Arknights

I actually love this game despite my review of it, the art is incredible, the writing is occasionally great, the music is phenomenal, Contingency contract is amazing, and one of the best gamemodes in any gacha game. These are just a few of the things that make the game so great, but it's easier to find problems so that will be the majority of this fucking essay

The difficulty is inconsistent, 99% of the time being so easy you could beat it with your eyes closed, the other times it's so challenging, that you just get obliterated without doing much. When you do finally succeed at a tough, it's incredibly underwhelming. The whole community jokes about using Kyostin's guides to beat content, which is indicative of HG's inability to balance the game's content. The time commitment that the game takes also makes me wonder why the hell the game has the casual tag in the first place, even without considering the gameplay's difficulty.

The biggest problem is the story, a lot of people call it long-winded or something else, but the writing is just some of the worst purple prose imaginable, many scenes could be reduced to about 35% of their original length while still maintaining the poetic style it already had. The story the game actually tells is pretty good, the events are a special case. Most of the events are set at random points that are out of chronological order, so while making a lot of the events potentially fun self-contained stories, it happens to the detriment of the overall plot. Many of the events have some of the best stories and writing the game has to offer, like Mansfield break finally being a relief from the bs that goes on in other chapters. The main group of people the story revolves around, Rhodes Island, is almost like black lives matter for the infected- if black lives matter never did much of anything and was purely non-violence. You need both violent and non-violent actions for a change as big as helping the infected. The idea that actual conflict isn't necessary to make a big change is incredibly immature, and RI embodies it by accomplishing almost nothing related to their own goals, the lives of the infected are exactly the same after the story as it was before. This doesn't mean that I support a group like reunion of course, but Rhodes Island almost goes out of its way to support these hateful and evil characters to the detriment of the infected. I don't blame HG for making this type of narrative as it's a game meant to appeal to a wide audience, and also made in china, so anything that challenges China's doctrine probably won't be getting into the hands of anyone, but that really isn't a complete pardon.

On a more personal note, a lot of people talk about how great this games community is. In my personal experience, I've had almost all negative experiences, elitism, Hypergryph dick riding, etc. Having a different opinion from the community has pretty much isolated me completely.