Yes, but I never mentioned Among Thieves. I agree, The second games was damn near perfect. But to say that Golden Abyss is better than Drake's Deception is deluding themselves.
Sorry for the late reply, but I think that anyone who says that Drake's incredibly loosely-woven Deception is better than Golden Abyss is deluding themselves with pointless set piece moments.
Suffice it to say, I have a
lot of problems with Uncharted 3, most notably the shooting that didn't feel quite right to me after Uncharted 2 and a story full of possibly more filler than both previous Uncharted games
combined. Go ahead, tell me who the main villain is in Uncharted 3, and I mean beyond the surface level information.
Who is she, because the game never bothers to tell us? All we
ever know about her is that she wants the ring to find the treasure because...treasure is nice, I guess?
That would normally be fine, but the game seems to strongly hint that there's more to her motivation than that. Unfortunately, she's in
maybe 3 scenes in the entire game, so to say she's a total waste is a huge understatement. And for that matter, what's the deal with her mind-control toxin-wielding henchman, who has this almost magical connection with tarot cards? Can he tell the future? Can he manipulate fate? Or it is just another plot thread Naughty Dog cut at the last moment so they could throw in another pointless set piece moment?
Which brings me to my biggest problem with the game: the sheer pointlessness of at least half the game. At
numerous times throughout the game, Drake receives more than fair warning that there's nothing good awaiting him at the end of the journey, yet he pursues it anyway. The villain's plan only moves forward because Drake won't just
stop. And I realize that that's his character arc in this game. However, after everything he's experienced in the 1st 2 games (where in
both games he flat-out
demanded to stop the journey and had to be brought back in by other characters), I think it's bad writing to have Drake not have
learned from his experiences by now.
And go ahead, defend the entire middle 1/3 of the game involving the pirates. You can't. It's pretty and it's technologically impressive what Naughty Dog does with their set piece moments there, but at the end of that arc Drake is
literally right back where he started with absolutely
nothing accomplished.
Add on top of that very weak contributions from the supporting cast,
wildly imbalanced combat scenarios (two specific sequences come to mind, one against the pirates in the floating junkyard and the other at the end against the teleporting, armored, shotgun-wielding enemies), and some just bad level design (hooray for the return of the "kill rooms" where stealth is almost impossible so get used to fending off 5 billion generic goons!), and I think Drake's Deception is a very bad game.
By contrast, I think Golden Abyss works through its simplicity. The story is simple, but you understand the villain and why he does what he does. The gameplay is suitably varied, the levels are well-designed to allow several different combat approaches, and I think the game encourages more exploration with better puzzles than Uncharted 3 does (which is all about the plot railroad...such as it is). Are certain Vita features over-used? Certainly, though they didn't bother me that much. Does it lack the over-the-top set piece moments of previous games? In a way, yes, but I found the combat scenarios to be set piece moments in themselves (such as when you're trying to protect your allies from waves of enemies while grappling around overhead on ruins, or when you're taking turns distracting a turret so you can eventually work your way around an enemy).
And Golden Abyss doesn't cheat with magic B.S. at the end like the 3 console games do. That's a nice feather in its cap for me.
Overall, I'm not going to call Golden Abyss "the best" Uncharted game, as Among Thieves is
clearly the best in the series, but I'd
at least put it ahead of the underwhelming Uncharted 3. And that's all I'm going to say in pulling this thread off-track.