Aristotled

If you base your decision to play a thing because a company resides in a country with a crappy government that is not your own, that's just rather...well it certainly SEEMS racist or Xenophobic

It's not like Mihoyo is gonna just break the law in China, bad things happen

@efesell: I played IV in Japanese without playing the Crossbell games and it was fine? I don't know if playing that arc would make me care more about a few villains and a few characters that really could just not be there for this story

The cast bloat in that game is a real problem

Overall I think Ghost is the release I've enjoyed the most this year. Ghost is a real testament to how much Art Direction and Artistry within the world you've created matter in a way I wasn't sure I fully understood before. I have not played a game that just the beauty of the game alone got me super invested in playing it.

Breath of the Wild is close, but it isn't just the look of that game that made me fall in. It is funny to think about how mediocre any game made by Ubisoft in the last decade looks despite likely having higher fidelity in some cases.

Lighting and use of color raised a game that I would otherwise describe as pretty alright into something spectacular. Light and color made every shrine something I wanted to do despite the platforming being very stuck in the past. I wanted to soak in the moonlight as I would travel with Yuna. I would slow walk with every character that the game would let me just to have quiet moments to observe the world (and occasionally see bears Yeet Mongols 10 feet into the air).

The Japanese VA did a superb job in lifting what felt like a somewhat average overall story that had some beats that didn't quite hit or I flat out disliked (you really don't need to kill the Horse that was noted specifically as a Samurai Horse early in the game to symbolically convey to the player that Jin is no longer Samurai). Also while nice that they tried to convey the road into being honorless based on the actions you used in gameplay it did not work considering they really tie that into one specific plot beat a type of issue that has always plagued AAA games( I remember having a big beef with this in the Tomb Raider reboot).

As for the ending, I found giving the player a binary choice very strange. Jin supposedly has broken bonds entirely with the code of Bushido seeing it as useless in serving the people so I don't see why you wouldn't take a stance and say that he wouldn't kill Shimura even though Jin clearly knows that Shimura would likely kill himself to maintain his precious honor that Jin clearly scorns at the end of the story.

At the end of the day, I platinumed this game because it was extremely pretty to look at it and I had a good time. Also, Yuriko's side story was exceptional.

I wrapped it up earlier today, it is definitely far better than I expected. I appreciated the fractured story-telling by the end, it really aids in the short-stories feel, and they do a good job with threading the confusing bits together(which for me didn't last super long, to begin with, it was mostly confusing because de-aged queen calanthe didn't look notably different to me). I'm certainly interested in whatever comes next.

Perhaps having Geralt Yen and Ciri introduced in 3 separate episodes that were "their" episode could have been better, but I don't know if it would change how I feel about it overall.

They even got the part where I hate Dandelion and wanna slug him right.

My only real comment here is that the first 3 days felt utterly pointless and a waste of time, listened to maybe 20 minutes of any of those. If there was meaningful discussion in any of that I didn't get to it.

I find myself more and more interested in other outlets and their deeper dives into a thing

Shouldn't Botw 2 be on this list? Seems at least like a decent chance

The only thing that would immediately improve this show is if they simply slapped a

Location, Month, Year in the bottom corner for transitions to new locations or when the timeline jumps. It's hard to tell if they are making The Ciri, Yennefer, Geralt storylines occur simultaneously or not

Yea its pretty bad that the only remotely good thing about Demon of Hatred is the Lore implication

So far playing through the English version my only complaint is some characters don't have the same voice actor, and Kurt's VA is very similar to Sean Chiplocke in some dialogue.

Milliums VA isn't the same and it really bugs me. Which is funny because in Cold Steel 1 I couldn't stand Millium or the voice acting at first.

I think a great deal of it comes from essentially being demanding of the player, like a dark souls game, but not as easy to understand what is going to happen. A Souls move set is very linear for any given weapon. In W3 what attack would come out in light or heavy was dependent on a number of factors that are initially hard to get a feel for. Distance to an enemy and direction of the camera all fall into changing what animation plays.

Also, the game doesn't do a good job at letting the player know that in most fights you wanna sidestep/dodge and that the roll is exclusively for certain monsters. In an era where dodge rolling is how you played certain action games, having significantly fewer iframes on the roll and the animation being longer results in people getting frustrated that they can't evade attacks because they don't know they are using the wrong move