A pretty flawed game in terms of how it handles quests and story but an incredibly ambitious one. I can't think of anything else that would make you wait 30+ hours to unlock one of the main selling features, but there's something about working your way up as a blade on that harsh planet that makes the moment you finally get a skell license and eventually take flight so special and satisfying... It completely changes the world you've come to know so far. Soaring around an exceptionally designed open world fighting monsters in the sky with Hiroyuki Sawano music blasting is something you won't find anywhere else.

So many things about XCX make it feel like a true evolution of XC1, in gameplay and art design, complex mechanics, intricate area layouts, so much customization and freedom, that were all just thrown out of the window for the next entries. The whole thing feels genuinely impossible to pull off on this toaster of a console, its scale and visual fidelity impressed me more than anything on Switch ever has. In the best way it doesn't feel like a Nintendo game at all.

I really enjoyed spending most of last month chilling exploring this alien planet. It's just been sitting on my shelf for years unplayed after I failed to get into it before, and it ended up being my most enjoyable Xenoblade experience since the original. 1 and X truly feel like they're in a different series from 2 and 3 to me. Had I played this back in 2015 I don't think I would have been nearly as impressed by BOTW, or any open world for that matter. I would recommend checking it out now because any future port is going to be missing some stuff, it's very tailored for the Wii U unfortunately.

I recently completed all days in v0.7, so I've seen most of what there is to experience for now. This game still has a long way to go before it's finished, but even it's current rough state, it's one of the most immersive and effective horror games I've ever played. It's still very buggy, poorly optimized and due for a lot of changes before a full release, but the core gameplay that's here right now is great and very addictive. It takes its time, allowing you to build up a routine doing your menial, daily tasks before things really start to change and begin to delve into the alien and supernatural. The slow pace and repetitive main objectives may not be for everyone, but it's incredibly effective in making you fall into a set routine, only to mess with you down the road. There's already an incredible amount of content with a heavy emphasis on player freedom and exploration to uncover the games many secrets, some of which are best left unseen.
It's best to go into this game with as little knowledge of it as possible, and experience everything it throws at you blind. It might take a while, but I'm waiting in anticipation for the next update. I can't wait to follow how this game grows in the future now.

Alright, strap in. I have a lot to say.

Let's get the elephant out of the room before I actually talk about this game. I am going to bring up issues I have with the game's art direction later on but none of that has to do with how sexualized the character designs are. I am fine with all of those other characters you want to use as a counterargument. That is not the core of my issue with this game, but before I get into that, I'll talk about what I DO like because I do still like this game.

I think on a graphical level, the game looks amazing. It runs consistently well and has been thoroughly play-tested which I shouldn't have to appreciate, but most great games usually have at least some small level of bugginess that this game does not have. Additionally, on this aesthetic front, I love the game's soundtrack, probably one of the year's standouts alongside Rebirth and Prince of Persia. I also think the linear and open-world missions in the game are, for the most part, quite fun! There are some survival horror-type missions that I found particularly memorable, even if they clash really hard with the rest of the game, but we're not there yet!

But the place where I have the hugest amount of praise for this game is its combat and enemy encounters. I'm gonna talk more about the game's "identity" later but this is where Stellar Blade's identity is strongest as it can't really be put in any camp for these 3D hack-and-slash games. It's not slow-paced and deliberate like a souls-like, but it's not super quick and combo-heavy like a DMC or a Bayonetta. The combat feels like a good mix of light comboing, really nice feeling parries, strong finishers, and a good amount of diversity in the way that you can approach combat. The enemies and bosses are also very well-designed and super difficult. The game shines brightest when focused on its great combat and there is a sequence near the end that works well for this game. It's great!

The game for the most part is really fun, super polished, and not particularly painful to go through. If someone might not have some of the same issues I do later on in this review, then I can see someone loving this game to pieces. But.. I have some SERIOUS issues with this game.

Starting off is the one that everyone, even the people who like the game is bringing up. On a narrative front, Stellar Blade is an absolute mess. The game's script is written so awkwardly, almost like it was machine-translated rather than actually localized. The dialogue is super awkwardly written and some moments in the side missions just feel kind of... embarrassing? The story setup is mildly interesting (until you notice something I'll bring up later), but the story's themes are barely explored apart from naming conventions and a couple of moments at the beginning and end.

The narrative didn't even need to be particularly deep or anything. Bayonetta and DMC games don't have deep stories, but A, they're not really trying to, and B, they do have a memorable cast with personalities at least. When I heard from reviews that Stellar Blade's cast isn't the strongest out there, what I DIDN'T expect to find was the most emotionless and barebones main character this side of The Callisto Protocol.

Eve is such a remarkably bland character, lacking a single actual personality trait. They try to develop Eve in a couple of ways regarding her ambiguous relationship with Tachy, who is also boring and has no character and then dies. They do a scene with this relationship in particular near the end of the game and it just felt so stilted and not super earned. But surely the other characters are better, right? I mean... I guess so? Lily at least has.. a personality and Adam, as boring as he is, at least has some interesting things happen with them later on, but the character writing is so incredibly weak in this game and the voice acting, both in Korean and English only makes it worse.

Okay, so that's the narrative stuff out of the way, what's that other major problem I have with the game that I've been edging you out of? This game does not have a fucking identity. I've been trying my best to hold back on comparing this game to NieR Automata up to this point, because I wanted to judge this game on its own, but it's so blatantly apparent just HOW MUCH of this game was derived from it. You play as a sexy android lady from a space base and are sent down to get rid of all of the bad guys that took over the Earth. You run around a semi-open world with a little drone that follows you around everywhere and talks to you. The game goes into detail on who the guys you are fighting and who you're working for REALLY ARE and there are themes of Identity and Religion and Life. The main character is very stoic and emotionless, but unlike 2B, here it's because they aren't written to have one. Hell, there are characters named Adam and Eve IN NIER AUTOMATA.

I know this all seems super surface level, but these comparisons wouldn't be such a huge problem if they had a super strong identity on their own and it really REALLY doesn't. The most distinctive thing about this game is that you're fighting Semi-religious gross penis monsters called Naytiba instead of robots. But that feels more like it clashes with the game's sci-fi aesthetic more than anything. Speaking of clashing, the character designs don't even really feel like they belong in the same game, most notably when you compare Eve, Lily, and Adam's designs. And they are the main 3 characters of the whole game. And most of the side characters don't even have faces, which is super weird? Why does the hairdresser have no hair? What are we doing here?

This also extends to the locations, Xion just feels like a pretty generic post-apocalyptic world. Half the time, in these linear missions, you fight in ruined cities and sewers and the two semi-open world areas you get are both bare empty deserts. I know asking for visual variety in a post-apocalyptic game is asking the wrong questions, but maybe have at least one of the open-world areas not be a desert??

All of these things combined, the art style clash between the different characters, friend, and foe, in this game, the super generic areas, the basic and derivative story, the lack of any characters with more than one personality trait, and the themes it doesn't touch on very much at all, leads to a game that doesn't really have an identity of its own. Hell, even though I love the music, it sounds very much like NieR music. The game's identity shines brightest in its combat, in its missions, in its boss encounters, and in one section near the end of the game that I thought was actually excellent.

This is clearly a talented team and the fact they were able to make a big console game this good on their first try is astounding. I can only hope their next game has more of a unique identity.

TLDR; The game is well-polished, has some great music, some decently fun linear and open world missions, and some exceptional combat and boss fights, but the character designs clash super hard with each other, the environments don't feel distinct, the story and character writing are incredibly bad, and the game just doesn't have a strong identity outside of copying NieR Automata's homework.

Unstellar Blade

A game so milquetoast that it literally crashed my PC in switching inputs from my PS5 to my main display so I could write this review, and thus I lost all of my notes I had carefully constructed over the past three days of playtime. What I pulled together is that this was an attempt at making Nier: Automata without actually making it fun and without Yoko Taro.

I remember Stellar Blade's Official Reveal as Project Eve, named after the game's main character, jumping out of an otherwise uneventful and boring Sony State of Play with its flashy combat, beautiful environments, and overwhelmingly attractive protagonist. Hot character bait aside, I was interested in this game because of the influences it was clearly wearing on its sleeve in the aforementioned Platinum Games magnum opus. Many have tried and few have succeeded in nailing hack and slash as well as Platinum or their cousins in Capcom have done with the plethora of impressive titles between the two. Did I think Stellar Blade was going to go one on one with Nier, DMCV, or Metal Gear Rising? Absolutely not, but I did think it was worth a try, to see if there was a company out there who could go to bat with the best of them and put an effort forward that would be worth paying attention to in the years to come. I was excited for Stellar Blade as the release date neared, because it meant that I could one quell the discourse over the design of Eve by providing actual input on how the game plays, and secondly because the need for a fast paced hack and slash was weighing heavily on me after playing slower burn titles like FF7R2 and P3R fairly recently. Within a day of playing my interest waned but I remained hopeful, however on the third complete day of playing and the day I ultimately completed the game... I came away fairly perturbed.

The good, lets start with that why don't we? This game is downright beautiful. I played it on my PS5 on my 4K display with HDR enabled and woah nelly, it looked great. One of the greatest aspects of this title was how great both characters and the world looked from a graphical standpoint. As you transition from dilapidated buildings and streets into destroyed railways and misgiving deserts, your eyes will feast at the eye candy abound in the backgrounds of the world. I found myself navigating the camera up and down constantly at the world I was interacting with as it was tremendously rich in flavour and care from a design standpoint. I felt like the developers put a great deal of effort into creating a visually striking game, which unfortunately seems to have accompanied a trade off in other aspects of the title. More to come on that shortly, as I do want to praise the team for putting some of the best facial and body design in gaming forward. As I've already experienced, much of the conversation about Stellar Blade has been lost in the perceived attractiveness of Eve, but every character you interact with truly looks incredible. Though their proportions and mannerisms may not be totally... human, they are indubitably crafted with an intricacy and care to look astonishing. Stellar Blade if nothing else is a journey of eye candy, but that's kind of... it.

While not exactly fast enough to be a Nier-like, and not fun punishing and explore heavy enough to be a Souls-like, Stellar Blade attempted to forge a path forward that played out like a middle ground between Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and the Jedi: Fallen Order/Survivor games. Eve's combat relies on using a plethora of learned abilities and tech to parry and dodge her way through a litany of grotesque alien foes who have claimed Earth to be their own. Where this goes wrong is in quite a few places, but the most apparent and earliest was in the poor "janky" feel and lack of reliability in both parry and dodge timings. This can be sort-of remedied by investing in Eve's skill trees and upgrading Eve's exo-spine but never really feels... good. Even if I was a dissenter of Sekiro over all, I felt like it mostly gave the right kind of feedback and snap to the parry/dodge timings required to master such a difficult title. For a game as infuriatingly hard as Stellar Blade gets in its late game, I felt like I was at the whimsy of luck in my dodges not directly feeding into a followup attack by a boss and my perfect parries not being read by the game because of poor latency or buffer timing. Time after time I'd land a perfect dodge only to be hit by the boss moving faster than Eve could recover right after. Cheap is the way I'd put that and it proliferated throughout the entire runtime of the title.

Difficulty is something I've spoken about ad nauseum in action-rpg titles and I'll continue to do so as I have an affinity for these kinds of games. After grinding my teeth in the (generally) slower paced Fromsoft classics and the speedy Platinum/Capcom games of the last decade and change, I feel like I'm fairly qualified. Stellar Blade early on feels hard, but not in a way that cannot be conquered. If I was getting my tail kicked by a group of world enemies or a boss, I found that I could readjust my stratagems to craft a better gameplan, coming back smarter and using my abilities at optimized times to come out victorious. I found my confidence growing, something that did not happen this early in Sekiro, and I continued on to the later stages of the game. I opened up my Playstation menu to check my progress, a feature of the console that tracks how far you've made it through the main story, and saw I had notched at 89%. I labored on to the area boss on one of the last major quests of the game. It was here I through my face into a wall, stressing with every ability and item I had to make it through the three phases and effective six health bars that the boss had. I double this up because of the way shields work. See in Stellar Blade, simply doing damage and having fun taking down your enemy's health bar is simply not allowed, you must first deplete their shields before you can do any "meaningful" damage to their hitpoints. Meaningful in quotations because even then on a fully upgraded weapon, after laboriously taking away the superfluous shield bar, you are granted the ability to do slightly more damage to the bosses health per hit. I've played Dark Souls underleveled and with un-upgraded weapons enough to know torment when it comes to weapons doing very little damage to bosses... and even that does not compare to how insulting Stellar Blade's damage counter feels.

It wasn't even until a few bosses later that I truly came to terms with my disdain for the needlessly draconian difficulty that exists within Stellar Blade's late game boss fights. I threw everything together that I could into defeating the (name kept out of review due to spoiler) boss. I thought I could craft a winning effort of combining my ultimate abilities with my tertiary skills and burst maneuvers, but nothing was taking. I couldn't perfect dodge and parry any longer against the multi-faceted and multi-phase boss fight at hand. Visual clarity was completely nuked from orbit as I could barely tell what moves were hitting me, where certain objects were, or where my Eve's reactions would take me next. A greater qualm I have with games at large now, I wrote about these most notably in my FFXVI DLC reviews, is a complete lack of being able to actually see what's going on in boss fights because of the "ooh how cool" quality that moves need to have. Keeping this in mind, the bosses began to teleport away CONSTANTLY from Eve so as to reposition their efforts while tarnishing any offensive effort I had put forth. This was rhythm breaking and tore any motivation I had towards chasing the enemy down, I felt discouraged and unmotivated to capitalize on optimized windows because I knew the boss would simply teleport away at any given moment. After being unable to keep up with this, the visuals going on, and the randomly included DPS checks, I put the game on "story mode" (reminder this is in the last hour or so of a medium length title) and kept chugging. I'm not actually sure this did anything to make the game easier. What it does in theory is give you windows to dodge and parry, popping up with on screen prompts of what button to press to not be hit by the enemies maneuvers. Does this work? Absolutely not. Most of the time these move to fast to even parse what move you're supposed to use, and half the bosses moves don't even populate your screen with a prompt at all. Through the next couple bosses and into the final boss I became increasingly confused if this was actually a difficulty slider at all or simply an effort to make you "feel" better by putting a semblance of choice of difficulty in front of you.

A best in class soundtrack (potentially one of the best of the year) and impressive visuals couldn't prop Stellar Blade up enough to go against its resoundingly poor English VA (I eventually played in Korean,) drab narrative heavily borrowed from Nier: Automata, and impressively frustrating and unrewarding combat. This is absolutely not a title worthy of purchasing at a $70 price tag, maybe half of that at best. I commend Sony and SHIFT UP for putting together a brand new IP and throwing some serious marketing at making this game stick out, but it felt like a great value Sekiro meets Nier at best. I would not recommend Stellar Blade to anyone with a PS5.

There's a really solid foundation here, but this game is held back by so many fundamental issues that keep it from being anything more than okay. It can be really fun to throw shit around with telekinesis for a while, but the combat eventually becomes really stale. Enemies are damage sponges and eventually you won't even be using your gun, just hurling shit at endless waves of the same repeated mobs, only shooting when your energy is on cooldown. The art design here is phenomenal, and implements live action in genius ways, but nearly every area you explore looks identical, and the in game models look incredibly uncanny, it's honestly hilarious every time it cuts from a live action scene to their in game model that looks like them made out of clay. The story has some really interesting concepts, but I was mostly just interested in the facility, Dr. Darling and the stuff with Alan Wake. The main plot involving Jesse, her brother and the hiss feels incredibly half baked, and ends as soon as it feels like it's really picking up.
The game really wasn't that bad, but it really started wearing me down by the end with it's repetitive gameplay. I only played this because I was interested in continuing Alan Wake and heard there was stuff relating to the story in this game, and I can't really say it was worth it in that regard, but if you're interested I think you should check it out. Despite it's flaws, there's still a lot of fun to be had here, for a while at least.

Near unmatched style and presentation for a PS1 title. Parasite Eve boasts a stupid, out-there, and self-serious story paired with an insanely good OST. Combat is surprisingly fun, short, simple, and easy for the time, which makes exploration less of a chore than most JRPGs that came out around this time. If I had any gripes about this game it's the limited inventory space and sometimes confusing intractability.

Basically, Mitochondria Eve makes me feel hot.

Absolutely fucking immaculate. This game is far and away my favourite Ace Attorney experience so far and one of my favourite games ever, and I would be extremely surprised if something manages to top this.

For starters, almost everything is improved on from the original trilogy: The cases are more intriguing and there's hardly one that's not "good", the characters are so so much better (excluding maybe the prosecutor), the investigation periods are less tedious, it's funnier, and holy shit I thought Trials & Tribulations was well planned out, this game one-ups it in every single damn way, tying in practically every case in the outstanding culmination that is "The Resolve of Ryunosuke Naruhodo".

If that wasn't enough the plot twists are batshit crazy, genuinely stuff I'd never expect especially the one(s) in the final case that left me practically speechless. The time period allows for more insightful topics like Case 1 of TGAA2 although perhaps we could tone down on the slurs. For the characters, I LOVE Susato to death, she is so much more interesting than Maya (not to say that Maya is necessarily a bad character) and she doesn't explicitly give you answers and appear at the most random moments when you are about to lose (like a certain someone). Herlock Sholmes is the greatest character ever and there is no debate - I would honestly replay this game just to laugh at his antics and his stupid ass dialogue and faces. Barok Van Zieks is such a brilliant prosecutor, his reasoning for hating the Japanese is pretty ridiculous but putting that aside I love how he doesn't fuck around, he almost always has a reason to contradict what you might have found out during a summation examination or something and it feels so real, he doesn't pretend to get faked out like the prosecutors in the originals. I love Iris as well and the whole thing to do with her family is just so beautiful. The entire side cast is just so damn good it's honestly unreal that it obliterates the original trilogy, a game that already had a fantastic and endearing cast.

Ryunosuke is genuinely light years better than Phoenix as a character as well, his whole thing to do with resolve may come off as corny or uninspired at times but when it hits, it fucking HITS. When he just goes from being nervous to not giving a shit and doing anything possible to unravel the truth is so damn satisfying, especially with how quickly it tested his spirit and questioned a lawyer's morals in TGAA1.

For the gameplay it stays mostly the same although the new additions are mostly welcome, I do enjoy the summation examinations although sometimes the jury's reasonings are just complete bullshit like "Well he looks like a nice man"??? But obviously, the best addition here is the Logic and Deduction parts which are just so much fun, the music just gets you hyped up, and even though it's mostly simple it is so enjoyable to solve cases with Herlock.

The animations felt jarring at first, but once you get used to them they almost overshadow the goofy static ones from its predecessor, it allows for so much more expression from characters and makes certain parts a lot more memorable (Susato punching the air or Barok Van Zieks throwing a wine bottle for the 30th time). And god damn the music is such a banger, Kazuma's theme, Susato's, pursuing a contradiction, even indoors the music is so cozy, it's all so perfect.

It's so fitting that it's called the Great Ace Attorney since it truly is that, a game that just improves upon everything that made its predecessors so loveable.

The textbook definition of a flawed masterpiece.

It's no secret that the original Final Fantasy VII is a legendary game that changed the gaming landscape forever - would a remake ever be able to live up to it? Well, I'd say it depends on what you're looking for. I've only played the original FF7 up until the Shinra Building, so I can't really answer this question more in detail, but I can tell you the remake (and possibly the rest of the trilogy) is an exceptional experience, IF you're willing to accept something different. This might sound weird, so let me explain.

Final Fantasy VII Remake is not an 1:1 remake of the iconic original game. Without spoiling anything, it's trying something new in the already established world of Midgar in the hope of pleasing both fans of the original game and newcomers entirely new to the franchise or Final Fantasy VII in general. I'm not trying to give too much away, but basically, there are those new mysterious entities, and a common complaint is them being too involved in the plot. I wasn't a fan of those either for a long time, but after finishing the game and understanding their purpose, I reflected on their inclusion for a bit and then thought they were integrated fairly well actually. To sum things up, FF7R doesn't replace FF7 at all; they both have the same major plot beats, characters and everything, but are heading into different directions. This way there are new surprises in store for returning players, but it also brought out frustrations in others, since now will never be a "true" remake of the original game - and I can totally understand that sentiment.

The identity of 7R however wasn't the reason why I called it a flawed masterpiece in the opening sentence, instead it's some things that still could have been better. Even though I had a fantastic time with the game as a whole, I feel the need to still address those problems, as I'm not only writing those reviews for myself, but also to help others. With that out of the way, the most apparent flaw is the amount of filler content every now and then. A good example of this is near the end of the game, where the party backtracks to a previous dungeon as part of the story to retrieve an important item for another character. The issue at hand: a monster has stolen this key item! This results in a 30-minute segment of tracking down the monster by backtracking through the exact same segments of this dungeon used previously in the game. At least you get a sweet resolution for that character at the end, so it's not all for naught. But coming back to the dungeon/level design, that's a point I have mixed thoughts on. On one hand, Midgar in the original game was incredibly linear and the world only really opened up later, on the other hand, the remake could have fixed this - but this is where they decided to stay faithful! The Hallway Simulator™ complaints are entirely justified, however it never was that much of a problem for me, since those dungeons look pretty atleast and you get many fun conversations with your party members along the way, so it doesn't feel like the game is trying to waste your time.

Generally the setpieces are more lively than ever before, the little details everywhere and the new third-person camera make for a so much more immersive experience than the top-down view of the original game. My favorite example is the Wall Market chapter in the remake, the lighting and bustling streets really sold me on the festive vibe the devs were going for. The entire segment was a real joy to play through and it is a prime example of extending the overall playtime in a meaningful way. This also applies for the Collapsed Expressway and Train Graveyard in the remake for me, for fans of the original game those areas might be too long (as they were only one to two screens long in the original game), but I loved how the devs expanded on those already established locations, it adds to the sense of scale in the massive dystopian city of Midgar. In general, I believe this "sense of scale" is exceptionally well done throughout the game, there are several occasions where you can just gaze in awe upon the towering buildings of the city from below or some other parts where you can look from a high point into the far distance and see all the detailed infrastructure on the horizon, it's genuinely impressive how they handled it.

You know what else is genuinely impressive? The combat in 7R. It still follows the same rules as the original ATB system, but with more player agency. Instead of just waiting for some bar to fill, you can block and dodge enemy attacks (ironically, blocking is better 90% of the time, as the dodge has no i-frames!) or deal some physical damage by yourself. All of this is accompanied by intuitive switching between characters in the middle of a fight in order to exploit enemy weakness with certain Materia or gain access to different skills and movesets. With the return of the Materia system, every party member can be individually built to one's likings - you may turn someone into an Electric AoE damage dealer or give everyone in the group an Ice Materia for some reason, there's a lot of different combinations! Summons are also back and they look just as cool here as you would expect. Unfortunately they're not available too often, but on the flip side this means their appearances against hard bosses are even more satisfying.

Now, I don't think anything has to be said about the soundtrack. It's a Final Fantasy game, so obviously it's near perfection. Uematsu and the crew put a lot of heart into the new songs and remixes and it shows. There are so many good tracks and it's hard to choose favorites, but one overworld song that particularly stands out to me for being surprisingly captivating is the theme of the Collapsed Expressway. In terms of battle themes, the Ghoul fight is an incredible new composition and if we're talking about remixed songs, [this video contains spoilers!] the iconic One-Winged Angel got an utterly fantastic orchestral rendition in the remake. They really went all out in remaking an already superb soundtrack and certainly didn't miss.

So yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to playing Rebirth eventually, but I'll probably play through the original FF7 first (hopefully in the near future). I love those characters and this world so much and I can't wait to see where their adventure is going next!