When I first started Hi-Fi Rush a few weeks ago, I anticipated I'd be prefacing this review by saying that I am terrible at this game. I rarely ever got above a B rank, and died often. Yet, my skill (or lack thereof) never impacted how much I absolutely adored every second I spent with this game. I wanted to write about how that was one of this game's biggest strengths, how even when the battles get challenging, the game never stopped being fun.

But in light of recent events, I realize there are more important things that should be said instead.

This was always a 10/10 game for me, one of those things that you can't believe exist even though you're experiencing it. I could write paragraphs about how the soundtrack is pure perfection, or how the style of the game feels like you're watching a Saturday morning cartoon, or how the cast of characters feel like your own friend group which you have been hanging out with for years and years. But for all it's strengths, the one that stands out after all of what has happened recently, is the passion and love so evident in every little part of this game. This much is obvious from the minute the game starts and stays true until the end of the credits, when John Johanas, the director of the game, sings Making Things Is Hard, a song about the love and hard work that went into making Hi-Fi Rush.

In the game, friendship and teamwork are enough to take down the company which has lost it way and only creates products to make money. In real life, Microsoft, a company worth 3+ trillion dollars, shuts down Tango Gameworks for delivering exactly what they asked for (and then some). It's nothing short of tragic. Microsoft seems to think AAA slop like Starfield sells over smaller games like Hi-Fi Rush, and yet only one of those two 2023 Xbox releases is still being talked about in 2024. I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere (something about how no singular game will ever make enough to get them out of the 70 billion dollar hole they've dug themselves into etc etc), but sadly not one that will ever get through the thick skulls of Phil Spencer et al.

I feel lucky I got to play this game at all. To me, and many others, it'll always be a classic we keep coming back to. To everyone at Tango who poured their heart and soul into this game, thank you for sharing this wonderful experience with us. You guys were always the real rockstars.

I can't hold back anymore... I can't handle this kind of gaslighting online that has been going on recently full of revisionism and blatant rabid MMO fan shit. Fallout 76 is pure slop to the highest degree. It's an insult to the players time and intelligence. The gameplay is worse than 4 extremely unresponsive and braindead. The quest design boils down to grabbing something and then taking to it another location. Every. Single. Time. Not even the main quests are interesting. The map is insanely goofy for what a fallout game should look like. You're telling me California looks the same in fallout but all of a sudden West Virginia has shit piss and vomit colour scheme forests everywhere? Yes I DESPISE this game. I always have and no the updates didn't fix shit. Now you can talk to extremely bland NPCs with wastelanders who are comically good or comically evilish. They couldn't even make the faction quests interesting like the enclave is just talking to a really lame computer and doing his chores around the map. Guess what? More MMO slop where it needs to make you take up as much time as possible doing multiple super insignificant quests to pad out your playtime and make you artificially feel like you're getting somewhere. No this game ISNT "good now." This game ISNT just blindly hated on. Its just your average MMO fans who wasted hundreds of hours doing absolutely nothing trying to find any reason to justify themselves from doing jack shit.
Yeah this is a super heated review but because this is genuinely everything wrong with a video game. Taking a franchise which already got dummed down with fallout 4 and then turning it into pure slop with an online only MMO. How fun. I wouldn't even hate on it if it wasn't extremely boring from every way you look at it. And no. It's not "fun with friends" either. Fallout is shit and people who unironically defend this game after everything Bethesda has done are the reason why.