Final Fantasy VII Remake project has absolutely no right working as well as it does, and Rebirth doubles down on what made Remake work -- and occasionally what really brought it down, with more unsavory additions to spare. But don't get the wrong idea, in Rebirth's extravangance and conceptually superfluous presentation exists the most actualized and engrossing take on the events of Final Fantasy VII's post-Midgar disc one that one could possibly even imagine, and I'm saying this as somebody whose love for the original is ironclad and unbreakable: Rebirth is probably going to end up being my favorite way to experience the moments tucked away in what was once a maybe 7 to 12 hour-ish section of a 25 hour long game -- with the 7 to 12 hour section now being close to 50 or 60 hours on average I'd imagine. That is to say, I've come to terms with a lot of the liberties Square has taken with the narrative and characterization and presentation, everything really; what made the original special to me, and most likely to many others as well, can't be perfectly replicated anyways, so I really do mean it when I say that the end result given here is bordering on a "best case scenario" for an adaptation of this vast a scope.

Much like Remake, characters that were once tableaus feel alive and truly connected as a group in a way the original just didn't have the ability to convey, just on an even more detailed and broader scale. And once again don't take that the wrong way, they're tableaus that I cherish dearly -- Final Fantasy VII's cast is my absolute favorite across like, all media -- but they're expanded upon so meaningfully: Tifa's self-destructive people-pleasing, Aerith's down to earth and fun attitude, Barret being the leftist extremist father figure we all know and love, Red XIII's deep loyalty, Yuffie's obnoxious little sister energy, Cait Sith's inopportune joviality, Cid's weird uncle vibes, and Vincent being the resident goth kid that has issues with authority. And their relationships with one other: Aerith's deep friendships with Tifa and Red XIII, Barret's new found friendships with Yuffie and Red XIII, and even the basic and immediate kinship many of them feel towards one other is more detailed and vibrant. I don't know man, I just love all these fuckin' guys, I constantly had the stupidest fucking grin on my face while playing this game it was honestly kinda cringe. Even side characters have so much more going on with them, certain characters that were previously throwaway will often give one a sense that there's something deeper going on with them as they continue to try to exist in this broken world, even the ones that are more comic relief than pathos-invoking.

The plot can often feel clumsy, but I'd say it's a lot more cohesive than the original's, pretty significantly too, the original occasionally feeling aimless and as it tried to find a reason to send you to the next exciting setpiece; even as somebody who replays the game often I find myself being confused which event flag I need to trigger next. And really the original Final Fantasy VII can be best-described as like, a bunch of Final Fantasy VI opera scenes strung together, and Rebirth leans into that so hard that I could see it being way too much for some people. If Final Fantasy XVI was way too dry for many, myself included, I could genuinely see Rebirth being perceived as excessively "wet" for others. Though, as a side note, when playing Final Fantasy XVI I'd often find myself unintentionally dozing off, whereas with Rebirth I actually had enormous trouble sleeping, both in finding a place I wanted to stop playing and the mild insomnia the excitement of getting to play the game again induced in my four day-ish long binge (which, I haven't done in a long fucking time without needing to take significant breaks, which happened quite often with Final Fantasy XVI, and as an adult in her 30s I think that's saying a lot).

On the topic of CBU1 styling super fucking hard on CBU3, god damn the combat in Rebirth is exactly what I wanted it to be, probably my favorite combat in general, from like, any video game? Like, it's not mechanically the deepest action game I've ever played, but it does expand upon Remake's systems in a meaningful way without upending what made those systems work in the first place. Final Fantasy has been focused on telling the player what any given character is about through how they play since like, FF4, and Rebirth's execution of that philosophy doesn't miss at all. Tifa is more fun than ever with an extensive aerial toolkit, I fucking love that she can juggle enemies and it kinda became my go to strategy at a certain point, which like Tifa was the blueprint for young Theia so I'm so glad they did her so good in this game both on a gameplay and narrative level. Red XIII I have to say feels a little bit busted!! I'm bad at playing as him, and he still seems really fucking useful even with unskilled play. Cait Sith I'm still trying to wrap my head around, but I wouldn't have it any other way than making Cait Sith a confusing mess to properly utilize. I wish Vincent was playable, one of like 10 or so boys in media that I actually care about, but I kinda understand why he isn't when he shows up so late that it was probably better to just focus on polishing the rest of the cast than implementing what's probably going to be a pretty unique kit on top of everything else going on.

There's a particular level involving Cait Sith that I'm pretty sure is gonna become like the third or fourth most contentious thing about the game, but I fucking loved it in a really fucked up Banjo-Tooieian way and nobody can take that away from me. The thing I can see becoming the second most contentious aspect about the game, what I thought would be the primary contention until I got to the ending (which I'll get to in a bit, and without spoiling anything, but if you don't want to know literally anything just be forewarned), is the open world game design elements. The best way to describe it is probably Xenoblade with some pointless Ubisoft shit, but it's not really as bad as it sounds, and much of it is entirely optional only providing secondary or tertiary benefits to character progression. As a "modern" interpretation of the original's wide, open, and mostly empty fields populated by sets of random enemy tables, I think it's probably a fair enough way to go about things. The life springs and towers I wasn't so much a fan of, like why do the towers play the BotW theme But At Home when you activate them, but the summon temple thingies felt a lot more meaningful than just picking up a materia off the ground, like how it usually worked in the original (seriously who was dropping all those bahamut variants and just leaving them there). The map designs themselves I did enjoy though, even if the Cosmo Canyon and Gongaga regions can be a little tedious at times, I honestly prefer having to mentally map out the geographical logic of an open world than the modern trend of empty fields with little identity and often no reason to engage with a game's environments and systems.

That said, the more linear "dungeon" levels are kinda mostly the same deal, but they did an even better job at making them feel like real places you're exploring this time 'round, as opposed to the modified FF13 hallway dealie in Remake. They're still largely linear, but the best way to explain why I think they work better is how the Final Fantasy standby of forked paths with option A being progression and option B being a treasure chest is more heavily obscured; I actually got a little bit lost in a couple of levels!!! Though sometimes that was the result of perhaps poor tutorialization of a level's specific gimmick or progress not being visually distinct enough, which like god damn the graphics are so fucking good in this game that it's almost hard to see anything unless I walked up to my TV (maybe I just need to invest in a larger screen for my old lady eyes but whateverrr), it's no wonder that there are several areas where the Uncharted climbing walls have the RE4R yellow paint on them. I know people are gonna slam the game for shit like that, which is like, yeah I can kinda get it, personally would've preferred more non-diegetic signaling over things that make me have annoying CinemaSin-esque intrusive thoughts about "who is painting all this shit out here in the middle of nowhere".

And you know, it's not gonna be the most discussed thing in the end, as uninspired as Rebirth's "structural quirks" may feel now, they'll probly become innocuous given enough time; that's just how these thing typically go. I wanna say the same will happen for the game's ending which... yeah. Not gonna say much here, but if you find yourself frustrated by it, I'd say give yourself some space and rewatch it on YouTube or something. It's a lot to take in, and I found it a lot more impactful after I had gotten some sleep and finally digested what was being shown to me. I don't think it was all exactly what I wanted it to be, far from it maybe, but there's something to be said about the way the entirety of Rebirth takes special moments dear to us and recontextualizes them into new special moments, sometimes even more special.

And a bit of a tangent, but I loathe the critic scores for this game. Not so much because they're necessarily wrong for enjoying the game, but because I'm starting to strongly believe that art, and especially interactive art, can't really be quantified on such simple terms, especially when people tend to have such viscerally opposed reactions to their experiences with any given work. What does a 10/10 even mean? On a personal level I could almost understand, but detached from the context of that personal experience how can we consider any piece of media to be in some arbitrary upper percentile of perfection? I guess I'm saying this because I know with scores like that people are going to come at this game with a certain set of expectations, but despite it being one of the most gorgeous and polished Final Fantasy titles that CBU1 has brought out in recent years, it's a deeply uneven experience. You will be frustrated, maybe you'll even get annoyed at the many side quests that suck ass and are total shit!!! Or something, maybe you'll hate the combat even if it's exactly what my brain has always wanted FF7's combat to be. But I guess like, when you look at a piece of art in its totality as opposed to a given qualification of Good or Bad, it's easier to just appreciate things as they are. Or even fucking hate them for what they are! People on this website tend to tear the shit out of really popular games and who's to say they're wrong for looking past consensus into a deeper inner truth, which you know, even if that comes from a place of unfounded contrarianism, good for them, man. Fuck video games!!

I hope it doesn't come off like I'm waffling or anything, I just really love this game, and I feel like the things I hated about it only made me love it more in a really fucked up way. I think playing Drakengard 3 for the first time a year ago gave me brain damage or something. Also like, on a final note, let me get more on brand here: there's some premier fucking queerbaiting going on here, and if that ain't more accurate to the actual single lesbian in her early 30s experience than any other AAA video game that has some fake ass porn-afflicted interpretation of sapphic romance where flesh puppets say sweet nothings at each other after completing a single questline or whatever the fuck, than I don't know what is. Anyways, sorry I had to make it gay in the end, but truly that is what the Final Fantasy VII was about all along: twinks with swords and bisexual women who can suplex kaijus. Which, you know, being able to do the latter is what's going to be main determinant if part 3 is good or not, so the ball's in your court now Square...

I have never played any major game that comes off this infantile and soy and basic before. It's like a season of Paw Patrol produced by Tesla. Legitimately painful at times.

I guess chalk it up to MILES MORALES being way better than I expected, but in my apparently infinite naivete, I didn't even consider that this would be worse than the first game. It is, though - wow is it - in every way possible, including the above. Traversal, combat, story, quest design, side quests, incidental features, bugs - even the look of the game, which is supposed to be this thing's bread and butter - all took noticeable hits. Shocking how big of a stumble backwards this is.

It's perfectly clear at this point that Insomniac has nothing interesting to say or do with Spider-Man. The story of this game is so straightforward and basic it's embarrassing that it was written by adults. And once again, the dialogue and the extremely shaky and inconsistent motion capture and facial capture^ can't pull off the prestige MCU thing they're desperately reaching for. I'm no Spidey expert, but this is far and away the least interesting rendition of him that I'm familiar with. Nothing at all going on. Zero juice. It seriously feels like it's for little children.

^(not buying into the absurd conspiracies around MJ's face, but I can understand why someone would search for an alternative explanation for what they did to her because it genuinely seems impossible that they're that incompetent)

As for the gameplay, it really exposes itself in this one, with combat now being so overstuffed, spongey, and yet trivially easy that it becomes flat-out boring. And and they seemed to realize it and for variety's sake had no choice but to leaven the experience with UNCHARTED-style hold-forward-while-stuff-happens tunnels and, much worse, SEQUENCE after SEQUENCE after SEQUENCE of just walking around doing normal ass pointless stuff. It is CRAZY how much time you spend outside of a spider-suit (especially in the first few hours of the game!!!) looking at stuff, walking between nodes, hearing literal science lectures. The BATMAN: ARKHAM games had lots of different applications for its gameplay systems, always had different interesting things to do and discover that felt holistic to that world and story, and it never just felt like a sequence of samey fights (even though it accasionally was). Here, they have just got NOTHING to fall back on.

At one point, there's a sidequest where a Spidey fan has a copy of the first Daily Bugle photo Peter ever took of himself in action (recreating the cover of the real-world first Spider-Man comic, you know, where he's swinging and he's got the criminal under his arm). So Peter starts to flash back and you're like, oh nice, we're going to relive his first big adventure! But no, the sidequest is actually about him riding his bike to work to get the pictures in on time. I'd say that about fucking sums things up.

“The reunion at hand may bring joy. It may bring fear. But let us embrace whatever it brings.”

As early as that original E3 2015 trailer, Final Fantasy VII Remake labored to clarify its mission statement: “We’re about to take some artistic liberties, please bear with us.” If you listen past the fluffy prose, it becomes clear that this narrator isn’t actually part of the game’s fiction: when they speak of “us” and “them,” they’re literally describing our perspective on the original game, the “silence” following in its wake, every “remembrance” since (Advent Children, Crisis Core, etc.) and the natural fervor resulting from that very announcement. As we all know by now, the final game would go on to completely defy traditional understandings of that “Remake” moniker, literalizing its meta context in the form of the “Whispers” (the plot ghosts) — it’s a “remake” in the sense that the events of the original FF7 are literally set in motion again (supposedly in some alternate timeline,) only for Cloud’s party to eventually destroy the Whispers, defying the boundaries set by that game and leaving the door open for Remakes Part 2 and 3 to go off in a completely new direction.

I, too, gave that aspect of FF7R a reluctant nod of acknowledgement in my original review for the title, which was a more traditional and comprehensive look at its failings as a game first-and-foremost. If you’re reading this, it should be clear by now that that was not enough to exorcise my demon; if FF7R wants to be a cheeky little meta prank this badly, it seems only appropriate to look at it again primarily in this larger meta-context for its third anniversary. And the statement I want to lead in with is that leaving that proverbial door open for any upcoming games to realize the potential of its message was giving it way too much fucking credit.

FF7R wants to have its cake and eat it, too. Three years on, I’m still floored at the amount of hypocrisy and hubris in literally constructing an entire plot around the message “please have faith in our original ideas uwu” while leaning this obsessively on your past and succumbing to the shallowest trends. Think about the premise of redoing Midgar with current technology — a 3D camera with polygonal environments means seeing the world from the kinds of angles and at an intimate scale unthinkable on the PS1. It could mean more granular interactions with your surroundings, NPCs that genuinely inhabit the space instead of being mere exposition delivery bots. It could mean a more seamless flow to the experience, letting the player dictate more autonomously how they transition between locations or conveying story while maintaining player control.

Instead, FF7R copies the original’s design scope almost verbatim, placing a giant magnifying glass over its limitations when coupled with these jarring new production values. You have bartenders verbally offering you a seat, yet all you can actually do is stand around and watch them cycle through their idle animation as they repeat that one line of dialogue. You can transition between rooms without the game cutting to black now, but that’s accomplished via squeeze-through loading tunnels that will not benefit from any future hardware improvements. Environment traversal is now expressed via bespoke gameplay for those sections, but the way that works in practice is that you hold up on the analog stick for five minutes at a time as you watch Tifa robotically climb across an entire room of monkey bars — and do you really want me to talk about the part with the robot hand?

Some environments now invite you to hang out in them for longer stretches, but the new activities on offer here include highlights such as “have quest giver tell you to kill some rats, go to dead-end circular combat arena, kill rats, return to quest giver, be told you ‘didn’t kill the right rats,’ literally go back the exact same way, kill the new set of rats that just spawned there, return to quest giver again and receive your reward.” Combat now takes place within the game world in real-time, but the only way for you to decipher the properties of any given attack still is to read the big dumb name popping up over the enemy’s head, with no consistent indication for how these attacks conform to any of your defensive options, be it your three different parry moves or the non-functional dodge roll. This is a game that puts you up against flying opponents, but is somehow reluctant to give its characters anything in the way of aerial mobility, so what you’re left with is either linearly throwing out some kind of ranged option or watching your one robotic alibi air combo play out. This is a game that goes to the length of eliminating the original’s instanced combat transitions, yet it also makes you watch its characters slowly throw out potions one-by-one to heal outside of combat, with no way to have these kinds of items take effect immediately on pressing the button the way it literally worked in Final Fantasy 1 on the NES. (https://twitter.com/wondermagenta/status/1286438919916093444)

Instead of focusing on how hard I’m nitpicking, I really want you to think about just how absurd all this shit is. Consider FF7R’s approach to loading specifically: consider that it literally re-released on the PS5, a console whose entire premise is “we know what an SSD is,” only a year later, yet the game’s flaws are so deeply embedded in shortsighted design that a whole generational leap can’t salvage them. This remake was dreamt about for a solid decade before its eventual announcement, and yet somehow it manifested into a game that feels so much more outdated than its source material. It’s “upscaled PS2 JRPG (derogatory.)”

Consider further how much more intimate you could get with these characters now that you’re spending so much more time in this setting. They could’ve gone for a Mass Effect-esque structure, where you inhabit Midgar a day at a time, watching your crew progress and go through various personal struggles — the game is even hinting at this by giving Cloud his own apartment! Instead, you’re still bound to a rigid progression of events and set pieces, now padded by vapid exposition. You now regularly spend PS1-FF7-Midgar-level stretches of time simply running through linear tunnels, and somehow the only type of dialogue that void is filled with is “damn I hope we don’t get lost in this linear tunnel.” You have locked doors that are opened by flipping a single switch within the same room, characters regularly making observations that don’t actually match their surroundings in a way that makes them sound like complete himbos and a general disregard for the player’s intelligence.

In a sense, this game does actually cater to our current-day sensibilities in its Marvel-fication: more, more, more of “thing you already love,” thematic focus be damned. How ironic that this game desperately contorts itself around some vague message about the value of artistic freedom in its final act, meanwhile the way there is paved by shoving tear-jerk origin stories into the framework of every random background character the original presented that contribute absolutely nothing to any kind of overarching message. We literally will not be “free” until we realize that stories like this or Kingdom Hearts can be spun ad infinitum — Square have effectively proven you can reuse the same iconography for 20 years in slightly different scenarios, and people will show up. This game wants to be all meta, yet it never actually analyzes or challenges its source material, it’s all empty reverence.

What this means is that almost every “original idea” in FF7R either directly undermines the original’s pacing, drama and charm, or fails to be compelling on its own terms. This is why any charitability toward future entries in this series feels misplaced: so many resources at their disposal, so much talent eager to put their mark on a monumental game, so much distance to analyze its legacy from… and this is what you come up with? You may be inclined to call this game brave for being so explicit in its intentions and willing to subvert expectations with its finale, but there’s nothing “brave” about grafting these hollow-ass platitudes onto a shallow, rigid, predictable 40-hour fan service vehicle. The creative team here may have attempted to kill the burden of fan expectation alongside those plot ghosts, but the only thing they truly eviscerated is my interest in their games.

If you reached the end of this post and feel disappointed at how many points I remade from my original review, you may have some understanding of how I felt when I rolled credits on FF7R. Damn this meta shit is easy. 🤪

EDIT: had to bump up the score by half a star because I couldn't justify having this at the same level as TLOU2.

andy blunden writes the following in Stalinism: Its Origin and Its Future:

"The bureaucracy, owing to its conditions of life, aspired to ownership of the means of production, but was excluded from this by Soviet law. Nevertheless, like all bureaucracies, they used their position to gain the greatest possible freedom from the control from the population."

blunden identifies the bureaucracy of a stalinist system as wielding the instruments of political violence on behalf of the proletariat (who won said instruments via revolutionary upheaval of a capitalist social order) while simultaneously negotiating greater and greater autonomy to conduct the state away from proletariat desires. this is specifically attributed to the isolation of the soviet state and the failure of international socialism in the wake of the russian revolution. when operating in a capitalist global economy and with the need to establish industrialized productive forces in a relatively undeveloped country, the bureaucracy organized markets and rigid economic control in order to create competitive parity with its neighbors.

these threads are woven tightly throughout your days as immigration officer in arstotzka. it presents the material contradiction at the heart of socialist bureaucratic rule cleanly: the regulatory actions of the bureaucracy can themselves be twisted into commodities. the ideal value of the officer's choice to accept or deny an immigrant's paperwork lies in its judgment on the fitness of a person to enter or exit a country; a binary moral evaluation of someone as a refugee, traveler, or potential productive labor vs an ideological dissident, terrorist, or purveyor of bourgeoisie exploitation. when this receives an exchange valuation in the form of "credits," a dialectic relation emerges. the need to keep one's family afloat in the face of daily expenses turns the throughput of the line into the driver of decision-making while the just impetus behind the officer's duty becomes less and less relevant. the game counterweighs this somewhat by instantly scoring you on your decisions, but it's only able to do so in terms of factual, unnuanced contradictions. forged seals on entry permits and stolen visas are smashed into the same category as those with minor typos in their region of origin and identification cards just a day or two expired. any means of quantifying the ideal behind the action of immigration squashes it into a degenerated new interpretation.

with this transformation of the action of immigration approval into a commodity, the state and its handlers are able to leverage it as such. when asian-expy country impor imposes trade sanctions on arstotzka, the latter fires back by cutting off access to its borders, withholding a service identical to its rival's cessation of the trade of physical goods. a fellow guard gets kickbacks off of detainments and cuts you into his share, giving the player the opportunity to reap rewards from detaining immigrants for virtually any small paperwork infraction. even terrorist attacks become easy paydays for the player, changing from unfortunate interruptions in your commission-based salary to a sigh of relief as a suicide bomber rushing the outpost is surgically eliminated by your hand. in all of these instances, the meaning behind these bureaucratic, theoretically necessary actions are gamified through their transformation into commodities. even the physical passports themselves are commodified by the end of the game, where surreptitiously confiscating above-board foreign passports gives your family the opportunity to create forgeries and emigrate into a different country.

in this way, the game forces the player's hand by accelerating a bureaucratization of the mind. I denied entry to a woman because she lacked an ID card even with a valid domestic visa; I immediately rationalized this because her excuse ("I left the country before ID cards were distributed") seemed incongruent with a supposed history that I had literally no basis for. at the same time, I applauded myself for making "morally correct" choices to weigh out my perpetuation of injustice, such as letting a woman join her husband even when missing her entry permit or denying entry to a pimp trafficking women through your checkpoint. in essence, the existence of the service I provided as a commodity gave the illusion of perpetual justice when I made discrete choices that defied the imposed exchange value, buoying the contradiction between moral ideal and commodified existence in the process. any sense of personal gratification off of these actions stemmed entirely from the fact that I wielded complete control over these people's lives, even if I occasionally offered benevolence. it succinctly shows the inability for meaningful revolutionary action by a single actor when perpetuating a regressive mode of a production. rather, only organized methods can viably allow for a true, international struggle for a classless society.

mechanically the game perfectly conjures the claustrophobic doldrums of work giving way to dull bouts of relief at the absence of any citation. chump sums it up rather tidily in their own review. virtually never a possible contradiction that doesn't appear during regular play at least once or twice, encouraging thorough play while simultaneously rushing you along.

nintendo's R&D1 began experimenting heavily with the form of the platformer with wario land 2 and 3: each games that attempted to remove typical fail states by making the protagonist invincible and able to acquire temporary abilities after touching specific enemies. while bold puzzle-platformers and generally excellent 8-bit titles, they still hewed close to typical loops of gameplay centered around replaying sections of stages until a goal state is achieved, thus nullifying the practical effects of the absence of player health or damage. their first title on the gba seemed to recognize this and shifted its rejection of form to averting the traditional mario-chartered methodology of building challenge and design iteratively over the course of the game by instead abruptly shifting focus and mechanics between levels. while rooted in the idioms of the prior two wario land entries, WL4 was flippant in how it approached challenges based on these predefined player mechanics, and it rejected both the narrative cohesion of WL2 and the rich environmental persistence of WL3 in favor of rapidly defying player expectations with incongruous level concepts and its frog pillar mechanic that required the player to quickly reevaluate the level in reverse once reaching its endpoint. thus began a trilogy of standout GBA titles where R&D1 deconstructed commonly-held design principles of gaming in order to produce shocking, absurd, and creative experiences.

warioware inc. is where that absurdism really comes into its own. at its root much of gaming involves the player applying their intuition based on real-world experiences to in-game conflicts using a built-in toolkit. games that deviate too far from logical or sensible principles may be seen as obtuse, while games that lean heavily on a player's knowledge of genre conventions may be considered "gamey." warioware leverages this intuition application as a reflex-based game of skill: recontextualize your understanding of the goal state and your toolkit, and do it so fast and naturally that it becomes automatic. that single word or phrase projected at the start of each round instantly locks the player into that goal state, and within an instant of seeing their surroundings they should understand how they can achieve that goal and what the interface may be to perform the actions required. shake a dog's paw, pick your nose, shoot down aliens, match the shape, catch the baseball, chop the block, collect the mushroom, count the frogs, jump the hurdle, dodge the arrows. in the collection of these instances and all others present in the game, the vast breadth of human experience is discretized and miniaturized into flashes of memory. this game is tailor-made to fire as many different synapses in rapid succession as possible.

surrounding this genius distillation of the gaming experience itself is this eccentric framing device of games themselves, mass-produced and advertised to you through the screen, or veering into real-life alternative gaming experiences than the one in your hands as you work your way through the game. aptly the game presents its user interface as a mock desktop, featuring the loosely-connected sets of games into neat little folders for you to work through. each character presents their own idiosyncratic narrative to their gaming experience; my favorite of the bunch is dribble and spitz's Taxi Driver homage that translates the endless neon corridors to a sloshy windshield and a fuzzy car radio, with games flying at you through the haze. they drive their passenger (supposedly you) to the sea, where they proceed to turn into a mermaid and dive into the depths, much to the driving duo's delight. other stories range the spectrum from kat and ana's downright traditional journey through the floors of a shiro to mona's frenzied pizza delivery route where she kills pursuing cops by the dozen.

on its own these pieces would be sufficient for something truly interesting, but warioware elevates the experience through a natural high-score mentality and drive to keep the player engaged and toying around with all of the content. many more microgames unlock in the post-game, where you can endlessly play a character's collection until you run out of health. although your first playthrough of each will end at the boss stage, these boss stages serve as cycle-enders in repeat attempts, where new cycles push the difficulty higher for each individual microgame. suddenly the context you understood for a given microgame is purposefully subverted to further test your reflexes and/or patience. as the speed increases and the microgame flow becomes more hectic, what seemed like cut-and-dry microgames become sweat-inducing tests of pushing that intuition-swap ability to the peak of its potential, and in the process rewiring your brain every precious couple of seconds.

I'm able to gush so thoroughly about this debut in particular because I feel no later entry ever managed to top it. beyond this the warioware series became nintendo's playground for testing out their array of control gimmicks, and thus the games themselves became entirely beholden to the constraints of those input methods. while I imagine their goal was to deepen the interactivity with each microgame, the limits of waggling a wiimote or tapping a screen choked that incredible spark of creativity that they exhibited so genuinely here. the gamepad is already universally the understood abstraction of choice of varied gameplay mechanics, and R&D1 tapped into our inherent connection to it as gamers to make something that not only celebrated games as a form, but refined it to a microscopic, perfectly shaped pearl.

Pokémon goes open-world! You can travel through most of the world seamlessly, and the creatures are visible everywhere. This is the actualization of my childhood dream! But after playing Violet, I had a realization: open-world Pokémon doesn’t work. At least, it won’t work with series gameplay as-is unless the franchise goes through major overhauls.

The incompatibility arises from the menu-based combat. Beyond the rock-paper-scissors of types, fighting is entirely stats-based. Unlike other open RPGs, you can’t brute-force much higher-leveled enemies with execution skill, making open-world freedom an illusion. Twenty level jumps from stepping in the “wrong” direction and level caps deciding which Pokémon are usable don’t help, making the experience feel more railroaded. Deviations from the implied path resulting in temporary satisfaction from increased difficulty lead to the tediousness of steamrolling skipped areas. In other open RPGs this is mitigated with gameplay more involved than using a menu to spam your most effective attack.

Battling is ultimately the vehicle for the real goals: completing the story and/or the Pokédex collect-a-thon, both of which see improvements in Gen 9. The story is composed of three separate plots that eventually converge into one, and it’s generally solid. It has some good characters and emotional beats, and even characters with only five minutes of screen time feel distinct. Starfall Street is bizarre in how woefully inept it makes the school staff look, though. Pokédex hunting feels better than ever without random encounters, but some species placements feel off. Version exclusives will never not feel like a cash grab to convince players to buy both games.

Systems are a mixed bag. Terastallization is a cool new gimmick affecting Pokémon typing that can be used offensively to boost attack damage or defensively to change resistances or gain specific passives (such as Grass to resist Spore). While it’s a cool mechanic competitively (VGC), the long, unskippable animation makes it tedious and unusable for the quick battles in solo play. TMs were hit with a huge downgrade, abandoning infinite use in favor of a shoehorned crafting system in yet another series that didn’t need one. Raids are 90% waiting for text and animations, and rewarded Pokémon rarely have useful tera types.

The presentation is beyond awful. If you’ve heard anything about the game, it’s how plagued with technical issues it is, and none of it is exaggeration. Environments are so bland they’re almost painful to look at. The music feels really underbaked with bland area themes and battle themes that sound poorly mixed, grating, or unfinished. Good tracks are saved for the endgame, but they only encompass a small part of the total runtime. Overall, Gen 9 is unfinished in many areas which is disappointing because the main draws of Pokémon (story and collecting) saw huge upgrades. Its success despite glaring issues doesn’t inspire much confidence in the future of the series.

I BET YOU ALL HAVE EGG ON YOUR FACE NOW THINKING THIS GAME WAS GONNA BE DOO DOO

LOTS OF FUN! GREAT WRITING! I HAVE GROWN SLEEPY WITH MOVIE TYPE WALKING GAMES (SONY) BUT THIS WAS BRILLIANT !

GOT A BIT LONG IN THE TEET AT THE END PERSONALLY FELT IT SHOULD HAVE FINISHED 4-5 HOURS EARLIER BUT STILL A GREAT GAME

this game makes me so fucking angry

for once, 343 managed to nail a gameplay loop. is it halo? no, it isnt. but it's fun. the gadgets are fun, the weapons are fun, enemies are cool and fun to engage and shoot at, and the multiplayer is obviously fun as a result of this. what i cant ignore is how they managed TO FUCK UP EVERY SINGLE OTHER FUCKING THING

interesting levels and world? nah, time for generic triple AAA OPEN WORLD SHIT! UBISOFT! MAP MARKERS! NO REASON TO EXPLORE THE WORLD! everything looks the exact fucking same. nothing is interesting, none of the upgrades are worth exploring for or getting, IT ADDS NOTHING TO THE GAME. what the FUCK is the point of these stupid ass open world games? stop making good, linear games into fucking open worlds!!! IT ADDS NOTHING!! YOU ARE BAD AT IT!!!

what is this story? why does the game not actually pick up from halo 5? it just starts you smack in the middle of some new shit, and everything is !!! horribly written !!! plot convenience! two annoying ass companions who boss you around and bring the game to a screeching halt! oh yeah you do get linear levels for the story, except every area looks the fucking same! nothing actually interesting or unique that could be even close to the interesting locales seen in previous games! WOO! FUN

we also get shit-ass marvel quips now. chief goes from this stoic guy with a sense of humor, with a soft spot for cortana, to this weird awkward superhero character. he doesnt talk to people like this. why is he acting like this. i cant stand him in this game. he does shit that makes zero sense for his character and attitude. he's empathetic and caring, to a fault, he puts himself in danger many, many times to save a fucking AI. where are these qualities? who is this character??

OTHER NOTES:
-ost is extremely forgettable. you will like the main halo theme. enjoy background noise for the remainder of the game.
-escharum is quite possibly the worst halo villain ive ever seen. he is extremely not intimidating. i was fucking laughing during all of his angry rants. you really think im going to be scared of an oversized monkey who is yelling at me... THROUGH HOLOGRAMS?
-WHY DO YOU KEEP NOSTALGIA BAITING ME. JUST WRITE A COMPETENT STORY. FUCK. THE ORIGINAL HALO GAMES ARENT EXACTLY CINEMATIC PIECES OF STORYTELLING, HOW ARE YOU FUCKING IT UP THIS BAD?

i think i have to realize new, triple A games are just not for me anymore. it's this same bland copy pasted bullshit every single year. every franchise must be open world. every franchise must have a battle pass. we must copy everyone else. we must have MCU quips and writing. we must make our game a service, not an experience.

i stopped right before the last level. i am so bored and angry at this game i cannot bring myself to finish it. there is basically zero plot development all the way until the end where suddenly every plotthread must be opened and then tied up at once. it's so stupid. it's so fucking stupid.

fuck you 343 and fuck you microsoft for the corporate greed that keeps bleeding this shriveled corpse of an IP. god i wish this franchise had ended 14 years ago.