Bearing numerous improvements, XIII-2 manages to bring XIII back above water--despite making many of the same mistakes.

I'll be writing this review just like Square Enix makes their sequel games. But not just any of their sequel games, I'm talking about the ones that boldly feature Roman and Arabic numerals strung together. Which means I'll be doing this one quick, cheap, and dirty.

After all, I wouldn't expect a film buff to spend much time on Disney's direct-to-DVD offerings, which is about where we're at right now in gaming terms.

Where's Lightning…?
But to be fair, these types of games aren't inherently a bad thing. Developers who are freed from all the expectations (and marketing budget) tied up in massive flagship titles are more likely to experiment and try out strange--and if we're lucky, interesting--new ideas. X-2 was ostensibly an asset flip of X , but was crammed full of so many weird, admirable, and frankly better ideas that it easily outshines its predecessor in every category. Its runtime (my casual playthrough clocked in at sixteen hours) certainly helped impressions as well.

One thing is certainly clear: when the stakes are so much lower, it's easier to roll with wacky ideas, faster pacing, and goofy presentation.

So, how does XIII-2 hold up compared to XIII?

Far, far better than I imagined it would.

Don't get me wrong, it's still not what I'd call a good game--it almost was--but if you even remotely enjoyed XIII, then you'll be hard pressed to not enjoy XIII-2 far more.

Nearly every single obvious issue from XIII has been addressed in some way--usually to decent success. The world is no longer linear, there are side-quests and NPCs galore, mini-games are constantly thrown in to spice up gameplay pacing, etc. etc. Even the battle systems have been refined to allow greater flexibility, player expression, and moment to moment freedom of choice.

So in that sense, XIII-2 not only outshines its predecessor, it also reminds just how fucking dire XIII was in the first place. Most of these "improvements" are (at least in any other game) the bare fucking minimum. But hey, XIII was a complete and total trainwreck, so let's give credit that some lessons were actually learned.

Even the fucking music has been massively improved--much like it was in the jump between X and X-2. Hamauzu's exceeding dry score has been bolstered by the more dynamic, energetic, and frankly fun work of Naoshi Mizuta. It's still a far cry from Uematsu's greatest moments, but XIII-2's score is at least filled with rhythmic intrigue and charming moments.

So in general, XIII-2 is--at least at times--a genuinely fun game. I can't say the same about XIII at all. So big points for that.

Valhalla is a place where nothing ever happens

However, XIII-2 still manages to drop the ball in many of the same ways XIII does. Don't forget, this is still a Toriyama/Watanabe joint. Even though the battle systems have been greatly improved…it's still sitting on an unstable foundation. The auto-battle system is still inherently unfun and requires players to seek out moments of enjoyment in an otherwise dull framework. It doesn't help that weapon and accessory choice is still rudimentary and often uninteresting.

Beyond that, most of my problems with XIII-2 come from its incessant need to meter out content as well as its disastrous narrative.

If there's one thing X-2 got right, it was its pacing. You could dick around with all the silly side content the game had to offer, which might be enjoyable if you were truly obsessed with the world and characters of X . Or, you could beeline your way through the game's main content in a fast and fun manner. In-and-out before you cracked the twenty hour mark.

XIII-2 comes close to this breezy pacing, but manages to blow it in the second half of the game. Which, at this point, seems to be the Toriyama specialty. There's just a lot of unfun, uninteresting, and tedious shit you need to do in order to finish up the game. From areas filled with uninteresting random encounters every five feet (that don't even give you XP!), to fetch quests across space and time, to massive areas filled with lame puzzles that are just plain unfun to explore and solve…XIII-2 has all of the Toriyama classics. The final area in particular is just plain cruel--requiring players to navigate a massive area filled with ultra-slow turning platform puzzles and random-encounters up the ass. I might have been kinder, if not for the fact that Square's dogshit PC port crashed on me three times during this segment.

And it’s a damn shame too. The first half of the game is filled with simple, quick, and fun set pieces that constantly have us rolling between random places in space and time--shootin' the shit with random side characters for just enough time before they become boring. If XIII-2 kept up this presentation, it definitely would have gotten an easy 7/10…but alas, Toriyama and co. just can't help themselves.

Which is pretty crazy when you think about it. Do you seriously care if your game is longer if it's at the cost of its enjoyability? I'd rather have something short and sweet. Sadly it seems like your average JRPG fan begs to differ. After all, Square has managed to turn a five hour rollercoaster ride through Midgar into a forty hour chore--to massive acclaim. Shows what I know.

Speaking of critical acclaim, can you believe that Famitsu gave XIII-2 its coveted perfect score? The early 2010s were a very curious time for gaming.

Beyond everything I've already said, it's hard to imagine anyone giving XIII-2 a perfect score on account of its awful narrative. X-2 certainly had a goofy story, but it played into its sense of camp very well. XIII-2 instead tries to create a "darker" tale about love and life strewn across many timelines and beyond temporal paradoxes.

I'm not gonna scrutinize the story in detail--it's really not worth the effort. But needless to say it's got that trademark Kingdom Hearts sense of melodrama and needless convolution. Which would be fine, if not for the fact that it takes up a good chunk of your playtime in the second half of the game. Instead, I'm forced to feel secondhand embarrassment for the development staff (and anyone who was forced to play the game on a shared living room TV) every time a cutscene starts rolling. If only they just owned up to the camp and took the X-2 approach…

In closing, I want to admire Square for managing to unfuck a lot XIII's bullshit. But, at the same time, they weren't able to lean into XIII-2's status as "silly asset flip cash grab sequel" as hard as they should have. We're instead left in an awkward middle-ground, one that’s too silly to be serious and too serious to be fun.

Who knows? Maybe a fucking third try at the XIII formula will give us a decent game. Only Lightning knows the answer…

How the hell do you start a review about Stranger of Paradise?

I'll admit that statement alone makes the game worth playing for those of you still on the fence. It's just one of those games that you need to experience to understand. But seriously, where do you begin?

How about a few launching points:

1) The incredibly busy and convoluted souls-like gameplay?
2) The shockingly dated graphics that scream Unreal 3 game circa 2007?
3) The somehow awful game performance, that can't maintain 60 FPS even on a PS5?
4) The wacked-out-of-its-mind plot graced upon us by one Kazushige Nojima?
5) The surreal characters, voice acting, and presentation?
6) Or the fact that this entire package is supposed to function as the prequel to THE Final Fantasy--a game that has hardly any real plot or world to call its own?

There's as many disparate threads here as there are gameplay systems. I had never played a Nioh game before--I always figured it was just a slight morph of Dark Souls, but I was somehow dead wrong and right on the mark at the same time. For those of you entirely out of the know like I was, let me summarize the flow chart during a typical boss fight in SoP:

1) Use both left and right on the D-Pad to activate the 'aggressive' mode on your two party members.
2) Move in towards the boss and start putting on the heat with some regular attacks.
3) When it comes time for them to attack you, figure out how we're going to not die. Which means you need to decide between:
3.1) Blocking, which will make you take some damage but is usually safe...Unless
3.1.1) The boss performs a command grab, in which case you're fucked. Or...
3.1.2) The attack is unblockable. More on that later.
3.1.3) If you are able to start a block right before the hit strikes, you actually parry the attack instead.
3.2) Dodging/Rolling, which is not nearly as viable in this game (on most jobs) because you don't get a good amount of I-Frames to actually move out of the way of most attacks safely. Avoid this move unless you're a risk taker or absolutely in a pinch with no other options.
3.3) Soul Shield, which allows you to use a special 'poise' meter to absorb a hit from the boss.
3.3.1) If it's a magical ability with a blue background you end up 'stealing' a copy of it that ability that you can then cast back upon the boss unless...
3.3.2) It's a certain type of magical ability with a red background, which is not absorbable, you're gonna get fucked.
3.3.3) Keep in mind that the meter also goes down with every single hit you absorb, and requires time to recharge. If the meter is depleted then you become stunned and are unable to take actions for several seconds. However you have some options here because...
3.3.3.1) you have two different jobs selected at any given time which means that you're able to swap between the two on the fly--each of which has their own separate soul shield meters that can recharge separate from each other.
4) Alright now that you've considered all of that in the 100 millisecond window you've had before the boss hits you, you now have a few options before you:
4.1) If you did some damage beforehand and also did some soul shielding, you probably have some special meter built up, which means that you can:
4.1.1) Perform one of several special combos that you have to pre-define in a customization menu
4.1.2) Perform one of several special job abilities like Chakra magic or Jump.
5) Oh shit I forgot to turn back on my party's 'aggressive mode' once their meters depleted, shit I need to reach over to the D-Pad to do that again...
6) Wait what HP am I at? Did my special meter get depleted or do I have some left I can use? Oh shit I forgot I still had some stolen magic that I can cast back at the bo...
6) Oh fuck they're about to slap me in the face which way should I....
7) And....I'm dead.

Got all that? In reality there's some hyperbole going on here, but the rough feeling is true: There's a lot of random bullshit that you need to juggle while you're in the heat of battle. Between all the different jobs, party members, combos, special abilities, and block/dodge/parry/soul-shield/magic-reflect/stagger/heal options that you have before you, the game very quickly walks a dangerous path towards being too busy for its own good. Sure there were classes, stats, and weapons to juggle in a game like Dark Souls, but the core gameplay loop always felt very clean and compact.

Speaking of classes, lets talk about jobs for a moment, shall we? Certainly a souls-like hack-n-slash following the pedigree of the original class-based Final Fantasy would be remiss if it didn't have jobs, right? Right. Well, if you didn't already think there were enough cooks in the kitchen, we've now got enough to feed a whole army. There's 27 jobs, each with unique gimmicks, abilities, and entire skill trees that need to be leveled through. Some might view this as a great way to encourage replayability, but it often leads to a confused mess of unbalanced and unfun game design.

All of that is to say, the job system makes it incredibly easy to crack this game wide open. By the 30% mark, I had already discovered a combination of mechanical interactions that broke the game in two. Lets see what my actual SoP flowchart looked like as a Lancer/Dragoon:

1) Use both left and right on the D-Pad to activate the 'aggressive' mode on your two party members. They'll tank the boss aggro.
2) Stand at a safe distance and throw spears at the boss using the lancer ability.
3) If I'm somehow out of special meter before the boss is at 50% HP, I'll wait until my teammates are back in 'aggressive' mode and get a few safe hits in while they tank aggro
4) Back off and start throwing spears again
5) If the boss aggro is ever drawn to me, wait until he gets close and use the Dragoon's Jump ability to hop the fuck across the battlefield to safety. Begin throwing spears again.
6) The boss dies before they've even laid a finger on me.

I've only done one playthrough of the game, but I'm certain that there's dozens of simple one-track strategies that players can use to breeze through the game. Obviously it's unfair to judge a title simply on the broken strats you can create, but the path of least resistance in a game can't be as plain and boring as it is here. I had a feeling from the start that the inclusion of party members as well as 27 different jobs was a recipe for broken mechanics. After all, you can only stack so many gimmicks onto a soulslike before the whole system topples under its own weight.

But enough about the gameplay. Everyone was driven here by the hilarious E3 trailer that focused on the story, so what about that? Well, I'm not going to mediate long on it here...but it is just as laugh-out-loud funny and absurd as you'd imagine. Frankly it's a reminder that Nojima really should have thrown in the towel on RPG writing after VII and became a writer for wacked-out-of-its-mind games like this instead. He would have been an incredible Platinum Games writer in another life.

But despite all of the bad things I've said...goddamn it I still like this game a hell of a lot. It's busted and dumb, but it still manages to be a fun experience beyond all of that. Everything is faulted so clearly that even a Kingdom Hearts player could see the cruft, but let's be honest--nobody's here for the emotional, epic, and lifechanging game of the year. They're here to see one man punch the everliving fuck out of CHAOS. And in that regard, the game delivers in spades.



There are many theories that posit camp is a combination of bad qualities and time. The Phantom Menace might have pissed off Lightsaber clutching Star Wars fans back in '99, but now we can all just sit back and laugh at the whole affair. It's so far removed from our current life that we can admire its goofy qualities from the cheap seats. In that same sense, Stranger of Paradise performed an incredible magic trick. The game managed to package up of that same powerful sense of camp even before it released. It was as if the game just warped to us from the year 2007--in every sense of the concept. But that's not where the real magic was. SoP packaged up all that absurd camp without the smallest shred of irony behind it. Everyone involved with the project believed in it. Nojima and Nomura genuinely considered it a great way to pay homage to the game that eventually gave them careers. That nightmare "fantasy" JRPG that barely functioned and featured UFOs, giant mechs, time-travel schemes, and T-Rexes abound.

And you know what? In that sense, this game is a really great homage to the original Final Fantasy. Not in the actual content of the game, but the absurdity of it all. It's dumb, simple, busted, and hardly capable of keeping consistent with anything it sets out to do. Of course FF-creator Hironobu Sakaguchi would refine the series and eventually strike gold with Hiroyuki Ito and Yoshinori Kitase on FFV, VI, and (with a young Nomura and Nojima) on FFVII. Perhaps the passing of the torch between these two generations isn't as crazy as I initially thought.

I suppose the difference is Sakaguchi quit designing/writing FF after IX in 2000--13 years following his creation of the franchise. Ito and Kitase wouldn't be too far behind him. By contrast, Nojima and Nomura have been chief creative forces behind the FF series since 1997 with FFVII, a career now spanning 25 years. Maybe they also mentally checked out after around the 13 year mark, eternally stuck in the 2007-2010 era. I think Stranger of Paradise is living proof of that fact. But hey, now that new faces like Yoshi P. dominate the industry with FFXIV, and now that Nojima/Nomura are nostalgia-tripping on their FFVII remake, perhaps Stranger of Paradise represents that last waltz for the late 2000s era--a fascinating time capsule filled with a lot of stupid shit that many of us yearn for because it reminds us of the final epoch before the modern internet turned our world (gaming and otherwise) into a nightmarish hyper-aware, hyper-social, live-service, microtransaction filled hellscape. So, despite all the clear flaws, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is still a unique and charming trip that harkens back to simpler times--a game worth playing in 2022.

Visual excellence fails to save poor execution shackled to a shallow and stagnant genre

I'll admit I had reservations about Playdead (Limbo, Inside) founder Dino Patti's new title Somerville from the start. But to be fair to Somerville, I've never enjoyed the cinematic platformer genre that Patti has been bound to his entire career as producer...but more on that later. It's more crucial to credit Somerville's actual (first time) writer and director, Chris Olsen, for the mess we have here.

Olsen, a CG animator turned director, has clearly mastered their own sense of visual aesthetic and direction--and I commend them for that. If nothing else, Somerville is (from a visual perspective) an incredibly well directed game. The lighting, shot composition, and color choices are par excellence for the entire experience. You really do get the feeling that Olsen spent years crafting the world of Somerville in his own head--using his years of artistic experience to fortify his ideas. Viewing this game on a large 4K TV was a nothing short of a visual treat that I wish more games could offer me without resorting to AAA level photorealism in titles like The Last of Us, Part II. In this sense, Olsen has totally nailed one of the most crucial aspects of the cinematic platformer, which earns Somerville some points.

Another World (Visual Art and Game)

Unfortunately for Olsen, games still have to be played...which is where Somerville quickly falls apart. For every strength I praised above, it often leads to one of the game's hapless weaknesses. Take for instance the shot composition. Somerville often features gorgeous wide shots that allow players to enjoy the scope of large environments. Unfortunately, you'll also often have to solve puzzles or perform tasks in these same shots, where it quickly becomes difficult to easily see where items or other interactive materials are. I frequently got stumped during puzzles not because I couldn't solve some logical question, but because I couldn't even see what I was supposed to be interacting with.

Beyond that, Somerville falls prey to the same core issue that plagues virtually every single cinematic platformer: they are cinematic to a fault. So many crucial game elements are ignored to preserve their cinematic quality. As a consequence, puzzles are vague, movement is awkward, and the narrative is minimalistic to avoid distracting text boxes or protracted voice acting. To many fans of the game, these drawbacks don't seem like much of a dealbreaker in light of just how fantastic the game looks. But let me ask you: if your game has unfun movement, confusing puzzle interactions, and barebones narrative...then what the hell is left in your puzzle platformer with heavy story emphasis? The answer, as we know it, is purely visuals and sound design.

Flashback (Close Encounters with [Bad] Minimal Narratives)

To be fair, minimalistic narratives aren't bad in their own right. However, Somerville misunderstands its own approach. Despite keeping a very lightweight narrative, it attempts heavy emotional twists in its 11th hour that fail to resonate because the game's story is so minimalistic. It's impossible to really understand or care about our characters because we spend so little time with them and have so little invested in their struggles. Naturally, the only trick the game has left is to boil down these struggles into one dimensional symbols like 'family' that can be cheaply resonated with despite lacking any meaningful elaboration on the topics at hand.

Even with the basic narrative theming Somerville has going for it, the game manages to blow it. Although the aliens approach is banal for cinematic platformers (Another World, Oddworld, Flashback, Heart of Darkness, etc.), many felt it fresh for the gaming environment of 2022. And even I'll admit, Somerville's opening--a casual countryside family hangout interrupted by alien invasion--is a great start to the game. McPherson Tape shenanigans aside though, Somerville spends most of its second act (a sizeable chunk of playtime) in an abandoned underground mine--bereft of any meaningful alien influence. Instead, players are left with repetitive environments and tedious puzzles that feel like filler to pad time between the more interesting first and third act.

Blackthorne (Christ, Hurry Up!)

Beyond narrative, the gameplay choices in Somerville are also often egregious. The player's movement speed is often swapped without any input from the player in order to suit the cinematic quality of the scene. As a consequence, you'll often go from a full sprint to a molasses pace without any understanding as to why. Although arbitrarily altering player control is bad as it is, the game will often fail to even be consistent in its own logic. Sometimes you'll be sprinting during a random no-stress puzzle and practically crawling while your life is on the line. No matter the situation, the lack of control is frustrating and textbook "how not to design movement" in a game centered around movement.

The puzzles also suffer from the same complaints you'll see strewn about most reviews. They often land either in 'braindead easy,' 'how was I supposed to even see that thing?' or the 'this is the stupidest shit I've ever seen' categories. Unfortunately, the puzzle sweet spot for cinematic platformers is, at least in my opinion, practically impossible to achieve by design--so Somerville is arguably no worse than other games, but it's certainly also no better either.

Heart of Darkness (Is There Anything Left For Cinematic Platforming?)

So what do I even mean by 'impossible' by design? And why do I have so many problems with this genre to begin with? Well for starters, beyond the raw innovations to platforming and pioneered by Jordan Mechner with Prince of Persia and narrative presentation by Éric Chahi with Another World, I'd say the cinematic platformer has failed to develop any new consistent ideas. As a consequence, the games are left to rely on their aesthetic values--to a fault. As graphics have progressed, the visual flairs that defined early cinematic platformers have been rendered irrelevant, which means that the games have had no choice but to lean in even harder on aesthetics.

As a consequence, we have titles obsessed with their hyper-minimal narratives and shallow gameplay all in the service of looking cinematic. Unfortunately directors like Olsen fail to understand that the incessant pursuit of cinematic immersion almost always comes at the cost of gameplay immersion. In order for the visual designer to preserve their high quality cinematography, players will be left fumbling around the screen spamming *X on every object they can (or can't) see in hopes it's that 'one thing' they need for their puzzle. In order for the designer to not remind you* that you're playing a game, players will redo the same life-or-death encounter twenty times while trying to guess what the hell they're supposed to do to survive. And, in order for a director to mimic their favorite movies, all good ludonarrative conventions are ignored in favor of twisting the player's arm to care about characters who they spend less time with than certain youtube ads.

I think, all in all, I despise the modern cinematic platformer more than almost any other genre (outside of inherently exploitive ones like gacha) because cinematic platformers are ashamed to be video games. They sacrifice crucial foundational gameplay decisions all in the pursuit of cheap artistic vanity. Early titles like Prince of Persia had the benefit of being technological showcases and (for the time) a breath of fresh air. But Limbo, and the horde of knockoffs it spawned have done nothing but encourage the creation of titles that make you press right on your thumbstick while being fed some of the most trite narratives you've ever seen--even if they look great while doing it.

Ironically enough, despite the genre (and Somerville's) aims, the cinematic platformer is like the cinematic equivalent of pointing a static camera at a stageplay: the story and acting might be great, but any movie director would tell you it's nothing but a waste of a film.