ChaseFace

As a MASSIVE fan of the original Resident Evil 3, this is a massive letdown in every sense of the word. I liked the RE2 remake. They changed what they needed to change and improved on almost everything aside from the Scenario A/B feature which removed any sense of commitment or punishment. Resident Evil 3 Remake has no impulse control. It doesn't want you to get invested by introducing you to the universe and slowly building up to Nemesis' reveal like it does in the original where you save Brad from a zombie in a bar, he warns you about "he's coming for us," and then gets killed by Nemesis in front of the RPD. In the first 5 minutes of this game, Nemesis breaks into Jill's apartment which prompts a scripted chase sequence. Then you meet Brad who dies immediately in the cliche "I'm bitten, I'll hold them off, save yourself!" way that all zombie fans are used to, then you meet Dario Rosso, the man who freaks out on you after losing his daughter, but in the remake he's bald, makes no mention of his daughter, and his voice actor sounds so flat and irritated. That was when I knew this game was going to be bad. Dario isn't an important character, he's literally just a survivor who throws his hands up, locks himself in a storage truck and tells you he's not going anywhere after seeing his daughter get eaten by zombies. It's tragic, and the original voice actor for Dario, Tony Rosato, really gave it his all. Even darker still, Rosato suffered from Capgras syndrome, in which he believed all of his loved ones had been replaced by imposters before dying in 2017. His performance as Dario was phenomenally heart-wrenching and believable. In R3make Dario just scoffs at you and delivers a similar speech of "I'm not going to sit around and be eaten by undead monsters! Now leave me alone!" except the new VA managed to make it sound irritated more than emotional. A small part of the game for sure but you'll find that "rushed with no attention to detail" will be a theme in this game as you play. For the rest of the game Nemesis occasionally pops up to stalk you, and when he does he lingers for a while. Mr. X in Resident Evil 2 was scary but once you hid in a safe place he would forget about you and wander off. Nemesis in the remake waits for you outside of safe rooms and any other locations he can't get into. He just stands there like a hunter watching his prey. It's terrifying. It's really good. And then the next time you see him it's another scripted action sequence where you lose him and fight sewer monsters. When Nemesis is there, he's terrifyingly aggressive, almost to the point of frustration. When he's not, he's being replaced by less scary bullet sponge monsters that serve to simply eat away at the player's bullets. I was talking to a friend who already beat the game and he said "Resident Evil 3 feels like a game that's going to have an anxiety attack if it doesn't get to make something explode," and I'm inclined to believe him. Capcom, we don't care about RESISTANCE, the little multiplayer game that you tacked on using recycled assets from the RE2 remake. It's shallow, it's repetitive, it's tedious and arcadey. Remaster Resident Evil Outbreak and do it right. That game knew how to do horror multiplayer. Really disappointing game. They could have done better, and they simply chose to cut corners.

It has potential, but until the developer pulls his head out of the ground and starts communicating with his loyal fanbase that's been waiting for over 6 years to play his novel little MMO-lite experiment, it's not worth anyone's time. I understand rebalancing the game to make it so that the end-game has more meaning and isn't so boring, but in the process the developer made EVERYTHING about the game ungratifying and tedious. You die in almost every encounter, you lose all of your armor every time you change areas, and the only permanent aspect of the game that buff your stats are negligible traits like "increases swimming speed." Even something as simple and fun as grinding for EXP has been removed, so you have almost no reason to kill mobs except to hope they drop gear you can use, which becomes useless once you walk to an adjacent biome. Insulting.

On paper, this game is awesome, and people are praising it because it's nostalgic and a return to a simpler time, when games were cute and easy to pick-up and play. But when you give people with no experience in level creation the tools and audience to do so, it turns out they squander that opportunity. You can create your own Mario levels, share them with friends, and play other people's levels, but once you realize the levels people upload range from gimmicky "don't move and watch all the crazy things that almost kill you in this on-rails level," to "look at how insanely difficult this level is because I love Kaizo Mario" and "I'm 11 and what is game design," you quickly start to feel some buyer's remorse. It's reminiscent of Little Big Planet, where anyone could make levels, but most people make terrible levels. When you make a game where the ONLY thing you can do (besides create your own stages) is play other people's generally lackluster levels. The game controls great, there's multiple game styles you can choose from that actually give you different abilities (original Mario is basic, Super Mario World has spin jumps, New Super Mario Bros has wall-jumping, etc) but when the game's only attempt at a single-player is "try to beat 10 random user-created levels and be rewarded with literally nothing," then you get a game that's basically a really cool gimmick that delivers no extrinsic rewards. There are TONS of cool, interestingly-made levels, but they're absolutely drowned out by the onslaught of terribly made joke levels where you hit a coin block and a bunch of confetti and annoying sound effects pop out, as well as a slew of levels designed to be so hard that you might have found a new fetish by the time you manage to beat it.

Awesome. REALLY challenging game and it's so fast-paced and intense it'll make your eyes bleed, but it's one of the few games I've played in recent memory that REALLY challenge me. The soundtrack is really bumpin' and the gameplay is so visceral that you'll never want to put it down, even when you're throwing your controller from anger and can't seem to stop.

It looks GORGEOUS, the music is amazing and has lots of throw-backs to older Final Fantasy games including Materia from FF7, for example. If you've always wanted the universe of Final Fantasy to be a multiplayer adventure, this is your answer. That being said, it's not a perfect MMO from a mechanics standpoint, but it feels like if World of Warcraft was friendlier and more majestic. Square Enix keeps adding new content every 2 months so there's never a lack of things to accomplish. There's 8 crafting classes, 3 gathering classes, and 9 combat classes, and they're adding more combat classes in the future. The combat, GUI, game mechanics, crafting, gathering, etc. are all explained simply to you through the main storyline, which doubles as a tutorial with a very manageable learning curve. The end-game can be either really close-knit and supportive or highly competitive with neckbeards trolling over the shout channel and prove how leet they are with their top-tier gear. I suspect they migrated from World of Warcraft. But don't worry, the game offers a LOT of challenge. The Primals (Garuda, Ifrit, Titan, Siren, Odin and now Leviathan) have 3 difficulties - Normal, which you complete to progress the storyline, Hard, which you complete to get your Relic Weapon as well as get Primal Weapon drops, and Extreme, which you complete for high-level quests (I would assume, I'm still trying to beat Titan HM). Hard Mode is already pretty hard. If you happen to be a big fan of RUSHING through the game to get to the end-game content, you're gonna be a little disappointed. There's a good amount to do end-game, but since the game's only 6 months old they're still releasing new content. Take your time and smell the roses. ALSO, THE ONLY REASON THIS GAME HAS SO MANY NEGATIVE REVIEWS IS BECAUSE THE LAUNCH WAS REALLY CHAOTIC AND PEOPLE COULDN'T LOGIN OR CREATE NEW CHARACTERS (y'know, like most MMOs experience when they receive a massive amount of traffic) SO EVERYONE **** AND MOANED EVERYWHERE ON THE INTERNET. The problems have been MORE than resolved. I haven't had to wait in a queue more than twice in about 6 months, and I'm in an extremely populated server.

Don't get me wrong, the entire series is brilliant. I just kind of wish Telltale would make their games open-ended and actually 'tailor to my decisions' like they say they will. Instead of mixing things up with more outcomes, they give you a very linear storyline with small differences. You can choose to let person A live, or person B, but they'll both die in different ways, so it doesn't really matter which ones you choose. It just changes the dialogue a bit. I know why they don't do this, though. It would make a LOT of work for them and the storylines could eventually get so varied in different playthroughs that they wouldn't be able to come up with such a huge number of outcomes from which to continue each episode. That being said, I just want a game where my decisions actually make a difference, not one where everything is predetermined. Is that so much to ask from a game that prides itself on its' difficult decision-making narrative?