"Until the day we meet again"

Gonna pump out some Shinra propaganda for listening while you read this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftFF70_9cog

Bai Gawd it has been a wonderful year for so many great new releases and this one has yet again topped my list so far this year. I am definitely a major fanboy for this one since I grew up around this Final Fantasy as my introduction to this life changing series for me. From playing the games, watching my brother play it, to watching the Advent Children movie when we were younger and reaching this point now and playing the next installment of this remake. Revisiting the locations and witnessing some of these scenes and nearly improving in so many areas and the party feels so alive and the interactions made my heart so damn happy. This game is a rollercoaster of emotions in a great way! From laughing out loud to the unexpected jokes to the tearful emotional moments.

Overall gameplay has been definitely improved on and I love how the quicker you think ahead pays off with the synergy moves and making nearly every party member so damn fun to play and experiment with. RED XIII was definitely one of my absolute favorites to play with! I love how the other party members are in the background in some of the fights as well and you can see them fighting other enemies as well. Could not believe how much mini games they threw in here as well and all are pretty nice to breakup the repetition and have you always doing unique things and Queens Blood is definitely the brightest most addictive diamond of the bunch.

I knew the soundtrack was gonna hit me with some damn fine tunes like the first installment did, but of course I still underestimated them. I will also say some of the side quests are pretty good to do and the banter between party members is so good and makes for some additional lore and fanservice for our favorite characters except Chadley who can go suck a Chocobo egg! I loved how much Barrett was fleshed out in this one they did his story with Dyne damn well and goddamn that man is such a badass party member to have once you get into late game territory.

By no means is it the perfect game, but for longtime fans of the original it is one hell of a treat and I am curious to see where they continue to go with telling the story in its new ways. I was on the fence about this one with its new twists and turns to the story changes, but I feel like it worked out really well. I am definitely cool with waiting a bit for the next part considering all the RPGS I still need to get to, the new and old ones! I could certainly go on and talk about every little detail, but I don't wanna be like these game trailers nowadays that tell you every little thing about games and want you to experience it for yourself!

Remains one of my favorites of all time so many years later. I'm sure it helps that this was one of the first games I ever owned, but there's still such a zen-like quality to running and jumping around the most beautiful PS1 pastels and polygons while Copeland's perfect score accompanies every moment. Full completion is a breeze and rarely frustrating (Tree Tops aside of course), so much so that you could probably knock out this entire game in a weekend if you wanted.

I'll keep coming back to Spyro until the day I die, you can count on that.

Stunning art - world, rich and clever;
Renaissance mice and voles and more.
Charm recalls classics I adore,
90s Sam & Max, however
the dialogue became a chore.
The worldbuilding became ignored,
memes cheapen what was once clever;
my expectations were severed.

Every fibre of my being wanted to love this, and in many ways, I do. However, I often felt weary of some aspects of the game. Some of the zones you travel to are very cumbersome, making it a pain to complete the numerous and dull side activities. That being said, the best parts were the linear parts that follow the main story, which hit unbelievably hard. The worst part of the whole thing is that it feels like no minigame idea was turned down. Some of which are mandatory, and some have weapons behind them. If you are a completionist like me, you'll have a rough time seeing everything the game offers.

My brother and I used to mess around with Pikmin as kids, and I always loved the little guys, but I think I was not prepared for the level of challenge it brings when I was 8 years old - I'm not sure we got past the second world. Pikmin 3 is one of my favorite games of all time, and Pikmin 4 is not far behind, so I thought I'd head back to the roots of this franchise now that they've made their way to Switch.

Pikmin is held back only by the AI, which I am sure is the best we had available back in 2001. The fact that you can effectively control 100 soldiers on a map for an RTS game with a controller was already a miracle. Pikmin 1 is best described as a well-executed proof of concept - over time, this basic idea blossomed into a masterpiece in later titles. I was thoroughly addicted and stuck to the screen for the 8 hour adventure, looking for new strats and racing the clock to retrieve all my rocket parts. I'm so glad this game exists and existed when it did, and it holds up quite well on its own.

Pikmin 1 is brutal and tests your survival abilities in a way that has faded out of the series, and it's something I think I can live without. The racing clock is stressful, with the threat of permadeath looming over you, but I managed to escape with all 30 parts on day 28 due to careful planning and knowing when to replay the day once or twice (or eight times). I wish the Pikmin were smart enough not to constantly drown themselves, or know when to pick up items, or even know the shortest way back to camp, or understand they can't dive into pits of fire, but that's just life innit. It's interesting to see how Pikmin evolved in this game from mindless, expendable drones that you're expected to lose hundreds of to cherished friends you'll die protecting in Pikmin 4. I can't wait for Pikmin 2! Coming soon.

I’m obsessed with aesthetics and environment design. Striking ideas woven into something's presentation gets me giddy. My tendency to undervalue a game's positives when its art direction is lacking—and vice versa—is my most identifiable bias. I often say I’m a visual person and that’s something I take pride in, but it can be a curse.

I loved how Halo Infinite felt when I first played it. There is immense joy in grapple-hooking across its open-world, using my full kit to come out unscathed against a dozen bosses, and the bone shattering explosion when popping an Elite’s head with a sniper rifle. Gunfights, the new utility equipment, and the sound/feel of each weapon is accompanied by exceptional weight. Approaching battles in any number of classic Halo ways, and adapting when things go wrong, is enormous fun.

But Infinite’s campaign didn’t click years ago. It’s obsession with rehashed aesthetics stretched over the franchise’s longest campaign to date underwhelmed me. I thought I might have just been overly cynical, so after the addition of co-op (alongside the latest update finally letting me play without crashing), I was itching to revisit it.

Yet not much has changed. Infinite is painfully uninventive. Its biome is limited to homochromatic grassy plains littered with identical trees and hexagonal pillars. It does a decent job keeping this region fresh with mountain peaks, ravines, and little swamplands, but it feels more like a single MMO zone than the focus of a full game. Some adore the way this world looks and I don't necessarily disagree; it's lovely in a vacuum. If this were a slice of what Infinite had to offer, I'd speak of it fondly, but the over reliance on that concept loses its novelty fast.

On the other hand, its missions are properly dire, with few memorable set pieces alternating between minimalist forerunner structures and dark metal military bases. In particular, the last four or five missions are chock full of reused blue corridors. I have no love for the spiritless presentation of this campaign. It’s as if it was designed by the only person on Earth whose favorite part of Halo is The Library in Combat Evolved. Regardless of their many mechanical flaws, both Halo 4 and 5 are significantly more exciting in scope.

Infinite ends up coming across as a demo; an unfinished experiment revealing what this franchise could look like when thrust into an open-world. It successfully proves that Master Chief running, gunning, flying, driving, and grapple-hooking throughout a massive map is tons of fun, but it doesn't have much meat on its bones.

I've never been narrative-obsessed when it comes to Halo, but it’s fitting that the plot boils down to a convoluted attempt to get a Cortana-esque A.I. quipping with the Chief like the good ol’ days. It’s a “here's what the next big step for Halo looks like” without actually taking steps to push the series forward. It's 343’s attempt to get back on the “right track” through a reboot of sorts.

But even after the launch, there was reason to be excited for its future. “Infinite” as a title wasn't related to its themes, but instead signaled the beginning of a 10-year plan. No more numbered entries or sequels. Infinite would house Halo for a long time. And that was exciting. Its first expansion could have knocked it out of the park.

That reportedly fell apart. Story expansions are not in development, the Slipspace Engine might actually be a total mess, and the campaign was originally planned to be much more. You can watch the Infinite engine demonstration on YouTube to see how few of these ideas made it into the final game: In my review at launch, I wrote “much of what was revealed in the announcement trailer is not present. Where are the large animals? The rain? The oceans? The snowy mountains? The moonlit groves occupied by stags? The raging thunder? The shifting deserts? The coiling trees? The waves of great bulls stampeding? The underwater vehicles exploring ruins? The beaches?”

So yeah, Infinite feels like a demo. And after revisiting, it’s still an unbelievable mess on PC. My girlfriend crashed dozens of times, and I couldn’t play for years because it wouldn’t stay open for more than a few minutes. Half of the time we respawned, we couldn’t swap equipment. During the final mission, we had to do it without dying because checkpoints were broken, and if we failed, it would reset the level. Sometimes we’d lose big chunks of progress out of nowhere when loading our save.

And I'm sad to see Halo once again promise the start of something new yet end unfinished. We were meant to explore more of this Halo ring, see what the Endless would turn into, and probably get new weapons, fight more bosses, and unlock extra equipment. With the potential for more environments and less dire campaign missions, I was looking forward to it.

Infinite is tons of fun when it works, but it's rarely exciting to look at. I can see why people love it; it feels great in your hands, but the other half of what I look for in Halo isn’t here.

I'm shattered. No game has made me sob this hard. I often say "I'm crying" when I watch, read, or play something sad, but that's mostly exaggeration. I just tear up and very rarely actually cry, but no, I straight up loud sobbed after finishing this. I broke down. My face contorted and couldn't hold back a stream of tears for half an hour straight. My lips were quivering and I was groaning and I could barely breathe; I almost never respond this intensely to things.

Stories about apocalypses normally benefit from their own silliness. These narratives never feel real; they're either too fun, dramatic, or action-packed to have substantial weight. But Goodbye Volcano High is exceptionally hard to swallow.

These feel like actual teenagers. They have real interests, their diverse identities are relatable, their dialogue sounds genuine, they mess around naturally, their tabletop sessions have all these little details and comments that make them feel like the ones I've had, they have awfully relatable casual conversations, and their issues are grounded. For a game about dinosaur people, I always felt like these kids were human.

When you take some of the most real feeling characters I've met in any game and have them face the existentialism that arises from fears of an apocalypse, I was constantly on edge. This is a story where its characters have to grapple with the inevitability of their deaths, and at no point was I not deep in thought regarding their fate. Their happiness, each tuft of fun, and all of its love and positivity is carried by the gargantuan burden of questioning what will happen when that asteroid hits.

When characters make comments about "asteroid facts," describing things like "if you hit solid rock hard enough, it can liquify," it's some of the most disturbing shit I've seen in a game. It may seem tame in a vacuum, but when your world and characters are this convincing, the concept of a realistically approached end of the world is terrifying.

It's especially upsetting in the beginning, when everyone treats the asteroid as a joke, with folks making memes and using it as a crutch for humor. People claiming they wish the asteroid would just hit to get them out of certain situations is so painfully real. It's a behavior that actual people would showcase, and little moments like that make me think about our own existence and how little time we have.

Its narrative is tied to our most future-conscious period—senior year of high school, where we are expected to make definitive decisions on what we do for the rest of our lives—and those futures being shattered by an unavoidable natural disaster is heartbreaking. To see these kids lose their ambitions and dreams, and there is nothing they can do but accept their fates… it's far too fucking heavy for anyone at that age to have to go through. Just thinking about it nearly brings me to tears.

And I cannot put into words how much I relate to the protagonist. Fang failing to find acceptance from their parents, difficulties with their gender identity, conflicts and conversations with their brother, being pegged as the spoiled, selfish brat, and even something as simple as being Arabic... all of it feels so scarily relatable to my personal experience. Many people won't quite get that from it, and it is probably a huge contributor towards why Goodbye Volcano High felt so real for me, but I see myself in Fang more than I ever have in any fictional character.

Today, I'm flying across the Atlantic ocean to see my girlfriend for the first time. I can say a lot about Goodbye Volcano High, but the only thing that matters is that after finishing it, I want nothing more than to hug her as hard as possible. To value the people in my life and the short time we have. The few moments of happiness we can spare in something so ephemeral.

Goodbye Volcano High shattered me, but rather than it having a debilitating effect, I want to do better at cherishing the people I love.

Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 are my favorite games of all time, so when I saw the first trailer for Baldur’s Gate 3, I was beyond excited. I knew it was going to be a little different, as the story in the original games is pretty well wrapped up with nowhere to go narratively, but Black Isle had plans for a third entry (The Black Hound), so I figured things would be able to be worked out. I was also completely geeking out because I absolutely love Mind Flayers. They were terrifying in Baldur’s Gate 2, and there was a whole cut/unfinished subplot with a Mind Flayer colony in Athkatla that just brimmed with potential on how they could connect the dots here. One of my DND group’s favorite dungeons we ever ran was a giant library in the astral plane that had been taken over by a singular Mind Flayer that I tortured them with through manipulation, stealth, cunning, and pitting them against each other over 12 hours. By the end of it, they were deathly afraid of him and hated his guts. It was fantastic. I was really ready to love this game…and I tried so hard, but I just don’t.

Turns out, it was a bad idea to make the new 5th Edition game Baldur’s Gate 3. There is a fantastic skeleton here with interesting characters and fun locations, but as a huge fan of the early games, I can’t help but feel like it’s significantly held back by what Wizards of the Coast did to the Baldur’s Gate canon. BG3 isn’t a sequel to Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 - it’s a sequel to the WotC canon of Baldur’s Gate, and it’s done very poorly. Some of the characters that appear are completely divorced from their characters in the originals, as if the person writing them had no idea of their motivations or any understanding of who these people are. I don’t know whether to blame that on Wizards for the terrible choices regarding canon, or to blame Larian for the awful characterization, but it drove me insane. I realize I might sound like a whiny old-head, but it is just such a strange choice to make a sequel based on a game when you can’t actually adhere to the plot of that game.

The legacy characters aren’t the only strange moments of Baldur’s Gate 3’s writing unfortunately, as it struggles to maintain a foundation between being grounded in the Forgotten Realms setting while wanting to tell a grandiose story. At the beginning of the game, I recruited three companions - one that was incredibly fearsome fighting Demons in the Blood War, another was such a powerful mage that he actually had an intimate relationship with the Goddess of Magic herself, and the last one was sent on a mission to retrieve an incredibly powerful and rare artifact from a race of other dimensional beings. They’re also level 1 and we’re fighting goblins. This type of narrative/world disconnect continues on throughout the rest of the game and I constantly felt out of place and just at odds with the game’s representation of the Forgotten Realms.

For a game that is effusively praised for player freedom - don’t get me wrong there is a ton of it - it does itself no favors with regards to pacing. In particular, Act 2 is paced in such a way that players easily can find themselves locked out of almost all the Act’s content if they simply explore the area, which is the exact opposite of how Act 1 encouraged gameplay. When Act 3 rolls around, BG3 again flips things around and gives a giant sandbox city to run around it, all the while dumping quests on you that beg to be solved with urgency. There isn’t inherently anything wrong in this approach, but because the pacing isn’t consistent across the game, it can be very overwhelming and disorienting.

This disorienting feeling carries over to companion quests and the rest system as well, as the game seems to discourage you from long resting too often, but in order to continue companion quests, long rests at camp are necessary. I actually missed an entire companion questline because I did not rest enough in Act 2, and it wasn’t until late game that I realized the game does actually have a cue to tell you to rest. Every time a party member complains about being tired, a new conversation or cutscene is available at camp. Otherwise, the resting mechanic makes a nice balance between the original games’ dungeon rest-a-thons, and the fear of running out of resources in combat.

Encounters and combat were something I personally was worried about, as I’m much more a fan of the Real Time with Pause system, but I actually think Larian did a great job implementing 5e into crpg format. Most of the time, combat feels engaging and quick due to the encounter and level design, and the environment takes a much bigger stage than it ever did in the older games. Later on, the encounters do seem to fall off regarding intentionality and then it can be frustrating when there are just too many enemies and allies for things to go quickly. In the later stages of the game, Larian also becomes obsessed with placing trap after trap, which just makes things tedious in this engine. Traps are a classic part of DND dungeon design, but throwing 6 of the same DC trap in a room does not make a good dungeon. Honestly, this is true for the game at large. Act 1 in all of its Early Access polished glory is wonderful in pacing, encounter design, world detail, and narrative beats, however the whole thing starts to fall apart as the game goes on and then all of the little, minor things that were overlooked as nitpicks start to become giant thorns.

While the combat system mostly does a good job, it does lack polish with basic functionality. There were so many times that I clicked to attack an enemy, was told “too far, can’t reach,” and then I moved my character manually in range and was able to attack. There were entire battles where certain enemies just stood still for their turn, wasting 10-20 seconds without doing anything. There were times in which I got stuck with one character fighting six by himself because the pathing for the other character broke while jumping, and they couldn’t join combat until forced because they were stuck in a different spot. There were many times where I was told I could not see the enemy, only to swivel the camera around to find that character has a perfect line of sight on the enemy, but just can’t attack because the game says no. After 50-plus hours, all of that began to wear me down, and the experience just felt clunky. Apart from those minor things, I also started to hit real bugs like companions talking to me about events that haven’t happened yet, doors not loading, people popping into cutscenes, among others.

It is highly ironic that Baldur’s Gate 3 has gotten so much praise from people pitting it against other AAA releases that were deemed broken, as if the game does not have its share of cracks and broken bits as well. Ultimately, there is a good game here that I’m sure will grow and be ironed out as a “Definitive Edition” arrives, but for me the entire experience was disappointing and lacking. Baldur’s Gate 3 nails the upfront presentation with cinematic style, but what lies beneath is mediocrity.

This review will mainly focus on the new additions that were brought to Final Mix.

But first, a quick feeling about my overall thoughts on the base game. It's grand.

Okay, with II Final Mix, like in Kingdom Hearts 1 Final Mix, the enemies have gotten their color palettes changed, but you do get used to it after a few playthroughs, so it isn't a huge deal.

Some minor additions first up are additional cutscenes, you get to fight Roxas in The World That Never Was, some unnoticeable things behind the hood, like Drive Form gauge regeneration speed, some time limit changes, etc.

One of the major additions for Final Mix is a new group of Heartless called the Mushroom XIII, which are the mushroom enemies within the first game. These enemies give you certain criteria to beat them. If you get below that threshold, you do have a chance to get helpful items from them, but still its not the thing that would get them to be finished. These offer nice strategy mixups for each one, and you do get good rewards as well from them, and after doing them all.

Another major addition for Final Mix was a new area in Radiant Garden added called the Cavern of Remembrance. This adds a great deal of challenge to the game with new stronger versions of enemies you've faced before and new traversal challenges, which do require you to essentially, have all of your Drive Forms maxed out to unlock all of those abilities to get further into the Cavern. At the end of this area, you unlock rematches with each Organization XIII member. They are now stronger, add additional attacks to their arsenal, and new strategies as well. These are great because of the added challenge, but you can also do them in any order, which helps you out if you're having trouble with one of the bosses you can just go to another boss.

But, they aren't all unlocked if you haven't done a handful of fights before, called the Absent Silhouette battles, another addition for Final Mix. These fights are the Organization members who perished in Chain of Memories and are a good ease to the rematches as they are challenging, but not too bad if you're at a good level.

One of the last major additions is one boss called the Lingering Will. This boss fight is popularly one of the toughest boss fights in the entire series, but it also ties so freaking well to the overall story coming up in the series.

Gameplay additions include a new Drive Form and a new difficulty mode.

You do get a new Drive Form as well which ties into the first game, the Limit Form. This form allows you to use various attack abilities from the first game like Ars Arcanum, Strike Raid, Sonic Blade, etc. Sora's clothes also change to reference the first game too which is a nice hint. This is a great addition since it gives you some more Drive Form variety, and this one does not use any Party Members. Helpful!

The difficulty mode is the infamous Critical Mode. Lots of pain and struggle if you want that extra challenge. A nice little addition to the game if you so desire!

So, overall Final Mix adds some great new challenges to the base game, great new boss battles, but also some great additional context around certain characters too. This is the definitive version of Kingdom Hearts II.