RBMango

Okay, good. Hopefully they fixed the irritating trophy issues too.

I hope Guerrilla just bites the bullet and writes Sylens out of the third Horizon entirely. Lance made that character. Without him, there's no point, and recasting him would be lame.

John Wick 4 is one of the most visually striking movies I've seen in recent memory, so I have complete faith in Stahelski to pull the dazzling color palette of Ghost of Tsushima off. I really hope the suits at Sony and PlayStation just back off and let Stahelski do his thing. He's earned the carte blanche as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, I'll absolutely be forking over $20 for this.

I'm a few hours into it on PS5. The inconsistent 30 fps on PS5 is inexcusable and the trophies are completely borked for me. It's a fun and charming game, but I'm going to put it down unless they release a few patches. It's a real shame.

That's a really heartwarming sight to see.

I'm really excited to get my hands on this. I just hope the platinum isn't an insufferable grind like Hogwarts.

Oh come on.... There is no way Supermassive didn't know this was a problem before launch.

This is so sad. He was always a pleasure to see and listen to in anything I watched or played. It's going to be bittersweet seeing him in John Wick 4 next week and the Horizon DLC next month. Such a shame.

As a P.S., one of my favorite roles from him is the Captain in Netflix's Castlevania show. A very small role, but hugely important in the grand scheme of things and Reddick nailed it.

I liked (and sometimes loved) most individual episodes as isolated stories, but as a whole season, I'm very mixed on how they handled it. This was all over the place for me when it came to its pacing, quality of writing, acting, visuals, faithfulness to the source material, and execution of new bits. Very messy, but (if I'm being honest) this show still ended up being much better than I expected.

This was a very good finale imo. It was paced very well for this being the shortest episode.

I also thought the giraffe scene and final scene were handled a lot better than I expected them to be.

I was looking forward to getting the platinum for this, but after seeing what that entails, I can't be bothered. Doesn't help that I don't enjoy the game enough to dedicate that kind of commitment to it. Once I finish all the side missions, I'm out.

LMAO those are some hilariously desperate arguments from Sony.

"...it looks nice, it's performed well, it's got a good pace..."

I strongly disagree with all of that when it comes to this episode, but, hey, different strokes for different folks.

God, the visuals in this episode were so flat and uninteresting. Why did they light and color correct what should be the most disturbing episode to look like a ski resort travelogue?

So we haven't gotten faceplates and controllers based on Spider-Man MM, Ratchet, Demon's Souls, HFW, or Astro, but we get some based on a basketball player? Right... Good to know where modern PlayStation's priorities are.

"The writing and voice direction is excellent: it’s melodramatic in the manner you’d expect from a good anime, but it lacks the disconnected awkwardness you may anticipate from contemporary Final Fantasy games – almost as though it’s been written in English first, rather than translated from Japanese."

I'm pretty sure Yoshi-P or someone on the dev team confirmed that this was the case.

Let's be real: we all saw this coming.

Very, very good. They did this part of the story justice. This is easily the best performance Ramsey has given in the show, so far. Just heartbreaking. I thought she and Storm Reid had great chemistry too.

I'm not going to lie and say I think it looks awful or anything. Just very, VERY uninspired, boring, and desperate. It looks even worse after how poorly stuff like Anthem and Marvel's Avengers went down.

And this being Rocksteady's first game since 2015 is just sad...

Yeah, the duo of Capcom games was easily the big highlight for me. And Tchia, but I don't expect that to get big viewer numbers.

The only exciting part of the State of Play for me.

@Flaming_Kaiser Yeah, I don't think this looks terrible at all. People are being WAY too harsh on this just because of the style and vibe it's going for.

Why does the art direction look so bland? I can't believe this is from the same developer as the Arkham trilogy.

I don't follow Microsoft's line of thinking here, and it's dishonestly presented, at best.

1. They strategically ignore that PlayStation earned that market dominance thanks in large part to years of consistent, high-quality critical and commercial successes they mostly own and funded. They didn't go out and buy tons of established franchises to increase their IP vault. It took multiple generations of in-house building, learning, and creativity to get them where they are today.

2. Microsoft knows damn well it's playing the long game to be the dominant force in the inevitable subscription-based future. They don't give two craps if you buy an X, S, or a la carte game from them. What they want is Game Pass subscription money.

Sure, as raw data, the market dominance stats make PlayStation out to be this big, bad console manufacturer, but Microsoft conveniently left out quite a few variables that give the stats a lot more texture and historical context.

I hate sounding like some corporate defender and shill for PlayStation, but a bad argument is a bad argument all the same. Microsoft comes off as a willfully ignorant doofus here.

My Yakuza side story addiction begins again!

Keeping my expectations extremely low for this one. Not particularly interested in Suicide Squad, but hopefully they show the release date for Tchia.

@PegasusActual93 Fair enough, but it's presented in such a flat and unexciting way in the show that I would have greatly preferred how it goes in the game.

I thought it was average at best. This episode was proof that this season needed an extra episode to make the story breathe a lot more. There's way too much crammed into this episode for its runtime, and the editing and pacing are kind of terrible in the last 15 minutes because of that. Also, THAT is how Joel gets his critical injury in this? Seriously? Laaaame.

Also, I always liked how the arrival of winter in the game reflected a bleak and scary part of the story for Ellie, but they threw that bit of visual storytelling and ambiance out the window in this show.

My second least favorite episode, so far.

That thumbnail is the stuff of nightmares.

With Yakuza, I always go up to the trophies that have to do with finishing the main story and all the side quests. Beyond that? No way.

@YourNameHere I saw some journalists and well-known Twitter vultures claim that the game's cast is either "too diverse" or "suspiciously diverse". If anyone else said that about any other game, there would be countless articles and tweets making fun of that person for saying something like that. Total hypocrisy.

I get what they were going for with Kathleen, but I don't think Lynskey had the acting chops to consistently carry it. It's a shame we won't be seeing more of Jeffrey Pierce as I thought his stoic and subtle presence was quite interesting. He was far more menacing and nuanced than she was. I wish they had made his character the resistance leader hellbent on revenge and scrapped Kathleen entirely.

It's the one stumble in an otherwise very impressive episode.

GREAT episode. I didn't think it was possible, but I think they improved the Sam and Henry relationship from the game. Those two actors playing them were terrific.

Got the digital deluxe edition and I'm about 12 hours into it. I think most of it is totally unremarkable and your bog-standard modern western AAA open-world action RPG, but the combat and exploration are so good that it's carrying me through this.

The return of Level-5 was one of the few big highlights for me during today's Direct. They're one of my childhood favorite studios.

I'm oddly curious to see more of RoboCop.

This was hands down my least favorite episode, so far. It was way too short and felt like mostly pointless filler. Them trying to show the inner workings of the raiders feels so forced and like a giant waste of time. Also, for an MA-rated show on HBO based on an extremely violent video game, the violence being mostly off-screen and bloodless drove me nuts, especially for this being the raiders section.

Joel is also waaaay too open with Ellie in this adaptation. A single sentence and silence went a long way in the game. I don't need Joel spelling out his thoughts and feelings to Ellie every chance he gets. It gets old so damn fast.

Finally, on a more personal note, them replicating the men's magazine scene felt extremely out-of-place here, especially with all of the major changes they made to Bill in the previous episode. They should have just left it out entirely.

So, yeah, I thought this episode sucked.

Like a Dragon: Ishin for me, but Hogwarts Legacy is a very close second.

I'd absolutely be down for another Uncharted with Cassie.

Frank's "give me one last good day" monologue to Bill hit me like a freight train.

I really liked it. Definitely my favorite of the series, so far. I don't mind the huge changes in this case at all.

I was also very dubious about Nick Offerman as Bill, but he was excellent.

Incredibly sad news =(

There's also a bit of concept art for the Horizon multiplayer game making the rounds that looks VERY Fortnite-esque. I think this kind of art style COULD work, but I'll need to see it in action. Even with that in mind, I'd love a 4-player Horizon game to play with the Discord homies.

Cool to read that it's really good. Looking forward to playing it next Tuesday.

I lost interest in it after a while, and I'd rather put that $70 towards Hogwarts or Like a Dragon: Ishin.

As for how well I think it will sell, I think it will sell alright. But as @mariomaster96 aptly stated, Square Enix will still label it a commercial disappointment.

This is unacceptable for something that's $70 and takes up around 90 GB of the PS5's storage space. I remember the demo having a really ugly low-res look at times, and I'm shocked those blemishes made it into the final release.

I really hope Square scraps the Luminous Engine after this. It's like the antithesis of Capcom's RE Engine.

@IOI That's the million dollar question I've wanted to ask PlayStation for over a year now. They're normally great at selecting the stuff they want to be heavily associated with, so I don't know what possessed them to link up with this outside of it being from Square Enix.

Yeah, that "kiss" was very strange and I don't mean that as a compliment... I liked the episode overall, but Tess' revised "going out guns blazing" moment was the first big misstep of this series for me. It came off as awkward and goofy. Greatly preferred how it was handled in the game.