I actually totally sympathize with that critic from your clip and don’t think there’s anything dishonest or otherwise cognitively dissonant about that review. There’s nothing I can spend more time complaining about than something I really enjoy because I naturally fixate on things that stand out about a given experience and the flaws are what stands out in something that’s overall very good.
I would never in a million years rate that particular game a 9.1/10 but that’s just me and the critic valuing different aspects of design different amounts.
I’ve absolutely died as a result of bad dialogue choices but that’s just role playing; sometimes something you might choose to do can only logically result in your death and I, for one, am happy to be given that choice. I’ve straight up deleted a character profile with lots of progress because there was no in-character way not to do the thing that would kill me in dialogue. That game over is just that character’s canonical ending as far as I’m concerned. He couldn’t not shit-talk that god, that god couldn’t not erase him from existence out of spite. If the game had not provided me with an option to shit-talk the god, I would have been annoyed that none of the dialogue options were true to my character.
That’s why the phrasing was “from the caste of people” in the clarification. It was just a cultural difference: his home treated him as honorable and other cultures don’t.
When he is briefly enslaved, it wasn’t because they mistook him for being the kind of person you get to do that to, it’s because he was that kind of person and simply hadn’t been treated that way before.
The only notable thing about the game is that it’s extremely pretty. So I say start it again, see how much this prettiness matters to you on this new TV, and then decide whether to continue.
I beat Tears of the Kingdom without doing any main quests at all after getting to the surface, which I didn’t realize going in would mean beating it without the paraglider. It changes everything about how you approach movement and even a lot of the combat when you don’t have that crutch to lean on.
I accidentally created a speedster pacifist in Oblivion, building the crap out of my speed and acrobatics and neglecting the archery and stealth I had planned to specialize in so I just had to rush through dungeons stealing all the treasure and weaving between an ever-growing web of enemy attacks. By far the best Oblivion character I ever made.
It’s a part of my most hated trend in the video game industry: video games that are ashamed to be video games so they try to fool you into thinking they’re a more “respectable” art form like TV shows or movies. The mainstream hype we’re seeing is probably that it’s popular with Naughty Dog fans rather than Final Fantasy fans.
I wish these types of games would at least consistently ape more interesting TV shows and movies. Alan Wake seems like the only one that didn’t aspire to be something forgettable. I don’t even like Twin Peaks but at least it’s an identity.
This game is okay enough that I’m probably going to eventually finish it but I don’t think I’d ever feel tempted to start it again even if somehow every other option available to me were objectively worse because at least some of what’s left would be memorable enough to care about.
In general, the graphics are roughly the same as FFXIV.
The graphics are apparently deceptively good. Not immediately jaw-dropping for us lay people like the series is known for but more of a technical quality. I thought it was underwhelming on first glance but I admit I enjoy the things that video brings up now that I’ve started paying attention to them.
I’ve got a 1080p monitor and a 4k TV in my house and have used my computer plugged into each. The TV is also better for a lot of non-resolution reasons so sometimes I’ll want to move it there for those factors but in terms of displaying the 4k visuals, I honestly don’t think it makes a difference for me at all. Rendering the image at 4k internally has all sorts of benefits for the graphics but displaying that internally 4k image on the 1080 monitor retains all those benefits so I don’t see any point in buying a higher-definition monitor.
But the thing is, I never even wanted 4k on the TV at all. I didn’t want it to be smart, either. I just wanted good-looking colors and it became impossible to find a TV that put the effort into what I cared about that didn’t come with the other features. So I suspect that when I do ever replace my monitor, it’s probably also going to strong-arm me into having a higher resolution that I don’t actually want. And I can’t help but assume this is a big portion of what’s leading to these survey results.