It did not get good 10 hours in. It did not get good 20 hours in. It did not get good 30 hours in. It did not get good 40 hours in.

It did not get good.

It's fascinating to come to a game like this for the first time. You know, one with the kind of baggage Final Fantasy XIII has, and so many years removed from its most heated discourse. It dawned on me very quickly during my playthrough that the criticisms I heard levied against this game were all indeed true. However, I also feel like they didn't tell the whole story. The reality is that when people painted the picture of what this controversial entry into the series entailed, they didn't do enough justice to how awful it truly is.

For example, when people describe the game as being "too linear" - often in a negative context - that doesn't get to the heart of the problem. Yes, it can sometimes be an issue, but other Final Fantasy games have been overly linear and haven't suffered nearly as much for it. Here, you'll find yourself trudging down the same hallway, looking at the same things, with nothing to break the tedium up, for hours at a time. When you couple that with FF13's braindead combat system, a pisspoor attempt to attract people to the genre during a time many were questioning what relevance the genre still had (especially in the West), you get a mind-numbing experience that offers little for the player to engage in. Let me tell you, I got some good Twitter scrolling in during the first 20 hours of this game.

And yet - AND YET - if it had merely remained that, I'd have walked away like a disaffected anime protagonist going "Whatever." I don't want to belittle this point, mind you - saying "It gets good 20 hours in" is a BIG ask. That's a lot of time to invest in something that isn't particularly compelling. But the real problem is that it got worse than that. Much worse. Pounding my head against my desk on the verge of pulling my hair out worse. When the credits finally rolled, I was thrilled that I would never have to play another second of this game again.

That part where everyone says the game gets good? A lie. Sure, after almost NINE full chapters, you get access to your complete party and see the true breadth of the combat system, but what you find is a game that substitutes basic RPG staples like resource management and strategy for a flowchart of your paradigm sets that require little thought process to choose the right one. Worse yet, as the game progresses, you realize the most optimal strategy is to switch back and forth between the same ones ad nauseam because there is absolutely no penalty for doing so and it's much quicker than letting your ATB gauge recharge. More than playing a video game, my time with Final Fantasy XIII felt like experiencing a simulation of one. You don't even have to execute commands - it's often better not to because the game simply moves too fast to fumble around in menus. Just make sure you're on the right paradigm set and you're good to go.

Well, except for that part where the game "opens up" - all five minutes of it, before you realize the one open area in the game is full of monsters far too powerful to fight at that point in the game. It then corrals you into yet another hallway for several hours, culminating in the game's ONE dungeon. You can tell this game was made during the period when they were ostensibly embarrassed to call this an RPG. All the while, FF13 tosses an overwhelming number of high-level enemies at you in standard encounters to create the illusion of difficulty, before it ends with a series of boss battles that required me to throw away the team I mostly ran with because they literally could execute the strategies required to complete it. Fucking lame. This was also the point in the game where previously minor issues - like enemies interrupting your attacks/healing or how it's an auto-lose if your party leader dies - become omni-present, resulting in a staggering amount of frustration.

Oh, what's that? What did I think of the story? I genuinely couldn't tell you. By the time Final Fantasy XIII started getting around to explaining what was going on, I was mentally checked out. The only thing I could tell you is that I disliked the majority of the cast, outside of Sazh and maybe Fang. (Sazh was genuinely too good for this game.) I do, however, think the complaints about needing to read the datalogs to explain the story are unfounded. That said, it is an issue that the game largely delegates worldbuilding to said datalogs. I never really got a good sense of the world around me from just experiencing the game. It's genuinely hard to tell how this universe operates from a visual standpoint; a lot is going on and very little of it is presented to the player without the additional reading.

I think it speaks volumes that the most fun I had with Final Fantasy XIII came in the earliest moments of its campaign. It opens in such a spectacular fashion that it imprints on you the feeling that this thing might actually beat the bad game allegations. And, for those first few hours, you can turn your brain off and go with the flow, but eventually, the thirteenth entry in the Final Fantasy series begins to reveal itself as perhaps the worst one. There are quite a few other games in the series I need to go through before I can definitively say that, but it's going to take a lot to outrank the misery and frustration I felt forcing myself to see this through to the end. It really wasn't worth it.

I really loved the simplicity and personality of the SNES version of SimCity. I've tried for decades to chase the feeling I had playing this as a kid but to be honest, even with how much more advanced city builders became, this particular one had everything I ever needed. Including an absolutely killer soundtrack, one of the most underrated of the 16-bit era!

Get this game on Nintendo Switch Online, Nintendo. I know you can do it - you did for the Wii Virtual Console when it launched back in 2006. You may have forgotten this game is one of your own, but I haven't.

Playing Sony's Marvel's Spider-Man for the PlayStation 4 computer entertainment system back in 2018 was a rare case of a dream game coming true. Like most fans of the character, I adored the bizarrely ambitious licensed game that was Activision's Spider-Man 2, and it felt like the deluge of Spider-Man games that came in the wake of its success were always chasing that high yet never quite achieved it. Spider-Man: Web of Shadows was the game that likely came the closest, but it wasn't until Insomniac Games brought forth this big AAA take on the character that it felt like we finally had a game that made you TRULY FEEL LIKE SPIDER-MAN™

Okay, I had to get one in there, but there is truth in that oft-repeated statement. Amazing web-slinging allowing fun and fast traversal over a high-fidelity recreation of Manhattan; a free-flowing combat system that felt the most responsive out of any superhero game and fully utilized all the character's strengths; and finally a story that tapped into the things about Peter Parker that resonate the most with people. That was honestly the biggest surprise for me, and the result is a narrative that I think one can put amongst some of the greatest Spider-Man stories ever told, regardless of medium.

From the opening moments of the game, as the camera pans over Peter's messy, low-income apartment, with an overdue bill notice being slid under his door immediately before he needs to dash out the window for his first mission, you can tell the writers of this game truly understood the assignment. The rest of the game that followed is an incredible underscoring of that, from his dealing with eviction to juggling his failed relationships to being late to every important meeting he needs to attend. It works super well with a story that's traveling at a brisk pace the whole time, making YOU the player feel like you've forgotten to do something important just as Peter often does. And I will forever give credit to this game for having an entire mission dedicated to Peter, at his lowest point, digging through trash to find a lost USB drive. Not many games would showcase their main character doing something of that nature, but it's perfectly in-character for the struggles of this particular superhero.

The game's larger narrative is incredibly jam-packed, hitting all the personal highlights of what you'd want to see from a Spider-Man adventure, complete with a healthy chunk of his rogue's gallery in tow. And yet, it effortlessly handles all these plot threads in unison. The big one, however, that ultimately drives the events and forms the heart of the story, is Peter's relationship with Otto Octavius. The core of this is naturally building off what had been done in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 film, but I think it says a lot about how good the story of this game is that I think they might have even outdone its inspiration. This could be the definitive Doctor Octopus story in all Spider-Man media.

See, in a film, you only have a couple of hours to tell a story, so you need to move things along quickly. The Spider-Man 2 movie gets Doc Ock from Point A to Point B very fast, explaining his fall from respected scientist to evil supervillain as largely the result of a biochip that alters his personality. Marvel's Spider-Man retains that explanation, but given the longer form of storytelling a video game affords, spends much more time building out not only the friendship between Peter and Otto but seeds in stronger anchors to the Doctor's inevitable madness. The darker elements of his personality were always there; the interface with the tentacles merely heightened it. I also think it's a huge mark of honor to the writing that I can say that despite how well this game builds up to Doc Ock's inevitable turn, I was still fully convinced it might not happen...right up until the point you see him pull out the tentacles. Such amazing chemistry and friendship developed between him and Peter that I found myself rooting for Ocatvius to be a good guy for once.

Oh, and another aspect about this incarnation of Doctor Octopus I really loved and wanted to highlight: the origin of his iconic tentacles. It's kind of amazing how the defining aspect of this supervillain has always been such an afterthought in his creation. For me, I saw his development of these things as a cool accomplishment, but most Spider-Man stories treat the tentacles as just a tool he needs for his work before they accidentally become grafted to him. Here, Doc building these things WAS his origin story, and ties into his tragedy as a person, giving him an incredibly sympathetic backstory that truly seals the deal for this characterization of Doc Ock being best ever constructed.

Also, how the game ends was another incredibly bold choice in its writing, and I give huge props to the team at Insomniac for going through with it. It's one of those elements that the Spider-Man comics have struggled forever to deal with, never committing to it and walking it back whenever they try, but here? No, they understood that Spider-Man never gets out clean, always has to balance success with hardship, and what makes the character of Peter Parker truly special is his ability TO make that hard choice. In this case, they gave him the hardest possible choice he could ever have to make, and they didn't even blink in having him do it. No truer understanding of the character than in those final moments next to Aunt May.

All that praise heaped upon this game, and now I have to get in my one big criticism. It has to do specifically with this Remastered version, and it's the reason why I'm docking it points compared to my scoring of the original game. While I'm by no means the first person to harp on this, I absolutely HATE the change in Peter's character design. No explanation from the Insomniac team will change this opinion. The whole point of this game was to have a Peter Parker who was experienced and well-established in the role of Spider-Man, and the original look reflected that. Not only that, he looked like your average guy, which is what Peter is supposed to represent. Instead, he's replaced with a baby-faced Tom Holland lookalike that I just couldn't stand to view for more than a few seconds at a time. Seriously, there's a scene early on where he's in the diner with MJ and it looks like she's his babysitter. How am I supposed to take this seriously? Seems like such a minor complaint and maybe it is but damn does it still piss me off. Playing the Remastered version in full only solidified that.

Beyond that? A truly amazing game. If you can't tell by this review, I fucking love Spider-Man, and despite my initial worries back in the day this might be another overly cinematic snoozefest like many of Sony's offerings, this one stood out as being a genuinely fantastic video game. Much like the film Spider-Man 2 did, I hope Insomniac's Spider-Man 2 will push things to the next level in just a few short months.

What I love about BattleBit isn't that it's fun. It's not that it's tactical, either, and I don't find it particularly compelling as a platform for teamwork. As much as I like sticking it to the man, my admiration also doesn't stem from it being a cheaper, more approachable version of Battlefield.

BattleBit makes dying a therapeutic form of art.

All too often, I find death in these games frustrating. You're pulled in by the punchiness of the guns, the gorgeous vistas, and the hard-hitting combat. But all too often, that realism compounds frustration. I want to be immersed in the world in front of me, but I can't because I'm stupid, part of my disability is a reduction in motor capability, and I have this constant, nagging feeling that I'm worse off than the others around me.

What BattleBit does to address this is three-fold: its dedication to a simplistic art style means you take it less seriously, everyone is as vulnerable as you are, and toxicity is actually dealt with. I wrote in my review for Unturned over a year ago that one of the key features of a blocky art style is that it's inherently goofy. It's a flavor of minimalism that favors a more tongue-in-cheek approach, whether or not that was the intent. And it works a lot here! Roblox comparisons are inevitable, and as long as they're welcome, I'll say that this reminds me of the string of really fun First Person Shooters on the platform before it became a shamelessly commercial enterprise. BattleBit might not have the originality of Framed! or Very Important Person, but it's far more polished than either of those ever were and doesn't need to rely on any Freemium trappings to get the job done. If I were to make a serious comparison to any of the games on Roblox now, the obvious candidate is Phantom Forces. I don't find the movement to be as smooth here, but what BattleBit manages to smooth over is a lot of the frustrating aspects of Phantom Forces. Phantom Forces is a game where, roughly eight times out of ten, the optimal strategy I find myself using is to pull an automatic shotgun with a twenty-round drum and unload. It doesn't work to the degree that a sniper would, but still manages to be lots of fun to use. While that's entertaining to a degree, it doesn't fix the fact that Phantom isn't the most balanced of games. You'll have rounds where that strategy can do wonders for you, but you'll also have games where you're always just absolutely being stomped on by players who have had hundreds of hours more experience than you have. It's to BattleBit's benefit that the first time I decided to snipe, somebody from halfway across the map got me. If anyone wanted to do the same to them, they could without hesitation. While, in theory, this sounds ridiculously frustrating, I find that the larger servers create an entirely different beast. Death is not an exception that good soldiers dodge, it's the expectation. You're not playing to win or to even see if you can, but to see how far you can push yourself before something gets you. In that sense, the rules of the game fade into the background. Winning or losing just kind of happens; everything else around them may fade into a blur at some point, but generally speaking, it's kind of a relaxing experience overall. It's super strange to say that about a game whose overwhelmingly chaotic nature will turn anyone expecting a fast-paced, Call of Duty-like arcade experience at the gate. But genuinely, I find losing to be fun here. And I think what reinforces that is that, at least at a cursory glance, the developers seem to be aware of what these kinds of games devolve into. Before entering any of the official servers, you pretty much have to click on an agreement where you promise to be a civilized little gamer and comfortably enjoy your time playing without needing to take casually trash-talk too far. The Steam forums are, predictably, not happy about this. But the people who frequent those have an unhealthy relationship with the word Woke that borders on limerent, so I don't care.

If you really don't care for multiplayer shooters, this isn't going to do much to change your mind. But otherwise, I highly recommend this.

2003-me would have despised the tone and style of this game. 2023-me absolutely adored it...which is why it kind of pains me to find myself abandoning it. Its structure, which essentially amounts to a selection of side quests that you can pick and choose from, wears exceedingly thin, and without a compelling enough hook for the narrative to push me forward, I found myself burning out extremely fast. This is compounded by the fact that many of those quests amount to little more than a collection of uninspired minigames, and the daunting task of doing all of this to see 100% completion weighed too heavily on my motivation to keep going.

Had Final Fantasy X-2 stuck with the same combat system as its predecessor, I might have been able to find enough enjoyment in the game to justify finishing it. However, the switch back to an ATB system kind of doomed the whole experience for me in retrospect. ATB isn't a bad system by any means, but it's always been a weird middle-ground between action and turn-based. Even when done well, as it was here, I still find myself longing for either of the other two options. As a result, my journey with the Final Fantasy X universe ends here. I wish I enjoyed my time in Spira more than I ultimately did.

As I write this review I struggle to put into words why Final Fantasy X didn't click with me. It's a game where all the pieces are assembled to achieve a special outcome, but they never quite fell into place for me enough to coalesce into something I truly enjoyed. I know a lot of people hold this game in high regard and I was hoping to find something during my 40-hour playtime to elicit those same emotions in me. But, as the credits rolled, I walked away more frustrated than anything else.

Honestly, I had a whole host of notes taken for what I wanted to say about this game, but I'm not sure I have it in me to tear too much into a two-decade-old PS2 staple that is still looked back on quite fondly. I do think it's interesting that, in a bizarre way, FFX feels like it's aged a little worse than its PS1 predecessors, as you can tell they were a little uncertain with their footing on the more powerful hardware of the PS2. Final Fantasy XII would eventually show how much more ambitious games in this series could be during that generation. On top of that, a LOT of things about this game's presentation held it back, notably cutscene direction, a lack of exploration, and some truly awful voice acting. That's probably where a big part of the disconnect came from.

That, and to be honest I never really fell in love with the game's story. It's not terrible, and they built a very unique and interesting world (especially for the time), but the crux of the narrative falling on the shoulders of both the relationship between Tidus and Yuna and the relationship between Tidus and his father was not a strong enough foundation for me to gain real investment. With the former, I never felt their chemistry truly develop; Final Fantasy X was a bit ahead of its time in being an isekai where the main girl falls for the MC with little prompting. It certainly didn't help that I had just come off playing Final Fantasy 8, another game that featured a love story central to its events, but it felt much more compelling there.

As for the latter, I think I outright reject the bridge they attempted to build between Tidus and Jecht. From the outset, your character's father is portrayed as an alcoholic, emotionally abusive figure. The game REALLY pushes you to believe he wanted what was best for his asymmetrical doofus of a son; he merely didn't know how to show it. And you know what? With a bit more care taken in the writing, that could have easily worked. Hell, you didn't even need to go with the angle of his "tough love" approach; they could have simply had Tidus resent his father for disappearing and that would have done the job swimmingly. But instead, they chose to portray Jecht in the worst possible light before trying to walk it back, and considering this forms the emotional throughline of the ENTIRE story, you can see why that not working for me did a number on my investment in Final Fantasy X.

Okay, well I ended up tearing into this game a bit after all, huh? Let me reverse it by saying the saving grace in all this was FFX's battle system, which might be one of the best in any RPG I've ever played. It baffles me they ditched it after a single outing because it was such a welcome change from the ATB system and I love how quick and fluid swapping your entire team in and out was. The sphere grid was also a remarkable system in keeping progression through the game well-balanced and the overall challenge of the game reasonably high. The less said about the endgame slog, the Cloister of Trials, and the side content, however, the better.

I think it's important I acknowledge I ultimately did have some fun with Final Fantasy X, with the core gameplay carrying a huge chunk of that, but I did finish my time with this one wishing I connected with it more. Whereas I described FF8 in my review of it as being profoundly weird, I would describe FFX as being profoundly awkward. They were clearly getting their feet wet conceptualizing what a new generation of Final Fantasy might be, but for my take, this game sinks about as much as it swims.

What a profoundly weird game. Bold, ambitious, and more than a little pretentious, it's really hard to wrap my mind around what I've just experienced. Final Fantasy VIII almost feels like a modern video game trapped in PS1-era design; a game largely driven by extravagant setpieces stringing together a narrative that feels like it could split apart at any given moment. A story that takes a huge gamble with a nuanced and introspective main character whose development is remarkably well-realized, although at the expense of almost every other character surrounding him. A beautiful and evocative setting with stunning locales that shine even decades later, though don't look too closely or else you might see cracks in the worldbuilding where it's struggling to hold it all together.

I kind of dig it, really, even enough to overlook some truly glaring holes in its plot construction, like how its quest revolved around a villain whose goals and motives are never clearly stated, or a midpoint twist that only really exists for the sake of it and never felt properly built up. It's a little harder to look past its gameplay failings, particularly the oft-maligned Junction system, something I found both easier to understand than expected but also needlessly complex to the point of frustration.

I get they probably wanted to resist the urge to just redo what Final Fantasy VII achieved with its Materia system, but they hit the nail on the head so well with it that the Junction system merely comes across like change for the sake of it. The customization it offers never felt like a suitable tradeoff for how much of my time felt wasted by drawing spells I rarely used because doing so paradoxically makes you weaker. Not to mention how much the game annoyed me with switching builds around because it kept forcing characters in and out of my party, or how agonizingly long using your GF units takes (especially early-game when they are your primary form of damage). Even the 3x speed option doesn't alleviate this much.

I fully understand this game's reputation as a love-it-or-hate-it experience but I guess I find myself landing somewhere in the middle. I appreciate how genuinely ambitious this game tried to be, especially coming off the massive success of FFVII; it would have been tempting to simply run that back again but they were willing to push the envelope even further of what Final Fantasy could be. It just went a little too far for my tastes.

I wish someone told me Final Fantasy XII was actually a Xenoblade in disguise, because I would have played this shit years ago. Adding to that are some of the clear inspirations taken from Star Wars (despite some apparent insistence to the contrary) and you have an RPG experience that's hitting all the right buttons for me. I genuinely thought people were memeing about the Star Wars thing but some of the scenes and characterizations are so on the nose you can't help but laugh. Yes, I know a sizeable part of that likely comes instead from The Hidden Fortress (itself one of the biggest inspirations for George Lucas's epic) but when your story culminates with you attacking a Death Star, you lose a bit of plausible deniability.

In terms of the actual game, while Final Fantasy XII obviously existed before Xenoblade, my previous experience with that series more than prepared me to enjoy the more automated style of combat employed here. I can understand how this might have put people off back in 2006 but I can't help but think of Marty McFly going "Guess you guys aren't ready for that yet, but your kids are going to love it." It's aged remarkably well, with a fast, free-flowing combat system and a ton of flexibility and customization available to build your party to your liking. And while the gambit system has largely been superseded in later years by developers simply becoming more proficient at designing better AI companions, I can appreciate how wild it is that a game from this era gave you so much specific control over how your party operates. Seriously, this came out the same year as Persona 3, a game with notoriously awful automated party members. Ahead of its time.

If I could point to any major criticisms of this game, it would be:

1) The license system goes a bit overboard in terms of things you need to unlock; would have preferred they scaled back some of the armor and accessory slots because you don't need 30 of those.

2) Later story beats felt a bit too spaced out or lacking the impact I think they were intended to have, as the game gets a little too bogged down with chasing one MacGuffin after another.

3) I hate to echo complaints people have been making for almost two decades now but Vaan was a pretty weak main protagonist and it didn't surprise me at all to learn he wasn't originally intended to be one. I loved the party overall and thought they had great chemistry together but it is held back when certain characters feel more like they're along for the ride than possessing agency in the story's events.

Beyond that, I truly enjoyed my time with Final Fantasy XII. There likely would have been more quibbles with a few gameplay design choices but this remaster does a fantastic job at mitigating many of those, making for an overall smooth experience. Great game and I wish more people would have sung its praises because it probably deserves a bigger seat at the Final Fantasy table than it's been given over the years.

From the producers who watched Game of Thrones and Attack on Titan comes Final Fantasy XVI, the latest entry in the long-running RPG franchise that seeks to upend the tea table and forge a new path for the series. It is a game of terrifying lows, of dizzying highs, and were the middles creamy then I might have come out impressed with my 50 hours spent here. But it's in those middles that a good RPG makes, and unfortunately, Final Fantasy XVI is disappointingly hollow.

Now, let me make it clear: I have no interest in the "Is this a Final Fantasy?" debate that has seemingly spawned around this game. If anything, FFXVI might be the MOST Final Fantasy the series has been in a long time, if not ever. It's married to many of the classic themes found throughout the series and the RPG genre in general to an almost cliched degree. If you think that a shift towards a more action-oriented style somehow lessens its pedigree I don't know what to tell you, as action RPGs have been around forever, and Final Fantasy has long been a series DEFINED by its ability to constantly experiment and reinvent itself. It's a silly conversation to have.

What I will take issue with is that both the action and the RPG elements of this game are shallow at best. So many systems that form the core of a good role-playing game have either been excised or drastically reduced, some to the point where you question why they even remained in the game. I could maybe forgive this if the action part was robust enough to make up for it, but that aspect of the game feels like a paper-thin copy of the "character action" genre it seeks to emulate. It's a game that doesn't know whether it wants to be an action game or an RPG game, and that tug-of-war between the two tears at the seams of what might have otherwise been a great game. There was genuine potential here, but even putting aside some of my personal preferences for what I enjoy, FFXVI never truly managed to capture my full attention.

That isn't to say there weren't things about this game I enjoyed, mind you. As I said, it's a game of peaks and valleys, and both of those reach out as high and as low as you can go. But man when this game is rolling it's genuinely exciting. The way each story beat culminates in a bombastic crescendo, coupled with one of the best soundtracks of the year, results in some incredibly hype moments and some awe-inspiring boss battles. These Eikon battles (the in-game term given to the kaiju-like summons the characters inhabit) are practically worth the price of admission alone. Almost at odds with its setting, Final Fantasy XVI loves to reach into a huge bag of shonen anime nonsense and pull out whatever blood-pumping inspirations it can find, to the point where you can easily recognize some of the specific things being referenced. Throughout much of the game, there is just an insane escalation that goes even further than what you'd expect, though sadly it peaks well before you land the final blow at story's end.

Final Fantasy XVI is also a showpiece of just what the PS5 is capable of. This might genuinely be the most gorgeous game to ever exist, with incredibly detailed landscapes and far more unique towns and locations than I was expecting. The decision to pull back from the open world of FF15 into more narrow, structured environments was the right decision, as it allowed for tighter handcrafting of what you discover and a more memorable, believable world. Now, I'd love for Final Fantasy to take another shot at the open-world formula after the huge swing-and-a-miss it took last time, but this wasn't the occasion for it. Smart decision-making here.

Less intelligent were some of the choices made in telling Final Fantasy XVI's story, because if I could point to one glaring issue with its overall presentation, it's how massively terrible its pacing is. I've seen this point brought up by others but it almost feels too glossed over. FFXVI's narrative is one that's stretched out almost twice what it needs to be. Several plot points are drawn out longer than what's required or reiterated in a way that attempts to establish facts we already know. You'll think you're at a moment to confront a major character, only to have it snatched away so we can fill out time with needless bullshit. I'd be more forgiving of this if the things you did in between these climactic events were good, or satisfying, but they aren't. This is what constitutes the middle of the game I referred to before.

So much of FFXVI's gameplay revolves around running through these gambits of smaller enemies into minibosses into more smaller enemies into bigger bosses. I don't want to get too much into the combat just yet, so I'll say for now that it's not nearly compelling enough to hold your attention or challenge you enough to make this repetitive mission structure enticing for a full playthrough. Game design is usually repetitive by nature; I don't have an issue with that. I do have an issue when it's not nearly fun enough in most of these encounters to become anything other than a slog.

Side quests are perhaps an even bigger offender, where here they constitute some of the most rote and boring you'll find in an RPG. I suppose I should be happy they were even included at all with all the other RPG elements that were dropped. But man, so SO MANY of them are the bargain basement fetch quest variety, to the point where they even bleed into some main story missions. I don't mind doing a bit of legwork for quests but you gotta give me some more interesting ones in between. Fetch quests also tend to work best if you can merely collect the items along the way, in standard gameplay, so in some cases, you'll have already completed the quest by the time you're assigned it. Here, though, all items for these side quests are only generated on activation of the quest, so you'll have to drop what you're doing and go to that specific area of the map to get what you need, then return. There's an embarrassing number of "go deliver this food to people" tasks. Waste of time.

The worst thing is a lot of the resentment I feel towards this part of the game is partly my own fault. I forced myself to do every side quest. And the frustrating thing is, by the time I got to the end of them all, I completely understood what they were going for. The culmination of these side quests dovetails nicely into what Clive is doing at that time and paints a more complete vision for the story. It just doesn't excuse the tedium of it all, and it wasn't made better by the fact that it dumps more than 15 side quests on you at once right as you're about to hit the point of no return.

There's an overall lack of things outside your main quest to even do. The world of Valisthea is not a "fun one." You aren't going to find neat little minigames to play. You aren't going to find any interesting caves or side dungeons to explore. Hell, there isn't even fishing. Come on guys. In the words of Yoko Taro: JRPG NEEDS FISHING. No, what you're left with is a setting and narrative that's overly dour and serious, where humor is left to a minimum, and where you have a development team who wanted to make the most of their first M-Rated game by sticking enough "fucks" and "shits" into the dialogue to make even the hardest among us blush. That settles down a bit as the story progresses but I do think it's funny how hard they tried to make their game "mature" when in the end so much of it came off as largely immature. In that respect, this game feels like a relic from the late 90s or early 2000s when it comes to that.

So what about the story then? Well, Final Fantasy XVI is the story of Clive Rosfield and Clive Rosfield alone. In one of the most drastic and noticeable changes, you don't truly form a party in this game, you play as one solitary character the whole time. Other companions come and go as the narrative dictates, and do join your "party" to "fight" alongside you, but you can't control them, and they're usually gone before you've even gotten a real chance to bond with them. This is Clive's story, and as much as I wish I could say he was a strong enough character to carry that weight, he simply didn't do it for me. The whole story doesn't, really, and although some of that can be chalked up to personal preference, it has enough issues on its own that I can't overlook.

Listen, Clive is a surprisingly well-written character, I can't deny that. I appreciate that the game allows him to be genuinely emotional at times, and he certainly has more sides to him than I initially thought. But he's also decidedly uninteresting to me; another in a long line of chosen one protagonists that only plays further into the cliched nature of what's going on here. And he (along with most of the characters in the game) does not have a strong enough personality that I felt I could latch onto them and become invested in their struggles. There were some exceptions - Cid fucking rules, and I don't think you'll find many who say otherwise - but overall Clive and his band of outlaws didn't leave the impression on me that I had hoped they would. It didn't help that Clive himself seemed kind of bored with as many of the goings-on as I was.

The story itself doesn't fare much better. It oscillates between truly compelling and mind-numbingly boring, and unfortunately, it dives further into the latter as you begin to reach the end of the game. Honestly, I initially laughed at the people who said the story took a turn for the worse later on, as I think they largely were filtered by the reveal that this Final Fantasy game was ultimately a Final Fantasy game. But I also can't deny the early game political backstabbing and posturing was far more interesting than the overly-wrought descent into Jungian philosophical arguments that had nothing new or interesting to say, and felt more akin to a first-semester college student lesson. The main villain, in particular, was thoroughly uninteresting and it's sad because some characters in the story would have made for a more fantastic final antagonist. Real missed potential in this area and I can't go further without delving into spoiler territory (which I don't want to do) so you'll have to take my word on it.

And despite what is largely a very solid performance from most of the voice-acting cast, I feel for them a bit because a lot of the dialogue in FFXVI is cliché at best and downright laughable at worst. They do their best with what they're giving but so many of the characters in the game just trade boring verbal barbs that cemented my overall impression that so much of what was written here is not up to the level of what a Final Fantasy usually is. I don't feel like I'm being unrealistic in my expectations that what has traditionally been the gold standard in RPG storytelling could have been done way better in all departments here.

Now let's finally get to the combat. There is a specific reason why I have been avoiding it up to this point: I wanted to steer clear of comparisons to another Final Fantasy game. I had to reiterate this to myself while playing the game because I wanted to give it a fair shot. I wanted to judge it on its own merits. I wanted to show it was lacking for what it was, not what it wasn't. However, I cannot talk about how much this game fails at its combat system, and how much its gutted RPG elements hurt the overall experience without sharing a few words about its most recent comparable: Final Fantasy VII Remake.

Did you know the marketing for FFXVI described it as "the first fully-fledged action RPG in the mainline Final Fantasy series?" First of all, that's kind of laughable, because what the hell does that make Final Fantasy XV then? Even side-stepping that, I get the qualifier of "mainline Final Fantasy" probably excludes VII Remake, but should it? The whole narrative around this game being an evolution of Final Fantasy felt so bizarre because they intentionally included a blind spot for Final Fantasy VII Remake, and I suppose it's because that game IS the evolution. It already did what 16 set out to do, and far better.

Final Fantasy VII Remake's combat is a beautiful hybrid and fusion of an action game and a turn-based game. You can play it like a pure action game if you want, mapping your attacks to button combos and never having to bring up a menu, but you can also open your command list and stop time at any point to plot your next move; to consider your strategy against what you're fighting. It's exciting and fast-paced but also willing to give you a breather when you need it. That was exactly what I was looking for in terms of a game that brought Final Fantasy's combat to the next level.

By far the biggest issue with XVI's combat is that it's just completely shallow and offers little in the way of thinking or customization. There's no strategy to be found here, and battles can largely be won by spamming your attacks off cooldown. There's no resource to manage here, there are no strengths and weaknesses to account for, your attack's element does factor into damage, there are no buffs and debuffs, there are no status effects; there isn't much of anything that makes a good RPG combat system. All that stuff was in FF7R and learning how to maximize all that was a big part in becoming better as the game went on. In contrast, I learned the basics of how to play FFXVI's combat early on and never needed to deviate from that. It was the same boring combat loop from beginning to end; every single enemy is fought in the exact same manner.

There is no experimenting with different builds either. Final Fantasy 7 Remake has four different party members, each with their own play styles and strengths/weaknesses. But you could make them into whatever you wanted with the materia system; there was a ton of flexibility there. In addition, every character had half a dozen different weapons, each with a unique attack that could be mastered and added to your full roster of commands. And each weapon itself had different abilities that you could put skill points into and level up, while also containing different amounts of materia slots, meaning you had to make a tactical choice on what kind of weapon you wanted to use.

Final Fantasy XVI handles its weapons by basically throwing its hands up in the air and saying "Who cares about gear in an RPG game?" Weapons here only have two stats: raw damage and stagger damage. There is nothing unique or special about an individual weapon, same with your two other gear slots, so you never have to think about what you want to use. Bigger number? Yeah, go with that. XVI also has a perfunctory crafting system that lets you reinforce your gear, but you'll seldom use it because major story missions give you specific material to craft the most powerful weapons. That also means the game is filled with generic materials lying in the field you can pick, or are dropped by monsters, that you'll probably never use. This whole system needed to be rethought from the ground up or dropped entirely.

Okay, so it's not a strong RPG when it comes to combat, but hey, it's aiming to be an action game, right? They brought on the guy who designed Devil May Cry V's combat after all. And yeah, that would be fine, if it at all lived up to those hyper-focused action games. Did they forget the point of games like Devil May Cry is not just action, but STYLISH action? There is nothing stylish about Final Fantasy XVI's combat. Very few attacks have specialized effects; they're all essentially different ways of doing damage. Like there's a fire attack that reflects projectiles but so few enemies in the game do that why would you ever bother? There is little in the way of expression here, and only the bare minimum of combo potential. You don't even get rated on your combat performance after battles. Why are we comparing this to character action games again?

Much like weapons, your Eikon abilities only really do raw damage and stagger damage, but you don't even have to worry about your build here either. It's not like you have to make a choice when you have six attack slots but only two types of damage. Pick the bigger number and spam your heart out to win. The closest you get to maybe an interesting decision is the Eikon powers that relate to countering, but those are really only useful on bosses. At least they're better than the game's standard parry, which is wildly inconsistent and completely counter-intuitive compared to the parry in just about any other action game.

It's not a total loss, however. I do think for how simple the combat is, it works surprisingly well when you're one-on-one against another person or unique monster. It's flashy and at times even fun when you have an enemy that you can actually stop to read its attacks and have your skill tested. If the game were merely that I probably would have had a more positive impression overall despite the relative shallowness of it, but unfortunately far too many of your combat encounters are a boring grind to get through. There's a reason action games tend to be on the shorter side, 10-15 hours or so. This combat isn't nearly good enough to sustain itself throughout a 50-hour game. The meat grinder of wave after wave of standard enemies toward the end of the game was a real test of my patience.

Writing this review has been kind of a bummer. I've come to love JRPGs over the last 6-7 years after mostly ignoring the genre when I was younger. And I really wanted to like Final Fantasy XVI, even if many aspects of its setting and its lore aren't my particular cup of tea. To me, the discussion around this game was never about whether it was a "true" Final Fantasy or a "true" JRPG; it was about whether it was a "good" one of those things. My conclusion at the end is that much like Cid's daughter, Final Fantasy XVI is decidedly...mid.

This is my second ever Fire Emblem game and I think it might be the last. There isn't anything particularly wrong with this game, but at this point I feel I have enough evidence that I simply don't jibe with SRPGs. My first foray into permadeath with these games certainly didn't help, as it more than activated my mind goblins and prevented me from making real progress into the later campaign, lest I make a mistake and not finish a map flawlessly. Abusing the NSO rewind function only goes so far until you question why you're still playing.

I'm sorry Lyn Fire Emblem, I have failed you.

A lot of people frame Mario Party as the friendship-ender but there was no game closer to disbanding my friend group back in 2004 than Four Swords Adventures. When developing a game such as this I think you should decide whether you want it to be competitive or want it to be cooperative. Nintendo, unwisely, chose both, and so the four of us playing split along even lines: half trying solely to make progress in the game, and the other half going for the high score every level, at the expense of everyone else.

I was banned from ever playing this game with friends after just one session. You can imagine which side I fell on. I never saw this game to completion, but that was probably for the best.