No I don't care if it's the chronological order, I don't care if the story is 'better' this way, I don't care what the devs say or what they changed or retconned

If Dragon Quest 3 was meant to be the first game you play it wouldn't have a FUCKING 3 in the name!!!

Release order. Always.

I still need to watch the Animatrix because everyone says that one is great but I might need a break from this series for a bit first.

It was just such a frustrating film experience and I am so glad I didn't wait 20 years and see it in theaters like so many people did. The last hour or so was a chore and I just wanted it to be over. I barely paid attention to the last act.

Like Total Recall, where there's that uncertainty of whether this is all happening or if the protagonist is crazy. The scene with Neil Patrick Harris talking to him and trying to ground him in 'reality' really caught my attention. But right after that he gets out and the entire idea is dropped.

The first 30 minutes or so made me the angriest because it almost worked. If they cut out all the groan-inducing meta-ness and the constant callbacks, and played more into the psychological aspect of not knowing what is real, then the movie could have justified itself.

The little girl program from the third movie comes back, all grown up but still with the exact same haircut and reveals she knew Neo and Trinity were alive for 60 years and just didn't say anything??

I hated the new actor playing Smith and was angry every time he showed up. I wish he was just not in the movie at all, what purpose did he even have other than as a Deus ex Machina at the end? That cameo with the exile programs was so fucking surreal it feels like something you'd make up as a joke.

I feel like Keanu's acting has gotten worse with age, or maybe it's just that everything he says sounds like Johnny Silverhand to me now. The new characters were all boring and talked like zoomers. The new "Morpheus" was pointless and made me miss Laurence Fishburne.

And then we get to Resurrections and just... WTF.

I don't even know what to say about it. It felt like a group of 2013-era redditors brainstormed a Matrix sequel, every idea was approved, and they were somehow given $200 million and the original actors and allowed to make it.

Of the original trilogy, I loved the music and the fashion and just the sheer late 90's/early 00's of it all. The fight choreography was consistently amazing through all of it. The cgi obviously hasn't aged well but it was pretty groundbreaking technology in its time, so it deserves respect.

The opening section of Revolutions with Neo trapped in the train station reminded me of rescuing Han from Jabba in Return of the Jedi, and not in a good way. It just felt like padding.

Cutting some stuff and just making one movie would have made for a much stronger story, I think.

I do think that there were some odd pacing issues due to the 2 part movie structure. Reloaded seemed to take forever to get going, but then Revolutions spent so much time on the Zion battle and just stuff that didn't really seem to matter.

Then there's movies 2 & 3. I've heard about them so much over the years and about how terrible they are, so of course I wasn't surprised to find that they are perfectly fine movies. Not as great as the original, but far from being bad movies. Early 2000's nerd culture had a pattern.

In hindsight the trans themes are so obvious. Trinity talking to Neo at the party, Morpheus' quote about a splinter of the mind, the interplay between Smith constantly saying "Mr. Anderson" and his 'true name' being Neo, etc. It all echoes experiences that I and many others have had.

Also in my dream I looked it up on rotten tomatoes and it had an 86% critic score and a 12% audience score which is probably exactly what the actual movie will get tbh

Hulk and Punisher were also there and they were all supposed to be working together but every 5 minutes they would get into little bitch fights with each other so it was kind of like the original Defenders comics but it was really boring and nothing was happening and people were leaving the theater

The other one was the Damsel, which was very funny, but which then led right into Happily Ever After, which almost caused me to drop the game because it was affecting me so much. As someone who rushed into a relationship and tried to force it to work when it clearly wasn't, it hit too close to home.