Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

Expand

A sort of review of Division 2 in 2025 as a returning player / a sort of review of the Battle for Brooklyn DLC:

To this day, there is no game I have put more hours into than the Division 2 (unless you count like, maybe games like Monster Hunter World or Destiny, where I played them on multiple different platforms, but then you are fudging it a bit). But it was very clear the WONY DLC and the corresponding season were really meant to be the end of the Division 1 and 2 experience, ready to lead us into Division 3.

I'm not sure if it is because of the pandemic or something else, but it didn't play out that way, with the Division 2 moving into a multi year seasonal model, that was clearly extending a story beyond the limits of where that story was ever meant to go. They introduced new gear, new modes were added, along with new story developments but none of it was very substantial, and most of it was just a lot of remixing of what was already there.

To the shock of everyone I think, five years on from WONY, Division 2 got a second, true, expansion. Battle for Brooklyn. It brought back an old Skill from Division 1, injected the pool with both new, returning and reworked gear, offered us a new open world space and a collection of new story missions. All priced less than the premium season pass bundle to be clear, so I think they set expectations fairly around what exactly you were getting with this DLC.

This is the confusing part, because after beating the DLC, I feel really whelmed by the whole experience, but it is almost like for the price they set, they've sort of made it critically bulletproof, because how high can your expectations really be, with a price tag like that? My issue more with this though, is not really in the content offering itself, and more that I had hoped this DLC would be set up ready for us to step straight into the Division 3, but that isn't what this DLC is. Instead, it is a fairly meaningless side quest, broken into a few story missions which can be cleared within just a few hours, filled with muted, difficult to follow story execution, that leads basically to nowhere.

In addition, for someone like me who fell off of the Division 2 probably around 3 years ago the game is almost impregnable as a returning player. From a story perspective, it seems almost everything definitive up to the end of WONY has now been undone and Battle for Brooklyn makes no concessions for those who haven't played through every season. As such, villains I had killed in previous content were now alive, and we were on the same side, so it just gave me extreme whiplash and pulled me out of it. Using Wikipedia to catch myself up, as there doesn't appear to be anything in game I can use, I see the desperate need to keep extending this story beyond its intended shelf life has mostly required an extreme jumping of the shark. Now people can come back from the dead. Use AI and deepfakes to fake their own death or allow basically anything to take place, with a magic undo button. This for me basically kills all story investment, because the story can never have permanence ever again.

In addition, from a gameplay perspective, while truly meaningful content has been rarely added to the Division 2 over the years, there is still a lot of game here which you'll organically learn you way around as you go through your journey with the game. Coming back though, there is no reminders, nor anything to point out what may have changed, or been added (there are a mountain of pop ups you have to wade through when you log back in for the first time, but they aren't driven by context, so you'll read a bunch of stuff you won't understand, close the pop up with no clear how to access it again and then when you finally end up at a point where you may need that information, it has only left your brain. This means huge amounts of the content available for you to do in the game is buried within menus, under sub menus, within even more menus making it completely unclear what the long term loop is beyond the new campaign missions.

In addition to this, while it is neat the game lets you play legacy content from past seasons (if you can find it, which is no easy feat) this content is absolutely dead from a matchmaking perspective, so you either gotta hope you have friends who will play, or be willing to lower the difficulty right down (meaning terrible loot) as this game's tuning is now no longer single player friendly.

Yet, despite how negative this probably all reads, playing this game again just reminds me of why I fell for this game in the first place, and gave up hundreds of hours of my life to it. No other looter feels closer to an ARPG in terms of its robust systems, and mechanics. Even with huge chunks of the depth being torn out by Gear 2.0, there is still no looter that sets the mind racing with a drop quite like the Division does. Each build forming effectively an ARPG class of its own, offering new ways to play and engage with the game, offering you a new dynamic within a team, and with three years + a DLC worth of new gear to add to my collection, I'm sure I've got plenty of hours ahead of me, as I once again absolutely lose my life to this game.

Expand

I wrote this piece on Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition last month on a whim, and I'd figured I'd give it a small make-over and post it here now.

Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition
Rating: 9/10

***

Xenoblade Chronicles is the first JRPG I ever bought. In the last few months of 2023, I became highly intrigued by this particular franchise due to the praise I’d been hearing for the third entry’s Future Redeemed DLC. It promised to tie up the narrative ends of the three games and mix them altogether into a glorious finale bringing this trilogy’s over-arching narrative to an end. As a fan of narrative writing in any form, I feel like it’s not that often this kind of joint resolution to three stories worth of different characters and narrative is attempted. The attempt and the apparent success of it is what ultimately got me to start it and experience the full journey, so that I will hopefully be able to experience the same level of delight and satisfaction by the end of it.

Admittedly, the game and I started off on a rocky note. The underleveled nature of my party compared to the very first enemies I was coming across made the combat feel like nothing more than an uphill climb with an unhealthy dose of RNG. The near-instant deluge of nameless NPCs giving me fetch quest after fetch quest filled me with a sense of dread only modern open-world games can match. The more than occasionally questionable voice acting gave me the impression that this might not be the kind of narrative I would be getting much fun out of. And so, after a rough three hours with a rather unimpressive first impression, I dropped the game. It was as I expected… JRPGs were simply not my genre.

Fast forward to about a year later, when I played Metaphor: ReFantazio, stealing the thunder as my first ever JRPG finished. I got along better with it to the point that I managed to finish the whole thing, which in and of itself is almost unheard of for me in recent years with the ungodly length of it. While the combat systems are entirely different, playing it did expose me to more of JRPG-style mechanics and the style of storytelling. And surprisingly, by the end of it, I was yearning for more. So, with my newfound appreciation of a JRPG game and a longing for another humongous undertaking, what other game could possibly fit the bill? How convenient I had a dusty cartridge of Xenoblade Chronicles sitting there just waiting for someone to plug it into a Switch.

I got the gang back together again, or rather the three or four characters I had met by the point I quit previously. I was quick to notice that something had changed within me. Something was not the same. The enemies I had trouble with just over a year ago suddenly were a total walk in the park. It was like I experienced real personal growth instead of living vicariously through my characters leveling up and upgrading their gear. I contribute that to two different ways in which I played differently. First of all, I made sure to actually level up to the enemies I was facing.

It might sound to an obvious fix to all of you role-playing aficionados, but as someone who had been exclusively used to playing the type of adventure or action-adventure games where keeping an eye on your level was mostly absent from the experience, going out of my way to keep my level on par was far from second nature for me. Secondly, which goes hand in hand with the first, is that I stopped trying to rush to the next big story beat and just enjoy my time with it. Long games, especially open-world games, intimidate me to the point I have often tried to limit the time spent finishing it as much as possible (and failing). Now that I had a, by my standards, ridiculously elongated playtime with the aforementioned JRPG under my belt, I felt less intimidated by it and left myself the space to just explore and get to the next waypoint on my own time.

The combat system itself is nothing to write home about. I appreciate that they tried to go for a different route instead of the usual turn-based mechanics of most JRPGs, but I think what they ended up with was simultaneously over- and underbaked with a sprinkle of RNG and far too many sprinkles of the same flavor. The endless tutorials you start the game with promise a probably hard to learn, hard to master set of combat mechanics, and that is how I experienced it at first. I had no clue what I was doing with any of the moves I had or what build I should even go for or where I should even stand. Add insult to injury that I absolutely hate creating builds for anything in any game and would rather just go ahead and play it. Arranging a bunch of moves out of many possibilities to create the most synergized set, deciding which armor sets fit my playstyle best, inserting my gear with the most beneficial thingamajigs to get the most power out of myself for combat situations… blah blah blah. I could not care less, and this game throws all of it in my face.

My solution was to simply ignore the thingamajigs aside from what I had collected from loot, just put on the armor with the best physical defense at any point, and stick with the default movesets the game decided for me whenever I’d receive a new character. I simply do not want to put more thought into it than that, and luckily, that was enough to let me mostly brute-force any average encounter without problems. The problem came in when I wanted to fight enemies slightly overleveled compared to my party, where I quickly realized RNG was a huge part of this game. You can get an enemy down to almost no health the first try, respawn, and somehow die without the same enemy having even lost a third of its health bar the second time around. That was incredibly frustrating, but luckily, I was barely ever in a situation where an enemy was notably higher in level than myself. And if they were, it usually meant I had no need to fight them in the first place.

A certain white-haired lady ended up my go-to party leader, as I found her skill set to be the least difficult to play, in a party with a (weirdly too old for his behavior) furball and a bloke whose sword I’d unapologetically stolen. They dominated my party so much that by the end I would’ve probably forgotten other options existed if not for the constant reminders of them in cutscenes. None of them saved the combat scenarios from being overly repetitive, and I think none of the others would have helped on that front either, but it was a solid party to get enemies down with in a quick enough fashion that I could deal with the repetition.

The ambush of exclamation marks on my mini-map materializing themselves into NPCs wanting me to pick some flowers felt less off-putting by now too. I figured that at this point I’d dug many a rock or slain many an enemy for people irrelevant to my saving the princess. What’s another odd job between friends? I’ll take your request and see if I get back to it within the next hundred working hours. That said, I quickly grew an entirely new appreciation for the 449 side quests (stay with me here) to the point that by the time I finished the game, I probably finished 98% of them. This part has less to do with JRPG as a genre as a whole, but with the Affinity system the game smartly implemented.

Most NPCs in the game are named and will in some way be related to other NPCs you can interact with throughout each area, which is presented in an absolute nightmare of a statistical chart called the Affinity Chart. Through this chart, you can see the ways in which all the citizens of Bionis are connected, whether that’s through a romantic relationship or because someone stole someone else’s lollipop one time and they’re still super upset about it. The genius thing the side quests do is that they integrate themselves with this chart, where it will update whenever you finish practically any side quest with new information or events that happened that affect the quest-givers relationship to any person.

Suddenly a fetch quest felt less like a fetch quest and more like integrating myself into a community and happily learning more about the goings-on, even if yes, it ultimately still was a fetch quest where someone lost their favorite teddy bear on a remote island. I became invested in the people living in this city through the stories the Affinity chart and the only slightly narratively dressed-up side quests were telling. It no longer felt like a chore, but like a chore I had to do because I didn’t want to risk upsetting Dorothy by not giving her life advice after I got her shoe polished at another colony roughly weeks of traveling away. The fact that finishing certain quests and unlocking certain Affinity between different NPCs unlocked more quests that were directly tied to either previous quests or their relationship too, just added a bunch of depth to it that I couldn’t help but appreciate.

And my final initial reservation, the quality of the narrative and the voice acting. I can’t necessarily say that I personally did anything to make either better or worse, but I can say that the way I engaged with it was less instantly judgmental and let me end up loving the narrative and characters for what they are instead of what I’d make them. The voice acting has a certain charm when you get used to it, and there’s actually a fair few moments throughout the narrative where the actors are truly giving it their best and mostly succeeding. The plot also quickly won me over and despite some pacing mishaps here and there, ended up being an emotionally resonant tale of a group of people doing the thing that they seem to always do at the end of a JRPG... as is my now expert opinion after having played only two. The journey to it, however, was incredibly engaging and filled with many highs to keep my commitment to it ongoing.

I do have to say that it’s not a perfect story and there’s definitely a few things here and there I ding the ultimate scoring of the game for, which mainly is the characters. While they’re all charming in their own right and serve their purpose, with most having solidly written character arcs and some real over-arching plot importance, their personalities are nothing more than that. They’re charming and serve their purpose in the story, that’s all. Outside of the necessities of even wanting to engage with them at all, they’re rather bland and lack much depth. I enjoyed spending my time with them in the moment as virtual avatars for playing through the game, but they’re not characters I would hold on a high pedestal as being the peak of character work, because there is simply just not that much to them.

The Heart-to-Hearts, which are events meant to deepen the relationship between two characters in your party, do some lifting to add a bit more to the characters, but are too few and far between to have any meaningful impact. They also, as a side note, are very annoying to complete as the game will lock them behind a certain Affinity if you have not yet achieved it when you first find them, and afterwards will refuse to let you know exactly where this Heart-to-Heart was when you eventually do reach the threshold and search for it in your menu. I’ve heard the Definitive Edition makes a lot of quality-of-life changes to the map in regards to quests, but this is seemingly an area where a change would’ve been highly appreciated yet was skipped over.

Something that I never got far enough to explore my first time around was the exploration of the maps you’re given to freely roam around, which turned out to be one of my favorite activities in the game. My issue with many modern open-world games is that they don’t truly encourage you to explore for the sake of exploring outside of putting a god-forsaken number of markers on your map telling you there’s some bandits to beat up here or another [insert time period-appropriate tower] to go up there. I never find exploration satisfying because even if I do decide to explore for my own sake, many of these open-world games feel quickly repetitive in their locales or the architecture they decide to put on the map. This is where Xenoblade Chronicles does a way better job at keeping the exploration interesting.

The game is divided into many different maps you’ll be traversing through to reach your final destination of the narrative. Each one feels incredibly different and new, making it so that you won’t quickly be bored of the type of environment you’re currently exploring. The maps have hidden landmarks you won’t be able to find other than deciding to explore yourself, and more importantly… it has the most serotonin-inducing visual and audio cue that happens any time you reach a new area the game deems noteworthy. Sure, it serves the main purpose mechanically of being a new waypoint to fast travel to, but the instant gratification I feel when this visual and sound pops up made exploring in and of itself worth it. Maybe I’m just easily entertained, I’ll concur. But in a world where Survivor-like serotonin simulators are now a genre themselves, I feel like this was likely intentional more than anything.

This brings me to the finale of the game and my thoughts alike: Future Connected, a little side-campaign added as a bonus for long-time fans in the Definitive Edition. I was pleased to see that my favorite white-haired lady returned as the main focus on the campaign’s narrative, as I’d gotten most narratively invested in her arc. And also, because I would’ve hated to get to grips with a new moveset this late into the experience. At this point I want to hear nothing other than "summon Earth!" and "summon Copy!" and many blasting sound effects while characters are constantly screaming catchphrases out of the poor Switch’s speaker. It served as a satisfying finale to some of the plot points left untouched by the end of the main game and ended the full experience on a positive note. It doesn’t reach the highs of the game at its best, as I don’t imagine it was intended to, but it never drops into the worst of the main games’ weaknesses either.

The most notable thing I found mechanically in Future Connected was the removal of the Heart-to-Hearts in favor of the so-called Quiet Moments. They serve the same purpose as the Heart-to-Hearts, but are simply locked behind story progression instead of Affinity. Unlike the Heart-to-Hearts, they also include full voice acting, which I believe was both a blessing and a curse. I often resented the lack of voice acting for the main game’s Heart-to-Hearts. These are supposed to be building blocks to the characters’ personalities, which felt cheapened by the fact that they weren’t even given full resources to bring the best out of them. Here they receive it, but the Quiet Moments often felt lacking in their writing and overly long due to it. There are a few stand-out ones involving a sister that really do a lot to develop that relationship, but it ultimately just made me wish that the same level of effort and attention was put into the main game equivalent. Oh, and the Nopon inspectors were delightful.

***

Verdict: 93 hours later and I’m left with an incredibly positive impression of the whole game. It has its faults, surely, but the journey was narratively impressive at its best and mind-numbingly engaging at its worst. I ended the game with full-star Affinity for each of the areas, and some real investment in some of the NPCs I met along the way. I can’t name a single other game with that many different NPCs and quest-givers that worked together to actually form a believable community of people that I actively went out of my way to help out. And isn’t that ultimately the whole point of the game? Rejecting the old and finding new ways to co-exist and thrive together? I can’t help but feel it mirrors how my experience on a meta level went exactly. I rejected what I thought I wanted from the game and let me teach me how to love it instead, and along the way created the kind of parasocial relationships that made me want the best for this world and for its characters to be able to thrive. Enough with the “narratively”. It was personally satisfying, and that is the mark of a great game.

Expand

The Outer Worlds 2
Rating: 5/10

***

The first entry of The Outer Worlds franchise was the first game I played and finished on my first gaming PC. Aside from being a fan overall, it holds a special place in my heart for that. Over the years, there's been a seemingly ever-growing contingent of people who criticised the original from everything to its writing, pacing and quest design. I refused to let it affect my rose-tinted view of the game, which was made especially easy by having never felt any of those issues to be true myself. I thought the writing was comically on point. The criticism of the pacing overblown. The quest design to offer narratively interesting arcs and consequences. No wonder that when they finally revealed the sequel in all its marketing glory, I was excited to recapture the love I felt for this pivotal universe in my gaming history. When reviews started pouring in calling the sequel everything the first was but better, I don't think my hype could've reached a higher stratosphere. Now that I've landed on the other side... they say to never meet your heroes.

It starts off well enough. The visuals are breathtaking. The combat is refined. From the very first conversations you have with NPCs, it seems like the role-playing mechanics are deepened and your choices in both your skills and actions will be more important than ever. In every way, it seemed like the reviews were right. This is an improved version of everything the first game tried to be, but ultimately didn't quite have the budget to achieve. It's a feeling that, despite my mixed reaction to the sequel overall, stays true for the full extent of the game. Everything feels more fleshed-out and of higher-caliber production. When people say money can't buy happiness however, it seems the case here all the same. All the extra money, time and effort undoubtedly put into the development couldn't buy the sense of true engagement that any video game aims for. I was playing it. I was going through the motions. Yet, outside of a few rare moments, it never went beyond that. I've had to confront if the criticism of the first was right after all. Was I blinded by the allure of running a newly released title on my newly built PC? There might be a case to be made there, but the larger issue seems to personally come down to one thing in particular: the narrative.

The Outer Worlds 2 sets you off in a new region of space called Arcadia. Outside of a merged company comprised out of two of the first game's factions, the characters and factions you will meet throughout are newly invented for this story. Newly invented might be a somewhat of a generous term, since the four factions are all varying shades of incredibly generic. Auntie's Choice serves as the returning player, but feels like nothing but a rehash of the same humor they employed for both factions in the original. The Order is a highly typical scientist society where all work towards the betterment of mankind with some predictably shady dealings in the process. These two are the only factions you build reputation that have any actual importance to the over-arching narrative and your choices. The Protectorate is the enemy faction, in that you will spend most of your time fighting humans fighting them. The black sheep of the galaxy, but for no interesting reasons. It is simply because they're authoritarian and territorial, which therefore paints them as the most evil. Sub Rosa exists as your black market network, but is never at any point related to the major goings-on nor has any depth. You could remove them from the game without changing anything else and nothing of value would be lost.

In a genre where having a strong narrative is one of the driving factors in the quality of your project, having an unimpressive collection of groups to deal with is one of the worst sins you can commit. There are no twists and turns within their characterisation. No insightful commentary into the inner workings of the stereotypes they portray. What is there is entirely surface level, with possibly a few ethical or philosophical debates thrown in to momentarily convince you there might be some deeper writing at play here. It feels reactionary to say it's elementary school-level of thesis writing, which it's obviously not, but it doesn't shake the feeling that it is. The moral quandaries they will try to throw at you are that only in name, because there is always a best option if you have skillfully built your character or gathered enough information to get the best outcome. For the most part, anyone coming into any confrontation prepared will not leave it with a surprising or disappointing outcome. Disappointing only if you expected better, which I do from a studio with decades of experience behind them.

You might hope that even if the main factions are weak, the overall narrative and companions might jump in to save the whole ordeal. I've never been more disappointed to say that it's equally not the case. The main story evolves over time from a typical revenge arc to your usual saving the galaxy trope. I'm always in for a good revenge arc, but the writers seemed to have missed the necessary prerequisite to pulling it off successfully. Mainly, making the player genuinely invested in getting said revenge. The story will tell you that they're a traitor to your cause. It will tell you through its companions how badly they want revenge on them. It will tell you how much it's of utmost importance to stop them from committing more heinous acts. You're actively being told how to feel about this person, but the groundwork was never laid to elicit true emotion from the player. You barely know anything about this person at all, which is not something that's slowly rectified as you play more. Sure, you learn about their motives, but I couldn't tell you one thing about their backstory after having just finished a good 65 hours playing or why I should hate them beyond the basics of what they want you to feel. There is nothing to react to on a personal level. Only impersonal plot points.

I became slightly more interested with what the game eventually turned into with its narrative, but it wasn't a very notable difference. Saving the universe is an easier motive to grasp onto than having to feel betrayal from a person you only just met. The end-of-universe scenario presented is somewhat interesting, yet they could've done more with it. I will say that it results in an exciting finale hinging on the paths you chose to take in the story, which was a great highlight to end the full experience on. The ending slides presented to you before the credits roll also seemed to cover most of what I was wondering about and served as a thoughtful epilogue to the actions I've taken over the course of my journey. On that front, it satisfyingly ended an underwhelming narrative, but it didn't do anything to elevate the thoughts I have regarding it as a whole.

As for the companions, they get better treatment than most characters in that they are by far the most fleshed out. The issue with them remains however, that standing out in a game full of unmemorable characters is hardly the most difficult of tasks. I liked how the companions felt like they were truly committed to their own view of the world and not instantly amenable to seeing things your way. The way they develop over the course of the action while staying true to their own character was well-executed. They simply are not particularly memorable. None of them will be likely to enter the pantheon of the most beloved companions for any person playing. They have a good enough diversity of personalities between them and some of their quests are the highlights of the story, but they're far from expertly crafted characters you just want to root for. They fulfill their purpose of helping you along your journey, but I'm not very invested in what will happen to them afterwards other than seeing whether my own actions had any effect on their future. This is an issue the first game shared however, which itself had no companions that truly stood out in the broader gaming landscape.

It's a shame that I've had to be so negative about the writing. As I've said, the game does ultimately feel like it's an improvement on the first game in almost all of its areas. It's exactly what's made me question my memory of the first entry. If I agree that almost everything is better in this one, is it simply my own external feelings that I had around the previous game that's making me think more positively of its writing as well? It's possible. I'd like to say that I don't think the writing is necessarily of piss-poor quality at any point. It's not. It's (mostly) competently written, but that's about the nicest thing you can say about it. You could say it's still better than a lot of video game narratives. The problem arises where this game is supposed to rely on it. If there's no story to want to role-play in, then what am I playing a role-playing game for? Other stories may be worse overall, but they often have other mechanics they either focus on or lift them up entirely. Even if everything else in this game is above average, that simply doesn't cut it for this genre.

When it comes to the other aspects of the game, it's worth talking about them. The combat feels very polished and fun to play. There's many different weapons with exciting gimmicks, though I've personally not used much of them. The stealth attacks feel very satisfying to pull off even if I only realised a long while from the start of the game that it worked with guns too. I did find companions within combat to be rather useless. In almost every battle, there'd be one of them that would instantly go down. I'm not sure if I missed anything besides upgrading their levels and choosing their mods that could've avoided that, but if I did, the game never pointed me in the right direction. I was often left to fend for myself, which is maybe the first time I felt like a ''Lone Ranger'' in a RPG game without having choosen that type of perk equivalent. The difficulty of the fights is well balanced and I never felt like I ran into a really difficult spike, nor did I feel like I ever became overly powerful. The enemies were always able to keep up with my team and I as much as I was able to keep up with their scaling health pools.

What wasn't scaled as professionally was the levels of your character. I reached max level a long time before I ever came close to the end of the game. You could say that that might be a personal thing because I explored too much, but I've seen the same sentiment expressed by almost every player of the game. There was a good one-to-two dozen hours where I gained absolutely no experience, and thus no reward was given outside of currency (which I already had way too much of) or guns (when I had already settled on my favourite way to engage combat). It removed incentive from a game that desperately needed it in the moments where the story was lacking. My insistence with clearing my quest log was enough to incentivise me to do them still, but I wish that feeling wouldn't have had to come externally. I did like how it is fairly brutal with the amount of skills you can specialise in and actively use. The skill checks can be unforgiving, and you might simply be out of luck with doing some things here and there. That made the way I built my character feel important, which is always a benefit in a game like this. I've seen sentiment expressed that they could've been more loose with the points given, but this is one place where I personally wouldn't have changed a thing.

As I've mentioned before, the visuals are indeed breathtaking. Plenty of stunning vistas are offered to you throughout the course of your journey. The art directors absolutely understood the assignment like no one else on this project. I'm sure the capabilities of the controversial Unreal Engine 5 were also a very helpful tool there, but it still takes the people working with it to make the best out of it. That they did. Not only is it just beautifully directed, but the fidelity of the textures are also top-notch. I can't say I've noticed any stretchy, blurring textures throughout my whole playtime. They had a lot more time to bring this world to life visually and clearly optimised it to the best extent. I will also add that I noticed none of the trappings that Unreal Engine 5 games are usually accused of, such as stuttering. Technically, a very well optimised and gorgeous game which I can only wish had better bones attached to it. A case of style over substance, but not due to a lack of trying for the latter. The only thing I would've asked for graphically is the sorely missing photo mode.

Another thing I want to mention as being actually impressive is the quality of the animations. I have exclusively played in first-person mode, so I will only be able to comment on the animations from that view. The few times I switched to third-person only to make certain screenshots, they did seem a lot more janky, but it's not something that affected my experience on a regular basis. In first-person, they're buttery smooth in the way both your body moves and how it interacts with objects in the environments. From simple actions like performing skill checks such as hacking, engineering or to reloading your gun, it feels really good and satisfying. Unfortunately, the NPCs are limited to generic movements for the most part unless the dialogue calls for something specific, but the pool of those is wide enough that I didn't necessarily mind. The quality of those often reused animations were not quite on par, but not enough to distract from the high-quality nature of the rest.

***

Verdict: All in all, it's hard to call The Outer Worlds 2 an actively bad game. The sum of its parts includes a lot of good on a mechanical and visual level, but it's all dragged down by the mediocre writing of the game's characters, narrative and factions. It's disappointing that after a long wait and a prospective successful franchise, they seem to have shot themselves in the foot with making this sequel the worst of all: largely boring. It's not going to convince anyone who didn't enjoy the first to become a fan. I will assume it will only validate their feelings of the first one. For me, it made me question my views instead of validating anything, which is easily a worse feeling. I think many people who will come into the sequel who enjoyed the first will similarly be disappointed, but I genuinely hope their mileage will vary for their own sake. It's a shame when a game does not live up to your expectations, even if I may have put them unreasonably high after all. I had a hard time deciding whether I should grade this game a five or a six, but ultimately a five felt more appropriate as I consider that to be a truly mediocre game. Sadly, that seems the most appropriate word I can use to describe this one. A mediocre game with certain strengths in all the worst places for its genre. Alas, may we possibly meet again in future under better circumstances.

Expand

Feels like it's been ages, but here some writeups on the last few games I beat (all on Steam).

Tales of Symphonia

I spent a large portion of the back half of 2025 playing through this. I don't think it's quite as great as it's reputation would lead you to believe, but it's still great JRPG comfort food. I do love the little "diorama" aesthetic of the towns & dungeons in this era of Tales games too (they make great use of 3D space for verticality & have a charm to them that I think is largely gone from the more modern Tales games). Also nice is a bit of non-linearity when it comes to dungeon completion order at points, but unfortunately it also has missable quests/areas that aren't really telegraphed well (there's like 3 towns that are wiped off the map as you progress through the story).

Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution

Not the best in the franchise, but still a solid "Metroidvania" that's well infused with the colorful aesthetic & bubbly humor found in the series. The big twist here is that you can manipulate the layout of the environment in certain areas (they'll have foreground & background planes, and certain switches will move the background around letting you access different areas) which is novel, however in a huge oversight there's absolutely no in-game map whatsoever. Nothing is ever quite so confusing for this to be anything but a mild inconvenience, but it does mean I'm not going to bother looking for the two Secret Squids left unfound.

Captain Blood

A long lost pirate themed hack & slasher cancelled right before release, finally seeing the light of day decades after the fact. It's certainly a PS360 era game, from the over the top bloody action to the plethora of insta fail QTE's. In all honesty it's not all that hard of a game, though it can be inconsistent. It's only ever hard if it decides to cap off a level by puking out wave after wave of random enemies in large amounts. Otherwise, they tend to end with a cinematic QTE sequence (while insta fail, it'll just send you back to the start of the sequence & they usually aren't long) or a boss fight (bosses are spongey, but not at all hard other than one instance where it pairs the boss with the aforementioned enemy waves). One annoyance is that it also features a QTE after every boss, and (based on the couple I failed) sometimes it'll just set you back at the start of the QTE, but other times... it'll make you redo the entire boss fight. The story largely just exists to provide context for the action on screen and could largely be improved (you're an outlaw taking on various missions for the English to attack the Spanish, and I had assumed that the Brits were going to throw you under the bus at some point, but that just doesn't happen & the game ends. I have a feeling the game was originally going to be longer).

Expand

It took around 65 hours, but I have finally rolled credits on AC Shadows. I do have the expansion as a part of my sub, and I think I have a week left, but if I can’t complete it in time I don’t want to pay another month, plus I am just kinda ready to move onto other things, so I am deciding to close the book on the game here, unless some big new expansion comes out in the future, then maybe I’d give it another look.

I have kinda said everything I wanted to say about this already in my other two posts, but one was a positives summary and one was a negatives summary, so I kinda wanted to bring all of those thoughts together in one cohesive package, with the hindsight of now finishing the game and being able to look back and reflect on certain things.

To kinda TLDR my thoughts up top, I think Assassin’s Creed Shadows was so close to being a truly elegant solution to address the discourse around modern AC games and the Ubisoft formula, undone so utterly by the sheer bloat of it all. And at this point I just don’t think this is a specifically Ubisoft problem, this is a modern gaming epidemic. It is basically year 15 of my overriding thought on every game I play being “this was way too long”.

I know you’ve heard this from me before, but I am once again arguing with my whole chest that had this been a 10 - 15 hour main quest, double that if you want to 100 percent this, with a map 10 percent of the size, with each included region having its own identity and set of activities… then this game would have basically been perfect.

You could cut out every single one of the seemingly infinite number of faceless, nameless, contract rings that are outside of the two core ones for Yasuke and Naoe and instantly this is a better game. I always hated how YouTubers talked about creating “content” for their channels, because it shows how much of the creative process has been devalued over the years, it isn’t about creating one piece of true meaning that can be savoured and enjoyed as your heart desires, it is just about flooding everything with stuff, quality isn’t even a secondary consideration, it is just an endless pursuit of boundless empty calorie junk to trick the consumer into thinking they somehow won the exchange because they got more of it, even though what they got more of is a bunch of low quality junk they don’t need and is effectively worthless to them. That is what is packed around the genuinely strong core of AC Shadows, until it simply drowns in the filler and gets lost.

And I guess it is probably easier seemingly for devs to make 15 percent of a video game, and then for the other 85 percent just copy and paste that first 15 percent over and over again, with zero evolution whatsoever, but I just think every game is worse for it. Every single part of the experience you enjoyed eventually gets diluted into utter meaninglessness by the crushing weight of endless play hours.

AC Shadows is in many ways the "super-version" of the feudal Japan open world game, offering a gorgeous rendition of feudal Japan, that we experience through 8 different rotating seasons, and the "Thunder and Lightning" protagonist duo could have felt genuinely inspired had it been given a few more years in the oven.

But that modern gaming bloat man.

As the hours roll on, and you churn through seemingly endlessly repeated sections of map with the same two or three world activities over and over and over again, all anchoring to this world, this story, these characters, even any anchoring to what you even enjoyed about the game to start with, is either completely drowned out, if not just lost entirely. The narrative loses its heart under a mountain of map markers, the gear system starts in second gear and never leaves it, and the gameplay balance eventually makes Yasuke redundant as Naoe scales into an all-powerful god.

I enjoyed the human focus of the early hours of the narrative, but this becomes lost by the midpoint as your objective board ends up just so utterly bloated with targets you’re practically tripping over them, which throws you from narrative thread to narrative thread, making it nearly impossible to follow one thread through coherently. The whole time you’re trying as hard as you can to remember who anyone is and why you’re doing anything and so by the time I had gotten to some of the largest narrative payoffs, I just simply felt nothing because the hours and hours of bloat had utterly disconnected me from the emotional core of any of these stories. And it is such a shame too, as those early hours show they could have told an excellent story if that was their focus here, but this is Ubisoft, and map markers are always the primary focus.

I feel like the sheer length and volume of this does more than just harm the narrative though. I initially thought this world so gorgeous, I thought the eight-stage seasonal system was such an elegant solution to setting this version of feudal Japan apart from other games like GOT or ROTR, but huge parts of this map are not curated, it is like I am going through a community created sandbox, and this only becomes more apparent with each passing hour. Beautiful vistas lose their impact when you see the same vista so many times, the world cannot feel organic and real when huge sections of square mileage are copied and pasted over and over again. The world feels placeless because no region has an identity different to any other.

Likewise, a lack of evolution in the activities you are completing also breaks your connection to this world. There is nothing setting one area of the map apart from any other, to the point where I sorta stopped exploring new regions at one point and just started fast travelling backwards and forwards, as I knew there would be no rewards for going off the beaten path.

It breaks the game from a gameplay perspective, too. Initially, the role of each playable character is striking. You play as Naoe exclusively for the first 15 or so hours, her fantasy is clear, and her vulnerabilities force the player to engage with her full kit and the game’s full suite of mechanics. When you first get your hands on Yasuke, it is a treat because it feels like the game suddenly allows you to break out of the very box it has been so heavily clamping down around you in those opening hours. Naoe’s damage is low, and her survivability lower, while Yasuke is practically immortal, and each blow is like a nuclear explosion. Engagements with Naoe took careful preparation, while Yasuke kicks down the door and demands the very kind of chaos you were previously actively avoiding.

However, somewhere along the way, this just all stops being true. While Naoe technically does remain the more fragile and lower damage of the two, you will naturally hit a point where Naoe can just take on 10+ elites in open combat just as well as Yasuke can. And maybe this is just unavoidable in a loot based RPG where your power is constantly growing, but this was their problem to solve in the planning stage, not be an unresolved conflict at full release.

I think at its core, a Thunder and Lightning set of protagonists is as elegant as the seasonal solution in addressing the core conflict of trying to appeal to the fractured playerbase they created by pivoting into these loot based RPGs. Those who like the modern style of AC, can play as Yasuke. While those who long for AC to return to the stealth focused titles of the past, can play as Naoe. But when the chips are all on the table, Naoe ends up the Thunder and the Lightning, and Yasuke ends up not a lot at all. Yasuke physically doesn’t have access to the tools that allow him to be the Lightning, while Naoe just naturally becomes the Thunder because you eventually just become so cartoonishly powerful.So what is Yasuke for? I was never able to find an answer to this question.

Talking of loot and RPG systems, they suck honestly. It seems to be trying to find a middle ground between the overwhelming boredom of Valhalla, and that of something like Odyssey (which I loved, but I know many didn’t), but all they have found here really is a No Man’s Land, not a compromise meeting in the middle. This has basically none of the positives or negatives of either system, so all it leaves in its wake is an overwhelming blandness.

The range of stats and abilities are too small, and too minor. This makes sense in some regards because even the most loot shy will naturally be funnelled into builds because there are just so few options here it is kinda hard to screw anything up. But the first build you create within the opening hours of the game feels so strong and cohesive, because you’ve basically experienced the limits of what this gear system can offer you already and the loot game for the next 45+ hours is effectively just trying to find the same items again with higher levels and stat rolls on. Even "Legendary" items don’t really make things any more interesting, as they lack the truly transformative properties a piece of Legendary or Exotic gear has in other ARPGs.

I dunno, maybe this is a controversial opinion, but if you want to have these modern looter RPG AC games, but then also want to appeal to the members of the audience that complained about the loot in Odyssey, maybe your entire design directive is just flawed and needs rethinking. Like either stick with the looter RPG AC games and be willing to let go of the audience who don’t like these, or maybe just don’t make these at all, as trying to make loot games that appeal to those who don’t like loot just makes the game worse for everybody.

I dunno, it is just hard not to think of so many of the RPG ideas in this as like a 1.0 early access idea that was meant to be fleshed out over the next 8 years of community feedback, not the finished product in the launch of the title. And that feels like a major problem when we’re on our fourth go around of the AC Looter RPG. Surely the formula should feel a lot more figured out than this by now.

So yeah, overall, it’s a game that I’m ultimately glad I played, but it feels more like a 1.0 proof-of-concept for a better AC RPG a long way down the road, rather than the triumphant “they finally did it” Japan AC it almost was. To me, and seemingly to many, Valhalla was an overcorrection to the complaints about Odyssey, and I think they make some big strides in Shadows in steering this flawed formula in the best direction it has been going in since Odyssey, but by the time the credits rolled, the main feeling I had was the familiar feeling mix of apathy and burnout.