the smartass review I really wanted to write while playing most of this:

Much like the base game, Elden Ring continues to be a moderately difficult game about exploration, build tinkering and summoning pet NPCs that both its most annoying fans and its most annoying critics choose to believe is an extremely, extremely, extremely difficult game about a boss rush with a bunch of weird filler you have to run past.

my review after the final boss:

I kind of hope we're done with Souls games for a while. thank god more Armored Core is coming.

A game with what should be lethal gimmick poisoning still skating by almost entirely on having the best open world traversal in the universe, and they're even over-gimmicking that. Nobody asked for a watered down version of the Super Mario 64 Flight Cap, Insomniac, you made a game about swinging on fucking WEBS.

No comment on the main plot since I'm not done (or 100% sure I will finish), but if there's anything that bothers me about the writing so far it's actually just another consequence of all the stupid gimmicks; every new game mechanic they came up with has to be relevant absolutely constantly. This is a world where everyone, everywhere, is going out of their way to engineer as many problems as possible that can only be solved by the increasingly specific and ridiculous properties of web fluid.

Even aside from the skill tree bloat and all the sidequests being mediocre minigames, I think I'm pretty close to my permanent, lifetime limit for tolerating Arkham Combat. It's definitely not not because of my lack of rhythm, but I also maintain that the more they iterate on this genre the more they blur the line separating it from Asura's Wrath-ass pure QTE gameplay--the difference is just gone altogether in major setpiece boss fights.

Also, actually, this is not unique to this one but I might as well do my bit about this series' use of Arkham combat that's been bugging me since the first game: why do the Spidered Men do Arkham combat? Like, where you just absolutely fucking wail on people and it's so over the top and so protracted and so obviously fatal but don't worry we promise everyone's alive--like, that's not. How these characters roll? In any other iteration? Honestly it's a huge edgelord exaggeration of how Batman rolls, too, but it's so insane for Spider-Man. This level of violence is really not the tone, guys.

Also, unlike Batman, these guys have super strength. Peter Parker stopped a runaway train with muscle power once, and yes that happened in this universe too, they did a cheeky reference to it in the first game--the point is these bad guys are fucking unconscionably cooked, on a level that would make even the shittiest, Frank Millerest Batman wince. Their bones are dust and their organs are paste. It's such radically unnecessary and out-of-place force that it genuinely makes the combat system less satisfying than it could be; I just uppercut a normal human man so hard he flew fifteen feet into the air, then I did a midair swinging drop kick that sent him careening off the roof and guaranteed a K.O., then I did another one of those kicks just to make my combo go up more. His crime was selling unlicensed fireworks (and then admittedly pulling a gun on Spider-Man, but, still, like, Jesus, dude).

I dunno. I really liked the first game, and Miles Morales was like, okay we all love Miles but maybe we didn't need the second game in this series quite so soon, it already feels a lot less fresh. And then this one I didn't bother with until I could get it from the library and I didn't really feel like I was missing out and I still don't. Is it the slow, humiliating death of AAA gaming souring the experience, the lack of whatever novelty the first one offered, or a combination of the two? I ask myself that question and I don't know if I have the energy to care about the answer.

But it must be said: letting go at the apex of a swing at full speed and no-scoping a landing on the exact perch you wanted still fucking rules.

Full disclosure: I gave up on ending D. My rhythm game skill level hovers somewhere between "literal toddler" and "excited dog jumping on the controller at random," so it was just not happening for me in any universe. Anyway,

Whoof. I had actually watched a playthrough of this a long time ago back when I listened when people told me not to play things, so while I didn't remember much, I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what to expect from DG3. I mean, everybody knows about Drakengard, right? And to be honest, my first impression was that the warnings were overhyped. Was the combat deep or satisfying? Obviously not. Did it run at 12 FPS? Yes. Would the lockon functionality and camera have been subpar in 1999? Again, certainly. But it was at a level where those things were mostly just funny. It wasn't painful to play or anything.

This, I think, was a trap. You know from cultural osmosis that Drakengard is bad on purpose, but it really is striking how clearly deliberate the construction of its badness is, how planned. The camera's brokenness alone escalates more steadily from beginning to end than the difficulty curve of most games. There are layers of openly hostile design choices woven intricately together; what could make an action game more annoying than basically every attack the player can use having multiple seconds of animation lock? How about none of them having hyper armor? How about normal enemies having attacks with hyper armor that send you flying? It's not as if it makes the combat particularly hard, if you don't get greedy it's still basically just mashing buttons until everything is dead. But the gamefeel of trying to finish off one of those spear bastards while he's telegraphing the big slow charge and not doing quite enough damage so you get clipped by the cruise liner-sized hitbox while trying to disengage is fucking heinous. And don't get me started on the platforming, which even Zero breaks the fourth wall to complain about.

Dragonriding combat is even worse. Controls aside, how do you make shooting a big exploding fireball feel so piddly and unsatisfying? The projectiles and rate of fire are too slow for a basic attack, and you spend a lot of time shooting at tiny, tiny targets. And these missions still aren't the low point--most of Accord's sidequests are horrendously hard the first time around and grinding them for quite a while is going to be integral to upgrading all the weapons for Ending E, even if you get extra money from the DLC. I'm glad I didn't actually finish that grind before getting stonewalled, actually...

So, yes, the game lives down to its reputation. By the really late game, my spirit was getting pretty broken; I'm usually very stubborn about things like this, but I have to admit giving up was as much a relief as a disappointment. The story, of course, is compelling, often dated sense of humor aside, but I don't know that I really feel the need to go into it much. The thing is, the story of Drakengard 3 would work just as well in a game that's half-decent to play. And if you just wanted that story, you could do what I did back in the day and just watch it on Youtube. I'm not saying that's the best way to experience this game, but rather that the appeal isn't as simple as "good story bad gameplay." It's a very holistic art piece that I think is best absorbed head on, without mitigation.

This point of view is much discussed, of course, mostly with regard to Drakengard 1, which I admit I haven't played. Yet. Oh god I'm definitely gonna--god it feels bad to think about playing more--it's not gonna be soon, okay, I need to fucking heal from 3. God. Ohhhh, god. What was I saying? Right--the popular view is that Drakengard is unpleasant to play on purpose as a commentary on violence and war. It's basically naked anti-intellectualism to dispute this; the intent is heavily telegraphed, at least in 3. In a game not otherwise big on immersive attention to detail, enemies will sometimes fall down and start crawling away from you as you get to the end of a combat encounter. There is constant yet non-repeating enemy chatter about how afraid they are to die.

And yet I think "the gameplay is bad because war is bad" is still an oversimplification. That is a confirmed, intentional statement the game is making, but I posit there's another theme coexisting with this one on a deeper layer:

The gameplay is bad as a bit. It's a bit he's doing. Drakengard is a prank on the player. It's a game made by and for irony-poisoned perverts with depression and it's having a wonderful time being that. There's a great work of performance art in the existence of the game itself about what makes art good or bad. There also, alongside that work of art, is a bit. Yoko Taro is laughing at you for being a weird, stupid masochist, as affectionately as only a fellow weird, stupid masochist can do.

In conclusion:

Kainé > Zero > 2B > A2