255 Reviews liked by lastkeymusic


Hades

2018

only so many times I can go thru the same floors with the same enemies and the same bosses and the same weapons and the same everythings. for something so lauded I expected some variety. I'm sure some bozo will tell me "umm actually curse, there's six billion lines of bespoke artisinal stone baked dialogue" but you can blow it out your ass if the whole thing's contingent on slaving away in the metalayer currency mines for hours on end

every room seems to go on forever man. imagine if in isaac or monolith you cleared a room and then it filled back up with the same shit five more times. what the fuck guys? you have like four enemies per zone, you don't need to rub it in. is the expectation that I'm basking and luxuriating in these encounters? I'm not. I'm bored before I hit the third floor

maybe it gets better once I suck up to every NPC and collect all the gizmos and upgrade the weapons and upgrade the dungeon and upgrade the shop and upgrade the trinkets and fill out my pokedex, but I'll never know. I fuck with greek mythology when it's about cronus eating his kids and perseus cutting heads and severed testicles goin in the sea, but I don't think I'm the target audience for this kinda snarky post-tumblr young adult stuff. I'm glad folks like jacking off to it, I guess?

probably beats playing it!

"oh but the speed stages are too easy and badly designed and control poorly"

"oh but the shooting stages are slower than in sonic adventure 1"

"the treasure hunting stages are lackluster and underdeveloped in comparison to the other two kinds of missions at best, and overly convoluted and artificially difficult at worst"

you know, in my quest to 100% this game for the first time in my 22-year sonic adventure 2 career, i was worried i'd ruined the magic of the game for myself. mastering this game is grueling, man. it's one of the most tedious, difficult, and demanding collect-a-thons ever made, and after a certain point the cracks in the foundation of the basic game design begins to show as sonic adventure 2 begins to burst under the weight of its own ambition. there are only so many times you can handle playing the same set of missions over the same set of levels clearly not designed around them before you start to feel a little wearied, you feel me?

but i think my saving grace was the fact that i opted to gather all of the mission emblems before i actually completed the main story. after getting every A-rank from city escape all the way to final chase, i strapped right back in to the last story and let it enfold me. it's kind of funny how a lot of the things i cherished heavily at one point due to nostalgia vision and their impact on me lose their luster when i revisit them - sonic adventure 1 itself isn't immune to this, nor are other contemporary classics like half-life 2 or the original bioshock that were equally impactful on me - but nope, sonic adventure 2 still makes me feel like i'm standing on the fucking ceiling every time i strap in and let the main campaign take me. i mean, sure, the game is strongest as a 5-hour tour de force where it can showcase the strengths of its perfected gameplay loops without having to stretch them thin over a bevy of tasks not suited to them, and a few of the levels actively work against what the game's mission statement is... but what does any of that matter in the long run when sonic adventure 2 is simply the coolest game ever made?

by june 2001, the writing wasn't even on the wall anymore - the wall had actively been blown the fuck down by a monolithic black juggernaut sent by sony to wipe the floor with any and all competitors. the dreamcast had already been discontinued in march after a less-than-three-year lifespan, and with sega's transition into exclusively third-party software development the future of the company and its individual identity was cast into utmost obfuscation. it would be all too easy to just bow your head and duck out quietly here, but sonic team didn't seem content to just sit there and take it. if they were gonna sink, they must have planned on going down with the ship, because sonic adventure 2 is a masterclass in confidence - narratively and mechanically this is the best game that they ever made, and it knows it.

i think i could make an easy case for sonic adventure 2's complexity and depth if i compared it to devil may cry 3 (a game which has a lot of story and stylistic parallels to sonic adventure 2 as well... hmmmm): it's easy to waffle your way through each level and just keep going after you stumble, keeping a skill ceiling just low enough that you don't drown in the insane amount of shit going on... but part of the reason why sonic adventure 2 has such a reputation for its insane 100% status is because playing sonic adventure 2 well takes a lot of skill, practice, and willingness to learn. between the points system actively rewarding stylish gameplay and optimizing the living hell out of every second of your run, the fact that even one mess-up can potentially mean a restart, be it due to failing to maximize your point accumilation or (even worse) dying and starting with 0 points from whatever checkpoint you'd hit before that point. granted, many of the missions actively work against this design philosophy (especially since the same set of 5 missions is copy-and-pasted onto probably 95% of the stages, regardless of genre or level design), but when it hits? you get what you put into it. i've been eking away at sonic frontiers for the past sixth months or so, and it's perpetually perplexing to me that they apparently still don't know how to make sonic control well when they got it right twenty-three years ago. i'm starting to think we'll never get platforming levels like metal harbor or final chase ever again, or even the utterly deranged examples set by cosmic wall and mad space...

all right. sit the fuck down with your jututsu kaisens and your chainsaw mans and your my hero academias. bleach? one piece? dragon ball z? hell, fucking full metal alchemist (the indisputable GOAT in my opinion)? you all take notes too. this is the real shit, motherfuckers. REAL SHOUNEN. all killer, no filler. a series of picture-perfect Moments flawlessly interwoven together with just enough internal rhyme and reason to convince you to Go With It and not think about it too hard, all while having enough genuine substance and things to say for its children-and-teens audience to chew on. there's a reason that you hear people recite basically every cutscene in this game word for word during GDQ runs: everything from the iconic jungle clash between sonic and shadow to the mundane little moments like amy, knuckles and tails chilling on the side of the road just ooze style and personality, even when the story at hand is so boneheaded and numbskulled that you can't really get much out of it besides the raw adrenaline pumping through your veins. i even think the weird mo-cap on the anthro actors gives everything a lot of personality and charm, if only because this is the only time that sonic and co have felt like real people and genuine action heroes to me: it's little things like sonic assuming a cool guy fighting pose when he's about to square up with eggman, or the sheer cuntiness in rouge dangling above the eclipse cannon when introducing herself to eggman and shadow. sonic has always sort of had this reputation as being a silly scrimblo bimblo cartoon series, and it is that, but for one brilliant moment of clarity it commits to the bit and makes sonic actually as cool as he purports to be... and he's got enough swag that it actively rubs off on everyone and anything around him.

of course, this is maybe sonic the hedgehog's most controversial foray into genuine pathos... but i think everybody hams up the perceived "edginess" at the heart of the game without considering whether or not it's all in service of what the game ultimately has to say. sega knew that this would likely be their swan song, and the introspection and reflection littered throughout the script and reflection reflect that perfectly: sega was going out with a whimper after exploding onto the game scene with a bang, and the sort of questions the story poses reflects that perfectly. what happens when you're not who you thought you were, or when the people you define yourself by aren't who they thought you to be? the consistent anti-authoritarian throughline (sonic adventure 2 is an explicitly anti-police and anti-military game, and i'm not exaggerating even a little) reflects a willingness to distrust that which is portrayed as the unambiguous and untouchable good within our society. eggman's idolization of his grandfather is broken when he beholds dr. gerald's descent into wickedness, perhaps coming to understand his own lust for power and control as something less than the true tragic evil that now lives on through the blood in his veins. rouge's loyalty eventually yields not to her government benefactors or to her own selfish desires, but to her endearment to knuckles - an act which seems to even surprise herself by the end. hell, tails actually manages to make good on his "being independent from sonic" character arc from the previous game, considering that he breaks free from the mold of being a simple sidekick and is probably the single largest driving factor in the hero storyline from the moment sonic gets arrested for a second time.

last but most CERTAINLY not least, shadow the hedgehog's obfuscated memories and trauma-laden motivations all act to obscure and suppress the genuine kind heart and noble intentions he was born with and made for, perhaps being the embodiment of the game's study of and statements against the very concept of dualism. you would think that sonic's comparative lack of depth would make him stick out like a sore thumb here, but if anything i think this is the one and only example of that one-note characterization working to his favor: sonic simply is who he is, and his acceptance of his simple nature allows him to be who he is effortlessly without any kind of cognitive dissonance or baggage keeping him burdened to the past or anchored to laments about his present. he holds himself to no particular moral standard or self-image save for doing what he simply feels is appropriate at any given moment, his need for self-indulgence and going with his heart mercifully counter-balanced by the inherent purity of his character. shadow yields the title of "ultimate life form" to sonic not out of a recognition of his physical power or infalliability as a person, but because sonic's ideology is simply the way to be: unapologetically, violently, proudly yourself, unfettered to the artificial molds arbitrated your society, your past, or even your own everyday insecurities.

when i say sonic adventure 2 is one of the all-time top game narratives, i don't mean that it reaches the ideological potence of something like disco elysium or the inscrutable complexity of chrono cross, my personal favorite game narrative... i just mean that for the kind of thing it sets out to accomplish there's simply nothing better than it. crucially, to understand this the same logic applied to the main cast must be applied to sonic adventure 2 itself. yes, sonic the hedgehog is a silly series for silly children about silly cartoon animals... but if you look past that exterior and let go of all the pre-conceived notions you might have forged about what sonic apparently is, something special awaits you: the reality that sonic adventure 2, top to bottom, is one of the greatest games ever made.

this game is garbage

nolan north and richard mcgonagle give good performances as Nate and Sully for what they're given. thats everything good i have to say about this game

at its best, its the world's most generic cover shooter with the same problems all these ungodly games have. at its worst, its a repetitive series of climbing, braindead puzzle solving, and irritating monotony.

i cant even put into credible thoughts just how bad this game so here's some general shit i hate

- there were several instances where i had my reticle over an enemy's head and it registered as me shooting them in the chest

- enemies are all bullet sponges unless you hit them in the head, so the pistol is the only good weapon due to it not having horrible accuracy

- enemies will figuratively and literally pop out of cover dramatically like an actual whack-a-mole machine

- the level design is so uninspired with every shootout being so obviously marked by bright, glowing chest-high walls

- shoulder switching slightly moves the camera and takes several seconds, so if you come out of cover and the camera is on the wrong side its not even worth hitting the button

- getting into cover can sometimes be smooth (with the nice edition that dodge rolling near cover automatically puts you into it) but it can sometimes never put you into cover at all and nathan sticks so hard to it that if an enemy flanks you its up to the good lord whether or not you can get away

- enemies blend into the environment so much you have to step out of cover and let yourself get shot so you can follow the bullet trail back to the enemy

- most of my deaths were from the shitty climbing

- the distances nathan drake can actually jump are completely contextual

- quick time events

- nathan drake and ellen have like no chemistry and their idea of flirtation is sarcasming at each other

- no characters have any development and while sullivan and nobody else can sometimes have funny lines, the idea that there's actually a story in this game is the funniest joke it can tell

- nathan shooting a man in the god damn head and saying "ooh, that ones gonna sting in the morning!" makes him seem like a god damn psychopath

- the zombie stuff feels completely left field and while the enemies were a decent change of pace to the braindead fucking cover shooting, they get stale quickly and dont gel well with regular enemies at all

- this game marked the death of third person shooters until naughty dog themselves had to revive it again

i cannot fucking believe this is by the same developers as the last of us and uncharted 4. fuck this game

From the outside, the building looks fairly ugly. As you step inside, you realize that you've never felt so compelled to understand how something so mundane fills you with such joy. Upon closer inspection, you discover that the entire thing is put together with duct tape and chewing gum. This just leaves you more impressed.

This review contains spoilers

If you are at all interested in this game and you clicked "show spoilers" because you've played FFVII and you know about Aeris and viewed the optional cutscenes and know about Zack... I would implore you to go play the main game and only play optional missions if you're underleveled, which is a memorable and relatively compact (for an RPG) experience sitting at around 12 hours, and skip the next few paragraphs.


(SPOILERS!!!)
You see, I can't talk about this game without talking about how perfect its ending is. You know how some movies seem to have been written entirely around one scene? Not just that the scene is iconic, but it feels like the writers started with that scene and then used it as a scaffolding for everything else? (Children of Men is one such movie) Crisis Core's ending is like that. It was so well written and directed that even though I knew what was going to happen, it managed to subvert my expectations multiple times and hit me right in the feels.

I saw Zack draw his sword to charge at a literal army and prepared myself to watch a cutscene of the death of this guy who'd spent the last 20 or so hours endearing himself to m-"ACTIVATING COMBAT MODE"

dafuq?

The game forced me to play through his hopeless last stand, and even though I knew it would end in his death I fought as hard as I could (and being slightly overleveled I held out really long) in the vain hope that I would be able to cheat fate. And as the bullets rained down, the DMW slots metamorphosed from a needlessly-clunky RNG mechanic into the representation of Zack's life flashing before his eyes. And when, near death, the DMW rolled Aeris like it had so many times before, I thought I would at least be able to trigger the Healing Wave limit break and keep fighting for just a while more... but it was only Zack's nearly-gone consciousness focusing on who he most wanted to see in that moment, before finally shutting down.

I can't remember the last time a video game affected me so much.









(SPOILERS END HERE)
-----------------------------------------
Does Crisis Core have issues? Plenty! The action elements feel half-assed, in that everything takes place in real-time but the hit detection and physics feel slightly "off", never fully consistent or intuitive - if they wanted to do an action style, they missed an opportunity to make it handle like a musou game which would have been perfect for this! The side content is bloated beyond belief, and consists entirely of generic cutpaste missions with little variety to them. Genesis sits proudly at the top of the pile of my least favorite RPG villains thanks to his incessant and obnoxious quotations from a pompous and irrelevant text.

Those are all relevant criticisms of the game and can be dealbreaking for some, but they are not enough to eclipse how good an experience it was for me. Crisis Core adds nice worldbuilding and history to the FFVII timeline, introduces some (mostly) great side characters - Cissnei being a particular hit - and if you have any nostalgia for the original FFVII at all, it'll kick your feels in the balls.

I won't forget.

This review contains spoilers

I was left with way more complicated feelings on this thing than I was expecting. It's a fun game to play, with a tweaked battle system taken far past the clumsy feel of the PSP version and a nice, compact structure that makes it a super easy game to open up when you decide you got some time to kill. Those side-missions rock and they have the same sort of goofy yakuza-adjacent tone that Final Fantasy VII Remake happens to strike as well, probably mostly due to this version's HD facelift.

The story and presentation and just... everything to do with that though, that's a different story. Zack Fair is a hilariously stupid dickhead and I like him a lot for that but I don't necessarily love him. The returning cast is kind of a mixed bag with Cloud and Sephiroth's parts being great and Aerith... well, I'll circle back to that. The new additions to the cast are genuinely baffling. Just the most bizarre personalities that never crack past a surface reading, given absolutely ridiculous importance in the story. It's really stupid in both the good and the bad way.

A lot of the character relationships don't really hold together very well. Angeal is too weird and hilarious to take seriously, Genesis basically never makes sense at all, and Aerith's friendship/hamfisted will they won't they with Zack swings back and forth between being kinda cute and incredibly forced. That forced feeling does kinda start to work on me though, as I started to read Aerith as less someone in puppy love and more as someone being a friend that everyone in her immediate circle just assumes needs to be paired up with the guy that fell through her ceiling. It's goofy but when I look at the character that way it starts to sit better with me.

Zack starts the game as a boot boy through and through, totally bought into the culture of war and capital that Shinra peddles off to its working class. He admires literal psychopaths and broken weirdos and starts off the game committing war crimes in Wutai under the vague goal of being a hero. This literally always comes off as weird and even if the game's creators dont necessarily line up with that reading, this angle keeps being supported by the game's events... so I think deep inside there really was an intent to make a sort of weird ironic hero story like this. The way everyone talks past each other. Zack barely comprehends whats going on in the first half and then suddenly his idol dies and boom, he's broken too and thus a hero to the lower ranking soldiers.

He makes friends with Cloud, in which case suddenly the dialogue is really well acted and endearing. In Nibelheim the game just ascends to a new level where the bizarre inclusions of the new characters start to bring a newfound psychosis into focus for the characters. The world is being ruined by a corporation, it's breaking all the "heroes" and now they're sick and dying with nowhere to go, and this whole time those broken people they admired continue to be a north star. It's actually unsettling stuff as the game crawls to its conclusion, a funeral rite that starts well before the heart stops beating. Zack asks if you think he became a hero. The game fucking ends! It's kind of fucking amazing, man I dunno!

This is one of the messiest, most uneven games I've played in a long time but I'll be god damned if it gets dismissed as something fans of FF7 should skip over. More people gotta learn that Final Fantasy Is Real Good, Even When It Isn't. This is a series that has been steadfast in staying interesting no matter what, and that includes this fuckin weird thing. This failed little J-Drama of a video game. Never before have I seen a game go from laugh-a-minute kusoge to actual compelling drama before, at least not on this level. I know I'm giving the game and its creators a lot of credit here but dammit this game made me feel stuff. Hats off.

you have 1 moveset + 3 switchable buttons (2 of which are on cooldowns) to cover 40 hours of fighting boring enemies that mostly wait to be killed, all while watching an unhinged plot that keeps going "your father always loved his slaves... unlike your harlot mother"

“And thus did our journey begin…”

You’re a wide-eyed, adventurous youth, that sees the world through a vision painted in vibrant hues of wonder. It’s your friend’s birthday, and the stars align as you, along with two others are going to spend the night at his home. The thrill is palpable because it’s the first time you’re spending the night at a friend’s place—a realm usually off-limits according to the unwritten rules of your mother’s parenting playbook.

You love video games. You always have. Some of your first memories are sitting in your father’s lap as he plays Sonic the Hedgehog and X-Men on the Sega Genesis. Just last year the universe smiled upon you, bestowing a Nintendo 64 and a Gameboy into your eager hands. It’s lead you on a path toward infatuation with the worlds of Pokémon and Super Mario. Yet, in this tapestry of nostalgia, a new thread weaves in—the enchanting notes of a little game named Ocarina of Time, your sole deviation from the familiar.

But back in the present, the birthday boy unveils something else that is unfamiliar to you—the PlayStation. Prior encounters were confined to store kiosks, but now, in the warm glow of your friend’s living room, the PlayStation becomes a symphony of novelty. He pulls out a plastic case, revealing a disc for a game he says is called “Final Fantasy VII”. You didn’t know games could come on CDs, nor have you ever heard of Final Fantasy. You have no idea what to expect as he snaps the game disc into the console, and it begins to whirr.

You’re instantly struck by the visual allure of this game. The painterly backgrounds, the lifelike character models, and the music, unlike anything you’ve ever heard in a video game, leave you utterly astonished. It’s more than just a game; it’s a portal to an undiscovered realm where moments of joy become indelibly etched onto the canvas of your memories.

Captivated, you and your friends take turns between playing and watching each other until the first light of dawn breaks. In those magical hours, not a single worry occupies your thoughts.


Final Fantasy is not merely a series; it has inexplicably become a part of my personal growth, evolving synchronously with my own journey–a steadfast companion that has consistently stood by my side, much like a trusted friend.

While not every attempt at evolution has been an unqualified success, the enduring truth remained—Final Fantasy retained its distinctive essence. It was still the person you knew.

Through shifts in tone, aesthetic, mechanics, and lore, there has always been a discernible throughline that defines the essence of Final Fantasy. This enduring thread of continuity is what fuels my excitement when contemplating the new horizons the series will explore and why I was anticipating its arrival on new hardware.

Much to my chagrin, Final Fantasy XVI has left me more disappointed than I could have ever imagined a game in the series could. That’s because XVI is a confused, over-embellished mess resulting in a work that seems to have strayed far from the core of what defines the series’ identity. While continuing the series’ ethos of reinvention and eschewing all of its RPG systems is not an inherently adverse decision, the execution is often abysmal.

That’s because now Final Fantasy is a bleary action game that lacks the mechanical depth or focus necessary to produce an enthralling action experience. While flashy and well-animated, the combat system is woefully straightforward and repetitive due to being restricted to a singular combo sequence heavily reliant on Eikon abilities kept primarily on cooldown for optimal damage output.

Ironically, this makes the gameplay feel much more like three Final Fantasy XIVs in a Dante costume than embodying the essence of a Devil May Cry game. With a low skill floor and ceiling, the game falls short of delivering a truly gratifying action experience that fosters individual player expression. As a consequence, nearly every combat encounter unfolds in a uniform manner, requiring little more from the player than the management of cooldown rotations.

The game exhibits a persistent inclination to rip control away from the player, particularly during crucial boss encounters. Rather than allowing players to get into a flow, it frequently interrupts the player’s agency to initiate cutscenes or quick-time events. Furthermore, for an action-centric game, it notably lacks in challenge; I managed to navigate through the entire game without dying once.

Moreover, while most action games typically span 8 to 12 hours and steadily introduce upgrades and new abilities, this game follows a different trajectory. It extends combat in the same monotonous combat patterns for prolonged stretches of 5 to 8 hours before infrequently introducing new abilities through Eikons, disrupting the expected pace of progression.

Speaking of pace, XVI is one of the most poorly-paced games I’ve ever played. It falls into a predictable pattern that is not unlike the main story in XIV since you’ll be undertaking 45-minute to one-hour missions that are primarily cutscenes (that often have admittedly high peaks of spectacle) before spending hours running around performing errands like picking up dirt or killing wolves.

This may have been fine on its own since side content often enriches the world and imparts a distinct essence to it. VII Remake masterfully achieved this, as its focus on the ordinary in side quests significantly contributed to the overall humanist experience.

For instance, an early side quest involves Clive delivering meals to the hideout’s residents, a task that recurs later in the game.

Ostensibly meant to underscore Clive’s character evolution and his growing connection with those around him, the lack of endearment in both Clive and these characters results in this endeavor feeling more like inconsequential padding.

It doesn’t help that the world of Valisthea is an uninteresting dark fantasy facsimile that lacks any defining traits other than series pastiche. Despite attempts to convey vastness across the continent, the game predominantly features diminutive, quaint villages, failing to offer the grandeur of bustling cities seen in earlier titles. While large, distant cities occasionally tease the horizon, these remain inaccessible, confined to linear story segments. This limitation is regrettable, considering the considerable effort invested in crafting detailed and visually appealing landscapes.

There were so many instances where I felt something akin to what I often felt playing XV: a sense of exploration driven by intrigue from the environment. I’d catch sight of captivating landmarks on the horizon, enticing mu curiosity. Occasionally, they might appear trivial, but sometimes they would end up being legitimately impressive dungeons. All of this takes place in a seamlessly interconnected world, encouraging and emphasizing the joy of exploration with your party.

XVI regrettably fails to offer any definitive fulfillment in this aspect. The world is a series of barren, disjointed hubs that could fit into a thimble and merely pad the game’s run time.

Even the set pieces and boss fights are mostly glorified cutscenes with player control taken away, often at multiple junctures during combat, to set up a quick time event. Most of the game is on autopilot, and combat often feels like a formality… a genuinely great decision for an action game.

The vestiges of RPG systems in XVI serve as little more than window dressing, only coming off as lip service to previous titles. While you can level up and acquire or craft weapons, their absence wouldn’t significantly impact the gaming experience. Weapons merely serve as objective upgrades, enhancing damage and stagger potential without introducing any elemental advantages or trade-offs for specialized performance. Consequently, this lack of depth fosters a sense of hesitancy and a lack of confidence in the game’s new direction, leaving XVI feeling muddled and uncertain in its approach.

XVI falls short in delivering an engrossing narrative. The storytelling unfolds as a sluggish, uneven journey that veers away from its core thematic elements midway. The intricate exploration of themes like slavery and bureaucracy? Abruptly abandoned in favor of a divergent quest to confront a divine entity.

This makes producer Naoki Yoshida’s statements about the lack of inclusion of non-white people humorous since the game gets quite ridiculous and rarely finds itself grounded in “reality”. Hence, the idea that brown people can’t exist in a fantasy setting with kaiju battles in space is worthy of all the ridicule it received. It’s also really funny how it tries to justify Clive’s family’s slave ownership because they were nice to their slaves.

Final Fantasy XVI is a shallow and hollow experience with nothing to offer besides production values. Everything exists in service of spectacle, and what we are left with is a game so obsessed with cinematic prestige that it is bereft of substance.

There are flashes of brilliance. In a different world, this game, with its combat and scope, could have been a somewhat solid open-world RPG. Or if the scope was reigned in and more complexity baked into the combat system, a solid, linear action game.

Also, for a game that seems to harbor such an active disdain for its legacy, the ending tries desperately to tug on nostalgia strings to evoke pathos. The result is a lazy, intellectually insulting narrative climax that is entirely unearned.

The Final Fantasy series has always made reinvention the point. If one game in the series was not your favorite flavor, the next installment could be. However, I do not think that will be the case moving forward. With this game being a critical and commercial success, coupled with bloated budgets and long gestation periods, I believe this is the direction we can expect the series to take. This is a problem because XVI sacrifices so much of the essence of Final Fantasy without leaving much left to take its place.

If that’s the case, I fear I might have to disembark from the journey, left with nostalgia for what once was, rather than anticipation for what might come.

You’re older now. The weight of the years makes it increasingly challenging to muster the fervor for pursuits that once ignited your passion. It feels like just yesterday you were eagerly tearing through the packaging of a pristine PlayStation 2, enveloped in sheer elation at the prospect of delving into the world of Final Fantasy X. Yet, paradoxically, those moments now seem shrouded in mist. The vivid tapestry of memories has gradually receded into indistinct relics, their vibrant hues fading into a subdued palette of somber grays.

The friends with whom you forged a foundational memory on the day of discovering a beloved video game series have become mere echoes in the corridors of distant recollection. Decades have elapsed since your last exchange, and thoughts of them now rarely arise.

In the intervening years, new friendships have blossomed, and others have withered away. The ebb and flow of companionship has charted a course that, much like your own journey, has gradually distanced you from the familiar shores of home. As the currents of time carry you further away, the recollection of those once-cherished moments becomes increasingly elusive, obscured by the passage of experiences and the ever-expanding horizon of your life.

Have the hues of enthusiasm faded into a more muted palette? Is this a natural evolution of the human spirit as it traverses the landscape of age? Acknowledging the inevitability of change, you recognize that transformation can often herald improvement, even carrying the potential for exciting developments.

A new Final Fantasy’s release is imminent, and the initial spark of excitement dims under the weight of tempered expectations. A new friend, attuned to the significance this series holds in your heart, surprises you with a fresh copy of Final Fantasy XVI, blissfully unaware of the skepticism clouding your anticipation. Embracing the notion that change can breathe life into the familiar, you decide to immerse yourself in the new chapter.

Yet, after a few hours of exploring this new realm, a sobering reality settles in. It resounds a contemplation that has resonated within you concerning existence itself. The experience leaves you pondering whether a subtle cynicism has woven its threads into the fabric of your once-unbridled optimism. Your journey through the corridor of time has left you with a reluctant acceptance of the present—it is what it is.


“…and thus did our journey end.”

I considered strongly putting together a long-form critique of this game, but the most damning statement I could possibly make about Final Fantasy XVI is that I truly don't think it's worth it. The ways in which I think this game is bad are not unique or interesting: it is bad in the same way the vast majority of these prestige Sony single-player exclusives are. Its failures are common, predictable, and depressingly endemic. It is bad because it hates women, it is bad because it treats it's subject matter with an aggressive lack of care or interest, it is bad because it's imagination is as narrow and constrained as it's level design. But more than anything else, it is bad because it only wants to be Good.

Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.

From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.

In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.

In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.

The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.

In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.

Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.

It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.

Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.

Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.

This review contains spoilers

An interesting thing about a game that has perhaps the most spoiled moment in video games is that when you play through it for the first time, you can’t exactly get that thought off your mind. The second cloud meets Aerith it becomes tragedy, a slowly marching clock to when the big moment comes. And in between those moments you play a pretty good rpg. I suppose this sort of inevitability is what the remake trilogy thrives on, even for my own personal time spent in 7’s occasionally industrial mostly classic fantasy world I am, in some way creating my own final fantasy 7 remake. Every time you use an ability is a reminder of what’s going to come next, a cute date sequence becomes the closest thing both characters have to what could have been, and even if you’re able to recognize the point of which it happens you hope in the back of your mind that it won’t happen, that maybe there’s a one in a trillion chance she lives. But then Sephiroth plunges down and shifts the story.

A less spoken on benefit to one of gaming’s biggest spoilers is that it acts as a lightning rod for the rest of the game. While I may have the cutscene of Aerith’s deaths memorized through sheer cultural osmosis, I saw even more beautiful, quiet and poignant stories about people who live in a beautiful world and wish to fight for it. The world of Final Fantasy VII is full of people, people with dreams and aspirations who may impact your life even if they were in them for a brief moment. Memories are a beautiful thing, but they are designed to drift away, leaving mossy ruins where there once was a city.

watch dogs had so much potential and material to work with to become THE commentary piece for sovereignty in the age of big tech oligopolies, especially considering the political events and scandals coinciding at the time, and Ubisoft leveraged none of that??? the Hollywoodification of the technical mechanism, the forced edgy writing with PG13 dialogues, the cookie-cutting art direction void of any identity, this game feels nauseatingly plain and unoriginal as a player.

as a media enthusiast, i fucking hate the corporate indoctrinated approach to media production and the braindead content taking up so much space in the public sphere. i would rather play horse boyfriend simulator than continue endorsing this piece of shit. fuck you ubisoft.

in the original Final Fantasy VII, Sephiroth is an imposing figure steeped in mystery - you only see him in flashbacks, everyone talks about him like the unachievable height of humanity, and for a while all you see is the calamity left in his wake. Bodies senselessly slaughtered, trails of blood tracing his path. The corpse of a dreadful monster, effortlessly defeated and strung up like he's taunting you.

in FFVII R, he shows up in the first 20mins and goes "muahaha im so fuckin ominous"

fans love to make erroneous arguments about how detractors dislike the game cos it's different, but the problem has always been that those differences amount to nothing of substance. if they're not completely insignificant they're fakeouts or walked back, if they're not fakeouts or walked back they're jj abrams mystery box bullshit to keep the online dustcloud with arms and legs kicking and howling about The Implications for another four years. this is a game more concerned with how to capture will they/won't they Engagement than its own thematic core; an impressively meticulous effort moored in goopy fanservice and speculation bait

control freak energy from top to bottom, sanitized to an extent that you'd think square report directly to the health department, and guided by one of the medium's most overbearing directorial hands. all slick and shiny bombast and spectacle, perfect skin, compilation pilled navel gazing, and endlessly wrested control. thirty long hours of red light green light meandering thru kidzbop cover acts of familiar events and environments before shunting all responsibility for unpacking anything it might have to say onto the next game

big win for folks who wanted tifa to be a noodle armed simp and sephiroth to have the presence of yakuza kiwami majima

If you're in eighth grade, I cannot recommend this game enough.

I tip my hat to Lara for going to a frozen tundra with her bare fucking legs out