Really cute game. Short but sweet. Exploring is very fun, there's so much interactivity in the world and a surprising amount of verticality. I'd honestly give it 4 stars if it was a bit more polished. Glitches are one thing and can be patched (though I did have one that prevented me from completing an achievement which is annoying) but the camera frequently gets stuck on walls and jumping can be finicky. Sometimes it's hard to tell where you'll land when aiming a big jump and you can't cancel a jump either. There's no death in the game so when you fall you just have to climb back up but it can get pretty frustrating when you fall from a high spot through no fault of your own. Still it's a very cute game and is a great palette cleanser between bigger games.

I've never been as heartbroken by a video game the way I was by this. I love Final Fantasy, I love FF7, I love Remake and I loved this for a time. It starts off so well. The combat is fantastic, I love spending more time with the characters and seeing them interact more but this game is too big for its britches.

There are 8 open-world areas that are all essentially the same. The environments are different but every activity is the same, the amount of every activity is the same. And you're not rewarded for exploring either, there are no interesting landmarks or places to discover, you go to Ubisoft towers to fill your map with checklist items. And it's that 8 times! It's all optional but it's indicative of the game's main problem, meandering excess. There's too much here and too much of it is just meandering. When the story is good it is GOOD but so much of it is just meandering to keep you in the areas longer. So much of it is just of so little consequence and you just want things to happen, it's nice to get more time with the characters but after a certain point the bubble bursts and you just want it to move on. There's simply too much game here and not enough to justify it. Remake is the first part of a story stretched into a full 30-hour game but it feels like a full 30 complete story. This is the middle part of a story stretched into a full 80-hour game and it feels like a middle section stretched out beyond what it can justify.

When I first played Remake I ended it feeling excited. Excited for the future, excited over the game I just played. When I finished this I felt deflated and despondent. I just wanted it to end. I'm so sad.

Um, this sucks. Some of that has to do with age. The controls and camera are both bad and that can be blamed on technical limitations but most of this game is a time-wasting slog and that's a design choice. The hub area is a godawful exercise in padding out the playtime, as is forcing you to essentially 100% the game. Most of the jiggies boil down to annoying, obtuse objectives that are made more frustrating due to the aforementioned bad camera and wonky controls. It all culminates in one of the worst 1-2 punches of a final boss I've ever played. I hope whoever decided to make the penultimate level of this a game show got what they deserved. I don't know what kind of member berry nostalgia cocktail people are drinking when they talk about this because I can't even imagine this being good in 1998, the year of Spyro, Crash 3, and Sonic Adventure.

It's good, it's very good but I can't shake the feeling that I played a different game than everyone else. The music, character design, and sprite work are all outstanding but I just didn't find the story that compelling. It's fine, it's not bad but it's pretty standard JRPG fare as far as stories go, time travel aside I've seen these beats before and I just wasn't fully sucked in. Same with combat, it's good but it's pretty standard. The characters are likable enough but once I found a party comp I liked I rarely switched so I never really got to interact with the other characters that much. I don't know maybe it was hyped up too much so I was expecting something Earth-shattering. It's really good but it didn't exactly leave me clamoring to play it again.

One of the most refreshing open-world games I've ever played. It asks you not to just simply explore its world but to become one with it, to connect with it, and to respect it. It's the antithesis of so many modern AAA games that only have you running through a world as its sole focal point. The systems in the gameplay loop are familiar but they're done in a way that's much more thoughtful to how you interact with the world and forces you to truly connect with it on a deeper level than just as a map filled with things.

Full review here: https://rongopro.ca/2024/02/06/avatar-frontiers-of-pandora-review-anti-far-cry/