Very good.
If this ever gets revived, or a remake gets made, i have a few suggestions on how to improve it.
Make it an open world rythym game, you are able to craft more than one guitar that gives you stat boosts during battles, the guitars would come in various tiers from "EPIC" to "LEGENDARY" i think this would genuinely impact the enjoyment of the game and give it more replay value.
Also make the story more mature, make the characters swear all the time to show you are commited to the vision of the new direction you are steering the series to, and last but not least, UNREAL ENGINE 5. Yea you best believe it would sell TRILLIONS of copies.

When it comes to the overall writting compared to the first game, its a massive downgrade. Possibly the earliest example you can find of the oversaturation of what has come to be known today as "millenial writting" (alot of your dialogue choices can be pretty much boiled down to being a goody two shoes, a snarky asshole for no reason, or some reference to american pop culture, the last one not even making that much sense considering your character is a tribal). However that is not to say that the overall writting in this game is bad, matter of fact i would dare to even say FO2 has some of the best world building i have ever seen in a game, each town being rich with lore and characters, each one having its own purpose and its own set of rules and culture, quests dont feel like a checkmark on your long list of chores as each one will affect the world around you immensely, its a kind of weight and purpose attached to how you interact with the game that you dont see alot of these days, and its honestly a feat how a game from 1998 managed to do all that. Incredibly ambitious. I still prefer the 1st one though >:)

I mean where do i even begin, its good but its also really bad? Like the fact that it even exists and is a huge mod in itself is a grand achievement but at the same time the whole "realistic" approach to progress is so ???, thankfully you can tweak all of that shit out, there are tons of add-ons out there and those are one of the main reasons of what makes this game so good, its the main modding platform for all 3 games but i still consider Call of chernobyl (or call of the zone) to be superior simply for the fact that its way more stable and crashes alot less, it just sucks that its not getting any support anymore.
>iron man mode
>1 extra life per day survived
yep, its gaming time

Overhated and underrated.
Definitely way more buggy than the other two games even with the unnoficial patch but its such an ambitious entry that nails so many aspects well, i had alot of fun with its more often than not bullshit difficulty and heat seeking grenades.
Honestly i really dont think there's a single bad STALKER game, yes we all know the x ray engine tends to work like an otherwordly artefact at times but the community has more than done their job of fixing and revamping so anyone can actually play these games.
Whether you prefer Shadow of Chernobyl's focus on the tense atmosphere, Clear Sky's faction warfare or Call of Pripyat's more slower paced survival horror gameplay, you cant deny each of the three main games bring something completely unique to the table, hence why i dont agree with the statement of "Dont bother with the main series! Just play Anomaly and other mods!", the main games offer so much variety already, why would you want to deny yourself from experiencing that?
Anyway, check out Tarkovsky's STALKER (1979) and Roadside picnic by the strugatsky brothers, they're both more than worth the read and the watch.

The tiktok writting room did ruin alot of the dialogue in this game, that much is true, all i know is that i just stopped giving a fuck halfway through the story and skipped everything.
Its a fun game when characters arent talking nonetheless, great level design coupled with intuitive, fast and brain scratching gameplay that rewards quick thinking, a very interesting concept for a game. The soundtrack by Machine Girl is another strong aspect of it too, its surprisingly varied and i dont think there was a single song i thought was trash, the soundtrack album for this game by itself is probably one of the artist's best works.
Just dont give so much of a shit about the story and you will be fine, you will notice what's exactly wrong with the dialogue in this game after playing it for an hour anyway lol

I tried, i really tried, but i genuinely wouldnt wish a playthrough of this on my worst enemy. I got to ending A and its staying that way at least for a long time, its a shame how much i hate playing the game but find the characters in it very interesting its too bad that there's so much "game" to drakengard that i feel everytime the game wants to reward me with a gorgeously animated cutscene im instantly cockblocked by that short term pleasure that is the story and immediately thrown back into the musou hell gameplay loop, there's alot of games that use the clunkiness of its controls as a way to elevate the story and even use it as a tool to make you feel a certain type of way, clunkiness can be deliberate, however drakengard's problems go way beyond this because you can genuinely see they were trying to do something unique and unlike any other rpg at the time but absolutely lacked the experience to even achieve that goal, so many weapons but you will be sticking yourself to 2 or 3 because you take 10 years to swing your weapon, every enemy no matter how big or small is always ten times faster than you, constant stunlocks, running around a huge map just looking for health pick ups because you cant use your dragon or else archers will shoot you down, the HORRIBLE camera, the completely useless dodge and guard button, restarting the whole stage once you die because there's no checkpoint system hence losing all your exp on both your character and weapons, it all adds up to a very frustrating and tiring experience, there's so many options and things to use but everything in the game works so actively against you that you NEED to purposefully break its own rules in order to win, the game itself is a victim of inexperience and over ambitiousness. It really could have been something phenomenal but there's just too many problems with it that distract me from enjoying the truly good stuff that it has to offer.
And with all of that said, fuck the game lol.