Nothing Squeenix ever does will make me think Zack Fair is good and/or cool. In fact, the more I learn about him the more I start to actively dislike him.

There is a part of me that feels fundamentally opposed to all the "Compilation of Final Fantasy VII" stuff because FF7 on its own is such an exquisitely self-contained thing. Like, they did a great job with it! We don't need every little detail explained and expanded upon! It frequently makes things worse! Sometimes you do still end up with something that is Cool and Fun (Advent Children) but mostly you end up with stuff that is Bad and Sucks (Crisis Core).

I didn't realize just how much this game pushes Zack and Aerith together. I had always assuming the fandom shipping them was based on some crumbs but they are pretty clearly Together in this, huh. I am choosing to ship Zack with Tseng out of pure spite because both Aerith and Cloud deserve better than this dumpster boy.

Genesis constantly dropping in to quote a play is very stupid and funny. Genesis walked so V Devilmaycryfive could run.

weird prank from squeenix to name the trans woman "Cissnei" but okay

YES the third person shooting is kinda mid and YES the later levels get some pretty mean design choices that almost force you into grinding earlier levels for xp and gil and YES the first three-quarters of the game have very little meaningful or interesting story and YES everything with Omega and the Protomateria raises a lot of Big Lore questions about things going on in FF7.

BUT.

That last bit of the game! The last, like, three levels or something! It's all kinda sick as hell! The Rosso and Azul boss fights are just so damn cool. And basically everything once you get to the Weiss fight?? It's all anime bullshit and I love it. Vincent is great. What a cool guy. Yuffie is fun to have around sometimes! The little bit of Cloud/Tifa/Barret you get rules! Reeve sucks! And I guess Cid is there, too!

And I think the choice at the end of each level to convert your points into either XP or Gil is genuinely cool! And having your RPG stats to level up helps set this apart from the majority of shooters, which is neat!

I think I'm going to be rotating Rosso the Crimson in my mind for a long time.

If you don't like the edgy goth twink game then, I dunno, try letting joy into your heart or something.

Ok, well, the drive AC Valhalla was installed on died and I Can Not be bothered to re-download 150 gigs for this fuckin' game so I guess it's time to try and sum up my thoughts on this one, huh. Spoiler alert: I think it's bad!

I like to indulge in some big dumb open world game from time to time and have put many many hours into both AC Origins and Odyssey, so I was actually looking forward to Valhalla! Another one of these big dumb games for me to use to stave off depression but this time it's got a vikings and Norse mythology coat of paint? Sure! Sign me up! But! Alas! It sucks!

This game is so chock full of design choices that I think are potentially very interesting or compelling but then they only ever commit halfway to them which results in this largely frictionless and uninteresting game. A big example of this is how they've structured the main plot of the game. They give you a choice in which region's questline you'll do next. At first I thought this meant that you would pick one region to ally yourself with and that would result in another region becoming an enemy and then there'd be some conflict later but, no, it's just literally the order you do them in because you will end up doing all of them eventually! And also! The individual regions don't really matter because there is zero interaction between any of them. People of one region really have no thoughts or feelings about the guy who just took over the region next door? Really? Nothing at all? Yeah, okay, sure Valhalla, whatever you say.

Speaking of those individual regions: they make the main plot of the game mostly feel like this collection of short stories. Which, again, I think is potentially interesting! Getting to learn about the core cast of characters by putting them in a variety of Situations is very compelling! But all the short stories suck ass and have zero interesting things going on and Eivor doesn't really do or say anything particularly notable. It's all just the most boring version of this idea!

And Eivor... I need to talk about Eivor. If you know me then you'd probably expect me to feel Very Normal about Eivor. I adored Kassandra and Eivor at first seemed like she might be another run at that character type. Strong powerful woman in kind of a mainstream generic hero way... like, sure it's kind of basic but also I can be kind of a basic bitch. But Eivor is so boring! She's supposed to be the quiet, stoic badass but it means she just sort of ends up standing around in every cutscene and occasionally grunting. If that's how your protagonist is going to be then you need to have some good characters around her to bounce off of. And unfortunately! The main plot does not have that! The absolute best of Eivor is in the dlc(?) add-on when Eivor heads to some island and meets up with Kassandra because Kassandra keeps trying to be her charismatic, jokey self but Eivor is always no-selling her attempts at humor and the dynamic works really well! But after four or five hours, that island is done and Kassandra leaves forever and it's back to Eivor and her boring viking pals all being dull and wooden together and it makes every cutscene a fucking slog.

(That bit when Kassandra comes back is fun. Sure, it's partially because I love her but also I think it's fun to have a functionally immortal character that could pop up anywhere in your big dumb franchise! What a goofy thing to add in a series chock full of goofy shit.)

The world is SO big and SO empty!! The majority of things are densely packed into the handful of cities and so most of the landmass is just empty fields and forest. I use the horse auto-pilot mechanic waaay more in this game than in AC:O or AC:O. I had frequent stretches of just riding across hillsides for, like, two minutes where nothing happens. No interesting terrain or landmarks, no combat, no collectable to grab. No nothing! It's so big and empty and boring!

And the thing is, this kind of feels like it's the developers trying to respond to the criticism/memes about "Ubisoft open world game map icon vomit". Like, they want the map to not be so cluttered with icons and so if there's big stretches of empty land, that technically addresses the issue but not in a good or satisfying way! There's still tons of shit to do it's just all concentrated in a handful of smaller areas. Why bother with such a big world!!

(There's also another aspect that feels like them trying to address that criticism and missing the mark: The icons are (partially) gone! They show up as a little colored dot that is kinda hard to see until you get close to it and then it reveals the icon. It's just annoying! Let me know what dumb collectible I'm heading towards before I get there! Why make this more tedious when this isn't going to actually make people happy!

But maybe none of that matters because most of the stuff you pick up is worthless! I ended up with way more of every material type than I could reasonable use (to the point that I started upgrading whatever extra armor or weapons just to unlock their higher level forms as cosmetics). So there came a point where I just started ignoring most of the icons on the map because I didn't need anything from them.

The Ireland DLC was pretty good! I think the added set of mechanics around capturing resource generators and then trading those resources for stuff is neat! It really feels like they're testing things and exploring possible mechanics for other/future AC games and I think that's alright. The rewards you get for trading things aren't particularly useful (some armor but mostly boat cosmetics) but I think because the materials are passively generated while you're off doing video game bullshit, it makes the lack of meaningful reward feel not as bad. The story is at least better than the main game's (a low bar, but still worth noting) mostly because they have some characters that are actually mildly compelling. I am not Irish but I have a feeling that the representation of Ireland and of Irish people that is presented here is probably not great!

And then there's the mythology DLC. I think between Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, Odyssey really struck a sweet spot with balancing history and mythology. There's enough of it spread out through that game that it feels ever-present but there's never too much to be oversaturated with it. But with Valhalla they seem to have gone back closer to Origin where there isn't a whole lot of it (until you get to the DLC that is entirely mythology). So for a lot of the game it's just boring old historical(ish) England.

I am a long time Norse mythology enjoyer (not in a weird way, I promise!! I just think mythology is cool!!) but the DLC really didn't land with me. It mostly just feels like More but with a new coat of paint. More maps to run around, more enemies to kill, more resources to gather. More more more. They do add another unique mechanic here: Eivor can now suck off enemies to gain special abilities! It's used for some puzzle solving and can theoretically be used for traversal or combat but I never found myself ever really thinking about it or using it very much. The puzzles are either dead simple and obvious or way too obtuse with very little in between. The combat isn't really something I needed any more tools for because the ability list is already so vast. And the world isn't so much different from any other location that being able to move around it different is very meaningful. It's just way too much of a new coat of paint on a game that there is already Way Too Much of!

I didn't get a chance to check out the France DLC because by the time I was high enough level to do it, I was feeling very burnt out on the game and was trying to focus on the main story but didn't even manage to finish that all the way through!

TOO MUCH VIDEO GAME. I was just over 100 hours in and wasn't even done with the main story! I probably had at least a dozen more hours to go!! What the hell! Maybe someday I'll go back and see the last chunk of story and go "wow this wasn't worth it" and then I'll treat myself to murdering a bunch of French people. But for now I'm done with this game. And, y'know what? I think this might've cured me of my "Ubisoft open world enjoyer" disease. I know there's another AC out at this point and I don't know that I'm really interested in checking it out at all! It'd be nice if it were good but I'm just not sure I have faith that it would be!

well I finally went and finished it. I've started this game probably a dozen times in my life, as far back as borrowing a friend's copy to play on my psone (the lil round one, not the big original kind) in 2001. And to no one's surprise: it's really fucking good! It's a classic for a reason.

Over the years I had already had a lot of major story moments spoiled and so I was expecting the game to not quite land or not really hit as hard as it did but it turns out that the execution is so strong that it didn't really matter that I went into a scene and said "Oh, this is the part where [redacted] dies" because that scene still Fuckin Hits!!

And there was still stuff I hadn't heard about! The submarine! Playing as Tifa! So there was still fun surprises for me here, too. And that moment when I finally got Cloud back after he's gone for a while? Hit so fuckin' hard!! The boy!!! He's back!!! Love him. Love it. Love it all.

I don't have many complaints about this game but one of them is all the little minigames you have to play. I think it is an interesting/cool idea to say "your character is going to perform an action that we can't really make work with turn-based combat so instead we'll do a lil bespoke minigame so the player isn't just watching a cutscene". I do, generally, like that idea. But so many of the minigames it has you do feel like unresponsive shit-garbage to control and frequently have little to no feedback to if you're even doing them correctly (or if you are doing things wrong, what it is you're doing wrong). So many frustrating moments that really feel like they should just make them more lenient. Just let me get through your story!! Don't be super strict about making sure I perform CPR correctly or am good enough at a military parade or raced a dumb bird or whatever else. I think the only one I really liked was the snowboarding but even that was kinda fucked up because of the Steam version's love/hate relationship with my controller.

My only other big complaint is Cid because, wow, that dude sucks ass. No wonder I've never heard anyone really talk about him when they talk about the characters in this game. His whole thing is really just he's an angry misogynist and I guess I'm supposed to think he's... cool? Because at the end he realizes he was mad about something he was wrong about? Fuck off into the sun, Cid. This is maybe the only FF I've played where I disliked a party member to the degree that I found him actually repellent. When I got to the section where I had to play as him I looked up a walkthrough to figure out how long I was stuck in that hell and what the quickest way through it was. Luckily, it was blessedly short.

Red XIII's line "It's hard to stand on your own two legs" has really stuck with me, maybe more than any other individual line of dialogue has in a long time. It's just such a succinct summation of part of this game's theme, y'know? You can't do it on your own, you have to be ready and willing to not just ask for help but also to accept it. You need people around you because life is hard and we can't make it on our own. Also, if you're an alien dog in disguise pretending to be a human solider it is literally difficult to stand on your own two feet.

At the start of the game I was a staunch Aerti shipper but the relationship that builds between Cloud and Tifa throughout this is so sweet it got me dangerously close to becoming a Cloti shipper. Although in my heart of hearts I know the real answer here is Claerti.

One last thing: like I alluded to above, the Steam version is super fucked! It didn't properly recognize my controller and had no way to rebind them so my only option would've been to do it via Steam's controller shit but that would've messed it up for every other game I play! It sucks! And if you use a controller the button prompts don't update correctly so you have to the keyboard binds and how those map to your controller! It sucks! Bad port! I think the only advantage this has is that it's easier to plug into a cheat engine table if you want that for any particular reason, y'know.

Wingspan is a game that I want to like more than I actually do like it. It's incredibly charming–the art of the birds, all the little sounds, the way the menus move, the factoids about birds you can read, all the aesthetic choices in the UI are all wonderful. But actually playing it feels a little... dull? Not exactly dull but it's a little un-engaging? While the gameplay is satisfying on its own, the biggest problem I have is that you have almost no interaction with the other players. Which, for a board game, I think is a pretty big negative! There's very few card effects that let you interact with the other players and even the ones there are are relatively minimal (and most of them are pretty simple things like "if a player does X then you gain Y"). The deck of card and the dice are shared and so you could potentially maybe strategically take things to try and deny them from other players but that is either not a great strategy or a strategy that goes way over my head because I couldn't really see a way to make it work.

To me, board games are largely about the ways in which the game makes you interact with the people you play with. Maybe you broker alliances or make deals with people or choose to backstab them. But there isn't really any of that to be done here. So it's a little disappointing to go into a board game and then not get the thing I expect out of them. But, hey, at least there's cute birds.

There is one interesting mode, though, where you play against a single AI opponent with a set RNG seed and compete against other players to see who can use the identical setup to score the most possible points. It let's you play the game (fun) and optimize strategy (also fun) so it seems like it's kind of the best way to play.

Did I mention the birds are cute? Because the birds are cute.

Adorable art, lovely music, charming writing, and overall a very comfy lil picross vn about witches. Only takes about an hour to play, strong recommendation from me!!

An actual criticism about the game: there's a point where it starts to talk about privilege and how it changes what peoples lives are but then shies away from actually saying anything in favor of being Cute™ and Wholesome™ which is a bit disappointing. Like, I dunno, maybe I shouldn't expect a small vn like this to have Big Things to say about life like that but also maybe don't invoke it if you're going to immediately step back from it, y'know.

As far as narrative picross games go, this one is okay. The puzzles themselves never got particularly hard which, for a picross sicko like me, is a little disappointing but I understand they probably want normal people to be able to complete the game too. I just wish there was one of these that really challenged me there.

The writing is trying to be charming but it really didn't do anything for me. I didn't think it was bad or annoying or anything, it just didn't hook me. Inoffensive but I had hoped for better.

Sometimes the actual critical path of where you need to go to keep doing puzzles is very unclear and so I ended up doing a lot of wandering around and not knowing what I needed to interact with to make the story continue.

Not the best narrative picross I've played but it's such a small genre that it's hard for me to be too hard on this game.

The extremely sick art style does a lot of work to carry this game. The whole aesthetic style is powerful and pretty unique. The lore and world also make the game worth checking out because I just haven't seen something quite like this in a game before. The gameplay does leave a bit to be desired though. It's solidly serviceable but truly nothing to write home about. By the end of the game a lot of the combat and platforming was more annoying than anything and I just wanted to be done so I rushed to the end a bit which is quite probably why I ended up getting what I assume is the 'bad' ending.

I finished this like a month ago and forgot to log it here so I'm gonna do my best to jot down some notes about it but I have almost certainly forgotten things so this "review" is going to be even more of a jumbled mess of my thoughts than my usual ""reviews"" are.

First off, this story bangs. It sucks, it fucks, it whips ass, it's incredible. Jack and his polycule do it their way. I love how it makes Jack & co. strangers to this world but you are also a stranger to it! Love that good title with double meaning bullshit. I do feel like I missed out a bit because I haven't palyed FF1, so not all the connections hit with their full force but the game does more than enough work to give context so all the big reveals land. It ends up being a really powerful ending!

I do wish we had more moments that we had gotten to know the party members as individual characters. They very occasionally get some lines of dialogue but it's really not much to give them the depth that I like to get from RPGs. Also, Sophia and Neon should have gotten together. Known woman-kisser Alexa Lily thinks the women should kiss, more news at 11.

It's a little mechanically odd, especially when you get into the loot and all the systems around it. I never kept an individual piece equipped for more than a mission or two because I got so much stuff so fast that I was always finding gear that was straight-up better all the time. So it meant dismantling stuff for materials only matters as a way to de-clutter the inventory screens and the blacksmith was almost entirely useless. If I had gotten into the post-game mission grind then it's obvious that I would've engaged with these systems more but as someone that was just hear for the story it was all so wildly unnecessary. It's just this weird situation where I can see all these systems in place—for the loot, the Job Affinity, even some of the more advanced combat mechanics—but I really have little to no need to mess with them at all because I just played through the story on normal difficulty and then stopped when the credits rolled. I can still look at them and appreciate the work that went into designing it and I can get a pretty good idea of how it all fits together but it does leave this weird feeling where I spent hours and hours in this game and all of it largely ignoring big parts of it.

Speaking of the items, this game commits the cardinal sin of loot games where they change my appearance but I can't put something in a cosmetic slot. Let me where a cool hat regardless of what the stats are! I desperately need to look cool while I punch goblins but your game doesn't allow for that!! Fucked up thing to do in to us in 2022.

I will never think of fistbumps the same way ever again.

Astos is one of the boys of all time. I need to soak him in water and wring him dry like a dirty washcloth. I need to squeeze him like a stressball. I need to neatly fold him up and keep him in my pocket. He is a lovely little gremlin and I would die for him.

the video game is good and the haters are wrong

A game that bravely asks the question "what if Vampire Survivors had an aesthetic that was more appealing to Alexa, specifically, and also all the characters were like cool women and witches and stuff". And, well, it turns out the answer to that question is that it'd hold my attention about as long as Vampire Survivors did. I dunno, it's just kinda boring to play! I'm just not really feeling any strong draw to do more runs. I did a couple and it was whatever. If I needed something to play while listening to a podcast there's about dozen other games I'd go back to before this one (or another entry in whatever this genre is called). It seems Fine if you're into this genre, I guess.

I played Apex at launch for a handful of weeks, throughout "Season 0" and into the beginning of Season 1, and ever since then I had this itch in the back of my mind to go back to it because it's very fun and I really enjoy the cast of characters they've built. Finally, upon adding the goth trans mommy I decided that this character is laser targeted at me, specifically, and I had to jump back in. I played for a few days and had fun despite being terrible at it. And then one day I didn't play but I still felt this itch as I was getting ready for bed that night that maybe I should pop on real quick to check the dailies and that was when I knew I had to uninstall. It's just not how I want to engage with games - even ones that I really enjoy playing! I don't want to be thinking about daily quests and weeklies and what tier of the battle pass I'm at vs. what tier/rewards I want to get to. I've got enough Brain Problems going on, I don't need a video game to take advantage of me and make me feel worse. So, despite how much I do genuinely enjoy the movement and the gunplay and even the whole battle royale mode, I have to quit playing this because I can't stand the way the bits around the edge make me feel. Maybe if I were playing this with friends instead of solo and it had a more social element to it then I'd be willing to go back and play more. But I guess until then, I'm done with this game? Kind of a disappointing and depressing way to quit a game but I gotta do what's best for myself, y'know?

Catalyst is a 10/10 character tho, love her to death.

Yeah, I don't know about this one. Part of it is definitely feel burnt out on this specific type of game after powering through TR 2013 and Rise (2015) one after another but also... this game has some horrid vibes to it.

It's like they want to recognize the missteps of the previous two games (and the whole franchise before that) but also they're just doing the exact same things. Lara is still a white savior parachuting into a place to save the poor defenseless locals. And she's still doing it by destroying ruins, setting fire to things, and stealing artifacts. How can you criticize the antagonists for doing that shit when your solution is "Well I need to go and do it before they do because it's okay when I do it." What sort of mental gymnastics must Lara be doing to justify this? And the thing is, the game seems wholly uninterested in actually digging in to that.

There's the scene after a huge flood hits the village they're in where Lara is talking about how she needs to go save everyone and how she's the only one who can do it and Jonah gets up in her face about it. How does she know that? How can she just leave this place without helping people who are literally dying right in front of her? Why is it her responsibility to go save everyone? And it seemed like the game was going somewhere with it, maybe Lara might actually have to reckon with the consequences of her actions. And then about 90 seconds later Jonah basically says "Actually, you know what, you're right Lara, you do need to go save everyone." Truly the writers want to have their cake and eat it too.

And in some truly "we don't actually understand what is problematic or insensitive about this" shit, Lara can just dress up in tradition indigenous garb in order to get, like, xp bonuses or whatever. Lara, honey, stick to the tank tops and khakis.

The other big(ish) problem I'm having is that the visuals are very cluttered. It's the amazon rainforest, so of course they, but then it's so hard to parse things, especially in the fast action platforming sequences. I've already had multiple deaths because I couldn't see the spikes or whatever deathtrap I needed to quickly dodge out of the way of.

The slight changes they made to the UI and menus all feel worse. Navigating any of it is just slightly more annoying that, when combined with Everything Else about this game, it's just too much to put up with.

Also, you're really gonna introduce Abigaile Ortiz and try to convince me that that woman is straight? fuck outta here

And it just doesn't run great on my old pos computer. Which shouldn't be too much of surprise but the other two ran well enough that it wasn't an issue so I was feeling hopeful about this one.

Maybe some day I'll come back to this but I can't imagine it would be for anything beyond "no thoughts, head empty, open world collectables" type game.