Marley
I have a really hard time writing this review. I don't think it's a good review either. But I wrote this review specifically for those who are on the fence about getting this game, who are not sure what to expect, and I am trying to give an idea of what it is like. Moreover, it doesn't seem to be without its controversies, it does seem to have a few haters, so I will try my best to show what the appeal of this game is.
Mecha is my favorite genre in anime. I think the original Gundam and of course Evangelion are the peak of the medium and good enough to be considered great not just for anime, but for cinema as a whole. So I think I know a thing or two about mecha. What makes mecha great? It's quite similar to what makes shounen great - mecha is vehicle for very expressive Sci-Fi. Rather than having factions, characters and people fight each other in general weapons like tanks or ships, they have their mechs, and these mechs give the conflict a very personal note. The mechs are a symbol of the characters and in a sense their own self-expression on the battlefield. In shounen manga, characters likewise have abilities that fit their personalities and allows them to express themselves on the battlefield. This is important, because battles in mecha and shounen aren't just about who is stronger, but whose personality ultimately can prevail. Their battle prowess are just an expression of who they are as people.
That is why, when mecha is at its best, it is a character drama. It's about people who have to struggle, grow and adapt to war, who are forced onto the battlefield often by difficult circumstances, and there, on the battlefield, they express their struggles with their mechs.
AC6 is a love letter to mecha, and all that it stands for, and it understand this perfectly. The ample customization and all the options available to you allow you, the player, all the room in the world to express yourself and who you want to be on the battlefield. You can change colors, add decals, pick a fighting style, a weight all you want - making AC6 (and other ACs) the games where you can personalize your player character the most out of pretty much any game out there. But on top of that, AC6 understands how to allow other characters to express themselves through their mechs. One look at Rusty's mecha and you can instantly tell that this guy is a heroic figure. You look at the Arquebus group's weapons and armor and compare them to Balam's or the RaD's and you know what kind of companies they are and what philosophies they believe in.
Mecha is a genre all about character drama, and AC6 is a mecha game, and thankfully, it chose to weave a story all about character drama.
Every character is brimming with personality, while you may not see any of their faces, you do hear their voices. You never would expect it, but the writing - the writing of the lines in this case - is excellent. They tried their hardest to fill each line with as much personality as possible, sometimes the lines are genuinely funny, sometimes they are some of the coolest and hardest stuff you've ever heard and sometimes there's scenes that are full of emotion and empathy. The voice acting in this game knocks it out of the park, it is genuinely some of the if not the best voice acting I have ever heard in a video game, and I am so glad that Bandai Namco recognized how critically important the voice acting is in a game like this, and that they chose to localize it with such care that goes above and beyond from what you'd expect a game like this to get.
The story itself is, likewise , surprisingly great, especially for a FromSoftware game. Keeping up with the theme of character drama, in essence they managed to create a story that's full of allusions, references to mecha classics, a setting that is wonderfully sci-fi, and structure it in a way that gets the most out of its characters, a story that allows you to make a meaningful choice that's not about right or wrong, good or evil - but about what kind of person you are, and maybe, with which character you felt more of a connection with. It allows for player expression just like mech building, which couldn't have been more fitting for a game like this.
Most impressively, the game has excellent pacing. It starts slow, almost boring, unimpressive and old-school, but the more you play, the more the stakes ramp up, the more interesting the locations become, the more complex and dramatic do the missions become, the more the mysteries of the plot unravel. All the most impressive set-pieces are at the end. There's memorable hype moments that will stick with you long after the credits have rolled. Most importantly, it keeps getting better and better all the way to the end, with the ending as the apex of the game itself. This alone raises the quality of the game to new heights. Once you understand that the game keeps getting better, it raises the excitement for the next missions while you play. The structure and pacing of the game is wonderfully satisfying, in this sense at minimum, it's an absolute masterpiece. FromSoftware games' biggest issue has always been the pacing, but somehow this game comes out and completely reverses this - it might be the game with the absolute best pacing on the market. This is Masaru Yamamura's directorial debut and I cannot be any more impressed with him. What a fantastic start!
AC6 is a game that is incredibly exciting. Because it shows that FromSoftware has a lot more talent than just Miyazaki. That FromSoftware can write fantastic stories if they put their mind to it. That FromSoftware knows how to get the pacing right. That FromSoftware is full of passionate mecha fans who understand the genre and know how to make it fun. This is a company that is on its track to conquer the world.
The only reason my review isn't 5 stars is that the balance of the game is famously weak, there are weapons that are straight up useless compared to others which are almost broken. There's people who have made powerful builds that completely trivialized the game, and understandably it's hard to get invested in a game that way. But those issues can be easily fixed in a patch or two.
The only other flaw would be the environmental design looking kind of toy-like and not very convincingly real. But that issue exists only at the beginning, towards the end the environmental design improves massively.
Hopefully AC6 can be the Demon's Souls of the new modern Armored Core - an innovative, excellent foundation, whose flaws will be fixed in the next entry, which will hopefully get the critical and financial success it deserves.
Mecha is my favorite genre in anime. I think the original Gundam and of course Evangelion are the peak of the medium and good enough to be considered great not just for anime, but for cinema as a whole. So I think I know a thing or two about mecha. What makes mecha great? It's quite similar to what makes shounen great - mecha is vehicle for very expressive Sci-Fi. Rather than having factions, characters and people fight each other in general weapons like tanks or ships, they have their mechs, and these mechs give the conflict a very personal note. The mechs are a symbol of the characters and in a sense their own self-expression on the battlefield. In shounen manga, characters likewise have abilities that fit their personalities and allows them to express themselves on the battlefield. This is important, because battles in mecha and shounen aren't just about who is stronger, but whose personality ultimately can prevail. Their battle prowess are just an expression of who they are as people.
That is why, when mecha is at its best, it is a character drama. It's about people who have to struggle, grow and adapt to war, who are forced onto the battlefield often by difficult circumstances, and there, on the battlefield, they express their struggles with their mechs.
AC6 is a love letter to mecha, and all that it stands for, and it understand this perfectly. The ample customization and all the options available to you allow you, the player, all the room in the world to express yourself and who you want to be on the battlefield. You can change colors, add decals, pick a fighting style, a weight all you want - making AC6 (and other ACs) the games where you can personalize your player character the most out of pretty much any game out there. But on top of that, AC6 understands how to allow other characters to express themselves through their mechs. One look at Rusty's mecha and you can instantly tell that this guy is a heroic figure. You look at the Arquebus group's weapons and armor and compare them to Balam's or the RaD's and you know what kind of companies they are and what philosophies they believe in.
Mecha is a genre all about character drama, and AC6 is a mecha game, and thankfully, it chose to weave a story all about character drama.
Every character is brimming with personality, while you may not see any of their faces, you do hear their voices. You never would expect it, but the writing - the writing of the lines in this case - is excellent. They tried their hardest to fill each line with as much personality as possible, sometimes the lines are genuinely funny, sometimes they are some of the coolest and hardest stuff you've ever heard and sometimes there's scenes that are full of emotion and empathy. The voice acting in this game knocks it out of the park, it is genuinely some of the if not the best voice acting I have ever heard in a video game, and I am so glad that Bandai Namco recognized how critically important the voice acting is in a game like this, and that they chose to localize it with such care that goes above and beyond from what you'd expect a game like this to get.
The story itself is, likewise , surprisingly great, especially for a FromSoftware game. Keeping up with the theme of character drama, in essence they managed to create a story that's full of allusions, references to mecha classics, a setting that is wonderfully sci-fi, and structure it in a way that gets the most out of its characters, a story that allows you to make a meaningful choice that's not about right or wrong, good or evil - but about what kind of person you are, and maybe, with which character you felt more of a connection with. It allows for player expression just like mech building, which couldn't have been more fitting for a game like this.
Most impressively, the game has excellent pacing. It starts slow, almost boring, unimpressive and old-school, but the more you play, the more the stakes ramp up, the more interesting the locations become, the more complex and dramatic do the missions become, the more the mysteries of the plot unravel. All the most impressive set-pieces are at the end. There's memorable hype moments that will stick with you long after the credits have rolled. Most importantly, it keeps getting better and better all the way to the end, with the ending as the apex of the game itself. This alone raises the quality of the game to new heights. Once you understand that the game keeps getting better, it raises the excitement for the next missions while you play. The structure and pacing of the game is wonderfully satisfying, in this sense at minimum, it's an absolute masterpiece. FromSoftware games' biggest issue has always been the pacing, but somehow this game comes out and completely reverses this - it might be the game with the absolute best pacing on the market. This is Masaru Yamamura's directorial debut and I cannot be any more impressed with him. What a fantastic start!
AC6 is a game that is incredibly exciting. Because it shows that FromSoftware has a lot more talent than just Miyazaki. That FromSoftware can write fantastic stories if they put their mind to it. That FromSoftware knows how to get the pacing right. That FromSoftware is full of passionate mecha fans who understand the genre and know how to make it fun. This is a company that is on its track to conquer the world.
The only reason my review isn't 5 stars is that the balance of the game is famously weak, there are weapons that are straight up useless compared to others which are almost broken. There's people who have made powerful builds that completely trivialized the game, and understandably it's hard to get invested in a game that way. But those issues can be easily fixed in a patch or two.
The only other flaw would be the environmental design looking kind of toy-like and not very convincingly real. But that issue exists only at the beginning, towards the end the environmental design improves massively.
Hopefully AC6 can be the Demon's Souls of the new modern Armored Core - an innovative, excellent foundation, whose flaws will be fixed in the next entry, which will hopefully get the critical and financial success it deserves.
it's beautiful they finally made a game with customization where you can't just choose a build within the first 2 hours of the game and keep at it until the end. finally a game that actually forces you to understand all kinds of builds, how they work, and wrap your mind around different playstyles in order to succeed. the game is hard, demanding, and wants you to learn, but unlike souls games, this isn't just about learning patterns (but that too), but, above all, understanding and adapting to the playstyle of your enemy.
what is the point of all those different options and all those builds if you are never gonna use them because you can get by with your favorite one? this is a question i have always been asking myself, and finally, i have a game just for me, that does it the other way around.
it feels rewarding to understand different builds, it feels fantastic to get that aha moment when you figure out what works together, test it in the battle, and immediately see positive results. in this game you are just as much of an enginner as you are a pilot, and this is exactly how mech games should be.
not a perfect game, i am tired of all the stagger mechanics in games lately, and the world design looks kind of... toy-like? but the story is intriguing (so far) and the gameplay exhilirating. great game and proof that from software is a great studio even without miyazaki around.
what is the point of all those different options and all those builds if you are never gonna use them because you can get by with your favorite one? this is a question i have always been asking myself, and finally, i have a game just for me, that does it the other way around.
it feels rewarding to understand different builds, it feels fantastic to get that aha moment when you figure out what works together, test it in the battle, and immediately see positive results. in this game you are just as much of an enginner as you are a pilot, and this is exactly how mech games should be.
not a perfect game, i am tired of all the stagger mechanics in games lately, and the world design looks kind of... toy-like? but the story is intriguing (so far) and the gameplay exhilirating. great game and proof that from software is a great studio even without miyazaki around.
2006
persona if it was bad
2020
I genuinely would question if you like video games as a medium at all if you dislike this game
2023
This review contains spoilers
The first five to ten hours are good. Not great, just good. Meeting Jill and Torgal right after the first timeskip was ridiculous to an extreme degree, but beyond that it was fun. It was spectacle after spectacle, high after high and new things kept happening. The world building was interesting and is still the best part of the game. The combat is still exciting and fun.
But the more you play, the worse it gets. Let's go through it one by one.
Gameplay:
The fundamentals of the game are good, it's responsive, there's a varied amount of abilities, there's sufficient amount of freedom on how to combine different abilities. But something that's important about video games for me is that the challenges of the game are appropriate for the amount of tools that you have, that they test if you've mastered the tools given to you, so that the game can create a sense for accomplishment for you when you manage to learn something new in order to overcome the challenge presented to you. Fromsoftware games are famous for having a very difficult fight early on that tests if you understand how the game works correctly, and the games repeatedly test your knowledge of the mechanics. The problem with FFXVI is that while you have plenty of tools, you have too much freedom. The game doesn't challenge you for your mastery of the different eikons in the main story, it doesn't even have elemental weaknesses, it doesn't reward you for understanding which tool is the right one for which challenge. Even Sekiro, not an RPG, has the ninja tools which are very effective against certain bosses and not effective against others. Why not make a boss very hard unless you use this one eikon that's very useful against it? You can reskill everything anyways. Removing even this kind of aspect of RPGs is frankly unforgivable. You can beat everything in the game with your good ole Phoenix, even fire enemies, no problem. There's no reason to use all the different eikons unless you want to play around for a bit. Getting a new eikon is not exciting because there's not going to be enemies you'll finally get past now or have an easier time against. The only benefit you get is playing around.
The next big problem is the difficulty, obviously, without difficulty you're not being tested, and if you're not being tested things can get kind of boring. You become absentminded, you get in a routine. Challenge is important to keep your brain engaged.
Next, the enemy variety is piss poor for such a long game. I probably fought those orc dudes 50 times in this game, both main story and sidequest. Wolves everywhere, soldiers everywhere, the ninja dudes that keep showing up. It gets tiresome. It's so boring. There's a reason action games are short, because you don't want to repeat enemies and bore the player. In the last third I was struggling even staying awake because I've fought every mob that showed up dozens of times at this point and it was simply not fun when mobs can hardly even touch you in the first place. It was mind numbing. I barely felt involved, I didn't feel like I made any decisions that mattered. The game played itself and was on repeat.
Outside of combat, there's no gameplay. This is, probably, the absolute worst aspect of this game. Exploration? There's nothing to find. You get the best weapon from the next boss anyway. Minigames? Deliberately left out. Sidequests? They're just "go there and kill x" or "go there and pick up this". There's no alternative gameplay they offer. Crafting? Pointless. Puzzles? None. Platforming or environmental traversal like in SMTV? None. There's straight up nothing to do in this game except battling and watching cutscenes, and battling involves the same 10 enemies which don't even attack you from the prologue but this time they're etheric or whatever.
Yes, boss battles can be fun, yes, Eikon battles are spectacular. But they're a very small percentage of this 60h game. And they're ruined by the horrible pacing anyway.
This is not how you make a good game.
Story:
I will say that I don't hate the story and that to some extent I think that what I say here is fully subjective, while other stuff is close to objective. Let's start with the stuff I think is objectively bad.
The pacing.
I'm sure you remember that in school you we're taught that a play has 5 acts, the third act is the climax where it's most exciting and what comes after is wrapping up what the climax started.
One problem with the pacing is that the biggest climax is in the demo, the most emotionally engaging and consequential scene in the entire game happens within the first two hours. Then the game desperately tries to chase the high of the initial climax with increasingly less emotionally engaging and important mini climaxes, aka the eikon fights, but it fills the inbetween of the climaxes with absolute rubbish generic JRPG fetch quests, where, once again, it's hard to even stay awake playing these.
There's a concept Aristotle said about dramatic plays that's quite interesting which FFXVI violates like no other piece of fiction I have ever read. He said that in a play, it's best if each scene feels like it forcibly leads to the next scene. It sounds very simple but what it means that whatever is happening on the screen is the direct result for what happened before. The reason for this rule is that this way, every scene can be meaningful and important, this way you avoid filler, and this way you keep your audience engaged from beginning to end, because for the exciting climax to happen, you need all these little moments that build on each other for the grand climax to even happen.
FFXVI, on the other hand, chooses to show you a massive fight, against a big bad guy who you have beef with, it looks like the planet is about to blow up, and then 5 minutes late you're at the hideout killing wolves for Otto because a bearer is afraid or something. It makes the filler feel so much worse because you just want it to be over with to get to the next scene, so you can feel the next rush of excitement, it makes you care so much less for the little inbetween. But worst of all, it even makes the climaxes less impactful and interesting, because they don't organically develop in a sensible manner out of the previous, low stakes scenes before. They often lack the emotional impact they should be having to be effective. Past FFs were so much better at this, even FFIV (a game I also dislike) managed go organically increase the stakes without filler. After you beat one boss, the conflict with Kain develops and you're chasing him now, or it's something about Rydia now, or Cid... after each climax, the next plothread grows out of it in order to keep interest and excitement high. FFXVI had the interesting and detailed world building to achieve this, but fumbled it completely.
Now we come to the more subjective part, I found the game completely played out in story and subject matter on every single level imaginable I had immense trouble feeling engaged with any of the themes presented.
For me, what matters the most is how a story is executed. I need a strong theme, and then for every plotthread to feed into this theme and realize it. FFXVI felt disjointed. Yes, the detailed world building was cool and all, but why was it needed for the story about the will of humanity vs the tyranny of god? Why does Clive have two power of friendship fight speeches that he fights completely alone? Why is Clive fighting his own shadow when he himself didn't actually do anything wrong? What growth is Clive truly going through when he never made a mistake and his fake mistake (killing Joshua) was not his fault in the first place? What character flaw is he overcoming? What does he have to learn before he's a true hero? Why is the power of bonds and friendship the single most important factor for how Ultima gets defeated but is barely a topic for the first half of the game? What were Jill and Clive doing for five years, why no relationship earlier? Why didn't they blow up crystals before that? Why did they not question themselves when Ultima made it clear from before the Barnabas fight that he wanted him to take the powers and destroy the crystals? I digress.
About Jill being bland plenty of people have already written plenty about. I hope this doesn't need further explaination, Clive is alright to me but he's not too interesting to me because he's too perfect. He has nothing to grow from and little to learn, he's already a heroic prince from the start and there's only minor aspects of himself hr adjusts over time. I prefer broken, heavily flawed protagonists like Cloud, Ichiban or Estelle who have to navigate life through their flaws or question themselves.
All in all, I just find it generic, which isn't bad, but it's generic and badly executed and disjointed. It's honestly Xenoblade 's story and themes but worse in every way. less interesting world, worse characters, worse God villain worse mysteries, worse power of friendship plot, worse romance.
Misc:
It's absolutely insane to me how bad the sidequests are when Witcher 3 came out in 2015 and YoshiP got mad when people asked him about JRPGs and how he doesn't like the term. My guy, if you don't like the term JRPG, then why don't you at least try to reach the level WRPGs reached in fucking 2015. Furthermore, W3 had Novigrad, a fully explorable, massive city, with different classes, different quarters, tons of people, varied architecture and great sidequests. FFXVI doesn't have a single explorable city like that, let alone anything close to as interesting, and it's a much smaller and shorter game.
For me, this game is an embarrassing effort. It fails as an action game because it's repetitive and too easy. It fails as a JRPG because it's disjointed with terrible pacing, no party members and a lack of a sense of journey because you keep going back to the hideout. It fails as an RPG since it lacks choices or any type of gameplay outside of combat. It fails as a story because it's in the end a generic JRPG story but this time with criminally bad pacing and horrible female characters.
And it fails as a game because it's not fun
But the more you play, the worse it gets. Let's go through it one by one.
Gameplay:
The fundamentals of the game are good, it's responsive, there's a varied amount of abilities, there's sufficient amount of freedom on how to combine different abilities. But something that's important about video games for me is that the challenges of the game are appropriate for the amount of tools that you have, that they test if you've mastered the tools given to you, so that the game can create a sense for accomplishment for you when you manage to learn something new in order to overcome the challenge presented to you. Fromsoftware games are famous for having a very difficult fight early on that tests if you understand how the game works correctly, and the games repeatedly test your knowledge of the mechanics. The problem with FFXVI is that while you have plenty of tools, you have too much freedom. The game doesn't challenge you for your mastery of the different eikons in the main story, it doesn't even have elemental weaknesses, it doesn't reward you for understanding which tool is the right one for which challenge. Even Sekiro, not an RPG, has the ninja tools which are very effective against certain bosses and not effective against others. Why not make a boss very hard unless you use this one eikon that's very useful against it? You can reskill everything anyways. Removing even this kind of aspect of RPGs is frankly unforgivable. You can beat everything in the game with your good ole Phoenix, even fire enemies, no problem. There's no reason to use all the different eikons unless you want to play around for a bit. Getting a new eikon is not exciting because there's not going to be enemies you'll finally get past now or have an easier time against. The only benefit you get is playing around.
The next big problem is the difficulty, obviously, without difficulty you're not being tested, and if you're not being tested things can get kind of boring. You become absentminded, you get in a routine. Challenge is important to keep your brain engaged.
Next, the enemy variety is piss poor for such a long game. I probably fought those orc dudes 50 times in this game, both main story and sidequest. Wolves everywhere, soldiers everywhere, the ninja dudes that keep showing up. It gets tiresome. It's so boring. There's a reason action games are short, because you don't want to repeat enemies and bore the player. In the last third I was struggling even staying awake because I've fought every mob that showed up dozens of times at this point and it was simply not fun when mobs can hardly even touch you in the first place. It was mind numbing. I barely felt involved, I didn't feel like I made any decisions that mattered. The game played itself and was on repeat.
Outside of combat, there's no gameplay. This is, probably, the absolute worst aspect of this game. Exploration? There's nothing to find. You get the best weapon from the next boss anyway. Minigames? Deliberately left out. Sidequests? They're just "go there and kill x" or "go there and pick up this". There's no alternative gameplay they offer. Crafting? Pointless. Puzzles? None. Platforming or environmental traversal like in SMTV? None. There's straight up nothing to do in this game except battling and watching cutscenes, and battling involves the same 10 enemies which don't even attack you from the prologue but this time they're etheric or whatever.
Yes, boss battles can be fun, yes, Eikon battles are spectacular. But they're a very small percentage of this 60h game. And they're ruined by the horrible pacing anyway.
This is not how you make a good game.
Story:
I will say that I don't hate the story and that to some extent I think that what I say here is fully subjective, while other stuff is close to objective. Let's start with the stuff I think is objectively bad.
The pacing.
I'm sure you remember that in school you we're taught that a play has 5 acts, the third act is the climax where it's most exciting and what comes after is wrapping up what the climax started.
One problem with the pacing is that the biggest climax is in the demo, the most emotionally engaging and consequential scene in the entire game happens within the first two hours. Then the game desperately tries to chase the high of the initial climax with increasingly less emotionally engaging and important mini climaxes, aka the eikon fights, but it fills the inbetween of the climaxes with absolute rubbish generic JRPG fetch quests, where, once again, it's hard to even stay awake playing these.
There's a concept Aristotle said about dramatic plays that's quite interesting which FFXVI violates like no other piece of fiction I have ever read. He said that in a play, it's best if each scene feels like it forcibly leads to the next scene. It sounds very simple but what it means that whatever is happening on the screen is the direct result for what happened before. The reason for this rule is that this way, every scene can be meaningful and important, this way you avoid filler, and this way you keep your audience engaged from beginning to end, because for the exciting climax to happen, you need all these little moments that build on each other for the grand climax to even happen.
FFXVI, on the other hand, chooses to show you a massive fight, against a big bad guy who you have beef with, it looks like the planet is about to blow up, and then 5 minutes late you're at the hideout killing wolves for Otto because a bearer is afraid or something. It makes the filler feel so much worse because you just want it to be over with to get to the next scene, so you can feel the next rush of excitement, it makes you care so much less for the little inbetween. But worst of all, it even makes the climaxes less impactful and interesting, because they don't organically develop in a sensible manner out of the previous, low stakes scenes before. They often lack the emotional impact they should be having to be effective. Past FFs were so much better at this, even FFIV (a game I also dislike) managed go organically increase the stakes without filler. After you beat one boss, the conflict with Kain develops and you're chasing him now, or it's something about Rydia now, or Cid... after each climax, the next plothread grows out of it in order to keep interest and excitement high. FFXVI had the interesting and detailed world building to achieve this, but fumbled it completely.
Now we come to the more subjective part, I found the game completely played out in story and subject matter on every single level imaginable I had immense trouble feeling engaged with any of the themes presented.
For me, what matters the most is how a story is executed. I need a strong theme, and then for every plotthread to feed into this theme and realize it. FFXVI felt disjointed. Yes, the detailed world building was cool and all, but why was it needed for the story about the will of humanity vs the tyranny of god? Why does Clive have two power of friendship fight speeches that he fights completely alone? Why is Clive fighting his own shadow when he himself didn't actually do anything wrong? What growth is Clive truly going through when he never made a mistake and his fake mistake (killing Joshua) was not his fault in the first place? What character flaw is he overcoming? What does he have to learn before he's a true hero? Why is the power of bonds and friendship the single most important factor for how Ultima gets defeated but is barely a topic for the first half of the game? What were Jill and Clive doing for five years, why no relationship earlier? Why didn't they blow up crystals before that? Why did they not question themselves when Ultima made it clear from before the Barnabas fight that he wanted him to take the powers and destroy the crystals? I digress.
About Jill being bland plenty of people have already written plenty about. I hope this doesn't need further explaination, Clive is alright to me but he's not too interesting to me because he's too perfect. He has nothing to grow from and little to learn, he's already a heroic prince from the start and there's only minor aspects of himself hr adjusts over time. I prefer broken, heavily flawed protagonists like Cloud, Ichiban or Estelle who have to navigate life through their flaws or question themselves.
All in all, I just find it generic, which isn't bad, but it's generic and badly executed and disjointed. It's honestly Xenoblade 's story and themes but worse in every way. less interesting world, worse characters, worse God villain worse mysteries, worse power of friendship plot, worse romance.
Misc:
It's absolutely insane to me how bad the sidequests are when Witcher 3 came out in 2015 and YoshiP got mad when people asked him about JRPGs and how he doesn't like the term. My guy, if you don't like the term JRPG, then why don't you at least try to reach the level WRPGs reached in fucking 2015. Furthermore, W3 had Novigrad, a fully explorable, massive city, with different classes, different quarters, tons of people, varied architecture and great sidequests. FFXVI doesn't have a single explorable city like that, let alone anything close to as interesting, and it's a much smaller and shorter game.
For me, this game is an embarrassing effort. It fails as an action game because it's repetitive and too easy. It fails as a JRPG because it's disjointed with terrible pacing, no party members and a lack of a sense of journey because you keep going back to the hideout. It fails as an RPG since it lacks choices or any type of gameplay outside of combat. It fails as a story because it's in the end a generic JRPG story but this time with criminally bad pacing and horrible female characters.
And it fails as a game because it's not fun
2023
In 2021, Atlus made a daring experiment: Release a JRPG without a story. They called it Shin Megami Tensei V.
In 2023, CBU3 seemingly wanting to do something similar, made the bold decision to release a JRPG without RPG elements. They called it Final Fantasy XVI.
edit: I unlocked s rank hunts the game isn't so bad after all
edit: this game is bad after all, every line from barnabas puts me to sleep
In 2023, CBU3 seemingly wanting to do something similar, made the bold decision to release a JRPG without RPG elements. They called it Final Fantasy XVI.
edit: I unlocked s rank hunts the game isn't so bad after all
edit: this game is bad after all, every line from barnabas puts me to sleep
1999
If a 16 year old boy with a terrible fever stuck in a hospital were to start fantasizing about a magical world where he's an ultra badass who gets the popular girl from class who's unfortunately crushing on his rival, this game would probably be the result.
Everyone will tell you that what stands out about Soul Hackers are the 90s cyberpunk aesthetics, but above all it's the creativity with which the designs are designed and how the setting is used that make this a very fun experience.
The game anticipates how the internet sucks up all of our souls away, and in a sense warns us of the dangers of the internet and those who control it, but I wouldn't say it goes very deep with its cyberpunk anti-establishment themes, which is a good thing. The game maintains a rather lighthearted tone until around the end, which greatly fits the often wacky scenarios that the player encounters.
The dungeon design is a standout of this game, with highly creative dungeons like the haunted house or the art gallery. The game has probably the second most fun first person dungeon crawling in the SMT series after Strange Journey (which heavily relies on the work Etrian Odyssey did before it) and it's impressive throughout. There's only one teleporter puzzle and it's fairly short, funny and sweet - unique puzzles and challenges await the player with fairly great late 90s Saturn aesthetics.
Vision Quests are simply endlessly cool. The cutscenes that accompany them, usually dressed in neo-noir style are engaging. Taking the player out of their main character is usually a very bad idea in RPGs. Because when you control another character, you are not progressing, you are not levelling up or getting new items. The game works around this by nonetheless giving the player bonuses through the vision quests when completed, which I found brilliant. Naomi's vision quest at the end in particular is fantastic and mysterious.
Nemissa is obviously also a standout - there's a reason she's on the cover. She starts out as a bratty, teenie, selfish punk girl who is uninterested in anything but her own fun. But as she discovers she had a past over the course of the game, she becomes attaches to the spookies, the main character and even starts to feel bad about Hitomi's degrading health as a result of her possession. I found this transition very sweet and heartwarming, and it's amazing how this demonic intruder becomes a respected member of the team. But even the other spookies members have their moments which REALLY surprised me. They get some pretty interesting development and by the end of the game, the crew really grows on you. Especially Lunch and Six are great characters and you can only commend what Atlus managed to create in 1997.
Kaneko and Soejima are at the top of their game here, and outside the main character who is butt ugly, the character designs are fantastic.
This game was a big surprise for me because I initially dropped it around ten hours in because the story was not grabbing me at all and I had some questions about the setting, but after replaying it a lot of those questions were answered later on and i was much more experienced with first-person dungeon crawlers by the point, so I can say with certainty this thing:
Yes. THIS is the first Atlus game with good gameplay and a high level of maturity when it comes to its storytelling that will find its final form in Persona 2. Great and important game.
The game anticipates how the internet sucks up all of our souls away, and in a sense warns us of the dangers of the internet and those who control it, but I wouldn't say it goes very deep with its cyberpunk anti-establishment themes, which is a good thing. The game maintains a rather lighthearted tone until around the end, which greatly fits the often wacky scenarios that the player encounters.
The dungeon design is a standout of this game, with highly creative dungeons like the haunted house or the art gallery. The game has probably the second most fun first person dungeon crawling in the SMT series after Strange Journey (which heavily relies on the work Etrian Odyssey did before it) and it's impressive throughout. There's only one teleporter puzzle and it's fairly short, funny and sweet - unique puzzles and challenges await the player with fairly great late 90s Saturn aesthetics.
Vision Quests are simply endlessly cool. The cutscenes that accompany them, usually dressed in neo-noir style are engaging. Taking the player out of their main character is usually a very bad idea in RPGs. Because when you control another character, you are not progressing, you are not levelling up or getting new items. The game works around this by nonetheless giving the player bonuses through the vision quests when completed, which I found brilliant. Naomi's vision quest at the end in particular is fantastic and mysterious.
Nemissa is obviously also a standout - there's a reason she's on the cover. She starts out as a bratty, teenie, selfish punk girl who is uninterested in anything but her own fun. But as she discovers she had a past over the course of the game, she becomes attaches to the spookies, the main character and even starts to feel bad about Hitomi's degrading health as a result of her possession. I found this transition very sweet and heartwarming, and it's amazing how this demonic intruder becomes a respected member of the team. But even the other spookies members have their moments which REALLY surprised me. They get some pretty interesting development and by the end of the game, the crew really grows on you. Especially Lunch and Six are great characters and you can only commend what Atlus managed to create in 1997.
Kaneko and Soejima are at the top of their game here, and outside the main character who is butt ugly, the character designs are fantastic.
This game was a big surprise for me because I initially dropped it around ten hours in because the story was not grabbing me at all and I had some questions about the setting, but after replaying it a lot of those questions were answered later on and i was much more experienced with first-person dungeon crawlers by the point, so I can say with certainty this thing:
Yes. THIS is the first Atlus game with good gameplay and a high level of maturity when it comes to its storytelling that will find its final form in Persona 2. Great and important game.
2005
this is literally the best action game ever made.
1994
I think what we can learn from FFVI is that for a game to be great, it doesn't need to excel at everything. True, it has to be at least good at everything (sound, gameplay, presentation, story, controls), but all it needs to be remembered for the ages is that one thing, that one aspect it does better than almost anything else, that one thing that blows your mind and that you haven't seen anywhere else.
The specific aspect that FFVI excels at above all is: Presentation. It might seem strange to say this, considering we now live in the age of 4k 3D motion-captured animations and yet I say that the presentation of this SNES game is the best thing about it to this day. I mentioned this in my review of FFIV, but what Sakaguchi and his team have figured out with FFIV is that you can use the little sprites on the screen like actors on a stage. Make the screen "the room" - the stage of a play - and make the sprites the characters of the play. Then use the "stage" and its space to direct dramatic scenes in order to convey emotion and storybeats. This game is the last of the "theatre" era until FFIX comes along, and this game absolutely perfects the art. This is not just because the sprite work for this game is absolutely gorgeous, probably the absolute best on the system (everyone should play this game with a good CRT filter if you really want to be blown away by how good this game looks), but above all because it is extremely expressive. It will always remain a mystery to me how they managed to instill so much emotion, so much character and so much individuality into these tiny little sprites. As mentioned, each character has multiple sprites that show them either showing emotion like surprise, sadness or smugness or perform small little animations like waggling their finger or winking at the screen. Combine these ultra-expressive sprites with fantastic direction, and you have a game that finally achieves what FFIV always wanted to be - a game that makes you feel like you are sitting in the audience of a theatre play.
Here is an example of how it works. Characters move away from each other to show distance, move closer when they want to be caring, they dance and jump around to show excitement, they look at the screen / the audience during emotional scenes (as is very common in drama) or look away from the audience when they are uncertain. Despite the game having no access to actual facial expressions or detailed body movements to show off to the player, many of the scenes in FFVI are incredibly engaging, entertaining and emotionally affecting simply through their fantastic direction.
That is not all however, what the game does is use this fantastic technique and show it off in a variety of amazing and memorable set-pieces. Phenomenal visually, they are varied, interesting and often quite funny. The fight for Narshe against Kefka, the Phantom Train and of course the legendary Opera scene stand out. The game keeps putting the characters in fun and interesting set pieces and uses them to play out stage plays to the best possible result. Many of them surpass anything people have seen up to that point in video games. It truly deserves the highest possible praise even by 2022 standards. This is why the game is so engaging and fun - it is not the story itself, but the set pieces on the way that are so great. This is also why the game declines in the World of Ruin while it improves massively gameplay wise - the core appeal is mostly gone, as you largely visit older vistas and the new set pieces that appear in the World of Ruin, outside the ending, aren't nearly as engaging.
At the end of the day, FFVI found a very unique way to make its storytelling interesting and engaging. A method that I wish more games would have used since then.
FF as a series seems to often live and die by its presentation, but this is not at all a bad thing. When the presentation is at its peak, and Square is at the peak of their powers, the presentation alone can be so engaging and entertaining that it makes you forget about anything else. FFVI is a triumph.
The specific aspect that FFVI excels at above all is: Presentation. It might seem strange to say this, considering we now live in the age of 4k 3D motion-captured animations and yet I say that the presentation of this SNES game is the best thing about it to this day. I mentioned this in my review of FFIV, but what Sakaguchi and his team have figured out with FFIV is that you can use the little sprites on the screen like actors on a stage. Make the screen "the room" - the stage of a play - and make the sprites the characters of the play. Then use the "stage" and its space to direct dramatic scenes in order to convey emotion and storybeats. This game is the last of the "theatre" era until FFIX comes along, and this game absolutely perfects the art. This is not just because the sprite work for this game is absolutely gorgeous, probably the absolute best on the system (everyone should play this game with a good CRT filter if you really want to be blown away by how good this game looks), but above all because it is extremely expressive. It will always remain a mystery to me how they managed to instill so much emotion, so much character and so much individuality into these tiny little sprites. As mentioned, each character has multiple sprites that show them either showing emotion like surprise, sadness or smugness or perform small little animations like waggling their finger or winking at the screen. Combine these ultra-expressive sprites with fantastic direction, and you have a game that finally achieves what FFIV always wanted to be - a game that makes you feel like you are sitting in the audience of a theatre play.
Here is an example of how it works. Characters move away from each other to show distance, move closer when they want to be caring, they dance and jump around to show excitement, they look at the screen / the audience during emotional scenes (as is very common in drama) or look away from the audience when they are uncertain. Despite the game having no access to actual facial expressions or detailed body movements to show off to the player, many of the scenes in FFVI are incredibly engaging, entertaining and emotionally affecting simply through their fantastic direction.
That is not all however, what the game does is use this fantastic technique and show it off in a variety of amazing and memorable set-pieces. Phenomenal visually, they are varied, interesting and often quite funny. The fight for Narshe against Kefka, the Phantom Train and of course the legendary Opera scene stand out. The game keeps putting the characters in fun and interesting set pieces and uses them to play out stage plays to the best possible result. Many of them surpass anything people have seen up to that point in video games. It truly deserves the highest possible praise even by 2022 standards. This is why the game is so engaging and fun - it is not the story itself, but the set pieces on the way that are so great. This is also why the game declines in the World of Ruin while it improves massively gameplay wise - the core appeal is mostly gone, as you largely visit older vistas and the new set pieces that appear in the World of Ruin, outside the ending, aren't nearly as engaging.
At the end of the day, FFVI found a very unique way to make its storytelling interesting and engaging. A method that I wish more games would have used since then.
FF as a series seems to often live and die by its presentation, but this is not at all a bad thing. When the presentation is at its peak, and Square is at the peak of their powers, the presentation alone can be so engaging and entertaining that it makes you forget about anything else. FFVI is a triumph.
2022
Fantastic concept for a game, but the way the story is told is not very satisfying, and the game is somewhat repetitive. But I would still say Sonic is back and Sega did a tremendous job. Maybe this isn't the best game ever made, but there is such a massive, insane improvement over the last game that I haven't seen a studio manage in a long long long time. It remains to be seen if they can maintain the momentum and create a sequel to this game that truly convinces both critics and fans and not just fans.
Untold 1, but better. Amazing dungeons as always, better characters, great and very difficult battle system and absolutely fantastic music. Fantastic JRPG and if you remotely enjoy dungeon crawlers, you have to play this.
2010
yep
2022
nope
Xenoblade's greatest strength is how nicely the plot unfolds over its length. The seeds of its plot are sown at the beginning, all its mysteries are laid out almost right away. Slowly but surely, the veil on them is lifted one by one and crucially, each reveal is satisfying. They reward the player's curiosity by providing the necessary "Ahhhh, so that's what that meant" moment while also increasing the stakes of the plot each time (i.e. HYPE). AND they are engaging because they appropriately give context to the journey and make it retroactively more meaningful, allowing you to make more sense of past events. The central plot is as often noted a rather classic story and THE cliche for JRPGs, but its execution is top of the line and this is what matters for me above all else.
While not all the characters are hits, Shulk, Melia, Dunban, Reyn and Fiora together form a homerun. Each of them have clear strengths and weaknesses that allow them to complement each other. What is great about them is that they all have a scene where they show weakness and need help from others around them, and each of them have a scene where they are the key in helping others. Melia and [seventh party member]'s private interaction towards the end is a great example for that. This makes the relationship between the party members feel all the stronger and all the tighter as they genuinely need each other to achieve their goals. I much prefer this to the tried and true "character arc", a character doesn't necessarily have to grow or change to be interesting, doesn't have to overcome their flaws and become someone else or someone better. This is also very nicely complemented by the battle system. Many attacks are useless without your team members building on them, each party member can do little on their own and only through combining their forces can results be achieved. It's as if the way the characters were conceived to complement the battle system!
A mind boggling achievement is of course the environmental design. The different levels are extremely diverse and have interesting biomes. They manage to be more than simple "desert, forest, ice" biome tropes that you find in every JRPG, adding interesting challenges to each of these levels to make them stand tall in their own right. The sense of scale they provide is awe-inspiring, which is interesting since the world of Xenoblade is very small - confined to the bodies of the two titans after all - but this makes the levels come across as the actual real world as it exists, rather than as abstract representations of a place. This gigantic level that goes on as long as eye can see? Yeah, all of that really is the actual leg of the Bionis. I love this effect. Beyond that, they simply look interesting to look at. Varied and otherworldy looking structures, plants and animals makes reaching new levels exciting. Of course, a large problem is that travelling across these lands is generally slow and can get very repetitive due to a lack of mounts, and the awe of the scenery wears off after doing your 15th sidequest. Yet, even the indoor levels like the factories manage to convey a great sense of scale and complexity. I genuinely do not think there is a single developer in the entire world that can best Monolithsoft when it comes to environmental design, not even Elden Ring manages to create such interesting structures and biomes. Just imagine what they could do with strong hardware!
Lastly, while the battle system is very repetitive to the point you do exact same sequence all the way to the end, the plot is beautifully connected to the gameplay through the visions, and building the most effiicient skill trees and gem set-ups is still fairly fun. If the plot failed to keep me engaged I could see the battle system becoming a sticking point however, luckily this is not the case.
All in all, Xenoblade deserves its status as a classic JRPG and I would say it is no exaggeration to say that it represents alongside Dragon Quest XI and Persona 4/5 the rebirth of the genre and its return in the mainstream consciousness.
While not all the characters are hits, Shulk, Melia, Dunban, Reyn and Fiora together form a homerun. Each of them have clear strengths and weaknesses that allow them to complement each other. What is great about them is that they all have a scene where they show weakness and need help from others around them, and each of them have a scene where they are the key in helping others. Melia and [seventh party member]'s private interaction towards the end is a great example for that. This makes the relationship between the party members feel all the stronger and all the tighter as they genuinely need each other to achieve their goals. I much prefer this to the tried and true "character arc", a character doesn't necessarily have to grow or change to be interesting, doesn't have to overcome their flaws and become someone else or someone better. This is also very nicely complemented by the battle system. Many attacks are useless without your team members building on them, each party member can do little on their own and only through combining their forces can results be achieved. It's as if the way the characters were conceived to complement the battle system!
A mind boggling achievement is of course the environmental design. The different levels are extremely diverse and have interesting biomes. They manage to be more than simple "desert, forest, ice" biome tropes that you find in every JRPG, adding interesting challenges to each of these levels to make them stand tall in their own right. The sense of scale they provide is awe-inspiring, which is interesting since the world of Xenoblade is very small - confined to the bodies of the two titans after all - but this makes the levels come across as the actual real world as it exists, rather than as abstract representations of a place. This gigantic level that goes on as long as eye can see? Yeah, all of that really is the actual leg of the Bionis. I love this effect. Beyond that, they simply look interesting to look at. Varied and otherworldy looking structures, plants and animals makes reaching new levels exciting. Of course, a large problem is that travelling across these lands is generally slow and can get very repetitive due to a lack of mounts, and the awe of the scenery wears off after doing your 15th sidequest. Yet, even the indoor levels like the factories manage to convey a great sense of scale and complexity. I genuinely do not think there is a single developer in the entire world that can best Monolithsoft when it comes to environmental design, not even Elden Ring manages to create such interesting structures and biomes. Just imagine what they could do with strong hardware!
Lastly, while the battle system is very repetitive to the point you do exact same sequence all the way to the end, the plot is beautifully connected to the gameplay through the visions, and building the most effiicient skill trees and gem set-ups is still fairly fun. If the plot failed to keep me engaged I could see the battle system becoming a sticking point however, luckily this is not the case.
All in all, Xenoblade deserves its status as a classic JRPG and I would say it is no exaggeration to say that it represents alongside Dragon Quest XI and Persona 4/5 the rebirth of the genre and its return in the mainstream consciousness.