by freddie_bert
Showing 1-10 of 20 items
Let me get this out of the way: I would never dispute that this is one of the best jrpgs of all time and arguably one of the best games ever made. Although I personally have my issues with it, I'm not gonna argue that it shouldn't be at the top of either of those respective lists. Things like the art and the music have held up incredibly good over time. For me though, even though the dressings have held up great, I just couldn't find much fun in playing the game itself. There were more than a few times I got lost and by the time you unlock several time periods to travel through, it can be a pain to figure out where you need to go next without wasting too much time traveling around. A lot of the entrances to specific time periods are tucked away and cumbersome to get to so it's really not fun when you don't know where to go. It's definitely a product of its time and I don't hold that against it, but for me, it often led to frustration akin to pixel hunting in adventure games rather then a fun sense of exploration. When I wasn't getting frustrated exploring, I was getting bored by the battles. Besides the occasional boss fight that demanded more of the player, like a specific mechanic to do damage to that specific boss or something, I got through every fight by just mashing A on attack. I'd use aoe spells when I needed to, but that's about it. Especially in jrpgs which are filled full of random encounters, the last thing you want is a boring battle system. Maybe in the later half of the game it gets more complicated, but by the time I get a dozen or more hours into the game I was kinda hoping for more. What I did see of the story was intriguing and I did want to see it through, especially to see what happens to the quirky, fun cast of characters you assemble through the game (Frog squad). At some point though I just couldn't get excited about booting up my SNES though. Maybe one day I'll go back and try it again, but until then I'll appreciate it from a distance.
The CoD that started my reentry into the franchise. Really tight shooting, but the maps are pretty damn boring which was one thing that drove me to Cold War. This game has a much better BR mode than it's sequel also.
Probably the most fun of the three I played. Maps are the most interesting, shooting is fast paced and fun, and I had the least problems getting murdered by campers.
The shooting feels the worst out of the three CoD's I got into. There's a fidelity to the animations and sound design that makes them feel and sound good, but the actual pull down the trigger and aiming, as well as movement, feels slow and unresponsive. This is a huge deal in Call of Duty especially and the main reason I've ended up being Cold War and Modern Warfare 1 much more. The progression was another thing I had issues with; it's just not fun to have to use a bunch of guns I don't give a shit about to use what I want to use.
I bounced off of Yes Your Grace after a few hours. While the idea of having to make hard choices to manage your kindgom with real consequences does appeal to me, it became obvious early on that anything actually important the game would decide for me. That's fine, I get wanting to tell your story at the end of the day, but for me I was expecting a more personalized journey, so having the rug pulled out from under me a couple times just left a bad taste in my mouth. By no means a bad game, but not exactly what I wanted unfortunately.
6/10 I really like the premise of Road 96. Going on a cross country roadtrip where you're meeting interesting people and figuring out more about the state of the world and why your characters are fleeing in the first place. Unfortunately, the game fails to properly flesh out both things. The characters are interesting when you meet them the first couple things in your first couple different lives, but at some point you know what to expect from all of them. Even worse, the best character (Zoey) ended up becoming unavailable somewhere around halfway through my time with the game and her absence made the game worse as a hole, which I guess is kind of a compliment in a way. The fact that you see the world through all these different people you play as traveling towards the border does offer a unique perspective of all the other characters journeys, but it does mean that you as the player have no character at all. Everyone is pretty quick to trust you, even though we're supposed to believe they're all mostly wary and on the run, so it does take away from the believability of the interactions you have with each of them as well. The world itself is hard to invest in too. From what I put together, the country seems to be run by a tyrant people are on the run from. The game spends a lot of time telling you he's a bad dude, and you're forced to pick sides all the time throughout the game. It's only near the end of the game that you actually see some stuff that he's done that's bad though, the rest of the time the game just wants you to take its wod, which is really bizarre considering one of its core messages is you can't just blindly trust and conform, you have to rise up and fight for the truth. I would've liked to see a more nuanced grey vs grey kind of ideological battle if that's the kind of story it wanted to tell, but perhaps I'm foisting too high of a demand on what feels like a relatively small scale project. For what it is, it's a sometimes fun and often goofy adventure game. It does bite off more than it can chew and I'd almost rather they cut out the amount of runs you can do to focus more on just a few different options they could flesh out.
8/10 I remember saying after Breath of the Wild came out that I'd love for more Zelda games like this, but not necessarily one taking place in the same world, as I've already -been- in this world for 85+ hours and I didn't really have anything left to discover. After putting 155+ hours into the sequel that takes place in the same world, I'm happy to be wrong. Although I did put a ton of time into Tears of the Kingdom, that didn't stop my previous concerns from manifesting. This Hyrule is inherently less interesting. You've met these people, you've discovered these places, you've collected a lot of the same exact things before. I can't imagine what it must feel like for completionists who finished the Compendium and found all the Korok Seeds to come to this game and see all that progress wiped out, only for Nintendo to ask you to do the exact same thing again, but more this time. That being said, sequels like this have some benefits too. It's awesome seeing how people have changed in the years since the first game, and seeing how the world has changed too. It's a bit of a double-edged sword, to be honest. I think being in this same world again allows them to better justify adding the Ultrahand ability too, because what you can do with that thing just completely subverts how Nintendo originally wanted people to traverse this world. Gone are the days of stamina rationing, or trying to angle your paraglider just right off the highest point you can find. In are the ways of strapping rockets to your shield and building flying machines to go everywhere. It inherently diminishes what made BotW's exploration so good, but in a world you've already -seen- (for the most part), why not fly in style? It's a fun as hell mechanic and it's one of the things that make this direct sequel work. The abilities in general are much more fun than BotW, I'd say. I do miss the momentium building ability, but that's about it honestly. TotK's abilities are all basically just hacks that the developers intentially left on, and it makes the game incredibly goofy sometimes, but also really fun to mess around with. Although I did mess around with making vehicles a fair bunch, I rarely tried to make much else. The same goes for Fusing: I kept it pretty vanilla and played it mostly like a standard run up and slash dudes Zelda game. I've seen people combine some crazy shit though to interesting effect. The story is another point of contention for me. I really liked the actual story beats, but they're told in a way that does a disservice to the story itself. TotK gives the player much more guidance than BotW does, quickly giving you waypoints to several main quests. Not long after that, you learn of geoglyphs and then it wasn't too long till the game told me exactly where to find all of them. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but when you tell me exactly where a bunch of story related cutscenes are, the first thing I want to do is seek them out and before I had even finished the second dungeon I had found them all. They very explicitly tell you what's going on with the main story and as a consequence for that, it undermines the dramatic moments you end up having with characters throughout the remainder. There were several instances of characters openly wondering what was going on, where the game was clearly trying to give me hints to understand the larger mystery. Meanwhile, I'm there having seen all the geoglyphs and knowing exactly what's going on. It makes the characters seem real dumb. To their credit, for some moments they even wrote dialogue acknowledging -spoiler- you have the Master Sword already, but there are way many more times where the game is trying to be mysterious or trying to have a big reveal to no effect. I'm glad they made it easier than BotW to find the memories, but they made them waaaay more crucial in this game. When you add that to how copy pasted the sages reactions are to everything, it's kinda disappointing. Like I said before, I like the story itself, but it's told in a bad way. I suppose it's partially a consequence to how open the world is. Thankfully, that world, despite everything else, is still fun as hell to explore. I put way more time into this game than BotW. I did every shrine, lit every lightroot, found every outfit from other Zelda games, and in general just spent a ton of time finding and doing anything that I thought would make Link stronger and seemed important. This world is less interesting than BotW, but it's still interesting as fuck. I played the shit out of this game. I have a very similar opinion coming out of this game overall as I did when I finished BotW. It's a cool ass open world Zelda game that's really fun to play and explore, but ultimately has some flaws that hold it back from being perfect. Same as before, if this is the formula from hear on out, I'm down with it. HOWEVER. They should make the dungeons more expansive, like the old games. They should put you in a different kind of Hyrule, Two is the limit for basically the same world, That being said, who am I kidding. I would play the shit out of a third game in this world. I'm sure I'd have the same problems, but Nintendo has proven twice now that they stand above the rest of the industry in their ability to create fun as hell, open world rpgs where the exploration and abilities and story all feed into each other to make a kickass game.
7/10 Probably the biggest blotch on my lifelong Zelda playing career is never beating Link to the Past. I'm happy to have finally rectified that and more than willing to admit that it's probably one of the best games ever made, and if not that, then at least one of the most important games ever made. HOWEVER. For me personally, it is not one of my favorite games, nor is it anywhere close to one of my favorite Zelda games. That's not because I don't like it! The games got a lot going for it. The art is timeless, especially the sprites. There's some iconic tracks, like Kakariko Village, Lost Woods, and Hyrule Castle. This is the first game where you go pull out the friggin Master Sword! There's lots of great things about this game, but the game itself is not perfect. The difficulty is one of the biggest complaints I have. As soon as you enter the Dark World, the difficulty shifts dramatically. Everything does way more damage and there's not really much you can do about it until several dungeons in where you can upgrade your armor and sword. To be clear, I'd be down for a difficulty spike, it does make thematic sense, but the ways to mitigate that spike are hidden way too far down the line when most of the enemies are doing 1 - 3 hearts of damage. Dealing with this influx of hard enemies is another problem I have. When they're weaker it's not as big of a deal if you get hit, but when they hit for a couple hearts, every hit matters and the game is limited by its control scheme. You can move in four directions and attack in four directions, but enemies can hurt you by just moving into you diagonally. You're forced to do a sort of run away and turn around quick bait and switch, but a lot of enemies move faster than you do. Or there's a bunch of them. Or there's a pit around you they'll bump you into. It makes for tense moments which I sometimes appreciated, but it's often overwhelming and feels incredibly hard to deal with. I also was a little disappointed in the world itself. This version of Hyrule is pretty barebones. it has a lot of the same locales of later Zelda's, but there's really not much to them, artistically or content wise. For instance, if you compare Zora's Domain or Death Mountain in LttP to OoT, it's night and day. Not to mention that the only real civilization you interact with in LttP is just other Hylians. This lack of content compared to later Zelda's was really noticeable for me and it made the world seem much smaller and less interesting. On the totally other end of the spectrum, I beat this game in two and a half, maybe 3 days. That's not me saying it was short, though it is compared to what the series has become. I just didn't wanna stop playing. It's still a damn good Zelda game at the end of the day, and that's my jam. I don't find it as fun or interesting as what came after, but I still enjoyed my time with it.
6/10 I got a significant chunk of the way through this game years ago on the PS4, but never finished it. I couldn't remember why I dropped off, considering I put so much time into it and I remember liking it. Upon finally replaying it and finishing it, I now remember what caused me to drop it in the first place. I never played Resident Evil back in the day, and the order in which I did experience them as a young adult is like a fucked up Star Wars watch order. It went: 5 6 4 7 2 Remake 3 Remake. I'm waaaay more used to a more action-y Resident Evil, where there's still inventory management and ink ribbions, but the game is much more forgiving and the control schemes are much more modern. I imagine the GC remake is a big improvement on the original in this regard, but compared to the post Resident Evil 4 games, it's a big difference and one I couldn't really appreciate. I wanted to kill every zombie I saw, I wanted to shoot them in the head for maximum effectiveness to conserve ammo, and this game isn't really that. Playing on the Easy difficult like I did helps, but the aiming still leaves a lot to be desired, there's sometimes issues where if you don't straight up miss, the game won't register a hit if they're in the middle of a falling down or getting up animation which can also be frustrating when ammo is limited. Maybe this is another intentional thing, like the camera angles purposely obfuscating views of enemies, or the tension created by the door opening animations, or the narrow hallways, that is designed to get more tension out of each encounter and encourage the player to time things better, or to use space better, but I found all of those things frustrating more than I did tension inducing. I still enjoy exploring the mansion and I can really appreciate RE2 Remake more now for how obvious the police station is a follow up to the mansion design. It just becomes frustrating to explore the mansion when you've got door loading screens constantly and such limited item space that you're constantly running back to the item box. I do like that the scarcity of item boxes forces you to reenter the same areas over and over again, so it's easy to get surprised when you let down your guard, however, like I mentioned above, tons of loading screens and lack of inventory make this happen faaaaaaar too often for my liking. I'm glad I finally closed the book on this first Resident Evil game and although I had problems with the gameplay and some design choices, there's still enough in the core loop of that game to spend an afternoon solving puzzles, finally using that item you've been holding onto for six hours, and shooting a bunch of zombies without realizing how late it's gotten.
9/10 I remember that I played RE4, but huge chunks of the game have been lost to my shitty memory. I didn't even remember there was an island section, for instance. Needless to say, I was not someone who went into this remake with any expectations, nor anything to hold against it if it didn't get it true to the original, so to speak. It doesn't seem to have mattered thankfully, as both people I know who love the original and "newcomers" like myself all loved it. The same tight gameplay from RE2 Remake is found here once again and it's even better than its predecessor. You're still kickin' boxes and collectin treasures like you always have, and using those rewards to make your guns perform even better is a very satisfying loop. This works for me because the gunplay feels so satisfying; not just shooting dudes in the head (though that's a huge part of it), but in smaller details. Shooting them in the head and immediately following up with a melee attack, timing a parry just right, that terrifying moment you're dumping into some stupid villagers skull and you hear the click of an empty magazine, but then cool guy Leon flicks it away super cool like and reloads. Shooting dummies never felt so damn good. It's awesome that RE4 could come out again like 20 years later almost and still be one of the tightest third person shooters around. They changed the way Ashley works in this game as well so she feels a little less like a hassle to have around. It's still an escort mission when she's around, and it definitely adds tension during combat when she gets picked up and you have to deal with that on top of a thousand other things, but it's definitely better than it was in the original. They obviously completely redid the graphics for the remake too and it looks fuckin great. As for as remakes go, this might be one of the best if not the best one ever made. It keeps faithful to what matters from the original, but brings it into the modern Capcom RE fold. It looks and plays great and as soon as I finished it, I was very tempted to just jump right back in.