After sinking more than a hundred hours into Rebirth, I know the last thing I should do is try to bite off more Final Fantasy. I've already had too much, I'm bloated on chocobos and moogles and nearly ready to burst, and yet I've been eyeballing Final Fantasy IV and thinking "I can handle it." Comparatively speaking, 23 hours of gameplay is light, downright brisk. Rebirth's after dinner mint... Why shouldn't I indulge?

Well, back-to-back negative reviews from mutuals - both of which abandoned the game - should be reason enough for me to pass, at least for the time being.

It's so over.

Or is it? I'm Weatherby, when have I ever listened to anyone about how bad a game might be? Especially for a game I already paid my money for. The cellophane on this unopened Final Fantasy Chronicles is coming off, baby!

We're so back!

It's probably worth pointing out up front that by going with the Chronicles version of the game, I am effectively playing the real Final Fantasy IV, which originally released stateside on the SNES as a port of Japan's easy mode. For babies. I'm not a baby, how hard can this version of the game be?

Turns out very, at least in fits and bursts. Final Fantasy IV is a very inconsistent game in a lot of ways, and I think a lot of this inconsistency is born from the unique space it occupies in the overarching trajectory of the franchise. The SNES allowed Square to do so much more than what they previously accomplished with the NES trilogy, especially in regard to story, but a lot of FFIV's mechanical features feel as though the game has one foot firmly rooted a generation behind. Things like a highly restrictive inventory is just unnecessary thanks to the SNES' expanded memory space, and the encounter rate is just as bonkers as it was on the NES, sometimes sending you from one daunting battle to the next with only a mere tile separating them.

Guest characters, something Final Fantasy II leaned on with its rotating fourth party slot, are commonplace in the early half of FFIV, and a some of them feel more like a hindrance, resulting in a lot of stretches where you need to nanny idiots like Edward, who has no useful abilities, low health, and straight up runs off screen when you try to heal him up. Likewise, you'll occasionally be gifted with guest characters that are too good, creating this pendulum swing of the game being "too annoying" and "too easy."

This combination of antiquated design elements and inconsistent party composition makes the early game a drag, and it's no wonder I ditched the GBA version around Mt. Ordeals back when I originally played it in 2005.

It's so over.

Final Fantasy IV's story also struggles in the early half of the game and spends a bit too long meandering around. It is interesting to play this right off the heels of Final Fantasy III as both games feature numerous character sacrifices, though the greater scope of FFIV means you'll get to spend more time with them rather than coming upon each character briefly before they like, chuck themselves into a furnace or whatever. Each death feels meaningful, which is why it's a bit upsetting that FFIV walks back most of them, sheepishly shrugging and going "I don't know, they lived I guess."

Thankfully, both the story and gameplay eventually find their focus, and once FFIV dials things in, I found that I was starting to have a really good time with the game. Turns out a stable party of well-rounded characters who share a clear and common goal is just what you need to get me invested, even if it may not address every single problem I had with the game up to that point.

By the time the party awakens the Lunar Whale and takes a trip up to the god damned moon, I was fully in it, and I loved the way the game handles the reveal of its true antagonist, Zeromus, who is less a singular consciousness driven by focused malice and more representative of the game's greater themes concerning good and evil, its presence in all men, and the cyclical nature of war and peace. I am a noted Necron defender, so the idea that the party has to do battle with something more representative of a thought or manifestation of man's own nature is my kind of thing.

Also, he's got a sick battle theme.

We're so back

Unfortunately, actually fighting Zeromus is another matter entirely. I thought the Cloud of Darkness was a motherfucker, but this might be the most I've struggled with a final boss in any Final Fantasy game. Apparently this guy can cast Meteo, Holy, Bio, AND Flare, but you'd never know it because he spends 90% of the fight spamming Big Bang over and over again. The solution here is to let Rydia stay dead as all of her spells will result in an immediate counterattack that operates separately from the fixed timer that dictates Big Bang. This also buys you better healing as Rosa only has to split Curaja between four characters instead of five. At the 11th hour, Final Fantasy IV deigned it necessary to saddle me with more dead weight, and the constant run back through several floors with high encounter rates and ~ten minutes of mashing through mandatory dialog is a steep price for failure, which unfortunately sucked a lot of the wind out from Final Fantasy IV's ending.

it's so over. literally, i am done playing this video game

Rating games in a series can be a little tricky, but I think I've more or less settled on a curve when it comes to Final Fantasy. I gave the original game a 3.5/5, which seems a bit high when you consider how approachable, engaging, and bombastic later titles are. All qualities I would assign to FFIV even if I think it spends a little too much time playing around in the protoplasmic puddle left behind by the previous three entries. That's why it's simultaneously the easiest of these four for me to sit down with, yet it's also a 3/5.

Maybe one day I'll check out the SNES version. I am genuinely curious if the easier difficulty curve results in a more evenly paced game, or if it simply makes combat dull and predictable.

Anyway, the next game has a protagonist name Butz. We're so back.

ts3 is the peak of the sims series, and i'm gonna try to explain why briefly.

the sims 3 takes everything that the sims 2 introduced to the series and polishes them to perfection. sure, we lost cinematics and some animations but we got HUGE open worlds with this game, each of them containing so many lots (remember the tiny worlds in ts4? they do not exist in this game)

open world might sound like a small improvement but this system is what the sims series needed all this time. not having to wait for loading screens even when visiting the lot accros the road and being able to control all of the sims in the household at the same time even when each of them are at different places (one can be at home, others can be at somewhere else within the borders of the city) is so immersive that they make the open world system the primary reason for me to prefer ts3 over the other sims games. ts2 and ts4, mostly ts4 feels like a home simulation instead of a town simulation. i rarely leave my houses in the other 2 games. so, switching back to ts3 from ts4 was the best decision for me, considering my playstyle in the sims series.

also, ts3 has a feature called create a style where you can select the color of your wigs, clothing, furniture etc. from a color wheel. you can also adjust its darkness etc. so you have unlimited options of colors, whereas the sims 4 limits you to swatches, completely removing what the sims 3 introcuded to the series. create a style lets you to combine every piece of furniture or clothing without a struggle, which i think is one of the main problems of the sims 4.

the sims 3 has the best of expansion packs too! you can get 6 occults in ONE pack whereas you have to pay for werewolves, vampires and spellcasters individually in ts4. you also get ts4's high school pack, parenthood pack, toddlers pack, wedding pack, kids pack and growing together pack in ts3's generations pack. there are many other examples like that. you of course get the carbon copies of ts3 packs in ts4, but they are not as polished and they do not contain as much features either.

gameplay wise, the sims 3 has so many cool gameplay features like being able to ride a bicycle, give your infant or toddler a ride with a stroller, drive cars, swim in the sea only with the BASE GAME and many, many more that you cannot see in the sims 4. story progression actually worked properly in the sims 3 too. even though the sims 4 has a lot of features too, the sims 3 also has most of them, more polished versions of them even.

one more thing that makes the sims 3 superior is that your sims actually has personalities now. you can choose between 60+ traits and give 5 of them in the base game. number of traits to choose between increases to 99 if you have all the expansions, which is a horrendous number of options. being able to choose 5 traits instead of 3 like in ts4 is also great.

a great thing about your sims is that their ai actually works this time! and the relationships between them build much slower than in the sims 4, where you can get married in like 5 minutes. yes, the sims is not meant to be a complicated game but games still require challenge and ts3 has the balance. it's not as hard as ts2 but not as easy as ts4 either. this applies to the needs system as well. your sims' needs don't hit zero in like 3 hours like it was in sims 2 but it also doesn't take them 2 days to feel sleepy like it is in the sims 4.

there are many other things to list such as lifetime wishes being better than the other games, whims actually making sense and being fun, more fun careers, more variety of lots to go to, being able to edit worlds and create your own worlds and many more. sure, the sims 3 has its own flaws like lagging and such but these problems can be overseen easily since the actual gameplay is SOOOO much fun. the sims 3 is the best one in the series to me, and also one of the best simulation games ever made. it was ambitious and was made with passion and this is something that you can't see in the newer games in the industry.

We’ve been starving for a new 2D Mario game for a minute now. I’ll save you all from me bitching about NSMB, as I’m pretty sure everyone is aware of those games at this point. I was ecstatic to see this revealed at the Nintendo Direct it was presented in with its profound new artstyle, but I started to get weary of the footage from the trailers as to if it was going to suffer the same design problems as the NSMB games did with its spacious stages to account for multiplayer.

Levels are very spacious, and Mario Wonder is definitely best played with others because of this. They’re not as broad as something like NSMB Wii, but a lot of sections don’t have much going on in them. It’s a good medium, though, as I get that it’s hard to make levels that work well for 4 players and 1 player at the same time. There’s no player collision in this game either, which makes multiplayer pretty hassle-free. I played through the game by myself and tried multiplayer for a bit, and even though multiplayer is more fun, it was still great to focus on getting 100% as a single player experience. You honestly miss out on a lot if you don’t 100% this game; there’s secret exits, flower coins (which are this game's star coins), and stuff like reaching the top of the flagpole even counts for 100%, and a lot of stages will use their gimmick at the end accustomed around reaching it, kind of as a level design progression to see if you’ve mastered the stage. Stuff like this is why I really appreciate Mario Wonder’s game design, and it’s clear there was a lot of work put in to make these stages all feel unique. 

The double-edged sword of why I really like and don’t like Mario Wonder, though, is its badges. Kind of being a bit of a reference to Paper Mario, this game has a bunch of badges that will grant your character a unique ability, some much better than others. The first one you get is a Parachute Cap, which lets you hover and can also be used to float back onto walls as an infinite wall climb, making a later badge basically useless. A lot of these badges, most notably the boosting spin jump badge, can be used to cheese a lot of the game's secrets and ignore a lot of the game's level design. There’s also stages designed around the badges, and a few are honestly some of my favorites in the game. Stages designed around these new mechanics usually have two per badge, the first of which is a tutorial of sorts and the second to see if you’ve mastered it. One of my favorites was the second wall climb jump stage, which is basically Getting Over It if it were a Mario stage. These stages had me thinking, “Why hadn’t they integrated some of these new mechanics into the movesets?”. A perfect one to have added to the moveset would have been the Dolphin Kick, which would have actually made the water levels fun for once, offering a new, faster-paced movement style. 

Other additions to Mario Wonder are its three new power-ups and the Wonder Flowers. The new power-ups are all really fun, my favorite being the elephant, since I kind of like having a strong melee attack in platformers. It kind of goes against Mario’s whole gimmick of stomping on enemies heads, but it is a power-up, and you can lose it, so I was trying to keep it as best as I could. Then there’s the Wonder Flowers, which I can only imagine are a direct response to complaints about NSMB being really boring. Every main stage has one, which will either enable some new visuals or change the way the game plays. These are honestly really hit-or-miss, as a lot of them are really boring. Some of the more fun ones are when they’ll change your character into an enemy, sometimes as a sort of debuff that you’ll have to work around, changing the way you approach the stage. From the top of my head, I think my favorite one was where you have to walk on the wall in the background. Outside of these Wonder Flowers, a lot of the stages already have their own unique gimmick, so it wasn’t like these were entirely necessary, but I enjoyed their addition. 

Mario Wonder was very refreshing nonetheless, and I’m glad I gave it a shot. I loved getting all the secrets and using the new badge abilities. I can only hope we get new 2D Mario games in the near future, as this was a huge step in the right direction. It’s cool to see Nintendo actually listen to fans on this one, and we got one of the more creative Mario experiences out of it. 

A great return for the series, after so many years. Clearly heavily inspired by how Age II operated rather than III, but still with a strong overall production value. The game is quite solid overall; the cutscenes are all very well done with excellent visual clarity and many aesthetically pleasing moments.

The Mongol campaign is clearly the highlight here, where you are incredibly powerful and leave an incredible trail of devastation. One of the best and most enjoyable moments in the entire Age of Empires history is the mission to create a super-trebuchet to destroy the walls of Xiangjiang.

Another incredibly fun mission is defending against the Mongols on the Ugra River.

That said, the pathfinding isn't as good, and the UI options aren't as robust as in previous games, making you struggle quite a bit with the keyboard and mouse. Just for that reason, it possibly ranks as the least enjoyable among the three good games in the series (the first one is easily ignorable), but still something entirely worth playing.

Probably the worst RTS I've ever played. I believe the Definitive Edition doesn't help, as it apparently adds a bunch of bugs such as stages where the enemy AI simply doesn't function correctly unless on a specific difficulty.

The pathfinding is atrocious (it was already bad for its time), the game is quite clunky, and clearly quite unbalanced as well. It's a shame because many things could have been fixed in this version and simply weren't.

And that becomes even worse when you consider that many of the campaigns and civilizations in this game are quite cool and quite iconic for history.

Apparently, some of the campaigns from the first game were remade for the second one in the Return of Rome DLC. I guess that must be the best way to experience a bit of the first Age of Empires.

Hate to say this one simply does not hold up - and not even the metal in the soundtrack. The platforming is still there but it's so muddied by everything else. A move to a combat focus to the point of it infecting drawn-out boss fights and repetitive enemy encounters. Tons of backtracking furthered by a poor map and worse signposting. Lame sense of "edginess' (i.e. swearing and blood) and a childish view of women. Surprisingly buggy. Muddy color palette - I get what they were going for with the past/present palettes and the moodiness, but it does not work as anything other than being visually confusing.

Could have been an interesting follow-up to Sands of Time. It's meant to explore the Prince's regret over losing the woman he loved due to retracting the sands at the end of the last game and his subsequent descent down violence and depression in his attempt in undoing everything. There's a great game buried under here but it's frankly not successful at all and that's a shame.

The original Persona 5 was a somewhat bittersweet experience for me. On one hand, the game had its qualities like the stylish UI, the solid gameplay system, and now you were facing the classic demons of Megami Tensei instead of shadows in battle.Also, its new dungeons had great level design. But on the other hand, the game lacked some of the soulful content that the previous entries had. It was also overly long, especially the first few months felt quite dragged out. The party wasn't as likable as in the previous games, the protagonist's rival was somewhat bland, and the villain fell short compared to the predecessors. There was also a lack of overall cohesion, or at least a theme that tied everything together as well as "memento mori" did in Persona 3 and "bonds of friendship" did in Persona 4.

But Atlus, in another excellent job of improving what was already good, managed to fix almost everything in Royal.

I'm completely amazed by everything new in Royal. Persona 5 went from a game that, despite liking it quite a bit, didn't even come close to Eternal Punishment, Persona 3, and Persona 4 for me. Now, it is for sure something very close, in some cases maybe even surpassing Eternal Punishment and Persona 3 FES in my eyes.

Of course, the game is still excessive and unnecessarily long at over 100 hours. While Reload and Golden shortened the time of their original games, Royal ADDS more hours to what was already the longest Persona to date. The dungeons for example are all excellent but all take too long. And there's another set of a gigantic procedural dungeon to do before the game ends...

That said, a lot of things also improve. The first few months are less of a slog and the two new characters are very special, the new social link and deepening of an old character turned out really well, the game remains quite fun in its dungeons (although all the quality of life additions have made the game even easier), the music and new opening are very good, the new palace is very good...

But when I stop to think, almost all the profound improvements of Royal pass through one character: Maruki Takuto.

Ah, Maruki... How to explain what this character was during part of those 107 hours of gameplay. How this character fascinated me, moved me, made me wander through my thoughts. The last time I remember such a great impact from a fictional character in my life were probably with Gon Freecs, in my formative years, and with Fei Fong Wong, over ten years ago. I probably never wanted to give a fictional character a hug and tell them everything would be okay as much as I did with him.

He retroactively improves the entire cast of characters, gives Kasumi one of the most interesting and intense plot twists I've ever seen in a work, and gives a new meaning to the themes addressed in Persona 5. The original 5 failed quite a bit in dealing with serious themes since it wanted to address them as 3 did at the same time it wanted to have the light and laid-back atmosphere of Persona 4. And these things didn't match. Maruki and the Royal move away from this and from these themes and deal with something new, and the outcome as a whole is something more sentimental, more human, a soulful content that makes this game something special for me just like the other Personas.

That January, which begins shortly after the end of the original game, is and will always be for me one of the most brilliant arcs of a video game. The only time in my life I played such a good extra content/DLC was with Artorias of the Abyss. And much of this because this incredible character finally shows what he came for.

Paraphrasing him: His existence and Persona 5 Royal's are an amazing miracle.

"I'll keep on rooting for all of you to have the best lives possible"

Mega Man ZX annoys me. I desperately wanted to like this game more than I ended up liking it. But I find its map implementation to be one of the worst I've ever seen in a metroidvania. In fact, it's not even a proper metroidvania; its map handles things in a very strange way. And the backtracking is unbearable, the areas have an extremely confusing layout and some of the worst padding I've ever seen in a game.

Something that should last two, maybe three hours, ends up lasting seven because the game developers either hate the players or disregard their free time.

Even the dialogue and the distance you have to travel for mundane things within the ship are a huge time sink. The sub tank in the fire stage is one of the biggest absurdities I've seen in a game of this style. I literally gave up trying to get the last sub tank after that one because it is a even bigger waste of your time.

The game having three different items to collect also makes the rare HP healing items too scarce. The implementation of currency in this game is simply bizarre and very unnecessary. With the amount of useless space this game has, it would have been easier to include armor upgrades there instead of the bizarre system of final strike on bosses.

And I say all this sadly, because I really wanted to like this game. It has a wonderful visual style (better than whatever the fuck they were trying on Megaman Zero), the armors themselves have great designs (although I'm annoyed they baited and switched with X's armor), and the gameplay itself is the enjoyable Megaman X gameplay as always. I honestly hope they've fixed at least some of this in ZX.

Furthermore, if you're going to make a horrendous map like this, it's better to do it like in the classic series and X. You select a stage and that's it. Better than a half-assed attempt of a Metroidvania. Furthermore, this lives system, reminiscent of the old Mega Man system, doesn't even make sense in a game trying to be a faux-metroidvania

Anyway, the formula of selecting a stage and it being just the right size has been repeated for over 20 games for a very simple reason: IT JUST WORKS, DAMMIT!

This does not work.

This is definitely a tech-demo. There's no way this is a full game. This is a proof of concept. This is an early-access pre-alpha build for a Steam indie game.

How DARE this game be this long?!

And how dare the environment be this open?! There's nothing in it!

You know how we say a game is "unfinished" when it's buggy and stuff. But this game is barely even started. WHO SAID THEY COULD RELEASE THIS?!

These guys have never seen a cutscene before.

These guys have never played a stealth game before.

This color grading sort of works in what it wants to do, but everything looks so fucking boring.

They're lucky they put the game on the Revelations disc for free 'cause if I paid money for this game I'd legitimately burn their offices down.

This gameplay sucks.

It probably has the worst basics tutorial.

The traversal is a good starting point, especially for 2007, but it is SO SLOW! And it's not even slow as in just physically slow, it's almost never smooth. You climb up a building because it looks like you should be able to climb up it, and then Altaïr stops halfway up because he can't climb the rest of the building, even though it legitimately looked just like the bottom part of the building, and very much looked like you should be able to climb it, so you have to slowly shimmy your way to the side and climb another part of the building while people are throwing rocks and shooting arrows at you. Fun. Sometimes I might hold the stick a bit to the left, because the left thumb's axis is on the left, and Altaïr will just shoot out to the left and die.

The goal in this game is to get from point A to point B, and then listen to a boring-ass conversation, and then get from B to C, and hit a button, and then go to another C, and then another C, and then walk back to B, and then go to D, hit a button, and then walk back to B, and then back to A, and do it again, and again, and again. And while there are different B's and C's, they still look and play exactly the same. D is the only thing that sort of changes enough to not feel too monotonous.

This structure could be really interesting, if it wasn't for the fact that every segment of the game is the same as the rest. And there is some beauty in its simplicity, but there's also boredom.

Oh, side quests? You want me to do side quests? You want me to collect 420 flags? Hehe... HAHA... HAHAHAHAHAH! You fucking idiots. Why in the FUCK would I do that?

And also, there are just random-ass pedestrians whose only goal in life is to push you. Fuck them. Fuck whoever programmed that shit. It does nothing but annoy me.

Informer Assassinations reset if you get discovered. Even if you kill both, and then bump into a fucker two feet from the informer, that will reset the whole thing and you have to kill both again.

There's a part where you have to jump across small boats and posts to get to a ship to assassinate a guy. What happens if you touch the water? Instant death. INSTANT DEATH!

I'm sure that, if this was the first game of the generation that you tried out, it probably blew your mind, but this is not a game. It is a "wow, this is so cool" experience demo for the new generation. But it isn't new anymore.

Now, I'm not gonna lie. Desmond's story is fucking gold. It is gold. I love the atmosphere of it. And even Altaïr's story goes hard towards the end.

I don't like that Desmond can't go faster than a slow walk, but that's the gameplay aspect again, and you just have to deal, because this is the most interesting part of the game.

I honestly couldn't remember if I had finished this game before this replay, until I hit the credits and instantly remembered the absolute perplexity and stupefaction I felt at how jarringly this game ends, and I had the same experience this time. These guys were on some other shit. You really have to get past the disappointment of the ending before you can really appreciate how fucking ludicrous it is.

As a storytelling technique, I absolutely love it, but fucking tell a story, assholes.

If I could have the atmosphere and story of this, with the smoother and faster and just more polished gameplay of the sequels, then great. But I can't.

Great storytelling, great world-building.

3/10. I love this game.


It's this dilemma. Between knowing that I love the story and atmosphere and everything like that, but also knowing that I did not have fun playing the actual game part of it.

But, now knowing how much I enjoy the last couple of hours of this game, I definitely have to replay it at some point, hoping that, just by having that knowledge, it'll be without the first hours of boredom. But it'll be after I replay all the other AC games, so it'll definitely also be more jarring. So, it loses anyway.

But all this makes sense because the Animus was made by Templars.

Gameplay is a 2/10, everything else is a 7, nearing an 8. I hate splitting ratings up like that because that's not a thing, that's not how this works, but I have to with this fuck.

8/10 tech-demo. 3/10 game.