TJohn

Fire Emblem: Three Houses is one of the best games I've ever played. It's one of those rare games that I actually beat, and then immediately booted up another playthrough, which I pretty much never do. The last time I played through a game I've already beaten was in 2009 when I replayed Pokemon Platinum. I'm not kidding. So the fact that I finished Three Houses and wanted to keep playing speaks volumes to how good **** it actually is. A few of the highlights of the game were: the characters (Edelgard and Dimitri in particular were some of the best characters I've seen in a video game), the voice acting was exceptional, the tactical combat was fun and satisfying, and the social sim stuff was pretty good as well, though it started to overstay its welcome towards the end. The star of the show for Three Houses though was the story, which is, yet again, one of the best I've ever seen in a game. It deals with some incredibly complex world building, alongside some great twists. The 4 paths you can take in this game just make things even more interesting, as they provide tons of replayability to see the story play out in different ways. My only minor complaints about this game (keeping it from a 10) are that it suffers from some of the anime-isms that plague a lot of Japanese content, like characters doing stuff that normal people would never do in the real world (for instance making promises for stupid things and then being overly zealous about fulfilling this promise to move along the plot). I also didn't love some of the weirder elements of the lore, some of the monster designs, religious aspects, etc. The lore was also downright confusing at times, and I don't think some elements of it are explained well. The graphics were also pretty mid. I get that there were hardware limitations, but compared to Luigi's Mansion 3, some of the Xenoblade games, BOTW, etc. this game is pretty meh to look at. Overall though, Fire Emblem: Three Houses is an incredible game that I thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish, in my opinion (even in spite of the graphics and story problems), it's the best game on the Switch because of its unique mix of fun (and dare I say addicting) tactical combat, engaging social sim stuff, deep story, and lovable characters.

Dispatch is one of the best games I've played in a long time. I don't really play a lot of games, and most of my time is spent playing older stuff like Skyrim. But this game caught my eye at the Game Awards last year because of the art style (I'm a **** for good animated stuff), so I figured I'd give it a shot. And I'm seriously glad I played it, because this game is incredible. It didn't take long to beat, but in that time, they were able to tell one of the best stories I've ever seen from a video game. A particular high note of the game were the characters who proved to be some of the most interesting characters I've ever seen in a work of fiction. The voice acting was also incredible and (hot take) I would argue it was better than Baldur's Gate 3 or any other recent game. Then there was the art style, which as I already alluded to, was beautiful and incredible. The style suited the comic book, cartoony vibe perfectly and allowed for some awesome spectacles and imagery throughout. I also loved the tone of the world and the story. This game was meant to be a comedy, and it mostly delivered on that front. I wouldn't say I was laughing the entire time, but I had a couple of good laughs during my time playing. More importantly, though, I felt like the game had some really good underlying themes like good vs evil, redemption, loyalty, optimism, and conscience which are ideas that I wish were more common in a gaming world that's increasingly dominated by dark, depressing, cynical games that constantly subvert your expectations. Dispatch seemed like a game that was made by idealistic adults who haven't been overrun by cynicism yet, something which I'm all here for. My only real complaints about this game were that there were a couple of minor plot points that weren't fleshed out by the end (at least with the ending I got). The characters were also so incredible that I found myself wishing at the end that we had more time with them, as most of them could've been more fleshed out. As far as the gameplay goes, I almost found myself wishing I didn't even need to play it. The gameplay was fun, and had some cool ideas, but I honestly wished I could've had some more of the story. My last minor complaint is the length, I completed the game in around 8.5 hours which I felt like was almost enough time. I think if they'd added in another hour of cut scenes that fleshed out a few of the characters it would've been the perfect length. I can't stand marathon length games like BG3 that require you to waste a hundred hours just to finish the story, so this game being less than 10 hours felt like a breath of fresh air to me even if I did wish it was just a bit longer. But besides these minor issues, Dispatch was an exceptional game and I could tell the game was developed by a team of people that knew what they were doing. I could glaze it a while longer, but suffice to say I love this game, and I seriously hope we get a sequel or some more content.

The Witcher 3 is a solid game but not a perfect game in my view. I think the Witcher 3 does a lot of things right. The sound design (including music and voice acting) is some of the best I've ever heard, and the graphics are excellent as well, even years after its release it still compares favorably to many newer titles. The world is also incredible, with tons of cool places to discover, characters to meet, quests to do, and monsters to kill. I feel like the world CD Projekt realized in this game is perhaps one of the best in gaming history. The side quests are top of the line and there were a few standout ones that I felt like were among the best quests I've ever played. I also love that the main quest has several options to deviate depending on your choices, having a few options makes the game feel so much more dynamic. Then there was Gwent... a card game within TW3 which is more than likely the best side game I've ever played. It's integrated so well into the world that you can never touch it if you'd like, yet you can also become a degenerate gambler if you want to challenging people across the land and betting large sums of money. Now despite all this praise, I did have a few gripes with TW3. For one I didn't really like the third person viewpoint or movement controls. Something about them felt kind of clunky, and it felt like I was often getting Geralt stuck in weird places due to the way it worked. I also didn't love the leveling system or its implementation. The designers kinda just filled the world with a mix of different leveled enemies all over, so you're constantly running into enemies that are either too high or too low leveled for you to fight. This can get pretty frustrating because you're constantly having to ignore some cool point of interest because the enemies are too high level. And when you're looking for level appropriate stuff you never quite know where to go since it's all jumbled together. I also don't really like how the game follows Geralt. This is more a personal complaint, but I would've had more fun if I could've created my own character with my own head canon and lore behind him. Following Geralt was exhausting at times because I didn't play the other Witcher games or read the books, so I was constantly trying to figure out what was going on. There were tons of times where some whacky character shows up in the dialogue and Geralt already has this long backstory with them that took place off screen. You as the player are wondering who this person is, what happened between them and Geralt, etc. and they will just skip explaining that and go straight to business with a passing comment or two about the past. There were like half a dozen characters where this happened and it started to get a little annoying, it felt like I was hanging out with a friend group where everyone is in on some inside joke but me, and no one will outright tell you what the joke is, so you're wasting your energy trying to figure it out, then you finally do figure it out only for there to be another inside joke that you aren't in on. This is how the Witcher 3 felt to me. It's still a great game, don't get me wrong, but these few grievances did bother me enough to take it from a 9 or 10 to an 8. Overall though this game is a great RPG game with amazing graphics, sound, quests, and of course Gwent. It's not a perfect game, but I don't think you'll be disappointed by it if you enjoy Fantasy RPGs.

Starfield is just a really bland game. Nothing about it is amazing, and nothing about it is outright awful. My biggest complaint is that there are way too many loading screens. I honestly hate the loading screens in this game, it completely ruins the experience. The game would've been way better if they just did 2 or 3 planets in a big shared world, where you need to fly through space to get between them instead of depend on constant loading screens. I also hate the setting, it's so boring. All the guns feel the same, all the people feel the same, all the building interiors feel the same. They should've had 2 or 3 playable alien civilizations with unique technology to mix it up, that would've been way more fun. As it stands I wouldn't recommend this game, especially for $70. It's probably worth $30. I only got 25 hours out of it and got bored.

Probably one of the greatest games of all time. I could gush for hours about how beautiful and intricately designed the world is, how expansive the side quests are, and how rich the lore and setting is. But I'll spare you a massive wall of text. To me what makes Skyrim so great, is that it's a game that releases you into a world to do whatever you want, whenever you want. The world is filled with all kinds of cool stuff to be found. Ancient ruins, huge cities, crime syndicates, warring armies, kings trying to maintain power, etc. But what's even cooler than all this scripted stuff, is the unscripted stuff you can do. For instance, if you want to rob a store, you can go rob it. No quest or even UI required. Just pick the lock, walk inside, and take what you want. If you want to assassinate a character, you can track them through the city, follow them to some dark alley and knife them from behind in the dead of night. If you want to become a monster hunter, you can go out into the world and ravage giant camps, face off against powerful dragons, and hunt vampires through the caverns beneath Skyrim. Or maybe you want to be an Indiana Jones, you can scour the land searching for mysterious artifacts, temples, and ruins. The game truly allows you to do it all. And if you get bored of running around making your own stories, Bethesda's got you covered. There are dozens of deep side questlines to keep you entertained that range everywhere from rebuilding a disgraced guild of thieves to tracking down an ancient Dwarven city rumored to have a forge capable of crafting weapons of incomprehensible power. Skyrim is a masterpiece, a word that I don't use lightly. And that's without even considering the modding scene, which is among the best in gaming. I completed my first playthrough of it in 2022 and am shocked to report that, in my opinion, Skyrim is still better than many of the games that have been released since 2011. The fact that a game from 2011 is better than a game released in 2023 is baffling to me, and a true testament to how great the game actually is. Some might claim that Skyrim is great because of nostalgia, but I've only played it a handful of times in my life prior to getting it in 2022 and have very little nostalgia for it. It's just a great game, and still holds up well even 12 years after release. There's not a lot of games that have this kind of lifespan, and still continue to hold their own against newer games. As a result of this, and the truly incredible experience that Skyrim provides, I think it's easily deserving of a perfect score. 10/10

As far as Pokémon games go it was fun. The school setting was brilliant, the characters are some of the most memorable to me since Gen IV, and the setting of Paldea is probably one of my most favorite Pokémon regions. The 3 main questlines, and free roaming of the map is also a welcome change over the old stories that were more linear. I liked the new Pokémon as well. The battling is fun as usual, and I love that all the Pokémon are running around in the world. When I think about it, I really like the game, but it's held back by some really aggravating choices by the developers. Chief among these issues is the graphics, they are terrible. Character and Pokemon models are generally fine, but most of the textures are downright awful, characters and pokemon really close to you walk at like 5 FPS and the pop in is obnoxious. I actually think SwSh had better graphics than S/V, or at least they were more consistent and the issues less noticeable. A lot of people complained about FPS drops and bugs but neither of these were much of a problem for me. I never experienced a crash, and the FPS drops were noticeable but never lasted for very long and didn't impact my enjoyment of the game. When I see games like TOTK, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, DQXIS, etc. running on the Switch and looking great, it really makes me angry that this game looks so bad and has such obvious graphical problems. I also wished they incorporated the Legends Arceus style of catching and battling, as that was more fast paced and fun. It's another aggravating decision by the developers, as the technology already exists and has already been applied to another Pokemon game and proven to work... it's just strange that they didn't add it to this game. So yeah, I actually really enjoy this game, but I can't give it more than a 7 with all the obvious cut corners that the development team made to get it out. It's a fun game, no doubt held back by executives pushing tight release windows on the development team. 7/10

Despite the high review score, I don't believe this is that great ****. Within its very specific subgenre this game might be enjoyable to some people (especially those who like D&D, BG, or Larian's other games), but when compared to the broader gaming landscape I don't see a reason to play this game when there are so many better ones out there. The scores for this game are disproportionately inflated by fans of the genre/studio as opposed to your average gamer, so take some of the talk about this game with a grain of salt. BG3 does have some strengths. For instance the graphics and art style are nice, the audio and voice acting are some of the best I've ever heard, and the combat can be fun at times. But these pros are heavily weighed down by the rest of the game. The mechanics and nearly everything you do on the map outside of combat is absolutely horrible in my opinion. The map design and traversal are extremely outdated, it's like the developers forgot about the last 20 years of game design when making it. BG3 maps are small, linear, and full of empty space with nothing to do, just like a lot of outdated 90s RPGs. Navigating the map is like doing a maze with annoying obstacles scattered between paths of nothingness. Say you want to go to the other side of the map, well first you need to waste your time doing an unnecessarily hard battle, then you have to solve a frustrating puzzle/find the key to a locked door/etc, all the while trying to navigate the maze and avoid dead ends. There are ways out of some of these (talking your way out of a battle, picking the lock, etc) but it's not fun, picking the lock, for instance, is just a dice roll. It's not like Skyrim where there's a fun little minigame. And this is essentially how the developers pad the run time, by populating the map with these obstacles that force you into a dice roll. They give you the illusion of choice and 3 or 4 options for how to proceed, but you'll probably end up rolling the dice no matter which option you choose so the end result feels the same with every encounter. I don't hate the use of dice in the game, especially for combat, but for a modern RPG it is annoying that they don't have some mechanics or minigames that require an element of skill. Outside of battle, nearly everything is left to chance which makes for a bland experience. Want to find buried treasure on the map? Dice roll. Want to persuade someone to do something? Dice roll. Want to find a secret passageway? Dice roll. There's very little you as the player can do on your own accord, which takes away some of the thrill of the game for me. I'm not truly discovering these things for myself, the game is rolling the dice and giving them to me if I pass the check. The map also has issues with scope, as most of the maps are relatively small (by 2023 standards), and they're extremely linear. Each map essentially equates to a level, and you have to beat one level to advance to the next which is another outdated concept. I personally think the game would've been far better if you started in a hub map (like the city of Baldur's Gate) and then had 5-10 maps surrounding you. Then you could choose which maps to go to based on quests, RP goals, etc. Instead, they took the 90s model of map design and make you do the same levels again and again in the same order with little choice as to which map to do. You can't, for instance, travel directly to the titular city of Baldur's Gate from the beginning of the game without first playing 30-40 hours. The combat in the game, as I mentioned earlier, can actually be fun. The problem I ran into though was twofold. First, most encounters are unnecessarily hard, even at explorer level. You often find yourself facing off against enemies that outnumber you 2 or 3 to 1. This is a problem, but the even bigger problem is that there aren't enough small fights you can do to grind up a level or practice a little more to prepare for the big fights. As I said, enemies don't respawn so the few easy fights in the game pass quickly and can't be repeated. If I want to fight, for instance, I can't just run into the forest and find a dynamically spawning pack of wolves. Instead I need to go through the maze and deal with a ton of nonsense only to find one of the scripted battles which is likely way too hard to be a simple fight. There isn't enough side content to make up for this either, I cleared the entire first map and was still only the recommended level for the next zone. Where's all the side content I can do if I want to get ahead? So overall I did not like this game, and I haven't even touched on my issues with the story (including its length and content), oversexualization of characters, and lack of replay ability. I love RPGs and tactical combat, but this game is just not something everyone will enjoy (despite the "universal acclaim"). Overall I see why some people would like this game, but for most I'd recommend passing on it.

As others have said, it’s a solid game with excellent controls and a beautiful art style. The story isn’t as good as 3H and the characters aren’t as memorable, but aside from these differences it has made some welcome changes over 3H. The tactical combat is some of the best in the series, period, and I love the art style and relaxing vibe of the Somniel. The UI is also much better and it feels way more streamlined to navigate. The emblems are also a cool addition, and the AI itself is much better in Engage making it more fun to try out different emblem combinations. I think in many respects this game is better than 3H, so giving it anything less than an 8 seems unjustified. Still I feel like 3H did such an incredible job with the characters, voice acting, and story, that this game just feels like it’s missing something by comparison. There are a few minor changes that do annoy me in this game. There are a lot of random lines that aren’t voice acted which seems like a strange choice after 3H voice acted nearly everything. I also felt like the tutorial/get to know the game on the beginning was too long, but these are minor gripes. Overall Engage is an excellent game that doesn’t quite have the same heart as 3 Houses, but definitely makes up for it with a beautiful art style and tight controls. 8/10