I can barely form a coherent thought about what I just finished but I feel weirdly seen by Final Fantasy VIII and its protagonist in particular as this understanding of specific feelings of capitalist alienation that I've been unable to articulate for the longest time. I don't have any official diagnosis and especially do not want people I barely know armchair diagnosing me online but Squall's struggles to process the most basic social interactions in terms of anything other than capitalist obligations like school or work, "shut up and get the job done" mentality, and specific jaded outlook are core parts of myself I never expected to see reflected in this fashion. While I narrowly prefer the basic bitch choices of VI and VII in terms of Final Fantasy games, this surreal response to the cultural zeitgeist of the latter game and weird as fuck (complimentary) use of Marxist theory (specifically the "annihilation of space by time" described in Grundrisse and expanded upon over a century later by David Harvey) in the same way that most RPGs use religious/mythological concepts solely because it sounds cool is a game that will no doubt have a special place in my heart from now on.

Just finished Disc 2 and the twist that everyone hypes up as "ruining the game" is something that, while kinda corny, is such a nonissue that all it does is prove that everyone who hates this game is simply too weak
Go back to using a bad fan theory to cope with your inability to recognize a good game, losers

2008

This review contains spoilers

It cannot be understated how funny it was to make the final boss a general of a genocidal empire, have it made clear before the fight starts that he can not be reasoned with, and then have the fight end with a morality choice where if you kill him, the game tries to make you feel bad for it. Like for the most part, I enjoyed this game but I burst out laughing at how bad that was because it genuinely felt like something someone would come up with to make fun of bad morality systems in video games.

2010

Aesthetics this, theories that, the actual takeaway from this game is that the children yearn for the Belmont jump.

It seems like every long lasting RPG series has that one entry with a reputation for being one of the most meticulously crafted mechanical objects but also having some unique failing(s) in its storytelling, whether it's Fire Emblem Engage having maps that will be circlejerked for decades to come at the cost of some of the worst prose and cutscene presentation in an RPG or SMT IV: Apocalypse having a cast of party members so annoying that the option to kill them is a significant portion of its playerbase's unironic reason for loving it. Final Fantasy 5 serves this role for its respective series, as a game with a well crafted job/skill system (Random side note: I think it is extremely funny how the job system being seen as "too complex" is a major reason the game initially wasn't released overseas when in hindsight, it's incredibly tame in comparison to the level of systems bloat in the average 2020s AAA release) but also its goofier story that would seem out of place when put next to the other two SNES Final Fantasy narratives. However, this piece is not going to go over the game as a mechanical object, or really anything about it that's already near universally loved (Gilgamesh my beloved). When it comes to how I use this website, I operate by a rule that I only dedicate extended writing pieces to things that I haven't seen said and the positive qualities of FF5's gameplay have been said countless times by hardcore fans of the series. Rather, this is a piece dedicated to why the story resonated with me in a way that, while nowhere near the heights of what this legendary series has accomplished at its best, is still significantly more than what most would give it credit for.
To me, Final Fantasy V is a game about humanity's mistreatment of the environment. The game's inciting incident is the wind crystal shattering as a result of the inventor Cid creating a device to amplify the elemental crystals' power for the sake of increased productivity. This reason for the crystals' destruction is best exemplified by Karnak, a town whose use of the fire crystal for the sake of unnecessary opulence is visualized through the excess of flames within it, not serving any practical function beyond a flashy showing of the wealth its rulers live in. The destruction of all four of these crystals results in the return of main antagonist Exdeath, whose existence similarly ties into the general idea of the environment being mistreated both in terms of his origins as several evil spirits dumped within a tree as a failed solution to the problems caused by an evil sorcerer's quest for ultimate power and in terms of his sealing in Bartz's world 30 years ago by the Warriors of Dawn being a similar failed attempt at short term solution for a long term problem.
And around halfway through the game, the consequences of this collective disregard for the environment begin to show. Exdeath burns down the Forest of Moore in which he initially hailed from and obtains the crystals of the Warriors of Dawn's world, which are destroyed shortly after, resulting in the two worlds being merged together. This new merged world has a melancholy feel to it, conveyed through the lower energy overworld theme, visual imagery like the once active quicksand surrounding the pyramid dungeon becoming lifeless or the Forest of Moore's desperate attempt to cling to life, and the constant threat of whole stretches of land and their inhabitants being completely consumed by the void, which even causes you to go through the aforementioned pyramid dungeon with only three party members due to the presumed death of the fourth. In a stretch of a game that was no doubt the blueprint for the next entry in the series' biggest twist, it seems like humanity has doomed itself to destruction by its own hand.
However, by the endgame stretch, you should have mastered quite a few jobs on each of your four party members and been able to combine the best attributes of these mastered jobs to create a freelancer (or mime for the truly Gogopilled) that can't truly fit within the narrow roles of the old society. In my playthrough of the game, Bartz and Faris combined the stat boosts and counterattacking ability of a monk with the weapons and equipment of knights, Lenna transferred over the stat boosts from her brief stint as a berserker to her usual role as a support mage, and Crylle became a mime with both black and white magic as well as the HP +30% gained from her time as a monk. The ludonarrative purpose of the game's job class system is to be the radical transforming of societal roles necessary to prevent an environmental crisis and these new roles are what ultimately allow our four heroes to stop Exdeath once and for all.
Is Final Fantasy V making a truly radical political statement here? No, it's ultimately just another drop in the vast ocean of cheesy/defanged 90s environmentalist messages and its environmentalism especially comes off as milquetoast when you literally play as an ecoterrorist two games later. But with the various environmental crises our planet deals with only worsening three decades after game's release, it takes on a new meaning as representing both the impossible odds that humanity must overcome and a symbol of hope that we can pull through regardless. I long for the day where Bartz and friends can master the Marxist job class.

Obviously the core appeal of this is nostalgia for the weird cultural zeitgeist the CDi games have become but I have this deranged reading that the way it blends together the weird design choices of two infamously bad games (namely the fetch-quest style of progression) and the more conventional design choices of contemporary Metroidvanias was done as a parody of/way of taking the piss out of the latter

If the final series of dungeons and the 2006 remake fought over which ruined this game's reputation more, it would be at a scale that makes Goku VS Frieza look like a children's karate match in comparison

SpecterOfTormentcels seething over PlagueOfShadows Chads

Legend has it that on the day that King of Cards released, an inexplicable sigh of relief could be heard in the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians in Madrid, Spain, as if Miguel de Cervantes was happy to finally find a worthy successor to his most famous work

I prefer the specter of communism but this was pretty good too

I think what makes this one stand out as even better than the already really good base game is the way it taps into the same primal mystique that motivates us to put characters into games they shouldn't be (be it official bonus modes or fan mods) and works that into both the game design and the story. Plague Knight is an outcast, both in a narrative sense where they're shunned by the local villagefolk and forced to live in an underground lab and in a mechanical sense where it is abundantly clear that the main campaign's levels were not made with them in mind. Sometimes it's in the sense of unintentional side effects of a character with drastically different attacks, movement physics, etc. like many such cases in Propeller Knight's stage and other times it's parts of levels hard coded to not work like they did in Shovel Knight's campaign such as the flying bushes in Specter Knight's stage and the rainbow bridges in Polar Knight's stage. However, while this might seem like something that only works to Plague Knight's detriment, it also leans the other way around. Plague Knight's sheer quantity of movement options allow them to cheese many platforming challenges that would have given the cerulean coward trouble and the increased range and spammability of their attacks makes cheesing bosses even easier. Controlling Plague Knight feels like controlling a character modded into a game they very much weren't supposed to be (ex. that Sonic Generations mod from a while back that allows you to play as Mario 64 Mario, complete with their very specific movement physics) and also playing the role of the cartoon mad scientist character that Plague Knight is clearly riffing on; never having a chance of winning if you play fair and square but instead getting success through being a cheating bastard. The world wasn't made with Plague Knight in mind but goddamnit if they aren't going to hang on by any means necessary.
Also, Plague Knight and Mona are yuri to me.

THE LGBT COMMUNITY DOES NOT ACCEPT PROPELLER KNIGHT INTO OUR RANKS

Such a shame that Konami didn't do more with this IP. Think of all we could have gotten: pachinko machines, Grog Drinkwater NFTs, a remake made by Lockheed Martin that causes stupid people to insist the original game was never good. The possibilities are truly endless.

I was wondering why this game had a reputation for being way more brutal/grindy than it actually is but then I saw that the Starmen.net guide I was used recommended that you grind to a level where you one-shot enemies at a point where you're already safely two-shotting them and remembered that the average Nintendo fan can't be trusted to know shit about RPGs

Did you know? It's well documented that first lady Hillary Clinton was an avid player of the Game Boy during her husband's presidency. However, what isn't as well documented is how she loved the handheld system so much that she bought two of them to give to George Bush and Dick Cheney before their inauguration as a symbol of goodwill among the two parties. Bush and Cheney reportedly loved Metroid II in particular so much that the game's plot about the Galactic Federation making up some bullshit about dangerous weapons and sending Samus to SR388 was what inspired the invasion of Iraq in 2003.