I didn't think I'd wrap this one up before the end of the year, but this game was a lot shorter than I anticipated. I have such vague memories of watching my older sister playing this game on the PS2 back then, Quina's theme was basically etched into my brain because she spent so much time catching frogs from what I remember. By the time I got to my first Qu's Marsh in my playthrough, it was like I was hit with the enlightenment stick and then raptured right then and there. I remember trying so hard to beat this game myself back then too, but I was too stupid to figure out the first plant boss and thought that the game was fucking impossible, so I gave up. My child self has officially been avenged, but that was in like.. the first hour of the game. How was the rest?

It was very close to perfect in my eyes, from start to finish. The plot is so fittingly Shakespearean, so fluidly tragic and comedic ala Midsummer's Night Dream. Just a group of hooligans befriending each other on the way to killing a God in such JRPG fashion. It's a trope, but it's a trope that I love and this game served that up on a silver platter. There was a very effective emotional punch to the game's themes about individuality and personal existence that resonated with me. It was filled with so much empathy and heartfelt bond that actually grows as the plot moves forward. Some of the characters do stupid as shit things, but it's effectively told through the bittersweet enveloping of the narrative. The twists are gut wrenching to the characters and they're acting in ways rational to them. There's a lot of darkness and death, but also a lot of moments of light peeking in that I really appreciated. I was also a theatre kid after all, it's in the roots of my personality that make me omega cringe.

I like the character's a lot for the most part. There are clearly some that are more integral than others, but those characters help balance out the dreary with some comic whimsy. I couldn't help but exhale air out of my nose every time Quina randomly appeared on screen and I applaud them for being a Blue Mage that is actually useful. I could do with some more fleshing out of specific characters though. Amarant is the last party member you get fairly deep into the game and his motivations for following the party are pretty flimsy. He doesn't have the charm or helpfulness in combat that Quina has for me to be like, "That's a character that's doing stuff", so most of the time I was like, "Why's this guy still here?" instead. Garnet needed to give a little more, she's like almost a perfect character to me (story-wise) but then the game gives her plot MUTENESS and literally shuts her up and deletes her dialogue for a whole disc of story. That and there being another character that is the same class as her, but objectively way better in combat for plot reasons, she ended up getting sidelined near the end for me. Those are really the only character gripes I had, but I will say that Square finally crafted a love story that didn't make my eyes roll out of my head.

There's some fantastic scenes in this game that are hampered down a bit by the game having old disease, and I'm looking forward to seeing those scenes revitalized in the supposed remake of this game that's being made. I really think the character's and emotional beats of the story could thrive with a little more oomph injected into the writing and it's exciting to think about it. (If they don't fuck it up, of course.) I should note that I don't think this game needs a remake, but since one has already been heavily rumored, I guess this review is what I hope they would add/change in it. I'm not the biggest fan of FF7 Remake or FF16's more action-oriented combat, so I pray they don't just copy paste those systems into this one. Anyways..

So yeah, the story slaps cheeks red, but for the gameplay? I would say it's more positive than bad, but I do have complaints that I'm noticing have been spewed out before on here, so let me just add my own vomit to that pile really quick. Yeah, the combat is really slow. It's super duper slow. There's a reason why so many people complain about it. It's not even really the battle animations or the 360 no scope camera zoom ins at the start of each battle that bother me, it's moreso the fact that when I cast spell buffs onto my party, they're already completely expired by the time it's my White Mage's turn again so it kind of felt to me like giving your party buffs was a useless waste of a turn for the majority of the time. At first I actually thought that you couldn't cast buffs on multiple people at a time and it turned out that wasn't the case, it was literally just the first buff expiring before I even got a chance to cast it again because the battle timer doesn't pause during the crazy ass battle animations from each enemy, summon, and character on screen. I know that there's a speed up function that came with this port but I didn't like using it because it made the battles overwhelming. It's harder to focus on what is happening and it would just make the buffs expire even faster, so there was no point unless I was grinding.

Also, Trance is kind of.... uh... ass? I like the idea of it, sure, but it's just a watered down Limit Break that you can't control. There's no way to stop the gauge from filling and there's no way to prevent it from happening, so most of the time when Trance happened it would be in a normal battle where Steiner cleaves a poor goblin in half but then doesn't budge an inch during a life or death fight against a boss who wants to eat our innards. Or, someone Trances on the same turn that the enemy dies so it gets completely wasted entirely. It came in clutch for some instances for sure and I like that it's a brief steroid for all of the characters, but the uncontrollable nature of it definitely ruins it as a mechanic.

I do really enjoy the ability mechanic in this game because it reminded me of Bravely Default's ability mechanic in a way. The difference here is that the abilities are leveled up through the use of each character's weapons, so when they kill a certain amount of enemies with said weapon, they'll be able to use that ability permanently without it. I like it a lot, but I also think it could be better to be honest. The plot is constantly ripping the characters away from each other and separating them all the time, so there's some segments where you're forced to use a set of 2 or 4 for hours, and I don't mind that in a story sense at all, but it left some of the characters in the dust when it came to their abilities. By the time you get some of them back, they're under leveled and missing abilities that you'd have to grind to get because the stores would have updated weapons with stronger attributes but different abilities attached to them. Maybe it's more my fault for not grinding them out at every chance I had, but it's not like the game outright warns you that you won't be using character X once your toe touches this specific pixel of the place you're in. Overall though, I find these complaints to be really minor and the story makes me forget about them for the most part in the first place.

This concludes my review of Square's Final Fantasy IX released in 2000 for the Sony Playstation 1! Now I am going to review Square-Enix's Final Fantasy IX released in 2016 as a port for PC:

THIS PORT IS ABSOLUTE DONKEY PISS!!
I wish so bad that I could have played the original, but I have no way of obtaining it so I have to play with this beat up, chewed on, curb stomped, crumpled, doo doo ass version instead. This port looks so.. bad, man. What the fuck happened? Apparently it's a port of a port made for MOBILE? and you can tell. The backgrounds look like the crusty, ambiguous paste I can find on the pavement of a Floridian parking lot. It's so bad that there's literally a whole modding team that had to overhaul the graphics on this game just to make them slightly better. They did the absolute best they could do, but it's still so hard to see what is an interactable object on screen when it's blended in so harshly with the pre-rendered backgrounds that look as bad as that. I find it so ironically comical that Square would give Garnet a high-definition ass on her character model, but won't change the overworld model of Madain Sari even slightly so you can tell it's an enterable place and not a crusty dog shit you can't interact with.

I honestly really don't care that much for graphix, but it's so grating to play this game on a monitor that's bigger than a 4:3 box, because you can literally see the character's blip in and out of cutscenes off to the side where you're not supposed to and it's really annoying. The special effects don't leave that ratio either, so when you get flashbanged by a boss, there's just a white square covering the middle of the screen while you can still see the outskirts of it. It's just awful.

To top it off, my game crashed in the transition between the final dialogue and the ending CGI cutscene right after I finally beat the final boss, so I had to watch the ending on Youtube instead. The game doesn't acknowledge that I beat it because of this and if you think I'm getting my ass pounded by the final boss for 3 hours straight again, you are fucking wrong, bucko.

Anyways, I like this game a lot and I really hope the remake isn't a lie because I'd play the hell out of it. It's not my favorite Final Fantasy ever, (I still think mine is 10) but it's definitely up there. My complaints are super minor and I don't want to change my score on it just because I played the port instead of the OG, but holy shit, just play the OG version if you can. Square did this one so dirty and it's a bit of a shame.

Pretty bare bones and also pretty boring. It's not really the MMO that they claim it to be. Like sure, there's players who are running around the map alongside you that you can talk to, but there's no activities or questlines that you can do with them. The social interactions only go as far as an /all chat that rarely gets used aside from pointing out where special trees are that require multiple people to chop down. You can group up with players for a more private chat, but there's a limit of like 4? I think, and even then, there's just nothing to do with them aside from maybe fishing next to each other in the same pond.

I suppose the main draw for the typical person who would pog at a game like this would be the house building and NPC relationship building, but neither of those are enjoyable in this game to be honest. Once you get past the initial tutorial, you find out pretty quickly that not only do you have to craft ingredients into more ingredients, you also have to wait for those ingredients to be made. Something like 2 or so minutes in real time per plank of wood or stone? Which gets even more time consuming with other ingredients. Some items require a plethora of that shit to make too, so the game basically runs on mobile game time mechanics to achieve any progress. It makes the game extremely grindy for living room furniture. No thank you. Since this is a free game, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if they introduce monetized boosters for that crap down the line, if they haven't already.

I also found it weird that each server runs on it's own timer as well, where all the NPCs go to bed with their own sleep schedules like it's Animal Crossing or something. So often times you need to finish a questline with someone and you can't because it's 12:00 AM and they don't wake up until it's noon. The NPCs themselves aren't really that interesting either to begin with anyways. You can date almost all of them for some reason so it's kind of like literally every player is just dating all 12 of your partners too.

Yeah, it's just kind of a really lackluster amalgamation of other farm games with really tedious mechanics blocking you from achieving any real progress within a reasonable amount of time. Once I got to the actual aspect of building my own house and crafting the furniture, I fell asleep pretty quickly. Calling this an MMO is a bit of a stretch. Sure, all MMO's have a grindy aspect to them, but they also have a major social draw to them as well that balances that out. I'm sure since it's another live-service game it'll have things added to it later but I'm not particularly interested in finding out.

I apologize to Pikmin 4 in retrospect because as much as I loved that game, I gave it a lot of hell for adding in features that made the game way too easy. I'm about to shamefully admit that the only Mario game I've played before this one is Mario Galaxy and as a new player to this series, I was sweating, shitting my pants, and throwing up in just about every level. The only thing preventing me from crushing Prince Florian with a boot was the fact that he always gives you 5 1-Ups upon Game Over. The Bounce Badge saved my life way too many times to count. My friend basically carried me through some of the Special Worlds.

I'm not sure really what it is with the Mario series. I just never got into it as a kid and the 2D entries never seemed to entice me enough to try later in life. I have to say that I probably wouldn't have bothered with this one either if I hadn't committed to playing all 6 of the GOTY nominees this year. It's not that I didn't know what to do per se. You hop on the enemies and use the Koopa shells to kill others. Don't fall off the ledge. Dome your head into bricks for gold schmeckles, etc, etc. A ton of stuff that is so obvious in my mind, but yet I kept tremendously fumbling in execution. I'm happy to say though that while this was a WILD game to basically begin the series with, it was still a pleasantly fun experience that will haunt me when I try to sleep at night from now on.

I mean, I don't really have anything to compare it to but I stand pretty firm in believing that it's just a creatively done and well made game overall. Anything that really annoyed me was more likely caused by skill issue-itis, so I don't have many criticisms to air out. It was fun to enter a level and never truly know what exactly you were walking into until you slapped the Wonder Flower and transported yourself into a new torture chamber. While some mechanics were re-used here and there, there was a much larger variety than I was expecting. To top it off, the levels had fantastic music, doubled by the fact that the Elephant form has it's own soundtrack as well.

I think the only thing that I truly did not like was the online multiplayer functionality. Your friends are wildly de-synced from you and aren't tangible, which means that they'll be witnessing your ghost basically skate across the map in the middle of the air. What you see isn't the same as what they see and therefore they're reacting to something that you're not. The ability to revive your friends with a standee is a good feature on paper, but it doesn't take the auto-scroller levels into consideration by any means. Some levels are just so FAST that if your friend is even slightly ahead of you, you're basically screwed. If they finish the level before you and you die, you're doomed to burn in Hell. I just didn't see a point in that. It's just weird that local co-op works normally, but because I am an adult who lives miles away from my friends, we're subjected to this awful disjointed experience instead.

The other thing is the lack of boss variety as well. For a game that has such wacky level design at every turn, it's pretty disappointing that there aren't any cool boss fights that even slightly differ from each other. There are some levels that just hand you the Royal Seed upon completion with no real sense of conflict as well. I know I'm bad at the game, but it still would have been nice to have a greater sense of challenge aside from the Special Worlds. They took the time to create all these new monsters we've never seen before but that never bled into the bosses. You'd think that with all the badges the game hands you, they'd have some sort of purpose in the big battles, but you really only get some of them and then never need to use them again. Literally when did you ever use the Dolphin badge.. like ever..?

Anyways, this game was fun and I played the whole thing with my friend using an Ouija board. You don't really see level design like this, so I'm hoping that this one doing so well will encourage other companies to take note. Have I been Mario-pilled? I think I've been Mario-pilled.

Oh and uh... the talking flowers? Ok.. a few of them made me laugh... .. . ... .

Edit: Used to be a 4.5 star rating, but I stopped doing halfsies.

I like me some Spidey-Men but I still can't seem to get myself interested in their games. I can't help but feel like they're just average at best, knowing that I will immediately forget what happened in them as soon as the credits roll.

Navigation still reigns supreme for these games, but the combat is just so extremely tedious. It's like a never-ending onslaught of goons that vary from man with shield to big boy with unga bunga stick, while Spider-Man break dances in different directions because the game lacks a lock-on feature. The newly added feature of using D-Pad Ability 1-4 doesn't really add anything to me because I found it quite repetitive. It's the same D-Pad Ability Usage that was in Final Fantasy XVI and I hated it in that game too. Most combat scenarios led to me fighting 4 parry enemies at once, just to get domed in the head by a larger enemy off screen. It's flashy and cool, but quickly loses steam as the game progresses and keeps introducing more enemy and attack types. It turns most of the later fights into annoying rave shows of dodge/dodge/parry/dodge/parry/parry/dodge. Eugh. Arguably, the best part of the game for me was when you got to play as other characters because it was finally something different. One in particular is not only cheeked the fuck up, but also gives a fun respite to the monotony. (I'm talking about a specific spoiler character, not MJ. MJ segments are mostly okay for me, although I think her graduation into the Ph.D of Girl Bossery was a bit goofy.)

It's odd for me because Peter obviously has the more urgent, chaotic, and attempt at emotional storytelling while Miles seems to do fuck all until the last act. Yet, I much preferred playing as Miles at almost every turn. His abilities are better suited for fighting huge swathes of enemies, albeit still the same repetitive D-Pad cooldown thing. Aside from the "contemplating revenge" plotline we've seen multiple times before, his missions were generally more fun for me. It is unfortunate that he has zero drip in this game though.

The pacing is break neck fast in this game and it lead to some plot threads feeling rather anti-climactic? There's certain sections that I think were too long, and others that were too short to even have the impact that they were going for. It went by so fast that you didn't even have time to process what happened anyways, and then the game ends. The story is rather short and I wouldn't say that I took it as seriously as I was probably meant to, but I can't help but feel if the pacing was a bit better in those areas, that I would at least feel bad about what happened and how it affects the relationships between the characters.

A pretty noticeable amount of this game is just a PS5 showcase where you're meant to walk around admiring scenery while someone gives you a science lesson and jerk yourself off with the controller's motion controls so you're pogging at raising your hands on a rollercoaster. The other 50% of the game is running around and doing collectible quests. I found those obnoxious in the last game and didn't do them here either. It's unfortunate that your upgrades are tied to doing that side content because I don't find any of it engaging. You could put a gun to my head and tell me to platinum this game, and I'd still probably tell you no. I really feel that they could have fleshed out the main story a lot more and done away with a good chunk of the collectibles that just bloat the playtime.

Thank god for the audio settings because this game is a completely better experience when speech volume is set at 0. There is no reason for so many people to be constantly talking all the damn time in these games!!! Please shut up!! Basically every single traversal moment is plagued with a phone call or some random asshole talking in a podcast. Almost EVERY fight, Peter never stops talking or is having a literal phone conversation with MJ during the whole thing. If you die, the whole thing resets and you have to listen to the dialogue again. Please for the love of God LMAO. There's not a single second of peace. Turning it off meant that I could finally fucking concentrate and actually be able to listen to the soundtrack for once.

Overall I do think this game is fine and I get the appeal it has on it's audience, but this is just very samey to me. It's not ass enough to warrant a lower score, but it's also not impressive enough to warrant a higher one either. It has the same complaints that I had in the previous games and doesn't really change anything enough for me to feel any differently about it. I would say that I have a better tolerance of cringe than most people, but I don't find myself gripped by the narrative and the gameplay didn't balance that out. It's just simply a game that I played.

The current state of gaming is buying a game on PC just for it to be unoptimized as all Hell, then refunding it and having to buy it on console with an extra $10 "fuck you" fee added on top. I opened this game to the audio just straight up not functioning no matter what I did to fix it. It definitely set the scary tone of the game, that's for sure.

I really badly wanted to like this one. I played Alan Wake 1 when it was originally released and while I didn't remember most of what happened, I did have fond memories of it. There is a lot to like in this game, but also a lot to really despise, personally.

First I want to give this game a lot of credit for telling it's narrative in ways that I truly did not expect. Both of the characters that you play as have their own unique abilities that help progress the story and dig a little deeper into the mystery of what is going on. Saga has the more combat heavy sections where she's constantly asking the questions, while Alan uses environmental puzzles to answer those questions in his own chapters. It was an intriguing way to sift through all of the confusion that was elevated by Alan's literal interpretation of environmental storytelling. The FMV movies are quite goofy at first, but help sell the surreal weirdness of the conflict at hand. It's so unserious and serious at the same time and I give them props for going all in with it. The meta scenes didn't always hit, but when they did, they were quite fun.

I wish that the gameplay and level design would have matched that level of quality though. This game had a lot of awesome ideas on paper that just didn't quite stick the landing and that's where most of my gripes are. The characters when they're in active combat feel so excruciatingly slow, like there's zero urgency. You'll find yourself waltzing down a windy path, just to get bum rushed by 4 Olympian athletes who take 15 bullets each to drop. The dodge is barely effective and the time it takes to reload your guns is way too long. It's hard to enjoy some of the more fantastic scenes in this game when they're bogged down by the horrendous last stand combat sections. I love the aspect of having to blast bad guys with a light source before dealing damage, but it feels like a chore here. There's no way to cancel it out once you've started doing it, and half the time it takes more than 1 bar to eliminate the darkness on a single enemy. I just found it incredibly tedious. It's definitely the worst part of the game. Also, there are a lot of jumpscares that really did nothing but cover the screen for a few seconds.

Alan's chapters were less combat oriented and more trippy, but his segments were also annoying as shit in their own right. I feel like both characters suffer from similar things, where the chapters really establish this effectively spooky tension just in look and atmosphere alone, but then they're eventually ruined by the fact that most of the level design leads to stumbling around in pitch black hallways for way longer than you intend. I get that being extremely confused is the point, but it turns the horror into annoyance rather quickly. Alan's main ability of changing his environment is a fantastic idea, but his changes are often so subtle that it just leads to you rewriting the scene over and over again while he keeps saying "Bro, I think I'm onto something." At that point, you realize you're just trapped in this dude's awful writing and want to end it all.

Saga's detective board was also a good idea in theory, but it also lead to being somewhat groan-inducing as well. The problem with it mainly is that I was putting the pieces of the story together at a much faster rate than she was, and I don't know if that's just because I played one too many Alan segments before hers or what, but there were often times where I couldn't progress the story because Saga wouldn't let me without putting her evidence on the wall first. I would be exploring around and seeing important items that come into play later, only to be roadblocked from getting them because she didn't have her "A-ha!" moment yet. It was a really weird mechanic that didn't seem to take the player's diverging exploration into account, which was a bit of a time waster when you accidentally found things out of order and get invisible walled.

This was just sort of not my cup of tea overall, but it gets a lot of points for the genuine creativity. The narrative is really interesting up until the end, where it kind of just gives off "middle sibling in between a trilogy" vibes. I want to see more ideas like this in games though and I'm interested in seeing where Remedy goes from here. They have something nice cooking up so I hope they lean even further into the madness instead. The fun meta singy songy meme bits were a really creative way to dump exposition after 13 years, but it was not enough to save the rest of the game for me, which bored me to tears.

I just finished my 110 hour playthrough of this game and it's occupying a cavity in my brain that has transformed into a battleground between all of the positive and negative criticisms I have for it.

I've never participated in a full D&D campaign due to the few attempts I've tried fizzling out after a session or two. So, I don't have any knowledge on the elements of this game that were pulled from actual DnD lore and manuals or what was changed/simplified. The only dungeon I've ever been in is the public restroom of my local Walmart, so this is purely a review coming from a person who just enjoys playing a variety of wildly different games.

My first initial thought was to create a Tav that was some replication of a character I created who never saw the light of day from one of those previous DnD attempts. Enter in my Half-Orc Bard, primarily meant to cast debuffs as some sort of unga bunga saboteur to anyone who dared step to my party. Turns out, that idea was atrocious and it resulted in my first 15 or so hours getting absolutely nothing done and everyone getting absolutely raw dogged by every fight we came across. Fine. My saviour Withers came to town and the game allowed me to change things up, thank god. You can do this with any of your characters at literally any time and I can't thank them enough for including it because after this, we cruised through Act 1 like it was nothing. My character was now a dual wielding Bard with the occasional healing buffs instead. I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't necessarily craft the character I thought up in my mind, but I just attributed that to me not understanding DnD classes or mechanics, so it's whatever.

As for someone who has never played a game like this before, it was slightly overwhelming at first. By the end of it, I was glad to see a multitude of giga spells and attacks at my disposal, but to say that it wasn't confusing at first would be a huge lie. The game just kind of assumes that you'd be aware what every little dice roll means, or what concentration even is in the first place. I originally thought that buffs could stack similar to JRPGs, but it took time for me to realize that's nowhere near the case because it isn't really explained. There's some fights in the game where misclicking or getting your concentration immediately broken is very bad, so I imagine that first 15 hours would have been more manageable if it was a bit clearer. Nevertheless, we persevered.

The combat in this game has highs and lows for me. Once I finally grappled the mechanics and shifted my spells around, it started to become a lot more fun. It became pretty clear to me that pre-emptively making my life less miserable for the future was the best strategy to getting through some boring as shit fights. My character looked like a dumpster, yet had such high charisma that it meant fighting 20 less enemies in some scenarios. So, I don't even want to imagine what playing this game without it is like. The persuasion rolls were some of the funniest moments in the game for me and it actively changed the outcomes of some battles. The worst fights in this game are the ones where it's 50 vs. 4. It's incredibly tedious and the difficulty of them are purely based on the map layout and initiative roll of your characters. Act 3 has some of the most horrendous fights I've ever seen in my life. They basically boiled down to just forcing the enemies to walk through a meat grinder of AoE spells, which was incredibly unfun.

I persevered through all of that because I was genuinely intrigued in the story and characters. I was the most invested in my party of Gale/Shadowheart/Karlach, but the other characters chilling back at camp had compelling weight to them as well. There are definitely some characters who were treated with more care than others. Astarion and Shadowheart's plotlines are like 3 novels of writing in comparison to someone like Karlach, which I found pretty disappointing. I wish that the other characters interacted with each other a bit more because it kind of feels like they just are friends by default after a certain point despite never seeing them together in any capacity whatsoever.

Playing this game as an asexual person is a wild ride. Everyone wants to eat your ass in this game. I tried to make the ugliest character I could and yet, she was still a super model. You do not understand how badly I wanted to play as a goblin freak, only to realize that if I got my wish, the characters would still cry for my grubby goblin hands. I see why this is the way it is, so that everyone has an option, but they didn't need to give Wyll such a sad puppy dog face after I rejected him. I'm not complaining too much about it because it's optional content, it just took me out a bit because it continued to be the funniest thing ever. You know I still gave in and got that fire engine hot rod pussy though.

The level of pseudo-sandbox this game gives you to play in is tremendous. I've found myself getting pretty exhausted with open-world games lately, but it's mostly because those games don't seem to offer really anything in their worlds for me to stay interested. Here, there's side quests and interesting lore bits crammed into just about every crevice. It helped really sell the world building for me, as someone with zero experience with DnD. I found myself investigating through most conversations and genuinely wanting to absorb the information as much as possible because it was actually interesting, for once, and delivered by actors that were giving it their all. If I could complain a little bit though, I wish the journal was handled a bit better, especially with the time sensitive sounding nature of the events taking place. Some quests are written with such mixed signals and given deceptive waypoints, that it literally caused me anxiety. It would result in me running around looking for the way to go for way too long sometimes.

This game was great. It was great for the first 2 Acts, it was even awesome. Then I beat Act 2. Oof. Act 3? Oof. Pretty much all of my criticisms revolve around this section of the game, just like most others who have beaten it. I actually find the sheer amount of people who are saying this is a 5 Star masterpiece while also openly admitting that they still haven't even set foot past Act 1 in the same sentence is insane.

I'm gonna vaguely mention some things that happen in Act 3 without directly spoiling them, but if you want to know literally nothing about Act 3 before going into it, this is your stopping point of my review.

I personally think that the pacing in Act 3 from start to finish is paced very weirdly in comparison to the first two acts. Before, I really felt as though the side quests and every little battle or tribulation weaved together very nicely no matter which scenario you went to first. Pretty much as soon as I entered the city in Act 3, the city that the characters have been talking about the entire game, the city that my character is literally from, a certain character decided "Hey. You stepped foot in my area so I'm now going to railroad you into doing my very important quest. :)" WHY? A scenario that was only triggered because I was exploring in a game meant to be heavily explored. I thought that was a very odd choice, and I didn't like it. Not to mention that most of Act 3, all of the character trauma companion quests are backloaded in this section. It made the game start to feel like a big checklist, "Ope- I did Shadowheart's therapy session, so now I gotta do Gale's." Of course, I wanted to do these quests because I cared about the plotlines that were hanging open, but I feel like they just could have been wrapped up a bit better while also intertwining themselves with the important plotlines as well. It just made Act 3 a bit of a slog to get through, especially with a certain grief fueled fight that might as well have run me over with a car. I also didn't really care for the introduction of Spoiler, Spoiler, and Spoiler. It just felt goofy the way that it was done at the end of Act 2.

And for my last trick, this section of the game is still atrociously buggy. As my playthrough went along, it ran mostly fine up until the final battles of Act 2, where I noticed some graphical bugs beginning to show up more often with every session. Once I got to Act 3 though, Jesus Christ. Baldur's Gate was supposed to be this beautiful city no one would shut up about, but all I saw was endless planes of grass with invisible walls and people floating around while the game chugged to load everything. It messed with the cutscenes endlessly. I had some weirdo conversations with some companions who were suddenly addressing me as one of the Origin characters instead of my Tav. I couldn't finish some side quests because they just simply wouldn't work. It made every session closer to the end even more painful than the last.

My last grievance: The Ending. I will not spoil, but holy shit did it give me the biggest course of blue balls I have ever been given. I spent 110 hours with my party, suffering through some grueling, endless fights, the game shitting itself to death, and the emotional weight of every character piled on top of my back, just for the ending to feel so incredibly rushed with basically zero closure to any of the characters, including mine. Some companions weren't even present. It felt like such a massive wet fart to the face, I questioned if the game bugged out and missed some scenes and it turns out that, no, it did not. This was what I was left with. The final cutscene did not load a single building or object and the final dialogue scene kept freezing because it couldn't load the transitions. That was... a way to end my playthrough, for sure.

I am happy having played this game, but it did not come without it's problems. It's definitely a unique playstyle that I had to seriously commit to learning and I am seriously glad that I did. But, this game does not stick it's landing and that's really unfortunate. The plot threads were what inspired me to keep surviving every battle despite how hard they were getting, so to see the final 25 or so hours to end up like this, really threw me off and kind of offended me.

I really do want to give this game a lot of the credit it deserves though, but it's a weird one to think about. Acts 1 and 2 are basically entire seperate RPGs worth of content and length alone, with so many diverging paths to make the adventure you want while never feeling like they're overstaying their welcome. That alone warrants this game to being fantastic. It's been a while since I truly gave a shit about such a large cast of characters. But, I cannot hand wave how salty everything in the last act made me. I still had fun though, and I'll be remembering this playthrough for a long time.

I knew going into this that this wouldn't be a pleasant experience based off of other reviews but I still went in open-minded having played it a full year after it's release. The bar was low man, but holy shit. What happened between House of Ashes and this?

Something about this entire premise just did not hit right with me. They already went with the whole "saw trap serial killer" concept with Until Dawn, but this one just full sent it to death, with no believable reasoning behind it. The backstory twist was predictable and completely undermines it's own villain, just turning him into a teleporting superhuman who shows up whenever it's convenient. The game suggests that he's in 3 or 4 locations at the same time while never hinting that there are some supernatural elements at play. It just made the whole 8 hour runtime feel weird and pointless.

This isn't helped by the pacing at all. The first half is outrageously boring, setting up some of the worst characters in the series who all seem to hate each other. The 2nd half is where all the "action" takes place, but it's more like scenes where character A or sometimes B run/hide from discount Mikie Myers interspersed with the most annoying investigation settings in the series. They introduced the most useless collectible ever in this game, on top of the usual lore clues sprinkled about. It basically gave them an excuse to go hog wild with these bland and almost pitch black empty spaces that just exist for you to fumble around in for 20 minutes trying to figure out where the game intends for you to go. If there was any tension at all that you achieved from running away from the killer, these walking around bits usually nuked that feeling every time they showed up. These are usually the worst parts of the other games but they've never been this annoying to deal with until now.

They implemented a new inventory item system where each character has their own light source and bonus "power" they can individually use, such as Charlie being able to open locked drawers. I'm open to this series trying new things, but this one was a bit of a flop. I kept forgetting that it was even a thing you could do because some characters just use their abilities much more often than others. I found myself locked in a room as Kate for 30 minutes because she's supposed to use this super cool investigative journalist trick with a pencil that the game gave no indication that she even fucking had in the first place. She used it literally once in that moment, and then never again, so what was the point?

Trying to dabble into this part without spoiling, but if the game wants me to utilize what we know about the character's and their individual personalities to our advantage, then they need to really consider writing better characters? This series isn't well known for having the most stellar casts and I'm usually able to swallow it fine, but this one in particular has some of the most one-note, insufferable barbarians at it's helm. You learn almost nothing about them and yet the Curator's smug ass treats you like a dickhead for not picking up on what you're supposed to do with the little information that's thrown at you. This, coupled up with the fact that the villain is basically Homelander, made the deaths and failures feel extremely cheap.

The optimization itself is also still pretty stinky a year after release. I almost refunded it because it was doing some weird audio de-syncing and displaying extreme desaturation that I never turned on. Opening the game itself was like opening malware; it just death gripped my whole system and refused to exit fullscreen mode no matter how hard I struggled to change it. Subtitles were written incorrectly and had words spelled wrong sometimes. The first fuse box mini-game had the wrong inputs listed. I thought for sure that the game was just broken, but it turned out that you're supposed to use your keyboard to do them even though the UI tells you to use the mouse. Just straight up forehead mechanics.

Please just be a fluke, Supermassive. I really like their games but they need to slow down the release times if they're gonna try to make longer, bigger games like this. Not every story they put out can be golden, but there's some formulas they refuse to change and it's starting to ruin the experiences. Each game has worse looking models with zero souls behind their eyes. I would love if the next one has a cast of characters who are actual friends that don't snipe each other with every line of dialogue, but it's set in space so who the fuck knows. They're probably miserable co-workers, again, who all have a previous past of dating each other, again. At least that one looks like it has a monster.

This series continues to be goofy as hell. The budget looks like it went up like crazy despite the actors performing worse. The mystery delves deeper into the ass crack of the Internet in comparison to it's predecessor, focusing much more on fake Instagram as it's primary tool of investigation, which is cool.

I was enjoying it as the rollercoaster it was up until the game forced me to make a choice and it abruptly ended, and I was like, "Oh-".

I didn't expect much out of it though. These games are like less than two dollars during sales and to their credit, provide a lot for that price tag. They're fun little mystery one offs and this one is no different.

It's a fairly standard Pokémon game. Nothing really stuck out aside from it unfortunately being.. kind of a slog? There's so many long stretches of nothing but 50 back to back double battles just to have to backtrack again anyways because Wallace did child neglect on your ass and left you to deal with a demi-God battle happening on his front yard.

HM moves are such garbage cock ass and this game forces you to use all of them to get through Victory Road. That is something that is a minor annoyance in normal gameplay, but absolute torture in a Nuzlocke. Why did we live like this before?? I don't want to suffer anymore!!

The music is fine on it's own but listening to it on repeat literally gave me a migraine. I love me some trumpets, but the midi version of trumpets might as well have set ants loose into my brain for the same effect. I could not stand fighting Team Aqua/Magma because their song is like listening to dying cats, very fitting since they're all psychos anyways.

It's also completely UNPLAYABLE since you can't get Lickitung easily in this game, but it's still leagues above Sword/Shield. Rayquaza does slap cheeks red though.