Knocked this one out after the main body of Remake. On a gameplay front, this feels like a great next step for the base combat of the trilogy - Yuffie's options and movement are quicker and snappier, there's more depth to her ability and gear options, she's got several unique mechanics that feel really good to engage with. Her synergy moves with Sonon are pretty fun too and it's not hard to see why they doubled down on those for Rebirth. This is a tight 4 hours long so I can't even say there's really all THAT much combat but learning her felt a lot more rewarding than anyone in the main game. Couple of fights here put up a nice challenge even if the major bosses didn't require more than one try.

Story is pretty sparse since they had to fit it in the gaps of the Midgar plot, but it's alright I guess. The focus on Scarlet is the real smart move here since she's a ton of fun to watch and listen to - excited to see more of her in Rebirth. Sonon and Yuffie as characters are pretty appealing, Yuffie definitely makes her mark and I can imagine it would be weird to play Rebirth without this. The Deepground stuff is handled pretty well. Music is a real highlight, I enjoyed a lot of the tracks in this one.

Despite its length and relative high price if you didn't get it bundled with Intergrade, this feels like a really good step forward for the remake trilogy. Establishes Yuffie well and takes a lot of steps to improve little things about combat, exploration, cutscenes, and overall gamefeel. Enjoyable time.

Finished this one up just in time for Rebirth. Going to try to keep thoughts short.

I think, at its core, this is a fantastically impressive ARPG / JRPG hybrid that takes a lot of the things that make FF7 so good and adapts them thoughtfully to this new breed of game. It stumbles in places, largely the pacing and padding, but the overall experience is compelling.

Combat
Combat is not my favorite part of this, actually, and I would've preferred a fully turn-based approach - I adore action games and turn-based alike, but this version doesn't end up eclipsing either for me personally. But that said, it more than gets the job done and learning its systems is rewarding. I think my biggest issue overall is just how easy it is to take damage seemingly out of nowhere if you're not guarding all the time. Again, with practice and materia like steadfast block, this becomes less of an issue, but the focus on using ATB for abilities / spells / items lends poorly to "unpausing" and getting tagged for 900 damage from something you barely registered. The game also plays a little coy with giving you the full roster of Cloud, Tifa, Barret, and Aerith as well, so you're oftentimes having to juggle a party that doesn't have all its roles accounted for. Materia is perhaps a little too stingily given out - I would've liked to have more than the 1 (2 if you 100% the side content) elemental materia, given how much it feels like it spices up combat. In a similar vein, the stark linearity of this game sorta works to the deficit of gear and weapons since it never really felt to me like I had the opportunity to "build" anything other than just straight numbers.

Story
Storywise, there's a distinct give and take happening here. All the major beats of FF7's first couple hours aren't just hit, they're elevated to incredible heights. The budget and the scale of this game is simply shocking, especially given just how little of the original they're actually working with. To that end, it's clear to me that they wanted to hit a certain length to justify this game's existence - Rebirth and the eventual 3rd release (Requiem?) are clearly easy to spin out into 30+ hour games, but this one? There are more than a few sequences that truly test my patience. The abandoned expressway with Aerith and the crane puzzles, the haunted trainyard with its repetition, and the absolutely atrociously long Jenova lab section all truly bewilder me with their inclusion. One chapter you have a spectacular cinematic sequence with great boss battles and the next you're going up and down ladders for 45 minutes for no real reason. These did wear pretty hard on me and my mental score was dropping, but... that finale is just too damn good. I think there's a 4.5 or even 5 game hiding in here if the 18 chapters were cut down to, say, 14.

Remake?
I understand why some don't love the new path that Remake is taking, but it doesn't bother me - if anything, I really like it. The original game is just as good as ever and very easily accessible. FF7 is really the only FF (outside of 14) that has this expansive a world from a release standpoint. Using the remake to tap into the extended compilation - Crisis Core, Advent Children, Dirge of Cerberus - works only in its favor IMO. While I'm not huge on the specific use of the Whispers, the rest is very strong. That final couple minutes with Future? Omnipresent? Alternate? Sephiroth nearly makes it all worth it in the end.

Lows
Sidequests felt largely dull and never really compelled me to do them.
As noted in my God of War 2018 review, I hate 8th generation bullshit. I doubt it will be an issue in Rebirth but please stop making me slowly duck under things and sidle through gaps and hold a button to pull a switch. It feels especially egregious in chapters like the haunted trainyard where you're truly just going around climbing ladders and pressing buttons for an hour. The rest of this game is so good, we really just don't need to indulge this particular brand of game design.

Highlights
The whole first bombing mission - I think I played the initial demo for the PS4 release like 4 times in a row. Stellar stuff.
Hell house - aside from Sephiroth, Rude / Reno, and Rufus, this is probably the best boss in the game.
Leslie Kyle - very cool character introduced out of nowhere
Destiny's Crossroads (Chapter 18)
Load times (I mean... holy shit)
Excellent dub all around
I liked the overly indulgent staircase scene
Do I need to say graphics? These are some of the best character models ever made. Cloud, Aerith, Tifa, Barret, Sephiroth, Red XIII, Rufus, Scarlet, Yuffie, Marlene, Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge all look phenomenal. Oh yeah, Shiva too.
That end credits song is really good.

Overall, aside from the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde thing that this game has with regard to pacing, I'm thoroughly impressed. It's clear to me that the team at Square are truly passionate about both this new retelling and the original game. They really do care about making it great. To that end, this is a great stepping-off point for the whole Remake trilogy - there are a couple missteps but the foundation is more than solid and they've delivered a very memorable experience. They've given themselves a great first entry in a very long awaited trilogy and I can only assume it will keep improving from here.

Finally got this finished up. I started the first Danganronpa a couple years ago and basically have gotten through the next each successive year, finishing here, on the 7th anniversary of Danganronpa v3: Killing Harmony’s release. As much as I do like them, the overwhelmingly samey gameplay would’ve made them a real trial to play back-to-back-to-back so I think it was the right decision to let each breathe a bit before continuing on. I had obviously heard about v3 through osmosis and @PolaroidJack is a big fan, so I was expecting a lot. While the first half of the game is still too slow for my liking, the final act is so well done that it really catapults it beyond the other games and makes for a memorable experience. Spoilers to follow?

The cast is fantastic, even if I did call a couple of the character twists ahead of time. Kokichi, Miu, Kaede, Shuichi, Korekiyo, Kaito, all very enjoyable characters. Maybe one or two duds in here but that's not too surprising. Pretty much everyone grows or changes in interesting ways throughout the narrative but Miu and Kokichi really stole the show. Aided perhaps by the more vulgar localization, but their unhinged antics really took every scene to new heights. I might prefer Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair as far as a “game” thanks to its cast and the overall tone and narrative path but the actual meat of the narrative of v3 goes beyond 2 for me. I will say though, the Monokubs (this entry's mascots) are such a waste of space. I have no idea what the team was thinking with them. Is it just a gag on the audience that they’re annoying? Because they never serve any narrative role and they almost exclusively make worthless commentary. Monomi in 2 was a fantastic foil to Monokuma, so I’m confused what they were intending with the Kubs. Them aside, every moment is punctuated by the strength of this cast, as is usually the case with this series.

Trial 6 / Final Act (Spoilers)
What makes the finale so special is what it does with the twist. The twist itself isn’t too absurdly shocking - Danganronpa 1 ends with the reveal of the death game being watched and Danganronpa 2 is about a virtual world, this is the next logical step - but where the narrative goes with reflecting on this twist and what it means is what makes it effective. There's a lot of reflection on what makes a piece of fiction, how fiction affects us, and what game development can mean from a business perspective. To this end, at some point in the latter minutes of the game I did genuinely experience the unnerving feeling that the characters were real. That playing the game was looking into another world. Their lives behind the screen and mine in front of it. That's a unique feeling. The added layer of Kodaka’s reflection on how Chunsoft pushed him into this third game rings so strongly in the final chapter that it feels like Kojima on how Konami treated him - lots of questions like “what makes Danganronpa? “Who decides where the story goes?”“Should you give the fans what they want and expect or switch it up?””Can I do that without getting fired?” It's a ballsy ending that feels like it does give closure to years worth of narrative and character work. The reveals hit really hard and do things that just feel pretty unique for the medium. I can see why it might not land for some people, but it blew me away.

Criticism
My main issues are the issues I have with EACH game in the main trilogy -

• They’re too slowly paced - The overarching narrative of Danganronpa is… ineffective. I kept waiting for v3 to tie everything up, make the stuff about the despairs and THE TRAGEDY make more sense and feel less like YA fiction stuff. Obviously, the twist makes this irrelevant. While I love the twist and think it makes the game work, it does cause me to reflect on the fact that the “outside” narrative never mattered. In 1, it was just set up to the death game; in 2, it was only to make the virtual world reveal make more sense; in v3, it’s completely eschewed for the sake of the metanarrative, to its betterment. So I’m a little conflicted in that, on one hand, it does away with any need to criticize Kodaka for delaying story content in each iteration - going “Arrgghh! When will this stuff get explained?!” is pointless when, in reality, the death game was really the focus all along, and I was hyping myself for something that didn’t exist. On the other hand, I did sort of want that explanation, and getting out of it is perhaps a little cowardly - I wanted to see how the hell he could make The Tragedy make sense.

• Relevant story content for the overarching narrative is relegated to the last 2 chapters - While this is partially explained by above, I do still think it’s a negative for the structure of each game that the flow is so identical. Outside of Kaede’s role, everything in v3 is layed out early with the expectation that it won’t be explained for 15-20 hours and, yeah, that’s still the case.

•Wonky action minigames in trials that feel more like hindrance than anything - I like some of them here, and overall, this is an improvement over everything in 2. “Swords Rebuttal” in particular was massively improved now that you can actually read the dialogue before interacting with it. Debate Scrum, while very easy, is probably the best minigame in the series. Really liked it a lot. Otherwise… eh. I don’t ever feel like the minigames add much in Danganronpa. Obviously the central Debate minigame is pretty important for the game’s structure, but I don’t particularly enjoy it or the others. Outside of some truly terrible hitboxes and hit detection on firing truth bullets, the minigames are mostly pretty inoffensive in v3.

• Little interesting content in the free time + extraneous content (like the skills in v3) aren’t easily accessible in a single playthrough - While Danganronpa is on the shorter side for a VN, I still dislike the free time moments for taking away from the narrative. Additionally, they hardly ever feel truly relevant. There are definitely going to be funny moments here and there, but the strength of v3 is in the storytelling and the character interactions, the 1 on 1 date moments aren’t ever anything to write home about. The skills are a really nice addition here, but if you’re mostly just playing for the story, you only end up with a couple of them, which feels like it limits the possible gameplay elements of the trials.

• Controls are still completely asinine, I do not understand why they stayed exactly the same in the transition from a handheld to console. Menus are, overall, incompetently crafted as well. I’m glad this was mostly not the case for Rain Code.

• Fucking insane that this game is still screenshot / recording locked on PlayStation - I’m writing this review on the 7th anniversary of Danganronpa v3’s release, Spike Chunsoft. I don't think spoilers are too worrying at this point.

I just wrote up a lot of criticism, huh? Well, take that and ignore it, because it’s basically completely irrelevant to my enjoyment of the story and the game as a whole.

Presentation
Best it’s ever been. The art, the cutscenes, the music, the voice performances (I played in Japanese). Absolutely knocked it out of the park. Kokichi’s VA makes some incredible things happen in the back half and I really noticed how much work they were putting in. Takada Masafumi’s music is incredible as ever. So many standout tracks in here that really run the gamut of genre. Always a pleasure to hear his work. The art team really solidified all the designs and major elements of the world into a cohesive whole - I looked back at 1 (as well as saw it referenced ingame) and noted how off model the early CGs looked by comparison to v3’s, which just goes to show how much they had improved with them. This is not a spectacularly impressive game but the new UI elements and whatnot feel nice, and the trial UI in particular feels markedly different from prior entries, befitting the end of the series.

I'm finishing Master Detective Archives: Rain Code next and have high expectations just for it escaping the mold of Danganronpa, which only feels natural given the end of this game. Kodaka took a somewhat lopsided death game narrative and wrapped it into an extraordinarily satisfying knot, bringing together all sorts of ideas about the nature of game development, the place of fiction in society, and the very nature of existence. I know this is a controversial ending for some, but for me it was the only logical place for Danganronpa to go, and sends the series out on the biggest bang possible. The story goes on.

Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name is, for one, quite a mouthful, but also something of a conflicting release. On one hand, it’s a cool addition to the tale of Yakuza 7 and an important part of Kiryu’s story, especially in light of the upcoming Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth. On the other, it feels unnecessary in parts, largely forgettable in key ways, and extraordinarily expensive.

Story
I think the story of Gaiden is, at best, awkwardly delivered. I wholeheartedly agree with the majority that the finale is excellent, and some of the best work RGG have done in terms of an evocative and emotional narrative beat. The intro is pretty good as well, if perhaps a little odd. Everything else in between feels shoddy at best. Chapters 2-4 have merit and progression here and there, but they feel largely incomplete and force the player to do mindless stuff to just make the next plot beat happen. There were more than a few moments with the Daidoji x Omi plot in the first couple chapters that I went “What? Why? That doesn’t make sense.” As the game comes to its inevitable conclusion by syncing up with the events of Yakuza 7, these complaints fall away a bit, but the need to force in a whole narrative to explain how Kiryu ended up where he was while keeping it in line with the idea that the Daidoji were using him just results in a clunky story. Akame, Tsuruno, and Shishido are all exceedingly likable characters and don’t feel at all out of place in the wider series. The Daidoji agents, Hanawa included, are… ehh… I didn’t care too much for them. Overall, the switch from Daidoji being a political club manipulating government to actual superspy group with hundreds of agents and secret weapons comes off very strangely to me. Yakuza 3 has secret spy groups, sure, but this particular development feels out of touch with the ending Yakuza 6 was going for. All that said, yeah, that ending is phenomenal. Kuroda’s performance is fantastic. I hope we see more of this caliber from Infinite Wealth.

Gameplay
Sotenbori is overused. There, I said it! This version of Sotenbori is such an afterthought in terms of player enjoyment. Usually, there’s an effort to make even repeated areas feel different from game to game, giving them new locations and activities to stave off the repetition. Here, the Castle is sort of supposed to take the edge off, but given that its activities are limited to coliseum battles and the gambling minigames, it really only serves as a pretty area to look at. Combat is an improvement over Y6 in some ways, but the Yakuza style is largely the same and, as such, a bit clunky, and Agent style has some neat gimmicks but hardly feels like a full on style to me. This was a great opportunity to bring Kiryu’s style into Lost Judgment’s combat engine but they completely swerved away from that, resulting in what feels like, to me, a lot more of the same. In a related sense, tying all of the upgrades (which are largely just single move unlocks and stat upgrades, very lacking in any meaningful changes to your kit) to Akame’s point system AND money is such a drag. Yakuza 6 / Kiwami 2’s upgrade system was awkward, but consistent. The Judgment style is probably the best, giving you free reign to spend your upgrade points. Tying it to multiple sources of imaginary income weighs down the narrative as getting to meaningfully increase your combat potential means going to grind not just for money, but ALSO Akame points. For a game as short as this one is, I can’t see this any way other than an attempt to stretch the runtime. Add to it that substories are now packaged as part of Akame’s storyline and it really feels at points like they were lacking central mechanics or ideas to make this game click and instead relied on the existing systems to make it work. The story segment where you show off to Nishitani by going to Sotenbori and spending money is so sloppy, just making the player run around and do the minigames that have been a part of this engine for damn near a decade at this point. Is it still fun to shoot pool? Sure! But is it meaningful as story content when I can just do that on my own for kicks? Not really. The coliseum is the biggest offender in this regard. A random coliseum battle here or there in the main series is not uncommon, but it’s usually a one-off as an introduction to the side content or for one plot beat. Making it a key point of this game’s story and tying it directly to the upgrade system is seriously uncreative. Even the advertised “Elite Fighter Pack” with Saejima, Daigo, and Majima is just recycled movesets from previous games! Yakuza 5 is one of my favorite games of all time but I’m not going to spend a couple bucks to see half of Saejima’s animations from 2010 in the year of our lord 2023.

Price
It might not be clear from the number of games I log and review each year, but I do buy a lot of games. I have little issue spending $50-70 on new releases upwards of a dozen times a year. Despite that, and despite the fact my own spending has never bothered me, I spent more than a couple points of Gaiden regretting my purchase. Initially I criticized RGG online for making this a digital only release in the West, and while I still do, I wonder if it wasn’t intentional for its size. See, tying the story to multiple different mechanics that are, at best, secondary in other RGG releases in order to make it stretch to a 10-12 hour ordeal feels bad to me. For many people, playing all the minigames and doing all the substories will warrant them another 5-10 hours, and they’ll feel perfectly happy with a 25-30 hour jaunt. That’s great! I seriously hope they got everything they could out of this. But for me, having played the whole series to this point, doing coliseum battles and grinding for money and doing substories just to have upgrade points feels like a huge slog and less than I expect from Ryu Ga Gotoku. It feels like to me that they had a couple of great ideas - Kiryu hiding out, tying into the Omi dissolution, Shishido and Tsuruno’s story, the character of Akame - and then had to figure out a way to make this hit a $50 price point. I kept thinking back to Lost Judgment’s The Kaito Files expansion for comparison. That goes for $30 solo, and is included in the $35 or whatever season pass. You can check my review of that release here - I quite liked it a lot! Despite its length (8-10 hours doing nearly everything) it told an original story about a fan favorite character, provided new locations to explore, and the plot felt all-killer-no-filler to me, a lean and mean distillation of a whole Yakuza plot into a tight ~7ish hours. Gaiden did not give me this feeling. Kiryu’s moveset has fewer original moves and ideas than Kaito’s two styles, the upgrades are far worse, the story meanders more, and the bosses are far less imaginative - minus the final boss, who is excellent. I just couldn’t shake the feeling while playing Gaiden that I was being ripped off. All that work went into a DLC for $30 (which people thought was too expensive!) but here we have a full release for $50 which feels like it does less? I’m not the arbiter of what’s worth it or not in a video game, so take all this with a grain of salt, but at the absolute minimum I don’t think Gaiden is 5/6ths of the value of the Ishin! remake from this same calendar year. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it was worth it for you or not.

At the end of it all, there’s always going to be fun to be had in a release like this. Kiryu is fun, there’s great activities to do, lots to see, and karaoke to be sung (First Summer Uika knocks it out of the park as Akame here). The story feels unnecessarily stretched out and I think imperfectly delivered. I have serious issues with the pricing of what feels like a glorified DLC. But despite it all, it will stick with you. The ridiculous spy gadgets, the excellent final boss, the phenomenal finale cutscenes. I hope the latter elements are signs of what’s to come in the next mainline release, because in that case, we’re in good hands.

I started this game just around the time of release, played about half / two thirds of it, and then stopped. In the time since then and returning to it a couple weeks ago, I played all of the Kiryu saga (minus what of 0 I had played) as well as Judgment and Lost Judgment. Initially I had stopped playing 7 because I wanted to really have the full picture for when Kiryu shows up in the story. Ironically, I picked it back up because I reached the point of Gaiden where those events happen again. There’s something poetic about that, I suppose. I’ll keep my thoughts on this one short but I wanted them down for posterity.

Story
Ichiban is a great new protagonist for the series to jump off with. His approach to problems is different from Kiryu’s and he sees the world differently (in a literal sense). The whole cast is so good, the party really comes together organically and the central group of Ichi, Saeko, Nanba, and Adachi work so well together. The extra additions along the way only increase the enjoyment. The story is phenomenally well done in certain parts and only really dragged down by a couple chapters here and there. The opening third is so grounded and fun, I thought the hospital / old folks home sequence is just a little genius bit thrown in that you never would’ve seen from a Kiryu game. The finale is rather great too, minus the perhaps-too-long campaigning section. It feels like they took what they learned from telling a “cinematic” story from Yakuza 6 and really improved on it here, lots of movie-quality cutscenes that make the whole thing come alive and quite honestly stand out from the rest of the JRPG crowd. As much as I like FF7 Remake, the type of lengthy and somewhat quiet cutscene like the final interaction between Ichi and Aoki Ryo just doesn’t happen there. The story is strongest in its smaller and more contained moments, like working at the soapland or helping the Yokohama residents. The grander shit with the Omi and the Tojo is fun in a big picture “LORE” kind of way but doesn’t feel necessary for Ichiban’s story in the slightest, and feels like an excuse to bring Kiryu and the other Tojo legends into the picture. I don’t think this is the strongest in the extended series, but it sits nicely up at the top with Judgment, Lost Judgment, and Yakuza 5.

Combat
Oh jeez. I think Ryu Ga Gotoku’s best case scenario is making a Judgment -> Lost Judgment type glowup happen with Infinite Wealth because there’s so much to improve upon. It’s not a bad start for a team who have never made a JRPG before, but it feels lacking in a number of ways. Reservations about the job system aside, I feel like there isn’t enough actual experimentation to do - fights are largely decided by having a damage dealer, a healer, and a defense / attack debuff. Status effects are largely worthless and there’s little in the way of party composition strategy. The move lists are a little underwhelming too, and they feel lacking in that they don’t actually take advantage of Ichiban’s delusional Dragon Quest vision. Most attacks are just walking up and hitting the opponent with something, minus the heat actions / Essence skills. Gear is similarly bleh, with basically only stat upgrades meaning anything. I actually will NOT criticize the difficulty, as despite the fact that you can easily find criticisms of the Majima / Saejima and Kiryu fights online, I cleared both on the first try without doing any grinding beyond the singular dungeons they give you access to before each. I will criticize other things, however. I absolutely despise the “always moving” mechanic within battle. The fact that your attacks can straight up miss entirely regardless of your accuracy stat because the physics engine pushed you back when you moved past a box or something is infuriating. All the movement within combat feels clunky and unnecessary. The level curve feels wack, not in a difficulty way but in a numbers way. Leveling up a job takes probably 2-3 times longer than I feel it should for the number of jobs each character has, and considering that the game’s story ends at basically level 60, why is level 99 even the cap? Overall it’s a relatively acceptable system that feels like it leaves a few things down to be finetuned in the next game, which is hopefully the case.

Misc
Extra content is still pretty much as good as ever, minus the extra dungeons being a slog. Karaoke is fantastic and there are some amazing renditions in here. There are a ton of substories which, admittedly, felt a bit more committed to the bit of “being weird” than just simply telling a standalone story, which I don’t like, but they’re mostly pretty great. The strength of the party chat / “drink links” help make up for the substories as the one-on-ones are pretty emotional and unique in terms of the series. Dragon Kart and Can Hero are… fine, I guess. These types of minigames are never perfect in RGG releases but they’re fun enough. Part Time Hero is imperfect in terms of its missions but I can’t be bothered to seek out 100% regardless so it hardly matters in the long run.

Yeah, really great game. I don’t think it makes sense to play this as your first Yakuza release, but it does serve as a great first step in a new period of Yakuza. It would’ve felt more meaningful if RGG were capable of truly setting Kiryu aside instead of trotting him out 4 more times after his “last” game, but maybe they’ll make good on that decision in Infinite Wealth. The story is excellent, the smaller scale of the conflict helps it immensely, and the RPG focus is good enough to never feel dull but leaves room for improvement.

Doing a replay of this through the Ultimate Edition to catch up before Alan Wake 2. What an absolutely fantastic time.

Control takes all the elements that detract from Alan Wake and improve on them greatly. Combat is frenetic and tactile and gives you good options for creativity. The story is told in bits and pieces, but much more cleverly and fully engaging than its predecessor. The switch from a half-baked Stephen King novel to SCP story gives so much great perspective on the supernatural elements and engages the player with little mysteries and stories the whole way. Remedy's technical prowess shines as the whole game is just gorgeous, especially with some of the coolest particle effects in gaming.

Won't go into details on the story, but nearly everything sticks. The cast of characters are great, and Jesse is a very good protagonist. I'll be moving on to the two DLCs, Foundation and AWE (Alan Wake) as prep as well.

Highly recommend checking this out. Engaging gameplay, a great and imaginative setting for a third person shooter, wonderful to look at, and paced quite nicely. Moments like the ashtray maze and the dynamite video really add to the unique quality of the experience. So happy that Remedy kept improving over the years.

I first started Alan Wake years ago, but only got into the tutorial before my attention wandered. After playing Control on release and with the hype for Alan Wake 2 building, I figured it was time to sit down and play through the remaster. While this is still probably the right call for maximum enjoyment of the sequel, I found the original game to be dull, frustrating, overly long, needlessly repetitive, and honestly outright bad.

The story is Alan Wake’s only real appeal. What clearly begins by resting on the laurels of Twin Peaks does blossom (with the help of the excellent Control) into a wider narrative that is genuinely engaging. For the most part, anyway. I won’t go into too many specifics because I do think that’s what makes the game tick. It’s relatively well delivered, but paced terribly and is overly vague. There are a couple details that get expanded on in the DLC and the spinoff Alan Wake’s American Nightmare that do originate from this game, but… they’re not really actually explained. Even the wiki is a little unclear about how certain details line up. It stinks that you have to get info from so many other places to see the full broader narrative, but I guess that was the intent from the start, so it’s hardly worth criticizing. The full cast is shockingly small, with really only Alan and Barry and the Anderson brothers being consistent characters. Agent Nightingale is basically absent from the story and the other Bright Falls residents are genuinely window dressing. Still, despite these issues, there is an appeal here. YMMV if the game itself is worth trudging through for that.

The real death knell for Alan Wake is the gameplay. For a narrative focused game, almost nothing you do is related to the actual narrative. The cutscenes and manuscripts tell the story, and the bulk of the chapters (“Episodes”) of the game itself are mostly traipsing through forest segments fighting shadow people. The third person shooting mechanics here are laughably shallow. Alan’s flashlight burns the darkness off of infected people - “Taken” - (who I guess are beyond saving despite that, because he then kills the shit out of them) and your weapons kill them.
You have a pistol, a shotgun, a hunting rifle, and a variation of each (ex: pump shotgun). Flares act as “get off me” tools and flashbangs are grenades. That’s about it. Alan moves like a tank through a swimming pool of high-grade molasses, and his stamina is awful, giving you very little mobility in fights. A not-super-reliable dodge can save you sometimes, but once you’re surrounded you’re likely to take damage regardless, as the terrible camera and bad environmental design allows enemies to easily swarm you. There are really only about 5 enemies, and they’re all variations on either lumberjacks or fishermen. I figured from the first chapter that this was an aesthetic choice for that part of the story, and I would go on to fight, say, Taken engineers, or Taken chefs or something. No, it’s just lumberjacks all the way down. The game loves to just send Alan into the woods to fight things, and it is actually a majority of this game’s runtime. I cannot stress just how dull and repetitive these sections are - I groaned audibly when I figured a chapter was ending only to find out I had multiple more forest segments to go. The game also only knows to switch things up by taking away your weapons, not by throwing new enemies or challenges at you. Alan will regularly get into a car / helicopter / window accident that causes him to run into the woods, having forgotten or lost his guns and ammo, forcing you to scavenge new ones that are exactly the same. The game will throw a wave or two of enemies at you over and over until you reach a checkpoint, get given ammo for every gun you have, heal, and then do it again.

To be a little more analytical, Alan’s iconic flashlight doesn't work effectively as a mechanic since it is REQUIRED to make enemies vulnerable - there's nothing clever you can do to manage a crowd like in Resident Evil 4, you literally just have to focus one Taken at a time and kill them all. The addition of the flares and flashbangs helps, but these are just an escape from the central mechanics being extremely weak. The level design is atrocious, and it feels like the increase in enemy numbers is always hiding the fact that the mechanical depth is simply not enough to create any meaningful sense of progression throughout, resulting in a need to bury the player under the weight of sheer numbers and the time it takes to flashlight each enemy down before killing them.

In terms of pacing, there's rarely any payoff to a bunch of different objectives - when Alan runs from the cops (sigh... into the forest) and he sees the radio station, you'd think that once you get there you'll get character building, context, even just a break from woods-walking. Nope, the second you see the DJ inside, a cutscene plays and the cops shoot at Alan through the window so he jumps out and runs into the forest. Not a single second of this exchange is worth anything, it is blatant and embarrassing filler. The player is teased with an objective, a possible meeting with another character, a break from the mediocre gameplay - only to have it last less than 20 seconds before returning you to a carbon copy of what you did for the last 15 minutes. The other objectives outside the woods feel like busywork: get this gate open, go get a generator running, etc. Episode 5’s walk through the abandoned Bright Falls is a real highlight of the game as it is not just a break from forest segments, but also feels connected to the narrative and worth engaging with.

some bullet points:
- sheriff breaker is an agent of the bureau of control, which is kind of awesome
- there's this one clip of the dark presence taking Alan's wife that plays probably 10 times in the story when he like has a flash of pain in his head and it's only like 0.8 seconds long and it repeated so many times i thought my game was bugged
- Nightingale calling Wake different authors' names is pretty funny
- the possessed barrels and girders flying at you suck so much
- i hope you like Adidas bc this game could be an ad for it with how much that one enemy in the tracksuit shows up
- Barry gets a head torch and Alan wants it. yeah me too man, me too
- that final "boss" is such a whimper to end a game on
- the whole final act is weirdly quick and anticlimactic for a game that's already double the length it should be
- the episodes of Night Springs that play on tvs are the most well written part of the game, they really capture the tone that makes Control feel so special

I feel like I haven’t even really touched on how many things about this game bothered me, but I’m going to end there. A truly frustrating and dull experience that offers gameplay so wretched that I did consider stopping and watching a Lets Play for the last half. While looking some stuff up about it, I saw someone say that they believed this was the best linear third person shooter ever made. I truly hope for their sake that they played RE4 or Dead Space after they made that comment, because it is a grim statement otherwise.

Decided to get this one out of the way in advance of Spider-Man 2 later this week. Not too much to say about it, honestly. This is, gameplay-wise, pretty much a minor improvement on the original in every way, but falls a little shorter on the story front.

Swinging as Miles is just as good as the original, and the snowy Manhattan backdrop fits very well. Exploration is always going to be fun in the Insomniac Spider games, so no complaints there. The side quests are pretty solid, but since this is a half-sequel / big DLC / spinoff with a length of only like 10 hours or so, they kind of have to be since the main story is quite abridged. If they were more checklist-y (like the other activities) the game would feel far more empty.

Combat-wise I do prefer Miles to Peter - the venom punch is satisfying and his moves look great. Stealth is greatly improved with his cloaking ability and actually felt far more convincing than any of the stealth sections in the first game. The skill tree is pretty small but there are a couple good additions. I wasn’t fond of the “anti-venom-powers-energy” that Roxxon goons have since it largely felt unfun to have your abilities taken away and it never felt earned on the part of the villain to adapt to Miles’ powers.

Overall, the story lands the largely unsurprising but effective beats outside of the villain. The Tinkerer is largely forgettable in terms of design and threat level, but mostly suffers most in the writing. More than a couple ??? moments to be had here for sure. This isn’t super surprising since the first game used a number of Spider-Man’s rogue’s gallery and the ones that went unused were certainly already planned for the sequel in development. Ganke is a nice highlight, he’s played well and never feels forced - I look forward to seeing him more in 2. Prowler is neither here nor there. He’s competent in the “Miles’s backstory and family problems” vein, but doesn’t really make too much of an impact. While it is largely rote, I would be lying if I said the ending didn’t elicit an emotion from me. A broken and battered Spider-Man fighting to save his neighborhood will always land well.

Good stuff overall, if still playing it relatively safe after the first game. Looking forward to Spider-Man 2 in 36 hours.

Gonna go against the grain and say I had a great time with Ghostwire: Tokyo. I was really excited for it to come out and it didn’t really disappoint me. If you’re able to engage with it on its own terms and recognize that the combat is, yes, not fantastic and will get a little old by the end of the game, I think you can have a good experience.

This game got essentially no press, so I feel it's worth pointing out how excellent the open world truly is - it’s like Kamurocho in terms of the player:building scale and detail but spread out over a much, MUCH larger distance. This is probably one of my favorite open worlds in gaming and if you’re into the type of virtual tourism of Japan that Yakuza or Persona offer, I think you’ll get something out of this. The first area you really get to explore does a great job showing off the amazing number of unique objects and rooms and textures they managed to stuff into this game. Signs, objects, buildings, etc. All of this in a PS5 game that only comes out to 18 gigabytes! Which does lead me to the actual looks of the game, which are great! Okay, the framerate is lower than it needs to be and the FOV should be higher, but this is a damn good looking game with some excellent lighting. I spent WAY too long in the photo mode just snapping pictures of cool alleys and buildings. I’ve actually gone to the trouble of selecting a few of those screenshots and compiled an album of them if you’re interested - [album coming soon when I can find my USB3->C adapter].

One of the best ways to approach this game IMO is more of a ghost / supernatural meets modern world art piece with a focus on cultural exchange rather than a pure game. I say this because the combat is, as noted by many people, not incredible. In general, you have 3 types of ammo to fire from your fingertips, fulfilling basically an SMG / handgun, shotgun, and grenade launcher archetype each. You have a fairly ineffective shield with a perfect parry and a really bad melee attack as well as a bow to use for stealth encounters. Every fight will basically boil down to swapping between your elemental types and keeping a variety of the enemies at bay as they charge you or fire projectiles. Now, I played about half of Ghostwire at launch in March of 2022, and then came back to it a couple weeks ago. In that time, Tango pushed more than a few updates to the game, adding a bunch of pieces of content and extra missions, but more importantly a whole new set of mechanics as part of the “Spider’s Thread” update. The key addition being new alternate firing modes as well as the INTENSELY needed dodge. The fact that this game shipped without a dodge is kinda baffling, since your insanely slow walk speed and the limited camera use on PS5 meant that combat, especially hectic combat, could be really overwhelming and you could be left with few options for escape. The dodge isn’t amazing, but it does the job well enough and you can bind it to different things. They also added new charms, new tags, and an aerial ground pound and a chain assassinate technique, which I used often in the final hours. The actual enemy designs are great, I love how each draws from different parts of the Japanese cultural consciousness - the lady with the scissors, the child lost in the rain, etc. - and they have pretty disturbing looks. In terms of gameplay, they don’t usually impress too much and one or two are way too annoying to deal with, but they have a variety of different attack patterns and can feel threatening and the game keeps throwing new ones at you throughout the 25+ hours. The bosses are actually a pretty great highlight. I really enjoyed the Ko-Omote fight, which forces you to deal with the boss in a completely different way. Long story short, the shoot ‘em up gameplay is not deep enough to make the player seek out a fight for fun, but it will stay more or less engaging enough as the game progresses, especially with the additions made in the most recent update.

I love how genuine the whole thing feels, from the loving recreation of basically an entire ward down to the extremely detailed historical summaries and cultural contexts of the food items carried in your inventory. Tango and their localization team went the extra mile to give you tons of information on every single detail of the game’s world, down to the consumables and fill in the checklist collectibles. Sometimes it can feel like Atlus, for example, releases only make it to the West incidentally, like they never actually thought a Westerner would play their games but hey, cool if they do - Ghostwire feels like the opposite, like a game made by Japanese devs with the Western audience explicitly in mind. The post-launch support has also been really good, so it’s clear that Tango / Bethesda were listening to criticism and player feedback.

Most climactic moments include a lead up, whether that be making your way down into the bowels of the subway system or climbing up through a tiered shopping center / department building / office building, usually culminating in a big setpiece wherein the spirit haunts the area, messing with reality and sometimes outright placing the player in an alternate dimension. These are easily the best part of the game. The art team clearly had a great eye for interior design and the stuff they do to show off the “haunted” nature of any place is really neat - shifting objects in the room, flickering shadows, textures that flow from room to room, and my personal favorite: a hallway floating above the whole of the open world - and add a ton of character to these moments. In a way, it takes a page out of PT's book with the emphasis on these room and indoor segments - juxtaposing the go anywhere (and relatively rote) exploration of the open world with the controlled and contained experiential setpieces of the indoor.

The side cases are the best showcase of the aforementioned ideas and are usually pretty unique and fun, like mini ghost hunts. They often take classic ideas from Japanese cultural folklore and ghost stories to craft a little investigation for you. The bathhouse and inkwater dragon were particular favorites of mine.

The main story itself is nothing to write home about. The setup is genius, and the scattered clothes and empty streets of Shibuya are an absolutely prime setting for the game which never wore off for me - but the actual plot is kinda whatever. Hannya is creepy enough but he’s the only real character besides Akito and KK. His reasons aren’t super deep or super complex and the game’s beats are relatively cliche. Still, I enjoyed the banter between KK and Akito all the way throughout and they do feel like partners by the end. I did actually play the short little VN ahead of release, which, while hilarious in its own way, hardly adds anything to the game’s story or background. Hannya should’ve been built up a bit more or there should’ve been a few spoken characters running around Shibuya besides you that could act as allies or enemies, other sorcerer / detective types, perhaps? The calls from Ed and Rinko do not do nearly enough to fill that void.

The bulk of the fun of this will be down to the player. Do you enjoy the exploration of a gorgeous, nearly 1:1 recreation of a ward of Tokyo while doing Jujutsu Kaisen-esque modern-day onmyōji type stuff? You’ll have a good time. Are you looking for a deep story and deeper combat? Probably look elsewhere. For me, it ticked the right boxes.

So how do you remake one of the greatest and most iconic games of all time? Well, I’d say you should double down on the things that made it what it was while trying to improve on the elements that have either become dull with age or simply weren’t necessary in the first place. As it happens, Capcom did basically precisely that with Resident Evil 4 Remake.

Gameplay-wise, I was a little worried playing the Chainsaw Demo, as the combat felt a little off, just slightly too much wobble on Leon’s gun, a little too much reaction from enemies, that sort of thing. I did give the demo more than a few runs and this wore off pretty quickly, and definitely did not persist into the full game. Part of it is most likely that the Silver Ghost (now without laser sight at the beginning) just sorta sucks. Everything else is near full upgrade in my mind. The parry adds so much to the gameplay loop and the creative ways in which you can engage a group of enemies, adding another option to Leon’s veritable toolbox of mechanics. The melee attacks all come together even more smoothly than the original, lending a lot of feeling of flow to fights. The guns feel great, the new additions are fun, there’s a ton of variety in how you approach your loadout, all still done through the fantastic attache case.

Graphically they did an incredible job upgrading the visuals, this is a pretty damn next-gen looking game, and the work they put into adding detail to the various important parts of the map is really fantastic. The iconic village looks even more real and lived in than it used to, the castle is huge and imposing, and the island and its labs are a great mix of mechanical and sedimentary. Almost every character looks improved overall.

But all that said, this is not a perfect game. The central change from the original game is obviously Leon’s moving aim system, adapting a variation of RE2’s gun combat from the stand-your-ground system. I don’t actually see this as an out and out negative - RE4R and RE4 are different games, and both will give different experiences, which is a good thing. RE4’s gunplay is a unique, puzzle-like system that gives it a very singular identity. RE4R is going for a more modern action-oriented style, which works to its strengths. I lead with this in the negatives section as I think it’s one thing people will / have focused on in criticism of this remake and I don’t personally agree - both games have their place. For the most part, the things I don’t like are, like the original game, certain setpieces or pacing options. But it’s a give and take! In the original, I hated the hive, the truck section, Mike’s gunship section on the island, a few rooms in the castle, and the entire filler section in the underground on the island. Save for Mike, these have been taken out or vastly altered, which is great. On the other hand, I really dislike the new minecart section, which is pretty dull overall and feels wasted. The double gigante fight with Luis is also pretty mediocre, which results in a perceived dip in quality in Chapter 11 for me. The bosses basically stay a weak point of the game, with the exception of Krauser and Salazar, who were vastly improved. Big Cheese is still pretty lame. If you check my original review, I noted that I felt Saddler should have a second phase in his fight - it seems Capcom agreed! It’s not really a gameplay segment but I was glad to see a big goopy tentacle guy to kill. In terms of tertiary content, I was undecided on whether or not the addition of crafting materials was good or not - giving the player the option to choose what ammo they need in addition to what they’re already picking up is good, but it adds a layer of unnecessary micromanagement that the original seemed to make an effort to avoid. The new shooting range is utterly fantastic fun and a wonderful addition to the Merchant’s character but I hated the randomized charms as rewards. It’s a dull grind and I think they would’ve been better used as rewards for the sidequests.

What Capcom really went above and beyond in this Remake is adding things where they were needed - the village is now a large, fully explorable map. The boat is now controlled and opens an entirely new area. They’ve added a chase sequence in the gorge before the Big Cheese fight, which I thought was excellent. Overall, there’s a lot of very smart reordering of rooms / areas just to make the pacing and flow make more sense. The castle is now more of an actual place and less of a haunted house with bizarro disconnected rooms. That ridiculous aforementioned underground section has been removed entirely, and the minecart appears in a more logical place. There’s a lot of this sort of thing, which is very very smart. Again, there are missing or changed rooms here or there that I was sad to see gone - the shaman who runs around the square room, for example - but it’s not really worth being disappointed by these things.

As the credits rolled and I reflected on my 20-ish hour playthrough, I was shocked to be hit by a full on vocal credits theme - Craig McConnell and Sam Drysdale’s “The Bullet or the Blade.” It’s a pretty good song in general but, more importantly, its placement is immaculate, urging the player to think deeply about the game. But not just the game, but actually the story. The original Resident Evil 4 is a fantastic game, as I’ve noted above and in my original 5 star review, but it lacks something in terms of characterization for Ashley, Luis, background on the village, stuff like that. It gained some of its cult fame from being arcadey, begging for multiple playthroughs and highscore hunting, as it were. This game is no different in that regard, but Capcom have managed to add in enough detail and emotional weight to the characters and story that it now truly works as a cinematic story, and not just a fun action game with sorta relevant background. Ashley’s growth throughout the story, Leon’s struggle with his past, Luis’ redemption, even Krauser’s obsession - they all carry a lot more weight than they ever did in the original, and IMO it lands. Resident Evil 4’s layout was always something magical - the player goes through a triptych of unique, separate locations with a bevy of memorable fights and rooms. The actual structure is sort of comparable to Dante’s Inferno, the player descends (or ascends) through varying levels of hell as Leon learns of the depths to which this Spanish community has been corrupted and bastardized by a cult seeking their own twisted goal. The village will always be the thing this game is known for, and Capcom went the extra mile to add a whole lot more reasons to care about how it came to be what it is.

I went back and forth a little bit on what to score this, but I gave the original game a 5 despite the issues I had with it as its overall identity and fun factor reach far above those negatives. I feel pretty much exactly the same about Remake, despite the issues themselves being different. The iconically good core gameplay was treated with the utmost respect, and the additions and changes are overwhelmingly good, with the strength of the story finally coming to light, giving Ashley, Luis, and even Leon all more to do. The wisecracking comments and silly pirate merchant are all still here, perhaps even enhanced by a more seriously considered storyline. As far as I’m concerned, every remake should strive to be this good.

I've played 6-8ish hours of this, which is not really enough to give a full review, just a few thoughts ahead of the English localized remake coming out in a couple weeks (which I will play in full).

I do read and write Japanese so I can follow this game - for the most part anyway, there's a lot of older period vocab and speech patterns that come more easily to native speakers. Think Olde Englishe but Japanese. I wouldn't recommend playing this if you don't, it's just too text heavy to bother, IMO.

This is a weird little game. I think what will most blatantly surprise people who are completely unaware of this game's roots is how different it is to the mainline series. Combat is completely different, focusing on your gun, sword, and mixture styles instead of fighting straight up. It's not ridiculously different to the brawler gameplay, but it's a lot less clean and sillier. People will be surprised to learn that it has multiple open world zones separated by loading screens, and sometimes linear ones. Full-on Meiji Kamurocho this ain't. Overall, mechanically this is a little clunkier and jankier than the mainline games (unsurprisingly) and I'm curious how much they buffed those out for the remake, considering it seems to me that a lot of fans in the west are expecting it to be like Yakuza 7 in terms of quality and presentation.

The story is obviously the main draw here, and while simplistic in overarching stuff, the individual notes are pretty cool. You kinda need to know the context of the Meiji Restoration and the last gasp of the Bakufu and what exactly the shinsengumi were and why it's important... but if you have a general grasp of that stuff you'll get a lot out of it. RGG's real stroke of genius here is not Kiryu Ryoma, but instead bringing over dead or minor characters from the main series and giving them room to run around and have fun. The most obvious is Mine as Hijikata. It's so nice to have him back in a major role and he really gets to shine. Baba and Park are fantastic, too, alongside the mainstays like Majima and Saejima. Oddly Nishikiyama is hardly present in the first third of the game, but I believe he plays more of a role later. I'll get into it with the Remake review I'm sure but I really dislike their decision to replace several of these faces/VAs with either Y0 or Y7 characters - the lieutenants especially, but I'll save that rant for then.

Stuff I enjoyed: The substories are a lot of fun - the one to do with the dancing crowds as well as the Lady Who Never Stops Fucking Talking will be well received in the remake, I'm sure. THE BATH HOUSE FIGHT IS AMAZING. The animations and detail on costumes and whatnot are great. The opening song (Clock Strikes - ONE OK ROCK) is super good!! If they remove it from the remake I'll kill them! Ryoma instantly spawns slippers when he walks up the stairs in the Shinsengumi base.

Stuff I didn't enjoy: The crafting stuff is super lame, and I've heard it only gets grindier and worse farther in the story. Some of the level design can be a little odd. One of the first bosses is kinda bad and slow. Lots of unnecessary button prompts and menuing, but that might've just been exacerbated by being aware of playing it in Japanese. The upgrade tree is Y0-style, which is my least favorite upgrade variation in the series.

So yeah, just some quick thoughts to get out before the remake. Cool time, but not super high in my personal RGG-verse rankings. We'll see if that changes!

Prior to this, I wasn't huge on Uncharted overall. I like Nathan Drake but Uncharted 1 is a pretty meh affair and Uncharted 2 rubbed me the wrong way entirely, despite the incredible cachet it carries. I'm also not a fan of ND's foray into The Last of Us, so I went into Uncharted 4 with some skepticism. I'm pleasantly surprised to say that not only did I like it, I downright loved it. As long as you're willing to deal with cover shooting as a central mechanic, I think you'll find A Thief's End to be a fantastically fun cinematic action adventure with the strongest narrative in the series and probably the best visuals ever put to a screen.

Story
The previous games were such deeply impersonal stories of supernatural treasure hunting that, by comparison, A Thief’s End
is a vastly different beast. The emphasis on narrative here is so much more pronounced than any of the trilogy. Perhaps, at times, too much so. This is Naughty Dog hot off the heels of The Last of Us, which quickly became not just a contender for Game of the Year, but all-timer material in the eyes of many. The shift in writing style is pretty noticeable, and I would say that it does clash with the nature of the series, mostly at the beginning. In Chapter 3, Nate, now in his… midlife crisis, let’s say, turns down an offer for a job at first. He cites a lack of permits as reason to steer clear, saying not getting the money “beats going to prison”. Yes, this is after the events of Chapter 2’s flashback to prison, but this is Nathan Drake. He slaughtered thousands on a blood-soaked rampage across Asia in the main trilogy, so forgive me if I’m not 100% sold on this new lifestyle of his. Once this little arc finishes and Sam shows up, the narrative begins to pick up steam. The brothers play off each other beautifully, and a little playful banter feels a whole lot more natural than when Nate talks to himself with nobody around. The story itself is hardly anything to write home about, but each beat is competently carried out, all the peaks and valleys included. Rafe is perhaps slightly underwhelming as a villain, but the final fight is good nonetheless. Nadine is definitely underdeveloped, but I'll assume that Lost Legacy fixes that somewhat. Nate and Elena's relationship is really well done, both on the "cutesy married couple having dinner after work" front and on the "past they tried to leave behind" front.

(Minor story spoilers)
I like how the history of the pirates founding Libertalia mirrors Nate and Sam's relationship - they imagine a pirate utopia, founded on common respect when helping each other under the pretense of Sam's precarious situation, only to realize the pirates duped the colonists and massacred them after Sam reveals his lie and Nate is left for dead. It's a simple trick, but very effectively done.

Gameplay
I'll get the combat out of the way first - I'm not really a huge fan of cover shooting in general and both U1 and U2's were excessively passable with their slow bullet speed and shaky aim. 4 improves it in some ways - more contextual cover, better movement, relatively fun stealth and some weapon variety - but ultimately it still doesn't impress. In particular I'm not fond of the large reticle for aiming, having your shots group within a certain range is kinda just frustrating. Guns with actual sights make the combat a joke, which shows how it was balanced around not having them. The use of ropes to swing around during combat is cool but underused and not game-changing. Fortunately, for all the complaining I just did, this game boasts way fewer combat encounters than the previous games and they genuinely don't overstay their welcome. Also, there's no yeti-type bosses, so that's a plus in my book.

Shooting aside, the rest of the gameplay is excellent. The climbing feels the best it's ever felt, with far finer control over Nate. Better yet, he doesn't fling himself into bottomless pits all the time! All exploration feels fluid and natural, despite the fantastical physics. I did a bit of a "oooohhh" when doing the climbing after Nate's boat crash, which doesn't allow you to jump from hold to hold, instead requiring you to guide the injured Nate more slowly and deliberately with just the analog stick. Getting a long climbing and exploring sequence is what I looked forward to the most, which I feel is high praise considering how much I groaned when I had to climb things as Kratos in 2018's God of War. Vehicles feel great too, and the rope is a great addition to the overall moveset. Plus, using the winch to hook up and maneuver the car is wonderful. All the little physics toys they came up with are just delightful. Same with all the contextual dialogue you get for doing them or working up to doing them. The constant flow of banter is the strongest it's ever been and it lends so much life to all the characters.

One of the things I hated about the aforementioned God of War was its liberal use of the most mind-numbing "puzzles" one can imagine, a veritable conveyor belt of throw axe -> freeze thing -> pull lever -> lift thing -> recall axe, repeated as needed for periods of narration. Uncharted 4's actual puzzles are not only much better in terms of variety and difficulty, they almost never repeat. As a result, the game never deviates from the core idea of a cinematic narrative, never dives into ideas that stick out as overtly "game-y". There are no character levels, no quest markers, no perks, and no map. The game fully commits to the idea of a fully cinematic adventure and wants the player to completely forget the standards of the open world game. In a way, I found this stark, dedicated linearity quite refreshing after God of War, Xenoblade 3, Gotham Knights, Cyberpunk, etc etc. We spend so much time on backloggd praising the benefits of intricate gameplay and deep mechanics all coming together in thoughtful ways that it feels a little like blasphemy to say, but I really enjoyed this 20 hour movie.

Looks
I actually played the Legacy of Thieves Remaster for PS5 for this, but I'm logging here because of the disparity in play count (sue me). In this regard, I admit that my experience doesn't match the original release of the game. But boy howdy is this game gorgeous. Naughty Dog are pioneers of graphical fidelity, and their work on facial animation in particular is shocking. This game is just downright staggering in the visuals department. The lighting, the detail on the texture work, as well as some technical thing I'm not sure I can put my finger on - ambient occlusion? TAA? I don't know, but whatever it is, it lends a certain visual sharpness I've never seen before. Couple that with the incredible performance on PS5, with near instant loads and a frame rate that seems untenable on console hardware for the quality of picture, and you've got a strong contender for the best looking game of all time. The Madagascar section might be one of the most visually stunning things I've ever seen in a video game. Same for several parts of the island, as well as the boat segment and mansion party. All of this to say that I took an absurd number of screenshots.

Final Thoughts
I'll just end by saying a couple of my favorite setpieces include the whole of Scotland, Twelve Towers, New Devon -> No Escape, Join Me in Paradise, and At Sea -> Marooned. The absolute best ones however are Nathan's dinner with Elena, the clock tower, and the auction, with the Madagascar car chase after Sam being probably the most fluidly designed action sequence I've ever played in a video game.

So yeah, high praise for Uncharted 4. My preconceptions of it being entirely overwrought and dull were completely off the mark, and what I was happy to discover in its stead is a stellar action adventure experience with some real heartfelt moments, especially as a closing chapter to one of gaming's iconic franchises. Highly recommended.