Judgment Review

This is my first RGG Studios since Yakuza 6, I played the latter game back when it came out since I got burnt out on the series. I started it back in 2015. With that said, I won't be touching the mainline games since the main series' plot I have lost all interest in. I'm playing Judgment becuase it's divorced enough from that. In a sense, Yakuza and by extension Kiryu is Spider-Man and Yagami is Daredevil. I held off playing Judgment for such a long time because the length of the individual chapters are as long as a feature length films if not longer. It made organizing my playthrough whenever I would start very difficult.  

Anyways, with that out of the way, I spent a long time for years even deciding to play the game with the english dub or subtitled. For a while, I was going to with subtitles since RGG games with the exceptions of the first Yakuza and Binary Domain never had them and all though I watch anime english dubbed unless if there isn't one for it at all, Judgment's very realistic looking characters was going to create that weird effect of watching a live action movie of any kind not in it's original language. I can take this with anime and Japanese games since everything doesn't look realistic and it's mainly just the voices being replaced more than anything. 

With all that said, I think the english dub for the game is very well acted and the actors did a very good job. A lot of the VAs from games, anime and even western animation pop up here. It's far above the dub of the first Yakuza and I try not to trash on that as much as other people do even if there are moments in that can be really funny and not for the intended reasons. Everyone is directed well and considering how much talking and exposition there is in the game, I'm glad I chose this since the cutscenes and exposition can go on for some time and subtitles is going to make me feel like I'm reading more than watching it and my eyes will be glued to the bottom two inches of the screen. 

Enough of all that, the story of Judgment is good and entertaining for the most part. The characters in particular are well written with Kaito especially being my favorite with how he can be an over the top tough guy but also has a chill and goofy side to balance it out. Him and Yagami have a pretty good chemistry together. Higashi won me over in how he is still conflicted about Kaito after being banished from Matsugame family. Izumida was a character who greatly angered me at first with how little he seemed to know about critical thinking to the point where he would bring up the look who's talking and appeal to the person fallacies to a witness while then getting owned by the same fallacies a few minutes later but he does slowly start to get less antagonistic towards Yagami and even contributes to the plot. 

The story itself also has interesting themes and an extremely fascinating moral dilemma on the very idea of if there was a geniune cure for Alzheimer's disease with cover ups, conspiracies and how far people are willing to go to get the medicine put out even if it was never that effective to begin with. 

However there are issues I have, like how Yagami won the Shinpei Okubo case because the Jury felt sorry for Emi Teresawa than because Yagami did a very good job at arguing, the story hyped him as someone who somehow did the impossible when it was the sob story that won the jury over. 

The villains are on the underdeveloped side with the exception of Hamura but he turns face later. Kuriowa is a big example, he's a police officer who has the skills of a hitman yet there is barely anything revealed about his backstory and this is a game with lots of cutscenes. Shono doesn't really have much to him other than being cowardly. 

The story's pacing also isn't the greatest since at least 4-5 hours is you being forced to do side quests to progress the story, these can lead into the realm of filler since they get in the way of the moment to moment story beats, if one good thing about them is that you get more money to get healing items and to get past progression roadblocks. 

Much of the game consist of cutscenes which I don't mind since I enjoy the story but it really felt like they can drag out the chapter lengths since I view game chapters like episodes of a TV show and if I were to evaluate Judgment's ability to get story beats and ideas across very quickly without relying too much on words and talking, I don't think the game does the greatest job at doing that.

I have spoken mostly about story but that's the thing, if you choose to only do the story missions much of the game consists of watching cutscenes, fighting, investigating, running around Kamorocho and using the drone and tailing missions. 

Investigating mainly just involves moving the cursor around to until you found the clue to interact with to progress the story and pressing dialogue options that reminds the player that they are playing a game and not watching a movie and to pay attention to the plot so you can progress the story. 

The drone pops a few times and it's not particularly that interesting since you just need to position it and press a button, you might need to deal with wind even though the game doesn't tell you.

The stealth sections which mostly involves tailing and one infiltration level where you dress up as a repairman where the hardest part is getting the money to get past the progression roadblock early game to buy the disguise to do the mission. 

Contrary to popular belief, I don't think the tailing missions are as frequent as some make out. The first level made me think there was going to be many but they pop up once every few hours. The hardest parts of these is when you are following them and the npc you are tailing turns his back and you are now in his line of sight and hoping you can stay out of it long enough for you to get behind him again and not get a game over. The hardest tail was with Higashi late game where the you have to be in a very specific hidespot in order for Higashi to eventually get out of his patrol pattern and get back to following him again. 

This pretty much leaves only combat, when not watching cutscenes, investigating or exploring the city. To put it simpily, it's tolerable at best and very obnoxious and grating at worst.

You have two styles to fight with crane and tiger and at first the game wants you to switch these two up one for crowd control and the other for one on one battles. Thing is Tiger style is objectively the best one since you will be fighting and taking enemies out one at a time anyway, crowd control is never needed to be done. There is acrobatic attacks but they seem very contextual and something I needed to go out of my way to do. You can just use Tiger style and use the 4-5 hit combo to get past most enemies and boss encounters.

The lock on system never feels accurate or reliable. You can actively switch between targets and it just focuses on who Yagami is the closest too.

However the biggest grievance is the mortal wound system. This just adds needless busy work. Since the lock on and by extension the dodging isn't very reliable, when you fight tougher enemies or bosses and they start to get powered up after wailing on them, it becomes a game of luck of dodging out of the way before they destory a chunk of your health bar which means you need to find and buy expensive medkits or keep on healing yourself as you tank hits if you want to save medkits.

The random encounter rate can get out of hand considering combat isn't amazing since there will be times where the Keihin gang will be everywhere around Kamrocho will keep spawning and you want to get to the next story objective.

Overall, I do enjoy Judgment but I'm not sure how much furthur I will delve into playing RGG games.

Assassin's Creed 2(Nintendo Switch) Review

This was a game whenever I would recall it, I always tend to remember not have very fond memories of. I have been playing AC games lately albeit in reverse order minus the RPG games. Every time the thought of me coming back to playing this came to my mind, I always dreaded it and after playing it, I can say I wasn't wrong. I may not be as impressed by mainstream games and by extension mainstream media that are fondly remembered by many on the internet, but I try to accept that people have their prefrences and what they think is good might just be "okay" or "dull" for me. With AC2, outside of the art direction, music and to some degree the parkour system, I have a very hard time seeing what many people see in the game. I don't even like to attack Ubisoft as a company as much as many people do now and how the company gets vilified by the gaming community every time when given the chance, I have enjoyed their games before 2014 and even after where you could consider when they became the infamous "heels" they are now and I do get some enjoyment from their games from 2014 and to now even if I mainly have an attachment towards their games before that. Their games 2014 and onwards I do get some enjoyment from depending on the title even if I don't consider them to be "great". 

AC2 however is a game that either made me laugh for how incompetently designed it is, annoyed me with it's design quirks or just bored me so much. At times, I wonder why I even got to the end especially when you shove in the fact that the Ezio collection version of AC2 forces you to complete it's DLC chapters that got made later as mandatory to finish the game, it made a game I already wasn't big on into something that was slowly starting to make me angry. This is also the most easily accessible way to play AC2 btw. 

I will start with the story and to point it simpily, there's so many writing sins the game has that everything about the story seems like it was designed to annoy me. A big problem is that Ezio Auditore is a very dull character. The inciting incident of the story involves Ezio not knowing any better than because it happening due to the choices he made. Ezio didn't know the papers proving his family's innocence were given to Templars. Then there is the fact that Ezio decides to become an Assassin and helping Mario despite his initial reluctance comes out of nowhere and has no build up to it happening. Ezio barely even struggles or goes through any personal growth of his own. Every time he asssassinates his targets, Ezio is always designed to be in the right for doing so and his targets are just generic bad guys who are in on the conspiracy and never makes Ezio or the player question anything. He is always designed to look good and never be vunerable(he gets stabbed by Rodrigo towards the end of the game and then just gets up like nothing happened). The biggest kicker to all this that Ezio only thinks of his father and brothers on occasion if even that, he never once brings up a memory he has of them before they died to sell you on how much they mean to him. Loranzo de Medici remembers Ezio's father more than Ezio himself.

It doesn't just end there, the amount of contrivances to bail Ezio out of a potential situation is too numerous to count. The game has no respect for foreshadowing, build up or just making the player pay attention to plot points or ideas that could pop up later on. I'll give you three examples, when Ezio's father and brothers die, the family's maid just so happens to know of someone who can keep his mother and sister safe while goes out killing people and conviently teaches him crowd blending. Mario and his villa never gets any mention from his father before he dies, Ezio just so happens to remember Mario exists when something bad happens and he needs a get out of jail free card espeically since Ezio will have no where to go since him, his mom and sister are wanted fugitives. When Ezio needs to a pass to go to Venice, Caterina Sfortza just so happens to be inserted into the story and is there for Ezio to help her so he can get to Venice. That's just a few examples out of many. 

One good thing I could say on the story is that there is also a decent change in scenery after a few missions but the Venice portion of the game drags since it takes so long for the plot to move forward, there is a guy Ezio needs to kill but then he is framed and then there is another guy Ezio needs to kill and the DLC being mandatory drags out the story even more. The DLC is esstentially a filler arc of a shonen anime but at least those you can skip if you don't enjoy them. This is mandatory. 

The plot twist late game makes even less sense the more I think about it, Niccolo Machievill pops up out of nowhere and they kept a secret from Ezio that doesn't even do much to benefit them. What advantage do they even gain by keeping Ezio in the dark about his "training"? His father died because he was an Assassin and Mario tells him about his heritage and heavily encourages him to join the cause.Then there is the ending section of the game where Ezio suddenly spares Rodrigo Borgia despite him already having an extremely high kill count before this moment. I could also complain about how Rodrigo became the Pope off screen, somehow got the Staff of Eden, and knew where the Vault was even though you needed the Codex Pages to find them. 

I will be a little nice on the story in that the concept of Ezio's entire life of being nothing more than a conduit to deliver a message to Desmond who won't be born until centuries later and Ezio will die before he ever meets him or knows what the message was even about is fascinating on paper, the  problem is that all of this is just frontloaded at the end and I already went in length on how the game's story has no respect for foreshadowing and build up.

The worst part is, this story is not even an excuse plot so I'm much less forgiving on how poorly written it is, if the story was nothing more than an excuse for the gameplay, I'd just put all my story issues aside. At the very least I can put AC2 under, "play the game, skip the story". I do enjoy the Team Ninja developed Ninja Gaiden games, Ratchet and Clank 2016, Star Wars Jedi Survivor and I'm forgiving on the numerous story issues Insomniac Spider-Man 2 has due to having solid gameplay to name a few examples. 

Unfortunately, I can't call AC2 this. 

The game has stealth but there is no crouch button, cover button or lure a guard over to you. On top of that, the game gives you throwing knives, poison, and smoke bombs but you don't even need them since every guard can be countered and Ezio is a one man army, not even the final boss is immune to this. The hidden gun I only used when forced to because of the game's buggy detection system or how some missions just forces you to assassinate some targets with it since any other way won't work. 

The hidden blade has a counter kill that instant kills every enemy upon activating it's animation. This move can kill at least 95% of all enemies. The game actually gives you the option to hire mercenaries to help you in combat with Ezio being as powerful as he is. Occasionally, the hidden blade's insta counter killing won't work, luckily, the sword has a smaller counter window, it won't be an insta kill counter, but the counters with them will widdle away at the enemies' health and they will die. You can also play with fists and disarm enemies and get free kills that adding options to a combat system that is already to break. 

The AI is very buggy and doesn't have very consistent rules on what you can or can't do. That just makes the no detection missions that much worse since the AI's buggy nature can lead to many unfair game overs, this is even worse in the Bonfires of the Vanaties DLC since many of those missions are no detections some of the assassinations in that DLC borderline requires you to be lucky because of the AI's buggy nature. To name an example, you can try to kill a guard seconds after spotting you and it could either lead to an instant fail or you can continue onwards. There were times where guards would spot me and it takes the game a while to even acknowledge the fail state. 

You can hire prostitutes to distract guards but I only ever used it once and that was escourting Ezio's remaining family out of Floreance and I can't use parkour, guards were covering the entire gate and it was an escourt mission. This is known for being the most reliable and easy way to cheese stealth encounters but I never even relied on it that much. 

With the amount of mechanics and systems AC2 has, it almost seems like the game is designed to see how many different ways the game could be broken something along the lines of Metal Gear Solid 5 but it never really ever leans into this since many of the missions are the typical Grand Theft Auto style mission system of linear missions taking place on the open world so there isn't much in the way of finding clever ways to "break" and play around with the amount of options you have. 

The health system makes little sense, there are doctors all over the map and getting a quick heal costs very little so there is little need for potion use. The armour system gives you more health but it's already hard to die due to counters being a quick solution for everything. The repair system is nothing more than an inconveince since fixing armor costs little and happens so infrequnently that when it does happens it feels like a massive inconvience that just wastes time. 

The funny thing is that the final mission has no doctors meaning that you might have to worry about your potion count but this could come out of left field since I hardly if ever need to heal myself using potions before this point. 

You also get WAY too much money, doing main missions even those that don't add much to the plot will have you rolling in cash. You can buy armor and that eats up money sure, but you will make all that money back again in no time if you just do story missions.

The parkour system is...interesting. I wouldn't call it good by any means. I do like the idea of wall and side ejects even if wall ejects I almost never needed to use since in the main game there were rarely if ever any any instances where there two opposite walls nearby by each other either because it looked cool and because there was random tower in the game where you can't sync the viewpoint with unless you do a side eject to reach it. I did wish the game forced you into using it more often instead of that one instance. I really do like how you can slow down your descent and even do climb leaps, the former however is inconsistent since I would hold the grab button and there is a good chance I could grab a ledge or tackle someone instead.

The big issue I have with the parkour is the amount of rooftop guards there are, for a game that really goes out of it's way to have an interesting movement system, there always a rooftop guard who spots you and then you either kill them before they spot you or fight them on the roof and their body falls to the ground and it raises your notreity. 

This leads into another issue I have with game is the notriety system, you can kill guard where no one is even a witness to the crime and it goes up. You can kill all the guards who is even aware of all the kills you did and it goes up. What's worse is that getting your notriety down can always be done by ripping off wanted posters, there are other ways, but there will always be posters to find and are all over the map and it's the easiest way to get it down. 

That's the thing with much of AC2's design. There's just inconviences after inconvience that wastes the player's time. Taken fall damage? Run to a doctor and heal yourself for little money. Armor gets damaged? Just run to a blacksmith and it's quick and adds nothing to the game on the occasion it gets damged. Want to use the parkour to run on rooftops? Watch out for rooftop guards and then you kill them and your notriety goes up and then you got to rip off some wanted posters than back to usual. 

To top everything off, you also need all 30 condex pages to unlock the the final mission but the game never once makes it urgent for the player to get them, I already knew about this beforehand but this is just even more tedious since inbetween main missions I would do, I had to sync viewpoint after viewpoint just to get them and it just wastes time. This is going to be even worse if you play the game for the first time and aren't aware of this. 

Final issue is that I'm not sure if this can apply to the original release but the Ezio Collection version but the game is insanely buggy and has bugs happen regarding parkour or air kill animations. The worst part is when at the game's final mission, the sound would bug out and not play and I couldn't continue the game, there is no checkpoint restart feature, I tried to get an intentional game over but the game would never respawn me and I had to load from the menu, if your checkpoints weren't your save points and I had start from the very start of the mission, I would've lost it since I just wanted the game to end by that point so I suppose I can give that as a positive. 

Overall, I should've just dropped AC2 at some point but playing it does remind me why I enjoy the games I like. There are people to this day who complain about games being "too short" but I argue if AC2 was much shorter, I would be much kinder on the game. I try to avoid calling any "mainstream" game I don't like as "bad" especially those I got to the end of and rolled credits on but there were many moments when I played the game that made me want to call it just that. 

Portal(Nintendo Switch) Review

Portal was a game I played 10 years ago and I remember wanting to play it because it was short and I wanted to beat it one sitting. I did enjoy it but at the same time, I didn't overly think too much of it outside of certain things like Glados and how the game told it's story over the course of it's short length. However, upon replaying Portal on the Nintendo Switch, I really appreciate the way the campaign is structured and the idea of smooth difficulty curve that eased you into the game while playing.

The story is interesting more so in how it's told much like the Half Life series where there isn't much in the way of cutscenes or cinematics and the player is always in control whenever story beats are happening. The main difference between this and Half Life is that the player will often have to pause and wait for the characters to finish speaking before he can continue on with the game.

Portal changes this where now, you can keep playing the game while characters are speaking but instead it's just one character which is Glados. It's fascinating in how the whole thing is contextualized, you are trapped in a facality being forced to do these "experiments" of sorts. Glados is an antagonistic figure who just keeps insulting and belitting you and never expects you to solve any of these puzzles but the player keeps surprising her every time you solve one.

In one sense, if you choose to listen to her, it makes solving the puzzles that much more rewarding when you pull it off but you can choose to ignore her if you want to.

I don't make nearly as big of a deal in how a game story is presented as long a game writer follows the rule of establishing major character traits, story beats quickly, efficiently within in a short period of time. Portal's story much like Half Life does do that but more so over the course of the game where the more you progress through it, the more Glados gets annoyed and wants to get you out of the way. It's a good way to give a reason to solve the puzzles.

The biggest star of the show is how campaign. I don't like puzzles in games especially really challenging ones since trying to figure them out is the gameplay. Portal manages to strattle the line between being easy enough to follow but without being challenging and eventually needing a guide.

A big reason to this is how the campaign eases you into doing what the player will be doing throughout the game. On a replay and if you are adept at puzzles this might be very easy but for some not really into a puzzles or even someone who is new to video games, the game hits the right level of challenge. That and the very idea of the portal gun wasn't really even explored in gaming before this.

The campaign structure plays a big part of in that. What Portal esstentially does is that it gives the player one gimmick, do a few puzzles with that said gimmick, then introduces a new one a few rooms later.

First you start off with only one portal, then you get two, then there is pressure and interactable switchs and cubes, then there is momentum jumps, then there is turrets, then there is energy orbs, timing puzzles, then there is shooting a portal jump while during a momentum jump and so on.

What works about all this is that it has the player slowly learn the game's mechanics and slowly he starts to feel more competent. A common theory in game design is that the more player feels competent, the more he wants to be challenged.

This all culminates in Test Chamber 18, some have criticized this section for being noticeably harder than the rest of the game, however the argument I make is that it feels like a culmination of everything the player learned. Everything is here from momentum jumps, turrets, cubes, switches, energy orbs and fast paced timing to boot it all off is all here. It might stump a first time player but on a replay, I appreciated this a lot more.

In many ways, this section is a great final test because from here on afterwards, it's an escape from the Aperture Science facility and the player pretty much knows the mechanics and concepts of the game inside out and now he is using them to outsmart Glados. By this point, the player instictively knows what he is supposed to do because of everything learned in the Test Chambers.

The only big issue with the game I can say is that certain puzzles require the player to fire a portal while in the air but every time he gets out of one, the camera reorients itself constanly and as a result not giving a good angle to see the platform to fire another portal. If I had motion sickness this would make me feel dizzy.

Overall, Portal is a game that I had a great time with and has a very well structured and enjoyable campaign. Some could criticize the game for being "short" but the game feels so self contained and never overstaying it's welcome because of how short it is.

Blacksite: Area 51 Review

I bought this at a convention, the fact that I am more willing to try out games that aren't fondly remembered, and it was cheap did get me curious in buying it. It's also connected to the Area 51 game from 2005 and I remember having some fun with it. Honestly? I wasn't even expecting to get to the end of this game at all, I was expecting to reach a difficulty spike of some kind and drop but no, I actually managed to get to the of the game and finish it. As a whole I wouldn't call the game in the vein realm of "good" but as far as painfully mediocre games that are just "there" is concerned, it's not the worst. With that said, there is nothing about Blacksite Area 51 does isn't done better elsewhere like pretty much everyone has said.

I'll start with good. The game checkpoints pretty well and there isn't a whole of content you have to redo upon death, however if you choose to play on casual difficulty, you probably won't die that much to begin with since the player can take a lot of damage on that difficulty. I only died twice one during a mini boss with the giant grab creature where kamikaze enemies where attacking me while I was aiming a rocket at the former and the final boss since everything about the last level is poorly explained and I didn't know the game was scripted to have the fight take place inside of a closed interior, before that I just kept firing bullets and he wouldn't die.

There is no standard or normal difficulty of any kind, just easy, hard and very hard, which is pretty weird for a game like this. It's also pretty short and can pretty much be beaten in one sitting which is good since if a mediocre game like this was any longer, I would just start to get more and more annoyed and wish it would hurry up and end. The character of Grayson is pretty over the top and unhinged and his over the top lines did make me a smile a good deal.

Final positive is that the game does an okay job at breaking up the monotonous shooting by having a vehicle section, turret section, sniping, on rails rope rapelling and mini bosses and bosses. The game also does a decent job at guiding the player where to go with lighting and with environmental details even if the game is very linear.

This is where pretty much my praise ends. Like I said before everything Blacksite does has been done better in other games. You got the two weapon limit, melee attack, quick grenade throw, regen health and vehicle sections from Halo, the following around npcs in CoD games, the squad tactics in Rainbow 6 Vegas, and the whole alien invasion desert motif from Half Life 1 and 2.

There are some weird quirks with Blacksite that makes it inherently worse than those games, for one on console the default controls has two crouch buttons, the left analog stick crouch button isn't toggle but down on the D pad is so why have one that isn't toggle and the other that is? You could have the left analog stick click be a run button. Another quirk is how in CoD games when the player had to do a contextual action or if an NPC will activate the next sequence, these sections were made clear. In this game, it tries to have squad commands of R6 Vegas and be like CoD where there is always a marker for the player to press R1 in order for the NPCs and the player to do anything. Want to open a door? Wait for the red marker to turn green and then you can do it. Want to do anything do what I just said, everything that this pseudo squad and interaction system is waiting for the red indicator to turn green.

There is also technical bugs maybe this is just the PS3 version but there is a lot of level loading that disruptes the gameplay since you will be playing than the game just says "loading". This is an issue with 7th gen games but Blacksite has so many of these. There is also game breaking bugs that will make you reload from the menu to progress since there is no restart from checkpoint option.

Combat is pretty dull, despite this being a game where you fight aliens, many of them can be beaten with using the base M4 assault rifle at the start of the game. It has the same CoDesque combat where you just need to ADS, shoot, enemy dies, get hit, then hide behind cover, rinse repeat, all the combat entirely takes place in your forward direction.

The weapons are dull too. You mainly just kill everything with the M4 and enemies don't make noticeably reactions or sounds to getting shot making combat feel not so great. Compare this to fighting the Chimera in Resistance where they groan and get stagger to getting shot by the weapons.

You occasionally need a sniper and rocket launcher but those are during situational and specific moments. The alien shotgun is also pathetic since you don't even have any trace of the bullets land on the target you aim at.

Overall, it's been said many times that the game isn't good but the cheap price and short length enticed me to play. If anything, I'm just surprised I finished it and wrote this review at all.

Call of Duty: Roads to Victory Review

Well this was certainly a CoD game on PSP. I wouldn't call the game terrible but at the same time like many of the WW2 "spin off" CoDs like Unitied Offensive, Finest Hour and Big Red One, I struggle to question the existence of this game. It's not as bad to me as Unitied Offensive but like Finest Hour and Big Red One, it does so little espeically from a gameplay standpoint to standout from those games and the plethora of CoD and Medal of Honor games that got made in the 00s.

With all that said, if you were a fan of those WW2 era CoD games and if you are looking for a quick game to beat, it's sort of worth looking into whether it'd be through original hardware or emulation.

The visuals get the job done and does an okay job at capturing the art style of the CoD games pre Modern Warfare.

However the biggest differences is going to be the controls since it's on the PSP. You can use the face buttons to move the camera but I opted to map them to the right stick on PPSSPP. With that in mind, the controls aren't too bad, you got all your CoD usual stuff before MW like grenade throwing, crouching and going prone, aim down sights, and reloading, it's somewhat impressive that with the PSP's control scheme they were able to replicate all this.

The biggest difference is that there is a heavy amount of aim assist when shooting from the hip so now the reticle will lock on to an enemy regardless of distance and it makes CoD's already basic shooting mechanics of "point and shoot" even more basic since the aim assist is so high that even trying to aim down sights and lining up shots is done for you.

The regen health from Infinity Ward CoD2 is back and it functions exactly how you expect. So many shoot outs consits of point in general direction, shoot from hip or use ADS, kill enemies, then get hit a couple of times, and crouch or prone around objects to regen health so it's the same as the console and PC games in the series with regen health. Easy mode lowers the amount of time I have to wait for the health to regenerate.

To the game's credit, the campaign is pretty short, levels are rarely longer than 15 minutes and the only level that dragged on was the on rails plane shooting section. Game also checkpointed frequently too. If the game was longer, I'd be much harsher on it. Blasting enemies with an MP40 and firing weapons like an M1 Garand can still provide some fun even if that said fun had greatly diminished in returns due to how many of these games that can already let you do this.

Other than that, it's your usual early CoD game stuff. Plant charges, shoot down tanks, clear out rooms and buildings, do some NPC escorting, shoot down enemies with turrets, some sniping sections and shoot enemies that come from you attack you in one direction which is from the front, if you played these games before you know what to expect. The only difference now is that the demoliations timer is noticeably shorter and the base movement speed isn't fast enough to get away from the blast radius without taking some damage.

Overall, pretty much an iterative portable "spin off" game and a very iterative game as a whole, not terrible but not anything worth looking into. I only tried this out of curosity and I did get some fun out of it.

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity Review

I'm not really a Zelda fan however I did play Hyrule Warriors a while ago and I remember kind of enjoying that, I have heard some say Age of Calamity is the better game so I decided to buy it and play that. While AoC has some improvements over the first game it is hindered by a story that fails to be anything other than a happy ending and a long and bloated campaign that could've ended at least 5 if not 10 hours earlier.

From a presentation standpoint AoC is an improvement over HW in that there are way more cutscenes and there is quite a lot of voice acting here. The first half of the story is pretty interesting especially considering I didn't know too much of the spoilers and I thought at first it was going to be to Zelda BOTW what Halo Reach was to Halo CE and Crisis Core is to Final Fantasy 7. How at first, it was going to start off as hopeful and optimistic but as the game went on, slowly the bad guys would start winning and it would eventually set up BOTW, like how Reach did with CE. Zelda was slowly had to win over everyone, how her father "dying" and the Divine Beasts being taken over meant that it was going to end where BOTW would begin but no, Nintendo doesn't like the idea of a Downer Ending so they came up with some weird time travel plot twist instead where the good guys win.

So now, the very premise of AoC being a prequel to BOTW is pretty much a complete and total farce. It starts to make me wonder what even is the point of it since now all it does establish that the Calamity Ganon in the AoC timeline is a weakling and the Ganon in BOTW is retroactively more interesting since he actually succeeded in conquering BOTW's version of Hyrule.

As a result, by having the 2nd half of the story esstentially be defeating Calamity Ganon, it bloats the game's length and this has a major effect on the campaign itself.

Now this transitions me over to gameplay. At first, there are some geniune improvements. NPCs won't get you game overs nearly as often. The regular enemies are pretty easy to beat after all this is what the musou genre is known for, the various mini bosses are enjoyable to fight due to multiple ways of getting the stagger meter down. You can hit specific weak spots on them to get a circular meter to zero which allows them to be staggered but there are other ways to do it. For example, the flurry rush from BOTW is back and it encourages the player want to make "perfect dodges" because it allows you to damage the stagger meter on mini bosses without hitting them in specific weakspots. There is also elemental weaknesses which can be accessed by holding down the L button which allows the player to also weaken the stagger the meter without hitting weak spots depending on what element they are weak to.

Ability uses like cryosis, bombs and magnesis from BOTW can be quickly accessed by holding the R button and when timed right, you can damage and stun the mini bosses for a bit so in a lot of ways there is a decent number of ways these mini bosses can be beaten. Two other improvements is that healing items like apples can be accessed using the L shortcut on elemental attacks, the game also has difficulty options with the easy mode being pretty accomadating.

For all these improvements, there are multiple things that hold AoC back by a long shot. First you can't buy apples from the menu and it seemingly was added as DLC which is bizarre. The game doesn't explain it's systems or mechanics that well particularly involving weapon fusing which is something you will need to get through later parts of the game.

Two of the biggest issues it has is the camera and the especially the reused mini bosses. The former is so bad that it reminded me why I strongly dislike player controlled cameras in 3D beat em ups. They especially get bad when you fight flying, big or fast moving enemies since the camera has a hard to keeping a decent view of the player and the enemies surronding him, the lock on tracks the enemy but it say if an enemy starts attacking especially a fast one, the lock on will track him and while the character is closing the distance, the camera will follow him. With bigger enemies, he will take up so much of the screen making dodging a guessing game since so little of the screen is given to the player to reliable dodge and attack. It especially gets bad in tight spaces since the camera will just have Link be in first person while the interiors are covering his character model.

Then there are the reused mini bosses, here is much of AoC, fight Bobokins, Lizalfos, Hinox, Guardians, Moblins, Lynels, Talus, and Wizzorbes and different color variations of them for 20 hours and then have more of them pop with way more HP and just have the challenge be from being HP sponges. As a result, I lowered the difficulty to easy so I can kill them faster because adding more tough enemies with lots of HP is the only way the game knew how to add challenge.

The Divine Beast sections while really fun at first to reign fire down on weaker enemies gets boring when you do it a second time since these sections are too basic and dull to be something worth doing a second time, adding a timer just makes these less of a power fantasy since know you can't just win by spamming the various attack buttons, luckily when as the timer goes down the places you need to destroy do get marked but why weren't these just added to begin with? The lack of commitment is confusing. 

Overall, AoC as a whole, I question it's existence and what even was the point so the gameplay isn't very good and the story doesn't even commit to the interesting premise it has. 

Attack on Titan Anime Review

AoT is a strange show for me. I remember it being one of the most popular anime in the 2010s, the show pretty much got viral around the time it aired and even before I watched season 1 of the english dub on Adult Swim Toonami 11 years ago, I already heard quite a lot about it. It's was even popular amongst people who didn't even watch anime that much. When I did initially watch the first season, I was wondering what on earth the hype was even about, why on earth was it so popular and even recall it being one of my most hated anime for a few years, I was really convinced that AoT was not a good show at all, I even got into multiple flame wars with it's fans back when I did do stuff like that. However, AoT is a series while starting off rough, did slowly start to get better as it went along, all though the final season's writing while fascinating on paper left a lot to be desired. It also ends on a rather undwhelming and unffufilling note. 

Anyways, enough of all that, let's begin this review. The first season like I said before, I have a complicated history with, it might be one of the few anime I watched 3 times(2nd time I watched was due to me thinking that the final season was going to be quickly finished in 2020), but every time I watch it and especially in the first half of that said season, I get a strong sense, "the writing is extremely underwhelming". This is in large part due to the underdeveloped characters, outside of maybe Jean Kirstein and Erwin Smith. The cast are all completely one note and don't have much going on to them. Eren Jaeger is short tempered loud mouth hot head who has to shove in a shout almost every 5 minutes. Armin Arlett despite being smarter than Eren is esstentially just follows the latter around like a dog and Mikasa Ackerman's entire character despite being stronger than Eren physically is nothing more than just a guard dog for him. The rest of the characters don't really fare much better other than just having one note quirks to them. Sasha just likes to eat food, Hunjie is extremely quirky, Levi is a borderline psycho and the Levi's squad are just extremely loyal to him and get killed off pretty quickly and those are the ones I recall. 

This is much in large part due to the season 1's knack for relying on shock value more so than developing and fleshing out characters. 

To give an example, Eren's mother Carla Jaeger despite her being important to the story and her death being the inciting incident that kicks off the said story, the viewer is barely given enough to know her before she dies so they can feel as invested as Eren, all I really know about her is that she is kind hearted and puts up with Eren's brashness. If you ignore that fact that this might be many people's first introduction to anime and seeing an animated character get eaten to death might be geniunely shocking to many but even by 2014 when I did watch the dub, I already watched a decent amount of anime so this had no effect on me. 

Another example is how the character of Marco despite being important to Jean Kirstein, only has one major and somewhat forgettable scene where the former tells the latter that he's good leader because he knows when to be afraid, not bad but this is the major scene Marco gets before he dies. 

The final battle of Annie Leonheart fighting Eren at the end of the season is pretty much supposed to be Eren being conflicted about fighting her since they were in Cadet training for so long but they only had one major scene together and that's it, yet the writers want the audience to believe they've known and spoken to each other for a while before the showdown. 

Then there is shock value that contradicts it's own themes and character roles. The former being how AoT establishes itself as nilhilstic show where anyone could die but then it turns out Eren has superpowers, many including myself had an issue with this since one, it circumvents any character development Mikasa and Armin have by having needing to grow past their need to rely on Eren but then it's also a show that establishes that superpowers are suddenly a thing. The problem isn't that there is superpowers it's more so how it's used as a way to keep Eren alive when the story seemingly killed him off. The story does do interesting things with this later but this is a hard pill to swallow. 

The latter is how Mikasa is much stronger and more combat efficient than Eren is despite the two's first encounter has the later killing multiple grown men much bigger than him and so how is she stronger than Eren if he is capable of doing all that? Who trained Mikasa? Never explained. 

I can list some other examples how the show wants you to care for a bunch of random soldiers and their dead comrades during the female titan portion or how Petra had an attachment towards Levi despite it being revealed after she died but I made my point. 

Then there are just other issues with the season like how the Battle on Trost district takes a good 8-10 episodes to finish and this would be fine if the characterization was there but instead I just wanted it to be over and partnered that with the Eren death fake out and that only added insult to injury. 

I have complained about S1 a good deal but some good things to come from it is that Jean and his chracter development as someone who starts as someone who wants to live a free and complacenent life to realizing that there someone who believes that isn't really the way to live is decent writing especially for S1 standards. 

The 2nd half introduces Erwin Smith who is my favorite character in the series and S1 does a decent enough job at establishing his cryptic, reckless and cunning ways. 

Then there is the fact that 25 episodes has gone by and not much has been explained regarding the cellar in Eren's basement in Shinganshina. 

After all that, it's really to easy to see why AoT is a show I disliked for a decent number of years and time hasn't made me kinder towards S1. Attack on Titan's anime thus far really seems like the kind of anime adaptation that seemingly cuts out a lot of material from the manga. The thing is, bad manga adaptations usually get derided and get forgotten about to the sands of time, this was a show that had a huge following despite having the many shortcomings that it did. 

However seasons 2 and 3 would come along and massively overhauled everything I had with the series. If you told me from about 2014-2019 that AoT would be a much better series and would become a geniunely good show, I would tell you were wrong but AoT is a show that proves that any series especially long running can have a rough start. 

Season 2 pretty much massively improves the characters, now the show isn't relying immense shock value anymore and characters are getting much more fleshed out now. Ymir and Historia who were esstentially just background characters in S1 have a pretty interesting relationship in S2. How Ymir is brash and upfront about who she is and Historia is more shy and quiet by comparison. Historia's character development in S2 and 3 is one of my favorite things about the series in how she slowly comes to accept who she is regarding duty to the throne and herself. 

Reiner was one of S1's more slightly developed characters and the show this time around has him along with Connie, Sasha, Ymir and Historia try to fend off some titans in a castle and there is a decent bit of downtime, in between titan attacks and a scene like this while there somewhat in season 1, didn't really pop as much as this scene did. 

Eren's battle and even being conflicted about Reiner is a bit more developed by comparison to the fight with Annie since they had more time together. Seeing Eren slowly get angry but comes to grips with the fact he has to fight Reiner hits close to home with me now. 

The only major gripe I have with the season is that Eren having the ability to control titans was a seemingly out of nowhere deus ex machina since the Scouts were borderline out of luck and the plot needed to find to get them out of hairy situation so the writers came up with this. 

Then comes season 3 and this is pretty much AoT at it's highest point in terms of writing. A conspiracy gets introduced, mystery boxes get revealed and after this point the show's writing never reaches this height again. 

The aforementioned conspiracy is already interesting stuff since it turns the much of AoT's premise on it's head where it turns out there is a greater threat than titans out there and it's about uncovering all that. The Scout Regiment are pretty much the ultimate underdogs here with them slowly trying to uncover it all, trying to route the people behind them and answer the mystery box. 

Kenny Ackerman is my favorite villain in the series, his appreance establishes multiple things, there are members in the Scouts who now have to kill actual people than titans, he's the only character in the series that made Levi uneasy by the mere mention of his name, that there is something that government is hiding and even in death, he has the titan serum that can turn certain people into titans which will come into play later in the season. 

His line during his death scene where he mentions everyone is a slave to something is a line that resonates with me more now than it did when I first watched it. 

Historia's character arc comes to a complete circle. 

Erwin's backstory and why he is willing to gamble so many lives is explained here and he feels very guilty about but at the same time, he's gone too far off down the deep end to stop now. 

The final battle on Shinganshina is pretty well in that both the good and bad side are constantly one upping each other and it all esstentially comes full circle with Erwin willing to scarifice himself in order to give the Scouts one major chance at victory. The season a great job at selling you how important Erwin was to cause and how everyone wanted to keep him alive and even after the victory, Erwin's name is still being mentioned and remembered and everyone doesn't know what to do now. 

If you AoT summed up as simpily as possible is that it was a series that lived and died with Erwin Smith. S1 got more tolerable with him introduced and the series starts to become more dull with him gone. 

However a big issue with S3 is that the backstory is revealed that Eren eats his father Grisha to obtain his titan powers but Eren never once comes to gripes with the fact that he killed his own father or how the story explains how he managed to get back to to civilization since in order to turn into a titan behind the wall, it would cause a lot of noise. It's not to dissimilar to Naruto Uzumaki's backstory on his body was just lying there after his parents were killed. Dragon Ball is a much more lighthearted series than AoT and the former had a scene where Goku came to gripes to the fact that he accidentally killed a parental figure while being transformed into a monster and not being in control while in it. 

Now this leads to the final season and well...it's a weird dozy. AoT might've finally explained it's mystery box with that the wall was nothing more to keep a certain group of people known as "Eldians" in where they have "titan blood" and it has started century long war with the a group called the "Marlyeans". Attack on Titan in many ways suffers from the same problem that the 00s Battlestar Galactica reboot did in that when the mystery boxes are explained, it becomes less interesting and more confusing. Both pretty much start off with "humanity - good" and "opposing force - bad" turns into, "good guys were actually connected the opposing force the whole time". 

Some parts of this season is interesting on paper, the idea of the protagonist you've been following the whole time, Eren Jaeger turning heel. Armin and Mikasa needing to come with the terms with the fact that the guy they depended on isn't there for them anymore, so everything season 1 seemingly copped out on is now being full embraced here. There is also a fascinating retcon that could've retroactively made Mikasa Ackerman an interesting character, where it was Ackerman blood was the reason why she was such a guard dog towards Eren and the latter actually hated the former the whole time. With that last one especially, it felt like final season was going to head somewhere but punches were pulled but in a different way. 

The biggest problem this season has is that there is almost no one of geniune virtue that is worth supporting and the characters we are supposed to root for have barely any geniune agency or worthwhile solutions plans of their own. 

Two of the characters in the final season who have the power to change the world Eren and Zeke Jaeger are both genocidal nilhilists. The former pretty much wants to use the Rumbling to kill as many Maryleans as can and the latter wants Eldians to slowly die by taking away their ability to reproduce. 

Both are esstentially people that are impossible to root for in any way since both of their endgames involve commiting genocide. The series than switches main character chair to Armin and Mikasa and their whole group and once Eren activates the Rumbling the entire season from here on out is just fighting Eren's cult terrorist group the "Jeagerists" and catching up to Eren. The plot moves at a snail's pace and Armin has no interesting alternative to stop this century's long war despite the story establishing that Armin is smarter than Eren.

As a result, it's hard to get invested in anything that goes on in the final season then the series establishes that Eren had the ability for titan blood to be completely eradicated without killing Eldians and it comes too out of left field for me to care and comes off as a last minute attempt to make Eren seem heroic despite all the horrible things he did. 

Mikasa was the one give the final blow on Eren but at the end, she ultimately has stockholm syndrome to a dead guy and isn't conflicted or tries to grow past the guy who's final words he said face to face was "I always hated you". The subplot regarding her duty to her clan never once even gets mentined. It felt like by that point it just pulled the biggest punch.

Speaking of the ending, I know it's often derided but what I dislike about is that it pulled an original Final Fantasy 7 where it turns out humanity at the end is pretty much wiped out making Eren's entire struggle to get rid of titan blood entirely pointless since mankind would wipe each other out anyway regardless of that said blood. 

At this point, how do I not know Hajime Isyama isn't going to do what Square Enix did with FF7 and retcon the ending to AoT for a quick buck by making endless prequels, spinoffs or alternate realties? Akria Toriyama sort of did the samething by making constant prequels before the timeskip epilogue of Dragon Ball. That's what I truly dislike the most about the ending. 

Overall, this review has been pretty lengthy, and Attack on Titan is a series I can basically say I liked the middle portion of more than anything. It is fascinating how an anime I used to be so apathetic towards was a show I got to the end of at all. Would I consider it great? No but it is interesting how I managed to ultimately invest this much time to a show I initially disliked 11 years ago. I am open for this happening again but at the same time, I doubt it.