My opinion changed a lot the more I played this game.

When I first started it, I was completely hooked. The beginning sky island area is well designed and gets you familiar with the new cool abilities that I used much more then the ones in BOTW. The graphics and size of the world are also super impressive for being a Switch title.

Once I finished the tutorial area which took around 5 hours, everything started going downhill. The game is basically an exact copy of BOTW. The enemies are identical with the only new ones being these small robots that have replaced guardians and some dragon mini boss which I didn't bother fighting. Armor sets are also the same, there are a few new additions but to get many of them is a real chore. The main negative is that the map and story are pretty much identical to BOTW. The whole sky island I found to be a really cool concept but there's almost none of that in the rest of the game. That tutorial sky island is the largest with none of the rest being as remotely interesting anywhere. They're all very tiny with nothing on them and no reason to visit them except shrines. Another addition was an entire underground world which sounds cool and again is quite technically impressive for the Switch but after 20 minutes I decided to never go there again unless I needed to progress the story. It's all empty copy pasted land with nothing special and no reason to explore it. This leaves the main land left and as I've repeatedly said, it is an exact copy of BOTW I keep finding the need to say it over and over since I'm still amazed at how little they decided to change for this hyped $90 game. I played the shit out of BOTW in 2019 and even after 6 years so many things felt familiar, practically nothing surprised me in my playthrough. The story is very generic and worse then BOTW imo. Once again you find 4 sages then gain their powers to defeat Ganon; only this time the sages are younger kid versions who were made into anime personalities for some reason. The dungeons I found to be a downgrade and as they were much easier than BOTW, that goes for the shrines as well; they were still quite enjoyable and my favorite part of the game. I really thought I'd spend a lot of time on this game especially with the increased price tag but that was not the case. In BOTW I spend around 150hrs with 100% completion, in this game I did all shrines, a few uninteresting side quests, and the story picking up whatever korok seeds I find on my way which brought me to around 65 hours with no urge to do anything else but put it back on the shelf. Why play anymore when I pretty much experienced all of it already in BOTW? I'm very tired of this new Zelda formula and would love to see it go back to its core.

The one thing I did quite enjoy with the story was the ending. The Ganon boss fight was solid, one of the best in Zelda and a huge improvement from the BOTW final boss. The ending cinematic was also amazing. Seeing that caught me off guard, it made me wish they focused on story more as it showed they are capable. I was impressed that there could be such epic cinematics in a Zelda game and wish there was more of it throughout the story rather then using the most bare bones RPG story that goes all the way back to Final Fantasy on the NES. This game has no reason for existing. A sequel like this was not needed, this felt much more of a quality of life update with new sandbox stuff and that's about it. This was not a GOTY 2023 contender to me.

This is the only game I've ever played during which I've thought to myself "this is probably what it would be like to fight a dragon in real life."

From that thought, a lot can be gleaned about Dragon's Dogma. The animations and behaviours of its fictional fantasy creatures are remarkably lifelike, which bolsters its already strong immersive qualities, but the combat is arguably where it shines the most - and not just because its bows feel like semi-automatic rifles or because Arc of Deliverance is the single most satisfying move to use in any game ever made. Where a lesser game would typically have you fight a giant monster by whittling away at its ankles ad nauseam or some other comparably restrictive method, Dragon's Dogma lets you (among other things) climb onto it, knock it over, stun it, break off or cripple certain body parts, douse it in oil & light it on fire, lure it into a disadvantageous spot or environmental hazard, bring it crashing down to the ground while it's flying, send it flying through the air, freeze it, parry it, or jump off of it to reach a place you otherwise couldn't. It's like a power metal album cover come to life, with a soundtrack to match. It’s chaotic, it’s dynamic, and it’s absolutely drowning in techniques to try out.

That alone would be enough to set Dragon's Dogma above most other real-time combat systems, but what takes it to the next level is the genius pawn system. Few games offer satisfaction on the level of figuring out a golden tactic against a particularly troublesome enemy, watching your pawns become better and better at its execution over time, and being rewarded by other players for renting out your home-made killing machine to them. My mind was blown the first time I realised my pawn had learned to throw explosive barrels specifically when a tough enemy is near a ledge to kill them instantly, and almost a full decade later they continue to surprise with behaviours like this. There’s plenty else to enjoy about Dragon’s Dogma’s combat system, like the enormous playstyle diversity afforded by its classes or the chunky hitstop that provides great feedback on every attack, but it’s far from the only thing the game offers.

For one thing, Dragon’s Dogma sells the feeling of adventure very well. While not quite to the extent of in something like Breath of the Wild, you really do have to legitimately think about how to get from one place to another. Should I risk trying to clamber up that ledge or is it more practical to take the long way around, even if that means meeting more monsters? What time of day should I start my journey, or will it be short enough that I shouldn’t have to worry about all the beasties coming out when night falls? If night falls, do I have enough fuel for my lantern and is my character tall enough that it won't be extinguished by forging through bodies of water? You find yourself asking all these questions as you make your way to distant landmarks which you weren’t initially even sure if you could physically get to, which I think is enough to make the open world a net positive overall despite its blatant and unfortunate unfinished-ness. It helps that pretty much all of the dungeons in both Gransys and Bitterblack are rewarding to explore, with lots of goodies to find in hidden alternate pathways and enemy layouts which get dramatically overhauled in the post-game.

Beyond that, I’ll always stick up for the story of Dragon’s Dogma. Bingo Morihashi is seemingly cursed to always deliver well thought-out, thematically solid stories that everyone writes off as crap for some reason. Even if contextualising new game plus into it wasn’t rad as hell (and it is), the intentionally antiquated dialogue gives it so much character and it conveys such an immense, ambitious sense of progression in terms of scale. And speaking of scales (literally), Grigori is an all-timer in the realm of video game antagonists. Coupled with David Lodge’s masterful delivery, every line of his gives him such presence. He’s everything a dragon should be according to their traditional cultural depictions; not just huge, imposing and a fierce fighter, but also really intelligent and reserved to the point where it's not easy to classify him as a 'villain.' The fight against him having both style and substance in spades is just the cherry on top.

Daimon is also compelling, and his segment of the game is probably what’ll keep you coming back for more. Bitterblack Isle’s not just a wonderful, almost endlessly replayable DLC that marks a gold-standard for content density, it’s also a tantalising glimpse into Hideaki Itsuno’s full vision for Dragon’s Dogma. It was meant to have dozens of Bitterblack equivalents scattered throughout the world before its development was cut short, not the least of which included being able to travel to the moon and a massive MMO-like tower in which players could trade with one another and glimpse at each other’s worlds, endlessly stacked on top of each other. Had Itsuno and his team been allowed to carry out that vision, I’ve little doubt that Dragon’s Dogma would probably be my favourite game of all time. As it stands, it’s close enough already – all I think a hypothetical sequel would really need is for its open world to be more densely packed with content and a real-time healing system (outside of hotkeys and spells), like that of Nioh or a certain other ARPG series from the past decade or so that I hear is pretty popular.

It’s well known now that Capcom presented Itsuno with the choice to either develop Devil May Cry 5 or Dragon’s Dogma 2 a few years ago. Given the freedom that Capcom granted to him during the making of DMC5 and his recent teasing that his elusive new project is making good progress, I can’t help but have hope for the first time since release that aught is on the horizon. A Dragon’s Dogma sequel wouldn’t just be nice to see, it’d mark a victory for any and all game creators who want to see their vision fully realised.

I went into Final Fantasy II with trepidation. This is the Final Fantasy game everyone seems to hate. Lot of words out there on the Internet about having to whack your own party members in the back of their plush, malleable skulls until they learn to have better HP. Literal tomes about memorizing complex sequences of key words to further the story, like a child learning to navigate the English language. "Final Fantasy II sucks!" all my friends shout, "Play Alan Wake 2, god damnit!"

"No, no, it's not on disc! I have to play a 2001 remake of a 1988 NES JRPG!" I cry out, seeing no other option.

This game is nearly as old as I am, and like me, it has some good ideas, and a whole lot of poorly aged ones that repulse the youth. For example, every stat from strength and endurance to weapon and spell proficiency is increased based on use, which is where a lot of the advice about hitting your own party members comes from as it seems like an efficient way to simultaneously build your offense, defense, and curative abilities. This system and the criticisms of it have largely informed my perception of the game, but now that I have FFII's 20+ hour campaign under my belt, I can safely say it's all a little overblown.

I was able to get by just fine playing the game like normal, and never once did I feel like I needed to grind. It wouldn't surprise me if the WonderSwan remake - and by extension, the PlayStation port that I played - smooths over and expedites stat progression, but outside of faster gains to weapon proficiency, I couldn't find what exactly was changed and what remained the same.

It's not a flawless system, though. I did find that prioritizing weapons over magic was the best COA (course of action), as you're always building stats into your preferred weapon type whereas each individual spell needs to grow on its own. This makes late game spells like Flare and Holy remarkably weak starting out, incentivizing you to hold the X button and essentially auto-attack through every battle. Swords are also ridiculously good and have a far more varied pool to choose from, including those imbued with elements to bypass physically resistant enemies, and the health syphoning blood sword that initially appears to have meager stats, but which everything in the end game (including the final boss) is severely weak to. About halfway through the game you can safely ditch shields and start dual-wielding, and once you're flailing two blood swords around, there's really no going back. I'm surprised anyone has any trouble with this game's difficulty as I mostly found it to devolves into utter banality, and that's probably where I'd fault Final Fantasy II the most.

One other part of FFII's dated design that gave me trouble was the key word system. You have to "memorize" highlighted words in a conversation and then present them to other NPCs to gain new key words or open up events that progress the story, but god help you if you forgot one key word somewhere in the world. Imagine getting in your car and driving all the way to the grocery store to pick up a refreshing beverage only to find that you hadn't internalized the term "NOS Energy Drink" and are unable to proceed unless you turn around and go find the one random schmuck who can tell you what you want. This has happened to me a lot throughout my life, I think it's a memory problem (probably from drinking too much NOS!), and I don't like it when it's in my video games!

This key word system is at least interesting on paper. Final Fantasy II is far more narrative driven than the last game, so needing to bank highlighted words and present key items to NPCs makes you a more active participant in the story. I get why it's here, it just never materializes into anything valuable.

For all its faults, I don't think Final Fantasy II lives up to its negative reputation, or least this version doesn't. I had fun with it overall, even if I might prefer the original game a little bit more. Should you play it? No! I gave Lies of P a 2/5 and Castlevania: The Adventure a 4/5, I am disconnected from reality. I drench my brain in CMPLX6 and high quantities of disodium EDTA daily, you cannot hope to process video games the way I do.

A few months after picking up a PlayStation 2 and telling myself "just put games on the hard drive, do NOT go down the rabbit hole of buying used games," I saw the cover of Final Fantasy Origins and was so spellbound by Yoshitaka Amano's gorgeous art that I broke my solemn vow. It's just that meme of the guy looking over his shoulder, my gaze pulled away from my 1TB Western Digital hard drive towards the alluring figure of Final Fantasy Origins... Yeah... Yeah this game's got a great ass...

Whoa. Ok, I guess Origins still has me captive. But who could blame me? It's a fine looking collection, and it happens to hold two Final Fantasy games I've never played before outside of dipping my toes into the first few minutes of Final Fantasy I. It's not like grabbing this would set me down a costly path of buying every Final Fantasy on the PSX. That'd just be crazy!

I've already reviewed both games in this collection, so I won't go over what I think about them individually. Instead, I want to touch on the improvements Origins makes over the original releases. The most apparent of which is its presentation. Gone are the flat 8-bit graphics in favor of something more akin to the Super Nintendo era of Final Fantasy games, with the score getting its own boost to match Origins' graphical fidelity. Though it is graphically the same as the WonderSwan release for which it is a port of, the PSX Origins collection also includes a sparing amount of FMVs which adds a little more of that Amano flavor, and that's just what daddy wants its really graet. .

More importantly, Origins introduces a ton of quality-of-life improvements to modernize the experience of playing both games, including a "memo" save feature that allows you to make a hot save to the system's RAM. This is invaluable given the length and brutality of some of Final Fantasy's dungeons and was all but mandatory to ease my slog through Final Fantasy II's Pandaemonium. You still need to commit to sitting down and finishing these dungeons in a single playthrough but is eases the burden of redoing them from scratch due to bad RNG, which I feel is a good compromise. It's also just nice that spells which did not function correctly (if at all) in the original games now work as intended.

This might all seem a bit too transformative, but I don't get the sense that any of these changes and fixes trivialize the experience so much as they simply make it more palatable. These still feel like NES era JRPGs, the way they're paced and the order of operations you must undertake to progress through them still feels obtuse in a way that's authentic, but I can also sit down and play them, you know? I think that's exactly what you'd want from a collection like this. Also, god damn that cover art. Fuck.

Final Fantasy I review
Final Fantasy II review

My first and favorite game in the series, Far Cry 3 was an introduction to “modern open world” games for me. All the attention to detail for the time was really immaculate. One of the motifs that really inspired me was the tattoo aesthetic; the individual part of the tattoo related to an ability your character possesses.

I remember the satisfaction I had early in the game, when I stealth killed a guard and threw a knife at another guard standing in front of him. As the protagonist would progress the story, he would become more unhinge and bloodthirsty, complimenting the player’s skill tree progression. The protagonist was decent, but the antagonist was really where it was at.

The Far Cry series is quite unique, in that they advertise and focus each game on the principal antagonist, with that theming starting from this game. Vass and his actor really captured the crazed island pirate vibe, in a way that’s unmatched in the series.

One of my gripes with this game would be how often the antagonist would corner the protagonist, but never directly kill him or confirm that he’s died in whatever situation the antagonist placed him in. But I guess this is a common issue shared across many action movies and games.

Both gameplay and platinum trophy were easy, with the exception of the tacked on multiplayer part. The multiplayer part was super weird and oddly detailed for something relegated to side content. I remember that the player character would embark on a campaign of sorts with three other players, fulfilling objectives from area to area. Overall a simple, satisfying game.

Overall Rating: 87
Personal Difficulty: 30
Trophy Hunting Difficulty: 45

despite having over a hundred hours of playtime in this game, i still hadn't beaten it. i was too scared to. all of the endings seemed so unfavorable, and i was okay with the unpredictability of the mojave prior to the war at the hoover dam. but i bit the bullet, fought for an independent vegas (arguably, my most favored ending, if i were going to go with any), and finished the game.

there are a lot of things i could say about this title. the writing is phenomenal, the characters are iconic and interesting, and everything about it reeks of charm. there will never be a game like fallout new vegas, i think. with the dlcs, it brings it even more together. my favorite one being old world blues, since i love things that are both mildly serious but also don't take themselves seriously at all. be a little silly, have some fun.

i still have a lot to explore in this game. i still want to continue playing it, maybe experience the other endings, much to my chagrin, and play community-made quests and stories.

i fully, wholeheartedly, recommend this game. it is literally the best one out of the fallout franchise, and arguably one of the best rpgs ever made.