Games Beaten 2026

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

Depths of Sanity, cool, thanks for the heads up!!

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

13: Fallout 3

It's not garbage, but yeah, compared to 1, 2, and New Vegas, it's pretty lacklustre. There are a couple of interesting quests (the tree, the virtual reality town, the Dave cult election), and one cannot deny the impact the game's aesthetic had. But at least half the of dozens of hours you play this game are underwhelming.
I could go on, but just watch HBomberman's legendary essay:


6/10

[ElkinFencer10]

Games Beaten in 2026 - 2
* denotes a replay

January (Not Shit Beaten)

February (2 Games Beaten)

1. Metal Slug 2 - Neo Geo - January 20*
2. Metal Slug X - Neo Geo - January 25*

1. Metal Slug 2- Neo Geo - January 20*

SNK’s 1998 follow-up to the legendary Metal Slug is a double-edged sword of a game. Metal Slug 2 features numerous gameplay additions, and the level design is definitely a leap forward from the first game’s levels. That said, what is otherwise a masterpiece of arcade greatness is marred by some egregious performance drops. The original Metal Slug had some issues with slowdown, but Metal Slug 2 frequently turns into a slide show. Fortunately, this was later fixed in the enhanced rerelease/remaster of Metal Slug 2 entitled Metal Slug X which I will be reviewing separately.



The first thing that you’ll notice Metal Slug 2 added over the first game is more playable characters. Marco Rossi and Tarma Roving return from the first game, but you can also choose to play as Eri Kasamoto or Fio Germi, two new characters. General Morden also returns in Metal Slug 2, once again trying to conquer the world; this time, however, he has extraterrestrial allies. As far as core gameplay goes, SNK knew not to fix it if it ain’t broke, and Metal Slug wasn’t broke; the same running and gunning action that made the first game great is the core of the second game. The controls are the same as the first game, too; A shoots, B jumps, and C throws a grenade. A lot of arcade games, especially fighters with their combos and finishers, can feel overwhelming and cumbersome because of complicated control schemes. Metal Slug 2 doesn’t do that; it doesn’t even use all four buttons available.



Metal Slug 2 has you fighting through some fairly common environments - desert towns, jungles, so on and so forth. It also has you fight in some pretty cool and unexpected areas, such as a crypt filled with mummies that can mummify you with a breath attack and high-tech bases filled with alien soldiers. With these environments comes new rideable vehicles in addition to the titular Metal Slug. My favorite of these, for sheer absurdity, is the camel with machine guns where one would expect to see saddle bags. Returning to the mummy enemies, when you’re mummified, it’s not an instant death; you can still shoot your pistol, although you’ll lose any special weapon you have been using. Your movement is much slower, and your jumps are super stiff, so it’s definitely not a condition you want to have, but it’s a cool way to add in a new challenge without having it just be something new to kill you.



Let’s look at everything Metal Slug 2 gets right, and then we’ll look at where it misses the mark. The artwork and animation are top notch with gorgeous environments and bright, detailed sprites. Movement and control is silky smooth. You never feel like you’re having to fight with the controller; everything works as it should and feels fluid. Metal Slug 2 brings a level of diversity in gameplay and level design that wasn’t seen in the original game. Like the visuals, the music is also absolutely fantastic with great sound effects and a soundtrack that manages to penetrate the overarching din of gunfire and explosions without being so in your face that it distracts from the gameplay. Lastly, if you can look past the slowdown, it’s one of the best co-op arcade experiences around.



Now for the elephant in the tank - the negatives about the game. First and foremost has to be the slowdown. It’s egregious, especially in areas thick with enemy units and explosions. At times, it legit slows to just a few frames per second before picking up as the explosions die down. And that’s it. That’s genuinely my only complaint about Metal Slug 2. Just about everything else is perfect or close to. Despite the slowdown, which I only found mildly annoying at worst, Metal Slug 2 still stands as one of the premier arcade experiences, and the slowdown is the only thing keeping it from a perfect score from me.

2. Metal Slug X - Neo Geo - January 25*

Released in 1999, Metal Slug X is best described as an enhanced version of Metal Slug 2 rather than a unique game. It builds upon the already frantic run ‘n’ gun formula that the series popularized while addressing the abysmal slowdown that made the original Metal Slug 2 nigh unplayable at times. At its core, Metal Slug X delivers the same explosive and fast-paced experience that Metal Slug 2 did (except that pace actually stays as fast as intended). You pick one of four soldiers, shoot your way through six missions crawling with enemies, rescue old homeless men, and pilot combat vehicles like tanks and planes. This may be the same bones as Metal Slug 2, but pretty much everything is improved over the original release. I’m not going to say that there’s no reason to play Metal Slug 2 if you have access to Metal Slug X, but it’s probably not worth playing both unless you’re a die-hard Metal Slug fan.



Metal Slug 2’s most infamous issue was severe slowdown whenever the screen got crowded. This performance disaster is rooted in the fact that Metal Slug 2 pushed the limits of the MVS hardware without also being given some dedicated optimization work. Metal Slug X directly confronts this by using the same framework that Metal Slug 3 would use a year later which greatly reduces slowdown and generally makes the gameplay smoother and more responsive. While occasional slowdown does still occur during particularly hectic sequences, the difference is night and day and dramatically improves the game’s playability. The result is a Metal Slug experience that feels tighter and more polished than the two entries before. Enemies rain down in greater numbers without sacrificing (much) animation fluidity fitting the intensity for which Metal Slug is so well-known.



Metal Slug X is pretty much an enhanced re-release of Metal Slug 2, but there are some key differences. Obviously, Metal Slug 2’s slowdown issues have largely been resolved in Metal Slug X, but the differences extend beyond fixing Metal Slug 2’s Achilles' heel. Visually, a dusk lighting setting has been added in to give a more dynamic feel to the time of day than just day vs night.There are also some new destruction animations. In terms of audio, some new sound effects have been added in - for example, Fio has her own death sound instead of using Eri’s as she did in Metal Slug 2 - and the announcer’s lines have been re-recorded. Couple that with the remixed soundtrack the game sports, and the overall sound design feels pretty fresh despite being largely just Metal Slug 2 but smoother. As for gameplay changes, these are minimal. Some enemy and vehicle placements have changed, what power-up you get when has been changed as well as adding several new power-ups that didn’t appear at all in Metal Slug 2, and there are more POWs and items than in the original release.



What Metal Slug X ultimately delivers is the definitive way to experience Metal Slug 2. It takes what made Metal Slug 2 great to start with and fixes the major flaws that held it back as well as making some minor but welcome enhancements and additions. The increased enemy counts, new weapons, more varied stage lighting, and significantly smoother performance combine to make Metal Slug X feel simultaneously both familiar and fresh. It retains the core gameplay and story of Metal Slug 2, but it does so with much more polish. Even over a quarter century after its release, the Neo Geo MVS version stands as an exemplar of 2D run ‘n’ gun excellence. Metal Slug X isn’t just a remix; it’s a rebirth that showcases what Metal Slug 2 could have been at launch if it had been given a little more TLC in the QA department, and it remains one of the best entries in the series.

[marurun]

I mostly agree with your reviews of Metal Slugs 2 and X, but I actually find X adds too much content and changes too much of the fundamentals of the game to really be considered just a better way to play 2. I played a lot of both in the arcades in Japan when I was there in college, and both games have their own distinct personalities and play styles. I actually liked 2 a little better, despite the slowdown (coding error: apparently the game's run internal code at 60 FPS but graphics/display code at 30 FPS, and MS2 has a coding error causing it to skip 2 frames when things slow down instead of 1 frame, according to one source.) 2 feels a little tighter just in level design and mechanics, slowdown notwithstanding.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Depths of Sanity, cool, thanks for the heads up!!

Happy to recommend it! It has its share of flaws - the graphics, the mostly-situational weaponry, etc. but it’s still a very solid effort from a very small development team.

[ElkinFencer10]

Games Beaten in 2026 - 3
* denotes a replay

January (2 Games Beaten)

1. Metal Slug 2 - Neo Geo - January 20*
2. Metal Slug X - Neo Geo - January 25*

February (1 Game Beaten)

3. Metal Slug 3- Neo Geo - February 23*

3. Metal Slug 3- Neo Geo - February 23*



Metal Slug 3 - actually the fourth Metal Slug game released coming in a year after Metal Slug X - is a high point for the series in my opinion. The level environments are much more varied and interesting than in the previous games, and the game introduces new enemies that break from the standard “fascist soldier.” It shares the same perfected core run ‘n’ gun gameplay as the previous games, but it’s refined to near perfection.



In terms of visuals, Metal Slug 3 has some of the best 2D sprite artwork I’ve ever seen in an arcade game. At a time when 3D was the name of the game, SNK was bold enough to say “Y’all have fun. We’ll be over here making the most impressive sprites you’ve ever seen.” The series had already established a reputation for detailed and smooth character animation, but Metal Slug 3 ups the ante. Massive bosses, branching level routes, underwater segments, and alien-infested environments all give the game a variety that puts the experience a cut above the earlier games. Animation remains fluid with soldiers reacting to damage and environments packed with detail and explosive destruction effects.



In fairness, though, the density of sprites is a bit of a double-edged sword. Like Metal Slug 2, Metal Slug 3 often fills the screen with enemies, explosions, and projectiles. The difference is that Metal Slug 3 generally manages this chaos more gracefully. Whereas Metal Slug 2’s busy battlefields frequently overwhelmed the hardware and caused major slowdown, Metal Slug 3 feels much better optimized with slowdown being occasional rather than constant. Earlier games had already demonstrated the Neo Geo’s limits, and Metal Slug 3 feels like a more disciplined attempt to color inside the lines, so to speak, while still packing in as much detail as possible. Compared to the original Metal Slug, which emphasized clean readability and smoother pacing, Metal Slug 3 prioritizes a grand scale and visual hedonism. The result is one of the most visually impressive games not only in the series but on the system as a whole.



Sound design has always been one of Metal Slug’s strengths, and that remains true here. Metal Slug 3 retains the punchy weapon effects, exaggerated explosions, and iconic vocal samples that give the series so much personality. Gunfire has a satisfying, meaty “pew” while enemy screams and environmental sounds reinforce the feeling of battlefield chaos. The audio mix remains clear even when the screen is crowded which is impressive given the number of simultaneous effects with neither sound effects nor music ever being drowned out by the other.



Performance is where Metal Slug 3’s place within the series gets interesting. All Metal Slug games exhibit some degree of slowdown due to how the Neo Geo struggles with lots of sprites and effects on screen at once. The original Metal Slug generally runs the most smoothly, with occasional dips during heavy action but rarely anything disruptive. Its relatively restrained enemy counts help maintain a stable pace. Metal Slug 2, on the other hand, is truly abysmal from a performance standpoint, although some prefer its slowdown to give more time to see and analyze the battlefield. Metal Slug 3 falls between these extremes. Slowdown is still present, and it occasionally gets pretty bad, especially during large boss encounters or co-op play, but it’s a lot less constant and less severe than in Metal Slug 2. Some of this slowdown appears to be an accepted part of the design; faithful ports of Metal Slug 3 usually retain these dips because they were present in the original arcade version.



Metal Slug 3 is exactly what you want a sequel to be. It takes what made the previous games great and makes it better, and it takes what held the previous games back and smooths it out. It’s not perfect, but it has the crowded and busy battlefields of Metal Slug 2 with the relatively smooth performance of the original Metal Slug. It also provides players with a solid variety of enemies and battlefield environments. I always have a hard time picking which Metal Slug game is my “favorite,” but Metal Slug 3 is a strong contender. It is, in my view, essentially a perfect arcade game.

[MrPopo]

Out of curiosity, which of the Metal Slug games have you come closest to 1ccing?

[prfsnl_gmr]

Metal Slug 3 rules so hard. Great review, @elk! If you’re ever down for some more co-op, let me know.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2026 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
* indicates a repeat

1. Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
2. We Were Here (Steam)
3. We Were Here Too (Steam)
4. Tales of Graces f (PS3) *
5. Retro Game Challenge (Switch) *
6. We Were Here Forever (Steam)
7. Tales of Hearts R (PSVita) *
8. Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered (PC)
9. Mega Man 11 (PC)
10. Gravity Circuit (PC)
11. Mario Party DS (DS)

12. Ghost of Tsushima (PS5)

This is a game I’ve heard about for a *long* time, and heard a lot of things that made me have a decidedly unkind view of it. However, I’m very much not someone who likes to read detailed judgments or evaluations into a work that I haven’t experienced myself, so it’s been on my radar for a good few years now. Recently, I bought a PS5 from my partner, and she said that I was free to play the games she’d bought on her account until she bought a new PS5 later this year. The director’s cut of this game happened to be one of the games on there, and it immediately went to the top of my To Do list as a result. It took me about 55 hours to beat the English version of the game (including about 10 hours for the Iki Island DLC expansion).

The year is 1274, and Tsushima is in peril. The 80 samurai who guard the island find themselves against an invading army of Mongol forces, and they ready themselves for whatever fate may await them at Komoda Beach. Unsurprisingly, the superior numbers of the invaders overwhelm the best efforts of the samurai, and not a single one makes it out alive. Not one, that is, but Jin Sakai, lord of Clan Sakai. Terribly wounded on the battlefield but saved by a passing bandit, Jin swears to save his home from certain doom at the hands of the invading armies of the Khan, but that won’t be easy. He’s the last samurai on the island, the Khan’s forces control nearly every town and village, and the jito (samurai leader) of Tsushima, his uncle, Lord Shimura has been captured as well. Even if he must sacrifice every scrap of honor he has to make things right, there’s no way that Tsushima’s last samurai, one people come to call “The Ghost”, will go down without a fight.

That’s the broad gist of things, anyhow. To not bury the lede too deeply, I absolutely despise the writing in this game and find it, to put it lightly, an immensely distasteful work of fiction. There are a lot of layers to my feelings on that point, however, and I’m giving a fair warning here that this review will have no small amount of spoilers in it as I go into them. The most general issue I have with the game’s writing is the basic premise of its setting being the first attempted invasion of Japan by the Yuan Dynasty. This is not some harmless, forgotten about piece of ancient history with no connection to the modern day. The attempted Yuan (Mongol) invasions of Japan are events that *still* shape worldviews across East Asia much like the legacy of the Crusades still shape so much of the relationship between Europe and the Middle East. Japanese far right groups even still use the attempted Yuan invasions as analogies for the threat they believe mainland Asia still presents to Japan (a stance I obviously disagree with, but I also believe that the reality of the situation begs elaboration at least to this degree). Using this sort of setting for your action-adventure game in the modern day is a grossly irresponsible design choice, especially for a western development team to take on. Though, given that Sucker Punch’s previous game handled Native Americans in such an amazingly disrespectful and racist light, I guess it’s not really that surprising that they saw this an acceptable topic for their next game.

That isn’t to say that Sucker Punch or anyone should *never* use this setting for any fiction ever, but it is to say that anyone who *is* using this setting as their story premise should really have their ducks in a row as to *why* they are using this setting in particular to tell their story. With a historical event like this, even one or two careless writing choices could overshadow the entire rest of the narrative by unintentionally creating some horrible analogy or implication that was never originally intended. Unfortunately for all of us, Sucker Punch have absolutely not taken that careful a hand with the research for this game, and the whole thing comes off as not just incredibly commercial and cynical but also just plain incurious about the event they saw so fit to design an action game around.

Case and point is their depiction of the samurai as a whole. Ghost of Tsushima casts the samurai as focused on honor nigh to a fault. It consumes their entire being and concept of themselves, and the consequences of dishonorable conduct can range from social ostracization to even grand treason outright just for the crime of bringing dishonor to one’s clan and/or the shogunate. This is a wildly inaccurate and ahistorical portrayal of the samurai, and I’m aware of that even with my far from encyclopedic research into the topic (it should not take that much research to find that *Bushido: Soul of Japan* is nowhere near the historically accurate text it claims to be). Sucker Punch, however, treats this view of the samurai as gospel, and it comes off as simply wanting to validate their own preexisting ideas about the samurai (and by extension, Japan itself) rather than actually explore or examine the historical event they’ve set their story in.

The best example of this, in microcosm, is how the samurai dress in this game. They’ll likely look very familiar to pretty much anyone who has an idea in their head when they think “samurai”. The armored skirt, the shoulder pads, and even the big crest on the helmet all positively scream “samurai”. The only issue there is that the modern idea of samurai these draw from is the Warring States period hundreds of years after the attempted Yuan invasion where this game takes place. Sucker Punch have gone on record that they specifically objected to using actual samurai dress and armaments from the 13th century because it just wasn’t in line enough with the popular idea of what samurai were. They wanted to give people a playable Kurosawa film (there’s even a “Kurosawa Mode” in the game that makes everything greyscale like an old black & white movie), and being historically accurate to the era the game takes place in would go squarely against that main objective. They’re not here to thoughtfully explore or inform about a very politically sensitive era in East Asian history: They’re here to cater to preexisting notions about samurai and Mongols to give people a big fancy katana-wielding power fantasy no matter how unwise or racist an endeavor it might ultimately be.

But so what? Ultimately, all of those things are just superficial aspects of historical depiction. I’ve said before in previous reviews that an over dedication to being accurate to real life can often be a detriment to your video game, and I don’t suddenly not believe that. Sucker Punch also didn’t actually make their in-game island of Tsushima look anything like the real place outside of the shape of the island because they wanted each of the 3 acts to have distinct feelings to their environments, so they chose to make the island very different from how it is or was in real life. I think that’s a good thing! Real places aren’t designed to be good video game locations, and if it’ll make for a better video game experience, I don’t see anything wrong with bending the truth a bit where it won’t be painless. To expand a bit on the question I began this paragraph with, none of these issues would matter if the end result were *good*.

Even if the real samurai weren’t these pillars of belief about the virtues of honor, it’s not like honor isn’t a real concept in our world that could be explored through a setting like this. For example, it’d be perfectly possible, albeit still distasteful, to use a story of the last samurai of the Mongol assault at Komoda Beach to explore ideas about honor. You could look at how it serves both the perception of the nobility of the self as well as how it serves as an isolating moral construct between the “honorable” rulers and the “dishonorable” ruled, and how the illusion of a greater morality of the noble class helped reinforce their rule (and how legitimate or illegitimate a social construct that may or may not be). That’s just an example off the top of my head, and Ghost of Tsushima didn’t have to be about that in particular to have a well written story. This example here simply serves to illustrate that I don’t by any means believe that this narrative was doomed from the start to be irredeemable garbage or something. Plenty of great or engaging stories have problematic elements, and Ghost of Tsushima would’ve been just one more of them.

However, as the previous paragraph so strongly implies, Sucker Punch have absolutely not made a great story that happens to be interlaced with problematic elements. They have made a hopelessly confused and miserably paced story that can never decide what it wants to be about, and that’s entirely separate from the historical distastefulness and inaccuracy. I say that, but I should also clarify that point. The worldviews that led them to find the Mongol invasion of Tsushima an acceptable setting and historical accuracy ultimately unimportant are very much connected to what made them write such a confused mess of a story, but that’s a different level of causation. That all is to say that the characterizations and narrative arcs are clumsy, meandering, and self-contradictory in ways that could easily exist in a story set in some other time period in some other place.

Nowhere is this better exemplified than in our main character: Jin Sakai. While I think it’s ultimately rather easy to miss this if you’re not paying close attention to the narrative, Jin seems to change what he believes about things almost constantly between conversations. This isn’t in some larger effort to deceive people on the part of Jin as a character either. There is no logical reason that he seems to hold such contradictory ideas about so many things that should ideally be fundamental aspects of his worldview. Does he have serious issues with acting/fighting dishonorably as The Ghost despite being a samurai, or does the end ultimately justify the means to the point where his actions are obvious? Does he view bandits/thieves as subhuman scum and barely different from outright traitors with how they demoralize the native island inhabitants and strengthen the invaders’ cause, or does he view them with sympathy as just unlucky victims of circumstance worthy of mercy whenever possible? Does he think people are generally worth giving the benefit of the doubt no matter their past transgressions, or does he think that those already distrusted are better left that way? You can try and read some character growth into his actions as the Ghost as the story goes on, and there is *some* effort to paint him going down some dark trail of revenge, but nothing is ever consistent enough to actually give us a picture of this person that feels like anything but a main operator of a giant plot of convenience.

Jin’s crummy characterization has ramifications throughout the entire rest of the story as a result. On the more minor end of the scale, we have pretty much every side story feeling far more vapid than it needs to. Side quests both large and small (even the several 9-part character quests for your minor characters) end up feeling very confused because they just don’t seem to be building sensical parallels between Jin and the people he’s interacting with. He’ll be a revenge-fueled invader-hater one minute in the main quest, and he’ll be chastising one of his closest friends in a side quest a minute later for letting the idea of revenge cloud their judgment for even a moment. Part of this is just down to these side quests always being available at any part of the story (even post-main story), so Sucker Punch have, by design, crafted a story where non-main story content can absolutely never have meaningful ramifications on anything else. The side quests functionally can’t exist as anything but self-contained, very jarringly paced side shows, because to do otherwise would necessitate making some of them missable, and the dev team seems to have prioritized never permanently locking the player out of anything. That’s not an invalid design choice for your gameplay, but it definitely leads you into far more boring storytelling.

On the more extreme end of the spectrum, Jin just ends up feeling like an extremely flat and boring character because the story never actually gives him any ambiguous choices in what he does. This game doesn’t have any Mass Effect or Infamous-style morality system, so there’s already no mechanical choices in how the story progresses as you go through it. However, if this is meant to be some story of how forsaking honor leads you down a dark path to becoming a more heartless, cruel person, they have fundamentally failed at that at every attempt. Jin never actually does anything “monstrous” or “drastic” that is no explicitly reinforced as completely necessary for the war effort by the narrative.

Even the big climax at the end of act 2 where he breaks with Lord Shimura’s plan to invade Castle Shimura and poison the Mongols instead of attack them head-on doesn’t serve as a moral failing of Jin even a little, because we explicitly point out that, had Jin gone with his uncle’s plan, they all would’ve died at the hands of another trap of the Khan’s that was waiting for them. Lord Shimura scold Jin for even considering the poisoning by telling him that "terror is not the weapon of a samurai" (what does he think the demon masks they wear are for???) because I guess the writers are just that firmly in denial about the illogical nature of the worldview they've foisted upon these characters. The narrative effectively paints the Khan’s strategy, one that was already mixing an attempt to find collaborators with immense cruelty towards any who showed resistance, as one of an abuser going “look what you made me do” as the Mongols only escalate to mass poisoning of the occupied population *after* Jin poisons them. Not only is it something that just makes very little sense in the first place (surely the Khan would’ve used any trick he could, because that’s already what we’ve shown him to do time and time again because he has no honor), but we’ve never actually painted acting dishonorably as something actually bad in the first place because we’ve always framed it as necessary. When, in the lead up the final boss fight, Jin’s uncle drops that the Shogun has branded Jin a traitor *because* his actions as the Ghost have undermined the legitimacy of samurai authority over the peasants, I had my head in my hands in disbelief at how that was not the overriding core of the whole story from moment 1 instead of some last second plot twist(?) like this.

Ultimately, Ghost of Tsushima’s plot has absolutely nothing to say about honor one way or the other. It barely has anything to say about revenge either, given that acting out of passion or revenge always seems to end just fine for Jin. Sucker Punch have made a huge tale that both reinforces modern day right-wing talking points about racism in East Asia that takes immensely from ahistorical stereotypes to build the groups it’s representing while simultaneously saying nothing coherent about any of it. It’s a giant exercise in self-gratification about one’s own ideas in Mongols and samurai and very little else. By borrowing from the visual language of prestige film and television, they’ve built a very self-serious story that is ultimately totally uninterested in any kind of historical fidelity despite carrying itself as something that speaks nothing but the truth. As someone who has gone through and continues to go through great efforts to acknowledge and respect the not unproblematic history and cultural legacy of the place I consider my adopted homeland, I cannot help but find Ghost of Tsushima’s approach to Japan, East Asia, and everyone who lives there vehemently disgusting in the sheer lack of any modicum of respect it affords any party involved.

To give a big tl;dr to this whole section on narrative: It’s both phenomenally racist as well as written like garbage, full stop.

So the writing may be awful, but what about the gameplay? The gameplay is pretty standard open world fare, but for every interesting idea, there’s a far more annoying wrinkle in the experience to undermine that and annoy you. If you’ve played pretty much any open world game in the past 15 years, you’re not going to be very surprised by the general construction of the gameplay loop here. You’ve got main quests, side quests, and collectibles scattered around the map (some of which are just cosmetic bonuses, and others of which give outright upgrades to your kit). It’s a Ubisoft game by way of Sucker Punch, pretty much, even down to having a ton of fog of war to uncover on the map and watchtower equivalents that reveal a bunch at once. The weakest part of it has to be the platforming for me, especially for the shrine "challenges". The platforming is incredibly uninteractive, and it's mostly just "point the joystick in the right direction a few times in between pressing the X button to jump". It's boring to the point that a friend watching me play it described it as "not even gameplay", and that's a statement I have a hard time disagreeing with XD. There's not a great variety in the things you're actually doing for that side stuff (tracking stuff, going from place to place, fighting guys, the boring platforming sections), but it’s still very much an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach, and if you’re a fan of stuff like Ubisoft games, you’ll feel right at home here.

The most novel thing here is probably the combat, which is Jin’s katana styles against foes in combination with your “Ghost weapons” (pretty much any tool you’ve got that isn’t your katana). For the former, you’ve got progressively unlocked different styles of katana you can switch between that are good against respective enemy types, but they still operate on the same principle of heavy and light attacks. Combat is always a big dance of “heavy attack one guy until his guard breaks then heavy attack until he’s dead”, rinse and repeat. If you’re fighting “honorably” like a samurai, that’s pretty much gonna be your whole game, but you’ve got some extra Ghost weapons you can use mid-sword fight as well. Kunai that stun several enemies at once were always my go to, but you’ve also got smoke bombs and sticky bombs to hurl at foes too if that’s more your style. The game honestly has a *ton* to keep track of with various special combo moves you can do, and I was just happy that so much of it was ultimately so easily ignored in favor of that guard breaking strategy instead.

You’ve also got a pretty decent stealth system if you want to play that way, too. The less samurai and more Ghost way of fighting is sneaking across rooftops, assassinating from behind, and staying hidden. You’ve got a few distraction or instant kill Ghost weapons for that as well as some interesting ranged options like bows or poison darts, but it’s nothing super original or interesting. I usually love playing games stealth rather than frontal combat, and even I found the stealth options too slow to warrant using them most of the time with just how easily most enemies go down, so take from that what you will. Fighting more or less “honorably” also doesn’t mean anything from a gameplay or narrative perspective either, so far as I could tell. There’s no morality system, so people don’t treat you any differently depending on how you choose to fight or anything. The only thing that changes is that it rains more if you don’t fight people head-on.

You should still probably get good or tech into both types of combat, as there will be plenty of missions that require you to do one or the other, but as far as your general gameplay goes, nothing is too complicated that you’ll feel cornered for leveling yourself the wrong way. That’s with the exception of the duels, of course. The game’s version of boss battles is generally in very samurai movie-like duels between you and an opponent, and the whole perspective of the game changes as well as the mechanics. No Ghost weapons can be used in duels, so it’s entirely on your ability to use the game’s perfect dodge and parry/perfect parry systems on whether or not you’ll survive the fight. I found these to be easily the worst parts of the gameplay loop, because the normal gameplay loop doesn’t actually encourage you to play in a way that would ever necessarily get you well practiced for the skills you’ll *need* to win at these duels. I did nearly all the side content I could in act 1, and the boss still wrecked the hell outta me over half a dozen times before I got lucky enough to beat him. I’m really not a fan of technical 3D action games that focus on parry systems and such, so this was a really unappreciated aspect of the game for me. I eventually got practiced enough at it (and got powerful enough gear later on) that duels became something far less scary to deal with, but for anyone who’s a more casual 3D action game fan like me, buyer beware that you *will* be forced into rather difficult duels from time to time, so you’ll need to be ready for that.

Outside of that, it’s really the controls that were my biggest issue with the moment to moment gameplay experience. I've got issues with joint pain in my hands, so if a game that requires you to hold R2 or L2 a lot has an option to turn those holds into just toggles, I take the option. Ghost of Tsushima has force feedback for the triggers (which I had turned off from moment 1, so I never got to experience that) and has you constantly holding the R2 and L2 buttons for context sensitive actions and ranged attacks respectively, so I turned those into toggles pretty quickly. These disability controls are appreciated being there, sure, but they're so damn terrible that I cannot leave them unaddressed. The use of R2 as your "do everything" button (from climbing up a ladder to down a cliff, for picking up items, to changing weapon stances) in particular was a very consistent source of frustration. From the perspective of the disability controls overall, it made the game far harder to play. There were countless times where I got my face wrecked in because I was trying to tap R2 to change stances but instead picked up an item (dropped from a slain enemy) without realizing it, so the enemy I was trying to fight got in a good few free hits before I could finally properly counterattack. That's a 50%+ of the time-level problem, so it's not some tiny inconvenience. Usually, you hold R2 to change stances and let go to go back to normal combat, but even that can get annoying if you're near context sensitive prompts while you're fighting. I had several times where Jin would hop up a ladder or down a cliff mid-fight because the context sensitive action overrode the stance change feature of R2, and that's not something the disability controls are to blame for. Overall, I just really wish the overall control design had been better tightened up, because especially for a disabled player, the moment to moment play experience is far more full of BS than it ever needed to be.

This game got a lot of praise for its aesthetics, and for all my complaints towards the rest of the game's aspects, I really cannot disagree with that. Even for a PS5 version of a PS4 game, the fictionalized version of Tsushima that Sucker Punch have created really is beautiful. I may've laughed out loud at just how "jacking ourselves off about JAPAN"-levels of absurd the collectible haiku poem writing spots were when I found them, but the vistas that Jin looks over while he writes them sure are beautiful! The instant loading times between fast travel is also great, and the game overall has had a really stellar conversion to PS5 for performance in general. The only real issue I could have with the graphics is how people look, as they sometimes have some weird clunkiness to their animations (or just kinda glitchy-lookin' bodies in general) that really take you out of the experience since the game has no proper physics engine (so you can't really push people off of ledges and bodies will hang in midair if they "fall" partially off a cliff).

The weakest part of the presentation is definitely the sound design for me. Not the music, because that's alright. The lyrics can get a bit silly at times, but the songs that accentuate the tension of your bigger fights in big crowds of enemies really get the blood flowing in an awesome way. My bigger issue is with the voice acting and voice direction in general. I played this game in English because it's an American-developed game. It may take place in a fictionalized version of Japan, but the initial dub (even down to the lip sync, which is sometimes really weird and bad) is all in English. Given that Sucker Punch's writing is the thing I was most here to analyze and dissect, it felt wrong to not play it with this *original* voice acting. The voice *actors* seem fine, but the voice direction leaves a lot to be desired. Jin, in particular, just has such an incredibly flat emotion to SO much of his dialogue that it makes him feel really unaffected and unconcerned about a lot of events where it makes really little sense for him to be talking that way (and this just adds to how "does he care about anything?" jumbled up and confused his characterization already is that much more). One of my friends mentioned that people in this game "talk like Jedi" with how flat and emotionless so much of their speech is, and I even started calling Jin "Qui-Gon Jinn" to drive home the point of how overly emotionless our honor-bound (and comically emotionally suppressed for no real larger narrative point that I could find) main character was.

Outside of him, the VAs were clearly not given any kind of master pronunciation guide for places and terms, and it gets VERY weird sometimes. Usually it's fine, and most of the main characters seem to have their pronunciations right, and as someone who knows Japanese and has studied it for most of my life, I know how hard it can be to do a "correct" pronunciation of a Japanese word in the middle of an otherwise naturally flowing English sentence. Even still, there are some *grossly* wrong pronunciations that made me feel like I playing a game from 2003, because sometimes characters will pronounce a word to one another completely differently without batting an eye despite there being no reason they'd disagree on the pronunciation (like saying "Kaneda" (pronounced like kah-neh-dah) like the country "Canada"). A lot of minor NPCs also have what I can only describe as a "Japanese-ish" affect to their speech, and it's *very* weird when most characters don't have that sort of affectation to their talking, and it really doesn't make that whole general vibe of "this feels quite racist" any smaller, lemee tell ya :/

Verdict: Not Recommended. In terms of just the moment to moment gameplay, I think this game is passable at best. If you REALLY like vistas of fictional Japanese countryside, maybe that will help make up for how brutal the duels are likely to slam down most casual action game players, but you can do just as good if not better for your open world vibes from pretty much any Ubisoft game or some such. The truly unforgivable thing for me, though, is everything about the narrative. This game is a monument of self-indulgence in orientalist racism, and I struggle to find words strong enough to describe how great the disgust I feel towards it is. Gaming and art in general deserve better than Ghost of Tsushima, and you, too, deserve picking a better game to play.

Spoilered for just the sheer length of the review, and I'll also be writing a separate review for the DLC expansion, but I didn't have time to get to that in particular today <w>

[marurun]

Metal Slug 3 is VERY visually impressive and is a lot of folks' favorite, but I watched an interesting perspective on it in a recent YouTube video that has changed my own impression of it. If you're a speedrunner or high score player, Metal Slug 3 is a slog. Metal Slug 3 has a lot of bits, especially in the shooter sections, where the game just has you doing a lot of waiting for things to happen, and some of the stages are stretched out when they didn't need to be. So for quarter feeding it's fantastic, but for actual skill play the game can apparently be quite annoying.