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1. Final Fantasy VII Remake 2. Death Stranding It's kind of crazy to think that these are the only two games I've beaten so far this year, but I guess I've been playing a decent amount of unbeatable games or ones that are online-focused. But I finally beat this game. Got the Platinum trophy, too, which I'm pretty sure is only my second one. It was actually fairly easy if you've already put all the time into it I did. Just tedious. Overall, I kinda compare this game to Final Fantasy XV. There's a great engine and gameplay style being employed, with a big open world that you can take a lot of time to explore. But there's not really enough in the world to make it consistently interesting. The difference for me is FFXV still made the open-world part feel satisfying and rewarding to explore. Death Stranding's world...kinda doesn't. Likes are useless when not for the sake of leveling a location up, so the lost cargo becomes an endeavor of diminishing returns in most cases. The memory chips and the lore is cool, but there's only so many mountain peaks and interesting areas where you'll find something like that to really make it worth your while. And I hate hate hate how cut and paste a lot of the game is. The distribution centers all reuse the same models and animations, with the same cookie-cutter dialogue templates, and it contributes to the "low reward" factor. I also feel like the stealth was only really engaging the first few times. After that it just became tedious. The majority of the boss fights offering little in the way of variance didn't help either. All of this became more painfully obvious when I came back to it after putting it down for a couple months. Before, I saw the shortcomings and was still pretty into connecting all the centers and 100%-ing everything. But it was almost enough to make me give up on the game when I came back. That said, I decided to plow through the story and...I ended up getting hooked again. The story was, surprisingly, pretty tame and coherent compared to the MGS storyline. Stuff that's still overly complex, but actually makes a good amount of sense and is told pretty straight-forward once the info is out there. You do need some of the interviews and reports to put together the whole story, but even without that stuff, the event of the last few chapters actually come together pretty clearly, even if you don't remember every detail from earlier parts. There weren't a lot of twists that you couldn't see coming in some way, but the big one definitely made me drop my jaw. While I feel the story wasn't spliced into the gameplay enough to really make you grow with the characters, the final moments end up being pretty emotional. Death Stranding isn't perfect, and definitely not for everybody. I think what Kojima has is an excellent engine and a base idea that could be expanded into future entries that really take advantage of the possibilities. The game feels a bit rushed as far as the actual content that fills up your game clock. But with a few more story moments mixed into the entire game and a world that's actually interesting and rewarding to explore, I could see myself falling in love.

Watched old guard last night. I haven't watched a movie in a while. I liked it.

This "PPV" is gonna blow 1. McIntyre 2. Asuka 3. Bayley 4. Wyatt 5. Rollins 6. Crews 7. New Day B1. Ladder Match B2. Nakamura B3. Yeah B4. No B5. No

3. Final Fantasy V Did the four job fiesta for the 2nd year in a row, but actually finished it this time.

Done! First time beating FFV and FJF. Exdeath wasn't bad. Kept Shell and Blink on all characters, spammed Quick and Fire 3 Spells (Meteor on first form) and Faris(Thief) was on item duty mainly Elixirs to the mages. Although to be fair I did turn my Battle speed down to 4.

Fire Force s2e3

Will be there for the Londish meeting, but not the American one