i’ve always been scared of big empty areas. they’re always a little unnerving, and i find my mind often filling up the empty unknown with all sorts of awful things.

nier automata builds this atmosphere of sheer peace and tranquility. throughout the game you’re met with tragedy and drama through every new area you visit, but while you run around the soft, empty fields and buildings and absorb the beautiful music you can’t help but look around and think that maybe things would be okay. maybe if the world were to halt for the rest of time.. it’d be okay. the grass feels almost angelic to look at, and the buildings feel soft and serene. the roots of overgrown trees line the buildings to the point where you can scale up and down to your heart’s content.
idk i have more to say but i forgot

FFVI, like pretty much every other FF, falls squarely in the “games I’m glad I finished when I was younger and whose holistic quality I won’t deny, but holy shit I’m never gonna touch this again” category as a result of developing a nasty allergy to JRPG flowchart gameplay.
One playthrough of this mod later, it now sits at “mechanically best RPG I’ve played not named Cosmic Star Heroine”.

If I had to sum up the brilliance of this mod in as few points as possible, I’d name two. One is expanding a lot on the AI of casual battles by fine tuning different triggers for every enemy. Some will counter physical attacks but not magical, and vice versa, some will hit a immensely powerful AoE attack after being alive for x time, some react to attacking their allies, etc. The result is that I clearly, and fondly, remember more enemy setups from casual battles in specific parts of the world and/or story than I remember bosses from the entire series. When you statistically spend more time on random encounters than anything else in the game, making them interesting affects my enjoyment a lot!

The second one is a big overhaul in stats and formulae, and an even bigger overhaul in character toolkits. FF had a terminal case of “assume 3/4ths of the numbers you see are completely broken and stupid, either syntactically or semantically” until like… VIII? IX? and after those they only fixed the first part. It seems boring and nitpicky to laser focus on the math behind the scenes, but the results are obvious when throwaway legacy mechanics, like the Jump and Cover of yore that seemed to be put in every game out of obligation towards an invisible checklist, are now character defining gameplans of their own, changing equipment brings noticeable boosts to the table, and oh god the synergies with the new characters. Sabin can be a HP/MP battery that deals insane damage from counterattacks exclusively. Shadow can be a spellblade ninja that attacks 4 times a turn, proccing a spell on every hit, or a speed demon who uses ninja scrolls to roleplay as an expensive nuker wizard. Terra gets a freaking DRAGON INSTALL that turns her into a glass cannon with crazy self-sustain, dancing in and out the brink of death. Gau is SO FUN once his hugely redundant skill list has been cut down to only include immediately useful stuff. Characters now have clearly labelled strong and weak points, instead of being mostly interchangeable stat sticks for Ultima spam. The majority of them can’t even spam Ultima anymore! Magic went from the general mechanic that everyone got access to to offering a list of specific feats for every character, in what’s a more contentious choice as it further pushes them towards specific roles - personally I don’t consider “there’s no reason not to teach everything to everyone, yet I still can not do it I guess” an interesting choice, nor is the opportunity cost of “which spell do I grind for first”, and I welcome my toons having 2-4 well defined career paths all equally relevant, in what’s still a cast of 14.

The new spell changes are made through a completely new skill tree system that puts the spotlight on the new menu stuff hacked into the game. Aesthetically pleasing and indistinguishable from what an alternative vanilla FFVI could’ve looked like, it actually got the more recent ports beat as far as QoL goes, changing and checking gear has never been easier. I always hated playing the SNES versions of those mainlines I played on GBA first, with their weirdly chunky fonts, rigid menus devoid of shortcuts, heavily cut down names to fit space limitations, but BNW felt natural and modern while keeping the original OST and more vivid colors.

Let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room: the edgy rewrites. More swears, more dirty jokes, more references, more SWEARS. Once infamous for this stuff, the hack got rid of the most heinous stuff and is much closer in tone to the original. There’s a version that cleans up the script to be 1:1 with vanilla when possible, meaning that you are still playing with Woolsey’s script which is indefensible under any criteria a translation might be judged under, and completely supplanted by the GBA script. Unfortunate and the one thing that keeps me from suggesting it as the definitive edition of FFVI to everyone that isn’t completely new to JRPG combat (I still do it, but I have to second guess myself).

The one damning fault I can give BNW is to have a pretty boring stretch in the mid-game, between the second visit to Zoro and the end of the WoB. You visit a cave full of undead all weak and strong to the same things, fight a boss that barely qualifies as such and more of a completely unneeded “you understand what beats armored humans right?” check by this point of the game, bother people in the bathrooms in Vector, the whole burning house deal that is as one dimensional as it was in vanilla, Ultros scene, and finally you get to the Floating Continent and the game gets fun again. I feel the romhack was very limited by vanilla progression of events with its sparse fights and thematic dungeons, and it couldn’t be avoided without rewrites of the main scenario. It’s a big con, but the only serious blemish I can think of.
Oh, huh, keep a save state ready for the very very very early game, a bad initiative roll can lead to a gameover until you have your first three characters.

It’s here - Danganronpa 4, in a nice legally distinct package. And it’s about 40% gameplay and 60% staring at constant and unbearably long loading screens.
This is really only worth playing if you’re a Danganronpa fan, and if I had to rank it with the 3 mainline games, this would come last by a wide margin.

The game uses a ‘mystery labyrinth’ gameplay section, that’s essentially just the trials in Danganronpa. The trials in those games felt natural within the story though, and here the game bends over backwards to force the introduction of all the same trial gameplay mechanics. I got used to it as the game went on, but the initial introduction of the labyrinth in chapter 0 felt unnatural and forced, which put me off a bit. I don't know if Kodaka just wanted to make Danganronpa 4, but felt he couldn't due to the ending of 3, so he had to stretch this story into unnatural places to force the inclusion of those gameplay mechanics, or if he genuinely thought this was a good application of the same gameplay mechanics within a new story, but the way it was handled just really didn't work for me.

Chapters 2, 4 and 5 were enjoyable for me, but chapters 0, 1 and 3 were unbelievably tedious. Way too hand-holdy and you have no connection to the characters featured in those chapters. And of course, the performance is terrible. I know this is running on switch, but the loading screens are just crazy - even the chapters I enjoyed felt like a chore at a lot of points due to the endless loading screens that you have to endure.