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.

like most video games, combat is your main way of interacting with the world. unlikely most Final Fantasy titles, in this one its without menus, but as an action game! fun note: I have never really properly played an action game before this. I’ve never touched a soulsborne, didn’t get on with monster hunter, and only got about 20% of the way into MGS: R, so this is my first real exposure to the genre. it was good! I didn’t feel like it was impossible to learn what to do or how to get used to my toolkit which was nice! there's enough customisation of eikon powers to feel like you could do different playthroughs of the game with different styles each time, and its satisfying finding the setup that works for you. quick sidenote, I think Torgal should always have been auto controlled, because trying to control him manually feels clunky and difficult. I'm sure it's probably better to manually control him but by God, I couldn't work it out and relinquishing him control of his own life made the game simpler. the game's reliance of dodging is great fun but reads more like FF14 fights than it does Bloodborne. it's less tells and more AOEs that you're avoiding, but there are still tells to deal with. the berserker’s ring made for great gameplay as it rewards a perfect dodge with extra, fast, hard-hitting damage. that and a perfectly timed mega flare with stammer and limit break? feels good. when you can make this game's combat work it feels so rewarding. seeing 179000 damage come up in a stagger window feels incredible.

the game's item economy is terrible. gil is practically worthless as you always have enough to buy your gear and craft stuff, and the actual materials for crafting are always either already in your inventory or specific boss drops you'll get from the MSQ, so just playing the game casually is basically enough. opening a treasure chest and getting bones or hides feels weird, and it’s the games way of leaning into the action elements as opposed to the RPG ones. I love classic JRPGs, so this was a bit of a bummer for the fact that exploring the world just isn’t worth it. there is Never anything to find that is worth it, just useless crafting materials that all blend in together.

the game will tell you there are party members, but they're more decoration than anything else and their effect on combat is hardly noticeable. they're fun to have around but if you're fighting alone or with others you'll hardly notice. furthermore the "world" is smaller too. you have these teleportation stones you can use to fast travel around the world which is appreciated. they make it feel like the world you’re exploring is just a part of the country you're in, but based on the obelisk locations you quickly gather that you are exploring the entire country, and it’s made up of two cities and four villages at most. it makes the world feel small which isn't a great thing.

that kind of brings me to discussing the story, which is the big one.

I believe it was Tim Rogers of ACTION BUTTON fame who once said that "every Final Fantasy since Final Fantasy VII has been a proto remake of Final Fantasy VII" or something along those lines. we are at a point where the FF7 remake now exists, but also, this game did begin its development before the remake came out, in 2015. it’s clear that FF16 did not necessarily fully know what the FF7 remake was going to look that, and that lofty philosophical nightmare inspired this title, as it probably will future entries. this game was also very clearly inspired by Game of Thrones, which was premiering its fourth season when development began. rumour has it that a Blu-ray of the show at that time was bought, and everyone in the development team was made to watch the whole show! now this game is not a rip off of Game of Thrones by any means, but its setting is massively influences 16. decisions like British VAs over American ones may be attributed to Game of Thrones even, and its emphasis on noble families and medieval warfare as opposed to the high fantasy/science fiction borderline that we've experience for the previous 9 titles. Structurally we can see how this game has been developed alongside FF14's expansions Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker as well, with that game's director being this game's producer, Naoki Yoshida. if we understand that Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy XIV, and Game of Thrones were three key pieces of influential work for this game, we might begin to understand where the world that was produced came from, for better and for worse.

where to even really start with the writing? perhaps with the inciting incident, which was also the demo. I love this game's opening; I love the way you can see Ned Stark is Elwin Rosfield, and Clive Rosfield is clearly Jon Snow. he's also Cloud Strife, but we'll get to that. we establish some of our main cast and move to the tragedy. tonally we're in for a darker, more graphic game with a world that is harsher than previous entries. the first use of "fuck" in a Final Fantasy game, gore and decapitations. it fucks, and the music absolutely owns. perfectly paced with things that are set up that we, the engaged audience, are hopeful will pay off later. the game changes tracks 13 years later and Clive is a slave soldier being used for his magic for the imperials who murdered his father. this is an important backstory event for Clive! or rather, it should be. the problem comes from the fact that 13 years of Clive's life have been spent fighting in proxy wars and killing people he didn’t know for another, all as a slave. Clive's intimate knowledge of the Empire and its systems never come up. he has no opinions on the secret bearer squad of assassins, nor does he have any feelings about Prince Dion or the Emperor. Even the bearer assassin squad never gets mentioned again, which is shocking because those bearers are super interesting characters! highly competent bearer warriors who wield magic, essentially willingly, for their slave masters! and it doesn't come up at all. Clive's trauma as a teenager does come up which is good, but his treatment as a slave hardly matters. the fact that he's been a slave for well over a decade doesn’t even seem to impact his decision to try to free the slaves - he doesn't really care about the plight of bearers at that time (despite being shown to be sympathetic to their cause) because he just wants vengeance. it's not until Cid properly convinces him why he's fighting that Clive dons the mantle. but we do get there, we get that Clive is fighting to essentially emancipate all bearers across the world, as well as humanity in general. a pretty unambiguously morally good stance to take I think slavery is bad and humans should have a right to live how they want. this arc of Clive's come to a head when you fight Ultima for the first time, in Stonehyrr, near the end of the game. Clive is trapped in a vision of Ultima's making where facsimiles of his companions try to convince Clive to give up as it's too late for him to atone for his crimes. His crimes of... what, exactly? killing people when he was a slave? from murdering slave masters and establishing systemic change across a continent so that slaves can have their own lives? what, exactly, is Clive atoning for? Clive Rosfield is not a morally ambiguous character. he's not even depicted as one. Clive is a pleasant, happy man with good intentions and an unwavering determination to do good and change the world with revolutionary tactics. he essentially gets forced into having this one scene that just doesn’t make sense, and it’s seen as a culmination of sorts of his story, but it’s totally unearned. a lot of the writing in this game is unearned. The moment with Clive and Jill on the beach where they first confess their love for one another is also problematic in this respect. Jill gives Clive the eikon of Shiva and has to help convince Clive that he’s not a “monster” which he identifies with. But again, his stance on freeing all slaves and wiping out slavery is not a morally complex one. Compare this to Barret Wallace’s arc in FF7, about being an eco-terrorist. Yes, Barret’s goal of saving the planet from an energy company is a good one, but as a terrorist whose actions leave multiple civilians dead or people in poverty or the slums, his arc is one about learning the method by which to change the world. Secondly, the scene where Tifa and Cloud are in the life stream mirrors Clive and Jill on the beach. In both cases, the magic pixie dream girl helps our big sword wielding C-named protagonist with their identity problems. Cloud’s story works because we’ve seen how his perspective and narrative don’t fit the truth and make him fall apart. Clive is lacking any of this complex feeling. The history is there to make him interesting but not the reason. Clive is just a nice, good guy, who knows what he’s about, and tells you that he has an identity problem. But it’s not believable and these scenes feel unearned.

Jill Warrick is another character whose entire storyline is unearned. Its not that the events that transpire in it aren’t interesting, but nothing actually happens with them! We see Jill a normal girl as a child, but really, its Game of Thrones influence in place, she is actually a ward of the Rosfields. She is Theon to the Starks, or Sansa to the Lannisters. Where Theon’s treatment under the Starks was kind, the novels and show still understand that despite their kindness, Theon is still a hostage. This complexity never comes up with Jill. It is mentioned, once? Maybe twice? It has no bearing on how Jill feels about Clive, Joshua, Elwin, or even Annabella. Jill never talks about this time or her feelings on it. She never really talks about anything other than to advance the plot. Her character and personality are never made clear. She never has casual dialogue that shows us what she is like! She never jokes or quips or reacts. She’s just there. When Jill joins us for the first time, she tells Clive that she has to go to Phoenix Gate with him to “get answers”. But nothing at Phoenix Gate directly has an impact on her personality or perspective. It’s not an event she was present for. The answers that Clive gets don’t make a lick of difference to Jill or her feelings on the situation. She says to Clive afterwards that she has her own motive now, and that’s to kill the high priest of her slaves. That’s because Jill was also made a slave soldier! But she is a Dominant, meaning they used her like a walking nuclear bomb. She would’ve committed huge war crimes for many years as a Dominant, and while powerful enough to escape, other hostages meant she stayed. This is a HUGE and very compelling story that explains why someone would stay and commit evil acts. If Jill had considered herself a monster, I might have understood it more, seeing as the devastating power of Shiva would have meant she took far more lives than Clive ever did. But Jill never speaks about this time beyond the story mandated reason to go and get the mothercrystal and take this vengeance. Her desire for vengeance has never once been explored or displayed. She simply tells us one day that she wants it, then she gets her vengeance, and never mentions it again. She continues to live on the fringes of writing, just saying things to be a person. I love her design and her VA does a good job, but Jill Warrick is unfortunately a husk of a character. While the same cannot be said for the other main women of the game, there are unfortunately few female characters even worth talking about.

They are primarily Benedikta Harmenn, Annabella Rosfield, and Mid Telamon. the first is the first dominant we fight and defeat. A fun femme fatale who has chemistry with Cid, Hugo Kupka, and Barnabas Tharmr, whose death before we even have Clive’s main outfit robs the narrative of a potentially fun rival whose complex relationships could’ve been further explored on screen. It’s made clear she is using Hugo for Waloed’s purposes and possibly also Cid, but there is such a short time with her, and her death ends up being more of an important moment for Hugo than for herself. Benedikta is fun, and then quickly forgotten.

The other character is Annabella Rosfield, Clive and Joshua’s mother. She is, of course, Cersei Lannister. Her role in the story is less on screen and more that she, like Rebecca de Winter, haunts the narrative by being the powerful, cunning and manipulative figure that caused our downfall, and whose wit knows no end. Her death is satisfying and gruesome when it occurs, but she seemed to lack much of a plan for actually what was going on. As a villain she is compelling and fun, but probably should’ve been in the narrative more presently, perhaps actively attempting to thwart Clive, Dion, and Joshua more.

Mid is Cid’s adopted daughter, a silly joke referencing Mid, the grandson of Cid from Final Fantasy V. Much like her father she is an inventor who is witty and sarcastic but very well meaning. She has little to no arc beyond being the person to invent things that advance the plot. There is a brief mention of her thinking that airships shouldn’t be invented for the possibility they have on modern warfare, but it feels unearned as none of her creations have been used that way before. Otherwise, quite forgettable

There is a slurry of other important characters who are worth talking about. I particularly like Cid, Gav, Byron, and Dion. This game’s Cid is probably the best one that we have. Ralph Inneson’s performance is amazing, and the character is witty, interesting, and believable. He immediately strikes us a hero whose death will come too early. From his coughing a bit too much and the evidence petrification he is undergoing due to his magic, we know Cid is not long for the world. His death is necessary for the purpose of Clive’s autonomy as leader of the outlaws. The problem is when, I think, and how. Cid dies in a duel saving Clive’s life against a large, otherworldly monster, and then bleeds out. Why foreshadow his weakened state if he’s going to die from a grievous wound? I would have, instead, had him survive this encounter, but slowly die of the next story events. Having several more scenes of him infirm in bed, helping Clive take agency. It would’ve been sadder and more tragic, and much more hammered home the fact that overusing one’s magic abilities as Dominant, or bearer has terrible consequences for the wielder. I think possibly up to the defeat of Hugo Kupka could Cid have survived, wasting away slowly in bed until he was no more. I would’ve also deleted the five-year time skip year for this reason, as it feels otherwise totally pointless.

Gav and Byron both are side characters who are fun, large comedy characters who have a surprising amount of pathos. Both characters are lacking in magic but are clearly competent and well loved. Their charm may have something to do with the fact that both have great performances behind them. Neither has a particularly exciting arc, but they fit into the story in such a way that they don’t need them. They’re just good, fun honest boy, and I am happy that they both get to survive.

Dion is a more complicated matter. He is a character who is mentioned and discussed throughout many of the events of the game. We essentially watch his storyline happening in cutscenes from the side with literally no involvement ourselves. Clive doesn’t actually meet and speak to Dion until very shortly before the final events of the game. Never does Dion actually join us as a party member, which feels sorely missed (although we do get one quick time cinematic clash as Bahumat in the final battle) as he has been in the narrative for so long. But even his arc is unearned. He feels guilt about the destruction that Bahumat caused in the dominion, but Ultima had literally controlled him at that time, so his actions were not his own. This massive point completely undermines Dion’s guilt, and makes his death feel pointless. Which is a shame, because as he is our first explicitly gay Final Fantasy main character, if anyone deserved a happy ending, it was him.

Surprisingly I don’t have too much to say about Joshua, other than that I like him, and the writers were clearly trying to make G’raha Tia from FF14 your brother instead of your boyfriend. And you know what? It works! I am of the theory that Joshua does survive the events of the game because of Clive’s actions.

I’d like to talk about villains and evil intentions now, because I feel the Game of Thrones influence and previous Final Fantasy influences get their wires crossed. Clearly there is love for Game of Thrones and its interesting, complex characters. Annabella would not exist without Cersei, and Clive as the jaded son who does years of hard labour would not exist without Jon Snow. But what of Ultima? Where does that leave the ultimate villain? And Barnabas? Game of Thrones’ villains are interesting because they are explicitly human beings with motives that are derived from their experiences in life, and the people they have loved and lived with. Ultima is an otherworldly creature, he's more Night King than Ramsay Bolton. As such, his perspective is unknowable to us. We cannot empathise or understand or even rationalise with Ultima’s motives because they come from a place that human beings cannot go to. This is fine, I don’t care for it but it’s how a lot of world ending monsters are perceived. The problem here grows from the fact that Ultima doesn’t stop fucking talking! (Side note, I wish they hadn’t called him Ultima. Feels like he should have had a unique name, because Ultima is a series staple and now its delegated as the villain of this game. I don’t know, I find it hard to find the words to describe exactly what my issue is here, but every Final Fantasy needs a villain, so to name the one we know we’re going to encounter something like this, feels like it takes away from their identity? I just don’t like it). Ultima has so many scenes where he just goes on about how the greatest sin humanity ever made was waking up. First of all, you have failed in your comparison to Paradise Lost, because the first sin was using free will to disobey God, and then they became aware of their nakedness. Simply having free will was not a sin in the Bible, it was how they used it. Secondly, the obvious hypocrisy that Joshua and Clive themselves mentions makes Ultima so easy to discredit. He doesn’t need a tragic backstory to be interesting, but his motive should come from a place we can reckon with for it to feel weighty. But he’s just a big evil monster who hates humans because he thinks they’re lesser. It’s so boring, it’s the same old crap that we’ve seen time and time again. Ultima goes on about Clive’s will being his weakness and breaking it, and teaching us the meaning of suffering, but it’s just villainous buzzwords to fill the silence. Ultima ends up having no flavour whatsoever. He’s an alien, make him feel more like one instead of his anime-ass boring nonsense. You’d think the mysterious dark knight Barnabas would be more compelling, but when it’s revealed that Barnabas is just a servant of Ultima we run into more problems. For one, the world already feels small because of the limited maps we explore. But if Barnabas, a villain we know is actually just working for Ultima, then suddenly the complexity is gone. If we have myriad villains throughout the game with different motives and feelings from each other, then every action Clive and co. make makes the world that bit more complex and interesting. The world feels huge and alive. Welcome to Game of Thrones! Barnabas being a pawn of Ultima from the get-go slices off any interest dynamic that could’ve been there. Barnabas gives out lofty villain monologues about accepting your destiny and humans losing their free-will, and its just philosophical nonsense that is so incredibly easy to dismiss. The perspectives that Barnabas is coming from is one that no real humans believe in, so what’s the point in letting him talk? The audience will hardly understand where he’s coming from and Clive will just dismiss it, which is correctly done! It just makes Barnabas fall so flat at the end of the day and made him feel disappointing. I would’ve liked him more if he was different to Annabella, and different to Ultima. And that if he and Sleipnir had fucked nasty, which they should’ve done. At least Kupka was kind of his own unique villain.

The game’s FF14 DNA can be seen in its alliant quests, little miniature storylines that we do throughout side quests through the world. They are cookie cutter stories about working together, and the goodliness of acceptance. They have no real weight to them, and their characters are as bland as their messaging. They are entirely forgettable and far too frequent. Some of FF14’s worst stuff is when you have storylines that are saccharine that they make you want to feel sick. You spend enough time in the world of Eorzea and that’s what you get, storylines that conclude with everyone hugging each other and kissing each other on the cheek. The alliant quests are like that too and they are not good, they are just boring and bad.

That’s it, I think. I’m sure I’ll have more to say later, but that’s it. I didn’t spend much time praising the game’s writing, so I will say that the period wherein Hugo Kupka is the main villain up to the Bahumat fight is probably the best the game ever gets. Its exciting, there are multiple perspectives and strange things. The fight with Hugo is great and cutting his hands off is a genuine shock surprise. It’s nice to not have Jill around because she’s so boring, and we get to hang out with Byron and get some environment changes too. Then, there’ the eikon fight against Titan. With amazing music, it leans in on humour and spectacle and oh boy does it deliver. There aren’t many eikon fights in the game but this one is so, so, so good. I was cheering during it, and Hugo’s death at the end felt like this long-awaited rival who has been causing us problems is finally gone. The victory felt earned and the fight itself was amazing fun. If the rest of the game had this killer pacing and fun character balances, then this game could’ve been truly incredible. Unfortunately, its mired down by disappointing villains, arcs and storylines that simply make sense, and a pacing that doesn’t suit its unfortunately tiny world. I really did have fun with Final Fantasy XVI, I just think it needed to be tighter in its writing. I’m very excited to see if this game gets any DLC at all because I’ll definitely play it, and I’m looking forward to replaying it on PC with mods when it one day comes out. But for now, I think I’ll leave it at that.

the pokemon company delivered their promise to make an open world pokemon game this time around. they genuinely commited to it, they didnt hold our hands and railroad us on some cheesy feelgood bullshit this time around. this, in an essence, is everything we wanted pokemon to be, and performance issues aside they really tried to meet the fan expectations... but they were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

this is an open world game. this is also a JRPG-lite. i do not think they mesh well.

in another open world game where your destination is your choice, you might encounter something that is too ferocious to deal with, but with your cunning and wits, you might still be out to outgun whatever baddie you encounter. in a JRPG, fighting an enemy that's twenty levels higher than you is almost always impossible without some form of exploit that makes you play the game entirely differently. this is true of pokemon too, you might be able to take on a gym where the pokemon are so many levels higher than you, but it will be because of some bullshit, or because you had a fuck tonne of potions/max revives. i hate using items in pokemon because it feels so cheap; for a game where the premise is equal opponents against each other, using items just feels like cheating. as a result of this, winning a fight against a gym i'm not levelled for is an impossibility. there's simply no point! doesn't really matter how well I know my type matchups, if you have a dragonite that's 40 levels higher than me there's no way my wooper and dunsparce are surviving that. as a result, the open world nature of pokemon kind of failed here i feel like! i just ended up using a guide to go to the recommended next area because it felt like otherwise i was getting my shit kicked in, purposely avoiding trainers and wild pokemon until i could reach the gym and cheese my way through it, and that wasn't fun at all.

another aspect of the open world is navigating it; we're given Miraidon/Kiraidon for this purpose, and it's cool how our mount evolves with each titan that we beat. it's so much faster than running on our feet it feels absolutely necessary to use, but honestly, i felt like i didnt get agood picture of what paldea looks like because of it. sure i explored, but that quickly got boring because there was never really anything worth finding. sure there's items and TMs, but they're both boring. there was never, as far as i'm aware, a case of only finding a certain pokemon in a certain place. each pokemon kind of wanders round aimlessly in each area, feeling less like actual animals with habitats and more like freckles that are scattered across your skin. the towns too are completely bland, totally lacking in personality. i would say they might be the worst towns in the franchise. you can't enter any buildings except for the gyms, which are just boring ass gray buildings with nothing going on! i get that there's an emphasis on being outside but man, i didnt get that feeling of "oh cool a new town!" that you get when you find one in an older pokemon game, which was a real shame. they used to be so colourful. i guess the mount controls okay though. side note, the game's overstated horrific performance issues do not make paldea a nice region to look at either! paldea was not particularly fun to explore for any reason! it wasnt bad it was just... not good?

the story is pokemon as always. team star was absolutely the worst bit, completely lacking in flavour at all. the bosses are all boring, and cassiopea was boring. i DID like clive though; i wish he would have got flustered everytime i called out who he really was though, that would've been funny. the champion storyline is also pretty meh, the gym leaders this time around are mostly forgettable, some of them being memorable only for their visual designs and not much else. i didnt like nemona at the start but whatever reason she grew on me! the game seems to realise that she's stupid and that makes me like her more.

arven's story was the best one with the titans. the titans were the coolest thing in it, and i wish they had been a bit tougher or stranger, but i did enjoy them a lot, and arven's thing with sada/turo is good too... speaking of...

area zero takes the game into a totally different, bizarre for pokemon, act. nemona, penny, and arven have all this expository banter while you explore this dazzlingly beautiful area on foot, it's tough and dangerous. for once a pokemon game also acknowledges that people can dislike each other; the characters are witty and have banter with each other, and they're mean about it sometimes! even penny has a level of sarcasm to her that gives her some flavour, and i suddenly found myself invested in this little friendship group i was in. the paradox pokemon are genuinely cool, and the mystery of what's going on genuinely caught my attention. the fact that the real professor turo/sada has been dead the entire time is a genuine shock, and the final battle with their robot clone is tough and super exciting! it's not a long final act, but it's a really good one! it made me wish for not an open world pokemon game, but a focused one with a decent story... kind of like colosseum, but with more choice of pokemon in the team!

the new pokemon this time around are really good, i surprised myself by managing to finish the game with a team full of entirely new pokemon, which i dont think i've ever done before in a new pokemon game! that's genuinely awesome!

final note, i think making your first open world game also the game with the boarding school was a HUUUGE mistake! boarding school fiction is fun because it's a centralised location that the audience becomes intimately familiar with; dropping that in a game where we have very little incentive to go back to is insane! and now we're likely to never get it again which is a shame, bc i love boarding school fiction! ah well!

phenomenal, still holds up on all grounds.

its simplitic art style is charming, colourful, and fun. the animations for attacks are great, and its unique character sprites stand out as imposing an interesting. a good example of a game whose sprites inspire your imagination. joy mutants look silly but the dark, thick lines of their twisted skin inspires fear and caution.

the music is goofy and weird, often looping badly or ruining its own songs with unnecessary changes or interruptions. its so perfectly LISA that a song like Summer Love can be as relaxing as it is but have those big drums in them. that a song like the Beehive can be so mysterious and then so beautiful, or a theme like Die Die Die! can be so slimey and then so intense. its tunes are memorable and strange and funny, and totally heartbreaking

its gameplay is fire. exploring the world is fun and punishing, the upgrade from walking to cycling feels so earned and smooth, and the world is clearly expertly designed around that. the humour that comes from traversing to a new screen and falling off a cliff to your death or massive damage is brilliant. the battles too are fantastic, almost every enemy being unique, with quirky names and abilities. SP and TP mirror each other delightful and the characters having button inputs like a fighting game works so well. the vast number of party members allows for a huge amount of replayability, although i'll always use terry

the humour in this game is so dark, so silly! from accidentally pouring gasoline on children to Timmy Carrots and Percy Peas saying goodbye to each other, this game made me laugh out loud constantly. it juxtaposes true silliness with heartrending drama , being able to ramp up your emotions with humour to strike it all with drama. we love to see what olathe has to throw at us next because its always stupid. its stupid, silly little sprites with their dumb soundeffects, dumb music, and bright pink nipples. I dont think there's a joke in this game that didnt land for me

but all of that aside we talk about LISA because we talk about its story and its world. olathe is fucking horrible and so is this game. it covers themes like abuse, rape, suicide, trauma, drug addiction, and complicity. where does all of it start and where does it end? the apocalypse in this game is secondary to the story that is interesting; which is brad's journey to find and capture buddy. brad is neither hero nor villain, he is simply a selfish man doing what he thinks is right... or what he wants to be right. brad proves time and again he is capable of selfless heroism, sacrificing his limbs for his comrades and defeating gangs or bandits. he also proves they are secondary to his own desires, throwing them to the wolves if need be. he is so interesting, one of the best examples of a character whose history is so storied it cannot be fully comprehended by the individual living that life. all of brad's life is wordlessly mushed into his spirit and they make the broken man we see at the end of the game. we love brad, we root for him. we hate brad, we know he is a selfish murderer. we know he must be beaten, but we don't want him to. his companions feel the same.

for a long time, i felt complicated about the fact that his companions betray him to save buddy at the end, but the definitive edition made me like it more, specifically because of the campfire scene with Terry Hintz and Mad Dog. brad is not a stupid man, he is aware that he is in the wrong but he cannot act otherwise. furthermore, his sense of guilt urges him to reach out to Terry for comfort. and Terry does comfort him, reassures him that Brad is a good man for the way he makes him feel! Terry, in his ignorance, does not know brad truly. he says to Brad "Promise me one thing. That you won't become a monster like the rest." It's Mad Dog who recognises what Brad is really, sees the violence for what it is.

"A dog
in a dog
in a dog
in a dog."

When Terry turns on Brad with the gang to defeat him, it's because Brad failed in his promise. He became a monster. he couldn't get away from it

all for nothing

actually, i think sonon not being controllable suits the perspective of yuffie. sonon kind of pretends/allows yuffie to be his "boss", like he's her older brother, right? when yuffie drops in battle he gives the remaining amount of his HP to her, and then he obviously permanently does that at the end of the DLC. you spend the whole DLC in the perspective of cocky naive yuffie that the one actual adult character should feel out of reach. idk, I just felt like it worked well in terms of its narrative structure! nero is still incredibly stupid and should've been scrubbed from the whole thing, and these dungeons are kind of too big, but idk, i had a good time :)