Wife’s Reaction:
“Can you please stop talking about how good the graphics are? Seriously. Stop.”

A Hunk, A Hunk of Burning Love:
Horizon really is getting better and better. The games have never looked better this. Aloy doesn’t seem so rigid here, and Seyka is a great addition to the cast. Burning Shores even had the best boss battle the series has seen yet. Glad I hadn’t written this series off after Zero Dawn and I’m excited for more.

Sure the combat could be better but if you think its bad clearly you've never impulse mega flare permafrost dancing steel into stagger will-o-the-wykes lightning rod gigaflare zantetsuken level 5-ed before and it shows :/

I struggled a good bit throughout my playthroughs of Final Fantasy XVI. It is now the third mainline game in the series I've beaten but at the time I started it I had intended it to be my first. Its a series I've always known i needed to try to get into, and the demo of this game was absolutely amazing, it completely blew me away. I was very unexpectedly hyped for this. And playing it I was like oh yeah this is def 5/5 material, after the Garuda fight I was so sold on the game. The music is fucking fantastic and I've never seen such awesome boss fights. But then after that the game felt like it had already peaked. There are still great boss fights through the rest of the game but they never were as impactful as the first 10 or so hours were for me. I felt myself increasingly disinterested in the plot and all the lore and by extension - the game itself.

All that changed near the end when I finally actually started doing side missions. I surprisingly ended up becoming quite fond of all the side characters in the Hideaway and to a much lesser extent the different characters out in the various towns and villages. The game has a pretty damn good cast. It was around that point that I was pretty hype for the end. And for the most part the finale delivers. Its plenty epic, and I was having a great time. But in the end, I was a bit disappointed in how everything wrapped up. That's not to say that there's really anything wrong with the ending, it just wasn't what I was wanting. How i feel about that is how I feel about Final Fantasy XVI as a whole. Plenty of great moments, but in the end still just a little disappointing.

Now that I've explained that I still think FFXVI is great, I have a lot more to complain about. Mostly minor things but it all added up over my 90 hours spent with the game. Some minor annoyances like enemy phases being tied to health bars so sometimes when you set up a stagger and start unleashing, the game just lets them sit there and recover without taking damage and you being unable to do anything for like 20 seconds before the next phase begins. There's also some battles in the wild where if the fight naturally goes a little further than where it started, enemies may just become immune and run back to their spawn point at full health. There's also without fail after every big boss, a main quest that's meant to let things settle but it just kills the pacing and feels like the game is wasting your time by dishing out forced side quests, sometimes several in a row. In the more dungeon-y areas the game is also pretty bad at leading the player along, there were several times I ran completely in the wrong direction because it doesn't make it clear what doors you can open unless you're right next to them. My final complaint is that Final Fantasy mode, the supposed hard mode for NG+, is a complete joke. Now I'm sort of glad it wasn't hard because it made the platinum obtainable for me and now that i have one for a mainline game in the series I don't ever have to bother again. But like, the games idea of hard is give every enemy 50x as much HP. For normal enemies it ain't nothin a level 5 Zantetsuken can't solve but any enemy with a stagger bar doesn't actually feel harder to fight, they just take ages to fucking kill. Even though i skipped every cutscene and did minimal side content, my FF playthrough felt longer than my first where I did basically everything. It just isn't very fun.

So that's about all of my thoughts with Final Fantasy XVI. But to end on a more positive note: Jill is hot and Titanic Block + Counter is one of the most satisfying moves of all time.

Thanks for reading <3

-----TLDR----
+ Great cast
+ Amazing soundtrack
+ Awesome boss fights throughout
- Story quality and pacing is wildly inconsistent
- Didn't like the way it ended
- Too many little gameplay grievances that add up

Nancymeter - 85/100
Trophy Completion - 100% (Platinum #278)
Time Played: 92 hours
Completion #6 of November
Completion #210 of 2023

Wife’s Reaction:
“This game is so spooky it makes the house shake.”

Follow You Into the Dark:
The surprise hit of 2023 and, just maybe, my Game of the Year. It’s a horror experience through and through, yet it does so much more with its story and presentation that it goes beyond just being a scary video game. Alan Wake II gives me exactly what I look for in games and I won’t ever forget my time with it.

I sobbed like a baby at the end of this game.

I can't believe RGG managed to make a short game that bridges Kiryu's story between LAD 6 and 7 this damn good. Kiryu is one of my all-time favorite characters in gaming and fiction as a whole, and getting to play as him again after so long was so nice. The combat was as good as it's ever been and the final boss fight was a satisfyingly tough fight that I really enjoyed. The new characters were all great and the story, while short, did a great job at explaining what happened between 6 and 7 before Infinite Wealth comes out next year.

I love this series so fucking much, and this is up there with 0, 6 and 7 as one of my all-time favorites. Kiryu is such an amazing character, and I truly can't believe how much of an emotional gut-punch the ending was; I don't often cry at games but I feel like I've invested so much time and emotional energy into this man's journey that it almost felt cathartic to cry. This was a such a special gaming experience and I'm so glad I got to play it.

An absolute masterpiece from Remedy. This game is leaps and bounds better than the first game and is my favorite game in their catalogue by a mile.

Alan Wake II is such a wonderfully strange and passionate project - I'm so glad we have games this weird being made in 2023 without developers needing to compromise on their vision. Remedy has perfected their craft here - the story is absurd and entertaining, the graphics, art direction and presentation are absolutely insane (the mix of in-engine and live-video cutscenes was genius) and the gameplay is fun and doesn't overstay its welcome (probably the weakest part of the package but not bad at all; it felt much better than the first game).

I have to give a special shout-out to the sound design in this game - it's truly top notch. I highly recommend playing with headphones; the music and sound effects create an incredibly tense atmosphere that immersed me the entire time. I was genuinely creeped out from the sound design alone and it made the experience that much better.

As I've slowly been making my way through Remedy's catalogue the last few years I've realized that they're one of the most talented developers working today. You can tell that they put their all into their projects and that they're true labors of love. Alan Wake II was one of the best gaming experiences I've had this year and I'm beyond excited to dig deeper into their Remedy Connected Universe in the years to come.

AW2 is without a doubt of the best games of 2023 and to be honest I can only describe it with one word: love.

The love Remedy has put into this game is astounding, the level of details and care for certain things can only be achieved when the people who work on a game are really passionate about it and do believe in the project.

Ilkka Villi, Melanie Liburd and our boy Sam Lake have put on an AMAZING perfomance.

In-engine cutscenes and real life ones are mixed to perfection, the switch between one and the other are always smooth and fit the mood so well.

The game is creepy and in some cases really spooky, especially during Initiation.

I will not discuss anything further because even the smallest sentence could spoil some scenes so I'll keep my mouth shut.

AW2 still has some things that could be improved like perfomances and a lack of a NG+ which, on a survival horror, is quite essential; the first is probably going to be fixed in future patches, the latter has already been confirmed so I really don't have anything negative to say about it.

I encountered quite a few bugs with some items i couldn't pick up if I didn't set the camera in a very specific way, mostly during the last 5 chapters.

I would really love to discuss the finale but I want to keep this review short, straight to the point and spoiler free: I'll just say I can't wait to know what the DLCs will bring to the table.

Overall my vote is a 9.85 out of 10, it really is "a work of art" :)

Edit: a friend of mine has made me notice how I didn't credit both Matthew Porretta and James McCaffrey for their performances as VAs. He is right. To make amend I will bump this game from a 9.8/10 to a 9.85/10

"simply lovely"

- art style is great
- 1st hour of gameplay is a bit confusing, UI and mechanics take a bit to understand
- replayable af, but that's expected: it's a roguelike
- on console the UX is not great all, WOH uses a cursor to navigate which make things slow and d-pad selection is even slower. Play it on Switch (touchscreen is a better input method than controller) or PC/Mac

I'm very new to VNs and this won't be a lenghty review, but I need to say the following: Hirugashi ch.1 is amazing.

The first 6 chapters are pretty much slow while at the same time really funny, but when sh*t hits the fan things get absolutely creepy.

It's a MUST play for anyone in the mood to be spooked.

Well deserved 8.5/10