God, I wish I loved this game - I was immediately hooked after playing the demo, I was so confident this game was going to be a classic. Unfortunately, this game turned into an incredible slog with brief sparks of genuine excellence. If this game could focus for any extended period of time, it would've been fine, it really is an incredible spectacle at times. Ultimately, FFXVI couldn't help from gorging itself on pointless filler and morphing into a hideous, bloated corpse of what could've been.

Replaying this 'cause the GTA VI trailer got me all hyped and shit. I haven't played this game since 2014, back on my old fat PS3 (RIP). It's still real good, especially with all the touchups in the PS5 remaster. The art direction and technical team absolutely cooked here, I'm constantly blown away by how beautiful the game's lighting looks. And I can't help but yelp everytime the dusk/dawn in the horizon presents itself, the colors are so pleasing to the eyes. So hats off to them, it's a very good remaster job.

Before I started, I admit, I was expecting to enjoy the story more now, since I actually can understand English at a higher level. But it's such a dumb mess. The fact that it's mostly an excuse to be able to do crazy ass mission scenarios is just too obvious, a lot of them barely connect. I also can't stand most of Michael's scum family drama, and many of Trevor's psychotic antics. Franklin's not perfect, but his interactions with the people in his hood are always a stand out. Lamar might be a loser but he's the funniest guy around, easily my favorite out of the side cast.

At least they didn't stumble with the missions. Of course, you have to put in the fact that Rockstar is very much still in the business of putting way too many shootouts in them. In many cases, it's either not necessary, or they go on for too long. But I can't deny that there's a lot of kick-ass missions here. If I had to pick a couple favorites, it would be:
- The Bureau Raid. It's so cool pretending to be firemen and navigating the ruined floors. And you get some AAA floor mopping action too!
- Father/Son. There's so much happening in a few minutes here. Getting Franklin to jump on the yacht, catching Jimmy while he's hanging from the pole, and listening to all the dysfunctional father-son banter in the process.
- Scouting the Port. I liked all the heist prep missions because they serve well as the bridge between the hard hitting action, and this is probably the best one to me. I guess I like handling the heavy equipment too much, haha.

A lot of these missions, especially the heists, are big, showboat-y set pieces made to amaze. At this point, bombastic action doesn't hit as hard as they did a decade ago, and the aforementioned shootout bloat only makes things worse. Still, I appreciate that Rockstar were trying to push themselves, at least on the technical side.

Now I want to talk a bit about the side activities. This is where the scope of the game gets truly massive. There's just so much to do. Races, tennis, parachuting, hunting, etc. Most of these aren't individually stellar, but you can't beat Rockstar at being the jack of ALL trades. My personal favorite is the Triathlon, it's basically a set piece, but about seeing the most beautiful environments instead of killing and blowing things up. In fact, I almost shed a tear seeing the blue-orange Los Santos city scape in the distance as I was frantically mashing X, biking from hillbilly land in the other direction. And I gotta say, I like towing vehicles a lot, haha. There's also a lot of things to spend your money on, which helps the end game even more. It feels like no matter what your interests are, there's at least one side activity that you can treat like a hobby and just focus on.

This replay was a very productive one, might be the most productive replay I ever had. It's hard to believe that since GTA V first came out, there's only one game that can challenge it on its turf (Watch Dogs 2, baby!). The open world modern city genre has not been in the spotlight for a while now, and many of the old GTA clones from back in the day has taken a down turn, or outright disappear. I really think that there's still so much to gain from this open world formula, and I hope GTA VI can prove it. There's a lot of new tricks that Rockstar can learn, and I have faith in their capability to excite us with something fresh.

Side note: there's so many cats and dogs running around the city now. I'm pretty sure they added these post PS3-360. They're so cute!

First of all, I gotta thank my local coffee shop for the clutch brew. Made me all focused and hyped up and stuff. With the power of caffeine, I just spent an incredibly fun 5 hours, tightening my gameplay skills and getting enough powerful abilities, in order to set up the one run that will be enough to carry me all the way to the end. Ended up beating the final boss at age 44. Lots of room to improve, but I'm happy with it for now. I just want to gush about this wonderful game for a bit.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like the art direction of this game is kinda underrated. The soft painting-esque look of the game is pleasant enough on its own, but the game continuously impresses with the kinds of environments that it introduces as it goes on. Not to mention how surreal it can be sometimes. The game is not afraid to break reality and move beyond it to create absolutely stunning moments. The boss fight in the 3rd area is an absolute highlight in this regard.

Now let's move on to the juicy meat; this game's melee combat system is simply impeccable. There's definitely a lot of learning and practicing to do on your own before the system truly clicks, but once it does, it's so exhilarating. My personal favorite part of it is learning how the defensive mechanics work. Dodging, deflecting, parrying, and avoiding; all separate moves with their own use cases and benefits, but the game demands you to master them all, in that order. It's a highly rewarding feat, when you have studied the enemies' attack patterns enough, and you know exactly what to do in order to achieve the outcome you want. My favorite combo so far is avoiding or parrying an attack, pushing them with the palm strike, and pummeling them with chasing strikes; it's the kind of offensive manuever that I associate with Asian martial art movies the most, and it's so badass.

So, the fundamentals of the game are supremely solid. But what makes this game truly special is the intricacies of its accessory systems. You only can get new abilities from Shrines that are spread in all the levels, and they have certain requirements: being below a certain age, or requiring a set amount of score/XP. You can just use the level shortcuts to avoid fighting too many enemies, and just focus on the boss fights, while skipping some Shrines because of it. But you can do the opposite, and be rewarded for your efforts; I got enough abilities to make all the weapons in the game last much longer and hit much harder than normal, especially with bladed weapons, and it wouldn't happen if I don't take the scenic route. This meta aspect of the game is a big, fun puzzle that only strengthens the game's core qualities.

There's also some smaller quirks and features of the combat that I find really fun to learn. For example, learning that doing enough takedowns will randomly turn an enemy into a "fired up" state, and avoiding these mighty obstacles by resisting the extraordinarily strong urge to do a takedown in the first place; their animations are so fun to watch! It's so hard to resist sometimes. Not to mention the fact that they make you invincible for the duration of the animation, so you can do them to avoid getting hit by another enemy. Another example is abusing the environment to your advantage, like pushing an enemy from a ledge, or pushing them to hit a wall. It's far more situational, but still useful enough to give you the extra edge if you are aware enough to execute them.

The boss fights deserve a spotlight of their own too. All of them are challenging affairs that properly test your skills, while also pushing you to plan things out to make things easier. For example, finding a way to carry a weapon to the fight. The final boss fight is noticably harder than the rest, and is much more skill-based since one of your powers is completely handicapped, which was kinda annoying at first. But I realized that this design choice adds so much depth and replayability to the rest of the game, since the game asks you to optimize your gameplay in every other level leading up to it, to give you enough cushion and leeway to prevail in the final fight. In that way, this boss fight isn't just about mastering this one opponent, but also mastering the game itself.

Lastly, the presentation of this game is clean af. The camera moves during the takedowns, the sound effects of all the punches and kicks, the aforementioned art design, and so on: they all unite to form a beautiful, confident, and distinctive look and feel.

I want to give this a perfect score, but I'm holding out until I see more of the extra content. I do, however, have the confidence to say that this game is the absolute peak of melee combat gaming. Easily an all-timer game for me, too.

Elden Ring is difficult, not in gameplay, but in how I wrestle with it in my memories. The first week was pure magic, I completely let go and gave myself up to the primal (teenage) gamer urges of yesteryear - I fucking devoured this game. As pathetic as it sounds, it was time well spent, very few games these days afford me the opportunity to wholeheartedly consume. If you were to ask me then, what I thought as I rolled credits, I would've enthusiastically proclaimed Elden Ring as a masterpiece without a shred of doubt. Ask me now, I'm not so certain - I've replayed the game a couple of times since release, it has never struck me the same way that it did upon release. The awe of discovery is tarnished (ha), I've come to accept that I'll never get to experience the Lands Between for the first time ever again, and that's fine, that's just how life goes. So here we are, in the end, I'm choosing to remember this game more fondly, I desperately want to view this game with rose-tinted glasses, take me back to the time where I felt like a kid for the first time in a long time.

Finally, the distillate of pure gamer slop. It's fine, whatever... a perfectly serviceable open-world survival game aping Ark, devoid of any creativity besides "le epic pokemon with gunzzz". The creatures are all Walmart-brand Pokémon, no effort was put in to hide that they are blatant rip-offs; sounds, menu layouts, fonts, all incredibly insignificant details which would be incredibly easy to create, are copied wholesale from other games - it's disgusting that this game will go down as one of 2024's biggest successes.

oh come on man, whyd this game have to be so GOOD! i’ve had this on my list of classic, medium defining games to experience for a long time and yeah, its worth it. the controls havent aged perfectly and kojima’s writing can be a little bit verbose and his female characters are a little too oversexualized womp womp. but generally, the set pieces, voice acting, fourth wall breaks, and super unique and fun boss fights make this game really memorable and i understand why everyone holds it so highly.

i finally understand. kojima is goated

Ground Zeroes is one of the greatest prologue chapters in gaming history, it's an absolutely perfect introduction to The Phantom Pain.
Speaking about TPP, its gameplay is one of the most fun experiences I've had in a game in a very long time, probably the best in the MGS series. The story is obviously the weak part of the game but unlike many others I think it has its good moments and also I didn't really mind the concept of listening to the audio tapes, some were actually really good (especially the ones you get after beating the game).
Overall despite the lack of KoTF (the infamous mission 51) I have a very positive opinion of this game, I still play it from time to time