Trying to review this game or even muse on it is an exercise in frustration, which is really poignant considering playing it hits the same notes of confusion and dissatisfaction.

I could point to any one era of Destiny and go "it was better/worse back then!" but to even do that as a lighthearted joke would require enough context, setup and exposition that it'd make a Yakuza game blush. But I'll try because it's 1:26am as of writing and none of my sleeping aids have aided in sleeping.

Once upon a time this franchise was little more than "High Sci-fi Borderlands x Halo shooting with dailies and weeklies", and while that might make some of you sweat and wish that videogames never progressed past the level of Tetris, for me it was enough to sustain my interest. Tacking on Bungie's best-in-class sense of scale and environment design was just delicious icing on a juicy spongecake.

When I opened this google doc I had a lot of jokes at Destiny's expense swirling around my head but I'm already four paragraphs in and struggling, because those jokes are predicated on the assumption that Destiny is art, and my particular brand of autism means I hate jokes that aren't grounded in reality.

Destiny 2 is a product to be sold more than it is 'art' and the only real difference between the game in 2017 and the game in 2023 is that Bungie's upper management have simply stripped away the pretense. I know this might ring hollow to any of you who play AAA games or know what 'Fortnite' means, and even as I type it I find myself furrowing my brow and saying "hmmmm" out loud like I'm in a Persona game, but I think 'product' applies to Destiny 2 more than most other games.

Because Destiny 2 has a shelf life, and unlike many other live service games it is actually upfront about this shelf life. Not as upfront as it should be, but nonethless any Seasons a person purchases will be thrown in the garbage once an expansion's cycle ends. These seasons often have a worse shelf life than some of the crisps I buy. Did you like that one activity from Season of Plunder? You didn't because nobody liked Ketchrash, but if you hypothetically did then tough luck buddy. It's gone forever. It's temporary. Almost everything is temporary. It's a lot like life except rather than capping off the highlights of your life with comfort, you get Lightfall instead.

I bring all this up first because the actual gameplay, story and anything without profit incentives behind them are superfluous. Bungie's concept of balance is still as bad as it was in 2004, the story is written ad-hoc by an endlessly spinning carousel of underpaid and overworked writers, and while the environments are pretty they are ultimately backdrops for dailies, weeklies and grinds.

My cynicism might seem overbearing, but really I'm just truncating Bungie's appalling GDC conference to you. Trigger warning: They say the word "overdelivery" with all sincerity.

Everything in Destiny 2, for good or ill, is secondary to player retention and cash. This goes for most games, and all 'live' games, but D2 sticks out because it is unique in its antipathy for the player. Bungie do not care if you're having fun, they do not care if you like specific content, they do not care about the player. Again, this is not me kvetching about 'mistreatment' or somesuch nonsense (for I made my peace with this game's state after Shadowkeep and the free trial debacle), it is simply Bungie's stated policy.

What really makes Bungie stick out compared to even Epic or the thousands of gacha games aimed at lonely people in their 20s who want idol culture but hate human beings is that Bungie have a very open and recorded distaste for Destiny as a piece of art. While even Epic are willing to bring back an entire season/map for nostalgia bait, Bungie burn their content bridges with glee and only really drag things out for brief 1 minute setpieces to appease the 5-6 people who're still earnestly engaged with the story in much the same way I reference Fesh Pince of Blair to see if anyone in VC is still awake. At times, discussing the history of D2 and the amount of burnt bridges is not unlike talking about a Discord server staffed entirely by people whose conflict resolution skills stopped developing once they learned their times tables.

I have unfortunately been on this ride since the start, because much like anyone who has spent 20+ years playing videogames I went through a cringe phase and mine was Bungie worship. Admittedly, I lucked out by not being a Team Fortress 2 defender or one of those guys who thinks Metal Gear Solid V's rocky development is an artful critique on player expectation. What I can tell you, having played this series since D1, is that it honestly does just kind of suck?

I'm going to dispense with the jokes for a minute and also switch back to my usual manner of speaking: The whole thing is just kind of immature. It's Bungie having a moment of imposter syndrome after two Seroquel and a cluster migraine. The core of their games for the last two decades is there and it's great, but it's wrapped in a thick layer of insincerity and insecurity. High profile VAs, dramatic mid-mission speeches, an addiction to melodrama so crippling that it makes Kojima seem chaste, and 'lore' that's somehow less captivating than a lot of randomly generated Dwarf Fortress stuff.

It is wank. Were Destiny posited as a parody of high sci-fi I would be much kinder to it, but it is not so I have to endure cutscenes where almost every single major factor in the plot is "The [Thing]". The Traveler, The Witness, The Darkness, The Fallen, The Veil, The Gardener, The Winnower, The The The The The The. Dispensing with the pretense and calling The Witness "The Bad Guy" would be more dignified at this point. There's also an alarming addiction to vagueness. This is not Hideo Kojima "I leave it vague because speculation amuses me" vagueness or Hidetaka Miyazaki "I leave it vague to recreate the feeling I had reading English picturebooks as a kid" vagueness, it's... Hmm.

I'll go ahead and call it crutch-vagueness. Dart vagueness. Throwing shit at the wall vagueness. Whatever metaphor for inaccuracy and creative insecurity you want vagueness. It is Bungie couching their 'lore' in a thick layer of vague metaphor so that they can pull back the curtain and pretend the pig in lipstick was always planned. I know this because I and most other creatives I know who've made a failed attempt to write an epic as one of their first literary outings did the same thing. It worked for Halo because Halo ended, but much like queer infighting Destiny is doomed to continue forever.

You've heard of technical debt, now get ready for narrative debt! [Disclaimer: Any FFXIV fans from 15-20 years in the future who're making a "The Downfall of FFXIV" video are free to use this one.]

And no, text entries of poorly named characters speaking entirely in abstracts or concepts isn't 'lore'. It's not even fluff. It's the shit I did when I was 12, when I thought having every character's name be a bible/torah reference was clever and every work I wrote was named after a song I liked. You can replace most words in Unveiling with anything and it'll still make just as much sense and have just as much narrative weight.

This penchant for gormless melodrama is carried over into the actual text, mind you. A great number of the cutscenes and dialogues in this game are two models doing canned emotes at one another while the voice actors audibly sound like they regret not listening to dad and becoming a lawyer. It's honestly impressive that they got a man like Lance Reddick [RIP] into the studio to record lines with all the gravity of someone ordering McDonalds at 4am on a work day. It's doubly impressive that Bungie backslid from the Halo series in terms of cutscene direction and are now producing dialogue exchanges with all the tenseness and artistic flair as Fable 2. If I ever decay that hard please just take me to a rabbit cafe, slip some cyanide in my poison, and tell me to go for a nap.

If you're wondering what prompted this diatribe, someone asked me to hop on the latest season "because the writing is really good". So I looked up the cutscenes and realized that I should stop taking game recommendations from people with shonen anime avatars.

There are things about Destiny to praise, of course, but with the above in mind the question becomes "why bother"? I could sit here and regale you with stories of how beautiful The Reef (ugh.) was, how great the Black Armory weapons were, how much fun I had doing the Leviathan raids, how Forsaken's story content is a cut above the rest, but none of that content currently exists. Parts will inevitably be brought out of the content vault when player numbers dip and Bungie crave a surge, but is there any point in reviewing something that 'might' happen? You may as well review your lottery ticket, your future child, or your inevitable death.

I don't really have a succinct finisher for this ramble, but that's okay because Destiny 2 will end just as poorly.

didn't really talk much about the combat in my last few classic RE reviews because so much of it boils down to pressing aim and shooting until the zombie goes down; the main appeal is the resource consumption, where every shot counts and evading enemies is often preferable. on its face re3's combat focus seems to violate this core appeal, as the increase in enemy counts across the board comes with a corresponding increase in heavy weaponry. shotgun shells weren't even sparse in re2, and in re3 you might as well just use your shotgun as your daily driver given how lush the ammo haul is. between this, chokepoints with explosive barrels, the contextual dodge, the wealth of gunpowders, and the grace pushdowns you get if you've previously been bitten in a room, it really feels like jill is nigh invincible in most regular encounters. with the more claustrophobic corridor design and increased enemy limit in rooms, there are certainly more times that the game pushes you into one of these options instead of going for straight evasion, but at the same time the core conceit is still the same: click aim, click shoot. a lot of mechanics to defray what is still relatively rudimentary gameplay.

however, the devs went out of their way to keep the routing intact. the addition of nemesis as a mr. X replacement so thoroughly trumps its predecessor that it feels a bit shocking they didn't get it this right the first time. mr. X was a effectively an ammo conversion spot; this lumbering beast you could pump full of cheaper ammo to get drops of the nicer stuff. nemesis completely flips this on its head by offering a real challenge between all of his different mutations, with attacks such as full-screen lunges, tentacle whips, and a rocket launcher. tackling him requires a much stronger focus on positioning and dodge acumen than mr. X (or even many other early RE bosses), and fittingly in return for choosing to fight you get parts for specialized weapons. granted, actually mastering the dodge in these fights plays up the issues with its seemingly random outcomes and directions, but at the same time tanking hits or controlling his speed with the freeze grenades gives much-needed leeway in what is probably the hardest boss up to this point in the series. unfortunately, killing him in optional encounters doesn't seem to influence rank at all, and I never got a sense that these optional kills help make his later obligatory fights easier, but his presence still gives the benefit of influencing your ammo route. killing nemesis isn't cheap, so if you're interested in his weapons, the regular fights that are so easily trivialized by the bounty of grenades you receive becomes moments for you to tighten your belt and conserve ammo.

small variations to the campaign are also more prevalent in this entry, from randomized enemy layouts and different item locations to subtle route-dependent event trigger alterations. the least interesting of these are timed binary choices that are occasionally given to you during cutscenes, which generally are nothing more than knowledge checks, especially when you can get a free nemesis kill out of it like in the restaurant or on the bell tower. occasionally these actually affect routing, as on the bridge prior to the dead factory, but more often than not the difference seemed either negligible or not a real tradeoff. the rest of these do affect routing in meaningful ways, from things as minor as changing a room from hunters to brain suckers to major changes such as the magnum and the grenade launcher getting swapped in the stars office. this plus the plentiful ammo fosters a nice "go with the flow" atmosphere where reloading a save and getting thrown into different circumstances is often a worse choice than just limping along through mistakes. on the flip-side, the actual effects of this feels like it would be most relevant between many separate runs, so I really haven't played around with really planning a route for this one as much as I would have liked. it already took me a year to play through this short game lol, hopefully next year once I'm done teaching I'll come back to this one.

with that in mind, the real thing that elevated this for me over re2 was the area design. re3 sticks with general design thrust of the first two -- bigger early areas, smaller later areas -- but it moves away from interconnected inner loops and major-key gating of the mansion or the police station in favor of something more akin to spokes coming out from a wheel, where each spoke has its own little setpiece and order of exploration feels more loose. the best example of this is easily downtown, which implements an item collection challenge similar to chess plugs or medals puzzles from previous games (get supplies to fix a cable car). each primary location in this section is a building, whether a sub station or a press office, all connected via alleys and streets with interactables strewn along the way. does a good job both corralling the player into fighting enemies in narrow spaces as well as providing many separated nodes with their own little sparks of action and intrigue. not really as genius as the mansion's taut, intertwined room layout, but it's cool to see them try something a little different. the later game devolves into mini-puzzle areas on par with the guardhouse (or even smaller in the case of the park or the hospital), but these are a significantly improvement over the undercooked sewer from re2. the puzzles themselves are pretty fun too; I like spatial puzzles more than riddles, and they lean into that more here with stuff like the water purification check near the end of the game.