Horizon: Forbidden West initial gripes

If you know me you know that I can find fault in anything including games that I enjoy. There is no such thing as a perfect game in my world except for maybe Ender Lilies and every game, and this goes for my favorite games of all time as well, is going to have a few aspects about it that gets under my skin. Horizon is no exception and even though I consider it to be an absolutely fantastic game, there are some things about it that I could do without. These are minor gripes and I realize that I am being nitpicky, but I feel the need to point them out anyways.

Which weapon is better?

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I feel as though it has been quite standard in RPG's or just games in general that when you are looking at a possible new weapon that there should at least be the option of comparing it to whatever weapon of that type you currently have but Forbidden West doesn't do this - at least not in any way that I can determine. The game has a TON of weapons in it and most of them can be upgraded in some sort of way. When I am looking at weapons, even the ones that I currently possess and especially when looking at a vendor when I am considering getting a new one, I want to know how it stacks up against the ones that I currently have so that I don't end up with redundant weapons or even worse, purchasing one that is worse than the one I already have.

I have multiple duplicate weapons in my inventory already and I can't remember all the stats off the top of my head right out of the gate. Comparing the weapons as far as I can tell consists of exiting the one screen, then going back to your inventory screen and then remembering the stats before going back to consider purchasing the new one. I don't WANT to have to do this. If there is a way to do this and I am just too stupid to figure it out, it isn't as intuitive as it should be. I no likey!

Far too many cutscenes

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A game without a good story is tough for me to love especially if it is an RPG. This is the reason that despite the graphics being inferior to other games at the time I absolutely loved early Final Fantasy games. It is a huge part of the overall experience with RPG's in particular. That being said, if I wanted to watch a movie I would watch a movie. When I play a video game, I am more interested in actually playing the damn game.

I don't mind a cutscene here and there but Forbidden West has them every time you turn around. It has gotten to the point where I am a bit afraid to engage in conversations with NPC's because I don't want to trigger the 17th cutscene that I have been forced to watch in the past hour. Sure, I could skip them but then I miss out on what the hell is going on, and I have been doing a great deal of that lately.

I don't mind the scenes where you can advance lines of dialogue faster than they are being spoken but some of them you only have the choice of watching the entire thing or skipping ALL of it and I have been doing a lot of that as well. This is particularly evident in conversations that you have with GAIA where she just goes on and on for ages about your upcoming objectives. Some people out there may truly love this aspect of the game but it really grinds my gears. This is probably the main reason why this game clocks in at nearly 100GB too.

I'm not going to use most of the combat mechanics

This has a lot to do with me being a bit of a lazy gamer that doesn't want to remember massive combos because while I do play games a lot, I am not a fan of needing to remember button combinations that remind me of finishing moves in Mortal Kombat just to do an attack on a trash mob.

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The melee pits serve as a tutorial of sorts to help you to remember these combos but honestly, in the heat of a battle I am not going to remember this or I am going to botch them anyway. Combine this with the fact that in an actual battle that your combo, most of which take a while to pull off, is very likely to be interrupted by getting thwacked in the back by some other enemy, and you have something that I am very unlikely to ever use.

I foresee myself going through the entire game without using a majority of them. I guess it is a good thing they put them in the game for people that are looking for a more complicated experience but I am not one of those people. I am likely just going to snipe weak parts of the enemies from afar and flip roll around like a madman/woman.

These are the only faults I can find in the game thus far except for of course, the annoyance caused by any flying enemy. Flying enemies being a pain in the ass is true in any 3D RPG and always has been so this is not something I was going to dedicate a section to.

I have no intention of quitting this game but I would imagine that because of the immense nature of this game, I am likely going to skip a great deal of what it has to offer. I'm still enjoying myself and will almost certainly complete the game but I can see now that there is no way I can walk away from this game and come back to it later. It's too complicated to do that with it. I tried doing that with Witcher 3 and when I logged back in I had no idea what to do and have simply never played it again.