This is a game that for some reason is completely eluding me when I try writing up something more structured on it, but I will say that I really liked a lot about this and wanted to say SOMETHING in regards to it, so here:

This is the one kind of remake that I won't be an annoying hater about, it really sets itself apart from the original game in a ton of ways and feels like its own experience that just uses the same foundation as another game, rather than trying to just be a smoother rehash that removes a lot of the weirdness of said game.

Making Midgar an entire game was a choice that I feel didn't fully work out in all aspects because there is just a bit too much time in between the big story beats, slowing the pacing to an absolute crawl at times.

The "filler" chapters are cool for the way that they try expanding upon the insignificant aspects of the city to reinforce the player's connection with the location as a whole.

The sheer amount of gay energy exuded every time Cloud and Sephiroth exist on screen together is insane.

35 hours of Midgar unfortunately means around 30 hours of seeing very similar rundown urban environments or factories, and that gets super tiring.

I love how good basically every attack feels to use, and the ATB system here is a great way to try encouraging switching between characters constantly.

Unfortunately combat is also easy to the point where I never really felt the need to properly strategise outside of a couple specific encounters, which ended up being my favourite as a result of making me properly interact with the game's systems. It doesn't help that Cloud just feels by far the strongest in a lot of cases.

More of the game should've involved Cloud wearing a dress

I love the way NPC flavour text is handled here, it adds a ton of life to the world when you just hear snippets of these random conversations as you're running through a crowd.

The side quests suck for the most part, especially in chapter 14 where there's a downright egregious amount of backtracking to be done.

I adore the main cast and do think it's the one aspect of this game that I like considerably more than in the original, even though I liked them all a lot there too.

I wish Cloud was real and that I could make out with him.

I am so glad that they kept in the Shinra Building emergency stairs and made the ascent EVEN LONGER, all while letting you listen to Barret complain the entire time you ran up.

The last stretch of the game had so many batshit plot revelations one after the other and it makes me really interested to see the direction that Rebirth will take.

I've played a lot of FF7 related stuff in preparation for Rebirth and I think it's driven me a bit insane, almost feels like purgatory, still looking forward to it though!!!

If Y7 was the passing of the torch to the next generation then Y8 is the last spark of the old guard.
Feels kinda bad when Gaiden was made only after most of 8's development was done because it hurts seeing how Hanawa and Daidoji were handled.
Don't want to beat a dead horse but the story is kinda meh (the first part is pretty good and interesting but after the ending of chapter 9 iirc the story fluctuated too much in quality akin to a sinusoidal wave) but gotta appreciate the whole messianic theme they did with one of the villains and the MCs.
The beloved characters from Y7 are back in business (even though some were kinda shoehorned in there cough cough Zhao and Joongi Han cough cough) and the new characters are pretty good most of the time ("This hoodlum wanted money and he pointed a gun right at me!" Tomizawa, Cutiepie Chitose not Buster Holmes, Fangirl Suengee, Cold-blooded Yamai) but some of them like the villains or some minor characters are kinda shitty.
The gameplay received an overall improvement and it’s so enjoyable that I’ve grinded dungeons just to juggle enemies between the team members (don't even get me started how I creamed my pants when Dragon's Resurgence was introduced).
For the love of God just leave Kiryu alone so he can live his last days in peace and not bait us with another battle on the Millennium Tower in the future.
I wanted more Yamai but he was too good for this game and left too early (hope he'll become a playable character in Y9 somehow).
My first impression was a 6/10 but in retrospect I've enjoyed the game too much so yeah fuck it 7/10.

Remarkably more engaging than the first game. Kinda overstays its welcome after a certain point, but I anticipated that simply from it being a Ubisoft game. For how much I complained about "binary stealth" in my review of the previous game, I was elated to find that you can simply walk along with a crowd to blend in. It's so seamless, and it enabled one of the funnier moments of my playthrough: casually walking into the audience of my target and firing a bullet into him at close range. They never saw it coming.

The story actually left an impact on me this time, but probably for all the wrong reasons. Being a pseudo-historical recreation of sorts, there are murals hidden on major landmarks that serve as glitches in the Animus. Locating these prompts you with a puzzle to solve that unlocks a piece of "the truth". All these puzzles are a bunch of fictional nonsense, tying the conflict between templars and assassins to non-fictional figures and events throughout history. It's fuckin' silly, but it delivers on expanding the conflict that was merely alluded to in AC1: The conflict between the templars and assassins never ended, and it continues in present day.

I must be getting soft. Never would've imagined that I would be enjoying Ubislop, but here we are. That being said, I am not playing another one of these games for at least a couple of months, "Ezio Trilogy" be damned.

Not for honour, but for you...

I knew about Snake Eater's sterling reputation going into the game, but now it's very clear just how much that reputation upholds itself. If MGS2 was Hideo Kojima's (all too prophetic) observations on the rise of AI, then this is his ode to classic spy cinema and action movies. And he's having a blast doing it.

What makes Snake Eater stand out from the other MGS games (and a lot of other games of it's ilk) is the unbridled sense of fun running throughout it. From the sublime opening credits theme (and it's reappearances throughout the game), to the hilarious codec calls about the various animals you can eat and movies Para-Medic/Kojima has seen, I had a big smile on my face throughout the game. And yet, when the game's emotional moments do hit, they hit hard. Everyone knows how iconic the final boss fight is but when the theme music kicks in again during it, it really hits home how special this game is.

Of course, I still suck at the core stealth gameplay, but I feel like this time around you get a little more leeway in how you can approach things. In MGS1, getting caught was practically a death sentence, but with Snake Eater I found myself being able to get away and reposition pretty easily, with the camo system particularly coming in useful. I didn't have to mow down everything in my path when the going got tough (which turned out to be helpful when it came to The Sorrow, I've found out since).

Speaking of the bosses, I kinda loved how over-the-top and comic book villain-y Cobra Squad are. Man who can control hornets? An old sniping master who's practically dead? An insane pyromaniac astronaut? I thought MGS2's Vamp and Fatman were pretty silly, but these guys were damn goofy. The tense game of cat and mouse I played with The End was a particular highlight for me.

The only real problems I have with the game are a couple of annoying parts; The Fury's boss fight wasn't very fun, and the section near the end where you have to escort EVA made me want to rip my hair out. Speaking of EVA, I'd be interested to know the community's general thoughts on her. I'm not really sure what to make of a woman over-sexualised to the point where it's almost comical, but on the other hand she's pretty compelling too. In any case, she's certainly memorable.

I've decided to emulate MGS4 and Peace Walker rather than wait for the next volume of the Master Collection, so expect me to try and cram those in before I fully immerse myself back into Baldur's Gate 3 and the upcoming Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

If Final Fantasy VI was basically just a group of wizards pushing a game system to its absolute limit in terms of capabilities, Final Fantasy VII is more akin to a ramshackle amalgamation of jankily implemented ideas, held together with old bits of duct tape. Despite how the latter option sounds though, it also fits the kind of gameplay experience that I have a certain fondness of, never being short of ideas whatsoever, just throwing more weird stuff at the wall and watching it lightly come apart at the seams, all tied together with the rest of the game going all out in making setpieces that feel utterly massive in scope. The game in general feels really big in a way that led to it having this effect where I'd often feel the need take big breaks in between play sessions and almost dread returning, but then I'd pick it up again and become enthralled all over again, and by the end I felt pretty confident in this being something that's almost as amazing as people have said for quite some time.

The game strikes this great balance of being incredibly goofy for a lot of its runtime while still maintaining just enough elements of self-seriousness to keep you engaged in the actual narrative going on. Time and time again, the stakes of what's broadly going on around the player is contrasted by a lot of funny character interactions, especially from Cloud, who continues trying to appear very solemn but ends up just being really awkward and a bit in over his head, especially with some of the dialogue options you get in the first half of the game. I really like the way that the game being so consistently off the wall in the first half also works at making the big turning point of the game hit so much harder once all of this is torn away, leaving some moments of levity, but having them be very few and far between.

In terms of the core gameplay, I felt that this took some interesting steps forward to the systems found in FF6, especially with how Materia feels like an evolution of espers in a lot of regards, and one that I like a lot more. One of my biggest problems with the mechanics of FF6 was the way that the espers essentially meant that all of your characters could do anything as long as you put a bit of time in to grind those abilities, limiting the sense of mechanical individuality each character would have outside of their core special ability. While at a glance, the ability to assign any materia to anyone seems to have the same effect, the limited materia slots each character can have will leave each party member in a certain role of your choosing anyway, since there aren't really enough slots to be able to let everyone do everything. This is further bolstered by the stat changes that the materia gives when equipping it, often lowering a couple of stats while raising others, giving a nice layer of strategy to team composition. I like this as a way to make each piece of new equipment feel a bit more interesting and exciting as well, as the more powerful pieces of gear will often come with more materia slots as well. This makes getting better gear not just feel like a statistical bonus, but an opportunity to further expand upon your battle strategy and team complexity.

The combat itself is rather easy for the most part, but provides sufficient enough roadblocks for players who try completely turning their brains off and mashing through everything, it feels comfortable, yet rewards a bit of thought as well. This leads to there being nothing in the main game that requires any grinding as long as you're smart about things, which is especially nice, given that for the first time in the FF series, the random encounters feel sparse enough to almost never be intrusive, which makes the exploration feel more fun. I also love the limit break system, not only for the spectacle of it all, but also with how it manages to make enemies using powerful attacks feel exciting, as while you're obviously damaged and now likely in a rough position, you're a lot closer to being able to unleash something big of your own, making for a wonderful bit of give and take.

This isn't to say that the combat is flawless however, as there are definitely some issues that became increasingly annoying as the game went on. I feel like with each passing game, the ATB system has felt more intrusive and annoying, with this being the peak of that for a few reasons. The reason why I thought this was a neat system in FF4 mainly was because of the little quirks in the character loadouts that specifically played out in ways that wouldn't translate quite as well in pure turn based gameplay, such as making twincast feel cooler because of its slowly charging bar, but by FF7, an instance of this stuff is almost nowhere to be seen, making it feel superfluous at best. These issues are exacerbated by the UI, as while it's visually appealing, it's so big that it barely shows any actual information either. This is most egregious when you need to scroll your inventory for an item and only 3 of them can be shown on screen at once, leading to a lot of scrolling while the enemies are still able to keep attacking, it just feels awful all around, and while the other abilities you can use aren't quite as egregious as this, it's a common problem that becomes especially frustrating once you're far enough in the game that this can become very costly. Other elements of the UI that felt bothersome were the way that targeting had a tendency to be quite finicky due to the shifting camera angles and fact that there aren't really any strong bits of feedback to let you know what you're targeting unless you press a separate button to bring up another element that clutters the screen more.

The game is still very fun despite these issues though. The constant minigames were always a highlight to me, especially with the way that no matter how simple something seemed, it was actually horribly broken in one way or another. While I get that not everyone's sentiment would quite be the same as mine here, I couldn't help but smile whenever one of these appeared and brought forth a new frontier of barely functioning nonsense. After all, how can you not at least find a bit of comedy in your ascent up to one of the most significant moments in the narrative having a random snowboarding section that controls horrifically? It's not just the jank that I find endearing in the game though, as the game can pull off some absolutely fantastic bits of spectacle when it wants to, with the fearsome power of the Weapons being especially notable, easily standing out as one of the coolest things in any of the Final Fantasy games up to this point. Thanks to them, along with a few other specific points in the story, disc 2 ends up being this constant thrill, overcoming the one other big issue I had with FF6, that being its largely uninteresting 2nd half.

This game is just awesome, everything feels so big and flashy, with the summons especially benefitting from this. The experience is undoubtedly a bit of a mess, with the seams being very visible all over the place, along with there clearly being some ideas that were added very late into development and ended up being visibly half-baked as a result, but what we got here is still a phenomenal achievement.

Well, I didn't enjoy this quite as much as the first one.

I somehow managed to suck worse at this game than the first one, even with the modernised controls. I don't really like Raiden as a protagonist, and the story didn't really hook me like the first one did. I did quite like the meta nature of it all, even though it did seem quite up-it's-own-ass at times. The long, rambling codec call before the final boss really took me out of the game, in all honesty. Ah well, seems that's Kojima for you.

Moving on to what many consider to be the peak of the series: Snake Eater.

EDIT: after a few months of reflection I've realised that I actually like this game more than I thought I did, so I'm bumping it up a mark.