Incredibly bizarre survival horror game sporting some uneven gameplay and a narrative that's generally just campy shlock (in a fun way) but will occasionally veer into being grotesque and shocking (that acid bath murder sequence is genuinely unsettling). I was surprised to learn that this was directed by Kinji Fukasaku (film director of Battle Royale and the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series) but in hindsight Survival Horror is just naturally cinematic, especially when fixed camera angles are involved, so it's honestly a pretty nice fit even if some of those motion capture scenes have aged horrendously.

I think this might be one of those games that falls into the 'so bad it's good' category for me and it's absolutely the type of game that couldn't get made today (outside of a misguided crowdfunded revival project perhaps) but honestly it was consistently entertaining and really managed to invoke the feeling of watching a B-Horror movie (though I'm mostly certain that wasn't their intention), which is a pastime I quite enjoy.

outside of the (understandably) on-the-nose coloured doorways nearly every instance of environmental interaction is rich and tactile. thirty years later it's still a wonder to grope and paw at every (Possibly Maybe) malleable surface and leverage every new upgrade toward greater structural manipulation and command

in ensuring how and when are given as much significance as what and where it forms a relationship between actor and environment that bears uncommonly personal patterns and markings as you learn to use Your body as an implement to interface with the world. sidepaths and back alleys that carve Under - Over - Through reshape the familiar thru layered mechanical discovery and shift the internal v external dynamic in turn; mastery of the self begetting exponential mastery of the other

a fitting problem then that the biocircuitry, plunging intestinal mazes, and gloomy dark ambient synthesis quickly become less something to endure so much as to dominate; the dissonance for show, and the brutality nakedly glamorous and one sided. so much of it exists in service to the pursuit of (Your) power, kneeling with its neck outstretched waiting to feel bones shatter for Your gratification. sure, I feel obscenely powerful, but I'd rather feel anything else

I played this with a friend who is usually very on edge during any kind of horror media. He fell asleep.

I could stop my review right here, on this tongue and cheek, but also completely sincere remark of my experience, because it hammers my main point of contempt home. That these games are utterly boring and uninteresting.
Even external things like a drinking game with the homie can't upgrade the experience. The game has a fucking catch phrase (used in the drinking game by us) it constantly spouts in desperation for relatability and as a lacklustre faux identity. The instagram motivational content classic you see at the bottom of your local gym bros workout pics "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger". The game tries to evoke Nietzsche, but can't even reach Kelly Clarkson.

I know there is a subset of narrow minded people in high up positions who actively want games to just be interactive films, but it seems to me like no matter how many A's these studios have their attempts fail even at B-Movie level. Made up of mostly cutscenens plagued by over done horror clichés and a term coined millenial writing. The second half consisting of tension robbing quick time events, fixed camera angles that learned nothing beyond superficiality from the original resident evils and choices the game just can't help but remind the player of, right after they were made.

That last one is something that I will never get. How unconfident in the player's ability to understand that they just made a choice is the game? Can they expect me to take it serious if it doesn't take me and the limited opinions of interactivity as such and therefore itself serious? Why try to immerse the player with 'agency' if you then immediately televise to them that this is just a game? Just put it in the logs without the pop up notification. At the same time revealing their cards like this let's the player notice whenever their choices actually meant nothing instead of leaving it out or god forbid up to interpretation. The path I choose was to shelve this game.

Before my friend fell asleep he said something that hit the nail on it's head "if this was a film I would have already closed it."
He is right. Games have this excuse. The novelty of interactivity alone carries way to often completely unoriginal and boring stories. How long till this novelty wears off?

To cleanse my soul and to keep my guilt conscious from feeling the need to review and find the right words for the games I actually love, for at least a little longer, I'll have to give credit where its due.
The scene with the narcissistic girl in which she walks the pier alone while talking to her phone. No other character would be able to have scene like this, but her behaviour up untill this point of the game makes it completely believable that she would just talk to her phone camera and half ironically pretend like she is talking to her followers. But i think the interesting part happens at the end of the scene. Idk if this is optional, but she does some verbal introspection about her actions towards the guy she likes and it humanises her. It was the first and only time i said "damn, this wasn't even bad writing" to my friend who was already asleep, but not yet snoring. Mere seconds later she enters a cabin at the end of her walk and gets killed by one of the things. The game humanised her right before killing her off. They robbed the viewer of the 'satisfaction' from seeing the unlikeable character killed and turned my indifference into sympathy and as result the moment almost into horror in the last second. I say almost, because the scene was still goofy af.

Also graphics so good they'll make you say "thats that dude from the netflix show they cancelled after one season." I don't know why netfilx is catching strays now, but i especially don't know how to end rev

You never really hear about PS3 homebrew, do you? After hacking my PS3, I found out why. It's a fucking pain in the arse.

If you know where to look, and join a private discord, you can find people modding old PS3 games. I almost found myself motivated to pursue this when I found out that fans have brought back MGS4's online mode, but that didn't feel like something I needed. Apparently, having the whole of Revolver and Magical Mystery Tour as Rock Band DLC was.

I guess it speaks to how earnestly I love The Beatles. They weren't just a bunch of guys who played good songs. When they emerged out of the early sixties, they were like a whole new kind of person. They broke the conventions of what an adult was supposed to be, and with their wit, intelligence and compassion, made all those guys look ridiculous. They made it okay not to live for the expectations of society or your family name, but your passions. Maybe you're not a fan of the band personally, and that's fine, but I think if you have any interest in pop media, fringe political thought or the embrace of foreign cultures, I think you owe some gratitude to The Beatles' influence. I can't imagine there would be a videogame industry without The Fabs. (This is beside the point, but did you know all those Atari 2600 cover artists were Yellow Submarine animators?)

Playing PS3 Rock Band in 2024 at all is a pain in the arse. If you didn't buy all the equipment 15 years ago, and held onto them for the following decade and a half, you have some very expensive eBay purchases ahead of you if you want to get in on this. I've still got a couple of the guitars, but thanks to multiple house moves, and weird, malicious flatmates who may not have appreciated my vocals on Debaser, those USB dongles were long gone. And it's not as if you can just buy any old dongle. With very few exceptions, they will only pair with their specific controller. And I have one of those fancy George Harrison Gretsch Duo Jets that you couldn't even buy in highstreet shops. I'm not willing to readily give up how much I spent on the dongle when it finally showed up for sale. Unless you're emulating (and seriously, if you're new to all this, please consider emulating), there's no new devices that are compatible with the PS3 games. Harmonix remedied this a little bit with the release of Rock Band 4, which supported full song exports for the previous games (which require DLC keys that are no longer purchasable) and are still playable on PS5 and Xbox Series consoles today, but one-off games like The Beatles Rock Band, which didn't allow you to transfer their highly-valued content to other titles, are still trapped on PS3, Wii and 360, with all their awkward "it made sense at the time" quirks.

So, hacking. I'm not confident I can recall the process well enough to provide even the most rudimentary of tutorials, but if you're going to hack your PS3, you'll need to be on a specific outdated firmware release, and it matters what kind of PS3 you have. You can utilise custom firmware on original PS3s and some slim models, but if, like me, you currently own a "superslim", you'll have more limited access to homebrew software. You can still do it though, with the Homebrew Enabler software ("PS3HEN"), but it's just a little more awkward. Each custom song needs to be transferred to the PS3 via FTP software (something that the installation guidelines only give a cursory mention of, and I hadn't used since college), you may need to make a direct Ethernet connection between your computer and PS3, and you'll need to keep every track in a special folder on your PC to use an executable to recompile the full tracklist each time you want to modify it. You also have to transfer over a special bit of software to make the game modifiable in the first place, and in the haze of everything I tried and retried, I really can't remember how I did this. This isn't a casual undertaking.

I'd argue Harmonix are one of the most under-valued development studios out there. Even in their smaller games, like Super Beat Sports, that nobody cares about, they're stuffed to the brim with extra modes and optional content. Rock Band was an insane logistical undertaking. Not only are thousands of songs accurately transcribed for multiple instruments and difficulty settings, but the on-stage bands are authentically animated, too. They made enormous bespoke electric drumkit controllers and sold them to American normies. By the peak of all their energy and ambition, on Rock Band 3, they were even including tracks for two backing vocalists, "Pro Guitar" mode (which would have you plug in either a midi-compatible electric guitar or a special, expensive plastic one with buttons on every string of every fret, to play the real guitar parts) and keytar, and barely anybody was playing the game like that. That doesn't even scratch the surface of how much of an undertaking it was to acquire the licences to an incredible range of pop and rock songs from a huge number of different publishing houses, and re-sell them. Of course, modders don't have to worry about the legal aspect, but it's just as ambitious for them to attempt reverse engineering the game to play home-made content and match the level of quality that Harmonix established.

There are amateurish custom Beatles Rock Band DLC tracks out there, but they're not the ones made by the core TBRB Customs devs. For the most part, you'd really struggle to tell them apart from the official Harmonix ones without prior knowledge. Sure, they have to lean on the handful of environments that were established for the original game, some of the surreal Pepperland visuals wear a little thin when applied to multiple songs, and in a post-Get Back world, Twickenham and Apple Studios seem like crucial Beatle locations, so it's a shame that they haven't been incorporated, but man, they managed to hack the Magical Mystery Tour bus into this. Would you have even the slightest idea how to make your PS3 games do that? They've been pretty clever, utilising the established assets to animate each new song, and the multiple costume changes during Glass Onion's callbacks are a particular treat.

TBRB Customs have set themselves the goal of creating custom DLC for every studio-recorded Beatles album, including the Past Masters singles collections and Giles Martin's remix album, Love. It's a lofty ambition, and the team have approached the to-do list with a completionist mindset. Frustratingly, this means that many of the most wanted tracks have been held off on for now, while we're stuck pissing around for the files for Sie Leibt Dich and Hold Me Tight. So far, there's been a huge number of tracks from With The Beatles and A Hard Day's Night, but no All I've Got To Do or You Can't Do That, and I personally find that extremely distressing. No Baby's In Black, no Hide Your Love Away, no Bad Boy, upsettingly few White Album songs - we're promised them in the future, but apparently, there were no new releases in the whole of 2023, and the team's recent focus has been on making previous tracks available for the Wii version of the game. I really want to believe they'll complete the tracklist, but I worry their energy may run dry when they see how many years they'll need to devote to the process.

There's also the fact that the modders seem to be young American Beatles fans. The kind who cried over 2023's Now & Then and think all of Paul McCartney's solo career is worth paying attention to. They don't have the same interest in the back catalogue as us slightly older fans who still think John was the big Beatle to like, despite the things he's alleged to have done after hearing of Nixon's reelection. They're insular and memey, and if you look into the more amateurish Anthology and Solo Career projects, you'll have to wade through some rake of Spongebob shit to get some comparatively rough content. It's very annoying that they've made a custom track for George's terrible White Album off-cut, Circles, while we're still waiting for Happiness is a Warm Gun, but I shouldn't upset the babies too much while they're working so diligently on my precious Rock Band DLC.

There's always a bit of a fear of custom Rock Band stuff. The most hardcore fans seem to be those who never got over Through the Fire and Flames, and not just guys who really like songs. While the focus in this DLC has been on matching Harmonix's precedent, there's still a wee bit of that Guitar Hero elite in here. We were never supposed to play the tape loop at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever, and I think you know this. Please take your job more seriously, unpaid hobbyists.

Many have approached the custom content as a thing strictly for emulators, and sensibly, it's the only way I can recommend a fan to go through this rigmarole. That strips out so much of Rock Band's appeal for me, though. For me, accessibility was such a draw to these games. I've played them at house parties with exchange students who really struggled with conversational English, but were delighted to see those falling note icons and become part of the band. If fellow Big Bad Beatleborgs are over, I can show them my special game that has twice as many songs as anybody else's copy, and we can delight in playing the whole of the Long Tall Sally EP. Nobody should go through the embarrassment of having to navigate a docked Steam Deck in front of another person. Now I've got everything set up, Beatles Rock Band is just as inviting to casuals as it was in 2009. I can grumble about minor details or the trajectory of the project, but really, it's so cool that any of this is possible.

Does some really clever stuff in juxtaposing York/Zach's increasingly close relationship to the town against a conception of death as continued existence in a state of alienation. SWERY represents the Pacific Northwest as functionally Shinto and still manages to create the most effective portrait of the United States in the medium, in which the corrosive dreams of self-transcendence and absolute unity with the other can only be countered by a kind of boddhisattva of pop culture appreciation. Where Revengeance anticipated 2016 in some odd details, Deadly Premonition's a lot more on the nose thematically.
All of this is peripheral to the sheer charisma of York which is the sustaining quality of the game. While he's obviously modeled on Kyle McLaughlin, the Twin Peaks comparisons kind of understate the influence of The Hidden on this game, ironically suggesting that SWERY and Lynch were influenced by the same source.

The Hintkeeper should be in every game. He has the most dramatic way of describing everything in the game. You could show him a set of like, scuba gear, and he'd say some shit like, "This will help you descend into the deepest depths, but are you sure you'll be able to come back...up?" Absolutely divine decision putting his ass in the game.

So the sequel, A Puzzle of Flesh, is the superior game and one of my all-time favorite adventure games, but...look, I'll keep it real, I love this game. This game and I go way back. Some of the death scenes scared the fucking shit out of me as a 10 year old and they're still genuinely shocking, so the game was for a long time this boogeyman to me. Like, this HAD to be the scariest game ever, and on the early 2000s internet where you were mostly relegated to screenshots of games, just seeing stills from it had me looking over my shoulder...

of course, the game is VERY funny. Nowadays, I love it because it's so charming. I love FMVs, I love PC Midi music, I love the huge expressions actors had to make to be visible through compression, and I love the bombast and drama therein. I recently replayed it with my partner and we both were engrossed, it was such a great experience.

To be honest, I think the chase scene at the end holds up. For its tension and cheese factor in equal amounts. I don't think the game does anything truly remarkably, but if you are into FMV stuff from the 90s? God you have GOTTA check this one out.

I guess I’ll start off this review by saying that I am not Final Fantasy VII’s biggest shooter. I’ve played the original and the remake and it’s a pretty good story, but it’s not my favorite Final Fantasy. I don’t really have any outward complaints about the narrative because of this, except for what’s directly presented to us. If they were to remake X or IX and do whatever they wanted with them in the same vein as this trilogy, I’m sure I could understand a lot of fan’s frustration, but for the most part I’ll be talking about the core gameplay. I’m gonna be trying this new thing where I talk about spoilers in hyperlinks instead of cramming them in the bottom of the review and describing them in vague terms, so don’t worry about getting your eyes tainted to something you don’t want to see. For the most part, it sits in a weird place in my head because I liked a lot of what they did but also despised a lot as well. As soon as I opened the menu and saw crafting I was extremely hesitant. It’s really funny to me that this game had so much discourse about yellow paint breaking people’s immersion, but no one seems to care about the pouches of crafting materials just laid all over the place for no reason. I would describe this game as a complete descent into madness personally.

I’ll start with the combat because it was my main gripe with Remake, and I want to get the positives out before I get into salt territory with the negatives. I’m much more of a turn-based connoisseur and getting used to the action gameplay was like getting shoved into arctic waters. I always felt like the dodges on the characters weren’t effective and the ATB gauge build up would drop a sledgehammer on my balls every time I’d get caught with it empty and unable to heal during a 45 minute boss fight. It sucked ass in that game, and it wouldn’t benefit from the fact that most chapters are just endless roadblocks of bosses that fly and cancel out your actions with cinematic cutscenes. Some of this is still present in Rebirth, but they managed to both fix the momentum of the characters in combat and delete half the health on most of the enemies. It was like leagues different and done way better here. Most of the character’s dodges were changed and were actually able to dodge attacks. Cloud was given this ranged laser attack that allowed him to build ATB from a distance which made him so much better to play as, especially because he’s the only party member that can’t be switched out. I found both Red and Tifa to be extremely overpowered due to their critical chances. If you give them ATB boosting items, they turn into automatic weapons that barely need to reload. It was just a much better experience overall. Instead of rolling my eyes at the giant mech boss, I was actually enjoying myself for once. I do still think Aerith is atrocious to play as though. She has better Ward abilities, but she’s still cannon fodder. Everytime she was forced to do a battle by herself, it was like Guantanomo torture.

The addition of the other party members hanging out on the side was neat, but I honestly can’t tell if they were actually helping or if they were just there for moral support. I definitely saw Barret pressure some enemies from afar when the stars aligned, but it seemed like Red and Cait Sith would just stare menacingly off to the side. It was still like, the perfect small change that you didn’t really know you needed though. There’s never any questioning what they were up to while your core 3 get to kill everything, because well… they’re right there! What I would love to see in the next game is the ability to potentially swap characters out on the fly, similar to Final Fantasy X. If the characters are there anyways, it shouldn’t be hard to implement. It would just be so nice if you ran into a flying enemy and could swap your melee attackers out for Yuffie/Barret mid-battle, instead of having to do it before battle after a reload. Since you’ll have the full party for that game, I feel like it’s going to be a must-have feature and I hope they don’t continue these full chapters of split parties just for the sake of forcing you to play as someone else for 3 monotonous hours. It helps that enemies are much easier to stagger in this game, meaning that they’re also much easier to kill overall. The combat is just a huge step up and it was actually fun in this game.

Just like in Remake though, there are a lot of highs and lows in this game. The highs are monumentally fantastic, while the lows are like slamming your face into concrete. If you thought that Remake had a serious issue with padding out its ass, then I’m so sorry to say this, but it’s made so much worse in this game. The issue is still extremely prevalent, it’s just that it’s relegated more into the side content than it is in the main story this time. Rebirth does benefit from taking place across multiple locations, and they are beautiful, but the chapters are still bloated beyond all Hell by chores masked as mini-games and mini-challenges. And here’s the thing, I don’t want to hear anyone in the comments raising a finger and going, “well, it’s all optional and you’re very dumb!! Why did you do it if you didn’t enjoy it? ☝️🤓” Is it though…? Is it truly optional content if your party’s EXP, SP, and relationship with them are tied to the side quests and intel? You can say all day that the shit doesn’t have to be done, but it doesn’t eliminate the fact that your main level progression comes from playing the same QTE puzzle 6 times per area and turning on shitty ass Tears of the Kingdom towers so that Chadley can constantly bitch in your ear about shit you do not care about. I’m genuinely wondering if people actually liked doing these? Not just, “I didn’t mind it.” Nope, did you genuinely enjoy doing this repetitive crap? Don’t hesitate to raise your hands. Even if you did, just because the shit is “optional” it does not mean it’s not in the game, and I’m here to talk about what I don’t like in the game, bucko. Like 75% of the playtime of this game is just as much bloated trash as the Trash Island that’s swimming in the ocean right now.

The mini-games ranged from very fun to complete horseshit. People are like, “man I wish Final Fantasy had mini-games again, what happened to them??!!” What, you mean these torture devices? I’ve never been a fan of most Final Fantasy mini-games. They’re at their best when they’re short and confined to one area. If they’re forced to be played, they should at least wrap into the story in the same way that Blitzball does. And I KNOW!! Final Fantasy VII was like mini-game central, there’s some sort of mini-game from giving CPR, snowboarding, to changing your damn clothes. I got it, but in Rebirth there are more than just the recreations of the original mini-games. There is a mini-game for doing the most mundane shit in this game and it’s overbearingly god awful. The beginning of the game was so overwhelming; you’re tossed into this gigantic landscape and get 37 tutorials thrown at you at once. How to run around, how to do combat, how to get a chocobo, how to ride a chocobo, how to tie your shoes, how to sit through Chadley’s dialogue without killing yourself, how to use SP, etcetera ad nauseam, until finally it just leaves you alone. There’s got to be a better way of introducing players to open-world games because the first 6 hours of each one always feels like sitting through job orientation everytime. Now toss in 24 mini-games per square inch of each area and you have my Joker origin story. I think it was in Chapter 9 when I was doing a side-quest for Aerith and it turned out to be another mini-game where you have to use the controller bumpers to rip mushrooms out of the ground, the inner coil of my being keeping me sane just burst like the engine belt inside of a car. From then on, I was hanging on a ledge by my last remaining fingers. I did eventually fall off the ledge, but it’ll be brought up in spoiler talk due to it being extremely late-game.

To be honest, not all of them were terrible. The Costa del Sol events, while extended way beyond its original counterpart, were easier to swallow because they were meant to be a fun respite to the major plot. The Gold Saucer events obviously were fine, it’s like the one part of the game where you’re supposed to fuck around. Queen’s Blood was genuinely interesting and the Junon marching was really fun when the game finally let you fucking get on with it. However, Fort Condor can drink my piss, especially because they changed the rules of the game for the sole reason of probably annoying me. Chocobo Racing can die in a ditch off the highway. That punching mini-game was needlessly complicated for no reason at all. The Cactuar mini-game might as well have ripped my face off instead. These are just the ones that annoyed me the most, the 50 other ones were either less annoying or just forgettable. It’s nice that the soundtrack is amped up to its extreme, with this being what seems like a 500 song discography, but that only slightly mitigates how annoying the games are to play. (I would drop that one dog song here, but everyone else beat me to the punch a month ago.) The PS5 has some dogshit bumpers too, like I can’t be the only one who thinks this? They hurt to use for someone like me with wrist pain, and there’s a lot of mini-games that require you to mash them. They’re too busy trying to ooh and aaahh you with motion controls and sensory features that they forgot how shit it is to mash bumpers that are literally fighting back. It’s nice that you can turn that off, but they put it in by default as the intended way of playing it. It’s just so egregious and doesn’t help with the pacing issues that most people had in Remake, in fact it’s made somewhat worse.

ring ring “Hey, it’s Chadley here!! I’m going to remind you that this game was $70 and therefore your complaint is rendered discarded. Just don’t do the content, forehead. It’s that easy."

Chadley, I will not hesitate to split you in half. I keep seeing this flimsy argument thrown around every time someone complains about this game. They get swarmed by people dropping the $70 comment like it’s the ultimate backhand. That it’s okay for the game to be overflowing with boring slop because it justifies it being $10 more than it would have been 5 years ago. It’s so cool that you like watching paint dry, but I don’t. There are games worth $30 and 5 hours long that were much more pleasant and much more memorable experiences than this. Baldur’s Gate 3 discourse has rotted all of your brains thinking that every game has to be 200 hours long to be worth it, when in reality if that game had been cut 50 hours it still would have been great because it was fun and had meaningful content. All the boring chore work in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth bothers me because it does nothing but waste your time and take you away from the character writing, which is the good shit. I will never forget how this game forces you to do a shitty on-rails gun mini-game 5 seconds after Barret has one of the most heart-wrenching cutscenes in the entire game. You might as well have played a laugh track over it. It’s not enough that you talk to the characters and maybe sometimes go on an outing with them, nope, you have to do a 6 chain side quest of killing monsters and playing mini-games, or looking for locations from a photograph, or crafting an object for the local idiot. There’s literally one Yuffie quest where a character you don’t remember from the Intermission DLC basically says “Hi” to you, then you run around the entire map looking for a monster for 30 minutes just for him to leave and have nothing else to add. It was worth it to get brownie points for Yuffie and unlock better dialogue for her that actually rules, but did they really have to make you work that hard for it? I guarantee no one will remember these quests in like 6 months.

It just blows honestly, because they put so much care into fleshing these characters out to the extreme. Their friendships are more prevalent and actually matter in this game. The comedy is funny when it hits and there’s sprinkles of silly moments that work well in making Cloud less of a hardass and more of a softie as the game progresses. I have never given a shit about shipping in this game, and it doesn’t matter here because they finally give those fans what they want if they work for it, so just about everyone is happy. Aerith and Tifa are actually friends and not weird competition, it’s so refreshing. And no matter how you feel about the narrative changes, the plot of FF7 is still just as fascinating as it ever was so the game is fantastic when you’re actually going through the main events. This has got to be one of the most rag-tag cast of characters in the whole series, maybe right next to IX’s gaggle of weirdos, and I genuinely care about what happens to them so of course I want to unlock all of their special dialogues. It’s just so unfortunate that it’s all bogged down by the most monotonous content ever. The writing prevents the game from being less ass than it could be, but it also could be so much better at the same time.

This link is everything I have to say about spoiler territory. Click at your own discretion.

Some other random things I felt: I’m glad that they introduced a fast travel mechanic because it's the one thing that doesn't waste your time. It’s not just a fast-travel at chocobo stops, but just about any location you discover has the ability to teleport to it. Without that, it would suck. The landscapes are amazing and so beautiful, but it came at the cost of mobility. Everytime my chocobo clipped onto a rock or refused to leap off of a small cliff, part of my soul cracked. It just made travel a pain in the ass sometimes, especially in the rocky, ruin like areas. Every action from getting out of the dune buggy and sitting on benches would feel excruciating because Cloud would always pause for a second before and after doing it, just breaking up the flow of the mobility for no real reason. I really hope they fix this in the next game because it was just another thing in it that started off kind of annoying, but then grew to extreme displeasure as the game went on. Selena is by far the best chocobo though.

The game over screen is worded atrociously. The multiple options to reload are confusing and I learned the hard way that reloading a checkpoint instead of a battle was a deathly mistake. These needed to either not exist or be rephrased differently. Why on God’s green Earth would I ever want to go back 3 hours on reload? It’s also really awful that you can’t adjust game settings mid-combat. More like ASScessible if you ask me. There’s no real reason for this, especially when some fights are right after cutscenes because the reload brings you right back to the fight, not before it. It made a certain Chapter 12 fight so fucking annoying to do because the NPCs wouldn’t shut the hell up the whole time. Jesus Christ. Imagine someone needed to adjust color blind filters or some other visible- oh wait, there aren’t any accessibility features at all, except for the scary yellow paint everyone pooped their pants about.

I really did want to like more of this game but it seemed as the longer it went on, the more psychotic I felt. I have found out how much of a pushover I truly am because of this game at the detriment of my own sanity. Critiquing this game seems to be an act of war in some parts, like having criticism for it is somehow removing the mask that I'm actually a gluttonous consumer that doesn't appreciate the art of games, which is nonsense. This toilet is art and I'd piss on that too. I'm glad that people found things to love in this game, and while it is beautiful, it is much more boring than anything else. There’s so much that I liked and yet so much that I hated, so I can only hope that the final game fixes a lot of the issues I have. I’m not going to hold my breath though because that’s exactly what I said in my review for Remake. This story never needed three 60+ hour games to tell itself and it’s getting more clear as time goes on. If the combat stays the same or changes for the better again, then I’m willing to see it through to the end. I'm already 2 games deep and I want to see where the story is going, but I imagine this game without the combat fixes and shudder at the possibility of its existence. We'll see in another 4 or so years.