Man... is this... the best one??? I dug this one way more than I thought I would. Great stages, great bosses... in a lot of ways this feels to me like a "fixed" version of Mega Man 2. You've got the slide and charged shot here now, you don't have anything like Metal Blades being the overpowered answer to every situation, you don't have bosses turning to dust the second you enter their room with the right weapon, there's no freakish difficulty outlier like boobeam or yellow devil... You've got a secret side-collectible thing but it's just a useful and fun bonus, not something secretly mandatory like the Magnet Beam...

Yeah I'm gonna say it, this one totally rules. If you're looking for something harder, you'll like 3 more, but if you're a big fan of 2...? I think this is the one to check out. It's hard to quantify why I feel this one is so much less bland than 4, but there it is.

Edit: I've figured out why I like this one so much more than everyone else seems to... I don't use the boss weapons outside of hitting boss weaknesses and I never have. Turns out the main complaint people have with this one is the weapons. Well, if you're usually a buster-only hero like me, you'll be right at home.

I'm sorry dog, I just can't. I don't like having to change equipment for every boss. I don't like hitting enemies for 1 or 2 damage until my combo ramps up and I can start maybe hitting it for actual numbers. I don't like having everything come to a screeching halt every two seconds because somebody's casting a spell. I do not appreciate arbitrarily placed invisible traps that only exist to make me cast a slow-ass spell every time I walk into a room. None of the systems in this game give me any satisfaction or joy. Fiddling with inventory crap is almost universally my least favorite part of any game, and Vagrant Story perfectly represents to me the issues with difficulty in so many RPGs. Show up with the right gun and fire the silver bullet, or prepare for abject misery. The only choices are the right and the wrong, and even being right still feels like shit. In my experience, I have found defenders of Vagrant Story's gameplay to all be operating under the same misunderstanding. Something having depth or it being difficult to discover, does not actually make it fun. The complexity of Vagrant Story does not, in any way make it a more enjoyable experience for me to play. It just makes it even easier for me to have a miserable, god-awful time by entertaining any of the fifty thousand ways to play it "wrong." Even if you're doing Vagrant Story "right", it is so stop-and-start, so infuriatingly slow in each of the wrong ways, so loaded to bear with stupid block puzzles that even the game's fans don't seem to actually like, that I am adamantly convinced no teacher in the world can help me learn how to enjoy playing Vagrant Story.

The writing however, is something else entirely. As is typical of all these Ivalice games, it is stellar. The dialog here is immaculate and carries the same type of maturity present in Xenogears and Final Fantasy Tactics which is so uncharacteristic of the rest of the medium even today, but especially for in its time. The most impressive thing about this whole game though is the honest to god cinematography of its cutscenes. The introductory section is absolutely phenomenal and feels like a genuine feature film, in a way that not even Metal Gear Solid does. It's such a pity that I find it hard to enjoy playing through this even with a supercharged, action-replay powered character. Even when making the combat as painless as possible for me in this way, on a second playthrough, just trying to navigate and traverse Lea Monde is so fucking irritating to me that no amount of optimism can show me a good time. If I felt like being even more inflammatory, I could call Vagrant Story the worst metroidvania I've ever played, but even if every second of gameplay makes me wish I were dead, its writing and cutscenes absolutely demand my respect.

With Shadowbringers, FFXIV has not only finally, unquestionably earned its place among the "real" Final Fantasy games, it may have proven itself to be the best one.

A Realm Reborn (and 1.0 before it) presented a trite, threadbare narrative which gave a player little to latch onto at best, and bored them to tears at worst. Heavensward offered something much more engaging, but required the player to fight through walls of archaic prose, and many players would need to unlearn their base-game habits of ignoring such things. Stormblood rolled out every trope in the book to create a fun, simple, and effective story. After ARR's tedium and the alienatingly high fantasy of Heavensward, it was exactly what the game needed.

Shadowbringers, by contrast, has it all. The slow burn of three games worth of character development from its cast means Shadowbringers doesn't have to try very hard to get the player invested in those characters, but it does a damn fine job of it anyway. It's astounding what a new wardrobe and change of environment can do for an old face. Shadowbringers is a much needed break from the ever-present Empire saga, and everything new that Shadowbringers puts on the player's table is divine.

Shadowbringers continues a consistent patch cycle that puts virtually every other MMO to shame. I can name a handful of disastrous WoW patches off the top of my head that were released in bizarre, half-formed states, or simply never showed up at all. Every FFXIV expansion has had almost exactly the same amount of content, and it has always satisfied.

At time of writing, without having touched any of Endwalker's content yet, I truly believe that Shadowbringers is the best expansion that any game has ever had. Even Wrath of the Lich King, WoW at its absolute zenith, was a series of peaks and valleys.

Whether played as an MMO or taken alone as a single player JRPG, Shadowbringers delivers everything it could ever have promised.

If you've ever wanted to know how beneficial snappy movement, innovative storytelling, cohesive direction, and a wonderful soundtrack can possibly be to a game, play Nier Replicant.

This is a game loaded with drudgery. Almost every side quest is a menial chore and the main game's content is recycled ad nauseum. If not for the very solid combat and the fantastic strengths above, this game would be insufferable to play.

Typically though, it's not. The soundtrack breeds a desire to simply relax and inhabit the game's world, and both movement and combat are pleasing enough to ease the tedious tasks given to the player.

I'm honestly a bit surprised to see such universally high ratings for this on here, because this game almost feels destined for controversy. Love it or hate it, it is certainly memorable and distinct.

The sheer scale of this thing demands mentioning. This is the length of a full Zelda game, and that's damned impressive. I just wish that it was able to hold my interest for the full duration. The biggest issue unfortunately is the design itself. Puzzle, dungeon, and level design all feel very... master questy, and that's uh... not actually a complement. At any point in time finding the way forward in this game feels unintuitive. Whether you're in Abello field wondering where to go next, in a dungeon trying to decode an overly inscrutable puzzle, or just trying to find your way from one end of an area to another and failing to realize that nonsensically yes, Link CAN grab that ledge, the player's experience is usually a confounding one. This is not NECESSARILY a bad thing. After all, Metroidvanias and Zelda randomizers are all about unraveling the puzzle box that is the world, pulling at any loose thread you can find... but this just feels obstructively unclear. Some of this can be blamed on textures... it's easy to lose your bearings when there's so much visual noise that it's hard to tell at a glance what anything is. There are some areas like Lake Abello that look genuinely impressive due to clever lighting and fog, but a lot of this hack is rough on the eyes. The player receives very little guidance, which is unusual considering the amount of text. There's honestly too much of it, and it's poorly written. There is a definite, admirable attempt at the makings of a full scale story in this hack, but it is burdened with so much angst and so many grammatical errors that it cannot be taken seriously. Some of the music is quite good, and given the number of areas there's naturally quite a bit of it. I'd say give this a look for curiosity's sake, but it's unlikely that you'll stick with it long enough to get anywhere close to the end.

FF7R has only grown on me more and more as the years tick by. Its combat is nothing short of phenomenal, and I believe it has some of the best art direction in gaming history. The fact that these characters and locales have been so gloriously realized from the much compromised presentation of the original game in a way that virtually everyone sees as "correct" is nothing short of a miracle. Sound design, especially the voice casting is impeccable. It maintains every bit of the original's goofy spirit by refusing to omit ludicrous monster designs like that of the Hell House and instead wearing them on its sleeve, rightfully proud of its own soul. The English localization is even more delicious than the original Japanese. The ending, while off-putting at first, like so many similar Nomura stunts, finds its way from "confusing mess" to "fascinating and memorable storytelling" as time rolls by, though I still have my qualms about its execution.

In the space of two years, I have slowly fallen into a sort of love with FF7R that rivals even my love of the original game, and considering the game we're talking about, that is an absolutely incredible feat.

Most Fire Emblem games are pretty hard. This one is just an asshole. Weapon durability is a thing, as (almost) always, but the only real way to maintain your army is to capture enemies and take their weapons, which is significantly harder than just killing them. The game throws reinforcements at you in massive quantities in order to whittle away at your durability. The bosses are built like brick shithouses, your lord character is trash, enemy crits are more of an issue than ever, recruiting one unit in particular is a living nightmare, and the way the game uses enemy staff users feels like you must have died in your sleep last night because you are clearly now in hell. The story won't give the player much motivation to overcome the gauntlet either, since this game is just a side-story that takes place halfway through Genealogy of the Holy War and has relatively low stakes.

For the fanatics who want that sadistic gameplay crunch and care for nothing else, this'll do just fine. For the rest of us? Not so appealing.

Vanilla WoW in 2020 is a radically different experience than vanilla WoW in 2005. The leveling content is still a great adventure, but the endgame meta is absolutely choking the life out of this game. In the ancient days, these raids were considered hard because we were idiots, but also because we were playing unfinished classes with unbalanced gear and information wasn't publicly available. More importantly players weren't stacking every available consumable and world buff. Those buffs and consumables when layered together are obscenely powerful and make an already easy game even more trivial. Unfortunately for basically everyone, that lack of difficulty leads to people competing with each other in order to find some kind of challenge. Classic WoW PvE is now essentially PvP, and the social pressure to spend hours accruing those consumables and buffs before every raid is intense. The group's performance is of course impacted by how many people get these buffs, so in a sense by refusing to get them, you'd be be bringing the team down. It may sound then like the simple solution is to just join a casual guild that doesn't care about the dickmeasuring competition, but the reality is that the players that AREN'T competing are bored as hell and moving on to other things. Your options at the end of the day are to join a guild that IS interested in this competitive rat race, or join an incompetent guild that wipes on easy bosses for frustrating reasons.