Fun, but not remotely funny or satirical - beyond some witless Team America-style exaggeration with no punchlines - which makes its similarities to Starship Troopers surface level at best. It's also dispiriting how much this plays like a corporate rebranding of Earth Defense Force with all the charm sucked out - more "balanced" or whatever, but who cares? Above-average AAA slop is still slop.

The kind of proudly stupid work of outsider art that I'm nostalgic for. It still stands out, years later, mostly because it's surprisingly functional as an RPG and motivated by genuine anger towards a stale genre. Great soundtrack.

Rating's essentially meaningless, as the first two discs or so are peak Final Fantasy, and the back half sadly plummets into the convoluted nonsense that turns me off most JRPGs. What makes this franchise special is the way that gameplay is so often weaved into storytelling - there's narrative tension, for instance, in how this game introduces all its characters (from lowly thieves to high royalty - the Shakespearean aspirations couldn't be clearer), brings them together into a party - then uses big events like "the destruction of a city" to split them apart, jump through time, tell an episodic story through environment and NPC dialogue. The ATE system is amazing - being able to choose between lovely little scenes that deepen the characters and world without shouldering the burden of being "necessary" to the narrative makes them all the more impactful. And the characters are so vivid - Vivi and Steiner, in particular, are cartoonish types that deepen without betraying their established essence - the theatrical performances that bookend the narrative couldn't be more perfect for a game so adept at small-scale dramas.

So why do we have to travel between dimensions and defeat God? Again? Final Fantasy VII earned its planet-sized ambition, but it doesn't fit here - once you get to freely choose your party and the dull villains (never the best part of these games) take centre stage, all the air goes out of the balloon. It doesn't help that the game has virtually no interest in the fundamentals of the genre - battles are perfunctory (and incessant), the card game is stupider than ever, the side quests mostly involving catching frogs, etc etc. Perhaps VII's success trapped the company into catering to expectations, but I wish it hadn't. There's such mastery in its visual storytelling, tone, music - even translation this time around - that I wish it played to its strengths throughout.

Found this off-putting at first, doing that high fantasy thing of referencing names before we can put them to faces, then presenting a dense thicket of betrayals and shifting allegiances that never quite satisfies. (Could be a PS1 translation issue, though I never had that problem with other Final Fantasies of this era, which are notably populated by a smaller number of intense personalities - this is recognisably a different authorial voice.) But the combat system - once it clicked - became incredibly addictive, a mind-boggling combination of Pokémon and chess. The big battle in the slums early on is a major obstacle that forces the player to pay attention to their players and every single move they make - and from then on, the game presents an impressive series of scenarios that display not just tactical but emotional variety, gamifying often complex human behaviour on its isometric stage. There’s a stage where you have to rescue a friendly character on a rooftop from assassins, and the character’s first instinct is to run headfirst into combat - which is frustrating (they die very quickly) until you realise that they’re emotionally affected by the events of the cutscene prior and therefore reckless, even suicidal. The game keeps finding ways to ground its tactical scenarios in concrete human realities, and if the magic evil stones business is ultimately less than satisfying, things do pay off with this devastating epilogue that’s tossed off after the end credits, but completes the narrative in a classically tragic sense. If this is a game about the human instinct to strategise - to acquire power, to overcome grief, to deny death - it concludes the same way WarGames does: the only winning move is not to play.

More so than any other Hideo Kojima game, this sees a divide between his talents as a video game developer and his original aspirations to be a film director. As a developer, I don't think he's ever been better. The gameplay loop is fantastic, creating a lonely world to be explored and populated by the ghosts of other players. The physics of parcel carrying are gratifyingly complex, and the environmental design is organic enough to make every journey and route feel original without ever becoming overwhelmingly dull or lacking in variation. The boss fights are unnecessary, but I think Kojima knows this - as it's such a leap into new territory, some elements of third-person action game design have been retained as a kind of compromise, to entice players who would never play an "art house" game.

Cinematically, it's more of a mixed bag. Along with Avatar: The Way of Water, it's certainly some of the most interesting use of motion capture I've ever seen. Léa Seydoux and Margaret Qualley are incredible, using their unique screen talents (Qualley used to be a ballerina, Seydoux is perhaps the most exciting actress to emerge in the past decade) to lean into the peculiarities of the process - treating it like black box theatre. And then there's Nicolas Winding Refn, giving an absolute void of a performance as Mr. Exposition, and Lindsay Wagner, whose thanklessly boring character the entire narrative hinges on. The Metal Gear games were appealingly episodic in their narratives, gaining a lot from the incongruous comparison between them and the American action movies that inspired them. Death Stranding is at its strongest in its early, individual character-focused chapters, but at a certain point it gets too lost in its own mythology, and Kojima's penchant for dream sequences overwhelms to the point of incomprehension. Still, easily the most singular and inspired game of its console generation. Bring on the sequel.

I love the structure, the slow, difficult progression of the first half spent inadvertently memorising an environment that gets (literally) flipped in the second half. You don't get a map when you get to the inverted castle - you just have to work it out from memory and familiar cues.

I also love the weirdness of each individual enemy, and the sheer volume of them. It's an excessive game, the last gasp of 2D before 3D became king, which means it's actually dated rather well. It's boring to say that all roads lead to Dark Souls, but this is its most obvious stylistic influence - hands off, surprisingly stat-driven, and eventually able to be broken in an appealing way.

Kirby by way of 3D Mario, replacing scattered power-ups with RPG-lite upgrades, some of which are ludicrously overpowered (the big sword that blocks all damage?) and others being simply, enjoyably ludicrous (a kind of suicide vest, duel-wielding pistols). Reasonably fun and imaginative, even if it rips off Mario Odyssey with the inanimate object possession and incongruously “realistic” setting, and shares that game’s same problem of over-cluttered busyness. Both suffer from the degradation of a corporate brand that once felt strange and singular (Kirby Super Star felt like it had been developed under the influence of LSD) and has now had the edges sanded off to appeal to a broader market. Also Kirby just isn’t as much fun to control as Mario, though he (?) is cuter, and this is the first mainline game in the series I’ve played that doesn’t feel insultingly easy. The boss fights might repeat themselves too much but there’s a care taken with attack variety and telegraphing that (hilariously) evokes Dark Souls, Kirby’s slow-mo dodge being an improbably cool cherry on that particular cake. My favourite in the series is still the golf one (Dream Course) - not sure if that’s controversial...

This review contains spoilers

So the greatest video game franchise of all time ends on a bit of a whimper. It’s still 90% of the way there, ditching much of the series’ lunatic theatrics for an addictive gameplay loop where war is a fun business. I like how this, like its predecessors, tries to reinvent the wheel, and while it’s similar to the (brilliant) Peace Walker - proceeding like a television show, with regular small-scale crises and a larger threat only occasionally making itself known - the overall trajectory is very different. The unfinished aspects almost help the game’s structure, as the unsatisfying Skull Face defeat gives way to diminishing returns, paranoia, and boredom, at which point the main character’s slide into villainy seems inevitable. It sometimes gets a bit Spec Ops: The Line with its unsubtle messaging - but I don’t hate that game (war games are inherently pro-military, it’s fair to criticise that) and moments like your base soldiers humming the Peace Walker theme before you shoot them are suitably chill-inducing.

That being said, the ending is terrible. It isn’t woven into the dramatic structure, it just happens - you suddenly replay the tedious hospital sequence with a new cutscene at the end. It’s a shame, because there’s something fascinating there about puppetry and identity and power - all key to the Metal Gear experience. There’s something powerful, too, about Quiet, the silent assassin who falls in love with the doppelgänger of the man she’s supposed to kill, whose silence is revealed as irrefutable proof of that. But the character design (and camera angles) are Kojima at his most openly misogynistic. (Thankfully there’s nothing quite as bad this time as Paz’s vagina bomb.) So 90% of the way there - which, as it turns out, is a pretty good game.

Likely the most absorbed I've been in a game in a long time (my playthrough clocked in at around 90 hours), so I might have just been so oversaturated by the end that I'm already underrating an instant classic. It reminded me less of Dark Souls than World of Warcraft, with an amazing variety of distinctive zones and enemies designed to catch you off-guard. Everything that's unbalanced and weird about it works in its favour, creating a world with loose rules designed to be broken - Margit is a barrier that teaches you to explore further, Rahdan teaches you that there's no shame in summoning, Malenia teaches you that life is unfair sometimes and then you die. An uncompromising investment in every one of Miyazaki/Fromsoft's pet themes, obsessions, and mechanics, with a real effort made with secondary characters this time around (Iron Fist Alexander MVP). Also just a bit overfamiliar, with a story so vague that it evaporates to nothingness by the end. I don't play these for narrative reasons, though Dark and Demon Souls had a clear purpose in mind with their downward, rotting trajectories, whereas this - with its huge map, buzzing with life - hardly feels like a world in decline. Still probably the coolest game ever made.

In some ways I think this suffers from being Ueda’s most conventional game: the idea is borderline Pixar, there’s a terrible didactic voiceover, and even the score sounds distractingly like Thomas Newman. On the other hand, every bit of frustration and jank is brilliantly incorporated into the game’s design, which takes the most mocked of video game objectives (the escort quest) and takes it to gigantic, spectacular heights, with one of the most convincing companion AIs ever devised. Also found the part where Trico thinks you’re (spoiler) so emotionally affecting I had to stop playing for a while. Which never happens.

A roguelike bullet hell-fusion that I blamed at first for having an intense difficulty based on luck. But it’s really about risk management. You could keep exploring for that perfect gun and perk, but what if you run into a difficult enemy that sets back your precious health bar? You could risk a malfunction that handicaps you in a negligible way, but what if it’s terminal? Very demoralising to play for long periods of time, as every death stings - and unlike Dark Souls, there’s no easy route back to a boss, demanding your full concentration on every run. Also a brilliant, complicated system with no wasted parts, rewarding experimentation and attention to detail. Ends weak, and I wish it didn’t even bother with a narrative, with the stilted horror sequences and ultimate reveal that it’s all a dream or about trauma or something taking the bloom off the rose a bit.

Starts off strong, with mercenaries in the Middle East, serious digressions on the war economy, and the genetic horror of Metal Gear Solid 2 taken to its logical end point. War machines braying like cows is wonderfully disturbing, and while the nanomachines are in some respects too-easy solutions to deus ex machina, the idea of every soldier and weapon being subjected to the whims of a cloud-based operating system (with no clear corporate owners) is obviously resonant. The balance between gameplay and cutscene shifts heavily towards the latter compared to earlier entries, but I was surprised by how little this bothered me - I treated it like a multimedia project, and the split-screens and ability to move around the cutscene space in briefings felt inspired, especially the (awesome) divided boss fight with Vamp and the Gekkos.

As is often the case with Kojima, though, a degree of sexism emerges, and the backslide from the (mostly brilliant) politics of Snake Eater is dramatic. A secondary character having her top irrationally unbuttoned the whole time soon pales compared to the Beauty and the Beast corps, some of the most ill-conceived characters I’ve ever seen in a game. It’s possible that these repetitive encounters - with a leering camera, skin-tight character designs, and stupid as shit writing - are a conscious protest against being forced to include fan-pleasing boss fights by corporate overlords. I don’t care - it doesn’t work and it’s gross.

But this grossness gets to the heart of the matter, really, which is that this is a game that seems to hate itself. Or at least the part of itself that glorifies war. While the others indulge in plenty of auteurist smuggling, offering nuanced critique of American foreign policy, nuclear warfare, genetics, etc, they are, on their surface level, entertaining - a power fantasy with guns and gadgets. There are more of those here than ever, but the fantasy is gone, Snake a hacking husk whose adventures are more grim and pointless than ever. How else to justify the awkward gunplay that barely bothers with setting up stealth situations, or the self-parodic repetition of past glories? The fact that the fan-despised Raiden is re-introduced as a supernaturally powerful ninja who ends up losing both his arms and holding his sword between his teeth is part and parcel with the camp ludicrousness of the series, and an indicator of something new - a resentment toward player expectation.

This even extends to the game’s hideous look, embracing the bloom-filled browns that now seem typical of the PS3 era. Perhaps it’s more fascinating now than it was at the time as a time capsule of a different era - a turbulent afterbirth of the War on Terror, and a franchise eating its own tale. The final, long cutscenes are true to form: excessive, silly, but also thoughtful and oddly moving. ("Snake had a hard life..." / "This is good, isn't it?") The worst Metal Gear game I’ve played, and still undeniably touched by genius.

The premise implies a procedural whodunnit, à la Phoenix Wright, but it's actually much stranger than that - it's closer to an open-world collect-a-thon, though one where almost every item is important, a key puzzle piece in an overarching mystery. Or rather several, interlinked mysteries; a multiple homicide and missing person at first, then followed by matters of break-ins, sacrifices, genealogy, demonic possession, fanaticism, and every suspect bearing a secret that may or may not implicate them in all of the above. Combine this with the Pynchonian naming conventions (Kafka Memory, anyone?), the vaporwave soundtrack, and a surfeit of red herrings to add flavour, and you have a very strange game, the type of which I've never really encountered before. Compared to Phoenix Wright, the immediate appeal is the freedom. You can visit the suspects in any order, revisit them with new evidence and testimony to uncover a fresh angle, or just keep exploring a gorgeously designed world map. It uses the uncanny nature of a lifeless game world to tie into its theme of religious hubris - the powerful rich using the powerless poor to create their own fantasy of perfection is given an effective, literal analogue here, and the writing is intelligent enough to trust us to understand this without pressing the point too hard. The main issue is that this all becomes clear within the first half of the game, and because of the player-created structure there isn't the same kind of momentum as a traditional whodunnit - the only tension is whether you can hoover up the last bits of evidence. And the trial is a big disappointment, too, especially given how it set up a difficult situation regarding sympathetic (but not blameless) participants in the crime, then sweeps any complications in character relationships under the rug with a truncated epilogue. Still, one of the most ambitious games of recent times - I can't imagine I'll forget it any time soon.

Great game if you enjoy pushing up on an analogue stick for 45 minutes.

This review contains spoilers

The flaws are obvious: 108 characters is just too many for one game to handle without feeling overstuffed, though I appreciate the efforts to make them all distinct, even if some end up as one-dimensional comic relief. I wasn't convinced by the best friend's betrayal, with the subsequent parallel narrative only glimpsed in occasional, underwritten cutscenes. The endings are curiously unsatisfying, too - perhaps all a result of a clumsy translation. And yet the game's appeal still shines through. It's uncommonly direct about politics and the devastation of war, and constantly ties it into the gameplay - hearing e.g. a village you regularly visit for items has been destroyed lends the story an extra degree of weight. The evolving home castle is a marvellous location, too. It's full of asides that deepen our relationship to the characters and the ideology of the main mission, culminating in the moving moment where "reinforcements" in a major battle are simply the vendors and NPCs coming to your aid. Not exactly a challenging game, and not quite as emotionally magnificent as something like Final Fantasy VI, but it shares with that one a precision in its 16-bit cutscene direction, revealing all manner of human detail with the smallest changes to its sprites.