I wanted to love this game.

This was my most hyped up release in years,
the game I was looking forward to the most and now after finishing it, I feel utterly disappointed.
I think I'll start with some technical complaints I have:
- I want RGG to abandon this Frankenstein ass corpse of an engine they're carrying around. The Dragon Engine is an unrefined piece of shit and never have I felt this more than with Infinite Wealth. This thing is priced at $70 but fails to actually feel like a full price game with its complete lack of polish.
- There are no seamless transitions in this game whether you're entering let's say a Substory, a scripted event or a Cutscene. It is always either an abrupt hard-cut or a shitty fade to black
- Companion AI sucks dick and their path finding is straight up broken
- The always re-used animations during in game dialogue sections are getting on my fucking nerves. I understand that you can't mo-cap everything in large scale JRPG's like these, but I would like for SOMETIMES VERY IMPORTANT SCENES to not feel like a fucking Garry's Mod animation on Youtube.

Which now brings me to one of my biggest gripes with this whole experience.
- T H E - P R E S E N T A T I O N -
Everything that isn't part of a motion captured and well composed cutscene looks like absolute horse shit and won't stop drilling THE SAME 5 SONGS FROM LIKE THE LAST 4 GAMES INTO MY HEAD.
I am sick and tired of hearing the melancholic substory theme from Yakuza 0. What's even worse is that every and I really mean EVERY music cue in this game is forced and as agonizingly formulaic as possible. It's not even like these are entirely new issues,
-> the R in RGG does stand for re-use after all, but I am starting to feel ripped off after they have tried to pull this shit a few too many times now.
I also despise the way anything is framed in this game,
Yakuza has lost its style, every interaction between NPCs looks fucking robotic and had me skipping dialogue more times than I wanted to.
Almost every bit of side content felt unrewarding or like a complete waste of my time and the structure of this game only makes this worse, by
A) putting the entire story on halt just to shove minigames you do not give a fuck about down your throat
and B) Constantly putting your next objective on the other side of town, making the exploration of Hawaii feel like an obligatory chore.

I don't even want to start talking about the story, because it is the biggest problem I have with Like a Dragon: Infinite Ass and I would quite literally have to write a book to fully elaborate on why this is one of the worst narratives I have ever seen in the medium.
A game so incompetently written that it actively devalues its previous installments by acting like the consequences that were established after the last 2 mainline entries just do not matter anymore
- While also refusing to elaborate on how we got to certain points in the story or just forgetting to properly tie up its loose ends in the final chapter.
They chomped up more than they could swallow here... This shit is legit missing scenes and the necessary context to make anything that happens matter.
Infinite Wealth tries to do and say a lot, but falls flat on its face, failing to justify its existence.
It is without a single doubt in my mind, the most pointless addition to the franchise,
one that has done nothing but aggravate me with its quantity over quality philosophy.

I feel ripped off, betrayed and lied to....

The only good things about this game are the quality of life improvements to 7's combat, perhaps a few good scenes sprinkled onto a steaming pile of shit and that is it.

Google tells me I'm past halfway through Final Fantasy XVI and I keep finding weak excuses to not finish it. I just don't find this game fun.

Frustrating combat, weak story and lifeless semi-open worlds... all working against the beautiful score, truly next gen presentation, and the epic but infrequent Eikon battles.

I could probably push my way through if the combat was fun, however it is so dull to smash through. There is no challenge to it, just spongey enemies and repetition. The game often throws waves of enemies at you, yet rarely offers anything new. There is a mission about 10 hours in where you are working your way to a boss through these puzzle rooms, and you fight the same enemy dozens of times for about an hour. I was bored out of my mind.

I consider myself a mediocre gamer (Souls-likes terrify me) and haven't died once, not even in the optional side boss battles. That isn't what you want from a game like this.

Sounds like I hate it, so why the rating? The Eikon battles are incredible. The spectacle of them is unparalleled. Trim the game down by 10 hours so these battles become more frequent, and you've got a game I'd finish.

I also loved the performances, even if I didn't care for a lot of the characters or what was happening. There was a lot of heavy lifting done by the talented cast, and they deserve all the praise I think they'll receive this awards season.

Crystal Project is an unfortunate one for me because on one hand I love what it's going for but on the other hand holy HELL it's bogged down by so much tedium and annoying design choices that feel very intentional and because of that becomes such a SLOGGGGGGG to play

I'll just get what I like out of the way first so I can get into the actual nitty gritty BULLSHIT I wanna talk about. I think the bosses are fucking awesome. They use the mechanics of the game to create fun boss fights that all feel unique, they're fun to build around and very seldom feel like they actually rely on RNG. I've had a ton of bosses that came down to my last character being put in a clutch or kick situation and that's badass. BASICALLY, I LIKE COUNTERBUILDING BOSSES. THIS GAME DOES THAT WELL.

Ok now time for the booboo ass shit i HATE abt this game. I THINK THE EXPLORATION FUCKING BLOWWWSSSSSSS. At the beginning I was down with it but progressing a bit more I was like damn, this shit stinks! Why's that? Well it's for a LOT of reasons. For one, I think the platforming kinda sucks most of the time and isn't fun. This may be considered quite controversial as most people I've talked to like the platforming aspect of the game a good bit. My biggest problem with the platforming is you'll often be put into situations where if you fuck up one instance of platforming you'll have to redo the entire thing due to how respawning works, that sucks. Another issue to go alongside this is a lot of the time I feel like the perspective is kinda fucked, so I'll often have to work around that which just adds to the tedium of platforming, not fun stuff. I also think the amount of encounters in areas can be super annoying especially when I don't like the normal encounters that much in the first place (we'll go over that later). Lastly, and this is probably my biggest issue with exploration, is that for some god forsaken reason they decided to make maps things you have to unlock??? Normally in super roundabout ways???? Like I get that's part of the exploration but exploring a game like this without having a map fucking blows and makes finding out where you're supposed to go next EXTREMELY tedious. Btw it's kinda up to you to find out where to go next, which I get that's part of the fun for some people but for me personally I just found it added to the tedium. This isn't a problem depending on who you are I just found that aspect of it to be annoying.

Anyways with that out of the way time to get to the actual combat. Combat is weird for me because on paper I like it and it does a lot of things right. You always know how much damage you'll do, how much delay you'll have so on and so forth. Very little is left to the imagination and nothing feels random and that's cool, I wish more jrpgs would follow suit with this. My problem mostly stems from the teambuilding options not feeling very satisfying to play around with. What I mean by this is that most jobs really don't have much fun options and it feels like the creators tried VERY hard to create something impossible to break the game with. Which is fair and I get that but at the same time this mindset restricts the classes so much to the point where I wasn't really excited to see what tools a class would give me. Most of the time upon seeing a classes skills I'd just be like "yeah ok" or "this class seems kinda bad". For a game BASED AROUND PLAYING WITH CLASSES this is NOT GOOD. If I don't shit my pants upon getting a new class literally what are you doing. I get this game is trying to create a balanced experience but it feels like I am being offered breadcrumbs instead of fun and unique classes to play with. Even the Bravely Games, which I am very lukewarm on, did this well. Yeah those games were easy to break but it's up to the player to break them, and I'm 100% fine with that because each class felt extremely unique, fun to play with and almost always felt worth using, as opposed to here where they do not.
Aside from the teambuilding options kinda sucking I found normal encounters to be tedious as all hell. Yeah bosses are sick but most of the time you'll be fighting the same encounters with an oddly high amount of HP and can do a pretty big number to you. I get wanting to make normal encounters difficult but I feel as if this misses the mark HARD and just turns them into an absolute slog. Even worse is that areas have a LOT of encounters and more often than not in dungeons they're very difficult to actually avoid meaning you'll have to go through a LOT of them which SUCKS when encounters take as long as they do. Overall not a good time.

Tldr: I like the bosses and game has some cool ideas but most of the ideas are kinda executed like shit which made this super tedious to play and made me decide to drop it.

To start off this monetization style was designed by Hitler. Not sure what kind of game deserves the unholy trio of money siphoning that is price for game + subscription + microtransaction store, but it ain't this one. The often applauded mentality of FFXIV's creator that one should play other games; that this one doesn't intend to jam its claws in you like many live service titles do, that the world will always be there waiting for its heroes to come back - is at odds with the aforementioned subscription model and comes across as a bit cynical. Yeah the game will be waiting for you as long as you pay up motherfucker, your monthly just renewed and you're burned out? May as well play the month out, don't wanna waste that hard earned coin do we? No pressure though! This of course isn't enough, The Heart of the Party that is Blizzard deserves yet another commendation for inspiring its competitors to stoop to the same level with the addition of a microtransaction shop, except the majority seems okay with this implementation because... it's not in-game? A 5headed loophole perhaps and I've seen claims that it's not as bad as others but I'm sorry, 7 fucking USD for a tea drinking emote? We've gone way past micro ladies and gents, I better get a stat boost every time I take a sip or you're taking the fucking piss. Sure I'm not so much of a dreamer to think that a live service game can continue servicing on LOVE™ alone like those 5 people still playing Guild Wars 2 (please no one tell them that it also has a shop with gold buying), with it needing server maintenance, events, updates, usual speak. But for the 3 or so months that I've been playing, every event has been an almost complete joke, crappy series of whocares cutscenes with a small reward attached, maybe a cosmetic item or 2 that fail to serve as anything other than a thing to flex on new players a year from now as a "look what you can't get ;)" before they promptly ignore you for looking like a goddamn clown. The event going on as of time of writing is admittedly the best one because you can get the funny chubby pokeymans, but... this is their 10th anniversary, an outlier and something that should've arguably been grander, and yet all they did was make you grind through old content for event currency. Maybe it would be unfair to compare it to gacha games considering their immense revenue, though I'm left wondering still what all this asking money is for; a hope that Dawntrail won't be Dawnfail, or maybe the slightly touched up visuals that were recently announced? You guys all have mods right?

Since ranting about shitthatdoesntmatter inevitably calls for the "just get more money" rebuttal, how's the game itself? Yet another modern MMO where the leveling experience is a slightly annoying rash that hopefully will go away one day if ignored enough, with only actual challenge awaiting in lategame trials and raids? Don't answer that of course, and for anyone remotely initiated that's not a flex of gamercred; it feels like a more casual, multitask-encouraging experience by design and that's not always the worst thing. Here and there I'd come across praises how XIV allegedly revolutionized the genre for people, and some of that speak I'd echo even; while maybe not a pioneer in this regard, it does feel better not running all the way back to the dungeon or a boss after a wipe ("social experience" as WoW players would call it) or having your goldbag guillotined just for wanting to respec. Eyebrow raising though is that those same people will complain about the "gather 10 bear asses" type of quest design so infamous for the genre, which I'd agree is largely basic and sucks, so how does XIV solve it? By making you gather only 3, brilliant. I jest a bit, story context makes it better but not everyone gives a damn about the story. Thinking about how many missions boil down to going to a purple circle or interacting with a marker which makes a couple of hostiles spawn (usually 3) brings forth depression, there's very little variety. On top of that playing this thing like a usual MMO, grabbing every sidequest one comes across, is the biggest mistake you could make as they give fuck all rewards and it's just infinitely wiser to push the main scenario along or at least do almost any of the other side activities like the random blue circles on the map which still give more experience for less time and effort. The main stuff alone will overboost your primary job, so I wondered what the situation is like on one of the preferred servers that give a significant +exp, made a char after which the first guild quest granted me about 5 levels on completion which genuinely reminded me of playing some private server or a game at its death door. Can see how this would make leveling side jobs much less of a hassle later on but it fucks up any shred of balance and fun. And naturally since everything's so easy it deemphasizes working with other players most of the time so they only ever get /pets if one likes the shape of their rabbit ears and not because they actually helped.

A lot of the lauded main story is very snooze inducing, there's so much backtracking working as a de facto fantasy world postman in a setting where telepathic cellphones exist (or something like that). It also reaches some genuinely embarrassing lows, like throwing away macguffins of unlimited power off the side of the cliff (surely the dimension hopping dementors following our every move won't dig them up?). The weird kicker here being that... I kinda like it? Stockholm syndrome sadly kicked in and maybe all this can be taken with a couple of salt masses. Admitting to your mistakes is one thing but also canonizing them in a successful way is another; the 1.0 version was such a shitshow that it had to be burned down, with a meteor very literally. What's left is a new beginning, a chosen one story that appears like a seemingly thankless job, in its downtime you're left listening to constant whimpers of your companions; and honestly why? Why would elf grandpa give his life away for the thousands of face 1 hime cut lizards and fair-haired not-Y'shtollas spamming the bee gees dance in Limsa, while calling me basic for picking a midlander in a world with felines and bunnoids? Why give away everything so this ungrateful scum can still complain about CBU3 not adding more than 4 faces; that they still can't separate facial hair or horns or ears from mug types, tech-illiterate peasants unable to comprehend how hard it is to master this otherworldly technology. How many more cries about not being able to change eye color without paying real $$$ must we listen to, this asshole, entitled community really believes that a world with mechs and spaceships should also have colored contact lenses? Never expected the Postman of Light's job to give me an existential crisis; it's thankless and at times unbearable but somebody has to do it, a lightbulb moment that finally helped me realize how Death Stranding fans can enjoy such a horrible looking game.

The combat lacks punchiness of some others in the genre and is known to give eye crust in its snailish starts, but feels more like an elaborate dance later on as you're constantly cycling through skills, weaving them between one another without even looking at their cooldowns; I missed that feel when you finally memorize all 30 keybinds for your abilities and slam them so methodically like you're piloting a spaceship. With Linkin Park in my veins and an unending will to compensate I stuck with the dark knight for the most part because casting abilities with names like EDGE OF DARKNESS and THE BLACKEST NIGHT is in my M.O; tanks in this game would make Warthunder jealous, their mere presence making enemies mald in furious anger as they mumble AM's hate monologue while being unable to target anyone but your flesh carapace of mithril steel; the drawback to insane sustain and option to aggro everything with a press of a button being of course the ability to also do a lot of damage, carefully balanced. And as the combat gets more involved so does the narrative, maybe insisting far too much at times at fishing for soyface YT thumbnails with fairly constant references to the rest of the franchise, but some of it does work (an encounter with a certain wandering ronin and an order of knights were highlights). Like habitually stated the postman's journey DOES get more interesting in the expansions and this rating is more so for their starting experience, but it's not a wholly "it gets better after x hours" scenario since many of my complaints still ring true and I'm not sure how long I'll keep going at it. Currently running through Stormblood and it kinda fucks but the burnout is real (Takedown to be specific as the bi-yearly replay started).

I questioned if I would turn into that annoying type of Steam reviewer with this kind of rambling. More than 300 hours in and a lot about the game bothers me, will there be enough good to mention even? Suppose I'll turn to the saying of a wise man who once noted that "playing an MMORPG these days really just boils down to what kind of dick you want to suck". Other than the monetization, nothing in this is offensively bad but the highs aren't that high either. So what else are you gonna play if you need the fix? World of Peacecraft is a dead horse so used to beating it developed M tendencies, while Classic is a shadow of not only vanilla but also its 2019-20 self. Old School Runescape is fine enough but if the wi-fi in your retirement home goes out you're fucked. No other MMO is being played and if you see anyone saying otherwise they're probably a federal agent so watch yourself.

Fate Samurai Remnant found itself in a very compromising position where it isn't enough of a musou game to satiate musou fans and Fate fans might enjoy the story, the slog of having to play through the game three times (4 if you want to see everything) will make them hate every second of playthrough 2 and beyond.

I really enjoyed the story and absolutely loved the True Ending, but I don't think I could really recommend the game because of how much of a chore the game gets.

I'd say wait for an anime adaptation.

Going to preface that they should have rename this game Fate/Padding Remnant. Whatever enjoyment I had with the game was dampened by how atrocious the game was on respecting the players' time. Combat is a slog with how numerous and spongy the mobs are and how every bosses have shield mechanic that took ages to shred, worse yet in combat with Servant since they will regenerate their shield after certain HP thresholds and some make you restart the fight before the pre-fight cutscene starts so if you die you have to spend time pressing the skip button.

Moving on but still somewhat related, the game love to throws multitudinous amount of combat encounters to your face at every point of the story, making the pacing slows to a crawl like a snail's. Nary a moment in the story progression where there isn't obligatory 'we're under fucking attack' battle or 'fight me if you want to pass through' boss combat with the stray Servants. At several points I lose track of what was even going on in the main story from all the button mashing I need to do before reaching my destination. The Servant combat is sort of fun but if you have to fight ten waves of damage-sponge mooks beforehand you'll want to get it over by then like how I just gobbled all the skill charge items and then spam it on boss... all so I could restart the loop and fight another ten waves in next chapter again and again. Do I mention you need to repeat this with three playthroughs to see all the content? Well, now you know.

The story itself is... fine, I guess? It might be because they need to cater to newcomer of the series but I feel they played way too safe with the scenario to the end (the unlockable ending is admittedly very cool, but it's too little too late by then). If you have read feudal Japan setting chapters written by Higashide or Sakurai in FGO then you'll see nothing new in here, if you haven't then... uh, I don't know, you get a standard JRPG plot with Fate setting? You expect being written by Koei team means they will try something fresh, but I guess the story supervision was pretty strict this time. Honestly speaking, it doesn't matter which player you are: by the end of the game I'm convinced the story is just a dressing for Type-Moon to put all the new characters in eventual future FGO collab event.

While it's nice to have a new console Fate game since Extra series (fuck Extella) after so long and the production itself is pretty solid, boy, does playing this was a drag. Can we have the Extra remake now and while at it, remaking CCC too?

Fate/Samurai Remnant is overall a very great game with a couple of pretty glaring flaws.

The story of this game was a very fun return to the "proper" Holy Grail War format that the franchise had not really used (Excluding FGO's Paper Moon chapter from earlier in the year) in ages. The way the game splits into a couple of different “routes” near the end also felt very reminiscent of Stay Night which was the best thing it could have been. Some parts of the story were unfortunately seemingly left open for DLC, but the package that's there is easily compelling enough to play the game without waiting for those.

The characters are all really great. Iori and Saber are just an incredibly charismatic duo to follow through the game and the way the NG+ exclusive ending caps off their story felt very cathartic. All of the other masters were also very endearing and I’m glad the game managed to show their side as well.

My biggest issue with the game though is its gameplay. The boss “break bars” are far too annoying to deal with and every single fight feels like a drag. The normal enemies and the more “musoulike” gameplay was very fun but most story bosses lost some of their oomph due to the super long time to beat them. It also did not help that the game required another playthrough to reach the 2 endings you didn't achieve on your first playthrough.

Something that surprises me about Capcom is how good they are at comeback stories. I wouldn't really call them an underdog of the video game industry, as they have a few consistently good franchises, like Monster Hunter, Ace Attorney, and Mega Man. But for every perfect series under their belt, there's another one that faltered at some point with an impossibility for recovery. Yet, despite the huge mountain left for the next game to climb, they climbed it nonetheless. Devil May Cry 3 is maybe the greatest comeback story in the industry done out of the developer's own ego for not wanting to be responsible for the worst game in the series. Resident Evil 7 took the series back to its roots with actual horror, instead of doing whatever 5 and 6 were plotting, and it saved the series from the brink of cancellation.

While not to the same degree, I would say Street Fighter 6 is in a similar boat. Street Fighter V is a good game and I will forever stand by that, but it took a hell of a while for it to get to that point. With one of the worst launches ever for a video game, the devs didn't make up for it until years later with much needed improvements, balance changes, and gameplay additions. Street Fighter 4 was responsible for keeping the genre as a whole from becoming obsolete, but as much as I love that game, it faltered near the end of its life and needed a change. SFV was a very safe play, because unlike SF4, there was very little risk involved.

A few issues that were introduced at the start, and some even persisting throughout, were character depth, universal mechanics, and freedom. Movesets were barebones, as the proximity normals from SF4 were removed. Every character was easy to understand, easy to pick up, and easy to master. The V-System was cool, but was different for every character, leading to loads of problems regarding balance and expression. Universal mechanics can be hard to balance, as some characters will naturally benefit from them more than others. In SF4, Balrog not only had no meaningful way to FADC (Focus Attack Dash Cancel) to extend combos, but he also had one of the worst Focus Attacks in general, having negative horizontal range. Meanwhile, Evil Ryu got a number of damaging combo extensions from FADC and also had a great Focus Attack despite that.

The overall barebones movesets and clunky universal mechanics limited the overall freedom and expression available to players. You want a max damage punish against a blocked DP? Great, do this exact combo and use your super at the end if you have the meter. EX extensions were limited, and any more combo variety was limited to the V-Triggers and V-Skills, which not every character could even use to their advantage. Some characters were just stuck with a shitty V-System. Both of Lucia's triggers and skills were limited to combo extensions and hardly anything else. If they did anything else, they were generally really bad at it. Very few characters got as fleshed out of a system as Cody and Akira; not to underplay those that were a bit worse but still useful, but about half the roster suffered from uninteresting game plans and movesets.

Thank the glorious bastards at Capcom who made SF6 possible. Right off the bat, this game grabs your attention with every fiber of its being. Every frame of animation and every nanosecond of sound oozes personality. SFV lacked any kind of signature style that made it stand out, so seeing SF6 establish a unique identity for itself even from the initial teaser trailer is astounding. Characters move with style, their hits leaving a powerful impact. Supers finally look cool again, most even looking cooler when they become their critical art variant when you reach 25% health or lower. Luke's level three is pretty brutal; he runs you over and unloads a barrage of punches while mounted on you. But his critical art? It's the same thing but he fucking kills you. Your character helplessly is stuck as they block each punch. It's only when they try throwing a punch of their own that Luke utterly obliterates them. He fucking kills his opponent. They explode and Luke just exhales afterwards as if it took little to no effort at all. When you get hit with something like this, you know you messed up.

One thing I will say that has irked me for a while is Capcom's neverending boner for SF2. They make it their job to include each of the original eight world warriors because they were the characters who revolutionized the genre, I think. I wouldn't have a problem if half these characters weren't the absolute worst. Ryu, Ken, Guile, and Chun are cool. I like them a lot, their gameplay is unique, and there's a lot to their characters from a lore and personality perspective. However, Zangief, Blanka, Honda, and Dhalsim suck ass. Although arguments can be made for their unique gameplay archetypes (I love watching Zangief kill with three command grabs as much as the next guy), there's absolutely nothing to their character outside of that. I have not met a single person, offline or online, that genuinely likes Honda or Dhalsim for their character traits or personality. Zangief is Russian and he wrestles. Blanka is monkey. Honda is sumo guy. Dhalsim is yoga. Congrats, you now know everything there is to know about these characters. It pains me to see some of these characters constantly returning when I'm positive that nobody likes them. I don't see why some of these characters couldn't be swapped with another that fulfills the same function. Hell, Lily essentially has all of T. Hawks moves, input for input, just with clubs instead of long arms, so if they're willing to let another veteran retire and pass on their legacy to someone with a more promising future, why can't they do the same for someone like Honda or Dhalsim?

I apologize for letting my SF2 hate leak into this review. While a lot I've said has been negative, I want to let it be known that I say this out of love for SF6. This game is the coolest thing ever. With that being said, I have another complaint: how is there not a Final Fight rep in the base roster? The main setting for the game is Metro City, the setting of the Final Fight series. Decorations based on the series are everywhere, including a massive statue dedicated to Mike Haggar. You can meet Carlos from Final Fight 2 just hanging around. But, nobody from the games is actually playable. They added Kimberley, a student to Guy, which kind of makes me more upset than if she had been absent. They really wanted to make ANOTHER Bushinryu specialist instead of revamping one of the two they already had? Zeku was awesome, one of the few new additions to SFV that made the game worth buying all on his own, and his style differed greatly from Guy. This was a perfect opportunity to get the gang back together, considering Cody is still the mayor and lots of the gameplay in world tour is just beating up the Mad Gear. The devs said in an interview that the hardest character for them to cut was Cody, which kind of makes me worried that he won't be playable at all. It just sucks to see all this tribute to Final Fight without an actual character to play as.

With those complaints about the roster out of the way, I really like everyone else. Veterans were implemented with revisions that allow them to keep up with everyone else while also remaining interesting, and new characters are fresh and varied. Ryu is somehow cool, he now has an install to improve his fireball, and a new palm attack that's great for pressure and combos. Ken has rekkas, giving him the same high/low mixup he's excelled with, but in a new coat of paint. Deejay was completely revamped to have decent tools all around, but with feints to fake out the opponent and get some greedy resets and fake outs. Zangief is finally scary again, unleashing damage that other characters get by expending multiple resources over the course of a combo in a single command grab. The new system seems to favor him quite a bit, so I'm excited to see the tournament upsets. The new characters are great, as well. Marisa hits like a freight train and has armor on everything. I'm sorry, you whiffed a jab at half screen? You fucking idiot, let me take a fourth of your health bar with a single charged special move. Lily is just T. Hawk with a new install, but I like T. Hawk, so I like Lily. Manon is somehow a scarier grappler than Zangief when she plays the long game. Each command grab she gets powers up the next one, meaning if you take her to round 3, you WILL be eating grabs that take a third of your health. Jamie has a lot of style and flair, but his ego does annoy me a bit, which is funny because one of his apparent dislikes is people with big egos. He's got a lot of unique combo routes, even after his level three, so I wouldn't be surprised if people are finding new combos with him for a while. JP has the best win animation in any fighting game. I love his parallels with Bison; rather than being an upfront dictator, showing his power to the world, he acts behind the scenes and prefers to keep himself unknown, which is portrayed greatly in his gameplay. A pressure monster who benefits from being in your face vs a long range poking and zoning monster who is more dangerous the further away he is from you.

Every character presented here has something unique and interesting to offer. I think I might have to give them all a fair shot, even the characters I typically don't like, just because the gameplay is impeccable. Instead of an EX meter, a new meter takes its place in the form of the Overdrive meter. EX moves are now OD moves, and multiple actions can be performed for specific amounts of the gauge. A Drive Parry is like the parry from days of old but done with a button press. Holding it isn't as broken as you would think it is; it allows you to avoid chip damage, but doesn't change the frame data of the move, i.e. you hold parry against a +4 attack, that attack will still be +4. Timing your button press perfectly will result in a perfect parry, with a highly reactable screen freeze, allowing you an easy punish, so getting good parry punishes still requires precise timing. Doing a dash input while holding a parry results in a Drive Rush. This is like a faster dash in neutral, but if you do a move at the end of it, its frame advantage increases. You can perform a raw Drive Rush from a cancellable normal by simply inputting dash, opening up new combo opportunities and frame traps. Drive Impact is a big, armored, unblockable lunge. In the corner, trying to block it results in a wall splat, giving the opponent a combo. Challenging these directly is a death sentence, so a jump, grab, or a Drive Impact of your own will get you out of danger. When your OD meter is completely gone, you enter burn out. In this state, you take actual chip damage, and each of your opponent's moves has greater frame advantage on block. Eating a Drive Impact in the corner while in this state will result in a traditional stun like previous titles.

The magic of a universal system that benefits everyone is that you don't ever have to balance the mechanic itself, but rather, balance characters around the mechanic. Like I said earlier, V-Triggers were cool, but each of them were so radically different, that they warranted individual balancing of how they worked. With any universal mechanic, some characters will naturally benefit from them more than others, and some characters will struggle to fight against its benefits, but as long as everyone can make some decent use of it and there are no apparent abusers of the system, then it's good.

The abundance of options within the system offers lots of creativity and flare. The drive meter refills itself over time, giving the player tons of meter to play with without having to wait too long to get bars like SFV. Nobody likes limited access to their tools, so you start every round with full OD meter and build it over time instead of according to moves that you land. Drive rushes and OD moves open up lots of combo opportunities. Characters with lackluster OD moves can still make use of drive rush for new combos and vice versa. Supers being tied to their own meter also gives more leniency to how they can be used. Everyone has a level 1, a level 2, and a level 3. These vary in terms of utility; some characters often make use of every super they have, while some characters would rather save up for level 3 and cash out at the end of a round. Bottom line is: the characters themselves are easy enough to understand, but the system mechanics give more depth to everyone, adding personal expression and tense optimization. I think the way the system mechanics work make everyone easier to get a hold of. I've been playing characters I never even thought of trying before, like Ken and Zangief, just because the system mechanics give a lot of leeway between characters.

While I don't take part in most of them myself, the efforts gone through to turn Street Fighter into a more widely accessible game are commendable. I would like modern controls a lot more if they didn't remove half of your moves, it feels terrible not having every option available to you. This sucks even more because I really want to try learning pad (I've been a keyboard warrior my whole life) but have been deterred because inputs on it feel awful. Modern controls could've been the answer to my prayers, but it just feels objectively worse. I'm glad it's getting other people into the game, and I'm glad it's an option, but if it were up to me, I would prefer the classic controls in terms of normals and modern in terms of specials. World Tour is another big selling point to get more casuals on board with fighting games that I'm not a huge fan of. People like making fun of modern open world games and simplifying them as "dude you just go to a place and do a thing and then go to another place and that's the whole game," but that actually is this whole game. The most you ever do in this mode is fights. There is one method of gameplay and that's it. I've only played a few hours and I'm already sick of it. I like how I can create an avatar that looks stupid as hell (if you ever see Grug from The Croods in the battle hub, say hi) and give them moves based on other fighters, but it's WAY too much work for what it's worth. I'll keep playing just so I can get more outfits without having to pay, but it's VERY repetitive.

Speaking of the battle hub, it's been a hot minute since Capcom made good online services. The online call for rollback gets annoying fast when most people don't even know what that entails. SFV had rollback, but it was still shit. Capcom is capable of good online, I still play SF4 to this day and the online is one of the only things worth mentioning about MVCI, but there's plenty of bad online services as well; SFxT online makes me want to die. But, the online in SF6 is pretty good. You join a lobby and can play casual matches with anyone in there. You still have access to SFV background matchmaking, so I think this should please everyone. It's fast, efficient, and easy. The battle hubs also have shops, display boards of who's on a big winning streak so you know who to look for, and a fighting ground for your avatar character. It's really fun, I'm surprised this kind of lobby hasn't been done this well before.

One last complaint because I don't know where else to put it: despite the incredible visual style, the music is pretty bad. Every character got a brand new theme (except Luke but that's because they made his SF6 theme first and then remixed his SFV theme based on it) and most of them are far cries from what they once were. Ryu has an upbeat jazzy tune which I dig, adds some more personality to him. JP has a nice theme, but it falls into this trend that most of the other character themes are under where it sounds like all buildup with no payoff. Some of them are just straight up bad. Guile's theme… look how they massacred my boy. This is especially out of place considering that the stage and menu themes are fire. The main theme, Not On The Sidelines, pops off and got me excited for the game on its own, and I can't ever remember hearing it in game. Hopefully legacy music options will be available, because the current selection sucks.

I'm glad Capcom is great at making these kinds of comebacks. That notion implies that I'm glad they screw up to being with, but those screw ups are equally as important as the redemption stories. We never would've gotten DMC3 if Hideaki Itsuno didn't see how bad DMC2 was and feel the need to save the franchise. We never would've gotten RE7 if the devs hadn't taken a step back to the roots of the series in the first place and remembered what made the games before RE6 so good. We wouldn't be here enjoying this masterful fighting game if Takayuki Nakayama and Shuhei Matsumoto hadn't recognized the abysmal direction that SFV was going in and wanted to make a change. This is the first fighting game that I've been part of at launch, and I'm going to stick with it until the end. It's not perfect, and it never will be. There will be broken characters, there will be long losing streaks, but never have I fallen in love with a game so quickly and been this happy that other people love it as much as I do. Thank you for everything SFV, but it's time for a new challenger to enter the ring.

“he’d love to spend the night in zion / he’s been a long while in babylon / he’d like a lover’s wings to fly on / to a tropic isle of avalon” - digital man, rush

dense, layered, and easy to get lost in all the same as its island centerpiece, flower sun and rain endures as personally-tailored perfection in a video game.

some years ago when i was working my way through kill the past, a good friend of mine advised me to not bother with the completely optional and not at all mandatory lost & found puzzles, as “they suck and they ruin the pacing of the game”. as a matter of pride i simply decided to not heed that advice and go through the game solving as many of the lost & found puzzles as i possibly could. in doing so i’ve made the playthrough likely much longer and more drawn out than it should have been, but it’s only until as of writing this in 2023 that i’ve realized that doing these puzzles actually held some value to me.

flower sun and rain is a game of multifaceted allegory and metaphor, where no ‘truth’ is singular (despite what sumio initially says) and just about any way of reading into it is a valid reading. to me, flower sun and rain is a metaphor about a man unwilling to acknowledge the past and move on to the future; a man eternally stuck in the present. the titular hotel claims its stake on being a paradise to forget about time in, and like a moth to a flame, sumio does as much as he can to waste away in paradise for as long as he possibly can. he lets himself get distracted with the denizens and their issues, letting paradise pull him deeper into itself so sumio doesn’t have to think about the airport and everything outside of this paradise. 25th ward puts a wrenchingly satisfying end to this thread as his life outside of paradise has become completely void of enjoyment. in the end he lets paradise subsume him, never to move on again.

paradise as an idea is something i had touched upon earlier in my thoughts on kaizen game works’ paradise killer, which for anyone who’s played a decent number of suda51 games, can very much see the unabashed ktp cribbing it proudly flaunts. it is rooted in a need to escape human problems ironically caused by humans and the societies they’ve built up. in building these paradises, it comes down to exploitation of resources and people to cultivate these getaways and romanticizing a world fundamentally incompatible with the systems that even lets a vacation spot like this exist in the first place. vacation spots like the flower sun and rain hotel are inextricably linked to colonial structures thriving off of that exploitation. this brings flower sun and rain close to an idea proposed by writer mark “k-punk” fisher known as capitalist realism, in which he proposes that due to the sheer widespread influence of global capitalism, it’s believed that it is the only viable political and economic system and that it would simply be impossible to even begin to imagine any viable alternative. in that sense there’s no such thing as a true-to-definition paradise; it is at best only a temporary state of mind, but it’s one that a person can find themselves unfathomably lost in.

there’s probably not a lot of people who went out of their way to do the ds port’s lost & found puzzles, as they’re technically not really rewarding the player with any juicy lore or narrative revelations, just some stuff to look at in the game’s model viewer and maybe the satisfaction of solving esoteric puzzles that have nothing to do with anything. or so one thinks they have nothing to do with anything relevant. for the player to deliberately seek out the lost & found puzzles and forget about time solving them, it is, to me, the perfect way to reinforce the narrative flower sun and rain presents. sumio is a man who lets frivolous people distract him and seeks out these meaningless problems to solve for others, and for the player to do these lost & found puzzles, they act as an extension of sumio to drag out every second possible to indulge in paradise. one of the most potent executions of a ludonarrative tool i’ve seen in a video game, and it’s entirely done through optional puzzles that a good deal of the people who played this game likely did not do.

i don’t regret doing the lost & found puzzles. i think they’re the best part of the game.