Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) by Rockstar Games

Red Dead Redemption 2 provides an immersive experience that's second-to-none

I'll start off by saying that, although I do consider this game worth playing, and though it has had clear effort and care put into its development, it is certainly no masterpiece, and I fought regular frustration with it. I was surprised to see so many gaming publications and fans alike score it a perfect 10 because, in my opinion, it is severely flawed. It's a good open world game with stunning detail, it tells one of the best, most emotionally devastating and bittersweet stories in gaming history with great characters, but outside of that, I actually found it frustrating and shallow.

The open world is incredible and full of remarkable depth. From random events to NPC encounters, a staggering amount of detail has been injected into this world by the developers who really did a fantastic job. There's a stunning amount of handcrafted detail to stumble over that will more than satisfy most fans of open world games, so if that's your thing, go ahead and buy Red Dead Redemption 2 without regret.

I've seen plenty of praise for the graphics, which I think this is mostly due to the fantastic lighting engine. Volumetric lighting and how it reacts with fog and geometry looks incredible, god rays are marvelous, and the glow that permeates the setting from light sources serves to do a lot of heavy graphical lifting here. It's really something to behold, and combined with the fantastic soundtrack it serves to add a lot of atmospheric heft to the experience. This feeds into the high quality and immersive nature of the open world, one of this game's strengths.

I enjoyed how the game gave me hidden side quests to find in the form of Stranger encounters littered through the world. Many of these grow to add detail to the setting and its people and have lots of writing depth to them, despite being little more than random encounters triggered by the player entering a certain area. Despite the strong open world, this experience is at its best during its thrilling, affecting main story missions and when you're getting to know the very well-written side characters in the Van Der Linde Gang via taking on camp side quests, usually in the form of coach robbery, hunting, or fishing with them. However many of the main story missions—although they're often very compelling narratively—are so on-rails that deviating from the set mission path will often lead you to a fail state outright and push you back to a checkpoint, and the checkpointing system is often poor. For one stealthy mission in Chapter 4 I was forced repeatedly to view the same full minute-long wagon ride into the camp over and over, as the game failed me for trying to sneak into a roof window. I later realized the game fails you if you go off the 1st floor, and you're expected to sneak through the ground level. This kind of railroading stifles player agency regularly and pulls you right out of the experience.

Despite these flaws, single player is a strong narrative with good characters, twists and turns that mostly feel earned and are emotionally impactful, well-written dialogue, and fantastic voice acting and performance capture. Dan Houser and the writing team at Rockstar are at the peak of their abilities. This is a well-told story which makes important points about American exceptionalism, frontier expansion, human civilization, and morality. It's all helped along by the fantastic performance of the cast, particularly the player character's actor, Roger Clark. A fair amount of the side content is also quite compelling, but a lot of it does unfortunately fall into typical open world game territory, which leaves you feeling like you're doing tedious busywork for NPCs whom you just met and don't care about. Although I admittedly loved some side quests, I began skipping side content later in the game after one too many "collect 5 bounty posters" type missions, which was very disappointing.

The slow, laggy way that both the player character and horses control is awful, unfortunately. There were several extremely frustrating moments during combat in which my character would become stuck either on a piece of in-game geometry, or running in a loop, which led to some frustrating deaths. Additionally, inventory management is an unintuitive chore, and you're never quite sure which weapon Arthur considers his default, as you're constantly drowning in dozens of them since the game doesn't allow to equip a main, nor sell those you aren't using. There's something very wrong about a game in which you're a wild west gunslinger, yet half the time you attempting to draw your pistol quickly (by holding right mouse button, then clicking left mouse button), the game fails to respond at all and you stand there like an idiot as you get shot to death. These clunky bugaboos ensured I never felt fully in control of the player character, and some of the game's fantastic immersive quality was lost as a result. I regularly felt frustrated from moment-to-moment while playing this game.

Despite the compelling main quests and companion quests, this game also features some of the typical open world bloat that I've come to despise in games of this sort. I never want to hunt animals for crafting components, for example. Not out of any sort of animal-rights motivation, but because it's never been compelling for me to go out into the woods and spend hours trying to find the right damn animal to obtain materials from. I've also long despised hunting for treasure using only hand-drawn maps—another sin this game commits. I had a particularly poor experience finally finding a treasure location, only to open the hidden compartment and receive another map to decipher: What a kick in the groin it was spending 15 minutes trying to scale Caliban's Seat to complete the first treasure map I purchased, battling bad platform jumping and awkward walk/run controls and falling a couple of times only to finally find it and realize it was ANOTHER TREASURE MAP. This is the kind of boring, time-wasting side content I can't stand, and I was disappointed to see it in yet another open world game which is an otherwise fantastic experience.

Additionally, the camp upgrade options are little more than window dressing. Beyond gaining fast travel capabilities and gaining new satchels, there's almost nothing of value to be gained by upgrading your camp, which is a huge missed opportunity. Because the characters are so compelling, the acting is so great, and the dialogue is so carefully crafted, I found myself wishing for an opportunity to impact the lives of the gang around me by putting some of my hard-earned wealth into the camp. It's prohibitively expensive to do so, and you gain little in-game reward for it other than certain cosmetic flourishes. If I could do it again I'd have instead poured that money into my own clothing and horses. It's simply not worth it, and before long I began ignoring the feature entirely.

There are also several sorts of minigames available, such as poker or five finger fillet, but most of these—although they received obvious care in development in the form of unique animations and lines for the NPCs against whom you play—ended up feeling obviously rigged to me. The worst of this is during the poker game in Saint Denis, which one player always just stomps and led me to think he was cheating in-game. But no further explanation is available, so it instead feels just like he was programmed to take all of your money by winning lucky hands constantly. I gave up on most of the minigames after experiencing this.

Red Dead Redemption 2 lives or dies on its being a great story and a deep, atmospheric world. If you love immersive, engulfing video game worlds or want an amazing story, you're going to love it. If you want great shooting or compelling gameplay in general, you're likely to end up frustrated.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Final Fantasy VII Remake (2020) by Square Enix

An enormous amount of personal nostalgia can't make up for Final Fantasy VII Remake's shortcomings

Note: My screenshots are rather poor since this is a console game rather than a PC release.

I'll state up-front that I don't have a problem with this being just part one of a remake. It felt like it had enough to warrant the full price tag to me. So, if that is your only concern, you can buy without worry. But if you're interested to hear whether or not the game is good, read on for further detail.

I played the original Final Fantasy VII in 1997. As you can see from the photo above, I still have my original black back discs and jewel case. Some parts of the Remake game carried for me on pure nostalgia. Others were not so good. Others still were so awful that I have no idea how any adult making the game could have examined them and thought, "yes, this is good, this should go in our game."

I'll start with the good stuff. Some parts of the Final Fantasy VII Remake are really exceptional. Number one is that it starts off amazingly well, and feeds fans of the original tons of fan service and nostalgia right off the bat. A tear came to my eye playing the opening few hours. The new combat system, although far different from the ATB of the original, is pretty fun! Animation is amazing- really stunning, and that extends from combat, to NPCs, to cutscenes. Great soundtrack, of course, as the original was fantastic as well. And the art direction is fantastic. Despite the PS4 showing its age and several areas featuring really bad, low-resolution textures, Midgar has come alive for me. It looks phenomenal and feels like the city in the original game did. There's also an exceptional level of polish here. There are very few bugs and there's a deep attention to detail in every part of Midgar.

However, a lot of the game is a complete mess narratively whenever it's not re-creating scenes from the original.

The only time the writing was hitting for me and felt good was when depicting the original characters. Square Enix has a lot of character designers from the original working on this team, and it shows. Not once did the characters say a single line of dialogue that felt out of character for them. The writers clearly still know these characters deeply, and the voice actors nail every single one of them and are casted perfectly.

But that's where the good stuff ends. I won't spoil the game here, but suffice it to say that almost all of the new content added to flesh out the original story is bad. It's full of inconsistent rules and plot holes (being stuck in the area in Chapter 17 after falling and having to spend the entire chapter climbing back up, and then just next chapter watching Cloud jump literal hundreds of feet), full of MacGuffins (Chapter 4 is guilty of this, along with Chapter 13 which makes zero sense whatsoever, and Chapter 14 which could have been cut completely and the game would have lost nothing), and rampant use of deus ex machina for anything and everything whenever the ghosts show up, culminating in an event near to the end of the game that made me roll my eyes and literally groan aloud because of how awful it was.

The real problem with all of the stuff they've added is that it completely torpedoes the pace of the Midgar portion of the original game. I expected this bloat to be represented by the side quests, but those were actually fine. This bloat shows itself in the main quest, which I did not expect. Entire chapters of this game feel like a complete waste of time, and a lot of the writing in these new chapters is so amateur as to feel like fan-fiction. The moment-to-moment scenarios are often just cornball video game nonsense that's impossible to take seriously, eg. "monster stole the key, go chase him down", or "this bridge you are crossing just fell down, now you have to go through this entire level, routed through conspicuous combat rooms with enemies". Lots of random nonsense to move the plot forward that feels contrived and unnecessary and impossible to care about. Compare this to modern story-driven games like Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, or God of War (2018) which are using every single moment, every single line of dialogue, either to tell a compelling story or develop their characters further. Final Fantasy VII Remake feels bloated with tons of fatty, disposable content when you compare it to other titles that strive for great storytelling. It's extremely disappointing, because I consider the original Final Fantasy VII to be fantastic at storytelling, tone, timely comic relief, and pacing. And the Remake fails in all of these aspects.

The textures are absolutely awful in certain cases (click to maximize)

Despite how good this game tends to look, a lot of these failures make it feel old and outdated, which is ironic, of course, because it's a remake of an old game! These are the exact problems the remake was supposed to fix! But these arise not just because it's a remake, because this flaw primarily exhibits itself in the new stuff. The classic scenes from the original game which are re-created here are as timeless as ever and work really well. But the structure of the new portions they have added for the remake feel like they've been designed by a bunch of guys who are stuck with '90s video game design philosophies—Everything feels way too gamey and arbitrary, put in place by a developer's decision rather than organically arising from the story and characters, and because of this it becomes impossible to take seriously and fails to have the emotional heft that good storytelling often does. Look, I don't mind if you make me chase a MacGuffin every once in while, but it has to serve either to develop the mechanics of the game and teach me something new, or develop the core characters or story further, or even lead to a relevant, specatcular set-piece. Too much of the pitfalls of Remake lead to none of this, and the game feels like it spends half its length spinning its wheels as a result.

So a lot of this game is a mess and inconsistent from moment to moment with what it wants to be, whether it wants to be a faithful remake head nodding to its original fans, or a new story all its own. I thought they executed on the former very well, the latter was pretty disposable, standard video gamey stuff. This is very relevant to the game's ending, which I won't spoil here, but suffice it to say that the ending was the culmination of this kind of poor writing, as it seems to go completely off the rails with the most obvious, heavy-handed pseudo-artistic statement to the point where I'm not even really interested to continue playing the next episode. I've heard that Nomura is famous for this kind of stuff, which does no favors for his talents as a director and a writer in my eyes. I really hate disliking the ending because I just know people are going to rag on anyone who doesn't like it for being perpetually angry gamers or whatever, but it's seriously bad. Think Game of Thrones Season 8 bad. I honestly cannot believe that the game got out the door with this ending. Someone high up at Square Enix needed to tell whomever was responsible for writing this ending that it was not going to work. It's a failure of epic proportions.

To summarize: All of the best stuff is from when they re-create the original scenes, most of the stuff I didn't like was new writing injected into the framework of the story which already exists. So if they're going to tell their own story now with these characters, from here on forward, I'm really not interested in that, because I don't find their storytelling up to par in most cases and the bombastic, campy style with which they tell it is really not for me. Others may feel differently.

Basically, it's neat that this thing even exists, and it's got a lot of polish. But it's very inconsistent, and I'm surprised it's been so well-received both critically and among fans new and old. Maybe it's because it starts off so well, and ends so poorly, and most of the hearsay surrounding the game is taken from statements made when players are still in the first half of the game? Nevertheless, if you were a fan of the original, it's still probably worth playing—warts and all. But it disappointed me greatly by the end.

⭐⭐

The Witcher (2007) by CD Projekt Red

I feel really bad doing this because I absolutely love CD Projekt Red and I enjoy later games in the series such as The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, but I just can't recommend this game. It's not a terrible game, but its age and some of the mistakes made by the developers working on their first game do a lot to make it a terrible experience to play.

Most notably is that the combat is awful. It's incredibly easy for the most part, but also very bland. Potions are all but useless, leaving you to whack with your sword repeatedly in its faux-rhythm game. I was completely exhausted of it by the beginning of the second chapter and was beginning to choose just to run past enemies.

There are a number of side quests that are worthwhile as far as story and character development, but too many are simple fetch quests and just not worth your time despite the experience and money they reward you with. Too many "fetch 10 wolf pelts", and "find the 10 sephirahs" here—the latter of which broke me for good and had me uninstalling the game.

Probably most tiresome is the fact that the maps are some of the worst designed playing areas I've ever seen in an RPG. I am not exaggerating when I say that 90% of my gametime here was spent running around the map. They are not cyclical at all, but require you to run end-to-end, which is incredibly boring and frustrating. The maps that are open, such as the swamp, often have shrubbery and fences blocking paths that you might use to get somewhere more quickly. I don't mind padding out some gametime, but you've got to be smart about it; give me some good dialogue with NPCs, or entertaining combat. Here even the skill trees—one of my favorite parts of an RPG—feel ineffective, and like a waste of time.

There are minor annoyances as well, such as the awful character models, or poor dialogue writing. The game also starts off about as terribly as possible, with awful, generic, clichéd fantasy dialogue, and bad animations and storytelling.

I used to think of this game like the first Mass Effect—a good game, but very rough around the edges. But while it does do some good things, it's nothing like Mass Effect, which has competent levels, character building, and far better writing and dialogue.

Pretty much all The Witcher has going for it is some interestingly complex quest design and a great setting. Aside from that, this game is nearly completely skippable. Witcher 2 is a far better game, and probably even a better starting place for the series. But if you're dead set on playing the entire trilogy, you can give this one a shot—It's going to be all but impossible to play once you've experienced the later, better games and CD Projekt Red's maturity as one of the best game developers on the planet.

⭐