Where the base game introduced a vast and deep world of lore and stories tied deeply into the heart of the Warcraft series, Burning Crusade began a trend of stitching on 'content islands' that referenced the world without truly committing to being part of it, an approach that is emblematic of BC as a whole.

The Dranei are awkwardly fit into the game both as a high tech race dressed up for classical fantasy and with a starting zone that feels entirely contrived. No part of it feels like the Dranei dropped into an existing realised landmass, it just feels like a patchwork of recycled assets without any real identity. The zone itself is just barely tethered to the rest of Azeroth by a single boat which makes the Exodar city even less accessible than Darnassus while somehow being just as remote and laid out even worse.

I don't know the blood elves quite as intimately as I never really committed to playing on the horde side, but the few arguments I've heard against them is that they aesthetically betray the tribal and edgy feel of the horde, while being very popular with anime fans, women, and teenagers - arguments I don't think are problematic in the grand scheme of things.

Outland meanwhile follows the trend of disconnection, the devs didn't want people without the expansion going there so everything is gated off away from the main world. While a few locations in outland are interesting the entire region suffers a similar identity crisis. On the one hand it's very much about demons and the themes of abusing magic, but also it's heavily space themed with the Dranei's crystal aesthetic and the Ethereal race being introduced. Neither of these mesh particularly well in-game and together they clash with the vanilla world which is quintessentially Tolkien at its heart.

Perhaps the worst sin in my opinion is how BC treated gear. If you raided at the end of vanilla and were proud of your hard earned epics, it felt like an insult to immediately be given free greens more powerful than anything in vanilla. BC set a precedent where each expansion jumped the item level to a new tier making all old gear redundant. The whole point of the game was to raid and earn the best gear, but why bother when you immediately discard everything when the next expansion comes around? Talk about self defeating.

This was the expansion which led to me quitting WoW back in 2007 when it became clear that the game was built around an end game that was pointless and expansions would tack on islands of rushed content rather than enriching Azeroth itself - bearing in mind that Azeroth still felt unfinished at the time. The Illidan story had sat cold for years and didn't tie into any of the events in vanilla, the blasted portal was compelling but Hellfire Peninsula was underwhelming to arrive in.

Sadly the through line of BC is just how disconnected it was from the base game at every level, and it set a precedent for every future expansion to feel the same way by taking on random new races, instanced regions, and setting up raids that were ever more complex and difficult with rewards that had no purpose. A trend that continues to this very day.

Had to sit on this one for a while.
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Played on Hardcore
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I’m wholly disappointed by many things this ended up doing, it changed too little in places and too much in others, the game’s biggest flaw is still there, there’s a significant decrease in overall quality between Village, Castle and Island while the Castle had some rather major improvements, half of it was still the same ol’ badly designed mess and I would even say they fare worse in 4R, and that’s what I meant by “changed too much”, for some god forsaken reason, someone at Capcom decided it’s a good idea to give 2R’s reticle focusing mechanic, one that was crafted for a more meticulous, slow, low enemy count game and give it to 4R, which happens to be the complete opposite of that, so now the game is not as snappy and responsive as the original and ends up In a really awkward place at best, while it sinks to greater low’s than the original in the worse sections of the game.

About 2/3rds of the way through so I'm abstaining from giving a definitive score.

I'll get this out of the way now, the game is fun and is pretty good. But that's because a lot of what works for this remake was also worked for the original, to the point where I am still wondering "Who was really asking for this?"

In terms of remakes, RE4make is closer to the original REmake than it is to the remakes of RE2 or 3. It isn't trying adapt something that is considered "old and outdated", but rather it's a sort of revision of something that is still fairly cotemporary. But unlike RE1, which had aged considerably in the six years between the original release and the GameCube remake, the original RE4 has faired incredibly well in the 18 years (holy shit) since it released.

Because of this, many of the changes thrown into this remake feel, well, thrown in. Like, oh wow you can walk and shoot now, crazy, but the original wasn't at all hampered by Leon's lack of mobility. Enemies would start to slow down as they got close, giving you a chance to get a last minute shot in. Was it realistic, no, but if you're coming to Resident Evil for realism... uh... what's wrong with you?

In order to mitigate Leon's new found mobility, enemies in REmake take bullets like champs and only sometimes get staggered. In the original, you were rewarded for landing proper shots, but here it seems so inconsistent as to when an enemy might be stunned that you pray that the RNG rolls the dice in your favor. I could handle this in RE2make as they were slow zombies and the game was a sort of puzzle-box which was more about knowing when or if you should dispatch enemies rather than finding some way to navigate around them. In both RE4s, the answer is always "KILL", but when your damage output feels so inconsistent, I get to wondering why they went about it this way.

The other new addition is the parry mechanic, which is cool but to dampen the fun that comes with it, they added a durability meter to it. I'd just rather have the windows be less forgiving (they are very forgiving in this) than to constantly have to just dump money into upgrading and repairing this thing. This is only a real nuisance at for the first third, because by the halfway point, you've sunken so much money into the thing that it rarely breaks so why did they add even add this durability mechanic in there?

Stealth is included. I don't care for it's inclusion because it really seems antithetical to what the original was going for and only serves to put the breaks on this game's gameplay pacing, but whatever. It isn't in so much of the game to be that noteworthy.

The changes to story (outside of Luis) don't add much substantively to the game. You're basically getting a slightly remixed plot with less charm and cheese. There are attempts to be campy, but it's balancing act of seriousness (Leon is supposed to be suffering from survivor's guilt, but that's not really touched on much at all, even when it probably should at a certain plot point involving Ashley) makes it all feel really wonky.

RE4make is essentially like someone trying to remake Pink Flamingos with a concerted effort to make it less queer. The original RE4 isn't just good because of it's mechanic's, because RE4 wouldn't be half the game it was if it wasn't for it's camp, atmosphere and style. It'd end up being Cold Fear otherwise. Which makes these changes presented in this remake feel all the more misguided (and at worst cynical).

I can't speak much on the new music because it has the same problem as RE2make where it's largely forgettable. It's not nearly as bad as it was in RE2make's case, because comparatively RE4 already had a more understated OST compared to it's predecessors, but it still comes off as pretty bland. Adding in live musical arrangements doesn't make an OST better, just look at how botched the Demon's Souls OST is as proof.

I want to clarify that I do like this game, a lot even, and if the Dead Space Remake showed me anything it's that there is probably some worth going back and remaking titles that aren't "out-of-date", but RE4make somehow adds very little to properly flesh out or expand on the original in any meaningful way, and instead just makes odd sidesteps that original never called for in terms of gameplay, and straight up trips over it's shoelaces with the plot and atmosphere.

RE4make is good and I'm glad so many people absolutely adore it, and it's bringing new people folks to the series like original did 18 years ago. I just sadly don't vibe with it as most folks are, and unless it somehow drastically changes in it's last third, I'd struggle to give this anything higher than a solid B.

i think it's abhorrent that this thing ultimately wants you to smash the bird with a rock. this bird who might be dying, but otherwise appears to be at peace. i've had birds as pets, and even held sick and dying birds in my hands, and i would have never, ever thought to do something as violent as crush them with rocks and sticks.

"getting help isn't making me weak, but refusing it is" says the text bubble, as if these are the bird's final thoughts. i just find it strange and clumsy. who is supposed to benefit from this?

i removed the stick and the rock from my sight and then placed each flower in a crescent around the little bird's face. compassion comes as simply as being there, requiring no bloody "act of mercy" beyond sharing in one's suffering, hoping to bring comfort by doing so. obviously, there are situations where granting a living creature release is the right thing to do, but that all seems outside the scope of this thing. closed the window feeling a mixture of heartache and disgust. i miss my birds.

A bluntly referential homage to the survival horror canon. The moment-to-moment map navigation is a joy but is undercut by a second act pivot to geometrically perverted, cosmic horror meat mazes. An over adherence to genre tropes makes for a fussy conclusion that struggles to escape Silent Hill's Event Horizon, and a litany of small frustrations (why can't I drop items?) compile into a game I was ready to be over.

The backdrop of a vaguely Soviet Union totalitarian regime and the nature of personhood in artificial intelligence go unexplored despite being the only source of narration for 2/3 of the game, before switching gears to an even more thinly articulated trauma allegory. There's a strong mechanical foundation here but without a coherent thematic or narrative direction it ends up little more than a competent imitation.

A seasoned understanding of the series strengths, Fatal Frame 3 contains some of the best scares of the trilogy, with a good dosage of effective and earned jumpscares and subdued moments of increasing unease and tension developed through the masterful environmental storytelling and its ever present voyeuristic fixed camera, additionally course correcting the lack of challenge from FF2 with a much more scarce availableness of ammo and health aids that hearken back to the last tense hours of FF1.

Taking survival's guilt as its core premise, FF3 is a more introspective journey than its more fetishistic predecessors, antagonizing its main character Rei with grief through unsettling hauntings that invade the player's safe space long after your wanderings inside the nightmarish Shintoistic mansion game world, in a similar fashion to what Silent Hill 4 succeeded with its titular room and ultimately the unique aspect that makes FF3 stand out from the remaining series.

It's shame that FF3 spends so much of its time with Rei out of the spotlight in service of other playable characters. It certainly benefits the now familiar setting of the series, as it creates some of the more understated hair raising moments from the mere act of opening a door to suddenly find yourself in an area from FF1 or FF2, while also elevating its dream mansion with a maze-like set of hallways and rooms that have a propensity to make you feel lost.

But the overbloated runtime plagues the game with patience testing backtracking that turn the dread of familiarity betrayal into exhausting fetch quests that have you passing through the same static corridors more than enough times, a feeling exacerbated for players who have done the FF song and dance before FF3. And the added characters introduced with the intent to connect all 3 FF games into one over-arching story rob Rei's inner turmoil of a more deserving focused storyline.

It doesn't contain the brevity of FF1 nor the cohesiveness of FF2, and it definitely starts to feel like a dead end to a series that would expand into even more polarizing and acquired taste sequels. But it ties the trilogy neatly with sorrowful bow, as it manages to combine the core themes of the series with a more grounded and personal ghostly tale that provides the series with a poignant and oddly satisfying happy closure to a series so defined by its tragic haunting tales.