I know I usually try to be coy, or come up with clever names for these, but I figured I would just get to the point with this one. Especially after seeing so much praise for 6 (if anyone has a link to some actual criticism of the game (not just 4/5 reviews or fluff on "how good a dad" Kiryu is), let me know because I haven't seen any), I found myself profoundly disappointed. Especially because this is what the developers are claiming is the final (new) game starring the Dragon of Dojima himself, Kazuma Kiryu.

And to be clear, this will have some spoilers for both the end of Yakuza 5, and some stuff from the early parts of Yakuza 6. Then, later on there's spoilers for the end of the game, and that will be in a spoiler thing. But I figure if you are into these games enough to worry about spoilers, you've probably already played/are playing 6. That said, as disappointed as I am in this game, if you are a longtime fan of the series and haven't played yet, probably just stop reading here and go play the game yourself. I feel like I'm an outlier in my take on the game (though I'm baffled about the people who loved it), so I don't know.

Yakuza 6 picks up right where Yakuza 5 left off. Kiryu is badly wounded from the final boss of that game, Haruka had just announced her retirement from being an idol (something I strongly criticized a couple years ago), and the Tojo Clan is in disarray. After a short recap of that stuff (and to be fair, the game technically starts with a tutorial fight set later on, but then flashes back to that), the story really begins with Kiryu in the hospital, and making the first questionable decision of the game.

When faced with the choice between "hire a good lawyer" and "go to prison to take the fall for the Yakuza clan he hasn't been a part of for years," he decides that even though he runs an orphanage without the help of any other adults, he would be better off in prison. The idea being that otherwise he'd draw too much attention to the orphanage. And while I guess there is something resembling a logic to it, and he had already been letting the orphans run the place themselves in 5, at least in that game Kiryu had been sending them money to run the place. I'm sure Japanese prisons are different from US ones in a great deal of ways, but I'm pretty confident there wouldn't have been a way for Kiryu to keep funding the orphanage. And even beyond all that, it's hard for me to look at a decision like that and think anything other than Kiryu is just trying to hide from his problems until they blow over.

Haruka, meanwhile, discovers that even though she abandoned her dream to spend more time with her fellow orphans, the media was still keen on assassinating her character, so she comes to the same conclusion as Kiryu, and runs away, though at least not to prison. And being the oldest of the bunch, that meant the orphanage was run by no one but young teens for the three years Kiryu was in prison.

This is when it gets to the thing that actually ruins Yakuza 6 for me. Upon getting out of prison, Kiryu returns to the orphanage to find everything in order (I guess letting orphans run it wasn't so bad after all), except that Haruka is missing. So, Kiryu goes to the only place in Japan that anyone ever goes in this series, which is that one tiny square of Tokyo called Kamurocho. Here is where he learns that Haruka was hit by a car, is now in a coma, and was a clutching a baby when the car hit. And Kiryu embarks on his adventure to figure out who hit her, why she was hit, and who the father of the baby is.

And I hate it. I already hated that in Yakuza 5, a game explicitly about following one's dreams, Haruka's entire arc was to give up on her dream because like most women in this series, she felt most at home at, well, home. Now that she's old enough to be an adult, that's come full circle and she's become a mom. But not even an actual mom, just a mom plot device to force Kiryu to have to take care of a baby, which only amounts to having to repeat a bad minigame to calm the baby while running around a small town looking for milk.

It's especially frustrating that after seeing nothing but praise for this game, and seeing people (rightfully) criticize God of War for having the wife be dead, and never directly seen or heard from, that I haven't seen a single person complain about how Haruka is in a coma for the vast majority of this game. Yes, I realize it's not the same thing because Haruka does appear (brief though it is) at the start, and eventually wake up. And even when she does wake up, it's not like she suddenly gains a vast amount of agency in the story. She still exists just to be something the men fight over. But between that, and the story in general, I just feel like I played a different Yakuza 6 from the one I've seen people talk about.

Nothing in this game's story did anything for me. The closest I got to really enjoying it was seeing some of the antics of what has to be the most slapdash, half-assed Yakuza family in history. Even that didn't last, because they had to get involved in the quest to find Haruto's (the baby) real father (the reveal of who it is I saw coming a mile away, even if I preferred my original prediction that the baby wasn't actually Haruka's). To be honest, I liked them better when they were just comic relief, and not a serious part of the story.

But for real, it felt like it wasn't until I was over halfway into the story that it started to pick up at all, and even when it did, I just couldn't bring myself to care. It's just the same sneaky back-stabbing politicking between criminal syndicates that the series always has, but without a memorable cast to propel the action along. The game tries to make a big deal out of the events taking place, and I'm sure some of them (like 'The "Secret" of Onomichi,' a late game McGuffin) are more meaningful for the Japanese audience the game was written for. But again, when the new characters don't feel like they're worth caring about, I couldn't bring myself to get invested in the plot.

Most of my favorite characters from the previous games are nowhere to be seen, outside of brief appearances. Majima, Saejima, even Daigo might as well not even be in the game, for how little they are. Even Akiyama, who shows up a few times, has far less screen time than the new characters, who just...aren't great. Outside of those aforementioned knuckleheads, the new characters aren't likable at all. They're not even villainous or interesting enough to be the "good" kind of unlikable.

Even Kiryu just feels like he's Kiryu doing the same Kiryu thing he has been doing for the last few games, outside of 0. When he was one of four or five playable characters, that was fine because he didn't need to carry an entire game on his own. But that shtick just doesn't cut it anymore. Honestly, 6 has helped me realize that Kiryu doesn't really have that much depth as a character. He's just this generic stalwart of what's right, and he just wants to help his family, which is fine, but...boring. At least in 0 he had actual character growth, where he went from just another Yakuza into the Dragon.

But back to Haruka, and how this game really just continues to treat women the way the series pretty much always has. They're not active players in the story so much as just plot devices for the men to care (or not care) about. Haruka is in her coma, and Kiyomi (the one other woman relevant to the story) is there to babysit Haruto while Kiryu is out beating up people. Oh, and don't forget about Kiyomi's tragic back story (spoilers, I guess) about her abusive husband (who is vying for control of the Tojo Clan) who she had to run away from, and in the process abandoned her actual child to life with him. And also don't forget that she basically just stops showing up in the story once that back story is revealed, because women have no place in this series if they can't be either a McGuffin, or have some tragedy to either take part in, or relay to the men. SPOILERS: When she does show up again, it's only because she's been kidnapped, used to force the men to fight each other, then "killed" (of course she was fine) to again, just get the men riled up.

(In retrospect, while I loved 0 last year, thinking about this is making me rethink Makoto's role in that game's story, and I'm suddenly finding a lot of similar issues I wish I'd thought more about back then.)

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that just like (what feels like) every other game in the series, trans women exist only to be the punchline of a "joke." Though at least this time the woman was correctly gendered, and there wasn't any violence involved. But Kiryu's visible discomfort at being near a trans woman was still played for "laughs," as I'm sure the physical design of the character was (you can surely imagine how this series would represent a trans woman stereotype without me going into details). Of course that's all assuming this was the only LGBT related "joke" in the game, and there wasn't anything else I missed, which is...possible.

So, I've complained about as much as I can without getting into SPOILERS for the ending, so let this be your warning.

Anyway, I can't really overstate how disappointed this game really made me. I was feeling bummed out pretty much all day after I saw that ending. Part of me wanted to take the disc out then and there, and never play the game again, but I still had side content to do, and you know...

Okay, but I know what you're thinking: Even if the story is disappointing, at least the game play is still fun, right? Well, that's a bit more complicated. Ultimately, yes, I do think the combat is still fun, but it takes too long for it to really get good, and even then still isn't as deep as it was in 0. Yakuza 6, it turns out, is the first time there's been a serious and substantial change in the tech around which the Yakuza games are made since Yakuza 3. 3, 4, 5, 0, Kiwami (which I didn't play after reading it wasn't great/had plenty of transmisogyny), and all the spin-offs I didn't play were ultimately all designed as PS3 games, and generally all felt the same (aside from maybe the zombie one, but I didn't play that).

Yakuza 6 is the first one built for PS4, and as such it has a variety of new innovations that only the PS4 can handle. Like being able to enter stores without loading. If that sounds sarcastic, it's because while it's a welcome change, stuff like that feels like it should have been possible back in Yakuza 3. It also allows for a greater level of detail possible in the design of the cities than ever before, which is nice, but comes at a cost.

I'm not the sort of person to complain about anti-aliasing, and in fact, I'd be willing to bet that in all the years I've been writing these blogs, this is the first time I've ever felt the need to mention it, but the aliasing in Yakuza 6 is terrible. I mean, so bad that there were cutscenes where I was supposed to be focused on the characters (really, the subtitles at the bottom since I don't know Japanese), but I couldn't keep my eyes off the horribly aliased objects in the background. Power lines, buildings, cars, just about everything. There's spots in the game where it looks like almost the whole screen is just a mess of aliasing, and on top of that, there's bad screen tearing in some areas too. It's especially noticeable in the first person mode. After 0, which sure, still "looked like a PS3 game," but ran well and I don't remember having issues like this, it feels like more harm than good has been done to the visual side of the game.

And, I feel the same way about the changes made to the combat. I was already worried going into the game, knowing that after three games of multiple protagonists that this was going back to just one. I became even more worried when I learned Kiryu was only going to have one fighting style, as opposed to the three for 0 (four, if you count the secret one you had to grind for (which involved going through the terrible transmisogyny of that game, which is why I didn't)).

All that aside, the combat is on the surface the same as ever, but in that nebulous "feel," not quite the same. The older games, for better or worse, felt very rigid in their combat. Rigid in the sense that every time you did the same combo, the moves came out in exactly the same, snappy way. 6, on the other hand, in motion, looks a lot more fluid. I don't know if that's just because there's more and newer animations, or if there's some sort of dynamic animating going on (the game sure likes to use the word "dynamic" in the descriptions for some of the moves, at least).

I don't know how much of it is fundamental changes made to the combat, and how much was the need to upgrade Kiryu's attack speed, but the opening hours of the game are a slog any time Kiryu gets into a fight. By the time I fully upgraded the speed of Kiryu's attacks, it got to a point where it felt pretty much good as it did in 0, but still not quite there. Maybe that slower speed was supposed to represent Kiryu being rusty from being in prison, but honestly I would have preferred less of that, and not made the opening hours feel like such a drag.

And the way Heat works has changed too. There's much less of an emphasis on getting enemies into specific situations, and then hitting Triangle to do a special move that drains part of the Heat gauge. That still exists, but now it feels like the thing to do is wait for the Heat to max out (now represented by orbs instead of meters), then hit R2 to go Kaio-ken, which speeds up and increases the power of Kiryu's attacks. It also opens up a lot more Heat Actions that simply aren't available normally. It's not the worst thing in the world, but I just don't enjoy what it's done to the flow of fights compared to the previous games.

It does, however, lead to my favorite thing about the combat in 6. Ending combos with Triangle in Heat mode will zoom in on the enemy's face while Kiryu's fist or foot smashes into it, and seeing the faces contort while the game prompts you to mash Triangle, only to then send the enemy flying is fantastic. More than anything else in the game, it demonstrates the raw power of the Dragon of Dojima, and it's cool as heck to look at. I wish there was more stuff like that. Maybe involving weapons? Which, weapons aren't nearly as much of a thing in this game as the past ones. Not that I ever got super into using them, not counting Majima's baseball bat fighting style, but it still feels a bit lacking in that regard.

Speaking of the fights themselves, like walking into buildings, they're a lot more seamless than before. That's good, and another thing I mostly like is the increased amount of physics on the enemies. Sending enemies flying after a big hit has long been in the series, but it's never felt as rag-dolly as it does here, and if there's anything I love, it's wonky physics on bodies in games. Seeing someone fly ten feet into the air, for no reason, after falling to the ground is certainly immersion breaking, but in the way that I can't help but enjoy.

There's also a heavy emphasis on knocking enemies into other enemies as a means of both crowd control, and doing damage. The old throw of the past is replaced with Kiryu spinning someone around, which knocks everyone back. It's cool, but sometimes it can make fights kind of a mess, where everyone gets knocked out at once, or most of the enemies are still technically conscious, but in a stunned state on the ground. At which point it tends to be either kicking them out, or waiting for them to stand up, because I found trying to grab enemies on the ground to be hit or miss with it actually working. And toward the end of the game, so many enemies are thrown at Kiryu (who often has some allies with him) at once, in tight enough spaces that it gets hard to tell what's going on, which was frustrating.

Anyway, the combat is ultimately still fun enough that it kept me going through the disappointing story. But really my biggest gripe with the changes to the game play systems are around the leveling. Yakuzas 3 through 5 (and I assume the first two) all leveled like regular games, and 0 had Kiryu and Majima spending money directly to unlock abilities on skill trees (which I really liked). 6 is back to XP, but in a baffling move, it has five different types of XP. Yes, FIVE. I think the idea was that these different types of XP represent different things Kiryu has to work on. Strength, speed, etc. The problem is that almost all of the things to be unlocked require multiple types of XP, and most of those require ALL of them, which just makes the splitting of XP into categories seem meaningless. Actually, more frustrating than meaningless, because Kiryu doesn't get XP for all five categories at the same rate.

There's XP from fighting, from completing story missions, sub stories, eating (which you can't do infinitely because Kiryu has a stomach that can get full (you can spend XP to increase his stomach capacity and the rate at which he digests the food (for better or worse, there's no need for him to use the toilet ever)), going to the gym, just about everything gives some amount of XP. But the things that happen the most in the game, like fighting, only give some of the XP types. And those other two types ended up being the bottleneck that slowed my progress toward unlocking things, especially later in the game. By the end of the game I had thousands of XP for three of the types, in a couple cases I literally hit the cap on how much XP can be had for them (9999), and I could barely get enough of the other two to keep unlocking anything.

On top of all these types of XP, and different ways to get it, over the course of the game it felt like I spent more XP getting abilities to get XP faster than I did on new abilities, or even on improving Kiryu's core stats (which only go up like, two points at a time, making any individual upgrade feel meaningless). Over the last few years, I've been feeling myself getting tired with these sorts of incremental, individually insignificant upgrades in games (something I recently felt a bit of with the runes in God of War), but this game has to be one of the worst examples in recent memory. It's just so much busywork, and the end result is just that the regular enemies are so weak that when I do come across a slightly tough boss, I'm paying so little attention to not getting hit that I don't realize I need to be careful until half my health is gone.

Unlocking new moves, stuff like that is fine. This just feels like busywork for the sake of having busywork. And it's frustrating in a game where I just want to have a good time being up lowlifes and criminals, not checking the stomach meter every five minutes and running to a restaurant to maximize what to eat.

One thing that I do think the game gets right (mostly) is feeling like these are places that could actually exist. When I first started the game, I thought having to hold X to run everywhere, and running out of breath was going to be a hassle. And, at times it still is. But the answer (aside from upgrading stamina, which I did) ended up being that I didn't mind just...walking. Most of the time, I just strolled through the game at a lackadaisical pace, taking in the sights, and feeling like I was walking through the streets of Kamurocho and Onomichi. It's relaxing...even if half the time Kiryu just gets jumped by thugs.

It's still not perfect, though. The first person mode is great for getting really immersed, but the game does nothing outside of the minimap to show where things are in the world, which means either having this big, intrusive map, or turning it off and trying to go on memory. I can do that in broad strokes, at least for Kamurocho, which is still mostly unchanged after all these years (for better and worse). But I ended up keeping the minimap on, because the alternative just meant I was pausing the game to check the map way more often. It allows for setting a waypoint that shows on the minimap, but I would have liked if that at least appeared in the world, or if the game had any sort of a less intrusive way to show where things are.

I often see people praise these games for having small, but dense areas, rather than huge, sprawling worlds, and while I generally agree, I also think these are too small. This is the same Kamurocho I've been wandering since Yakuza 3, and presumably the same Kamurocho from the first two as well. Of course 3 was the first one to not have loads and camera cuts just walking down the street, which would have been a meaningful change, but that doesn't change that it's the same layout.

Yes, that can feel good at times, because it feels like I'm returning to an old haunt. Going back to a place that might look a little different at first glance, but still feels like home. But it can be just as disappointing, when I'm back and it feels like the only ways it's truly changed are ways that make it smaller. I don't mean that it feels smaller, I mean that it's literally smaller. Granted, it's ultimately only a few streets, but there's parts of Kamurocho from the older games that are just blocked off in Yakuza 6. Still on the map, but there's construction going on, I guess, so no going there. That, and it's still a bummer to have the edges of the playable areas just have big red things pop up if you try to go any further.

Onomichi, as pleasant as it is, is even smaller, and has even less to do in it. It was nice to walk around for an hour, but after that, I just wished for more. It stopped feeling like a real town I was visiting, and felt like a small level in a video game. Sure, one with lots of detail, but not enough to actually feel alive. And even within these small spaces, there's too many fenced, or gated off areas that are simply inaccessible. The areas wouldn't even need to be physically larger if there was a lot more going on in the spaces. Sure, there's a handful of places that can be entered, but there's far more that can't. I'm not saying Kiryu should be able to barge into every person's apartment, but what if there was a way onto every roof of the game? What if the sewers weren't just one spot that Kiryu goes to for the story, and were big enough that they might as well be their own level? I know things like this are often more limited by resources, and even tech, but that won't stop me from thinking about what this game should have, and probably could have been.

I dunno. I really wanted, and expected to have a great time with Yakuza 6. I've truly loved these games in the past, even when they had issues. And while nothing in 6 reaches the lowest lows of the awful transmisogyny in 0, nothing in it approaches the highest highs of that game, or any of the other great moments in the others. It even felt like it was struggling to meet the averages of them most of the time.

Even the sub stories aren't up to par. The ones where Kiryu dresses up as Onomichi's mascot Ono Michio stand out as the best in 6, but most of them just aren't that memorable. A whole branch of them just seem to be built around the joke that Kiryu is old and isn't familiar with technology. There's multiple sub stories about people trying to scam Kiryu out of money over the phone, for example. Again, they're not really bad so much as they just feel...average. There are a couple that call back to things from Yakuza 0, and even feature returning characters from that game, even if they look like they've aged twice as much as Kiryu has over the same period of time. But, again, doing a quest involving the same cult from 0 didn't feel novel, it just felt like they were rehashing the same story, for anyone who might not have played 0.

I don't want to call the game bad, because as much as I griped, I did come around on the combat, and there were brief moments, like a fistfight in a burning building where everything clicked, and it started to feel like the Yakuza games that I know and love. But looking back on everything I've written, I have to at least admit this is my by far least favorite of the series. In time, I'll probably find my lack of wanting to call it bad because of how much I've loved previous games diminish as I get some distance from the game. Don't be surprised if by the end of the year, when I'm doing my GOTY stuff, that I say I should rename my "Todd Howard Presents the Fallout 4 Award for Most Disappointing Game," because I feel like that's the trajectory I'm going to have with this game.

And given it's Kiryu's last new game, that's a bummer.

I'm reminded of, how last year, after loving so much of 0, I didn't want to play Kiwami, and burn out on a sub-par Yakuza game. Except now, after playing a sub-par Yakuza game, I'm hoping that Kiwami 2 is really good, so I can play that, and leave the series on a better note.

Here's to hoping.

"All I remember is what I have lost."

God of War III ends with Kratos having finally achieved his vengeance, and in doing so, seemingly destroyed the world, or at least Greece. At the time I found this ending, in which Kratos finally realizes that all he's done is destroy, and attempts to kill the one thing he hasn't yet, himself, to be fitting for the series. In the eight years since playing God of War III, this ending morphed in my head into something that it isn't, and never was. I remembered the parts I liked, and forgot about all the hokey stuff with Athena wanting the literal manifestation of Hope from Kratos, forgot about the game using a young woman (Pandora) as a shameless stand-in for Kratos' dead daughter, forgot how violent that game as a whole is, not just toward literal monsters, or gods, but to people in general. All I remembered was the part where Kratos realized he had done harm, and tried to kill himself.

I'm glad I went and rewatched that ending, and a few choice clips from other parts of GoW III to refresh myself on that game. It's only helped to reinforce how stark the differences are between that, those games in general, and the new one. GoW III attempts to end with Kratos realizing his wrongs, but it was too little, too late. Especially considering that 2 (two) prequels were released after that. Only one of which I played because I had a PSP, and was bound and determined to play every noteworthy release for that thing, so I wouldn't have spent all that money just to play Peace Walker. I, as did many, had my fill, or more than my fill.

But the new God of War starts with that idea from the end of GoW III: Kratos realizing the wrongs he's committed. And just like the end of III, where Kratos' response was to run away from those wrongs by killing himself, the new game begins with the premise that Kratos survived, and if he couldn't figuratively run from his past, he would do so literally. And north he went, until he wound up in fantasy Scandinavia (or Iceland, if the occasional use of the Icelandic language is any indication). After settling down with Faye, who sounds like every bit the warrior Kratos is (just without the blood lust), building a log cabin in the forest, and starting a family, Kratos was finally given a second chance to be the best family man he could.

So of course he squandered it by brooding in the woods instead of helping raise his son. Then, God of War begins, not with any of the bombast of the previous games. No giant monster to slay, no leading an army of titans up Mount Olympus. It begins with Kratos chopping down a tree for firewood; to build a funeral pyre for Faye. Faye is never heard from or seen directly, but the impact she left is felt throughout the game. Kratos, a god who never had the maturity or desire to use his powers responsibly, is lost without her. And Atreus, just a boy, has to deal with not only the loss of his mother, but now only having a man who seemed more interested in anything else as his caretaker, and only companion in a cold world.

Faye left them with just one wish: That they spread her ashes from the highest peak in all the realms. And though Kratos would probably rather sulk in the woods, he knows he can't deny her that wish, but also knows the journey will be long and perilous. So he says that he needs to see if Atreus is ready for that journey, even though he knows he himself is not. And after a hunt that turned into a fight with a troll, Kratos says Atreus isn't ready, and they return home, only to have their home intruded by a stranger with the power of a god. After this man wouldn't leave, Kratos resorts to his old ways, and after a long fight, snaps the stranger's neck, leaving him for dead. Left with no choice, and knowing neither he nor the boy are ready, they set off for the mountain.

And what follows is a game that left a much bigger impact on me than I expected. So much bigger than I ever thought was possible for a God of War game that I almost can't believe it. It made me care about Kratos, not as a god, but as a person. Caring about Atreus is one thing, he's just a kid doing his best, in the way that all kids who want their parents to love them do. But Kratos? The character who was the living embodiment of every sophomoric power fantasy in the book? The one whose defining characteristic was not only his violence, but the absurd lengths his violence went to?

Really, the thing that made me empathize with Kratos is that I can relate to him. Not to the violence, at least not directly. I enjoyed the violence of the previous games as much as anyone. I remember mashing buttons to tear Helios' head from his body, and loving the detail of the bits of flesh and bone left dangling. I remember loving the pun of turning him into a literal headlight, and frankly part of me still does enjoy that because I love word play. Like Kratos, I never really stopped to think about how cruel and needless his violence often was, because they were "just video games." My only criticism back then was that I thought the sex minigames were crass, and immature.

I'm obviously not a god, or a murderer. I'm not even a father, which is definitely the thing that has gotten a lot of people's attention around the game. No, I relate to him because I've spent the last few years of my life hiding from my own problems. I know I've never done anything even a thousandth as bad as Kratos. That doesn't mean I still don't torture myself over the mean things I've said and done to people I used to care about; the people who used to care about me. Former friends I haven't seen or heard from in years, specifically because of my mistakes. Family I'm distant with, and know I should be better about reconnecting with, while I still can. Hiding behind the shield of my "health problems," when really I'm just afraid of the world, all the while knowing I should be doing something to move my life forward.

And yet I don't, despite knowing I should be better.

"You must be better than me."

God of War knows that people do bad things, make mistakes. We all have. I have. And over the course of the game, Kratos realizes he can't run or hide from his past forever. All he wants is impart one lesson onto his son. "Be better."

He doesn't just tell his son that, and continue to be the monster he once was. I mean, yes, he still kills a lot in this game. It is a big budget action game, after all, of course he's still going to rip and tear his way through countless monsters and undead (there's a Trophy for killing one thousand).The combat is deeper and more fun than ever before, and the primary weapon, The Leviathan Axe, is one of my favorite weapons in any game I've ever played (video games being about the only context in which "favorite weapon" is a thing I could ever seriously say). But this isn't the Kratos who took pleasure in brutalizing anyone he could, or even the Kratos that sees killing as the only option. Yes, he tried to kill the stranger at the start of the game, and one other god (in self defense) midway through, but by the end, he does his best to show mercy. To give his enemy a chance to be better.

And yes, when Baldur (the stranger from the start) does not take his chance to be better, Kratos steps in and actually kills him, but only to save someone else's life.

Kratos wouldn't have striven to be better himself were it not for Atreus. For all his faults, and all his inability to show it early in the game, Kratos truly does love his son, and want what's best for him. Or, at least what he thinks is best. It takes a resurgence, worse than before, of Atreus' illness for Kratos to really show it, and realize how far he is willing to go to save his son. The illness and its cause is a little contrived, but I'm willing to overlook that in a world of gods and dragons, when the emotional part works. Seeing Kratos finally, honestly put someone else ahead of himself was touching.

Atreus, right at that age between the blissful years of childhood innocence, and the moody years of teen angst. Just a boy wanting to prove himself to his father, and do right by the world, even when Kratos scoffs at anything that won't directly benefit himself, or the boy. And he spends most of the game doing his best, being kind, and pushing his father to help others when they're in need.

That is, until he learns he's a god. His initial reaction was almost adorable. "Does that mean I can turn into an animal?" The sort of cute question only a kid would ask. But, as the story continues, despite Kratos' repeated mentions of how all gods do is take care of themselves, and take it out on everyone else, Atreus lets it go to his head. First just a few comments, then he begins showing complete disrespect for the friendly dwarven blacksmith Sindri, and eventually this even manifests itself in the game play. For a chunk of the game, Atreus starts disregarding what Kratos says, and sometimes even what I, the player, was telling him to do. Things like casting magic summons when I didn't tell him to.

That part of Atreus' arc really stuck with me because it's a good example of just how easily, and how quickly power, or even just the idea of power can change people. Nothing actually changed with Atreus. There's moments in the game where he gets new abilities, like the magic summons, or different arrow types, but this wasn't one of them. Simply the idea of being a god changed Atreus' way of thinking, and definitely for the worse. Until he finally realizes it, and like Kratos kept trying to impress upon him, he did all he could to be better, not just in order to complete their quest, but in life as a whole.

Ultimately, Faye's wish to have her ashes spread had as much to do with her realizing that journey was what Kratos and Atreus needed, as much as it was for her to return to her home, one last time. While it is a bummer that she's never directly seen or heard in the game (though I could certainly see an argument where that's intentional to make the players feel her absence), she had the foresight to realize what her son and husband needed to be better than they were. I'm just sad she didn't live to see that day.

Maybe she's due for a cameo in Valhalla in the sequel? I'd play a whole game starring her, honestly.

If there's any message to be taken from God of War, it's that we all need to be better than we are, and better than those that came before us. We might not live in a land of petty gods, where the undead and monsters roam the realms, but it can sure feel like it at times. And if Kratos could find it in himself to change, and be better, then I think we all can.

We need to.

Hello! Been kind of a while, huh? I've not posted anything here since my GOTY stuff, and I'm sorry about that. It's not because I haven't been playing games (though I've only played a couple of 2018 releases thus far), but more because my main writing focus has still been elsewhere. Not that I really have much to show for it yet, but someday. Someday.

And in the meantime, here's some good old fashioned kinda rambly things I wrote about a few games I've been playing!

Monster Hunter World.

I have been, over the years, let's say, skeptical of Monster Hunter. From afar, there were aspects of it that looked appealing, but whether because of where the games were being released (largely on handhelds I didn't own), or the games just looking impenetrable, I never tried playing them. However, as someone who enjoys fighting large monsters in video games, I did often at least keep my eye on them. Just to see if any would pique my interest. That, and there were those Monster Hunter missions in MGS Peace Walker, which I still consider to be fully canon in both MGS and Monster Hunter.

Then, last year, Monster Hunter World was announced, and not only was my interest piqued, but it was feeling peaked. I mean, not really, because I only got more interested in it the closer it got to release, but I like wordplay. Anyway, right from that first trailer at E3, I had a feeling this was going to be the time I actually played a Monster Hunter, and, lo and behold, I was right. Helped in no small part by it being the first big release of 2018, by all accounts MHW drew in a lot of new players. And, what did I think?

Monster Hunter World is a rad game. Not without issues, but good enough that I have almost 160 hours played thus far. There was a lot of word of mouth of this game drawing in a lot of people who left Destiny 2, and I'm also among them. Not that I left Destiny 2 wanting more, or having burned out on that game (like I did the first Destiny), but I had my fill, and MHW came at the right moment to get me on board.

Even though MHW really doesn't scratch quite the same itch for me. Destiny (1 and 2) is a game that I play because the shooting is really fun, and for loot. MHW, on the other hand, is a game all about boss fights. It's about learning the ins and outs of your weapon class of choice (or choices, if you like to switch around), and the environments. It is, after all, a game about hunting, and there's more to hunting than just aiming down the sights and shooting, like in Destiny.

In the early hours of discovering a specific monster, tracking is key. Finding the tracks, or other clues left behind, and following them to the creature. Whether that's literal tracks, or anything from snot on the side of a tree, skidmarks from a belly rub in the dirt, or a leftover carcass from an unfinished meal, the monsters always leave something to follow.

And while there is a part of me that would have liked to see the version of this game where you, the player, have to be extremely observant and follow all these things on your own, perhaps this game's best new feature (compared to previous ones) are the Scout Flies. These glowing little flies will zoom over to anything in the environment that can be interacted with, whether it's a track to follow, a plant to swipe to turn into a healing item (they auto craft!), or what have you. And, the more you investigate the tracks of specific monsters, the better the flies get at picking up the trail on their own, until eventually they just know instantly where the monster is at the start of the quest.

That, I think, is both a good and a bad thing. It's good because it's extremely helpful, and has a good amount of progression in it that rewards picking up those tracks to research the monsters. But it's bad because at a certain point it removes any of the tracking aspect from the hunt, and you can basically just run to wherever the monster is. Or, at most, you just have to find a single track, and then they lead you to the monster. On the other hand, generally speaking the monsters tend to hang around pretty similar areas, and by the point the Scout Flies are this adept, there's a good chance you'll have just learned where the monsters are anyway, so it'd happen either way.

But really, the stars of the show are the monsters themselves, and fighting them. At its absolute best, MHW evokes the same feelings as a good boss fight in a Souls game. Learning the tells for each attack, when to dodge, when to counter attack, how best to use the environment to my advantage, and feeling my heart race when a fight gets down to the line... It's fantastic. Whether alone or in co-op, the fights are a blast, and even going into the game with somewhat high expectations, I still came away really impressed. Like I said, impressed enough that I've spent close to 160 hours in the game.

Though, sadly, that's not 150+ hours of genuinely playing the game. A lot of that was spent in town, between hunts, which is where I think the game's issues start to crop up. There's a lot of little things I could nitpick, like how doing many simple tasks (like taking new bounties) require talking to NPCs every time you do them, and buttoning through the same handful of different things that they have to say every time. But, compared to actual issues like the ones around the multiplayer, like I said, they're nitpicks.

I'm not going to bore you with all the details, since most people reading this probably already know, but getting into matches with other players, especially for story related quests, is a hassle. And it's a hassle in ways that other games have solved already, so it's just frustrating to see this game feel like it's stuck in the past. Just a few months before MHW, I played a lot of Destiny 2, which has a few quirks with its co-op (namely that you can't do story missions later on than where you're at (an issue MHW also has, but somehow even worse than Destiny 2)), but it's very easy to group up with people, and stay grouped up. Something that is not the case at all in MHW.

Then, there's the armor and weapons. Now, I know what you're thinking: The point of Monster Hunter is to get stuff to make/upgrade new weapons and armor. And while you're right, after this much time with the game...I feel like it would have been a better game with substantially less of that. Yes, that would also mean it's a game I would have spent a lot less time with, but that would translate to less time spent repeating the same things. Fighting the same monsters multiple times is one thing, but having an event quest that I need to repeat three or four times get the necessary materials to build a novelty hat I'm not really going to actually use isn't fun. A lot of these goofier event quests are fun once. Or not even once. The one to get the Wiggler Hat just involves running around shooting a net at some wiggly worms that pop out of the ground. It's not a hunt, it's not challenging, it's just tedious. And again, you have to do it like three times.

And yes, I know all of that is optional. But, when these are the sorts of things Capcom trots out as reasons to return to the game for special events, it's a bummer that they're so grindy. Just a few days ago I was repeating the same quest with a friend to get the Mega Man stuff for our Palicos (which, I forgot to mention it, but the cat friends are fantastic). Due to sheer luck, I ended up getting enough of the thing needed to make the armor and weapon, but my friend didn't. And that was after playing it, again, multiple times in a row.

Anyway, the point is that if this game was less tuned toward repeating this stuff, I think it'd be a better game. I've heard horror stories from people that just needed a specific thing from a monster to get a specific weapon, but it just wouldn't drop, no matter how many times they hunted it. I didn't run into anything like that, but I absolutely believe it.

But don't get me wrong, grinding aside, I still think Monster Hunter World is a great game, and I'm really interested in where it goes over the months. Capcom's post release support has been interesting, to say the least. The events are neat, if grindy, and them adding new monsters is really cool. Deviljho is a great addition to the game, and the Golden Goat Lizard (as I've come to call) Siege event is a great quest. The spring event is cool too.

On the flip side, some of the monetization stuff they've done is a little...much. Selling emotes is fine, but the prices seem exorbitant. But really the thing that I'm not a fan of is that they're selling the gender change item. Yes, they give you one for free, but you've got to pay after that. And as someone that would've liked to be able to change that willy nilly, it's disappointing that it's a thing you need to buy every time you do it. Which, I dunno. I guess it's not a thing most people would want to do.

Anyway, great game. Watching Palicos cook, or go on missions is amazing.

Shadow of the Colossus (the remake).

I don't know that I really have that much to say about this game. I mean, if I really wanted to, I could write up a whole thing about how much this game means to me, and has meant to me over the years. How the feelings of isolation and desolation that it brings out are unlike almost anything else I've ever played. But, I dunno that this goofy catch-up blog is the place for that, nor that I especially feel like it.

Suffice it to say, Shadow of the Colossus is still one of my favorite games of all time, and I think this is the best version of it. It continues the streak of Sony games I've played that just floor me with how good they look. Like, there are times where I almost can't believe what they're able to do visually, and it is really good to get that feeling from an older game that I've played multiple times before. What I mean is that at its core this is the same Shadow of the Colossus, just looking much newer.

Maybe I'll write more about it in the future. Stay tuned?

Trackmania Turbo.

The PlayStation Plus free games have been hit or miss for a while now, and often when they are games worth playing, they're ones I've already played (I'm looking at you, Bloodborne and Ratchet & Clank). Not that I'm upset about now having digital versions of those games too, but it's left me with less in the way of "free" games to keep my unemployed self occupied with. And thus, really the only noteworthy one I've played this year is Trackmania Turbo.

Frankly, I don't have much to say about this. It's fun, and it scratches the same itch that Trials type games do. I wish it had less strict medal requirements on unlocking new tracks, because I'm not even halfway through the total number of tracks, but already feeling like I'm soon to get to the point where I just have to stop. But hey, for the price of free (never mind the yearly subscription to PS+), I'm not complaining.

A Way Out.

This game has gotten somewhat of a mixed reception from people, on the whole. I've seen everything from it being described as a "must play" to being disappointing and possibly even bad. And where do I stand on it?

Well, first off, I should say that I had the good fortune to play through this game with one of my best friends, and while we weren't able to play in person, the game's online works as advertised. Even the thing where only one person needs to actually own it works (though only the person who paid gets Trophies, which in this case was me).

And, I'm very happy I played it with the person I did, because we had an absolute blast, but I one hundred percent understand how playing it with the wrong person could result in the whole thing being a drag.

As much as I want to wholeheartedly endorse A Way Out, I feel like I need to amend a few asterisks onto that recommendation. Even outside of the game requiring co-op (though I suspect it's only a matter of time before someone uploads a video of themselves playing the whole thing solo, somehow), it's not for everyone. The best comparison I've thought of is that it's like a B movie, that if you try to really think about every last little thing in it, it all falls apart. But, like a good B movie, if you experience it with the right person, and you're both in the right mood, it's a ton of fun. It's campy, goofy, and there are definitely times that I'm not sure if we were laughing with the game, or laughing at it, but either way, we were laughing, and loving it.

Even outside of the camp, I think the game has a lot of really great uses of co-op. Some of it is around puzzles that require two people to figure out what to do, and work in concert to accomplish the task, and some of it is in bigger, more action-y set piece moments. Some of it is straightforward, like a car chase where one player is driving the vehicle, and the other is in the back with a gun, fending off the police. But there's other sequences that are a lot less like stuff you've seen in countless other co-op games. Like a boat ride down some rapids that require both players to switch which side they're rowing on, and a lot of coordination to keep the boat from careening into rocks.

And then there's the story itself. Again, for the most part, it's pretty campy, and clichéd, but really enjoyable. Unless you're the sort of person that gets put off by European actors doing their best attempts at American accents. I find that sort of stuff charming, and I think this game has a lot of heart, and it shines through in that stuff...even if the performances are, well, a little hit or miss. I'm not going to call any of it bad (though I'm sure others would), but just know before you play the game that this isn't a Naughty Dog game where all the acting is impeccable. It's got charm, though.

I'm going to mention the ending now, and big, BIG SPOILER WARNING for the text in the SPOILER THING below. Don't read it if you haven't finished game already. Just know that for all the game's camp, both my friend and I were completely drawn in and invested in what was going on by the end.

FINAL SPOILER WARNING.

End of spoilers.

My friend and I are probably going to replay the ending to see the other one, and hopefully do some other stuff we missed. I'd like to get the Platinum Trophy, and it sounds like it isn't a hard one to get. But even if we don't get around to that, we still both had a tremendous time. If you and a friend want to have a fun co-op romp, and and down for a lot of silliness (and some seriousness toward the end), I really can't recommend A Way Out enough. I will say, as my last asterisk on my recommendation, that if you can't play together in person, I wouldn't recommend playing it without voice chat. Both for sequences that feel like they need coordination, but mostly because it's a game to laugh about, and chat about with a friend while you're playing.

The real heart of A Way Out is in camaraderie, and honestly, it is about the friend you made along the way. Both in game, and outside of it. Just don't worry about the logistics of the toilets, and you'll have a good time.

Anything else?

Well, as of when I wrote this, Yakuza 6 just came out, and God of War is soon to be out. I absolutely want to play both of those games, and hopefully will soon. And, within the last couple of months, I missed Far Cry 5, and Ni no Kuni II. Both I intend to play eventually, just after some price drops. I'd gotten back into Titanfall 2 recently (still great), and dabbled a little in Overwatch after Brigitte was added, but that's it for things I've played or could have played.

And going forward into the year, with games like Spider-Man, and Red Dead Redemption 2, it'll be a great fall, I hope. I'm disappointed by the leaks around Black Ops IIII (silly name) not having a campaign, as I'd been hoping this might be the one to bring me back into CoD. But probably not. Definitely not if Titanfall 3 is this year, but if I had to bet, I'd say that probably won't be this year. So far as spring (if it ever comes), and summer goes? Dunno, but if I have anything to write about any games, it'll be here.

I do still feel bad that it's been so many months since the last time I posted, especially when in years past I used to do this much more regularly. I can't promise that it'll get much more regular than this, because I don't think that it will. But when I have something worthwhile to write, I will.

Until then, thank you very much for reading this, and I hope you have a great day. <3

Hello everybody, it's that time of year again! That's right, it's...

Though it felt like a decade of slogging through a swamp of burning ash, 2017 is finally over, and we're onto likely an even boggier swamp in 2018. But hey, at least the games were good, right? They were so good, I came up with this revolutionary new idea: What if I wrote a list of my top ten games of the year, and also had some awards for other noteworthy games (by which I mean the other games I played because I only played like, thirteen games total)? What's that you say? This is the ninth time I've done something like this, and everyone else has been making lists forever? Nonsense!

And, as I've done for the last year or so, I'm starting with my predictions for 2017, that I wrote way back at the last Moosies. Let's see how wrong I was this time!

9^th Moosies Game of the Year Prediction 2017: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Hm, what an interesting prediction this was. Who can say if it was false or true?

Knack 2 is good enough that we all eat our words and play it.

While I will say that Knack 2 seems like a totally fine game from afar, this prediction was wrong, as we did not all eat our words, or play it.

Persona 5 gets delayed one more time before its western release.

This one was true! Bit of an easy one to predict, in retrospect, but I'll take my correct guesses where I can get them.

Nintendo Switch sells only marginally better than the Wii U, is yet another system owned only for Nintendo developed games.

I guess I sure was wrong, huh? Isn't the Switch already almost at Wii U's lifetime sales, in less than a year? Never mind that it seems to be replacing the 3DS as people's gaming handheld of choice, and many really want games on the Switch specifically to play them on the go. That's actually why I've come to think of it as more of a handheld than a console. Seems like that's the real draw of the thing, isn't it?

In a move that defies all logic, Nintendo announces the Newer 3DS, ruining our dreams of them unifying development behind one system.

Well, Nintendo did begin selling the New Nintendo 2DS XL this year, and they are still releasing noteworthy games on 3DS/2DS. Like that Metroid game. Will that continue to be the case? For a little while, sure, but with the Switch selling so well, I think they'll put all their money behind Switch, and fade 3DS out eventually.

Still no more F-Zero or Metroid.

Of all my predictions, I can't believe I got this one (half) wrong! Not only was a new Metroid (remake) released this year, but another was announced! All we got was a logo, but a logo is more than Nintendo's given people in a long time.

F-Zero, though? My heart still weeps...

Half-Life 3 gets released. It's a new character for Dota 2 instead of a game.

They did make the Portal Companion Cube a skin or something for one of the characters, right? That's in the Half-Life universe, so I'll say this one was...one third right?

New Splinter Cell game is announced.

Much like Metal Gear, and seemingly Deus Ex, it sounds like Splinter Cell won't be back any time soon. Though I'd still put money on this returning before MGS, and probably Deus Ex. (Cue another prediction gone wrong).

Xbox Scorpio is fueled by actual scorpions.

No, but it is cooled by Vape, which is something I doubt any of us saw coming. Okay, someone did. BUT, there is a cute little picture of Master Chief riding a scorpion inside each Xbox One X, so there is a little scorpion in there.

Red Dead Redemption 2 gets delayed to 2018.

Like Persona 5, this was another really easy one to predict. Even though RockStar, in 2016, was airing ads on television for this game, saying fall 2017.

Second Kickstarter for Shenmue III.

I'm happy this one wasn't true. I don't mind them taking their time, especially since a new Shenmue probably won't be great anyway (most of my enjoyment from the original came from the bad voice acting). But, if they came out asking for more money, that probably wouldn't have helped their cause.

So, that's it for predictions. As is usual, I was wrong far more than I was right, but it's still fun to do. Now, onto the core of The Moosies: The Awards! Same format as always, with a top ten list, and awards for other games in between (some of) the numbered entries. I know I could just make a list larger than ten, but then I couldn't do things like point out high profile games I didn't play, or do Old Game of the Year! Anyway, enough dawdling!

X. Best Action Set Pieces: Uncharted: The Lost Legacy.

Of all the years I've done The Moosies Awards, two of them had an Uncharted as game of the year, and another had it as either second or third, overall. That might have been before I did a numbered list, actually. Either way, Lost Legacy ending up at number ten on this list is the lowest an Uncharted has ever ranked for me at the end of the year. But that's not a mark against the game's quality, just more how this side story is exactly that. It's another Uncharted game, re-using a lot of the tech, and other things from A Thief's End to give Chloe some extra screen time.

It's a smaller, leaner Uncharted experience that probably benefits overall from tighter pacing, and more focused design but ultimately isn't as memorable as the main entries. But it's hard to follow up a game that was specifically tugging at the nostalgia strings in key parts, especially when it's a side story. Even this game's big action set piece at the end, which I genuinely think is the best finale of the entire series, feels like a greatest hits of prior Uncharted set pieces. But like just about everything The Lost Legacy does, it shows that it knows how to be just as good as what came before, if not better.

All that said, even an Uncharted game that is merely "more Uncharted," rather than pushing the franchise forward in some substantial way, is still all right in my book. More than all right, because it's a great game, and definitely deserving of a spot on my top ten list. Also, maybe a controversial statement, but I think I like Chloe better as a protagonist than Nathan Drake, in retrospect. So, Naughty Dog, if you're reading this (and obviously they are), maybe make Uncharted 5 about her? Don't try to tell me Uncharted is over, we all know it's not, not while you're owned by a big corporation!

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy also wins:

• Best Elephant.

• Best Use of Monkeys.

• Best Pizza.

• Best Train.

Game I Most Wish I Played: Super Mario Odyssey.

In a year where I couldn't afford to buy the new Nintendo, and thus couldn't buy its flagship exclusive, this award was an easy choice. A new Mario game, widely beloved, and probably topping a lot of people's game of the year lists. And here all I can do is write about how I should have played it. Oh well, that's what I get for not having a spare three hundred and sixty dollars lying around to pay for just one game (and even more if I wanted to shell out the money for a better controller).

Alas, such is the way the world is. Hopefully it won't take too long for the price to go down enough for me to join in the fun...Then barely ever use the Switch because I don't like playing games on handhelds, and without that there's no reason to play anything other than Switch exclusives on there. It's going to be a while before the price gets low enough for me, isn't it?

Just as an addendum, between my writing those paragraphs, and coming back to proof-read this, I realized, between years of birthdays and Christmases, I've saved up enough money for a Switch, and I almost impulse bought one on Amazon one day. So who knows, maybe I'll have one sooner than later. Still not in time for this, though!

Runners Up: Hollow Knight, Night in the Woods, What Remains of Edith Finch, Tacoma, Heat Signature, many others, probably.

IX. Spookiest Game: The Evil Within 2.

Something about The Evil Within 2, even when it was just announced, grabbed me in a way I wasn't expecting. Especially as I haven't played the first one, nor heard anyone articulate a solid argument for why I should. This one, however, is a pretty great mix of survival horror and stealth game mechanics that I really enjoyed. It's been long enough since the last survival horror game I played (does The Last of Us count?) that I was really itching for one to play this year. And, naturally, I didn't play Resident Evil VII, so instead I played a sequel to a (probably) bad game!

I think probably The Evil Within 2's greatest strength is that its premise, it being set in a computer simulation, allows the game to do basically anything at all. One minute ex-detective Sebastian Castellanos (great name) might be sneaking down a suburban street, hiding behind bushes, and the next he might be running away from an invincible ghost, or any number of ghastly ghouls or mutant monstrosities. Yes, most of the game's enemies are pretty zombie-ish looking, and acting, but everything around them is imaginative, and keeps the game fresh and exciting through most of its run (it's drags a little by the end). And even if they are zombie-ish, they are at least slightly smarter than the average zombie, and fun to deal with.

Besides, how many games have a spooky yogurt monster in them, after all?

While the story or characters might not be anything to write home about, The Evil Within 2 is still a great overall experience, and one I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy as much as I did. It was everything I wanted from a new survival horror game, at just the right time (a month after Halloween because I waited for a sale because capitalism is bad).

The Evil Within 2 also wins:

• Best Use of Yogurt.

• Best Use of (temporary) Letterboxing.

• Best Cat with a Ribbon.

• Big Bo Presents Year of the Bow Crossbow of the Year: Warden Crossbow.

• Best Sneaking.

• Best Easter Egg (Evil Within Too).

Best Digging: SteamWorld Dig 2.

Movement in games is so focused on either lateral movement across flat plains, or upward movement over and around things, that going down is often overlooked. In the real world, digging is a slow, laborious process that isn't the least bit enjoyable. But in SteamWorld, Digging is a fun challenge. Yes, the game does have plenty of abilities focused on getting back up out of the tunnels, but still. It's called SteamWorld Dig (2), not SteamWorld Jump!

In all seriousness, though, Dig 2 is a really good game. The digging is as fun, if not more so than in the original, and the game built around that feels even more like a Castlevania, or even Metroid game than before. I believe there's a mash-up word for that...Castletroid. Challenge rooms, secrets all around, and plenty of mystery. But, at the end of the day, it couldn't quite make the cut for the top ten list.

Steamworld Dig 2 also wins:

• Best Castletroid Game.

• Best Grappling Hook.

• Best Jetpack.

VIII. Multiplayer Game of the Year: Destiny 2.

Destiny 2 has managed what Destiny 1 never could: To get onto my top ten list for a year. All it had to do was have a coherent (if ultimately forgettable) story, and not be so grindy it led me to stop playing the game out of spite. Really, that's all it took, because outside of a new ability for each class, there really isn't that much different between this game and the first. Sure, there's new subclasses, new weapons, minor things like that all around, but as a whole? It's just more Destiny.

And like Destiny 1, I found myself pretty quickly drawn into playing a lot of Destiny 2. Like the first one, Destiny 2 is built around playing with other people, and that's where it shines the brightest. Whether it's just there to be something to talk over, or a legitimately difficult mission that requires a level of coordination and focus my associates and I couldn't usually achieve due to our lackadaisical attitudes, Destiny 2 is a fantastic game to play with other people. Even the player vs. player stuff is fun, under the right circumstances.

It's not perfect. The three player Fireteam limits for Strikes, and Patrol/public quests is still frustrating. Especially for public quests, given those often involved more than four people when passersby are factored in. And given my Destiny 2 associates and I numbered four in total, that led to a lot of switching out a person. Worked for the PvP, though, given that's arbitrarily a four vs. four mode (I'm sure it's not actually arbitrary in terms of what Bungie wants, I'm just saying).

I was never able to coordinate well enough with a group to even get enough people together at once to attempt the Raid, which may or may not be a good thing, from what I've heard about the current one. But all that said, I had a whole heck of a lot of fun playing Destiny 2 too much this year. I got one character up to the Power cap, and two others almost to it! Well, at least what the cap was before the DLC.

Like Destiny 1, I've Fallen off of this one, though I think for a less Vexing reason than last time. While Destiny 2 has Taken more of my time than the first, it doesn't feel like it has, because it's not a horrific grind like that game was. The first game got me stuck on his horrible loop, and I left that game feeling so bad I might as well have had Hives. And, I'll admit some of the things I've heard about Destiny 2 as of late make it sound like it's being run by a microtransaction Cabal, so it's probably for the best that I left Destiny 2 when I did. I'm still glad this time I left the game because it wasn't grindy enough, rather than too grindy.

Too grindy, or not grindy enough. I'm so fickle, aren't I?

Destiny 2 also wins:

• Best Use of Colored Lighting.

• Best Skyboxes.

• Best Dancing.

• Also Worst Dancing.

• Vibrating-est Bird.

• Best Multiplayer Announcer: Lord Shaxx.

• Most Unintentionally Funny line of Dialog: "And I have become legend!"

"The Dark Souls of Awards" Award: Nioh.

Nioh is a game that I simultaneously really like, but also think falls very short of its potential. The combat is great. It starts with the same core as something like Dark Souls. Similar lock-on and stamina mechanics, and a moderately high level of difficulty with similarly designed levels. But from there, it goes in another direction, with a focus on fighting stances, customizing moves, and even a way to "active reload" stamina. It's a ton of fun, and deep enough to allow for a lot of different strategies.

The thing that holds Nioh back is the rest of the game around that great core is...mediocre. There's some fun charm in the game, like the eyepatch wearing ghost cat that gives advice to Anime Geralt (or William, whatever his actual name is). For as fun as the combat is, the game is too grindy for its own good, and doesn't have nearly enough enemy variety for as long as it is. And even most of the enemies in the game are some variation on "dudes with swords." Some are just skeleton dudes, demon dudes, or bird demon dudes. They're not all just guys with swords, but a handful of spiders or malevolent umbrellas weren't quite enough.

It did, however, get me to go look up some stuff about the era it's set in, and I learned a few things about Sengoku period of Japan. Despite all the demons and stuff, the game is weirdly historically accurate in some ways?

Overall, Nioh is a solid, fun game, that wasn't quite good enough to get onto my top ten. Even if it doesn't have a big interconnected world like the better Dark Souls and Bloodbornes of the world, the combat was enough to scratch that itch, and keep me satisfied for another year. Now let's just wait and see if that From Software trailer was them teasing their own take on this period of Japan.

Nioh also wins:

• Best Sword Combat.

• Most Malevolent Umbrellas.

• Best Ghost Cat.

VII. Best Punching and Kicking Simulator: Yakuza 0.

Yakuza 0 is a game of incredibly high highs, and incredibly low lows. At its pinnacle, it's fun beat'em up with a great story, incredible characters, absurd humor, and some of the best moments of the year. It tells a sometimes heart wrenching story of two men fighting against a Yakuza plot so convoluted it would make Hideo Kojima wake in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. It's a tale of brotherhood, of loyalty, and of how far people would go to prove, or disprove, said loyalty. It's hilarious, strange, and chock full of things I'll remember for years to come.

I went back and forth on whether to bring this up again or not, but ultimately it's the thing holding this game back from being higher on the list. At its worst, Yakuza 0 has some of the worst transmisogyny in any game I've played. It's also not great toward cisgender woman, and the series really never has been. There's probably an unhealthy dose of homophobia in there too, I just missed it, or don't remember it. It's so disappointing because it has so much genuine heart in so much of the rest of the game, that I don't want to be bringing this up. And yet.

Conversely, as much as I want to take a stand against games with awful stuff like that, it's still number VII on my list. Despite all its issues (which it has a fair number game related ones too), it's still a great game. I only have so much willpower, and it turns out Japanese men yelling at and beating up each other, if it's done sufficiently well, wins out.

I'm weak.

But I love Kiryu and Majima so much. I love the new fight styles, and being able to switch between them on the fly. I love that this game runs at a much better framerate than the PS3 Yakuza games ever did. I love that this game is focused on a good story, and only ramps up the pace as it continues to the end, rather than getting bogged down in too many characters and unnecessary baseball subplots like Yakuza 5 did. The game gets so much right.

There might be an alternate universe where this game doesn't have any anti-LGBT+ jokes in it, and one where it treats women better. And maybe in that universe this game is higher on my list. But if we're talking hypothetical universes where games that I want to be better are better, this is a much different list, haha.

Yakuza 0 also wins:

• Best Chicken: Nugget.

• Best Melee Special Moves.

• Funniest Game.

• Best Packaging/Extra Goodies: Business Cards and Metal Business Card Holder Inside a Bigger Box.

• Most Minigames.

• Best Suits.

Most Improved Game from 2016: No Man's Sky.

I actually ended up playing quite a bit of this game in 2017. Definitely more than I did in 2016. While not all of that is due to improvements made to the game (it was a good podcast game after I was recovering from a few days in the hospital), it has, overall, improved a good amount this year. I still don't think all the changes were for the best (particularly finding crashed ships and needing to repair their inventory slots), but the addition of an actual Story goes a long way to make No Man's Sky a pretty enjoyable time spender. The added ground vehicles are fun to use too, even if (like many things in the game) the resources required to make and upgrade them are too prohibitive for what doesn't have many real advantages over just flying.

Still though, it's better, and I like it. Even if one of the patches turned the planet I built my base on from a lovely world of blue grass to being all yucky and acidic.

VI. Best Looking Game of the Year: Horizon Zero Dawn.

Months after finishing Horizon, two things about it immediately jump to my mind. The first, is how gorgeous the game is. There's plenty of people out there that (often rightfully) decry games that emphasize raw visual fidelity and chasing after realism over more stylized looks. And sure, maybe a decade from now we'll look back on Horizon and wonder how we ever thought it looked good, but right now? It's gorgeous, and I think a lot of that is as much from great art, and design as it is from raw technical prowess.

From dusty deserts to jaw-dropping jungles, this game wowed me almost every step of the way with how perfectly it captures the natural beauty of its world. I'm a sucker for sunsets, and good lighting in general, and this game probably has the best I've ever seen. One image I just cannot get out of my head is Aloy wandering through a misty jungle at night, the ground covered in foliage, and shafts of moonlight sifting through the trees, and...making the mist look...good Look, I don't know what the technical terms are, but it looks good! And the human world built around this, with its ancient metal husks of skyscrapers contrasted against the modest constructions of the new civilizations are equally beautiful.

Aside from, you know, all the cultural appropriation. That's a blemish on an otherwise beautiful game. Okay, that's not the right way to word it. The appropriation isn't a problem because of how it looks, it's a problem because when tasked with "how would people in this situation dress, build their homes, culture, etc," Guerrilla Games' answer was to just steal things from cultures without putting in the work to properly justify it, or do whatever would be needed to not have it be appropriation. I'm not really sure what that would be, frankly. They probably should have just gone for something a little more original.

The other thing that jumps to my mind is the combat. Specifically fighting the robots, as I had all but forgotten that there were humans to fight too. The enemies in this game are built to be ripped and torn apart, the tools given to deal with them meld perfectly with this, and the result is a game that I still think plays like little else out there. There's snares to set, elemental types to keep in mind, arrows and bows suited for attacking specific pieces of enemies, and even a weapon that attaches cables between enemies and the ground, letting you tie them down for a short while. Combined with a lot of enemy variety, and a fast pace, it's an exhilarating time.

It's not all for show, either. Knocking pieces off enemies changes how they fight. A big robo-cat with a gun on its back is a lot less threatening if you can shoot the gun off, especially when you can then pick up that gun and use it against itself! There's less obvious uses for dismantling enemies too, like stopping robo-turkeys from using their big air blasts by rupturing their air sacs, or preventing giant mecha-salamanders from burrowing by doing enough damage to the right parts. Or stealing extra resources from large crab foes by targeting the clamps on the storage units they're carrying before killing them. Or even not killing them at all once the goodies are gotten.

Even just writing about it now makes me wish I'd played the DLC for the game, because I could go for more of that. There's no reason why I can't still do that at some point, of course. I think I'll do that! Eventually.

As much as even thinking about fighting the huge robots in this game still excites me, the story hasn't stuck with me like I expected it to. I still like Aloy as a protagonist (thanks in no small part to Ashly Burch's performance), plus there's certain aspects of the back story and world as a whole that I appreciate. But when I think about the actual narrative of the game, it just feels like yet another video game story, especially after other games that I've played since in the year. Not bad by any means, but I'd say that's the part of the game holding it back in my mind. That, and fighting against humans, which to be frank, was bad. Less of that in the sequel, please.

And if I'm nitpicking, then this was the game that finally broke me on hunting as a means to find crafting parts in games. I love fighting giant robots, but running after a defenseless jungle turkey and killing it to get some feathers so I can hold a few more arrows is not fun, and it makes me feel bad. Sure, I've eaten many a turkey in my life, but there's a difference in taking part in gruesome capitalist slaughter of animals for food and shooting a digital bird.

Wait.

Horizon Zero Dawn also wins:

• Big Bo Presents Year of the Bow Bows of the Year.

• Best Robot Designs.

• Most Hair (Aloy has so much hair, but I think she pulls it off).

• Best Turkeys.

• Best Lighting.

• Best Photo Mode: Aloy can make a heart with her hands.

Best Animal Petting: Assassin's Creed Origins.

Assassin's Creed as a franchise has been all over the place. The first game had a lot of interesting ideas, but wasted them on a game where progressing often involved little more than sitting on a bench and eavesdropping on a meaningless conversation. II and Brotherhood tied everything together, but the series has been kind of coasting ever since. Even the best ones after that, Black Flag and Syndicate, feel like they were still grasping at the series' former glory, even if they were technically better games in a lot of ways.

And then we have Origins, a game that throws out most of the good things from Assassin's Creed, keeps some of the good (like looking at beautiful vistas on top of tall things), and a lot of the bad (all the present day stuff). Then it replaces all the removed Assassin's Creed with what is really just another open world action game with loot and light leveling. That doesn't mean it's bad, I've enjoyed playing it, and plan on going back to do more of the side stuff I never got around to. But that also doesn't mean it's great.

The thing that salvages what would otherwise be a very forgettable game for me ends up being the main character, Bayek. The best games in the series have had charismatic protagonists. Ezio and Edward Kenway had that classic swagger, and Evie was great in Syndicate (Jacob not so much, but he wasn't bad). But Bayek feels like the first one in any of these games to feel more like a real person, and not some video game archetype. I mean, he's still a video game dad on a vengeance quest, and he kills hundreds of bandits and solves everyone's problems across all of Egypt.

But when Bayek mourns the loss of his son, that loss feels real. When he's furious at the people who have been ravaging his country, I feel that anger. When he and Aya meet up, and get all romantic, it seems as real to me as any hetero romance ever has. When his smile at meeting an old friend fades right before the camera cuts back to game play, I know that feeling of just putting on an act, because they haven't changed in the years since, but I have. When he's overjoyed at realizing his wonderful bird friend is alive and well, I too felt that joy, because games almost never get that feeling of a person and their animal friends so right. More than anything, I attribute this to Abubakar Salim's performance, as I'm not going to sit here and try to argue that the writing is anything special. It's fine, but a case where a good performance turns it into something memorable.

And like Horizon Zero Dawn, it can be a really gorgeous game. I don't think that presentation holds up as consistently as Horizon does, even if this game has some truly extraordinary vistas. It's also got a lot of video game looking rock textures, and rough looking NPCs walking around streets.

Also when Senu lands on Bayek's arm, you can hit the interact button to pet her. And Bayek will pet cats if he crouches near them. Sadly no dog petting, but this isn't the only open world game with dogs that should be pet but aren't, so I won't hold it against this game. Too much.

Assassin's Creed Origins also wins:

• Best Bird: Senu.

• Best Beard: Bayek.

• Best Cats.

• Best Secret(?) Option: Giving Bayek his Hair and Beard Back.

• "Most Historically Accurate Game."

• Most Pyramids.

• Camels.

The Moosies 2017 "Retro" Game of the Year: Life is Strange.

Despite having already watched Giant Bomb East play through Life is Strange back in 2015, I didn't actually play it until 2017, when it was free with PlayStation Plus. Whether because of the strength of Life is Strange, or (more likely) the relative weakness of the rest of the older games I played in 2017, Life is Strange still stood out as the one. It's rife with issues, which would require much more space and time than I'm willing to go into, but the parts that work still work. Even with the context of me knowing what's going to happen, I still really enjoyed spending time with Chloe and Max this year.

Even if it wasn't the best Chloe game I played this year.

Runners Up: Downwell, Abzu.

Now, is when the list gets serious. It's easy to say these sorts of things, but I really mean it this year: Despite some flaws and issues that the following games have, in a lot of other years, any one of these could have been my game of the year. And I don't mean like, "Oh if this was another 2014, this would be game of the year." I mean that each of the following games really are something special, in their own way. But, at the end of the day, I had to settle on an order for them, and I did. Even if numbers V through III I probably could've ordered in any way and felt good about it.

V. Best Moose Riding Simulator: NieR:Automata.

Of all the games in 2017, I think this is the one that left me most...unsure. There are things in Automata that I think are fantastic. Parts of this game reminded me of the best parts of the MGS games, in that they made me think, "no one else would do this in a game." It's a very strange game that is unafraid to be exactly what it wants to be, even if it would probably be a better game if it wasn't as stubborn about some of those things.

It's also a game that many people adore in a way that I never could, and sometimes it feels like I missed something. It certainly doesn't help that the "discourse" around this game got so heated that at one point anyone mentioning the game at all, regardless of context, started to get on my nerves. Not that it made me angry, I just wanted to get away from the game, and stop thinking about it before people's obsession over it made me forget the things that I liked about it.

I like how weird it is. I like how the game does it what it wants to do. There are very specific things in the story that I, well, like isn't exactly the right word for them. Pascal's arc, for example. I'm not going to spoil anything, but if you've finished the game, you know what I mean. Few games, and basically no games in the bigger, "Triple A" space are willing to do the things that Automata does, and I really appreciate that it does these things.

Months later, this game still baffles me. Originally I had a paragraph here about how I never grew attached to the characters, but then I went back to look at the snippet I wrote about the game months ago, where I said, "Even the characters grew on me to the point that by the time the game wanted me to be attached to them, I was attached to them." Is this a case for the game not sticking with me like I thought it would, or a case of my memory just being awful? I DON'T KNOW.

It's a game made by Platinum, with the same fluid, responsive combat that I've come to expect from them...just without interesting enemies or encounters to use it in. Or, rather, that same fluid combat for most, but not all, of the game. Some characters are more fun to play as than others, is what I'll say. Even beside that, it bounces around between game types to keep things fresh, but none of them are fun or challenging in the ways I want a Platinum game to be. And even if it gets hard, by fighting enemies that are too high level, the only real difficulty is in how much damage they do relative to how much health you have. The ship shooter sequences are neat, but again, not ever difficult in a way to make them a challenge, unless it's a sequence specifically designed to be impossibly hard.

Then there's the music, which is impeccable. I still find myself wanting to shout BECOME AS GODS whenever I think about it. It sweeps the gamut between silly/goofy, touching, and pulse-pounding intensity. And basically all of it is phenomenal. I might make some arguments for other games this year having better "use of music," but this game's soundtrack really does top all others.

I'm still not exactly sure what I think about Automata as a whole. I liked it? I liked it. Part of me wanted to not include it on the list at all because I kind of don't like it? But also I kind of love it? The more time I've spent thinking about it this past week as I've been working on writing this, thinking about the year's games, and listening to Giant Bomb's short and concise GOTY podcasts, the higher this game kept getting on this list.

It's something special.

It's also really weird.

Also I wish the camera didn't focus on 2B's butt every time she dashes/runs and her weird 3/4 skirt didn't flap up in the wind. Kinda pervy Japanese game design is something I wish this game didn't remind me of MGS.

One last thing, I'm going to leave another quote from what I previously wrote about Automata. A good reminder of why it was that I liked the game when I played it, and summation of why this game does deserve (at least) the number V spot on my list.

"Then, the machine has a revelation: The bodies of animals, while inconvenient, have something the machines don't: Warmth.

And I've never empathized with a fetch quest more in my entire life."

NieR Automata also wins:

• Best Boar Riding Simulator.

• Best Late Title Card.

• Best Fishing.

• Best Robot Friends.

• Best Late Title Card.

• Nakedest Bio-Mechanical(?) Men.

• Best butts.

• Most Original Music.

• Best Mech-Suits.

• Big Bo Presents Year of the Bow Hair Bow of the Year.

IV. Best Game that's so Good it'll make you forget it's technically a reboot: Prey.

I wrote so much about Prey earlier in the year that I don't think there's much more I can say about it now. But what I can say that I couldn't then is how much the game has still, months and months later, stuck with me. Not every game I played this year did that. Horizon certainly didn't, not as much as I expected it to. But Prey? Prey earned its spot in my memory, and it's going to stay nuzzled in my brain for a long time.

Of course, maybe saying a game heavily featuring brain implants, and memory wipes is stuck in my head isn't the best way to word it. Or maybe it is, actually. Only fitting, right?

Sure, Prey has issues, especially on console. Even after patching it a whole lot, the game still doesn't run as smoothly as it should, and the load times are too long. The combat isn't great, but you know what is? The world they created. The mimics, which are still one of my all time favorite game enemies. The characters, the writing, the way the game got me to play right into exactly what it wanted me to do all along, without me being wise to it at all. But also the way that even after I realized it, I wasn't mad that the game "tricked me." I was happy, because even if Prey is a game that likes playing tricks on you, they're not mean tricks. Well, in universe they are, sure.

But thematically? I'll take games that place more importance on empathy than anything else any day of the week. And Prey, above all else, wants to stress how important empathy is, and I believe even more strongly now than when I first played it: More empathy is something we need in this world right now. Or, at the very least, empathy for the people who deserve it.

Prey also wins:

• Best Use of Eels.

• Best Enemy: Mimics.

• Best Space Lesbians.

• Best "Snowman."

• Best "Weapon:" The Gloo Gun.

• Best Plot Twists.

• Best Use of (Outer) Space.

III. Most Cathartic Game: Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.

Because you know who don't deserve empathy? Nazis. You know what Wolfenstein II has a whole hell of a lot of? Killing Nazis. And oh golly, what a good Nazi killing game it is. Sure, there are a lot of people out there that don't care for the combat in this game, and I'm not saying they're wrong when they say that's the worst part of the game. I was just better able to look past its flaws (which are there), and found the high difficulty to be a fun challenge, rather than an impediment. All that said, they should adjust that for the next one.

In 2017, more so than any year of my life, I needed this game, and for what I needed, it delivered. What I wanted was carnage against Nazis, and it delivered. Wolfenstein II revels in it. BJ storms through this game raining bullets, buckshot, shrapnel, diesel, and hatchets upon his foes, tearing them into shreds of bloody pulp and rent metal. Sure, the stealth barely works because the game doesn't do anything to make up for the lack of awareness the first person perspective gives you. The levels aren't well designed, which often leads to spending time after fights figuring out where to go. The game doesn't do enough to let you know when you're being flanked, or attacked from behind, which can lead to quick deaths. Solutions to other, smaller issues the combat has for little or no reason are fixed with optional gadgets that can't be found until late in the game.

But none of that got in the way for me. The guns in this game feel powerful, and so does BJ when he gets the ability TO RUN INTO NAZIS AND MAKE THEM EXPLODE. All I'm saying is that it's unfortunate that not everyone got as much enjoyment from playing the game as I did. Hopefully next time around they can make it even better.

Then there's the story, which left me speechless multiple times, for wildly different reasons. One moment there's an emotional confrontation with someone from BJ's past, then an over the top action sequence, and then, after a while, a scene that I literally could not believe as it was happening. It was so out there I thought I'd lost my head, and was just simply speechless. None of what this game does story wise would work in the slightest if the writing and performances weren't as strong as they are, and despite being the prototypical generic white guy protagonist on paper, BJ is without a doubt one of the best characters of the year. I like to credit where credit is due, and Brian Bloom deserves it for his performance.

As much absurd bombast as it has, it's the quiet moments that glue it all together. Returning to the submarine between missions, to check in on friends, and keep feeding that pig. I fed that pig every single chance I could, and while I don't regret it, because I want Rosa to find every bit of happiness she can, I was a little disappointed there wasn't any payoff. Or maybe the payoff was knowing I went out of my way to help a nice animal friend. Because, you see, the real Wolfenstein II was the friends we-

Wolfenstein II runs the gamut from bizarre and hilarious to serious and grim, nailing it almost every step of the way. And despite being made in Sweden, it understands white America better than most white Americans do. It shows not only how easily people can submit to a fascist regime, but how willingly they'll do it. Its vision of Nazi America is not one of a bitter fight to the very end, but one of a bitterly racist, hateful country selling out anyone it could at the first opportunity it got.

Makes you think about where we're at now, doesn't it? Not that different from where we've always been, in a lot of ways. At least it made me think about that.

I do think the game feels a bit rushed toward the end, and the ending itself felt flat compared to the bombastic heights this game reaches earlier. However, a lackluster ending, and bizarre choice of credits song don't come close to ruining The New Colossus. It's a wild ride that I at least needed this year, and its message of hope, and needing to fight back against the forces oppressing us is one that I hope many take to heart.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus also wins:

• Best Pig: Rosa.

• Best New Weapon: Dieselkraftwerk.

• Best Use of Axes.

• Best Dual-Wielding.

• Most Ridiculous Game.

• Most Jaw-Dropping Moments.

• Best Cutscene Direction.

• Button Prompt of the Year: Boot to the Face.

II. Most Heartwarming Game: Life is Strange: Before the Storm.

Of all the games I've written about here, this is the most surprising one. It had everything going against it. An "unnecessary" prequel to a mostly beloved, but heavily flawed game that no one was asking for, that was to fill in gaps no one thought needed to be filled. The main character's voice actress was replaced not because they felt she needed to be recast, but because of the voice acting strike. The original developers weren't working on this one, because they've been busy with their vampire game.

But the end product? Without a doubt the most emotionally affecting game I've played in years. I think it surpasses original Life is Strange in every way. It's better written, the performances are more consistently good, it's more explicitly queer (even if you play wrong and don't go down that route, there is at least ONE openly queer character in the game, which is an improvement (though just one is hardly enough)), and more than anything else, it just feels more focused on finding joy in life, rather than dealing with misery.

It's a game about love, about discovering one's self, and about queerness. It embraces and understands queerness in ways I've never seen a game before. At least not in one published by a big publisher. It's not afraid to let you spend lots of time just sitting and thinking, or playing off-brand D&D with friends before school. It's a game that understands grief, and how much the loss of a loved one can deeply change a person, but it never makes that pain the focus, unlike so many other things that treat suffering as the ultimate form of art. It understands that pain and grief should be stepping stones to overcome, not weights to drag you down.

Or...at least it's two thirds of that game. The first two episodes of Before the Storm are incredible, and will stick with me for a very long time. Episode three, well...I won't spoil it, and you can read how it changed my thoughts on the game as a whole here (be warned of spoilers). But let me stress that if episode three was as good as the first one, Before the Storm would have had a strong shot at being my game of the year. At this point I'm sure anyone reading this who knows me already knows what my game of the year is, and knowing how much I love that game, I can't overstate how much Before the Storm impacted me. It came so, so close.

In a year that honestly felt more dystopian than many dystopian works of fiction, having a brief flash of joy and warmth in Before the Storm had a deeper effect on me than I ever imagined it would. I bought this game on a lark, because it was accidentally six dollars one day, and here I am, thinking about my wonderful lesbians Chloe and Rachel, and just wishing they could have the happiness they deserve.

I guess it's true what they say, huh? Representation really does matter, because I doubt I'd have gotten as much out of it if it was about two straights! Here's to more queerness in games.

Life is Strange: Before the Storm also wins:

• Best Performances: Rhianna DeVries as Chloe Price, and Kylie Brown as Rachel Amber.

• Best Writing.

• Queerest Game.

• Best Earth Lesbians.

• Best Stage Performance.

• Best Off-Brand D&D use.

And, finally, here it is. What you've been waiting for! I'm sure you'll all be surprised, and this wasn't 100% the game anyone who knows me was predicting to be my Game of the Year, it's...

I. The Ninth Annual Moosies Video Game Awards Game of the Year: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Breath of the Wild embraces a sense of adventure in a way that I don't think I've felt in a game since I was a kid. The funny part being that games back then were tiny compared to what they are now. Back then all you needed was adventurous music and a copious amount of N64 fog to make a world feel vast. These days, the worlds have to actually span miles to feel that big, and no game this year felt big in the way Breath of the Wild did. No game made me feel a since of wonder at what would be at the crest of a hill, the bottom of a valley, tucked away in a cave, anywhere and anything was a new adventure. A new surprise around every corner.

Whenever I saw a Shrine in the distance, I had to stop and make note of it. In each one, a new challenge to solve. Mostly puzzles, sometimes repetitive combat "challenges," but usually rewarding. Bite sized chunks of Zelda puzzle solving, my biggest complaint of which being I just wish there was more, and they lasted longer. Some didn't even have any puzzles inside, and are built around solving a puzzle in the world itself. It just adds to this feeling that anything in the game can be something significant, something important, if only I can figure it out.

It made me stop and think about how to deal with problems in the world. How can I cross this river without drowning? Do I sail on a raft, chop down a tree and ride that across, or find some other way? If I see an encampment of enemies, do I rush in and fight, or try to find a way to make the environment do the fighting for me? In no other game have I opted for the latter, and then had the latter involve cutting down a tree, and rolling it down a hill to smoosh enemies to death. Of course I could just avoid most enemies, but then I wouldn't get what was in the treasure chest!

Not only is there an incredible amount of different ways to interact with the world, but it feels like everything interacts with everything else, and anything is possible. After many months of watching videos of people pushing this game's systems to its breaking points, it's clear that even at my wildest ideas, I wasn't close to the limits of what's possible. One of my favorite examples being the speedrun strategy that involves cutting down a tree, using the time stop power to build its momentum, then riding it through the air across most of the map, to get to the final dungeon.

Even engaging in the combat through normal means is a thrill like never before in the series. I still see people complain about weapons breaking, but those breaks are what makes the combat work for me. That "oh crap" moment when my sword breaks, and I need to scramble to find a replacement was tenser and more exciting than almost any other combat in any game I've played this year. The first time I saw one of the bigger enemies pick up a smaller one, and throw it at me as an attack, I was cackling with laughter, because anything felt like it was possible, and I was loving every second of it.

It's a game where the simple act of discovering a village for the first time, hearing those faint notes of music grow louder as I approach, until it becomes the full song as I enter it, walking about, seeing people going about their lives, just made something swell up in me. It's such a charming, wonderful game. So much personality wrapped up in the people, in the towns, in almost every corner of the world. Like Kass, the bird man who has an odd habit of playing his accordion right around the areas with Shrine puzzles to solve. Like hearing the faint music of a town start to play, hearing him serves a purpose in directing you toward the puzzle, but does so in an organic, charming way.

I mentioned vistas when talking about other games this year, but none of them made vistas important like Breath of the Wild did. Not only are the views breathtaking, but they're vital for traversing the world. Every mountaintop, every tower, even every little hill, feels like it's placed exactly so you'll spot something in the distance. Another Shrine, a suspicious collection of rocks, a stable, or maybe a monster camp.

And yet, while all this was engineered with exact sight lines in mind, it never feels like an artificial world. It feels real. It feels like a real world ravaged by war, but also one that is trying to regrow. The hills, mountains, and forests all feel like places that could really be in this world. But not just a real world, a mysterious world. What happened at this wall to cause all these robotic Guardians to break down? How was this village destroyed? What happened to split this mountain in two, directly down the middle?

The game doesn't even try to answer all of these questions, but that's not important. It's the questions that matter. I've spent hundreds of hours exploring plenty of open world games over the years, but none have made me feel so much wonder as this one has. None have felt so organic, so magical, or so real.

The mark of a truly great game, one that left an impact on me like few have, is that while I've been writing and thinking about it again, I just want to go back in and play it all again. The whole thing. Even all those times it rained, as it feels like I'm the only person on the planet that didn't mind the rain (I know I'm not actually alone, but still). I'm just saying, sitting in one spot waiting for it to stop instead of going around and searching for an alternate route up, which I almost always found, was a better way to deal with it.

Breath of the Wild certainly has issues. Like Yakuza 0, it ain't great with LGBT related stuff, specifically the "man disguised as a woman" bit around getting the Gerudo outfit. The dungeons are repetitive, and too short. There are multiple stealth sequences that brutally punish detection, and they're terrible. The story, even by Zelda standards, isn't great, and the voice acting often can't even manage to be laughably bad. But most of those things (aside from that awful stealth) don't detract from sense of wonder and amazement the game gave me. It made me feel like a kid again, even though I know the games back then weren't a fraction of what this game is in scope, or to be frank, quality.

And part of me fears it'll be a long time before we get another game like this. I don't mean literally like this, as I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo was literally making "Breath of the Wild 2." I mean a game that unlocks this sense of wonder that I haven't felt in so long. I don't think a straight sequel doing more of the same could do that again. But who knows! I've certainly been wrong before.

All I do know, is that I loved Breath of the Wild, with all of my heart. No game could topple it from my number one spot. And it was well deserved, too.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild also wins:

• Best Dogs.

• Best Bear and Deer Riding Simulation.

• Big Bo Presents Year of the Bow Bow Slow Motion of the Year.

• Best Adventuring.

• Best World.

• Best Art/Visual Design.

• Best Sound Design.

• Best Puzzling.

• Best Do Rag.

• Best Use of Music.

• Best Mountains that I Could See and then Go To.

With the awards out of the way, let me just take a moment to probably be very wrong yet again! It's a silly thing, but I like writing out predictions for the following year, and here they are!

10^th Annual Moosies Game of the Year Prediction: Red Dead Redemption 2.

2018 doesn't really have anything that jumps out at me as an obvious game of the year pick for me, at least not like 2017 did with Breath of the Wild. But of what I know of coming out next year, this one seems like a plausible choice. Speaking of...

Red Dead Redemption 2 gets delayed to Fall 2018.

Have they even given a tentative time frame beyond the year? Am I just assuming they said Spring? Early summer is probably most likely, but sometimes I like to aim high with my predictions.

Still no F-Zero. Somewhere a literal falcon dies of sadness over this.

Rest in peace, Falcon.

From Software's new game is Tenchu in name, but plays more like Dark Souls than anything else. Is still fantastic.

This one I actually don't want to be true, because I'm not exactly thrilled with From making a new Tenchu, of all things. Give me Samurai Bloodborne. Actually, I'd probably rather they do something entirely new instead, I dunno.

EA learns nothing from this year, and its games only have more microtransactions. Anthem's commercial failure because of them leads to BioWare's closing.

Another I hope is wrong.

Many governments attempt to regulate loot boxes, but loopholes persist.

The early inklings of this are starting to happen already, at least outside of China, where there's already some rule in place (with loopholes). Anyone's guess as to if anything will come of it.

Yet another Death Stranding trailer, this time with actual game play. It just looks like MGSV, but strange and with chords.

Listen, even if we'll never get another proper MGS game that pushes what (2015 Moosies GOTY, and "almost the greatest game ever made" according to Brad Shoemaker) MGSV did in terms of mission design, and all that, can't I just have a little hope Death Stranding might attempt it? Actually, since I still think this game won't release before 2020, the biggest reason I'd have to doubt this prediction would be them actually showing any game play next year.

Destiny 2 has a big expansion that everyone loves, but it requires you own the bad ones, so I end up missing it out of spite, just like with Destiny 1.

If we don't learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. That's a quote someone said once, right? Something like that?

Nintendo continues to make bizarre blunders, but sells exceptionally well.

Two questions stick in my head regarding the Switch. The first is how long can they maintain these sales. The Wii sold phenomenally well too, remember. But that eventually fell off a cliff (granted after many more than what Switch has now), and now we just look back at that as a weird gimmick (even if VR seems to be revolving around the latest evolution of what Nintendo started with motion controls).

The other question is if they'll do hardware revisions of the Switch. That's something they usually don't do with consoles, but do almost constantly with handhelds. And I don't know if that'd be a smart move or not. Nintendo's weird.

Shenmue III still not released.

Listen, I needed one easy prediction here so I would have at least ONE I got right.

Vib-Ribbon and Spyro become the next PS1 games to get inexplicable PS4 remasters.

Crash remake sold really well. Just saying!

Thank you for reading! I know I don't write on here as often as I used to, but I'm glad to have people read it when I do. Can't guarantee I'll have anything else to write any time soon, but this ended up longer than I expected, so hopefully that's enough for you! And, hopefully, you all have a wonderful day.

Just a few days ago, the third and final episode of Life is Strange: Before the Storm was released. And while everyone else is either writing up their game of the year lists, or not writing at all, I have found myself compelled to write about Before the Storm. There's going to be SPOILERS, for it and original Life is Strange, so here's your warning. Go play it, the first two episodes are fantastic, but episode 3 has problems. I'll get to that soon enough.

In particular, I wanted to write about how the game handles queer characters, and queerness in general. As a queer person (I'm bi, and nonbinary in terms of gender, fyi), to say I have some thoughts on it is putting it lightly.

Generally, I have a lot of thoughts about how media, and specifically video games, deals with LGBT+ characters and themes. In terms of bigger budget games, that basically amounts to a whole lot of nothing. The best you can usually hope for are queer romance options in BioWare games, which is a whole other topic. But just as often what you get is Watch_Dogs 2, where they cast a cisgender man as a transgender woman. Usually if you want games about these sorts of things, you need to look at the indie scene, and when I say that, I mean the indie scene of games most people don't even hear about. Not the bigger stuff that ends up on consoles and played by people like myself.

And that brings me to Before the Storm. A prequel to a game that was, if I'm being polite, "hesitant" to make its characters openly queer, and instead was happy to just imply it. But, one thing I thought was obvious in the original Life is Strange was that Chloe and Rachel were romantically involved. That relationship, and specifically how it began, is the focus on Before the Storm, so from the outset, I was curious how it would be handled.

I was surprised. Not so much at what was in the game, but how much I related to it. It's not really something I can remember any other game making me feel. For as different as Chloe is from me, I still saw more of myself in her than any other character in a game, in recent memory, at least. She's brash, outspoken, rebellious. When I was her age, I was quiet, reserved, and content to just stay holed up on my own, letting the world go by.

The thing I saw in Chloe, that I see in myself at that age, and really, through most of my life, is that combination of not knowing where your place in the world is, just that it isn't here, and...loneliness. The difference between her and me is that she tried to hide it behind rebellion, and being an 'insufferable teen,' whereas I hid it by, well, hiding away in my room. Maybe our reasons were different, I've been fortunate to not have to deal with the loss of a family member like Chloe, but I couldn't help but see myself in Chloe. Both of us just hiding our actual problems, going about our lives with our very small number of friends, pretending like nothing is wrong.

But then when she meets Rachel, and then sees her again at school, everything changes. Chloe lights up, and almost becomes another person. She goes from rebellion for the sake of rebellion, to actually feeling like she has, if not a place in the world, then at least someone to share it with. Someone to discover the world with, and discover herself with. Someone to help through her the rough times in life, and someone she could help through the rough times in life.

I never had a "Rachel." Maybe a few people who could've been, had things worked out differently. Instead I'm left to live vicariously through things like this. Feeling what I've come to call "lesbian envy," because I can never take anything seriously, even now. But, even without a literal version of her in my life, I can still relate to Chloe. She just had the opportunity to discover herself through a teenage love instead of thinking too much about Metal Gear's queer characters one night. She got to share a truly beautiful moment on stage with her love, and follow it up with a first kiss, rather than being left with the memories of a few lost friends, like me.

To get away from me not so subtly complaining about my life, that realization, and feeling it come so clearly into focus is something I relate to completely. Going from being stuck in a rut, not knowing what's wrong, just that something is wrong, to having it all make perfect sense? I've never seen a game capture that part of being queer so perfectly, and again, beautifully.

It's not just that the game has these things, it's that it does them better than I'm capable of conveying in text here. The writing, performances, music choices, plot beats, all line up perfectly in those first two episodes to create a truly magical, wonderful thing. Even when things go wrong for them, they still go wrong in ways that I can feel deep inside. That awkward dinner with Rachel's parents is unlike anything I've seen in a game, but I've had dinners in real life that felt like that, even if the reasons why were different.

Which is why episode 3 was such a disappointment. It takes all those good, warm and fuzzy queer feelings, and chucks them to the side to focus on Rachel wanting to reunite with her birth mother, Sera. Focusing the plot on that is fine, but that then quickly turns into a bizarre hostage and ransom situation, and sidelines Rachel into the hospital while Chloe goes off on her own. But the real problem, the real knife in the gut, that made me wonder if the developers actually understood what they made at all, came after the credits.

After the final choice, and after a montage of Chloe and Rachel doing stuff, the credits roll. Then after the game shows the stats of what everyone else did, there's a stinger. First it's just more of Chloe and Rachel, in a photo booth, laughing and having fun. Then it cuts to Rachel's phone, getting a call from Chloe, in Jefferson's photo dungeon from Life is Strange.

I haven't been this angry at a game in a long time. Here was this game, that for the first two episodes, felt like it understood what it was like to be queer, and to realize you're queer better than any game I've played. Sure, it got sidelined a bit in episode 3 to focus on a ginned up, thrown together feeling story, but I could slough that off as probably due to time constraints, cuts, or any number of things.

But this? This was just cruel. Not only did they not hesitate to take away the happiness I so desperately want those characters to have, they had to go about it by reminding me of one of the worst parts of Life is Strange. They had do it while reinforcing that terrible sad/dead lesbian trope. Do they actually understand what it's like to be queer, or do they just want to make people like me attached, and then twist the knife in, as if suffering is the ultimate art form?

And after thinking about it more, I found more to pick apart about the game as a whole. In particular, here's a quote from Zak Garriss, the lead writer on the game, when being asked about Chloe.

"to me, chloe is gay. but other players might make different choices and have different interpretations, and I want to respect that."

Now, on the surface, nothing wrong with that. But it brings me to my next issue. When I played Life is Strange, or even when I first experienced it through GB East's play through (I was in no place to be playing a game involving suicide on my own at that point in my life), there was no doubt in my mind that Chloe and Rachel were queer, and in a relationship. Just like I had no doubt Max and Chloe were developing similar feelings for each other. The fact that the developers chose to value player choice over making them explicitly queer is disappointing.

Player choice is important in a lot of games, but I think having explicitly queer characters is more important. This isn't Fallout, where the character is a blank slate. This is an established character that means something to me. I haven't felt this way about a game because I've never played a game this openly queer, and this accurately queer (which is a bizarre combination of words). Maybe that's partly on me for the sorts of games I tend to play, but it's not the least bit unreasonable to want to see more queer representation in the games I play.

Otherwise, it just leads to situations like episode 3, where aside from a goodnight kiss on the cheek, there's really nothing to indicate that they're in that sort of relationship. The first two episodes felt like they were written with them being queer as a focal point, but that feels forgotten in the third. Because of player choice, and letting people choose not to pursue romance, they had to write that episode ambiguously. Rather, they didn't have to, they chose to. And instead of exploring that relationship in greater detail, they chose let being straight be the default, like so many other things in life.

Yes, the queer stuff is still in those first two episodes, having the choice to do otherwise doesn't erase that. But making it clear says more. It says that the developers realize this stuff is important, and that it's an actual focus for them. That it matters. That people like me matter, rather than just being a choice in a game that some people won't choose.

Sure, discovering my sexuality through a Metal Gear vampire is a funny story I can tell now, but I've spent my entire life thinking I hated romance in stories because of the romance itself, not because it's just that straight people are boring. Like so many before me, I've had to cling onto little scraps because that's all there is, and frankly, I'm sick of it.

We deserve better. We deserve better than a small handful of games throwing us scraps, only to reveal they were poisoned to begin with. We deserve big dumb blockbuster games that just happen to be starring queer people as much as we deserve small, heartwarming experiences like the first two episodes of Before the Storm.

I don't deserve to feel my heart break when I realize people care more about suffering in art than in actual, good representation.

Maybe the worst part, if the internet is to be believed, is this wasn't the original plan. Like anything, it's to be taken with a grain of salt, but it sounds like a substantial amount of stuff was cut, or changed in episode 3. You can read it for yourselves, and decide on your own if it's true. To me, it reads as much like a fan wish list of improvements, but who knows. Outside of giving Sera magic powers, those all seem like improvements to me. If it is true, it would have been nice if further exploring that relationship got the focus, instead of the rushed hostage story. But I've already speculated more than I should.

So where does that leave me with Before the Storm? As bad as episode 3 gets, especially after the credits, it still doesn't change how the first two episodes made me feel. And the third one still has some good moments in it, even if none of them come close to Chloe and Rachel sharing the stage in The Tempest. It's a beautiful, heartwarming game full of cute, funny, nice moments. It's a game that isn't afraid to let you just sit, and think. It understands what it's like at that stage of life, what it's like to make a life changing realization about yourself, and just how powerful and magical that can be. It made me feel a very specific emotion whenever I hear a specific, corny country song, and I never thought that would happen to me.

It's also a game that took its last, final moment, to twist that knife back in.

If nothing else, it's only helped galvanize my feelings about the importance of representation, and that we need more, and better. And that's not something I'm giving up on.

Thank you for reading.

Hey! Been a...few months, hasn't it? I've still been playing the video games, just not writing about them. Been writing other stuff. What other stuff? Shush, you, don't worry about that. Anyway, even though there's a couple games in here that I probably could go and blabber on about forever, I'm "trying" to keep this relatively short, but as always, I wrote this before the rest of the blog, so forgive me if I went a little overboard.

PS+ Catch Up?

Downwell

Downwell is a lot of fun, it turns out. Of all the procedural start over after dying games that I've played in recent years (not nearly as many as a lot of people), I'd say this one is my second favorite. After, of course, Spelunky. I've yet to actually finish Downwell, but I'm going to keep at it. It's a good podcast game, too. Sometimes I feel like I actually do better in Downwell whilst listening to a podcast than just focusing solely on the game.

Until Dawn.

While I don't really enjoy horror movies, at all, I did like Until Dawn. Of course, like when I played Life is Strange earlier in the summer, I had already seen Giant Bomb easy play this game two years ago, but it was still a fun time.

Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry.

Assassin's Creedom Cry (sorry) was...disappointing. At least in the context of playing it in 2017. Despite having a premise ripe for exploration in games (being a free pirate of color in the Caribbean during the height of the slave trade in the region), the game just drops the ball during just about every mission in the game. It leans hard on the stuff that everyone hates about AC. Eavesdropping, tailing, mission failures upon being detected, you name it. And since it was originally DLC for AC IV, it really feels like a slapdash project that doesn't have nearly enough, or good enough story to make up for the game play shortcomings. And that's a bummer, because Adéwalé is a good character who deserved better from his one shot at having his own game. He's certainly a better realized character than Connor from III.

Just Cause 3.

I need to state a couple things up front: There have been other PS+ games more worth talking about than this one, and I did not play much of this game. But, even after hearing everything I did about the technical issues Just Cause 3 has, I still wasn't prepared. And somehow, as bad as the framerate is, that wasn't even the thing that made me stop playing Just Cause 3. No, that was the game disconnecting from Square Enix, then forcing me to stop whatever I had been doing any time I brought up the map while it tried to connect. The lack of a satisfactory offline mode, where this isn't an issue, or having servers that actually work made the game borderline unplayable at times. If the rest of the game had been great, I'd have put up with it, but not when it seemed mediocre at best. Speaking off...

Mass Effect Andromeda (free trial).

Note the "(free trial)" there. I didn't play the full game. In fact, I didn't even play the full free trial. If you didn't know, there's a free trial that let's you play up to ten hours of Mass Effect Andromeda. Ten hours of the final game, so far as I could tell, because I certainly had to download the full game. But, I didn't make it ten hours into Andromeda. I barely made it one hour, honestly. I got through that very first tutorial mission on the planet, but it just made me feel sad, so I stopped.

Even the one part of the game that I heard defenders of Andromeda bring up the most, the combat, just didn't feel right to me. I'm willing to let "it gets better later on" slide, because it seems like it would with more powers and the like, but the lack of a hard cover system like 2 and 3 had just made it feel...I don't know how to describe it. Too loose? Anyway, it was a good reminder that if a game is going to have an explicit cover system, it should probably have a button to enter cover. I would even go so far as to say the button-less cover in Mass Effect 1 felt better than this did. But that had sort of the opposite problem, where it was too...sticky(?) for a system that didn't have a button tied to it.

Some time later I deleted it off my PS4 to clear space on the hard drive. Finally at the point where my 2TB drive was almost full. Which, speaking of, I need to air a complaint about that. I kept running into instances where I had around 100GB free on the drive, but then games were refusing to download patches because of lack of space! Not all of them, but I ran into that with DOOM at one point. I'm far from an expert on these things, but you'd think that having 100GB free would be more than enough for patches that aren't nearly that big in size. But, again, I don't know how this stuff works.

And now some games I actually paid money for!

NieR Automata.

Remember when I said there were some games in here that I could go on and on about if I really wanted to? Yup. I think Automata has its issues, but the things it does well more than make up for them. The music, combat, themes, everything just adds up to this really unique experience that will stick with me for a long time. Even the characters grew on me to the point that by the time the game wanted me to be attached to them, I was attached to them. Of course, had I actually played the first NieR, instead of watching the story on YouTube, maybe this wouldn't feel quite as unique, but I can't go back and undo that mistake now.

You know, I probably should give this game a proper, full write up, going into spoilers and such. Maybe after I get the Platinum Trophy, I'll find the time to do that. I certainly have more than enough time, just a matter of spending it on that instead of my other writing, or a certain other game I'll get to soon enough. Oh, and I mean getting all the Trophies the actual way, and not spending in game money on them. Partly because I already spent all my in game money buying things to upgrade weapons.

But, for now, I'm just going to give a brief anecdote about a side quest I did in the game.

In a forest, I found a lone machine who had taken to caring for wild animals. The animals, of course, being enormous boars and majestic moose (also the moose riding is great). One time, a moose had fallen ill, so the machine wanted me to help "repair" it. After explaining to the machine that animals can't be repaired in the same way that machines can, the heroes of this story set out to acquire either medicine, or a formula with which to make medicine for the moose. After a somewhat comical scene where they find a medicinal book, only to learn a Pod companion already had the book's contents in its memory banks, they return, and teach the machine how to brew the medicine. The moose heals, and all is well.

Then, the machine has a revelation: The bodies of animals, while inconvenient, have something the machines don't: Warmth.

And I've never empathized with a fetch quest more in my entire life.

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy.

Hey, you know what? Naughty Dog went and made another great Uncharted game! Most of it is just the same Uncharted that I know and love, but of note is the more open ended section of the game. It's not doing anything revolutionary, or new for video games as a whole (it quite literally includes climbing a tower to mark things on a map), but it is a great change of pace for Uncharted. And it makes me wonder if any of this will find its way into The Last of Us Part II. I don't just mean having more open areas, I wonder if that game will have actual driving in it. Or, what if they went full open world? I can't imagine it'd be a huge world, but I would love to see their take on that sort of game. Rather than just having an open ended section in the middle of a game, and the rest being typical Uncharted fair.

And that's not a slight against the game, because it's some of the best Uncharted out there. It's short. I beat it, doing almost everything in it (I missed some treasures, optional conversations, and pictures (which I should look up where to find and then find them)) in under eight hours. But, unlike Uncharted 4, Lost Legacy never drags, or feels padded out. Between the two, I'd still say 4 is my favorite, because of the story, but Lost Legacy is probably a better game because of that tighter, more focused pace. It's just hard to compete with a game that tugs on the nostalgia heartstrings like Uncharted 4 did with me.

On top of that, I think LL has the best end action sequence of the series. In some ways, it feels like a mash-up "Best of" Uncharted action sequences, with a combination of (action set-piece SPOILERS) Uncharted 2's train and Uncharted 4's jeep chase, but it works, and it's a thrilling end to a great game.

And, frankly, I like Claudia Black as an actress, so I was happy just to have more of her as Chloe. One of my only complaints about the story end of U4 was that she wasn't in it, but getting her own game was more than enough to make up for that. Especially since it's a great game, and greater for having her at the center. There's an alternate universe where Naughty Dog gave Sam Drake a spin-off game instead of Chloe, but between this game and that theoretical one, I'm glad we got this one. Besides, the way these things go, he'll probably get his own game eventually, for better or (more likely), worse. I'd rather the Uncharted series either stick with Chloe, or take a long break before coming back with something substantially different, but long breaks aren't how the capitalist hellscape works.

Destiny 2.

Long time readers may remember my time with Destiny the First a few years ago. That was a game I played too much of in too short a period of time. I greatly enjoyed it, despite of its flaws, but burned out on it once I completed the first raid, The Vault of Glass (after several failed attempts), and got only a Shader to show for it. I played the House of Wolves expansion (thanks to getting a free code from a too generous friend), which helped me out of that "I never want to play this game again" mindset, and would have played The Taken King if it hadn't required I buy The Dark Below expansion (widely regarded as being bad) to even access The Taken King content.

So, here we are years later, with Destiny 2. And you know what? Not only is it a better game in almost every way, but it's a better game in ways that feel like it was designed to prevent idiots like me from playing it so obsessively that we burn out on it and never want to play it again. Instead of having to spend hours and hours grinding on planets for Relic Iron and Helium Filaments to upgrade weapons, I can play when I want, for fun! Spend an afternoon playing with friends, then take a day off to go for a jaunt through Uncharted, and come back not feeling like I've fallen (pun) behind on the grinding I should have been doing. It's fantastic, because it's a better playing game in terms of class abilities, enemies, and really just in general, but it's also a better balanced game.

And the campaign is pretty good! The story, while certainly coherent and follow-able, doesn't quite have the fever dream mystique of the first game, but the missions feel more like missions from a regular shooter, and I like that a lot. More so than almost all of Destiny 1, this feels like a campaign made by the people that made Halo. That's not to say this feels like Bungie's version of Halo 4, but it's more along those lines than Destiny 1 was.

On top of that, Destiny 2 has a lot of really good side quests, called Adventures, to do in the patrol zones. The game still has the generic, repeatable patrol missions, but all the Adventures have some voice acting and story attached to them, and from what I've seen, they all seem like they're worth doing, at least from the point of view of consuming content. Which, as we know, is the ultimate goal of every human in the twenty-first century. If one's goal was simply to get to the level cap, and get the best gear, then there comes in the problem with the Adventures, and really a lot of Destiny 2 in general. It doesn't take that long to get to the max level of 20, and it doesn't take that long after that to out level most of the Adventures in Destiny 2, which can put you in a spot where you have a lot of fun side quests to do, but none of them give any loot that is worth equipping. I don't mind that, because I'm playing more for fun than the loot grind (as much as I also want that loot), but it'd be nice if the game had an option for more difficult versions of the adventures that gave better rewards. Destiny 1 had different difficulties for its story missions, and that Destiny 2 lacks that, or anything similar for this content is a little odd.

Then there's the Shaders, which really feel like one step forward, but two steps back. In Destiny 1, a Shader would color coordinate all your armor, and you could swap between them whenever you wanted. In Destiny 2, a Shader can only be applied to one piece of armor, or a weapon, which gives more depth to the customization. Now, for my money, I trust Bungie's artists more than I do myself to make my character look decent, but more customization is rarely a bad thing in games. The problem is that Bungie and Activision don't just want my figurative money on this, they want my actual money. And after spending $60 on the game (which I don't regret, it's worth it for me), I'm not spending real money on digital loot boxes with the hope of getting the Shaders I want. Because, dear reader, Shaders are single use items. Once applied, that Shader is gone. Oh, but don't worry, they come in packs of three. Not four, like the number of armor items you have in Destiny, three.

And the response when asked about this new system? Well, the people at Bungie expect players to want to grind stuff like the Raid for Shaders. Remind you of anything? Like, let's say, when I quit the first game because all I got from a Raid was a Shader?!? But, to be fair, at least Shaders do drop frequently in Destiny 2, and if the Shader you want happens to be one of the handful of things being sold for one of the in game currencies during a given week, you can buy them that way too. I may or may not have done that this past weekend because I had a lot of Bright Dust, and wanted to stock up. Don't judge me, it was fake money.

Also a complaint I have about the cosmetic end of Destiny 2 is that there's still no way to change the look of your character after character creation. I know it's primarily a first person game, and even when it goes to third person (which is frequent), aside from social spaces, your character always has a helmet on, and aside from gender, all you can change is your character's head. In a sci-fi game filled with as much space magic as there is, there's no good reason to not be able to change your character's appearance after the fact.

Especially when you're me and you don't realize your character looks dumb until a couple hours into the game, at which point I don't want to go and start over again, especially when I'm just as likely to have the same outcome. And it's not just the face, being locked into one of two genders is frustrating too. But, hey, I don't want to turn this into a treatise on the nature of gender and whatnot. But again, if I can play a space magic warlock android, I should be able to at least change the color of the paint job on my space magic warlock android.

My last big complaint is around the Strikes. Not that the Strikes are bad, aside from one all the ones I've played have been great. The problem is that there's no way to pick which one you're going to do, which Destiny 1 did. I think I've done all the Strikes in Destiny 2, but without having a list of them in game, I don't know for sure. Yes, I know I could look them up online, but there should be a way to see them all in game. And, especially if I'm in a full group of three people, we should be able to play whichever one we want. Or be able to not do that one with the tedious invisible boss at the end. I know that, like in Destiny 1, I'd end up using the Strike playlist more than picking a particular Strike, but that's beside the point. The option was there in the first game, and it being gone here is strange.

Complaints aside I'm really enjoying it, and the way things are going, I feel confident this isn't going to end up backfiring on me like the first game did. I am still hopeful to find a group to do the raid with, but who knows if that'll come together or not. I'd rather not have to resort to doing it with a group of all people I don't know, is the thing. Specifically because Destiny raids require so much coordination, and thus talking, that I wouldn't want to do that unless there was at least one actual friend of mine in on it too. But even if I never get around to doing the raid, I'm still loving the game, and look forward to playing a good chunk more of it. Here's hoping the expansions are good, and that if they aren't all worth playing, I don't have to buy the bad ones to play the good ones.

Anything else?

In terms of games, not at the moment. Next up for me is definitely Wolfenstein II, which is a game that I think we need now, more than ever. I'm also still hopeful for Assassin's Creed: Origins, and I'm sure Super Mario Odyssey will be splendid. But there's basically zero chance I get a Switch this year, so I'll be waiting on that.

There was that big update for No Man's Sky, which added a story, and while you might think that, given my enjoyment of that game (despite some issues with some changes made in a previous patch), that I'd have played this story. I started to, but then got distracted, so I stopped early in it. I do want to get back to it eventually. I'm sure I will.

I got grill-dad 76 during the Overwatch Summer Event. Nothing else to say in terms of me playing Overwatch. Still enjoy that game, but at this point I really only play it around the big events, or when new characters get added. Especially now that I have Destiny 2, which has enjoyable PvP, even if I'd still rather play Overwatch of Titanfall 2, were it not for getting loot.

I really have no idea when the next time I'll write something here is. I'm sorry I haven't been writing as much as I used to, but that's how these things go. Even if I don't get around to another regular blog before the end of the year (a possibility when there's three month gaps between when I post here), I will definitely have something up for Game of the Year time. I know it's weird to be promising that in September, but hey! Better early than never? Thanks for reading!

I haven't written a ton of stuff so far this year, and when I have, it's been about the bigger games I've played. Breath of the Wild, Horizon, Prey, those sorts of games. Because I've neglected to write about the other games I've played this year, the ones I didn't really have expansive thoughts about, I'm writing about them all here. No deep dives, just shallow swims. That, and my hot take on the Electronic Entertainment Exposition from this year. Plus some stuff on No Man's Sky and Overwatch because of course.

No Man's Sky.

You might recall that I've played a decent amount of the game. Not really sure how much, because it doesn't have an in game timer (that I know of), but it's been a lot. It's a good podcast game, it turns out. Or, at least it was for a few months there. After the last big update hit the game (and I continued to play more than I should have), I think the game actually got worse. Or at least I really didn't care for some of what was changed.

The biggest additions in the update were the ground vehicles. They're fine on their own, there just isn't much use for them, and they're too resource intensive to use. In true NMS fashion, you need to build new ones every time you want to use them on a new planet, and of course they come without any upgrades, which you also would need to build. Once you have them, they can be fun to zoom around in (except for the hover vehicle, which can't strafe, like say the Ghosts in Halo), but they're still not as effective at covering lots of ground as the ships are. You could mine stuff along the way, but most worthwhile mining spots are visible when flying, so that's not especially useful. It needs to be fueled like the ship too, so no advantage there.

Then there's the nanites. Originally in NMS, blueprints for upgrades were found all over the place, and were usually random as to what you'd get. It was far from perfect, but it encouraged looting stuff for those blueprints. Now, almost everything that used to give a blueprint gives nanites instead, which can then be spent to buy blueprints on space stations (and maybe elsewhere). This sounds better on paper, but in practice every time I've gone to one of those shops to buy blueprints, they never have anything I wanted. It was either new types of weapons for the ship (which I didn't want because I already had the lock-on lasers), or it was stuff I already had. And it's not like they all have the same selection of stuff for sale. Each one only sells five or six at a time. On top of all that, the nanites take up room in the inventory, which is just one more thing to have to manage.

But my biggest problem is the change to how the crashed ships work. Before, all you needed to do was repair some broken systems, like the launch thrusters or warp drive, and it was good as new. On top of that, they usually had a slightly bigger inventory than your current ship. Now, after changes to how the ships work in general with regard to inventory and stats, they come with a huge downside. Many of the inventory slots in crashed ships are broken, and need to be repaired. However, they aren't repaired by spending a flat amount of a resource on each slot. Instead, they cost money, and the cost increases for each slot. Meaning by the time you get the inventory fully repaired, you'd have spent as much, if not more than if you had bought the same ship from a trader on a station.

The end result of the nanites, and the changes to the crashed ships meant that I had little to no reason to partake in those "activities." That means even less variety in what I was doing, which meant I finally stopped playing NMS. Now, maybe some of that stuff was changed since I played, or maybe the next big update will improve those systems. Either way, I think I'm finally done with NMS. I wish I left that game on better terms than I did.

Quick Overwatch Update:

I played a bunch of it during the Anniversary Event, and got some skins! Still a fun game.

Quick Titanfall 2 Update:

Also still a fun game! I keep thinking they've put out that horde mode equivalent, but they haven't yet. That new Titan is cool, though. I like the idea of upgrading it mid-match, and being able to pop a full shield repeatedly after fully upgrading it is rad. That's also likely because so much is going on that I might not be paying as close attention as I should be, to be fair.

Nioh.

I was originally intending to give Nioh a proper write up, but between what I wrote about the demos last year, I didn't have a ton of new things to say. It's a fun game, and I think the core combat is great. I really wish there was more variety in the enemies, because most of them are some variant on dudes with weapons. Some are regular humans, some are skeletons, and some are demons, but they're still humanoids with weapons. Sure, there's spiders, blobs, and a couple other oddballs like umbrellas, but there's far too much repetition for a game as long as Nioh (around 50 hours for me, having done most of the side stuff).

Nioh, being set in olde timey Japan, did get me to go watch some videos about olde timey Japan. A large portion of its story is centered around an ongoing war at the time, and my curiosity as to how accurate that stuff was to the real thing got the better of me. And it turns out it's actually a lot more accurate than I would have expected, at least based on what I saw online (which I admit was really just an overview of the broad events). There weren't any demons, or anything like that, but everything else seemed pretty close.

Anyway, I enjoyed my time with Nioh, and I'd recommend it if you have an itch for Souls-ish combat (though not really most of the rest of the Souls games) and don't mind some repetition in the enemies you fight. There's an eyepatch wearing ghost cat.

VVVVVV.

Surprisingly, I hadn't actually ever played VVVVVV until this year. Not really sure how that happened, but it is what it is. The main mechanic of switching gravity between up and down instead of jumping is neat, and the game has some clever ways of keeping that fresh throughout. It's also super difficult in spots, which I think kinda hurt my overall experience with it, but I did enjoy it more often than not.

PS+ Catch Up.

Now I'm getting into the PS+ games I've played this year. This is not every PS+ game released so far this year, nor is it every one I've played. Some I only played very briefly, some I didn't play because they're PS3 games and I wish Sony would stop including those in Plus and have more/better PS4 games instead, and some don't deserve to even be mentioned here because they made me very annoyed, David Jaffe.

Titan Souls.

This one is a fun, though very challenging series of boss fights using only a magic bow and arrow. Specifically just the one arrow, because once it's shot, the shoot button pulls it back in. This locks the character in place, but the arrow can still hit the bosses whilst returning, which is a neat mechanic. The character dies in one hit, as do most of the bosses, which gives the fights a different feel from most other games I've played. Some can end in an instant, even if that instant came after many failed attempts.

If I have any complaint about the game, it's that it takes too long to retry bosses after dying. It doesn't respawn you in the boss rooms, instead at a checkpoint in each area, like a Souls game. But unlike those games, there's no enemies to fight along the way, so all it does is waste time. Death comes so quickly in Titan Souls that retrying bosses should be equally quick. The old Meat Boy/Trials design philosophy regarding instant restarts would have been greatly appreciated here.

Though I almost gave up on the game several times because of getting stuck on some bosses (which I eventually conquered all of), I did finish it, and overall enjoy my time. It's a fun game.

LittleBigPlanet 3.

I really enjoyed my time with the first two LBP games. So much so that before I even played LBP3, I went and bought the MGSV costume DLC because it was on sale, and I specifically remember playing much of LBP 1, and all of LBP 2 with the Old Snake costume. Those costumes are certainly good, and enhanced my experience with 3. That said, I was a bit disappointed with the game itself. It still has the same charm that the first two had, and there's some fun to be had, but it's really short, and most of what's new isn't that great.

In my memory, the first two LBP's were lengthy games, full of enjoyable platforming throughout. My memory has been proven wrong many times before, so don't trust me there. In my mind, at least, they were full length games, whereas LBP 3 feels like the developers wanted to demonstrate all the new mechanics, and just ended the game once they had run out of that stuff. That's not fair, it does build to a big conclusion, but that last level is also the hardest/worst in the game, and I was glad to be done with the game by the time I was. That's never a good feeling.

There's new characters, which all play differently from the Sack-folk (I'm glad the game seems to have tried to move away from gendering them with "Sack-boy," even if I dressed mine up as Punished "Venom" Sack). There's a dog (I forget its name because I used a D-Dog skin and just called it DD), one that can switch from big to small (this one got a Revolver Ocelot costume), and a bird, which I gave a Dragon Age outfit instead of the Quiet one, because I guess I got the Dragon Age DLC free for owning Inquisition. The dog is the only one I enjoyed playing, because it's fast, and can wall jump. More fun than the Sack people, honestly.

LBP 3 also has top down stuff, rather than just side scrolling, which is neat, but not really used much in the story. I'm sure there's ample user levels that use it splendidly, but I didn't spend as much time playing user levels as I probably should have. Maybe I'll get back to that some day.

Anyway, LBP 3 is fine, but my least favorite of them. If an LBP 4 ever exists, which it will because video games are still a business, I hope some significant changes are made and the story stuff is...better.

Not A Hero.

Not A Hero sees a murderous rabbit (or guy in a rabbit suit, I'm not sure) hiring British thugs to murder crime across London(?) in a bid to wipe out crime for his mayoral election. It's a fun side scrolling action game, with some good variety in how the characters play. I'm not really a fan of the game's sense of humor, and I think parts of it might be kinda racist (but it's been a while since I played the game so I don't really remember), but the shooting is fun. Not much else to say about it.

Lumo.

Lumo is a bit of an isometric platformer adventure game, and there's some neat stuff in the game. I didn't finish it, because I felt like it was starting to rely too much on precision platforming that the game didn't really do especially well, but I did enjoy a lot of what I played. Maybe I'll finish it eventually.

Tearaway Unfolded.

I also didn't finish this game, but that was because I got bored with this one. It's also kind of an adventure platformer, and like LBP, it has a cute craft-y aesthetic. It just couldn't hold my attention after the first couple hours, which is saying something because I have way too much free time, and it takes a lot to get me to stop playing something once I get more than an hour into it.

Type: Rider.

This one I did finish! Type: Rider is a game about a spunky little umlaut (it's probably a sideways colon) rolling its way through the history of typography. It's an odd premise for a game, but the different eras of fonts do lead to decent visual variety in the levels, and the game ended before I got tired of it. Though, I'm pretty sure there's a (not so) secret final level that I didn't get access to because I missed some collectibles. I didn't like it enough to go back and try to find all of those. It's neat, but not anything especially memorable.

Abzû.

This game is an Abzûlute delight. It's beautiful, fun to swim around in, and this will sound repetitive, but delightful. There really isn't a whole lot to it, but I quite enjoyed it.

Life is Strange.

Being the Giant Bomb hashtag content fiend that I am, I watched Vinny, Austin, and Alex play through Life is Strange back in 2015, so I already knew what happened. This gave me a chance to relive that game, and get a bunch of easy Trophies (they're all for completing episodes of the game and taking pictures), so I played it. Aside from some of the dialog sounding more like what adults think teens sound like than what teens actually sound like (not that I'd know, I'm no teen), and my still not caring for the final choice of the game, I really like Life is Strange. I guess I should say why I don't like the final choice? Okay, mega SPOILERS.

Like I said, there were other PS+ games I played, but I don't really think I played enough of any of them to have anything worth saying. And really, I didn't have anything worth saying about Abzû, but I really liked it, so I wanted to convey that. Killing Floor 2 seems like it'd be fun if you had people to play it with, but my internet associates and myself are bad at coordinating. Probably the same for that Disc Jam game. But now, onto E3!

E3!!

This year's E3 wasn't what I was expecting it to be. I'm not exactly sure what I expected, but this really wasn't it. None of the individual showings from the big publishers/console makers were incredibly exciting on their own, but as a whole there were a decent number of games shown off that I'll probably be excited to play when they're out.

EA.

EA wasn't a comical mess like last year (though probably still the messiest of the bunch), but they still had some good stuff to show. A Way Out was one of my favorites of the whole of E3, even if I know actually coordinating playing a full game in co-op with someone is going to be a nightmare. I wish this game existed a decade ago when I had a friend that I played games with cooperatively (locally) all the time. That aside, I do think the idea of building a full game around bespoke cooperative situations is really cool, and I hope it works out. It also seems like the sort of game that will live and die based on the strength of its writing, and its main duo, so we'll have to wait and see if that stuff works out too.

Battlefront II got me really excited in the heat of the moment, but now that some time has passed, I dunno if I'll actually play it this fall. I love Star Wars as much as the next person, but I've already got a couple multiplayer games that I flip between, and unless that campaign is rock solid, I might pass on it. Really, Battlefront II just makes me wish they had shown some of Visceral's and Respawn's Star Wars games. They weren't even mentioned by EA, which worries me a little, but hopefully it won't be an Andromeda situation for those games.

Xbox.

I think, of the actual conferences/videos, Microsoft's was the best. At the very least, it was the one that ended with me most excited about video games, even if I wasn't excited about buying an Xbox One X. Which is to say, I'm not going to buy an Xbox One X. Between the cost, a lack of first party games that interest me, and my continued lack of access to my Xbox account (due to a variety of things, ultimately hinging on anxiety around actually calling support because I worry they wouldn't be able to help because of bad decisions idiot me made 11 years ago when creating an account), I just can't justify getting one. Even if the allure of better graphics and whatnot (without building a PC which worries me for entirely different reasons) is quite...alluring.

All that said, they still had a bunch of great looking games on display, and some games that maybe don't look so great but I'll probably play anyway. I really liked the first two Metro games, so I'm definitely excited for Exodus. I'm really curious about how the inversion of the gas mask mechanics will play out over the next game. Is most of the game going to be above ground, with the occasional dive into toxic dungeons? And what's the story justification for it going to be? I have to admit, it's been long enough since I played the first two that I can't remember if there was anything in them that could explain it. And also they were games that were better at atmosphere and mood than actual storytelling, if you get my drift.

Another of the games that most got my attention at E3, and something that actually makes me a bit angry I'm as excited about as I am: Dragon Ball FighterZ. Don't get me wrong, I watched a lot of DBZ as a kid, and loved it. I also played a handful of DBZ games back then, which probably don't hold up in the slightest, but I thought they were fun. But I never expected that there would be a DBZ game coming in the year 2018 that actually looks rad. Stylistically, and game play wise, it just looks like it captures the spirit of DBZ better than any other game I've seen. Of course, being a fighting game, and one not from Nether Realm, I have no idea how much I'd actually play it. I'm not going to play that online against random people, I'll get destroyed, and I don't really have people to play with locally. Not often enough to buy the game before a massive price drop. But, let's not worry about that until next year.

Actually, I wasn't being entirely honest when I said the first party games didn't interest me. Or rather, I kinda forgot that the new Ori game is, well, at least published by Microsoft, I'm not sure if it's technically first party or not (ie, developed by a Microsoft owned studio). I didn't play the first one, but I probably would've liked it. That, and actual first party game Sea of Thieves looks pretty cool. Getting up to piratical hijinks with friends sounds like it'd be a lot of fun. But, you know where this is going, I wouldn't have people to play with often enough. Still, I'm really happy that Rare is making something new, different, and seems like it has plenty of that Rare charm that they haven't really exercised in years. Good banana eating technique, too.

Even though it's technically a Ubisoft game, Microsoft was where Assassin's Creed Origins was shown and...I want that game to be good. I love Ancient Egypt as a setting, and that game looks gorgeous (hopefully the version I play won't look too much worse), but...what they've shown so far hasn't gotten me excited in the least. It looks like they took out parts of what made Assassin's Creed Assassin's Creed, and replaced them with RPG loot and bits of Far Cry that have found their way into almost everything that Ubisoft puts out. I'll probably still play it, and come away from it having had a fair amount of fun, but I can't honestly say I'm excited.

The last big thing that Microsoft showed was EA's Anthem, and I'll be honest: Anthem looks 100% up my alley. Destiny, but with off-brand Iron Man suits and (presumably?) BioWare style storytelling? It's also one of those cases where what they showed looks so visually impressive that it's hard NOT to get excited. Granted, I had to remind myself during it that who knows what the final game will actually look like, and even if the Xbox One X/PC versions do look that good, the PS4 version won't.

That's actually one of my bigger questions coming out of E3: How much better will the Xbox One X versions of these games actually look than the other console versions? It's one thing to get up on a stage and talk about 4K, it's another to actually demonstrate how different they'll look. I bet it probably will be a pretty noticeable difference with some games, like Anthem, but them not having comparisons just makes me think that it actually won't be that big a difference. That part of my brain that just assumes anything not directly stated or shown is done for some sneaky reason. And I get it, if the Xbox One S version of Forza 7 would look the same as the X version on a 720P stream, I wouldn't show it off either. But if they do look substantially different (and they probably do, don't get me wrong), I'd have at least shown a few seconds of comparison footage.

Skyrim Presents Bethesda.

Bethesda, in between announcements of new versions of Skyrim, showed off Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, which is my favorite game of E3 2017. I'm not the biggest fan of the previous Wolfenstein (it was good, but I wasn't in love with it), but I'm really hopeful that The New Colossus will be a good time. The only other non-Skyrim game Bethesda showed was The Evil Within 2. I didn't play the first one, but maybe this'll be worth checking out! Who knows!

Ubisoft.

Then there's Ubisoft, which was fun to watch, but really only had one game on show that I'm likely to play, and that's Far Cry 5. Well, that's me discounting AC: Origins because of Microsoft, and assuming Beyond Good & Evil 2 won't be finished before the end of the world, but maybe it will, and maybe it'll be cool. And as funny as I think it is that the Mario & Rabbids game is an XCOM style strategy(?) game, I know that even if I had a Switch, I wouldn't play it. I'm terrible at those sorts of games, and I'm not a huge fan of playing them either. But like I said, it was fun to watch that unfold live!

Sony.

And then Sony. So far as newly announced games go, I think Monster Hunter World was the only non-VR game announced. And, somewhat like Dragon Ball FighterZ, I'm almost upset about how much I'm actually kinda excited for that game. It looks good! Hopefully it's a bit more approachable than the other Monster Hunters.

As for Sony published games, I still think Spider-Man and God of War are going to be games I'll really like. It would have been nice if the Spider-Man footage wasn't so QTE heavy, but they'll likely have a full year to better sell that game on its open-world-iness, so I'm not worried. And I'll play that Uncharted spin-off in a couple months when it's out. Same with the Horizon DLC. But the rest of Sony's games this E3? Can't say Days Gone does anything for me, aside from the zombie swarming being neat to at least look at. And Detroit? Low expectations. That Shadow of the Colossus remake looks nice, but I'll probably wait until that drops in price before buying it, given that I've played the original numerous times already.

Sony's showing was disappointing as a whole. No Death Stranding trailer, which I knew was going to be the case because Kojima said as much, but that doesn't make it less disappointing. I mean, they had two trailers for it last year! No mention of The Last of Us Part II, which just makes me think they should have held off on announcing that. Last year Sony had more than enough announcements, so they probably could have benefited from holding one or two until this year, given that they certainly didn't come out between then and now.

Frankly, Sony in general has really been going back into "Hubris Sony" mode lately, and I don't like it one bit. I'm not talking about how the E3 show had too little talking, and weird stuff like people dangling from the ceiling (though I wasn't a fan of that). I mean stuff like having that guy out there saying that people don't want to play old games, and that's why they don't have backwards compatibility. Stuff like raising the price of PlayStation Plus last year, but doing nothing to indicate that the extra money is being used to improve PSN as a whole, or the games provided on Plus.

It kind of makes me want to get an Xbox One X to, you know, "send a message" about which corporation that doesn't actually care about me gets my money. I just don't have that much money, and I'm too deep into Sony with the games I've already bought to just jump ship (never mind the aforementioned account troubles). Why can't all corporations cater to what I think they should be doing?

Nintendo.

Anyway, last up is Nintendo. I think Super Mario Odyssey looks weird and out there in the ways that I want big Nintendo games to be. I just don't think I can afford to get a Switch this year, not when Odyssey is the only game I'd get for it. So, despite the hilarity of revealing that Mario can possess things via hat, and have them grow mustaches, I can't say I'm especially excited for Nintendo at the moment either. Maybe by the time Metroid Prime 4 is a game, rather than just a logo, there will be enough games to get a Switch for.

Now that I've written all this out, and thought about it, I actually feel worse about E3 than I did just a few days ago. Maybe I just forgot about something good, I dunno. Anyway, there's going to be great games still coming out, so that's what really matters, right? If you've read this whole rambling mess, thank you. Next time I write something, I'll try to keep it a bit more concise, and focused.

Prey is a bit of an odd one. Even removed from the lineage of the Prey name (which I can only imagine was forced upon Arkane by a man in a suit from Bethesda), it's an odd one. Not on the surface, but the more time I spent with the game, the more something about it just felt...either off, or missing. I'm still not exactly sure. But I'll get to that later, once I get into the story spoilers. I don't want to ruin it for anyone that hasn't played it yet, and I think it's a game well worth playing.

I've never played the System Shock games, but I know that if I start this by comparing Prey to BioShock, a game I have played, someone is going to jump down my throat for it. Instead, I'll mention System Shock. Prey is the most "Shock-ing" game I've played since BioShock 2 (Infinite was much more linear, with little exploration). I know that multiple Deus Exes and Dishonoreds have released since then (and likely a whole host of indie games I've never heard of), but those are more focused on stealth, and Human Revolution is the only one of them that I thought was an overall great game (note that I didn't play Dishonored 2).

It's been a long time since I played BioShock 2, and it's a style of game that I wish was more prevalent these days. Prey evokes those same feelings of being stuck in this enormous structure, trying to survive by scrounging whatever is lying around, and using the environment against the enemies. Whether that's sneaking by, setting up some sort of trap, going head on, or whatever else you can think of. And that's the key that sets this style of game apart from the aforementioned Deus Exes (at least the Jensen ones; what I've played) and Dishonored. Those feel like level based sneaking missions, whereas the interconnected singular structure of Talos I in Prey feels like a place, and it feels like it's trying to be BioShock in that way. Or, System Shock, probably, as it does feel like it goes farther with that stuff than BioShock ever did.

Talos I is an intriguing place. A decades old research station, which has swapped hands between the Soviets, Americans, and finally the most evil of all, private investors. There isn't an enormous amount of variety in the environments of Talos I, but there's just enough where it really counts. The main lobby has a grand, clean "space-deco" feel, as do the other "public facing" areas. The parts where only the main crew and workers go? Definitely a lot less of that facade. Well, that's not entirely true, the work areas aren't as friendly and inviting, but spots like the crew quarters are. Echoing the real evil corporations of today, at least they try to make the employees feel happy while they're conducting human rights violations in international waters space. And of course the game takes place after everything went wrong, so there's the added layer of broken things, corpses, and sufficiently strewn about debris on top..

Which brings me to one of my favorite things about Prey: its attention to detail. This is a game where a lot of people spent a lot of time thinking stuff through, figuring out not just how this stuff would happen, but why it would happen. Determining the logic behind everything, and how to best present that information in a way that feels natural, rather than for the sake of exposition. The sort of stuff that most games (or fiction in general) would gloss over, or not even mention. For example, in proper video game form, there's all sorts of junk and assorted items that can be looted and hoarded.

When I say junk, I mean things that are literally garbage. Banana peels and eel scraps. Yes, eel scraps. And cans of jellied eels, which can be eaten for health, like many other food stuffs. For much of the game, I thought the eels were only in there as a joke. I know the main studio that worked on Prey was in Austin, Texas, so it couldn't be some weird British thing where eels are normal to eat. So I just kept laughing at all the eel items in the game, because it seemed like a good joke.

Then I got to the water treatment facility on Talos I and realized they used eels served an actual purpose. There's a tank full of them, where they eat a lot of the "waste," which I assume we all know what that means. But then at a certain point they harvest the excess eels for food, which is both kind of gross (because they eat "waste"), but also, the attention to detail. They didn't need to explain how "waste" got dealt with on the station, nor did they then have to explain how they dealt with the thing that dealt with the "waste." But they did, and I love that they did. And they did it without involving "electric eels powering something," because that would be too silly.

And that attention to detail is in every other facet of the game too. If you want explanations for how the oddball weapons work, how they were developed, those are there. Every NPC (and corpse) in the game has a name (or a number, for some of the research "volunteers"). No, they're not all fully developed characters, but there's just enough to make it feel like glimpsing into the lives of real people. The usual suspects of hacked emails, and found audio logs are there, but the places the people existed in prior to everything going wrong bare their marks like real places would.

My favorite ongoing examples of this were the knock-off D&D game and the shenanigans involving off brand Nerf® guns. This wasn't a station of faceless scientists droning away on evil research. These were regular people living their lives, playing games, making (and breaking) relationships with coworkers, and most importantly just trying to be happy. It's a lot easier to empathize with them when they feel like they could be real people, and that's not a feeling most games instill in me. It makes the whole of Talos I, the people living there, and what was happening feel more like things that could exist than most other games I've played.

Discounting the science fiction part of the game, but that's what science fiction is all about. This is the sort of sci-fi where, like with those silly eels, there's an explanation for everything. I love it when probably impossible things are given just enough grounding to seem plausible. And some of it, like the ghostly alien Typhon infesting the station, I think are firmly in that "there's no way this could actually exist" territory. They almost look like dark clouds of smoke trying to take corporeal form, and not quite getting there. Visually, it makes them feel distinct, but like I said, they're rather implausible.

In many ways, that's also to the game's benefit, because the Typhon are a really fascinating set of enemies. Despite looking evil, the game states numerous times, in dialog and various bits of research that they don't appear to be evil, or really anything other than just creatures trying to survive. No empathy, but no malice. They just are, and they do what they need to, which seems to involve killing a lot of people. At least that's what some of the NPCs say, whether or not that's true is one of those things you'll have to play the game and figure out for yourself.

How interesting the Typhon are to engage with in the game, however, is hit or miss. Some, like the Phantoms, just dart around and attack, and aren't that interesting, even when they come in elemental varieties later on. They're fun encounters, but nothing exceptional. But the Mimics? One of my favorite all time enemies across all games. And it's such a simple concept too. Any odd object scattered about a room might be a Mimic in disguise. It creates a tension and paranoia toward harmless things like coffee mugs that I've never seen any other game do. What would merely be window dressing elsewhere might be an enemy lying in wait, completely indistinguishable from what it mimics. The "classical" video game Mimic only ever takes the form of treasure chests, and all that does is teach you to attack every chest you find. Unless it's Dark Souls, in which case you just have to learn the visual difference between the two, because they're consistent.

For those first few hours of Prey, you can't trust anything that you come across, because any object could be a Mimic. Well, at least any small or medium sized object, so far as I know they can't turn into fridges, or big things. But what if they could? If there's anything I'd want from a Prey II (not to be confused with Prey 2), it'd be even more variety in what the Mimics can become. For better or worse, Prey does eventually present a way to scan objects to see what ones are Mimics, which causes them to lose some of the fun tension. There still were times where I forgot to scan a room before entering, and it doesn't work for their cousins, the Greater Mimics (at least not without an upgrade). I definitely got caught off guard by them more than a few times, even late into Prey. Games almost never make me "jump" in the horror game sense of the word, but I did here a couple times when they un-mimicked right in my face.

One last thing about the Mimics is that even if you discover where they are, that doesn't mean they go instantly into fight mode. Sometimes they'll attack, then run away and Mimic something else. Sometimes I would go through a room, think it was clear of Mimics, then return five minutes later and feel like something was...off. The next thing I knew the second wastebasket I swore I hadn't seen before was no longer a basket, and trying to kill me. They're fantastic. I almost wish the whole game was just about dealing with these ingenious fiends, though I suppose they might get old after a game the length of Prey if there weren't other enemies to mix it up.

My second favorite enemy type, the Telepath, isn't terribly exciting on its own. It's a big, kinda blobby looking specter that floats around lackadaisically, shooting psychic blasts as its main attack. Psychic is just one of the damage types in the game, so there isn't anything especially creative about that. It's when they get a hold of some NPCs that it gets interesting. Telepaths have the ability to turn humans into their mind slaves. Okay, that's not quite true, I just like the sound of "mind slave." What they actually do is gain the ability to control what the humans do, but not actually their minds. You can see them struggling against the control as they meander toward you, and they warn you to stay away because when they get close...their heads explode. Explode big enough that it'll damage you in the process.

If you don't care about those NPCs, they're easy enough to deal with. Prey has more than enough in terms of weapons to just kill them. A few pistol shots from afar will pop their heads at a safe distance, or a well placed recycler charge will suck them up, and turn them into handy crafting materials with ease. But you'd have to be heartless to just let their heads explode without even trying to save them. So, any time I encountered a telepath with a group of humans, I took it upon myself to save those humans. Sometimes that meant methodical uses of the stun gun, and sometimes that meant severing the connection to the telepath by killing it, or using anti-psychic grenades. There is an ability that can be used to sever that connection as well, but for reasons I'll get to later, I didn't have access to that.

I want to mention the weapons before I get to that. The pistol and shotgun are standard video game fair, as is the stun gun, but the rest of the arsenal isn't. Okay, and the wrench too. But several of them don't even do damage. The Huntress Boltcaster is useless as a weapon, because it shoots Nerf® darts. But those darts work on touch screens, and being able to use touch screens at range is useful when this is a future where touch screens are all over the place. The GLOO Gun won't hurt enemies, but it will stick them in place for a few seconds, and it can be used to create makeshift paths around the environment. Nothing is out of reach if you have enough GLOO, and know where to shoot it. It reminds me of the foam gun from Shadow Complex, though it isn't quite as robust or explosive as that was. There's a lure that is supposed to attract Typhon (it was hit or miss for me), and finally the Q-Beam, which slowly turns the enemy's health bar green. When the green reaches whatever their current health is, they just explode. Not a fiery, damage other enemies explosion, for better or worse.

Then there's the powers, which is where I think the game makes a misstep. Not in the powers themselves, because I didn't use any of them, outside of one. Aside from the slow motion power, they're all considered alien powers, and the game not so subtly suggests that getting the alien powers might be a bad idea. Or rather, a character in the game calls you and says doing so will cause the station's automated defenses (turrets) to attack on sight, and could have other complications. What complications? The game didn't say, which only increased my desire to play the game without getting any of the Typhon powers. This led to what I would probably say isn't the best way to actually play Prey.

Neuromods, in fiction, are used to augment people in a variety of ways. References are made in game to people being able to learn entire new languages, how to play instruments, and a whole host of other useful skills through neuromods. In game, they're used for passive and active powers: more health, bigger inventory, faster movement speed, etc. That last one in particular is irksome because the default movement speed is just too slow. It's a perfect example of an upgrade that should be a part of the base experience. Aside from the aforementioned slow motion, all the human upgrades are passive abilities, or things like higher tiers of hacking. They're useful, but all straightforward.

The Typhon powers are where things get a bit different. Why let Mimics have all the fun when you can mimic too? You can even mimic a mimicked Mimic! Other powers include trapping enemies in an upward draft thing, lighting them on fire, electricity, and what seems like this game's equivalent of the Dishonored Blink, for darting into safety. But I didn't use any of them, because the game made me think it'd be a bad idea to do that. Was it? Well, given that I feel like I missed out, I'd say it was probably a bad idea NOT to use any of them.

The flip side is that the number of neuromods in the game (especially if you craft A TON of them like me) feels like it's balanced for using all of the skill trees, instead of half of them. By the end, I had almost every human upgrade. I was over-powered. Did it ruin the game? No, I was still having fun blasting my way through the Typhon, but there's something disappointing about an enemy called "The Nightmare" that is easy to dispatch because of the way I've upgraded.

The Nightmares channel the idea of Nemesis from Resident Evil 3, where they're massive, scary things hunting you. When one is on the hunt, the game activates a side quest with a timer. Either you evade The Nightmare for three minutes, or you find a way to kill it. And it does that every time. My first encounter with a Nightmare resulted in my hiding in a maintenance tunnel for the full three minutes. The second time was the only time I think it went the way Arkane intended. Creeping around, staying out of sight, and just narrowly avoiding detection. After that I completed a side quest which gave me the ability to force it to leave the area I'm in, or call it directly to me, with a limited number of uses. But before I tried that, I wanted to see how I'd actually do in a straight on fight with it.

Using the slow motion ability (fully upgraded, which gives a decent bonus to damage), and a heavily upgraded shotgun made short work of it. I didn't even have to reload. I think I'll have to play it again, and play a much stealthier, more power focused character than I did the first time. And when I say "have to," I mean want to. I really enjoyed Prey, and I think I might enjoy it even more playing that way. Plus, I want to see how certain things play out differently based on choices through the game.

I don't mean choices in the usual video game sense. This isn't a game with "Push A to do the virtuous good thing or Push B to do the evil mean thing." People ask for help, and you have the choice to help them, ignore them, or outright kill them, if you truly lack that much empathy! There's a Trophy for killing literally every NPC in the game, and from what I've read on a Trophy guide, that means you need to deal the killing blow. Letting mind controlled humans explode won't cut it, you need to pull the trigger and kill them. And as the story progresses, these situations get more dire. Instead of being asked to go find a trinket, you're being asked to save a lot of people. Time limits get imposed, and if you're not fast enough, they will die.

About all that's left for me to write about is the story. Don't spoil Prey for yourself, go play it. Without further ado: SPOILERS.

So that's Prey. It has issues, I know I could've spent time harping about the technical side of it (the load times are too long, being my biggest gripe), but I really think this is a game worth playing. We don't get many games like this, both in terms of the general game design of it harking back to the Shock games of yore, and those spoilery things it was really about.

Now if you excuse me, I'm going to go start it up again and check out those Typhon powers. I wish it had a New Game Plus so I could see it a bit earlier, but it is what it is. Thanks for reading.

You ever keep meaning to do something, keep telling yourself you'll do it tomorrow, but then never actually get around to it? That was more or less me and Horizon Zero Dawn for a couple months. Or, more specifically, me and actually buying the game, not playing it. I'm not one of those people that buys a game and takes forever to actually...Okay, yes, I did that with The Witcher III's DLC, but I did play those! And I finally got around to playing Horizon Zero Dawn, to the point where I got the Platinum Trophy! And guess what? This game's pretty rad.

After having the misfortune of coming out the same week as Breath of the Wild, and my reading a lot of hot takes about how Breath of the Wild did "stuff" better than Horizon, I was a bit apprehensive about how much I'd end up enjoying Horizon. Of course those apprehensions were mostly wrong, because it turns out a great game is still great, even if it releases close to a different great game. There are certainly things I wish Horizon did more like BotW, but there are also things I wish BotW did more like Horizon. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Horizon Zero Dawn is at its absolute best in the heat of battle. Slow motion sliding around monstrous machines, dodging attacks from every angle, knocking off pieces of their armor and weapons off whenever there's a clear shot, using elemental weaknesses to gain an upper hand, and eventually felling these huge mechanical beasts. It's thrilling, and to be frank, cool. It also feels original in a way that I'm not sure a game's combat has for me in quite a few years. I can't think of any other games I've played that have had such a large focus on dismantling enemies before actually defeating them (I'm sure they exist, you know what I mean).

It's not just about head on conflict, either. If you want to be sneaky, there are stealth attacks, though the stealth isn't up there with stuff like the best MGS games, even if one of the sneaking songs in this game sounds like it's straight out of that series. There's also traps to be laid out, preferably before a fight starts, but I definitely found myself using them mid fight as well. Some are effectively proximity mines, where you just drop it and forget it. Then there's trip wires, where you shoot one end into one spot (ground or wall), and the other somewhere else.

I do think it's a bit absurd that enemies don't see these trip wires, but it's one of those things where realistically intelligent enemies might be too smart to be fun to fight. Though, there were times where it felt like some of the enemies were avoiding them once fights started, so I don't know! Anyway, whatever walks into the wire (aside from Aloy, thankfully) gets blown up. Or set on fire/shocked, depending on which elemental variant is selected. As one might expect, fire does damage over time, and shock can stun enemies if they're weak to it, or get shocked enough. There's also freeze damage, which weakens enemies so they take more damage from non-freeze attacks, and might slow them down? I'm still not sure if it actually slows them or not.

And if a certain enemy is getting a little too aggressive, or if you need to back off and heal (which I did a lot because the enemies do a lot of damage), you can shoot cables at them, which tie them to the ground, at least temporarily. The more connect, the longer they stay tied, and enough will pull them down to the ground, where you can do a critical hit, or override them and make them friendly robots. Of course Aloy can't override any old enemy from the start of the game, and unlocking new overrides was always exciting because I wanted to get bigger and bigger machines fighting on my side. And really, there's something satisfying about using those cables to lock enemies in place and seeing them struggle while I take a moment to breathe and figure out my next move. Conversely, sometimes it made me a little sad to see these majestic robotic beasts struggling against the cables, but then I would either override them and let them go, or remind myself that they wanted to kill me. There's some really good sound work on the straining cable noises (and all the audio in general, it's superb). There's a lot of options available in the fights, and just about all of them feel really useful. There are certainly ways to break the game, and get really over-powered, but at its best, it's some of the most fun, original combat I've played in a game in years.

As cool as it is, I actually wish it went even farther. Rolling around with a squad of overridden robots would probably be too powerful, but I do wish the overridden robots would follow Aloy at least a bit farther than they do. Knocking the gun off a Ravager's (big robot saber tooth tiger) back will affect how it fights, but what if actual limbs were being blown off these things? Removing armor, and sometimes revealing hidden weak spots is cool, but what if actual holes were being blown into the machines, and I could see all the way through to the other side? Though, given how hectic the fights in this game are, especially against larger groups of enemies, I'm not sure that I'd even notice holes in the robots, so who knows if it'd even be worth the extra time/resources it'd take to make that work.

It's still tremendously fun, and there's plenty of variety in the machines throughout the game to keep it fresh. Fighting a group of Longlegs (big turkeys with a yell attack that stuns Aloy) is a lot different than fighting a Rockbreaker, which tunnels through the ground and responds to the noise you make, like the cinematic classic Tremors. And again, there are parts of these machines that can be destroyed mid-fight that change how the enemies react. Don't like getting stunned by the Longlegs? Shoot the big air sack on their chests enough, and it'll pop! And I think that if you hit the tunneling legs of the Rockbreakers enough, they'll be stuck up on the ground with you. I'm not entirely sure, though, because I didn't figure that out until near the end of the game, when an NPC suggested it to me, and I didn't quite manage it the last time I fought one. And there's plenty more neat ways to take on the other enemy types in the game, but I don't want to spoil them for you. I won't take away the thrill of figuring out how to conquer a majestic Thunderjaw (think T-Rex, but bigger and more heavily armed (though ironically with no actual arms)), or whatever else lies in wait.

That said, I hope they add a bunch of new ones for the sequel (which is most likely going to happen). I have some ideas, which is why I'm bringing it up. Stuff like gorillas, spiders, and scorpions are some of the more obvious ones to go to for video game robot enemies. I think armadillos could be interesting to fight, too. Heavily armored, so they'd be tough, and a fun rolling attack to dodge. A big porcupine covered in spikes, so you can't get close to it at all would be interesting. Plenty of other types of bugs, like preying mantises could be cool. Maybe a walrus, or an octopus? They don't even need to be directly based on real world animals, if they want to make truly out there enemy designs. And they should! I'm just saying, there's so much potential for even more enemy variety in the future, and I hope they go all out with it.

But all of that is in contradiction with the combat against human enemies, which is okay, but not great. Their AI isn't especially fun to deal with, and there's not really anything the game does to make them any different than fighting humans in any other game. It's not thrilling or exciting like fighting the machines, but it also doesn't detract from the experience. Though, some of the tougher enemies, especially near the end of the game, take multiple arrow headshots to kill, which is a bit too bullet-sponge-y (arrow-sponge-y?) for my taste. I'd have much preferred if the human enemies had some more similarities to the machines, actually. Aloy can shoot armor off machines, so why not shoot armor off humans too? That'd be more interesting, and more sensible than a regular dude being able to take multiple arrows to the head. That, or maybe more depth to the melee combat than just mashing R1 and R2 for light and heavy attacks.

Then there's the world itself. It is a big open world, and an astoundingly gorgeous one, too. I'd have to go look at Uncharted 4 again to compare the two, but I'd say Horizon is probably the best looking game I've ever played. It definitely is for a game of this scale and scope. U4 still has the advantage in faces, but that's more because the more limited scope of that game lets them do facial capture and make every cutscene as bespoke as possible, whereas Horizon suffers from some hit or miss facial animations. That, and the lip-syncing is off in spots in a way that is weird, and I thought they probably would have fixed by the time I played it.

That sort of thing can be disappointing in the moment, but it didn't really detract from the overall experience. Even if the mouths weren't lining up with what was coming out of them, the acting and writing were usually good enough to make up for it. Story is always one of the things I appreciate most in games, and Horizon's is good enough that even after it was praised by many, I was still pleasantly surprised. The main cast of characters, while perhaps a bit smaller than I expected, is great, especially Aloy. The world itself, and the lore of the various cultures is fleshed out in a way that I feel like most game worlds aren't. Or, if they are, that stuff is buried deep enough that I don't find it, or it's not especially interesting. A lot of the stuff around the Carja, and their former "Mad Sun King" in particular was the sort of stuff I wasn't expecting at all from this game, and it really drew me into the world.

On top of all that (or beneath it all), is the mystery of how the world became the way it is. Yes, it's true that a lot of this part of the story is told through finding audio logs, and "exposition dumps," but the game's unique spin on that sort of story (you'll know what I mean if you play it, I don't want to spoil it) is more than enough to make up for it. I did spend some time trying to think of better ways the game could convey that stuff, and the best I could think of would be playable flashbacks to the past when that stuff is happening. That would be cool, but it's the sort of thing that would require a lot of extra time and resources on the developers' part. Then it might just end up feeling out of place, like they disrupt the flow of the game, or just have a different set of issues. Anyway, the actual story part of that stuff is just as good as the rest of the game, and worth seeing through to the end.

I do have some other issues with the game, which range from nitpicks to more important issues. Stuff like how most of the time the armor Aloy has equipped is in the cutscenes, but there are some where it isn't, and she's wearing the default from the start of the game. That's definitely jarring, and I don't really know why it's the case. Nothing in those cutscenes seemed outlandish enough that they had to be pre-rendered, but who am I to say?

And the game has some issues related to inventory stuff. Apparently the option to sort the inventory was added after the game released, which seems absurd to me, given that it's still a bit of a chore even with that! Yes, there's a button to sort stuff, but it'd be nice if the game told me how it was being sorted, or let me pick how it was sorted instead of just cycling through the options. That, and the game could really use a "sell all junk" button. You can mark stuff to sell a variety of things at once, but unless I missed it, there's no sell all junk button.

On top of that, this is yet another post Far Cry 3 game where you need to hunt all sorts of arbitrary critters to craft bigger inventories. Everything from holding more resources to more of each ammo type for each type of weapon. Hunting for skins to upgrade stuff was novel in 2012, but now it's just a chore. If a game wants to make inventory management a serious component of the game, that's fine, but this isn't that sort of game. This is a "take as much stuff as you possibly can" game. But to get the inventory maxed out, you need to kill a whole bunch of cute little bunnies, foxes, turkeys, boars raccoons, and fish. Honestly, it makes me feel bad. I know they're not real animals, but they can't even fight back. I'd much rather just have the inventory be maxed from the start, or make the upgrades something bought from merchants with money. I'd even take using parts gathered from the machines over this, because again, at least fighting the machines is fun.

Oh, and the worst part? What you get from the animals is random, so you might end up killing a whole bunch of foxes just to get the one skin you need to upgrade your quiver. It's also the thing, like all these games since Far Cry 3, where there's no logical reason for why it needs to be a fox skin instead of a boar skin. Why fish bones instead of boar bones? Why rich meat instead of bony meat? At least it's not as absurd as Assassin's Creed IV, which required killing a full sized whale to craft the fourth gun holster. You know, because if you have four guns, you can only make the fourth holster out of whale skin, and you can't use the rest of that entire, fully grown whale for anything else. Only a holster for a pistol.

Earlier on I said I was worried I might like this game less after having played BotW, and I will say that one area where Horizon doesn't hold up is in how you can traverse the world itself. One of the first things I did after the opening prologue was try to climb up a rock like in Breath of the Wild. Sadly, as capable as Aloy is, she can't climb basically anything like Link can. Instead, there's Uncharted style specific ledges and hand holds that she can grab onto, and you can try to hop up rocks and other stuff.

I think this is the first game I've played with that sort of climbing where sometimes it was actually hard for me to see what was and wasn't climbable. Then again, every time that happened, it ended up being a lighting thing, where it just happened to the the one time of day where a shadow was over the spot I needed to climb, and it was a bit tougher to see. Doesn't mean it wasn't irksome, but it's not a huge problem. Anyway, between steep slants, and invisible walls, the game is usually pretty good about keeping you out of places the developers don't want you in. Or at least they were with me, I'm sure people out there have found ways around that stuff. They always do.

I'm not saying that every big open game needs to let you climb ANYTHING like BotW does, but I hope games in general move more in that direction. In this case specifically, I'd love for both some more freedom in what can be climbed/traversed, and some more reasons to actually explore around every nook and cranny. Sure, there's plenty of collectibles, but those aren't as enticing as stuff like puzzles in BotW. Horizon is a gorgeous game, and I loved looking at the ancient ruins, and majestic mountains of it, but I never, or at least only very rarely had the same sense of adventure and wonder that I did in BotW. Finding an old, rusted out building should be exciting. It should make me go, "OOH, what's in there?" Instead I thought, "That's cool looking," and usually continued on my way. I'm not saying it needs to have elaborate shrines filled with bespoke puzzles like BotW (though I wouldn't complain if it did), but just a little more of...something for bits like that would've gone a long way to add more of that adventurous wonder to Horizon.

I know good puzzle-crafting is hard, and especially doing it in a game the scale of BotW is even harder, but I'd sure love it if there was stuff like that in Horizon. As is, after BotW it does sort of feel like something is missing from the open world parts of the game, and the best answer I can think of for what that is, is some sort of puzzle solving. Do I think they'll have a lot of puzzles in the next one? Probably not, but who knows!

Breath of the Wild has been referenced several times here, but now I'm going to reference another open world game that Horizon reminded me of: The Witcher III. Remember all the side quests in that game that boiled down to using Witcher senses to follow a trail to a thing? Well, a whole lot of the side quests in Horizon boil down to using Aloy's fancy ear piece to follow a trail to a thing. It's not bad quest design every once in a while, but so many of them use this exact framework that it I wanted to mention it here.

The last nitpick I have is that sometimes when aiming toward the sky (be it at a flying enemy or a really big one I'm a bit too close to), the camera gets behind grass and other foliage, which makes it harder to aim. Other than that stuff, I really do think it's a fantastic game. These days especially, I know I only write about the stuff I really like, but I REALLY LIKE Horizon Zero Dawn. And I'm really happy that not only did Guerrilla Games' overlords at Sony let them make something other than Killzone, but that what they made is easily their best game. They've set a really high bar, and I hope the next one is even better!

Thanks for reading! I know it's been a while since the last thing I wrote, and I'm hoping I can get back into the swing of putting stuff up more frequently. Either way, I hope you all have a pleasant day!

Back in my younger days, I rented Ocarina of Time, as I did with many a game. For better or worse, the game didn't click with me then, and it wasn't until a decade or so later that I actually played the game to completion (after having finished several others in the series). But, back when I first tried the game, my big issue was that the game didn't have a jump button, and now, in 2017, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has a jump button.

Finally, young me is vindicated.

Because of the nature of some of the things I want to discuss about this game, I'm giving fair warning that there's going to be some SPOILERS. Spoilers related to anything story, or let's say "dungeon related" will be marked as I always do, but if you're worried about me spoiling game mechanics and stuff of that ilk, the don't read this! If you just want my quick take on the game before I get into that: I think Breath of the Wild is probably my favorite Zelda game, but it's not without issues, and some disappointments. I don't think it's quite a masterpiece of gaming unrivaled amongst its peers, but it's my favorite game that I've played since MGSV, and it'll probably be years before a new game hits me the same way this one did. That good enough for a quick take?

Breath of the Wild is, in many ways, what Zelda was originally, and what it always should have been. It puts exploration and adventure ahead of almost everything else, and in doing so, it's a game that really feels like you're on not just a scripted, plotted out story, but your own adventure. I don't just mean that you can do the dungeons in any order, or skip them all and head straight to Ganon and finish the game. I mean that while the game does point you in the direction of story quests, it leaves how you get from point A to B up to you, and the world is crafted in such a way that it usually feels like there are countless ways to get there.

Even more importantly is that these don't just feel like picking which road to take, or like a choice between heading straight to the quest or dawdling (though those certainly are choices to be made). Breath of the Wild makes traversing the world fun and engaging in ways that few, if any, other games of this scale does. Certainly more than the previous Zelda games did, because those did feel like just traveling down a handful of paths, some of which led to the story, some of which led to smaller areas with a puzzle to get a Heart Piece, or something similar.

When I think back on Skyrim, a game I quite enjoyed, the act of moving around that world felt tedious in comparison. Yes, it was the origin (so far as I know) of the, "See that mountain? You can go there," joke, but once you actually got to the mountain? Either you went up the one or two paths they built into the mountain, or you struggled with the clunky controls as you inched your way up something you weren't really supposed to climb.

It's one of those nebulous "feel" things that is difficult to actually explain, but running and jumping around Breath of the Wild just feels good (at least when the frame rate is cooperating, which is most of the time). Not only that, but the game is built in such a way that aside from the edges of the world, your only real limitations are your ingenuity, and your stamina. Who needs a path up the side of the mountain when Link can climb basically anything in the world? And who needs a path back down it when Link can just glide off the mountain, and float gently downward? Or float over to the next mountain, and the next one, and then that little hill over there, and then that pond, oh, and I need to check out that forest, and- wait, is that a camp of monsters?

It's so easy to get distracted, and sidetracked that it's almost a wonder I actually did any of the story stuff. That's not quite true, because my meanderings would have gotten me to those points eventually. I'm having trouble thinking of any other games I've ever played that have really done the simple act of exploring and adventuring as well as this game has. Yes, I could say what others have said and say it reminds me of playing games as a kid, but honestly? This goes way beyond anything I felt playing games back then. And more modern games like Skyrim certainly feel big, and have plenty to do, but those worlds ultimately feel like they're only in service of making the game bigger, so it takes longer to get to the next quest giver. In Breath of the Wild, the huge world is the point. It really is about the journey, as cheesy as it feels for me to type that, without a smidgen of joking.

There's plenty to do along that journey as well, even if aspects of it do get repetitive. Reaching the top of a hill, or a mountain and looking out over an area I hadn't seen before never got old, but finding a rock at the top of that mountain with a Korok under it did. Not that I mind having the Korok there as a way of knowing I'd already climbed it, but in general I wish there was more variety to the Koroks. Push a boulder into a hole, pick up a rock, put a rock in the empty space in a circle of other rocks, and my least favorite, putting an apple into a bowl in front of a statue. Or, if you're lucky, maybe bananas instead of an apple. Of course there's more to the tasks required to make the Koroks appear and hand over their seeds, but they were the first part of the game where I felt the repetition set in. That's not to say I didn't still enjoy doing stuff to get them, but I really wish there was more variety, especially given that there's NINE HUNDRED of them in the game.

The Shrines, the other oft repeated thing in the world, were another source of great joy...and of some disappointment. The idea of bite-sized dungeons strewn about the world is great, and for the most part it works. You descend into one, spend some time solving puzzles, get your reward, and then return to the world to venture onward. The puzzles themselves are frequently great, but rarely did it feel like they lasted long enough. Some of them are meatier, and those were definitely my favorites, but most of them feel like they're over just as soon as they start.

And then there's the Tests of Strength. The game has 120 Shrines total, and 20 of them are Tests of Strength. Compared to the number of times I genuinely enjoyed them, I'd say that's 19 more than there should have been. I could be generous and say 18 more, and concede that the one that teaches stuff like how to parry was useful, but that shouldn't have been a Shrine, that should have been a thing the game taught on the starting plateau, along with the rune powers and whatnot (the parry was the only bit of that I didn't know). Anyway, it was consistently disappointing to enter a Shrine and see it was a Test of Strength. Perhaps if the game did more to vary them, I'd give it a pass. But each one is just a fight against a single mini-Guardian, with the only differences being its health, and what weapons it's equipped with. The only time I really enjoyed one was when I found a Major Test of Strength early in the game, and it was a legitimate challenge. After that, I found a long string of easy ones, and didn't find any tougher ones until I was too well upgraded and equipped, so they were cakewalks.

That said, I still did them, because I wanted those Spirit Orbs. I ended up completing 98 of the 120 Shrines throughout the game, and part of me wants to go back and find the rest of them. I did enough of those Tests of Strength that I think most of the ones left must be regular Shrines, so I'd like to solve those puzzles. And I do know that some of them are hidden Shrines, which I have mixed feelings about. Plenty of them are engaging enough puzzles or riddles to solve to get them to appear, but they were inconsistent with what was in the Shrine after the fact. Sometimes I'd bomb an odd wall in the side of a cliff, find a Shrine, and get excited only for it to have no puzzles inside, only a chest and a Spirit Orb. But then sometimes I'd spend a long time trying to make a Hidden Shrine appear, feel like I had accomplished enough just getting it to appear, and then enter to find a proper Shrine. I'm not complaining about that, I just think it's odd. And there's some of them that require doing something at a specific time of day, or even worse, during a Blood Moon, and trying to line that stuff up can be a nightmare. I was lucky enough to find the Blood Moon one on the night of a Blood Moon, but I've heard from at least one other person that wasn't. Apparently the Blood Moon happens randomly, no less.

The Blood Moon is a good example one of the experiences I had playing this game where I discovered something for the first time. It was my first night out in the world beyond the starting plateau, and I was just poking around some ruins, not really doing anything of importance, when I looked up in the school and completely forgot what I was doing. In the sky was a deep red, nefarious looking moon, creeping its way up. At first all I could think was that this game was trying to one-up Majora's Mask in terms of creepy moons (not sure that it's actually creepier, though), and wondering how I hadn't noticed it when on the plateau. As it rose higher, music started to play, and fiery particles started to appear around, and at I was starting to worry. "Wait, is this game also Bloodborne???" After it fully rose, I learned the Blood Moon resurrects all the enemies around the world, and everything went back to normal.

There's plenty of other experiences I had throughout the game where I saw something wild and had no idea what was going on. Of course, not all of them ended up being especially great once I did figure out what was going on, like the dragons. The first time I saw one flying in the distance, I was completely in awe. It was huge, majestic, and all I could think about was wondering what kind of rad stuff would happen with it. But, it turns out that aside from a Shrine Quest involving one of them, the only interactions you have with them is shooting arrows at them to farm materials to upgrade armor. It's not only tedious, but needlessly difficult to actually hit them and get the stuff. Or at least it was for me. But for the most part, the moments of discovery in Breath of the Wild were magical, and great.

Then there's the combat. On its surface it's not really that different from previous 3D Zelda games. You lock onto an enemy and whack 'em with whatever you've got. If you dodge with good enough timing, the game goes into slow motion and lets you really wail on them. It's the same with parrying attacks, but you can only parry with a shield, and you can only use a shield with one handed weapons. There's also slower weapons, and spears, which are all enjoyable in their own right. I do wish the spears/slower weapons had something for the A button to do, given that's the parry button, but sadly not. And there's boomerangs, which can be one or two handed. When thrown, instead of breaking after hitting an enemy, they keep flying, and will try to curve back to Link. Sometimes they hit stuff and don't make it back, but even when they do, you still have to hit a button to pick it back up. They're a lot of fun.

The thing that gives Breath of the Wild easily the most engaging combat in the series is the way a whole bunch of different parts of the game interact with each other. First is the AI. The enemies in this game not only don't hesitate to gang up on you, they try to do it constantly. Getting surrounded is easy if you're not careful, and that can be a recipe for disaster, especially early in the game when a blue Bokoblin with a spiked club can kill Link in a single hit. But it's not just that they're aggressive, it's ways they interact with the world around them. Is there a lit fire? Okay, then a Bokoblin might try to light its club on fire so it'll do even more damage. If you knock a weapon out of an enemy's hand, it'll be visibly angry, and scour the area for something to replace it (assuming you let them, and don't just them them have it). I've seen huge Moblins pick up smaller Bokoblins (about the size of Link) and literally throw them at Link as an attack! Skeleton monsters will pick up the heads of fallen comrades to replace their own, or the limbs of others to use as clubs. They'll kick your bombs back at you if you don't detonate them fast enough, and they are capable of much better aim with a bow than you would expect.

Then there's Link, and everything his abilities bring to the table. Want to chop down a tree and roll it down a hill into some enemies? Go for it! But why not use Stasis on it first, and then smack it a few times to increase its momentum, and watch it hurdle into the enemies at hyper speed? Shoot a fire or bomb arrow at some explosive barrels? Sure! Or you could climb a hill, glide over the camp, drop a remote bomb on them, and watch the explosion from the sky. No hill to jump off? Then light some grass on fire and use the updraft to soar up with the paraglider! Metal boxes around? Well, it's not exactly efficient, but you can totally use Magnesis to pick those up and use them for mobile cover, or to smash into enemies! Or, at least try to smash, I wasn't exactly great at getting a lot of momentum with them.

What to just stick to weapons? Great! I know a lot of people complain about the weapon durability, but I really like how it works in the game. I love the scramble after a weapon breaks mid fight, when I'm not exactly sure what to do. One of my favorite strategies was to throw a weapon that was about to break into an enemy, which tends to knock the weapon out of its hands, then pick up that weapon and finish off the monster! For better or worse, as the game progressed, the answer to that question of what to do increasingly became just equipping another weapon, rather than running around wildly looking for something new to pick up. It's why I sort of regret upgrading the weapon inventory. Sure, I was armed to the teeth, and beyond, but I really loved that early game scramble.

I will, however, say that the interface for a lot of that stuff in the menus is not very good. Really, all of the interface is kinda bad. Being able to quickly swap weapons, shields, bows, and arrows is great, but not being able to equip a new bow after one breaks without going into the pause menu is a drag. Especially when the menu goes into my pages and pages of ingredients when I hit the pause button, and I have to scroll all the way through that, and clothes, and other weapons to get to the bows.

One other nitpick I have about the combat is the music. First off, I think the combat music is great at getting me excited about fighting monsters, this isn't me complaining about the music itself. But it has this weird habit of resetting midway into a fight, as it'll go back to the early ramping up part when the combat is still going. I'm not sure if it's because they didn't really get it to loop right, or if the game isn't great at detecting when combat is actually dying down, so it tries to dynamically adjust, but doesn't always get it right. I dunno, all I know is that it's a bit jarring, but certainly doesn't ruin anything.

The music in general is fantastic, both in the actual music itself, and how it's used in game. Yes, I'm referring to the fact that large swathes of the game have no, or very little music. I'm not going to fault anyone for wanting a sweeping, dramatic score, but I think it fits the mood and tone of the game to have so little of it when exploring. And, when the music does kick in, it kicks in, and has all the more impact. This may make me sound a little, I dunno, but also the fact that (so far as I know), this is the first Zelda game where all the music was done with proper instruments helps. I'm not saying anything against the music in the older games, a lot of it was fantastic, and classic, but actual instruments just fit better for these sorts of games.

Less fitting, sadly, is the voice acting. While I've been saying these games should have properly orchestrated soundtracks and voiced dialog since Twilight Princess eleven years ago (I feel old), it turns out I was only right in wishing for one of them. I mean, the voice acting in Breath of the Wild isn't terrible, but that in itself doesn't help. What I mean is, the voice acting in this game ranges from wooden to mediocre after school anime, whereas when I want bad voice acting in a game, I want bad voice acting. Reliving Shenmue last year through Giant Bomb East reminded me just how much I love bad voice acting when it's comically bad. The voice acting here is just bad. Of course I wanted good voice acting, but I can't help but be disappointed that if we couldn't have that, we also couldn't have comically bad voice acting. Oh well. At least the various "guffaws" and "oohoos" from NPCs are goofy and decent.

And while I'm on disappointments, it's time to get to the parts of the game that I found most disappointing. If you didn't heed my SPOILER warnings before, then take heed now, because I'm getting into story quests and dungeons!

I think a lot of the story quest stuff in the game is kinda bad. None of the game's dungeons have a particularly interesting "lead-up," for lack of a better term. At least not once you get to the quest giver for each, because obviously the long trek to get there in the first place is a lot of what I love about the game. That's actually part of my problem with the story stuff. Exploring around the world, discovering things is tremendously enjoyable, because I can go about it however I want, and at whatever pace I want. And part of what I don't like about a lot of the story quests is that they tend to go out of their way to restrict you in one way or another.

In the case of the Zora area, that meant constant rain, which funnels you down a specific path, because the rain makes it basically impossible to climb large distances (not something I hate with a passion like many seem to, because unlike some I have the patience to use that time to just walk around things and look for other ways up). Now, I didn't hate that one, and if anything it was actually my favorite lead-up to a dungeon. After going through that path and talking to the Zora king, the next step was to acquire some electric arrows. I don't know what happens if you already have enough of them, but they had me climb a mountain and steal some from a Lynel, a horned, lion headed centaur. I didn't have to, but I ended up fighting this Lynel, and it was definitely one of my favorite fights in the entire game. This completely optional duel with a Lynel on top of a rainy mountain was more dramatic and challenging than many final bosses in games I've played. Certainly more so than the actual boss of the dungeon, but I'll get to the dungeons later. After getting the arrows, and returning to the Zora, I went off with everyone's favorite shark man Prince Sidon, and engaged in a bit of swimming as I shot those arrows at the dungeon to gain entrance.

I enjoyed all of that, but I didn't enjoy the Rito lead-up as much. After I got to the Rito village (really, even calling the villages in this game "villages" feels like an insult to real villages because these are so small, but that's an issue I have with a lot of games), all I had to do was go through a tutorial about shooting arrows in midair (which I already knew how to do), and then I went up with a bird man and...shot arrows at the dungeon to gain entrance. But this time they were bomb arrows! So that's...slightly different.

Then the Gerudo dungeon, which has my least favorite parts of the game in its lead-up. Also, keep in mind, this is just the order I did the dungeons in. First I had to wander around a desert until I found a specific NPC, then I had to put on a ridiculous outfit to sneak into a town of all women (which is a WHOLE OTHER THING that I'm not going to get into because plenty of other people have covered it better), and then, my absolute least favorite part of the game. After trekking out deeper into the desert, shield-surfing behind a desert walrus (which is rad (though the game calls them seals, in an effort to get in seal puns, which I appreciate, but they have walrus tusks)), I got to a desert ninja lair...and had to partake in a basically forced stealth section.

If you read these blogs, you know me. I love stealth games. But what I don't love are games that aren't built for stealth that force you into stealth, because stealth is very hard to get right. The stealth in Breath of the Wild is fine in open environments, when all you're doing is crouching through tall grass and hiding behind the occasional tree or rock to avoid being seen by a Bokoblin. It doesn't work at all when I'm trying to creep around a contained space, and avoid enemies that kill Link in a single hit. NOT ONLY THAT, but they instantly game over you in a single hit, and are the only enemies in the game that do that, and they only do that in this specific part of the game. They appear out in the world after this sequence, but then, they work like everything else, where they just do X amount of damage, which can be mitigated by whatever defense rating Link's clothing has. But in that area? One hit, game over, start at the start. Fairies won't revive Link, and neither will the resurrection skill received from the Zora dungeon. And unlike most of the game, you can't manually save, so no save scumming either!

Mercifully, this section is pretty short. I did end up having to get myself into a corner where the enemies couldn't reach me and kill them with arrows to actually get through it, but I got through it. And then after that, there was a fun boss fight, and I returned to Gerudo town, only to set off to...shoot arrows at the dungeons to gain access to it. I think they were bomb arrows again, but this time there were more sand walruses, so it was kind of different!

Then to add insult to injury, the Goron dungeon has ANOTHER bad stealth sequence in its lead-up, and that one might actually be worse in terms of getting spotted, but it didn't have instant game overs, so it didn't irk me as much. And instead of shooting arrows, I was shooting an actual Goron at the dungeon, so that was at least a little humorous.

But then there's the dungeons themselves. You may have noticed me emphasizing the similarity in the lead-up to the dungeons. You will also notice that I think the dungeons are disappointing in this game, and a major reason for that is they're all basically the same. Each one is a Divine Beast, or in other words, a giant robot animal. There's an elephant, a bird, a camel, and a lizard. They all have the same visual aesthetic, and follow the same formula. You get the map, which lets you move some part of the dungeon, and you use that to assist in solving puzzles, which all result in activating control panels. There's some optional treasure chests to open, but aside from that, it's just the boss at the end, and the bosses aren't especially great, or challenging. Especially not if you have the Master Sword, which gets more powerful (and unbreakable?) in dungeons. Because you can do the dungeons in any order, that means they're all roughly the same in terms of difficulty, which resulted in them only getting easier as the game went on.

They're also all too short, because in every one of the dungeons, I got to the boss and was out of things to do just as I was getting into a good puzzle solving groove. When I think of Zelda dungeons, I think of these huge, sprawling structures that take hours to explore, and to solve all the puzzles. I think of them all being different, having different looks, different gimmicks, and different goals. I think of them as being unique. In Breath of the Wild, the only difference is what you can move in them. The elephant moves its trunk, which is spewing out water, for example, whereas the bird tilts from side to side.

Actually, that's not entirely true. In the lizard, it begins with it pitch dark, and the first few puzzles involve running around in that complete blackness, using torches to see. It's cool, and the only unique feeling thing in any of this game's dungeons. But once you get the map, it gets well lit, and turns into just another of the dungeons, and no longer feels unique.

It's even more of a bummer because in the early hours of the game, I was getting so excited just thinking about the dungeons. Conceptually, the idea of the dungeons being giant robots you manipulate from inside sounds amazing. And for the first one, it was really cool, at least while it lasted. By the end of the fourth one, all I could feel was disappointed, even if the individual puzzles in them were good puzzles. It's also a bummer because there are enough cool things out in the world that feel like they could make interesting gimmicks for dungeons. Using the wind to find my way through the Lost Woods was cool, as were the huge labyrinths I found on the edges of the world. An expanded version of Eventide Island, which takes away all your equipment, weapons, and inventory, aside from the rune powers, could've made for a great dungeon. Just, you know, with the ability to save intact, so I wasn't trying to rush through it because I started Eventide Island with only an hour to play (I did get through it just fine).

I would even be fine if they has drastically reduced the number of Shrines in the world, and just used those puzzles (more or less) as parts of dungeons, and spent some more time making them more visually distinct (also all the Shrines look pretty much the same, which didn't bother me much). I feel like if you were to (somehow) count the number of actual puzzles in this game, it's at least as many, if not more than a lot of the previous games; I just would've liked them to be more concentrated. Oh well.

That story quest stuff, and the dungeons are really my two biggest gripes with the game. But, let me put it another way: Were it not for those, this would be, for me, one of the greatest games ever made. If the dungeons were on par with the best in the series, and it didn't have awful stealth sequences, it'd be practically perfect. Okay, not perfect, it still has a variety of other, smaller issues, but you get what I mean. I just wish those parts of the game were as good as the things I really love about it.

Overall, I really, truly love this game. At its best, it's a phenomenal game, and so much of it is so good, that it makes it very easy to overlook the times when the game missteps, even if those missteps are pretty bad. There's so many wonderful discoveries, and moments that will stick with me for a long time. Like the first time I figured out how to actually defeat the Guardians, and what once seemed like unstoppable death machines now became a doable challenge. Or my quest to transform Tarrey Town from a pile of rocks into a nice little village. Really, the whole thing is going to stick with me for a long time. Probably until whatever the next big Zelda game is. Let's just hope the team at Nintendo learns the right lessons from this one, and they come back next time to make a true masterpiece.

Thanks for reading.