god i hate atari and their 12 year old looking ceo trying to salvage the company despite it's lack of ANYTHING MEANINGFUL IN THE 21ST CENTURY, pumping NFTs and dumping copypastas of 'DAE pong?' wherever it goes. This is the most toothless presentation of Atari's shit ass legacy but at least we got to find out that the programmers smoked weeeeeddd duuuudddee.

Digital Eclipse, my sweet child, none of this is aimed at you, you could never do wrong, though I do question wtf the new ReImAgInEd games are doing here and why The Stacks has been self-inserted? I thought we all agreed Ready Player One was a trash book?

How many expansions do I have to play before I come to terms with the fact that Final Fantasy XIV is simply not engaging. The last few expansions I bought as a bundle, on sale, and I used my sub time as efficiently as I could as well as some time during a play-for-free campaign. But this month I finished university, and I decided that now was the time to put down £45 and finally play 'the greatest final fantasy story ever created' (citation needed).

As I write this, my character is middle-mousing themselves across a lush expanse, requiring gentle taps from me to correct their course like a Roomba, so that I can click on the npc that awaits me at the end of my ride. This npc is similar to the hundreds of npcs I have already spoken to in my time playing FFXIV and its expansions, and I know what to expect: I get to read some text, and then off I go, middle-mousing myself to the next npc.

FFXIV has the best writing of an MMO (which isn't to say too much) but even then Yoshi-P and his team are not immune to padding their experiences with pointless quests and overwritten text boxes. Here is my main problem with the game, and one that will not be fixed until Final Fantasy ((14-11)+14): Every single text box crushes my soul. The ones that are quick to read are often pointless and use unnecessarily flowery language. And then there are the unvoiced cutscenes, where I get to wait 5 seconds between text boxes so that I can watch npcs move their mouths or sigh. Voiced cutscenes often feel worse, leaving plenty of dead air between voice lines that is filled with awkward cuts to show my character soulessly and silently emoting. A particularly bad cutscene may consist of a cut to show my character, Alphinaud, Alisae, This Guy I've Just Met, his pet dog, Freddie Mercury: "So this is The Scions... And you, must be the Warrior of Light''.

When playing Shadowbringers I conceded that this game is a visual novel with a mahjong simulator plugged into the side of it. The problem is that the dialogue does not have the pacing and the presentation isn't as slick as your typical visual novel... and I still have to walk 5 minutes to get to the next text box.