Here is a game that is definitely for someone, but that someone just isn't me. Penny's Big Breakaway looked intriguing from trailers, and I'm not one to say no to a good 3D platformer so I bought it on release, played the first two worlds and realized quickly what a mistake I'd made.

You see, Penny's Big Breakaway is not your ordinary 3D platformer. It is a linear game where you go through stages with platforms and various obstacles, and you clear them by reaching the goal, but it's all about the combos and maintaining it throuhgout the stage to get a nice high score, and there is no game on earth that will ever make me care about my score, and especially not one that rewards me for playing well with a very small piece of artwork. "But you don't have to care about score to beat the stage, Sillen", and that's true, but the stages are so unbelievably boring (Penny's movement withou constant yo-yoing is so slow!!!) that the only real way to make them even a bit enjoyable is by comboing through, trying to get to the end as fast as possible, ignoring the pointless collectibles, not caring about the even more pointless side missions, and just overall engaging with as little as possible with whatever comes your way. Doesn't help either that there's only one track per world (and the soundtrack is of very mixed quality), or how each stage in a world uses the same basic theming so you get around four (some worlds thankfully fewer stages) stages in a row that look and sound the same, which unsurprisingly makes the experience kind of boring when you're not exactly in love with how the game plays.

When Penny's Big Breakaway clicks, it becomes more fun, and especially when the controls clicked as I also realized just exactly how pointless exploring for those collectibles or caring about the side missions whatsoever was, I was having a decent time just going through most stages and not really caring about anything other than looking decent while doing so, but I still wouldn't call the game good even from this point on. Some stages are more fun than others and I wasn't actively hating my life or anything, but I never stopped being annoyed by a lot of things the game did, like how much longer than needed most stages are, the garbage hit detection on power-ups, the inconsistent physics, phasing through walls, sometimes flinging myself off a platform when trying to do that spinning move to maintain a combo despite doing the exact same thing as all those times I managed to pull it off, the genuinely hall of fame boss fights in how bad they are, the sometimes straight-up evil camera, or how inputs would sometimes just be eaten.

I can see a great game in an iteration on Penny's Big Breakaway, even for someone like me who doesn't care about score or speedrunning, but this game was just too buggy when I played it, too focused on being a cool GDQ game that it forgot to also be fun as a more casual 3D platformer experience, which it obviously doesn't have to be, but it seems to be designed to also work as one one paper when you look at the stage design, and the pretty traditional obstacles you face, the gimmicky power-ups to spice things up here and there, but actually engaging with most of those without just flying past them and styling over those annoying penguin enemies makes for a very C or even D-tier platforming experience.

There's also something very unsettling about Penny's design, and I can't quite put my finger on what it is. I at least know it doesn't help that her face looks to be animated in Garry's Mod during the non-2D cutscenes.

Just like in the case of something like a Resident Evil 4, it's hard to really have anything interesting to say about a game like Ocarina of Time because everything that could be said about it has already been said. It's a classic, one of the best games ever made, with one of the most unexpected but best soundtracks (and sound effects!) of all time, that uses space in a way that it makes a fairly small world feel big, and despite having such a sparse story manages to be this really interesting, melancholic rumination on aging and how the innocence of youth can never be reclaimed.

There are smarter and more eloquent people than I who you should probably seek out for more in-depth opinions on on all things OoT, but what I can say is that going back to the N64 original (and I actually thought about digging out my actual N64 for this, but it's too convenient to just play it on my Switch) is that it feels... A bit rough after having played the 3DS remake (remaster? Remakester?) It's still a great game and the most important parts of what make Ocarina of Time are still intact here and just as good as in any other version, but actually playing it just doesn't feel super good. The very low frame rate I can mostly live with without any issues, but the supremely poor aiming, the criminally slow text scrolling, and what at least feels like a much less reliable lock-on (which might be related to the frame rate, not that I think about it) did drag down my experience with the original version in a way that I honestly wasn't expecting. Combat against enemies with a shield is also just kind of a drag, but I guess that's an issue no matter which version of the game I'm playing.

But it's still very good! Not as good as I know it can be with future releases (I should probably play the PC port at some point), but no matter the flaws that do become very apparent at certain points, it's still a game that's very hard to put down one one gets into it, and I even enjoyed going through Jabu-Jabu's Belly this time around which was a first. I probably prefer the new, BotW-style Zeldas we get every six years now over the classic 3D Zelda structure, but I can't deny that it's nice sometimes to just take a relaxing stroll through a hostile temple, doing some light puzzling, wondering where to find the next small key while marveling over some of the genius design choices made (that twisted corridor in Forest Temple!!!) and listening to great music. The introduction of every boss having their name and some kind of title was also so smart to build up the fight against them as something major, even when it's just a Giant Aquatic Amoeba I'm fighting and they can easily be stunlocked.

I should probably replay Majora's Mask as well at some point this year.

I discovered the Persona series in 2016 when I was probably at my all-time lowest, having moved away from my hometown to study at a university, then moving back home a year later, feeling like a complete failure and spent most of my time avoiding people and pondering what in the world I was supposed to be doing with my life or what I even wanted to do, and these huge games (especially 4) about sort of finding oneself honestly helped me a lot to both feel a bit better about myself and made me feel a bit less alone in some way, but also distracted me from the most depressive thoughts I had, which I'm very grateful for even to this day.

It was also from an economic viewpoint a very good time to get into the series since it was before 5 and all the games were quite old at this point so even those PSP games that are so expensive these days could be bought for, like, $10 each. This meant that I could buy and play all 4 games within a pretty short time span, and I liked them all to some extent, but I think I might have been a bit burnt out by the time I got to 3 (I played them in order of 4, 1, 2 IS, 2 EP, and then 3 FES for last) and maybe just didn't really appreciate it to the extent that it deserved. I haven't gone back to it since then so I was really looking forward to Reload and whether I'd find new appreciation for what these days seems like the favorite Persona game for Cool People™.

Now that I've played Reload, platinumed it even, I can safely say that... It's still my least favorite of the modern Persona games. Not that it's bad – it's actually very good! – but it's just so infuriatingly uneven of an experience that I just couldn't enjoy it as much as I'd have liked. It has by far the best main story of any of the games after the 2 duology, and the whole memento mori theme of the game and how you shouldn't let fear of death keep you from living is honestly pretty inspiring, and really well done throughout both the main plot as well as the social links, often in a way that's surprisingly subtle for this series that really likes to hit the player over the head over and over again with what it wants to say with each game.

The party members are also about as strong as usual. I mean, Fuuka is sort of just there and Koromaru is very much a dog voiced by a human who does a pretty poor job at imitating a dog's noises, but the rest of them all get their time to shine, and manage to have lives outside of spending time with the protagonist, and actually grow bonds with each other during the journey which was nice to see. I do find though that their personalities can be a bit bland and therefore don't find them as fun to be around as the characters in later games, and it's a bit jarring how the game very clearly just turns Junpei into a different character whenever it needs someone to freak out about what's going on, and then just flip him back to the same "best friend" Persona trope character that he usually is immediately afterwards. Would have been nice if the other characters – especially Yukari who starts out the game very afraid of death and how that aspect of her is sort of just never really relevant again – could have shared his load a bit more, and if it these aspects could have seeped out a bit more than just during the big story moments. Still like them all despite this, and the remake adding new scenes for the boys (who don't get social links) is very much appreciated since they make me as a player grow closer to them.

The biggest issue I probably had with the original game was the, uh, JRPG part of it, for lack of a better term. Outside of the life sim, Persona 3 is mainly a dungeon crawler through the tower Tartarus that's just a whole lot of procedurally generated floors, and combat had you only control the protagonist and the entire rest of the party were AI controlled though you could set different behaviors. Tartarus was okay, and the AI certainly worked well enough for me to get through the game, but none of these things were ideal. Nor was the fact that characters would get fatigued after spending enough time fighting, which meant you'd have to retreat or fight with pretty severe drawbacks, and then go into to Tartarus with a whole different party set-up the next night since it took a while to rest up, which shouldn't be an issue, but characters outside the party wouldn't get any experience, and this was a pretty grind-heavy game so it just added a layer of annoyance to what already wasn't a great experience.

All of this has been mostly fixed in Reload, probably to the chagrin of some fans of the original who liked that kind of friction, but 100% for the better in my opinion. Tartarus is still pretty weak as a dungeon to spend most of the game in, but it at least changes looks and music a few times throughout the game to breathe a bit of new life into it when needed, party control is finally a thing (which it obviously was already in the PSP port, but that wasn't the version I played back in the day so this is new to me!), and fatigue is gone for good while leveling up characters outside the party is much less of a hassle so switching someone in is pretty painless now. From what I recall of the original, I still think I stuck with the same party here as I did back then, though, without even trying to (Yukari, Akihiko, and Aigis.) The combat is also noticeably easier than it used to be, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that since I do like at least some challenge in my turn-based RPGs, at least on bosses, and didn't really get any here. At least the combat system itself is basically just 5's, and that's about as snappy as it gets in a game like this which I appreciate greatly when there's so much combat to be had, but I can't help but feel like I've been a bit robbed of re-experiencing the true Persona 3 experience when the final boss doesn't kill me on its last phase after spending about 24 hours fighting it (I will probably never forget that The Arcana is the means by which all is revealed.)

Did I still have a good time going up all those floors, fighting all those enemies that didn't pose much of a threath whatsoever and sometimes looked suspiciously like Hulk Hogan? Yeah, I honestly did. I'd have preferred some tweaks to the difficulty and hand-crafted dungeons instead of what we got, but it still works and the developers do have a very strong sense of pacing (not something most people would probably associate with a Persona game) in the floors don't take long to get through, combat is fast-paced and there's always something to do on every floor, be that finding useful treasure, fighting rare enemies for more experiences, or gathering materials by smashing things. It's nothing amazing, but also not boring until maybe the final few floors and at that point the game's almost over anyway.

So there are a few small things that I'm not the biggest fan of in Persona 3, but the biggest issue is one that this remake probably could have fixed, but for some reason didn't. Probably the biggest draw of the modern Persona games to me is the life-sim aspect of them, and just getting lost in the day-to-day activities. As the first game in the series to have this structure, it's not super surprising that 3 sort of doesn't do this very well, but I'd forgotten just how poorly it manages to balance Tartarus with this. It's still as addictive as ever, but weak social links are a big issue (so many of them just revolve around saying yes to the worst suggestions people throw at you, and even the good ones rarely have enough of a story to really be interesting for the 10 parts they have), as is the fact that you can max out all of your skills fairly early in the game without any need of some guide to get an optimal playthrough.

Persona 3's biggest flaw, however, is just how many days there isn't anything to do. Since you have both days and nights and Tartarus can only be entered during night-time, there's a lot of just going to bed at least once, but often even twice a day since there isn't anything to do after a certain point and that month's whole Tartarus section can easily be cleared in a day or two. For a game about not being afraid to live life and sort of seize the day, I'm not sure just wasting day after day on doing nothing really goes hand in hand with that, and from a gameplay perspective it becomes pretty boring. It becomes even worse during the game's many school breaks since almost every social link is tied to a student and they only exist on school days, so those days are mostly spent just wasting away when you really should be able to call up at least some of these people to make more progress with their, admittedly often pretty weak (though I will not accept any criticism towards Bebe), micro story. At least I can use those days to progress that one social link where you're supposed to protect a scammer with a doomsday cult from being beaten up by people he's stolen money from.

Revamped art style and rearranged music were honestly neither good or bad to me. I feel like people overestimate the grime of the original's aesthetics so this being more colorful doesn't really change much to me or ruin the tone that's being conveyed, and most of the music sounds basically the same, though with some notable exceptions being worse and others being better. It looks good (though it feels like these games probably could be a bit more graphically impressive, even if the art styles are always great), sounds great, so I'm personally pretty pleased with the whole audio-visual thing, and some of the new tracks are fantastic. The new voice actors also do an admirable job, mostly sounding like I remember the previous voice actors outside of Yukari who sounds like a completely different character though not really in a bad way, but she definitely took a while to get used to. Still romanced her, just like in the original. Starting to worry that I haven't changed at all in these eight years...?

Anyway, I'm starting to feel like I've spent too much time talking about this game (almost 2000 words, apparently), but I guess there's a lot to say about the things you care about, and I really do care about Persona 3 and like so much about it and its whole deal, but also find myself frustrated about a lot of decisions made both with the original, but also the remake and how it didn't really do enough to maybe iron out some of issues that have mostly been fixed in later games (though good on Atlus for removing the original's really weird transphobic "joke"). The entire epilogue, though? Goddamn, by far the best in the series, especially when you've maxed out all the social links like I did and you really get to take your time walking down this very melancholic memory lane with all the characters you've grown to at least tolerate and in some cases really like, before the inevitable ending (which I honestly wish wasn't so ambiguous even as someone who knows what's going on, but it's still really powerful), and then being left to ponder on life, death and this grand journey as the credits roll with that great song playing in the background. Few games have stuck the landing as well as Persona 3 does, and it's honestly worth the entire price of admission on its own.

Rest in piss Strega

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

The second-best game of 2020 and one that I haven't played since it first came out. Always a slight worry that a game won't hold up on a replay, but luckily FF7R was just as good as I remembered it being, with one of the best parties in all of gaming (made even better in Rebirth, which I'm playing at the moment), incredible combat and an all-timer of a soundtrack. Not everything is perfect (or even particularly good), of course; no games are, not even the original FFVII (my favorite game of all time), but the package as a whole feels almost like it was made specifically for me to love it.

I think I have a bad habit of unconsciously being fairly easily swayed by popular opinion in regards to works of art so I was honestly a bit worried that all the discourse around padding and stiffness in certain parts of the game (NPC animations are... Not great) would affect me much more now than previously, but I'm still just so impressed by what Square managed to do with a very short part of the original game, stretching maybe 4-5 hours into a 30 hour experience. Not that there aren't some cases where the padding is really noticeable – like the sewer revisit, the underground lab or the much too long Train Graveyard – but as a whole I think the developers did some really smart things to organically lengthen the game, mainly by having a lot more character and relationship building moments spread throughout the game, and showing off more of Midgar to make it feel just a bit more gigantic than it did on the PS1. Some mediocre side quests as well, but let's just ignore those.

Guess it also helps that fights tend to be quite a bit longer than in the original game as well, which in most RPGs would be a bad thing to me, but this weird hybrid between Action RPG and ATB works really well, giving you something to do while it's recharging, and also forcing the player to really choose carefully what to do with a bar when it's filled up. Buff someone, do a strong attack, or maybe heal just in case? And the fact that these commands can also be interrupted by some enemy attacks also give some nerve to battle scenarios since you also have to be mindful of your surroundings before committing to anything.

Not to use this review of FF7R to complain about FFXVI, but what really strikes me on this playthrough is how much more weight there is to the combat here which makes every hit feel so much more satisfying, and, even though this game isn't particularly challenging either, how much more involving the combat in a game becomes when can't constantly just use a dodge with about a million i-frames to avoid every single attack, but where you actually have to tank some hits and see that HP number go down fairly often, which creates a sense of danger even if the damage isn't that high. A lot of different systems at play here to make me as a player care about all the battles the game throws at me, is what I'm trying to say here, and also throw in that the game constantly wanting me to switch between party members, and you have a game that never lets me stay still in combat, and always giving me something to react to, while also just feeling plain good from a gamefeel standpoint thanks to very smooth controls and fantastic animations that really sell whatever crazy anime shit Cloud and gang are doing during any given attack. Combat against aerial enemies is pretty terrible, though.

What else? I like the story being told here, honestly. It definitely stumbles a bit here and there and I'm not a fan of every new thing, but I admire the ambition a whole lot, and the willingness to take great risks with such a beloved game. Not that I wouldn't have been content with just a straight remake, but this Rebuild of Evangelion (which I also loved, by the way. 3.0 + 1.0 best film of 2021!) approach to the whole thing makes me so much more intrigued. There's something so interesting to me about creators looking back on previous work and, influenced by things they probably wanted to change even back then, life after its release and probably to some extent also the reactions it's gotten over the years, going back as the people they are now and giving it another shot while not being afraid to admit that time has passed and that you can't really bathe in the same river twice. FF7R is messy as all hell at times, but in an endearing way where it's made by people so passionate about what they're doing that the creativity of it all can become a bit it too ambitious and so many ideas are stuffed into the thing that the game can't really carry everything it holds within itself in any way that most people would call even slightly competent or well thought out. But that's also what Final Fantasy VII has always been, this strange chimera of disparate ideas that shouldn't work together and often sort of doesn't, but when those far out ideas mesh and hit, they hit so goddamn hard and manage to cut through everything else, to the point where it feels like one of the most human video games ever made.

You already know how good the music is.

Just like the movie it's based on, this is not a particularly good game. But unlike the movie this actually does a few ambitious things that I find very charming and interesting, even though they're rarely executed in a particularly decent way. First of all, it really is as open as I remembered it, but often for no reason whatsoever since there's usually no reward for going off the correct path, and some stages have side quests that give you no reward at all. I think both of these things are just symptoms of a very rushed development cycle where some things were added without being fully completed. However, it also makes the game world feel a lot more real and like the galaxy far, far away doesn't just exist for the player to find something cool wherever they go (it's actually pretty stupid to not rush towards where you're supposed to go when you're in a hurry and there're enemies everywhere!), or that a Jedi should need a gameplay beneficiary reason to help someone in need.

The game's also just plain weird. There're small dialogue trees for most conversations you can have, and you're really allowed to act like the biggest Jedi asshole that ever lived. You can even kill most NPCs in the game without much repercussion, even being able to beat the gungan stage by killing every gungan rather than talk your way through on the way to release Jar-Jar Binks from prison. From absolutely nowhere, the middle of the game also almost completely abandons its action gameplay and turns into a fairly simplistic adventure game where Qui-Gon Jinn has to trade with people in Mos Espa to get the right parts for Anakin's Podracer, and later has to trick a man to lead him to Watto by buying him enough drinks (and after having taken money from Jabba the Hutt for fighting some weird monster of his). Maybe strangest of all, though, is how one stage lets you play as Captain Panaka, who I'd be surprised if most people would remember even appeared in the Phantom Menace movie, but is given a weirdly large part in this game.

So Phantom Menace is kind of a whirlwind of a game that would probably not get made today since it is a strange as it is, but that's not all it is, because it's also quite bad. I would genuinely recommend everyone with an interest in the game to play it because it really is a memorable experience with a lot of ambitious ideas and weird combinations of genres, but I would warn them that it controls like absolute garbage (too stiff with the d-pad, too sensitive with the stick), guns are almost impossible to aim with, enemies do an insane amount of damage very quickly, the isometric camera is way too zoomed in on the player, and the platforming is a nightmare whenever it rears its ugly head. There's also quite a bit of slowdown as soon as there are more than, like, two enemies on screen, and loading saves (which is a frequent occurrence since death comes often in this game) certainly takes a PS1 amount of time.

The escort missions are kind of a nightmare since the AI you're escorting is dumb as bricks and just walks into enemies' lines of fire, get stuck on geometry which sometimes forces you to restart the entire stage, and I even had Padme fall through the floor and despawn once which gave me a game over. Playing this game can be real pain at times, is what I'm saying, and it's really only my love of its many idiosyncrasies that makes it fairly enjoyable to me. It is also a bit charming to go through the movie's locations in these charmingly primitive 32-bit graphics, and John William's soundtrack is still some of the best scores he's composed (though it's bizarre how Duel of Fates appears in the game, but not when you're fighting Darth Maul at the end).

The story's super interesting (outside of the very forced romance between Gabriel and Malia Gedde), the mystery is fun to watch unravel, it legitimately taught me a lot about voodoo, and the giant dialogue trees are so extremely well written and voice acted (well, Tim Curry in the titular role is honestly pretty bad and couldn't do a New Orleans accent to save his life, but everyone else is great! Especially Michael Dorn as Doctor John!) that I'd have probably been content with if the game was just dialogue and didn't have any its adventure game aspects. It's also presented in such a nice way, with beautiful 1993 adventure game graphics that still look great today (and with some shockingly good lighting!), and a fantastic, atmospheric soundtrack where there isn't a single song that feels out of place or fails to enhance the mood of any given situation.

It's just too bad that actually playing Gabriel Knight just wasn't a particularly positive experience for me. These old adventure games did have a habit of being sort of nonsensical and you'd really have to know the language of the genre to get on their wavelength, and even then they're still very clearly made for a market where not as many games were coming out constantly and there weren't really resources to make particularly long games while still maintaining these production values, so they're fairly short, but extremely obtuse so that they'd last a long time. This is definitely the case with Gabriel Knight as well, sadly.

First of all, the game is set over ten days and there are things you can do as early as the first day, but that are actually supposed to be done later, so there's no feedback whatsoever when solving one of those puzzles, and they're also just noise that makes it confusing which puzzles you should be doing to end the day, and the game is so bad at giving directions at what Gabriel's supposed to do that even finding those correct puzzles can sometimes be even harder than the puzzles themselves (though a lot of the puzzles are complete BS. Strangely enough most of the worst ones are in the first half of the game, though.)

This also isn't helped by the very egregious pixel hunting the game forces the player to do, which is made a lot worse since there is no text to tell you what you're highlighting. You just have to use the "look" action on basically everything and hope that Gabriel has some interesting reaction to it, because it's almost impossible sometimes to even see a relevant thing since it just completely blends in with the rest of the background. Sometimes the puzzles also don't really don't give any clear feedback when completing them, but are still mandatory to do that day despite not showing their relevance until several days later, so there's really no consistency there.

Overall I feel like I'd have wanted more subtle hints from the game regarding what it wanted me to do, because while the puzzles would still be really hard most of the time, not even knowing where to go and what I should be aiming to do when I'm even at the right spot gets really frustrating after a while. Of course, there are guides these days and I definitely used one for this game (not for the entire thing, but probably for at least one or two puzzles every other day), which I'd usually say lessens the experience a bit since figuring out these puzzles are a big part of the genre's charm, but when I don't even know where to start it's pretty hard to make any sort of progress. That sekey madoule puzzle in particular would probably have just been the end point for me if I'd played the game 30 years ago (and that's if I'd even get past the part where Gabriel has to guide a mime to a cop in order to listen to a police radio.)

So no, I did not have a great time with Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. I do, though, still want to play the sequel since it seems to be one of very few FMV games that a lot of people seem to really like, and as much as I disliked the gameplay here, I really wouldn't mind more of Jane Jensen's writing. Hopefully she can write a better romance in that game, though, or maybe just not have one at all. I do, however, hope that Gabriel still asks everyone what they know about Voodoo and New Orleans (despite him being born and raised there.)

I guess the main draw of these games are the eight separate stories that you play through, that all take place within one world and all basically at the same time. It is a bit weird to play through the game and the characters not really acknowledning each other whatsoever despite appearing in the party during each other's stories (the old FF6 problem of maybe being a bit too ambitious and open to the player), but after accepting that's just how it is, I definitely appreciated these bite-sized RPG stories each character took part in. I wouldn't say any of them are fantastic and all of them suffer from being a bit wordy, cutscenes tending to be slower than they probably should be, and having at least one very stupid plot point (except for maybe Throné, now that I think about it). But they're mostly a good time since each of the eight main characters are really compelling in their own right, and their stories are all really good at setting things up that I as a player look forward to see the conclusion of, or mysteries that I want to see solved. The end-game where all eight characters do intersect sadly feels a bit rushed, though, and feels like it pulls out a bunch of twists more for the sake of having twists than them being properly set up at all, but at least the game ends on a high note. The english voice cast is also really good, so even the lesser material they work with is delivered with a lot of conviction, and the HD2D ensures that even the most static of conversations manage to look very, very good.

So while enjoyable, the game but stumbles a bit in the story department. However, not only does Octopath Traveler II have the best soundtrack of last year, it is also an extraordinarily well designed game to actually play (which is why some might say it was the sixth best game of 2023.) It is sort of difficult to explain why a turn-based battle system is good without showing it off, but something I really appreciate about OTII is how flexible it is. Like, every single character and subclass feels viable, and each of the eight have a couple of really good unique skills that make them useful in most situations. Of course, that's partly because the game is certainly not the hardest JRPG out there, but I do also want to commend the developers for how they've seemingly taken almost every party constellation into account and making sure that the ones you enjoy playing with are also going to work in basically every scenario, and that those left on the bench will feel useful and actually pretty fun those few times the game wants you to use those as well.

The battles themselves are also really quick and snappy (doesn't hurt that you can turn on double speed in combat, which every game like this really should have), the animations are great and attack pack some punch. It's also just plain fun to use up all battle points (you get one per turn and can use up to four to charge up abilities) and destroy enemies with attacks that, while previously looking pretty cool, now has the cinematography of an attack that would kill a god at the end of a game like this. Enemies look good, boss look great, and it's somehow here we get the only party interactions for most of the game, with party members actually cheering each other on (by name! Partitio's "You're a star, Agnea" gave me quite the shock when I first heard it)

The exploration is really good as well. OTII is basically an open world JRPG so you can go anywhere at any time (though different areas have different level recommendations, so maybe don't go into a lv 40 area after beating a character's first chapter), and the developers were really smart to make it large enough that it does feel like an adventure to traverse the entire world and see all the different biomes with their own, very distinct looks and atmospheres, but it's also small enough that travelling never feels like a slog, and basically every screen has something new to discover, whether that be an optional dungeon or a side quest. Just like the combat, movement on the overworld just feels so snappy and fast in a way a lot of other JRPGs just aren't. Encounter rates can feel a bit high at times, admittedly, but no dungeon or non-town screen is large enough that it ever becomes a big issue. So nice to have a lot of different towns, by the way. From large industrial cities, to small forest villages, there's a lot of variety here, but they all feel lived in, and are full of weirdly interesting NPCs (seriously, use any type of interrogation skill on townspeople and you'll get to read some of the most interesting character bios that have ever been put into a game, and there is one written for almost every single NPC in the game!)

Had a lot of fun playing the entirety of Mario Wonder with someone, but it's honestly not a very good multiplayer game since the camera is always strictly tied to one player at a time which means the second player always have to keep pace with them in order to not go offscreen and get bubbled. It's never unplayable or anything like that, but a bit strange how much better the multiplayer was handled in the NSMB games.

As for the rest of the game, I thought it was pretty great! I'm not the biggest fan of 2D Mario outside of Bros. 3 (World is very good, but I find it pretty unspectacular as a whole), so probably the second best in that sub-series? Doesn't really matter I suppose, but what does matter is how fresh Wonder feels to play. It's very much a mix of Yoshi's Island and classic Mario, with more focus on exploration and finding secrets rather than platforming challenges, but unlike Yoshi, it doesn't feel completely inconsequential to just go through stages without collecting everything since the wonder flower gimmicks kept throwing surprising and almost always amusing new gimmicks at me on almost every stage, and it's also not a pain to try and find all the purple coins and hidden wonder seeds in a stage. It's also impeccably paced for a game where the player is expected to replay stages to find every secret, having them be pretty short (though never too short, I thought) and letting you skip the wonder effects in order to get through them even faster.

Also really loved the overhauled visuals and sound effects. The Poplin Kingdom is so vibrant and beautiful to experience, and the varied landscapes never stop being impressive, especially with this being a Switch game that runs at a pretty rock solid 60fps the entire game. The characters are all so expressive through their animations; you can really tell how much love and care has been put into making all of them feel distinct and fun to play as, despite them all playing exactly the same (we played as the two Toads for most of the game, by the way. Never even touched Mario.) Also really bold move to get rid of the iconic jump sound in favor of... A guitar chord? Not really sure about the instrument, but I really like the sound of it either way! The really high amount of unique enemies also have weirdly distinct sound effects to each and every one of them, really giving them some more identity than just their (admittedly often really good) designs. Mario Wonder is not a perfect game, but it is an audiovisual treat the entire way through.

But why isn't it perfect? Well, it's definitely a bit too easy for one. Like, I was never bored by the game, but it was very noticeable during the special stages – that are really just at a pretty medium difficulty outside of the final, final special stage – how much more engaged I felt when the game started actually demanding some sort of platforming skills of me. I don't think the developers were that interested in making a challenging platformer, being more interested in a relaxing game focusing on discovery, but I guess I would have liked just a bit more friction from the main game at times since some stages could feel a bit too much like I was just playing Wonder on auto pilot. This game sold extremely well so I expect a sequel will probably come at some point, and hopefully it'll take the Galaxy 2 route of retaining the core gameplay, but just adding a tiny bit of challenge to the overall experience.

The boss fights also aren't that good. For a game full of so much creativity, it's a bit disappointing to just do variations of the same boring fight against Bowser, Jr., and then a pretty anticlimactic final boss fight against Bowser (who I'm not really sure why he wanted to turn into a sentient castle.) No 2D Mario has especially good boss fights (and honestly, most 3D Mario boss fights aren't that great either), but even when they're not very good, they can at least be killed so much quicker than these ones that just drag for no reason whatsoever, and are extremely easy like the rest of the game.

But overall, Mario Wonder is a super fun game (and the tenth best of 2023, some would say) that shows how a new 2D Mario has a place in the present day, and how something new and interesting can be made with its previously pretty strictly followed formula. Looks great, sounds great, and leads to a lot of laughter when played with someone else, despite the jank of the multiplayer. Certainly wouldn't say no to getting another game in this vein, or the elephant power-up being in every Mario game from now on!

Final game of 2023 for me! I don't really have strong opinions on climbing in various games, but I can now say that it can actually be pretty fun when an entire game revolves around it! Jusant is a nice, relaxing climb up a very, very tall mountain that looks a bit Journey-like and tries to have the tone and sparse storytelling of a Team ICO game. Of course, it doesn't look as good as Journey (though it's very beautifully lit), and doesn't even come close to anything Ueda would have made, but the ambition is there and appreciated.

Some would probably say Jusant is a bit too easy, lacking any real challenge or peril during the entire adventure despite being about a boy climbing an extremely tall mountain where people have seemingly died trying to do the same, but I'm fine with there not being much friction, and the challenge moreso coming from how to get to the next handhold and keep climbing, or finding where to start climbing when running around on foot. It's a chill game, and I respect that a lot, and despite having much challenge, it is fun to climb, using the shoulder buttons for each hand and using the climbing rope to wallrun, descend, and jump to progress. Don't Nod were even smart enough to gradually throw in some fun gimmicks along the way, like plants you need to sort of "activate" to make them grow and create new handholds, or critters that you can hold on to and get up a bit that way. There's something new introduced for basically each chapter so even though most of the game really is just climbing, Jusant does find new ways to surprise throughout the climbing experience.

Overall, though, as much as I'm impressed by how much Jusant gets out of its climbing mechanic, it's really not a super interesting game to me. It's a nice few hours, but even if I wasn't bored by the constant climbing, I also wasn't really loving it either, and the writing is so incredibly stiff and boring that I just stopped picking up the letters after a while, and every type of collectible is equally as boring, like walls you light up to... Get a poorly written poem? I don't know, Jusant is a decent game, beautiful at times even, but very much a 3/5 experience that I can look back on and appreciate, but not really be interested in enough to probably ever revisit.

After predicting the fall of her coven, the tarot card reading witch Fortuna has her cards taken away from her and is banished to live on an asteroid for a thousand years. Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood picks up 200 years after said banishment, when Fortuna calls forth a bargaining Behemoth to regain her powers and ability to create new cards, and at the same time gets permission to have visitors in her home.

I don't want to say too much since The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is all about that story (and making your own tarot cards, which is surprisingly fun), but what I can say is that this is probably my favorite narrative of the year, and definitely the one the feels the most mature. Not only in its language and very sex-positive attitude, but also in how it tackles themes such as transhumanism, severe depression, gender dysphoria and found families, and it does so extremely well with nothing feeling forced whatsoever, and it's all depicted in a thoughtful way. I'm also pretty sure there are even more really cool things I missed since the plot itself is super malleable by the player and Fortuna's different cards (at least on the one playthrough I've done it seemed to be about as reactive to player choices as Slay the Princess, which is about as good as it gets on that front). It's also, strangely enough, an election simulator and is maybe not the best at that since it's so simple I'm not sure it's even possible to lose no matter which side you choose to work with, but it still adds a bit more gameplay to what is otherwise mostly a... Not really visual novel, but certainly mostly just reading lots of text. Some cringy writing about real life video games with things like "Elden Ring 2 is so cool", and "Have you ever experienced the wonders of Itch.io™?", but I've always had weird issues with that kind of thing in games, so maybe it's a me problem more than the game. Goddamn what an impressive game, though, and the ending I got just wrecked me emotionally. Video games can be really good sometimes.

Gravity Circuit has a pretty boring story and a grappling hook that feels really bad to use for anything other than attacking enemies with, but it sure is a good time running through its pseudo 16-bit stages, punching enemies, throwing enemies at other enemies, and platforming at high speeds to reach one of eight bosses at the end while great chiptune music plays. Almost like Capcom should try and develop something similar...

Yeah, this is very much a Mega Man-like, but with melee combat instead of shooting (think maybe the combat and hub area of Mega Man Zero crossed with the stages of Mega Man X), and it is so nice to be able to play a new game in this style that I've missed for so long. I don't think it's quite at the level of Capcom's best (though I'd certainly put it over at least five or six of the X games), and I honestly prefer shooting over punching, but I can't complain too much since Gravity Circuity still delivers on a high quality game that seems to sadly have gone under a lot of people's radars. I really don't have much else to say about it since it is so much like a Mega Man, but you punch instead and buy chips in between stages that give you new moves, be it (the very good) double jump or exciting new ways of attacking (SUPLEX!!!), to equip rather than get abilities from bosses. It doesn't reinvent the wheel whatsoever, but for what it is, it's a lot of fun and except for the grappling hook controls like an absolute dream, and while some levels can feel a bit long they're at least really well designed for you to really be able to tear through and look extremely cool while doing so on replays. Definitely one of my favorite indies of the year, and would certainly not say no to a sequel in a few years.

Played the original game almost exactly eight years before I began playing this remake, and while this seems to be very faithful to the original from what I can recall, I had a much greater time on the Nostromo in 2023 than 2015. Dead Space is not really a scary game whatsoever to me, but it does have an extremely strong, oppressive atmosphere, looks proper next (or is it current now?) gen and has some of the best sound mixing of the year that did make me a bit paranoid at times and look for enemies that may or may not be near, or even exist. Whoever in-universe thought it was a good idea to have every video transmission open with a jump scare sound must have been a bit evil, though.

Gameplay wise, very good third person shooter with a fun gimmick of having to slice off body parts to do decent damage to enemies, and doing the very satisfying stomp to make items pop out of them post mortem. The Nostromo is also a fun, labyrinthian setting to explore, and the new side quests flesh out some of the murkier parts of the original game a bit, while the redesign of the ship to make it more open gives the game a bit of a classic Resident Evil feel where you have to find key(cards), backtrack to certain doors to make progress or sometimes get to read some of that juicy lore and collect valuable resources, which will always be a satisfying gameplay loop. The weird space hopping while in zero G from the original has also been exchanged with a kind of hovering which feels so much better.

The plot is simple, but still a fun one about simply trying to escape this hellish place, but always failing at the last second and having to find yet another way, which always leads protagonist Isaac down even more messed up halls than he visited previously, and facing off against an insane space cult. It does have some fun twists, some surprising moments, and while maybe not the most original thing in the world even when the game first released in 2008, it knows not to get in the way of the great gameplay too much, and the fact that the entire game plays out as one sequential shot (which is honestly a bit of a nebulous term in video games, because does it count as a cut if I die and respawn?) is really cool and seems to have gone a bit under the radar, even now that the new God of War games have popularized it a bit more. If I remember the original correctly, there're also some plot changes in remake that are absolutely for the better.

All in all, one of those rare remakes that really improves on the original in almost every single way, and a real joy to play through. The final boss is still boring and way too easy, though.