AtheistPreacher

Good stuff. Our lists have Remnant 2 and RE4 in common, but I literally haven't played anything else on your list. I'd probably like a lot of it if I had the money and the time, particularly Alan Wake II and Lies of P.

I also had Wo Long on my list, but put it last because it was definitely somewhat disappointing. E.g., the loot system is terrible and morale felt really half-baked. I did finish the game, but had no urge to play the subsequent DLCs even though I'd already paid for them.

I considered buying FF16 for about five seconds during a Black Friday sale, then remembered that I own and still haven't touched the FF7 Remake, and it makes no sense to buy another one of these before I've played the one I have. I also just wasn't that impressed by the demo.

We have had a few recent examples of good and relatively cheap DLC for triple-A titles. There's that free Valhalla DLC for GoWR that came out less than a week ago; I liked it less than a lot of people seemed to because I wasn't really looking for a roguelite from that game, but I have to admit that it's pretty robust for being free. Also, the Separate Ways DLC for RE4 was only $10 and was awesome for that price, could have easily been $20.

But there's no denying that a lot of this type of DLC is overpriced or lacking meatiness. Sorry the first FF16 effort wasn't better.

This pretty well reflects my thoughts. Unity and Embracer really do seem like the obvious answers. In the end I just voted for those and didn't pick a third, because nothing else jumps out in comparison. I was unsurprised to see after voting that both are currently sitting at over 80% while nothing else has broken 25%. Others I considered:

• E3 is definitely a mess, but it has been for years now and at this point it's not any kind of surprise, everyone has more or less given up on it.
• Twitter sure is a hot mess and Musk just let Alex Jones back on it, but all of that is only tangentially related to video games.
• Seeing those unredacted documents from Microsoft and Sony was fun, but I don't know how hot of a mess it really was or how much lasting damage was actually done. The inner thoughts of those execs and the future plans of those companies is all stuff we could have guessed at.
• Sony removing the ability to watch purchased content is definitely a mess, but it feels like most people were smart enough not to buy that stuff for fear that something just like this would happen, much as happened with Stadia.
• I was personally disappointed about no Overwatch 2 PvE because that's the part of the game I was interested in, but it sounds like Overwatch 2 is still doing fine, so, eh? And overall, the failure or broken promises of a single game just doesn't really hold a candle to the wide-ranging implications of the Unity and Embracer messes. That goes for a lot of the other stuff on this list.

So, yeah, it seems like we've just got a pair of runaway winners in the Hottest Mess category this year. Should probably just call them the co-winners. Whatever comes in third will be only the worst of the rest.

EDIT:

If I had add new candidates, two come to mind:

• Games journalism layoffs/closures in general. That just keeps getting worse. If you want a specific one from this year, I'd point to Vice/Waypoint Radio, but there have been others. Obviously not a new mess by any stretch.
• The Game Awards being a show that doesn't give a crap about awards and reserves most of its time for announcements/reveals/trailers. I saw a lot of justified grousing about winners being rushed off stage, and many awards not even being given on stage at all. One might say that if video games in general want to be taken more seriously as an artistic medium, they should first take themselves more seriously by holding an actual celebration of excellence in games, rather than put on a three- to four-hour infomercial.

@zombiepie: BTW thanks for doing this. I did not have the patience to actually watch TGA, so this was a nice way to catch up on announcements (likewise the award winners thread).

@zombiepie FWIW you've got the Rocket Racing trailer in there twice, the first time where the Jurassic Park Survivor trailer should be.

I'm definitely excited for P3 Reload and have already pre-ordered it. After reading your blogs, I'm more aware of just how much I've forgotten since playing FES and P3P more than a decade ago, and am looking forward to dipping back into that world.

In contrast, I'm not sure if "excited" is the right adjective for my feelings about the new MH game. I mean, on the one hand I'm a little surprised it took them this long to announce it considering how successful World was, and I've put hundreds of hours into every NA release except the very first game and consider myself a series devotee, but Rise enlarged on a trend from World that really, really rubbed me the wrong way: adding arbitrary "rank meters" (especially "Anomaly Research Level") to gate progress in a game that is already very grindy at its core. This may be "old man yells at cloud," but it used to be that nothing gated progress other than a few key quests and your own equipment and skill. Now players are forced to grind for dozens of hours at endgame just to earn the right to start getting the new stuff they want. I'm sure some marketing executive over at Capcom thinks this boosts engagement, when in reality it just makes me not want to play their game. I really hope they cut that shit out or at least tone it down significantly.

Lastly, I'm interested to see what the Valhalla expansion for GoWR is all about in a few days, but I'm not sure that a roguelite mode is really what I'm looking for in that game. I really love GoWR, but the Muspelheim trials were my least favorite bit, divorced as they were from the world exploration and narrative, and if Valhalla is just more like that, I'm not sure I'll be playing it very long. We'll see.

As a rule I'm generally just not that interested in spinoff games in which the gameplay is something wildly different from the original. I did end up downloading and trying Strikers only because it was a free PS+ game, but I played it for about ten minutes and then had to put it down because the core action gameplay just felt bad to me--and I say this as someone who has purchased about a half-dozen of the Koei Warriors games. And I dismissed Tactica as something I knew I'd have no real interest in; I've been known to like tactics games like FFT and the original X-Com, but this one looked too half-assed gameplay-wise.

All that said, yeah, I don't feel like I need any more with these characters, either. I did play Royal again this past year and really enjoyed myself, but that doesn't mean they need to keep bringing back the same characters for new games.

One wonders how many spin-off titles we'll get with the P3 characters after Reload. I suspect I shall continue to ignore them.

It did tickle me the number of times that the Remake re-created an area from the OG exactly, but then made you proceed through that area in the opposite direction. For anyone who's played the OG, but a long time ago, yeah, I imagine that sort of thing would really screw with you in a fun way.

Yeah, the "side quests" are largely nothing-burgers. The three "strong threat" missions feel like the only "real" ones in that they offer substantial reward for substantial extra risk, while the rest involve killing rats or shooting medallions. Nothing that will slow you down substantially, but they also don't add much. Overall, as you say, the game does move along, a quality that it shares with the OG.

Yeah, the Remake is definitely harder on balance. I think I'd even go so far as to say that the Remake on Standard feels harder than the OG did on Professional... and then the Remake has two more difficulty settings above that. And it also leans more toward horror and less toward cheese. In both cases I generally prefer the OG. The exception is that it's nice that the Remake has a NG+ mode that can properly challenge players who have fully upgraded their weapons; the OG simply doesn't have that, and it makes NG+ a bore.

It sure is. I ended up placing it at #3 on my GOTY list, behind only Remnant 2 and Hitman: World of Assassination. I can definitely see myself making a return to it at some point down the line when I have a bit more free time.

A nice thing about an eventual return play will be that I've finished doing all the challenge run nonsense Capcom wants you to do, including beating the highest difficulty on a fresh save, and the super-fast timed runs with limited saves, and doing runs without healing and without talking to the merchant, etc. The timed runs in particular I hated, because RE games are so much about being careful and scrounging, and it feels so wrong to just run past loot (and why is your "rank" at the end of a play solely based on time, and not at all on shot accuracy or hits taken?). But I have a bad habit of wanting to be completionist about this kind of stuff if it gets me cool gameplay-changing gear, like the cat ears that give you infinite ammo.

Anyway, all that junk will be finished for me the next time I fire up the game, so that I can play it again in the style I want without needing to worry about fulfilling strange conditions. I'll be interested to see what I think of it after giving it a little distance. It's still never going to surpass the OG in my eyes, but it's nonetheless possible that my opinion of it could improve. We'll see.

@demigodraven: Oh boy. I did actually get deep into Warframe and it was on the PS ecosystem (all on PS4, as I recall). I got all the frames that had been released at the time, maybe missing some of the prime ones, and got back into it slightly when they added the flyable spaceship stuff. But after 600+ hours I tapped out. I think I ended up at mastery rank 21 or 22 at the end, not sure. In contrast, my brother ended being one of those crazies who actually hit rank 30 (the max). I think he must have logged double the hours I did, at least.

It's a fantastic game, and has what feels like one of the better F2P models out there--it clearly makes them money, but doesn't feel overly exploitative. But at some point I was just tired of leveling weapons and frames, and worn out on the core combat.

Gaming-wise, I bought an extra PS5 controller for $50, and the Dead Space remake for half off. But it seems unlikely that I'll actually get around to playing the latter before the end of the year.

Again, a fun read for me. Though I feel that your KF1 blog maybe had more analysis in it, while this one was a little more just a walkthrough of the experience from beginning to end? I suppose a lot of the criticisms of the first game don't need to be explicitly repeated here.

Anyway, boy, a lot of things I want to react to and mention. I guess I'll just do a bulleted list, maybe that will make this more manageable (also, I do wish quoting long posts like this on the GB forums was less of a pain, I'll probably just paraphrase a lot).

• Completion time. It was interesting for me to see the completion time comparison between KF1 and KF2, because of course these things don't tell you time played, so even though I've played KF2 many times, I'm not actually 100% sure how long it takes me. I guess it's about 50% longer than the first one, eh? CONTENT. For whatever it's worth, KF4 being the only one that shows your time played, I know that one takes me about 11.5 hours each time for a fairly completionist run of it, and I've always had the feeling that KF2 and KF3 were of vaguely similar lengths.
  
  
• Story nonsense, and the official guide. Some years ago, I was playing KF3 for the dozenth time or whatever, and really noticed for the first time that the back of the instruction manual on the inside of the game's jewel case had an ad for the official strategy guide. Despite being a superfan of these games, I had never bought the guide. This being 5-10 years ago, I knew I could probably find it pretty easily on Amazon or ebay, and sure enough, yeah, I did. It was actually mainly a guide for KF3, but had KF2 maps in it as well. Besides leading me to a few things I hadn't found before (not very many, actually, considering how much I'd played these things), the guide contained "The Complete Chronicles of Verdite" on pages 108-118. It reads like a bad Tolkien rip-off, as if someone had recently read The Silmarillion and changed it just enough to avoid copyright infringement, but without, ya know, having any talent for writing this kind of stuff. This would seem to a prime example of why FS are better off keeping their stories vague, because when it's all written out like this, it's way less interesting than when you're trying to just piece together fragments for yourself.
  
  
• Dragon story nonsense. Was Seath actually described as good, and Guyra evil, in that first game? I sort of thought they were supposed to be more of a yin-yang thing, opposing forces, but neither actually purely good or evil. But then, maybe this was retconned in afterward for the sake of KF3, where suddenly Seath is the main antagonist. The conceit for that one seems to be that without Guyra to check him, Seath went cuckoo bananas.
  
  
• That giant kraken. Boy is that guy a joker. Not only can he one-hit kill you, he can do it from a fair distance away since his tentacles are so long. This is probably the time to point out that I once loaned this game to a friend of mine during high school, and he returned it a week later and told me that he just kept dying and never actually found a save point. I was surprised, which maybe says something about my lack of awareness of the game's shortcomings at the time (or at least its difficulty). Also, I feel like the little krakens behind the giant one who shoot the blue fireballs were possibly even more dangerous, what with the projectiles, and because they could actually move around.
  
  
• Dropping into new areas without being able to return. This is possibly one of my least favorite design conceits, but I actually feel the KF games do it much less than the Shadow Tower games, which is one of the reasons why I just never got into Shadow Tower. I did play a fan translation of Abyss on emulator, but would not want to play it again, and I noped out of the first one entirely. But then, there are also other reasons I didn't like those games as much...
  
  
• Frame rates. First, the frame rate is definitely both atrocious and highly variable, and maybe that might have made other people a little ill or something, but I never had a problem playing long sessions despite that. But the other thing I wanted to mention was that at one point my brother tried booting this game up on his OG, backwards-compatible PS3, and it was a real mindfuck because whatever that PS3 was doing, it stabilized the framerate to about 30, and as a result made the whole game speed up, because the speed of the action itself was for some reason tied to the framerate. Wild. Reminds me of the whole Dark Souls 2 bug where 60FPS on PC would cause weapons to degrade quickly, because weapon degradation was for some reason tied to framerate. Like, what? Why?
  
  
• The fountain. Boy do I ever vividly recall trying to remember, on follow-up plays, which of those little statue items unlocked which type of water for the flasks. I think I usually just saved before I chose until I got the one(s) I wanted.
  
  
• The loading corridors. I remember being wise, even at the time, to the fact that they were making the world "seamless" by adding these featureless winding corridors to mask the load times. I also remember thinking it was funny that using the warp back to one of your placed "keys" seemed significantly faster than the time it took you to traverse one of those corridor sections. Did they really need to be that long? Well, anyway, it really was pretty neat in 1996 that there weren't any load screens after starting the game.
  
  
• The Ruinous Boots merchant guy. First, funny that the boots were named differently than the rest of the armor set to which they clearly belonged. But secondly, I remember my brother and I figuring out, all on our own, that you can keep attacking this guy with a minimum-stamina swing and that he would be pushed ever so slightly every two swings, so that you could ultimately push him out of the way enough to slip past him and loot the chest behind for the Ruinous Boots without killing him. You can thus get the best leg armor in the game for free in the mid-game, rather than paying a fortune for them. This trick is, I believe, described in one of the online guides, but it was a cool thing to discover for myself. I also remember being impressed that when you do this, the boots disappear from the NPC's inventory, rather than staying there as a duplicate; they can't have planned for players to do this, right? They had to have assumed that players would need to kill the guy to loot the chest behind him. But who knows.
  
  
• The giant termite. I actually never knew about that cheese strat, I would just end up using a lot of healing items!
  
  
• A minecart ride. So I didn't see you mention this, but there is a minecart ride in the game, up a sloping area with a bunch of the man-eating plants, and right near a save point, in which a skeleton archer often seems to shoot you in the middle of the ride, instantly knocking you out of the minecart and killing you, and as far as I know, there is nothing you can do to avoid this attack, you just have to hope it doesn't happen. As far as I know you can't duck and can't possibly attack back in time to make any difference. I suspect FS may have realized that this was a problem, and that's why there's a save point so nearby. But boy, that one particular bit seems unforgivable because there's literally nothing the player can do other than pray to RNG gods that they won't be insta-killed. Reminds me of that one FFT fight in which an NPC you're required to protect can get herself killed before you even get a turn. Why didn't they just remove the archer?
  
  
• Throwing yourself off a cliff to get the Katana. I just want to register that it amuses me that every KF game--aside perhaps from KF1, which I never played--has a katana that you can only get by hurling yourself off a cliff. That's a weirdly specific thing to keep repeating.
  
  
• More RNG. Speaking of KF1 and recurring gags, were you aware that at least in KF2 through KF4, each of these games has one weapon that is a rare drop from a specific enemy? At one point I read that the chance varied between games from 1/256 to 5/256. For KF2, you can get an earth elemental thrusting sword from one of those earth elemental dinosaur things. I think I only ever bothered farming for it once. Again, don't know if KF1 has something like this.
  
  
• Dark Sword/Slayer? You referred to it as "Dark Sword," but isn't it "Dark Slayer"? Not a big deal, just wondering if somehow you were playing a version of the game that was translated differently than the one I played. By the way, I'm pretty sure that one of the two "Greatswords of Artorias" from Dark Souls is supposed to be a Dark Slayer reference, but the English translators just fucked up and called them literally the exact same thing, which is why all the wikis now refer to the second one as "Greatsword of Artorias (Cursed)" just to differentiate them.
  
  
• The ice area. I remember thinking at the time that it was incredibly cool that all the ice disappeared after you beat that ice golem boss. What can I say, I was young and video games were bad and I was easily impressed.
  
  
• 60-60/80-80 sword magic. Hah, funny that you point this out, I never even noticed this being a thing. Maybe when I got to the swords that could use sword magic, I always already had high enough stats, or just didn't bother with it most of time (really, the MP needed for it often meant you were better off doing a simple wind cutter or fireball). At least it's not a required attack to kill a boss.
  
  
• The helmet that will kill you. So, you never mentioned this either, and why would you, you probably never experienced it. But there's a helmet which you can only acquire late-game that, when equipped, will randomly fire off a lightning bolt spell. The problem is that if it hits a wall near you, the splash damage from the lightning strike can hit the player and easily kill them. I remember being distinctly confused at what the actual fuck was killing me when I saw no enemies around. Took me a bit to figure out that this helmet was the thing damaging me with its random spell, and that it was more hazardous to the player than the enemies.
  
  
• Repeating the boss rush. I also think I never knew about possibly needing to repeat the boss rush if you retreated and healed. I mean, maybe I did that once? But if so, I forgot.
  
  
• The Tron maze. I take it as something of a point of pride that usually, on replaying the game, I can get the route to Guyra right without consulting any guides on the first try. I guess that tells you what kind of sicko I am.
  
  
• The Moonlight Sword is an actual weapon. I think you probably knew this because I feel it's pretty well-known among the fandom, but for others reading, it's worth mentioning. You are supposed to only get the Moonlight Sword after beating Guyra; it's right behind him, floating in the air, and there's a pre-canned animation where you slowly walk up to it, and then the ending plays. However, you can actually glitch over Guyra's back and end up behind him, where you can pick up the sword for use, then warp out. I remember being amazed at how wild it was that the Moonlight Sword was a fully programmed, usable weapon, considering that the game is supposed to be over before you can reach it. What possessed them to even program the ability for the player to pick it up? By the way, doing so also means that when you do beat Guyra, the same slow, solemn animation of walking up to the sword plays, only now you're walking up to empty air.
  
  
• Maps. Interesting that you note about how having all the verticality meant that maps were made more difficult, and ended up almost useless; I'd certainly agree with that. I imagine that's where the whole idea for KF3's design came from, which is very flat and cut-and-dried, mostly to accommodate their "Pixie's Map," which was a damned cool automap at the time.

I guess that's it. What a weird game. I still like it a lot, but I must admit that I replay this one less often, especially more recently, than I do KF3 and KF4, which both feel like much more polished products in comparison.