scriabin

I rarely write negative reviews, but this might be the most disappointing game I've ever played. I LOVED the original on 3DS and was hoping for something similar. This game was a huge letdown both in terms of story and in terms of gameplay mechanics. Gameplay: the boss fights are ridiculous, almost like a puzzle game that doesn't mesh with the rest of the gameplay. The experience of fighting weak enemies along the way in no way prepares you for the extreme "strategizing" the the bosses require. Because of the limited information we are given about said bosses, we are apparently just supposed to try a million things out until something sticks. Given that an average boss fight can last for an hour if you haven't yet figured out "the trick," this trial and error process is incredibly time-consuming. Fine for gamers who don't have social and professional commitments away from their consoles, but for the rest of us, we have only so many hours we can put into a game, and the idea of spending HOURS randomly trying out strategies to beat bosses is a huge waste of limited leisure time. Usually, when I encounter this sort of thing in a game, I'll give it my best try for a bit and then switch to "easy" mode so that I can just get on with the game and story. In BD2, "easy mode" is still punishingly hard, requiring hours upon hours of either grinding or randomly trying out new strategies on each boss. The latter would be more forgivable if you could change classes/equipment mid-figh to speed up the "testing" processt. At least that would be more honest about what the game is asking the player to do: try random techniques until something starts to stick. Instead, you have to completely settle your jobs/equipment before each attempt, which again can result in hours of wasted time trying to guess the magic number. No worries if you have 40 hours a week to play games, but not all of us do. Generally, when a game is just too hard for casual players, they go online and ask the strategy guides to just give the darn answer to each boss "puzzle." In BD2, these solutions tend to be woefully stupid. For example, the first "final boss" at the end of Chapter 5 (the first of two bland "fake" endings) - can ultimately be taken down with a few contagion bombs. Just get the Salve-Maker Job and buy some ingredients from any local store, and you can deplete said boss of all MP relatively quickly. She just floats there for the rest of the fight, lamely shaking her wings trying to cast magic that never comes. Cheap and unsatisfying—the kind of thing that you would only come upon by trial and error. And yet without this trick, expect your party to get wiped out an HOUR into the fight when the boss suddenly starts spamming you with party-kill spells. At this point, it becomes a story issue as well. Because honestly, wouldn't this boss realize that she didn't have any MP left and... I don't know, try something else? Or run away? Nope, she just keeps wiggling her wings lamely for the rest of the battle, which by the way still lasted the better part of 30 minutes because she had such a ridiculous number of hit points. It stops feeling like a fight. It feels meaningless. Same with the final "final" boss at the end of chapter 7 - the "trick" is just using the ranger's paralyze ability and then you get to spend 20 minutes just slowly hacking away at her mountain of hit points while she is helpless to respond. It's not challenging, it's cheap. And it's not particularly fun. And don't even get me started on the side quests. Carry a lunch from the town to the ruins. Oops forgot the fork, gotta go back to the town. Oops forgot the drink, got go back to the town. Oops, another inane thing, gotta go back to the town. Is running back and forth 4 times between a town and a dungeon supposed to be fun? I found myself asking the "supposed to be fun?" question far too many times playing this game. I continued to slog through this mess because I wanted to believe the story was going somewhere. After investing 40 hours, you want to see it through, and you want to believe that it will be worth it to do so.. BD2 has its moments, for sure, but not enough of them. (spoiler alert for the original) I found the story in the first game quite compelling, when the entire quest was turned on its head and the cutest sweetest character turned out to be a genocidal maniac—disturbing stuff, a compelling portrait of betrayal in the midst of a story about friendship. In BD2, I kept waiting to the twist, but it never came. There's basically zero character development. Everyone ends up exactly the same as when they started. By the end, the story has devolved into a series of platitudes about friendship and choosing to do the right thing. It would have meant a lot more if these characters ever had to actually make difficult decisions or change their perspective. 72 hours gone. All in all, a terrible investment.

Immortals Fenyx Rising is hands down the most pure, joyful FUN I have had with a video game in 2020, and maybe 2019 as well. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve played some great games in that span—some with tighter combat mechanics or a better story or deeper characters—but none that was more fun. It’s Breath of the Wild meets Greek myth with an Aesthetic inspired by Studio Gibli and emotional undertones of an animated Disney film. The game is absolutely gorgeous. This is the kind of game where you want to walk/fly around just to feast your eyes. The music is, for the most part, pretty great too. It’s a joy just to be in this world, full monsters and myths and challenges and puzzles (so many puzzles—seriously, this game is a real puzzler). And after the prologue, it’s fully open, meaning you can play any way you want to. If you love the arrow challenges and fresco puzzles but hate the constellation puzzles, you can usually do what you like and skip what you don’t. What the world lacks up in size it makes up in density: around just about every corner is puzzle hiding some kind of reward, and you can engage that puzzle or not, for as long as you want. Or you can just go fight some monsters, or climb a mountain, fight an optional boss, collect power-up items and gear to strengthen your character, learn new godly powers… and maybe at some point proceed with the story. The story is not the game’s strong point, and I don’t think it’s meant to be. After the prologue, I played for about 20 hours just exploring and having fun before I finally got back to the next main story quest. And I took lots of breaks from the main story after that too. I can’t help but feel that the game is meant to be paced this way. I played 70 hours total and finished with dozens of vaults and challenges still left incomplete. If you’re just rushing through the main story, you’re missing the game, IMHO. Not that the main story is bad, exactly: Typhon, a Titan, is trying to take down the Greek Gods and you, the unlikely hero Fenyx, need to help restore some of them to power. It’s all kind of goofy and silly, sometimes genuinely funny, sometimes kind of cringey. The Gods themselves are larger than life, often oafish, and the game really emphasizes the way they all function as an extremely dysfunctional family. Fenyx, meanwhile, has a heart of gold. The occasional moment of mean-spirited humor aside, the story overall has the kind of relentless emotional earnestness that makes Disney movies a household name. Immortals Fenyx Rising lite fare as stories and characters go … but lite fare enables the overall tone of light-heartedness that pervades the game and adds to its joy. There was only one big letdown for me, and that was the game’s final five hours or so. The game teases you with what looks like a giant mountain area that you can’t access until later on. Because the rest of the game was constituted by such excellent open world design, it’s easy to assume this final area will be a similar garden of treasures. Not so. It turns out the final area is a linear path with only one “right” way to go, and several mandatory puzzles. It has secrets and off-shoots along the way, but at the end of the day, there is only one way to climb that mountain. This marks a radical shift in game design that feels like a betrayal of everything that came before. Slogging up that mountain was not super-fun, and made the final vault, with its final round of mandatory puzzles, feel like more **** than it would have otherwise. But the frustration of the linear endgame ultimately was not enough to tarnish the joy that this game brought me. I LOVED Immortals Fenyx Rising. Getting to sink into this world for a week after all the hardships of 2020 seriously felt like therapy for me. Like, I’m a better, happier person because of this game. And that is not something I say often. Thank you, Ubisoft, for giving us this gem.

Immortals Fenyx Rising is hands down the most pure, joyful FUN I have had with a video game in 2020, and maybe 2019 as well. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve played some great games in that span—some with tighter combat mechanics or a better story or deeper characters—but none that was more fun. It’s Breath of the Wild meets Greek myth with an Aesthetic inspired by Studio Gibli and emotional undertones of an animated Disney film. The game is absolutely gorgeous. This is the kind of game where you want to walk/fly around just to feast your eyes. The music is, for the most part, pretty great too. It’s a joy just to be in this world, full monsters and myths and challenges and puzzles (so many puzzles—seriously, this game is a real puzzler). And after the prologue, it’s fully open, meaning you can play any way you want to. If you love the arrow challenges and fresco puzzles but hate the constellation puzzles, you can usually do what you like and skip what you don’t. What the world lacks up in size it makes up in density: around just about every corner is puzzle hiding some kind of reward, and you can engage that puzzle or not, for as long as you want. Or you can just go fight some monsters, or climb a mountain, fight an optional boss, collect power-up items and gear to strengthen your character, learn new godly powers… and maybe at some point proceed with the story. The story is not the game’s strong point, and I don’t think it’s meant to be. After the prologue, I played for about 20 hours just exploring and having fun before I finally got back to the next main story quest. And I took lots of breaks from the main story after that too. I can’t help but feel that the game is meant to be paced this way. I played 70 hours total and finished with dozens of vaults and challenges still left incomplete. If you’re just rushing through the main story, you’re missing the game, IMHO. Not that the main story is bad, exactly: Typhon, a Titan, is trying to take down the Greek Gods and you, the unlikely hero Fenyx, need to help restore some of them to power. It’s all kind of goofy and silly, sometimes genuinely funny, sometimes kind of cringey. The Gods themselves are larger than life, often oafish, and the game really emphasizes the way they all function as an extremely dysfunctional family. Fenyx, meanwhile, has a heart of gold. The occasional moment of mean-spirited humor aside, the story overall has the kind of relentless emotional earnestness that makes Disney movies a household name. Immortals Fenyx Rising lite fare as stories and characters go … but lite fare enables the overall tone of light-heartedness that pervades the game and adds to its joy. There was only one big letdown for me, and that was the game’s final five hours or so. The game teases you with what looks like a giant mountain area that you can’t access until later on. Because the rest of the game was constituted by such excellent open world design, it’s easy to assume this final area will be a similar garden of treasures. Not so. It turns out the final area is a linear path with only one “right” way to go, and several mandatory puzzles. It has secrets and off-shoots along the way, but at the end of the day, there is only one way to climb that mountain. This marks a radical shift in game design that feels like a betrayal of everything that came before. Slogging up that mountain was not super-fun, and made the final vault, with its final round of mandatory puzzles, feel like more **** than it would have otherwise. But the frustration of the linear endgame ultimately was not enough to tarnish the joy that this game brought me. I LOVED Immortals Fenyx Rising. Getting to sink into this world for a week after all the hardships of 2020 seriously felt like therapy for me. Like, I’m a better, happier person because of this game. And that is not something I say often. Thank you, Ubisoft, for giving us this gem.

I really enjoyed this game. Maybe because i didn't think of it as a "survival-horror" per se ... I saw it more as a unique game that allows me to experience life like a blind person. I was invested in Carrie's journey and intrigued to discover what her connection to the house was. I mean, what a crazy thing for a blind woman to fly across the country and go into a random abandoned mansion alone following her gut that she has to be there to figure something out? From a narrative/character perspective, the game makes sense and is a lot of fun - and also occasionally pretty creepy.