It's the end of the year, and I feel like I'm as grumpy as ever. I am a bit scared of my current development, especially when it comes to my current taste in media in general. Why? Because I find it harder and harder to find things which I'm not annoyed at.

Persona 4

Persona 4 is the favorite games of a close friend of mine. The reviews speak for themselves: 97% of ~56k reviews are positive on steam. Some steam-sale inevitably came around around, so I got the game to give it a try.

I started into the game with mixed feelings: I'm not too much of a fan of a lot of anime, as the ones I watched seem pretty generic, awfully written, predictable, full of tropes, unnecessary sexualization / fanservice or all of the above. But if you read reviews of such anime or look at the hype around VTubers [0], it feels like people are basically following the following infographic:

So this thing having both the "JRPG" and the "Anime"-tag left me a bit worried. But I got it for cheap, and it's 97% positive. How bad can that be? So I booted up the game...

...and dropped it an hour later.

While the game opens up later on (or so I was told), it's railroading hard in the beginning. And I get that: You probably want to introduce the gameplay, the characters and startup the story. Dialogue-heavy games / sections are certainly not everyone's favourite, but I did enjoy some telltale games, so that's not inherently an issue for me.

Problem is: If you fill the first hour with dialogue, it kind of has to be not complete dogshit. The dialogue was as cliche and generic as Anime gets, leaving you to listen to unlikable characters for an hour, whose voice acting might be appropriate, but fucking annoying to listen to. The "story" being """developed""" within that time-frame could be condensed to 10min easily, and there is basically no gameplay involved.

Could the game get way better later on? Sure. But 60 minutes is a lot of time to setup a lot of things. Just look at any good movie. Even if you don't understand anything, media can be very engaging [1]. Given the same friend of mine has played 72 hours of that game, I'm not interested in sinking that much time into a game which clearly does not respect my time (and sanity), so I dropped it shortly after playing it for an hour.

Outer Wilds

This one is less ranty, just an observation of my own.

95% of 50k reviews are positive. Everyone keeps telling you:

• Go into the game blind
• It provides an experience like no-other game
• It has an incredible story
• ...

In contrast to Persona 4, I played Outer Wilds for over 7 hours. I liked exploring stuff in the beginning, but I just didn't find the story that interesting - which is kind of bad if the whole game is about exploration in order to uncover the story [2]. Certainly doesn't help that the movement feels wonky to me, and the time-based in conjunction with the basic game-loop simply felt tedious to me without feeling gratification.

I think I get what the developers were going for and why the game is liked by so many people, but it simply wasn't for me.

Anodyne

Another friend of mine has recommended "Anodyne 2" to me. Due to the steam winter sale, I got both games in a bundle for cheap and decided to start with the prequel. 87% of 800 reviews are positive. It looks like a Zelda-like with its top-down pixel graphics. Sounds good to me!

The first 40min were great: You are dropped into an open world and are free to explore it. You are supposed to collect cards, find one or two weapon upgrades and find new world regions. Your little weapon, the broom, can also help you navigate through obstacles in the world using balls of dust. You find dungeons and fight enemies, while also having some parkour / easy puzzle sections. This sounds good, but it only get worse after that.

The world is open, but not really interesting: Apparently there are only three upgrades to your weapon, one of which I find pretty much useless. The only reward for exploring the world therefore is the act of exploring the world itself and collecting the cards, the latter of which is just tedious. The same enemies are encountered repeatedly, meaning the become uninteresting very quickly. There are bosses in the game, which are all trivial and beaten by just spamming attack. I've seen people describe them as "challenging but fair", which makes you wonder what kind of other "challenging" games they have played.

Screen scrolling in general is pretty janky when combined with drowning in the water or jumping over a pit. The game also contains (several) game breaking bugs. The one I found for myself was that you can pixel-walk over any pit. In the game, there are three big statues which are supposed to be an obstacle, which block the path to certain game areas.

• One statue is a proper obstacle
• You can just jump around the second one
• You can pixel-walk to navigate around the third one

The some dungeons / rooms can be shortcutted, while the rest of the design does not indicate that these cuts are on purpose. The game contains a "nexus" which you can use to teleport to several world regions / dungeons. In the nexus, there is also an indicator for each teleport to show whether you found all cards within a region. This indicator is misleading and made me look up a guide because it showed a section as completed, even though the dungeon contained loot required to progress with the game. This all made me comnpletely uninterested in the secrets sprinkled through out the game, which are completely optional and don't do anything.

There is not much of a story to this game. Each section has some motif, but it isn't doesn't feel connected to other regions and constantly feels out-of-place. The game feels like it wants to be a Yume Nikki spin-off, but it slapped a Zelda demo on top of it, without any of the parts which make me like Zelda in the first place. This makes the whole exploration a tedious task. Furthermore, I'm a big fan of "show, don't tell"-rule, but the game mostly dumps these thoughts and ideas onto you using dialogue boxes, which also ruins the whole Yume Nikki aspect of the game for me. So I dropped the game after 3 hours.

Other

I could go on and on. This website is already full with software / technology I dislike. I've been really tired of the youtube algorithm lately, so I'm just rewatching old-ish let's plays or stream VODs instead of watching new things. I currently have no interest in watching any anime, because the last few animes / series I watched were pretty bad. For movies, I have no interest in any current movies [3]. The games I've tried this year were pretty disappointing.

Maybe I'm just unlucky with my picks, or I'm becoming more and more grumpy. I don't even know at this point.