games

Genshin's character quests are a hairball. Too easy to accidentally trigger once unlocked, and then you end up with other quests locked out, including dailies. There's also limited story reward-- I don't really need a deep dive into some B-plot character who you'll never see again in the main story progrrssion.

space station 13 can vary wildly from being one of the best gaming experiences out there to actually soul sucking gameplay with unpleasant people. Also the interface is dogshit but upon playing the remakes I realized that I actually LIKE that dogshit. I just wish it ran better and had a couple QoL touchups

also the mechanics can get very stale unless youre playing antagonist roles. But I guess that's what you get for playing Low-RP servers and relying on mechanics for storytelling instead of roleplay

Final Fantasy X, a game with heavy enphasis on death and mourning, didn't feature the death of a party member. Sin is terrible and named characters die to it, but it's not the same. In fact there were few on-screen deaths.

Also, I wish the world didn't feel like it had a population of 200. I get the population was dwindling after the thousand years, but it just felt so small. I think this could have been solved by having a larger unexplored world or by explicitly stating there are villages dotted all over Spira that the protagonists cannot explore on their journey.

Also also, over the course of 1000 years only five people performed the pilgrimage to the point of defeating Sin. The practice of the pilgrimage would have fallen out of favor with such a low success rate. I'd sooner expect Spirans to move underground in tunnels as mole people.

Also also also, there was no water Aeon. Leviathan deserves justice. More Aeons in general could have explored more heroes who defeated Sin in the past.

Warcraft 3’s legacy is World of Warcraft instead of Warcraft 4

Oh in SOTC killing the collosi made me way too sad

More criticism, indie game edition

OneShot: having a hard time thinking of criticism for this one, maybe the music could have been improved in some parts but I generally like the soundtrack. I think this game's gimmick is something I'm a sucker for, but not everyone finds it appealing or engaging as I've experienced with people I've tried to share the game with.

Hyper Light Drifter: Also hard to criticize, but I am ambivalent towards the lack of dialogue or solid explanation of what is happening in the world. A lot of lore explanations stipulate that what they're saying is sort of up to interpretation because lore just happens through pictures (ignoring some of the coded sections, which I'm not fond of either). I'm still lost as to what happens to "drifters" that leads to their demise. Some of the pacing is also off in the game, namely the crystal forest/west section (I think). I'm also not a fan of the artistic direction of the sequel, but that's another game.

Katana zero: Amazing concept, but the ending is unsatisfying and leaves too much unexplained. (not sure if we're getting a sequel or not). Also makes no sense how Headhunter is killable even though she's also NULL, but you're not. Maybe I misunderstood something. Also don't really like the vehicle chase/helicopter fight level, doesn't feel like it fits with the rest of the game.

Undertale: Chara's motivations don't make sense

Signalis: YOU COULD HAVE BEEN SO FUCKING GOOD, BUT YOU JUST HAD TO BE ANTICOMMUNIST SLOP, FUCK OFF

Fallout: New Vegas should have been more optimized at launch

The bossfight at the end of Sonic 2 is a bullshit difficulty curve, you should be able to get at least one ring

I can only actually play Outer Wilds once, replaying it isn't even close to the same magical first experience.

The level design of Super Mario 64 is a messy directionless jumble of 3D assets with pasted-on themes.

Balatro is very fun but the replayablitiy of it hits a limit after 25 hours. The general strategy becomes less interesting once you have a deeper understanding of the game, and it leads into higher stake battles being dependant less on skill and more on just luck of the jokers you get. Winning or getting high scores loses its enjoyment quickly, especially if you try to farm gold stakes

9/10

Idk if it's my favorite but it's one that I've played a lot recently:

Cassette Beasts would be better without fusion. It's so strong that it is necessary (sans grinding) for a lot of boss fights, and it's very cool and dramatic when the combat music's lyrics start, but going from two to one party member reduces the complexity of fights so much that they become less enjoyable.

I wish Eastward had made more of an attempt to tie the plot together. I spent the entire game excited to see how all the details relate and then it just ended with almost no clear explanations at all.

Cs2 is a game. Idk how to properly critize it though, cause it does exactly what it says on the box. Very competative team objective based shooter. Most of the criticisms I'd have would be around valve and how they created an underage casino but thats not the games fault.

The community is kinda shit, fps games tend to attract chuds in droves

literally not one of them are good without mods, and those mods aren't good until i've fucked with them myself

Xcom 2 shouldn't be so demanding of my video card and it gets worse as the campaign goes on. Not a big fan of the chosen either, especially with the long war mod - they're either unfairly overpowered and unfun or just a bullet sponge and unfun and neither the mod nor vanilla can hit the right balance to make them fun. Also not particularly fond of the story, but that's kind of secondary to what actually makes the game fun.

The first Dead Space was magical (the remake is also really good) and then everything afterwards falls off hard. Dead Space 2 is still worth playing I guess, but it's not the same - the way the markers effects manifest as hallucinations and psychological conditions makes more sense and works better in the first game, but in the second one, idk, the final boss fight just feels like an overdramticization of mental illness (literally going into your own head and having a gun fight with your hallucinations? Idk just feels gaudy compared to DS1's reveal). The only thing that makes DS2 strong is how it expands on the theme of religions mimicking cults and causing damage to society and people's psyche, something that was mostly junt hinted at in the original DS1.

All that to say everything that comes after DS1 makes it feel worse in retrospect and I really wish they'd finish the story in a more satisfying way. The only other criticism I'd offer is that DS doesn't need so many weapons and, in fact, it both makes the game harder and removes tension if you carry more than one. Multiple types of weapons work best in games where each weapon fills a role or purpose that the others can't (this is accomplished with stasis and telekenesis, the other weapons have nothing else to do besides do damage) and it might actually create MORE tension in the game if you're only offered the plasma cutter to fight with and nothing else.

KSP has a lot of really bad physics bugs, collectively called the kraken. My most hated one is that surface bases, as they grow or even just continue to exist, will gradually and inevitably floating point error themselves into the ground and then explode.

Ocarina of Time was TOO perfect and ahead of it's time, so the water temple was very difficult on the low resolution CRT screens that was the technology at the time.

Imma hit STALKER franchise (haven't played S2) and Project Zomboid (with great pain because it's an indie game but I have to)

STALKER: The worldbuilding of GSC is not great to be honest. A place like the Zone in real life would be an insane mess of world powers and ridiculously big and powerful corporations butchering each other to control it. To think that a place that can naturally warp reality, spawn science-shattering artefacts and control the minds of people like it's nothing is not object of contest between AT LEAST NATO and Russia is insane to me. In the game the Zone is known to relatively few people and the Ukrainian state is able to more or less "keep it under control". Everyone inside appears to be ukrainian or russian but most are freelancer weirdos who go there to be rich or hide from authorities. There is little to no foreign interference. It makes little sense that such place would go unnoticed by the world's biggest powers. In the real world a place like this would have their weak "loner", "bandit", "duty" and "freedom" factions, among others (including the mutants) be swept aside by the sheer power of entire militaries called to intervene and control the place, all of this would have immense geopolitical rammifications. It is implied in the game that outside forces know about the Zone and are interested in it's riches, but these outside forces do not intervene other than sending Mercs to do their shit and maybe finance the Monolith, but in general they leave that place alone and do not try to directly control it which is not very realistic imo. Yet despite all this I love the Zone as it is in STALKER, it's just me being insufferable, that's all.

Project Zomboid: Best zombie survival game that ever existed but it has an awful development cycle. They released one update in two years and frankly it sucks, it's broken and it added uninteresting stuff like animals and pointless crafting. Devs refuse to listen to players (who have been asking for NPCs since day ONE AND THAT WAS OVER A DECADE AGO) .Also the devs have left a lot of stuff just incomplete for years and years, from bugs to half-baked gameplay features. And tbh the game lacks a purpose and general depth, like one you get to your first month there is NOTHING ELSE to do other than finding your own way to just die or you'll just get bored and drop the game. The game is easy when you figure out the basics and surviving becomes trivial unless you push it to the absolute limit.

The atmosphere and ballistics are the only things in Shadow of Chernobyl that aged even remotely well.

The canonical explanation for what the zone is and how it works is sorta dissapointing because running (incorrect) theory that the NPCs talk about is tight as hell "Oh yeah its a totally unprecidented organism brought about by people fucking with psychic energy in some secret experiments and btw it hates us and the emissions are its immune response and also the zombies and monolith dudes are basically the zone hijacking the nervous systems of other organisms to act as extensions of itself"

while the actual explanation is basically "Nah yeah after the meltdown a bunch of government scientists were like 'yo lets do some fucked up experiments in the abandoned nuclear place' and shit kinda got crazy with the genetic modification and it all went nuts after we tapped into the psychic field that surrounds the earth... so anyways we're literally just five or so dudes hanging out in tubes of goo, we got a spot open if you wanna join the goo gang... please join the goo gang"

(though i may be misremembering/misinterpreting a lot of stuff here)

Had to recreate this one because I refreshed instead of posting

For Undertale, I disagree with the final Chara scene at the end of No Mercy. It muddies the waters on an otherwise very-deliberate thematic overtone of the whole route (you are engaging in a gameplay strategy that is designed to be extremely tedious and grindy in a continuous slog of deliberate cruelty so banal that it’s probably for no other reason than wanting to experience everything). I’d honestly prefer that the game continued to specifically lambaste me and reinforce my culpability rather than give room for anything else.

Like, okay, let’s spitball. Chara is the only entity in the game that has enough natural determination to step in and override you. Instead of being just ‘evil child’, let’s have them be an entity that is generally non-interfering but wants to enforce 'responsibility for deliberate acts' to counteract the godlike nature of SAVE/LOAD. Maybe Chara is the intermediary who allows us to interface with SAVE/LOAD and/or Frisk, or maybe they’re just an observer of beings with high determination, or something else entirely. Instead of the consequence in Tainted Pacifist being 'evil kill bad now spooky haunted' at the very end, have Chara make a show of them seizing control in the middle of the ending sequence (at the most unresolved moment possible) and leverage the metanarrative elements of the world to inflict a depth of dissatisfaction that can only come from a game—back to title screen, save wipe. Instead of 'you experience true pacifist but game haunted oh nooo' it would be 'you can never experience true pacifist in full again. live with your choices.'

Alternatively, let’s take another option. Don't involve Chara. Don't give a true 'conclusion' in that sense. Just end with a black screen after killing Flowey that persists until you manually go into the files and unfuck the save—i.e. 'What are you still doing here? The monsters are all gone. There’s nothing left. Isn’t that what you wanted?'

Instead, it really just kinda serves to make talking about the route annoying (no Patrick, you were not possessed to do evil, you chose what buttons to press) and feels a little hackish in retrospect. 'wow evil child monster haunts the game kill everyone and you too ooh wow' is a bit of an eye-roller when tailing one of the most otherwise ludonarratively-consonant gameplay routes in an RPG, IMO.

Moving on, encounter and non-encounter area differentiation is a bit unintuitive. Pokémon solves this by having special encounter tiles, and Deltarune solves this with roaming encounters. Properly adds to the tedium of No Mercy, annoying elsewhere.

Speaking of Deltarune, you can feel the lack of a run button on replay. Rather annoying now that I’ve been spoiled with having it.

Lastly, I don’t really like Muffet’s heart mechanic. Idea is cute, but it feels like it'd give me RSI if played for a good bit.