Hypnotica
4 reviews liked by Hypnotica
Balatro
2024
game of the year. i’ve seen enough. i don’t care that it’s february there’s no way this is getting topped. the gameplay is addictive, fun, innovative, and challenging. the amount of content is insane with 15 decks, 8 difficulty levels, dozens of achievements/unlocks, CHALLENGES??, endless mode, and a gameplay loop that doesn’t even need a motivation for me to want to play more. this game could have no progression whatsoever and i would still call it perfect, so the amount here goes above and beyond. all this for only $15 too when it could easily be $10 or $15 more than that. i am genuinely in awe of how perfect this game is; it was worth the wait and then some and it’s easily the best deckbuilder since slay the spire.
This review contains spoilers
“DELIVER UNTO US THE REMNANTS OF OUR PAST. RESTORE THEM TO THEIR RIGHTFUL PLACE.”
From the early hours of the first game, it’s very clear that the Final Fantasy VII Remake project, encompassing a trilogy of games, is going to be about the process of the creatives remaking the game just as much as it is about actually remaking it. With REBIRTH we reach the middle chapter, and as the name implies it’s very much a game about new beginnings. It took me 100 hours to roll credits on this behemoth, and the whole way through I was being surprised and delighted by all manner of gameplay scenario, brilliant mechanic, and charming dialogue. Yet despite its enormity, Square Enix is able to keep a tight grasp on the game’s many running themes. I believe Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is absolutely one of the all time great video games, and the best Final Fantasy in over 20 years, and it’s that good precisely because of its ability to balance the heart and soul of its script with its immense wealth of Video Gamey goofiness and game-iness. And the creative team remembers one thing above all else: Final Fantasy VII is a game that means a lot of things to a lot of people, and all of those people want something different from this Remake project. Just as much as you feel celebration in Rebirth, you can feel fear. Fear of all the things that everyone wants. Fear of the people shipping Cloud with Aerith, of the people shipping Cloud with Tifa, of the people shipping Cloud with Chadley. Fear of the people demanding Aerith stay dead and demanding she be saved. Fear of the people wanting a perfectly faithful remake and the people wanting a new adventure built on the bones of the old. To remake a game like Final Fantasy VII is a thankless task, and with Rebirth the developers have realized the true potential of it: To deliver a story about delivering a story.
In FF7 Rebirth, we are shown a Planet that has been decimated by the defeat of the Whispers from REMAKE. Fate no longer being a set path has resulted in many doors opening within the planet, each doomed to a quick death but living potent lives while they’re around. This renders the planet even less stable than Shinra’s mako-farming already did. Every possibility is playing out, all at once, with every choice opening more doors, putting more strain on a planet in peril. As usual, Sephiroth designs some bullshit convoluted plan to manipulate this strain, uniting all of these worlds, making all the grief and despair and loss within them manifest at once and using that to do weird Sephiroth shit. And of course he’d want this, because I’m sure it’s what the creative team behind these games wanted too. Let Zack live! Let Aerith live! Jessie, Biggs, Wedge, everyone gets to live! Cloud gets with whoever the player wants, it’s all valid somewhere! Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone could get everything they wanted?
“Ever wish you could just snap your fingers and forget the worst stuff?”
“It’s a part of who we are. Whether we like it or not.”
“Yeah. The deepest wounds never really heal.”
In their soulsearching for how to handle this, the developers of this game came to a sad conclusion. Final Fantasy VII is a game about losing things, and building something new from their ashes. Aerith’s death is possibly the most famous loss in the history of this medium. To save her would be to deny what Final Fantasy VII is. So instead of doing that, instead of giving everyone what they want, Square Enix instead shows us what that looks like. A bright mess, with visual metaphors and expository dialogue being thrown as everywhere fast as the camera can keep up. And then just as quickly, they hammer down on loss yet again. We save Aerith, deflecting Sephiroth’s fatal blow in a magical moment of deus ex machina that probably delighted as many people as it disgusted. Only to reverse those emotions upon the reveal that, no, we didn’t. Cloud as an unreliable narrator was always a key component of Final Fantasy VII, but in Rebirth that bit is played significantly more loudly and more frequently. At the start of the game, Cloud misremembers his past, to the great concern of his GIRLFRIEND LOVE OF HIS LIFE DARLING Tifa. But by its end, even his present and future are distorted. It was fascinating to me, seeing Square go for this. Turning our beloved if awkward protagonist into an empty vessel over the course of a massive adventure felt… wrong, in a way that felt right. It’s the opposite of your typical character development, and by the end it feels tremendously unsettling. Watching Cloud scamper madly after Aerith to get the Black Materia from her, only to give it up like a dog with a bone the instant Sephiroth tells him to hell, is emotionally frightening in much the same way that Cloud assaulting Aerith in the original is viscerally frightening. And I feel like that subtler edge is sprinkled over the game writ large - we don’t see Sephy kill Aerith here, but we see him flick her blood into Cloud’s face, see Aerith manipulate the lifestream to say a few parting words, and see Cloud descend into disbelief and madness for the remainder of the running time. The parallel worlds and timelines nonsense is handled in a very Lynchian way here, lending it all the emotional understanding that it lacks in logical understanding.
Its ending may be convoluted and messy, but the moments that should hit do hit, especially when you’re watching them again without expectation. It’s all very smartly done, making for a hype and difficult final challenge while also paying off both the subtle and unsubtle visual and emotional language that the game had spent so much time building. Final Fantasy VII is a monolith, and Rebirth feels like a game that manages to bring out both the darkness and the light within it.
All the while, you are also experiencing, yknow, an enormous 100 hour JRPG, full of sidequests and minigames and dumb bullshit galore. The combat is fantastic, the cutscene direction is top tier, and every odd task and bizarre mechanical addition lends itself to creating an absolute benchmark in video game scope. This is the first time I’ve ever felt like a current gen video game has approached the enormity and variety of one of the classic PS1 RPGs that this game is remaking, and seeing it with so much panache is genuinely electric. I was never bored and never anything more than intentionally annoyed. Even if the game had no script at all, it would be one of the all time great video games solely based on its video game-iness alone. It’s truly something special.
All these words said and I still feel like I haven’t scratched the surface. This is an extremely dense game, stuffed full to bursting with worldbuilding, visual metaphor, complicated themes and complex storytelling. It would take many playthroughs and many more hours of analysis and thought for me to come to some sort of truly comprehensive overview of what this game is trying to say and do. But for now, I think I get the gist. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is very much a game about creating itself, about the many doors open to its creators and the struggle to deliver something that could make everybody happy. The struggle to resist their own urges, the struggle to resist the easy temptations of both pleasure and pretentiousness. In that same sense, Rebirth is also about clinging to yourself, holding on to what you are in the face of insurmountable terror and pain. Of using your past to overcome your present and face a bright future. About how what has been lost, what has been stolen, what has been destroyed is never gone. It is only turned into something else. Everything we ever have is with us always, and it’s how we use those things that define who we are. Are we Rufus and Dyne, letting our past manipulate us and goad us into destruction? Or are we Aerith, or Tifa? Using what we’ve lost to strengthen our principles, to move on with fiery eyes towards the unknown?
“Reflect on thy long and bloody path, and kindle life’s fire anew. Forget not thine ire. For it shall remake you.”
From the early hours of the first game, it’s very clear that the Final Fantasy VII Remake project, encompassing a trilogy of games, is going to be about the process of the creatives remaking the game just as much as it is about actually remaking it. With REBIRTH we reach the middle chapter, and as the name implies it’s very much a game about new beginnings. It took me 100 hours to roll credits on this behemoth, and the whole way through I was being surprised and delighted by all manner of gameplay scenario, brilliant mechanic, and charming dialogue. Yet despite its enormity, Square Enix is able to keep a tight grasp on the game’s many running themes. I believe Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is absolutely one of the all time great video games, and the best Final Fantasy in over 20 years, and it’s that good precisely because of its ability to balance the heart and soul of its script with its immense wealth of Video Gamey goofiness and game-iness. And the creative team remembers one thing above all else: Final Fantasy VII is a game that means a lot of things to a lot of people, and all of those people want something different from this Remake project. Just as much as you feel celebration in Rebirth, you can feel fear. Fear of all the things that everyone wants. Fear of the people shipping Cloud with Aerith, of the people shipping Cloud with Tifa, of the people shipping Cloud with Chadley. Fear of the people demanding Aerith stay dead and demanding she be saved. Fear of the people wanting a perfectly faithful remake and the people wanting a new adventure built on the bones of the old. To remake a game like Final Fantasy VII is a thankless task, and with Rebirth the developers have realized the true potential of it: To deliver a story about delivering a story.
In FF7 Rebirth, we are shown a Planet that has been decimated by the defeat of the Whispers from REMAKE. Fate no longer being a set path has resulted in many doors opening within the planet, each doomed to a quick death but living potent lives while they’re around. This renders the planet even less stable than Shinra’s mako-farming already did. Every possibility is playing out, all at once, with every choice opening more doors, putting more strain on a planet in peril. As usual, Sephiroth designs some bullshit convoluted plan to manipulate this strain, uniting all of these worlds, making all the grief and despair and loss within them manifest at once and using that to do weird Sephiroth shit. And of course he’d want this, because I’m sure it’s what the creative team behind these games wanted too. Let Zack live! Let Aerith live! Jessie, Biggs, Wedge, everyone gets to live! Cloud gets with whoever the player wants, it’s all valid somewhere! Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone could get everything they wanted?
“Ever wish you could just snap your fingers and forget the worst stuff?”
“It’s a part of who we are. Whether we like it or not.”
“Yeah. The deepest wounds never really heal.”
In their soulsearching for how to handle this, the developers of this game came to a sad conclusion. Final Fantasy VII is a game about losing things, and building something new from their ashes. Aerith’s death is possibly the most famous loss in the history of this medium. To save her would be to deny what Final Fantasy VII is. So instead of doing that, instead of giving everyone what they want, Square Enix instead shows us what that looks like. A bright mess, with visual metaphors and expository dialogue being thrown as everywhere fast as the camera can keep up. And then just as quickly, they hammer down on loss yet again. We save Aerith, deflecting Sephiroth’s fatal blow in a magical moment of deus ex machina that probably delighted as many people as it disgusted. Only to reverse those emotions upon the reveal that, no, we didn’t. Cloud as an unreliable narrator was always a key component of Final Fantasy VII, but in Rebirth that bit is played significantly more loudly and more frequently. At the start of the game, Cloud misremembers his past, to the great concern of his GIRLFRIEND LOVE OF HIS LIFE DARLING Tifa. But by its end, even his present and future are distorted. It was fascinating to me, seeing Square go for this. Turning our beloved if awkward protagonist into an empty vessel over the course of a massive adventure felt… wrong, in a way that felt right. It’s the opposite of your typical character development, and by the end it feels tremendously unsettling. Watching Cloud scamper madly after Aerith to get the Black Materia from her, only to give it up like a dog with a bone the instant Sephiroth tells him to hell, is emotionally frightening in much the same way that Cloud assaulting Aerith in the original is viscerally frightening. And I feel like that subtler edge is sprinkled over the game writ large - we don’t see Sephy kill Aerith here, but we see him flick her blood into Cloud’s face, see Aerith manipulate the lifestream to say a few parting words, and see Cloud descend into disbelief and madness for the remainder of the running time. The parallel worlds and timelines nonsense is handled in a very Lynchian way here, lending it all the emotional understanding that it lacks in logical understanding.
Its ending may be convoluted and messy, but the moments that should hit do hit, especially when you’re watching them again without expectation. It’s all very smartly done, making for a hype and difficult final challenge while also paying off both the subtle and unsubtle visual and emotional language that the game had spent so much time building. Final Fantasy VII is a monolith, and Rebirth feels like a game that manages to bring out both the darkness and the light within it.
All the while, you are also experiencing, yknow, an enormous 100 hour JRPG, full of sidequests and minigames and dumb bullshit galore. The combat is fantastic, the cutscene direction is top tier, and every odd task and bizarre mechanical addition lends itself to creating an absolute benchmark in video game scope. This is the first time I’ve ever felt like a current gen video game has approached the enormity and variety of one of the classic PS1 RPGs that this game is remaking, and seeing it with so much panache is genuinely electric. I was never bored and never anything more than intentionally annoyed. Even if the game had no script at all, it would be one of the all time great video games solely based on its video game-iness alone. It’s truly something special.
All these words said and I still feel like I haven’t scratched the surface. This is an extremely dense game, stuffed full to bursting with worldbuilding, visual metaphor, complicated themes and complex storytelling. It would take many playthroughs and many more hours of analysis and thought for me to come to some sort of truly comprehensive overview of what this game is trying to say and do. But for now, I think I get the gist. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is very much a game about creating itself, about the many doors open to its creators and the struggle to deliver something that could make everybody happy. The struggle to resist their own urges, the struggle to resist the easy temptations of both pleasure and pretentiousness. In that same sense, Rebirth is also about clinging to yourself, holding on to what you are in the face of insurmountable terror and pain. Of using your past to overcome your present and face a bright future. About how what has been lost, what has been stolen, what has been destroyed is never gone. It is only turned into something else. Everything we ever have is with us always, and it’s how we use those things that define who we are. Are we Rufus and Dyne, letting our past manipulate us and goad us into destruction? Or are we Aerith, or Tifa? Using what we’ve lost to strengthen our principles, to move on with fiery eyes towards the unknown?
“Reflect on thy long and bloody path, and kindle life’s fire anew. Forget not thine ire. For it shall remake you.”
i never had mario party but i did have Tamagotchi: Party On! and no one would play it with me because it was horrendously dull
Final Fantasy X
2001
“Everyone has lost something precious. Everyone has lost homes, dreams, and friends. We can make new homes for ourselves, and new dreams. But the people and friends we have lost, the dreams that have faded. Never forget them.”
In 2000, with the Playstation 2 already released, Squaresoft released Final Fantasy IX for the Playstation 1. A grand adventure full of obtuse side content and immaculate presentation, FF9 felt like the culmination of generations of experience making these games. A year later, Final Fantasy X arrived for the Playstation 2, beginning a new era for the franchise that took all those lessons learned and used them to pivot the franchise into an exciting new direction. One that clearly owed thematically and structurally to its predecessors, but that wasn’t afraid to excise and build until it felt so much like its own thing that a new Final Fantasy was able to feel truly fresh. And it paid off in spades, because Final Fantasy X is maybe the single truest 3D masterpiece of the franchise.
The key differences with FFX and what came before it lie in the nitty gritty of its gameplay approach. Most notably, the ATB system that had been iterated on so prominently for the last several entries has been entirely replaced by a more traditional turn based system. Characters get EXP for participating in battle, but you can only have three in battle at a time. Every character has a specific use-case, and where the game brings it all together is in its switching system. You can switch an active character with anyone else in your roster on their turn, and the switched character will still get to act. This is brilliant, and battles will often center around figuring out when a certain character needs to use a specific maneuver against an enemy and swapping around to capitalize. Using Tidus to cast Slow on flying enemies that can petrify your party, then swapping over to Wakka who specializes in taking down flying enemies and taking them all out before they can move. It’s a really snappy system and it feels very good to play. After the molasses slowness of FF9’s take on ATB, FFX feels like a colossal readjustment for the better in every conceivable way.
The other significant changes are with the leveling system and the gear system. I won’t go as in-depth with these mechanics, just know that it’s all in the service of allowing the player to truly customize their experience. Traditional level ups have been replaced with an insane gigantic skill tree, with each level giving a character a single move along the tree. This allows you to pick and choose how you want to progress your characters - make your white mage the strongest physical attacker on the team, turn your nimble protagonist into a Vivi-tier black mage, do whatever the hell you want. Coupled with the new gear system, which completely removes stats from equipment and focuses entirely on passive buffs, mastery and excessive play can allow you to essentially turn your entire party into invincible demigods that turn every fight into a joke. But it’s a long journey there.
Narratively, Final Fantasy X centers around a pilgrimage. A few great characters, traveling together on a journey to a specific destination, making a few necessary stops along the way. FFX’s most obvious difference in world design from the games that came before is its linearity, but because of this narrative structure it feels kind of hard to fault it. Of course you’re going down straight linear paths - you are doing a tried and true journey and following in the footsteps of your forebears. It’s definitely an early mark against the game regardless, but I think this narrative conceit is the reason people are less harsh on FFX for this as opposed to, say, FFXIII. The game also does a great job pacing itself, every long linear path is usually punctuated with some sort of switch-up, whether that be a series of intense boss fights, a dungeon, a puzzle sequence, or some awful underwater soccer. There’s enough variety to keep things fresh despite the repetition of its general level progression, which is a huge boon that helps wipe away some of the disappointment from the lack of freedom.
Towards the very end of the game, it opens up substantially. Once you can go wherever you want whenever you want, suddenly there are a million things to do. Many of them are annoying, many of them are obtuse, and many of them are difficult. I didn’t do all of them, but I did go through the hassle of acquiring everybody’s Celestial Weapon and all of the Aeons. And while dodging 200 lightning bolts and playing like six hours of Blitzball did suck, that’s kind of… the fun? It’s an impossible feeling to describe, but there’s something about overcoming an obtuse and ridiculous challenge and getting rewarded by becoming so strong you can sleep through endgame superbosses that makes you feel incredibly accomplished. It’s sort of like the game’s own narrative structure - journey through something painful to experience a relaxing calm.
What a wonderful journey it is, too. Final Fantasy X tells possibly the single greatest story in the franchise, with a unique and well thought out world populated with interesting characters. Not all of them get tons of development, but they don’t have to. They all serve a role in both battle and the group dynamic, and they’re great to have around. When they do have a role in the narrative - and they all do - it’s always done with tenderness and weight. And I think that’s the best way to describe the game’s story and script: tender and heavy. So many great individual lines, individual moments, individual scenes. The early PS2-era animation and voice acting cruft largely wears off early on, so by the time you’re getting to the seriously impactful scenes you are all in, and the actors are doing great work. Tidus especially is given a lot of work to do, and actor James Arnold Taylor is able to pull it all off. From confident braggadocio to covert sadness to out and out despair, he’s able to make it all work. Even the infamous laugh scene works well in context and is called back to many hours later in a way that felt genuinely moving. I have no complaints about the narrative, which trucks along at a pretty good pace and ends perfectly. No notes.
So what we have here is a Final Fantasy for fans and first timers, one that reinvents so many aspects of the series while maintaining the core of its soul. Through its excellent storytelling, phenomenal soundtrack, and deep gameplay it marks itself as possibly the single greatest rpg of its era and easily one of the top Final Fantasy games.
I never want to play Blitzball again.
In 2000, with the Playstation 2 already released, Squaresoft released Final Fantasy IX for the Playstation 1. A grand adventure full of obtuse side content and immaculate presentation, FF9 felt like the culmination of generations of experience making these games. A year later, Final Fantasy X arrived for the Playstation 2, beginning a new era for the franchise that took all those lessons learned and used them to pivot the franchise into an exciting new direction. One that clearly owed thematically and structurally to its predecessors, but that wasn’t afraid to excise and build until it felt so much like its own thing that a new Final Fantasy was able to feel truly fresh. And it paid off in spades, because Final Fantasy X is maybe the single truest 3D masterpiece of the franchise.
The key differences with FFX and what came before it lie in the nitty gritty of its gameplay approach. Most notably, the ATB system that had been iterated on so prominently for the last several entries has been entirely replaced by a more traditional turn based system. Characters get EXP for participating in battle, but you can only have three in battle at a time. Every character has a specific use-case, and where the game brings it all together is in its switching system. You can switch an active character with anyone else in your roster on their turn, and the switched character will still get to act. This is brilliant, and battles will often center around figuring out when a certain character needs to use a specific maneuver against an enemy and swapping around to capitalize. Using Tidus to cast Slow on flying enemies that can petrify your party, then swapping over to Wakka who specializes in taking down flying enemies and taking them all out before they can move. It’s a really snappy system and it feels very good to play. After the molasses slowness of FF9’s take on ATB, FFX feels like a colossal readjustment for the better in every conceivable way.
The other significant changes are with the leveling system and the gear system. I won’t go as in-depth with these mechanics, just know that it’s all in the service of allowing the player to truly customize their experience. Traditional level ups have been replaced with an insane gigantic skill tree, with each level giving a character a single move along the tree. This allows you to pick and choose how you want to progress your characters - make your white mage the strongest physical attacker on the team, turn your nimble protagonist into a Vivi-tier black mage, do whatever the hell you want. Coupled with the new gear system, which completely removes stats from equipment and focuses entirely on passive buffs, mastery and excessive play can allow you to essentially turn your entire party into invincible demigods that turn every fight into a joke. But it’s a long journey there.
Narratively, Final Fantasy X centers around a pilgrimage. A few great characters, traveling together on a journey to a specific destination, making a few necessary stops along the way. FFX’s most obvious difference in world design from the games that came before is its linearity, but because of this narrative structure it feels kind of hard to fault it. Of course you’re going down straight linear paths - you are doing a tried and true journey and following in the footsteps of your forebears. It’s definitely an early mark against the game regardless, but I think this narrative conceit is the reason people are less harsh on FFX for this as opposed to, say, FFXIII. The game also does a great job pacing itself, every long linear path is usually punctuated with some sort of switch-up, whether that be a series of intense boss fights, a dungeon, a puzzle sequence, or some awful underwater soccer. There’s enough variety to keep things fresh despite the repetition of its general level progression, which is a huge boon that helps wipe away some of the disappointment from the lack of freedom.
Towards the very end of the game, it opens up substantially. Once you can go wherever you want whenever you want, suddenly there are a million things to do. Many of them are annoying, many of them are obtuse, and many of them are difficult. I didn’t do all of them, but I did go through the hassle of acquiring everybody’s Celestial Weapon and all of the Aeons. And while dodging 200 lightning bolts and playing like six hours of Blitzball did suck, that’s kind of… the fun? It’s an impossible feeling to describe, but there’s something about overcoming an obtuse and ridiculous challenge and getting rewarded by becoming so strong you can sleep through endgame superbosses that makes you feel incredibly accomplished. It’s sort of like the game’s own narrative structure - journey through something painful to experience a relaxing calm.
What a wonderful journey it is, too. Final Fantasy X tells possibly the single greatest story in the franchise, with a unique and well thought out world populated with interesting characters. Not all of them get tons of development, but they don’t have to. They all serve a role in both battle and the group dynamic, and they’re great to have around. When they do have a role in the narrative - and they all do - it’s always done with tenderness and weight. And I think that’s the best way to describe the game’s story and script: tender and heavy. So many great individual lines, individual moments, individual scenes. The early PS2-era animation and voice acting cruft largely wears off early on, so by the time you’re getting to the seriously impactful scenes you are all in, and the actors are doing great work. Tidus especially is given a lot of work to do, and actor James Arnold Taylor is able to pull it all off. From confident braggadocio to covert sadness to out and out despair, he’s able to make it all work. Even the infamous laugh scene works well in context and is called back to many hours later in a way that felt genuinely moving. I have no complaints about the narrative, which trucks along at a pretty good pace and ends perfectly. No notes.
So what we have here is a Final Fantasy for fans and first timers, one that reinvents so many aspects of the series while maintaining the core of its soul. Through its excellent storytelling, phenomenal soundtrack, and deep gameplay it marks itself as possibly the single greatest rpg of its era and easily one of the top Final Fantasy games.
I never want to play Blitzball again.