games

Fire Emblem: Three Houses: Manages to feel like one of the most packed Fire Emblem games while also feeling incomplete. It has 4 routes, but the first half of the game feels very similar in all routes, and two of the routes are also very similar in the second half. Master Classes are horrible, as are gendered classes. The game should have done Divine Pulse via save points instead of a turnwheel, and should have left the weapon triangle in the game. The graphics/animations are not great, and considering what they did with Shadows of Valentia it's shocking how a switch game feels like a downgrade compared to a 3DS game. Last thing I'll mention is Byleth and queer representation. Should have been more queer people in the game, and while Three Houses is better than the rest of the avatar characters in terms of characters being avatarsexual, it's still present. I feel like the game would have been better if Female Byleth were the only Byleth (I do not like Male Byleth), could not have her name changed, and was made more of her own character who's one of the co-protagonists to the other 3 protagonists (depending on route choice), rather than being a (not so great) stand-in for the player. Also the story, while pretty good, leaves things to be desired (they did Edelgard DIRTY).

Tears of the Kingdom: "Demon King? Secret Stone?"

This was not a well-researched post, and I'm not going to try to make one. I haven't played through either of these games too recently, I could be forgetting things or misremembering things.

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)

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.

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.

i dunno what my favourite game itself is (current or all time), but I'll gladly shit on the battlefield franchise because there is no greater example of a continuous, slow motion, generational bag fumble culminating with 2042 killing the last vestiges of good favour DICE ever had.

while there are a few nonsensical chud criticisms of the franchise in the last decade (V getting bombed before release because customised woman skin existed), the consistent elimination of game mechanics specifically on the tactical/team management side to try and chase the COD/Fortnite moneybag through simplification and monetisation left everyone eventually realising that the only thing moderately 'battlefield' about 2042 was conquest being a mode and vehicles being usable. but the downward spiral started years before.

everyone knows about EA enshitification, given that they've cratered almost all of their non-sports IP at this point (and even the sports fans hate the games but keep buying that garbage), so i'm not going to write an essay on what we already know. but my boomer-ass contention is that the removal of the commander position in BF3 is like one of the core blunders for the whole franchise, the attempts to re-add it were half-baked in 4, and it subsequently killed the overarching layer of (optional) tactical teamwork that actually kept more players invested.

BC2 not having it can maybe be forgiven, as Bad Company was specifically console-focussed, still had decent squad-order mechanics and the destruction physics in Frostbite at that point were amazing. But then they nerfed the destruction, the commander role, the squad orders, the fucking class system, the availability of vehicles and even making the maps boring flat fields with fuck-all assets left anyone playing 2042 thinking "what are we actually doing here? what's the point?"

honestly, if BF1 wasn't the absolute marvel of sound design (and arguably graphic design & tech) or untapped setting that it was, the franchise would have died over a decade ago. the "love letter to fans" PR and overpromising for 2042 didn't help things. we've basically been watching EA and DICE uppercut themselves over and over for 15 years at this point, and no amount of begging for them to stop has worked.

it honestly makes me sad, which is so lame... but 1942, Vietnam, 2 and 2142 were just so engrossing for my formative online gaming years that i can't help it

DotA 2: Should have had random items as rewards from matches based on the hero you are playing, instead of entirely random. Also, they should have had in-game currency for their stores rather than just barter and RMT.

Disco Elysium: Thought cabinet should not cost a skill point to remove an already internalized thought.

EU4: More internal realm management/struggle.

WoW: Raising the level cap is always a mistake. Obsoleting content is always a mistake. Worst storyline imaginable.

Heroes of Might and Magic: Conflux in HoMM 3 was lame

Digimon world 1's digivolution requirements are so obscure that there is not a single guide for the system that is completely correct lmao
this includes the printed one, which is the most incorrect

ok, disclaimer, these criticisms are only refreshed as far as my last playthrough, which was late 2023, so they may be half-remembered

CrossCode's level graph very much assumes you're champing at the bit to do a good chunk of the quests in each area before you move on (or an annoying amount of grinding), which–especially in the early game–can be a bit of a slog due to the amount of backtracking and/or fetching you have to do. The justifications I've heard for this is that it's supposed to be a part of the general satire of MMOs–however, if you make something that drags on purpose and I have to play it, I may or may not feel the purpose but I definitely feel the drag.

The bit after Red Area^TM^ and before Japan^TM^ honestly drags a little. I see the vision but it feels like it ballooned in scope relative to its importance to the story. Don't get me wrong, after Red Area^TM^ you absolutely need to have downtime, but I remember a bit before you get to the temples feeling like we should either be getting back into the plot action or at least be in another area by now, and then there's two temples. Cool idea, a bit much, especially on replay.

I think the puzzles are a design strength of the game, especially the final puzzle, but it very much constitutes a barrier to entry, especially the very long puzzles (including the final puzzle) where sometimes I just want to get back into the combat (the most fun part for me). It's more in retrospect that I like some of those longer puzzles.

I don't like the stealth sections at all. They're insta-room resets (annoying), and Lea feels too floaty to work with it. Her fluidity is great for combat but it just doesn't do precision. I'm glad that there's like, two in total, but I think they should have nixed it. CrossCode is a very active game, and IMO it thrives most when it allows you Metal Gear Rising/Sekiro levels of pure activity in gameplay. It's like if you were mid-Titanfall and they hit you with turn-based menu combat (shoot at options)–funny bit, kills the momentum, frustrating to control.

Lastly, platforming is generally fine but there are some bits where the isometric layering is poorly communicated, and it's rather frustrating when that happens. Also, I'm generally not the biggest fan of auto-jump platforming (currently first-timing Ocarina of Time so this is rather fresh) but it's implemented well-enough to not be annoying in a way that I remember.

your turn

Shadow Empire's user interface is quite possibly the least intuitive I've ever used, and I play Paradox games.

You think those fuckers would have let me boil the rice before coming out of early access... DayZ

Trespasser doesn't run on Steam Deck no other criticism

Tf2: remove sniper. Game should have been updated to source 2 for better mod support and mod accessibility. Removing quick play was bad. There should be a way do see other people's sprays. Let people be exposed to horrible sprays, could not be worse than all the bots. Removing speech from f2p is bad. I am not paying for that shit.

Morrowind should have a start that gives just a little more direction and reason to keep playing.

Baldur's Gate 3 can be too safe art direction wise. I get they are trying to do the DnD aesthetic and I'm sure WotC had a specific view on what it wanted the Forgotten Realms to look like, but it feels a bit too generic fantasy.

Final Fantasy XIV needs new quest design for the main story. Dawntrail suffered because of the quest design.

• Ratchet and Clank 1 (PS2) has tank controls that make zero sense.
• Streets of Rogue 1's NPC AI is super easy to exploit that using items isn't necessary for most runs.
• Fallout New Vegas isn't actually that deep narrative wise, the NCR have the most quests while everyone else is underdeveloped. On closer examination a lot of it is libshit sophistry apart from chasing down the guy who shot you in the head and some companion quests.
• Hitman WOA's NPC AI is extremely exploitable while also being frustrating to babysit, some levels are a snoozefest.
• Mother 3's rhythm mechanic was annoying because I could never actually do it (probably because I was playing on a emulator with a patched fan-translated ROM)