Played: January 2024

Why so much serious-minded affect when the follow-through has no backbone? An adult romance reduced to puppy dog eyes and sexless nudity. A depiction of slavery so liberalized it walks into conservatism. Any semblance of meaningful commentary on economic or environmental violence marred by contradictions and lack of imagination in worldbuilding. Some imagery, presentation, and occasional sense of place round out the highlights, but Final Fantasy XVI betrays the promise of a challenging narrative by instead delivering the frictionless experience of a hot knife through butter.

Misogyny is a hit-and-run job throughout. Sure, the camera doesn't leer, and the clothing is sensible, but in every woman's story the initial signs of interesting motivations and machinations turn out to be false. Benedikta is presented as having a dangerous shadowy agency until she's revealed to be a mess of trauma-fueled narrative confusion. Annabella could've been a window into the fascist obsession with eugenics, but she's given no interiority to carry out a real idea. Jill amounts to a fair maiden awaiting her knight despite a rich backstory rife with corrosive revenge and tough responsibility that is hardly allowed to play out. There's a prominent presence of off-screen sex work in the game, but FFXVI's answer to the Madonna-whore complex is to just make all the "whores" into "Madonnas" out of shame. This speaks to how underwritten the men are as well, but the frameworks the female characters are placed into are uniquely sexist. Trust me, I'd rather not have to harp on representation, but when a work has taken so many steps back, how can I not?

"And then there's the slavery" is not how I wanted to start this sentence, but here we are. FFXVI wants to take human bondage seriously and does just enough to signal so. But it's foundational understanding is either so misguided, or it chose so many incongruous plates to spin, that anything it has to say about subjugation and dehumanization wanes from toothless to reactionary by default. Like the characters, its politics initially intrigued me. Was this going to be an entire game about blowing up mako reactors? Are we really going to contend with the morality of violent liberation and what it may wreak on the intended beneficiaries? Is everyone so institutionally conditioned to accept slavery that I'm going to have to sit with genuine unease about potential allies? The answer to all of these range from "not really…" to "lol no". In the early going the depictions of oppression coupled with disorienting aesthetic choices put me in an exciting discomfort that I could not wait to see pay off. Even if the final statements or questions to come could be exploitative or nasty, something interesting was bound for me. And then… nothing. Or nothing but sliding further into shonen iconography, and with it, an easy morality. Morality so easy, that the resolution of certain injustices slide into conservatism not out of any actively destructive worldview (that could still be interesting) but a lazy passive decline into status quo. FFXVI just walks away. I spent a while wondering if I prefer Tales of Arise's failure that simply picked a topic that was always out of its depth or this one that makes an earnest attempt and then sidelines it for nothing. Honestly, I don't know. Maybe I'm just letting the presentation fool me into believing it's taking it seriously?

Because it's a pretty presentation. I'm not someone who was bothered by the cursing or the purple verbiage. The voice acting felt correctly theatrical. The kaiju Eikon fights were mostly thrilling but also too sparkly with little consideration for depth of field. I have felt similarly confused about where to focus my eyes during Final Fantasy XIII's gorgeous spectacles. The vistas are picturesque and traversal was a pleasure. Clive's jump sucks, but the actual footfalls through the land felt tactile, and I honestly had no trouble with the timing of his sprints or riding the Chocobo. On a purely arcade level, I'm of two minds on the combat. It's filled with beats of cathartic power fantasy, but the rhythm of nearly all fights are boringly similar. On a thematic level, it's a shame that anything about a world so complicit in injustice could feel so frictionless. There are times to have your cake and eat it too, but you can't position yourself above pastry only to fall flat with pie on your face.

I've read thoughtful defenses of Final Fantasy XVI, and, man, I wish I played the same game. If we went point for spoilerous point on my issues, I'm sure its champions could highlight answers squirreled away somewhere in the game. Show me a way to look at how each bug is a secret feature. But that's the forest for the trees. It just doesn't add up to a whole that conveys a clear eyed approach to slavery, environmental justice, the definition of freedom, and the discomfort of fighting for it. All topics that the story openly declares war on, and all explorations that I have to squint hard to make sense of. Previously, I met Final Fantasy XV beyond halfway and fell in absolute love with it, but the difference is that I didn't have to be talked into it.

Let's end on a good note. What are those 2 stars worth? A sense of place, time, and people. Whatever their politics, I took 70+ hours to play this game because I was always invested in listening to its denizens wherever I set foot. Every new town or settlement, every NPC on the road, every trip to the Hideaway, I was eavesdropping. Even the bad sidequests flesh out the world as being full of real-ish people. I actually believe the game is doing something interesting with its models by not designing the Hollywood handsome main characters to stand out too far from the masses as most RPGs do. Intentional or not, this creates an equalizing effect in aesthetics regardless of what the narrative undercuts. Similarly, I quite like the music because, while there are few earworms, the soundtrack creates an ambiance of melancholy and malaise that uniformly blankets Valisthea. I'm also a sucker for a good home base with all your pals, and the Hideaway is delightful and ripe with endearing sidequests to pick from. A game where I have the patience to walk the farthest reaches of the central hub between each mission just to hear what the gardener has to say about recent events is doing something right.

What Final Fantasy XVI lacks in substance it makes up partly in texture. Too bad that's not nearly enough.

Played: November 2023

Miles Morales apparently raised this franchise into the category of "buy at full price" because I needed my web-swinging fix to continue immediately after finishing it, and Spider-Man 2 was there to give it in spades. How well Insomniac has mastered traversal is truly remarkable. I love flipping through new suits, gliding through New York City (now up to 3 boroughs), and punch-swing-kicking bad guys like it's Saturday morning, and I'm 10 years old. As suspected, Peter really does hit stronger protagonist notes than Miles. I could actually feel how the symbiote was affecting him through combat. And while moment-to-moment story beats do little for me, the sum of the parts add up to more than enough by the endgame. Like the first game, the emotional investment creeps up on you, even if individual scenes or character chemistries waver throughout. Still, it never reaches those Doc-Ock highs.

I wouldn't be interested in this story outside of the context of a game, but when you're in their shoes, the Spider-Men are good at making you care. These games are too slight to reach my all-timers, but coupled with the extremely feel-good gameplay over a tough Thanksgiving, Spider-Man 2 was worth the full $70 USD.

Played: August 2023

Higher highs than Great Ace Attorney: Adventures and lower lows.

On pure drama, it's through the roof. I'm obsessed with the decision to split up "Pursuit" as two separate tracks in the score. What a surge of amplitude. When you get on that dog-on-a-bone thread with a penultimate line of questioning, and then the track shifts from Prelude to the main Pursuit theme, you will feel as if you're marshaling all the forces of truth in the world to rain down justice on a corrupt influence. A single katana slash in music form.

The characters remained endearing, and Ryunosuke Naruhodo is cemented as a protagonist for the Ace Attorney history books. 90% of the core mystery was a thrill to seek through and resolve.

Yet, I also can't hide some disappointment. The difficulty couldn't make up its mind if I should be thinking only a half step or a whole 2 steps ahead, often within the same case, which is all around a step back from the intuition honed in the previous game. Iris as a character never clicked with me. A couple of the secondary narrative resolutions also weren't as satisfying as could be.

THEMATIC SPOILER (no plot details): The biggest letdown, however, was the story's choice to pull back on indicting the structural forces of Western hegemony that these two games spent so many combined trials and tribulations to pursue. In the end, the villainry is reduced to powerful individuals. And while it doesn't negate the critical eye that came before, the status quo is unjustly glorified. I had such high hopes as this duology bared its fangs for 90% of the way only to sand things down at the end. Your tolerance may vary at certain gimmicky plot copouts, but the heart of my issue lies with the story poising itself to be something sharper than its gift-wrapped ending turned out to be. END THEMATIC SPOILER.

Still, these are a pair of series high marks. No assistant quite hits like Susato, including her role in the killer opening case of the second game. All in all, extremely worth anyone's time, Ace Attorney veteran or not.