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.

Final Fantasy XVI recognizes Final Fantasy IV as the GOAT, as everyone should.

Alright, it took me a while to get through this game, and throughout it I had so many thoughts, impressions and the like that changed a bit over time. At the end of the day, I don't believe this is top-tier Final Fantasy, though it is filled with some top-tier moments. The game unfortunately does not balance the high highs of this game very well and the result is a game I really enjoyed, but do not completely love.

First and foremost, I'm of two minds with the combat. I believe there are moments where it's really fun to play and moments where it's a bit of a slog. I actually credit the trophy list with really getting me to explore many variations of the combat, thus opening it up to me an interesting way. But I can't pretend that I don't feel like I permanently damaged some controllers with how often I mashed the square button throughout this game (I'm exaggerating, but it was a lot). In particular, this game largely has wonderful boss fights, but some annoying in-betweens. Fighting a badass boss with a huge health gauge? Alright, sure. Fighting big dudes with stagger gauges amongst random hordes of enemies for the sake of prolonging the gameplay? Not so much.

As far as the narrative goes...unfortunately, I just wasn't that invested. I think the voice acting is really well done, I think the active time lore and ways to dig into the story are really cool features, but I got kind of bored with it. I think conversations with NPCs are largely too long, and that goes for main quest, side quests, and pretty much everything else. I think a lot of the side quests are very basic in their design, and frustrating in other ways. How many times was an objective 'go talk to this person' then 'go talk to that person' then 'go back and talk to that person'. It was a little too much.

That being said, the pure spectacle of the big moments in this game are admirable and take the game up a notch, along with the boss fights. I just wish the rest of the game held up as well for me. I debated giving this 3.5 stars or 4, and ultimately I went with 4 because I did enjoy a lot of my time with it, but I'm happy to be done with the main game. I'll play the DLC next but I won't go for the platinum, at least not right now. Playing through the game a second time and reaching an additional 30-40 levels sounds like a slog.

Achei bem legal a expansão, a gameplay com a Yuffie é divertidíssima e bem diferente dos outros personagens, sem contar os golpes de sinergia com o Sonon que são viciantes. Porém, conseguiram deixar a Yuffie ainda mais insuportável, nunca foi uma personagem que eu gostasse muito e nessa expansão eu fiquei com vontade de dar um tiro nela. Quando ela finalmente começa a ficar mais gostável, a DLC se encerra, e já acrescentando, a duração é bem decente, levei 5 horinhas pra finalizar, e o minigame do Fort Condor é viciante apesar de ser bem desbalanceado. Um toque interessante foi a última luta contra chefe, onde o Nero do Dirge of Cerberus voltou de forma repaginada e com uma luta digna.

A nice lovely 1-2 hour long trip around an island/campsite remote area. The dialogue felt genuine, as real people would talk. The art style was cute, but personally I turned off the pixel filter and enjoyed it better that way. All the characters looked like generic Animal Crossing characters, but the lighting and scale made them feel natural. The gameplay of walking around an island and interacting with everyone and aiding them with their small little interests was just a nice escape from after I finished my finals. The soundtrack on at sea level was lovely and calming, but heading to the peak, the piano made me reminisce over scaling mountains in Zelda Breath of the Wild. Reaching the top truly felt like I went on a journey, despite how short of a game it was. Also very fun to control the Claire thanks to how fast the stamina recharges and the simplicity of gliding.
Overall just a very well rounded and precise short game that filled me with the exact feeling it was trying to convey.

First Summer Uika, I love you. I am in love with you.

Kazuma Kiryu is a very important character to me. I only started with Yakuza 0 back in 2021 but I quickly became obsessed with the series. And with Gaiden, I now have to grapple with the fact that Kiryu may be leaving us soon (again).

After playing through Like A Dragon, Judgment and Lost Judgment I was happy to be reunited with the Dragon of Dojima in this intensely personal chapter of his story. I loved how the narrative interweaved with Like A Dragon's, and the final chapter hits some incredibly emotional beats.

The new characters are all excellent, including the wonderful Akame (who has officially usurped Yuki as my number 1 Like A Dragon Waifu). The shorter, side-story runtime allows a much pacier story, similar to Lost Judgment's The Kaito Files. The final few scenes left a lump in my throat, and Takaya Kuroda absolutely killed it in his voice performance. In a perfect world, Kuroda would be mentioned in the same breath as Roger Clark and Stephen Ogg in the all-time greatest video game character performances. The substories are great as always, with such shenanigans as Kiryu grappling with "ChotDDT" and teaming up with a certain Kamurocho detective leaving me with a huge grin on my face.

My only complaints are pretty minor; Agent Style isn't as fun to use as it appeared at first and I stuck with Yakuza Style for the majority of the game, and every enemy seemed to have so much health. Every fight - including simple street fights - took way too long and I would end up actively avoiding street thugs because they were so annoying to get through.

Though it may be a Gaiden, this is an essential chapter of the Like A Dragon story that everyone should play in the run-up to Infinite Wealth.

I am not emotionally prepared for what's to come.

This must have felt like a blockbuster movie back in 1998, huh?

Well, Metal Gear Solid is a classic for a reason. An engrossing story, overwritten to within an inch of it's life and excellently voice-acted. This is my first Hideo Kojima game and I'm starting to see why he has the divisive reputation he does. Personally, I really like the vibe, even if the crazy amount of fourth-wall breaking did overwhelm me at times. Psycho Mantis didn't tell me that I liked Castlevania but he did tell me I was shitty at combat which, well... he wasn't wrong.

It's funny, I found most of the bosses a breeze but really struggled with a lot of the standard sneaking sections. I know I suck at stealth in general but I feel that MGS's gameplay hasn't really held up as well as other games of it's ilk, such as Resident Evil 2. Man, 1998 was a good year for games, wasn't it?

This was my initiation into the Kojimaverse and I'm very curious to see where the Metal Gear Solid universe goes next. I'm sure it'll be full of surprises.