Mittens

There's also the issue of: what gameswriter truly has no opinion on the Soulsborne series at this point? If you've even had a tiny bit of curiosity about these games, you've probably tried at least one of these games and either liked it or didn't. And if you haven't it's probably because you decided it wasn't for you. Either way, a review from someone who doesn't like that type of game isn't really any more useful than a review from a fanboy.

Isn't that true of reviews of, well, all franchises? I don't remember seeing a lot of Zelda reviews made by newcomers to the franchise. Same with, say, Civ or GTA. Hell it's probably a part of why reviews of new IPs tend to be more mixed than those of sequels and other iterations.

Ideally, a good review will have enough info to allow you to make a purchasing decision regardless of whether you actually agree with the reviewer. That said, it's usually not possible to address everything, especially with ambitious, relatively complex games. This post is a good example: those criticisms of From games are perfectly fine and valid, but they're not things I would have ever thought to discuss in a review of those games, either because I didn't experience them, or because I personally found them too minor to affect my experience with those games.

As much as I love games writing, the idea of reviews existing help consumers make buying decisions is fading for good reason. Nobody knows your taste in games better than you do, and it's generally more useful to pop in on twitch or youtube and see the game in action for yourself, rather than make a decision based on someone else's opinion. I've made my share of purchases based on widespread critical acclaim, and I regretted many of them. Could never play more than a few hours of Divinity OS because of that writing. Persisted through many, many hours of Red Dead thinking there was something wrong with me for not enjoying a game everyone seemed to love. And everytime a new Zelda comes out with glowing praise, I have to remind myself that I find that franchise profoundly dull. I still occasionally read reviews, but mostly because I enjoy reading about games, and not to help me make a decision.

Even as someone that actually likes deckbuilders, this looks disappointing: it just screams "made for mobile". A bland look, enemies packed in small maps with no interesting terrain or features, , a simple card-based system that doesn't seem to mesh well with the rest of the game, a lot of focus on what seems like bog-standard RPG progression instead of the combat...

If this was 10 years ago, I might give Firaxis the benefit of the doubt, but their output since XCOM 2012 has been a mixed bag at best. The little they've shown of this game doesn't fill me with confidence.

I'm gonna echo most of the comments here and say that while I was excited to see GB's new direction, I'm pretty disappointed by it so far. In fact, this "new" direction seems to exactly the same direction that every other game site/magazine has taken in the last 20 years: replacing teams of game reviewers/writers/editors with freelancers that churn out siloed-off content aggregated on an online platform. Maybe it was inevitable, but it's still a bummer.

I have nothing against any of these new content producers; they all seem fine. But I liked GB as a group, not as a brand. If GB wants to be yet another corporate entity that lives to tell me: "Hey, I think you'd like this...", well fine, but know that there's at least a dozen bigger, more powerful tech companies doing that to me at any given moment, and I've gotten pretty good at ignoring them all.

I like Guilty Treasures though. I might watch Borne to Run eventually too, but like most of these other shows, it's something that's been done to death.

@eccentrix: Aren't they just wearing goggles and gas masks?

Honestly I haven't played it in a few years. I bought the HD remaster recently but didn't get around to it yet. Maybe they made more changes than I thought.

@eccentrix: Oh he does hate the Al Bhed, but they're not a different race, like the Guado or Ronto. In the context of the game, they're heathens, or heretics, who don't live by Yevon's rules. Since Yevon holds them responsible for the continuous existence of Sin, it makes sense that Wakka (and everyone else in Spira) hates em.

Maybe it's kind of a pedantic distinction, but religious intolerance and fundamentalism aligns a lot more with the game's themes than race does.

I never really got the Wakka is racist meme. Isn't his whole thing that he's a big rube who's a big Yevon believer? He's fine with other races, it's heretics that he hates. Which makes sense for someone devoutly into a religion centered around collective punishment/salvation. FFX as a whole doesn't really delve into race issues much, if at all; it's more religion-themed.

Since FFX is pretty linear for most of the game, it's pretty good at keeping you at roughly the right level. Though I always hated how it only gives XP to characters who took an action in combat. It's a good way to make sure that players with minmaxing tendencies will waste a turn in every fight swapping characters in and out.

Blitzball is not fun, but I kind of admire how much effort and thought they put into this minigame. Honestly, I really got into it when I played the game for the 1st time. It has a bit of depth, but once you're good enough/have good enough players to win consistently, which doesn't take very long, it just becomes a boring grind you have to do if you want to unlock Wakka's stuff.

It's hard to pin down immersive sims as a genre; it's almost more of a brand for Looking Glass games in the 90s and Looking Glass-inspired games that came out since then. Arkane in particular have very much billed themselves as the modern-day successors to Looking Glass. Besides Arkane games, there's also S.T.A.L.K.E.R, VtM Bloodlines, Pathologic... If you expand the definition a bit you can include Hitman games, or indie games like Gunpoint. There aren't a ton of those games because they're difficult to make and don't sell that well.

What a rough presentation.

-GoG looks somewhat better than Avengers, but a better attempt at making something that's already pretty safe and bland isn't particularly exciting.

-I'm mildly curious about Babylon's Fall, but that was a very rough trailer. Just a bunch of combat shots that don't look particularly interesting or impressive.

-FF Origin: God. I didn't think you could squeeze all the worst aspects of SE Japan in a single short trailer, but they managed it. Nomura's bad character designs, Nojima's bad writing, bad fanservice, copycat gameplay that's ten years too late...

- Life is Strange: Not for me, but cool that is successful and ongoing.

-FF Pixel Remaster: they spent so little time on it, and it's a bit worrying. Hopefully they'll at least avoid the mistakes of the previous awful mobile ports they made.

-A million mobile announcements: Fair enough I guess. They know what side of their bread is buttered...

And no mention of Project Triangle at all, the only Square project I care about at this point. It just makes me sad. Square used to be one of my favorite devs.

JRPGs had times when they were more ambitious narrative-wise. For example, PS1-era Square, or PS2-era Atlus (there isn't much naiveté in SMT : Nocturne). Ever since JRPGs have lost popularity in the West, devs seem to have become more conservative in that regard. Played Ni No Kuni 2 recently; the Suikoden-like elements pulled me through most of the game, but every time one of these characters spoke, I felt like quitting. Makes me a bit sad.