whatsarobot Not sure if this materially adds to what other folks hav said, but I spent a good amount of last year revisiting the NMH series, so I have a few lil observations.
I loved NMH back in 2007, but like so many things like that for me, the first game is the equivalent of a stupid joke you heard and laughed at years ago, but then you hear it again 15 years later and you’re like… yikes, that was super cringe, what did I ever see in it?
Sometime about 6 months before NMH3 came out, I played back through the first 2 games and TSA, and while the first game is still fun from a gameplay perspective, it feels a lot to me it was a step backward from the extremely strange Killer7 (which still holds up strongly, IMO). I never cared for 2, but I tried it anyway and still didn’t really enjoy it.
TSA, on the other hand, is an excellent 7/10 game, I completely agree! And it’s got a bunch of the strangeness that NMH didn’t have in so many ways. I enjoy it a lot, and it feels like an actual meditation on NMH’s successes and shortcomings, in a way that made me wonder if NMH was more intelligently made than it seems. I still don’t know how I feel about it, overall.
But based on all that, I bought MHN3, thinking it could be great. I mean, it severely hurts the game in my eyes that in the first figurative five minutes of the game, it has some extremely shitty treatment of its two female supporting characters, killing one off and maiming another, who was previously maimed already in an earlier game. Not an encouraging start! I hung in there despite this, and while it’s got some cool and interesting things going for it, like the combat system and some of the side characters and parts of the world, it just increasingly left a sour taste in my mouth, so I set it aside to play something else.
I still don’t know how I feel about the series on the whole! I think Suda is the kind of person who was almost better as a designer when he had less to work with, and NMH3 is a game that had a bunch of money and resources thrown at it. As a result it feels like almost every idea that he had for the game made it into the final product.