I think I hated Animal Well. I think I loved it, but I also kinda hated it.

Let me start right off the bat by saying I'm typically not a fan of games that contain zero hand holding and refuse to explain anything. I'm a filthy casual; I like being told what to do and having a sense of direction, just so long as the game doesn't do it too much. So by that rationale, someone like me ought to reject Animal Well outright. Right off the bat it's as esoteric as can be. There's no context given to the player, no story, no lore... nothing. And after a short linear introductory area, it opens up in all directions, leading to an immense feeling of being overwhelmed. I go one way, eventually come up against a puzzle that I'm either too stupid to solve or lack the required tool to do so, and so I go somewhere else. This is the kind of game design that keeps me up at night.

But you know, when all is said and done, Animal Well's overall design is pretty damn impeccable. The game is esoteric, but it isn't unfair, and the difficulty of the puzzles is well balanced for the most part. All my sessions involved some level of frustration sure, but I was never stuck for too long, and to counter that, there were also lots of eureka moments that left me feeling pretty pleased with myself. I had little patience for something like The Witness, which felt like an endless bombardment of puzzles with zero downtime in between, but something about Animal Well kept me pressing on. While it's mostly cited as a 'Metroidvania', Animal Well to me also has the DNA of the cinematic platforming genre, which I appreciate. Games like Another World and Flashback, which switched things up on a frequent basis with their mixture of puzzle solving and trial-and-error platforming, added some necessary diversity to proceedings. And this is what Animal Well has in spades. When you enter a room you haven't visited before, that room will often present it's own unique challenge to the player. It could be a puzzle, it could be an exercise in pure dexterity, or it could be a rare boss encounter. The point is that you never know what's around the next corner, and that design ethos keeps things fresh and exciting. It also doesn't hurt that the game is gorgeous to look at. The eerie subterranean world of Animal Well is rife washed out splashes of colour, warm hues and little details placed everywhere. For anyone who appreciates some choice pixel art, this game is a veritable feast for the eyes.

Full disclosure - I reached the end credits with 29 eggs. Part of me wants to do the post-game stuff, because I know there's a lot more to discover, but at the same time, I'm eager to move on and check off something else that's on my backlog. I've read some people say that Animal Well doesn't truly begin until you've reached the end credits, so I don't know whether I've officially 'completed' it or not, but I feel content with what I've played. I also don't want to risk hating the game completely because I spent half an hour trying to use both a frisbee and a bubble wand in order to reach a collectable... again. Best to quit while I'm ahead.

I had a longer review written, but... Hmm...

There's this interview that plays in my head a lot. Someone brings up how popular Zero (a dashing genderweird character introduced in 6.1) is and Naoki Yoshida - the game's producer, director, and member of Square Enix's board - awkwardly mumbles out that he didn't quite expect people to love her so much.

This is innocent on the surface, but to me it was a huge head tilter at the time.

See, FFXIV has a problem with misogyny. Whether it's inconsequential shit like "Minfilia polled terribly with players, so we killed her and turned her into a mcguffin", Yotsuyu's weird allergory for comfort women turning sour in Stormblood postpatch, Ysayle/Moenbryda (self-explanatory), the double standard invoked with the fates of Fordola compared to Gaius Baelsar, the incredible overuse of sexual assault references in dialogue up until late Stormblood, or Lyse getting written out of the story because people hated her, there's a lot to chew on regarding misogyny.
It's sort of a "joke" (insofar as banal reality can be humorous) among woman-liking FFXIV fans that pretty much any new woman introduced will probably either die or be written out. Venat implicitly (in the Japanese text, explicitly) being denied reincarnation while the setting's equivalent to Super Hitler gets to constantly appear in flashbacks was just the nail in the coffin.

I bring this up because 6.5 is bad. It's not bad in the same ways 6.0 was bad - Natsuko Ishikawa's uncomfortably Imperial Japan sympathizing fingers are at a minimum barring 6.4 - but it's bad in more banal, eyebrow-raising ways.
To avoid burying the lede: 6.5 smacks of both swift, lazy rewrites and also creative sterility.

After 5 patches of overwritten, backtracking-padded, unsatisfying buildup, 6.5 just dispenses with most of the stakes and conflict to say "Beat Zeromus and Golbez will be a good guy!". You get an admittedly decent trial out of it before Zero abruptly becomes a Paladin with little fanfare (mirroring Cecil's iconic moment from FF4, but terrible) and surprise Golbez is a good guy.
Zero thanks you for your friendship and aid, before declaring that she's going off to the same not-relevant closet as Lyse and demanding you don't ever come knocking for her.

Honestly, as an aside: XIV's format is killing it. There is no real reason for 6.4 to not have the Scions immediately leap in to fight Zeromus other than the devs needing to do another patch. It sucks so much.

"Zero was intended to die but they changed their mind last minute" is, at the time of writing, a conspiracy theory. Nonetheless, it's a believable one.

What's really telling to me, both about the void arc's development and also the reception Endwalker got, is that this patch opens with an incredibly lazy and overbearing Shadowbringers nostalgia trip. Needing Light for a storyline that should've ended last patch, you and Zero hop over to the First and meet all of your Shadowbringers friends! Hurray!
Except... Look, even putting aside my negative bias (I consider Shadowbringers the worst XIV expansion) it just reads incredibly poorly. It's an abrupt plot stopper, is mostly unvoiced filler dialogue/quests that serve no purpose than to tug at the player's nostalgia, and genuinely does not matter at all until the very end.
This is alarming, at least to me, because they did this after Stormblood (an expansion Japan infamously despises to this day) what with the sudden surge of Ishgard/Heavensward references and Aymeric being your BFFL all of a sudden in Ghimlyt, the nuking of Stormblood plot threads in Shadowbringers, plus the very abrupt resurrection of Zenos and the sudden announcement of a whole event centered on Ishgard - the first and so far last of its kind.
Lastly, the dungeon of this patch is a cheap rehash of Amaurot but because nobody gives a flying fuck about the storyline it has all the impact of picking up a plate with a towel and it sliding back into the basin.

All of this combines into a package that, honestly? Pisses me off personally. The Void and everything around it has long since been one of the most int- [remembers what games I'm talking about] least boring parts of the setting and it's essentially gelded, its sole promising voiced NPC neutered, all to... idk, shove the single remaining plot thread from pre-Ishikawa days in the trash and move onto Dawntrail?

Other reviews have said it already and I'm adding my voice to the chorus: I think FFXIV has went on too long.

I only have so much tolerance for drab cutscenes with the same canned animations, the same WoL responses, the same bad audio mixing that feels like mics are about to peak, the same annoying placid and uninventive BGM that I've been hearing since 2013. I have even less tolerance for quest design that hasn't changed since I left education - and it was the same when I went into it!

I want to lie and say that maybe Dawntrail will be better, but... Will it?

I forgave a lot of XIV's bullshit because the writers had a series of curtains drawn that I was eager to peek behind.

The curtains are open now, and despite my hopes they are indeed blue.

Will Dawntrail be any good? Will it deviant from dungeons/trials at odd levels, playing Machinations whenever it's safe to skip a cutscene, overly choreographed duties that're aimed at people who have panic attacks when asked to use tank stance, mediocre writing which betrays the writers' uncomfortable opinions on Imperial Japan's colonization efforts, and music which occasionally rises above "fine" but is mostly just forgettable BGM unless you're in a duty?

Beats me.

[The review has functionally ended here, I'm now just talking to myself.]

I've seen a lot of comparisons to TV shows and the MCU when talking about how exhausted FFXIV's formula is, and while I agree to an extent (I am an ex-Red vs Blue fan.) I think with games it's actually worse.

I alluded to it up above, but games being tired and going on too long is far more noticeable than in other mediums besides maybe music (shoutout to BFMV for making Fever for a decade straight).
It terrifies me that FFXIV is somehow one of SE's top earning games (barring this year, where their MMO division lost money for the first time in a while) but it feels so cheap. The same animations, the same music, the same format. For a decade, nothing but empty field areas and inconsequential yellow quests and 3 alliance raids and 12 normal raids and Hildebrand and five post-patches. A trial before you hit level cap, then a back-to-back dungeon and trial. Main leitmotif for the final boss. Final boss is a well intentioned extremist.
Over and over and over...

It's strange, too. I've recently gotten super into Granblue Fantasy, and it feels like a mirror into a better world. A better FFXIV. It, too, is a decade-spanning pseudo-MMO that's had to deal with the pains of being a GaaS title, yet it's managed to innovate within itself. Fights only get cooler and cooler as time goes on, characer kits manage to be relatively interesting without being a straight upgrade to existing characters (though these still exist), their writing has matured from its infancy, and the art/visuals/music only get better every month.

Sure, it has gacha money, but FFXIV is one of SE's top earners, yet it feels cheaper than some games I've played that were literally made by 10-15 Chinese folks in a shed.

I don't actually think CBU3 are entirely to blame. They are absolutely to blame for XIV's weirdly conservative stances on things, bad writing, and overexertion of creative control (STOP FORCING SOKEN TO MAKE ORCHESTRAL MUSIC.), but I think most problems I've talked about here can be traced back to both the very strict "5 post-patches, then an expansion every two years" shit and chronic mismanagement/underfunding.
I know Naoki Yoshida is everyone's parasocial best friend who can do no wrong, but c'mon. Fumbling FF16 despite having infinite Mainline Final Fantasy money can't say anything good about his capabilities.

As I wrote this all out I found myself longing for Stormblood. I don't like Stormblood (or anything in XIV anymore, really, I just came back to get my IRLs prepped for Dawntrail) but...
Hm.
I don't know how much the devs really care about FFXIV, especially as Yoshida continually looks more withdrawn and disinterested with each fanfest, but as a simple end user it just feels like Stormblood was the last time they were firing on all cylinders. The duties were great - in side content especially - the field areas were gorgeous, the music had so much flavour compared to ShB and EW's morose slop, and for just a brief moment in this game's gargantuan lifespan I was actually interested in where the individual location plots went.

I don't feel the same way about everything after it. Shadowbringers was, in hindsight, the developers panicking after Stormblood's reception and throwing the player into a world divorced of the icky plot threads/women they so despise, and Endwalker was Endwalker.

Am I just projecting my own discontent? Probably.

But when you offer the player a dialogue choice to voice their discontent at being forced to meddle in Tural's affairs, only for G'raha Tia to smile and tell you "nawwww it'll be fun :)" I can't help but wonder.

P.S: This patch was so bad I actually forget Vrtra was there, despite Azdaja being the instigating incident. Imagine.

Short review for a very insubstantial experience. Complete lack of challenge or stress in the gameplay that I would say subverts the horror experience had any effort actually been made to make the game even remotely scary or suspenseful. Ostensibly pays homage to old survival horror titles despite being a facsimile of what they actually looked like while adopting the very worst of their gameplay loops.

Crow Country is entirely putting square pegs into square holes to unlock triangular pegs for triangular holes. Silent Hill and Resident Evil had this as well but they had the sense to force the player to absorb the tense atmosphere between those bits by forcing enemy combat with intense resource management via ammo count and healing items. The gameplay reinforced the atmosphere; not a deep thought but it eludes Crow Country.

The writing is completely off as well. It's all Reddit-tier quips and lighthearted asides as if the setting was Candyland. It's tonally inconsistent with the visuals and also ineffective at inspiring humor if one was to assume that's a worthy goal. Following all of that up with the reveal of a future that refused to change was a particularly intense whiplash. Unsatisfying.

The worst thing I can say about Crow Country is that it proves anyone can make a game. No matter how fundamentally you misunderstand the design of games you insist you like, you can make a game. No matter how bad of a writer you are, you can make a game. No matter how misguided you are in your mission statement, you too can make a game.

After experiencing another disappointment with Signalis a year or so ago I'm about ready to call the "Survival Horror w/PS1 inspired graphics" genre DOA. Get them out of here.

I thought it was called Crow County for 95% of my playthrough. Pretty good dithering work.

2/5

The Game as a sequel improves in terms of presentation, gameplay, feedback and engine with a good showcase of physics at the time.

yet, it feels so undercooked compared to the original, since the story is very in love with itself, but it lacks any of the great story beats, unique levels or one-off characters from the original, making it hard to stick the landing on a lot of emotional scenes besides the ending, despite having really good direction, humor and presentation, it just feels lacking all around with such simple levels.

Max Pussy whipped 2. Max is pussy whipped. Dear god. The gameplay is leagues better than the first game. The writing is leagues less entertaining.

There are less comic book shots, leaving for more scenes to be told through just the game engine like your regular PS2 cutscene. Which is honestly nice, because it lets you stay locked in to the game. But the comic shots that were in the game are less cool than the first one which is a shame!

The gameplay allows you to be expressive and actually use the fucking bullet time mechanic. It's basically what you imagined the first game would be like before you booted up that abomination. You can jump around corners and shoot shit up like a king. Getting kills in slow-mo regens your slow-mo, badass.

There are sections where you play as Max's girlfriend and I have no idea why they exist. She plays exactly like Max, and they didn't feel relevant to the story.

I had fun