Personally I'm none too keen on this new action focus that SquareEnix has taken the series but many people like it.

What really has me second guessing myself are the graphics. They seem not necessarily bad but dated and/or lower budget than I expect from a main series release. Their character models still suffer from lack of mocap especially facial details. The backgrounds are lackluster and the textures basic. Even during one of their much touted Epic Eikon battles they use a completely gray background?! I feel like my PS5 hardware is taking a nap while playing this game.

Edit: turns out that after adjusting settings on both the game and my TV everything looks much better. For some reason my usual game profile on my TV made everything look super washed out. Between that and the beginning of the game being pretty monotone for the first bit with the game look super washed out and without detail.

One of the main driving factors of the series have always been the progression tree. Historically unique awesome visual representations of the skills you can gain with varying paths to choose from. FF16 has a basic interface that essentially amounts to equippable skills with (so far) no exploratory elements whatsoever.

Lastly the main protagonist seems almost like a clone of final fantasy FFXV character. The clothes are similar, his backstory is similar, and his skills are similar.

I understand that I'm probably aging out of their target demographic and I'm especially curious on younger people's thoughts on it.

Edit: After about 30 hours and almost at the end of the game it has grown on me a bit. The combat while still super easy at least it is more fun with added Eikons. The side missions get a bit better towards the last third of the game and some of the hunts are pretty challenging. I'm still disappointed in the lack of RPG elements such as, skill trees, elemenal and status mechanics, and equipment variety but I've enjoyed the game and can at least appreciate the accessibility to a wider audience.

My favourite game is Crystal Version for the Game Boy Color. I've been playing Pokemon since the beginning - Red and Blue. I loved the original games, and as a kid I saw the hype for the release of Gold/Silver online. Gold/Silver's release is easily the most excited I've been for anything in my life. When they finally came out in the west, they hit all my expectations and more. The introduction of genders, time-based events with a visible day/night cycle, new types, new Pokemon, held items and so much more made the games a hugely more in-depth experience compared to the originals. No other game in the franchise has offered such a marked improvement over the previous to date.

Crystal, being a third version, is essentially an enhanced version of Gold and Silver. It doesn't blow them out of the water, but what it does add is nice. Animated sprites, some feature refinements and an improved storyline makes it the quintessential Gen II game in my opinion.

Remakes of Gold/Silver - with some Crystal features included - exist in the form of HGSS for the Nintendo DS. A top five Pokemon game in it's own right, I like it slightly less because they don't have quite the same vibe the originals had. This is almost entirely due to nostalgia, but it's what I believe.

Do you agree? Do you disagree entirely? Share with us your favourite Pokemon game and why.

I was playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with my kid the other day and it was a blast. Nintendo have really nailed this game, especially in the balance of accessible enough for beginners to have fun but hard enough for people to have a challenge too.

My other favourite game (although I haven't played it for a while) is Sega Rally Championship on Sega Saturn. This game has 4 tracks (one of which needs to be unlocked) and 3 cars (and again, one of these needs to be unlocked). The tiny number of cars and tracks means that you get to do the same corners over and over. This might sound tedious, but when you hit the corner just right you know it. You can get a sense of mastery over it. I've spent many hours playing games in the Gran Turismo series, and I really enjoy them, but fair play some of the tracks and cars are just shovelled into the game and you don't spend much time with them

In the first Gran Turismo the licensing tests were properly hard. They weren't messing around. Getting bronze requires people to read the manual and understand what the point of the test is. Getting all gold is an actual challenge for experienced players. I feel like the tests (at least, the bronze levels) got easier in later games. The UK soundtrack was small but pretty good.

My final mention is the Burnout series. I loved the crash junctions. I'm not sure the open world of Paradise was fun - it meant spending a lot of time driving across a map to get to the start line of various events. I feel the same way about many games - I'd rather just have a menu of levels and what I need to do to complete them (GoldenEye, SNES PilotWings, BlastCorps are all good examples) than have this stuff obscured by the open world. Burnout on the Nintendo DS was a genuinely awful game. I think Burnout Dominator was my favourite in the series.

So, what do driving games get right? What do they miss? What interesting game mechanics do you enjoy?