Nearly 100 hours later, I come away a changed person. I love Final Fantasy VII so much, and this game is a near-perfect retelling and remake of that game's middle act, culminating in one of the most iconic moments in gaming. I think the whole of FF7's story is one of my favorite pieces of fiction in any medium. There is so much fun to be had in this game, but also so much sadness and pain. This game does have some fairly generic open world checklist stuff, but it was engaging enough that I was compelled to do all of it. My biggest gripe with the game is probably that some of the minigames had frustrating balancing, but that's really minor overall. The ending, though I thought I was prepared, absolutely shattered me in a way that so few games ever have. So many beautiful moments honoring the original, or Crisis Core, or Remake, it's so wonderful for a huge fan of FF7. The music is all-time, the characters are all-time, the story is all-time, and the gameplay is actually a ton of fun. I don't think it would be any exaggeration to say the third game in the FF7 Remake series is any less than my most anticipated game of all time. I have zero doubt that when 2024 is done and gone, Rebirth will easily be my GOTY.

Gah gah gah I really wanted this to work but it just didn’t click for me

The first five hours were captivating, I was hooked the first play session and seeing the main story beats in HD was exhilarating

But then the mini games kept piling on, the storylines began feeling cheesier and less authentic, and the structure more fan service-y…

The main story was solid most of the time, but it was hard to keep the momentum when there was all the side stuff that was downright bad at times

Also crazy annoying difficulty spikes, and finicky confusing mechanics. I was at 70+ hours and still had to bump it down to easy at times to progress

I feel like this game could have been way better as a 30-40 hour main story, 50-60 hour completionist vibe. I felt myself just wanting it to be over towards the end and couldn’t enjoy it as much as a non-completionist

I’ll still play the third one but it won’t be my most anticipated game that’s for sure

A genuinely magical game that’s kept me thinking about it and will continue having this grip on me for quite some time. Games that utilise the medium to such an extent that their identity hinges on the interactive element being present are some of the most fun ones to let sit with you, and this is one of my favourite instances of it. Return of the Obra Dinn is one of the greatest mystery games I’ve played and a lot of this is owed to the structure of the game, forgoing crafting a mystery specifically designed to surprise the player with its various twists and instead laying it all out bare and forcing you to pick everything apart to fully grasp the finer details of things. The mystery and story themselves are not the important aspects here, it’s just trying to immerse you into the role of a detective without any handholding beyond the bare essentials, and it does so perfectly.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a mystery/puzzle game that revolves around incomplete information and assumption, often leaving little to no definitive evidence and forcing you to jump all around to place with increasingly tenuous lines of logic as you feel yourself going insane. It was quite funny taking a step back after combing through a few scenes in excruciating detail and just thinking “wow, this is deranged” but that’s just how the game is. The player is likely to find all of the story beats of the game rather early on without knowing the fates of the vast majority of the cast, and then the rest of the game boils down to going between the relevant scenes in the game to try and figure out how to deduce some of them, which would seem like an experience that would feel stagnant very quickly, but is saved due to the sense of progression that will take place despite it all just looking like cleanup at first. The progression gates in this game are entirely dependent on and driven by the player, hinging on multiple big realisations on how they need to approach their investigations. This culminates in a deeply rewarding loop of thinking that you’ve hit the logical endpoint of what you achieve on your own, before realising a new detail that leads you down a new line of logic to discover someone, and then applying this newfound understanding of how to figure something out to other characters. A contributing factor to how this is so successful is due to the plethora of approaches that you’re expected to work out, sometimes really being as simple but uncertain feeling as “this guy hangs around this other guy a lot, they’re probably in the same field”.

The way that your answers are confirmed is a clever way of limiting the ability to brute force a lot of puzzle answers as well, since you’ve only got confirmation on whether you’re correct or not once you have 3 correct answers simultaneously written down. While some amount of guesswork was an expected element of this game’s design, by structuring it like this, players are still forced to confidently deduce 2 other people before they can start taking real shots in the dark with incomplete assumptions, solving a problem I’ve seen time and time again in deduction games where people will often resort to total guesswork the moment they’re met with some confusion and uncertainty. The presentation goes a long way in tying everything together as well, being visually striking while having the effect of being simple enough to make the important details easier to pinpoint while simultaneously obscuring everything just enough to invite uncertainty into every observation. I adore whenever a game can keep me thinking for so long after I’m done with it, and I love it even more when it does so through something as esoteric as it is here. Total masterpiece, something new to add to my list of favourites.

Gave myself a day to kinda just sit with the whole experience of my first playthrough. Xenogears is one of those games that kinda just existed within the culture in a way where I always heard people vaguely gesture at its greatness, but never actually got any full details about what exactly made it so great. So for years and years and years and years and years I kinda just kept putting it off, playing many other games before and after it, hearing about its complexities but never really the details as of what those complexities were. Finally experiencing it for myself I completely get it.

An experience that is some parts Neon Genesis Evangelion, some parts Gundam some parts sci-fi novels and films, Xenogears wears all of its inspirations firmly on its sleeve and proudly bears it all as it goes into its own psychological, religious explorations of the self.

The ways in which it talks about running away from your problems rather than dealing with them and how that inevitably comes to bite you in the ass, there's a quite good example with the martial arts tournament you enter that genuinely surprised me when it happened.

The ways it delves into how trauma can inform and explain behaviors, can cause people to drift one way or another instead of facing the real problems within themselves, be lead to more and differing kinds of abuses, or completely shut themselves down due to their inability to truly cope with the things that've happened to them. But it also firmly discusses how important it is to continue to live, to continue to fight and go on despite the struggles we face in life, how we have to take responsibility for ourselves and the things we do despite our traumas, that again our traumas can be an explanation for behaviors and actions you may take, but at the end of the day you have to be responsible for your own actions.

There are a few characters I do wish were able to get more from the story (Rico, Maria, Chu Chu) and the very clear rushing of things does absolutely fuck with what was clearly supposed to be this ambitious and sprawling experience, though I will say in spite of the clear rush job that Disc 2 ends up as, I genuinely still quite loved the way they handle the presentation and style. Some of the quick cuts are really sharp and effective, I dig the kinda play stage type beat they do for some of the cutscenes they didn't have time to fully make enviornments for, I like the way they frame each part from differing characters POV's. There's a lot of cool things that make that second disc really interesting, kinda reflecting episodes 25 and 26 of NGE in ways.

It's such a strange feeling in ways cause like I kinda despised the gameplay at times (ground combat relies a bit too heavily on deathblows and grinding them out where-as I feel like the Gear combat is a bit better balanced in terms of building up to your deathblows and having to strategically manage your fuel levels in interesting ways). But even though I wasn't huge on the combat or some of the dungeon design (fuck Babel Tower) the whole thing just really came together for me. Everything it was doing was absolutely fuckin aces, it honestly reminded me of watching NGE for the first time as a teenager AS WELL AS watching both Shiki-Jitsu and Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0+1.0 with what exactly it was going for in its messaging and just how much it resonated with me. How much Fei's character arc resonated with me, how dense and packed of an experience it was overall.

I think I can safely say that I'm getting into the series cause I wanna see what else can come from anyone involved who was able to put this together.

Oh man, where do I even begin with this game? I'll preface by saying that Final Fantasy VII Remake is one of my favorite games in the series. It was a title that understood how to create a humanist experience that genuinely makes you care about its world and inhabitants with excellent narrative, character writing, and world-building through its side quests.

It was also a tight and focused experience that culminated in an ending so staggeringly ambitious that I still think about it often.

So, it's no surprise that I was looking forward to the follow-up, especially since it has most of the same cooks behind the sauce of Remake.

However, after finally finishing Rebirth after what seems like an eternity, I'm left confused and ambivalent.

The big red flag for me was when, during an interview, one of the game's directors highlighted the Horizon as an inspiration for the game's approach to open-world design.

Man, they weren't lying.

Rebirth begins with a linear, story-focused segment that lasts a few hours before thrusting you into one of the most insufferably prescriptive open-worlds I've ever played in a video game.

You spend around 15-20 hours doing the most fucking pea-brained busywork imaginable for Chadley, who has to berate and interrupt your progression at every possible moment. It's built upon the most mind-numbing tasks imaginable such as "activate tower," "kill a group of enemies," and "interact with a McGuffin and play a minigame where you either play Simon Says for morons or time a button press."

The world is absolutely bursting with these menial activities, and they take a fucking Mossberg to the game's narrative pacing. I shit you not: there was a good 15-hour block of this game's early hours where not a single piece of narrative occurred.

Maybe this would have been easier to stomach if the characters had interacted when navigating the open-world, but they aren't even there outside of an occasional comment. This issue is especially true for characters that are outside your active party. I legitimately forgot some of them existed even though they added the "backline" into the game's combat system, where non-active characters still stand at the edge of a combat encounter doing what I assume to be chip damage.

When I finally completed my Chadley Chores, I progressed to one of the game's more linear segments where some goddamn plot finally happened and was reminded of why I was still playing this in the first place. In these segments, characters feel alive with interactions heightened by curated moments, a complete 180 from the dozen or so hours prior.

However, it wasn't too long before I was shoved into another open-world area filled with the most boring fucking slop imaginable. I know the original Final Fantasy VII had a decent chunk of minigames, but Rebirth takes this to an unimaginable extreme.

It feels like there is a new minigame around every corner, and these things range in quality from pretty fun to complete dogshit. And look, I can appreciate a shitty minigame here and there if there is some rhyme or reason to its existence. I liked playing frisbee with the dog in Gravity Rush 2. I may as well be a shitty minigame connoisseur, for fuck's sake.

I think the biggest issue is that there is just too fucking much. Full stop. Too much side content. Too many fucking minigames. This game is just the most padded fucking experience I have ever had, and most of the content fucking sucks ass.

I usually try to keep a flow of thought in my writing, but I don't know where to put this, so it's going here. Let me tell you about this motherfucker Chadley. I've never hated a character in a video game as much as I do Chadley. Not only is he an intolerable, passive-aggressive, and holier-than-thou little Young Sheldon ripoff, but his mere existence is a manifestation of all my problems with the game. He's going to pop up on your stupid ass little cellphone, stop you in your tracks, and mansplain the most basic shit ever to you like you've never played a fucking video game before.

I honestly think I would rather individually pluck each one of my ass hairs out with tweezers than have to listen to Chadley flap his fucking gums at me. Sometimes, I think the developers are aware of how bad he is. For instance, during one of the game's better moments, the Queens Blade tournament, Chadley becomes one of the later opponents. After taking the fattest fucking dump on him—I'm talking like shutting him out and dropping 120+ on him and giving me an overwhelming feeling of catharsis—I spoke to a couple of other people about it. They all managed to crush him similarly, which makes me think the balancing is tilted heavily in your favor for the Chadley battle, which kind of rules.

If you have enough brain rot to still be reading my semi-coherent rambling about this game, you're probably asking yourself, "Man, why the hell is this dipshit still playing a game he clearly hates?"

That's because interspersed throughout all of this dogshit are genuine moments of excellence. Everyone is going to mention how good the Bow Wow sidequest—where you escort a dog accompanied by an insanely catchy song while Barret lets his emotional walls down to vent about how worried he is about Marlene's future and his role as her father—is and they should because it's fantastic.

These are things that Remake had consistently and in spades, and it's a testament to how great this cast of characters is and how great the writing can be when the bloat doesn't get in its way.

By the time I had completed all of the open-world monotony—like 100 hours into the game, lol—I could finally enjoy something close to my experience with Remake. I could approach sidequests that were still good despite rarely reaching the highs of the previous game without worrying about the mundane busy work.

But even then, this game just can't fucking help itself. After hours of Protorelic quests that teased Gilgamesh, ranging in quality from excellent to alright, I thought I was finally about to confront the goofy wandering swordsman. Lol, fat chance; enjoy four boss fights of insane difficulty that require you to grind levels because you are too weak. Get fucked nerd.

I won't say much about the combat because it's as excellent as Remake's. However, this time, there is more focus on encounters as puzzles with specific solutions, which I enjoy but don't necessarily prefer. But it's still an often frantic and satisfying mix of ATB and real-time combat that rewards strategic party composition and setups. I ended up settling on Cloud, Tifa, and Cait Sith as my main party because they could max out the stagger modifier and crit chance, resulting in jolting amounts of damage.

The last two chapters of the game did solidify the reason I persisted through this bipolar experience. Once you reach the game's point of no return, you're treated to about four to five hours of pure joy, and the game ends on an incredibly high note that brings out the best in its cast and writing.

There’s plenty of fantastic stuff in this game, you just have to climb a mountain of shit to get to it.

For the first time in my life, I genuinely don't know how I feel about a game. I beat this last week, and I've been thinking about it with mixed emotions since then. It's one of the most maddeningly polarizing pieces of media I've ever experienced, and I can't tell you if it's bad or good.

I can’t even give this thing a score because I literally do not know how to quantify my opinion of this game.

I usually do some pretty heavy editing to my in-depth assessments of games that I've played, cutting out plenty of sections that don't fit, but I'm just going to say fuck it and post this just like Square Enix did when they released this shit.

Have some fucking self-control for the next game. Either way, I’m only playing that shit if you let me crucify Chadley.

Also, if you made it this far, check yourself into a psyche ward because you're just as insane as I am for finishing this game.

I guess I’ll start off this review by saying that I am not Final Fantasy VII’s biggest shooter. I’ve played the original and the remake and it’s a pretty good story, but it’s not my favorite Final Fantasy. I don’t really have any outward complaints about the narrative because of this, except for what’s directly presented to us. If they were to remake X or IX and do whatever they wanted with them in the same vein as this trilogy, I’m sure I could understand a lot of fan’s frustration, but for the most part I’ll be talking about the core gameplay. I’m gonna be trying this new thing where I talk about spoilers in hyperlinks instead of cramming them in the bottom of the review and describing them in vague terms, so don’t worry about getting your eyes tainted to something you don’t want to see. For the most part, it sits in a weird place in my head because I liked a lot of what they did but also despised a lot as well. As soon as I opened the menu and saw crafting I was extremely hesitant. It’s really funny to me that this game had so much discourse about yellow paint breaking people’s immersion, but no one seems to care about the pouches of crafting materials just laid all over the place for no reason. I would describe this game as a complete descent into madness personally.

I’ll start with the combat because it was my main gripe with Remake, and I want to get the positives out before I get into salt territory with the negatives. I’m much more of a turn-based connoisseur and getting used to the action gameplay was like getting shoved into arctic waters. I always felt like the dodges on the characters weren’t effective and the ATB gauge build up would drop a sledgehammer on my balls every time I’d get caught with it empty and unable to heal during a 45 minute boss fight. It sucked ass in that game, and it wouldn’t benefit from the fact that most chapters are just endless roadblocks of bosses that fly and cancel out your actions with cinematic cutscenes. Some of this is still present in Rebirth, but they managed to both fix the momentum of the characters in combat and delete half the health on most of the enemies. It was like leagues different and done way better here. Most of the character’s dodges were changed and were actually able to dodge attacks. Cloud was given this ranged laser attack that allowed him to build ATB from a distance which made him so much better to play as, especially because he’s the only party member that can’t be switched out. I found both Red and Tifa to be extremely overpowered due to their critical chances. If you give them ATB boosting items, they turn into automatic weapons that barely need to reload. It was just a much better experience overall. Instead of rolling my eyes at the giant mech boss, I was actually enjoying myself for once. I do still think Aerith is atrocious to play as though. She has better Ward abilities, but she’s still cannon fodder. Everytime she was forced to do a battle by herself, it was like Guantanomo torture.

The addition of the other party members hanging out on the side was neat, but I honestly can’t tell if they were actually helping or if they were just there for moral support. I definitely saw Barret pressure some enemies from afar when the stars aligned, but it seemed like Red and Cait Sith would just stare menacingly off to the side. It was still like, the perfect small change that you didn’t really know you needed though. There’s never any questioning what they were up to while your core 3 get to kill everything, because well… they’re right there! What I would love to see in the next game is the ability to potentially swap characters out on the fly, similar to Final Fantasy X. If the characters are there anyways, it shouldn’t be hard to implement. It would just be so nice if you ran into a flying enemy and could swap your melee attackers out for Yuffie/Barret mid-battle, instead of having to do it before battle after a reload. Since you’ll have the full party for that game, I feel like it’s going to be a must-have feature and I hope they don’t continue these full chapters of split parties just for the sake of forcing you to play as someone else for 3 monotonous hours. It helps that enemies are much easier to stagger in this game, meaning that they’re also much easier to kill overall. The combat is just a huge step up and it was actually fun in this game.

Just like in Remake though, there are a lot of highs and lows in this game. The highs are monumentally fantastic, while the lows are like slamming your face into concrete. If you thought that Remake had a serious issue with padding out its ass, then I’m so sorry to say this, but it’s made so much worse in this game. The issue is still extremely prevalent, it’s just that it’s relegated more into the side content than it is in the main story this time. Rebirth does benefit from taking place across multiple locations, and they are beautiful, but the chapters are still bloated beyond all Hell by chores masked as mini-games and mini-challenges. And here’s the thing, I don’t want to hear anyone in the comments raising a finger and going, “well, it’s all optional and you’re very dumb!! Why did you do it if you didn’t enjoy it? ☝️🤓” Is it though…? Is it truly optional content if your party’s EXP, SP, and relationship with them are tied to the side quests and intel? You can say all day that the shit doesn’t have to be done, but it doesn’t eliminate the fact that your main level progression comes from playing the same QTE puzzle 6 times per area and turning on shitty ass Tears of the Kingdom towers so that Chadley can constantly bitch in your ear about shit you do not care about. I’m genuinely wondering if people actually liked doing these? Not just, “I didn’t mind it.” Nope, did you genuinely enjoy doing this repetitive crap? Don’t hesitate to raise your hands. Even if you did, just because the shit is “optional” it does not mean it’s not in the game, and I’m here to talk about what I don’t like in the game, bucko. Like 75% of the playtime of this game is just as much bloated trash as the Trash Island that’s swimming in the ocean right now.

The mini-games ranged from very fun to complete horseshit. People are like, “man I wish Final Fantasy had mini-games again, what happened to them??!!” What, you mean these torture devices? I’ve never been a fan of most Final Fantasy mini-games. They’re at their best when they’re short and confined to one area. If they’re forced to be played, they should at least wrap into the story in the same way that Blitzball does. And I KNOW!! Final Fantasy VII was like mini-game central, there’s some sort of mini-game from giving CPR, snowboarding, to changing your damn clothes. I got it, but in Rebirth there are more than just the recreations of the original mini-games. There is a mini-game for doing the most mundane shit in this game and it’s overbearingly god awful. The beginning of the game was so overwhelming; you’re tossed into this gigantic landscape and get 37 tutorials thrown at you at once. How to run around, how to do combat, how to get a chocobo, how to ride a chocobo, how to tie your shoes, how to sit through Chadley’s dialogue without killing yourself, how to use SP, etcetera ad nauseam, until finally it just leaves you alone. There’s got to be a better way of introducing players to open-world games because the first 6 hours of each one always feels like sitting through job orientation everytime. Now toss in 24 mini-games per square inch of each area and you have my Joker origin story. I think it was in Chapter 9 when I was doing a side-quest for Aerith and it turned out to be another mini-game where you have to use the controller bumpers to rip mushrooms out of the ground, the inner coil of my being keeping me sane just burst like the engine belt inside of a car. From then on, I was hanging on a ledge by my last remaining fingers. I did eventually fall off the ledge, but it’ll be brought up in spoiler talk due to it being extremely late-game.

To be honest, not all of them were terrible. The Costa del Sol events, while extended way beyond its original counterpart, were easier to swallow because they were meant to be a fun respite to the major plot. The Gold Saucer events obviously were fine, it’s like the one part of the game where you’re supposed to fuck around. Queen’s Blood was genuinely interesting and the Junon marching was really fun when the game finally let you fucking get on with it. However, Fort Condor can drink my piss, especially because they changed the rules of the game for the sole reason of probably annoying me. Chocobo Racing can die in a ditch off the highway. That punching mini-game was needlessly complicated for no reason at all. The Cactuar mini-game might as well have ripped my face off instead. These are just the ones that annoyed me the most, the 50 other ones were either less annoying or just forgettable. It’s nice that the soundtrack is amped up to its extreme, with this being what seems like a 500 song discography, but that only slightly mitigates how annoying the games are to play. (I would drop that one dog song here, but everyone else beat me to the punch a month ago.) The PS5 has some dogshit bumpers too, like I can’t be the only one who thinks this? They hurt to use for someone like me with wrist pain, and there’s a lot of mini-games that require you to mash them. They’re too busy trying to ooh and aaahh you with motion controls and sensory features that they forgot how shit it is to mash bumpers that are literally fighting back. It’s nice that you can turn that off, but they put it in by default as the intended way of playing it. It’s just so egregious and doesn’t help with the pacing issues that most people had in Remake, in fact it’s made somewhat worse.

ring ring “Hey, it’s Chadley here!! I’m going to remind you that this game was $70 and therefore your complaint is rendered discarded. Just don’t do the content, forehead. It’s that easy."

Chadley, I will not hesitate to split you in half. I keep seeing this flimsy argument thrown around every time someone complains about this game. They get swarmed by people dropping the $70 comment like it’s the ultimate backhand. That it’s okay for the game to be overflowing with boring slop because it justifies it being $10 more than it would have been 5 years ago. It’s so cool that you like watching paint dry, but I don’t. There are games worth $30 and 5 hours long that were much more pleasant and much more memorable experiences than this. Baldur’s Gate 3 discourse has rotted all of your brains thinking that every game has to be 200 hours long to be worth it, when in reality if that game had been cut 50 hours it still would have been great because it was fun and had meaningful content. All the boring chore work in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth bothers me because it does nothing but waste your time and take you away from the character writing, which is the good shit. I will never forget how this game forces you to do a shitty on-rails gun mini-game 5 seconds after Barret has one of the most heart-wrenching cutscenes in the entire game. You might as well have played a laugh track over it. It’s not enough that you talk to the characters and maybe sometimes go on an outing with them, nope, you have to do a 6 chain side quest of killing monsters and playing mini-games, or looking for locations from a photograph, or crafting an object for the local idiot. There’s literally one Yuffie quest where a character you don’t remember from the Intermission DLC basically says “Hi” to you, then you run around the entire map looking for a monster for 30 minutes just for him to leave and have nothing else to add. It was worth it to get brownie points for Yuffie and unlock better dialogue for her that actually rules, but did they really have to make you work that hard for it? I guarantee no one will remember these quests in like 6 months.

It just blows honestly, because they put so much care into fleshing these characters out to the extreme. Their friendships are more prevalent and actually matter in this game. The comedy is funny when it hits and there’s sprinkles of silly moments that work well in making Cloud less of a hardass and more of a softie as the game progresses. I have never given a shit about shipping in this game, and it doesn’t matter here because they finally give those fans what they want if they work for it, so just about everyone is happy. Aerith and Tifa are actually friends and not weird competition, it’s so refreshing. And no matter how you feel about the narrative changes, the plot of FF7 is still just as fascinating as it ever was so the game is fantastic when you’re actually going through the main events. This has got to be one of the most rag-tag cast of characters in the whole series, maybe right next to IX’s gaggle of weirdos, and I genuinely care about what happens to them so of course I want to unlock all of their special dialogues. It’s just so unfortunate that it’s all bogged down by the most monotonous content ever. The writing prevents the game from being less ass than it could be, but it also could be so much better at the same time.

This link is everything I have to say about spoiler territory. Click at your own discretion.

Some other random things I felt: I’m glad that they introduced a fast travel mechanic because it's the one thing that doesn't waste your time. It’s not just a fast-travel at chocobo stops, but just about any location you discover has the ability to teleport to it. Without that, it would suck. The landscapes are amazing and so beautiful, but it came at the cost of mobility. Everytime my chocobo clipped onto a rock or refused to leap off of a small cliff, part of my soul cracked. It just made travel a pain in the ass sometimes, especially in the rocky, ruin like areas. Every action from getting out of the dune buggy and sitting on benches would feel excruciating because Cloud would always pause for a second before and after doing it, just breaking up the flow of the mobility for no real reason. I really hope they fix this in the next game because it was just another thing in it that started off kind of annoying, but then grew to extreme displeasure as the game went on. Selena is by far the best chocobo though.

The game over screen is worded atrociously. The multiple options to reload are confusing and I learned the hard way that reloading a checkpoint instead of a battle was a deathly mistake. These needed to either not exist or be rephrased differently. Why on God’s green Earth would I ever want to go back 3 hours on reload? It’s also really awful that you can’t adjust game settings mid-combat. More like ASScessible if you ask me. There’s no real reason for this, especially when some fights are right after cutscenes because the reload brings you right back to the fight, not before it. It made a certain Chapter 12 fight so fucking annoying to do because the NPCs wouldn’t shut the hell up the whole time. Jesus Christ. Imagine someone needed to adjust color blind filters or some other visible- oh wait, there aren’t any accessibility features at all, except for the scary yellow paint everyone pooped their pants about.

I really did want to like more of this game but it seemed as the longer it went on, the more psychotic I felt. I have found out how much of a pushover I truly am because of this game at the detriment of my own sanity. Critiquing this game seems to be an act of war in some parts, like having criticism for it is somehow removing the mask that I'm actually a gluttonous consumer that doesn't appreciate the art of games, which is nonsense. This toilet is art and I'd piss on that too. I'm glad that people found things to love in this game, and while it is beautiful, it is much more boring than anything else. There’s so much that I liked and yet so much that I hated, so I can only hope that the final game fixes a lot of the issues I have. I’m not going to hold my breath though because that’s exactly what I said in my review for Remake. This story never needed three 60+ hour games to tell itself and it’s getting more clear as time goes on. If the combat stays the same or changes for the better again, then I’m willing to see it through to the end. I'm already 2 games deep and I want to see where the story is going, but I imagine this game without the combat fixes and shudder at the possibility of its existence. We'll see in another 4 or so years.

I don't even know where to begin LMAO, Echo is truly one of a kind, a culmination of passion throughout the years that feels like a genuine dialogue between the writer and the reader. I was immediately drawn to Echo's furries and desert imagery, two of my favorite things, and I left feeling like I just had a spiritual experience.

This visual novel is not without its flaws, as its earliest developed portions suffer heavily from unfocused writing (Carl's route in particular feels strikingly out of place from the rest of the routes), but overall it's an unforgettable story. Pardon the fur, but Echo's characters are some of the most human and sincere I've come across in writing. When I look at Leo, Jenna, and the rest of the gang, I see a little bit of the people around me in them, and sometimes even myself for better or worse.

The emotions felt here are some of the strongest I've come across in writing. I could physically feel the tension whenever arguments arose between the cast, and the horror had me so stressed at times I had to leave my desk. There isn't always a happy ending to be found here, but real life doesn't offer many such a relief. But life isn't about the endings, it's the journeys we take and the people who join along with us. The same could be said about Echo.

I was lucky to have stumbled upon this game through a random comment back in 2018. At the time, I was going through a rough point in my life, and Echo's builds gave me a lot to look forward to and keep my mind off the pain. I could go on and on about this VN, but in the end this is a story that'll stick with me forever. 💕

Echo is a visual novel with such impressive and rarely seen depth that delivers a truly touching and personal experience, one that reads like a heart-to-heart from the writer to the reader. It is a shame, therefore, that The Smoke Room feels antithetical to Echo, never seeking to go beyond the surface level and instead only acting as a shallow puddle far removed from what made Echo so beloved.

What stands as a prequel to a story playing on the diversion of the overabundance of romance VNs of its time, The Smoke Room instead takes a nosedive into the opposite direction and ditches any sort of narrative cohesion and purpose in order to provide an erotica of supposedly epic proportions. Just witnessed a murder? Why not try 69! Barely escaped a monster in the woods? What better time than a threesome!

Understandably, there is to be sex in a story based around a prostitute, but these scenes are never written to be anything more than a pleasuring reward for anyone who stuck around with a plot that uses many words to say nothing of interest. It speaks for itself that I have nothing to say about the "horror" in this VN; It's hard to be afraid of or have any reaction to anything when you know that nothing you read matters and thus you have no reason to be invested in the characters or world.

I tried to give TSR leeway over the years for being led by a different writer than Echo, but ultimately anything to be found in this VN only serves to push you forward to the erotica, and as a result I was pushed away from reading it any further and regretted what I had already read.

[UPDATE: 2.0 came out earlier today, and I've played more of the game. As such, I'm adding a few notes as I promised - the original review will be present below for the sake of posterity.]

- The AI has been tuned to be less rubberbandy. Good change, and I hope they touch up the items next; some of them feel absurdly overtuned. The shrink rays last way too long, cover way too much of the track, and have a deceptive hitbox (the sparks appear to be just for aesthetic purpose, but actually hit you), tops can hit you twice, and bumpers are way too punishing.
- Track design is a mixed bag. There's a lot of fun ones here, but Marble Garden Zone and Balloon Park Zone are some of the worst tracks I've ever seen in the genre and I'm genuinely baffled they were let through. In general, it appears the game has a thing for track design that forces you to slow down if you don't play absolutely perfectly (a good example being the crates in chokepoints in City Escape), whereas in better kart racers every hazard can be dealt with without slowing down simply by knowing the map and playing well. Not even the AI can navigate some of these decently!
- The fast falling button isn't as useful as I thought, since it makes your kart bounce when you land, which makes it far less useful in tighter tracks.
- The tutorial, while still obligatory, can be skipped earlier. I'm still not keen on that - just make the tutorial optional and have a prompt asking if they'd like to play the tutorial when entering Grand Prix or Online for the first time. Time Attack is also unlocked after completing your first race (instead of requiring 82 spray cans, what the hell?!), and, thinking about it, it's absurd it wasn't like this from the get go.
- Online is still locked behind five cups, albeit the optional tutorial race can unlock it instantly now. Just have it unlocked from the get-go! I think the devs' heart is in the right place (it's a hard game and they probably don't want players jumping online immediately and getting discouraged), but this is still oddly restrictive - again, just add a prompt asking if they'd like to learn the mechanics when they start the game or try to go into Grand Prix or Online right away. Mods are also unlocked at the same time.

I'm feeling more positive about this game, albeit there's still some changes to be made before I consider it "pretty good". Personally, I'd do some more balance changes to make items less overtuned and retool tracks so that you aren't forced to slow down at all, and then by making the tutorial optional but heavily recommended.

Again, the devs' heart is in the right place and there's a lot of promise here - the game just needs to move past those aches.

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[ORIGINAL REVIEW - Based on day 1 thoughts.]

I’m learning I’m more tolerant of a lot more bullshit than most people on this site.

A lot of the complaints here are valid. To get it out of the way, yes, the tutorial is needlessly bullshit long. I get it there are many new mechanics here, and I think the presentation for it (and the setup screens before it) is charming and ooze passion from every pore, but the tutorial did not need to be 30-60 minutes long! The vast majority of what’s instructed here could be delivered in 10 minutes, tops.

I’m not too keen on some of the mechanics either; specifically the new currency system and the melee attack attached. You can have up to 20 rings, and that makes you faster (like the coins in Mario Kart and the Wumpa Fruit in Crash Team Racing), but you can spend those rings to charge up a melee attack that hits everyone around you. I don’t really see the point, because the items feel strong already (some maybe a bit too strong), and, y’know, it’s a racing game. Faster options are preferable.

Another I don’t really get is the trick system. I think the idea is fine, but there’s a few gripes I have with it - the UI element for timing a perfect trick (which covers more distance) is needlessly convoluted, and I don’t quite get the need to even have a “perfect” trick mechanic anyway given there’s a fast fall button now. Tricks are also only accessible through trick springs, which I rarely saw within the first seven cups, so it feels like an underused mechanic as well.

Unlike SRB2 Kart, this has a big singleplayer offering - I’m more of a singleplayer type, so that works great for me. What doesn’t is the AI; it feels absurdly aggressive and fucking LOVES to rubber band. It’s not uncommon for you to be doing well and the AI suddenly sails past you while cutting several corners. Maybe I just suck, I dunno, but I haven’t played another kart racing game with this level of bullshittery. There’s a bunch more singleplayer modes from what I gather, but I haven’t unlocked them yet, so… no comment.

However, the dumbest decision here is, by far, the one to lock mods behind completing five cups. The cups here are pretty big for kart racer standards, and considering just how important mods are to the scene that spawned this game… yeah, stupid ass decision. I get wanting to have players familiarize themselves with the game before modding the hell out of it, but this is, at minimum, a questionable approach to that.

Locking online behind completing a cup first is also something that got a lot irritated, and although I am a singleplayer gal first and foremost as I mentioned earlier, I completely understand the frustration - you can’t just hop on with friends online right out of the box. Couple that with the long ass tutorial, and you have a dealbreaker for many.

Another complaint I share is with color customization being locked behind finding spray cans in each map, instead of simply selecting it from the menu like in SBR2 Kart. I don’t mind the idea of having special unlockables hidden in the tracks (Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled did something similar with the unlockable metal box in its last update) but color customization feels like something too significant to make the target of a goose chase like that. Getting to the spray cans themselves can be very annoying too, with the few ones I’ve gone after so far being needlessly precise.

Moving on to the positives, this game is gorgeous and sounds great. The menu presentation and general artstyle feels ripped straight out of the Sega Saturn era, and it has a pretty excellent soundtrack, at least from what I’ve heard. The tracks look gorgeous as well, and the sheer number of them is insane. 200+! There appears to be a ridiculous number of SEGA characters, (crossing my fingers that a Yakuza character made the cut) and it’s just got generally really good fanservice.

And… honestly? Behind all the weird decisions here, there’s a really fun racing game here. It’s exhilarating to pull off a powerful drift and keep the speed going, and when the AI isn’t being a total jerk, it provides a really fun challenge! It can be a bit much visually and the game does a bad job explaining items and the new race start mechanic (ironic, given the tutorial’s length), but all in all, when it hits, it hits pretty well. It’s fun.

I absolutely do not blame anyone who decides to go back to SBR2K. Locking online, mods, and customization behind completing singleplayer stuff and that long ass tutorial can be a total dealbreaker if you’re just looking for something to fuck around in with your friends. But… I often just play singleplayer anyway. It works out in my favor here.

There’s a lot of love for the series on display here, and it’s obvious the devs are very passionate - it just needs to hold the player’s hand less.