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.

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.

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.

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.

Prescience of the world aside, I just can't love MGS2 with as much of my heart as MGS1 or 3. It's the little things, but they add up, and the flapjacks and tuning forks just don't hit the same if you see them coming.

The thing is, I still can't deny MGS2 a spot in the five-star club. Over time my highest rating has become less and less of an indication of what games I consider "perfect" and more of a showcase of recommendations, and I know that whether I'm as into it as the others or not, MGS2 deserves their status, and so here it is.

A product of infectious, childlike passion. FFIV implements the somewhat flawed but then-innovative ATB system, and unlike many of its successors actually feels designed around it. Bosses take far more advantage of the system's unique affordances than later games do. Party members and their "gimmicks" are well thought out and decently balanced.

The story feels like it was written by a child, but an exceptionally enthusiastic child with some great ideas. It frequently comes across as hokey, but at its heart carries splinters of meaningful maturity. It is the fertile garden from which FFVI would eventually bloom and supplant its progenitor in just about every way possible.

I always recommend that people play FFIV before FFVI if they have any intention of playing them all, because looking backward renders FFIV sophomoric and prototypical, but when its ideas are new, if not to the world than to the player, one can see how much of a revelation FFIV really was, and how much of the final form was already in this first draft.

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.