This is a simple list to keep track of all the games I've played this year and to give my short thoughts on them all. Spoilers will be unmarked
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Completed 1/2 Firewatch was great at building up a story and providing a beautiful setting to display it on. However as the story continues it leads you down many roads of possible things that could happen and ultimately none of them do and it ends rather disappointingly.
Completed 1/11 Overall a great game however majorly flawed. To start out with the good stuff the relationship between Noctis and his friends is great and heart warming to see, the visuals are fantastic, and for the most part the combat is fun if simple. The flaws being that the game is paced very poorly. I spent almost 30+ hours doing side quests in the first 1-4 chapters before I realized how similar they all were and it wasn't going to change; as the chapter continue less and less side quests appeared overall making it feel like they just threw all of them in at the beginning and if one were to do them all or a lot like myself they would majorly over-leveled. The other big issue is the story many characters hinted at being major or big parts of the game aren't mentioned at all or are killed off suddenly with no real explanation. Like many people have said Chapter 13 is horrendous but the chapters after aren't much better the story is confusing because of how much is left out and the game then just wraps itself up quickly at the end with a horribly boring boss fight. The game started out strong but crashed and burned at the end.
Completed 1/12 A short 4 hour experience wildly superior to Limbo. Frankly Limbo was boring I felt it had nothing going for it and could not bring myself to even finish it. However this game takes a similar art style and game play and improves on them so much. Inside's mostly dark visuals with just a tiny bit of color gives off a scary world but it makes you actually care to look around and enjoy how everything looks unlike Limbo. The only issues is how easy most of the puzzles are and how tedious they can be to do them, the answers are usually right in front of you it just takes too long to actually complete them. Overall a very enjoyable experience everyone should play once.
Completed 1/15 A great vn that actually came to the west !!! Not much too say about this if you like mystery with a little bit of romance in your visual novels you should definitely play this. It's definitely not incredible or the best in this category but was still enjoyable. It was great that you could also skip most of the parts you already played through when doing the other routes. The pen pal system of being able to choose responses to the letter was very cute and I wish more vns did this where you could ask things about the girls you liked. Illustrations and art for this game was terrific as well I loved many of the character designs especially Snappy. The only downsides were some weird translations and typos, as well as some of the routes ended pretty suddenly or fast expecting you to just move on to the next one.
COMPLETED 1/16 GLORIOUS FPS BEST IN YEARS FAST FLUID BRUTAL I LOVED IT RIP AND TEAR
Completed 1/17 I first played this on release and got about half way through before dropping it because of the 30fps lock that ruined a game that relies on precise timing and movement. After finally getting back to it after the patch it's a great game. Very fast and precise combat that is punishing but doesn't make you have to backtrack much if you die. The boss fights were all enjoyable and the ability to take any path you wanted and no route made the others easier was great. There was a few rooms that had annoying enemy layouts but for the most part it all worked great. Overall this game had everything great art design, combat, soundtrack.
Completed 1/22 First off this is the first musou game that I've played and went in expecting very easy/repetitive gameplay and came out surprisingly enjoying it a lot. I finished all 4 main stories as well as all of the side stories. The first two main stories were great to play through however as I got to the 3rd and 4th it was a pain to see the same story retold over and over again. Lots of things got repeated multiple times for little to no reason not to mention the story is a mess and not very good to begin with being a weird moon/space version of the Holy Grail War. Gameplay however was very fast and addicting where you're almost always doing something it's just filled with constant action. The few true boss battles that are in this game are basically a waste of time and are the most boring easy thing to do and are also no fun not to mention that you have to do it at the end of every story is annoying. Side story wise it was fun to play as a huge variety of servants unfortunately almost all the missions are just copy pasted missions across the 4 main stories making it super lazy. To make it quick the best side stories are Lu Bu, Elizabeth, Archimedes, and Gilgamesh. Overall the game is good not great definitely worth playing if you like the Fate series.
Completed 1/27 While improving on the first game 100% this game was still ultimately mediocre for me. First off some of the good, the combat was much better especially with the edition of multiple styles of combat however they were not as fleshed out as I thought they could have been especially Jupiter style which was mostly worthless without upgrading. The world is beautiful and I love the dungeon mine type places that you go through however they all boil down to the same exact objective sit in this area and kill things wow. There was many things to do in this game including many side quests but after about 5 I stopped doing them all together because they were basically all fly over here grab something bring it back over and over with some races and combat throw in; there is not enough variety in the missions at all. Variety is the main reason this game fails because after 10 hours your combat and shifting is all pretty much the same even all the bosses just boil down to hitting their huge weak spot. To go further into how this game hasn't improved the camera is still the most egregious thing in this whole game it's absolutely awful. First it still gets stuck looking in weird angles like straight down or sideways no matter how much you try to manually move it because who knows. Second in some tight spaces or when being thrown around in gravity mode the camera whips around at high speed and you have no idea where you are looking or where you are. This issue of the camera multiple times had me having to stop for a second and think if I was looking up or down because at times dropping gravity would make me go one way and sometimes the other. These problems are especially bad during the Lost city boss fight where the camera was whipping around constantly on the way to the boss and I had to stop playing for a bit because of the huge headache I was getting trying to track my movement and control the camera something that has never happened in a game before for myself. Bosses as I said earlier aren't this games strong point, however the final boss takes this a step further in how long and boring the fight, it's one of the most drawn out fights not only in this game but just games in general. You hit the weak spots like most other bosses except after landing a hit you have to stop back up and wait for it to scream before going back in again or you will just sit there tanking damage as you fight; one of the worst bosses in any game honestly. Now I've just ranted about how many things I hate about the game but it's still not a terrible game, for the most part the gameplay is fun the whole concept of shifting gravity like Kat does is awesome. I loved the platforming segments with Lunar style and playing through the forbidden city mine for the first time. The story is sweet and all the characters are easy to attach to because it's clear they have heart put into them. Overall the game is fun but has many many things holding it back if you enjoyed the first Gravity Rush you'll love this one because it's improved 100x.
This game is a great example of wasted resources. What I mean by this is that the game has a great engine and visually looks amazing and includes many immersive elements like snow staying on your clothes, cars locking when you push the door, and one of the best weather effects in a game I've seen. However despite how good the game looks it plays like trash. First off in a loot shooter one of the biggest disappointments is how little variety there is in weapons, sure there might be a bunch of weapons with different names but they almost all feel the same to shoot; you basically have a pistol, an assault rifle, sniper, and shotgun and tiny variances on those. Continued with the complete lack of variety is the missions. There are many many side quests in this game many of which you are forced to do because you don't level fast enough to skip to the main missions and there are only about 6 types. What I means is you do around 40 side missions all of which are slight SLIGHT changes on the base 6. This is incredibly boring very fast; added on to this main missions just feel like side missions stretched out agonizingly long. There is few differences between main missions and side missions besides how long it takes to finish them. Now about the loot system the other half of the game. It's garbage! I think I can count on my hands the number of times a gun dropped from an enemy that was actually better than one I had bought from the store, 90% of the time the drops you got were absolute trash. This is even more so with the armor drops I would consistently get no better armor for my character for probably about 5-6 levels and then all the sudden would get something that was like 3x better just to repeat the cycle again. In a game about drops and shooting this game makes sure you enjoys neither of those at all. Finally the story; it's lame and generic adding nothing to an already boring game. All of the characters are forced archetypes of characters already in most shooting games, especially Faye Lau the supposedly bad ass chick trying to lead you through this whole mess. However it makes no sense her being the leader as she was a recruit just like you and gets injured before she was even in action. I guess her being injured before actually doing anything makes her a fallen hero, this game makes no sense. Further when you finally beat the game it forces to give you any satisfaction no cutscene no anything, just a shitty voiceline from Faye saying how much more there is to do in this shitty game; DON'T FORGET ABOUT THE DARK ZONE GUYS. All in all this is truly a terrible game with it's only redeeming factor is it being fun to mess around in co-op and laughing at how bad the voice lines can be sometimes. "I repeat small arms fire!"
Completed 3/8 Quite possibly the greatest Yakuza game made up there with 2 and 5 at the very least. 0 brings a very dark story to set up the beginnings of both Goro and Kiryu. The amount of content this game has is insane I finished the game at 114 hours played with around 70% completion. It improves the combat of the previous games minor, per usual however the styles that all the characters have makes you able to change things up if you ever get bored of a certain one. Memorable characters and great substories really beef your enjoyment. The story elements and cut scenes related to both the real estate and club jobs are great and worth getting to however for most people they will probably get too tedious as the gameplay loop for them is very short. Overall this game had some of the best content out of any of the Yakuza games and is simply spectacular.