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I just finished RDR2 recently, and the story in that is full of moments that don't really make any sense. Particularly the scenes with the Pinkertons. There's so many times they are offered an easy way out and never take it and instead chose to do the hard thing over the easy thing that would stop it all. It's sort of nonsense. Naughty Dog games are awful for it. I feel they are trying to put a square peg in a round hole. They want to tell these stories, but it has to revolve around game mechanics, and what makes it worse is the game mechanics are usually sufficient at best and garbage at worst. There's way too many games where the hero you're playing is a bit of a cunt just for the sake of being a bit of a cunt, or actively the only way to progress it to do unspeakable things. Apart from Yakuza where you are a supposed bad guy, but end up doing like a million and one good deeds interspersed with not being able to walk 10 meters in any direction because you have to fight random people in between looking for slot cars, going to karaoke and looking for the woman that roofied and robbed you. I think a great example of a game mechanic not fucking up the story is HADES. Everything in that game feels so right. Nothing feels like it's just smashed together. I wish more games were crafted with that kind of care and attention.

It wasn't part of my plan to have my beastren dress like this, but for whatever reason the armour with the highest stats seems to show off the most amount of boobs and arse, even for the men. I've just unlocked the 'trickster' vocation, which is a vocation all about deception but you are unable to directly damage with your weapons. You create illusions of yourself, try to convince the monsters that they are you by hitting them with the incense and you can do things like astral projection and create illusory walls to fuck with the AI I find this really interesting, as I'd spent a lot of time on mage and was struggling to see what the point of it was. But then I ran into some fights with griffons and cyclops, some taking place at night, and figured out that the way the game works is there's an element of randomness you have to sort of submit to. Nag mentions it with the town attacks, but it's in everything. You have to trust that your warrior pawn is well versed at parrying enemies with its launcher ability*. So you have to manage your stamina a bit, take the cue from your co-mage when they say 'let us cast our spell together and have it come out faster!' that you're good to go for doing just that. The ally AI seems to have a really good knack of knowing how to resolve combat mechanics, usually the deaths that have happened to my pawns are a mea culpa, like not using 'roar' as a warrior to pull aggro off them. They have far poorer survival instinct when it comes to their pathing when exploring, they slip off cliffs. But to me the combat seems like a more impressive and difficult problem that they appear to have solved here. The most interesting thing about the game isn't combat however, it's just one piece of the precarious jenga tower of interacting systems and its always enjoyable, never annoying jank. If a griffon happens to dive bomb you in the middle of a minotaur fight and an ox cart comes tearing through and crashes into them and people fly everywhere like physics objects, well lucky you, you're playing Dragon's fucking Dogma II. That's what you're here for. It's a game with stretches of mundanity punctuated by explosions of random and unexpected events. Some of them they want you to see, others are these kinds of random collisions of different things. The biggest thing about it I think is you've got to try and sort of not bend it to your will. I found the stuff with the MTX news a bit interesting cause a lot of people looked mainly at the cosmetic MTX, which I do agree are gross (you can change your appearance in this, but it's not a trivial amount of in-game gold/RC to do so). But the bit about the furour of the fast travel systems, it's hard to articulate how important the fast travel systems are in this game but not in the way you might expect unless you've played stuff like Morrowind. Or Death Stranding, maybe. Or Gothic. It's about how it all integrates the world together and with your progression. Time is important, in the sense that things need to happen slowly. Ferry stones are the fast way of getting around, but very expensive (early on anyway). Ox carts are another 'fast' way and much cheaper, but in-game hours pass when on them and you can have random monster encounters on them, and those monsters might be a griffon and minotaur tag team (not happened to me yet, but I heard it can). So there's a potential for massive disruption there. Time passes and you can fail quests, so do you really want to take that ox cart which might explode in a fiery mess of feathers and gore? Wasting all that time just to save 9000 gold. But this is also the point, it's what the game is about. At one point I fought a griffon and mounted it, and (im going to spoiler this, because I think it's tool cool to say out loud but it's why Dragon's Dogma is an amazing game) and so the progression comes with the learning how to deal with these curveballs. You want to go to that next city? Take this narrow mountain pass but watch out, beasts be lurking. Sure will be nice when you unlock a FT system to get around it, huh? Or when the story progression might relax getting to this particular area But that's where the game happens, this organic crashing together of crazy shit. It's not a hard game, but it's a very dynamic game. The fact that time matters, that quests send you off to come back a few days later, the way exploring, questlines, fighting/physics/combat AI and resource/survival systems interlock together in such clever ways. It's why 'janky' shouldn't be a pejoratives, cause polished games don't do half this type of shit. You can't curate the outcomes of a game like this. If you want to buy those FT MTX then go ahead, but man you're not even playing the game at that point *(actually, I wonder does the player train the pawn to do that, and if it re-uses DMC5's cameo system? The game doesn't say one way or the other, but I know it was something I was learning to do while playing Warrior).

I can see the Persona thing. That definitely felt like a twist written to be a twist. Thankfully it didn't ruin my enjoyment at all, for me these games are less about the antagonists and more about how the party overcomes their own struggles. One example that came to mind was the first Mirror's Edge, with its completely out-of-place option to mow down enemies with MGs and such. Not only did it make zero sense from a character standpoint (Faith lost her mother in a violent uprising) but it also completely brought the gameplay to a halt. Which, for a series built around momentum, is obviously not beneficial. As mentioned, it is only an option, and there's an achievement for a pacifist run – but the fact that it's even included and ironically also makes those sections significantly easier (which I doubt is some kind of meta commentary) always felt like a misstep. They did thankfully rectify that in the sequel. As for games that do a good job in bypassing the problem: I'd say RPGs in general. Be it JRPGs where you usually combat in self-defense against monstrosities (let's forget the Phoenix Down problem for the moment) or the more choice-driven western versions, that regularly do a good job and make choice and consequence feel fleshed out and believable. Even if beating a game like The Witcher and having killed as many people as monsters can feel a bit disjointed with regards to the lore. Edit: I just thought about another one that was mostly dissonance between the game and myself, and that's AC Valhalla. It really rubbed me the wrong way how you're forced, especially early on without context, to just rob and plunder and murder people and the whole mise en scène portraying it as something heroic. And when there's repercussions for those actions and someone in your own ranks dies, you somehow have to feel with your protagonist for the loss? I don't know what they wanted to say with all of that but I found it appalling.

I suspect narrative inconsistency is something you'd care about a lot in comics etc, which is essentially what this is. It's just having the logic of the game and the narrative match, not the violence in and of itself Animal Crossing has a non violent version of it with the money grabbing slum landlord

I think enough has been said about the old ludo-narrative dissonance, maybe too much. It's no doubt there's a problem with way most games have your 'hero' mowing down opponents in their hundreds. But I was quite happy about it until some clever sod coined that phrase. Now I can't go on a Croftian murder spree without it scratching at the back of my mind. Bastards.