antilaser
This review contains spoilers
I was left with way more complicated feelings on this thing than I was expecting. It's a fun game to play, with a tweaked battle system taken far past the clumsy feel of the PSP version and a nice, compact structure that makes it a super easy game to open up when you decide you got some time to kill. Those side-missions rock and they have the same sort of goofy yakuza-adjacent tone that Final Fantasy VII Remake happens to strike as well, probably mostly due to this version's HD facelift.
The story and presentation and just... everything to do with that though, that's a different story. Zack Fair is a hilariously stupid dickhead and I like him a lot for that but I don't necessarily love him. The returning cast is kind of a mixed bag with Cloud and Sephiroth's parts being great and Aerith... well, I'll circle back to that. The new additions to the cast are genuinely baffling. Just the most bizarre personalities that never crack past a surface reading, given absolutely ridiculous importance in the story. It's really stupid in both the good and the bad way.
A lot of the character relationships don't really hold together very well. Angeal is too weird and hilarious to take seriously, Genesis basically never makes sense at all, and Aerith's friendship/hamfisted will they won't they with Zack swings back and forth between being kinda cute and incredibly forced. That forced feeling does kinda start to work on me though, as I started to read Aerith as less someone in puppy love and more as someone being a friend that everyone in her immediate circle just assumes needs to be paired up with the guy that fell through her ceiling. It's goofy but when I look at the character that way it starts to sit better with me.
Zack starts the game as a boot boy through and through, totally bought into the culture of war and capital that Shinra peddles off to its working class. He admires literal psychopaths and broken weirdos and starts off the game committing war crimes in Wutai under the vague goal of being a hero. This literally always comes off as weird and even if the game's creators dont necessarily line up with that reading, this angle keeps being supported by the game's events... so I think deep inside there really was an intent to make a sort of weird ironic hero story like this. The way everyone talks past each other. Zack barely comprehends whats going on in the first half and then suddenly his idol dies and boom, he's broken too and thus a hero to the lower ranking soldiers.
He makes friends with Cloud, in which case suddenly the dialogue is really well acted and endearing. In Nibelheim the game just ascends to a new level where the bizarre inclusions of the new characters start to bring a newfound psychosis into focus for the characters. The world is being ruined by a corporation, it's breaking all the "heroes" and now they're sick and dying with nowhere to go, and this whole time those broken people they admired continue to be a north star. It's actually unsettling stuff as the game crawls to its conclusion, a funeral rite that starts well before the heart stops beating. Zack asks if you think he became a hero. The game fucking ends! It's kind of fucking amazing, man I dunno!
This is one of the messiest, most uneven games I've played in a long time but I'll be god damned if it gets dismissed as something fans of FF7 should skip over. More people gotta learn that Final Fantasy Is Real Good, Even When It Isn't. This is a series that has been steadfast in staying interesting no matter what, and that includes this fuckin weird thing. This failed little J-Drama of a video game. Never before have I seen a game go from laugh-a-minute kusoge to actual compelling drama before, at least not on this level. I know I'm giving the game and its creators a lot of credit here but dammit this game made me feel stuff. Hats off.
The story and presentation and just... everything to do with that though, that's a different story. Zack Fair is a hilariously stupid dickhead and I like him a lot for that but I don't necessarily love him. The returning cast is kind of a mixed bag with Cloud and Sephiroth's parts being great and Aerith... well, I'll circle back to that. The new additions to the cast are genuinely baffling. Just the most bizarre personalities that never crack past a surface reading, given absolutely ridiculous importance in the story. It's really stupid in both the good and the bad way.
A lot of the character relationships don't really hold together very well. Angeal is too weird and hilarious to take seriously, Genesis basically never makes sense at all, and Aerith's friendship/hamfisted will they won't they with Zack swings back and forth between being kinda cute and incredibly forced. That forced feeling does kinda start to work on me though, as I started to read Aerith as less someone in puppy love and more as someone being a friend that everyone in her immediate circle just assumes needs to be paired up with the guy that fell through her ceiling. It's goofy but when I look at the character that way it starts to sit better with me.
Zack starts the game as a boot boy through and through, totally bought into the culture of war and capital that Shinra peddles off to its working class. He admires literal psychopaths and broken weirdos and starts off the game committing war crimes in Wutai under the vague goal of being a hero. This literally always comes off as weird and even if the game's creators dont necessarily line up with that reading, this angle keeps being supported by the game's events... so I think deep inside there really was an intent to make a sort of weird ironic hero story like this. The way everyone talks past each other. Zack barely comprehends whats going on in the first half and then suddenly his idol dies and boom, he's broken too and thus a hero to the lower ranking soldiers.
He makes friends with Cloud, in which case suddenly the dialogue is really well acted and endearing. In Nibelheim the game just ascends to a new level where the bizarre inclusions of the new characters start to bring a newfound psychosis into focus for the characters. The world is being ruined by a corporation, it's breaking all the "heroes" and now they're sick and dying with nowhere to go, and this whole time those broken people they admired continue to be a north star. It's actually unsettling stuff as the game crawls to its conclusion, a funeral rite that starts well before the heart stops beating. Zack asks if you think he became a hero. The game fucking ends! It's kind of fucking amazing, man I dunno!
This is one of the messiest, most uneven games I've played in a long time but I'll be god damned if it gets dismissed as something fans of FF7 should skip over. More people gotta learn that Final Fantasy Is Real Good, Even When It Isn't. This is a series that has been steadfast in staying interesting no matter what, and that includes this fuckin weird thing. This failed little J-Drama of a video game. Never before have I seen a game go from laugh-a-minute kusoge to actual compelling drama before, at least not on this level. I know I'm giving the game and its creators a lot of credit here but dammit this game made me feel stuff. Hats off.
I went into Dragon Quest Treasures fairly blind, all I knew (or needed to know!) about the game was that it's a Dragon Quest XI prequel about popular party member Erik and his sister Mia befriending monsters and searching for treasure. This sort of setup with a built-in hook is actually kind of standard for Dragon Quest. We've got spinoffs about Torneko, Yangus, that one smug guy from VII, and Monsters itself as a sub-series is basically just taking V's monster gimmick and running with it. I knew this stuff going in. I'm gonna hang out with my buddy Erik as a young'n and hang out.
What I did NOT expect was the absolutely insane, brilliant, addictive, joyous, dastardly gameplay loop of this fucking thing. Once you break into the meat of the game, you will be turned into an absolute tycoon with an army of monsters acting as truffle hounds at your disposal. Wake up by the campfire, set out on the open terrain and let those fuckers loose as they get to sniffing up valuable goodies made out of 3D models of Dragon Quests past. Fan service fuels the fire in your heart to absolutely rip this shit up and cash in for LUDICROUS amounts of money. Amounts that'll make your eyes spin like slots and show up as dollar signs. It's amazing. Feels wonderful. A game that makes you feel the way that health-conscious moms do when they describe a chocolate cake as "sinful".
So yeah, you play as a rascal in this one and you certainly feel like one too. TONS of fun that doesn't overstay its welcome, don't miss it because it's bound to be overlooked in a weirdly stacked season of mid-budget JRPGs.
What I did NOT expect was the absolutely insane, brilliant, addictive, joyous, dastardly gameplay loop of this fucking thing. Once you break into the meat of the game, you will be turned into an absolute tycoon with an army of monsters acting as truffle hounds at your disposal. Wake up by the campfire, set out on the open terrain and let those fuckers loose as they get to sniffing up valuable goodies made out of 3D models of Dragon Quests past. Fan service fuels the fire in your heart to absolutely rip this shit up and cash in for LUDICROUS amounts of money. Amounts that'll make your eyes spin like slots and show up as dollar signs. It's amazing. Feels wonderful. A game that makes you feel the way that health-conscious moms do when they describe a chocolate cake as "sinful".
So yeah, you play as a rascal in this one and you certainly feel like one too. TONS of fun that doesn't overstay its welcome, don't miss it because it's bound to be overlooked in a weirdly stacked season of mid-budget JRPGs.
2022
The roots of our communities are an intricate system, too large for any one of us to imagine. In every discovery of fresh soil, we find a long history of its breaking and in our investigation find those same roots again. They connect us all, they teach us lessons. They wrap around our necks, crawl around old bones. We perform dramas about escaping their hold or burning the whole tree but these roots remain. Sooner or later, someone's bound to find our choices in the soil.
Unfolds as more of a sequel to A Realm Reborn than a direct follow-up to Heavensward, with all of the pros and cons that that statement implies. There's genuinely a better sense of place in the conflicts of Doma and Ala Mhigo, and the dungeons and trials operate at an even higher level of quality than the highlights of Heavensward. Really impressive stuff! However, there's a lot about the finer details in aesthetic and character interactions in Heavensward that just plain appealed to me better than Stormblood. The expansion is perfectly solid though! I honestly have trouble seeing what makes this expansion in particular contentious, because so many of its bigger issues particularly in its pacing and some of its politics are just issues with Final Fantasy XIV in its entirety.
2022
I have a funny history with the God of War series. The PS2/PS3 trilogy was the first Playstation series I ever played through, as a newbie to the whole thing when I got my own PS3 in like 2010. In replaying those games before the 2018 game, I discovered that I liked them a great deal less, found them just totally tiresome and annoying. The 2018 game shocked me completely by being a lot more considered and digging into Kratos as a character and his new surroundings, giving him friends and family to protect. To some people this was also tiresome in a new way, but I found it well-meaning and genuine and so it worked on me. Idk, sue me.
So when it came to Ragnarok, I honestly just filed it away in my brain as "more good stuff" and proceeded to not think about it, worry about it, or hype about it until it eventually dropped. That's a weirdly super good headspace to be in for a new game! I should try it again sometime lol. Anyways, they got me again! God of War Ragnarok is impressive for all the ways that it seems unconcerned with itself, taking a longer time to just weave a really fucking engaging narrative that brings this whole series to a thrilling and natural climax. It's such a breath of fresh air, to play a modern Playstation game that doesnt feel like it has anything to fucking prove to me. It's focused on being a fun ass video game with competent progression systems, and enough story hooks and surprising twists to keep me engaged the whole way. They made the new God of War the closest thing I've personally seen to a western-developed modern Final Fantasy game lmao, it's so fucking cool. I dunno, there's a lot of meaty stuff here in the narrative about unraveling a dark, abusive, colonial history and succeeding our parents and what that means, but like. All I wanna say is that the game is fucking cool as hell! Great job to everyone involved, excited to see what Santa Monica does next.
So when it came to Ragnarok, I honestly just filed it away in my brain as "more good stuff" and proceeded to not think about it, worry about it, or hype about it until it eventually dropped. That's a weirdly super good headspace to be in for a new game! I should try it again sometime lol. Anyways, they got me again! God of War Ragnarok is impressive for all the ways that it seems unconcerned with itself, taking a longer time to just weave a really fucking engaging narrative that brings this whole series to a thrilling and natural climax. It's such a breath of fresh air, to play a modern Playstation game that doesnt feel like it has anything to fucking prove to me. It's focused on being a fun ass video game with competent progression systems, and enough story hooks and surprising twists to keep me engaged the whole way. They made the new God of War the closest thing I've personally seen to a western-developed modern Final Fantasy game lmao, it's so fucking cool. I dunno, there's a lot of meaty stuff here in the narrative about unraveling a dark, abusive, colonial history and succeeding our parents and what that means, but like. All I wanna say is that the game is fucking cool as hell! Great job to everyone involved, excited to see what Santa Monica does next.
2021
I believe every video game playing human on earth needs to have a short list of games that massage your brain with dead-simple stimulation. Vampire Survivors is one such game. It's kinda like geometry wars but with an evil horror movie skin and numbers. It's great!
2022
I really wanted to stick up for this game, it's a new entry in the Valkyrie Profile series hopeful in expanding the series to include newer, more modern gameplay styles. However, as a newcomer to the series I feel like I'm getting a terrible first impression. I find the combat incredibly solid and fun to mess around with, especially on a Dualsense, but I just cannot connect with the story whatsoever. It's so nothing, there's so little care or budget given to its presentation that it just comes off feeling Blah, and maybe playing this directly after finishing Final Fantasy XII was a death knell. Maybe I'm being unfair, but either way I'm not in a space whatsoever to be impressed by this game. There just isn't enough substance. I'm reminded of Shin Sakura Wars from 2020, where another Cool Ass JRPG Series finally got a new game and it just fell flat in the mission of converting new fans. At least in this case, Square is also releasing the PSP version of the first game on the Playstation store.
It's honestly staggering that Final Fantasy XII is as good as it is when you consider its famously troubled development. This is a game with one of the most brilliant RPG gameplay systems in all creation, a semi-automated battle system where the bulk of the consideration happens before the battle. The perfect midpoint of tactics and action RPGs, with one of the most addictive progression loops I've ever come across. All of this collides together and sings in beautiful concert when you consider the vast open fields and intricate dungeons that this team has designed for you. Forget Final Fantasies X, XIII and XV, THIS is what we call fucking vast. Gliding across frontiers, trudging in catacombs, I'm not sure I've ever felt more genuinely immersed in an RPG. Nocturne comes to mind but slips in dungeon design ever so slightly.
All of this! And then you consider Ivalice. How exactly did we forget to design towns and cities in this genre? It was clearly once there, this game is proof that a world can feel lived in and populated, but as budgets balloon and resolutions multiply, we continue to lose the soul of a Place in these games. Kamurocho in the Yakuza/Like A Dragon games, that's the last great JRPG town. This game has like at least 5 cities that feel huge and memorable. A modern marvel. I've spoken about Hiroyuki Ito but I haven't mentioned that this game was once helmed by Yasumi Matsuno. He created Ivalice after all, and I think even at the beginning of the game you can feel that exact same voice ring out in the story. After some internal reshuffling, Matsuno cited health problems and promptly left the Final Fantasy XII team. This is something I knew going in, I was bracing myself for the story dropoff, though hopefully not quite as cavernous as Vagrant Story's more vacant chapters.
Color me surprised then, when I found out that the story still comes away rock solid. It's maybe not quite as brilliant as Final Fantasy Tactics or as thought-provoking as Vagrant Story, but Final Fantasy XII does manage to retain that soul. People point to the characters being relative strangers as a weakness, I found it beautiful. That we could have 6 people bound by hasty circumstance, come together for the good of their homeland. People complain that there isn't a strong main character, I find that an utterly fascinating aspect of the story. It's clearly not what was intended, in early drafts it was clear that Basch was meant to be the protagonist of the game. But god, just how cool is it that we have three duos of characters to latch onto. Vaan and Penelo, the little fish in a big ocean. Gateways. Balthier and Fran, the cool, aloof, free sky pirates. Aspirations. Ashe and Basch, tragic victims learning to forgive. Heroes. This is well rounded! The game makes you care! It just doesn't throw 15 hours of cutscenes and constant dialogue at you to make it work. Final Fantasy XII trusts you to invest with your gameplay. Play the Roles. People, either jokingly or dismissively, say the game cribs everything from Star Wars. Sure yeah, Gabranth is Darth Vader. However, in every way that it is Star Wars it is also Lord of the Rings, Godzilla, AKIRA, and allegory to the occupation of Japan in the 1940s and 50s.
Final Fantasy XII. I love it. Completely and utterly. I'll be back.
All of this! And then you consider Ivalice. How exactly did we forget to design towns and cities in this genre? It was clearly once there, this game is proof that a world can feel lived in and populated, but as budgets balloon and resolutions multiply, we continue to lose the soul of a Place in these games. Kamurocho in the Yakuza/Like A Dragon games, that's the last great JRPG town. This game has like at least 5 cities that feel huge and memorable. A modern marvel. I've spoken about Hiroyuki Ito but I haven't mentioned that this game was once helmed by Yasumi Matsuno. He created Ivalice after all, and I think even at the beginning of the game you can feel that exact same voice ring out in the story. After some internal reshuffling, Matsuno cited health problems and promptly left the Final Fantasy XII team. This is something I knew going in, I was bracing myself for the story dropoff, though hopefully not quite as cavernous as Vagrant Story's more vacant chapters.
Color me surprised then, when I found out that the story still comes away rock solid. It's maybe not quite as brilliant as Final Fantasy Tactics or as thought-provoking as Vagrant Story, but Final Fantasy XII does manage to retain that soul. People point to the characters being relative strangers as a weakness, I found it beautiful. That we could have 6 people bound by hasty circumstance, come together for the good of their homeland. People complain that there isn't a strong main character, I find that an utterly fascinating aspect of the story. It's clearly not what was intended, in early drafts it was clear that Basch was meant to be the protagonist of the game. But god, just how cool is it that we have three duos of characters to latch onto. Vaan and Penelo, the little fish in a big ocean. Gateways. Balthier and Fran, the cool, aloof, free sky pirates. Aspirations. Ashe and Basch, tragic victims learning to forgive. Heroes. This is well rounded! The game makes you care! It just doesn't throw 15 hours of cutscenes and constant dialogue at you to make it work. Final Fantasy XII trusts you to invest with your gameplay. Play the Roles. People, either jokingly or dismissively, say the game cribs everything from Star Wars. Sure yeah, Gabranth is Darth Vader. However, in every way that it is Star Wars it is also Lord of the Rings, Godzilla, AKIRA, and allegory to the occupation of Japan in the 1940s and 50s.
Final Fantasy XII. I love it. Completely and utterly. I'll be back.
Honestly kinda cool! It's kind of a progression on what Godzilla 2 was doing, with some more going on with how battles work. Monsters will fight each other as well as you, and when you encounter monsters you get a little shooter minigame to try and shave some damage off of them. You can also play AS the monsters, which I imagine involves jumping on JSDF guys and having a much easier time. Still a pretty tedious game though! I found it really charming despite everything (helped by the fact that I played a lot worse Godzilla shit right before this) and honestly if I found the drive, I think it could eventually become fun to see it through. I dunno, feelin warm on this one!
1993
I wanna root for this game because the presentation rocks so hard, I even like the weird martian-brained layout of the gameplay with the goji-cam on the top half. It's just dull! and you're not supposed to walk into every building?? C'mon man. I can't shake thinking that its kinda cool tho
1990
made me feel like a doo doo baby idiot because I couldn't figure out the first screen of this chibi puzzle platformer godzilla for children. Also I pressed a menu button and got
> CONTINUE
TRY AGAIN
ENTIRE PLAN
PASSWORD
What in the fuck does "Entire Plan" mean???
> CONTINUE
TRY AGAIN
ENTIRE PLAN
PASSWORD
What in the fuck does "Entire Plan" mean???
Core idea is good, but it's still a bad SRPG lol. Music is weirdly more basic than the original?
Sucks.
Slowdown actually got so bad that I tapped into my inner AVGN and shouted "SHITTY GAME"
Slowdown actually got so bad that I tapped into my inner AVGN and shouted "SHITTY GAME"
"I think it's gotta be different someplace else. It's gotta be someplace."
2022
Above all else, this is a celebration of the Japanese role-playing game. It's Dragon Quest IV with a little more sparkle to it, a short-form writing and structure exercise by the team that made it to try and stretch the genre's legs, to go further than the fantasy RPGs that had prevailed in the mid-90s. JRPGs have become more diverse in the years since, but it is telling that in 2022 this game and all of its toying with genres doesn't feel old or tired. Feels like we could definitely use more of this type of thing.