Yamigishi
BACKER
A good story that’s, in my opinion, really being brought down by being in a MMO. Shadowbringers starts off really strong, by introducing you to a brand new post apocalyptic world that looks really cool, and I’d say that up to Il Mheg, almost everything with the expansion is really good: the setting is good, both of the twins quests make you discover some really cool locations with interesting storylines, the exarch/crystarium are shrouded in mystery, you even get to talk to John ‘Ardbert’ Shadowbringers once again! The only thing i found kinda silly was Ranjit who’s like way too strong to be credible imo (like no character should be able to overpower the entire scions with no exposure about them to explain how come they’re so strong imo, and even by the end of the expansion him being so strong isn’t explained). But then, once you get to Il Mheg, I think the story starts to take a dive. Because the game falls back into the same old boring loop it uses for most of its runtime: go into a new locale, help the people there, get exposed to their lore, you can now progress to the new locale. Rinse and repeat. I get it, you’re in a new world, nobody knows you and everyone needs help because the apocalypse literally happened, plus you’re retracing the step of Ardbert, so it’s normal to just play the beginner adventurer, but i still think it’s boring and drags on way too much. The settings are interesting, yes, but it takes so long for the story to progress that it killed a lot of my enjoyment for it overall, and a lot of time i was just wishing this entire story would be in another game because I think shadowbringers really highlights how the MMO structure is draining away all the fun i could have with the game’s story, by making it so slow to progress. Which is a shame, because i liked the story! I don’t think it’s as good as the best games of the series, but still pretty good overall, and Emet-Selch is definitely one the coolest villains of the series. The scions are finally starting to feel like they’re actual characters and actually are a band of friends, since for the first time ever they’re all here instead of the expansion only focusing on one or two of them. The crystal exarch is also a really cool character, and even side characters like the Chai couples are pretty cool instead of just being kinda there like most side characters in previous expansions. I do have some complaints about the fact that it really feels like the end of 5.0 feels more like it’s the actual midpoint of the story rather than the end of it, which imo should be the case since you get literal credits rolling etc after it, however. And like i said, the pacing of everything in between Il Mheg and Amaurot is horrendous and really made me not enjoy this as much as i could have. That coupled to how everyone sells this as one of the greatest game of the serie really made the expansion feel underwhelming because while it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t as good as i expected it to be. Maybe if i cared about the MMO aspects of it, it’d be better, but I still don’t, and at this point i’m fully convinced i would have probably have enjoyed this game’s storyline/lore better if i had watched it instead of playing it.
2023
About 3 weeks before Final Fantasy XVI released, Square Enix released a demo for the game, that was basically the story’s introduction, and in my opinion this demo was genuinely awesome, and made me really excited for the game. Sadly, as it turns out, it feels like the game should have stayed a demo, because after a few hours of playing the full game, it becomes incredibly jarring that a lot of the game’s aspects should have never gotten past some kind of playtesting.
The demo really worked because it was short: everything was well paced, the combat system seemed full of promises due to only having one eikon while still managing to be fun, and the story opened up very strongly. All the full game needed to do was to just expand Clive’s toolkit as the game progressed to keep it fresh, and you’d have a really solid game. And that’s what the game failed to do correctly, which led to it being an experience that was way too long and repetitive to be enjoyable.
The pacing of this game is atrocious, and I frankly don’t know how most people don’t seem bothered by it. While getting your second eikon is something that happens pretty fast, each subsequent one takes way too long to get unlocked. Most “action games”, for lack of a better term, take between 10 and 15 hours to complete, while FF16 is around 60 hours if you do the side content (more on that later), but even without it it’s probably around 35-40 hours. And nothing in the game is there to justify its length. The entire time, you’ll follow the same structure: you do a dungeon, get back to the hub, unlock new sidequests, then go “explore” a new part of the overworld, rinse and repeat. The dungeons take up maybe 20% of the runtime (and i’m being very generous), and they’re the only part of the game that’s even remotely good.
The overworld is where you’ll spend the biggest amount of time in the game, and at no point does it manage to justify its existence. It’s just big open spaces filled with nothing. Sure, there are enemies to fight, but it gets old quickly and it’s not rewarding: just like in a certain MMO from the same series, you’ll get 10 times more exp doing quests than fighting mobs, meaning every mob that’s not mandatory to kill is just a waste of time once leveling up starts to require bigger amounts of exp. Fighting enemies is useless, but so is exploration in itself, since the loot mechanics in this game are so laughably surface level I can't stop but wonder why they’re even here in the first place.
Final Fantasy XVI decided to ditch “RPG elements” to have its gameplay focus entirely on the combat itself, which is a choice i don’t have issues with on a fundamental level. Except that for some reason, the game decided to still have loot and crafting, but their implementation is laughable. Every enemy will drop some kind of materials, and other kind of materials are scattered all around the open world, and you use those materials to craft new weapons and equipment. Except all those new equipment do is increase numbers in a linear fashion. So all you have to do is craft whatever’s the strongest equipment at any given time because there’s never any situation where equipment X has slightly more damage but Y has added bonuses that would make you consider using it instead. And you get way too many materials to craft things anyway, like i had triple or even quadruple digits numbers of most of the materials which was useless, and it’s not because i farmed those, it just happens naturally.
The combat in this game is… Clearly lacking depth. Now I’m not an expert in “action games” the title took inspiration from, I just played the first 3 DMC games, bayonetta 1 and i guess nier automata if you want to count it as an action game (i wouldn’t) so maybe, just maybe, i just lack the necessary skills to make the combat more fun, but i doubt it.
Clive’s base toolkit is very limited. If you’ve played the demo you’ve seen it all, his base moves don’t evolve. There’s only one combo, a charge attack, a lunge/downthrust, and magic that you can either charge or weave in between hits of your one and only combo. You can also order torgal to launch enemies, but everything else has you rely on eikons. Want to warp to an enemy after launching him? That’s an eikonic ability. Grab an enemy from afar to pull them towards you? Eikonic ability. Since you can only equip 3 eikons at a time, that means two of the eikon slots have to be used by phoenix and garuda if you want to do longer combos.
Eikons also let you equip 2 abilities to them, and those all have cooldown. So while you can implement some of those attacks in a combo, once it’s done you have to wait before being able to do that combo again. But chances are after a while you won’t even do that, because of how the combat system works and how unbalanced the game is. Normal enemies pose literally no threat 99% so you can just do your basic juggle combo on them while waiting for your cooldowns to be off,which gets very very repetitive really quick, especially with how long the game is.
(Mini)Bosses are where the game’s system is really flawed. They all have a poise bar you can deplete by attacking, and once you break their bar they’re staggered for a while, and attacks will raise a dmg multiplier up to 1.5. Which means every single boss encounter will follow the same cycle: you dodge, use regular attacks and maybe some abilities to go faster, but your goal is to have as many abilities off cooldown for when the boss will be staggered since that’s when you’ll do the most damage. Even worse yet, some abilities are extremely broken when combined and it’s not hard at all to figure out which ones they are, so you’ll likely have them constantly equipped. There is almost no player expression in this game, instead the game plays more like something like Kingdom Hearts and i like kingdom hearts gameplay! But not for a game that long. Again, nothing in this game justifies it being that long.
The kaiju fights are.. Okay? They’re definitely some good spectacle but gameplay wise they’re not much better than the rest of the game, especially considering how long some of those can be. The QTEs are also hilarious, you have a 5 seconds window to press either R1 or square, it’s really funny. I absolutely disagree with the consensus that they’re “some of the best bosses ever”, they’re just cool looking bosses but they’re really not that thrilling to fight, it’s all style over substance (just like the rest of the game)
But what about the story, Final Fantasy is all about the story right? Well i want to keep my review spoilers free so i won’t delve too much into it, but it didn’t get me. The game opens up very strongly, but the more it goes on the more it sidelines all the interesting political stuff to instead become very “anime”. None of the characters really stood out to me, except like Cid he’s cool. Clive’s alright, Jill is a bowl of soup and there’s a couple side characters that are really cool (shoutouts to Dion and Byron, i like those guys) but it feels like none of the characters bare Clive are developed enough, even if you do the sidequests they’re like all missing something to be more than just pretty stereotypical characters, some of those being almost 1:1 copies of Game of thrones character (like yeah i do like Goetz but he’s literally just Hodor from GoT lol)
And what about the music? This game’s got to have good music right? Eeeeeeeeh. Older FF titles (except 15 which has the same issue imo) have really good and memorable music, the music in this game is just there. It’s like a movie score, sure it’s fitting most of the time but is it memorable, apart from a couple key songs? Not really. Worse than that, i’m actually wondering why the fuck they got Soken for it. I do like his work on FF14, but i think everyone will agree his best tracks are either rock and/or electronic music, which are genres completely absent from this game except for like one song. Everything in the game is just either medieval sounding stuff, or orchestra for the big fights. There’s also not a lot of variety in the songs which is insane. Like in A Realm Reborn alone, each city had its major themes that all gave off different vibes, Ul’dah has a bombastic song that screams of its riches, Limsa has a song that gives you the feeling of being called by the sea, Gridania is a calm and inviting place… FF16 has no diversity in its themes like that. Every city has the same songs, none of them give off really emotive vibes, they’re just medieval_town.mp3. The combat theme is always the same, same for the miniboss themes, even every eikon battle has the same song playing for the first phase… The only places where the music stops being repetitive is the dungeons, driving even further home the fact those are the only good piece of content of the game.
All in all, Final Fantasy XVI was a very mediocre experience for me. It’s a game that wanted to be different, but half baked everything. It’s a game that wants to be a dark and mature experience, but rapidly falls into common RPG tropes. It’s a game that wants to be a “spectacle fighting” game, but that doesn’t feature any deep mechanics to make that spectacle feel fun to play. It’s a game that wants to be a full length RPG, but doesn’t ever justify why it should be that long, it feels like it’s just that long either because you expect a Final Fantasy game to be long, or because the dev team behind it is a MMO team and apparently MMO devs are unaware MMO designs do not work in single player experiences. It’s a game full of flaws, and it feels like as soon as you start noticing some of those all the other ones become apparent really quick afterwards, leaving you with a game that has potential, but got so half baked it just ends up being the same thing Cid’s daughter is: Mid.
The demo really worked because it was short: everything was well paced, the combat system seemed full of promises due to only having one eikon while still managing to be fun, and the story opened up very strongly. All the full game needed to do was to just expand Clive’s toolkit as the game progressed to keep it fresh, and you’d have a really solid game. And that’s what the game failed to do correctly, which led to it being an experience that was way too long and repetitive to be enjoyable.
The pacing of this game is atrocious, and I frankly don’t know how most people don’t seem bothered by it. While getting your second eikon is something that happens pretty fast, each subsequent one takes way too long to get unlocked. Most “action games”, for lack of a better term, take between 10 and 15 hours to complete, while FF16 is around 60 hours if you do the side content (more on that later), but even without it it’s probably around 35-40 hours. And nothing in the game is there to justify its length. The entire time, you’ll follow the same structure: you do a dungeon, get back to the hub, unlock new sidequests, then go “explore” a new part of the overworld, rinse and repeat. The dungeons take up maybe 20% of the runtime (and i’m being very generous), and they’re the only part of the game that’s even remotely good.
The overworld is where you’ll spend the biggest amount of time in the game, and at no point does it manage to justify its existence. It’s just big open spaces filled with nothing. Sure, there are enemies to fight, but it gets old quickly and it’s not rewarding: just like in a certain MMO from the same series, you’ll get 10 times more exp doing quests than fighting mobs, meaning every mob that’s not mandatory to kill is just a waste of time once leveling up starts to require bigger amounts of exp. Fighting enemies is useless, but so is exploration in itself, since the loot mechanics in this game are so laughably surface level I can't stop but wonder why they’re even here in the first place.
Final Fantasy XVI decided to ditch “RPG elements” to have its gameplay focus entirely on the combat itself, which is a choice i don’t have issues with on a fundamental level. Except that for some reason, the game decided to still have loot and crafting, but their implementation is laughable. Every enemy will drop some kind of materials, and other kind of materials are scattered all around the open world, and you use those materials to craft new weapons and equipment. Except all those new equipment do is increase numbers in a linear fashion. So all you have to do is craft whatever’s the strongest equipment at any given time because there’s never any situation where equipment X has slightly more damage but Y has added bonuses that would make you consider using it instead. And you get way too many materials to craft things anyway, like i had triple or even quadruple digits numbers of most of the materials which was useless, and it’s not because i farmed those, it just happens naturally.
The combat in this game is… Clearly lacking depth. Now I’m not an expert in “action games” the title took inspiration from, I just played the first 3 DMC games, bayonetta 1 and i guess nier automata if you want to count it as an action game (i wouldn’t) so maybe, just maybe, i just lack the necessary skills to make the combat more fun, but i doubt it.
Clive’s base toolkit is very limited. If you’ve played the demo you’ve seen it all, his base moves don’t evolve. There’s only one combo, a charge attack, a lunge/downthrust, and magic that you can either charge or weave in between hits of your one and only combo. You can also order torgal to launch enemies, but everything else has you rely on eikons. Want to warp to an enemy after launching him? That’s an eikonic ability. Grab an enemy from afar to pull them towards you? Eikonic ability. Since you can only equip 3 eikons at a time, that means two of the eikon slots have to be used by phoenix and garuda if you want to do longer combos.
Eikons also let you equip 2 abilities to them, and those all have cooldown. So while you can implement some of those attacks in a combo, once it’s done you have to wait before being able to do that combo again. But chances are after a while you won’t even do that, because of how the combat system works and how unbalanced the game is. Normal enemies pose literally no threat 99% so you can just do your basic juggle combo on them while waiting for your cooldowns to be off,which gets very very repetitive really quick, especially with how long the game is.
(Mini)Bosses are where the game’s system is really flawed. They all have a poise bar you can deplete by attacking, and once you break their bar they’re staggered for a while, and attacks will raise a dmg multiplier up to 1.5. Which means every single boss encounter will follow the same cycle: you dodge, use regular attacks and maybe some abilities to go faster, but your goal is to have as many abilities off cooldown for when the boss will be staggered since that’s when you’ll do the most damage. Even worse yet, some abilities are extremely broken when combined and it’s not hard at all to figure out which ones they are, so you’ll likely have them constantly equipped. There is almost no player expression in this game, instead the game plays more like something like Kingdom Hearts and i like kingdom hearts gameplay! But not for a game that long. Again, nothing in this game justifies it being that long.
The kaiju fights are.. Okay? They’re definitely some good spectacle but gameplay wise they’re not much better than the rest of the game, especially considering how long some of those can be. The QTEs are also hilarious, you have a 5 seconds window to press either R1 or square, it’s really funny. I absolutely disagree with the consensus that they’re “some of the best bosses ever”, they’re just cool looking bosses but they’re really not that thrilling to fight, it’s all style over substance (just like the rest of the game)
But what about the story, Final Fantasy is all about the story right? Well i want to keep my review spoilers free so i won’t delve too much into it, but it didn’t get me. The game opens up very strongly, but the more it goes on the more it sidelines all the interesting political stuff to instead become very “anime”. None of the characters really stood out to me, except like Cid he’s cool. Clive’s alright, Jill is a bowl of soup and there’s a couple side characters that are really cool (shoutouts to Dion and Byron, i like those guys) but it feels like none of the characters bare Clive are developed enough, even if you do the sidequests they’re like all missing something to be more than just pretty stereotypical characters, some of those being almost 1:1 copies of Game of thrones character (like yeah i do like Goetz but he’s literally just Hodor from GoT lol)
And what about the music? This game’s got to have good music right? Eeeeeeeeh. Older FF titles (except 15 which has the same issue imo) have really good and memorable music, the music in this game is just there. It’s like a movie score, sure it’s fitting most of the time but is it memorable, apart from a couple key songs? Not really. Worse than that, i’m actually wondering why the fuck they got Soken for it. I do like his work on FF14, but i think everyone will agree his best tracks are either rock and/or electronic music, which are genres completely absent from this game except for like one song. Everything in the game is just either medieval sounding stuff, or orchestra for the big fights. There’s also not a lot of variety in the songs which is insane. Like in A Realm Reborn alone, each city had its major themes that all gave off different vibes, Ul’dah has a bombastic song that screams of its riches, Limsa has a song that gives you the feeling of being called by the sea, Gridania is a calm and inviting place… FF16 has no diversity in its themes like that. Every city has the same songs, none of them give off really emotive vibes, they’re just medieval_town.mp3. The combat theme is always the same, same for the miniboss themes, even every eikon battle has the same song playing for the first phase… The only places where the music stops being repetitive is the dungeons, driving even further home the fact those are the only good piece of content of the game.
All in all, Final Fantasy XVI was a very mediocre experience for me. It’s a game that wanted to be different, but half baked everything. It’s a game that wants to be a dark and mature experience, but rapidly falls into common RPG tropes. It’s a game that wants to be a “spectacle fighting” game, but that doesn’t feature any deep mechanics to make that spectacle feel fun to play. It’s a game that wants to be a full length RPG, but doesn’t ever justify why it should be that long, it feels like it’s just that long either because you expect a Final Fantasy game to be long, or because the dev team behind it is a MMO team and apparently MMO devs are unaware MMO designs do not work in single player experiences. It’s a game full of flaws, and it feels like as soon as you start noticing some of those all the other ones become apparent really quick afterwards, leaving you with a game that has potential, but got so half baked it just ends up being the same thing Cid’s daughter is: Mid.
2021
This review contains spoilers
Metroid is probably my favorite Nintendo serie, and Super Metroid is one of my favorite game of all time, if someone asked me my top 3 games ever, it would be part of this top. I’ve started playing the serie when I was in highschool, so about 8 years ago, and I immediately fell in love with it, even tho I never played the 3D games except the first Prime. When Metroid Dread was announced, I was really excited to see how it would turn out, but also a bit worried it wouldn’t meet my expectations. Spoiler alert: it did meet them, and even surpassed them in some ways.
Before the game release, I did replay through Super Metroid, Metroid Zero Mission, and Metroid Fusion (in that order), I didn’t really try to speedrun them but I did use a few speedrunning tricks in both Super and Zero Mission, and for every game I tried to go pretty fast. Super Metroid is gonna be my main point of comparison for this game because imo it’s the best game of the serie, at least prior to Dread.
First, I’m gonna start with what I didn’t like about the game, but none of these issues are major, far from it.
I think that while the sound design is still very good, the music of the game is not as good as it could be. Super Metroid had a lot of really awesome atmospheric tracks, and while ZM/Fusion are less good in that regard, they still got some pretty good songs. In Dread, the music is kinda just there, never bad, but also except for a few cutscenes, never really good either.
The lack of interconnectivity between the areas is also something I’m not a big fan of. You do get some hidden elevators to go to new parts of previous areas, but you never end up opening a door to get through a new area, it’s always using an elevator. The areas themselves are… A mixed bag. The backgrounds in this game are really good, you can see a lot of care put into them, but every E.M.M.I area looks similar, and I think the lack of really good music makes the areas more forgettable than in Super, which is a shame because I really like how they look.
My biggest grip with the game however is about the lack of sequence breaking. I know that most of the sequence break in Super Metroid is done using glitches so shouldn’t be used as a point of reference, however Zero Mission had a couple of really cool ones you could do if you were skilled enough. (early super missile, early varia suit, beating Ridley before Kraid, etc…) Obviously, I haven’t experienced the game enough (I didn’t do a 100% run) and speedrunning strats are always found after a lot of playing, however, i did manage to snag an early power bomb to find out…. I was unable to use it until i got the actual power bomb upgrade. I totally understand that from a dev standpoint, having items too early can totally break the experience you want players to have, but at the same time, I feel like part of the appeal of the serie is to try and find out way to get around that, so seeing that really feels weird to me. Also slightly related, I’m not a big fan of the wall jump being scripted like in Fusion, which prevents you from doing single walled wall jump, but the game was also designed with that in mind, so it’s not that big of a deal. The shinespark also feels like it’s not that useful because you have to manually run and your base speed is high enough that i never really felt like using it.
EDIT: after playing a bit more of the game i learned that there is still some sequence breaks, like getting the grapple beam and bomb before kraid which lets you one shot his second phase, you can also get the gravity suit early etc... I'm keeping that part of the review up for archiving's sake but you can actually consider it to not be accurate anymore.
Except for those issues, the game is simply phenomenal. I won’t even mention the story because spoilers, but it’s there, and it’s honestly pretty good.
First of all, the movement is absolutely amazing. Samus never controlled that smoothly before, and having a full controller for the first time in the serie history really feels right: no more awkwardly pressing select to use the missiles, the 360° aiming feels awesome, having a button to quickly morph just feels natural, even using the grapple beam isn’t a pain in this game. As in every other Metroid games, you start with almost no abilities and slowly rebuild your full power, with some new abilities added and those new abilities feel very clever, I really enjoyed them, even if some of them end up being replaced by way more powerful abilities from previous games (like you get a double jump, but later on you also get the space jump, which is kind of a shame because the double jump really feels out of place because of it)
Samus being the best she’s ever controlled is for the best, because this games features something none of the other games of the serie really got: really awesome bosses. Most of the bosses in Metroid are not that fun to fight, they’re pretty quick to kill or require some really simple strategy. In Metroid Dread however, the bosses are nothing to joke about. For example, Kraid is back, but while he’s a big pushover in Super/Zero Mission, in Dread he killed me more than once, but it never felt like it was bullshit. The bosses in this game are like Dark Souls bosses: they’re challenging, but their patterns are easy to figure out if you pay attention, and 99% of the time when you take damage or die, it feels like it’s your fault, and emerging victorious never felt so good in a Metroid game. There’s a couple boss i didn’t particularly like, but the rest of them is extremely good, by far the best the serie has to offer and even the video game medium in general imo, the final boss in particular was some of the best final bosses i’ve beaten in a video game.
Speaking of bosses, Metroid Dread features not one, not two, but three kinds of recurring minibosses: the E.M.M.I, and two kinds of Chozo warrior. The first kind of chozo warrior is alright, the first battle against one of them is awesome but i feel like having it being a recurring miniboss wasn’t necessary, and even lessens the impact of the first fight. The E.M.M.I are very good: every area of the game has an E.M.M.I zone, where you’ll have to proceed with caution, because if you don’t, the E.M.M.I is gonna chase you, and if it catches you, you have a tiny window of opportunity to parry but missing it means game over. Your goal is to manage to find a way to reactivate your Omega buster, and once you do, blast the E.M.M.I’s head off, which is also very dreadful, because you can’t move while charging your shot, so if you miss, the E.M.M.I will get you. Every E.M.M.I has different properties, and I really loved them, they’re really good at pressuring you. The final type of recurring boss is the “corrupted chozo warrior”, and it’s by far my favorite. When I first beat one, i was excited beyond belief at how cool the boss battle was, and then after playing more I met another one and realizing that i’d fight them again made me scream of joy, this boss is one of the most fun boss to fight and you do it multiple times!
And finally, a Metroid game wouldn’t be a Metroid game without exploration. (just pretend Metroid 2 doesn’t exist) And in this game, I sometimes felt lost, and that was purely amazing. At some point, I found a new upgrade, and spent almost half an hour trying to find where to go: once I did, the path to take felt almost wrong, and multiple times during it i was wondering if I was even going the right way, or if i would just end up finding a dead end with a few powerup. The Metroid Dread world is really well crafted, I haven’t explored all of it yet but I can’t wait to do so on my next run, trying to 100% the game feels like a huge but rewarding challenge.
If I had to rate this game, I’d probably give it a 9.5/10. I have some very minor issues with it, but some of them may go away with time, and the sheer quality and quantity of good stuff far surpasses those issues, I feel like I haven’t even mentioned everything I loved about the game, and the best part is, I don’t even know everything about it yet. This game was first rumored in 2006, and honestly, I’m glad it got cancelled and delayed to today, because I don’t think it would have been able to achieve a tenth of what it was trying to do on a DS. Every Metroid fan should buy this game because if you liked a Metroid game, you’re guaranteed to love this one. And if you haven’t played a Metroid game yet, I’m not sure if this one is the best one to start with because it’s pretty challenging, but I’d heavily recommend trying out Metroid Zero Mission first, and play through the rest of the serie before coming to Dread
Before the game release, I did replay through Super Metroid, Metroid Zero Mission, and Metroid Fusion (in that order), I didn’t really try to speedrun them but I did use a few speedrunning tricks in both Super and Zero Mission, and for every game I tried to go pretty fast. Super Metroid is gonna be my main point of comparison for this game because imo it’s the best game of the serie, at least prior to Dread.
First, I’m gonna start with what I didn’t like about the game, but none of these issues are major, far from it.
I think that while the sound design is still very good, the music of the game is not as good as it could be. Super Metroid had a lot of really awesome atmospheric tracks, and while ZM/Fusion are less good in that regard, they still got some pretty good songs. In Dread, the music is kinda just there, never bad, but also except for a few cutscenes, never really good either.
The lack of interconnectivity between the areas is also something I’m not a big fan of. You do get some hidden elevators to go to new parts of previous areas, but you never end up opening a door to get through a new area, it’s always using an elevator. The areas themselves are… A mixed bag. The backgrounds in this game are really good, you can see a lot of care put into them, but every E.M.M.I area looks similar, and I think the lack of really good music makes the areas more forgettable than in Super, which is a shame because I really like how they look.
My biggest grip with the game however is about the lack of sequence breaking. I know that most of the sequence break in Super Metroid is done using glitches so shouldn’t be used as a point of reference, however Zero Mission had a couple of really cool ones you could do if you were skilled enough. (early super missile, early varia suit, beating Ridley before Kraid, etc…) Obviously, I haven’t experienced the game enough (I didn’t do a 100% run) and speedrunning strats are always found after a lot of playing, however, i did manage to snag an early power bomb to find out…. I was unable to use it until i got the actual power bomb upgrade. I totally understand that from a dev standpoint, having items too early can totally break the experience you want players to have, but at the same time, I feel like part of the appeal of the serie is to try and find out way to get around that, so seeing that really feels weird to me. Also slightly related, I’m not a big fan of the wall jump being scripted like in Fusion, which prevents you from doing single walled wall jump, but the game was also designed with that in mind, so it’s not that big of a deal. The shinespark also feels like it’s not that useful because you have to manually run and your base speed is high enough that i never really felt like using it.
EDIT: after playing a bit more of the game i learned that there is still some sequence breaks, like getting the grapple beam and bomb before kraid which lets you one shot his second phase, you can also get the gravity suit early etc... I'm keeping that part of the review up for archiving's sake but you can actually consider it to not be accurate anymore.
Except for those issues, the game is simply phenomenal. I won’t even mention the story because spoilers, but it’s there, and it’s honestly pretty good.
First of all, the movement is absolutely amazing. Samus never controlled that smoothly before, and having a full controller for the first time in the serie history really feels right: no more awkwardly pressing select to use the missiles, the 360° aiming feels awesome, having a button to quickly morph just feels natural, even using the grapple beam isn’t a pain in this game. As in every other Metroid games, you start with almost no abilities and slowly rebuild your full power, with some new abilities added and those new abilities feel very clever, I really enjoyed them, even if some of them end up being replaced by way more powerful abilities from previous games (like you get a double jump, but later on you also get the space jump, which is kind of a shame because the double jump really feels out of place because of it)
Samus being the best she’s ever controlled is for the best, because this games features something none of the other games of the serie really got: really awesome bosses. Most of the bosses in Metroid are not that fun to fight, they’re pretty quick to kill or require some really simple strategy. In Metroid Dread however, the bosses are nothing to joke about. For example, Kraid is back, but while he’s a big pushover in Super/Zero Mission, in Dread he killed me more than once, but it never felt like it was bullshit. The bosses in this game are like Dark Souls bosses: they’re challenging, but their patterns are easy to figure out if you pay attention, and 99% of the time when you take damage or die, it feels like it’s your fault, and emerging victorious never felt so good in a Metroid game. There’s a couple boss i didn’t particularly like, but the rest of them is extremely good, by far the best the serie has to offer and even the video game medium in general imo, the final boss in particular was some of the best final bosses i’ve beaten in a video game.
Speaking of bosses, Metroid Dread features not one, not two, but three kinds of recurring minibosses: the E.M.M.I, and two kinds of Chozo warrior. The first kind of chozo warrior is alright, the first battle against one of them is awesome but i feel like having it being a recurring miniboss wasn’t necessary, and even lessens the impact of the first fight. The E.M.M.I are very good: every area of the game has an E.M.M.I zone, where you’ll have to proceed with caution, because if you don’t, the E.M.M.I is gonna chase you, and if it catches you, you have a tiny window of opportunity to parry but missing it means game over. Your goal is to manage to find a way to reactivate your Omega buster, and once you do, blast the E.M.M.I’s head off, which is also very dreadful, because you can’t move while charging your shot, so if you miss, the E.M.M.I will get you. Every E.M.M.I has different properties, and I really loved them, they’re really good at pressuring you. The final type of recurring boss is the “corrupted chozo warrior”, and it’s by far my favorite. When I first beat one, i was excited beyond belief at how cool the boss battle was, and then after playing more I met another one and realizing that i’d fight them again made me scream of joy, this boss is one of the most fun boss to fight and you do it multiple times!
And finally, a Metroid game wouldn’t be a Metroid game without exploration. (just pretend Metroid 2 doesn’t exist) And in this game, I sometimes felt lost, and that was purely amazing. At some point, I found a new upgrade, and spent almost half an hour trying to find where to go: once I did, the path to take felt almost wrong, and multiple times during it i was wondering if I was even going the right way, or if i would just end up finding a dead end with a few powerup. The Metroid Dread world is really well crafted, I haven’t explored all of it yet but I can’t wait to do so on my next run, trying to 100% the game feels like a huge but rewarding challenge.
If I had to rate this game, I’d probably give it a 9.5/10. I have some very minor issues with it, but some of them may go away with time, and the sheer quality and quantity of good stuff far surpasses those issues, I feel like I haven’t even mentioned everything I loved about the game, and the best part is, I don’t even know everything about it yet. This game was first rumored in 2006, and honestly, I’m glad it got cancelled and delayed to today, because I don’t think it would have been able to achieve a tenth of what it was trying to do on a DS. Every Metroid fan should buy this game because if you liked a Metroid game, you’re guaranteed to love this one. And if you haven’t played a Metroid game yet, I’m not sure if this one is the best one to start with because it’s pretty challenging, but I’d heavily recommend trying out Metroid Zero Mission first, and play through the rest of the serie before coming to Dread
2016
This game is a mess, which isn’t surprising considering how its development went. That doesn’t make it bad per say, but it’s definitely not as good as it could have been and even makes it frustrating in some ways.
As far as gameplay goes, Final Fantasy XV is one of the most bland game i can think of. The combat isn’t terrible per say, but it just feels so boring. Attacking is done by holding a button (you can mash it instead i don’t know if it really makes a difference tho) and you have a few different moves depending on which direction you hold your stick in but at its core it just boils down to one simple act: holding a button, there’s no timing required, and the closest thing there is to combo would be that if you’re close to an ally/behind the enemy you have a chance to unleash a move with them. Dodging works very much the same, you just hold the block button. That’s it, no timing. Unless the attack is an AoE or there’s just a lot of attacks coming from every way at once just holding a button means you’ll dodge everything. Sure there are warp strikes and different weapon kinds with different movesets etc but at its core the combat is just very weak, and it’s made worse by how easy that game is. Unless you forcefully restrain yourself, dying is quite virtually impossible because once you die you can just use a phoenix down on yourself so unless you decide to use no items you really need to try hard to die. It’s also very easy to get overleveled: since the game is an open world with a lot of sidequests and hunts, if you’re like me and decide to do virtually every single one of them you come across you’ll end up way way way overlevel, for reference i finished chapter 3 after 27 hours and at level 46 while the recommended level is like 15 or something like that.
The pacing of the game is also extremely fucked up, the end of chapter 9 marks a big turn in the game tone which i’m totally not against but… I think the way everything from this point on goes so fast goes against it by not letting you process what’s happening. Sure, i did spend way too much time doing all the sidequest before that, but even then the last 5 chapters with the exception of the last one are all in a straight line, there’s no longer any open world to explore (you can technically go back to it but there’s nothing new there so if you’ve already done everything it’s kinda useless) and except for the much dreaded chapter 13, everything goes extremely fast, you don’t really have the time to catch a breather and think about what just happened. Some might say it helps show how fucked up everything is going since neither you the player nor the characters get time to breathe, but i personally think it’d have been better to let you spend more time in those parts of the game. The ending at least was extremely good, i just feel like everything leading to it was too rushed.
The story itself is also kinda eh for me. The main characters are really good, i love the bros and their bonds between each other, and Aldyn is a funny villain (he wears a fedora). But i find the plot simply not that engaging, which is something i’m totally ok with for once because of how strong the roadtrip feeling is (this game really is about the journey) and the ending also being very good. However i really hate how parts of the story is split outside of the main game: movie (which sucks), anime (which is decent with episode 2 being really really good), DLCs, books… Like i get this game got a fucked up development cycle but come on
Another point i’m really extremely underwhelmed about is the music. Final Fantasy has always been a series with OSTs of top tier quality, and this game’s ost is… Weird? First of all, it feels like they forgot to actually use it in the game, i learned there’s supposed to be an overworld theme AFTER beating the game because it takes so long to start you’ll likely never hear it because you’ll get into a fight before that, and it also doesn’t play if you’re on a chocobo or in the car which is how you’ll spend most of the time moving around. The car also doesn’t have any theme, you just either play the radio (which is old FF games song and a few ones from the DLCs/movies) or listen to nothing. Having listened to the full ost outside of the game, some of the tracks are really strong (somnus, Valse di Fantastica, the battle themes…) but a lot of them are also just ok or like.. They’re more like a movie score, like they’re not the kind of songs i’d listen to on a regular basis and i feel like they lack identity. The good songs are really good as expected from the series, but i just feel like overall that OST is pretty disappointing by being filled with a bunch of just eh songs, and due to how poorly implemented in the game it was.
Overall, FF15 is for me a pretty weird game. It’s not bad, but it’s not great either, and a lot of it is just very frustrating like you have to play a dlc released 3 years after the game to have the villain’s backstory/motivation which sounds insane to me like i’m totally fine with some things in games not being explained but in this case it’s not “not explained because they wanted to have it be a mystery up to everyone’s interpretation” it’s just not explained because they didn’t have the time to put it into the game. As I said above, this game is a big mess in a way that’s pretty frustrating, but honestly considering the development cycle it’s kinda a miracle that despite everything it’s still a decent experience
As far as gameplay goes, Final Fantasy XV is one of the most bland game i can think of. The combat isn’t terrible per say, but it just feels so boring. Attacking is done by holding a button (you can mash it instead i don’t know if it really makes a difference tho) and you have a few different moves depending on which direction you hold your stick in but at its core it just boils down to one simple act: holding a button, there’s no timing required, and the closest thing there is to combo would be that if you’re close to an ally/behind the enemy you have a chance to unleash a move with them. Dodging works very much the same, you just hold the block button. That’s it, no timing. Unless the attack is an AoE or there’s just a lot of attacks coming from every way at once just holding a button means you’ll dodge everything. Sure there are warp strikes and different weapon kinds with different movesets etc but at its core the combat is just very weak, and it’s made worse by how easy that game is. Unless you forcefully restrain yourself, dying is quite virtually impossible because once you die you can just use a phoenix down on yourself so unless you decide to use no items you really need to try hard to die. It’s also very easy to get overleveled: since the game is an open world with a lot of sidequests and hunts, if you’re like me and decide to do virtually every single one of them you come across you’ll end up way way way overlevel, for reference i finished chapter 3 after 27 hours and at level 46 while the recommended level is like 15 or something like that.
The pacing of the game is also extremely fucked up, the end of chapter 9 marks a big turn in the game tone which i’m totally not against but… I think the way everything from this point on goes so fast goes against it by not letting you process what’s happening. Sure, i did spend way too much time doing all the sidequest before that, but even then the last 5 chapters with the exception of the last one are all in a straight line, there’s no longer any open world to explore (you can technically go back to it but there’s nothing new there so if you’ve already done everything it’s kinda useless) and except for the much dreaded chapter 13, everything goes extremely fast, you don’t really have the time to catch a breather and think about what just happened. Some might say it helps show how fucked up everything is going since neither you the player nor the characters get time to breathe, but i personally think it’d have been better to let you spend more time in those parts of the game. The ending at least was extremely good, i just feel like everything leading to it was too rushed.
The story itself is also kinda eh for me. The main characters are really good, i love the bros and their bonds between each other, and Aldyn is a funny villain (he wears a fedora). But i find the plot simply not that engaging, which is something i’m totally ok with for once because of how strong the roadtrip feeling is (this game really is about the journey) and the ending also being very good. However i really hate how parts of the story is split outside of the main game: movie (which sucks), anime (which is decent with episode 2 being really really good), DLCs, books… Like i get this game got a fucked up development cycle but come on
Another point i’m really extremely underwhelmed about is the music. Final Fantasy has always been a series with OSTs of top tier quality, and this game’s ost is… Weird? First of all, it feels like they forgot to actually use it in the game, i learned there’s supposed to be an overworld theme AFTER beating the game because it takes so long to start you’ll likely never hear it because you’ll get into a fight before that, and it also doesn’t play if you’re on a chocobo or in the car which is how you’ll spend most of the time moving around. The car also doesn’t have any theme, you just either play the radio (which is old FF games song and a few ones from the DLCs/movies) or listen to nothing. Having listened to the full ost outside of the game, some of the tracks are really strong (somnus, Valse di Fantastica, the battle themes…) but a lot of them are also just ok or like.. They’re more like a movie score, like they’re not the kind of songs i’d listen to on a regular basis and i feel like they lack identity. The good songs are really good as expected from the series, but i just feel like overall that OST is pretty disappointing by being filled with a bunch of just eh songs, and due to how poorly implemented in the game it was.
Overall, FF15 is for me a pretty weird game. It’s not bad, but it’s not great either, and a lot of it is just very frustrating like you have to play a dlc released 3 years after the game to have the villain’s backstory/motivation which sounds insane to me like i’m totally fine with some things in games not being explained but in this case it’s not “not explained because they wanted to have it be a mystery up to everyone’s interpretation” it’s just not explained because they didn’t have the time to put it into the game. As I said above, this game is a big mess in a way that’s pretty frustrating, but honestly considering the development cycle it’s kinda a miracle that despite everything it’s still a decent experience
"more of the same but greater" would be an accurate description of Spider-Man 2, but that's not a bad thing if you ask me. Unless you didn't like the first two games for w/e reason, SM2 is an easy sell, because almost everything to love from the previous games is there, but with so much more new cool stuff.
The worst part of these games, at least for me, is the inherent nature of the triple A open world formula; spending time just transiting from point A to point B while getting distracted by activites scattered all around the place to give you some small dopamine hits when you complete them is a design philosophy i don't really vibe with, and i think the SM games are the only ones of that kind i actually completed, and i think the reason for that, besides the fact that i think spider-man is awesome, is that the traversal system is just god damn good.
SM2 vastly improves on said traversal system. Right off the bat, i turned the web assist thing all the way down, and activated fall damage, which imo really makes the game better since you need to be more active in your swings. But more than that, i think the web wings they added in the game just works really well. Swinging around is fun, but the wings really let you gain speed really fast if you know what to do, and balancing wings, swinging and doing tricks in the air to gain as much speed as you want is just cool. And if you end up being bored from that, the insanely fast fast travel system is really helpful, i ended up basically using it all the time when i was finishing up doing all the side content and had to go from one side of the map to the other.
The combat also got some sick overhauls, the new moves are sick and playing as symbiote pete is BADASS. What i really didn't expect was how cool the boss are; in the previous games, they weren't really bad but they weren't good either, just kinda w/e (tho i do love the SM1 final one). In this game however, bosses feel way more dynamic: you can parry their attacks, some gadgets or skills will let you get openings on them, instead of being a game of waiting for an opening to get a combo in, this time around you can really make the fights go your own way if you're good enough, and it feels good.
I'm not gonna talk much about the story but it also was really good, i especially loved the arc Miles went through during this game. The side missions were also all awesome, they really showcase the "friendly neighborhood" aspect of spidey extremely well, i even wish we could have gotten a couple more of them because there's a few that can really hit you hard in the feels
The worst part of these games, at least for me, is the inherent nature of the triple A open world formula; spending time just transiting from point A to point B while getting distracted by activites scattered all around the place to give you some small dopamine hits when you complete them is a design philosophy i don't really vibe with, and i think the SM games are the only ones of that kind i actually completed, and i think the reason for that, besides the fact that i think spider-man is awesome, is that the traversal system is just god damn good.
SM2 vastly improves on said traversal system. Right off the bat, i turned the web assist thing all the way down, and activated fall damage, which imo really makes the game better since you need to be more active in your swings. But more than that, i think the web wings they added in the game just works really well. Swinging around is fun, but the wings really let you gain speed really fast if you know what to do, and balancing wings, swinging and doing tricks in the air to gain as much speed as you want is just cool. And if you end up being bored from that, the insanely fast fast travel system is really helpful, i ended up basically using it all the time when i was finishing up doing all the side content and had to go from one side of the map to the other.
The combat also got some sick overhauls, the new moves are sick and playing as symbiote pete is BADASS. What i really didn't expect was how cool the boss are; in the previous games, they weren't really bad but they weren't good either, just kinda w/e (tho i do love the SM1 final one). In this game however, bosses feel way more dynamic: you can parry their attacks, some gadgets or skills will let you get openings on them, instead of being a game of waiting for an opening to get a combo in, this time around you can really make the fights go your own way if you're good enough, and it feels good.
I'm not gonna talk much about the story but it also was really good, i especially loved the arc Miles went through during this game. The side missions were also all awesome, they really showcase the "friendly neighborhood" aspect of spidey extremely well, i even wish we could have gotten a couple more of them because there's a few that can really hit you hard in the feels
A much needed dive into Ardyn's backstory which definitely should have been in the main game (AGAIN, that's really a recurring issue i have with all those episodes)
I'm not the biggest fan of all of the story bit in it but it's definitely by far the best of the DLCs, the combat is even quite fun because of how op ardyn is + for some reason they put lotus juice on the ost which rules
I'm not the biggest fan of all of the story bit in it but it's definitely by far the best of the DLCs, the combat is even quite fun because of how op ardyn is + for some reason they put lotus juice on the ost which rules
I’m absolutely not interested in farm sims in the first place (and from what i’ve been told none really compare to RF4) but holy shit does this one manage to just fit everything together in a way that gets me invested in it. There’s a shit ton of mechanics and not only are they pretty good individually, but they all interact with each other in a way that flows so naturally and makes them even better. RF4 lets you live in a small town with a bit more than 20 other characters, and (except for 2 of them that are cameo characters from previous games and have way less dialogue than the others) they’re all really cool and feel like actual characters. In my 46 hours of playtime, i don’t think i saw a single line of dialogue being repeated. And i know you could spend more time in the game and it’ll still be like that, even if you go above 100s of gameplay you’ll still find new lines, new events, it’s crazy. Not only are the characters all cool, but they also interact with each others which apparently isn’t something other games in the genre have and it’s so crazy?? Like you could just go out and see people talking to each other, sometimes it’s just visual (like they’re next to each other and have emotes above their head to show they’re talking), sometimes you get actual conversations between them. The MC is also pretty cool, they’re not a silent character and it’s for the best because i don’t like silent characters to begin with, you still get some freedom in what you say but they also have a personality behind that which i like.
You can take characters with you in dungeons, and the combat in this game is pretty cool too! There’s multiple types of weapons (swords, spears, fists, magic etc..), all with different moves, and the equipment system is pretty neat. You can unlock new crafting recipes by leveling up your crafting level (which is something you do by crafting), this gives the game a real sense of progression since sometimes you’ll unlock weapons you can’t craft because they require components you don’t have access to yet. But on top of that you can upgrade your weapons, and there’s a lot of different materials that’ll give you different effects: more damage, poison attacks, paralysis attacks, etc… there’s a lot of options to choose from.
And last but not least, the farming aspect is really cool too. You start off with only one type of crop, but quickly unlock more. The entire system is pretty simple, you plant your seed, water it every day, and after X days you get veggies from it. But where it gets really interesting is how deep it can get, without ever forcing the player to invest themselves too much into it if they don’t wish to. You can level up your seeds level to yield better veggies, there are items you can buy or craft to make them grow faster, there’s soil quality that can make a seed yield more or less veggies, you can even make GIANT veggies… And all of that is optional, you can also just simply plant seeds and wait if you don’t want to bother.
And in my opinion that’s why RF4 shines so much. It’s a game that understands that not everyone wants to have the same experience nor investment in it, so everything in this game feels like it’s been made to be there if you want to interact with it but also you can just ignore it, and it ends up making a game that feels like everyone will have a unique experience. Nobody will take care of their field the same way. The same applies for your equipment, there’s so many ways to customize! And let’s not even talk about the NPCs, there’s so many lines of dialogue, so many little things you’d have to really try hard to see everything. And on top of that, everything just mashes together in really cool ways: the story and characters are engaging so you want to see more, so you have to go do the dungeons, but then that forces you to make food and healing items so you have to farm, and dungeons reward you with better farming tools etc… There’s a lot of stuff i haven’t even seen (like i know there’s a fucking roguelike mode, i can get married and have kids, etc..) this game is just incredibly good and packed to the brim, and it’s a real shame it’s so not well known.
You can take characters with you in dungeons, and the combat in this game is pretty cool too! There’s multiple types of weapons (swords, spears, fists, magic etc..), all with different moves, and the equipment system is pretty neat. You can unlock new crafting recipes by leveling up your crafting level (which is something you do by crafting), this gives the game a real sense of progression since sometimes you’ll unlock weapons you can’t craft because they require components you don’t have access to yet. But on top of that you can upgrade your weapons, and there’s a lot of different materials that’ll give you different effects: more damage, poison attacks, paralysis attacks, etc… there’s a lot of options to choose from.
And last but not least, the farming aspect is really cool too. You start off with only one type of crop, but quickly unlock more. The entire system is pretty simple, you plant your seed, water it every day, and after X days you get veggies from it. But where it gets really interesting is how deep it can get, without ever forcing the player to invest themselves too much into it if they don’t wish to. You can level up your seeds level to yield better veggies, there are items you can buy or craft to make them grow faster, there’s soil quality that can make a seed yield more or less veggies, you can even make GIANT veggies… And all of that is optional, you can also just simply plant seeds and wait if you don’t want to bother.
And in my opinion that’s why RF4 shines so much. It’s a game that understands that not everyone wants to have the same experience nor investment in it, so everything in this game feels like it’s been made to be there if you want to interact with it but also you can just ignore it, and it ends up making a game that feels like everyone will have a unique experience. Nobody will take care of their field the same way. The same applies for your equipment, there’s so many ways to customize! And let’s not even talk about the NPCs, there’s so many lines of dialogue, so many little things you’d have to really try hard to see everything. And on top of that, everything just mashes together in really cool ways: the story and characters are engaging so you want to see more, so you have to go do the dungeons, but then that forces you to make food and healing items so you have to farm, and dungeons reward you with better farming tools etc… There’s a lot of stuff i haven’t even seen (like i know there’s a fucking roguelike mode, i can get married and have kids, etc..) this game is just incredibly good and packed to the brim, and it’s a real shame it’s so not well known.
Vandham daniel ar ar ar ar ar ar ar
1993
i liked the part where you turn a rose hologram into a skull
2022
i've "only" played 23 hours of this game as of writing this but i think i can safely say this is my favorite game of all time unless the rest of the game drops the ball really hard. It takes everything good from previous souls game, and adds its own things on top of it, the open world is so good and feels so natural for the serie you really end up wondering why it wasn't always like this, and the fights are as fun and challenging as ever
A huge setback from Heavensward, Stormblood really just feels like it’s A Realm Reborn 2.0.
The gameplay felt better, still boring but not to an excruciating level like it was at low level, tho part of it might be because i switched jobs (i played Dragoon for ARR and HS, and switched to Dancer once i reached level 60 and Reaper at 70) and started playing on controller instead of keyboard and mouse which feels way better for me. Some of the solo instances were actually close to being fun (mostly the Zenos fights), but I still have the same issues with the gameplay that I don’t think the game is ever gonna fix: 99% of the time you just do your rotation and while the bosses have mechanics, failing to understand them is almost never an issue because at worse they kill you and only you, and unless your entire team dies and you have to start over, all that means is that you’ll have to wait a few seconds before you can play again and you don’t learn anything, so the entire experience is mind numbing because if i don’t understand what i have to do before it happens there’s no real consequence, and since i don’t plan to replay dungeons/trials i’ve already done i basically learn nothing.
Story (and pacing) wise, the expansion drops in quality a lot compared to Heavensward. Stormblood is all about liberating an occupied country from the grasp of the empire, but there’s a twist: you do that twice! And that’s one of the biggest issue with Stormblood: not only is the prelude of the story pretty generic, but you quickly realize the expansion is gonna make you go through very similar events twice. Sure, Ala Mhigo and Doma are different places with different cultures, but you still end up doing the same thing twice. You go to a new region, help people by doing fetch quests, they start trusting you, you confront the empire and win, the place is liberated, rinse and repeat. There’s no big plot twist or anything too, you just liberate some cities and like i don’t think every story needs a plot twist to work but when the prelude of the entire expansion ends up really being what the entire story is about i’d at least expect to have something on the side to motivate me like some really really good characters you’d meet to really make you go “wow those are my friends i need to save them” and… Stormblood also fails on that front. Sure, I really like Gosetsu and Hien for example, but it’s just because they’re archetypes of characters i really like, because otherwise for most of the expansion, they’re kinda not really developed in my opinion. They have their moments every now and then (and the 4.3 storyline for Gosetsu was really good but more on that later) but I feel like they’re pretty one dimensional and not developed enough, I think the mainHeavensward cast (Ysayle, Aymeric and Estinien) was way better than the main Stormblood characters. On top of that, a big part of the story focuses around Lyse and I really think she might be the worst character of the entire game, not because she sucks but because of how bland and boring she is. I can’t think of a single thing she did during the story or any like big quality she has, she’s just there and kinda just randomly becomes a leader despite having no leadership quality, and when you compare her “development” to Alphinaud in Heavensward, it’s really night and day. And her development sucks: she doesn’t seem like she matured or anything near the end, and she only becomes a leader because… The previous leader decided to make her the new leader instead of choosing someone who’d fit the shoes way better like Raubahn or even M’naago? It’s just so weird.
As I said, the story really was bland for the most part, but the funniest part is that they decided to introduce a lot of new stuff and reveals for the like… 5 or so last quests of 4.0? So you basically went through an insane amount of quests (ARR asides it’s the expansion with the biggest number of quests and a lot of them are just empty fetch quests just like in ARR), to have a really not original story repeat twice (like seriously “the resistance fights off the evil empire” is nothing new) and just at the end the story introduces all this new stuff that get a bit relevant in the 4.1-5 MSQ and probably will be more relevant in Shadowbringers which imo totally sucks because that just means this really really long story i just went through was just a bunch of nothing to tease a future story. The 4.3-4.5 story bits were fine and all (i don’t really have an opinion on 4.1 and 4.2 they were just here to close some character arcs from the previous story) but like they were mostly there to introduce you to whatever the hell the MSQ of Shadowbringers is gonna be about, especially 4.5, which imo just goes to show how boring Stormblood is: the best piece of content in it is content that is mostly if not completely outside of its main story.
Even the music in my opinion is a step down in terms of quality. It’s not bad by any means, but I don’t think it’s as good as what Heavensward or even ARR had, and even worse it made me realize some stuff the game does with music i don’t like that has always been there. In this expansion, one of the song is a remix of Cyan’s theme from FF6, and it’s mostly played when Hien appears. And this made me realize that there’s no real character themes like in previous FF games, which i didn’t really think about during the previous expansions but realizing it now i really miss having themes linked to characters, but all this games has is themes for factions or areas. So the first (and so far only) character theme being a theme from a previous game makes it even worse like if he had an original theme just for him that’d be fine tho it’s weird he’s the only one with a theme, but it’s not even original so like why would they even make that
Overall Stormblood really was a mediocre experience for me. It’s not as actively bad as ARR was, but compared to Heavensward i can’t help but wonder what they were thinking because they managed to just ignore everything HS did well to instead go back to something more similar to ARR, which like is probably fine if you liked ARR but I hated it so this just looks like an insane decision to me.
The gameplay felt better, still boring but not to an excruciating level like it was at low level, tho part of it might be because i switched jobs (i played Dragoon for ARR and HS, and switched to Dancer once i reached level 60 and Reaper at 70) and started playing on controller instead of keyboard and mouse which feels way better for me. Some of the solo instances were actually close to being fun (mostly the Zenos fights), but I still have the same issues with the gameplay that I don’t think the game is ever gonna fix: 99% of the time you just do your rotation and while the bosses have mechanics, failing to understand them is almost never an issue because at worse they kill you and only you, and unless your entire team dies and you have to start over, all that means is that you’ll have to wait a few seconds before you can play again and you don’t learn anything, so the entire experience is mind numbing because if i don’t understand what i have to do before it happens there’s no real consequence, and since i don’t plan to replay dungeons/trials i’ve already done i basically learn nothing.
Story (and pacing) wise, the expansion drops in quality a lot compared to Heavensward. Stormblood is all about liberating an occupied country from the grasp of the empire, but there’s a twist: you do that twice! And that’s one of the biggest issue with Stormblood: not only is the prelude of the story pretty generic, but you quickly realize the expansion is gonna make you go through very similar events twice. Sure, Ala Mhigo and Doma are different places with different cultures, but you still end up doing the same thing twice. You go to a new region, help people by doing fetch quests, they start trusting you, you confront the empire and win, the place is liberated, rinse and repeat. There’s no big plot twist or anything too, you just liberate some cities and like i don’t think every story needs a plot twist to work but when the prelude of the entire expansion ends up really being what the entire story is about i’d at least expect to have something on the side to motivate me like some really really good characters you’d meet to really make you go “wow those are my friends i need to save them” and… Stormblood also fails on that front. Sure, I really like Gosetsu and Hien for example, but it’s just because they’re archetypes of characters i really like, because otherwise for most of the expansion, they’re kinda not really developed in my opinion. They have their moments every now and then (and the 4.3 storyline for Gosetsu was really good but more on that later) but I feel like they’re pretty one dimensional and not developed enough, I think the mainHeavensward cast (Ysayle, Aymeric and Estinien) was way better than the main Stormblood characters. On top of that, a big part of the story focuses around Lyse and I really think she might be the worst character of the entire game, not because she sucks but because of how bland and boring she is. I can’t think of a single thing she did during the story or any like big quality she has, she’s just there and kinda just randomly becomes a leader despite having no leadership quality, and when you compare her “development” to Alphinaud in Heavensward, it’s really night and day. And her development sucks: she doesn’t seem like she matured or anything near the end, and she only becomes a leader because… The previous leader decided to make her the new leader instead of choosing someone who’d fit the shoes way better like Raubahn or even M’naago? It’s just so weird.
As I said, the story really was bland for the most part, but the funniest part is that they decided to introduce a lot of new stuff and reveals for the like… 5 or so last quests of 4.0? So you basically went through an insane amount of quests (ARR asides it’s the expansion with the biggest number of quests and a lot of them are just empty fetch quests just like in ARR), to have a really not original story repeat twice (like seriously “the resistance fights off the evil empire” is nothing new) and just at the end the story introduces all this new stuff that get a bit relevant in the 4.1-5 MSQ and probably will be more relevant in Shadowbringers which imo totally sucks because that just means this really really long story i just went through was just a bunch of nothing to tease a future story. The 4.3-4.5 story bits were fine and all (i don’t really have an opinion on 4.1 and 4.2 they were just here to close some character arcs from the previous story) but like they were mostly there to introduce you to whatever the hell the MSQ of Shadowbringers is gonna be about, especially 4.5, which imo just goes to show how boring Stormblood is: the best piece of content in it is content that is mostly if not completely outside of its main story.
Even the music in my opinion is a step down in terms of quality. It’s not bad by any means, but I don’t think it’s as good as what Heavensward or even ARR had, and even worse it made me realize some stuff the game does with music i don’t like that has always been there. In this expansion, one of the song is a remix of Cyan’s theme from FF6, and it’s mostly played when Hien appears. And this made me realize that there’s no real character themes like in previous FF games, which i didn’t really think about during the previous expansions but realizing it now i really miss having themes linked to characters, but all this games has is themes for factions or areas. So the first (and so far only) character theme being a theme from a previous game makes it even worse like if he had an original theme just for him that’d be fine tho it’s weird he’s the only one with a theme, but it’s not even original so like why would they even make that
Overall Stormblood really was a mediocre experience for me. It’s not as actively bad as ARR was, but compared to Heavensward i can’t help but wonder what they were thinking because they managed to just ignore everything HS did well to instead go back to something more similar to ARR, which like is probably fine if you liked ARR but I hated it so this just looks like an insane decision to me.
I liked the part when the bad guys said "it's moebing time" and moebed all over ouroboros
[Review written during 6.25]
After being mostly disappointed (tho still enjoying) Shadowbringers, I wasn’t really expecting Endwalker to be any different, so I was pleasantly surprised to be proved wrong by the game. Endwalker doesn’t fix all my issues with the game (which, to be fair, is impossible since a lot of them stems from the game being a MMO), but at least it tones them down a lot. The big pacing issues i had with ShB are mostly gone: sure, it’s still a MMO, meaning they still sometimes drag out how long certain part of the story are, but for the most part, in this expansion the “filler quests” feel more involved in the ongoing story or are self contained stories that are usually pretty good, like in Heavensward, instead of being “help those dudes and they’ll help you back” like in ARR/SB/ShB. There’s a couple of moments where the MSQ really feels like it should progress faster and overall it’s still way better paced than the previous expansions. This pacing being better also applies to the story: unlike Shadowbringers, the story actually concludes in 6.0, with 6.1 and onwards just being a new arc starting. And the story itself goes at a way faster pace than before: what i thought would be the endgame happened pretty early on into the game, and basically everything they advertised in trailers etc happened by the halfway point i’d say, meaning you had a lot of surprises in the game. And overall, the story is really good! Some might say that its last third is too conventional because it shares themes found across a lot of other RPGs (nihilism bad), unlike ShB that had something more unique to its themes, to which i would agree, EW is less original than ShB for its themes. However, i still really enjoyed the end of the game, because it’s a theme i really enjoy and also it’s literally just the plot of Gurren Lagann which instantly makes it raw. Gameplay wise, i’m still not a fan of how the game is played but it’s just me simply not being a fan of this kind of gameplay and not it being boring. There’s been a few fun fights tho, there’s like a couple single player instances that are really good, the last one of them being probably the rawest moment of the entire game, and there’s even a trial you can do with the scions instead of a party of player which is really really cool (tho alisaie has a tendency of literally griefing i died a couple times because she decided it’d be funny to run away from everyone else while having a stack marker on her)
Overall, i still think i would have had a way better time just watching cutscenes on youtube than playing this game (at least it’d have been shorter), but apart from that, Endwalker was a surprisingly better time than i expected it to be. It’s not at the level of my fav FF games (6, 7, 9 and 10) and having to go through ARR and SB was soul sucking, but HS, ShB and EW are all pretty good stories tho the game they’re in really made them less enjoyable for me.
After being mostly disappointed (tho still enjoying) Shadowbringers, I wasn’t really expecting Endwalker to be any different, so I was pleasantly surprised to be proved wrong by the game. Endwalker doesn’t fix all my issues with the game (which, to be fair, is impossible since a lot of them stems from the game being a MMO), but at least it tones them down a lot. The big pacing issues i had with ShB are mostly gone: sure, it’s still a MMO, meaning they still sometimes drag out how long certain part of the story are, but for the most part, in this expansion the “filler quests” feel more involved in the ongoing story or are self contained stories that are usually pretty good, like in Heavensward, instead of being “help those dudes and they’ll help you back” like in ARR/SB/ShB. There’s a couple of moments where the MSQ really feels like it should progress faster and overall it’s still way better paced than the previous expansions. This pacing being better also applies to the story: unlike Shadowbringers, the story actually concludes in 6.0, with 6.1 and onwards just being a new arc starting. And the story itself goes at a way faster pace than before: what i thought would be the endgame happened pretty early on into the game, and basically everything they advertised in trailers etc happened by the halfway point i’d say, meaning you had a lot of surprises in the game. And overall, the story is really good! Some might say that its last third is too conventional because it shares themes found across a lot of other RPGs (nihilism bad), unlike ShB that had something more unique to its themes, to which i would agree, EW is less original than ShB for its themes. However, i still really enjoyed the end of the game, because it’s a theme i really enjoy and also it’s literally just the plot of Gurren Lagann which instantly makes it raw. Gameplay wise, i’m still not a fan of how the game is played but it’s just me simply not being a fan of this kind of gameplay and not it being boring. There’s been a few fun fights tho, there’s like a couple single player instances that are really good, the last one of them being probably the rawest moment of the entire game, and there’s even a trial you can do with the scions instead of a party of player which is really really cool (tho alisaie has a tendency of literally griefing i died a couple times because she decided it’d be funny to run away from everyone else while having a stack marker on her)
Overall, i still think i would have had a way better time just watching cutscenes on youtube than playing this game (at least it’d have been shorter), but apart from that, Endwalker was a surprisingly better time than i expected it to be. It’s not at the level of my fav FF games (6, 7, 9 and 10) and having to go through ARR and SB was soul sucking, but HS, ShB and EW are all pretty good stories tho the game they’re in really made them less enjoyable for me.
idk i feel like this entire part of prompto's (back)story came out of nowhere and undermines his Brotherhood backstory that was really good + the gameplay is kinda meh i don't like this one too much
2003
nothing broke me harder than learning the gameplay didn't suck on purpose