KevinWeast
5 reviews liked by KevinWeast
Final Fantasy
2021
(This review was made shortly after writing Strangers of Paradise's as well. Read that review first if you want to go through my FF reviews in order)
The game that started it all. A fantasy that was the final chance for one man to make the game he wanted.... And he did.
Final Fantasy 1 is an amazing game. Has an easy to follow story, a great collection of enemies with some of this best art used to bring them to life, and some of the best music that still gets new renditions to this day. It's been many years since this game first came out and thanks to Square Enix with the Pixel Remasters... this and 2 through 6 have a chance to easily bring in more fans in.
The story is as classic as you can get. The 4 elements are out of control and 4 brave adventures arrive with a dimmed crystal each to purify the altars of each element to restore balance and save the world. This time however, you get to chose who the heroes are between a Thief, Warrior, Black Mage, White Mage, Monk, and Red Mage. Each providing something different to the table so you gotta pick think what you'll do. (Mine was a Thief, Monk, White Mage, and Red Mage)
Combat is pretty good and was revolutionary for the time. Turned based with both the enemy party and your party on the screen duking it out. Magic works similarly to DnD with spell slots. Run out of slots and you can't cast anymore. There are tons of different spells, weapons, and armor that can change the tide of battle with even equipment not equipped having spells tied to them as a one time use so none spell casters can cast if need be.
Now gameplay for story... well if you played a game back in the 90s or have heard about how they played I sure hope you are prepared to just wonder about and write down info you see mentioned that could be important. Of course there are guides out now but if you want the original experience I recommend having a way to take notes nearby. I got lost a few times but eventually got on the right path and continued on without to much trouble. You will need to grind a few times so just be ready for that. Somethings are just vague for story but it helps with the world to an extent.
Now for additions given to the Pixel Remasters. The game has had all it's original bugs fixed, a brand new arrangement to the songs are available or you can play with the NES original version, a bestiary is included so you can keep up with all the enemies you've taken down in your journey to save the world, a Booster option to boost money or exp if you so chose or you can lower how much you get to make it harder, a music player to hear just the music from the arrangement and the original whenever you want, and my personal favorite, an art gallery that shows all the concept art for the original game including art done for anniversaries.
All in All. Final Fantasy 1 is a nice benchmark for the series and paved the way for many JRPGs to come. I highly recommend giving this game a go to see Final Fantasy's beginnings.
The game that started it all. A fantasy that was the final chance for one man to make the game he wanted.... And he did.
Final Fantasy 1 is an amazing game. Has an easy to follow story, a great collection of enemies with some of this best art used to bring them to life, and some of the best music that still gets new renditions to this day. It's been many years since this game first came out and thanks to Square Enix with the Pixel Remasters... this and 2 through 6 have a chance to easily bring in more fans in.
The story is as classic as you can get. The 4 elements are out of control and 4 brave adventures arrive with a dimmed crystal each to purify the altars of each element to restore balance and save the world. This time however, you get to chose who the heroes are between a Thief, Warrior, Black Mage, White Mage, Monk, and Red Mage. Each providing something different to the table so you gotta pick think what you'll do. (Mine was a Thief, Monk, White Mage, and Red Mage)
Combat is pretty good and was revolutionary for the time. Turned based with both the enemy party and your party on the screen duking it out. Magic works similarly to DnD with spell slots. Run out of slots and you can't cast anymore. There are tons of different spells, weapons, and armor that can change the tide of battle with even equipment not equipped having spells tied to them as a one time use so none spell casters can cast if need be.
Now gameplay for story... well if you played a game back in the 90s or have heard about how they played I sure hope you are prepared to just wonder about and write down info you see mentioned that could be important. Of course there are guides out now but if you want the original experience I recommend having a way to take notes nearby. I got lost a few times but eventually got on the right path and continued on without to much trouble. You will need to grind a few times so just be ready for that. Somethings are just vague for story but it helps with the world to an extent.
Now for additions given to the Pixel Remasters. The game has had all it's original bugs fixed, a brand new arrangement to the songs are available or you can play with the NES original version, a bestiary is included so you can keep up with all the enemies you've taken down in your journey to save the world, a Booster option to boost money or exp if you so chose or you can lower how much you get to make it harder, a music player to hear just the music from the arrangement and the original whenever you want, and my personal favorite, an art gallery that shows all the concept art for the original game including art done for anniversaries.
All in All. Final Fantasy 1 is a nice benchmark for the series and paved the way for many JRPGs to come. I highly recommend giving this game a go to see Final Fantasy's beginnings.
This review contains spoilers
Being a fan of the final fantasy series. I wanted to at least give each game its fair share to see what exactly they all have that special to them. Which is why it's funny enough that I am starting with one of the newer titles that is a prequel to the original game.
In concept Stranger of Paradise is an interesting attempt to give a story to the character Jack Garland who spoiler alert, is the first boss of final fantasy one. So there's not a lot you can try to come up with there. But to their credit Square Enix and Team Ninja tried to at least do something.
The problem is it's very hard to get attached to a character that in the original game exists and gets defeated by 4 level 5 characters. Throughout the entire time with the story, I found it very hard to believe that this guy is the same person that I had to fight in the chaos shrine within the first maybe half an hour of final fantasy one.
I played through the whole game with a friend and tried to keep an open mind to the story and to try and let it all get into my head. So I could have my own opinions and see how good this story could possibly be. The only words I can say before I come back to it is anyone who says that Jack Garland is the best protagonist we have ever had in final fantasy is a liar. The story felt like it was beating me over the head for even trying to understand it and really only became good within the final hour maybe.
Combat wise the game is incredibly fun. Setting up classes however you want. Each having different abilities that make them viable and combing abilities from some classes makes the experience even more fun. For example, I played Dark Knight which allowed you to use your health to deal more damage so a risk vs reward. I would then add in abilities from other classes to recover HP so I wouldn't lose as much.
Graphically the game looks great. Each location is based off a location from all the past final fantasies up to that point so from 1 to 15, each places has a location tied to it. It was a love letter in the sense. Each location also used a motif from the original games so you could have part of the original song included in and it sounded so good. My favorite was 15's rep.
Now the actual story. The entire time you're getting these moments that are supposed to make Jack and his comrades seem as though they know each other very well but we never get to see them actually do anything together, and all these are just weird moments that make no sense until the very end. And even then it's still done poorly to the point that you still don't understand.
The game ends how you expect if you've played Final Fantasy. Jack has to become Chaos. However, the way in which they do was interesting, but feel flat for me. You find out that basically the world of Final Fantasy is being reset by another race of people to keep trying to balance light and dark within it to help with their own world??? It was kinda vague even then. And Jack has been sent in multiple times to keep the balance. By the time you take control of him, he has secretly set in motion the means to stop this reset and to have the world act in its own way and can't be controlled anymore.
The plan of course being, become Chaos. But due to the world being reset, they keep losing their memories. So Jack gets someone on the inside and basically says, "Hey, lead me and I will make sure this doesn't happen again." The rest of the party slowly gets their memories back but it takes Jack the longest to get it back so for the entire game you're as in the dark as he is. The second to last mission has the party remember what to do and fight Jack so he can kill them and regain more memories and corrupt himself to become chaos as you are now forced to kill your comrades which maybe would've made someone emotional but because of how it is handled you're kinda meh about it.
The final mission itself has you go and blast your way through the chaos shrine to go and take the fight back to the lufenians to take the world of FF1 back. You invade and fight Darkness Manifest which is Amano's art of Chaos turned into a 3D model and it looks fantastic. The game ends with Jack taking up the mantle of Chaos, his "friends" becoming the 4 fiends, and them saying we'll train the warriors of light ourselves as the game fades to black and begins the timeloop before cutting ahead the beginning of FF1 with Jack, officially in the Garland armor sitting on the throne in the chaos shrine as the Warrior of Light and his party enter. You see them wrapped in light before.... and I'm not joking... fucking Frank Sinatra's My Way starts playing and credits role.
The moment the credits hit, the bits I was starting to enjoy and even looking forward to immediately turned sour. I felt angry, annoyed, and felt like I was played for even trying to enjoy the story.
All in all. Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origins is great with combat, cool outfits, but horribly captured characters that have no reasons for you to care about them till it's to late and a story that beats you up for trying to understand it.
I can not in good faith recommend this game unless you just want to ignore the story and beat the shit out of stuff.
While there is DLC for it I'm not sure when I'll get to it after how the story made me feel. But when I do this review will be updated.
In concept Stranger of Paradise is an interesting attempt to give a story to the character Jack Garland who spoiler alert, is the first boss of final fantasy one. So there's not a lot you can try to come up with there. But to their credit Square Enix and Team Ninja tried to at least do something.
The problem is it's very hard to get attached to a character that in the original game exists and gets defeated by 4 level 5 characters. Throughout the entire time with the story, I found it very hard to believe that this guy is the same person that I had to fight in the chaos shrine within the first maybe half an hour of final fantasy one.
I played through the whole game with a friend and tried to keep an open mind to the story and to try and let it all get into my head. So I could have my own opinions and see how good this story could possibly be. The only words I can say before I come back to it is anyone who says that Jack Garland is the best protagonist we have ever had in final fantasy is a liar. The story felt like it was beating me over the head for even trying to understand it and really only became good within the final hour maybe.
Combat wise the game is incredibly fun. Setting up classes however you want. Each having different abilities that make them viable and combing abilities from some classes makes the experience even more fun. For example, I played Dark Knight which allowed you to use your health to deal more damage so a risk vs reward. I would then add in abilities from other classes to recover HP so I wouldn't lose as much.
Graphically the game looks great. Each location is based off a location from all the past final fantasies up to that point so from 1 to 15, each places has a location tied to it. It was a love letter in the sense. Each location also used a motif from the original games so you could have part of the original song included in and it sounded so good. My favorite was 15's rep.
Now the actual story. The entire time you're getting these moments that are supposed to make Jack and his comrades seem as though they know each other very well but we never get to see them actually do anything together, and all these are just weird moments that make no sense until the very end. And even then it's still done poorly to the point that you still don't understand.
The game ends how you expect if you've played Final Fantasy. Jack has to become Chaos. However, the way in which they do was interesting, but feel flat for me. You find out that basically the world of Final Fantasy is being reset by another race of people to keep trying to balance light and dark within it to help with their own world??? It was kinda vague even then. And Jack has been sent in multiple times to keep the balance. By the time you take control of him, he has secretly set in motion the means to stop this reset and to have the world act in its own way and can't be controlled anymore.
The plan of course being, become Chaos. But due to the world being reset, they keep losing their memories. So Jack gets someone on the inside and basically says, "Hey, lead me and I will make sure this doesn't happen again." The rest of the party slowly gets their memories back but it takes Jack the longest to get it back so for the entire game you're as in the dark as he is. The second to last mission has the party remember what to do and fight Jack so he can kill them and regain more memories and corrupt himself to become chaos as you are now forced to kill your comrades which maybe would've made someone emotional but because of how it is handled you're kinda meh about it.
The final mission itself has you go and blast your way through the chaos shrine to go and take the fight back to the lufenians to take the world of FF1 back. You invade and fight Darkness Manifest which is Amano's art of Chaos turned into a 3D model and it looks fantastic. The game ends with Jack taking up the mantle of Chaos, his "friends" becoming the 4 fiends, and them saying we'll train the warriors of light ourselves as the game fades to black and begins the timeloop before cutting ahead the beginning of FF1 with Jack, officially in the Garland armor sitting on the throne in the chaos shrine as the Warrior of Light and his party enter. You see them wrapped in light before.... and I'm not joking... fucking Frank Sinatra's My Way starts playing and credits role.
The moment the credits hit, the bits I was starting to enjoy and even looking forward to immediately turned sour. I felt angry, annoyed, and felt like I was played for even trying to enjoy the story.
All in all. Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origins is great with combat, cool outfits, but horribly captured characters that have no reasons for you to care about them till it's to late and a story that beats you up for trying to understand it.
I can not in good faith recommend this game unless you just want to ignore the story and beat the shit out of stuff.
While there is DLC for it I'm not sure when I'll get to it after how the story made me feel. But when I do this review will be updated.
Red Dead Revolver
2004
I really wanted to like this more, but I think there's just a bit too much jank in the game. The voice acting and character animations are really well done despite its simple story and gameplay, and it has a lot of that PS2 charm.
Red Dead Redemption
2010
This review contains spoilers
This game feels. so. long.
Red Dead Redemption looks incredible considering its release year. Genuinely incredible tech on this game. The character animations and voice acting is top notch. Nothing particularly surprising from Rockstar, but still worth mentioning nonetheless. The soundtrack of the game is also decent, with some standout tracks.
However, much of the game is a waste of time. The lack of quality of life really contributes to this feeling. The tie between saving and passing time is genuinely unforgivable - I wouldn't be surprised if I lost maybe 10-15 minutes of my life in this relatively short game to just saving to pass the time, or passing the time to save. This honestly wouldn't be such a big deal if certain missions didn't have a time requirement. Or, better yet, if you could just move to the time of day by approaching the needed mission. This lack of QoL is baffling.
Much of this game is riding on my horse. The horse controls in this game are by no means bad, in fact I was pretty impressed. However, getting most of the character dialogue in this game from just holding X for a few minutes is. bad. Genuinely, just have the horse follow the road. Or have the dialogue be presented in an actually interesting manner.
The combat in this game is fun, but very very simple. Deadeye simplifies things even further. Relatively, there isn't much combat in the game (which rightfully sets a decent tone of how serious shooting can be in this time). However, the encounters within the game feel fairly uninspired. None of the locals look very interesting, and they don't play out anymore complicated than running between cover and shooting. The cover barely even works in this game, so you really don't even have to do the first part. Especially if you have deadeye on deck.
The default controls in this game are also abysmal for riding a horse and shooting. Most of the time I was claw gripping the A button to ride, and shooting with my other fingers. Very uncomfortable.
Additionally, the actual open world feels utterly useless and needless. There is no reason to fast travel using camps, which wastes more time. The side quests in this game are not interesting, save for the ones that continue throughout the game. The Wanted system in this game is useless for how much money you get. The honor and fame systems give nearly useless boons by the end of the game. Normally, I'd be prone to explore more and take my time and figure out scenarios in which I would use some of these little buffs they give John, but there isn't much to explore in the samey looking world of Red Dead. I got one near the end of the game that said that I could not face repercussions for stealing horses, and it's like, why? Why would I take someone else's horse anyways? It really tries to shoehorn GTA mechanics into a game that doesn't need them.
But, honestly, the worst part of this game is the story. It's just plain boring. It doesn't even function as a character study of John Marston, who is so blinded by being a wife guy that he doesn't understand the plot he's in. In that sense, it fails as a tragedy as well. The actually interesting part of the game falls within the last 2 hours, after I had lost much of my interest. The first couple of parts (minus Bonnie and Ricketts) are completely devoid of any gripping content, and mostly consists of doing substories for Old West caricatures, which culminate in a very anticlimactic mission that completely fails anyways, leaving me feeling like I completely wasted my time. The game's questionable politics concerning the rebels in Mexico left me fairly downtrodden, and the third part of the game left me confounded as it expected me to have any emotion about John's past with Dutch. I just. don't understand. This is a bad game, and I don't understand the hype.
Red Dead Redemption looks incredible considering its release year. Genuinely incredible tech on this game. The character animations and voice acting is top notch. Nothing particularly surprising from Rockstar, but still worth mentioning nonetheless. The soundtrack of the game is also decent, with some standout tracks.
However, much of the game is a waste of time. The lack of quality of life really contributes to this feeling. The tie between saving and passing time is genuinely unforgivable - I wouldn't be surprised if I lost maybe 10-15 minutes of my life in this relatively short game to just saving to pass the time, or passing the time to save. This honestly wouldn't be such a big deal if certain missions didn't have a time requirement. Or, better yet, if you could just move to the time of day by approaching the needed mission. This lack of QoL is baffling.
Much of this game is riding on my horse. The horse controls in this game are by no means bad, in fact I was pretty impressed. However, getting most of the character dialogue in this game from just holding X for a few minutes is. bad. Genuinely, just have the horse follow the road. Or have the dialogue be presented in an actually interesting manner.
The combat in this game is fun, but very very simple. Deadeye simplifies things even further. Relatively, there isn't much combat in the game (which rightfully sets a decent tone of how serious shooting can be in this time). However, the encounters within the game feel fairly uninspired. None of the locals look very interesting, and they don't play out anymore complicated than running between cover and shooting. The cover barely even works in this game, so you really don't even have to do the first part. Especially if you have deadeye on deck.
The default controls in this game are also abysmal for riding a horse and shooting. Most of the time I was claw gripping the A button to ride, and shooting with my other fingers. Very uncomfortable.
Additionally, the actual open world feels utterly useless and needless. There is no reason to fast travel using camps, which wastes more time. The side quests in this game are not interesting, save for the ones that continue throughout the game. The Wanted system in this game is useless for how much money you get. The honor and fame systems give nearly useless boons by the end of the game. Normally, I'd be prone to explore more and take my time and figure out scenarios in which I would use some of these little buffs they give John, but there isn't much to explore in the samey looking world of Red Dead. I got one near the end of the game that said that I could not face repercussions for stealing horses, and it's like, why? Why would I take someone else's horse anyways? It really tries to shoehorn GTA mechanics into a game that doesn't need them.
But, honestly, the worst part of this game is the story. It's just plain boring. It doesn't even function as a character study of John Marston, who is so blinded by being a wife guy that he doesn't understand the plot he's in. In that sense, it fails as a tragedy as well. The actually interesting part of the game falls within the last 2 hours, after I had lost much of my interest. The first couple of parts (minus Bonnie and Ricketts) are completely devoid of any gripping content, and mostly consists of doing substories for Old West caricatures, which culminate in a very anticlimactic mission that completely fails anyways, leaving me feeling like I completely wasted my time. The game's questionable politics concerning the rebels in Mexico left me fairly downtrodden, and the third part of the game left me confounded as it expected me to have any emotion about John's past with Dutch. I just. don't understand. This is a bad game, and I don't understand the hype.
This review contains spoilers
This was the first traditional pokemon game I've played since Yellow came out, so as far as typing and weaknesses go I was more or less entirely blind outside of core memories like "Charmanders tail was going out cause the rain in the episode Ash first got him, so clearly water is strong against fire."
Going in so blind might be kind of a downside because it definitely didn't help my case when I was getting washed by gyms I just didn't have anything for, i.e the Psychic gym. I had to grind for a couple hours with a new Pokemon with a dark type move just to beat this one, but I pushed through.
Also, I don't think grinding games like this are really for me. I'm not sure if the later games in the series are as bad, but this one had some rough moments. The elite four rush at the end felt really exhausting, for example. This might just be a skill issue, because again this may as well have been a first pokemon experience for me, but I still felt the grinding was rough.
THAT SAID, the game was a lot of fun. I loved seeing all the lil' dudes and catching new friends. I liked the rivals, and while I THOUGHT the person stalking me was my dad, it just turned out to be a regular guy.
Going in so blind might be kind of a downside because it definitely didn't help my case when I was getting washed by gyms I just didn't have anything for, i.e the Psychic gym. I had to grind for a couple hours with a new Pokemon with a dark type move just to beat this one, but I pushed through.
Also, I don't think grinding games like this are really for me. I'm not sure if the later games in the series are as bad, but this one had some rough moments. The elite four rush at the end felt really exhausting, for example. This might just be a skill issue, because again this may as well have been a first pokemon experience for me, but I still felt the grinding was rough.
THAT SAID, the game was a lot of fun. I loved seeing all the lil' dudes and catching new friends. I liked the rivals, and while I THOUGHT the person stalking me was my dad, it just turned out to be a regular guy.