gerrid

Shadowbringers by a country mile, but it's not on your list. One of my favourite games of all time, and the most exceptional music.

Otherwise: Resi 2 - Sekiro - Outer Wilds - Fire Emblem

@lebowski : set your status to /busy to avoid this.

Hearing everyone complain on the podcasts about how easy Normal is, I'm really glad I went for Hard, with permadeath.

I didn't do much research before I started the game but that is one thing I googled, thanks Polygon for letting me know you can only go -down- difficulty levels after starting.

The combination of real consequences and everyone being vulnerable is like an adrenaline rush. You can't be lazy in battles and I end up using Divine Pulse fairly often. You have to think about unit turn order, make sure not to leave anyone vulnerable, and re-starting to try different strategies and seeing it pay off is really rewarding. Worst thing so far has been a Paralogue with endlessly-respawning flying units than can one-shot anyone in my party.

You gotta think they'll have fixed the stick drift issue for this revision. Plus, it has a + d-pad already, rather than the separate buttons on the joycons, so no need for mods now, unless for whatever reason this d-pad is awful.

The smaller screen is what puts me off though, the switch lite screen would be smaller than my phone at that point.

I've played a few hours and started to get more into it. I love the inventive design of the worlds, it is like a curated NMS which I appreciate, and I find the aesthetic really charming. The way the game opens up to you through the story is really fantastic though, as the things you're seeing start to take on more meaning and you uncover more of what's going on. A couple of "woah!" revelation moments for me so far and I'm expecting more as I go.

I think the way the game controls is pretty fiddly, especially how easy it is to get stuck on geometry or get futzed about trying to land the ship. It adds a bit of charm but can get annoying. A watch would be nice but you can generally tell from looking at the sun how long you have, if you can see it.

I agree that we should get a series of Vinny playing through it, but not livestreamed since it would be spoiled with chat.

If you think back to what happened in the last 4 episodes of this show, the pace has been supersonic. I can't imagine what it would be like to watch all of this in one go.

End of episode 2 we had the huge threat to the existence of all humanity poised at the walls of man, set up for the epic final battle. The culmination of years of planning, a dozen storylines converging in one place just to face this great challenge and save the world.

But then that was all over with a single knife to the belly, so the real threat could now be the focus in episode 4 - evil Queen Cersei. The heroes had suffered not much consequence from defeating the mystic evil (it was just a distraction? Meant to be a side-plot many people argued, not the real focus of the story at all!), so this was going to be the real battle, the big one.

But then evil Queen Cersei dies with merely a whimper in episode 5 and it turns out she had no chance to begin with. And actually the real real threat was one of the heroes all along, not the army of the dead or the evil queen.

But then, after one speech in episode 6, the new evil queen gets knifed in the heart and is dead. And everyone basically lived happily ever after, with all the evil defeated in quick sequence.

As ever, none of it holds up to even the slightest scrutiny but at least they tied it up. Feels very hollow though. I think mostly because it was an ending for the sake of an ending rather than an actual culmination of years of storytelling. Comparing it with the endings of other great television series it is a million miles away.

I would say it was a well made episode of TV, but I have to say that abrupt bounce on from Dany's death scene (which was fantastic, if a little cliche), sort of ruined it for me as a dramatic episode. Reminded me exactly of the transition between the ending of Read Dead 2 and the epilogue. The way the tone shifts so jarringly. After all that, 8 seasons, she is gone and then forgotten about completely. We get one or two lines of Jon asking if he did the right thing, that's it. From saviour to genocide to forgotten in the span of 2 episodes.

I also feel like the way this season has gone, and in particular the ending, is a thematic void. This story had nothing to say, in the end. What was the message here, that if people are evil you should kill them and then everything will be OK? List off the evil characters, have them all murdered, and then everything will turn out fine?

I'm so intrigued by people who loved it, singing its praises as an amazing conclusion. I guess if you take things completely at face value then it's very rewarding and successful.

according to the writers from this week's Inside the Episode, Dany in fact decided to "make things personal" when she "sees the red keep".

so there you have it! they also said if she hadn't been betrayed by Jon and seen missandei die "we wouldn't have seen this side" of her.

not sure what this does to the interesting discussion of whether she was always a monster or not.

Is it possible that Danaerys wasn't actually going mad, but instead had just pragmatically decided she was going to destroy the city in order to make everyone terrified of her? I suppose it's a kind of madness, but rather than her flying into a rage we are meant to read it as cold and calculating ruthlessness?

Destroying King's Landing also severs the link to the Lannisters and lets her start fresh without having to worry too much about being surrounded by people who don't want her there. Dany is just executing carefully judged realpolitik, it turns out. Perhaps this also explains what Grey Worm did - she told him to do it?

Saying that, theorising about deeper motivations or plot points behind these past two seasons has been a fool's errand, since probably the writers will do their after episode special and say something like "the city reminded her of Mereen, and she just snapped, without Missandei there to calm her down", making all of the better ideas you come up with pointless.

@mellotronrules: A lot of these characters should have died ages ago, or gone off elsewhere and been done, but they have all stuck around because they are popular or the writers like them. So now they run into the problem of having to tie everything up in a short space of time, and it feels rushed. It also reduces the impact of each ending, because they happen so quickly one after the other.