I have a confession to make: I used cheat codes / hacks to complete a good portion of Final Fantasy 7. The PS3 / PS4 port of Final Fantasy 7 came installed with a handful of built-in cheats you can easily turn on through pressing the L3 or R3 buttons (or both): a hack for 3x speed, a hack that turns off random encounters, and (crucially) a hack that fills up the characters' Limit Break gauges and completely refills their health every turn. At first, I only used 3x Speed intermittently because FF7 is often slow as hell, and I only really flicked on No Random Encounters while exploring the overworld and trying to figure out where the hell to go next without getting interrupted.

But here's the thing: FF7 is an old game. It is an oldass game, and in some places it has aged like milk. The aforementioned slowness of the dialogue and movement is one thing, but you are constantly being reminded of the antiquated nature of the game at almost every turn. FF7's overworld is an overambitious disaster: no landmarks on the map (which makes backtracking miserable without a guide), indecipherably weird movement, and a strange warping effect that makes walking around somewhat nauseating. Random and oft-unpredictable difficulty spikes permeate throughout the campaign; sometimes you will just killed by random bullshit and there's nothing you can do about it in the moment (froglocking). The translation is notoriously wonky and uncanny, so important mechanics are often poorly contextualized to the point of some bits of advice being outright lies ("attack while its tail is up"). And the less said about BS like climbing the frozen mountain or passing through the green whirlwinds, the better. There are so many frustrating little things pockmarked throughout the 20-30 hours the average player will spend with FF7 that start tallying up over time, and the older I get, the less patience I have for difficulty spikes and stupid bullshit.

So I caved. I turned on Infinite Limit Breaks and Restoring Health and basically never turned it off as the game's runtime stretched into the double digits... and in doing so, I felt my frustration (mostly) fade away into the ether, allowing me to appreciate what works about this classic without being reminded of what has aged about it.

Was this the right thing to do? Did my decision to turn on hacks hinder the authenticity of my critical experience with FF7? Do I really have a platform of any kind to judge this game upon compared to the thousands of 90s kids that had to put up with this game's tomfoolery and beat it through sheer force of will? I don't know... and I honestly don't care. Nerdietalk wrote a brief review of Fallout: New Vegas where she admitted to using console commands to breeze through the game, and in doing so, she got to "experience some incredible writing and worldbuilding." I kept thinking about that small writeup while playing through Final Fantasy 7, and I ultimately came to the exact same conclusion. It's possible that using cheat codes cheapened my experience with FF7 and made it less authentic and genuine than playing it as-is on the PS1, imperfections and all. But at some point during my playthrough, I stopped caring about this nefarious, ambiguous question of 'authenticity' altogether, because in the process of using cheats & hacks to streamline my experience, I got to play an incredibly creative and compelling adventure where something memorable, funny, and heartbreaking was always waiting for me around the corner.

FF7's world is an timeless one, filled to the brim with distinctive landmarks and rock-solid worldbuilding. Midgar alone is a killer cyberpunk location, an iconic dystopia so memorable and well-realized that they could well have set the entire game here (foreshadowing); the fact that we're also treated to strong, striking locations like Cosmo Canyon, the Gold Saucer, and the Forgotten City long after Midgar has been left in ruins just feels like the frosting on top of a delicious cake (or the sauce on top of a Midgar pizza). FF7 combines futuristic cyberpunk aesthetics with swords-and-sorcery fantasy so seamlessly that you don't even question why all these magic users and swordsmiths drive motorcycles, blow up power plants, and travel across the world in armored cars, planes, and airships. The way that Mako energy & "The Lifestream" as a concept is tied into the game's themes of nature & technology is brilliant, the Materia system is a flexible and customizable work of art, and the way the game's scope gradually evolves from "ecoterrorist revolution" to "fighting a godly being to save the planet" is actually pretty flawless and well-paced, all things considered. It's not hard to see why the broad strokes of FF7's alluring and creative world captured the imagination of thousands; there is something enchanting about the world of Gaia and the characters and stories found within it.

So much about the plot just works in spite of the infamously off-kilter and terse translation. The disastrous and often self-destructive impact that Shinra has on the world around them can be felt even at the fringes of the planet, creating this delightfully apocalyptic and anti-imperialist atmosphere that imbues FF7 with a crucial sense of revolutionary fervor. But in spite of this dystopia, Final Fantasy 7 is a shockingly funny game, unafraid to be silly and lighthearted and larger-than-life in places like Wall Market, the Gold Saucer, the Chocobo Farm, and Wutai. But these moments of levity and goofball comedy never detract from the mysticism and gravitas of the overarching plot about life and death and the fate of the planet. FF7 is often a beautiful game, its quieter moments defined by a strangely contemplative and damp atmosphere, and sometimes the game even does a great job at being chilling and kind of horrifying: everything about Sephiroth (a legitimately intimidating force-of-nature type of villain that makes the absolute most of his minimal screentime) and the thick, asphyxiating mystery of Nibelheim is legitimately haunting. And even though I knew the two biggest plot twists in the game coming in (Aerith's death and everything about Cloud and Zack), the fact that I still felt a genuine sense of shock, awe, and impact when those moments finally came proves just how strong the writing of FF7 is after all this time.

Though honestly, the journey that our main protagonist takes is proof enough of the story's inherent strength. Cloud Strife is one of the best and most iconic JRPG protagonists of all time for a good reason: he's cool, he has a badass sword, a badass motorcycle, he's a tough antihero that refuses to take shit from anyone, and it's all a lie. I'd even go as far to call Cloud perhaps the best JRPG protagonist of all time. I have more of a personal connection with Skies of Arcadia's Vyse, and I could easily see someone making a similar case for Mother 3's Lucas or Persona 5's Joker. But in my mind, Cloud stands atop every single one of them because of how cleverly and succinctly he subverts the audience's expectations.

Cloud is an unreliable narrator, a liar so damaged by trauma and inferiority that Cloud himself is the most devout believer of his own lies, so fooled by his own smoke and mirrors that his mind has become fog itself. The way the game gradually unravels his badass tough-guy persona to reveal the broken, hurt child underneath it all is legitimately stellar. Cloud's character arc goes through so many twists and turns that keeps the audience on their toes, and yet there's a clear throughline of trauma and self-loathing throughout. He is, simultaneously, a ruthless and cool lone-wolf hero that can take on the world alone... and an insecure, lonely boy that was robbed of his chance to grow up by propaganda and mental illness. Only through properly working through his trauma and discovering himself does Cloud become a proper hero. When he says "I'm going to live my life without pretending", you want to cry with happiness, and when he whips out the Omnislash to defeat Sephiroth in a duel that ends the entire game, you want to fucking cheer for him. Cloud is consistently great every step of the way. No one has ever done it quite like Cloud Strife, and the fact that he's surrounded by a distinctive and fleshed-out cast of memorable and well-written characters is just the cherry on top.

Final Fantasy 7 is a complex game from toe to tip. It's antiquated, obtuse, frequently frustrating, and intermittently hard to love... but it's also creative, clever, frequently funny, and easy to fall in love with. It is an exciting game, with an impeccably timeless prog-rock soundtrack with catchy, complex songs that pump you up and make you cry. It is beautiful, painfully beautiful at parts with its gorgeously textured and painterly pre-rendered backgrounds (which look fantastic even now) and the heavy sense of mysticism shrouded over everything. Its beauty and gravitas are kept in check by the game's goofy sense of humor, the humor is kept grounded by FF7's impressive propensity for psychological horror and cosmic terror, and the horror is numbed by the lovable found-family cast of characters and the wonderful, hilarious, and deeply sad things they persevere through. FF7 is hilarious, tragic, imaginative, and overambitious as hell, and it somehow manages to run the full gamut of emotional highs and lows throughout a fairly brisk 20-to-25 hour runtime that ultimately left me exhilarated and awe-inspired in spite of the numerous legitimate frustrations that hindered my progress to the action-packed finish line.

There are too many issues present in the game's DNA for me to call it a timeless classic... but these issues ultimately aren't enough to detract from how confident, clever, creative, and cathartic of a journey Final Fantasy 7 really is. No matter how often I'll sharply exhale through my nose and mutter 'fuck this', I know for a fact I'll likely keep returning to this game over and over and over again as the years go by, and no matter how many cheat codes or hacks I'll resort to in order to reduce the migraine, I know for a fact the brilliant soundtrack, the ethereal pre-rendered visuals, and the simultaneously hysterical and evocative story will never cease to capture my imagination no matter what.

To the settling of everything. Let's mosey.

Watch Dogs 2 is defined by its insecurity. From the very beginning, the game does absolutely everything in its power to tonally and aesthetically set itself apart from its darker and edgier predecessor. A squad of quirky, eccentric characters instead of a brooding, solitary protagonist; high-stakes cyberheists and Anonymous-esque exposés instead of fixer gigs and small-scale stealthy encounters; San Francisco's neon-splattered punk aesthetics instead of the sleek urban elegance of Chicago; an overall goofy and bombastic tone throughout instead of the straight-faced, byronic feel of the original. Everything is different, and yet... absolutely none of it feels authentic or genuine.

The squad of quirky, eccentric characters the plot centers around feel like hollow, depthless stereotypes designed exclusively to pander to Millenials, an aggressively samey quartet (quintet when the game remembers Horatio exists) that exist to spew out references to outdated memes, do Arnold Schwarzenegger references, and have random arguments about Aliens versus Predators. The cyberpunk element of the plot exists almost solely for spectacle; Watch Dogs 2 pretends that DedSec's hacktivism is motivated by direct action and revolutionary sentiment, but the game's politics are so shallow and so disinterested that the most definitive statement Watch Dogs 2 ever makes on its themes is a safe, surface-level "corporations suck" message that lands with absolutely zero impact given the company that made this. The graffiti-laden punk stylings of the game are equally as shallow and function as little more than colorful branding, borrowing and co-opting the aesthetics of a hack's understanding of rebellion, and the comedy and overall goofy tone of Watch Dogs 2 is, frankly, fucking awful. Now mind you, this isn't because the game isn't funny per se (though the comedy is genuinely nightmarish sometimes), but it's the sheer, utter insincerity and insecurity behind the comedy that saps all of the energy and authenticity out of Watch Dogs 2's intended tone.

Watch Dogs 2's plot is overflowing with random jokes, outdated memes, and loud, Deadpool-esque characters that exist solely to either quip, dole out references, or make funny noises. This, to me, is the sign of Ubisoft desperately compensating for the poor reception that Watch Dogs 1's plot received upon release. Aiden Pearce was often derided for essentially being the king of generic edgelords, a brooding antihero seemingly so cookie-cutter and dime-a-dozen that a lot of his critics marked him as being nothing more than a walking cliche. Now, I wrote a whole review about how I feel like Watch Dogs 1 failed to extrapolate upon the potential and hidden depths of Aiden's character; I think he was a potentially interesting villain protagonist the plot failed to do much of anything with because of its lack of creativity and nuance. I'm not about to call Aiden's critics wrong, but I'm also not about to call Marcus Holloway's fans correct, either. Aiden was certainly a very tropey and predictable character, but honestly, at least I knew who Aiden was. At least I knew what he wanted, even if it was little more than revenge. We got a pretty full picture of what Aiden was like as a character, even if that wasn't much to write home about. I've spent upwards of twenty to thirty hours with Marcus and I still have no idea who the fuck this guy even is.

Marcus does has a personality: funny, relatable nerd. Unfortunately, that is the personality of literally all of his friends in DedSec. Marcus also wants the exact same things as his DedSec comrades, for equally shallow reasons of wanting to 'stick it to the man' without ever really knowing why they want this in the first place (Horatio is the only character with a compelling premise but he is woefully underutilized). The story tells us that Marcus was falsely convicted of... something, and presumably spent some time in jail and doing community service, but that is literally all we're ever permited to learn about Marcus. We don't learn what he was falsely convicted for, we don't learn how long his jailtime was, how he was treated in jail, how expensive his bail was (if someone paid his bail at all), what his community service entailed and how long it was, or how society treats him now that he has a criminal record he never asked for. Literally none of these things matter to the overall plot, and they don't even really matter to Marcus as a whole. He goofs off and commits cyberterrorism and vandalism without a care of the world, and we never get to see what brought him to the point of radicalization beyond what essentially amounts to a hand-wavey backstory you'd probably find in the back of a game manual. Marcus is less generic than Aiden upon first blush, yes, but he's also somehow far less distinct and far less fleshed-out. I never knew what was at stake for Marcus beyond the expected punishments of imprisonment or death, and thus, it was utterly impossible to care about him whenever the game asked me to. You spend the entire game controlling an absolute stranger, and this is because Ubisoft didn't want to write a character, they wanted to make a hollow vessel for jokes, references, and memes in a misguided attempt to distance themselves from Watch Dogs 1's oft-derided darkness.

The plot absolutely refuses to take it seriously, and it doesn't want you to take it seriously... except for the moments when it absolutely does. In spite of the wackier, larger-than-life, Saints Row-knockoff tone that defines your experience with Watch Dogs 2, the game is still trying to be about the exact same intended themes of its predecessor: Big Tech, government control, conspiracy, and the way that corporations use the digital age and the Internet to manipulate and control people. These are heavy, dystopic themes that clash hard with the game's lighthearted, goofy exterior, and more often than not, the game absolutely crumbles under the weight of trying to balance these two wholly different spheres of influence.

Marcus' best friend, Horatio, is murdered by a random gang out of nowhere. It's sudden and cruel and the characters are devastated by this loss... and then one or two missions later, they're cracking unfunny jokes about 'hipster dicks' and pretending Horatio never even existed. There's a shockingly well-written and well-acted scene where the main villain reveals he's been artificially inflating DedSec's follower count with bots as a way of bringing more customers to Blume's doorstep, dropping this bombshell mere moments before calling the cops on a cornered Marcus. It's a genuinely tense moment that presents a legitimately interesting plot twist, and then immediately thereafter, Marcus and his friends dick off to the desert and get high and then hack a dinosaur statue in a hacking competition that was apparently being held in the desert because that's a thing you fucking do I guess?????? Constant, unstoppable whiplash. There are subplots about cults and human trafficking and gang violence, heavy and dramatic plot points that demand your attention alongside pop culture rants, nerdgasms, quippy puns, and an overlong mission where you fight a queer-coded SJW intentionally made to be thoroughly unlikable because fuck Tumblr, am I right? Watch Dogs 2 wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It demands you take it seriously, but it also covers itself in a thick coating of irony as a defense mechanism against criticism. Maybe this worked back in 2016, but in an era as heavily, unavoidably political as the 2020s, Watch Dogs 2's failure to commit to its themes of radicalization vs. corruption is a deeply embarrassing and deeply uninteresting reflection of the time it was made and the company who made it. Watch Dogs 2's inability to commit to either tragedy or comedy made it impossible to take either facet seriously, creating a hollow void of a plot where nothing happens and nothing matters.

Regrettably, however, the gameplay of Watch Dogs 2 is so much fun that it almost manages to make up for its disaster of a plot. Whereas 2's story and themes feel like a downgrade from even the most generic and underdeveloped plot beats of Watch Dogs 1, the gameplay loop here is a significant improvement from the decent foundation laid by its predecessor. The combat feels smoother, the infamously bad driving actually feels pretty manageable this time around, and there's so much cool and inventive stuff you can do with hacking that it makes Watch Dogs 1's hacking mechanics feel like mere waddling in the script kiddie pool (that's a hacker pun, heheheh, how do you do, fellow nerds). You can hack vehicles to swerve out of the way, you can deactivate a door and effectively lock enemies out, you can set up EMP traps, and you can even sic a gang or the police on an enemy or civilian as a patsy if you either want some backup or want to orchestrate a screening action as a decoy. You can be legitimately really smart in the moment-to-moment gameplay of Watch Dogs 2; there were several instances throughout the game where I felt like I did something very cool or very smart, and Watch Dogs 2 is very good at allowing the player to experiment and manipulate the electronic world around them. The drone and the RC car are also great additions to your arsenal, allowing you to access high and low places you were never able to see in Watch Dogs 1. Combat feels good, stealth is basically always a viable option, car chases away from the police feel exciting and dynamic, and the process is so multifaceted and nuanced now that it leaves Watch Dogs 1's already pretty-solid template behind in the dust.

The gameplay is very good, and the fact that it's forced to share living space with an obnoxiously underwritten story is a genuine shame. Watch Dogs 2 is a game defined by whiplash: its daring attempt at colorful dystopia is neutered by its cowardly sense of irony, moments of tragedy and intrigue are rendered incoherent by poorly-timed, ill-fitting "comedy", and the stimulating, entertaining gameplay is constantly hampered by the pathetic context in which the gameplay exists. It's fun to be a cybercriminal in Watch Dogs 2, but it would have been far more fun to be a revolutionary. What could have been a thrilling, pulpy take on cybercrime and direct action against the Powers That Be instead manifested as this deeply insecure and thoroughly insincere response to the mockery that Watch Dogs 1's plot received. The unfunny, performative comedy is nothing more than a shield against criticism, the punk leanings and vaguely anti-establishment themes little more than a desperate marketing strategy, and any and all attempts to say anything of merit are quickly silenced by gags, memes, and references that were outdated even by 2016 standards. In a way, it's not surprising at all that Wrench was the breakout character here, because he perfectly embodies Watch Dogs 2 (albeit not in the way they maybe intended him to): a loud, washed-up, out-of-touch, how-do-you-do-fellow-kids class clown that quickly shows his true colors of insecurity and awkwardness the moment you take his mask off.

But you can pet actual dogs in this game! You can finally watch dogs in Watch Dogs, so it honestly might be a little better than the original game just because of that.

A middle-of-the-road 2.5/5 rating simultaneously feels overly unfair and overly generous. In spite of its expensive, lavish, and confident sense of style and presentation, FF7R is a thoroughly confused game, a mixed bag that fluctuates wildly in quality at completely sporadic intervals throughout. It's fun, and then it's frustrating; it's entertaining, and then it's energy-sapping; it's compelling, and then it's a complete and total clusterfuck. Sometimes Remake actually feels like FF7 come to life on the big screen, and then sometimes it occurs to you that you're just playing an incoherent fanfiction of a beloved classic. Confusion and imbalance are at the core of Remake's very identity in spite of its confident and professional facade, much like its unreliable-narrator protagonist and his personal struggles that FF7R only gets to briefly touch on before coming to an anticlimactic 'end'.

The choice to adapt the famous Midgar Arc into an entire 30-40 hour game is one I can almost understand from a certain perspective. FF7's Midgar has everything going for it: it's visually striking, immediately memorable, and drenched in a weirdly evocative mixture of dystopia and realism. Midgar is a tale of societal upheaval and cyberpunk revolution told through a uniquely fantastical lens, and almost every single iconic moment from the original game can be found in Midgar. The trains, the Mako reactors, Aerith's church, Cloud's motorcycle, Wall Market & Don Corneo, the destruction of Sector 7 and Sephiroth's slaughter of Shinra HQ, just one action-packed and iconic setpiece after another in the span of like 6-7 hours. Midgar is such a compelling and well-realized location, and yet it felt like there was so much we never got to see. So I can almost understand the merit behind focusing the entirety of FF7R within the rotting pizza that is Midgar: it's an endlessly interesting and unique location with so much lore, drama, and comedy built into it that maybe, just maybe, an entire game centered around this teal junkyard metropolis might be able to sustain itself for 30 hours.

What this amounts to in execution, however, is padding. A lot of padding. Almost everything I liked and appreciated in FF7R was lifted almost verbatim from the original game. Nothing new is really done with AVALANCHE, or Shinra, or the Turks, Mako, SOLDIER, the Cetra, or anything at all, really. For the most part, you're merely playing through the Greatest Hits of FF7 bloated with often unnecessary jam sessions comprised of overlong exposition and artificial gameplay lengtheners. The collapsed tunnel in FF7 is now an entire explorable area with a dreadful robot-hand minigame. The train-graveyard sequence is now an hour long and full of confusing, plothole-y ghost shit. Every time Cloud and co. have to shimmy through a tight space, you're forced to watch a cutscene of them slowly, painfully moving their way through something that should have taken a second to clear. Every side quest is this game is either a collect-a-thon fetch quest or a kill-a-thon fight sequence that adds minimal substance to the world around you. FF7R is defined by its padding, and all of this extra fluff culminates in the truly godawful Shinra Infiltration arc which, apart from a fun motorcycle chase at the very end and the goofy staircase sequence, is a dull, frustrating chore full of stupid, boring bullshit. The party splits up and you have to swap between party members because why not, the game needs to be longer. You have to slowly lumber across some monkey bars because why not, the game needs to be longer. You have to slowly walk through a boring museum room with unskippable dialogue and then slowly crawl through a boring fucking vent shaft because why not, the game--

And when FF7R's plot isn't being let down by its padding, it's being let down by a lack of subtlety and a misunderstanding about what worked in the quieter moments of FF7. The first bombing mission in FF7 was defined by a strangely dark climax; AVALANCHE's destruction of the first Mako Reactor cause millions of dollars in property damage and likely claims dozens of lives in the process, and yet the party decides to move on to the next bombing mission regardless. It's an interesting note to open the game on. It's a morally gray and ambiguous situation that casts a complex light on AVALANCHE's justified but violent actions, so of course FF7R ruins this moral ambiguity by revealing the overwhelming destruction was an intentional sabotage plot orchestrated by Shinra because evil. There are moments like this scattered throughout the entirety of FF7R. Sector 7's destruction is reduced from an atrocious war crime into an inconvenient tragedy, courtesy of an overlong evacuation sequence that ensures most of the civilians' survival. Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie were three unlucky, nameless victims of capitalism, callously slaughtered by an imperialistic world for daring to rebel against it, so naturally in FF7R these characters are given an ultimately unnecessary amount of added characterization and depth in spite of the inevitability of their fate, added characterization that ultimately (and paradoxically) adds very little to their overall character beyond trying to make you feel more :( when they die.

And then there's fucking Sephiroth. Sephiroth, the intimidating and mysterious monster that felt more like myth than man. He was a violent, ominous force of nature soaked in mystery and blood, a grim-reaper ghost that barely ever appeared in the first part of FF7, only manifesting into the plot when it was absolutely necessary. So of course Sephiroth appears every 20 fucking minutes to smirk and be pretentious and say cryptic hogwash like "muahaha there will be consequences", a bunch of hollow gobbledygook that amounts to nothing because your final fight with him ends in a stalemate, because of course it has to, his story can't end just yet, which means all of the buildup surrounding him ends on a flat-noted cliffhanger. Sephiroth made the most of his minimal appearances in Disc 1 of FF7, whereas the game can barely justify any of his fifty thousand scenes in FF7R.

And honestly, I'm not even gonna get into the new multiverse aspects of the plot and Zack Fair presumably being alive again (thus ruining literally everything about him) and the fucking Whispers or whatever and how their presence completely invalidates the intended stakes of the story, because this review is long enough and any further discussion about Tetsuya Nomura's additions to the narrative of FF7 would just descend into incoherent rambling. I'll just leave it at this: Nomura's flair for convoluted mythos and anime bullshit was charming in Kingdom Hearts, but it has already overstayed its welcome in Remake, and I can only imagine how much worse and thinly-worn it's going to get in Rebirth.

The plot of FF7R is, unfortunately, a wash more often than not. So much of what Remake adds to the world of FF7 is either needless or convoluted. It poorly rearranges the plot of a beloved RPG and laboriously, artificially stretches it out to the point where almost every new addition just feels like 'content', poorly-contextualized filler meant to hit a quota and nothing else... at least until the final hours of the game when it throws up its hands and says 'fuck it', deciding to bank on a bland fusion of Dissidia and Kingdom Hearts in its last moments instead. It is genuinely hard to say how much of the enjoyable stuff in FF7R's story is enjoyable on its own merits, or enjoyable because someone thought of it already years ago. I'm not inherently opposed to an Evangelion Rebuild-style subversion of FF7's plot, but the execution leaves so much to be desired. FF7R falls flat in ways that FF7 never did; FF7's story was overflowing with creative ideas, whereas FF7R struggles to bring anything new to a table that's been around since before I (and statistically, a fair chunk of you) were even born.

Sometimes, though, FF7R catches you off-guard. Sometimes FF7R is really fun. The action-RPG hybrid gameplay is fluid, fast, and full of catharsis; it's clear that Nomura et al. have come a long way since Kingdom Hearts 1, and the combat in FF7R continues to feel fresh and inviting even as the game's runtime drags into the double digits. The music is fucking fantastic throughout. The character models look utterly fantastic, the perfect blend between triple-A realism and gothic anime aesthetics. Certain locales, like the Mako reactors, Loveless Avenue, Wall Market or even the dreadfully-paced Shinra HQ and Train Graveyards, actually look and feel like beloved landmarks in FF7 come to life, liberated from the restraints of outdated and limited graphics. And as much of a meandering, incomplete mess the plot winds up being, the distinctive and memorable characters that inhabit Midgar are still a lot of fun to talk to and observe. Barret, Tifa, and Aerith are still some of the most fun and fleshed-out RPG party members pop culture's ever gotten, and that hasn't changed one iota.

In fact, this is actually probably the best interpretation of Cloud we've gotten since the OG game: Nomura had gradually morphed him into a generic, angsty edgelord in the 2000's and practically all of Cloud's personality and relevance had been scrubbed off in the 2010s, so it's nice to see Cloud finally resembling his old self again: a cocky, complex, socially-awkward loner that's just as silly as he is sad and sympathetic. FF7R does a great job at reminding you of the Cloud that everyone fell in love with, the grumpy but genuinely traumatized child at heart that just wanted to be a hero but didn't quite make the cut, deciding to roleplay as someone else entirely as a coping mechanism instead of properly confronting his mental hangups. He's both a badass antihero and a wet cat of a person, and I'm glad that FF7R embraces both of these equally-valid sides of Cloud. At least the protagonist is strong even when the plot around him keeps tumbling down.

It's genuinely very hard to properly express my feelings on FF7R. I was legitimately enjoying myself for most of the game's runtime, even if I was constantly making notes in the back of my head, even if I was constantly being reminded of the game's shortcomings. For about 15 hours, I was able to stomach most of its evident flaws courtesy of the fun characters and the flashy combat and the joyous feeling of playing FF7 all over again, but the final eight or so hours of FF7R were such a fucking drag that it dissipated and shattered the already-flimsy smoke and mirrors the game had been dangling over my eyes. At times, FF7R is desperately unfun, weighed down by cynical Triple-A Game Design decisions and pointless, boring filler designed solely to artificially pad out the runtime... and at other times, FF7R is a desperately auteurist product, more of an overeager Tetsuya Nomura fanfiction than a genuinely inspired re-imagining of Final Fantasy 7. Too much of his usual theatrics and eccentric design choices seep through the seams of the plot, fundamentally altering the feel of the narrative to the point where it starts to feel more like a weirdly futuristic version of Kingdom Hearts than a grand adventure about ecoterrorism and corruption.

Maybe it's proof that FF7 was lightning in a bottle, a perfect patchwork surgery of influences, ideas, and passions that could only have been made once. Every single attempt to reinterpret or continue the story of FF7 has faltered to some degree, whether it be the edgy anime shlock of Advent Children, or the way that Crisis Core unintentionally spits on the anti-imperialist themes of its source, or whatever the actual fuck was even going on in Dirge of Cerberus... and Remake, unfortunately, is no different. When FF7R is at its best, it's merely emulating the highlights of FF7 with better graphics and (arguably) better combat. When it's at its worst, however, you see it for what it really is: a nostalgia-bait piece of Final Fantasy 7-shaped content, a legacy act carefully designed to remind you of a better game made before George Bush was even President.

But hey, at least you can't get frog-stunlocked like you could in the original game! That alone gives Remake a 3/5 in spirit.

If you were disappointed by the handling of the corporate "route" in Cyberpunk 2077, then Syndicate just might scratch that very particular itch for you, given that you blast through the entire campaign as a corporate supersoldier. Syndicate is so reminiscent of its much-more-relevant spiritual successor that one could argue CD Projekt Red might have committed a smidge of plagiarism: first-person shooter theatrics, the interplay of gunplay and hacking, the bloom-heavy and stylized San Fransokyo-esque world. In execution, though, Cyberpunk 2077 and Syndicate are pretty radically different from one another, with emphasis on the 'radical': Cyberpunk 2077 actually feels 'punk' whereas Syndicate is a little more confused and conformist.

You spend about 90% of the game's runtime as a roided-up corporate slave until the main protagonist arbitrarily decides to ruin the plans of his superiors. By this point, however, you've already committed Geneva-shattering levels of corporate espionage against rival corporations, slaughtered dozens upon dozens of the actual rebels fighting against the state, and either aided in (or at least have been privy to) the needless slaughter of innocent civilians. Cyberpunk, as a genre, has always had a strong anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist bent to it: most cyberpunk stories (the good ones, anyway) focus on the underdogs etching out an existence in a decaying world with a sharp divide between the haves and the have-nots. For Syndicate to thoroughly misinterpret that crucial anarchic aspect of the cyberpunk genre demonstrates a lack of understanding of said genre: Syndicate uses cyberpunk as an aesthetic rather than any legitimate theming.

The reason your guy goes against EuroCorp is because of a generic backstory where his parents were murdered and the main villain lied about it so he could groom him into becoming the perfect instrument of murder. Bias is what drives your character to rebellion, not the ideology of the actual rebellion whose members you shot to death about two levels ago. Miles Kilo is only nominally a hero: he's a vital asset to corruption and police brutality until the game decides that it's time for you to shoot up his coworkers for the big, dramatic climax. It's hard to feel like you've changed the world for the better when the main villain kills himself at the end. So what? It's just another corpse in the mass grave of bodies you rack up over the course of the game. Senseless murder dominates the plot, murder that says nothing, achieves little, and absolves no one of anything.

In many ways, the deuteragonist Lily Drawl is a far better 'cyberpunk' character than Miles Kilo. Lily has a compelling and coherent arc: she's a rebel that actively fights for the very things that the cyberpunk genre upholds and makes dynamic, interesting choices in order to achieve those goals. She puts her life at risk and infiltrates the EuroCorp Syndicate as a mole, working all the way up to lead engineer. Once her cover's blown, she's forced on the run, fleeing back into the slums where she was born and raised, and once Kilo almost singlehandedly destroys the rebellion she worked so hard to nurture and engineer, she's forced to take matters into her hands and fight the Powers That Be herself, come hell or high water.

Now that's a fucking arc. That's punk as hell. But Lily's not allowed to be the one who puts an end to EuroCorp: the murderous, thoughtless Kilo is the one responsible for the head honcho's downfall, mere moments after being the one responsible for the sudden, violent end of Lily's liberation front. In many ways, Kilo is less of a character and more of a mindless force of nature, a needlessly destructive whirlwind of death that kills not out of impact or ideology, but out of impulse and idiocy. In short, Kilo is a faceless FPS protagonist: a blank-slate weapon of mass destruction and the most ill-fitting choice for a cyberpunk protagonist.

It's a good thing the game itself is actually pretty fun once you get past the misguided plot. Shooting is responsive and fluid, and the hacking mechanics are clever and well-implemented (for once); mindjacking a guy into suicide or betrayal never got old, and most combat encounters are briskly-paced and high-energy enough to keep you engaged. The sound design is loud and punchy. The minigun is an addicting power fantasy. The million-dollar upgrade that allows you to restore health via melee kills gives Syndicate's combat a uniquely Doom-esque rush that's hard to replicate outside of, well, Doom. And Syndicate mercifully gives you a wide host of vibrant, eye-catching, neon-slathered playgrounds to fight your battles in, so the spectacle is constantly being given an alluring backdrop: if the oversaturated bloom and harsh, overtuned lighting effects were less in-your-face (or adjustable at all beyond a pathetic gamma slider in the options), I'd call Syndicate shockingly ahead of its time on a visual level, barring a handful of janky animations from time to time. The fact that I wanted Syndicate's campaign to be longer so I could shoot more is a good sign at the end of the day: most FPS games from this era clocked out at the 5-hour mark, but Syndicate's gameplay is weirdly invigorating and chock full of adrenaline and catharsis that never quite swings into 'overwhelming'.

Syndicate is a mess, but its flaws usually come with fun caveats that help balance it out somewhat. The plot feels antithetical to the cyberpunk spirit and the main protagonist is a faceless nobody, but the audio logs & supplemental documents build a very fleshed-out world and the supporting cast is full of memorable (albeit somewhat underutilized) characters with actual agendas and ideologies. The lighting is overwhelming and hard to look at, but there's a richly-designed world hiding beneath the figurative and literal bloom. The campaign is way too short, but it's carried by thrilling and kinetic gunplay that's just dynamic enough to ensure that combat encounters don't overstay their welcome. It's a game that views cyberpunk as more of an aesthetic than a theme, but at least it does a good job at selling that aesthetic to the player. Everything clunkily and clumsily balances out into an alright game that might satiate any chooms that wanted to go full-on Arasaka in Cyberpunk 2077. Syndicate could have been more, and it's definitely disappointing in more ways than one, but the superficial pleasures of high-octane gunplay and breakneck virtual violence make the red pill an easier one to swallow.

That dubstep was fucking stupid even back in the day though, and this 'reboot' has practically fuckall to do with the original 1993 game, a tactical asset-management type of game made by Peter Molyneux back when he actually bothered to make games instead of shilling for NFTs. Make of that what you will.

I can only imagine how much fun playing this game online would have been back in the mid-2000's, but speaking from the perspective of someone who played the game for the first time almost twenty years later, the campaign for PSU is aggressively dull and outdated. Combat encounters are tedious, mass-produced sludge where your only viable option is moving and mashing the X button. There's no dodge or roll mechanics, there's no block button, there's no jump or run button (or any kind of mobility options at all), the "parrying system" refuses to work, and guns & staffs are useless for the main character, so you're going to be sticking with the same sword you start out with because at least you're able to press Y sometimes with that starter sword (enemies also have no visible health bars, so you're never able to ascertain your progress with a boss encounter). PSU is visually fantastic, the score is a sweeping, wondrous blend of orchestral cues and synth flourishes, and the story & characters channel a charming amount of 2000s anime cringe, but the superficial aspects of PSU's presentation aren't enough to save the core gameplay loop from being as dull as dishwater. You can't even buy any clothes until like halfway through the campaign, wtf get outta here with that dystopic shit

When you get over how absurdly hilarious the idea of personally beating up your Pokemon and then forcing them to do slave labor with these blank, cute, stupid looks on their faces is, there is something genuinely unsettling and disturbing about driving your "Pals" to the brink of insanity as a result of overwork and slave-driver labor conditions. You can't even say it's an effective political statement - or a scathing critique of Nintendo and Game Freak's business practices - because Palworld is a soulless, empty, plagiarizing husk of a video game whose sole interest is capitalizing upon the initial shock value that comes with a hook as brazen as 'ripoff Pokemon slavery simulator with guns'. This is a Family Guy Cutaway Gag of a video game, a Robot Chicken skit turned viral, a shitty Smosh parody given a source code. Apart from the weirdly interesting and complex slavery system, Palworld is clickbait and nothing more.

Remember Me is such an unusually experimental and auteurist debut project that I'm honestly surprised the more 'realistic and grounded' Life is Strange was the hit that put Dontnod on the map. Remember Me is so wildly and so vastly unlike Life is Strange that your only clue that the two titles share a developer is the strange, uncanny, half-cringey and half-poetic dialogue that defines both Remember Me and Life is Strange's character writing. Apart from that and some mindfuck plot moments, Remember Me is literally nothing like its far-more-successful sister project. Gritty cyberpunk theatrics take the place of Life is Strange's serene slice-of-life trappings. Nilin's combat and parkour skills define Remember Me's gameplay loop, whereas Maxine relied on puzzles, fetch quests, and dialogue trees. Time travel was Life is Strange's defining gimmick, whereas memory-alteration is Remember Me's calling card. So much is different, and yet two things ring true above all else: Dontnod is a company that is overflowing with good ideas, and Dontnod is a company that has no idea how to execute those good ideas.

On first blush, the cyberpunk world of Remember Me's "Neo-Paris" is striking. There's a sharp divide between the rich and the poor here: the upper crust live in sleek, sterile metropoli dominated by holographic billboards, hospital-white architecture, and digital displays around every corner, whereas the poor neo-Parisians are forced to rot away in rain-heavy, flooded slums adorned with crumbling metro tunnels, crowded marketplaces, and hand-me-down neon signs littering the landscape like a flashy scrapyard. Memories are a tangible thing in this universe; a giant megacorporation named Memorize created a 'sensation implant' device named Sensen, and with your Sensen, memories can be sold, exchanged, shared... and easily hunted down and stolen. Memory theft is such a common problem, in fact, that not only is "memory hunter" an actual profession you can have in this world - our protagonist Nilin's profession of choice, as point of fact - but the rampant abuse of memory theft and a growing addiction to Sensen has created a subset of severely mentally-ill human beings that have lost all sense of self and stability called "Leapers". Social tensions have reached such a boiling point that when the game begins, we're smack dab in the middle of an enormous social upheaval being led by a group of anti-Memorize revolutionaries called Errorists, and our amnesia-induced Nilin is thrust into the thick of this chaotic uprising with only the instructions of a distant, enigmatic Errorist figurehead named 'Edge' to follow and a mystery to uncover.

On paper, that sounds like the dopest shit ever. It's radicalized Ghost in the Shell, how could you not be on board with that? Unfortunately, however, the alluring and exciting world of Neo-Paris is only skin-deep. Crucial questions about this world are never truly answered. Why do Leapers happen? What causes them to get addicted to Sensen compared to other, more well-adjusted human beings that have the same device? Why did the government allow this invention to happen in the first place? Who are the Errorists? Where are they located? Why don't we meet more than, like, three Errorists throughout the entire plot? And what the actual fuck is up with the robots? There are multiple points in Remember Me where Nilin will run into robots, but the game never bothers to explain anything about them. Who invented them? What do humans think about them? Why do they just stand there and do nothing whenever Nilin breaks into an apartment, a lab, a facility, a prison, or a high-tech cybercompound? That last part is particularly strange: the robots seem to be pretty subservient to their 'owners' (rich human beings), and yet they will do literally nothing if Nilin bursts into a location she's not supposed to be at. If the robots aren't going to matter in the slightest, then why are they even part of the setting? Remember Me refuses to answer a lot of the pressing questions on its plate, and that inherently cagey attitude towards worldbuilding hurts the legitimacy and believability of Neo-Paris as a setting. On paper, Neo-Paris is so fucking cool; it's a shame, then, that the story is so inconsistent and the world is only superficially appealing.

The parkour winds up being more of a chore than anything else: it's the same bland, automated spectator sport that it is in Uncharted, serving more as spectacle than actual substantive gameplay. The combat has a few worthwhile ideas - customizable combos! - but Remember Me has an obnoxious tendency to throw way too many enemies at you at any given time, gradually turning combat encounters into more of a chore in the later levels and watering the pretty fleshed-out combat system down into button-mashing sludge.

I've heard a lot of praise on here for the memory-altering gimmick, and I'll be honest, while it's cool as hell on paper, it's easily my least favorite mechanical part of the game due to how unintuitive and repetitive memory-remixing winds up feeling. You have to rewind and fast-forward through the exact same scene several times in order to spot 'memory glitches' in order to alter the memory, but sometimes those glitches are a red herring and won't lead anywhere, so you have to use your intuition in order to rearrange the scene before you. Honestly sounds pretty cool on paper - noticing a trend here? - but in execution, some of the solutions to these memory puzzles are fucking obtuse. The fact that there's only four of these puzzles in the game is perhaps the strangest thing; on one hand, that means you don't have to deal with them very often, but on the other hand, it feels like a waste of a clever and thought-provoking concept. Yahtzee was 100% on the money here: the memory-alteration gimmick could have sustained an entire game, but the fact that it has to rub shoulders with the oddly hack-n-slash-y combat and the Uncharted parkour means that the mechanics have no choice but to feel pretty underdeveloped and annoying. The gimmick has no room to breathe and naturally grow on its own.

And as for the plot beats themselves... much like the rest of the game, they're a mixed bag. There's definitely a stronger understanding of scale and scope here than the confused and histrionic Life is Strange, but the further the game went on, the more confused I became. Remember Me throws a lot of cool-sounding characters on screen and then either refuses to develop them any further beyond their initial hook or proceeds to ruin them by turning them into a clown. Remember Me's dialogue is a unique blend of poetic, goofy, pretentious, and the unnatural but charming way of speaking you get from someone whose first language clearly isn't English. One moment, characters will wax poetic about the morally gray nature of what they're doing and the horrors of the world they live in, and the next moment, they'll spout out garbled one-liners so headass stupid and crazy it'd make the MCU blush. It's a whiplash-inducing story, fluctuating rapidly from fun to frustrating to fascinating to fucking stupid in the span of an entire level. Our protagonists are strong enough, I suppose: the confused, conflicted Nilin and especially the mysterious but passionate Edge help keep the delirious story grounded, and their dynamic and shared history is easily the strongest and most comprehensible emotional core of the plot (Edge's story in particular is genuinely pretty fascinating). But Nilin and Edge aren't enough to salvage what winds up being a cathartic but convoluted trainwreck of a plot. It was fun to watch, but hard to grasp.

In spite of all my complaints, there is something about Remember Me that's hard to hate. The visual presentation is utterly jaw-dropping (especially for 2013), the core themes and ideas at the nexus of Remember Me's plot are strong and interesting, and sometimes the customizable combat is punchy and inventive when you get a good flow going and the enemy placement is just right. But more often than not, Remember Me is hindered by its ambitions: it wants to be everything and everywhere all at once, and this spiderwebbing mindset ultimately stretches and thins out Remember Me's good ideas to the point of almost shattering. Credit where credit is due, though, this was a hell of a debut, and I honestly feel kinda bad that history seems to remember the stilted and awful Life is Strange over the colorful but pretentious Remember Me. It's hard to call this a hidden gem - too much Triple-A bullshit and too much stuff going on at all times - but there's something worth treasuring about Dontnod's cyberpunk debutante darling all the same.

I doubt I'll forget this game for quite some time. Remember you soon.

First of all, Miles Morales is an insanely short game. When the game told me point blank that "this is the end of the story, make sure you're ready" outside of the Oscorp Science Center, I was legitimately stunned because I was only two sessions into my playthrough. In two nights' time, I was done with the entire campaign. Sure, I may have skipped over practically all of the side missions (because I frankly had very little interest or motivation to actually do them), but even so, that's pretty unacceptably brief for a game that was $50-$60 on launch, especially given the fact that this is just the previous Spiderman PS4 game but with a new coat of paint. Mechanically, visually, and tonally, so little has changed from its' 2018 predecessor that it puts Miles Morales in a uniquely 'unnecessary by existence' position. It's too long to be a DLC expansion pack, but it's too brief to be a full Triple-A game on its own, so it exists in this awkward middle ground that makes it feel like a bargain-bin direct-to-video sequel to the original.

And since very little has actually changed from the original, that unfortunately means all of the faintly buggy and questionable stuff has been left intact. Miles Morales' difficulty balancing is jarring, to say the least. Generic mooks do way too much damage, especially the ones with swords and the guns that lock you in place... and yet, you have a dedicated heal button that you can spam while doing combos. So either they made the enemies way too tanky to begin with and added the heal button as a bandaid, or realized the heal button made combat a joke and decided to bump up the enemies' damage output. Regardless of what came first, this leaves the game in a flimsy position where Miles is both way too weak and way too resilient. The stealth mechanics are mediocre (there is a dedicated "go invisible for free" button) and the Arkham-esque 'detective vision' is literally never used in any meaningful way. The only thing that works is the mobility, and to the game's credit, it's still pretty great. It's responsive, fun, flighty and weightless. It's barely a mechanic because it really is just spamming R2 in the air (no skill ceiling or learning curve to be found here), but I'm honestly okay with that. The issue with Miles Morales is that... well, this isn't new. The mobility feels just as good as it did back in 2018, and so nothing has really... changed. From a gameplay standpoint, there isn't much to be impressed by in Miles Morales that you couldn't already find in Spider-Man PS4.

This lack of forward momentum or ingenuity on the gameplay side of things puts the ball squarely in the court of the plot. And the plot is...

Look. Copaganda has always been a problem with superhero comics and stories, especially in the post-9/11 era of comic plotlines (and the gradual Disneyfication of Marvel), and Spider-Man in particular has always been weirdly infatuated with the police and the institution. This sinking feeling of "blue-lives-matter" was alarmingly present in the 2018 game that preceded this one (the truly cringeworthy "Spider-Cop" arc, anyone?), and it definitely carried over into Miles Morales, albeit in a more... subtle way.

See, here's the thing: Miles Morales tricks you into thinking it's gotten over that. Almost every major character in the game is a person of color (Peter Parker is notably absent for most of this game), save for the milkshake-white villain who clearly views minorities and second-class citizens as expendable at best. The only notable cop character relevant to this story - Miles' dad - passed away already. There's a Black Lives Matter graffiti mural on a wall somewhere. The bad guys are the Roxxon Corporation, a Big Tech company that's clearly comprised of a bunch of fascists and self-concerned capitalists. The finale's conflict is all about saving Harlem and other poor neighborhoods from being destroyed. That sounds progressive on paper. That sounds like it's a step in the right direction. But don't let that fool you in the same way that Hamilton's "colorblind casting" fooled millions into thinking it was woke. Miles Morales operates under the illusion of being progressive without the balls to actually commit to it, and that's largely because it just kind of... doesn't say anything meaningful at all about criminal justice, marginalized communities, or revolution.

(In fact, notice how the police are just... mysteriously absent from the plot? Period? Miles Morales handily avoided addressing the pro-cop problems of its predecessor by just... not having any cops around at all. Very clever!)

Practically all of these elements I just mentioned are superficial at best and don't contribute any meaningful dialogue in the slightest. The POC characters are mostly there for brownie points. Officer Jefferson Davis' death is undeniably considered a tragedy, and not the nuanced situation that it really is. That BLM mural has no impact or weight given that the villains are faceless, cartoonishly evil supersoldiers instead of the corrupt yt pigs that actually caused the movement to erupt in the first place. And according to the plot, the biggest reason behind the finale's conflict (where Harlem and Miles' neighborhood, by extension, are about to be destroyed by a haywire nuclear reactor) is... well...

The game pretends that Simon Krieger is the main antagonist of the game, but let's not kid ourselves here: Simon Krieger is a fucking joke. He's in the game for maybe ten minutes total (if that) and he spends all of his screentime being a boring discount Far Cry villain, complete with the constant fluctuation between smug "charisma" (a hack's understanding of charisma, anyway) and violent sociopathy. His goals are both generic and undefined at the same time, he barely interacts with any of the characters at all, and he gets unceremoniously arrested offscreen in the finale with no input at all from Miles. Krieger is a nobody, a fucking chump that no one will remember. Who cares?

No, the true antagonist of the game is, unfortunately, The Tinkerer, aka the only interesting aspect of this entire game. They went in a totally different direction for The Tinkerer this time around: instead of being some weird old man that never contributed much to the world of Spider-Man whatsoever, this time around The Tinkerer is Phin Mason, Miles' friend and a brilliant prodigy that created entire armories' worth of cutting-edge weaponry and cyberpunk tech in the hopes of spearheading a violent revolution against Roxxon. I'll give the game some credit here: that's a genuinely fresh idea, a bold place to take a C-Lister villain.

But let's see if you can spot the problem here. They decided the best use for a villain... was to make them a revolutionary. Do you see the problem? If you don't, then you might be the problem.

The more we learn about Phin, the more sympathetic and justified her motives become. She's obsessed with taking down both Roxxon and Nuform, a brand-new power source being developed by Roxxon. See, Nuform makes people incredibly sick, and Phin knows this because her brother (who happened to be one of the lead designers of Nuform before having a change of heart) became incredibly ill after continued exposure to Nuform. The two of them attempted to destroy the Nuform reactor and reveal all of Roxxon's dirty laundry, but Krieger had Phin's brother murdered and Phin was forced to go on the run.

So Phin has a clear-cut motive, a justifiable cause, and both the will and the intelligence to carry out her goal of stopping an undeniably-evil corporation. She even has a pretty good plan: she intends to overload and destroy the Nuform reactor in the heart of a Roxxon plaza, and she intends to do so before it opens up to the public, therefore minimizing casualties and overall damage. Wow! She sounds great! In what way, shape, or form is she supposed to be the bad guy?

Well, don't you worry, the plot has that ground covered, and it does so in the most insulting and contrived way imaginable. See, unbeknownst to Phin, the reactor will probably vaporize all of Harlem if it explodes, because Krieger secretly modified the reactor to destroy of Harlem, for... idk, evil reasons, I guess. And because of this singular issue that Phin doesn't know and also has no way of knowing, the game decides that Phin must be stopped, that her methods are wrong. Miles tries to argue that the best way to take down Roxxon is by letting the media and the law dispose of them, that going public with evidence of their misdeeds is the safest and cleanest way to kill the beast. But neither Miles nor the game considers, even for a second, that this literally wouldn't fucking matter. How many times in the real world have we heard about big companies committing atrocities in the name of the profit? Hundreds. How many times have those companies just shrugged it off and gotten away with it? Every time. Even if Krieger himself is taken down and arrested, there are doubtlessly plenty of evil Elon Musk clones at Roxxon waiting in line to take his place.

And here's another thing the game never considers (largely because it's a huge plothole): why is Roxxon here? Like, why are they in Harlem? Who let them in? Who made the choice to let this incredibly dangerous paramilitary organization set up shop in New York City? Well... it's obvious, isn't it? The police. The government. The state. Now, the game literally never brings attention to this (Roxxon just shows up, out of thin air, and no one ever questions who gave them the authority to do so), but I was smart enough to realize that, realistically speaking, the only reason Krieger would be allowed to put a fucking nuclear reactor in Harlem would be because he got carte blanche to do whatever he wanted by the state.

Do you understand? Even if Miles hands Krieger over to the police, that wouldn't fucking matter. The police are in Krieger's pocket, too, because if NYC were the ones that let Krieger in... well, by extension, so are the police. That implies that Roxxon is a much, much deeper conspiracy thanjust "random soldier men that showed up to cause problems for money". There are systems in place that put Roxxon there, and those same systems will undeniably protect Roxxon so long as it serves their interests.

Phin was right. Phin was 100% right. The violent route was, is, and always has been, the way to go. In our real world, in our actual, current reality, hundreds of megacorporations get away with murder because they're powerful, because they have connections, and because they put on a charming smile and sell products that the everyman loves. Disney, Amazon, Nestle, BP Oil, et cetera et cetera. Even if the world knew that Krieger was a murderer, even if everything about Nuform's toxicity was unveiled to the public... who cares? All it would take is the Vice President of Roxxon stepping in and saying, with a charming smile: "I am truly mortified by my predecessor's actions, and we will do everything in our power to make amends and make a brighter future for everyone!" And guess what? Realistically, the average person would be appeased by that.

But no. Because of something that Phin would have had no logical way of knowing, because of something that wasn't even her fault, Phin not only has to be stopped, but she has to be killed at the end of the plot, by sacrificing herself in a way that the story seems to think makes up for all of its' backhanded criticism against her morally-justified acts of rebellion. Phin doesn't even get a grave, but Officer Jefferson gets a fucking memorial. Phin is ultimately demonized by the plot, and yet Krieger is merely arrested offscreen and treated as a joke villain that we don't have to take too seriously. Roxxon presumably falls apart offscreen quietly (yeah sure, okay), and nothing surrounding them or their existence is interrogated. Phin and the Underground's violent actions are criticized far more plainly and frequently than anything the generic Roxxon goon does (you wind up fighting the Underground way more often than you fight Roxxon), and Miles walks out of the whole experience feeling more conflicted about his feelings on Phin herself than about anything that actually happened. Miles ultimately isn't forced to change his perspective or broaden his horizon because of the events of the plot. Nope. He just keeps on being the exact same naive Spiderman he's always been, keeps on helping Peter Parker suck off the police and ensuring the broken status quo remains that way in perpetuity. After all, what's a Spider-Cop without his deputy?

Am I surprised that yet another superhero story winds up being a right-winger's wet fantasy? No, this happens all the fucking time. But am I disappointed? Yes, because this had the nerve to masquerade as being woke and leftist. Even though this game loves the Powers That Be and constantly incentivizes you to beat the shit out of the oppressed and marginalized, it still has the audacity to throw in BLM murals and people-of-color as if that absolves them of anything. It has the gall to make The Tinkerer an empathetic and humanizing underdog motivated by direct action and personal tragedy, and then, in the same breath, manipulatively chastise and murder her when she "goes too far". And it has the nerve to do all of this in a glorified DLC to a game that was already a bunch of quippy, uncanny-valley copaganda. In summation? Boy howdy, it sure made me feel like Spiderman.

(Narrowly given 2 stars because there are no Mary Jane-style side missions and you get to pet a cat.)

In my opinion, the most intriguing element of the plot of Watch Dogs is the fact that the entire core of the story revolves around Aiden Pearce trying to avenge his niece. Let that sink in: the protagonist's journey is marked by a need for revenge... for his niece. They made a very deliberate choice for the object of Aiden's fixation to be his dead niece, and I find that very interesting. They didn't give him the generic "dead wife / dead child / dead parents" backstory; no, they gave him a dead niece. And initially, I found this to be a very strange hook. Aiden has no direct and immediate connection to this girl. She's family, sure, and he clearly cared for her and loved her, but there is a degree of separation between her and him that needs to be scrutinized. She isn't his offspring, or his predecessor, or his lover (thank God); she is the child of his sister. This is presumably someone that Aiden didn't see every day, presumably someone that he had no obligation to raise, care for, nurture, and educate. And yet, in spite of the relative distance between her and him, the brooding and angst-ridden Aiden is still thrust into a downward spiral of violence, crime, and vengeance in the wake of her death. If this is how her weird uncle reacted to her death, how the fuck did her mother react?

Well, as it turns out, we learn very early on that Aiden's sister has taken her child's passing... surprisingly well. She's clearly still distraught and grief-stricken about the whole thing, but she's clearly doing her best to work through it as best she can. And likewise, Aiden's nephew is also handling the whole sordid and sad affair... pretty swimmingly, all things considered. He's pretty shy, quiet, and reticent around people these days, but it's clear that he's just processing everything that happened in his own childlike way. The surprisingly mature and empathetic ways that Aiden's sister and nephew - you know, the dead niece's literal immediate family - handle her death stand at such a stark contrast to Aiden's immature and selfish angsting that it almost makes Aiden look like a pathetic, overgrown crybaby.

...And I actually really, really wish they went with that angle. The story should have embraced the fact that Aiden wants desperately to white-knight for someone he probably only ever saw once a month on a good year. They should have rolled with that. Make it obvious that Aiden is a manchild that's simply using his niece's death as a pretense, as a justification to go on a rampage of bloodshed and cybernetic chaos. Make it obvious that Aiden's just using her as a morality shield. Make it obvious that Aiden is responding to a tragedy in the wrong way: instead of being there for his sister, instead of changing his ways in the hopes of this never happening to his loved ones ever again, he instead sinks further and further into the criminal underworld and drags everyone down into the cesspool with him, just so he can have an excuse to hurt whoever he wants. I think that would have been interesting! I think that would have been a nuanced, sad, and complex take on toxic masculinity and "vigilante justice" and how the innate, burning desire for violence sometimes overshadows our ability to show love, logic, and empathy.

But no, the story is wholly unaware of the subversive thinkpiece it could have been. To its credit, Watch Dogs is faintly aware that Aiden's destructive, criminal actions ultimately bring more harm to his family than good, but the problem is that the story ultimately thinks Aiden is right at the end of the day. The bad guys in Watch Dogs are all slimy scumbags and numerous side missions revolve around Aiden stopping a random crime from happening. He's usually painted as the guy who gets the job done, no matter what. So the plot is undeniably on Aiden's side, which means his narrow-minded, arrogant perspective is never challenged or examined to any degree. Instead of being portrayed as the overdramatic, savior-complex edgelord he really is - which is an idea with a lot of merit, especially in a GTA-style open world shooter! - Aiden is instead just another dime-a-dozen "serious antihero" that the plot thinks is too cool to properly scrutinize, mock, or even characterize all that well.

It's a shame the plot refused to delve into the "school shooter manchild" character study, because it truly is the only promising aspect of an otherwise bloated, meandering story. Watch Dogs' plot is noisy and aimless - I couldn't even really tell you what most of the antagonists wanted, let alone what was going on or why half the time. A lot of stuff happens in Watch Dogs, but it's all a bunch of inconsequential filler bullshit that amounts to not much at all. There's a mini-arc where Aiden stupidly gets himself arrested in the hopes of silencing someone that might rat him out in prison... but it turns out the cops were planning on killing that prisoner anyway, rendering the entire escapade completely pointless. Aiden tracks down a "legendary hacker" - a white guy with dreads - to enlist his help with decrypting the data off of... something idk, and then after a big, drawn-out fight, it turns out this new hacker guy can't even decrypt the data to begin with, which begs the question: "why the fuck did this need to happen in the first place, then?" There's a crazy, rambling man that loves poker and you're asked to track him down so he can... give you the remote control to a random bridge??? And there's a long, drawn-out midsection arc about human trafficking and sex slavery that ultimately has no bearing on the overarching plot whatsoever. It's a bunch of dumb, overblown shit that exists to give Hackerman various things to hack without any rhyme or reason. It's white noise, plain and simple, and it does a pretty piss-poor job at making you fundamentally care about the world around you.

The rest of Watch Dogs is nothing special. It's a generic Ubisoft open-world game, so the usual hallmarks of that all-too-common genre are present here: cluttered map, blatantly recycled and reskinned side missions, and pointless busywork. The shooting is... functional. The driving is... funny. Limited mobility options and slow traversal speed make exploring feel like a chore. Quick-time events dominate Watch Dogs' runtime and severely impact the tension and immediacy of the (numerous) combat encounters... and even then, the game is already piss-easy because there's a powerful grenade launcher, ammo is plentiful, and there's a slow-mo button that makes fighting a joke. Yes, you read that right: Watch Dogs has a dedicated slow-mo button, like a free VATS button you can spam without consequence.

I'll give the game credit on this front, though: whenever Watch Dogs gives you the option to resolve a mission in a stealthy manner (which is not quite as often as I would have liked), eight times out of ten the stealth route absolutely rocks. It's actually a lot of fun to go stealth mode in Watch Dogs. Seamlessly jumping from camera-to-camera, distracting or diverting enemies, creating openings, using your hacking skills to alter small things about the electronic world... the tools and techniques at your disposal are simple but surprisingly fun and varied, and I loved the feeling of being able to sneak inside somewhere with just my smartphone and my smarts. Nothing felt better in this game than huddling in the shadows and carefully, surgically taking out an entire squad of goons with a vast array of traps and hacks, raining judgment upon a bunch of clueless and terrified peons without ever having to show my face. If Watch Dogs was a more focused stealth experience, I'd say Watch Dogs is actually quite good! There's a really good stealthy shooter game hidden inside of Watch Dogs' DNA, but unfortunately, it's a generic Triple-A open world game, which means the unexpectedly atmospheric and varied stealth gameplay has to rub shoulders with a bunch of bland and undercooked core mechanics for the sake of "variety", rarely getting a chance to truly shine on its own.

When you aren't momentarily getting the chance to feel like a hacker spy-ninja that glitches and ghosts his way through the shady underbelly of a corrupt metropolis, Watch Dogs is an utterly sanded-down experience, a game so bereft of life it makes you wonder if all its personality was surgically removed. The plot is total hogwash nonsense, the overworld is bland, the game controls poorly 85% of the time, and apart from the stealth options, there isn't a single core mechanic or central concept that stands out due to the bland, corporate "do it your own way" design philosophy that's been plaguing Ubisoft titles for well over a decade now. Outside of these intermittent moments where you might catch yourself having fun, Watch Dogs is empty and vapid and utterly refuses to make a strong, definitive statement about anything at all. You can't even watch over any dogs in this game. Why the fuck not, man??? Where they at, dawg?? Where's the DOGS, Watch Dogs?!?!