I agree with most stuff but curious what your problem is with the M&KB controls? Everything's rebindable and most of the defaults are intuitive, haven't noticed any problem with mouse smoothing and the cam control is okay except for certain tight angles where the cam turns to shit even on pad. It's leagues ahead of some of the problems I had with, say, Max Payne 3 back in the day.

I've had some hair-tearing moments with the gameplay, like the bullshit tracking attacks and jankily sped up attack animations on Lethal difficulty. The most annoying part for me is the checkpointing, where on death you have no penalty except that you get reset into a random nearby position while the enemies who killed you are usually randomly deleted from the world, so you don't even get a retry. That's for random encounters... die during a map/story location and it's way more arbitrary where you end up; could be somewhere in the middle, could be right at the beginning with all enemies respawned but some bonus objective progress saved, but also some of your consumed items gone... who knows. The fact that I haven't seen a single person complain about this tells me that maybe it's just the standard for open world slop these days so I've been well off avoiding it these past few years.

I'm also unimpressed that very few people online flagged up the latent feminism. Main char gets his life saved by a woman who on first introduction appears to be a crying helpless peasant but soon turns out to be a badass ladybandit who assassinates Mongols on a dime, also she's butt ugly. Dialogue can never resist reminding me she's a handful and always down for a fight. A little while later I encounter a grizzled, no-nonsense lady samurai who's the only survivor of her assassinated family; she's also ugly (because old), but since this one's angry and sad she's also rude and (obviously) a badass, plus a bit of a handful to control when we're trying to get information out of people. Then, in a sidequest, I encounter a samurai warrior who has arrived in the region to help train up the local resistance fighters - this warrior is, obviously, a lady. In a world first, she isn't very badass, but this turns out to be more of a gameplay device to force you to save her in a protect quest when her fearless anger (naturally she has this) causes her to charge head first into a fight. An utterly infuriating encounter on Lethal, to the extent I would have hated her no matter what kind of character she was otherwise. She was however slightly less ugly.

Next I decide to go on a treasure hunt for some antique legendary armour. The way to the treasure is littered with mongol bodies so I know it's guarded by a badass. Such a badass that it turns out to be my first taste of Tsushima's boss-like encounters, which I became more familiar with afterwards. The boss iiiiis... a no-nonsense lady samurai, highly skilled, the last of her line- wait, didn't we just do this unlikely archetype? Guess you can never have too many. Whatever. I was getting too jaded to note down how ugly this one was.

All this within the first few hours of what could be dozens if not hundreds of hours of gameplay. I get that in story terms, most of the fighting men have been killed by the mongols. Yet it's funny that there seem to still be plenty of fighting age men left among the dozens of dishonnaburru Japanese bandits I'm forced to slay, while the very first bandit I encountered in the entire world was my buttfaced lady sidekick who I now owe everything to, and never another female one since. How come the resistance is all ladybosses and the treacherous Japanese sellouts are all men? I will be completely unsurprised if I go the entire game without there being an interesting male ally character or male friendship.

Anyway the game is occasionally fun when you're allowed to engage with the core of the combat and not having to deal with trash gameplay conventions. The open world might not stack up to some others...? IDK, I'm not much of a judge of open worlds, but for me it's on a par in atmosphere and interactibles to parts of Witcher 3's Velen, in terms of being a wartorn medieval countryside with a believable soul and aesthetic. It's fun for me to explore and there's enough attention to detail to convince me much of this game was made with love (flute playing and Jin praying when you bow to corpses is a nice touch). But with that said it's at best a fun, pretty game that's obviously written by feminists. Much like Disco Elysium was a kind of cool game-prototype that was obviously made by communists. The fact it has only been maimed by ideology as opposed to completely destroyed by it seems like weak cause for celebration imo. I'm starting to think the overton window's shifted so much that the effect is just invisible to most.

I agree with most stuff but curious what your problem is with the M&KB controls? Everything's rebindable and most of the defaults are intuitive, haven't noticed any problem with mouse smoothing and the cam control is okay except for certain tight angles where the cam turns to shit even on pad. It's leagues ahead of some of the problems I had with, say, Max Payne 3 back in the day.

I've had some hair-tearing moments with the gameplay, like the bullshit tracking attacks and jankily sped up attack animations on Lethal. The most annoying part for me is the checkpointing, where on death you have no penalty except that you get reset into a random nearby position while the enemies who killed you are usually randomly deleted from the world, so you don't even get a retry. That's for random encounters... die during a map/story location and it's way more arbitrary where you end up; could be somewhere in the middle, could be right at the beginning with all enemies respawned but some bonus objective progress saved, but also some of your consumed items gone... who knows. The fact that I haven't seen a single person complain about this tells me that maybe it's just the standard for open world slop these days so I've been well off avoiding it these past few years.

I'm also unimpressed that very few people online flagged up the latent feminism. Main char gets his life saved by a woman who on first introduction appears to be a crying helpless peasant but soon turns out to be a badass ladybandit who assassinates Mongols on a dime, also she's butt ugly. Dialogue can never resist reminding me she's a handful and always down for a fight. A little while later I encounter a grizzled, no-nonsense lady samurai who's the only survivor of her assassinated family; she's also ugly (because old), but since this one's angry and sad she's also rude and (obviously) a badass, plus a bit of a handful to control when we're trying to get information out of people. Then, in a sidequest, I encounter a samurai warrior who has arrived in the region to help train up the local resistance fighters - this warrior is, obviously, a lady. In a world first, she isn't very badass, but this turns out to be more of a gameplay device to force you to save her in a protect quest when her fearless anger (naturally she has this) causes her to charge head first into a fight. An utterly infuriating encounter on Lethal, to the extent I would have hated her no matter what kind of character she was otherwise. She was however slightly less ugly.

Next I decide to go on a treasure hunt for some antique legendary armour. The way to the treasure is littered with mongol bodies so I know it's guarded by a badass. Such a badass that it turns out to be my first taste of Tsushima's boss-like encounters, which I became more familiar with afterwards. The boss iiiiis... a no-nonsense lady samurai, highly skilled, the last of her line- wait, didn't we just do this unlikely archetype? Guess you can never have too many. Whatever. I was getting too jaded to note down how ugly this one was.

All this within the first few hours of what could be dozens if not hundreds of hours of gameplay. I get that in story terms, most of the fighting men have been killed by the mongols. Yet it's funny that there seem to still be plenty of fighting age men left among the dozens of dishonnaburru Japanese bandits I'm forced to slay, while the very first bandit I encountered in the entire world was my buttfaced lady sidekick who I now owe everything to, and never another female one since. How come the resistance is all ladybosses and the treacherous Japanese sellouts are all men? I will be completely unsurprised if I go the entire game without there being an interesting male ally character or male friendship.

Anyway the game is occasionally fun when you're allowed to engage with the core of the combat and not having to deal with trash gameplay conventions. The open world might not stack up to some others...? IDK, I'm not much of a judge of open worlds, but for me it's on a par in atmosphere and interactibles to parts of Witcher 3's Velen, in terms of being a wartorn medieval countryside with a believable soul and aesthetic. It's fun for me to explore and there's enough attention to detail to convince me much of this game was made with love (flute playing and Jin praying when you bow to corpses is a nice touch). But with that said it's at best a fun, pretty game that's obviously written by feminists. Much like Disco Elysium was a kind of cool game-prototype that was obviously made by communists. The fact it has only been maimed by ideology as opposed to completely destroyed by it seems like weak cause for celebration imo. I'm starting to think the overton window's shifted so much that the effect is just invisible to most.