LaserRaptor
77 Reviews liked by LaserRaptor
Phantasy Star II
1989
The first Phantasy Star on the Sega Master System was a surprise to me. Maybe it's a feeling I had that because it was the oldest one in the series on an earlier console it would be bad? It's dated in many ways but bad? Not even close. Impressive art, music and technical feats on the system made it a really fun little game. The second Phantasy Star title is equally a surprise to me but literally in the polar opposite direction. I assumed because it was on the megadrive it and a sequel it would be an improvement on everything laid before it.
I was wrong.
I actually kind of actively hate this game and I just didn't expect that going in. The story starts with an interesting premise. Set 1000 years after Phantasy Star the Algol star system is ruled by a super computer called Mother Brain that has made every decision for it's residents. Controlling everything to make their lives easy but when something goes wrong they are not equipped to deal with it. As an agent of the governor you are chosen to find out the cause behind a new wave of monsters appearing due to Mother Brain not taking action. I like the idea a lot of people becoming too dependent to act on their own though the game never feels like that in the actual world.
The 80s/90s anime sci-fi visual design is still quite striking. Characters have mixture of, knives, boomerangs, magic, laser swords and plasma pistols in a mixture of high fantasy and sci-fi. It's a great blend the game works well cohesively with the character designs of shoulder pads and big hair dos with obvious Star Wars influences. Whilst I like the art and atmosphere I did find it actually less impressive from a technical standpoint than it's predecessor. The dungeons losing their first person view into the more traditional top down exploration with that was disappointing though, but that's the least of the dungeons problems.
They. Are. Terrible.
Initially they aren't too bad but as the game progressed further and further my drive to continue lessened with my progress. Each dungeon is a giant sprawling maze filled with warp points zooming you from floor to floor. It's full of unrewarding dead ends and twists with no in game map to help you navigate the labyrinthine nightmares. It's no wonder on release the game came with a guide book with a walkthrough and maps, they knew. I followed an online walkthrough in the end because I couldn't see myself brute forcing through without one. At one point the guide describes a new dungeon you come to as: "The first floor has no less than 69 chutes leading up to the next floor (No, I'm not kidding. There really are 69 chutes. Stop laughing.)" and many later are even worse. In an interview in 1993 whilst promoting Phantasy Star IV the game designer Kotaro Hayashida discusses Phantasy Star II and when asked about the dungeons he is translated as stating:
"Another issue was related to the dungeons, which were created by a new employee. Because he was new, he put a ton of effort into the maps and kind of overdid it… the game became more about the complex dungeons than anything else. I think you really see that on the Dezolis dungeons. They were really well done, and when Chieko Aoki saw them she didn’t want all the new employee’s work to be for naught, so we ended up using those maps… albeit with some mixed feelings. They contributed to the latter half of the game being unbalanced"
I agree with this though think Phantasy Star II being generally unbalanced from the get go. Due to the huge twisting warping bland looking dungeons and encounters every two steps the amount of combat in the game is kind of staggering. The amount of experience you get from them though is pitiful to the point that grinding and battling over and over just to gain one level up that does little towards improving your overall strength made the experience of playing extremely tedious. (Fans have created a double money, double experience hack due to this) I was even using fast forward playing this on the Playstation 4 Megadrive collection so god only knows how it would have felt at the original speed. To compound matters the games combat feels slightly unwieldly but to it's credit also a little ahead of it's time in some ways. There is a button to fight where the party will just auto combat each turn. In between you can manually select orders to the team to make them use spells, items or defend but it means going through extra menu steps each time unnecessarily. The menus generally feel kind of poorly implemented and equipping items, giving them to each other or using healing spells outside of battle was irritating every time. Despite all of this I did continue on as I wanted to see all the game had to offer only to reach an ending that actually made me think all the effort flat wasn't worth it.
In the same interview mentioned above on shupcompilations they discuss the game originally being made on the Master System then changed and ported in an extremely short amount of time. It sounds like it was a miracle and hard work the game came out at all to which I respect them greatly. I'm glad I finally finished the first RPG released on the Sega Megadrive and such a pillar of gaming history I was missing. It doesn't change my opinion though that Phantasy Star II is actually pretty poorly designed and not actually very fun to play.
As a Sega fan, retro gaming fan and RPG fan, this hurt to write. Half a star for the art design though, especially the cover art. Hitoshi Yoneda's work is stunning.
+ I like the story premise.
+ The ingame art design and promotional artwork is wonderful with a blend of high fantast and tech heavy sci-fi.
- It has possible the worst dungeons of the nearly 150 JRPGs I have played. Extremely tedious. Every one made me want to quit.
- It's a huge grind but feels unrewarding with it.
- Story is generally unsatisfying.
I was wrong.
I actually kind of actively hate this game and I just didn't expect that going in. The story starts with an interesting premise. Set 1000 years after Phantasy Star the Algol star system is ruled by a super computer called Mother Brain that has made every decision for it's residents. Controlling everything to make their lives easy but when something goes wrong they are not equipped to deal with it. As an agent of the governor you are chosen to find out the cause behind a new wave of monsters appearing due to Mother Brain not taking action. I like the idea a lot of people becoming too dependent to act on their own though the game never feels like that in the actual world.
The 80s/90s anime sci-fi visual design is still quite striking. Characters have mixture of, knives, boomerangs, magic, laser swords and plasma pistols in a mixture of high fantasy and sci-fi. It's a great blend the game works well cohesively with the character designs of shoulder pads and big hair dos with obvious Star Wars influences. Whilst I like the art and atmosphere I did find it actually less impressive from a technical standpoint than it's predecessor. The dungeons losing their first person view into the more traditional top down exploration with that was disappointing though, but that's the least of the dungeons problems.
They. Are. Terrible.
Initially they aren't too bad but as the game progressed further and further my drive to continue lessened with my progress. Each dungeon is a giant sprawling maze filled with warp points zooming you from floor to floor. It's full of unrewarding dead ends and twists with no in game map to help you navigate the labyrinthine nightmares. It's no wonder on release the game came with a guide book with a walkthrough and maps, they knew. I followed an online walkthrough in the end because I couldn't see myself brute forcing through without one. At one point the guide describes a new dungeon you come to as: "The first floor has no less than 69 chutes leading up to the next floor (No, I'm not kidding. There really are 69 chutes. Stop laughing.)" and many later are even worse. In an interview in 1993 whilst promoting Phantasy Star IV the game designer Kotaro Hayashida discusses Phantasy Star II and when asked about the dungeons he is translated as stating:
"Another issue was related to the dungeons, which were created by a new employee. Because he was new, he put a ton of effort into the maps and kind of overdid it… the game became more about the complex dungeons than anything else. I think you really see that on the Dezolis dungeons. They were really well done, and when Chieko Aoki saw them she didn’t want all the new employee’s work to be for naught, so we ended up using those maps… albeit with some mixed feelings. They contributed to the latter half of the game being unbalanced"
I agree with this though think Phantasy Star II being generally unbalanced from the get go. Due to the huge twisting warping bland looking dungeons and encounters every two steps the amount of combat in the game is kind of staggering. The amount of experience you get from them though is pitiful to the point that grinding and battling over and over just to gain one level up that does little towards improving your overall strength made the experience of playing extremely tedious. (Fans have created a double money, double experience hack due to this) I was even using fast forward playing this on the Playstation 4 Megadrive collection so god only knows how it would have felt at the original speed. To compound matters the games combat feels slightly unwieldly but to it's credit also a little ahead of it's time in some ways. There is a button to fight where the party will just auto combat each turn. In between you can manually select orders to the team to make them use spells, items or defend but it means going through extra menu steps each time unnecessarily. The menus generally feel kind of poorly implemented and equipping items, giving them to each other or using healing spells outside of battle was irritating every time. Despite all of this I did continue on as I wanted to see all the game had to offer only to reach an ending that actually made me think all the effort flat wasn't worth it.
In the same interview mentioned above on shupcompilations they discuss the game originally being made on the Master System then changed and ported in an extremely short amount of time. It sounds like it was a miracle and hard work the game came out at all to which I respect them greatly. I'm glad I finally finished the first RPG released on the Sega Megadrive and such a pillar of gaming history I was missing. It doesn't change my opinion though that Phantasy Star II is actually pretty poorly designed and not actually very fun to play.
As a Sega fan, retro gaming fan and RPG fan, this hurt to write. Half a star for the art design though, especially the cover art. Hitoshi Yoneda's work is stunning.
+ I like the story premise.
+ The ingame art design and promotional artwork is wonderful with a blend of high fantast and tech heavy sci-fi.
- It has possible the worst dungeons of the nearly 150 JRPGs I have played. Extremely tedious. Every one made me want to quit.
- It's a huge grind but feels unrewarding with it.
- Story is generally unsatisfying.
This is my second attempt to play Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. I originally bought it when it launched in 2010 having been hyped by the launch trailer with Patrick Stewart and Robert Carlyle narrating. Its been 14 years since then and all I remember is not enjoying it much and eventually trading it in but nothing specific about it. A friend of mine bought it so we decided to play through it together as Castlevania fans, what could go wrong?
Everything about this game feels bad to play.
Let's start with the protagonist Gabriel Belmont, he has all the personality and emotional range of a slab of granite. Literally anything that happens gives him no reaction at all like the developers forgot to animate his face. A magic horse teleporting in next to him? No problem. Giant titan smashing out of the lake? Sure. Dead wife appearing in front of him? It's Tuesday. Not a flicker of acknowledgement of surprising events like an animated corpse. His voice actor Robert Carlyle is normally a great performer but it doesn't seem like he was given much direction here. Perhaps it's because voice acting is a very different skill? but it really sounds like he is just reading off a script. Perhaps I'm underselling him here and he is acting to the characters visually displayed emotions, which is absolutely nothing, so in fact an A+ performance.
I could overlook this if the game was fun to play and control Granite Belmont but that's actually the worst part, by a country mile. It's a 3D action game but has a fixed camera with a soft lock following the action. Because the game lacks personality as much as Mr. Granite it's essentially a God of War clone but it fails to understand the level design to make that enjoyable leaving large dead zones of the camera view constantly. The combat just feels terrible, It's slow but not deliberate. Attacks lack weight and impact yet everything is unresponsive at the same time. The controls are somewhat baffling in their design to compound this further. Roll is on L2 with the left analog stick, the right analog stick doesn't seem to be used at all as you can't control the camera. There is no manual lock on to attack enemies, just a soft lock that's easy to lose. It's feels so cumbersome, even after a few hours it still felt like we were learning the controls.
A second friend came by when we were playing and gave it a go and their only impression was "This doesn't feel good does it?"
You can buy more combos for your whip using experience gained through combat but none of them feel easy to pull off or actually useful in any way when you do. The whip completely lacks impact. Enemies will just interrupt you mid attack so most the time hit and run is the most effective strategy. It's Castlevania yet you get access to one sub weapon of a throwing knife and two magic spells of light and shadow. Light heals you, shadow increases your attack. It's...coloured auras in which you collect orbs from enemies with L3 or R3 depending which pool you want to refill. Getting access to this IP and only giving that as options feels so...derivative.
This complete lack of imagination extends to the level and enemy designs equally. Enemies are bland fantasy archetypes of werewolves, trolls, goblins, and spiders. We completed 14 levels in two chapters with several hours of play and barely saw anything else. This is a series known for animated armour, floating medusa heads, dancing ghosts, chimeras etc. How do you take the past games and boil them down to such uninteresting foes? The first main level after the tutorial fight was a swamp you slowly trudge through with some goblins. It's so painfully generic but it's not even done well or designed interestingly to make it fresh. It utterly lacks the panache and style of the series it's based on.
It feels like it's aged terribly going back to it, it has all the worst aspects of the PS3 era. Quick time events for finishing enemies or traversing with a circle going into another circle. Balancing to cross a beam and having to hold R2 if you are about to fall. The game also constantly takes control away from you like it's mansplaining everything feeling incredibly patronising. Constant tutorials, pop ups, camera sweeps. Just let me play the game! I know I can pick up items with R2, I've been playing for over 2 hours! It treats you like your memory is wiped every 15 minutes.
The game tries to be a large epic with high production values with epic music and voice acting yet there are large chunks of levels with no music at all but it's not atmospheric, just empty. What music there is is forgettable like a generic orchestral theme for a summer block buster but no punch or stand out beats. Like trailer music.
After several hours my friend and I just called it quits. Maybe it gets better further on? I am aware of the twist but after learning there were still 34 more levels we just didn't actually want to play anymore. We moved onto Space Marine after this as my friend hadn't played it and the quality difference on the same system was night and day. Full camera movement, easy fluid to use controls, and interestingly a better frame rate and clearer image quality. It really just emphasized all of this game's flaws.
The thing is, I'm sad about this. We wanted to like this, we wanted to beat it and play Lords of Shadow 2 to fill in some gaps in our Castlevania history and see Granite Belmont's story unfold. There isn't an original idea to be had here though and everything just feels so banal with it. Playing this feels like a PS3 game with all the negatives that sentence implies. It takes the worst aspects of gaming in that generation and merges them together but above all it's just forgettable.
Even Patrick Stewart can't save this.
+ I like Granite Slab's outfit.
- Awful camera, controls and combat.
- Bland level, skills and enemy designs.
- Gabriel has the personality of a plank of wood used in a button measuring contest.
- Everything feels so safe and by the numbers like designed by committee.
Everything about this game feels bad to play.
Let's start with the protagonist Gabriel Belmont, he has all the personality and emotional range of a slab of granite. Literally anything that happens gives him no reaction at all like the developers forgot to animate his face. A magic horse teleporting in next to him? No problem. Giant titan smashing out of the lake? Sure. Dead wife appearing in front of him? It's Tuesday. Not a flicker of acknowledgement of surprising events like an animated corpse. His voice actor Robert Carlyle is normally a great performer but it doesn't seem like he was given much direction here. Perhaps it's because voice acting is a very different skill? but it really sounds like he is just reading off a script. Perhaps I'm underselling him here and he is acting to the characters visually displayed emotions, which is absolutely nothing, so in fact an A+ performance.
I could overlook this if the game was fun to play and control Granite Belmont but that's actually the worst part, by a country mile. It's a 3D action game but has a fixed camera with a soft lock following the action. Because the game lacks personality as much as Mr. Granite it's essentially a God of War clone but it fails to understand the level design to make that enjoyable leaving large dead zones of the camera view constantly. The combat just feels terrible, It's slow but not deliberate. Attacks lack weight and impact yet everything is unresponsive at the same time. The controls are somewhat baffling in their design to compound this further. Roll is on L2 with the left analog stick, the right analog stick doesn't seem to be used at all as you can't control the camera. There is no manual lock on to attack enemies, just a soft lock that's easy to lose. It's feels so cumbersome, even after a few hours it still felt like we were learning the controls.
A second friend came by when we were playing and gave it a go and their only impression was "This doesn't feel good does it?"
You can buy more combos for your whip using experience gained through combat but none of them feel easy to pull off or actually useful in any way when you do. The whip completely lacks impact. Enemies will just interrupt you mid attack so most the time hit and run is the most effective strategy. It's Castlevania yet you get access to one sub weapon of a throwing knife and two magic spells of light and shadow. Light heals you, shadow increases your attack. It's...coloured auras in which you collect orbs from enemies with L3 or R3 depending which pool you want to refill. Getting access to this IP and only giving that as options feels so...derivative.
This complete lack of imagination extends to the level and enemy designs equally. Enemies are bland fantasy archetypes of werewolves, trolls, goblins, and spiders. We completed 14 levels in two chapters with several hours of play and barely saw anything else. This is a series known for animated armour, floating medusa heads, dancing ghosts, chimeras etc. How do you take the past games and boil them down to such uninteresting foes? The first main level after the tutorial fight was a swamp you slowly trudge through with some goblins. It's so painfully generic but it's not even done well or designed interestingly to make it fresh. It utterly lacks the panache and style of the series it's based on.
It feels like it's aged terribly going back to it, it has all the worst aspects of the PS3 era. Quick time events for finishing enemies or traversing with a circle going into another circle. Balancing to cross a beam and having to hold R2 if you are about to fall. The game also constantly takes control away from you like it's mansplaining everything feeling incredibly patronising. Constant tutorials, pop ups, camera sweeps. Just let me play the game! I know I can pick up items with R2, I've been playing for over 2 hours! It treats you like your memory is wiped every 15 minutes.
The game tries to be a large epic with high production values with epic music and voice acting yet there are large chunks of levels with no music at all but it's not atmospheric, just empty. What music there is is forgettable like a generic orchestral theme for a summer block buster but no punch or stand out beats. Like trailer music.
After several hours my friend and I just called it quits. Maybe it gets better further on? I am aware of the twist but after learning there were still 34 more levels we just didn't actually want to play anymore. We moved onto Space Marine after this as my friend hadn't played it and the quality difference on the same system was night and day. Full camera movement, easy fluid to use controls, and interestingly a better frame rate and clearer image quality. It really just emphasized all of this game's flaws.
The thing is, I'm sad about this. We wanted to like this, we wanted to beat it and play Lords of Shadow 2 to fill in some gaps in our Castlevania history and see Granite Belmont's story unfold. There isn't an original idea to be had here though and everything just feels so banal with it. Playing this feels like a PS3 game with all the negatives that sentence implies. It takes the worst aspects of gaming in that generation and merges them together but above all it's just forgettable.
Even Patrick Stewart can't save this.
+ I like Granite Slab's outfit.
- Awful camera, controls and combat.
- Bland level, skills and enemy designs.
- Gabriel has the personality of a plank of wood used in a button measuring contest.
- Everything feels so safe and by the numbers like designed by committee.
Frequently enthralling in theory, occasionally stumbling in practice, yet incredibly beguiling in retrospect. Like Alan Wake, this is a game that toys with spooky contradictions and the grueling concept of ‘process’. Yet unlike that game (besides this being actually good), this is less a twisting narrative about the complicated and often defeating journey of creating art and deconstructing success than one about the sheer mundane becoming extraordinary and introducing order from such a chaotic dynamic. Elements and objects of everyday existence are touched with the supernatural and the obvious American response to this is to transform these newfound and wondrous discoveries into bureaucratic nonsense; where even the forces of capitalist labor inevitably puncture. Remedy stretches these ideas to its absolute limit, nothing feeling shortchanged through the extensive notes and tapes littered around the map. While I think the game is afraid to allow the player to deduce these simplistic connections (Jesse being a talkative cipher yet largely devoid of personality) it’s pretty wild that a AAA title was allowed to be this devoted to such an overtly antagonistic and distinct aesthetic. The brutalist design here is utterly astonishing in how it invites the player to partake in the haywire destruction of office and industrial spaces; witnessing antiquated practices and oppressive structures devolve into otherworldly abstraction. Perhaps that’s the greatest credit I could owe to Remedy despite the overwritten (yet unsentimental) nature of their creation. Anyways the DLC expansions here are rather bloated and lack the grace and active sense of visual innovation that the base game carried, and the overall experience falls into the familiar trapping of chaining endless enemy encounters as its climax in lieu of something as bold as the first two acts. Ultimately, it’s a game I haven’t stopped thinking about while and since playing. The playful and surreal world Remedy has intricately crafted here shows vast promise and the slick gameplay loop is as addictive and deeply satisfying as it is explosively chic.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
2022
Holy crap, what a weird rabbit hole playing Grimace’s Birthday caused me to fall into…
This is a free web browser game playable on phones from McDonald’s that was released as part of a Happy Meal marketing campaign to promote the film. An idea they stole from Jack in the Box by the way. In it you play as a 3D model of Sonic that looks uncomfortably like something out of a unlicensed project lurking in the bowels of a second or third-rate flash gaming site, and with a deeper voice than the one in Sonic Frontiers. The gameplay consists solely of choosing to either turn left or right at certain junctions, which you don’t even need to do as continuing on straight is just as effective a strategy, as you try to collect as many rings as possible in sixty seconds. There’s an augmented reality element where you can replace the sky in the background with whatever your device’s camera is pointed at, but it adds nothing to the experience.
The only question I’m left with after trying this is, well, WHY?!?! I can see kids maybe getting a few minutes of distraction out of this, but even they will put it down quickly and never touch it again due to how pointless the whole thing is. Like, there’s no reward for wasting your time on this. At least with Jack in the Box’s we got a free Uber Eats delivery out of the ordeal. Here there isn’t so much as leaderboards…
The reason I’m bothering to write about this at all is because it’s kind of hilarious the lows Sega’s mascot gets taken to right whenever you think he can’t go any lower. So if you find this sort of thing as morbidly amusing as I do here’s a link in case you want a good laugh (or cry), as this is legitimately a new rock bottom for the character.
1/10
This is a free web browser game playable on phones from McDonald’s that was released as part of a Happy Meal marketing campaign to promote the film. An idea they stole from Jack in the Box by the way. In it you play as a 3D model of Sonic that looks uncomfortably like something out of a unlicensed project lurking in the bowels of a second or third-rate flash gaming site, and with a deeper voice than the one in Sonic Frontiers. The gameplay consists solely of choosing to either turn left or right at certain junctions, which you don’t even need to do as continuing on straight is just as effective a strategy, as you try to collect as many rings as possible in sixty seconds. There’s an augmented reality element where you can replace the sky in the background with whatever your device’s camera is pointed at, but it adds nothing to the experience.
The only question I’m left with after trying this is, well, WHY?!?! I can see kids maybe getting a few minutes of distraction out of this, but even they will put it down quickly and never touch it again due to how pointless the whole thing is. Like, there’s no reward for wasting your time on this. At least with Jack in the Box’s we got a free Uber Eats delivery out of the ordeal. Here there isn’t so much as leaderboards…
The reason I’m bothering to write about this at all is because it’s kind of hilarious the lows Sega’s mascot gets taken to right whenever you think he can’t go any lower. So if you find this sort of thing as morbidly amusing as I do here’s a link in case you want a good laugh (or cry), as this is legitimately a new rock bottom for the character.
1/10
Initially I wasn't going to review this. About halfway through, maybe less I just thought "it's more Cyberpunk" which whilst absolutely spot on and how I view most DLC, I think that actually does Phantom Liberty a disservice. It has a new open world area, fixer quests and makes you hang around waiting for the next objective for no fathomable reason just like the main game but the story structure is just far tighter. Something I felt Cyberpunk 2077 lacked after a certain point.
Phantom Liberty unlocks an area of Night City called Dogtown. Cyberpunk's influences have always been pretty obvious to me with things like The Matrix, Akira, Blade Runner etc. but Phantom Liberty really reminds me of Kurt Russell's escape from New York. A walled off section of Night City with its own laws and ruler the police avoid.
Your character V arrives outside Dogtown from a mysterious message. You meet Songbird, an FIA netrunner agent. She needs your help and in turn promises to help you. The story takes an almost James Bond secret agent behind enemy lines theme to it with V partnering up with another FIA agent Sol Reed played by the fantastic Idris Elba. (Even the credits role like a bond theme). The missions are structured really well and they flow nicely from point to point. The open world aspect between missions actually gets in the way but it's still a nice improvement over the main game where some quests just felt like disconnected busy work. There are some really stand out set pieces that are quite varied. One part has you sniping as a look out, another mingling with guests at a party etc. The main story beats and characters around it are really well implemented and that, that is what makes this good. I prefer a tighter more directed experience, especially around story missions but then I just don't like open world games much.
There is a lot of content here. A decent amount of missions, new locations, characters and quests. CD Project Red obviously put effort into this and it shows. You get a new skill tree, new weapons and clothing but none of it adds much of note. I barely used or changed anything throughout from my end game character. I did like how some side quests or characters you met merged into Phantom Liberty, sometimes subtlety. Also expanding fully on Mr. Hands the fixer was interesting too. Dogtown as an area has quite a bit of personality as a run down dystopia that was obviously meant to be a grand entertainment area for the mega rich. Essentially it's a great expansion for those who enjoyed Cyberpunk and want more.
Anyone else feel it sounds more like A Metal Gear game though?
+ Story quests are much better executed in Phantom Liberty.
+ Smaller tighter location is more memorable to explore.
+ Songbird, Reed and Alex make good additional characters.
- Downtime between missions is still a drag.
- New skills, weapons, items etc feel pointless.
Phantom Liberty unlocks an area of Night City called Dogtown. Cyberpunk's influences have always been pretty obvious to me with things like The Matrix, Akira, Blade Runner etc. but Phantom Liberty really reminds me of Kurt Russell's escape from New York. A walled off section of Night City with its own laws and ruler the police avoid.
Your character V arrives outside Dogtown from a mysterious message. You meet Songbird, an FIA netrunner agent. She needs your help and in turn promises to help you. The story takes an almost James Bond secret agent behind enemy lines theme to it with V partnering up with another FIA agent Sol Reed played by the fantastic Idris Elba. (Even the credits role like a bond theme). The missions are structured really well and they flow nicely from point to point. The open world aspect between missions actually gets in the way but it's still a nice improvement over the main game where some quests just felt like disconnected busy work. There are some really stand out set pieces that are quite varied. One part has you sniping as a look out, another mingling with guests at a party etc. The main story beats and characters around it are really well implemented and that, that is what makes this good. I prefer a tighter more directed experience, especially around story missions but then I just don't like open world games much.
There is a lot of content here. A decent amount of missions, new locations, characters and quests. CD Project Red obviously put effort into this and it shows. You get a new skill tree, new weapons and clothing but none of it adds much of note. I barely used or changed anything throughout from my end game character. I did like how some side quests or characters you met merged into Phantom Liberty, sometimes subtlety. Also expanding fully on Mr. Hands the fixer was interesting too. Dogtown as an area has quite a bit of personality as a run down dystopia that was obviously meant to be a grand entertainment area for the mega rich. Essentially it's a great expansion for those who enjoyed Cyberpunk and want more.
Anyone else feel it sounds more like A Metal Gear game though?
+ Story quests are much better executed in Phantom Liberty.
+ Smaller tighter location is more memorable to explore.
+ Songbird, Reed and Alex make good additional characters.
- Downtime between missions is still a drag.
- New skills, weapons, items etc feel pointless.
Cyberpunk 2077
2020
Cyberpunk 2077 is one of those games that has no doubt had and will continue to have "what happened" case studies and documentaries. It's a fascinating game in a lot of ways before even playing it. Riding high off the success of The Witcher III and the goodwill gained from that release and it's superb DLC it felt like the developer CD Projekt Red could do no wrong. Even a simple beep tweet on Cyberpunk's twitter account after a dormant time from announcement caused a lot of discussion and hype leading up to their next big project. Cracks under the surface though unknown to most with troubled development led to launching on platforms the game wasn't ready for. The game came out with performance, AI and balance issues in abundance. Overnight after it's rushed release CDPR's bubble burst. Noise about it for the PS4 specifically was so bad that Sony did the unthinkable removing it from the PSstore and handing out refunds. It stayed that way for months. Moral of the story here? never pre-order no matter who the developer is in this day and age.
So very quick background about Cyberpunk's history out the way, how is the game 3 years later after all it's patching, PS5 version release and 2.0 Update release? All in all pretty good though I have nothing to compare it to prior to this as I was waiting for it to be finished before I played it. So this will not be a No Man's Sky or FFXIV redemption story review. Simply one of how I experienced it as it is now.
First thing I have to comment about is that as a role playing game I still found Cyberpunk disappointing and to be honest I just don't count it as one. I remember in an interview when the game was still just an announced CGI trailer 10 years ago from a developer that the game would be dense and vertical. I clearly misinterpreted that taking it to mean it would be a bit more like Deus Ex but the end result is quite the opposite. This left it feeling extremely wide and flat with a few buildings to traverse at key points. It just feels like any other open world game with a Cyberpunk skin. This may be a me problem rather than a Cyberpunk 2077 problem but I just expected more to it than that. The level up and skill system is actually just bad and this is after it has been revised, stripped down and balanced as I understand from launch. Normal level up perk point skills seem pointless mostly. Slightly more damage, quick hack damage at 10%? It's all just a bit...boring. I think I would have preferred they scrap perk abilities completely and had all abilities attached to the Cyberware you install. Having gorilla arms that increase physical strength for melee attacks and forcing open doors? Legs giving double jumps? Optics for seeing enemies through walls etc. There are just more useful abilities that offer more utility for both exploration and combat. Additionally these type of upgrades fit the cyberpunk thematic a lot better to boot. Instead it's got multiple systems that feel uninteresting and tacked on. Equipment and Cyberware should have been the focus.
Now I know that so far I have come across as negative but the thing is I actually had a really good time with Cyberpunk 2077. I mean sure as an RPG it's pretty crap and the overall main story feels a bit disjointed but so much of the rest of it is a real blast. A lot of the characters and set pieces really build up Night City as a living result of a corporation only future which is often bleak with a large almost class divide. You play the role of V, a character who through misfortune ends up with a countdown clock dying and is trying to find a solution to that predicament. This leads you to finding fixers, mercs, prostitutes and corporation suits to try and save yourself. It's an interesting setting in that so much of it looks like a modern skyscraper idyllic future city covered in neon lights yet there is a constant layer of filth and garbage bags almost everywhere undermining it's more grandiose appearance at first glance. Many of the characters reflect the city coming across as guarded and jaded but with their own reasons underneath it all. Johnny SilverHand played by Keanu Reeves is a prime example. He is your companion throughout the game and for most of It I actively hated the guy, yet the game with the best ending in was through him in the end. I liked how the characters and city are unveiled and the shades of grey between them all.
From a larger gameplay perspective it's somewhat less interesting though that could be my build. Stealth silencer head shotting goons with an over powered pistol sweeping through areas. AI was pretty unimpressive but I enjoyed some of the abilities and weapons available. It lacks the depth of an immersive sim but jumping onto a roof, finding a hidden entrance, hacking a turret remotely to turn it on it's enemies whilst throwing grenades in to cause carnage is fun, if not especially deep. I guess what you need to know going into this game is where to set your expectations to. I didn't have any really going in and had a good time exploring around the vistas killing gang members and exploring the city. The technical side of things seem to have mostly been fixed. I had one crash and a couple of items fall through floors but otherwise this is a pretty fun open world game with a large amount of content. It's not the game I wanted, nor is it the game CDPR promised but it's not bad either. The characters and set pieces are good fun as is the combat but even fixed a few years later it doesn't reach the clear ambitions CDPR had when starting development. I hope they learned their lesson from this going into the sequel and their other projects.
Still, I got to ride a cool looking Akira motorbike with a katana drawn power sliding into enemies to start a fight. What other games can you finish a review with that in?
+ Night City is a cool looking location.
+ Fun set pieces and fairly interesting characters.
+ Johnny Silverhand is a likeable dick.
+ Akira bike.
- As an RPG it's pretty crap frankly.
- Lacks depth for combat, skills and level design.
- Some story beats and resolutions don't quite land at the end.
So very quick background about Cyberpunk's history out the way, how is the game 3 years later after all it's patching, PS5 version release and 2.0 Update release? All in all pretty good though I have nothing to compare it to prior to this as I was waiting for it to be finished before I played it. So this will not be a No Man's Sky or FFXIV redemption story review. Simply one of how I experienced it as it is now.
First thing I have to comment about is that as a role playing game I still found Cyberpunk disappointing and to be honest I just don't count it as one. I remember in an interview when the game was still just an announced CGI trailer 10 years ago from a developer that the game would be dense and vertical. I clearly misinterpreted that taking it to mean it would be a bit more like Deus Ex but the end result is quite the opposite. This left it feeling extremely wide and flat with a few buildings to traverse at key points. It just feels like any other open world game with a Cyberpunk skin. This may be a me problem rather than a Cyberpunk 2077 problem but I just expected more to it than that. The level up and skill system is actually just bad and this is after it has been revised, stripped down and balanced as I understand from launch. Normal level up perk point skills seem pointless mostly. Slightly more damage, quick hack damage at 10%? It's all just a bit...boring. I think I would have preferred they scrap perk abilities completely and had all abilities attached to the Cyberware you install. Having gorilla arms that increase physical strength for melee attacks and forcing open doors? Legs giving double jumps? Optics for seeing enemies through walls etc. There are just more useful abilities that offer more utility for both exploration and combat. Additionally these type of upgrades fit the cyberpunk thematic a lot better to boot. Instead it's got multiple systems that feel uninteresting and tacked on. Equipment and Cyberware should have been the focus.
Now I know that so far I have come across as negative but the thing is I actually had a really good time with Cyberpunk 2077. I mean sure as an RPG it's pretty crap and the overall main story feels a bit disjointed but so much of the rest of it is a real blast. A lot of the characters and set pieces really build up Night City as a living result of a corporation only future which is often bleak with a large almost class divide. You play the role of V, a character who through misfortune ends up with a countdown clock dying and is trying to find a solution to that predicament. This leads you to finding fixers, mercs, prostitutes and corporation suits to try and save yourself. It's an interesting setting in that so much of it looks like a modern skyscraper idyllic future city covered in neon lights yet there is a constant layer of filth and garbage bags almost everywhere undermining it's more grandiose appearance at first glance. Many of the characters reflect the city coming across as guarded and jaded but with their own reasons underneath it all. Johnny SilverHand played by Keanu Reeves is a prime example. He is your companion throughout the game and for most of It I actively hated the guy, yet the game with the best ending in was through him in the end. I liked how the characters and city are unveiled and the shades of grey between them all.
From a larger gameplay perspective it's somewhat less interesting though that could be my build. Stealth silencer head shotting goons with an over powered pistol sweeping through areas. AI was pretty unimpressive but I enjoyed some of the abilities and weapons available. It lacks the depth of an immersive sim but jumping onto a roof, finding a hidden entrance, hacking a turret remotely to turn it on it's enemies whilst throwing grenades in to cause carnage is fun, if not especially deep. I guess what you need to know going into this game is where to set your expectations to. I didn't have any really going in and had a good time exploring around the vistas killing gang members and exploring the city. The technical side of things seem to have mostly been fixed. I had one crash and a couple of items fall through floors but otherwise this is a pretty fun open world game with a large amount of content. It's not the game I wanted, nor is it the game CDPR promised but it's not bad either. The characters and set pieces are good fun as is the combat but even fixed a few years later it doesn't reach the clear ambitions CDPR had when starting development. I hope they learned their lesson from this going into the sequel and their other projects.
Still, I got to ride a cool looking Akira motorbike with a katana drawn power sliding into enemies to start a fight. What other games can you finish a review with that in?
+ Night City is a cool looking location.
+ Fun set pieces and fairly interesting characters.
+ Johnny Silverhand is a likeable dick.
+ Akira bike.
- As an RPG it's pretty crap frankly.
- Lacks depth for combat, skills and level design.
- Some story beats and resolutions don't quite land at the end.
Baldur's Gate 3
2020
Don't even need to finish the game to know this is a full 10/10, or 100/100, or a 5 star. It's perfect.
See ya again with an edit when I'll be done
EDIT: Yes, I was right. Absolute (pun not intended) masterpiece
See ya again with an edit when I'll be done
EDIT: Yes, I was right. Absolute (pun not intended) masterpiece
I write this review from my bed as a few days ago I had one of my teeth ripped out by a dentist due to it being cracked. Deep root, firmly in molar. A nurse literally had to hold my head whilst the dentist got bigger pliers to pull it like in a cartoon. Most pain I've ever been in both before and after. This has hampered my gaming as I can only play in short bursts whilst holding my swollen face feeling sorry for myself.
The thing is that Coffee Talk 2 is a perfect pick up and play game for this just like it's predecessor. It's a Mythpunk visual novel where you are an enigmatic late night coffee shop owner serving drinks to elves, orcs, vampires, banshees and an assortment of other creatures as you learn about their lives and troubles. It's minimally interactive with only making correct drinks or handing items over the bar effecting the slice of life stories for the endings you get.
The game just works though. It's wholesome, chill with fantastic pixel art and character designs supported by the sort of pleasant music you'd find in a nice cafe or an elevator. I would recommend playing the original game first as characters and subplots do progress through and it plays with your assumption of that knowledge.
Recommended.
+ Very relaxing.
+ I like the characters and their lives.
+ Lovely visuals and music.
- Drink making is still semi guess work.
The thing is that Coffee Talk 2 is a perfect pick up and play game for this just like it's predecessor. It's a Mythpunk visual novel where you are an enigmatic late night coffee shop owner serving drinks to elves, orcs, vampires, banshees and an assortment of other creatures as you learn about their lives and troubles. It's minimally interactive with only making correct drinks or handing items over the bar effecting the slice of life stories for the endings you get.
The game just works though. It's wholesome, chill with fantastic pixel art and character designs supported by the sort of pleasant music you'd find in a nice cafe or an elevator. I would recommend playing the original game first as characters and subplots do progress through and it plays with your assumption of that knowledge.
Recommended.
+ Very relaxing.
+ I like the characters and their lives.
+ Lovely visuals and music.
- Drink making is still semi guess work.
Reviewing Castlevania Symphony of the Night is an interesting one because there is just nothing new I could possibly say about it really as a game that other far better writers with more analytical tendency's haven't covered in greater depth. The thing is though this was my first Castlevania, my first Metroidvania, and it had quite an impact on me.
I was about 20 when I first played Symphony of the Night. I'd never actually played a Castlevania game before but found the limited edition copy of this with artbook and soundtrack in a second hand store. The first thing that grabbed my attention when walking by was the amazing cover artwork by Ayami Kojima. I've always enjoyed gothic architecture, historical buildings, clothing and legends (of which vampires certainly is one of interest). Seeing that cover of a vampiric figure holding his sword upright with the moon, Castle and massive collar mixed with the slightly muted colour palette was extremely striking compared with many other drab or blocky covers in the store. The gothic atmosphere imparted in that one image left such an impression on me I had to have the game.
The artwork in the book in the back of the double CD case complimented the cover and after flipping through I popped the game in and away I went. I'm not sure what I fully expected but the hybrid mix of exploration with action RPG mechanics was a delight. It's a fairly standard affair now days, not only for the Castlevanias that came afterwards but for the dozens of indie games that have taken influence from it. The fact is though that back then this game was so influential that the genre is often simply named 'Metroidvania' partially after it. I'd never played anything like it at the time, and going back to it again over 20 years later for this digital rerelease I'm extremely pleased it's held up remarkably well on almost all fronts.
"It's strange... this castle is different than I remember it."
For those unaware, Symphony of the Night brings back Alucard the son of Dracula, a character from Castelvania III as the main character. It's a direct sequel to Rondo of Blood and Dracula's Castle has once again risen only a few years after fading away when Richter Belmont defeated Dracula..... Having actually played Rondo of Blood now a few weeks ago it makes the start all the more impactful as well as Maria's presence in the game and is a really interesting start set up literally playing against the final boss from the game before just as a prologue.
The castle itself is easy to navigate with a good map and yet it's littered with secrets as are the spells and weapons. Alucard has a variety of equipment that he can find and equip from swords, shields, hammers, cloaks etc. Additionally he can find spells and abilities for turning into a bat, a wolf or mist which help him to unlock further areas of the castle and traverse in a more fluid way. The amount of items and little easter eggs and secrets to find is quite impressive. On this playthrough trophy hunting I learned there was a sword that summons skeletons to briefly fight for you. Literally every time I play this I find something new. Playing through again after beating the game as a second character of Richter isn't something I'd tried before either and his completely different move set and abilities as a more traditional Classicvania character just add that much more life to a game.
"What is a man?! A miserable little pile of secrets!"
Great art and gameplay mechanics aside would be nothing however without Symphony of the Night's stellar audio. This particular version is the remaster based on Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles. This is the redubbed and rewritten version over the original 1997 release and to be honest I prefer it. The voice acting is just way better but I appreciate that is entirely subjective and you may prefer the more over the top iconic dialogue. Regardless of the version you play though, the soundtrack is an absolute striker. I could choose almost any song from the soundtrack and it would be not only a great piece but also a perfect accompaniment to build that atmosphere.
I went into this because Castlevania Nocturne is coming soon on Netflix and it's been in my backlog to replay for sometime but I'm really glad I did. It's been some years since I last played it and it's great to not only see that it still holds up to the test of time competing with almost any Metroidvania in the genre but also that it can still surprise me with content I never knew about. Replaying some games with memories through rose tinted glasses vcan sometimes be a let down and are better left in memories, but not Symphony of the Night. This is a game that influenced a lot but taken just at it's own merit it's still a fantastic experience.
I still hate the clocktower though.
+ Gorgeous 2D sprites mixed with 3D rendering.
+ Iconic soundtrack.
+ Insanely good artwork and atmosphere.
- Some small sound popping and map issues due to emulation over the original release.
On a side note, for anyone interested in retro games or Castlevania I recommend this video and channel The Making of Castlevania Symphony of the Night and Dracula X by Strafefox.
I was about 20 when I first played Symphony of the Night. I'd never actually played a Castlevania game before but found the limited edition copy of this with artbook and soundtrack in a second hand store. The first thing that grabbed my attention when walking by was the amazing cover artwork by Ayami Kojima. I've always enjoyed gothic architecture, historical buildings, clothing and legends (of which vampires certainly is one of interest). Seeing that cover of a vampiric figure holding his sword upright with the moon, Castle and massive collar mixed with the slightly muted colour palette was extremely striking compared with many other drab or blocky covers in the store. The gothic atmosphere imparted in that one image left such an impression on me I had to have the game.
The artwork in the book in the back of the double CD case complimented the cover and after flipping through I popped the game in and away I went. I'm not sure what I fully expected but the hybrid mix of exploration with action RPG mechanics was a delight. It's a fairly standard affair now days, not only for the Castlevanias that came afterwards but for the dozens of indie games that have taken influence from it. The fact is though that back then this game was so influential that the genre is often simply named 'Metroidvania' partially after it. I'd never played anything like it at the time, and going back to it again over 20 years later for this digital rerelease I'm extremely pleased it's held up remarkably well on almost all fronts.
"It's strange... this castle is different than I remember it."
For those unaware, Symphony of the Night brings back Alucard the son of Dracula, a character from Castelvania III as the main character. It's a direct sequel to Rondo of Blood and Dracula's Castle has once again risen only a few years after fading away when Richter Belmont defeated Dracula..... Having actually played Rondo of Blood now a few weeks ago it makes the start all the more impactful as well as Maria's presence in the game and is a really interesting start set up literally playing against the final boss from the game before just as a prologue.
The castle itself is easy to navigate with a good map and yet it's littered with secrets as are the spells and weapons. Alucard has a variety of equipment that he can find and equip from swords, shields, hammers, cloaks etc. Additionally he can find spells and abilities for turning into a bat, a wolf or mist which help him to unlock further areas of the castle and traverse in a more fluid way. The amount of items and little easter eggs and secrets to find is quite impressive. On this playthrough trophy hunting I learned there was a sword that summons skeletons to briefly fight for you. Literally every time I play this I find something new. Playing through again after beating the game as a second character of Richter isn't something I'd tried before either and his completely different move set and abilities as a more traditional Classicvania character just add that much more life to a game.
"What is a man?! A miserable little pile of secrets!"
Great art and gameplay mechanics aside would be nothing however without Symphony of the Night's stellar audio. This particular version is the remaster based on Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles. This is the redubbed and rewritten version over the original 1997 release and to be honest I prefer it. The voice acting is just way better but I appreciate that is entirely subjective and you may prefer the more over the top iconic dialogue. Regardless of the version you play though, the soundtrack is an absolute striker. I could choose almost any song from the soundtrack and it would be not only a great piece but also a perfect accompaniment to build that atmosphere.
I went into this because Castlevania Nocturne is coming soon on Netflix and it's been in my backlog to replay for sometime but I'm really glad I did. It's been some years since I last played it and it's great to not only see that it still holds up to the test of time competing with almost any Metroidvania in the genre but also that it can still surprise me with content I never knew about. Replaying some games with memories through rose tinted glasses vcan sometimes be a let down and are better left in memories, but not Symphony of the Night. This is a game that influenced a lot but taken just at it's own merit it's still a fantastic experience.
I still hate the clocktower though.
+ Gorgeous 2D sprites mixed with 3D rendering.
+ Iconic soundtrack.
+ Insanely good artwork and atmosphere.
- Some small sound popping and map issues due to emulation over the original release.
On a side note, for anyone interested in retro games or Castlevania I recommend this video and channel The Making of Castlevania Symphony of the Night and Dracula X by Strafefox.
Walking simulators are something I really enjoy as they can focus mostly on the story, characters, and atmosphere. Sadly, it's also a big gamble as sometimes the story can be great, but the gameplay is awful or the story is awesome, but the ending sucks and pretty much makes the entire experience not worthwhile. The Chinese Room is notorious for its walking simulators, being almost exactly that, and this game is a spiritual successor to Dear Esther which looked great but was forgettable.
The game puts you in a small rural British town of Shropshire where there doesn't seem to be anyone around. All you know is to follow a ball of light floating around and it guides you around the town to activate cut scenes of the main characters talking about what happened at that moment. You will see the aftermath such as a wrecked car, a turned-over box, bloody rags, etc. There are no actual character models as they are just whisps of light in the shape of people acting things out on screen. This can make the game aggravating to play and pay attention to. A game with literally zero gameplay outside of an action button, and doesn't have any characters on screen better be damn good right?
As you walk around and follow the ball of light you will sometimes hear a numbers station playing on a radio or a telephone ring. These are extra tidbits of stories you can listen to. Each part of the town focuses on a specific character, but sadly I was often lost as to who was what as there were no faces to put to any of the voices. Once you see a cutscene play out your ball of light will stop and wait, sometimes. There were quite a few glitches in the game in which the ball of light would get stuck in the ground, not continue on, or just disappear somewhere never to be found. I had to restart the game to get the ball back on track.
Major cutscenes that actually advance the story are triggered by grabbing a ball of light and moving it left and right until it explodes. This was originally an excuse to use the then-new DualShock 4 touchpad. Here it's just a mouse drag and feels pointless. You know you are done with an area when you get a ball of exploding light that takes a few seconds to trigger. After this cutscene, the area goes dark and you follow a trail of lights on the ground to the next area. This is all there is to the game. It's pretty to look at, even today. The game uses CryEngine so it looks awesome and holds up well, but it's still forgettable. There's nothing memorable about a realistic-looking generic old English rural town.
I did eventually get into the story towards the end. However, the game just ends on a pretentious note and I felt deflated and annoyed. I really hate endings like this. This was four hours I will never get back and I won't take anything away from this game at all. No interesting gameplay, no memorable visuals, and no exciting story. The voice acting is great, but that's about it.
Sadly, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a game I've avoided for a decade and there's a reason for that. I knew that this game would be very forgettable and a waste of time. I enjoyed the idea of this strange apocalyptic infection that's passed around through phone and radio waves, but there's no pay-off in the end. That also doesn't take into account the aggravatingly slow walking pace that most people won't be able to put up with. Even if it was two times faster it would be more tolerable. It feels like you're crawling. That would be fine if there were more visuals to look at but there aren't.
The game puts you in a small rural British town of Shropshire where there doesn't seem to be anyone around. All you know is to follow a ball of light floating around and it guides you around the town to activate cut scenes of the main characters talking about what happened at that moment. You will see the aftermath such as a wrecked car, a turned-over box, bloody rags, etc. There are no actual character models as they are just whisps of light in the shape of people acting things out on screen. This can make the game aggravating to play and pay attention to. A game with literally zero gameplay outside of an action button, and doesn't have any characters on screen better be damn good right?
As you walk around and follow the ball of light you will sometimes hear a numbers station playing on a radio or a telephone ring. These are extra tidbits of stories you can listen to. Each part of the town focuses on a specific character, but sadly I was often lost as to who was what as there were no faces to put to any of the voices. Once you see a cutscene play out your ball of light will stop and wait, sometimes. There were quite a few glitches in the game in which the ball of light would get stuck in the ground, not continue on, or just disappear somewhere never to be found. I had to restart the game to get the ball back on track.
Major cutscenes that actually advance the story are triggered by grabbing a ball of light and moving it left and right until it explodes. This was originally an excuse to use the then-new DualShock 4 touchpad. Here it's just a mouse drag and feels pointless. You know you are done with an area when you get a ball of exploding light that takes a few seconds to trigger. After this cutscene, the area goes dark and you follow a trail of lights on the ground to the next area. This is all there is to the game. It's pretty to look at, even today. The game uses CryEngine so it looks awesome and holds up well, but it's still forgettable. There's nothing memorable about a realistic-looking generic old English rural town.
I did eventually get into the story towards the end. However, the game just ends on a pretentious note and I felt deflated and annoyed. I really hate endings like this. This was four hours I will never get back and I won't take anything away from this game at all. No interesting gameplay, no memorable visuals, and no exciting story. The voice acting is great, but that's about it.
Sadly, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a game I've avoided for a decade and there's a reason for that. I knew that this game would be very forgettable and a waste of time. I enjoyed the idea of this strange apocalyptic infection that's passed around through phone and radio waves, but there's no pay-off in the end. That also doesn't take into account the aggravatingly slow walking pace that most people won't be able to put up with. Even if it was two times faster it would be more tolerable. It feels like you're crawling. That would be fine if there were more visuals to look at but there aren't.
I’ve held off on playing this for a long time. The first The Last of Us is easily one of my favorite games ever made, but like everyone I’ve been aware of what a massive hotbed for controversy this sequel is. I even had the source of many’s frustration spoiled for me, knowing full well the reason Ellie sets out on her quest for revenge and what her ultimate decision is by the time the credits roll in advance. The only information missing was the extremely crucial why behind the latter. The thing that’s stopped me from getting the answer to that question before now is how hostile discussion around “Part II” can get, alongside simply not wanting to risk experiencing something that could potentially have a negative affect on the love I carry for the world and characters Naughty Dog had created 7 years prior. Well, with discourse seemingly having reached the best it’s going to be for a while I decided to finally step out of the blissful comfort zone of my ignorance on the matter and at last discover what all the bloody friction is about. What I found has made it easy to understand why so many were/are left exasperated and dissatisfied with the adventure, as this is a VERY imperfect follow-up to a title that’s as close to perfect as a video game has ever come to being.
A big dilemma I believe the devs likely encountered in relation to the gameplay while making this was trying to figure out how to expand and improve upon a predecessor that was basically flawless at what it set out to do and within the confines of what it needed to achieve on that front. You can really see that early on. The opening hours are more or less what I expected; a slow, largely uneventful start as the narrative goes through the process of establishing the conflict that will serve as the driving force moving forward. There is the occasional exciting set piece in the form of moments such as a thrilling solo sprint down a snowy mountain while being chased by a rapidly growing horde of the infected, but for the most part it’s just walking forward while listening to conversations and it’s not hard to wish you had more to do in these instances than merely pushing up on the analog stick. Upon reaching Seattle where the bulk of the proceedings take place though, after breaching the gates of its quarantine zone you’re treated to a rather wide, sprawling area of the city reminiscent of Uncharted 4’s Madagascar section to explore at your leisure with plenty of optional activities to engage in outside of your main objective. Enemy encounters are pretty basic in design and strictly limited to the handful of interior locations you can visit, but it’s a nice unexpected surprise nonetheless that also shows off the massive potential a full open-world Naughty Dog project has. That’s unfortunately where the experimentation ends however, because you’re quickly thrown back into the more traditional linear levels for the rest of the runtime where the only new mechanics are stuff like a dedicated dodge button against melee attacks and the ability to hide in tall grass, leading to this entire segment feeling weirdly disconnected from the whole.
That means those hoping for true innovation beyond what II’s forerunner offered will be sadly disappointed. Yet, it does make a pretty good case for why more of the same is far from a problem here. Clashes against human and inhuman foes alike become more interesting and complex via the increase in their scripted nature, usually taking place in exhilarating settings including an underground transit system lit only by the dim red glow of burning road flares (a particular highlight). Their intensity cannot be overstated either as the intelligence of the AI paired with your limited supplies can spell your doom if you aren’t smart in your approach, and right when you think they can’t get any more challenging that’s when the dogs that can track your scent are introduced. Brutal. The stages also maintain a hint of the grander scale from the introductory chapter as well, providing frequent opportunities for the curious to get off the beaten path a bit and poke around in nonessential buildings, which always reward with helpful items and the occasional hidden scenario you won’t see otherwise.
Honestly, I think the biggest issue the package has is its length, or is at the very least directly related to that. On top of overstaying its welcome by some margin, the willingness of the developers to stretch out the journey for as long as possible severely hurts the plot. There’s a point in the game, two or more actually, where they could have ended the story without sacrificing its overall moral and everything would have been fine. Don’t get me wrong, a portion of people would have still been mad regardless, but their number would be significantly lower than what it consequently ended up being instead. I’ll try to remain as spoiler-free as I can. The first instance occurs when Ellie performs an act of particular savagery to learn the location of her target. She walks away from it visibly shaken, and in a better universe Naughty Dog used the moment to say something about the violence we’ve witnessed before closing the curtain on the tale. Shockingly enough, the instance evidently didn’t actually have much of a profound effect on her at all as minutes later she’s right back to talking about her desire for reprisal and continuing on with her mission, which later finds her committing something even more heinous that she again takes nothing away from despite appearing to realize the weight of it at first. My first thought was that this was the creators attempting to ensure players didn’t walk away with the perspective that they blew their hard-earned money on a product that was too short and that it would maybe make those last few cutscenes hit a touch harder as a result. Turns out, that couldn’t have been farther from the truth as a crazy thing happens when you come face-to-face with the woman Ellie’s hunting in a tense standoff. Basically, the game restarts.
If I had to guess, I would say Druckmann and crew knew their choices for the script’s resolution would be contentious, so they decided to force a mandatory replay where you see through the eyes of the villain in an effort to make us like her. Unfortunately, not only is this a total momentum killer due to when it occurs, but you’re essentially beginning from scratch again as ”Abby” has to acquire/learn her own set of tools and skills. What’s worse is that it felt like a direct insult to my intelligence. I didn’t need to like her. I understood and empathized with the reason behind why she did what kickstarted this whole shebang. I saw it as another one of the superbly befitting gray aspects of TLOU’s world. I eventually began to come around to the idea of this shift in protagonists when it looked like the writers were setting up a scene that would mirror the one that set Ellie on her murderous crusade and deliver a powerful, poignant lesson involving not passing your pain onto others by refusing to let cycles of violence continue. That’s not the route they took either, however. It isn’t until after you’re returned to the part where the two opposing forces meet that you enter the final leg of the journey, causing the side-character they spent the last three in-game days introducing to come off as somewhat wasted.
Normally, I wouldn’t necessarily be complaining about the amount of content, especially considering its progenitor’s multiplayer was cut, if when I finally arrived at the resolution it wasn’t so ineffective and unfulfilling. All I was left with afterwards was the question of why? What was truly gained by not wrapping the tale up 3-5 hours earlier? A greater degree of excessive padding? A bleaker, less satisfying conclusion? Not to mention you’re constantly subjected to ever-increasingly graphic depictions of horrific brutality the deeper you progress that seriously dilutes the overall message so that it lands without much impact. Having covered my opinions on all that, while the mishandling of the narrative definitely sours my view of this successor to an outright masterpiece, I can’t sit here and proclaim it as completely devoid of any value. The mix of combat, scavenging, and light (lite?) exploration is still an absolute blast and from a technological standpoint this is a staggeringly impressive feat. Those seamless transitions between gameplay and cutscenes will never not blow my mind. The production values in general are beyond outstanding with photorealistic graphics, incredible facial animation, and Hollywood A-lister quality acting. Plus, it’s just rare to receive a triple-A release this provocative and surprisingly expansive, even if it is ultimately exhausting and inconsistently written. As with anything this divisive, despite so strongly documenting my attitude over the course of this review the number one recommendation I or anyone else can give you is to try the game out for yourself in order to form your own stance on it, as what is offers will effect everyone differently. Kind of a lame way to bring a close to a read this big I know, but let’s pretend I’m doing it as a means of cleverly parodying its topic, shall we?
7.5/10
A big dilemma I believe the devs likely encountered in relation to the gameplay while making this was trying to figure out how to expand and improve upon a predecessor that was basically flawless at what it set out to do and within the confines of what it needed to achieve on that front. You can really see that early on. The opening hours are more or less what I expected; a slow, largely uneventful start as the narrative goes through the process of establishing the conflict that will serve as the driving force moving forward. There is the occasional exciting set piece in the form of moments such as a thrilling solo sprint down a snowy mountain while being chased by a rapidly growing horde of the infected, but for the most part it’s just walking forward while listening to conversations and it’s not hard to wish you had more to do in these instances than merely pushing up on the analog stick. Upon reaching Seattle where the bulk of the proceedings take place though, after breaching the gates of its quarantine zone you’re treated to a rather wide, sprawling area of the city reminiscent of Uncharted 4’s Madagascar section to explore at your leisure with plenty of optional activities to engage in outside of your main objective. Enemy encounters are pretty basic in design and strictly limited to the handful of interior locations you can visit, but it’s a nice unexpected surprise nonetheless that also shows off the massive potential a full open-world Naughty Dog project has. That’s unfortunately where the experimentation ends however, because you’re quickly thrown back into the more traditional linear levels for the rest of the runtime where the only new mechanics are stuff like a dedicated dodge button against melee attacks and the ability to hide in tall grass, leading to this entire segment feeling weirdly disconnected from the whole.
That means those hoping for true innovation beyond what II’s forerunner offered will be sadly disappointed. Yet, it does make a pretty good case for why more of the same is far from a problem here. Clashes against human and inhuman foes alike become more interesting and complex via the increase in their scripted nature, usually taking place in exhilarating settings including an underground transit system lit only by the dim red glow of burning road flares (a particular highlight). Their intensity cannot be overstated either as the intelligence of the AI paired with your limited supplies can spell your doom if you aren’t smart in your approach, and right when you think they can’t get any more challenging that’s when the dogs that can track your scent are introduced. Brutal. The stages also maintain a hint of the grander scale from the introductory chapter as well, providing frequent opportunities for the curious to get off the beaten path a bit and poke around in nonessential buildings, which always reward with helpful items and the occasional hidden scenario you won’t see otherwise.
Honestly, I think the biggest issue the package has is its length, or is at the very least directly related to that. On top of overstaying its welcome by some margin, the willingness of the developers to stretch out the journey for as long as possible severely hurts the plot. There’s a point in the game, two or more actually, where they could have ended the story without sacrificing its overall moral and everything would have been fine. Don’t get me wrong, a portion of people would have still been mad regardless, but their number would be significantly lower than what it consequently ended up being instead. I’ll try to remain as spoiler-free as I can. The first instance occurs when Ellie performs an act of particular savagery to learn the location of her target. She walks away from it visibly shaken, and in a better universe Naughty Dog used the moment to say something about the violence we’ve witnessed before closing the curtain on the tale. Shockingly enough, the instance evidently didn’t actually have much of a profound effect on her at all as minutes later she’s right back to talking about her desire for reprisal and continuing on with her mission, which later finds her committing something even more heinous that she again takes nothing away from despite appearing to realize the weight of it at first. My first thought was that this was the creators attempting to ensure players didn’t walk away with the perspective that they blew their hard-earned money on a product that was too short and that it would maybe make those last few cutscenes hit a touch harder as a result. Turns out, that couldn’t have been farther from the truth as a crazy thing happens when you come face-to-face with the woman Ellie’s hunting in a tense standoff. Basically, the game restarts.
If I had to guess, I would say Druckmann and crew knew their choices for the script’s resolution would be contentious, so they decided to force a mandatory replay where you see through the eyes of the villain in an effort to make us like her. Unfortunately, not only is this a total momentum killer due to when it occurs, but you’re essentially beginning from scratch again as ”Abby” has to acquire/learn her own set of tools and skills. What’s worse is that it felt like a direct insult to my intelligence. I didn’t need to like her. I understood and empathized with the reason behind why she did what kickstarted this whole shebang. I saw it as another one of the superbly befitting gray aspects of TLOU’s world. I eventually began to come around to the idea of this shift in protagonists when it looked like the writers were setting up a scene that would mirror the one that set Ellie on her murderous crusade and deliver a powerful, poignant lesson involving not passing your pain onto others by refusing to let cycles of violence continue. That’s not the route they took either, however. It isn’t until after you’re returned to the part where the two opposing forces meet that you enter the final leg of the journey, causing the side-character they spent the last three in-game days introducing to come off as somewhat wasted.
Normally, I wouldn’t necessarily be complaining about the amount of content, especially considering its progenitor’s multiplayer was cut, if when I finally arrived at the resolution it wasn’t so ineffective and unfulfilling. All I was left with afterwards was the question of why? What was truly gained by not wrapping the tale up 3-5 hours earlier? A greater degree of excessive padding? A bleaker, less satisfying conclusion? Not to mention you’re constantly subjected to ever-increasingly graphic depictions of horrific brutality the deeper you progress that seriously dilutes the overall message so that it lands without much impact. Having covered my opinions on all that, while the mishandling of the narrative definitely sours my view of this successor to an outright masterpiece, I can’t sit here and proclaim it as completely devoid of any value. The mix of combat, scavenging, and light (lite?) exploration is still an absolute blast and from a technological standpoint this is a staggeringly impressive feat. Those seamless transitions between gameplay and cutscenes will never not blow my mind. The production values in general are beyond outstanding with photorealistic graphics, incredible facial animation, and Hollywood A-lister quality acting. Plus, it’s just rare to receive a triple-A release this provocative and surprisingly expansive, even if it is ultimately exhausting and inconsistently written. As with anything this divisive, despite so strongly documenting my attitude over the course of this review the number one recommendation I or anyone else can give you is to try the game out for yourself in order to form your own stance on it, as what is offers will effect everyone differently. Kind of a lame way to bring a close to a read this big I know, but let’s pretend I’m doing it as a means of cleverly parodying its topic, shall we?
7.5/10
Final Fantasy XVI
2023
This review contains spoilers
HE A LITTLE CONFUSED, BUT HE GOT THE SPIRIT:
Much and more has been said about all of the things Final Fantasy XVI gets wrong (including on this very site by writers who I respect, who I consider friends and who can probably voice their thoughts and make points in a more captivating and eloquent way than I can): the unfair-at-absolute-best treatment of its female characters, the missteps with its political storytelling that indicate anything and everything from a well-intentioned carelessness to an active othering of refugees and oppressed peoples, the conscious and gleeful lack of diversity in characters’ ethnicities and races… you get the picture.
I’m not gonna talk about any of that stuff in-depth though, partially because I feel as if I don’t have anything meaningful to add to the already-existing discussions and partially because I think that a lot of this stuff isn’t really unique to XVI within the context of Final Fantasy. XVI’s sexism didn't get under my skin the way Final Fantasy VII’s infamous slap fight or Final Fantasy XV’s nigh-hostile treatment of any and all female characters did… and honestly, the laundry list of XVI’s issues are pretty much equally present in the current-day darling of the franchise, Final Fantasy XIV, which is also developed and maintained by Creative Business Unit 3. I’m not bringing up XIV specifically as a “gotcha!” (I’ve been playing it since 2018 and been a regular since 2021, and I have two different FFXIV tattoos on my wrist), but because a lot of the way I look at XVI is rooted in the way I look at XIV.
XIV routinely treats its women like shit (hell, Jill Warrick isn’t even the first Shiva penned by Maehiro to get fucked out of a place in the story while acting as a crutch for her love interest’s character development). XIV has a serious problem with xenophobia and portraying brown people as thinly-veiled caricatures or regarding them with a thinly-veiled hostility. XIV shames victims of imperialism for wanting to give their oppressors their comeuppance, dehumanizes refugees from said imperialized countries, and unironically uses gimmick characters to act as spokespersons for trickle-down economics. Hell, it does most of this shit within the span of a single patch story.
But like, honestly, none of that is particularly relevant to why XVI manages to speak to me in spite of itself. I’m gonna talk about XIV again, are you ready?
Final Fantasy XIV is a game I love, it’s a game that’s important to me, and in many ways it’s a game that has impacted my life in a way few other games have. It also frequently leaves me feeling frustrated, unseen, or actively disregarded. While the Dark Knight questline is probably the single piece of written word that’s resonated with me the most and certain characters such as the aforementioned Estinien give a voice to aspects of my worldview and morality I often feel are understood, more often than not I feel like Final Fantasy XIV wants me to feel ashamed for being who and how I am. The again-aforementioned questline where an angry mob is compared to their oppressors for ganging up on a member of an occupying military force, the almost exclusive emphasis on empathy and understanding of those who have wronged you no matter their crimes (again, with Estinien and the recently-added Zero being notable exceptions), the fucking ending to Endwalker framing the founder of a fascist state as a noble hero after spending a long time earlier in the expansion demonstrating the horrors of the well-oiled machine he designed…
I don’t know, dude, I’m just not wired like that. Some people are and I’m glad they find meaning in it, but time and time again Final Fantasy XIV feels like it doesn’t really welcome anybody who doesn’t have a boundless fount of empathy and compassion towards evildoers.
And then there’s the fact that as an MMO Final Fantasy XIV must maintain a status quo and cannot ever meaningfully change its world without uprooting the foundations upon which it’s built (which - credit where credit is due - it did in fact pull off once). The Warrior of Light fights to maintain a neoliberal utopia in which the corpses of the poor are left to rot outside the walls of Ul’dah and Ishgard remains defined by its horrific class disparity between the Brume and the Pillars. Final Fantasy XIV is about hope for the future, but that future can never and will never come. Pat yourselves on the back, kids, you’ve just contracted Ala Mhigan refugees to work in the salt mines which will be fantastic for the economy.
Okay! I’m gonna talk about Final Fantasy XVI now. You know Hugo Kupka, the guy that looks like he’s walked out of the Apple store with an iPhone 12 in his mouth? I fucking love Kupka; he’s a really fascinating character to me and I think he’s the most strongly-written as an individual character of all of XVI’s villains. Kupka has a pretty typical Man-Pain motivation (unfortunately earned by the unearned death of Benedikta Harman, one of the earliest examples of XVI’s latent misogyny) of wanting to avenge his dead lover, with his definition of vengeance being a reign of terror over the Hideaway (a commune of runaway slaves run by his archnemesis Cid Telamon, who he believes responsible for Benedikta’s death).
What makes Kupka interesting to me though is that Benedikta probably never actually cared about him and appeared to value him exclusively as a political pawn, using intimacy to get him wrapped around her finger while her true affections ironically lay with Cid. There’s a unique sort of tragedy to Kupka with that in mind: all of his pain, anger and all of the blood spilled in the name of his vengeance was all in the name of a woman who in all likelihood never loved him and only used him as a means to an end while her heart lay with another man. It’s interesting! He’s fascinating and a well-executed if not unconventional example of a tragic, sympathetic villain.
Our protagonist Clive though? Clive doesn’t give a shit about any of that. When confronting Kupka as not only his own form of revenge but to stop Kupka’s attacks against Clive’s current and former homes, the two share plenty of verbal blows and monologue at each other, pretty typical JRPG stuff… until Clive highlights the hypocrisy in Kupka’s logic and makes painfully clear that Kupka didn’t give a damn about any of the pain he caused as compensation for his own pain, considering the majority of the people he killed were entirely innocent and that Clive killed Benedikta only to keep her from killing innocent people too.
He’s a hypocrite who will not offer even a smidgen of the respect to his own victims that he demands, and Clive makes it agonizingly clear that Kupka will get “no pity from me - no pity and no mercy.”
Clive is full of righteous anger, a fury fueled by the souls of the friends he’s lost to Kupka’s actions. He has nothing but spite and hostility towards Kupka, he has no intentions of understanding or sparing a single thought towards Kupka’s own pain, and he’s framed as wholly and entirely right for doing so. There are a lot of examples of this in XVI, from Jill brutally murdering the abusive father figure who forced her to act as a weapon of war, all the way to Charon gouging out the eye of a fellow trader in compensation for the eye he took from her years and years ago. None of it is ever framed as anything but a justified and cathartic experience for the one who seeks revenge, nor are we ever expected to really sympathize with any of the people who had caused harm to the characters XVI follows. Whenever news of Kupka’s death reaches the Hideaway, they rejoice not only for justice served but for the threat that no longer lingers over their heads.
After years and years of feeling misunderstood and othered by XIV, XVI feels like a breath of fresh air and some indirect form of acceptance from FF’s writing - especially since XVI’s story is pretty specifically about revolutionary violence as a means to deconstruct oppressive power structures, another topic that is really near and dear to my heart. Ultima and the Mothercrystals can act as a metaphor for capitalism, for colonialism, for religious oppression, or all three depending on the angle from which you view them and the scene at hand, and the game never really meaningfully questions or doubts the righteousness of revolt in the face of being held underfoot. I think XVI lives and dies by its politics, and considering Tactics and XII don’t really do that much for me I’m pleasantly surprised by the fact that I find XVI’s politics engaging and resonant enough to make up for the shoddy writing elsewhere.
Which… yeah, dude, towards the end the game starts trying to work in a bunch of shounen tropes about the power of wills and friends and loved ones giving you strength and that shit sucks dude, God, earlier in the game lower-class people coming together to bring about societal change seemed like a pretty opaque portrayal of working-class organization (again, the Hideaway is pretty blatantly supposed to be a commune even if some sidequests expose that it’s funded by external benefactors) but when you try and make it The Power Of Friendship it sucks. Why does Clive have it harped on constantly that he’s not alone but he ends up doing most shit alone anyways? None of it goes anywhere. It sucks. In the mid-game I was fully ready to call FFXVI one of the best FFs because of how strong its narrative was but once they shoved the obligatory JRPG theme tropes in there it starts to drag its feet hard.
I still think it sticks the landing though; FFXVI is pretty uncompromising about the fact that destroying oppressive power structures won’t immediately unfuck the world and that things will get worse before they get better. Clive has a monologue towards the end where he talks about how people will suffer, die, try, and fail before billions of people manage to work in tandem to build a better world, but a post-credits sequence shows the fruits of mankinds’ labor within a distant future where the societal norms that caused the strife at the root of the game’s narrative are such a thing of the past they’re considered simply fantasy. It’s a much-needed spot of hope after a fairly bleak and grim ending that veers hard into the “things will get worse before they get better” train of thought, but it reminds you of what all that effort and pain will be in service of. It actually got a pretty strong emotional reaction out of me if only for again the vindication of affirmation.
And like, full disclosure, even if character writing isn’t nominally its strong suit (Clive’s initial character arc is a 50-hour ordeal stuffed into 10 hours of screentime) the game still made me cry once. Not to get too personal on my silly game review but the past year hasn’t been great to me: family members and pets passing away, acrimoniously losing contact with people I considered to be closer than the people I actually do share blood with, facing the reality of my roommate and best friend having to move away for over a year… and the scene of Clive and Joshua finally being reunited after eighteen years just got me, dude. That strong sense of yearning to be reunited with one’s family hit me really hard in a game that otherwise didn’t get me super invested in the individual characters as hard as other Final Fantasy games did.
So like… yeah, it’s got more issues than you can count, most of those issues are entirely valid and ones I agree wholeheartedly with, the character writing is hit-or-miss and it’s awful at the typical JRPG tropes it forces into the narrative, the combat is repetitive and exhausting, the pacing is godawful, it drags on for way too long… and yet there’s still so much here that means something to me it feels like a disservice to write it all off on account of all the things that any reasonable person wouldn’t care for.
XVI is an enormous mess, but it’s a mess with a lot things I find beautiful caught up in the disharmony of it all, and that’s Final Fucking Fantasy Baby.
Much and more has been said about all of the things Final Fantasy XVI gets wrong (including on this very site by writers who I respect, who I consider friends and who can probably voice their thoughts and make points in a more captivating and eloquent way than I can): the unfair-at-absolute-best treatment of its female characters, the missteps with its political storytelling that indicate anything and everything from a well-intentioned carelessness to an active othering of refugees and oppressed peoples, the conscious and gleeful lack of diversity in characters’ ethnicities and races… you get the picture.
I’m not gonna talk about any of that stuff in-depth though, partially because I feel as if I don’t have anything meaningful to add to the already-existing discussions and partially because I think that a lot of this stuff isn’t really unique to XVI within the context of Final Fantasy. XVI’s sexism didn't get under my skin the way Final Fantasy VII’s infamous slap fight or Final Fantasy XV’s nigh-hostile treatment of any and all female characters did… and honestly, the laundry list of XVI’s issues are pretty much equally present in the current-day darling of the franchise, Final Fantasy XIV, which is also developed and maintained by Creative Business Unit 3. I’m not bringing up XIV specifically as a “gotcha!” (I’ve been playing it since 2018 and been a regular since 2021, and I have two different FFXIV tattoos on my wrist), but because a lot of the way I look at XVI is rooted in the way I look at XIV.
XIV routinely treats its women like shit (hell, Jill Warrick isn’t even the first Shiva penned by Maehiro to get fucked out of a place in the story while acting as a crutch for her love interest’s character development). XIV has a serious problem with xenophobia and portraying brown people as thinly-veiled caricatures or regarding them with a thinly-veiled hostility. XIV shames victims of imperialism for wanting to give their oppressors their comeuppance, dehumanizes refugees from said imperialized countries, and unironically uses gimmick characters to act as spokespersons for trickle-down economics. Hell, it does most of this shit within the span of a single patch story.
But like, honestly, none of that is particularly relevant to why XVI manages to speak to me in spite of itself. I’m gonna talk about XIV again, are you ready?
Final Fantasy XIV is a game I love, it’s a game that’s important to me, and in many ways it’s a game that has impacted my life in a way few other games have. It also frequently leaves me feeling frustrated, unseen, or actively disregarded. While the Dark Knight questline is probably the single piece of written word that’s resonated with me the most and certain characters such as the aforementioned Estinien give a voice to aspects of my worldview and morality I often feel are understood, more often than not I feel like Final Fantasy XIV wants me to feel ashamed for being who and how I am. The again-aforementioned questline where an angry mob is compared to their oppressors for ganging up on a member of an occupying military force, the almost exclusive emphasis on empathy and understanding of those who have wronged you no matter their crimes (again, with Estinien and the recently-added Zero being notable exceptions), the fucking ending to Endwalker framing the founder of a fascist state as a noble hero after spending a long time earlier in the expansion demonstrating the horrors of the well-oiled machine he designed…
I don’t know, dude, I’m just not wired like that. Some people are and I’m glad they find meaning in it, but time and time again Final Fantasy XIV feels like it doesn’t really welcome anybody who doesn’t have a boundless fount of empathy and compassion towards evildoers.
And then there’s the fact that as an MMO Final Fantasy XIV must maintain a status quo and cannot ever meaningfully change its world without uprooting the foundations upon which it’s built (which - credit where credit is due - it did in fact pull off once). The Warrior of Light fights to maintain a neoliberal utopia in which the corpses of the poor are left to rot outside the walls of Ul’dah and Ishgard remains defined by its horrific class disparity between the Brume and the Pillars. Final Fantasy XIV is about hope for the future, but that future can never and will never come. Pat yourselves on the back, kids, you’ve just contracted Ala Mhigan refugees to work in the salt mines which will be fantastic for the economy.
Okay! I’m gonna talk about Final Fantasy XVI now. You know Hugo Kupka, the guy that looks like he’s walked out of the Apple store with an iPhone 12 in his mouth? I fucking love Kupka; he’s a really fascinating character to me and I think he’s the most strongly-written as an individual character of all of XVI’s villains. Kupka has a pretty typical Man-Pain motivation (unfortunately earned by the unearned death of Benedikta Harman, one of the earliest examples of XVI’s latent misogyny) of wanting to avenge his dead lover, with his definition of vengeance being a reign of terror over the Hideaway (a commune of runaway slaves run by his archnemesis Cid Telamon, who he believes responsible for Benedikta’s death).
What makes Kupka interesting to me though is that Benedikta probably never actually cared about him and appeared to value him exclusively as a political pawn, using intimacy to get him wrapped around her finger while her true affections ironically lay with Cid. There’s a unique sort of tragedy to Kupka with that in mind: all of his pain, anger and all of the blood spilled in the name of his vengeance was all in the name of a woman who in all likelihood never loved him and only used him as a means to an end while her heart lay with another man. It’s interesting! He’s fascinating and a well-executed if not unconventional example of a tragic, sympathetic villain.
Our protagonist Clive though? Clive doesn’t give a shit about any of that. When confronting Kupka as not only his own form of revenge but to stop Kupka’s attacks against Clive’s current and former homes, the two share plenty of verbal blows and monologue at each other, pretty typical JRPG stuff… until Clive highlights the hypocrisy in Kupka’s logic and makes painfully clear that Kupka didn’t give a damn about any of the pain he caused as compensation for his own pain, considering the majority of the people he killed were entirely innocent and that Clive killed Benedikta only to keep her from killing innocent people too.
He’s a hypocrite who will not offer even a smidgen of the respect to his own victims that he demands, and Clive makes it agonizingly clear that Kupka will get “no pity from me - no pity and no mercy.”
Clive is full of righteous anger, a fury fueled by the souls of the friends he’s lost to Kupka’s actions. He has nothing but spite and hostility towards Kupka, he has no intentions of understanding or sparing a single thought towards Kupka’s own pain, and he’s framed as wholly and entirely right for doing so. There are a lot of examples of this in XVI, from Jill brutally murdering the abusive father figure who forced her to act as a weapon of war, all the way to Charon gouging out the eye of a fellow trader in compensation for the eye he took from her years and years ago. None of it is ever framed as anything but a justified and cathartic experience for the one who seeks revenge, nor are we ever expected to really sympathize with any of the people who had caused harm to the characters XVI follows. Whenever news of Kupka’s death reaches the Hideaway, they rejoice not only for justice served but for the threat that no longer lingers over their heads.
After years and years of feeling misunderstood and othered by XIV, XVI feels like a breath of fresh air and some indirect form of acceptance from FF’s writing - especially since XVI’s story is pretty specifically about revolutionary violence as a means to deconstruct oppressive power structures, another topic that is really near and dear to my heart. Ultima and the Mothercrystals can act as a metaphor for capitalism, for colonialism, for religious oppression, or all three depending on the angle from which you view them and the scene at hand, and the game never really meaningfully questions or doubts the righteousness of revolt in the face of being held underfoot. I think XVI lives and dies by its politics, and considering Tactics and XII don’t really do that much for me I’m pleasantly surprised by the fact that I find XVI’s politics engaging and resonant enough to make up for the shoddy writing elsewhere.
Which… yeah, dude, towards the end the game starts trying to work in a bunch of shounen tropes about the power of wills and friends and loved ones giving you strength and that shit sucks dude, God, earlier in the game lower-class people coming together to bring about societal change seemed like a pretty opaque portrayal of working-class organization (again, the Hideaway is pretty blatantly supposed to be a commune even if some sidequests expose that it’s funded by external benefactors) but when you try and make it The Power Of Friendship it sucks. Why does Clive have it harped on constantly that he’s not alone but he ends up doing most shit alone anyways? None of it goes anywhere. It sucks. In the mid-game I was fully ready to call FFXVI one of the best FFs because of how strong its narrative was but once they shoved the obligatory JRPG theme tropes in there it starts to drag its feet hard.
I still think it sticks the landing though; FFXVI is pretty uncompromising about the fact that destroying oppressive power structures won’t immediately unfuck the world and that things will get worse before they get better. Clive has a monologue towards the end where he talks about how people will suffer, die, try, and fail before billions of people manage to work in tandem to build a better world, but a post-credits sequence shows the fruits of mankinds’ labor within a distant future where the societal norms that caused the strife at the root of the game’s narrative are such a thing of the past they’re considered simply fantasy. It’s a much-needed spot of hope after a fairly bleak and grim ending that veers hard into the “things will get worse before they get better” train of thought, but it reminds you of what all that effort and pain will be in service of. It actually got a pretty strong emotional reaction out of me if only for again the vindication of affirmation.
And like, full disclosure, even if character writing isn’t nominally its strong suit (Clive’s initial character arc is a 50-hour ordeal stuffed into 10 hours of screentime) the game still made me cry once. Not to get too personal on my silly game review but the past year hasn’t been great to me: family members and pets passing away, acrimoniously losing contact with people I considered to be closer than the people I actually do share blood with, facing the reality of my roommate and best friend having to move away for over a year… and the scene of Clive and Joshua finally being reunited after eighteen years just got me, dude. That strong sense of yearning to be reunited with one’s family hit me really hard in a game that otherwise didn’t get me super invested in the individual characters as hard as other Final Fantasy games did.
So like… yeah, it’s got more issues than you can count, most of those issues are entirely valid and ones I agree wholeheartedly with, the character writing is hit-or-miss and it’s awful at the typical JRPG tropes it forces into the narrative, the combat is repetitive and exhausting, the pacing is godawful, it drags on for way too long… and yet there’s still so much here that means something to me it feels like a disservice to write it all off on account of all the things that any reasonable person wouldn’t care for.
XVI is an enormous mess, but it’s a mess with a lot things I find beautiful caught up in the disharmony of it all, and that’s Final Fucking Fantasy Baby.
Hogwarts Legacy
2023
Hogwarts Legacy is quite an odd title, because in theory I like all the elements that the game comprises of, and I had a lot of fun in the first 20 or so hours but then something just snapped and I didn't really see myself wanting to play any more.
The environments are beautifully crafted with the Hogwarts Castle being exceptionally well done. I enjoyed the combat, the story and I think the initial exploration was nicely done. There's definitely love for the universe in this title. The game started running into more issues once the wider world opened up, and it just sadly became a bit of a chore. It's a tiny bit repetitive and the more time I spent in the open world the more I realized that I want to be in the actual castle more than anything else. Once I realized that a bunch of omissions like proper focus on the actual school life became more apparent and the magic was lost for me.
The environments are beautifully crafted with the Hogwarts Castle being exceptionally well done. I enjoyed the combat, the story and I think the initial exploration was nicely done. There's definitely love for the universe in this title. The game started running into more issues once the wider world opened up, and it just sadly became a bit of a chore. It's a tiny bit repetitive and the more time I spent in the open world the more I realized that I want to be in the actual castle more than anything else. Once I realized that a bunch of omissions like proper focus on the actual school life became more apparent and the magic was lost for me.
Corridor Simulator VII is terribly inconsistent.
Where to start with this game? it's a hard one to review because while I don't completely hate it, I don't remotely like it either. It's a mix of things that don't really work together leaving a bit of a flat experience for me if you look past the Final Fantasy VII aesthetic and nostalgia involved in it's creation.
For those unaware Final Fantasy VII remake is, obviously a remake of Final Fantasy VII, originally a Playstation 1 game released in 1997. I say Remake, it only actually covers the part of the original game set in Midgar which was only a few hours but has been dragged out into a 30-40 hour experience. It is being sold episodic and while I don't have a problem with this as a principal. I do have a problem with it in execution because so much of the game is inconsistent.
The game is incredibly linear, I'm not talking about story, I have no problem with that, i'm talking about level design. It is awful. Awful! Past the first chapter which was the game highlight for me it's just incredibly narrow corridors leading from one place to the next with very little to explore or do. These corridors are also filled with slow forced walking sections or narrow gaps Cloud has to slowly shimmy through like he's in Uncharted or Tomb raider destroying the pacing completely. The few branching paths you meet you are often railroaded past "this way Cloud!" without being allowed to explore. These few side paths are often just corridors to arena rooms anyway for obvious later side quests.
Speaking of which, Side quests! Cool right? A chance to see more of Midgar and meet cool characters? wrong. These are terrible. There are 20 plus in the game and every. Single. One. is. boring. Meet a forgettable character, have mundane dialogue, backtrack through a narrow corridor to above mentioned obvious side quest area, kill monster variant, come back. Repeat. there is no soul to them at all, they feel thrown in to extend the game length, no more, no less. while I understand a lot of RPGs use this kind of formula they might at least be funny or have memorable characters, these all just feel bland like created by committee or for an mmo.
Fighting the above mentioned monsters is also a let down for me. I love action RPGS, I love turn based RPGs, I dislike whatever this is. It's a jack of both and master of none. You have three party members to swap between on the fly, each can attack, block, dodge, use a variety of skills and magic and you can pause the game to select abilities and order characters to use moves. Sounds great? wrong.
The dodge is useless. It has no invincibility frames so doing a last minute well timed dodge like most action games is a waste of time, you'll get hit anyway and can only use it for slow obvious attacks. Block lessens damage but you take a huge amount anyway and you can't cancel out of attacks to block so if you're committed you're taking huge damage. the game seems designed to make sure you're taking damage.
The AI is just intentionally bad. Your team mates can't do anything on their own but some basic attacking occasionally and sit like lemmings most of the time. Square Enix solved this themselves years ago with the gambit system on Playstation 2 yet have weirdly regressed. Enemy AI just swarms your controlled character forcing you to constantly swap characters for breathing room. All I want to do is play as Tifa but I can't do that to use the combat effectively. She is also the only fun character to use in combat (Barrett especially is so boring) Don't even get me started on the stagger system where enemies take almost no damage unless you assess them and use the right magic on them. Not got those equipped? a boss fight can take like 40 minutes unless you reload your game. It gives you options on what you want to use, then often forces you another way anyway. Throw in how useless and limited summons are, (they may as well not be in the game) and how terrible the camera often is keeping track, especially in narrow confines and flying enemies and the combat is just disappointing :(
I really dislike it and yet I can see where it could have been fantastically fun but it feels like they hamstrung themselves and the whole game feels like that. Expanded story could have been wonderful but it's often cringey or bland. Bigger Midgar would be great, but it's a linear corridor simulator. Action combat could be exciting but it's instead got shoe horned in mechanics that slow it all down and leave it in a genre limbo.
This brings me to the visuals. This game is gorgeous, the character models look amazing, better than the Advent Children CG movie and Chapter 1 is also stunning for detailed areas, brickwork and textures. So why do some other parts look so awful? there seems to be a texture issue especially in Chapters 3 and 8 but can happen any time where the walls, junk or posters are so blurry sections of it look like a Playstation 2 background. For a game that's so linear and small in level scope that shouldn't be happening. See what I mean? Inconsistent.
Lastly the ending is absolute garbage. A lot of the added content is appalling or cringe worthy but the ending just felt like they wanted to make Advent Children 2 rather than a FFVII remake and Barrett is just an awful stereotype the whole way through.
Overall I'm aware i'm probably in the minority but I just don't like it that much. By chapter 14 I dropped the difficulty down to easy, not because it was hard, it's not, it's just tedious. Easy at least allowed me to combo in as Tifa and made that more fun to see it through to the end. I'm glad I played it and saw it through to the end but it just wasn't the game I wanted I guess, it felt like Final Fantasy XIII crossed with Kingdom Hearts and that is not a sentence I ever want to write again. I have no interest in playing this again or the next part.
+ Expanded character development about Avalanche is a (mostly) welcome addition.
+ Tifa is at least semi fun in combat when you can use her.
+ The nostalgia of playing a new FFVII game is great, especially when some of the iconic music fires up.
+ The game is gorgeous...
- .....except when it isn't texture wise.
- Narrow corridor, forced walking, crevice crawling moments are horrendous.
- Side quests are laughably dull.
- Combat is no fun. Intentionally road blocks any fun you could have, camera is terrible, summons are useless, stagger is a chore.
- New content is just padding. Ending to the game is terrible.
- Roche.
Where to start with this game? it's a hard one to review because while I don't completely hate it, I don't remotely like it either. It's a mix of things that don't really work together leaving a bit of a flat experience for me if you look past the Final Fantasy VII aesthetic and nostalgia involved in it's creation.
For those unaware Final Fantasy VII remake is, obviously a remake of Final Fantasy VII, originally a Playstation 1 game released in 1997. I say Remake, it only actually covers the part of the original game set in Midgar which was only a few hours but has been dragged out into a 30-40 hour experience. It is being sold episodic and while I don't have a problem with this as a principal. I do have a problem with it in execution because so much of the game is inconsistent.
The game is incredibly linear, I'm not talking about story, I have no problem with that, i'm talking about level design. It is awful. Awful! Past the first chapter which was the game highlight for me it's just incredibly narrow corridors leading from one place to the next with very little to explore or do. These corridors are also filled with slow forced walking sections or narrow gaps Cloud has to slowly shimmy through like he's in Uncharted or Tomb raider destroying the pacing completely. The few branching paths you meet you are often railroaded past "this way Cloud!" without being allowed to explore. These few side paths are often just corridors to arena rooms anyway for obvious later side quests.
Speaking of which, Side quests! Cool right? A chance to see more of Midgar and meet cool characters? wrong. These are terrible. There are 20 plus in the game and every. Single. One. is. boring. Meet a forgettable character, have mundane dialogue, backtrack through a narrow corridor to above mentioned obvious side quest area, kill monster variant, come back. Repeat. there is no soul to them at all, they feel thrown in to extend the game length, no more, no less. while I understand a lot of RPGs use this kind of formula they might at least be funny or have memorable characters, these all just feel bland like created by committee or for an mmo.
Fighting the above mentioned monsters is also a let down for me. I love action RPGS, I love turn based RPGs, I dislike whatever this is. It's a jack of both and master of none. You have three party members to swap between on the fly, each can attack, block, dodge, use a variety of skills and magic and you can pause the game to select abilities and order characters to use moves. Sounds great? wrong.
The dodge is useless. It has no invincibility frames so doing a last minute well timed dodge like most action games is a waste of time, you'll get hit anyway and can only use it for slow obvious attacks. Block lessens damage but you take a huge amount anyway and you can't cancel out of attacks to block so if you're committed you're taking huge damage. the game seems designed to make sure you're taking damage.
The AI is just intentionally bad. Your team mates can't do anything on their own but some basic attacking occasionally and sit like lemmings most of the time. Square Enix solved this themselves years ago with the gambit system on Playstation 2 yet have weirdly regressed. Enemy AI just swarms your controlled character forcing you to constantly swap characters for breathing room. All I want to do is play as Tifa but I can't do that to use the combat effectively. She is also the only fun character to use in combat (Barrett especially is so boring) Don't even get me started on the stagger system where enemies take almost no damage unless you assess them and use the right magic on them. Not got those equipped? a boss fight can take like 40 minutes unless you reload your game. It gives you options on what you want to use, then often forces you another way anyway. Throw in how useless and limited summons are, (they may as well not be in the game) and how terrible the camera often is keeping track, especially in narrow confines and flying enemies and the combat is just disappointing :(
I really dislike it and yet I can see where it could have been fantastically fun but it feels like they hamstrung themselves and the whole game feels like that. Expanded story could have been wonderful but it's often cringey or bland. Bigger Midgar would be great, but it's a linear corridor simulator. Action combat could be exciting but it's instead got shoe horned in mechanics that slow it all down and leave it in a genre limbo.
This brings me to the visuals. This game is gorgeous, the character models look amazing, better than the Advent Children CG movie and Chapter 1 is also stunning for detailed areas, brickwork and textures. So why do some other parts look so awful? there seems to be a texture issue especially in Chapters 3 and 8 but can happen any time where the walls, junk or posters are so blurry sections of it look like a Playstation 2 background. For a game that's so linear and small in level scope that shouldn't be happening. See what I mean? Inconsistent.
Lastly the ending is absolute garbage. A lot of the added content is appalling or cringe worthy but the ending just felt like they wanted to make Advent Children 2 rather than a FFVII remake and Barrett is just an awful stereotype the whole way through.
Overall I'm aware i'm probably in the minority but I just don't like it that much. By chapter 14 I dropped the difficulty down to easy, not because it was hard, it's not, it's just tedious. Easy at least allowed me to combo in as Tifa and made that more fun to see it through to the end. I'm glad I played it and saw it through to the end but it just wasn't the game I wanted I guess, it felt like Final Fantasy XIII crossed with Kingdom Hearts and that is not a sentence I ever want to write again. I have no interest in playing this again or the next part.
+ Expanded character development about Avalanche is a (mostly) welcome addition.
+ Tifa is at least semi fun in combat when you can use her.
+ The nostalgia of playing a new FFVII game is great, especially when some of the iconic music fires up.
+ The game is gorgeous...
- .....except when it isn't texture wise.
- Narrow corridor, forced walking, crevice crawling moments are horrendous.
- Side quests are laughably dull.
- Combat is no fun. Intentionally road blocks any fun you could have, camera is terrible, summons are useless, stagger is a chore.
- New content is just padding. Ending to the game is terrible.
- Roche.
Final Fantasy XVI
2023
This review contains spoilers
I have so many mixed feelings about this.
I LOVE every single FF out there, they're my shit, they're perfect for my little heart. But I also can criticize them and I will.
The game starts really well, setting up a very interesting story and interesting characters. It goes on by introducing Benedikta to you and I honestly grew so attached with her I had a very hard time accepting she later dies. She seems to be one of the most important characters in the entire game and she... dies. Very soon, I might add. The problem is: the game does this with every Dominant. They seem to be very important and then they only have like 3 or 4 scenes about them and it's over. For me, that's not much. The game fills the narrative holes with the logs and infos about the world, story and lore, but that's not enough for a game like this, which is held up by its plot and cutscenes. The only Dominants we get to know a little better are Joshua and Cid, none of the others.
One thing the game does wrong is focusing too much on useless and boring side quests, instead of taking the chance to make more insightful quests and cutscene about the secondary characters. It would have felt like a better and more thoroughly done story, but it just misses on the opportunity and that makes me sad.
That said, I have to add that I really liked the emotional weight this game carries, it made me tear up and cry many times and it just hits the right spots even it makes you suffer like an animal. So it's overall good as a generic game and really great as a Final Fantasy game.
(I still think japanese authors have to work a little more than this to give us a full and well done "western fantasy" experience, tho. The west and the east of the world just have different ways of telling a story).
It's an 8/10 for me
I LOVE every single FF out there, they're my shit, they're perfect for my little heart. But I also can criticize them and I will.
The game starts really well, setting up a very interesting story and interesting characters. It goes on by introducing Benedikta to you and I honestly grew so attached with her I had a very hard time accepting she later dies. She seems to be one of the most important characters in the entire game and she... dies. Very soon, I might add. The problem is: the game does this with every Dominant. They seem to be very important and then they only have like 3 or 4 scenes about them and it's over. For me, that's not much. The game fills the narrative holes with the logs and infos about the world, story and lore, but that's not enough for a game like this, which is held up by its plot and cutscenes. The only Dominants we get to know a little better are Joshua and Cid, none of the others.
One thing the game does wrong is focusing too much on useless and boring side quests, instead of taking the chance to make more insightful quests and cutscene about the secondary characters. It would have felt like a better and more thoroughly done story, but it just misses on the opportunity and that makes me sad.
That said, I have to add that I really liked the emotional weight this game carries, it made me tear up and cry many times and it just hits the right spots even it makes you suffer like an animal. So it's overall good as a generic game and really great as a Final Fantasy game.
(I still think japanese authors have to work a little more than this to give us a full and well done "western fantasy" experience, tho. The west and the east of the world just have different ways of telling a story).
It's an 8/10 for me