The best thing I can say about Mass Effect Andromeda is that it's playable.

To press deeper, this game represents the absolute worst of the modern video game industry. In BioWare's infinite wisdom, they decided to strip away everything they built in the original trilogy, sacrificing its tight, streamlined gameplay experience for open-world AAA garbage. Andromeda is like a bad future timeline that split off from the first Mass Effect, where instead of what we got in 2 they chose to double down on the boring, monotonous planetary exploration of 1. This is open-world design in its most tedious and least interesting form, and on top of that, hey let's pile on other features that everyone loves, like endless resource collecting, crafting mods and consumable powerups, equipment rarity, pointless 2% percentage upgrades to your powers, and a ton of side content that never amounts to anything more than bottom of the barrel fetch quests. Thus, a memorable action-RPG transforms into a goddamn loot shooter.

Anything you loved about the core experience of the Mass Effect trilogy is practically gone, and the vestiges that remain only serve to remind you how inferior the product is in comparison. Mass Effect was all about hanging out with your cool squadmates in space, getting to know them and becoming invested in their stories, and being presented with difficult decisions that challenge your morals and understanding of the story. Here, your crew are all merely different flavors of bland. I did not care to learn about any of them. I cannot think of a single choice presented that I felt I needed to consider for more than a second. And while I had my issues with the morality system of the original games, replacing it with four personality types that do absolutely nothing to color your character or their experience was a piss-poor alternative.

There seems to be a push to redefine this game as being "overhated" or somehow not as bad as originally characterized, but let me tell you, the massive technical disaster Mass Effect Andromeda was at launch only served to hide that this thing was absolutely rotten to the core. Even with the (slightly) cleaned-up presentation, there's almost nothing redeeming about it. Like many open-world games, it throws a lot at you, keeping you on that grind, where there's always something to do and you never have to stop and ponder about how little thought was put into any of this. It's like fast food, where you can keep shoving it into your mouth, never getting full but never feeling fulfilled.

Congrats to BioWare on developing the Arby's of video games.

This review is about the collection as a package rather than the individual games. It's been nearly 10 years since I played this trilogy and it's been an absolute joy being able to relive them. I had forgotten many parts of them and not played all the DLC so having it all in one package? Couldn't be happier.

To start, all 3 games have been enhanced though to varying degrees. Each game plays extremely smoothly now with a near solid 60fps, increased resolution and textures for a really high level of performance and image quality all around. Mass Effect 1 especially had a complete overhaul needing it more than the others with completely new visuals in a lot of areas, improved lighting and the integration of later higher quality models from Mass Effect 3 brought into it. The changes here are frankly, huge. Mass Effect 2 and 3 haven't had quite the same attention though your Shepard character model is at least consistent for all three titles now. There have been other more subtle tweaks to user interface, controls etc. to enhance the overall experience and some slight moments of slow down I experienced in Mass Effect 1 in a couple of places aside they look and play better than they ever have.

The collection has all previously released DLC, mostly. It's missing one smaller piece of content for Mass Effect 1, Pinnacle Station as the source files for that were corrupted after initial release preventing it though it's not key content fortunately. All other DLC content has been included in the package big or small including armour packs, additional characters, weapons and quests supplying a huge amount of additional game.

My only complaints about this collection are that despite the obvious effort put into remastering the games, (which is the important part I fully acknowledge) the overall package feels threadbare on additional content. I would have liked to have seen more museum type extras like other remasters and collections include like concept and character art, a music gallery, history of or interviews with developers. A little disappointing. Additionally Mass Effect 3's multiplayer has been cut from the collection and whilst in most cases I'd be happy about that I seriously loved the co-op mode and would have loved to play through it with friends again.

Small gripes aside, this is the best way to play these three games now visually, performance wise and content wise (mostly). A celebration of one of the best trilogies in gaming. as a collection it could be better but it's a small complaint in what was clearly a surprising amount of effort and the first Electronic Arts game I've bought in literally years.

+ Games look and play brilliantly.
+ Mass Effect 1 improvements especially notable.
+ Nearly all content for the trilogy included in one package.

- Lack of extras.
- No Mass Effect 3 multiplayer.

Never has a game gotten me so invested in its world surrounding it. Never has any piece of fiction, really. In most games, maybe only bar Horizon Zero Dawn, when you find a random note collectible or listen to an audio log, I almost always ignore them. They're usually just filler and ultimately unimportant. But Mass Effect proved to me that they don't have to be that way, and I read through and listened to just about damn near everything I could, stopping to exhaust all dialogue options whenever available. The worldbuilding is genuinely phenomenal and I can say with certainty that this is the coolest fictional universe I've ever experienced and likely will ever experience. Most of this is just do to the writing, its great. It can be humorous, witty, introspective or just about any other good sounding adjective you can think of and its just about always compelling. Characters like Liara, my love and Garrus, my bestie and Thane, my other love (and basically just about everyone else besides Jacob, fuck you Jacob) are fantastic to be around and really help make the world feel alive and The Normandy feel like a home. The combat is kind of shit, and the driving around in the Mako in the first game left a lot to be desired. The simplification of mechanics over the series was a little upsetting. The animations in dialogue/action sequences can be a bit jarring and mess up the tone of things. The ending had more potential than what was got out of it. All those problems are present here and a lot of it can be very noticeable. But even then? this series was still amazing and every of the honestly many problems mean jack shit in comparison to the sheer quality of everything else. This feels like I'm rambling now so this is the end. One final thing: The romance with Liara is the peak of the lesbian human-alien connection. Getting to tell her that you love her in the third game damn near broke my heart.

It was an honor serving with you Commander Shepard.

Nancyfly certified Top 10 game of all time
- 99/100

     'Those great, beautiful ships, rocking silently on the calm waters, with their idle and wistful sails, are they not telling us in a silent language — when will we depart for happiness?'
     – Charles Baudelaire, Fusées, VIII, 1887 (personal translation).

One of the most difficult issues in fantasy studies is to define its contours and, by extension, its relationship to reality. In her seminal study, Fantasy: The literature of subversion (1981), Rosemary Jackson points out that fantasy violates the conventions and rules of our reality and: 'threatens to subvert rules and conventions taken to be normative [and] disturb "rules" of artistic representation and literature’s reproduction of the "real"' [1]. The capacity for deviation that speculative fiction offers is both an opportunity and a danger. Jackson points out that this subversive potential does not mean that fantasy or the fantastic are genres that always aim for social progressivism. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the pulp tradition was steeped in racist, homophobic and misogynist tropes that exerted a lasting influence on fiction throughout the late twentieth century and to this day.

     The misogynist issue in Western-style fantasy

Many authors hide behind these historical precedents to conceal a conservative discourse. The existence of multiple races allows for the perpetuation of social oppression, and while female characters have generally become more active in recent decades, they continue to fit into old-fashioned stereotypes [2]. The Final Fantasy series is part of this dynamic and has always oscillated between these major themes of fantasy fiction, notably by offering a regular comparison between magic and technological modernity, nature and industry, good and evil, humanity and divinity. These dichotomies are relatively common and allow the story to touch on issues such as capitalist exploitation and the use of natural resources. However, the representation of other topics remains disastrous: Final Fantasy XIV (2010) is especially characterised by deep-seated racism and sexism, the latter partially masked by the presence of strong female characters in positions of power.

It is hard to say whether these precautions were taken to appeal to a particular audience, but it is clear that Final Fantasy XVI ignores all these concerns and plunges into the most outrageous archaism, piling on misogynistic scenes wherever possible, supposedly justified by the harshness of European medieval society. Excuses of this kind obscure the real issues. The player follows the story of Clive Rosfield, drawn into a quest for revenge after the Phoenix Gate incident, which spells the end of the Duchy of Rosaria. Miraculously reunited with his childhood friend Jill Warrick, he joins Cid's group, determined to change the situation of the Bearers – magic-capable individuals enslaved across the continent. Final Fantasy XVI is therefore a tale of free will and independence, pitting the dark nature of the world against the purity of Cid and Clive's ideals.

To create this atmosphere, as well as the division between good and evil, the title makes extensive use of violence, sex and sexual violence as narrative drivers. Lenise Prater explains that Fiona McIntosh's Percheron trilogy (2005) constructs: 'a series of juxtapositions between good and evil [...] through the representation of sexual violence' [3]. The same processes are at work in Final Fantasy XVI, from the very first narrative arc of the adventure, where Benedikta is cast as the archetypal femme fatale, ready to use her body to manipulate her rivals: the character is constantly brought back to her status as a woman, and it is the threat of sexual violence that cements her development – Annabella is constructed in a similar way. Final Fantasy XVI revels in the dichotomy between whores and innocent virgins. Despite the Western aesthetic of the title, Jill is no more than a yamato nadeshiko who is constantly sidelined by the game. She mostly serves as a narrative device to advance the plot, through her multiple visits to the infirmary or because she is kidnapped by Clive's enemies. The title denies her any agency, and her nuanced fragility is only hinted at in a few sentences before being brushed aside: it takes almost thirty hours of gameplay before Clive explicitly asks her how she is, despite her constant concern for the protagonist's anxieties.

     A case for centrism and laissez-faire

This conservative portrayal is echoed in the discourse on the Bearers. The game is moderately critical of slavery on the continent and fails to make it a structural issue for Clive, who always remains somewhat detached from the problem. This issue is structurally embedded in the way the player interacts with the world, as they are extremely passive in relation to the events portrayed in the story. While the player is aware of the political manipulations taking place in Storm, they cannot act on them directly; Clive is blindly thrown into the fray and the situation is simply resolved in a battle that depoliticises the social stakes. Similarly, the Seals donated by certain NPCs guarantee Clive's reputation in the community in a highly artificial way, removing any roughness from the interactions. Clive fights to free the Bearers because he inherits this mission from his father and Cid, but this task seems disembodied throughout the game.

Beyond the main quest, the side quests are particularly lacklustre and do little to deepen the world-building. Because they can be accessed at any point in the game, Final Fantasy XVI chooses to exclude companions from them. They simply disappear from the cutscenes and thus have no chance to react to the world around them. Since the intention is to establish Clive as an ideologically good, open and self-governing character, all side quests are resolved by Clive's ideological concessions or miraculous unifications in the face of artificially created danger, without the slightest contradiction from any of the other main characters. Only in the final stretch does someone point out Clive's hypocrisy and domineering power over Jill, but the scene is quickly swept away by the return of Gav, the comic relief of the group.

Final Fantasy XVI is more concerned with shocking, melodramatic or cathartic platitudes than with radical denunciations of inequality and oppression. Worse, these shocking scenes do not even make the world dynamic, so poor is the structure of the narrative. Two problems stand out. Firstly, the interweaving of high-intensity sequences with slower passages: instead of building up the world through genuine slice-of-life sequences, the game multiplies banalities that the player has already understood for several dozen hours. The temporality of the story is also incoherent. Clive seems to cross the continent in a matter of hours, while his rivals remain completely passive. The confrontation between the Sanbreque Empire and the Dhalmekian Republic is characterised by irrational stagnation and passivity, allowing Clive to strike unhindered. The Twins always remain static, despite long ellipses in time.

     A hollow and meaningless experience

Perhaps Final Fantasy XVI should not be taken so literally, but rather accepted as the nekketsu it becomes in the second half of the game. Such an interpretation would be acceptable if the game did not take itself so seriously. However, as in Final Fantasy XIV, the writing wallows in a very uncomfortable theatrical heaviness – which the actors generally manage to save from disaster – as if clumsily mimicking the drama of Shakespeare's historical plays. However, Clive's disillusioned, self-deprecating, borderline comic character breaks up this fiction. Some characters work well, playing up their theatrical nature, such as Cid or Lord Byron, but they are quickly relegated to the background or an essentially comic role.

The shifts in tone and pacing detract from the development of the narrative, which cannot be saved by a few flashes of brilliance. The aetheric floods seem to have been imagined as a reflection of nuclear risks, highlighting the danger of Japan's post-Fukushima energy crutch, but in the end they are only used as a narrative expedient to create danger where the plot needs it. The pinnacle of dishonesty and disrespect for a title that centres its discourse on human free will lies in the choice of names for the NPC fillers. In the pure tradition of Final Fantasy XIV, they include puns and comical alliterations ('Broom-Bearer') that strip them of all substance and reduce them to ridicule. In the second half of the game, a little girl is introduced as a character of some narrative importance, but the title does not even bother to give her a name or address her living conditions.

Meanwhile, the action sequences prove to be particularly hollow. The choreography in the first few hours is quite ingenious, highlighting Clive's agility with complex movements and rather creative camera angles. As the title progresses, this aspect is abandoned in favour of fights that drag on and resort to nekketsu clichés. The duel against Titan lasts forty minutes and is a miserable succession of attacks around the stone tentacles. Final Fantasy XVI even has the audacity to end the battle not with the obvious cinematic climax, but with a dull and particularly unpleasant aerial sequence. Subsequent encounters also drag on for no apparent reason other than to demonstrate a genuine – if futile – mastery of the lightning engine.

     Ergonomics, gameplay and fluidity

While Final Fantasy XVI boasts detailed environments at first glance, the facade quickly cracks. The early areas are indeed highly detailed, to the point of drowning the player in detail – navigating through the thick vegetation is quite difficult, forcing the player to use Torgal to progress – but the quality deteriorates as the game progresses. The dense environments disappear in favour of vast open areas that struggle to convey the majesty of the world. Although the cities visible on the horizon are beautiful backdrops, they fail to radiate materially onto their surroundings, which then become mere abstractions. Moreover, Clive's movement is extremely sluggish: even getting on his chocobo is an unpleasant task that constantly interrupts the fluidity of the action, while the player is condemned to an extraordinary passivity in order to get from one place to another.

In the Hideaway, this impression is reinforced by Clive's inability to sprint: in the second half of the game, getting to the backyard is a gruelling chore. The magic of this cocoon quickly vanishes, as the various characters keep repeating themselves and are only mediocrely animated. Despite the detailed scenery, the game borrows all its animations from Final Fantasy XIV, giving a very artificial tone to the discussions. The Hideaway is less a place where the player can comfortably catch up with their favourite NPCs, and more a burdensome obligation to access NPCs, side quests and the hunt board – requiring the player to physically go there to see the location of elite monsters, a design mistake that even Final Fantasy XIV avoided.

The enjoyment of the combat system is left to the player and their experience of other character-action games, but it is absurd that the player has to wait at least twenty hours to finally be given a modicum of flexibility in their attack options: Final Fantasy XVI justifies its unique protagonist with a deep combat system that encourages the creation of diverse builds, but this philosophy is only appropriate in a New Game+ where all powers are unlocked from the start. In a first playthrough, the player must suffer from an impressive slowness, to the point where the Story Mode becomes an obvious option. The title here echoes the recent problem of Shadowbringers (2019) and especially Endwalker (2021), which first designs its battles with the Extreme and Savage versions, before cutting out the most difficult sections for the Normal versions – the result is a sense of incompleteness that is particularly damaging when combined with the very slowly evolving combat system.

It is difficult to place Final Fantasy XVI in the landscape of modern Japanese video games, so awkward is it in every way. With the title still in its cycle of artificial marketing in preparation for the DLCs, one can only speculate as to the reasons for these failings. Perhaps the lack of coherence can be explained by the fractured development team working on two major games, and the highly eclectic nature of the directors brought together by Naoki Yoshida. His design philosophy is particularly well suited to an MMO, but Final Fantasy XVI suffers greatly from it: the endless succession of side quests involving the Hideaway characters just before the final battle is incomprehensible, as if the game had remembered that it needed to conclude. Hiroshi Takai and Kazutoyo Maehiro's narrative vision is a series of shocking, empty, meaningless scenes: players of Heavensward (2015) had the opportunity to suffer from Ysayle's portrayal, and it is surprising that Final Fantasy XVI does even worse, a standard-bearer for passive misogyny in modern fantasy. That Jill's theme becomes 'My Star' and denies her any agency in the game's final moments is particularly painful and aptly sums up the title.

__________
[1] Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The literature of subversion, Routledge, London, 2005 [1981], p. 14.
[2] On the topic, see for example Peter Bebergal (ed.), Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots Of Dungeons & Dragons, Strange Attractor Press, London, 2021. In the afterword, Ann VanderMeer discusses the conservative roots of pulp fantasy and of the historical TTRPG.
[3] Lenise Prater, 'Monstrous Fantasies: Reinforcing Rape Culture in Fiona McIntosh's Fantasy Novels', in Hecate, vol. 39, no. 1-2, 2014.

less of a "sequel to dragon's dogma" and more of a "what if dragon's dogma had a budget"

the peaks are absolutely insane but there's still a lot of conflicting subsystems and rpgjank - i was really hoping for they'd add more non-boss monsters (they added uh.. slimes) so you're not just fighting saurians 80% of the time but alas. the new big guys are really fun and the world design is spectacular. i just be running around looking for caves. i be in the caves, mining, digging- you wouldnt get it.

let me be clear, i like the limited fast travel, i like the friction, i like the only-one-save-file-deal-with-it approach. but i also wish i could, like, ask a pawn to throw me over a river or whatever, and like, maybe access more than 4 abilities without having to go to the Menu Stone. or co-op! imagine co-op! goodness! these are the kinds of things i expected to be expanded - they were not. maybe thats on me.

oh it does also run like shit but like, cry about it....

I'm not done the game yet or anything, but I've done the main quest and a bunch of side quests, so I felt like writing up about it.

As much as I decently enjoyed dragons dogma 1 it was definitely an extremely annoying game with jank overload and just the most egregious traveling ever even though I was playing dark arisen I didn't even know the eternal ferrystone was a thing so most of it I was just playing normally. It has fine combat, but you get pretty busted pretty quick, and the game felt like it ended multiple times just to keep going.

This game very much ends a bit abruptly. Despite that, though, I enjoyed it a bit more being a more straightforward boss rather than a script fest. Dragons Dogma 2 has some great gameplay with a great sense of exploration. I know that people will dog on the enemy variety and how often you'll find hobgoblins, harpies, or bandits, yet I find the enemy variety to be quite good since they offer different changes to your playstyle. (I'm especially glad there's no evil eye) I hope this game reaches the group that finds games nowadays to be boring or the people who think devs don't make more bold games anymore.

Overall, I think this game shouldn't exist in a good way. I'm glad we got it even with its performance issues and use of microtransactions (which are extremely tame for microtransactions and the first game already used). I think it's worth playing, and there's a lot of secret substories you probably wouldn't know about and secret bosses you wouldn't find just doing the main story. Like the first game, there's way more to it than just killing the dragon. I recommend it.

So, as I expected, the game is what the first one did well but even better. Never have I been so drilled by the gameplay of an ARPG and it's been a WHILE since the last time the physics of a game impressed me that much (since RDR2 to be precise). Being able to make a Cyclop loose his balance and then pushing his feet to make him fall on the ground and sending big swings in his head then grabbing is neck when he gets back up and finishing him off with a slash of greatsword going from the neck to the leg is just epicness itself.

There is a lot of different vocations in the game and the gameplay and up being very diversified when you reach the end. I personnaly spent almost all my playthrough playing the Champion class after unlocking it but I tried some of the other and while yes there is a lot of different gameplays I need to recognise that some like the archer class is particularily dogshit. Maybe because in higher level zones it's difficult to restart from level 1 with archer but DAMN what a horrible time it was hahaha. The classes are really unbalanced, like the Thief is over broken and deals so much damages to the enemy that I decided to ban it completely from my party do have a little more challenge. So, yeah, the gameplay is really diversified and really cool, all the upgrades can make you change completely your playstyle even within the same class.

Moreover, if great gameplay wasn't enough, there is also a great exploration ! The map isn't very big (even though it can be long to go from a capital to another) so you'll don't really need fast travel, you'll use them only when you have to go to the same place 4 or 5 times to complete a special quest. The only thing I missed while exploring is being rewarded with unique weapons, armor or else like you may have in Elden Ring but instead you are rewarded with a special place with a quest serie to do, it's still great though ! And when reaching true ending, being rewarded for spending time in the open world is really cool.

The game is clearly a gigantic upgrade of the first one, keeping the philosophy of the game while making it more fun to play and more casual friendly event though I still think it's not a game for everyone. I don't like those kind of phrases usually but I really mean it, there is a lot of things in the game that is against what the industry has become, it's the kind of game where you have to often guess what you have to do and I love that.

But I didn't note it with a 5/5 but a 4.5/5, why ? To be honest there is a shadow glooming over the game that makes you feel like the game released too early and a lot of content was cut exactly like the first one. The things hinting that are the variety of ennemies that are the same from hour 10 to hour 40 unfortunately. And the other hint in my opinion is the pacing of the story, it really feels like some arcs were cut, you and up with a skeleton with the skull, the spine and the legs but without the limbs and the arms. It surely is once again a story of investors pushing the dev team to release the game early. But thanks to the popularity and the sales, maybe there will be another game in the future ?

So in the end, yeah, I loved this game. I started to doubt halfway through but when I came back to the main story after being done exploring, the game told me how great he was. But yeah, I think when Dragon's Dogma 3 will release, we will finally have the whole experience that Itsuno intended.

Persona 3 Reload is the greatest remake of all time.

I will talk about the story, but briefly as I've already played Persona 3 twice before: FES and Portable. Let me say one thing first, though. This is what remakes should strive to be.

The soundtrack is flawless, the voice acting, while different, is absolutely remarkable, the visuals are everything I'd ever wanted, this game is a Persona 3 fan's wet dream.

As I'm writing this review, I am listening to the soundtrack play over the end credits and just reflecting on my experience with it. Persona 3 takes themes of life and death, the meaning of both of them, mental health, and many other things. I don't wanna go TOO in-depth with it right now, because I can hardly even piece myself together after that ending, but let me just say it is very worth your time.

This game takes just about everything in the original and improves on it. There are, of course, some core gameplay loop stuff that can't be changed for obvious reasons, so I don't fault Reload for it. What matters is this: this game is very special to me. I don't know if I like it more or less than Persona 5 Royal. I genuinely can't decide.

I can't even say for certain if there will be another game that comes out this year that I hold higher than this. Gaming may have just peaked in February of 2024. Thank you, Persona 3 Reload. I promise I don't actually give 10s this often, it's just that lately, the stuff I've been playing have been ridiculously good.

My score - 10/10