FranklinWI
25 reviews liked by FranklinWI
Hydrogen Bomb vs Hydrogen Baby
Super Mario 64 DS
2004
nintendo salvaging the american gaming market with the release of the NES was the modern inflection point for our industry, in some ways that are less obvious than others. the console enshrined gaming as a medium with legitimacy beyond the original fad-like relevance of the atari VCS, but the centralization of this success around nintendo gave the company an uncomfortable amount of leverage. this immediately portended poorly with the simultaneous release of the console's killer app: super mario bros., which gestured to a sinister rejection of the console's original intent. look to the japanese launch line-up and you'll see arcade staples such as donkey kong and popeye; games that lauded precise, restricted play with definitive rules and short runtimes. super mario bros. was a refutation of this design philosophy in favor of the loosey-goosey variable jump heights, frequent health restoration items, and long hallways of copy-paste content replacing the tightly paced experiences that defined the era before. the NES still featured arguably the greatest console expressions of the rigorous arcade action experiences that defined the '80s - castlevania, ninja gaiden, and the early mega mans all come to mind - but the seeds super mario bros. planted would presage a shift into more and more experiences that coddled the player rather than testing their fortitude. in some ways, super mario bros. lit the match that would leave our gaming landscape in the smoldering ruins of the AAA design philosophy.
the '90s only deepened nintendo's exploration of trends that would further attempt to curb the arcade philosophy, which still floated on thanks to the valiant efforts of their competitors at sega, capcom, konami, and others. super mario world kicked off nintendo's 16-bit era with an explicitly non-linear world map that favored the illusion of charting unknown lands over the concrete reality of learning play fundamentals, and its pseudo-sequel yoshi's island would further de-emphasize actual platforming chops by giving the player a generous hover and grading them on their ability to pixel hunt for collectables rather than play well, but the most stunning example of nintendo's decadence in this era is undoubtedly donkey kong '94. the original donkey kong had four levels tightly wound around a fixed jump arc and limited ability for mario to deal with obstacles; its ostensible "remake" shat all over its legacy by infusing mario's toolkit with such ridiculous pablum such as exaggerated flip jumps, handstands, and other such acrobatics. by this point nintendo was engaging in blatant historical revisionism, turning this cornerstone of the genre into a bug-eyed circus romp, stuffed with dozens of new puzzle-centric levels that completely jettisoned any semblance of toolkit-oriented level design from the original game. and yet, this was the final fissure before the dam fully burst in 1996.
with the release of the nintendo 64 came the death knell of the industry: the analog stick. nintendo's most cunning engineers and depraved designers had cooked up a new way to hand unprecedented control to the player and tear down all obstacles standing in the way of the paternalistic head-pat of a "job well done" that came with finishing a game. with it also came this demonic interloper's physical vessel, super mario 64; the refined, sneering coalescence of all of nintendo's design tendencies up to this point. see here a game with enormous, previously unfathomable player expression, with virtually every objective solvable in myriad different ways to accommodate those who refuse to engage with the essential challenges the game offers. too lazy to even attempt some challenges at all? feel free to skip over a third of the game's "star" objectives on your way to the final boss; you can almost see the designers snickering as they copy-pasted objectives left and right, knowing that the majority of their player base would never even catch them in the act due to their zombie-like waddle to the atrociously easy finish line. even as arcade games stood proud at the apex of the early 3D era, super mario 64 pulled the ground out underneath them, leaving millions of gamers flocking to similar experiences bereft of the true game design fundamentals that had existed since the origination of the medium.
this context is long but hopefully sobering to you, the reader, likely a gamer so inoculated by the drip-feed of modern AAA slop that you likely have regarded super mario 64 as a milestone in 3D design up to now. yet, it also serves as a stark contrast to super mario 64 ds, a revelation and admission of guilt by nintendo a decade after their donkey kong remake plunged modern platformers into oblivion.
the d-pad alone is cool water against the brow of one in the throes of a desert of permissive design techniques. tightening up the input space from the shallow dazzle of an analog surface to the limitations of eight directions instantly reframes the way one looks at the open environments of the original super mario 64. sure, there's a touch screen option, but the awkward translation of a stick to the literal flat surface of the screen seems to be intentionally hobbled in order to encourage use of the d-pad. while moving in a straight line may still be simple, any sort of other action now begets a pause for reflection over the exact way one should proceed. is the sharp 45 or 90 degree turn to one side "good enough", or will I need to make a camera adjustment in-place? for this bridge, what combination of angles should I concoct in order to work through this section? the removal of analog control also forces the addition of an extra button to differentiate between running and walking, slapping the player on the wrist if they try to gently segue between the two states as in the original. the precision rewards those who aim to learn their way around the rapid shifts in speed while punishing those who hope they can squeak by with the same sloppy handling that the original game allowed.
on its own this change is crucial, but it still doesn't cure the ills of the original's permissive objective structure. however, the remake wisely adds a new character selection system that subtly injects routing fundamentals into the game's core. for starters: each of the characters has a separate moveset, and while some characters such as yoshi and luigi regrettably have the floaty hover and scuttle that I disdained in yoshi's island, it's at least balanced here by removing other key aspects of their kit such as wall jumps and punches. the addition of wario gives the game a proper "hard mode," with wario's lumbering speed and poor jump characteristics putting much-needed limiters on the game's handling. for objectives that now explicitly require wario to complete, the game is effectively barring you from abusing the superior movement of the original game by forcing you into a much more limited toolkit with rigid d-pad controls, the kind of limitations this game absolutely needed in order to shine.
that last point about objectives that specifically require a given character is key: the remake segments its objectives based on which characters are viable to use to complete them. however, while in some cases the game may telegraph which specific characters are required for a particular task, in many cases the "correct" solution is actually to bounce between the characters in real time. this is done by strategically placing hats for each of the characters throughout the map - some attached to enemies and some free-floating - which allow the player to switch on the fly. this adds new detours to the otherwise simple objectives that vastly increases their complexity: which toolkit is best suited for which part of each mission? how should my route be planned around the level to accommodate hats I need to pick up? will I be able to defeat an enemy that's guarding the hat if I had to? this decision-making fleshes out what was previously a mindless experience.
there's one additional element to this system that truly elevates it to something resembling the arcade experiences of yore. while you can enter a level as any character, entering as yoshi allows you to preemptively don the cap of any other character as you spawn in, preventing the player from having to back-track to switch characters. on the surface this seems like another ill-advised QoL feature, but some subtle features reveal something more fascinating. yoshi has no cap associated with him, so to play as him, one must enter the level with him. however, you often need to switch to another character in the middle of a level. how do you switch back? by taking damage. to solve the ridiculously overstuffed eight piece health bar of the original, this remake transforms it into a resource you expend in order to undergo transformation. sure, one could theoretically collect coins in order to replenish this resource, but this adds a new layer onto the routing that simply didn't exist in the original game, where there were so many ways to circumvent obstacles with the permissive controls that getting hit in the first place was often harder than completing the objective. by reframing the way that the player looks at their heath gauge, the game is calling to mind classic beat 'em ups, where the health gauge often doubled as a resource to expend for powerful AoE supers.
the game still suffers from much of the rotten design at the core of its forebear; these above changes are phenomenal additions, but they're grafted onto a framework that's crumbling as you delve into it. regardless, the effort is admirable. for a brief moment, nintendo offered an apology to all of those hurt by their curbstomping of the design philosophies that springboarded them into juggernaut status in the first place, and they revitalized classic design perspectives for many millions more who first entered the world of gaming after it had already been tainted by nintendo's misdeeds. the galaxy duology, released a few years after this game, attempted to rework the series from the ground up with a new appreciation for arcade design by limiting the bloated toolkit of previous games and linearizing levels, but the damage had already been done. the modern switch era has magnified nintendo's worst tendencies, putting proper execution and mechanical comprehension to the wayside as they accelerate the disturbing "the player is always right" principles that have infested their games since that original super mario bros. by looking at super mario 64 ds in this context, we at least get a glimpse of what a better world could have looked like had nintendo listened to their elders all along.
the '90s only deepened nintendo's exploration of trends that would further attempt to curb the arcade philosophy, which still floated on thanks to the valiant efforts of their competitors at sega, capcom, konami, and others. super mario world kicked off nintendo's 16-bit era with an explicitly non-linear world map that favored the illusion of charting unknown lands over the concrete reality of learning play fundamentals, and its pseudo-sequel yoshi's island would further de-emphasize actual platforming chops by giving the player a generous hover and grading them on their ability to pixel hunt for collectables rather than play well, but the most stunning example of nintendo's decadence in this era is undoubtedly donkey kong '94. the original donkey kong had four levels tightly wound around a fixed jump arc and limited ability for mario to deal with obstacles; its ostensible "remake" shat all over its legacy by infusing mario's toolkit with such ridiculous pablum such as exaggerated flip jumps, handstands, and other such acrobatics. by this point nintendo was engaging in blatant historical revisionism, turning this cornerstone of the genre into a bug-eyed circus romp, stuffed with dozens of new puzzle-centric levels that completely jettisoned any semblance of toolkit-oriented level design from the original game. and yet, this was the final fissure before the dam fully burst in 1996.
with the release of the nintendo 64 came the death knell of the industry: the analog stick. nintendo's most cunning engineers and depraved designers had cooked up a new way to hand unprecedented control to the player and tear down all obstacles standing in the way of the paternalistic head-pat of a "job well done" that came with finishing a game. with it also came this demonic interloper's physical vessel, super mario 64; the refined, sneering coalescence of all of nintendo's design tendencies up to this point. see here a game with enormous, previously unfathomable player expression, with virtually every objective solvable in myriad different ways to accommodate those who refuse to engage with the essential challenges the game offers. too lazy to even attempt some challenges at all? feel free to skip over a third of the game's "star" objectives on your way to the final boss; you can almost see the designers snickering as they copy-pasted objectives left and right, knowing that the majority of their player base would never even catch them in the act due to their zombie-like waddle to the atrociously easy finish line. even as arcade games stood proud at the apex of the early 3D era, super mario 64 pulled the ground out underneath them, leaving millions of gamers flocking to similar experiences bereft of the true game design fundamentals that had existed since the origination of the medium.
this context is long but hopefully sobering to you, the reader, likely a gamer so inoculated by the drip-feed of modern AAA slop that you likely have regarded super mario 64 as a milestone in 3D design up to now. yet, it also serves as a stark contrast to super mario 64 ds, a revelation and admission of guilt by nintendo a decade after their donkey kong remake plunged modern platformers into oblivion.
the d-pad alone is cool water against the brow of one in the throes of a desert of permissive design techniques. tightening up the input space from the shallow dazzle of an analog surface to the limitations of eight directions instantly reframes the way one looks at the open environments of the original super mario 64. sure, there's a touch screen option, but the awkward translation of a stick to the literal flat surface of the screen seems to be intentionally hobbled in order to encourage use of the d-pad. while moving in a straight line may still be simple, any sort of other action now begets a pause for reflection over the exact way one should proceed. is the sharp 45 or 90 degree turn to one side "good enough", or will I need to make a camera adjustment in-place? for this bridge, what combination of angles should I concoct in order to work through this section? the removal of analog control also forces the addition of an extra button to differentiate between running and walking, slapping the player on the wrist if they try to gently segue between the two states as in the original. the precision rewards those who aim to learn their way around the rapid shifts in speed while punishing those who hope they can squeak by with the same sloppy handling that the original game allowed.
on its own this change is crucial, but it still doesn't cure the ills of the original's permissive objective structure. however, the remake wisely adds a new character selection system that subtly injects routing fundamentals into the game's core. for starters: each of the characters has a separate moveset, and while some characters such as yoshi and luigi regrettably have the floaty hover and scuttle that I disdained in yoshi's island, it's at least balanced here by removing other key aspects of their kit such as wall jumps and punches. the addition of wario gives the game a proper "hard mode," with wario's lumbering speed and poor jump characteristics putting much-needed limiters on the game's handling. for objectives that now explicitly require wario to complete, the game is effectively barring you from abusing the superior movement of the original game by forcing you into a much more limited toolkit with rigid d-pad controls, the kind of limitations this game absolutely needed in order to shine.
that last point about objectives that specifically require a given character is key: the remake segments its objectives based on which characters are viable to use to complete them. however, while in some cases the game may telegraph which specific characters are required for a particular task, in many cases the "correct" solution is actually to bounce between the characters in real time. this is done by strategically placing hats for each of the characters throughout the map - some attached to enemies and some free-floating - which allow the player to switch on the fly. this adds new detours to the otherwise simple objectives that vastly increases their complexity: which toolkit is best suited for which part of each mission? how should my route be planned around the level to accommodate hats I need to pick up? will I be able to defeat an enemy that's guarding the hat if I had to? this decision-making fleshes out what was previously a mindless experience.
there's one additional element to this system that truly elevates it to something resembling the arcade experiences of yore. while you can enter a level as any character, entering as yoshi allows you to preemptively don the cap of any other character as you spawn in, preventing the player from having to back-track to switch characters. on the surface this seems like another ill-advised QoL feature, but some subtle features reveal something more fascinating. yoshi has no cap associated with him, so to play as him, one must enter the level with him. however, you often need to switch to another character in the middle of a level. how do you switch back? by taking damage. to solve the ridiculously overstuffed eight piece health bar of the original, this remake transforms it into a resource you expend in order to undergo transformation. sure, one could theoretically collect coins in order to replenish this resource, but this adds a new layer onto the routing that simply didn't exist in the original game, where there were so many ways to circumvent obstacles with the permissive controls that getting hit in the first place was often harder than completing the objective. by reframing the way that the player looks at their heath gauge, the game is calling to mind classic beat 'em ups, where the health gauge often doubled as a resource to expend for powerful AoE supers.
the game still suffers from much of the rotten design at the core of its forebear; these above changes are phenomenal additions, but they're grafted onto a framework that's crumbling as you delve into it. regardless, the effort is admirable. for a brief moment, nintendo offered an apology to all of those hurt by their curbstomping of the design philosophies that springboarded them into juggernaut status in the first place, and they revitalized classic design perspectives for many millions more who first entered the world of gaming after it had already been tainted by nintendo's misdeeds. the galaxy duology, released a few years after this game, attempted to rework the series from the ground up with a new appreciation for arcade design by limiting the bloated toolkit of previous games and linearizing levels, but the damage had already been done. the modern switch era has magnified nintendo's worst tendencies, putting proper execution and mechanical comprehension to the wayside as they accelerate the disturbing "the player is always right" principles that have infested their games since that original super mario bros. by looking at super mario 64 ds in this context, we at least get a glimpse of what a better world could have looked like had nintendo listened to their elders all along.
Final Fantasy XIII
2009
Does anybody else get exhausted of our cultural tendency to immediately lump any given piece of media into concrete categories like "good" or "bad", the latter often attributing a sort of spiritual disposability to said piece of media? Like, in a vacuum, I guess it's not the worst thing we can do, and it's something you shouldn't be ashamed of doing or something you have to stop doing outright if you just really love or really hate something, but it does tend to have this knock on effect where we don't have to engage with media once we've categorized something as either "peak" or "dogshit".
Because of that sort of black-and-white mindset, Gamer Discourse just ended up eviscerating all discussion of Final Fantasy XIII when it came out, and in all honesty probably bled into the potential enjoyment other people may have otherwise received from the game. I'm not a psychologist I can't prove that, but like, it happened to me for a long time until I broke out of that mindset! Not saying people have to suddenly like FF13, or that we have to completely flip the discourse around towards largely positive, but it's pretty cool that Final Fantasy XIII even exists imho!! Like, how many AAA sci-fi fantasy RPG epics were we even getting during that era of gaming? I won't say it's as overall satisfying or as complete feeling of a work when up against most other Final Fantasy titles, and maybe even other RPGs of similar budget and scope, but I enjoyed my time with it despite it kind of having a Wind Waker-ian malaise to it (I mean that in both a good and bad way, but mostly a good way!! btw while we're hanging out in the parentheses dimension misusing basic conventions of punctuation and general formatting, does anybody else want to eat the little spheres in the Crystarium? They look like tasty little candies to me, probably even tastier than materia).
The basic combat system is contentious for a reason, but it's kinda sick as hell in a way I both love and despise. It's like, attempting to replicate the feeling of turn-based combat -- which is a style of gameplay that typically abstracts interactions between entities for the sake of compartmentalizing actions to allow strategy to be coherent for the player -- while ostensibly (and correct me if I'm wrong about how this game actually functions) being an action game that the player only tangentially controls. Even in the event that the player has chosen to manually select abilities, the other two thirds of your party still remain uncontrollable, but they function within the specific physical minutiae of an action game that Square Enix has created but that we are not allowed to play directly. In opposition to similar systems like maybe Chrono Trigger or Dragon Quest IX, characters and enemies move in realtime, collide with other models, and can get hurt by splash damage (a particularly frustrating aspect of the combat system when afaik you cannot change the position of a character without making them perform an action that would require them to move); it's not always an immediately pertinent aspect of the game's combat, but it's something that remained on my mind consistently after I noticed it.
The result, along with its almost proto-Yokai Watch-esque approach to RPG strategy, is combat that can often make you feel like you just coached somebody else into getting a SSS rank in a Devil May Cry game, but equally ends up being probably the closest a video game has ever gotten to replicate the feeling of what it's like to drive a car in a dream? Idk if anybody else has dreams like that where you're in a dream, and you're trying to drive a car, and it is NOT working AT ALL, and you kind of just swerve all the over place and kinda noclip through dream terrain until it gets too scary and you wake up. Maybe that's just me?
Dream logic is also a pretty fuckin' apt way to describe Final Fantasy XIII's plotting and narrative delivery. Final Fantasy XIII is like an obscure OVA of itself that's been spread out across 40 hours? It's feeling abridged in this bizarre but kinda charming way like, damn I shoulda read the manga of this one before buying the VHS, I guess. So much of what happens on screen is just not explained diegetically at all, which I wasn't a huge fan of in Final Fantasy VIII either, but I heard you could go to Selphie's custom GeoCities site in-game to see what the fuck everything is and means. Never did it myself, but I love that there it's at least seemingly diegetic. To be clear, I think in-game encyclopedias are cool as hell and I'm glad it exists in Final Fantasy XIII, every game needs a Piklopedia-esque feature as far I'm concerned, but I kinda like ending up there out of curiosity and not so much obligation. Maybe it's because I have issues with authority? I don't like being told what to do? I dunno. For what it's worth though, I don't think it outright ruined my enjoyment of Final Fantasy XIII.
I probably enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII more than at least three or four other mainline Final Fantasy titles, and I think it's unabashedly one of the most Final Fantasy entries in the series. I love the character designs (Lightning and Fang in particular Appeal to My Interests), I had fun with the combat sometimes, music is sick as hell; the visual concept of Cocoon and Pulse is powerful shit, though it feels underutilized both functionally and thematically. The game overall has this really rad 80s/90s anime vibe but with those sleek 00s sci-fi aesthetic touches; it's almost like Toriyama and team were making a secret AAA Phantasy Star title. The game is way more gorgeous than it has any right to be, which is unfortunately sometimes all the game is.
I wanted to kick down the door and scream "IT'S NOT HALLWAYS IT'S NOT HALLWAYS" so badly, but unfortunately, it is definitely hallways. Which isn't inherently a bad thing, Final Fantasy VII Remake's also hallways! But I think what makes it particularly excruciating in Final Fantasy XIII is that that's kind of all it is, and many environments repeat ad nauseam (that fuckin' forest level was definitely overkill with the same exact environmental structures over and over with only a couple narrative chokepoints to break up the pace), an issue that I don't remember the other Final Fantasy with a similar structure, Final Fantasy X, really having. This isn't something that's necessarily new to Final Fantasy at least, I think my least favorite aspect about going back to the pre-PSX Final Fantasy titles is The Caves. I wanna say Final Fantasy V was probably the best about it, but it got really bad in Final Fantasy VI sometimes and that game manages to be good as hell in spite of that.
Except, Final Fantasy VI does share some other issues with Final Fantasy XIII, like awkward scripts and translation, but I suppose it's a lot more noticeable in Final Fantasy XIII when real people are speaking dialogue that no person would ever say ever. I think my favorite "this translator was maybe being overworked god I hope they paid them enough at least" moment was when a villain told one of the good guys that "the next time you open your eyes will be the last" which like, what does that even fucking mean in the context of English. Like I've taken a decade of Japanese studies so I know it's most likely a direct translation of a vaguely idiomatic expression for "waking up", but it's so fucking funny that it got to the voice actor phase and nobody questioned it. I'm not even like, clowning on it, it's just extremely interesting to me.
Either way, my point isn't to say Final Fantasy VI or any other Final Fantasy is actually the Bad Game, my point is that Final Fantasy XIII is a reflection of the games that came before it both conceptually and logistically and maybe we should give it a break sometimes because it's a decently enjoyable experience when you aren't being cranky about the parts that maybe aren't perfect. And I won't lie, I definitely got cranky a few times; ironically I got the most crankiest at the point of the game that most people claim is "when it gets good". Friend, the game was already good, putting in a Xenoblade level isn't gonna suddenly make the game worth it, you either bought into it by that point, or you didn't, honestly.
One more thing that's sorely missing from Final Fantasy XIII though: minigames or minigame adjacent activities. Like, I think in this game of all games, a little extra would've gone a long way cuz sooooo fucking much of the game is just fighting the same exact guys over and over. I don't even think there's puzzles? I hated the puzzles in Final Fantasy X, but by the end of Final Fantasy XIII I almost missed them. They also find ways to put more of the same enemies in levels that by all means should NOT have those enemies, and like I get it, it's an issue that Final Fantasy X ran into as well, at a high enough fidelity it's probably not possible to make enough unique models/enemy types to fill out an entire 40 hour RPG's worth of content, but the lack of variety is notably pretty rough in XIII. I think the best signifier of that is how early and often you fight behemoths, a mob that's typically reserved for like, the last few dungeons of a given Final Fantasy title if not the final level outright. Plus, battles end up feeling pretty exhausting like, at least in Final Fantasy X the bosses with a bajillion health points are being fought via a fully turn-based system; the battles are strategically more simple in XIII, but they always took a lot more out of me due to the relatively fast pace of the action itself and the amount of moment-to-moment babysitting you're engaging in.
I don't really feel like getting into spoiler territory for this one, not that I think it's even possible to spoil anything about Final Fantasy XIII that aren't things you'd find out in the first few chapters or so anyways, but either way, lemme awkwardly transition to a conclusion where I talk about Lightning. She's probably in my like, top 10 favorite fictional characters designs despite Final Fantasy XIII not even breaching my top 100 favorite games. She's like, if you combined Utena Tenjou with Cloud Strife and Squall Leonhart. She kinda sucks really bad as a person early on, but I like that she grows from her whole "being a cop who punches people for no good reason" phase after getting scolded by a lesbian for being that way. Pretty excited to see how they simultaneously ruin her characterization and make her even cooler in the other two games in the trilogy! Half expecting Lightning Returns to end up as my favorite of the trilogy since it looks like it's the funniest, but we'll see.
Also I originally had this whole bit at the beginning about the tangential relationship being Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) and Final Fantasy XIII, but I dropped it cuz I couldn't really work it into a broader cohesive point, but I think they're cool fucked up 7th gen console zeitgeist siblings, and my brain just associates them with each other cuz of that. Anyways, this discussion is pretty much pointless because we ALL know and have unanimously agreed upon as a culture that Final Fantasy XV is the actual best Final Fantasy.
Because of that sort of black-and-white mindset, Gamer Discourse just ended up eviscerating all discussion of Final Fantasy XIII when it came out, and in all honesty probably bled into the potential enjoyment other people may have otherwise received from the game. I'm not a psychologist I can't prove that, but like, it happened to me for a long time until I broke out of that mindset! Not saying people have to suddenly like FF13, or that we have to completely flip the discourse around towards largely positive, but it's pretty cool that Final Fantasy XIII even exists imho!! Like, how many AAA sci-fi fantasy RPG epics were we even getting during that era of gaming? I won't say it's as overall satisfying or as complete feeling of a work when up against most other Final Fantasy titles, and maybe even other RPGs of similar budget and scope, but I enjoyed my time with it despite it kind of having a Wind Waker-ian malaise to it (I mean that in both a good and bad way, but mostly a good way!! btw while we're hanging out in the parentheses dimension misusing basic conventions of punctuation and general formatting, does anybody else want to eat the little spheres in the Crystarium? They look like tasty little candies to me, probably even tastier than materia).
The basic combat system is contentious for a reason, but it's kinda sick as hell in a way I both love and despise. It's like, attempting to replicate the feeling of turn-based combat -- which is a style of gameplay that typically abstracts interactions between entities for the sake of compartmentalizing actions to allow strategy to be coherent for the player -- while ostensibly (and correct me if I'm wrong about how this game actually functions) being an action game that the player only tangentially controls. Even in the event that the player has chosen to manually select abilities, the other two thirds of your party still remain uncontrollable, but they function within the specific physical minutiae of an action game that Square Enix has created but that we are not allowed to play directly. In opposition to similar systems like maybe Chrono Trigger or Dragon Quest IX, characters and enemies move in realtime, collide with other models, and can get hurt by splash damage (a particularly frustrating aspect of the combat system when afaik you cannot change the position of a character without making them perform an action that would require them to move); it's not always an immediately pertinent aspect of the game's combat, but it's something that remained on my mind consistently after I noticed it.
The result, along with its almost proto-Yokai Watch-esque approach to RPG strategy, is combat that can often make you feel like you just coached somebody else into getting a SSS rank in a Devil May Cry game, but equally ends up being probably the closest a video game has ever gotten to replicate the feeling of what it's like to drive a car in a dream? Idk if anybody else has dreams like that where you're in a dream, and you're trying to drive a car, and it is NOT working AT ALL, and you kind of just swerve all the over place and kinda noclip through dream terrain until it gets too scary and you wake up. Maybe that's just me?
Dream logic is also a pretty fuckin' apt way to describe Final Fantasy XIII's plotting and narrative delivery. Final Fantasy XIII is like an obscure OVA of itself that's been spread out across 40 hours? It's feeling abridged in this bizarre but kinda charming way like, damn I shoulda read the manga of this one before buying the VHS, I guess. So much of what happens on screen is just not explained diegetically at all, which I wasn't a huge fan of in Final Fantasy VIII either, but I heard you could go to Selphie's custom GeoCities site in-game to see what the fuck everything is and means. Never did it myself, but I love that there it's at least seemingly diegetic. To be clear, I think in-game encyclopedias are cool as hell and I'm glad it exists in Final Fantasy XIII, every game needs a Piklopedia-esque feature as far I'm concerned, but I kinda like ending up there out of curiosity and not so much obligation. Maybe it's because I have issues with authority? I don't like being told what to do? I dunno. For what it's worth though, I don't think it outright ruined my enjoyment of Final Fantasy XIII.
I probably enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII more than at least three or four other mainline Final Fantasy titles, and I think it's unabashedly one of the most Final Fantasy entries in the series. I love the character designs (Lightning and Fang in particular Appeal to My Interests), I had fun with the combat sometimes, music is sick as hell; the visual concept of Cocoon and Pulse is powerful shit, though it feels underutilized both functionally and thematically. The game overall has this really rad 80s/90s anime vibe but with those sleek 00s sci-fi aesthetic touches; it's almost like Toriyama and team were making a secret AAA Phantasy Star title. The game is way more gorgeous than it has any right to be, which is unfortunately sometimes all the game is.
I wanted to kick down the door and scream "IT'S NOT HALLWAYS IT'S NOT HALLWAYS" so badly, but unfortunately, it is definitely hallways. Which isn't inherently a bad thing, Final Fantasy VII Remake's also hallways! But I think what makes it particularly excruciating in Final Fantasy XIII is that that's kind of all it is, and many environments repeat ad nauseam (that fuckin' forest level was definitely overkill with the same exact environmental structures over and over with only a couple narrative chokepoints to break up the pace), an issue that I don't remember the other Final Fantasy with a similar structure, Final Fantasy X, really having. This isn't something that's necessarily new to Final Fantasy at least, I think my least favorite aspect about going back to the pre-PSX Final Fantasy titles is The Caves. I wanna say Final Fantasy V was probably the best about it, but it got really bad in Final Fantasy VI sometimes and that game manages to be good as hell in spite of that.
Except, Final Fantasy VI does share some other issues with Final Fantasy XIII, like awkward scripts and translation, but I suppose it's a lot more noticeable in Final Fantasy XIII when real people are speaking dialogue that no person would ever say ever. I think my favorite "this translator was maybe being overworked god I hope they paid them enough at least" moment was when a villain told one of the good guys that "the next time you open your eyes will be the last" which like, what does that even fucking mean in the context of English. Like I've taken a decade of Japanese studies so I know it's most likely a direct translation of a vaguely idiomatic expression for "waking up", but it's so fucking funny that it got to the voice actor phase and nobody questioned it. I'm not even like, clowning on it, it's just extremely interesting to me.
Either way, my point isn't to say Final Fantasy VI or any other Final Fantasy is actually the Bad Game, my point is that Final Fantasy XIII is a reflection of the games that came before it both conceptually and logistically and maybe we should give it a break sometimes because it's a decently enjoyable experience when you aren't being cranky about the parts that maybe aren't perfect. And I won't lie, I definitely got cranky a few times; ironically I got the most crankiest at the point of the game that most people claim is "when it gets good". Friend, the game was already good, putting in a Xenoblade level isn't gonna suddenly make the game worth it, you either bought into it by that point, or you didn't, honestly.
One more thing that's sorely missing from Final Fantasy XIII though: minigames or minigame adjacent activities. Like, I think in this game of all games, a little extra would've gone a long way cuz sooooo fucking much of the game is just fighting the same exact guys over and over. I don't even think there's puzzles? I hated the puzzles in Final Fantasy X, but by the end of Final Fantasy XIII I almost missed them. They also find ways to put more of the same enemies in levels that by all means should NOT have those enemies, and like I get it, it's an issue that Final Fantasy X ran into as well, at a high enough fidelity it's probably not possible to make enough unique models/enemy types to fill out an entire 40 hour RPG's worth of content, but the lack of variety is notably pretty rough in XIII. I think the best signifier of that is how early and often you fight behemoths, a mob that's typically reserved for like, the last few dungeons of a given Final Fantasy title if not the final level outright. Plus, battles end up feeling pretty exhausting like, at least in Final Fantasy X the bosses with a bajillion health points are being fought via a fully turn-based system; the battles are strategically more simple in XIII, but they always took a lot more out of me due to the relatively fast pace of the action itself and the amount of moment-to-moment babysitting you're engaging in.
I don't really feel like getting into spoiler territory for this one, not that I think it's even possible to spoil anything about Final Fantasy XIII that aren't things you'd find out in the first few chapters or so anyways, but either way, lemme awkwardly transition to a conclusion where I talk about Lightning. She's probably in my like, top 10 favorite fictional characters designs despite Final Fantasy XIII not even breaching my top 100 favorite games. She's like, if you combined Utena Tenjou with Cloud Strife and Squall Leonhart. She kinda sucks really bad as a person early on, but I like that she grows from her whole "being a cop who punches people for no good reason" phase after getting scolded by a lesbian for being that way. Pretty excited to see how they simultaneously ruin her characterization and make her even cooler in the other two games in the trilogy! Half expecting Lightning Returns to end up as my favorite of the trilogy since it looks like it's the funniest, but we'll see.
Also I originally had this whole bit at the beginning about the tangential relationship being Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) and Final Fantasy XIII, but I dropped it cuz I couldn't really work it into a broader cohesive point, but I think they're cool fucked up 7th gen console zeitgeist siblings, and my brain just associates them with each other cuz of that. Anyways, this discussion is pretty much pointless because we ALL know and have unanimously agreed upon as a culture that Final Fantasy XV is the actual best Final Fantasy.
This review contains spoilers
This is a companion to my initial thoughts on Rebirth, and if you're like me and just kind of mindlessly click on things that are spoiler tagged, consider this your warning that I will be talking about the game's ending and many other elements unique to Rebirth's narrative. But first, I'm gonna start off by going over some stuff I missed in that first review: side quests are overall higher quality and hold a lot more intrinsic value (i.e. they're actually kinda rewarding on their own merit and not just for the rewards themselves; i love the one with the puppy and the one with the cats don't remember da rest tbh), however there's way more of them so numerically speaking there's a lot more stinkers and personally I'm just not a huuuge fan of gameifying progression within relationships -- the bright side of that is the relationship system isn't really that strict, and I think you get more relationship boosts for just playing the main scenario and using synergy abilities than you'd expect. Didn't really annoy me as much as other AAA games, but I'd say I prefer just having relationships form naturally through the narrative (or have the progression be invisible like the original, at least until new game plus, which they did partially do).
On that note, I really loved the chapter 12 visit to the Gold Saucer; Final Fantasy VII finally has its 90s love ballad and I think compared to its PSX Final Fantasy theme song brethren it's my new favorite (still fucking love Eyes on Me and Melodies of Life tho). Highly recommend aiming for the Tifa date, it's really awkward how non-present she is in the Loveless sequence compared to other characters when you go for Aerith being the princess in the Loveless play, and her little words of encouragement to Aerith before she sings is so cute (me when I see a girl being nice to another girl in a piece of media: she's literally me). I'm happy it's pretty easy to go back and see different variations of the date in new game plus though. Also Cloud and Tifa in the ferris wheel was pretty cute, and he wasn't a butthole for once, which like god damn he fucking SUCKS in this game it kinda rules.
I think my one major gripe is that they added a new sequence to the Gongaga Reactor portion where Cloud essentially puts Tifa in mortal peril, but nobody feels as upset about it as they should? Like maybe I'm just reading the scenes wrong, and it does fit into Tifa's character at this point in the narrative that she would forgive him given some time, but kinda felt like there needed to be a little more exploration on the emotional and physical implications of Cloud's mental degradation and the potential danger the people he cares about face because of that. It's a very cool sequence regardless, which tbh I think is me being biased cuz 50% of it has Tifa as the temporary party leader.
There's other things that I think people are gonna bitch about that I kinda see the value in adding, like Yuffie's presidential assassination attempt is pretty fucking cool imo, very based of her. Roche's little side plot is extremely Final Fantasy and I'm here for it, mostly for the homoeroticism. I love how often Tifa and Aerith have to bitch at Cloud for being a creep/weirdo/insecure prick, it rules. I love how much the characters suck in this game while still feeling like they're just trying their best to do the right thing. Really wish they were more okay with wanton murder of Shinra employees and the other unamibiguously evil wastes of breath that exist in this game's world, but I guess this ain't that kinda story so I'll take what I can get.
So uh, the multiverse, huh? Yeah, it's a tough thing to unpack considering it's not actually all that present within the core narrative, mostly showing up between major events and culminating in the finale. I wanna say first off, I fucking hate multiverse shit; most of the time it's utilized when a story has nowhere else to go or to cheaply introduce fan service. And I won't say that Rebirth's utilization of multiverse theory isn't at least partly the latter, but it's definitely more complicated than that, because like the wisps in Remake, the utilization of alternate "timelines" (I believe they're referred to as worlds in the game itself) due to Sephiroth and Aerith's meddling with the built-in defense mechanisms of the planet that maintained a specific planetary determinism had actual consequences. It's, extremely heady to say the least, but that's Final Fantasy, baby!
I honestly expected that the Zack sections of the game would take up like 30% of the game or something, but I'd estimate it's somewhere closer to between 1% and 5%. And like, another preface here to show how meaningful it is that these sequences mostly worked for me: I do not like Crisis Core. I think it's stinky, it's bad, and I don't really hate Zack as much as I found his story to be really pointless and centered around needless fan service; like if they made a whole game about FF6 Locke's ex-gf or something and the intro involved the magitek armors going to Narshe while Terra's theme played for some reason. But it's whatever I'm over its whole existence, and I kinda like Zack he's a fun little guy, hard to hate him really, and outside of the context of Crisis Core I learned to appreciate him. And while my initial reaction to the ending was, "well, what was the fucking point of the multiverse shit then", it eventually sunk in for me what they were going for by adapting it in this way.
It's a bit of a mystery box, but unlike most mystery boxes (like Lost if it it was only a little bit stupid and not completely stupid), people were able to kind of predict this one correctly! Aerith doesn't die! And I mean, she does die, but I'm kind of cautiously really fucking down with what they're doing by placing Cloud's consciousness between two different worlds essentially, one where he saved Aerith and his actual reality where Aerith dies, and how that specifically adds to both his visible mental degradation and an even deeper inability to cope with the loss of Aerith. At least that's my interpretation since they go out of their way to show that Aerith's "spirit" was noticed by Nanaki in the final scene and that it wasn't an outright hallucination on Cloud's part, which I would've preferred, but I can see what they're cooking here.
I mean, really, I would've preferred none of this extra shit, and the way the leads devs talk about the "shock value" of it all is definitely off-putting, but I think... I think it kinda works? I'm pretty sure Aerith died in the original for pretty similar developmental reasons, and while I def need even more time to really figure out why it ended up working, it definitely left me in kind of malaise that not many other games since like, the ending of Drakengard 3 or something have made me feel for days on end.
But what's especially interesting is that my initial reaction to Aerith's death scene was outright confusion and frustration as it was extremely difficult to parse if she was actually alive or not until I beat the final boss -- but I believe that's kind of the point. Both Cloud and the player are in denial, how much of what happens in the final sequence is real and how much of it is a "fever dream", as Sephiroth puts it, is up to player interpretation. There's some physically established reality to the multiverse shit ofc, but thematically speaking, making the two characters that show up for Cloud in these dream-like sequences be Zack and Aerith fits so fucking well into Cloud's inability to process loss that I feel that was more the intention than simply fan service. Also Biggs and Zack being buddies is kinda cute, but from a utilitarian perspective these sequences help to prove that the dying worlds are indeed really happening, and not necessarily just "Aerith's dreams" or purely in Cloud's mind, even if functionally that's kind of what they end up being since I think (?) they're connected through the lifestream, which up to this point only really Sephiroth and Aerith have been able to navigate.
Again, not really the direction I would've personally chosen, and there are some aspects lost in terms of impact in Aerith's death scene, particularly Cloud's speech (which is more implied by voiceless cutaways within the "Aerith dies" universe) and the individual reactions each character once had are no longer there, which makes sense when you consider there like 7 other dudes there now when last time you just had two other characters in your party during that scene. But it'd be remiss if I didn't mention that a lot has been gained: both Barret and Tifa's reactions are so visceral that it's difficult to outright dismiss this iteration, at least until you're thrown into a 10 phase boss battle, which if that loses you after that point, I guess I can't blame you. I don't think the reality of it all is fully lost in the end though, the game takes ample time to linger on the loss of the party's beloved flower girl, in such a way that I can't really stop thinking about it, even days after completing the game for the first time. The original scene makes me cry every time without fail, but there's something to be said for how much feels truly lost this time, how much more Aerith means to the party and to the player this time around is much more "real" in a way that the original game was only able to suggest in key moments.
Basically, the multiverse is there for fan service to a certain degree, but a) it's not some annoying MCU bullshit like people are gonna inevitably strawman it as, and b) it's more there to create a physical representation of Cloud's grief, and while I think it significantly detracts from the force of nature that Sephiroth could feel like in the original, there's something going on here that feels unabashedly Final Fantasy VII, and not even in the shitty ass Compilation way, just the way it chose to expand on the emotional core of the original without necessarily stepping too far out of the game's already somewhat flimsy physical rules. Like seriously, the reason we love Final Fantasy VII in the first place is because there is no place the game was afraid to go. Not perfect, but it feels special all the same. Also Tifa's reaction to Aerith's death is so fucking raw, and Cloud just smiling away because he has a ghost gf now is just, absolutely fucking gutwrenching, I love it man. I'm glad at least Nanaki is comforting Tifa in the final scene or else I think I'd be emotionally ruined probably. Can't wait for Cloud to be absolutely unbearable for the first 30 hours of part 3!!!
And on that note, Part 3 is probably gonna be the weakest of the trilogy, both in terms of narrative and gameplay, so I'm not too gutted about having to wait 4 years for the finale, but I'm excited nonetheless. I'm not really sure what they're gonna do for the areas you're expected to return to though? Either way, I hope the open world shit is toned a bit overall, more condensed regions similar to Nibelheim and Junon would be nice. There's lots of hints of extra shit that didn't exist in the original's disc 2 and 3, and that kinda makes sense when you stop and consider just how empty disc 2 kinda feels towards the end, particularly compared to disc 1. Really excited for part 3 to have a Sonic Adventure 2-esque opening where Cloud snowboards away from his troubles...
Idk man, maybe I'm being too lenient, but it's just Final Fantasy in the end; if people can love the endings to games like FF8 and FF10, then FF7 Rebirth is like easy mode compared to those two games' fucking insane stories. 10 years from now it'll maybe still hold some level of controversy within broader gaming culture, mostly by people who were told to be mad about it by the internet, but I feel like the consensus will turn out to be mostly positive. I think back to the first time I played the original Final Fantasy VII, there are so many aspects of that game that I found to be really fucking stupid back then, that now I deeply cherish -- I wouldn't have them any other way, in their own right, of course.
At the same time though, I get it if it didn't work for you, cuz it almost didn't work for me, and I might have just gaslit myself into loving it as a coping mechanism (kinda meta when you think about it...). Also why does Chadley talk like he's presenting a Nintendo Direct and why is he a horrible misogynist to his vtuber pokedex daughter, she didn't do anything wrong besides infodump about her special interests...... :(
edit: after reading details from the Rebirth Ultimania that just released and also after rewatching the final scenes several times after the past month, i think the vagueness is intentional from a thematic sense since so much is unclear to cloud himself, the player surrogate
i feel like soooo much "theorycrafting" misses the like
thematic point of a lot of these things. whether the aerith we're seeing at various points in the finale are lifestream aerith or sephiroth hallucination aerith doesn't ultimately matter because it serves two points:
a) to demonstrate's clouds mental and emotional degradation, he is at his lowest point yet. he can't even see what's right in front of him -- aerith has died and tifa desperately needs his support. he is failing himself and the people around him. the only productive thing he ultimately does is pointing out where to go next (but we all know what happens when he gets to northern crater with the black materia in-hand)
b) i think they really did want to give aerith a more meaningful goodbye, even if the rest of the party can't see it. she's made the ultimate sacrifice, and it allows the player to really understand the weight of what she's lost in allowing herself to perish to save the world
also it's not multiverses :) it's just other worlds existing in the lifestream shit, which is cool, and was mostly already clear in retrospect, i think gamer discourse jargon is destroying meaningful art discussion at times. once again, it's final fantasy baby!!
On that note, I really loved the chapter 12 visit to the Gold Saucer; Final Fantasy VII finally has its 90s love ballad and I think compared to its PSX Final Fantasy theme song brethren it's my new favorite (still fucking love Eyes on Me and Melodies of Life tho). Highly recommend aiming for the Tifa date, it's really awkward how non-present she is in the Loveless sequence compared to other characters when you go for Aerith being the princess in the Loveless play, and her little words of encouragement to Aerith before she sings is so cute (me when I see a girl being nice to another girl in a piece of media: she's literally me). I'm happy it's pretty easy to go back and see different variations of the date in new game plus though. Also Cloud and Tifa in the ferris wheel was pretty cute, and he wasn't a butthole for once, which like god damn he fucking SUCKS in this game it kinda rules.
I think my one major gripe is that they added a new sequence to the Gongaga Reactor portion where Cloud essentially puts Tifa in mortal peril, but nobody feels as upset about it as they should? Like maybe I'm just reading the scenes wrong, and it does fit into Tifa's character at this point in the narrative that she would forgive him given some time, but kinda felt like there needed to be a little more exploration on the emotional and physical implications of Cloud's mental degradation and the potential danger the people he cares about face because of that. It's a very cool sequence regardless, which tbh I think is me being biased cuz 50% of it has Tifa as the temporary party leader.
There's other things that I think people are gonna bitch about that I kinda see the value in adding, like Yuffie's presidential assassination attempt is pretty fucking cool imo, very based of her. Roche's little side plot is extremely Final Fantasy and I'm here for it, mostly for the homoeroticism. I love how often Tifa and Aerith have to bitch at Cloud for being a creep/weirdo/insecure prick, it rules. I love how much the characters suck in this game while still feeling like they're just trying their best to do the right thing. Really wish they were more okay with wanton murder of Shinra employees and the other unamibiguously evil wastes of breath that exist in this game's world, but I guess this ain't that kinda story so I'll take what I can get.
So uh, the multiverse, huh? Yeah, it's a tough thing to unpack considering it's not actually all that present within the core narrative, mostly showing up between major events and culminating in the finale. I wanna say first off, I fucking hate multiverse shit; most of the time it's utilized when a story has nowhere else to go or to cheaply introduce fan service. And I won't say that Rebirth's utilization of multiverse theory isn't at least partly the latter, but it's definitely more complicated than that, because like the wisps in Remake, the utilization of alternate "timelines" (I believe they're referred to as worlds in the game itself) due to Sephiroth and Aerith's meddling with the built-in defense mechanisms of the planet that maintained a specific planetary determinism had actual consequences. It's, extremely heady to say the least, but that's Final Fantasy, baby!
I honestly expected that the Zack sections of the game would take up like 30% of the game or something, but I'd estimate it's somewhere closer to between 1% and 5%. And like, another preface here to show how meaningful it is that these sequences mostly worked for me: I do not like Crisis Core. I think it's stinky, it's bad, and I don't really hate Zack as much as I found his story to be really pointless and centered around needless fan service; like if they made a whole game about FF6 Locke's ex-gf or something and the intro involved the magitek armors going to Narshe while Terra's theme played for some reason. But it's whatever I'm over its whole existence, and I kinda like Zack he's a fun little guy, hard to hate him really, and outside of the context of Crisis Core I learned to appreciate him. And while my initial reaction to the ending was, "well, what was the fucking point of the multiverse shit then", it eventually sunk in for me what they were going for by adapting it in this way.
It's a bit of a mystery box, but unlike most mystery boxes (like Lost if it it was only a little bit stupid and not completely stupid), people were able to kind of predict this one correctly! Aerith doesn't die! And I mean, she does die, but I'm kind of cautiously really fucking down with what they're doing by placing Cloud's consciousness between two different worlds essentially, one where he saved Aerith and his actual reality where Aerith dies, and how that specifically adds to both his visible mental degradation and an even deeper inability to cope with the loss of Aerith. At least that's my interpretation since they go out of their way to show that Aerith's "spirit" was noticed by Nanaki in the final scene and that it wasn't an outright hallucination on Cloud's part, which I would've preferred, but I can see what they're cooking here.
I mean, really, I would've preferred none of this extra shit, and the way the leads devs talk about the "shock value" of it all is definitely off-putting, but I think... I think it kinda works? I'm pretty sure Aerith died in the original for pretty similar developmental reasons, and while I def need even more time to really figure out why it ended up working, it definitely left me in kind of malaise that not many other games since like, the ending of Drakengard 3 or something have made me feel for days on end.
But what's especially interesting is that my initial reaction to Aerith's death scene was outright confusion and frustration as it was extremely difficult to parse if she was actually alive or not until I beat the final boss -- but I believe that's kind of the point. Both Cloud and the player are in denial, how much of what happens in the final sequence is real and how much of it is a "fever dream", as Sephiroth puts it, is up to player interpretation. There's some physically established reality to the multiverse shit ofc, but thematically speaking, making the two characters that show up for Cloud in these dream-like sequences be Zack and Aerith fits so fucking well into Cloud's inability to process loss that I feel that was more the intention than simply fan service. Also Biggs and Zack being buddies is kinda cute, but from a utilitarian perspective these sequences help to prove that the dying worlds are indeed really happening, and not necessarily just "Aerith's dreams" or purely in Cloud's mind, even if functionally that's kind of what they end up being since I think (?) they're connected through the lifestream, which up to this point only really Sephiroth and Aerith have been able to navigate.
Again, not really the direction I would've personally chosen, and there are some aspects lost in terms of impact in Aerith's death scene, particularly Cloud's speech (which is more implied by voiceless cutaways within the "Aerith dies" universe) and the individual reactions each character once had are no longer there, which makes sense when you consider there like 7 other dudes there now when last time you just had two other characters in your party during that scene. But it'd be remiss if I didn't mention that a lot has been gained: both Barret and Tifa's reactions are so visceral that it's difficult to outright dismiss this iteration, at least until you're thrown into a 10 phase boss battle, which if that loses you after that point, I guess I can't blame you. I don't think the reality of it all is fully lost in the end though, the game takes ample time to linger on the loss of the party's beloved flower girl, in such a way that I can't really stop thinking about it, even days after completing the game for the first time. The original scene makes me cry every time without fail, but there's something to be said for how much feels truly lost this time, how much more Aerith means to the party and to the player this time around is much more "real" in a way that the original game was only able to suggest in key moments.
Basically, the multiverse is there for fan service to a certain degree, but a) it's not some annoying MCU bullshit like people are gonna inevitably strawman it as, and b) it's more there to create a physical representation of Cloud's grief, and while I think it significantly detracts from the force of nature that Sephiroth could feel like in the original, there's something going on here that feels unabashedly Final Fantasy VII, and not even in the shitty ass Compilation way, just the way it chose to expand on the emotional core of the original without necessarily stepping too far out of the game's already somewhat flimsy physical rules. Like seriously, the reason we love Final Fantasy VII in the first place is because there is no place the game was afraid to go. Not perfect, but it feels special all the same. Also Tifa's reaction to Aerith's death is so fucking raw, and Cloud just smiling away because he has a ghost gf now is just, absolutely fucking gutwrenching, I love it man. I'm glad at least Nanaki is comforting Tifa in the final scene or else I think I'd be emotionally ruined probably. Can't wait for Cloud to be absolutely unbearable for the first 30 hours of part 3!!!
And on that note, Part 3 is probably gonna be the weakest of the trilogy, both in terms of narrative and gameplay, so I'm not too gutted about having to wait 4 years for the finale, but I'm excited nonetheless. I'm not really sure what they're gonna do for the areas you're expected to return to though? Either way, I hope the open world shit is toned a bit overall, more condensed regions similar to Nibelheim and Junon would be nice. There's lots of hints of extra shit that didn't exist in the original's disc 2 and 3, and that kinda makes sense when you stop and consider just how empty disc 2 kinda feels towards the end, particularly compared to disc 1. Really excited for part 3 to have a Sonic Adventure 2-esque opening where Cloud snowboards away from his troubles...
Idk man, maybe I'm being too lenient, but it's just Final Fantasy in the end; if people can love the endings to games like FF8 and FF10, then FF7 Rebirth is like easy mode compared to those two games' fucking insane stories. 10 years from now it'll maybe still hold some level of controversy within broader gaming culture, mostly by people who were told to be mad about it by the internet, but I feel like the consensus will turn out to be mostly positive. I think back to the first time I played the original Final Fantasy VII, there are so many aspects of that game that I found to be really fucking stupid back then, that now I deeply cherish -- I wouldn't have them any other way, in their own right, of course.
At the same time though, I get it if it didn't work for you, cuz it almost didn't work for me, and I might have just gaslit myself into loving it as a coping mechanism (kinda meta when you think about it...). Also why does Chadley talk like he's presenting a Nintendo Direct and why is he a horrible misogynist to his vtuber pokedex daughter, she didn't do anything wrong besides infodump about her special interests...... :(
edit: after reading details from the Rebirth Ultimania that just released and also after rewatching the final scenes several times after the past month, i think the vagueness is intentional from a thematic sense since so much is unclear to cloud himself, the player surrogate
i feel like soooo much "theorycrafting" misses the like
thematic point of a lot of these things. whether the aerith we're seeing at various points in the finale are lifestream aerith or sephiroth hallucination aerith doesn't ultimately matter because it serves two points:
a) to demonstrate's clouds mental and emotional degradation, he is at his lowest point yet. he can't even see what's right in front of him -- aerith has died and tifa desperately needs his support. he is failing himself and the people around him. the only productive thing he ultimately does is pointing out where to go next (but we all know what happens when he gets to northern crater with the black materia in-hand)
b) i think they really did want to give aerith a more meaningful goodbye, even if the rest of the party can't see it. she's made the ultimate sacrifice, and it allows the player to really understand the weight of what she's lost in allowing herself to perish to save the world
also it's not multiverses :) it's just other worlds existing in the lifestream shit, which is cool, and was mostly already clear in retrospect, i think gamer discourse jargon is destroying meaningful art discussion at times. once again, it's final fantasy baby!!
This review contains spoilers
Good but not great. Yuffie's combat is fun and her synergized moves with Sonon do a hefty amount of damage. It would've been cool to be able to control him, but given how short this DLC is and Sonon's fate in the end, it also makes sense why the devs didn't feel it was worth investing time into that.
Sonon looks and sounds like an NPC, so it was difficult to find myself invested in him or his backstory. It just felt like a lazy, basic "Shrina bad" story beat, and when he died I didn't feel too beat up about it. Yuffie is astoundingly annoying, and it was only during the more serious moments of the plot that I liked her because I was spared the obnoxious "I'm quirky and upbeat" anime tropes from her.
Nero embodies everything that's wrong with Nomura and his character designs, and I don't understand why he's got a Hannibal Lecter mask on if he can speak normally and unencumbered with it on. He'd be a lot more effective and off-putting if he were silent, but then we wouldn't get the generic bad-guy-obsessed-with-darkness quotes from him if he was.
The decision to include an unskippable cutscene during the final fight with Nero was baffling and maddening. I can only hope that's not something we can look forward to in Rebirth.
Weak writing aside, the combat was strong, the boss fights were fun, and Fort Condor was surprisingly entertaining and not the slog I expected it to be. I'll probably never play this DLC again, but I think it's worth playing at least once. The near-final scene of Yuffie watching the destruction of Sector 7, and seeing the plate falling topside, was a very good scene and extremely effective. For a moment, Yuffie actually felt like a human and not a copy-and-pasted precocious anime teen whose mouth you want to duct tape shut.
Again, good but not great.
Sonon looks and sounds like an NPC, so it was difficult to find myself invested in him or his backstory. It just felt like a lazy, basic "Shrina bad" story beat, and when he died I didn't feel too beat up about it. Yuffie is astoundingly annoying, and it was only during the more serious moments of the plot that I liked her because I was spared the obnoxious "I'm quirky and upbeat" anime tropes from her.
Nero embodies everything that's wrong with Nomura and his character designs, and I don't understand why he's got a Hannibal Lecter mask on if he can speak normally and unencumbered with it on. He'd be a lot more effective and off-putting if he were silent, but then we wouldn't get the generic bad-guy-obsessed-with-darkness quotes from him if he was.
The decision to include an unskippable cutscene during the final fight with Nero was baffling and maddening. I can only hope that's not something we can look forward to in Rebirth.
Weak writing aside, the combat was strong, the boss fights were fun, and Fort Condor was surprisingly entertaining and not the slog I expected it to be. I'll probably never play this DLC again, but I think it's worth playing at least once. The near-final scene of Yuffie watching the destruction of Sector 7, and seeing the plate falling topside, was a very good scene and extremely effective. For a moment, Yuffie actually felt like a human and not a copy-and-pasted precocious anime teen whose mouth you want to duct tape shut.
Again, good but not great.
This review contains spoilers
Played the first two games for the first time via this collection on the PS5. In a nutshell the first game isn't great and hasn't held up well, while the second is decent but seems like mostly an excuse for spectacle. Bloated games that start off alright and then devolve into overly-convoluted messes that refuse to end, centered around boring antagonists with zero substance. By the end of the second game, I had no desire or patience for the third.
Not really going to spend much time talking about the first game. Incredibly one-dimensional and generic antagonists, terrible chemistry and what feels like a forced relationship between Drake and Elena, clunky gameplay, and the inclusion of zombie-like enemies at the end of the game mostly for the shock value.
It's impressive how great of a leap the series took with the second game, and in only two years. And while it's easy to see why Uncharted 2 (U2) got many of the accolades and praise that it has, I also didn't go into this series with the nostalgia that many people have for it. So while I agree that U2 was ahead of its time and has some genuinely impressive moments, I also think it's overrated in many ways and critically flawed in others.
The story isn't particularly complicated at first: partner with old associates to steal a treasure which contains info on the location of a greater treasure, get double-crossed, one of them has a change of heart and partners with you again to stop the bad guys from getting to the greater treasure. But, as is the nature of Uncharted games, things quickly snowball into a world-threatening race against both time and poorly developed, flat antagonists. Flynn and Lazarević are at least somewhat more interesting (and get significantly more screen time) than the enemies from the first game but are ultimately just Bad Guy Minor and Bad Guy Major.
Writing is this game's biggest weakness, despite the writers clearly thinking very highly of their writing. Off-screen storytelling works when you have writers who know how to do it. This team did not. Despite the events of U2 occurring only two years after the first game, Elena and Drake are already broken up. No explanation for this is ever given, not even after Elena is forced back into the story and spends much of it shitting on Drake or making sarcastic remarks at his expense. There's no sexual tension between them and they spend most of the second half of the game quipping at each other. So when Chloe asks if he loves Elena at the end of the game and Drake all but explicitly says yes, and then he and Elena are back together again, you're left wondering why and why you should care about this relationship that seemed to be long dead in the water until they ran into each other again by chance in Nepal (the absurdity of which I'll address in a minute).
By contrast, Chloe (who is significantly more interesting than Elena) makes so much more sense as a love interest for Drake. She's part of the same treasure hunting underworld that he is, she can physically keep up with him (likely because they've had the same training and she's explored much of the same terrain he has), and she already has romantic history with him. There's so much lost potential in not exploring this relationship further and sticking Drake with humdrum Elena, who seems to harbor more resentment and annoyance toward him than anything resembling love or deep affection. Their relationship is more akin to the dumbbell husband and exasperated wife combo that's dominated most commercials and sitcoms for a couple decades now.
Elena's sudden appearance in Nepal makes little sense. She went from adventure show TV host to serious journalist visiting war torn nations on the ground, mid-firefights, in two short years. Was Elena perhaps a journalist-turned-TV-host-turned-journalist? Don't know! Is Drake the reason why she can now parkour across dangerous chasms and scale walls like he can? Don't know! Why can Elena speak fluent Tibetan? Don't ask questions, just go with it.
Why is Drake sent to explore dangerous terrain with someone who doesn't speak a word of English, with whom he can't effectively communicate? Why did Schaefer lead his men through an insanely treacherous trek through ice caves to a dead-end temple when he could've just killed them at any point on the godforsaken, lonely mountain they were on? How exactly did he figure out what the Cintamani Stone does to men if he never reached Shamballa? Who were the men who got to Shamballa first, how long ago did they find it (hence the fully decomposed skeletons), and why did they have AK-47s (suggesting they were a more modern set of explorers)?
And how did Elena not only survive a grenade blast to the face, but how did her shredded, bloody clothes get repaired and cleaned to factory newness in a remote Tibetan village? Where the heck did Sully come from?
The answer for many is probably, "You're taking this too seriously and it's just a game." My retort to that would be, "Naughty Dog presented a story that it wanted me to be invested in and didn't care that much of it didn't make a lot of sense." And again, while none of them were trying to position themselves as modern-day Hemingways, they did make an effort to write a story more interesting than bangboomexplosions. The problem is that they didn't get enough people outside of the writer's room to ask if it was cohesive.
One of the worst moments and most egregious examples of making me bury my forehead in my hand was when Lazarević attempts to guilt trip Drake for the hundreds of Lazarević's men he's killed, saying Drake is really no better than him. Drake, who has indeed killed hundreds of men in this game alone (to say nothing of the hundreds he killed in the last game), chooses to let the Shamballa guardians beat Lazarević's skull in instead of just shooting him, almost as if to prove Lazarević wrong. As if there's any validity to this stupid, shallow, desperate bit of movie villain writing, and if Drake had dared to blow this dude away like all the other guys, he's be proving Lazarević right.
Let's also not forget how Elena berates herself and Drake for bringing danger to an innocent Tibetan village, how all the murders are their fault, and then instantly drops the lecture and never brings up the topic again.
Awful writing aside, the gameplay in U2 is night and day compared to the first game. Granted, I'm aware that certain mechanics were retooled for these remasters compared to the original releases, but even despite this it was clear that U2 fine tuned much of what made the first game feel so clunky and sluggish. Unfortunately, while it's a much funner game to play, there were too many instances of, "Hey, wouldn't it be fun to fight another five waves of enemies even though you just did that two minutes ago? And have to start from the beginning of the fight if you die?" Along with a lot of instances of, "Oh gee, this door is locked or the way forward is impassable, looks like you have to engage in more spectacle-laden parkour to get around."
Much of the climbing and scaling just felt like an excuse for the player to spend more time admiring the (admittedly outstanding) set pieces of this game. A lot of it could've been cut or streamlined. While some of it was very cool, some of it started to overstay its welcome and contributed to my choice of the word "bloated" to describe the game. U2 began to feel like the friend who doesn't understand when to go home and keeps trying to harangue everyone into just one more drink at one more bar when everyone else just wants to go to bed and already had their fill.
Scaling the train at the beginning of the game was fantastic. Scaling it a second time, exactly the same way, was somewhat effective for narrative purposes but ultimately a time sink. Fighting your way to the front of the moving train had some great, creative gameplay moments. Fighting yet another helicopter while doing it created some genuine moments of frustration.
Is U2 a bad game? Not taken as a whole. It does some things very well and does others very poorly. Is it overrated? In my opinion, yes. The Uncharted series undoubtedly left a mark on the industry and inspired many titles that came after it. But the games ultimately feel like more spectacle than substance, and ask you to care about characters who give you very little reason to care about them.
And after reading the full plot synopsis of U3 and U4, I can't imagine slogging through another two games worth of vapid writing that takes itself very seriously, middling puzzles, and a forced on-again-off-again no-chemistry relationship between Drake and Elena just to end the last game with the possibility of the fifth being led by their Disney Channel reject looking kid.
Really hoped I'd like these games more than I did. In the end, they weren't for me.
Not really going to spend much time talking about the first game. Incredibly one-dimensional and generic antagonists, terrible chemistry and what feels like a forced relationship between Drake and Elena, clunky gameplay, and the inclusion of zombie-like enemies at the end of the game mostly for the shock value.
It's impressive how great of a leap the series took with the second game, and in only two years. And while it's easy to see why Uncharted 2 (U2) got many of the accolades and praise that it has, I also didn't go into this series with the nostalgia that many people have for it. So while I agree that U2 was ahead of its time and has some genuinely impressive moments, I also think it's overrated in many ways and critically flawed in others.
The story isn't particularly complicated at first: partner with old associates to steal a treasure which contains info on the location of a greater treasure, get double-crossed, one of them has a change of heart and partners with you again to stop the bad guys from getting to the greater treasure. But, as is the nature of Uncharted games, things quickly snowball into a world-threatening race against both time and poorly developed, flat antagonists. Flynn and Lazarević are at least somewhat more interesting (and get significantly more screen time) than the enemies from the first game but are ultimately just Bad Guy Minor and Bad Guy Major.
Writing is this game's biggest weakness, despite the writers clearly thinking very highly of their writing. Off-screen storytelling works when you have writers who know how to do it. This team did not. Despite the events of U2 occurring only two years after the first game, Elena and Drake are already broken up. No explanation for this is ever given, not even after Elena is forced back into the story and spends much of it shitting on Drake or making sarcastic remarks at his expense. There's no sexual tension between them and they spend most of the second half of the game quipping at each other. So when Chloe asks if he loves Elena at the end of the game and Drake all but explicitly says yes, and then he and Elena are back together again, you're left wondering why and why you should care about this relationship that seemed to be long dead in the water until they ran into each other again by chance in Nepal (the absurdity of which I'll address in a minute).
By contrast, Chloe (who is significantly more interesting than Elena) makes so much more sense as a love interest for Drake. She's part of the same treasure hunting underworld that he is, she can physically keep up with him (likely because they've had the same training and she's explored much of the same terrain he has), and she already has romantic history with him. There's so much lost potential in not exploring this relationship further and sticking Drake with humdrum Elena, who seems to harbor more resentment and annoyance toward him than anything resembling love or deep affection. Their relationship is more akin to the dumbbell husband and exasperated wife combo that's dominated most commercials and sitcoms for a couple decades now.
Elena's sudden appearance in Nepal makes little sense. She went from adventure show TV host to serious journalist visiting war torn nations on the ground, mid-firefights, in two short years. Was Elena perhaps a journalist-turned-TV-host-turned-journalist? Don't know! Is Drake the reason why she can now parkour across dangerous chasms and scale walls like he can? Don't know! Why can Elena speak fluent Tibetan? Don't ask questions, just go with it.
Why is Drake sent to explore dangerous terrain with someone who doesn't speak a word of English, with whom he can't effectively communicate? Why did Schaefer lead his men through an insanely treacherous trek through ice caves to a dead-end temple when he could've just killed them at any point on the godforsaken, lonely mountain they were on? How exactly did he figure out what the Cintamani Stone does to men if he never reached Shamballa? Who were the men who got to Shamballa first, how long ago did they find it (hence the fully decomposed skeletons), and why did they have AK-47s (suggesting they were a more modern set of explorers)?
And how did Elena not only survive a grenade blast to the face, but how did her shredded, bloody clothes get repaired and cleaned to factory newness in a remote Tibetan village? Where the heck did Sully come from?
The answer for many is probably, "You're taking this too seriously and it's just a game." My retort to that would be, "Naughty Dog presented a story that it wanted me to be invested in and didn't care that much of it didn't make a lot of sense." And again, while none of them were trying to position themselves as modern-day Hemingways, they did make an effort to write a story more interesting than bangboomexplosions. The problem is that they didn't get enough people outside of the writer's room to ask if it was cohesive.
One of the worst moments and most egregious examples of making me bury my forehead in my hand was when Lazarević attempts to guilt trip Drake for the hundreds of Lazarević's men he's killed, saying Drake is really no better than him. Drake, who has indeed killed hundreds of men in this game alone (to say nothing of the hundreds he killed in the last game), chooses to let the Shamballa guardians beat Lazarević's skull in instead of just shooting him, almost as if to prove Lazarević wrong. As if there's any validity to this stupid, shallow, desperate bit of movie villain writing, and if Drake had dared to blow this dude away like all the other guys, he's be proving Lazarević right.
Let's also not forget how Elena berates herself and Drake for bringing danger to an innocent Tibetan village, how all the murders are their fault, and then instantly drops the lecture and never brings up the topic again.
Awful writing aside, the gameplay in U2 is night and day compared to the first game. Granted, I'm aware that certain mechanics were retooled for these remasters compared to the original releases, but even despite this it was clear that U2 fine tuned much of what made the first game feel so clunky and sluggish. Unfortunately, while it's a much funner game to play, there were too many instances of, "Hey, wouldn't it be fun to fight another five waves of enemies even though you just did that two minutes ago? And have to start from the beginning of the fight if you die?" Along with a lot of instances of, "Oh gee, this door is locked or the way forward is impassable, looks like you have to engage in more spectacle-laden parkour to get around."
Much of the climbing and scaling just felt like an excuse for the player to spend more time admiring the (admittedly outstanding) set pieces of this game. A lot of it could've been cut or streamlined. While some of it was very cool, some of it started to overstay its welcome and contributed to my choice of the word "bloated" to describe the game. U2 began to feel like the friend who doesn't understand when to go home and keeps trying to harangue everyone into just one more drink at one more bar when everyone else just wants to go to bed and already had their fill.
Scaling the train at the beginning of the game was fantastic. Scaling it a second time, exactly the same way, was somewhat effective for narrative purposes but ultimately a time sink. Fighting your way to the front of the moving train had some great, creative gameplay moments. Fighting yet another helicopter while doing it created some genuine moments of frustration.
Is U2 a bad game? Not taken as a whole. It does some things very well and does others very poorly. Is it overrated? In my opinion, yes. The Uncharted series undoubtedly left a mark on the industry and inspired many titles that came after it. But the games ultimately feel like more spectacle than substance, and ask you to care about characters who give you very little reason to care about them.
And after reading the full plot synopsis of U3 and U4, I can't imagine slogging through another two games worth of vapid writing that takes itself very seriously, middling puzzles, and a forced on-again-off-again no-chemistry relationship between Drake and Elena just to end the last game with the possibility of the fifth being led by their Disney Channel reject looking kid.
Really hoped I'd like these games more than I did. In the end, they weren't for me.
Days Gone
2019
This review contains spoilers
I put in somewhere around 75 hours into this game and I felt every minute of it. Far too much main story progression is locked behind tedious tasks and mandatory side quests involving random NPCs you've never heard of prior to getting the quest and will never interact with again.
There's not a whole lot to see in the overworld, and what's there is all the same. Small towns, rest stops, and roadside attractions are all littered with Freaks, and once you clear them out you can forage for supplies in the area. Maybe burn out some Freaker nests or find a horde later in the game. Marauder camps follow the same format too: clear them out, find their bunker. Granted, I did enjoy the novelty of occasionally coming across a souvenir for a little world building, but the general lack of variety in things to do started to weigh on the game early on.
But the writing is where Days Gone really suffers. Deacon comes across as less of a biker and more of a guy who really liked Sons of Anarchy and wanted to make that his persona, but is still the guy who gets upset over tweets that offend him and opinions he finds distasteful. Some of the dialogue was so cringe, so insufferable, that I found myself wondering more than once who read those lines and thought, "Now that's quality writing."
The game absolutely didn't deserve some of the ridiculous criticisms it got, like outrage over real biker wedding vows or pearl-clutching over a guy admiring his wife's ass. But it does deserve scrutiny for treating Boozer like a ball and chain for quite a large chunk of the game; for introducing too many key characters and plot points with next to no context or history; and for creating a world filled with people so nasty and miserable that I didn't give a shit what happened to any of them.
Days Gone does a cool thing in exploring the human element of the zombie apocalypse, showing the toll that a day-to-day existence in this world would likely take on the average person, including the protagonist himself. It's a unique concept that would be brilliant in the hands of a solid writing team. Instead, everyone — literally everyone — is bitter, angry, depressed, rude, two-faced, murderous, opportunistic, anxiety-riddled, on-edge, and miserable. At two years into the apocalypse, I'd expect a greater array of emotions and personalities. It's just lazy writing that lacks any of the nuance needed to communicate why I should care about any of these people.
Combat is where this game shines because it's fun. I liked finding progressively stronger melee weapons to craft, and shooting felt good to control. Once hordes are introduced (which I never stopped being terrified of), it felt amazing taking one on while totally maxed out on consumables galore, equipped with crowd-clearing guns. The hordes are a unique, well-done feature.
However, for a game centered around a biker, your bike in this game is more nuisance than asset. Even after multiple critical upgrades to fuel tanks and durability, it still felt like my bike was a sluggish gas-guzzler that couldn't withstand much damage before needing repairs.
I get that there's some demand for a sequel, but it's for the best that a sequel has been written off. I think the ending is as good as it could be for this game's world. Deacon's little family is safe together and ready to rebuild their lives at Lost Lake with their friends. And while O'Brian's final reveal and parting words are cryptic and unsettling, some stories are better suited for that level of ambiguity and uncertainty. I'm just not sure what else there is to say that wouldn't take Deacon on an adventure that would feel way too over-the-top.
Days Gone is perhaps too ambitious for its own good. It wanted to do too much at once and overstayed its welcome, particularly by the time I fled Wizard Island for Lost Lake and realized I was being put on multiple fetch quests involving clearing hordes in order to finally, this time (no, for real this time) reach the end. What the game does right, it does very well. But it's just not enough to outweigh the middling to bad.
(Side note: I first played this game on the PS4 when it came out, then abandoned it. This second attempt to play and finish it was on a PS5 and while the game doesn't have an official PS5 version, the graphical upgrade it gets from the console is incredibly impressive. The game looks amazing, though there are some issues in some cutscenes with textures not rendering properly or at all. Also, sometimes NPCs will suddenly get pulled a few feet to the left or right during battle, like they're puppets on invisible strings being dragged around for whatever reason. But visually, the game for the most part looks amazing on a PS5.)
There's not a whole lot to see in the overworld, and what's there is all the same. Small towns, rest stops, and roadside attractions are all littered with Freaks, and once you clear them out you can forage for supplies in the area. Maybe burn out some Freaker nests or find a horde later in the game. Marauder camps follow the same format too: clear them out, find their bunker. Granted, I did enjoy the novelty of occasionally coming across a souvenir for a little world building, but the general lack of variety in things to do started to weigh on the game early on.
But the writing is where Days Gone really suffers. Deacon comes across as less of a biker and more of a guy who really liked Sons of Anarchy and wanted to make that his persona, but is still the guy who gets upset over tweets that offend him and opinions he finds distasteful. Some of the dialogue was so cringe, so insufferable, that I found myself wondering more than once who read those lines and thought, "Now that's quality writing."
The game absolutely didn't deserve some of the ridiculous criticisms it got, like outrage over real biker wedding vows or pearl-clutching over a guy admiring his wife's ass. But it does deserve scrutiny for treating Boozer like a ball and chain for quite a large chunk of the game; for introducing too many key characters and plot points with next to no context or history; and for creating a world filled with people so nasty and miserable that I didn't give a shit what happened to any of them.
Days Gone does a cool thing in exploring the human element of the zombie apocalypse, showing the toll that a day-to-day existence in this world would likely take on the average person, including the protagonist himself. It's a unique concept that would be brilliant in the hands of a solid writing team. Instead, everyone — literally everyone — is bitter, angry, depressed, rude, two-faced, murderous, opportunistic, anxiety-riddled, on-edge, and miserable. At two years into the apocalypse, I'd expect a greater array of emotions and personalities. It's just lazy writing that lacks any of the nuance needed to communicate why I should care about any of these people.
Combat is where this game shines because it's fun. I liked finding progressively stronger melee weapons to craft, and shooting felt good to control. Once hordes are introduced (which I never stopped being terrified of), it felt amazing taking one on while totally maxed out on consumables galore, equipped with crowd-clearing guns. The hordes are a unique, well-done feature.
However, for a game centered around a biker, your bike in this game is more nuisance than asset. Even after multiple critical upgrades to fuel tanks and durability, it still felt like my bike was a sluggish gas-guzzler that couldn't withstand much damage before needing repairs.
I get that there's some demand for a sequel, but it's for the best that a sequel has been written off. I think the ending is as good as it could be for this game's world. Deacon's little family is safe together and ready to rebuild their lives at Lost Lake with their friends. And while O'Brian's final reveal and parting words are cryptic and unsettling, some stories are better suited for that level of ambiguity and uncertainty. I'm just not sure what else there is to say that wouldn't take Deacon on an adventure that would feel way too over-the-top.
Days Gone is perhaps too ambitious for its own good. It wanted to do too much at once and overstayed its welcome, particularly by the time I fled Wizard Island for Lost Lake and realized I was being put on multiple fetch quests involving clearing hordes in order to finally, this time (no, for real this time) reach the end. What the game does right, it does very well. But it's just not enough to outweigh the middling to bad.
(Side note: I first played this game on the PS4 when it came out, then abandoned it. This second attempt to play and finish it was on a PS5 and while the game doesn't have an official PS5 version, the graphical upgrade it gets from the console is incredibly impressive. The game looks amazing, though there are some issues in some cutscenes with textures not rendering properly or at all. Also, sometimes NPCs will suddenly get pulled a few feet to the left or right during battle, like they're puppets on invisible strings being dragged around for whatever reason. But visually, the game for the most part looks amazing on a PS5.)
Resident Evil 4
2023
This was one of the remakes we got in 2023 of already-perfect games that, in my opinion, didn't need remakes. That being said, this version of RE4 didn't depart so much from the original that it was either unrecognizable or lost sight of what made the original so good. It took some of the very best parts of RE4 and amplified them, giving them just enough newness to feel fresh while still giving fans of the original the experiences they were looking for.
I do think it's a shame that the devs tried to play this one straight as opposed to leaning into the campiness of the original, but at the same time I appreciate their willingness to let Leon get in his goofy one-liners. The game would've felt off without them.
Definitely not a fan of the breakable knife. It makes sense realistically, but there's plenty in this game that's far from realistic so the addition of this feature just felt lame and unnecessary. But given that it was one the few things I had to complain about in this remake, the game could've done a heck of a lot worse. Other additions, like crafting ammo, I was neutral on; didn't hate it, didn't love it, but I think I'm leaning more positive on it because I felt a little less strapped for ammo than in the past.
I was still terrified the entire time. I was still dreading my first encounter with the Regeneradors on the island (whose faces are even more frightening now). The opening sequence in the village is even more unsettling this time due to the incredible visuals and details in the environment. Nearly all of the very best things about RE4 are still here, and I had a ton of fun with this game.
I do think it's a shame that the devs tried to play this one straight as opposed to leaning into the campiness of the original, but at the same time I appreciate their willingness to let Leon get in his goofy one-liners. The game would've felt off without them.
Definitely not a fan of the breakable knife. It makes sense realistically, but there's plenty in this game that's far from realistic so the addition of this feature just felt lame and unnecessary. But given that it was one the few things I had to complain about in this remake, the game could've done a heck of a lot worse. Other additions, like crafting ammo, I was neutral on; didn't hate it, didn't love it, but I think I'm leaning more positive on it because I felt a little less strapped for ammo than in the past.
I was still terrified the entire time. I was still dreading my first encounter with the Regeneradors on the island (whose faces are even more frightening now). The opening sequence in the village is even more unsettling this time due to the incredible visuals and details in the environment. Nearly all of the very best things about RE4 are still here, and I had a ton of fun with this game.
Super Mario RPG
2023
This review contains spoilers
The original Mario RPG is one of my favorite games of all time. It's very near and dear to my heart and didn't need a remake, in my opinion — it's perfection.
But because I love the original so much, I had to play the remake, and while I was pleasantly surprised and really enjoyed my time with it, there are some changes that weren't great.
We'll start with the bad so we can end on a positive note. The new music is awful. It doesn't hold a candle to the original soundtrack, which is just incredible. The new tracks are all too grand, too big, trying too hard to sound "better," and the recordings sound so distant and far away. While I briefly sampled every new track whenever I'd get to a new area, I would quickly switch the music back to the original OST every time.
The various naming and localization changes are strange and unnecessary, and eliminate some of the charm. Frog Sage is so boring and sterile; the same can be said of Cinder Toad compared to Hinopio. That's on top of weird edits, like changing the description of the Fire Dress from "a determined woman's dress" to "a determined-person's dress" (no need for the added hyphen there, either).
The other changes, however, I'm fine with. The triple attacks are cool, and it's neat that different party combinations unlock new attacks. I liked the quality of life changes, like enabling Mario to run by default instead of having to hold down a button to make him run. Some people might find that the splash damage of some attacks makes combat too easy, and I can respect that criticism, but perhaps the answer to that are the random "special enemies" that appear to increase the challenge.
While on the subject of challenge, I will say that the new post-game boss rematches were fun, but definitely a spike in difficulty. Some were certainly more difficult than Smithy. So be prepared to possibly have to do a bit of grinding to take on some of them. One change Nintendo absolutely should've implemented is the ability to skip dialogue or intros for some of these bosses; you'll inevitably have to fight some of them more than once, and having to sit there mashing A to try to skip through dialogue just to start the fight again is a major annoyance.
Overall, I think this was a fine remake that's better if you don't hold it up against the original too much. That's such a high bar to clear, and this game has plenty of great things about it that it makes it perhaps a bit unfair to constantly compare it to one of the best games to ever grace a Nintendo console. And yes, it is a remake so to some degree you HAVE to compare it to the original, but this is all just to say that it's a fun game on its own and while it can never be as amazing as the SNES title, it's a great game that I really enjoyed.
But because I love the original so much, I had to play the remake, and while I was pleasantly surprised and really enjoyed my time with it, there are some changes that weren't great.
We'll start with the bad so we can end on a positive note. The new music is awful. It doesn't hold a candle to the original soundtrack, which is just incredible. The new tracks are all too grand, too big, trying too hard to sound "better," and the recordings sound so distant and far away. While I briefly sampled every new track whenever I'd get to a new area, I would quickly switch the music back to the original OST every time.
The various naming and localization changes are strange and unnecessary, and eliminate some of the charm. Frog Sage is so boring and sterile; the same can be said of Cinder Toad compared to Hinopio. That's on top of weird edits, like changing the description of the Fire Dress from "a determined woman's dress" to "a determined-person's dress" (no need for the added hyphen there, either).
The other changes, however, I'm fine with. The triple attacks are cool, and it's neat that different party combinations unlock new attacks. I liked the quality of life changes, like enabling Mario to run by default instead of having to hold down a button to make him run. Some people might find that the splash damage of some attacks makes combat too easy, and I can respect that criticism, but perhaps the answer to that are the random "special enemies" that appear to increase the challenge.
While on the subject of challenge, I will say that the new post-game boss rematches were fun, but definitely a spike in difficulty. Some were certainly more difficult than Smithy. So be prepared to possibly have to do a bit of grinding to take on some of them. One change Nintendo absolutely should've implemented is the ability to skip dialogue or intros for some of these bosses; you'll inevitably have to fight some of them more than once, and having to sit there mashing A to try to skip through dialogue just to start the fight again is a major annoyance.
Overall, I think this was a fine remake that's better if you don't hold it up against the original too much. That's such a high bar to clear, and this game has plenty of great things about it that it makes it perhaps a bit unfair to constantly compare it to one of the best games to ever grace a Nintendo console. And yes, it is a remake so to some degree you HAVE to compare it to the original, but this is all just to say that it's a fun game on its own and while it can never be as amazing as the SNES title, it's a great game that I really enjoyed.
Do you know what a crane is? Not the bird, the machine. They're operated via ropes, chains and/or pulleys, and at their core they’re actually composed of several smaller machines working in tandem.. Most of the time they're used for carrying heavy loads, and they can get pretty tall. Naturally, the saying 'the bigger they are, the harder they fall' applies. You can reinforce them with pneumatic stabilizers, supports, counterweights and all that jazz, needing more and more as it gets taller. Unfortunately the reinforcement you can offer is limited, meanwhile the loads and height are theoretically infinite. Eventually, it'll fall over, or something will break.
In many ways, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (WOTR from here on in) is a crane, and the load is Owlcat's lofty ambitions. Even as I'm writing this, I'm not sure whether the game succeeds in hoisting them high or not.
There's a lot to this game. Even if we just spoke about the story in a vacuum, there are an incredible amount of plot threads - major and minor - running through and parallel to the main story that I can't really summarise them in a snappy tl;dr. Factoring in story-altering Mythic Paths, side quests, companion story arcs and all the mechanics? We'd be here for a while. At the time of this review my hour count is around 100~. That's not repeated playthroughs, it's just one, and I am well aware I missed a lot of content.
The first thing you see upon clicking "New Game" and selecting a difficulty is an infinitely complex character creator. This is both an omen of what's to come, and a filter. It seems simple at first, merely asking you for a portrait and race... Then there's everything else. Merely selecting something as simple as "Paladin" brings up a million options: What's your domain? Deity? Pick some feats. What's your character's background? Are they a normal member of their race or something else? Distribute some stat points, now some skill points. These aren't complaints, the complexity is great. There's a good vessel here for roleplaying and once you're familiar with the system the creation process is super intuitive.
There... are two problems with both of those - the roleplaying and the complexity - that we'll get to later. You may also notice that I specified "once you're familiar", and that's when the game's first real downside comes in: This game is not newcomer friendly.
While the game mercifully offers respecs for a fair price, the system is far from intuitive. For starters, levelling up does not immediately level up your chosen class. No, you have to pick the class again to level it up. This seems simple, right? And it is!
The problem begins to rear its head when multiclassing comes into play, and the game begins bringing up concepts such as Caster Level.
See, unlike in many other RPGs with classes/jobs/vocations/what have you, multi-classing is remarkably easy. Merely pick another class on level up, right?
When you read the phrase ‘caster level’, your assumption may be that it refers to ‘level of the caster’. I did too, and I’ve spoken to many people who made the same mistake. No, ‘caster level’ specifically refers to the level of the class from which a spell is derived.
Once you understand this, it’s clear as day. Until then… You may be tempted to put 1-3 levels into Sorcerer while playing as a Paladin to get some extra damage spells. You can do this, nothing is stopping you, but those spells will eternally be weak if they scale with caster level. Compounding this is the exceptionally low level cap: Only 20 levels are available to you, and they’re easily wasted while dicking around.
Again, the complexity on display is not a bad thing, and respecs are cheap - especially with how much loot you get. It’s just part of a larger issue with this game and onboarding, but we can talk about that when I cover gameplay.
As for the questing, I’ll say this: There are many games on Steam tagged as ‘choices matter’. Some of them in jest, some of them sincerely. Having played many of them, and many other games on other platforms/storefronts that purport to have ‘meaningful choices’:
Wrath of the Righteous is perhaps one of the only games I can think of where a lot of your choices have tangible, meaningful impacts on the story. Not just the main story, but side stories too. Even as late as the finale, things were popping up in response to dialogue choices I’d picked 40-50 hours prior.
This is not the modern RPG style of ‘choices matter’ either. You are not free to say and do whatever until the designated MAKE CHOICE prompts appear. Most things you do will come back to haunt you - for better or worse - later on. These appear early in the game and just keep going. An overarching theme of the game is that while your control over your own destiny is debatable, the consequences of your decisions are yours alone. Hell, NPCs even comment on your deity if it’s applicable.
Perhaps most impressively is that many of these choices are not binary, and oftentimes the player is given the choice to bail on something. Indeed, my pursuit of Lichdom in the main story was met with apprehension and a not-insignificant number of my allies begged me to stop as I cast off my humanity and defiled the dead. The option to bail was always there, yet I chose not to take it anyway. When the option was no longer there, and I felt horrified by the scorn thrust upon me or the consequences of my inhumanity, all I could think was…
I chose this.
The plot’s general outline is the same for everyone: The Worldwound has been dumping out demons for a century and you have to solve the issue. What really sets WOTR apart from other games and especially other RPGs is how much control you have over defining your character’s motives. Are they doing this as a bare-fanged power grab? Are they a zealot? Will they take extreme measures and cast off their humanity to win? How many ‘By any means necessary’ declarations do they have in them? Or are they forced into it?
The decision is in your hands. This is not The Witcher or FFXIV or your favourite story where the protagonist’s motivations are handed to you on a platter with no choice for a different serving.
Accentuating the story is the Mythic Path system; having received a mysterious but malleable grand power from an unknown source, you’re granted the choice to shape it how you will. These have an impact both on your character as a mechanical entity, but also the story. The power afforded to you and the shape it takes can act as a key, and like in real life not all keys fit all locks.
I played a Lich, so I can’t comment on the others, but I thoroughly enjoyed the personal story I witnessed. Playing as a Neutral Evil character, I decided to forsake my humanity and anything else in pursuit of closing the Worldwound. At first it was simply following the course of pragmatism, but eventually that wasn’t enough. Curious research gave way to new goals and with those came opportunities to command the dead.
But this is not Dragon Age: Inquisition, and the opposition are not idle. As they became more dangerous, I was met with no choice but to rise and meet the challenge. My allies whispered in my ear and begged me to reconsider, imploring me to stop what I was doing and hold onto my humanity.
I did not heed their advice.
The final act of the game was not triumphant. Iomedae’s glorious crusade had become a march of the dead, and many of my Good aligned allies deserted. The titular righteousness had deserted, and there were more corpses in my army than mortals by the time the credits rolled. Indeed, even party members deserted me for this. Many of whom I cared a great deal for, and enjoyed the company of.
By the end of the game, my allies were amoral fools, soulless pragmatists, and the eternal silence of death hanging over my base. This was both my punishment and my reward. I said up above that I was met with no choice, but the game was not going to give me the luxury of holding onto that particular delusion; my choices led me there. I, at every point, had the chance to stop.
WOTR’s strength in writing, however, comes from the characters more than the overall plot. Surprisingly for a game with a plot on such a grand scale, it is primarily driven by the machinations of its cast. This game reaches into topics I didn’t expect from an AA game and handles them with surprising nuance. Indeed, the characters themselves are multifaceted and people I’d dismissed as ‘boring’ or ‘one-dimensional’ turned out to be… well, not. Motivations and beliefs are laid out quite clearly, either upfront or through breadcrumbs, and by the end of the game only one party member (Nenio) struck me as shallow or one-dimensional.
Perhaps this game’s biggest strength is that it avoids a pitfall many other party-based games stumble into and never climb out of: There is no ‘The [Trait] Guy’. I’ve been playing RPGs - CRPGs in particular - since I had my own computer, and even the best of them have a party that can be boiled down to “the pragmatic one”, “the just one”, “the wildcard”, etc etc. Whenever those characters broke from their established ‘role’ it was always an out of character moment meant to show the gravity of the situation.
There’s none of that here. Characters you usually agree with will oftentimes make a statement or suggestion you find abominable, and sometimes the party members you think are assholes will be right. This is only compounded by interactions between party members, wherein the dynamics and ideals clash in a way that feels natural. I am being deliberately vague so as to avoid spoilers, but around act 3 the game truly took me off guard by having me go “Ah shit, [party member I hate] is actually dead on the money” a few times.
This luxury is not exclusive to the party, with many of the main and supporting cast being just as fleshed out. If a character has a portrait, they’re guaranteed to bring nuances and surprises to the table, but even many of the ‘faceless’ NPCs are nothing to scoff at. While the game does have its one-note characters, it’s rare for the more substantial storylines to feature tropey characters and the vast majority of the game’s story is spent dealing with characters who are a realistic composition of beliefs, traumas, ideals and neuroses.
Except Nenio. Fuck Nenio. Worst CRPG character.
We need to talk about Nenio. Not her as a character, but what she represents.
Do you remember my question about cranes? Well, I asked it to get you thinking about the process of lifting weights, and how you just cannot lift certain things without the mechanism - or you - starting to buckle. It’s a basic application of the laws of physics
Yeah, well, WOTR is a crane and it’s trying to lift Owlcat’s ambitions. For as much as I just gushed over the game, it’s definitely straining to hold them aloft. This game aspires to be and do so much that it was impossible for it to pull it all off cleanly.
One thing WOTR glaringly aspires to be is funny. It’s why I mentioned Nenio; she’s emblematic of the issue, often torpedoing serious scenes with annoying quips and dragging other (better) characters into her irritating one-note gimmick. That she’s a genuinely unpleasant person without any justification does not help.
Unfortunately, Nenio is not the only part of this problem. I’m not a particularly big fan of stories trying to be funny in the middle of a setpiece with heavy gravitas and a serious tone - it’s why later Final Fantasy XIV content irked me - and this game does it a lot. Not quite as often as FFXIV or, god forbid, Marvel movies, but there were more than a few eye-rollers. It’s particularly grating to be in the middle of a fairly grim, serious dungeon only for that one whimsical song to start playing and inform me that I’m going to bear witness to some utterly banal attempts at humor.
Perhaps the worst part is that WOTR is a funny game, but it’s often in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments and it rarely occurs when the game is trying. Interactions between party members have more intentional and accidental humor than most of the designed Funny Scenes.
…You know, to be entirely honest for a moment: I’ve been writing this review for two days. It’s the 4th of June right now and I finished it near about the 1st. In all this time, I’ve been putting off talking about the gameplay. As a general rule worth keeping in mind; I don’t like being unceasingly negative to things that don’t deserve it. It’s easier for me to rag endlessly on Warframe or Daemon x Machina or Daemonhunters or MASS Builder or just… any game that’s very quantifiably bad through and through. But for works clearly made with passion, love and an earnest ambition to be amazing, I struggle.
And… so does WOTR, once you look past the writing.
‘Adaptation’ is a word described by the Cambridge Dictionary as meaning:
the process of changing to suit different conditions:
In the context of videogames, adaptation often means taking a plot or mechanic from another medium. Tabletop games, as massive mechanical behemoths that have a few hundred interlocking systems regardless of rulebook, are often subject to this to avoid players being overwhelmed or turned off by the complexity. When Shadowrun was adapted to videogame format with the Shadowrun Returns trilogy, much was excised and cut down for the sake of a better videogame experience. When Warhammer 40k made its close-to-tabletop debut with Gladius, naturally much was trimmed down or streamlined both to prevent these issues appearing and to keep the game from being ‘outdated’ as newer editions come out.
With this is in mind, I would not say WOTR has ‘adapted’ the Pathfinder systems. Rather, it has adopted them nearly wholesale and merely provided a GUI for many actions. This, in a vacuum, is not a bad thing. There is a critical lack of CRPGs that’re willing to hit you with complex systems, often going for more palatable one so as to prevent the onboarding process alienating people.
No, the problem comes from how the system interacts with the more videogame-y numbers.
Let’s take combat spellcasting for example. In XCOM or Shadowrun or Divinity Original Sin, you merely click it and the game resolves the calculation.
Here? We have dice rolls, the staple of any tabletop.
There are a few dice rolls…
There are a lot of dice rolls.
When casting a spell, first you must roll to make a concentration check and then roll for the spell to succeed, which is two rolls to begin with. Then you must roll to actually hit, which is a roll calculated against a target’s armor class and spell resistance - so two more separate rolls, with the latter being affected by the caster’s spell penetration. From there, targets will make a fortitude and/or will save to resist further effects. Any of these can fail in sequence, and every single roll is affected by some other stat.
The overreliance of Dice Rolls is, in itself, not bad. The actual problem is how many additional bonuses are heaped on, owing to the fact that this is a videogame which can deal with far bigger numbers than a D20 can. “Characters make saving rolls'' wouldn't be an issue if enemies did not regularly appear with AC stats of around 50~ or higher and had access to feats and traits that give them bonuses to saving throws.
Perhaps in an admission of their own stat bloat, the devs quietly sneak you armor and shields with sizeable AC ratings early on. I wish I could say ‘these are just boons, you don’t really need them’ but the game spikes hard and fast. It is perhaps an unstated rule of videogames that any scenario where a token force defends against a swarm be populated by trash mobs, but WOTR offers you no such mercy and makes sure to dump a horde on you every now and then - with one such encounter taking place about 6 hours in.
In other RPGs (beside looters), minmaxing is seen as a self-imposed diversion and rarely considered mandatory for the main path. The focus is, after all, on playing a role. In WOTR, it’s considered standard, at least on Normal and above. This isn’t a game where you can safely dick around, pick some traits that seem fun, and experiment in the course of a playthrough. No, you have to commit or else you’ll eventually wall against an enemy with an AC/deflect value you simply cannot surpass.
In other RPGs, some options are simply “not-good” relative to the overall difficulty. In WOTR, some options are just outright bad and it can take a few hours of playtime to realise something’s off. Branching off of this, while the aforementioned class system does let you multiclass with ease, it is in fact a horrible idea to ‘try out’ other classes without knowing what you’re doing. XP is at a premium in this game and there’s only 20 levels, with a lot of classes having very powerful 20th level abilities.
Let’s say you’re a Sorcerer, and you decide that being squishy in melee is dull and that you want a level in Fighter to get a weapon feat. Valid on paper, and maybe even on the tabletop, but consider: The game expects you to be getting stronger on an upward level most of the time. In taking a level in Fighter, your caster level is not raising and you’re not getting any new spells. While you do have access to the weapon you chose, you have no additional weapon feats to augment it and having spent a few levels in Sorcerer means you’re likely missing out on that sweet Basic Attack Bonus and the bonus damage from Strength - a dump stat for Sorcerers.
The cruellest part of this system is that sometimes, multi-classing only a few levels into something is a valid choice. Referred to as ‘dipping’, many build guides will point you towards picking up 1-3 levels in something like Mutagen Warrior for the sake of a hefty buff. But, as with most of this game, it can only be known ahead of time.
This further extends to your party members. ‘Canon’ party members (i.e, provided by the story and not made via the mercenary system) are best left on autolevel, as trying to experiment with them will only continue the cycle of hurting. It is unfortunately a bad idea to build for a versatile party, with it often being a safer choice to simply make everyone a monoclass specialist and then rotate them out as needed.
The sole exception are party members who come with multiple classes; most notably Regill, who (as per the Hellknight lore) starts with levels in Fighter Armiger and Hellknight and a proficiency in the gnome hooked hammer. Refuse to respec them at your peril.
So we have stat bloat, restrictive class building, endless dice rolls that can make combat feel miserable and sharp/sudden difficulty spikes. Surely there can’t be more?
Sigh… Alright, let’s talk about weapons and feats for a second. At the start of the game, you’ll be given the option to pick a feat. Among these is Weapon Proficiency, and clicking it unfurls a MASSIVE list of weapon types. Everything from simple shit like spears and longswords to exotic weapons like curved elven blades, the estoc, and many more.
If you’ve played other CRPGs that let you pick a weapon archetype, you might think that speccing into one in character creation will simply give you one of those weapons, right?
Wrong, unfortunately. You get proficiency in that weapon type but are otherwise stuck with the pre-generated loot. Which, to your potential dismay, will likely not conclude any of the more exotic weapon types. If you spec into Longswords or Bows or Spears or anything common you’ll reap instant results, but good luck if you picked an Elven Curved Blade feat.
I bring this up because it really exemplifies WOTR’s habit of letting you make explicitly wrong gameplay choices that actively hamper the experience. These options aren’t inherently bad, and certainly serve metagaming/repeat players, but for a first timer they’re blatant traps.
Traps… traps… traps… Alright let’s talk about character select forcing.
Almost every major level has traps in them. Traps are disarmed by characters with high Trickery, and like every other stat in this game, the requirements to safely disarm them skyrocket over time. Unless you yourself have Trickery as a class skill, you will inevitably be forced into bringing a character who does have it. You might think this is common sense, and it is!
But you only have 6 party member slots. Including yourself, that’s 5. Add in a trap disarmer, that’s 4. Ah, but you absolutely need a dedicated healer as well. We’re down to 3… God, you need a tank as well, so that’s 2 left. You will inevitably need a caster as well to deal with enemies who are nigh unbeatable in melee, so you have one free slot left-
Wait, do I have ranged attacks? Ah shit.
Early in the game you’re given Seelah, a Paladin who will in most paths stay with you. She can tank a lot of damage, hits respectably, and carries a number of useful buffs and debuffs if you keep her as a Paladin. You get Camellia soon after, and she’s a ‘dodge tank’ who can be useful but will otherwise melt to a well placed hit. But hey, at least she sticks around!
A short while later, you’re given Lann or Wenduag. Strong physical ranged attackers who can burst down anything. After them, you’ll likely run into Woljif who is both a rogue and someone with high trickery. A few random events later and Nenio (regrettably) appears as a dedicated offensive caster. Blah blah blah, Daeran and Ember appear as your healers.
I tell you this because to me it is the game admitting that you shouldn’t really bother on a varied or interesting party and instead opt for a rigidly defined one. You can try to get by without the archetypes I listed above, but good luck doing that. There are only so many potions, scrolls and lockpicks in the game world, yet spells and trickery are functionally infinite.
Everything I listed above is a contributing factor to the game’s worst part: Combat length. My god, fights are long.
This isn’t so bad in the early game, where the more methodical pacing of Act 1 leads to fewer fights overall. Trash fights are quick, and more substantial ones are long but not annoyingly so. Unfortunately this goes out the window with Act 1’s final area, which features a gauntlet of fights against decently strong enemies and each fight lasts a while. To the point where it was surprising to find the final fight only took a few minutes, but in this sole instance there is a good plot reason.
As it happens, Act 1’s finale was an omen for the future. WOTR has an incredible amount of combat, and as early as Act 2 even trash fights begin to take a lot of time. Due to stat bloat, a surge in enemy counts, and the introduction of enemies with resistances that often nullify a certain party member, they can DRAG. Unlike say, Shadowrun: Hong Kong (to use one example), the number of fights per area is rarely if ever in the singledigits. Main story levels have a nasty habit of throwing you into a fight and then placing another one about a hallway away… Like six or seven times. By Act 3 I was already sick of fighting, having done too many fights that took an age even when they were against ‘trash’ enemies (who still had high AC and access to debilitating spells). This game isn't short, my first run took about 105 hours and that's with missing a lot.
So, after deciding that I simply hated one aspect of the entire game, I lowered the difficulty and switched to auto mode. It just stopped being fun past a certain point, and I was reassured that Acts 4 and 5 are much worse on that front. This game is merciful in that regard, you can turn off or dial down things that irritate you.
Except resting, a mechanic which I grew to hate so much that I nearly got into modding just to remove it.
As you adventure through WOTR’s world, you accumulate fatigue and become… well, Fatigued. Continue further and you become Exhausted. Both debuffs inflict major stat penalties, and annoyingly they accrue uncomfortably fast. You can rest for free to cleanse them, but doing so builds up Abyssal corruption which… debuffs you significantly, and then kills you. Thus demanding a rest at a safe zone.
Your mileage may vary, but I just can’t stand this system. On such a huge world map, it feels as though it serves little purpose than to arbitrarily restrict exploration. It only gets worse in Acts 3 and 5 - which see a significant expansion to the explorable space on the map - and it felt like I was becoming exhausted every few steps. This sadly isn’t something you can just power through, either; Exhausted debuffs most major stats by -6. Combine that with stat bloat and it’ll just turn your entire party into invalids.
Lastly on the gameplay side, there’s the Crusade mode. Some would described it as a poor man’s Heroes Of Might And Magic, and they’d be right. I understand the developer’s intent, they clearly wanted you as a crusader to actually partake in the crusade, but the execution is just awful. While it supplements lots of other systems (including the fantastic writing, which it provides more of), the actual gameplay of Crusades is a boring numbers-game version of chess where you have little meaningful choice beyond “Spam archers and a tanky melee unit, have your General dump spells on the enemy”. This does not get better in Act 5.
It’s rather telling that while the use of mods to skip certain elements (like rest) is contentious, the most common response to “I don’t like Crusades” is “Get a mod to skip the fights”. There is an option to automate it in the base game, but this locks you out of research projects, several powerful items and even the resolution to some character arcs. It’s a bad option, don’t pick it.
Much of my vitriol for Crusades comes from how interwoven they are with the rest of the game. There is some exceptional writing in the Council events but to get them requires Crusade progress. Want to explore the map? Your Crusaders have to clear the way first. Want to progress the story? Yup, Crusades. Because of the aforementioned issues with the built-in Crusade auto-mode, and the sheer amount of the map gated off by Demons, this truly is a mechanic you cannot safely avoid engaging with safely without mods.
It’s a shame, too, because the actual Crusade in the story leads to some of its best bits. Even with a demigod at the helm, you’re not immune to logistics, morale and politics. How you navigate those minefields can influence the outcome of character arcs and even the ending, to say nothing of how enjoyable the council discussions on each issue are. They even react to your mythic path, like the Lich path featuring events involving necromancers, vampires and followers of Urgathoa. I just wish they were attached to an actually enjoyable system.
This review begins with an analogy about cranes, and the reason my mind homed in on that particular comparison is because cranes are the sum of their parts. One part being out of line or faulty can (literally) bring everything else crashing down. WOTR is an incredibly ambitious game, probably the most ambitious CRPG ever made and released, but… I don’t actually know if it can support its own ambitions.
Again, the writing and characterization (not Nenio) are fucking phenomenal, and mythic paths are obscenely cool. The voice acting is solid (except Nenio) and the game does an excellent job at making you feel like part of a well-realized world. It is perhaps one of the most painstakingly accurate depictions of a tabletop system outside of actual tabletop sims like Talisman or Tabletop Simulator, and…
I just hate actually playing it, you know? The combat is good in theory, but it’s a huge drag and it felt like my punishment for chasing the story. The writing itself started to feel like a reward for suffering.
“Congrats on suffering through like 9 Shadow Volaries and cultists who have a ton of crit-heavy weapons, here’s a great rumination on whether power as an entity can be inherently good or evil.”
Ultimately, I still recommend WOTR. Mods and difficulty settings can alleviate most of your grievances, and the writing is worth whatever unavoidable grievances you may have. Hell, you might even like the things I hate! I’ll probably replay it in the future because my curiosity about the other mythic paths outweighs my aversion to the gameplay. I wish I could’ve praised the story and writing more, but there’s a lot to spoil on both the quest and character fronts.
WOTR is a bright shining star of CRPGs and it’ll be hard to top it in the future, but like every bright light… that sure is a dark shadow over there, huh- No wait, it’s just Nenio.
In many ways, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (WOTR from here on in) is a crane, and the load is Owlcat's lofty ambitions. Even as I'm writing this, I'm not sure whether the game succeeds in hoisting them high or not.
There's a lot to this game. Even if we just spoke about the story in a vacuum, there are an incredible amount of plot threads - major and minor - running through and parallel to the main story that I can't really summarise them in a snappy tl;dr. Factoring in story-altering Mythic Paths, side quests, companion story arcs and all the mechanics? We'd be here for a while. At the time of this review my hour count is around 100~. That's not repeated playthroughs, it's just one, and I am well aware I missed a lot of content.
The first thing you see upon clicking "New Game" and selecting a difficulty is an infinitely complex character creator. This is both an omen of what's to come, and a filter. It seems simple at first, merely asking you for a portrait and race... Then there's everything else. Merely selecting something as simple as "Paladin" brings up a million options: What's your domain? Deity? Pick some feats. What's your character's background? Are they a normal member of their race or something else? Distribute some stat points, now some skill points. These aren't complaints, the complexity is great. There's a good vessel here for roleplaying and once you're familiar with the system the creation process is super intuitive.
There... are two problems with both of those - the roleplaying and the complexity - that we'll get to later. You may also notice that I specified "once you're familiar", and that's when the game's first real downside comes in: This game is not newcomer friendly.
While the game mercifully offers respecs for a fair price, the system is far from intuitive. For starters, levelling up does not immediately level up your chosen class. No, you have to pick the class again to level it up. This seems simple, right? And it is!
The problem begins to rear its head when multiclassing comes into play, and the game begins bringing up concepts such as Caster Level.
See, unlike in many other RPGs with classes/jobs/vocations/what have you, multi-classing is remarkably easy. Merely pick another class on level up, right?
When you read the phrase ‘caster level’, your assumption may be that it refers to ‘level of the caster’. I did too, and I’ve spoken to many people who made the same mistake. No, ‘caster level’ specifically refers to the level of the class from which a spell is derived.
Once you understand this, it’s clear as day. Until then… You may be tempted to put 1-3 levels into Sorcerer while playing as a Paladin to get some extra damage spells. You can do this, nothing is stopping you, but those spells will eternally be weak if they scale with caster level. Compounding this is the exceptionally low level cap: Only 20 levels are available to you, and they’re easily wasted while dicking around.
Again, the complexity on display is not a bad thing, and respecs are cheap - especially with how much loot you get. It’s just part of a larger issue with this game and onboarding, but we can talk about that when I cover gameplay.
As for the questing, I’ll say this: There are many games on Steam tagged as ‘choices matter’. Some of them in jest, some of them sincerely. Having played many of them, and many other games on other platforms/storefronts that purport to have ‘meaningful choices’:
Wrath of the Righteous is perhaps one of the only games I can think of where a lot of your choices have tangible, meaningful impacts on the story. Not just the main story, but side stories too. Even as late as the finale, things were popping up in response to dialogue choices I’d picked 40-50 hours prior.
This is not the modern RPG style of ‘choices matter’ either. You are not free to say and do whatever until the designated MAKE CHOICE prompts appear. Most things you do will come back to haunt you - for better or worse - later on. These appear early in the game and just keep going. An overarching theme of the game is that while your control over your own destiny is debatable, the consequences of your decisions are yours alone. Hell, NPCs even comment on your deity if it’s applicable.
Perhaps most impressively is that many of these choices are not binary, and oftentimes the player is given the choice to bail on something. Indeed, my pursuit of Lichdom in the main story was met with apprehension and a not-insignificant number of my allies begged me to stop as I cast off my humanity and defiled the dead. The option to bail was always there, yet I chose not to take it anyway. When the option was no longer there, and I felt horrified by the scorn thrust upon me or the consequences of my inhumanity, all I could think was…
I chose this.
The plot’s general outline is the same for everyone: The Worldwound has been dumping out demons for a century and you have to solve the issue. What really sets WOTR apart from other games and especially other RPGs is how much control you have over defining your character’s motives. Are they doing this as a bare-fanged power grab? Are they a zealot? Will they take extreme measures and cast off their humanity to win? How many ‘By any means necessary’ declarations do they have in them? Or are they forced into it?
The decision is in your hands. This is not The Witcher or FFXIV or your favourite story where the protagonist’s motivations are handed to you on a platter with no choice for a different serving.
Accentuating the story is the Mythic Path system; having received a mysterious but malleable grand power from an unknown source, you’re granted the choice to shape it how you will. These have an impact both on your character as a mechanical entity, but also the story. The power afforded to you and the shape it takes can act as a key, and like in real life not all keys fit all locks.
I played a Lich, so I can’t comment on the others, but I thoroughly enjoyed the personal story I witnessed. Playing as a Neutral Evil character, I decided to forsake my humanity and anything else in pursuit of closing the Worldwound. At first it was simply following the course of pragmatism, but eventually that wasn’t enough. Curious research gave way to new goals and with those came opportunities to command the dead.
But this is not Dragon Age: Inquisition, and the opposition are not idle. As they became more dangerous, I was met with no choice but to rise and meet the challenge. My allies whispered in my ear and begged me to reconsider, imploring me to stop what I was doing and hold onto my humanity.
I did not heed their advice.
The final act of the game was not triumphant. Iomedae’s glorious crusade had become a march of the dead, and many of my Good aligned allies deserted. The titular righteousness had deserted, and there were more corpses in my army than mortals by the time the credits rolled. Indeed, even party members deserted me for this. Many of whom I cared a great deal for, and enjoyed the company of.
By the end of the game, my allies were amoral fools, soulless pragmatists, and the eternal silence of death hanging over my base. This was both my punishment and my reward. I said up above that I was met with no choice, but the game was not going to give me the luxury of holding onto that particular delusion; my choices led me there. I, at every point, had the chance to stop.
WOTR’s strength in writing, however, comes from the characters more than the overall plot. Surprisingly for a game with a plot on such a grand scale, it is primarily driven by the machinations of its cast. This game reaches into topics I didn’t expect from an AA game and handles them with surprising nuance. Indeed, the characters themselves are multifaceted and people I’d dismissed as ‘boring’ or ‘one-dimensional’ turned out to be… well, not. Motivations and beliefs are laid out quite clearly, either upfront or through breadcrumbs, and by the end of the game only one party member (Nenio) struck me as shallow or one-dimensional.
Perhaps this game’s biggest strength is that it avoids a pitfall many other party-based games stumble into and never climb out of: There is no ‘The [Trait] Guy’. I’ve been playing RPGs - CRPGs in particular - since I had my own computer, and even the best of them have a party that can be boiled down to “the pragmatic one”, “the just one”, “the wildcard”, etc etc. Whenever those characters broke from their established ‘role’ it was always an out of character moment meant to show the gravity of the situation.
There’s none of that here. Characters you usually agree with will oftentimes make a statement or suggestion you find abominable, and sometimes the party members you think are assholes will be right. This is only compounded by interactions between party members, wherein the dynamics and ideals clash in a way that feels natural. I am being deliberately vague so as to avoid spoilers, but around act 3 the game truly took me off guard by having me go “Ah shit, [party member I hate] is actually dead on the money” a few times.
This luxury is not exclusive to the party, with many of the main and supporting cast being just as fleshed out. If a character has a portrait, they’re guaranteed to bring nuances and surprises to the table, but even many of the ‘faceless’ NPCs are nothing to scoff at. While the game does have its one-note characters, it’s rare for the more substantial storylines to feature tropey characters and the vast majority of the game’s story is spent dealing with characters who are a realistic composition of beliefs, traumas, ideals and neuroses.
Except Nenio. Fuck Nenio. Worst CRPG character.
We need to talk about Nenio. Not her as a character, but what she represents.
Do you remember my question about cranes? Well, I asked it to get you thinking about the process of lifting weights, and how you just cannot lift certain things without the mechanism - or you - starting to buckle. It’s a basic application of the laws of physics
Yeah, well, WOTR is a crane and it’s trying to lift Owlcat’s ambitions. For as much as I just gushed over the game, it’s definitely straining to hold them aloft. This game aspires to be and do so much that it was impossible for it to pull it all off cleanly.
One thing WOTR glaringly aspires to be is funny. It’s why I mentioned Nenio; she’s emblematic of the issue, often torpedoing serious scenes with annoying quips and dragging other (better) characters into her irritating one-note gimmick. That she’s a genuinely unpleasant person without any justification does not help.
Unfortunately, Nenio is not the only part of this problem. I’m not a particularly big fan of stories trying to be funny in the middle of a setpiece with heavy gravitas and a serious tone - it’s why later Final Fantasy XIV content irked me - and this game does it a lot. Not quite as often as FFXIV or, god forbid, Marvel movies, but there were more than a few eye-rollers. It’s particularly grating to be in the middle of a fairly grim, serious dungeon only for that one whimsical song to start playing and inform me that I’m going to bear witness to some utterly banal attempts at humor.
Perhaps the worst part is that WOTR is a funny game, but it’s often in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments and it rarely occurs when the game is trying. Interactions between party members have more intentional and accidental humor than most of the designed Funny Scenes.
…You know, to be entirely honest for a moment: I’ve been writing this review for two days. It’s the 4th of June right now and I finished it near about the 1st. In all this time, I’ve been putting off talking about the gameplay. As a general rule worth keeping in mind; I don’t like being unceasingly negative to things that don’t deserve it. It’s easier for me to rag endlessly on Warframe or Daemon x Machina or Daemonhunters or MASS Builder or just… any game that’s very quantifiably bad through and through. But for works clearly made with passion, love and an earnest ambition to be amazing, I struggle.
And… so does WOTR, once you look past the writing.
‘Adaptation’ is a word described by the Cambridge Dictionary as meaning:
the process of changing to suit different conditions:
In the context of videogames, adaptation often means taking a plot or mechanic from another medium. Tabletop games, as massive mechanical behemoths that have a few hundred interlocking systems regardless of rulebook, are often subject to this to avoid players being overwhelmed or turned off by the complexity. When Shadowrun was adapted to videogame format with the Shadowrun Returns trilogy, much was excised and cut down for the sake of a better videogame experience. When Warhammer 40k made its close-to-tabletop debut with Gladius, naturally much was trimmed down or streamlined both to prevent these issues appearing and to keep the game from being ‘outdated’ as newer editions come out.
With this is in mind, I would not say WOTR has ‘adapted’ the Pathfinder systems. Rather, it has adopted them nearly wholesale and merely provided a GUI for many actions. This, in a vacuum, is not a bad thing. There is a critical lack of CRPGs that’re willing to hit you with complex systems, often going for more palatable one so as to prevent the onboarding process alienating people.
No, the problem comes from how the system interacts with the more videogame-y numbers.
Let’s take combat spellcasting for example. In XCOM or Shadowrun or Divinity Original Sin, you merely click it and the game resolves the calculation.
Here? We have dice rolls, the staple of any tabletop.
There are a few dice rolls…
There are a lot of dice rolls.
When casting a spell, first you must roll to make a concentration check and then roll for the spell to succeed, which is two rolls to begin with. Then you must roll to actually hit, which is a roll calculated against a target’s armor class and spell resistance - so two more separate rolls, with the latter being affected by the caster’s spell penetration. From there, targets will make a fortitude and/or will save to resist further effects. Any of these can fail in sequence, and every single roll is affected by some other stat.
The overreliance of Dice Rolls is, in itself, not bad. The actual problem is how many additional bonuses are heaped on, owing to the fact that this is a videogame which can deal with far bigger numbers than a D20 can. “Characters make saving rolls'' wouldn't be an issue if enemies did not regularly appear with AC stats of around 50~ or higher and had access to feats and traits that give them bonuses to saving throws.
Perhaps in an admission of their own stat bloat, the devs quietly sneak you armor and shields with sizeable AC ratings early on. I wish I could say ‘these are just boons, you don’t really need them’ but the game spikes hard and fast. It is perhaps an unstated rule of videogames that any scenario where a token force defends against a swarm be populated by trash mobs, but WOTR offers you no such mercy and makes sure to dump a horde on you every now and then - with one such encounter taking place about 6 hours in.
In other RPGs (beside looters), minmaxing is seen as a self-imposed diversion and rarely considered mandatory for the main path. The focus is, after all, on playing a role. In WOTR, it’s considered standard, at least on Normal and above. This isn’t a game where you can safely dick around, pick some traits that seem fun, and experiment in the course of a playthrough. No, you have to commit or else you’ll eventually wall against an enemy with an AC/deflect value you simply cannot surpass.
In other RPGs, some options are simply “not-good” relative to the overall difficulty. In WOTR, some options are just outright bad and it can take a few hours of playtime to realise something’s off. Branching off of this, while the aforementioned class system does let you multiclass with ease, it is in fact a horrible idea to ‘try out’ other classes without knowing what you’re doing. XP is at a premium in this game and there’s only 20 levels, with a lot of classes having very powerful 20th level abilities.
Let’s say you’re a Sorcerer, and you decide that being squishy in melee is dull and that you want a level in Fighter to get a weapon feat. Valid on paper, and maybe even on the tabletop, but consider: The game expects you to be getting stronger on an upward level most of the time. In taking a level in Fighter, your caster level is not raising and you’re not getting any new spells. While you do have access to the weapon you chose, you have no additional weapon feats to augment it and having spent a few levels in Sorcerer means you’re likely missing out on that sweet Basic Attack Bonus and the bonus damage from Strength - a dump stat for Sorcerers.
The cruellest part of this system is that sometimes, multi-classing only a few levels into something is a valid choice. Referred to as ‘dipping’, many build guides will point you towards picking up 1-3 levels in something like Mutagen Warrior for the sake of a hefty buff. But, as with most of this game, it can only be known ahead of time.
This further extends to your party members. ‘Canon’ party members (i.e, provided by the story and not made via the mercenary system) are best left on autolevel, as trying to experiment with them will only continue the cycle of hurting. It is unfortunately a bad idea to build for a versatile party, with it often being a safer choice to simply make everyone a monoclass specialist and then rotate them out as needed.
The sole exception are party members who come with multiple classes; most notably Regill, who (as per the Hellknight lore) starts with levels in Fighter Armiger and Hellknight and a proficiency in the gnome hooked hammer. Refuse to respec them at your peril.
So we have stat bloat, restrictive class building, endless dice rolls that can make combat feel miserable and sharp/sudden difficulty spikes. Surely there can’t be more?
Sigh… Alright, let’s talk about weapons and feats for a second. At the start of the game, you’ll be given the option to pick a feat. Among these is Weapon Proficiency, and clicking it unfurls a MASSIVE list of weapon types. Everything from simple shit like spears and longswords to exotic weapons like curved elven blades, the estoc, and many more.
If you’ve played other CRPGs that let you pick a weapon archetype, you might think that speccing into one in character creation will simply give you one of those weapons, right?
Wrong, unfortunately. You get proficiency in that weapon type but are otherwise stuck with the pre-generated loot. Which, to your potential dismay, will likely not conclude any of the more exotic weapon types. If you spec into Longswords or Bows or Spears or anything common you’ll reap instant results, but good luck if you picked an Elven Curved Blade feat.
I bring this up because it really exemplifies WOTR’s habit of letting you make explicitly wrong gameplay choices that actively hamper the experience. These options aren’t inherently bad, and certainly serve metagaming/repeat players, but for a first timer they’re blatant traps.
Traps… traps… traps… Alright let’s talk about character select forcing.
Almost every major level has traps in them. Traps are disarmed by characters with high Trickery, and like every other stat in this game, the requirements to safely disarm them skyrocket over time. Unless you yourself have Trickery as a class skill, you will inevitably be forced into bringing a character who does have it. You might think this is common sense, and it is!
But you only have 6 party member slots. Including yourself, that’s 5. Add in a trap disarmer, that’s 4. Ah, but you absolutely need a dedicated healer as well. We’re down to 3… God, you need a tank as well, so that’s 2 left. You will inevitably need a caster as well to deal with enemies who are nigh unbeatable in melee, so you have one free slot left-
Wait, do I have ranged attacks? Ah shit.
Early in the game you’re given Seelah, a Paladin who will in most paths stay with you. She can tank a lot of damage, hits respectably, and carries a number of useful buffs and debuffs if you keep her as a Paladin. You get Camellia soon after, and she’s a ‘dodge tank’ who can be useful but will otherwise melt to a well placed hit. But hey, at least she sticks around!
A short while later, you’re given Lann or Wenduag. Strong physical ranged attackers who can burst down anything. After them, you’ll likely run into Woljif who is both a rogue and someone with high trickery. A few random events later and Nenio (regrettably) appears as a dedicated offensive caster. Blah blah blah, Daeran and Ember appear as your healers.
I tell you this because to me it is the game admitting that you shouldn’t really bother on a varied or interesting party and instead opt for a rigidly defined one. You can try to get by without the archetypes I listed above, but good luck doing that. There are only so many potions, scrolls and lockpicks in the game world, yet spells and trickery are functionally infinite.
Everything I listed above is a contributing factor to the game’s worst part: Combat length. My god, fights are long.
This isn’t so bad in the early game, where the more methodical pacing of Act 1 leads to fewer fights overall. Trash fights are quick, and more substantial ones are long but not annoyingly so. Unfortunately this goes out the window with Act 1’s final area, which features a gauntlet of fights against decently strong enemies and each fight lasts a while. To the point where it was surprising to find the final fight only took a few minutes, but in this sole instance there is a good plot reason.
As it happens, Act 1’s finale was an omen for the future. WOTR has an incredible amount of combat, and as early as Act 2 even trash fights begin to take a lot of time. Due to stat bloat, a surge in enemy counts, and the introduction of enemies with resistances that often nullify a certain party member, they can DRAG. Unlike say, Shadowrun: Hong Kong (to use one example), the number of fights per area is rarely if ever in the singledigits. Main story levels have a nasty habit of throwing you into a fight and then placing another one about a hallway away… Like six or seven times. By Act 3 I was already sick of fighting, having done too many fights that took an age even when they were against ‘trash’ enemies (who still had high AC and access to debilitating spells). This game isn't short, my first run took about 105 hours and that's with missing a lot.
So, after deciding that I simply hated one aspect of the entire game, I lowered the difficulty and switched to auto mode. It just stopped being fun past a certain point, and I was reassured that Acts 4 and 5 are much worse on that front. This game is merciful in that regard, you can turn off or dial down things that irritate you.
Except resting, a mechanic which I grew to hate so much that I nearly got into modding just to remove it.
As you adventure through WOTR’s world, you accumulate fatigue and become… well, Fatigued. Continue further and you become Exhausted. Both debuffs inflict major stat penalties, and annoyingly they accrue uncomfortably fast. You can rest for free to cleanse them, but doing so builds up Abyssal corruption which… debuffs you significantly, and then kills you. Thus demanding a rest at a safe zone.
Your mileage may vary, but I just can’t stand this system. On such a huge world map, it feels as though it serves little purpose than to arbitrarily restrict exploration. It only gets worse in Acts 3 and 5 - which see a significant expansion to the explorable space on the map - and it felt like I was becoming exhausted every few steps. This sadly isn’t something you can just power through, either; Exhausted debuffs most major stats by -6. Combine that with stat bloat and it’ll just turn your entire party into invalids.
Lastly on the gameplay side, there’s the Crusade mode. Some would described it as a poor man’s Heroes Of Might And Magic, and they’d be right. I understand the developer’s intent, they clearly wanted you as a crusader to actually partake in the crusade, but the execution is just awful. While it supplements lots of other systems (including the fantastic writing, which it provides more of), the actual gameplay of Crusades is a boring numbers-game version of chess where you have little meaningful choice beyond “Spam archers and a tanky melee unit, have your General dump spells on the enemy”. This does not get better in Act 5.
It’s rather telling that while the use of mods to skip certain elements (like rest) is contentious, the most common response to “I don’t like Crusades” is “Get a mod to skip the fights”. There is an option to automate it in the base game, but this locks you out of research projects, several powerful items and even the resolution to some character arcs. It’s a bad option, don’t pick it.
Much of my vitriol for Crusades comes from how interwoven they are with the rest of the game. There is some exceptional writing in the Council events but to get them requires Crusade progress. Want to explore the map? Your Crusaders have to clear the way first. Want to progress the story? Yup, Crusades. Because of the aforementioned issues with the built-in Crusade auto-mode, and the sheer amount of the map gated off by Demons, this truly is a mechanic you cannot safely avoid engaging with safely without mods.
It’s a shame, too, because the actual Crusade in the story leads to some of its best bits. Even with a demigod at the helm, you’re not immune to logistics, morale and politics. How you navigate those minefields can influence the outcome of character arcs and even the ending, to say nothing of how enjoyable the council discussions on each issue are. They even react to your mythic path, like the Lich path featuring events involving necromancers, vampires and followers of Urgathoa. I just wish they were attached to an actually enjoyable system.
This review begins with an analogy about cranes, and the reason my mind homed in on that particular comparison is because cranes are the sum of their parts. One part being out of line or faulty can (literally) bring everything else crashing down. WOTR is an incredibly ambitious game, probably the most ambitious CRPG ever made and released, but… I don’t actually know if it can support its own ambitions.
Again, the writing and characterization (not Nenio) are fucking phenomenal, and mythic paths are obscenely cool. The voice acting is solid (except Nenio) and the game does an excellent job at making you feel like part of a well-realized world. It is perhaps one of the most painstakingly accurate depictions of a tabletop system outside of actual tabletop sims like Talisman or Tabletop Simulator, and…
I just hate actually playing it, you know? The combat is good in theory, but it’s a huge drag and it felt like my punishment for chasing the story. The writing itself started to feel like a reward for suffering.
“Congrats on suffering through like 9 Shadow Volaries and cultists who have a ton of crit-heavy weapons, here’s a great rumination on whether power as an entity can be inherently good or evil.”
Ultimately, I still recommend WOTR. Mods and difficulty settings can alleviate most of your grievances, and the writing is worth whatever unavoidable grievances you may have. Hell, you might even like the things I hate! I’ll probably replay it in the future because my curiosity about the other mythic paths outweighs my aversion to the gameplay. I wish I could’ve praised the story and writing more, but there’s a lot to spoil on both the quest and character fronts.
WOTR is a bright shining star of CRPGs and it’ll be hard to top it in the future, but like every bright light… that sure is a dark shadow over there, huh- No wait, it’s just Nenio.