It’s a mercy to forget, but you shouldn’t forget Jack’s game. Sweet music, a story that ends up being surprisingly affecting by the end and an accessible yet slick combat system all add up to form a legit great ARPG that’s much more than what the post-post-ironic meme culture surrounding it would have you believe. Comparisons to Nioh are easy, but leaving it there would be reductive; Stranger of Paradise has plenty of ideas that help it stand on its own two feet and which I’d like to see carried forward into future iterations of this genre.

The star of the show is probably the job cancelling system. Being able to instantly cancel special moves by switching to another job makes combat a real sandbox for creativity – the first time I remember instinctively saying “oh shit” out loud was when I scooped up a bunch of enemies with Aeroga, switched to Ronin and wiped them all out with one fully charged slash that would’ve left me vulnerable otherwise, but that kind of thing is only really scratching the surface of what’s possible. Throw in one of the more fun magic systems this side of Dark Messiah, customisation of your combo trees and party members, experimenting with enemies’ hit reactions (like launching them into the air or splatting them against walls), directional attacks, stealing enemies’ attacks like a human Kirby, etc. and you’ve got a really robust set of mechanics that invite replays just by virtue of how much variety’s on offer.

In particular, I like what an emphasis Stranger of Paradise puts on positioning. Soul bursting an enemy causes a small AOE explosion that damages nearby enemies’ break gauges and sends them flying, which gives you more to think about in terms of timing than just exploiting i-frames. Inputting a direction when you job cancel makes Jack dodge in that direction, which can and will often save your ass in a pinch on top of giving you the drop on your opponent (accentuated by the fact that you get automatic crits when hitting an enemy from behind). Bosses tend to have a specific body part or other quirk that can crippled in some way, rewarding you for being in the right place at the right time by staggering them or occasionally disabling some of their more troublesome moves. All good stuff that gives you a bunch to consider when it comes to the simple act of just moving around.

Anyway, how’s the music? I mean, good God. How am I supposed to not like a game that’s launching an all-out assault on my eardrums with a constant stream of phat beats like this, or this, or this? It’s sick, in other words, but it offers more types of tunes than even these. I’m a big fan of the Nier-esque choir that kicks in during the fight with Tiamat, for example, or the watery acoustic guitars that string you along through the two forest levels. Mizuta & co. knocked it out of the park.

I won’t give much away story-wise, because the whole second half really deserves to be experienced yourself, but I will say it’s nice to have one that gets better as it goes along for a change. By the end of Stranger of Paradise, which is well executed enough that even the initially weird timeskip at the very beginning starts to make sense, I was more eager to see what came next than with most modern games I’ve played which got a lot of praise specifically for their stories. Part of the credit for this surely goes to the voice actors, most of whom are surprisingly relatively new to the industry, because I can’t imagine Jack & f(r)iends with any voices other than the ones they have. Mocean Melvin in particular said he made a point of researching Final Fantasy to really sell his role, and I think it shows. Case in point: Lich's introductory cutscene is already legendary, and anyone who's played up to that point will know what I'm talking about.

This isn't all to say that Stranger of Paradise doesn’t have a few issues, of course. In contrast to internet hyperbole, the level design never really dips below ‘functional,’ but it could still stand to be a bit more interesting. 150+ hours on the PS3 version of Dragon’s Dogma has made me basically immune to caring about framerates, but it’s still worth mentioning that SoP is a little wonky in that regard (though never to the point where it affects parrying). Visually, it would’ve helped if the contrast had been dialled down a smidge too – I sometimes found it hard to see where I was going in the (still good) penultimate level in particular before I eventually caved and turned the brightness up.

Overall, though, it’s too enjoyable in too many ways for this stuff to weigh it down much. And it’s got heart, dagnabbit. Did you know that despite being introduced in FF2, Amano drew concept art of a Behemoth for FF1, which until recently was the only instance of it ever having wings? And then along comes Stranger of Paradise, FF1 prequel-sequel-reimagining extraordinaire, featuring a Behemoth with wings? Bellissimo, says I. A thousand chef’s kisses. That's not all in the way of small, lovingly crafted details either - pay attention to the colour of Jack's hand as he finishes off the final boss.

Between NEO TWEWY and this, I can only hope Square keep hold of whoever is greenlighting all these poorly marketed but really good ARPGs that feel tailor-made to my tastes. If Stranger of Paradise’s DLCs are at all comparable to the Niohs’ quality-wise, it’ll only keep going higher in my estimation and it’s already pretty up there. Can’t wait to see more of Jack’s antics, whether there or in future spinoffs (fingers crossed).

Until then, goodbye... Jack.

i played a whole bunch of this last year and earlier this year, primarily with the intention of finally trying the shivering isles dlc... and then failing to quite get there. at present i'm just a few levels short of the requirement to enter it, but i figure i'll pick this up again at some point and get sucked in once more.

anyway, i think that oblivion is a fine rpg with some careful modding, given what's available these days. first and foremost, get rid of those splotchy potato faces. throw in a nice water mod, better interior lighting, protective armor for women, perhaps some northern lights for bruma (since it borders skyrim), and louder nirnroots because i just love the sound they make and they're already hard enough to find... and, well, yeah, plenty of issues remain, but even just that makes it considerably better than the game was out of the box in 2006. really, its most glaring issue is the radiant ai system, which produces the most surreally stupid, awkward, often goofy as hell interactions between npcs. give me the grumbles and sighs of morrowind over that nonsense any day. there are other problems, like the level scaling eventually leading to basic thieves wearing full glass armor—though there are mods to prevent this (and overhaul the leveling system entirely) as well. and, yes, the oblivion gates do become tedious, though they're also worth it if you just rush through and savescum before leaving to get the enchantments you want. personally, i like stacking strength so i can carry tons of shit and haul ass.

what i really love about oblivion is the quests. many of them are quite good, and far more involving than just fast-traveling somewhere to find an item or kill someone. they can be even more fun to play through than many of morrowind's quests, even when the writing isn't quite as interesting (really just because cyrodiil itself is just so much blander than vvardenfell). the thieves' guild is a must... and, well, the dark brotherhood questline is sick as hell. and i mean sick as hell. shit's downright fucked and disturbing! the wonderful thing about this, i feel, is the complete dissonance it creates when you also partake in the main quest. you're the ultimate interloper, charged with an imperial task of the utmost importance by the emperor himself, who claims to have seen you in his dreams just before his demise... and you're an opportunist with a thirst for blood and subterfuge. i struggle to think of any other rpg with such freedom to play both sides at once. i mean, morrowind is subtler about it, but here it's fucking wild that you're getting away with such exploitation. absolute chaos god shenanigans, and you're just some asshole who happened to be in the wrong prison cell. it rules.

I can't rate this game because I can't tell you if its good or not. I don't know how to rate this game. I don't know how to define this game.

The cyberpunk mystery centers on Karl Carbon, a gritty ex-cop turned social worker who manages various child protection cases involving robots and hybrid creatures. His first scene involves him smoking an e-cigarette, which immediately informs him he’s “out of smoking credits for the day.” He bitterly remarks "damn social justice AIs."

Fearing the worst from that line, I start to plan to close the game as soon as the cutscene ended. But then the cutscene progresses to Karl's daily work. A robot is in line to receive assistance. She needs support so she can get a job and move into better housing. The clerk informs the robot that she needs to get better housing if she's going to get assistance. The robot complains: this is a catch-22. She can't get assistance until she's already on assistance. A security guard immediately proclaims that he's been approved to use lethal force and pulls out his gun. Karl complains: "its these kind of trigger happy idiots that I had to leave the force to begin with." The puzzle involves using your taser on the security guard and letting the robot escape before she gets killed. The sequence was so intriguing, I decided to stick with the game a little longer.

The game jump between these weird extremes a lot. Karl travels to a robot neighborhood, which is AGGRESSIVELY black coded and full of misused AAVE. At the same time, research informed me that the creator is a Native Hawaiian social worker/STEM robotics teacher. Even if the robot = people of color cliche makes me uncomfortable, I don't think I have the place to comment on it when the creator is distinctly non-white.

In the middle of that, you get a minigame where you complete a CPS checklist. The home you're vising violates every health protocol in the book, but you can tell the family is trying their best to offer their kids the support they can afford. You can choose to look the other way and let them live in peace. There's no reward for this and the game's events make the choice meaningless soon after. It doesn't do it to make the protagonist or the player feel good about themselves. It just offers the possibility and leaves the player to determine their beliefs. Its a genuine sincerity in a game that came off kind of edgelordy at first. Karl has no quips that permeates most of his dialogue. He's quiet, gentle, and doing his job.

Oh, also, the robot father in that scene is a Terminator. Like, traced over art of a Terminator.

The game never stops with strange swerves and decisions. A human-squid hybrid girl reading Das Kapital on a street corner. A (white) socialist princess who's time traveled from the future to prevent feudalism from taking over again. One of the final scenes is a rich woman complaining that she won't be able to afford riding her mutant pegasus if she has to pay taxes. Weird pop culture references, stolen art. LONG monologues about the failures of bureaucracy in social work and how the rich profit from it all. It keeps throwing whatever idea it has right at your face, without stopping to breathe. Its an assault to the senses. It has some of the worst voice acting I've ever heard. Its art style is aggressively post-modern and absurdist, sometimes to its detriment. I lost track of the factions and manipulations the second time travel entered the equation. I don't know if I could rec it in good conscience. I think I kind of loved it? Its charming, from a distance. There's an infectious glee it takes in its absurdist, slapdash aesthetic. It has strong beliefs about social structures and oppression and that's more than I can say about some other cyberpunk stories I've encountered.

What an experience.

fromsoft's strangest, most disturbing and effortlessly surprising game since demon's souls, and one that feels like it absolutely should not exist

i have more issues with elden ring's gameplay than most other souls games but i seriously think this thing has a lot of fromsoft's best, most haunting art & direction ever, and it's a real success compared to the exhaustingly rote version of souls seen in ds3

i like it a lot :)

God, what whiplash. While Half-Life 2 hasn't aged a day, Episode 1 really feels like the wheels came off at Valve during production (which they basically did!). Retreads of the Citadel and City 17 sections of the preceding game immediately feel stale, and throughout the entire run there isn't really an original idea. The best section is the elevator defense, which is entertaining enough (and pretty tense in the darkness!) but really doesn't match up to the high points of Half-Life 2.
Being accompanied by Alyx for the entire game is fun, and I imagine this was quite impressive at the time, but overbearing NPCs are maddeningly common in games nowadays, so it's not exactly impressive now.
I played through the entire game with the gravity gun to get the One Free Bullet achievement, and that injected some fun (and difficulty!) into the game, but Episode 1 has serious Middle Sequel Syndrome. Pretty disappointing, honestly! Hope Episode 2 hasn't aged equally badly.

Gran Turismo 7 is a lie. For all the words spouted about how this is a return to form of the massive singleplayer campaigns and content of Gran Turismos past, it's really not. It tries, goddamit, and definetly scratches the itch that we all have of Gran Turismo 4 and such... but it never goes more than skin deep.

Because Gran Turismo 7 is just an expansion of GT Sport, and with it, the promise of new stuff to come at an indeterminate date. At time of writing it's just a buy in to a live service.

The kicker here is content. Versus GT sport there's a grand total of... 4 new tracks and two new layouts of existing ones. I'm not joking thats it, and whilst the selection is mostly good - High speed ring, deep forest, and Trial Mountain are classics - there being no completely new additions outright is really sad.

The car selection is also quite small by mainline gt standards. 400 cars which are mostly unique (compared to GT6's deluge of 20 different types of Miata) and all beautifully modelled - but lots of these are ludicrously expensive, the vast majority are imported from GT sport, and there's very few additions in the racing car categories. The overall car selection is also, by now, quite old. Most of the cars here you can track back to about 2015-ish, and there's very few non concept cars from post 2020.

And it kinda all makes sense. The reduced scope of GT7 compared to - particularly GT4, is almost unavoidable. The level of fidelity demanded these days makes something the scope of GT4 or even GT6 basically impossible, and Polyphony arent the crazed madmen sleeping at the office and making Naughty dog's crunch practices look pedestrian anymore.

And thus, the campaign doesn't really work. There's the delightful level of gran turismo charm and cheese which is lovely to have back and is probably my outright biggest criticism of Sport, but the whole thing is too linear, short, and really lacks the freedom of previous GTs.

Particularly dissapointing is the lack of the super high level events from bygone days - Like the wind, Formula grand turismo championships, etc. It's outright bizzare, the game carries the license system from previous games, but there arent even any license requirements over A in the game at time of writing. And it's so weird, because the game dangles these awesome legendary cars in front of you for stonking credit values but there's like fuck all to do with them except online!

But despite it all, there's sparks here. S-10, the final license test, has you wrangling a classic Porsche 917 around a slightly damp Spa Francorchamps. It's probably the most fun i've ever had in a driving game. The handling model in GT7 is top tier, it's implementation of weather and changeable conditions amazing, it's level of fidelity so damn high, the Car such a fun beast to drive - that it all comes together and it's downright magical. It's the apotheosis of the driving fantasy GT has always been trying to fullfill, and it's the best it has ever done it. Some of the other missions and driving tests are also great, but this moment is what makes it, and proves GT7s potential.

But we'll have to wait, i guess. More than even GT sport, this is a game where buying it is buying into a live service and years of updates which will eventually make it the game we all wanted. GT sport eventually got there. And if there's more moments like S-10 coming... I guess i'll be there to see it in GT7.

Thorny, vantablack comedy, dripping with its own caustic bitterness. Successfully defines the difference between the pain of intentionally pressing your thumb against a sharp edge and someone else doing it. However, some incredibly clear moments bleed through the cacophony and will probably stick around in my mind for some time. Even a single character like Anri herself will probably cause me to collapse at some point in the near future - looking forward to that.

It might not yours, but Hello Charlotte 0/3 evades my rating scale. It's the messiest shit I've played... ever? To confine it to one conclusion would do a disservice to it, but most importantly to me. I need time with this.

edit: time's up, 5 stars.

mascotizing, de-eroticized, de-humanizing wooby doo-doo that started out as a low key homophobic ~sooo randim~ joke about how funny gay cultural nomenclature is to its straight creators but then got agonizingly retconned into game grumps' (ugh) flailing attempt at a self-serious inclusivity project. Too ignorant and afraid of offending anyone to portray anything resembling adult human intimacy or eroticism, and reeks with the no homo!!!! creator's fears of depicting anything messy, hot, or specific about icky degenerate gay sexuality. Never overtly cruel and clearly interested in playacting safeness and inclusivity, but the placid smoothness of everything feels like its own form of erasure--and it's a smug, self congratulatory one. This is clearly not really trying to provide anything meaningful or substantive for gay audiences: it's for obnoxious straight "allies" to play and have fuzzy wuzzies about how great they are for wubbing the cutesy wootsie daddy poos--they're smol pastel beans just like us!!! Heinous. I dont want to yuck anyones yum too hard or whatever but if you're a queer adult and love this game I kind of think you're a fucking idiot

The only game company that always instils a tinge of excitement in me whenever I boot up a game for the first time and see their logo is, or was, Japan Studio. Even when a game they produced wasn’t necessarily great (and they often were), it was almost always a safe bet that it’d at the very least be different from everything else. They were the embodiment of the happy medium between creativity and just the right size of budgets & teams to actualise that creativity without corporate meddling getting in the way. Patapon represents the very best of this sort of thing.

There’s still nothing quite like it today, even conceptually. Who’da thunk that rhythm and strategy would go so well together? Unlike most strategy games, Patapon piles on the pressure via music – you have to issue a command to your army every four beats or else they’ll stumble over, lose their combo streak and be unable to accept commands for about a second. It creates this balancing act where you have to constantly juggle quick decision-making, precise timing and your ability to keep a cool enough head to follow the 1-2-3-4 rhythm while dealing with rival armies drowning your screen in projectiles and/or big monsters trying to nibble on your army of eyeball people. It sounds intimidating, but it’s made easier by the absolutely expert touch of having a small border around the screen that pulsates in time with the rhythm, meaning that the timing is always being communicated to you via your peripheral vision as well as the music itself.

There’s that, and there’s also the fact that Patapon rewards you for doing well in equal proportion. Issue ten commands in a row and you’ll enter the Fever state, significantly buffing your army, but you can get it as early as with three commands if you time your drumbeats perfectly (signalled with louder, clearer, relentlessly satisfying drum noises). Keep up the offensive against a boss for long enough and they’ll stagger, not only cancelling their next attack but also causing them to drop either money or rare items, which you can then use to make stronger soldiers. Regularly switch up the composition and equipment of your army and you’ll be able to exploit weaknesses of certain creatures that a lazier player might not even notice – burn the limbs off of a boss with fire weapons to remove one of its more dangerous attacks, for example, or get rid of your cavalry to more easily sneak up on game animals (since the scent of horses spooks them off). It’s deceptively deep in a lot of ways.

Patapon’s excellence doesn’t stop there, though. Another one of my favourite parts about it is the weather system. Different weather patterns occur randomly in almost every mission in the game, which means they rarely ever play out the same way. Strong winds can either limit or extend the range of your projectiles, while rain can mask your scent or put out fires, and lightning strikes can either help or hinder you in any given battle. The best part is you can (temporarily) manipulate the weather yourself, but you have to sacrifice your Fever to do it, adding yet another layer to the strategic side of things – is the temporary advantage worth becoming slower and weaker until you can get your Fever back again? Decisions, decisions.

This part probably goes without saying, but every ounce of the game oozes charm. Rolito’s art is minimalism done right. The Patapons aren’t much more than eyeballs with limbs and hat, but that’s all you really need to be able to convey their character – this even has an in-game purpose, since they start to look angry once they’re in range of an enemy. If Sony were actually capable of holding on to any of their potential mascots, these fellas would be a shoe-in; I have no data to back that up, but my mum has started to refer to them as “those wee people,” so I’d say they’re pretty recognisable. Market analysis aside, their little speech bubbles during battles always get a smirk out of me, the soundtrack is the perfect mix of bizarre and catchy, and the story has a nice storybook-like presentation that wraps it all up with a nice, adventurous bow. It’s got a ton of soul put into it for sure.

This ended up being a bit longer than I thought it would, but Patapon deserves being gushed about a bit - not just because its average score on here is bewilderingly low for how brilliant it is, but also because it's doubtful we'll see anything like it again any time soon. Japan Studio were always one for taking risks and bucking trends, or facilitating that sort of thing in cases like this where they were mainly producers, and Patapon’s a fitting addition to that lineage. Their dissolution was one of more than a few semi-recent things which pretty much confirmed that Sony are heading in a direction that isn't really for me anymore, but games like Patapon will always have a sort of archival value in that they hearken back to a time when they were bursting at the seams with creativity.

Don’t cry because it’s over, though. [Daba-daba-dabapon because it happened.]( https://i.imgur.com/kR3HKJs.png)

Recommended by BeachEpisode as part of this list.

"Until I feel new dawn bloom on the silent sea/Sing for me your song... "

Within the woefully cut-short multimedia duology known as the Zone of the Enders franchise, the first entry is regarded as a black sheep: Even with the prestiguous name of Hideo Kojima attatched to it, its most known for its original PS2 release being coupled with a demo of Metal Gear Solid 2, and even Konami seems fit to forget about it, since the only game of the duology to get the snazzy 4K VR rerelease was its sequel. Zone of the Enders, for all intents and purposes, has forgettable written all over it, and it's easy to see why on a surface level: It's in many regards, a mediocre early-PS2 game that suffers from poor gameplay, massive amounts of padding and ambitions far larger than its woefully-small britches. But despite being cognizant of these flaws, Zone of the Enders manages to be a gripping experience, stuffed to the brim with a sense of comfortable familiarity.

Zone of the Enders is a story familiar to many mecha connoisseurs, a tale of a boy thrust into the horrors of war from the cockpit of his cool robot that's at the center of a scheme far grander than he can comprehend, coupled with an early 2000s English dub that while at first laughable, manages to elevate the basic story into a surprisingly gripping and emotional 4 hour ride. The combat is incredibly simple, but its self-expression and showmanship are what lifts the entire thing up, letting the player do some incredible anime bullshit like flash-stepping, clashing giant mecha swords, shooting big fuck-off laser beams and throwing your opponents around like ragdolls into one another to cause massive explosions. Even when I was faced with the same combat encounter I've been dealing with for the past 2 hours, dashing behind an opponent and chucking the enemy into a building and watching the fireworks fly never gets old. All of this is complimented by its incredibly sleek post-Y2K aesthetic and short runtime, which means that just before everything can start grating your nerves too hard, its over. Even though its been forgotten by publisher and fanbase alike, there's a clear passion evident in every facet of ZoE, from its visual language to its mecha design, and even if it can fall quite flat at times, its got oodles of heart overflowing from every pore, and that alone makes it worth a shot if you have even the slightest interest in giant robot action games.

"Until my rumbled hands lead to the end of night/Find me in your eyes... "

One of my favourite traits of Fromsoft's work on their assorted Souls games is their ability to make worlds feel larger than they actually are. The way these games will have you be able to visually see in the distance places you will reach over ten hours in the future, or looking back and seeing where you journeyed from and feeling so small compared to this world around you. How the very existence of illusory walls makes it feel like there could be a secret hiding basically anywhere. Huge chunks of content being hidden in compelling, obtuse or even outright bizarre ways, with no concern for the notion of players missing out on literal entire regions or multiple major boss fights as a result, leading both to excitement and surprise when you manage to stumble upon these secrets or figure them out on your own, and to those amazing moments where you get to share discoveries with others or learn from them, the game repeatedly opening up to be even bigger and more mysterious somehow. I typically don't love the npc quests in these games but even those, with their habit of careening off-course as if some player's unfortunate choices unknowingly ruined their dungeon master's plans, make the world feel somehow larger than you and beyond your strict control.

This is also why I think lore videos for these games have ended up coming awfully close to just being their own miniature industry. You're always playing as someone showing up long after the main event has already concluded, with the history of these worlds and characters being something spoken of in riddles and hidden in item descriptions of the relics you find, etched into the environment around you. You have to piece together what happened to get the world to this state from incomplete information, often with the gaps leaving things up to player interpretation. Yet again this all leads to you feeling very small, and the world around you feeling incomprehensibly large with a history so rich that someone as inconsequential as some random undead/hunter/unkindled can't possibly hope to fully grasp all it.

A lot of this would be considered by many to go against a lot of principles of Industry Standard Good Game Design™, but the sum total of it is game worlds that become just endlessly fascinating and evocative to the people they connect with; it turns out designing games is a lot more than just fulfilling a bunch of heuristics on how games and narratives should look, and FromSoft's holistic approach to how the design and lore of these worlds interact with their mechanics is such a great example of this.

This is the environment into which Elden Ring is born. On the one hand an open world game feels almost inevitable in some sense; FromSoft has spent so much time designing game worlds that have their first priority set as making you feel miniscule contrasted with your environment, the player often feeling like a footnote in a long and storied history, and so going ahead and making these feelings come a bit less from smoke and mirrors and a bit more from something literal feels like, at the very least, something they must have been curious to experiment with ever since the original Dark Souls' deeply interlinked, almost Metroidvania-esque map design. On the other hand, isn't it a bit redundant? If they're already instilling these emotions in people what is there to gain from actual, physical vastness, and wildly excessive runtimes, and aren't there just too many costs involved in pushing your game to be this large? This forms the central conflict at the heart of Elden Ring's existence, and whilst I do largely have a lot of fondness for this game, laying out the conflict in this manner makes it very easy both to see why some people are so besotted with Elden Ring, and also to see why others feel like FromSoft jumped the shark here compared to their previous work. Towering, spectacular, intoxicating ambition meets the awkward reality of trying to make that sense of scale be something rendered so literally in a world where realising that takes unfathomable hours of labour.

If you had asked me what I thought of Elden Ring 30 hours into my playthrough I would have said it felt like one of the best games I'd ever played, and that I was anticipating the possible reality where it ends up becoming my favourite FromSoft game. This opening act for me was frankly magical, and really shows what FromSoft can bring to open world games as they apply many of the principles that they approached their previous Souls games with but on a grander scale. I'm going to avoid explicit spoilers here and make oblique references instead, but the manner in which I first discovered Caelid and Leyndell, how you are shown Siofra, and interacting with The Four Belfries for the first time, all rank as some of my favourite moments in gaming as multiple different tricks are taken advantage of, that follow through on FromSoft's usual strategies but writ unthinkably large, to impart a sense of scale, wonder, curiosity and awe on the player. Combine these tricks with how rich these environments are to explore, the handcrafted element that even the various catacombs or caves had to them, and the ways in which, in stark contrast with other open world games, ticking off lists and markers is heavily de-emphasised in favour of advocating for intrinsic motivation and player agency being much greater focal points of your journey, and I found exploring the Lands Between simply enchanting.

If you had asked me what I thought of Elden Ring 60 hours into my playthrough I would have said it was a really great game, but one that is not without sizable flaws. This is the point at which the cracks start to show as the sad reality of trying to make any open world game is you're going to need to re-use a lot of content to make that achievable. The Erdtree Avatar fight that I'd really enjoyed several hours into my playthrough had been repeated to the point where it had become mundane, the wriggly Tree Spirit I'd found in Stormveil Castle that really wasn't very fun to fight but was still interesting because it was a fairly unique encounter was, apparently, nowhere even close to being a unique encounter, and almost any boss that I found in a catacomb or cave would end up being dredged up again, sometimes multiple times, sometimes even as a normal mob enemy. Even some of the wonderful early-game surprises become diluted a bit as they're repeated, the recurrence of the walking mausoleum being the saddest example to me. The crafting system, that I touched only a handful of times in my entire playthrough, is very much a symptom of the open world format too; you need something you can scatter around the world for players to pick up, some reason for them to jump to that hard to reach ledge, but you can only put so many runes and swords and hats in the game so crafting materials start to seem like a necessity and yet it's hard to say that they really add anything to the game except more menus and a slight pang of disappointment when you finally fight your way to that shiny purple item and it turns out it's just another Arteria Leaf.

Despite this I understand that these design decisions are largely just a necessity in a game this large, and outside of them the game was a really great time for me at this point in my playthrough. Exploring was still lots of fun and whilst the exciting moments of discovery had become a bit less frequent they were still there, often delightful, and the quieter, emptier moments found in areas like the Altus Plateau made for a sense of palpable loneliness that served the game well. Build variety felt the best it ever has to the point where I was toying with the idea of a second playthrough later this year. Ranni's and Fia's questlines were very compelling to me, emotionally, narratively and in terms of the physical journeys they involve, and are among the highlights of the game. The bosses felt like a clear step down in quality from Dark Souls 3, but there were a handful of fights that were still really enjoyable to me in different ways, and the game has a great sense of spectacle that sold even some of its overwise more uneven fights.

By far the most impressive portion of the game at this point were its legacy dungeons though. Even the weakest ones among these are still largely fantastic, and the level design in the two highlights, Stormveil Castle and Leyndell, is among the finest work FromSoft has ever done; packed with secrets to an almost ludicrous extent, constantly looping back in on themselves in really cool ways, and with great encounter design throughout. I adored these portions of the game, but I could never fully shake the notion from my head that if the very best portions of this game are the bits that are contained to a single zone then why exactly is it open world?

Sadly, this is where things start to really drop off for me. My playthrough landed at a little over 90 hours and I'm honestly a little exhausted? Leyndell was the highlight of the game for me, and after this area was complete I was very satisfied with my experience and honestly pretty ready for the game to end soon but it just kept going.

A part of the problem here is that I'm not convinced a game like this was ever meant to be this long; the various Souls design tropes that are very entertaining in a shorter game start to wear thin when you're seeing an enemy with their back to you mournfully looking at an item on the ground for the 25th time. A part of this too is that reused content was starting to rear its head to an absurd extent; a beloved enemy type that I was thrilled to see be brought back and placed in a tonally appropriate area earlier in the game would go on to reappear a few more times in areas much less fitting to it, earlier enemies in general just get brought back far too much (the hands are a great example of this; I adored their first appearance and how well suited they were to that locale, and every appearance since felt like the game was just struggling to know what to fill the environments with), Erdtree Avatars, dragons and Tree Spirits showing up yet again would just start prompting eyerolls from me, even a storyline boss from earlier in the game could be found roaming out in the wild in multiple different places. In possibly the most insulting example a secret boss from earlier in the game, that felt very important from a lore perspective and which was very visually unique and impressive, ends up reappearing as the final boss of an otherwise inconsequential cave. This is the sad reality of trying to make a game this literally vast instead of simply instilling a sense of vastness.

Despite all of this I think I would still have mostly been onboard with the late-game stretch, or would have at least been more forgiving towards it, if all the bosses after you leave Leyndell didn't just...kind of suck? There are far too many ridiculous AoE attacks with some bosses having a few different variations of these, shockwave attacks that hit on multiple different frames and so feel very janky and unintuitive to dodge, ridiculous combo attack strings that would appear a couple times per game previously become the norm now instead, every boss had multiple attacks with ridiculous wind-ups (again, a thing that was used but sparingly so in previous games) to the point that fights feel weirdly disjointed and impossible to sight read, multiple bosses are placed in the same arena without any real concern for how these are going to interact with one another, windows to get in attacks are narrowed to the bare minimum especially for anyone who wants to play the game purely melee, and there are a handful of bosses that are gigantic to the point where you can only see their feet as you slash at them oblivious to whatever is actually happening. In two different cases with these oversized bosses I felt like I spent as much time charging across the arena to reach them whenever they ran away as I did actually engaging in combat.

Many of these late-game bosses are just not fun, poorly designed, and beating them for me felt less like I learnt the fight and played it well and more like I just got lucky and rng landed correctly. Even that exciting feeling of how much build variety the game had started to slip away at this point; the late-game requires that your build be incredibly powerful and severely limits what things are viable as a result. Maybe this is just a case of FromSoft just misbalancing things or having an off-day, a bunch of the bosses in Dark Souls 2 are very disappointing too so it's not like this is a first, but I think this is actually the final, and most frustrating, manifestation of the downsides of open world games. It's so hard to keep one-upping yourself over the course of a 90 hour playtime, in a game with a colossal number of boss fights, that the only way you can guarantee the bosses become even more spectacular is to start pushing them in the direction where they also start to feel unfair too, and with how big the game is leading to there being so much game to test it's easy to believe that maybe these bosses just weren't given as much playtesting as they should have as a result.

I see everyone talking about how Elden Ring refined open world games and is going to change them for years to come and whilst I do think there are a bunch of elements of Elden Ring's approach to the quasi-genre that make for a more satisfying, rewarding, and less cloying experience than what you'd find elsewhere, I think ultimately it made me feel like the best thing this game could do for open world games is convince more developers to just make tighter, more refined experiences instead.

I wouldn't blame someone for being just completely turned off of Elden Ring by these problems that crop up in this final stretch. It left a really sour taste in my mouth at points, even in between moments of still genuinely enchanting imagery and art direction. Ultimately though I really loved so much of my experience with Elden Ring in its earlier hours, and there are many moments from this game that will stick with me for a long time, so despite its fairly severe flaws I can't help but find a lot of love in my heart for it regardless. Elden Ring is a display both of the reasons I love FromSoft's approach to game development, and of why I hope they never make another open world game again.