It's fun for like 20 minutes, but the game just feels kind of empty after that. There are a few things that I actually like, like how you need to confirm a kill by ramming into them, building up cover with foam, or the 2D art for most of the characters, but that's really it. It's a pretty basic hero shooter that "borrowed" a few of Splatoon's mechanics without really understanding how they work. All the characters have these really big shots with a large spread, which makes sense for spreading foam over the ground, but since foam basically doesn't matter outside of moving slightly faster, covering enemy foam with your own is nowhere near as important as inking over your enemy's turf in Splatoon is. The same goes for the foam boards which replace squid mode, as they basically just let you move a little faster than normal but don't come with any of the other bonuses of squid mode like camouflage or ammo recovery. As far as modes go, there's a basic team death match that kind of reminds me of Kid Icarus Uprising's multiplayer in the sense that you whittle down the enemy team until a marked player appears, a standard payload mode, and a really basic horde mode that feels more like a tower defense game in terms of enemy distribution than a real horde kind of thing (there might be more but the second mode cycles just like Splatoon's ranked modes and I'm not playing any more of this to see if there are any more modes.The game also only has a total of eight characters, one of which is locked behind the paid battle pass in a paid game (yeah it's free on PS+ this month but after that it'll be $30.)

Also the game's cosmetic shop just prices everything with real money. Normally there's at least some level of abstraction in games like this, even if it's just needing to use proprietary fun bux instead of your local currency. That's the kind of egregious business decision I've come to expect both from Square and from this kind of perpetually online live service shooter, but it's still really funny to see them be upfront about asking $10.99 for a recolor of one of these generic characters and up to $45 for one of the "premium" skin bundles.

Like The First Soldier, this game probably won't even last a year.

There are two basic types of Pokemon fans: those that play the games for the battling aspects (I'm including stuff like team building, breeding, and online play in here), and those that play it for the catching and collecting mechanics. I fall pretty firmly into the latter camp, which is probably the reason I enjoy games like Snap and Legends Arceus as much as I do. It's also the reason why, despite its laundry list of flaws and nonexistent difficulty, I had a great time with Scarlet.

I'll start with the negative stuff, just to get it out of the way. The game runs like shit. The game looks like shit (except the models for Pokemon and major characters, those are actually kind of okay). The only interiors in towns are gyms and sandwich shops, both of which use the exact same template regardless of the town they’re in. Even though there are way more options to customize your trainer's face, the clothing options are worse than every other game in the series with character customization. The forced EXP share coupled with the more open nature of the three main questlines basically forces you to handicap yourself (I cycled through like 20 Pokemon, switching them out once they were five levels below whatever my limit for obeying me was) if you ever want a trainer to take out even one of your own Pokemon. The overworld catching mechanics from PLA are gone, so even if you just want to throw a quick ball at something and run away if it doesn’t work, you need to start a battle. There’s no more fishing because Pokemon appear on the overworld, even though SwSh did the same thing but still gave you a fishing rod to use in a few places. Shiny Pokemon don’t have an indicator like they did in PLA and since some of the newer shinies are nearly identical to their original colors, it’s possible for a shiny Pokemon to spawn without you even noticing. There really isn’t any kind of battle facility in the game, but that could possibly be added in a patch like how the Eternal Battle Reverie was added to PLA, or more likely in the inevitable paid dlc that in accordance with TPC’s unshakable release schedule will probably release some time in 2023. The only minigames in the game (the Emotional Spectrum Practice thing in Alfornada and the Snow Slope Run at the Glaseado gym) are way too simple, and they don’t even involve your own Pokemon. The thing that made side modes like the Pokeathalon or contests so interesting to me was that they gave you reasons outside of combat to raise and train up Pokemon, while also just being fun to mess around with and play. Yeah that kind of stuff has been absent from the series for a while (the contests in BDSP were a simple rhythm game kind of thing and a lot simpler than their gen 3/4/6 versions), but even Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon had the surprisingly fun Mantine Surfing minigame, and Legends Arceus had the shooting gallery minigame and the balloon popping races. Most of these issues add together to make a region that feels kind of lifeless. It’s less like an actual place and more like a theme park that exists just so your battles have cool backdrops. That’s basically what the world in every Pokemon game is, but there was at least the illusion of more depth to the world than there is now. Simple things like being able to go into people’s houses or seeing how people and pokemon interacted outside of battles really helped with that, so even though they’re not integral parts of the Pokemon formula, their absence in Paldea is pretty noticeable.

Despite all of this, there are actually a lot of things I really enjoyed. I thought the soundtrack was great, especially compared to SwSh’s lackluster music. The story was surprisingly good even if I would have liked to see Team Star have some kind of presence outside of their bases, and the major characters were all really charming. The Paldean Pokedex has a lot of great designs in it, and I didn’t have any trouble with finding new pokemon that I actually wanted to use unlike in SwSh. The terastallization mechanic is a lot more interesting than Z-moves and dynamaxing were, and although it isn’t quite as cool as mega evolution it can still be used in some pretty creative ways to round out a team. Making dumb sandwiches out of nothing but eggs and watercress is way more amusing than it should be, and since it uses actual models instead of images, the whole process feels way more involved than the curry making from SwSh. Koraidon actually felt pretty good to ride around on once it was fully upgraded, despite the complaints I’ve seen from other people playing the game. I wonder if this is an animation thing since most people are playing Violet and Miraidon seems to be floatier than Koraidon, but I don’t know. The thing I enjoyed the most about the game, however, was the way it distributed the Pokemon in its dex throughout Paldea. Every field, cave, and mountaintop was home to Pokemon I hadn’t caught yet, and my drive to complete the Pokedex (I have about 260 species caught at the time of writing this review) kept the world feeling fresh, even when there really isn’t that much to do other than battle underpowered trainers and participate in mediocre raid battles. Constantly finding new Pokemon encouraged me to explore every nook and cranny of Paldea’s otherwise empty landscape, and managed to create a sense of adventure and exploration on par with Legends Arceus. If I was someone who only caught Pokemon I actually wanted to use and ignored everything else, I could see how Scarlet wouldn’t be any fun, but that goes back to the statement I made at the start of this review.

Pokemon as a series has been shifting towards appeasing the collecting side of its fanbase ever since Pokemon Go, and some could argue that Gamefreak was doing so even before that with things like the DexNav in ORAS. This is at the cost of cutting out things like the Battle Frontier, or coming up with a new gimmick every generation instead of fleshing out the mechanics that are already in place. The only thing people who play Pokemon for battling really have left is multiplayer, and Pokemon Showdown already fills that niche even if it is unofficial. At some point Game Freak or The Pokemon Company should probably put out another game like Stadium or Battle Revolution that’s almost like a hub for different battle modes if they’re going to keep shifting the focus of the main titles away from the battling side of things and towards just collecting Pokemon. Or they could just bring the Battle Frontier back but everyone knows that’s never going to happen.

Also Clodisre is the best I love this dumb guy so much it’s unbelievable.

I dedicate this work to the Muses, so that they may guide my hand as I undertake this herculean task.

We live in an age of unprecedented interconnectedness. News travels across the globe in a manner of minutes, and journeys that used to take months of careful planning and as much time to execute can now be made on a whim in an afternoon. Information is obtained, processed, and distributed without regard for national, continental, or linguistic barriers. And yet, one thing has eluded speakers of the English language for years. In December 2021, Bandai Namco Games released PUI PUI MOLCAR Let’s! MOLCAR PARTY in Japan and Southeast Asia. The game features a full English translation, but for some reason, there is almost no information on the game in English to be found online. I seek to fix that. I will brave the frontier that is PUI PUI MOLCAR Let’s MOLCAR PARTY and document my findings for the world to see. This will be my magnum opus. This will be the mark I leave on history.

For those unaware of the cultural phenomenon that is PUI PUI MOLCAR, it is a stop-motion animated series released in Japan in 2021 that follows a group of car/guinea pig hybrids as they navigate the stressful and oftentimes cruel world of being used as transportation for their human masters. This manifests in such gruesome and emotional ways as being left outside in the heat, being hijacked and used as a getaway car, or eating trash because it looked like food (Let’s! MOLCAR PARTY actually reveals that carrots, the primary food and fuel source for the molcar, are made from processed and recycled trash, which provides some much-needed context to the episode “Chewing Chewing Cleaning”). As any self-respecting game developer would, the geniuses at Bandai Namco Entertainment decided that the best way to present these complex and moving stories in video game form would be the long-standing tradition of a mini game collection. Such masterpieces as Game & Wario (2013) or Rayman: Raving Rabbids 2 (2007) no doubt influenced Bandai Namco’s decision to present the gripping story of Moltown and its inhabitants in this way.

The game itself is structured around the aforementioned Moltown, which the player is tasked with building up from zero. This is doubtless due to some kind of unmentioned tragedy leveling the town and its inhabitants, which leaves the surviving molcars with the burdensome task of rebuilding their civilization. The molcars, which are rendered in impressive detail, do this by partaking in a series of 10 sacred rituals known as “minigames” in order to win a currency known as PUI. As this PUI can be used to magically recreate buildings and to procure accessories for the surviving molcars, it is doubtless the concentrated form of divine favor, bestowed upon the molcars by whatever deity they worship. Once enough PUI is gathered, the molcars use it to restore one of 12 buildings to Moltown, which I will go through in order of their appearance.

1. The Mol Shop
The only building to have survived the destruction of Moltown, the Mol Shop is exactly what it advertises itself as, a shop. In the game itself, it only sells accessories that are used to customize your molcars, but it doubtless serves a much greater purpose in wider molcar society due to its proximity to the third building on this list.

2. The Photo Studio
The Photo Studio is a monument to eternity. The molcars use it to preserve images of themselves for future generations, and the player is tasked with arranging these images in order to best capture the essence of molcar society.

3. The Hangout Area
The Hangout Area is at the core of molcar society. This is where molcars go receive “pats” from their divine overlords. What exactly these “pats” are is unclear, but as molcars seem to be pleased by them, they are of no doubt important to their culture and belief systems.

4. The DJ Booth
The DJ Booth is where molcars go to participate in the first minigame, Mol Rhythm. Given a set of three directions, molcars are tasked with reproducing said directions to a beat. The minigame very much resembles a game that the western world knows as Simon Says, but that is a gross oversimplification of its artistic and cultural significance.

5. The Soccer Stadium
It is here that molcars go to compete against each other in a sport known as Mol Soccer. Two teams, consisting of one to three molcars each, are tasked with pushing an oversized ball into the opposing team’s goal. As molcars lack clear hands and require all four wheel-like feet to move, this is done by running and jumping into the ball. The actual sport is quite similar to the hit video game Rocket League (2015), which is most likely little more than coincidence.

6. Potato’s Driver’s House
This is where molcars go to throw their Surprise Parties. A Surprise Party is an event in which molcars gather and dance while attempting to not wake up the human occupants of a given building. The event takes on a form very similar to the schoolyard game known as “Red Light, Green Light” and being caught dancing when the human participant wakes is considered quite the cultural faux pas.

7. The Arcade
The Arcade is where PUI PUI Turf Battles are held. Four molcars are dropped onto a floor equipped with lit panels and are made to brutally fight over territory. Any panel a molcar steps on is changed to that molcar’s assigned color and awarded to them as their own turf, but other molcars can just as easily claim it as their own by stepping on the aforementioned panel. This leads to PUI PUI Turf Battles being quick, messy affairs where molcars scramble to protect their own territory while still expanding it. This nature of territorial conflict is no doubt a harsh critique of human nations and their tendency to go to war over tracts of land.

8. The Dump Site
This is where molcars take their collected trash and convert it into edible carrots in a minigame known as City Cleaning. In it, molcars are tasked with gathering bags of trash that are littered about Moltown’s streets and returning them to the dump site. When they arrive, the trash is emptied out into a machine and miraculously converted into carrots, thus preserving the ecosystem and contributing to molcar society. If only mankind could find such a use for our own refuse, but that is little more than wishful thinking,

9. The Villain’s Hideout
This is where molcars go to partake in Mol Missions. A Mol Mission is an event in which molcars run away from a giant, mechanized shark capable of launching damaging lasers in multiple directions. This is perhaps the most mysterious of the events, and there is little I can say to expand upon it further.

10. Molfes Land
This is where molcars go to participate in the event known as Molfes. Molfes very much resembles our own Fall Guys (2020), as molcars are tasked with running through an obstacle course in the allotted time. It is a relatively simple minigame, but serves as a testament to the physical prowess of these creatures.

11. The Desert
The desert is where molcars go to brave the Mol Of The Dead event. As to why the desert is considered a building, I do not know, but as that is how the molcars treat it, I will follow their example. Mol Of The Dead sees molcars run through an apocalyptic wasteland as they scrounge for supplies and avoid the zombie hordes that call the wastes home. The event, at its most basic level, resembles Pac Man (1980).

12. The Racing Arena.
This is where molcars go to participate in PUI PUI Racing. This event consists of two laps around a short, carrot shaped track. The first molcar to complete both laps is deemed the champion, leaving the remaining molcars to compete over the lower places.

13. The Bank
The site of the final minigame, the bank is where molcars go to play Hide and Mol-seek. In a game that resembles our own “Cops and Robbers”, two teams of molcars are let loose in Moltown. The robbers team is tasked with evading capture while the cops team is tasked with capturing the robbers. The two scamper through the streets, coming into close contact with each other, but often avoiding direct confrontations. If Moltown is able to turn crime into such a simple game, I wonder about the frequency of legitimate crimes.

Outside of these games, molcars spend their days wandering the paradise of Moltown and doing whatever they so desire. This is most often chewing on shrubs or squeaking in groups, but I am not one to judge the legitimacy of their actions.


Honestly, it’s just a minigame collection, so it makes sense nobody bothered to write about it. The minigame quality ranges from pretty barebones to actually kind of fun, but it never goes beyond that. I wasn’t joking when I said the molcars looked nice since the devs did a really good job of actually animating them in a way that matches the feel of the show, but other than that there’s nothing of note here. Shoutout to the guy who imported the special release edition of this game at full price and then sold it to me for like $15, though.

Also how am I worse at molcar Rocket League than real Rocket League?

Somehow both the best rhythm game and the best platformer of 2020. It's a whole game that manages to nail that "moving to the music" feel that the rhythm levels in Rayman Legends had, despite playing nothing like that. Mechanically it's probably closest to Crypt of the Necrodancer where every beat matches to a movement, but things like doing tricks in the air or breakdancing/charging to give yourself a longer dash or jump can be used to circumvent that a bit.

The soundtrack is also worth talking about. NIS brought in a few different artists to work on it, as well as having some of their own composers write tracks. The biggest outside contributor was DYES IWASAKI of Fake Type, but there are a few other independent artists too. I don't exactly know what to call the genre that most of the music falls into, but it's a kind of jazz-electronic hybrid (electroswing? IDK I'm not a big music guy). I've always kind of liked jazz so that part appeals to me and is probably one of the reasons I liked the soundtrack as much as I did, but the songs are all super distinct from each other and have a variety of tempos that are used to speed up or slow down the whole pace of a level. There are even a few songs that play with the beats a bit to throw you off of a basic "1-2-3-4" tempo for pressing buttons. The music also meshes incredibly well with the weird art style of the game and the absolute fever dream that is its story. This game has boss fights. This game has large scale hallucinations. This game begins with a narrator asking you moral questions while you watch a rat be cut open on an operating table. It's weird, it's wild, and it's incredibly fun.

Reading over my review of FFXVI before I posted this, I realized that this is by far my longest review I've written and probably ever will write (ended up being exactly 2500 words when the most I've done before is a little more than 1000) so if you're not interested in reading that, I'll sum things up with one sentence. Final Fantasy XVI had the potential to be great, but it just ended up being boring.

Final Fantasy XVI is a perfectly serviceable video game. It doesn’t feel like it was hampered by external pressures, a tight development schedule, or constant rewrites and redesigns like the mess that was FFXV was. It doesn’t suffer from any game breaking bugs, egregious performance issues, or any of the other problems that most modern AAA titles release with. It feels like a (mostly) complete product that was what the development team wanted to make. They wanted to make a “dark” Final Fantasy game that’s heavily inspired by western dark fantasy with flashy action combat. The problem is that the game they wanted to make is, as a whole, incredibly dull. I’m not the kind of person to normally whine about the casualization of video games, but FFXVI’s core gameplay is so unbelievably basic when compared not just to the character action games it’s trying to emulate, but also to Square’s own catalog of action RPGS that it feels like a clear attempt to dumb things down for a larger audience. In the last five years, Square Enix has released Trials of Mana, NEO The World Ends with You, NieR Replicant ver. 1.22, two different Star Ocean games, both Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth, Stranger of Paradise, Harvestella, and Valkyrie Elysium. Dragon Quest Builders 2 as well if you want to count that as an action RPG. Go just a little further back and you have to add NieR Automata, The World Ends with You Final Remix, and Kingdom Hearts III + ReMind to that list. I have not played Valkyrie Elysium or Second Story R myself, but I have played all of the other games I listed for at least a few hours and every single one of them has a better combat system and at least a slightly more interesting plot than FFXVI. If the game was made by a different studio and pushed out as a new single player epic exclusively for the Sony Slopbox 5, then I’d probably look at it a bit more favorably when having to compare it more to games like Horizon or God of War than to NieR and TWEWY. That’s not the case, though. This is a flagship product from Square Enix. Square. Fucking. Enix. One of, if not the biggest names in RPGs and Japanese games as a whole spent years on this game and developed it alongside some absolutely fantastic titles, but somehow it ended up being overshadowed by their own back catalog and paling in comparison to its more direct inspirations.

On paper, FFXVI sounds rad as hell. You play as a guy who can turn into a giant fire monster in order to fight other people who turn into giant elemental beasts, swap between a bunch of different elemental powers, and even has a dog companion. You fight alongside characters like your childhood friend who wields both a rapier and the power of ice, a charming outlaw who smokes and can call down lightning at will, and several other less colorful companions. You’ll travel the world and destroy the very foundations of society in order to save mankind as a whole, all while fighting against an unjust system and freeing magic users who are seen as little more than monstrous tools by their own families. It’ll be a flashy action game with things like air juggling, perfect dodges and parries, and even a stagger system for larger enemies. The game definitely has potential, but it just doesn’t live up to that. Moreso on the gameplay side than the story side, so I’ll start by getting my story complaints out of the way first.

Starting with the characters, I actually like Clive as a protagonist. Yeah he’s kind of a standard brooding JRPG protagonist, but he has enough personality to keep things interesting and isn’t quite as aloof as someone like Squall or as generally disinterested as Noctis. Jill has a few decent moments, but just stands around or fights alongside Clive for most of the game. For being the main heroine, she has way less of an impact on the story than characters like Aerith, Rinoa, Yuna, and Garnet. Cid is great, though. I’m always a fan of that kind of dashing rogue character, but Cid steals the show whenever he’s around. Not only is he the driving force for almost all of the game’s first act, but his animation and voice just nail the whole devil-may-care persona he’s developed for himself while still making him come across as serious when he needs to be. Hugo Kupka is an asshole, but that makes for an effective villain so I didn’t mind it. Some of the side characters, especially the ones that populate the hideaway, are rather likeable, too. Everyone else just kind of sucks. Joshua is little more than a plot device for most of the game, serving to show up and either save Clive or dump lore on what the fuck Ultima is. Ultima himself is a pretty bland main villain, and even his mortal agents like the whole Waloed gang or Olivier are just boring. Anabella’s one-dimensional obsession with power and noble bloodlines is kind of funny, at least. The main plot itself also isn’t that bad, but it feels like the different arcs of the game (Finding the second Eikon of Fire, trying to save bearers, taking over as Cid and destroying the mothercrystals, Primogenesis, and finally the final showdown with Barnabas and Ultima) are kind of disconnected, especially everything that happened before the second timeskip. Clive pretty quickly just starts acting like he’s fine with having destroyed Phoenix Gate, killed hundreds of his own countrymen, and effectively having caused the downfall of Rosaria. As soon as Cid starts talking about how the mothercrystals are draining the aether from the world, any developments regarding the plight of the bearers is sidelined and shoehorned into side quests that are scattered throughout the game and then thrown in your face right before the ending. The same goes for most side plots such as the aether flood in Lostwing or Blackthorne’s whole character arc. Yeah they handwave this as needing to save the world itself before saving the people in it, but that’s a pretty bad excuse for dropping an entire core theme of your game in favor of leaning back on a somewhat standard FF elemental crystals and otherworldly evil plot. A lot of the Eikon fights also feel kind of shoehorned in, which is weird considering how heavily they were advertised. It’s almost like the fights were thought up first and the story was made as way to justify moving the player between them. Overall I thought it was fine, but a pretty average story overall. For a series that’s fondly remembered for its storytelling (I don’t think most FF stories are all that great, but they’re definitely a big reason as to why the series is as popular as it is) , that’s a pretty big failure.

If the gameplay was great, then it could make up for a kind of dull story, but sadly it isn’t. Clive is limited to a single sword combo, a few special attacks (a stinger, a charged attack, an air combo, and the ability to press triangle to shoot an incredibly weak magic shot at the enemy or to add little magic flourishes to your normal sword combo), using the d-pad to make Torgal attack an enemy, and his Eikonic abilities. He also gets a limit break which basically functions like a DT/transformation in other action games that changes your combo into an unintelligible mess of swirling sword strikes without making it feel that much stronger. You can equip up to three of these at once, and outside of changing the element of your magic (this never seems to matter but maybe there are a few enemies with actual weaknesses), they give you access to different special attacks on a cooldown timer and a different ability mapped to O. These range from basic things like Titan’s block/parry or Phoenix’s pseudo-teleport dash to some things that are actually kind of neat like Bahamut’s Megaflare that’s charged up by dodging attacks while stuck in a mostly-defenseless charge mode or how using Odin’s ability completely changes Clive’s combo (every Eikon should have done this IMO). You can also equip up to two special attacks on each Eikon, and even mix and match them once they’re mastered. They can kind of change the way you play, but the combat’s core flow never changes. For small enemies, you just wail on them with your basic combo and Eikonic abilities, and with big enemies you just chip away at their stagger bar until they get knocked down, then you cycle through all of your abilities on cooldown for the damage multiplier. There are no branching combo paths, no changes to Clive’s basic move set with different eikons, or even different weapon types, and there are really only three kinds of Eikonic abilities: ones that are attacks, ones that are counters, and ones that add a passive source of damage. Yeah things like Rising Flames and Upheaval may seem different, but the only reason you’ll ever choose one over the other is because one is on cooldown. Since the overwhelming majority of your damage comes from the stagger window where you can build up a damage multiplier, the fastest way to beat an enemy is to stagger it and then just use all of your Eikonic abilities in order, assuming they aren’t on cooldown. This becomes even more apparent if you decide to use the “ultimate” abilities for each Eikon like Flames of Rebirth or Gigaflare that have significantly longer cooldowns than the normal abilities. Because of these things, every encounter plays out exactly the same, regardless of what enemy you’re fighting. You can’t even really mess around with different moves or try to fight more stylishly. The only real change between normal fights and boss fights is that bosses have some QTEs scattered between them and get interrupted by cutscenes three or four times per fight. I have no problem with the skill floor being low in a game like this, but when every single fight is so similar and the skill ceiling is just about as low as the floor is, it makes for a boring experience. Eikon battles are a little more interesting since Ifrit actually has different combo finishers depending on how far into the base combo you are when you press triangle, but that mostly begs the question of why Clive couldn’t also have more than one way to end a combo. The combat would have been tolerable in a 10-15 hour game, but since a playthrough of XVI can take well over 60 hours if you decide to do most of the lackluster side content like I did, it’s nowhere near deep enough. Since there are also only the absolute basics of an RPG system underlying it, there’s not much of a wider reason to fight enemies other than because you find it fun.

One Eikon fight comes close to redeeming this game, however. A little after the halfway point, Clive fights Hugo Kupka, Titan’s Dominant. Kupka has been on a five-year long crusade against Clive since Clive killed his manipulative lover/one true love Benedikta Harman. Clive wins the first fight by cutting off Hugo’s hands, only to be interrupted by soldiers from the kingdom of Waloed before he can finish the job. They take Kupka back to his home and give him a pair of iron hands. This is an excuse to stretch out the Kupka arc of the game, move the actual fight with Titan from Rosalith to the middle of nowhere in Dhalmekia, and to have a scene where Kupka struggles to eat with his hands and throws a temper tantrum while yelling fuck. When Clive finally arrives, he finds Kupka having a schizophrenic episode where the naked ghost of Benedikta is convincing him to use the power of the mothercrystal to finally kill Clive. A pretty standard fight between Titan and Ifrit ensues, but when Ifrit is about to win, Titan finds and promptly eats the magical crack rock that is the heart of the mothercrystal. Turning into a giant tentacled monstrosity, Titan erupts from the earth and this theme starts playing.
https://youtu.be/7L_6atLQouc?si=g40adyLy3WVG776G
It is important to note that almost every track in the game up this point has been pretty standard fantasy fare (a few songs like the hideaway themes are actually quite nice but most of it is kind of forgettable, especially compared to other FF soundtracks). A fight ensues between Ifrit and the newly born Titan Lost that involves Ifrit running up the tentacles like a Sonic the Hedgehog boss fight, ripping one of them off, and plunging it into Titan Lost from above while yelling “Heads up, Hugo” The fight continues with Hugo now back in his normal Titan form and Clive/Ifrit using the power of the magical crack rock to create a pair of giant hands that he uses for a grand total of one attack. It’s pure chuuni nonsense, and it’s great. The fight isn’t particularly good, but the spectacle and sheer stupidity of it all makes it an absolute joy to play through. The fight with Bahamut comes close, as Clive and Joshua end up fusing to make a super Eikon of Fire that’s just Ifrit with some more spikes and some feathers coming off of him, then they chase Bahamut into space and stop it from using Zettaflare (made famous by Donald Duck during his heroic act of self-sacrifice in Kingdom Hearts III) and destroying the planet.

FFXVI could have benefited so much from having more of that stupidity in it, or otherwise embracing the goofier side of the series. It alco could have just been more fun to play, but considering this was made by the director of an MMO I don’t think that was ever really on the table. As it is now, the game is mostly just dull, and the story isn’t nearly good enough to make it worth sitting through. It’s much more competently made than the absolute mess that was FFXV, but that’s a particularly low bar to pass. It’s not comically shitty, but that also means it’s not the kind of trainwreck that’s interesting to play through. I feel like I SHOULD give this a 2.5/5 just to be consistent since I gave XV a 2 and XVI is definitely a better game, but I think I actually enjoy XV more than this despite its laundry list of flaws so they get the same score. There are other things like how the game makes you hold R2 to open a bunch of doors or how Clive is never shown to use any abilities other than Ifrit’s/Phoenix’s outside of gameplay until the final boss, or how the Ultima Prime fight is just a cutscene with some QTEs thrown in that I could say, but I feel like I’ve complained enough to get my point across.

I do really like how you hear Torgal from the speaker on the Dualsense whenever you pet him, though.

Before playing this, I had very little exposure to Prince of Persia. I knew it was a series of action platformers. I knew there was a bad movie adaptation of it. I remember really wanting to play Warrior Within since the cover for the Gamecube version looked super cool and edgy, but my parents wouldn't let elementary school me buy it, so I ended up playing games like Chibi-Robo and Animal Crossing instead. I played maybe 20 minutes of the Wii version of Forgotten Sands a while back. That's about it. I only ended up playing this game now because I wanted to play at least one of the older Prince of Persia titles before diving into Lost Crown. Although I do think Sands of Time has some pretty big flaws, I do want to preface this by saying I had an absolutely great time playing it. This might be the recency bias talking, but this could easily be up there with something like the original Dragon's Dogma on my list of "best 7/10 games you'll ever play". A good two thirds of the game is made up of what would now be mockingly referred to as "uncharted climbing", there's a certain deliberateness to all of your actions that still makes it enjoyable. Most of the game's challenges boil down to having to figure out how to traverse a room or outdoor area, then actually timing things like pole swings and wall jumps to make it happen. Simply having to do things like press a button to raise yourself up or drop down a ledge, or not being able to stand up on a pole you can swing on and instead having to turn around, swing, then jump against the wall in order to get to a pole directly above you are satisfying enough to keep platforming interesting. Using the dagger to rewind time mostly seemed like a gimmick to me thanks to the fast load times and incredibly generous checkpointing of the PC release, but then I got to the point near the end of the game where you have to climb a large tower without it and I realized just how nice it was to be able to undo one bad jump or something without having to go through the whole sequence again.

The combat is rather simple, though not because of the Prince's moveset. You have a basic melee combo, a block and parry, several abilities tied to the Dagger of Time, and a few acrobatic moves such as a lunge that's performed by jumping against a wall or vaulting over an enemy to attack them from behind. I do quite like how most enemies don't actually die unless you stab them with the dagger while they're down ( a pretty clear inspiration for the systems used by games like Assasin's Creed or the Arkham series where you have to confirm takedowns) and the enemy variety is nice, but there are two things that hold the combat sections back. The first is that most enemies have one attack that's always the best way to deal with them. Use the lunge against the two-sided spearmen or the big guys with swords. Vault over the female enemies with two swords and the big hammer guys. You can vary this up, especially with the parry, but it always feels like you're just drawing out encounters in order to use cool moves that are weaker than the best option. The second issue is the encounter design itself. Fights are mostly limited to open spaces and enemies come at you in groups of three or four. Kill an enemy, and another one will spawn in to take its place. Repeat this 15 or 20 times. Now I get that that's probably due to hardware limitations, but it really makes fights feel like they're artificially dragged out when you just keep cutting down enemies and exact copies of them appear out of nowhere like there's a spectral clown car just driving around the arena. I also get that the development team didn't want the game to be like 90% platforming so they needed to put more combat encounters in the game, but doing something like putting some enemies in the mostly empty hallways of the palace, or even just putting some traps in the arenas and letting you use them on the enemies could have gone a long way.

As far as presentation goes, the game holds up pretty well. The art direction and the way that the Prince grows more disheveled as the game goes on really sell it, and Yuri Lowenthal's performance is easily a high point in his career. He manages to sell the Prince as both a cocky noble seeking glory and as someone who's in way over his head and who knows it. I particularly like the narration of the Prince retelling the story of the game to Farah and the parts where you fail and he goes "No no no, I jumped over the bridge" or things like that. The music was generally fine, but there were a few standout tracks. A lot of it is a kind of mix of metal music and stereotypically Arabian music. I really wish there were more tracks that leaned into using vocals like The Tower of Dawn or Discover the Royal Chambers, though. The story itself was decent enough, but I felt like Farah as a character was pretty bland and her romance with the Prince was forced to the point that I honestly couldn't tell if she was actually into him or just seduced him to steal the dagger near the end (it seems like she only did this because he hesitated the first time they got to the hourglass, but IDK). For like half of the game I couldn't even remember her name and just thought of her as the girl who pulled switches. I do like the overall story of the Prince letting his pride get the better of him and making a terrible mistake that he then has to try and fix, though. It's very much a tragic tale in the classical sense of the word.

The PC port was surprisingly stable considering this is just a game from 2003, but I did have two issues with it. First was that the fog effects are just fucked to the point of completely covering the screen in the stuff. Thankfully the fog can just be turned off, but I don't really know how much that impacts the atmosphere of the game since I played through the whole thing without any fog. Second was that a lot of the dialogue from Farah during gameplay was super quiet, almost to the point of being unintelligible. This seemed like some kind of positional audio thing, but I can't say for sure since there were times where I could barely hear even though she was like three feet away from the Prince. It was still pretty painless for an older title, though, since I didn't have to really mess with compatibility or fan patches or any of the other tinkering that you normally have to do to make a game like this run on modern hardware. Considering I mostly played this game on a whim and got it for like $2 in a Steam sale, I'm really glad I played it. I'm looking forward to playing the other PoP games in the future, particularly Warrior Within. I want to see if it's really as edgy as the box art suggests.

I still kind of prefer Echoes over the original Prime, but man this is a near perfect remaster of an already great game. There are a few odd downgrades like how the flying pirates don't explode like the used to or how your beam weapons don't act like a light source anymore. Some of the visor effects like the steam or the reflection of Samus's face look a little weird, too, but basically everything else looks great. A lot of things were kind of redesigned or changed, but it feels more like the art team was trying to fully realize the designs/concepts for enemies and areas in a way that they just couldn't do in 2002. The control options and being able to mix gyro controls in with basically any other style are both great, since it means you can make the game play like the GC original, the Trilogy release, a modern shooter, or even kind of like Federation Force. The extras like the music player and model viewer are neat, too, but those don't really add to the game in any meaningful way. I still liked spinning around the turrets and making the lights on them turn red, though.

I know this is basically just me talking about how the game looks pretty, but that's really all there is to say about the remaster specifically. It's Metroid Prime but it looks nicer. The original still holds up visually thanks to its fantastic art direction, but this is probably one of the best looking games on the Switch. It might even be the best looking Switch game, but that's a bit more subjective.