I am writing this review before finishing the game, because I want to wait until the last 2 weapons are released

Boyfriend dungeon is a pretty good game.
The combat is fine, but nothing groundbreaking.
The music and sound design are fine, the character creator is simple but fun, and getting to customize yourself with outfits and hats is pretty fun too.
The game's goal of using the weapon mechanic to make you spend more time with your romance options than you would in a typical visual novel works excellently, with only 6 dates you feel like you really got to know a character, thanks to the time you spent fighting monsters together.
Valeria's route was excellent, my clear favorite (for now)
Rowan's and Sawyer's route were both great, though Rowan felt a bit too much like a caricature at the beginning (and also they were much more obscure to find than they needed to be)
I wasn't really interested in Isaac, Sunder, or Seven personality wise, but they were hot, and I'm sure other people enjoy dating them.
I wasn't very interested in befriending a cat in a dating sim, so didn't really do much with Pocket.

The game's pacing is a bit shit. You get stuff leading to the final quest after reaching rank 5/6 with one character. If you (like me) focused on one character early on and were planning on leveling the others later on, you spend more than half of the game with "summer nearly over" and a dangerous threat breathing down your neck (but not really doing anything) and no more main story. I feel like a good alternative trigger could have been rank 6/6 with one weapon or 5/6 with 2 weapons.

The game also could have been a bit longer. Not in a "I paid X amount of money for this and only played this for Y amount of hours, so it's a ripoff" way, I just didn't feel like I could really appreciate each weapon's mechanical uniqueness properly.

I greatly appreciate the game's representation, especially its polyamorous representation, though I wish it would have been possible to be an aromantic protagonist (it's possible to be asexual which is cool)

Overall, Boyfriend Dungeon is a perfectly alright game that you'll probably have a fun time playing. At least if you're pansexual, no idea how appealing this game is if you're only attracted to some of the characters in the first place.

Oh, and mind that trigger warning at the beginnig. Stalking features pretty heavily in the game.

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is a fine time. It is enjoyable. Occasionally it aims higher than just that, and does some weird or unique things just like previous AC games did, but largely it is Ubisoft taking the incredibly ambitious and unusual foundation laid by Assassin's Creed III, and shaping it into a larger and more normal open world game. The lows are less low, but the highs are also less high. This is the first of the AC games where I started to feel like the modern Ubisoft formula, that dominated their game design during the PS4 generation, was a more significant presence in the structure of the game.

The coolest thing about ACIV is also the biggest departure from previous games: the ships and crew and what that enables. You are a pirate captain and you have your own ship which you can sail on the high seas as you please, from island to island, hunting for treasure, battling the English and Spanish fleets and plundering them, raiding forts, and so on and so forth. The ocean looks incredible, and the feel of the ships in motion is very physical and tactile. Wind and waves and weather all have a big impact on your navigability and perception of whats around you, and they did a good job of translating this to a much more dynamic open world setup from the highly scripted ship missions of ACIII. The English and Spanish fleets (and the occasional other pirate crew) will battle if they encounter each other, regardless of whether you are involved, which goes a long way to make the oceans feel more alive. The flow of ship battles from cannon fire and maneuvering, to boarding and fighting man-to man, is a bit simple, and gets repetitive by the end of the game. Still, it works for making you feel like a swashbuckling captain, and can feel pretty satisfying and exciting when it all comes together just right. Your crew also sings sea shanties as you sail, which are one of the collectables you can find, and you bet your ass i got all the sea shanties in the game. My favorites were "Farewell, Spanish Ladies" and "Fish in the Sea." but they're all great, love to sing with the lads about how much the ocean sucks and how horny we are for all the ladies we haven't seen for weeks.

You can upgrade your ship to have more cannons and armor, and a bigger crew, but aside from cannons most of the upgrades don't feel especially meaningful, either mechanically or visually. Part of this is that I never made enough money to get many of the cosmetic upgrades, cause they really want you to do a ship management mini-game to make money. It has mobile game style timers and can only be accessed while on the ship, so it is generally a pain in the ass to keep on top of while doing other stuff. The other way to make money is to grind ship battles, which No I will not do that Ubisoft. Because of this my ship was never strong enough to really take on one of the legendary boss ships.

On-foot, its an evolution of what ACIII was doing, and while the combat feels a little worse (swords will never be as cool as Connor's dual tomahawk fighting style, sorry Edward), it is otherwise a bit more polished. Stealth in particular is much better here and feels smoother in general. While it is a bit simpler and relies more on the stalking zones, it largely avoids the issues ACIII had where you could easily get caught by accident because you got caught on something or the AI was just excessively observant, or there was nowhere to hide. Accidental failure is less common in general in ACIV. It also does not do the awful thing ACIII did where whole squads of redcoats would spawn in offscreen when you got caught, so that's nice. All the gameplay systems of combat, movement, stealth, are working in harmony here more than they ever had in the series up to this point.

There are several medium-sized cities and a ton of smaller islands, some of which contain jungles (which look awesomely lush for a 2013 game). Its still a lot of fun to move through the environments, and there are plenty of very natural feeling routes to make that work smoothly, slightly more so than in previous games I think. There's a pretty good variety of missions and setpieces and the main story does a good job of bringing you to new places and putting you in interesting situations. There are also a few underwater zones, which are awesomely atmospheric. These are mostly setpieces based around exploring wrecks for treasure while hiding from sharks and trying not to drown or get swept away by currents, so they are a bit simplistic, but its a nice change of pace and makes the ocean exploration feel a bit more robust.

The story itself is a bit of a mixed bag. It feels kind of scattered, like its missing some pieces. The sense of time passing is quite a bit more vague than previous games, which convolutes the pacing in the latter half of the game as things accelerate perhaps a bit too suddenly towards an ending. I imagine it was a bit rushed due to the yearly schedule AC was on at the time. I like the characters, and it hits all the classic pirate story beats you want to see but doesnt do nearly as good a job of exploring the Caribbean setting compared to previous AC games. It does ok with creating interesting gameplay that emerges from the specificity of the historical setting, but narratively and thematically it doesn't have nearly as compelling a viewpoint on the politics of the setting as ACIII did with Connor. I wish Adewale had a bigger role (though I know he got his own side game) beyond being like "Edward I love you bro but you are a huge dipshit." all the time, because he does get some of the better writing. I also wish we spent more time with the Central American assassin's brotherhood since their whole deal would have been very interesting to explore in more depth. Its also kind of a shame that there's no equivalent to the homestead characters from ACIII in this game, as your crew and the people at your hideout are largely just nameless set dressing, and the hideout here feels very much like it only exists because other games had it. The game does do a good job though in how it integrates the precursor civilization into the main story more directly. It ties into character motivations and worldbuilding throughout and leads to some fun story beats and gameplay.

The present day segments here really worked for me, though, and are quite different from previous games. What to do when Desmond is no longer around to provide an easy modern day viewpoint? Well they went buckwild with it and made a whole Abstergo Game Development Studio Office to explore, that is blatantly a thinly veiled parody of Ubisoft itself. You are an unnamed QA tester for the first commercial animus game, and you wander around the office in first person, and get talked at by execs and project managers between animus sessions. Eventually you also end up involved with uncovering precursor secrets, and some of the assassins from the other games coerce you into hacking computers and sneaking around. I love representations of real, "mundane" spaces in games and this is a very good one of those. The audio logs and other data you uncover by hacking also serve as a pretty interesting epilogue of sorts to Desmond's story. It feels like they were setting up a bunch of stuff for how the future games could handle the present day aspect, so I'm interested to see where it goes. The cyber ghost of Juno appearing from the server is a pretty wild moment, and is exactly the kind of goofy yet cool bullshit I want from AC's modern day segments.

So this is an AC that, while it takes some big swings of its own with the sailing and the weirdass present day stuff, it ends up feeling like they've sanded down a lot of the rough edges the series had, for better and worse. It's a very good game, but it doesnt quite justify its size, and it is not quite as memorable or interesting as its direct predecessor.