Horizon: Forbidden West

Gameplay & Combat

• I do not like the trend of AAA characters being slow to turn around, it causes a lot of awkwardness that can be pretty rough with the way climbing and traversal work in this game

• The Vistas are pretty bad content if you ask me. I do not like the “match the image” type of minigame, and even with good hints, finding the exact right spot is so finicky

• It feels like it’s rewarding a skill that I don’t care about, and has no impact on the game, and is never trained or used elsewhere

• I do like the feeling of revealing the old world though, narratively

• This isn’t even mentioning how stupid it is that you can’t actually use your focus if you’re in the area of an in-progress Vista. Here’s hoping there’s no enemies or artifact you want to examine, because you’re locked behind doing the Vista now

• It is really disappointing to see this game continue Zero Dawn’s tread of making the enemy’s attacks SIGNIFICANTLY better than Aloy’s dodge, that won’t lead to any frustration at all, certainly not in a game where they are trying to make you melee more

• Human enemies used to be my favourite to fight, but it feels like they are more armoured than the machines now, so the difference between fighting the 2 is actually kind of small now

• They have tried to update the gameplay with new skill trees and and weapon abilities and valor surges, but 10 hours in, it really feels like I’ve played this game already

• It’s fun that they added a glider and all, but I never really felt like Horizon needed one. I’m not complaining that it’s here, but it feels a little superfluous with how accessible camp fires are, and how they are usually placed

• I feel like they need to take control of the camera away from the player sometimes

• Specifically, there are a TON of instances where Aloy will say something like “hey what’s that?” or “how do I get up there?”, and I swear I have never once been looking in the right direction to actually know what she is talking about

• I feel like it would reduce the feeling of getting lost (and help minimap-less navigation) so much just to force the player to look at the weenie

• I never liked the climbing in Zero Dawn, and this game feels like it has made it even worse. Half the time it feels like Aloy is not going where I am directing her, she randomly detaches from the wall, her jump is pathetic, and just in general the climbing always feels messy and laboured

• I think part of the issue is that they seem to be relying on rock climbing WAY MORE than adding yellow beams and planks everywhere, so the grab points are on average may less even and harder to see

• The best thing they did is to add a grapple that lets you skip some climbing - I wish they had leaned on it way more

• It feels like they have tried to place machines near the water more often, and it just doesn’t work

• Fighting in and around water is a pain because of how short Aloy’s legs are

• Also, when she’s swimming, Aloy just moves like there’s no urgency in the world, even if you’re mashing dodge

• It feels really weird when there are like 5 huge machines trying to beat you up as you frantically look for the shore

• The tracking on Aloy’s melee is all kinds of weird, you warp insane distances, and it’s practically random what enemy you actually snap to, even if you’re mid-combo with one enemy you can just randomly jump to a different enemy

• The new machines don’t feel as well designed as the old ones, a lot of the new machines don’t feel like they have a real specific method or damage type that’s effective, they just are an animal with the same detachable parts as all the other machines 

• It also feels like they have very erratic, hard to read animations that don’t really lead to hitboxes that you can reliably predict or react to, stuff just kind of happens sometimes

• The game is so bad at delineating it’s playable area, particularly the edges of the game map

• They have huge mountains around the edge of the map, but they are entirely climbable

• They also have kill planes right around the area you can climb to

• So why on Earth do you do both? Just make the mountains unclimbable!

• Why would you ENABLE the player to reach the edge of the world, when mountains should be a barrier?

• Why would you tempt the player to climb up the mountains when there’s nothing there but kill planes?

• They even have the technology to just have a hard stop, with a ‘Can’t enter this location’ message, so why not just use that

• It’s kind of annoying that you can’t deactivate a Valor Surge. At level 3 they last FOREVER, and it’s really weird and kind of bad feeling to have it ticking down after combat has ended

• The screen effect is very distracting and makes the transition out of combat feel very strange

• It feels bad to just be sitting there and watching your meter dwindle

Systems & Progression

• I appreciate that, while a lot of the crafting and economy elements are very similar, they get going way way faster in this game

• It’s good because it means you sidestep a lot of the early game annoyance that Zero Dawn had, without loosing the scavenging feel completely

• It’s also appropriate, because Aloy is a legendary hero now, even if she lost her gear or whatever, it’s appropriate that she would be way better at the survival and scrounging part of things, and wouldn’t have to suffer as much as she did previously

• A criticism of Zero Dawn was that it's pretty easy to just unlock every skill in the skill tree. I feel like this is still possible, but there are now so many skills that it feels like it should hopefully be less of an issue in this game

• It feels like this game has pretty firmly moved itself into the ‘too much content’ camp

UI/UX

• When you complete an objective, the game automatically tracks a new one for you, and it’s honestly pretty annoying. 

• I want to decide what my objectives are, leave me alone!

• They have chosen a pretty bad shade of gray to use for things in this game, it’s not all that different from the white they use, and if they aren’t right next to each other, I honestly have a hard time telling them apart

• This is mostly relevant for undiscovered map icons, and for dialogue options that have been selected already

• For some unknown reason, melee pits and hunting grounds do not get checked off in the quest log when they are completed?

• This is doubly stupid when combined with the fact that the game automatically tracks something when you finish your current objective

• ie. if it tracks a Melee Pit I’ve already finished, you’re literally just making my life harder, there is no reason for me to go there, it’s not a real objective, why would you do this to me

• It feels like objectives are not communicated as clearly as they could be on the map, and in the world

• Objectives are indicated by a little icon ‘hat’ on top of the associated icon, which isn’t the clearest thing ever

• It’s a bit hard to tell if the icon is on the map, attached to another icon, and just in general creates a lot of visual noise

• Other games have

• We use the same gold colour for waypoints as we do for our currently tracked objective (it also has the same screen clamping behaviour)

• This can make them a bit hard to tell apart from a glance, particularly if you have BOTH, and are trying to find one or the other on the HUD

• It looks especially off if you have the yellow flag on the yellow objective marker

• I feel like the waypoint needs to be a bracket encircling the icon, like in other games

• This way, it’s really obvious what your waypoint is on / it isn’t so easily conflated with your current objective

• Encircling the icon makes it kind of stand out more, whereas hats just add to the visual noise

• ie. When scanning, you ‘read’ the circle before it’s contents, whereas you see the base icon before you see it’s hat

• There’s no differentiation between main quest objectives, and side objectives

• Different question marks on the map will be filtered at different zoom levels, and I’m not even really sure what to make of this, it seems kind of confusing and inconvenient, though probably not a huge deal

• The paths that the map draws to your objective feels kind of useless, at least for pathfinding, you basically never end up actually following it

• However, I do find it’s actually pretty useful for showing you where your objectives actually are, even if how the paths are drawn doesn’t seem to make any sense at all

• Good luck finding anything in town, considering your waypoint is automatically removed on half the things inside of sanctuaries

• I do not know why you can’t fast travel for free while inside of a sanctuary, it’s kind of annoying to have to actually go to the camp fire to travel

• The compass does not work with verticality very well at all, and considering there is no minimap, it makes me wish icons appeared over things in the world from a little bit further away (this would make towns particularly SO MUCH EASIER to navigate)

• A great example of this is inactive quests. They aren’t shown on the compass at all, and so you can easily be 20 feet away from a quest objective and have no idea at all

• For the most part, I am a big fan of the “Guided Waypoint Pathfinding” option, I think it works really well in a game with no minimap, but it also does this by lying to you

• If you just want to follow the marker it works great, but it isn’t showing you where the thing is in the world, it’s taking you on an auto-generated path, so any time you want to circumvent that path (read: Almost Always), it kind of works against you

• eg: I am on top of a building, my objective is NE, but the road down the building is SW, the marker will show me SW, and I have to figure out on my own that I actually want to jump off the NE side of the building

• There is no ‘track nearby quest’ feature, and it feels like it would absolutely help with some of the issues this game has with objective tracking

• Considering how much rock climbing you do in the game, I really think they should have set ‘always show climbing points’ on by default - it’s weird that climbable beams and such would be so prominent and yellow, yet rocks (which you do MOST of your climbing on) you have to ping to see? Makes no sense, just be consistent and always show the yellow

• I don’t get why the workbench uses a horizontal list of items when everywhere else it’s displayed as a grid

• The list makes it a lot harder to see all the weapons you’re working with, and breaks all your positional associations that would help tell them apart

Narrative & Misc

• I find the game world pulls me back in really quickly

• It’s nice being able to just assume you played the last game, so things can get going a little bit quicker

• It’s a kind of interesting dynamic, how everyone loves Aloy, and yet she has to leave and disappoint them all constantly

• Though to be honest, it makes me kind of dislike Aloy. I don’t really like this 

• In Zero Dawn, Aloy is a stranger solving everyone’s problems unexpectedly, but now, everyone has the expectation that we are going to solve all their problems, and we will, but Aloy is like “ok but really I don’t have time for this or you, leave me alone”, which doesn’t feel very hero-ly

• It’s like the little people are a nuisance she just can’t say no to, even though it feels like she wants to

• The cinematic animations in this game are pretty weird if you ask me. The characters have a lot of weirdly unnatural poses and faces

• In particular, Aloy has an extremely expressive face, and it always feels like she’s doing some weirdly big expression that isn’t always appropriate or logical to the situation

• I have no ability to care about any of the goings on of the little people, once we enter the west, they don’t feel relevant to the story that has been told so far

• These aren’t my people, I literally am only here to pass through their land, every single issue they have feels like filler

• In Zero Dawn it felt like every sidequest was helping humanity survive it’s darkest hour, and my kindness would be repaid to me

• In Forbidden West it feels like busywork - and there is so much of it - and we abandoned the people we actually care about to come do it

• I would honestly be fine if Aloy didn’t mention a dyer could make use of every single flower I pick up

Tales of Arise

Gameplay & Combat

• It kind of feels like normal attacks are a bit of a trap, at least at the very beginning of the game

• They do way more damage, and if you’re dodging in and out of enemies, they regenerate pretty naturally

• This may just be a function of not having any meter initially, because the more valuable long combo strings are, the more valuable normal attacks are going to be 

• I do like how the tighter camera angle makes the game feel a bit more like an action game, but it also comes with the consequence of more things hitting you from offscreen with no way of telling it’s coming

• It seems like enemies have armor until you ‘break’ them, but I can’t seem to tell when a ‘break’ will happen, which makes it kind of hard to plan out your combo around

• Also, Break lasts for like less than a second, to the point where it’s actually really common for enemies to exit Break DURING your combo

• You can literally be in the middle of your combo, the enemy wakes up, and counter-hits you, if they have enough resistance, it’s maddening

• Boost attacks are a huge boon to the flow of combat. I never really appreciated it properly in the demo, but with it properly tutorialised and laid out in a progression of mechanics, it makes a lot more sense how to properly use it

• It’s really nice even just to use it as a combo reset, you can almost use it like a V-Trigger or Roman Cancel

• I do wonder if it’s use as a combo reset won’t be overly centralising though, because these abilities are also meant to each have their own unique function

• We shall see once we have a full party I suppose

• I like the Boost Strikes act as a sort of cap on how long random battles can take

• It’s a bit unpredictable when you’ll be able to trigger one, but it’s based on enemy health and your combo length

• If you’re comboing a single enemy well, you’re going to be able to finish them off really quickly and avoid prolonged fights where you’re 30 hits into a combo, the only one hitting the enemy while up in the air, for slivers of health each attack

• They could really use a better name to better differentiate them from Boost Attacks (or whatever the ‘real’ names are)

• Overall- the combat feels quite good early game

• But historically Tales battles become less coherent as battle and party sizes scale up, so we’ll see where it goes

• I think the probably ultimately comes down to, the game wants you to be doing sick combos, but the battlefield becomes so hectic, and there are so many things that want to stop you from doing sick combos

• 35 hours in, it definitely seems like this is starting to be the case, battles are particle madness, and the new camera angle makes it a lot easier for enemies to attack from off-screen

• For the most part I like manual mode over semi-auto, but against small / agile enemies, it definitely feels like there could be a bit more attack magnetism

• It also feels kind of bad when using some directional moves that you would expect to track onto the enemy, like Demon Fang, Hurricane Thrust, etc

• I particularly like that, in manual mode, you kind of don’t need to worry about what enemy you’re actually targeting

• I don’t really get the point of Alphen’s blazing sword mechanic

• The blazing sword hurts you, in a game where healing is more limited than ever

• Unlike Berseria, Alphen doesn’t seem to have any passive way to heal himself, so any time you use the blazing sword, you’re just shrinking your CP pool

• We can never use an inferno arte until after using another normal arte first, so it’s hard to actually use Inferno Artes during the small window an enemy is downed (which is when they do extra damage)

• Damage and frame data both seem pretty mediocre, at least at the start of the game

• Perhaps we just need more skills / better inferno artes

• They definitely become a lot more usable later in the game, when you get a few upgrades and some better inferno artes - they become a nice way to extend combos without using AG

• It never stops being a pain that you have to be careful about charging your Interno Artes though, it’s really easy to accidentally charge too long and use up ⅓ of your health when you didn’t mean to

• Ok nevermind, I take it all back, it’s actually kind of a thrill late-game to dump your whole health bar and just absolutely shred an enemy (and then instantly get it all back with a single healing spell)

• It doesn’t seem to ever get old, to finish a battle with a special arte, and it just cuts to black (boost artes, mystic artes, etc)

• To note, this is only really possible because of the more streamlined victory screen they have in this game, would not be possible with a more traditional Tales style victory screen where the party all poses and says their lines

• I had a ton of trouble with the second boss, and it’s hard to tell if I was just doing it wrong, or if it’s supposed to be really scrappy

• This is why I hate fights where you can’t break enemies; you’re left with very little way to control the chaos, so you kind of have to hope your allies aren’t morons

• I really don't like the way Tales games design their levels these days (it’s been true for the last several games, at least since Xillia, though the issues were less pronounced back then)

• Lots of small areas and hard-to-track connections

• It makes everything feel disconnected

• It's harder to distinguish a field vs a town vs a dungeon, because they're all weird little blob maps

• The duration of Overlimit feels so short, and so far I haven’t seen any skills that extend the duration of it

• Specifically, it feels like the point of overlimit is to do some crazy stuff with infinite artes, and then finish with a Mystic Arte, but it doesn’t really feel like you have time to do anything cool

• If you need to fix your positioning, maybe you need to get up into the air, your Overlimit will be half done before you even start attacking

• Most of the time it feels like I can only just get in a couple hits and then try and trigger the Mystic Arte for the real big damage

• It doesn’t help that triggering the Mystic Arte feels so finicky, and I can’t tell why

• It feels like you need to be standing on the ground to trigger a Mystic Arte, which would be very strange for a game that so blatantly encourages you to be airborne

• Plus, infinite artes often isn’t as cool as it sounds, because the enemy is just going to fall out after the second or third arte anyways

• I think it would be more useful if it was just reduced damage and some armor, honestly

• The duration does improve later in the game, but it doesn’t count for a ton, because you also need to string more attacks together to use the higher level Mystic Artes, so it’s a bit of a wash

• In the end, it still feels like why bother using arts longer than you need to to hit the mystic arte

• I imagine the Mystic Arte does more damage the longer your combo, like in other Tales games, but the longer your combo the better the chance your enemy will fall out of it / randomly stop being broken, and then you just don’t get a Mystic Arte at all

• 25 hours in, and I still wish I had some kind of self-sustain

• There are some fun food abilities that help a lot, but the problem isn’t actually that you die and need a lot of healing

• The actual problem is that, the food you get is just passive regen, when what we really want, is a little bonus that rewards us for playing well or playing around a certain condition/objective

• Eg. +5 CP whenever you kill an enemy with a boost strike, something like that

• At about 35 hours we FINALLY get an accessory that can heal 5% when you kill an enemy, which definitely helps, but is really really small (and by now, a basic healing spell is a much smaller % of the overall CP pool)

• This game focuses a lot of knocking down enemies, that’s the entire purpose of boost skills, but interacting with a knocked down enemy isn’t actually that fun

• You want to combo enemies normally, but comboing enemies is basically a waste of time, normal attacks are weak, and you can’t break a downed enemy

• But in the case of a downed enemy, you’re a lot better off using slow laggy moves that hit hard, and ignoring combos altogether, which is in turn forsaking other mechanics that are encouraging you to get high combo counts

• The result is that, it feels like you can kind of ignore the combo system in a lot of random battles if you use boost skills > reigning slash exclusively

• A huge number of the things you can counterattack are multi-hit combos, hitboxes that are very active, etc etc etc, and so you end up getting hit out of your counterattack surprisingly often

• This feels especially weird because of the warp component, it feels pretty bad to warp to your opponent, and then just get hit out of your own attack

• Or say, warp into a damage field / spell cast in progress, ie. things that you have very limited ability to even recognise you’re warping into, because you’re not over there to see it… that’s why you’re warping

• I’m not sure why they wouldn’t just put armor on this attack. I don’t really care if I take the damage, but armor would at least allow me to connect my own attack

• It feels particularly bad because a counterattack is supposed to represent a reversal of sorts, but sometimes your advantage state just completely fizzles out 

• The bosses are honestly so trash, especially small/humanoid bosses

• Every rule stops applying against bosses, and you’re left just whacking a giant health pool with your little noodle weapons, all the while the boss can turn around and do some annoying bullshit with no counterplay

• And of course we KNOW the bosses are the ones that are truly going to wield some bullshit

• With no ability to true combo bosses, 90% of your arsenal becomes useless, and normal attacks kind of do to (we’re talking like 0.05% of the bosses health per attack)

• And let's not even get started on Inferno Artes, their damage is ok, but their frame data is so abysmal - they work normally by tacking them onto the end of combos, so you can use the enemy’s frame disadvantage to land them, but of course, that is not possible against bosses

• So bosses feel like something to get through, there’s no joy in them, they aren’t testing your skills, just your patience

• I don’t know who decided there should be spells that just track you / have no ground targeting effect / stunlock you for several hits, it’s insanely bad and there is no counterplay, so screw you I guess?

• This game has a really hard time scaling up the difficulty without just making things less fair, which leads to it being really frustrating

• Attacks without counterplay that stunlock you and/or murder your party relentlessly

• Huge masses of enemies that stunlock you and/or murder your party relentlessly

• Damage sponging never really felt like a big issue until the end of the game, where even normal enemies are damage sponges, which is great when you are fighting 8-10 of them in a single encounter

• Damage sponges are especially damaging to the game’s fun because, it disincentives aggressive play

• If an enemy dies fast, even if they are dangerous, it can feel right to go in because you can win with good play

• The spongier an enemy is, the more likely you’re going to get clipped by something stupid, that you probaly had no ability to account for, so I hope you like spamming Demon Fang from a distance

• Your enemies get way more deadly, but your allies do not get more intelligent, so it can feel like there’s no in-between, either you’re sitting there praying for your allies to cast some heals, or you’re sitting there watching your allies get demolished and spam-healing their way through your whole CP pool

• Super cool awesome reward for skillfully dodging and comboing your enemies - take 0 damage, and yet have 0CP left when you DO get hit because your party members are morons

• It’s pretty annoying how intrusive Mystic Artes are, especially when it’s one of your allies doing it 

• You can tell them not to use Mystic Artes, but like, obviously you do want them to use Mystic Artes, it’s just annoying that it comes with so many downsides

• It completely resets the battlefield, so any casts or combos, or ground targeting, or active AoE effects will be completely lost

• If you’re in the middle of a combo, there is no way to salvage it through a mystic arte

• Against some enemies, this can actively work against you, Mystic Artes are great, but a broken enemy who is being combo’d is not a threat, whereas if you hit it with a Mystic Arte, if it survives, you have to break it again, which means you just completely lose your advantage state, and a reset to neutral gives the enemy more chances to do bad things to you

• If you are spending HP to use the Blazing Sword, that HP can be completely lost if the Mystic Arte interrupts your attack after you start it

• This is especially true of long multi-hit attacks, like Explosive Ring

Systems & Progression

• It feels like a good message to teach players early on to not fight EVERY enemy (because the way these Tales games are set up, that would take AGES)

• And additionally, combine this with teaching players to rest early and often, this seems like it would be a good way to set players up for success, given the way that cure points work

• It feels weird to reduce your survivability down into a single pool of points, but I think it makes sense

• It allows them to give people cool spells and abilities that don’t cost MP, without having to apply the same rules to both offensive spells and restorative / support spells

• I don’t really get why field actions consume your healing pool, I’m not sure why they would want to tie survival and exploration to the same resource

• It feels like the game throttles how much exp you get pretty aggressively, and they don’t introduce a lot of new enemies within a given area, so it feels like I pretty quickly run out of enemies that can really give me good exp

• Arguably, the game just doesn’t want me to get overlevelled, but I kind of DO want to get just a bit overlevelled

• I’m personally a big fan (as a player) of overindulging in combat just a bit (at least when it’s fin), fight everything, force a few extra encounters, and just stay a bit ahead of the curve

• It feels like the game is pretty resolute in not wanting me to get ahead of the curve, however

• It’s kind of interesting that they decided to be extra tight with money in this game

• It’s certainly not a coincidence that it’s in the same game where they strictly limit how much healing you can do

• Or in the same game where they jack the price of healing items way up

• Overall I think I’m a fan, but it REALLY sucks if you get caught in a situation where you end up blowing all your healing items

• You end up feeling like you just have to deal long-term with that loss of resources, because you can’t just farm up infinite money any time cash is tight

• I like the feeling of your resource management having consequences, but it sucks to feel like ”you barely eked out a victory, but maybe it would have been better if you hadn’t won”

• Also, it does kind of suck that you don’t really get much from winning battles as a result (other than XP and stuff of course)

• Most item drops are kind of indistinguishable from each other, I don’t really care what I get from a specific battle

• It’s always cool to be able to complete a sidequest before even picking it up, especially when the game acknowledges it

• BUT, this game finds itself down that path too often if you ask me

• It’s pretty lame to roll up to a new town, see half a dozen side quests, and realise you’ve done them all already

• It’s cool to be able to just collect a whole bunch of rewards, but on some level, I think we hope that accepting new quests will give us new things to do

• When you roll up to a new town, you kind of want to come away with a bunch of exciting new tasks

• This is clearly a choice by the devs, these could easily be ‘kill x enemies’ quests instead of ‘collect x of y’ quests

• I think you definitely want some of these quests, but there should clearly be a balance

• A lot of the ‘loot with random affixes’ stuff has been moved over to accessories exclusively, rather than having it proliferate all of the gear in the game

• I like how this lets you continue to min-max hard for one piece, but you don’t need to do it quite so thoroughly

• If you get a sexy new sword, it’s a sexy new sword right away, no need to worry about what skills it has on it

• Now accessory materials need to be consumed to level up your accessories, so you have a natural sink for the random garbage you constantly find, rather than just selling it to clear space

• Although notably, you kind of stop being able to reliably get low level ores, which is a bit odd

• As a result you end up having to use higher level ores to upgrade your accessories, which they are at least worth more charge, but it feels weird to be consuming level 3 and 4 ores for this purpose

• You kind of want to be able to rapidly chug level 1 ores because you know there’s a 0% chance you need them

• The battle chain system was changed in this game so that at a certain point, it will give you a burst or maximum bonus, and then rapidly deplete

• I don’t really like this, because it makes the system more about maximizing the gauge, than rapidly chaining battles together

• The strategy now becomes, rapidly chain battles AFTER the gauge is maxed, and if you hit the max when there are no enemies in the immediate vicinity, then you are just doing it wrong and you should not have fought that enemy

• It feels very strange for the optimal strategy to maximize your battle chain being “I should not fight this enemy, I should go explore until I find a bigger pack”

• It’s actually really really easy to chain battles, and in fact you’re almost guaranteed to get to the highest chain level, the hard part is popping it at the right time, which just feels strange

• When the time doesn’t line up right, it feels bad, but also you don’t really feel like you have a lot of control over that, because the chain is just naturally building without you having to do much 

• It’s kind of interesting that when you go back to old areas, everything is the same level as you left it - except for the the ores specifically

• It’s definitely nice for the ores specifically, but a bit inconsistent

• Granted, I’m not sure I’d actually want stronger enemies, anyways

• 99% of armor in this game is just a straight upgrade to all 3 of your defensive stats, with nothing to consider beyond that, which is just really boring, it’s something you have to upgrade, but it’s definitely not exciting to upgrade

• The ability to get a ‘free counterattack’ after you kill an enemy is a great way to hasten the pace of battle, it adds a ton of momentum in random battles

• You get a reasonably big hit as a result of it, and you get to enjoy what the feels like even if you’re not someone that routinely goes for counterattacks

• You warp to the target, which looks and feels cool, as well as greatly reducing downtime in combat because you don’t need to run across the field to your next target

• You instantly break the target, meaning you can instantly launch into a sick combo

• This also provides you with a great way to easily open up some of the enemies that are tougher to break, like armadillos or werewolves, you just focus on the weaker enemies first to get an easy kill, and then chain that into a free break on something bigger and scarier

• I don’t really get why the Owl Forest is cut off from Fast Travel when the rest of the world is

• You certainly don’t stop finding owls, so instead you just have to hear “hey we should check out the forest” every single owl you find, because you CAN’T go back there

• If it’s an issue of your ability to leave the forest… They should be able to just turn off the entrance portal if fast travel is disabled, or something

UI/UX

• It feels a little weird not having the map connected to the rest of the menu. 

• That’s not to say that it’s bad necessarily, but it’s what every game does now (and this is a game that in particular, is trying to modernise)

• It’s interesting having a little check mark inside the dialogue icon, to indicate if you’ve talked to them yet (although, an extremely small gain)

• It seems like the checkmark doesn’t always appear when it seems like it should, though, so it might be a bit of a mixed blessing

• I LOVE pairing a description of the item with the item acquisition message

• The immediate thought is always “oh cool, I wonder what that does”, so immediately answering that question is A+ in my book

• Big fan of the gray arrow on the minimap indicating where you were standing (and facing) when entering the zone

• It’s a little difficult to tell exactly what it’s communicating to me, but having that reference is real nice (refer to: Quest 64 camera issues)

• I wish the subtitles came with speaker names and optional backgrounds

• But at least the text is very large and clear

• The gold marker isn’t quite as easy to find as I would like, if you haven’t already discovered the area it’s in, it just doesn’t show up 

• Berseria had this problem too

• Even if it does appear on the maps, if it’s in another zone, it can be hard to find in all the map layers

• It feels odd needing to click R3 to zoom in the Skill Panel, especially since the map doesn’t work that way

• This is probably because the map can scale linearly but the Skill Panel only has 2 distinct sizes

• I still would have preferred R-stick up to zoom in, R-stick down to zoom out, just to stay consistent

• The yellow main quest star and the green side quest star look way too similar to each other

• I’d have liked to have seen side quests use a diamond or something

• Search areas are pretty hard to see on the map, and they are especially inscrutable because when one is present, there just isn’t a star anywhere

• There is a surprising amount of teeny-tiny text in this game, which is pretty unreadable from across the room

• For example, most of the important text in the Skill Panel

• I really wish I had a better way to zoom out, see how zones connect, and in particular see region and world maps. They don’t need to have much functionality

• Without a zoomed out view of how regions connect, it’s really hard to contextualise the area, and how each screen connects to it

• Each area, and even each major region, feels small and disconnected from the world as a whole

• I have a really hard time conceptualising the scope of the areas, and of the world

• It’s a bit difficult to tell what skills are left to purchase on the Skill Panel

• Even when you’re zoomed in, you can’t easily tell purchase icons apart from unpurchased icons

• This means you need to hover over a title to see if any of the skills have prices listed still

• It also makes it a bit tricky to tell which titles are completed or not

• There isn’t any actual indication on the title’s hovercard, it indicates what the completion bonus is, but not if it’s been acquired or not

• The only way to tell is to hover over the title, and see if there are any skills left unpurchased

• It doesn’t even list the bonuses under the ‘Learned Skill List’

• Battles are very hectic, and I find I often can’t tell when a spell is being cast to move out of the way

• I also can’t really tell when a spell graphic is friendly or not - who knows if the tornado is friendly

• This is especially problematic when you consider Rinwell’s Boost Skill, which allows her to cast the enemy’s spells - now you can’t even tell by what the spell is, if it’s friendly or not, because it could be cast by Rinwell

• It would be really nice if you could buffer L1 inputs when entering battle - if you’re holding L1, so you can change which enemy you’re targeting quickly

• Instead, you have to try and time it with the actual start of battle, which is a second after loading in or something

• The problem is that, if you press too early, your input is just eaten, and so you spend a second standing around like an idiot

• It’s nice that the game lets you have a tracked sidequest alongside the main quest, which is always tracked

• Though, I wish the currently tracked sidequest had a different icon on the map, especially if you have a bunch of sidequests (either accepted or yet to be accepted), there isn’t really a way to tell the 2 apart

• If your party wipes, you have to choose between retrying the battle, or returning to the title screen, so if you just DON’T want to redo the fight, it feels a little bit awkward

• Normally you can just run from fights, but there are some instances where you don’t have that option (even outside of boss fights in some cases)

• The type of monster you can’t run from is probably the most likely type of monster you’re not going to just run away from (because they are serious business, so you may not stand a chance)

• You can’t see what loot you get if you also have an sp notification on screen - which doesn’t happen constantly, but it’s surprisingly frequent

• I can kind of understand why they might restrict one’s ability to open the inventory menu while swimming, but I don’t get why you can’t open the map

• I guess, let’s hope you never need directions when in the water, cause screw you is why

Narrative & Misc

• It feels like they didn’t really try that hard to match lip flex, and while I usually don’t care about that very much, it is very distracting with how prominent the models’ mouths are

• I find myself getting pretty tired of Shionne’s character pretty quickly, at least at the start, she is very repetitive and one-note

• Having skits take the form of a sort of motion comic (with talking animations and all), really adds a lot of life to these scenes

• And it’s neat that skits are good enough quality now that, they feel comfortable using the same tech for normal in-game scenes

• It’s nice that we can now see skits we missed from the campfire, but it’s also the case that, not watching the skits when they first pop up can remove a lot of important context, so they can come off as kind of awkward sometimes

• It kind of feels like every scene / dialogue is longer than it needs to be, like there is just a bit too much text, and the cutscenes are just a bit too long

• I guess to be more specific, if I’m say, turning in a sidequest, I expect like maybe 1 or 2 back and forths with the quest giver when I turn it in, not like 3-7

• It feels like a lot of the voice tracks are weirdly low quality, I don’t really have the language to describe it, but it sounds like it’s overly compressed or something

• It kind of feels like there isn’t a lot pushing the story forward

• The world doesn’t feel particularly strong, so I don’t have much desire to see what new areas might be like

• And realistically, there isn’t a lot to each area beyond a generic fantasy veneer

• I want to learn more about Alphen and Shionne, but instead the only interesting plot thread is immediately dropped for what feels like infinite side plots

• It feels like the only driving force is Shionne’s desire to ‘defeat all the lords’, but we don’t even know why. Alphen is basically just along for the journey because he doesn’t have anywhere else to be

• I think this doesn’t feel as good as other generic “do the thing” stories, because we don’t really know anything about the slaves, the challenges in the way, even the world as a whole, and nobody is really forthcoming with this information

• We never really have a solid throughline between areas other than “I guess we go to this area now”

• It kind of feels like we’re wandering about defeating lieutenants, without ever being told who the general is, or why we are defeating lieutenants

• Obviously we have the stated motivation of ‘freeing all the slaves from Renans’ or whatever, but that’s so paper-thin as to be insulting; we all know that’s not what this game is about

• I think part of the problem is that we aren’t rolling up in town and solving everyone’s problems like in most JRPGs

• If anything, it feels like we are the ones causing conflict to occur, and more to the point, it’s only happening because something needs to happen to drive the plot forward

• Maybe this isn’t the case for every chapter, but the fact remains that, we don’t really have a good reason to show up in each individual town other than “that’s the next area”

• Which I guess is pretty normal, but I feel like normally we would at least get some sort of side-reason to go to a town, “we have a contact there”, SOMETHING, but no we’re just showing up in town and seeing what happens

• There are some voice lines that are really repetitive, and played so often even when they don’t really need to play that often, or just have no alt lines

• It kind of feels like the subject matter is trying to be way deeper and more mature, but it doesn’t really handle the topics well, so it comes of feeling like they haven’t ‘earned’ using such heavy themes

• It kind of feels like they have these very heavy themes and plot devices, and the characters act very dramatic about it, and yet it all feels like just a thin veneer of theme overtop of a very generic anime plot

• I think one of the issues the plot faces is that, it’s all about this systemic oppression of Dahnans and the fallout of societal imbalances - but the game doesn’t do a very good job of showing you those societal issues after the first area

• Instead, the plot focuses very intently on the party, who are clearly the most important people in existence, and not the societies that are actually suffering, which is supposed to be the driving incentive for all of this

• You don’t really meet or talk to very many people, and the ones you do, you rarely see more than once or twice, so it’s hard to connect with the issues of the people

• You do get a sense of the issues happening in each area, but they are very different, and they feel like external problems, like the quirky thing you need to fix in an RPG town before you can move on to the next place, moreso than centuries of systemic oppression

• It also feels like each area is very disconnected. Like nobody knows anything about the world outside their own realm, and the people that do, don’t really seem to care that much, which doesn’t really help the plot throughline at all

• The plot really does go somewhere, but not until the literal end of the game, and then they have a huge, prolonged plot dump

• It’s pretty chock full of plot holes though, they dedicated so much time and effort to this grand plot reveal, you can kind of see how easy it is to gloss over this thing or that thing, which really doesn’t hold up when you scrutinise it

• If we are to call this a 60 hour game, then the plot is good around hor 50-55, everything else is pretty dumb. Stylish, dramatic, but friggen dumb

• But all the same, after 60 hours with a cast that has admittedly grown quite a bit, it’s hard not to feel anything, even if the goings-on of the story are so dumb

Persona 5 Strikers

Gameplay & Combat

• Tying spell element to charge attacks is a really good way of making you think a bit harder about which specific attacks to use

• Enemies really don’t seem to flinch much, which doesn’t feel to great, especially when there are so MANY enemies most of the time

• Even against single enemies, I rarely really feel like I have the confidence to go for the really long combos, because you’re kind of just praying that you aren’t going to get punished for it, there doesn’t seem to be a solid way to MAKE SURE you’re going to be safe to go for a big combo, outside of big staggers

• It’s ridiculously easy to get lost in the pure chaos of enemies, and so many of them have abilities that can inflict status ailments and the like, which become very hard to read in time

• It also feels like enemies do a ton of damage to you, which makes some sense if the idea is that you’re avoiding damage, but it means the consequences are really big when you do get hit

• Combined with how much chaos a lot of the battles have, things tend to fall apart really fast

• I like the Futaba hacking parts, it’s a nice way to pull her into the gameplay a bit more, and it feels like the truest Musou experience, with most of the game being dedicated to smaller encounters sprinkled throughout a larger dungeon

• It feels harder to ambush enemies than it used to be, unless there’s a car or something to jump to (in which case, it becomes almost too easy)

• Part of this is just that, the areas are much more open and so sneaking up on enemies is harder

• A BIG part of this though, is that it’s really hard to tell where you can actually hide. Cars and things revealed with Phantom Vision are obvious, but not every hiding spot is revealed with Phantom Vision

• In P5 it was always pretty obvious when you could hide in a corner or something, but this is NOT the case in P5 Strikers

• And yet, Phantom Vision has 0 indication of where these non-obvious hiding spots are, so it’s hard to build a plan of approach

• It’s definitely really nice being able to hit enemies with an elemental attack WITHOUT having to spend SP

• It’s also cool that this adds another little something to each Persona, in the form of their “charge attack” action, it fleshes out their personality even more, and also can add a little something to Persona that are mostly physical focused

• It would be really nice if there was a way to use your allies’ magic without having to switch to them, at least to do buffs and heals

• In particular, your AI allies seem like pretty inept healers. They’ll literally just stand there and let you die even if they are the only person on the team with healing magic

• In this way, character “roles” don’t really seem to exist in the way they may in an RPG. Every character is intended to be the main character when you’re controlling them, and useless when you’re not

• You definitely got to a point where you can afford to use your abilities much more aggressively, and at that point the combat’s rhythm really starts to feel a lot better

• A big part of this is because your enemies spend a lot more time locked down because you can target their weakness more aggressively

• You eventually get to a point where you can kind of take on anything as long as you have the SP to lock it down, but this feels really bad in long fights, and when you end up having to scrounge around for items to keep yourself going, it just feels bad

• All this to say, the boss battles in this game suck - everything else is fine

• Persona that can heal as their charge action adds an interesting wrinkle, it’s very convenient having that source of constant free (but smallish) healing. 

• You can do it in battle, but it comes at the cost of a lot of your offense. 

• You can do it out of battle for unlimited full heals, but that can become a tad tedious

• When you enter the Persona menu in combat, the camera is always facing whatever direction the analogue stick is pointing

• This, for me, leads to endlessly dodging away from something, holding the button to open the Persona menu on the first available frame, and then being faced 180 degrees from where I want to be faced

• You can avoid this if you are locked on to your target (which I generally prefer not to do, in favor of controlling the camera myself)

• I’m just not sure what the advantage is to doing it this way, instead of just using the camera’s position when opening the menu

• Whipping the camera around to a completely different direction is jarring and unexpected

• This is perhaps the best control method for a player who is consciously choosing their directions BEFORE opening the Persona menu, but I don’t feel like players would tend to play that way

• All of this is also true of entering “gun mode”

• I wish they had leaned more towards having your allies saying more contextual / conversive things, because their mid-battle callouts are impossible to pay attention to, and if anything I find them distracting / easier to just tune out entirely

• I’m really glad that, in the end of the day, action game or not, having the right persona for the job is still the most important thing - a little bit of planning can completely undo the need for any amount of skilled execution

Systems & Progression

• It feels really strange that this game is so faithful to P5 in every way, but the new systems don’t jive super well

• Particularly, the fact that this game has very limited sim elements, and no time management elements

• Persona games work largely because of the time pressure, and  consequently the release of that pressure in between plot beats - but this game has none of that

• The result is that, a lot of the game loops kind of short circuit, and you wind up with a much more mundane loop masquerading as the same old Persona 5 world. 

• It also means there’s almost no risk/reward in dungeons, there’s no incentive to go out of your comfort zone, and even when you leave the dungeon, there isn’t really anything to do on the outside other than immediately return to the hideout, sell some stuff, and then dive back in

• There’s also no pressure on your wallet, because you can farm dungeons infinitely, and so the amount of item scarcity is directly tied to your patience

• If anything, it kind of feels like you’re encouraged to leave the dungeon frequently, as you’ll often gain access to new Requests that can be completed in the dungeon you already want to be in

• It does feel pretty good to double up by having your sidequests in your main quest dungeon, though

• Being able to exit dungeons at any time for a full heal is so antithetical to the way Persona games are structured, but at least enemies and Showtime gauges reset when you leave, so it’s not truly “no downside” like the game would have you believe

• It’s a little overwhelming having so many party members dumped onto your team at once, especially considering that they all have their own gameplay quirks in this game

• It’s nice that, even if they’ve hugely trimmed down the systems in this game compared to Persona 5, they still have rough equivalents of the social link system. The feeling of powering up by becoming closer with your friends is absolutely integral to the series, and it would not be the same without the hangout scenes

• I really like that they made cooking a more central mechanic, and centered it on Joker

• He could learn curry and coffee in the first game, so it’s a nod to that, but now he is really branching out and becoming a much better chef overall

• Learning new recipes feels like a really measurable way to mark his growth, which counts for a lot because he is a silent, mostly ambivalent protagonist

• Learning new recipes also requires you to do a lot of looking around the world, visiting lots of shops, trying lots of dishes, buying lots of ingredients, but rewards you with a lot of Bond Experience, so it ties nicely into the game’s overall progression mechanics as well

• Late in the game, you get the ability to regen SP on “1 more”s and all out attacks, and this should honestly have been in from the start of the game

• It feels great, it rewards you for properly using the battle mechanics, and it smooths out the flow a bit, so you can afford to be less reserved with your skills

• It starts out at a very small amount that, would probably not even break the game at the very start (if anything, the start is the hardest part, and this would be the MOST helpful there)

• I think we could pretty easily have gotten this as our first BOND skill, and then just wait until late in the game to unlock upgrades to it

UI/UX

• Which target you “snap” to with circle can be pretty weird to manage, especially in vertical spaces.

•  I find myself frequently snapping to geography rather than getting followup attacks on enemies, which feels really bad

• The menus are as visually impressive as ever, and I really like that they worked in a little bit more colour in places, so it feels like a nice upgrade that’s still true to form

• However, I also feel like they went too far with some of the animations, and as a result, the usability of the menu has gone noticeably down, despite still looking amazing

• I definitely do not miss the more sprawling version of Shibuya, even if the game world feels a little cramped with all the areas being so small

• It’s real nice to be able to summon a registered persona directly from the fusion list

• Similarly nice to be able to register Personas before they are used in Fusion

• It would be so nice if we could just map the 4 party members to the 4 dpad directions, it adds a lot of mental bandwidth required to switch characters to only use 3 directions and swap the characters around

• Of course, dpad down is used for a quick heal, but I think it would be better served with a button combo, or in the menu. You can’t quick-heal in battle anyways!

• It would be VERY NICE if the objective marker would consistently display on the dungeon map

• It often does show, and then, other times it just doesn’t, I have no idea why

• Same is true of Request markers (Though for these, most of the time it makes sense that finding the thing is just a part of the request)

• Come to think of it, why does the dungeon map function differently than the exploration map?

• It’s really clever of them to suggest moves that your partner can do, as a way to promote more frequent baton passing (because I know I sure tend to forget, or get lazy, and find the prompt really works to jog the memory)

• Additionally, it seems like they purposefully suggest abilities on characters that would perform well in the given situation (ie an enemy is weak to fire, so it will suggest the character that does fire things)

• Managing your current list of active Personas is kind of annoying, in large part because you automatically collect every mask that ever drops, so your list quickly grows, and you may not even notice you’re picking up these Personas

• This can also lead to you NOT picking up a Persona that you DO want, because your list is full without you realising it - due to no actual choice that you made

• That being said, you DO get to summon it for free when you return to the Velvet Room, if you actually realize you do have it, which isn’t an awful workaround

• This means that a lot of the time, your party is going to be largely just whatever you can fuse

• But even then, you can’t really see your current list of Persona, or dismiss Persona when you are in the Velvet Room, so this makes it even harder to make informed fusion decisions, free up spots if you need to summon a registered persona for one of your fusions, etc.

• It’s a small thing, and maybe somewhat unavoidable, but it’s unfortunate that the first 3 dungeons all start with ‘S’. Looking at a list of locations is much harder to parse when it’s all S locations

• It’s really unfortunate that there’s no way to organize your inventory. You get so many different items, that it’s really hard to keep track of what you’ve even got, let alone find good answers to the problems you’re trying to solve mid-combat

• I wish it was easier to find your newly obtained items. If you happen to miss what you got out of a chest, for example, there isn’t really a good way to find what it was, other than going through your entire inventory

• It’s a little cruel of them to lie to you about the Point Of No Return (ie. They tell you to wrap everything up because there’s no going back, when that’s not the case)

• It doesn’t matter too much, because it works out in the player’s favour, but in the end of the day, you’re still lying to the player about something important

• It’s a bit weird that you can never see the gun’s damage in combat. 

• It makes some sense when you’re looking at something like Ann’s machine gun

• but to charge up Joker’s shot and not know how much damage it actually did, is annoying, and removes a lot of the impact of that moment

• You can’t always tell what type of attack a Persona will do with its charge attacks, unless you throw it on and try it out

• This can be especially annoying, because often planning your team, requires fusing existing Persona (and so if you make a mistake, you can’t just go back to your old team)

• They label each Persona with an element, but sometimes that element isn’t applied to their 3hit charge attack, or their 5hit charge attack (or sometimes neither)

• Once your list of Persona gets decently large, it becomes a huge pain to swap between them 

• P5 had an “auto suggestion” at least, that would suggest something  your current target is weak against

• You can see a couple persona of each direction from your current one, but that doesn’t really help

• the scan time it would take to recognize your desired persona’s portrait is longer than it would take to just go in a direction until you find it

• The list doesn’t really have a beginning or an end, as in battle, it’s goes from whatever your current Persona is, so you can’t even remember it as “this one’s around the middle”

• The only way to really get around this, is to memorize the list, and where each Persona is relative to each other

• This of course, is rarely worth doing because your list of Persona changes so often

• There are a lot of voice lines to announce that something in the dungeon is nearby (an enemy, a chest, a valuable, etc), but it seems like the triggers for these only look for distance

• This results in a lot of scenarios (arguably, most of them) wherein the “thing” being called out is behind a wall or a closed door

• In these scenarios, the information is not only bad, but untrue

• I don’t think it really leads to big problems in any case, but it definitely contributes to the player becoming fatigued by ally messages of questionably useful value

• Putting all types of fusion into one list is definitely convenient, and it’s very easy to find the persona you need in this game

• That being said, it would definitely be nice if there were more ways to refine your search a tad, which have been removed from previous games

• Sometimes I just want to find something I can do with a specific Persona, but I can’t really pick one persona and let the game give me possible pairings like in P5

• Persona with 4+ fusion components are in the same list, but are also kind of in their own class of Persona, so especially by the time you unlock 4 and 5, the big boy Persona can kind of get lost in the list

• This happens because the list suggests EVERY POSSIBLE COMBINATION you have access to, so it can become very long, especially considering some persona that have many different ways to obtain them

Misc & Narrative

• This game is such an earnest followup to Persona 5, and it feels amazingly good just to see the crew again

• It’s a little depressing being able to interact with all the little things that, in Persona 5, would be different ways to spend your time, each with its own little quirk. They all served a purpose of some kind, but in this game, they kind of don’t do anything but give you some filler dialogue

• Same story when it comes to things like Iwai and Takemi being out of town, Big Bang Burger and the various restaurants being reduced to shops, etc

• I’m not gonna lie, turning the game into a road trip with the gang is a really great idea, especially considering how scaled back their locations are - it’s a great opportunity to have many different locations

• One small advantage to not having Takemi in this game is that, the type of restorative items you can get are very decentralised. You’re much more incentivised to hit up tons of different shops and vending machines, which has a lot more narrative flavour (plus, they all have different costs, so you get the feeling of deal hunting)

• It’s a little weird how every storyline (so far) feels like a remix of a beat in the last game - simply with the protagonists seeing their struggles in an antagonist instead

• Of course a continuation can’t hit the same beats, as the protagonists have already explored their pasts and battled their demons - it’s just a bit strange, and mayhaps a bit derivative, to just see those same challenges again

• A kind of weird thing to think about is just the timespan of this game. P5 was a bit slower paced for the player, but not hugely so. But on the flipside, while an arc in P5 is typically a month, in this game it’s closer to 3-5 days

• It doesn’t really feel any less like a long journey, but it’s kind of weird to think about how ABSOLUTELY PACKED these kids’ summer is

• The roadtrip vibe is a really big strength of this game, and it’s just really fun to visit so many different, lively locales across Japan

• I think it was also really important to get the game out of Tokyo. Running around the same locales as P5 caused me to make a lot of unfair comparisons between the 2 games, but once the crew leaves Tokyo, it feels like P5 Strikers becomes a lot more free to be its own thing

• There’s this moment near the end of the game where the party all shares keepsakes with each other, which are all accessories granting damage reduction with their given element

• I really like this for one, because it’s a touching scene that commemorates their travels, through an item that embodies the character

• But also, they become really good accessories for another character in the party, because someone will be weak to that element

• It’s strangely touching to think about the party all using their friends’ strength to cover for their own weaknesses

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla

Gameplay & Combat

• The combat definitely feels a little bit slower and more deliberate than in Origins / Odyssey. It feels good, but enemies kind of seem to live longer than I’d expect

• It’s always kind of felt like the climbing controls get a little bit worse every game

• This seems especially true for tight spaces, narrow windows, etc

• I don’t understand how the horse sprint works at all

• it seems like it’s mostly based on the land you’re running over, then you also have this sprint toggle, which barely does anything on uneven terrain

• There’s a whole sprint bar, but you can only start using it when the horse says

• It seems like you can cancel out of more animations with your dodge than you can with your block, which feels a little weird to wrap my head around

• I don’t know why takedowns are on R3, I have literally never locked on to an enemy on purpose, but man have I locked on to a lot of enemies by accident

• Tying block/parry to L1 feels really weird when the player is wielding an offhand weapon or 2 handed weapon

• You create a scenario where a tap is a low lag defensive move, but a hold is an attack that commits you to an attack animation

• You want them both to be quickly and easily available, but the hold threshold has to be long enough that you don’t accidentally use the wrong one

• At least in Valhalla, I find I end up using the wrong one constantly (usually using the L1 attack when I’m trying to parry)

• I’m not really sure why they brought back the need for a sprint button, at least so far it seems like it just adds thumb pain for no gain, because I just always want to be sprinting

• I guess they have now added a new state (ie. Sprinting > crouch-sprinting > walking > crouch-walking), but I’m not sure what need there was for it

Systems & Progression

• I don’t really mind the anomaly segments where you play as Layla, they’re super otherworldly, and not too complicated, is at least how I initially feel

• I feel this way about all the other “weird” activities, but the anomalies feel worth calling out specifically because normally the “real world” sections in AC suck and nobody wants them, but these anomalies feel really inoffensive

• It feels like main story quests are decidedly much faster than world exploration, when it comes to leveling up your character

• It feels like they’ve managed to really show raiding from this perspective of, it being this most glorious way to get resources, and it feels fun to do them, even despite the villagers screaming and the buildings burning

• It feels like this game suffers, like Odyssey did, from the curse of having too much to do, there are just so many side collectibles to get, and most of them are just not worth the time

• It feels like there isn’t a ton of variety in them, and most don’t offer much by way of gameplay

• If you want to get everything, SO MUCH of your game time is spent just playing “where is the hidden entrance”

• It’s to the point that I almost feel like the open world detracts from this game’s appeal, it tries so hard to push players to its least interesting content

• It’s just so weird to place a marker on the map and say “here is your next objective, between here and there represents anywhere from 2 minutes, to dozens of hours worth of gameplay”, how do you pace that game well?

• I think one of the big issues with the world content in this game is that, it really lacks a punchy reward

• This isn’t a universal rule, but in general the exp rewards you get are small, and the resources you get appear A LOT. Only new gear feels significant

• It’s more of a UX thing, but it also doesn’t feel like there isn’t a big “moment” for these rewards. Some of them glow a bit, but even then, the element UI is still displayed way off in the corner of the screen

• THEN you see the little territory UI show up to cross off one of the squares for that region, and if anything, it kind of makes me feel worse, because you’re just showing me how more times I need to repeat this task to clear out the region

UI/UX

• It’s very interesting having separate difficulty levels for stealth/combat/exploration

• It feels like things appear on your compass from way too far away, it starts to look very crowded when you have things on there that are like 1km away or more, which typically means it’s probably not even on the same land mass

• I really wish there was an easy way to opt out of the photo mode markers on my map, I can’t remember if there was a way to do this in Origins/Odyssey

• I can turn photo mode off for myself, but I can’t turn off seeing other peoples’ photos???

• It feels like World Events could use a lot of help as far as signage, it becomes very easy to completely lose where your objective is

• The event isn’t seemingly tracked in any meaningful way

• The event icon ONLY ever displays where the event STARTS

• So if a character moves away, or they instruct you to go somewhere else, you’re just completely on your own (even with exploration difficulty set to easy)

• I don’t even really mind if there aren’t more functional markers for these, but you often can’t even talk to the NPC again or something as a reminder, it’s kind of down to, pay attention when you arrive, or get lost forever

• It feels like the UI is constantly pinging and shooting particles at me, and I don’t know what it actually means half the time

• I find it really weird that your cursor can’t actually snap to many things on the map, it makes it hard to acquire information as to what the icon actually represents

• There isn’t really a good way to associate a quest in the quest screen with a quest marker on the map

• There’s no way to jump directly to the quest marker

• Even after you track the mission, you just have to find what on the map has changed

• You’re only real recourse is to zoom in on some water and see which markers are clamped

• AC Origins and Odyssey both had this problem as well

• It feels like they are very aggressive when it comes to hiding on-screen controls

• A common situation is, I enter some altered control state (say, I pick up a jar), I move to my target (say, a cracked floor), and now that I want to “do the thing”, the controls  have long since been hidden, so now I don’t know what they are

• It’s a little weird to me that L2/R2 work to zoom in/out on the map, but not the skill tree (right stick up/down works for both screens)

• I get that they want you to use the right stick, but L2/R2 are better buttons for this imo

• The fact that I CAN do it on the map, is constantly re-conditioning my brain to think I can ALSO do it on the skill tree, so I’m never getting used to what the actual controls are

Narrative & Misc

• For whatever reason, it feels like this game has so many random awkward pauses and animations

Final Fantasy VII Remake

Game Structure & Narrative

• It’s really interesting that the Mako explosion was bigger than they expected, and they feel some remorse for the damage they’ve caused. Or maybe that was always there and it just never registered with me.

• Putting a lot more focus on the people of the slums observing the actions of the party really pushes home the idea that these people are terrorists. Literally, showing the townsfolk looking on in terror

• They did SUCH A GOOD JOB of porting the “glitching” effect from the original. I wasn’t sure how they were going to handle that whole thing, or if they would even try, but they nailed the effect, and even the feeling it evokes

• They build the narrative association between sephiroth and burning buildings REAL EARLY

• The amount of foreshadowing is insane, it feels like every microbeat in the story is hinting at something, which, obviously most people playing this game will know. It’s like, free, instant payoff, it’s actually kind of brilliant

• I definitely don’t mind some time to chill and connect with Tifa, and the idea of building Cloud’s merc cred is cool, but these sidequests really hamper the pace of the game. Some is a GREAT addition, this much feels like padding

• Same deal with the detour to the Sector 7 warehouse honestly, I really love the worldbuilding, and how much background they are giving Jesse, I appreciate how hard they are trying to make us care for this girl who is going to die, but it feels so tacked on and arbitrary

• I think one of the biggest things that this game adds narratively is just how much better fleshed out the bond between Tifa and Aerith is, it’s really endearing, and it makes me like both of them more

• There’s a moment where you get this view of this vista of the rubble of sector 6 after the plate dropped on it, and it’s like, it would be a lot easier to process the sorrow of that characters and of that moment, if it hadn’t been 2 dungeons and a side quest chapter ago

• This game is so in love with Midgar, and it wants you to be obsessed with it too. It wants to slowly, painfully show you everything there is to know, regardless of how interested you might be. It will literally force you to sit and watch.

• Shinra HQ is a great microcosm of this game’s issues. Things that were interactive puzzles in FF7 (eg. Mayor’s password, model of Midgar) are now just… Passive, non-interactive scenes. They just don’t work as well as the integrated narrative in original FF7, even if there is more detail and more lore in FF7 Remake

• It feels like they managed to completely screw up the pacing inside of Shinra HQ, and almost literally every story beat is either missing, or screwed up 

• I have no idea what’s going on when you get to President Shinra’s office, I’m fine with the boss fight that happens, but there’s a lot of bullshit that is just screaming plothole here

• I kind of hate what they’ve done with Sephiroth in this game. I appreciate that they felt the need to include him in some way, because he’s so iconic, but his story really doesn’t work as well when he’s on your ass before you know anything about him, and when Shinra are still supposed to be the bad guys

• Oh god, what have they done, what is any of this, things… sure go off the rails in the remake, huh...

Combat & Progression

• Cloud’s attacks are super weighty and feel great, other than the fact that you’re super locked into them. It doesn’t feel like dodge does a lot for him because you kind of have to premeditate every dodge by not attacking

• The FIRST attack in his punisher combo is like 1.5s long and 4 actual slashes, it feels super awkward, you can’t really tell when you get control back, and it leaves you hella open. But I guess it’s meant to be a literal “punish”

• Enemies who don’t flinch when they are attacked are like, my #1 pet peeve in action games, especially action RPGs

• 1 on 1 fights are kind of interesting, they almost feel turn based

• Command materia and Magic materia don’t feel super differentiated, they all take ATB. Maybe the distinction becomes greater in the future when spells cost more.

• Debuff design feels kind of lacking honestly. They aren’t that useful for you to use, and yet are pretty annoying to be inflicted by. They’re usually pretty hard to avoid, and there aren’t really many good ways of curing them because of how ATB works (and even the warding materia just decreases the duration - ie. it still sucks, but for 10 seconds instead of 20, wowee)

• The character switching mechanics don’t quite work for me. You always switch back to Cloud at the start of a battle, so controlling another character is a chore. I ALWAYS have to change twice before landing on the character I’m trying to play, too

• As a result of the character switching being a bit jank, I feel like I don’t have much agency over what my party members are doing. In the turn based games it felt like you are controlling your allies just as much as you are Cloud, but here, they don’t often get a chance to shine at all in battle

• I don’t know why all the enemies in this game have so much health. Maybe I’m just not fighting some of them right, but bosses especially feel like they just take FOREVER. Often it’s not even a case of the boss being hard, it’s just a matter of, you’re managing their attacks perfectly, but no matter what attack you use, it just does no damage

• I feel like the battle system actually works a lot better against simpler enemies. When you can successfully select the right options, it’s satisfying, but that scenario just doesn’t exist against a lot of the harder enemies. They all have some weird gimmick, or ultra mobility that prevents you from doing the things you want to do outside of a few seconds window. It can feel like you aren’t engaging with the battle system so much as running around with your head cut off 

• I think I like the idea of the weapon upgrade system better than the actual implementation. They set it up as though you can use different weapons for different builds, but realistically you’re usually best off just using the newest weapon, especially since you can just learn it’s ability and carry that over to other weapons

• When combat is more than 1on1, things get super chaotic super quickly, and it just becomes really hard to tell what’s going on in order to stay on top of it. I can’t really tell what my allies are doing at any given time, but it’s probably safe to assume that the answer is essentially “nothing”

UI/UX

• The equipment screen feels like it has so much wasted space, which is weird when it’s combining what was previously 2 screens. It looks stylish, but I don’t like the layout- it feels unnatural, like they have to try a bit too hard to get your eye to scan the screen correctly

• The equip screen is a little unintuitive, there are too many functions, and some of them require pressing non-obvious buttons to get to

• I really like the weapon upgrade system, but it’s super tedious to do. You can’t easily swap between weapons (even though you get SP for ALL your weapons simultaneously!), and selecting the nodes you want is a pain (you can’t see which is which easily, and you don’t scroll through them in a predictable, logical order)

• Seems like they could have added a shortcut between upgrade weapon, and equip materia, considering how many of the weapon upgrades are adding materia slots

• It’s a little weird that they made a point of building the weapon assets such that they could show equipped materia directly on the weapon, and yet, they don’t have any support for doing this for additional material slots unlocked through weapon upgrading. It kind of turns this into anti-feedback, because now the weapon is actually lying to you about what materia is equipped

• It feels a little weird that they would have a newness indicator at the equip screen level, but not at the level above it, I don’t find I have trouble knowing what slot equipment goes into, if I have trouble with anything, it’s because I missed that I got a new piece of equipment in the first place

• The degree to which this game uses the slow walk is absolutely maddening, I don’t know why they even put a run button in this game, you can barely ever use it. I don’t mind taking some time to soak in the world or a conversation, but I’m so sick of the game arbitrarily deciding I can’t move at top speed because I hit a switch, or I’m 10 feet away from a POI

• When flipping through weapon upgrades, the controls are SCREEN RELATIVE, even though the little orbs are constantly revolving, so the order is completely inconsistent, who thought it was a good idea to have non-deterministic menu navigation!?

Miscllaneous

• Having the world map music play in the sector 7 slums is really weird, but not entirely unwelcome. I’m just really glad it’s here, just like the entire game

• Just in general, it seems like they did a pretty good job of weaving in the old classic songs in new places

• This game has a really severe problem with directional audio. Considering you’re constantly listening to your teammates’ chatter, they duck it super aggresively, and I wish they wouldn’t. I want to hear this chatter! Yes, even when I am walking forward slowly

Gemcraft

Things that it does beautifully

• The concept of each gem having a property, and your ability to mix those properties at whatever ratios you want, is very freeing, and just neat

• The idea that you can choose to increase the number of enemies (and thus challenge) coming at you creates a really great risk/reward, and encourages you to push yourself, if the pace ever starts to get a bit slow (because you are crushing too hard)

• Because the game is always pushing you to up the difficulty, you’re more likely to be in situations where you’re at your limits, where you’re barely getting by; this increases the drama

• Similarly, with the heightened level of drama that one tends to see, is the need to min/max and make clutch plays. The game supports this well by having things like swapping gems (and active action the incorporates elements of timing) and Gem Bombs (which allow you to “panic”, and perform inefficient actions for the sake of your larger goal)

• The level of meta-progression is really out of this world, and it can all be shifted around at will so you can try any number of approaches to any situation, and meshes really nicely with the idea of having different types of gems. Different gems are going to benefit from different strategies, and so it encourages you to experiment

• I like how you personally build the towers, the walls, and the gems. They are all separate things you have to purchase, and have escalating costs, so you have to balance how much you buy of each. You create a balance of gem strength, vs gem count, vs maze quality.

• Part of what helps the game maintain its economy so well, is the fact that building towers and building walls are completely separate things - towers are 100% for increasing gem count and 0% for maze building, walls are 100% for maze building and 0% for increasing gem count

• The way they make the Talisman system into a little puzzle is so cool, it’s like turning inventory management into inventory tetris, except better, because the interlocking of the pieces means that it takes actual thought

• Wizard stashes introduce a really cool challenge wherein you have to make some level of choice between focusing on enemies, and focusing on rewards. Another case of risk/reward

Not so Good

• It’s pretty annoying how you can’t tell what kind of gem you have in a trap, beyond the colour (ie. you can’t tell what level it is)