This is a review of A Realm Reborn, not any of the post 2.0 patches or any other expansions.

This was an incredible time. The Main Story Quests honestly weren't anything special but it did have some awesome moments and great characters, it's a pretty basic Final Fantasy game in that regard, but it's not just a basic Final Fantasy game because it's also a MMO. I haven't played an actual MMO before, the only things like it I've played is Xenoblade Chronicles which has a relatively similar playstyle but way less intricate. But I had an incredible time fighting all these monsters, especially the Primals. The only issue is grinding levels is incredibly tedious and it discouraged me from exploring other jobs since I already had 1 job so high. But more than the story, more than the combat, more than anything, this game excels at the community. I've met so many unbelievably nice and sincere people playing this game. You can just walk around any hub and find people performing musical pieces, or danced, or full rock band covers, it's awe inspiring. Every city feels so lived in because you can see all these real people walking around and doing their own thing, it's incredible to witness and be a part of. This is truly a game you can sink so many hours into. And that's exactly what I plan on doing.

Edit: Just wrapped up my second play-through of this game, and fuck, do I love it even more than the first time. Remains my favorite ARPG of all time. Literally just throw a mini-map on here and a mute option for Jed and it's a perfect game.

It's still pretty surreal, sitting down to write this piece, to be able to say it, but Stranger of Paradise is easily the most ballsy and unique entry the Final Fantasy series has seen since the XIII trilogy, and stands pretty easily as my favorite entry of the post-VIII games. It's like the ambitious, earnest, and thrill-seeking Final Fantasy never left us. After decades of what I feel has been a progression of back-stepping, reductive, and trepidatious entries, Stranger of Paradise bursts in, guns blazing and Limp Bizkit blasting, and demands your attention, your frustration, and your heart.

Through the entire experience, I felt like I'd been transported back to the days in which these types of experiences were the norm for major third parties like Square - parts of me even imagine this must've been what lesser titles like Dirge of Cerberus wanted to be. There is no irony to Stranger of Paradise; what you see is what you get, and it stakes its claim as a new step for action-RPGs loudly and pulls it off in stride. The gameplay is just ridiculously fun - swapping between classes, casting magic and going in for strings of melee combos is a blast to pull off in succession. The boss fights are almost all hype as fuck, with awesome delineations between phases to keep things fresh. Modern takes on Final Fantasy I classic bosses that feel fresh and new, while bringing back memories of my first runs through the original title, created memorable moment after moment. Speaking of, the dungeons are pretty breathtaking - and the choice to model each area lightly after a landmark from another Final Fantasy (Mount Gulg after VIII's Fire Cavern, Crystal Mirage after III's Crystal Tower) made this longtime fan stoked to see every new outing spring to life. A mini-map would've been nice for some of these areas, but it never got all too bad; no traditional dungeon crawling here.

Looting was never too overwhelming, save the few times my inventory filled when I really could've used boss drops, but to see Jack and the crew in whatever obnoxiously loud new outfits I obtained next was a joy after another - especially considered like 70% of the outfits in this game constantly clip through themselves. Oh, I love the jank in this game. It was always a laugh WITH the game, not quite at it, and playing the title as a couch hang-out with close friends only accentuated this.

Not to parrot the exact same sentiment as many others have about the plot, but I have to hand it to Stranger of Paradise for taking it from "tacky, goofy but entertaining anime plot" to "honestly powerful final act" as quickly as it did, and I'm left with a genuinely positive impression over all. Stranger of Paradise is a title confident in what it's doing and honest to God believes in itself - and I do, too. This is my favorite Final Fantasy in a long, long time. Since the XIII games, for sure. And yes, it did it its way.

Didn't find it as bad as everyone says. The political context and the diverse relation between nations is pretty good and give a strong (enough) sense of living in a complex world.

The major problem for me is that our character is just depicted as "the heroes", logically helping everyone while receiving nothing in return. I found that it easily breaks the immersion and shadows the direct implications of our character in his world.

That said, many characters are well written with a grounded attitudes and believable emotions dilemmas. The story is a bit on the long side with many quests being just FedEx bullshit, but overall I think it's pretty good. It expands the universe of the game and treat a politic conflict with enough realism for me to be immerged in it.

PS: I talk about both the Expansion and the Post Expansion as it directly follows it.

Power lead both to freedom and despair, Oh and don't forget your cookie 🍪

Cult of the Lamb is very shallow and devoid of content, but the devs perfected the art of the streamerbait.

The game looks and sounds amazing, and presents the whole gameplay loop within the first hour, so if you catch a glimpse of the game on someone's stream, you will probably think "oh damn, this is really cool" and go to buy it.
If you haven't played any games in either the roguelite genre (The Binding of Isaac, Hades, Enter the Gungeon, etc) or the colony management sim genre (Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Oxygen not Included, etc) you might even have some fun playing it. Otherwise though you'll quickly notice there's nothing more to what you already saw on stream, and that the game doesn't live up to the level of an average game in either of those genres.

I've beaten the entirety of it in about 10 hours; the colony management is primitive and about 5-6 hours into the game my cult started playing itself with the only remaining duties being cooking and preaching, and after that I just rushed through the dungeons, of which there are only 4, all of them functionally identical. It's possible to repeat those dungeons after defeating the corresponding big boss, but outside of a tat one of the NPCs dispenses for completing the repeat dungeon for the first time, there is no point to it - they play exactly the same except you can loop 3 times through them to collect more rewards in one go (the rewards are completely meaningless by that point, because the cult will already be developed enough to maintain itself).
The combat itself is completely broken - rolling towards the enemy, striking once and rolling away by far outperforms any other tactic you can come up with, and there is pressure to avoid fooling around too much with suboptimal tactics because of the global timer which means that the cult's stats will diminish even during the dungeon time.
The enemies are copypasted from TBoI, and the bosses are just the same enemies, but bigger and with the ability to spawn smaller enemies. The only boss with the actual patterns is the final boss, and he's laughably easy, some bosses from the early floors of the aforementioned TBoI are more difficult to beat than the final boss in this game.
There are curses which act like the active items, but there's no interesting utility to them, just outputting a bit more damage.
There are tarot cards which act like the passive items, but they can be roughly divided into the two categories: minor buff to health/damage and an extremely circumstantional benefit you will never fulfill the conditions for.

I wrote a lot about the dungeon part of the game even though I think it's meant to be secondary for the colony management part.
This is because there's not much to say about the colony management part.
Followers have basic needs: hunger and hygiene, and they generate devotion. You build structures to satisfy those two needs, and structures to farm materials to build structures to satisfy those two needs. You use devotion to unlock more structures to... you get the idea. You can also preach once a day to make your followers generate cooler devotion which you use to unlock completely unsubstantial upgrades for the dungeon part. The followers level up which does pretty much nothing other than eventually allowing you to unlock perks for the cult none of which are particularly transformative.
It's all functional and completely boring, the only paradigm shift that happens in this part of the game is that eventually it loops onto itself and the cult generates enough materials which the followers use to satisfy their needs without any input on the part of the player (with the exception of cooking, and apparently the chef was on one of the promo screenshots, so I'm guessing they either removed this to put in a DLC later, it was too buggy to put in the game, or they realised that the player will literally have nothing to do at the cult anymore except preaching if the chef is present)

This shallowness, however, makes the game very approachable, and the target audience for the game, I think, is pretty clear. There is a lot of effort put into the visuals, the sound, and the Twitch integration, and seemingly a lot of money put into sponsoring the streamers to play it. The game allows you to pet a dog to tick off that meme "can you pet a dog in this game" twitter account box. The game has a fishing minigame to tick off that meme "does this game have a fishing minigame" twitter account box. When you finish the game, before the credits roll the game makes sure to plead you to recommend the game to the others.

At the end of this review I will instead recommend playing Oxygen not Included for the better colony management sim experience, and Hades for the better roguelite experience. They're just as polished as Cult of the Lamb visually and acoustically, but also are much better designed games.

This game is nearly impossible for me to rate. It's kind of a mess, the base campaign is pretty bad, but the expansions and wealth of premium and player made content is staggering, and more importantly extremely varied despite all stemming from the same core system.

I've been reading D&D books since well before I was old enough to even be playing them, rulebooks, modules, and The Legend of Drizzt Books in particular all come to mind. In highschool there were others who I played with, ofc none of them knew the actual rules and not wanting to be a nerd I never corrected them and let it play it out as a silly sort of theater of the mind type thing with friends. Which, to be fair, is sort of the idea, the rules exist to facilitate storytelling.

That's also why I find D&D games fascinating, seeing how much of it is merely adapting the rules of the various editions, and how much emphasis is put on capturing the idea, mood, or setting of what TTRPGS are all about. Neverwinter Nights, I think, shines the most in both of these regards compared to other D&D games; for better and for worse. The game can be jank, some modules have super detailed extra rulesets pertaining to specific things like jousting or base building. And that's what I like about this game, it might be a jank mess, the main scenario is basically not worth playing, but a lot of it makes a more genuine attempt at realizing what D&D is and the purpose of rules and rulings in TTRPGS being to facilitate storytelling. And I think that's neat.

being a xenoblade fan is the jrpg equivalent of cult indoctrination, which is saying a lot because being a jrpg fan is like joining a cult in and of itself, so really it's like separating into an extremist faction of a larger cult that simultaneously infights at every given opportunity while taunting non-members for not finding Dunban "being over there" ticklingly hysterical even after the 167th time it's referenced in deeply brainrotted twitter circles.

I am allowed to say this and mean it endearingly because I am myself an unfathomably deranged xenoblade fan far beyond the brink of salvation. this game has irreparably changed me. I have been ruined. my brain is broken. I'm not sure it ever worked right, but my xenoblade fandom experience has ensured that it will always work wrong. otherwise innocuous terms such as "44 seconds" or "bestest" have pavloved me into laughing forever. when I see shulk take a bite of a sandwich and that bite does not animate on said sandwich, I emphatically applaud. the mere sight of Juju, a child whose only crime is loving his people, makes me black out with vitriolic rage. anytime I slice a hot knife through butter, I cry. anytime I walk on ice, I scream. when I check the time, all I see is Reyn's face on the clock - it is always Reyn time in my world now.

the other day around Reyn time (lunch) I was slicing open a bagel with a freshly sharpened serrated knife in order to make myself a toasted chicken salad sandwich. delicious. yum. bestest. unfortunately, the bagel slipped out from underneath my hand and I ended up slicing my own thumb instead. despite the alarmingly large amount of blood and even more abundant visceral pain, I luckily did not end up needing stitches. was I relieved? no. grateful? no. all that could cross my mind in that moment was that "your blade... it did not cut deep enough."

I mained Shulk competitively in super smash bros. for wii u because of my love and loyalty for this damned game. for those of you unfamiliar with Smash 4 - Shulk is booty buttcheeks doodoo dogass tier in Smash 4. he is fundamentally fucked. hopelessly hoed. maining Smash 4 Shulk is like marathon training for months only to tie a boulder to your ankle at the starting line, or maining Sharla in xenoblade 1. for four whole memorable-but-not-wonderful years I would mosey to local tournaments having extensively practiced my Arts Landing Lag Cancels and Monado B-Reversals and Purge 50-50s and Airslash Ledge Snaps (in AND out of Jump Art!) only to get utterly dicked and shitted and pissed and vomited on by some iron-deficient 14-year-old Kirby player who sucked the monado into his disgusting mouth hole and used Jump and Speed arts to Run The Fuck Away for 6 minutes. all that suffering to appease the cultish urge to remain steadfast in my xenoblade chronicles brainrot. peak fiction. I hate myself. I live for this game, and therefore want to die.

I am a shattered man. I come to you as a cautionary tale. I love xenoblade 1. it is a good game. some might call it a great one. I could even wager that it's a classic. but it is not worth a total fundamental collapse of the self. this game has significant faults that time has further illuminated. sidequests are trash. the game's third act is a disaster. characters have chemistry but very few have arcs. women don't exist in this game. why doesn't unfinished battle loop in that one fight. juju. I have heard it all. it is no longer cool or trendy or tasteful to praise xenoblade 1 as the jrpg bastion it once was.

I do not care. It is far too late for me to view this game objectively, yet I find I am more grateful to have loved a game to an extreme degree beyond objectivity even if it has cost me an entire lifetime of mental fortitude. I wish Dunban was my real dad and was "over there" instead of "forgetting me because of dementia." Riki eats your favorite jrpg mascot character for breakfast and still has time to canonically fuck his probably-smokin-hot-by-nopon-standards wife before lunch. expert worldbuilding dares to ask "what if we were all on A Guy and we climbed up his ass" and thats raw as fuck. expert OST dares to ask "what would it feel like if ears could cum" and then made my ears uncontrollably bust jumbo nut wads for over a decade running. I am one of the deranged freaks who mained Melia and therefore thinks the combat is Pretty Sick Actually. stop maining Shulk, losers. stop cradling that milquetoast monado like a security blanket and get in Melia's pain train, we're starlight kicking god in his Klaussy.

I don't care if this game is "overrated," or if i'm "scaring the hoes." I don't care if xenoblade 1 is "too anime" or "predictable" or "nonsensical" or "boring" or "not a replacement for proper nourishment." I love this game. I eat it up. I consume it in its totality - characters, world, combat, music, fandom, memes, merch, a decade of irreparably damaged culture and identity. like Shulk, it changed my future. Xenoblade Chronicles ruined my life, and I am forever thankful.