You dislike such a wide swath of games I have to ask what you actually do enjoy

I loved Halo, but I played so much Halo back in the day, and a couple of stretches since, that now when I jump into any part of halo 1, 2 or 3 I am instantly bored to tears. I played it all on like Legendary and half the time I was reloading to keep every Marine alive or some shit. I have seen every corridor just tooooo many goddamn times

Oh also despite being that much into Halo, I never finished Infinite. Didnt hate it just had no motivation to keep playing. I think the meaningless ally respawn farms were part of it

Use VATS to get a clear shot of the tails, once the tails are crippled they lose the majority of their damage.

fuck mario

Preach

Scoped shotgun loaded w/ birdshot

I kinda liked the loot and shoots but the setting was drab and I could not suffer the dialogue.

I think it really was a product of the times. The looter shooter was fairly novel and you can see how that affect of banter w/e you wanna call it really aged badly in bl2 and 3

My issue with going back to old TW, is that while I will agree that there are certain things that feel better about how it plays, and settlements feel like actual places instead of just production hubs; almost every faction feels basically identical in how they play with only the most marginal possible variations in roster. This is less true in Rome 1 of course, but it’s especially so in Med2, and Shogun 2, even though I do still like both those games.

TWWH, I believe, is for all it’s flaws a genuine advancement in design, because it gave CA license to experiment with hard asymmetries between faction rosters & campaign mechanics.

The series peak for me is Rome: Total Realism 7. The zoomed in Mediterranean map, having to balance your family members’ political and military careers, the way integration of conquered territory was modeled . I think Empire: Total War’s lukewarm reception scared CA away from doing “realistic” combat, since Napoleon and later Shogun 2 both introduced a bunch of “special abilities” that made things really video game-y - but IMO if they had done a deep dive into realism, overhauled siege warfare and enemy AI, and scaled everything up to full historical battle sizes, they could have kept the series’ charm instead of going full fantasy which is what they did (fukken three Warhammer games? Really?).

That’s a take I really feel that I should have thought of saying first. I always did like SMB3 a lot more and didn’t like most of the changes SMW made. Mario All Stars’ remake of SMB3 was great for that reason.

Totally agree. I love 3 to death but could never enjoy World. The movement feels way too floaty even without the cape.

I think the cape and being able to skip levels with it goes right in line with the traditions of earlier mario games (1 and 3) introducing you to the warp zone by the second level. The ability to play the same game with ease or difficulty depending on your style is good design, I say. I do agree 3 is the pinnacle of the 2D era if not the franchise.

I don’t like any dark souls. I just don’t like how even the most basic enemies revolve around “sit and wait, don’t attack yet, if you get bored and impatient, well, you are gonna get even more bored so just accept being bored”

It’s a bit of a litmus test when asking someone about their opinion of KOTOR2. If they say Kreia/Traya was “based” and actually buy into her bullshit Enlightened Centrist fortune cookie wisdom (which IN THE GAME is shown to be a deceitful bullshit ploy to hide her actual motives), they’re probably an asshole.

As someone who appreciates KOTOR 2, I think that a lot of the love for the game comes from 3 factors:

• Nostalgia for KOTOR 1

• The fact that KOTOR 2 improved the combat system and the class/skill system, so if you liked skipping all the dialogue and getting to the part where you could swing your lightsaber around then this game feels like a significant improvement when the combat in the previous game often felt very tacked-on and like an afterthought

• The aspirational “But it could have been a masterpiece!” sort of thing, where people see the rushed development which resulted in a game that was ultimately unfinished, this cohort tends to fill in the gaps with how great it could have been rather than extrapolating from what the game really was into what it likely would have been if it actually completed its development cycle, which wouldn’t have been all that much better and the lost content restoration mod stands testament to the fact that, no, the bits that got left out weren’t really going to be better than the rest of the game.

I think you’re right about how Revan’s story just got sidelined in the second game and how the villains were kinda meh. I feel like Nihilus was a really bad choice and just a placeholder for an actual villain because they didn’t bother with any development, they used in-lore reasons for why he couldn’t talk and his character was essentially incomprehensible in his motives aside from The One Thing™ 🙄, and they just kinda dropped him in towards the end and it’s supposed to be a big deal because he’s… kinda spooky I guess? Oh wait, some characters also tell you throughout the game that he’s a big deal and you should invest in his character because they said so.

Kreia I think was decent but not fully realised (see above for what that means to fans) but I think conceptually it was cool to have a greyish-to-evil Jedi as your mentor.

The game did a better job of moral pathways, especially the grey and evil ones. The first KOTOR would pose very simple situations to the player - help and do the good thing, to good outcomes, but you either have to pay extra or miss the opportunity for money/loot or you lie and/or slaughter your way through and you get that loot.

KOTOR 2 made you think about the consequences of your actions more and there wasn’t always the clearly obvious righteous path but instead you had to grapple with means vs ends and the ramifications of your choices. There was less [console the orphaned child and give them money to help them get back on their feet/kill the orphaned child and loot their bloodied corpse] options and more morally ambiguous options.

Kreia was supposed to be the fleshing out of the whole fall to evil thing and she did an okay job of it most of the time. If you played the game purely lawful good then she would have been frustrating but if you played it other ways or you weren’t certain of your path then she is a more interesting deuteragonist than Bastila, who would just demand that you always take the lawful good path and chide you if you didn’t, which wears thin really quickly. (This is from someone who has set out to play the game as evil multiple times and yet has failed and fallen to their better insticts every time lol, and this is also at the cost of Kreia chiding you for doing the right thing, for doing the wrong thing, or for trying to do the right/wrong thing and it backfiring due to circumstances, leaving you feeling as though there was no way to appease her because whatever you do she’s likely going to be disappointed in you regardless.) She was, imo, a very clear swing-and-miss at representing something close to representing the concept of Wu Wei because the problem therein is to have a fallen/ultimately evil character who also represents neutrality/neutral-good - those two sit it direct contradiction with one another so it got muddled up in the story. Hence the beggar scene.

Being able to crack characters open and bring them to be your apprentices and to influence their alignment was a pretty cool mechanic that helped flesh out the story imo.

The game was really reaching for gritty realism (see: Atton being an actual representation of a rogue character rather than a caricature of a rogue who once was self-interested but decided to join up and now they’re part of a merry band of do-gooders without any real justification or development, also the drab setting for most of the game) and a subversion of the tropes (which, in combination with the gritty realism, often devolved into outright edgelordism) but it often fell short of this lofty vision.

I think ultimately what the game was attempting, and failed to achieve, was a truly introspective player experience where there were more shades of gray than any clarity on anything - will Kreia be the final villain and if so, why is she on your side and why does she not do Big Evil Stuff™? (Which explains Nihilus being largely absent from the game, although that turned out kinda bad.) Why do I not trust the good characters a lot of the time and why do the evil-coded characters make compelling cases (sometimes)? Why is it that I can’t always do the correct thing but I am forced to choose between imperfect options? Why do I find myself at odds with my Jedi mentor? Is there truly right and wrong? Are the means justified by the ends and what are the implications? etc.

I think one thing that needs to be kept in mind is that this game came out when the subversion of the trope wasn’t itself a massive trope and gritty realism, while popular, hadn’t reached peak saturation yet and so for a lot of people who grew up with the game it really did feel groundbreaking due to that context. I think this bookends really well with the discussion on Seinfeld happening elsewhere on Hexbear - people look back on Seinfeld and ask why it was considered so great at the time but they often don’t understand that in the context of when it was produced, it was pretty groundbreaking for comedy and its influence was so significant that for a person going back to watch it after its run, it seems like Seinfeld is just rehashed and worn out. But that’s not because of Seinfeld itself, it’s because it changed the shape of comedy that came after it (for better or worse) such that it doesn’t feel groundbreaking at all looking at it retrospectively.

It’s a bit like if we were to watch an early husband and wife sitcom like I Love Lucy or something - we’d know all the tropes, we’d see all the punchlines before they landed, we’d consider it a tired and worn out concept despite never having watched it even though, at the time, it was so influential and groundbreaking that it effectively shaped the direction of its entire genre. Sometimes things are just a product of their time and that means that they don’t always age that well.

I like KOTOR 2 because Darth Nihilus is hot.

I like KOTOR because Darth Revan is hot.