Gaming II - Revengeance

I finally finished FFXV after about 2 years... The story is actually really good, I love the dynamic of the four friends, Ardyn as a villain, Noctis and Luna's relationship... It's just told in a very strange way.

The first half (honestly, the majority of the games playtime), is spent in a open world that feels kind of unnecessary to the plot, since the story only really gets interesting after you leave it and head to Altissia, at which point you get railroaded straight through to the end of the game, which is a bit sad, because the open world is actually quite well designed, but in the sense of the narrative, very little of it is really important.

Once the plot evolves though the game gets a lot more interesting. In terms of the villain, I kinda feel like Ardyn is one of the series more interesting bad guys. He has a fairly sympathetic motive, even if his plan is utterly evil. He's a lot less cliche than I initially thought him to be, and while he doesn't really break the mould of FF villains, (I can't really look at him without being reminded of Seymour or Vayne) he is far from a disappointment. He has a lot of personality to him, and that's something I always enjoy.

That said, the combat remained largely atrocious throughout. Most of the time I barely have any idea what's going on before I get hit, or hit the enemy. The link combos are cool and all, but I usually only hit them by accident while button mashing my way through fights. Then there are the fights that are entirely just on rail experiences where we button mash our way through. The worst of these being the Leviathan fight and the very end of the battle with Ardyn. I get they wanted to make these cinematic, but mashing the same button for five minutes while Noctis flies around gets old very quickly.

I'm fairly excited to play the DLC episodes. The characters were the strongest part of this, and they each get their own story so, hopefully once I finish those in 5 years time, I won't be disappointed... and FFXVI will finally release.

still no PS5 for Danny yet unfortunately. Once I do get one, my first stop is Spider Man: Miles Morales and then my second stop is Cyberpunk 2077. And then, by that point, Gotham Knights will probably be out and who knows what else. I know they're making a God of War follow-up, but i'm sure that's years away honestly. 

I work at Target, so I want to make sure I get a PS5 there (because employee discount) so it's just a matter of them waiting for them to get some that don't sell out in 10 seconds.

in the mean time, i still never played the Resident Evil 2 remaster i bought for PS4, so maybe i'll kill some time with that one. i actually have lots of games i never finished, to be honest, so i can keep myself busy with those.

i'm actually playing Resident Evil 2 right now (the remake)

so i finished Leon's storyline and am halfway through Claire's right now. This storyline is NOT going where i expected it would (which is a good thing). I thought it would just be a zombie story confined to the police station, but now we've got secret labs and mad scientists and mercenaries and creepy orphanages.

the giant blue man in the trenchcoat is super annoying tho and honestly makes the game kind of a chore at times, because he makes it impossible to do anything (also i have yet to get any explanation from the story of who/what he is, but i googled it so i know he's sent to remove any survivors who know what Umbrella was doing, but it would be nice if the game actually told us that)

i really like it so i guess i'll play RE3 remake after this, even though i heard it's not as good

poor Ethan

So basically, the first three games in the series (as well as all the associated spin-offs and remakes) were about the zombie outbreak in Raccoon City, which was caused when Umbrella discovered the progenitor virus and used it to create bioweapons. But that storyline kind of ends with RE3, and since then the series has gone off in many different directions in terms of its plot.

Resident Evil 8 is a direct sequel to Resident Evil 7, which was lowkey a soft reboot to the entire series with only minor connections to the previous games (even though it does technically still take place in the same universe). And in RE7, you had a new kind of fungal bioweapon, refered to as the Mold, which functions very differently from the viruses of the previous games.

Obviously I have not played RE8 yet, but I assume the tall vampire lady was a normal human once who was infected with whatever new type of bioweapon RE8 has in store (for all we know, it could just be the Mold again - in RE7, there was a molded character who also grew twice the size of a normal human when shit went down). That's what usually happens with bad guys in Resident Evil games, at some point they mutate.

So, I guess, tl;dr: tall lady is tall because she's probably infected with some kind of bioweapon, just not the same as the one from RE2. I highly doubt she's an actual vampire. Resident Evil as a series has never gone full supernatural, it's always been about science gone super wrong.

resident evil 3 remake was okay

I thought it was really good, but I'm also one of the few people who actually prefer the original RE3 over RE2. 

The remake's biggest strengths in my opinion were the characters, especially Jill and Carlos. And I mean, Jill has always been a great character, even back then, but Carlos in the original RE3 was ... bland as fuck. Whereas in the remake, he one hundred percent steals the show, like somehow they turned him into one of the coolest, most memorable Resident Evil characters.

Nemesis on the other hand was a little bit of a let down for me. Most of the encounters with him were scripted, and designed to be action set pieces rather than the dynamic threat he was in the original game, where he could show up literally out of nowhere and attack you at any time. In the remake, he was cool and all and the encounters with him were the highlights of the game for sure, I just expected him to be (and hoped he would be) more of a pursuer like Mr. X, not the scripted boss battle at the end of each area like he ended up being.

Objectively speaking, RE2 Remake is definitely the better of the two, but because of my love for the original RE3, I ended up loving them both equally.

A new game in the Octopath world was announced last night. Looks like a mix of Octopath and Fire Emblem. I'm so hyped. There's a demo out atm for anyone who likes these types of games (and owns a Switch).

They said decisions will actually affect the story, so here's hoping it's more like 3 Houses and not like TellTale games.

Fucking LOL. Like I wasn't expecting much, but they actually gave us nothing.

Okay, we get it ... Overwatch 2 is still a while off, but if that's the case, you need to keep Overwatch 1 alive. You need to release new heroes, new maps, new game modes ... like anything to at least keep the hype going. This is BlizzCon, and they didn't even give us a new cinematic. How depressing is that?