Yet another good game! Definitely enjoyed it a lot more having experienced Halo 1 and 2 now and I think it's about as solid as the others, but probably my least favorite of the original trilogy personally.

The biggest thing is that it just feels like a long finale for Halo 2, which isn't inherently bad, but it's not the best as a story on its own merit. Setpieces are constantly kicking in and things are always moving which has its own appeal, but it made me miss some of the slower moments and solid pacing of the originals. The gameplay is the best it's ever been at this point, but I felt it traded off for somewhat lacking enemy design and less balanced harder difficulties. I also really enjoyed that your AI companions have a lot more fun things to say and are generally more competent, and the shift back to more Halo 1-adjacent open levels was appreciated, even if there is still a bit of backtracking and design reuse.

And of course, the multiplayer is forever great. Wonderful memories doing custom games with buddies.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is confidently enormous and ambitious, a crazy leap from Remake, and shows a clear love for its source material pouring out of nearly every aspect.

I think the gameplay has seen the most improvement here, and I have to imagine going back to remake is gonna be difficult after this. It’s so much faster and more responsive, and gives you an impressive amount of options to play with. The loop of ATB into synergy attacks into better and better limits is absolutely excellent, and the increased tools to deal with distanced and flying enemies are highly appreciated. I still don’t quite understand how “Dynamic” difficulty works, aside from what I am left to assume from some strangely-placed difficulty spikes, but when it all clicks together it feels fantastic. I can’t wait to see what they do with this already excellent system next.

The story is quite good as well, it more directly follows the events of FF7 proper than its predecessor and continues to embellish and expand on those events quite well (perhaps better, even) with a clear understanding of why certain things worked. Its divergences are much more sectioned off which I think helps the game at large, give or take a couple weird placements of certain events, and I found said divergences to be much more interesting on their own merit. If I had to single out anything, I think the beginning is a bit rough as the game throws you straight into the action with next to zero effort to ease the player back into the universe, but that was my only real point of friction with it and I actually liked the ending of this one a bit more.

One of the most impressive things about it is how deeply they seem to have taken the criticisms of the first game’s side content, because almost everything here feels fun, substantial, and worth doing. Hell, in general I find it impressive that Remake’s formula worked so well in an open world format. Sure, you can rag on it for an “Ubisoft Open World” as has become the go-to (and to be fair, I think you could cut a couple lesser minigames and a good chunk of the small “World Intel” tasks and the game wouldn’t be much different for it), but most of it is content worth seeing at best and something you can probably do in 2 minutes and/or easily ignore while you’re traversing to the next objective anyway at worst. At times it can be a bit too much, I had to take a bit of a break around the middle because there the game is just A LOT, but much of the time it works, it’s smooth, and most importantly it’s good!

I don’t tend to drone on about visuals a whole lot, but this is the first game in awhile that has wowed me. There are scuffed textures here and there sure, but the game is extremely well-realized and a pleasure to look at, with a super indulgent and excellent soundtrack to match. It’s hard to describe, but some of these areas are a shockingly perfect translation of the graphics of the era into a modern style that somehow manages not to lose any of the original’s feel. However I do have to mention the graphics modes; there is clearly something really wrong with the performance mode here and hopefully it gets fixed eventually. Conversely, this is the first time I’ve used a resolution mode and it’s been consistent enough that I stuck with it, and I’m really glad I did. Also god have I missed big expensive CG cutscenes, we need to bring that back into vogue!

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth may have its issues, but rarely does a game come along that makes me feel like I’m a child on Christmas morning like this one did, and it’s hard to overstate the importance of that.

Sometimes you just gotta face the music. I put this one off for an entire decade before finally getting around to it. And I should go on record upfront that I loved the first Lords of Shadow and think Mirror of Fate is a decent, underrated game. I understand for plenty of people these aren't Castlevania or whatever buzzwords get tossed around, but I maintain there was value in an Ultimate Universe style timeline to the original's 616 (the success of the cartoon pretty much shows this as well.) And as much as I adore the DS games, I vividly remember Castlevania fansites back around their release going "something has to change." The cheap IGAvanias with reused sprites were not doing it for people anymore (again, I adore them but that's pretty much factual) so taking a wild swing like this was a worthwhile endeavor.

There's lots of ink spilled on what went wrong here. For my money, it feels like the team bit off more than they could chew and ended up diluting the whole experience. LoS might have been a bit overlong and its story might have been your basic sad husband stuff that the 7th gen loved so much, but it was paced well and the levels had variety to them with a nice straightforward thrust. This wants to be an open world game, but it also wants to be a 3D metroidvania and ALSO still a linear action experience, which makes everything feel so jumbled. The areas don't have any real flavor to them which makes backtracking or exploring feel much, much more of a slog than it needed to be. And the plot, full of promise, ends up suffering the most. Characters are barely shown and nothing has any real gravitas.

The combat, despite it all, is still good. There's a lot less enemy types this time around, but the bosses are mostly all very good. When I was focused in on fighting a giant gorgon or weird demon lady or something, all the issues seemed to melt away. Its far from the most deep hack and slash, but the combat throughout all three games has a nice weight to it and the balance of healing, extra damage and such was always fun for me even if I really wanted to fight something other than a basic doom imp knock off.

I'm glad I got this monkey off my back. And even after all that, I'd still play this over something like Legend or Haunted Castle. I think there's a good game there (hell, one only has to look at what Mercury Steam did with Metroid after this game), but alas. If there's ever another Castlevania (which who the hell knows at this point) I'm sure it will resemble the cartoon more than this. But even though it ended on a failed landing, I can't help but appreciate the swing the LoS games as a whole took.

Demographically speaking, I am the target audience for this game (an adult who owned a PS1 between the years of 1996-2001.) Personally speaking, I am not the target audience of this game. I didn't play FFVII until many years after the PS1's obsolescence. My main experience with it was in the summer of 2000 where I spent a week at a camp in Northern New Jersey homesick, listening to my friend tell me every single thing about the game (I did the same thing for him with Ocarina of Time.) I think the original is a good game but its not something important to me. The subsequent influx of FFVII spinoffs, most of which seemed to miss the point of what made the game and characters interesting, were enough to put me off from wanting to play this for awhile. With Rebirth out now and the hot point of discussion for 2024, I figured it was time.

I'm glad I did. Unlike so many of those spinoffs, this game gets what makes the original characters interesting and embellishes them for this most part. Aeris (I will die with the old translation sorry) is funny and charming, Cloud is a doofus, Barrett is compelling, etc. The weird eccentricities of the game are embraced instead of washed out. And while I have no idea if I will be satisfied with its conclusion, I appreciate approaching the material in a new way rather than it being a completely slavish remake. FFVII has never been a sacrosanct game for me so maybe I'm more lenient than someone who was waiting for this game for decades, but I think the balancing act of keeping the characters true to the 97 original and also taking things in a different direction is its most interesting aspect.

My qualms are more gameplay related. I don't think FF needs to be stuck in the past or locked into a turn based style (I've never beaten it but I think XII is one of the best games in the series for reference) but the Kingdom Hearts sort of combat really never did it for me. There's times in this where it feels good, but more often than not I would feel like it was just a smidge too slow or to unwieldy for me to really enjoy it, especially when you start fighting flying enemies and combat becomes more complicated. It never was enough to break my will, but by the end of the game I was very much ready to just call it a day.

So yeah, its good! I don't think its for me in many ways, but I am glad I played it. I'll probably wait another 4 years for FVVI ReLife or whatever the third one is going to be called before playing Rebirth, even though that game covers my favorite parts of the original. That 60+ hours is terrifying to me right now.

I'm fascinated by what games and franchises Konami chooses to put out these days. First a Getsu Fuma Den game and now this? I never would have guessed we would get one Contra game in the past 5 years, let alone two of them. Need whoever is making decisions to get weird and bring back Goemon soon.

Anyway, Contra games probably have the biggest variance in quality out of all the classic Konami games. This one is firmly in the top half of quality, which isn't surprising since WayForward already made a top tier Contra with 4. I mostly played Story Mode with one hit kill here and had a thoroughly ball busting time. More than nay Contra I've played this felt like a Gradius; I would be cruising along with power ups until an errant bullet hit me and then I was overwhelmed (pro-tip, weapon retention perk is a god send.)

This was my childhood platformer. Others played Mario or Metroid, I played this on my GBA, and I have no regrets. This game was awesome. The visual design of the levels was always beautiful while still being easy to navigate, the music was fantastic, and the gameplay was engaging throughout, with small mini-games or set piece sections to break-up the flow. Baby Mario's cry is seared into my brain, a testament to how effective a gameplay mechanic it is when playing.

Truly a defining game of my childhood, and one that I replayed many times over trying to perfect each and every level.

this is a baffler. so many things about the gameplay are perfect idealized versions of what should be in every farming game, very little useless time-wasting and a lot of great QoL stuff. but like, for what? I'm not even the sort who cares too much about plot but there is none to be had. the relationships and characters are shallow and meaningless. the one thing I can say about the story is when I unexpectedly hit credits, I missed having like, quests and interaction at all.

it's a very satisfying gameplay loop for a surprisingly small amount of time.

Perfection. Not a single dull or uninteresting moment, this is exactly what I want out of an action-RE game. I love how they ratcheted up the horror and general pressure you feel during gameplay from the original. Adored almost every single change. Have a couple small nitpicks and I found myself wishing for just a tad bit more of Leon shit-talking the villains, but it's all just a footnote in an incredible 15-20 hour experience. Also shout-outs to the writers/localization team for this remakes, they clearly have a deep love for and understanding of the series at large. Possibly a new favorite of all time.