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Embarrassingly late into my development as an amateur philosophist, I decided that I believed that the most important question one could ask is why. All actions worth making and statements worth stating must surely be purposeful, and interrogating the purpose which drives actions and speech is surely the key to greater understanding, or so I once reasoned. Nioh 2 had me asking two why questions. Each why was a killer of my enjoyment. The first is of potential players: why would you play this? What would attract one into the Nioh 2 experience, and what would carry them through it? Unfortunately, the two main selling points of the game fail to mesh, instead undermining each other. You could be sold on it as a technical, demanding action game from the developers that made Ninja Gaiden 2 (or whichever entry of the series you claim to be the best), or you could be sold on it as a Diablo -esque loot game where enemies die in explosions of loot. There’s a market for both experiences, and on p...

Discussions about video game genres can often get a little stupid. There’s a number of problems going on. It’s a little more complex than film genre, in part because similar genres can be applied to the traditional stories, whereas the actual genres are named for mechanics and structure. In 2014, SuperBunnyHop commented on the ubiquity of certain controls and mechanics throughout the AAA space – twin stick controls (for both first- and third-person), upgrades, light stealth . Generic elements blurred genres together, and even as mechanics like stealth became pervasive, the stealth genre itself faded from relevance as its stalwarts stalled out. Games, especially bigger games, could incorporate so many elements that genre became hard to distill. Additionally, the complexity of developments and people’s histories with the medium cause them to view game genres with different perspectives. Most games can be described with a combination of three or four genres, and even multiple entirely sep...

Finally playing  Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag in 2023 was a strange experience for me. Assassin’s Creed was the series I bought my first console for (a PS3 in 2011); I transitioned from Altair’s Chronicles on iOS to the series proper with II . I played Revelations shortly thereafter, skipping the middle chapter of Ezio's trilogy. After patches had smoothed a few of its roughest edges, I played Assassin’s Creed III , but the release of eighth generation consoles saw me take a little break from the series, one that ultimately marked the end of my engagement with it. I wasn’t too interested in risking the PS3 version of Black Flag - I’m generally a little leery of cross-gen titles, although I did play Rogue at some point after its release and I’m pretty sure I played Black Flag’s DLC/spinoff Freedom Cry twice. I haven’t played any later games in the series yet. It wasn’t just weird because I was stepping back to the series that drew me to video games when I was younger, it was weir...