maybe not the strongest game ever writing or story wise but conceptually and in execution for a jrpg from 1993 romancing saga 2 is incredibly interesting and a game i'll probably be thinking about for a long time. the only version available in english being an inferior remaster definitely doesn't do it any favors for a wider audience, but it's still something worth checking out if you care at all about the genre. my only hope from something like team asano or just the influx of more classic-inspired jrpgs in general is that we go back to an era where we get experimental titles like this again

absolutely the best experience dragon quest has provided me with so far and i honestly don't think anything will ever top it in that regard. an incredibly compelling narrative with amazing and surprisingly complex characters bundled together in that classic dragon quest charm. version 3 being the last version made for the wii is very obvious here as well, with some spectacular cutscene choreography and beautiful environments to tie it all together. akira toriyama also gets to put his incredible talent with drawing machines and vehicles to use, even more so than with what was in prior versions which i appreciate both for it being my favorite part of his art style as well as something that really sets version 4 and 10 as a whole apart from the rest of the series to me. like versions 2 and 3 though, all of the new music made specifically for the expansions use synths, but so far the use of legacy tracks has been done well enough that it's a relatively minor issue to me. overall incredibly gripping, and i'm excited to see where the rest of the expansions go after this one.

For reference, I played the Steam version of Persona 3 on hard difficulty.

Persona 3 Reload is a near-perfect experience for me personally. This game has a lot going for it but Id be lying if I said I enjoyed every aspect of this, as I believe they dropped the ball on a few instances in this game. This review won’t contain any major story spoilers but I might hint at some stuff in here. Read at your own discretion. I'll first go into what I like about this game and what it does good.

Firstly, the graphics and engine upgrade is one of the first things you notice, everything looks much cleaner and a lot better. Compared to P5 it's a massive graphic update. They went overkill with every aspect of the UI as well, making sure every menu has some sort of graphic, at least in the pause menu, each one of them having a hidden meaning which I think is a nice touch. While they toned it down in terms of the splash screens doing all-out attacks compared to P5, the simpler style still fits well. Where they shine is the theurgy special attacks. It all just looks amazing. The characters feel less stiff and more lively during any sort of talking sequence.

I consider this battle system the best out of 3, 4, and 5 (Insert obligatory persona joke that the first 2 don't exist.) They brought back baton pass under a new name, shifting. A standard version of giving your turn to another party member without the added benefits of baton pass in Persona 5, which is fine considering it was incredibly broken. And, you're never gonna believe this, you can CONTROL your party members. Yep, you heard me right. Shocking shit I know. On top of that, they rebalanced every party member from the original Persona 3, regardless if there is a “best” party every character is viable regardless of team comp as long as you fuse enough personas for the main protagonist. The new system to Persona 3 and what makes it unique is the newly implemented theurgy system. Every turn in battle fills up this meter so unleash a super move each character has. Each character has their own criteria to boost the meter more to get the move faster (I.E Yukari’s meter fills faster when she heals hurt party members.) My one issue with this while it adds that dopamine when you get it, there's no downside to using this, and is just there to make the game easier without any repercussions using overpowered moves. Other than that, this game is incredibly balanced in my opinion. I was over-leveled for a majority of the game with min-maxed personas and I still had some trouble with bosses. The battles encouraged me to use items as well and correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't as encouraged or even necessary in 4 and 5. On top of all of this, the shuffle system is completely revamped and is no longer random, you can even reliably trigger it by finishing the battle with an All-Out Attack. The only random thing about it is which cards appear. While admittedly, it loses a bit of its identity, and no reason for it to be called shuffle time anymore, this is a much better and welcome change. The enemy AI is much smarter in this game and follows up more with hitting weaknesses. The most notable fight that I had trouble with was The Reaper. He was easily the hardest fight in this game and it doesn’t come close in my opinion. It took me around 40 minutes to beat him using all of my resources. And on top of all of that, there is still more minibosses through these doors that appear randomly that will reward you a decent amount. There still isn't even stuff I’ve covered but the point is that they made the gameplay loop more engaging and intuitive. Never have I felt the need to keep fusing until now. I finished with an 89% compendium registry. I usually finish with around 50-60% which I think says alot.

The story in this game is 1 to 1 with the original with added segments of the antagonists of the game for the better. They are done much better and build the characters more throughout. And this goes for all of the characters. Comparing it to the original, every character is more fleshed out and given more opportunities to learn more about them and it was done amazingly. Sadly, you can miss a few as all of them are timed therefore missing out on the character-building. Another neat edition is the characters talking mid-combat to each other when they shift or hit a weakness. It's a very small thing that can go unnoticed but for me, it added a lot.

The VAs in this game also killed it, dare I say this is my favorite entry in terms of the voice-acted cast. I think the social links being voice-acted for sure adds a lot. I didn't think I would enjoy this cast more than the original but they nailed it and I actually prefer them over the original.

Now, some minor nitpicks that I want to point out before I go into my dislikes are one of them being that I personally think the VA for Yukari just misses some lines. None that ruined the game nor killed the character for me but enough to the point where it was bothersome and annoying. I can't remember what lines exactly but besides those few she is fine. Makoto (the protagonist) also is too quiet when getting shifted compared to when he summons his persona it doesn't match the energy. One more thing is that the “child” voice actors definitely don’t sound like children. They just sound like adults putting on their best teen impression.

Ok NOW onto my dislikes I have with this game and my main grievance with this remake is that it's TOO faithful of a remake. Meaning they didn’t fix some of the issues that FES had. Including some certain story scenes where it ruins the theme of the game. IYKYK. While the confidants are much better voice acted, aside from the party members I find it extremely hard to care for any of them nor do they add much to the story. I was hoping they would add or even change most of them to make them more appealing or at least somehow relate to the character. The only confidant that I felt that was done well was the sun arcana. My favorite arcana in the entire series at that. Shame that they didn't expand on them as much. And while I was invested from the get-go because I already knew the story, it still took too long for the game to pick up during the story.

Expanding on my point that it's too faithful of a remake, there still isn't enough to do at night around the midgame. Once your stats are maxed out and you get every character's special characteristic there is literally nothing to do. Also very disappointing to see they didn't expand any areas you could go to. I excused the first game as it was a first in the series but seeing them stick to it in the remake is inexcusable. Another thing that really killed the impact of one of the scenes was one of the scenes during the end of the game. I won't go into details but I really don't see why they changed it and the original was much more impactful.

All in all, I still think this game is amazing and does enhance the original in many ways but sadly downgrades it in others. An almost perfect remake in my eyes that they sadly didn't push as much as they should've. Thank you for taking the time to read this review as this is the first time I've decided to go full lengths to review a game this important to me.

I’ve known about this game for a minute and just avoided it because of the cover art. It didn't really look like my kind of game. What reminded me of this game's existence was seeing a tweet around a week ago that Wild Woody was added to an NSFW kart racing game. I had to do a double take, but it was actually real. I shouldn’t be surprised considering the name of the game, but, like, wow. I consider myself to be a fan of the Sega CD, so I did want to give this game a try.

The controls are some of the worst I’ve seen in the medium. When jumping, Woody stutters when rising and falling, so it ends up feeling like you’re rubber banding in an online game. Woody’s main form of attacking is jumping on enemies, which will play out an animation where he sinks into the enemy while erasing them from the level. There’s been times where I would try jumping on enemies upwards of 5 times in a row and it would still not register! He’s also got this sketch ability where you’ll have to press the pause button, flip through the sketch book to find the ability you want to use, and activate it, which plays out an animation. Admittedly, a cool idea, but badly integrated since you can only use 2 of these before having to get a powerup later in the level. For the most part, these are useless in the sense that they obstruct the flow of the game and are never good enough to where you’d even think of using them instead of just damage boosting through whatever enemy is in front of you. Abilities are mostly some awkward projectile or something that transforms you into something for more jump height and movement speed, all controlling as bad if not worse than your standard form. For example, there’s ones that turn you into a kangaroo and hobby horse.

This game is not good in the level design department either. Wild Woody has the design philosophies of Sonic CD with these large, incoherent mazes I’ve gotten lost in for some embarrassingly long times. Also cluttered with enemy placements that, at times, make taking damage feel unavoidable. It’s so bad you’re better off just damage boosting through everything since you’ll probably take more damage trying to avoid them. The enemies also really like throwing unfair projectiles, which you can’t even avoid at times. It’s evident this game was a rush job, and the stage design really makes that show. I get the vibe that they made the levels and didn’t even try playing through the game because a ton of stages have platforming segments that are way too awkward to perform consistently. In the Mount Olympus stage, there is a part where you literally have to take a leap of faith and hope you land on a small platform instead of falling below the area and having to climb back up again. I haven’t mentioned yet that Woody has an ability where he can erase areas of the map to find secrets and progress through the stage. That’s fine; at the start of the game, they highlight these areas to let you know you can erase them, but past level 1, they never mark them again. So, there are areas I’ve gotten trapped in where you just have to waste time guessing where the erasable floor or wall is. Funnily enough, they also increase the time to do so in later stages if it wasn’t already cryptic enough, because then you’ll have to wait longer to erase things with no prior indication.

First impressions of the music from stage 1 sound bad initially, but make more sense since Ron Thal who did the music, said that he made the soundtrack start off silly and progressively get more intense throughout. So even though the first song sounds like a prog rock cover of a nursery rhyme, it does start to pick up the pace with the later stages. My favorite songs are the space stage theme and this song that went unused due to a presumed programming bug. It's a bit goofy, but the high-tempo drums and the piano make for a pretty kickass boss theme, so it’s sad this song didn’t make it in.

How was this released?! Ristar literally came out earlier in the year, and this was supposed to be the swan-song for the Sega CD? How unfortunate… It’s a shame because I think this game had the potential to be pretty cool. I also think it's hilarious that the platforming mascot shit got so out of hand that they made one for a fucking pencil… At least the soundtrack is good.

I enjoyed playing this game so much on my Nintendo Wii U.

I know it's an extremely unpopular opinion but this is up there as one of if not the BEST 3D Mario game for me as experiencing these worlds the way I did was truly something special for me at the time that I had played this game. It was also one of the first games that I went out of my way to 100% and I enjoyed my time doing it so much + with the bonus content after 100% is well worth it and so much content within the game.


Each level looked so beautiful and being able to see these 3D levels in HD for the first time was a very memorial experience for me!

The multiplayer is also a very fun experience with the added competition mode of who scores the most for this useless crown ends up being so fun.

this game has so much content and will always remain very very special to me and also came at a time that I really needed a game like this.

I just really wish that they would've added online on here which they later did on the Switch.

Front Mission seemed kind of daunting at first to me, as I’ve never really played anything like it with the customizable mechs. What really intrigued me about playing Front Mission was the talent of Amano and Shimomura behind it. There’s digitized portraits of Amano’s character designs in-game, and his timeless art is the kind of stuff I’ll never get sick of looking at. It started to make more sense as I played it, and honestly, it wasn't as confusing as I had thought.

Front Mission is a strategy RPG where you customize mecha for your units to use in battle. When changing the equipment for your mechs though, they didn’t take the easy route with spritework. There are different battle sprites, field sprites, and giant sprites in the setup menu that all change depending on the pieces of equipment you pick. There’s a ton of equipment too, with there being body armor, legs, guns, and even backpacks too, so to see this much work put into something like this is astounding. It really helps sell the game's whole gimmick of building mechs and really makes some builds feel unique. Might I add that you can even paint the mechs different colors for free? This actually helped a ton because I usually have a hard time differentiating troops in these games, so I knew who was who with the allocated colors.

Much of the time will be spent sitting in the menu and customizing your mechs. Admittedly, buying parts is slow, but it’s fun thinking about which builds to go for. There’s a weight limit for mechs, so you kind of need to balance out your builds and not have too much stuff on them as you mix and match a variety of parts from shops, which all raise certain stats. Another aspect of the builds is your character stats. There’s some sort of hidden leveling system for weapon proficiency, so you’ll usually want to stick to one type of weapon for each character. You have the “Fight” stat, which is for gauntlets; the “Short” stat for 1 tile range weaponry; and “Long” for missiles and other long range guns. Certain equipment will work better for short-range or long-range people, so that’s why there’s a lot to think about in the parts shop.

The combat revolves around this body part system, where each mech has separate health bars for their leg parts, both individual hands and the body. Destroying the legs will lower their tile movement; destroying either hand will make whatever weapon the mech is equipped with unusable; and destroying their body will immobilize them completely. You also can’t control what parts you shoot unless someone has a skill that lets them, so it kind of makes a lot of battles very RNG-reliant. I also really like the combat animations. It’s pretty satisfying seeing your mech fire off a multi-hit machine gun as the game lags with the debris flying everywhere…

Front Mission has some awkward balancing as well. The start of the game provides you with some pretty unremarkable equipment, and leveling up units is tricky since they don’t do very much damage. This made the game very hard at the beginning, and I was getting my ass kicked at a certain skill check. At around a third through the game, the characters start to get stronger, unlock their skills, and eventually become some of the most broken units in RPG history (probably). This means you don’t even have to be strategizing anymore. There is benefit at the start of the game from having a balanced team, but in the latter half, the short-range units are so busted that it doesn’t even matter if you have any other differently classed units. Hell, I’m sure you could solo most maps with just one of them!

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Front Mission. The story is very ahead of its time and probably my favorite aspect of the game, which is rare for me since I’m more of a gameplay-oriented person. It’s a pretty easy game and not that hard to get into, despite how complicated it may seem. If all still goes south, there’s an arena you can grind at in case you get stuck too.

I didn’t think i would be giving out the worst game i ever played contender out so soon, let alone a .5 stars but i cannot stress enough about how i disliked everything about this video game. I played this game hoping at the very least would be better than nier automata (low expectations because i didn’t like automata) but even then it failed.

First, would be of course the gameplay of the game, now automata isnt known for its quality in combat, enemy variation, bosses, exploration just about everything but the story(which still is pretty underwhelming) and that doesn’t change with replicant but its much worse, the combat had potential to be better than automata but all of it went out the door with replicants poor enemy variation and boss battle design etc. You go from like 8 abilities with Weiss book to forced to having one of them in ur arsenal since all the bosses are in the air and dark lance is the only ability that takes out air enemies and all the other abilities are pretty much useless or take too much time when u can simply dodge or block, so i was stuck with dark lance and dark hand for the entire game.

Referring back to the point of enemy variation, replicant falls incredibly short on creating a grindy engaging rpg, all the enemies use the same attacks and pretty much are sponges which eliminates all potential difficulty of the game. The bosses aren’t much different, they are all usually in the air so majority of the fight ur spamming dark lance and waiting for the blue bar to slowly refill up to repeat the same actions. The boss fights are just straight up awful, theres no uniqueness or identity that makes any of the bosses stick out and they are basically just a bigger version of common enemies.

Exploration is downright awful, and the fact that majority of the game is a fetch and report just makes the world feel so dead and repetitive. the world building is hardly apparent and the only area with potential (the desert kingdom) felt rushed and poorly executed. Dungeons in this game are probably the most boring areas to explore and the puzzles don’t make it any better, it’s disrespectful to even call them puzzles cuz its just stupid shit that makes the game more tedious (PRIME EXAMPLE;FOREST OF THE MYTH)

The soundtrack of this game is actually terrible, i know people like to praise this game for its music but it literally sounds the same, high pitch choir with the same set of orchestra or it sounds like they took automata soundtrack and reused it, theres no originality in its soundtrack and the game plays the same 5 soundtrack the entire game which just becomes boring.

One last thing about the gameplay is its graphics and voice acting, the graphics look very awkward especially during cutscenes, characters barely show expressions on their face or it doesn’t even match the situation and the voice acting (Japanese va btw) doesn’t make it better, the quality sounds like it was recorded under a thick blanket.

Unfortunately the gameplay isn’t the only thing bad about this game, debatably not even the worst about this game, what i hate most about nier replicant is its story.
I honestly dont know where to begin, the story feels like if you gave the fans who wrote ANR (Aot no requiem which is a shitty fan-made ending for those who don’t know) the opportunity to make a story inspired from the concepts of aot. both protagonists start off with losing smth they care for and declare to kill every last of these creatures, difference is aot does it in a unique compelling way which makes the story amazing while replicant does the exact opposite.

Replicant suffers majorly from its poor execution and nier protag suffers the most from it as to me he was the only character who i thought was interesting but didn’t get the depth he deserved due to yoko taros tendency to put more detail on the ass of the main female lead and his unoriginal fetch quests that does not progress the plot. The one thing that bothers me the most is kaine, i feel like kaine wearing her undergarments cuz of her being unisex so she has the need to reveal herself to represent a “feminine” characteristics is an excuse for yoko taro to sexualize another female character and appeal it to players, cuz her concept was just awfully executed and jus poor writing all around. every other character is just there and don’t rlly add much

As I said before the plot of replicant hardly progresses because of its fetch and report for majority of the game so it literally feels like the plot gets split in two parts which is: Yonah is sick, protag ask popola about medicine for yonah, she will say no then send us off to a fetch mission for that whole first half then the time skip happens which turns to yonah gets captured by shadowlord, nier protag ask popola about shadow lord and yonahs wherabouts, she will say nothing important and then she will send you to a fetch mission, its horribly structured and hard to play through.

Its honestly hard to take this game seriously alot of the cutscenes have the most bullshit convenience or some dumbshit happening, like how many times did kaine nearly fucking died due to her having the reaction time of a sloth and how she forgets she has the ability to jump really fucking high, or the junk heap incident where jakob clearly dies trying to save Gideon after his clumsy ass almost got himself killed and then Gideon develops hatred to the robot who happens to jus be standing there, Gideon never shown any type of self hatred to himself for his brothers death and its jus stupid, another stupid cutscene is when emil blows up an entire town after he randomly goes on a rampage, just out of nowhere with no lead up or anything, and
had zero impact on the story, like it was forgotten right after that shit and his rampage never happened again, thats how random it is. I could go on and on about these stupid cutscenes but i would be typing the longest review ever.

The fact you have replay the game 4 times to fully grasp the lore of the game is absolutely terrible and it doesn’t make the game have replay value, it makes the game worse in fact especially since replicant barely adds any new content in each of its route. You shouldn’t have to play the game more than twice to grasp all the content of the game anything more than that is absurd.

In conclusion, nothing about nier replicant does anything i like in a video game and a complete waste of time, unless you like to look at an woman’s ass crack for hours and hours then i do not recommend this game.

this game gets really sold short just for not being as self serious as ff4 and not as grand as the series gets from 6 onward but it's a really spectacular game even outside of its stellar mechanics and practically outdoes ff4 in every way. definitely leans a bit more on comic relief than some people might like but there's some really great moments here and the cast is really strong, especially with galuf and bartz, and exdeath is undercut by fans for how interesting of an antagonist he is. neo exdeath is by far the coolest final boss design in this series to me other than safer sephiroth, and even if he's pretty stock standard on a surface level i think he deserves more credit as a villain. easily my favorite of the snes trilogy of final fantasy games and a game i can't recommend enough to fans of jrpgs

This is probably gonna be one of my longer review since i have alot of mixed feelings on this game and its sad that i cant put this game any higher. I was waiting for this game as long as any other ff7 fan with high expectations, and i spent 100 dollars on this shit so this game leaving me with unsatisfactory rlly bothers me.

I want to start with the positives cuz dont get me wrong its not a BAD game by any means.

First, rebirth is one of the most visually beautiful games you will ever see, cutscenes, areas, land, characters all look better than it ever was compared to prior ff games and im glad to see how attractive the game looks, similar to OG, rebirth does a great job at getting comfortable and enjoying all the characters in the cast giving them individual dungeons, focus in the story and the constant back n forth between one half of a party to another allowing the player to have a chance to explore and play as each and every character. The combat is a big stepup from remake, with the addition of synergy attacks and vast combinations of abilities.


I am a little mixed(or confused)on the story but the one thing im satisfied the most is cloud and sephiroth as they have a huge stepup narratively compared to OG, i like how rebirth focuses more on the degration of a soldiers body and particularly how clouds psyche is affected+with sephiroth interference. Rebirth emphasizes on how powerful sephiroth is by manipulating clouds mind to doing things without a conscious such as when the visions he sees and his impact to attack other people such as when he attacks the sephiroth clones constantly or to the extent of attacking tifa, or he when he retrieves the black materia from aerith. rebirth rlly shows us how messed up and unreliable cloud truly is and that what looks like is going to be the main focus of next game has me hooked.

Now the positives of this game is unfortunately cut short as square enix still suffers from making an engaging open world game, mission layouts and pacing for when it comes to ff7. I never rlly had the love other ff fans when it comes to 7 and unfortunately its the same for rebirth as it continues to make this game feel like a chore, now to specifically what im complaining about is:

The open world, one of if not my biggest concern when starting this game was if square enix was able to create a fresh, unique and engaging open world that allows players to freely explore the unknown without some kid calling you every time you discover something or when you open up the map and dont see a whole checklist that makes up the exploration.

Oh well to no surprise im talking about rebirth, Now i full cleared the first three regions before i got absolutely bored of the other and half assed them and holy shit man this game did not change a SINGLE thing in each region, its the same thing every region, get chocobo,find towers, investigate summons,scan that crystal shit who even knows what that does, and do some battle challenges maybe a mini boss thats not rlly challenging and side quests which as per usual arent good. the open world is very limited and the only thing that is not marked on the map are chocobo stations but they are impossible to miss when a big ass chocobo is leading you to it.

this is like assassins creed type of open world, which are also not good, this was by far the biggest disappointment and it was sad that i didnt have the motivation to continue to explore the world by like chapter 8.

Another thing that bothered me is the unusual amount of mandatory mini games during the main chapters, there should never EVER be like 4-5 chapters where minigames take up majority of the chapter, like what type of bullshit was square enix on? Excluding the last 2 chapters, im sure there is more mandatory minigames than main bosses fought, and like 75% of the minigames werent even good and all the good ones were locked in late game where i was alrdy drained out and tired of rebirth.

Dont get me wrong i dont hate games that have 1 or 2 mandatory sections of minigames, i was even enjoying it in rebirth early in the game with minigames such as queens blood. But when u have filler chapters every other chapter it not only slows down the pacing but it makes the game (for me at least) disengaging, and its not like the dungeons are that good that it kept me going cuz even those were pretty boring and basic dungeons, the pure motivation to finish this game was cloud/sephiroth and the 100 dollars i potentially wasted.

I do wanna leave off a positive point of rebirth because i do think this game is more good than bad, as for example the last 2 chapters of this game was the first time i was like “i might’ve gotten my money worth” since it actually looked like square enix put effort and time intos the final dungeon and ofc the iconic scene and sephiroth boss fights. It sucks cuz the ending hooked me like the remake did and i know im gonna buy the next game, i jus hope that some of these problems are fixed/improved.

I do really want to like this game, i like the cast and the concept in ff7, and it sucks cuz probably im the only ff7 player who feels this way about this game because this is not the first time i have these mixed feelings about ff7, its every single ff7 game ;from og to crisis core to remake and now rebirth, where I enjoy the story but the gameplay keeps it from the score i want to put it at.

it’s unfortunate this game didnt live to the expectations not only i put on it but as well as square enix did and the only thing i can hope is it grows on me or the next game whenever it is, makes up for it but this time i should probably keep my expectations a bit lower.

I guess I’ll start off this review by saying that I am not Final Fantasy VII’s biggest shooter. I’ve played the original and the remake and it’s a pretty good story, but it’s not my favorite Final Fantasy. I don’t really have any outward complaints about the narrative because of this, except for what’s directly presented to us. If they were to remake X or IX and do whatever they wanted with them in the same vein as this trilogy, I’m sure I could understand a lot of fan’s frustration, but for the most part I’ll be talking about the core gameplay. I’m gonna be trying this new thing where I talk about spoilers in hyperlinks instead of cramming them in the bottom of the review and describing them in vague terms, so don’t worry about getting your eyes tainted to something you don’t want to see. For the most part, it sits in a weird place in my head because I liked a lot of what they did but also despised a lot as well. As soon as I opened the menu and saw crafting I was extremely hesitant. It’s really funny to me that this game had so much discourse about yellow paint breaking people’s immersion, but no one seems to care about the pouches of crafting materials just laid all over the place for no reason. I would describe this game as a complete descent into madness personally.

I’ll start with the combat because it was my main gripe with Remake, and I want to get the positives out before I get into salt territory with the negatives. I’m much more of a turn-based connoisseur and getting used to the action gameplay was like getting shoved into arctic waters. I always felt like the dodges on the characters weren’t effective and the ATB gauge build up would drop a sledgehammer on my balls every time I’d get caught with it empty and unable to heal during a 45 minute boss fight. It sucked ass in that game, and it wouldn’t benefit from the fact that most chapters are just endless roadblocks of bosses that fly and cancel out your actions with cinematic cutscenes. Some of this is still present in Rebirth, but they managed to both fix the momentum of the characters in combat and delete half the health on most of the enemies. It was like leagues different and done way better here. Most of the character’s dodges were changed and were actually able to dodge attacks. Cloud was given this ranged laser attack that allowed him to build ATB from a distance which made him so much better to play as, especially because he’s the only party member that can’t be switched out. I found both Red and Tifa to be extremely overpowered due to their critical chances. If you give them ATB boosting items, they turn into automatic weapons that barely need to reload. It was just a much better experience overall. Instead of rolling my eyes at the giant mech boss, I was actually enjoying myself for once. I do still think Aerith is atrocious to play as though. She has better Ward abilities, but she’s still cannon fodder. Everytime she was forced to do a battle by herself, it was like Guantanomo torture.

The addition of the other party members hanging out on the side was neat, but I honestly can’t tell if they were actually helping or if they were just there for moral support. I definitely saw Barret pressure some enemies from afar when the stars aligned, but it seemed like Red and Cait Sith would just stare menacingly off to the side. It was still like, the perfect small change that you didn’t really know you needed though. There’s never any questioning what they were up to while your core 3 get to kill everything, because well… they’re right there! What I would love to see in the next game is the ability to potentially swap characters out on the fly, similar to Final Fantasy X. If the characters are there anyways, it shouldn’t be hard to implement. It would just be so nice if you ran into a flying enemy and could swap your melee attackers out for Yuffie/Barret mid-battle, instead of having to do it before battle after a reload. Since you’ll have the full party for that game, I feel like it’s going to be a must-have feature and I hope they don’t continue these full chapters of split parties just for the sake of forcing you to play as someone else for 3 monotonous hours. It helps that enemies are much easier to stagger in this game, meaning that they’re also much easier to kill overall. The combat is just a huge step up and it was actually fun in this game.

Just like in Remake though, there are a lot of highs and lows in this game. The highs are monumentally fantastic, while the lows are like slamming your face into concrete. If you thought that Remake had a serious issue with padding out its ass, then I’m so sorry to say this, but it’s made so much worse in this game. The issue is still extremely prevalent, it’s just that it’s relegated more into the side content than it is in the main story this time. Rebirth does benefit from taking place across multiple locations, and they are beautiful, but the chapters are still bloated beyond all Hell by chores masked as mini-games and mini-challenges. And here’s the thing, I don’t want to hear anyone in the comments raising a finger and going, “well, it’s all optional and you’re very dumb!! Why did you do it if you didn’t enjoy it? ☝️🤓” Is it though…? Is it truly optional content if your party’s EXP, SP, and relationship with them are tied to the side quests and intel? You can say all day that the shit doesn’t have to be done, but it doesn’t eliminate the fact that your main level progression comes from playing the same QTE puzzle 6 times per area and turning on shitty ass Tears of the Kingdom towers so that Chadley can constantly bitch in your ear about shit you do not care about. I’m genuinely wondering if people actually liked doing these? Not just, “I didn’t mind it.” Nope, did you genuinely enjoy doing this repetitive crap? Don’t hesitate to raise your hands. Even if you did, just because the shit is “optional” it does not mean it’s not in the game, and I’m here to talk about what I don’t like in the game, bucko. Like 75% of the playtime of this game is just as much bloated trash as the Trash Island that’s swimming in the ocean right now.

The mini-games ranged from very fun to complete horseshit. People are like, “man I wish Final Fantasy had mini-games again, what happened to them??!!” What, you mean these torture devices? I’ve never been a fan of most Final Fantasy mini-games. They’re at their best when they’re short and confined to one area. If they’re forced to be played, they should at least wrap into the story in the same way that Blitzball does. And I KNOW!! Final Fantasy VII was like mini-game central, there’s some sort of mini-game from giving CPR, snowboarding, to changing your damn clothes. I got it, but in Rebirth there are more than just the recreations of the original mini-games. There is a mini-game for doing the most mundane shit in this game and it’s overbearingly god awful. The beginning of the game was so overwhelming; you’re tossed into this gigantic landscape and get 37 tutorials thrown at you at once. How to run around, how to do combat, how to get a chocobo, how to ride a chocobo, how to tie your shoes, how to sit through Chadley’s dialogue without killing yourself, how to use SP, etcetera ad nauseam, until finally it just leaves you alone. There’s got to be a better way of introducing players to open-world games because the first 6 hours of each one always feels like sitting through job orientation everytime. Now toss in 24 mini-games per square inch of each area and you have my Joker origin story. I think it was in Chapter 9 when I was doing a side-quest for Aerith and it turned out to be another mini-game where you have to use the controller bumpers to rip mushrooms out of the ground, the inner coil of my being keeping me sane just burst like the engine belt inside of a car. From then on, I was hanging on a ledge by my last remaining fingers. I did eventually fall off the ledge, but it’ll be brought up in spoiler talk due to it being extremely late-game.

To be honest, not all of them were terrible. The Costa del Sol events, while extended way beyond its original counterpart, were easier to swallow because they were meant to be a fun respite to the major plot. The Gold Saucer events obviously were fine, it’s like the one part of the game where you’re supposed to fuck around. Queen’s Blood was genuinely interesting and the Junon marching was really fun when the game finally let you fucking get on with it. However, Fort Condor can drink my piss, especially because they changed the rules of the game for the sole reason of probably annoying me. Chocobo Racing can die in a ditch off the highway. That punching mini-game was needlessly complicated for no reason at all. The Cactuar mini-game might as well have ripped my face off instead. These are just the ones that annoyed me the most, the 50 other ones were either less annoying or just forgettable. It’s nice that the soundtrack is amped up to its extreme, with this being what seems like a 500 song discography, but that only slightly mitigates how annoying the games are to play. (I would drop that one dog song here, but everyone else beat me to the punch a month ago.) The PS5 has some dogshit bumpers too, like I can’t be the only one who thinks this? They hurt to use for someone like me with wrist pain, and there’s a lot of mini-games that require you to mash them. They’re too busy trying to ooh and aaahh you with motion controls and sensory features that they forgot how shit it is to mash bumpers that are literally fighting back. It’s nice that you can turn that off, but they put it in by default as the intended way of playing it. It’s just so egregious and doesn’t help with the pacing issues that most people had in Remake, in fact it’s made somewhat worse.

ring ring “Hey, it’s Chadley here!! I’m going to remind you that this game was $70 and therefore your complaint is rendered discarded. Just don’t do the content, forehead. It’s that easy."

Chadley, I will not hesitate to split you in half. I keep seeing this flimsy argument thrown around every time someone complains about this game. They get swarmed by people dropping the $70 comment like it’s the ultimate backhand. That it’s okay for the game to be overflowing with boring slop because it justifies it being $10 more than it would have been 5 years ago. It’s so cool that you like watching paint dry, but I don’t. There are games worth $30 and 5 hours long that were much more pleasant and much more memorable experiences than this. Baldur’s Gate 3 discourse has rotted all of your brains thinking that every game has to be 200 hours long to be worth it, when in reality if that game had been cut 50 hours it still would have been great because it was fun and had meaningful content. All the boring chore work in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth bothers me because it does nothing but waste your time and take you away from the character writing, which is the good shit. I will never forget how this game forces you to do a shitty on-rails gun mini-game 5 seconds after Barret has one of the most heart-wrenching cutscenes in the entire game. You might as well have played a laugh track over it. It’s not enough that you talk to the characters and maybe sometimes go on an outing with them, nope, you have to do a 6 chain side quest of killing monsters and playing mini-games, or looking for locations from a photograph, or crafting an object for the local idiot. There’s literally one Yuffie quest where a character you don’t remember from the Intermission DLC basically says “Hi” to you, then you run around the entire map looking for a monster for 30 minutes just for him to leave and have nothing else to add. It was worth it to get brownie points for Yuffie and unlock better dialogue for her that actually rules, but did they really have to make you work that hard for it? I guarantee no one will remember these quests in like 6 months.

It just blows honestly, because they put so much care into fleshing these characters out to the extreme. Their friendships are more prevalent and actually matter in this game. The comedy is funny when it hits and there’s sprinkles of silly moments that work well in making Cloud less of a hardass and more of a softie as the game progresses. I have never given a shit about shipping in this game, and it doesn’t matter here because they finally give those fans what they want if they work for it, so just about everyone is happy. Aerith and Tifa are actually friends and not weird competition, it’s so refreshing. And no matter how you feel about the narrative changes, the plot of FF7 is still just as fascinating as it ever was so the game is fantastic when you’re actually going through the main events. This has got to be one of the most rag-tag cast of characters in the whole series, maybe right next to IX’s gaggle of weirdos, and I genuinely care about what happens to them so of course I want to unlock all of their special dialogues. It’s just so unfortunate that it’s all bogged down by the most monotonous content ever. The writing prevents the game from being less ass than it could be, but it also could be so much better at the same time.

This link is everything I have to say about spoiler territory. Click at your own discretion.

Some other random things I felt: I’m glad that they introduced a fast travel mechanic because it's the one thing that doesn't waste your time. It’s not just a fast-travel at chocobo stops, but just about any location you discover has the ability to teleport to it. Without that, it would suck. The landscapes are amazing and so beautiful, but it came at the cost of mobility. Everytime my chocobo clipped onto a rock or refused to leap off of a small cliff, part of my soul cracked. It just made travel a pain in the ass sometimes, especially in the rocky, ruin like areas. Every action from getting out of the dune buggy and sitting on benches would feel excruciating because Cloud would always pause for a second before and after doing it, just breaking up the flow of the mobility for no real reason. I really hope they fix this in the next game because it was just another thing in it that started off kind of annoying, but then grew to extreme displeasure as the game went on. Selena is by far the best chocobo though.

The game over screen is worded atrociously. The multiple options to reload are confusing and I learned the hard way that reloading a checkpoint instead of a battle was a deathly mistake. These needed to either not exist or be rephrased differently. Why on God’s green Earth would I ever want to go back 3 hours on reload? It’s also really awful that you can’t adjust game settings mid-combat. More like ASScessible if you ask me. There’s no real reason for this, especially when some fights are right after cutscenes because the reload brings you right back to the fight, not before it. It made a certain Chapter 12 fight so fucking annoying to do because the NPCs wouldn’t shut the hell up the whole time. Jesus Christ. Imagine someone needed to adjust color blind filters or some other visible- oh wait, there aren’t any accessibility features at all, except for the scary yellow paint everyone pooped their pants about.

I really did want to like more of this game but it seemed as the longer it went on, the more psychotic I felt. I have found out how much of a pushover I truly am because of this game at the detriment of my own sanity. Critiquing this game seems to be an act of war in some parts, like having criticism for it is somehow removing the mask that I'm actually a gluttonous consumer that doesn't appreciate the art of games, which is nonsense. This toilet is art and I'd piss on that too. I'm glad that people found things to love in this game, and while it is beautiful, it is much more boring than anything else. There’s so much that I liked and yet so much that I hated, so I can only hope that the final game fixes a lot of the issues I have. I’m not going to hold my breath though because that’s exactly what I said in my review for Remake. This story never needed three 60+ hour games to tell itself and it’s getting more clear as time goes on. If the combat stays the same or changes for the better again, then I’m willing to see it through to the end. I'm already 2 games deep and I want to see where the story is going, but I imagine this game without the combat fixes and shudder at the possibility of its existence. We'll see in another 4 or so years.

Treasure of the Rudras - Squaresoft's last project for the SNES, appropriately played like a 'greatest hits' of their past experiments, assembling concepts not only from Final Fantasy (row-based sideview combat, personal subplots) but also from Live A Live (multiple routes tackled in almost any order, although this time reduced to four) and Trials of Mana (intersecting storylines). What makes this portfolio stand out is the Enscribe function; Ars Magica-like spellmaking achieved by entering names into the magic menu, their power, element and range determined by a combination of keywords learned from around the world. Combat - however, fails to exploit its potential, often resorting to type-matching during boss fights instead (i.e. cast the element opposite of whatever they're using while wearing the appropriate armor). In the meantime, a severe lack of unit/party-building options and lightweight versions of Square's usual merits (story beats, dialogue and humor) tend to expose their usual flaws (simplistic dungeons & progression). Gameplay marks a step forward in terms of animations & pacing, and their town designs remain top-notch, but overall this is unusually conventional by their standards, trying in vain to impose a meaningful identity despite 30 hours of play.