a idiot cynic tries to write with an open heart. in our current landscape, it is only prudent to suspect that every word uttered is a form of engagement bait, and i hope the following is not coloured as such. thankfully i write only for myself, not you. sometimes we just need a spot to unload, particularly if we are the type of person built without a release valve. and i guess an anonymous, parasocial, gamified tracker website is as good a place as any.

as i type, i am preoccupied with thoughts of my almost lifelong companion awaiting the outcome of a coin flip. to think they could be gone at any moment, stuck in a hospital i can’t reach quickly enough to say goodbye, is enough to induce a fresh heart attack every other minute. so i needed to feel something else. anything, really, beyond a drip feed of negativity.

our tendency to use media as a salve for despair is frankly stupid, a good sign that we can no longer relate to our real, lived environment in a meaningful way (like come on just go for a fucking walk and look at a bird or whatever). nor does it provide much reward or tangible relief. let’s say we want to min-max our distraction therapy: open world game #642 could easily occupy my idiot brain for 100+ hours with garbage (which, at a time like this, i cannot pretend to be above). no offense to open world game #642, of course; this truth would as easily hold for something good, engaging. all for what, though? is it just to forestall, only for the levee to break once it’s over? so rarely, if ever, can consumption act as tourniquet. for now, though, we may as well try.

i booted tower of heaven for the millionth time in as many years. mainly to hear the music. but why not see it through. a game whose runtime you can count in minutes is good for the soul; at this time, at any time. i can only wonder (rhetorically, as we know the answer) why games struggle to be this efficient, succinct. in no way does this hamper it: this is a flawless game in the only sense that means something. an instance where a creator simply made the exact thing they wanted to make, as it existed in their own mind.

i do not wish to discuss the game too much. i could not care less about some gamereviewese bullshit right now. i would just implore others to try - it’s pretty fun! it is a short, ostensibly difficult platformer with a game boy sheen and fantastic compositions. as we all know, flash games were required by law to have loose, questionable notions of momentum and inertia, and this one does not disappoint. all told, you should be done in thirty minutes or less. maybe longer if you want to find a secret ending. it is the exact kind of game i wish i was young enough to experience as intended: playing in your high school pc lab while ignoring your work.

the tower of heaven itself, allegedly insurmountable, at least mirrored my predicament to the extent which i have rationalised my circumstances. it has been a while, and i had somewhat forgotten about the laws and their broader lessons. i should have my ass beaten for using a phrase like “mechanics as metaphor”, and maybe it is just my own addled state, but fuck it. where so many games contort themselves to chase this paradigm, and even where games handle this gracefully (let’s say bloodborne, as an easy example), tower of heaven manages to capitalise on this in a handful of minutes, elegant, efficient, and convincing as ever.

i reached the point where ‘luna ascension’ plays and shed a couple of tears. to be fair, i would probably do the same in any state. even as sucker for silly midi orchestrations, i cannot think of many which carry such richness and emotional weight (some of ZUN’s pc-98 compositions would make the list). this stands for the entire soundtrack, of course. the use of motifs, even in a game with so few tracks, each part recalling and referencing another, could put toby fox to shame. at this point, i realise i’ve found a small sense of lasting catharsis.

upon reaching the end and [redacted], i ponder the laws once more. i’ve seen this sequence countless times, i will not pretend they offer any novel, deep insight (at their most trite and simplified they can amount to, for example, ‘don’t look back, live in the present’). i know this sounds like an undersell, yet it is anything but. sometimes we just need a reminder of the basics. and the fact that these are here at all, ingrained in the entire game flow, and deepened further through some surprisingly consistent allegory and visual symbolism, all in a tiny fifteen year old flash game, astounds me. right now, this is just what i needed.

god is in his heaven. i will keep climbing.

truthfully, i finished this game weeks ago, and truthfully i still find myself stunned on what to say.

the final stretch of this game is so absolutely magnificent that so much of my gut wants to rate this a 5/5. the final two chapters, and the post credits scene, are beyond stunning. they encapsulate the story beyond measure, leave me full of love and melancholy and feelings so full i don't know what to do with them.

but my brain knows this is not a 5/5. there are some biiiig flaws to this game that i just can't deny. some, if not most, of the new characters feel a little underdone, their stories rushed or cut off or just not as good as i know they could have been with a longer story. the engine's combat is just not for me, there's only so much ragdolling hilarity before i wish enemies would just sit still whilst i crush them LMAO

some bigger feelings i would have towards this game would realm too into spoilers for this review, but all in all, this and yakuza 5 are, to me, the Ultimate Kiryu Kazuma games. they are so good at dissecting him and showing him to be a man so full of flaws, and a man you just want to be happy. he is so beautiful, and after Y6 i think about him a worrying amount. he used to not be in my top5 yakuza characters and now he's battling it out for number 1. he really did it. i love him. he is the reason my heart screams for this to be 5/5 stars!!! kiryu!!!! !! aaaaaaaaaa!!! !!!! !!!

This is strictly reviewing the base-game content of A Realm Reborn (not including the post-patch epilogue quests leading into Heavensward).

I COMPLETELY understand why most people will tell you to either play through ARR as fast as possible or buy the skip and watch a story recap, because, unfortunately, yes, it is a fairly substandard by-the-numbers Final Fantasy story. The game does NOT do a lot to make itself very engaging to play outside of a couple dungeons nearing the end of the story. If you're not familiar with the prior story of what this game was before ARR, most of the characters in the story will seem paper-thin and unimpressive. It's a shame really, because there's a ton of characters here that were given a good amount of depth prior to ARR that you simply will not see reflected here.

But honestly? All of these negatives, which in other games might be enough for me to drop them, did not really bother me all too much. It was probably because I was playing a Lalafell Warrior because the idea of being a tiny guy running around holding all the aggro was really funny to me, and I honestly had a pretty good time getting to play that out. I did a duty roulette once where I got put into a premade group of three Miqo'te girls and they all patted me on the head before leaving the instance when we finished. So that was pretty cool.

Much of me has been... 'trained', I guess, to really pay attention to the inner workings of games to evaluate them. My angle with games is often to analyze mechanics, understand what various systems exist in the game and see how they interact or don't. Yet, MMOs, a genre that I've only recently experienced through vanilla WoW private servers (rest in piece nostalrius) and like two weeks of playing Runescape on my second monitor, can't really be held to this standard. It might be more accurate to say that it isn't fair to hold them to this standard, mainly because the 'massively multiplayer' aspect of MMOs adds a lot of gray areas when it comes to forming a concrete 'objective' analysis of video games. In single player-games, regardless of how many different playstyles any single game might be able to account for in it's design, the ways a player interfaces with the game appear countably finite. Every player, regardless of specific choices in their gameplay, will encounter the same problems, story checkpoints and other scenarios that effectively funnel the immersion and agency of the player into predetermined outcomes. It's not possible for developers to create a truly unique outcome for every different way a player may approach a problem. MMOs, being intrinsically social games, are designed to truly offer a scope of choice most single-player experiences simply aren't equipped to replicate. What this leads to is several different strata and substrata of players who are all playing the same game, but for entirely different purposes and goals. This is how you get people like pure-crafters, immersive role-players, the Limsa Lominsa catgirls, and even player groups and discords solely bonded because they all chose to play as Lalafells. The scope of MMOs is something more traditional and technical frameworks for understanding games can't really talk about without missing the forest for the trees. I really hope i'm using that metaphor correctly.

Point being, I think Final Fantasy XIV is a pretty special game, through and through. For every part that

[We are announcing the end of this review of Final Fantasy XIV Online. We thank all readers of the review for the time and energy they have spent in reading and supporting this publication. If we had a cool seven minute long music video to commemorate this occasion, this is where we'd put it.]