Gàlaron's Gaming

And I also did graphs for the last two rows (left is sum with multipliers, and right is average per pokémon)

I also did a table with all the values to see which one is the generation I prefer based on its Pokémon:

Simply doing the total sum with the multipliers, the ranking is:
1) Gen 8
2) Gen 3
3) Gen 7
4) Gen 6
With Gen 5 being the last.

While keeping into consideration also the amount of pokémon added in that generation (so, the average value per pokémon), the ranking is:
1) Gen 7
2) Gen 6
3) Gen 8
4) Gen 3
With Gen 5 still being last.

It's interesting to notice how Gen 8 and 7 switched places (thus fighting for the first/second place overall) and the same happened with Gen 3 and Gen 6 (thus battling for third/fourth place). And on the latter case, Gen 6 contains the remakes of Gen 3 (and therefore, its mega evolutions).

Last consideration: I don't particularly care for the games of Gen 7, thus making it the Gen with the highest gap between my interest for the games and that for the Pokémon that it introduced.

I made a person tierlist of all the Pokémon

— #Review #SteamReview #InDepthReview —

Furi
Review: Positive

An hardcore action game which is almost perfect in its execution. And I don't use the term "perfect" light-heartedly.

The title is a boss-rush with some walking sequences between each fight to showcase the story. The combat system is based on only five inputs: the left stick to move, the right stick to shoot in that direction, a button to attack melee, a button to parry, and a button to dodge. That's it. Quick to learn, quick to apply.
Yet, every boss has its unique twists, and the whole structure of the fights is made so that although they are hard, it is possible to learn each on of them during the fight itself without getting constant "Game Overs". This is due to a combination of three mechanics: healing, "resurrection", and incremental phases.
The first one is tied to the fact that parrying attacks restores a bit of health, and that multiple bosses have projectiles that can be destroyed to get some healing.
The second one is the most interesting one and that really improves the whole structure of the game: both the player and the boss have a set amount of lives, with the player having three and each boss having a different amount — each of which will represent a phase of the fight. When the player loses one, they will resurrect and the current phase of the boss will start over, and if the bosses loses one, then the player will restore one of theirs (and fully restore their HPs). This means that for every phase of a boss, there is one free "death" that is pretty inconsequential, and only three losses in the same phase (or two in a previous one plus two in the current one) will lead to a game over.
The third one is that the phases of each boss are quite incremental, generally getting from easier to harder adding and mixing their previously shown mechanics. So, every battle is a pretty linear learning process — also thanks to the facts that all the attacks are telegraphed in a good visual and auditory way and that it is often possible to hit back the boss even if you fail to parry/dodge their attack (which doesn't allow to brute-force bossfights, but it helps in keeping the momentum and in building up damage throughout the phase).

The whole structure of the game is based on learning through a linear process of fighting, and not through trial and error on multiple iterations of the same battle. And once the game has been completed, an higher difficulty is unlocked that will not only increase the damage of enemies but most importantly give them an array of new phases and moves. And if you like a good challenge and go through that as well, you can then move on to master each fight (also thanks to the "Practice mode") and join the speedrun leaderboard. And if you want yet another twist, you can buy the DLC of the "Onnamusha" to test your skills with a different playable character.

And if you're not one for an hardcore experience but only want to try the combat system, experience the story and see the great aesthetics, then you can play with the "Promenade" difficulty, which also allows for skipping phases, skipping bossfights, and making the player invincible.

Given all of this, why do I say "almost perfect" then? That is for multiple "minor" reasons, such as being unable to skip the slow story sections if you only want the bossfights, the fact that the invincible mode can only be used at the lowest difficulty (meaning that, given that bosses have expanded moveset at higher difficulties, you cannot used it to fully see bosses but only to burst through them), and that practice mode can be obtained for a boss only after defeating them (so if you have issues with the final phase of a fight, you always have to go through all the other phases before getting to try it again to study it).

— #Review #SteamReview #InDepthReview —

God of War (2018)
Review: Negative

In short:
It's not a bad game, but it's nowhere near to being the masterpiece a lot of people make it seem to be. Also, if you go in expecting to violently wreck gods like in the old trilogy, you're going to be disappointed.
I can see why some people might like it, but I absolutely did not (hence, the negative review)

In more details:

- Story & Characters: I really hated Kratos as a character throughout the whole game (and I can't really get his personality and behavior giving that he spent the last 40 years of his life with a wife and even in the original trilogy he was very attached to his family) and I hate how almost every problem in the game could be solve just by TALKING. And I don't mean talking about Kratos' past, as that is a plot point, but talking in general. Other than him, Atreus has two moments in which he completely changes personality without any proper build up to that. The other characters are ok, as in the story overall.

- Combat: extremely repetitive, and I felt a lot the (unexplainable) lack of aerial combat. The main issues with repetitiveness are the huge enemy reusage (even bosses, with only something like 3 of them being unique enemies) and the fact that they only have something like two attacks each (yes, even bosses). On top of that, I felt like the combat didn't have a good feedback, with the strength of Kratos not being properly felt in his attacks.

- Puzzles & Traversals: between fights you will have to either do puzzles or traversing areas. Areas traversal is basically all scripted, as there are no platforming sections or anything of the sort. As for puzzles, they are almost all reskins of the same concept: to look around in the area for something to hit.

- Side quests: there's a good amount of side quests and optional areas to explore, but after doing a few of them I couldn't be bothered to do any more as they have the same gameplay issues of the rest of the game.

- Cutscenes: multiple of them were, in my opinion, too slow. But most of all, I hated how the camera was always wobbly even when there wasn't movements going on and how a lot of fights are in cutscenes with only few and bad QTE: for instance, the first and last boss of the game have combat segments in cutscenes which are cool to see but are too long with and a few bad QTEs (and I'm not saying that QTEs in general are bad, as they can be very powerful if done properly, as the old God of Wars have shown) just for then go into a gameplay battle that is very simple — which is kind of sad to see.

— #Video #VideoITA —

La serie su Big Walk è finalmente completa!
Potete trovarla per intero qui:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWXy1xF0v4g4&si=N7mS1f2OABm4XjUk

— #Video #VideoITA —

Ed ecco il secondo episodio di completismo nonché ultimo episodio della serie su Big Walk!

https://youtu.be/Gf92LMNUt60

The last video of our run will come out soon, probably tomorrow!

— #Review #SteamReview #ShortReview —

Big Walk
Review: Positive

I hate Friendslops, but this game? This is Friends-peak.
It has lot of original puzzles — which scale based on the number of players (2, 3, or 4+) — and that can be faced in any order after the initial section, interesting mechanics, and good proximity audio. On top of all of that, the ending is absolutely incredible.

— #Video #VideoITA —

Primo episodio su due di completismo!

Ho provato a fare qualche miglioramento aggiungendo degli zoom per mettere in focus alcune cose, e aggiungendo sottotitoli per i momenti in cui non si riesce a sentire qualcosa di importante che viene detto.

https://youtu.be/zNNEnvABL7Q

One last UP to this

— #Review #SteamReview —

Devil May Cry 5
Review: Positive

The combat system is focused much more on buttons combinations rather than sequences, requiring to always take into account if R1/RB is being held down, and in which direction the stick is being held with regards to the direction in which the character is looking relative to the camera position. People say that it is great if mastered, but honestly it is a system that I really don't like and that I found to be bothersome, especially if you're only looking forward to play the 10 hours of the main story without replaying levels or engaging in challenges.
The game does have an "auto" mode for making combos, which oscillates between very good and being extremely stupid.
Anyway, each playable character has its own mechanics, and they are fun to play and really cool to see.

Outside of the gameplay, the voice acting and the facial expressions positively staggered me: they are sensational and especially the latter is among the best I've seen in video games. The graphics are also generally really good, and the OSTs are great — just like in any other Devil May Cry.

Story-wise, the summary the games gives of the previous titles is cool but kind of bad — it's been more than 15 years since I've played a Devil May Cry game and didn't remember much of the story, and going in through the DMC5 own summary of events I was extremely confused, as it omits many important elements.

Regarding the Vergil DLC, it makes him be available as a playable character for the missions, but although the missions are exactly the same (minus some cutscenes), his campaign is counted as a separate one. That means that playing the missions as him first makes no sense as you're gonna lose the story, but if you play the original story first, then you cannot play a specific mission you want as Vergil afterwards but you have to go through all the missions one by one as him.

Additional things that I want to point out are:
- Cutscenes cannot be paused, and pressing "Start" will automatically skip them without confirmation
- Sprinting and Double jump are skills that have to be unlocked
- Sprinting starts automatically after walking for a bit, but gets interrupted every time you attack or jump, which happens almost constantly during exploration due to height differences and lumps to hit in the map

After 7 years, I finally played Devil May Cry 5

God I love this kind of stupid bullshits in video games

UP for those who are willing to read a lot and give me their opinion

— #Review #SteamReview #ShortReview —

Bayonetta
Review: Positive

A game that is great in its style, animations, combat, designs, and enemy variety. An outstanding hack & slash title with beautiful over-the-top characters and cutscenes.
Truly a classic of the genre.

BUT there is a huge downside that I have to highlight: abilities/techniques that can be unlocked expending halos (the game currency) are going to change certain aspects of the combat, and can NOT be disabled or sold once acquired. Honestly, I felt like too many of them were making the gameplay worse instead of better, and made me wish I did not get them. Multiple times, unlocking abilities almost fell like increasing the difficulty of the game.

— #NEWS #Discussion —

• GGA: Going Forward •

Following the current direction of the video games industry, I have a few things that I wish to discuss regarding the Gàlaron's Game Awards (GGA).



— The road so far
The GGAs were born for two reason:
- Unsatisfaction towards official Game Awards ceremonies, such as TGA. My wish was therefore that of showcasing more lesser known games and more that made sense for their category.
- A desire to use it as an occasion for me to delve more into the field and share my discoveries and analysis.

When I started the GGAs in 2023, I wanted to consider all video games regardless of their genre, even those that I don't play — thus requiring to do a lot of research online and to ask friends to play some games in my stead. Even so, since the beginning I had to leave out certain categories, specifically: AR/VR games, Mobile-first games, and Visual Novels. The first one is due to me not possessing a VR headset (not being interested in getting one, also because I suffer from motion sickness), and to VR games being both not a prominent category and being sufficiently detached from everything else. As for the other two, it was due to the sheer amount of content released, with a lot of them being of dubious quality — therefore, keeping track and looking into all mobile-first games and VNs would be a whole work of its own.

As time passed, I had issues with PS5-exclusive titles, as I did not posses one of my own and I didn't want to get one only for those few titles every year. So, I either borrowed the console from a friend of mine, or I simply looked online as much as possible to gather information about those games.

Even so, I did not want to make PS5-exlusives ineligible. And the same goes for games which content goes against my ideals — e.g. questionable thematic or bad contexts (such as issues in the company that made them). That is because I believe that the good parts of a title — such as OSTs, for example — could still be worth of recognition. And at the same time, it was also the reason for the "Circus Award": highlighting those games even though they might appear elsewhere in the GGAs.



— Sony and console-exclusives
This year, Sony announced that their console-exclusive games would no longer be released on PC or other consoles in the future: if a game is an exclusive, it will always remain an exclusive. Then, it announced that in 2028 they would drop support of physical games (justifying it with fallacious data).
Those two things are bad on their own, but the situation is even worse when we consider also the following elements:
- Sony will remove all your account's digital possession if the account is not accessed for more than 3 years;
- Sony has removed digital content from their platforms in the past, thus lacking the users' trust that the video games they will buy will actually remain always available;
- Their next console will surely completely lack a disc-reader, therefore having no possibility whatsoever for retro-compatibility (which has always been lacking if not fully absent in previous PlayStation consoles).

All of this makes it so that PlayStation exclusive games from now on will have absolutely no way to be conserved or ""possessed"": it will be possible to buy them only through Sony itself and Sony will have the full power on whether to allow someone to play it or not in the present and in the future. And those games will all be lost if you won't keep accessing the Sony ecosystem every few years — so, forget going away from PlayStation games and return 10 years from now to play something you loved, as often happens with people going back to titles they played as children.

This is obviously extremely anti-users, and it gets even worse when you consider that all of this will also completely kill the second-hand market: games will cost a lot and you will only be able to buy them at that price. And you won't be able to re-sell them, nor to lending them to friends, even though a lot of people got into a game and/or franchise thanks to first buying it at a lower price or by borrowing it from someone.

Therefore, also considering that all I do in the video games field I do in my free time and I don't get paid for it, I have no intention of supporting Sony's path. So, I've been pondering the possibility to remove PlayStation-exclusive titles from the GGAs, even though I would like to make as many titles as possible eligible.
But such a choice would bring to another question: what about Nintendo? All of Nintendo's first-party titles have always been console-exclusive. They do support physical medias, but are infamously known for their issues with giving no options to play many older games and constantly fight against emulating them. So, if I were to make PlayStation-exclusive games ineligible for the GGA, should I do the same for all other console-exclusive (aka Nintendo) titles as well for consistency?



— Gen-AI
Video games that have had Gen-AI be used during their development, would so far fall into my category of "Circus Awards while still eligible for specific categories" — for instance, Shift Up (creator of Stellar Blade) is openly using Gen-AI in game development and therefore also for their next Stellar Blade title, but even so the OSTs will be incredible if they will be similar to those of the previous game. That would mean that if I were to make ineligible games which have been made using Gen-AI, the OSTs of Stellar Blade: Blood Rain would not appear in the OSTs Award even though they are not made with AI (implying that they would actually not be), and I can't say that I completely agree with it.

Also, making ineligible the titles which have had Gen-AI used in their development brings the question: where to draw the line? Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had some Gen-AI placeholder assets due to outsourcing, and the main company itself was not (probably, at least) fully aware of the Gen-AI usage. But most importantly, a lot of studios in the future will use Gen-AI without disclaiming it. Or, they would use it for "minor" speed up processes which are unrelated to the artistic part of development, such as writing prediction and other Gen-AI assisting tools in coding.

So, even though I'm against the usage of Gen-AI for creative purposes, I am still uncertain about how to handle Gen-AI presence in game development as far as the GGAs are concerned.



— Feedback
All of this said, I'm interesting in knowing what you all think about all of this and what are your ideas and advices on how I should handle those two topics (Sony/console-exclusives and Gen-AI) for the GGA.

— #Review #SteamReview —

The Last Winter Knight
Review: Positive

But the past does not care for what you'd like to be true.

A bittersweet, tragic, painful, and at times gruesome tale of regrets, suffering, vengeance, and deceits. Fragments of shattered lives.

You are alone. Whispers wrap around you like silk, trapping you in their threads. You are alone.
You are not alone. Voices linger. Memory coalesces. Theirs. Yours. They flicker and burn. They wither and choke.

The story follows a spirit with no memories awakening after possessing a suit of armor which feels familiar. Navigating dark halls of a castle, remembrances will return to shed light over a forgotten life. But the light might be only metaphorical, as it seems that the only things awaiting to be unveiled are shades of sorrow: sadness, fear, grief, loneliness, jealousy, and more.

I ask the spirits now: whom have I offended, what great being have I challenged, that my life's course is charted only through misery?

A visual novel with some small graphic adventure mechanics, which excels in atmosphere thanks to its poetic language, its visual arts, and its outstandingly synergetic soundtracks. Whereas the choices are not too consequential story-wise, they are capable of adding supplementary layers to the atmosphere, also due to seeing certain desirable option being fatally locked.

Death has dipped his brush and soaken his palette to present the scene before you.

The whole experience is well-paced, and it flows magnificently delivering all the needed information without breaking its mood nor losing itself in endless dialogues or descriptions.
Additionally, it has a well-made glossary for both elements that have been discovered during the story and contextual terminology (such as the name of armor parts).

As I get older, I often think about you both, Mother and Father. I think about my life, and where I want to go, and how bleak my chances are.

One thing that it might need though is some trigger warnings for those who may need them, as it touches upon some pretty dark topics, and some scenes and drawings are quite eerie and unsettling.

I hope that I can end my confession here. I hope I will not live long enough to lengthen the list of my mistakes.

— #Review #SteamReview #ShortReview —

What Remains of Edith Finch
Review: Positive

An extremely famous title, which deserves its popularity.
In this story-driven game, you will go through the deaths of the members of the Finch family during the last century, and each one will have its unique gameplay and storytelling.

I believe that the first one to be introduced is the weakest and the doesn't really shows the full potential and tone of the game. But as the journey progresses, the themes and seriousness of the tale will start to emerge.

This is a must-play for all the fans of short story-driven experiences.

— #Review #SteamReview #ShortReview —

Eternal Afternoon
Review: Positive

A memory of a childhood afternoon, which lasts only 20 minutes. Each iteration cannot go beyond that, and every time, you have to start over. But every time, you — the player — know more.
You can keep living those 20 minutes of childhood memory in the most peaceful and playful way possible, or you can start to unravel its secrets.

"Eternal Afternoon" is a simple but well-executed game, which decides not to go for a creepy and/or horror vibe like most of the games of its genre.