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.

Played the first two games for the first time via this collection on the PS5. In a nutshell the first game isn't great and hasn't held up well, while the second is decent but seems like mostly an excuse for spectacle. Bloated games that start off alright and then devolve into overly-convoluted messes that refuse to end, centered around boring antagonists with zero substance. By the end of the second game, I had no desire or patience for the third.

Not really going to spend much time talking about the first game. Incredibly one-dimensional and generic antagonists, terrible chemistry and what feels like a forced relationship between Drake and Elena, clunky gameplay, and the inclusion of zombie-like enemies at the end of the game mostly for the shock value.

It's impressive how great of a leap the series took with the second game, and in only two years. And while it's easy to see why Uncharted 2 (U2) got many of the accolades and praise that it has, I also didn't go into this series with the nostalgia that many people have for it. So while I agree that U2 was ahead of its time and has some genuinely impressive moments, I also think it's overrated in many ways and critically flawed in others.

The story isn't particularly complicated at first: partner with old associates to steal a treasure which contains info on the location of a greater treasure, get double-crossed, one of them has a change of heart and partners with you again to stop the bad guys from getting to the greater treasure. But, as is the nature of Uncharted games, things quickly snowball into a world-threatening race against both time and poorly developed, flat antagonists. Flynn and Lazarević are at least somewhat more interesting (and get significantly more screen time) than the enemies from the first game but are ultimately just Bad Guy Minor and Bad Guy Major.

Writing is this game's biggest weakness, despite the writers clearly thinking very highly of their writing. Off-screen storytelling works when you have writers who know how to do it. This team did not. Despite the events of U2 occurring only two years after the first game, Elena and Drake are already broken up. No explanation for this is ever given, not even after Elena is forced back into the story and spends much of it shitting on Drake or making sarcastic remarks at his expense. There's no sexual tension between them and they spend most of the second half of the game quipping at each other. So when Chloe asks if he loves Elena at the end of the game and Drake all but explicitly says yes, and then he and Elena are back together again, you're left wondering why and why you should care about this relationship that seemed to be long dead in the water until they ran into each other again by chance in Nepal (the absurdity of which I'll address in a minute).

By contrast, Chloe (who is significantly more interesting than Elena) makes so much more sense as a love interest for Drake. She's part of the same treasure hunting underworld that he is, she can physically keep up with him (likely because they've had the same training and she's explored much of the same terrain he has), and she already has romantic history with him. There's so much lost potential in not exploring this relationship further and sticking Drake with humdrum Elena, who seems to harbor more resentment and annoyance toward him than anything resembling love or deep affection. Their relationship is more akin to the dumbbell husband and exasperated wife combo that's dominated most commercials and sitcoms for a couple decades now.

Elena's sudden appearance in Nepal makes little sense. She went from adventure show TV host to serious journalist visiting war torn nations on the ground, mid-firefights, in two short years. Was Elena perhaps a journalist-turned-TV-host-turned-journalist? Don't know! Is Drake the reason why she can now parkour across dangerous chasms and scale walls like he can? Don't know! Why can Elena speak fluent Tibetan? Don't ask questions, just go with it.

Why is Drake sent to explore dangerous terrain with someone who doesn't speak a word of English, with whom he can't effectively communicate? Why did Schaefer lead his men through an insanely treacherous trek through ice caves to a dead-end temple when he could've just killed them at any point on the godforsaken, lonely mountain they were on? How exactly did he figure out what the Cintamani Stone does to men if he never reached Shamballa? Who were the men who got to Shamballa first, how long ago did they find it (hence the fully decomposed skeletons), and why did they have AK-47s (suggesting they were a more modern set of explorers)?

And how did Elena not only survive a grenade blast to the face, but how did her shredded, bloody clothes get repaired and cleaned to factory newness in a remote Tibetan village? Where the heck did Sully come from?

The answer for many is probably, "You're taking this too seriously and it's just a game." My retort to that would be, "Naughty Dog presented a story that it wanted me to be invested in and didn't care that much of it didn't make a lot of sense." And again, while none of them were trying to position themselves as modern-day Hemingways, they did make an effort to write a story more interesting than bangboomexplosions. The problem is that they didn't get enough people outside of the writer's room to ask if it was cohesive.

One of the worst moments and most egregious examples of making me bury my forehead in my hand was when Lazarević attempts to guilt trip Drake for the hundreds of Lazarević's men he's killed, saying Drake is really no better than him. Drake, who has indeed killed hundreds of men in this game alone (to say nothing of the hundreds he killed in the last game), chooses to let the Shamballa guardians beat Lazarević's skull in instead of just shooting him, almost as if to prove Lazarević wrong. As if there's any validity to this stupid, shallow, desperate bit of movie villain writing, and if Drake had dared to blow this dude away like all the other guys, he's be proving Lazarević right.

Let's also not forget how Elena berates herself and Drake for bringing danger to an innocent Tibetan village, how all the murders are their fault, and then instantly drops the lecture and never brings up the topic again.

Awful writing aside, the gameplay in U2 is night and day compared to the first game. Granted, I'm aware that certain mechanics were retooled for these remasters compared to the original releases, but even despite this it was clear that U2 fine tuned much of what made the first game feel so clunky and sluggish. Unfortunately, while it's a much funner game to play, there were too many instances of, "Hey, wouldn't it be fun to fight another five waves of enemies even though you just did that two minutes ago? And have to start from the beginning of the fight if you die?" Along with a lot of instances of, "Oh gee, this door is locked or the way forward is impassable, looks like you have to engage in more spectacle-laden parkour to get around."

Much of the climbing and scaling just felt like an excuse for the player to spend more time admiring the (admittedly outstanding) set pieces of this game. A lot of it could've been cut or streamlined. While some of it was very cool, some of it started to overstay its welcome and contributed to my choice of the word "bloated" to describe the game. U2 began to feel like the friend who doesn't understand when to go home and keeps trying to harangue everyone into just one more drink at one more bar when everyone else just wants to go to bed and already had their fill.

Scaling the train at the beginning of the game was fantastic. Scaling it a second time, exactly the same way, was somewhat effective for narrative purposes but ultimately a time sink. Fighting your way to the front of the moving train had some great, creative gameplay moments. Fighting yet another helicopter while doing it created some genuine moments of frustration.

Is U2 a bad game? Not taken as a whole. It does some things very well and does others very poorly. Is it overrated? In my opinion, yes. The Uncharted series undoubtedly left a mark on the industry and inspired many titles that came after it. But the games ultimately feel like more spectacle than substance, and ask you to care about characters who give you very little reason to care about them.

And after reading the full plot synopsis of U3 and U4, I can't imagine slogging through another two games worth of vapid writing that takes itself very seriously, middling puzzles, and a forced on-again-off-again no-chemistry relationship between Drake and Elena just to end the last game with the possibility of the fifth being led by their Disney Channel reject looking kid.

Really hoped I'd like these games more than I did. In the end, they weren't for me.

I put in somewhere around 75 hours into this game and I felt every minute of it. Far too much main story progression is locked behind tedious tasks and mandatory side quests involving random NPCs you've never heard of prior to getting the quest and will never interact with again.

There's not a whole lot to see in the overworld, and what's there is all the same. Small towns, rest stops, and roadside attractions are all littered with Freaks, and once you clear them out you can forage for supplies in the area. Maybe burn out some Freaker nests or find a horde later in the game. Marauder camps follow the same format too: clear them out, find their bunker. Granted, I did enjoy the novelty of occasionally coming across a souvenir for a little world building, but the general lack of variety in things to do started to weigh on the game early on.

But the writing is where Days Gone really suffers. Deacon comes across as less of a biker and more of a guy who really liked Sons of Anarchy and wanted to make that his persona, but is still the guy who gets upset over tweets that offend him and opinions he finds distasteful. Some of the dialogue was so cringe, so insufferable, that I found myself wondering more than once who read those lines and thought, "Now that's quality writing."

The game absolutely didn't deserve some of the ridiculous criticisms it got, like outrage over real biker wedding vows or pearl-clutching over a guy admiring his wife's ass. But it does deserve scrutiny for treating Boozer like a ball and chain for quite a large chunk of the game; for introducing too many key characters and plot points with next to no context or history; and for creating a world filled with people so nasty and miserable that I didn't give a shit what happened to any of them.

Days Gone does a cool thing in exploring the human element of the zombie apocalypse, showing the toll that a day-to-day existence in this world would likely take on the average person, including the protagonist himself. It's a unique concept that would be brilliant in the hands of a solid writing team. Instead, everyone — literally everyone — is bitter, angry, depressed, rude, two-faced, murderous, opportunistic, anxiety-riddled, on-edge, and miserable. At two years into the apocalypse, I'd expect a greater array of emotions and personalities. It's just lazy writing that lacks any of the nuance needed to communicate why I should care about any of these people.

Combat is where this game shines because it's fun. I liked finding progressively stronger melee weapons to craft, and shooting felt good to control. Once hordes are introduced (which I never stopped being terrified of), it felt amazing taking one on while totally maxed out on consumables galore, equipped with crowd-clearing guns. The hordes are a unique, well-done feature.

However, for a game centered around a biker, your bike in this game is more nuisance than asset. Even after multiple critical upgrades to fuel tanks and durability, it still felt like my bike was a sluggish gas-guzzler that couldn't withstand much damage before needing repairs.

I get that there's some demand for a sequel, but it's for the best that a sequel has been written off. I think the ending is as good as it could be for this game's world. Deacon's little family is safe together and ready to rebuild their lives at Lost Lake with their friends. And while O'Brian's final reveal and parting words are cryptic and unsettling, some stories are better suited for that level of ambiguity and uncertainty. I'm just not sure what else there is to say that wouldn't take Deacon on an adventure that would feel way too over-the-top.

Days Gone is perhaps too ambitious for its own good. It wanted to do too much at once and overstayed its welcome, particularly by the time I fled Wizard Island for Lost Lake and realized I was being put on multiple fetch quests involving clearing hordes in order to finally, this time (no, for real this time) reach the end. What the game does right, it does very well. But it's just not enough to outweigh the middling to bad.

(Side note: I first played this game on the PS4 when it came out, then abandoned it. This second attempt to play and finish it was on a PS5 and while the game doesn't have an official PS5 version, the graphical upgrade it gets from the console is incredibly impressive. The game looks amazing, though there are some issues in some cutscenes with textures not rendering properly or at all. Also, sometimes NPCs will suddenly get pulled a few feet to the left or right during battle, like they're puppets on invisible strings being dragged around for whatever reason. But visually, the game for the most part looks amazing on a PS5.)

The original Mario RPG is one of my favorite games of all time. It's very near and dear to my heart and didn't need a remake, in my opinion — it's perfection.

But because I love the original so much, I had to play the remake, and while I was pleasantly surprised and really enjoyed my time with it, there are some changes that weren't great.

We'll start with the bad so we can end on a positive note. The new music is awful. It doesn't hold a candle to the original soundtrack, which is just incredible. The new tracks are all too grand, too big, trying too hard to sound "better," and the recordings sound so distant and far away. While I briefly sampled every new track whenever I'd get to a new area, I would quickly switch the music back to the original OST every time.

The various naming and localization changes are strange and unnecessary, and eliminate some of the charm. Frog Sage is so boring and sterile; the same can be said of Cinder Toad compared to Hinopio. That's on top of weird edits, like changing the description of the Fire Dress from "a determined woman's dress" to "a determined-person's dress" (no need for the added hyphen there, either).

The other changes, however, I'm fine with. The triple attacks are cool, and it's neat that different party combinations unlock new attacks. I liked the quality of life changes, like enabling Mario to run by default instead of having to hold down a button to make him run. Some people might find that the splash damage of some attacks makes combat too easy, and I can respect that criticism, but perhaps the answer to that are the random "special enemies" that appear to increase the challenge.

While on the subject of challenge, I will say that the new post-game boss rematches were fun, but definitely a spike in difficulty. Some were certainly more difficult than Smithy. So be prepared to possibly have to do a bit of grinding to take on some of them. One change Nintendo absolutely should've implemented is the ability to skip dialogue or intros for some of these bosses; you'll inevitably have to fight some of them more than once, and having to sit there mashing A to try to skip through dialogue just to start the fight again is a major annoyance.

Overall, I think this was a fine remake that's better if you don't hold it up against the original too much. That's such a high bar to clear, and this game has plenty of great things about it that it makes it perhaps a bit unfair to constantly compare it to one of the best games to ever grace a Nintendo console. And yes, it is a remake so to some degree you HAVE to compare it to the original, but this is all just to say that it's a fun game on its own and while it can never be as amazing as the SNES title, it's a great game that I really enjoyed.

Major spoilers ahead

FFXVI was a nearly-perfect experience for me. Combat was fun and the Eikonic abilities made Clive feel incredibly formidable in battle. I especially enjoyed clearing the Hunt Board and thought some of those fights were really cool, especially the one with Svarog. The perfect dodge and parry system keeps fights interesting and kept me on my toes, and I loved the variety of enemies. I never felt bored by what or who I was fighting.

Graphically, the game is stunning. There were some small moments of slowdown/jerky animations of flying enemies in the distant horizon, along with the strong motion blur on the camera when moving it quickly. But the game is otherwise stunningly beautiful. It's also clear that Square Enix was really proud of their ability to render skin realistically and found every excuse they could to zoom in on a face to show pores and stubble, or light gleaming off of bare skin. Same can be said of their crying/tear animations.

This game's soundtrack is fantastic and I couldn't get enough of it. From the battle themes to music in the overworld, the music is incredibly solid and some of the tracks have already become some of my all-time favorites of any game.

But more than anything, I was deeply invested in the story, and that's what prevented me from giving this game a perfect score. What started off strong fell apart at the very end and left me feeling genuinely angry and dissatisfied.

At its core, this is a story about bonds. Romantic, platonic, familial — connections that make us human and give us purpose, a reason to live. The game, including its side stories tied to main characters, reinforces Clive's bonds with the people he loves. His Wall of Memories is dedicated to baubles and items that remind him of the friends and loved ones in his life who care deeply for him, and the memories they've shared together.

His ties to Joshua, Jill, and Torgal are especially important and central to the game, and their respective sidequests — yes, even Torgal gets his own — cement how important they all are to one another. Clive's romance with Jill was one of the deepest and most well-written I've experienced in a game, and he makes many promises to her along the way: to leave The Twins with her when everything is over and start anew, as Jill wants; to create a world in which they can look again at the moon together, this time in a world where they can live on their own terms; to return to her after destroying Ultima.

It's these promises, and the sheer number of people in The Hideaway and across the realm that are counting on him and looking to him for guidance, that make his ultimate decision so bafflingly stupid.

I expected Dion and Joshua to die. Dion all but says outright that this is his intention in joining Clive and Joshua in the fight with Ultima. And Joshua's body was too far gone for me to believe that he'd be able to survive Ultima breaking free of him, which was clearly inevitable. I felt that Dion deserved better and didn't need to die for his story to come to a satisfying close, but also understand it and feel it made sense, even if it was heartbreaking. Same for Joshua, though I was more upset by his death despite knowing it was very likely.

It also felt like Joshua's survival of the events of Phoenix Gate was unnatural, or that he actually did die but divine intervention gave him the extra time he needed to help his brother save the world before returning to the afterlife, where he belonged. Perhaps another example of a fictional story that illustrates why the dead must stay dead and can't truly return to this world, even if their return is briefly successful.

But Clive's (admittedly ambiguous) death was so bizarre that I found myself throwing up my hands in confusion and frustration when he made the decision to expend all of his magic and life force to wipe magic from the world. There's nothing in the story to suggest that was the only way he could either destroy Ultima's crystal or eliminate magic; it was a purely arbitrary writing decision. But it also didn't feel like a decision that Clive would've made, given his promises to Jill and knowing how many people back home were awaiting his return.

It also felt like such a waste of Joshua's final gift and sacrifice. Carrying around Ultima trapped in his body for years, while it slowly ate away at Joshua's health, then giving Clive the Phoenix so he could destroy Ultima. All so Clive could just kill himself in the end because he felt he needed to stop the Blight or the people wouldn't truly be free. Joshua repeatedly pleas for Clive to take care of himself, and even in his final moments says he has faith that Clive will answer Jill's plea for Clive to save himself. Clive's self-sacrifice is not what most people would define as "saving himself."

It was an especially shitty decision on Clive's part given the pain everyone in the Hideaway was still feeling over the loss of Cid five years prior. Clive had become not just their new Cid in name, but the embodiment of everything Cid stood and fought for, a beacon of hope in the dark. And they now have to relive that loss, a new hole in their hearts.

Ultima thrives off of the pain and agony of humans. He relishes in it, and his final words to Clive are him gloating about Clive and mankind inheriting a blackened husk of a world. In a way, it felt like Ultima had the last laugh: the man who killed him kills himself to stop the Blight, causing extreme anguish and an unfillable void in the lives of the people he left behind.

Some of the game's moments felt unnecessarily brutal, like they were included more for shock value than anything else. I remember thinking this during the demo, which has a handful of moments of graphic violence towards the Chocobos. Chocobos can obviously be violent (and appear as both friends and enemies in this game) but are generally represented as peaceful creatures, the horses of this world. So seeing them stabbed, crushed, and violently injured felt more than a little gratuitous to me. Similarly, Clive's final decision felt more like it was for shock value than an ending that made any real sense.

Plus, if Clive wiped magic from the world, the curse of Bearers and Dominants should be gone too. We see at the end that his hand has been turned to stone due to constant expense of magic, but he can no longer perform magic. So why would the curse have killed him if, in theory, it shouldn't even exist anymore? And in every instance in which a Bearer was shown dead from overexertion of magic, their entire body or almost all of it was stone, not just a hand.

It actually lends credence to the theory that Clive is NOT dead, but merely passed out from exhaustion. And while Metia fades in the sky, which Jill takes as a sign that Clive died, almost immediately the sun begins to rise — and as Jill once told Clive, he always returns to her when the dawn breaks, like the rising sun. The look on her face in that moment seems to suggest a sudden understanding that he's not, in fact, dead. Harpocrates gives Clive his favorite quill, in the hope that one day when Clive puts down the sword, he'll pick up the pen to write about his adventures. Joshua also mentions that he and Jote are keeping writings on their travels. The name of the book on the table in the closing scene, Final Fantasy, could be derived from what Clive told Ultima before he killed him: "The only fantasy here is yours. And we shall be its final witness!" Only Clive could possibly know he said that; it seems very likely he compiled Joshua's writings, wrote about his own adventures, and titled the work Final Fantasy.

The game's writing is extremely solid overall. The only other significant complaints I had was that they killed Benedikta too early in the story, and that Anabella absolutely should not have been allowed to go out on her own terms rather than being held to account for what she did to so many people. Her end was especially dissatisfying. The game also suffers from a bit of the typical FF up-its-own-butt writing, like the constant talk about human will and vague concepts like "Primogenesis" and "Logos." But those gripes aside, the writing was incredibly good, which is what made the ending both so bizarre and so poorly contrived. And even though it's pretty clear that Clive likely survived, it's extremely disappointing and frustrating as the player to invest so much time in such a well-developed romance, only to watch it die with Ultima.

Jill really doesn't have anyone else. Joshua is dead, Torgal, while loyal and loving isn't human, and everyone else are just friends, allies, and confidantes. She said Clive was her whole world, her treasure, because it was true — her family is likely long dead, and the friendships she's built are still incomparable to the deep love and companionship she shared with Clive. It feels unnecessarily cruel to tear from Jill the one person who truly loved and understood her.

Gav's ending felt incredibly anticlimactic, and Clive's decision nearly as cruel to him as it was to Jill and Torgal. After all the years of fighting alongside Cid and then Clive, men who were as close to him as brothers, it's all over in an instant. Now both men have been ripped from his life, and all we see is a final scene of him sobbing and then nothing else. It was borderline insulting to reduce this guy to a glorified babysitter of some stranger's baby (why I'm supposed to care about this woman is beyond me) and then rip away his closest friend in the world.

FFXVI had an opportunity to present players with a story that balanced numerous instances of tragic loss with a shining ray of hope in the form of Clive and Jill's future together. Instead, caught up in the typical FF obsession with bittersweetness and melodrama, it delivered an increasingly depressing story that made me wonder exactly what I invested so much time into if, in the end, everyone you care about is either dead or left to pick up the pieces of their now-shattered lives, unclear about where their future will lead. The writers seemed to think that showing the birth of some NPC's baby, or two kids and a dog living happily in the magic-free future (who are clearly supposed to strongly resemble Clive, Joshua, and Torgal and got an eye roll out of me) was enough to make me feel butterflies and happiness in the end. When in reality, the characters I actually cared very much about all wound up with a shit lot.

Torgal spent years looking for Clive, the ever-loyal hound who deeply missed his master but never gave up on finding him. Ambrosia survived Phoenix Gate and is miraculously reunited with Clive, happy to return to life as his steed. Byron assumes his whole family is dead until Joshua and Clive return, bringing him unbridled joy and rekindling his lust for life and adventure. Sir Wade reunites with Clive after thinking him dead for years. All of these reunions and reconnections, gone in an instant.

Extremely disappointing end to what was an otherwise amazing game.

This game left an impression on me from the first time I played it back in 2011. I played and beat it again this month (January 2023) and may love it even more than I did 12 years ago.

Alice's story is disturbing and it's tragic seeing her descent into madness, fueled by the fact that she's surrounded by nothing but vultures who, in one way or another, are using her or trying to take advantage of her. Yet, the game is incredibly visually beautiful, with some truly stunning moments and environments, such as the Oriental Grove, the Card Bridge, and the Vale of Tears. I was particularly impressed by the mechanics of the Card Bridge on my recent playthrough and the beauty of the light and brightness of the sky, along with the creative and buttery smooth movements of the cards as they rapidly create card houses and other formations beneath your feet.

The game can also be deeply unnerving and frightening not because of jump scares, but due to the rapid increase of psychological horror elements and incredibly disturbing imagery in the last half of the game. The Dollhouse is perhaps some of the creepiest content I've engaged with in any game, with subtle and not-so-subtle references to childhood abuse, medical abuse, and the way some adults prey on vulnerable kids. The raw meat textures in the environment speak volumes about how these adults view these kids.

Alice's time in the asylum is another moment the game handles really well, doing a great job of showing the torture she was put through as she shambles through the halls, head shaved and bound in a straight jacket, drooling and empty-eyed.

The reveal of Dr. Bumby's crimes against Alice's family and Alice herself is pretty impactful, especially as the camera zooms in on Lizzie's bedroom key hanging from his pocket watch chain. It's a particularly depraved detail that underscores how truly sick and evil the man is, on top of his total lack of remorse for supplying children for perverts and his only sense of regret being that he failed to sell off Alice, too. My skin crawled as he insisted Lizzie was merely playing hard to get and got what she wanted in the end, his delusions and narcissism fueling an unspeakable act that destroyed an entire family.

My only disappointment is that I feel he didn't get it good enough in the end. While it's great seeing Alice finally do what needed to be done, his end came too swiftly compared to the long, torturous years Alice was forced to endure following the fire.

The voice acting is top-notch in Madness Returns, with standout performances from Alice and the Cheshire Cat.

Despite its age, Madness Returns still plays very well, with smooth combat mechanics, really solid platforming, and a very satisfying multi-jump and float mechanic that makes even the most daunting chasms accessible. All of the weapons are satisfying to use and you can see enemies going down faster with each weapon upgrade.

My only complaints are that chapters 3-5 are too long and should've been broken up into smaller chapters. While Oriental Grove is my favorite chapter in the game, it does get to the point where you start to actively feel like you're ready for the next environment, a feeling that replicates itself in the Heart Palace and especially in the Dollhouse. The doll head obstacle course minigame in the Dollhouse chapter is more frustrating than fun and I couldn't wait to be done with those segments because of how bad the camera was and how finicky some of the mechanics were.

Small gripes aside, this is a fantastic game that I'm glad I revisited and wish I hadn't waited so long to replay. I can see why it stuck with me even after all this time.