I watched the Arise stuff on Netflix recently.. I thought it was pretty good? At least for the great action scenes and animation..
/shrug
Consensus among GitS fans tends to be that Arise is hot garbage. It's largely divorced from the original creators of the series and it shows in the poorer quality of the animation and writing. It also shamelessly rehashes moments from SAC and the original movie, for whatever reason.
Also, the excellent HL2 mod NEOTOKYO° continues to be the best Ghost in the Shell game.
I'm always a little saddened that no one remembers Dystopia, which made Neotokyo look like a kiddie pool by comparison. Unfortunately, the devs went on to make a mediocre 3rd person dueling game instead of a retail version of their original mod.
I think the weirdest thing about this is the fact that they didn't even bother to use weapons from the GitS universe and shoehorn in M4s and the like instead. Where are Shirow's iconic Seburos?
Incidentally, it really seems like Jeff would enjoy Stand Alone Complex far more than the original movie. The movie is a mood piece more than anything (and the sequel goes in some batshit insane directions) - in contrast with the show, which has more in common with a detective serial.
The momentum behind Bethesda games has always seemed a little weird to me to be honest. I actually think most their offerings, including Skyrim, are bad games, so take what I say with a grain of salt. Even so, surely even the most diehard TES/Fallout fans should be a little wary of how little progression is actually taking place between each one of these games at this point. In my experience, Fallout 4 is broken in ways that the previous games never struggled with. I can accept a significant amount of jank in an open-world game of Fallout's scope, but when I have to restart the first quest of the game 6-7 times because the Deathclaw keeps spawning inside the geometry I become a little less forgiving. Then, when every single one of my save files for the past 10 hours become corrupted for seemingly no reason, that's about the point when I say 'fuck this game' and move on.
Speaking mechanically, Fallout 4 improves the core shooting gameplay but removes many of the RPG elements like the character customisation and dialogue choices and/or manipulation - only to replace them with an undercooked base construction system with seemingly no real point. The main plot is mediocre and only offers the illusion of choice - although that's neither here nor there really as Bethesda games have always been quite poor in the story department.
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