I imagine Ragnarök would be easier to swallow if it had stellar gameplay. TLoU2 may have been the cornerstone of "video game Oscar bait" but at least that was also a mechanically cool experience with emergent systems requiring thought—often a thought process unique from other game experiences for that matter. Meanwhile, GoW:R doesn't feel like an evolution in any way to me.

Tartarus definitely doesn't look too thrilling so far. P5R made Mementos way better, so sure it can be done, but you have a point nonetheless. In general, I wonder about whether certain dated concepts will be removed / replaced / improved considering the mission is to recreate the vanilla P3 experience. Obviously some will, but that's always the dilemma with remakes. On the other hand, this could be a FF7R scenario, in which case we'd be getting more changes than we bargained for after all.

I finally got around to nirvanA Initiative and unsurprisingly loved it! The somniums were extremely better this time with more variety and appropriate symbolism, bringing it closer to Psychonauts vibes. The mystery may have overdone it with the amount of tricks this time (two Mizukis felt like a stretch), but the characters are still lovable enough that I have a pretty high forgiveness threshold. The timeline rearrangement was the mind-bending highlight for sure, so I guess we still don't know all of Uchikoshi's moves! Staying separate from the first game's events was a good way to avoid the overgrowth issues VLR and ZTD faced, to the absurd point of having a no-spoiler mode. Uchi and Okada have been optimistic about a third game focusing on Hitomi; whenever that comes around, I promise I will pick it up day one!

What's interesting about Elden Ring to me is that it's taking the patterns of a Metroidvania (i.e. Dark Souls) and applying that to an open world, with strong and weak results. Loot feels more valuable and useful than it typically does in huge worlds since a lot of it serves a specific purpose, but sometimes when you need a super-specific item like that to progress, it can be virtually impossible to figure out where to get it on your own. So the density factor is favorable to this scale, but the getting lost factor isn't.

You're not the only person I've seen raise that question: Why promote TotK as a narrative-rich experience (and even frame it that way in the beginning) when it generally isn't? Weird that Age of Calamity ended up being the most story-driven out of the three. Otherwise, I think Ultrahand is a neat demo for a mechanic that will no doubt rise to greater applications in future games — and not even necessarily Zelda games, considering it runs on the Splatoon 3 engine. I do love how advertising only showed expanding Hyrule to sky islands, yet the true massive addition turned out to be the DEPTHS!

I think I just got into Ragnarök at a bad time, because right now I feel quite done with the cinematic drama experience that Sony has adopted as its business model. We're on our third gen of forced walking simulators thinly veiled by (in this case) repetitive fighting and meh puzzles. As if that wasn't dull enough, it's so much longer than it needs to be! I remember liking GoW '18 a lot more, if only due to it having better setpieces? Between this, Bayonetta 3, and Jedi Survivor, it's as if we're dialing back spectacle but not self-importance... though the latter is nothing new for God of War.

You've said it before and I'll say it now: You know it's an odd year at (not) E3 when Ubisoft isn't the worst. Microsoft still isn't leading in any true flagships besides Fable, but it definitely had a leg up by getting to show Senua's Saga, Like a Dragon, and of course the Atlus stuff. Plus the amount of Game Pass day one promises is insane.

Amid this remake generation, I daresay Persona 3 Reload is the upgrade I wanted most! It even has potential to be the best Persona ever depending on what all is improved, though I'll limit my expectations for now. Meanwhile, I love how Metaphor: ReFantazio's main selling point is that it comes from the director, character designer, and composer of Persona 3-5 (also Catherine) so it's essentially the game we'd expect Persona 6 to be. That said, I am open to what P6 itself will do differently too, considering Royal was made after Hashino's departure and actually had some of the best characterization yet.

I'd also like to celebrate that Capcom is finally doing our boy justice (heh) in the title. HERE COMES... [Link]

My original take on BotW was that it was a solid backbone for a new formula with room for improvement. Sure enough, TotK improves on what we had before (even a lot of pre-BotW concepts, arguably) and introduces some cool new elements that still demand their own improvement in the future. This series is escalating by a margin I'm not sure I've ever seen.

Hi-Fi, meanwhile, hits every beat that I personally like seeing in a game—or any medium, for that matter! Between this, Sunset Overdrive, and (sort of) Psychonauts, maybe Microsoft should all-out embrace a wacky action brand if there's an audience for it. Or at least, I hope HFR was successful enough that Tango can be known for something and perhaps make a bigger sequel with everyone being playable, a wider variety of environments and tunes, and yes, more licensed songs.

You aren't kidding. I tried to have an open mind during the PlayStation stream but eeehhh, even Spidey didn't do much for me besides introducing web wing gliding (which should make it a bona fide superhero experience and completely denecessitate fast travel). MGS Delta was probably supposed to be a headliner, but "Konami" and "Not actual gameplay footage" are mood killers on their own, let alone together. I'm most curious about how the inevitable Master Collection Vol. 2 will handle the nigh-unportable MGS4.

CDKeys is nuts sometimes. I remember getting RE8 for like $18 when it was maybe half a year old. I did cave into morbid curiosity and grab RE4 which, as the consensus suggests, feels about the same as the original for better or worse. Ragnarök is naturally a safe bet at this point, so I'm looking forward to that.

Right, I was in fact referring more to environmental variety with BotW and Elden Ring rather than distinct tasks, whereas Witcher 3 would be vice versa. Guess having it all truly is a pipe dream, if only due to the absurd amount of effort that would take.

But on that subject, I will say this: As someone who wasn't drawn into BotW right away (and even then, despite being amazed by the sense of true freedom, for me it still never quite felt like the deeply impactful experience it should have), I was immediately hooked on TotK, continuously want to try everything in sight, and already want to call it an all-time favorite game.

So yeah, we have a not-so-unexpected GotY upon us. But personally I'm still stoked to get into Hi-Fi Rush at some point too! Any further feedback on that one?

You are on to something for sure. As RPG fatigue leaves me grossly intolerant of padding, and aware of how heinously common it is (particularly attribute-dependent quest barriers), I notice the trend especially in the 2010s seemed to be one-note atmosphere. I'd guess we have Skyrim to thank for that, but either way I imagine it was inevitable as developers tried to make games bigger and bigger. Maybe since criticisms of emptiness popped up so quickly, the workaround was to sacrifice variety instead? I will say the most noteworthy exceptions are Witcher 3, BotW, and apparently Elden Ring... and hey BIG SURPRISE, they're held in the highest regard!

Thinking about SMT availability has me realizing so many of them are somehow only on DS and 3DS. But considering Nocturne HD's array of ports, and how much more innately accessible SMT5 is than its predecessors, expanding its presence to other platforms feels like a no-brainer. Plus modded emulation has proven that the game can easily run much better with just a little extra hardware, something that had also been preemptively achieved with NMH3, so c'mon! Let's go!

How was The Quarry? I do intend to get around to that when I'm in the mood, which could be a while. But I remember Until Dawn so vividly that I must've been pretty engrossed in it and would certainly like to recapture that.

I've neglected to mention this for years, but feel the need to since it was our original threshold: You ever checked out any of the Back to the Future comics? All the ones I've read are fun enough to be worthwhile, but in particular there's a run called Citizen Brown that adapts the game and basically fixes everything that was odd and awkward about it! Definitely the palette cleanser we needed, if a bit of a niche one.