Played through Ghost and played more of F1 and Xenoblade. My thoughts on Ghost are in that thread, in short I give it 9.1/10 its fantastic.
XC is pretty good but its an RPG I'm already getting fairly tired with yet again. So many quests that are just: read a load of textboxes about some random shame -> teleport somewhere -> kill x amount of enemies / pick x of something up -> teleport and go back and read through textboxes about random shame again. Some are streamlined and don't make you return which is nice but some are really annoying in that the NPC/ enemy is only around at a certain time of day with no indication when so you just have to trial and error time skip until they appear, its just dumb. Also quest markers on the map don't show unless you're in that map area so you have to teleport somewhere first just to check the map to see the markers and teleport again. You have to do lots of side quests to keep up with the level for the main quest even though they're rubbish and boring, but that's just how most RPGs work.
The game's combat system is interesting but a little messy and awkward to manage sometimes. The story is good but delivery is weird and it feels especially bad after playing through two Sony games recently. Overall after 17 hours I'm just not seeing how this game earned an 89 review average in 2020, but RPGs and JRPGs especially often are forgiven for so much tedium and bad design that it doesn't really surprise me. I skipped over a lot that I am liking about the game though, I still think it feels like a 7/10 so far perhaps.
Also started in Control. Its weird and runs like dog on base PS4, those are my main two observations so far. I'm liking it though, definitely looking forward to playing it through to the end.
