i wanna give it a 5 because the front half was so fucking good, but i also wanna give it a 1 because the back half was so mindbogglingly bad.

i found it very odd that the game's writing dropped off when the main plot started coming to the fore. legitimately, everything up to that point was golden. toe to tip, the writing was way beyond what AAA RPGs have been shitting out for the last eternity. so why, then, did none of it last through the unraveling of its own story?

as soon as the game starts pushing you more heavily into the main plot, all the intricate character writing seems to fly out the window and the whole party devolves from characters into plot devices. if you asked me what was going on in the last 10 hours of that game, or why any of it even happened, i genuinely could not tell you. i wish i could. it was epilepsy-inducing light shows happening back-to-back in a bloated, wet fart of a boss rush for 3-4 hours only to then turn around and smirk at you like, "wasn't that shit awesome?"

i wanted to love this game very much. the open world stuff was common fare but couched in enough nostalgia and clever/funny bits of writing that i had full intentions to complete all the side content. i could not, in good faith, recommend this game to anyone unless they get it for free or at super discount.

2.5/5. i am absolutely fucking begging people to stop letting tetsuya nomura and kazushige nojima write stories.

Katsura Hashino is my mortal enemy and I would put myself in unimaginable debt if it just meant I could get into a cage match with him. Fair warning that I'm not gonna bother getting into the gameplay aspects because that, at least, is something the bulk of players seem to agree on.

P5 espouses a solid overarching message; take control of your life! Stand up to The Man! Foster community with your fellow freaks to find meaning in a world designed to put you down! However, it's written by a middle-aged with ass-backwards views on women, queerness, and society. It's one thing to tout the ideals that P5 is allegedly all about, and a whole other entirely to actually follow through on any of it. But the game has Japanese Bernie Sanders in it, so it's Progressive, or something.

I truly cannot comprehend the layers of cognitive dissonance it takes to tell people to fight The Man, then double-fist perpetuating homophobia AND sexism in the same breath. I think constantly about the creepy power imbalance relationships like letting a teenage boy date his teacher but how that's supposed to be chill, yet the mere idea of anyone being gay is completely unthinkable. I try not to take a hard anti-player stance for specific tastes but I do for this game; if you think Futaba makes sense as a dating option to this day, we are mortal enemies and I will see you in the pit.

None of this is even remotely surprising, but I'm continually stunned by how tone deaf players are about the content. Hashino has been writing hollow lip service to progressive ideals and actively bashing them since day one, so we all know what expect from him. But as a player, going from one Persona game to the next, it boggles my mind that so many people uncritically love this game and seem shocked to hear I very critically hate it.

P5 is the epitome of style over substance and I would invite people to fight me on it, but I don't trust anyone on the internet to know how to talk to another human being anymore.

metroidvania + pokemon + final fantasy (your party members are the monsters) is a stellar combo in theory, and thankfully also in execution. i played this whole game in one week, got neck-deep in the party build meta, explored every single nook and cranny, and had dreams about playing it. it's a nearly perfect intersection of very specific interests for me, and i sometimes wish i could wipe my brain clean so i could experience it all again. maybe not the story though. the story was aggressively okay.

that said, complaints about the repetitive navigation are so valid. more than once, i found myself spacing out or falling asleep trying to get to a certain area, and i did not especially enjoy most of the puzzles. eventually i got to a point where i just defaulted to looking some of them up because i have ADHD and cannot be bothered to memorize the placements of which lever affects what door when it's off-screen. there's some tedium to the game for sure, and it won't be for everyone. i was able to happily power through it because i love a game with smooth movement, and this one had it.

the party-building and combat aspects are finely tuned but seem very unfriendly toward casual players; i found myself needing to engage with the gameplay meta in a way i didn't intend at the start because i started getting my shit absolutely whipped by babies and it felt bad. still, i do appreciate the options players are given to engage that deeply with the system; i cannot tell you how satisfying it was to wipe the floor with my spinner/bard/caraglow team. on the other hand, i literally did not use any other monsters after finalizing this team.

all in all, it was well worth the money and time i sunk into it and i'm looking forward to the next game the devs are working on.

For such a visually distinct and lore-rich game, Horizon Forbidden West is most memorable to me for its bland, overwritten main plot and profoundly annoying over-explanation of every single puzzle you find in the game. And the game is huge. With a lot of puzzles. If I never hear a AAA protagonist tell me I need to pull the lever, Kronk, to open the door approx. 5 seconds before I'm even aware there's a lever and door to be opened at all, it will be too soon.

I don't know how I played through the entirety of the first game because I also don't remember a single thing that happened besides the reveal of Aloy's ~true origins~ and Lance Reddick's character being evil, or something? If nothing else, Forbidden West is admirably consistent with the first game in that way; forgettable characters and stiff or awkward voice acting makes it hard to buy into what's happening, much less follow any of it. I came back to this game a total of three times and got about 12 hours in before deciding there were much better uses of my time, not to mention much more respectful ones. I'm not entirely sure how the game creation process works step-by-step, especially regarding the melding of writing and gameplay, but Forbidden West follows the trend of telling a grave story of Evil That Must Be Stopped Yesterday in a game that directly bucks against the immediacy of the plot. Aloy needs to make her way west ASAP to stop the end of the world? That's crazy. Let me finish my side quests, inspect these lore sites, get this sick-ass armor, and fully upgrade my weapons first. Also if we have time can I take a detour and go scan that Tall Neck to fill out my map? It'll only take me an entire in-game day. Maybe three. The best thing about open world RPGs like Elden Ring and Witcher 3 is that the game compliments the pacing; there are certain points of no return but by and large, the entire game is not trying to cajole you into believing the end is nigh while also firmly nudging you to explore every nook and cranny.

I will say that the mo-cap is at first arresting in how good it is. Technology sure has come a long way and whatever. However, because characters can talk for minutes and minutes without saying a single thing, you get more than enough time to stare at their faces and wonder why something about it just isn't sitting right. It strikes an uncanny valley chord where you start to notice the nuances, and it becomes more of a performance of those deeply unsettling faux-skin wearing robots that are supposed to replicate human behavior and expression than anything.
Sticking to the subject of technology coming a long way, I'm continually stunned at the sheer amount of money AAA companies sink into graphical fidelity over gameplay feel. I don't personally think open world games should work to emulate "realistic" movement because it interferes with how the exploration should feel. Climbing and grappling especially feel awkward, and sometimes you're tricked into thinking you needed to press the jump button to make a jump when instead, you absolute buffoon, you veritable mayor of Clown Town, you should have simply tilted the left stick in the correct radial direction.

I could really go on forever about how much of a wet fart this game is, and I haven't even addressed the time-honored Only Savages Live In These Uncolonized Lands trope this game predictably perpetuates as Aloy finally crosses borders and is told, and shown, that these new faces and cultures respond and deal predominantly in violence. It's the usual anti-indigenous, white colonizer bullshit we've all been fed before. It's backwards and unimaginative, same as always. There's not much more to say about it.

I'll probably spend the rest of my life wondering at what place it's supposed to occupy in the pantheon of incredibly mid AAA games. I don't know anyone who really loves this series, I don't know who out there is absolutely begging for more of it, and yet we keep moving forward in this baffling direction of Marvel-style writing (derogatory) and throwing players into their gamer diapers. Western developers don't seem to trust that any of us have working brain cells, or that any of us would want even a little bit of tangible substance to the media we consume. But hey; cool robot dinosaurs.

yes i am the dude who plays every soulsborne game on release and then spends dozens of hours watching lore videos about them a year later.

the thing about elden ring is i wish there was more of it. yes i'm serious. by my personal metric, that's always been the measure of a good game; no matter how much you played, you still want more. i've played other games for not even half as long and gotten so sick of them that i still want to combust at the mere mention. but this one? this is a good one. this is one of those games that was rumored for 5,000 years and then is actually incredible when it comes out.

my favorite thing about elden ring, and why i champion it as the ideal entry point into soulsborne for people who aren't sure, is that it enables every single style of gameplay you've heard of in the series. it's embarrassing that so many fans are still so loud and annoying about Being True Gamers and how Sorcery Is Cheating, And So Are The Spirit Summons. my brothers in the byzantine empire, if that shit was not meant to be in the game by the actual developers, it would simply not be in the game.
you know what i like doing in elden ring? humiliating bosses by killing them with only swift glintstone shard. you know what i also like doing? sprinting through mobs of enemies to speedrun exploration, find the next grace, and then come back when i'm a big boy with bigger stats. elden ring just lets you do whatever the hell you want at whatever pace you want, and really does not ask a lot relative to the other games in the "series." also? torrent. that's all.

idk how fromsoftware made an open-world dark souls that enables and rewards every style of play, while also rewarding lore heads and those whack-ass "only real gamers" gamers and people who like running past mobs all at the same time, but they did.

PS fellow soulsborne loreheads check out tarnished archaeologist on youtube, it still stuns me that someone with such an insanely detailed lore series that ties soulsborne games to real world history has only a fraction of vaatividya's success okay bye

i never played chrono trigger or super mario RPG so the stuff in this game that borrows from those two had to be relayed to me by someone else LOL. i did, however, play golden sun, the long lost love of my life who got done so dirty, and sea of stars had a lot of its DNA. what a soothing experience.

i most appreciate this game from a development standpoint because it is utterly bonkers to me in the best way that sabotage is building a cohesive narrative universe between two wildly different games. i loved plaguing my roommate, who's playing the messenger, with "wow that's from sea of stars" every 5 minutes, and he managed to get in "wow that's from the messenger" yesterday. good stuff.

i wish i had more specific things to say about this game? i'm giving it a 4.5/5 because it accomplishes everything it set out to do in a pretty satisfying way. i won't say i personally loved it, but it does deserve the praise and success it's getting.

great game, i love an RPG that is under 50 hours long.

i had to add this one for all the obvious reasons.

you ever play a game that changes your brain chemistry and how you think about and consume media for the rest of your life? lemme be clear, i played demons' souls first. i also MAD cheated in it with the item duplicating glitch. i also only played it because a friend guilt-tripped me into it. but dark souls is the one that changed the game (ahyuk).

i think about stories differently. i think about how a game feels to play, the intention behind it. i think about accessibility more. i think harder about whether the difficulty of anything is meaningful or not, and if it's really worth all the trouble of those first fifty-seven times that smough ends your bloodline with the sheer weight of his fucking ass.

there's not much else to say that you haven't already heard. i don't know if there are more video essays about anything than there are for dark souls, except video essays about majora's mask being a metaphor for the stages of grief. it's just a weird fucking game that changed the landscape of games forever, and i should like to grab lunch with miyazaki sometime right after i give him a bear hug and ask if he's good.

this is the game i turned off comments for because i am Not here to get yelled at by sweaty-ass D&D shills and tiktok girlypops who love a problematic white man.

lemme be clear homie. 150 hours in this game. i have played it to hell and back (lol), and i loved a lot of it. but the shine starts wearing off around hour 120, especially as you start to notice that your interest always drops off at one specific point in the game. yes. it was act 3. you've heard everyone talk about it.

what larian did here whips, let's just get that absolutely clear. as far as the RPG landscape is concerned, they took a mold that was frankly mistreated as hell for a very long time (hi Bioware) and completely reshaped it. shit's rad. it's fun. it's awesome. half the appeal of it now is how much the cast seems to have loved working on it, and how communicative the devs have been about supporting it.

and like, the most i'm going to say about the story? act 3 tanks it for me. it just does. acts 1 and 2 were polished to such an insane degree that to go from that to the clown car of cliches and mixed messaging about the urgency of it all just gave me a bit of whiplash.

that's really all i'm going to say about story issues because i'm going to be That Guy and start talking about the queerness of this game. yes. we are going to talk about the romances. we are also going to talk about that genital slider.

larian took that RPG mold and reshaped it, but i think they maybe should've just broken it altogether. i've been a longtime believer that romances are handled pretty terribly in this vein of games and they shouldn't be in them as just more video game shit to min-max for achievements. if the romance isn't baked into the story itself, cut it. don't act like fanfiction and spotify playlists don't exist to fill in the blanks, bitch.

but back to the point, this game really, really makes romance a priority in such a strange way. having a romantic relationship isn't baked into the plot for tav, but you can't build friendships or to show your party members any amount of physical or verbal affection without it being not just romantic, but sexual.
i think it's such a bizarre choice. you can't cuddle karlach, who's in your corner from the word go, and who's been literally unable to touch anyone without hurting them for A While, without wanting to have sex with her? you can't goof off and dance with wyll without him asking you out the night after? i personally would die if i lived in a world where no platonic love existed, or was so unheard of that to have Big Fun and A Hug means y'all need to start planning your wedding yesterday. whack.

i also just couldn't stop thinking that all the romances were written with a savior complex in mind. besides astarion's added interactions in dark urge playthroughs, i couldn't really come up with anything specific that anyone else did for tav. it was kind of just always them helping the party members enough to date them. i understand that these kinds of games tend to be created for the savior complex shit, but we can surely do better, be a little more honest? but this part verges so hard into nitpicking that i, personally, would probably not include in a formal review. i just don't really care much for one-sided relationships in my life, and not in the media i consume unless it's in there for a reason.

my final queer nitpick is that i don't want anyone on this earth to go around their whole lives thinking that BG3 changed the fuckin game with queer rep. don't think i didn't notice that every single party member is cisgender, and don't think i didn't notice that if i played a transgender character, they would be mirroring my exact discomfort of being the only trans person in a room full of people because i would not find any other friend in my party who understood me in that way. this weeeird, weird burgeoning trend with mainstream RPGs where you get to mix and match pronouns and genitals feels like old navy's jank-ass gender-neutral clothing line. it's weak, it's pandering, and it's shallow. truly, i could not give a smaller shit if your game lets me choose pronouns or whether or not i decide i want to piss sitting or standing up this playthrough. i care about seeing characters like me who are literally just out here trying to vibe like everybody else. i don't know why that has to be such a huge ask, or why people don't seem to understand it when they are asked.

all in all, sure, play the D&D game. it helped me understand the 5e system more than any DM explaining it to me ever could. the voice acting is perfect. the voice actors are all suspiciously hot themselves. the mo-cap adds a sense of depth to characters that used to only exist in players' imaginations. it does shlocky fantasy pulp like no other. its memes are endlessly funny. it's a good game and i look forward to seeing how it influences future games in this genre. it's a good game. it's just not groundbreaking.

you ever just play a game that completely rewires your brain and lives in it and everything you do from that point forward?

this game legitimately changed my life, as we all know it has for a billion other people. this game also is one of my least talked about loves because the fandom is a nightmare, and to be called an undertale fan is also to be called an irredeemable sex pest. we also can't forget matpat giving a copy of the game to the actual pope.

but if we can stretch our imaginations and pretend like undertale isn't inextricably tied to the nastiest corners of tumblr and also the catholic church, we can just call a spade a spade: undertale is a great game with an earnest need for kindness to win in a world that isn't kind to us. it's small, it's goofy, it's not everyone's cup of tea, and i will always be shit at the actual combat portions, but it changed me for the better. just please don't ask me if i'm an undertale fan in public. i will ignore you.