I usually spend a half an hour or so every week sitting next to Gary's sister. I used to get such a raging boner when she'd give me the map, knowing that her brother would hate it, but that her connection with me was more important. He was out there, autistically raising his Pokemons' power levels, while I was at home sitting next to his hot piece-of-ass sister, smelling her hair, looking forward to getting a map that she once held in her soft hands. It's such a purity and elegance in the relationship that none of the later games captured. She was always the real motivation to beat the Elite Four. To come back to Pallet, worldly and experienced, finally putting down her brother in the worst way, to rightfully claim her patient body.
I also really like the safari zone; it's fun trying to find all of the Pokemon and items before the time runs out, while having to use unconventional capture techniques.

Do the graphics suck? Yes.
Does it run like shit? Yes.
Do the load times suck? Yes.
Are all the assets reused? Yes.
Is this one of the most unique, creative and fun games in the franchise? Absolutely.

Lightning Returns's unique structure, combat and customization make it a total joy to experience. The key is how well all aspects of the game work with each other.

You want to do sidequests because aside from getting their cool little subplots you earn stats, equipment and extra in-game days with more quests, rewards and things to do. You're on a timer, so you want to get good at the combat because defeating hard enemies means being able to stop time for longer periods.

How do you get good at the combat? By playing the game! Experiment with the garbs, accessories and commands to find the most efficient way at defeating every enemy type. You'll not only get a lot of drops to complete sidequests and improve your commands but you'll also eventually make the monster extinct and earn a new (and usually very good) accessory or weapon along with materials to upgrade your commands to the next tier.

In sum: we have a really fun combat system that's extremely rewarding in every way which complements the extremely rewarding sidequest system which again furthers your combat options and capabilities.

The flow of the game feels very organic, I wanted to do things because they were fun and by doing fun things I unlocked even more fun things while also being handsomely rewarded in the process and understanding how I should play the game more efficiently bit by bit. Earning 100% feels more like a side effect rather than a goal, which to me is great design. I really loved this game and everyone should give it a fair shot, you might love it too.

I was already expecting a really emotionally packed banger after seeing the My Way trailer but they really went above and beyond and executed it flawlessly. There’s a genuinely challenging and extremely fun game here too.

Nothing beat my ass harder than Garland in the original beta version but the same great boss design is all over this game. I wholly recommend playing with party members off on hard difficulty for the best experience. My only real complaint is the level design is lacking but there are some strokes of genius here and there and the FF aesthetics and music mostly alleviate issues.

We can all learn something from Jack, do it your way.

This game looks really cool at a glance and the roster is insane but when actually playing it you’ll be met with one of the worst SRPGs you’ll ever touch.

Initially the stages are very short but soon after finishing the 5 prologue stages you’ll be met with increasingly longer and longer stages, capping out at about two hours for the majority of the game but the last two stages took me about three hours a pop. My final in-game time was 77 hours. This averages out to about an hour and a half per stage, of which there are a whopping 50 (including the prologue).

Almost every stage in this game feels like an eternity because the reinforcements just keep piling on and you’ll frequently see bosses from previous stages reused over and over in nearly every stage. Due to how the systems work it’s not really possible to play this while giving it a small piece of attention too, I’ll talk about them later.

On the story: it sucks. The main plot is very barebones and the whole thing can be told in a short paragraph without losing any meaning. So why does this game have so much fucking text? Well it’s apparently really important to explain how all these characters are crossing over and what worlds they are from. Fun crossover interactions you’d expect take a backseat to the total mess that is the lore of this game. They are still present though and they’re quite good when you see them. That said, usually all you get is random plot points or key terms/items from various origin games being thrown around and the game pretends it all makes sense, but it just comes off as lame. I should also mention here that the only English patch for this game has an absolutely terrible translation with mistakes and inconsistencies everywhere. You won’t have trouble understanding anything but it’s really subpar and feels like a machine translation. In fact, it probably is mostly machine translation.

Some quick positives I can hand it though: the characters abilities and attacks are very well represented within the combat and the sprites are quite good. Some are better than others but they’re mostly good. The tales of destiny duo has easily the best animations, with the tekken characters and kos-mos not far behind. As I mentioned before, the roster is insane. There's a ton of obscure IPs most people would never have heard of represented and this got me interested in looking into some of them.

Whenever a character gets their turn you get to hear a song from their origin game, a lot of these are very unfitting in this context and I can only think of a few that weren’t grating after a handful of levels using a specific character. To add insult to injury a lot of characters share songs too. Enemies always use the same enemy phase song until a few select moments nearing the end of the game.

Now for the last stretch of this review I’m going to talk exclusively about the gameplay and why it’s so unpleasant to play this. I'm going to explain the key systems that are unique to this game and why they suck.

The game superficially functions like you’d expect an SRPG to. You move your units around on a map divided into a grid to defeat the various enemies. The most important systems to know for playing this game are AP and SP. Almost every action in this game costs AP, moving, attacking, ending your turn. Units have a maximum of 10 AP and when a unit has 10 AP it is their turn (or they get put next in line behind other units that already had 10 AP). AP is replenished by being attacked and making the correct inputs in the defense sequence. AP is also replenished over time as turns pass.

When you are attacked the game has to load into the combat mode and you need to pay attention to what you need to input as you watch the enemy spam the same attacks 6-10 times. Now here’s where SP comes in as well. By attacking or being attacked you will gain SP. With max SP you can use your super (this goes for both allies and enemies) otherwise most characters also have counters and perfect guards which cost 30 SP and 10 SP respectively + 1 AP (this pushes the units turn back). Enemies need full AP to counter or perfect guard, and if they have one they will always use it when attacked, pushing their turn back in the queue and wasting your turn. The only difference between these two defensive actions is that a counter deals a bit of damage. Enemies generally also gain AP when they get hit (their turn comes sooner).

Now for attacking, every time you attack an enemy the game has to load into the combat sequence, you see an intro line and then you can attack. Characters are divided into melee, ranged and both. Characters with both have two separate movesets for when they’re attacking from each position. For every moveset that units possess, they have 5 attacks, executed by pushing O and O while holding a direction on the dpad. Each character also has a super, but if they’re a hybrid unit it may only be on one of their movesets. Early on they will actually only have 3 moves and some are repeated for different inputs. They’ll be able to attack 5 or 6 times. As characters level up they will gain more hits per attack sequence and their full distinct movesets. Every attack in this game also has an elemental affinity, there are 6 elements and every allied unit and every enemy has their own distinct elemental weaknesses and resistances. Move effectiveness is shown on the pre-battle screen.

During the combat sequence your objective is to juggle the enemy as well as you can. Getting lots of hits will give you various rewards that are rewarded as you achieve certain consecutive hit counts. You can get extra combo hits, extra SP gain, extra stun inflicted, extra damage and item drops. You can get these multiple times and they all stack. What you get here is random as far as I can tell. If you use all of a characters moves once during your attack sequence you’ll gain a HP or MP boost, this is also random so you can get MP when your MP is full and your HP is not and vice-versa. This can be activated multiple times provided you can execute the moves enough. Besides keeping the enemy in the air for more combo hits you want to hit the enemy just as they are going to hit the ground, or right after they bounced off it. Executing either of these will add a damage boost to those hits. One bounce is forgiven and does not cut your combo counter short.

Where do I stand on all this? The comboing is quite fun and defending is engaging enough. The units movesets are very varied and unique a lot of the time. This is where the positives end. The AP and SP systems only serve to make the game more tedious as opposed to having traditional turns. Requiring player input at every single attack and defense sequence makes stages extremely long. It gets extremely lame to play a decent combat system when you’re forced to do it so many times it gets boring over the course of a typical stage's length. It can feel rewarding at times to pull off combos, but at the end of the day units levels, stats and elemental affinities make way more of a difference than how good you are at combos. The elemental affinities are total nonsense because of how true they are to the characters real abilities from their origin game. Most of these characters are martial artists from tekken or street fighter, a massive amount of enemies resist their type of damage resulting in them being tanky for no real good reason. Bosses also typically have a bunch of resistances for no reason other than to make them tankier and their HP is already higher due to being bosses. The character balancing is also extremely poor, characters like kos-mos and captain commando absolutely tear through the game like it’s nothing, others like bruce, fong and bravoman are near useless even when leveled up, this can mostly be traced back to their attacks' elements but there’s also a major disparity in raw stats, abilities and general moveset strength. Hitting enemies makes their turn come sooner, enemies hitting you makes your turn come sooner, what is even the point? There is no interesting map design at any time in this game.

The maps are nearly all huge open fields with no sort of terrain, when there is some sort of terrain it’s hardly utilized or interesting. The AI never uses the map to their advantage in any way or has any sort of design, it just attacks the nearest thing it can reach making it trivial to exploit. No stage is difficult, but there are always endless reinforcements. To add insult to injury they typically begin with a handful of enemies and you’d think oh, this is fine. After defeating a few enemies you’ll usually get a character saying something like “Hey we’re almost done!” and bam, reinforcements. This will happen at least 2 or 3 times in every single stage and yes, with only 2 or 3 exceptions in 50 stages, the clear objective is to defeat all the enemies.

In sum, for the minimum 75 hour duration of Namco x Capcom you’ll be: fighting your way through a combat system that hardly rewards good play and takes forever to get anything done, circumventing the AP/SP system as much as you can, easily exploiting terrible AI, listening to the same handful of songs on repeat and MAYBE catching a glimpse of a neat crossover interaction on the way.

Game that gets a ton of shit for wrong reasons, the cast is the most consistent in the series as a whole and individually they all set a decently high bar. The ATB system coupled with the Paradigm Shift system for the battles in this game are very polished, unfortunately the main game does not really require pushing it to its limits or experimenting too far with it. The side bosses do however and going for 5 stars on all 64 missions + fighting Long Gui/Adamantoise was very fun. The crystarium is a budget sphere grid but that is a very high bar anyway, it's a fine level up system. The story itself is not too interesting on its own but when coupled with the world and characters you're in for one of the most engaging FF stories there is. Props to the graphics as well, not something I really care for in general but this game stands out and still looks amazing today.