Bioshock: Infinite(Nintendo Switch) Review

This is my favorite Bioshock game but it is hard to deny the problems it has. There of course the narrative issues that are well known with it. I can look past those but the gameplay while being the best in the series has issues I'm noticing more this time around. Playing Infinite now knowing the behind the scenes as well as the interviews at the time, a part of me is impressed that they were able to salvage the game into something fun and enjoyable shooter from the 7th gen.

The story of course is a rather divisive if not outright derided part of the game depending on which circle of the internet you are in at the moment. I don't particularly think it's outright repulsive. The voice acting and moment to moment dialogue with Elizebeth and Booker are fine in the moment and they are the heart of the story. Since that part is handled decently, I can overlook the big narrative shortcomings like the premise of an FPS protagonist being framed as an everyman who is constantly in debt. The pointless Vox Populi sub plot that almost makes the story enter in the realm of "too bleak, stop caring". Ignoring all that, it's nothing more than padding since Daisy Fitzroy is going to die anyway and the whole point was to avoid unnessescary killing to get the airship back. There of course the pointless and bizzare time travel story that was ultimately a multiverse story and the latter is nothing more than relativism as a narrative device.

The absolutely ridiculous twist and Booker and Comstock somehow being the same person. It's easy to tear into the story during it's big moments but in video games, what matters to me is the journey. Bioshock Infinite nails that part down even if a lot of the way the story is told can borrow heavily from the Half Life series particularly the 2nd game. However, what worked in HL works here too like never breaking from the first person perspective, the moment to moment dialogue being enjoyable and always giving a player a sense of purpose of what do to. Infinite does have a talking protagonist which is above Gordon Freeman in HL. He also actively interacts with the campanion Elizebeth. One huge aspect of the game that works is Infinite is Elizebeth during gameplay.

As far as campanion npcs that are with you during combat. Elizebeth might be the best of all time. She always helps you in the right moment. At critical health? She might throw you a medkit. Low on salts? She'll give a pack to replenish. She might give you a decent amount of money. She'll open tears to give an advantage during combat. Tear for medkits, one for a powerful weapon, maybe another for a gun turret, or spawn a decoy. If you ever wanted Yorda from ICO to do more than just help open doors for you Elizebeth feels like a geniune evolution over that.

There is also other improvements over past games. Shooting feels better with better sound effects for weapons and guns like shotguns and hand canons can rip apart the heads of enemies. Levels can be have quite a bit verticality with the skylines. Landing an attack from launching from a hook feels gratifying. The addition of a regenerating shield gives the player a quick buffer before the finite health gets chipped away. It's also nice to use vigors as a quick way to stun or use as crowd control to do damage or as a quick way to retreat.

With all that said, there are some noticeable problems. It's easy to feel it's elements from past games and "immersive sim" DNA here. It is very much a traditional FPS particularly similar to CoD and Halo with the weapon limit of both, snappy ADS gameplay of the former, with the melee and shield of the latter but you have an upgrade system even though you can hold two guns. Since weapon use is based on weapon scavenging in the moment, upgrading and favoring certain weapons feels out of place.

Many of the vigors are the same which all mainly just consist of staggering enemies or area of effect stagger with no damage. It's often easy to stick to shock jock.

Certain weapons like handcanons, snipers and shotguns feel great especially the shotgun's spread, machine guns of any kind feels takes too many shots and feel pathetic to use. Carbine fairing the best of the bunch.

You have an explorable hub areas but you will never need to backtrack except for defeating Lady Comstock's ghost towards the end of the game. The final shootout has a protect mission with Songbird where there is an actual fail state instead of losing money and respawning with everything remaining the same. It can feel very out of place. Songbird was also slower to react in the Switch version which didn't help.

Handymen are almost never fun to fight since all they do is rush your position and keep shoving you into corners until you lose your health and respawn. It's a battle of widdling down yours or their health first.

Overall, with all this said, Bioshock Infinite is a game I do enjoy in the moment but I'm starting to see more of it's cracks upon playing it the 3rd time

Bleach: Rebirth of Souls(Playstation 5) Review

Years ago I asked, where was a Dragon Ball Kakarot and a Naruto Storm series for Bleach? I wanted to go through the story without having to go through the terrible pacing that the anime adaptations of the aforementioned series had and didn't feel like reading the source material. I eventually finished the original anime run before it's cancellation months before this very game would come out. Talk about ill timing. I did try it out of sheer curosity considering I do like everything up until the Soul Society arc and strongly dislike everything after. I thought that the many drawn out, pointless and boring henchmen fights of the Arancar arc would be more tolerable as gameplay since it's now less than 3 minute fights rather watching them play out. More or less, I got what I wanted. There's no Fullbring arc but I strongly dislike that so much that this game leaving it out felt like a sigh of relief.

The core gameplay however is where unfortunately is where Rebirth of Souls strongly suffers. It plays worse than any of the Dragon Ball arena fighters and any of CyberConnect's anime licensed games. Movement feels stiff in that the characters can't can't run, they only move by stepping so the act of zoning and closing the distance feels very cumbersome. You won't be moving at very fast speeds by comparison to say Dragon Ball Sparking Zero. Your main way of closing the distance is using a teleport attack by pressing one of the triggers and x. You can't power up like in DB games and there isn't a substitution jutsu cooldown like Naruto Storm.

Your main means of using special attacks is by hitting your opponents. This yet another very awkward quirk of the fighting. You can't do a combo unless if the strike is hitting your enemy so if you strike and you aren't touching someone, it will just be an awkward slash and no follow up move can be done. There's 3 attack buttons when all you really need is 2 since it follows 3D action game logic of chaining light and heavy attacks.

There's also a live system during fights which sort of works like finishing off enemies with your supers like in Playstation All Stars and the enemy having two health bars instead of rounds like in the Injustice games. It doesn't really add much other than mashing the right trigger like a madman when the enemy is at critical.

To end off everything, you have two seperate buttons for guarding and guard breaking when all you needed to do was have one. Have it be mapped to L1 and if you time the block animation correctly, you can do a parry. You know like most parry systems in a game.

Due all of this I eventually lowered to casual mode when facing off against Ikkaku as Ichigo. Luckily causal mode was accomdating enough to see the game through to the end minus one fight with Byayuka where his jobber arancar enemy kept teleporting around making him hard to hit.

After all this, I'm sort of soft on the game mainly due it's story mode. It's more or less the story of the anime with a mostly weaker soundtrack, it's non superpowered characters and most of Shinji's Vizorded gang adapted out and the anime filler arcs removed. Oh but this game does have it's own share of filler weirdly like Dragon Ball Kakarot all though not as charming like in the latter. Grimmjow's fate was bizarrely altered and directed like Guldo's death in Kakarot.

This is where everything loops back in of itself despite Rebirth of Souls' weak gameplay, it's a solid way of reliving the series outside of the aforementioned changes. I enjoyed going through the first two arcs especially Soul Society. Aarancar arc is much more bearable due to the lengthy henchmen battles being reduced to less than 3 minute gameplay sequences especially thanks to that easy mode. The game is mostly cutscenes as expected considering my Kakarot and Storm comparisons but this is what I came to this title for and I got it when I heard of how faithful it was.

It was fun to go to relive going through Ichigo's backstory and how he could've been a more interesting character than he ended up being. It was great to relive Soul Society and reminded me that the series could've been well written. It was so much fun mocking and ridiculing the Arancar arc for all it's problems and writing shortcomings in a "video game story that is a complete trainwreck" kind of way.

Overall, I already knew going in that the game played awkwardly and was below standard gameplay wise of your usual arena fighter adaptation but it was the Dragon Ball Kakarot and Naruto Storm that I asked for. I'm more surprised that it even exists at all.