GrooviestPine
2024
The sort of game where I respect it from a distance but it does absolutely nothing for me.
Sort of assumed that this would have plot elements or characters that would come into play in Rebirth but this seems completely useless narratively (and I just got that confirmed by a friend of mine who just finished Rebirth). So kind of a complete waste of time, and you spend it playing as possibly the worst character in the history of Final Fantasy, but at least she's fun to play in combat I guess. And it's only 3 hours which I'm appreciating more and more as I get older. The stuff that gets imported in from Compilation of FF7 seems like genuinely the worst shit ever made though. Kingdom Hearts but even worse.
2021
This has probably my favorite job system of any RPG I've ever played, heavily emphasizing on-the-fly party customization to a degree not really seen elsewhere in the series except FF8. Really really loved experimenting with the various jobs, even if more than a couple of them are basically useless. And I dig the comparatively jaunty, almost Shounen Jump-esque vibe after FFIV's somber self-seriousness. More FF protagonists should be plucky nice guys who are also a little bit stupid.
2017
Pretty much all the stuff I don't like about Yakuza/Like a Dragon is at its worst here--the cartoonish chauvinism, the deeply weird attitudes about Chinese and/or Korean people. Ryuji Goda's a decent villain but the story--at least as it's told here, can't speak for the original Yakuza 2--is a complete dud, culminating in easily the stupidest climax of the series so far. The Dragon engine looks nice but just sucks to play in. I could ignore the way it makes controlling the player character feel like steering a drunk elephant in Y7 because the combat there is turn-based so it's not that big of a deal. Not the case here. I've never liked Yakuza's brawler combat much to begin with but it's actively bad in Kiwami 2. And in general the world feels emptier--most of my favorite minigames are gone, replaced with...not a whole lot. Nice to see the cabaret club minigame again but Majima Construction is a complete nonstarter. I dunno. Still speaks to how high the floor is for this series that I still had a half-decent time running around Kamurocho and Sotenbori again anyway.
2023
Remedy takes their worst game and follows it up over a decade later with their magnum opus, a dizzying spiral into layers upon layers of fiction and metafiction colliding spectacularly with each other. It feels like the game Remedy has been working toward their whole existence. Incredible stuff.
1991
very very cool little game. why did the west hate roguelikes so much in the 90s?
2002
More interesting than it is fun but boy is this game interesting. I don't think I can name another RPG that gives its characters completely different progression systems depending on their race. Very excited to dive deeper into the SaGa series.
2018
A game where literally everything interesting about it is in the uncontrollable cutscenes while I get stuck fighting off the same 5 or 6 enemy types endlessly. I'm not exactly a fan of the original trilogy but at least they had no delusions about what they were. GoW 2018 siphons everything fun out of the equation in the name of quote-unquote maturity so instead of the tight, snappy combat of the originals you get this unpleasantly lumbering mess. Prestige TV-ass game in the worst way, dour and self-serious in a way that only serves to underline how stupid it all is. Kratos is possibly my least favorite video game character ever created, but at least he serves as an interesting mirror of the particular kind of solipsism his biggest fans indulge in: 13 years prior a mindless, misogynist rage machine for adolescent boys, in 2018 a sad shitty dad for those same boys now grown up. Extremely telling that his wife is dead the second the game begins and she never rises above the level of plot device, her face never even shown. Sony closed Japan Studio so they could make more loud, flashy, empty bullshit like this. Bleak stuff.
2021
A game made for a very, very particular kind of freak, and I happen to be one of those freaks. I love close to everything about it--its clean, minimalist aesthetic; the lack of story; the flavor text it gives its characters even though they all might as well be paper dolls; its oddball, playfully mean sense of humor. I'm not sure I'd necessarily call it deep, but there's a lot hidden underneath its seemingly simple surface, and the way its systems feed into each other...the intelligence and thoughtfulness of Hiroyuki Ito and his team really come through here.
To say it's not for everybody would be an understatement but I would call it equally suited for adventurous newcomers to dungeon crawlers and veterans alike: newcomers for its immediate accessibility and pick-up-and-play quality; veterans for the fun, interesting ways it toys around with genre conventions. Cannot believe something like this came from Square Enix.
To say it's not for everybody would be an understatement but I would call it equally suited for adventurous newcomers to dungeon crawlers and veterans alike: newcomers for its immediate accessibility and pick-up-and-play quality; veterans for the fun, interesting ways it toys around with genre conventions. Cannot believe something like this came from Square Enix.
2023
Pretty damn good remake, on the whole. It never quite stopped irking me the way ArtePiazza altered the UI for function rather than style--there's a little bit of Love-de-lic's nascent soul missing from this--but it's certainly not an aesthetic travesty on the level of what Square Enix has been doing with their mobile ports for the last ten years. The trailers made this remake look a little bit soulless but once I got over my minor gripes I had a real good time. With the QOL improvements I might even recommend it to new players, which I definitely didn't expect.
2020
Kind of a whiff as far as the mystery stuff goes, but really all you need to get me onboard with a VN is a fun colorful cast and this game certainly has that, so. And you don't exactly need to use force to get me to play picross for hours at a time either. Good game! Kind of a bummer Mediatonic will never make anything even slightly like this again but oh well.
2021
At least have the decency to compare it to Threes instead of 2048 you clowns.
2023
Those posts on Twitter and Facebook where British people post pictures of boiled unseasoned chicken and complain that putting ketchup on it makes it "too spicy," but in video game form
Pretty solid entry into the "interesting handheld ports of bad console games" canon alongside Daikatana, The Sims: Bustin' Out, The Urbz, etc. Just not really my thing though.
1992
very strange cognitive feeling to be playing a very mechanically archetypyal JRPG from 1992 with an autosave system more modern than some RPGs released this year. cool game! deserves to be more well known than it is.