Had never played a Souls-like before this and depending on how you define the genre maybe I still haven't. Either way, this was enjoyable. A little too much emphasis on class variety, if you ask me. I maxed out most job trees at Level 30 without grinding, and very rarely did I need to switch up jobs to handle bosses. The story's predictably a messy disaster but it all mostly still works as either a prequel to or alternate version of the original Final Fantasy game. Ultimately this feels like a fairly minor and largely forgotten title - did it really only come out two years ago? Feels like five to ten! - but I really did enjoy it for the most part once I understood how to play it.

Satisfying enough, but admittedly a little slighter than I expected. Yuffie's never been my bag - sorry, basic Aerith (Aeris) boy here turned proud Tifa man - but this was always going to live or die based on the gameplay and the story. They were... fine. Clocks in at just two chapters and the pace is a total mess, starting slower than molasses and ending with an absurd boss gauntlet. I had my fun here and had more of it the more I played, but really this mostly just got me hyped for Rebirth, you know? Can't believe Remake is four years old already. So is my four-year-old. It all tracks but it's fucked up al the same, you know?

Easily the best "new console hardware demonstration" title since Wii U's Nintendo Land. Just an incredible display of what the DualSense controller is capable of, namely: precise gyroscopic awareness, highly resolved vibrations, incredible adaptive haptic technology in the triggers. Combine that gameplay with a quick and easy "story" about collecting old PlayStation controllers and memory cards and baby you've got yourself a very pleasant three-hour experience. Real shame how nobody is designing games around these console-specific features, though. Appreciate the future-proofing foresight, but it must be a total buzzkill for the designers and engineers who make these incredible components only to see them go to waste.

Played the first two Theatrhythm games ten years ago and they were little more than niche obscurities, little rhythm games on the 3DS for Final Fantasy diehards meant to scratch nostalgic itches. Chippy little MIDI battle songs, sweeping and bombastic orchestral stuff - it all falls into the same "hey, I 'memba that song!" basket, and that's really the extent of what those games felt like. Imagine my surprise then when I dug into this third title and found a full-fledged JRPG system in its own right, serving as a framing device of sorts around 400-something songs from the franchise. I dumped so many more hours into this thing than I ever imagined I would, not content just to "beat the game" but trying to complete every series and song and quest, collect every character, and boost each of them up to Level 99. Cooler heads are prevailing in 2024 and I'm recognizing that I'm just still so, so far away from achieving... any of that. I've got a PS5 now, I can't dump another thirty hours into this thing. Let's retroactively call it a 2023 finish - I'm overqualified, I beat this back in March and only sat waiting on "endgame" content for so long because I wanted to wait for Chrono Trigger DLC - and increase last year's logging output by 50% in the process. It'll be a better 2024 folks, I promise. Did I mention I got a PS5?

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.

Was a big fan of the first Life Is Strange and then never touched another game in the series for years. This one had its moments, but there was an awful lot of empty space and time in between them. Still a heartfelt story about a young woman helping people and wrestling with the choices she makes, set largely to folksy and twee ear pleasers and taking place in a carefully-rendered and fully realized environment - but the whole thing felt flatter and emptier than the original did five years back or whenever. Maybe the well ran dry. Maybe I'm just too old now and have too little time for hours-long LARP excursions.

Time to call it. Got a genuine kick out of Biohazard after decades of mostly avoiding the Resident Evil series and hit the ground running here. Same first-person engine, same mechanics - there was nothing not to like! And yet, after only a few enjoyable hours and without making it through the Lady Dimitrescu section, I lost all will to press forward, to finish the fight. Weeks turned into months, months turned into a year, and I've only started and abandoned half a dozen more games since this one. I'm a mess! So yeah, time to acknowledge a failed effort and return this disc to my disappointed but patient friend. For me, Ethan's journey ends in perpetually being stalked by the tall vampire lady. Maybe he's happy. A veritable sea full of horny Deviant Art suggests that he should be!

I'll be vague but blunt. If you've played either of Sam Barlow's previous two games you know exactly what you're in for here - spend a few hours collecting a bunch of disjoint video clips so as to figure out "what happened." As in the previous two games, you can get as much or as little out of the characters and the clips as you want; you're entirely responsible for your own inertia and your own trajectory through the experience. There is one twist - one - which you will inevitably encounter after anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours of gameplay. It's an absolute mindfuck and it recontextualizes everything about the story you've been putting together, sending you straight back to every clip you've already seen and changing the scope and vibe of the game from that point forward. I had the... misfortune, maybe?... of discovering this twist fairly early on. It sent chills straight down my spine, but finding it so quickly may have made my gameplay experience shorter and shallower. But that's the way Sam Barlow's games work. (I found the climactic clip of Telling Lies like ten minutes in and then spent five hours filling in a story I just couldn't stay interested in.) Ultimately, I love the unconventional gameplay and - again, staying vague - this is easily Barlow's most artistic game so far. I'm sure I'll be reading discussions and theories and breakdowns for years to come. Play it alone in the dark late at night by yourself and make up your own mind.

This was everything a modern-retro beat-em-up should be: two hours long and easily beaten with a remote crew of friends. Game itself is busted as hell and I think the four of us collectively had to quit out and reenter five or six times in the two hours we spent playing, but who cares? The levels were five minutes long and replaying them was only ever a minor nuisance. Sucks that you don't unlock Casey Jones until beating it once; I imagine the replay rate on this thing is very, very low, so why not just let that be a starting character? I'm nitpicking. Plenty of easy fun, no need to revisit.

Virtually identical to last year's release, right down to the in-game menus and graphical interface. There's nothing wrong with that - hell, there's everything right with that! - but it did contribute to the overall "been there, done that" feeling I had while playing this game every night for the month of April. I think I dumped more hours into The Show 22 than I did The Show 21 last year, but felt like I accomplished even less this time around. As long as I have Game Pass and as long as these are part of it, I bet I come back every April for more. But thirty or forty hours into this particular title, it's just time for me to move on, not out of boredom but self-preservation. There are only so many hours and so many days, and such.

Had a great time with this one. The Zelda inspirations are obvious and plentiful but not ham-fisted and had Nintendo released exactly this game with a few visual tweaks and called it a minor Zelda game, people would have gone apeshit for it just the same. Hits that perfect 10-15 hour length and just as soon as I started to feel the slightest bit like the whole thing was dragging a bit, the endgame turned into this nonstop rush of secrets and formerly hidden treasures and I could have gone for another five. Even busted out some pencil and paper for some of the more challenging puzzles, triggering a delightful and specific nostalgic feeling I haven't had in gaming since The Witness. Just a beauty from start to finish. And if this was truly "Souls-hard" then I can handle Souls games, no problem.

After 25 years, this is as close as I've seen to a worthy Final Fantasy Tactics successor. Feels like something halfway between that game and a Fire Emblem. Every character is unique and there are multiple paths through the story, a Game of Thrones-like web of alliances and betrayals. Slightly surprised by how soon it all ended (thirty, thirty-five hours?) especially after the grindfest that was Octopath Traveler. Likely makes up for that "brevity" on replays, what with all the branching story paths, but I'm content to put this down for now. I expected great things and wasn't disappointed at all. What a gem!