Old me: This seems like a fun game, but even though I've poured dozens of hours into this, I think I need a break. I'll come back to it later in my backlog.

Now me: Let's give it a go!

Ubisoft, Existential Dread Monster: HEY, WE HEAR YOU WANTED FEATURES YOU DIDN'T ASK FOR SO WE UPDATED THE GAME AUTOMATICALLY TO NOT ALLOW FOR YOUR OLD SAVES TO WORK WITH IT! ENJOY PLAYING DOZENS OF HOURS ALL OVER AGAIN TO MAKE YOUR PROGRESS BACK!

Now me: Yeah, that's a big no for me, Ubisoft.

The graphics are pretty one-note and the combat is about as basic as you're going to get, but for a platforming micro-Metroidvania, the movement/jump controls are GOLDEN and the music ranges from mediocre to excellent depending on the area you're in.

I beat the game in just under an hour, but more importantly, didn't realize that there was a whole DLC area for free that was a separate ship with extra content. Go figure.

For three bucks, it's a steal and you don't even need to wait for a sale. Worst case scenario, you're out 20-33% of the cost of a movie ticket while also wasting less time than if your movie sucked. Give this dev some love, please!

I used to play this with one of my younger half-brothers when I was a kid. I loved that you could toggle the types of maps to fight in and the aircraft iterations were fun enough, even if duplicating the aircrafts just resulted in more objects on screen and not more targets (the bullets had to line up to hit all duplicated targets to count).

The real fun was the base mode because shooting your opponent around walls in a limited time period to rack up points was mildly addictive, especially with no visible timer on screen to let you know how long you had left.

A decent game that is a reasonable 6/10, regardless of nostalgia.

It's fun, but damn if the camera isn't a nightmare sometimes to deal with and some areas have the worst back-and-forth design ever (I'm looking especially at you, Deep Jungle).

Wasn't really here for the story, since I've heard it's pretty much all over the place in later games, but wanted to tackle this one again (via the 1.5+2.5 collection) so I could give the later games a try.

The most important thing to say here is that the music for Hollow Bastion is golden.

It's a step up from FF2J, but it's not without some design issues, which make sense if you look at the direction the games went in -- it's a bit of a feeling out and adjustments that were to try and craft a new experience, even if said adjustments may not have had the best end result.

A lot of jobs are largely pointless, equipment can be a pain to acquire if you are trying for certain jobs, and some early jobs just get outclassed by later iterations (not counting the two secret jobs if you do the optional dungeon -- one of those jobs is simply broken in terms of power).

I appreciate the attempt to really bring a story into the mix this time around, but this game really ends up being a story of grinding more than anything else. Even with the easing of difficulty, you're going to have to put in a little more work than usual to get some smooth sailing in this game.

It's on the fringe of being good for me, but doesn't quite get there. The soundtrack is solid in a few spots, if nothing else. Also, thank all the gods for this being the only game with airships that don't understand how height works. Mountain jumping might have been one of the dumbest things in FF-history, especially when you consider how the world in this game works.

EDIT: Now that I've played the free and paid DLCs, I'm bumping this to five stars.

My original gripe with sequence breaking and not being able to progress in the non-Volcano area was my fault because there actually are ways around those "roadblocks", to the extent that there's actually a 0% Item/Ability run you can do that you can get achievements for in both the main game and postgame. You can actually play the entire game without your weapon and still beat it in a non-pacifist manner. In fact, the game was designed with so many different ways to approach it that the devs added in achievements for each scenario that you could pull off and encouraged you to break the game as much as possible, while still making it manageable for anyone who wants that challenge.

The volcano thing is still weird because you needed to have a particular conversation and then have a couple cutscenes to progress that exploration because of story, and this happens with a few other postgame sections, including a post-postgame (yes, there is one).

I'd say that my only real standing gripe is the buttons being listed as numbers in the movelists because yes, I do enjoy experimenting with controls, but sometimes I would rather just look and see a familiar button list to know how to do things. Everything else is essentially golden, with some very excellent boss fights on top of that exploration and sequence breaking that the game unabashedly showcases.

Original review follows.

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If you like Metroivanias with non-linear exploration and bosses that are fun bullet hells, this game is made for you and you need to play it.

I have only a couple gripes.

1) Although the UI itself is absolutely lovely, text instructions for abilities that show up in them are unintuitive because it doesn't account for the names of controller buttons, so explanations of moves will be things like, "Press (down arrow) + BUTTON 4." Sometimes when I'd learn a new ability/move, I'd just mess around with all buttons and directions until I figured it out. Not a big deal, just a small thing that makes you burn a few extra seconds to figure stuff out.

2) The non-linearity of this game is mostly excellent, and it's the "mostly" that's come back to haunt me a couple times in one form or another. There's an area I found early on that I couldn't proceed through because the game wants you to clear the first chapter before you're allowed to go do it.

At another point, I used hidden moves to get myself really deep into the volcano area and found myself eventually at a long shaft that seems to repeat infinitely with a save point in the middle of it. I was looking for hidden ledges to drop onto while falling infinitely because the map overlay on the save screen shows a separate-colored room at the bottom.

After spending about fifteen minutes wandering slamming into walls with my face or hammer or magic (and the brief opening that has some spikes on the ground in one section), I checked a walkthrough, only to find out that this area was inaccessible until MUCH later in the game and I had to use my hidden-tech skills to work my way all the way back out of the volcano to the teleporter (which was much more difficult to get back to than it was getting in from). This one was a little more frustrating because the non-linearity encourages exploration, but I was also penalized very thoroughly for exploring in this instance, to the point that I had to check a walkthrough to see I was wasting my time.

Those are minor issues, though -- the walk back from the first area I mentioned wasn't that bad (even if I did it twice) and if you're reading this and haven't played it yet, you're now aware that you shouldn't go too deep into the volcano using hidden tech abilities once you figure out how they work. It's essentially an extra 30 minutes I tacked onto the game for walking back from places and if nothing else, the volcano situation was good practice for honing those skills, even if it was frustrating.

I used all of this review to talk about these things because frankly, I don't want to lay out all the good things this game has going for it because they're innumerable. It's beautiful, non-linear, mostly encourages exploration, lets you progress story at your leisure for the most part, and the soundtrack is nice. There's a postgame and I haven't started it yet, but I will soon. There's also a free DLC that is suggested to be played in postgame and two other DLCs that add more areas/content and I intend to check those out eventually, as well.

Easily in the Top 20 and possibly Top 10 best Metroidvanias just for content alone.

As far as the games in the series go, kinda enjoyed this one a lot more than I thought I would. Felt like a story dealing with military characters wasn't going to resonate well with me (especially given how very pointedly they try and make your initial interactions between characters awkward for one-another), but it kinda drew me in as the game progressed.

I still hate QTEs to death, House of Ashes at least made me feel like stealth and action moments were important, even if you could feel out the pattern of when the QTEs were coming (especially in the final stand-off of the game).

It doesn't win any awards for me and sometimes characters had a bit of that creepy uncanny valley look to them (Rebecca more than anyone else), but it was fun and probably the best DPA game in the series (if you don't count Until Dawn, which the series doesn't seem to do, either).

Get it on sale, as it's about six to seven hours if you are being careful and trying to find collectables (I collected all frames and 43/50 secrets). There is replayability as always because of different storyline potentials and achievements/trophies, so it's worth it simply on the principle of treating it like going to the movies -- this is largely just an interactive movie that runs about 3-4 times as long as your typical movie, priced at about 2-3 times the cost of a movie, with extra reasons to go back and "watch" it again. If nothing else, get a friend to come over and watch them play through it and see how much their choices differ.

I'd say it's a reasonable deal at 30% off, a steal at 50%.