It must be hard to land the planes.

Dragon Quest XI Scompleted

Alright we've rolled credits but as I understand it there's quite a bit left!

Act 3 spoilers: Going back in time to undo shit is just the height of hubris and "I read the script." Like why would you gamble all of the success for a chance at bringing one person who knowingly sacrificed herself FOR THE WIN?

Narratively this is also just such a weird fucking choice. It undoes all the character growth that was had by these people, some of who had huge changes, like Serena and Hendrik.

I guess metanarratively it's the character doing a NG+.

I dunno. This is the first time I've felt like the game might be losing me. Narratively this seems like a weird decision, and mechanically I have to deal with these characters being crap again and having to unlock shit again?

And at this point why not just go back in time to the night Dundrasil fell and stop THAT? I guess that would be TOOOOO crazy.

I think it's weird this game expects me to care about Gemma. I really thought she would be the first party member.

Metroid: Samus Returnscompleted

I think this is pretty easily my least favorite one. My backtracking has not yielded much. The game feels very stingy with upgrades and the path seems very fixed. Like I feel stuck and there are lots of things I can see I CAN'T do and I can't really tell which way to go from here without a new thing.

Yep. So I figured it out and got farther. I'm just very over the bog standard Metroid fights here. I did it once. Do I have to really keep doing it? This chasing me down the hallway thing also sucks and is infuriating.

There are other issues here. The Aeion Pulse thing has made the game worse. I thought this would be an “I’m stuck” button but they’ve used it to make the environments unreadable. Gone is the ability to check the environments with your eyes for vulnerable blocks. You just have to spam the pulse button. You can’t even opt to not use it. Some of the blocks just aren’t differentiable without it.

Additionally this grinder thingy chase through the tunnels sequence made me want to throw the game in the dumpster.