I don't really see any honest attempt at diagnosing issues, really. He just spouts out some vagueries about pacing and railroading and then his solutions to them amount to "okay, throw out everything you had before."
It's not even that the game is unflawed; it's just that it's also a great success in enough regards to where dismissing it out of hand is totally unfair.
I mean, right off the top of my head I can give an assessment of the game's issues- it was an ambitious title released early in a console's lifespan (ie before the various conventions for a game on that console would be established) in a genre that was beginning to lose its foothold in the medium (JRPGs were one of the few genres that could deliver a relatively compelling narrative in the early days of gaming, but around the late 90s/early 00s this began to change). Portable games had historically skimped on plot and with Golden Sun there seemed to have been simultaneously an effort at averting that and an adherence to this tradition, so the narrative ended up having some very strange pacing and somewhat undercooked characters. Narrative aside, it also led to a rather constant cycle of "achieve goal, get stuck, achieve goal, get stuck, etc." that is positively an epidemic in adventure games already (and Golden Sun was more indicative of this genre-wide problem than a particularly exemplar instance of it).
That being the case, the game also had a very fun, interesting take on JRPG combat that may not have been the most original thing around but still felt fresh and continually interesting the entire way through, an occasionally interesting story, a surprisingly developed world, and if nothing else it paved the way for other portable RPGs.
I like in-depth organic worldbuilding, and I don't mind expository rants when they are well-written and intrinsically entertaining. Iain Banks was really good at conveying a lot of new information without making you feel like you were being lectured to.
Iain m banks is the fucking man
his sci fi is on the whole better than his "serious" fiction imo
The Wasp Factory was the first thing by him that I read. It's supremely fucked up and wonderful because of it. One of his mainstream fiction rather than sci-fi, though there's often a bit of overlap there.
I don't really see any honest attempt at diagnosing issues, really. He just spouts out some vagueries about pacing and railroading and then his solutions to them amount to "okay, throw out everything you had before."
It's not even that the game is unflawed; it's just that it's also a great success in enough regards to where dismissing it out of hand is totally unfair.
You do recognise what you're doing right now, correct? You are mansplaining because you don't like the tone someone took when negatively "reviewing" a game that you like. It's a Let's Play and there's bitching in it. That's not journalism, that's a riff, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's someone demonstrating why they feel a certain way about a thing by playing through and talking about that thing for the amusement of others. You don't have to "prove" why it's "wrong" and you're "right."
If you want to explain why you liked it, go ahead, but either way you're both just going to be two people with diverging opinions. It's not like this person is attacking you personally. Get over it.
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his sci fi is on the whole better than his "serious" fiction imo
400 pages of nothing whatsoever happening and yet it's absolutely riveting idgi its brilliant