Such a great game. This game redefines what it means to be a remake. I really like how the two stories are intertwined with each other. One of the scariest games I've ever played if I'm honest. I personally enjoyed Claire's campaign a lot more than Leon's but Leon's was still really good. My main issue however are certain painful puzzles that sometimes ruin the pacing and flow of the story that they clearly made really difficult to stretch the game out. Also I would've liked the stories to be a little bit more different as some moments felt like I was doing the same thing as before. But overall this game kicks ass and I would seriously recommend playing it. You do really have to use your brain however. Since I'm stubborn and refuse to search up tutorials it took me so long to complete but I think that it was worth it.

A lot of people consider this their favorite Final Fantasy game or JRPG, and I can definitely see why. There is just so much charm in this game. Great characters, a grand story about purpose and hope, legendary music, beautiful pixel environments, and so much more make this the unforgiving journey that many JRPG fans cherish. So many moments show pure raw emotion in them that is rare in video games, and those moments truly show the amount of heart and soul that the developers at Square put into the game.

Unfortunately, there were a few minor problems that plagued the game for me, which took away some of its greatness. I found a few dungeons straight up annoying or uninspiring. The combat is serviceable, but not really anything to shout about. But worst of all, like many PSX and pre-PSX JRPGs, the encounter rate is horrendous. I kind of feel cheap for blaming the encounter rate, but it really dragged the game down in so many moments and hearing that battle theme play every five steps really caused some frustration.

Overall, FFVI is very close to greatness for me, and damn, some of the beautiful moments from beginning
to end really make this a candidate for replaying.

What a masterpiece. Co-op games are lacking in the video game market. That's why It Takes Two surprises with the incredible implementation of such a title. 13 hours without repetitive puzzles, environments, dialogs or story. Only some puzzles required a bit of fiddling. Collaboration stands in the spotlight. The story was enough to keep the game's progression from being too boring, but brought up the feeling of clumsily putting things in the way so there's something to do. Still, the dialogue is fabulously written, the various settings incredibly well designed, and the puzzles more varied than anywhere before. Clearly, Hazelight has once again exceeded expectations here.

I had never played an MMO before this one, and I had always felt bad about my lack of exposure to the genre, since I’m someone who’s tried to experience the breadth of what gaming has to offer. The MMO experience is one that has drawn in millions and millions of people over the course of decades, with the most popular games becoming cultural landmarks, so it was a pretty glaring omission, and I was waiting for a perfect opportunity to jump in. Luckily, I had a friend who was one of the “XIV free trial up to the award-winning expansion Heavensward” cultists, and having seen the amazing positive reception of Shadowbringers, I began under his tutelage. This review is just a rough journal of my time in each major release of the game, which at the time of writing, excludes Endwalker. If I end up playing that, I’ll write a review on its own page.

I warn you right now, though: this is the most pointless review I’ll ever write.

A Realm Reborn
I had always heard that the FFXIV community was friendly to newcomers, but to my surprise, there was hardly a community at all. Not in the sense that no one was on the server, but in that I didn’t see anyone speaking to each other. The vision of an MMO hub that I had in my head was that of a bustling marketplace, people trying to get you to buy stuff, join their organization, scam you, any number of things. Instead, I was greeted by a giant cluster of Organization Thirteen lookalikes and catgirls silently standing in a circle around a giant crystal. I did my little starter quests in silence, occasionally intersecting with another newcomer who was doing the same thing, never speaking, just getting through the content as fast as possible. I attempted to follow the story of these quests, but so many were the sort of fetching and “prove yourself by killing a monster” quests that I tuned out of the story entirely. The friend who was serving as my guide agreed that this was the best way to play, at least until you started reaching the back end of the 2.0 content. So, for about forty hours, all I did was mindlessly run from one point to the next, not talking, no story to enjoy, and not enough abilities to have interesting gameplay in the dungeons along the way. It wasn’t exactly painful, the novelty of seeing all the different areas was nice, but these first forty hours were pretty evenly bland for me. However, committed to the task at hand, I pushed forward to Heavensward.

Heavensward
In terms of story and characters, this expansion ended up being my favorite, but it was also when I began to have problems with the learning curve. Specifically, the fact that the game doesn’t provide you with one, in a manner of speaking. You’re put through filler quests for a hundred hours, then into a dungeon with unique boss mechanics you’ve never been exposed to. If players are forced through the main story before they can queue for these dungeons, why do the quests not take the opportunity to teach mechanics? Veteran players swap memes about how terrible sprouts are for not understanding these things, but how in the world could they? Is the best path really to ask players to go look up a guide before even starting the dungeon, ruining any excitement for themselves? As you can probably guess, the raids and high level dungeons of Heavensward were the first time I received player communication of any type, which was usually of the “learn to play” variety. The problem with such statements is that the implication is that I should have already learned to play, not that I should continue the active process of doing so. As I shirked aggro to these players to provide them some downtime with which to consider this paradox, I thought about how there really isn’t a perfect solution to the problem. Some bosses are so intricate that loading up dungeons with simplified versions of individual mechanics isn’t a tenable solution, since the content is designed to work well in repetition. Having to replay a tutorial even once when playing a game in NG+ can be a drag, so redoing mini-tutorials hundreds of times could be terrible unless executed flawlessly. Even so, there are a lot more fundamentals that could have been included in the normal questline that would have helped immensely. Later expansions would go on to have enemies that use gaze effects and rotating zones of damage in the same way bosses do, but it was too little too late. The only reason I was able to make it through all the early content was because I had someone to explain all this stuff to me directly, and I can’t imagine the flaming I would have received otherwise. I may have even stopped playing the game altogether, which leads into...

Stormblood
This is where people thought I would stop playing the game altogether. The story of this expansion is pretty bad, with the focus falling on characters who are fairly uninteresting, namely Lyse, Fordola, Yotsuyu, and Zenos. The graphics engine may give these characters three dimensions, but the writing certainly doesn’t, and they stay stagnant and boring throughout the entire expansion. Splitting the action between two hubs was also a questionable move, with Ala Mhigo feeling boring and underdeveloped compared to the obvious love that went into Kugane. I wish there was more I had to say about this expansion or its gameplay, but it just felt like A Realm Reborn 2. Bland story content, running from place to place doing stuff I didn’t care much about, a drawn-out introduction to the much more interesting followup.

Shadowbringers
The way this expansion had been praised, you would think it was the best Final Fantasy game to release in the last decade, and I’ve seen it literally described as such fairly often. Some parts were pretty enchanting, and the characters received a notable improvement in their writing. I’m not sure how much I’ll remember of this expansion’s plot in the future, but my crush on Urianger will last forever, and I think that speaks to the quality of the characterization compared to Stormblood. The start of the DLC in particular grips you with one horrific moment that comes out of left field, so from that moment onward, I was totally invested in the story. The problem is, as good as the story is for an MMO, stretching it out over so many hours, over so many basic and mindless quests, the pace flows like a river of bricks. It was like watching a great movie for fifteen minutes, leaving to mow the lawn, watching another fifteen, then getting up and doing the dishes, over and over until the movie was over. It’s not that it makes the story itself bad, but the format is so clunky that it’s hard to stay involved.

Postgame
...otherwise known as “the game”. This is when I started doing the raids and trials I had missed during my run through the main quest. Even though it’s something that should have dawned on me earlier in this process, the same way it’s already dawned on everyone reading, this is when I started to realize that I might be closed off from MMO experience. Even though I was doing these raids, getting better stuff, and chatting with my friend while doing so, I just… didn’t care. I didn’t care about getting better so the parser-users would think I’m the best, I didn’t care about gear when it would be inevitably obsoleted by a future expansion, the appeal of the story was over, there wasn’t any content left for me. Even with thousands of hours of things to do, raid tiers and trials as far as the eye can see, I just did not care. The bosses weren’t as fun as the ones in my single-player action games, there wasn’t the expressiveness of a traditional RPG, I was always left thinking “I could be having more fun right now”. It’s emblematic of the way I approach games, where I’m looking for something focused and direct, not a game that I can get lost in, not a forum for enjoying time with a community or working with a team to get to the top. My goal may have been to get a taste of what it’s like to be into an MMO, but after hundreds of hours spent in the game, the only realization to be had was that there’s a lot more to that experience than just playing the game. You have to find people you like, you have to enjoy the lengthy journey, you have to find some heart in the game that lets you call it home. Even though I had decided to commit my time and energy, I couldn’t just decide to love it.

Post game
After spending all that time with XIV, focusing on it exclusively for a couple months, I was expecting it to heavily occupy my thoughts after stopping. I expected to sit down at my computer and think of something to do, only to feel the pang of wanting to go back to Eorzea. However, this ended up not being the case, and it slipped out of my mind to a degree where I had to google that name just now because I had forgotten it. Honestly, had I not developed such a crush on Urianger, I doubt I would have thought about the game afterwards at all. When the Endwalker trailer dropped, I was expecting another rush of wanting to go back to that world, but… nothing. I’m vaguely interested in it because I dumped so much time into this story already, but I could just as easily read a summary and be happy with it. To tell the truth, I’m a bit sad about how this whole MMO experiment went. I was hoping to open my eyes to a whole new style of game, to maybe find a nice, escapist home I could always go back to, but instead all I got was a reminder of how limiting taste and preference can be.

So, that’s what brings me back to the pointlessness. I played a game for hundreds of hours, and all I can say is “I didn’t like it because I don’t like MMO’s, and that’s fine because everyone has different taste”. At least I warned you, but thanks for reading all of this. I had to get it off my chest after wasting so much of my friend’s time, who explained things to me so patiently. Cherish your friends, everyone.

This game is considered a remake of Resident Evil 2, but it’s not an entirely accurate designation. That’s even when using the term “remake” somewhat loosely, like in the case of Resident Evil for the Gamecube, and the key point to consider when drawing the line is continuity of the core challenge. In the original games, the core challenge is applying character and resource limitations wisely, allocating your reserves in proportion to the difficulty of a given challenge. This isn’t what Resident Evil 2 REimagined is about, but it’s hard to notice that at first. It’s not because of the over-the-shoulder perspective or the enhanced movement, but in the inability for players to wisely invest resources. Similar to Resident Evil 4, this game has an invisible difficulty adjustment system, which secretly changes the rules as you play. I won’t divulge everything it does so you can enjoy the game without being spoiled, but I believe that just knowing it exists will prevent frustration. Resident Evil 4’s adjustments could be handled gracefully with its linear structure and item drops coming from enemies, adjusting your supply levels without interrupting the pacing at all, but Resident Evil 2 didn’t use this type of system. It instead has set locations for items and a small nonlinear play space, so the only place to automatically tune the difficulty was with the enemies. Players in a rough spot may cripple zombies with a single bullet and incapacitate them with four, when a well-performing player may require five and ten respectively. If you enter a new room and intelligently devise a plan, only for it to be thwarted by enemies that are suddenly incredibly durable and aggressive, the difficulty adjustment is why. You have to put aside your frustration and accept that the game is trying to make sure you stay on the edge of your seat, even if it means being unfair. In a genre about making smart decisions, these foggy parameters can cripple the experience.

Since arguments about difficulty can easily be dismissed with a “get good” and it seems like such a minor issue get worked up about, I feel the need to finally show my badge. I beat Resident Evil 2 six times, including a hardcore S+ run with each character, where the enemies are stronger, you can only save 3 times, and have to beat it in two hours. The reason I enjoyed doing all that is the same reason why I said you should know about difficulty adjustment before starting the game. Once the cryptic mechanics are demystified, Resident Evil 2 can be enjoyed as the most cinematic action game ever created. There isn’t a Devil May Cry level of depth, but the reactivity from each enemy in such a nuanced environment leads to an incredibly satisfying gameplay system to master. That’s why I recommend it under the caveat that you give it your full attention over multiple playthroughs. After all, if I stopped after my first run, this review would have ended after the first paragraph.