Seems weird to ignore Alfred the Great given that he’s the only English monarch with “the Great” in his name.

Is that the sorceress from Dragon’s Crown in that Black Room GIF? Anyway, this weekend I’ll be playing Total War Saga: Thrones of Brittania. I’ve never been a big fan of the Total War series, but I love, love, love Total Warhammer, so I wanted to see what Creative Assembly would do with a focused, historical spin-off…

I think the game definitely tips in that direction, but the ending ultimately has Pandora deploying a bunch of “you must forgive yourself” nonsense that seems intended to undermine the point that the game seemed to be building to regarding Kratos and his monstrous behavior.

GoW3 comes so close to acknowledging Kratos as the piece of shit he is. The Hermes sequence in particular is full of 100% accurate descriptions of Kratos as an awful monster. But the end of the game chickens out and has Pandora deploy some “you must forgive yourself” horseshit that tries its best to downplay what…

If I have a pointed critique about the game’s themes and story, it’s that it treats Kratos killing his father as the be-all end-all of his evil deeds, which is some serious cherry picking. Kratos didn’t just kill his dad, he killed Zeus and almost the entire Greek pantheon, causing an apocalypse that destroyed the…

*thinky face*

I really want some reviews for Strange Journey Redux. SMTIV: Apocalypse was astonishingly good, and I don’t think I can give up the many quality of life improvements it made.

Reviews are suggesting it’s possible to win a campaign in a single night, depending on which victory you aim for, which sounds like exactly what I want right now.

As an investor in Pillars 2, I urge all of you to rush out and buy as many copies at full price as you can afford, regardless of personal interest or critical reception.

Does anyone besides me even remember the Dave Barry adaptation Big Trouble? It’s not very good, but there is a running gag about two hitmen who can’t escape pervasive Florida Gators fandom and wind up on a bus full of Florida Gators fans. It’s weird and completely beyond my understanding as a non-Floridian, but it’s…

That team doesn’t seem capable of making an engaging system outside a standard JRPG template. Why Nintendo doesn’t just let them do what they’re good at is beyond me.

It kind of annoys me that no subsequent Final Fantasy lifted the ATE system. It works incredibly well for filling out the world, and later in the game it actually kind of sucks that the party doesn’t split up much anymore to make room for more of those scenes.

Also, have you heard about some of the updates to Total Warhammer 2 coming in late May? They’re reworking the Skaven hunger mechanic a bit, which should go a long way to making them easier to handle.

One of the nice things about FFIX is it makes grinding more bearable by giving you short-term goals in the form of skills. “I need to learn these skills, so I need to win 40 battles to get enough AP.” If you stop periodically to learn skills at points when a bunch of new equipment becomes available, you never really…

“F Blitzball!” is the correct choice. Easily the worst thing about FFX is its obsession with locking shit behind godawful mini-games (and in the remaster, locking shit behind unavoidable mega-bosses).

Hot and Cold is not just addictive, it’s incredibly rewarding. Besides keeping you stocked up on consumables—including ethers, which you can’t buy in shops—it is the path to some of the best equipment in the game, whether by making things available long before you could buy or find them in a chest or by being Hot and…

I’ve heard vague news about mixed reality, but I didn’t realize it was for sale or of any particular use to anyone at this point.

He’s not wrong, but the last time I played FFX I utterly destroyed the other team in the championship, and I’ve never been interested in or good at Blitzball. Use Tidus’ special kick move and you’re set. So I think it’s less that it’s utterly stacked against the player and more that they didn’t do a good job of…

I’ll be playing God of War, which has completely won me over despite my best efforts to be a grump. There are still some flaws—the camera isn’t well-suited to fighting groups of enemies and spawning in high-level enemies in places you’ve previously cleared is a dick move that obstructs backtracking are at the top of…

It is absolutely not well-suited to fighting multiple enemies at once, and the best fights are easily against single opponents.