Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is a behemoth. It's filled to the brim with sights to see, places to be, things to do and monsters to fight. And it... overwhelmed me. I've never been this overwhelmed by any game, which may be because I thought I knew what to expect after playing Remake. I've never been so wrong. The devs added an immense amount of new features and tweaked the central systems to the point of unrecognizability. The end result is, at its core, the most full open world game I've experienced yet - keep in mind, there aren't many, I don't really vibe with these games normally. And, in the end, I did experience almost none of it, instead going for my established Xenoblade-strategy of just always waltzing over to the next map marker and adjusting the difficulty when the going got too tough. So yea, in the end, my experience with Rebirth was that of a Xenoblade game, mostly. But, and this is actually the important bit, I still enjoyed that experience immensely.

Because, oh, does this game have the vibes: the wonderful enviromental and character designs, the quirkyness, the really esoteric and kinda hippie enviromentalist message, the clusterfuck of a story. It's raw and yet beautifully realized. Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, for me, is an engine running entirely on its vibes and themes, pulling off the most difficult part of creating any trilogy that aims to tell a single story: not making the second part shit. Only time will tell if it avoids the other pitfall of feeling mostly irrelevant after the conclusion of the story.

On first glance Pepper Grinder is remarkable because of it's central gameplay conceit, on second glance I found remarkable because of everything else. Because while the digging gameplay of the titular grinder is really fun, it's not what kept me engaged. It was the world the game portrays that fascinated me the most. Initially I kinda assumed it would be a harmless, vividly rendered world like so many others 2D platformers (like what the boxart would imply). But Pepper Grinder is absolutely obsessed with death. Enemies explode into small bones, the one big collectible is skull coins and in the end you burrow through layers of bone. In its second half the game makes the tantalizing decision to mostly forego the complexities of its central movement system in favor of gimmicks and fights: controlling a robot of mass destruction, sinking ships with enemies on them, killing hundreds of goons in a final skirmish, destroying houses and firing a gatling gun. This doesn't meaningfully build on any gameplay dynamics, but instead on the thematic resonance of this game's obsession with death. You tear through an entire civilization in your conquest. You have no context as why you are doing this until the very end.

It's a competent deckbuilder with a fun character designs, but really not much more than that? I think towards the end the runs go on for wayy to long and the control the player has over their deck is kinda restricted by not having a reliable way to remove cards from your deck (or reject picking any new cards up). For me, this led to most runs just being played with a steadily balooning deck size, where you can try to make the most of the synergies the game randomly gives you, but you're kinda consigned to that randomness.

Snufkin: Memory of Moominvalley was everything I hoped it would be. It's a short game with the coziest of vibes showing a deep love for all the characters it features. I enjoyed every second I spent in this beautiful rendition of Moominvalley. This is my dream Moomin game, it's a wonderfully light adventure game that puts most of its effort into recreating the vibes and soul of the Moomin books - and while that doesn't make it extraordinary, it does make it the perfect type of comfort game to just lose yourself in. I felt calmer whenever I played this game. (Stay away from the Switch version though, Moominvally is best enjoyed with a framerate above 15fps!)

After having completed the epilogue, I know finally feel comfortable rating this game. Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a game so thoroughly streamlined, so optimized for fun, that it's very hard not to enjoy your time with it. The gameplay is snappy and varied through all of the different unique characters with their own movesets and game plans, the presentation is beautiful and the main story goes over so fast there's literally no downtime. What happens after that is a cleverly designed loot grind to optimize your loadout and team, one that is so addictive even I wasn't able to shy away from it (normally, a single hour of grind would be a reason to drop a game). In short: It's a really fun game. And I was and am still able to derive a lot of joy from that. Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a completely frictionless game. And if you want exactly that, a fun way to spend 15-999hrs and not think about anything, I can't recommend it highly enough.

But this also results in me not really loving it. Because all this streamlining also results in a game experience that is entirely toothless, it has nothing to say. Its story is as bare-bones and clichéd as they come, it's characters mostly rough caricatures. Which is sad to me, as they didn't feel like that in the other Granblue media I looked at in preperation for this, neither in the anime nor in the (admittedly terrible) gatcha game. In a way, Granblue Fantasy: Relink lost a lot of soul in this streamlining, and no amount of optimization grind can fill that void. There are moments where that soul shines through, the completely voiced Fate Episodes i.e., or some smaller character interactions in the moment-to-moment gameplay, but overall, it's a little too streamlined, a little too frictionless. Which doesn't take away from the fact that it's still a very fun game, but I feel like it could've been a lot more.

review in progress, but I vibe with this kinda? Foamstars is a really bizarre game in a lot of ways, and that's most of what makes it so weird is what I like about it? First up, there's this entire map editor for your training area that can only be accessed through interacting with one kinda random element of the lobby. Then there's the incredibly barebones, weirdly slice-of-lifey singleplayer that they spun into a PvE mode with exactly two stages and difficulties with small rogue-lite elements, which is really random but also kinda fun, actually. Also, one collectible is just fake ads the game auto-plays in the lobby consisting of like two still images (that play for up to two minutes). And then there's just the entire aesthetic of the game, which to me looks incredibly trashy in all its over-produced glamor. It's bare-bones and probably quite cheaply made, feeling a little amateurish at times. There's not a lot of content here, but what is there just feels bizarre, like you stumbled upon a closed beta for a five-year old game that's mysteriously still up and running. Which means I'm actually quite suprised that the gameplay is this fun? I like the idea of three-dimensional foam as a twist on the Splatoon-formula, maybe after the "fucking around and finding out"-phase the player base will actually find strategic uses for stacking foam. I dunno, it's just a bizarre game with quite a fun gameplay loop that is definitely going to get shut down within this year, so I'll savour it for as long as I can!

I think this mainly exists to draw people in with the shock factor that is "Pokemon with guns and slave labour" and keep them engaged with a mediocre survival gameplay-loop. Which is fine & all but makes this kinda equivalent to all those Winnie Pooh horror movies that popped up when that character entered the public domain. What is interesting tho it's more gruesome mechanics also at least a logical evolution of Pokémon's internal logic, just brought to the extreme. In the Open World mainline games, Pokémon are already mostly resources to farm for exp or items and to use in combat for your own gains. Only these games try to contextualize the relationship between monster and trainer within the realms of friendship, whereas this game just stays within the gameplay logic of "exploit these monsters for your own gain" and just dials it up a lot. Both result in gameplay experiences that are devoid of any meaning, although Palworld feels much more cynical and I feel that cynicism has a kinda violent aspect to it. It has nothing to say about the ideas it portrays, instead joyfully revelling in the violence it reproduces.