kafkaonthesh0ree
3 reviews liked by kafkaonthesh0ree
God of War Ragnarök
2022
This review contains spoilers
I was hoping for a Last of Us 2 sense of dour self seriousness, with the scale of Shadow of the Colossus, a sprinkle of the challenging Baby Souls-like gameplay of Jedi Fallen Order, and the urgency of what a one-shot camera and 'Ragnarok' subtitle imply.
Instead, it's basically just Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy redo. Same kind of ragtag motley crüe. Similar late 2000s PC wallpaper aesthetic. Similiar kind of after school special writing and tone. Similiar repetitive gameplay. Same meta fakeout credits scene at one point.
My expectations aside, playing this just felt like a chore. The way the gameplay loop is set up. Get some dialogue about how killing is bad. Leap over a rock. Press O to shimmy through a wall. Swing a weapon to nonchalantly dismember some googly monsters while your companions tell you if you're on fire or not. Leave combat arena. Do a light puzzle, get a shiny do-dad. Repeat.
And sure, that's generally how video games go. But because of the slavish devotion to the one shot camera, the game has this very long, drawn out feel. The in-game walk n talks are expository dumps and always feels calculated and robotic, never naturalistic anf in step with the rhythm of the game. The fast travel feels that way too, always timed to end when the convo dies. And the game just feels like it's artificiality padded, all the little elemental puzzles in my way feel there to keep me around another hour. There's no fluidity to the combat.
This would he fine for me if the story was good but it's just as rigid and cliche as the game itself. No surprises. Every line that's walked feels like the perfect script one writes in their head when one imagines themselves after the therapy the plan to take one day. Kratos' authentic edge has been smoothed completely out. He says all the right things and feels all the right things. Atreus misbehaves but all in the good ways one would like their rebellious child to misbehave. Sure, he strays from the path, but he's quick to see the err of his ways and reign himself back in. Freya's rage toned down as well, and what could have been an interesting dramatic web to untangle becomes just another edge sanded away to make room for a simplistic stop the bad man story. The bad man being Odin, another character completely underwritten. There's just no edge to any of this. It feels utterly without consequence.
Instead, it's basically just Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy redo. Same kind of ragtag motley crüe. Similar late 2000s PC wallpaper aesthetic. Similiar kind of after school special writing and tone. Similiar repetitive gameplay. Same meta fakeout credits scene at one point.
My expectations aside, playing this just felt like a chore. The way the gameplay loop is set up. Get some dialogue about how killing is bad. Leap over a rock. Press O to shimmy through a wall. Swing a weapon to nonchalantly dismember some googly monsters while your companions tell you if you're on fire or not. Leave combat arena. Do a light puzzle, get a shiny do-dad. Repeat.
And sure, that's generally how video games go. But because of the slavish devotion to the one shot camera, the game has this very long, drawn out feel. The in-game walk n talks are expository dumps and always feels calculated and robotic, never naturalistic anf in step with the rhythm of the game. The fast travel feels that way too, always timed to end when the convo dies. And the game just feels like it's artificiality padded, all the little elemental puzzles in my way feel there to keep me around another hour. There's no fluidity to the combat.
This would he fine for me if the story was good but it's just as rigid and cliche as the game itself. No surprises. Every line that's walked feels like the perfect script one writes in their head when one imagines themselves after the therapy the plan to take one day. Kratos' authentic edge has been smoothed completely out. He says all the right things and feels all the right things. Atreus misbehaves but all in the good ways one would like their rebellious child to misbehave. Sure, he strays from the path, but he's quick to see the err of his ways and reign himself back in. Freya's rage toned down as well, and what could have been an interesting dramatic web to untangle becomes just another edge sanded away to make room for a simplistic stop the bad man story. The bad man being Odin, another character completely underwritten. There's just no edge to any of this. It feels utterly without consequence.
Devil May Cry
2001
Man am I glad to be done with this one. This game has been a barrier to getting into the Devil May Cry series for me because it's hard to get myself to play games that I don't really like. I could have skipped over DMC 1 but the fans kept saying that this one is worth playing - with some fans even saying that it's the purest form of Devil May Cry and future entries water things down. The idea of anyone being elitist over this game is ridiculous to me. I suppose if the motto of JRPG fans is "It gets good after 80 hours" then the motto of character action game fans is "It gets good after you go for a perfect ranking on the hardest difficulty". Yeah, I'm not doing that. I'd rather invest my time in an action game that isn't randomly flipping the camera all over the place with no regard for the player.
The camera ruins the game for me. In a game that's supposed to be hard but fair, the camera does everything in its power to make sure the player experiences plenty of cheap deaths. It should be obvious, but a resident evil style camera doesn't work for a game that's very fast paced, relies on a quick succession of inputs, and allows the protagonist to perform different moves depending on the direction he's facing. A random camera shift could happen at any moment that changes what your inputs do, resulting in a loss of player control. Once again I have to ask why there are any hardcore fans that prefer this game when the constantly shifting camera limits the degree that you can be in control of your own moveset. I know people prefer Kamiya directed games because of their focus on the ranking system but this easily one of Kamiya's worst games. It has a solid combat system for the time and you can really see the aspects that make it a Kamiya game... But it's just needlessly frustrating due to the camera.
Devil May Cry can feel like a boss rush at times and while there are a number of challenging encounters, most of them you have to fight 2-3 times with little variation in their movesets. I can see that Devil May Cry wants to be the game that's constantly throwing challenging fights at the player, but this isn't as impactful when it's the just the same fight in the same way repeatedly. The final boss encounter was also underwhelming. There's a shmup section for the first phase, which is fine. It is a Kamiya game after all. But the second phase which is fought on land is also just a battle of projectiles, which seems like a ill-fitting way to round out the experience. It's not an outlandish idea to suggest the final boss should have used the melee mechanics which you've been using the entire game.
For the origin of the acclaimed Devil May Cry series I was pretty surprised to see how weak the story is. I enjoyed the character Dante more from cultural osmosis, memes, and SMT Nocturne than I did in his own game. His personality is far less confident and quippy than the internet would have you believe. I've heard from purists that the games after DMC 1 ruin Dante's personality... bro, what personality? When people compared original RE4 Leon to Dante I was expecting him to be similarly badass... But it turns out Leon makes a better Dante than Dante himself. I never once bought into Trish and Dante's character relationship. The game expects you believe that these two care for each other but they've only spoken to each other a handful of times... And one of those times was Trish betraying Dante.
I respect and appreciate what this game accomplished by inventing the character-action game genre. But as a game I didn't enjoy it very much. This is the only DMC game I've played so I can't speak for the series, but I'm already seriously doubting the purists who say that this one's the best.
The camera ruins the game for me. In a game that's supposed to be hard but fair, the camera does everything in its power to make sure the player experiences plenty of cheap deaths. It should be obvious, but a resident evil style camera doesn't work for a game that's very fast paced, relies on a quick succession of inputs, and allows the protagonist to perform different moves depending on the direction he's facing. A random camera shift could happen at any moment that changes what your inputs do, resulting in a loss of player control. Once again I have to ask why there are any hardcore fans that prefer this game when the constantly shifting camera limits the degree that you can be in control of your own moveset. I know people prefer Kamiya directed games because of their focus on the ranking system but this easily one of Kamiya's worst games. It has a solid combat system for the time and you can really see the aspects that make it a Kamiya game... But it's just needlessly frustrating due to the camera.
Devil May Cry can feel like a boss rush at times and while there are a number of challenging encounters, most of them you have to fight 2-3 times with little variation in their movesets. I can see that Devil May Cry wants to be the game that's constantly throwing challenging fights at the player, but this isn't as impactful when it's the just the same fight in the same way repeatedly. The final boss encounter was also underwhelming. There's a shmup section for the first phase, which is fine. It is a Kamiya game after all. But the second phase which is fought on land is also just a battle of projectiles, which seems like a ill-fitting way to round out the experience. It's not an outlandish idea to suggest the final boss should have used the melee mechanics which you've been using the entire game.
For the origin of the acclaimed Devil May Cry series I was pretty surprised to see how weak the story is. I enjoyed the character Dante more from cultural osmosis, memes, and SMT Nocturne than I did in his own game. His personality is far less confident and quippy than the internet would have you believe. I've heard from purists that the games after DMC 1 ruin Dante's personality... bro, what personality? When people compared original RE4 Leon to Dante I was expecting him to be similarly badass... But it turns out Leon makes a better Dante than Dante himself. I never once bought into Trish and Dante's character relationship. The game expects you believe that these two care for each other but they've only spoken to each other a handful of times... And one of those times was Trish betraying Dante.
I respect and appreciate what this game accomplished by inventing the character-action game genre. But as a game I didn't enjoy it very much. This is the only DMC game I've played so I can't speak for the series, but I'm already seriously doubting the purists who say that this one's the best.
Blasphemous
2019
Why is there a boss with a larger and pointier hat than mine fuck this game