Risen - Review | A 10-Year Retrospective

Risen is a fantasy-themed open-world action-RPG by Piranha Bytes, a small German studio who were previously responsible for the first three Gothic games -- the first two of which are some of the best RPGs of all time. Following the colossal mess that was Gothic 3, Piranha Bytes split from their publisher, JoWood, who retained the rights to the Gothic name, thus forcing Piranha Bytes to create a new series which would serve as a spiritual successor to their beloved Gothic series. As such, Risen sticks pretty closely to the formula set up by Gothic 1 and 2, so if you're at all familiar with those games then you should know pretty much exactly what to expect with Risen.

Link's Awakening: A 25+ Year Retrospective

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was originally released in 1993, and I vividly remember playing Link's Awakening on that bulky, unlit, green-screened Game Boy while sitting in church and on long car rides as a young boy. It's probably safe to say that it was one of my favorite games in my early childhood, and I was overjoyed when it was re-released on the Game Boy Color a few years later with extra content. With the 2019 remake for the Nintendo Switch coming out, I figured it was time to go back and re-examine a classic that I used to love so much as a kid, and see how well it holds up 25+ years later.

As it turns out, Link's Awakening is still really good. Surprisingly good, actually, considering it's one of the oldest games in the series on one of the most primitive Nintendo devices. The only thing really holding it back is the sheer limitations of the Game Boy, only being able to render a very small resolution and only having two buttons to work with; otherwise, the actual game designs feel timelessly classic, which makes sense seeing as later games in the series seem to have taken a strong influence from Link's Awakening. Its impact on the series is especially noteworthy considering it originated a lot of elements that have now become Zelda staples, like playing songs on the ocarina for various effects, trading sequences, collectibles that lead to extra rewards, fishing, owl and companion characters, and more. It is, as far as I'm concerned, a quintessential Zelda game and ranks among the series' best, easily making my top five, and maybe even having a case for top three.

Gothic 3 Sucks -- A Critique From a Longtime Gothic Fan (Updated Ver 1.1)

Note: This article was originally published in January 2018, but has since been updated with extra content, including a full video review.

Gothic and Gothic 2 are two of my favorite games of all time, being two of the games that had the most influence on my young and developing mind when I first played them in the early 2000s. And yet I harbor virtually no love for Gothic 3. I've barely mentioned it in any of my Gothic articles because I don't even like to consider it part of the series; it doesn't connect to Gothic 2 very well, and the whole gameplay formula is a radical departure from what made Gothic and Gothic 2 so great. Even though it was made by the same developer, Piranha Bytes, Gothic 3 feels like a different game by a different group of people who had only a vague understanding of what the Gothic games were, and who were told to make everything "bigger and more epic" in order to compete with the likes of Morrowind and Oblivion. Spoiler alert: they failed miserably.

Gothic 3 is a classic case of a game being ruined by ambition, of a developer trying to reach beyond their own means and biting off more than they could chew. The game, besides being unfinished and under-developed, was a buggy mess upon its release, and it took years of fan-made patches to supposedly "fix" the game and make it functional. The community patch is now almost one-third the file size of the base game, and contains numerous bug fixes and stability tweaks, and also attempts to completely redesign and rebalance the combat system. I played the game at launch (late 2006) before the community patch even existed, and again a few years later with it, and while the patch truly does a lot to improve the game's overall playability, it doesn't (and simply cannot) fix the core gameplay design and story problems, which are the real reasons Gothic 3 sucks -- not just the bugs and broken combat that the patch supposedly fixes.

Normally I'd be content to dismiss the issue and move on with life (the game's over a decade old, after all, and I haven't even played it in about eight or nine years), but I find it surprising that, even today, people still speak highly of Gothic 3. With the recent release of Elex, newcomers to Piranha Bytes games frequently ask about their previous games and which ones are worth playing, and people readily leap to defend (or even recommend) Gothic 3, usually with the caveat that you need to play with the community patch. That's sound advice, of course, but I just can't justify recommending Gothic 3 to anyone because of how bad of a Gothic game it is, and how mediocre it is, just as a game in general. So in this article I'll be explaining my opinion on Gothic 3 and why I think it sucks.

My Personal Ranking of the Soulsborne Games

Dark Souls has been one of the most culturally significant video game series over the last decade, spawning a new sub-genre of games like it and basically setting a new standard of comparison for melee combat, level design, and difficulty. The series has been so popular that it really needs no introduction -- if you haven't heard of Dark Souls by now then you've been living under a rock, and even if you've never played any of them you surely know what kind of games they are. I began playing the series with the original Demon's Souls and have kept up with every release since, though it took me a while to get around to Bloodborne and I still haven't played Sekiro, although from what I understand Sekiro is more an evolution of Tenchu than Dark Souls, so it maybe doesn't fully belong in the "Soulsborne" category of games. With each release of a new Soulsborne game I usually find myself having mixed opinions -- while usually enjoying each one, there's usually some aspect that leaves me a little unsatisfied or subtly disappointed. So I thought it would be fun to review all five games against one another, comparing their relative strengths and weaknesses while attempting to rank them in terms of my personal favorites.

When brainstorming this list and trying to figure out how I'd actually order them, I went back and replayed large chunks of each game, just to refresh my memory, and so I decided to base these rankings on a combination of how much I remember enjoying each game the first time I played it, how much I enjoyed replaying it, and finally how well it compares to the other games in the series mechanically. So in other words, this is not a purely objective ranking of how good the games are technically, since I'm putting a lot of weight in my own subjective feelings in addition to their more technical design elements. If it were purely objective, then believe me they would be in a very different order. All of which is to say that this is my personal opinion, so don't get offended if I don't have the exact same feelings as you do.

Bloodborne Review: Interesting, but Ultimately Disappointing

Dark Souls has been one of the most influential video games over the last decade, with its unique gameplay formula and entire presentation becoming a standard of comparison whenever people talk about melee combat, level design, and difficulty in other video games. The Souls series has been such a cultural phenomenon that it's essentially become its own sub-genre of games, with the "Souls-like" term catching on as a way to describe other, similar types of games who've taken clear inspiration from Dark Souls. In 2015, between the release of Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3, developer From Software released Bloodborne, a main-entry "Souls-like" (or Soulsborne) game, which is basically just a spin-off from Dark Souls, taking the core gameplay concepts and mechanics from Dark Souls and giving them a complete make-over with a whole new setting and a bunch of mechanical tweaks on the familiar formula.

Speaking as someone who's played all four of the Souls games in order, starting with the original Demon's Souls, Bloodborne breathes a lot of new life into a gameplay formula that's become a little too tired and repetitive over the years, but ultimately doesn't set itself apart from the Souls series as much as I would have liked it to. In practice, my experience playing Bloodborne started with excited optimism as I relished the positive effect many of its changes had on the core gameplay formula, until about halfway through when I started to feel like I was just playing Yet Another Version of the exact same game I've already played four times previously over the last decade -- this now being the fifth. And the more I played, the more I started to feel subtly disappointed and underwhelmed by some of the game's other design elements, and by the missed opportunities to do something more with the potential that a spin-off game could have.

Gothic 1+2: Masterpieces in Immersive Design

Gothic 1 and 2 are some of the best open-world action-adventure-RPGs of all time, and part of the reason why is their uniquely immersive gameplay designs. Developed by the small German studio Piranha Bytes and released in 2000 and 2002 in their native Germany, Gothic 1 and 2 were truly ahead of their time; while not the first to implement scripted NPC scheduling and reactions, they were already doing so years before Bethesda supposedly pioneered that concept with Oblivion, while some of their other design elements like in-world skill trainers and the process of forging weapons aren't really seen in other games, even to this day with almost two decades of industry advancements since the original Gothic. Some of their design elements may be a little quaint or antiquated at this point, but for the most part the immersive design of Gothic 1 and 2 is timelessly brilliant and contributes to a feeling of atmospheric immersion that often isn't found in other games.

Gothic 1 vs Gothic 2 - Which is Better?

Gothic 1 and 2 are some of my favorite games of all time, being some of the most deeply satisfying and immersive action-adventure-RPGs that I've ever played. While most people in the early 2000s were raving about how great Morrowind was, I was busy playing Gothic, and my experience with those games fundamentally altered my ability to appreciate other, similar types of games because the early Gothic games were truly ahead of their time and did some really impressive things that other developers weren't doing at the time, and still aren't doing to this day. I sometimes struggle, however, to decide which of the two Gothic games I like better. With Gothic 2 being a direct sequel to the first game, directly continuing the story with many of the exact same characters in the exact same world, and being built on the exact same game engine, they're about as similar as two games in a series can be, and so I often like to think of them as essentially one game broken into two parts. At the end of the day, however, they are separate games with some key differences, so I thought I'd take some time to review the two games against one another and discuss the relative pro's and con's of each game.