This review contains spoilers
Good but not great. Yuffie's combat is fun and her synergized moves with Sonon do a hefty amount of damage. It would've been cool to be able to control him, but given how short this DLC is and Sonon's fate in the end, it also makes sense why the devs didn't feel it was worth investing time into that.
Sonon looks and sounds like an NPC, so it was difficult to find myself invested in him or his backstory. It just felt like a lazy, basic "Shrina bad" story beat, and when he died I didn't feel too beat up about it. Yuffie is astoundingly annoying, and it was only during the more serious moments of the plot that I liked her because I was spared the obnoxious "I'm quirky and upbeat" anime tropes from her.
Nero embodies everything that's wrong with Nomura and his character designs, and I don't understand why he's got a Hannibal Lecter mask on if he can speak normally and unencumbered with it on. He'd be a lot more effective and off-putting if he were silent, but then we wouldn't get the generic bad-guy-obsessed-with-darkness quotes from him if he was.
The decision to include an unskippable cutscene during the final fight with Nero was baffling and maddening. I can only hope that's not something we can look forward to in Rebirth.
Weak writing aside, the combat was strong, the boss fights were fun, and Fort Condor was surprisingly entertaining and not the slog I expected it to be. I'll probably never play this DLC again, but I think it's worth playing at least once. The near-final scene of Yuffie watching the destruction of Sector 7, and seeing the plate falling topside, was a very good scene and extremely effective. For a moment, Yuffie actually felt like a human and not a copy-and-pasted precocious anime teen whose mouth you want to duct tape shut.
Again, good but not great.
Sonon looks and sounds like an NPC, so it was difficult to find myself invested in him or his backstory. It just felt like a lazy, basic "Shrina bad" story beat, and when he died I didn't feel too beat up about it. Yuffie is astoundingly annoying, and it was only during the more serious moments of the plot that I liked her because I was spared the obnoxious "I'm quirky and upbeat" anime tropes from her.
Nero embodies everything that's wrong with Nomura and his character designs, and I don't understand why he's got a Hannibal Lecter mask on if he can speak normally and unencumbered with it on. He'd be a lot more effective and off-putting if he were silent, but then we wouldn't get the generic bad-guy-obsessed-with-darkness quotes from him if he was.
The decision to include an unskippable cutscene during the final fight with Nero was baffling and maddening. I can only hope that's not something we can look forward to in Rebirth.
Weak writing aside, the combat was strong, the boss fights were fun, and Fort Condor was surprisingly entertaining and not the slog I expected it to be. I'll probably never play this DLC again, but I think it's worth playing at least once. The near-final scene of Yuffie watching the destruction of Sector 7, and seeing the plate falling topside, was a very good scene and extremely effective. For a moment, Yuffie actually felt like a human and not a copy-and-pasted precocious anime teen whose mouth you want to duct tape shut.
Again, good but not great.