toxicitizen

Yeah, I've been wanting to play it for a while since it seems like something I'd really enjoy. It's one of those games that I fully expect I'll be kicking myself for not playing sooner.

Super Mario Odyssey At least, I consider it beaten. I rolled credits about a week ago and then I kept playing until the Odyssey stopped telling me it needed more moons to unlock new destinations. I did the final gauntlet on Darker Side and everything. I'll probably keep playing here and there to get all the moons but I think I'm done playing it as my main game for now. The game didn't make a great first impression, especially coming right from 3D World which is more of a pure platformer. The first few worlds in Odyssey were way too easy and boring. But as I kept playing I saw what the game was going for and started appreciating it for what it was. Especially as the difficulty ramped up to at least a level that wasn't completely braindead. I was shocked by how short the story mode is, though. My profile said I had played "10 hours or more" at that point but it honestly felt more like 6 hours to me. It's been over 20 years but I feel like 64 and Sunshine took me way longer to beat back in the day. As an aside, the playtime log on the Switch kinda sucks, uh? What happened to the super detailed activity log from the 3DS?! Anyway, yeah this game was a ton of fun. I think I enjoyed 3D World more overall but Odyssey was just different enough that playing it back-to-back with 3D World wasn't an issue. Metroid: Zero Mission Holy crap, why did I wait so long to play this game?! I guess it being a remake of the original NES Metroid made me lowkey expect a frustrating experience but this was anything but. It was like playing a mini-version of Super Metroid and it ruled. I especially loved how the game gives you a vague destination to reach without telling you outright how to get there. It doesn't ruin the feeling of exploring an alien world but it also keeps you from needlessly wasting your time looking in all the wrong places. Also, I was surprised by the last section of the game. Somehow in all these years, I had never been spoiled on the fact that this version added an extra zone. At first I thought it was pretty cool but this zone can be kinda frustrating. At one point near the very end I actually thought I got soft-locked because no matter where I went, I kept running into a roadblock but I eventually found a hidden room with the power bombs I was missing and was able to finish the game. Also, not exactly platform-accurate but playing it on the SNES controller was neat. I'm definitely looking forward to playing more classics with the retro controllers.

I'm still very much in the honeymoon phase with my Switch 2, so idk why I spent so much in the Steam sale nor when I'll get around to playing any of these but here's what I got: Best part is I just know I'll blink a couple times and the Atelier series will have somehow released another half dozen games before I manage to play a single one of these.

Donkey Kong Country Returns HD Holy shit, I figured this one would be solid but I wasn't prepared for how much I was going to love it. I've always enjoyed Mario games but the DKC trilogy is the one that I played the shit out of as a kid. So when I first started this game and that familiar music started playing, the nostalgia hit me pretty hard. This game does a fantastic job of feeling and playing exactly how I remember the DKC games. Except for one thing. Maybe this is just another sign that I'm becoming an old man but I found this game challenging as fuck. It was always fun and rarely got frustrating but I don't remember the SNES trilogy being this hard. A part of me really wants to keep playing and go for 101% completion or however much it is this time but I've got way too many games to play lol. Maybe I'll come back to it at some point. I'm also really looking forward to trying out Tropical Freeze as that seems to be the one everyone is constantly giving high praise to. I'm not sure what to expect as DKCR already made such a strong impression (and I kinda want to say is now in my top favorite games of all-time), so I don't want to set my expectations too high for the sequel. Anyway, the last couple weeks have been pretty great. Being able to binge 3D World and this (and put close to 50 hours into Breath of the Wild) was a real treat. I was already planning to take some time off from work in the early summer but timing it with the Switch 2 release was the best move I could've made. Getting back to work on Monday, though, so I won't be able to keep going through these games as quickly anymore.

One of the things that made me want a Switch was how all the classic titles are now part of NSO instead of having to purchase them individually. Having access to all these classic titles at all times means I can go through some series I've barely touched before. I'll probably do Kirby at some point but the main one I'm looking forward to doing is Metroid before playing Metroid Dread. Excluding the Prime games, I should be able to play everything except Other M, which it doesn't sound like I'll be missing much. Anyway, the point is I decided I didn't wanna do the Game Boy version of Metroid 2, so I hunted down a copy of the 3DS remake on ebay. And while we're on the subject of classic games available on NSO. I simply couldn't resist the nostalgia of playing these games with their original controllers, so... I'll probably get the NES ones as well at some point to complete the set but those are actually Joy-Cons, so I'll need a charging stand or something to actually be able to use them.

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury I've been wanting to play this one for over a decade at this point, since first hearing all the praise it got when it initially came out on Wii U. At the time, I only had a 3DS so I settled for playing 3D Land instead. This and other ports from previous Nintendo consoles were a big part of what finally made the Switch so appealing to me. I've been wanting to buy one for at least a couple years but had been holding off because it always seemed like the successor was right around the corner. Anyway, 3D World was about as great as I expected it to be. I love how it feels like an evolution of the old side-scrolling games. On the 3DS version, I had done basically everything including replaying all the levels as Luigi once I unlocked him but this time I'm drawing the line there. I beat the game, then beat the post-game worlds and collected all the green stars and all but 5 of the stamps. The last 5 stamps require replaying all the levels as the other characters and there's an extra 4 characters this time. Maybe I'll come back and do it at some point but right now I have other games to play. Bowser's Fury was a neat little expansion. It's kinda cool how they managed to build a mini open-world Mario game from the building blocks of 3D World, which was very linear. It did feel kinda limited by it but it was still a ton of fun. I basically played through the entire thing in one sitting. I got the first 50 Cat Shines and rolled credits, then took a short break and came right back to get the other 50. I was under the impression that there would be a secret ending after getting all 100 but as far as I could tell it was the same. Bowser just had different hair during the fight... But yeah, not a bad way to spend an evening. And it definitely whet my appetite for a proper 3D Mario game, so I'll probably be playing Odyssey sometime soon.

I call it my "launch backlog".

Getting the Switch 1 version and paying for the upgrade is going to cost about the same so I decided to just go for the Switch 2 version. Also, I guess I never posted all the Switch 1 games I bought in the lead-up to the Switch 2's release. Not gonna get individual pics because there's too many of them but here's a pic of the actual stack: Why, yes, I did go overboard... Oh and I just got a copy of Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity from ebay. I'm holding off on Super Mario Wonder and a few more in case they get Switch 2 versions in the near future but at this point there's only a few more first-party games I'm interested in.

When people asked for Marvel 4, I don't think anyone meant a Marvel-only 4v4 fighter by Arc System Works but you know what? I'll take it. Seriously, this looks so freaking good!

Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny This one is supposed to be the fan favorite but I think I actually liked the first one better. Onimusha 2 is longer, bigger, and more ambitious for sure. Especially in its storytelling. It's probably a better game for it overall but I just really liked how short and sweet the first one was. The story is very minimalistic and it has that Spencer Mansion kind of layout where you're running around the same area for the entire game, going back and forth as you unlock new sections. Onimusha 2 is more linear in that sense: you're going through a sequence of mostly linear areas and while you do revisit some (and even revisit some sections from the first game, which I thought was pretty cool), most of them are a one and done kinda deal. It also kinda tones down the horror more than I would've liked. Hell, horror isn't even the right term. It's really more of a spooky atmosphere, which is something I always appreciate. So seeing even that getting toned down was disappointing. Onimusha 1 is very much Feudal Japan Resident Evil but this one feels way closer to just being a sword action game with some demonic stuff in it. At that point, it's basically Devil May Cry without the stylish combat. It also has a bigger focus on story but it has the story of a Japanese action game from 2002, so... yeah... One thing Oni 2 has going for it is a companion system where you can give gifts to some characters and it affects which story route you end up on. So some sections will play out differently depending on which character you have the best relationship with. I think the sections where these companions are playable will vary as well because I only played as one side-character in my playthrough in that one area but other areas had some chests that the protagonist couldn't open. So I'll definitely be doing more runs to see what else can happen. So yeah, it didn't blow me away as much as the original did but it did surprise me a little bit. I really hope they won't wait another 6 years to remaster Onimusha 3. We're halfway there at this point, two games done out of four. Might as well commit. Unless the new Onimusha is an early 2026 release, there should be plenty of time to remaster Onimusha 3 before it comes out. Jean Reno is down, so that's not an issue! After that they can remaster Dawn of Dreams whenever but imho they really need to get Oni 3 out before the new game.

Onimusha Warlords With the remaster of Onimusha 2 finally coming out this week, I figured I'd give the original a replay since it's really short. I was a little worried that it wouldn't be as good as I remembered but I realized that was dumb pretty much as soon as I started the game. This is a really fun take on the classic RE style of gameplay. It has a few flaws but overall it's still very enjoyable. I'm not sure why I was worried in the first place because I played it for the first time in 2019 when the remaster came out. So, it was already as dated as it's going to get then lol. At the time, I was super bummed out that they didn't seem like they were going to remaster the sequels, so I'm really excited to finally play the second game. Hopefully they'll keep the momentum going this time and will at least remaster Onimusha 3 as well before the new one comes out next year.

Yeah, the DeathAdder felt great at first but it went to shit so quickly that it made me dismiss Razer as worthless junk. The only piece of Razer hardware I've bought since was my Kitsune over a year ago. I don't know if their build quality in general has improved since my DeathAdder but the Kitsune at least seems like quality. I haven't had any issues with it. Although at that price, it better be fucking good lol. My current build is like 90% Corsair and I've beeb pretty happy with it. The mouse I just replaced was also a Corsair but tbh I'm pretty sure a deep cleaning around the wheel with compressed air would've solved the issue. But I already wanted to change it, so it just gave me the excuse I needed.

I've been wanting to switch to a wireless mouse for some time now and my previous one was starting to drive me nuts so I decided now was the time. I used to think my old Razer DeathAdder that started randomly double clicking or not clicking at all was the most annoying thing a mouse could do, but I stand corrected. A mouse that fights you every time you try to use the scroll wheel is much worse! Scrolling down only for the screen to end up going up instead is absolute maddening. Cleaning around the wheel helped a little for a while but the problem would just come back, so I decided to replace it. Loving this one so far, although it's gonna take some getting used to because it's been a while since I've used a mouse this light. My previous mice sometimes even came with extra weights you could slot into the bottom to make them heavier lol.

Got basically everything done in my first playthrough. Just needed to beat the game on Nightmare difficulty to get the 100%. I usually save these for later, I'm planning on going through the entire series on Nightmare at some point. But they already announced a rerelease of this game, so I figured I'd just get this version over with immediately, so that when I feel like replaying it I can just focus on the rerelease. Anyway, Nightmare was easier than I expected. It helps that you can do it on NG+ and transfer a lot of stuff over. I was able to rush through the entire game in about 10 hours, only doing a few side-quests so that I could get fully upgraded endgame gear. I expected the final boss to be the only part that gave me trouble but it turns out my strategy going in was the correct one. I almost got him on my first try and just needed to make a few adjustments to succeed.

Ys X Nordics I have also beaten an Ys game this week. I actually started it last Fall when it launched but I fell off of it after 20 hours or so. In part because Indiana Jones came out and I was super excited for that but I also wasn't really feeling Ys X at the time. That was weird since I usually devour these games. At the time I couldn't really point to any single thing about it that I didn't like (and I still can't) but now that I'm done with it, I kinda see what the problem was. Basically, this is pirates/vikings Ys. The entire game has a Norse theme and you sail around on a ship and spend your time exploring islands and fighting undead monsters. The problem is that, early on in the game, the ship is insanely slow. It gets better over time as you upgrade it but it's fairly tedious early on. I'm speedrunning through new game plus on Nightmare difficulty right now and even though I was skipping all the cutscenes and ignoring most of the optional stuff, the first few chapters were still excruciatingly slow because of it. That alone isn't a huge problem but the best part of Ys has always been running around and killing monsters while listening to that sweet soundtrack. So the ship exploration fucks with the pacing, and since you're exploring islands that tend to be fairly small, you only do the running around killing monsters part for short periods of time. The game also keeps introducing new gameplay elements up until about the halfway point. So when you take all of these things into account, the pacing gets absolutely obliterated in the first half of the game. It gets way better in the second half as you upgrade your ship to be faster, the dungeons become longer and the game is done throwing tutorials at you. Ironically enough, I had stopped basically right when the game was about to get better. Everything I've been playing over the past week has basically been what I want out of an Ys game. It really was just the first half that had pacing issues. So yeah, overall this is a solid Ys game. It's biggest strength is the new combat system. It drops the party-based combat of the last few games in favor of a dual-protagonist setup. The focus is on rapidly switching between them while chaining up skill attacks and precisely timing your blocks to build up a meter that allows you to perform big team-up attacks. I hope they'll keep this system for the next few games because I absolutely loved it and I want to see them iterate on it like they did with the party system. Other than that, it's Ys. If you love the series, you'll love this one.

Finally got my order confirmation from Best Buy, so looks like I should be good. I also got an invite to pre-order from Amazon this morning, so I got another order from them as a backup. Along with a few other things:

Was able to get an order in with Best Buy! Had to go through their queue system like 3 times but I finally managed. Hopefully it doesn't end up getting cancelled... Also those game prices are insane. According to Amazon CA, the Switch 2 editions of BotW and TotK are 100$ and 115$ respectively. Fuck that, I bought the Switch 1 versions and I'll get the free upgrades through NSO. Between the Mario Kart Bundle and getting the Switch 1 versions of both Zelda games, that's already 100$ saved on games.

I mean, do you really need a safety that you're only ever going to use once (to turn it off) and then never again?

Assassin's Creed Shadows It's been a while since I played one of these at launch. Overall, I really enjoyed it and I think it might be my favorite AC game so far (keep in mind, my only modern point of reference is AC Origins since that's the last and most recent one I played) but ultimately it's still Assassin's Creed. The setting is great, the visuals are gorgeous and the parkour is the most polished it's ever been but that AC jank still shows up every now and then. The "modern day" story is limited to text entries in the new AC launcher and a handful of glitchy sequences in the actual game. The actual story starts out really strong but then it sort of just goes away. After a brief intro with Yasuke, you play as Naoe only for the entirety of Act 1. That includes an opening sequence that features some Tarantino-ass musical choices. It's almost like Prey 2017 where the opening is so freaking awesome that the rest of the game struggles to reach the same height again. Basically it sets up Naoe's motivation and the group of enemies she'll be hunting down for the rest of the game. If you're like me and do a lot of side-content alongside the main story, it might take you close to 20 hours before you unlock Yasuke. When you do, you'll get a bunch of flashback missions giving you more of his backstory, including one that's basically a 30mins short film with the occasional interaction and that might actually be my favorite part of the entire story. Naoe's story is perfectly fine (and she also gets some flashback to flesh out what happened to her prior to the destruction of Iga at the beginning of the game) but Yasuke's story is just so freaking good. Once that's out of the way, though, you're mostly just going after your targets one by one. Which is fine, don't get me wrong. I'm all for the lack of padding. It was just weird to see the story almost taking a backseat after such a strong opening. After a while you go through your entire list of targets and then some more personal quests are introduced for Naoe and Yasuke that pick up where some of their respective side-quests left off. And then the game just sort of ends. Like, when the credits rolled I literally said "What the fuck?!" because it was so out of nowhere. I'd literally just finished a fairly pivotal boss fight/scene that seemed to be setting up the next bit of story and then it just... ends. I have to assume it's setup for the DLC because if not then I don't know what the hell that was. The story isn't the only thing that's uneven. Both Naoe and Yasuke are incredibly fun to play as. Naoe has all the cool parkour moves and tools to go stealthy and Yasuke is for when you just wanna cut down everything in your path and burst through big wooden gates like the Kool-Aid man. The problem is that stealth as Yasuke is treated like a joke. When he does a leap of faith, he immediately bounces out of hiding and the pile of hay is destroyed. When you do a "stealth kill" with him, he screams as he impales the enemy and lifts their corpse over his head. He's really fun in combat but since this is supposed to be a stealth game you end up favoring Naoe most of the time. The game is at its best during main story missions where you alternate between both of them in scripted missions: e.g. sneak in as Naoe to open the gate, Yasuke fights his way in to create a distraction, switch back to Naoe to use the commotion to get to the target and take them out. Having some agency over that kind of stuff to come up with your own strategies could've been great but as it is you can only swap between them either at pre-determined moments during story missions or from the menu when outside of combat/hostile areas. One thing I really liked is that there is no quest log like in AC Origins because, well, there are no boring quests like that game had. When you get a quest from an NPC, 90% of the time it'll just add a circle on your objective board and on that circle will be targets for you to take out. Imagine that, most of the gameplay (both main and side-content) has you just getting lists of targets to... assassinate. In an Assassin's Creed game! I'm surprised it only took them like a dozen games over almost 20 years to figure that one out! (I have no idea if Odyssey and Valhalla were also like this lol all I know is Origins sure as shit wasn't...) So yeah, overall I thought it was very enjoyable but if you don't like Assassin's Creed (or care for the Japanese setting) then YMMV. Oh and another thing I appreciate is that the achievements list doesn't require an insane amount of completion or grinding: I was able to get all the missing ones fairly quickly after finishing the main story. The only annoying thing was some stuff required specific time of day/seasons to be doable. If I'd known earlier I could've planned around it, but since I didn't I ended up having to sit around waiting for in-game time to pass because for some baffling reason they removed the option to "medidate" to fast-forward the day/night cycle. Even though there's literally a meditation mini-game for Naoe... There's technically a mechanic to skip ahead to the next season but it's kinda unintuitive and useless. Oh and another thing they removed for no reason whatsoever is the ability to sell more than one piece of gear at a time. This was a solved problem all the way back in AC Origins so idk what the fuck happened there. They patched it back in like a couple weeks ago but I guess it was buggy cause they already patched it out.

The Last of Us Part II Remastered I finished it last night. It's good to have finally played it as I feel like I've been waiting for it for an eternity. I had a feeling the game would make me feel like everyone else is smoking crack and that turned out to only be partially the case. On the one hand, I think it's a massive improvement over the original and I found the gameplay in particular to be incredible. On the other hand, I understand why the game was so divisive based on the story alone. I imagine your typical gamer isn't used to narratives with characters this flawed and nuanced. I also don't think the execution was necessarily the best it could have been. Without getting into spoilers, I felt like the inciting incident was handled about as well as it could've been and when Ellie decides to go after Abby and her friends I was 100% on board with her. The first half of the game was basically what I expected: more TLoU but better. The second half of the game is where I think some issues crop up. Most importantly, I fucking hated Abby so at first I wasn't crazy about having to play as her. When the game finally revealed who she is and what set her on that path, I was like: The game did a good enough job of giving her character nuance up to a point. After a few hours of playing as her, I stopped hating her (it helped that her gameplay was really good) but, despite the writers' efforts, I never stopped seeing her as the villain of the story. So when you catch up to the present after her part of the story, I didn't really like having to continue playing as her during The game also keeps banging on that "I could've killed you but I didn't" drum as if to highlight that I also found the ending unsatisfying but that was clearly by design, so I'm not holding that against the game. At that point, I was kinda shocked the game was still going, tbh. When I got through all of those cutscenes after the theater and then there was more gameplay I couldn't help but ask "why is this game still going? lol". I don't mean that as a criticism, though. I'm honestly amazed that a linear, single-player game this meaty was made. Especially one that's arguably mostly a stealth game. I liked that. I liked that a lot. So yeah, basically all of my criticism is about the story. I thought the gameplay was absolutely fantastic. Why did no one tell me this game was influenced by MGS3?! At least, that was the first thing that came to mind the first time I found myself crawling in tall grass to sneak around and pick enemies off one by one. Ethan mentioned not liking the encounter design a while back and I couldn't disagree more. I had a blast crawling around in the grass, taking enemies out with the bow and leaving mines in choke points only to toss a bottle to draw enemies right to it. The resource management also added another great layer to it. I would crawl into a hiding spot and consider whether to craft more arrows vs breaking stealth and using my limited ammo. I can't remember the last time I found a game's combat this engaging and rewarding. Maybe playing on hard mode had something to do with it. There's actually an achievement for beating Grounded mode this time and I'm tempted to jump right into it but I'd like to finish AC Shadows within a reasonable time frame, so I think I'll go back to continue that for now. Maybe I'll use this as an excuse to do a Grounded run of both games at some point down the line. And with that, I think that was the last big Sony game I was really anticipating. I can't really think of anything else that I would be nearly as excited to play on PC. Well, there is one game that starts with B and ends with "loodborne" but Sony seems adamant on pretending it doesn't exist, so I gave up on that one a while ago. If it does get an eventual rerelease, I expect it to be in a form no one asked for: i.e. a needless remake by a different dev that completely butchers the art direction.

Yeah, I'll be on the lookout for pre-orders this week. I'm not in the US, so hopefully I'll have an easier time securing one.

I guess I'm getting a Switch 2! Having skipped the first system means I'll have a hell of a launch line-up available to me, so I figured I'd start building the library early. I'll probably grab a few more between now and June 5th.

I've been hoping for more remasters of their PS2 titles from Atlus, so I'm there day one for this. I've been anticipating the announcement ever since there was that achievement "leak" on SteamDB. Although the leak suggested both games were coming, so hopefully that means they're already working on the second one in parallel. It seems to be a much more high effort remaster than SMT III got, too. They're reworking a lot of the gameplay to be more like the sequel, which apparently had a ton of improvements, to the point where it's arguably more remake than remaster. Can't wait!

It was kind of an impulse purchase. I'd typically want to catch up first but I'm also way more interested in this one than the others. Since it sounds like the modern day narrative is very minimal in this one (and from what I understand, not even included in the actual game), I figured I'm safe to just play this one now and go back to the others later.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Finished it about a week ago. Overall, my thoughts are basically the same as with Remake. It's very good and I thoroughly enjoyed every second I spent with it, however it feels like a bloated mess. Rebirth in particular feels like it doesn't really have a plot of its own. You've got the party deciding to chase after Sephiroth at the end of Remake and in this one they mostly just do that. Like, I would struggle to explain the plot of just Rebirth to someone that hasn't played the original or even just Remake. It doesn't really stand on its own in any way. Almost like the story of FFVII doesn't really suit itself to being expanded to a full trilogy! Like, don't get me wrong, a ton of stuff happens throughout the game but none of it really drives any kind of overall narrative forward. Then again, who is going to play this without being already super invested in FFVII? So it's probably not that big of a deal. And I don't want to sound overly negative, either. After all, this is a game that took me 120 hours to get through without ever overstaying its welcome. I completed all the side-content I could find in every single region before moving on and I never got sick of it. The first couple weeks, I couldn't wait to finish work so that I could fire up the game and lose myself in it until it was time for bed. It's been a while since a game took over my life like this. I think the last one would have been Witcher 3 when I finally got around to it a few years ago. The only time the game lost any kind of Steam was when I got to one of the last chapters and unlocked a bunch of end-game side-quests. I gave them a shot but most of them were such an insane difficulty spike that I figured they were meant for post-game/hard mode. So after taking a few days off out of frustrating, I just moved on with the main story and finished the game because I only had a week left until Monster Hunter Wilds. I think I'll have to replay the original before part 3 because I'm kinda baffled that two games into this trilogy we're still only at the end of disc 1. Maybe less happens in discs 2w and 3 than I remember? I thought disc 1 ended when you left Midgar until I looked it up, so it's not like I have super clear memories of the original. Either that or part 3 is going to be absolutely massive. And I'm having a hard time picturing how they could possibly top Rebirth in that regard. Monster Hunter Wilds I mean, technically I did roll credits on the main story but unlike Monster Hunter World, the story in Wilds only covers Low Rank. So basically I only finished the tutorial and the real game begins now. And thank god because while I can appreciate what they were going for, some aspects of the story mode were kind of a misfire. What made me fall in love with World was the gameplay loop: going into a zone, tracking the monster, finding it and getting into a long fight to finally take it down. But the story mode in Wilds kinda throws all of that out the window. All of those elements are still there but when doing main story quests, you constantly get stuck into "slow walking" sections where you mount auto-rides you to the next objective while characters talk. It got old pretty fast. And after a while it got kinda comical how you kept randomly running into monsters on your way to various places. Like, most of the main story quests go down like this : get sent to investigate location XYZ -> ride 2 mins to get there -> oh no big monster in the way! -> kill it -> teleport back to camp -> mission accomplished! Some of the set pieces are really cool and there's some pretty awesome cutscenes in there but I feel like there's some improvements to be made in how they tackle story in future Monster Hunter games. Meanwhile, in High Rank/post-game, my current main objective is : "investigate stuff and level up your hunter rank" and this is the most excited I've been to play since the game came out. Especially since most of the low rank monsters were complete pushovers. Like, at one point you fight a monster that's obviously a pretty big deal and very important story-wise. But I only figured out that it was actually the final boss when it turned out to take much longer to kill than everything else up to that point. And sure enough, credits rolled after that fight. But calling HR the post-game isn't really accurate. I beat the story mode but I haven't beaten the game. Like, obviously most of HR is going to be stronger versions of monsters you've already fought but the very first one you fight is actually brand new at that point. So the game definitely still has a few surprises in store and there's still some story content here and there, it's just less of a focus. But I can already tell that going forward it's going to be closer to the World gameplay loop I loved so much. And the additional freedom given to you in HR means that the seamless world gets to shine even more. Like, the biggest selling point of the game is that the various zones are now all connected into one seamless world (although it is not an open-world game by any stretch of the imagination) but the story mode just kinda railroads you through it without letting you explore much. I really don't get what they were thinking lol. So yeah, the game itself is pretty great but the story campaign is more uneven. If you're considering this as your first MonHun game, you might be better off grabbing World or Rise for cheaper to get a better sense of the core gameplay loop. Especially if you're on PC since that version of Wilds kinda runs like ass. Although weirdly enough, that hasn't been a problem for me ever since I switched from DLSS to FSR3. I even get to turn on frame gen. It's baffling to me that I get better results with AMD tech on my Nvidia card but it made the game go from sub-60fps to ~100fps. There's some visible ghosting at times but I'll gladly take that in exchange for a smoother experience.