One of those that I just never got around to when it released despite being interested in it. I don't have any excuses; I'm just a bad person. Though not anymore, because I finally did play Senua's Sacrifice this February! Fueled by being sort-of-hyped-but-not-really-sure-why for Senua's Saga releasing this May, I thought I might as well try this one out before that one releases (which I won't be able to play anyway since I don't own an Xbox and my PC is definitely not strong enough for it) to experience the beginning of Senua's Journey.

And this is an interesting game, I think? I mean, not every day you get a game where the main conceit is the main character suffering through some kind of psychotic episode and it being, apparently, very deeply rooted in what that's actually like for a lot of people. Hearing constant voices in her head, hallucinations, paranoia, and pareidolia specifically, and I sort of have to just trust that these aspects were done well since I have never suffered from any kind of psychosis myself, but seems like most who have and have played the game seem positive on Ninja Theory's depictions of these things. From my layman point of view on the whole thing, I'm impressed how they managed to sort of gamify these very serious things without feeling disrespectful (though, again, what do I know), and making the experience of playing Hellblade actually pretty enjoyable and not just a miserably bleak walk through Norse environments.

This isn't just trying to teach a broad audience about mental health issues and destigmatizing of said issues, but it uses them in a way where I as a player get a broader understanding of them through making them the focus of the gameplay. You have your puzzles, your combat with supernatural beings, your audio logs, and they can actually all be explained by reading up a bit on what different experiences one with psychosis might have, while also being pretty fun to play for most of the game's runtime. It's also really clever how the developers made the voices in Senua's head act as tutorials for what you're supposed to do when needed, though since they're constantly talking for most of the game, it doesn't really feel like the game's hitting me over the head with information so much as frightened voices yelling at Senua how to not die and subtly hinting towards what you should be doing.

The actual plot Senua's Sacrifice tells really impressed me as well. It's pretty simple, but fun to piece together through Senua's revenge filled journey where her trauma induced psychosis (at least I think that's what it is? Though I seem to recall it being mentioned her mother also suffering from something similar, so maybe there's more to it) is used to first shield her from an awful truth, and then to let her process what's been happening. It is sort of ludicrous how the entirety of the game is apparently set over one single day, though, and I shouldn't really let that bother me, but when the rest of the game seems to focus so much on correctly depicting many of its mental health related aspects, it's sort of ruined by Senua seemingly coming to terms with her very traumatic experience and completely moving on, less than 24 hours after it happened. The ending is still beautiful, but... I don't know, it doesn't quite work with this fact in mind.

There's also just an issue with how this short, seven hour game is still too long for its own good. I said the gameplay was fun, and it is! But it's fun for maybe four or five of those seven hours. I thought the combat was fine, but the more I got to experience it, the less interesting it got, and as much as I liked the puzzles of finding various patterns and lining them up right or finding three identical ones, the game never really evolves beyond the first few. What you see in Senua's Sacrifice in the first hour is basically all you're ever going to get, and as novel as they are the first few times, they're not good enough to carry an entire game in my opinion when they don't ever evolve into something more interesting or even really become more challenging, and especially not when the story starts taking a backseat so there isn't really much interesting to experience between puzzles or combat. The one time it really switches things up is in this obnoxious dungeon where you're quickly killed by a creature if you don't stay in the light, which isn't exactly ideal and feels very video game-y in a bad way.

Overall, I'm not the biggest fan of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Had it been just four hours I might have complained about it being too short I guess, but it just can't carry its length as it is now. Its gameplay isn't interesting enough for it and there isn't enough plot to keep things intriguing in those moments, which lead to me just hoping it would end sometime soon which shouldn't be the case with such a short game. It still does extremely cool things, talks about topics that are never really covered in video games and certainly not in any respectful ways, the sound is absolutely out of this world (I almost never play with headphones, but felt like I had to with this since the inner voices are such an integral part of the game, and it was quite the experience!), and for about two thirds of the game, I was hooked on the gameplay and the plot. So, not some hidden masterpiece I've missed out on all these years, but definitely interesting enough to be worth playing and an instance of a video game that probably couldn't be made into another art form without losing a lot of what makes it special. Which I generally don't really care that much about to be honest, but it's worth mentioning, I guess.

This one feels like a game I should have played so long ago. I mean, I'd like to say I'm a fan of the Metroid games and I've been aware of Fusion since it first came out so I really don't have any excuses for waiting over 20 years before I finally played through it. Honestly, having now played it I sort of regret having waited for so long. Not because Fusion is this incredible game, but because later games sort of just improved upon most of its USPs, and I unfortunately played those before this.

Metroid Fusion is certainly a good game, definitely above average, but it also feels stuck between two different schools of Metroid; the more exploratory of the past, and the more action focused of the future, and while it does both fairly well, it feels very much like a first experiment in trying to move the series beyond Super Metroid's large shadow and lacks the refinement of something like a Dread that feels so much more confident in what it wants to be.

But I really do like Metroid Fusion! It looks great and has a killer atmosphere and soundtrack that feel more horror than anything the series has ever done before or after. The space station is a fun locale that offers mostly familiar, but slightly different habitats for Samus to traverse through, and the linearity of the game lets the developers really change up locations for revisits to show how everything is just falling apart more and more as the X Parasites keep multiplying and replicating monsters. The Metroids, as dangerous as they could be, never really seemed to pose much of a threat to anything other than Samus, but I really buy these new creatures as a threat to everything and everyone they come close to, despite them looking like some sort of candy.

Samus hunted creatures before, but now she's the one being hunted, which is really felt throughout the game not only because the X's aforementioned station demolishing, but also because she's so weak in Fusion, which is a good thing. It can definitely be annoying how much damage enemies will do throughout the entire game, but it really sells how Samus has been severely weakened by her Power Suit being removed from her, and having to sort of re-learn how to be Samus Aran over the course of the game. It's not exactly survival horror, but creates some tension with every new enemy since it takes so little to die. In previous Metroid games, you could plow through a lot of enemies and not really care too much about how much damage they do for quite a while, so this is completely different from what either we or Samus are used to, and I really appreciate how the gameplay puts us in her shoes in a way. I guess there's also some kind of irony in Samus now being hunted ("hunted." It really doesn't show up more than a handful of times throughout the game and those sequences are very scripted) by SA-X, the parasite that copied her at her strongest so now she gets a taste of her own medicine.

At the same time, I feel like Fusion plays a bit too much like an old Metroid for all of it to really work. There is something quite loose about how older games in the series feel, and I personally would have preferred something a bit heavier for Samus here since the game is so much about combat and being careful of what's ahead. The combat in, for example, Super Metroid was always that game's biggest flaw, being a bit too flimsy for my tastes and making a lot of boss fights just feel like spamming missiles before they can kill you, but that game was more about exploration and bosses were more of a "you're going the right way!" than anything else, and fairly rare occurrences, while enemies were mostly very weak and just there to give some friction here and there.

Fusion is a very linear game with barely any exploration, with a lot of boss fights, a lot of mandatory combat with regular enemies, and I just feel like for what it is, it sticks too close to Super Metroid. With this much fighting, the combat really needed to have felt better than this Super Metroid tier that it sits at. I mean, this game has so many boss fights, and most of them just amount to shooting about a million missiles at them since they all have either way too much health or are invulnerable a good while before exposing their weak point for a second. These fights are not interesting, they're not particularly hard (I think my only death in the game came against Ridley), and for a game that is so focused on Samus being told "go fight this thing" over and over again, I wouldn't have minded if they were given more interesting patterns, less HP but doing more damage. Fights that stand out in my memory for more reasons than "wow, that sure took a while." You know, like the amazing boss fights of Metroid Dread.

I don't really mind the linearity of Fusion all that much, though. It doesn't make for the most stimulating experience at all times and traversal can be a bit annoying since there are Naughty Dog levels of "oh shit, guess this path is closed down/destroyed, better take an even longer route there" at times, but like I said before, the game is very good at creating a sense of tension and despite me always knowing where the room I'm supposed to get to is, the way there isn't always as obvious as one might think. This does unfortunately result in a lot of invisible walls during the second half of the game which is a bit annoying, but the level design as a whole feels much more fair than previous games could at times be, without completely letting go of the series staple of just shooting wildly at blocks and hoping one of them will blow up and lead you down a new path.

I don't know where I would put Metroid Fusion in a ranking of the 2D games (probably above Samus Returns, but below Super Metroid), but despite my issues with some of its aspects, I did enjoy my very short time with it. It's not some fantastic game that I'll always cherish or probably even the best Metroid on the GBA, but it certainly does a lot of interesting things and does those things very well. It's just let down by some of its gameplay and not being able to let go of the past while trying to step into the future, which creates kind of a funky experience that I wish I could have enjoyed just a bit more than I do.

So I also played the DLC for Remake, but this was a first time playthrough. I'd be lying if I said I was ever too fond of Yuffie as a character in the original FF7, but her theme's great and I like having her in my party since she doesn't need the long reach materia to hit some enemies that are too far away for melee attackers. So I guess I have formed some sort of attachment to her over the years despite her being written to be as annoying as humanly possible, and so it was nice to get acquainted with her remake incarnation where she not only once again is great at hitting enemies that are far away (aerial combat that actually feels good!), but is also just so much more well written than before, still being that overconfident matera thief that she was before, but complementing that aspect of her with a more vulnerable, human side, and much better interactions with the people around her. Probably helps that she's not an optional character this time around.

Playing through the DLC, it's mainly just more of what I liked in the base game, plus some refinements with regards to traversal thanks to Yuffie's shuriken, and her combat being a bit different since she's extremely fragile and sort of has to rely on AI partner Sonon to tank hits for her and unleash syncronized attacks on enemies for Massive Damage™, which makes for combat that's definitely harder at the beginning, but once I sort of got the ins and outs of her moveset and the syncronized attacks (and realized Sonon would resurrect her every time she dies if he wasn't knocked out before her), it probably got a bit easier, and felt just unbelievably smooth at its best. Some really fun boss fights that could be surprisingly challenging despite this as well. Especially the final boss, who makes the Remake continuity fly a bit too close to Dirge of Cerberus for my liking, but is a very fun fight to learn and get decent at.

Sonon is great, by the way. Not a particularly complicated character and he has a very cliche backstory, but great still. Strictly AI in battle so Yuffie's the only actually playable character in this DLC, but he has a very compelling personality throughout the short plot, acting as both guardian and underling to Yuffie, and just being an all-around nice guy who's sort of like Cloud if he wasn't a chronic loner and would let others see him show any emotions. Sure hope ha can show up in some capacity in future games!

What else to say...?

Roche has returned
Fort Condor is a great game
​Weiss is dumb but fun