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Eden of the east, terminator resistance, highguard and beyond the infinite two minutes. This is a show I originally watched a long time ago. it was one of the first anime I ever bought on DVD back in the late 00s, I loved its characters and setting and as a budding conspiracy kid I *adored* the tone of the thing, but despite all this I never finished it. I bought the DVD for both it and the first movie and binged both in a day but for some reason I just, never got around to buying and watching the second one. all these years it's remained a mystery to me how the show ends and over time it just faded in and out of memory despite all the love i had for both it and the things around it. earlier this year I decided to fix that when I started getting into anime again in a big way. I found my old DVD's and grabbed the second movie online, determined to finish it and while I do still need to watch those two movies at the time of writing this paragraph. My rewatch of the series itself sparked so much in me, both nostalgia for how much I used to love it and a new love for it now as an adult, I might love it even more on this watch and it's secured itself up there with some of my favourite shows out there. it's an easy top 10 contender and a perfect example of why art is so special. the story set up is one of the most interesting in any anime for me. the main character wakes up naked in front of the white house with no memory and a gun where he then finds out he's part of a death game. the rules? get given 10 billion yen and save Japan, first one to do so gets to live. it's hard to deny just how good a premise it is and the show really takes advantage of it. the story and characters stay interesting throughout the entire runtime and each of the participants called "selecao" have interesting goals and motivations. for the most part you can really see how and why they think they can fix the country and they're all really interesting characters. most people might even find one they agree with and start rooting for. the idea is so good i spent tons of time after every episode thinking what i would do as a selecao and i love when a show can get your imagination going like that. it's a more politically charged death game and i think that really makes it stand out from what has at this point became a very overcrowded genre. it just nails the sense of mystery and intrigue too with the game, it takes so long for things to get revealed that the show has a real sense of mystery for a lot of it's runtime. there's also a heavy romantic focus that i love, it's such a heavy focus that i'd even outright consider it a romantic anime and it's a really sweet and solid one at that. the core couple is one of my favourites in any anime and it's the kind of ship i think about *all* the time even after I've long since finished the show. it's split into a bunch of mini-arcs focusing on the different selecao but none of them last too long or really outstay their welcome. I'd say my personal favorites would be the hospital and the stuff with the hotel, but the first few episodes focusing on the romance between takezawa and saki are also really cute and the mystery is at its strongest there. it's also a story about NEET's but not in the way a lot of anime tend to be, it talks a lot about how to help NEET's and focuses on them while never fully being pandering like a lot of anime can be. sure those kind of shows are appealing and as someone that has spent a lot of my life as a NEET of sorts i even find them relatable to a degree, but i like that the show does it in a different way without over glorification or condemnation. The animation and backgrounds look great too! there's so many super detailed indoor areas like the Eden office with all it's antiques. saki's bakery which looks so nice and cozy and i love how all the little baked stuff looks. the indoors shine especially the mall, which gets a heavy focus in the series midway point and always looks like it would be so fun to explore with detailed storefronts and some fun names referencing real life places. akira's home in that mall too with the cool bar and the fancy bedroom with a built in cinema next door, it even comes with a cute dog with wings. sounds like a fine place to live if you ask me. the mall really stood out to me on my first watch, even years later i always remembered how it looked. Though i think I'd take diana's hotel over it, cool waterfalls and some of the nicest bedrooms I've seen. owning a place like that would be pretty killer i think. the backgrounds also have this cool painterly quality to them at times, like they're based on real scouted locations painted over. it looks really striking and unique. there is some iffy CG though like with the NEET's at the end and certain buildings, but it's nothing too distracting and it's made up for with how good the rest of the show looks. There are some set pieces in there like the rush to the hotel or the ending sequence that really show off what the animation team can do and they can be really impressive looking. the weather too! there's some really good snow later on in the show which gives the latter set of episodes a really nice Christmassy energy to them and they're so pretty, especially the scenes on the shinkansen or the mall roof. the character work is also great! the show has designs by Chica Umino who has such a cute style for her characters and it's interesting how much variety she gives the cast. akira, diana, saki and the NEET's all feel like they could be from entirely different series and i think that's pretty impressive. the design for the selecao phone also deserves special shoutout, that thing looks rad and i'm so sad the official kits they used to sell for them are so hard to find, I'd love one of these, doubly so if it was usable. the series cast is another real highlight. the selecao aren't all given a focus but the ones that are, are seriously cool. takezawa is the main one of them and more or less the show's co-main character. he's always been a husbando of mine and that's always stuck with me: he's cute and cool and mysterious and he just has an air about him that always gets me. he's simultaneously a goofy dork and a mysterious terrorist and his design is cute too. he's also very much a stand-in for the views of the people working on the show. Akira might as well be one of the NEET's the story is all about, he loves movies and he references them all the time to the point they're some of the few things he remembers even after his amnesia. he's a way for them to say that even those like the rest of the extended cast: the weirdos and the otaku and the NEET's. they are the future, they could change the world and make a difference, maybe not with a selecao budget but they still can even in the small ways the series shows us how. Akira exists in a way to give hope like that, and i think that's beautiful. it's a sentiment that's needed now more than ever. NEET unity is important. my other two favourite characters are equally as good. there's the secondary protagonist in saki. a part time NEET that meets takezawa on a trip to the USA with her friends. she's the audience stand-in and she gives the show a real shoujo energy with her feeling totally out of her element and having a really sweet romance with takezawa which is probably my favourite overall element of the story. she gives a nice contrast to all the terrorist plots and political intrigue and really grounds the story in a way i like a lot, her struggles are seriously relatable. plus she's pretty proactive, she gets the eden gang involved and does her own investigations throughout, she's even basically the protagonist of the first movie. her design is great too and i love all the different outfits she gets in the show. Her dub voice is great too, it's always fun when you get some noticeably Canadian VA's involved. there's also my favourite of the selecao in Kuroha Diana Shiratori. a woman who's ideal for saving Japan is one in which it's worst criminals face justice and in doing so, the country will be fixed. basically she castrates and murders rapists. the most justified selecao and the one i personally rooted for, she quite literally did nothing wrong. on top of having the best reason she's just such a fun character with the show's best design. she's constantly super fashionable and cool and it's nice that the show never fully demonizes her for her actions like i feel a lesser show would. she's outright a hero in the show's latter half and the movies and she has many of the best moments overall like the wing stunt and a super cool escape sequence in the first movie. she's even inspired me to re-dye my hair sometime to the cool shade of purpley blue she has in some scenes in the show, which to me is the mark of a cool character, her hair is inconsistently colored though since it's just a icey blue in other scenes. the rest of the selecao are pretty cool though. i love the smug junpei iori looking producer one but he doesn't get much time to shine until the sequel movie. he gets one of the show's best lines though in the final scene. selecao 1 is a great villain and his scenes near the end are really interesting to see play out, same with selecao 10 who just has such a menacing presence. 5 and 4 are also personal favourites, both have really interesting reasons for their participation and 4 especially has some of the shows best scenes, i love his villain turn at the end of episode 2 where he points his hand like a finger gun and has two yakuza guys assassinated. the show had me hooked then and there. the show even manages to write characters well that a lot of other shows would struggle too. A perfect example of this is in a member of the eden gang. an overweight NEET hacker nicknamed "panties". in a lesser show this would just be a joke character and his name would be a signifier that he's a pervert or something. Here though it's not like that, he's got a really funny backstory for his name and it's used as a chance for real commentary on the excuses some people can use as an out for self improvement. he grows and gets moments to be cool and heroic, he's not just a one off joke character. a lot of the cast get that treatment and the rest of the NEET's in the eden gang are no exception. They're some of the best characters. the leader, Hirasawa is one of the show's more likable characters and his eng VA carries the comedy super well. mi-tan is my other favourite from the gang, she's just the most consistently funny and her and takezawa have some of my favourite interactions in the show, plus it's nice to see a female character in a role you would normally see given to men. osugi, sis and kasuga round out the gang well. the latter especially has one of he best VA performances in the Japanese dub, he was hilarious in the compilation movie, but they don't get as much of a focus as the rest of the gang so they feel a little underdeveloped at least in the show. it's a foreword looking show too. It had real ideas and thoughts on where the world should have went, on tech optimism and the dangers of tech. In some ways it was right on where it would end up going. it's interesting especially how the show's namesake, eden of the east, was kind of a showcase of where tech would go with things like CHATGPT and image search tech. Albeit Eden in the how is user driven and GPT is stolen user data driven, it was still an example of a neat prediction on the shows part. it does a good job of showing us the eventual dangers of things like AI search engines and social media surveillance, it's a nuanced take even if i think all such tech is evil. juiz herself too gives feels close to the (complete lie) vision of AI that corpos now want to sell us with things like virtual assistants, though in this case juiz can actually, you know, accomplish literally anything. that is until you get to the other twist with juiz, that it's actually just a bunch of people working behind the scenes to accomplish the tasks given to juiz, just like AI in real life! the idea of juiz herself is appealing though, even for a paranoid luddite like myself. i do like how each character has their own version of her too, it's a cute detail. still, even juiz get's the bullet during my eventual tech purge, fight the good fight against all forms of AI. there is no ethical use of ai, always remember that. the show's stance on employment has aged like wine too, the issues presented with corporate hierarchies and unethical, cliquey hiring practices have only served to get worse in a post-linked in world and the problems that system presents are only serving to bolster the issues with the world. the music for the show is pretty excellent too! both its original OST and its licenced tracks are huge standouts for me. I've even used the former on the site before a few weeks back. the original OST is composed by Kenji Kawai and it has an amazing track list. kawai himself is a very renowned composer and this is just a blip on his already amazing track record. Other works he's been involved with include folklore for ps3, a personal favourite game of mine. the live action death notes which were two of the first Japanese movies i ever saw. resident evil vendetta, mobile police patlabour, ranma 1/2, project a-ko, ghost in the shell, many fate and higurashi anime, touken Ranbu, mob psycho and kamen rider build. he's one of the best to ever do it. standout tracks for me include "saki's theme" which is probably my favourite track on the OST. it has a very sega Saturn energy to it, the tracks "Yuuutsu wo Fukitobase!" and "Hajimari no Kuui" have a similar tone. "eden of the east" which i used a few weeks back on the site, it's remix in "ame no eden" is great too. "Takizawa theme", "winning run" and "Blue Monday" sound like they would fit right into one of the FF13 games or musashi samurai legend. "juiz", "AXK-0" and "society" are super mysterious and catchy tracks. "atatakai ame" and "erabareshi mono" are great. "shopping mall" is a top 5 track also, sounds right out of gran turismo or a falcom RPG. " Mitasareta Koritsu" is one of the more relaxing tracks and is another personal favourite it has real VN backing track energy, same with the track "hatsukoi". " futari de te wo tsunaide" and "yuuyake" round out the last tracks, both pretty great. the openings get a little strange, see, there's two. one of which is the more usual pick with Saori Hayami's "Michael Ka Belial" which is a very solid and catchy, if slightly ill fitting seeming choice. the reason it sounds ill fitting is because it's a little clear it wasn't the intended OP for the series, something you may not notice if you stream the show now since it's other opening is completely absent on these platforms. the other opening is the song "falling down" by oasis. it's a weird choice but it fits the show well and the opening animation is very noticeably timed around it. it's a great OP stylistically and the song fits well. though weirdly it's also my only real exposure to the band, a good first impression even though it's not the kind of thing I'd usually listen to. the highlight of the OP for me is the animation in it though, it has tons of cool imagery and i love the pink fruitager metro looking aesthetic it has going on, and all the cool text that i have memorized. You can even find some of those quotes making their way into some of my website bio's on various messaging services. the ending theme is the best though, with "futuristic imagination" by school food punishment. A band i was really into when i first watched this right from the second when i first heard the ED at the end of episode 2. something that repeated again this time when that episode hit and i was hooked on them again, they're an all timer for me and I've listened to their entire discography at least a dozen times over. this might be one of their best songs too, it's catchy, fits the show great and the stop motion animation they chose for it absolutely kills. it's an easy top 5 anime ED for me. while it's not an ED or OP i figured i would also mention the track "reveal the world" here which plays at key points in the show, a cool western(?) christmas sounding track that fits the show perfectly since the latter chunks do take place in winter. *spoiler segment* the show sticks the landing too, the ending had me in tears and it the scene with Akira destroying the missiles is an all time favourite of mine, it's a perfect way to go out and the music choice for it is amazing too. the image of Akira as the air king is just so iconic. sure it might not wrap everything up, but it gets across the shows message pretty perfectly and it gives so much emotional catharsis. the stuff with Eden and the NEET's in the mall was especially perfect to me and for sure the funniest way it could have ended. the rest would be resolved later in the shows two movies, king of Eden and paradise lost. both of these I'll cover on their own separately, i have more than enough to talk about that they deserve their own page. the show was directed by Kenji Kamiyama. he's pretty well known for stuff like ghost in the shell: stand alone complex, moribito, a run of ultraman, 009 RE: cyborg, jin roh and napping princess. he does a great job with the show and you can get the feeling it was very much a passion project. same goes for the animation studio behind it who did a great job. it was animated by production IG, best known for stuff like haikyuu, GITS: stand alone complex, cromartie high school, XXXholic, a personal favourite of mine with the 3 seasons of sengoku basara as well as it's movie, kimi ni todoke, kuroko no basuke, psycho pass and video girl ai. The show is pretty easy to find if you want to watch it. The whole thing is on youtube for free and the DVD's are super cheap and common at least in my region, plus it's only 11 episodes so it's a very breezy watch. there's even a collected version with both movies that's on blu ray and DVD or the individual ones like i have, so your options are wide open. i would avoid the streaming versions though, these cut the oasis opening and don't seem to have the "air communication" movie which is a theatrical retelling of the movie that shortens it a little and ads in some fun commentary from the show's characters on the events. it's a neat bonus that was included on the second disc for king of eden. it's worth a watch but i'd say only as a bonus after you finish the show since it spoils a ton and has the characters speaking over key scenes. still the extra lore was super welcome and i'm always willing to hear more from this cast any chance i could. the two movies are required viewing though. they act as the second half of the show more or less and are still on par with the show, king of eden especially is a great time. the show in general is a great watch, it goes without saying that you should give it a try but if you have any hesitation then at least check out the first episode on youtube. i promise it'll hook you. from a modern day set anime we move on to a post apocalyptic game. initially I went into this under an assumption, a false one. I had never seen these movies, probably never will, but I had an interest in this game anyway based on something I read online calling the game a "fallout-like" which to me meant that the game was going to be an open world with scavenging kin to a fallout. that it would have a large world with cool locations to explore and in depth RPG systems and a little freedom in builds. This isn't really how the game is, now I won't let that cloud my opinion of the game but I will clarity that incase like me, you also saw this comparison online. it's not a fallout clone. it has some elements like the dialogue tree and some semi open segments, plus the looting mechanics, but the game in reality is actually more of a far cry like, a series I directly do not enjoy. this did lessen my opinion of the game I do have to admit. it's a solid far cry clone, but even a good far cry, is still a far cry. the gameplay is just as you would expect given this comparison: a shooter with light exploration and scavenging elements, some cute little hub areas, options between stealth or action and a large skill tree that's half meaningless. it's the kind of thing that you know you'll like just from hearing it's a far cry clone. the stealth isn't all that deep and a little boring, the gunplay isn't very fun and is super unbalanced and the enemies are total bullet sponges. it's got issues but none of them really damage it all that much and none of it really stands out as being particularly bad. There are a few neat things like the hacking minigame just being frogger or how the terminators can only be damaged by energy weapons, but these are just small things and the latter even kind of hurts the game since it means you'll only be carrying around a small selection of those guns which don't have a ton of ammo available for them. there is nice weapon variety though, some fun shotguns and machineguns and snipers and a few really neat miniguns, though outside of the energy weapons and the shotgun none of them feel super good to use and the endgame is focused more or less exclusively on rocket launchers and the energy weapons, which does make the second half of the game feel really samey. it's not a bad time all things told, low budget and jank but in a way that feels kind of good overall, it's got a 7th gen charm to it in that way which i think will seriously click with some people. It even has more linier shooter levels with set pieces which i think are some of the games highlights. A stealth level set in an abandoned hospital full of enemies you aren't prepped to kill yet being the highlight of the whole game (though i learned early on you could hack the turrets and lure them into it for easy kills). the graphics are just fine. The game has some cool levels and some neat looking hub worlds, but for the most part there just isn't much to look at here. the level themes don't do much for me , it's a lot of very similar looking area's and many of them tended to blend in together after a short time. really the only thing that differentiates some of them to me is the time of day or a set piece or two there-in like the aformentioned hospital or the final battle with it's giant mechs and the blandness makes me not really want to explore them. for the most part it's all just ruins and bases, though the california ruins near the games end do at least feel like a distinct set of ruins with some hillside mansions and tennis courts. i do like how they look at night though, they feel super grimy and oppressive and i think it gives the game a good atmosphere. The OST does much the same but i never found much of it that stands out or is really worth mentioning, feels super 90's though. the story also doesn't do much for me, but I've also never seen the movie, so all of these characters and references probably went over my head. regardless it just struggled to engage me, though i did like some of the people around the base and i liked their little side stories and personalities and i did want to see them survive. quick warning though the game has a few very out of place sex scenes with some of those characters if you do their quests. they came out of nowhere and felt super crass and a little gross, just very ill fitting for the game and they don't look very high effort either in a way that makes them feel very tacked on. The fact that almost every named woman in the game has one feels more than a little misogynistic. as far as length goes it's a good 7-9 hours which i think is a fine runtime, though the lack of variety in the gameplay and environments do make it feel like kind of a drag, especially if you factor in the DLC. It's a difficult game too. level-ups do help but on normal i found the game didn't give you nearly enough health or ammo and i frequently found myself running entirely dry of both in the early game and a lot of the stat increases feel very marginal and meaningless. i do like the atmosphere the difficulty gives the game at points but at least for me i couldn't stick with it for the whole game and changed to easy, which i had a far better time with. it's not an expensive game at least either. The ps4 version will run you about £10 but i would say to go for the ps5 version for reasons I'll get to, it's maybe £5-8 more but it has a bunch of exclusive features that make this version feel a lot obsolete. This ps5 version added some new stuff like haptic feedback that feels pretty strong, those cool triggers that are used to semi good effect here and a whole new mode thrown in as well as an exclusive DLC campaign. all of this making it the definitive version. this new mode is neat, it's called infiltrator mode and it lets you play as the machine in a cute little randomizer roguelike setting. it's a fun time with you going into a map, having to complete mini objectives to gain intel so you can go on to find more mini objectives so you can eventually find and kill a target. it has a fun loop though the map is very repetitive, a little overly big and the missions are pretty one note, plus playing as a robot doesn't really add much. It gives you more health, a new weapon or two and a slightly better vision mode, but as a small distraction it's a solid, if buggy, time. there was also a DLC expansion added to this version of the game. it has a full blown new campaign set during the events of the base game just after the halfway point and it's pretty solid. It's another 3-4 hours of game time with some new areas, enemy types, a new mall hub and an entire new cast of characters. it might actually be my favourite part of the game overall with how it feels like the game realizing more of it's potential and working to fix the issues it had. the new zones are more interesting to explore, with a cool downtown area with radio stations, train stations, a spooky cemetary,a cool stealth segment in a school during a flashback and even a cool excavator zone with a different colour pallet and vibe to anything else in the game. sure it's all very samey but it's at least slightly more interesting samey and they're all good to explore, the mall especially. even the missions there are more interesting. cool hunts for items you can use, bombs to plant and some neat hidden objectives like destroying things faster than your teammates, a lot of work has clearly went into it and it shows. the set pieces too are great, more tense stealth segments, a big escape sequence set in a train station that's a lot of fun, prison breaks and even a boss that's larger than anything else in the game. that said it's got issues, there just isn't a lot new here for the price and you don't get access to a lot of the most fun weapons from the campaign since it's set long before you get the final stage of plasma weapons. in addition to needing to level up again and not having any new weapons or items to play around with, making it feel a little boring if you come right into it from the campaign, but if those don't matter to you then you'll have a good time here. keeping with the sci-fi theming I also watched a pretty cool modern set sci-fi movie called "beyond the infinite 2 minutes" and really liked it. it's about a cafe manager who gets a TV that can see into the future and the things it gets him caught up in. it's a really cool take on an almost-but-not-really time loop movie and the way it handles the time stuff is like nothing I've ever seen, it's really trippy with how it's all in one take. it does a lot with it that I won't spoil but it's consistently funny, earnest and heartfelt, there's even a pretty sweet romance in there that I liked a lot and some fun action scenes with a few pretty scary yakuza. the cast are great too, with different people from the managers life coming in and out of the cafe to see the TV in action and it's always funny seeing them react to it and the various ideas they have for messing with the future. I am trying to stay a little vague so I don't spoil too much because I really think this should be watched at least a little blind, it makes the movie a lot more fun to see what they do with it. it's a nice breezy watch though that never gets too dark or serious, it can even be really cozy because of how nice the cafe setting is. give it a try, it's fun and it has a really nice message to it that resonated a lot with me, you can find it online for pretty cheap on DVD, I got it in a black Friday sale for only £2 a little ago and it was absolutely worth that. the movie also has "title call" by vollyboys in its credits and i think that deserves mention because that's a pretty great song and I'm glad this introduced me to it. lastly we'll move away from the sci-fi and move into fantasy with the game Highguard. This game really came out of nowhere, huh. usually i keep my eye on these kinds of weirdo GAAS titles since at this point it's kind of my thing. Good or bad or whatever i play basically all of the ones i can before shutdown, so usually i know what's coming and going at least on the console front. This blindsided me though. I saw the reveal live at TGA in a call with my sister and we were both kind of dumbfounded at why *this* was the final reveal, but we both agreed then and there that we had to play it. The wait for the game too was just as strange, no beta's or communication or anything, just a launch event a few days beforehand and then it was out to very little real fanfare. i saw way more stuff that week for things like arknights endfield and 2XKO which also launched at the same timeframe. This game was a total enigma which is weird since the game itself just isn't all that interesting. the game is a weird mix of a siege game, a hero shooter and a looter shooter, but that's something that sounds a lot more interesting than it is. because on the face of it that doesn't sound all that bad, it could be like mordhau but good! instead it's just mordhau but only slightly less boring. How the loop goes is you start the match by picking a hero and a mount. personally i liked the desert girl who could walk through walls and go invisible and the ice guy, which is very clearly is the developers attempts to court a Chinese audience, who can spawn these big ice walls and go into a big monkey rage mode. My mount of choice was also the bear, naturally, you can't hand me a cute little bear and not have me pick him. You then fortify your base, go looting in a map that is *far* too big for the 3V3 matches the games go for. It's a lot of nothingy open space and it means that you'll rarely really encounter anyone else during this looting phase. this is also where you'll grab your guns and armour, i tended to prefer the machineguns myself, though there was a cool autoshotgun that had a cross style spread that i found really neat. these guns also get better after each loop, but to negligible degrees. after this the shieldbreaker will form and this is the thing you need to get into enemy bases, it's basically a battering ram summoner. You get this to the base and it begins the last phase which is where it just turns into a short match of R6 siege or demolition from call of duty and that's your loop. if you don't finish off the base fast enough the loop resets and you need the battering ram again. i don't super like this, it means games either feel a little too short or far, far too long and the whole time you're just waiting for the siege to start since it's the most fun and engaging part of the game. not so subtle last second edit, they actually did add 5V5 mode as i was writing this and it's actually big improvement, it fixes a good few of the flaws i mentioned, but it does make matches go on *forever* in the few i tried. still though, huge improvement! there's a few other heroes too than the two i mained. Like the broccoli haired guy who can throw a spear that damages around him. A bear guy who can tear down walls and do a big roar to break a ton at once. A woman with a crow that can scout areas. A cool looking huge oni with demon summoning powers. a witch that can block off areas with tenticles and who gains bonuses by breaking the enemies dropped revive orbs. lastly you have a guy with fire powers that can send along a trail of fire by throwing it. they're not all that varied mechanically and i find very few of the powers that useful, the designs aren't much to write home about either. the game just doesn't have a distinct art style beyond "fantasy with guns" like they took the old "oblivion with guns" meme a little too seriously. it's a varied cast sure and i like the desert girl and the witch, but none of it will stick with me and it's a game i already find myself forgetting about artistically. same for the maps, they all kind of blend in together beyond what biome they are, but it does have a snow map and i like both the snow base and the cool desert pirate base so i will give it credit for that. what else, what else... there isn't much of a story here but the characters do have dialogue and there's even me recognisable VA's in English and in Japanese, the latter being what i played in. the netcode too deserves a mention for being genuinely awful. me and my sister spent a good hour just trying to get the game to let her finish the tutorial without kicking her to the lobby and when we did get into a game it wasn't much better. this persisted long after our playsession and the one i had with the 5V5 mode was the worst yet, too many times a match it borders on unplayable. All this said do i recommend it? not really, though for the price of free and the fact it is improving slowly, I'd say at least try if you're curious, you don't have much to lose. it beats blindly repeating what others are saying about it and with a game like this that captured the zeitgeist in such a negative way. i find it's better to try them and form your own opinion, rather than blindly following the hate-train for something. At least then your own negative opinion you may have on it will at least be your own.