this one is still a little pink in the middle. while i feel the story mode generally and battle system have improved from the last one, the "master battle" system is god awful and they make you do wayyyy too much of that instead of the actually good combat, and as nice as the story mode here is the fact it is only half an arc with such a sudden ending is really disappointing along with the fact so many characters are just utterly missing from the world map because their shippuden designs hadn't dropped yet, it's really noticeable and disappointing. maybe they should waited like .. the tiniest bit more. other than that i had fun.

oh and hero mode is a total snooze

there is certainly something here that caused the series to go on for so long but being the first it's. .the most unrefined version of that. extremely bare bones ""story"" mode that features some of the most stitched together dialogue. mind numbing mission mode. got up to the A-Rank missions and about 560 items get on the First of Three gacha type things to unlock items, which by the way, you can get blanks from rolling. the final straw was when i unlocked every character and therefore the first secret scroll item of many which the reward for that was an image that just said "congratulations" on it. that was truly just when i decided you know what. i think my time is done with this one.

Alan Wake is a game i've been putting off playing for quite a long time due to being really fearful of where i would end up in terms of liking it but after playing Control and adoring it (despite AWE going entirely over my head) and seeing exactly how AWII pushed everything together from the sidelines I finally gave it a go! as it turns out I clicked with this a lot more than I had ever expected to, from a distance I considered it's referential nature to be somewhat off putting at best and annoying at worst (especially as a huge fan of twin peaks) but within the context of the game and it's narrative this ceased to be an issue for me, the way it explores meta narrative through the lens of someone actively struggling to come up with something good, to explain away why anything is happening ended up coming together really nicely in such a close way that could have easily fallen apart if even nudged slightly to the left. my one complaint in the narrative would have to be that I wished Alice Wake got a little bit more room to breathe, everything involving her revolved around Alan and while yes, he is the protagonist I think fleshing out Alice would have only serviced the story more.

gameplay was gameplay. I didn't have any major issues there other than they could have improved the dodges, gun feel nice.