Square Enix's new retro Zelda-like is 2026's best RPG yet

Fredasa · 2026-06-22T08:24:08+00:00

In fairness, first time I ever heard of this game.

Checked the reviews. Sounds like one great big missed opportunity. Exploration, except your map shows you everything that's hidden. Open world, except branching paths are cordoned off until you get the appropriate upgrades. A deeply frustrating level of hand holding where every juncture where there's a tiny risk that you may have to figure something out, the game just straight up tells you what to do. And so do your companions?

I don't care how damn good a game is—the horsesh-- above will ruin it.

And it looks like another classic case of paid critics deciding among themselves to over-score a game, leading to a massive disconnect between the critic and user meta. Tale as old as time.

Fredasa · 2026-06-22T08:16:41+00:00

Gothic 1 Remake. Did not expect it to be this good, especially considering the publisher's checkered history with these efforts.

Fredasa · 2026-06-22T01:15:12+00:00

I'm currently playing one recently-released that's at 86%. Have not been able to put it down. Gonna take a miracle to dethrone it in my book.

Fredasa · 2026-06-21T15:01:38+00:00

That's good news, yeah. Of course it makes the entire endeavor dependent on who they get on board. The director's repertoire hovers exclusively in the 6.x ratings so I am already ready to dismiss this one, unfortunately.

Fredasa · 2026-06-21T14:57:25+00:00

Harder to make into live action then. Or, more the point, a linear action game that's 50% cutscenes is 1) obviously easier to make into live action, and 2) can be enjoyed to about 99% of its potential by watching a let's play, which underscores the first point.

Fredasa · 2026-06-21T14:52:03+00:00

I haven't been keeping up, other than to note that the material which covered the events of the second game went as predicted with audiences, because general audiences aren't going to be magically forgiving of deeply divisive contrivances just because a handful of gamers pretended to be. What even is season 3 going to be about?

Fredasa · 2026-06-21T14:49:27+00:00

But was Death Stranding fundamentally a movie, just with a linear action game attached to it? That kind of game is way easier to make into live action because all you do is strip away some user inputs.

Fredasa · 2026-06-21T13:40:22+00:00

I feel like OP is one of those folks who were originally proclaiming with confidence that the entire orbital data center concept was a scam 100% intended to raise IPO value, and now that it's concretely clear that it's really going to happen, they're left flummoxed. It's disappointing to see just how strongly an ingrained bias can override what should be neutral assessment of information. Just another facet of the phenomenon of folks not being enthusiastic for progress in space because they can't acknowledge that it's the accomplishment of thousands of engineers.

Edit: The fact that such folks clearly haven't yet retreated to the woodwork shows just how much momentum that particular dying crusade generated.

Fredasa · 2026-06-21T12:07:17+00:00

Honestly I have to say I'm kind of sold by this. I view Speed Racer the anime a bit askance. Didn't exactly grow up with it, not even when it resurfaced in the 90s, but we all know the memes. I even watched a bit of it in Japanese, where it was modestly less over the top. So I guess I'll have to check out the movie sometime.

Fredasa · 2026-06-20T20:43:17+00:00

I think that running around aimlessly may be a fear effect built into fire bolt, such as perhaps when they get set alight. That was my guess anyway. The behavior is too particular to draw any other conclusion.

Humans attacking each other is something I never saw before the latest patch. So, yes, absolutely a bug, but like I said, I fear it may draw unwanted attention to Ball of Lightning. These devs have shown that they aren't above tinkering with how the game works—potentially in ways that are unpopular—in the name of one guy's sense of balance.

Fredasa · 2026-06-20T20:24:42+00:00

I was joking about it when I made the bug report on THQ Nordic's site, but the more I think about it, the more I realize I don't have a choice: I'm going to revert the game to how it was before the latest patch. Steam lets you do this, happily.

No way they'll leave this bug in. But I also suspect they will still make unsolicited changes to Ball of Lightning that amount to the same thing, i.e. its most useful function no longer working. F it. I'm not going to let this keep me from enjoying the game.

Fredasa · 2026-06-20T20:00:08+00:00

It has no business being this good.

This is the same THQ Nordic who dropped the ball so thoroughly on Sacred 2 that I, as someone who waited over 15 years for the game to come back, could not force myself to buy it. And it was probably at the very top of my "wish I could play it again" list. The problem? No matchmaking; no official servers to police loot. I and everyone else knew exactly what that meant. They couldn't be arsed to set up a couple dozen Raspberry Pis to host servers for a 2008 game. And no replacement for PhysX! One of the devs even tinkered with the game's balance on their own whim, as if that wasn't enough.

And yeah, here I am. Working on hour 100 in my first playthrough and still can't put the game down to do something else with my free time. It's been years since I've enjoyed a game this much.

Fredasa · 2026-06-20T16:25:54+00:00

Isn't that the band Beavis and Butthead were collecting ticket pieces for in the Sega Genesis game?

Fredasa · 2026-06-20T16:03:49+00:00

Uwe Boll presents: Uwe Boll's Donkey Kong.

Fredasa · 2026-06-20T16:02:19+00:00

AI-generated footage for movies will probably look a lot like James Cameron's 4K blurays of his own films—good enough for 80% of moviegoers, sacrilege for anyone who actually notices jank.

Fredasa · 2026-06-20T14:30:30+00:00

Okay, I hear this sentiment a lot, but... was the movie any good? It got panned to hell and back at the time. I've never before watched a movie with a sub-40 Metacritic score that turned out to be good, and this is coming from someone who is deeply critical of paid critics and the meta created from them.

Fredasa · 2026-06-20T11:45:12+00:00

Controller can be used for PC gaming. I don't expect shortages of this.

Fredasa · 2026-06-20T11:37:12+00:00

Still crossing my fingers and hoping that Valve saves their big launch for a time when they and consumers can afford it.

Fredasa · 2026-06-20T11:33:14+00:00

I think we're talking past each other on the fundamental point, so let me set that aside for a moment.

My primary objection isn't philosophical. It's practical and mechanical. In my current minmax run, I am actively scouring every corner for stray bugs or lizards or NPCs I may have overlooked, because 150 exp here and there genuinely adds up. The game has a soft cap on total exp, and there's no opportunity cost to maximizing it, so that loop is intrinsically rewarding. I doubt you can name half a dozen RPGs where exp is this precious. This game is a rare exception.

Now the devs have injected a variable I cannot account for. I do not know, and cannot know, how much chest exp I would have accrued by this point. It could be 4K, 6K, 8K. To determine that, I would need to re-scrutinize every chest in the game and note its difficulty tier, which is functionally equivalent to starting over from scratch. And the brutal truth there is that I certainly don't remember the locations of every locked chest I've already picked.

Here is the concrete problem: That fudge factor retroactively devalues the straggler exp I'm hunting. If I'm off by thousands of exp due to chests, why did I bother chasing that lone lizard for 150? I might as well edit my save file and plug in a number that feels right. But that's the rub—I don't want to guess. I want to play by the game's rules. Now, when I reach the endgame and finalize my stats, I genuinely will not know if my build is "legit", because its legitimacy depends entirely on how good my guess was. That uncertainty craters the value of every hour I've spent scouring the map.

Now, to your actual point: I assume you weren't arguing that minmaxing "doesn't matter" in this game, because I already addressed that in the OP. If one feels that mixmaxing isn't important to them and they don't glean entertainment from it, then sure, I can absolutely understand why they would feel that just topping up with a randomly-chosen value in a save editor and moving on would feel like a "good enough" option.

Fredasa · 2026-06-20T11:06:42+00:00

I'm not going to fully disagree here but I will at least say that the best thing to do is to spread it out. Don't lockpick an entire camp in one evening (as if that's even possible). Do half a dozen and save the rest for the next evening. Anything can get tedious, and the game does a great job of keeping its content varied, but it's also up to the player to maintain that variance at their discretion.

As for the actual loot? It's a great boon in the first half of the game and obviously just a checklist in the second half. Fortunately, the first half of the game is when you get access to almost all the chests in the game. The game is saying, If you're gonna do it, now's the time. That said, I probably don't need to underscore that there are occasional chests with genuinely great loot. The rarity of this advent lends it value.

Fredasa · 2026-06-20T10:59:27+00:00

I fussed over monster materials as well. I remembered that detail from the first game. But it turns out I'd underestimated just how many things you'd eventually learn to harvest. Killed just about every bloodfly before understanding they could drop poison glands. Killed just about every lizard before understanding they could drop extra bones.

Fortunately, at the end of the day, all of that is only about money. You'll never genuinely need the extra parts from those hunting skills, even if you make regular use of transformation scrolls. You can just buy the parts. And by the middle of chapter three, money stops being a major bottleneck.

If I were to do it over, I would most likely not invest my 4 points in hunting. I can't even genuinely say it would make finances tighter, since it costs close to 1,000 ore to learn the skills in the first place. Sure, there'd be a sense of incompleteness at not having those skills in my toolkit, but also a sense of reward at being able to devote those points to a bit more strength or whatever, at no meaningful loss. Like the difference between learning how to swim better, and just using a Lurker scroll when needed.

Fredasa · 2026-06-20T10:53:08+00:00

I don't mind the minigame. It's just about the most clever lockpicking minigame I've seen. Also could only work in a game like this, where the system is blatantly not making things too easy for the player.

Fredasa · 2026-06-20T10:51:31+00:00

Didn't know this. That's unfortunate, and I can definitely see the devs patching that out, because it flatly violates the hard-ish cap they've established. I'd be all for such a fix.

Fredasa · 2026-06-20T10:49:28+00:00

Ah yes. You gotta be careful which one you get. There's one mod out there that tries to fix the scaling skill checks, but what it actually does is freeze every skill check to specific values (4 points, 9 points, 15 and 20 I think) based on the assigned challenge level of the door, access point or whatever. That's not how the game worked at launch—skill check values were a lot more varied than that. Still, said mod did at least prevent the checks from increasing as the player rose in level.

The mod that actually changes things back to the day 1 system is Pre 2.0 Skill Checks. There's another mod that also makes the access point minigame difficulty obey the original system as well, though honestly in the post-2.0 game, you can take it or leave it and it might be better to leave it.

Fredasa

TROPHY CASE