While the story never quite hits in the way the first game did, Xenoblade 3 is arguably the best overall experience of the trilogy (poor X, maybe you’ll get a port one day). At worst, the two main protagonists are the blander members of the ensemble, but everyone is fairly entertaining in their own way. There’s no blatant dead weight or irritants. The battle system has also improved to become the one I’ve had the most fun with.

Villains have been a mixed bag for these games and 3 is no different. For the most part, Moebius are entertaining mustache twirlers with amazing boss themes whose motivations rarely go beyond amusing themselves. One of the main antagonists is well done but the actual big bad is lacking and his fight is excruciatingly long (Oh did you die? Enjoy doing it again for the next 20 minutes! No, you can’t skip all of the cutscenes.)

First replay since the 360 days and I more or less have the same opinion. It really depends what your expectations were going into it. If you’re here for the gunplay, it’s arguably better than the original. If you liked Bioshock for the plot and world building, it’s a clumsy mess of retcons and weak characters that feels like it was made because execs thought “drill man cool”. While it is true that drill man is indeed cool and you can totally rev that shit like it’s Gurren Lagann, it does feel like it’s completely missing the point of the first game. Also, the escort mission was the worst part of the original and repeating it as a main gameplay loop is a bit obnoxious.

That said, it has the inverse progression of the original where it starts out weak and ends on a high note. Delta also feels hilariously OP by the end and it’s fun to just watch hypnotized brutes kill each other while security bots fly around and you just laugh while killing everything else with chain lightning.

The visuals add some nice touches but it’s otherwise just decent. Like the first game, I ran into a roadblock and I couldn’t determine if it was intentional or a bug. Unlike the first game, the only thing I could do was restart. My fault for not saving but it was an added frustration that didn’t need to be there, regardless of the possible artistic reason (again, assuming it wasn’t just a bug that soft locked the game).

The potential is there and I’d love to see what this developer could do with an actual budget.

The soundtrack alone was a guaranteed 3 stars even if everything else had been terrible. That said, the rest is a mixed bag. The gameplay feels better and some of the characters are entertaining. Unfortunately, Hugo just kind of exists and Lora, while likable, isn’t anywhere near as interesting as the game thinks. Considering that she’s a driving force behind one of the main villains of XC2, I needed more than what I got to buy what eventually happens.

On that note, there were only two plot threads I wanted Torna to address and both answers are kind of weak. It did confirm something I already felt from from the vanilla game: Pyra is a completely unnecessary character and the main story would have been perfectly fine if Rex met Mythra from the beginning.

Xenoblade 2 takes a long time to get going, not because it’s a long story but because it spends a lot of it’s run goofing around. Once the actual plot kicks into high gear, it’s decent. Where it eventually goes has its moments, even if its a typical “bad guy wants to blow up the world because reasons” affair. The villains are pretty weak, especially the twist villain who you never once give a shit about. The recurring mini boss squad feel like discount Organization XIII members and they wear out their welcome quickly, especially when it becomes really obvious that we’re supposed to sympathize with them later (which came too little and way too late).

All that said, it’s hard to tell what is the fault of the script and what is the fault of the English dub. The actors have talked about how they had no direction and boy, you can tell.

FFVII Remake delivers on so much that's been promised for years. The modern visuals are gorgeous, the voice acting is very good, and I'll even go as far as saying that the music sounds better than it ever has. While purists might miss the turn based battles, the new system is an action packed delight.

The story is where the issues arise. In order to stretch what was about 5-6 hours into 30+, there's a lot of unnecessary fluff and padding. Some of it is perfectly fine but one tedious section of jungle gym acrobatics could have been avoided by simply tossing Tifa a couple feet up, which had already happened prior to that chapter.

Whether or not you like the big changes will depend on your own tastes (and how all this ends up by game 3) but what absolutely doesn't work is every time the game stops to crowbar Sephiroth into places he's not supposed to be. He's the main antagonist of FFVII but this game presents him without a shred of context. Even with the excuse of the audience already knowing who he is, there should have been some kind of basic explanation of what he is to this universe. Without that, he's some asshole that Cloud hates because reasons and he keeps showing up every so often because he does.

Omori's biggest problem is that it's just too long, which is odd given that some of the battle mechanics feel undercooked. There's only one fight where the emotion system was fully utilized and after that, I could usually brute force everything. As far as the length, it needed to lose at least 5 hours. That said, outside of meandering in a whale, I don't know specifically what I would cut.

8/25 - All that said, Omori is one of those games that sticks with you for a while and it deserves more credit than I initially gave it.