It's been a good couple of weeks for game completion in the Brakeman household: I wrapped up The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Steamworld Dig. Both were great, though the former is, as I've noted elsewhere, one of the best games I've had the pleasure of playing. The latter was entertaining, if light.

I'm so glad you've said this. I quit a run of DS2 ages ago because I found the Chariot battle and arena so obnoxious (particularly given how far you have to go to get there after a bonfire), and I had genuinely never considered ranged attacks. Kudos - I think I'll start the game back up tonight!

Ugh, that would have driven me completely mad with Bloodborne. As a person who lacks a PS4, I've never had the chance to play it, but the idea of a constantly dwindling supply of healing items irritates me as much as DS2's boneheaded mechanic to reduce player health after he or she died. It reinforces failure, rather…

I appreciated that about the final area of the base game as well - glad to hear they managed to somehow improve it even further for the expansion. The utter incoherence and smashing together of past and present, along with the relevant decay, made that final boss fight in the base game so evocative. You really felt…

That was my understanding. Prior to the existence of the flame, Dark was not an understood, unique thing as it existed only in contrast to the Light that resulted from the First Flame. The darkness that existed prior to the lighting of the flame was an alll-encompassing, metaphysical darkness that precluded the reign…

I think it was only in Dark Souls 3 that I really got a grasp on the more intriguing metaphysical aspects of the flame and the abyss. It led to the most interesting conclusion of the series, for me, as I actually allowed the flame to die and, one assumes, plunged the universe out of the era of man and into the era of…

Perhaps my only disappointment with the series in its broad strokes is the unwillingness to bring Frampt and/or Kaathe back.

At least the hidden areas in DS3 were so cool though, eh? Untended Graves had that distinctly eerie quality that makes you feel like you just shouldn't be there, much as Ash Lake did in the original game.

Oh my goodness, those giant crabs were so cool! I love it when the Souls games, in contrast to their more typically horrifying monster design, just have a very large version of something that looks startling like it does in real life. See also: the Mega-Crow from the first game.

Good call on the lore. I barely pick any of the lore or the sidequests up from the game, but they provide any number of post-game hours spent finding more out about what I just played. From Software has been better than virtually anyone else at creating a world that is coherent enough in its presentation to not feel…

I think the reception to the expanded content has been lukewarm, but the reception to the base game was very positive. Though I appreciate the first game in the series for its comparative novelty, and the inter-connectedness of its physical space, I think Dark Souls 3 was actually a superior game in virtually every…

Sounds like my decision to end with the very apt, poetic conclusion to my DS3 campaign was wise. It's a shame that The Ringed City is as blase as this suggests, but not entirely surprising. DS3 was likely the strongest of the Dark Souls trilogy, purely in terms of its aesthetic, mechanics, and enemy design, but the…

Oh gosh, I'd love to talk about Spla2n:

With regard to being aware of the betrayal before-hand, I think it's a legitimate storytelling device (assuming the rest of the story is well-told). It offers some dramatic irony, in that the audience is aware of something that the characters are not, and you can see that looming betrayal in the distance as you…

Finished Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild over the weekend, which was incredible. Watching all of the memories as a prelude to the final confrontation offered some dramatic context to the proceedings, and improved my take on the game's overarching story as well. Great ending, besides.

I think the main thing is just the fact that it appropriates a very serious cultural plea for justice for the purpose of selling Pepsi (along with, of course, implying that the people involved are too worked up and could just get along if they settled down). That's my take on it, but I'm sure there's more going on.

I'm super pumped about this, though obviously very cautious. It'll be very interesting to hear what's going on with the ouster. Anyway, there's no way the country will be worse off by removing a white supremacist from a position of significant influence, so hooray!

I would argue that looking at serialization as an inherently valuable mechanism, rather than as a means to the end of telling a suspenseful or compelling long-form narrative, is part of the problem. I think content creators have latched onto the success of highly serialized works of fiction, including TV programs like …

I'd lay this at the feet of over-serialization and ballooning budgets making content creators more inclined to find something that works and just keep running it into the ground. Not every story needs to be an epic, and not every character needs a dramatic arc that takes three films/games/books/TV seasons to resolve.…

I've found there's a strong element of this in Dark Souls too - the game tends towards a dark aesthetic, but there's all manner of thematically inconsistent goofiness (exemplified best by the truly bizarre atonal vocalized "HELLO" items players drop when visiting other players).