When it comes to Final Fantasy VII, I think there tends to be a general fixation on Midgar as a centralized point of identity for the game. And while I do think it's one of the best opening segments in maybe any videogame, what makes it work so well in the grand scheme of things is just how introspective the rest of the game feels when juxtaposed to its explosive sense of grandiosity.

Final Fantasy VII's globe trotting adventure isn't primarily defined by it's sense for theatrics, but by it's mellow tone and somber sensibilities. The towns you come across are oftentimes humble and restrained, carefully crafted with precision point environmental design and delicate cinematography. There's a tender sense of balance to found throughout the whole affair, as it seeks to comfort you just as often as it alienates you. That push-and-pull dynamic it shares with the player is such a key focal point as to what make the worlds of VII and VIII feel so utterly compelling to me, and I can't help but feel that the unquestioned contrast between the science and fantasy elements plays a major factor in how sheerly effective that relationship it is.

Aerith's fate is something I'll never forget, not just because of the effective dramatization found within that one moment, but because of how silent and truly felt her absence is across the rest of the game. A lot of people give this game grief for putting the snowboarding segment not even like twenty minutes later, but the fact that the game just moves on afterwards without dwelling on itself too hard is exactly what I think makes it brilliant. Final Fantasy VII allows its punctual moments to breathe and sink skin deep, and it knows that no amount of self indulgent dialogue commemorating Aerith would ever hit as hard as opening the party screen just to see a missing slot there.

Cloud might not be the person he says he is, but what he becomes through learning to open his heart to other people and show compassion makes him more of a hero than any mere SOLDIER could ever hope to be. He never has any major transformation in regards to physicality and utility, he doesn't have to. Just as he doesn't need to be told by someone that he's finally enough, he always was.

For every magnificent setpiece Final Fantasy VII has, there's a slew of soft spoken moments of beauty that truly make this game what it is, even up to its final moments. It ends the same way it began, a friendly face amidst a writhing future of uncertainty. That faint shimmer of hope shining just as bright as it always has.

Vou tentar ser o mais breve possível nessa "review" mal escrita, porque esse jogo não vale mais um segundo sequer do meu tempo e esforço.

Nier Reincarnation é um gacha e é ruim, e morreu não foi à toa. Só terminei o jogo base porque era um desafio jogar mais de 30 minutos disso por dia. O combate é terrivelmente chato, repetitivo e cansativo, onde não exige literalmente nenhuma interatividade do jogador, é basicamente tudo full auto, onde os personagens fazem absolutamente tudo sozinhos e você só fica assistindo e perdendo seu precioso tempo e gastando bateria do seu celular. E quando você não tá assistindo um dos combates mais bostas já feitos, você apenas fica assistindo a personagem principal andando em linha reta pelo mapa, que geralmente é composto de cenários genéricos de ruinas, e a única "mecânica" sequer de gameplay que existe nesse jogo é pra fazer você gastar seu dinheiro e tempo tentando ganhar personagens e itens mais fortes pra conseguir avançar na campanha, resumo, aquela clássica asquerosidade de gacha que você já conhece. Então pra preservar a minha sanidade mental decidi TALVEZ ver o resto da história dessa porcaria de jogo no youtube num futuro nada breve.

Mas pra não dizer que absolutamente tudo é terrivel, a trilha sonora é ótima e a direção de arte durante as histórias é bem charmosa e bonita, inclusive algumas poucas dessas histórias são bem escritas e impactantes, com alguns personagens muito interessantes e cativantes, como o Deimos e Akeha.

Enfim, às 6 horas (que pareceram 15 horas) que passei jogando Nier Reincarnation foi uma das experiências mais miseráveis que já tive com a mídia, e eu quero que todos os fãs de Nier vão pra puta que pariu.

As I stated in my Kazooie review, I replayed the game two times back in September of 2023. With Kazooie, that doesn't seem too crazy because it's about half the length of Tooie. However, I also replayed this game twice as well. And with it being twice as long, or maybe even longer for some people, as Kazooie? Seems a bit nuts right? Well, I really went Banjo crazy that month because after beating both games once, I couldn't stop thinking about them which led to me replaying them again right away. The thing is, that whole time I couldn't stop thinking about playing them again...I was thinking about Tooie pretty much. I don't know what happened to me because I went from thinking this game was just decent and definitely worse than Kazooie, to thinking it was amazing and super addicting and better than Kazooie overall. After replaying both games yet again, do I still think this? Probably, tho it's a bit complicated.

If you played Kazooie prior, the first thing you'll notice with Tooie is just how much Banjo and Kazooie's moveset has improved. The roll attack lasts longer, is more mobile and has a nice visual of Kazooie shielding Banjo. The normal attack you perform by standing still, which before was a simple claw move by Banjo, is now replaced by a more effective stationary rat-a-tat rap. The swimming is now WAY better naturally and doesn't require you to hold the R button for it to be good. In fact I don't think the R button does anything when swimming lol. You can now flip-flap directly out of a talon trot. When you do a beak buster, you can now move forward while you're doing rather than staying in place. This change can actually lead to some exploits you can perform too which is rad. These along with some non move-set changes like how whenever you speed up the text it makes the characters talk faster and doesn't pitch up their voices (which was an issue I had forgot to mention in Kazooie), the camera is slower but smoother to use and is overall an improvement, Banjo's backpack animates now when he walks and something about it is incredibly satisfying to me idk why, and the biggest thing is now notes don't get reset when you die (for a reason I'll get into later). All of these improvements drastically enhance the basic gameplay and I honestly miss a ton of these whenever I go back to Kazooie.

That's all fine and dandy, but how about new moves? Well, Tooie's got you covered because it's got like double the amount of moves in Kazooie. The biggest addition is the split-up mechanic. Now you can play as Banjo and Kazooie separately which makes for some clever puzzles. Each singular character gets their own specific moves and while Kazooie's are generally really fun, Banjo's are mostly situational. Kazooie's consist of moves that aren't as context-specific like the ability to glide on her own, her own backflip that's better than the normal one, and the ability to hatch eggs which gets used quite a bit. Banjo's however, besides the first one that lets him pick up and move objects which can lead to some fun puzzles, aren't used that much. He has an ability that let's him recover HP which is nice but only gets used a couple times overall and isn't as helpful as you think because lives aren't an issue anymore. I actually forgot to say they don't exist anymore and it's actually better to die sometimes because it respawns you at the last split-ip bad/beginning of the world which can work in your favor. But anyways, his other two abilities which let him go in dangerous liquids and the other let's him go in his backpack like a burlap sack to cross dangerous obstacles, just aren't used much and are incredibly situational. They all feel pretty samey too unlike Kazooie's, so overall I'd say Kazooie had the better new moves overall. This isn't even getting into all the new moves they both got together. There's 4 new egg types: Fire, Grenade, Ice and Clockwork. All have various uses and are fun additions. There are two new shoes, the claw clamber boots and the springy step shoes. The springy step shoes feel a little derivative because of the jump pads but they're still cool. The claw clamber boots however let you walk on designated parts of walls and it's awesome. There's the bill drill which is also kind of situational but is super satisfying to use. You can now fire eggs in first-person, which can be a little tricky at first with the N64 joystick but is also fun. Because of this, the game also added egg shooting in the air and water when going in first-person mode. The first-person shooting also leads into this FPS mode where you use Kazooie as a gun, certainly riding on the success of Goldeneye, and they can be super fun as well. All of these additions, plus the split-up stuff just really add to their whole move set and makes traversing through worlds a ton of fun.

Speaking of the worlds in this game, they're overall a lot bigger than Kazooie's. The first couple are kinda comparable in size to the first game's but by the time you get to Terrydactyland, they become just massive in size. You'd think this would be super annoying compared to Kazooie, but the game added warp pads that can warp you all over the level. These are the reason I never found the game tedious, if the game didn't have them or if they were awful like DK 64's warps, then the game would be way worse than it is. Anyways, the world's are much bigger in size and there's a lot more things you can do in each world. Though, overall there are less collectables because notes are now in bundles of 5 and 20. So overall the game has less of a focus on tons of collectables like the notes and more of a focus on the jiggys themselves. Jiggy's require way more steps than they did in Kazooie and this turns a lot of people off of the game. A bit understandable but the game is clearly trying to be more of a slower paced adventure platformer rather than Kazooie's brisk pace. I like both approaches but when it comes to Tooie's unique world themes like a run-down amusement park, a dinosaur world and a combined fire and ice world, I definitely prefer just how creative Tooie gets.

I mentioned how Jiggy's take longer to get because more steps are involved, and that's partly because of Mumbo Jumbo and Humba Wumba. In this game, Humba is the one that transforms you and Mumbo is actually a playable character. It greatly depends on the world but overall, I think this is a fun change. Mumbo has a very basic moveset compared to BK but his whole deal is using his magic on specific Mumbo pads. This is incredibly situational ofc and depending on the world it can be a bit tedious, but it can also lead to some interesting puzzles where you have to switch back and forth between BK and Mumbo. Same thing with Humba, sometimes you actually have to switch between Mumbo and then the Humba transformation. Mostly in the later levels do they make these portions kinda puzzling. In terms of everything new they added, this is probably the weakest addition just because it can lead to some tedium, I'll admit that, however I personally never had much of an issue with it tho I also have the whole game memorized at this point so take that as you will.

Besides all that, one of my absolute favorite additions was the fact a lot of the world's are interconnected. Early on, you'll help this mayan cat character out in recovering this idol. Well, you obtain it from this caveman in a weird looking cave and bring it back to him. That's strange though, you're in a world called Mayahem Temple and you just saw a caveman. What gives? Well it turns out, you just entered Terrydactyland when you did that, the aformentioned dinosaur world. This happens a lot in this game where you'll briefly cross over from one world into another or even unlock paths to directly travel between each one. The most memorable one is where you have to feed a different tribe of (good) cavemen this time, and to do so, you unlock a shortcut between Terrydactyland and WitchyWorld. You pick up some burgers from this one character, use the claw clamber boots you get from Grunty Industries and walk along the wall to feed them. All these working parts and interconnectivity just make the world feel alive and I love it.

I mentioned how you had to get the claw clamber boots from Grunty Industries, which is world 6, and use them for a jiggy in Terrydactyland which is world 5. Banjo Kazooie did this exact same thing only once, where you had to backtrack with an ability from another world. Tooie does this way more often and because of that and the interconnectivity of the world, it kind of feels like a 3D metroidvania at points which is awesome. Anyways, people seem to have an issue with backtracking in this game and I don't get it. The more complex jiggy's I understand, but the backtracking is not required as there's enough jiggy's in the game for you to beat the final boss. And even then, there really aren't that many backtracking jiggy's in general. Maybe like 12 or 13 of the 90 jiggy's require backtracking I think? Either way I think that complaint is majorly overblown and is not an issue at all to me, again the Mumbo and Humba stuff I can understand but backtracking to old levels with future abilities? Never even crossed my mind as an issue.

Something else this game added was a boss for every world and they're all really fun. Some are better than others, Lord Woo Fak Fak for example is probably the worst, but I really like how almost every single one of them are large in scope. They really feel menacing even if some of them are pathetically easy.

The game is also way funnier and a lot more cynical in general which I dig. Kazooie was both of these things as well but Tooie cranks it up to the max. The game literally starts off with Bottles dying and Kazooie going "well, he wasnt the most popular character anyways". The game is just full of this tongue-in cheese cynicism. The cast of side characters is not only WAY larger, they're more distinct and memorable just because the dialogue is so much better. There's literally an immigration joke when BK have to help some actual aliens, it's amazing. I think this, plus the interconnected worlds and more unique world themes, are THE main things I like over Kazooie. That plus the improved move set ofc.
The OST is again wondeful just like the first game, but instead of being upbeat, catchy tunes..Grant went for a more atmospheric darker ost this time around. Because worlds are much larger and take more time to beat, I think this change is for the better since the music track won't get old at all. Some of my favorite songs were Grunty Industries, Weldar's Theme and Mr Patch's Theme.

Yes I know two of those are from Grunty Industries. I honestly don't get the hate at all for that world. Something like Terrydactyland I can get, even if I still like it, because it's a massive world with empty space in a lot of it. However, Grunty Industries is a complex, zelda dungeon-like world and it's amazingly designed. I guess if you went into Tooie expecting it to just be like Kazooie, you'd hate it however it's very fun to explore and again super well-designed. It's not even that easy to get lost imo, it's a multi-layered world with distinct set-pieces rather than a super large open world. Sorry for the rant, I just don't get Grunty Industries hate lol. Something I did end up feeling a tiny bit sour on this time around was Hailfire Peaks. I still really like that world, and think the theming is awesome. However the fire side is a little too big for its bridges I will admit and the lag gets really bad sometimes there. The game can get laggy throughout portions of the game, which is only a thing on the N64 version, but there especially it's pretty bad.

One more thing before I mention the endgame and close out the review, is Canary Mary. Canary Mary has methods that make her very doable but she's still easily the worst part of the game and the only part I straight up dislike and dread doing. Her first button mashing races in Glittergulch Mine are perfectly fine. Her races in Cloud CuckooLand tho are insane. If you aren't doing the pause trick, idk how it's humenaly possible to win without using a turbo controller or something. The 2nd race isn't as bad because you can stay near her until the very end and then button mash to hell to pass her right before she can catch up. These races are easily doable with the right methods but the fact you have to do them this way, it just stinks man. But luckily this is only for 100% and only a tiny portion of the actual game so it's not the worst thing in the world.

I talked about a lot of improvements this game has over Kazooie. If there's one thing Kazooie destroys Tooie on however, it's the quiz section and final boss. Gone is the charming board game aesthetic of Kazooie, now you have a typical game show-esque quiz game where you have to answer enough questions to beat Grunty's sisters. It's not bad but it pales in comparison to Kazooie's version as it's less charming and even has less question types. Yeah, I won't miss the Gruntilda specific questions but no sound/music quizzes? That's kinda lame. Again, it's not bad and is only disappointing when compared to Kazooie. The final boss is also not nearly as good as Kazooie's. Is the Hag 1 harder? Most definitely but it's not as memorable as the Gruntilda fight from Kazooie and isn't as fun. It's a solid fight overall but compared to Kazooie's, just a bit lackluster.

So do I like Tooie more than Kazooie? In many ways, hell yes. It improves on many things like the duo's moveset, the writing is way funnier and the interconnectivity between worlds felt like a logical step to take after Kazooie. It may have the weaker end boss and quiz show, it's definitely and easier game to replay/100% and the Canary Mary rematch race is the worst thing between both games, however I'm still feeling like I may like this just slightly more than Kazooie just because of how ambitious and fun it is. It's kinda like Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 where each game has is own strengths over the other and it's just hard to choose what's better. Either way, it's still a 10/10 like the first game and one of my favorite games ever now. Easily in my top 3 N64 games, alongside the first game and Majora's Mask of course. Either way, if you see people saying you shouldn't play this game after you've beaten Kazooie. Don't listen to them, give this a try and you might fall become infatuated with it like I have.

This Banjo double feature was fun but I reckon it's time to play some Kirby again. Stay tuned for a Dreamland 2 review coming soon!

Will forever be known to me as a game i played ONLY during every single one of my Jewish Studies lectures. Im not even Jewish so i cant begin to tell you how i ended up in that class but this was the only thing i looked forward doing at 10:55 - 11:30am tuesdays and thursdays every week. Today was my last day of class so it was either I beat the game today or i take another class about the Jewish religion. There was no better option.

Fun game though if not a little confusing at times which is why it took me so long to beat it, though the game does have hints which i used religiously because between learning about pangrea or whatever my professor was talking about and me not knowing the geography of Japan i couldnt hope to keep up... Then i would have had to take a second Jewish culture class. The zones are pretty open at times and normally i would find this to be boring but the music was very good so i didnt really care much... either that or i was just so bored that anything was entertaining. The tight corridor areas were extremely fucking annoying due to the god awful camera

This game also does that Final Fantasy V shit with the humor where they do an attempt at comedy and nobody laughs but instead of playing this it just plays a laugh track (<-- thats a laugh track in case any of you didnt know) and unfortunately im a sucker for shitty jokes so this appealed to me. I think beating this game was more of an accomplishment to me than completing the course

Can I really be that harsh on a mfin atari 2600 launch title that seeks to replicate a simple gambling card game and nothing else? It's exactly what it says on the box, you want blackjack, you get blackjack. Only in the late 70's will you be able to find a card game that you play with a mfin paddle controller. It's pretty cool that this game supports up to four players though, even if its everyone vs the house rather than everyone vs each other. For the launch lineup this is probably one of the more social games in the bunch. You start with 200 chips and the chip counter resets at 1000 so I initially set that as my goal, but after getting to around 750 and then watching the house completely own me with enough back-to-back losses that I was back at basically square one again did I realize that huh yeah maybe this is why I shouldn't get a gambling addiction. Truly a cautionary tale from the dawn of console gaming that nobody seemed to heed, this game ran so Balatro and gacha games could crawl.

This review has been a long time coming. It's been coming since before the site you're reading this on was founded. It's been coming before some of you were even born.

To know about my relationship with Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, you have to know something about me. I first started this game some 20 years ago, at a time when I couldn't even tie my own shoelaces. In those intervening years, many attempts to beat this game followed. Just off the top of my head, I can remember attempts in 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2015 and even in 2017, a time period where I didn't play video games a lot. Yet I always came up short. After reaching the game's halfway point - which was hammered into me by rote - Tomb Raider 4 would always get the best of me. I would give up. I would quit.

In 2020, I decided that I was never going to finish this game, and I skimmed through its ending cutscenes so that I could claim that I had beaten it. But I hadn't beaten it. I was a hack, a fraud, a liar. I was practically a member of Congress.

When I started my marathon of the Tomb Raider series in January of this year, this was the game I was looking forward to most. This was my opportunity to make things right, to make the lie a truth, to beat TR4 for good - for once in my life, to get the best of this game, instead of the other way around. I proudly proclaimed to my friends that I was Captain Ahab and Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was my white whale. Of course, nobody has actually read Moby Dick, or they'd have pointed out to me that the story ends with the whale dragging Ahab beneath the waves.

Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was to be Lara Croft's 'final problem.' Like her detective compatriot Sherlock Holmes, the character was so popular that the creator had burned out, and decided to kill them off. This was to be her last adventure, and she was assigned an appropriately epic quest - saving the world from the scourge of Egyptian god and all-around villain Seth, whom she accidentally releases on a routine raid. Her final send-off was intended to be her biggest adventure yet: huge levels, new abilities and ever more impressive graphics were prepared to accompany her into the afterlife.

The first half of Tomb Raider 4 - up to the point I always gave up at - is the best and most definitive classic TR has ever been. With Lara's new abilities and the tightly focused levels, traversing tombs and temples has never been more fun. There's even a prologue episode with a younger Lara, setting up her rivalry with one-time mentor Werner Von Croy. There are breezy exploration segments, smartly designed puzzles, thrilling timed runs and even a few passable combat sections - something the series has always struggled with. Apart from the introduction, the whole game takes in Egypt, and as a young player, I learned a lot about its ancient mythology just from this game. The race between Lara and a Seth-possessed Von Croy over the world's fate promises a thrilling conclusion to our heroine's last huzzah.

Yet it breaks my heart to say this, but the cracks eventually do start to show. The first half's linearity allows its strong points to shine. Once you get to the point where the game has interconnected levels - almost a sort of open world, and start running into rooms that are dead ends, that's where you should swallow your pride and open a walkthrough, because now it's a lot less focused and you'll want to save your time. The second half's location of keys and gates, with nary a context clue as to what you should do next, almost turns it into a point-and-click adventure game. There are a couple of puzzles whose logic has not been figured out even today, 25 years later. There are even more platforming sections that are made just to fuck with the player. Brute force - or a guide - is the only way through. Somewhere during Tomb Raider 3's development, it seems, Core Design lost their mojo for designing skill-based platforming segments that would throw down the gauntlet and challenge players to make use of everything they'd learned - best illustrated in the endgame of Tomb Raider II. Instead, they opted just to create trial-and-error sections with an instant death on every error.

The most glaring flaw, however is that this game clearly ran out of resources in its second half. Despite the apocalyptic events taking place in the story, the environments hardly convey them. A few half-hearted attempts at showing the brewing storm are made, yet the story tells me the clouds have already burst. The final boss is anticlimactic and subdued, and the final cutscene is too rushed to carry any poignancy. It feels more like a cheap cliffhanger than the 21-gun-salute, fireworks-forming-a-union-jack, not-a-dry-eye-in-the-house send-off Lara deserves. Of course we are aware that Eidos bosses found out that Core Design were planning to kill Lara off and screamed at them about it, but all oral histories say it was too late to alter the ending, so why wasn't it made better to begin with?

There isn't even a proper credits screen - after Lara is buried alive, her rival Von Croy (now suddenly back to his usual self) having failed to save her, we are kicked back to the title screen with a staff roll. No stats screen, no 'The End,' and not even a new music track to signal the end of an era - all we get is the same 'danger music' we heard throughout the game's boss encounters (except the final showdown, which lacks gravitas in part because of how awkwardly silent it is). This has to be the worst possible choice for what's supposed to be a downer ending.

This ludonarrative dissonance takes away from the latter half of the game, and I am utterly confident that if The Last Revelation was remade today with its second half done right, it could still be the best Tomb Raider game.

I've read many reviews of TR4 over the years saying that Core Design had gotten lazy with the series, and were pumping games out annually like the new Madden or Call of Duty. I completely disagree. While Tomb Raider 4's latter half does show the hallmarks of money running out during development, of an exhausted development team, and of time constraints, I can't say the developers were lazy with it. The gameplay is the best that classic Tomb Raider has ever been - just compare how many more fan mods were built in the TR4 engine than in any other classic TR. It also looks incredible for its time, and the FMVs are among the best of the era. It's just a pity that in the end, Core Design lacked the resources to make this the farewell it should have been. Not when they had Eidos breathing down their necks.

Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation will always be my favourite classic TR, the one I have the fondest childhood memories of, the one dearest to my heart, but objectively it's not the best one. That title still goes to the original. It was also the last 'good' Tomb Raider game for several years: the next entry, Chronicles, was a collection of B-sides that was hastily cobbled together like the yearly Madden, and Angel of Darkness is remembered as a promising yet half-finished mess. That was the end of Core Design's control over Tomb Raider, and the series was handed over to Crystal Dynamics.

But hey, that gave us the Legend-Anniversary-Underworld trilogy. Sometimes when God closes a door, he does open a window.

God bless Stella and her walkthrough site. Where would we be without that woman?