There are plenty of things I really like about this game: the art and character design is adorable, it's fun to talk to and text all the different characters, the side quests are very charming, the setting is interesting and intriguing, and the writing in general is pretty solid.

But oh my god the match-3 combat is atrocious. It saps all the fun out of the game. It's not fun to do and there's kind of a lot of it, considering how short the game is. You get caught up on enemies, trying to move sigils around fizzles way too often, if you're too close to the end of a tile is the same as not being on the tile at all, it occasionally won't use all the sigils in a combo for no discernible reason. It's extremely frustrating to deal with. Luckily, there is an option in the menu to turn on invincibility; despite how much I love the other parts of the game I nearly quit playing over how un-fun the combat is.

One of my things about this game is when you get a new object and it's unclear what exactly it is. You need to organize is somewhere, so you come up with your best guess as to what it is and sort it accordingly. Maybe you see a white triangle with some yellow on one side and go "Well, I guess I'll call this a tent and put it with the outdoors objects, next to the trees and mountains." But then you talk to a friend or see a stream of someone playing and they get that same item and go "Ah! This is a block of cheese, I will sort it with the food objects" A food? That's not a food, it's a tent! You can't eat a tent! But then you see someone else get that same yellow and white triangle item and they say "I Do Not Care about the thing itself, it is a yellow background and so it goes with the other yellow background items." How could they do that?? Putting a tent next to rings and hiking boots and dinosaurs. How will they ever find anything with a sorting system like that!? And yet these are all viable ways to play Wilmot's Warehouse because it's ultimately about whatever system works best for you. There is no "optimal" way to play like there is in most games because the most "optimal" way is for you to play in whatever way makes the most sense to you and I think that's beautiful.

Very fun little game. Striking visuals, great soundtrack, and fun puzzles. It never got too difficult but never felt too easy, which can be a very tricky thing to balance with puzzle games. One note though, is that it recommends playing on a controller and I'd strongly second that. Keyboard controls are serviceable but controller feels significantly better.

The New Game + playthrough is an interesting thing for a puzzle game to have but because most of the puzzle elements of the game are seeing an spot and trying to figure out how to get there, they're able to move the orbs around and make sort-of remixes of the puzzles without having to alter level geometry at all. I think some of the orbs have been moved to silly positions (like hiding them in a bush so you can't see it at all) but for the most part it's a fun addition if you want to play the game for another hour or so.

The story is forgettable and wrapped up much faster than I thought it would. The main character is, at best, fine but he's so inconsistent in tone and behavior that it's hard to really latch on to him.

The puzzles are okay, I suppose. They're mostly nothing to write home about except for the ones that are on strict timers but you'd only want to write home about how terrible and frustrating it is to have to die several times just to be able to see what your options to solve the puzzle even are. In the last hour or so the puzzles are replaced by minigames which weren't as bad as I thought they would be but they certainly weren't any good, either.

Also, I thought Christianity was supposed to be all about kindness and forgiveness or whatever but this game sure does have a grudge with sex workers and homeless people and drug users and several other marginalized groups. There is this quiet cruelty to the game where the man sent to supposedly save humanity ends up killing, maiming, and generally terrorizing an awful lot of the people he's supposed to save.

I cannot possibly recommend anyone actually play this game but I would recommend looking up the soundtrack because it legitimately slaps.

It's cool! It's got a strong opening and an interesting world that makes it genuinely fun to find the collectables and learn all the little extra bits of lore. The story does fall a bit flat in the end but it's mostly pretty good.

I'm not great with horror games but this one was barely a horror game for most of it. The jumpscares are cheap in the exact ways that all jumpscares are cheap. The chase sequences are never really scary they're just occasionally frustrating. And the ambiance is never quite right to make it properly spooky. But for me that's all totally fine because it meant I could actually play the game to completion!

I did have some gnarly texture glitches with somethings being extremely low-res despite having quality set to high (making some puzzles un-solvable) and, very occasionally, textures were completely missing. It doesn't seem like a super common issue but your mileage may vary.

Let me tell you a tale of the wasteland. The Courier was wandering, as she is wont to do, and stumbled upon Vault 34. She made her way through a cave full of geckos and the irradiated hallways of the vault full of feral ghouls, all the while uncovering bits and pieces of the story of what happened to the vault dwellers. Too many people, too many guns, a struggle for power, and a broken reactor. A tragic story but stories like that come a dime a dozen in the wasteland. Eventually, the Courier made it to the bottom of the vault and found a suspicious terminal that allowed her to do one of two things: reroute the vault's controls or close the reactor vents. No one had told her to do anything about either of them and she wasn't sure what doing either would actually do. So she pushed a button and left to continue her adventures elsewhere.

This was what a large chunk of my experience with New Vegas was like: stumbling backwards into an area or a quest, getting a fraction of context on what is supposed to be going on, and then being asked to make a Grey Moral Choice™ to decide the fate of some strangers. I looked up what was up with Vault 34 and it turns out you can either let some people who are trapped in the vault out or close the vents so the nearby NCR Sharecroppers would have less radiation coming out of the vault and messing up their crops. It maybe would've been an interesting choice if the game had ever indicated that to me or found some way to communicate that to me. But instead I just tripped on into the last objective in the quest and pressed a random button. This quest was basically incoherent and it happened with enough other quests that I encountered that entire swathes of the game felt incoherent.

What I want to say is that the writing was strong enough and that individual stories worked well enough that I didn't need it to all fit together nicely and be presented in a way that was comprehensible but honestly I'm not sure I can really say that. I visited nearly every location and did every quest I could find but so much of the writing is relatively bland. The game is so chock full of uninteresting characters and stale stories that I found it hard to maintain interest beyond the most basic level of "I guess I should be paying attention so I have some idea of the larger plot." Maybe time is a factor and ten years of other games and other stories make this game feel a bit more stale now but I can't imagine that would effect every bit of writing across the entire game, right?

I'd like to end this with at least one positive note, though. I think this game does a much better job at connecting back to the roots of Fallout 1 and 2 than 3 does. This is mostly due to New Vegas's proximity but just the simple act of having people be like "oh, yeah, I grew up in Shady Sands" or whatever makes the franchise feel much more like a singular whole whereas F3 is just like "I dunno, this ghoul you might know wandered across the entire country and turned into a tree or whatever".

Oh, and the game only crashed to desktop twice and corrupted saves four times which is much lower than I was expected considering how monumentally broken and barely functional the engine is! So, good job on that one, New Vegas.

I played around with this for about two hours before deciding I didn't need to see any more of it. When I had a rough fight or lost a run, it very rarely felt like I could have done anything better. Every run that died was because I would draw a card and have zero options for seven or eight turns in a row and, let me tell you, that feels real bad.

I've always heard this is a great game to play on your commute but I don't have one (and got this for free on EGS anyway) so maybe desktop is just a bad way to play it and I'd be more patient with it on-the-go.

After about seven hours (and 16 chapters?) I can't put up with this game anymore. The combat feels bad, the story is bland, the characters are mostly unlikable. There are plenty of interesting ideas and things that I want to like but none of it was coming together so I had to tap out. Seven hours oscillating between boredom and frustration is a lot more than I'd give to most games but The Last Story wouldn't give anything back.

The combat wants to be tactical but has too many limits on it for it to really give you the ability to think about engagements. You can order your allies to do specific actions but only when your meter has charged up enough so oftentimes they'll just hang out and maybe do something useful if they're feeling generous. You can use Gathering to draw aggro but I found that usually just results in death because of how limited healing is. The automatic attacking feels bad and makes it hard to move but manual makes it hard to dodge which became more and more necessary the further I went. It all felt so clumsy and like it needed some more refinement to make it all come together properly.

The characters. I wish I liked the characters. But Zael is just some bland guy, Calista is a generic love interest, Syrenne is 50% jokes about alcoholism and 50% sexual innuendo, Yurick is a jerk, and Lowell is a misogynist. Dagran and Mirania seemed alright, at least, but they weren't enough to salvage the cast.

The main plot is a pretty generic JRPG story, for better or worse. I've played more than enough of them to see this and have a solid idea of how it's going to play out and it wasn't enough to make me want to put up with any more of the un-fun combat to see it through.

Also, it is very funny to me that the title of this game is just a synonym for "Final Fantasy". They wanted it to be a Final Fantasy game so bad that they even named the dang game after it.

I made the mistake of going into this game immediately after finishing 7th Dragon 2020. I thought "Okay, I was a little tired of the relatively basic mechanics by the end of the first game but I'm sure the sequel will mix things up enough to make it feel fresh!" Unfortunately, 7th Dragon 2020-II is functionally identical. There's one new class that I didn't particularly care for and a bunch of balance changes that, as far as I could tell, only made my characters weaker. That second part is important because it made the game feel like it was pushing me to grind a bunch of extra levels right at the start because no one could survive more than two or three hits and all the costs of skills went way up so I couldn't get much stronger without committing to lots of extra fights.

On top of all that, the story sets itself up to be an exact repeat of the previous game. Oh, you killed the True Dragon who is a god that created all other dragons? Well, there's six more attacking Tokyo, please go kill them. Maybe there's something interesting later on but getting what appears to be largely the same story isn't worth the investment right now. Maybe someday I'll return to this and enjoy it, but not right now.

It's not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. A lot of criticism the game faced was for technical aspects that have been patched and now vary between "acceptable" to "completely fine". The game itself feels pretty good to play and might be the best feeling game in the franchise in terms of combat and movement. The writing is all over the place, though. Something like 30-40% of the writing is actually any good and the rest can go in the bin. The biggest, glaring issue with it is the colonialism is off the charts. "Oh, we're going somewhere no one is so we can settle new homes! Oh wait, there's an alien species here already? That's okay, shoot half of them, befriend the other half, and continue our settling plans without any change!" fuck off

There was enough good stuff in it that I wish they'd do another one but with how poorly it was received I doubt they'll take another crack at it.