Game-Hogger

I went into this with the premise of a horrifying adventure and was greeted with a messy, cinematic adventure that tries too hard to be intricate and ends up swimming in an ocean of commonalities with plenty of other media from the same genre. From the beginning the game starts strongly and makes Marianne's world interesting, however once you get into Nowa resort the story fails to hold itself together and becomes too tangled with its smaller details while being ignorant towards the larger ones. Marianne's main motive which is to investigate a mysterious caller who has promised to speak to her about her ability to converse with the dead, as well as a reoccurring dream she keeps experiencing is sidelined heavily and in comes a focus on smaller characters and smaller story notes which ultimately add no substance to the plot, such as Ursula, a grief stricken nurse who as a result of her own sadness is possessed and kills the people of the resort. While the description of this character and her acts of horror sound interesting, you never once come in contact with Ursula or experience the horrors of this character as not only is she long gone before Marianne's arrival, her story is mostly shown in collectibles and adds little weight to the plot as never once is she mentioned. Then there's Richard, a traumatic painter who has a "Jekyll and Hyde" personality that is controlled by a gargantuous multiple armed monster known as the "Child Eater", who is also collectible material until one scene where he's linked to the plot and if you didn't find enough collectibles to know this same person is Richard, the story looks structurally messy. This is due to how lazily executed their decision making is and ultimately makes collectible hunting a double edged sword where the result is largely inconsequential in Ursula's case, as well as a few other faces you won't meet along the way. However an obligation in Richard's case otherwise you're out of the loop on a large plot detail and left lost. With these side plots out the way you may think you find the mysterious voice who was the focal point of the plot, however through the 8 hour + run you never do, it's more useless plot extensions up until the last half hour where the game decides to drop a huge bomb shell that wasn't hinted at once within the story or built up so it seems incredibly forced and out of place. As a result the game ends with a flat story and an even messier ending where it's open ended for the sake of trying to push a sequel yet largely lacks suspense. Throughout the 8 hour run there's only 5 encounters with an "enemy" and they're delegated to easy stealth situations which can be finished in 10 minutes. The rest of the game has you treading an empty world doing easy puzzles that won't require you to look up a guide once as you're strung along by a story that seemingly makes details up as you go. The camera is horrible and can be the reason you miss collectibles and/or doorways meaning you'll be stuck in loop until you find the right area by mistake, the characters outside of Marianne are underdeveloped, lack personality and exist to make the world seem bigger, despite coming off as empty because of this and the musical score is something I don't remember even as I type this, it's so samey and fails to stand out. Enemy design is wasted on cutscenes and never once pose a threat or succeed in delivering fear, instead you'll go in a room expecting to be scared yet never encounter anything that makes you scared. The voice acting is praiseworthy however and the usage of multiple realities made the game tolerable, but didn't save it from being a common possession story with a lame story. I expected better but I got it off gamepass so I don't feel cheated, just let down.

As much as I tried to be open to the heavy changes within this game, I just couldn't click with this it. The combat is so boring, repetitive and unrewarding to the point you'll actively avoid "encounters" if you want to call them that, the boss battles are unnecessarily complex and make a stupid battle system even more dreadful than its random "encounters". Although I could eventually solve them myself, I had to help numerous people in my household who couldn't despite the game being aimed at said kids and it only shows Nintendo's core audience can't even solve them. The stories for the recent entries come across as being basic since Miyamoto's stance that the Paper Mario franchise doesn't need a story and is nothing more than a forgetful adventure fueled with jokes you're not going to remember. You're progressing through an empty world for literally no reason and they're only adding a story wherever it's necessary, though a lack of one actively leaves you not only wanting more - but feeling a desire to replay older Paper Mario titles if you've had the joy of doing so. I also dislike the characters, especially Olivia who is annoying, comes off as empty headed and unfunny to the point where you just want her to shut up and quit pointing out the obvious, which you can tell is to give Nintendo's child audience a sense of direction since this games so bad at explaining how to get from point A to B. For an origami character, she's rather flat when it comes to writing. None of the other characters stand out to me either, they're as bland as their designs. The only good thing about this is the music and the stage design (albeit each world being small and lacking exploration), however that's not enough to keep me going through a mundane game This only made me appreciate Super Paper Mario's combat and I had issues with that. I really dislike this game and the recent direction of Paper Mario. Mario & Luigi shouldn't have died for this

Not the experience we were led to believe it would be, it completely discards the experience and the memories left with the first game all for a poorly structured game that focuses on trying to tell a story that would much be suited for an original project. No character feels the same and all of them feel oddly parodic of how they'd usually be, the new characters fail to be interesting and provide zero incentive to push a plot ahead such as Abby defecting with a person she's barely shared enough time with to discard the feelings she has for those she spent years with, all of the WLF are very one sided and exist to be discarded while providing little to no substance and Ellie just seems out of character and like she's written by someone who has little knowledge on how she is, which funnily enough isn't the case. The combat fails to be innovative and feels like it's been plucked from the first game and the story has a lot of monotonous points as well as cheapest transitions I've seen in writing (e.g. Time skips to avoid telling a story) and ultimately misses the mark with the moral the story tries to tell when never once is the motive of revenge questioned. TLOU should have never had a sequel and remained as a standalone game.