Phat_Baby
2023
This is what I've been waiting for, baby. The slate of Inscryption-inspired indie gems. Throw me in all the sinister, claustrophobic rooms with as many creepy lil' gremlin freaks as you can muster. Make them invite me to an endless lineup of mystical, bizarre, thoroughly fucked up contests where the odds are infinitely stacked against me.
And I'll say, for the first game to give me that same experience, this was so damn fun. Just me and a little goblin man playing Russian Roulette while he fearfully chain smokes cigarettes in retaliation to me playing the cheapest, most underhanded tactics humanly possible. Looks great, has a simple but satisfying concept, and, most of all, features a superb gremlin dude for me to play against. Would love to see a more fleshed-out version one day, because, much like Inscryption, I could play this forever.
And I'll say, for the first game to give me that same experience, this was so damn fun. Just me and a little goblin man playing Russian Roulette while he fearfully chain smokes cigarettes in retaliation to me playing the cheapest, most underhanded tactics humanly possible. Looks great, has a simple but satisfying concept, and, most of all, features a superb gremlin dude for me to play against. Would love to see a more fleshed-out version one day, because, much like Inscryption, I could play this forever.
2024
Loved the scene in this where a dying robot screams "PLEASE. KILL ME. JUST KILL ME. PLEASE." And the main character's like, huh, I wonder what that means???
I dunno man, I think the robot wants you to kill it. Can't be sure though.
I dunno man, I think the robot wants you to kill it. Can't be sure though.
1997
Pretty much every review of this I see now is someone saying either: I can't get into this because it's an ancient relic passed down through the hands of our ancestors and my computer turns to dust the moment Steam loads it or how dare any human being ever not play it because this and its sequel are unequivocally the best Fallout games ever made and people who haven't played it are heathenous traitors to the Fallout cult. And so let's get it out the way. Yes, this game is as old as time itself. Every animation or character close-up looks like it's been sat in vinegar for a century and learning how on Earth you're actually supposed to play it is like playing a game of riddles with a troll sat under a bridge who never even explained that he wanted to play a game of riddles in the first place.
The first hour of this is just living in sheer fear of massive molerats and searching every nook and cranny for some rope to progress the story. If you're like me and grew up in an era where the CRPG had died, you're gonna get cooked over and over until you figure out the essential rules of navigating its world. And even then, 15 hours in, you'll suddenly get hit with a new problem the game never explains. When you visit the Glow for the first time and try to leave with like 3 trillion radiation particles coursing through your body, you can almost hear Interplay laughing at you from behind the screen for not reading some ancient, long-forgotten strategy guide buried in a crypt somewhere. It's hard to just pick up and play, and you have to become a scholar in old GameFAQ guides and be resilient to make it over the early hump.
But when you do manage to get it down and embrace the experience for what it is, this is genuinely some of the best Fallout you can play. I love Bethesda and can't deny their work on the series has made it a household name. But damn, Interplay's take on this universe is a lot different and, to me, slightly more compelling from a narrative standpoint (up there with Obsidian's work on the series, for sure). It just throws you into a harsh, morally devoid world where capitalistic greed has eviscerated everything. From the gameplay to your interactions with characters, nothing here is easy. Everyone and everything hates you, to the point where it feels like the wasteland itself is conspiring against you. And while it has the hilariously bleak sense of humour and colourful characters of later entries, the much darker tone makes the whole experience feel like a morbidly, dog-eat-dog take on the apocalypse.
And the moments that come out of that, even years later, hit like a truck. Debating the philosophy and logic of the Master's plan as an alternative to just blasting him away in a gunfight is such a fitting moment for that villain, and searching the ruins of Necropolis for a working water chip after hours of hearing nothing but rumours genuinely feels like a massive weight off your shoulders, because as small a victory it is, you goddamn WORKED for it. Even down to the way the game portrays factions, like the Brotherhood of Steel actively refusing to engage in conflicts and highlighting how they're essentially just hoarding potentially life-saving tech for themselves in a world full of those who need it, has so much nuance and truly cements this as a world where morality exists purely in shades of grey.
I could get on its case for a lot of things that haven't aged particularly gracefully. Most of the quests rely on you digging for story in long text chains and nearly all its systems are unintuitive in today's landscape, but overall, some of the most fun I've had playing an RPG in recent memory. If you can't get along with it, no one's going to blame you. But if you can stick with it and learn how it works, this is genuinely some grade-A, top-shelf post-apocalyptic storytelling. And I say that as someone who has literally never been a fan of the post-apocalyptic genre. Just be prepared to spend the first six hours begging for mercy from pretty much every enemy you could just twat with a baseball bat in Fallout 3 and 4... the Radscorpions' ancestors were absolute chads and they'll throw hands like you just murdered their wife and kids and they're the lead in a Chad Stahelski directed revenge flick.
The first hour of this is just living in sheer fear of massive molerats and searching every nook and cranny for some rope to progress the story. If you're like me and grew up in an era where the CRPG had died, you're gonna get cooked over and over until you figure out the essential rules of navigating its world. And even then, 15 hours in, you'll suddenly get hit with a new problem the game never explains. When you visit the Glow for the first time and try to leave with like 3 trillion radiation particles coursing through your body, you can almost hear Interplay laughing at you from behind the screen for not reading some ancient, long-forgotten strategy guide buried in a crypt somewhere. It's hard to just pick up and play, and you have to become a scholar in old GameFAQ guides and be resilient to make it over the early hump.
But when you do manage to get it down and embrace the experience for what it is, this is genuinely some of the best Fallout you can play. I love Bethesda and can't deny their work on the series has made it a household name. But damn, Interplay's take on this universe is a lot different and, to me, slightly more compelling from a narrative standpoint (up there with Obsidian's work on the series, for sure). It just throws you into a harsh, morally devoid world where capitalistic greed has eviscerated everything. From the gameplay to your interactions with characters, nothing here is easy. Everyone and everything hates you, to the point where it feels like the wasteland itself is conspiring against you. And while it has the hilariously bleak sense of humour and colourful characters of later entries, the much darker tone makes the whole experience feel like a morbidly, dog-eat-dog take on the apocalypse.
And the moments that come out of that, even years later, hit like a truck. Debating the philosophy and logic of the Master's plan as an alternative to just blasting him away in a gunfight is such a fitting moment for that villain, and searching the ruins of Necropolis for a working water chip after hours of hearing nothing but rumours genuinely feels like a massive weight off your shoulders, because as small a victory it is, you goddamn WORKED for it. Even down to the way the game portrays factions, like the Brotherhood of Steel actively refusing to engage in conflicts and highlighting how they're essentially just hoarding potentially life-saving tech for themselves in a world full of those who need it, has so much nuance and truly cements this as a world where morality exists purely in shades of grey.
I could get on its case for a lot of things that haven't aged particularly gracefully. Most of the quests rely on you digging for story in long text chains and nearly all its systems are unintuitive in today's landscape, but overall, some of the most fun I've had playing an RPG in recent memory. If you can't get along with it, no one's going to blame you. But if you can stick with it and learn how it works, this is genuinely some grade-A, top-shelf post-apocalyptic storytelling. And I say that as someone who has literally never been a fan of the post-apocalyptic genre. Just be prepared to spend the first six hours begging for mercy from pretty much every enemy you could just twat with a baseball bat in Fallout 3 and 4... the Radscorpions' ancestors were absolute chads and they'll throw hands like you just murdered their wife and kids and they're the lead in a Chad Stahelski directed revenge flick.
2019
This review contains spoilers
Outside of the typical, canon ending for this, there's endings where you become the king of hell, go broke after betting and losing all your money on women's professional wrestling, become an astronaut in a futuristic space colony and attend an alien concert with your homies. Truly, Atlus dug deep and discovered the innermost desires of me and every man I've ever met.
2024
We've got our first contender for the most unintentionally genius game of the year. I knew I was in for peak when David Harbour stumbled across a magical talisman that teleported him to an eldritchian nightmare realm where the streets were always night and massive scum-covered flesh creatures were watching his every move, and he was like, "huh, now this is a predicament. Anyway, I have a mystery to solve!" And then proceeded to keep that exact air of extreme disinterest about discovering that cosmic, supernatural magic was a tangible, real part of his world for the next four hours.
To be clear, this game is a mess. While the environments are stunning and the sound design is top-notch, It's glitchy as hell, the combat is broken and feels awful to play, the dialogue is stilted and the puzzles are your pretty standard "wacky key" Resident Evil affairs. But there's just something about a scuffed game that lulls my bargain-bin-ass right in like a moth to a flame. Whether it's a bowl of soup in the background of a cutscene just freely stirring itself or one of the final bosses stopping mid-fighting me to reflect on his sins, this was some Grade-A jank.
If we're being real, probably best to wait for a sale or avoid it completely; it's not really worth your time. But my god, with the combination of two lead characters who seem to not give a single shit about being trapped in a Lovecraftian nightmare and combat where enemies will just walk through gunfire like your lobbing fruity pebbles at them, this whole thing is an essential one to play drunk with the homies.
To be clear, this game is a mess. While the environments are stunning and the sound design is top-notch, It's glitchy as hell, the combat is broken and feels awful to play, the dialogue is stilted and the puzzles are your pretty standard "wacky key" Resident Evil affairs. But there's just something about a scuffed game that lulls my bargain-bin-ass right in like a moth to a flame. Whether it's a bowl of soup in the background of a cutscene just freely stirring itself or one of the final bosses stopping mid-fighting me to reflect on his sins, this was some Grade-A jank.
If we're being real, probably best to wait for a sale or avoid it completely; it's not really worth your time. But my god, with the combination of two lead characters who seem to not give a single shit about being trapped in a Lovecraftian nightmare and combat where enemies will just walk through gunfire like your lobbing fruity pebbles at them, this whole thing is an essential one to play drunk with the homies.
2024
This game is wild, because you can be in the most dire situation humanly possible. Your party is half-dead, you have no potions, your health only regenerates to like half cause you haven't slept in three days and it's night. Then out of nowhere, The Rock will show up, force you into a mandatory conversation where he spouts one of seven Shakespearian lines about how good at killing things he is, then proceed to absolutely decimate any enemy in the nearby area and walk off like nothing happened.
As for everything around your chance meetings with The Rock, Dragon's Dogma 2 is such a tough game to weigh up, because I completely appreciate and quite like how Capcom had a distinct creative vision and didn't budge on it in favour of ease of access. As my film teacher told me back in a uni seminar: "Never judge anything on what you want it to be. Judge it on what it is." And for better or worse, this is Capcom asking you to buy into their core concept of a sprawling adventure, accept it for what it is and understand that the whole idea is the game's more about the journey than the destination. It wants you to interact with the world, so it removes fast travel. It wants you to collaborate with other players, so it subs out fun companions for player-created party members. It wants you to engage with its quests, so it makes them easily failable and often gated by time limits. It's a game with intent, and it's not bothered if you don't like that.
And I think that largely makes for a unique experience that's well worth at least dabbling in to see if it clicks with you. For me, it definitely did. Dragon's Dogma 2's best quality is that it's not about flashy game mechanics or turning everything into a stimulation factory. It wants you to meaningfully engage with it, and so focuses on well-built, inherently fun systems that are great to experiment with. The physics system and the climbing mechanics are dope, and learning how to use them in tandem to take down colossal enemies allows you to make your own big cinematic setpieces that are entirely organic. When you stumble across an ogre and a dragon slugging it out in the open world like some royalty-free Kong vs Godzilla movie, and you join in and start getting to work just as a griffin shows up out of nowhere and decides to yeet you halfway across the map, the whole thing just clicks into place and you fully get it.
But, unfortunately, a lot of its rigid core tenants make for a game that can be MEGA tedious. If you don't want me to use fast travel, why is walking around this world so frustrating? Why can I not walk for a single minute without having to murder an entire civilization of goblins? Why not give me a horse, or add some satisfying traversal methods for my vocation? Better yet, if you're going to lock fast-travel behind carts I have to pay for, make it so 9 times out of 10, the cart isn't just obliterated by a skeleton leaning against it for two seconds. Genuinely, I'd love to see the ox cart company's insurance plan, cause those motherfuckers can't go a day without seven carts exploding.
If you want me to team up with players through the pawn system, give them some damn sauce. Let me customize as much about their personality as their appearance. If side quests are so important, make them more fleshed out, interesting and worth completing, because half of them are just some girl saying "hey, can you bring me some flowers" and then you go to a quest marker, bring them back and she goes "oh cool, thanks man."
It's funny, because when you reach the endgame, it kind of feels like Dragon's Dogma finally hits the nail on the head of what this could've been with a little more refinement and less focus on an arbitrary and very messy story. It throws you into a visually interesting world with some general objectives you need to complete before an invisible timer hits zero, and you know what, it was the most fun I had in the entire game. It stops playing the disapproving parent who's banned me from fast travelling for being too TikTok-brained and just says, here's a truckload of teleportation stones, some bosses that you can fight in any order and some general quests you can complete in between. That's how you make me want to explore. Not by having my generic ChatGPT AI companion hound me to go find a chest with some grass in it because he's super gassed he found it in a random other player's game.
And so, yes. Dragon's Dogma 2 isn't going to be for everyone. Generally, my recommendation kinda goes like this: If you hate monotony, you're going to detest every minute. If you want a big RPG that values exploration over everything else, you're going to fuck with it hard. I think I fall somewhere in between personally, but overall, I had a fun ol' time. It's kind of hard to hate a game where wizard Lizzo can just show up out of nowhere, join your party, get a rampant dragon disease and then go on a murder spree in your local city, forcing you to walk around reviving every single person for hours on end.
As for everything around your chance meetings with The Rock, Dragon's Dogma 2 is such a tough game to weigh up, because I completely appreciate and quite like how Capcom had a distinct creative vision and didn't budge on it in favour of ease of access. As my film teacher told me back in a uni seminar: "Never judge anything on what you want it to be. Judge it on what it is." And for better or worse, this is Capcom asking you to buy into their core concept of a sprawling adventure, accept it for what it is and understand that the whole idea is the game's more about the journey than the destination. It wants you to interact with the world, so it removes fast travel. It wants you to collaborate with other players, so it subs out fun companions for player-created party members. It wants you to engage with its quests, so it makes them easily failable and often gated by time limits. It's a game with intent, and it's not bothered if you don't like that.
And I think that largely makes for a unique experience that's well worth at least dabbling in to see if it clicks with you. For me, it definitely did. Dragon's Dogma 2's best quality is that it's not about flashy game mechanics or turning everything into a stimulation factory. It wants you to meaningfully engage with it, and so focuses on well-built, inherently fun systems that are great to experiment with. The physics system and the climbing mechanics are dope, and learning how to use them in tandem to take down colossal enemies allows you to make your own big cinematic setpieces that are entirely organic. When you stumble across an ogre and a dragon slugging it out in the open world like some royalty-free Kong vs Godzilla movie, and you join in and start getting to work just as a griffin shows up out of nowhere and decides to yeet you halfway across the map, the whole thing just clicks into place and you fully get it.
But, unfortunately, a lot of its rigid core tenants make for a game that can be MEGA tedious. If you don't want me to use fast travel, why is walking around this world so frustrating? Why can I not walk for a single minute without having to murder an entire civilization of goblins? Why not give me a horse, or add some satisfying traversal methods for my vocation? Better yet, if you're going to lock fast-travel behind carts I have to pay for, make it so 9 times out of 10, the cart isn't just obliterated by a skeleton leaning against it for two seconds. Genuinely, I'd love to see the ox cart company's insurance plan, cause those motherfuckers can't go a day without seven carts exploding.
If you want me to team up with players through the pawn system, give them some damn sauce. Let me customize as much about their personality as their appearance. If side quests are so important, make them more fleshed out, interesting and worth completing, because half of them are just some girl saying "hey, can you bring me some flowers" and then you go to a quest marker, bring them back and she goes "oh cool, thanks man."
It's funny, because when you reach the endgame, it kind of feels like Dragon's Dogma finally hits the nail on the head of what this could've been with a little more refinement and less focus on an arbitrary and very messy story. It throws you into a visually interesting world with some general objectives you need to complete before an invisible timer hits zero, and you know what, it was the most fun I had in the entire game. It stops playing the disapproving parent who's banned me from fast travelling for being too TikTok-brained and just says, here's a truckload of teleportation stones, some bosses that you can fight in any order and some general quests you can complete in between. That's how you make me want to explore. Not by having my generic ChatGPT AI companion hound me to go find a chest with some grass in it because he's super gassed he found it in a random other player's game.
And so, yes. Dragon's Dogma 2 isn't going to be for everyone. Generally, my recommendation kinda goes like this: If you hate monotony, you're going to detest every minute. If you want a big RPG that values exploration over everything else, you're going to fuck with it hard. I think I fall somewhere in between personally, but overall, I had a fun ol' time. It's kind of hard to hate a game where wizard Lizzo can just show up out of nowhere, join your party, get a rampant dragon disease and then go on a murder spree in your local city, forcing you to walk around reviving every single person for hours on end.
2019
Out and out a masterpiece. Well and truly. I've always said a five-star rating doesn't mean a game is perfect; nothing is. It means it's perfect at what it's trying to accomplish. And that's this game to a tee. It's just 100 hours of phenomenal storytelling, elite characters, thoughtful worlds, UNREAL music, sublime turn-based combat and, most importantly, heart. All around, it's the kind of experience that's unbelievably special; just the culmination of years of Atlus making some of the best RPGs ever and finishing things off with a bang.
And as I mentioned, I really don't think it's flawless by any means. The pacing is janky as hell at points, locking you into these infinitely long, linear story segments between each main mission where all the free time aspects are locked off and you just endure all the characters waffling on about the same plot details for like two hours. The Royal content, which I hadn't played up to now, has some of Atlus' best writing yet, finally fleshes out Goro and has a top-notch villain, but it comes so late that it kinda feels like its wrestling with the original conclusion considering it introduces the THIRD mysterious final big bad in a row that forces the team to come together for a "one last job" final stand. And dear god, Morgana is still like my fucking prison warden, chatting mad shit at me from my bag about everything I haven't done yet.
But that stuff is kind of just part of Persona 5's charm in a way. It's made by a team that had a set goal; they wanted to make a gargantuan adventure which bonded you to this world and these characters in a way most RPGs simply can't. And they ate that shit up. Better than that, they ate that shit up TWICE. Royal is the best way to experience this world and hang out with these characters, and it leaves things in a much more final state than the original.
But to save you all from the 8,000 words I could write about how goddamn saucy this whole package is, all you need to know is that it's one of the best games ever made by one of the best developers of all time. It's that rare, once-in-a-generation experience that reminds you why you fell in love with video games in the first place, and I'd put up with Morgana yapping about all the Mementos Requests I haven't done for the rest of my life if it meant I could spend another 100 hours shooting the shit with its cast of goofy-ass dudes. Really, just a giga-chad of an RPG and the peak of what they can be when made right.
And as I mentioned, I really don't think it's flawless by any means. The pacing is janky as hell at points, locking you into these infinitely long, linear story segments between each main mission where all the free time aspects are locked off and you just endure all the characters waffling on about the same plot details for like two hours. The Royal content, which I hadn't played up to now, has some of Atlus' best writing yet, finally fleshes out Goro and has a top-notch villain, but it comes so late that it kinda feels like its wrestling with the original conclusion considering it introduces the THIRD mysterious final big bad in a row that forces the team to come together for a "one last job" final stand. And dear god, Morgana is still like my fucking prison warden, chatting mad shit at me from my bag about everything I haven't done yet.
But that stuff is kind of just part of Persona 5's charm in a way. It's made by a team that had a set goal; they wanted to make a gargantuan adventure which bonded you to this world and these characters in a way most RPGs simply can't. And they ate that shit up. Better than that, they ate that shit up TWICE. Royal is the best way to experience this world and hang out with these characters, and it leaves things in a much more final state than the original.
But to save you all from the 8,000 words I could write about how goddamn saucy this whole package is, all you need to know is that it's one of the best games ever made by one of the best developers of all time. It's that rare, once-in-a-generation experience that reminds you why you fell in love with video games in the first place, and I'd put up with Morgana yapping about all the Mementos Requests I haven't done for the rest of my life if it meant I could spend another 100 hours shooting the shit with its cast of goofy-ass dudes. Really, just a giga-chad of an RPG and the peak of what they can be when made right.
I sighed like a Dad who's just been told their delinquent son has flunked all his exams again after playing three hours of this, getting back into the world, reinvesting in arguably the greatest RPG party ever and embarking on my adventure, then leaving the Chocobo Stable and fucking Chadley showed up. Just that little blank smile, his monotone AI voice, the way he can't seem to have a conversation that doesn't last three minutes longer than it has any right to.
The harbinger of every element of these remakes I hate in the form of this goody-two-shoes ten-year-old robot child. He asked me if I remember him, and I purposefully selected "no" just to fuck with him and make him feel bad. Was it petty, yes, but he got his revenge by calling me every 10 minutes while I was doing literally anything in the open world and holding me hostage in a cutscene as he explained every single goddamn activity I will never make the time to complete. Doesn't matter how many sequels, DLC chapters, or spin-offs they make; I know I'm destined to be haunted by Chadley and his inability to deliver concise information for the rest of my life.
...anyway, yeah, the game's pretty good.
The harbinger of every element of these remakes I hate in the form of this goody-two-shoes ten-year-old robot child. He asked me if I remember him, and I purposefully selected "no" just to fuck with him and make him feel bad. Was it petty, yes, but he got his revenge by calling me every 10 minutes while I was doing literally anything in the open world and holding me hostage in a cutscene as he explained every single goddamn activity I will never make the time to complete. Doesn't matter how many sequels, DLC chapters, or spin-offs they make; I know I'm destined to be haunted by Chadley and his inability to deliver concise information for the rest of my life.
...anyway, yeah, the game's pretty good.
Another sad live-service joint where you can tell a studio that specialises in phenomenal single-player games was forced to make something more "mass-appealing" by a publisher who doesn't even remotely understand what makes them tick. As a massive fan of the Arkham games, you can see the ingredients to make something baller were here. It looks great, the motion capture is second to none and, early on, there are moments of cinematic storytelling that make you almost forget that this is just another live-service looter shooter. I played the first hour or so (which is mostly just full-on Rocksteady-caliber storytelling) and actually was quite enjoying it.
And then the story gives way to reams of repetitive, unfulfilling missions that revolve around the same five structures, meaningless loot that's more about stats than fun, and setting up an endgame that's entirely focused on grinding with no useful rewards. It sucks to see a studio that is so unbelievably talented at making rich worlds filled with brilliant blockbuster stories and tight combat work on something that feels so hollow. But what's worse is that, beneath it all, you can see how this might've worked.
A co-op Suicide Squad game that focused in on story and some Arkham-style setpieces could've been great. A single-player Batman or Superman game set in Metropolis after the Justice League were corrupted by Braniac could've been great. Instead, this just strips Rocksteady of everything that makes them such a terrific studio to try and shake 15 quid out of my pockets for a new Harley Quinn hairstyle.
And then the story gives way to reams of repetitive, unfulfilling missions that revolve around the same five structures, meaningless loot that's more about stats than fun, and setting up an endgame that's entirely focused on grinding with no useful rewards. It sucks to see a studio that is so unbelievably talented at making rich worlds filled with brilliant blockbuster stories and tight combat work on something that feels so hollow. But what's worse is that, beneath it all, you can see how this might've worked.
A co-op Suicide Squad game that focused in on story and some Arkham-style setpieces could've been great. A single-player Batman or Superman game set in Metropolis after the Justice League were corrupted by Braniac could've been great. Instead, this just strips Rocksteady of everything that makes them such a terrific studio to try and shake 15 quid out of my pockets for a new Harley Quinn hairstyle.
2024
Atlus, you beautiful bastards, you've done it again. I played Persona 3 FES last year and liked it, but felt it was hard to go back to after Persona 4 and 5 tweaked and finessed the formula so perfectly in the years following its release. And almost like these absolute chads were responding to me specifically, they said here you go lil' buddy, here's literally exactly what you want: Persona 3 but it's Persona 5 level quality. And goddamn it, this whole thing is just immaculate. It looks incredible, the music is god-tier, the UI is visual candy and the game plays like an absolute dream.
And when you have all that stuff in place, every element that worked about the original Persona 3 just cooks so much harder. You get the best Persona story of the lot, with this genuinely beautiful parable about fearing death and how facing it head-on is the only way to truly live. You get a bunch of great characters who you genuinely fall in love with over 100 hours (except Kenji, Keisuke and the Gourmet King, who are still the utter definition of a nightmare blunt rotation). And Tartarus, which was tedious as hell in the original, is now streamlined into a very manageable and fun gameplay loop. Hell, I've never given a shit about the series' fusion mechanics, but this one had me glueing together all my little magical buddies so I could build literal Satan.
Genuinely, Atlus are just god-like when it comes to this series; Persona is maybe the most consistently phenomenal, must-play RPG franchise around and, with this, they just cement that no one does it quite like them. They just make the impossible possible. They introduce an idea and you go, eh, why would that work? But you suddenly realise the bizarre Frankensteining of a quirky high-school simulator and a tactical pocket monster battler just somehow clicks, and it's all because they are unprecedented and making innocuous ideas into the most compelling mechanics possible. And that's largely because they're so good at writing loveable characters and goofy but strangely investing storylines to go with them.
These games always just reignite my love and passion for playing games. Now I'm at the elderly age of... checks notes... 26 and have made a career out of having to play games every day, it's rare I'll sit and play a 100 RPG just for funsies. But P3 Reload is the kind of experience that detests the idea of filling 100 hours for the sake of filling 100 hours. It's always switched on, telling a new story, giving you some new thing to pursue or actively rewarding the time you've invested with meaningful character moments or arcs. Yes, I think it's a bit of a waste to make a P3 remake without adding the FeMC route or The Answer expansion, but for what's here, this is another must-play RPG from what might be my favourite RPG franchise ever.
And when you have all that stuff in place, every element that worked about the original Persona 3 just cooks so much harder. You get the best Persona story of the lot, with this genuinely beautiful parable about fearing death and how facing it head-on is the only way to truly live. You get a bunch of great characters who you genuinely fall in love with over 100 hours (except Kenji, Keisuke and the Gourmet King, who are still the utter definition of a nightmare blunt rotation). And Tartarus, which was tedious as hell in the original, is now streamlined into a very manageable and fun gameplay loop. Hell, I've never given a shit about the series' fusion mechanics, but this one had me glueing together all my little magical buddies so I could build literal Satan.
Genuinely, Atlus are just god-like when it comes to this series; Persona is maybe the most consistently phenomenal, must-play RPG franchise around and, with this, they just cement that no one does it quite like them. They just make the impossible possible. They introduce an idea and you go, eh, why would that work? But you suddenly realise the bizarre Frankensteining of a quirky high-school simulator and a tactical pocket monster battler just somehow clicks, and it's all because they are unprecedented and making innocuous ideas into the most compelling mechanics possible. And that's largely because they're so good at writing loveable characters and goofy but strangely investing storylines to go with them.
These games always just reignite my love and passion for playing games. Now I'm at the elderly age of... checks notes... 26 and have made a career out of having to play games every day, it's rare I'll sit and play a 100 RPG just for funsies. But P3 Reload is the kind of experience that detests the idea of filling 100 hours for the sake of filling 100 hours. It's always switched on, telling a new story, giving you some new thing to pursue or actively rewarding the time you've invested with meaningful character moments or arcs. Yes, I think it's a bit of a waste to make a P3 remake without adding the FeMC route or The Answer expansion, but for what's here, this is another must-play RPG from what might be my favourite RPG franchise ever.
Kind of comes across as Konami trying to recapture the success of PT but not truly understanding what made that game tick. It's clear the success of Kojima's take on the franchise is what's driving them, but the real issue is their modern interpretation of the series just doesn't feel haunted enough. What made PT so great is that it was this completely random piece of software that seemingly just appeared out of the blue; like a cursed tape you weren't supposed to watch. It was so atmospheric and unsettling, and by the time anything actually happens, it so effectively immersed you into this feeling that you're seeing something you're not supposed to that the scare hits 90 times harder.
By comparison, this is just leading you through a much less interesting version of that concept where the atmosphere is never allowed to build and you're never given the chance to unravel what's going on because the main character is just constantly telling you what to think, what the message is and why you should feel a certain way about it. I have no issue with Silent Hill using its concept to tackle modern issues, and on the surface, mental health and social media aren't a bad fit for Silent Hill. I'm sure if the team had some less cliche ways of presenting that and tweaked the atmosphere and tension so it was more like Silent Hill 2, it could cook.
But this needed to drop me in the situation, take the stablisers off and let pure dread do the talking. There are tons of other issues, including the forced chase segments, the weird text chains that slow everything down and the fact that the story is dealing with very heavy, sensitive subject matter like a jackhammer hammering a nail. But the main thing is it's so heavy-handed and filled with so much dialogue that you can never just immerse yourself into the horror, and by extension, it's not scary.
By comparison, this is just leading you through a much less interesting version of that concept where the atmosphere is never allowed to build and you're never given the chance to unravel what's going on because the main character is just constantly telling you what to think, what the message is and why you should feel a certain way about it. I have no issue with Silent Hill using its concept to tackle modern issues, and on the surface, mental health and social media aren't a bad fit for Silent Hill. I'm sure if the team had some less cliche ways of presenting that and tweaked the atmosphere and tension so it was more like Silent Hill 2, it could cook.
But this needed to drop me in the situation, take the stablisers off and let pure dread do the talking. There are tons of other issues, including the forced chase segments, the weird text chains that slow everything down and the fact that the story is dealing with very heavy, sensitive subject matter like a jackhammer hammering a nail. But the main thing is it's so heavy-handed and filled with so much dialogue that you can never just immerse yourself into the horror, and by extension, it's not scary.
I'm not a mascot horror guy, but Poppy Playtime has always been one of the rare ones that I think works. Like, yes, it too is just a brightly coloured vehicle to sell ugly-ass toys to kids (there's literally a dude in the middle of the city I live in that peddles knock-off Huggy Wuggys to people from a little cart, and I think that's the moment I realised we'd be doomed to see this blue bastard for the rest of our lives), but the devs have a simple, effective vision. Creepy, Goose-Bumps-esque stories with some mystery, fun set pieces and high production values. They aren't out here aiming to make exceptional video games. They're out here making heavily scripted rollercoaster rides that largely play themselves but are good fun considering you're going through in one sitting.
But I feel they kinda bit off more than they could chew with this one; the whole thing is just kind of a mess. For the majority of the runtime, it's just playing through boring puzzles and unintuitive gameplay segments which you can tell it knows are unintuitive because you have this whiny ass little kid in your ear overexplaining everything. I feel like the idea was to focus more on gameplay, but Poppy Playtime's gameplay has never really had that much longevity. It's usually just grab a green thing and use it to power up another green thing. In the other episodes, it's to give you downtime between the scary spaghetti lady chasing you, but here, there is barely a spaghetti lady at all, so it's all downtime.
The bread and butter of this series is the scripted setpieces. You've spent a year being like, there's this massive cat guy wandering around that's gonna pull your bones out and play the drums with them. How come I don't get to interact with this dude until the last 20 minutes? Why am I fighting him in the world's most convoluted final boss encounter, where the scariest part is having to telepathically link myself with the devs to figure out what they actually want me to do?
As always, production values: top notch. Looks great, sounds great, animations are... mostly great (sometimes there's a little 'ooooo, spooky moment' but then the spooky thing will just disappear because you didn't stop and admire it for five seconds). But I came for the spooky cat and I got an endless supply of boring puzzles, so maybe give me more spooky cat next time.
But I feel they kinda bit off more than they could chew with this one; the whole thing is just kind of a mess. For the majority of the runtime, it's just playing through boring puzzles and unintuitive gameplay segments which you can tell it knows are unintuitive because you have this whiny ass little kid in your ear overexplaining everything. I feel like the idea was to focus more on gameplay, but Poppy Playtime's gameplay has never really had that much longevity. It's usually just grab a green thing and use it to power up another green thing. In the other episodes, it's to give you downtime between the scary spaghetti lady chasing you, but here, there is barely a spaghetti lady at all, so it's all downtime.
The bread and butter of this series is the scripted setpieces. You've spent a year being like, there's this massive cat guy wandering around that's gonna pull your bones out and play the drums with them. How come I don't get to interact with this dude until the last 20 minutes? Why am I fighting him in the world's most convoluted final boss encounter, where the scariest part is having to telepathically link myself with the devs to figure out what they actually want me to do?
As always, production values: top notch. Looks great, sounds great, animations are... mostly great (sometimes there's a little 'ooooo, spooky moment' but then the spooky thing will just disappear because you didn't stop and admire it for five seconds). But I came for the spooky cat and I got an endless supply of boring puzzles, so maybe give me more spooky cat next time.
For a while, this was my white whale game. I'd come back to it like once a year, restart it, play five hours, get to the Quiet bit, crack up at how utterly ridiculous Quiet running around warzones in a bikini is and then immediately lose track of what was happening and dip out to something else. And so for a long time, I never got why so many people said it was deeply affected by Hideo leaving Konami. Now I've beaten it, ya'll were right. This whole thing is weird as hell, and not in a normal, Hideo is kind of a strange dude sorta way. The gameplay is great, but the whole thing feels like it's sorely missing a huge chunk of... I dunno... something.
I definitely don't hate it. For Kojima, this feels like him listening to feedback about how it isn't always good when the ghosts of a million film students possess his body, and he starts jamming exposition bombs and agonisingly long feature-length cutscenes into every level. It's been said a million times, but he focuses fully on players organically telling their own stories through gameplay in Phantom Pain, and the result becomes the definitive Metal Gear game from an actual video game standpoint. The other games are clunky as hell, but here you actually feel like the giga-chad, badass, elite soldier that every generic masked thug stuck guarding a base would piss themselves seeing in the flesh.
The way you can approach bases with your own tactics and strategies makes the game such a joy to experiment with, and I love how it focuses on improvisation rather than perfection. Everyone has that story where they Infiltrated a high-security base and saved a prisoner, only to be spotted while escaping, forcing them to flip around and take out three dudes with pinpoint precision before they can sound an alarm, and that's a credit to how good this is at facilitating those moments. Everything feels so smooth and intuitive, to the point where if you're sat thinking "Huh, I wonder if I could do that," the chances are you almost certainly can.
But the way Phantom Pain is structured and the actual story itself just feels unfinished. So much is technically happening in its two chapters, but it's so incohesive and strangely placed. At first, I thought that was going to be a cool design decision. Chapter 1 is such a standard Metal Gear story, with a cartoonishly evil villain and a big final boss (which FYI, was dope as hell), so I figured Chapter 2 would be the moment you realise the after-effects of that sort of fight. Everyone on board for this big, patriotic mission is in it for their own gain; they're all villains feeding off Miller and Big Boss' need for revenge. Considering Kojima's best stuff has always been his anti-war storylines, that's an incredibly smart way to wrap up the series, making a point about how conflict only services the powerful's personal agendas. But no, it's really just that the story is a jumbled clump of ideas with nothing tying them together.
There are 38 true story missions, but a good 25 of them are standard base infiltration missions that don't particularly add anything to the story. They recast David Hayter and slotted in Kiefer Sutherland, which is a weird decision, but then they barely give his Big Boss anything to say or really any personality of any kind. There are like a million story threads that are set up, and very few get any actual payoff, and if they do, it's usually in the most uninteresting, vague way possible. So much of this is just stuff happening and silly plot points that, even by Kojima's standards, are just ridiculous and nonsensical. There's no timeline where you can convince me that Quiet needs to be half-naked cause she breathes through her skin; Kojima was just being horny on main.
And the whole thing quickly becomes a chaotic experience. The gameplay is superb, but Big Boss is an absolutely elite character; dare I say it, he's a cooler, more compelling lead than Solid Snake. Considering we know this dude goes on to become an absolute bastard in the years leading up to the first Metal Gear games, this should've been Kojima's magnum opus; a story where we see a disillusioned war hero finally walk the path to hell paved with good intentions. And there are moments here where you see that vision. The quarantine level at the end of the game is some of Kojima's best work; just a haunting setpiece where the Boss is suddenly forced to face the truth that succeeding in your goal doesn't guarantee a happy ending.
But Konami's so desperately busy trying to create "woah, you won't see this coming" swerves that the whole thing quickly becomes an absolute mess. Outside of the true final mission, I don't know how much didn't make the cut, as there are so many plotlines here that get set up and then never talked about again, but what I do know is that you walk away wishing you had a culmination that was just a bit more satisfying. Also, the end twist is silly and I hate that to get it, you have to literally just replay the first mission, which is exceptionally slow. Yes Kojima, the first mission slapped at the beginning, but your grand finale shouldn't just be "yo, do you remember how much that first mission slapped? LET'S PLAY IT AGAIN."
I definitely don't hate it. For Kojima, this feels like him listening to feedback about how it isn't always good when the ghosts of a million film students possess his body, and he starts jamming exposition bombs and agonisingly long feature-length cutscenes into every level. It's been said a million times, but he focuses fully on players organically telling their own stories through gameplay in Phantom Pain, and the result becomes the definitive Metal Gear game from an actual video game standpoint. The other games are clunky as hell, but here you actually feel like the giga-chad, badass, elite soldier that every generic masked thug stuck guarding a base would piss themselves seeing in the flesh.
The way you can approach bases with your own tactics and strategies makes the game such a joy to experiment with, and I love how it focuses on improvisation rather than perfection. Everyone has that story where they Infiltrated a high-security base and saved a prisoner, only to be spotted while escaping, forcing them to flip around and take out three dudes with pinpoint precision before they can sound an alarm, and that's a credit to how good this is at facilitating those moments. Everything feels so smooth and intuitive, to the point where if you're sat thinking "Huh, I wonder if I could do that," the chances are you almost certainly can.
But the way Phantom Pain is structured and the actual story itself just feels unfinished. So much is technically happening in its two chapters, but it's so incohesive and strangely placed. At first, I thought that was going to be a cool design decision. Chapter 1 is such a standard Metal Gear story, with a cartoonishly evil villain and a big final boss (which FYI, was dope as hell), so I figured Chapter 2 would be the moment you realise the after-effects of that sort of fight. Everyone on board for this big, patriotic mission is in it for their own gain; they're all villains feeding off Miller and Big Boss' need for revenge. Considering Kojima's best stuff has always been his anti-war storylines, that's an incredibly smart way to wrap up the series, making a point about how conflict only services the powerful's personal agendas. But no, it's really just that the story is a jumbled clump of ideas with nothing tying them together.
There are 38 true story missions, but a good 25 of them are standard base infiltration missions that don't particularly add anything to the story. They recast David Hayter and slotted in Kiefer Sutherland, which is a weird decision, but then they barely give his Big Boss anything to say or really any personality of any kind. There are like a million story threads that are set up, and very few get any actual payoff, and if they do, it's usually in the most uninteresting, vague way possible. So much of this is just stuff happening and silly plot points that, even by Kojima's standards, are just ridiculous and nonsensical. There's no timeline where you can convince me that Quiet needs to be half-naked cause she breathes through her skin; Kojima was just being horny on main.
And the whole thing quickly becomes a chaotic experience. The gameplay is superb, but Big Boss is an absolutely elite character; dare I say it, he's a cooler, more compelling lead than Solid Snake. Considering we know this dude goes on to become an absolute bastard in the years leading up to the first Metal Gear games, this should've been Kojima's magnum opus; a story where we see a disillusioned war hero finally walk the path to hell paved with good intentions. And there are moments here where you see that vision. The quarantine level at the end of the game is some of Kojima's best work; just a haunting setpiece where the Boss is suddenly forced to face the truth that succeeding in your goal doesn't guarantee a happy ending.
But Konami's so desperately busy trying to create "woah, you won't see this coming" swerves that the whole thing quickly becomes an absolute mess. Outside of the true final mission, I don't know how much didn't make the cut, as there are so many plotlines here that get set up and then never talked about again, but what I do know is that you walk away wishing you had a culmination that was just a bit more satisfying. Also, the end twist is silly and I hate that to get it, you have to literally just replay the first mission, which is exceptionally slow. Yes Kojima, the first mission slapped at the beginning, but your grand finale shouldn't just be "yo, do you remember how much that first mission slapped? LET'S PLAY IT AGAIN."
There's a scene in this game where Snake infiltrates a weapons lab and stumbles into a Soviet Weapons Scientist. You're thinking, this man's the enemy! He's gonna rat us out! But no. Instead, like a drunk uncle on Christmas day, this bloke waffles on for about five minutes about all the weapons he's ever worked on and how he would never defect from his country, then makes an analogy where he gestures to his legs. Snake doesn't understand this analogy, and so responds: "nice shoes." The Soviet Scientist then decides to actively betray his allies and help Snake, and when asked why, he tells him it's because Snake was so nice about his shoes.
This exquisite scene is a great encapsulation of why Metal Gear Solid is the weirdest "must-play" franchise. You can never tell whether it's video games at the very highest form of artistic brilliance or the ramblings of a man who has no idea what the fuck is going on. And for so long, I fully believed the answer lay in camp B. I'll say it. I was a Hideo Kojima detractor. And in a lot of ways, I still think the dude isn't this angelic beacon of artistic hope sent down from the heavens to eradicate darkness and bless babies so they can grow up into eye-patch-wearing, bandana-clad angels. From my perspective, he's slowly realising he wants to make movies; every game he makes he's like, right, I'll do the innovative, boundary-breaking video game half for you if you let me make the other half a bunch of long-winded, nuance-devoid exposition dumps.
But goddamn it, when you play Snake Eater, you realise this man's vision is undeniable. No matter which way you slice it, Metal Gear Solid 3 is a masterpiece. It's just Hideo Kojima at the perfect level of reined-in, where his eccentric ideas are allowed to flourish into some of the coolest video game moments of all time and his storytelling is just ludicrous enough without pushing it to tell a dope-ass story that's distinctly his. This game just goes hard as shit. There's no two ways about it.
And that's because Kojima is constantly pushing the envelope of what the medium is capable of. Despite Snake Eater's 20th birthday looming on the horizon, there are so many systems and ideas in here that would be heralded if they came out today. Destroying enemy ration supplies makes soldiers weaker, allowing you to take them down faster. Knocking out enemies creates opportunities to devise genius traps, as you lure in foes trying to wake them up. Hell, every boss fight has like ninety different ways you can exploit your opponent, one of which being a section in the mid-game where you can headshot one of the bosses directly after a cutscene and kill him before you ever meet him in combat.
Over 11 hours, this is just non-stop creative genius at its finest. The story pivots casually from Kojima-branded melodrama and silliness to emotional, cinematic showdowns like it's nothing. One minute, people are doing backflips on motorcycles and shooting electricity out of their hands despite the source of their powers literally never being explained, then the next a character is talking about the nature of honour and the frivolous purpose of war. The final boss fight is godlike video game storytelling; a thematic masterclass where two soldiers put everything on the line in a thematic clash of ideals and fists, then right after, there's a revolver spinning style-off, where two dudes just flex on each other for like five minutes. And somehow, some way, it all just kinda works.
And I'd be remiss without talking about how The End boss fight is an absolute all-timer. For everything this game just knocks out of the park, the coup de grace is this long bout of mental warfare, where Snake goes toe-to-toe with a dying sniper who wants one last hunt. I've never experienced a single boss fight with so many layers, as you fight a half-hour battle of endurance, slowly concocting strategies to outplay this carcass of an old man and deliver him a warrior's death while he absolutely fries your ass and roasts you.
The whole game is Kojima cooking on another level. And it genuinely confuses me how it winds up hooking you so effectively, because there are so many creative choices here that, in the moment, are frustrating. The movement is mega clunky, the first-person camera is a nightmare and, my god, some of the dialogue sections are infinitely long while saying absolutely nothing at all. Every time you save, you have to ring the most talkative woman on the planet, who just reads her laundry list of Letterbox reviews to you. Like, my dude, I'm going downstairs to eat dinner. I don't want your intricate take on From Russia with Love.
But the whole thing somehow coalesces into one of the coolest examples of what this medium can do. I think the original Metal Gear Solid is still the current height of Kojima's creative juices flowing; in my eyes, it's tighter, leaner and overall a better game. But this is Kojima's best story for sure and a game that belongs in the history books. Mainly because Snake's god-awful romance with Eva is truly legendary. Nothing in this world will ever top Eva hitting on Snake and him responding by offering her some of the disgusting burnt python he's been messily chowing down on for like three minutes.
This exquisite scene is a great encapsulation of why Metal Gear Solid is the weirdest "must-play" franchise. You can never tell whether it's video games at the very highest form of artistic brilliance or the ramblings of a man who has no idea what the fuck is going on. And for so long, I fully believed the answer lay in camp B. I'll say it. I was a Hideo Kojima detractor. And in a lot of ways, I still think the dude isn't this angelic beacon of artistic hope sent down from the heavens to eradicate darkness and bless babies so they can grow up into eye-patch-wearing, bandana-clad angels. From my perspective, he's slowly realising he wants to make movies; every game he makes he's like, right, I'll do the innovative, boundary-breaking video game half for you if you let me make the other half a bunch of long-winded, nuance-devoid exposition dumps.
But goddamn it, when you play Snake Eater, you realise this man's vision is undeniable. No matter which way you slice it, Metal Gear Solid 3 is a masterpiece. It's just Hideo Kojima at the perfect level of reined-in, where his eccentric ideas are allowed to flourish into some of the coolest video game moments of all time and his storytelling is just ludicrous enough without pushing it to tell a dope-ass story that's distinctly his. This game just goes hard as shit. There's no two ways about it.
And that's because Kojima is constantly pushing the envelope of what the medium is capable of. Despite Snake Eater's 20th birthday looming on the horizon, there are so many systems and ideas in here that would be heralded if they came out today. Destroying enemy ration supplies makes soldiers weaker, allowing you to take them down faster. Knocking out enemies creates opportunities to devise genius traps, as you lure in foes trying to wake them up. Hell, every boss fight has like ninety different ways you can exploit your opponent, one of which being a section in the mid-game where you can headshot one of the bosses directly after a cutscene and kill him before you ever meet him in combat.
Over 11 hours, this is just non-stop creative genius at its finest. The story pivots casually from Kojima-branded melodrama and silliness to emotional, cinematic showdowns like it's nothing. One minute, people are doing backflips on motorcycles and shooting electricity out of their hands despite the source of their powers literally never being explained, then the next a character is talking about the nature of honour and the frivolous purpose of war. The final boss fight is godlike video game storytelling; a thematic masterclass where two soldiers put everything on the line in a thematic clash of ideals and fists, then right after, there's a revolver spinning style-off, where two dudes just flex on each other for like five minutes. And somehow, some way, it all just kinda works.
And I'd be remiss without talking about how The End boss fight is an absolute all-timer. For everything this game just knocks out of the park, the coup de grace is this long bout of mental warfare, where Snake goes toe-to-toe with a dying sniper who wants one last hunt. I've never experienced a single boss fight with so many layers, as you fight a half-hour battle of endurance, slowly concocting strategies to outplay this carcass of an old man and deliver him a warrior's death while he absolutely fries your ass and roasts you.
The whole game is Kojima cooking on another level. And it genuinely confuses me how it winds up hooking you so effectively, because there are so many creative choices here that, in the moment, are frustrating. The movement is mega clunky, the first-person camera is a nightmare and, my god, some of the dialogue sections are infinitely long while saying absolutely nothing at all. Every time you save, you have to ring the most talkative woman on the planet, who just reads her laundry list of Letterbox reviews to you. Like, my dude, I'm going downstairs to eat dinner. I don't want your intricate take on From Russia with Love.
But the whole thing somehow coalesces into one of the coolest examples of what this medium can do. I think the original Metal Gear Solid is still the current height of Kojima's creative juices flowing; in my eyes, it's tighter, leaner and overall a better game. But this is Kojima's best story for sure and a game that belongs in the history books. Mainly because Snake's god-awful romance with Eva is truly legendary. Nothing in this world will ever top Eva hitting on Snake and him responding by offering her some of the disgusting burnt python he's been messily chowing down on for like three minutes.
After playing Baldur's Gate 3 last year, I remember telling one of my mates: "I have no idea where this came from? Larian just showed up and was like, I'm the greatest RPG developer ever, here's a certified godlike banger, goodbye." Having now rolled credits on Divinity 2, it turns out I'm just stupid. Larian's been cooking for years but my debilitating fear of top-down cameras and ability hotbars as long as Route 66 meant I completely avoided it. Divinity 2: Original Sin is essentially Baldur's Gate 3's older, slightly nerdier brother, and by extension, it's another boundary-breaking master class in how to make ginormous, sprawling experiences that are still somehow rewarding, reactive and quality-rich. And when I say quality-rich, I mean unfathomably quality-rich.
This game is like 80 hours long. It's just filled to the brim with stuff. It's one of those games that I have to dig deep, speak mystical incantations and summon my relentless 13-year-old, gremlin-brained self to have the patience, stamina and sheer lack of self-preservation to get through in a timely manner. And somehow, while offering such a vast spread of stuff to engage with, nothing in here ever really feels like it's scraping the bottom of the barrel. It's never just serving you up content. It's mission after mission of main event, must-play stuff, largely because everything from the side quests and the companion missions to the core story sections and even random NPC encounters are intertwined. Every quest somehow links into the larger story, every character has something relevant to say and every corner is filled with something worth investigating.
Having played this and Baldur's Gate 3 only a few months apart, it's wild to me how good Larian is at spinning these kinds of stories. They're unparalleled at setting up a huge world that you can explore freely while still somehow making every element you interact with feel like it's part of one, seamlessly unified narrative. Their games are labours of love, and Divinity 2 is no exception. It's just a really saucy, well-made, video-game-ass video game.
And that extends far beyond the story. The way it doesn't establish arbitrary rules regarding how you play or solve a situation. The way combat is a puzzle that challenges you to think outside the box. The way it never holds your hand or tells you what to do but slyly always somehow guides you back to your objective.
And yes, I don't think it's quite as good as BG3. It's more tedious to play, the inventory management is hellish, and act 4 is filled with bullshit gimmick fights and puzzles that are more annoying than fun. The difficulty spikes are also ROUGH at points. The tutorial area's my personal favourite, because it's like, oh here's some slugs to fight. Really learn the game and all that. Then it randomly just decides it's tired of all the loser baby shit now, and spawns in giant alligators with teleporting magic who will absolutely push your shit in for no reason at all.
And don't even get me started on the many, many sections where you get a potato-brained AI teammate you have to protect. Every single one of these goofy lil bastards will single-handedly pull off the most elaborately stupid manoeuvres you've ever seen, to the point where you wonder if they're throwing on purpose and you're gonna pop up in a YouTube prank video in two months' time. They'll actively cancel out every big-damage-set-up you're currently putting together, and then after they inevitably die, every NPC you meet will just chat mad shit about what a terrible person you are for not reloading every turn 9 times to protect them from their own stupidity.
But this is still an absolute banger from a studio that I'm slowly learning is incapable of dropping the ball. Considering the talks before Baldur's Gate 3 were that Divinity 3 could be the next big project on the docket for Larian, I'm pretty gassed to see what these dudes could do with the IP now they've managed to launch arguably one of the best RPGs ever made. Gonna hazard a guess that it'll feature way more horny vampire dudes and shapeshifting grizzly bear sex...
This game is like 80 hours long. It's just filled to the brim with stuff. It's one of those games that I have to dig deep, speak mystical incantations and summon my relentless 13-year-old, gremlin-brained self to have the patience, stamina and sheer lack of self-preservation to get through in a timely manner. And somehow, while offering such a vast spread of stuff to engage with, nothing in here ever really feels like it's scraping the bottom of the barrel. It's never just serving you up content. It's mission after mission of main event, must-play stuff, largely because everything from the side quests and the companion missions to the core story sections and even random NPC encounters are intertwined. Every quest somehow links into the larger story, every character has something relevant to say and every corner is filled with something worth investigating.
Having played this and Baldur's Gate 3 only a few months apart, it's wild to me how good Larian is at spinning these kinds of stories. They're unparalleled at setting up a huge world that you can explore freely while still somehow making every element you interact with feel like it's part of one, seamlessly unified narrative. Their games are labours of love, and Divinity 2 is no exception. It's just a really saucy, well-made, video-game-ass video game.
And that extends far beyond the story. The way it doesn't establish arbitrary rules regarding how you play or solve a situation. The way combat is a puzzle that challenges you to think outside the box. The way it never holds your hand or tells you what to do but slyly always somehow guides you back to your objective.
And yes, I don't think it's quite as good as BG3. It's more tedious to play, the inventory management is hellish, and act 4 is filled with bullshit gimmick fights and puzzles that are more annoying than fun. The difficulty spikes are also ROUGH at points. The tutorial area's my personal favourite, because it's like, oh here's some slugs to fight. Really learn the game and all that. Then it randomly just decides it's tired of all the loser baby shit now, and spawns in giant alligators with teleporting magic who will absolutely push your shit in for no reason at all.
And don't even get me started on the many, many sections where you get a potato-brained AI teammate you have to protect. Every single one of these goofy lil bastards will single-handedly pull off the most elaborately stupid manoeuvres you've ever seen, to the point where you wonder if they're throwing on purpose and you're gonna pop up in a YouTube prank video in two months' time. They'll actively cancel out every big-damage-set-up you're currently putting together, and then after they inevitably die, every NPC you meet will just chat mad shit about what a terrible person you are for not reloading every turn 9 times to protect them from their own stupidity.
But this is still an absolute banger from a studio that I'm slowly learning is incapable of dropping the ball. Considering the talks before Baldur's Gate 3 were that Divinity 3 could be the next big project on the docket for Larian, I'm pretty gassed to see what these dudes could do with the IP now they've managed to launch arguably one of the best RPGs ever made. Gonna hazard a guess that it'll feature way more horny vampire dudes and shapeshifting grizzly bear sex...