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slight squaresoft 90s jrpg bias here
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GOTY '23

Participated in the 2023 Game of the Year Event

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Favorite Games

Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VII
Chrono Trigger
Chrono Trigger
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
Xenogears
Xenogears
NieR: Automata
NieR: Automata

128

Total Games Played

004

Played in 2024

067

Games Backloggd


Recently Played See More

SuperHot
SuperHot

Mar 21

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Feb 29

Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VII

Feb 03

Hi-Fi Rush
Hi-Fi Rush

Jan 03

Needy Streamer Overload
Needy Streamer Overload

Dec 17

Recently Reviewed See More

My only complaint with this game is that the movement outside of combat felt a bit awkward. Seriously, that's it. It's kind of insane to me that in a time where gaming produces nothing but AAA slop which doesn't even work as intended half the time yet still charges up the ass, this one manages to slip through the cracks and in some ways intentionally defines itself as a cult classic.

I'll start with the artstyle(s). Gaming has this obession nowadays of making everything look hyper realistic. I don't really have a problem with that, in fact I guess it's probably a good thing for mass appeal, but Hi-Fi Rush intentionally sticks to just using more cartoony artstyles throughout everything. More vibrant colors, more wacky animations, and more silly shenanigans happening both in the background and right in front of your face. It just gives more life to everything than just having your characters look over realistic looking grassy plains over the sunrise just like Breath of the Wild and every open-ish AAA game that came out after it. Very nice refresher.

I also never play rhythm games, yet this one made me stick to it. Everything, from Chai's movement (which felt a bit out of place I guess, especially with how his double jump works, but that's my only nitpick) to platforms opening up and then closing, fits to a rhythm. It's all seamless to the same beat, and it's even crazy to me how the enviroments around Chai also sync to that same beat. It's, again, such a nice change of pace from everything trying to be flashy action combat, because now you have to pay attention more in fight instead of just spamming buttons to win.

Oh yeah, speaking of combat, it's amazing how much emphasis this game puts on its combat system. It's almost impossible to go about it without learning at least some nuance to it. Sure, you can just keep spamming the same attack button over and over, but you actively get punished for that through both the score you get at the end of each fight and also through the amount of damage you do. It's quintessential to learn the intricacies. Once again, such a nice refresher from just spamming buttons to win.

The characters, while on the surface seem like the same old cliche of "let's use the power of friendship to overcome the insane odds we put ourselves unnecessarily against!!!!", leave such a lasting impression. Every single one of them grows through some way or another, where eventually I started feeling parallels to my actual friends in real life. Even the villains, while for the most part you don't really hear from them after they've been defeated, have their own quirky little goofy over the top personalities.

One small thing I want to mention; this game is CHOCK full of references to other forms of media. The one that stuck out to me the most was a reference to the sitdown "tell, not show" style of the second disc of Xenogears, which I immediately pointed at my monitor screen in shock as soon as I saw it, given that I had only just recently played Xenogears and also that I didn't really think they'd put such a niche reference into a game like this.

This game was almost shoved down my throat through a few friends of mine, and I'm gonna be honest that made me not want to play it, but I'm glad I eventually just forked over the money and played the game. Very rarely do you see actual passion projects come out like this where every single detail both big and small had some level of love put into it. I really wanna play more games like these which do everything in their power to stand out.

9/10. Please give me more.

For Spider-Man fans, by Spider-Man fans.

Playing through this, you can really tell that the wizards over at Insomniac really put effort and care into their craft. Almost (keyword here) everything feels like a substantial improvement; the traversal, side content, bosses, most aspects of the gameplay (I have a few complaints with this, I'll get to them later), and even New York itself.

The biggest improvement I saw was the boss fights. In the last 2 games, the bosses felt kind of underwhelming in hindsight, whereas I died several times on pretty much all of the bosses on Spectacular (the normal mode) in this game.

A close second goes to the traversal; sure it's still just New York and on paper this game just has more of the same, but when you look closer at the details you'd see that this game's NYC is probably the most realistic the city has ever felt in a video game. With all the new traversal options, such as gliding, loop de loops, and even surfing, you experience it all at breakneck pace instead of sitting through NYC traffic that's on the roads now compared to the previous games having basically none of that. There's even more texture to the NPCs walking around town in this one if you decide to take a break from heroics, whereas in the other games they all looked the same.

Side content feels like it could be on par with main story missions in this game, given how spectacle heavy they are. One that stuck out to me the most is the one where you play as Hailey from the Miles game, and only being able to faintly hear the sound of a wooden board breaking as the player brings a certain kind of immersion when you remember that she's deaf. It's just that good.

I also really enjoyed the new abilities that both Spider-Men now have in combat. Miles can literally throw blue lightning on some Star Wars Emperor Palpatine shit, while Peter can throw around a motherfucking alien at enemies. It adds a new sense of depth to the combat, whereas in the last two games it kind of just felt like the same loop of "air launch, beat the shit out of them in the air, and if they move too far away in the air just press Triangle to catch them, rinse and repeat". At least Miles' game had invisibilty which added depth and is also available in this game as well, but I barely ever used them due to how useless it can be with how quickly it runs out. Both characters now also have the ability to parry like a fighting game, which feels like another bit of depth, especially when you're forced to parry certain attacks in order to dodge them now.

The characters are all still the same characters from the first game, which makes sense for a sequel, but the new ones for this game are alright as well. In the beginning you meet Harry Osborn again after his "trip to Europe" from the 2018 game, and then are immediately shown a playable memory from their shared past to show their strong friendship. I do kind of wish, however, that some of the new characters bonded well with other side characters and not just Peter. MJ and Harry are also supposed to be besties, but it doesn't really show in this game even if MJ was there with Harry and Peter in their past and MJ is still closely connected to Peter as his girlfriend.

The story, while I don't really expect much from it given it's a superhero game, still feels kind of safe in comparison to the 2018 game. While it's still one of the better superhero stories I've seen in the past few years, especially with the MCU putting out only slop as of late, I can't help but feel at times that they could have gone a bit harder with the story at times. The story feels kind of front loaded, but for a super hero story I think it's overall still mostly fine, especially one done by fans of the IP like Insomniac.

Now come my biggest complaints. I don't know why, but with everything this game gives, it's strange that it also takes away certain gameplay elements as well.
- In this one, they reworked the Focus system. Originally you could have multiple Focus bars for multiple finishers, and continuously heal from them if you want so long as you were building Focus. In this game it's stripped down to just 1 Focus bar that does fuck all until it's full. Don't really know why they did this, but I don't really like it.
- There's half the gadgets now, which I'm not gonna sit here and pretend I used all of them in the first two games, but the fact that they limit you now is strange.
- Leveling up in the other games gave skill points, occasional movement speed increases, and rarely health increases. This gave incentive to do that. I can forgo the lack of movement speed increases due to new traversal changes already in-built into the game; I can't excuse how now on level up you only get a single skill point for your now THREE equally big skill trees, whereas health increases are earned through doing side quests where you get tokens for completing them and use those to grow out MORE skill trees.
- Web Lines are a new mechanic that both Spider-Men have. It allows you to create a tightrope between any two walls that you can walk across and stealthily pluck enemies off the ground and wipe them out. This is counteracted by the AI looking up more frequently compared to the previous games, but even then these lines just almost entirely trivialize stealth missions. It's not that hard to just pluck 3 enemies at once with just a single web shot and a zipline completely undetected.
- Suits are now not only a bit lacking compared to the first game, they're now completely cosmetic. Unlike the 2018 game where you had suit powers given to each suit, now it's just what suit you like the most at a given moment.

I'm saying it again. For Spider-Man fans, by Spider-Man fans. While not short of flaws, it's definitely a console seller for Spider-Man fans. 8.5/10, maybe even a 9.

also can everyone shut the fuck up about 19 inches? you're not funny holy shit

[Review of 2.0, A Realm Reborn]

After 7 months, I finally got around to getting through my first proper experience of an MMO. However, I feel a bit mixed on this personally, but from what I can gather this chapter of the game sets up for what could be a lot better story in the future expansions.

Of course, with hindsight of 10 years ARR seems like a really drawn out, 50-hour long tutorial for the rest of the game. Most of the MSQs in this chapter boil down to meaningless fetch quests; about 70-80% of them are just like this. This is especially the case in the beginning and middle of the chapter. The highs of ARR are very few and far between. It gets quite cumbersome to do them at times, so I can't quite put my finger on why people stuck through this in 2013 but also it must be way better than whatever catastrophe 1.0 was.

That's really my only criticism, however. What I can appreciate about these sloggish MSQs is that they allow for so much open ended-ness with how you want to play the game. It opens you up into a universe of opportunities. Want to (mostly) solo the entire chapter as a Tank like I did? Go ahead, or if you wanted to you could also experiment with other Disciples as well. Want to host a fashion show instead? That sounds fun, go for it; or just stick with the clothes that give you the best stats and not worry about appearance at all. Want to just explore the environments before actually delivering whatever pipe bomb the MSQ forces you to deliver to an NPC's mailbox? Be my guest. (Oh, by the way, the scenery and soundtrack of this game are absolutely phenomenal. How they managed to pull it off in an MMO is crazy to me). There's so much you can do in this chapter alone, (fitting for an MMO at least) and I'm sure it'll carry over into the next expansions I play, whenever I get to them.

What's even better is the game doesn't really penalize you for doing anything outside of the MSQ either. Changing your job/class doesn't take anything except the time it would take to level up that class again starting from level 1. The community for the game is always receptive and nice, especially for Sprouts like me. At any given moment, it doesn't really feel like you could get bored of having nothing to do.

Towards the end of ARR, the story actually starts to pick up and it's super solid to me. There's more to come given that I'm playing this for the first time in 2023, so with what ARR sets up for I'm optimistic that it'll be able to top off what exactly happened now.

With how much the XIV community oversells this game, I was reluctant to finally step foot into it. But now I don't regret it at all. 7/10. Can't wait.

also i got to run around as a catboy in fruity outfits so it's just already an amazing game lmao