Final Fantasy XVI: Once More Into the Peak

When words came around that Square Enix had intended to release a sixteenth main title in what is probably the most acclaimed and storied JRPG franchise of all time, the gaming world was put on notice. Outside of FFXIV the series had been in creative freefall for the better part of two decades, with the last unanimously "good" title (FFXII) coming out in 2006. Mishap after mishap, poor writing decisions combined with development issues meant that the legendary series was spiraling towards creative mediocrity. What began in the late 1980's as a dream to keep a fledgling gaming company alive had morphed into a worldwide phenomenon quicker than one could anticipate. Some of the greatest moments, songs, and stories were born by Squaresoft in the 90's and early 2000's. Final Fantasy VI through XII are universally individually respected as some of the greatest titles of all time across any genre. With XVI there were questions, how would the series evolve past XV? XV has its fanbase and their opinions are to be respected, but largely it was panned and unappreciated as it fell victim to a nightmare development cycle and DLC was required to fulfill the true ambitions of the story.

Here comes Final Fantasy XVI, I remember hearing the initial rumors revolving around it and I almost couldn't believe it. I don't remember the exact verbage as some serious time has passed, but the word on the street was that its production was to be helmed by none other than Naoki Yoshida of Square Enix' Creative Business Unit III, and combat was to be done by the man in charge of Devil May Cry 5's action, the most silky smooth the character action genre had ever seen. As a longtime fan and subscriber of the MMO Final Fantasy XIV I was almost in shock, how would Yoshi-P have time to develop an acclaimed and incredible adventure in XIV and then have the time and energy to resurrect the mainline series from its effective grave? I purchased a Playstation 5 in anticipation of this, after the initial trailer rollout and website were released for the game, because I knew of all people that I could trust Yoshida in making a lasting memory out of the FF series. He is a man, with the rest of CBU3 (Koji-Fox and Soken included,) who I trusted more than anything to create a well rounded Final Fantasy experience.

Now for the game itself... though I had initial reservations about playing the demo because I wanted to avoid spoilers, I loaded in and embarked on the two or so hour adventure that serves as the beginning of the game. Initially weary about audio issues and performance on the PS5, my concerns were very quickly waned as I met Clive, Joshua, and Lord Rosfeld. The Game of Thrones influence clear very early on in FFXVI, not only just in the aesthetics and world that Valisthea exists in, but in the approach to quality of realizing a believable and livable low fantasy setting. WIth the demo completed, and my mind absolutely melted at the way it ended, I laid in anticipation of the full game arriving just a few days later... and arrived it did.

What I got in Final Fantasy XVI was genuienly the greatest meld of action, storytelling, music, environmental presentation, and character writing that I could have ever asked for. Beginning with the world, Valisthea is a masterfully constructed dual-continent with its histories carefully created to give each and every nation-state and their peoples their own culture and approach to political and social goings-ons. Reading the FFXVI website before the game actually had come out was a tremendous help to the rich lore within the title, as it lays out the political makeup of Rosaria, Waloed, The Republic of Dhalmekia, the Crystalline Dominion, and most importantly the Holy Republic. Each of these powers are wildly different in the way that they are run administratively, some as a Duchy, others as a loosely allied Republic, and another as a Holy Empire. While these countries are also vastly different in size and makeup, they are privy to a state of Mutually Assured Destruction as a result of beings called Dominants. These Dominants are individuals in the royal families who posses the ability to call upon Eikons, mythical figures of immense size and power who can effectively end conflict in a fell swoop. This is also the fire that begins the conflict of the game as our protagonist Clive Rosfeld does not possess the Dominant of Fire, the Phoenix as the eldest sibling in Rosaria is meant to do. Each of these Dominants are powerful in different ways that bring nuance to their interactions with other nations and combat maneuvers. Surely Titan is the largest and strongest eikon in the Twin Realms... but he is not mobile and deploying him requires a large amount of care. Surely Bahamut is immensely powerful, but can his destructive magicks match the agility of Ifrit? It's with these questions and interactions between the nations of Final Fantasy XVI that such an interesting world is created. These powers differ in how large they are, in how strong their ground millitaries are, but they are at a stand still in their perpetual conflicts because of the power at the fingertips of their royal families. This is what felt so Game of Thrones to me, each country so unique (and a lot of these mirror those in GoT,) but so fragile in the manner of which they combat and invade... I could go on and on about how good of a job CBU3 did in setting this world up, but its already so late and I have more to write about!

The world itself that Clive finds himself is a grim one, and it's here that I would call upon another title that gave me the stark depressing feeling that FFXVI did in its traversal: The Witcher. Now, much of what Clive is doing is trying to restore a hope to a people that are oppressed (more to come on that later,) but the impetus of much of the conflict of the game between the nation states is that a remarkable blight is moving upon their continents, killing their crops and the destroying the homes of those within the affected areas. Like the world that Geralt calls home, much of FFXVI is dark tonally, the medieval setting is already grim as slavery is abundant and there is a remarkably large amount of displaced peoples and families affected by the violence of the heads of state. You are a man who is not respected by much of the world you are interacting with, many of the ruling classes look upon Clive as an outlaw beneath the common man. As he grows and matures, he embarks on a quest with Cidolfus to free the bottom class from their chains of malice that have been placed upon them by the ruling classes. In the world of FFXVI, the oppressed lower class that you spend much of the game assisting and freeing are called bearers, as they naturally have the ability to cast magicks without using crystals for assistance. Its with this prejudice that they are abused, mistreated, tortured, and killed, as the bearers are viewed as freaks and not worthy of being considered as human. Clive, a bearer himself leads a ragtag group of ambitious rebels, along with his ally Cid, to create a world in with the bearers can live as people amongst those not blessed with magic. Thus the conflict within Final Fantasy XVI's story is born, Clive now abandoned from his former state and people by his wretched mother, must unite the world of the Twins under a common banner, as humans. His quest is simple, to remove all from the shackles of class and culture that bind them to hatred. A world in which the bearer is not subhuman.

The writing in FFXVI is careful and deliberate. I've already touched upon the way the world is set up, but the avenue that the story goes through it's extensive runtime is constructed such a way that few games of recent can hold a candle to. I don't like to divulge spoilers are per usual, but I everyday that I wrapped up playing the game I would message my friends who were of similar progress about the twists and turns that the narrative had left us with. This game will make you angry at its villains, tear up with its heroes, and feel general angst at the suffocating world at large. Game of Thrones did a superb job in creating despicable characters from the get go who were easy to hate, and FFXVI picks up on that to the T. You have a general disgust for Anabella, for Hugo, for Barnabas, their motives laid bare for the player to pick apart and challenge. Clive is an impressive protagonist, and a refreshing one in the realm of Final Fantasy as he's finally an adult character. Sure you spend the initial sequence as an adolescent, and it's hard to truly drive home, but it was SO refreshing to have a character this mature in a JRPG that is willling to express love and hate to such a degree. He's a grizzled himbo, a true boy-toy, but he's not willing to depart from nuanced discussions with his foes and turn them into bouts of true malice. There is an eloquence in writing protagonists to be more diplomatic in their dialogue with the antagonists (Cloud in FFVII for example,) but it was marvelous to hear Clive conscious of his guilt, of his actions of violence. In a world as dark as the one in Valisthea, it's not possible to take the road that appeases all. Clive is aware of the blood that was required to be spilled to realize his dream of uniting the land under a common social norm. It is here that my comparisons with the Witcher continue, in true Geraltian fashion Clive doesn't shy away from the tough decisions he has to make, there is no "happy ending" and he is aware of that. There are moments in which he bursts into a fit of rage (one early on in the demo for example,) and you as the player cannot help but empathize with the amount of anger you would likely have in that situation as well. This is unique in my now storied history with Final Fantasy as a franchise, this was the first time I could see a protagonist truly come to terms with the tragedies of the dark reality their world was now engrossed in. Clive does what he can to help those in need, but he's not afraid to combat those who are actively bringing the world down. He is compassionate and respected amongst his peers and friends like Jill, Gav, Cid, and Charon, but a nightmare in waiting to his enemies.

The cast outside of Clive were crafted into a resounding success, beginning with the Archduke of Rosaria, Elwin Rosfeld himself who is one of the first characters you meet, all the way to the minor characters you meet and leave right before the game ends. There are a plethora of NPC's both in the villages you pass through (Martha and Lu'bor for example) that will stick with you and interact with Clive multiple times throughout the story, as well as his own group of outlaws that journey with him and share the same hideout. These characters like Tarja, Midadol, Otto, Charon, Gav, Jill, and Harpocrates to name a few will stick with you throughout a treacherous and longform journey. These aren't just people that stick around you and interact with you for their various gimmicks (Charon is the shoplady, Harpocrates the loremaster etc,) but occasional party members and frequent requestors of Clive's aid. They don't all just have one sidequest either, often multiple through the long journey which helps make them feel a real member of the family. Much like Mass Effect and its loyalty mission in ME2, FFXVI has a questline for seemingly every NPC Ally that Clive has, which can seem like it simply just inflates the runtime, but rather produces a believable relationship between player character and his constituents. I felt an actual connection to everybody that calls the hub home and helps Clive along on his mission, and for a game this long and in the weeds, that is a huge +1 to its overall composition. Without going into it too much, it's revitalizing to have a character like Jill in a Final Fantasy game. Their "romance" is written so well, and in true Final Fantasy fashion she is FAR from a damsel in distress. She quickly became one of my favorite female characters in a video game that I've played, and the emotional maturity and power in her story had me clutching my tear strings at a few points.

Now that I've covered the story, world, and characters, I would like to get into the fun parts! Oh my GOSH is this game beautiful. Unfortunately brought down a peg by its jail sentence on the PS5 30 FPS, this game in its entirety is eye candy... from the characters to the fights to the environment itself. Now with the investment that this game probably gets from Sony and Square Enix, a budget to make all this possible isn't too surprising, but this game contains a vast amount of cutscene time done in the legendary Square visual fidelity fashion. Characters are downright beautiful, portrayed in a way (much like FF7R) that they feel and look real. Anytiime I got a closeup of Jill, Clive, or Cid I held my hand on the screenshot button waiting to take a visual imprint of their beautiful faces. I don't know if this habit will ever die, but I'm still shocked by games nowadays and how far they've come in their portrayal of characters. Not only did they look good from a clarity standpoint, but the design choices in making each character stand out from one another was a resounding success. I loved Dr. Castlevania Clive, and the azure clothing that Jill wears. Cid dons a regal outfit befit of a Chad, Gav a orange/grey shirt that works great for a mysterious rogue, Dion a beautifully piece of armor and long robe to match his suave and regality. Outside of the characters, the fights were a thing of beauty. Multiple times during the eikon battles and Clive 1 on 1s I had to pause and let out an audible "Holy S***" at what I was looking at. Games have come so far, but Square realized this to the best extent in FFXVI. The world, grim as it may be, was visually striking as well. In the cities and the hub world, I found myself just simply strolling along with no end quite a few times to the world and beautiful Masayoshi Soken soundtrack. Be it Uematsu, Hamauzu, Shimomura, or Soken, this series has been blessed to have such a rich group of talented composers. Again as a fan of FFXIV, I knew Soken would do a good job scoring XVI, but I was blown out of the water by his soundtrack at multiple times... all the way to the end credits. This title is a home run and a half for so many reasons.

The day has finally come, from the evolutions begun in FFXII, into making Final Fantasy a series with a pure action game. From 2006's beloved entry on, Square has toyed and shifted more and more into making Final Fantasy no longer a turn based ATB action series, but one where the fighting got faster and faster with each title. FFXIII was a vast mis-step, effectively able to be played by only pressing the space bar, FFXV another step toward action with some unfortunate funk to it, and FF7R even more action intensive with a cool pause menu to select spells and items. All this considered, the series had never completely made the leap until it tapped DMCV combat director Ryota Suzuki to be in charge of crafting a captivating combat system for the sixteenth game in the Final Fantasy franchise... and lo and behold he did it to an absolute success. This game plays a lot like a DMC or Bayonetta, but with even more tools at your disposal that fit that of the FF Intellectual property. You need to make use of parries, perfect dodges, and quick attack windows to stagger your opponents and rack the damage up when you can. Clive not only has his sword and trusty pup Torgal in every encounter, but is able to utilize the power of the eikons he claims along his journey. Beginning with that of the Phoenix, Clive can use fire spells as part of his combos. This never gets old, even after playing north of seventy hours of the game. I loved mixind and matching the eikons I used, the spells that come with said eikons, and the combos you can craft by simply feeling out the game. I would love to go into greater detail about which eikons make for the best combat experience, but that would include spoiling the story content. I will say, in most titles that have them I don't find myself going outside of my general wheelhouse to fight super bosses or optionial hunt targets, however I managed to clear every single one in FFXVI. I didn't care if I was twelve levels down, I was having such a fun time with the combat system of this game that I wanted to play with it as much as I could. I would scream in joy after defeating the S Rank hunts with how far removed from the recommended level I was. This game just feels so smooth and the tough battles are beyond rewarding when you are done with them. Combat was so DMC down to the Devil Trigger button, that I could simply not give it up.

As a fan of Devil May Cry, as a Game of Thrones, as a fan of the Witcher, as a fan of Final Fantasy XIV, as a fan of Final Fantasy, and lastly as a fan of good video games... Final Fantasy XVI is one of the greatest video games I've ever played. A frontrunner for GOTY of 2023 quite easily for me, and an instant inclusion into my personal Top 10, I am still in disbelief that it is over. For anyone with a PS5, and anyone with a PC when it inevitably launches there, I strongly recommend Final Fantasy XVI.

PS: I apologize at the likely high amount of syntax and diction errors in writing this review. I almost always do my writeups immediately after completing the game and this one was long and it's very late at night here! This is probably one of my weaker writing jobs from a skill standpoint, but I have so much to talk about and so little patience to wait to do it!

Wow. We have officially reached peak character action, and I'm not sure if it will ever be matched.

I'd been waiting for Bayonetta 3, like zillions of others for years upon years, starving for anything more than the short teaser trailer they showed what felt like eons ago. When we finally got the Project GG fakeout trailer, I jumped for joy, screamed, did a jig, and kept waiting. To say that there had been expectations for the Umbral Witch's third entry would be an excessive understatement, as the first two beloved entries delivered something so right to gaming that was foreign to the medium. Bayonetta is an unapologetically raunchy and sexy character with a sense of humor derived straight from her Devil May Cry DNA, with an arsenal of moves that would put a Joestar to shame.

Now to the game itself. I expected to have a good time, playing through a campaign and getting on to the next game, hopefully satiated with my favorite femme fatale. What I didn't expect was to have an experience where I'd smile from ear to ear the entire time, laugh out loud to the point where it hurt, and tear up upon the games conclusion. Bayonetta to me was always a "fun" series in games 1 and 2, and even the anime, but it dawned on me with 3 that it was more than a game, but a memory to hold and take with me. What Platinum never fails to do with their character action games (MG: Revengance, Nier: Automata, Astral Chain) is keep the gameplay loop fresh, evolving from entry to entry with something new yet familiar so fans of the companies attention to making action fun feel rewarded and continiously interested in what is yet to come. In Bayonetta 1 you become familiar with Witch Time and ultra tight dodging and 1 on 1 combat with humanoids and massive angels alike. Bayonetta 2 begins to think bigger with its addition of the demonic elements into your routine arsenal. Bayonetta 3 takes the series' formula and supersizes it, giving the titular witch an entire arsenal of Kaiju-demons and weapons to bring with her in battle. I LOVED this, as it gives FULL agency to the player in making Bayonetta the game THEY want while keeping the game in its base alive. I played with Bayonetta's legendary pistol as my main weapon and toyed around with secondaries. Going from the G-Pillar (which is an awesome name) associated with Gomorrah, and the massive trainsaw associated with totally not DoomTrain from FFVIII. Being able to summon Doom Train, Gomorrah, and Madame Butterfly in combat whenever my meter was high made fights feel epic and grandiose, as they should with the series. Having the ability to jump between my fast combo and a heavy hitting G-Pillar or Trainsaw (I forgot the actually name but its a chainsaw made out of a train so I'm running with it) felt great because I could weave in and out of combat and do big damage when I wanted. With each area you visit, you gain a new demon to summon and weapon to use, meaning that your experience will vary from location to location and you'll have the time and availability to try out each set. Platinum's been phenomenal with player agency ever since Kamiya began his journey on the DMC series, bringing with him total player control at each step of his character action expertise (and even outside of it, like with Wonderful 101.) In all, Bayonetta 3's combat feels like a player sandbox, throwing enemies at you and letting the player decide on the best route to take to remedy opposition. This made the entire experience a delight, as I didn't feel hamfisted into playing a certain way.

Many games have experimented with adding new playable characters to series with a beloved protagonist to varying success. Metal Gear Solid 2 had the infamous Big Shell fakeout where players discover they're going to play the majority of the game as the freshly minted Raiden instead of the heroic Solid Snake. Yakuza 4 which I recently played has the player split between four characters, the last of which you play being the Dragon of Dojima. Devil May Cry 4 drops the hot headed and bragadocious Nero on the player, a cringe, young, unfamiliar blonde with an attitude and a whole lot to say. Speaking of cringe, young, blonde, and hot headed... Bayonetta 3 introduces a new playable character: Viola. Viola is cringe, there's no way to go around that, but remember Luka in Bayonetta 1? In 2? He's as cringe as they come, but with Bayonetta's self aware satire and humour, it fits like a glove. She's annoying... but it's alright in the scope of the game at hand. Tasked with saving the multiverse, she is mostly inexperienced and unready for the objective at large, which is perfectly contrasted with the aged Bayonetta in her third attempt at righting the ship. I didn't love her playstyle at first, but the totally not Nero stand-in, grew on me as I played and eventually graced into the game's last chapter. She uses a katana, with one of her special combo's being practically Vergil's judgement cut, coupled with the familiar (if you've played Bayonetta 1&2) Cheshire summon who can aid her in combat. With no built in witch time mechanic it was very tough to understand how to play her at first, as you're more or less implored to take a Metal Gear Rising approach to fighting. Making use of perfect parry's allows for witch time with Viola, which admittably was rather tough to master because her block button is the same (when double tapped) as her gap closer, meaning that players must use dilligent timing and patience to master the art of not taking damage. While I ultimately enjoyed Bayonetta's gameplay WAY more than I did Viola's, I applaud Platinum for the risk they took in making a bold and brash character like Viola with a completely different moveset.

Difficulty is an interesting concept with Bayonetta and Platinum at large. The concept of an action game being hard is largely subjective, as reflexes and attention span vary from person to person. I found Bloodborne for example to be, generally speaking, quite easy, which is the opposite of what many others will say. Now, I'm not alone in that quip but it is just a sign of how the opinion of a reviewer in stating a game's difficulty should always be called into question in regards to the reader's own experience. What is easy for me, may be hard for you. Now I've played many Platinum Games' games at this point... starting with Bayonetta (and going even further into all the DMC games if you take in Kamiya's repertoire) into Rising, Automata, Astral Chain, Bayonetta 2, into Bayonetta 3 so I'm quite familiar with the way these games are meant to be played and the requirements for dodge timings and damage windows. I found Bayonetta 3 to be quite easy, not necessarily because of the difficulty of combat in and of itself, but the tools Platinum gives players to just up and complete the game. Gone is the increasing cost of restorative items that grew out of DMC and in is the ability to purchase healing/power items ad nauseum. I LOVED how I had a safety net of healing and damage items in case I ran into difficult enemies. Did it make the game easier? Sure, but did it make it "less fun" because I didn't have to spend as much time grinding in enemy encounters so I understood each and every witch time moment? No.

The story is light, but who really cares? It's serviceable enough in the nearly 14 hours it took me to complete and gives moments of comedy and sorrow to each of the series' mainstays. Enzo, Rodin, Jeanne, Luka, and Bayonetta all return with a new look but retain their unique brands of exposition. Jeanne is beautiful once again, Bayonetta is even beautifulist (that is a word I will only use in regards to Bayonetta,) and Viola was quite astonishing as well. You'll travel from location to location and meet some very intricate characters that all will repeat familiar stories and moments, with their tragic downfalls becoming a trend to the game's climax. I don't want to spoil anything but damn, if I didn't say that the Chinese location had one of the most eye-candy characters in gaming history I would be lying. Also, riding a train on the Great Wall of totally not China will shooting cannons at a Kaiju before summoning a massive Demon to have a bubblebath fight is an absolutely unforgettable and unbeatable moment in gaming history.

Music has only improved in each Bayonetta entry with 3 being the complete peak of the series thus far. Bayonetta's theme is incredible, and Viola's totally not Paramore combat theme is going to be a popular listen for me in the weeks to come. The motifs/themes in each level and at familiar moments of the games are excellently laid as is usual with Platinum, adding even more to the basically flawless game at large.

I know there was a lot of controversy about it, and I did really love Hellena Taylor as Bayonetta but man... Jennifer Hale is gonna do what Jennifer Hale is gonna do. She does a PHENOMENAL job voicing Bayonetta, even as an Canadian-American. She crushed it, and I'm really happy she's who Platinum was able to get.

I knew this game would make me happy, but I didn't know how much. I didn't know this game would make me cry at the ending. I didn't know how much Bayonetta as a franchise meant to me. I didn't know this would make me reflect on my experience with Platinum and Kamiya to this degree. Bayonetta 3 knocked every single expectation I had for the Umbral Witch out of the park to never be seen again. Bayonetta 3 is peak, peak gaming, peak action, peak Bayonetta. This is a MUST play to fans of the franchise, and of character action games. Platinum went all that and then some to make this feel like the ultimate experience.

This is the Dark Souls of video games.

A grander take could probably be made than what I will do, but what has been said in the discourse of Dark Souls and the Fromsoft Formula over the last twelve plus years that hasn't already been mentioned? This game is difficult, but not for the reasons I like games being difficult. In Bloodborne and Sekiro, for better or for worse respectively, I felt like I was being challenged upon the contents of me versus boss, or me versus world enemy. Previously, my encounters with the toughest elements of those games, Elden Ring included, boiled down to my skill against a meticulously crafted combat experience. I like that to an extent. You don't necessarily feel cheated if you lose, rather pursuant of a methodology to improve. In Bloodborne when I found myself fail-rolling against gravestones when fighting Father Gascoigne, I told myself "Git gud" and was able to overcome the fight after a few more tries. In Sekiro, I bit my lip, yelled an obscenity, and buckled down my parry timings to win the duels. In Dark Souls? I threw my hands in the air like a confused ape wondering what jape had wandered upon my nape.

I named my character Chunky Thomas... there is no real etymology here, but after playing thirty-three (afk time included) some hours of Dark Souls I think Clunky Thomas would be a better moniker. I came to the conclusion after defeating the lava-spider boss (leaving name out as a spoiler) that Dark Souls did not feel more difficult because of its bosses than other Fromsoft games, but rather that the game was more difficult overall. This is due to a plethora of reasons that can be mostly boiled down to archaic overworld design and resoundingly poor hitbox tech. Now when I speak on the overworld design I don't mean the environments, because for 2011 they are phenomenally detailed and deep, but rather the corpse runs, enemy placement, and contrived sequencing of "objectives" to name a few. Legendary Youtuber VideoGameDunkey's "Thank You Dark Souls" quip isn't just a silly gag, it's a great dig at the cheap tricks this game pulls on the player when simply trying to enjoy going from A to B. Blight Town should be called Indict town because of how much of a sour mark it jumps the game off with. Nothing says "fun" or "weehee" or "yahoo" like jumping from the top of a cliff down to the bottom while fighting through enemies that you can't see, corners that abruptly end, easy places to trip and fall and have to restart progress, and status effects galore. Blight Town is simply the easiest place to point a finger at, but this happens in multiple places in the game, most annoying when you are trying to take on Dark Souls' large collection of bosses. Corpse Runs are no stranger in FromSoft games, as Demon Souls had you do it from the BEGINNING OF EACH LEVEL, but with Dark Souls they are incredibly sinister. It sucks to die in any game sure, but you kinda know it comes with the Fromsoft territory. Though it's unfair to judge games after their successors made positive changes, I really missed Elden Ring's statues of Marika and respawning you right near boss rooms. There was a boss (named after four enemies,) that I'd die to and have to make a two to three minute trek each time across some seriously dangerous ground to even make it back to the boss arena. Now I coulda "gotten gud" and beaten the boss much earlier sure, but having to retrace my steps to that extent soured my experience greatly. This happened time and time again, where even if I wasn't dying to the boss a lot, the amount of times I did coupled with the journey back made the experience excessively tiredsome.

I remember playing Dark Souls as it released in 2011, I didn't quite understand it but I had a blast playing through and observing my buddies back then on their PS3 take on this mysterious world for the first time. Ever since watching them play, I tried it myself a few times and it never took because of its aimless exploration and lack of upfront story. I was the Fallout and Elder Scrolls kid that liked having a game that said "story here" and "objective roughly in this area" and I haven't really ever gotten over that. It's the way my brain works and has since, I operate very well in a space that offers me a general sense of direction in lieu of a formless endeavour. Do I like games and media without a said "goal?" Absolutely. Minecraft is one of the greatest games of all time in my opinion. Even in another Fromsoft title like Elden Ring, which is one of my favorite titles ever, I enjoyed it despite not having a clear "go here" mantra. But what Elden Ring did do that Dark Souls didn't was give you even a modicum of a hint. I get that the sequences of Dark Souls could be formulated on one's own after a good amount of careful deliberation, but I simply don't have that time anymore and my brain sure dislikes the conflict of trial and error in such an unfair world. In Elden Ring I could explore an area and not no where to go, but it would be okay because the general placement of enemies was less opressive and I could traverse the world with ease. In Dark Souls, getting from place to place is a hastle and a non-guarentee in the manner of having your souls/humanities survive. I loved looking at the world but had a strong disdain for moving through it. Another dislike I had in this regard was not having each bonfire be a warp spot, the decision making is clearly to make the game feel less "safe" but to me felt more like a headache as a result. Not having any kind of map or reasonable connection between realms of interest is inexcusable and dejecting toward a players time and wherewithal.

Combat felt jank, full stop. This is absolutely a product of the time but woah nelly did I have a rough time understanding the ways I was perishing to enemy combatants. I ran a full oonga boonga strength build, as I often do in games of this nature (or most action/RPG's) and attempted to operate under my knowledge of enemy moves and roll timings. I quickly learned after a few bosses that this wasn't going to work the whole way through, as each boss seemed to have their own hitboxes that were made up and impact upon my hp that didn't matter. It felt like I was always in 2-3 shot range, and that was frequently tested because the bosses would have an AoE that got me in the hitbox despite nothing indicating that I was actually hit by the bosses move physically. Many a time did I think (and this happened especially in the DLC) that I had succesfully timed a roll out of a move just to look up at my health bar and see a declining yellow bar make an appearance. Like I mentioned above, this is definitely due to the age of the game and hitbox technology not being near what it is today and in Fromsoft's magnum opus Elden Ring, but it feels awful to go back and experience. My takeaway was that I felt more cheated by encounters than I felt that I was playing the game poorly, I didn't get good feedback on many fights as to what I could do better, moreso just what I could survive.

I know this title is intentionally cryptic, and I also Know that my favorite Fromsoft releases are guilty of this too, but the lack of any cohesive story element left a sore spot for me. With the intro cutscenes big lore dump and some self searching on the good ol' interwebs, I was able to put together what the story means and why I was doing certain things towards the end of its narrative, but it could have been told in a much better and easier to parse way than what it did. Fromsoft seems to have learned this with time; as Bloodborne drips the narrative in front of the player a little more with Gehrmann, Sekiro is completely narrative driven, and Elden Ring has SIR GIDEON OFFNIR, THE ALL KNOWING giving out his lore dumps and information on the Elden Lords. Not having any of that in Dark Souls made it unfortunately difficult to know the "why's and what's" of my actions as the main character.

Dark Souls wasn't all bad, but it felt bad for me to play. I thoroughly enjoyed the aesthetics and tropes that would make their way through Fromsoft's games to follow. Locations like Anor Londo and the Royal Woods were really neat. Everything felt like it was meticulously designed to craft a once lived in fantasy realm. Bosses, while they didn't play so cool, looked real cool and had that charm to them that makes the series and company as special as it is. The music for these fights, and especially for the final (which was hilariously easy) boss was a good touch to make them feel memorable.

Dark Souls is clearly one of the more influential games of this milennia (Blade of Miqullla?) but it feels dated. I can't recommend this game to anyone because of its dated map design, hitbox tech, and lack of narrative cohesion, but I do understand why it exists and why people have such an affinity to it.

P.S: I began this review at around 4AM, thinking I'd offer a few sentences and then depart to bed, but it's nearly 5AM and I think I overstepped my intentions.

Working titles for my review included:

1) "God of Snore" - Reason not used: Taken
2) "God of More" - Reason not used: Could imply the more was positive/good
3) "Teen Angst Simulator" - Reason not used: Everyone was angsty, not just Atreus.

Used Title: "A Series of Unfortunate MacGuffin's"

I bought this game almost entierly out of curiousity, one of my more controversial gaming opinions and reviews is that of the renewed God of War (2018,) which I played because I wanted to get a gauge on the game that defeated Red Dead Redemption 2 come year's end at the Game Awards. In my experience I found GoW to be a mostly bland, monotonous, and unadventerous experience. I didn't get the same buzz or energy others did from the axe-wielding combat, I didn't enjoy the consistent babbling from Mimir and crew, and I certainly did not have a positive takeaway on the MacGuffin nature of the plot. I'd hoped, in playing Ragnarok, that the extremely high acclaim given to the game by critics when review embargo ceased meant that Sony had remdied the issues I had with the previous title. Now, I know that The Game Award should and have zero bearing on my enjoyment of a game, but it's clear that the two frontrunners for the big daddy of them all "Game of the Year Award" will be Elden Ring and God of War Ragnarok. Curiosity killled the cat, and maybe it killed me too. What I found almost immediately in Ragnarok was that I'd be getting the exact same takeaways and experiences that I had in the 2018 game.

Starting it off with combat, which is admittably a little less... boring as it was in 2018 but comes with its own grievances. Gone is going 75% of the game with the same weapon, as you start the game with Kratos' famous Blades of Chaos and pick up a third weapon down the line (redacted for spoilers.) This is nice because it gives you a little variation in terms of visual flavor for the majority of the game but this fell completely flat for me as the enemies, from start to finish are pretty much all just "bullet" sponges for lack of a better term. There's a certian flare to the combo weaving of different weapons and taking advantages of status effects, but at the end of the day you'll have to pump so much time and effort into enemies to kill them, that I abandoned trying to make it look snazzy. Basic enemies aren't too bad but once you get into the special/mini-boss fights it gets real samey, real quick. Monotonous combat was a compaint I had in the 2018 release that really took up a lot of my opinion on the game, and unfortunately it's back in Ragnarok. Not only does Kratos' arsenal not feel very different overall, not enough for me rather, but again the enemy variation and recycled encounters greatly holds this game back just as it did in the predecessor. I recently played Bayonetta 3 which had the enemy arsenal/variety to make this work, but in God of War every gameplay sequence in a realm can be boiled down into such: Shimmy through a tight loading screen corridor -> solved light puzzle that requires throwing axe and using some kind of time magic -> fight same three to five enemies that are dropped into area -> shimmy loading screen -> repeat. These enemies change per location but the cyclical nature of fighting them, their spongey health bars, and responding to their same mechanics got reallllly old real quick.

You switch between Atreus and Kratos in Ragnarok for level sequences and unfortunately the combat doesn't feel very fresh in either when you change between. Atreus' gameplay loop is even more restricted than Kratos in the first game and his equivalent of Spartan Rage, while stronger, is just a swap-in move which doesn't even do the Nero-Dante dynamic that every character action game should do in making playable protagonists FEEL fundamentally different so controlling them comes off as fresh. My ultimate qualm with the combat, which is also backlines my qualm with the game itself, is that it doesn't feel fresh enough. The combat feels the same, the Hollywood-board-room-type dialogue feels the exact same, the light unecessary puzzle solving feels the same, the missions/levels feel the exact same. What's new with God of War that's supposed to push this series from Great to Fantastic? I don't know, I can't answer that question because I surely didn't find it. The narrative that is meant to wrap up Kratos' Nordic saga felt bland and broken at times, leaving me to constantly wonder the where's and why's of my actions. I get there is an over-arching narrative at play leading to Ragnarok itself, given the actions of the previous title, but I think the game could have done a much better job sequencing its filler-story content. Missions just felt like they were happening to give characters exposition, rather than move the narrative forward and do so. Final Fantasy X does a great job at this, giving each character their own arc while actually advancing the stakes and story at hand. Wakka, Kimahri, Auron, Tidus, and Yuna all have their character examined and challenged while keeping the focus on stopping Sin. Ragnarok had me wondering why I was taking Freya, Atreus, Sindi, Brok all on their own respective adventures that didn't really add to the sequencing of the game in a manner that made sense. With each of these characters you'll find either Kratos or Atreus running the same combat-puzzle-loading screen gambit in an attempt to achieve something or retrieve an item that is to help them in their final huzzah. Doing this over and over and over just felt... bland. God of War Ragnarok for much of its runtime didn't feel like an epic adventure across one of the cooler pantheons to exist within dated mythos, but like a buddy cop comedy where the entire exposition was to retrieve MacGufffin's.

This game honestly just reminded me of the MCU, specifically speaking the Avengers film franchise. Avengers is a media phenomenon that took the world by storm, utilizing a carefully crafted pattern to set up a plethora of Marvel heroes/villains to have them culminate in an epic cinematic experience sure to take the world by storm, and it did. Marvel/Disney spent the time and monetary effort setting up this big "Huzzah" that had never been seen before in the world of film. Almost everyone I knew that was a casual movie watcher, thus excluding those who I would call "Movie hipsters" like myself, were jumping at the seams to speak on the magnitude of the avengers and its fiscal achievements. People were completely enamored in what was a fairly basic story. How do you react when so many around you are speaking in praise of something that you view so mediocre? Surely the right thing to do is not speak ill on something in the world of media that others hold high, because a film series like the Avengers is entierly subjective when it comes to taste, but it's reasonable to have the discourse with those that investigate your dissent with the series further. Thus is my issue with God of War 2018 and Ragnarok. Almost everyone I know that has played the game(s) has loved them, critics have been raving over Ragnarok as soon as reviews were allowed to come out. I've had to step back from most discourse because I don't want to be "that guy" but this is a review space and this is my review, so I feel alright stating how I feel. God of War is that Avengers to me, it's something that can only be made possible by having a lot of money to make and afford the resources needed to make it "work." They both are spectatcles, never shying away from thrusting intense CG and big moments at the consumer. They both utilize top tier composition, sound design, and voice acting to create a complete experience, free of any hitch. God of War was a completely polished game, I had only one minor bug, and it ran phenomenally on my computer... but can that alone with a mediocre story and samey combat make the game "good" for me? The answer I found, to be no it cannot.

There are some things God of War Ragnarok does well, but in the theme of things being the "same" to me as 2018, they were the same things that the game before it did. Christopher Judge is a great Kratos, matter of fact the entire cast does an amazing job acting out and making their characters mostly believable (shoutout SungWon Cho,) but it's almost... too AAA. The game itself is beautiful, I played performance mode on my PS5 and it truly was a crisp experience, taking full advantage of the graphical prowess of the console and my 4k monitor. The game was eye candy, but to that point I felt myself let down with these amazing vistas because of the soulless gameplay loop I knew I was about to embark upon. Animation was great, again I had that "wow I remember gaming twenty years ago moment" whenever they panned to Kratos' face and you could see his emotion vividly. I also love how they took full advantage of the Norse pantheon, including smaller characters like the Norns, Sigurn, Angrboða, and many more to the bigwigs like Freya, Fenrir, Tyr, and Surtr. I loved seeing/hearing a character speak and opening up their wikipedia page to remind myself about their lore. I used to love doing that in my youth, and God of War Ragnarok was a great reminder of doing that.

Lesser issues I had with the game include one, the assumption that you as the player did all the sidequesting and optional content from the previous game. It was a little confusing when Kratos/Atreus were referencing things they did like "Hey remember when we did this" or explaining to another character of their actions and I'm sitting there completely confused because no... I never did that and I had no clue what they were talking about. Secondly, the camera was just downright poor in most combat and even in cutscenes. There was quite a lot of forced panning that takes away player agency from experiencing what they want in a game. Maybe this is part of appealing to the most common consumer, but it was more offputting to me because I am overall not a fan of being told how to interpret or take away scenes from a narrative experience. I would be trying to walk through a scene or turn to see the entire environment at large to only be met by a slow moving camera and a locked screen.

Ragnarok largely missed the mark for me, really feeling like a DLC/Expansion of the 2018 game without enough variety/change to rectify the previous mistakes for me. There were new vistas and characters, but it felt like the fundamental same experience for me, and I'm glad I didn't wait four years between these two releases. Odds are, fans of the 2018 game will absolutely love Ragnarok, and dissenters will not. I cannot recommend God of War Ragnarok, especially for $70, unless you're set on the experience and getting the most out of its sidequesting and characters.

Armored Core VI: Possible Game of the Year

I've written a few times about my introduction to From Software and how despite playing Dark Souls way back in 2011, the company's trademark difficulty and cryptic narratives didn't grasp me until Elden Ring in 2022. I, like a lot of people in the zeitgeist know Fromsoft as the "Souls" guys, but therein lies a deeper origin, one that involves Armored Core.

I never was a Playstation kid, we had a way to play PS1 games on our Emac growing up, but it wasn't until Final Fantasy 7 Remake that I used my hard earned adult money to buy my first Playstation, a PS4. As a result I missed out on a lot of pivotal games and moments in the history of 3D gaming. One of these titles was the seminal cult classic mech franchise: Armored Core. Coincidentally outside of being really into Zoids as a wee lad and taking part in the Transformers media wave in the late 00's, I wasn't really into Mechs or Mech related media until I got into Code Geass in 2019. I knew that Japanese gaming, anime, and film loved the mecha genre but wasn't cognizant about the when's, where's, and why's. There were two names that stuck out through time and the aforementioned Armored Core was one of them, the other Zone of the Enders. Through conversation with my friends over time I learned about the importance of these two and how they diferred. Kojima's ZoE was balls to the wall action that utilized speed to create immersion, whereas Armored Core was the nerdy stat reliant customization game for those who were into the minutiae of mech creation. I decided that with the announcement of Armored Core VI, off the heels of From's insane post Dark Souls 2 run, that I should embark into the legendary mecha franchises. Earlier this year I sat down and hooked up my Xbox 360 to finally play ZoE and it was... alright, so I then set my eyes on Armored Core VI.

I watched quite literally one gameplay trailer before the game dropped and decided it would be something I was into, it was the one featuring the smelter demon, wait wrong game. It was the one featuring the Cleaner Robot with the furnace on top of it, acting like a Blowhole. The richly detailed factory landscape coupled with crisply quick movement was an immediate sell for me, and thus I anxiously waited for the release of Fires of Rubicon. What I got on release was the exact kind of game I'd wanted, Fromsoft's punishing combat with a richly customizable path through completion. I had a grand time comparing my progress with friends and family and how we approached each fight. While some of my buddies went with the grounded tank approach, others went with a speedy in and out build. I waxed poetic about the glory of the double Songbird (mounted Howitzer-esque cannons) and its ability to stagger bosses with ease. This approach to gameplay, where everybody has their own build that works for them is awesome and I heavily commend From for making a game that is so uniquely accessible in its player agency, because I'm all about player agency. The fights are hard, and the bosses are extremely punishing in places, but there are so many avenues for you the player to bypass them.

I struggled with one of the games first real bosses for anywhere from five to six hours (Balteus for the experienced,) because I wasn't respecting the multiple avenues of approach to defeat him. I was getting greedy, thinking I could brute force my way through the encounter like it was Dark Souls, but no I had to strip apart my oonga boonga playstyle and approach it with a Bloodborne attitude, dancing with the boss to learn and react to its every move. Once I got the patterns down on Balteus, I felt like I understood the game much better. You can create a build that allows you to take more hits, but ultimately you'll have to respect what the encounters do to you, and the limitations that ammunition and only having three repair kits has in store. With my double songbird, double gatling gun build with a heavier mech body, I created a mech that hit like a bruiser. I dealt heavy stagger damage with the cannons, and could melt damage during said stagger state with the barrage of gatling rounds. Creating a strategy that worked without the assistance of looking online through my own determination was greatly rewarding. I more or less used this with some slight variations all the way to the end game and again would like to shout out the devs for allowing this to work.

Fights in Armored Core VI were unique in the fact that they were so wildly different in terms of mechanics but generally the same degree of difficulty that prevented anything from being a cakewalk. From the first main boss to the ultimate encounter, I felt greatly engaged to study boss patterns and timings in my immediate introduction to each fight. Whether it was AC on AC action in which you were in a duel with an enemy that could heal and mimic your own actions like expansion and shoulder firing, set piece bosses in which you had to utilize a specific item to succeed, or just a good old fashion Fromsoft rumble in the jungle against a larger menacing foe, nothing came easy and battles could only be won through hard work. Outside of the one I mentioned above, I don't want to give anything away as to remain spoiler-free, but the boss at the end of chapter four was really dang cool and reminiscient of some of the fun I had in Dark Souls 3. Fittingly enough, the last boss of the game also felt like a callback to some of From's most glorious moments. Outside of bosses, the world fights were the exact right amount of difficulty. You are plopped into a world with a finite amount of ammo and often tasked to take out jobbers and tougher enemies alike, but rarely did I feel like it was unfair. Armored Core VI is checkpointed well enough that should you be stressing your limits on resource, you'll be reimbursed for your efforts upon completion of an area. There were occasionally moments where I felt like the standard zone enemies werew winning against me simply because of a war of attrition, particularly in a "protect the objective" battle near the end of the game, but everything felt manageable as I reassessed my strategies and approached with a new state of mind.

The real unsung hero of this game was the environmental design and oh man was it absolutely incredible. From the moment you step foot on Rubicon, Fromsoft wasted no time in demonstrating the innate talent of their art teams and their ability to craft unforgettable and jawdropping vistas every chance they could. Numerous moments throughout my playthrough did I exclaim "this is really f* cool" to the friends I was streaming it to, stopping to stare at the great expanse of the delapidated world at large. Fromsoft have been the kings of ambience for quite some time now, with each title that I've enjoyed since DS1 in 2011 having that "Fromsoft Moment" where the landscape appears after entering an area and speaks volumes about the world and story at large without saying a single word. As chapter four wraps up and chapter five is introduced, there is a moment in which this happens that had my jaw near the floor, a significant factor in my remembrance of this game. Science Fiction often lives and dies upon the world it exists in, where effectively translating the nuances of the diverse locations is imperative to helping the titles stick out amongst the plethora of others within the genre. You remember the diverse locations of Star Wars, of Mass Effect, of Cowboy Bebop because of the way they are communicated to the audience. Armored Core VI with its Fromsoft DNA follows suit in offering enriching and memorable moments throughout the entire twenty hour runtime via optimal enemy placement, gorgeous vistas, and intricate cityscapes.

While Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon is surely not for everybody, it checked the fast paced and difficult action game box for me in the absolute best way possible. Engaging fights, a rewarding customization system, and incredible environmental design all are elements that make this one of the best new games I've played in recent memory, and a hallmark of the mecha genre. I strongly recommend Armored Core VI to anyone who is a fan of Fromsoft, science fiction, and/or action games that require intense focus from the player.

Super Mario Bros. Wonderful

I've played a lot of games this year, Backloggd says sixty five to be exact, ranging in terms of emotional scale from the ever-so-jubilant We Love Katamari all the way to the anxious and heart wrenching Final Fantasy XVI. Throughout all that I'd played, I felt like I had hit every nook and cranny of gaming that I'd set out to touch since I started the year with Crisis Core all the way back in January. There are a few titles I was looking forward to wrap up the year, but I was satiated with my enjoyment of the year thus far. On a whimsy before the release of Like a Dragon: Gaiden, I ordered a copy of Super Mario Bros Wonder. This was a game I had told at least five people who asked me if I would play it that I hadn't planned on it because the 2D Mario's weren't necessarily my cup of tea.

Like seemingly everyone in the gaming world I grew up around Mario. I sat on the ground watching my brother play through SM64 and Sunshine on our CRTV, constantly laughing and smiling in joy at the fun little Italian man doing his fun little thing with all his triple bing bing wahoos and all. We had all the Smash Bros., all the Mario Karts, the Mario Parties... we weren't unique in that aspect but the point is that Mario effectively was present throughout my entire childhood. When the 3D Allstar collection released during the COVID times, I sat alone in my apartment in North Dakota and smiled from ear to ear reliving my childhood in the first two 3D titles and then playing Galaxy for the first time. To add, Odyssey is one of my all time favorite titles. This all written to drive the point home, Mario to me is like a warm glass of happiness. Each time I load up anything Mario related, be it a party game, a 3D title, or a 2D sidescroller, I find myself simply happy to be alive.

With my new copy of Wonder and some time to kill, I booted it up and reconfigured my Switch audio to work through my PC, jumping into the 2D world not really sure what to expect. I saw the Direct where Mario turned into an elephant, I guess that was all I knew... and I can't say that was the most exciting aspect to me. Immediately though, I felt the Mario Magic. What I got in Wonder's short runtime was a game that set what it needed to do perfectly. To start, I've had a bone to pick with the processing power on the Switch in several games I've played recently, most critically was Master Detectives Archives: Rain Code in which the frame dropping and aliasing nearly drove me to a fervent rage. In Wonder there is none of that, rather an engrossing colour palette rich in every single detail you could want out of a Mario game. The bright hues of the greens and yellows speak volumes of jubilee and warmth into a game that is intended to exude such a feeling. The darker levels bloom with intriguing blacks, nefarious greens, and harrowing fires that dimly guide you along your journey. This game is beautiful full stop, and it runs perfectly. I don't like that this is something I have to worry about with a console in the current year, but it is, and Super Mario Bros. Wonder passes with flying colours. The six worlds you pass through are all resoundingly different in their thematic presentation, a showcase at the environmental design expertise that Nintendo retains in house.

Another element of Wonder's full suite that I fell in love with was the audio design. Though Martinet has sung his swan song as the red capped runner, the new talent feels just the same. Outside of our main protagonist, the sounds of each level across the varied worlds was appropriately done to make them feel unique from one another, and also fun within the moment. There lies a level early on in which you run along musical blocks as a cacophony of flowers sing you a song, I cracked a smile and trotted through like I was the king of the castle. This is just a short example of what is in store in Super Mario Bros. Wonder, there's a plethora of moments that remind you why we all cherish the franchise so much. This game and Mario in general is simply life-affirming in the its presentation, especially in the aural landscape. Whether in the Desert, in the Petal Isles, or stopping by the Fungi Mines, you are accompanied by a musical counterpart perfect for your journey.

All this being said, the real success of a 2D Mario title is how it handles simple 2D platforming, a genre it helped pioneer and innovate way back in the eighties when the famed plumber first hit the (small) big screen. It's safe to say that Mario still does the running, jumping, crouching, and scurrying he has always done, but in Wonder you have a few different avenues to take to complete your journey. Enter badges, a unique ability system that gives the player some agency into completing levels and obtaining the Wonder Seeds necessary to advance and beat the game. These badges range in relevancy/necessity from things like having a vine that attaches to walls when you hit the trigger button, to being able to jump hire with an additional float at the top to having a magnet that snatches normal and flower coins alike. I used the aforementioned jumping coin for most of the runtime, outside of levels where a specific badge was required, because it augmented the 2D scape in the way I felt most driving. I appreciated this quite a bit, as I feel like 2D games often can fall into a realm of monotony or awkwardness in the way that they force the player to navigate. This is Nintendo and Mario though, so I should have known better, as they manage to innovate both in 2D and 3D realms with every new Mario titles in ways that reinvent the genre.

Level variety and design both were clearly handled with legitimate thought and care throughout the entirety of Wonder. Though levels often felt familiar, no two truly felt the same. Of course you're utilizing the same platforming mechanics to survive hazards, but there was a significant degree of brainstorming put into making things feel different. Many types of levels exist: Racing Challenges, Enemy Elimination Challenges, Jumping to the Beat, Boss fights, Simple Platforming, and they're all spaced out with effective perfection. At no point did I hit a rut of levels within a world that felt too much like another. Whether I was tasked to run, swim, or fly, I was fighting a new enemy or using a new power to succeed. Mario as a franchise has always been about creating the new out of the familiar, and making sure that no two moments are specifically the same, and that nail is hit with tremendous precision once more in Wonder.

I absolutely recommend Super Mario Bros. Wonder to anyone with a Nintendo Switch, an affinity for Mario, or a liking for 2D Platformers. This was a title that managed to make me smile through every moment I spent, and to me that gives a title an invaluable level of credential.

The good, the bad, and the... Starfield.

I was a believer, I really was. I didn't dislike Fallout 4 as much as most of my constituents and peers, and decided to waste none of my time on Fallout 76. Despite going on a somewhat downward trajectory since the release of Oblivion, I had faith that with the Microsoft purchase and subsequent fiscal investment that Todd "It Just Works" Howard was going to be able to Houdini an amazing game out of effectively thin air with Starfield. I, like many others waited with bated breath as the marketing wave for Bethesda's newest IP in decades pushed into the gamingsphere. WIth every announcement, every showcase, I became more and more invested in the world I would soon embark in. Science Fiction when done right is an exploration of limitless possibilities, of worlds and galaxies foreign to the audience waiting to be freshly explored. This is what my dream for Starfield was, and did I get it? The answer is simply: not really.

Fallout and the Elder Scrolls succeeded in the moments in between, starting with the trademark cold opens (as seen in Oblivion, Skyrim, and the Fallouts) and continuing on to your first moments of freedom. Remember in Skyrim as you escape the executioner's block in the first thirty minutes of runtime, how the entirety of the land the Nords call home is open to you? You have a loosely defined main quest to embark on, but there is an entire world and path to craft between you and your destination. Nothing is forced. Once you began to creep into the stories of each respective game, it felt like there was a limitless possibility of what you could find on your way from Point A to Point B. In Fallout, walking through a simple cliff face could see you crossing path with an entire colony of people with the name "Gary" all yelling their name as they attacked you without rhyme or reason. In Oblivion on your way walking through the countryside could find the player interacting with a formidable prince of an otherworldy deity.

Starfield however, it never had that... magical spunk that the aforementioned titles did. In Starfield you spend the majority of your time doing two things: chasing down quest markers and flying to said quest markers. In theory this isn't a terrible idea, effectively the other titles are all about the same thing, but the issue in translating that mantra to Bethesda's big 2023 title is that there is no in between. Now much against my chagrin this is my biggest gripe with the game, the inability to have a reason to explore and the lack of reward of doing so. As I mentioned previously, in the "good" Bethesda titles I found myself overjoyed at taking the long way because it meant that I was likely to find myself distracted and taken on a path to a babbling brook of curiosities. In Starfield, this doesn't exist as it takes the form of grav jumping from system to system (as your ship's capabilities allow) with complete lack of middle ground. You fly from your starting point to your destination, there is no random occurrence, there is no vista to pause at along the way, there is no mysterious force that will stop you in your tracks to explore. Not having anything to look forward to in my active journey in a Bethesda game just felt... wrong. They'd always been the antithesis of the open world epidemic as sprung by Ubisoft, which had towers to climb and random outposts to capture. Bethesda titles championed the random and gave you a reason, completely unprodded to explore. That wasn't present here. It's hard to stress how strange it felt getting an objective for a faction that was taking you to a world a plethora of lightyears away only for it to require the same sequence of system jumps that the twenty quests before it did, the only variance being the end destination. As I mentioned previously, this was my greatest and gravest letdown with Starfield and an unfortunate result of a scope that didn't quite meet expectations.

There's another avenue of complaint to my issues of exploration and scope, and it is in the worlds of Starfield at large. My next statement may gesture itself as hyperbole but I assure the reader that I mean it in sincerity: I found there was genuinely nothing interesting about the planets in Starfield. Outside of legitimately well constructed cities like Neon and New Atlantis, the planets you do land on for side and main stories alike felt completely lifeless. Recycled clear procedural generation made for planet after planet of monotony with no motivation to poke around in other than completing a flora & fauna scanning log and collection of materials for resource crafting that I also found rather unengaging. Starfield didn't position itself to be No Man's Sky in that aspect and the expectation of the general public for it to be so is completely unfounded and misguided. But in the times I did find myself off the beaten path on the seemingly endless worlds at large, it was simply a nothing burger out there. I'd look out at the vast expanse of the freshly landed-upon planet and continue straight on my way, as there was nothing for me to poke around and find.

This takes me to my next issue with Starfield, and I promise this review is not just a laundry list of problems I had with the game, as I am giving it a favorable score. I touched previously on the great job the (recent) Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles did, and that was give the player an organically engaging approach to side content in the ways of questing and base building. Starfield sort of just... dumps everything on you pretty much right away. Quickly jaunting through New Atlantis (the game's starting city and most important location,) dumps more quests on you than you can count, and they are almost all unprovoked. By walking through each district the activity log grows with people you need to speak to and places you need to find as a result of NPC's conversating about them to eachother. This in particular felt strange to me, you were no adventurer in need as you were in the Elder Scrolls helping the woman in her painted world, you were just an eavesdropper who heard a character complaining into the void. This didn't necessarily impact the quality of the sidequests, but beginning the game with four factions dropped on your and a laundry list of people I needed to seek out before even beginning the second main story quest was numbing.

My favorite part of this game was easily the factions and side content that it throws at you, despite the awkward nature that you first interact with it. I loved the way the factions worked and varied from one another. If you wanted to dabble in humorous corporate espionage, you had the Ryujin Industries questline. If you wanted to embark on a well thought out space pirate adventure (and who doesn't,) you had the Crimson Fleet storyline. Players looking for an excellent piece of science fiction with an incredible twist, there was the UC Vanguard. And lastly for cowboys, you had the uh, Freestar Collective. Each of these brought something new to the questing and enjoyment table that the other ones didn't, and I found the bulk of my seventy hour runtime was spent with these storylines and the missions throughout. I greatly enjoyed the variation of writing styles, mission structure, and combat that were involved and showed that Bethesda in all of its recent faults still had some incredible scenario writers on retainer.

I left out a faction, and that one would be "Constellation" AKA the main story questline. Because of the nature that Starfield drops its side content on you, I made sure to do as much as I could of it first before engaging with the main scenario. This meant for practically fifty hours I had gone without talking to the members of my crew patiently waiting for me in New Atlantis to set the events of the story in motion. By the time they had asked and instructed me to explore the galaxy, I had already done so. I had done things that led me to interesting storylines and met many interesting people. I'd been to the other two major cities in the galaxy, Neon and Akila City. I had already travelled from one end of the explorable system to the other and had weapons that could one or two shot most opponents. The point of the above is to effectively say that the main scenario felt diluted after doing the side content. I felt like I was saving the best for last, but in reality I had set aside the most mediocre and uninteresting narrative in the game which is... unfortunate to say the least for what is the main story. Maybe unfair because the tertiary questing in the Elder Scrolls/Fallout series was also probably more "fun" than the respective narratives of each game's set path, but the gap was just too large in Starfield. I didn't feel a connection to quite literally anyone in the faction that you fight tooth and nail with to protect. Sarah had a moral compass and ability to annoy you more than Fi did in the original Skyward Sword, Stroud was fun for the few missions you had with him but ultimately was a rich playboy, Sam was a boring version of Irvine from FFVIII, Vasco was a robot doing the recycled dry humor robot schtick, Barrett was supposed to be someone we cared about, and Andreja was just kinda... there. I couldn't empathize with a group like Constellation and their ongoing mission if I couldn't connect with any of the group. I felt a connection to the plight of Martin Septim and Jauffre in Oblivion, I felt a connection to the issues plaguing my father and the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 3, I didn't get that in Starfield. Every time I walked into The Lodge (Constellation's hub area,) I did a side eye at those around me. I just felt... 100% detached from a group I was meant to empathize with. I know they're completely of different strokes, but its impossible not to think of a series like Mass Effect and how it quickly got you to care about each of your party members in its expansive sci-fi narrative. Bethesda's never been about that to the same degree but man, it just makes you think.

Honestly thinking about it too, you just straight up don't matter in this game other than an advancement to the plot. Once more, I don't really expect too much more from Todd and his expertise but there came a point towards the end of the game where I read some testimonials from my brother and others who were also playing and came to the question: Am I really present in the story? I don't have the opportunity to say anything very interesting, I'm quite literally just the vehicle for a questline that chooses you as important within an hour of the game. I'm not the dragonborn, I'm not the son of an important figure reshaping a wasteland, I'm not the father of a child whose importance is likely beyond my scope... I'm just a character who touched a rock. Not the end of the world, but it made me ponder my actual intentions and level of engagement with the world(s) at large.

Speaking of engaging... you know what's really hard to engage with even with an Nvidia 3090 GPU? Ding ding ding... it's Starfield! Performance in this game on a good rig is straight up inexcusable and is responsible for a large degree of my detriment to this game, even more so than the previously mentioned dissent on worlds, questing, and player agency. I have a good rig, I'm fortunate enough where I'm at a position to be playing with effectively top of the line hardware... I should not be able to see Steam's frame counter register sub thirty in combat towards the end of the game. This is not okay. First person shooters are not fun below a certain threshold and Starfield managed to reach it. One of my favorite gaming experiences of all time, Bloodborne, saw its personal rating fall by quite a bit from me because it was locked at thirty on the PS4 and that was a third person action game! Starfield is a first/third person shooter in which aiming is... important! Movement and tracking is... important! Running around Akila City and feeling like I was in slow motion because of how astonishingly low the framerate was felt like a slap in the face to me as the player. Even Cyberpunk ran better at launch... on worse hardware!!! Sometimes I would find reprieve in smaller zones inside cities or at space stations where I was able to hit a reasonable seventy to eighty frames per second, but these moments were remarkably few and far between. The majority of my seventy hours of Starfield were spent sub fifty and I can sacrifice framerate SOMETIMES for fidelity and beautiful vistas... but that was not present in Starfield. When it was running well the game looked good but not great, not worthy of the tradeoff that came in the form of gutter-level performance.

The framerate issue made combat tougher than it should have been. I didn't expect fighting in any way to be the best part of Starfield, as it decidedly isn't in any Bethesda game, but it was another element of this game that added my ultimate takeaway of "meh" as I saw the end credits roll. The guns didn't feel very interesting to me as they were all variations of familiar Fallout formulas but without the nuance and strategy of V.A.T.S. You use shotguns, snipers, pistols, melee, and lasers to cut your way through unimportant humanoid and arachnid enemies alike just as you did in Fallout. Aiming though was a nice callback to the pre-Oblivion days where it felt like a complete dice roll. I laughed at the amount of times I'd have my reticle on enemies only to whiff shot after shot after shot because the combat mechanics of Starfield deemed a miss necessary. I was never frustrated... just confused.

Combat leads into another point of contention I had with Starfield: space flight. Not only is the shipbuilder resoundingly obtuse and unfair in the way it gates creativity, but actually employing the ship you carefully crafted in a combat scenario is a most woefully uninteresting and grating endeavor that I could have easily gone without. Dogfighting is a tall task to make work, but EA and Pandemic studios were able to do it with Battlefront way back in 2005. It wasn't complicated, as it was a simple follow and target system, but it was fun. Starfield's space combat requires the player to face slam three attack buttons that control cannons, missiles, and lasers, until however many ships you are forced to defeat have been silenced. The tracking system was a dud, and I didn't want to chase the skill tree to make it any better as I knew that would take away my enjoyment of more tangible and useful things like the persuasion system or on-world combat. If you accidentally ported to a system that had space pirates or enemies target you upon entry and didn't have enough ship parts to heal right away, you were effectively S.O.L. Enemies have a tendency to fly right over you and evade your targeting, forcing the player to spend an awkward amount of time just so they can recalibrate. Weapons had an annoying level of recharge period that took the active interest and engagement levels of the fights completely away. For something I really wanted to love and have that simply living-out-my-Star-Wars-dream-jubilee with, I was rather against ever partaking in. All in all, I stopped having fun with a lot of the appeal of the title real quick.

Starfield was a game meant for a lot of people, it is Bethesda's first big IP in too many years to count and unfortunately, it missed my mark by a long shot. What I had hoped would be a game to rival FFXVI for my GOTY spot, is really nothing more than another candle in the wind. Starfield is a game somebody is going to enjoy, but not me. If I want to build outposts and get some sort of vindication in doing so, I could play Satisfactory. If I want to dogfight, I'll just jump on Ace Combat. If I wish for an engaging first person shooter, I can get back into DOOM. If I want peak Bethesda, I have my Oblivion GOTY edition sitting on the shelf next to me. I can't recommend Starfield and it breaks my heart. It's the first time I've played a Bethesda game and truly felt indifferent. I reached the credits and I didn't clap, I didn't smile, I did the worst thing imaginable... I asked my friends to play League of Legends.

I literally don't know what to say... Sonic is... Sonic... Sonic is... good?

The clock reads 4:25 AM and I have just completed Sonic Frontiers, I'm listening to the end credits theme for the second time in a row, I'm oddly emotional, it's Thanksgiving and I plan on spending it fully alone, listening to a lo-fi R&B song about Dr. Eggman. This is the state of things and I find myself oddly sentimental about Sonic of all things. This is like the one player on your favorite sportsball team who was on the team for all of its bad years, and finally got his big break and won it all after a decade plus of mediocrity. Sonic Frontiers is like that one musician that put out years and years of passable music at best, but finally got it together for that classic album. Sonic Frontiers is the Sonic that everybody has been asking for... since the dawn of the series.

Like a lot of people I've dipped and dabbled in Sonic as a franchise, with the bulk of my playtime coming in Sonic Adventure 2 Battle for the Gamecube (Recently completed on PC this past year) and while I loved that game, it was for a lot of the wrong reasons. Outside of the stellar OST, the game didn't play all that well... but it was at least fun. It had it's moments from the initial Escape from the City to the Knuckles rap songs to the "WE ALL DID IT TOGETHER" from Miles "Tails" Prower, but it was rough, writing was below acceptable, and the Chao stuff is not as fun as you thought it was, but like I said... it was fun. Does Sonic Frontiers fix all of that? The answer is no, but it does remedy enough. Sonic as a series strikes a weird chord because it's undoubtedly meant for Children in a way that other juvenile franchises like Mario and Kirby aren't, it found itself nestled within "cringe" as a draw. Mario and Kirby aren't cringe, they're funny and wholesome (respectively,) and bring about different swaggers in their branding and presentation that have led them down their path through superstardom. Sonic has taken an even more youth-friendly approach to its games and media, which might be at the risk of how quality its forray into gaming actually is. You can't make Sonic a serious character, and they don't really try. He cracks jokes that are unironically not funny at all, but somehow... the cringe makes them work? The entire crew of Frontiers is pretty dry... but I found myself smiling sometimes? The Silly Dr. Eggman-Sonic dynamic is the same as it was way back in my childhood, Knuckles is still as stupid cool as I remember him, and Tails is uh... Tails!

Some issues include the pop-in of various courses and world elements (SkillUp did a pretty good video on this) which is in my opinion, inexcusable, but didn't impact my overall gameplay in the end. It was just kinda funny to be running along the countryside and see random loops and jump pads come into view randomly.

I don't want to bog down on the negatives too much before going into the positive but it should be spoken about. There is a narrative in Frontiers and I have to hand it to them, it was the most invested I've been in a Sonic story since, ever, and actually was pretty appropriate for the series. Given the nature of Sonic, blowing out a full story that measures like other games isn't really possible, because that's not what people play the series for. They want to go fast and do things, not sit down and watch cutscenes where the characters go and do what heroes in an epic story do, there's seperate media for that. Frontiers gives exposition to the struggles of a pre-existing civilization that has seemingly been wiped from the planet inhabit, and what the Sonic team must do to prevent that from happening again. I didn't feel bad per se for the previous society, but I did collect that they were a victim of a tragedy that I was motivated to prevent.

The vibes of Sonic Frontiers are immaculate. The first trailer I saw of this game didn't necessarily sell that idea too well, as it felt like they were really trying to "BotW" the Sonic franchise, and while that isn't really untrue, they did it in a way that works for Sonic. Gone is the mostly linear level design of previous Sonic games in favour of large open world missions that are filled with incredible vistas and a plethora of things to do and accomplish, enemies to fight, and allies to converse with. I never, ever, thought I'd have that "Witcher 3" moment that I had in Skellige in Sonic where I would stop running around like a buffoon and just take in the sights. They nailed the post apocalyptic meets Sonic that they set out to tackle so well. While the worlds aren't really teeming with life, they have a suave to them that makes them feel great to just run and run and run around in. Sonic Team accomplishes the sense of scale of these worlds, encouraging the player to trot in Sonic's trademark red shoes around this world with sky-high structures and well designed flora.

Mechanics of Sonic Frontiers aren't too different in the end from other Sonic games, as you're running along the same speed boost squares and jumping off jump pads, but that's honestly alright, the game does enough things differently that it doesn't matter in the end. While you spend a majority of this game in the open world segments, the Cyberspace areas that you use to get resources to advance the main story were pretty neat and a nice ode to Sonic of years past. These are completely linear levels that see you run and jump in isolated levels like the famed Green Hill Zone and Chemical Power Plant (among others.) They don't occupy much time, and beating the time/ring challenges was quite easy, but were a nice change of pace from the open world courses and challenges.

Music man, this might be the biggest surprise for me out of the entire game. I remember Sonic Adventure 2's soundtrack quite fondly, as I still to this day play it quite frequently, but I didn't know if Sonic Team had preserved that commitment to making the sound of their games as good as it was in Adventure 2. I can't even put into words how happy I am to report that the soundtracking of this game across the board is nothing short of phenomenal. From the ambient/light orchestral sounds of running along the countryside, to the drum and bass/dubstep cyberspace courses, to the metalcore of the boss fights, I was head bopping and messaging everybody I knew about how great the music was. I'm going to be listening to these songs for a loooooooooooooong time. I'm kind of against writing about music for the most part because it's so subjective, so I won't do that here other than to tell the reader to listen to the soundtrack if they can (on the condition that they don't intend to play the game, otherwise they should experience it there.) This has easily catapulted into one of my favorite OST's of any game... ever. Recency bias be damned.

It's not perfect but damnit Sonic really nailed this one, my 4/5 stars signify a hope that Sonic will continue to take risks and go down this path of intricacy and trying to do something new for once. The writing wasn't great, and Sonic doesn't change enough in its core gameplay loop (like a Mario does,) to make this game a must play piece of history, but I had a lot more fun than I ever could have imagined.

This review is probably riddled with typos, but sometimes that's what happens when you defend Sonic from decades of your own criticism at 4:50 AM on Thanksgiving. On behalf of Sonic Haters Anonymous, I am sorry.

I strongly recommend anybody who is willing to step out of their wheelhouse to play Sonic Frontiers. The fresh soundtrack, beautiful atmosphere, and enjoyable gameplay loop (heh) makes this Sonic's best entry, and hopefully a sign of things to come for the Blue Hedgehog.

"Don't say stuff like that, it's depressing"
- Sora Kingdom-Hearts (2013)

Two weeks after the day I began the game, I have finally finished Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, my most anticipated game of 2024. What I imagined would be my surefire GOTY runaway pick, with Final Fantasy VII Remake being a game I beat three times, ended up being something I couldn't even smile at in completion. The ramifications of a changing games industry on Square Enix have been plentiful, with a large creative downfall since Final Fantasy XII hit the late-stage PS2 in 2006, the series has had a handful of ups and a plethora of downs. For every Final Fantasy XVI or VII Remake, there were three FFXIII's and a Crisis Core in tow. Quantity beseeched lack of quality, and the legendary fervor the series had invoked for decades previous had largely escaped. With the aforementioned XVI and VII Remake, it seemed like Square had finally righted the ship, creating action-rpg experiences with their familiar franchise that were quality in both narrative and mechanical scope... so what happened with Rebirth? I will divulge below.

I'll start with the good, and to give credit to the Rebirth team there is quite a bit of positives about this title in its entirety. The most immediate and obvious boon to Rebirth and the legendary world of Final Fantasy VII is... the world itself. Shortly after the completion of chapter one the game opens up to a faux open world (in reality, this is open zone) that beckons Cloud and the rest of Avalanche's splinter cell to roam across it. Throughout the fourteen chapters of the game the world and environment are thrown at the player to ooh and ahh at, beautiful beyond words especially in contrast to the 1997 title. Historical moments from twenty seven years ago are brought into HD in a manner that not even I could imagine, with my mouth agape at so many of the backdrops and cities recreated within Rebirth. Familiar places (of which I shall not divulge in respect to spoilers) blew me away. For a game that was developed effectively in four years, it is almost impossible to believe how hard the team led by Naoki Hamaguchi must have worked to not only create, but faithfully bring back to life, a world that was rich back then into the modern gamescape. As I motioned throughout Cloud's journey and came across familiar sites, my brain superimposed the 1997 titles' pre-rendered backgrounds and polygonal Cloud in front of me. There's a significantly delicate line that had to be walked across to be faithful to what was originally imagined and entered into the annals of media history by Yoshinori Kitase while also putting together an engrossing and interactive world for the zeitgeist of pop culture, and yet they found success. Colors pop, the world is filled to the brim with flora, fauna and perfected asset-placement to make it feel lived in. Each biome/locale is visibly different from the rest, granting a linear benchmark for players to cite where the memorable moments of their journey lie and how far they've come... it's impressive and one of the better done worlds that I've experienced in recent memory.

Character writing remains another highlight that carried over from Remake, with some of the original titles' most heart-gripping and serious moments taking place in Rebirth. The nice thing about having a thirty plus hour experience and the events that took place after Cloud joined the squad in Midgar is that the party is very familiar with one another. Barrett takes a more mature role, often playing the voice of reason to Cloud's ever-growing disillusionment. Aerith and Tifa become best buds gushing over the blonde bombshell's buster sword skills, while also careful of his Sephiroth-borne fragility. Red becomes a trusted confidant, friend, and much more than the lab-rat you find him as in the tail-end of Remake. Couple these in with new crew additions like Yuffie, Vincent, Cid, and Cait and you've got a colorful crew (mostly) ready to save the day. They all play off each other well too, keeping the focus on the effectively apocalyptic nature of the world they're in but not allowing the fear and anxiety to overwhelm them, often quipping with one another on their route with jokes and aimed gags. The lightheartedness of the in between moments in Rebirth gave this game legs that are very hard to convey without voice acting and simply as text upon a screen. Aerith, Red, Cloud, and even asinine characters like Cait are legitimately funny throughout this title. My only real gripe about the character writing is that Yuffie, a completely optional character in the Original FFVII talks WAY too much about Materia and how EVERYTHING has to be excused for her involvement because it could result in a cool-hip new materia for Wutai. That got old real quick, but thankfully tapered off in the game's final few chapters. There were a few moments where the tear ducts wanted to rev up, all moments that originated in 1997 but didn't come to emotional fruition until 2024. Moments like these drive home how special this remake series is, not only to FFVII itself but also for the history of gaming at large. The ability the Rebirth team has to bring these special scenes to life is going to do a lot for people who have grown up knowing Cloud and the gang for as long as they've been around.

Per usual I won't speak on the greater narrative at hand, but I do strongly believe it does a great job in not just remaining faithful to the original vision developed by Kitase, but expounding on the landmark moments as well. As I touched on in the previous paragraph, the VA work and modified writing a great job on their own, but the longform dedicated cutscenery is the right hook to the emotional network of Rebirth. You can tell this game was expensive to develop for a lot of reasons, but for the sake of this point its most evident in the advanced effort put into the CGI. I was yet again pausing ad nauseum taking screencaps of characters faces, beautiful backdrops, summons, cool moves, and epic fights. Because everything looks so damn good, it makes the moments that were so narratively impressive in the first title even more so in Rebirth. Character deaths, story arcs (Red's and Barrett's in particular) are tear-jerk extravaganza's because of the visual sheen that everything has.

Other miscellaneous congratulations to this game are in order for having an actual enjoyable card game (the first since Triple Triad in FFVIII) in Queen's Blood, and for also having one of the best introductory chapters in any title that I’ve ever played. To echo the former, I didn't realize how cavernous the minigame content would get within Rebirth, but Queen's Blood kept going, and it felt better and generally more fun with the more cards I got. I found myself restarting matches less and thinking more creatively against advanced opponents, it was cool!

Unfortunately that is where the good within Final Fantasy VII Rebirth generally stops for me, in the Final Fantasy VII of it all. The moments they re-created and breathed new life into were f** awesome, but what the team added and engulfed the title into was largely fluff work that waned my enjoyment of Rebirth greatly.

There's a real power in having a concise game, in a linear narrative or a controlled game that beckons the player to complete it in a structured manner. Now if you've read my reviews thus far this may seem like it combats my affinity for player agency, but it really doesn't. The best games are once that allow players to meld their playstyle to a journey that doesn't waste their time or ask them to embark upon completion of side content that exists without point. My favorite Final Fantasy titles are FFX, FFXVI, and FFVII Remake... some of the more "linear" titles that the series has to offer (XIII was not good, I choose to forget about it.) These three games push the player through loss, intense conflict, entire character arcs, and changed worlds without forcing the player into sidequest hell. This is where Rebirth falters so greatly that I could hardly believe what I was dealing with, even so much to think I was being pranked early into chapter two of fourteen. I rolled my eyes so hard that they almost fell out of their socket when nobody's favorite AI Chadley mentioned the "TOWERS" that Cloud would have to find across each region to map out the other sidequest chains. You go to a tower, of which there were probably six to eight for each of the game's major regions, and these towers would shine light on the location of special fights, lore spots that decreased the power of the area's summon, protorelic locations that involve a major sidequest line with a secret boss, and scavenging hunt locations. All of these suck by the way, none of them were enjoyable.

The Ubisoft-ification of the industry at large plagues open world titles, forgoing the legitimate interest these massive lived out zones can have in favor of map markers that are nothing more than things to complete. You backtrack, climb, hide, slide, and glide all over Final Fantasy VII Rebirth just to tick a checkmark and get on with your marry way. Where XVI and VII Remake succeed is that the only side content that involved, are sidequests of which there aren't really that many. People had a qualm with the volume of XVI's side quests, but Rebirth's feels as if it were tripled, especially with the length that these have. It was fun to become engrossed with the populous of these new locales and fulfill their requests as you do in Remake, however the vast majority of these end with you fighting some big bad monster at the end to right all of their wrongs. This got old REAL quick, as you enter a new area ready to become engrossed in the legendary narrative and beautiful world just to be met with a litany of orange "GO HERE FOR TOWERS" and green "MONOTONOUS SIDEQUEST" notices with a full on checklist to work through as soon as you arrive. My major qualm here is that there's a legitimate power into letting players breath and become involved in the world that has been meticulously laid before them. When I get to [insert location] I want to be wowed by the overwhelming forest and beautiful greens and blues that bring it to life. I want to meet the characters that will guide Cloud along his journey and the troubles that are soon to follow before I'm beckoned to engage with recycled mechanical content that feels more like a chore than a game. I wouldn't've had as much of an issue with this if it was lower in volume or didn't persist for as long as it did... but for ten of the games first twelve chapters (2-11,) I was doing a thousand yard stare as I powered through tower after tower and fought fiend after fiend to quell whatever concern villager after villager had. I became tired, and that's something that let me down more than anything else with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

And while I'm complaining about the Ubisoft plague on Square Enix' household, can we talk about those Moogles? like... what is this? Why is this? Who is this? Remember that one story of the Composer for the Resident Evil Dualshock edition who gave us the butt trumpets because he convinced everyone at Capcom that he was deaf, but he actually wasn't and had absolutely no idea how to compose video game music? Do we have a certain situation with the design of the moogle here? Moogles by the way were another genuinely awful minigame mechanic within Rebirth, forcing you to round up five or so moogles into a round pen while they throw a cacophony of mysterious attacks at you. Cloud does this inside of a moogle chief's mushroom house while nightmare fueling music plays. The hero of a resoundingly serious narrative in which the fate of the world as we know it and the entire population within is on the line, is running in circles pushing these Lovecraftian creatures together so he can buy some... books? It sucks and it isn't even the worst of the side content that you as the player are asked to complete because it holds rewards that make you and your party stronger.

The other is the completion of the protorelic questline, rewarding you with the ability to transmute top of the line gear and a summon that is stronger than most of the ones you'll receive. None of these protorelic questlines are fun, and there's one again for each major region that Cloud finds himself in. Four times the player in these areas will be asked to engage with a certain minigame to get closer to retrieving a protorelic. In the first area this is Queen's Blood which is... doable. In the second it's Fort Condor, raise your hand if you had ANY fun playing Fort Condor in the 1997 title or in the Intermission content for Remake. See? I don't even need to know who you are, what you look like, or where you are to know that ZERO people in the world are raising their hand. With Fort Condussy in mind, another region asks Cloud to learn how to play Battle Bots to obtain this gear... for what reason? Couldn't tell you! Is it thematically relevant to the narrative or world at hand? No! Is it fun at all? No! Does it make you, the player, feel like you've used your time accordingly? Absolutely not! But hey, there's useful gear hidden behind this questline so you better do it! The worst offender doesn't materialize until the last chapter of the game in which you are asked to play "Cactuar Crush" with a goblin named Kid G. Do yourself a favor right now, if you don't care about a minor sidequest spoiler, and look at what Kid G from Rebirth looks like. You'll want to wish you never read that sentence. Cactuar Crush is a minigame in which you have to kill a certain amount of nobody's favorite Final Fantasy recurring Cacti in a restricted time span. The kicker is that these cactuar have varying resistances that force the player to switch up their strategy to combo and kill. In theory this sounds like an engaging minigame to take part in, perhaps getting creative with movesets and attack combos. In reality though you're using Yuffie and Aerith to frantically take out these repulsively loud enemies in an awfully short period of time, stressed to hit a score that is definitely too high for the amount of time given and the ease it is to be docked points when you're hit. Add the awfully repulsive volume and frequency in which these cactuar make noise and you'll wish it was never a part of the game. That's my take on sidequest and tertiary content of FFVII Rebirth. You could offer the rebuttal to the above of "just don't do it," but there's unfortunately a sizable amount of useful material, gear, and experience stowed away within.

Not far removed from the amount of fights that these minigames and secondary content throws you into is my qualm with the combat and weapon upgrading at large within Rebirth. Final Fantasy VII Remake largely got it right, with fights that could be repetitive but it was pretty well split between humanoid enemies within Shinra and fiends that were found within the world. Bossfights weren't recycled for the most part, and they weren't perfect, but they were doable and outside of the Rufus fight... pretty easy to get through on your first go. Rebirth flips that one on its head and says "how about we bring a lot of those boss fights back, make you fight the same people two, three, maybe four times, and make the combat harder just because." Too many times to count was I getting hit by room-wide AOE's that I had to pre-plan for, of which could wipe my party to zero. Too many times were Barrett and Aerith being targeted by moves that they legitimately could not dodge out of because their i-frames don't exist and their rolls take them three feet one way. You'll get hit by everything and it'll hurt. Now I beat Remake three times, zero of those on hard, but I never felt that the game was too difficult. I didn't per se with Rebirth either, but every boss fight took WAY too long. Enemies felt like sponges and the stagger/pressure conditions on most of these boss encounters were infuriating. Add that into a reused offering of the special foes you fight, the frequency of which you do so, and many of these fights having pause points where you can't do damage because the boss needs to get a voice line/cutscene/move in, and you have an exhausting endeavor. That's my major gripe with this title, it's exhausting in all the wrong ways. I don't have an inherent issue with long games, pointing at Red Dead Redemption 2 and Persona's 4 and 5 for example. What these games do is give you ample moments to rest between monotonous moments of grind or boss-fighting. Rebirth throws it at you for effectively the entire ninety some hour runtime. Fights are long, against bosses and world enemies alike, and you never really feel... strong, an issue which may sound doltish to complain about but damnit after spending the entire first game being a badass SOLDIER with a crew of badasses, I want to feel like a badass! There was never a point in which I felt like I was amply handling world or story enemies with ease, despite being appropriately leveled. Sometimes you do just want to gun down a room of Shinra soldiers and get on with it, you don't always need to hit Yeoman First Class-Kun with forty buster sword hits to fell him. Simply, I felt like you as a powerful character who is tasked with destroying one of gaming's most sinister villains never actually feel as strong as you should and it removes some of the buy-in I had to the narrative pacing of Rebirth.

Another element to this game that made the character power of this game feel off was the way character levelling is done. Gone is the "yeah that makes sense" of Remake in favor of an obfuscated sphere grid that puts emphasis on party synergy over physically endorsing the strength/power of each character. I get that the larger cast makes this make more sense as an approach to take, but man does it just... not feel good. Remake's Intermission episode that came out with the Intergrade release forecasted the inevitability of Rebirth putting an emphasis on team-based combat, so I knew this was coming, but I think Rebirth goes about it the wrong way. Instead of letting you choose between stronger individuality and a cohesive team approach to combat, you're effectively forced into the latter. Even then though, it's just giving your party members more capabilities to synergize with each other and execute maneuvers with more and more members of your team. Once more, I understand why they did this but I think it throws the heroic power that the narrative beckons for into the gutter in favour of a misaligned execution of party mechanics.

Add these issues in with other slight complaints like the Kingdom-Heartsification of how FAST enemies move around the arena, and also an entire chapter where you play as Cait Sith for too long (longer than one minute) and you have a title I wish I liked a lot more than I did. It pains me to say, with how much I anticipated Final Fantasy VII Rebirth that the Final Fantasy VII parts were largely the only things I enjoyed about this game. I had this marked on my calendar for months, avoiding any demo content, and trailers, any State of Play material, because I enjoyed Remake so much. Due to the effects of Ubisoft on the industry, there’s too much content, most of which I found to be lacking of any real sort of enjoyment. I thought Rebirth would continue to put an effortless cherry on top of the dessert that was the original Final Fantasy VII. Instead they created a new dish and man, I wouldn't order it again. It seems the public at large enjoy it and critical reception of Rebirth is high, but I don't know if I could recommend it to anyone.

He's dead, Jim.

I legitimately can't believe it, Blizzard actually went ahead and "released" the exact same game that they'd compartmentalized and destroyed over the last six years with less features, a board-room bland UI, and a predatory battle pass. There is almost too many issues when it comes to Blizzard's decision making process in the last decade plus that even pointing them out becomes a chore, there is quite literally a surplus of awful, and Overwatch 2 is no exception.

I was a competitive player when Overwatch first released, and the game was a catalyst for me becoming a more social person as I met and befriended a completely new circle of people as well as for taking games much more seriously. I put hundreds upon hundreds of hours playing casual, custom, and competitive matches to hone my skills as both a single player and teammate. As the years went by, Blizzard did their best to make that experience that I had molded, a chore. The balancing team released meta-destroying characters and refused to change the game, more or less saying "deal with it" as the consensus of the beloved Overwatch took a nose dive. What people had fallen in love with, myself included, with Overwatch in 2016 was a completely new hero shooter experience that emphasized teamwork and jubilee. Time progressed and the experience of playing Overwatch became an experiment. Additions to maps and characters were lazy at best and boring, communication to the playerbase was insulting, the company did its best to ruin its internal image by doing a complete disservice and committing to horrendous acts upon its female employees, and they removed features from the Overwatch that gave it the identity it held. I didn't want to gloss over the treatment of women at Activision-Blizzard, as it is completely deplorable. Moving Overwatch to a five player team felt like a decision for decision's sake rather than actually investing in making the gameplay fun or invigorating. It felt like a corporate "what-if" scenario to throw at players to make them feel like "OOOH AHHH something new!" rather than put content in the game that would be genuinely interesting or engaging. Moving away from the open queue to a role queue that made it nigh impossible to play as a DPS further cemented the downfall of Overwatch from an acceptance standpoint. How does Blizzard expect working adults or anyone with a time constraint to wait anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes to find a match? In my previous days, when the game was still a little fresh, you could pop in and play as whichever character, and that was beautiful! If I wanted to play a ranked game, I could jump on and pick my Hanzo within a few minutes, play the game and be on with it.

I enjoyed each role in the first few years of Overwatch, playing at nearly the highest tier as both a tank and a healer, and near that as a DPS. I'm experienced in every role and I would like to think that made me a good well rounded player, yet having a queue and rank devoted to each seperate role enforced that I would never commit to the grind, because I simply couldn't afford the time for what was becoming such a middling gameplay experience. How is it that a game like Halo Reach, a game that I frequent, has aged better than Overwatch? Well you can abandon any of the incomprehensively poor gameplay decisions that Blizzard has made with OW in favor of a completely free, cosmetic only, not even available to purchase with a seperate currency, cosmetic pass for items not available in the original game. Overwatch, victim of a poorly designed ever changing meta, cannibalized itself by never having a gameplay identity that felt reliable. Reach fundamentally today is still the Reach it was back in 2010 from a matchmaking standpoint. Playing Overwatch now after the six years have passed since its original release feels like you've landed on the Planet of the Apes. Gone is the joy, gone is the happiness, gone is the gameplay loop that once took the world by storm, and now you have... role queue's, a poorly optimized engine, a few new characters which have boiled down the competitive and casual experience, an eyesore UI that robs the game of its flare, and a battle past thrust into the player as soon as they load up the game.

You know what's crazy? I've basically gone this entire "review" without mentioning Overwatch 2, and that's because it doesn't exist. Overwatch 2 is legitimately Overwatch again. It's the same exact game. Nothing is new, I figured that with the release of this game I'd be getting a plethora of new characters and maps, but that was not the case. Remember back in the day when Super Smash Bros Brawl came out and you cracked the game open, ran through the gambit and unlocked freaking Sonic and Solid Snake? That's what a new title based on heroes should feel like. In Overwatch 2 you load into the game, should you have an account from the first Overwatch, and you have all the characters, the same ones from Overwatch and/or the Overwatch 2 beta, which again is just Overwatch with a new character. How is this excused? How was Blizzard able to craft this update as a new game and how are journalists and consumers even treating this like its a second game? I'm at a loss for words at the predatory greed that Blizzard continues to embark itself on, between WCIII, Diablo Reforged, and Overwatch 2, Blizzard has done nothing but demonstrate that they do not care for their consumer base, just for their coffers.

I remember having the physical copy of Gameinformer two years ago, long before GI got culled in the same style of corporate greed as Blizzard, that went into extreme depth detailing the story and narrative experiences of Overwatch 2. Can you recall that adding a story to go along with these heroes was the entire reason that this game was coming out? Probably not! Blizzard went into depth about the mission structure and RPG elements of Overwatch 2 as its selling point, giving some love back to the players who requested more out of the attractive new IP. Not often does a company like Blizzard, which has some committed series lore in games like Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft launch a new title in a completely new universe. Players were hungry for some insight on the characters they were playing as, clawing for any exposition they could get on the world of heroes and Overwatch 2 was it!... until it became clear that the company couldn't offer what they had promised players and instead realized they could be milked like the cash cows they are. Why give your players, after years of clamoring for more and promising of a new story experience what they asked for when you could opt for a faux relaunch of the baked down version of the game they're already playing (and leaving?)

It's for this reason that I'm granting a half star review for Overwatch 2, I don't know what makes it a new game, other than the predatory battle pass and resoundingly boring new UI experience. There's no single player, there's no new exciting group of characters, there's no graphical update, there's no improvement to user communication, there's just more of the same. Why don't we start releasing new Fighting game characters as new games. Bridget is now out in Guilty Gear but its the exact same game? How about release it as Guilty Gear Strive 2! PUBG has a bug fix update and a new 3x3 map? Let's release it as PUBG 2! This is an inexcusable, undeniable cash grab by a former legendary developer that is now a complete husk of its former self.

Overwatch is dead.

This was... really not good.

A short form review for a short form experience, with a runtime of maybe four or five hours at best, Final Fantasy XVI's final DLC is a complete departure from what made the main title so good. Ultimately (heh) the issue with Rising Tide is that it's both not interesting and infuriating. The new locale Clive and the gang find themselves in is isolated much like the Echoes of the Fallen DLC. There's not much to do in the realm of exploring, and what you can poke around and interact with wasn't worth the price tag. The village and its populous are kinda just there with no real varied culture or intrigue to make me wish to interact with them further, and the setting chugs the Playstation 5 somehow to Bloodborne levels of framerate. The unfortunate thing for XVI here is that it is not Bloodborne and won't get a pass. I don't know, if I'm engaging with a civilization and its dominant unbeknownst to the greater world and largely lost to time, I'd like them to stand out just a little bit past their appearance?

The combat in Rising Tide frustrated me at similar levels as EotF did just before it, in that you're playing through a dungeon with raised difficulty levels (Which is okay!) however you're throttled by an inability to return to Outer Heaven and restock at any point. Now when you game over you can refresh potions... but this felt like a pretty annoying workaround. Bosses, namely the ultimate one, are genuine sponges taking a frustrating amount of time to defeat even if you're well equipped and geared for the task at hand. This was an issue I had with Rebirth and it rears its ugly head again here in the last bit of XVI we'll get. If I'm doing stagger damage of over two million... you'd hope to get a sense of vindication in healthbar removal moreso than you'll get in Rising Tide. Poorly tuned DPS checks, overwhelming mechanics that lack visual clarity, an enemy that is constantly flying away from you all in addition to the aforementioned sponge issue make for a resoundingly aggrivating experience.

For someone who was a massive fan of the main game in FFXVI and even had it as their Game of the Year for 2023, Rising Tide unfortunately tarnishes the legacy of an otherwise stellar title. It doesn't add much to the excellently crafted personas of Clive, Joshua, or Jill, as you get little in the way of conversation or captivating quotables, instead thrusting the player into a lukewarm time. I do not recommend Final Fantasy XVI: The Rising Tide.

If I wasn't such a fan of Final Fantasy X, I would say without a shadow of a doubt that Red Dead Redemption 2 is the greatest game I've ever played. I got into RDR2 at the request of several around me who had been prodding me for years and years to finally get on it, I didn't have a PS4 for some time and didn't have a capable PC either so I had held if off. Lo and behold upgrade time came and I finally got on both the proverbial and actual train.

RDR2 starts off slow, and I mean really slow. I think for the first few hours I might have touch a key other than W maybe one or two times (major hyperbole there) but you are doing a LOT of walking and following. However throughout the story of Dutch Van Der Linde's infamous gang, things and people start to change. Greed and anger seep their way into the gang slowly but surely over the fifty+ hour experience.

This game is the definition of a slowburn, but what you get in the payoff is quite easily a top two written story and the greatest open world in attention to detail ever made. Fans of the original Red Dead Redemption are probably aware that this is no shocker, but the minutia that Rockstar gets into here is absolutely off the wall. Animals, people, the weather all interact in unique ways, you're never sure to see the same thing twice in the same location.

The story of Red Dead 2 takes the form of a multi-season cowboy television show, it feels almost surreal in how un-rushed and realistic it is. Fear and death follows Arthur Morgan everywhere he goes whether its his fault or somebody elses. The twists and foreshadowing that occur throughout this game will have you audibly gasping and pausing as they unveil.

Though the ending you can see a mile away, it's the delivery Rockstar achieved that will make anybody no matter how manly they are, cry some damn cowboy tears.

Unstellar Blade

A game so milquetoast that it literally crashed my PC in switching inputs from my PS5 to my main display so I could write this review, and thus I lost all of my notes I had carefully constructed over the past three days of playtime. What I pulled together is that this was an attempt at making Nier: Automata without actually making it fun and without Yoko Taro.

I remember Stellar Blade's Official Reveal as Project Eve, named after the game's main character, jumping out of an otherwise uneventful and boring Sony State of Play with its flashy combat, beautiful environments, and overwhelmingly attractive protagonist. Hot character bait aside, I was interested in this game because of the influences it was clearly wearing on its sleeve in the aforementioned Platinum Games magnum opus. Many have tried and few have succeeded in nailing hack and slash as well as Platinum or their cousins in Capcom have done with the plethora of impressive titles between the two. Did I think Stellar Blade was going to go one on one with Nier, DMCV, or Metal Gear Rising? Absolutely not, but I did think it was worth a try, to see if there was a company out there who could go to bat with the best of them and put an effort forward that would be worth paying attention to in the years to come. I was excited for Stellar Blade as the release date neared, because it meant that I could one quell the discourse over the design of Eve by providing actual input on how the game plays, and secondly because the need for a fast paced hack and slash was weighing heavily on me after playing slower burn titles like FF7R2 and P3R fairly recently. Within a day of playing my interest waned but I remained hopeful, however on the third complete day of playing and the day I ultimately completed the game... I came away fairly perturbed.

The good, lets start with that why don't we? This game is downright beautiful. I played it on my PS5 on my 4K display with HDR enabled and woah nelly, it looked great. One of the greatest aspects of this title was how great both characters and the world looked from a graphical standpoint. As you transition from dilapidated buildings and streets into destroyed railways and misgiving deserts, your eyes will feast at the eye candy abound in the backgrounds of the world. I found myself navigating the camera up and down constantly at the world I was interacting with as it was tremendously rich in flavour and care from a design standpoint. I felt like the developers put a great deal of effort into creating a visually striking game, which unfortunately seems to have accompanied a trade off in other aspects of the title. More to come on that shortly, as I do want to praise the team for putting some of the best facial and body design in gaming forward. As I've already experienced, much of the conversation about Stellar Blade has been lost in the perceived attractiveness of Eve, but every character you interact with truly looks incredible. Though their proportions and mannerisms may not be totally... human, they are indubitably crafted with an intricacy and care to look astonishing. Stellar Blade if nothing else is a journey of eye candy, but that's kind of... it.

While not exactly fast enough to be a Nier-like, and not fun punishing and explore heavy enough to be a Souls-like, Stellar Blade attempted to forge a path forward that played out like a middle ground between Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and the Jedi: Fallen Order/Survivor games. Eve's combat relies on using a plethora of learned abilities and tech to parry and dodge her way through a litany of grotesque alien foes who have claimed Earth to be their own. Where this goes wrong is in quite a few places, but the most apparent and earliest was in the poor "janky" feel and lack of reliability in both parry and dodge timings. This can be sort-of remedied by investing in Eve's skill trees and upgrading Eve's exo-spine but never really feels... good. Even if I was a dissenter of Sekiro over all, I felt like it mostly gave the right kind of feedback and snap to the parry/dodge timings required to master such a difficult title. For a game as infuriatingly hard as Stellar Blade gets in its late game, I felt like I was at the whimsy of luck in my dodges not directly feeding into a followup attack by a boss and my perfect parries not being read by the game because of poor latency or buffer timing. Time after time I'd land a perfect dodge only to be hit by the boss moving faster than Eve could recover right after. Cheap is the way I'd put that and it proliferated throughout the entire runtime of the title.

Difficulty is something I've spoken about ad nauseum in action-rpg titles and I'll continue to do so as I have an affinity for these kinds of games. After grinding my teeth in the (generally) slower paced Fromsoft classics and the speedy Platinum/Capcom games of the last decade and change, I feel like I'm fairly qualified. Stellar Blade early on feels hard, but not in a way that cannot be conquered. If I was getting my tail kicked by a group of world enemies or a boss, I found that I could readjust my stratagems to craft a better gameplan, coming back smarter and using my abilities at optimized times to come out victorious. I found my confidence growing, something that did not happen this early in Sekiro, and I continued on to the later stages of the game. I opened up my Playstation menu to check my progress, a feature of the console that tracks how far you've made it through the main story, and saw I had notched at 89%. I labored on to the area boss on one of the last major quests of the game. It was here I through my face into a wall, stressing with every ability and item I had to make it through the three phases and effective six health bars that the boss had. I double this up because of the way shields work. See in Stellar Blade, simply doing damage and having fun taking down your enemy's health bar is simply not allowed, you must first deplete their shields before you can do any "meaningful" damage to their hitpoints. Meaningful in quotations because even then on a fully upgraded weapon, after laboriously taking away the superfluous shield bar, you are granted the ability to do slightly more damage to the bosses health per hit. I've played Dark Souls underleveled and with un-upgraded weapons enough to know torment when it comes to weapons doing very little damage to bosses... and even that does not compare to how insulting Stellar Blade's damage counter feels.

It wasn't even until a few bosses later that I truly came to terms with my disdain for the needlessly draconian difficulty that exists within Stellar Blade's late game boss fights. I threw everything together that I could into defeating the (name kept out of review due to spoiler) boss. I thought I could craft a winning effort of combining my ultimate abilities with my tertiary skills and burst maneuvers, but nothing was taking. I couldn't perfect dodge and parry any longer against the multi-faceted and multi-phase boss fight at hand. Visual clarity was completely nuked from orbit as I could barely tell what moves were hitting me, where certain objects were, or where my Eve's reactions would take me next. A greater qualm I have with games at large now, I wrote about these most notably in my FFXVI DLC reviews, is a complete lack of being able to actually see what's going on in boss fights because of the "ooh how cool" quality that moves need to have. Keeping this in mind, the bosses began to teleport away CONSTANTLY from Eve so as to reposition their efforts while tarnishing any offensive effort I had put forth. This was rhythm breaking and tore any motivation I had towards chasing the enemy down, I felt discouraged and unmotivated to capitalize on optimized windows because I knew the boss would simply teleport away at any given moment. After being unable to keep up with this, the visuals going on, and the randomly included DPS checks, I put the game on "story mode" (reminder this is in the last hour or so of a medium length title) and kept chugging. I'm not actually sure this did anything to make the game easier. What it does in theory is give you windows to dodge and parry, popping up with on screen prompts of what button to press to not be hit by the enemies maneuvers. Does this work? Absolutely not. Most of the time these move to fast to even parse what move you're supposed to use, and half the bosses moves don't even populate your screen with a prompt at all. Through the next couple bosses and into the final boss I became increasingly confused if this was actually a difficulty slider at all or simply an effort to make you "feel" better by putting a semblance of choice of difficulty in front of you.

A best in class soundtrack (potentially one of the best of the year) and impressive visuals couldn't prop Stellar Blade up enough to go against its resoundingly poor English VA (I eventually played in Korean,) drab narrative heavily borrowed from Nier: Automata, and impressively frustrating and unrewarding combat. This is absolutely not a title worthy of purchasing at a $70 price tag, maybe half of that at best. I commend Sony and SHIFT UP for putting together a brand new IP and throwing some serious marketing at making this game stick out, but it felt like a great value Sekiro meets Nier at best. I would not recommend Stellar Blade to anyone with a PS5.

The Witcher 3 is, now that I've played it, officially a part of the Holy Trinity of Western RPG's with Red Dead Redemption 2 and Mass Effect 3 due to its tremendous character writing, unparalleled world building and lore, and overall style. Seriously, there is not one thing about this game that after completion, I felt it needed.

Characters in the Witcher, be it in the games, show, or books, are the definitive strongsuit and most important aspect as set in place by Andrzej Sapkowski way back in the 90's when first creating the story of Geralt that would eventually sweep the world by storm. Everybody in the series matters, nobody is intrinsically good, nobody is faultless. Geralt of Rivia, who is probably the greatest protagonist in video game history is a man of imperfection, a mutated shell of a human whose history is marred with bloodshed and tragedy. Geralt never looks back though, he is a pragmatist with a heart. I've never encountered a character in a series who is as multi-faceted and believable as Geralt. He bows to nobody and adheres to his own code, owes no alleigances to men of state or people of power, loves those who he wants to love, and is confident in his staggering ability in combat. One beautiful aspect of the series is how often you split between fighting and conversation, as the history of the continent and people within are decided by Geralt's words, which he carefully must pick and cater to those he speaks with. He is a sly and cunning man, and always cognizant of the intentions of those around him, he is no fool. He knows his love for Ciri, Yennefer, and Vesimir can lead him astray, but his abilties make up for it.

The protagonist Geralt takes center stage as the player character and decision maker within the story, but every single character within the world crafts what is the greatest low-fantasy adventure and most well fleshed out world in video game history. Secondary characters like Yennefer, Triss, Vesimir, Ciri, Dandelion, Zoltan, Keira, Djikstra, Ehmyr, and many more add an invaluable amount to not only the story, but the passion behind the player's actions. Each character has their own unique motives, their own special relationship to Geralt and the others around, their own piece that fits together for the final puzzle. You spend hours seperately with each of these characters, disputing romance, debating politics, bargaining, and laughing in good faith. The depth that The Witcher 3 goes in to with your supporting cast, without ever overstaying its welcome is only paralleled with one game, Red Dead Redemption 2. I only want to spend MORE hours with the Witchers of Kaer Morhan, with the two beautiful Sorceresses in Triss and Yennefer learning about their world and complicated relationships with Geralt, with the beautiful and evasive Cirilla, and countless others. Few games are like the Witcher 3 and have you smiling when you reunite with characters from previous games or books, when I met with Roche for the first time I jumped with joy, same as with the lovable duo of Dandelion and Zoltan. I can not drive the point home enough, these side characters are some of the most fleshed out peers and comrades of any video game ever. Even the more minor characters, involved in singular quest chains like the Bloody Baron, Cerys, or [REDACTED DUE TO SPOILERS] leave a mark that you shant forget, as their memories and experiences add an extreme amount to the overall journey.

Now, this is clearly evident to anybody who has seen the show or read any of the books, but aside from the characters, the thing that lays the groundwork for the Witcher's success as a game franchise is the beautiful worldbuilding by Andrzej Sapkowski. EVERYTHING from the Eastern-European influenced folklore to the medieval European architecture and setting is meticulously laid out with extreme thought and care. The cities withing the Witcher 3 feel like real Medieval cities reflecting of their culture. The royal castle of Vizima feels like that befitting of a grand emperor, the free city of Novigrad is one of the most impressive and fleshed out cities in any video game in the history of the medium, and the multiple communities within Skellige are a thing of Scandinavian beauty. The towns and world were so beautiful to traverse, many a moment was spent stopping and staring at the colorful countrysides. Disclaimer, I did play this game with a 4K texture pack enabled to make the pretty things more pretty. But man, I could speak for days about how REAL this felt as a fantasy setting. There is a perfect balance of power within the universe of the Witcher, and that is evident in its third entry. Sorceresses are extremely powerful, yet their volatility is too high for excessive power usage. The Wild Hunt are an impressively scary force, however they are kept in check by certain abilities that will be explained. Geralt and the Witchers themself are the strongest of human warriors, however they are the last of a dying breed. The power in the Witcher series is kept in check by wit and chess-like geopolitics, as it would be in an actual medieval setting. Not by a superhero or undefeatable protagonist. The Witcher is a carefuilly crafted universe of lore that has been in motion for nearly thirty years, culminating with the effort that it took to get to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Each narrative empowering, passionate, and given an incredible amount of thought.

The music of the Witcher 3 is something of note as well, and those who have played this game can easily find a common ground in this aspect, whether they liked the other aspects or not. These songs are long and drawn out, borrowing aspects from Medieval instruments and fantasy choruses and sounds. Each song, whether its for a specific zone or character, couples with the mood and settings perfectly without any shadow of a doubt. I paused when I was riding the trusty steed Roach through the winding hills of Skelige as the beautiful soundtrack played and looked at the open ocean. I was in awe, completely lost in the world. I felt like Geralt, wind howling and hitting my face on a horse looking over a familiar crag. It's moments that games like this and RDR2 nail that have the player completely divulged into the immersive nature that they put forth.

The only knocks I can give the Witcher 3 is the combat being far less than stellar in difficult and rigidity, and the ham-fisted relationship with Yennefer that is more of a qualm I have with the series as a whole. The former is excusable with the addition of the points I made above, however the latter irked me to a fairly large degree. I don't like Yennefer, full stop, which is interesting because she is clearly Geralt's canon love interest if you know anything about the series or have played even a few minutes of this game. The topic of whether I like her or not is strictly an opinion of subjective nature and each player is left to their own vices in that regard, however my qualm for this post is moreso how the game deals with that if you pick Triss as your romantic option. The game does a mostly great job in dealing with this, even hiding nuggets of voice lines in conversation about the awkwardness of having Yennefer around when you're romantically involved with the sorceress you spent time with in the last few games. It does get a little awkward sometimes when there are plot elements that pair you with Yennefer and imply that she is your betrothed, but as this review is a five star review, that is clearly not enough to detract any major points away from the game.

I had not played the Witcher 3 until now because I was not a fan of the low-fantasy medieval setting. Once I played the Witcher 2, I became invested and watched the show, read some books, and became completely enthralled in the world of Geralt. With the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt you have a tremendously crafted narrative, flawlessly written memorable and diverse characters, a lively fleshed out world with a cavernous lore and history, and a magnificent soundtrack that thrusts immersion into the the player.

I strongly recommend The Witcher 3 to those who are looking for a narrative video game journey that they will not forget.