Holy smokes, my first logging in ten months or so? Fellas the gaming game is rapidly passing me by. But not this game, a delightful and barely challenging game for babies in which I collected every wonder seed over the course of, I dunno, three weeks, concentrated into four or five nights of actual playtime? Look, I loved this. Loved the idea of each level going batshit sideways in its own hyperspecific way, loved the quality of life improvements over previous games in the series. Probably my favorite 2D Super Mario game since the SNES days? Low bar, but consider it high praise all the same. A better game might have thrown more difficult endgame content at me... says the guy who's logged two games total in 2023? Get the fuck outta here, self. Go beat Tears of the Kingdom already!

Thrilled to finally have an opportunity to play the PSP prequel to maybe my all time favorite game. Bluntly though, much sooner would have been much better; this game has aged poorly to say the least, remastered skin and all. FF13 took a lot of shit for being more or less a continuous series of corridors, but that's really, really all this game felt like it was. I shouldn't complain too much, because years ago I was debating buying a used PSP just to play this and a handful of other JRPGs. Genuinely appreciate that this PS4 game exists at all! The story here is a mishmash of good and bad elements with a lot of eventual FF7 characters appearing naturally and a few more shoehorned in gratuitously. The new characters here were generally trash and the early game is an absolutely aimless mess, but once Cloud shows up and the Nibelheim Incident starts unfolding, oh baby that's the good stuff right there! Sadly that's Chapter 8 of 10. The whole thing ends surprisingly poignantly - you know Zack's fate if you've played FF7, and if you haven't played FF7 what on earth brought you to this niche title? - and I'm as curious as ever what the upcoming Rebirth game will do with this particular storyline in the wake of Remake's retconned ending, or maybe more accurately beginning.