I played so many old platformers this year and the main thing I realized with them is that sometimes you really don't know what you've got until it's gone.

Because of the Mario games, you take for granted that A button jumps and the B button attacks, and then you play Alex Kidd in Miracle World and keep on punching bottomless pits and jumping on top of bats.

Because of Mario you think it's just a simple obvious thing to make sure your mascot character for your whole console and company is as effortlessly appealing as they can be, and then you go and play one of the OTHER Alex Kidd games on the master system. Yeech!

Because of this game, you assume it's a no brainer to make your character jump and then be able to control the trajectory in midair so as to hit the platform you're aiming for, and then you play something like Strider for the genesis, where you can either accidentally jump straight in the air right into a spike trap, or remember to first tap forward before jumping and hope that, if you don't first accidentally just step into a pit, your predetermined jump arc lands you on the platform.

When you play Mario, you think to yourself ah, here's a momentum button that makes sense. Sometimes you need a little jump to get across a small gap, sometimes you need to hold that button if you want to make a bigger one, and then you go and play a game like Psycho Fox, with some weird shit where like you have to hold the button to make him accelerate like a car

When you play Mario, it's clear to you that you should be able to just pick up the controller and play, and he should be easy and fun to control, and just like the hero's journey, the levels should be a little easy and welcoming at first, then progressively harder. The GAME should be hard to play, not the CHARACTER hard to control. And then, sometime later, you get a game like Blaster Master, where it's a whole lot of fun right up until the last level where you have no choice but to keep an upgrade for your vehicle that makes you stick to platforms and roll right into spike pits and the developers just laugh at you and say we did it on purpose, get better at games dork.

Any time you play a retro game and it's not fun to play, you have no right to just shrug and say that's how games were back then, or even worse, "the stiff play control is just part of the charm for a game like that back then." Super Mario Bros was the first game ever, and it did everything right. What's your excuse?

This is a review of the game as of patch 6.05.

First off, I'm not going to be talking about the story. I do not play FFXIV for the story. A lot of people do, and that's great, but I am not one of them. It seems good, I dunno.

Instead I would like to talk about everything else. Often times when discussing FFXIV, most people discuss their favorite story beat or maybe their favorite music track but they never seem to get too deep into the weeds with the gameplay. I find this very strange because outside of the story there's an entire MMORPG waiting to be played. In my opinion, I believe people don't talk about the gameplay because, honestly, there's not much there to talk about.

Let me take you back. No, don't worry, this isn't going to be a boomer reminiscing about the "good old days" because ARR and Heavensward very much had a myriad of problems. But, we absolutely need to understand where this game came from to fully realize why the state that its in is sort of... depressing.

Lets look at Warrior. Going into Heavensward the design behind WAR was thus; a tank that doesn't necessarily mitigate, but instead relies on raw hp and self-healing to sustain high amounts of damage. Warriors were also known for their ability to output a respectable amount of damage, which is why in Heavensward they got a damage stance. Back in Heavensward tanks were very much expected to drop tank stance and enter their damage stance if they were not actively tanking. Sounds cool, right? But hey, here's something even cooler. If you were a really good raid group you could have the warrior tank IN their damage stance and gain a substantial amount of raid dps. How were you able to achieve this? Well through many various methods, most notably the usage of aggro manipulation that was "built" in to every single damage dealer's kit. Ninja had a skill that allowed them to redirect all of their aggro to a single character, and healers could work together with the warrior's new kit to put out super barriers that would act as a mitigative cooldown.

So what? Why is this important? Well, lets compare that to not just warrior, but every single tank in Endwalker. Firstly, warrior's entire design of "big hp tank" has been thrown out the window. Now defiance is just an aggro button. Flip it on to do aggro, flip it off to not do aggro, that's it. Same goes for every single tank, I'm not sure why they haven't just made tank stance a role ability at this point given how worthless that button is on every single class. Now, you're going to be sitting in tank stance the entire time, maybe you drop it cuz your offtank/main tank is garbage and doesn't know how to generate aggro. So long as you're in tank stance, it is literally impossible for any dps to even come remotely close to pulling aggro. You put stance on, you hit your 123 combo, slam your oGCDs into raid buff windows, and you pop your respective cooldowns when needed. That's it.

So Endwalker is bad because tank gameplay got more simple? No, of course not you imaginary strawman. Endwalker is boring because there's no longer any team interaction. No longer do you have to coordinate with your ninja and your healers to properly mitigate tank damage while your main tank tries to tank in damage stance. No longer do you have to ask your bard to play songs to regenerate your resources. No longer can you bring two monks so one can keep the blunt resistance buff up while the other bootshines the entire time. No longer can you express yourself through your gameplay or your team composition.

Now, because aggro has been entirely disregarded as a mechanic in FFXIV, interesting fights become more difficult to design. All of a sudden they've lost an entire mechanic that can be exploited and worked around in so many creative ways.

Time for another boomer moment. Did you know that healers used to generate INSANE amounts of aggro? So much so that if an add spawns and the tank hasn't hit it yet (which, by the way, most good tanks would have to line up their combo so that when adds spawn you need to hit it with your finisher in order to generate the most amount of aggro possible so that you have a solid grip on it. Wow! Interesting gameplay!) and a healer pops cure 3 and it hits the entire low hp party there is almost no way the tank can rip aggro off without provoking. Shit like that is COOL. Having to be aware of what every party member is doing is FUN. Working as a team is the entire POINT OF RAIDING IN AN MMO. FFXIV has almost gone out of its way to turn raiding into some anti-social nightmare where instead of working together with your team to down an enemy you're begging and pleading to get non-dysfunctional raid members who know not to stand in the fire so that you can move on to the next stack/spread boss.

Endwalker has become a wildly paired down, streamlined experience. I've already written way too much and I wasn't even able to get into how horrible this new 2 minute raid buff window meta is, or how straight up dogshit some of the new class designs are. (Like, honest to god bafflingly bad). To some people this new streamlined experience is great, as the game was too hard to get into or too much. To me, it is exceptionally depressing to watch a game that once had so much nuance and potential be thrown to the wayside because people couldn't be bothered to improve. Oh well, now I at least understand why my warrior quit during Stormblood.

This is a NINTENDO-ass sequel man, it sure plays smoother but it can be so overly focus-tested and child-proofed to the point of tedium. This conversation could start at the 'no house music' bullet point but it extends further than that. There's so little meaningful platforming and just a lot of 'use X gadget on this stage gimmick to progress'. The difficulty never expands or escalates in a way that keeps you invested, and the lack of progressional theming from stage-to-stage makes the whole game kinda feel aimless in design. It FEELS at times like it wants to have a consistent 'travel around the world' theme, but it breaks the ordering so often for random gimmick stages that it just fails. Non-ape enemies are a fucking joke this time around too - and I'm glad they're not annoying like in 1, but they overcorrected too hard and made them glorified item containers. There's more bosses here, and they are generally better, but they're also Zelda-ass bosses where you wait for their weak point to be exposed and then hit them three - I'm sorry, SIX???!?!?, - times. These are just a laundry list of tacky nuances that make the game feel tepidly safe instead of the lovingly experimental ambiance and structure of the original. If Ape Escape 1 is McJRPGguy, then Ape Escape 2 is Scrimblo Bimblo

I know this makes it sound like the game is a horrible classless shitshow, but it seriously isn't as bad as I'm making it seem. It was just jarring because kid me had an insane esteem for it and played it nonstop, and that clashed with the expectations 1 set for me internally. It has some good stuff tho, and divorced from 1's high-caliber, it's still one of the better mascot platformers out there. I think there's a lot more spectacle to be had here, given that monkey behaviors and costumes have been expanded tenfold. The dub's genuinely great (US, anyway), with Ash and Misty's VA's being literally perfect for the sibling-like chemistry Jimmy and Natalie have, and Specter's brooding tone makes him sound like a terminally-online teenager. And yeah, although it's at the expense of level design, the moment-to-moment monkey catching is a LOT better here. The stealth and sneaking elements are much more subdued, as monkeys can much more easily detect you. This keeps the gameplay loop in a pretty perpetual state of flow, as you'll seamlessly transition back and forth through dedicated platforming and catching segments. The best of it is in stages where monkey appear in hordes and a well-timed surprise attack can chain-catch all of them in a matter of seconds. The sentai boss team is very endearing too, especially Red who attacks by power bombing an entire ass t-rex into the earth to create a shockwave. Not sure if yellow monkey has aged too well tho :/

But the highlight of Ape Escape 2 isn't even Ape Escape 2 - it's the MONKEY SOCCER BAYBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE AW YEAH LET'S GO SCORE A GOAL ZOOKA THROW-IN, GOTTA CALL IN MY MAIN HOMIES EMMA, MANUEL AND APE-01, SLAM THAT SPIKE BALL RIGHT IN THE GOALIE'S FACE, GET FUUUUUUUCKED

Silent Hill's low point, Downpour haters be damned. Even though that entry has its fair share of problems, this fails in nearly every level as a SH game. The main character is a total non-entity, the tone is too blaring and garish to be scary, the gameplay is utter garbage, focusing on the cult makes no sense following the events of the earlier games - it's all subpar. The boss fights do manage to leave an impression, although that's more due to their gruesome designs than the actual fights themselves. Honestly, I hated this game, and I can't say that about any other entry in the franchise.

A really perfect example of all the worst elements of the 7th gen of video games.

- Linear cinematic story mode that you'll forget entirely after playing it.
- 3 hours long if that
- poor man's COD aesthetic ( brown, bloom, ironsights )
- heavy online emphasis that quickly becomes abandoned
- celebrity tie in ( red dawn writer )
- dlc, preorder bonuses etc.

This game rules if you can get into it. In some ways it feels like a proto-ffxiv but in many others it's a whole different beast. It's very much not for everyone with some of it's "fuck you, now die" levels of difficulty and the often detrimental but appreciated focus on immersion, i.e. having to walk.... EVERYWHERE (I love it). You won't get much direction unless you surf the wikis and other resources or talk to other players, but when you come out on top of the challenges the game presents you with it feels awesome. If you know other people who play, definitely try to get a gold world pass from them and start on the same server as them, but also don't sweat too much about being on a high-pop server like Asura (I currently play on Bahamut, btw). So long as the server isn't totally dead there will probably be other players you can connect with. Even if XI is something you don't want to get into now and you're afraid it'll go away at some point, you can probably put those worries to rest as the game is currently pure profit to square-enix at this point in it's life (20 years old at the time of writing this!) and the servers are dirt cheap, albeit a little wonky due to a dependency on PS2 devkits, to run, so as far as we know, they have no plans to end online service at this point.