A fun replay with the Mrs for spooky month. While its surprising how fine this game has aged, a part of me was thinking the entire playthrough, "Why don't I just play the remake?". Yet as I played I kept trying to figure out why a remake was even made for a game that can still scare me like it did when I played in 6th grade.

Dismemberment and the thrill of fighting off Necromorphs is still a tense feeling that makes the game for me. This time playing, though, I found myself not really scared as my wife was, but more so hyper fixated on the inner workings of the Ichimura. Issac being the repairman isn't talked about enough. Slowly fixing the ship and traveling to that Tram station made me feel like an accomplished mechanic. Seeing the debris cleared and rotors restarting gave me more accomplishment than fighting claw demons. For me, the necromorphs started to become a burden to my fun little space repairman game.

I'll be hopping into the rest of the series after finishing up some other titles.

The story intrigued me more than the gameplay. From the context of this originally being a budget downloadable title, the gameplay loop was novel. It was more fun though, trying to piece together the story and interpret below the surface level narrative.

The flashlight monsters were fun at first, but they were incessantly vicious. Getting caught by one often lead to me getting jumped to death. The inanimate Shadow monsters were the most annoying to fight because of the physics behind them, and sprinting through a pretty samey forest to a battle arena got tiresome quick. If it wasn't for the incredible story, I wouldn't even give this 3 Stars.

I don't even know where to begin to describe the mixed feelings I have about this game. On one hand, you have a game that's incredibly fun, albeit quirky. Upgrading the different gun parts and mismatching them to fit whatever needs you wanted were fun to me. The psuedo-light gun ass arenas never got dull. I was excited anytime I saw a giant group of enemies in the distance.

Even the dynamic of banking your points for leveling up or extra gil for upgrades was a fun trade-off. I had fun breaking this game. Maxing out the pistol and my favorite parts for it as quickly as I could to have this overpowered one shot revolver that can shoot thunder at any boss and kill it with ease is still satisfying even after starting my Ex-Hard Mode play through.

Then on the other hand, you have a terrible story. If it's not dropping its budget on beautiful CGI movies that don't really explain what the hell is happening, you have the dullest exposition dumps between characters. Even the characters are falling asleep reading it. Shelke as a character annoyed me every time she opened her mouth because her voice acting was chalkboard gratingly boring. The general plot isn't too convoluted or say hard to understand. It's just written poorly and paced even worse.

For my fun little shoot shoot game, I didn't expect to have 35-40 minute long cutscene breaks in between stages. Or even worse the airship level which is just running back and forth between characters to get cutscenes to even progress further. I almost want to call it pretentious. It can stand alone even if you never played FF7 (or like me, you played just the remake), but it wants to stab itself so deep into the minutia of FF7, and Its ending to be a complete epilogue.

The game got more fun in Ex-Hard mode when I could skip all the cutscenes and get to the actual fun part.

There's a specific scene in the very begining that made me shed actual tears. I really enjoyed the world that was built around it. The subway system is neat to learn and explore. I liked that the game allowed me to immerse myself to find the next objectives. Though I wished this game had a PC port because aiming with the PS3, and the overall quality is pretty lackluster. It looks like its running on medium settings, and it struggles to hit 30fps consistently.

I'm curious as to how they evolve this gameplay loop with the second game, because honestly the Darkness wasn't fleshed out as much as I thought it would, and the gun play was subpar if it wasn't for the aim assist. I was more invested in the story of Jackie than I was with enjoy a fun FPS, but it was serviceable enough to get me through to see the ending.