AlexaLily
2023
The way this is presented, like sifting through a stack of documents, is very cool and got me even more into the story than I already was. And there's so much style!! Absolutely dripping in style with the art and music and even the font and presentation of the text. An absolute banger. Cannot recommend it hard enough. It's already cool when friends make a thing but then when they make a thing that is actually really great?? oh yeah baby that's that good stuff hell yeah
2020
Wingspan is a game that I want to like more than I actually do like it. It's incredibly charming–the art of the birds, all the little sounds, the way the menus move, the factoids about birds you can read, all the aesthetic choices in the UI are all wonderful. But actually playing it feels a little... dull? Not exactly dull but it's a little un-engaging? While the gameplay is satisfying on its own, the biggest problem I have is that you have almost no interaction with the other players. Which, for a board game, I think is a pretty big negative! There's very few card effects that let you interact with the other players and even the ones there are are relatively minimal (and most of them are pretty simple things like "if a player does X then you gain Y"). The deck of card and the dice are shared and so you could potentially maybe strategically take things to try and deny them from other players but that is either not a great strategy or a strategy that goes way over my head because I couldn't really see a way to make it work.
To me, board games are largely about the ways in which the game makes you interact with the people you play with. Maybe you broker alliances or make deals with people or choose to backstab them. But there isn't really any of that to be done here. So it's a little disappointing to go into a board game and then not get the thing I expect out of them. But, hey, at least there's cute birds.
There is one interesting mode, though, where you play against a single AI opponent with a set RNG seed and compete against other players to see who can use the identical setup to score the most possible points. It let's you play the game (fun) and optimize strategy (also fun) so it seems like it's kind of the best way to play.
Did I mention the birds are cute? Because the birds are cute.
To me, board games are largely about the ways in which the game makes you interact with the people you play with. Maybe you broker alliances or make deals with people or choose to backstab them. But there isn't really any of that to be done here. So it's a little disappointing to go into a board game and then not get the thing I expect out of them. But, hey, at least there's cute birds.
There is one interesting mode, though, where you play against a single AI opponent with a set RNG seed and compete against other players to see who can use the identical setup to score the most possible points. It let's you play the game (fun) and optimize strategy (also fun) so it seems like it's kind of the best way to play.
Did I mention the birds are cute? Because the birds are cute.
1997
well I finally went and finished it. I've started this game probably a dozen times in my life, as far back as borrowing a friend's copy to play on my psone (the lil round one, not the big original kind) in 2001. And to no one's surprise: it's really fucking good! It's a classic for a reason.
Over the years I had already had a lot of major story moments spoiled and so I was expecting the game to not quite land or not really hit as hard as it did but it turns out that the execution is so strong that it didn't really matter that I went into a scene and said "Oh, this is the part where [redacted] dies" because that scene still Fuckin Hits!!
And there was still stuff I hadn't heard about! The submarine! Playing as Tifa! So there was still fun surprises for me here, too. And that moment when I finally got Cloud back after he's gone for a while? Hit so fuckin' hard!! The boy!!! He's back!!! Love him. Love it. Love it all.
I don't have many complaints about this game but one of them is all the little minigames you have to play. I think it is an interesting/cool idea to say "your character is going to perform an action that we can't really make work with turn-based combat so instead we'll do a lil bespoke minigame so the player isn't just watching a cutscene". I do, generally, like that idea. But so many of the minigames it has you do feel like unresponsive shit-garbage to control and frequently have little to no feedback to if you're even doing them correctly (or if you are doing things wrong, what it is you're doing wrong). So many frustrating moments that really feel like they should just make them more lenient. Just let me get through your story!! Don't be super strict about making sure I perform CPR correctly or am good enough at a military parade or raced a dumb bird or whatever else. I think the only one I really liked was the snowboarding but even that was kinda fucked up because of the Steam version's love/hate relationship with my controller.
My only other big complaint is Cid because, wow, that dude sucks ass. No wonder I've never heard anyone really talk about him when they talk about the characters in this game. His whole thing is really just he's an angry misogynist and I guess I'm supposed to think he's... cool? Because at the end he realizes he was mad about something he was wrong about? Fuck off into the sun, Cid. This is maybe the only FF I've played where I disliked a party member to the degree that I found him actually repellent. When I got to the section where I had to play as him I looked up a walkthrough to figure out how long I was stuck in that hell and what the quickest way through it was. Luckily, it was blessedly short.
Red XIII's line "It's hard to stand on your own two legs" has really stuck with me, maybe more than any other individual line of dialogue has in a long time. It's just such a succinct summation of part of this game's theme, y'know? You can't do it on your own, you have to be ready and willing to not just ask for help but also to accept it. You need people around you because life is hard and we can't make it on our own. Also, if you're an alien dog in disguise pretending to be a human solider it is literally difficult to stand on your own two feet.
At the start of the game I was a staunch Aerti shipper but the relationship that builds between Cloud and Tifa throughout this is so sweet it got me dangerously close to becoming a Cloti shipper. Although in my heart of hearts I know the real answer here is Claerti.
One last thing: like I alluded to above, the Steam version is super fucked! It didn't properly recognize my controller and had no way to rebind them so my only option would've been to do it via Steam's controller shit but that would've messed it up for every other game I play! It sucks! And if you use a controller the button prompts don't update correctly so you have to the keyboard binds and how those map to your controller! It sucks! Bad port! I think the only advantage this has is that it's easier to plug into a cheat engine table if you want that for any particular reason, y'know.
Over the years I had already had a lot of major story moments spoiled and so I was expecting the game to not quite land or not really hit as hard as it did but it turns out that the execution is so strong that it didn't really matter that I went into a scene and said "Oh, this is the part where [redacted] dies" because that scene still Fuckin Hits!!
And there was still stuff I hadn't heard about! The submarine! Playing as Tifa! So there was still fun surprises for me here, too. And that moment when I finally got Cloud back after he's gone for a while? Hit so fuckin' hard!! The boy!!! He's back!!! Love him. Love it. Love it all.
I don't have many complaints about this game but one of them is all the little minigames you have to play. I think it is an interesting/cool idea to say "your character is going to perform an action that we can't really make work with turn-based combat so instead we'll do a lil bespoke minigame so the player isn't just watching a cutscene". I do, generally, like that idea. But so many of the minigames it has you do feel like unresponsive shit-garbage to control and frequently have little to no feedback to if you're even doing them correctly (or if you are doing things wrong, what it is you're doing wrong). So many frustrating moments that really feel like they should just make them more lenient. Just let me get through your story!! Don't be super strict about making sure I perform CPR correctly or am good enough at a military parade or raced a dumb bird or whatever else. I think the only one I really liked was the snowboarding but even that was kinda fucked up because of the Steam version's love/hate relationship with my controller.
My only other big complaint is Cid because, wow, that dude sucks ass. No wonder I've never heard anyone really talk about him when they talk about the characters in this game. His whole thing is really just he's an angry misogynist and I guess I'm supposed to think he's... cool? Because at the end he realizes he was mad about something he was wrong about? Fuck off into the sun, Cid. This is maybe the only FF I've played where I disliked a party member to the degree that I found him actually repellent. When I got to the section where I had to play as him I looked up a walkthrough to figure out how long I was stuck in that hell and what the quickest way through it was. Luckily, it was blessedly short.
Red XIII's line "It's hard to stand on your own two legs" has really stuck with me, maybe more than any other individual line of dialogue has in a long time. It's just such a succinct summation of part of this game's theme, y'know? You can't do it on your own, you have to be ready and willing to not just ask for help but also to accept it. You need people around you because life is hard and we can't make it on our own. Also, if you're an alien dog in disguise pretending to be a human solider it is literally difficult to stand on your own two feet.
At the start of the game I was a staunch Aerti shipper but the relationship that builds between Cloud and Tifa throughout this is so sweet it got me dangerously close to becoming a Cloti shipper. Although in my heart of hearts I know the real answer here is Claerti.
One last thing: like I alluded to above, the Steam version is super fucked! It didn't properly recognize my controller and had no way to rebind them so my only option would've been to do it via Steam's controller shit but that would've messed it up for every other game I play! It sucks! And if you use a controller the button prompts don't update correctly so you have to the keyboard binds and how those map to your controller! It sucks! Bad port! I think the only advantage this has is that it's easier to plug into a cheat engine table if you want that for any particular reason, y'know.
2024
my brain is so big y'all
Ok, well, the drive AC Valhalla was installed on died and I Can Not be bothered to re-download 150 gigs for this fuckin' game so I guess it's time to try and sum up my thoughts on this one, huh. Spoiler alert: I think it's bad!
I like to indulge in some big dumb open world game from time to time and have put many many hours into both AC Origins and Odyssey, so I was actually looking forward to Valhalla! Another one of these big dumb games for me to use to stave off depression but this time it's got a vikings and Norse mythology coat of paint? Sure! Sign me up! But! Alas! It sucks!
This game is so chock full of design choices that I think are potentially very interesting or compelling but then they only ever commit halfway to them which results in this largely frictionless and uninteresting game. A big example of this is how they've structured the main plot of the game. They give you a choice in which region's questline you'll do next. At first I thought this meant that you would pick one region to ally yourself with and that would result in another region becoming an enemy and then there'd be some conflict later but, no, it's just literally the order you do them in because you will end up doing all of them eventually! And also! The individual regions don't really matter because there is zero interaction between any of them. People of one region really have no thoughts or feelings about the guy who just took over the region next door? Really? Nothing at all? Yeah, okay, sure Valhalla, whatever you say.
Speaking of those individual regions: they make the main plot of the game mostly feel like this collection of short stories. Which, again, I think is potentially interesting! Getting to learn about the core cast of characters by putting them in a variety of Situations is very compelling! But all the short stories suck ass and have zero interesting things going on and Eivor doesn't really do or say anything particularly notable. It's all just the most boring version of this idea!
And Eivor... I need to talk about Eivor. If you know me then you'd probably expect me to feel Very Normal about Eivor. I adored Kassandra and Eivor at first seemed like she might be another run at that character type. Strong powerful woman in kind of a mainstream generic hero way... like, sure it's kind of basic but also I can be kind of a basic bitch. But Eivor is so boring! She's supposed to be the quiet, stoic badass but it means she just sort of ends up standing around in every cutscene and occasionally grunting. If that's how your protagonist is going to be then you need to have some good characters around her to bounce off of. And unfortunately! The main plot does not have that! The absolute best of Eivor is in the dlc(?) add-on when Eivor heads to some island and meets up with Kassandra because Kassandra keeps trying to be her charismatic, jokey self but Eivor is always no-selling her attempts at humor and the dynamic works really well! But after four or five hours, that island is done and Kassandra leaves forever and it's back to Eivor and her boring viking pals all being dull and wooden together and it makes every cutscene a fucking slog.
(That bit when Kassandra comes back is fun. Sure, it's partially because I love her but also I think it's fun to have a functionally immortal character that could pop up anywhere in your big dumb franchise! What a goofy thing to add in a series chock full of goofy shit.)
The world is SO big and SO empty!! The majority of things are densely packed into the handful of cities and so most of the landmass is just empty fields and forest. I use the horse auto-pilot mechanic waaay more in this game than in AC:O or AC:O. I had frequent stretches of just riding across hillsides for, like, two minutes where nothing happens. No interesting terrain or landmarks, no combat, no collectable to grab. No nothing! It's so big and empty and boring!
And the thing is, this kind of feels like it's the developers trying to respond to the criticism/memes about "Ubisoft open world game map icon vomit". Like, they want the map to not be so cluttered with icons and so if there's big stretches of empty land, that technically addresses the issue but not in a good or satisfying way! There's still tons of shit to do it's just all concentrated in a handful of smaller areas. Why bother with such a big world!!
(There's also another aspect that feels like them trying to address that criticism and missing the mark: The icons are (partially) gone! They show up as a little colored dot that is kinda hard to see until you get close to it and then it reveals the icon. It's just annoying! Let me know what dumb collectible I'm heading towards before I get there! Why make this more tedious when this isn't going to actually make people happy!
But maybe none of that matters because most of the stuff you pick up is worthless! I ended up with way more of every material type than I could reasonable use (to the point that I started upgrading whatever extra armor or weapons just to unlock their higher level forms as cosmetics). So there came a point where I just started ignoring most of the icons on the map because I didn't need anything from them.
The Ireland DLC was pretty good! I think the added set of mechanics around capturing resource generators and then trading those resources for stuff is neat! It really feels like they're testing things and exploring possible mechanics for other/future AC games and I think that's alright. The rewards you get for trading things aren't particularly useful (some armor but mostly boat cosmetics) but I think because the materials are passively generated while you're off doing video game bullshit, it makes the lack of meaningful reward feel not as bad. The story is at least better than the main game's (a low bar, but still worth noting) mostly because they have some characters that are actually mildly compelling. I am not Irish but I have a feeling that the representation of Ireland and of Irish people that is presented here is probably not great!
And then there's the mythology DLC. I think between Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, Odyssey really struck a sweet spot with balancing history and mythology. There's enough of it spread out through that game that it feels ever-present but there's never too much to be oversaturated with it. But with Valhalla they seem to have gone back closer to Origin where there isn't a whole lot of it (until you get to the DLC that is entirely mythology). So for a lot of the game it's just boring old historical(ish) England.
I am a long time Norse mythology enjoyer (not in a weird way, I promise!! I just think mythology is cool!!) but the DLC really didn't land with me. It mostly just feels like More but with a new coat of paint. More maps to run around, more enemies to kill, more resources to gather. More more more. They do add another unique mechanic here: Eivor can now suck off enemies to gain special abilities! It's used for some puzzle solving and can theoretically be used for traversal or combat but I never found myself ever really thinking about it or using it very much. The puzzles are either dead simple and obvious or way too obtuse with very little in between. The combat isn't really something I needed any more tools for because the ability list is already so vast. And the world isn't so much different from any other location that being able to move around it different is very meaningful. It's just way too much of a new coat of paint on a game that there is already Way Too Much of!
I didn't get a chance to check out the France DLC because by the time I was high enough level to do it, I was feeling very burnt out on the game and was trying to focus on the main story but didn't even manage to finish that all the way through!
TOO MUCH VIDEO GAME. I was just over 100 hours in and wasn't even done with the main story! I probably had at least a dozen more hours to go!! What the hell! Maybe someday I'll go back and see the last chunk of story and go "wow this wasn't worth it" and then I'll treat myself to murdering a bunch of French people. But for now I'm done with this game. And, y'know what? I think this might've cured me of my "Ubisoft open world enjoyer" disease. I know there's another AC out at this point and I don't know that I'm really interested in checking it out at all! It'd be nice if it were good but I'm just not sure I have faith that it would be!
I like to indulge in some big dumb open world game from time to time and have put many many hours into both AC Origins and Odyssey, so I was actually looking forward to Valhalla! Another one of these big dumb games for me to use to stave off depression but this time it's got a vikings and Norse mythology coat of paint? Sure! Sign me up! But! Alas! It sucks!
This game is so chock full of design choices that I think are potentially very interesting or compelling but then they only ever commit halfway to them which results in this largely frictionless and uninteresting game. A big example of this is how they've structured the main plot of the game. They give you a choice in which region's questline you'll do next. At first I thought this meant that you would pick one region to ally yourself with and that would result in another region becoming an enemy and then there'd be some conflict later but, no, it's just literally the order you do them in because you will end up doing all of them eventually! And also! The individual regions don't really matter because there is zero interaction between any of them. People of one region really have no thoughts or feelings about the guy who just took over the region next door? Really? Nothing at all? Yeah, okay, sure Valhalla, whatever you say.
Speaking of those individual regions: they make the main plot of the game mostly feel like this collection of short stories. Which, again, I think is potentially interesting! Getting to learn about the core cast of characters by putting them in a variety of Situations is very compelling! But all the short stories suck ass and have zero interesting things going on and Eivor doesn't really do or say anything particularly notable. It's all just the most boring version of this idea!
And Eivor... I need to talk about Eivor. If you know me then you'd probably expect me to feel Very Normal about Eivor. I adored Kassandra and Eivor at first seemed like she might be another run at that character type. Strong powerful woman in kind of a mainstream generic hero way... like, sure it's kind of basic but also I can be kind of a basic bitch. But Eivor is so boring! She's supposed to be the quiet, stoic badass but it means she just sort of ends up standing around in every cutscene and occasionally grunting. If that's how your protagonist is going to be then you need to have some good characters around her to bounce off of. And unfortunately! The main plot does not have that! The absolute best of Eivor is in the dlc(?) add-on when Eivor heads to some island and meets up with Kassandra because Kassandra keeps trying to be her charismatic, jokey self but Eivor is always no-selling her attempts at humor and the dynamic works really well! But after four or five hours, that island is done and Kassandra leaves forever and it's back to Eivor and her boring viking pals all being dull and wooden together and it makes every cutscene a fucking slog.
(That bit when Kassandra comes back is fun. Sure, it's partially because I love her but also I think it's fun to have a functionally immortal character that could pop up anywhere in your big dumb franchise! What a goofy thing to add in a series chock full of goofy shit.)
The world is SO big and SO empty!! The majority of things are densely packed into the handful of cities and so most of the landmass is just empty fields and forest. I use the horse auto-pilot mechanic waaay more in this game than in AC:O or AC:O. I had frequent stretches of just riding across hillsides for, like, two minutes where nothing happens. No interesting terrain or landmarks, no combat, no collectable to grab. No nothing! It's so big and empty and boring!
And the thing is, this kind of feels like it's the developers trying to respond to the criticism/memes about "Ubisoft open world game map icon vomit". Like, they want the map to not be so cluttered with icons and so if there's big stretches of empty land, that technically addresses the issue but not in a good or satisfying way! There's still tons of shit to do it's just all concentrated in a handful of smaller areas. Why bother with such a big world!!
(There's also another aspect that feels like them trying to address that criticism and missing the mark: The icons are (partially) gone! They show up as a little colored dot that is kinda hard to see until you get close to it and then it reveals the icon. It's just annoying! Let me know what dumb collectible I'm heading towards before I get there! Why make this more tedious when this isn't going to actually make people happy!
But maybe none of that matters because most of the stuff you pick up is worthless! I ended up with way more of every material type than I could reasonable use (to the point that I started upgrading whatever extra armor or weapons just to unlock their higher level forms as cosmetics). So there came a point where I just started ignoring most of the icons on the map because I didn't need anything from them.
The Ireland DLC was pretty good! I think the added set of mechanics around capturing resource generators and then trading those resources for stuff is neat! It really feels like they're testing things and exploring possible mechanics for other/future AC games and I think that's alright. The rewards you get for trading things aren't particularly useful (some armor but mostly boat cosmetics) but I think because the materials are passively generated while you're off doing video game bullshit, it makes the lack of meaningful reward feel not as bad. The story is at least better than the main game's (a low bar, but still worth noting) mostly because they have some characters that are actually mildly compelling. I am not Irish but I have a feeling that the representation of Ireland and of Irish people that is presented here is probably not great!
And then there's the mythology DLC. I think between Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, Odyssey really struck a sweet spot with balancing history and mythology. There's enough of it spread out through that game that it feels ever-present but there's never too much to be oversaturated with it. But with Valhalla they seem to have gone back closer to Origin where there isn't a whole lot of it (until you get to the DLC that is entirely mythology). So for a lot of the game it's just boring old historical(ish) England.
I am a long time Norse mythology enjoyer (not in a weird way, I promise!! I just think mythology is cool!!) but the DLC really didn't land with me. It mostly just feels like More but with a new coat of paint. More maps to run around, more enemies to kill, more resources to gather. More more more. They do add another unique mechanic here: Eivor can now suck off enemies to gain special abilities! It's used for some puzzle solving and can theoretically be used for traversal or combat but I never found myself ever really thinking about it or using it very much. The puzzles are either dead simple and obvious or way too obtuse with very little in between. The combat isn't really something I needed any more tools for because the ability list is already so vast. And the world isn't so much different from any other location that being able to move around it different is very meaningful. It's just way too much of a new coat of paint on a game that there is already Way Too Much of!
I didn't get a chance to check out the France DLC because by the time I was high enough level to do it, I was feeling very burnt out on the game and was trying to focus on the main story but didn't even manage to finish that all the way through!
TOO MUCH VIDEO GAME. I was just over 100 hours in and wasn't even done with the main story! I probably had at least a dozen more hours to go!! What the hell! Maybe someday I'll go back and see the last chunk of story and go "wow this wasn't worth it" and then I'll treat myself to murdering a bunch of French people. But for now I'm done with this game. And, y'know what? I think this might've cured me of my "Ubisoft open world enjoyer" disease. I know there's another AC out at this point and I don't know that I'm really interested in checking it out at all! It'd be nice if it were good but I'm just not sure I have faith that it would be!
YES the third person shooting is kinda mid and YES the later levels get some pretty mean design choices that almost force you into grinding earlier levels for xp and gil and YES the first three-quarters of the game have very little meaningful or interesting story and YES everything with Omega and the Protomateria raises a lot of Big Lore questions about things going on in FF7.
BUT.
That last bit of the game! The last, like, three levels or something! It's all kinda sick as hell! The Rosso and Azul boss fights are just so damn cool. And basically everything once you get to the Weiss fight?? It's all anime bullshit and I love it. Vincent is great. What a cool guy. Yuffie is fun to have around sometimes! The little bit of Cloud/Tifa/Barret you get rules! Reeve sucks! And I guess Cid is there, too!
And I think the choice at the end of each level to convert your points into either XP or Gil is genuinely cool! And having your RPG stats to level up helps set this apart from the majority of shooters, which is neat!
I think I'm going to be rotating Rosso the Crimson in my mind for a long time.
If you don't like the edgy goth twink game then, I dunno, try letting joy into your heart or something.
BUT.
That last bit of the game! The last, like, three levels or something! It's all kinda sick as hell! The Rosso and Azul boss fights are just so damn cool. And basically everything once you get to the Weiss fight?? It's all anime bullshit and I love it. Vincent is great. What a cool guy. Yuffie is fun to have around sometimes! The little bit of Cloud/Tifa/Barret you get rules! Reeve sucks! And I guess Cid is there, too!
And I think the choice at the end of each level to convert your points into either XP or Gil is genuinely cool! And having your RPG stats to level up helps set this apart from the majority of shooters, which is neat!
I think I'm going to be rotating Rosso the Crimson in my mind for a long time.
If you don't like the edgy goth twink game then, I dunno, try letting joy into your heart or something.
Nothing Squeenix ever does will make me think Zack Fair is good and/or cool. In fact, the more I learn about him the more I start to actively dislike him.
There is a part of me that feels fundamentally opposed to all the "Compilation of Final Fantasy VII" stuff because FF7 on its own is such an exquisitely self-contained thing. Like, they did a great job with it! We don't need every little detail explained and expanded upon! It frequently makes things worse! Sometimes you do still end up with something that is Cool and Fun (Advent Children) but mostly you end up with stuff that is Bad and Sucks (Crisis Core).
I didn't realize just how much this game pushes Zack and Aerith together. I had always assuming the fandom shipping them was based on some crumbs but they are pretty clearly Together in this, huh. I am choosing to ship Zack with Tseng out of pure spite because both Aerith and Cloud deserve better than this dumpster boy.
Genesis constantly dropping in to quote a play is very stupid and funny. Genesis walked so V Devilmaycryfive could run.
weird prank from squeenix to name the trans woman "Cissnei" but okay
There is a part of me that feels fundamentally opposed to all the "Compilation of Final Fantasy VII" stuff because FF7 on its own is such an exquisitely self-contained thing. Like, they did a great job with it! We don't need every little detail explained and expanded upon! It frequently makes things worse! Sometimes you do still end up with something that is Cool and Fun (Advent Children) but mostly you end up with stuff that is Bad and Sucks (Crisis Core).
I didn't realize just how much this game pushes Zack and Aerith together. I had always assuming the fandom shipping them was based on some crumbs but they are pretty clearly Together in this, huh. I am choosing to ship Zack with Tseng out of pure spite because both Aerith and Cloud deserve better than this dumpster boy.
Genesis constantly dropping in to quote a play is very stupid and funny. Genesis walked so V Devilmaycryfive could run.
weird prank from squeenix to name the trans woman "Cissnei" but okay