"God, I love the military industrial complex."
- Albert Einstein after 6 straight hours of Armored Core

Armored Core is awesome because kiddie wink fuckwit Dark Souls fans and people who have sandblasted their taste away can publicly expose themselves for not understanding a single thing about AC. AC is not about epic Mech battles or lore or any bullshit. It's about you spending hours in the garage making the worst looking abomination of a unit ever so that you can throw it at a mission and see if you're stupid idea works and if it does you have the additional challenge of seeing if you can dunk on your friends with it in multiplayer.

All hail fromsoftware bringers of Kino

the second coming of christ

some years ago i played the original live a live and while i still think its one of the greatest rpgs ever made in this world where sinners wreak havoc i do think it actually has some issues here and there that couldve been fixed and in complete honesty i hated whatever they were going for with the battle system (im impressed with what they accomplished though and i can say that for the first 30 minutes the battle system was something so completely different from what people were used to in that age of videogames but still i wish it didnt single handedly give me brain damage)

live a live has a sick premise you get to choose between 7 (?) different scenarios that play out in 7 (?) different time periods and its absolutely incredible if you ask me even more incredible when you think about the fact that the main skeleton of the entire game still is the 1994 SNES original concept and everything else is either graphic overall or some QOL changes to story beats and combat mechanics

as for the remake in itself i can say that the 2D HD aesthetic of octopath travelers echoes of time really do justice to the beautiful and unique environments you will have to travel in this super convoluted story on god

so as always first things first lets talk about everything except the major story beats for the little gangsters out there who read sull reviews without actually having played the game on god

i didnt think about a real tier list for the different stories until now and im pretty confident i wont be able to make a tier list thats gonna really put all my feelings for this game into words so im gonna do it anyway because im quirky and goofy like that

Tier S
Oboromaru (sexy ninja) and then Oersted (sexy warrior)
Tier A
Sundown (has some gay implications) and Cube (has some incredibly tight horror/mystery vibes) and Akira (not a huge fan of the pacing but akira is kinda hot i wish he read all of my thoughts)
Tier B
Pogo (i actually do like this one a lot but the random grinding mid game was kinda baffling also the power of sex and pussy) and Shifu (i also love this one but it has some weird pacing) and Masaru (i hate masaru)

that being said i actually do enjoy most of these by themselves and the fact that you can play them in every order you deem fit so that people like me can go on and choose oboromaru right away so basically everything else turns into a B tier movie because the middle ages is just that good

as i was saying they remade the graphics from scratch and i believe this would be absolutely wasted if it wasnt of the incredible art design this game has going on every single scenario plays out a different vibe and therefore the atmosphere of the entire world around it changes with it the ninja scenario is gloomy and atmospheric due to the fact that it plays out at night and you gotta be stealthy stealthy (or murderous your choice) or like the cowboy scenario that plays out in a desert and so everything is bright as fuck and shit like that OR the robot scenario where theres thriller vibes all around and UGHHHHHHHH

this is not only about the environments in itself but the characters also got some bomb spritework thats honestly jawdropping compared to the original works and its absolutely fucking insane and when you put these 2 together with the 2D HD engine some bomb lighting effects (that dont look like the piss hue of octopath traveler) and some dinamic camerawork you get such an immersive experience that really enhances the already incredible story this game got going on

i would love to have an entire segment talking about music and how the music in this game is top notch and every ost got my bussy popping but thats not possible because theres no osts on youtube or anywhere else because square is a fucking disgrace to society and they didnt even publish the ost like HOW HARD CAN IT BE you already got the ost files ready you released the games you know how can you not have this stuff in there ready for uploading but i digress so anyway the music in this game is absolutely insane i wouldve loved to listen to it after beating the game but as i said its not possible for the love of everything alive on earth in this moment and megalomania is the most hype song in a videogame ive ever listened to so

the combat system was actually shall i say rejuvenated as in it didnt make me want to fucking kill myself which is a welcome feeling and now that its actually shall i say playable its incredible how actually great it is you got some of the most interesting grid turn based combat in a while and even though it may not be the greatest idea in the longrun it always keeps you entertained with different moves and move patterns to use and actually great conversion from story to battle (cowboy scenario is centered on long range attacks while fighter scenario focuses on short range attacks) and people need to respect the fact that the shit throwing attack is sick

so

time for some 1 on 1 convo about the different scenarios because im a mad man and i got something to say

PROBABLY SOME SPOILERS AHEAD IM NOT A SAFE PERSON TO BE AROUND

prehistory

possibly one of the most interesting scenarios in the entirety of the game due to environments and how it conveys the story you play as a caveman and since these people are actually years and years before language all day do is make noises and talk in speech bubbles (love the fact that the speech bubbles actually have the original sprites in them its such a cute detail if you ask me) and has some interesting gameplay mechanics you got to craft some weapons smell the foul odors of beasts to KILL THEM and EAT THEM and thats basically it until you rescue a femme fatale whose pussy probably stink of fish and yet shes one of my fav characters forreal not a big fan of the sudden grinding in this one but at least its not octopath traveler im sorry it sounds like i hate octopath but in general i do really like it so anyway big dinosaur boss monkey throwing shit around and a guy with a lizard on his dick and crazy hot sex

imperial china

i fuck with the themes around this scenario quite a lot actually like the fact that time will always eat everything up and the importance of generational traditions and death and stuff like that like i fuck FUCK with that . but i also do think this couldve been pushed a bit to the extremes and lacks some heart to heart convo due to the fact that it plays around with training new disciples and choosing a successor (if you dont choose lei we cannot be friends) and in general the environments do look a bit aseptic i wanted some more stuff some more angst some more more anyway still great if you ask me im sorry

twilight of edo japan

this is the one guys this is the best one . now this is probably the longest chapter in the entirety of the game if you put aside the final final chapter and it has such a great premise youre a ninja on a mission to rescue a guy who turns out to be a famous guy from japanese history whatever we dont care and in the meantime you can do it with different methods you can either kill everything in your path or just going there and doing your thing and leaving now im pretty sure if youre mentally stable you will choose to just kill everyone also being underleveled with oboromaru in the final chapter ? you dont want that plus its way easier to just kill then level up then kill some more and get a lot of goodies from around the place and being tricked and FALLING FROM THE CEILING GOD THAT FUCKING CEILING and you know stuff like that plus the castle is a fucking labyrinth so im pretty sure this is gonna take you some 4 hours or whatever thats probably how much it took me to finish it so anyway yeah this is great and also my favorite scenario in this game thank you everybody for your time

wild west

if you ask me this is the most queer coded media ive ever seen in a while like you cannot tell me sundown and the other guy are not enemies to lovers you literally cannot do that to me you may come and show me a picture of sundown FUCKING a biological woman and id say ok well what about the ending where they run off together in the horizon this is a homosexual im looking at and I wont reason with anybody in the group chat . anyhow this is a supershort chapter and isn't even battle heavy because you just gotta go around and craft traps so theres that

present day

i famously hate this chapter . now its not about the chapter in itself I actually do dig this I gotta be the strongest kind of theme but I'm not that generous with the actual gameplay stuff . mind you this chapter was actually MUCH MORE DIFFICULT in the original one this time if you know what you're doing you can breeze through it in just 30 minutes but yknow idk why I dislike this chapter this much maybe im just bitchy because the main man isn't hot

near future

I want to slurp on akiras dick . sorry now that that is out of the way this is an interesting chapter but i believe it looses its charm because of some weird pacing choices you are a telepath hot yankee with a thing for his sister but honestly who in japanese media doesn't have a siscon so whatever you gotta battle with some other thugs who are somehow thugger than you and go around with either a very macho motorbike guy or a super giant robot with an anime opening . honestly this chapter is actually kinda weird to explain but the battles are interesting due to the fact that are based around killing the main enemy so that you can also kill the 10+ mini robots around the battlefield . you will understand

distant future

possibly the weirdest one for the fact that theres no fighting (I mean for most of it) and it's entirely story driven with a focus on horror/mystery and lemme tell you this remake did SUCH a great job to the horrorish contents its insane yall basically you're a robot in a spaceship and there's also like 4 humans that begin to slowly die weird deaths here and there and you gotta uncover the mystery AND make some coffee so basically my day to day life . so this is a great chapter thank you everybody for you time

middle ages

now …….. this is the one . oersted is my little baby I will defend him to hell and back he did nothing wrong and is pretty hot and can split me apart whenever he wants . this is basically the most jrpg chapter of every single one the setting is medieval fantasy like your classic final fantasy / dragon quest title there's a focus on battles and leveling with random encounters you create a party with different "classes" (there's no classes but the characters represent different classes) and you gotta save the princess . slowly you can see the steady decline of oersteds mental capabilities due to the treasons of every single character around him its insane me when the silent protagonist of my little jrpg begins to talk . also its insane how this manages to emulate the jrpg genre so well you're like oh ok im gonna save the princess the end AND YET that bitch let you down with a suicide in front of you like nothing happened and at that point oersted shifts and becomes the lord of shadow ? like theres no stories like these anymore the complete dread and hopelessness this chapter gave me are insane . deadass oersted loved aletheia so much and if you noticed most bosses charm abilities have no effect on oersted because hes just so in love with aletheia he can't be swayed from his righteous path . like also streibough is a dick

final chapter

apart from the fact that the final chapter can be tackles from the viewpoint of sir odio and just crush every single character of the different chapters . after you pick your main fighter this is gonna play out also as a jrpg experience you're gonna recruit the different characters from the different chapters make them level up and explore some dungeons to get that good good equipments to fight head on with odio . obviously l chose orobomaru and he's fucking insane you can wipe out most of the enemies out there and it's definitely a great option if you leveled him enough in the main game . main party for me was cube sundown and pogo kinda great party if you ask me I didn't have any problem whatsoever . so after you do your stuff you get to odio beat his ass in an incredible final battle have some heartbreaking moment and everyone goes home the end

also the final battle Is damn fucking epic and you get some more final scenes to see what the characters are up to after their stories end . this game yall

so this is still the masterpiece from the end of the 20th century but completely revamped with some QOL changes and I'm incredibly glad this is even real so thank you everybody who worked on this one because now i can satiate my thirst with some rule34 fanarts of the main cast . cheers

For every good thing about this game there's probably five just as bad. It's a game that shows immense early promise and then slowly grinds you down until you cant wait for it to be over. Incredible highs lead way into baffling lows. The combat initially shows depth and promise but lives up to none of it. The story is a complete mess that despite trying to break new ground for the franchise ends with literally the power of friendship defeating god.

It is an absolutely gorgeous game with stunning vistas that are completely devoid of any meaningful things to do. Eikon battles provide truly spectacular moments but in between forces menial busywork.

All in all a massive disappointment.

Well, what was the point of all that?

I have been racking the question in my head occasionally for bordering on two months now.

There is enough "good stuff" in FFXVI to carry 5 different games on their own. The performances, especially Ben Starr's exceptional turn as clive, are pretty universally excellent. I like the characters, as dirtily done as basically any woman is by the plot. Soken's score is excellent and the sheer level of bombast in it's action scenes is top tier. It is in many ways, a game where a bunch of top-tier creatives are putting out their best work.

And I feel nothing!

Final Fantasy XVI might have a bunch of good shit in it, but it's overall creative direction is very poor. The first half of the game gets carried hard by being focused Clive, who is so brilliantly portrayed (and often, improvised) that when the focus of the game shifts to the larger scale conflicts, and some of the other good characters get less time, it just meanders around towards an eventual ending which might have been good had the back half of the game not just, completely failed to make compelling stakes and interweave this conflict with the characters at all well. This has been a problem with FF before - when the character focus basically departs from FF9's final disc the game limps to the line, for instance - but XVI feels like it has even less of a point and it's lull lasts the majority of the runtime.

This leads to the back half in particular becoming a game of awesome peaks - usually in the Eikon set pieces where it feels like all the talented people in development were actually on the same page - amid a sea of mediocrity, especially on retrospect. I am currently talking to a friend who's playing through FFX and even though it's not my favourite, seeing just a scant screenshot or two of "filler" scenes from Luca or Zanarkand, and I feel right there. With XVI it's been like a month and I had to google the name of the main antagonist of the second half, and that guy has like, a really obvious name too.

Another thing comes out of FFXVI in the end is how... careless it is, to put it nicely. The game's poor direction and failure to make it feel like it's trying to make a point or idk, be art, makes its borrowing of tropes from game of thrones feel all the more egregious. Carelessly throwing about implied sexual violence and its whole slavery thing without having, like, a point - at best it's just weird and uncomfortable and unneccessary, at worst its very suspect, lets just leave it at that. The game's treatment of women in particular ends up as an extremely bitter note that is probably a result of a piling up of uncocious biases rather than malice, but that's not good either!

This is to say nothing of the continually weak sidequests and questionable game structure, that it should have culled way more RPG elements, that its way too easy on the first run and more! But these are incidental problems in a game that just fails to make me feel anything when that was clearly what the intention was.

I love parts of XVI. I love Clive, Gav, Cid, Mid and Jill even if the game doesn't. I love the Eikon fights. I love the music. I can't love the game they're in, which in poor direction just wastes what good it's got.

It really should not be the case that Final Fantasy XVI, a game produced by a development team of legends with a nigh-infinite budget and all the time in the world should not be a legitimately more careless and harder to love game than Wanted: Dead, the follow up to devil's third where a lot of the creative decisions were made by an eccentric Swiss billionaire who has probably defrauded the russian state and really likes Stefanie Joosten. But here we are.

What I thought would be a simple nostalgic romp turned out to be an actually decent game. Crypto has a very unique feel, and while there's few weapons, they've all got a use.

Combat is mostly easy but then you'll get sniped by a missile or 2 one too many times and it starts to feel really frustrating.

This game has a decent script that's heavily carried by the stellar voice acting. It still completely holds up.

Some frustrating missions aside, this is absolute worth checking out again. Shame we've only seen remakes of these games so far, I think there's a lot of potential in a new current gen title.

How do you follow up the likes of that which has never been seen before? Could you even hope to surpass the video game equivalent of lightning in a bottle? Keita Takahashi didn’t think so, but Namco saw the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and wanted more. So, he compromised. He agreed to direct the sequel after learning that Namco was willing to forge ahead, with or without him, and in exchange, the sequel became a metaphor for his mixed feelings regarding sequelitis and his eventual alienation from videogames as a whole. The result is We Love Katamari, a successor that tackled the subject of pandering to those around you while attempting to maintain the spirit of the original. The original Katamari Damacy was interpreted by many as an object of childlike wonder, railing against any form of cynicism while explaining absolutely nothing to preserve that joy. We Love Katamari on the other hand, turns the irreverence up to 11… and honestly, I’m all for it. As the Prince and the King of the Cosmos attempt to fulfill every fan’s request while repopulating the sky, they’re confronted with increasingly absurd situations. There’s a baby that outright tells you that he’s glad he was born to see the Prince of the Cosmos fulfill his lifelong dreams. Animals send requests a few times too, with some white dog telling you to roll around a zoo so he can attend a concert with more friends. To top this all off, the astronaut from the first game begs you to save the Earth from impending doom by rolling up countries of the world to stop an asteroid. The requests are all over the place and just as wild, if not wilder, than Katamari Damacy, and it’s fascinating how simultaneously off-the-rails the plot and worldbuilding have become even as the game remains one of Takahashi’s most intimate works, conveying his complicated feelings in this microcosm of cathartic destruction.

In terms of gameplay, We Love Katamari takes many of the logical steps in terms of progressing its simple yet realized formula. While the original game was content setting up its structure and letting players romp about in an expanding playground, We Love Katamari actively tests its limits of experimentation, challenging perceptions of what could be achieved with its level design while making players sweat with more complex goals and stricter time limits. Now granted, I concede that not everything in the sequel impresses me. The firefly level has a solid concept (roll up fireflies in a camping ground so a student has more light to study with) but doesn’t achieve much in terms of sense of scale or underlying complexity besides “roll up things quickly to get bright,” I could have done without three different variations of the Saturn levels where you just have to decide when you’re of the proper size, and I personally am not a huge fan of the underwater level where you have to handle floatier physics while dodging fishing hooks that put you out of commission for a bit. That said, the expansions that I did enjoy, I ended up really enjoying. There’s another campgrounds level where you control a burning Katamari and must carefully consider pathing on the fly to make sure that you never run out of fuel while avoiding any water sources that would snuff you out. Conversely, there’s another zoo level that sets a limit not on time, but on the things you’re allowed to roll up; as a result, it becomes an interesting exercise of restraint and sight-recognition, figuring out exactly the biggest things you can roll up at any time while outright avoiding anything else. Other favorite levels here include a racetrack where you “race” against a flurry of karts on a looping island road while barreling through anything in your way, and a sumo wrestling level where instead of rolling a Katamari, you roll the awkwardly-shaped sumo wrestler himself, and must prioritize foods as part of training him up to eventually KO his awaiting opponent. While some of the sequel's levels are content just playing with the established formula of “roll up things to get bigger to roll up more things,” the best levels here emphasize Katamari’s arcade and puzzle-like qualities by enforcing familiarization with the intricate object placement while accentuating the need for careful routing to avoid larger obstacles only to consume them whole later.

I must admit that despite my appreciation for what the sequel brings to the table, there’s a part of me that still prefers the original. There’s a sort of cohesion present in the original from repeating the same three levels but in slightly different ways and exploring them with different sizes that I think is missing in the sequel; rather, the sequel feels a bit more disconnected, with all the different fan-requests pulling from all different sides and a lot of the environments showing up for just a couple of stages or so. As a result, despite having more fleshed out execution of its base formula, I still feel as if the sequel could have more thoroughly explored certain levels in order to realize their full potential. In addition, I do find the sequel slightly more grindy than the original: not necessarily just because it’s harder (though I can’t rule out the possibility that this might be a factor), but because one of the final levels can’t be unlocked until you collect all the cousins (more or less just a cosmetic in the original), and multiple cousins are often present in the same level even though you’re only allowed to roll up and unlock one cousin per run. Finally, I must agree with everyone else in that I don’t think the extra Reverie levels from the remaster add much to the core experience, or at the very least didn’t wow me in the same way that many of the more experimental base game levels did. Rolling up clutter in a room as fast as possible and creating a variation of the racetrack level (just with the goal of snagging tires instead of overall size) doesn’t quite hit the same I suppose. Nevertheless, don’t let my personal gripes distract you from the fact that I absolutely recommend this. It's everything that a sequel could hope to be and more, providing a satisfying evolution to the series that stresses its understated design principles while serving as both a love-letter to the franchise and a send-off to Keita Takahashi’s most famous contributions to the medium. At the end of the day, we love Katamari, and while it may not be enough for Takahashi, it’s enough to matter for me.