Tzelanit

The short version for people who don't want to read a meaty take: It's an A- game. There's no "woke" or DEI stuff like the YouTube grifters and incels have been lying about. It's not trying to be Skyrim but it still succeeds in creating a rich open world while doing its own thing. It's an A- game that deserves praise because translating Eora from an isometric space to a 3D space is hard, and they almost completely got it right. Now for those who want more to chew on, the continuity from the earlier games is top-notch. They don't beat you to death with the details of what's already happened in the world. There's a respectful nod to the players who are familiar with the lore, and then a refocus on what's currently happening. It's a really fine balancing act to reassure veterans of the series that they know what they're doing with the world while not alienating new players who may not be familiar with everything and making them feel included. You can either ask more questions about what's going on if you want to dive deeper into the lore, or you can keep things moving. It caters to everyone and that's great. Also, the exploration is phenomenal. You're almost always rewarded in some way for peeking around every corner, parkouring up structures and running across roofs and making hard jumps, and swimming into unassuming pockets of the landscape. I spent an hour just combing through the first small city looking for stuff and it just kept triggering that reward center of my brain. I walked away with a bunch of resources, a few pieces of great loot, and some additional tidbits of lore for my trouble. I was particularly impressed by one section where there was a small island with some items on it across a gap in the water that was too far to jump across, and had no handholds to climb up. I was informed by the game that some items and spells can interact with the world, so I shot an ice spell at the midway point in the water between where I was and the small island, and it created a small floating patch that I could use as a temporary platform to get across and back before it melted. It's nowhere near as linear as I was assuming. This is the kind of game that I can get lost in for a while. Sure, the framerates were sketchy every now and then on day one, and the AI could use a once-over to improve its logic, but I'm thoroughly impressed. Ultimately, I was probably going to love this and be forgiving of its faults pretty much no matter what as long as the lore was right and they did Eora justice, but I'm very happy with the experience. There's just so much here that I wasn't expecting. I guess I came into it with low expectations thinking that this was going to be a low-rent Skyrim with Pillars shoved in for good measure, but it's really its own thing. I've been waiting for this since that first teaser trailer years ago, and although it's not a mechanically complex game with rich RPG systems, I'm not at all disappointed. It's exactly what it needs to be and I'm proud of Obsidian. People doubted that Fallout would succeed in a shift from isometric CRPG to 3D and they gave Fallout 3 a LOT of grief, but it's a classic now, and I think people will warm up to this in the same way.

Bad design decisions: the game. A bunch of inexperienced game developers sat at a Denny's at 3AM after a long night of drinking, and one of them said "Bro, wouldn't it be cool if we turned Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver into a soulslike?" And an unqualified team with more passion than talent got the ball rolling. The whole "dual-layered world" mechanic is really cool for the first... 20 minutes. Then you begin to realize that you constantly have to stop and shine your lamp around constantly to make sure that you're not missing out on potential loot. Then come the sections where you're forced into that shadow world, and the Dread mechanic begins a snowball effect of issues. You're forced to stay in that realm and can only exit it through a vestige or one of those soul checkpoint dudes. And if you take a slower approach to these games, i.e. actually looking around for items and hidden things, you're actively and grievously penalized for it as more enemies and more difficult enemies begin to spawn to discourage you from hanging out in that realm. The game then goes from being a soulslike to a standard hack-and-slash if you decide to try to fight your way through (good luck,) or becomes Subway Surfers if you decide that not burning through health flasks and consumables is worth it and you try to run for it instead. The abysmal Dread mechanic and obligatory Umbral sections aside, there's a whole litany of other issues present. At character creation, you get the option to choose from spellcasting classes as well. These are marked as "Advanced" with no explanation as to why. Well, I figured it out quickly. There's nothing resembling a mana flask in the game, and you're instead forced to use consumables to get mana back... which give you back about 15-20% of your mana over the course of 15or so seconds. Basically, if you roll a spellcaster, you're essentially just using spells a handful of times before you can rest anyway because the scaling for mana through your attributes is garbage. The game heavily favors generic Strength bonk builds both through its approach to dealing with encounters, as well as its itemization as a grand majority of the weapons and armor in the world that you find will favor having tons of Strength and Endurance. And in one of the stupidest design decisions that I've seen in my decades on this planet, item lore descriptions are LOCKED based on your attributes, meaning that you can't read a majority of the lore on your items to get any sense of the world unless you have extreme amounts of one of the two (or sometimes a combination of) multiple stats. In a game that's intentionally cryptic where NPCs say nothing of value, item descriptions and world setting are required to tell the story. Well sorry, only some players will be able to read the lore, and the rest will be too busy running for their lives or fighting their fingers to the bone to survive to enjoy the world. Lemme just disclaimer this for the Souls vets: I've been playing FromSoft games since King's Field, and I've dumped on every single souls game and soulslike and everything in between that's ever released, so this isn't the standard situation where I'm some scrub who started with Elden Ring who's mad that it's hard. It's not hard, it's tedious and unrewarding and it wastes the players time. I'd literally rather just replay the old Lords of the Fallen because for all of its flaws, it's actually better than this game. Even Mortal Shell, for as slow and as simplified as it is, absolutely dumps on this game because those developers understood how to balance incremental progress alongside difficulty. Don't even get me started on this game's technical issues. Anyone rating this highly can be safely disregarded because they're either easy to please and don't have standards, or they're trying to cope with being cheated out of wasting $60-$70. If you dig soulslikes, just play Lies of P instead. I don't even love that game but it's SUBSTANTIALLY better than this drivel. I beat this game but I never want to touch it again. If I didn't purchase it digitally, I'dve given it to my friend as a Halloween prank. I'm going to play Dark Souls III again to bleach my soul of this horrid, half-baked experience.

This is the best Armored Core game in the series, and every system has been evolved. Worth the wait. FromSoft never misses. All of the Negative reviews are from either people who couldn't beat the first boss, or people who score popular things that they don't like low in order to bring the average down. A score of 0 means that a game has absolutely no redeemable qualities whatsoever. A score of 10 means that it's amongst the best in its class. To even imply that this fantastic effort wasn't worth the bandwidth that it took to download it and to score it a 0 means that you have room temperature IQ, **** taste, and you weren't hugged enough as a child.

Yet another mediocre JRPG, and another bad entry for a series that had its legacy destroyed. It's amazing that The Second Story was the last good Star Ocean game, but people keep paying tri-Ace and Square Enix, who've been past their prime for over a decade now, to keep pumping out terrible entries. Looks like a PS3 game when things get busy on the screen, and barely reaches PS4 levels of fidelity if standing perfectly still in an empty area. The optimization is garbage, so there are a lot of rough edges and performance dips. The story is more standard generic Star Ocean: someone on a space fleet gets stranded on a redneck planet and uncovers a plot that affects the universe, so everyone has to come together to stop this threat. So, typical Saturday morning weeb garbage that only 9-year-olds or emotionally-addled teenagers would give a score of a 10 to. The gameplay starts off strong and then devolves into a repetitive whack-a-mole against traditional Japanese design principles: AKA bosses being damage sponges who only really threaten you because they drag out a fight and expend your resources. The series should've stopped a long time ago, but the 14 people still playing this series who started with Til the End of Time who think THAT'S what Star Ocean should be keep signaling to these greedy developers that they're willing to pay literally any amount of money to have their nostalgia stroked. Hard pass. Waste of money unless you're either physically or emotionally a child and are easily impressed by pretty colors and simple stories with predictable outcomes.

Yet another mediocre JRPG, and another bad entry for a series that had its legacy destroyed. It's amazing that The Second Story was the last good Star Ocean game, but people keep paying tri-Ace and Square Enix, who've been past their prime for over a decade now, to keep pumping out terrible entries. Looks like a PS3 game when things get busy on the screen, and barely reaches PS4 levels of fidelity if standing perfectly still in an empty area. The optimization is garbage, so there are a lot of rough edges and performance dips. The story is more standard generic Star Ocean: someone on a space fleet gets stranded on a redneck planet and uncovers a plot that affects the universe, so everyone has to come together to stop this threat. So, typical Saturday morning weeb garbage that only 9-year-olds or emotionally-addled teenagers would give a score of a 10 to. The gameplay starts off strong and then devolves into a repetitive whack-a-mole against traditional Japanese design principles: AKA bosses being damage sponges who only really threaten you because they drag out a fight and expend your resources. The series should've stopped a long time ago, but the 14 people still playing this series who started with Til the End of Time who think THAT'S what Star Ocean should be keep signaling to these greedy developers that they're willing to pay literally any amount of money to have their nostalgia stroked. Hard pass. Waste of money unless you're either physically or emotionally a child and are easily impressed by pretty colors and simple stories with predictable outcomes.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

More derivative weeb garbage from a company that hit their peak almost 15 years ago. Once Kazuma Kaneko and Shigenori Soejima got pushed out because they wanted to keep Persona games dark so that they were more similar and faithful to mainline SMT, Atlus went to hell. More repetitive uwu for virgins who watch anime to escape from their mundane lives. This is a hard pass for anyone over the age of 16.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

People on Metacritic love to rate things as either a perfect 10 or flat 0, which makes the user scores essentially useless. Nothing is either the greatest thing ever created or pure **** that's completely irredeemable. That being said, SMT V is a missed opportunity for what has been a solid mainline series of SMT games. Switch hardware was a generation old the day that it was released, and it really shows here with a low framerate with constant fps dips and bad textures. The story, which is usually the meatiest part of mainline SMT, is stripped down on favor of aggressive repetition and an emphasis on exploring and grinding. This is essentially Persona without the cringe romance and relationships, which basically makes this a D- entry in an otherwise fantastic series. I worry for the future of mainline SMT. Up until now, Persona contained all of the cringe, but those design ethics are bleeding out and will begin to hurt the series starting with this entry if it keeps up. If you're one of the handful of people who still own a Switch, if Persona 3 was your first SMT game, and if you enjoy generic anime bull****, SMT V will be a 10 for you. If you actually have good taste and standards, it won't be more than a 3/10 on its best day.

I'm always the type to laugh off and disregard scores of either 10 or 0 because very few games either are revolutionary instant classics or irredeemable garbage, but after 116 hours of play time (yes, I not only actually played a game before reviewing it, but completed it before I left a review like a sensible human being,) Elden Ring gets a 10. I became familiar with the souls formula back in 1996 while playing King's Field II, and over the years, FromSoft games have become more refined with each subsequent entry. Each game that they've released has provided a great balance of something that feels familiar, but with a little more to consider. There's been a slow, natural evolution in their design principles that have very rarely disappointed. So it's with 26 years of experience with FromSoft's entries that I feel comfortable saying that this comes as close as we've ever seen to these design principles being perfected. The leap in approach between each souls game has never been this substantial. Whereas before you had to dedicate yourself to mastering a very specific path through the world, Elden Ring provides an experience where you grow to learn the world on your terms and in the order that you choose. The guiderails are still in place, but you're encouraged to step over them, and the feeling of "what's around the next corner?" is actually somehow exponentially increased with this new open-world design. And speaking of open-world games, I typically don't enjoy them because they devolve into henpicky busywork where you're only playing a game to meet a quota, and exploring is typically unrewarding in both an emotional sense, and in a material sense in the way of lacking rewards. In Elden Ring, your time is never wasted if you check around the next bend. The world is large, but it doesn't exist just to create the illusion of scale; there's something to look at or find in every corner that further contributes to the experience. A grand majority of the negative reviews that I've seen have been from people who so clearly hate souls games because they're challenging and have been parroting the same talking points for years. "The games are designed so poorly" actually means "I can't fulfill my power fantasy by walking into a room and effortlessly killing 50 enemies" "I have enough stress in my life and I don't need to play a hard game because games are supposed to be fun" actually means "I have too much pride to learn a game on its terms because I should be in full control of the experience." And finally, "these games are so bad" and anything similar to that notion actually means "I've never played any of those games, but people have said that they're hard and that doesn't interest me, and I'm tired of hearing about them because their popularity offends me." If you're having a bad day, just read a few of the negative user reviews. You're going to notice a lot of whining children who've clearly never beaten, let alone played a souls game recycling the same handful of hilarious points. I had to take my dog to the vet for surgery today and I was feeling a bit down, but scrolling through these user reviews and seeing "WHAT KIND OF SICK INDIVIDUAL ENJOYS GAMES WITH IMPOSSIBLE DIFFICULTY?" with a 0 scored attached really brightened my day. I've had the time of my life playing Elden Ring, and Miyazaki and the rest of the FromSoft team are laughing all the way to the bank while you drench yourself in your own tears throwing a tantrum. Git gud.

An uninspired mess with big ambition but poor execution. It's a largely empty world filled with forgettable characters, mediocre art direction, and confused design principles. It tries (and fails) to emulate the success of the JRPGs of yesteryear, but does absolutely nothing exceptional. The writing is substandard, with plot holes everywhere and and refusal to push the player to feel any sort of urgency outside of the opening tutorial section. The humor is out of place, and although the developer attempted to shoehorn in some lighthearted moments, it falls flat and feels awkward when the player isn't emotionally invested enough in what's going on to need a funny one-liner to ease the tension. Everything here just screams average, yet there's going to be a large subsection of the gaming population who is going to try to tell you that the game is great because it was made by a small team, and that people are being too harsh on it, etc. Everyone needs to remember that when you're paying for a product, you can't make excuses for someone who is providing a substandard experience and trying to take your money for it. Stop excusing lazy developers and poor work.