Zakel

RE4, RE4:R, and Requiem: A tale of stun systems

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 23:15:05 +0000

Resident Evil Requiem has recently been released, and with it revived the discussions around RE4 Remake regarding the different approach to action gameplay that Capcom has taken to modern Resident Evil. Seeing the oft repeated points has motivated me to expand on some of what I said about these games, and while I still stand by everything I said in my RE4 Remake review, I am a bit more knowledgeable about how the game works now and a little softer on it as a result, especially considering that Requiem doubled down on the worst parts and excised the few good parts. I will expand on that at the end, but first I want to talk about the various stun systems that have been attempted and what they bring to the table.

DOOM: The Dark Ages Critique

Sun, 18 May 2025 00:32:45 +0000

I’ve come to find that this is a rare game where I take issue with pretty much all of it, rather than being annoyed by just the gameplay, and it seems to all come down to the same core reason: Doom The Dark Ages is a very one-note game. Its gameplay, aesthetic, story, and soundtrack all feel like downgrades from Eternal and to some extent 2016 as well, in ways that made me feel like this game lacked a spark of creativity and desire to actually push their vision forward that I had got from Eternal.

Fatal Fury COTW's REV System Kinda Sucks + A little FG rant

Thu, 08 May 2025 20:43:29 +0000

I don’t talk about them a lot in this blog, but I love fighting games! It’s a genre that has had a hold on me since 2015 and I still enjoy them greatly. I’ve even gone as far as to compete in locals and managed to place 5th in Street Fighter 6 for Toryuken 2024, Ontario’s biggest tournament that year. Unfortunately, Fighting Games are in a bit of a weird place right now. Two years ago, SF6 released to critical acclaim heralding what felt like a new golden age of fighting games at the time. Rollback netcode became standard, many classics received modern re-releases with good netplay, and it seemed pretty much everyone had a game for them to play and people to play with worldwide. It was a pretty exciting time for the scene which had gotten bigger than it ever was before! Unfortunately, fast forward to 2025 and things don’t look so bright anymore.

The cracks in SF6’s design have revealed themselves quickly with all the intense competition it fostered and Capcom has been slow to respond, leading to a stale meta that has dampened the enthusiasm around the game. Strive’s latest season, as well intentioned as it was, failed its goals and inadvertently created a competitively unhealthy meta of oppressive top tiers with extreme damage and un-interactive mixups. Tekken 8 suffered from similar issues and had clear feedback from its passionate competitive playerbase, to which the devs promised them a Season 2 that would adjust the game to strengthen defensive play only to betray them with a patch that comically inflated all the game’s problems and led to the game getting review bombed on Steam and losing many players.

Monster Hunter Wilds - Combat Critique

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 23:20:41 +0000

In spite of everything I’m about to say, Monster Hunter Wilds will likely be my favorite action game of 2025, and unmatched in their niche Capcom still makes the kind of action games that appeal to me the most. Capcom isn’t afraid to experiment with its strong foundation while other AAA devs continue to homogenize their gameplay to suit the market’s defined taste for Soulslike action. However, not all experiments pan out, and with new approaches there is always risk.

My 15 Favorite Games

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 15:54:33 +0000

I wanted to make a post to gush a little about the games I’ve to come to appreciate both as a little writing exercise to learn to talk about things I like more often (lol) and for any readers who want to get to know me and my taste a bit better. This list is in no particular order.

Devil May Cry 4

An era-defining game for me, one that I am not exactly proud of having here. It’s a game with many problems, featuring a subpar campaign with a polarizing enemy roster, but it also has its iteration of Dante, the most complex and satisfying action game character to me. The game’s animations, physics, and systems are all perfectly tuned to make it essentially the Melee of action games: A game of unparalleled speed and smoothness once mastered, but also an arthritis-inducer that is difficult to get into. I got sucked in, I learned the ins-and-outs, and I played DMC4 until it fried my dopamine receptors for good.

Metal Gear Solid V Gameplay Critique - The impact of guard A.I

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 20:08:42 +0000

Context

Metal Gear Solid V is the most gameplay focused of the numbered MGS games, eschewing the linear story focus for a big buffet of stealth action scenarios. While the game is praised by the mainstream for achieving an enjoyable stealth sandbox, it is occasionally criticized for easily exploitable gameplay, mainly blamed on the lack of complex bases similar to the Ground Zeroes prologue, and the overpowered buddies and tools that the player can unlock throughout the game. The game’s open world nature often makes it easy to get around threats and approach any base from a favorable angle to snipe off or avoid most guards. While I agree with some of these criticisms, I think MGSV’s worst gameplay issues come from a more fundamental level, and if not for those issues some of MGSV’s level design problems could have been alleviated.

The Parry Epidemic - And why I'm worried about Monster Hunter Wilds

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 18:31:01 +0000

Monster Hunter is my favorite 3D action game series. Though many claim to do deep methodical combat, few nail it the way Monster Hunter does. It makes the player contend with a real sense of commitment that punishes you for not thinking two steps ahead, and gives you weapons that all control and move very uniquely to force entirely different approaches to combat. Among its qualities is one underappreciated aspect that really makes it stand out compared to modern action games, and that is its approach to defense: your dodge moves have only brief invincibility while enemy attacks tend to cover a ton of space for a long time. No perfectly timed dodge roll will save you from a continuous breath of fire or an aerial divebomb with an AoE the size of a small village. More than any other of its ilk, Monster Hunter demands understanding of the 3D space that enemies control, and for players to recognize when and where it’s viable to attack - not just because of the window of time, but also because of what space it would leave you in. When I see what the rest of the genre is doing, I feel that dimension of action games is starting to become rarer and rarer, and often there is a certain type of mechanic that is the culprit.

Kuntisu-Gami: Path Of The Godeess - Review

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 22:25:41 +0000

A game with a beautiful aesthetic, great music, and all the pieces for a compelling tower-defense/action hybrid that fails for me due to botched execution of its progression curve and a dire lack of challenge, compounded by many annoying tertiary elements that show how unaware the game is of its strengths and weaknesses.

To begin, I find there to be a lot of fundamental issues with regard to the game’s Day/Night cycle and how that impacts the experience of a player who is too well-prepared for what the game is willing to throw at them. Every stage begins with a day phase that requires you to look around the location for villagers to rescue and defilement to cleanse in order to get the currency you will need to complete the mission and give villagers equipment that allows them to fight with you. This is followed by a night phase where enemies spawn in waves until the night ends. Each day/night cycle takes around 8 minutes, 4 for the day and the other 4 for the night, and stages generally require 3-4 Day/Night cycles to complete.

Monster Hunter - A Starter Guide to Understanding Monsters

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 00:44:50 +0000

This is a guide that I initially wrote just to share around with friends who were learning Monster Hunter, forgot about it entirely and realized I should probably publish it. The information here is not very in-depth, but the parts about how most monster patterns operate should be useful to give a new player an idea for what to look for when learning how to fight monsters

Why I Love Final Fantasy VII Remake's Combat

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 22:06:37 +0000

As usual with my writing, this review is going to be focused on Final Fantasy VII Remake’s gameplay, an aspect of which I regard highly but might be easy to overlook for most people who play the game, mainly due to the game’s own fault. I did enjoy the game’s other aspects enough that it motivated me to play the original game to completion and I will leave it at that.

Armored Core VI: Fires Of Rubicon Review

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 22:10:01 +0000

Earlier this year, I played most Armored Core bar the PS3 games in anticipation for this game, though not really out of pure hype, but because I was curious what bedrock of design From Software was working with. I didn’t expect to like them much, as I'm not a big mecha fan and I rarely hear high praise for its gameplay, but I was pleasantly surprised. Armored Core had a great niche in which fast movement did not mean great flexibility. You can boost around at high speeds, but your ability to turn and aim is limited by your mech’s legs and your FCS Lockbox. It was an incredibly compelling way to design a console shooter in which traditional aiming was not the main skill, but instead the usage of movement and positioning to supplement your limited tank controls was heavily emphasized. It tickled a very different part of the brain than most games usually do, and this is not without getting into how deep and detailed the mech-building was and the way in which it very directly affected how you control and move with your AC.

Resident Evil 4 (2023) Review

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 02:59:26 +0000

To me, the heart and soul of Resident Evil 4 is the combat, and that's what this review is about. Everything else about the remake is something I can take or leave, but I have many issues with the gameplay and its design, and I’d like to talk about why because it feels like everything that the original did right has been forgotten by both the devs and the fans.

My Thoughts on Armored Core

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 18:53:23 +0000

When From Software announced Armored Core 6, I got interested in exploring the older games in the series in order to find out what kind of bedrock of design that the developer was working with for their next big title.

To expand on that...
I have somewhat complicated feelings on FromSoft, as their games are what made me understand a new to enjoy the medium and started my appreciation for deep, challenging gameplay, and I enjoyed them greatly when I first played them. Unfortunately, I ended up growing a bit frustrated with how their design has settled into a kind of mediocrity where they make their games simpler in terms of the skills they demand out of you, while trying to maintain the difficulty by adjusting the games in IMO uninteresting ways. The Souls games had always had a bit of an issue with how lenient the dodge roll timing is, but their earlier games had expensive stamina costs on them to balance this out, however, as they wanted to make the games more action focused, this started to get in the way. Instead of adjusting it so rolls have less i-frames in order to allow them to design enemies with more flexible attack patterns that emphasize positioning just as much as they could emphasize timing, they instead doubled down.

Ever since Bloodborne, they've been narrowing down their games into timing and reaction challenges as much as they can, with Dark Souls 3 giving you lots of stamina and easy fast roll, and designing bosses to have long strings of attacks to test your ability to roll through all of them as the new main challenge of the game.
Elden Ring headed further in this direction, with longer, weirder strings that meant to throw off the timing of even the most veteran players. their prior game, Sekiro, felt like a mission statement setting in stone their modern design: Extremely simple, static solutions to simple problems. Parry regular Attacks, Mikiri Counter the Thrusts, Jump the Sweeps, Dodge Grabs, and mash your attacks in-between. While its a little uncharitable, I would almost call it a game of Simon Says, at least that's how I felt about it given how reliant the game was on standing in front of the enemy and simply pressing the right button that completely counters that the enemy does. I wasn't very challenged and I didn't think the core design they had going on would even be fun if it was hard. Everything was boiled down into timing and reaction while positioning, difficult decisions, and compelling risk-reward seemed to have faded away from their design.

Melty Blood: Type Lumina Review (Backloggd)

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 16:31:11 +0000

This review was originally published on my BackLoggd account on October 9, 2021

It feels pretty rough to dislike this game cuz on paper its more interesting to me than any fighting game to come out in the last 5 years. It goes against the trend of recent fighters by keeping the movement options of Melty, speeding up the pace even further, and emphasizing a new host of defensive mechanics, a development that I would normally think is really sick if not for the fact that in practice, I dislike just about every change they made from MBAACC.

Omori Review (Backloggd)

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 16:28:39 +0000

This review was originally published on my BackLoggd account on July 3, 2021

I finished Omori thinking it was an alright 3 hour game that stretched itself into 12 hours, but the more I thought about the game and its story, the more those 3 hours lost their value and the weakness of its execution came to the forefront of my mind. It's a game that I wish was less afraid of showing its unique aspects, but it plays it safe and refuses to dig deeper into all the touchy subject matter that it brings up. The game is spends most of its time indulging in the escapist fantasy while leaving the meat of the story feel undeveloped, held back by the game's desire to fit into the mold of Earthbound-inspired RPGs.

Guilty Gear Strive Review (Backloggd)

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 16:26:52 +0000

This review was originally published on my BackLoggd account on Sept 2, 2021

I find it kinda hard to put my own opinion on Strive in an interesting way. I’d say “it's an alright but janky not-anime-fighter” with some wack mechanics and occasionally cool kits. I see it as the kind of game that won’t be many people’s favorite due to how many compromises it makes in the attempt to be accessible and expansive at the same time, pulling mechanics from all across fighting game sub-genres to do a little bit of everything. It’s far more interesting for me to think about what it represents culturally and what the game is trying to do with the FGC.

Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate (BackLoggd)

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 16:24:48 +0000

This review was originally published on my BackLoggd account on August 19, 2021

This game is fucked. What’s more fucked is that I really like it.

A lot of what this game does appeals to my ideal idea of a comfy game: A crazy amount of mechanical depth and variety comes paired with a behemoth amount of content that gives you adequate space to explore all that depth while also ticking off progression. You will get into a loop where you’re always being introduced to new encounters and new tools to play them with and once you’re in there this game is something special. Issue is uhhh….you won’t get there, not for 10 hours and not without the help of a dozen online resources.

Monster Hunter World: Iceborne Review (BackLoggd)

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 16:22:37 +0000

This review was originally published on my BackLoggd account on August 18, 2021

If I gotta use one word to describe World, it's that it’s bloated - not in content, but with goals and concepts that come in conflict with each other. An always-online game with unskippable cutscenes and terrible story progression that makes the co-op experience near unplayable for anyone going through the game. Attempts at QoL and tutorialization all over the game to make it more newbie friendly, yet confuses them with distended menus that are much more difficult to navigate and and a variety of unintuitive tertiary mechanics in the form of clutch claw and slinger that badly attempt to solve MH pain points (that were never really a problem) yet only serve to overwhelm new players and hurt the core combat for veterans. And on a more personal note, the more realistic aesthetic takes away a significant amount of the series’ charm to me. It's easy to see now why this game pushed me away from Monster Hunter.

Nioh 2 Review (Backloggd)

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 16:18:39 +0000

This review was originally published on my BackLoggd account on July 22, 2021

As a disclaimer, I didn’t finish the game. I got to the 5th region with about 40 hours clocked (felt longer) and the last boss I beat was Ryomen.

I enjoyed the concept of Nioh 1, but Nioh 2 actually hooked me in for a while. The good qualities of the combat stood out a lot more, the weapons were more complex, the enemies felt better balanced, and the yokai form was far more exciting than the living weapon. It helped that the game had a really nice character creator to boot, and a decent bit of QoL.

Monster Hunter Rise Review (BackLoggd)

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 16:15:15 +0000

This review was originally published on my BackLoggd account on July 3, 2021

Before playing this game, I tried to get into MHWorld and failed despite nearly finishing the base game, so I wasn’t expecting to get much out of MHRise when I played it at the request of a friend who definitely wasn’t going to follow up on playing with me, but I was motivated primarily by a dearth of things to occupy me in the time between semesters. Turns out, this game is pretty nice.

Old: Devil May Cry 5 Critique

Sat, 29 Jun 2019 02:30:14 +0000

This post is old and I'm not particularly proud of it, its only here for archival purposes

As an important notice, please be aware that this is a critique from a high level DMC player’s perspective. As such, advanced concepts and minute details that many readers might not be familiar with will be discussed, though I will try my best to describe and explain them when they become relevant. This critique will be focused on the game’s issues when it comes to gameplay.

I have 100%d the game at around 100 hours clocked, and played an extra 250 hours after that exploring the game’s combat system before writing this article. You can check out some of my gameplay on Twitter.

Old: The real issue with Blitz (DMC4)

Tue, 02 Oct 2018 13:52:05 +0000

This post is old and I'm not particularly proud of it, only here for archival purposes

Blitz, the most infamous enemy in DMC4

When DMC4’s enemy design is talked about online, chances are somewhere the convo will go “man Blitz sucks they are so annoying to kill you can’t even hit them” and someone will else will say “no you can kill them easily just watch this vid” and then this video is linked