances a lot of artistic splendor in its environments while juggling enough good encounters. It's no Last Wish in terms of mechanical difficulty or however many mechanics you're ending up balancing, but it's better telegraphed (other than really one encounter) than most of the raids and it ended up being one I rather enjoyed.

But it's not my selling point for shadowkeep, even on the deep sale it's currently at by the time of writing. I'm hoping with my heart that Bungie finds some sort of footing, or maybe in 3-4 years it has a FF14 style "you have to play this game just for this" expac. I do not think anything here implies that the life on D2's staff is utterly soulless, or that the quality of their work ethic for this game has dropped. If anything they've gotten better with their community and on top of things schedule wise as a whole, it's just that most of the content is deeply not for me and/or awful garbage.

If you do find yourself pushed into playing D2, skip this one. Forsaken is no golden king but it is certainly the best they've got right now and it's not worth putting faith into until they give genuine returns.

There's a moment at the end of world 2 where a cutscene plays, with the whole crew in a desert as Kirby lags behind, desperate for food as they then imagine their friends as said items. Of course, Adeleine makes food for everyone with her paintings and they have a nice picnic right there.

It's that kind of heartwarming, powerful energy that runs through the whole experience. This friendly, childlike pleasantry as you go across the galaxy with fun poplike music playing through the speakers, as your friends join you in a great amount of the levels to assist you. Whether that be sledding with waddle dee to king dedede himself helping you across lava chasms there's always a strong aura that feels like one very warm hug. If anything the only small issue is just that sometimes the game reminds you that it's a little old and shakes your attention by forcing you to grab a powerup twice from a completely different area for the true ending. But even still, the whole playthrough is rather forgiving, in that you can actually get a powerup mid-level, quit out of the level, and still have that powerup on you, including all the crystals you got in the level so far!!

Crystal Shards is very much a nostalgic, but also genuine fav of the kirby games for me. I'll always think about that final level where The Squad helps you out one final time before Ribbon carries you as you rail shoot an utterly corrupted angelic entity that bleeds while the game pleads with you to Tough It Out!!!

With talk of theme park ride games as of late, it's a great timing that of all the games I am the most excited to play, that I finally get working for me to play, it's this one. Quite literally a christian apocrypha story made manifest into powerful rainbow atmospheric audiovisual pleasure, never really missing a cohesive beat from vista to vista.

And also difficult to gush over in the same light, as pretty much every screenshot is a painting in its own justice, and is pretty much the entire appeal. The story and combat, while supportive and have honestly great bedrock foundation, are treated in a rather ancillary fashion in comparison. Really the game could've done with less of the combat, or at least refine the systems to better match the experience as a whole (more like Chapter 6, which literally does this, or modify the weapons for different modes in general!) because otherwise there's far too many of the same encounter that brings a good amount of it down. The ending itself is also rather anticlimactic, albeit sensible for the structure of where things were going. Hell, you could argue that it ending on a rather softer note makes sense for it, and tbh I'm also willing to take it simply because it implies that the queer relationship between these two lovebirds is far more important than one fallen angel :3. Even still, I felt a rather strong wanting for it to go full Bayonetta/TW101 finale with it. But honestly a lot of this was probably a budgetary issue, which makes the end experience all the more dumbfounding.

I also chose this after re-evaluating my principles and understandings of why I love the things I do, and what I pursue. And El Shaddai definitely offered me a strong, wide-eyed grin the whole way through, to affirm that yeah, video games are p cool actually.

I reached the end of the first area, got to the second and felt nothing so I just decided to close it.

Difficult to talk about I think, if only because I feel some aura of "maybe you should've just modded it" over my head. I don't mean that in that it's buggy, really I came across zero bugs total, but that it's lacking in any of sort of anything interesting that would otherwise fixed by mods that either made its balance matter at all or added things to make it interesting. This combined with the realm of eurojank community's general push to mod it or have a bad time. And maybe I'm the fool for not modding it to start, so I feel like I should explain my thought process.

My experience with Shadow of Chernobyl was really engaging, just constant back to back streak of encounters and sights to see that consistently unnerved me or kept my guard up. I didn't sidequest at all, but the main campaign itself felt like a nonstop barrage of exploring through anomaly filled tunnels and skin-of-your-teeth encounters. Bar a couple bugs, I made it about three hours in before I decided to put it away for a while, to come back to later.

This was all in vanilla, to make that clear. ALL in vanilla, no mods, and somehow I didn't crash more than once (and it wasn't a gamebreaking one. It was actually 2 minutes after a save funnily enough). So my interest was peaked when p much all of the discourse around me is about how Call of Pripyat was so much better.

It wasn't. Instead of vibes and powerful atmosphere and direction from location to location it was extremely isolated and detached plethora of side content. Like playing a bad open world game where I was checking off all the checkmarks where every quest was a less than satisfying venture with not a hint of tension. I raided a bloodsucker lair on my lonesome, took out a huge amount of them with one nade thinking "wow that was surprisingly easy", realized that maybe i should do it with the sidequest for it to be engaging, and then watched that sidequest be even worse. I walked through empty roads leading to marks on the map where encounters capped at a dog fight that caught me off guard with multiple of them only for them to go down just as easily.

I think my mistake is that Call of Pripyat isn't really made to appeal to me as much as it's made to appeal to people who loved SoC to death and found CoP to be a more polished mechanical journey. I did ask a few friends where it seems to be FAR less broken from a rudimentary level. But I don't know, both STALKER games weren't that hard and when I tried to apply the direction friends gave me I ended up breaking the game in half quite quickly which was just as unsatisfying. To me it was just an extremely boring venture, that both lacks the charm, and any appeal that I could've fallen in love with.

If it gets oh so much better, maybe I'll return. Personally I think it's just a complete skip from me and a disavow to anyone interested.

After a strong feeling of listlessness that prevented me from really playing much new, I pushed myself through an hour of saturn emulation config bullshit to finally kickstart my ass into this series. I did make sure to take a break before starting, lest my frustration with getting everything set up to begin with color any of this experience.

The result? Hmm.
Definitely has the charm of what I guess is somewhere in between tech demo and concept album, and well it has dragons in it so I guess I can't complain too much, but what is here is still an extremely scuffed rail shooter to play.

I don't mean from really a mechanical perspective, although that part is only moderately interesting there, I mean from a visual one. Processing the low resolution obstacles required a lot of squinting from my end and there was so many things that hit me that I couldn't tell what did at first. It's very coarse rough sandpaper to just feel through, with lightly sharp edges. I don't enjoy playing with it, but there's certainly some neat feeling to rub against the sandpaper initially.

In conclusion though, I finished stage 4 where I fought a large mech that had some cool animations, and then I decided that maybe this isn't the game I should be playing to try to get back into things at all, as I'm not feeling an ounce of much satisfaction or fun from this history piece. I don't recommend playing it, personally.

I've done enough secondary and primary haggling in my life, as well as go through basic capitalist economics in my econ degree to find this to be, well, not much of intrigue. Certainly, there is a charm to the game cutely dressing up the pains of market competition, debt chasing, and the 'glory' that is racketing your customers for every penny they own. But considering the extremely simple customer optimization, with the price fixing being starkingly routine, this is nothing more than a relaxing time-waster. And really, just not one I'd ever recommend when there is far far better on the market (ironically).

Might I suggest playing something actually riveting like say, Victoria II? You might think you're hot shit for racketing actual npcs, but see me on a battlefield of attacking your enemies economics with pinpoint precision. Yes this is a shill, you think I have anything more to say about Recettear? Go find 4chan threads over it!

Apologies for a sort of petty write-up (if you already couldn't tell by the score), but this is more a standing warning for it being on the top reviewed alongside Ao no Kiseki, although what I have to say applies vastly more for this one.

The Trails community is a very insular niche group, and not to remark against their enjoyment but I'd keep in mind that this game is largely untranslated with the only translation jobs for it so far are a butchered machine-writing version that certainly doesn't attest to any good writing and a single "loose" stream translation of which I imagine most people came to 'play' this game from. So I would be highly skeptical of the validity of whether or not this is worth getting into! And being at the complete tail end (or most recent one) of a very long series that's required to go through first, that makes the asking price a lot bigger.

So, buyers beware... haha.

Edit: Ok WOW lol.
A few points:
-it was definitely rather poor of me to not at least just keep this at shelved and no rating, but I was too petty and evil! Too number focused, wanted to see it fall. In the future Id rather not become some “outrage hot take reviewer/blogger” so I won’t commit the same mistake there. Apologies to those who follow me for souring the well like this
-Respect to kingbancho for keeping it real haha. I’m no help ofc, I’ve done the peanut stuff a couple times, that I’ve definitely pushed myself to curb away from. I for one especially took the whole brigade as a huge badge of honor at first, and ended up sharing it in a more personal private blog to feel giddy about. Then seeing it go to Twitter too just kept that gravy train rolling. I won’t apologize for taking a bizarre sense of glee in this, but I’ll double down I won’t do this again lol (or at least try!!)
-That being said, what I put up here I definitely reaffirm, in that the translation is trash (seriously awful prose and TL work, but what can you do at this rate), and making a blogpost like this is hardly new for me at all, and I’d rather keep that personal side of me here at all times. If you don’t like that it’s not a real review, fine!

The most mystifying realization of carving through tunnels, creating beautiful imagery out of something arguably mundane and simple, is the humanity we try to pour into it. Upon the journey through this spiraling cavern, the quotes you see from the character you inhabit have a much more sorrowful and haunting interpretation rather than the mixed feelings another might feel and silence that overtakes most of the way through.

It made my first immediate reaction to the ending interpret the whole thing as pompous, but then when it guided me back through what I'd just seen, a lot of what I saw started to really make sense. I still think the final 20 seconds ruin the good interpretations you can make out of the adventure, but it's fitting I guess that a cavern that takes the lives of plenty also takes some of my good will with it.

Great game, a genuine walk through the heart of what's left behind, and I swear this will make sense in my head later.

I always found getting used to the AI of the ghosts a tenuous extensively difficult concept when playing this for any longer than like a few minutes. Somehow reached a zen-like state with the AI though and managed to blow through to where the acts started repeating for this classic, which I will take as my victory. I'm not exactly sure WHY I chose to take this game as my use of birthday hours other than obligation of it being next up on my list so I'm just going to blog some bullshit about the last year and desperately try to somehow link it to this game cuz fuck it tim rogers can talk about this game for several hours why can't I?

22->23 isn't exactly the most exciting of yearly jumps, especially when said last year could very well be defined as "terror", "terrible", "terrifically shit". The end of quarantine is barely visible on the horizon now where it hasn't been for some time, and I walk into the celebration of living another year in it feeling like I haven't changed much. I like to think I've worked to improve myself in some areas, in that I've been able to refine my writing and express myself better, that I've been able to curb some of my worse behavior in terms of aggression, that I've gotten better at managing my time. I've managed to make due on some goals, and been able to make new ones I'm making good progress towards. Otherwise though, I still find myself feeling a bit of sorrow on an afternoon of celebration.

It's interesting I suppose to reflect while playing something that otherwise feels timeless, completely unchanged as years go by. We've Certainly Gone A Long Way since this, and hopefully I can look back on today feeling like I've gone a long way as well. Hope you all have a good rest of the year.

FeelsGoodMan

Solid action-platformer about a guy that does nothing but punch and sometimes gets robot assistance. Controls well, plays well, levels are mostly great, and bosses are mostly solid (if a bit too much waiting to get a hit in).

Enjoyed my time, and honestly on the easier side of games like this, which I sorta prefer.

It's funny that right after I write a whole spheel talking about how much I love the maximalist feeling of Doom Eternal and constant adrenaline run it provides me that the second dlc pulls all the punches and delivers an almost Marvel Cinematic Universe experience and I mean that in the worst way.

I knew coming in that it would be easier (I watch hugo streams) but I wasn't expecting it to be doom eternal midgame. This would be fine, but the encounters are also extremely milquetoast. Enemies are introduced and then only fought in the same arena you see them or maybe you get an encounter that's just a bunch of them, not paired with other enemies much. You'll see a blood makyr here from DLC1, but it'll be the first thing you see that's easy to prioritize, or it'll be the only threat. Riveting.

I'm overgeneralizing, as there are a few solid encounters here, especially the optional encounters that were just absolutely major thrills that I loved almost completely. But it still feels like the trollish lovely feelings of Hugo and his team feel, well, minimized? Watered down?

I keep thinking of two things. Firstly, that this is the Doom 2 to DLC1's Plutonia. I mean this for several reasons. Like Doom 2, TAG2 perfects the roster that was already pretty good if even great after base game and TAG1. These new enemies are phenomenal even, with the cursed prowler being my favorite just for being a troll enemy done right that also punishes you just as well. They force you to use more of your weapon roster in an optimal pattern and contribute well to the "you will press these buttons and you'll press them right dammit". But, just like Doom 2, the overall design of the game is a major step down from previous. About half of the encounters are too basic, utilizing little of the synergy in waves or asking for much of what the core systems provide.

The second one I'm thinking of is Ninja Gaiden, no please stick with me. Ninja Gaiden 2 is one of my favorite games and is a pinnacle of extremely brutal fuck you blah blah blah i covered this in my TAG1 review, and rightly it's TAG1. This? It feels a lot like Ninja Gaiden 3. Something is 'missing' here, so missing that it takes me straight out of the game and makes me wonder where the soul went sometimes. It's so sanded off, devoid of much edge and made way easier. They throw a ridiculous amount of super ammo at you and then have you do a few encounters where you just spam the same move for spectacle.

If you're tired of me making analogies at this point, I guess the right wording to describe my feelings is disappointed, and rather underwhelmed. It's still Doom Eternal, something I love and probably will stay in my top 20 games for a very very long time. But the ending for it all feels remarkably... less of it. Minimal

Also PS, I respect hugo's balls to make the final boss a super marauder but this is the one time I'm going to say I wish he had no hand in this.