Sadly this game has a couple of technical issues and bugs that caused more than a handful deaths throughout my playthrough. It's sad to see the game released in the state it's in.
That aside, when it works, it WORKS. The controls feel great for the most part (except maybe for the second and final bosses), the designs are all cute and the music is really solid. Saw some people on here slandering it, but holy, they're wrong. If you don't like the main theme and tracks of the first couple of levels, just search for "Balearic Birds" on the soundtrack and enjoy having your mind changed.
I expected a little more out of this. I was never really blown away throughout the game, although I really enjoyed playing it over the course of one day. Came back hourly, because once the movement clicked, it got addictive. I'm mainly just upset by the technical issues, that occurred so frequently.

Also, and this is not to be taken so seriously, but I couldn't really get used to how flat the surfaces on characters looked. I really really liked the style of the game for the majority of it's runtime and think it's drop dead gorgeous in some levels (this backround-shader, that blurs stuff in the distance is very well excecuted), but I've always wondered, why they didn't give the character models that same normal-map that the backrounds got, to make them look a little less smooth and shiny (untextured). Because funnily enough, that would fit the style they went with in the cutscenes really well. Remember when the MK8D DLC courses all had the same normal map? I think the characters in Penny's would've benefited from exactly those.

Square Enix and their requirements to even play the damn DLC is what made me laugh out loud at 2 am. It's a fucking mystery how to get to the Jill and Joshua quests respectively and the only thing the DLC mentions, is that you have to have done those. Why do they these two even have requirements in the first place? Not that my communication with Clives brother is dependent on 3 random fetch items I had to collect earlier. Most mind numbing markers I followed in a while to play what I payed for.

AND YET, Echoes of the Fallen is kind of goated, because of how absolutely crazy it is that they gave Omega the chicken tenders. The way the Azys La and e-scape theme are woven into the (pretty forgettable) dungeon that builds up to the fight, is pretty damn cool.
I REALLY enjoyed the Omega fight too. The DLC ends up being pretty short, but if you plan on buying 'The Rising Tide' anyway, it's a nice appetizer for what the second DLC COULD be.
Echoes of the Fallen didn't blow me away, but was enjoyable nonetheless.

After 4 months of fucking ... no games, I beat one, let me tell you about it.

BRC made me feel ecstatic at it's highest highs, when I was dodging cops left and right, listening to 'DA PEOPLE' while battling the crew, who's territory I'm about to snitch through graffiti and street dancing.

When it's not that at these highs though... it's a pretty solid exploration game with great music and traversal that isn't really deep, but fun and second nature after an hour. Combat is pretty bland, but beating up cops is fun. I'm so glad combat really isn't a huge component of this game though and every single boss-fight is more mechanically 'challenging' instead of making you use your 3 attack buttons, that basically give you no feedback whatsoever on hit. It's not hard at all though, once you know how to keep your combo going for literally ever, which I'm super into don't get me wrong. I liked myself some THPS, but tbh not having to deal with all this extra shit just while traversing an area has something cathartic with the focus more on looking and feeling cool.

This was a lot of fun all the way through and is definitely something I will boot up again whenever I want to relax and listen to an audio book or podcast.

TL;DR: XVI feels like Heavensward but with a ‘more colours’- DLC, fantastic combat and the exact same mission structure

I love to love Final Fantasy XVI. So much about this hit the spot for me and yet some aspects of it leave me wanting for more. I want to focus on these aspects in this review. By my score it should be obvious how much I like the rest of the game.

My biggest compliment goes to the pacing of the second half of 16. This game moves at a break-neck speed at times and keeps hitting you with one great set-piece after another. Yet later in the game that speed is regularly halted by what feels like filler quests in between. I barely really disliked any of these, but it is the gut reaction when confronted with the fact that you won’t get to the cool thing, you want to do for another 20 minutes, that colours the impression. This for me becomes really apparent in the last zone. A reason for that may be found in how I approached my playthrough. I wanted to get the strongest weapon before fighting the last boss, which meant without googling too much, doing every single Hunt mission as they got available. How these are distributed is a another aspect I don’t like, because for a minority of them you have to complete side quests first. Other than side quests which unlock new gameplay features or gear, they are not marked with the typical + symbol in the quest-icon. So I had to google which of these quests I have to sit through in order to unlock the hunts to unlock the previously mentioned weapon. Add the sort of filler main quests between larger set-pieces and you will see how my progress later in the game basically got halted every 2 main scenario missions. If the hunt-board was unlocked earlier, they could’ve spread these out more throughout the game. That would have improved my enjoyment of the very cool and fun hunt fights for sure.

I'm also not a fan of most of the side quests. Some tell neat stories, others don't and just reward you with money you'll never need and reputation in your camp. All of them are fetchy af. The same could be said about the main scenario ones too. They didn't really get out of the MMO quest design. As someone who loves 14 for many years now I can look past that. I'm used to their approach to story-telling in these quests and felt right at home. Still, they could be a whole lot better and more interesting from a gameplay standpoint.

Now to the spoilery bit:
Why the hell is Jill not more in this game?!?! She is amazing throughout the first half, but basically gets her entire screen-time cut after a certain introduction of another character. Don’t get me wrong, Joshua and Clive have great chemistry and captivating arcs, but Jill could have added to that. She sort of gets side-lined and acts like the love-interest with no agency. I loved the beginning of their love-story just to see it unaddressed for most of the runtime right up to the end. That fact did ruin Jills character for me personally. She has so much potential to add to the themes of Clive’s journey and they should have capitalized on that.

The overall narrative and world are amazing though. I was sceptical at first, because the tone and constant name dropping of kingdom names, places and characters and their history could have easily made for a very confusing and uninspired backdrop to the action-focused gameplay. But it IS interesting. It is really well thought out and understandable just by paying attention to the story and pressing the Active Time Lore Button like twice when you happen to get lost anyway. Hell, the features that keep track of the events in the realm are really cool too! Not needed, yet I still wish more games had that so when I drop them for a couple of months, I can just go to an NPC who has neatly arranged visualizations for every major event, ready for me to browse. This is way more accessible than having to browse the massive entries in 13 for sure.

As I said, I love XVI and while by no means perfect, it scratches that certain itch Final Fantasy has been scratching for most of my life now. It’s a peak comfort game and I’m convinced that I’ll return many many times in the search for solace. Outside of the game I’m already addicted to Soken and his team’s compositions for this one.

My only wish for the future is that 17 will be written by Natsuko Ishikawa and again composed by Soken or the Team that’s working on 7R currently.

I have nothing but love for this game and only started playing it because i have been addicted to the soundtrack for half a year now. Something in it's visual and audio identity is making me feel really cozy and like this is where I belong, even tho except for listening to the music I had no ties with this game till now. Glad I decided to dip my toes into it after I seem to have finally managed to get into fighting games through GGS and SF6. 3rd Strike is something else though and I'll definitely make this my new comfort game.

I don't sleep a lot whenever I boot this up around midnight.

I honestly lost interest in the World Tour mode within an hour and can't really be bothered to play through it even, but online, this is the most fun I had with a competitive game in years.
Also everything about the presentation of this game and it's music is phenomenal.

Update: If I continue playing SF6 as much as I do rn, it might end up GOTY for me

Second update: I'm 40 hours in and I fucking love this game. The only reason this is not a 5/5 is because of the stupid battle pass and monetization decisions for a 60€ game. Fuck Capcom, but they made a banger of a game.

Wanted to play this for a really long time and lowkey loved it. It defo isn't perfect, has frame rate issues in certain stages, but THE VIBEEEES!!! The only thing I'm mad about with this, is that we lack some tracks from the soundtrack on YouTube. And I take that personally, because the song right before the ending goes way too fucking hard and it is nowhere to be found on the internet.

The god damn animation in this drives me crazy. There is a shot where Ranko shoots her dad from a hotel window and the camera pans around her in 180° , before she slightly adjusts her violin-sniper, pulls out the fucking bow, rocks it on the strings and head-shots the guy. I was about to collect my jaw from the floor, but no, this game doesn't play and so he disintegrated into Mahjong pieces and the blood on the wall behind him was a fucking art piece.

Exactly what I mean with this game goes so fucking hard that you can overlook the sometimes a little stiff control scheme. It's fine and really fun, once you get the hang of it.
Even during gameplay do enemies explode in particle effects, chain their explosions into each other and fill your entire screen with graffiti-esque sticker designs.
Ranko Tsukigime's Longest Day is unstoppable, has the perfect length at about 50 minutes and still captivates me hours after completion. Play this, if you manage to grab a copy. Not even mad I payed as much as I did to get one honestly and it's also a blue-ray with the other 4 short peace films? I got my money worth for SURE!

Holy shit this is a hard one to play.
Visuals and music were phenomenal for the most part I got more from what I desperately wanted after playing the first game.
I just wish Bayo 2 got a PC Port like the first one, because with higher resolutions the artstyle REALLY shines and gets elevated a lot, while on the switch it just looks okay. Hard to play the second one on Switch after Bayo 1 on PC, I gotta be honest.

I HAVE to rate Bayo 2 lower for how they fucked up the combat system. The intricate deets are already out there, so I won't really elaborate on why Bayo 2 falls completely flat in comparison to the first one. How they made witch time the main focus of this game is frustratingly irritating as all your moves outside of it are useless tho.
Yes, it is fun for the first two hours because you just breeze through absolutely everything on normal, but the longer the boss fights get, the more did I cry to have encounters like Jeanne back, because her move-set was so meticulously crafted that she felt like an equal opponent without giving her a move that just cancels your attack, your combo and hits you with a follow up attack to punish for what you could not have seen coming.
I wasn't really goot at Bayonetta's combat, but even I felt how the second game just butchered the entire flow of gameplay and grew to appreciate 1 even more.

Overall a fun ride tho, but nothing I would voluntarily play a lot more of.

It's all I ever wanted. The mapping is excellent, there are a comical amount of songs, which can all be played in the co-op multiplayer AND in one-button mode and the presentation and RPG 'mechanics' are cute and entertaining, while never getting in one's way of enjoying the game.
The amount of intrinsic motivation I have for this title because of the sheer quality of it's content is still quite unfathomable to me. This is really up there with my fav rhythm games like P4 Dancing.
Even though I was super hyped for this release it didn't disappoint in the slightest and IndieZero did an amazing job, bringing together all these different Final Fantasy experiences, expanding on what they learned with the prior 3 installments.
Actual GOTY contender and I'm not even kidding in the slightest. See y'all in the online multiplayer

Crisis Core tries to do a lot of things, but ultimately gets into it's own way by failing to use the hardware it had to operate on to a degree that would have made an interesting playing experience.
My TLDR is that this could have been a really good game, if it came out on the PS2 instead of the PSP and would have had another editor or two to supervise the dialogue and character-writing.

How do I get there: Well first we have to aknowledge that Crisis Core is incredibly ambitious; being the action focused prequel to one of the most influential video games ever made... on a handheld console from the 2000's. For what it is, I can deffo give it credit and in this particular case I think it would work a lot better on the console it released on, than an emulator, as the entire game structure is designed to have you take breaks and hop in and out of gameplay over the cause of your playthrough. Binging this on an emulator like I did, which, without a doubt, harmed my enjoyment, as the missions especially were not meant to be played back to back, trying to balance missions and story in one sitting.

Crisis Core is held back by it's combat to a degree that it felt painful to play at times. The distance between Encounters can be hilariously short, which really wore me down over time. Exhibit A
Also does the combat lack responsiveness, which you CAN actually get used to tho and make it bend to your will pretty good, which is also the point you will realize that combat lacks mechanics. I complained out loud about the absurdity and tedium of the final boss, which was neither hard, nor interesting and in my eyes just a huge waste of time. It had enormous downtime, didn't manage to kill me once, but took painstakingly long to beat with all of the spawning ads and the DMW machine doing god fuck knows. CC is also really easy, just... not fun.

On to the story. The fuck. This one of the messiest told plots in recent memory. It's not bad per se, just clumsily progressed through weird writing (which might be the translation, I cannot confirm that), confusing set-ups and unclear character motivations for the majority of the runtime. The gameplay inherently kills the pacing here but as the hardware also necessitates not a lot of story can happen in between of the grand set-pieces. The philosophy of handheld games is super interesting, kinda weird and doesn't necessarily translate to game experiences we are used to rn and I can appreciate that too in a way. It's just as it is.

I want to end this on a good note tho, that being that I LOVE the visuals of this game. I think it looks waaaay better than Reunion. KH artstyle FFVII is looking clean as heck and on my emulator, I only doubled the resolution, instread of cranking it up to make everything super sharp and modern comicy looking, as it made for a whole vibe of it's own. Some of the locals are downright gorgeous, especially Shinra manor for instance.
The music is not really what I expected, nor did it fit my taste all of the time, but it does something unique and I can appreciate that it feels other-worldly with the choices of instruments of genre to sepperate itself from OG FF7.
My fav thing tho are the hella 2000-ish animations and especially the WAY TOO cool pre-rendered curscenes. That Sephiroth/Angeal/Genesis fight on the Junoon Canon is one of the greatest animated fight scenes period. It's quality in universe only being overshadowed by the fight in the church in Advent Children. I wrote a defense of that film on my letterboxd if ur interested lmao.

My time with Crisis Core wasn't all bad. I think there could be a lot to love for a lot of people. I'm sad I wouldn't necessarily call my self a CC connoisseur, but even I got something out of this title. The ending even managed to break through my frustration and got me hooked a lil again. I mean I knew all of it, but seeing it for the first time in game was still kinda cool.
Not really looking forward to playing Dirge of Cerberus now anymore tho.