I love the story and characters. The pacing and world building is near perfect. Voice delivery and timing can be off at times but overall the voice performances were charming and memorable. It's aged incredibly well. I was scared the gameplay was too basic at the beginning but it really opens up, the sphere upgrade system is genius. The end game encounters and bosses aggravated me a little but thanks to some cheesy tactics because of Rikku I got to the end with zero grinding required. The ending is something that will stick with me for a quite a while, it concluded beautifully. Recommended for any JRPG fan.

When i play Forbidden West, I can only think of one game. Ghost of Tsushima. Both, when they boil down to it, are the sort of basic crowdpleasers that there's been a million of over the past decade and that I don't usually tend to like, but made ridiculously pretty.

But I do like Ghost of Tsushima - quite a lot, actually. Whilst a big aspect of that is my love of the samurai cinema it's trying to ape, I do legitimately feel it takes the most generic of formulas and crafts a truly meaningful story and art piece out of it - whilst also being one of the best of it's class gameplay wise - And i've never felt that more than after playing forbidden west.

Because Forbidden west is just a pretty face. That's it. Whilst i will forever appreciate guerilla for crafting the robot dinosaurs that 10 year old me dreamed of, this is a weak as hell open world game. Not just in comparison to Tsushima from an artistic perspective, but also technically and mechanically, it's barely an evolution on it's predecessor.

And maybe that's the main issue. When horizon came out in 2017 I already felt it was a bit behind the curve on the open world adventure stuff, with a lot of bad UI, over reliance on crafting, a very weak core story and quests, and feeling a bit rough round the edges. But the aesthetic was really nice and the combat against the big robot dinosaurs was good.

Forbidden West, 5 years later, feels near identical to Zero Dawn. There's only minimal improvements to the game systems, and the whole thing has a level of polish way below the standard sony first party fare. These games have come to feel so polished over the last few years that even things like the movement, the climbing ribbed straight from uncharted like tsushima, feel notably worse. Doesnt help that at time of writing its full of technical issues and just lots of little quality of life imperfections that really add up like weird controls and overlong animations for picking up items which you do every 5 seconds.

But the real issue is that there's no innovation, no new hook to really make up for all this. Horizon Forbidden West is as about as iterative as a game could possibly be. It looks about the same, the story is the same bullshit as last time with basically the same boring characters and there's not even some really obvious gameplay feature they're trying to sell... it's just more of the same of a pretty open world game which is probably about a notch behind the average ubisoft trash mechanically at this point.

Even if you're really into this stuff, at this point I think you can do a lot better. If you're not, don't make this the one open world game you play a year. You can do better, and frankly, so can Guerilla.