I went into this one with pretty low expectations. It's definitely widely considered to be the black sheep of the series. At first, those low expectations were confirmed, with a firehose of nonsense jargon requiring constant Datalog lookups, straight line maps, and barebones gameplay. However, by the end of the game I was in love with its systems and its world. It turns out to be an incredibly tactical system, with a lot reliant on pre-battle setup and actually planning out a strategy, mixed with quick, on-the-fly thinking when things go wrong. The world paints a fascinating picture of humanity at the whims of malevolent gods, and while the story itself is confusing from time to time, it still came together. All in all, this one surprised me and I'm excited for the rest of the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy.

I really wanted to like this game because everything about it is stylish and slick, but it unfortunately did not land for me at all. I didn't find the characters interesting, and it often felt like the writers were trying much too hard with the different characters' mannerisms. The overarching story was low stakes and felt more like a bunch of vignettes, which weren't particularly interesting individually or altogether. The story segments were bridged with this first person exploration, but it was horrendous to control it with a touch screen, and the game performed like total ass. It was outright unplayable on my iPhone X and I wasn't even able to finish the game until I got an iPhone 12. Avoid.

This game is exactly the kind of thing that I like to see out of a retro "refresh" type game. It's a fairly well designed Metroidvania, with some cool power-ups and interesting split side-scrolling and top-down sections. I do think that the boss design is a little weak, as most of them go down pretty rapidly, and I'd also say that some of the on-foot side-scrolling sections feel a little janky in terms of controls (I swear I was holding up to get onto that ladder). Overall, solid game, and excited to check out the rest of the Blaster Master series.

Core gameplay is solid, classic Final Fantasy turn-based battling, and the story does have some interesting twists, but this game suffers in a few respects. Its pacing is way off, with the mid-game largely being a retelling of the same story ad infinitum as you play through each character's perspective. There's some interesting story beats to be had, but it's largely scraps. The encounter rate is also astronomical, which is exacerbated during the game's final (eternal) dungeon, putting Final Fantasy III's final dungeon to shame. Overall a solid, but flawed, entry in the series.

Woof. This is a great looking remaster, but its greatness is entirely surface level. The game controls like Alex Kidd is permanently sliding on ice, and jumps are almost impossible to handle precisely with how floaty it controls. Enemy placement is unfair, boss battles are random rock-paper-scissors (cool in concept, but in execution totally unfair), level design is dated to say the least. If they had actually improved on this game rather than faithfully recreating its old-school design philosophy, then this would have been a much better game. Truly impossible to play without the infinite lives option.

Anthem is the epitome of squandered potential. The game is gorgeous and flying is generally fun, but it's bogged down by an absolute lack of quality loot, boring gameplay loop, soulless world, wacky pacing, and forced multiplayer. The game's campaign is a nightmare in terms of pacing due to multiple instances where I was required to run around the open world just hoping I'd get the random event needed to finish the mission I was on. This game isn't offensively bad, but it is a huge disappointment coming from BioWare.

Maybe I'm more used to the way this series plays, but this one felt much more polished and well-paced than its predecessor. Yes, there are still frustrating moments where you're trying every possible command, but they're more far and few between--it's more often clear what the next command should be. I also felt that the game did a better job about restricting your dialogue options to realistic choices, making it less tedious to go through the entire list if you don't know how to progress. Regardless, enjoyed this one and definitely would recommend this one over The Missing Heir if someone is to just play one.