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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beats me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Am I just projecting my own discontent? Probably.

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

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

It's hard for me to complain too much about my issues (glacial combat speed, massive RNG influence, questionable class balance) because I still mostly had a good time with this game. Early on it's a multilayered resource management game; proper attack placement and spell management is necessary both to avoid falling victim to attrition, and to make sure you don't spend so much money on healing that you can't afford the next set of gear. Once your party becomes strong (and rich) enough to break this dynamic, it shifts into a globe-trotting dungeoneering adventure more focused on labyrinthine dungeons, trying to blow through encounters as quickly as possible and not falling prey to that one encounter that can stunlock your entire party if it feels like it. It’s satisfying to realise that you aren’t actually in as much danger as you used to be, that your fighter can hit multiple times for some reason and blast any enemy into low orbit when they feel like it, and that there’s nothing stopping you stuffing 99 potions in your back pocket to make your white mage really sad for the rest of the game. The stripped-back presentation and story lets these mechanics bring your own personal triumphs and failures to the forefront as the driving narrative. Even something as simple as watching one of your party members hit level-ups a bit slower than everyone else can call back to that one time where they got instakilled or stunned for eight turns in a row three dungeons ago.

While I didn’t find the game incredibly engaging once the earlier parts were over since the combat itself never gets any more interesting (or faster), it's still hard not to respect it. Almost everything weird, dissatisfying or ‘loose’ makes a whole lot of sense if you consider there’s a good chance it’d be one of the first RPGs you played if you had it back in the day, and was likely designed around that idea. The fact that I was measurably underleveled despite fighting everything I saw is uniquely interesting if considering that failure could have been intended in its design - losing characters and running back to revive them means gaining more experience on everyone else in the process. And while it’s not a particularly hard game - speaking as someone who *was* measurably underleveled - a lot of the friction it threatens is probably far more present for someone playing an RPG for the first time. While I can’t say if the whole ‘built for new players’ assumption is actually true or not, operating under it makes the game come off as extremely confident in how it can make itself approachable without compromising the experience it's trying to provide. It’s a beginner-friendly game built to be able to onboard people into a simple RPG system, but it’s still a heavily player-driven adventure with a lot of room for failure and discovery.

considering WotC and chimera squad were already Figurative Marvel Shit, the pivot to Literal Marvel Shit is about the least surprising thing ever; if you didn't see this coming I suggest staying out of the entrail reading business. the real surprise here's that everyone buried the lede blubbering about deckbuilding stuff so thoroughly that I had no idea this was Meet n Fuck Marvel

not since borderlands 2 has a game's dialogue filled me with the primal unease of an ape seeing a particularly snakelike vine. started this up while my wife was in the shower and when she texted asking if I could make some coffee I knew the choice was to smash ALT+F4 or risk being divorced on the spot

the cardgame bit I'm kinda whatever about. I think I'd like it more if the camera was positioned anywhere else and it didn't lean so hard into Epic Cinematic Presentation that even the most basic actions take a century to unfold. it's cool you can do the type of MTG blue deck bullshit where your turn lasts so long the person on the other side of the table regrets being a nerd, but not cool enough to endure the simpering social layer, endless cutscenes, and deranged tutorializing that make up the bulk of the game

have to imagine you'd have a better time stuffing hulk hands in your ass while playing slay the spire

In keeping with the free-flowing, improvisational spirit of Final Fantasy VII, a series of semi-connected thoughts:

- Lots of people are hung up on the minigames for one reason or another, and they are worthy of discussion, though not about whether they belong here (of course they do) or if they're any good (most aren't), but how their purpose has shifted between the original and this iteration. In 1997, they were tonal interludes meant to show off what a strange, crazy planet we're fighting to protect, bursting with unexpected things to see and do. In 2024, they're blown up in length and number to serve as narrative delivery devices, neatly structured to grant further dimension to one or more of your party members while also conveniently padding out the playtime of your $70 luxury consumer purchase.

More than that, even, they're ways of delaying the inevitable. Rebirth isn't really a game about a doomed planet, but a doomed woman, and everyone with the faintest knowledge of FF7 is aware of this. No matter how many sprawling overworld maps or Gold Saucer diversions or matches of Queen's Blood you throw yourself into, you're still on a beeline toward tragedy. Consider Cloud and Aerith's last "date" and how they never get exactly what they want - the candy, the tchotchke, the photo. Our choices in this world, like any other video game world, are merely a dilation of time, a hopeless attempt to forestall the medium's great historical trauma, gamer 9/11.

This is all theoretically interesting, but also has the unfortunate effect of imbricating the story's emotional slam dunk with the grim maximalist demands of the AAA market. You get what you came for... after 100 hours of wildly quality-variable content, of course. Even the Fated Event itself is compromised by a ludicrous boss rush, your characters all barking out their combat sound bites as if nothing has happened, multiversal fanservice rearing its ugly head for no discernible reason. (I ask this with no malice in my heart: why do people care about Zack enough to justify how much screentime he gets here?) In many ways this is a very simple game, but in the one moment that truly called for simplicity, all of the dubious worldline hijinks Nomura planted in the first game got in the way.

- I did find myself moved by one scene toward the end where the game briefly puts you in the shoes of a sad, scared little girl. The original FF7 made remarkable use of modifying your control scheme to convey shifts in your characters' emotional states; in Rebirth they generally overdo or mishandle it, much like everything else, but it worked well here.

- The combat is generally quite enjoyable. It's comforting to know that SE can get an action RPG right after FF16. Even with one installment worth of practice, though, some characters still feel better thought-out than others. Aerith sucks and Barret is truly just sad - what if you wanted to play Bayonetta using nothing but the guns? I have a few other complaints, like how ancillary and easily interrupted magic is, your characters' irritating lack of poise, and some hitbox tracking that would make Miyazaki blush, but they are ultimately pretty minor.

- Morph and Steal are so useless, what gives?

- Guarding feels terrible. No feedback.

- I liked the (PROTORELIC QUEST SPOILERS) fight a lot. It demands careful and attentive play but also gives you lots of options.

- The music is good, of course, although what other possible outcome could there be when you throw an exhausted supergroup of Japanese composers at one of the most beloved OSTs of all time? Unfortunately, the music is also a key factor in one of the game's great failures: it is almost perpetually unable to modulate its atmosphere. This shit is LOUD, all the time. There are no opportunities whatsoever to just be in a moment and collect your thoughts or size up your environment. I knew I was in for disappointment early on when Cloud and Sephiroth rolled into Nibelheim for their ill-fated flashback mission and I heard the sorrowful strains of Anxious Heart... followed by 15 different NPCs barking at me... followed by me stepping on a stool and dragging it noisily along with my character model for 100 feet. The din is constant from start to finish, and if you don't agree, Chadley would like to have a word or fifty thousand with you.

- This is a more personal gripe, but I feel that this trilogy's total inability to establish a horror tone is one of its great betrayals of its predecessor. The writing was on the wall with the Shinra Building in Remake; while that whole dungeon was badly handled in general, there was no attempt whatsoever at conveying any unease or fear. This is likely a result of Sephiroth being overexposed from the jump in Remake so there's no mystery, no terrible legend lurking around the corner. The horror in the original worked partly because Sephiroth was so brutal in a way that the franchise had never grappled with, but also because the world was more recognizably our own and easier to project yourself on than that of any other Final Fantasy: urban, modern, diseased, desperate, doomed. The Midgar Zolom incident makes you feel small and mortal, and the Shinra Mansion like you're a mere human enmeshed in something hostile and supernatural, but in this game those two setpieces are so fucking stupid that they're not even worth talking about.

- I know that everyone is nutting over the dumb dog song but for me the standout is One, Two, SABO!, which plays, as far as I can tell, during exactly one optional combat. Aggressively joyous and exuberant to the point of menace... love it! Fucking Cactuars!

- In a perfect world, both this game and FF16 falling short of SE's sales expectations would tell the company that the AAA open-world model is just not an effective container for video game storytelling, or at least the type that Final Fantasy made its name on so many years ago. It is my unreasonable hope that they will course correct for Part 3 and bring us back to a more focused experience, but as ever, the gamers demand more. Who are the devs to deny them the constant creep toward bigger and better?

- I really enjoyed Remake, but after this installment the project has lost its shine for me. No more remakes!

- One exception: if SE had any sort of cojones left, they would follow up this time dilation game with a remake of time kompression game FF8, omitting/streamlining all of the side content and churning out the most decadent 10-hour banger of all time, though they don't and they won't.

can something be obnoxiously juvenile but also a totally unique lightning-in-a-bottle experience at the same time? because that's B3313 to me. the internet iceberg meme/creepypasta origins of this ended up leading to the creation of something that is kind of unlike anything else in existence (even if it is heavily indebted to stuff like Yume Nikki), but it is also somewhat inherently limited by its origins.

it's sort of like if Mario's castle was reimagined as Constantine's Mansion in Thief: The Dark Project, mixed with Yume Nikki and various internet memes. in your endless hours wandering through the confusing labyrinth of the castle, there are isolated moments that are unique and brilliant. and then there others that are just sort of… there. you’ll spend 15 minutes wandering through a bunch of fairly bland, indistinct rooms and corridors and then you’ll come upon something really haunting and memorable. and then, maybe, you'll be right back in the bland mazes. maybe you'll run into some creepy thing and crash the game. maybe creepy thing will be interesting and well executed, or maybe it'll just be obnoxious boilerplate creepypasta stuff.

these contradictions get more and more noticeable the further into it you are. some of the levels are really interesting/bizarre alternate universe takes that recontextualize the original Mario 64 and seem to offer greater commentary about the nature of how nostalgia shifts things into an alternate universe that is actually different from the source of the memory. "i like to remember things my own way. how i remembered them, not necessarily how they happened" says the deeply troubled Fred Madison in David Lynch's Lost Highway. but other times it feels like you wish you were spending more time in the new/more unique areas you occasionally stumble upon, and less in the 6th variation of old Mario 64 levels.

B3313 feels almost like a bigger AAA game to me in both the sheer scope of the project that's filled with a lot of internal contradictions, and in also how much it truly doesn't respect your time. that’s probably the nature of things of this size, and that a lot of people were involved contributing in what seems like a very tumultuous dev cycle after a certain point. but perhaps that explains a lot about the sometimes inconsistent/varied nature of the experience.

i will personally admit to not caring whatsoever about the personalized copy of Mario 64 meme or the numerous ways this hack borrows from different beta builds of Mario 64. i like Mario 64 a lot, but it is absolutely wild to me the way that game has been metabolized into the consciousness of videogame world. and so i do think the whole “this is a beta version of the game” thing and slavishly cobbling together any and every scrap of asset or idea that was cut from an early documented build of Mario 64 to put on this thing is a bit of a dead end artistically. most of the stuff Nintendo used in earlier builds just seemed like temp assets and doesn’t seem THAT interesting to me outside of that context. it's just not very interesting to those of us who are not 17 years old anymore and not still spooked by internet lore. it just feeds back into a lot of fan culture content machine around big franchises that just feels like this self replicating beast that never really goes anywhere and is always invariably beaten back into conformity by the big companies that are in control of these properties.

i am someone who loves strange and unique experiences. but to me, i want stuff that i guess attaches itself more to telling a specific kind of story through what it’s doing, and B3313 is a bit too much online meme-referencing for me to take that aspect of it very seriously at all. B3313 doesn’t have the narrative coherence of a MyHouse which i guess is the other big artsy creepypasta game mod of the moment. and it doesn’t have the artful direction of a Yume Nikki, which it is obviously cribbing the general kind of surreal abstract multidimensional wander maze thing from.

all of this is to say: why did i give it 4 stars and 30+ hours of my time, then? maybe it comes down to: there is an indelible, haunting Tower of Druaga-esque charm to all of it. the commitment to being cryptic and giving the player nothing and doing all these machinations behind the scenes in the game is kind of remystifying what has been lost in a lot of consumer-facing art in general. in games, with all the talk of FromSoft games or like the last couple Zeldas bringing back "old school" difficulties and design values, those are meticulously tested commercial products… not community made romhacks. they simply can’t go anywhere near as far out there as something like this. and we in general are in a moment when so much art seems paralyzed and unwilling to take chances out of risk aversion from industries that have been strip-mined by the rich and powerful. something like B3313 stands in contrast to that - completely unwilling to compromise itself.

with B3313, oftentimes there really is nothing on the other side. but that emptiness starts to feel really intentional after a certain point. as a player, what's interesting in the feeling that you want the design to follow some kind of logic that you can eventually glean so that you can understand what the designers were getting at is that it feels almost like an intentional choice to have it consistently not do that. occasionally it does hint at a deeper language/design sensibility, but mostly it doesn’t. there are times when the “story” or the progression of stages seems to be developing into something more coherent, but then the rug is pulled out from under you. and that happens over and over. because it’s all rug pulls at the end of the day. the message of the design is: whatever happens, whatever journey you go through… it’s all inevitably a way to throw you back into the maze. you’ll always be endlessly wandering the maze.

to me, that says something about Nintendo games in general - how you have these long journeys that (in the case of the newer Zelda especially) aggressively don’t respect your time and send you to all these interesting locations. and then it always just sorta ends, because there’s nothing really deeper at the core a lot of the time. it's escapist entertainment, often with some kind of crypto-conservative values and imagery in it. B3313 feels totally unafraid to unearth and make you fully experience that ugly side.

maybe a lot of our larger culture right now, especially obsessive lore-based fan culture, are just variations of that too. increasingly everything seems like it's hostile, broken down, and filled with different kind of rug pulls. the ground feels totally unstable and there is no “there” there a lot of the time, but we keep shoveling through hoping for new discoveries and hoping for it all to make sense. it’s like being in an abusive, codependent relationship. there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. it’s a disempowerment fantasy. and B3313 captures that feeling absolutely perfectly, in such a uniquely fleshed out way.

there are moments to B3313 that are genuinely unique and fun too, like some of the more creative creepypasta scenarios that i won’t spoil here. or like, occasional stages like the one when you have to climb some structures that are supposed to be some sort of bob-omb factory. you activate the “self-destruct” sequence when you enter which causes you to have to outrun rising lava until the top. and then you get to the top and there’s a little yellow bob-omb guy sitting in a little office and just complaining about how you destroyed the whole factory. it does make me wonder if there’s like some kind of commentary on the tropes of Mario games being attempted in small moments like that. like the fact that Mario is basically a cipher who everything resolves around, and none of these other characters have any agency.

of course, none of that is delved upon for very long. because invariably, you're going to get fed back into the maze. and so that's both the great strength and the great flaw of something like B3313. it doesn't try to offer a way out, it just tries to express what is there. and in doing so it captures a feeling perfectly, in a way that is inspiring. even as a memey internet romhack, it is absolutely something i would call an "art game". there are a lot of memorable areas and moments that really explores the latent strangeness and darkness of Nintendo games, and the latent surrealism of a lot ofearly 3D games in general. it’s also real testament to how far romhacking/modding community projects can really go artistically, along with MyHouse.wad. it could have an enormous impact on a lot of games stuff that comes further down the line. so it’s definitely something that demands more attention and respect outside the whole memey lore ecosystem a lot of this stuff usually occupies. it of course, comes from that however and will probably will do itself no favors in distinguishing itself from that.

i only hope in the future that people take the ambition and interesting ideas from this and run with it in a way that feels unafraid to make a larger statement about the world, and doesn't just do the cowardly thing of retreating with its tail between its legs back into insular internet memes and the online lore ecosystem fed by various content creators. whether or not you think B3313 subverts or further perpetuates that that i guess is up to you. but i still think we have a pretty far way to go.

They sure did make one of these!

Filled with mixed feelings across the board. The narrative is, broadly speaking, really enjoyable. It's endearing to encounter these characters again in such a new format. Cloud is perfectly communicated as a tryhard, Barrett is a fanatic with the glasses on and a soulful man with the glasses off, Tifa and Aerith are cute. All the key dynamics are beautiful and they feel right. The things that exist in the original game are broadly done right.

Mechanically, it's sort of… muddled. I was surprised to find I actually really enjoyed the action rpg format. I’m a KH nerd, I’m still a sucker. But KH has the advantage of multiple worlds and environments to explore. There’s opportunities to engage with the mechanics and the enemies at your own leisure. By comparison, FF7R is… very linear. Your opportunities to level up or engage with its combat without main-line progression is limited to specific locations, all out of the way of each other. Shinra combat simulators, Collesseums, small enemy zones just outside of limited sidequest chapters. And the sidequest chapters often fall into things I thought we all know got tedious in these kinds of rpgs, chasing down rats and so on. I understand and even sympathize with needing to add time to the clock, to make the purchase worth it, but... man. I just want more character beats. On the other hand, your reward for finishing quests being more character moments is really charming as well. I guess my main issue is that I find exploring Midgar as the city so interesting and fulfilling, while the emptier monster sections feel so constrained and repetitive. Hated Train Graveyard, hated the freeways. I guess it really comes down to the map design. There's so many sections where I just end up staring at the minimap rather than actually looking at the game around me. When the level design is singing, I am in love with the combat and I'm thrilled in each enemy encounter. When the level design is failing, I was constantly begging for the chapter to end.

And then you get to the (I assume well known at this point) rebuild-esque shenanigans, where complicated characters kind of just start repeating the same sort of "I defy my fate" or "the future can be bright" voice lines that just bum me out in a way. While the weird dynamic of the anti-retcon ghosts helping or hindering the party initially makes some interesting narrative complications, the ultimate result is a narrative that just kind of loses my interest compared to the normal intimacy found in the original FF7.

Approaching FF7 decades after the original was a genuinely beautiful experience. I was consistently excited to talk about it, I was never bored or annoyed, all the overhype and preexisting fandom expectations melted away into experiencing Just One Of The Greatest Games Of All Time. FF7Remake looks gorgeous, feels great, and offers so many interesting character moments and divergences. But its broader narrative of trying to reconcile with that overwhelming fan response? Just ultimately kind of goes nowhere for me.

See you in three years when Rebirth gets on PC.

the part where the author asks whys so many games reward killing enemies or have a combat system is very interesting to me. games can be so much deeper than killing shit yet so many games involve beating the shit out of something. and it made me think about kirby because kirby just seems really confusing to me. in the ads and products its shown that he protects dreamland and loves any creatures and making friends and it’s really cute, yet in the gameplay he’s just beats the shit out of anything that moves and doesn’t even pose a threat which is just really odd messaging of what kirby is, and most of the creatures kirby beats up are just really cute dudes that are just hopping around. it would’ve been much more interesting to play a platformer where instead of resolving conflicts via violence you would’ve solved it via cuteness and friendship and the power you obtain aren’t from eating people and instead from making friends

I'm tempted to hold off on review because I hear the postgame is so robust, but I have to many thoughts, so here I am after hitting credits. I apologize for the unstructured ramble; I'll update this review when I've done postgame stuff.

Metroidvania is the genre that I think I like way more than I actually do like: I used to call it my favorite genre, and I STILL have plenty of games I consider favorites and replay over and over. But in truth, I feel like I'm in love with an idealization of the genre that rarely gets met by any game not called Super Metroid: Sequence being only a suggestion, with alternate paths and sequence breaks accomplished not just by glitches and wall clips, but mastery of mechanics and their nuances to master the environment. For whatever reason, the whole genre seems to have collectively decided that abilities, a persistent map, and collectibles are all that matter, with most of them feeling like tightly linear affairs pulling you on a string through a world that feels like it's begging to be truly trekked through, but disallowed by the developer for a myriad of reasons that I probably understand but think are silly.

Animal Well is Super Metroid 2. Not the only Super Metroid 2, but certainly one of the rare ones. (I would not be surprised if the solo developer was VERY inspired by my favorite Super Metroid 2, by the way. I'll leave it unnamed and see how many people guess it. Hint: It's not even a real metroidvania.)

The atmosphere? Moody. The ability upgrades? Unique to the point that I'm not sure I've seen a single one of them in another metroidvania, AND most of them with multiple hidden uses. The handholding? Nonexistent. The "intended" sequence? Hell if I know; I legit could not tell you how much of what I did on my one run so far was the path of least resistance or a sequence break.

There's just so damn much in this game that encourages you to get creative with what you have to see what works, and chances are if you can logically conceptualize something working within the bounds of the game's rules, it will, indeed, work (with or without tons of retry and maybe some luck). The result is the best metroidvania I've played in an absurdly long time, meeting my idealization of the genre in a way almost no others do.

And the fact that what I describe seems to have been a near-universal reaction among people playing it, that this game that doesn't tell you anything and expects you to get creative to progress is based? Man, oh man, I really hope metroidvania developers take note.

“The sinner shall be atoned. Even though no punishment will be enough for your sin.”

What is the worth of this experience we know of as life? There is a popular response to this question that has persisted throughout human social understanding. That the purpose of life is to be judged. That this existence we are experiencing is merely transitory. That it serves as a filter to determine which of us are worthy to behold the infinite love of the universe or to instead suffer in ceaseless unfathomable torment.

Seig Wahrheit is a condemned man. A character awaiting judgment. It does not matter to Seig that the sins on which he is accused are not the ones that he actually bears any guilt for. He is guilty all the same and knows it. Yet most insidiously still, despite the nigh certainty of his ultimate fate, he must ensure he persists until his day of judgment. To expire prematurely would disservice those whom have allowed him to prolong in this existence, this torture that is being alive. Such is his belief in life’s purpose as he has been taught to perceive. It is a trial to be endured, to exist is to be in pursuit of a knowingly futile atonement. To become a lamb marching willingly to their own slaughter.

Chaos Legion is a game that distills this idea of self-flagellation into essence. The struggle of life and existence is brought up, but extracting meaning from it is not to be sought. It is an answered question after all. Rather this game seeks to revere in the struggle itself. Absolution for Sieg is not even on the cards, he is to suffer eternally. This game seeks to beat you down and beat you down and beat you down until you understand you only exist to be beaten down. Yet you must get up each time. Powerful obstacles will incrementally show up to crush you. Through both perseverance and gradual acclimation towards these inferno legions in which you are eternally bound you will eventually overcome them. Your reward in doing so? More frequent and harsher trials. The challenge which you struggled to overcome repeated until mundane. Despite statistically growing over the course of the game, it never quite gets any easier. Rather you merely build up a tolerance to the pain. Even this is not ideal. The pain is all Sieg has after all to remind himself that he is in fact, still alive.

So, what awaits you at the end of all this? What is the final verdict in this perseverance that embodies Sieg’s existence? What reprieve will he be granted in death? You poor naive fool. You will never have been made to suffer enough. A judgment postponed. You get to be alive in this living hell for a while longer.

How cruel the creators of such a world must be.

(Chaos Legion is a game entirely dedicated to its mechanical nuance and is tightly crafted to be as such. Despite my framing its story and narrative elements is incredibly minimal. In its international localization it has been finely retuned in response to criticism of the Japanese version being boringly easy. The result of which is this game made for the sensibilities of sadomasochists. It demands mastery of obtuse systems that you will likely need to consult external references to truly understand. but feel ‘satisfying’ once mastered. If you are more inclined to experiencing it for its cool vibes you can forgo this suffering and should seek out the original Japanese version instead. Myself though? I think it is only through this pain it afflicted upon me that allowed me to connect to it at all)