40 Reviews liked by AssignedKnives


It’s kinda incredible how Pokémon’s biggest evolution and arguably best step forward is held back by GameFreak’s limited dev time because of the Pokémon Company’s endless quest for brand syngery as they’d rather prioritize increasing yearly profit margins for putting out Sprigatito merch on time over having a game that doesn’t look somewhat crusty and on the verge of imploding at any given moment.

Platform: PlayStation 5
Date Started: January 31st, 2024
Date Finished: February 6th, 2024
Time Played: 16 Hours

"There was a sequel. Wasn't as good."

One of, if not the most important things about The Last of Us Part I is its characters. Not just the main focus on Joel and Ellie's incredible growing relationship and journey together throughout, but all of the supporting characters you meet along the way. Bill, Sam and Henry, Tess, Tommy and even David are incredibly impactful, memorable, well written characters that leave a lasting impression on both the player and the characters at each part of your adventure, helping them grow and bond. They are all compelling, and all play a great role in the story.

In The Last of Us Part II there are even more characters - some returning, most new. The returning cast are all fairly good - Ellie's journey, quest for revenge, anger, hate, transformation and brutality are all executed well, although her character feels completely devoid of what we already knew. Joel gets much less time, but what little we see of him is also great, every scene leaving a huge mark on the player and reminding you what could have been if the story took a better direction. Tommy, too, is brilliant, and easily one of the best characters in the game - I definitely wish he played a more prominent role - something I believe would have made this chosen story much stronger. Dina, Jesse, Lev, Yara and Manny, however, are all utterly unmemorable, bland, boring, uninteresting, utterly poor characters, none of them feeling real, most of them being irritating.

Abby is where things sort of take a massive step backwards, too, and where it gets a little muddy. Her motives are completely understandable, but, like how Dina drags down Ellie's sections, all of Abby's supporting cast make hers even more of a chore, too. She in and of herself is already an incredibly boring, dry character, though, so everyone around her just makes matters even worse.

While it isn't close to what I would have wanted from a sequel to The Last of Us as it strips away almost everything that made the first game a great time, I do still like the idea of this story in concept. In execution, however, it just isn't pulled off well whatsoever, and from what we know about writer and director Neil Druckmann's ambitions for the original game, and how Bruce Straley reigned him in and contributed the better aspects of The Last of Us, it feels to me as if that co-director's presence was sorely missed, and Druckmann just couldn't craft these memorable characters alone (or with new co-writer Haley Gross).

There is a lot of melodramatic, teeny style drama here all throughout, and it drags down both Ellie's potentially great segments and adds to the reasons why Abbys are far from ever being interesting. The moments where Ellie and Abby's stories overlap are great, and there are some outstanding moments scattered throughout the game, but by the second half they are very few and far between, and grand set pieces have no impact if I don't care about the characters in them.

On top of this, the non-linear timeline, which I also think is a good idea, is also one executed poorly. Because of the extreme length of Abbys section, the game feels like it completely loses track of the main story in favour of these filler side-quest moments with the new characters instead of fully focusing on what the player is invested in narratively, and as such completely lost me.

There are also just too many conveniences and changes to returning characters in the plot that are incredibly glaring and jarring and feel surprisingly glossed over and not well thought out at all.

The game-play and presentation, however, are aspects where I have less complaints. Everything feels incredibly fluid, from the gun-play to the stealth, although the melee can be a little janky, and everything looks ridiculously good, with insane attention to detail at every moment. This is one of if not the best looking and produced games I have ever played, such a shame it is then that other things pull the experience down so much so that I eventually resorted to running past enemies to get through the game quicker.

In the end, then, this is a profoundly disappointing game - one that has incredible moments, brilliant game-play and near unrivalled visuals, but all that is let down by its main draw, and the thing I care about the most - its story and characters. Nothing else can really make up for this, it is too hard to enjoy the game-play when you are in control of and surrounded by characters that bored me to tears, and when the game is hours and hours longer than it needed to be.

     'Those great, beautiful ships, rocking silently on the calm waters, with their idle and wistful sails, are they not telling us in a silent language — when will we depart for happiness?'
     – Charles Baudelaire, Fusées, VIII, 1887 (personal translation).

One of the most difficult issues in fantasy studies is to define its contours and, by extension, its relationship to reality. In her seminal study, Fantasy: The literature of subversion (1981), Rosemary Jackson points out that fantasy violates the conventions and rules of our reality and: 'threatens to subvert rules and conventions taken to be normative [and] disturb "rules" of artistic representation and literature’s reproduction of the "real"' [1]. The capacity for deviation that speculative fiction offers is both an opportunity and a danger. Jackson points out that this subversive potential does not mean that fantasy or the fantastic are genres that always aim for social progressivism. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the pulp tradition was steeped in racist, homophobic and misogynist tropes that exerted a lasting influence on fiction throughout the late twentieth century and to this day.

     The misogynist issue in Western-style fantasy

Many authors hide behind these historical precedents to conceal a conservative discourse. The existence of multiple races allows for the perpetuation of social oppression, and while female characters have generally become more active in recent decades, they continue to fit into old-fashioned stereotypes [2]. The Final Fantasy series is part of this dynamic and has always oscillated between these major themes of fantasy fiction, notably by offering a regular comparison between magic and technological modernity, nature and industry, good and evil, humanity and divinity. These dichotomies are relatively common and allow the story to touch on issues such as capitalist exploitation and the use of natural resources. However, the representation of other topics remains disastrous: Final Fantasy XIV (2010) is especially characterised by deep-seated racism and sexism, the latter partially masked by the presence of strong female characters in positions of power.

It is hard to say whether these precautions were taken to appeal to a particular audience, but it is clear that Final Fantasy XVI ignores all these concerns and plunges into the most outrageous archaism, piling on misogynistic scenes wherever possible, supposedly justified by the harshness of European medieval society. Excuses of this kind obscure the real issues. The player follows the story of Clive Rosfield, drawn into a quest for revenge after the Phoenix Gate incident, which spells the end of the Duchy of Rosaria. Miraculously reunited with his childhood friend Jill Warrick, he joins Cid's group, determined to change the situation of the Bearers – magic-capable individuals enslaved across the continent. Final Fantasy XVI is therefore a tale of free will and independence, pitting the dark nature of the world against the purity of Cid and Clive's ideals.

To create this atmosphere, as well as the division between good and evil, the title makes extensive use of violence, sex and sexual violence as narrative drivers. Lenise Prater explains that Fiona McIntosh's Percheron trilogy (2005) constructs: 'a series of juxtapositions between good and evil [...] through the representation of sexual violence' [3]. The same processes are at work in Final Fantasy XVI, from the very first narrative arc of the adventure, where Benedikta is cast as the archetypal femme fatale, ready to use her body to manipulate her rivals: the character is constantly brought back to her status as a woman, and it is the threat of sexual violence that cements her development – Annabella is constructed in a similar way. Final Fantasy XVI revels in the dichotomy between whores and innocent virgins. Despite the Western aesthetic of the title, Jill is no more than a yamato nadeshiko who is constantly sidelined by the game. She mostly serves as a narrative device to advance the plot, through her multiple visits to the infirmary or because she is kidnapped by Clive's enemies. The title denies her any agency, and her nuanced fragility is only hinted at in a few sentences before being brushed aside: it takes almost thirty hours of gameplay before Clive explicitly asks her how she is, despite her constant concern for the protagonist's anxieties.

     A case for centrism and laissez-faire

This conservative portrayal is echoed in the discourse on the Bearers. The game is moderately critical of slavery on the continent and fails to make it a structural issue for Clive, who always remains somewhat detached from the problem. This issue is structurally embedded in the way the player interacts with the world, as they are extremely passive in relation to the events portrayed in the story. While the player is aware of the political manipulations taking place in Storm, they cannot act on them directly; Clive is blindly thrown into the fray and the situation is simply resolved in a battle that depoliticises the social stakes. Similarly, the Seals donated by certain NPCs guarantee Clive's reputation in the community in a highly artificial way, removing any roughness from the interactions. Clive fights to free the Bearers because he inherits this mission from his father and Cid, but this task seems disembodied throughout the game.

Beyond the main quest, the side quests are particularly lacklustre and do little to deepen the world-building. Because they can be accessed at any point in the game, Final Fantasy XVI chooses to exclude companions from them. They simply disappear from the cutscenes and thus have no chance to react to the world around them. Since the intention is to establish Clive as an ideologically good, open and self-governing character, all side quests are resolved by Clive's ideological concessions or miraculous unifications in the face of artificially created danger, without the slightest contradiction from any of the other main characters. Only in the final stretch does someone point out Clive's hypocrisy and domineering power over Jill, but the scene is quickly swept away by the return of Gav, the comic relief of the group.

Final Fantasy XVI is more concerned with shocking, melodramatic or cathartic platitudes than with radical denunciations of inequality and oppression. Worse, these shocking scenes do not even make the world dynamic, so poor is the structure of the narrative. Two problems stand out. Firstly, the interweaving of high-intensity sequences with slower passages: instead of building up the world through genuine slice-of-life sequences, the game multiplies banalities that the player has already understood for several dozen hours. The temporality of the story is also incoherent. Clive seems to cross the continent in a matter of hours, while his rivals remain completely passive. The confrontation between the Sanbreque Empire and the Dhalmekian Republic is characterised by irrational stagnation and passivity, allowing Clive to strike unhindered. The Twins always remain static, despite long ellipses in time.

     A hollow and meaningless experience

Perhaps Final Fantasy XVI should not be taken so literally, but rather accepted as the nekketsu it becomes in the second half of the game. Such an interpretation would be acceptable if the game did not take itself so seriously. However, as in Final Fantasy XIV, the writing wallows in a very uncomfortable theatrical heaviness – which the actors generally manage to save from disaster – as if clumsily mimicking the drama of Shakespeare's historical plays. However, Clive's disillusioned, self-deprecating, borderline comic character breaks up this fiction. Some characters work well, playing up their theatrical nature, such as Cid or Lord Byron, but they are quickly relegated to the background or an essentially comic role.

The shifts in tone and pacing detract from the development of the narrative, which cannot be saved by a few flashes of brilliance. The aetheric floods seem to have been imagined as a reflection of nuclear risks, highlighting the danger of Japan's post-Fukushima energy crutch, but in the end they are only used as a narrative expedient to create danger where the plot needs it. The pinnacle of dishonesty and disrespect for a title that centres its discourse on human free will lies in the choice of names for the NPC fillers. In the pure tradition of Final Fantasy XIV, they include puns and comical alliterations ('Broom-Bearer') that strip them of all substance and reduce them to ridicule. In the second half of the game, a little girl is introduced as a character of some narrative importance, but the title does not even bother to give her a name or address her living conditions.

Meanwhile, the action sequences prove to be particularly hollow. The choreography in the first few hours is quite ingenious, highlighting Clive's agility with complex movements and rather creative camera angles. As the title progresses, this aspect is abandoned in favour of fights that drag on and resort to nekketsu clichés. The duel against Titan lasts forty minutes and is a miserable succession of attacks around the stone tentacles. Final Fantasy XVI even has the audacity to end the battle not with the obvious cinematic climax, but with a dull and particularly unpleasant aerial sequence. Subsequent encounters also drag on for no apparent reason other than to demonstrate a genuine – if futile – mastery of the lightning engine.

     Ergonomics, gameplay and fluidity

While Final Fantasy XVI boasts detailed environments at first glance, the facade quickly cracks. The early areas are indeed highly detailed, to the point of drowning the player in detail – navigating through the thick vegetation is quite difficult, forcing the player to use Torgal to progress – but the quality deteriorates as the game progresses. The dense environments disappear in favour of vast open areas that struggle to convey the majesty of the world. Although the cities visible on the horizon are beautiful backdrops, they fail to radiate materially onto their surroundings, which then become mere abstractions. Moreover, Clive's movement is extremely sluggish: even getting on his chocobo is an unpleasant task that constantly interrupts the fluidity of the action, while the player is condemned to an extraordinary passivity in order to get from one place to another.

In the Hideaway, this impression is reinforced by Clive's inability to sprint: in the second half of the game, getting to the backyard is a gruelling chore. The magic of this cocoon quickly vanishes, as the various characters keep repeating themselves and are only mediocrely animated. Despite the detailed scenery, the game borrows all its animations from Final Fantasy XIV, giving a very artificial tone to the discussions. The Hideaway is less a place where the player can comfortably catch up with their favourite NPCs, and more a burdensome obligation to access NPCs, side quests and the hunt board – requiring the player to physically go there to see the location of elite monsters, a design mistake that even Final Fantasy XIV avoided.

The enjoyment of the combat system is left to the player and their experience of other character-action games, but it is absurd that the player has to wait at least twenty hours to finally be given a modicum of flexibility in their attack options: Final Fantasy XVI justifies its unique protagonist with a deep combat system that encourages the creation of diverse builds, but this philosophy is only appropriate in a New Game+ where all powers are unlocked from the start. In a first playthrough, the player must suffer from an impressive slowness, to the point where the Story Mode becomes an obvious option. The title here echoes the recent problem of Shadowbringers (2019) and especially Endwalker (2021), which first designs its battles with the Extreme and Savage versions, before cutting out the most difficult sections for the Normal versions – the result is a sense of incompleteness that is particularly damaging when combined with the very slowly evolving combat system.

It is difficult to place Final Fantasy XVI in the landscape of modern Japanese video games, so awkward is it in every way. With the title still in its cycle of artificial marketing in preparation for the DLCs, one can only speculate as to the reasons for these failings. Perhaps the lack of coherence can be explained by the fractured development team working on two major games, and the highly eclectic nature of the directors brought together by Naoki Yoshida. His design philosophy is particularly well suited to an MMO, but Final Fantasy XVI suffers greatly from it: the endless succession of side quests involving the Hideaway characters just before the final battle is incomprehensible, as if the game had remembered that it needed to conclude. Hiroshi Takai and Kazutoyo Maehiro's narrative vision is a series of shocking, empty, meaningless scenes: players of Heavensward (2015) had the opportunity to suffer from Ysayle's portrayal, and it is surprising that Final Fantasy XVI does even worse, a standard-bearer for passive misogyny in modern fantasy. That Jill's theme becomes 'My Star' and denies her any agency in the game's final moments is particularly painful and aptly sums up the title.

__________
[1] Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The literature of subversion, Routledge, London, 2005 [1981], p. 14.
[2] On the topic, see for example Peter Bebergal (ed.), Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots Of Dungeons & Dragons, Strange Attractor Press, London, 2021. In the afterword, Ann VanderMeer discusses the conservative roots of pulp fantasy and of the historical TTRPG.
[3] Lenise Prater, 'Monstrous Fantasies: Reinforcing Rape Culture in Fiona McIntosh's Fantasy Novels', in Hecate, vol. 39, no. 1-2, 2014.

This is the only game I've ever played during which I've thought to myself "this is probably what it would be like to fight a dragon in real life."

From that thought, a lot can be gleaned about Dragon's Dogma. The animations and behaviours of its fictional fantasy creatures are remarkably lifelike, which bolsters its already strong immersive qualities, but the combat is arguably where it shines the most - and not just because its bows feel like semi-automatic rifles or because Arc of Deliverance is the single most satisfying move to use in any game ever made. Where a lesser game would typically have you fight a giant monster by whittling away at its ankles ad nauseam or some other comparably restrictive method, Dragon's Dogma lets you (among other things) climb onto it, knock it over, stun it, break off or cripple certain body parts, douse it in oil & light it on fire, lure it into a disadvantageous spot or environmental hazard, bring it crashing down to the ground while it's flying, send it flying through the air, freeze it, parry it, or jump off of it to reach a place you otherwise couldn't. It's like a power metal album cover come to life, with a soundtrack to match. It’s chaotic, it’s dynamic, and it’s absolutely drowning in techniques to try out.

That alone would be enough to set Dragon's Dogma above most other real-time combat systems, but what takes it to the next level is the genius pawn system. Few games offer satisfaction on the level of figuring out a golden tactic against a particularly troublesome enemy, watching your pawns become better and better at its execution over time, and being rewarded by other players for renting out your home-made killing machine to them. My mind was blown the first time I realised my pawn had learned to throw explosive barrels specifically when a tough enemy is near a ledge to kill them instantly, and almost a full decade later they continue to surprise with behaviours like this. There’s plenty else to enjoy about Dragon’s Dogma’s combat system, like the enormous playstyle diversity afforded by its classes or the chunky hitstop that provides great feedback on every attack, but it’s far from the only thing the game offers.

For one thing, Dragon’s Dogma sells the feeling of adventure very well. While not quite to the extent of in something like Breath of the Wild, you really do have to legitimately think about how to get from one place to another. Should I risk trying to clamber up that ledge or is it more practical to take the long way around, even if that means meeting more monsters? What time of day should I start my journey, or will it be short enough that I shouldn’t have to worry about all the beasties coming out when night falls? If night falls, do I have enough fuel for my lantern and is my character tall enough that it won't be extinguished by forging through bodies of water? You find yourself asking all these questions as you make your way to distant landmarks which you weren’t initially even sure if you could physically get to, which I think is enough to make the open world a net positive overall despite its blatant and unfortunate unfinished-ness. It helps that pretty much all of the dungeons in both Gransys and Bitterblack are rewarding to explore, with lots of goodies to find in hidden alternate pathways and enemy layouts which get dramatically overhauled in the post-game.

Beyond that, I’ll always stick up for the story of Dragon’s Dogma. Bingo Morihashi is seemingly cursed to always deliver well thought-out, thematically solid stories that everyone writes off as crap for some reason. Even if contextualising new game plus into it wasn’t rad as hell (and it is), the intentionally antiquated dialogue gives it so much character and it conveys such an immense, ambitious sense of progression in terms of scale. And speaking of scales (literally), Grigori is an all-timer in the realm of video game antagonists. Coupled with David Lodge’s masterful delivery, every line of his gives him such presence. He’s everything a dragon should be according to their traditional cultural depictions; not just huge, imposing and a fierce fighter, but also really intelligent and reserved to the point where it's not easy to classify him as a 'villain.' The fight against him having both style and substance in spades is just the cherry on top.

Daimon is also compelling, and his segment of the game is probably what’ll keep you coming back for more. Bitterblack Isle’s not just a wonderful, almost endlessly replayable DLC that marks a gold-standard for content density, it’s also a tantalising glimpse into Hideaki Itsuno’s full vision for Dragon’s Dogma. It was meant to have dozens of Bitterblack equivalents scattered throughout the world before its development was cut short, not the least of which included being able to travel to the moon and a massive MMO-like tower in which players could trade with one another and glimpse at each other’s worlds, endlessly stacked on top of each other. Had Itsuno and his team been allowed to carry out that vision, I’ve little doubt that Dragon’s Dogma would probably be my favourite game of all time. As it stands, it’s close enough already – all I think a hypothetical sequel would really need is for its open world to be more densely packed with content and a real-time healing system (outside of hotkeys and spells), like that of Nioh or a certain other ARPG series from the past decade or so that I hear is pretty popular.

It’s well known now that Capcom presented Itsuno with the choice to either develop Devil May Cry 5 or Dragon’s Dogma 2 a few years ago. Given the freedom that Capcom granted to him during the making of DMC5 and his recent teasing that his elusive new project is making good progress, I can’t help but have hope for the first time since release that aught is on the horizon. A Dragon’s Dogma sequel wouldn’t just be nice to see, it’d mark a victory for any and all game creators who want to see their vision fully realised.

They don't make games like Dishonored anymore, do they?

Arkane Studios' defining title was always a remarkably creative piece of gaming greatness. It was one of the first games in a short-lived (yet still fantastic) revival of the immersive sim family of games. It was a strong addition to the stealth genre, and a rare new original property that managed to both stand out and be rewarded for its accomplishments. And aside from its sequels, there's still isn't anything else quite like it nowadays.

Dishonored has a lot of things going for it, most notably its art direction and setting. Dunwall is a memorable backdrop to the game's events and levels, brought to decaying life with its muted color scheme, Victorian-era architecture and a surprisingly strong combination of period piece, steampunk and dark fantasy imagery. While far from a horror game, Dishonored successfully fills Dunwall's crumbling society and plague-infested threats with never-ending and oppressive dread. And heartbreak, the more you explore the tragic decline of a once-powerful cultural and technological center.

Dunwall is a horrible place to live in, but a fantastic playground for its greatest assassin. The various locations Corvo has to get through during his missions are impeccably designed with multiple routes and options to experiment with and explore. The maps are not outrageously big, instead focusing on carefully-placed alternate paths, secrets, side objectives and additional methods that make you feel clever or sneaky if you find and use them. There is a great, elaborate verticality to each stage, allowing Corvo considerable amounts of freedom to find the perfect spots for takedowns and preparations.

As every good stealth game, Dishonored offers a very useful set of tools at Corvo's disposal. Corvo has a sword, a crossbow with various bolt types, a gun and even mines and grenades for good measure. While his arsenal does skew a little too much toward more violent solutions, it still offers non-lethal options such as a choking takedown and sleep darts. All in all, there is a lot of thought put into maintaining the ability to both go as violently as one pleases, but also spare even your assassination targets from certain death. And of course, courtesy of Dunwall's mythical godlike-slash-diabolical Outsider, Corvo gets a slew of cool superpowers.

The most notable of those powers is Blink, which grants Corvo teleportation. But there are even more powers to unlock and upgrade, like time manipulation and even rat plague, and assuming you have the mana for it, you can use a lot of them in quick succession for your ends or amusement. It's also balanced pretty well, with the more potent and complex abilities demanding more mana, and the game is kind enough to replenish your mana meter with spare elixirs whenever you try to use some of those more energy-consuming feats.

Interestingly, the actual combat system is also fairly robust. There is a strong emphasis on parrying, and enemies are also smart enough to know when to counter your sword, pushing you to time your attacks accordingly. There is some clumsiness to it, but it's more than serviceable and functional enough to be a valid option to utilize from start to finish.

So, the art, world, level design and gameplay are all great. I guess if there's any notable issue with Dishonored is that it's narrative and characters largely fail to do Dunwall's fascinating history and culture much-deserved justice. They're pretty standard-fare as far as the genre goes. There are some fun standouts like the sleazy-yet-honorable Slackjaw, the proud and guilt-ridden assassin Daud and the eccentric and philosophical Sokolov, but for the most part, both the allies and villains you meet across the way are there to fill roles, little more. This also goes to the Outsider who is a rather generic otherworldly benefactor, and Corvo himself, who is merely the player's avatar.

There is also this whole binary morality thing like we've seen in Bioshock and Infamous. It's pretty boring and limiting, but eh, nothing deal-breaking.

I do want to point out that despite the story's banality, the world is still very interesting and there are a lot of background bits to enrich the narrative. And Arkane's animators also did a great job in little bodily expressions to convey better emotion than what the dialogue could offer. Even Corvo - his little weapon swirl whenever he takes out or puts back his gear is a nice little demonstration of his skill and confidence. And while a rather contested point for some, I generally like the character designs. Yes, they can get rather ugly or disheveled, but this feels like a deliberate choice through and through, and even years after its original release, it's still refreshing to see a major AAA game rejecting conventional character designs for something so crude, yet stylized and believable at the same time.

It's not a particularly long game, but this only enhances Dishonored. This is game built for multiple playthroughs with so many scenarios to play out, and its true strength as a versatile slice of stealth-action can be seen as it adapts itself to the player's whims.

Excellent sound design completes an extremely strong package. The voice acting can be a little wooden but it does its job well enough, and every object and footstep can be clearly heard both and used both for advantage and disadvantage.

Dishonored was and remains a triumph of game design. It boasts one of the coolest settings in the medium and despite a thin narrative it's thriving with a personality of its own that both honors its spiritual predecessors such as Thief and System Shock, and modernizes their ideas for new generations. It's a reminder that AAA games can be more than just tedious mechanical kitchen sink, and even a decade later, I hope more studios will get the chance to create more unique, memorable games like this.

haven’t played this game and i really don’t plan to but I do think it’s deeply hilarious that upon this game’s release defenders of the game’s prominent antisemitic undertones and Rowling’s continued deranged behaviour called this a GOTY candidate and a phenomenal game only for it to not get nominated a single time at the game awards or the golden joysticks. get fucked losers

Yoshi-P personally baked me a cake. It was the most beautiful cake, with every detail placed with exquisite care. I went to take a bite of the cake. The cake was full of rats. There is nothing inherently wrong with rats, but I do not want to eat live rats; I want to eat cake.

I mean I'm not quite finished playing, but come on. We all know it's 5 stars. You can fuck a bear, two different devils and a squid. You can fuck anything.

This game lets me walk around looking out the windows of and meticulously hand-placing ornaments throughout a homemade, supersized approximation of an interceptor from Homeworld that I built for myself and my posh, English, spatially challenged Judge Anderson cosplayer wife to go dungeon diving in, and you’re telling me there are people who don’t enjoy it?

What’s as striking as this realisation is how much better Starfield feels to fundamentally move around in than Bethesda’s prior titles, especially in third person. Your character shifts their weight and takes a balancing step when moving from one direction to the opposite, the addition of mantling up ledges means where you can or can’t go’s significantly less ambiguous and a hefty degree of animation blending makes their transitioning between states more natural-looking. Beyond making it so that your character now actually feels like part of the world they’re in instead of indifferently gliding over it as in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, this has some positive knock-on effects in terms of environmental design.

Oblivion had its acrobatics and Fallout 4 its jetpack, but these largely weren’t able to factor into how you traversed dungeons since there had to be concessions for the inevitability that not every player would have them. In contrast, Starfield’s boost packs being practically universal alongside planetary modifiers means it can afford to get more creative in this respect. This was apparent even early on when I dropped into a cave on a low-gravity planet and had to get through it by jumping between a series of distant platforms, varying my boost timing to reach some of the taller ones like I was playing Jak & Daxter or something. Another particularly cool one let me float out of the roof of an initially closed hangar after a pirate ship arrived to give its inhabitants some backup, which I could later land my own ship inside after befriending those same pirates. Others still let me circumvent enemy encounters by way of boosting up to an overhead vent, something I might’ve missed if I were playing Starfield like one of Bethesda’s less vertical titles and never looked above me, or more colourfully via shifting between dimensions akin to that one level from Titanfall 2. The setting’s also a great help in terms of making shortcuts through these areas less conspicuous – emergency vents you have to break the seals of or imposing, computerised gates are a more natural fit for this kind of thing than what felt like every other ancient Nordic tomb having a not-so-secret collapsible door.

The semi-procedurally generated nature of Starfield’s planets means there’s always a risk of some of these places losing their lustre through repetition, but are two factors mitigating this. One, there are also no instances of Daggerfall’s ambitious but malevolently complicated RNG hellscapes and two, planets’ environmental conditions go at least some way towards keeping things varied; you’re probably not going to approach a multistorey Ecliptic tower on a nigh-zero G planet the same way you will on one where your feet barely leave the ground, for example. I’m inclined to chalk this up as a net positive partially for that reason and also because it creates a sense of not knowing how you’ll deal with what’s on the horizon even if you can eventually predict it, which is notably beneficial whenever everything’s reshuffled in a new game plus that’s conceptually reminiscent of and similarly sick as Dragon’s Dogma’s. Especially impressive was the fact that, as far as I can recall, I didn’t encounter the same alien wildlife on any two planets except when there was an in-universe explanation for it.

Some may find it dry that Starfield relegates aliens to fauna, but I find it refreshing if anything. A utilitarian focus purely on humanity, our place in the universe and what we ought to do with all that spess out there seem strangely underexplored ideas for how many sci-fi games there are, especially considering how naturally these lend themselves to RPGs specifically. Antagonists bicker over egoism versus altruism, quests commonly pose questions about how far venturing into the unknown is too far, balances of power can be tipped in situations as petty as a dispute between two local shop owners or as grand as instigating conflicts between galaxy-spanning factions, there’s always some trepidation in not knowing whether another spaceship is about to shake you down or treat you to a folk song, etc. Within the limitations of a game, it does quite a sound job of encapsulating what an eclectic bunch we are without being needlessly pessimistic about it.

As the above suggests, I don’t think Starfield’s writing particularly needs defending, in part because it’d do everyone some credit to recognise that writing in RPGs isn’t constrained to just dialogue boxes or cutscenes reflecting the outcomes of your pre-programmed “choices.” Coming across scenes like this tucked away in the collapsed shaft of an abandoned NASA facility, or spacer bases having credstiks strewn about where office appliances ought to be, gets the gears turning in my head as much as or more than any flowery bouts of exposition. In Todd Howard’s interview with Lex Fridman, he mentioned that Bethesda’s got a team specifically for arranging miscellaneous objects throughout their worlds in a way that makes them feel lived-in; although big-brained, standards-having gamers like you and me might scoff in disbelief when we trek outside our bubble and remember that Fallout 3’s not only generally very well liked but also won awards for its storytelling, it becomes easier to wrap your head around when you realise they’ve always been and continue to be ace at this.

An understated but crucial strength of all of these games which accentuates that’s also been expanded upon: Starfield lets you rotate and throw such objects with varying force in addition to being able to pick up and carry them as before. It’s got practical applications (e.g. chucking then shooting hazardous canisters), but to me its real importance is building upon an avenue of the kind of roleplaying that’s essentially unique to this developer, as well as a reason why I don’t understand what I’m supposed to be comparing it to, beyond the vaguest possible descriptors, when I read that it’s allegedly “dated.” Flipping a bucket and sticking it over Vasco’s head, orienting an object into a shopkeeper’s line of sight to prevent them from witnessing theft or otherwise messing about with physics are the kinds of things that I myself might actually do for kicks if I were really in my character’s shoes – I’m not actually a bug-themed, tanto-wielding sentai hero with a suspiciously large and well-organised stockpile of stolen food in his ship’s storage room, but the agency this one mechanic affords goes such a long way toward breaking down the barrier between character and player regardless that you could’ve fooled me.

Player agency falters a bit in other aspects like the abundance of essential NPCs, but this and occasionally finicky menus notwithstanding, I’m unsure which metrics I’m supposed to be gauging to determine that Starfield isn’t probably the best iteration of this formula in more ways than not. There’s not much to disparage here that couldn’t also be said of all its siblings ⁿᵒ ⁿᵉʷ ᵛᵉᵍᵃˢ ⁱˢ ʳᵉᵃˡˡʸ ⁿᵒᵗ ᵗʰᵃᵗ ᵈⁱᶠᶠᵉʳᵉⁿᵗ, except they weren’t counterweighted by the benefits of combat I don’t actively want to avoid whenever possible, the novelty of being able to divert power to different systems in a spaceship or a main quest climax which made me genuinely think about what I’d do in that scenario among other things. Catch me revving up the engines of the Hiigaran Beryl for another several dozen hours hereafter.

Warning:

Poorly written near four thousand word novel incoming. Big Bethesda fan so I’m probably biased too. Just read the conclusion if you want a TL;DR I guess. Or don’t.

Preamble:

After putting around 20 hours into Starfield I wrote a near 1000 word review. It was a review going into detail about how Starfield isn't the next No Man's Sky or the replacement to Star Citizen. About how comparing it to other critically acclaimed RPG series like The Witcher or the recently released Baldur's Gate 3 was like comparing apples and oranges. About how it wasn't a matter of one being better than the other but rather a matter of taste and direction. About Bethesda RPGs not truly belonging to the same categories as the aforementioned games, and the need to establish different expectations because of this. About how Starfield offered an entirely different experience from other RPGs. About how this experience wasn’t necessarily worse or better, just different -for other people with different tastes. To put it simply, I was defending Starfield.

Then I played for another 30 hours and I realised something: why should I need to justify my enjoyment? Why am I spending more time talking about games not called Starfield in my Starfield review? I realised that it didn't matter. So no more of that. Fair warning: lots of praise incoming and plenty of complaints too. So let's go.

Intro:

Starfield is the accumulation of everything Bethesda has learnt over the years. Through their Masterpieces, their flawed gems, and their failures. Starfield is a love letter to Bethesda fans who have been entrenched in the worlds of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. A love letter to those who get sucked into those worlds, who spend years playing these games that seemingly never end. Starfield, though by no means perfect, is Bethesda's Magnum Opus.

Praises:

So let's get into what I love about Starfield. As it's a Bethesda game it would be wrong to start with anything else but the game world. Starfield takes place in the aptly named ‘Settled Systems’, a catch-all term for a collective area of chartered systems within the Milky Way Galaxy. Naturally Starfield is in no short supply of places to go and see. It’s not just the wide vistas and deep blacks of outer space that grab your attention, but also the handful of cities neatly hand-crafted and packed full of detail. The hand-crafted portions of Starfield are what I’d call masterfully done, and it definitely shows in game. Delicately placed bits and pieces of detailed clutter breathe life into the game's areas. This clutter adds to the immersion of the settled worlds, alongside the delicately placed bars, restaurants, shops, and other key locations littered throughout. Each of the large cities have their own unique aesthetics not just in architecture: but also in lighting, atmosphere, and of course the characters and quests that populate these places.

Quests are something I always enjoy in Bethesda games, and Starfield is no different. Starfield features a genuinely insane amount of quests and content -perhaps to the point of becoming overwhelming. I haven’t gotten very far myself, but so far the main quest has been pretty interesting, and is definitely a level above Bethesda’s prior efforts. There are also plenty of side quests, faction quests, and a bunch of random encounters out in the far reaches of space that I’ve enjoyed sinking my teeth into. We also can’t forget about the procedural/radiant content that while lacking the depth and quality of the handcrafted content; help fill out the world to create a truly immersive universe to play in. I can’t speak on the quality of all of it as after 50 hours I feel I’ve barely even scratched the surface. Of the quests that I have played I can say they have been great.

When thinking about standout quests there are many quests that come to mind, but one that I always find myself thinking about is actually a very minor delivery quest. Without going into the details, I had to deliver a letter across systems. It was a simple quest that would get filed under ‘misc’; the kind you forget about after 10 minutes. I was given some credits and EXP after finishing it, and I figured that would be that. Flash forward an hour or so and I'm back where I got given the quest and would you look at that: the person I delivered the letter to had actually travelled across systems specifically because of the letter I had delivered. They were having a conversation because of that letter, and I was able to talk to them about it and get some deeper info. What's more the next day they were hanging out somewhere else; chatting about something entirely different! Something that I thought was just some stupid little side quest to fill out the game actually ended up having more depth than I had expected which was very cool.

Bugs, or lack thereof, are surprisingly a major positive for Starfield. It goes without saying that this is entirely anecdotal. After all, everyone's systems react differently; so my experience isn’t necessarily the same as everyone else's. Now I’ve had a few small bugs here or there, but I’ve never had anything more than an odd ragdoll or physics clutter. For a game of this size with everything it’s trying to do, it’s truly remarkable how polished it has been so far. I can thankfully say I’ve never once had to reload a save because of a bug. Time will tell whether or not this experience persists, but for now Starfield has been a very polished game in the bug department -which is a far cry from Bethesda’s prior titles.

Combat is the best it’s ever been in a Bethesda game. Gunplay is smooth, responsive, and most importantly fun. Animations are fluid and add to the general feel of combat. The jetpack provides a level of verticality to the already fast paced combat, and weapon variety helps it from feeling samey. There is however a big flaw in the combat, and a couple of smaller ones, but I will get to them later. Overall combat is very fun. It’s a massive improvement over Fallout which I already thought did a great job for a single player RPG shooter.

Another thing I love are the traits. Now, I haven't seen much action from my background (I chose Bounty Hunter) so I won't comment on that, but the traits I chose were: 'Neon Street Rat', 'Hero Worshipped', and 'Kid Stuff', and I have to say... wow. Obviously I can't comment on the other traits as I haven't used them (maybe I just chose the best traits), but man I was not expecting these traits to have so much content to them. I don't want to go into it too much, but I will simply say that these traits are more than little additions to your dialogue. They define who you are and ground you to the world. 'Neon Street Rat' has unsurprisingly seen a lot of action on Neon and comes up regularly in quests there. Hero Worshipped is probably a must have for Oblivion fans simply for the nostalgia factor. Kid Stuff... man that trait is genuinely just amazing. I won't say any more but yeah these traits are very cool.

The main companions/crew in this game are definitely some of the best Bethesda have ever made (sans Serana) and I’m certainly enjoying my time with them. They each have interesting backstories that have me looking forward to the next time they’ll ‘ask me for a chat’, so I can hear more about their lives. It’s fun seeing them mention what I said in our previous chats too, which makes me feel like I’m truly impacting them rather than just clicking whatever option progresses the dialogue. It truly feels like my talks with them actually affect who they are and how their problems will unfold. Time will tell how much of an impact my choices actually have on them as I’m so early into the game, but so far it’s very promising. Their voice acting is also superb as are their visual designs. Special shoutout to my best friend Adam Jense- err I mean Sam Coe. He’s my favourite by far.

Music. My god Inon Zur absolutely cooked with this soundtrack. I honestly have nothing to say, I’m not a music critic. Unfortunately I don’t know anything technical about music. All I know is those soundtracks play, and I’m taken away into another world. Truly magical stuff... well done.

Choice and consequence is actually surprisingly good for a Bethesda game. There are a variety of different choices you can make throughout all sorts of quests through Starfield that support proper role playing and gives the player agency in how they want their own story to play out. I haven’t played any of the faction quest lines yet, same with most of the main questline, so I’m unaware of how well they handle this. However given the choices I’ve been given in the many side quests I’ve done, I imagine it’s likely just as good.

Random encounters out in space have also been a highlight in my playthrough and gives incentive to interact with the areas outside of the planets rather than just fast travelling straight into a location. From geologists asking me to contribute to their fancy rock collection, to having a Q&A session with a group of overly excited customers on a tour ship, to helping random faction ships fight off some spacers; I’ve had plenty of fun encounters on my journeys in space.

Apparel is also a fun aspect of Starfield. Each of the locations in Starfield present a different motif and because of that there are a wide variety of different styled outfits available. I love getting new clothes not just for myself, but also to kit out my companions and crew. I don’t like that we can’t mix and match clothes anymore, but the outfits available are great. I also appreciate that hair changes dynamically depending on the hats you put on rather than just making you bald like in prior games. Spacesuits and Helmets also look very nice and have a great amount of attention to detail.

Now this is a much smaller thing than the others but I wanted to mention it. I love the detail in planet simulation. Different gravity between planets gets my heart absolutely racing and I always end up having a blast (literally) on low-grav planets. It’s also super cool to watch light scatter differently based on how the planet is orbiting its star, whether another planet is in the way, and even what type of star it's orbiting. I also love that sleeping on different planets has a different effect on universal time versus local time due to space-time dilation.

Ship Combat is pretty fun. It’s a lot more stat-check based than normal combat but the solution there is to just not go into high levelled systems or to grav-jump away. I originally thought it was just a hold your triggers and keep aim kind of thing but there’s a surprising depth to it. There’s definitely some skill required in piloting to make sure you are keeping target, keeping within range, and also moving enough to not be a sitting target dummy. There’s also a bit of tactic in shooting. Shields are up? Probably best to lay off the ballistics and send all your power into lasers. Shields are down? Divert everything to ballistics and missiles and let those spacer scum feel it! It’s actually pretty fun. I just wish there were a power profile button switcher or something since that time wasted manually diverting power can actually end up in taking a lot of damage. On a side note it would be really cool if there was a mod that could use our voices to change the power allocation... “Adoring Fan, divert all power to the grav drives! We’re making a run for it!”

Lastly I want to speak on Ship Building because it's seriously awesome and might just be one of my favourite parts of the game. There’s just something so special about creating your very own ship, hand picking all its systems and its look, and then flying into space and getting into a dogfight with it. I’ve seen people create the Millenium Falcon, and I’ve even seen someone make the Starship Enterprise. The builder system is actually much deeper than I expected from watching the direct and I have to say, I can’t wait to build up enough credits to make myself a whole new Ebon Hawk or even a Normandy SR-1. It would also be really cool if we could have our extra crew follow us as a fleet in our other ships or something too since ally NPC ships do actually assist in fights.

Criticisms:

Now that I've fellated Starfield long enough to be called the biggest fanboy alive, let's get to some of my gripes. Some will be minor nitpicks while others will be genuine issues, so let’s begin.

First and foremost has to be PC performance. Now granted the performance is not by any means outrageous, but it's still an issue. I've thankfully never had to deal with any stutters or issues unlike in [Insert UE4/5 Game Here] however those games also look much better as a tradeoff for the performance. For a game that doesn't even have Ray Tracing to need upscaling tech to keep a steady 60fps on a [3090 5800X3D] PC is very stupid, even if I'm at 3440x1440. Again, I haven't run into any issues with stuttering or any frame drops so it's not the end of the world; but given the fidelity of this game it really should not be so graphically demanding. Lack of official DLSS support is also very disappointing but I’m not sure who is at fault for this.

Next absolutely has to be the AI. While lots of aspects have improved over their prior games, AI is certainly not one of them. Both the enemy and companion AI are absolutely atrocious and I see no improvements over their past games. Now I can mostly ignore the enemy AI since on very hard I tend to just get completely ripped apart by their guns anyway, but companion AI is seriously terrible. Here are a few things I absolutely hate about companion AI:

Sitting in cover doing absolutely nothing but peeking through the corner for the entire fight.
Suddenly deciding that running out into the open is a great idea and getting completely shredded within seconds.
Not adjusting their tactics based on the gun they’re using -- why are you shooting a shotgun from a long range Barrett?
Not even arriving to the fight in time because they follow from 30 miles back for some reason.
Having the absolute worst aim I've ever seen with my own two eyes.

Saying the AI needs work would be a major understatement. Note I am specifically talking about on-foot AI since the space AI is actually pretty good. Anyway, I would rank this as my number one issue with the game but unfortunately I don't see a fix coming any time soon.

On the combat side, melee combat is seriously disappointing. There are a couple of cool melee weapons, but they are never any better than just using a gun. The lack of any level of modding for them really sucks too. This is unfortunately a regression from Fallout’s melee system (even if the animations are much better) and there is next to no reason to play melee in this game.

Continuing on from combat, enemy sponginess is something I'm of two ways about. On one hand, I think it's a necessary evil that comes from meshing a shooter into an RPG. On the other hand, having to empty 2 full mags into someone's unprotected skull to kill them is immersion breaking to say the least. I'm not too torn up about this since mods can just change it anyway, and it's realistically a drawback of shooter RPGs rather than a problem particular to Starfield; but I figured I should mention it anyway.

As much as I like the companions, I feel like they don’t really interact with each other enough outside of main story quests. Maybe this is an expectation I have due to playing so many party-based RPGs and I shouldn’t have them since Starfield only lets you bring one crew member, but I think it’s a shame nonetheless. Crew banter is one of the best things about companions/parties in RPGs and it’s a shame the banter is so lacking in Starfield. This is especially true given that while they may not be out together on foot, they are together literally any time I’m on my ship.

Following on from the companions I don’t like that they’re pretty much all goodie two shoes. Now I play a good guy typically with a bit of grey morality here or there so it’s not the biggest issue in the world, but it’s weird that we have no evil or at least grey companions in Constellation -I would’ve liked a little more variety there. Oh well, at least my Adoring Fan doesn’t question me when I accidentally throw a live grenade into a crowd of innocents.

Now this is a small one and honestly it's less to do with Starfield and more to do with RPGs in general, and that's the Persuasion system. Gamifying and tying dialogue to game skills will forever be something I absolutely hate in RPGs. Reward me for understanding the characters and paying attention to the quests and the conversation. Don't just let me use a 'skill' I spent a point on to magically get my way with one liners that wouldn't convince a child. Yes I know there are certain 'blue checks' in the persuasion system and they are great but they are also few and far between. Trait/Power based persuasion is okay with me because that is at least immersive, but the chance based xyz persuasion will always be bad. It is boring and it tends to make quest design lazy. Admittedly it is a better persuasion system than Fallout and Skyrim, but I still don't like it. I will stand by the fact that Deus Ex has, to this day, the best persuasion system in gaming; and will continue to hopelessly wish that other games will pick up on it.

I also don't like that enemies aren't fully lootable like in TES or Fallout. I don't think this is an economic choice since credits aren't exactly hard to come by and you'd be limited by encumbrance anyway. It was a key staple in Bethesda games that I feel added a depth to the immersion that other games simply didn't have. I genuinely think Starfield suffers with its loss. I also miss seeing the NPCs get stripped when we took their gear and I think it blows that it doesn't happen anymore. I’m sure it’ll get modded in eventually, but this isn’t something that we should need to be modded in the first place.

I'm not a huge fan of the perk system either. I like the idea behind challenges but I stand by Oblivion having the best levelling system in a Bethesda game. The perks that unlock systems or new functions are fine, but perks that just add an extra 10 percent damage or 20 percent chance are boring and lazy. It’s a shame that the vast majority of perks are like this and it takes away all of the fun of class building and levelling up when a level essentially constitutes to: “here’s an extra 10 percent damage”. Nothing else to really say except this is a very boring and uninspired part of the game. Thankfully there’s a system that I won’t mention for spoilers that does add some cool stuff, but that doesn’t negate how boring the perks are.

Now I’m not too sure how accurate this criticism will be since I haven’t maxed out the weapon modding skill, but I feel like modding guns is actually a step down from Fallout. In Fallout 4 you could change a gun's characteristics so much that you could turn say a Pipe Pistol into a Pipe Sniper Rifle or a Pipe Machine Gun. In Starfield you can still modify the guns to a good amount, but it just doesn’t feel as deep as the system in Fallout 4. I may just not have enough levels in the skill or I’m just misremembering Fallout 4, but right now it definitely feels like a regression.

The regional map is the worst map I've ever seen in any game too by the way. I have no idea who thought this completely unreadable dot amalgamation was a good idea, but it’s terrible. I honestly thought my game was bugged when I first saw it, only to find out it was intended. It would be one thing for the procedural planets to use that type of map (I still think it’s lazy) but the handcrafted cities too? The local maps needed a major revamp last week. Get on it.

Miscellaneous loot is also something I have a problem with. In Fallout 4 all miscellaneous items had a use -in that their components could be used as resources for crafting. Unfortunately Starfield does not follow this trend and goes back to having all that miscellaneous junk be useless. Not a fan of this at all. I understand that the majority of resources will be gathered from actual minerals and animals, but at least allow us to burn all the miscellaneous loot for a percentage of the resources. My loot goblin heart burns seeing all that clutter be completely useless and this feels like needless regression.

The lack of a transmog feature is something I find a little baffling. For a game with so many different armors with a diverse set of effects and resistances (a lot of which is also random) to not have a transmog system is so weird. It's 2023. We should not have to choose between the strongest armour in our inventory and the look that we like. Get with the program Bethesda, this is an outdated issue.

Another flaw is one that I imagine I share with many people here and that's the lack of seamlessness. This game is littered with loading screens and while I can ignore it for the most part on my M.2 (never takes more than a few seconds to load) it's still a shame. I don’t mind the existence of all different fast travels (it’s very convenient when you need to jump between 4 different outposts all in different systems) but I still think keeping in some sort of way to manually travel between planets and systems outside of these menus would’ve been nice. It’s not by any means a big deal to me, but it certainly hurts the flow of the game and general immersion.

The final flaw I think is worth mentioning has to be the tile system. I never had any intention of walking across an entire planet anyway, but I still think it would’ve been cool to have as an option. Even if it couldn’t be seamless, why not just prompt the player to generate a new tile as they’re walking? Why do they need to return to their ship? Just have a loading screen right there when they’re walking and make them go through a loading screen at each boundary, no ship necessary. In the end the tiles aren’t a huge problem to me since the only times I interact with the procedural planets is when it’s related to a quest or I’m making an outpost. Even then it’s still something that I consider a negative, if only in terms of immersion. Oh by the way I hate that there are no ground vehicles. It’s almost certainly because of the tile system (reaching boundaries would be way quicker) but it still sucks.

Conclusion:

Starfield is Bethesda’s first new IP in over 25 years and their first single player experience since the release of Fallout 4 back in 2015. How does it match up against their previous games? Does it beat out gaming behemoths like Skyrim and Fallout 4? How does it fare against their crowd favourites in Oblivion and Fallout 3? What about their original masterpiece that quite literally saved the company in Morrowind?

In my humble opinion: Starfield absolutely blows those games out of the water. Starfield is the accumulation of everything Bethesda has learnt and achieved since the beginning of their company. It is the embodiment of the Bethesda DNA that we’ve come to expect from their releases. It is the ultimate refinement of a Bethesda game; a Bethesda RPG. Starfield is their Magnum Opus.

For some this game will be a letdown, for others it will be just okay. It will really come down to whether you like Bethesda RPGs or you don’t, because that’s exactly what Starfield is. For me this game is what I’ve been waiting for the past 8 years when I had first heard of the trademark ‘Starfield’. It is the fulfilment of the dream I’ve had since I was a child. To explore the vastness of space and be set free in a near endlessly wide and fun open world, or better yet, open universe. That is what Starfield has given to me.

Starfield is not perfect, not even close; but I don’t care. In my eyes, this is a masterpiece. To me, this is what gaming is meant to be. An escape into a dream world where I can do anything I want, and be whoever I want. That is what Starfield truly is.

So to close out this far too long ramble that no one has even read, I’ll say this. Bethesda has created something truly special with Starfield; and I’ve barely even started my journey with it. As Marthe Troly-Curtin once wrote: ‘time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time’. Well, I suppose I’ll be spending a lot of time, ‘not wasted’, with Starfield.

5/5


Third Final Fantasy I've played, and this one was a pretty big mixed bag for me, unfortunately. When it's on, it's really on. Although it doesn't attempt anything remotely as interesting as 6's prolific fusion of story and battle mechanics or 7's distinct, offbeat humor and interactive fiction elements, it's hard to deny that most of its story is anything less than a resounding success. What the game excels at most are character interactions. They're used expertly for both comedic and dramatic purposes- the naive Vivi being lectured by the just-as-naive-but-slightly-more-emotionally-intelligent Eiko on the other party members' relationships and the quiet bombshell question that Dagger drops on Zidane in Maiden Sari regarding his personal motivation were the respective standouts from my perspective. A bold decision that might not seem significant is the game's consistent willingness to cut characters out for hours at a time when they're not important to what's currently going on. Steiner, for example, is just gone for huge chunks of the story after being introduced, which really works well with the stage play motif that surrounds the game. Adding to this, the story also starts off as a briskly paced, wonderfully small scale sequence of events that mostly has the party traveling from interesting location to interesting location. The game's initially focused on having the characters learn about themselves, each other, and the conflict that they're currently involved in rather than learning how to defeat some intergalactic being.

But, in the end, despite how good the game is at getting your hopes up, it has Final Fantasy in the title. I don't care about Kuja's plan to merge the planets and kidnap the Sandy Claws or whatever. Despite eating up so much of the storyline it's simply not interesting, and it also takes what should be a quiet, personal narrative and regresses it into standard sci-fantasy schlock. This disappointing third act turn of events and also some weird, seemingly unfinished details like certain side characters being built up with zero payoff mean that the narrative isn't perfect, and therefore it has to lean on its gameplay to at least some degree. And man, maybe it's just me, but this game is just so unenthusiastic about being an RPG. What feels like the vast majority of fights, at least in the first half of the game, are scripted, mid-cutscene bouts that you're not really supposed to lose. The amount of time spent in areas containing random encounters is purposefully minimized. Trance is the only unique part of the battle system but it's not well thought out at all and it adds absolutely nothing. The bosses are uninspired, usually being some nondescript creature being plopped in front of the party with no buildup- gone are the days of Jenova, of Shinra higher-ups, of ghost trains. There's nothing to their fights mechanically, either. I can think of only one boss in the entire game that isn't just one target that you can attack, and likewise only one that even reacts to your actions. The sole semblance of a saving grace, gameplay wise, is the abilities system. It's clever in more ways than one, as it encourages you to actually think about which equipment you put on and also gives you a nice feeling of growing your collection of abilities, but it's not enough to really affect anything in a major way. The game's also extremely easy. Final Fantasy 7's low level of difficulty gets a pass because of how enjoyable it is to mess around with the Materia system (although that has its own issues that I won't get into here), 9 does not, especially considering it's heralded as a throwback to the older games in the franchise. The story clashes, and the gameplay clashes. No matter how much I wanted to love it, Final Fantasy 9 has less to offer than either of the other games in its series that I've played before it.

I like to consider myself a fan of the Final Fantasy franchise. I have great memories of playing all the single player games throughout the years. I like the idea that every entry is a fresh take with a new story and set of characters and for the most part I have enjoyed the vast majority of them. I think as the years go by the last few entries FF12-15 I have had rather sour experiances with but with each new entry I like to keep an open mind. However after so many mainline duds it was hard to get excited for FF16 and I told myself that this time I was going to wait and not buy into the hype and play this day 1. I had watched a few trailers the last couple of years and they really didn't do anything for me in any way. Neither a negative or positive reaction. I couldn't even tell much of what it was even about or how it would play. But like I said I've been burnt the last few years on the past entries that i decided to wait. After about a month after the release. I had an open slot to play something new and with a bunch of free time coming up. It has been awhile since playing a big RPG and despite me saying I wasn't gunna be suckered into playing this at full price, I ended up just doing that. I still have love for this franchise and I want this to be good. I know next to nothing about it but all the major outlets have been singing it's praises for the recently released demo and reviews.

Starting FF16 the setting depicts a classic FF midevel esque locale with a focus on struggling kingdoms in a magic filled world that is ruled and governed by magic giving crystals that fuel the kingdoms prosperity and ways of life. This also coupled with more realisticly designed characters (well for FF) compared to the last entries did inspire some confidence that I would like this direction. However I feared it was very similar to FF12, and I would get lost in all the names, subkingdoms and detailed lore that was so heavy with politacal intrigue. I can say FF16 was not like that and even though it wares it clear game of thrones inspirations well, it is a simple story and very easy to keep track of it's huge world and lore. One of the many things I despise about FF13 is how much story and lore is thrown in the datalogs baried in the menu. When I learned that FF16 had a active time lore feature, I feared it was going to be just like that game. Burying crucial plot details and information critical for understand whats going on and figuring out the world into packed away long text info dumps. I hated that so much. Missing context of scenes and details because I didn't pause the game to read a 15min info dump. So hearing that FF16 has a active time lore feature, I instantly groan. To my surprise however it's implementation is very well done. At anytime during a cutscene, you can pause the game and open up the active time lore and it will tell you at that moment who each character is, what faction they belong to, their relationship to you and everything that has happened to them at the current point in the story. Not only characters but locations, words and factions are displayed in detail. It's a very nice feature if you haven't played in awhile to catch you up on whats going one or who this is or if you forgoten what that word means. It doesn't lock away critical info you can only find there or explains things that happen offscreen. Catches you up in the moment. There is also a really well done family tree for all the characters and a world history map feature about how the world is reacting to the current point in the story. I think this is a fantastic implementation of a lore feature for a massive RPG such as this and worth highlighting.

As for the story and characters FF16 drew me in from the get go. I think the opening act of the phoenix gate is really well done and a great introduction to the characters and world. It's a good start for learning Clive and what his place in the world is and right away we know where his ideals and goals lie. I think for the most part I like all the characters in this game. I think there isn't a single design that I felt was awful or felt out of place. Everyone looks stylish but at the same time something a person of this world would wear. As far as personalities go almost all the characters have character and a connection to you and what's going one with the story. Which isn't always the case for these kinda games. This random ninja guy joins your party cause he's cool ect ect. My problem with FF16 is that I think the games nose dives hard after the opening chapters. Nearly every character in this game while I find to be likable to varing degrees never have any kind of arc, growth or anything interesting happen to them. The characters of FF16 are the definition of what you see is what you get. Which is a shame because I think there is a foundation here but everything is so one dimentional. I think the voice acting is good, except for CId I can not stand the preformance from that character. I know what they were going for and nothing against the actor but I can't understand so much of what he says because a lot of his dialog is mumbled and hard to hear or make out what he is saying. It's just the way he talks. I wanted subtitles on just for that character. Rant over. Like I was saying there isn't much to work with when it comes to the characters. I feel like Clive is the same person he was at the start of the game as he is at the end of the game. It's frustrating too because with so much inner connected drama that could and should happen everything fizzles out and I get nothing. Then when something does happen it's so over the top melodramtic that it's hard to take seriously, but more on that later.

The story is simple to follow and there is hardly any twists and turns. It's a simple we are doing this mission and the whole game is just that. SImple good kingdoms vs bad kingdoms controlled by evil. Look that's fine if that's what you wanna do. I'm totally cool with it but do some interesting things from point A to point B. Have some drama with the characters. Every main character is like connected but they treat each other just like their combat buddies. Everything feels so bland and one dimentional.

After the opening chapters when you meet up with Cid at the Hideway for the first time is when the game takes a real nose dive in quality. This is the point where FF16's problems become aparent to me. At this point there are long stretches of cutscenes and cutscenes of just characters talking back and forth back and forth. Some times to move the plot along but a lot of the times it's just Clive talking to every god damn person about mundane stuff and what they are doing ad nauseum. This would be fine if it was meaningful or interesting but it drags so hard. It feel it's longer and more drawn out than Metal Gear Solid 4 or some other heavy story game. Then after all that they finally introduce side missions. Yes finally, let me stab something with my sword now. Nope, they just consist of walking all the way over here and talking to this guy to go all the way over here to pick up some wooden planks and bring them back to the first guy. Okay that is some real time wasting shit mission design but fine whatever it's the first one CLEARLY they won't all be like this. HA HA nope 95% of sub missions is exactly this or go to this spot in the world map, kill this one jobber enemy group and come back. In the year of 2023 this is not acceptable mission design. Hearing 20 min of a sub mission set up for it only to devolve into that and most of the time not even be important or revelevant at all is madening . But the shit cherry on top of these terrible missions is that the reward for completing them is paltry crumbs that even a peasant wouldn't want.

So what makes them so bad? You are ever only rewarded in gold and crafting materials and a small amount of exp and ability points. Now I know what you must be thinking well that doesn't sound bad, heck that sounds quite good, well sorry to inform you but it's not. Gold for starters is so plentiful it's meaningless. What can you even buy with gold? You can restock up on potions and bottles and buy weapons and armor. What's wrong with that you say, well all the weapons and armor you can buy are always underpowered and weaker than what you can forge at the smithy so there is no reason to buy them. Well you can buy materials? Sure you can but battles earn you more materials that you can ever possibly need. There is no need to farm them or stockpile them. They are so plentiful it is counter intuitive to why they are even in the game to start with. So you can buy potions and bottles everytime you need to refill your limited inventory space. Great 4 hours into the game you probually have enough gold to buy them the rest of the game. The only other thing to buy with gold is super over priced juke box tracks you can play at your hideout. Great okay gold is meaningless. After my two playthroughs I had someting like 100,000,000
gold and nothing to spend it on. So materials and gold are useless. So doing sub missions has no point. Oh wait you do get exp and ability points for completing them. Outside big story fights the exp and ability points you get from doing sub missions is super small and is about the same as just doing a couple of battles in the wild. So again there is no point to taking on these long fetch quest missions that waste your time and pad out the story sections with "gameplay" missions. If there was some character or story to these missions like in the Yakuza games they would be worth it for that but the vast majority of them are piles of nothing. A lot of decent ones open up at the end of the game but that is no excuse for the majority being this way. Terrible.

Let's talk about the gameplay now. This is where a lot of people live or die by this game. Let me say this first. I am not a fan of the action direction the series has taken in the last few main line entries. However, I look at Final Fantasy games as individual experiances as fresh and open takes so I am not opposed to different directions. I do not have a problem if this game wants to be an action game and not a RPG. I don't want it to or prefer it to go that way but I don't hold it against it. I do however will hold it against having shallow boring meaningless action gameplay. The game play in FF16 is so bad it makes my head hurt. It's bad as an RPG it's bad as the action game it wants to be. It's like the goal was to create a combat system that literally any player at any level could complete and feel like they are doing relevant stuff and seeing it on the screen. This isn't a bad philosophy and I welcome the idea of inclusion for types of players but this is NOT the way to do it. FF16 feels like a combat engine that has all the accessiblity features of an action game turned on at the same time. So how does combat work, lets break it down. You have four buttons that each do a different action. Square is your meele attack button, Triangle is you long range magic attack button and Circle is a movement ability (we will call it that) and the X button is a jump. R1 is also a dodge button. That's your basics. So meele is a simple five or so hit combo and what you will be doing the majority of the time. Magic attacks are so weak and redundant there is reason to spam the rapid fire button presses to hurl weak element attacks. It's main function is if you hold the attack it is a bit more powerful and it launces the enemy up in the air so If you want you can jump up and strike with your sword and do a little air combo.

At several points throughout the game you get what are called eikon abilities which are essentially summon moves that do a special attack. You can equip two eikon abilities at one time and by the end of the game you can equip 3 different eikons at once giving you 6 special attacks. These can range from lightning bolts, magic missiles and fire attacks and so forth. These attacks do more damage than regualr attacks for sure but their main utility is they cause much more stagger damage.

So every enemy in the game has a stagger bar. This is a feature that has been in the last few FF games and I am not a fan of it at all. Essentially you do regular attacks and special to weaken an enemies stagger bar and when it's completly depleted they are stunned and in a down position and slowly recover their stagger before the bar fills back up. While they are in this state all attacks do 1.5x damage. And that is the basics of combat. That's it. Simplistic as it gets. Now im not daft to realize that past FF games and turn paced RPG's in general are simple as well. So why do I not like the combat in this game?

The one word that describes my entire feelings about FF16, it drags. Combat is so slow and slimplistic that it becomes a complete chore and I want it to be over the second it starts. What I like about the old FF games despite being slow and simple is that I feel like my actions having meaning and purpose a real strategy to them. Here every encounter operates the exact same way. Immeaditly use your eikon abilites in a rotating fasion and simply mash square until the enemy becomes staggered. Then use those whatever eikon abilities you have left and then just mash square until they get back up. Here's the thing i didn't mention earlier about the eikons abilities, they are all on a cool down timer. These aren't combat enhancing abilities or mechanics to give you extra strategy or change your approach. The majority of them are one hitting move that does more damage than your regular attack and then go on cooldown before you can use again. The cool down timer is obviously longer the stronger the attack so by the later half everything has long timers. It feels so restrictive and rudementry. Combat is the same everytime. Doesn't matter what the boss or enemy is the strat is the same. Use abilites and mash attack, use abilities and mash attack > stagger > repeat. It's so dull and unsatisfying it's maddening. Even i wanted to do something cool like do a ground combo, pop up a magic attack to launch the enemy and jump up to do an air attack and come crashing down to finish with a fire burst. Thats sounds so cool huh. Well guess what that is counter intutive to how the game wants you to play it. It says it's an action game but it's more of a masher that wants to you spam the same chained attacks to get the best levels of dagame per second so you can get the stagger faster and end the fight faster. Why would I wanna do that? Well beause fighters last forever in this game. There are two types of enemies in this game. Lights and heavies. Light enemies can be launched in the air and generally how lower amount of health. If every enemy in the game was like this than maybe combat wouldn't feel like such a slog but no. If there are light enemies on the field to counter act thier lightness the games throws dozens of enemies at one time at you. That's not the worst of it though.

Heavy enemies and bosses suck the big one. Heavy enemies are any non human or small creature. They don't react to your hit strikes and have a ton of health. I mean a ton of health. This is why this game feels like such a chore to play. They don't react to hardly anything and you are just constantly mashing attack, useing a cool down ability and mashing away again. It feels brainless. No thought. My finger cramp from mashing so much in such repition and I have to do it because I want this long fight to end faster. Evertime I see a group of enemies and two heavy enemies I just audibly groan becuase I know, know this is going to be a test of will power.

So offensive gameplay sucks. What about that dodge button? Is it useful. Well yes actually. The dodge is very good. It's quick and has a huge invinciblity window. It feels an eqaual amount of skill and precsion balanced with a healthy amount of leanency. Plus if you dodge and strike at the same time you get this cool animation of a precision strike. It feels good. Okay a positive to the combat. Where can we mess it up here. Well for one that cool dodge strike, yea well it does slightly more damage than a regular strike. Like if a regular attack does 100 damage then this does 130 damage. It's so small in the grand scheme of the fight it might as well not exist. Another problem i have in combat is that your walk speed is so slow. So imagine this scenario an attack sends me flying back and I wanna run up to the enemy to continue my assult. It's taking too long you know whats faster. Dodging. Let's spam dodge towards the boss to get up there quicker before he jumps away or teleports to the other side of the arena. Opps a projectile hit me because I dodged right into it. Well thats my fault. Guess I'll just walk to him. Meh screw this is way too slow. Continue to spam dodge as a movement.

There is also a limit burst mechanic as well. So in past Final Fantasy games a limit burst would normally be a characters special move or ultimate attack that is special and unique to them. Well FF16 only has one playable character. So the limit burst here is more like a devil trigger or power up state. Taking damage or dealing damage will fill the gauge up over time. Pretty standard stuff. Then at anytime when it's full you can activate it and cancel out of any animation to go into a powered up state. From what I can tell you don't get a significant defense boost and the damage boost is minimal at best. It does make your attacks faster and your attacks aren't interupted and your health slowly regens at a very small rate but that is essentially all there is to it. I think Clive looks cool during it but mechaniclly i don't see the point of this at all. It never made a significant difference in a fight. It's like they just wanted a frenzy attack mode to look cool but didn't give it anything to make you wanna use it. Strange.

The last thing I wanna say about the combat is dedicated to one eikon in piticular, the last one you get Odin. Odin is massively broken and overpowered system that it has to be talked about. The last 3/4 of the game is when you get this eikon but it's such a game changer it needs to be mentioned. It's mechanic is this, you replace your sword with another sword that does little to no damage but instead builds up a seperate meter called zanzetusken (FF thing) when this meter is maxed out you can unleash a screen filling single attack that will instantly kill all normal enemies and heavily damage big enemies. At this point this completly changes the way the game is played to an extenet because this is such a powerful tool that there is no reason NOT to use it. So then the game starts unloading 20+ enemies at a time because it knows you have this tool now. My problem with this is that this mechanic forces your play to be even more restrictive than what it already was before and it was very restritive to start with. Now it's all about landing this odin eikon ability named dancing sword. This slow starting attack when landed does a huge attack that lasts for 30 seconds that fills the meter up big time. Then you wail with your weak sword to fiill up the rest and repeat. So get used to seeing this long overly winded attack animation because you will start to see it every battle as it's the easies and quickest way to dispatch the massive fodder enemies the game now puts on you. But don't worry if you thought you thumb would get a break it doesn't cauase heavies and bosses can't be insta killed like this and most times it does like 10% damgage to them. So back to the mashing. I think this makes the last fourth a even bigger slog as the dungeons and boss guantlents are get more and more elaborate as the games go on. The pacing is down right terrible here.

Let's move on and talk about the highlight of the game as most would say. The story boss fights. The whole marketing of this game since the start was always highlighting the epic battles and struggles of those who can summon or turn into huge epic eikon monsters and the massive battles. Anyone who plays FF16 will tell you these are the best part of the game. These battles are built like giant godzilla vs king kong epics. Where the fight constantly shifts from Clive and turning into the beast Ifrit and taking on massive foes in epic fashion. To say the set pieces don't have any effort or thought put into them would be flat out wrong. Clearly a large amount of the budget went towards these multi-stage fights, with several pieces of music and over the top effects and graphic fidelty to show a very momumental moment in the game and leave a lasting impression. This is obvious. This is what fans of FF16 love. I get it. If you like it it's fine. I, however hated these segments so much.

Let me explain why these segments did nothing for me. Overall it's just way way too over the top. I get that why some like it but it's too much for me. Yes even in a Final Fantasy game some magic bullshit is just too much. It's such a drastic difference from the regualar battles and world the game has built up and then we take it to Dragon Ball Z levels of super beams and space schenangins. You can't have a game of thrones style epic and design and then throw in fast and furious feats then go back to being grounded again. It doesn't work for me at all. There has to be a level or wall were I can see or understand what the limit is. These set peices go on for so long and are already at a super high power level and nonsense on the first one. Each one gets longer and more dramatic as well. The best way to describe it is if a child had two monster toys and it's hand and he just constantly bashed them togather to make explosions. That's what it feels like to me. Constant stuff happening. Just particle effects everywhere. It looks stunning and you can tell they had fun making it but to me it's a visual throw up of stuff. There's just no end to it. Start as clive fight the boss > he morphs into a big monster > you morph in to a monster > you fight > he kicks your ass dramaticly > fight again as clive > slowly turn back into monster and get the edge > fight some more > Kill boss in epic fashion. The eikon fights play very simialr to how combat is as a human just with different visuals so same issues apply here . The big difference is that a lot of these fights are heavily scripted. So while the boss may have a huge health bar and visiably is taking damgage. It's scripted to the points to when the fights shifts to the next part. I feel like the small damage im doing doesn't even matter becuase im just waiting for the scripted part to end so I can do the real fight part. The complete over the top nature and contrast to the rest of the game just doesn't work for me. I love over the top stuff I do but It has to be grounded and I have to know how the rules work and where the ceiling is. One part Ifrit gets his arm cut off and so I would think oh man this is the dramatic part where he might lose here and this will effect the rest of the fight but 30 seconds later he just magically regrows it. There's no rules here. So when the fights finally do finish and you get that epic FF victory cheer I feel like it's unwaranted as I didn't feel like "I" did anything and just thinking oh I guess it's over now, kinda hard to tell until I here that jingle.

So what about the rest of the game? I can't go over everything and boy I could talk about my experiance more but I'll try to wrap it up a bit. Inbetween the eikon fights, the long dungeon crawls of repat enemies and tedious sub missions. We simply just skip from new town to new town on our quest to destroy the crystals. Oh that's right I didn't even get into the main quest. So in this world there are several mother crystals that grant a kingdom a eikon to defend it and magic bearers to spread magic to the kingdom. Thos who are born as a eikon to summon the big monsters are treated like royalty and those who are born with the innate ability of magic are called bearers. Everything in this world is sustained through magic. Drinking water, fire for light and cooking, wind for turnbines and aire ect ect. Its a fantasy world and magic is what makes their day to day life go round. However the people who can cast magic are not super powerful wizards or anything but can summon simple elements for use. This causes regular people to relay upon them and they treat them as slaves. As they think they are put on this earth to serves and make their lives easier. As god and the people intended. This is how it is in the story but I feel like it's kinda backwards like i get there are more regular people in this world and magics bearers are more limited. Why not rise up against your masters kinda thing you have magic and they don't. I dunno. Well so our heroes decided that if they destroy all the crystals and erase magic from the wolrd everybody would be free and the world more pure and less chaos fighting over things and so forth. That's the main crutch the the story. We just go from land to land doing just that and at the end we fight the big bad. Like I said at the start simple story. Just remember though this is spread through like an 80 hour campaign so I would have liked a lot more depth than what we got. The Dion character was built up so well but I feel like it ultimately lead to know where and a very unsatisfying end. Jill was mishandeled the entire game, giving nothing to do and be a complete poor romantic partner for Clive. She had so many oppurtunities for some cool moments and nada. Clive and Joshua are the highlights but I would have loved to see some more drama or disagreements from them and how they would react to each other but everything deloves into "he's my brother" "I"m his sheild" "we can do anything" "power of family" type stuff. That's what's frustrating to me there is such good foundation to these characters and designs but nothing meaningful happens to them. They are all one note. They don't grow or have memorable scenes outside the epic fights. It's not enough. That couple with the terrible combat. I just cant'. I fell asleep more times than I can count on this game. In the middle of fights even. Look I know I'm getting older and long working days and take a toll on you but games stimulate me and keep me engaged. This game did not. Not in combat, not in the long walk for fetch quests or the visual barf of the eikon battles. Even after completing the game and seeing I had just a few trophies left I even contemplated if I should play it again. And well....I did. I'm such a trophy whore.

On playthrough 2 I was just gonna play on the hard difficulty. Which isn't really harder it's just that enemies have more health. Great like they needed any more. The level cap is increased and new gear can be unlocked as the game goes on. You can upgrade your old great and items as well. Thats actually a really cool idea for a new game plus so I do give the game some regard there. I just wish I wanted to play it again. I reluctantly moved on. I was thinking if I skip all the cutscenes and just play the main story path surely it won't be too long of a play and then I feel I will get my completionist mental check and feel like I got my 70 bucks worth out of the game. Skipping cutscense really shows you just how much there are in this game. Just five min of pausing game, skipping scene, pausing game skipping scene ect. So for this play through I decided I was gonna use the cheat rings. Cheat rings you say? Well yes another feature of this game is that you start with a few cheat items to help players who can't play action games well. Like an auto dodge ring or a auto heal or auto combo ect. So your telling me that this dumbed down combat system was created not for accesibility but for regular players. Oh my god. Why the hell couldn't we have more freedom or depth in the combat from the start if we had these items for accessiblity or as an easy mode from the start. The game is already brain dead easy on the first play and not we can make it easier. I don't care anymore I put on the auto dodge ring. I just fights to end faster. Im speed running this playthrough and that was the mentality I had for my second run. The second go around just reinforce everything I felt about my first playthrough. How tedious the combat is and how much of a drag it was to play. Why am I even playing this again. Is this even worth it. Well im not playing anything else and I only have a few days before the next game I want comes out. Can't start a new game this soon so I was determined to finish. Watching that trophy title Final, Fantasy pop up was so releaving. Finally Fantasty 16 is done.

FF16 has a lot of problems so scoring it was a little hard because technically there is a lot of effort on show here especially the eikon fights. In the end though the drag of the submissions and terrible combat really kept my enjoyment down. I did like aspects of it though. I do like the characters and parts of the story. The big bad was hella stupid though. There was a strong foundation in the world. So thinking about it would I rather play this over the average action game? RPG? Or any other game? and the answer is no. So that's why I feel like a 4/10 is waranted. Still like this one more than FF13 and maybe more than FF15 though but those are low bars as well.

Platinum #184

Metroid's Sonic 2006.

Other M has been on my radar for a while. The indisputable black sheep of the Metroid series, so known for the hate it gets that you'd be forgiven for not knowing it was positively received by critics upon release. I don't think I would've been able to appreciate what this game meant to Metroid fans circa 2010 as I would not have classified myself as one. In fact, my familiarity with the series was limited to Metroid Prime, a game I did not really care for, and which kept me from playing other Metroid games until only a few years ago. Being more familiar with the franchise now than I was, Other M has become a festering curiosity, always existing in the periphery while I play good Metroid games. It is not enough to be told it's bad, I need to know. I even began to gaslight myself into thinking the game is likely just mediocre, that all the derision and vitriol it gets is a classic case of people globbing onto a popular narrative and continuing to blow it all out of proportion.

Yeah, I'm an idiot. So what?

I don't even know where to begin with this game. Everything Other M sets out to accomplish - even on levels that are very fundamental to gaming as a whole - ends in spectacular failure. Its problems are so great, reviewing this game feels like walking into the home of a hoarder and being asked to sort everything out. I can't do that. You have to call in a professional, and apparently if you brought in any critic from 2010 they'd think it's just fine. GameSpot's Tom McShea looking at the wall-to-wall junk, shrugging, and going "I don't see any problem with this."

Like, do I start with the controls? That's a pretty important part of any game! There is only one controller setup for Other M: holding the Wiimote horizontally. I find this orientation to be inherently uncomfortable, and navigating Samus around in 3D using the Wiimote's gag D-Pad caused my hand to cramp horribly if I played for longer than an hour. Favoring uniqueness over ergonomics is an immutable element of Nintendo's greater design ethos, so... Whatever.

You can switch from third to first person perspectives by pointing the Wiimote at the TV, which you'll need to do frequently as it's the only way to fire your missiles. This locks Samus in place, making it very easy for her to eat shit while you're trying to line a shot up, but even more frustrating is how often the game drops you back out to third person. I started to worry something was wrong with my Wiimote or sensor bar, or that perhaps I was sitting too close to the TV, but everything seems to work fine in other games. It's just Other M that I'm having this problem with and given the overall poor quality of the rest of the game, I'm going to just go with it being either poorly implemented or outright bugged. Even if it was more reliable, I think this is a lousy way to play the game and would have vastly preferred they picked one perspective and just stuck with it. At one point in time, Other M was being designed as a purely 2D game, and I will lament to my dying days the fact that some bozo decided it ought to be this monstrosity instead.

Right, so, we've got a whole lot of garbage boxed up and taken out to the curb now, but oh no a whole fucking god damn muscle rack of SHIT has just fallen on me, and apparently it broke under the strain of Metroid's genre defining elements. All this crap about open-ended design and backtracking with new powers is all over the floor and I hate it here!!

Haha just kidding, because none of that stuff is in this game. Other M is less search-action and more action-platformer. All of your major suit upgrades are given to you at various points in the story, making them no longer feel earned, and most of the backtracking you'll be doing simply comes in the form of your objective marker arbitrarily moving around the Bottle Ship and it's three sectors. There's no satisfying sense of exploration here, and though E-Tanks and missile upgrades can still be collected, their presence is only to satisfy some sense of obligation to Metroid's identifiable pieces. You can just recharge your health or missiles when you're low by tilting the Wiimote vertically and holding down the A button, and because ammo is infinitely recoverable, enemies no longer drop health or missiles, giving you little reason to actually engage in skirmishes. In tacit recognition of the fact that nothing is worth interacting with, Other M frequently locks you into forced combat encounters and god do they drag. Most of them are spongy and have brief windows where they can actually be damaged. There's a handful against multiple enemies that like to zip around and collide with Samus, which causes her to bounce around like Brad Pitt in Meet Joe Black. I swear this game was either designed from a place of contempt for its players or Metroid. Maybe both.

However, I suspect the focus of people's dislike for Other M is its story, or more specifically its bizarre, borderline fetishistic portrayal of Samus Aran. Even if you get past the "male gaze" camera shots she's often framed in, her character is totally butchered. The story starts when Samus is called to the Bottle Ship after responding to a "baby's cry" distress signal... Baby's cry...? You mean, like the baby? Wait a minute, if I move the M in Other M it spells... Othmer!! Ah, it's all coming together now.

She's not the only one on the ship, however. The Galactic Federation has sent their own unit to investigate the disturbance, and it happens to be Samus' old squad, still led by her former CO, Adam. Samus has complicated feelings for Adam, which she articulates in very overwrought narration delivered by actor Jessica Erin Martin, whose delivery sounds like she's being stirred periodically from a medically induced coma. The way these feelings manifest in Samus is through utter submission to his authority. Like I said, you don't earn your upgrades, they're given to you through the story, and I mean they are literally given through Adam's permission. Oh, Samus is authorized to use her Varia suit now that she's been forced to run through several extremely hot areas that caused her physical damage? Well, I guess it's a good thing she acquiesced her autonomy to some asshole at the expense of her well-being.

It's all so out of character, to the point where I just assumed this was written by someone at Team Ninja who didn't care for the source material at best and at worst had some very problematic views on women, but uh nope, this is all on Sakamoto. This is a character who has always been portrayed stoically, hardened by her experiences as a bounty hunter and being orphaned. I never got the sense she'd have a panic attack seeing Ridley, someone she's canonically murdered four times prior to Other M, but she starts hyperventilating at the sight of him and it nearly gets someone else killed. Someone who, by the way, has a habit of calling Samus "princess," which should get both his arms broken. She's cool with it, though, and within the context of the game's narrative she finds it exhilarating to take orders from someone.

It is such a rancid depiction, and at several points it feels like she's just being written by a creep. It is also very heavy-handed in its themes about maternity, and it never has anything interesting to say about it. It's all surface level, superficial crap that's no more deep than the title of the game abbreviating to MOM. Even the more emotional beats feel hollow, partly due to how wooden everyone is, and partly because nothing feels earned within the story. Adam sacrifices himself to eliminate the sector the Metroids are propagating in, but like whatever. Get fucked, loser, you wouldn't let me power bomb.

Other M is legitimately one of the worst major franchise releases I have ever played. When I started this review a hundred years ago, I made a comparison to Sonic 2006 that might just seem snide, but I honestly don't think it's that off-base. It may not be broken in the same way as Sonic, but I think it's equally poor in terms of gameplay and how it feels in-hand. They're also responsible for nearly killing their respective franchises on the spot. There really isn't much else I can say about it, Other M fails to get even one thing right and that's astonishing.

I’d call myself the most casual of Pokémon fans; big into it as a kid who was the perfect age to get in on the ground floor of this Whole Thing, but after gen 3 and bar a brief but frenetic romhack phase in my late teens, I’ve settled into the kind of distantly pleasant relationship with the series where I pick up each new game and have a good time playing through to credits but then never touch or think about them again, and repeat every two years. I couldn’t tell you the names of most new guys, but I CAN see a picture of them and go damn, that’s a cute critter. Casual. So no one was more surprised than me when Pokémon Violet turned out to be not only my favorite Pokémon game easily and by far, but one of my favorite games this year?? I play a lot of games man, and mostly bangers too.

A big big part of this accomplishment is that Pokémon has finally cracked the code on writing, like really for real this time. I know Pokémon guys like to talk about gen V and I am even a gen Whatever Sun and Moon Were liker for the stuff those go for at the end but there is simply nothing as consistently and thoroughly well done in this series before now and certainly not on the scale we see here. Every single person pops with huge personality, and for the first time those personalities are supported by like, stories that while not REVOLUTIONARY are certainly a tier above the stock standard baby anime tropes we’ve seen in the past. Hearing that Team Star were like the what, third antagonist group in a row who were a spin on Misunderstood Waylaid Youths had me groaning at first but their stories and motivations land! There is nuance in the laying out of their situation, there is acknowledgment that institutions in power and authority, especially over children, can and do fail to care for them and also are able to accept responsibility. Arven is a great little guy, firmly in the “wanna stick him in a little glass bottle and shake it up” tier. A potent blend of condescending and pathetic with a genuinely deserved chip on his shoulder at the way his life has turned out. And I’ll acknowledge that it’s because I have a chronically (and someday probably sooner than later it will become terminally) ill cat who has been having a really bad month, but his scenes really hit for me and I extremely cried near the resolution of his story.

The idea that a Pokémon game can have that power over me is only possible because Game Freak’s writers have subtley but definitely expanded the scope of maturity in how they treat the world of Paldea compared to previous games. Arven’s story fundamentally cannot work without acknowledgment of violence, real violence outside of the context of Pokémon battles – of death and dying, active dying that is happening now and happening TO us rather than in abstract stories of ancient struggles. This sort of thing is evident everywhere you look in Paldea. The Pokémon League isn’t the centerpiece of your life or anyone else’s, even the people who work for it; and they DO work for it, in an employment capacity. But there’s a distinct feeling that it’s not in its heyday even if it’s still a Big Deal. Almost every single gym leader does this as more of a side gig than their whole thing, and sometimes they’re not around or there’s an implication that these events have to be scheduled around their availability to some degree. Gym tests are based on the local town culture more often that they are on hard battle prowess and those cultures are a much greater and more foregrounded part of the town identities. When you get to the Elite Four finally, the building has two rooms that you get to see, a sort of lobby foyer where you’re interviewed with a classic gray office carpet floor pattern that every American desk drone knows intimately, and the single battle arena that everyone shares. It’s a much more realistic take on the idea than everyone having a giant customized zone within a huge tower or something. Everyone stays to watch after you beat them. It’s more informal but it’s been formalized. Even though you can’t walk into everyone’s houses anymore Paldea feels so much more like a real place where people live than any other region.

In keeping with this new emphasis on storytelling both explicit and implicit, Violet rewards role playing. Sure, you’re a kid in a magical world on a fantasy school assignment with completely free reign to stop about the country at your leisure, but you’re allowed and encouraged to like, go to class also! And if you’re pacing them out you unlock a handful of classes as you hit major milestones in the game’s three concurrent storylines. These vary in usefulness and the degree of information you learn from them is extremely fucked up lmao, like this is the first time I can think of that Pokémon explicitly explains a LOT of the underlying mechanics that are going on beneath the simple surface of the menus but these explanations are meted out mostly in a math class that you won’t see all of for 80% of the game it’s very funny. I don’t know that these are for actually learning anything, they’re all flavor, and I think it was incredibly brave of Game Freak to ferret away like eight or nine completely fleshed out unique NPCs in the school, only two of whom you would ever even see after the tutorial if you weren’t coming back for all this completely optional shit. There’s even a social link system separate from the classroom stuff! The school nurse has a series of social link cutscenes and she doesn’t even TEACH a class! There’s your math teacher, right, and via some hints in dialogue and her character design you can figure out that she is a retired gym leader and she used rock type Pokémon and she is the sister of the current gym type leader before any of this is told to you and you can DO THIS because she has geometric shaped hair, geode-themed jewelry, her name scheme fits her sister’s, and in one of her classes she name drops specific moves in her examples. There is simply a degree of care here that may not be particularly DEEP but is deeply REWARDING to engage with, if you’re willing to engage with it.

I also find Violet to be a quite beautiful game, beyond the way it stylishly makes use of a lot of smart 2D assets and cleverly implemented recycled animations to paper over places where it’s clear development was rushed and there wasn’t time to finish or polish everything (the food eating cutscenes are charming and incredible I don’t make the rules!). If the Galar region felt a little generic in the styles of the environments, Paldea has it beat in two important ways: first by having a more creative set of locales to trudge through, including things like wildflower rich stream beds, misty lakes, spindly cliffs, and bamboo groves among others. These unique little treat areas do a lot to separate out the expected plains and deserts and snowy mountains and make things feel less monotonous. It’s always a treat to wander into somewhere pretty and special, and to see which Pokémon are thoughtfully placed to live in them. The second way Paldea marks itself as the better of Game Freaks 3D environment outings is that the terrain is just generally more varied. I was a little worried to hear about “entire game world wild area” because frankly the wild areas kind of sucked ass??? Like it was cool to run around and catch guys at will but I found the more authored routes in Sword and Shield ultimately more compelling even if I couldn’t just go catch a Flapple or whatever anytime. Here though, even when you are just running up the grassy plains there’s always a LOT going on in terms of mountains and trees and elevation – no two areas feel truly the same even when they’re the same biome. This makes the game world feel more like a place even as it cleverly routes the player roughly along only a few pathways to see most of the leveled content in a more or less proper order without compromising the ultimately nonlinear nature of the game.

I wanna give a special shoutout to Area Zero, the secret fucked up super big crater that occupies the center of the map and is where the last bit of story content in the game takes place after you’ve finished your initial three threads. It ties everything that’s cool about this game together really well. As you descend into this harsh and dangerous zone you may quickly realize that it’s the only place in the game where your minimap isn’t active and why would it be, Area Zero isn’t mapped. The music is sedate and uncanny, and when it breaks for battle it’s weird and anxious. The Pokémon here are weird ones, or rare ones, or fully evolved ones, or, at least on the very top levels, ones that can fly in and out of the crater’s rim. The Pokémon you find will become stranger the deeper you go. There’s an otherworldly shimmer in the air, and the twinkles mimic the ones that outside the crater indicate an item to pick up on the ground; here they trick and disorient you. It’s the only place in the game where your constant companion, the legendary on your box cover, won’t come out of their ball, which leaves you without a mount, so no bike, no jump, no glide, no easy way out of the crater. The distance feels huge when you have to hoof it. You bring the protagonists of each of the other three stories in the game with you on the trip and while it’s delightful to see them all interact with each other (it would have been TRAGIC for this to have not happened) it also reveals more about them even this late in the game; Nemona, my favorite character in the game for being a fucking freak ass weirdo who loves blood more than anything, in unimpeachably cheerful and energetic but when you see her out of her element in the Pokémon League circuit she’s revealed to have a hard time relating to other people outside of her one interest, and kind of generally rude and thoughtless with their feelings. Penny gets to show herself to be deeply empathetic towards and protective of others in a more proactive way than in her own story but she’s also harsh and quick to anger in doing so. Arven is the true protagonist of the game and its emotional burden rests with him, and his mask cracks the most. So ultimately you get a small sad story about the ways families can fail each other and these three awkward kids who bond through one pretty fuckin bad day and it’s like, y’know it’s good! There is a lot of cool stuff here.

Nobody is more surprised than me! Truly! I have always basically liked Pokémon but I’ve never been ENTHUSIASTIC. It’s just that this one did a lot of inacore stuff, gave me a bone with a lot of meat to chew on just to my tastes, and when you slap that on top of Pokémon's general play which is rock solid as ever, and what I feel is a real nailing down of the open world side of things this time? I dunno man, I think they really knocked this one out of the park.

I imagine that anybody who follows me is long past the moment of “oh Mass Effect is actually extremely fucking wack, politically” so I’m not going to spend a lot of time here on how deeply evil this game is except shoutouts to Wrex you deserve better, anti-shoutouts to Garrus I know you’re everyone’s boyfriend but you’re one of the most evil people of all time, rest in piss Ashley, awful awful woman.

Instead I want to talk about the thing the game is actually ABOUT and what it struck me as being really about when taken in its totality. At first glance Mass Effect seems like it’s sticking pretty much beat for beat to the early Bioware formula: tutorial, three discrete levels in any order, fourth level with a context shaking twist, and a funnel level into an endgame scenario. But Mass Effect has something that none of the other Bioware games that follow this specific formula do: a shit ton of completely optional side content. And while I think you can certainly derive what I got out of this game if you ignore it, which mostly people do, because it is obviously unfinished and largely uncompelling in the way you want a story-driven RPG to be compelling, I think that engaging in every single bit of it really helped this game reveal itself to me.

Now I have to come clean up front and admit that I am simply an enormous pervert (mako enjoyer). I like how it controls, this gigantic, floaty, unwieldy thing that will swing sharply in whatever direction you indicate at even the lightest touch, that takes forever to start or stop but is always a moment’s notice away from flipping fully onto its back because you ran over a small rock, that unless a surface is literally like 90 degrees vertical you can p much scale it no probbo. But you can get good at it! There is consistency to its floatiness, there is art and skill to the propulsion you get from its jump and the ways you can manipulate your airborne angles with it if you’re positioned correctly. The Legendary Edition says they “improved” the mako but all they really did was make it heavier which may have made driving it immediately easier but ironically makes climbing mountains and getting out of harsh terrain much more difficult because you have more mass and can’t accelerate as much from a stop or a precarious angle.

And yet driving across infinite essentially identical planets brings me so much joy, one of my favorite feelings in all of video games. It’s amazing how much you can change the feel of a place by changing the dominant color scheme, or adding a second color, or putting a harsh filter over the screen, or putting a massive moon in the sky, or environmental hazards, or any combination of these things. These places don’t feel distinct but Mass Effect, contrary to popular opinion, is actually a beautiful game, one that made up for limited animations and less-than-cutting-edge graphics with an incredible command of color and filters and art design. That stuff all stands out even in its largely featureless wildernesses, where you only company will ever be one of four kinds of salvage operations, a random boss fight, or the planet’s designated side quest location, of which there are maybe seven unique maps divvied across like 30 planets?

These maps are enormous and truly empty. If they’re dotted with small scraps of stuff for you to loot it’s almost never shit you care about or even shit with a story to tell. There’s no music and no ambient dialogue from your companions and no sound of any kind other than the wind and the noise of your engine encroaching on the silence of a planet that does not care. Because this is what Mass Effect is ultimately about: that the world is big, bigger than we can understand and certainly bigger than we can master. That to think we can know it is arrogance and that to think we can tame it is suicide.

Everywhere you go in Mass Effect you find people who have overextended, who have fucked around and found out. Usually they’re long dead. Sometimes this is dramatic, like their ship went down and they were killed by a large worm monster but mostly it’s just that something went wrong with their ship and they crashed on one of the overwhelming majority of planets in even the charted galaxy where no one lives, and even with their distress beacon going they’re too far out for anyone to ever find them because they were brave enough to be out here for a reason that suddenly seems very small in the scope of the death the universe is about to hit them with. Even the little largely scientific descriptions of planets that you get when you first scan them are often filled with small stories of people who died there for whatever reason. Explorers, pirates, settlers, whatever. All kinds of planets. All kinds of reasons. Always dead.

But it’s more than just this. Mass Effect isn’t just about how Nature Is Scary and We Need To Respect it. I think it’s becoming evident that Mass Effect is about how no matter how times we’re warned about this, we just won’t learn this lesson. We refuse it, we reject it. It’s a game where literally every main plot scenario is driven by people who have Fucked Around And Found Out, re: some primordial phenomenon, usually natural. Liara investigates prothean ruins alone and messes with shit she, the known universe’s foremost prothean expert, doesn’t understand and gets caught in a deathtrap, saved entirely by happenstance. On Feros, Exogeni Corp. unearths the thorian, a singular and ancient life form so old and obtuse that it defies the classifications we’ve used for plants and animals for hundreds of years, and even when they realize that it’s dangerous, and killing people, and possibly irreversibly destroying their brains, they just let it happen for research, until things spiral further out of control. Binary Helix is doing almost the exact same shit on the Rachni, who very quickly massacre everyone at their remote research base in response to the abusive way they’ve been resurrected. Let’s not forget either that the Peak 15 research base is cut off from the outside world by the extremely hostile and untamed weather conditions of Noveria itself; part security feature for shady corporations, equal part menacing trap when something goes wrong.

The thing is though, this doesn’t just happen, right? None of these things are innate to the conception of personhood. Most of the people you meet in these games are not enthusiastically being evil scientists and frontiersmen, they’re normal exploited workers trying to eke out a living in a world that’s forcing them. These disasters are the logical endpoint of the hypercapitalistic world that every species has to buy into hard to participate in galactic society. Everyone’s doing it. It’s a huge focus of the game, how deep we are in the rot. The game doesn’t fully realize how bad this is; sure, corporations are often the villains but their place as the glue that runs society and holds it together, the idea that all news, all entertainment, all life is filtered through a corporate veneer even less veiled than our own real life one is taken for granted. A runoff of the game constantly trying to make you feel like your choices matter and it can see what you’re doing is that every news report you might overhear in an elevator is about corporate colonies you visit, every shop is selling weapons and armor and all gossip is about military outfits and their trevails against pirates and extrasolar robotic boogeymen. The military and the frontier and the private business are all the same thing and while this world is broadened somewhat in the sequels, in Mass Effect they’re near the ONLY thing.

This need to not only study but to replicate and synthesize and weaponize the thorian, to recreate and subjugate the rachni, to create a bred army of mindless krogan slaves. The way the human government implants children with ever improving but ever-dangerous biotic amps with devastating lifelong side effects and abandoning them with no support as soon as the next generation of hardware comes along. Even simply the constant, omnipresent need to expand, to colonize new planets and dominate their ecosystems and strip them of everything valuable and force them into a state of habitability and relative comfort for the few species who exist in the realm of citadel space. What can these things be driven by but the demands of capital? Of eternal growth? Of wealth over humanity? Constantly in this game we’re punished for being this way but never does anyone figure it out.

Then there are, of course, the reapers. The ultimate expression of nature’s unknowability. Sovereign enters this story like a sledgehammer, and taken at face value (and without a reason not to do so), his words suggest the terrifying and infinite reality of our smallness in a world that rejects our attempts to reign it into our shitty and selfish frameworks. The protheans are ancient and mysterious? Sovereign is older, and killed them, seemingly and somehow. The rachni nearly wiped out everyone in the galaxy? Sovereign is so unconcerned with the might of the galaxy’s fleets that he doesn’t even acknowledge them in the game’s climax, he just moves through ships like they’re air, destroying them almost unknowingly, and it takes the combined might of literally everyone who is physically able to show up to kill him. He’s one reaper of untold numbers. The thorian was frightening because it defied classification and because it had brainwashing pheromones? Sovereign seems to warp perception simply by its presence. He is not only an AI like the geth but a truly living machine. He sort of explains stuff to you but it doesn’t even feel like he really cares all that much. He says scary stuff but it doesn’t feel like he’s trying to scare you; he’s just like this. “You exist because we allow it. You will end because we demand it.” What does he mean by this? It doesn’t matter. Understanding Sovereign isn't important. It might be to us, we WANT to understand, but he doesn't care if we do or not. We don’t matter. We can’t impose ourselves onto Sovereign. Even when we win the fight, how many other Sovereigns are on their way? Infinite, it seems. Living on a real Earth in 2022, as it begins to die more publicly than ever, and begins to turn on humanity in ways more and more obvious to the naked eye, and we continue to harvest it anyway, Sovereign hits me harder than before.

Where this reading stumbles, of course, is that Mass Effect itself doesn’t realize what a compelling case it’s made against its heroes and its world and every leadership body that populates it. Mass Effect is not a game that is saying on purpose to Drop The Meteor, that the Earth will be better off. The game ends, no matter how heroically or cruelly, with the defiant assertion of our right to conquer, our correctness in our way of life. It doesn’t realize how damned that sounds in the wake of how vile everyone in authority we meet is, how many victims we are. That in so valiantly preserving a status quo so rotten they are only digging a deeper reactionary hole.

I don’t think these feelings will be followed up on. I don’t recall Mass Effects 2 and 3 having the kind of relationship to the natural world that this game has, and obviously their narrative and thematic throughlines emerge strongly if discordantly from one another. Andromeda is deeply concerned with explicit colonialism in a way that only exists on the edges of Mass Effect 1. But as a stand alone experience I think Mass Effect hits. It is distracted by its vile politics and military aggrandizement but by insisting on staying out in the weeds in my stupid rover or pouring over planet descriptions for like 2/3rds of my time, that stuff fades in my memory just a little bit, even just a week out from finishing the game again. Much better to cruise across the plains and over the mountains, and feel small, and find nothing on the other side.