Same feeling. I hate the “eagerness” of game hate these days.

I’m disappointed in some of the time ghost decisions, but I can still praise the overall product as being a fantastic collection of work by some great artists, even if I don’t decide to play it.

I suppose a big part of it is: People don’t often finish games. Remake is obviously a very long JRPG on its own, so when Rebirth came out, maybe a lot of people thought “Oh yeah! I should finish Remake.” and then didn’t.

That does present an interesting idea to me though. Maybe I’ll just buy Revalations without playing Remake? I played the original - I already know the broad direction the story has gone. I could maybe just watch some cutscenes on YouTube to figure out whatever the hell they twisted the Temple of the Ancients story beat into.

It’s not quite what you wanted, but as someone with a lot of FF7 nostalgia, I ended up playing Trails in the Sky, another JRPG from that era, much later in life, and felt a lot of that nostalgia sense; badass characters with sensitive moments and big sinister twists. They remade that game very well, and the sequel (a bit of a necessary follow-on/conclusion) is out later this year. While it does add some brief action-combat, it’s only meant to give you an edge going into the traditional turn-based system (and bosses give you no action-combat).

Fun story; I wrote one about Ace Attorney, in relation to its premise of “If there’s a mystery with a big reveal, we build it up and resolve it in one game before the credits roll.” Instead, it made me realize I had a lot to say about Half-Life.

The series has built up a following around mysterious figures and theories. While the games themselves are fantastic, I should’ve had the confidence as a writer years ago to say no one, even at Valve, has any idea what’s going on in their stories. They very likely have no specific, well-formed plans about answering “who is the G-man”, and a certain dramatic event late in Episode 2 was very lazily shoe-horned to try to manufacture stakes, as made evident…

It’s tricky because I still love HL2 for its good, snappy character writing, use of advanced facial tech, the way it never removes the player’s presence for the sake of cutscenes, etc. But they likely shouldn’t be used as reference for overall story direction.

I’ve been long frustrated about the time ghost branching story effort stuff, but I’m still happy they’ve managed to put finishing touches on this trilogy. Maybe I’ll play it now.

69: Fuckersville

The drawn style takes long enough that it may be too much to expect it in even normal release periods.

I might consider it on console, just to avoid Epic. I did that with Hitman 3.

I wasn’t expecting a change of protagonist, but her combat seems interesting. I’ll be interested to learn more.

It’s possible costumes could alleviate that. The first game had a variety; some of them less sexualized than others.

But yeah, I can see it causing problems when you get sick of it.

Neat. I had an account issue trying to get into GW1/2, so, uh…this might be a nice reset.

There’s a game called Moonlight Pulse that has a Castlevania whip on one character; so you get to decide whether to focus on its use. If you nail the perfect spacing with it and strike with the tip, it does a TON of damage, helping to shred bosses.

The game lampshades it a bit too. The girl who owns the whip laments that she has no natural abilities like the others, and instead relies on a crummy piece of equipment.

That last paragraph is basically how Dark Souls 1 went for me. Everyone laughs “git gud” anytime a complaint is related to difficulty, but I am adamant that drop-on-death does NOT fit exploration-based games well. It was fine in Shovel Knight because you’re making linear progress, and it’s just a dare to do better than before.

Tunic basically took it out late in development - having you drop a measly 20 gold - and Another Crab’s Treasure added multiple accessibility options to either grab your current loss or disable the system, and both games are easily my favorite Soulslikes.

I think to be fair, Dark Souls was a bit inspired by Zelda. Even at the time, Zelda was not the only exploration game that scrolled screen by screen.

We’ve seen a few games that tried to look way back to the earliest Zelda for inspiration, which is very different from modern, Disneytendo Zelda. Tunic, Dark Souls, Breath of the Wild, Mina, all took that inspiration in a different direction.

007: Last Light

I suppose it’s a little dumb that I’m thinking of buying it now if only to instill a future headline “007: Danger Speaks barely achieves half the sales of its IOI-made predecessor”, and to show support to IOI for all their work on Hitman - even though I never really bought their DLC junk

I’m a little torn about death tropes; even Kratos has “died”, and then beat up Hades and slashed his way out of hell. I think it has some premise within the world.

I think God of Boy also had some pretty long cutscenes, and it could be forgiven as they’re very well written/acted. You kind of just have to be primed for it.

Now the question is, is her love of horror games so much that she’s willing to overlook the aggravatingly lackluster writing of The Casting of Frank Stone (mostly built to cater to Dead by Daylight players by occasional random lore mentions)

While Apollo, Raiden, Ichiban, and Nero hang out at the “Intended replacement protagonists that didn’t catch on Bar”, Lara Croft, Chris Redfield, and Fox McCloud now hang out at the “Series that have remade their first game multiple times Bar”.

There’s an MS-free version of it called “Indie Pass”. It’s not remarkable right now, but I’ll admit I’d like to see it built up into something worthy of more attention.