Control is the best Remedy game I've played thus far, because it's the only Remedy game I've played that lets the gameplay speak for itself. Alan Wake 1's RE4 imitation has certainly not aged as badly as a lot of people say, but it didn't always feel like it suited the game, and Alan Wake 2's mixture of survival and action horror was certainly ambitious but it wasn't exactly good either.

Meanwhile Control has a different problem: it's too fun but doesn't shake it up. Control definitely gets pretty repetitive at times, the enemy variety is low even when accounting for how short the game is, and the telekinesis power is just so OP that you'll rarely want to use any other strategy than spamming it in between gunfire. While the repetition definitely wore me down in some play sessions, overall I have a hard time being too critical of it when this is some of the most pure fun you can have with a third person shooter. What you're basically getting here is InFamous: but the rest of the game is good now too, flaws and all.

One area that really surprised me in the game is the setting. I absolutely loved it. If you asked me in 2019 what I thought of Control's setting, I would have told you it looked like one of the most boring ever conceived for a game. Every video was just about running through some offices or some random shapes, with not a lot else. Once you actually play the game, it becomes an entirely different experience. That can be said about a lot of Control, honestly, as I found my expectations were positively outdone pretty consistently throughout playing it. But it's especially true for the setting, as the Brutalist architecture combined with the fantastic lore logs make for some of the best atmosphere in gaming. Seriously, Remedy is uniquely great at collectibles.

By now saying that Remedy has good stories is pretty cliche but yes, the story in this game is good. I was surprised by how much I liked Jesse considering the marketing made her look like a pretty flat character. The narrative conceits of having her own internal voice, and also struggling to find where she stands during the course of the game ended up winning me over. I don't think this game stands up to Alan Wake in the character department though, and notably there's some odd things about the way it handles characters. Mainly that the supporting cast rarely feels important despite the fact that the game is always trying to make them seem important, even when they show up a lot and move to your base, they never have much impact in the story or major events and it's bizarre considering how much emphasis each individual character gets in their own chapters.

Unfortunately I feel like I kind of ruined the ending for myself, because I stopped playing the game 30 minutes before the end thinking I had at least another hour or two left, so I sort of experienced all the mini-climaxes before the finale. The actual finale itself is a bit lame, it really shows that this game could use more bosses when you're fighting the same trash mobs in the last two hours, but also I don't think it entirely works thematically. One of the things that really endeared me to Jesse was that it becomes clear that the game is more about Jesse overcoming her doubts and becoming the Director, and reappropriating the grooming into the role the FBC has been doing in the process by finally making a stance and taking the leadership role. This is more or less just hinted at in the final few hours of the game, but it isn't treated like a twist into the final hour. Even as someone who understood the theme very well long before the game had to reveal it, the fact that it's only really touched upon in detail right at the end of the game felt really sloppy. Or maybe it's more like the fact that Faden's transformation into letting go of her insecurities and taking up the role felt really sloppy, considering the office sequence is only like thirty minutes before the end of the game. The internal conflict itself is done really well, and the leadup to the finale is amazing, but it doesn't quite stick the landing.

I've been pretty critical of Control but overall I loved my time with it. It has a lot of flaws, and I mostly wish the gameplay was given a bit more attention so that the player would have to use more than one strategy, but it's one of the best games I've played in the last few years.

This is a weird one. As far as NES games go it's a lot more polished than even the best games in the library, and this makes it feel a lot more "modern" than a lot of its contemporaries, At the same time it doesn't have the consistent fun of Mario, doesn't come close to the fantastic level design of Castlevania, and push come to shove I think I'd even say Mega Man was doing more interesting things at the time. It ends up feeling pretty unspectacular for a lot of its playtime aside from some amazing audio visual design, and it isn't helped by the few ways it does feel unpolished. Mainly character control seems inconsistent, pretty often you'll get hit by something that you think you should have been able to dodge in time because some actions have a lot of startup. Kirby's controls never feel as smooth as they should which in some ways is practically a staple of his character but can be an annoyance.

It's made up for by the last three worlds being very good thanks to some really interesting settings, and the final boss is incredible. Even as my second Kirby game I wasn't expecting yet another boss to subvert my expectations this early on in the franchise, and not only is it great but I have to seriously think about if it's better than the final boss in Forgotten Land, which was already one of my favorites of all time. Crazy that a Kirby game did Dracula better than any Castlevania game.

This is a very good game once you get into its groove, you just have to go in with moderate expectations. There's a reason why it's both considered one of the best NES platformers but isn't really talked about on the same level as the greats.

The hardships of expanding Silent Hill as a series are not that different from why Indiana Jones is struggling while Star Wars or Marvel are thriving, Star Wars and Marvel represent entire universes to explore filled with characters and different literal and figurative worlds, while Indiana Jones is centered on one main character who thrived in the 80's and hasn't been nearly as relevant since. Silent Hill in this case is the real main character of the franchise, and while the first few games are very different from each other it becomes increasingly harder and harder to make something that is both original and unique enough to validate the existence of a new Silent Hill game while still making it feel like Silent Hill. There's an inevitable strain in trying to work within the confines of a Silent Hill game, because so much of what makes a Silent Hill game feel like a Silent Hill game is tied to that original setting despite the fact that even Team Silent was struggling to work with it by the fourth game.

It's because of this that I have a lot of appreciation for The Short Message conceptually, I think fans really need to get over the idea of Silent Hill games having the same exact setting and themes as the older ones if they want the series to continue to get new games. The new themes are also fertile ground to explore some interesting ideas, I liked the fact that this game touched on a lot of generational themes relating to my generation. The game has a lot of cringy topics and moments, but I couldn't really give the game that much flack for it a lot of the time because it felt pretty earnest and I think it was honestly brave to put out a product like this for a game franchise like Silent Hill where most of the people playing were probably going to be old men who don't give a shit about lesbian teenage girls.

Sadly there's one series convention I think that is almost required in order to make a Silent Hill game that's completely absent here: subtlety. Look, I won't lie and say that the subtlety of previous games completely matches up with the Life is Strange type story they're trying to tell here, but it just would have made the whole experience a lot better. There's a painful lack of subtlety here, because the writing isn't really good enough to bear the brunt of the trauma and cringe we're put through, and it would have just been a lot better to have the story be a bit less in your face. While the writing of the teenagers is generally ok, there's a lot less meat to dig into here with there being no nuance to details or ideas to ponder, the text files you see jthroughout the first few minutes alone basically explain the entire theme of the game right away. The voice acting also does not completely live up to the part, I can again say that the teenagers do a pretty good job though there is more cringe here than I would generally like but that's more of a me issue, the adults however are absolutely awful and I couldn't stand hearing them whenever you found their abusive messages. I did like the fact that the voice acting for Cherry Blossom is desynced from her visual performance, I thought it was a very nice intentional detail as it added an uncanniness to it and it reminded me a lot of behind the scenes commentary about how Silent Hill 2 purposely wanted to use more digital looking animation to appear more humanlike.

The gameplay in the game is pretty bad though, while I wouldn't say it's completely irredeemable as you can understand what it's going for immediately and it's pretty inoffensive, I found that the game just kinda dragged on. Not gonna lie for a game like this where you kinda just walk around and interact with stuff the highest score I'd probably give it is a 6/10, so in that respect the few gameplay complaints I have aren't terrible but it just generally doesn't have great pacing - it's a 2 to 2 and a half hour game that feels like a 4 hour game and that's pretty bad. The chase sequences are also pretty bad and feel very tacked on, I did the first three without even knowing what I was doing and I didn't die. I usually don't complain about cameras in games but the camera in this game is pretty problematic, as your phone basically has to alert you before the horror segment even starts that you're about to encounter a chase sequence, completely removing any tension whatsoever. I did like the last sequence though - it was a genuinely great blend of puzzles and horror gameplay and it was pretty intense.

It feels appropriate that Another Code, Celeste 64 and Silent Hill: The Short Message all released around the same time. All are about girls trying to solve some personal struggles, but only one of them is being used to prop up a cold dead franchise. I'm not going to say something like The Short Message is cynical because it's part of a major franchise, you can tell the people who made it put a lot of work into it. But the flaws are all a bit too much, and after a while you have to ask why did this really need to be a Silent Hill game? I'm all for the series changing and having new messages and forms of expression but not even the writing here really takes any queues from the qualities of the older games. And there's a very thin line between trying to use Silent Hill to greenlight interesting projects, and using major themes to promote the revitalization of a franchise. By the end of the game when you get to the parental abuse chapter, which almost feels like it was made to check off a box on a list of traumas and is genuinely the worst written chapter by far with irredeemably bad writing, I started feeling colder and colder to this game despite any good intentions have. For what it's worth I still hope they keep creating original stuff.

Small thematic spoilers, nothing plot relevant or major

I’m not a huge Final Fantasy fan, but I enjoy the games enough to play through them and I love character action games. So when Square Enix announced a medieval character action take on Final Fantasy, I was pretty intrigued. Sadly that first trailer ended up being the only one I really liked, and the longer the marketing campaign went on the less and less invested I became as the game started to feel monotone and a little flat. Then the demo came out and nitpicks and all I became pretty hyped for the story and was really invested. I preloaded it, played it day one, and beat it in just over a week. And the results were … mixed to say the least.

Final Fantasy XVI is one of the weirdest games I’ve played in a long time, and not for the typical reasons you’d associate with the franchise. This isn’t a title that goes off the rails into crazy town to a point of no return, nor is any one plot twist completely irredeemable. Rather, instead it feels like a lot of what Square Enix marketed the game as isn’t actually delivered in any meaningful capacity, even early on in the game. That dark, mature, political drama with fantastic worldbuilding never really surfaces and not because it isn’t there, but because it’s not done well at all, and a lot of the writing involving any remotely mature topic is either stunted by actions in the game at best or straight up bad at worst.

The entire first act of the game is tied together by mere coincidences and characters chasing red herrings, which makes everything feel sloppy and haphazard. This becomes incredibly obvious when you map out the events of the first act: You meet a guy who happens to have your dog that you haven’t seen for over a decade then chase a guy because of your memories then realize it’s not the guy then the guy you met tells you to find the guy anyways to progress the story and go forward. It’s so awkward just how limp of a start to the story this is, but these are unironically supposed to be the plot threads that make you want to progress further through the game.

What’s worse, the first act is where a lot of the attempts at “mature” storytelling are in full effect, and it’s mostly terrible thanks in large part to characters not having any meaningful flaws or self-reflection. Clive isn’t a character with flaws, not really, because the entire premise of his trauma is that the traumatic event wasn’t under his control anyways. His guilt and remorse in the beginning of the game is valid and logical and a great theme to draw from, but the tonal clash between the writers both wanting you to feel bad for him as he accepts what he’s done while also reassuring you that he himself didn’t actually do anything wrong and it doesn’t represent his character in the slightest so it’s all ok and you can love him now is so absurd that it actually becomes irritating. This all culminates in a one-hour story dungeon centered around his self-actualization where the writers really want to earn the players pity through Clive’s self-hatred and acceptance, and it’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever experienced in a game. What’s the point of creating an entire character arc about self-reflection if the self-reflection doesn’t say anything meaningful about the character? If the flaw isn’t really a flaw but a plot device? What’s worse, the entire arc is pretty much invalidated by the story anyways and made entirely unimportant. I’ve seen a lot of people say “Accept the Truth” is a highlight but really it’s just another hype anime moment and one of the worst written parts of the entire game. Sympathy porn is one hell of a drug.

In general consequences for actions are not this game's strongsuit, and it’s such a stark contrast from other games in the series. Just compare what the demo makes you think the game will be about and how much gravity and weight the situation has, to what it actually ends up being about and how little weight some of those events had. It’s a night and day difference. The game spends so much time sucking Clive’s royal sausage that some scenes feel entirely unconsidered. At one point, Clive literally meets the slaves that his dad owned and instead of taking the time to reflect upon the fact that hey maybe it was bad that my dad had slaves no matter how nice he was to them, he just kind of offhandedly says yeah you guys should be free or whatever. And look, I get it, the narrative establishes that his father is very sympathetic to bearers, but that excuse is the equivalent of shouting “Thomas Jefferson did nothing wrong”. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be something to think about and criticize especially from Clive’s perspective after all he’s been through as a branded. In fact, even that angle of the story is underdeveloped. This is a game where despite the entire point of the world being that magic users are an oppressed class of people, almost every major npc you meet in the first 15 hours is either an ally to your cause or an incredibly powerful magic user with lots of prestige, and Clive’s persecution amounts to what would be standard military service at that time anyway. Not the best worldbuilding if I may say so.

Luckily once the game devolves into Final Fantasy bullshit and anime politics the writing becomes increasingly better and more interesting, but it takes an entire act of the game to get up to that point and really I’m not sure if its just a case of lowered standards, you have to start thinking of Clive less as a Squall or a Cloud and more a medieval Batman. The second half gives the player a lot more room to breathe and it benefits so much from it. The slow development of you and your base as you build up relations with characters over time is incredibly strong, and while I didn’t care much about the cast in the beginning, by the end I cared about every character to some degree, even if I didn't love them. What really helps the story move along is the villains, which are a real highlight of the game, and while the conclusion to their characters is always a bit disappointing, they add so much to the game that its hard not to see them as a big success.

Unfortunately, even the second half has a new problem: filler. Lots and lots of filler. Final Fantasy XVI has no problem reminding you that the team that made it makes MMO timesinks by putting meaningless mandatory filler quests before each new mission, in the main story. This breaks the pacing of the game, especially since XVI is so cutscene heavy. It’s not enough to ruin what the story has going for it, but it does make it hard to want to play the game at times. The gameplay in general is luckily pretty strong to compensate, but that comes with some huge caveats. They’ve done a good job of transferring DMC combat into a Final Fantasy game, but it misses out on a lot of the subtleties that make Devil May Cry so great. Mainly that the enemies don’t really require different attack patterns or test any specific abilities. This can create a lot of repetition as most new bosses and enemies’ most unpredictable attacks are just another form of AOE that only requires a simple dodge. What this means is that any fight against a boss just boils down to dodge, attack, stagger, repeat, with not enough variety to last a 40 hour game. It’s great gameplay with a bad gameplay loop. You get new Eikons consistently enough to shake things up, and creating loadouts can be fun but some of them don’t feel particularly useful. And at times, I wish the controls were more tailor made for the kind of game this is. Instead of having style switching on the d-pad, you have it on the left trigger to make way for Torgal and potion commands which aren’t nearly as important to moment-to-moment gameplay as switching styles. Another example is that Garuda’s Deadly Embrace can start an aerial combo for bosses and mini-bosses, but not smaller enemies, which could have easily been alleviated by having the player hold down the button after the initial grab move, but instead the game would rather force you to use one of your two combo slots on an aerial starter. These flaws really stick out as the game trying to appear like more of a party-based RPG than it actually is, and it isn’t worth sacrificing character controls so heavily. Boss fights are mostly great standouts, though a lot of the most hyped up fights are also the worst and most monotonous, with very little real or engaging gameplay. These are the kind of fights that would absolutely be blasted in a Bayonetta game, but because they’re in a cinematic triple A package they gets tons of praise for spectacle alone. I don’t think the Eikon fights, specifically the movement and weight behind the Eikons, ever become quite as cathartic as the game wants them to be. Some of them are very cool, others were big misses for me.

Still, I have to commend how much better the game gets around this point. Even the sidequests improve more and more as the game goes on with some of them being legitimately great, though they never become consistent in quality. There are problems that plague the story through and through though. One area in particular that has gotten a lot of criticism is the writing of the female characters. To put it simply, while I think some of the criticism is maybe a bit harsh (Benedikta is probably the most three dimensional character in the game), there is a lot of problems with the way female characters are written. Jill is one of the least interesting characters in the main cast, and while I don’t think creating a quiet-type character is necessarily a bad thing, the fact that she has so little input in the story and literally ends her only arc with “Now, I can continue at your side with my head held high” is groan worthy. Great writing, Square. I also think the way that each villains’ arc ends is pretty disappointing, which becomes particularly egregious towards the end of the game when there isn’t even a story reason for their personalities to start deflating. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth when your last impression of certain characters is so underwhelming, and it impacts the final hours of the game pretty hard when villains start becoming completely generic.

That sort of sums up the entire Final Fantasy XVI experience. Every time it seems like the skies have cleared and it’s all smooth sailing ahead, another storm cloud approaches and ruins any momentum. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game that has so many contradicting design choices. The sidequests in the late-game give meaningful rewards and important pieces of worldbuilding that recontextualize cutscenes, but why would you go out of your way to do sidequests when you’ve been trained by the game for dozens of hours by that point to recognize them as filler? The areas open up more and more as the game progresses, but why would you explore the overworld when content is bare and none of the rewards you get matter for the practically non-existent upgrade path? The game wants you to do hunt quests, but then doesn’t even tell you what materials you get from them on the off chance they might be useful. The games loadout system incentivizes thinking about Eikons and abilities in a similar manner to JRPG staples like the materia system, but then the game takes 20+ hours to really open up its own RPG mechanics to force the player to make meaningful decisions about what to use. And while the game is effective enough as a hero’s journey tale, the attempts at mature storytelling often clash hard and are poorly considered.

I mentioned in the beginning of the review that I’m not a huge Final Fantasy fan, but I still keep coming back to this franchise over and over again to play these games. That’s because for a few brief moments, Final Fantasy always manages to have some of the most inspired content you’ll ever see in a video game. Celes learning to live again, Barret reconciling his past, Vivi’s entire character arc, Vivi. With how impactful those moments are, it almost seems silly to complain about the consistency of a 35+ hour video game. Those moments are still here in XVI, but they’re more backloaded than ever before, and the characters aren’t strong enough to carry the quieter connective tissue that every RPG needs. It feels like a 20-25 hour game artificially lengthened to 40 hours, and more than ever there’s design decisions that I just can’t respect. The voice acting and cinematography are almost enough to carry it, and the way the story wraps up and connects to the beginning is phenomenal. But for the most part, when I think about how to write an effective video game story, Final Fantasy XVI will be the furthest Final Fantasy from my mind.

Not really sure what to rate this one. Playing on hard mode on a first playthrough made it hard to tell what was bullshit and what was just a fair challenge. There are definitely some parts that are questionable either way though (some of the puzzles in particular), and I think the pacing is all sorts of wack. HLTB has this at about 9 hours, but on hard it was more like 14+. There's very little cutscenes throughout and what's kind of surprising is that this is an origin story that slowly reveals Kratos' backstory, despite it being such a famous part of his character. It definitely makes the game more interesting to see the parts slowly unravel, but if 2018 is a game with too many interruptions, than 2005 is a game that doesn't have enough of them.

However what kind of saves it for me is that ultimately it has more positive things that I'll remember than pure negatives. This game lowkey feels like one of the most inspired triple A video games of all time. The vistas and locations you get to see are phenomenal. The level design is often immaculate. The puzzles are no slouch and a lot of them are nearly Zelda-tier, which is kind of crazy for a game like this. In general, the fact that the God of War games are some of the only "action-adventure" games that triple A publishers put out is part of what I love about them, this game takes just as much from Zelda and Prince of Persia as it does DMC. There is a decent amount of story through gameplay and a lot of it is pretty subtle - Verdes dungeon basically being an extension of Kratos' character arc is fantastic, and for fans of story through gameplay, the last part of the game is quite literally jaw-dropping.

It's too bad its combat can be super repetitive and its difficulty and puzzles aren't as fine-tuned as I'd like, but ultimately what I get out of this is that I wish more triple A games were like this. And that's a good thing.

"hey what if far cry was good again?"

"cool. great. awesome!"

"now what if it was made by Capcom"

"wait wha-"

Pretty much the premier "so close, yet so far" game for me. Mega Man X is pretty good, even great. It's probably one of the most consistent action-platformers I've ever played. But there's just a few small things that really add up that are keeping it from true greatness for me.

The biggest selling point for Mega Man X over the original series is easily the fact that it basically plays like an action game with a completely revamped and overhauled movement system. X simply has some of the best controls in the history of 2D gaming. Even the button mapping, which I had a little bit of a problem with since no matter which button you map dash onto juggling between shoot, dash, and jump at the same time can be a bit problematic in the heat of the moment - ended up completely perfect once I realized that you can actually dash by double tapping the D-pad in the direction you are heading, meaning you don't actually have to juggle many buttons at all. Unfortunately I realized this too late - at the end of my second playthrough no less - so there was still some awkward moments with the control setup prior, even after customizing the button layout.

Putting that minor gripe aside, the biggest problem with Mega Man X is unfortunately related to the controls - it feels like this game often isn't made to take into account just how much more mobile X is. There's a decent number of stages where playing the game normally and utilizing your dash to continue on your merry way will result in a ton of enemies crashing right into X, and while I suppose the onus could theoretically be on the player for taking into account possible dangers ahead and playing more cautiously, the game is pretty inconsistent as to whether you would be served better to run or dash. It might be a nitpick, but I can't shake the feeling that if Mega Man X was less forgiving like its predecessors, or had the infamous knockback the Castlevania series is known for, some of its design flaws would stick out a lot more and it would be remembered a lot less fondly. As it stands, the games difficulty is made to account for Mega Man X's movement, not the games scenarios themselves.

I also can't help but think the decision to have enemies respawn the moment their original position is off-screen was a poorly thought-out design choice. While it certainly can benefit the player (such as when grinding the beginning of Armored Armadillo's stage), Mega Man X is a game that is much more exploration based, and unlike its predecessors players are going to find themselves wanting to backtrack more often. So it can be annoying when you realize just how much of a nuisance backtracking through enemy spawns can be. While I think Mega Man X's sprite sizes are absolutely fine as well, the mix of bigger sprites than the original games as well as faster gameplay certainly doesn't help with the last two points as well.

The soundtrack, much like the game itself, is great, albeit a little monotone and one-note. The OST most closely resembles power metal in terms of traditional music genres, with its fast and energetic pace and high pitches and squeals. only with an unquestionable videogame-y soundfont to back that energy up. The benefit to the approach taken here is that the music gives an unmistakable characteristic to Mega Man X that is totally unique. It has its own identity. The downside is that the music is so reassured of it that tracks often start to blend together. It's not that the tracks by themselves aren't great, put them in any other game and they'd surely be a standout, but most of the stage themes serve the exact same purpose and because of that only the strongest survive. Just listen to how close Sting Chameleon's breakdown is to the opening stage's theme, for example. Even the intro is not that different once you realize it resembles a slower less grand version of the intro to the opening theme. This type of repetition is probably why some of the more subdued or melancholic tracks really stick out to me as highlights - Sigma stage 1 & 3 as well as Variable X, for example. The fanfares are also absolutely amazing, though I have no idea why the "Get a Weapon!" theme seems to have lower quality samples.

Also, much like Castlevania III, the final boss would be much better with one less phase.