A Realm Reborn is a necessary, albeit, incredibly tough pill to swallow for anyone who is wanting to enter the world of Final Fantasy XIV. While a fun game when you are playing the dungeons and bosses, it is a game that is bogged down by needless padding, boring exposition, a shit ton of content that you will need to engage with in one way or another, and the general unfavourable task of being a game put together from a legendary disaster. But they got the ship in condition, and its time to move forward with your MMO, what’s next?

Heavensward is pretty much a straight improvement on A Realm Reborn. The first thing that happens is that Alphinaud’s voice actor immediately changes, as well as the entire cast, and it is almost a complete net positive across the board. The writing is tighter, the pacing flies by, the social aspect… okay it's basically the same, but for the sake of this, it felt better! XIV is a tough game to explain the general appeal of in terms of segments without just giving away story segments and boss battles, but Heavensward ups the stakes of the best part of the game in a major way. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I am now fully converted.

I should say I’ve technically been done with Heavensward for like a month or so, and I’ve been waiting for the right time to truly “complete” it, and doing all the excellent post game content over the course of a month has truly made me fall in love with this one. One of the best soundtracks I’ve ever the pleasure to experience, there is a goblin rap with time centered music ques. It is has been an absolute wild ride. A Realm Reborn sort of knocked the wind out of me, but Heavensward is just an absolute triumph. I can’t wait to see where the XIV journey continues to lead from here on.

Time travel meets Jack Reacher.

I want to preface this by saying I played on PC Gamepass and it ran like absolute ass for some reason (Alan Wake 2 ran well on my set up for reference) so my judgment might be clouded. But even with that in mind, I think a lot of my problems aren't necessarily with the gameplay. Gunplay in this one can be really fun, and messing around with the time powers zipping around and using time powers is fun. But this suffers the fate of being an early eight generation game with a lot of ambition on its plate. Every interesting decision is really undermined by how undercooked everything is. When you aren't doing pretty decent third person shooter arena fights, you're going at a snails pace as characters in the game say "Hmmm, I wonder if theres an entrance round here."

The timeloop is well fleshed out, but its really hard to care about that when most of the characters are very one note, only elevated by mostly decent performances. With Aidan Gillen (I'm CIA) and Lance Reddick (Rest in Peace) picking up slack. Anytime they were on screen I perked up, but the writing in this one feels so flaccid in this one. Not helped by the fact that the optional written text/audio in emails and radio is mindnumbling long in this one. Anytime I bothered to read it felt like I was completely distracting from game flow. And that is to say nothing of the well-shot but ultimately very uninteresting television aspect of the series (of which it wouldn't load properly on PC Gamepass, this was a Microsoft funded project).

I think there are cool things in this game, but a lot of them can be found in other Remedy works before and after. Might be worth your time if you think it'd be up your alley, but I'm glad Remedy has made more interesting works after this one.

I reckon waxing on about what a game like Undertale meant for someone like me as a somewhat emotionally stunted and depressed teenager on a review for something like this is preaching to the choir. Undertale was a game that came at the perfect time in my life, at the time it felt like the perfect game to me, and while I suppose it isn’t that, it might as well still be for me. I survived the “cringe trenches” of 2016-17 of a bunch of mostly harmless teenagers (like myself at the time) making AUs, remixes, fan-art, the works that made a lot of very strange people upset, before Deltarune and cultural reflection inevitably made Undertale cool again. Truth be told, as someone who was heavily invested in Undertale when I was younger, I never really paid any of the fanworks outside of strictly the main game much of a fair shake. Not sure why, I’m not exactly above that sort of material, but I just never found the interest. That said, of course I heard of Undertale Yellow at the time, and hearing of it releasing last year was something I knew I had to check out.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way, at least for me. Writing and music wise, this is definitely a peg below Toby Fox’s work. This is not a negative mind you. I think the game does a fantastic job of carving out its own niche while still keeping the spirit of the world that I fell in love with. And comparing a fanwork to its original is always going to be a tough uphill battle to overcome. Undertale Yellow is a game that fundamentally understands the general appeal of the original’s tone, and makes its own very unique spin to feel refreshing and familiar. The main cast of this game took some time to fully win me over, but towards the latter half, I really enjoyed what they brought to the table. Especially Starlow, who I reckon is a character about on the same caliber as some of the main cast of the original, which is a tough feat to overcome. The game also very smartly ditches almost all of the main cast of the game to mentions or a brief appearance, with the exception of Flowey, who is a smidge more toned down (at least in Pacifist) but still has some real shit eater energy.

With that out of the way, the real star of Yellow is undeniably its presentation and gameplay. They not only nailed the look, tone, and feel of what made its source material so good, but they really made it into a much more polished and refined work, that you only can really get from a team who love that world. Undertale is a shitty looking game a lot of the time, so even just seeing an actual run animation on the main protagonist is a big shock. While there is undeniably something that can be argued as being lost from the intentionally trashy look of the original, it is done with such passion, and more importantly confidence in itself that you come to respect its own vision. Boss fights in particular are a real treat in this game, both on a visual and mechanical level. They really do an amazing job differentiating the roster with some incredible sprite work that definitely outmatches the original in terms of visual fidelity, but some amazing backgrounds to boot. And fighting them is definitely on par with the original, although, I would say it never quite reaches those same high notes, it does come fairly close, and I think that is mighty commendable.

I think there is a natural apprehension towards fan made material of a well-known IP. Again, I remember high school, that sort of stigma is what made Undertale a “cringe game” to so many people. And in a lot of ways, I do understand where many folks are coming from. When people are passionate about a work, sometimes it can come off as strange, corny, very juvenile in a lot of aspects; and when something is extremely popular, that automatically means that the large size of that audience is going to attract more of some unsavory behaviors. Some of it can be more justified than others, but seeing how so many people 180’d on this game in particular always struck me as an example of how fucking stupid it all was. And seeing a game like Yellow, which can only have been made because of that community, come out almost a decade after the original’s release and capture hearts all over again warms my heart. There were times towards the beginning when I was waiting for the game to truly click with me the same way the original did, and attempting to enter my critical analysis mode, but overtime, this game made me remember why I loved Undertale so much to begin with. There is a charm to this game, that no other game has quite ever been able to replicate for me, maybe never will (outside of Deltarune) and that is okay. People are passionate, people will continue to love, and people will continue to create out of love, and I think that is a beautiful thing.

I think on an absolute technical level, Cry of Fear still feels monumental. The fact that this is a mod of the original Half-Life is absolutely mindboggling even now, even if the game's ambition definitely shows how much they have to push that engine with bugginess and crashes definitely being a hurdle to overcome. I think its easy to excuse those shortcomings though, this game is a technical marvel, helped by the fact that its a solid game ontop of that.

I know a lot of people are in love with this game's narrative, which I respect, I am an Omori fan, I am not in the wheelhouse of downplaying the impact a game had on them lol. I will say for me personally, the writing of this is competent, but never got past the immaturities that I sort of associate the early 2010s with. In some aspects, that is part of its appeal, and I think when it veers into the straight self-hatred horror, it does work a lot more than when its trying to have some deeper meaning to it. Not that I don't respect what it is attempting to do, and the soundtrack really does some good heavy lifting to not make those moments feel important, even if I never quite got there.

What this game is, however, is scary. It is very jumpscarey which is going to turn off some people. But its a decade after release now. This game geniunely made me scared to go through certain sections of game through great sound design and really great jerky animations courtesy of the engine its running off of. I was tense just about every step of the way, and the game's jankiness and excellent visual design really made this game a true nightmare to go through. Never before has Sweden looked so grimy and truly heinous to slog through.

While I wouldn't call Cry of Fear a masterpiece, I would call it a great horror game, in a weird timespace where the genre was starting to find its footing again, but wasn't quite refined to where it is now. Cry of Fear is messy in parts, but its that way because its an ambitious daring game that went all the way, and mostly delivered. Absolutely worth a revisit now that the Let's Play era has died down and we can appreciate what a piece of work it is.

Played this on and off while on vacation, and it did its job of being a competent fun little game during my downtime. I respect that this game, and honestly the whole Resident Evil series right now is so self sufficient they can make a whole bunch of titles without skimping on the quality too badly, which I think makes this remake’s shortcomings a bit more obvious. I have no real problem with them reusing assets or the shorter length in theory, but in practice, going back to the Raccoon Police Department with big chunks blocked off with barricades was a little sad to see. Doesn’t help that Nemesis is somehow more annoying and less prevalent than Mr. X which is honestly just bizarre to me given its the entire focus of the game.

That all said, this game isn’t nothing. Production value is still high, I think the more action oriented gameplay does turn this into the easiest Resident Evil but its still plenty satisfying. And seeing Raccoon City with all these bright colours and dingy locales was really cool. Jill and Carlos also make a fun duo for this one. And when you aren’t spending full price for it, and go in knowing what it is, it is a fun enough time. Unfortunately not much else to say about it though, it already had to compare with the excellent remake of 2 and now its sandwiched inbetween it and 4’s remake which is absolutely brutal. But sometimes, a fun little diversion can hit nicely.

Writing about a game like Chrono Trigger after completing it on your first go is honestly a truly daunting task. In the history of video games, finding games that are truly beloved are a rare feat, as even most of the most acclaimed games often have some form of detractors to it in some form or another. But in many ways, Chrono Trigger has not just held up as a memorable JRPG classic, but as simply one of the greatest games of all time, and one that just about everyone who has played it loves. I’m entering the conversation very late, it's been a bucket list game of mine for a while, and now that I’m here, finding what I want to say is honestly a bit difficult.

I think what I can say about it is that this game is an absolute king of simplicity. I’ve been playing many of the Squaresoft era JRPGs recently to fill out this sore blindspot in my backlog history, and it truly is unlike any other streak. Not just amazing games, but absolute classics left and right, with some new flavour to constantly reinvent and fresh the genre. Chrono Trigger, might be the absolute apex of what Square could do at the time. Having both creators of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest at the helm for a major JRPG project is something that is honestly unheard of even today, and the mastery of the genre that everyone displayed previously, is on masterful display here. A perfectly paced, fun, and constantly engaging time travel story, that has simple to understand characters that constantly grow throughout the story. It isn’t complicated, it doesn’t need to be. I think the secret in the sauce that makes Chrono Trigger so beloved is that it knows what it is, and does not waste your time, just as eager to show the goods as you are to see them.

Think it helps that as far as JRPG casts go for the era, a really fun and surprisingly fleshed out one! No character is very complicated to understand, but all of them get arcs that go throughout most of the entire game, and each of the main party members get an end game side quest to end their stories. Simple, to the point, but you’re always anticipating what comes next, which for an RPG is always going to be an important aspect. That is to say nothing of maybe my favourite “character” of the entire game, the central threat; Lavos.

I think Lavos doesn’t get enough attention for how absolutely terrifying it is. A parasitic alien, constantly sucking away at the planet, and has been since the dawn of man itself. One that is attempted to abuse the power of, only for it to come crashing down, make it more angry, and end the world as we know it as a result. One with no seeming consciousness other than never ending growth, and maybe the most horrifying sound to come of the SNES’ soundchip. The threat of Lavos, which is a classic JRPG where you kill God trope, feels especially relevant today as a metaphor for the incoming climate disaster, and the way that those in power try to abuse the planet’s drain for their own gain. It is a surprisingly poignant point for such an often not talked about JRPG antagonist, and it really stuck with me.

There is a lot to love in Chrono Trigger. I struggle to talk about the Squaresoft SNES games because I think a lot of what makes them such beloved games is that they pretty much speak for themselves. Toriyama’s art direction, when combined with the gorgeous sprite work, is one of the console’s best looking games. The gameplay is fast paced and fluid, and you’re pretty much always encouraged to see what is coming next, very rarely ever needing to grind. And an absolutely undeniable soundtrack to boot. I mean, its Chrono Trigger! Even if you don’t fancy yourself much one for JRPGs, I think this is one that should be on any self respecting gamer’s bucket list. Even well after the fact, and with barely anything else to its name but a PSX sequel, it is still a much beloved and cherished member of the JRPG library. And it’ll likely shock you with just how much it still has up its sleeve.

Lives and dies by the rule of cool.

I'm not super familiar with Jet Set Radio (a factor I will have to correct in the future) but this loving homage to the series lived up to its lofty expectations and then some. I know some have critiqued its length to price ratio, which I do understand, but this felt like a perfect bite sized experience to have while I was out of town. And that soundtrack is truly undeniable, that alone is surely worth the price of admission. We live in a world now with a new Jet Set Radio game on the seeming horizon, and all I can say is that its got some pretty steep competition now. Here's to the one that goes All City!

Lies of P's initial reaction was definitely one of the more funny game announcements in recent memory. A soulsborne styled game in the world of Pinocchio. And the game's title is absolutely clunky. Lies of P is such a slapdashed title, I have to respect it. I, like most others, probably didn’t think much about it, other than knowing I’d likely play it at some point because I am a massive Pinocchio fan, so something like this, I got to check out. Yeah, can’t say I expected this game to actually get a ton of critical acclaim, which is really cool, and definitely made me more anticipated to check this one out.

This game is very cute, and very competent. It basically sets out on its main mission of making a solid playing Bloodborne clone. And to its credit, it does a decent job of differentiating itself gameplay wise, with a weapon mix and matching system, an arm replacing your gun, and most importantly, a Sekiro inspired parry and stance gauge. I don’t think all these functions marry into one another super well, which I’ll get into later, but the actual gameplay mostly works pretty well. Definitely scratched a Bloodborne itch after three years after it started my Souls like addiction that led to me playing all the Fromsoft titles.

The decision to make this entirely inspired by Pinocchio truly is what makes this game stand out however. Like it or not, this absolutely batshit decision is definitely the highlight of the game, and for me, it was definitely the best part of the game. Seeing familiar faces like Honest John become like for trade kidnappers is fun. It even made Jiminy Cricket as annoying as ever, truly dedicated to the source material! It is fucking stupid, the fact that the best ending of the game is titled “Rise of P” is a truly brainmelting moment, but it delivers in its self-serious spectacle with earnestness and I admire that a lot.

Now, I know a lot of people put this game in high contention with the other Fromsoft titles. Look, I wish I was there with them. I don’t see it. The second half of this game almost guarantees I wouldn’t. After you encounter the King of Puppets, I feel like the game completely hikes the difficulty in a way that I did not find enjoyable at all. As someone who has pretty recently played every title in Fromsoft’s catalog, there can be a lot to criticize in those titles, but even the most brutal stretches of Elden Ring or Dark Souls III did not feel like this. Lies of P is pretty easy in the first two thirds of the game, and then it feels like every fight is asking you to become Sekiro, when you were playing Bloodborne with training wheels. I do not think the levels give you the preparation needed for those boss encounters, and a lot of the last handful of fights especially are truly abysmal in terms of my overall enjoyment. The final boss did a lot to mitigate my irritation, and gamer rage, but I truly hated how nearly every fight in this game felt the need to have two phase two health bar spectacles. A trick that should be saved for twice per game at most, not nearly every mandatory encounter.

Lies of P is very messy, but overall, I did enjoy it! I wish I loved it. There is a lot here that is cute, and there is obviously a lot of competency on display here. I think this game could make for an excellent sequel, and I hope for this studio’s sake, they get that opportunity. Even if I don’t love the game, I’m more than glad it exists and that it made such a splash. Seeing absolutely over the top concepts like this get success is a net good, and I support the endeavor to make literary soulslikes from here on. I hope we can get a Humpty Dumpty boss fight where he turns into The Yolk of Life or some shit in one of these games soon.

This review will mainly be concerning A Realm Reborn, and not Final Fantasy XIV as a whole; just want to get that out of the way off the bat.

It cannot be understated what an absolute success story that Final Fantasy XIV has been for Square Enix. It is at once, an underdog story into an absolute titan of the modern gaming landscape, essentially one of a select few, and dwindling crowd of MMORPGs, and of them, it is barely a competition of which one is on top. And all of this came after one of the worst conceivable launches of a game in history. I think in many ways, we forget how devastating the initial launch of Final Fantasy’s second go at the genre truly was. A boring, poorly controlling slog of a grindfest that alongside an ongoing disdain of the franchise at the time through games like XIII and general internet reactionary thought of “weird japanese games” this once historic franchise was at its arguable lowest point.

A Realm Reborn, in many regards, is a miracle game. While indeed, reusing what they could salvage from the original release, this was a from the ground up start from scratch. A game that is essentially putting together a last ditch effort to make something worthwhile from some truly rotten ingredients. All in a very strict schedule of just a couple of years, including the ending of the original game that becomes the basis for the entirety of the rest of XIV. And miraculously, it succeeded, and would only continue to succeed more and more. A new expansion is on the horizon this year, and after its wildly popular conclusion to its decade long story, it feels like a celebration to truly appreciate how far it has come.

All of this is well and good. And with that context, it becomes a lot easier to appreciate what A Realm Reborn is. That being said, as anyone can attest to who has played it; it is a tough pill to swallow. While XIV is an incredibly fun game when you’re going through dungeons, testing out job classes, and fighting bosses; this game is about as rough as it can get. Much of the meat of the game’s main campaign is about as basic as it can get, following mostly boring fetch quests that even now the team is still weeding out, a decade after the fact. Dialogue that you at some point realize you can just skip and understand what is going on just fine, and a distinct lack of polish, and many points where it feels like you aren’t doing much of anything, it certainly lacks a lot of the luster that the future expansions have seemingly been able to boast.

That said, when you do get the opportunity to actually participate in this game, by golly is it a lot of fun. I’m not particularly familiar with the genre, but XIV is such a social game, and trying out the different classes and running the many dungeons the game has to offer is a treat. Even this early on, Masayoshi Soken, the game’s composer is already a highlight of the game. Making some of the best compositions in a series that might just be the crown jewel of video game soundtracks, with not just beautiful fantastical pieces, but a wide variety of musical styles, genres, and tones. This matches well with the game’s gorgeous art direction which, while at times feeling bland, are laboured over with such attention to detail and weird little quirks that make them instantly recognizable. And the game does get to end on an incredible note, with a final confrontation that feels as epic as something like this could be leading up to. After doing shit like having to search for wine ingredients, having a satisfying final confrontation with a big ass weapon is satisfying, and well earned.

But that is not the end of A Realm Reborn, oh no, there is an entire post game, about the length of the regular campaign waiting for you. Somehow the post game suffers almost the exact same cycle that the base game does, with a particularly grueling first half being a section of game that even with my understanding of the game’s creation, I still cannot defend, even with some fun trials. But after a while, you can tell the reigns are in control. Literally the instant you fight one of the game’s bosses, the game is in full swing, and it starts to get going, and it is really good, ending yet again, on another fantastic climax. Leading up to the next expansion, and where XIV truly becomes what it is today. While I have only just barely started Heavensward yet at the time of writing this, you can notice the difference in quality almost immediately, and it has me jazzed. But this is not that story, at least not yet.

A Realm Reborn, is a mess, the best part of the game I experienced was a reworked solo boss fight that only got put in as of late 2021; nearly an entire decade after its initial launch. It is boring, clunky, very bloated and was even more so on its release, and yet in spite of all of that, it does work, it is compelling. While I have pretty close to no desire to return to it, as I’m sure many of XIV’s playbase would agree with, it needs to be celebrated for what it is. A momentous turn around of a true failure of a game. There is an argument to be had that XIV might be on the same level of success as VII is at, and that simply would not be possible if A Realm Reborn was truly the sum of its worst parts. I think it helps that this, along with two other expansions that are essentially full games, just are free to play, with almost little to no strings attached to the offer as well, making that initial tough sell, a lot easier to swallow when you aren’t paying a dime for it. And there is a reason they even can do that, it's because the team behind the game isn’t just confident, but they very obviously love what this game has become. This is the definitive modern gaming underdog story, and while not perfect, playing this with a friend and dicking about MSQ is something I wouldn’t trade for the world. Heavensward is almost certainly going to blow my socks off, but for now. Yeah. I guess I do like XIV, you weird little game you.