theia
2024
Kinda way too disillusioned by the superfluous pageantry of P-Studio's Persona titles to keep up with this and it's making me hate playing video games, so shelving this and P3P for my own sanity. Maybe I'll get around to it in a few months once I'm in the mood to push through a fluffy monster RPG with concerning portrayals of women again. Which like, even though I say that, Persona 3 feels a lot better in that department than P4 or P5, especially from what I've also been playing of Persona 3 Portable, where Yukari in particular almost feels like a real teenage girl with actual interiority! Really wanted to see more of Mitsuru, she seems pretty cool. Same with the autistic trans-coded robot girl and the dog, those guys are like 50% of the reason I wanted to play this game.
Tartarus was also way fucking cooler than I expected! Well, not in Reload, but in Portable it was pretty comfy and had enough going on with its moment to moment gameplay to make me not fall asleep. Though early on your power scales up way faster than the difficulty of the floors themselves do, and the bosses felt more like brute forcing them instead of instigating a strategy. Reload feels like it makes that whole dealie even worse, like you get all the fun midgame toys from Persona 5 like right away, and I feel like it just trivializes the whole thing (I am not playing on hard mode ever again though, it literally just makes the game twice as long, made the mistake once in Persona 5)! They also had an opportunity to give Tartarus sections more of their own mechanical identity to mix it up from the more pure dungeon crawling of the original, and at least what I've played it just feels worse somehow, even more lifeless and toothless. Maybe I'll change my mind once I get to the later portions, but I was not very impressed.
I don't wanna carry on with the negatives too much, there's clearly a lot to love here, and I'm sure this will end up being a lot of people's go-to way to experience P3, but man, Reload is so much. Seriously considering just playing FES first instead next time, and then working my way up through each iteration, because even as somebody who has only had minimal contact with the original Persona 3, something really feels off about this game. I don't trust it. Maybe I'm just annoying and old though.
Anyways, Persona 6 should be about a 40 year old lesbian detective and her talking tanuki tulpa that nobody else can see who says kinda borderline problematic shit. Also probably put a different kind of music in these games next time; maybe it's just the remixes that were giving me a migraine though.
Tartarus was also way fucking cooler than I expected! Well, not in Reload, but in Portable it was pretty comfy and had enough going on with its moment to moment gameplay to make me not fall asleep. Though early on your power scales up way faster than the difficulty of the floors themselves do, and the bosses felt more like brute forcing them instead of instigating a strategy. Reload feels like it makes that whole dealie even worse, like you get all the fun midgame toys from Persona 5 like right away, and I feel like it just trivializes the whole thing (I am not playing on hard mode ever again though, it literally just makes the game twice as long, made the mistake once in Persona 5)! They also had an opportunity to give Tartarus sections more of their own mechanical identity to mix it up from the more pure dungeon crawling of the original, and at least what I've played it just feels worse somehow, even more lifeless and toothless. Maybe I'll change my mind once I get to the later portions, but I was not very impressed.
I don't wanna carry on with the negatives too much, there's clearly a lot to love here, and I'm sure this will end up being a lot of people's go-to way to experience P3, but man, Reload is so much. Seriously considering just playing FES first instead next time, and then working my way up through each iteration, because even as somebody who has only had minimal contact with the original Persona 3, something really feels off about this game. I don't trust it. Maybe I'm just annoying and old though.
Anyways, Persona 6 should be about a 40 year old lesbian detective and her talking tanuki tulpa that nobody else can see who says kinda borderline problematic shit. Also probably put a different kind of music in these games next time; maybe it's just the remixes that were giving me a migraine though.
1998
wherever tifa lockhart and vincent valentine go, i'll be there
shitty in a very distinctly cool way. makes me miss when i'd walk into the arcade of a movie theater or w/e in the late 90s/early 00s and chuck a few of my parents' quarters away on something barely playable that looked rad as hell to my idiot child brain. i love how easy it is to cheese the AI with spamming specific attacks, the whole experience is just a flailing mess and it rules. makes me wanna boot up power stone or something, it's been like two decades since i've even thought about games like this, but i know my life is only enhanced by their existence
tifa's design here makes her look like an action figure for pervert otakus, but w/e i like spamming triangle and juggling the bad guy when they're close and spamming tifa hadouken when they're far away and winning. girls are so cool. i like the powers dog that has a red XIII alt and the animorph girl and the guy who shoots rockets out his leg. don't like the old guy with the annoying stick or the yoyo cop tho. i'll play the minigames and quest mode someday maybe, idk just something about blasting through an arcade mode that appeals more to me in these types of games
adding this to my "games that would fucking rule at slumber parties even though i'm turning 32 in a week and all the friends i could have slumber parties with are productive adults who live halfway across the country from me and also i have crippling student debt" list! shirtless sephiroth tho
shitty in a very distinctly cool way. makes me miss when i'd walk into the arcade of a movie theater or w/e in the late 90s/early 00s and chuck a few of my parents' quarters away on something barely playable that looked rad as hell to my idiot child brain. i love how easy it is to cheese the AI with spamming specific attacks, the whole experience is just a flailing mess and it rules. makes me wanna boot up power stone or something, it's been like two decades since i've even thought about games like this, but i know my life is only enhanced by their existence
tifa's design here makes her look like an action figure for pervert otakus, but w/e i like spamming triangle and juggling the bad guy when they're close and spamming tifa hadouken when they're far away and winning. girls are so cool. i like the powers dog that has a red XIII alt and the animorph girl and the guy who shoots rockets out his leg. don't like the old guy with the annoying stick or the yoyo cop tho. i'll play the minigames and quest mode someday maybe, idk just something about blasting through an arcade mode that appeals more to me in these types of games
adding this to my "games that would fucking rule at slumber parties even though i'm turning 32 in a week and all the friends i could have slumber parties with are productive adults who live halfway across the country from me and also i have crippling student debt" list! shirtless sephiroth tho
2024
Probably the first game in a while that's made me regret not doing scores for games on this website; Children of the Sun is as unwieldy and aggravatingly trial and error as it is aesthetically captivating and mechanically cathartic. I've seen others besmirch it as a poor puzzle game or shitty action game individually -- perhaps it's within that straddling of genre conventions that it never quite finds its way -- yet it's difficult to recall any other game I've played recently that's so confident in its fusion of puzzle-solving and reflexive execution. And while the latter is what ultimately allows Children of the Sun to carve out impactful moments in the player's mind, it's also its most egregious pain point (followed by the semi-optional "strategy phase" whose varying (in)elegance will inevitably filter a lot of players).
It becomes especially damning during the game's later stages where it's possible for the player to have figured out a few viable solutions, but executing the longer sequences of kills can be absolutely excruciating when failure is as easy as a simple misclick -- or your perfect solution gets fucked over by unreliable RNG (?) cycles, among other fiddly (to say the least) annoyances. I imagine this is going to vary wildly from person to person as well; some levels I completed in a single try while others took me upwards of two hours (not including the breaks I'd sometimes have to take). It's a shame when the player's momentary satisfaction is upended by the realization that the next level is the same thing but even more overwhelming intricate. That'll probably satisfy the people who really fuck with Children's unique gameplay toolkit and jazz-like structure, but for others it's going to make playing the game a draining experience, which maybe isn't what you want in a game that doesn't have a whole lot of content in the first place (or maybe that's its saving grace, I don't know! I'll let the gamer reading this decide). The last level was particularly harrowing as unraveling its solution required executing individual pieces of the what is the longest kill sequence in the game ad nauseam, and with its length was probably every single issue I've talked about so far along with it.
This is where I'd love to tell that this is all worth it somehow, that Children of the Sun's ludonarrative adds up to anything, and I... I don't think it does? The striking aesthetic and the revenge porn premise certainly elevate the experience, but the narrative itself feels exceedingly played out. Maybe this will do more for somebody who has had real life experience with cults, or maybe it's just that its story is portrayed through slideshows that are largely disconnected from the gameplay that, despite having pretty great art, don't really impart much upon the player outside of "this cult did bad things, the player character wants to do bad things back to the cult". Which like, understandable, good for her! But it just didn't do a whole lot for me personally. I want to say the ending is maybe saying something? I dunno man, I think I've played too many irreverent and/or Dark Souls-influenced indie titles that I'm just so desensitized to endings like this. Maybe I'm just a heartless bitch tho.
Children of the Sun has its moments though, like, there's a pretty fun quote towards the beginning of the game that I'm expecting fans of the game to repeat an annoying amount. I looooove the main character's design and the cover art itself (honestly it's why I ended up playing it in the first place lol). The whole game has this vibe to it that for some reason dug up forgotten memories of games like Project Rub/Feel the Magic: XY/XX; honestly it'd kinda fuck as a DS game now that I think about it (Killer7 DS real???). Not sure if I'd recommend Children of the Sun to everybody, but if it catches your interest in any way, I'd say it wouldn't hurt to give it a try once it's on sale for sub-$10 or so.
It becomes especially damning during the game's later stages where it's possible for the player to have figured out a few viable solutions, but executing the longer sequences of kills can be absolutely excruciating when failure is as easy as a simple misclick -- or your perfect solution gets fucked over by unreliable RNG (?) cycles, among other fiddly (to say the least) annoyances. I imagine this is going to vary wildly from person to person as well; some levels I completed in a single try while others took me upwards of two hours (not including the breaks I'd sometimes have to take). It's a shame when the player's momentary satisfaction is upended by the realization that the next level is the same thing but even more overwhelming intricate. That'll probably satisfy the people who really fuck with Children's unique gameplay toolkit and jazz-like structure, but for others it's going to make playing the game a draining experience, which maybe isn't what you want in a game that doesn't have a whole lot of content in the first place (or maybe that's its saving grace, I don't know! I'll let the gamer reading this decide). The last level was particularly harrowing as unraveling its solution required executing individual pieces of the what is the longest kill sequence in the game ad nauseam, and with its length was probably every single issue I've talked about so far along with it.
This is where I'd love to tell that this is all worth it somehow, that Children of the Sun's ludonarrative adds up to anything, and I... I don't think it does? The striking aesthetic and the revenge porn premise certainly elevate the experience, but the narrative itself feels exceedingly played out. Maybe this will do more for somebody who has had real life experience with cults, or maybe it's just that its story is portrayed through slideshows that are largely disconnected from the gameplay that, despite having pretty great art, don't really impart much upon the player outside of "this cult did bad things, the player character wants to do bad things back to the cult". Which like, understandable, good for her! But it just didn't do a whole lot for me personally. I want to say the ending is maybe saying something? I dunno man, I think I've played too many irreverent and/or Dark Souls-influenced indie titles that I'm just so desensitized to endings like this. Maybe I'm just a heartless bitch tho.
Children of the Sun has its moments though, like, there's a pretty fun quote towards the beginning of the game that I'm expecting fans of the game to repeat an annoying amount. I looooove the main character's design and the cover art itself (honestly it's why I ended up playing it in the first place lol). The whole game has this vibe to it that for some reason dug up forgotten memories of games like Project Rub/Feel the Magic: XY/XX; honestly it'd kinda fuck as a DS game now that I think about it (Killer7 DS real???). Not sure if I'd recommend Children of the Sun to everybody, but if it catches your interest in any way, I'd say it wouldn't hurt to give it a try once it's on sale for sub-$10 or so.
2022
Kinda went into Pentiment expecting to have to "eat my vegetables"; its aesthetic being artistically sound, but not really the kind of thing I'm generally into, and its premise sounding intellectually invigorating in a games industry that's arguably in arrested development when it comes to making mainstream experiences for adults, but maybe not enough to keep me personally going for a playtime of over 20 hours. And well, I was pretty fuckin' wrong! And not even in the Disco Elysium way where after I got over the hurdle of the first hour or two that it finally clicked (not to say that Disco Elysium's intro isn't basically perfect in its own way), Pentiment managed to sink its teeth into me right away. The game's art is also a lot more affective and unique than I would've expected just from the couple trailers I'd seen, and despite the entire game taking place across only a handful of screens (contextualized as pages in a book), there were many times that I found myself stopped in my tracks, contemplating the beauty of a specific moment.
It's also just as real as fuck without succumbing to either condemnation or romanticization. Pentiment's perspective on history and the people who shaped it is complex without cowardly labeling every participant as a morally grey agent -- there are unabashedly terrible and evil people in this world, people who are deceptive in their self-servitude, and even inarguably cruel entities like the Catholic Church house individuals who really do want to make the world a better place in their own way and even people who are in the church due to societal forces beyond their control. Pentiment is a game that tries its best to be honest about the world. It's also a game that's absolutely more intelligent and worldly than I'll ever be, and I really don't think I can do it the full justice it deserves in my own analysis of its setting and themes, so I'll just leave it there.
And yeah, Pentiment is also just a great example of how to make a dialogue-focused adventure game fun. Like, part of that is probably because I chose hedonism as one of my skills and made Andreas into a terrible little boyslut, but you know how it is. The dialogue never bored me, every character feels truly alive -- and that's without voice acting! I actually appreciated that there wasn't any honestly, it's a double-edged sword in a lot of games like this, and it only would've detracted from the bespoke aesthetic decision to give every character's spoken dialogue in "their own handwriting", in quotes because I'm not entirely sure what the implication was for the characters that are by their own admission illiterate (but I did love that Claus the town printer's dialogue is the only one that uses an actual typeface, accompanied by the satisfying thuds of a printing press).
By the end of the game, Tassing really does begin to feel like your home as well, not only because many pivotal events in Tassing's recent history are influenced by the player, but because you've grown close to the town's citizens and watched them grow and change as well. Pentiment isn't a power trip in that sense -- you cannot save everybody or give everybody a happy ending, not that you'd want to with some of the assholes you run into honestly -- but it does manage to encapsulate the warm and fuzzy feeling that despite the world being dogshit, we can still do our best for those around us, be a part of a greater whole with honest fervor. The player and Andreas will inevitably fuck up a lot, but it's something we have to live with, something to learn from. Things like that feel self-evident in the real world and are rarely explored properly in games, but the fact that Pentiment lacks a manual save function really sells that feeling. But even if we can't meta-game Tassing into the perfect little Bavarian town suffering under feudalism and religious oppression, the Tassing we end up with is undeniably ours. I think that's probably why I might never replay Pentiment, which is rare for me, since I tend to replay games I love quite often.
Also the "third act" is pretty good! Saw some people criticizing the shift in gameplay focus, but it was a nice change of pace and was probably my favorite part altogether. Don't normally recommend games on here, but honestly, check it out for yourself. I can't really think of many demographics that'd be outright disappointed by Pentiment. It's good. :)
It's also just as real as fuck without succumbing to either condemnation or romanticization. Pentiment's perspective on history and the people who shaped it is complex without cowardly labeling every participant as a morally grey agent -- there are unabashedly terrible and evil people in this world, people who are deceptive in their self-servitude, and even inarguably cruel entities like the Catholic Church house individuals who really do want to make the world a better place in their own way and even people who are in the church due to societal forces beyond their control. Pentiment is a game that tries its best to be honest about the world. It's also a game that's absolutely more intelligent and worldly than I'll ever be, and I really don't think I can do it the full justice it deserves in my own analysis of its setting and themes, so I'll just leave it there.
And yeah, Pentiment is also just a great example of how to make a dialogue-focused adventure game fun. Like, part of that is probably because I chose hedonism as one of my skills and made Andreas into a terrible little boyslut, but you know how it is. The dialogue never bored me, every character feels truly alive -- and that's without voice acting! I actually appreciated that there wasn't any honestly, it's a double-edged sword in a lot of games like this, and it only would've detracted from the bespoke aesthetic decision to give every character's spoken dialogue in "their own handwriting", in quotes because I'm not entirely sure what the implication was for the characters that are by their own admission illiterate (but I did love that Claus the town printer's dialogue is the only one that uses an actual typeface, accompanied by the satisfying thuds of a printing press).
By the end of the game, Tassing really does begin to feel like your home as well, not only because many pivotal events in Tassing's recent history are influenced by the player, but because you've grown close to the town's citizens and watched them grow and change as well. Pentiment isn't a power trip in that sense -- you cannot save everybody or give everybody a happy ending, not that you'd want to with some of the assholes you run into honestly -- but it does manage to encapsulate the warm and fuzzy feeling that despite the world being dogshit, we can still do our best for those around us, be a part of a greater whole with honest fervor. The player and Andreas will inevitably fuck up a lot, but it's something we have to live with, something to learn from. Things like that feel self-evident in the real world and are rarely explored properly in games, but the fact that Pentiment lacks a manual save function really sells that feeling. But even if we can't meta-game Tassing into the perfect little Bavarian town suffering under feudalism and religious oppression, the Tassing we end up with is undeniably ours. I think that's probably why I might never replay Pentiment, which is rare for me, since I tend to replay games I love quite often.
Also the "third act" is pretty good! Saw some people criticizing the shift in gameplay focus, but it was a nice change of pace and was probably my favorite part altogether. Don't normally recommend games on here, but honestly, check it out for yourself. I can't really think of many demographics that'd be outright disappointed by Pentiment. It's good. :)
Nothing on display here in terms of gameplay is exactly novel or impressive or even what the average gamer would consider "good video games", but it is a pretty polished and cute Wario World x Live A Live-style collection of miniature cinematic-ish gameplay experiences for young children who really like Princess Peach, or idk, just wanna play as a princess doing a bunch of cool shit in general. Don't really feel like there's a whole lot of learned skill expression to squeeze out of the experience; most levels kinda play themselves, and that's almost certainly by design. It's far from what *I* would want out of a Princess Peach game, but I'd say next to Super Princess Peach it's a step in the right direction, at least if you just want Peach's games to stand out from other Nintendo fare.
The swordfighter levels are like a baby version of Bayonetta, with its own little fucked up witch time and all -- super cute, loved 'em. The ninja level had really great music that caught me way the fuck off guard, did not expect a few of the tracks to be such bops in general, especially since a lot of the other music can feel generic to an almost grating extent. Mermaid levels were really cute and interesting for what they were; detective levels had me snoozing for real, but I guess you need to have babies not getting stuck, since as far as I can tell all the non-basement levels are required to beat the game.
Really wish the overworld dress up options weren't so lame!! Like the unlockable patterns are def cute, but feels like a big missed opportunity after all of Peach's lil outfits in Odyssey's post-game to just stick to her normal dress when she's not in one of the level-specific costumes (though I only made it like halfway through the game, so maybe it gets better later). Also my cat really hated all the loud ass buzzer noises between loading screens, if I still did scores I'd take off at least half a star for that...
As far as if this game deserves to be $60 or whatever they charge these days, honestly idfk. I don't buy Nintendo games, I simply "borrow" them from "friends", but for once I could honestly see adults who played this game as a kid being nostalgic for this game in 20 years in the same way a lot of current adults are overly sentimental about games like Luigi's Mansion or Yoshi's Story nowadays. There's def a bit of a focus-tested vibe to it, but I also wouldn't consider it devoid of artistic passion -- in a way Showtime feels more creatively ambitious than something like Super Mario Wonder, despite the former's far tighter scope and budget. Kinda shitty that Nintendo felt the need to bury the fact Good-Feel were the devs inside of the game's credits, it's not like they're Arzest or whatever. Good-Feel is basically just a lesser Treasure, if they were like, forced at gunpoint to only do Mario adjacent spin-offs.
Anyways, I had the day off, so decided to spend the afternoon playing this while my cat took a nap on my chest; also I kinda feel a general sense of duty to check out games where Nintendo is trying to market to the girlies. Probs not gonna bother finishing unless I get the sick urge to do so cuz it's def on the babier side of Nintendo stuff -- I could feel myself slipping away as early as the first world lol -- and I told myself I'd actually keep playing Pentiment this weekend (also the last Good-Feel developed title I actually bothered completing was Wario Land Shake It when I was like, 16). It's pretty cute!! I like playing as princesses in video games!! But I'm sure Backloggd users will come up with some nefarious spins on why this game is actually a moral and game design travesty, can't wait to see the takes. <3
The swordfighter levels are like a baby version of Bayonetta, with its own little fucked up witch time and all -- super cute, loved 'em. The ninja level had really great music that caught me way the fuck off guard, did not expect a few of the tracks to be such bops in general, especially since a lot of the other music can feel generic to an almost grating extent. Mermaid levels were really cute and interesting for what they were; detective levels had me snoozing for real, but I guess you need to have babies not getting stuck, since as far as I can tell all the non-basement levels are required to beat the game.
Really wish the overworld dress up options weren't so lame!! Like the unlockable patterns are def cute, but feels like a big missed opportunity after all of Peach's lil outfits in Odyssey's post-game to just stick to her normal dress when she's not in one of the level-specific costumes (though I only made it like halfway through the game, so maybe it gets better later). Also my cat really hated all the loud ass buzzer noises between loading screens, if I still did scores I'd take off at least half a star for that...
As far as if this game deserves to be $60 or whatever they charge these days, honestly idfk. I don't buy Nintendo games, I simply "borrow" them from "friends", but for once I could honestly see adults who played this game as a kid being nostalgic for this game in 20 years in the same way a lot of current adults are overly sentimental about games like Luigi's Mansion or Yoshi's Story nowadays. There's def a bit of a focus-tested vibe to it, but I also wouldn't consider it devoid of artistic passion -- in a way Showtime feels more creatively ambitious than something like Super Mario Wonder, despite the former's far tighter scope and budget. Kinda shitty that Nintendo felt the need to bury the fact Good-Feel were the devs inside of the game's credits, it's not like they're Arzest or whatever. Good-Feel is basically just a lesser Treasure, if they were like, forced at gunpoint to only do Mario adjacent spin-offs.
Anyways, I had the day off, so decided to spend the afternoon playing this while my cat took a nap on my chest; also I kinda feel a general sense of duty to check out games where Nintendo is trying to market to the girlies. Probs not gonna bother finishing unless I get the sick urge to do so cuz it's def on the babier side of Nintendo stuff -- I could feel myself slipping away as early as the first world lol -- and I told myself I'd actually keep playing Pentiment this weekend (also the last Good-Feel developed title I actually bothered completing was Wario Land Shake It when I was like, 16). It's pretty cute!! I like playing as princesses in video games!! But I'm sure Backloggd users will come up with some nefarious spins on why this game is actually a moral and game design travesty, can't wait to see the takes. <3
2017
Saccharine and dream-like without deliberately ignoring the harshness of reality that spurs on those idle fantasies. Since it's a period piece of sorts (set around the time of Barack Obama's first electoral win) there's plenty of anachronisms you could nitpick, but what I think it gets best is the hypocrisy of the era -- that empty hope for something better that we all know never really came. There's lots of "unrealistic" aspects baked into the experience, and I feel a nitpick would probably be that all the characters feel distinctly queer, but I also magically ended up being friends with a bunch of closeted queer people circa 2008, ones I'm still friends with to this day! And like, depending on the era the story is taking place in, the characters might act a little older than you'd expect for people of that age (both in the elementary school flashbacks and the "modern" high school perspective), but it fits so well into the game's themes, premise, and ultimately the fantasy that Butterfly Soup is trying to deliver that it's not even a legitimate criticism in my eyes.
The humor definitely seems hit or miss for some people, but I thought it was cute!! The most accurate "child-like" aspect of the characters the writing lands is their sense of humor and it honestly rules for that; I definitely knew people like and was friends with people like Akarsha in middle and high school. Plus, there's just genuinely snappy humor goin' on here (in the end though it was the "Mile 'Tails' Edgeworth" that really got me, probably because that's exactly the type of joke me and my friends would've made back in like 2009).
Butterfly Soup is just a really lovely visual novel, I think more people should check it out if it interests them!!! Also, I am definitely not beating the Min allegations.
The humor definitely seems hit or miss for some people, but I thought it was cute!! The most accurate "child-like" aspect of the characters the writing lands is their sense of humor and it honestly rules for that; I definitely knew people like and was friends with people like Akarsha in middle and high school. Plus, there's just genuinely snappy humor goin' on here (in the end though it was the "Mile 'Tails' Edgeworth" that really got me, probably because that's exactly the type of joke me and my friends would've made back in like 2009).
Butterfly Soup is just a really lovely visual novel, I think more people should check it out if it interests them!!! Also, I am definitely not beating the Min allegations.
picked this up just cuz the box art was pretty and this has probably one of the wildest movement systems i've ever experienced in a fighting game; motion sickness has never been this fun. like, yeah it's unfinished and half the characters are in 3D while the rest are 2D sprites, yeah the story mode was clearly written by extremely horny dudes who don't see women as people, yeah there's like a specific instance where they sexualize a small child that kinda ruins any good vibes i could have ultimately derived from the experience, but it is pretty cool that it lets you play as a muscular butch (sanitized for straight dudes to enjoy but we take what we can get out here), just wish more games would let us embody that kinda role
Swagless Bullet Witch with Metal Gear Solid rejects for antagonists. Now, don't get me wrong: Vincent Valentine is the only boy in the whole world I would date. I love him. I would do anything for him. But his game is ass, and there's not enough here to make it a bad game that's actually kind of good somehow or whatever; it's just dry, crumbly, and overproduced. I was absolutely fucking ready to be this game's strongest warrior, but it's really a case of what you see is what you get, and I can't even really bring myself to watch the rest of the cutscenes on YouTube, even after getting over halfway through the game in a single sitting a couple weeks ago. I don't even really hate the game either, it's probably the least offensive entry in the 2000s era of the FF7 compilation, it's just playing this game and watching these characters say words in cutscenes makes my tummy hurt.
The logistics behind Cait Sith in this one are really funny though, like what the fuck is even going on with that.
The logistics behind Cait Sith in this one are really funny though, like what the fuck is even going on with that.
This review contains spoilers
This is a companion to my initial thoughts on Rebirth, and if you're like me and just kind of mindlessly click on things that are spoiler tagged, consider this your warning that I will be talking about the game's ending and many other elements unique to Rebirth's narrative. But first, I'm gonna start off by going over some stuff I missed in that first review: side quests are overall higher quality and hold a lot more intrinsic value (i.e. they're actually kinda rewarding on their own merit and not just for the rewards themselves; i love the one with the puppy and the one with the cats don't remember da rest tbh), however there's way more of them so numerically speaking there's a lot more stinkers and personally I'm just not a huuuge fan of gameifying progression within relationships -- the bright side of that is the relationship system isn't really that strict, and I think you get more relationship boosts for just playing the main scenario and using synergy abilities than you'd expect. Didn't really annoy me as much as other AAA games, but I'd say I prefer just having relationships form naturally through the narrative (or have the progression be invisible like the original, at least until new game plus, which they did partially do).
On that note, I really loved the chapter 12 visit to the Gold Saucer; Final Fantasy VII finally has its 90s love ballad and I think compared to its PSX Final Fantasy theme song brethren it's my new favorite (still fucking love Eyes on Me and Melodies of Life tho). Highly recommend aiming for the Tifa date, it's really awkward how non-present she is in the Loveless sequence compared to other characters when you go for Aerith being the princess in the Loveless play, and her little words of encouragement to Aerith before she sings is so cute (me when I see a girl being nice to another girl in a piece of media: she's literally me). I'm happy it's pretty easy to go back and see different variations of the date in new game plus though. Also Cloud and Tifa in the ferris wheel was pretty cute, and he wasn't a butthole for once, which like god damn he fucking SUCKS in this game it kinda rules.
I think my one major gripe is that they added a new sequence to the Gongaga Reactor portion where Cloud essentially puts Tifa in mortal peril, but nobody feels as upset about it as they should? Like maybe I'm just reading the scenes wrong, and it does fit into Tifa's character at this point in the narrative that she would forgive him given some time, but kinda felt like there needed to be a little more exploration on the emotional and physical implications of Cloud's mental degradation and the potential danger the people he cares about face because of that. It's a very cool sequence regardless, which tbh I think is me being biased cuz 50% of it has Tifa as the temporary party leader.
There's other things that I think people are gonna bitch about that I kinda see the value in adding, like Yuffie's presidential assassination attempt is pretty fucking cool imo, very based of her. Roche's little side plot is extremely Final Fantasy and I'm here for it, mostly for the homoeroticism. I love how often Tifa and Aerith have to bitch at Cloud for being a creep/weirdo/insecure prick, it rules. I love how much the characters suck in this game while still feeling like they're just trying their best to do the right thing. Really wish they were more okay with wanton murder of Shinra employees and the other unamibiguously evil wastes of breath that exist in this game's world, but I guess this ain't that kinda story so I'll take what I can get.
So uh, the multiverse, huh? Yeah, it's a tough thing to unpack considering it's not actually all that present within the core narrative, mostly showing up between major events and culminating in the finale. I wanna say first off, I fucking hate multiverse shit; most of the time it's utilized when a story has nowhere else to go or to cheaply introduce fan service. And I won't say that Rebirth's utilization of multiverse theory isn't at least partly the latter, but it's definitely more complicated than that, because like the wisps in Remake, the utilization of alternate "timelines" (I believe they're referred to as worlds in the game itself) due to Sephiroth and Aerith's meddling with the built-in defense mechanisms of the planet that maintained a specific planetary determinism had actual consequences. It's, extremely heady to say the least, but that's Final Fantasy, baby!
I honestly expected that the Zack sections of the game would take up like 30% of the game or something, but I'd estimate it's somewhere closer to between 1% and 5%. And like, another preface here to show how meaningful it is that these sequences mostly worked for me: I do not like Crisis Core. I think it's stinky, it's bad, and I don't really hate Zack as much as I found his story to be really pointless and centered around needless fan service; like if they made a whole game about FF6 Locke's ex-gf or something and the intro involved the magitek armors going to Narshe while Terra's theme played for some reason. But it's whatever I'm over its whole existence, and I kinda like Zack he's a fun little guy, hard to hate him really, and outside of the context of Crisis Core I learned to appreciate him. And while my initial reaction to the ending was, "well, what was the fucking point of the multiverse shit then", it eventually sunk in for me what they were going for by adapting it in this way.
It's a bit of a mystery box, but unlike most mystery boxes (like Lost if it it was only a little bit stupid and not completely stupid), people were able to kind of predict this one correctly! Aerith doesn't die! And I mean, she does die, but I'm kind of cautiously really fucking down with what they're doing by placing Cloud's consciousness between two different worlds essentially, one where he saved Aerith and his actual reality where Aerith dies, and how that specifically adds to both his visible mental degradation and an even deeper inability to cope with the loss of Aerith. At least that's my interpretation since they go out of their way to show that Aerith's "spirit" was noticed by Nanaki in the final scene and that it wasn't an outright hallucination on Cloud's part, which I would've preferred, but I can see what they're cooking here.
I mean, really, I would've preferred none of this extra shit, and the way the leads devs talk about the "shock value" of it all is definitely off-putting, but I think... I think it kinda works? I'm pretty sure Aerith died in the original for pretty similar developmental reasons, and while I def need even more time to really figure out why it ended up working, it definitely left me in kind of malaise that not many other games since like, the ending of Drakengard 3 or something have made me feel for days on end.
But what's especially interesting is that my initial reaction to Aerith's death scene was outright confusion and frustration as it was extremely difficult to parse if she was actually alive or not until I beat the final boss -- but I believe that's kind of the point. Both Cloud and the player are in denial, how much of what happens in the final sequence is real and how much of it is a "fever dream", as Sephiroth puts it, is up to player interpretation. There's some physically established reality to the multiverse shit ofc, but thematically speaking, making the two characters that show up for Cloud in these dream-like sequences be Zack and Aerith fits so fucking well into Cloud's inability to process loss that I feel that was more the intention than simply fan service. Also Biggs and Zack being buddies is kinda cute, but from a utilitarian perspective these sequences help to prove that the dying worlds are indeed really happening, and not necessarily just "Aerith's dreams" or purely in Cloud's mind, even if functionally that's kind of what they end up being since I think (?) they're connected through the lifestream, which up to this point only really Sephiroth and Aerith have been able to navigate.
Again, not really the direction I would've personally chosen, and there are some aspects lost in terms of impact in Aerith's death scene, particularly Cloud's speech (which is more implied by voiceless cutaways within the "Aerith dies" universe) and the individual reactions each character once had are no longer there, which makes sense when you consider there like 7 other dudes there now when last time you just had two other characters in your party during that scene. But it'd be remiss if I didn't mention that a lot has been gained: both Barret and Tifa's reactions are so visceral that it's difficult to outright dismiss this iteration, at least until you're thrown into a 10 phase boss battle, which if that loses you after that point, I guess I can't blame you. I don't think the reality of it all is fully lost in the end though, the game takes ample time to linger on the loss of the party's beloved flower girl, in such a way that I can't really stop thinking about it, even days after completing the game for the first time. The original scene makes me cry every time without fail, but there's something to be said for how much feels truly lost this time, how much more Aerith means to the party and to the player this time around is much more "real" in a way that the original game was only able to suggest in key moments.
Basically, the multiverse is there for fan service to a certain degree, but a) it's not some annoying MCU bullshit like people are gonna inevitably strawman it as, and b) it's more there to create a physical representation of Cloud's grief, and while I think it significantly detracts from the force of nature that Sephiroth could feel like in the original, there's something going on here that feels unabashedly Final Fantasy VII, and not even in the shitty ass Compilation way, just the way it chose to expand on the emotional core of the original without necessarily stepping too far out of the game's already somewhat flimsy physical rules. Like seriously, the reason we love Final Fantasy VII in the first place is because there is no place the game was afraid to go. Not perfect, but it feels special all the same. Also Tifa's reaction to Aerith's death is so fucking raw, and Cloud just smiling away because he has a ghost gf now is just, absolutely fucking gutwrenching, I love it man. I'm glad at least Nanaki is comforting Tifa in the final scene or else I think I'd be emotionally ruined probably. Can't wait for Cloud to be absolutely unbearable for the first 30 hours of part 3!!!
And on that note, Part 3 is probably gonna be the weakest of the trilogy, both in terms of narrative and gameplay, so I'm not too gutted about having to wait 4 years for the finale, but I'm excited nonetheless. I'm not really sure what they're gonna do for the areas you're expected to return to though? Either way, I hope the open world shit is toned a bit overall, more condensed regions similar to Nibelheim and Junon would be nice. There's lots of hints of extra shit that didn't exist in the original's disc 2 and 3, and that kinda makes sense when you stop and consider just how empty disc 2 kinda feels towards the end, particularly compared to disc 1. Really excited for part 3 to have a Sonic Adventure 2-esque opening where Cloud snowboards away from his troubles...
Idk man, maybe I'm being too lenient, but it's just Final Fantasy in the end; if people can love the endings to games like FF8 and FF10, then FF7 Rebirth is like easy mode compared to those two games' fucking insane stories. 10 years from now it'll maybe still hold some level of controversy within broader gaming culture, mostly by people who were told to be mad about it by the internet, but I feel like the consensus will turn out to be mostly positive. I think back to the first time I played the original Final Fantasy VII, there are so many aspects of that game that I found to be really fucking stupid back then, that now I deeply cherish -- I wouldn't have them any other way, in their own right, of course.
At the same time though, I get it if it didn't work for you, cuz it almost didn't work for me, and I might have just gaslit myself into loving it as a coping mechanism (kinda meta when you think about it...). Also why does Chadley talk like he's presenting a Nintendo Direct and why is he a horrible misogynist to his vtuber pokedex daughter, she didn't do anything wrong besides infodump about her special interests...... :(
edit: after reading details from the Rebirth Ultimania that just released and also after rewatching the final scenes several times after the past month, i think the vagueness is intentional from a thematic sense since so much is unclear to cloud himself, the player surrogate
i feel like soooo much "theorycrafting" misses the like
thematic point of a lot of these things. whether the aerith we're seeing at various points in the finale are lifestream aerith or sephiroth hallucination aerith doesn't ultimately matter because it serves two points:
a) to demonstrate's clouds mental and emotional degradation, he is at his lowest point yet. he can't even see what's right in front of him -- aerith has died and tifa desperately needs his support. he is failing himself and the people around him. the only productive thing he ultimately does is pointing out where to go next (but we all know what happens when he gets to northern crater with the black materia in-hand)
b) i think they really did want to give aerith a more meaningful goodbye, even if the rest of the party can't see it. she's made the ultimate sacrifice, and it allows the player to really understand the weight of what she's lost in allowing herself to perish to save the world
also it's not multiverses :) it's just other worlds existing in the lifestream shit, which is cool, and was mostly already clear in retrospect, i think gamer discourse jargon is destroying meaningful art discussion at times. once again, it's final fantasy baby!!
On that note, I really loved the chapter 12 visit to the Gold Saucer; Final Fantasy VII finally has its 90s love ballad and I think compared to its PSX Final Fantasy theme song brethren it's my new favorite (still fucking love Eyes on Me and Melodies of Life tho). Highly recommend aiming for the Tifa date, it's really awkward how non-present she is in the Loveless sequence compared to other characters when you go for Aerith being the princess in the Loveless play, and her little words of encouragement to Aerith before she sings is so cute (me when I see a girl being nice to another girl in a piece of media: she's literally me). I'm happy it's pretty easy to go back and see different variations of the date in new game plus though. Also Cloud and Tifa in the ferris wheel was pretty cute, and he wasn't a butthole for once, which like god damn he fucking SUCKS in this game it kinda rules.
I think my one major gripe is that they added a new sequence to the Gongaga Reactor portion where Cloud essentially puts Tifa in mortal peril, but nobody feels as upset about it as they should? Like maybe I'm just reading the scenes wrong, and it does fit into Tifa's character at this point in the narrative that she would forgive him given some time, but kinda felt like there needed to be a little more exploration on the emotional and physical implications of Cloud's mental degradation and the potential danger the people he cares about face because of that. It's a very cool sequence regardless, which tbh I think is me being biased cuz 50% of it has Tifa as the temporary party leader.
There's other things that I think people are gonna bitch about that I kinda see the value in adding, like Yuffie's presidential assassination attempt is pretty fucking cool imo, very based of her. Roche's little side plot is extremely Final Fantasy and I'm here for it, mostly for the homoeroticism. I love how often Tifa and Aerith have to bitch at Cloud for being a creep/weirdo/insecure prick, it rules. I love how much the characters suck in this game while still feeling like they're just trying their best to do the right thing. Really wish they were more okay with wanton murder of Shinra employees and the other unamibiguously evil wastes of breath that exist in this game's world, but I guess this ain't that kinda story so I'll take what I can get.
So uh, the multiverse, huh? Yeah, it's a tough thing to unpack considering it's not actually all that present within the core narrative, mostly showing up between major events and culminating in the finale. I wanna say first off, I fucking hate multiverse shit; most of the time it's utilized when a story has nowhere else to go or to cheaply introduce fan service. And I won't say that Rebirth's utilization of multiverse theory isn't at least partly the latter, but it's definitely more complicated than that, because like the wisps in Remake, the utilization of alternate "timelines" (I believe they're referred to as worlds in the game itself) due to Sephiroth and Aerith's meddling with the built-in defense mechanisms of the planet that maintained a specific planetary determinism had actual consequences. It's, extremely heady to say the least, but that's Final Fantasy, baby!
I honestly expected that the Zack sections of the game would take up like 30% of the game or something, but I'd estimate it's somewhere closer to between 1% and 5%. And like, another preface here to show how meaningful it is that these sequences mostly worked for me: I do not like Crisis Core. I think it's stinky, it's bad, and I don't really hate Zack as much as I found his story to be really pointless and centered around needless fan service; like if they made a whole game about FF6 Locke's ex-gf or something and the intro involved the magitek armors going to Narshe while Terra's theme played for some reason. But it's whatever I'm over its whole existence, and I kinda like Zack he's a fun little guy, hard to hate him really, and outside of the context of Crisis Core I learned to appreciate him. And while my initial reaction to the ending was, "well, what was the fucking point of the multiverse shit then", it eventually sunk in for me what they were going for by adapting it in this way.
It's a bit of a mystery box, but unlike most mystery boxes (like Lost if it it was only a little bit stupid and not completely stupid), people were able to kind of predict this one correctly! Aerith doesn't die! And I mean, she does die, but I'm kind of cautiously really fucking down with what they're doing by placing Cloud's consciousness between two different worlds essentially, one where he saved Aerith and his actual reality where Aerith dies, and how that specifically adds to both his visible mental degradation and an even deeper inability to cope with the loss of Aerith. At least that's my interpretation since they go out of their way to show that Aerith's "spirit" was noticed by Nanaki in the final scene and that it wasn't an outright hallucination on Cloud's part, which I would've preferred, but I can see what they're cooking here.
I mean, really, I would've preferred none of this extra shit, and the way the leads devs talk about the "shock value" of it all is definitely off-putting, but I think... I think it kinda works? I'm pretty sure Aerith died in the original for pretty similar developmental reasons, and while I def need even more time to really figure out why it ended up working, it definitely left me in kind of malaise that not many other games since like, the ending of Drakengard 3 or something have made me feel for days on end.
But what's especially interesting is that my initial reaction to Aerith's death scene was outright confusion and frustration as it was extremely difficult to parse if she was actually alive or not until I beat the final boss -- but I believe that's kind of the point. Both Cloud and the player are in denial, how much of what happens in the final sequence is real and how much of it is a "fever dream", as Sephiroth puts it, is up to player interpretation. There's some physically established reality to the multiverse shit ofc, but thematically speaking, making the two characters that show up for Cloud in these dream-like sequences be Zack and Aerith fits so fucking well into Cloud's inability to process loss that I feel that was more the intention than simply fan service. Also Biggs and Zack being buddies is kinda cute, but from a utilitarian perspective these sequences help to prove that the dying worlds are indeed really happening, and not necessarily just "Aerith's dreams" or purely in Cloud's mind, even if functionally that's kind of what they end up being since I think (?) they're connected through the lifestream, which up to this point only really Sephiroth and Aerith have been able to navigate.
Again, not really the direction I would've personally chosen, and there are some aspects lost in terms of impact in Aerith's death scene, particularly Cloud's speech (which is more implied by voiceless cutaways within the "Aerith dies" universe) and the individual reactions each character once had are no longer there, which makes sense when you consider there like 7 other dudes there now when last time you just had two other characters in your party during that scene. But it'd be remiss if I didn't mention that a lot has been gained: both Barret and Tifa's reactions are so visceral that it's difficult to outright dismiss this iteration, at least until you're thrown into a 10 phase boss battle, which if that loses you after that point, I guess I can't blame you. I don't think the reality of it all is fully lost in the end though, the game takes ample time to linger on the loss of the party's beloved flower girl, in such a way that I can't really stop thinking about it, even days after completing the game for the first time. The original scene makes me cry every time without fail, but there's something to be said for how much feels truly lost this time, how much more Aerith means to the party and to the player this time around is much more "real" in a way that the original game was only able to suggest in key moments.
Basically, the multiverse is there for fan service to a certain degree, but a) it's not some annoying MCU bullshit like people are gonna inevitably strawman it as, and b) it's more there to create a physical representation of Cloud's grief, and while I think it significantly detracts from the force of nature that Sephiroth could feel like in the original, there's something going on here that feels unabashedly Final Fantasy VII, and not even in the shitty ass Compilation way, just the way it chose to expand on the emotional core of the original without necessarily stepping too far out of the game's already somewhat flimsy physical rules. Like seriously, the reason we love Final Fantasy VII in the first place is because there is no place the game was afraid to go. Not perfect, but it feels special all the same. Also Tifa's reaction to Aerith's death is so fucking raw, and Cloud just smiling away because he has a ghost gf now is just, absolutely fucking gutwrenching, I love it man. I'm glad at least Nanaki is comforting Tifa in the final scene or else I think I'd be emotionally ruined probably. Can't wait for Cloud to be absolutely unbearable for the first 30 hours of part 3!!!
And on that note, Part 3 is probably gonna be the weakest of the trilogy, both in terms of narrative and gameplay, so I'm not too gutted about having to wait 4 years for the finale, but I'm excited nonetheless. I'm not really sure what they're gonna do for the areas you're expected to return to though? Either way, I hope the open world shit is toned a bit overall, more condensed regions similar to Nibelheim and Junon would be nice. There's lots of hints of extra shit that didn't exist in the original's disc 2 and 3, and that kinda makes sense when you stop and consider just how empty disc 2 kinda feels towards the end, particularly compared to disc 1. Really excited for part 3 to have a Sonic Adventure 2-esque opening where Cloud snowboards away from his troubles...
Idk man, maybe I'm being too lenient, but it's just Final Fantasy in the end; if people can love the endings to games like FF8 and FF10, then FF7 Rebirth is like easy mode compared to those two games' fucking insane stories. 10 years from now it'll maybe still hold some level of controversy within broader gaming culture, mostly by people who were told to be mad about it by the internet, but I feel like the consensus will turn out to be mostly positive. I think back to the first time I played the original Final Fantasy VII, there are so many aspects of that game that I found to be really fucking stupid back then, that now I deeply cherish -- I wouldn't have them any other way, in their own right, of course.
At the same time though, I get it if it didn't work for you, cuz it almost didn't work for me, and I might have just gaslit myself into loving it as a coping mechanism (kinda meta when you think about it...). Also why does Chadley talk like he's presenting a Nintendo Direct and why is he a horrible misogynist to his vtuber pokedex daughter, she didn't do anything wrong besides infodump about her special interests...... :(
edit: after reading details from the Rebirth Ultimania that just released and also after rewatching the final scenes several times after the past month, i think the vagueness is intentional from a thematic sense since so much is unclear to cloud himself, the player surrogate
i feel like soooo much "theorycrafting" misses the like
thematic point of a lot of these things. whether the aerith we're seeing at various points in the finale are lifestream aerith or sephiroth hallucination aerith doesn't ultimately matter because it serves two points:
a) to demonstrate's clouds mental and emotional degradation, he is at his lowest point yet. he can't even see what's right in front of him -- aerith has died and tifa desperately needs his support. he is failing himself and the people around him. the only productive thing he ultimately does is pointing out where to go next (but we all know what happens when he gets to northern crater with the black materia in-hand)
b) i think they really did want to give aerith a more meaningful goodbye, even if the rest of the party can't see it. she's made the ultimate sacrifice, and it allows the player to really understand the weight of what she's lost in allowing herself to perish to save the world
also it's not multiverses :) it's just other worlds existing in the lifestream shit, which is cool, and was mostly already clear in retrospect, i think gamer discourse jargon is destroying meaningful art discussion at times. once again, it's final fantasy baby!!
Final Fantasy VII Remake project has absolutely no right working as well as it does, and Rebirth doubles down on what made Remake work -- and occasionally what really brought it down, with more unsavory additions to spare. But don't get the wrong idea, in Rebirth's extravangance and conceptually superfluous presentation exists the most actualized and engrossing take on the events of Final Fantasy VII's post-Midgar disc one that one could possibly even imagine, and I'm saying this as somebody whose love for the original is ironclad and unbreakable: Rebirth is probably going to end up being my favorite way to experience the moments tucked away in what was once a maybe 7 to 12 hour-ish section of a 25 hour long game -- with the 7 to 12 hour section now being close to 50 or 60 hours on average I'd imagine. That is to say, I've come to terms with a lot of the liberties Square has taken with the narrative and characterization and presentation, everything really; what made the original special to me, and most likely to many others as well, can't be perfectly replicated anyways, so I really do mean it when I say that the end result given here is bordering on a "best case scenario" for an adaptation of this vast a scope.
Much like Remake, characters that were once tableaus feel alive and truly connected as a group in a way the original just didn't have the ability to convey, just on an even more detailed and broader scale. And once again don't take that the wrong way, they're tableaus that I cherish dearly -- Final Fantasy VII's cast is my absolute favorite across like, all media -- but they're expanded upon so meaningfully: Tifa's self-destructive people-pleasing, Aerith's down to earth and fun attitude, Barret being the leftist extremist father figure we all know and love, Red XIII's deep loyalty, Yuffie's obnoxious little sister energy, Cait Sith's inopportune joviality, Cid's weird uncle vibes, and Vincent being the resident goth kid that has issues with authority. And their relationships with one other: Aerith's deep friendships with Tifa and Red XIII, Barret's new found friendships with Yuffie and Red XIII, and even the basic and immediate kinship many of them feel towards one other is more detailed and vibrant. I don't know man, I just love all these fuckin' guys, I constantly had the stupidest fucking grin on my face while playing this game it was honestly kinda cringe. Even side characters have so much more going on with them, certain characters that were previously throwaway will often give one a sense that there's something deeper going on with them as they continue to try to exist in this broken world, even the ones that are more comic relief than pathos-invoking.
The plot can often feel clumsy, but I'd say it's a lot more cohesive than the original's, pretty significantly too, the original occasionally feeling aimless and as it tried to find a reason to send you to the next exciting setpiece; even as somebody who replays the game often I find myself being confused which event flag I need to trigger next. And really the original Final Fantasy VII can be best-described as like, a bunch of Final Fantasy VI opera scenes strung together, and Rebirth leans into that so hard that I could see it being way too much for some people. If Final Fantasy XVI was way too dry for many, myself included, I could genuinely see Rebirth being perceived as excessively "wet" for others. Though, as a side note, when playing Final Fantasy XVI I'd often find myself unintentionally dozing off, whereas with Rebirth I actually had enormous trouble sleeping, both in finding a place I wanted to stop playing and the mild insomnia the excitement of getting to play the game again induced in my four day-ish long binge (which, I haven't done in a long fucking time without needing to take significant breaks, which happened quite often with Final Fantasy XVI, and as an adult in her 30s I think that's saying a lot).
On the topic of CBU1 styling super fucking hard on CBU3, god damn the combat in Rebirth is exactly what I wanted it to be, probably my favorite combat in general, from like, any video game? Like, it's not mechanically the deepest action game I've ever played, but it does expand upon Remake's systems in a meaningful way without upending what made those systems work in the first place. Final Fantasy has been focused on telling the player what any given character is about through how they play since like, FF4, and Rebirth's execution of that philosophy doesn't miss at all. Tifa is more fun than ever with an extensive aerial toolkit, I fucking love that she can juggle enemies and it kinda became my go to strategy at a certain point, which like Tifa was the blueprint for young Theia so I'm so glad they did her so good in this game both on a gameplay and narrative level. Red XIII I have to say feels a little bit busted!! I'm bad at playing as him, and he still seems really fucking useful even with unskilled play. Cait Sith I'm still trying to wrap my head around, but I wouldn't have it any other way than making Cait Sith a confusing mess to properly utilize. I wish Vincent was playable, one of like 10 or so boys in media that I actually care about, but I kinda understand why he isn't when he shows up so late that it was probably better to just focus on polishing the rest of the cast than implementing what's probably going to be a pretty unique kit on top of everything else going on.
There's a particular level involving Cait Sith that I'm pretty sure is gonna become like the third or fourth most contentious thing about the game, but I fucking loved it in a really fucked up Banjo-Tooieian way and nobody can take that away from me. The thing I can see becoming the second most contentious aspect about the game, what I thought would be the primary contention until I got to the ending (which I'll get to in a bit, and without spoiling anything, but if you don't want to know literally anything just be forewarned), is the open world game design elements. The best way to describe it is probably Xenoblade with some pointless Ubisoft shit, but it's not really as bad as it sounds, and much of it is entirely optional only providing secondary or tertiary benefits to character progression. As a "modern" interpretation of the original's wide, open, and mostly empty fields populated by sets of random enemy tables, I think it's probably a fair enough way to go about things. The life springs and towers I wasn't so much a fan of, like why do the towers play the BotW theme But At Home when you activate them, but the summon temple thingies felt a lot more meaningful than just picking up a materia off the ground, like how it usually worked in the original (seriously who was dropping all those bahamut variants and just leaving them there). The map designs themselves I did enjoy though, even if the Cosmo Canyon and Gongaga regions can be a little tedious at times, I honestly prefer having to mentally map out the geographical logic of an open world than the modern trend of empty fields with little identity and often no reason to engage with a game's environments and systems.
That said, the more linear "dungeon" levels are kinda mostly the same deal, but they did an even better job at making them feel like real places you're exploring this time 'round, as opposed to the modified FF13 hallway dealie in Remake. They're still largely linear, but the best way to explain why I think they work better is how the Final Fantasy standby of forked paths with option A being progression and option B being a treasure chest is more heavily obscured; I actually got a little bit lost in a couple of levels!!! Though sometimes that was the result of perhaps poor tutorialization of a level's specific gimmick or progress not being visually distinct enough, which like god damn the graphics are so fucking good in this game that it's almost hard to see anything unless I walked up to my TV (maybe I just need to invest in a larger screen for my old lady eyes but whateverrr), it's no wonder that there are several areas where the Uncharted climbing walls have the RE4R yellow paint on them. I know people are gonna slam the game for shit like that, which is like, yeah I can kinda get it, personally would've preferred more non-diegetic signaling over things that make me have annoying CinemaSin-esque intrusive thoughts about "who is painting all this shit out here in the middle of nowhere".
And you know, it's not gonna be the most discussed thing in the end, as uninspired as Rebirth's "structural quirks" may feel now, they'll probly become innocuous given enough time; that's just how these thing typically go. I wanna say the same will happen for the game's ending which... yeah. Not gonna say much here, but if you find yourself frustrated by it, I'd say give yourself some space and rewatch it on YouTube or something. It's a lot to take in, and I found it a lot more impactful after I had gotten some sleep and finally digested what was being shown to me. I don't think it was all exactly what I wanted it to be, far from it maybe, but there's something to be said about the way the entirety of Rebirth takes special moments dear to us and recontextualizes them into new special moments, sometimes even more special.
And a bit of a tangent, but I loathe the critic scores for this game. Not so much because they're necessarily wrong for enjoying the game, but because I'm starting to strongly believe that art, and especially interactive art, can't really be quantified on such simple terms, especially when people tend to have such viscerally opposed reactions to their experiences with any given work. What does a 10/10 even mean? On a personal level I could almost understand, but detached from the context of that personal experience how can we consider any piece of media to be in some arbitrary upper percentile of perfection? I guess I'm saying this because I know with scores like that people are going to come at this game with a certain set of expectations, but despite it being one of the most gorgeous and polished Final Fantasy titles that CBU1 has brought out in recent years, it's a deeply uneven experience. You will be frustrated, maybe you'll even get annoyed at the many side quests that suck ass and are total shit!!! Or something, maybe you'll hate the combat even if it's exactly what my brain has always wanted FF7's combat to be. But I guess like, when you look at a piece of art in its totality as opposed to a given qualification of Good or Bad, it's easier to just appreciate things as they are. Or even fucking hate them for what they are! People on this website tend to tear the shit out of really popular games and who's to say they're wrong for looking past consensus into a deeper inner truth, which you know, even if that comes from a place of unfounded contrarianism, good for them, man. Fuck video games!!
I hope it doesn't come off like I'm waffling or anything, I just really love this game, and I feel like the things I hated about it only made me love it more in a really fucked up way. I think playing Drakengard 3 for the first time a year ago gave me brain damage or something. Also like, on a final note, let me get more on brand here: there's some premier fucking queerbaiting going on here, and if that ain't more accurate to the actual single lesbian in her early 30s experience than any other AAA video game that has some fake ass porn-afflicted interpretation of sapphic romance where flesh puppets say sweet nothings at each other after completing a single questline or whatever the fuck, than I don't know what is. Anyways, sorry I had to make it gay in the end, but truly that is what the Final Fantasy VII was about all along: twinks with swords and bisexual women who can suplex kaijus. Which, you know, being able to do the latter is what's going to be main determinant if part 3 is good or not, so the ball's in your court now Square...
Much like Remake, characters that were once tableaus feel alive and truly connected as a group in a way the original just didn't have the ability to convey, just on an even more detailed and broader scale. And once again don't take that the wrong way, they're tableaus that I cherish dearly -- Final Fantasy VII's cast is my absolute favorite across like, all media -- but they're expanded upon so meaningfully: Tifa's self-destructive people-pleasing, Aerith's down to earth and fun attitude, Barret being the leftist extremist father figure we all know and love, Red XIII's deep loyalty, Yuffie's obnoxious little sister energy, Cait Sith's inopportune joviality, Cid's weird uncle vibes, and Vincent being the resident goth kid that has issues with authority. And their relationships with one other: Aerith's deep friendships with Tifa and Red XIII, Barret's new found friendships with Yuffie and Red XIII, and even the basic and immediate kinship many of them feel towards one other is more detailed and vibrant. I don't know man, I just love all these fuckin' guys, I constantly had the stupidest fucking grin on my face while playing this game it was honestly kinda cringe. Even side characters have so much more going on with them, certain characters that were previously throwaway will often give one a sense that there's something deeper going on with them as they continue to try to exist in this broken world, even the ones that are more comic relief than pathos-invoking.
The plot can often feel clumsy, but I'd say it's a lot more cohesive than the original's, pretty significantly too, the original occasionally feeling aimless and as it tried to find a reason to send you to the next exciting setpiece; even as somebody who replays the game often I find myself being confused which event flag I need to trigger next. And really the original Final Fantasy VII can be best-described as like, a bunch of Final Fantasy VI opera scenes strung together, and Rebirth leans into that so hard that I could see it being way too much for some people. If Final Fantasy XVI was way too dry for many, myself included, I could genuinely see Rebirth being perceived as excessively "wet" for others. Though, as a side note, when playing Final Fantasy XVI I'd often find myself unintentionally dozing off, whereas with Rebirth I actually had enormous trouble sleeping, both in finding a place I wanted to stop playing and the mild insomnia the excitement of getting to play the game again induced in my four day-ish long binge (which, I haven't done in a long fucking time without needing to take significant breaks, which happened quite often with Final Fantasy XVI, and as an adult in her 30s I think that's saying a lot).
On the topic of CBU1 styling super fucking hard on CBU3, god damn the combat in Rebirth is exactly what I wanted it to be, probably my favorite combat in general, from like, any video game? Like, it's not mechanically the deepest action game I've ever played, but it does expand upon Remake's systems in a meaningful way without upending what made those systems work in the first place. Final Fantasy has been focused on telling the player what any given character is about through how they play since like, FF4, and Rebirth's execution of that philosophy doesn't miss at all. Tifa is more fun than ever with an extensive aerial toolkit, I fucking love that she can juggle enemies and it kinda became my go to strategy at a certain point, which like Tifa was the blueprint for young Theia so I'm so glad they did her so good in this game both on a gameplay and narrative level. Red XIII I have to say feels a little bit busted!! I'm bad at playing as him, and he still seems really fucking useful even with unskilled play. Cait Sith I'm still trying to wrap my head around, but I wouldn't have it any other way than making Cait Sith a confusing mess to properly utilize. I wish Vincent was playable, one of like 10 or so boys in media that I actually care about, but I kinda understand why he isn't when he shows up so late that it was probably better to just focus on polishing the rest of the cast than implementing what's probably going to be a pretty unique kit on top of everything else going on.
There's a particular level involving Cait Sith that I'm pretty sure is gonna become like the third or fourth most contentious thing about the game, but I fucking loved it in a really fucked up Banjo-Tooieian way and nobody can take that away from me. The thing I can see becoming the second most contentious aspect about the game, what I thought would be the primary contention until I got to the ending (which I'll get to in a bit, and without spoiling anything, but if you don't want to know literally anything just be forewarned), is the open world game design elements. The best way to describe it is probably Xenoblade with some pointless Ubisoft shit, but it's not really as bad as it sounds, and much of it is entirely optional only providing secondary or tertiary benefits to character progression. As a "modern" interpretation of the original's wide, open, and mostly empty fields populated by sets of random enemy tables, I think it's probably a fair enough way to go about things. The life springs and towers I wasn't so much a fan of, like why do the towers play the BotW theme But At Home when you activate them, but the summon temple thingies felt a lot more meaningful than just picking up a materia off the ground, like how it usually worked in the original (seriously who was dropping all those bahamut variants and just leaving them there). The map designs themselves I did enjoy though, even if the Cosmo Canyon and Gongaga regions can be a little tedious at times, I honestly prefer having to mentally map out the geographical logic of an open world than the modern trend of empty fields with little identity and often no reason to engage with a game's environments and systems.
That said, the more linear "dungeon" levels are kinda mostly the same deal, but they did an even better job at making them feel like real places you're exploring this time 'round, as opposed to the modified FF13 hallway dealie in Remake. They're still largely linear, but the best way to explain why I think they work better is how the Final Fantasy standby of forked paths with option A being progression and option B being a treasure chest is more heavily obscured; I actually got a little bit lost in a couple of levels!!! Though sometimes that was the result of perhaps poor tutorialization of a level's specific gimmick or progress not being visually distinct enough, which like god damn the graphics are so fucking good in this game that it's almost hard to see anything unless I walked up to my TV (maybe I just need to invest in a larger screen for my old lady eyes but whateverrr), it's no wonder that there are several areas where the Uncharted climbing walls have the RE4R yellow paint on them. I know people are gonna slam the game for shit like that, which is like, yeah I can kinda get it, personally would've preferred more non-diegetic signaling over things that make me have annoying CinemaSin-esque intrusive thoughts about "who is painting all this shit out here in the middle of nowhere".
And you know, it's not gonna be the most discussed thing in the end, as uninspired as Rebirth's "structural quirks" may feel now, they'll probly become innocuous given enough time; that's just how these thing typically go. I wanna say the same will happen for the game's ending which... yeah. Not gonna say much here, but if you find yourself frustrated by it, I'd say give yourself some space and rewatch it on YouTube or something. It's a lot to take in, and I found it a lot more impactful after I had gotten some sleep and finally digested what was being shown to me. I don't think it was all exactly what I wanted it to be, far from it maybe, but there's something to be said about the way the entirety of Rebirth takes special moments dear to us and recontextualizes them into new special moments, sometimes even more special.
And a bit of a tangent, but I loathe the critic scores for this game. Not so much because they're necessarily wrong for enjoying the game, but because I'm starting to strongly believe that art, and especially interactive art, can't really be quantified on such simple terms, especially when people tend to have such viscerally opposed reactions to their experiences with any given work. What does a 10/10 even mean? On a personal level I could almost understand, but detached from the context of that personal experience how can we consider any piece of media to be in some arbitrary upper percentile of perfection? I guess I'm saying this because I know with scores like that people are going to come at this game with a certain set of expectations, but despite it being one of the most gorgeous and polished Final Fantasy titles that CBU1 has brought out in recent years, it's a deeply uneven experience. You will be frustrated, maybe you'll even get annoyed at the many side quests that suck ass and are total shit!!! Or something, maybe you'll hate the combat even if it's exactly what my brain has always wanted FF7's combat to be. But I guess like, when you look at a piece of art in its totality as opposed to a given qualification of Good or Bad, it's easier to just appreciate things as they are. Or even fucking hate them for what they are! People on this website tend to tear the shit out of really popular games and who's to say they're wrong for looking past consensus into a deeper inner truth, which you know, even if that comes from a place of unfounded contrarianism, good for them, man. Fuck video games!!
I hope it doesn't come off like I'm waffling or anything, I just really love this game, and I feel like the things I hated about it only made me love it more in a really fucked up way. I think playing Drakengard 3 for the first time a year ago gave me brain damage or something. Also like, on a final note, let me get more on brand here: there's some premier fucking queerbaiting going on here, and if that ain't more accurate to the actual single lesbian in her early 30s experience than any other AAA video game that has some fake ass porn-afflicted interpretation of sapphic romance where flesh puppets say sweet nothings at each other after completing a single questline or whatever the fuck, than I don't know what is. Anyways, sorry I had to make it gay in the end, but truly that is what the Final Fantasy VII was about all along: twinks with swords and bisexual women who can suplex kaijus. Which, you know, being able to do the latter is what's going to be main determinant if part 3 is good or not, so the ball's in your court now Square...
2023
TraumaCore Violence is completely unashamed of what it is, from its on the nose title, to its almost exactly what you'd expect narrative and gameplay premise. Yet, there's nothing else really quite like it. You can throw comparison after comparison at it from either its game specific inspirations or non-game aesthetic and cultural inspirations, but I'd say most don't quite stick once you really dig into the game -- TraumaCore Violence is beautifully unique in its own right. The entire experience is this chaotic flowstate of just barely comprehensible noise and inputs that manages to cozily wrap itself around a visual narrative that's both ambiguous enough for its intended audience to easily relate, while also giving off the vibe that the creator is conveying a deeply personal story to the player. I def wouldn't recommend it to everybody, but if you're an edgy trans femme and believe irony is dead and subtlety is for cowards, this might be exactly your shit.
2024
2012
Supremely fucking confident. In its presentation, in its dedication to the trimmed down action gameplay, in its boldly unique aesthetic premise, in its kind of trope-y story, in its blatant misogyny: you get the unshakeable feeling that CyberConnect2 knew what they were making, what they wanted to say, and how they were going to have the player experience it. Does it all work? Absolutely not. Does it even matter? That's gonna depend on how easily you buy into the broader experience Asura's Wrath is offering. It's insane a game like this even exists, in all its grandeur it makes you yearn for more from the gaming industry as a whole. Not necessarily in the sense that I want more games like Asura's Wrath specifically, but games that are willing to be themselves as opposed to the modern AAA trend of making every game their own individual mean of any other genre adjacent AAA title.
Still absolutely gorgeous (at least it is on RPCS3, not sure how it's lookin' on native consoles these days) while also finding this distinct visual balance in its character designs between humor and coolness, which is further reflected in its increasingly ridiculous setpieces that sometimes border on the edge of spectacle and gag -- it's too bad the same couldn't be said for how the game treats the women in its story, mostly being reduced to objects one way or another. Par for the course in shounen anime I guess, but I consider it the one actual blight on the game overall. There's other smaller issues like there not being a whole ton of enemy variety and the action segments can be pretty repetitive, but the pacing and visual language is so fucking on point that those less desirable aspects kinda melt into the back of your brain when the good shit is happening.
People who liked the kaiju shit in Final Fantasy XVI but wanna play a game without 20 hours of MMO questing to get to the good parts should definitely try to find a way to play this one. Also any God Hand enjoyers who thought that game had too much gameplay and not enough Star Wars-themed Hinduism-Buddhism-FotNS-Berserk fusion.
Still absolutely gorgeous (at least it is on RPCS3, not sure how it's lookin' on native consoles these days) while also finding this distinct visual balance in its character designs between humor and coolness, which is further reflected in its increasingly ridiculous setpieces that sometimes border on the edge of spectacle and gag -- it's too bad the same couldn't be said for how the game treats the women in its story, mostly being reduced to objects one way or another. Par for the course in shounen anime I guess, but I consider it the one actual blight on the game overall. There's other smaller issues like there not being a whole ton of enemy variety and the action segments can be pretty repetitive, but the pacing and visual language is so fucking on point that those less desirable aspects kinda melt into the back of your brain when the good shit is happening.
People who liked the kaiju shit in Final Fantasy XVI but wanna play a game without 20 hours of MMO questing to get to the good parts should definitely try to find a way to play this one. Also any God Hand enjoyers who thought that game had too much gameplay and not enough Star Wars-themed Hinduism-Buddhism-FotNS-Berserk fusion.
the feminine urge to reunite with the androgynous physical embodiment of a fragment of your soul that was forcibly taken away from you as a child and become whole again
2009
Does anybody else get exhausted of our cultural tendency to immediately lump any given piece of media into concrete categories like "good" or "bad", the latter often attributing a sort of spiritual disposability to said piece of media? Like, in a vacuum, I guess it's not the worst thing we can do, and it's something you shouldn't be ashamed of doing or something you have to stop doing outright if you just really love or really hate something, but it does tend to have this knock on effect where we don't have to engage with media once we've categorized something as either "peak" or "dogshit".
Because of that sort of black-and-white mindset, Gamer Discourse just ended up eviscerating all discussion of Final Fantasy XIII when it came out, and in all honesty probably bled into the potential enjoyment other people may have otherwise received from the game. I'm not a psychologist I can't prove that, but like, it happened to me for a long time until I broke out of that mindset! Not saying people have to suddenly like FF13, or that we have to completely flip the discourse around towards largely positive, but it's pretty cool that Final Fantasy XIII even exists imho!! Like, how many AAA sci-fi fantasy RPG epics were we even getting during that era of gaming? I won't say it's as overall satisfying or as complete feeling of a work when up against most other Final Fantasy titles, and maybe even other RPGs of similar budget and scope, but I enjoyed my time with it despite it kind of having a Wind Waker-ian malaise to it (I mean that in both a good and bad way, but mostly a good way!! btw while we're hanging out in the parentheses dimension misusing basic conventions of punctuation and general formatting, does anybody else want to eat the little spheres in the Crystarium? They look like tasty little candies to me, probably even tastier than materia).
The basic combat system is contentious for a reason, but it's kinda sick as hell in a way I both love and despise. It's like, attempting to replicate the feeling of turn-based combat -- which is a style of gameplay that typically abstracts interactions between entities for the sake of compartmentalizing actions to allow strategy to be coherent for the player -- while ostensibly (and correct me if I'm wrong about how this game actually functions) being an action game that the player only tangentially controls. Even in the event that the player has chosen to manually select abilities, the other two thirds of your party still remain uncontrollable, but they function within the specific physical minutiae of an action game that Square Enix has created but that we are not allowed to play directly. In opposition to similar systems like maybe Chrono Trigger or Dragon Quest IX, characters and enemies move in realtime, collide with other models, and can get hurt by splash damage (a particularly frustrating aspect of the combat system when afaik you cannot change the position of a character without making them perform an action that would require them to move); it's not always an immediately pertinent aspect of the game's combat, but it's something that remained on my mind consistently after I noticed it.
The result, along with its almost proto-Yokai Watch-esque approach to RPG strategy, is combat that can often make you feel like you just coached somebody else into getting a SSS rank in a Devil May Cry game, but equally ends up being probably the closest a video game has ever gotten to replicate the feeling of what it's like to drive a car in a dream? Idk if anybody else has dreams like that where you're in a dream, and you're trying to drive a car, and it is NOT working AT ALL, and you kind of just swerve all the over place and kinda noclip through dream terrain until it gets too scary and you wake up. Maybe that's just me?
Dream logic is also a pretty fuckin' apt way to describe Final Fantasy XIII's plotting and narrative delivery. Final Fantasy XIII is like an obscure OVA of itself that's been spread out across 40 hours? It's feeling abridged in this bizarre but kinda charming way like, damn I shoulda read the manga of this one before buying the VHS, I guess. So much of what happens on screen is just not explained diegetically at all, which I wasn't a huge fan of in Final Fantasy VIII either, but I heard you could go to Selphie's custom GeoCities site in-game to see what the fuck everything is and means. Never did it myself, but I love that there it's at least seemingly diegetic. To be clear, I think in-game encyclopedias are cool as hell and I'm glad it exists in Final Fantasy XIII, every game needs a Piklopedia-esque feature as far I'm concerned, but I kinda like ending up there out of curiosity and not so much obligation. Maybe it's because I have issues with authority? I don't like being told what to do? I dunno. For what it's worth though, I don't think it outright ruined my enjoyment of Final Fantasy XIII.
I probably enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII more than at least three or four other mainline Final Fantasy titles, and I think it's unabashedly one of the most Final Fantasy entries in the series. I love the character designs (Lightning and Fang in particular Appeal to My Interests), I had fun with the combat sometimes, music is sick as hell; the visual concept of Cocoon and Pulse is powerful shit, though it feels underutilized both functionally and thematically. The game overall has this really rad 80s/90s anime vibe but with those sleek 00s sci-fi aesthetic touches; it's almost like Toriyama and team were making a secret AAA Phantasy Star title. The game is way more gorgeous than it has any right to be, which is unfortunately sometimes all the game is.
I wanted to kick down the door and scream "IT'S NOT HALLWAYS IT'S NOT HALLWAYS" so badly, but unfortunately, it is definitely hallways. Which isn't inherently a bad thing, Final Fantasy VII Remake's also hallways! But I think what makes it particularly excruciating in Final Fantasy XIII is that that's kind of all it is, and many environments repeat ad nauseam (that fuckin' forest level was definitely overkill with the same exact environmental structures over and over with only a couple narrative chokepoints to break up the pace), an issue that I don't remember the other Final Fantasy with a similar structure, Final Fantasy X, really having. This isn't something that's necessarily new to Final Fantasy at least, I think my least favorite aspect about going back to the pre-PSX Final Fantasy titles is The Caves. I wanna say Final Fantasy V was probably the best about it, but it got really bad in Final Fantasy VI sometimes and that game manages to be good as hell in spite of that.
Except, Final Fantasy VI does share some other issues with Final Fantasy XIII, like awkward scripts and translation, but I suppose it's a lot more noticeable in Final Fantasy XIII when real people are speaking dialogue that no person would ever say ever. I think my favorite "this translator was maybe being overworked god I hope they paid them enough at least" moment was when a villain told one of the good guys that "the next time you open your eyes will be the last" which like, what does that even fucking mean in the context of English. Like I've taken a decade of Japanese studies so I know it's most likely a direct translation of a vaguely idiomatic expression for "waking up", but it's so fucking funny that it got to the voice actor phase and nobody questioned it. I'm not even like, clowning on it, it's just extremely interesting to me.
Either way, my point isn't to say Final Fantasy VI or any other Final Fantasy is actually the Bad Game, my point is that Final Fantasy XIII is a reflection of the games that came before it both conceptually and logistically and maybe we should give it a break sometimes because it's a decently enjoyable experience when you aren't being cranky about the parts that maybe aren't perfect. And I won't lie, I definitely got cranky a few times; ironically I got the most crankiest at the point of the game that most people claim is "when it gets good". Friend, the game was already good, putting in a Xenoblade level isn't gonna suddenly make the game worth it, you either bought into it by that point, or you didn't, honestly.
One more thing that's sorely missing from Final Fantasy XIII though: minigames or minigame adjacent activities. Like, I think in this game of all games, a little extra would've gone a long way cuz sooooo fucking much of the game is just fighting the same exact guys over and over. I don't even think there's puzzles? I hated the puzzles in Final Fantasy X, but by the end of Final Fantasy XIII I almost missed them. They also find ways to put more of the same enemies in levels that by all means should NOT have those enemies, and like I get it, it's an issue that Final Fantasy X ran into as well, at a high enough fidelity it's probably not possible to make enough unique models/enemy types to fill out an entire 40 hour RPG's worth of content, but the lack of variety is notably pretty rough in XIII. I think the best signifier of that is how early and often you fight behemoths, a mob that's typically reserved for like, the last few dungeons of a given Final Fantasy title if not the final level outright. Plus, battles end up feeling pretty exhausting like, at least in Final Fantasy X the bosses with a bajillion health points are being fought via a fully turn-based system; the battles are strategically more simple in XIII, but they always took a lot more out of me due to the relatively fast pace of the action itself and the amount of moment-to-moment babysitting you're engaging in.
I don't really feel like getting into spoiler territory for this one, not that I think it's even possible to spoil anything about Final Fantasy XIII that aren't things you'd find out in the first few chapters or so anyways, but either way, lemme awkwardly transition to a conclusion where I talk about Lightning. She's probably in my like, top 10 favorite fictional characters designs despite Final Fantasy XIII not even breaching my top 100 favorite games. She's like, if you combined Utena Tenjou with Cloud Strife and Squall Leonhart. She kinda sucks really bad as a person early on, but I like that she grows from her whole "being a cop who punches people for no good reason" phase after getting scolded by a lesbian for being that way. Pretty excited to see how they simultaneously ruin her characterization and make her even cooler in the other two games in the trilogy! Half expecting Lightning Returns to end up as my favorite of the trilogy since it looks like it's the funniest, but we'll see.
Also I originally had this whole bit at the beginning about the tangential relationship being Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) and Final Fantasy XIII, but I dropped it cuz I couldn't really work it into a broader cohesive point, but I think they're cool fucked up 7th gen console zeitgeist siblings, and my brain just associates them with each other cuz of that. Anyways, this discussion is pretty much pointless because we ALL know and have unanimously agreed upon as a culture that Final Fantasy XV is the actual best Final Fantasy.
Because of that sort of black-and-white mindset, Gamer Discourse just ended up eviscerating all discussion of Final Fantasy XIII when it came out, and in all honesty probably bled into the potential enjoyment other people may have otherwise received from the game. I'm not a psychologist I can't prove that, but like, it happened to me for a long time until I broke out of that mindset! Not saying people have to suddenly like FF13, or that we have to completely flip the discourse around towards largely positive, but it's pretty cool that Final Fantasy XIII even exists imho!! Like, how many AAA sci-fi fantasy RPG epics were we even getting during that era of gaming? I won't say it's as overall satisfying or as complete feeling of a work when up against most other Final Fantasy titles, and maybe even other RPGs of similar budget and scope, but I enjoyed my time with it despite it kind of having a Wind Waker-ian malaise to it (I mean that in both a good and bad way, but mostly a good way!! btw while we're hanging out in the parentheses dimension misusing basic conventions of punctuation and general formatting, does anybody else want to eat the little spheres in the Crystarium? They look like tasty little candies to me, probably even tastier than materia).
The basic combat system is contentious for a reason, but it's kinda sick as hell in a way I both love and despise. It's like, attempting to replicate the feeling of turn-based combat -- which is a style of gameplay that typically abstracts interactions between entities for the sake of compartmentalizing actions to allow strategy to be coherent for the player -- while ostensibly (and correct me if I'm wrong about how this game actually functions) being an action game that the player only tangentially controls. Even in the event that the player has chosen to manually select abilities, the other two thirds of your party still remain uncontrollable, but they function within the specific physical minutiae of an action game that Square Enix has created but that we are not allowed to play directly. In opposition to similar systems like maybe Chrono Trigger or Dragon Quest IX, characters and enemies move in realtime, collide with other models, and can get hurt by splash damage (a particularly frustrating aspect of the combat system when afaik you cannot change the position of a character without making them perform an action that would require them to move); it's not always an immediately pertinent aspect of the game's combat, but it's something that remained on my mind consistently after I noticed it.
The result, along with its almost proto-Yokai Watch-esque approach to RPG strategy, is combat that can often make you feel like you just coached somebody else into getting a SSS rank in a Devil May Cry game, but equally ends up being probably the closest a video game has ever gotten to replicate the feeling of what it's like to drive a car in a dream? Idk if anybody else has dreams like that where you're in a dream, and you're trying to drive a car, and it is NOT working AT ALL, and you kind of just swerve all the over place and kinda noclip through dream terrain until it gets too scary and you wake up. Maybe that's just me?
Dream logic is also a pretty fuckin' apt way to describe Final Fantasy XIII's plotting and narrative delivery. Final Fantasy XIII is like an obscure OVA of itself that's been spread out across 40 hours? It's feeling abridged in this bizarre but kinda charming way like, damn I shoulda read the manga of this one before buying the VHS, I guess. So much of what happens on screen is just not explained diegetically at all, which I wasn't a huge fan of in Final Fantasy VIII either, but I heard you could go to Selphie's custom GeoCities site in-game to see what the fuck everything is and means. Never did it myself, but I love that there it's at least seemingly diegetic. To be clear, I think in-game encyclopedias are cool as hell and I'm glad it exists in Final Fantasy XIII, every game needs a Piklopedia-esque feature as far I'm concerned, but I kinda like ending up there out of curiosity and not so much obligation. Maybe it's because I have issues with authority? I don't like being told what to do? I dunno. For what it's worth though, I don't think it outright ruined my enjoyment of Final Fantasy XIII.
I probably enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII more than at least three or four other mainline Final Fantasy titles, and I think it's unabashedly one of the most Final Fantasy entries in the series. I love the character designs (Lightning and Fang in particular Appeal to My Interests), I had fun with the combat sometimes, music is sick as hell; the visual concept of Cocoon and Pulse is powerful shit, though it feels underutilized both functionally and thematically. The game overall has this really rad 80s/90s anime vibe but with those sleek 00s sci-fi aesthetic touches; it's almost like Toriyama and team were making a secret AAA Phantasy Star title. The game is way more gorgeous than it has any right to be, which is unfortunately sometimes all the game is.
I wanted to kick down the door and scream "IT'S NOT HALLWAYS IT'S NOT HALLWAYS" so badly, but unfortunately, it is definitely hallways. Which isn't inherently a bad thing, Final Fantasy VII Remake's also hallways! But I think what makes it particularly excruciating in Final Fantasy XIII is that that's kind of all it is, and many environments repeat ad nauseam (that fuckin' forest level was definitely overkill with the same exact environmental structures over and over with only a couple narrative chokepoints to break up the pace), an issue that I don't remember the other Final Fantasy with a similar structure, Final Fantasy X, really having. This isn't something that's necessarily new to Final Fantasy at least, I think my least favorite aspect about going back to the pre-PSX Final Fantasy titles is The Caves. I wanna say Final Fantasy V was probably the best about it, but it got really bad in Final Fantasy VI sometimes and that game manages to be good as hell in spite of that.
Except, Final Fantasy VI does share some other issues with Final Fantasy XIII, like awkward scripts and translation, but I suppose it's a lot more noticeable in Final Fantasy XIII when real people are speaking dialogue that no person would ever say ever. I think my favorite "this translator was maybe being overworked god I hope they paid them enough at least" moment was when a villain told one of the good guys that "the next time you open your eyes will be the last" which like, what does that even fucking mean in the context of English. Like I've taken a decade of Japanese studies so I know it's most likely a direct translation of a vaguely idiomatic expression for "waking up", but it's so fucking funny that it got to the voice actor phase and nobody questioned it. I'm not even like, clowning on it, it's just extremely interesting to me.
Either way, my point isn't to say Final Fantasy VI or any other Final Fantasy is actually the Bad Game, my point is that Final Fantasy XIII is a reflection of the games that came before it both conceptually and logistically and maybe we should give it a break sometimes because it's a decently enjoyable experience when you aren't being cranky about the parts that maybe aren't perfect. And I won't lie, I definitely got cranky a few times; ironically I got the most crankiest at the point of the game that most people claim is "when it gets good". Friend, the game was already good, putting in a Xenoblade level isn't gonna suddenly make the game worth it, you either bought into it by that point, or you didn't, honestly.
One more thing that's sorely missing from Final Fantasy XIII though: minigames or minigame adjacent activities. Like, I think in this game of all games, a little extra would've gone a long way cuz sooooo fucking much of the game is just fighting the same exact guys over and over. I don't even think there's puzzles? I hated the puzzles in Final Fantasy X, but by the end of Final Fantasy XIII I almost missed them. They also find ways to put more of the same enemies in levels that by all means should NOT have those enemies, and like I get it, it's an issue that Final Fantasy X ran into as well, at a high enough fidelity it's probably not possible to make enough unique models/enemy types to fill out an entire 40 hour RPG's worth of content, but the lack of variety is notably pretty rough in XIII. I think the best signifier of that is how early and often you fight behemoths, a mob that's typically reserved for like, the last few dungeons of a given Final Fantasy title if not the final level outright. Plus, battles end up feeling pretty exhausting like, at least in Final Fantasy X the bosses with a bajillion health points are being fought via a fully turn-based system; the battles are strategically more simple in XIII, but they always took a lot more out of me due to the relatively fast pace of the action itself and the amount of moment-to-moment babysitting you're engaging in.
I don't really feel like getting into spoiler territory for this one, not that I think it's even possible to spoil anything about Final Fantasy XIII that aren't things you'd find out in the first few chapters or so anyways, but either way, lemme awkwardly transition to a conclusion where I talk about Lightning. She's probably in my like, top 10 favorite fictional characters designs despite Final Fantasy XIII not even breaching my top 100 favorite games. She's like, if you combined Utena Tenjou with Cloud Strife and Squall Leonhart. She kinda sucks really bad as a person early on, but I like that she grows from her whole "being a cop who punches people for no good reason" phase after getting scolded by a lesbian for being that way. Pretty excited to see how they simultaneously ruin her characterization and make her even cooler in the other two games in the trilogy! Half expecting Lightning Returns to end up as my favorite of the trilogy since it looks like it's the funniest, but we'll see.
Also I originally had this whole bit at the beginning about the tangential relationship being Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) and Final Fantasy XIII, but I dropped it cuz I couldn't really work it into a broader cohesive point, but I think they're cool fucked up 7th gen console zeitgeist siblings, and my brain just associates them with each other cuz of that. Anyways, this discussion is pretty much pointless because we ALL know and have unanimously agreed upon as a culture that Final Fantasy XV is the actual best Final Fantasy.