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Starting off, I was captivated by the unusual vibes and strange world that Kojima had imagined with Death Stranding. Its no surprise that the beginning of the game continued to be a mystery wrapped in an enigma just like the promotional material I had seen, but the opening sequences of events were a good enough hook. Unfortunately, after the initial couple hours of cutscenes and story, when the actual gameplay opens up, oh man. I know I'm late to the party here, but wow. The first two major chapters of Death Stranding are so awful and atrocious that, deep down, I knew in my heart of hearts that I disliked it. Like many before me, I attempted to go online to check and see if things improved later on. This isn't super uncommon in my experience, as there are tons of gems out there that one could potentially miss out on due to impatience with a boring segment, such as Bravely Default. There's even an entire series called Muv-Luv that has two much lower quality entire games that are asked to be played before getting to the real best part. At the time, I endeavored to push on, for these reasons, and others such as seeing some glowing opinions of the later half of the game, and in general still being interested in the mystery of this strange world you basically know nothing about. It actually reminds me alot of the original Nier, a similarly obtuse and ugly world with a lot of problems, but the major difference here is that Nier is actually 15 times as fun to play as Death Stranding is.
Sadly, this really came back to bite me something fierce and Death Stranding ended up being legitimately one of the worst games I have ever played. The main issue with Death Stranding as I'm sure everyone knows is the gameplay. I'm convinced that the entire purpose of the gameplay is put in place to frustrate and annoy the player. The biggest detractors here are the absolutely horrendous long and repeated menus and scenes that play when you do mundane things such as finish a mission, take a shower, claim materials, recycle, etc that force you to skip cutscene sometimes multiple times in transactions that can literally take minutes of your time. Another major issue with Death Stranding is that I would say its borderline unplayable without being online. I was playing offline for several hours at least until I figured out that there was simply no way I was ever going to get anything of value done myself. Now, I'm not sure how the online works, but whats crazy is that there was quite a bit of stuff unfinished even though I started playing well after launch, so it only alleviated the pain of getting from point A to Point B a little bit of the way. The amount of work that went into making fast travel feel almost utterly worthless and just making the player feel as if their time is melting away for no good reason is actually the real next level avant-garde genius of Death Stranding. The reward structure of the game is total garbage most of the time, with the carrots on the stick being "Music", "Maybe getting to a relevant part of the story", and "Here's some item that may or may not make the game a little less of a complete chore". Truly, the only value in the gameplay of Death Stranding for me is that it is such a mind-numblingly simple gameplay experience that if you just want to kill some time without involving your brain or hands too much, then this can get the job done.
Looking at the narrative, I am actually almost equally disappointed, as this is what is supposedly the best part of the game. Without going into spoilers, the genres Death Stranding tried to mix just seem to be essentially a failure. Considering the horror aspects, Death Stranding isn't much of a horror game. The opening sequence of events is a good opening for this type of thing, but it breaks down after that. The only semblance of typical survival horror you'd find here is during the gameplay, and due how easy the enemies are to completely ignore or defeat, they aren't much to offer any sort of suspense. There is some psychological horror present here, I guess, but most of the stuff here stems from uncomfortable images that are just gross or I'd really just rather not see more than anything else. As a mystery title Death Stranding does an absolutely terrible job, as the middle 20 hours of the game or so are virtually completely skippable due to the lack of lead-in to new events. And of course, theres the massive exposition dump at the end. The way Death Stranding literally beats the player over the head with its obvious themes and basically just purposely doesn't tell its story to try and keep you interested is just so egregious in my eyes. There's a lot of horribly cringe inducing dialogue here, some of it during important scenes, and generally I disliked all of the characters except for Die-Hardman, who gave a genuinely fantastic performance, Higgs, and Deadman. There is one thing about Death Stranding narratively speaking that is interesting, though. The fact that some of its material has parallels to current events is rather remarkable. Death Stranding has sort of a beautiful, overarching message that it seems to have sacrificed everything to try and capture. Try to do right by others in what is a terrible world. They even went so far as to make the ENTIRE GAME the TERRIBLE WORLD just emphasize an encompassing depiction of this message. Unfortunately for Death Stranding, this message of helping others and establishing connectedness can be found in tons of way better games that have much more likable casts of characters to care about, possess a more engaging and coherent plot line, and just in general are more fun to play and immerse yourself into. Cooking dinner for your friends or bringing your buddy his missing baseball bat is also less time consuming, more rewarding, and more accurately reflective of the idea in all honesty.
Anyway, that ended up being longer than expected, but this feeling of expression is the only recompense I can get for having spent my time on such an awful game.
on what system did you play it?
some part were quite hard, but we got infinite continue, so it not that bad.
This was about as solid a 3.5 as I can imagine. An enjoyable ARPG romp from start to finish, which for me was just under 16hrs. Played on normal, and had far more trouble with the early (mainly the first!) bosses than anything later in the game. After about halfway, I was beating bosses on the first or second try, bar the endgame. But that meant the game didn’t outstay its welcome and I could zip through. Liked it, and it’s always fun to pick up my PSP 1000 again. Still going!
Coming off of RE2, I had very high expectations for RE3make for a bunch of reasons. Capcom has just been killing it lately with with games like DMC5 and Monster Hunter World. While I enjoyed RE2 quite a bit, it felt a lot like a proof of concept for pushing the series forward in a great way, and if they just hashed out the little flaws here and there and used their new engine to its fullest that there would truly be a spectacular game on our hands. Unfortunately, RE3 doesn't really address any of the problems I had with RE2, and delivers a mostly subpar experience thats still barely a passing grade in the end. As if someone had to turn in their RE3 homework project. None of the things I took issue with in RE2 were addressed at all. Zombies still annoyingly play dead after shooting them, wasting your time and encouraging running. The music simply isn't on the level that it is in the original games. The element of fear is practically non-existent. The boss fights are sparse, all of them basically the same boss just in a slightly different way. This is coming from a series that I thought was known for its spectacular and interesting bosses that can be found in RE4, 7, some of the spin offs, etc. To make matters worse, the campaign content in RE3 is lacking big time, its very short and just not worth the money spent buying it. I suppose the writing was on the wall with this one though due to its short development time, but because of the timing of its launch, I didnt want to deal with returning a package based only on vague rumor, even though in hindsight, I should have. I just cant stand wasting the amount of money asked on the tiny campaigns that some of these high profile games offer. I haven't been tricked for a long time and have used Gamefly to great effect, but Capcom got one over on me here. Not gonna happen again, Capcom games are going to back to being relegated as rental only from now on.
That being said, RE3 was not terrible. It was actually kind of fun. Visually the game was stunning, the HDR was phenomenal and the whole game was a joy to look at, unlike the HDR of another game Im currently working on. Switching perspectives to Carlos at certain times was enjoyable, and the core aspect of the game, running around a destroyed urban area filled with zombies, still works. The addition of that perfect dodge was a nice little touch, and overall it provided decent entertainment. Truly RE3 REmake's crime is that it just simply could have been so much richer and better than the product we got. Look at how much SE squeezed so much out of the Midgar segment of FF7. Hopefully other Resident Evil Remakes or future entries have more time in development to fully flesh them out and deliver everything they ought to be capable of.
Ys: The Oath in Felghana (PC)
this is really a great game, I really love all thinking you can do to make sure that all your move are the best you can do.
Now I want to try all the other mech possibility, it seem to be quite different, so it will be fun to ty it out!
Final Fantasy XIV:Shadowbringers: Reflections In Crystal (PC) Wow. All I can say is wow. And yeah, if I forgot to mention the other major updates, I'll look'em up and spell them out. Was a real ending to the saga, a tearjerker and great. Well worth the wait, I can't blame Square for the delay. Stupid Covid..
My personal page
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My journey with the Utawarerumono series as a whole has been pretty strange and its still ongoing as I've yet to finish Mask of Truth. Going into Prelude to the Fallen, I was really excited for another visual novel and in the perfect mood for what this game does best, slow world building and character interactions that are the perfect companion to winding down to sleep on a relaxing night. Once I finally got around to starting it up, everything was going great. I was loving the long stretches of talking and falling asleep with this one, day after day. Unfortunately, and funnily enough, I eventually reached a point where I realized that Prelude has the exact opposite of the problems in Mask of Deception. The battles in this game are just so boring, plain, and uninteresting that when you get to segments where they ask you to fight several back to back, it gets extremely monotonous and mundane. This comes as a shock to me, because one would think that a remake created after Mask of Deception and Truth would have the same or even an improved battle system! But whats delivered here truly does feel like something that came out ages ago with only minor polishes. I certainly understand wanting to maintain the feel of the original, but this is absolutely a case where they could have improved on the overall battle system as well as character building. Prelude's battles are just so bare-bones, and certain characters like Oboro are so busted that unlike all the criticism thrown Mask of Deception's way, the freaking battles were too many and too frequent that they were the things getting in the way! Furthermore, Prelude had a few other issues that kept it from feeling like the full effort went into the remake. For instance, the sound quality, specifically during the opening but also in relation to the spoken dialogue at large ranges from hard to hear, poor, to down right terrible sometimes. There's also some issues with the plot, too. I definitely respect a slow burn and good build up, but man oh man were there some missed opportunities to shore up certain segments of the game and make things more interesting. A couple of the conflicts in the country that you face, such as the one against
Other than these things though, I genuinely enjoyed my time with it. Because I knew what to expect with this series, I got plenty of joy out of the longer visual novel segments. Once things started swirling heavily towards the end, I was quite engrossed in what was happening and also really looking forward to see what kinds of ties might remain in Mask of Truth. I'm not sure if I'll pick Truth back up right away or not as a few things I'm excited for are on the way soon such as 13 Sentinels, Robotics;Notes, and Cold Steel 4, but then again if I finish up the other games I'm working on before the 22nd then I'll probably do just that.
Suikoden II (PS Vita/Replay)
Cat Quest (Switch)
Paradise Killer has its own set of strengths and weaknesses. For me, its greatest strength is easily the soundtrack. Ive said this about a fair number of Visual Novels, but this is one of the higher end games where the music is, for me, the soul of the experience. Walking through the larger than expected open world island would be a completely different experience without the constantly changing and well implemented tunes that capture all sorts of feelings; ranging from chill tropical getaway to the otherworldly insanity that perfectly reflects the interesting lore that supports the title. I was very intrigued by all the different pieces of world building thrown into PK concerning things like various gods and how this strange island was came to be over time, and how these influences affected the people inhabiting the island. One thing that I do think is a little lacking in PK is character interaction and dialogue. Its unfortunate, but most of the interactions you have with the characters are 1 on 1 conversations, and interactions that have occurred between them are left to your up to your interpretation. Its not a bad thing per say as this is a main theme of the game, but given the size of the island and the sparser total number of characters in comparison, it leaves a little something to be desired. When it comes to the dialogue, I was kind of meh on it as it often uses a more direct/western approach with its writing. A lot of sentences are short and very to the point with little subtlety or nuance to them, and then when they did try to inject some more interesting prose, it was often laid on too thick, trite, and/or unnecessary. That being said, there is a lot of major plot points to unravel here and when you combine it with the interesting lore that accompanies the title it had me constantly wanting to learn more.
As far as gameplay goes, I think its another mixture of mostly good with some bad. Getting the bad out of the way, I already mentioned that there's just too much raw space to explore compared to the number of characters inhabiting the world. It makes for segments of gameplay where you can play for hours doing collectibles or going up these awful staircases that lead to nothing but masses of collectibles at a time. It was also a bad call I think to link fast travel to important finite currency. Even though I didnt find myself NEEDING fast travel and I had plenty of tokens left over at the end, not everyone is going to play as conservatively nor explore as much as I did, and in general it would have been nice to just be able to go between phone locations whenever and wherever. A better map could have helped too. That being said, I was quite surprised at how much stuff the devs were able to fill the island with, and it is fun to happen upon new evidence, characters, and secrets when things are flowing smoothly. I like how you can get more secrets out of each character by befriending them, and how much you can ask each individual character and their responses will prompt updates for others that may lead to surprising results, with a fair number of nothing burgers thrown in but still given to you so the player can feel like they can ask about a wide assortment of topics.
Finally, touching on the Trial, which is essentially the game's ending. There will be massive spoilers for everything in here so read at your own peril:
Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Switch)
Specifically the Crimson Flower route.
And I just so happened to finish another game: Tales of the Abyss (3DS). At last, I have played and completed a non-Aselia Tales game!
I really did enjoy this game! Tales of the Abyss's presentation on the 3DS is less than ideal, but it's likely the only way I would've been able to finish this game at all. The story is not only very good, I think the world and lore of Auldrant are very creative. I'm not sure how deliberate it was, but fonons being elementary particles of sound remind me of string theory and how the vibrations of the string/particle determine its properties. The story has a way of throwing a bunch of proper nouns around, but I wasn't really confused, at least no more than I imagine Luke was at the beginning of the game. The use of terms from the Kabbalah is a nice change of pace from other works of fiction.
I don't feel as attached to the characters in Tales of the Abyss compared to other video games (never mind ToS/ToS: DotNW), but I do like all of them. Luke makes for a strong protagonist, and I really enjoy seeing how he evolves throughout the game.
I can't compare this Tales of Symphonia at all fairly, or even Dawn of the New World. I haven't played either game in over a decade, and both are just too important to me to say if they are better or are weaker than Abyss. I can say that Abyss is a great game, though!
I still have that copy of Tales of Vesperia definitive edition to get around to, though likely not any time soon. As for the other Tales game, maybe someday? Ha ha.
The courage to try again...
Twitter: BerryEggs
A mature isometric thriller/horror point and click game. Was free on GoG so I thought I would give it a go. Felt like it had taken about 2 or so hours to complete the game (kinda of what I was looking for at the time). Only once did I get stuck with any of the puzzles.
I enjoyed the point and click aspect of this game. Anything interactable or can be used in conjunction with the inventory, comes up with a hand icon. Other objects in the environment come up with a eye icon and just add information. Don't have to try and use the items from the inventory on every object in the environment. Makes the game easier and streamlined (less time getting stuck on a puzzle solution). One draw back, there is no button to show all the objects in the environment.
Voice acting is great. Setting/scenery/graphics were good. Ending was confusing. Main menu is bland, manual is very basic (both come across as low effort).
Now interested in another game set in the same universe, Stasis (may add some context to the ending hopefully).
7.5/10
I feel like every fan of story heavy JRPGs should try this. The story is non-linear to an extreme, and the sci-fi is HEAVY so if either of those are a problem, that's the only reason to skip it.
wow that was a lot of fun, with a lot of link with all the old Wonder boy :) some of the secret were quite hard to find out, but it is nice that you can have some pointer to where to look for them into the game :)
Best Friend Forever (PC)
Thoroughly looking forward to the Nocturne remake and SMT V now.
As 7th said, the storytelling in this one is phenomenal, one of the best story-focused games I've ever played and that includes visual novels. Every time I booted up 13 Sentinels, there was some earth-shattering plot twist that had me completely engaged the whole way through. Its an absolute rollercoaster thrill ride. The battle system was also surprisingly fun to play, giving you 13 different characters, each with their own "class" and level up system which was welcome. I think if Vanillaware had managed to capture the same visual fidelity they had in the main story line, giving the battles a sort of Super Robot Wars-esque flair to them, that this would undoubtedly be one of the more talked about games of the year. Actually, its pretty insane that as good as this game is, almost no one I see anywhere is talking about it.
You can really see how Vanillaware has perfected their multi-protagonist narrative over the years into a shining gem that completely captured my imagination. Simply put, 13 Sentinels is the surprise smash hit of the year for me.
Interesting ending, but I did have a lot of trouble finding what to do next sometime, but short enough to not extent is welcome :)
Robo Notes ended up being a bit of an oddball of a VN. As a huge fan of Chaos;Child, and someone who generally likes SciADV from what I've been exposed to, a part of me was surprised this game is even considered in the same continuity as the others, at least for a huge chunk of the game. Part of the problem is that the starting portion of R;N is extremely slow and heavily slice of life based. It was difficult to get through the early stages due to the fact that nothing significant is really happening, and whatever bits of mystery that snuck in are clearly not the focus of the story until much, much later. I wasn't a big fan of the events or the characters for a long time. Most of them are initially presented as unlikable, and it takes a surprising amount of time for the main cast to even make appearances, much less interact with one another.
The game is structured in a weird way that has some pros and cons as far as this is concerned. What I like about it is that, compared to Chaos;Child, the character specific routes are integrated into the common route and serve as a sort of highlight and growth for them, but it doesn't take away from the progression of the plot or diverge things heavily where other characters just disappear or the information within them is optional so you can skip them. I like this approach and think it works well here. Unfortunately, what does not work at all is the game's "Choice Mechanic" which involves replying to vague "Tweeps" in a phone app that is not explained. On top of that, the comments you're replying to and the options you have to pick from make so little sense that I have to think this is one of the worst systems of choice I've ever seen integrated into a VN. This 100% should have been a kinetic VN, no questions asked. I also wasn't the biggest fan of personally having to find the "Hidden Things" in the background stills, as they are incredibly small, and at least one of them needs the zoom feature of the app to be at a certain level otherwise you can't even hover the cursor over it. Thats not even mentioning that it may not even be in one of the 6 or so places you're searching at all. Its a novel idea at first but all in all takes too long for how much its repeated. A shame they dropped the ball with this stuff so much, as the Delusion System in Chaos;Child was pretty fun to mess around with.
Overall, the story was pretty enjoyable, at the very end. It reminds me somewhat of Mask of Deception, where the first 60-70% of the game is not all that interesting, but the climax is certainly worth the investment. While R;N was kinda all over the place as far as narrative and tone go, hopefully we can continue to see more of what works here in future titles, as the the bits of intrigue and exciting conclusion are the things that drew me in the most.
Cinders (PC)
Detroit: Become Human (PS4)
Man of Medan (PS4)