The praise this game gets confuses me. Breath of the Wild itself was nothing particularly earthshattering, and this game is just Breath of the Wild again. The problem is that what made BOTW novel is not anymore. We've seen this type of expansive open world before. It's not impressive anymore.

Of course, more land was added, but what was added is half as much of what was worth exploring in BOTW. The skylands mostly exist for dungeons and chests, nothing more or less. There isn't enough landmass up there aside from the tutorial zone for it to feel like a whole new second map. The underground zone too is stagnant, introducing an annoying gimmick with an intense difficulty spike that makes exploring it a pain.

I understand that the new building system is technically impressive. I'm a game designer, I see this. However, just because something is impressive does not make it good. The fusing system itself does allow for a bunch of interesting puzzles, but it's the same gimmick reused for every single puzzle. Eventually, this mechanic too has its novelty wear off, and unless you have a degree in engineering or loved Banjo Kazooie Nuts 'n' Bolts too much, you won't be getting a lot out of it. Yes, it is impressive what it can do and that it functions at all, and the possibilities available to players is commendable. It is a feat in design that a lot of these puzzles have more than one solution. Yet the game does not force you to create anything super outside the box. While I said most puzzles have more than one solution, it is made very clear that there is 1 "right" way and every other solution is a player either a: intentionally breaking the game or b: not understanding the signs. Nowhere are you challenged to make an army of inter-continental strike drones. You can, and those who know how will, but this will never cross the mind of the average player. Had this game pushed the bounds of what this system could do perhaps I could find more praise for it. But they don't, it exists as simply a gimmick to justify the long development time and to show off a shiny new tech thing.

With this games announcement we were promised a much heavier story focus. We got slightly more story than BOTW. What we got was quite decent honestly, but it was the same egghunt from before to find all these things. This time, you just couldn't skip the intro story segment. What they gave us simply didn't carry the weight it should.

The intense amount of continuity errors are annoying too. The game hints to why this may be, but it simply does not make sense. This game likes the idea of being a direct sequel while also being too caught up in trying to rewrite it's own history. Where are the Divine Beasts? Where are the Guardians? Where is the fucking Shrine of Resurrection? Things vital to BOTW have vanished without a trace and the game refuses to explain itself. It should have, anyone who played BOTW would have noticed all of this immediately. There needs to be a reason for the sudden disappearance, and I sure would have liked to see it totally explained than just hoping I will take "time travel shenanigans" as an answer.

Tears of the Kingdom looks at what Breath of the Wild did well and misunderstands why it did well. The open world was good because it was so vast and nothing like any game had had before. Now, we have the same open world with minor variance, causing less desire to explore, and the marvel of such a vast world is now lost since it was done before. Of course, following up something like BOTW would prove to be a monolithic task regardless. Instead of improving the things BOTW did wrong, like the dungeons and puzzles, to try and succeed it's predecessor, it simply creates new things that solve nothing. Tears of the Kingdom prays its rehashed world with new zones will be enough to entice the player for the same hundreds of hours we all dumped into BOTW.

This game will forever be shadowed by it's predecessor. Not because the task was too big, but because they did not focus on the right things. Perhaps if Breath of the Wild never released, this game would be far better. Instead, it is a expansion in disguise as a $70 videogame. Shameless.

Just like Polyphia, just because something is hard to do does not immediately justify a perfect score. In a vacuum, the new system is very good, but the game simply does not allow for it to be as good as it can be, and in an attempt to perfect this feat in physics engineering and simulation, Nintendo seemingly forgot about the other aspects that make a Zelda game a Zelda game.

i always figured my top 10 was solid. there's a bunch of games on there that maybe aren't masterpieces, maybe aren't the greatest stories ever told, but they're important to me in one way or another. i didn't think anything could breach it.

until now.

pentiment is now in my top 10 games of all time. when i think about portal 2 i think of it as a mathematically perfect game. pentiment is the artistic equivalent. this game is LITERALLY art.

i didn't think i could get so invested in the world of 16th century bavaria, where half the cast are devout members of a religion that i've never felt particularly close to, and yet the humanizing of each and every character from a lowly peasant to even the archdeacon is absolutely fascinating.

acts 1 and 2 both involve investigating a murder, and the time limit never felt too short, there's never too much pressure, but you're always faced with the choice of what lead to take, which person to investigate. and even afterwards, you're often given the question of "SHOULD this person be punished" because of new information you discover through your investigations.

speaking of discovering information, the ease with which certain things in this game can be revealed to you is sometimes dependent on which backgrounds you pick. sometimes these backgrounds don't do much other than add flavor text or a bit of extra depth to your character, but other times you can use your fluency in other languages to read different texts, whereas other people might need to find somebody to translate for them. furthermore, the sheer number of backgrounds you can choose from means any and all replays can be unique and interesting.

every playthrough is likely at least a bit different. my andreas was a hedonist who also studied medicine, but was also an excellent orator and logician. he could make reasonable inferences based on context and so despite his flirty, fun-loving demeanor, he was a force to be reckoned with intellectually. other people's andreases will be different, and even my own, second andreas will be different from my first. this was utterly fascinating, and led to tons of replayability.

normally i like to comb a game once i finish it for the first time, try to get every achievement possible. i started up pentiment to do just that and found myself... hesitant. i was skipping dialogue and, sure, it was slow, too, but... i didn't want to. i didn't want to just go through the motions, making random dialogue choices. i wanted to build a new andreas, one that made different choices from myself.

joshua sawyer once more proves himself a competent writer, who utilizes the historical lens to craft a unique, touching, beautiful story that floored me many times. highly recommend even if you're wary. give it a shot.

Marvel's Three Houses is an extremely fun game. Even with the 80+ hours of repetitive grinding for the 100%, I loved it all.

As someone who doesn't really know too much about Marvel, it was cool learning about their backstories and how they interacted, especially with the really good voice casting. A few of them got annoying though, mainly Iron Man since he never stop quipping.

The gameplay for the first three hours seemed like a knockoff mobile game to me at first, mainly because I was expecting XCOM but Marvel. As you get deeper though, so many more strategies become available and it becomes and extremely fun create your own solution puzzle game, which was interesting and really fun.

The overall story I thought was fine. Nothing that had me at the edge of my seat or made me actually feel for any of these characters, but it was interesting enough for me to not be bored.

Exploring the Abbey was a hit or miss at best, and borderline boring at worse. Sure, you can ogle at the pretty graphics, but all you were doing was just pressing E on everything and doing only four minigames.

Although I think the battle animations are gorgeous and flow so well (especially Blade's), but all other animation looked extremely poor. Facial animations were robotic, bodily animation were mainly just standing still, and overall just felt soulless.

My biggest gripe with the game falls with the level design. While I absolutely love using the environment to my advantage, I found out that most of the time, objects were aligned in an X shape, making level designs super repetitive. I would've liked to see more varied designs with more unique pit positions (like the Venom bell level) and more varied environment interactions. If they ever do a sequel (which won't happen unfortunately) I'd love their take on having different elevation.