As I stare down the barrel of a new Fire Emblem game, I am met with as much trepidation as I am excited. The baggage I have with this series is, at this point, tremendous. Yet, as I have completed this game with the credits rolling I am feeling... catharsis. I had never expected to have this feeling in a new Fire Emblem world again. Yet here I stand.

This is not a review of Fire Emblem Engage. It exists as a musing of an individual who has spent far too long playing a series, and learning to feel misery at its mere mention. Now, forced to grapple with the idea that the series is once again in a place that I am engaged as I was only once before, and am learning to appreciate a game for what it is, and not for what it isn’t.

Fire Emblem, for better or worse, became a high school hyperfixation for me. It was the only thing able to wrest me from endless replays of the Mother series. Not only was I able to completely entrench myself in the games and mechanics, but I had an entire history to dig through. My prior fascination was largely with a 3 game series, and with each game I had spent countless hours learning every second that each game had to offer. And now, I had a series of over 13 (at the time) games to spend my hours getting into. It was an absolute bounty of riches, of which I plundered time and again, regularly experiencing some of the most engaging and enriching tactical gameplay I had ever experienced. Oftentimes with interesting, engaging characters and stories that have stuck with me in ways that few RPGs had at that point in my life. This was my burgeoning era of learning to love RPGs, and this alongside The World Ends With You opened my horizons far beyond where they were before.

An important piece of this puzzle which I am not mentioning is how I learned to experience this series. While not my first game, Fire Emblem Awakening is what made me a Fire Emblem fan. I had not purchased it too close to launch, maybe 8 months after launch or so. My girlfriend at the time was a massive Fire Emblem fan, and I was trying to impress her by getting into one of her favorite series. By the time credits rolled, we had broken up, yet Fire Emblem remained.

I had approached the game as someone who had played other RPGs, and when given all these options to level up, change classes, learn skills, and build supports, I turned to the grind. This led to me playing Fire Emblem Awakening again and again, trying new marriage combinations, making the best units I possibly could, and trying the best combinations. As I write this now, I cannot help but feel pride for my Galeforce, Armsthrift, Limit Breaker, Vantage Dread Fighter Owain with maxed stats. It had become an obsession, and the free time granted by being an unmotivated, closeted, depressed teenager meant I was able to spend all the time in the world on this fantasy.

If you were to check my 3DS play clock you would see that I have more than 500 hours in Awakening alone, which makes it very possibly my single most played game of all time, comparable only to Final Fantasy XIV or EarthBound. The next step was, obviously, to get really into roleplaying Fire Emblem on Tumblr. An endeavor which resulted in me meeting my current fiance.

While Awakening was my introduction to Fire Emblem, I fell in love with it in a way that stands in stark contrast to the rest of the franchise. The kind of love which is sequestered away, almost entirely divorced from my enjoyment to the rest of Fire Emblem.

Nintendo had included Sacred Stones as a part of the 3DS ambassador program, a program which I had become a part of as an early adopter of the handhelf. I played, and enjoyed, the game around the time the program went live. I didn’t finish it at the time, but I went back and did, and it opened the door to the wider Fire Emblem series. It ignited the flame which would go on to define the following years for me. Playing through FE7 on the Wii U virtual console, then dipping my toes into fan translations and emulation to play the rest of the series. Genealogy and Path or Radiance became some of my favorites, as they are for many of classic Fire Emblem’s fans, and still loom tall over my view of the series. There were periods in which I would bounce from Fire Emblem game to Fire Emblem game, learning to love even the black sheep Gaiden, a game which I fought tooth and nail to get anyone around me to care about. A battle I lost valiantly until I suddenly won a few years later.

By the time I finished high school, I had not beaten every Fire Emblem game, but I had nearly all of them. The two greatest omissions are Thracia 776, of which the current Project Exile patch did not exist for, and Radiant Dawn, as I did not know how to mod my Wii to play Wii games the same way I did for Gamecube games. I mined the games and experienced the riches which Fire Emblem had to offer.

The drive to recreate the high that Fire Emblem so regularly gave me became so intense that I began turning to other strategy games, such as Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, XCom. Each of them were unable to keep my attention. I was not a tactics fan. I was a Fire Emblem fan. A feeling which continues to the moment in which I’m writing this.

While on this journey, there were more new 3DS Fire Emblems to play. One left me exuberant, the other leaving me less so.

With the power of hindsight, it is easy to see Fire Emblem Fates as a creation made by those who had found success and had no idea how to possibly follow up on it. It is a messy game, created as the first Fire Emblem game while the series was still a strong going concern in an extremely long time, and trying to figure out what exactly about Fire Emblem Awakening had sparked such resonance among the wider gaming population. At the moment, I did not hate it. But, as I attempted to engage with it in a way somewhat reminiscent of Awakening, I grew a growing distaste for the game which grew over time. I, honestly, do not really want to talk more about Fates. If you are reading this, you are likely aware of the general reception around Fates among Fire Emblem fans. I believe I’ve made where I stand clear. It left me feeling sick and sad, and I grew frankly pessimistic towards a franchise I had emotionally invested in extremely over the past few years.

Then there is Echoes, a game announcement which had left me so excited. It stands as a swan song to the 3DS, and my youth. I got my copy of the game on the same day as my high school graduation party. I played it on the precipice of approaching college, gaining some sense of diet adulthood. Gaiden had become one of my absolute favorite Fire Emblem games, so seeing the game come back with a beautiful art style, wonderful gameplay, and just all around adapting a game I loved back as an NES RPG filled me with an almost indescribable feeling. The best remakes are ones which return to games which take big swings and have big ideas, but do not necessarily totally work out. This is one of those. I loved every minute of it. Living in a world in which individuals know and care about Alm and Celcia still fills my heart with an indescribable joy.

Despite Echoes being a game which filled me with such joy, it is also just a remake. Fire Emblem is no stranger to remakes, they have happened many times before, and the contents of remakes does not necessarily point toward the future of the series. While there certainly are parts of Echoes which informed specifically Three Houses, what I loved about Alm and Celica’s journey was not a guiding star in a series that had made its recent fortunes on character relationships and creating popular characters.

In the lead up to Three Houses, it initially boded poorly in terms of what I wanted. Those feelings never subsided throughout the lead up to release. I had become pretty set on the idea of skipping it on release. With Fates being what it was, and the trailers being what they were, I had resigned myself to the pain that Fire Emblem was no longer for me. While there was fun to be had, it ultimately failed to be the ‘righting of the ship’ which I needed from Fire Emblem. I reviewed Three Houses a good while ago, go read that review for more details on my feelings.

So here I am. Waiting for the release of Engage. The game’s early showings made specific notes of the emphasis on older Fire Emblem characters returning. While self-congratulatory, they managed to do it. This fan who had learned to almost exclusively love the newer games was interested in a new Fire Emblem, for whatever that was worth. At the very least, it had me intrigued, and it was released at a time in which I was looking for another game to play. The fates aligned, and there I was once again purchasing a new Fire Emblem game on launch day.

I was specifically slow at first, taking my time getting into the game. I found the return to Fire Emblem’s traditional structure appreciated given Three Houses having such a different structure. After playing for a few chapters, and enjoying it, once I began getting more and more emblems, the feelings which were initially stoked by Awakening were once again burning. The Emblem mechanic was a genius way to give significant player agency in how even two units of the same class play with one another. Instead of rewarding play based on raw grinding outside of the standard chapter to chapter gameplay, I was able to develop interesting bond pairings using the generously given bond currency the game provides. The feeling of creating broken units while still adapting to the chapter to chapter gameplay was an absolutely perfect blend, perfectly melding both of the kinds of gameplay which I had learned to love. Limited resource chapter to chapter gameplay mixed with interesting yet interchangeable character growth for unit progression are not antithetical to each other, they can stand together proudly and create a game which manages to thread the needle. They did it. They made a Fire Emblem for me.

At the time of writing, Fire Emblem Engage is the first wholly new Fire Emblem I truly feel good about playing since this series has etched itself deeply into my soul. I have finished the final boss by utilizing the bond pairings and engages to finish the game by absolutely destroying the final boss. I feel as though I’m on a mountaintop, truly enraptured by this new experience. The only thought I have is playing it again. God dammit, they did it.

Uh oh! It appears you read to the end of one woman’s self indulgent reflection on a series which has caused her psychological damage in such a way that only an improperly aged individual watching a horror movie should. Since you made it this far, my review of Fire Emblem Engage is:

Me and my boywife just killed my dad with our bond, an inherently queer experience

The concept of returning to The Stanley Parable is a nigh impossible task. It stands alone as this video game creation with nothing ever quite reaching the same peaks that the original did. Does this expanded release/sequel add to the original in a way that is meaningful and important? That's really difficult to answer.

I had played the original Stanley Parable near to launch, meaning I had just shy of a decade away from the game. I remembered the narrator, I remembered the broom closet, and I had a rough idea of the ending concepts and the things I needed to do to see them. But it was very fuzzy. As such, I took it upon myself to try and play as much of the original game's content just to re-experience it. I found myself enjoying it, as expected, and was keen to see that the original still had something interesting and meaningful to say.

Due to the above, I took my time getting to the new content. I wanted to savor the original's experience before I added to it. This makes the game feel more complete and justified for the price at hand. A mixture of old and new into a single package, engaging in both aspects of the product in bits and pieces.

The new content is, of course, the thing which sets Ultra Deluxe apart from The Stanley Parable. The quality of it I found to be a tad more hamfisted and less engaging to access overall compared to the initial game. Where there was certainly funny and thoughtful moments, they were far more scripted and even more long winded than the initial game's content. That isn't especially a bad thing, the narrator is top notch and consistently has something interesting and engaging to say. It's just to say that I felt like some endings overstayed their welcomes by just a bit, and did not feel like they were punctuated by something truly interesting taking place consistently. One of the longest endings in the original Stanley Parable is the confusion ending, which constantly was flipping the script and doing interesting things. The sections going over New New content or the vent into the memory zone, which were generally high quality and interesting, feel like they are stretching their interesting content to the limit.

I want to highlight The Memory Zone content in particular as something to applaud. While the time in The Memory Zone is a tad long, reading significant chunks of reviews, it lead to some interesting commentary and let the audience see the narrator break down in a way that felt powerful. It truly stacked up as one of the most memorable pieces of Stanley Parable content, even if perhaps the path to get there could have been just a touch breezier.

Once the dust settles and the game goes 'mask off' that it is actually The Stanley Parable 2, which might I add is something crazy to earnestly write in a sentence, the new content opt in became the bucket. This is where I believe Ultra Deluxe stumbles just a bit. The bucket essentially lets you 'opt in' to new endings, but the actually routes you take to get these endings are the same as they were sans bucket. While it allows the narrative to play with the existing routes, I still wish that they expanded on the player choice on offer for the game. At the end of the day, I'm still taking the same gameplay path, except at the end I get a different resolution. I'm sure the developers did this as a conscious decision, as to add new choices and paths means that they would need to write new bucket and no bucket endings for this path, but it still is something that left me mildly disappointed.

At the end of the day, is Ultra Deluxe worth it? Did I feel content with my time and money spent on this product? Sure, yea. But only as someone who has held the original with significant reverence for at this point a large portion of my life. This is my return to this world, and I want to see how it is played with and augmented. If someone is earnestly interested in trying The Stanley Parable, I would implore them to look to the original first, and then come to Ultra Deluxe after a significant period of time, maybe a year or two. That way, some memories might be a bit fuzzy and the game can surprise you again.

Playing this like, 1 month after beating Elden Ring sure was a choice. I wrote an entire 5 paragraph essay talking about how I was ready to be done with Elden Ring, yet I'm back again writing a review for another soulslike.

I stand by every single word that I wrote in my Elden Ring review. I was ready to be done with the game. That being said, I wasn't ready being done with Soulslikes.

While playing Elden Ring, I made an offhand comment to my partner about wanting to try Demon's Souls. My birthday was about a month away, so they pounced on that as an easy birthday present. Thank you! I love you!

I could give a diatribe going on about only mildly tangentially related goings on regarding this, but I would prefer to enter this review with a bit more focus on the game. I say 150 words into a review that has not even talked about the game itself. Maybe I have a future as a game reviewer.

I played this whole game during the early-mid stages of having covid which, at the time of writing, I still have. I was mildly delirious at first and frankly do not especially remember or know how I got through 1-1 given that area is really challenging, but I did it.

I poked at the game a bit the following couple of days, not making a ton of progress but playing enough to feel satisfied.

I then felt pretty good today! Good enough in fact to put about 13 hours into Demon's Souls and beat a vast majority of the game during one prolonged play session.

I am not someone who opts to do prolonged game sessions for games. It just isn't in my nature. It is not especially an attention span thing, it's just how I live my life. I like segmentation and putting things down for a bit. That did not happen with this game. I beat the final boss, looked at my watch and saw it was 10 PM. I thought it was, like, 6 PM tops. I missed dinner without even batting an eye.

Okay, focused, focused, this is about the game.

My overall feeling is that I felt like I was going back to play the NES version of one of my favorite franchises. Think The Legend of Zelda. I had beaten Bloodborne and Elden Ring, and had about half of a Dark Souls playthough, by the time I started this game. I had proverbially played A Link To The Past, Link's Awakening, and Ocarina of Time going into this. I understand what a Souls game was, and saw their evolution, but had never gone to the source itself.

So much of the Souls formula is introduced here, and for attempting to do something so drastically different, I found the experience to be shockingly coherent and enjoyable from start to finish. The soul form vs human form mechanic was a cool idea, but cutting your HP by half was a bridge too far (though equipping the ring to make it 75% alleviates much of this), and I think Dark Souls better handles this idea by making some smart changes to the formula. That being said, I found it nowhere near as obtrusive as I expected and found that I was able to enjoy the game nonetheless.

The bosses are something that I suppose I could call 'disappointing' but honestly, that doesn't feel especially fair to the game. They made Dark Souls knowing people enjoyed this style of combat and gameplay, and had the previous experience of working on the game to know what works and what doesn't work. Are most of the bosses far too easy and gimmicky? Yes! They are! But given the era that this came out in, I can totally forgive that. They didn't really have templates for bosses like this before, to my knowledge, and if I am simply not remembering any at this time, the developers did not have the action game experience to properly implement them. That isn't even to say that the bosses are all terrible-just that they are forced to stack up with some of the best boss experiences that video games have to offer.

On the other hand, I felt the levels themselves were expertly crafted. I adored exploring these environments to find new enemies and items. Exploring these environments felt as good, and as some points even better, than the other games that I have played from this series. I'm frankly impressed at how much they were able to nail this aspect right off the bat, and it makes sense that it seemingly was the most concrete part of the series, continuing fairly unchanged even through to Elden Ring's legacy dungeons.

I'll tip my hat to the PS5 remaster as well. It is visually probably the best game I've ever played environmentally, it ran at a nearly perfect 60FPS for me the whole time, and I found myself loving exploring the environment.

I loved this game, I enjoy it more than Dark Souls personally, and it was a real standout experience. I went in expecting to get something of a history lessen, but I found myself absolutely loving what was in front of me.

Please forgive any issues with formatting or if any of my points are not totally coherent. As stated, I currently have covid when writing this and am not quite feeling myself. I also didn't proofread this at all either, whoopsie.

I'm such a fake RE fan. I have only ever played the good ones. RE2 Remake, RE4, REVII and RE Village. All bangers all the time. RE Village deftly enters the same position. While it did not have the pizzazz and wow that RE VII had due to not playing it in VR (or having a VR mode at all), this game still left me impressed with its strong mixture of locales and action.
I hope RE 9 is able to as efficiently balance limited ammunition and restrained combat against a more action focused game in the same way that RE Village did.

However, I can say with certainty that this is not the Neon Genesis Evangelion of video games.

I've started this first sentence about 6 or 7 times but have found myself completely incapable to give a strong introduction. I find that giving introductions complaining about giving introductions is a way to just put words onto a page to give me enough time to get a cognizant, half decent point together.

Writing something cognizant and half decent of Elden Ring is difficult due to the fact that, in its already brief release window, people far smarter, far dumber, far more skilled, and far worse than me at this game have already smattered the internet with their 'takes' and 'opinions'. What is my take? If you want to condense it down into its smallest form, it is that this game is great! I loved it. I really did. It consumed my life in a way few pieces of media can. I had not felt so enamored by a game since, funny enough, when I first tried Bloodborne around 15 months ago. Since then, I tried Dark Souls, but fell off after getting lost. That’s roughly the extent of my soulsborne experience. A complete run of Bloodborne, a failed run of Dark Souls, and credits seen on Elden Ring.

When I said before I became enraptured in this video game, there is another side to that coin. In the week since I have beaten it, I have felt nothing but hollow since seeing the credits. Despite that, I have not gone back to try and finish loose ends. I am done with Elden Ring, at least for the time being. I do not need it anymore. I purposefully ejected the game from my PS5 upon completion. I wanted closure, finality. What a strange feeling, so sad it was over, and despite completely being able to return on my own terms, I opt not to. I want to do something else, something lower investment, yet still distracting to fulfill my need for escapism. Why did I choose to be this way? I’m not sure.

The word complete rings so hollow in this game’s context. There is so much I have not done. Bosses I tried, and failed, only to never return to. Roughly around the time I beat Morgot, I essentially rushed through the rest of the game. I was not exploring. I was not stopping to smell the roses. I was trying to finish the game. I was ready to be done. Is that the game’s fault? I’m not entirely sure. I’m reminded of a bountiful Thanksgiving feast at a family gathering. There are foods you love, and the foods you tolerate. The beginning of the meal is always the best. You have purposely saved your appetite for this meal, and you start right away loving almost every bite. The mashed potatoes are better than they have ever been, the corn casserole is once again fantastic, and each bite is better than the last. There is even some food you hate, but it’s the one that your really nice aunt brought, so you get a small-but-not-too-small portion on your plate and eat it, just because you knew it would make her happy. Despite having a delightful meal with your family, you reach a point in which you are ready to be done. The green beans, lovingly created by your grandmother, have gone uneaten. Not because of dislike, but because you simply could not have another bite. I’m sorry grandma. Maybe next year.

It feels obvious to me that Elden ring will stand as one of the most important video games to be created, certainly will be heralded as a highlight of the 2020 decade in gaming and will influence countless games in the future. As Dark Souls defined the 2010s in video games, so too will Elden Ring. Probably. I do not make video games, and can make claims such as this from the outside looking in. This perhaps could well be the most impossible video game of all time. This unicorn of an experience, one that we can only be graced with once FromSoftware inevitably decides to add a 2 on the end. Such as Zelda revolutionized the open world (which FromSoftware obviously took certain levels of inspiration), yet nobody has ever created a true piece to rival it in its depth and excitement, perhaps Elden Ring will stand atop a similar platform. Alone, cold, and constantly shunning shallow imitators. Perhaps I will be wrong. And that’s okay. Making predictions is stupid. Perhaps I should cut this entire paragraph.
I realize now that I have talked around the video game itself. I have not discussed builds, play mechanics, how I thought it felt. Do you care? You, reading this, probably played it already. You had your cool Strength Faith build in which you used sick incantations. You really struggled on Mohg in particular. That’s really cool, and I’m glad you had a positive experience playing this game. Conversations like that are best left to discords and people who get paid to write about video games for a corporation. I have no interest in that.

I’m writing this in the middle but am putting it at the end. I’ve decided not to score whatever this is. It is not a review. I prefer to think of it as a diary, a look into how I feel surrounding this game at this particular moment roughly 1 week since I beat it. I generally like scoring because it gives me an outlook later on for how I felt about a game in the moment. A score is too simple, too commercial. Elden Ring is a game I beat. One I will very likely return to someday. A game that I have spent countless hours discussing and ruminating on. Good night, Elden Ring.

I did it. I finished the critically acclaimed MMO RPG Final Fantasy XIV. At least until the next expansion.
It was great! I loved it. What was a decade long wait for some was a 7 month long binge for me. I had like a month break between finishing ShB and playing EW.
Despite the abbreviated time, I had gone through arcs both in my own life as well as in Final Fantasy XIV. There was a solid 2 months in there where I didn't play at all. Trudging through Stormblood was, at times, painful. I graduated, got a job, moved halfway across the country between starting XIV and finishing this arc. It is weird.
I will always associate this video game with a very specific moment of my life. One fraught with anxiety, excitement, and being oh so very busy.
How does it stack up to other expansions? It wasn't quite as great as Heavensward of Shadowbringers, but perhaps burnout of a key reason for that, who knows.
I cancelled my sub. I will be back, that was never a question, but for now, I'll let sleeping dogs lie.

It's fun! Will it blow your mind? Assuredly not, but that does not mean that it is not a lighthearted, enjoyable experience. This is pretty squarely for people who love Kingdom Hearts, and there is not a ton here if you aren't in that camp. The roster of songs is large, but it does not have many (if any, other than the title screen) remixes. It is all the original music, with the 1.5+2.5 and 2.8 models running across the same original worlds.
Don't buy this at 60, but if you find it for like 20? Yea, go ahead!

I put 250 hours into an MMO and, if you can tell by the score, I don't regret it.
I still do not consider myself someone who engages with MMOs in a meaningful manner. I am currently cleaning up the patch quests, and will be putting the game down until Endwalker. I will not be grinding out levels with all of the classes. I have had fun doing duties with friends, but you will never see me savage raid.
What I am trying to say is that there is significant swaths of content I will never see in this game. And you know what? That's fine. I don't need to. I saw the story through to the end, and I have no regret for the time I spent. I can't wait to see what's happening on the moon.