Hit Trailblazer 40 and suddenly forgot why I was grinding this game out. Retroactively justifies my hate for Genshin. Calling out gacha as being the problem deflects from the ACTUAL problem - stamina. Anything worth doing costs stamina in such large amounts for such low rewards that it does not feel worth it to play/watch these tedious battles; but you need the 30 different currencies on offer to make the numbers go up... And then what?

The presentation and sophistication is purposely deceiving to keep you from realising that there is actually very little reason to get attached to these characters or even download this game in the first place, there is no pay-off, there is no endgame.

At the end of Episode 2, 'Haunted' by Poe plays over a foggy screen, a blinking "press X to skip" sitting in the bottom left hand corner. This song, along with the rest of the tracks from the eponymous 2000 album form a companion piece of sorts to the much referenced and loved Mark Z. Danielewski novel House of Leaves.

When you buy House of Leaves you are intending to purchase a fictional novel, but no one has told the book that, and it will continue to present itself as a diary wrapped around an academic journal centering on a non-existent (in world and out of world) documentary about a house. Alan Wake is a game, it is very much a game to all of it's faults, but it desperately wants to be a TV Show about a writer who may or may not be living within his own manuscript.

Sadly in the year of our lord 2023, the monkey paw has already curled and we can't ask for a world where Remedy and Sam Lake just made a TV Show instead because Quantum Break exists and no one gave a shit.

In the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer's body is washed up from Black Lake. The 2008 australian indie film Lake Mungo opens with footage of a young Alice Palmer being dredged from the aforementioned Lake. In Alan Wake, Alice Wake finds her own way out of Cauldron Lake.

Truly baffling how mismanaged this project must have been. My heart goes out to any and all people who had to work on anything regarding this game. A multi-billion dollar company is incapable of giving the resources and the scope required to NOT end a half-a-decade development cycle with this bland, copy-pasted rehash. The grappling hook is goated, thank god, but even the implementation of alternative equipment sucks. They had to bring back the Halo 2 Gondola Ride, everyone's favourite masterclass in waiting for an encounter to end. This Halo sure could be infinite if they were willing to reuse the same environments a few million times more.

The numbers go up. The weight that Sam Porter Bridges can carry on his back and shoulders increases, kilogram by kilogram. The distance between waystations grows metres apart as you inch from prepper to prepper. You get likes. You get more likes. A friendly porter gives you 1 like(s) which increases your total likes by 0.003%. you come home from your real life job, which probably involves walking, climbing or carrying (mine does anyway) and you login to the chiral network and receive thousands of likes. What do the likes do? You don't know. But the numbers keep going up. More ammo, more power, more speed, more resources, more roads, more ziplines.

The Earth however does not go up. Elevation-wise, yes it goes up and what goes up must come down. But the rocks, the streams, the snow, the ravines, the shores don't have numbers to increase or decrease. You don't roll dice at rubble. It is you and the Earth, mano a mano, every step an attack and every hill a combo. You get to the top of a mountain, turn around and take a photo. You have been climbing for 20 minutes. Just pushing the left stick forward, and yet you feel that you may be conquering one of the hardest encounters JRPGs have to offer.

How many expansions do I have to play before I come to terms with the fact that Final Fantasy XIV is simply not engaging. The last few expansions I bought as a bundle, on sale, and I used my sub time as efficiently as I could as well as some time during a play-for-free campaign. But this month I finished university, and I decided that now was the time to put down £45 and finally play 'the greatest final fantasy story ever created' (citation needed).

As I write this, my character is middle-mousing themselves across a lush expanse, requiring gentle taps from me to correct their course like a Roomba, so that I can click on the npc that awaits me at the end of my ride. This npc is similar to the hundreds of npcs I have already spoken to in my time playing FFXIV and its expansions, and I know what to expect: I get to read some text, and then off I go, middle-mousing myself to the next npc.

FFXIV has the best writing of an MMO (which isn't to say too much) but even then Yoshi-P and his team are not immune to padding their experiences with pointless quests and overwritten text boxes. Here is my main problem with the game, and one that will not be fixed until Final Fantasy ((14-11)+14): Every single text box crushes my soul. The ones that are quick to read are often pointless and use unnecessarily flowery language. And then there are the unvoiced cutscenes, where I get to wait 5 seconds between text boxes so that I can watch npcs move their mouths or sigh. Voiced cutscenes often feel worse, leaving plenty of dead air between voice lines that is filled with awkward cuts to show my character soulessly and silently emoting. A particularly bad cutscene may consist of a cut to show my character, Alphinaud, Alisae, This Guy I've Just Met, his pet dog, Freddie Mercury: "So this is The Scions... And you, must be the Warrior of Light''.

When playing Shadowbringers I conceded that this game is a visual novel with a mahjong simulator plugged into the side of it. The problem is that the dialogue does not have the pacing and the presentation isn't as slick as your typical visual novel... and I still have to walk 5 minutes to get to the next text box.