All in all, I enjoyed my time in RDR2, but going back I wouldn't buy it and play it again. It's nice looking world to explore and immerse yourself, squandered by the worst of Rstar game design.

Playing on PC, each time I booted up the game on pc I had to log into the Rstar social club because reasons. But whatever, that's barely mildly annoying. Then the game reverted my graphic settings at every launch, so I had to re-edit back everything, every time. But okay, I could live with that.

Now, let’s list how RDR2 allows you to partake in its “open world”:
1. I tried to turn off radar and directions for a more immersive experience in this beautiful game, and got a game over twice in the first mission because it's not enough to just move towards your destination, you have to guess and follow the ONE specific route you're supposed to take.
2. My first duel went with a tutorial on the bottom centre, a prompt on the bottom right and another tutorial on the top left, all at the same time. I got killed five times trying to process all the info. This one is on me I guess, but that's really a counterintuitive way to explain stuff.
3. There were two separate missions where I tried to sneak close to a target and capture them without problems, but I couldn't do that because I had to follow the prompts and learn the tutorials for catching them while they were running away, which basically means riding a horse, the first thing the game teaches you.
4. In fact, in multiple instances I tried to solve a boring mission using a bullet or, again, sneaking, but every time I tried the game then just went "X cannot be done now, come back later", so I can't even choose to fail.
5. Hunting is dogshit. Chasing around critters following smoke trails with my witcher sense is something I can get by in small amounts, but the legendary hunts, the ones that should feel more like a test of your hunting skill, all boil down to go to one specific point in the map, following the same three tracks each time and unloading three rifle cartridges into an animal brain. If anything, the legendary hunts should be the harder to track and easier to kill, not viceversa, what the fuck is wrong with you, Rstar?
6. Once I got my horse stuck into the woods and kept whistling for a good minute because I refused to accept this nonsense was possible. While whistling a lawman saw me and, for some reason, I was now wanted. Very immersive indeed.
7. Speaking of immersion, in Rstar endless bullshit quest for achieving realism, there are perfectly climbable slopes in the world that, despite being visibly walkable if you were a human being, just makes you slip no matter how you approach them, slow, fast, jumping, crouching, you cannot traverse otherwise realistically traversable paths.

Bullshit realism aside let's talk about the mission structure. It's terrible.
The storyline wouldn't work if Arthur wasn't the world's greatest doormat and if the gameplay allowed for choices (not choices about the narrative but regarding what tools to utilize for each situation), but that's apparently Rstar whole template. The best mission I've played up to chapter 3 was the one where Arthur had to get drunk with Lenny, not because it was necessarily a good mission, although it was funny, but because it stuck out into the endless bog of sameness that prevents any mission from being unique. One mission starts with Molly trying to open up about her personal life, and immediately she's cut off for a robbery with horse chases and shootouts, she’s not heard from for another 15 hours. That's the entirity of RDR2, which would be fine if the game was more upfront about it. Instead, there are missions with a legitimate interesting premise (a jail break, a fishing trip with friends, sheep hustling, train robberies, stealth infiltrations) but screw it, at some point it turns, unavoidably, in horse chases and shootouts, with dozens of bodies piling up, bloody hell. The open world does not matter, at all, just like in every GTA since 3 you can either play what is essentially House of Dead during each mission or go screw yourself elsewhere until you stop finding new activities to try.
And, oh boy, aren’t these secondary objectives fun? Once, a man literally asked me to pick up pig manure and the only way I could play that mission was by doing that, the main character plainly stating "all right, but I ain't gonna like it", EVEN THE BLOODY PROTAGONIST WISHES THERE WERE OPTIONS IN THE GAME. I get punished for trying a different approach in a sandbox game (some sites like backloggd even say RPG lol), and the punishment is doing the task deemed, by the narrative itself, too stupid to do. Meanwhile Micah can decide to shoot up a whole town for no good reason and I can’t just laugh it off and run in the opposite direction, I must partake in the massacre because it’s not really a redemption if I’m not the biggest of the assholes around here, right?

Actually, at one point I did find the roleplaying feature: during a stealth mission the gang was, bloody of course, discovered and chase and shootout ensued. I was so done by that point that I just let the mission fail and discovered that, if you fail enough times, the game offers you to skip the checkpoint and proceed to the next part of the game. Which I did and, from a narrative perspective, it seemed like I had successfully completed the mission and left without problems.
So, Rstar actually did put the option to choose your own adventure, by letting you choose to skip it.
This is such a weird, bizarre, welcomed and utterly awful feature. If the devs were so uninterested in having the player play the game like they planned, then why not give them the possibility to choose how to approach a mission? The rails of each mission are fixed but, if I don't like them, I can just move on anyway instead of having an actual choice in the gameplay. And the only explanation I can find is that they were so confident in the narrative and so aware of the gameplay shortcomings that this seemed like the better choice? What the hell.

At that point I was actively avoiding story missions for as long as I could, I just travelled around trying to engage with npcs on the road and in the cities, walking around the camp looking for odd jobs, doing menial tasks, trying to balance hunting and wildlife preservation, finding random fun events that weren’t just copy-and-pasted for the gazillionth time. Apparently pointless stuff but, again, I was just trying to have fun by immersing myself into this world, anything but having to do only those obnoxious horse chases and shootouts.

I won’t get too deep into the story, only a couple of things on theming and presentation: pacing issue aside, I like the decadent western setting where there are no heroes, only criminals masquerading their atrocities as a search for freedom and a government that vexes its people with corruption, idiocy and militarism. Both are a most accurate representation of the United States, indeed.
Problem is, the way the story is told is so padded, the important bits relegated to sparse cutscenes or long debates on horse-back riding, which are funny but so overlong yet so overconfident in their delivery.
And all in all, it's just doesn't never hit emotional high, because the stakes are always so undercut by (supposedly) adrenaline pumping action. In the camp (the hub being actually one of the best features in the game) Arthur complains about feeling angry all the time and, by extent, killing a lot of people needlessly, when my playthrough instead was with no civilian death, so is he talking about the dozens of cannon fodder I had to slay with no saying in the matter? Bloody hell, at least Deus Ex or Mass Effect let me get to the ending before telling me, in the face, that every choice I made was equally useless, RDR2 doesn't even wait for the middle act. By that point the game has forced you to kill so many people that you’ve gone numb to it as one of many menial tasks you need to do to progress into the game, but now apparently it matters, even though the game sure as hell won’t stop having you mow down hundreds of mobs from that point onward.
All of this to say, no new ground in the western canon is being explored here (this genre has been used to tell how terrible white America is since, afaik, the 1950s, and it only progressively became more explicit with titles like High Noon, The Searchers, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy, Heaven's Gate, Unforgiven, Once upon a time in the West, The Good The Bad and The Ugly, etc etc you get the idea) and everything that the game's story actually explores would be good if it wasn’t unceasingly undercut by the worst ludonarrative dissonance.

The 2027 A.D. is a lovely year to live in. In the midst of the explosion of transhumanism and the resulting social and economic conflicts, there is a world to be discovered, in which to intervene to influence the fate of entire cities and massive corporations worth billions. This is the main objective of Adam Jensen, head of security at the Sarif Industries and at the centre of a plot involving industrial espionage and transhumanist philosophy.

Deus Ex Human Revolution (DEHR) is a delightful addition to the cyberpunk canon. It picks up for narrative and purpose from a lot of the genre milestones such as the novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, mixing apparently anachronistic themes with the consequences of an ultra-technological world where the boundary between organic and machine life becomes thinner and thinner. In the case of DEHR, this union is presented as a visual and thematic Cyberpunk Renaissance, with the setting being a futuristic ambient but the fashion, arts and the sense of grandeur from the majestic times of the XV century.

The era the game is set is lends itself to describe the contradiction of a technology that does not cease to evolve and move forward, contrasting with the part of humanity scared by the moral consequences that this advancement means. DEHR is often thought of as a curious hybrid of stealth and RPG because, beyond the exploratory and infiltration part that constitutes the first genre, the players will be led to answer moral questions related to the issues of technological development, influencing with their decisions the outcome of missions, destinies of people and the conclusion of the game itself.

In addition to this, the roleplaying component can be also observed in the wide variety of personalization that Jensen may receive by obtaining experience points. The player can aim to improve his hacking skills to ensure quieter and more precise infiltrations or decide to increase stamina and physical strength for a more "brutal" and direct approach.

Despite how enthralling the narrative of the title is, the gem of the game is certainly the stealth gameplay: offering the player immense but perfectly connected, contained and full of secrets maps to explore, DEHR offers a vast experience suitable for any style of approach to achieve certain goals, even if they are, more often than not, simply "go from point A to point B" or "get some data from computer C". The presence of side missions, some presented to the player, others hidden between the urban layers, increases even more the sense of greatness of the plot and world-building.

Years ago, at launch, the game could be blamed for, despite the ability to play without ever triggering an alarm or ever facing an enemy, some unavoidable boss fights, which were both mandatory and made futile to customize the character as a non-lethal spectrum. The Director's Cut, however, has masterfully solved this problem, magnifying different aspects of the basic game as well as the arenas of the bosses, expanding them from simple and bare rings to larger puzzles which lend themselves to the most different approaches for solution.

The Missing Link DLC can also be seen in a slightly negative way, as it blocks the narrative right in the middle for several hours and forces the player into an obligatory scenario that adds little to nothing to the main storyline.

DEHR works very well on every level it tries to explore: as stealth it presents claustrophobic, dirty, ultra-technological and rich in possibilities environments, among the pinnacles that the genre has to offer; as an RPG it is dictated by customization, immersion, a very strong narrative and a system of choices and consequences which brings some really interesting questions to light, especially for the modern context we live in. The relative simplicity of the title, even at the highest difficulty levels, allows anyone who wants to give a chance to something new to feel welcomed in this exciting and thrilling cyberpunk world.

“Inside a dream, I laugh, and the world laughs with me
Inside a dream, I forget, and the world forgets with me
Inside a dream, I am the world
Hello, world!”

Full of itself to an almost comical degree, yet all the more brutal and real exactly because of this contrast.
Following the thematic input of the first game, the struggle within, against the antipathetic world of false Gods, goes on, this time without even tip-toeing around the subject matter but ramming at full train speed into Charlotte’s reality, in her quest for free will. How does the world reflects in her eyes? Is it bleak, foggy and disgusting, or a wonderful, brighter place worth fighting for? For hope.

I don’t want this to be an excessively scathing review, what The Brotherhood devs did here is an amazing work of love and I encourage them to pursue their vision as much as they can and at the best of their capabilities. Contrary to many horror games, those made of poor and cheap ideas thrown around for shock value to create the bare minimum Outlast-clone, Stasis Bone Totem is far more than competently made, with a clear image behind, engaging concepts, strong writing and intriguing puzzles, and the sum of each part is a chore to play.

For example, it’s a given apparently that point-and-click adventure games must have some sections with a sprawling, intertwined map where multiple interactions must be followed simultaneously to progress, at the risk of having maybe too much backtracking, unintuitive inventory puzzles and some areas that are visually less interesting than others. That is the entirety of this game.

There are so, so, so many screens to traverse that at one point I dreaded finding new places rather than feeling curious at what might expect me. In no small part because there are clear limits in what the map design could achieve with texture and effects alone, and so much of the impact was conveyed through written descriptions, of gore, flora, environments, decors and so on, and they are fine, evocative even, but there is just too much of them.

I don't think a horror game necessarily loses its spark when the danger and mystery behind it are solved, but there is a moment when the balance between subtext and text is broken in favour of the latter and, at that point, you start to think the game is actively wasting your time. Each time I found a new room and scanned it with the ping, ten new green points with no interactions but text would pop up and I shivered at the idea of having to find and read each of them. That’s not even mentioning what I felt whenever a new PDA showed up. The cardinal sin, however, is having entire areas devoid of anything but items to pick up or just descriptions; if a room is only there to make the player walk more from one puzzle to the other instead of offering anything worthwhile but text, that room should not be there in the first place.

Same goes for the dialogues between the characters, there are only amazing voice performances in the game, and the players will absolutely take note of that because the characters never ever shut up. Every minute, interesting thing in the game necessitates for them to actively react and describe, talk between each other about what’s clearly there in front of them and it’s excruciating. It’s fine in terms of showing their interactions, the family dynamics and how they feel in key moments, but again it’s just too much text, just let me find something disturbing and react to it before any of these berks have something to say about it.

Between the end of chapter 2 and the halfway point of chapter 3 I was detached from anything that was happening in the story. There had been some interesting twists, but I had to run around empty maps so much, between so much text and hearing so much of the same reactions and dialogue from the cast, that it made some of my favourite tropes (the underwater horror, being trapped in a sci-fi confinement, violent murder mysteries and the moral implications of what capitalism and religion do to people) felt cheap and overwritten.

Sometimes it felt like the developers knew this too, because there were many terminals and documents scattered around with barely any text or commentary but simply pictures of experiments and unknown lifeforms or old drawings of alien schematics, and they were just so much more effective precisely because there was no explanation or reaction.

Stasis Bone Totem is kind of worth the effort though, I kept going ‘til the end because this is the type of video game that needs to be made. Just last year we had Signalis and Iron Lung, among many others I certainly have not even heard of, and they did nail the feeling of being trapped, haunted, oppressed, helpless but having to move forward, and they clearly conveyed all these emotions through gameplay and very little with straightforward narration, because in such hostile and terrifying situations the mind can fill in the blanks immensely well. A lot of work was put into SBT, amazing and effective work, just too much work for the kind of experience, I think, it was going for.

I think it is impossible to discuss the value of Little Busters! without focusing on how it achieves to be a successful emotional ride. Did I cry or was I moved? Yeah, I did, something like seven years ago when I first read it. This time around, after the Steam release, I found myself much less impressed by some portions of drama which, admittedly, oftentimes feel just thrown around for the sake of exasperating the melodrama. Also, the plot is mostly goofy and juvenile, some nice spins are given here and there, while the prose does its job it is largely mediocre, and if you won’t find the humour and the chemistry between the characters compelling you’re in for a tour de force rather than a pleasant tale about friendships.

However, the thing about the power of Little Busters! is how being aware of all of its shortcomings doesn’t affect my appreciation of the work Visual Art’s did here, at all. Maybe Little Busters! wouldn’t work magnificently as a story, but it sure is impressive as a visual novel: whilst many similar works would limit themselves to introduce characters and let you focus on a fixated path following which one interested you the most, Little Busters! add far more branch and choices, sometimes seemingly pointless, to let the player experience a bountiful of side contents, comedic or lore-related vignettes, and secrets hidden all over the place that just ask to be found. There’s also the gameplay, in the form of several quick mini-games which range from baseball practice to a fighting tournament, from hunting down mysterious creatures (which give a pretty hilarious insight on the character of Kyousuke) to serving in a cafeteria. And the impressive thing is how all of these are plot related, not because how the gameplay fits into the story but how because how much they reciprocally influence each other. I can’t emphasize enough how I adore the way this novel build around its theme by slightly changing, after each playthrough, some minor bits of it to give a more concrete idea of the characters changing and developing after major events, and the more obvious way to notice this would be, in fact, to check the protagonists’ stats at the beginning of each tournament.

As the story is in its surface state, I wouldn’t think much of it beside it being a heart-warming bildungsroman focused on friendship, but the care put into its every detail, from the immense content hidden in it to the game direction heavily helping the narrative with a pretty fitting musical score and spot-on CG events, raised it to being of my favourite product of its medium.

The indisputable thing about Trails in the Sky is that no matter where you are or how thought of a battle you are facing, it never gives up its light-heartiness. It may sound ridiculous considering some twists and events undeniably dramatic, but overall the charm it displays comes from a deep sense of familiarity you perceive from the world and its characters. Being the first chapter in a trilogy of the Legend of Heroes series you start having little to no clue regarding who is who, what is what, how things work and what kind of monster will come at you in every dungeon. But here’s the thing, all of the answers to these points are either pretty standard fare or predictable: you have kind of slimes, kind of insectoids, kind of monster birds, and the whole grid combat system and quartz equipment are pretty easy to catch up and recognize after few tries. The characters are the kind of broody gary stu, the kind of energetic female lead, the kind of cute little girl, the kind of uptight aristocratic, the kind of funny pervert, the kind of reliable jokester and so on.

From what I’ve been saying up to now it may sound as if I am dissing the game for being boring and uninspired, which is undeniable for me considering the average JRPG, and initially this was a big point behind the disappointment in my first playthrough. Yet there was something charming about the game, something not really flashy or amazing or memorable, but it just drew me in it again, and in its sequels. What it was, was the familiarity.

Playing Trails in the sky is returning to a game you have always played when turning on a JRPG: it makes the players discover a world where there are problems and stuff to solve (after all it would be an Atelier game otherwise, wouldn’t it) but rarely puts them are put into a spot where there isn’t a handful of warm, good feelings, where the people living in this world won’t smile and help the characters, give some nice trivia, or just crack a light, unfunny joke. All of these set up the mood for the heroes to feel the need to save the day and beat the bad guys, because they are concretely showed what is so important to protect, not just generically preventing the world to burn but an everyday worth of living made of significant people and hopes and dreams and children and all the kind of saccharine stuff edgy guy won’t relate to. To me, at least, this is a remarkable achievement.

Albeit, one may argue that this is by no mean something new, something unique, something that make the game stand out from many other similar JRPGs. I won’t deny this because I think so as well, I just think it’s more a part of Trails in the Sky’s charm than of its let-downs. Then again, if one wants still to immerse in an enthralling and challenging game you could always crank up the difficulty and let Lorence obliterate you time and time again without a specific quartz build to counter his one-hit kill attacks. Not that it will really matter if one spends just the tiniest amount of time exploring, looting and levelling up, strategizing is very intuitive and easy to master. Moreover, the grind in this game is really light and I’ve never been put into a spot where I wouldn’t be able to collect all the weapons and abilities compared to other games. Or, you could also just spam Joshua’s black fang and make every random encounter trivial.

If one just came for the story though, what they’ll get is a classic reinvention of the “the princess is in another castle” formula, where the player is given an episodic format of reaching a new city, meeting new people, investigating their own matters and finishing involved in something else entirely to solve. The nice thing about ending a chapter and leaving everything that the player explored or met behind is this is the kind of game that won’t forget to make everyone come back and fulfil their roles by the endgame, so that not one major quest will ever feel unnecessary or too gratuitous to alienate the player from the main objective. The game also ends on a quite nice cliff-hanger, which was subtlety built and hinted to thorough the whole story, but without leaving anything relevant presented up to that point unresolved: the bad guys are defeated, the princess was indeed in one castle, the world is save (for now), everything noteworthy was achieved, you are just presented the prologue to the next story in the epilogue to build the will to keep on playing the series. And admittedly, it works like a charm.

I wouldn’t recommend this game if one was searching for an innovative game, or a game which takes stereotypes and does something completely new and inspired with them (if you want a better “princess in another castle” game just go to The Witcher 3), rather Trails in the Sky was made for those people who unconditionally love JRPGs for the feeling the genre mastered, the feel of live inside a warm fable.

“Come, gather and bear witness to my opera, now in the making. Its script is the height of cliché, I am forced to admit. And yet its actors are of the finest fold; beyond exquisite. Thus, I believe you will find it enthralling.”

This is a line from a pretty late stage of the game, yet it is for understandable reasons being often quoted to express many of the things that make Dies Irae impressive. For one, the prose is absolutely stellar: if the incredible amount of care put into every line from the English localization team mirrored the quality of the original Japanese release, we are in front of a work that transcends the limit of games directed to a young audience and leads into the realm of actual literature. Each character expresses themselves with fitting and recognizable verbal quirks, their voice acting is nothing short of superb, the insight given to their personalities is of the most eloquent and beguiling kind, certainly if one had to read Dies Irae for one purpose it would be for how well narrated are its characters.

As the translation team discussed, what appears to be a regular plot of bad villains (Nazis, moreover) threating the world hides a deeper layer of meaning where are discussed the fundamentals of its own genre, being so subtlety hidden that, even when the dialogues are close to be so metafictional you could hear the fourth wall shattering, the plot still doesn’t cease its adrenaline rush, nor loses focus. When you think you finally reached the climax, the game goes beyond and a new, more impressive climax is just around the corner, you’ll find yourself jaw dropping while reading some of the most superb over-the-top scenes ever conceived. Whenever ‘Ω Ewigkeit’ starts playing, since its first usage as the title menu theme, you can’t help but feel the blood rushing, the thrill, the awe, being swarmed by whatever is bound next to subvert your every expectation.

Dies Irae is a crescendo that can’t, or rather shouldn’t, be halted, ever, not until the reader has enough understanding of its core content to properly decide if it was impressive or tedious, charming and elegant or uselessly over bombastic. It also the hope for many more similar remarkable visual novels to receive a western release so that, even if it has still a niche of fans, many can rejoice for the wonderful possibilities of the medium.

Antichamber is the ultimate form of any platform puzzle videogame, one that gives to the players the mean to overcome every room they are put in but that also asks them to constantly question everything they have learned, including common knowledge physics and previous rules established by the game itself.

The concept of being put into a conceptual impossible structure, that resembles on many levels a hypercube, is already something that could’ve worked so flawlessly only in a videogame. The progression across each level is logical, but requires thinking out of the box on the same degree, if not even more convoluted, than The Stanley Parable and the Portal series. What is absolutely unique to Antichamber though it’s the almost soundless, eerie and unnaturally coloured ambient, which all the more convey the feeling of a metaphysical nightmare not even the philosopher Frank Jackson could be able to properly explain.

Aside from the players themselves, the only (much welcomed) recognizable human inputs inside the game are posters put around rooms and hallways, which use cute drawing and helpful lines to either hint the solution of a puzzle, to comment and congratulate an outcome with a clever moral lesson about the matter of perspective and the importance of keeping an open mind at all time.

From beginning to end, Antichamber will be a joy to immerse oneself in; truly engaging for how well it plays gameplay-wise and how the game itself plays with its players minds. There aren’t many not-meme metagames that can boast the same mind-blowing accomplishments.

The big one, the video game that defined them all, the magnus opus that created a standard still used today and inspired almost every good survival horror to come. The controls, the setting, the atmosphere, the annoying but carefully placed jump scares. It wasn’t the first of its genre but the original Resident Evil implemented what every horror game had to show at the time – from previous Capcom titles such as Sweet Home to the western Alone in the Dark – along with the movie culture from the 80s, from Shining to Romero’s movies. All of these inspirations combined created a frightful journey of horror but with an over-the-top plot worthy of the worst, best American B-movie. Despite the low budget, they utilized whichever mean they had to craft the most immersive experience as possible, the pre-rendered backgrounds and the doors opening that create tension but are ultimately there to hide the loading times are two examples of this.

What came was a revolutionary game that set the bar and defined its medium, and still today this HD iteration, an upgrade over the Nintendo Gamecube remake of the game, of the first Resident Evil still holds as solid as ever. The tank controls might be unfamiliar for some but it is a deliberate and necessary choice to truly delve into the narrow and unsettling hallways of the mansion, where at every corner a disturbing sound or a tough enemy could be in wait to eat the players’ necks and immediate response is required without feeling confused over where to turn. The fixed camera all the more reinforces this feeling of dread and helplessness because, despite being fully armed and distant from the enemies, there will be many times where the players won’t be able to immediately see the zombies, nor realise how far and safe they are from danger.

The enemies’ placement, the puzzles and the difficulty spikes are all still highly accessible and rewarding to overcome today as they were over 20 years ago, the game has only ever improved and it still plays beautifully on every system blessed enough to have a port of its own. The series might have had its ups and downs and many old fans might be only pleased with the second remake of the series now since it’s the only game in years that tried to replicate the original feeling instead of fully committing to action set pieces, camp entertainment or the reboot RE7 tried to do, but this first chapter is still a milestone under every department, and it won’t yield its throne anytime soon.

A game where a guild self-regulates the colonization of new lands, whilst both promoting scientific development and managing environmental balance as an independent, economic entity. Truly the capitalistic dream fully realized. Also, you whack dinosaurs with a big f- sword, or hammer or whatever.

What I appreciate the most about Monster Hunter World is that it is perfectly adequate to satisfy my every moods whenever I want to play: if I want an adrenaline rush through hunts and varied gameplay mechanics I can put myself against a Savage Deviljho and curse its’ and the Lord’s name; if I just want to progress I can almost always count on online help to dump– cough to carry me during harder fights; if I need to relax I can walk around the main hubs and talk to colourful, funny characters, or doing expeditions to fetch rare materials, discover rare or unique interactions in the wildlife (the sexual habits of lynians are so fascinating and they don’t even mind you recording every second of it), or simply walk around and soak in the beauty of the maps.

Of course, the vast majority of those who will play the game (and those who won’t the c•ckblocked by its godawful optimization and manage some workarounds, thanks nexusmod and steamforums) will mainly be interested in the ‘hunter’ part rather than the ‘world’ part, and it certainly does deliver. Every hunt is a glorious boss fight in and on itself. They are exciting, tense, fast paced, even strategic as you have to manage your resources, your positioning, the condition of your prey and the environments around you. Every new monster is a series of discoveries, to assimilate the monster moveset and work your reflexes on countermeasures, while also adjusting your playstyle to something that may very well be completely different from every fight you have had before. It is certainly difficult, yet the game does not gatekeep its progress, you can almost always find ways to ease the challenge by adequately equipping your palico companion (just give him paralysis or poison gear), other aids such as traps, lynians and minor monsters in the map, or calling for other players to join you. There are plenty of hunters out there always willing to lend a hand.

Crafting always offers new ways to play the game. Today you might see a particular weapon or armour and you will hunt the same monster multiple times, praying the random number god that it will drop the materials you need before the date of your wedding or of your grandchildren’s college diploma. There is a grand total of 14 different weapons to try out, I myself haven’t tried a couple of them yet, surely haven’t mastered more than two or three, and each play so differently it is like trying a new game every time you pick a different one. They all offer complex but accessible mechanics, various way to approach a challenge and a long list of moves and combo to learn. The game actively incentives to not button mash through your fights but carefully weight the timing and damage of each blow, the reaction times of the monsters and how best to utilize your knowledge to balance offence and defence. Of course, not that I am any good at it myself, I keep panicking and just spam heavy blows many times. The best suggestion one could receive upon beginning the game is to play it as a turn-based action game, rather than a real-time one.

Minor grips with the game, aside from the status of the actual PC port, include: 1. the time limit on missions, it sure adds tension but come on, despite having plenty of time to kill the same monster thrice I’d still like to not have a mental pressure if I want to explore the map a little during a hunt; 2. after every faint your stats reverse back to before you ate to gain the bonuses, which means if you have real troubles with a particular monster you’d have to wait every ten minute mark to buff again or waste a lot of consumables to regain those buffs (ancient potions are expensive to make, bloody hell); 3. as much as it is fun to witness monsters fighting each other (and it sure simplifies some of the hunts as they bite hundreds if not thousands of HP out of each other), some monsters such as the bazelgeuse could get a clue and stop intruding every second, attacking your prey but also, always, unavoidably hitting your character as well; 4. the monsters have presence, they sure feel like living dinosaurs walking around, and oftentimes they are so big the camera will commit seppuku altogether and a monster will occupy the full screen, while you won’t be able to figure out for many seconds where you are or what (or if) you are hitting; 5. hitboxes are not, uh, perfect: sometimes, many monsters are clearly coded so that the air they move around can still halve you HP while others can move around and, as long as you aren’t precisely where they are targeting, you won’t get hit. This last one may very well be intentional, but if it is so then it’s a weird design choice to artificially inflate difficulty, in a game that otherwise teaches you to value every space you and the monsters occupy.

MHW looks and sounds beautifully. Just like games such as the witcher 3, the souls series, MGSV and so on, there is an almost surreal and gripping ambience in every map, an absurd amount of secrets, trails and areas to discover, a rich palette of colours. It is just so satisfying to walk around, crawling in caves and climbing rock walls, and end up in a place where flying glowing jellyfishes abound, surrounded by rainbow-tinted corals, and you’d just be there for minutes and stare at this fantastically magnificent atmosphere, while immersing in the sounds of nature.

All in all, MHW is an experience I thoroughly recommend, as long as your computer specs allow it and it doesn’t systematically burn your CPU like, as I understand it, was a clear intentional joke on the behalf of capcom, undoubtedly in cahoots with the CPU manufactures industry. There is potentially endless fun to be had in the game, one of the best modern-day multiplayer experience to have with friends or newly met strangers online (just don’t accept any cough herbal remedy candy they offer you) and certainly a landmark for future looting-based action games. (Editor’s note: it’s been almost three years since MHW released and almost no game learned a thing from it. Game industry, what is wrong with you, you absolute fuc–

I am helplessly biased toward this game. It was one of the first games I was shown on the PlayStation from a dear friend of mine, it opened me to the concept of games so huge – for the time – that they could sprawl over four discs. Its first opening hours are still some of the most variegated – for all its contents, secrets and minigames – and narratively engaging a JRPGs has ever conceived. The cast of characters is diverse, huge, memorable, sympathetic, lovable, funny, miserable. The narrative is something few games have topped to this day – Nier and its sequel come to mind – as it deals with the usual grand adventure of saving the world from the great evil but with the more subtle themes of existentialism, of finding one’s own purpose in life and accepting when you can’t, of dealing with the inevitability of death, of losing those dears to you, of the importance of the future but to always cherish your roots for they have made you the person you are today, for better or worse. Final Fantasy IX taught me to love steampunk, a genre which is basically dead aside from video games and some Japanese comics. Forever, willingly or not, this will be my benchmark for fantasy narrative in games and so on.

Final Fantasy IX was the return to a more classic approach to the series fantastical and magical roots after the more sci-fi oriented ones that preceded it – the ones so popular they are still referenced in Kingdom Hearts – and it is a grandiose return. Sakaguchi Hironobu created what he would later call his favourite game of the series, what encapsulates the most the concept behind the words ‘Final Fantasy’ and its roots as a series based on Medieval Europe and its mythology. The result is a product clearly influenced by Northern European and Norse myths but still quintessentially Japanese in how it plays out and blends sci-fi and fantasy to craft something inherently new and idiosyncratic, for its time at least.

The gameplay was streamlined from the previous iteration but the simplicity didn’t make it any less enjoyable and cunning. Levelling up is as easy as it was in the first games of the series, whilst abilities are tied to equipment and can be permanently learnt the more fights one characters wins with a particular item equipped. Some abilities are secretly tied to in-game mechanic, such as how many dragons have the party defeated, how many ores and minerals are in the inventory and how many steals were successfully achieved during battles. The trance mechanic could use some improvement, especially in the remaster, if not for the option, always felt needed, to activate it at any given time instead of automatically triggering whenever the corresponding bar is full. Still, as the combat is rewarding and presents many possible approaches to defeat particular enemies, after many hours no one will care if they can’t activate the trance during a precise phase of a difficult super boss. Also, the eidolons are as pleasant to summon as ever, they pack a megaton punch and are accompanied by some of the most inspired and impressive cutscene available during the PSX era.

Nevertheless, what it really matters, the soundtrack, is still as beautiful and outstanding as it has always been. Uematsu Nobuo is one of the greatest masters for video games music and this chapter of Final Fantasy has proved itself to be another badge of pride in his curriculum. The tunes are nostalgic, adventurous, romantic and melancholic at the same time. There are multiple versions of Melodies of life that plays at different times, each one perfectly in tune with the mood of the scene. The Place I'll Return to Someday is striking as the opening menu theme and all the more once put into context for what its title mean, both during the various events in the game and during its final climax. There could be many things to say about each track and how well put into the environment they are, but it’d take a whole review on the music alone.

Final Fantasy IX is a trip back to a time of nostalgia and discover, when young kids found themselves engaged by a thrilling fantasy adventure and had to deal with the first realization that in life many things more than simply games and story have to end. Today the script might be cheesy and simplistic at times, but the importance and value of its moral, as well as the passion its developers put into the realization of this game, are something that, alas, we rarely get to see in the industry.