Nothing especially insightful to add on this one compared to my original log, as I think I've said about all that can be objectively said about FFVIII in my previous review - just wanted to say how special an experience this game is to share with a partner.

I've heard plenty of reasonable complaints about how Squall and Rinoa's romance is caught in the middle of a million different things instead of being the main focus like some thinks it should, but in doing so it manages to capture a specific sort of feeling: of being thrust into an intersection of far too many things for any one person to handle, feeling as if it's going to crush you from all directions... and then looking up and finding that someone else has also somehow found their way right where they are, threatened by those exact same burdens and every bit as in need of help as you are. Our two protagonists' private moments alone are few and far between, but they're all the more special for it: just like how we always see Squall's narration as our protagonist but only rarely get to see Rinoa truly open up, it's far too easy to get in our own heads and be left helpless to our limited perceptions of others' points of view. Sometimes you might be surprised what you find on the other end - or on your own.

Anyways, sorry, don't want to get too sappy or mushy to a bunch of people who don't know me or the details of my personal life. Squall is literally me and Rinoa is literally my girlfriend, that's what I'm getting at here.

really, this is what I think RE7 should have been (and might have wanted to be) from the start: they finally shed any pretense of being a "horror game" and went all-in with the idea of an action game that uses horror aesthetics, complete with streamlined level design and combat that is unambiguously fun.

while not a hero was a welcome return to the conventional resident evil aesthetic of "tacticool guy killing zombies in an abandoned lab," end of zoe feels like a firm grasp on RE7 as a game of its own that embraces the quirks of its setting, organically something born from the unique identity of the American deep south. joe is an everyman in his own right, but rather than being a milquetoast vessel devoid of outward personality like ethan he drips personality in everything he does, from his dialogue and interactions with other characters all the way to the little changes they make to the gameplay to fit him. while it might not have made much sense for ethan to know how to pick herbs and make medicine from them, it makes perfect sense for joe as a woodsman who has chosen to live a hernitic life in the louisiana bayous. ethan has an improbable familiarity with the guns he uses, whereas joe relies on his own two fists and makeshift recipes he's presumably picked up from his time in the swamp. even the two characters' motivations are so similar but so drastically different in execution: while there's so little to become attached to in the relationship between ethan and mia, all you really need to know to understand the passion joe has for his niece is that he's a southerner. as someone born and raised in the deep south myself, there are few things more unstoppable than a redneck who will take no shit and will stop at nothing to defend his family's honor.

of course, i don't mean to overinflate this DLC: it's an hour long experience that ultimately provides a tiny peek into what this game could have been at its core, a proof of concept delivered only at the very end of its host's life cycle. it's also still RE7, and as such cannot escape the manners in which RE7 just kinda sucks: enemy design is pretty terrible when you're not squaring up against the enemies that are designed to have good chemistry with melee combat, and combat can fall into being a chore again when facing fat or fast zombies — especially lame when this is the first time it feels like RE7 really carved out its niche as far as combat goes, from the genuinely satisfying and addicting fistfight mechanics to honest-to-god stealth that actually works and is fun to execute!!!

the bottom line is that there's no such thing as a bad game when you can suplex people in it

Tech Guy in Movie " Uh You're gonna wanna See this "

Turns Screen to Action Guy in Movie

Tech Guy " Theyre Overriding the Mainframe "

Action Guy " Uh in English Four Eyes "

Tech Guy " They Fuckin our Pussys.!! "

Action Guy "Now you're Speakin my Language " Cocks Gun

the plot is nothing and your investment in it is only as thick as your willingness to go with the shreds of characterization Ethan gets (he can be charming in his own way, but let's face it, he's a faceless horror protagonist). the systems are tight and well designed but hindered by some insanely repetitive enemy design, horrifically obtuse level layouts, and one of the most perplexing control schemes i've ever been forced to get used to.

really don't know why this blew up the way it did, especially considering i've never played resident evil before and as a result can't understand what it brought to the series beyond an obvious change in perspective and setting, but even those just feel sort of weird to me: from an outsider's point of view i've always associated resident evil with a particular aesthetic and feel, and at many points i found that so gone that resident evil's trademark inventory management and crafting systems felt a bit out of place. this game feels like outlast with chainsaw duels and flamethrowers, and i don't mean that in a good way — it lacks personality and character of its own. when ethan picked up that samurai edge at the end i felt the only amount of elation or joy this game ever gave me, if only because it reminded me that wait, yes, i recognize that gun! this is resident evil!

anyways, i played this just to play village, so maybe i'll have more fun with that. and i did have fun with biohazard and i think it was a good way to break in my ps5 and get to know the controller! but in spite of that i don't really think it's very good.

As a prelude, Chrono Cross is my favorite game of all time and I think that it's functionally a perfectly-realized work of art. You can read an abstraction of my thoughts on the game proper here.

As for the remaster itself, looking at it purely as a repackaged and enhanced version of my favorite game... I've got some mixed feelings about it! As a rule of thumb I think that there's never anything wrong with an underappreciated work of art getting more accessibility and reaching a wider audience, but at the same time I kind of wish that this port was undertaken with more care, love and tact than it actually was. The big elephant in the room is the framerate: as beautiful as Chrono Cross is the game simply does not run well, often bottoming out at around 10 FPS during more cinematic and graphically intensive visuals. I'm used to this and so nominally it doesn't bother me, except that it's much, much worse when playing with the remastered graphics enabled. During summon animations or late-game element animations the game would crawl to less than 5 FPS, and some of the final dungeons were only barely playable because of how clunky and slow the maneuverability of the characters were.

I don't really think I like the new art, either - a lot of the original art has lost some of its trademark ambiguity (for example Serge's somewhat uncertain, hesitant expression and empty eyes are gone in favor of a more all-loving smile, complete with direct eye contact) and there are a few design revisions I'm not fond of like color schemes or detail work... but the one that really bothers me is that there's a criminal case of whitewashing going on for a lot of the characters. Chrono Cross's setting of El Nido is based on a mish-mash of different Central American and Southeast Asian countries (which one might be able to describe as a bit questionable in and of itself, admittedly) and so it makes sense that a large portion of the characters have darker skin tones, including major characters (Serge himself is even a bit on the tanner side, in spite of being a Square Enix protagonist)... and so naturally it makes sense that they're pretty much all made bone-white in the remaster's sprites, often and even at the expense of color schemes or what actually looks good. Furthermore a lot of the new sprites just look bad, and the horror of a certain character's appearance in the original is now just comedic as if they were deliberately trying to sanitize the game's undercurrent of darkness. In general there's something to say about valuing a unique and cohesive visual direction over what just looks "good," with regards to the original pixel-art portraits and low-polygon models...

...whose HD replacements do look quite good, I'll admit. Serge's model having an ever-present scowl is a particularly nice touch that I think befits his character, for example. I also think that the upscale-filtered backgrounds look remarkably good on a Switch's handheld screen, even if they don't look nearly as nice on a TV.

As for the quality-of-life changes, like the superpowers and encounter toggle... I don't know, they all seem a bit unnecessary to me. Chrono Cross isn't a particularly hard game save for the end stretch, and it's even less difficult if you sit down and learn how to use its unique deck-building battle system (and it's a good battle system! This game might have a strong anti-violence message and be unafraid of portraying the horrors that armed conflict brings unto innocent bystanders, but damn, brutality sure is fun when you card-gamify it!), and the game also already has so much quality-of-life features built into it that a lot of JRPGs still haven't caught up with! Being able to run away from any battle at any time to heal and switch up your equipment, enemies mostly being completely avoidable on the map, leveling being handled by leveling up your entire party when you beat a boss as opposed to anything resembling EXP or grinding, the Smith Spirit letting you forge weapons anywhere in the world as opposed to having to go to a store to do it... Chrono Cross really does everything it can to make you have as pleasant of an experience as possible, and adding even more on top of that just feels... unnecessary. (Especially because the power boost option seems to just max out your Elements charge? I don't know, I didn't mess around with it much). I also think the ability to disable encounters in a game about the inevitability of conflict is a bit puzzling, especially since encounters aren't hard to avoid if you want to, and sticking the time shifter in your inventory at the beginning not only feels lazy but de-incentivizes a New Game Plus replay.

Still though, this is Chrono Cross! It's my favorite game and I won't pretend like any of these issues kept me from being drawn into it even more intensely than my first playthrough, with every single allusion to the themes, ideas and messages I’d understood it to be about on my first playthrough further cementing the fact that this is indeed my single favorite game. I didn’t care about the poor FPS or questionable gameplay additions when I was standing up in front of my TV maneuvering my way through the game’s hardest boss, or getting chills when I found something I didn’t notice in a previous playthrough that further proved how tight-knit its storytelling and beliefs are. It certainly didn’t stop me from sniffling and wiping a few teardrops out of my eyes at the ending.

Do I think there are better ways to experience Chrono Cross? Yeah, for sure, absolutely. Preferable method is on a good, overclocked emulator running at native resolution with CRT Royale. But is it ever a bad thing to have my favorite game available to just pick-up-and-play if my endless rambling has gotten a friend into it who doesn’t care about any of that shit and just wants to see what all the fuss is about?

No, I don’t think it is. And even then, it made me so happy to see my favorite game get what felt like the recognition and love it deserved. Call me a sap but I teared up like a little baby booting this up for the first time and seeing the new art of all the party members set against Dreams of the Past, Memories of My Soul (a fantastic piece that perfectly captures the game’s feel and is a welcome late addition to its soundtrack).

It's a bit hard to go wrong with Radical Dreamers (the adventure game that acts as a sort-of-interquel-sort-of-prequel-sort-of-side-story to Chrono Cross), since it's an absolute miracle that it's available in any capacity, much less officially! I think I do prefer the original fan translation a bit more, but it's ultimately just a matter of taste... and how about that new ending, huh!?

"We alone do not have the power to heal the world's woes, or to solve all its mysteries.

And yet, even then...

It was bloody good knowing ya, mate!
Thanks for being born 'you,' Serge!"

Is it really so radical to dream of a better, kinder world of our own making?

We mourn that which we once were, what we could have been, and the lives that we may have once been able to call ours. We embrace who we are, who we will become, and the lives that we do call ours.

Conflict, grief and loss are all inevitable. Joy is scant, fleeting, something that must be found and forged rather than something that is promised. Even so - we endure, we survive, and against that which attempts to persuade us to falter and cease... we do our very best for the world around us, for those within it, and for ourselves. For what more can one be expected to do with their existence? What is the gift of life if not meant to be seized for all that it has to offer, against all odds, against all obstacles, and against all pretenses of what one is supposed to be?

Chrono Cross is my favorite game of all time and my favorite work of narrative fiction in general. I will probably never have enough to say about it that would be even remotely worthy of communicating the sentiment, value and importance that this game holds in my heart.

What a joke! I cannot comprehend how the developers so clearly have a sincere passion for Half-Life while simultaneously not understanding in the slightest what makes Half-Life what it is.

My disillusionment with the game set in the instant that I got into my first encounter with the HECU, who are so unbelievably obnoxious and focused on trial-and-error that the game stops for 30 minutes at a time every time you encounter them. Of course, this wouldn't be such a bad thing if they weren't the overwhelming majority in terms of enemy placement; once you first encounter a Marine the (genuinely very good) alien-fighting gunplay is sidelined up until you reach the very depths of the Lambda complex.

The HECU (while also obnoxiously and artificially difficult) are representative of Black Mesa's biggest flaw, and the most dire manner in which it fails to recreate what Half-Life is all about: rather than encouraging exploration, innovation and improvisation like every Half-Life game does, you're regulated to kneeling behind cover and using some of the most boring weapons in the game (namely the MP5 and shotgun) as you attempt to pick them off from a distance. Even the flow of using these weapons is neutered when compared to the original game, due to the MP5's magazine capacity, ammunition reserves and grenade stock being reduced to mere fractions of what they were, meaning that you can't even truly indulge in bombast without having to stop and reload or scavenge for ammo every minute or so. This problem also impacts the revolver and crossbow, genuinely fun weapons that lend themselves well to the long-distance based combat of the HECU: you're reduced to a measly three-or-two magazines in reserve for both of them, meaning you can carry a maximum of twenty-four and fifteen rounds apiece for them. I don't know if they were going for realism here or what, but tell me, do you play Half-Life for realistic portrayals of combat?

The gunplay is not alone in being completely representative of Black Mesa's disdain for exploration and player creativity: there are invisible walls and cheap mapping practices everywhere, determined to stomp out Half-Life's signature feeling of "what's up there? I wonder if I can get up there" at every possible corner. Some of my favorite examples were long-jumping off a floating island in Xen to land on one situated below, only to find that the developers had registered all long falls in Xen as falling into a bottomless pit and would force a reload upon landing... and feeling quite clever when I used satchel charges to bypass an explosive maze only to find that the map was designed to blow you up if the explosives blew up regardless of where you were on the map, even if you were well behind cover.

Speaking of Xen...! I don't know, it's beautiful and impressive and perhaps a step up from the original's from a certain perspective, but it's also not really anything we haven't seen before in a million other alien worlds from a million other science fiction stories. The Xen of Half-Life felt genuinely strange, incomprehensible and uncanny in a manner that not only acted in favor of the game's horror elements but also reinforced the notion that you are not welcome here, that this world was never meant for and never intended to pay host to those of your kind. Sure, we're treated to beautiful forests, swamps and factories, but... they're just that, things that I recognize, things that I've seen before, things that are familiar. It takes the alien out of "alien invasion."

Another thing that bothered me was the music. None of it was bad, I'd say, but none of it really felt like Half-Life to me. Half-Life's OST was dominated more than anything by droning guitar feedback, dark ambient soundscapes and industrial rhythms, the prevalence of which makes the heavy synths and pounding drums that much more impactful when they do show up. Not only does the Black Mesa OST sound much more like something you'd hear in a standard fare sci-fi FPS of the 2010s, it was more or less one Epic Videogame Song With Heavy Drum And Guitar And Synth after another - sometimes it worked for the moment (such as We've Got Hostiles, whose almost desert rock-styled riffage fit perfectly for the adrenaline rush of seeing the surface for the first time only amid a massive firefight) but most of the time I mostly either found the loud music irritating when it played during something as innocuous as exploring a reactor facility, or when I had to listen to it again, and again, and again as I reloaded save after save after save in one of the game's million-and-a-half HECU skirmishes.

It's a shame, because as I said in my intro it's clear that these developers love Half-Life. There's a lot of thought put into capturing the idiosyncrasies of 1998's portrayal of Black Mesa while also making them feel more lively and lived-in from a modern point of view. The moment-to-moment combat and "gun feel" is excellent when you're just fighting aliens, and the flow of the levels themselves is quick, breezy and natural... but because it all goes to hell whenever you get to Xen (the only completely original section of Black Mesa) it's clear that we can give credit to the fact that these are painstaking bit-for-bit recreations of Valve's innovations as opposed to something that the team can truly take credit for. Xen literally milks the same puzzle over and over and over again for the entirety of its 8-10 hour playtime, and only really bothers to introduce its trump card (which in fairness is cool as hell) during the last quarter of Interloper.

The Nihilanth fight, though? That shit fuckin' rules. It's just a shame that the game only finally realizes its potential during the literal final moments of the game.

Played on "hard" (eventually got so fed up with the very first tank fight and the Gonarch fight that I set it to normal until I'd killed those), completed in about 28 hours.

the common sentiment that people voice about kingdom hearts is that "i can't take this seriously, mickey mouse is there." and that is a sentiment that, as a twenty four year old woman with a job and a lot of social commitments and a bit of well-earned cynicism all culminating in the abstract of having Shit To Do (as well as one who believes the walt disney company to be actual, corporeal evil), i wholeheartedly agree with. but i think that it's commonly expressed from the wrong place, or at the very least from a place that lacks the perspective you kind of need to look at kingdom hearts from.

so like, yeah, there's disney shit in here and looking at it with an adult brain it might be a bit difficult to reconcile that with the melodrama and the convoluted lore and that Special Vibe that only Kitase's crew is capable of, but like. i played kingdom hearts when i was six or seven years old, i didn't know that it Wasn't Cool to make mickey mouse into a political figurehead and i sure as hell didn't know what the hell "tonal clash" was. any differences were reconciled purely by my imagination and a willingness to simply go with it and be taken away - and once again, there wasn't really any publisher willing to go for it with their stories and concepts the way squaresoft was in their final years of operation. kingdom hearts is in many ways a complete encapsulation of that squaresoft philosophy of going as far as you possibly can with your ideas no matter how self-indulgent, wacky or dumb they may be, and that's something i really appreciate and a big part of why i cherish what i consider to be the two definitive examples of that, chrono cross and final fantasy viii.

on top of all of that i think the idea of taking all of the silly kid's movie stuff and putting serious storytelling on top of it and trying to inject it with meaningful ideas on dualism and pseudo-intellectual jungian imagery and incredibly (perhaps a bit TOO) sincere displays of intense emotional vulnerability is like, a pretty perfect encapsulation of what kingdom hearts is fundamentally about at its core; that is to say stolen childhoods and lost innocence.

at the end of the day it's a narrative about a bunch of kids who are being manipulated within or otherwise tossed adrift into plans and greater schemes that they don't really know much of anything about and have no reason to know anything about. they're just kids. you can read this as being part of a greater statement on abuse or trauma or just growing up or something, but what's important is that it's saying something losing one's childhood and that meant something to me even if i didn't realize it, as somebody who even at the tender age of six-or-seven was terrified of growing up and was desperate to cling onto what little childhood i had left. again, taking something so innately childish and injecting it with Serious Stuff is a perfect culmination of that idea.

i haven't touched this game (or KH2, which was my favorite as a wee thing) in years and i'm not sure i will, but that's okay, it's not something that's really meant for me anyway. sure, kingdom hearts is schlocky and a bit embarrassingly self-indulgent sometimes and the concept is a bit too ridiculous for me to stomach even now as i've developed a taste for over-the-top chuuni shit (i like tsukihime for christs sakes). but that's fine. it's not for me, it's for six-or-seven year old me and meant to be experienced through a worldview that i'm just not capable of putting myself into anymore.

growing up sucks, and it's important to cherish the innocence of being a kid for everything it's worth, even when that's actively being taken away from you - if not by outside forces then by the passage of time itself.

There is a truly perfect game in here, somewhere within the knots and tangles of its narrative presentation - but alas, it exists in its current state as simply a very good one.

Still, I'm not going to complain about playing a great game! I think a lot of the critiques of FFXIII are more-or-less misguided, as I ended up either having no problems at all with or actively loving the parts that everybody complains about - namely the codex and the combat system. The codex means you have to stop every few hours to stop and read about the world, which isn't a problem to me because the world is so interesting. The gameplay is probably the best in the mainline Final Fantasy series (having finally perfected the ATB system after nearly two decades!) and is refreshingly hard, a surprise in a series known for being pretty easy to breeze through.

With this being said: there aren't many problems with FFXIII, but one of them is big enough to seriously dilute the experience. You hear a lot of people complain about the linearity but that really isn't the problem - the problem is that in a game so linear it still manages to have really poor pacing that simultaneously feels too slow and too fast. FFXIII is nothing without its characters and their internal conflicts, which are very well written and mesh with one another in a way that is perfect for the kind of story FFXIII is trying to tell. Problem is that the characters are exposited and fleshed out in a really rapid-fire way with so little downtime that all character development feels very abrupt and lacking in weight - it's more or less one dramatic scene and huge character moment after another, and as characters progress through their varying states of being it feels like you never get to really know who they are before you meet who they're becoming. Couple that with all of the actual plot developments and crucial world information being saved for the last five-or-so hours of the game and you have a story that feels rushed and way too slow at the same time - all of this only weighed down more heavily by bizarre and inexplicable difficulty spikes that leave you lingering further on moments that already overstay their welcome.

Even so, FFXIII is just a marvelous game to sit and exist in. The dual settings of Coccoon and Pulse are every bit as lively as they are beautiful - this is by far the prettiest game I've ever played both in terms of art direction and graphical fidelity, which is impressive considering this game came out in 2009 - and the atmosphere is bolstered even further by the phenomenal soundtrack. As poorly paced as the characters' personal arcs are, they're still extremely well-written on the whole and are all charming, likeable and memorable, with some seriously gripping character dynamics and relationships. Even when the writing's own convolution fails it, the Big Moments are delivered with a palpable heart-and-soul that I've only been really able to find in Final Fantasy games developed with Yoshinori Kitase and his usual posse at the helm. There were several moments in FFXIII that made me stop and remember why Final Fantasy is my favorite series, having been immersed in an intangible feeling you can really only get from this series (and Kitase's games in particular).

With themes, ideas, and characters this tight - as well as a near-perfect combat system - I imagine that with time the mess of FFXIII's presentation will long be overshadowed by the finesse of its actual substance in my mind, and that I'll only grow more and more fond of it as the years pass by.