Horizon: Forbidden West

[Moonface]

So I finished the main story of the game last night, and I have to say the ending of the story was up there for disappointments for me with God of War Ragnarök. I don't know what it is with Sony's first parties lately, but I'm getting tired of this trend where the stories go for this grand long-winded setup with multiple moving parts that always fail to deliver an ending that doesn't feel rushed and underwhelming in its attempt to wrap everything up. Compared to the end mission of HZD, there was absolutely nothing redeeming about HFW's one for me:

HFW Ending Mission

• Varl is killed by one of the Zenith members shortly before the final mission, and I expected the fight against this character to be something really cool since he's built up throughout the game to be a formidable member of the Zenith's. Instead, the fight against him wasn't just disappointing; it was boring. Except for two attacks, nothing he does deals any real damage even on the hardest difficulty, so you can just tank most of his attacks and continue shooting at him, while in the first fight against him earlier in the game he feels like a genuine threat when he tries to attack you. There's also very little reaction from Aloy about facing off against the killer of one of her best friends, and the fight ends with Varl's lover walking up behind him and running him through with her spear. With how devastated everyone is when Varl dies, I'd expect the two people closest to him to give way more of a shit about taking him out than they do. I also think the fight should have been Aloy and Zo fighting together against him for revenge, and having to work together to take him down.
  
• The final boss fight of the game is also just really shite. Unsurprisingly, the one Zenith ally you get betrays you and gets into a mech suit, and it was again just a really boring fight that had a really dull setup, and didn't feel satisfying to finish because the build-up wasn't there to be invested in the fight emotionally even if mechanically it had still been boring. I don't think it helps that the mech just explodes and shoots out the pilot pod that this Zenith is inside of, and Aloy just assumes the bitch is dead? I dunno, check for a pulse, have some final dying words that tries to take advantage of the character developments that had been done beforehand? For context, this Zenith knew the woman who Aloy is cloned from, and tries to use that at the start of the fight to justify her actions; maybe it could have ended with the Zenith lamenting in her final moments that she failed twice or something, and Aloy retorting with something simple like "You did, but this world is better off for it". I dunno, just another fight that was just "oh, guess we're done" that was swiftly moved on from.
  
• The "twist" at the end you discover was just total trash to me and couldn't make me any less interested in the next game if it tried. The whole premise of HFW was a lot of "Go here, fetch this thing, get an ally along the way", rinse and repeat and this new threat that gets revealed at the end of the game looks like it's going to be more "Fetch things and get allies to stop this threat" for the sequel, which just isn't interesting. There isn't even going to really be any mystery to uncover about this threat because we probably know everything we need to already from the ending; it's a sentient mass of digital human minds and knowledge that was formed by the failed experiments of the Zenith's attempts at immortality, and it will eventually come and wipe out life on Earth because it was chasing the Zenith's there. There's nothing else to go over about it, especially since all of this stuff was done off-planet so we can't even explore ancient ruins looking for clues like we could about GAIA, Zero Dawn, and the Faro Plague.
  
• This new threat also makes zero sense from a motivation standpoint. The Zenith's explain they locked this sentient mass up prior to it gaining sentience, and when it eventually did it was able to break free of its containment using all of the knowledge it had from basically being combined copies of all of the minds of the Zenith population. It chooses to break free and decimate the Zenith colony as payback for being locked up; one of them even explains it sent a signal to the HADES AI to turn it sentient and wipe out life on Earth before the Zenith's could arrive so that they would not have a place to flee to, but when Aloy stops HADES in HZD it causes this sentient Zenith mass to head to Earth itself to deal with the Zenith's that are fleeing there. However, at the end of this game all of the Zenith are dead, and although this sentient mass doesn't know this fact I don't see why it should give a shit about wiping out Earth once it learns the Zenith are dead. It can clearly become aware of whether the Zenith are dead or not, because of the Zenith's plan to flee to a faraway star system where they can't be detected. I guess maybe it doesn't care and will wreck Earth anyway, but an AI that will just wipe out life on the planet is literally retreading the motivations of the HADES AI in HZD except it's more dangerous; basically the next game is just Aloy vs. HADES 2.0.
  

I could go into more issues I had with the ending, but these were some of the biggest I had. The game itself is really fun and has some neat things, but it's for me yet another Sony sequel that improves on gameplay and falters heavily on story in its crucial moments and delivery. I'm honestly at a point where I doubt I'll buy a first-party Sony sequel at full price for a while because of this trend I've started seeing.