Man, there is so much SOUL in this game. Everything from the themes, the immersive world, the nostalgic visuals and the enchanting music, to the heartwarming interactions and overcoming challenges together, all resonate with a special magic that evokes strong feelings of nostalgia and fondness in me. It's all part of the unique charm that makes FFXI feel like an adventure.

Writing this while on a boat to Selbina, hiding from the rain, surrounded by fog, and enjoying the atmosphere with other players. I don't know of any other game that has something like this. There's a reason why tens of thousands of people are still playing FFXI years later. There's just nothing else like it.

Thanks to the private servers we still get to experience this fascinating world called Vana'diel the way it was meant to be experienced.

after having a gay old time installing the game (and actually enjoying browsing playonline), the game crashed on me on the character creation. then when i was starting to play it it crashed again and got stuck in a crash loop there. i looked for a solution for hours to no avail then decided to recreate my character Speedboat (female hume). then the game started actually working but it's crashed twice more even with the dx8 wrapper things and whatever. lol. will update in the comments as i go, i really like the mood and aesthetic but it's really fucken slow so far and the menu navigation is kinda hilariously overstuffed. still think i could end up loving this one but we'll see

ZORTCH HEADS STAY WINNING

I was absolutely not expecting to like this game as much as I did. I heard through word of mouth that Zortch was a surprisingly excellent little Boomer Shooter, but looking at how crude it looked, I honestly expected it to be overhyped. I was wrong.

Zortch is a classic FPS that takes a lot of inspiration from Half-Life, Quake, and most surprisingly Turok. The art style is very low-poly, almost looking like it came right off of the N64, but it works really well. The crude nature of some of the art also really adds to the alien atmosphere of the entire game. The atmosphere in general is fantastic, with the soundtrack honestly being one of the high points of the game for me due to how alien and atmospheric it was.

However, what stole the show for me was the enemy variety. There are like 30 different enemy types in this game, and they are almost all unique. It really adds to the entire experience, and makes the entire 4 hours feel consistently fresh as they keep adding more enemies to deal with. The shooting feels great too.

My only real major downside is that I found the level design to be amateurish at times. Its the area that really struggles, with a lot of levels feeling samey and uninteresting. The lack of a map feature and landmarks also makes navigating some of them an absolute nightmare, but thankfully most levels are still pretty short. It's not the worst issue in the world.

Zortch was a surprisingly really fun and unique shooter in a genre that is beginning to sadly grow oversaturated and stale in the past few years. I honest to god hope for a Zortch sequel because I think this developer has the potential to make something even better.....or at least even weirder.

I need to sit on this for a while but it pisses me off that even before the game released, one of my most recurring thoughts was "I can't wait for the sequel to be way better", and that's most likely going to be true in the next 5 years! I just want to appreciate the fact that I get to have a spiritual successor to my 3rd favorite game of all time, but this really does feel like Jet Set Radio 1 at times, rather than Future, in the sense that it knows what it wants to be, but can't be it quite yet.

They've laid the groundwork for something perfect to come and I look very forward to that. What we have here is great though.

For half of my life, all I've wanted is Beat from Jet Set Radio to actually be a character with a story, and boy, I sure got my wish and then some with this game. Absolutely love the protagonist. The characters involved with the story have excellent designs. The unlockable crew members are pretty whatever though. Most people I know didn't even realize Shine for example was a recruitable character, she just looks too normal, even though she's just in place dancing for your attention. I was shocked Coil wasn't a story character, his design is much more unique than say Shine or Mesh, but he's just completely miss-able. He's all over the place in the trailers too! Also, why can I not play as Escher? Not cool. I also wish there was more voice acting on display throughout the story. We're missing a pretty big piece that made Jet Set Radio so special here in regards to that. I'm not sure what the equivalent to DJ Professor K would be in this world, but I hope to god we get anything comparable to him in a sequel. Not trying to be mean here, but I wanted to highlight Rise's voice acting. Were those lines selected after one take?

Also......you're gonna have a guccied down to the nuts dog design in this game, and just make it an NPC??? You couldn't make that design be this world's Pots the Dog?????? FUCK YOU!!!!!!!

The additions to the Jet Set Radio style tricking are nice, but I do feel like the addition of manueling created the requirement for way too many open spaces, like the 2nd part of the mall for example, that didn't need to be that big. Hopefully in a sequel, they can craft tighter environments. I don't mind the simplicity of the tricking as much as most people, as Jet Set Radio never had that in mind much. I never expected it to be THPS levels of complex in this game, and thank fuck it's not. Absolutely love the addition of bikes though. We don't see enough bikes in extreme sports games these days.

I like the spraying mechanic here. It's cool to see it take from JSR 1 rather than Future in this area, as it was a really cool mechanic in JSR 1 that was sadly scrapped for the much quicker spraying in Future. I wish they kept the sense of fear that came with spraying in JSR 1, where while you're doing it, the cops are still getting closer, helicopters included. To be fair though, the police in this game are already extremely annoying to deal with. So annoying in fact, that there are portapotty's you can use to make your heat meter go down to 0 stars. Thank goodness they were self aware of that. It sucks that past 2 stars, the police just despawn all civilians and make the world feel very empty.

The music is pretty good. This game has it's own things going on in that department, and I respect that it wasn't trying to be 1-1 with Future's flavors, but I did find myself getting really tired of a lot of the songs here pretty fast. I am a B-Side kind of person, but some of these picks are kind of C-Sidey to me. The Klaus Veen song especially made me feel that way. His contribution to the soundtrack was the thing I was looking forward to the most, and it turned out to be a track from one of his albums released a few years ago. I immediately recognized it because I've had it in my Spotify likes for quite a while. And Anime Break is a good song, obviously I think so because I just said it's in my Spotify likes, but would I expect it in this game? No. Do I like listening to it after the 10th time in game? Not Really. I guess I just expected more stuff that would stick around in my head than what I got. It's got flavor, but not as much crazy variety as the games this is trying to emulate have. My favorite tracks are pretty much all the songs used in the trailers for the game. I love Agua a ton. It is very cool that you get rival gang's playlists after defeating them.

I think the game is the perfect length. Both Jet Set Radio's are between 8-13ish hours, and it took me about 11 here. I don't want a 20 hour long Jet Set Radio, and neither would you man. It would get repetitive.

A lot of what I have to say at the moment sounds negative, but I love the game regardless. It is still an extremely fun time whether you've played either Jet Set Radio's or not. It's probably more fun for you if you haven't touched them. I just know that a sequel to this will probably be as perfect as Jet Set Radio Future, and I look forward to that dream being real eventually. I hate that that's my foremost thought at the end of this, looking forward to the Future rather than what we just got not even a week ago. But can you blame me? The Future is amazing as long as it has Jet Set Radio before it! I think the Future with Bomb Rush Cyberfunk before it will also be incredible.

I'll spare you a full repost and just link the original review here: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Reyn/review/665135/

To leave some comments on the original version specifically...well, it's still ANUBIS: Zone of the Enders. The combat's beauty was obviously nailed the first time around, and this is technically still true for the encounter design, but (and this might just be from playing the versions with the Special Edition content so much) the pacing might be a little tooooo snappy; going straight from Anubis to finding Taper is the big glaring point in my eyes. Not necessarily worse, just pretty abrupt.

Part of why the SE content works is that all of the new fights are actually pretty general, owed to the reuse of areas (the Cellar Room was a VS. Mode map in the original). There's no real gimmick to any of them, but instead they give you some appreciated space in the main game to mess around for a bit. If you ask me, it's more preferable than the Extra Missions, which usually just tend to be recycled fights anyway, only now with a best time to shoot for.

Beyond that, it's mostly some visual polish that the SE has to its name: the extra Subweapon displays in cutscenes, and, ironically, extra cutscenes in general, smooth things out a bit more. Another abrupt jump in the original game is from the Codec bit with Ken on Phobos straight into the Nepthis clones. The new cutscene alone helps it feel less sudden, not to mention the chance to nuke regular mobs as Naked Jehuty. For all intents and purposes, the endgame is the equivalent of reaching robot godhood, and getting to exercise that power is always satisfying; funny how even a non-fight can add so much to the experience.

VS. Mode's new UI and meter system also make it feel more refined...even if it's still kusoge-tier.


Still a great game, just that you can see how those extra months in the oven made it even better. Does bring the fine-tuning (or lack thereof) of some of the wackier sections on Extreme into question, though.