Completed List
This is where I put games that I've beaten, along with little mini-reviews. Some of these mini-reviews may be fleshed out into fuller reviews later.
List items
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This game is such a blast! I've owned it for a few years, but got around to playing through the bulk of it in Sept. 2015. Awesome, awesome game that has a few flaws (mainly the loading times, imo), but generally holds it the fuck DOWN! Good, good shit, and something any PS2 owner should give a shot. The beginning of one of the most unique franchises out there. 6.0/10.
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Ugh. Bought day one, having followed the hype OBSESSIVELY for months, but the game ended up being a huge disappointment. All of the things that we had thrown around as theories from the trailers turned out to be true, and almost every single cutscene makes an appearance, which was gutting because it seemed like the trailers were simply showing scenes from what I thought was the first 1/4 or so of the game. The story ends up coming off as shallow and unfinished. Where are the boss fights? The story beats? Why is Mother Base so hollow and pointless after the first few hours of the game? All the shit-talking aside, however, the gameplay is fucking FANTASTIC, and the best in the series. This game is so god damn smooth in everything that it does. It's got a kickass soundtrack as well. I feel that this game was initially planned to be three or four times bigger than it is, and then at some point Konami came in and said "okay, wrap it up, folks" (I assume during the big Kojima scandal) and, following that, they had to just take what they had, fill in the gaps with copied and pasted missions, polish, and release. Of course, there's still hope with things like #neverbegameover, but I don't think more is coming. Face it, we fucking got Konami'd, folks, and the phantom pain of all that glorious missing content hurts so good. 7.0/10.
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There are SO MANY things I want to say about this game. I love the characters and their designs, and the world that DONTNOD brought to life so much. Being a self-hating hipster, I constantly felt that this game should be something that I couldn't stand, as it's essentially showcasing the popular wave of it that's become mainstream in the past few years (much to the dismay of myself and many other pretentious fools), but somehow all the cheesy attempts at using it for an aesthetic became something that I found to be endearing and much more more. I was fucking hooked from the first episode, and spent the entire time in between episodes discussing theories and just plain gushing about how much love and personality this game crams into every single frame. You can tell they REALLY put their heart into it. Many characters fall into typical tropes, and yet even so always twist those tropes in exciting and interesting ways, with many of them going through small arcs as the story continues. By the time you leave Arcadia Bay, you've cried and laughed and screamed at the monitor and had an experience that you will NEVER forget. The game also does a fairly decent job at using the cinematic Telltale-style interactive movie/CYOA style of gameplay to tackle themes that seem more at home in films, which I gotta give fucking kudos for because the gaming medium has been stagnating for so long and avoiding these topics because of the issues around gamifying them. They knocked it out of the fucking park. Sure, there are missteps, and I guess you could argue that the story is good but *only for a video game*, but it's an undeniable step forward for the medium and something that has the potential to help usher in a new era of thoughtful, interesting games with auteur-like visions regarding their storytelling. It's bold and risktaking in an industry that has been afraid of innovation for quite some time now, and I urge everyone to give it a shot. Fucking fantastic. Despite the less than perfect score, this game gets nothing but my highest possible recommendation. 8.5/10
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I played this game because of its nomination in the "Games for Change" category, and, honestly... I thought it fucking sucked. While the game attempts to cover interesting topics, and has neat ideas regarding its structure, it fails to produce anything of merit, and comes off as a soulless retelling of a shitty relationship in which the man uses the woman for sex and then dumps her. That's probably a spoiler, but I don't really care. The game sucks and I'm saving you time playing it. Don't buy this, don't touch it, don't encourage it. There's little of substance here. It feels like a prototype for what would have been a much more thorough story, but isn't. 1/10.
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