@millionsedge: isn't that the point though? To put you in situations where you might feel torn morally? Present challenges that aren't right or wrong, black and white?
There's a difference between putting you in a position that is open to moral interpretation, and having the grey aspect be inferred versus presenting everything as morally ambiguous from the outset with no room for interpretation.
The latter doesn't make you feel morally conflicted -- it makes you not care because you neither feel morally correct nor morally wrong, or even both at the same time... you feel neither.
Being morally conflicted is interesting (though not necessarily good or bad in and of itself), but being disinterested is inherently problematic.
If TLOU2 leaves people thinking "this is a game about assholes being assholes and I have no investment in their assholery because screw them, their assholes" then all the smart writing and characterisation in the world can't save it from being narrative noise.
That said, there is one angle the above could work by placing players outside of the shoes of either party/disassociating so we can see it as a grim but fascinating take on people being the worst of themselves. i.e. fascinating from a human angle, but not from one of character investment.
The thing is... you normally can't get away with doing that kind of story telling when using characters and a world that people are already invested in because people will try to relate to the story through the characters, rather than the anthropologist stance of the director.
@velcrosnake: I've done the game on Normal and Hard now (and about halfway through Hardest) so this isn't the most authoritative stance, but so far I've found that between the super armour and the lack of a run/roll the game pushes you to think more about where the enemy is going to be in a couple seconds, rather than where they are right now.
This makes the footsie jostling of trying projecting enemy attack lines, baiting attacks, and moving into place take up a higher ratio of your playtime than in previous entries.
I'm not sure that's better or worse, but it's certainly different.
@Barighm: In those cases you normally have all the end-game/pre-final boss content grind to work through, so while you are near the end of the story there's actually a fair bit of content left.
For the duration of the story this first installment covers all Red does is participate in two boss fights. Introducing a new playable character with their own style and mechanics right before the game (installment) would end would be really odd from a design standpoint. You'd barely have time to acquaint yourself.
@lordbeefjerky: Going by the relative size of the controller it should be no bigger than most AV receivers if you put it on its side (which fit into entertainment centres almost by definition). Given the exhaust would be unobstructed, and that having a vertical drive placed horizontally isn't normally contentious... it should be just fine.
I take issue with criticising the game for being archaic or anachronistic without substantiating the criticism. What, exactly, are we talking about here? Which aspects?
I ask because outside of the way the presentation is constructed, there's very little in Shenmue 3 that was superseded by superior systems. In anything the industry changed as a matter of trend. Case in point: most of the things Shenmue 3 does that don't align with modern games were never standard to its age anyway, because the only game that played like Shenmue 1 and 2... were Shenmue 1 and 2.
In my mind, that makes these elements characteristics of the series (that happened to start long ago), but it's not the same thing as being outdated in and of itself.
It would be like, for example, calling turn-based games outdated if turn-based systems had been left by the wayside, while completely ignoring whether the game plays to the strengths of a turn-based system (and surely how well it does that is what should be evaluated).
Shenmue 3 has its faults (which this review touches on), but there's a difference between being genuinely outdated, and not following a trend.
Yep, that's me. To be honest I didn't feel this game that much and still can't say I do, not in any big fashion. However the majority seems to think this will be the next thing, so figured I shouldn't miss this one.
Erm... What in the actual **** am I reading? If you aren't personally interested in the game, why are you buying it? There's something really weird happening in this post... and I can't quite put my finger on it.
@knolddasker: "If you are doing an open world then do it properly, fill it with alot of fun things to do."
Even with the game not yet out I feel this statement misconstrues the purpose of Spiderman's open world, which is not to provide scale (without content to match), but to allow you to be Spiderman. You can't exactly get the feeling of being a web-slinging superhero if you're always constrained by enclosed spaces. In that sense, the scale of the world is functioning in its intended fashion (from the looks of it).
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