They say the first Final Fantasy game you play will be your favorite one. This was my first Final Fantasy game, and I'd say it's up there with my favorites but not necessarily my favorite. It took me three attempts at a playthrough and ten years to complete. It was not only my first Final Fantasy, but my first JRPG, and I finally completed it in 2023 after about five years of JRPG experience (I started this in 2013, got filtered by Gran Pulse, tried again in 2017, got filtered by Barthandelus 2, started playing different JRPGs in 2018 including other FF games, then breezed through this from start to finish in 2023). This game gets a lot of unfair heat for being overly linear and having a combat system that's very different from not just every other Final Fantasy game, but every other game, period. I won't say it's a masterpiece, particularly after chapter 10, but I will say that this is a very solid game that's worth at least one playthrough.
The presentation is gorgeous. This is still an amazing looking game, even for something that came out in 2009. The art direction and aesthetics are downright inspired, they make me feel nostalgic for the shopping malls of the late 2000s. It has that indescribable Japanese charm to it that's hard to pinpoint, but a weasel word that can be used would be "comfy." The music is also incredible. It accentuates all of the emotions that go into the story, like a good soundtrack does. This is one of the best soundtracks in the entire series, with the best battle theme I've ever heard in this series. The console versions of this game are locked at 30 fps, which is a shame because it obfuscates a lot of the beautiful combat animations and world design. The voice acting is... serviceable. It's not early 2000s 4kids bad voice acting, but it's not exactly Cowboy Bebop's dub either. To be fair, it's mostly due to the more stilted and unintentionally Lynchian dialog. Everything about the presentation is a perfect 10/10, minus the framerate.
The story is pretty interesting for a Final Fantasy game. One thing I found really cool about this is that no other Final Fantasy game really capitalizes on the weight of being a hero and saving the world. Unlike in other games, the characters in this one (save Lightning, who is a soldier) are just normal people who got torn out of their day to day lives and lost everything to be unwillingly pulled into a quest to save the world and fulfill their focus. I won't go into great detail on the story, but it's pretty good. The big issue with it is the fact that you have to read the data logs to know what the hell is going on, because the game pulls a Dune and throws a lot of new terms at you from its own lexicon. The story is fairly simple once you get the hang of it, and the delivery is nice. This is a very emotional game, up to the tenth chapter. That's when the story kind of falls to the wayside and the gameplay takes a front seat. The ending was also kind of underwhelming, but I guess that's what the sequels are for.
The gameplay is excellent - to an extent. This combat system is great because it keeps you engaged and caresses the lower levels of action combat without being a full-on action game. Personally, I prefer action combat because you have more control over your character's positioning and can more easily dodge attacks, but this game still has its merits and is a really fun time. The auto-battle button receives a lot of flack, but later on in the game it just becomes a tool in your toolkit rather than something to mash over and over again in order to automatically win battles. Most of the strategy comes from creating the proper paradigms and shifting at the right time. The game is fairly rewarding once you get the hang of it. There are some things that I have a gripe with though. There are too many enemies who ignore the stagger system, where they are essentially gimped after you reach a certain level on the stagger meter. This is especially true for bosses, who may have one or two attacks interrupted but not the rest of them. Another issue is the enemies like the sahagins, who constantly interrupt your attacks to an obnoxious extent. Once or twice is fine, but the fact that the one mission where you have to fight a bunch of these minor enemies is harder than the literal final boss of the game is really saying something.
The endgame content is really nothing to write home about. It's just a bunch of text blurbs with "go here, kill group of guys, get next mission and do the same" as your objective. I did a handful of these missions, and they got boring after a while. Here's a nuclear take, but the endgame content for most of the Final Fantasy games I've played was never very engaging.
Overall, Final Fantasy XIII is a great game that you should try. It's not the best Final Fantasy game in the world, but there are plenty of beautiful and emotionally hard-hitting moments that make it worth experiencing all the way through at least once.

I was unfortunate enough to have played through two very, very bad sequels to two very good games this past weekend. The other was Medal of Honor: Underground. I feel like the Angry Video Game Nerd.
Gauntlet: Dark Legacy was a perfection of the Gauntlet formula that was built over the course of 15 years, starting with Gauntlet 1985. It was jam-packed full of engaging content that was extremely fun and oozing charm and soul. It was extremely fun both in single-player and co-op. Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows takes everything Gauntlet: Dark Legacy perfected and throws it in the garbage in favor of creating a soulless hack and slash with terrible combat, a lackluster story, and very little fun.
To start: the presentation. The graphics are much better than those of Dark Legacy and the games before it. However, the art style is bland compared to Dark Legacy. It looks and plays like a generic fantasy game from the era. The music is also fairly mediocre. It has some decent points, but it kind of just blends into the background. The sound design is horrendous. I don't usually notice this kind of thing in games, but it undercuts the entire weight of the combat. Most of the time, weapons sound like wet farts blowing in the wind. They barely make any substantial noises, making you feel like you're slashing at the air. It also makes you forget that you're actually taking damage, because it looks and feels like you haven't been hit but half your health bar vanishes into thin air within seconds due to a lack of feedback. The game is sure to remind you that you've gotten hit, with the narrator saying "[class] needs food badly" and all of the sound in the game completely bottoms out. It's very annoying.
The story is your standard dark fantasy story. It's mid. Just like most of the game. Basically this emperor is manipulated into chaining his heroes to a tree by these treacherous advisors. It almost reminds me of the story for the Overlord games, but without any of the charm, soul, or humor. If you haven't played Overlord, you should play that instead of this piece of crap. It's a really good game.
The gameplay has some things that it does better than the Gauntlet formula, but it's not really "Gauntlet", if that makes sense. It's just a mediocre hack and slash. There are actual combos you can do now, as opposed to walking up to the enemy and smacking them until they're dead. The ranged attacks do jack squat in terms of damage now, however, making it far more viable to do melee and spam magic. There are now also magic attacks besides the AoE spell. There is nothing stopping you from spamming these attacks with the directional button, because they take very little mana to cast and are far more effective than melee and ranged attacks. However, the aforementioned combos are very bland. The classes also have more meaningful differences than in the previous games, which more or less based their class designs on aesthetics and stat caps. The classes now have different "feels" and different combos you can learn. I played as an elf, which feels like you're playing a Dollar General version of Legolas. This was probably intentional, because Return of the King came out a few years before this hunk of junk. These "improvements" are not worth the gutting out of the core of the game, which mostly focuses on ranged combat with some melee combat in certain scenarios and is more stat-focused. The leveling up in this game is also not nearly as quick as it should be. The game is mercifully short, only about 5 hours, yet the levels are very long and very bland. You only get one or two levels at most with each mission in the late game, despite going up to level 99. You don't feel like you're progressing much in terms of character build. This isn't helped that when you run out of lives, you lose all of the experience that you got throughout the level. This is bad game design. It essentially turns that attempted run into a waste of time. This wouldn't be an issue if the levels were shorter, but there is a substantial amount of time that was wasted when you die. There are weapon and armor pickups that drastically increase your stats, but they're few and far between. This wouldn't be an issue if the game weren't short, but I'm not exactly itching to play more of this trash. Unlike Dark Legacy, this game is not properly designed to be played solo and co-op. There are sections of this game that were clearly designed with co-op in mind, and the entire game is much better when you have someone else to suffer through it with you. It's bland when you play it co-op, and downright miserable when you play it solo.
The bosses are pretty bad. They're all more or less the same, they do a small AoE in a circle, or they do a big AoE in a straight line. The only way to really beat them is to spam your d-pad moves and throw yourself into their meat grinder until they're dead. It's not very fun or well-designed because they can stunlock you into a coma. Since this is Gauntlet's first real hack and slash game, there are no ways to really stunlock bosses to prevent this or dodge out of the way in time, like you'd find in better hack and slash games.
As for content, this game is very short, as stated before. I would normally have no issue with this, because unlike people such as Angry Joe, who have contributed to a dialog which led to bloated games, I know that a long game is not necessarily a good game. That being said, a short game would benefit greatly from replay value and unlockables. Aside from difficulties, this game has no unlockables or fun skins to play with. Dark Legacy had plenty of replay value and secret classes to play with, as well as atmosphere that kept me coming back for more. And one playthrough of that game takes about 40 hours!
Overall, this is a pretty bad game. I had nostalgia for this game after having played it a lot as a kid, but it's just not good. Like I said before, I'm tough, but fair. Give this game a shot if you want, but don't expect something very fun.

This is the second entry in my quest to play all of the mainline Medal of Honor games.
So, to get a few things out of the way first:
This game would be a 4/5 if it ended after the fifth chapter.
Normal, sane people would use an emulator to avoid the severe performance issues plaguing this game. However, I am not a normal or sane person, so I played this all the way through on original hardware because I hate myself.
That being said, this game had a lot of potential but was dragged down by several nagging issues. I'm not one of those people who plays through the first few levels of a game to wax nostalgic about playing the easy levels as a kid, then gives a game five stars. If you read my Medal of Honor 1999 review, you'd know I'm tough, but fair in my analysis. That game was a fairly flawed, but very good game with some issues dragging it down towards the end. It had a lot of heart and soul poured into it that made it a fun experience, despite being a first person shooter on the PlayStation 1. Its sequel, Medal of Honor: Underground, on paper, should be the better game. It has better graphics, better lighting, a better soundtrack, a more interesting story that has you playing as Manon, a female French resistance soldier who sabotages the Nazi war machine on behalf of the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. The problem is, it's not.
To start, the first five chapters have some fairly low points but as a whole, I would say are better than the first game by a long shot. Especially the missions in Africa. They almost feel like a prototypical version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, a game that released about a year after this one, with their more supernatural and medieval elements.
The guns you are given are inferior to those in the first game. You get no good medium-range rifles like the M1 garand when playing as Manon. You are mostly stuck with submachine guns, pistols, a shotgun, and a sniper rifle. The sniper rifle would be great, were it not for the abysmal draw distance. A rifle without a scope, such as the M1 garand, would be a much better offering. The BAR was an absolute godsend in the final missions of the first game, but you are not given a weapon like that in this game for the more difficult Manon missions. I understand why you aren't given American weapons for reasons of historical authenticity, but still, some of the weapons Jimmy Patterson had in the first game would've been nice. Especially because you are given these missions by the OSS.
The story, just like the one in the first game, is your standard World War II shooter fare. You kill Nazis. Sometimes you do it in castles, sometimes you do it in a labyrinth, and sometimes you do it in the streets of Paris. This one has more interesting set dressing, like supernatural elements, but other than that it's your standard game about the French resistance.
The graphics are great, but the bad lighting returns from the first game. This predates the time when most games had a brightness slider, so if you want to see, then you'll have to turn up the brightness on your TV. The graphics are more varied, but the levels are more complex, so it evens out the complexity of the levels.
The levels themselves start off really fun and engaging, and the game feels a little smoother to play. That is, until the last few levels. The game always has an issue with performance, but there are so many enemies in the final two chapters with Manon that the frame rate drops into the single digits and you could fry bacon on your Playstation. You'd think they'd tone down the difficulty and number of enemies because performance drops like that are a really bad look for developers, but they didn't.
The enemies have more advanced and more obnoxious AI as well. They take cover, they duck, etc. The ducking is annoying because, even with bullet magnetism turned on, you have to aim like a foot lower than the actual soldier because the crosshair is askew. This is a problem in many situations, and with multiple weapons. The enemies also have this annoying habit of zipping around like meth heads (which, to be fair, is historically accurate) and being impossible to shoot. This is especially bad with the tankier submachine gunners, who will zip right up to you and mag dump right into you without you even noticing what happened. The game is plagued with these submachine gunners in the later chapters. It's even worse knowing that this is from an era where developers didn't respect your time and sanity, so you have to restart the entire mission when you die. These enemies also slow the game down much more than regular enemies, so you end up having to memorize their positions and anticipating them. You can't pick them off from a distance either, because they take cover behind impenetrable walls and don't aggro until you're right in their faces. They also love to corner camp so much that they'd make your average MW2 2009 player call BS. The Panzerschreck enemies also make a return, but they're not as numerous as they were in the first game. They'll still completely ruin your day if you're not careful.
Over the course of this entire game, I had a lot of fun and would highly recommend playing this for the first five chapters. The sixth and seventh chapter have genuinely unfair design that tanks the performance. I'm no stranger to hard games, but the last two chapters make me say that this is a bad game as a whole. It makes me wonder if everyone except a scant few played a different game altogether, because no one on the internet, not even Gmanlives, talks about the horrendous final levels.
There's also Panzerknacker Unleashed, the joke epilogue where you play as previous protagonist Jimmy Patterson. These missions are also horrendously difficult, with the developers continuing to indulge in their SMG fetish. The first level has you don your ATF hat and shoot a bunch of dogs, some of which wield our favorite firearm. You're just given a shotgun and pistol for this one. The second level has you fighting exploding zombies with SMGs and knights. These zombies, like the soldiers in the base game, have insane reflex time and aim. The mission is straight up unfair, like the last one. Luckily you get a BAR, which will carry you through the whole thing. The third has you killing nutcrackers. Enough said.

This was a very fun game about blowing things up with a giant robot. The story is hilarious and over the top, the explosions are satisfying, the soundtrack is incredible and unique with its funkiness, the graphics look great for a game made in 2004, and the missions are really fun. However, this game also has some serious issues. The difficulty curve is all over the place. The game is either way too difficult, or stuck on easy mode once you get the higher tiers of machine guns and bazookas. If you grind the early missions a little bit, you'll unlock the best guns in the game by upgrading your research all the way to the top for machine guns and bazookas. This is an automatic way to win the game, and completely neuters the experience. That being said, the game is far too unforgiving without these weapons because it kicks you to the beginning of the level if you fail. There's really no "happy medium" when it comes to the difficulty, so it ends up being as satisfying as a wet fart. This is not the "tough but fair" FromSoft challenge that you'll get with their other games. The final boss was also complete garbage. He's far too difficult to fight fairly, but taking pot shots at him from behind a piece of level geometry makes the boss far too easy. Thus, emblematic of my entire experience with the game. It still gets 3.5 stars because it's still a ton of fun, and the cheesy story and voice acting made this fever dream of a game live in my head rent free. Plus, the game is set around the current year and our next president will be our 47th, so I'm looking forward to president Michael Wilson, 2024!

I started playing this game with an open mind - as one should when playing a game that's almost as old as I am on the ps1, a console not exactly known for its smooth controls. It's a delicate balance between reviewing a game keeping the time it came out in mind, and understanding that we have different standards in the current year and discussing the game in that light. I came out of this game pleasantly surprised. It still holds up really well for a game made two and a half decades ago, on a very old console.
Controls: Before you start playing this game, you'll want to change the control scheme to the more modern one on offer. It's pretty much the same as more modern FPS control schemes, but with a few catches: you have to stand still to aim, and aiming does not aim down the sights. It shows a crosshair that moves across the screen, temporarily changing your game into an arcade style shooter. The aiming is more or less smooth, and the aim assist is somewhat decent, which allows you to face the gauntlet that you'll be up against in the later parts of the game. The weapon swap is also very much a product of its time. You have to swap through a roster of four or five weapons that you're given to get a single weapon that you want. This includes grenades, which don't have a dedicated button. This isn't too bad, unless you're out of ammo and the next weapon you have is a bazooka, and you instinctively fire it and blow yourself up in the process. This predates something like the GTA weapon wheel.
Enemy design: There are multiple enemy types on tap here: riflemen, who have helmets that allow them to survive most headshots once before the helmet falls off and requires you to kill them with a second headshot. Submachine gunners, which can be absolutely ridiculous when paired with the level design. They can melt your health bar very quickly because they have a tendency to bum rush you and corner camp behind doors, so you can lose your entire health bar in a second after walking through the door. Finally, we have the panzerschrek users. These guys completely ruin some of the later levels, because they hide in dark corridors. The last thing you'll see is a rocket propelling towards you, and all of your progress through the mission is obliterated. I absolutely despise these enemies, and the game would be better if they were nerfed or taken out altogether. Luckily, half the time they fire their weapons, they end up killing themselves by accident. The enemy AI is intelligent to an extent, they can take cover, dive down, roll around, and zoom up to you like a Fortnite zoomer with ADHD. They can also throw grenades, but, like the panzerschrek users, they mostly just end up throwing grenades and running into them. The death animations are pretty cool too, though they can be distracting in crucial points of the game.
Graphics: They look good for a ps1 game. The animations do too. The lighting, however, is absolutely abysmal. You can't modify the brightness in the game itself, so you'll have to change the brightness on your TV because some of these levels can be pitch black since they're set at night. The draw distance is not helped by this either.
Difficulty: The difficulty curve on this game looks like a heartbeat monitor belonging to a meth head with cardiac arrhythmia. One mission can be disgustingly brutal, and the next could be an absolute breeze. The final two missions are a hilarious example of this. The second to last mission is one of the hardest in the game, with panzerschrek users and submachine gunners hiding behind every corner, requiring a ton of trial and error. The problem is, you'd think the final mission would be one last challenge to send off the experience. It's not. If you tried to properly play the mission by using the turret in the beginning and killing all the enemies, you'll get absolutely destroyed. In this regard, it's the hardest level in the game. However, this is completely optional. It's the easiest level in the game when you just saunter past the gauntlet of enemies, kill a few scientists, and then launch the rocket. I was baffled at how easy it was to skirt the "final boss", but I'm not complaining because that last gauntlet would've been ridiculously hard to beat.
Level Design: You have to do objectives to get past the levels. If you don't, and try to leave the level before finishing the objectives, you'll have to restart the entire thing. Why they didn't just prevent you from walking through is beyond me. The objectives usually just involve blowing something up, picking up some papers, or killing a certain type of enemy. It's like Goldeneye but slightly dumbed down. I think it adds a good amount of depth to the game, because you keep your eyes peeled for the next objective and it lets you use your imagination to fill in the narrative blanks that are in the game due to its age. Some of the levels don't benefit from their age though, because many of the areas look exactly the same and loop within each other. Sometimes the only way to progress is through a grate near the floor that's covered entirely in darkness. There will be times when you're wandering around for a while. There are no mid-mission checkpoints either, which is a frustrating relic of the fifth and sixth generations of gaming. If you die, you're going back to the start. Luckily missions are fairly short.
Story: Almost nonexistent. You're Steven Spielberg's World War II fan-fic OC Jimmy Patterson, who is good at literally everything, from killing Natzees to theoretical physics. You go through a series of episodic missions, which have you sabotaging certain pieces of the German war machine, such as the V2 rocket or the D2O reserves for their atomic bombs in Norway. It's a very standard World War II game.
Overall, I would've docked it two points for this dated design, but it gets half a point because it keeps score of how many times you can shoot enemies in the dick. Sovl. If you don't mind some old jank, give this game a shot. It's pretty fun and memorable.

Had a lot of potential but ended up feeling very tedious. The faction system, while good on paper, doesn't mesh will with stealth mechanics that aren't fleshed out enough to warrant making one faction hate you. Friendly faction members get caught in the crossfire and tank your reputation as well. It just ended up being a layer of annoyance on top of a decent game. The shooting and driving mechanics were fine, though there was a lot of old school jank that prevented them from being the best they could be.