I've been grappling with this game for a little over two years now, and I feel like throwing in the towel. The same thing would always happen: I'd open it every couple of months, play it from a day to a week, then I'd quit out of disinterest or pure repulsion. There is nothing here that I like. Lore is dumped in ungodly amounts, the prose is purple, the music sucks, the combat is micromanagement hell, companions are too flat, it looks ugly, backer NPCs are fucking EVERYWHERE and deliver nothing of value, and the story is boring.

Of course, you could pick any of the aforementioned elements and go "nuh uh, that was actually good!" and sure, you could do that. I think combat is the most easily defensible of my complaints: it's reactive, requires no pre-buffing, and forces you to use everybody and their abilities to best your foes. In-practice however, it felt like driving during rush hour - watching companions slap around enemies in place while stopping very frequently to cast new spells and abilities in the hopes of ending the encounter quicker - it's a dire equivalent to slowly inching your car up in traffic while you sit there, bored with nothing to do. What's most annoying is how by default companions stand slack-jawed after killing an enemy: there's a whole battlefield out there dickhead, go get some action! What the hell happened to auto-attack!

I don't like this game very much.

Not just the beat-em-up, the stealth oriented preying-upon-armed-goons angle was such an insanely COOKED creative choice to embody the caped crusader. Attractively gothic detectivism that turns into a reverse-survival delight through seismic punchy combos and techno-noir sleuthing. So tonally splendid you'd groove from the ceremonial pacing running from one villain showdown to the next and game over screens down to the badass slow walking, gets a bit formulaic with far too easily readable boss fights to the point of unchallenging linearity, still takes a conceptual blast of comic book roots through amazingly ominous sequencing including a mindbending Scarecrow that toys around videogame metaphysics to amusing effect and a toolbox of crafty sneaking made particularly priceless when seeing the last armed guard running around while panicking helplessly. Solid pacesetter.

"there's an elegance in the simplicity of a well-designed town"
-> "the clockwork efficiency of a bustling city can be strangely serene"
-> -> "we should completely abolish the very concept of personal automobiles."

* Played perfectly on Linux via Proton 7.0-6.

Dragon's Dogmeh

I feel like I've been collectively gaslit by the gaming world for the better part of a decade after finally getting to play Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen. Throughout the past eleven years post release, I'd heard of Dragon's Dogma as this legendary cult classic from Capcom that championed a great game filled with the Western approach to wizardry and fantasy. A process unlike myself, I bought DD before really looking into anything about how it played or what made people so excited for its incoming sequel. I figured that as a fan of Capcom's marquee titles and RPG's rich in scope and lore in general that I would take to it, but I did not. It's like ordering a Whopper because you thought you were going to get a succulent juicy hamburger like in the photo, but instead you got two patties enveloped in year old mayonnaise and someone's Burger King Foot Lettuce.

This is genuinely one of the worst looking games I've played, and I will go as far to say that playing Metal Gear Solid (a 1998 release) for the first time a year or two ago, I'd rather look at the four polygons that make up Otacon's face than half the characters in DD. Everyone looks so... off, a far cry from how great Capcom's facial and character design would look a few years down the line. In terms of the character elements of DD, the VA is real real real bad, which is unfortunate because there are some recognizable names, most notably David Lodge, but the title simply feels bad to listen to.

The narrative is... boring, effectively not existing until the latter half of the second act, and then materializing moreso in the third. Nothing really inspires you to care about this drab and boring world. Even Shadow of the Colossus, a game I absolutely despised at least looked more interesting and had more intrigue into its boneless landscape, Dragon's Dogma's world and capital city of Grandsys just kinda feel like Diet Water. For how much you have to run in this game, which is a lot, the world does little to nothing to engage with the player. Recycled enemies placed in locations just simply because the devs felt like they needed enemies, which breaks the rhythm of travel, made traversal feel worse than it already did. Because the devs don't believe in fast travel, something ultimately too convenient and useful, you have to run from point A to point B and then back to point A every time. This feels awful the first time you do it, and then the second time, and then the third time, and so on and so forth. Add into the mix that you're operating off of a scant stamina bar outside of hub worlds and your perception of getting anywhere in a reasonable amount of time crumbles to dust.

My real favorite part about Dragon's Dogma is how the damage is calculated. In most RPG's, and many games outside of the genre, you have a clear progression route for weapons and gear. You start weak and then upgrade your way to bigger and better items. In a game like Dark Souls for example, you have clear points in which you realize you should probably be levelling up your weapons, it's those moments where you're conceivably doing less damage to enemies and bosses than you feel like you should. You can still conquer any foe, but you have to put in more and more work when the world becomes stronger and your weapons relatively become weaker. In DD, your weapons at a certain point simply do not hurt the enemy. This concept is so laughably flawed that I found myself doing the Jackie Chan meme face from like fifteen years ago at my computer screen on multiple occasions. I get having a sign of "maybe you should upgrade your weapons" but getting into it with a group of bandits or goblins and slapping Sauron with a literal wet noodle that didn't even touch the health bar was incredibly bad game design.

I'm adding another miscellaneous complaint here about silent protagonism. I love having this emotional and lore heavy moment going on and my character is just standing there, mouth agape like she was waiting for a bowl of Golden Grahams with a little itty bitty scoop of milk included. For a game that relies upon the actions of your character and how they shape the entire world at large for the infinite future, there is a resounding lack of feeling important in Dragon's Dogma.

I can't recommend this game for anyone, and it solely (along with dev comments about fast travel) made me take any interest in the sequel away. It's ugly, it plays ugly, it's dated, it's Dragon's Dogmeh.

This game is Quadruple Ass.

I am so glad I don't have to play this at launch. I played the open beta and an even earlier version about 6 months ago. The two versions were identical, and all accounts are saying that nothing has changed from the beta and the final game meaning I can talk about what I played.

That is, to say, a baffling regression from the 11-year-old AC: Black Flag. A game where 95% of all actions are done in your ship, only stepping out at specific ports to buy items and accept menial side quests. A game where you do all of the combat, exploration, and SURVIVAL MECHANICS in your ship. A truly baffling game that is so clearly limping out of development hell, and you can see it in every aspect of the game.

You can tell this game was going to have some sort of story at some point, but it just.. doesn't. I sometimes complain about RPGs that have a main quest that feels like a bunch of side quests duct-taped together but that's LITERALLY what this is. There is no overarching storyline, no interesting characters, NOTHING. Just awkwardly presented window dressing for you to do boring open-world quests that either ask you to find some materials kill a couple of ships or some flavor of those two.

It doesn't help that the game doesn't look that great either. There are moments where the visuals look pleasing like during a sunset, but the closer you are to the visuals the crustier and less defined they look, made all the worse when you see just how BUGGY this game is. There were so many opportunities to fix the bugs from the previous times I've played this game and we got NOTHING. Audio bugs, visual bugs, frame drops, server crashes, game crashes, the whole shebang. I have reported at least 8 of the bugs that still show up in the final product of this $70 Quadruple-A game.

The open-world and survival bullshit is not frustrating, but it is incredibly monotonous. Ship controls are generally janky and the process of mining for loot, using it to upgrade your ship, and increasing your infamy level CAN be super rewarding if it weren't for several baffling design decisions like the fact that you have to do ALL of that in your ship. But the other big one is that.. that's the extent of the game.

It's not deep enough to invest all your time into, but it takes the place of an interesting story, actual quests that mean anything, out-of-ship exploration, all of it. While it may have some nice music and there are brief moments where the stars align and the gameplay loop is decently engaging and interesting, it just doesn't make up for everything that was lost. It's just an objectively lesser version of a PART of Black Flag, stuffed with microtransactions and shoved onto stores for $70. What an embarrassing turnout from Ubisoft.