You ever notice how almost none of these reviews mention the gameplay?

I mean it's still good, but in terms of area design and resource management it leaves a lot to be desired up until the latter half. Genuinely has some scary moments, however those get muddled by the poor difficulty balancing, where normal is way too forgiving with resources, and hard exposes the broken design of two late game bosses. How am I supposed to be scared when I'm walking around with 50 shotgun shells on me and my melee options are perfectly reliable in most enemy encounters? Likewise, why is running around in a circle for 10 minutes the most effective way of dealing with the final boss on hard mode? That's not a me thing either, it's a strategy you see on any sort of hard mode or 10 star walkthrough.

The areas aren't much to write home about either , at least early on. I never cared for the first two areas due to how visually repetitive they become, and the segment where you have to make a big circle picking up random items in town is one of the most blatant cases of padding in any game I've ever seen, and while there are worse instances of it, I still find it appalling that nobody points it out or criticizes it. Everything after that section is great though, the labyrinth got under my skin more than any other level in any video game I've played before.

I know a lot of that sounded pretty harsh, but it's still a good game with a very solid narrative. However, it's absolutely worth criticizing for its shortcomings and it feels like not enough people are willing to do that. Please level your expectations going into this game, it's a really good experience like its predecessor and two sequels, but it's not an untouchable masterpiece, because no game is.

It has its moments, and the visual style here is phenomenal, but The 25th Ward really suffers from being too spread open. None of the games three sections are fleshed out enough to be truly enjoyable or fascinating like the original was, and the writing is noticeably worse outside of Suda's slice of the game. Gameplay is still a chore, and the final joke of the repetitive 100 endings was funny at first, but stopped being funny when you find out that they couldn't be bothered to even write ANYTHING of substance for a good quarter of them. The batman endings in particular are so pathetic that it just ruins the entire idea. Could have done with some more additions, and touching up, and I think it says a lot that the few new chapters added in this remaster are the best moments of it. Unfortunate.

Arc Rise Fantasia is a game that never got the appreciation it deserved when it was out. A JRPG for the Wii that was notorious for its limited selection in the genre, ARF took some ideas from the Tales series with regards to its story and tried a different kind of turn-based battle system, and all in all I believe it delivered on almost everything.
The story of ARF emphasizes the religions in the game and how conflicts arise from the differing Law’s of the two major gods. Later in the game, it also shows the history of the world, which is fantastic since more world-building is always something I can appreciate. I won’t go more into the story, but all I will say is that it’s not a groundbreaking story, but it’s an interesting one. One negative I will say is that the game has a lot of back-and-forth between different locations that gets annoying after a while. For a 50+ hour game, it has a limited location pool. Now for the characters
The main characters L’Arc and Ryfia are cliches of the genre. Most of the cast have cliches or tropes to them (Serge being a womanizer, Cecille wanting to be the courageous hero, Leslie being a femme-fatale and so on), though they all have grown throughout the game. They don’t stay static, the cast develops and shows more of them, especially in the Skits that the game offers. I don’t think it will be a stretch to say that the skits give a lot more for the characters than the actual story scenes.
The battle system is fantastic. It’s turn-based, putting a big emphasis on strategizing your turn to be as effective as possible. The game is challenging as well, most of all the boss battles, which with one or two wrong decisions, can spell a game over for you quickly. Level grinding can help you have an easier time with the boss battles, but you won’t run them over with a couple of extra levels. Strategizing is the key to winning. I had trouble with just one of the boss battles, which you are not expected to win, so if you like a challenge this game gets a recommendation just from the battles alone.
And lastly for the music. For me, it's probably tied with the battle system for the best part of the game. A fantastic OST and a joy to listen to, particularly the boss fight themes. Unexpected Fight and Before the Mighty One are the two biggest highlights of the OST.
I will touch on this in the end, but the most infamous part of this game is the atrocious English voice acting. Yes, it's shit, yes I played the undub version with the Japanese VAs, and no it does not ruin the game. If you can only play with the English voice acting, you can turn off the voices in the settings, my only suggestion is to turn it back on for boss battles (the characters give you hits when the boss is going to hit like a truck) and if you can play with the Japanese VAs do it.
In conclusion, Arc Rise Fantasia is a hidden gem that should be experienced by a lot more people.

For me to review MORT THE CHICKEN, it is a major conflict of interest, because Mort and I are brothers. His father says so. His wife believes this. Mort and I are just the best of friends, but when El Pollo calls my father Dad, and I call his Dad "Pops" and we delve into hours of passionate discussion about H.P. Lovecraft, Goya, Steve Ditko action, the games and pussy… We can lose all track of time on planet Earth.

But having attended the World Premiere of MORT THE CHICKEN last night, one inescapable thought crossed my mind during the gameplay. 10 to 1…. I believe Mort eats pussy better than any man alive.

Watch his ‘CLUCK KENT’ sequence in MORT THE CHICKEN. MORT THE CHICKEN is the tongue, mouth, fingers and lips of a lover. The Audience is the clit. Watch your audience. This is where Mort goes down on the audience. It starts with long licks with a nose bump on the joy button slowly. He smiles as he does this… Watching the audience begin to squirm, then he takes the audiences’ clit in his mouth and just licks it like crazy, the audience is ready, on that precipice, then calm. He backs off… long licks again, brings in a finger to massage a bit, licks from the bottom to the top… The audience is cooing… He has them, they want release. He acts like he’s going to give it to you, takes you right to the edge, the audiences’ backs arched, ready to cum…. Backs off pinching the nipples just so, his head bobbing up to say, "You like?" The audience shifts around needing release, he builds again… The pressure at a near boiling point… Each stroke and moment a hypersensitive place… Two fingers to the sweet spot, the audience is there… right there at that point… suddenly he’s relentless taking the audience through a rampage of orgasms… trying to get away, trying to escape… back back back, but he has you, and he’s never going to let you forget this moment, the audience was electric… Frenetically frothing… Mort hears them begging no more, when he decides to stop for a moment, there is that relaxed calm… The audience relaxes… labored breathing… a sated smile, WHEN SUDDENLY THE RELENTLESS BASTARD IS AT IT AGAIN!!!! You begin laughing, trying to push him away, but no… more pleasure, more joy, more fun… You can’t handle it, you start giggling and screaming… And it goes like this for quite some time, till at the end… The credits roll, the theater lights come up… You look at the screen, you realize you want that tongue again… You want that feeling again, and you watch it again and again, because damn he respects the clit!

Ok, maybe I take the metaphor too far… maybe… But I had two girls around me, Patch black and blued my right forearm with slaps and rabbit punches as though Mort was pounding the short hairs, and Saffron (not Vegas’) gripping my shoulder from behind like frickin Spock, leaning up to my ear to say, "You didn’t tell me this was pornography!!!!" To which I grab her hand, sniffed her fingers and said, "MMMm you’re fingers are wet… enjoy!"

Now you might feel all of this is inappropriate behavior on my part, but folks, at the Q&A afterwards, the second question came from a woman on the front row that asked The Chicken "Could you comment on the vaginal influence of the Cubes?"

Mort looked like the wet chinned thigh splitter that he is and said, "You have to understand game developers, they never get any pussy, so they are always creating it!"

ZACTLY!

Now lest you think this video game is merely pornographic, and you seemingly are living in the delusion that that is a bad thing… It is not. Mort likes to pretend this game is just there to make you go, "Whoa," but only a blind man can’t see Mort at work here.

MORT THE CHICKEN is from Goya’s Black period. Look at the palette, the brutal primalness of the Cubes.. The sparing use of color… There is sadness amongst the orgasms in this video game. There is a solemn pathetic nature to the emaciated monsters of the Cubes… A melancholy to the game at its quiet moments. When you see the Cube that Mort’s MORT THE CHICKEN catches… "Like a coyote he’s been gnawing away at his cube arm to get away." There is just a captivating, can’t look away, nature of the dead, the dying and the diseased, and Mort understands that morbidity. You can see it in his video game here.

His mounds of skulls in the basement of the farm are not pure bones, there’s rancid strings of something so icky and nasty that my eyes did not define it. The video game revels in the Grand Guignol of it all, and does it all with a smile.

A smile.

That reminds me. Many people will wonder why The Chicken’s MORT is so much more appealing than the novel that it’s based on, and the reason is The Chicken gets MORT to smile… and for a bit, he takes off his glasses and we see his eyes… He strips away a bit of his cool stoic manliness and lets a bit of that kid in the cookie jar joy of naughtiness out. The result is absolutely captivating.

Ron Perlman… When Ron and Mort get together, there is a magic to the scenes. Go check out CRONOS, watch Ron’s vain nose obsessed bad guy. Watch how utterly delicious those scenes are with Ron. Absolutely magic. Here… Here Ron comes off looking, sounding and being just that badass you love. King Cube is a glorious bastard in this video game. Just a fantastic ass of a man. After the gameplay, Ron took the stage with Mort… He was dressed with a cool black leather jacket and an assault rifle… HATRED. My god folks… Having read Mort’s HATRED script… It is 100% Mort and folks as cool as MORT THE CHICKEN is… MORT THE CHICKEN was a teaser… It was just pussylicking…. HATRED is deep dicking!

The difference between MORT THE CHICKEN and most adaptations that you see is that Mort wasn’t interested in making an adaptation to MORT. He wanted to make a space cube army that you could be afraid of again. Not some guy with a box-shaped torso, but something you would run in mortal fear of. He wanted to create a swallower of eggs… something from the inky black parts of your mind. Something new.

MORT has subtle romance… platonic bonds… machismo posturing… and just an insane amount of ass-kicking. I hope Sam Raimi can top this with SPIDER-MAN the video game, but can Tobey Maguire be more cool than Mort the Chicken? Does that Green Goblin costume allow for the digital actor to perform and improv and connect with his gamer audience the way that Perlman does here… Or the Cubes? Then there is the fact that this is 100% M-rated… unapologetically.

Hope you enjoy Mort’s tongu… I mean MORT THE CHICKEN, you’ll be back for seconds.