Hey, I got very, very sick with covid right around labor day, and took that time to finally start horizon zero dawn. Absolutely loved it, wandered far off path often, enjoyed exploring, did a ton of sidequests and just really enjoyed it end to end. Very interesting world, nuanced criticism of billionares and still presented them like real people, flawed, who think they are trying to do the right thing and tangled up with guilt and connections to others while they raced against time. Was very interesting. Combat stayed deliberate and fun right up until the end and although the final confrontation sucked - an angry ball summons a tough enemy you already fought after you just killed dozens of them with a cool cannon? and I was a little sad that there were such a small number of total machines, I had a great time with it. Took me about 100 hours to complete blind, but I wandered off a lot. Voice acting was great, and although lipsync was often bad it was fine. I liked aloy a lot as well and her character development from rejecting others to slowly recognizing that while she doesn't share their needs for community and such, that those communities are important running parallel to liz's motivations was interesting and I did not see Faro killing everyone off and purging appolo coming at all. The writing overall was interesting and cinematic in the best possible way.

I started Forbidden west shortly after, very excited to see how the story progresses and was immediately greated with an aloy who was much quicker to anger in general and it felt like they were full on dumping nuance. TED IS VERY BAD. Liz was VERY good. Aloy is no longer diplomatic and needs no one but herself. Sun king is now aloof and weird and stands super awkward and seems to be a different person entirely. Aloy is no longer privately dismissive of people but actively antagonistic in a lot of cases. That weird loud guy in the first big down claiming he's the best friend of the oseram but is such an insufferable twat with no redeemable qualities at all and you run him out of town because you are good and he is bad. Some stuff was really good in the beginning though, too! Teaching your buddy to use the focus was good cover for aloy explaining how it all works again. Combat immediately seemed more spear-friendly, and much more dynamic. Combos based on light and heavy attacks and delay timing was really fun! at first. Then it constantly gives you hints forever, there are a thousand more weapons so you immediately feel bad when you upgrade a weapon and then just replace it with a better weapon with no upgrades and ammo upgrades now feel like a huge chore since you have to hunt infinitely and by the end I had given up mostly on upgrading things. Even melee got worse as so much more damage was unavoidable, enemies would attack concurrently and damage lock you for 3-5 hits if you played it to close and combat started to feel less strategic and much more like basic kiting was about all you could do, run and shoot and dodge. Not being able to go back into hiding easily without smokebombs was infuriating, as it meant stealth gameplay was much, much more difficult, even after fully speccing into stealth it was not a general combat option to totally clear an area by the late game, and wasn't an option at all for medium and large machines. The story felt like it was covering all the same beats in aloy's personality as the first one, but she generally seemed a good deal more aggressive, mean and distrusting of everyone and it just seemed hamfisted and tropesy. Her absolute refusal to ever even try to empathize with sylens was baffling, even when he gave up on abandoning humanity to help and begrudgingly thanked aloy at the very end was baffling - I get why she doesn't want to trust him but it's also gone way beyond what makes sense for someone who could forgive murderers and slavers and all sorts in the first game. I was absolutely frustrated with the frog robots in burning shores that literally just try to jump on you, spray poison, and spray other further range poison and that's the whole thing. that completely reinforced that I wasn't fighting wrong, and managing constant damage was the combat directive in this game... and it just felt so sloppy.

Melee got better through horizon1, so it completely falling off in h2 felt SO bad - I don't hate ranged gameplay at all, but that felt worse, too! we were much more limited in carrying capacity so explosives weren't a viable go to to get out of fights quickly unless you wanted to resupply frequently, and targetting weak points or blowing off components with tear arrows was often less reliable and slower than it felt in the first game. Enemy weapons were less impactful - early on in H1 I found I could tear the weapons off a thunderjaw and use them to almost entirely kill it, then use precision arrows to carefully target the heart if anything was left. That was SUPER fun! in H2, this was no longer possible, fighting the the thunderjaw was worse generally, his weapons were weaker, he closed the distance faster so you just had to kind of... iframe through the leap, then put some space and plink away at him. And that was every big fight. I did really like the zenith turncoat, but "I am doing this because I was in love with your clone" felt... kind of lazy. And a little silly, for a thousand year old human who was clearly a deep pragmatist. In general, the writing often felt like that. just kind of lazy, kneejerky, simple. Less cinematic, less nuanced and much, much less thoughtful. It felt almost like a marvel movie. Grandiose in concept but execution felt juevenile and simple. I thought the siege on the island turning out to be just us killing some spectres and then seeing a huge battle that we don't really participate in was really pulling the ripcord too fast and not letting us enjoy it, and they should have at least had us do like, a hopelessly pinned down always-lose fight while sylens fired off the shield thing, or something. ANYTHING. other than "then they all fly away" and the fact that we got to see almost none of the zenith base was extremely depressing and felt like they hugely rushed the final section, but I thought the fight with the zenith guy was fun, and the fact that we got a real, unique final boss with Tilda's robot suit thing was fun. This was a huge letdown in the first game so while both of them were a little cringey and definitely didn't have enough lines for the fight (seriously devs... just don't loop lines, have them go quiet if they run out and just grunt angerly or blurt out random expletives when they get hurt or miss, come on) but overall it was good.

Sylens sticking around had to happen, but at least didn't feel obvious and felt like a pang of the writing I liked so much in the first one that was more nuanced and allowed him to be more than a villain we had an uneasy alliance with. It felt like almost a return to form in a small way and had me excited for the DLC, but in general that felt really hammy, too. Another quen group felt a little lazy, as did doing aloy 2 but she's quen as did chasing around another zenith who was extra bad guy and extra annoying and written with absolutely zero redeeming qualities, so basically rehashing erik but making him even more obviously just the most evil bad guy was again, just... lazy. As was "no these quen aren't crazy worshippers of the old world like the guys who worshipped faro, they uh, are brainwashed!" also felt just really lazy. it all felt so hollow and rehashy in something that already felt rehashy and had lost it's luster as it wore on. Culminating in a fight with a horus was great - thats what i had hoped we'd see in the first game as the final fight, and while the stealth optional sections were a decent way to be like "oh yeah, we used to be a stealth game kind of!" the actual fight with the thing being us targetting weak spots while dodging often repeated hits felt like it was just doing what we'd always done. There was one small climbing segment but having to wait for fire or zaps to stop completely ditched the platforming and challenge we had in some of the cauldrons and felt exceptionally lazy, yet again, for a fight that I feel like should have involved a LOT more climbing, swimming and flying on our part - would have been a great opportunity to have us say, remove a cannon from the horus, use that to overheat components but the canon also gets too hot and we have to dive on the bird to cool the canon down so we can continue the onslaught until we finally use the canon to peel open a hole in the horus and go in, but we get tossed off and it dives so we have to swim in. Could have felt like a shadows of the colossus style giant fight! But instead we shot some shiny spots, giant machine got mad and got wet, we went inside, we shot some shiny spots, the big evil man cries, and we win. I get a bunch more skillpoints I won't use because I don't care about the trapper skills and the machine skills and I maxed everything else out and in general I did not like the skill tree much and away we go to some kissing and the setup for game 3.

I thought the final thing was nice, the romance hinging on one of those 3 way choices gave us a choice between romance or pushing her off but I also feel like aloy's romance there felt forced and in general she seemed like she wouldn't have had time for such a distraction and a much more believable character wouldn't have been an almost clone of her personality wise in a game that already has done more cloning tropes than I care for but instead someone more like rost - patient, calm, reserved but forceful and strong when necessary, encouraging her to strike hard, but also take a deep breath and relax when she has time, and wormed their way in that way. Just felt... again, lazy. Poorly thought out. And I liked seyka a lot overall, just felt a little out of place, what they ended up doing with the character.

TL:DR:

The last thing I did was go and check out a thunderjaw fight in H2, then boot h1 back up and try the same fight and immediately, h1 felt like home again. it felt great, tight and focused, and the combat felt so much more deliberate and so much less like I was managing unavoidable damage and chugging heals and spamming roll after roll to ride through a series of attacks. And that really cemented it for me, that in nearly every way - writing, combat, gameplay, story structure H1 was just a masterpiece and H2 never really made it back to those same heights.

I know this is super long and rambling, but I had a lot of thoughts on the last 200 hours of horizon I played through. I desperately wanted to love H2 as much as H1, and I kept feeling like "oh shit, real final bosses! Finally, here we go!" but it kept just missing the mark a little bit. H2 was still a good game, but it felt like a good game from a different series, and following up such a clear masterpiece like h1 with this game feels bad. I haven't started looking at the wiki or digging into any other responses, reviews or deep dives, I wanted to type out my thoughts before I start looking, but I did want to know if anyone else generally felt like that was the case, or if H2 is universally considered better and I'm just nuts.

edit: I just want to note for some folks who seem pretty upset that an attack on something you like isn't an attack on you and I didn't even say I hate it and it's the worst game ever, just that it paled in comparison to the first game and playing both side by side totally blind it felt a little sad for it to not feel like a perfect sequel. and please do not DM me to argue with me and just reply here lol

Also lol at the guy downvoting every comment, you do you bud but it just tells everyone who sees it that someone is seething, again, it's OK to disagree