PREFACE: this is my longest review by far. It's about 7000 words long and not that funny. it has a bunch of spoilers for the game in, so please do BOUNCE if this aint ya thing

man. i dont even know where to start with this one. it goes without saying that the original Final Fantasy VII is one of my favourite video games of all time, if not my favourite, so anything that attempts to remake it is going to fall under my hard scrutiny. i replayed FF7 Remake only last year for the first time since release in anticipation for Rebirth, and ended up enjoying that a lot more than i expected to. i found it to be well paced, decently balanced, with some extremely strong moments... albeit some unecessary flourishes that blemished that final picture. despite those, i ended up more excited for Rebirth than nervous, although there certainly were nerves. what we got though wasn't something i could have predicted at all. not one bit.

i think the game opening on the Nibelheim sequence is perfect. it's an extremely faithful recreation of the original, especially in regards to the scene where Sephiroth gets to Jenova, but more than that it more subtley alludes to the truth of what really happened in ways that are quite delightful. it brings a lot of character to Nibelheim, and it is delightfully fun to be able to play as Sephiroth for a short time too. it's better than the original FF7 in that regard actually, because he was automatic in the PS1 version, so letting us actively take control of him is a really fun little bit! it's a great way to introduce synergy skills and abilities too, which i'll come back to later. overall, chapter 1 was a great way to open the game. then with chapter 2 we get the re-introduction of our main cast, and the beginnings of the open world. i think the opening is quite strong here too! we get to walk around Kalm, the first town in the game that isn't Midgar, and it's so beautifully realised. so unbelievably colourful and thriving with NPCs, it's a delight to be around. once we enter the open world though, things begin to change. there are ingredients at our left or right, and we are introduced to the game's first problem. crafting.

why is crafting here. are game developers really so idealess about what to put in an open world that it has to be crafting? the open world is now filled with an abundance of ingredients that are totally lacking in flavour, and THAT is our reward for exploring it. you'll get a whole bunch of Planet's Benison and sprigs or oregano, and you'll never use them! you'll still be picking them up for some reason even though you almost never use them! the game is not interested in the fiction of crafting things either, because we do our crafting with an "Item Transmuter", technobabble that allows us to make worthless items for no reason. the ingredient cap for an item is 99 so we end up with 99 ingredients that we never, ever use, and we don't ever bother actually crafting anything. why would i bother crafting items that i know i can't use in hard mode, and if i need items i'll use my ridiculous amount of gil to buy them from the millions of vending machines in the game! seriously, there are vending machines everywhere. i know immersion isn't the be-all and end-all of video game storytellign but it is pretty immersion breaking when i am in the centre of the gi cave and there's a fucking magic vending machine selling potions. is it REALLY so bad if i can't go back and buy potions? we know that the game is balanced well enough in hard mode ot be playable without items, so when the game is EASIER in normal mode we probably dont need fucking vending machines everywhere! i have come to the realisation that item economies are incredibly hard things to balance, FF16 and all Persona games have this problem of just not knowing what to do with all of these items. i've heard some people say that items themselves should be scrapped outright, and while i dont agree with that, i think we could do a lot better than what we have now. i've digressed a bit to complain about items generally, but their pointlessness is one of the reasons why crafting blows chunks so much. the items are pointless, the fiction isn't interested in the crafting itself, and bland ingredients are what make our reward for exploration in the open world.

and that's our main incentive to explore in the open world if we're being serious. so it means bad things for the open world, which it turns out, isn't an open world at all, not really, and also, is just some of the worst dogshit game design i've seen. and to pre-face this bit, i actually LIKE chadley as a character, just so you know. he's my son, in fact. but to start with, the remnawave towers don't clear the fog on the map. instead, they reveal locations on map you can find, like lifesprings (ingredients) or summon caves. the fog itself clears when you walk by it, which doesn't sound bad in ofitself, but means that if there's a large open area on your map that's all foggy, to clear it all you need to sweep back and forth. and because you've activated lots of remnawave towers you already know there isn't actually anything to discover in the fog, you're just clearing it because your map is fucking ugly otherwise! except there are parts of the map you can't access, so your map constantly ends up looking unfinished. i have to wonder what the point of even having the fog was there for, because it doesn't cover any of the secret locations at all? its just sort of there. i look forward to the mod for PC releases that simply deletes the fog, because it will be just much better! other people have mentioned this already, but the open world sections are also basically ubisoft checklist shit. you get told that there's a bunch of towers you have to activate, which only serve to tell you where more map locations are, which only really get you ingredients. you can also find the summon shrines as i said, which are basically fine, but they give you this absolutely pointless minigame to do. i'll take about minigames later too though. lastly there are the protorelics you can find, and these are basically fine. in each region the objective associated with the protorelic is different! so in Junon you play Fort Condor, but in Cosmo Canyon you play Gears n Gambits. they all have some little sidestories associated with them, and tie into a larger one that introduces Gilgamesh to the FF7 canon for the first time. and its cool! i like the protorelic stuff. some minigames are better than others, some stories better than others, but that's fine. i'm happy to leave the protorelic stuff as it is. i mentioned that the open world is broken up into regions, and there are checklists of things you can do in each region. i think the list itself makes the open world really suck here, because it gives you this sense of "okay i'm done here, I have absolutely no reason to come back" whereas if you didn't know you'd be more interested in returning, as you'd think there might actually be something you missed. it would make each of these regions feel a bit more alive, and that's really exciting! but nope, instead it's just boring checklist stuff. nothing really worth discovering, very little worth doing, and then you're done and you move on. i will say that each region has its own unique flavour though, and the architectur here is amazing. i've heard it said from youtube's very own Fudj that Elden Ring's devs were the master of architecture, but i have to give that to the team behind Remake and Rebirth. FF7's world is a world of junk in the best way, there are derelict facotires, reactors, junkyards, warehouses, construction sites, all sorts of stuff. the world feels really unique and has been crafted so lovingly that it's a delight to look at. there's absolutely fuck all worth finding in it, but it is cool to be in! so it's a world of junk in the bad way too. each region's different checklist also gives them a different flavour; the difference between the Junon region and the Grasslands (tangent, could they not have come up with a better name than "the Grasslands"? what kind of level 1 RPG name is that? they put all this work into technically you about the Republic of Junon and how the world has farred since the Republic lost the war against Shinra, and then the first fucking area is called the Grasslands? come ON) is really noticable, and the different chocobos in each region means you traverse each region differently too. actually, the Junon region is one of my favourite ones because the chocobo's new ability isn't particularly gimmicky. the music is nice, and the different locals in Junon are also markedly different! though it does suck that they just removed Fort Condor and put it somewhere else. in fact, the geography of the world has been changed quite markedly. this isn't something i was expecting! I thought they'd adapt the world so that the edges of the land all stayed the same, but that the smaller parts were different. i like the way the swamp starts in this game, as it actually has flavour compared to the original, but the actual shape of the land is different. this became quite frustrating around the Gongaga area, which is easily the worst in the game. horrifically hard to navigate because everything looks the same, and youre looking for these giant mushrooms to bounce off to get around. where the mushrooms bounce you to never really looks like it takes you where it should, so it's impossible to predict where a mushroom will take you. just far too hard hard to navigate by far, and ends up being not fun at all because of it. nothing worth finding it, horrible to move around it, awful. the cosmo canyon area is better than gongaga, but not by much. these areas took me the longest to do and were needlessly frustrating and just not fun. they end up feeling like huge playpits instead of an actually open, living, breathing world. the Nibel area is one of the best ones because the chocobo's ability there can be used throughout, and allows you to speed up how and when you want to. the walls and cliffs are less frustrating to deal with and it made collecting everything that much better. just a more enjoyable experience all around!

each of the open world regions also has towns in them. one of the exciting things about coming across a new town in an older JRPG is that there are new things to find there. shops and money in RPGs are not always interesting, i think dragon quest do them the best. in the original FF7 you'd essentially get the "next set" of weapons available to you from the next town, as well as some new materia. if you were beefing out the whole squad this would cost you a lot of gil, that you probably didnt have! this means gil has value, and shops are interesting, because they hold things you want! not so in FF7 rebirth. practically all of the game's weapons are found outside, meaning that there is really a reason to check the shops. they also rarely have new materia. because there are choco-stops all over the place and we have millions of potions all the time, the inn in a town is also basically useless as well. so towns become the next checkpoint for the fiction, but don't actually end up really serving a purpose outside of being a hub for sidequests or the ocassional minigame, and it's a real shame! i get that the game wants to reward exploration in the dungeons by giving us new weapons there, but it makes towns suck! this game could easily have avoided this problem by having different weapons available in the towns to the ones we find outside... like in the original FF7. i appreciate they don't want to overload us with lots of new abilities, and thats fine! the weapons we get in the shops don't have to come with new abilities! or they can come with those stupid elemental moves like snow flurry! and they could have simply been the weapons from remake, so that way we could've had the best of both worlds, old weapons and new ones. a lot of the weapons in this game are kind of ugly and it wouldve been really nice to have the nice ones from the first game too! hardege i forever miss you! when PC modding becomes a thing, i will replace igneous sabre with hardedge instantly lol (though i will replace mythril sabre in remake with the Runeblade however! so do with that what you will)

outside of towns and open world regions are the "dungeons" for lack of a better term. places like mythril mines, mount corel, temple of the ancients, and so on. the first game was only really towns and dungeons, and one of the reasons that worked was that all the dungeons had to be hyper-focused and well designed. this game is just a whole bunch bigger, so there are a lot more dungeons! i think the loop of dungeon exploration has gotten worse here, maybe because the ideas are worse or maybe because i'm just burnt out on them. dungeons in both Remake and Rebirth often have a puzzle element to them, or something you need to do. the party often splits up, with Cloud needing to do something like push blocks around to make a bridge. the puzzles are very barebones, never particularly interesting or exciting. we're talking the first few rooms of every zelda dungeon where its basically spelt out on the wall. the bits where you control someone else, like Yuffie or Barret, are even worse. Barret's ones are terrible because they boil down to "shoot thing on the wall to get pointless item". it's a shame because these linear, focused sections of the game are where the game should shine. they allow us more focused character moments, which we do sometimes get! but they never quite do enough with that. in Corel, Cloud gets a migraine from all of his cigar huffing and Yuffie takes the lead with Barret and Tifa. it's a nice moment to have a different team for a while, but the three of them literally dont speak until after theyve beaten the boss of the dungeon, and its such a shame! it's kind of true of all the dungeons, that the puzzles are mindnumbing and there isn't quite the focus that it needs. remember the collapsed expressway from Remake? that has some of the best character interraction between Cloud and Aerith possible, with slightly more engaging puzzles. rebirth should've been filled with dungeons that did that, but it doesn't quite deliver. by the time you get to the temple of ancients you are pretty sick of the dungeon "puzzles", and that dungeon's puzzles are the absolute worst. clouds pushing large blocks around again, and aerith has to hit little green crystal clusters and then hold down triangle to absorb a resource... i dont know man, they just fucked it up i think. mt corel's ascent was the best one.

i don't have too much to say about the combat to be honest! it's very similar to Remake but with the addition of new characters, more materia, and synergy skills and abilities. the skills feel really clunky to use, and i was never particularly sure when i should be using them considering they don't use ATB. but the abilities are great, they feel like cheeky new limit breaks that are exciting and useful! and it's fun to see all the different things that happen, so combat feels good! they start the game by giving cloud and barret their best abilities from the first game, triple slash and maximum fury respectfully. barret in particular is goated in this game. when he gets bonus round and overcharge speedup he can just decimate. his ATB grows so fast that having prayer or cure+magnify on him makes a powerhouse of utility. easily my favourite combat unit in the game, feels like he constantly has something to do. i think they made cloud's punisher mode less interesting in this one, but i love the addition of prime mode to make a much meatier punisher mode that i can forgive it. tifa ended up feeling very similar to the first game in a good way, she is still an absolute powerhouse of a unit that i dont fully understand. aerith unfortunately feels a lot worse, while radiant ward is incredible i really noticed how slow her ATB is in this game, and without Ray of Judgement she just feels like she has less utility. i'm glad tempest was moved to the square button but she just feels like she's missing something. i guess when she staggers enemies now you should just cast regular spells? yuffie is also goated in this game, elemental ninjutsu, doppleganger, and banishment make her nuts. a perfect glass canon but so worth using. red xiii is fun to use but i couldnt get used to using him. i almost wish the game opened on forcing him to be in my main party so i had to get used to him for a little while. same with cait sith, who i liked it, but found kind of confusing to use. i do love that i dont have to use the moogle though. using Kitty Wollop on Safer Sephiroth was pretty good... the actual fights themselves are fun too! i loved doing the summon fights on their hardest difficult. that was probably the hting i enjoyed the most, fighting Alexander, Bahumat, and Odin. super engaging, and not gimmicky. there is a couple of gimmicky fights that i didnt like, but the summons were great fun. i didn't reach Gilgamesh but i suspect he was probably fun too.

while i dont have much to say about the combat, i DO have something to say about the minigames! and thats that there are too damn many of them! dont get me wrong, i really praised Remake for having all of those minigames, old and new, like darts, but rebirth's gamification of things that don't need it gets in the way. when you find one of those summon caves you have to do this, lets call it a microgame, where you have to press buttons on your controller in an order. its never hard or engaging, its just padding. find lifesprings is even worse because you can't even get it wrong, you just have to press triangle on time. what is the point man? needless padding for something already uninteresting, and fels like a complete waste of time. the actual minigames themselves that are given whole rules-sets and space to breathe are mostly good fun! 3d brawler is good fun, as is fort condor. i know people dislike the new fort condor for its lack of customisation compared to Remake's DLC, but i actually preferred it. i almost wish it didnt let me pick my group setup at all! there's something i don't find fun about having to think about which group to use for which level, because the levels feel like they've been designed for you to use a particular group-set. i liked it though! i liked Gears n Gambits too even, which i didnt think i would! never really understood why i won and had no curiosity whatsoever to do the hard mode of those, because i knew i'd fuck up entirely. the protorelic cactuar minigames in corel dessert sucked big time! the aerith ones in particular were needlessly frustrating and i was glad to be done with them when i was! the dolphin minigame was good fun, nice and simple, and chocobo racing is super fun! i wish the tracks had a bit more variety but the minigame itself was actually fun and i was glad to have done it! the box minigame from Remake is back but with some slightly new features, and i enjoyed it again! i think they interrupt the plot a few too many times but i still liked them. there are others, but the real monarch of minigames is, of course, Queen's Blood, which I did really love. i loved that it has a stupid storyline about the death of the creator and a scary queen and all that jazz. incredibly silly stuff but i enjyoed it. the actual game itself is really engaging and building a deck is awesome. i appreciate how easy it is to reset a game and try again, so i'm okay with there being no real reward for beating all the Queen's Blood players, i just enjoyed playing the game. i'd love for a free to play app like Hearthstone of Queen's Blood for me to fuck around with other players. just a good time!

alright, enough fucking around. you didn't come here to talk about queen's blood, or how shops are boring in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. you came here to see how angry i got at the story. and oh boy. i got angry.

the part of the origina lgame that this is adapting is largely lax in actual storycontent to be honest. it's mostly just "let's go get Sephiroth" and you travel, go to places, do some things, and that's about it. which means this game had to use a lot of creative liberties to expand on some of that material. and that's okay! this game should be bigger, Kalm should have story signifigance by itself. we should be allowed to see what the power on Bill's Chocobo Ranch are actually like. we should have characters like Broden and Roche who succumb to SOLDIER's celluar degradation. i love that stuff. i found myself genuinely sad when Roche "died" in this game, and that's crazy because when i played Remake i didn't like him at first! funny how things change. that also means that we get really delightful stuff like everything that happens at Junon. Junon was fantastic, although i would've liked more to find in the town and to do there, but i loved it a lot. i love Rufus, I love the Turks, i like that Rufus gets more focus in this game instead of the board of directors, to justify his lack of presence in Remake. i abhor the inclusion glenn as a matter of principle - do NOT put characters from your fucking gatcha mobile game in to a mainline entry!!! it is creatively and morally bankrupt of you to do so. that being said, i do like that he acts as a foil to rufus, because rufus ends up getting more flavour. he's a good man! or rather, he's an interesting character, i think giving him that extra flavour will be one of those things that makes Advent Children slightly better on a rewatch (although Advent Children does blow chunks also sorry lol). the ship has been changed to a holiday cruiseliner now. i loved the ship in the original but i do think it needed changing! there's not much to actually do on there and it ends up being a bit boring in the original. the song that plays, originally called It's Hard to Stand on Two Legs, Isn't It? was conspicuously absent which i found very upsetting, but i did get to play a fucking bunch of Queen's Blood which meant it was okay. Costa Del Sol is fantastic, i love what they did with it. perfect time for a bunch of minigames, and dressing up in different outfits. the boss fight is kind of lame but it's a great time for Yuffie to join the team and, man, i just love the outfits. But i do HATE that the outfits are locked behind finishing the game!!! this will be hopefully another mod i can install in two years times lol. there are now two gold saucer dates in this game, which i also think is an improvement, and i respect the game going out of its way to flesh out getting different dates with different characters, making getting a date with someone like Barret a lot more viable than it was in the original game! the dates were delightful and i'm excited to go through that again. i think the story starts falling off from there onwards though. the desert badlands don't feel anywhere nearly as dangerous as they should, and the dyne situation has been totally toned down. i understand why they would to cut the scene of a man killing himself, but thematically it is a failing to have Dyne be killed by anyone other than himself. his attitude is a mirror of Barret's, angry at the world and Shinra for what happened to him. his attitude is his responsibility though. which means if he kills himself it was his own perspective that lead him there. that's what tragedy is in a literary sense! the inevitable downfall of someone because of an inherent trait in that person. in Dyne's suicide Barret sees himself, and realises he doesn't want to become a jaded monster like that. it ends up feeling spineless to have Dyne gunned down by a bunch of regular troopers, and that's really disappointing. then we get gongaga, which has already been the worst part of the game to explore. the story stuff there is... interesting. for one we meet Cissnei again from Crisis Core, and to be honest she sucks! Cissnei is super bland, totally sauceless. gongaga feels like a strange town, because I can't imagine Zack ever growing up there. i dont know, just didnt like it all that much. Then we get the return of the Whispers from Remake, which were the worst thing about that game's story. we get all this stuff about the Weapons, and Tifa falling into the lifestream. i think they are setting up the lifestream "revealing the truth" of the matter there, as Tifa gets a small revelation about something. I like this bit, but i find it frustrating because this thing gets cleared up for Tifa that we as the audience never knew was something she was confused about? the whole thing is very flashy and dramatic, something Rebirth has in spades. Cloud is going whacko Sephiroth mode too, and I like the slow depiction of this throughout the game, so no complaints from me. before we get to Cosmo Canyon, Cid Highwin gets introduced early, and that's also because they cut Rocket Town. I'm actually okay with Cid being introduced earlier because a lot of JRPGs suffer from this thing of the later party members having less reason to be in the team, and Cid's reason for joining us in the original game is quite flimsy! We almost accidentally end up on his aeroplane with him in the original and the wifebeater just sort of... decides to join us arbitrarily. However they didn't actually improve this at all in this one. In fact, Cid just feels worse in this game! I'm happy for them to cut the wifebeating stuff for sure, but his reason for joining us is that he knew Aerith's mother a long time ago, and "wants to do right by her", this isn't elaborated on or explored. he has no relationships with anyway, doesn't do anything other that pilot the Tiny Bronco as a boat. He's really nice now, so just ends up having no actual personality? you can cut the wifebeating stuff without making him a nice guy. he can still be a dickhead that we have to tolerate! and this is just his lot for the game! cosmo canyon is basically the same as it was, except Red XIII is now the most annoying character in the game. i can't believe it how much he sucks. YES I get he is experientally a child but he is just so unbelievably annoying in this game! i'm happy for the Gi to have made the Black Materia as it probably does make more sense that someone else made it, as the Cetra probably wouldn't have and i doubt it would've formed naturally in a lifespring. but we do find out that the Gi are not from the planet! and that's interesting! so they're aliens! but that also is not explored at all, so like, where the fuck did the Gi come from? maybe this will come up in the third game. I like the Nibelheim story stuff! They made Cloud remembering who Zack is work, and I love what they're doing with Cait Sith. the second date at the Gold Saucer is delightful, love that they lean into the romance with Tifa and Aerith (although as someone on team Clearith I am malding that they don't kiss, but I appreciate that what they're doing is having Aerith realise she likes Cloud as a person outside of his connection to Zack. it's sweet I think! Happy for the Cloti fans that Tifa and CLoud do actually kiss though!)

before i talk about the big story stuff, like the ending and the zack timeline, i'll harp on about the characters a bit more first

what this game is doing with cloud is great. from choosing which girlfriend you like the most out of aerith, tifa, and barret, to slowly going sicko mode, Cloud's development is really fun and exciting. his VA does a great job and i was never not interested in what was going on with cloud. they got him right! as I mentioned earlier, Barret's development is watered down by the watering down of Dyne's death, but Barret is one of the stars of this game still. there's that sidequest with the dog, salmon, in Junon, that gives him some adorable flavour. same with the side quest he has with vincent, he just gets to be a fun character in this game. i love barret wallace so much. Tifa also gets some great development, and i love her relationship with Aerith too. i really found their friendship incredibly believable, and its something that improves upon the original of making these characters have relatinoships with each other. It's development and expanding instead of changing something, and that's nice! like her gameplay, I actually found Aerith to have surprisingly few story moments in this game. there are very few story mandated moments of spending time with JUST Aerith, and that's kind of crazy considering this game should be making us spend time with her and Tifa all the time! despite the fact that both of my gold saucer dates were with Aerith, I didn't feel like I had actually spent all that much time with her. She doesn't really do anything! I like Yuffie as a character but i do wish she engaged with the plot a little bit more instead of going "I want more materia!" she feels like a Persona party member at points and it's frustrating. red xiii blows chunks and is the worst character in the game. cait sith ends up being super endearing, and i really like what they do with him. i wish we got a LITTLE bit more out of him, but i liked him enough to want to use him for parts of the game! i think the way relationships build are a little flawwed in this game. conceptually i love it, having all these dialogue checks where different options build my relationship differently. but some of the dialgoue is SO arbitrary it's like, how was i supposed to know which one was better? like in Gongaga tifa asks you what dinner she should make. and from the way she responded to each option i didnt know which one was the most effective because it was so arbitrary? there's no like, marker to indicate how successful it was? and it's like i could've been rewarded for knowing tifa very well, and knowing what she would like. she never told me she didnt like soup!!! how the fuck was i supposed to know that!! having side quests tied to character relationships again is good in theory, but ends up feeling tonally weird when your party of 6 people the majority just choose to not get involved in it and one person randomly decides TO get involved? especially with lacking cait sith, whose relationship doesn't get to build because of how late he joins the game. just feels odd! speaking of side quests, theyre okay. for the most part they're better than Remake's side quests, because a lot of them feature more established characters than Old Man, or Rude Woman from Remake, but some of them are downright DIRE. yes, I am talking about you Chicken Sidequest. i will never forgive you, Chicken Sidequest. and i am literally good chicken.

so the big stuff. zack's timeline. for the longest time i thought that what they were doing was hyping up this "doomed world" where aerith was in a coma with cloud, and then at the end when Aerith died in the real world, she would've woken up in Zack's world. not to toot my own horn but this would've been the best way to keep Aerith in the third game and also keep her death. if Advent Children is the fate of these characters, it wouldve been the perfect way to deal with this! the white materia in the real world faded, but was bright in that timeline! She and Zack could've helped summon the lifestream at the end of part 3 with Biggs or whatever!! and could've rekindled thei rromance so that when they show up in Advent Children as force ghosts to help Cloud, we can enjoy them together at the church! but nope. not what we got. in fact, the whole ending we got was garbage. the Zack timeline stuff ended up being pretty pointless! We got a bossfight with Cloud and Zack against Sephiroth that doesnt really feel earned, but is big on its dramatic flare. Sephiroth seperates them then Zack falls into this white abyss and goes "see ya!" which feels like he's dying again, but it's all meaningless dramatic flare as he just wakes up in the sector 7 church again immediately afterwards lmao. so the zack timeline is pointless. then forgotten capital gets totally butchered too. one of the most visually striking areas in the original game, and when we arrived there i was like "wow, it's so beautiful and fully realised!" and then the fucking whispers show up and just fucking destroy it. no exploration, ONE fight with whispers, then a multitude of bosses. never mind the fact that we teleport from temple of the ancients to the sleeping forest, and the survey team are gone. the world feels a lot smaller this time around and the pacing is ruined, the forgotten capital ends up being incredibly boring, just a place of totally nothingness. it was an underwater area over the sea level! it was so striking and now it lacks personality completely, just becomes a vague space to do boss battles. aerith still gets killed, thank GOD, but they completely fuck up the presentation of it for, what? shock value? because they just HAD to change it? what's the point of the fakeout? you have the most iconic scene in maybe all of video game history, and you just... completely fuck it up, because you can't bare to just adapt it straight. the devs have talked about respecting the original game but i just dont think that's true. why would you fuck up her death so much? cloud's words after aerith's death, "Aerith will never smile again, will never laugh again. My fingers are tingling. My lips are dry. My throat is hoarse" or whatever he says are all gone, just Sephiroth's yammering. The grief doesn't get time to play out as we go into an intense bossfight, and while they do use Aerith's theme for the JENOVA fight its no where near as impactful as the original was. Especially because Aerith SPEAKS after she gets killed!!!! and then she COMES BACK TO LIFE FOR THE FINAL BOSS!?! talk about gameplay and fiction overlap and you have FUCKED it up here so badly!!! The final scenes of Clouds delusion as he thinks Aerith is alive are frustrating because I think I know what they're going for, but I susect I'm also just wrong because what we get will just be infinitely worse! so the whole ending ends up blowing serious chunks.

but it sure had a lot of dramatic flare right? Aeirth came back, Zack came back, we fought Safer Sephiroth (even though they didn't use Birth of a God for the music, which was sorely disappointing... we got One Winged Angel again though. talk about wasting your musical trump card. it's just uninteresting here). THis game has dramatic flare in spades but its all style and no substance. I think that's a pretty good one line description for this game at the end of the day. SO much of what it's going for ends up falling flat because it's built on meaningless grandiose visuals and flares, like the ending of Remake having the fight against the Arbiters of Fate... genuinely pointless. Didn't impact that game's plot or this one, so what was the point? Anything to do with fate or destiny or whispers just convollutes the plot so much. Removes any of the intrinsically "human" elements to this story, the underdog nature of it all, and rams it into the fucking earth. I loved that middle point of the game where I felt like a bunch of fun characters going for a journey and going through all these towns, but outside of the dogshit open world, the dogshit ending, the terrible pacing, the disappointing dungeons, there's not that much left to love in this game. and it's so so so disappointing because i was so excited. When I played Remake for the second time i ended up liking it a whole bunch more than the first time, so I'm hoping that some years from now with mod support I will end up having a more positive experience with it. but i am feeling so jaded on this one right now. All it has made me want to do is play Final Fantasy VII for the PS1, a game that's actually just good. Tonally, pacing, open world, all of it just works. didn't need a god damn rebirth that's for sure.

Persona is so funny because on one hand you have this strong meditation on death and the importance of forging bonds with people, and on the other hand your teacher is a predator who considers using her position in the school to get you alone so she can have her way with you.

What works in persona games often really works, really well. Here you have this game that, as I say, has this central theme of death or ending that runs through almost all of its social links. Its social links explore the different relationships we can have with death, and some of them work really well. Akinari Kamiki’s social link is a little forced in its opening but is one exploration of how you might find meaning in your life even if you’re dying of a terminal disease. Bunkichi and his wife’s social link concerns having grown old, and mourning the death of their son. It’s no surprise that one of your party members gets murdered too (I’ll come back to this later), as witnessing and mourning someone is always an interaction with death. The story mandated social link with Pharos/Ryuji is also so important because he literally is death, and not just his arcana! All of this is made better, I think, by knowing that the lovely ending of the game has our protagonist pass away in his sleep. Personally, I love this ending. In the final exploration of death as a theme what is the other way in which we can interact with death as a topic? It is to die ourselves. The protagonist closing their eyes in warmth and sunlight, surrounded by a loved friend is the perfect way to die isn’t it? It’s a happy ending, despite the fact that we are no more. I don’t know. Apparently people don’t like that the protagonist dies? Especially as it’s kind of only vaguely suggested that something is wrong, and not made explicit until The Answer that the protagonist closes dies when he closes his eyes. Still, I really like it.

Not all the social links are good! In fact one of the problems with this game’s social links is the fact that we are really encouraged to be a yes-man in them to get the best social link points to level them up faster. The Emperor arcana dude, Odagiri I think his name is, absolutely sucks. I hate his guts and I hate that to level it up I have to tell him that he’s right by being a complete piece of shit loser. The Justice arcana girl who is scared of boys also blows chunks. I like that you can tell Maiko it’s probably her fault her parents are divorcing. It’s nuts that there are only two social links you can do at night because it really ends up feeling like there’s just not that much to be done at night? Thought Matatsu and Tanaka are two of the most fun social links because they’re not annoying school kids! Also coming off Persona 4 and 5 where there are social links with all party members available from the moment of getting the party member. Levelling them up is fun and rewarding. And in Persona 3 you can only social link your female party members? And only with a social stat maxed out? This is terrible! I get that P3R is a very faithful remake and that is cool, but this is something that feels like should’ve been modernised. Like you have all these hangouts at Iwatodai dorm, as well as the fact that each character has “link episodes” which function as social links basically, resulting in you being able to fuse special personas. So ATLUS kind of want to have their cake and eat it too, but I don’t feel like it works. It’s much harder to keep on top of these link episodes, especially when they only exist for the boys, because the girls have social links… make it make sense! Also, it’s really hard going back to P3 and P4 and doing social links where you don’t get tangible benefits for doing them. I don’t mean to sound like a baby, but at least in P5 if you did a social link where you didn’t like the character, you often at least got something interesting out of it. Not so in P3!!!! I can’t believe they didn’t find a way to incorporate this into P3…
On the topic of social stats, I don’t mind there only being 3 stats in this game, but I think activity balancing was waaay off in this game. I had all three stats maxed out by October without using guides for them, which meant that they became completely arbitrary metrics for the last three and a half months of the game, which sucks! That’s so lame. The pacing around social links also feels really off, because when I had the option to do Mitsuru’s one, no one else was available for like 2 weeks, so I just powered through it at one time, and same with Aigis. On one hand it’s kind of nice to be able to focus on them, but it feels really disconnected from the rest of the game.

I have some character beat issues too. Ryoji should’ve had a social link separate from Death? He’s so important to the latter part of the story but doesn’t actually have a particularly long part in the story, and it’s a little weird. I think Chidori and Junpei’s romance is kind of garbage, and Junpei ends up less endearing that say, P5’s Ryuji because he is much more intentionally pervy which sucks. I think Takaya has a really great look, and his voice actor is amazing, but it’s no surprise that people no remember Takaya over Persona’s other villains. Takaya’s motivations aren’t particularly inspiring or thought-provoking. There’s a scene where he talks about how car accidents cause loads of deaths every year, but we don’t try to stop them the way we try to stop the Dark Hour. Then we say “that logic makes no sense”, and that conversation is just sort of over. There’s no actual part of writing that seriously engages with Takaya’s point of view, because he doesn’t really have one, and it’s a shame because I see potential in him as a villain that we just don’t really get. I think he sort of fails as an example of someone who is embracing the theme of Death as a good thing to strive for in some ways? All he really does is kill Shinji, which is its own muddied murder/sacrifice. Listen, one of the things that makes Aerith’s death so great in the original FF7 is that she doesn’t sacrifice herself. She gets murdered. It’s infinitely more tragic. Stop heroically sacrificing characters!! Shinji’s death would’ve been a million times better if he JUST got murdered outright. Ikutsuki ends up being one of the most frustrating villains ever because his place in the story beforehand is so underused. We’re told that he’s the chairman of the school, and this adult who can interact with the Dark Hour but doesn’t have a Persona. Okay, that’s interesting, why is that? We should be asking questions about what Ikutsuki is doing and what he is doing to actually support SEES. I like that he’s a funny, silly, nice man. I wish he had a bit more active involvement with the plot, but the problem with Persona games is they often don’t HAVE a plot until the last quarter. Anyway, his betrayal is disappointing because there’s no indication of who he was beforehand. I think one of the things that is so brilliant about Persona 4’s villain is that his social link is optional. And if you do it, you certainly don’t find out that he’s the villain, so the reveal later is still a shock. But the social link allows his mask to slip just a little bit. It allows you to look at him and go “this guy is actually a lot more jaded and bitter than I thought, that’s kind of weird”, then when the twist comes around, suddenly his social link makes so much more sense. Ikutsuki is missing this entirely, just being a nice guy who makes jokes then suddenly wants to kill you. Whatever man! Boring.

I think that’s all I gots to say about the story… battle gameplay is good! Each Persona game mixes its gameplay up a little bit, and I really enjoyed that the physical attack types were all different in this one. Changing light and dark skills to actual attacks was really needed in 4, so it’s nice to see that update in reload too. Theurgies are cool, if not a bit overpowered. When the final boss had 75% of his health I used Armageddon which does 9999 damage to the boss, and it just killed him instantly. Like, getting Armageddon wasn’t very hard so this was a bit of a disappointing end to the final battle hahaha
But actually fighting gate keepers was fun, and I liked mixing up my team and thinking about how I was going to use my Personas. Once I fused Beezlebub I didn’t need to fuse ever again. As my social links and social stats were all done, I took the lord of flies to the arcade every day and maxed out his strength, magic, and agility, and gave him two stacks of Dark Amp, so he did stupid damage. Great game lmao
Tartarus sucks, and I hear it’s massively improved from the original game. I’m sure it has! But also it’s not improved enough. One of the problems of remaking a game like P3 is that Tartatus is there so you have to do something with it. You can’t just scrap it, which if you were making a new Persona game you would. I don’t know what the option is but Tartarus is really boring, and knowing that the creepy Dark hour is out there somewhere but we just can’t see it because we’re in a tower just sucks. The Dark Hour honestly feels under utilised from a creative point of view, but whatever

So, I like Persona 3 Reload. It’s probably my least favourite, because the story is worse than 4, and the gameplay is worse than 5, but it’s certainly not a bad game. I just think Persona as a series really improves later.

I mean really, Persona 4 introduced raining to its days, so it ends up having different things going on. Inaba is so cozy compared to Iwatodai, and Tokyo isn’t cozy in 5 but it is busy and elaborate and exciting. Iwatodai just doesn’t feel that interesting or cool. This game felt too small at times, like knowing that there is a group of people with Mitsuru’s dad and Ikutsuki who know about the Dark Hour who just kind of… let us get on with things as they are? Idk, it’s certainly not a plot hole or anything, but it is an oversight I think.
So yeah, P3 has the best soundtrack. P4 has the best story. And P5 has the best gameplay. Update P3R and put Kotone in it now please

listen. i love MGS as a series, but this one has aged like dog shit. the gameplay is so frustrating. from needing to always have the keycard equipped to open doors, to there being mines placed in random locations, to turrets that shoot you before you can see them... there's so much shit in this game that is needlessly annoying. when you get spotted by the last guy in the room and it makes another game spawn slightly out of frame to run in and shoot you, despite the fact that the place he spawned was a dead end? all of the annoying bullshit in this game is fixed in the sequel at least. i can appreciate that being seen in MGS2 means that the Attack Squad come in from one of the doors around the room, meaning you realistically hide knowing where extra support is coming from. the lack of being able to shoot down turrets too makes snake feel powerless despite the fiction telling me he's otherwise this incredible super soldier who can take down tanks, harriers, and a metal gear all on his jack. the nuclear stoage room and laser room before it activating a slowly killing gas while locking you in - why? why not just instantly kill me or do the usual with guards who teleport in? why gararuntee my death there in that moment? its so frustrating! that on top of the northward momentum of shadow moses means that backtracking this island is excruciatingly painful. you don't really get much stronger so going back to the beginning isn't necessarily a cakewalk the way it would be in other games. that's not a bad thing by itself but the fact is you have to do the laborious walk back and forth from all of these areas so many times and its boring and not fun!!! maybe one of the worst paced moments in a videogame is after meryl gets shot by sniper wolf and i have to walk alllll the way back to the tank hangar to get the PSG-1 to then walk alllll the way back to fight sniper wolf. i mean where's the urgency? she's bleeding to death on the floor and i have to take an elevator twice and crawl over some landmines and all kinds of shit!! SOME of the bossfights are okay. i like fighting ocelot, mantis is quite fun, and it goes without saying that the memory card and controller stuff is great (although admittedly much better played on an actual PS1, but i appreciate the new collection allowing you to select what data is on your "memory card". i picked castlevania, obviously, because i'm basic). but then you get to fighting REX which is a bit annoying by itself, with an unskillable cutscene in the middle of Gray Fox yammering about some bullshit!! the gameplay isnt the worst in the world but its genuinely just not fun to play anymore, and every iteration of MGS after this improves upon the formula.

but its not really the gameplay people play MGS for. we're talking solid snake baby in his most famous adventure! and here it is in its campy, james bond-esq style. it's okay? it's incredibly cheesey. maybe it's because we've seen so much stuff after MGS1 but for me, most of the emotional beats particularly work. these characters are all expanded upon and made much more interesting in later games (MGS2 specifically!) but here the characters are pretty uninteresting. snake is pretty void of personality actually. he's kind of james bond-like in that he's a legend and a bit of a womaniser, but doesnt have much reaction of feeling to stuff. you'd almost think he's kind of stupid because so much of his dialogue is responding to peoples statements with questions. you know, "metal gear, huh?" but he's not really. he's a musher, and the way he talks about animals shows he knows what he's talking about. i wish there was a bit more of the gentle man that snake was in it. meryl is just bad, literally has the scene where she goes "I'm not like other girls!" admittedly that is broken down a bit by the end of the game but it's still cringe and he "romance" with snake doesnt feel earned at all - again, its very james bond. gray fox feels like he was shoehorned into this game. doesn't really have anything interesting to add to the game beyond just kind of being there. it's kind of not really a beginner friendly game because of the references to MG1 and MG2 what with outer heaven, zanzibar land, grey fox and big boss for that reason. all of FOXHOUND basically suck. mantis is fun but is badly written outside of that, having gone crazy because he looked at a serial killers mind too much? cmon. sniper wolf and vulcan raven are like "You Are A Good Opponent In Battle So We Must Fight," snore!!! i'll give credit to ocelot who is most consistent here to how he is in later entries, as a conniving trickster who double crosses everyone all the time for everything. liquid is charming and cool, possibly just because of how good cam clarke's performance is, but a lot of what he says is nonsense and doesn't really have much dramatic weight behind it. i also do like naomi hunter, although her motive for disliking snake is boring. i think the subtly of her betrayal is done well, and especially as it's master miller (or liquid) who tells you it makes the reveal that miller was liquid all along all the stronger. it makes snake alone to know that colonel, master, and naomi have all betrayed him. it's practically only otacon who's a good guy and on his side. and otacon in this game is fine. he's a weeb loser who says some great shit. "can love bloom on the battlefield" is fine i guess. but again, where he puts his bigboy pants on in MGS2 he becomes so much more endearing, especially as he and snake realise that they're in love with each other. which is also why the canon ending of snake and meryl leaving together feels like such horseshit!

anyway, i played this as part of the re-releases that happened recently, so now i can not play MGS1 for many many years if i ever choose to again. sorry, it's bad!

this review is going to have spoilers for Twin Peaks, Persona 4, and Deadly Premonition.

lets get the obvious stuff out of the way first. the gameplay sucks. even fans of this game recognise that there isnt a single piece of this that works on a gameplay level. navigating greenvale is a nightmare because of the moving mini-map, but even the whole town map rotates without having an explicit north point. the most you can zoom out of the map shows you less than 1/8 of it, so its borderline impossible to work out where you're supposed to go using it. worst map in a game? might be! game shat the bed on nintendo switch too. driving through any of the populated areas plummeted the framerate to like 10fps at best, which is funny because despite them being the "populated" areas, theres absolutely no one there. the levels and combat encounters were incredibly boring. lame combat that doesnt evolve or do anything more interesting than literally the first time you get there. endless ugly corridors with the same pointless zombie enemies doing nothing. melee weapons break too often, guns are slow and clunky and have no weight too them, getting hit by an enemy takes so long to recover from. there are items galore that dont make managing the stats of hunger and sleep anymore interesting, theyre just tedious and dont contribute to any sense of atmosphere or vibe. they just clog up your tiny inventory. driving is slow and boring because there's nothing in town worth looking at, so the town isnt fun to explore in the car. theres no actual collision mechanics either so you can slam into another car at 90mph and nothing happens? its just boring! whatever, i think we're all in agreement of the gameplay being ass. unfortunately, the story is too, and here's where the real review begins...

we're looking at a story inspired by twin peaks, silent hill, and resident evil here i think. a murder mystery in a quaint but scary town, with gun action on the side. (thats the resident evil influence on the side). for most of my time playing the game i was actually complimentary of how it took twin peaks as an influence because i felt like it wasnt just lifting the black lodge and lynchian aesthetic the way that soul eater and gravity falls have. i felt like it was trying to understand the relationship because the quaint and the creepy, and trying to paint its own path to that. by the end of the game i changed my mind on this. for one, greenvale never succeeds to be quaint. twin peaks the town is charming and fun because of its colour pallette, because it's like a soap opera. we spend time with lots of characters, even outside of the detective's perspective. those characters and their lives and their oddities become intimate to us. in greenvale, theres no real sense of location because the town is absolutely huge and none of the areas outside actually stand out at all. furthermore, these areas arent populated, so our experiences there dont do anything for us. greenvales roads are eerily quiet, its street void of life. for a game that wanted to be about the quaint and familiar life of small countryside life, it felt incredibly lonely, something which i felt never went away. secondly, the horror of twin peaks works because we understand what the evil is. in short, BOB is the evil that men do, and the lodge entities represent aspects of human cruelty. almost all of the horror imagery in deadly premonition ends up being shallow and pointless.
both of these problems contribute to my problems with the plot. i'll admit i didn't necessarily think george was going to be the killer, but it doesnt work at all! for one, the main cast is actually incredibly small. it has george, thomas, emily, forrest, nick briefly, and diane briefly. its quite clear that its not nick who's the killer, so it only really leaves thomas and george left from the photos? forrest's involvement is abaundantely clear if you have eyes and brain because he's literally carrying around the red plant that seems to be found with evey crime? but george is the problem, not kaysen. the town is filled with lots of characters, but almost all of them are relegated to side content. what that means is if you only do the main story you know the characters who are and aren't going to be involved in the main plot. makes the whole thing fall apart when you realised that none of the other suspects actually turn up in the story whatsoever. again, the town is lonely and small, and our cast of suspects is too narrow to create a compelling mystery. secondly, george fails to have a motive. the george we spend most the of the game talking to isnt the same man that we have a (horrible) boss encounter with. is this inherently bad? kind of. in persona 4, the killer (or at least, man responsible for everything happening in inaba) is adachi, the goofy cop sidekick. its surprising because the time we spend with him he seems so nice, so this reveal that he's an evil nasty man makes him seem like he was faking it all along... but the fact is, he wasnt! if you spent time in persona 4 getting to know adachi, then you realised he was actually kind of a fucked up dude with some twisted beliefs on people. its clever subtle writing that makes you feel slightly weird about him. then when its revealed he's the killer, those worldviews he showed you suddenly make more sense. the character is consistent in his inconsistency, and a whole picture can be understood. the same is true of leland as the killer in twin peaks. even after its revealed he killed laura and maddie, or when cooper speaks to him in the prison, its clear that the leland we saw grieving or dancing was still the same man as the killer. its consistent in its inconsistency! george in deadly premonition doesnt fit this. it just falls into the same tired trap that people who were abused as children turn into fucked up killers. his world view about him being some kind of silly chosen one because of magic seeds isnt present in his character writing anywhere. his desire to sacrifice people has absolutely no meaning or merit outside of the plot needing there to be murder victims. he just kind of says to york "and then i decided to kill anna" and thats it for his motive i guess? it doesnt even make sense that he's the raincoat killer. the first time we encounter the killer in gameplay york says "he's here!" which implies the killer is actually in the building with you... but almost always when these sections happen, we know that george is outside with emily. the game essentially just lies to you about whats happening when the raincoat killer is chasing us. also, why does york run from the killer? he's literally pursuing him, and fighting all these zombies. why is he suddenly scared of a guy with an axe? theres a story/gameplay disconnect that that i found quite frustrating. at the start of the game i almost enjoyed this supernatural facet of wherever the killer was could conjure these hallucinogenic worlds of zombies for york, but then it becomes clear that they are artificial padding to keep the game lasting longer, and they have no meaningful impact on the story whatsoever. when i was fighting them in harry's mansion that's when i realised they were totally pointless. i liked kaysen more as a villain i think because his performance was good, but again in terms of motivation he's just like "Yeah i'm evil i guess" and it just doesnt mean anything at all! horror aesthetic for no reason. these are not characters you can get invested in. this is a story with no flavour beyond the immediate feeling its trying to provoke, and it doesnt do anything to justify wondering about what has happened or what will happen. it all just feels so pointless and hollow.

the only thing i'll give the game credit for is some of the music (limited as it was) and York. his performance is so good that it does really endear the player to him. i like that he gets everyones back up at first because he is just an insane man. spoilers, he is literally insane and that's why he talks to someone called zach! further spoilers, the reveal about who zach is literally changes nothing abuot the game. its genuinely a pointless bit of drama. i dont think i minded it too much because i already liked york, but i do think its ultimately meaningless. york is a charming protagnosit because of how confident he is in everything. its just a shame that literally everything surrounding him is superficial and doesnt work on basically any level.

sorry eveyone! thought i was going to have some fun with this one, but it just isnt good.

took me fucking ages to beat this badboy but i finally got around to it. should preface this by saying i never played 1.0 of this game! i wasn't super interested at that time and the more i heard of the gameplay mechanics the more i figured it weren't for me! by ashleigh played lisa the painful for me this year in exchange for me becoming the Cyber Punk, so i waitied until 2.0 dropped and here i am! i have become the cyber punk, the flatliner of gonks... or whatever

i like the gameplay. i like first person RPGs like fallout, TES, vampire masquerade, so on and so forth. so it was probably a given that i'd at least find this playable. but the gameplay is genuinely good and feels involved because it's got so much variation. there's a bunch of different types of gun, your pistols, SMGs, snipers, so on, but there's all these different variations of them from there. i don't just mean like, different types of SMGs, but there's power types, smart types that work with the cyberware in your body to produce extra affects, tech weapons that use electromagnetic technology to bust through walls and do the big damage. then there's melee weapons, which is blades and clubs, and punching, Gorilla Punching, or Mantis Slashing, or Wire Killing, theres so many different ways to murder people that it feels very fresh. i understand it certainly didnt use to be as balanced as it is now, but i decided from the get-go i wanted a shotgun, a sniper, a pistol, and mantis blades, and at literally no point did i ever have to even consider using other kinds of weapons. you can use quickhacks to set people on fire or distract enemies. i didn't do any of that sneaking stealthy shit because i'm not a pussy though. there are tonnes of options for avoiding combat encounters, and using quickhacks on tech around the room or on people to distract them, cover your path, so and so forth. i never did it as i say, but it's cool that every level feels designed with both rooty-tooting as well as sneaky peteing. you also, obviously, get better at your jazz as you go. there's normal leveling up and skill trees that you can put points into. if western RPGs have taught us anything its that interesting perks are ones that slightly change the way you interract with the world, not ones that produce bigger numbers. the perks allow you to get the dash, the sickest ability in the game, and not much else matters? there's a bunch of other cool shit in there like the first reloaded bullet being an eletrical explosion, or slowing down time, or deflecting bullets with a blade, but that dash and double jump is the only conceivable way to travel in this game. it makes movement for an RPG feel great, and i can't help but feel going back to new vegas where i cant even sprint is going to be a bit sore! especially now that matthew perry has passed into the great beyond! i digress... on the note of progression, there's also little mini level up trees that level up with specific actions that you do, so the game is constantly rewarding you for a specific playtype and you get better at the type of gameplay you keep doing. it's nothing major but its a nice bit of positive reinforcement. same with cyberware really, i found a lot of the cyberware was just "number go up" so didnt' care too much for it, but cyberware did allow me to double jump and have cool blades in my arms so i cant complain too much! i think the only problem with the gameplay is that maybe combat is too easy? i only had a few difficult combat encounters in the game. one was right at the start of phantom liberty (which i promised myself i woudlnt talk about, but fuck it. seems like the writers didnt give a fuck about dogtown because why the fuck would you renegate the quest of "who's going to lead dogtown" to a sidequest and make it THAT boring??? whatever) when i decided to kill ALL the guys outside dogtown's entrance, which was clearly not the intended way to play. the other hard fight was adam smasher, who wasn't too hard himself, more just that the ending segment makes it hard by capping your max health continuously as it goes. you have an infinite amount of healing items in teh game from the beginning, so all consumable items in a normal difficulty game were totally pointless. sold them every time and never felt wanting. maybe that stuff matters more in hardmode, but i just never felt the need to swap out from frag grenades or the normal healing item! they both served me perfectly for the entire game! tangent but the gun camo and car decals are so nice, i love that so many games have different coloured variants... shame you cant pick any! whats up with THAT? same with the car. i bought a maimai and used it for the whole game, but had to use the red one when i wanted a blue one? what am i carrying all these freakin eddies around for, huh, choom?

on the subject of "chooms" lets talk about that writing. was it preem or not? for the most part i really like it! the main story is relying so heavily that the relationship between V and Johnny will work. if it doesnt, the whole game is completely pointless and we should uninstall right now. it's not that you have to like johnny, but it's that you have to learn to understand him, the way he learns to understand you. the moment to moment plot beats are perfectly fine. they're servicable and sometimes serve to make night city feel like a lived in place. but the important stuff in this game is not really to do with themes of transhumanism or reliance on technology, or the ship of theseus. instead it's all about the characters. johnny is the duetoragonist of this and i think casting the most lovable man in hollywood as johnny works. listen, everyone loves keanu reeves (except for the aforementioned dead Benny Gecko of Fallout: New Vegas fame) so i'm choosing to believe that CDPR put a chunk of budget into Reeves bc they knew that if Johnny didnt work, the game wouldnt work... and not because they wanted a celebrity to help sell the game. even if the latter is true, which it at least partially is, Reeves' Johnny is overflowing with a well performed venom for your character and the state of the world. johnny's not edgy because he's a cool legend, he's a narcissistic dickhead who hurts other people and lets the guilt wash over him. he's also lonely, and bitter about what happened to him. the rare moments of sincerity in that character endear you to him so much. because like, this is the only guy in the whole world who GETS it. who gets YOU. he might not be the perfect person to team up with, but he's all you got, through thick or thin. and keanu makes it fucking work, baby. the side characters are okay too. or at least, judy is pretty damn good actually. i played as male V, made him a drug huffing booze cruiser who liked to shoot cops for fun. wasnt any place for romance for me. i did the quests for panam and kerry, both of which were fine, but i get why everyone says judy is queen. because she is! her story is so much more emotionally enriching and that much more tragic for it too. i didn't get to romance her because judy is a lesbian, but i know that if i ever play this game again i will do so as judy and see it through. characters got me wanting to come back to night city, which is saying something because the place is a shithole, and doesnt actualy have much in it! oh well, time for good chicken to delta! syonara!