Developer: Sucker Punch
Platform: Playstation 5
Do. Not. Buy. Ghost of Yotei.
I wish I could end the review right there, but alas, I'm a critic with integrity.
*Sigh*. Ghost of Yotei is a spiritual successor to 2020's excellent out-of-the-blue hit, Ghost of Tsushima, and it's by far the most predictable monument to AAA excess that exists. It's perhaps the most AAA game ever made. When I've tried to think of a brief way to describe my experience with this sorry waste of time and money, the descriptor that comes to mind is "apathetic disgust."
Taking place centuries after Tsushima, Yotei has absolutely nothing going for it story-wise. No historical invasion to riff off of, no Samurai code of honor to contend with, nothing.
You play as Atsu, who is surprisingly just as good a protagonist as Jin from Tsushima. Equally steeped in the culture (taking on a quest because "it's bad luck to leave a spiritual man alone in the woods", delaying combat to bow at shrines, etc), equally dedicated to helping anyone she comes across, pleasant, humble when needed, and joyful at times without resorting to quips, all around a pretty great protagonist. It's just too bad she has nothing to work with but the most bog-standard revenge story known to man.
On that note, the premise is this: when Atsu was a child, her family was killed by a band of ruffians known as "The Yotei Six." Each member of this gang rules some portion of Ezo (not Yotei, that's just the mountain in this area) with a truly mustache-twirling iron first. So, Atsu sets out to kill each member of the gang, getting caught up in various subplots in each area, blah blah blah.
Does this at all sound familiar? Because this game is a couple foot shots short of a weeaboo Kill Bill, and I walked out of a screening of Kill Bill because of how bored out of my pants I was. It's not like the moment-to-moment plot of Tsushima was special, but its overall narrative was at least fantastic and emotionally devastating. Here, though, it's just a wannabe Western with a Japanese coat of paint...and you know what? I can appreciate the team at Sucker Punch at least trying to not just do the exact same thing again...but the thing they try still has to be good.
One last thing about story and characters, I did find the leader of the Yotei six compelling. You don't get to see him do anything too often, but the promise of seeing more of him did get me further through this story than I would've thought.
Also lacking from Yotei is any sense of style whatsoever. This is a spiritual successor that chooses fidelity first and art second. It's empty grasslands, desolate snowscapes (like the worst part of Tsushima), barely-detailed red trees, etc. And it's all scored with one of the most lifeless soundtracks I've heard since the last time I saw a comedy in theaters.
To its credit, Yotei's map, dull as it is, is filled with content just like its predecessor (for the marked up $70 price tag, it goddamn better be), and this content is largely of that predecessor's same flavor. You get into hot springs to increase your health. You slice through bamboo to increase your maximum spirit. You find altars to gain new skills. And so on and so forth. The kind of thing that makes my average adult-sized autistic brain happy...but I never once felt compelled to do any of it except those hot springs and bamboo stands since more health and spirit are basically prerequisites to surviving any combat encounter. More on that later.
Earlier I called Yotei the most AAA game ever made, so here's what I mean.
You will slide down a steep hill on your butt several times.
You will have to investigate campfires by slowly bending down at various points to comment on pieces of evidence (followed by a companion also chiming in on it).
This will result in a gang of hooligans stumbling in who happen to be looking for whoever you're looking for, resulting in a padding-purposed battle.
You will say or hear somebody else say "that's the last of them" after just about every combat section.
You will do the most unresponsive, stiff climbing sections you've ever seen in your life more times than you'd like.
You will have to deal with Atsu giving tutorial details out loud ("I can use the grass to sneak up on them"). You won't hear it as much as in other AAA games, but you'll still hear it.
You will have to go through turret sections (yes, in early Japan).
You will struggle to get down from small ledges during and outside of combat because Atsu will get stuck at the edges since AAA companies don't trust you not to accidentally fall to your death off any ledge.
You will have to dip into cutscenes that are locked at 30fps for no discernable reason.
You will struggle to interact with items because you have to be standing in the exact right spot, and Atsu is so overanimated that it's impossible to turn with anything resembling precision.
You will approach rock faces with a companion, press against it, and say "give me a boost/I'll give you a boost" approximately 500 times.
Good god, I started getting irritated just writing that. I am so goddamned sick of AAA studios and their cowardice when it comes to mission and traversal design. For god's sake, do something NEW!
With all that out of the way, let's move on to gameplay. Gameplay in Tsushima was good, so maybe it'll be good here too, right? Since there isn't any kind of innovation here? Well, it's hard to say if it's just bad here or if my tolerance for clunky AAA gameplay isn't what it was in 2020, but I just didn't enjoy the combat here at all. If you want to have any kind of control over where you swing your sword, you need to press up on the d-pad every single time you enter combat (it isn't a setting or anything), otherwise you're just going to swing at whatever enemy is closest, not the one you're pointing at. Atsu will slowly turn around to accomplish this goal sometimes.
Killing enemies is all about breaking their guard first, and I found this an arduous process even after I'd collected the proper weapon to use against a certain enemy type. Maybe it's just because the sound effect when hitting a guarding enemy is so lame, but it felt like pulling teeth. Maybe it was like that in Tsushima too, but I simply can't remember. Even if it was, I'm still being entirely fair here because that was then and this is now.
Once you break an enemy's guard, it isn't a one-hit kill like in Sekiro. You still have to whittle down health...and what this means in practice is that if you're anything like me, you'll be hammering the attack button to try and kill the enemy before they get their guard up again.
Compounding on this is some frankly astounding difficulty...yeah, I know, odd thing to think for a AAA snoozefest, especially for someone who recently beat the true final boss in Silksong. But I do mean it. Even with my armor set (fully upgraded version of the defense-centric set), it seemed like getting hit twice was enough to knock me down to critical health no matter where I was. And even with my weapons close to fully upgraded (maybe one level to go), it felt like enemies took exactly the same amount of hits to kill. It got to the point where I had to turn the difficulty down to easy...in a AAA game...having conquered all of Silksong. Really think about that, because I do pretty frequently. It just goes to show how clunkiness in movement and carelessness in design can take what should be a simple gameplay loop and make it into a problem.
I'll say this in Yotei's favor though: just like in Tsushima, stealth is actually pretty good. Astoundingly easy, but satisfying to pull off nonetheless. It's exactly what you'd expect from AAA stealth sections (tall grass, etc), but I suppose all even somewhat-competent stealth is superior to other gameplay loops. This, like the main villain, carried me further through this game than I otherwise might have gotten. So, credit where it's due.
Another place where credit is due is in an aspect that I'm not alone in praising: the training segments. In every area, Atsu trains with a master to learn a new weapon, and there's a tangible sense that you're improving with each exercise. The segment people praise the most is the first one: the dual katana. This involves training Atsu's left hand to be as strong as her right, so quicktime event buttons start out awkward and demand complicated button presses entirely with the left hand. But as the training progresses, the buttons start to move close to the center, organically showing the growing ambidexterity. This was inspired, and it's a shame that this inspiration couldn't have extended to the rest of the game.
But now we're back to negatives, as it's time to discuss technical fidelity. Animations are stilted, throwable weapons will sometimes hover in the air, button prompts will sometimes flicker in and out of existence randomly, things like that.
There are also invisible walls in odd places, such as in front of offering boxes. Atsu can't simply walk up to those, she has to walk in kind of a circular pattern up to them. There's sometimes an NPC standing in front of these boxes, and it's like the collider doesn't go away when he isn't there.
One thing I definitely do remember about Tsushima is that it was oddly buggy, so I don't hold that against Yotei too much...I hold it against it somewhat since they really should have put the bigger budget to use here, but it would be at least a little hypocritical to be harsher on Yotei than on its predecessor.
There is, however, one technical flaw that I absolutely cannot forgive. In-between story segments, you have to "learn" where a member of the Yotei six is, and this is done by interrogating wandering Ronin (in other words, waiting to be ambushed).
Thing is, though, I got the exact location of all members of the gang from a single Ronin towards the beginning. These bits of information came with cutscenes, rundowns of the member's abilities, and most importantly, where exactly they are each time, and I got all of these from that one interrogation. Yet, I still had to wait to get ambushed in the open world every time I completed an arc.
You have to do this three times. The first time was that one I just finished talking about, and the second one happened almost immediately after the first story segment, so the fact that I was getting information I already had didn't quite register in my head. But the third time, the Ronin didn't immediately show up, so I actually had to look at my objective and see that I was supposed to be waiting to be ambushed.
That's when it hit me: I'd run into a bug. I wasn't supposed to have gotten all those bits of info from one guy at the beginning, and so the game wasn't treating me like I'd gotten the relevant information. I really was going to have to mindlessly ride through this boring open world hoping to run into exactly the right kind of enemy. As I combed the map, I actually ended up at the relevant gate for the last story segment before the main villain by complete accident, but I couldn't get through because I "hadn't gotten" the memo that my next target was through that gate.
But wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, there was a pack of Ronin right by this gate, so I went and fought them until I got the chance to interrogate their leader...at which point I didn't have a choice about what to ask, and instead I got a map to an enemy stronghold with an upgrade point inside.
I was now going to have to mindlessly wander this boring open world all over again, now armed with the knowledge that I wasn't guaranteed to get the information I needed to progress the story.
That was when I decided enough was enough. I put down Ghost of Yotei and didn't pick it back up. Well, actually, I tried to after beating the next game on this list, but as I booted it up, I found myself groaning out loud thinking about having to play it anymore...so I put it right back down again.
Yep...I didn't finish Ghost of Yotei. Lackluster combat, a terrible story unsaved by some good characters, a boring open world without an ounce of style or memorability to it, a winning bingo card of every AAA "insert game design here" decision under the sun, and a sorry technical state all made finishing an unlikely prospect for me, but this particular flaw was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Ghost of Yotei isn't exactly what I'd call "bad" or "unplayable," but it is the poster child for modern mediocrity and a reminder that the AAA game industry deserves every financial blow it brings upon itself. And what sucks is that the developers (who were undoubtedly worked to death with no sick leave and minimal pay on pain of termination) are the ones who are going to suffer for it. We all know that the mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging suits who decide to mandate cash grabs like this are just going to keep failing upward and punishing the people they force to work on this slop. So while my heart breaks for the team at Sucker Punch, I have to say I'm glad that the sales numbers for Yotei are evidently not great. Making slightly less money is, after all, the only language these executives understand...well, one can only hope they understand it, but Ghost of Yotei doesn't give me too much hope on that front. In fact, Ghost of Yotei gives me just about the least amount of hope that any AAA game has in a long time. But it isn't an active burning feeling. It is, as I stated earlier, nothing more than apathetic disgust.
Anyway, with the mic well and truly dropped, let us review:
Awful story - 1.0
Annoying, clunky combat - 1.0
Boring, styleless open world - 1.0
Every crap AAA game design decision ever made - 1.0
Didn't care to finish - 1.0
Technical flaws including Ronin one - 1.0
The final score for Ghost of Yotei is...
4.0/10 - Below Average
Sorry for what's going to happen, Sucker Punch, sorry for what's going to happen
Developer: NeoBards Entertainment Limited
Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Microsoft Windows, Xbox Series X/S
Before we begin, yes, the title is indeed spelled with a lowercase "f." It makes me want to scream, but c'est la vie. Another thing to bring up before we begin: there will be spoilers in this review. I'm going to be firmly recommending this game, but when that's the case, one has a responsibility to lay out things that might put people off in a traumatizing way, so there are content warnings to be provided here. If you're on the fence about this one and want to know what you're in for in terms of disturbing content, read on ready for details. But if you have a strong constitution for horror, maybe skip over the section where I say "here come the spoilers." I'll say this at this point: this game's writer is also responsible for Higurashi: When They Cry...and if hearing that title makes you bite your fingernails, you'll know how serious that call to review content warnings is. All good? Good, then let's go!
Konami has been on a pretty undeniable comeback tour lately. First there was the surprisingly competent Silent Hill 2 Remake in 2024 (which I can't say I was an enormous fan of, but it was good), then there was the Metal Gear Solid 3 remake earlier this year (which I didn't play because of performance issue reports), and now they have Silent Hill f, which is an easy top 10 contender for me. So yeah, for me personally it's been some meh and one home run, but that's still an undeniable comeback tour given how universally reviled Konami has been in recent years. You love to see things like this!
Here's where I typically give my history with an IP, but when it comes to Silent Hill, my only experience is that aforementioned remake from last year. With waning critical reception from later entries and the infamous transition from games to pachinko machines, there was never any real reason for me to explore this series. But the overwhelmingly positive word of mouth and the fact that this new entry in the saga handily outsold the remake's day 1 sales gave me hope that it would be worth my time. So, after quickly giving up on Cronos: The New Dawn, I decided to put my money on the line for survival horror once again...and I've already given my two cents on how well that went!
Silent Hill f breaks from tradition in that instead of mostly-modern America, it takes place in 1960's Japan in a small mountainside village called Ebisugaoka. You are Shimizu Hinako: a teenager with an unhappy home life, exactly one good friend, and two inconsistent, catty ones. So, not a perfect life, but it could always be worse...and worse is exactly what it gets when a mysterious fog rolls into town one day, making everyone except Hinako and her friend group disappear. A monster lurks in the fog, and throughout the town, various horrors now walk the streets. Armed with nothing but each other and whatever makeshift weapons they can find, our heroine and her entourage must find a way to escape the village and seek help.
Now, here come the spoilers, so move on if you don't want to see them.
It's no secret that Silent Hill f is mainly about the female experience specifically in 1960's Shinto arranged marriages, and when I say "female experience" in a section centered around content warnings, I imagine there's a particular thought that comes to mind...but it's not entirely a warranted thought. There are some monsters that attack by holding Hinako down and licking her, but this largely seems to be more of a metaphorical thing than anything else, as things in Silent Hill games tend to be.
Well, either that or my dumb male ass just proved a point.
On that same general note, there's also Shu, Hinako's aforementioned childhood friend. Given how Hinako's father has colored her views, it's hard not to look at Shu in all his supportiveness and apparent respect and anticipate another shoe (or Shu, hah!) to drop in the near future. But that time never comes, despite him clearly harboring some feelings that would've been clear fodder to run with in this kind of plot. With the kinds of stuff that happens to Hinako in this story, it's just nice that there's at least a little reprieve in one character....you know, assuming I haven't gone and proven another point here.
And golly bob howdy do things happen to Hinako. As I said, this story was written by the author responsible for Higurashi: When They Cry, so when you get the content warning at the start of the game warning you about torture, you know it's going to be gnarly stuff. It's somehow tastefully-filmed and understatedly-acted gnarly stuff to make the fact that it's happening to a kid at least a little less traumatizing, but that doesn't help much.
In a sequence that obviously serves as a metaphor for sacrificing pieces of yourself, Hinako slowly loses an arm to a manual saw, has what can only be described as a melted crater burned into her back with a branding iron, and in a particularly harrowing final ritual, has her face sliced off starting from just below the nose.
For the first ritual I mentioned, blood dripping to the ground, the saw's placement on her arm, and the movement on the saw either without showing the arm or showing little enough of the arm that I can't remember are the only things directly shown. You also hear the general cutting sound of the saw. Her arm is replaced with a gigantic fox arm after this, so you don't have to look at anything like a stump or sutures.
For the second ritual there isn't a lot that can be shown anyway given the specific circumstances and given the fact that the iron is placed on Hinako's uniform, but the aftermath is shown and continues to be shown off and on for the rest of the game. There is a simple sizzling sound effect played during this process.
For the third ritual, dripping blood makes up the majority of the visuals accompanied by ever-so-slight knife noises, and the only truly graphic thing shown is the removed face being placed on an altar. A mask is placed on Hinako to replace what was taken, so there isn't any gruesomeness shown after the ritual.
Across all these rituals, reactions are limited. There's intense wincing, but in terms of audio, actress Konatsu Kato delivers a held back series of grunts and other low-register reactions like that. Throughout other points of the game, Hinako screams like a banshee, so this was clearly an intentional choice to make these sequences less disturbing. We can argue all day about whether that was a worthwhile endeavor given everything else, but I appreciated it, at least.
We're done with spoilers, but there's still one more thing to be said about the story. While everything leading up to the ending is awesome, the ending itself is baaaaaaaad. Hoo boy, is it bad! It's an ending where looking up an "explained" video is 100% necessary because they introduce a character in exactly one scene who turns out to be a latchkey for the whole plot...but they don't bother to mention or even imply that this character is who they evidently are. The implication of the ending would've been great were it not for shortcomings like this and the fact that what actually happens is one of the most cliffhangery cliffhangers I've ever seen. There are evidently better endings available if you beat the game approximately three more times, but come one! I'm bad enough at survival horror that I play these games on story difficulty whenever I can! Does Konami really think someone like me can go through something like this 4 times even though I liked it? I shouldn't have to leave off an ultimately great game with my hands outstretched in a "what?" pose!
Well...speaking of playing these things on story difficulty, how about gameplay? Gameplay in f is split between combat and puzzles.
Combat isn't very good. That's pretty much the gist of it. It isn't bad, per-se, but I defy anyone who plays this to say they couldn't wait to start up combat again. This didn't matter to me, as I don't go into survival horror expecting Doom, but it might matter to you.
Essentially, you pick up melee weapons (and only melee weapons) out in the world and use those to slowly deal with monsters.
These are always things that you might find scattered throughout a village: steel pipes, kitchen knives, baseball bats, etc, and each of them has a certain level of durability. You can carry three weapons at a time, which is good given that any weapon is bound to break after a couple battles. There are repair kits you can find to restore durability, but they're few and far between, so that's a thing to keep in mind.
Once you're out of weapons, you have no means of defending yourself, and you'll have to make a break for it and break enemy line of sight to escape. This is easier than it might sound...sometimes. Some enemies have surprisingly long aggro ranges, and towards the end of the game, there are enemies that you can't progress without killing. But in those latter cases there are usually extra weapons nearby.
On that note, I was pretty impressed with the pace at which weapons were doled out. It often feels like you haven't found a weapon in forever when you finally find one...and yet, if you're anything like me, you won't have run out of weapons quite yet. It's like the balance between enemy encounters and spare weapons was meticulously calculated, and that expert item dispersion never stopped feeling perfect. Just a constant build up and release of tension as you get closer and closer to losing your last weapon and find a new one in the knick of time.
On the opposite side of the combat spectrum, there's the shrine segments. Throughout the plot, Hinako flips between the village and a sort of Shinto shrine spiritual world. In that world, she has set-in-stone weapons that don't have any durability limits. But even without that equalizing factor, the clunkiness of f's combat keeps her from feeling indestructible.
I was thinking about this as I made my way through the plot, and as I did so, I realized what the x-factor for f was. In survival horror, there's always combat apprehension of some kind, and the key to successful survival horror is to fall into the right camp.
In bad survival horror, such as Cronos: The New Dawn, the apprehension is due to annoyance with combat. You'll see enemies pop up, and then you'll groan and go "I guess..."
With good survival horror like Silent Hill f, the apprehension is due to fear of combat.
It's the difference between "oh, come on! I only have x amount of bullets left!" and "oh no! I only have x amount of bullets left!" As you may be able to tell, this is a difficult thing to get right, but Silent Hill f manages it. Whether I was in a position to lose my weapons or not, I always froze up a bit when I heard an enemy in another room because no matter what I did, I was always going to be at some kind of disadvantage.
There's more to be said on combat, but I'll make it brief. In addition to swinging a weapon, Hinako can also dodge with frankly absurd effectiveness, she can take advantage of brief parry windows, and by expending a secondary energy bar, she can unleash strong attacks. However, if she takes damage while using that bar, the bar gets used up much quicker, and once that bar reaches zero, health starts dropping on its own. So there's slightly more depth to things than I've made it seem like, but it's still not going to set the world on fire.
One last thing on the subject of combat is items besides weapons.
In addition to the red capsules that serve as your main healing item, bandages, first aid kits, etc, there are also items with slightly different effects. One might restore health over time, one might restore stamina, one might restore sanity (that aforementioned second energy bar), and one might only exist to exchange at shrines (not the shrine levels).
Shrines serve as your save points, and its here where the item economy enters the scene. You have an incredibly limited inventory, but items other than standard healing ones can be dropped off at shrines to gain "faith." Earning enough faith can allow you to do things like increase Hinako's maximum health or draw a random effect equippable item. So you might enter a room and be disappointed to find the little crackers that only restore a little bit of health over a small period of time, but picking them up is still worth it if for no other reason than you can get a little faith out of them. It's an item economy where nothing is useless, and the limited inventory helps drive decisions based on faith-vs-utility rather than on just which item you're more likely to use. You'll make choices between, for example, those little crackers I mentioned or a specific offering that nets you a great deal of faith. Is some progress towards more health in general more important? Or are you running low on healing and more likely to need any kind of edge you can get?
Then there are puzzles, which are a bit less forgivable than some clunky combat. Some puzzles are good, such as one where you're having to decipher a code middle schoolers use to decipher locker combinations. Others are pretty bad, such as the infamous scarecrow puzzle.
In this puzzle, you come across a field of scarecrows and a small hint. The hint is supposed to lead you to the correct scarecrow to interact with, and if you interact with the wrong one, you have to fight it. As resources are limited, you obviously want to find the right scarecrow right away...but the hints are just terrible. I haven't seen even one person able to flawlessly complete this puzzle, so a guide is more than likely going to be required, especially if you're already low on resources. I've seen speculation that this particular puzzle suffers from a poor translation job. While that makes sense, it doesn't change the fact that it's a negative experience.
Other not-great puzzles tend to require better knowledge of Japanese plants than the average person is likely to have. For example, there's a little puzzle box at one point that requires you to slide some tiles to reveal sweet and tart foods. You can clearly see cherries and strawberries, but I found the other items on this box impossible to recognize. How could I know whether or not a native Japanese plant I didn't recognize was sweet or tart?
Like I said, some puzzles are good. The bad ones don't take up too much time, in spite of everything...but it's worth noting that these bad puzzles are remarkably unfair when all is said and done.
We can talk about gameplay, puzzle design, and item economies until the cows come home, but none of these things are what you'd typically go into a horror game for. So, time for the question on everyone's mind: is Silent Hill f scary?
Yes, and in intelligent ways.
When I play most horror games, I have a pretty standard playbook: take a deep breath and hold it before I turn a corner. I don't scream or anything when I get jumpscared, but I do loudly blaspheme. With this game, however, I never did that. Monsters can be heard long before they're seen, and what little jumpscares exist are tastefully done and almost never feature any kind of jarring audio stings. So rather than doing my breath-holding, I'd instead be constantly bouncing between my three-pronged library of scared responses.
On the lower end, there's "oh, f***/ah shit" spoken just above a whisper. This is typically the response when I realize that the seemingly safe path I chose to take is now obstructed by a hitherto-unseen enemy.
Then there's "hngJesus," more of a middle-tier reaction. Think of the "hng" like a hiccup sound. Obviously this is a mild startle reaction.
Then, in the most extreme cases, there's "GYAJESUS!" which is where things get loud.
I bring this up because Silent Hill f is probably the first game I've played with a scare that took me through all three reactions. I'd planned out describing this scare in detail, but where would the fun be in that?
So, moving right along, I was constantly tense during this game, but as I've already implied, it wasn't from the prospect of being startled. It was the fear of combat, the grotesqueness of the monsters, the limited visibility, the way sound carries throughout the spaces, and above all else, the silence in the tensest moments.
One thing horror does tend to depend on quite a bit, though, is its technical fidelity. You can't be scared if your game crashes, after all! And in this way, Silent Hill f does have a few unfortunate stumbles.
There are more than a couple sections that take place indoors in tight corridors, and in these sections, the camera is liable to start rebelling. You'll often find that Hinako starts blocking your view of the path ahead in these areas simply because the camera doesn't want to cooperate.
There are also scattered framerate drops in area transitions...which would be a moderate complaint if that were all. But towards the end of the game when combat becomes much more frequent, I found that the framerate slowed to a slideshow level on several occasions.
This is beyond bizarre, because everything else throughout the game is pretty top-notch. No texture pop-in, asset pop-in, audio glitches, animation glitches, the graphics are impressive, the soundtrack is understated but fitting, the list goes on...but things really fall apart towards f's lackluster ending.
Silent Hill f isn't without its fault, but for my money it's definitely one of the better survival horror titles I've played. It features a compelling story (until it doesn't). There's an inescapable tension throughout. Its combat system manages to be just bad enough to instill fear without instilling annoyance. And save for some stumbles near the end, it all comes wrapped up in a decent technical package. This is easily a top 10 contender for me, so consider this a firm recommendation if you have the stomach for some of the more disturbing content.
Let us review:
Terrible ending - 0.5
Some lame puzzles - 0.5
Technical hiccups - 0.5
The final score for Silent Hill f is...
8.5/10 - Near Fantastic
Well done, NeoBards, well done!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thoughts? Questions? Think I'm full of it?