Nodima

Yeah, by the parameters of the question, FF7R2 belatedly takes the crown. I'm in Chapter 13, so right near the end, and with the Gold Saucer date out of the way I'm not sure exactly why I still feel compelled to mop up side content...but of what I have left, everything feels gated by mini-games with egregiously difficult final levels. I also think the traversal in Gongaga and Cosmo Canyon is mostly pretty fucking insufferable with the mushroom/flight mechanics, some of the routes to some of the most interesting side content can be so convoluted. It doesn't help at all that after the mini-game rush of Costa del Sol, these two places return to the exact same formula of the Grasslands and Corel.

Even if they kept the same basic spirit, it would've been nice if the open world activities had more flavor to them...a lot of the side stories aren't even as Yakuza-esque as the early game. And when you see the exact same "flight rings" challenges going on in Superman 64 and Rise of the Ronin footage, it's easy to throw your hands up and wonder why you'd ever bother when the main story is so much more interesting.

I've mostly been having an awesome time with it on the whole, but playing this back to back with Infinite Wealth helps emphasize the value of unique set dressing. Everything in Yakuza boils down to the a fight at the end of the day, but it's never a dull moment getting to those fights, and the "grind" as it were is entirely tucked away in one (impressively mediocre) dungeon. Obviously the franchise as a whole is far from immune to the mini-game difficulty creep, but rarely when it comes to the ones with significant story value.

Also, Queen's Blood ain't all that IMO.

Truthfully, it's been a bit of a 4AM year so far. I'm off work Tuesday through Thursday right now, which coincidentally is when most of the podcasts I stay current with drop...and that's led to a significant number of late night-early morning sessions with some Founders All Day IPA and the likes of Infinite Wealth, Helldivers 2 and FFVII Rebirth. Before that cornucopia sprang loose, I'd gone ahead and finally taken the plunge on FFXIV when all of it was on sale for just $20 shortly after Christmas.

To my credit, though I did essentially finish Heavensward before my 60 days expired (that's 122 hours, actually played over about half those days, so, like...yuck) and could see that the game was building towards what all the zealots proselytize to the secular masses...I uninstalled the game when those first 60 days were done, and of the four games I've mentioned here it was by far the worst offender so, for now, I'm happy to only sometimes lose sleep over those other three games than always lose sleep over some goofy little MMO that probably isn't actually all it's cracked up to be anyway, right?

More than anything, Superman was Having a Moment in the '90s. He was the boyfriend du jour on TV (Lois and Clark), he died in the comics, and the people who couldn't believe he'd died were also the people putting money together to ensure he lived.

Superman (64) had to happen. And video game rental stores ensured its endurance, as well as grandma Christmas bags.

@atheistpreacher: To be clear, the "god damn" bit of that quote is planet sized in stature. All I wanted was to start the game from the beginning, both because I had absolutely no handle on the controls anymore and I thought seeing the progression systems in action all these years later would be, at the very least, academically interesting. The intro is so damn long, and I started late enough at night, I didn't even see Mother Base until the following afternoon.

So you're probably right, it couldn't been entirely cinematic. If I had to harbor the flimsiest of guesses, I'd wager that because MGS4 was Playstation-exclusive there was a worry that opening the game with a cutscene the length of a feature film would never work with 5's wider audience, plus several games of the PS4/One era had codified those sorts of Prestige Tour © Tim Rogers set pieces so KJP put their spin on it. But yes, I absolutely agree that of all the studios to do one of those this was likely the worst possible one...especially this far removed from the novelty of the game's dedication to oners, with or without God of War muddying its cinematography further by proving the technique benefits from restraint in video games just as much as in film.

All that being said, and of course the obvious response to the following is "but why is it a game?" when all the intentional obtuseness and heavy-handed visual metaphors are stripped away by the insight of knowing everything that follows, I do think it's a pretty strong statement overall. That feeling of boredom, and wanting to get to "the fun part", clashes mightily with just the intro's questions about identity and purpose, let alone the things you know the game, once you finally get there, will let you do.

I know, I know, I know the more I play this game the more I'm going to become numb to its ham-fists same as I was the first time, but in a time of heightened conflict around the world I've honestly found myself pretty responsive to the numerous ways this game wrestles with self-image and the idea of military deterrence as somehow unmoored from the inevitability of violence; one of this series' great paradoxes has always been the way it uses "covert ops" (as well as, for The Gamers, secret unlocks and in this game mission scores) within broader geopolitical conflicts to try and coerce the player into pacifism while making emphatically clear how much more difficult it is to play these games that way.

But at this point I suppose I'm rambling, I haven't touched the game since I made this post (I know the first Skulls mission is coming, and I dread it) so I don't have anything to add about what I'm actually curious about here, which is whether one of the game's core mechanics is absolutely, comprehensively busted in the wake of years of corporate squabbling and failed monetization initiatives...and once more I'm pretty certain the further I get into this game I'll roll my eyes at all the narrative beats I vaguely remember.

As much as I agree about the intro's tediousness, having thought about it then and expounding on those thoughts now...as poor of a video game beginning as it ultimately is, I'd argue it also succeeds in its own clumsy way, and that how exhaustingly boring and melodramatic it is does a better job making its point than many of the story beats that follow.

I had a sudden itch to play this game again, and where the "mostly" does the work is in the initial scratchin'. Because the economic portion of this game relies on some social gaming era timers, and it does technically feature an online component that (to my mind) always sounded far more wild conceptually than it was in action, leaving this game alone for eight years doesn't mean you get to just start it brand new. Even though I'm not entirely sure why I treated this situation like I was carrying my own personal nuclear football, I had to triple-check I'd backed up by 68% completion save to the Playstation cloud before I had to at least double check I'd deleted it before I could start from the beginning.

Briefly, I'd like to say that I have no qualms with Phantom Pain's introduction. Especially knowing what the rest of the game is, I think it's neat. Neat as it is...god damn. Feel free to forget how limited the early missions are compared to your memory of this game, or more importantly feel free to remember how engrossing you might've found the early hours of this game to be if you (as I) felt so inclined at the time...it sucks that you've got no choice but to crawl through that just to get to the most awkward parts of an incredibly fun game.

What I've really noticed over the first handful of story and side missions, though, is what and what hasn't become arbitrary. I'm open to the premise of this post being entirely nullified by my having played the game before, but again, you've gotta wipe the slate clean to go home again. So I don't think that I started with nearly three million MGSV bucks had anything to do with that. I'm also not sure it bothers me much, because I just want to activate D-Dog and get my fulton to a point I'm not too concerned about who sees me tying soldiers to balloons...

But if this is just how the game is now, it extremely trivializes a lot of what the original game was. It seems like collecting materials is entirely arbitrary. Every time I collect a suitcase full of minerals, I feel like I'm just satisfying nostalgia. The menu starts begging me to refine them into more MGSV bucks. Then I look at a freight container and realize how impossible it'd be for me to become a billionaire. I can't even extract them and they already look like weeds.

The game insists on collecting these, and plants, and animals, and so on, through so much of the early missions and yet, again unless I'm entirely misunderstanding why I started with all this money, the economy is pointless. Which makes the time some items take to develop pointless. Which, sadly, makes me fully uninterested in meandering through any given scenario for an hour or more.

I just want to do the job, like in any other game. I remember MGS V differently.

You still need to collect soldiers to establish and then maximize each aspect of your base, but the moment whatever division hits whatever level whatever thing demands, you just make it. I think I said it before but in case I didn't - that's probably great. But I felt compelled to point this out because I'm not sure I've ever come back to a game I once became so engorged by only to years find a very different feast.

Part of why I'm fascinated by this experience is because of course it should be good that whatever I'm describing means the game is more accessible, and the Mother Base demands rightfully don't let you be the Super (Pseudo) Snake of your dreams right away. And I'm sure there's a shadow lingering over my actions that casts "don't worry about these E-class bozos, it'll get better quickly!" hindsight bolts at me constantly.

But that knowing is as much a part of what's so weird about coming back to this game in 2024 - all of its systems seem absolutely pointless, unless they remind you of what they used to mean.

@bigsocrates: All very fair. Except…I’m always fascinated by how game players perceive value. I spent $30 to see Poor Things in a theater last week. It reminded me that even if I didn’t get Baldur or Zelda, I still got 30+ and 70+ hours out of $60-70. That’s one fun per dollar!

Sure, I might think I coulda spent them dang $15 on a Train Simulator locomotive (supposing I had that game) but I honestly think it’s pretty rare when a game doesn’t give what it got.

@bigsocrates: On Peter, you got me. I did not and will not go nuts over it, but the original Peter seemed much more expressive to me. The performance seemed robotic in the remaster, but I'd hoped it'd improve once it was The One. But it didn't. It remained what it was. But yes, and I think of course, I really enjoy Yuri Lowenthal as Peter. I just feel if I were hosting a completely non-problematic casting couch, the previous face, or maybe a dozen other faces, make more sense than what we've got. That being said...it's a comic book story, so who cares?!

(I mean, other than the first Spidey-game made me tear up a few times, and like several critics I struggled to care about Peter's regular guy life at all this time.)

Sadly I don't own an XBox, so I'll just be keeping my eye on Venba for a while (though $14.99 doesn't really seem all that bad - I bought Virginia for that price, and woof!)

As for Titan, more than anything the style of music they scored it with was good for a quick laugh before I struggled to figure out if it was either a parody of or homage to late-2000s anime music videos. If it read like I was dunking on God of War III, I very much wasn't - I meant to say I felt like that fight completely biffed it (non-90s kids, I'm saying it tried and sucked) and that's all.

And Sea of Stars...I'm fully going off Jason Schreier and Tim Rogers here, but the former found several ways to couch his critiques in acknowledgements that ESL can be daunting while the latter very flatly (and probably exaggeratedly, as he's wont to do) described the text as an absolute bummer to read. Me being a guy who had an English teacher for a mom and was the asshole begging other kids to get on with it during Romeo & Juliet lessons in middle school and him being a guy who hath done made Japanese (and yes I know the studio behind Sea of Stars is decidedly not Japanese) wade in English waters...I know, I should see for myself, but one guy who's smart on purpose and one guy who's smart on accident, both of whom I trust, were mean about it. So here I am.

Incredible story regardless of context, but it also made me think...for many of us, our first experience with a game will be our only first experience with a game. It's so easy to share albums, movies or TV shows with others but because of either the length, the interactivity or the combination of the two it's so hard to share a game with someone like that outside summers in grade school or domestic relationships in adulthood. And even then, there's always the hurdle of "why would I watch somebody else play something?" Of course, Twitch and several other formats can somewhat mitigate this, but it's so hard to find honesty there.

This was a great example of what I'm getting at. The couch and the audience...chat...were both hotly anticipating one guy's reaction to something that at the time seemed exciting as hell, but nobody played it up, least of all the guy who knew he was playing a game on a live stream because his coworkers and their audience wanted to see his reaction to it.

All to say, I totally get your description of MGS. I'm no longer premium so I can't go back to it, but in the moment it was so awesome to see someone who hadn't been with the series from the beginning as I had - and almost more notably was exposing their "guide" to things they'd never considered, whether that be gameplay flaws or political minefields - that I also wished I could share games, let alone whole series, that I loved with friends the way Dan got to with Drew.

So it's also awesome you're getting to do that as well!

Normally I'd say something like I look forward to taking these first two months of 2024 to check out some of your lower picks. Primarily Venba and Jusant - unfortunately, I've only got a couple weeks until I (imagine I) spend way too much time with Last of Us II's rogue mode and then lose the rest of my snowy days to Ichiban's Hawaiian adventures... though if I could just appreciate my Switch one more time Mario RPG'd be the game I actually regret ignoring most. But I can't even compel myself to buy Mario Odyssey, let alone Wonder, so...crap!

Like I said in my own little post I love how much people have loved the last two Zelda games, and what I didn't say is that I only own a Switch because of them. Though I also bought the first Mario + Rabbids for whatever reason, I mostly think of it as my far too fancy Vampire Survivors provider.

I often feel like I come down too hard on game stories I enjoy so I won't harp on it, but as much as I also loved Spider-Man I felt like the acting slipped a bit from the first one. Or maybe it was just the tone? To that end, I did play until a bit past the prison break in the PS5 remaster just before release and...I swear I'm not one of those guys...the new Peter was and remains bizarrely blasé to me. But as I said and you say - oh well! Swing fun, punch fun, game great.

Having not played as many games as you did, and generally preferring the big spectacles that seem to be driving the studios that produce them increasingly mad, I am curious if FFXVI ranks so high for you primarily because it put money on the screen. Not a criticism! I just found that I most enjoyed that game, especially in the latter half (which was, what...25 hours long...) when it was not doing the big dumb thing. They were paced just right, and I agree with what seems like just about everybody who finished the game that Bahamut stole the show...but Titan also kinda ruined it, both because it was so impossibly God of War III-type huge and, to my mind anyway, was a total disaster of an experience.

Last comment is that I keep feeling the urge to download Sea of Stars, especially because it's still included in PS+, but I can't push the (mostly very strong) criticisms I've heard regarding its writing/English translation far enough aside to do it.

Indoctrination Theory from Mass Effect is the only one I ever took seriously because it sounded very plausible that it was just somehow written around or forgotten about in the rush to get ME3 out the door.

Like ZombiePie, Squall Is Dead is fascinating to me, though I don't agree with it in the end.