dragon quest is by far my favorite series of all time, and even then i only hope i can one day love dragon quest as much as dragon quest 11 loves dragon quest. it hears everyone out there who ignorantly derides this series for every "this is too basic" criticism you could think of and simply says "even if you were right, who cares?", because dragon quest 11 is a game that adores the structure and stories of the games before while simultaneously knowing there's so much more that can and will be done with that structure going forward.
i'm really glad that i played all of the other 10 mainline games before 11, because it really does feel like a victory lap with all the little nods to the other games you notice along the way. i hope very deeply and sincerely that one day that this beautiful celebration of this momentous series's storied past will be looked upon as another step in its long history.

Game's cool. You play as Meatwad. It’s filled with smartly designed puzzles, making engaging use of an oddball toolset that rewards out-of-the-box thinking… but only so much. Beyond manoeuvrability skill checks that are satisfying enough to clear, and a few cool mechanical revelations, there wasn't a lot of head scratching here for me. Animal Well is tremendously well-accomplished for a solo project, I had a great time with it! It's just lacking a certain star power for it to really raise the bar.

For complete transparency, I had this game sold to me as an ‘Outer Wilds-like’ - and upon seeing that it was a sidescrolling metroidvania, I was beside myself with hope that I’d get a few notes of La-Mulana in Animal Well, too. In practice however, I think the more apt comparisons for Animal Well would be games like Environmental Station Alpha, Super Junkoid, A Monster's Expedition, or Knytt. The distinction is important, to me at the very least, because I approached Animal Well with pure intentions but spent most of my runtime hoping for an experience that never actually came. This isn’t a game about losing yourself in the sprawling tendrils of a world’s unfolding internal logic - Animal Well is an array of screens containing pressure plate puzzles. The world feels utilitarian, and even with the animal themed ruins that politely aim to conjure a sense of dread and mystery, it’s all misaligned and mismatched in a way that lacks the cohesion of a place with a history worth learning. The latter end of my runtime was characterised by backtracking through areas to collect the final few tools, but it was made excruciating by way of the fact that practically all of the screens merely become desolate roadways once you’ve solved their focal puzzles. I don’t think I spent any more than five minutes on any given puzzle in the first ‘layer’’ of the game, and for as much as I like how left-field the player toolset is, their interplay with the puzzles themselves is usually shockingly obvious and leaves very little room for doubt.

There is, undeniably, an inclusion of outtadisworld ARG-like puzzles that at the time of writing are still being unfolded by dedicated Animal Well researchers, but I’d be lying if I said I value things like that remotely as much as game content I can be trusted to learn and master on my own. Will the community uncover a secret back half of the game that turns the whole joint on its head Frog Fractions-style? I kind of doubt it lol. I’m a sicko that completed La-Mulana 2 on launch week before any guides were even written, the distinction here is that that series takes great pains to contextualise its puzzles in multiple ways - through cryptic hints and also through things like inferred historicity and synergy. Animal Well doesn’t do this, it scatters codes and event flags around the map in obscure nooks in the hopes that a friend group is putting together a Google Doc.

I think I just no-lifed SaGa Emerald Byond harder than any game I've ever played before, even as a kid on summer break. Much less as a working adult in my late 30s.

I'll get a few basics out of the way before jumping into my rants on what I like.

This is a budget game. The character models and UI design really show the lack of money. Voice acting is very sparse.

This is not a narrative tour de force. The storylines are schlocky B-movie kitchen-sink nonsense, but, if you like that type of thing, it's very fun and frequently funny. I had an absolute blast with it. I love singing robots and saving molemen and helping plant people bloom, but I can easily see people being put off.

This is not a standard JRPG with dungeons and exploration. You move from event to event on a pop-up book like map, engaging with visual novel type sections or combat. It's a stripped down experience in many ways. As with the narrative, I enjoy this and relish the change of pace, but can easily see how others might not.

Kenji Ito delivered another banger soundtrack. This might be the thing Emerald Beyond has most in common with its higher budget cousins from Square.

With that out of the way, I'll dig into the real meat of what I love about Emerald Beyond. There are two main factors: the combat and the new-game plus cycle.

The combat is absolutely excellent, and sits as my favorite JRPG combat, maybe even surpassing SaGa Scarlet Grace. Much like Scarlet Grace, it's all about timeline manipulation and features a shared action point pool for your party. The specifics of how "united attacks" work has changed and is easier to perform -- for both you and your enemies. More importantly, there's far more variety in your characters -- humans with a ton of weapon types and magic, mechs that scale off equipment and get unique abilities from it, monsters that absorb enemy skills, and ephemerals who get more powerful as they cyclically die and are reborn. The systems are so much fun. Well, except for trading, but I'll circle back to that.

The most mind-blowing thing about the game is its new-game plus structure. There are 5 characters with their own stories and 17 worlds, each also with their own story. All of these stories -- characters and worlds -- can change across successive playthroughs. You can make different choices on who to help, sometimes new options are simply available to you, sometimes you get an entirely different story. Sometimes you recruit entirely different allies. The second playthrough for some characters is almost a sequel to their initial playthrough. It's so cool to see the huge variety in ways things can possible play out as you come back for successive runs. All of the games systems are made to work over multiple 5-20 hour runs, so your overall strength and progress is moving forward even when you restart with a new character.

My biggest complaint about the game is the aforementioned trading system. Essentially, once unlocked, after each and every battle, you have the option to 'sell' items for a random choice from several items, and the option to 'buy' items in fixed deals. These deals are all based on your trading rank, which takes hundreds of trades to level up. The best way to do this is to constantly trade high level weapons for other high level weapons that you then trade for more and so on. It's nothing but tedium, and I don't even have it maxed out after 75 hours of play. The UI is slow, requires a ton of clicks, and is just overall miserable to interact with. Unfortunately, it's the best and most consistent way to get crafting materials, so if you choose to ignore it, you are putting yourself at a huge disadvantage. It wasn't enough to knock the game out of favorite territory for me, but it was extremely annoying and unnecessary -- they could have just tied the trades to your battle rank and had the interface be an option directly at the end of battle screen. I guess it wouldn't be a SaGa game without at least one terrible system, though.

So, uh, rant about trading aside, Emerald Beyond has made its way right to the top of my favorites list. I never enjoy a game for 75 hours and still have plans to come back for more after a break. That just doesn't happen for me. I'm literally considering figuring out of I can mod trading out of the game. Give the demo a try. You'll probably hate it, but you might love it as much as I do.

(Demo abandoned)

What the fuck are we doing? How the hell did Dark Souls 3 become the template for action games?

"Oh, it's the potential for good levels!" But what would good level design even look like in this context? Dark Souls 1 has a simple combat system that doesn't rely on large open spaces without obstacles. This way the player can be trusted to defend themselves in most terrain, which in turn enables designs like Blighttown, Sen's Fortress, New Londo Ruins, etc. where enemies can meaningfully interact with the level geometry. One can argue how consistently applied or successful this was in practice, but there is a solid design goal there that's still visible even up to Elden Ring (as scattershot as that game is).

As you make combat systems and enemy AI more complex though, generally you'll have to start making the simplifying assumptions of plenty of open space and no blocking terrain, which in turn restricts your level design capabilities. This is fine if you build the game accordingly, i.e. most of the classic linear action games. But Dark Souls 3 likes do not actually seem to be aware of this and so have dragged along huge amounts of bloat sections (Stellar Blade: swimming, keypads, climbing) so they can continue to pretend that the spaces between fights have any relation to the actual mechanics.

Similarly constructed arguments can also be made for the following Souls systems, which I will leave as an exercise to the reader: items, camera, pacing, leveling.

So I guess the whole point of these games is to grit your teeth so that you can experience the combat system? But is the combat really all that interesting? The camera limits how many aggressive enemies you can reasonably handle at once, and not being able to hitstun enemies with normal attacks pushes you into hit and run defensive play, which in turn pushes you to abuse the simplistic, timing-based parrying and iframe systems that all these games are cursed with. Why bother when you can just play Nioh 2, which commits all the soulslike sins above but at least has actually interesting resource management, accessible hitstun, deep weapon movesets, and so on. Why play any of these games at all when you can play Monster Hunter where the defensive, commitment driven style that soulslikes are known for is a hundred times better executed?

This whole subgenre is a complete dead-end design wise and doesn't look to be getting better anytime soon. What a mess.

Alright Crash fans, you've officially lost me again. I'm not seeing what others do in this one. I guess the devs really wanted to add more variety, but instead of expanding on Crash's gameplay and levels, we get a bunch of nonsense. Underwater Crash levels? Boring. Jet ski stages? Why. Motorcycle races? Kinda annoying. A bi-plane dogfight??? I can't fuckin' stand it anymore!

There is one big addition to Crash's gameplay. Actually, it's more like five additions. Every time you beat a boss, you get a new powerup. They're a little superfluous, but I did notice that the level design going forward accounted for whatever new powerup you just earned. It's minor things, like occasional chasms that require the super tornado spin to glide across, but they're there. The game also introduces time trial relics for every stage, and I will come clean right now, I couldn't give a shit about these if I tried. The level design in this game feels weaker in general, and I have to wonder if Naughty Dog designed the stages with the expectation that you'd come back for the relic races. For me personally, gaining access to a couple more levels by earning relics isn't nearly as fun as seeking out cryptic hidden exits like in Crash 2.

Presentation's about as good as the last game. Being taunted by your enemies before stages begin is a really nice touch. Cortex sounds so dejected for most of this game, it's genuinely kind of hilarious, and a bit sad. They take full advantage of the time warp theming with the enemy and area designs too. Shoutouts to the water during the jet ski stages. I honestly have no idea how the geniuses at Naughty Dog got the water looking that good. MARIO WiiU would be proud.

Yeah I got nothing else. Cortex and his gang can keep their gems. I've had enough, personally.

only so many times I can go thru the same floors with the same enemies and the same bosses and the same weapons and the same everythings. for something so lauded I expected some variety. I'm sure some bozo will tell me "umm actually curse, there's six billion lines of bespoke artisinal stone baked dialogue" but you can blow it out your ass if the whole thing's contingent on slaving away in the metalayer currency mines for hours on end

every room seems to go on forever man. imagine if in isaac or monolith you cleared a room and then it filled back up with the same shit five more times. what the fuck guys? you have like four enemies per zone, you don't need to rub it in. is the expectation that I'm basking and luxuriating in these encounters? I'm not. I'm bored before I hit the third floor

maybe it gets better once I suck up to every NPC and collect all the gizmos and upgrade the weapons and upgrade the dungeon and upgrade the shop and upgrade the trinkets and fill out my pokedex, but I'll never know. I fuck with greek mythology when it's about cronus eating his kids and perseus cutting heads and severed testicles goin in the sea, but I don't think I'm the target audience for this kinda snarky post-tumblr young adult stuff. I'm glad folks like jacking off to it, I guess?

probably beats playing it!

I think the real triumph of this game is that the difficulty is actually reasonable! Ok, that's a bit harsh, and I don't want to throw Crash 1 under the bus too hard. If you just want to play through the game casually, collecting the 25 crystals and nothing else, you'll experience a pretty reasonable escalation of challenge. The level design and gimmicks are stronger, and the game hands out a pretty large buffer of extra lives. Going for 100%, on the other hand, feels like playing an entirely different game at times. You gotta run through stages without dying once, search every nook and cranny for all the crates, backtrack through entire chunks of levels (this part sucks actually), seek out the elusive colored gems, and use them to access even MORE alternate routes and collectibles. The important bit is that the hardcore challenge is there, and having a pool of lives to throw away makes me eager to actually try and show the game what I'm made of.

A cursory glance shows how much more vibrant and expressive Crash 2 is in comparison to its predecessor. The newly introduced nitro crates are hopping in place, just waiting to burst. Crash does a goofy dance when you clear a level with a gem in tow. The titular bandicoot has a couple dozen death animations, and is generally more fluid to control due to how smooth his animation is. He's also just got a few new moves, like a slide and high jump, and both help immensely for keeping the pace up. They're still reusing level themes pretty often, but the actual level design carries each reuse, usually with a notable gimmick to keep things interesting.

I didn't really touch on Crash 1's music in my review due to it being more atmospherically driven, but a certain name caught my eye in the credits: Mark Mothersbaugh. Lead singer and composer of Devo, and founder of Mutato Muzika, a music production studio that was all over the 90s. The other lead composer for Crash, Josh Mancell, composed the theme to Clifford the Big Red Dog, one of the many cartoons I watched on PBS Kids while growing up. That's a tangent and a half, but I'm trying to say that I recognize these musicians, I know this instrumentation, and I can hear their familiar composition style. The sounds they use perfectly match each stage's atmosphere and mood. You got the twanging guitar symbolizing Crash's unhinged demeanor, but you've also got the xylophone representing mischief. Stages like Sewer or Later have a sick bass track filling the background, and echoing metal clangs in place of standard percussion, it all just flows so well. I also love when you access a death route, and the music escalates into a faster, more aggressive version of the song you were already vibing to. (before and after)

The plot of this game is silly. The title of the game already implies that Cortex is the villain (where there's Cortex, he strikes back), but even the manual is playing up how Cortex is tricking Crash into collecting all the crystals. That is, Cortex thinks he's in control. I like to think that Crash Bandicoot is an agent of chaos, animal instincts from head to toe. He does what he wants for himself and no one else (except maybe his sister, Coco). Smashing things, eating fruit, and collecting shiny things. Anything that happens along the way is merely a byproduct.

After years of clowning on Crash fans (sorry, you guys are constantly desperate, you make it easy) and claiming to "not get" the appeal of the series, I'm surprised that Crash 2 clicked so well with me. Happy to have enjoyed this entry leagues more than the first one. Some sequels are just built different.

Polyphony Digital at the time of of writing this review have made 17 games since their founding in 1994. 16 of these are racing games with Omega Boost, a 3D mech action game being the one outlier in their repertoire. With the lead programmer on Omega Boost being Yuji Yasuhara (Panzer Dragoon Zwei), the mech designs by Shoji Kawamori (Macross, Visions of Escaflowne, Transformers) it's kind of amazing this is somewhat of a hidden gem considering the pedigree behind it.

And the thing is, a gem it really is. This is the first time I've played it in the 25 years since it's original release and it's amazing how well it holds up. The most impressive thing about it is actually the control scheme. It's simple yet highly effective at allowing players to traverse 3D environments having dog fights with a variety of enemies. It essentially uses 5 buttons. Boost, fire, special, hover and lock on. That's it. Your mech, The Omega Boost will always move forward unless you hover which will lock you in place from auto moving. This with the lock on that will auto target you facing the nearest enemy allows for a surprising degree of control in aiming, moving and shooting all at once that still holds up better than some more recent games. Once used to them you can strafe around targets, stop to fire, boost away and reacquire all with ease.

It has a very arcade feel to it with only two main weapons of a rapid fire gun and homing lasers when held down called boost. You get a special with a bar that builds up that does great damage but can only use sparingly but there are no other options or upgrades so to speak. There are 9 levels in total and each one you get scored on for how quickly you can beat them and the amount of enemies killed which can unlock more boost lock on segments to hit more targets at once. The game probably takes an hour or so to beat if you play straight and know what you are doing but it took me longer due to the aforementioned roots above. You only get 5 continues and only recover a chunk of life at the end of each level rather than starting full. I can think of no reason to do this other than to create an artificial difficulty. Honestly, I found it really pointlessly annoying as I would have almost full health but not quite at the start of each level. Just why?

The levels themselves are pretty varied and have this great chunky mechanical industrial feel to them that PSX visuals did so well. Initially I thought this would be a purely space based shooter but very early on you end up fighting ships in planet atmospheres watching them explode onto the planet as you destroy them, artificial tunnels with giant robots, sand plains with floating embers like a giant fire in the darkness as you fight a variety of enemies with some really creative bosses. I really hated the final couple of levels though with a needless difficulty spike. One of them has an annoying timer to beat two bosses then a very tough mini boss rush to finish that feel a little thrown together with no level before them. Maybe on sequential play throughs that would be easier but with only 5 continues and having to start the whole level over if you die it's just needlessly brutal.

The story is kind of basic. Essentially you are trying to go back in time to prevent a catastrophe where humanity are losing a war with an AI. It's presented in cutscenes that use a mixture of live action actors and CGI. The opening video if left to play seems to have a surprisingly high budget of a command centre, getting into the Omega Boost and flying off all to a completely out of place rock song. The rest of the music except the end credits sound more like something from Nier which I feel fit the aesthetic far better. The music feels bizarrely inconsistent in places though I like the actual cutscenes themselves, extremely 90's and I mean that in the best way.

So even with it's minor flaws, Omega Boost is a pretty crazy intense game that looks amazing. To think Polphony Digital made this cool 3D mech game and then went on to make nothing but racing games forever more will never not feel like wasted potential to me.

The US TV advert for Omega Boost as an extra.

+ Controls are really fluid, they hold up amazingly well.
+ Varied levels and fantastic visuals.
+ Some great music....

-....Also some really out of place music. It's like someone's put their rock track over the opening and ending videos for no reason.
- Brutal continue system and life recovery between levels just take some of the fun away from actually playing the game.

Has it ever happened to you that you're working on a sequel to your 2D handheld platformer for a beloved and iconic IP, and everything is going great because you're fixing a bunch of problems the first game had and designing really cool movement tech and levels that are fun to play, but this guy you don't know keeps sneaking in at night and programming the most dogshit bosses imaginable and adding bottomless pits to ruin all of your levels? What do you mean you gotta collect seven rings in a zone to unlock the special stage AND it's the worst one in the whole entire series!? Somebody needs to stop this guy!!

There was no guarantee that it would turn out like this. After the one-two punch of the first two Ys games in 1987 and 1988, the series would take a number of perplexing turns through the late 80s and early 90s. Ys III, originally intended as a gaiden, was a side-scrolling platformer with only the barest hints of RPG elements. Then the two primary creative forces behind the first three Ys games, Tomoyoshi Miyazaki and Masaya Hashimoto, left to found Quintet before a proper sequel could be developed. Unable to deliver a full game on its own, Nihon Falcom provided a scenario and music for two versions of Ys IV, both released in 1993: Tonkin House’s abysmal Mask of the Sun for Super Famicom, and Hudon’s Dawn of Ys for PC Engine CD-ROM², a highly-polished follow-up to the superlative PC Engine CD-ROM² ports of the first two games. Both versions of Ys IV strive to recreate the gameplay and style of the first two Ys games, but neither has a clue about how to evolve Ys beyond the basic bump combat that was growing stale by 1993.

The real death blow to the series, though, was 1995’s Ys V: Lost Kefin, Kingdom of Sand, a late Super Famicom release developed by Falcom that makes the first real stab at defining the future of the series. Ditching bump combat in favor of dedicated attack and jump buttons, Ys V plays a lot like a Quintet game, except it lacks the elegant construction and polish of games such as Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma. While it's a memorable adventure with many of Falcom’s classic touches (the soundtrack whips), it’s clearly rushed. The difficulty is wildly uneven, the attempts at platforming fall flat, and technical issues such as loading times reveal Falcom’s lack of expertise working with the Super Famicom hardware. It’s not a bad action-RPG, but it’s not Ys.

The only signs of Ys’s continued survival as a series for the rest of the 90s were well-received remakes of Ys I and II. This is where the story could have ended. Ys could have gone the way of Hydlide or any number of the other influential Japanese role-playing series that couldn’t keep up with the times. Even Falcom itself, by this point reduced to subsisting primarily on low-budget Windows games, seemed headed for a similar fate as its 80s Japanese microcomputer contemporaries. But instead we got Ys VI, the beginning of a remarkable second life not just for Ys but for Falcom as a whole.

After being sucked into the Great Vortex, a thinly veiled version of the Bermuda Triangle, Adol finds himself on the Canaan Islands, a thinly veiled pastiche of a Caribbean island chain dominated by the tension between its native peoples (the Rehda) and largely European colonizers (the Eresians). While the overarching story itself is no great shakes, Falcom’s gift for applying the sweeping grandeur of mythological fantasy bullshit to small-scale settings shines through.

There are only two small towns and a handful of other NPCs, but every character has a name, a character portrait, a personality, and even their own ongoing arcs. The little dramas that play out, from the town drunk turning a new leaf to the two siblings running rival shops, lend the game its heart. Perhaps the strongest of these threads is how the Eresians, largely trapped on the islands by the Great Vortex against their will, have learned to live on the islands. Some have embraced their fate, while others are haunted by it.

Doubling down on Ys V’s more traditional action-RPG mechanics, Ys VI’s combat is built around attack and jump buttons along with a very basic magic system. While it adds some new twists such as leveling up your three elemental swords, it’s surprisingly close to a highly refined version of Ys V’s combat. Unlike Ys V though, Ys VI’s combat is blazingly fast and fluid. It’s closer to a beat ’em up than the stiff action-RPGs of the 16-bit era, with Adol bouncing around against hordes of enemies who occasionally bombard him with danmaku-esque projectile patterns. On normal difficulty, the curve is just right, encouraging a mix of grinding and dexterity, but never rising to frustration.

While there are only a handful of dungeons, they’re all intricate mazes that are deeply satisfying to explore, although nothing here matches the scope and ambition of Darm Tower or Solomon Shrine. The game is on the short side, but highly replayable, with multiple difficulty levels and an optional Catastrophe mode that removes healing items. As with the best of the earlier Ys games, it’s closer to a Metroidvania than a traditional RPG. There’s no overworld, and the two islands that comprise the vast majority of the game can be traversed end-to-end in just a few minutes.

Despite its many highs, Ys VI stumbles in a few places. Pacing is uneven, with an extended exposition drop at the end of the second act in particular killing the momentum for no real payoff. Platforming is unnecessarily fussy, with a counterintuitive long jump mechanic that’s sure to annoy. These flaws pull the game down from all-timer status, but this is still a must-play for fans of Ys and Falcom. A number of key players in the company’s ongoing renaissance, including future president Toshihiro Kondo, worked on the game, and it’s a joy to see them begin to figure out the future Falcom style here. That isn’t even getting into the superb artwork or the spectacular soundtrack, which blends the style of classic Ys music, Ryo Yonemitsu’s beloved Redbook audio arrangements from the PC Engine CD-ROM² games, and modern touches such as drum’n’bass breaks. I already can’t wait to pick this one up again for a Nightmare mode run.

[LEARN THE DIFFERENCE]

Has politics (BAD)
Don't has politics (GOOD)

Thank goodness they will never put politics in my beloved Kiseki games.

life might be worth living, actually

things irl have been kind of miserable lately so I desperately needed to play a game that would make me feel something. of all things a pokemon isekai game for babies succeeded at this and it's mostly thanks to a bisexual grovyle. It's the single game I've played all year (other than mother 1, but I started that in 2023 and finished literally minutes after new year) that has actually invoked a reaction from me other than just nostalgia like all the mainline pokemon replays i've done. this was also a replay so despite knowing how things were going to turn out I still wound up being moved by it all

one of pmd's most appealing aspects is the world you're transported to. my enjoyment of and how much im able to resonate with mainline pokemon games fringes on its regions, but the world of pmd specifically just has a totally unmatched sense of belonging. you're immediately thrust into a welcoming, tightly-knit community of people with similar goals and the congregation of these people serves as the game's hub area for its entire runtime. all of these people, including you, has a purpose, and your presence leaves a positive impact on all of them - especially your partner. i think it's a rare example of a game actually conveying to the player that they are a part of the game world and that they as a person matter - that the world would be different without them. even minor npcs are given constantly changing dialogue thanks in part to the narrative's episodic structure - shoutouts to the toxic-yaoi wurmple-swellow duo.

spoilers for this paragraph: the latter portion of the game's narrative is what ties all of this in a neat bow for me. i've already harped on about how defying fate and saving the future is one of my favourite tropes in fiction in countless other reviews and it's no different here. there's just something so viscerally empowering about characters like grovyle or lucina or future trunks with the resolve to push on even in the most bleak of circumstances and to fight for a better tomorrow. pmd2 is one of the better examples of this given you get to experience that future firsthand and it's one of the few examples of showing the sacrifices that have to be made when messing with timelines. i hadn't actually played the grovyle postgame episode before now so that likely played a big part in the game still resonating with me despite this being a replay. that or it's because Arata Iiyoshi's compositions never fail to give me goosebumps. such an underappreciated composer, their only vgm works are seemingly for the pmd series as well as various beatmania and ddr games, and no one ever seems to bring them up by name.

probably my single gripe with pmd is that characters aside from your custom named protagonist and partner just use their normal pokemon names. no other pokemon game will make me care as much about a loudred or a wigglytuff or the other guild members but giving unique names to important story characters would've gone a long way i think. all the character personalities are so easily distinguishable already though so it's ultimately a minor complaint. doesn't stop this from being peak fiction. the gameplay is also just kinda ok but I enjoy it and tbh it's really not what you're playing this for lol










it's a monster house

It's surprising to me that this really quite excellent cyberpunk-noir title sold so poorly outside of Japan, but I think there were two factors behind this: its potent cocktail of gore, violence, and mature themes significantly reduced the demographic of gamers who would buy it, and it seemingly is one of the first (if not the first) visual novels to be released outside of Japan, into a playerbase that is more accustomed to point-and-click adventure games.

In a way, my initial experience with this game probably mirrored that of the West in general - this might be my first visual novel, and I was baffled at first by the linearity, the lack of difficulty, and the lack of... gameplay, really. But I warmed up to it quickly enough - the genre's laserlike focus on telling a story made the experience like reading a book but with extra interactivity, and the ability to take things at my own pace. Gillian Seed, who was investigating the menace of the Snatchers (humanoid robots who kill people and take their place), could either be played as a no-nonsense straight-laced agent, or a talented goof-off who flirts with anything that moves and drinks booze on the government's dime, or anything in-between. With each new area and next stage of the investigation, I could either rush through with urgency or spend time interacting with everything and soaking up the impressive tapestry of lore, and I enjoyed the freedom that this genre afforded me. And, of course, Hideo Kojima being Hideo Kojima, the game made very clever use of the medium to pull of some clever tricks that books can't; in a very early example of this, your companion hears a faint noise and rather than outright telling you what it is, prompts you to turn the volume up so you can hear it yourself.

Of course, an interactive book is only any good if the story itself is good, and Snatcher definitely delivers on that! A lot of the plot elements seem derivative, especially today, but that doesn't take away from how well-crafted the world is, how cool some of the plot twists are, and how this story about synthetic life forms replacing people contains a heart and humanity that I associate with Kojima's best works. The pacing and storytelling is generally good too, though it suffers slightly from a need to over-recap key plot points, and several jumpscares or genuinely tense moments lose some of that thrill due to being overly-telegraphed.

This is an easy recommend to anyone - a patchwork of cinematic influences and inspirations that contains the seeds of Kojima's later work, easy enough to play to completion, both streamlined and compelling enough to never wear out its welcome.

The fifth best Final Fantasy XIV expansion, a modern Final Fantasy IV: Final Fantasy XVI is a game that I understand why people like it, but I cannot really conceive of how somebody would love this game. And don't let me stop you from loving it if you truly do, there's certainly moments of beauty within FFXVI that feel meant for somebody with much different sensibilities than I, it just remains a pretty thoroughly underwhelming affair to me personally -- both in what the game promises and in what it fails to deliver.

Mechanically adequate, systemically superfluous, and structurally mundane, but where Final Fantasy XVI really fucks up is with its thoughtlessly derivative narrative and dull characters. The way CBU3 have plucked concepts, backstories, and characterizations from popular shows like Game of Thrones isn't necessarily the worst thing they could do on the face of it, it's just how little those aspects end up mattering outside of being familiar tropes that the player can quickly identify. The same could be said for the game's attempt at a more serious tone with a focus on geopolitical affairs. The game starts off with two sequences that are almost identical to ASOIAF/GoT's Winterfell introduction, which is then followed by a Red Wedding-esque event to make sure you understand how fucked up this world really is. Except, that's kinda where everything stops being like that, they copied GRRM's homework, now it's time to be Final Fantasy!

Which like, if they wanted to copy Game of Thrones, you'd think they'd be a little more confident about it. Like, the way Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy IV, and Final Fantasy VI cop shit from Star Wars (and I guess a bit of Dune and LotR) feels like expert craftsmanship in comparison, because they also fairly accurately replicate the tone of space operas (just, you know, in the form of pseudo-sci-fi medieval fantasy). They sort of try to keep up with the underlying geopolitics aspect throughout the game, but it mostly falls apart by the end and Valisthea never really ends up feeling like a real place to me. So post-GoT-esque intro, the first third of the game's tone plays out like a more linear, bootleg Witcher 3, in a kind of unflattering way.

The remaining two-thirds of the game do feel pretty distinctly Final Fantasy (with a pretty weak undercurrent of half-baked Matsuno-isms) with structure identical to a Final Fantasy XIV expansion. The latter aspect was comforting at first since I kinda enjoy the simplicity of a fresh FF14 expansion, but it's easily the worst part about the moment-to-moment experience of Final Fantasy XVI, making the game much more prolonged -- and much of it being coated with the tasteless grey sludge of live service content creation habits -- than it really needed to be during its most important narrative escalations. The former aspect is what keeps the experience feeling adequate, but it really just doesn't do enough to differentiate itself from most of the series in terms of character dynamics, overarching themes, and fantasy elements. Really feel like most people who aren't allergic to turn-based combat are better off playing Final Fantasy IX or VI for most of the stuff XVI is trying to pull off. There's even this point where the characters decide to embark on this Final Fantasy V/Final Fantasy VII-esque quest to save the environment, and that also just kind of goes nowhere as the game buckles under concept bloat and is wordlessly replaced with a different thing later on.

The funniest part is the last third of the game is so clearly bogged down in its own bullshit that they had to add this NPC that feels like she was ripped out of Dragon Age Inquisition or something to explain the plot to the player because there isn't actually enough deliverable gameplay moments or constructive skits to bookend all the threads the game has set up by this point. I guess it's more disappointing than funny in the end, there were moments in FFXVI that made me wanna feel that it's all somehow worth it, but so much of it is just unearned or passively malicious in what it's conveying to the player.

The thing that almost makes the whole experience worth it -- a pretty common opinion -- is def the eikon fights, though I can understand if they're too spread apart and too mechanically fluffy for somebody who wants more substantial action gameplay to sink their teeth into. They're carried by their presentation and spectacle, as the gameplay interaction ends up feeling pretty junk food-y, but fuck they rule. Even the one towards the end that everybody I hates, I love that one too! Though maybe it's because I'm permanently a sucker for CBU3's boss encounter design, even if it's gotten a little stale in Final Fantasy XIV itself lately.

The combat design might be another story unfortunately, like, it's not bad, I actually kind like it because I have the issue with my brain where I enjoy performing class rotations in MMOs, but slapping that kinda shit onto DMC5-lite was not the move I think. There's just not enough going on here to be having a cooldown-based system integrated with kinda barebones action gameplay, and I don't think the individual eikon abilities themselves are interesting or cohesive enough to make up for the lack of both strategy and truly engaging action. Glad to see the stagger system here, but I kind of almost would've preferred if CBU3 had copied even more from the FF13/FF7R dev team's combat ideas.

The game is clearly designed around the fact that you can only play as Clive, and it only adds to that dynamism that's sorely lacking from most of the characters; if you're not going to show me enough of who these characters are in the cutscenes themselves, you could at least communicate it through gameplay, like other games in the series do. Clive's solipsistic streak feels pretty fucking forced compared to protags like Zidane or Cloud, Clive is just way too fucking reasonable of a dude most of the time I don't really buy it! And that's fine, I like having nice protagonists sometimes, but they spend the entire game trying to convince he's this brooding lone wolf! It doesn't help that in the game's pursuit of copying and pasting elements from other FFs, it also steals their mistakes: like Clive's main motivating factor being resolved like 5 hours into the game just like Cecil in FF4 and forgetting to make any of the women actually characters, also like Final Fantasy IV.

Like, I wanna say on average Jill is better written than FF4 Rosa, but at least you get to play as Rosa! Sure, both Jill and Rosa are treated as fragile baby birds who are forced to stay at home while the men go fight, but at least Rosa gets to defy that notion when it counts. It's just kinda pathetic what's happened here, like, CBU3 doesn't have an amazing track record with women characters, but at least they do get to do things and have individual motivations for participating in the story in Final Fantasy XIV. Even compared to the FF14 expansion that preceded the start of FF16's development, Heavensward, it feels notably regressive.

It'd be bad enough if it stopped there, but the two other women in the main cast are probably treated even worse. The first one's whole characterization is how she manipulates men with sex to gain power, with the writers using threat of SA as a motivating factor for her transformation into an eikon. Actually fucking vile! They even just straight up copy a panel from Berserk! And the other one's main character trait is she's an evil mom (basically just Cersei Lannister without any of the actual interesting parts). There's one secondary woman character towards the back half of the narrative who's probs the only woman with a personality, which is a shame! Jill especially had a lot of potential as at least Clive's best friend and confidant, and it's just wasted on a character who sits there and placidly stares while bloodlessly agreeing with everything Clive says and does. They can't even make her interesting as an extension of Clive, let alone as a person with actual interiority.

I don't really hate Final Fantasy XVI as much as this review would make you believe: I love adventures and I love action RPGs, and it does a pretty decent job of both. It's "comfy", but it could've been so much more with the kind of talent that Square and CBU3 have on hand, but consistently have failed to utilize to their fullest, outside of maybe Shadowbringers. Like the soundtrack is the best microcosm of all of this; Soken has an insane pedigree, and while his work here is mostly high quality, it feels like his strengths are being misutilized to adhere to a specific vision that maybe should've gotten a few more complete redraftings. Final Fantasy XVI half-heartedly commits to aesthetic ideals and tropes that were already outdated years before it released, in a way that feels almost Final Fantasy, but is ultimately never really elevated into its own cohesive identity.

Anyways, play Asura's Wrath instead. It's got the same misogyny per capita, but it's basically like if you cut out all the rest of the bad parts of Final Fantasy XVI and then also made it way cooler at the same time. 'Star Wars x Fist of the North Star x Buddhism and Hinduism' clears 'Spark Notes of A Song of Ice and Fire books 1 thru 3 x Buzzfeed Article History of Final Fantasy Series' any day.