Let's talk about the holiphants in the room.

A few months ago (feels like years at this point) I decided to force myself to play this game start to finish all while cataloging my thoughts to see if this game was anything more than another cyberpunk / kendrick lamar / etc style fad that would be forgotten moments after it was trumpeted by the regime. This was not ideal because while I had the idea of discussing the game honestly with others to motivate me, but others did not want to discuss honestly with me; and after months of putting the game off due to how frankly bad the experience was I just gave up.

The thread is archived here https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/1086940/discussions/0/4141689926410173681/ if you want to see the salient points I noted linked in the OP. Ignore the 1400 post struggle session against me that occurred over a the span of 3 days, some people can't control themselves in any capacity.

My hypotheses were such:

1. 1) the game was otherwise normal but was shoehorned into the status quo as a simple cost of doing business under a worldwide totalitarian system.
   
2. 2) the game was otherwise pedestrian and was only championed to "own the chuds," which served larian quite well because it covered their faults.
   
3. 3) the game was terribly unfinished and regime features were added to secure funding for 1 and secure shielding for 2.

I can tell you that after forcing myself to play through the game all the way through on honor mode without forcing myself to write down observations, that (as usual) every one of my hypotheses were exactly the case.

As I pointed out in the review, all of the regime elements of the story stick out like a sore thumb because they are totally artificial. The game has a strong moral core, nothing remarkable, but it's shocking just how different the perception of the game by the fanbase and the game as it actually is. I go into more detail in the thread linked above, and my thoughts up to halfway through act 1 when I previously stopped playing are now totally confirmed having finished the game.

I would even go so far as to point out out that not only is the game quite benign (if you can ignore or mod out the surface-level regime elements) but it's actually subversive. The entire plot with the absolute, dead three, netherbrain, etc are a very pointed critique of the real-life regime and their adherents. I suppose this would then explain the struggle session: I found something I wasn't supposed to and dared to point out what I noticed in public.

Therefore this game is not like moldbug's proverbial tale of the "german cat" where true believers march through every institution (no matter how small or ancillary to the government) and proudly subordinating even cat magazines to the empire, but this game is more like Havel's greengrocer who puts up the "workers of the world unite" poster despite not believing in it simply because he knows the true believers will burn down his business if he doesn't. Therefore the liberal lionizing of this game appears to be more containment than anything else. I sincerely don't know why the culture warriors who like this game enjoy it, and why the culture warriors who hate this game don't; in actuality it seems like the parties should be switched here. Maybe the hivemind of the regime's outer circle knows this and so stakes a claim here knowing that the other side is to repulsed to look deeper.

So what of all the vaunted issues? Yes, all of the issues with the game are present, but there is circumstances to each.

Yes, your companions are all horndogs after you complete act 1, but this is just there to cover up the unexplained "relationship" system in the game. If you refuse the advances of a character here, it permanently locks them out of a "relationship" with you for the entire game no matter how high their affinity gets for you. Therefore all of the faff surrounding this specific moment in the story is really there to cover up larian's inability to code more complex character interactions.

Yes, alin and nocturne and the like are just plain odd and unsettling. Alin was a man and Nocturne was not "trans" before path 6 of beta; all of these were changed without editing the script to compensate which caused the uncanny feeling. Patch 6 signifies the time where larian ran out of money and was bought out by wizards of the coast, tencent, and netflix to keep them afloat. If you pretend Alin is a man, the personality and dialogue make perfect sense with him as the dumb jock boyfriend. In fact, every single male-male, female-female relationship was artificially added into the game during this patch, with a number of model-swaps needing to happen to force it to work. None of the "alphabet" elements are more than a ctrl+r swap, and can be almost entirely removed from the game with a change of some text files in a mod if it really bothers you that much.

Yes, all people of moderate authority in the game are female, but each and every one is crude, brutal, utterly incompetent, and at fault for just about every problem in not only the game but the entire forgotten realms setting. The only leaders with any vulnerability, humanity, grit, determination, and willingness to solve problems are male. Just about every storyline boils down to "female in charge mucks it all up until you get daddy to come home." If this game was meant to be a celebration of feminism, they did it VERY poorly. In fact, the entire overarching storyline itself is this, with the only meaningful choice being which reliable, magnanimous male you want to replace the vicious female agents of chaos with.

As I alluded to earlier this game really expends every effort to stab the regime in the heart, with no punches pulled. Sure there is a milimeter thin veneer of adherence throughout the whole thing, but the rest is just plain brutal. At no point did I look at the game's story and disapprove or be appalled, I was mostly smiling the whole way through. Originally I came in expecting the gameplay to save the experience and just grin and bear it through the sotry, but the exact opposite was true. I relished every chance the story came up and dreaded combat.

Which brings me to the review of the game as a game itself, which I will try to keep short because there isn't much to say.

Story:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/1086940/discussions/0/4413047708763407031/#c4413047708763408198

Gameplay:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/1086940/discussions/0/4413047708763407031/#c4413047708763408765

Verdict:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/1086940/discussions/0/4413047708763407031/#c4413047708763409285

A bonus character study on Gale that explains a lot of my thoughts about the plot in general:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/1086940/discussions/0/4413047708763407031/?ctp=2#c4413047708763877407

My more detailed final thoughts:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/1086940/discussions/0/4523386686505471536/

In the mid 20th century, two young oxford professors bonded over their love of GK Chesterton and their childhood inspiration by Frances MacDonald's book "Fantastes."

Both agreed that the cost of henry viii's tyranny was most easily felt by the destruction of all Monestaries: man robbed of God, the poor robbed of help, children robbed of learning, libraries burned to prevent Catholic History from being known, and all tales of Chivalry destroyed to prevent people from having Hope against the regime. Both agreed a new fantasy would have to be created for young and old, to fill the void of wonder left by the absence of long-lost tales that protestants and freemasons burned for 500 years. Both realized england was going to die any minute, and that a Truly Good series to inspire wonder (all while injecting Catholic Capital into civilization like hiding medicine from dogs with cheese) and give england at least 50 more years of life.

To this end, CS Lewis decided to make the "Narnia" series for children and the "Space Trilogy" for adults.
Tolkien, annoyed that his friend was being too obvious with his references, decided to make the "The Lord Of The Rings" and "Hobbit" series which basically give a scene-for-scene retelling of The Book Of Revelation hidden behind the terms and aesthetics of "Beowulf" and wagner's "niebelung" and "twilight of the gods."

With this in mind, "middle earth: shadow of war" is not a "Lord Of The Rings" game: it's your typical "light vs dark" gnostic claptrap with the same smattering of "necromancy keeps 'the balanceᵀᴹ'" that blizzard's "diablo" series has. Vague uses of LOTR sounding names are used, but that's where the similarities end; you could make this a tie-in to every single media property in a high fantasy world over the past 30 years by just moving around some terms. I honestly half-expected nazghul to name-drop arthas and the lich king from world of warcraft because this game's story takes its cues from blizzard more than it ever does Tolkien.

So if you are a hardcore LOTR fan or Christian, look elsewhere if you want a faithful adaptation of LOTR. If you like Good stories and don't care about LOTR (shame on you), that's not here either. This game's narrative starts nowhere and ends nowhere, simultaneously takes too long to tell you what it wants to say and speeds through it to the point it is always having to cut its thoughts short. Characters reference motives that that were never shown, conflicts that did not occur until the very end, and reference scenes that either were never written or cut from the game. Every inch of the game feels like a tutorial section for a bigger game that was not made. I am not entirely sure anyone at monolith software is aware of the nature of any of the characters they name mention in the game, with the most egregious being the fact that they present sauron as just being an elf and present Galadriel as some kind of angry political leader instead of a reference to The Blessed Virgin Mary.

So the story is bad, even by game standards it's bad, even by student book reports would this story be bad. The story wouldn't matter if you were not forced to do it to unlock basic abilities needed to enjoy the orc politics minigame.

So what about the gameplay? There isn't much of it. Talion (the player character) is constantly locked into cinematic sequences. Every weapon hit, every jump, every animation is just a mini cutscene. enemies constantly invalidate core parts of your kit. enemies hit you from offscreen all day. every difficulty but easy has you dying in seconds just to show off the game's inch-deep "nemesis" gimmick.

Want to do any of talions tricks? Prepare to have every orc on screen zoom to your side and attack you. Every action that might give even the slightest bit of enjoyment is immediately punished with a "counter this enemy" quicktime event. The game does every single thing it can to have you rhythmically mash the attack button while hitting the counter button, and any attempt to be creative will have an enemy teleport to you so they can interrupt what you are doing.

This game might be a novelty if it could just get out of its own way. If it had a lock on button with a combat system closer to the legend of zelda, it would be great just for the silliness of dismembering orcs. Instead you must play the game as the developers want, when they want it, and you just feel DRAINED having wasted your time playing it.

Ironically, the final dlc added a "roguelike" mode that fixes a lot of the games problems by just removing most of the story and letting you run around a desert killing orcs with gadgets. Still just a boring, "cinematic" mess though.